Iraqi shoe-thrower claims he suffered torture in jail

Missing a tooth and draped in an Iraqi flag, Muntazer al-Zaidi used his first hours of freedom since hurling his shoes at George Bush to angrily defend his action, and claim he was tortured by government officials after his arrest.

Zaidi's release today– nine months into a three-year sentence for assaulting a foreign dignitary – was met with muted celebration in Baghdad but rapturous applause in some corners of the Arab world, where the 30-year-old television journalist is feted as a David and Goliath figure for his act of defiance.

Read more at The Guardian

Obama takes center stage at UN General Assembly meeting

UN Wire | 09/21/2009

In a busy week for global diplomacy, U.S. President Barack Obama will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in New York during a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Israeli settlements will be a key subject of the discussions as the Palestinians are dissatisfied with Israeli offers to halt expansion temporarily. In addition to private meetings with each leader, Obama will meet individually with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and also will chair a meeting of the UN Security Council.

London Permits MI6 Torture Inquiry

Britain's foreign minister has referred a secret intelligence agent to the attorney-general over allegations of torture.

In a letter sent to a shadow cabinet member on Friday, David Miliband said the MI6 operative would face the country's judiciary following claims of complicity in ill treatment of terrorism suspects.

According to Britain's The Guardian newspaper, the allegations were made by members of parliament in London.

Read More at Al Jazeera

Iran Set to Allow First Transsexual Marriage

Iran is set to allow what is believed to be its first transsexual marriage after the would-be bride asked a court to override her father's opposition to the match.

The woman, named only as Shaghayegh, told Tehran's family court that she wanted to wed her best friend from school, who had recently undergone a sex-change operation to become a man, but was unable to obtain her father's blessing, as legally required.

Now her father has agreed to permit the union on condition that the male partner, Ardashir, who was previously a woman called Negar, undergoes a medical examination intended to prove it would be a proper male-female relationship.

Read More at the Guardian

Thousands flee Burma as army clashes with Kokang militias

Thousands of people have fled from northern Burma into China after fighting erupted between government troops and an armed ethnic group yesterday, breaking a 20-year ceasefire.

Witnesses in the Chinese border town of Nansan, in southern Yunnan province, reported hearing further gunfire today. Officials said about 10,000 refugees had arrived from Kokang, a mostly ethnically Chinese region where many Chinese nationals also do business, in the last few days.

Read More At the Guardian

Migrant workers face abuse in Lebanon

Too Many Obligations, Too Few Rights for Aymara Women

Teenage Aymara girls only mature as women in the eyes of their community when they are able to demonstrate great industriousness and knowledge of traditional tasks. But by virtue of that same condition they are denied rights, justice and access to community leadership positions.

These are some of the findings of a research study on gender rights in the Bolivian highlands, which illustrates the little-known reality of women who must skillfully manage a wide range of obligations, such as running the household, educating their children, making crafts and working in the fields alongside the men, while not fully enjoying their rights.

The aim of the study was to examine how gender relations are constructed in various indigenous peasant communities in Bolivia’s highlands, focusing on the values and views that shape social relations, the administration of justice and conflict resolution in connection with women’s rights, and analysing which aspects could help guarantee the full exercise of such rights and which tend to reproduce forms of gender oppression.

Read More At IPS

Iraqi Women Search for New Lives

Hiba's fate was sealed from the moment her mother decided to leave her to her father in Baghdad, Iraq, at the tender age of seven. At 15, he forced her to marry a cousin, who abandoned her 48 hours later after raping her. Unwilling to take her back, Hiba's father persuaded her to go to her mother, who, by then, was living in neighbouring Syria. But, at the Iraqi-Syrian border he sold her off to a stranger instead.

Trapped in a country where she knew no one, Hiba had no choice but to put her trust in the man who had bought her. He, however, turned out to be a monster. Over the next two years he forced her into prostitution.

Read More at News Blaze

Clinton Unveils U.S. Plan to Combat Sexual Violence in Visit to Eastern Congo

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with survivors of violent sexual assault the war-ravaged eastern Congo city of Goma in the first-ever visit by a high-level American official to the area. The staggeringly high number of rapes in the DRC have doubled and in some cases tripled since the deployment of a US- and UN-backed Congolese army force in January.

The staggeringly high number of rapes in the country have doubled and in some cases tripled since the deployment of a US- and UN-backed Congolese army force in the eastern Congo this January. The United Nations estimates that at least 3,500 women and girls have been sexually brutalized this year, adding to the 200,000 cases of rape recorded in the country since 1996. In a report released Monday, a coalition of international humanitarian and human rights groups blamed the army for the recent spike in violence and warned that the UN-backed peace effort was becoming a “human tragedy.”

Read More At Democracy Now!

Strategic Issues, Not Abuses, Are U.S. Focus in Kyrgyzstan

“You know what this is for,” Emilbek Kaptagaev recalled being told by the police officers who snatched him off the street. No other words, just blows to the head, then all went black. Mr. Kaptagaev, an opponent of Kyrgyzstan’s president, who is a vital American ally in the war in nearby Afghanistan, was found later in a field with a concussion, broken ribs and a face swollen into a mosaic of bruises.

Mr. Kaptagaev said that the beating last month was a warning to stop campaigning against the president, but that he would not. And so he received an anonymous call only a few days ago. “Have you forgotten?” the voice growled. “Want it to happen again?”

Mr. Kaptagaev’s story is not unusual in this poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia. Many opposition politicians and independent journalists have been arrested, prosecuted, attacked and even killed over the last year as the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has consolidated control in advance of elections on Thursday, which he is all but certain to win.

“This is how the authorities rule in Kyrgyzstan,” said Mr. Kaptagaev, 52. “They use criminal methods to keep power.”

Read More At the New York Times

Iraqis Freed by US Face Few Jobs and Little Hope

“We congratulate you on the release of your son,” read the letter, which was imprinted with the seal of the United States Department of Defense and written in Arabic. “His case has been concluded and we have made a decision that he needs to be released.”

With that, $25 in cash and a new set of civilian clothes, the detainee, Alaq Khleirallah, 27, was back out onto the streets of Baghdad. He is one of roughly 90,000 detainees who have been released from American detention centers in the past six years, a process that will end sometime next year, when the last center is to be transferred to Iraqi control. Almost 10,000 detainees remain in American custody.

They have received a grim welcome. Many return to families crippled by debt from months without a breadwinner. Insurgents see them as potential recruits — or American agents. Old friends, neighbors and even relatives refuse to greet them in public, suspicious of their backgrounds or worried that a few minutes of socializing could mean guilt by association when the authorities, as Iraqi officials often intimate, come to round them back up.

Read More at the New York Times

N. Korea's Hard-Labor Camps: On the Diplomatic Back Burner

A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.

The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors' stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show.

Read More at the Washington Post

Human Trafficking Plagues UAE

Gunman Attacks Tel Aviv Gay Centre

Two people have been killed and at least 10 others wounded when an unknown gunman attacked a community centre for gay teenagers in Tel Aviv before escaping.

Rescue services said that six of the wounded during the incident on Saturday were badly hurt.The shooting took place at the headquarters of the local lesbian and gay rights association on Nachmani street.

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said the attack was "most likely a criminal attack and not a terror attack," while representatives of Tel Aviv's gay community said it was a homophobic attack.

Read More At Al Jazeera

SRI LANKA: Gay Community Takes Heart in Indian Court Ruling

This month, Sri Lanka’s gay and lesbian community, long struggling for acceptance and respect in a conservative, majority-Buddhist country, cheered a landmark court ruling in neighbouring India.

On July 2, the New Delhi High Court knocked down a colonial-era law to decriminalise consensual homosexual sex. It was a historic ruling on gay rights.

"The ruling marked a historic day for gay and lesbian groups in the region and all over the world" . Sex between people of the same gender has been illegal in most of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, for more than a century. Archaic laws promulgated by the British in the 1860s, classified gay sex as "against the order of nature".

According to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, homosexual acts in India are punishable by 10 years in prison. A similar jail term is applicable in Sri Lanka, although no one has been charged or jailed yet for such an offence.

Read More At IPS

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

Doctors Without Limits

Hundreds of doctors belonging to World Medical Association are demanding its Israeli president, Dr. Yoram Blachar, be dismissed as Israeli physicians 'form part of a system in which detainees are tortured'.

A petition demanding the dismissal of Dr. Yoram Blachar as head of the World Medical Association asserts that Israeli doctors turn a blind eye to the involvement of physicians in torture.

According to a report published in British newspaper The Guardian, more than 700 doctors from 43 countries have signed the letter in question, which bases the demand on an Amnesty International decision from 1996 which determined that Israeli doctors working with security forces "form part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill-treated and humiliated in ways that place prison medical practice in conflict with medical ethics."

Read More At YNet

A Mother’s Nightmare: A Senegalese Woman Struggles to Save Her Daughters

Having survived female genital mutilation when she was three years old in Senegal, Fatoumata does not want her four U.S.-born daughters to face the same violence. But as an undocumented immigrant at risk of deportation, the past Fatoumata fought to leave behind might be catching up to her children.

Fatoumata, who requested that her last name be withheld, is fighting her case in U.S. immigration courts. If her application for political asylum is denied, then she faces the unenviable dilemma of either separating from her children, who have U.S. citizenship, or moving them back to Senegal where her family is demanding her daughters undergo the traditional genital cutting.

Read More At The Indypendent

Pakistan’s ‘Invisible Refugees’ Burden Cities

Pakistan is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947, and while the world may be familiar with the tent camps that have rolled out like carpets since its operation against the Taliban started in April, the overwhelming majority of the nearly three million people who have fled live unseen in houses and schools, according to aid agencies.

They are the invisible refugees, and their numbers have swollen the populations of towns like this one northwest of the capital, Islamabad, multiplying burdens on already sagging roads, schools, sewers and water supplies, and, not least, on their host families.

Most fled suddenly, without cash or belongings, and many have limited access to the millions of dollars in international aid that has been flowing in.

Read More At the New York Times

Freed Guantanamo Detainee Recounts Horror

Psychologist Pushes Ban on Torture

As a psychologist, Steven Reisner believes his job is “to do good . . . to improve human welfare.”

Now, as a co-founder of the grassroots organization New York Campaign Against Torture, Reisner is pushing for the passage of legislation that would prohibit any licensed New York health professional from participating in interrogations or “improper treatment” of prisoners.

“Much of the Bush administration’s use of torture was guided and spread by psychologists,” Reisner said. “Health professionals are supposed to help people. They are not supposed to participate in undermining their physical or mental state. They are not supposed to use their specialized knowledge to cause people distress. That’s why I find this so reprehensible.”

If passed, the law — which advocates refer to as the anti-torture bill — would apply to both detainees held in connection with the war on terror and prisoners in the U.S.

Read More in the Daily Gazette

Man Convicted of Terrorism Free to Sue Yoo Over Torture

A man serving a 17-year prison sentence for terrorist activities has been given the green light to sue a former US government lawyer who wrote memos that allegedly led to his torture, US media reports said Sunday.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen arrested in 2002 for an alleged "dirty bomb" plot only to have the charges dropped three years later, was jailed in January 2008 for separate charges of providing support to the Al-Qaeda terror network.

Lawyers for Padilla have filed a lawsuit against John Yoo, a former lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, arguing that he was responsible for crafting the legal memos which led to his detention and harsh interrogation.

Padilla, who was held in solitary confinement as an "enemy combatant" for more than three years at a US Navy installation in Charleston, South Carolina, alleges he was tortured.

Padilla's lawsuit, which demands Yoo be held accountable for his treatment, alleges he suffered "gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a systematic program of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr Padilla's humanity and his will to live."

Read More At AFP

US-AFGHANISTAN: Bagram Detainees Treated "Worse Than Animals"

An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that former detainees at the U.S. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs.

The BBC’s conclusions are based on interviews with 27 former detainees who were held at Bagram between 2002 and 2006. None of these men were ever charged with a crime. Hundreds of detainees are still being held in U.S. custody at the Afghan prison without charge or trial.

No prisoner in Bagram has been allowed to see a lawyer, or challenge his detention. According to the BBC, the U.S. justice department argues that because Afghanistan is an active combat zone it is not possible to conduct rigorous inquiries into individual cases and that it would divert precious military resources at a crucial time.

"These men were never in Afghanistan until the UK and the U.S. took them there," said Stafford Smith. "It is the height of hypocrisy to take someone to Bagram and then claim that it is too dangerous to let them see a lawyer. Even Guantánamo Bay is better than this."

Read More At IPS

Trans Day of Action: “The Rebellion Is Not Over”

Four decades after Stonewall, where is the transgender community? Well, earlier this week, the New York Times reported the Obama administration has begun drafting guidelines that would for the first time protect transgender federal employees from workplace discrimination.

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank has also just reintroduced a bill that would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The inclusion of gender identity in this version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, is seen as an important step by transgender activists. ENDA was introduced in 1994 and first included protections for the transgender community in 2007. It did not pass then, and a subsequent version that lacked the protections based on gender identity passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate.

Well, here in New York, today is the fourth annual Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice. A rally at the Stonewall Inn is planned for this afternoon to, quote, “let the world know, that on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, the rebellion is not over.”

Read More At Democracy Now!

Report Finds Israel Still Torturing Palestinians

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel has accused the Israeli security forces of deliberately shackling Palestinian prisoners in a painful and dangerous manner, amounting to a form of torture.

The report, "Shackling as a Form of Torture and Abuse," based on the evidence of over 500 prisoners, was released in advance of the UN International Day in Support of Torture Victims Friday, 26 June. It follows a report published in May by the UN Committee Against Torture that had criticized the continued mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israel.

The UN report also condemned Israel's refusal to allow access to a secret detention center known only as Facility 1391. The committee also criticized Israel's refusal to allow the Red Cross access to the secret Facility 1391, dubbed Israel's "secret Guantanamo Bay."

Facility 1391, a largely underground bunker reportedly some 100 km north of Jerusalem, is used to interrogate non-Palestinian Muslims and Arab prisoners from neighboring countries.

Israel has refused to identify the exact location of 1391, and denied to the UN committee that any prisoners are currently being held there.

Read More at EI

The Worst Places to Be a Refugee

Gaza, South Africa and Thailand are among the world's worst places to be a refugee, according to the latest annual World Refugee Survey released here Wednesday by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).The survey, which was issued in advance of World Refugee Day Jun. 20, found that the number of refugees had dropped modestly worldwide in the past year – from 14 million to 13.6 million, according to USCRI.

Of those, well over half, or nearly 8.5 million, have been trapped in refugee camps or otherwise denied their rights under the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol.

Of these, Palestinians, more than 2.6 million of whom have been "warehoused" for up to 60 years throughout the Middle East, constitute the largest national group that has been displaced for the longest period of time, according to the report. It also named Gaza as one of the worst places in the world, particularly in the aftermath of the three-week Israeli military campaign that began late last December. Israeli authorities have so far permitted only humanitarian goods to be imported into Gaza since Operation Cast Lead, in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed.

Read More At IPS

Quarter of men in South Africa Admit Rape, Survey Finds

One in four men in South Africa have admitted to rape and many confess to attacking more than one victim, according to a study that exposes the country's endemic culture of sexual violence.

Three out of four rapists first attacked while still in their teens, the study found. One in 20 men said they had raped a woman or girl in the last year.

South Africa is notorious for having one of the highest levels of rape in the world. Only a fraction are reported, and only a fraction of those lead to a conviction.

Of those surveyed, 28% said they had raped a woman or girl, and 3% said they had raped a man or boy. Almost half who said they had carried out a rape admitted they had done so more than once, with 73% saying they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.

Read More At The Guardian

Gay Filipino gets asylum in historic US case

A gay Filipino was granted political asylum in an historic US case.

Because Philip Belarmino, 43, was subjected to rapes and repeated sexual harassments as a boy and because Philippine police are “known to be corrupt” and the Philippine government is “unable to curtail their corruption,” a San Francisco immigration judge ruled on May 21, 2009 that Belarmino was entitled to political asylum in the US.

Read More At Global Nation

LGBTs want inclusion in new curriculum, Sexual minorities call for rights

KATHMANDU, June 10 - They did no wrong. Instead, nature made them different. But society discriminates them for a different sexual orientation. Sexual minorities — lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender (LGBT) — face indiscriminate persecution everywhere, including schools, homes and public places. "I was expelled from school and home and forced to conceal my true feelings from others," says a lesbian, who did not want to be named.

Sexual minorities form nearly 10 per cent of the Nepali population, and their problems are many. Yet, in a seminar on Tuesday, they demanded a unique position - that the government prepares a new national curriculum which includes different sections on sexual minorities and their rights.

Read More At eKantipur.com

The 13 people who made torture possible

The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.

On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

Read More At Salon.com

Sri Lankan Army recovers Prabhakaran's 'torture chamber'

Colombo (PTI): Sri Lankan security forces have found a heavily-fortified torture-chamber-cum prison complex, run by LTTE inside a three-room house in the Mullaivaikkal area near the no fire zone. The complex was found in the Vellamullavaikkal sub-post office by the troops on Saturday as they moved further in, the defence ministry said.

"The house with a wide sitting room, plus three spacious rooms was protected closely by bunkers on the orders of the LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran," the ministry said, quoting it the escapees as saying.

"All anti-LTTE men and women had been kept imprisoned and tightly tethered to heavy metal chains, generally used for elephants," it said.

Those metal prison cages of about 10-12 ft in height have been designed for padlocking, and another portion of the chamber appeared to have been used for beating and torturing, the ministry said.

"Unconfirmed reports said that Prabhakaran himself watched his enemies under punishment. Walls around that portion have been splashed with blood stains and pieces of hair of those who would have been subjected to LTTE torture," the ministry said.

Read More At the Hindu

Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said.

Read More At SF Chronicle

Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities

This report documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force. It contains the testimonies of 33 children who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation. Children report being painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand. The report finds that these illegally obtained confessions are routinely used as evidence in the military courts to convict around 700 Palestinian children every year.

Once sentenced, the children who gave these testimonies were mostly imprisoned inside Israel in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention where they receive few family visits, and little or no education. The report concludes that this widespread and systematic abuse is occurring within a general culture of impunity where in 600 complaints made against Israeli Security Agency interrogators for alleged ill-treatment and torture, not a single criminal investigation was ever conducted.

Read More At Defence For Children International

Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation

Today is the third anniversary of the deaths in Guantánamo of three prisoners, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani. The anniversary comes just two weeks after the second anniversary of the death of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, the fourth prisoner to die in mysterious circumstances, and just eight days after the death of a fifth prisoner, Muhammad Salih. The authorities maintain that the men died by committing suicide, although doubts about this explanation have repeatedly been voiced by former prisoners. However, it is also significant that all five men were long-term hunger strikers.

Cageprisoners is marking this sad anniversary with a brief report about the Guantánamo hunger strikers, and the dreadful toll that prolonged starvation — and brutal force-feeding, which is the response of the US military — exacts on prisoners held, for the most part, without charge or trial in a seemingly endless legal limbo. Force-feeding involves prisoners being strapped into a restraint chair and force-fed twice daily against their will, through an agonizing process that involves having a tube inserted into the stomach through the nose.

Read More At Andy Worthington's Blog

Heat Wave Ordeal for Pakistan's Displaced

Pakistan Risks 'Human Catastrophe'

Thousands of civilians trapped in Pakistan's Swat valley, where the military is battling Taliban forces, face a "humanitarian catastrophe" unless help reaches them soon, a rights group has said.

Human Rights Watch says the military must lift its curfew of the area, which has been in place for a full week, and airdrop essential food, water and medicine to the 200,000 residents trapped there."The government cannot allow the local population to remain trapped without food, clean water, and medicine as a tactic to defeat the Taliban."

Human Rights Watch said it was getting persistent reports of civilian casualties from army shelling and aerial bombardments as well as reports that the Taliban is killing civilians. Tens of thousands of people remain in the region where the army is carrying out its campaign against the Taliban.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Tracking the War on Women in Darfur

Seated on a woven straw mat in a refugee camp in eastern Chad, Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston Medical Center listened with mounting distress as the women of Darfur came forward, one by one over 12 days, to tell her their stories of rape, beatings, hunger, and humiliation.

She and three other Boston-area medical specialists interviewed 88 women in November in eastern Chad. This morning they released the results in a report that offers unprecedented and disturbing details on the long-term effects of the assaults - as well as fresh evidence of the continuing violence against the women of Darfur, years after they fled the battlefield.

The 88 women interviewed reported suffering 32 rapes. Of those, 17 occurred in Darfur and 15 in Chad. Seven women reported being the victim of gang rape in Darfur, and three women reported being raped more than once. For two of them, rape in Darfur was followed by rape in Chad.

The story of one woman, in particular, transfixed Crosby, who lives in Dedham with her five adopted children and has made it her calling to investigate cases of torture and abuse.

"The woman told me . . . she was beaten on her arms so badly that she couldn't use them, and she was raped by four to six men," Crosby recalled. "She witnessed the same thing happen to others who were hiding with her. She was eight months pregnant at the time. She described giving birth to a dead baby, and how painful it was. After the rape her husband divorced her."

Read More At CommonDreams.org

UN Poised to Close Gender Gap and Create Women's Agency

The UN is poised to create a powerful new department for women who say they have been sidelined for decades, to rectify a glaring omission in the world body.

Women from developing countries have been let down by the UN, say ministers. Photograph: Martin Godwin/GuardianAdvocates for women's rights are looking for a fully-fledged agency with a budget of $1bn (£639m) on a par with other high-profile UN departments, to address crucial areas such as violence against women, property rights and HIV/Aids.

"The UN record on women has been abysmal," said Stephen Lewis, co-director of Aids-Free World, and an advocate of gender equality. "It has neglected the rights and needs of women everywhere. It's clear to everyone that the marginalisation of women over decades is unacceptable and the best way to correct it is a UN agency like Unicef for children."

Read More At CommonDreams.org

Uighur Guantanamo Inmates Left in Limbo

UN Torture Watchdog Demands Access to Secret Prisons

United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticised Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay”, and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating.

In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the camp, officially referred to as “Facility 1391”, and allow access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Findings from Israeli human rights groups show that the prison has in the past been used to hold Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, and that routine torture and physical abuse were carried out by interrogators. The UN committee’s panel of 10 independent experts also found credible the submissions from Israeli groups that Palestinian detainees were systematically tortured despite the banning of such practices by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999.

Read More At The National

Philadelphia Inquirer Hires Torture Memo Author John Yoo to Write Column!!

The letters to the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer are on fire. People are writing in, overwhelmingly opposed to the newspaper’s hiring of John Yoo as a columnist, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped write what’s come to be known as the torture memo that claimed the treatment of prisoners amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

WILL BUNCH: I think a problem going back to the Bush’s first term is the media normalizing torture, that makes something like torture, which not only is illegal under a law that was signed by Ronald Reagan, among others, but, is clearly immoral, to make this a kind of a one-hand-on-the-other-hand debate, like it’s something like mass transit funding or something like that. And it’s not.

I think newspapers have a role to reflect the moral positions of their community. Nobody would argue giving a regular monthly column to somebody who advocated something like racial discrimination, for example, or something like—that would be so far out of the mainstream. And I think we need to put torture in that same category.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Russia Stops Gay March

Police in Russia have broken up a march by gay-rights activists in Moscow hours before the Eurovision Song Contest final. At least 30 campaigners had gathered near a university and were later arrested by riot police for taking part in the demonstration condemning the treatment of gays and lesbians in Russia.

The group, which included Peter Tatchell, British gay rights activist, were dragged away by police when they waved flags and chanted slogans demanding equal rights, including: "Homophobia is a disgrace of this country!"

Among those detained was Nikolai Alexeyev, a Russian gay rights leader. Police said they were arresting him for walking with a transvestite.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Saudi Arabia Delays the Right of Women's Vote

Saudi Arabia has delayed municipal elections in which women were hoping to take part for the first time. The vote has been postponed for another two years.

Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, is an absolute monarchy without political parties.
The kingdom held municipial elections in 2005 which were the country's first nationwide polls since its foundation in 1932.

Women were barred from voting or standing for office, but officials said then they would be allowed to stand in the next vote, which had been expected this year.

The election for half the seats on the councils was part of a series of reforms undertaken after the September 11 attacks of 2001 focused international attention on Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah ascended the throne in 2005 promising a programme of cautious reforms in the world's biggest oil exporter. Analysts and diplomats say he faces stiff opposition from senior members of the royal family as well as a powerful religious establishment fearing loss of influence.

Last week, a group of Saudi human rights and oppositionactivists sent a petition to Abdullah demanding political and judicial reforms, including holding elections.

In March, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, the interior minister and half-brother of Abdullah, was quoted by a local newspaper as saying that Saudi Arabia had no need for women members of parliament or elections.

Read More At Al Jazeera

New 'Prisoner Abuse' Photographs Emerge Despite US Bid to Block Publication

Graphic photographs of alleged prisoner abuse, thought to be among up to 2,000 images Barack Obama is trying to prevent from being released, emerged yesterday. The shocking images of inmates in Iraq and Afghanistan were published just a day after the US president announced plans for a legal battle stop them ever being seen.

Images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. They risked provoking renewed hostility in the Middle East as Mr Obama attempts to build bridges with the Islamic world.

He is scheduled to make a major speech in Cairo on June 4 when he will launch his version of a plan to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps.

The images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. They were not distributed around the world at the time but are now believed to be among those the president is trying to block.
Mr Obama previously committed to allowing thousands of images to be published but changed his mind after senior generals warned that their publication could place US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in greater danger.

The president's change of heart brought bitter criticism from the left wingers and the American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought a freedom of information case against the US government applying to see the pictures.

Pledging to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, the ACLU accused him of betraying his principles of open government and "complicity in covering up" the "commission of torture by the Bush administration".

"It is true that these photos would be disturbing. The day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one," said Anthony Romero, executive director.

Read More At CommonDreams.org

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo.

Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated … through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

Read More At AlterNet

War Crimes Suspect Heads Sudan Post

A man wanted for alleged war crimes in Darfur has been appointed as governor for Sudan's disputed south Kordofan province.

Ahmed Harun was named as being chosen to head the oil-rich region in a decree issued on Thursday by Omar al-Bashir, who is also sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes.

Harun, who had been the minister of state for humanitarian affairs, had an arrest warrant issued against him in 2007. Harun is wanted by the ICC for allegedly allowing rapes and murder to be committed in Darfur.

The ICC has 51 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Harun, which were allegedly committed in Sudan's western Darfur region in 2003 and 2004.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Obama to Restart Military Tribunals

President Obama is on the verge of breaking two key campaign promises in his troubled attempt to shut Guantánamo Bay — with plans to revive the military tribunal system set up by George Bush and to continue the indefinite detention of up to 100 inmates.

The moves, which have not yet been signed off by Mr Obama but look increasingly likely, are a result of his promise on his second day in office to shut the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year.

Since then, officials charged with working out how to shut down the prison concede that up to 100 of the 241 detainees remaining are either too dangerous to release or cannot be tried in a military or civilian court. The evidence against many of them is tainted because they were tortured, or involves sensitive issues of national security that cannot be revealed.

The latest Administration thinking has been decried by human rights groups who point out that as a presidential candidate, Mr Obama called the military tribunal system an enormous failure and condemned the indefinite detention of detainees as a gross breach of the US Constitution.

Read More At Times Online

Italy law cracks down on migrants

The Italian parliament has passed a controversial law aimed at deterring illegal immigration through measures including fines of thousands of dollars. The law, which was passed by 297 votes to 255 with three abstentions, creates an offence of illegal entry or residence on Italian soil punishable by fines of between $6,750 and $13,500.

The vote came as the government of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, was already under fire for sending would-be immigrants back to Libya last week without allowing them to apply for asylum.

Italy presented Libya with three patrol boats, the first of a total of six, to help intercept migrants at a ceremony in the Italian port town of Gaeta on Thursday.

The bill increases the period of detention of illegal immigrants for identification from two months to six and makes anyone letting accommodation to them liable to up to three months in jail.
Berlusconi, who claims 76 per cent popular support for the restrictions, said: "We are closing the doors [to immigration] and we will only half open them for those who come to work and to integrate."

The immigration provisions have been attacked by parties on the left, who accuse Berlusconi of harking back to the days of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator. Italian bishops have also expressed unease at the measures, which are designed to enable illegal immigrants to be brought rapidly before the courts and expelled from the country.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Pakistan Diary: Mass Exodus

"The media here have dubbed this the biggest movement of people since partition... in 1947". The first thing that hits you when you visit a refugee camp is the sheer scale. 'Camp' is too small a word to use- these are cities of canvas and rope. Hussein camp has only been running for a few days. So far it houses 4000 refugees - a small town compared to say Jallala refugee encampment which has upwards of 48,000 people living there.

It is a "massive crisis" - according to Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees."Pakistan has hosted the largest refugee population in the world - 5 million Afghans - Pakistan now needs help itself and the world must pay attention."

The UN and other aid agencies have a big job on their hands. This is the biggest movement of people in recent times. At least 1.3 million people are on the move and more than 800,000 are registered with the UN alone as refugees.

But behind that figure lies another one. You could call them the forgotten refugees. Since August 2008, people have been fleeing clashes across the North West Frontier Province. The army has been battling Taliban fighters and more than 500,000 refugees have been registered in camps by the UN since August last year. They have been living makeshift accommodation since then. The Red Cross has registered another 400,000.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Lhotsampa Leave Nepal Refugee Camps

Some 100,000 other Bhutanese have lived in bamboo huts on the Terai plains of eastern Nepal since the early 1990s, when they say they were 'ethnically cleansed' from Bhutan.

Another of the seven refugee camps in the region is Timai, where Hari Maya Gurung is crouching on a dirt floor, arranging the few pots and pans that distinguish this room as her kitchen.Her family used to own 15 acres of land in the village of Leopani in southern Bhutan, where they tended three orange orchards and raised cows and oxen. Today all that she possesses can be found within this small hut.

Gurung's great-great-grandfather was among thousands of Nepalese to emigrate to Bhutan a century ago, building farms in the inhospitable southern reaches of that country. The Gurungs and their ilk – called 'Lhotsampa' in Bhutan – were mostly Hindu and comprised the peasant class in a country that was predominantly Buddhist. Bhutan's rulers largely ignored the Lhotsampa until the later half of the 1900s when the government became nervous of their rapidly growing population and increasing political clout.

In 1985, the government passed a law stripping most Lhotsampa of their citizenship, effectively initiating a campaign to dislocate them from the land.

Gurung says the problems for her family started in the mid-1980s when the police in her village began "verifying" citizenship. Unable to produce the required paperwork, she says all nine of her children were categorised as "terrorists" by the Bhutanese state."It was agony," says Gurung, recalling how she pleaded with the authorities for leniency.

Refugees have always accused the army of setting up barracks throughout southern Bhutan and demolishing their homes. They have also accused the military of arresting, torturing, raping and murdering people from their community.The Bhutanese government has denied accusations that it ethnically cleansed the Lhotsampa from Bhutan. Nevertheless, Gurung remembers the night government officials knocked on her door."Nepal is your country" she says they told her. "Leave Bhutan. If we return and you are still here, we will lock you inside this house and burn it down."

Read More At Al Jazeera

Croatia massacre jail term tripled

A Serb officer jailed for the 1991 massacre of people seeking refuge at a Croatian hospital has had his sentence more than tripled to 17 years by a UN war crimes appeal court.

Veselin Sljivancanin, who had been provisionally released in December 2007 after spending four years in custody, had returned to the court in the Netherlands for the judgement on Tuesday.

The prosecution alleged that the former Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) laid siege to the city of Vukovar from August to November 1991, when it fell to Serb forces.

Several hundred people sought refuge at the Vukovar hospital in the last days of the siege in the hopes that it would be evacuated in the presence of international observers. But the indictment said that about 400 non-Serbs were removed by the JNA from the hospital, loaded onto buses and taken to JNA barracks and later to a farm in nearby Ovcara where they were beaten.

A court document said: "Soldiers then transported their non-Serb captives in groups of about 10 to 20 to a ravine ... where they killed at least 264 Croats and other non-Serbs."After the killings, the bodies of the victims were buried by bulldozer in a mass grave at the same location."

Read More At Al Jazeera

Back to Jail for Zimbabwe Activists

A Zimbabwe court has revoked the bail of 18 political activists facing charges of "terrorism", ordering them to return to prison in a trial that has been widely denounced as a sham.
The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the party headed by Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister, warned the move could endanger the country's fledgling unity government.

The activists were arrested last year and say they were abducted from their homes by state security agents and tortured into confessing to being party to a plan to remove Robert Mugabe, the president, from power.

The group, which includes Jestina Mukoko, a leading human rights activist, and several MDC members, were granted bail in March with the consent of state prosecutors.The 18 have now been indicted for a trial which starts next month.

Fifteen of the activists appeared in court on Tuesday for the remand hearing, the other three are still in hospital recovering from injuries they said they received at the hands of security forces.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Detained Immigrants at Federal Immigrant Detention Center in South Texas Stage Hunger Strike Over Alleged Abuses, Denial of Due Process

We turn now to the vast network of immigration prisons in Texas, many of which are privately operated by for-profit corporations. As many as a hundred people held at the Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville, Texas, have been on a hunger strike since last week to draw attention to alleged abuses in the facility and their extended detention without due process. Prisoners say their complaints to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, about lack of medical attention, denial of food and other abuses have fallen on deaf ears.

They began the hunger strike last Wednesday and are demanding to meet with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special adviser on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.

Independent journalist Renee Feltz interviewed one of the hunger strikers, Rama Carty, for the Texas Observer. Carty was born to Haitian parents in the Democratic Republic of Congo thirty-nine years ago today. He has lived in the United States for thirty-eight-and-a-half years and has been detained by ICE for over thirteen months after serving a two-year sentence for what he says was a wrongful drug conviction. Carty described why people at the facility are refusing to eat.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Torture-tape Gulf Prince Accused of 25 Other Attacks

The wealthy Gulf prince at the centre of a "torture tape" scandal has been accused of attacking at least 25 other people in incidents that have also been caught on film, it has been claimed.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan is now under investigation in the United Arab Emirates after the shocking tape showed him beating a man with a nailed plank, setting him on fire, attacking him with a cattle prod and running him over.

But now lawyers for American businessman Bassam Nabulsi, who smuggled the tape out of the UAE, have written to the justice minister of Abu Dhabi - the most powerful of the emirates that make up the UAE - claiming to have considerably more evidence against Issa.

I have more than two hours of video footage showing Sheikh Issa's involvement in the torture of more than 25 people," wrote Texas-based lawyer Anthony Buzbee in a letter obtained by the Observer.

The news of more torture videos involving Issa is another huge blow to the international image of the UAE. The oil-rich state has been keen to develop relations with wealthy western politicians, universities and corporations and to promote an aura of moderation and tolerance. But the shocking video of Issa torturing Afghan grain merchant Mohammed Shah Poor, whom Issa said had cheated him in a business deal, has heavily dented the UAE's reputation. Particularly damaging was the apparent involvement of a policeman in the torture and the impunity with which Sheikh Issa could act, even after the tape emerged. He is a senior prince related to powerful members of the ruling family in Abu Dhabi.

But now it appears the initial tape could just be the beginning of the problem. The new tapes apparently also involve police officers taking part in Issa's attacks, and some of his victims in the as-yet-unseen videos are believed to be Sudanese immigrants.

Read More At the Guardian

BRAZIL: Gay-Bashing Murders Up 55 Percent

In 2008, 190 homosexuals were killed in Brazil, one every two days, representing a 55 percent increase on the previous year – a veritable "homocaust" according to gay rights activists.

The Annual Report on Murders of Homosexuals, produced by the Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), says that 64 percent of the victims were gay men, 32 percent were transvestites, and four percent were lesbians. "A transvestite is 259 times more likely to be murdered than a gay man," says the study which is based on media reports, since there are no official statistics on hate crimes in Brazil. The study, coordinated by former GGB head Carlos Mott, one of the country’s most outspoken defenders of gay rights, says that 13 percent of the victims were under the age of 21.

Read More At IPS

Kenyan Forces Accused of Abusing Refugees

Chinese Petitioners Held in "Black Jails"

ABC News Exclusive: Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.

An investigation into a savage torture by a royal family member of a close ally.
A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.

In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.

Read More At ABC News

Rice 'Approved Torture Methods'

Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state, approved the use of torture methods such as waterboarding as early as 2002, a new report says.

A US senate intelligence committee report said on Wednesday that Rice, then national security adviser, verbally gave the green light to the CIA in July 2002 to use waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda suspect held in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

A few days later on August 1, 2002, the then US justice department approved the use of waterboarding in a secret memo, the report said.

Abu Zubaydah underwent waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002, according to memos from the administration of George Bush released earlier this week.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Burmese Refugees "Treated Like a Commodity"

Many Burmese migrants, escaping extensive human rights abuses perpetrated by the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the Burmese military junta, travel to Malaysia to register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for resettlement to a third country, according to the report.

Once in Malaysia, Burmese migrants are often arrested by Malaysian authorities, whether or not they have registered with the UNHCR and have identification papers. Burmese migrants are reportedly taken by Malaysian government personnel from detention facilities to the Malaysia-Thailand border for deportation.

Upon arrival at the Malaysia-Thailand border, human traffickers reportedly take possession of the migrants and issue ransom demands on an individual basis. Migrants state that freedom is possible only once money demands are met. Specific payment procedures are outlined, which reportedly include bank accounts in Kuala Lumpur to which money should be transferred.

It has become commonplace for the authorities to use the vigilante RELA force to periodically arrest and "deport" Rohingyas, a Muslim minority, but since Burma does not recognise them as citizens, the practise is to take them to the Bukit Kayu Hitam area on the Thai-Malaysia border and force them to cross over into Thailand. Migrants state that those unable to pay are turned over to human peddlers in Thailand, representing a variety of business interests from fishing boats to brothels.

Read More At IPS

Civilians 'escape' Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka

Human Rights Violations in Kurdistan

Since 2000, thousands of people have been detained arbitrarily and held without charge or trial in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in some cases for more than seven years. The vast majority were suspected members or supporters of local Islamist organizations, including both armed groups and legal political parties that do not use or advocate violence as part of their political platform. Some were tortured or otherwise ill-treated in detention.

Invariably, detentions were carried out by members of the Asayish , without producing an arrest warrant, and those detained were then denied access to legal representation or the opportunity to challenge their continuing detention before a court of law or an independent judicial body, throughout their incarceration. Some detainees were subjected to enforced disappearance, including some whose fate and whereabouts have yet to be disclosed – typically, following their arrest by the Asayish or the intelligence services of the two main Kurdish parties, their families were unaware of their fate and whereabouts and were unable to obtain information about them, or confirmation of their detention from the authorities. Dozens of other prisoners, meanwhile, are under sentence of death having been convicted in unfair trials.

Read More At Relief Web

No Charges Over CIA Waterboarding

Barack Obama has said that intelligence officials who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on so-called terrorism suspects will not be prosecuted for their actions.

"It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the department of justice that they will not be subject to prosecution," he said in Thursday's statement.

Read More At Al Jazeera

First Interview With Guantanamo Inmate

Afghans Rally Against Sexist Law

Scores of Afghan Shia women have protested against a new law, which they will take women's civil rights in the country back to the days of the Taliban.

Critics allege that the law allows marital rape by stopping a wife from refusing sex and prevents her from leaving her home without her husband's permission except on urgent business.

Wadir Safi, a law professor at Kabul University, told Al Jazeera that said that the law must be rewritten as it does not conform with either the constitution or Afghanistan's civil law.

"The public opinion of the Shia people has not been asked for, especially not from the females," he said.

"It really violates not only the constitution, but also the human rights of the Shia female, the terms are not in with international rights that have been accepted in the constitution."

Read More At Al Jazeera

Nepal's Bonded Slavery

UGANDA: Officials Complicit In Kololo Torture

The report, entitled "Open Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture by the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force in Uganda," is based on research between last August and February of this year. 106 cases of illegal detention were uncovered by HRW, which is based in New York.

"In more than 25 instances, detainees were also tortured or subjected to other ill-treatment," said the report, which traced back detentions over the last two years and found that 3 detainees had died from abuse suffered and another detainee was shot and killed at home after his release, according to eyewitness reports.

The Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force (JATT) responsible for or connected to those responsible for the abuses pulls its personnel from a combination of military, police and intelligence organisations, and operates under the command of the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI). JATT headquarters - which also serves as a detention centre - is located in the wealthy suburb of Kololo.

Because rights groups are denied access to the centre, which is not considered a legal detention centre by Uganda’s constitution, HRW interviewed former detainees there about their treatment and what they witnessed.

"Some described being hit repeatedly with the butt of a gun; slapped in the head and ears; or beaten with fists, whips, canes, chairs and shoes," according to the report. "JATT and CMI personnel put detainees into painful stress positions and forced red chilli pepper into eyes, nose and ears, which causes excruciating pain… Some described being shocked with electricity. They reported watching others being beaten and tortured by JATT agents, as well as observing other people with bruising, swelling and wounds."

Detention centres in Uganda are supposed to be "gazetted" - placed on an official government register - in order to be considered legal. The Kololo facility, among others, does not meet this requirement. Illegal detention centres are often called "safe houses". "The history of these kind of secret ‘safe houses’ has a long and quite horrible history in Uganda that dates back to the Idi Amin era," Paul Ronan, a senior policy analyst with Resolve Uganda, told IPS.

Amin was the military dictator who ruled Uganda for nearly all of the 1970s. Harsh repression and brutal human rights abuses under his rule left more than 100,000 dead - by conservative estimates.

Read More At IPS

Sierra Leone Ex-rebels Sentenced

Sierra Leone's war crimes tribunal has handed down sentences of up to 52 years in prison for three leaders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), convicted of overseeing atrocities during the country's 1991-2002 civil war.

Three men were convicted in February of ordering and carrying out a spree of killings, rapes and mutilations during Sierra Leone's decade-long war. The three are the first RUF fighters to be tried by the court, which has already jailed members of a pro-government force and those of a separate armed group formed by members of Sierra Leone's former military rulers.

By the time the Sierra Leone's civil war ended in 2001, thousands of people had been killed and tens of thousands more had had their arms, legs, noses or ears cut off.

According to a summary of the judgement in February, the three men were part of a so-called joint criminal enterprise aimed at gaining "political power and control over the territory of Sierra Leone and in particular the diamond mining areas". During the trial, the prosecution argued that the RUF needed the "blood diamonds" to fund their war against the government. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in the RUF-held diamond mines during the conflict.

The RUF established control by "terrorising the civilian population by massively killing innocent civilians, pillaging and burning houses of those they considered and branded supporters of the corrupt government", the prosecution said.

The judgement also invokes widespread rape, sexual violence and "short sleeved and long sleeved amputations" - where victims were asked to choose between short sleeves, meaning amputation of the arm at the shoulder, or long sleeves, amputation of the hand at the wrist - by RUF fighters.

Read More At Al Jazeera

US Court Allows Apartheid Cases

A US court has ruled that victims of South Africa's apartheid-era government can sue General Motors, IBM and other corporations accused of complicity in human rights abuses. A federal judge in New York ruled on Wednesday that joint actions against the corporations under a US law allowing rights claims from abroad should be addressed in a US court.

Car-makers Ford and Daimler and defence firm Rheinmetall are the other companies set to face legal action from South African plaintiffs.

The lawsuits argue that the car-makers knew their vehicles were being used by South African forces to violently suppress protests. They also claim that IBM and Fujitsu knew their computers were being used by South Africa's white minority government to help strip black citizens of their rights.

The judge disagreed with arguments made by the companies that it was not their responsibility to tell clients how to use their products.

"That level of wilful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid," she said. Scheindlen allowed lawsuits against IBM for "aiding and abetting arbitrary denationalisation and apartheid".

Read More At Al Jazeera

CIA to close down secret prisons

The CIA is to close down its global network of secret prisons, where "war on terror" suspects were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, Leon Panetta, the agency's director, has said. Private contractors would also no longer be allowed to interrogate prisoners held by the CIA, Panetta said in a letter to CIA employees on Thursday.

"CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites," Panetta was quoted as saying in the letter by the Reuters news agency.

Panetta also said that the CIA had told the US congress that it had captured no new prisoners since he became director in February and the "black sites" were now all empty of prisoners.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Roman Police Find Sewer Children

Italian police have found more than 100 immigrants, including 24 Afghan children, living in the sewer system beneath railway stations in Rome. The children range in age from 10 to 15 years and are now being looked after by the city's social services.

They were found when the railway police followed up reports of children living near the city's stations. The police say they do not speak Italian and broke into the sewers by removing manhole covers.

The charity Save the Children Italy says that more than 1,000 unaccompanied children arrived in Rome last year from various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some children were sleeping at night in sewers under the railway station to shelter from the cold, police said.

The number of foreign minors arriving in Italy has risen substantially over the past five years, according to children's charities. Roman police also recently discovered groups of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and China living crammed 20 or more to a room.

Read More At BBC

Revealed: 90 immigrants have died in US custody in last 5 1/2 years

At least 90 immigrants have died while in US custody since October 2003, a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed Friday. At least 32 deaths occurred at facilities run by private contractors.The document -- which has received little to no attention -- also displays an apparent carelessness on the part of prison officials, whose records of the deaths change and omit inmate deaths over time.

Moreover, it shows that prison officials are now recording even fewer details about immigrants' deaths, possibly in response to periodic scrutiny of the list. A previous list that covered the period up until 2007 included the locations of deaths; the current list records either the location or the facility where the inmate was held, without any evident pattern.

"Some information has been changed without explanation," the Times added. "For example, the cause of death for Boubacar Bah, 52, who was held at the Corrections Corporation of America detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., previously was listed as 'brain hemorrhage, fractured skull' and now reads 'undetermined.'"

In an effort to collect more information surrounding the detainees' deaths, the New York Times has created a tipline: if you have any knowledge of the incidents, email the Times' Nina Bernstein here.

Read More At The Raw Story

Women in Israeli Govt? Not if Photoshop Can Help.

Two women serve in Israel's new Cabinet, but some Israelis would rather not see them. Newspapers aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish readers tampered with the inaugural photograph of the Cabinet, erasing ministers Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver.

Ultra-Orthodox newspapers consider it immodest to print images of women. The daily Yated Neeman digitally changed the photo, moving two male ministers into the places formerly occupied by the women. The weekly Shaa Tova simply blacked the women out, in a photo reprinted Friday by the mainstream daily Maariv. No response was available from the two papers.

During the election, campaign posters featuring female candidate Tzipi Livni were defaced near ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods.

From The Washington Post

Smuggled Afghan Children Die in Sealed Container

More than 60 Afghans, mainly children and youths, have been found dead after suffocating inside a shipping container in southwestern Pakistan in an apparent human smuggling attempt.

More than 100 illegal immigrants were discovered inside the container, which had been locked from the outside, 20km from the border town of Quetta on Saturday.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's Pakistan correspondent, said the immigrants were first discovered after local residents at a lorry stop heard sounds coming from the container. Most of the dead were reported to be teenage Afghans and at least five were small children. The stench from the container suggested some of the immigrants may have been dead for days, Rasool Bakhsh, a police spokesman, said.

Read More At Al Jazeera

Karzai to Review 'Abhorrent' Law

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has ordered a review of a new law that critics say effectively legalises the rape of women by their husbands.

Western leaders, including Barack Obama, the US president, and Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, have criticised the law which grants Shia husbands the right to have intercourse with their wives every fourth night.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women has said it "legalises the rape of a wife by her husband". Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief in Afghanistan, has called on the Afghan government to revoke the legislation, saying it is "reminiscent of the decrees made by the Taliban regime". Under the new measure, Shia women would be banned from working or receiving an education without their husbands' permission, the UN agency said. They would also be forbidden from leaving their homes except for "legitimate purposes," the agency said.

Read More At Al Jazeera