Obama moves to grant political asylum to women who suffer domestic abuse

The Obama administration has moved to grant political asylum to foreign women who suffer severe physical or sexual abuse from which they are unable to escape because it is part of the culture of their own countries.

The decision, made evident in a court case involving a battered women from Mexico, ends years of dispute over the issue which saw the Bush administration stall moves toward recognizing domestic violence as legitimate grounds for asylum made during Bill Clinton's tenure.

The department of homeland security has told an immigration court that it regards the woman, identified only as 42-year-old LR, as potentially having grounds to apply for political asylum because she feared she would be murdered by her common-law husband who repeatedly raped her at gunpoint and tried to burn her alive when he discovered she was pregnant.

Read More At the Guardian

Jawad Case Uncertain Despite Release Order

One of Guantanamo's youngest prisoners, ordered by a federal judge to be released after almost seven years in detention because his "confession" was obtained through torture, may face further hurdles before being set free.

A federal judge Thursday ordered the government to release Mohammed Jawad, who was reportedly 12-14 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. But the Department of Justice said it had new eyewitness testimony of his guilt and was considering filing civilian criminal charges against him.

If they move forward with this prosecution, Jawad would probably be transferred to the U.S. for trial. If not, he would be repatriated to Afghanistan, as requested by the Afghan government, which has indicated that it is prepared to receive him immediately and unconditionally.

Read More At IPS

Rwandan Refugees Pushed to Return to a Home They Consider Unsafe

At the Nakivale refugee camp, a vast stretch of rolling, fertile land in southwest Uganda, some 8,000 Rwandan refugees were recently given a deadline.

Claiming that Rwanda, 15 years after the 1994 genocide, is now safe for everyone, the United Nations and the governments of Uganda and Rwanda have encouraged all 17,000 to 18,000 refugees in Uganda to go home before July 31.

But many of the Rwandan refugees in Uganda – most of whom are Hutus who fled Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 Hutu-led slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus –­ are skeptical of the assurances given by the Tutsi-dominated government, and say it's not safe to return.

Jehozo Ishimwe is one of them. "I am not feeling OK," says Ms. Ishimwe minutes before she boards a bus destined for Rwanda. "To go and live under [President Paul] Kagame's government is the end," she adds.

Read More At the Christian Science Monitor

South African Women Bring Rapists to Justice

When the rapist's aunt tried to settle the matter in the traditional way by offering two cows to the victim's mother, it was already too late to stop the women activists of Lusikisiki.

They had mobilized, and they were hunting for justice. They took to the streets with loudspeakers, placards and pamphlets. They went to the police station, the hospital, the courtrooms and the school.

They insisted on a police investigation, and they forced the police to bring in special rape kits to gather forensic evidence from the victim. They kept up the pressure in the courts.

It took almost two years, but the women won. On March 25, the rapist was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison – the toughest prison sentence ever imposed for rape in this region.

South Africa's epidemic of rape, which has raged for decades with near impunity for the attackers, has finally triggered a revolt. Sexual assaults, often dismissed as a ritual of manhood, are no longer ignored so routinely. Women's groups and other activists are breaking the code of silence and insisting on police investigations and convictions.

With more than 50,000 rapes reported annually – nearly 150 every day – and many more cases that are never reported, South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world. The incidence of rape in South Africa is the highest of any of Interpol's member states, yet only half of the rapes lead to arrests, and only 7 per cent result in convictions.

In a recent survey, 28 per cent of South African men admitted they had raped someone at least once in their lives. Almost three-quarters of them had committed their first rape before the age of 20.

Read More at the Globe and Mail

Liberia's Taylor to Claim He Was Working For Peace

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor will take the stand to assert that he was trying to bring peace to Sierra Leone with his actions during a savage civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead or mutilated, his attorney said Monday.

The first African head of state to be tried by an international court is charged with 11 counts of murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, using child soldiers and spreading terror. Prosecutors at the U.N.-backed court say he backed Sierra Leone rebels to help gain control of the neighboring country and strip it of its vast mineral wealth.

Some of the 91 witnesses called so far have claimed Taylor shipped weapons to rebels in rice sacks in contravention of an arms embargo and in return got so-called "blood diamonds" mined by slave labor.

Read More at the Associated Press

Tamils Now Languish in Sri Lanka Camps

More than two months after the fighting in Sri Lanka ended, Mr. Theventhran, a 56-year-old Tamil civil servant, finds himself once again a captive, this time of the people who freed him from the Tamil Tigers’ grip.

“We were liberated,” he said in an interview at one of the sprawling, closed camps set up here to house those displaced in the war against the rebel group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. “Now we are prisoners again. I lost everything in this war. The Tigers killed my son. I lost my property. Now I have lost my freedom, too.”

Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off limits to journalists, human rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says that the people in the camps are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them.

Read More at the New York Times

Uighur Detainees: US Helped Chinese Interrogate Us

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, actively helped Chinese interrogators question members of China's Uighur minority, including physically restraining them so they could be photographed against their will, according to testimony presented Thursday to a congressional subcommittee.

The testimony is certain to add to the controversy over how the U.S. government has handled the Uighurs, who were turned over to U.S. troops in Afghanistan by bounty hunters who were paid $5,000 per captive.

Eventually, the Uighurs were cleared of any connection to terrorism and ordered released from Guantanamo. Nine have been freed; 13 more remain at the prison as officials scour the world for a country that will take them.

Read More at CommonDreams.org

Yoo to Appeal Ruling That Greenlit Torture Lawsuit

Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo will appeal a federal judge's ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue him for devising the legal theories that led to his alleged torture, Yoo's attorneys said Monday.

President Obama's Justice Department, which represented Yoo in unsuccessfully seeking dismissal of the suit, filed a notice saying he would ask the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to intervene in the case. Department attorneys also said they were dropping the case and that Yoo was now represented by a private lawyer, not identified in the court document.

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was a Justice Department attorney from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers. One of his memos, which he wrote in 2002, said treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

The suit was filed by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen now serving a 17-year prison sentence after being convicted of conspiring to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups.
His suit covers his imprisonment in a Navy brig, where he was held without charges for thee years and eight months after he was arrested in Chicago in 2002. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft accused him of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," allegations that were later dropped.

Padilla said in his suit that he had been subjected to extremes of light and temperature, confined in painful positions and threatened with death. He alleged that Yoo, who has acknowledged being part of a Bush administration planning group, reviewed and approved his treatment and provided legal cover.

Read More At SFGate

Rape a "huge problem" in Afghanistan, U.N. says

Afghan law does not protect rape victims and for too long communities have turned to traditional forms of justice which tend to criminalise victims of a profound problem, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

"This is an issue that is under-reported and to a significant extent concealed, but it is a huge problem in Afghanistan," Norah Niland, the United Nations' human rights representative in Afghanistan, told a panel of Afghan women.

A U.N. report, the full version of which is yet to be published, described rape as an everyday occurence. A summary of the report said that in northern Afghanistan, for example, more than a third of cases analysed showed rapists were directly linked to local leaders who are immune from arrest. Those likely to commit rape are close family members, men who work in prisons or orphanages and men in powerful positions either in state-run institutions or in armed groups and criminal gangs, it said.

Read More at Reuters

Exile in the U.S. Becomes Face of Uighurs

As the global face of resistance to what she calls the worsening Chinese repression of the Uighurs, Rebiya Kadeer is displaying the tenacity and sense of destiny that drove her improbable climb inside China in decades past, from laundry girl to famed business mogul.

The Beijing government that hailed her as a model citizen in the 1990s, before imprisoning her for stealing state secrets and sending her into exile in the United States in 2005, vilifies her as the unseen hand behind protests that erupted Sunday in the Uighur homeland of western China.

“All the difficulties in my life prepared me for the tough times we face now,” said the woman, who is happy to be called the “Mother of the Uighurs,” in an interview on Tuesday.

Read More at the New York Times

China's "Go West" Policy Feuls Ethnic Tensions

Honduran Coup Shines Spotlight on Controversial U.S. Military Training School

Before the torture debates about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, there was the School of Americas -- a U.S. military training school in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has trained some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America.

As Facing South reported yesterday, two of the leaders of the Honduran coup -- General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, leader of the armed forces, and Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the Air Force which transported the president to Costa Rica -- were trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas.

The Honduran coup leaders are just two of over 60,000 Latin American graduates of the school, which since 1984 has been headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia. The SOA Watch database lists 3,566 graduates of the school from Honduras alone.

Read More At CommonDreams.org

Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas

Romeo Vasquez, a general who led the military coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya, received training at the US School of the Americas. The SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers, many of whom have returned home and committed human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial execution and massacres. According to School of the Americas Watch, Vasquez attended the SOA in 1976 and 1984. The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, also studied there in 1996. We speak with Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Kenya-Civilians 'tortured and raped'

Nairobi - Security forces tortured scores of men and raped 12 women in a sweep against the mainly ethnic Somali population of remote north-east Kenya, where their task late last year was to disarm militias.

The accusation by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in the US is the latest in a list of allegations made in the past few years that Kenyan soldiers and police engaged in security sweeps have resorted to terrorising and killing civilians.

"This is not a question of a few bad apples disobeying orders," Kenneth Roth, HRW executive director, said. "This operation was the result of a strategy devised by senior officials to use brutal force against Kenyans."

Read More At Iol