High Court To Hear Torture Case

WASHINGTON - When the question of whether former officials of foreign countries can be sued in American courts for acts of torture goes before the U.S. Supreme Court next month, it will be a landmark moment for a nonprofit legal group in San Francisco.

Although the case comes out of Virginia, the legal brains behind the fight are from the Center for Justice and Accountability, based on Market Street. In its 12-year history, the group has never had a case reach the Supreme Court, a milestone that executive director Pamela Merchant has mixed feelings about.


Read more from the "How Appealing" Blog (article from The Daily Journal)

5 Americans detained in Pakistan allege torture

SARGODHA, Pakistan -- Five Americans arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorism told a court Monday that they had been tortured by police - charges that could add to political sensitivities surrounding the case.

The men made the allegations during a hearing before a special anti-terrorism court in the eastern town of Sargodha. The session was held in order for police to submit a charge sheet alleging that the suspects had conspired in a terrorist act, a formal legal step that brings them closer to a possible indictment.

Read more at the Washington Post

Abu Dhabi Royal Acquitted in Torture Trial

A court in Abu Dhabi ruled on Sunday that 45 minutes of video showing a member of the emirate’s ruling family torturing an Afghan grain merchant — by stuffing his face with sand, firing a machine gun close to his body, hitting him with a whip and an electric cattle prod, cutting his bare buttocks by striking him a nail embedded in a stick and driving over him — did not prove the prosecution’s case that the sheik was guilty of a crime.

As the Abu Dhabi daily The National reported, the court ruled that Sheik Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a brother of president of the United Arab Emirates, had “diminished liability” for his actions, which he claimed took place while he was under the influence of medication. The trial was held in  Al Ain, an oasis city near Sheik Issa’s farm where the Afghan man, Mohammed Shah Poor, was tortured in 2004.

Read more at the New York Times

Amnesty International Press Release: USA continues to look the other way on 'war on terror' abuses

"A commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves… When injustice anywhere is ignored, justice everywhere is denied. Acknowledging and remedying mistakes does not make us weaker, it reaffirms the strengths of our principles and institutions."

Not Amnesty International's words, but those of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month in an address on the Obama administration's "Human Rights Agenda for the 21stCentury". - Accountability, she said, was elemental to the administration's approach, and it was under this principle that President Barack Obama had ordered an end to CIA torture and closure of the Guantánamo detention facility.


Read more at Amnesty International

Officials: DC trial eyed for Gitmo terror detainee

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is conducting an intense security review as part of a plan to bring one of the world's most notorious terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay to Washington for a trial just steps from the Capitol, officials said


Republican critics said the plan would make the city more dangerous, risk compromising U.S. intelligence methods and provide a powerful and expensive bullhorn for Osama bin Laden's alleged lieutenant, Riduan Isamuddin, and two associates. Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, is believed to be the main link between al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah, the terror group blamed for the 2002 bombing at a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people.


Read more at the Washington Post

Illinois: New Charges in Terror Attacks

Two Chicago men were indicted on new charges stemming from a violent attack on a Danish newspaper and for the November 2008 terrorist rampage that killed 166 people in Mumbai. David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were named in a 12-count superseding indictment that for the first time said Mr. Rana was in on the planning of the Mumbai attacks by a team of 10 terrorists. Both men are in federal custody in Chicago. A reputed terrorist leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, who has been linked to Al Qaeda and described as a leader of the Pakistani terrorist group Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, was also charged in the new indictment.

Read at the New York Times

4 Dead After 20-Hour Gun Battle in Kashmir

NEW DELHI — A 20-hour gun battle prompted by a deadly militant attack on a police outpost in Kashmir’s summer capital ended Thursday at a hotel after the police killed two militants, including one Pakistani national, Indian police officials said.


Militants opened fire Wednesday afternoon on security forces in the middle of a busy market at the center of Srinagar, on the Indian side of the border. One policeman and a civilian were killed, and 10 people were wounded in what officials said was the first such militant attack in two years.


Read more at the New York Times

Bomber Kills 10 in Eastern Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber aiming for a pro-government militia commander detonated his bomb-laden vest in the provincial capital of Gardez on Thursday, and witnesses said he killed 10 people and wounded 27, most of them civilians. Also on Thursday, the governor of a neighboring province survived a bomb attack.


In Gardez, capital of Paktia province, witnesses said the suicide bomber walked up to Nasir Paray, the commander of one of the many pro-government armed groups in the area, and detonated his vest up. Among the dead were four children.


Read more at the New York Times

Guidelines for Children Seeking Asylum

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently published guidelines for the treatment of child asylum seekers. Though not binding law, the document should be useful for those representing children in asylum claims, and hopefully for pushing forward the state of asylum law for children in the United States. Some highlights:


Read more at IntLawGrrls

Chile to open museum dedicated to Pinochet torture victims

SANTIAGO, Chile - -- What they'll put in and what they'll leave out -- that question haunts Margarita Iglesias as she considers next month's opening of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. 


That Chile is recognizing victims of its military dictatorship in a striking new "monument to memories" is positive, said Iglesias, both a victim and a historian of Augusto Pinochet's bloody 17-year rule. As a high school student activist in Santiago in 1975, she was tortured before fleeing with her family to France.


Read more at the Chicago Tribune

West Bank forces end abuse of Hamas

NABLUS, West Bank - Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have stopped torturing Hamas prisoners, ending two years of systematic abuse, Hamas inmates said in jailhouse interviews.
The change, said to have taken effect in October, was confirmed by a West Bank Hamas leader, human-rights activists, and the Palestinian prime minister.
The news is expected to defuse a potential problem for Washington since the United States has been closely involved in training Palestinian troops under Western-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a rival of the Hamas militants.

Read more at the Philadelphia Inquirer

Obama Slams Security Breach

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. had multiple pieces of information about alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, according to senior U.S. officials, including intelligence reports and communications intercepts suggesting a Nigerian was being prepped for a terror strike by al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.


The intercepts were collected piecemeal by the National Security Agency, which has been monitoring al Qaeda militants in that country, including former Guantanamo detainees believed to be leaders there.


Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Displaced and desperate in Gaza

One year has passed since the beginning of Operation Cast lead, Israel's 22-day military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip and suspended is a word that best describes daily life in the Strip; the internal reconciliation process, peace talks with Israel, and most importantly, reconstruction being halted until further notice.

On the street, conversations shift between two topics: The first is the 'internal peace process' between rival parties Fatah and Hamas. The other is a possible, even partial opening of the borders by Israel to allow rebuilding to begin; a topic alluded to casually with much cynicism and little hope.


Read More at Al Jazeera

Lesbian soldier inching to asylum in Canada

An American lesbian is breaking new ground in the fight for refuge from the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

On September 11, 2007, Army Private Bethany Smith (right), then 21, fled to Canada after enduring taunts, physical abuse, and a death threat from her military cohorts because she is gay. 

On November 20, 2009, Judge Yves de Montigny of the Federal Court of Canada granted Smith's petition for judicial review of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board's denial of her application for asylum on the grounds that she had failed to seek state protection, which would have been adequate.

Read More at the IntLawGrrls Blog

Mumbai gunman recants confession, alleges torture

MUMBAI, India – The accused gunman in last year's bloody siege of Mumbai retracted his detailed confession Friday, saying police tortured him into admitting his role in the attacks that left 166 people dead.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, who is being tried in a special court — and was photographed carrying an assault rifle during the attack onMumbai's main train station — told the judge he came to Mumbai as a tourist and was arrested 20 days before the siege began.

On the day the attacks started, Kasab said, police took him from his cell because he resembled one of the gunmen, shot him to make it look like he had been involved in the violence and re-arrested him.

Read more at Yahoo

Amnesty accuses Mexican military of torture

(CNN) -- The Mexican military has tortured and illegally killed citizens and committed other serious human rights violations as it battles the nation's drug cartels and organized crime groups, Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

The human rights group accuses authorities of failing to investigate allegations of abuses by the military, including abductions, extrajudicial and other unlawful killings, torture, ill treatment and arbitrary detentions.

Read more at CNN

Supreme Court rejects Guantanamo torture case

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it rejected an appeal by four former Guantanamo Bay prisoners arguing that they should be able to proceed with their lawsuit against top Pentagon officials for torture and religious abuse

The justices refused to review a U.S. appeals court ruling that dismissed the lawsuit by the four British citizens over their treatment at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on the grounds the officials enjoyed immunity.

The four men -- Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al-Harith -- were captured in late 2001 in Afghanistan and were transferred to Guantanamo in early 2002. Released in March of 2004, they were returned to Britain.

Read more at Reuters

Cleric's Death, Torture Case Jolt Iran

Iran's opposition on Sunday seized upon the death of one of the Islamic republic's founding fathers -- a revered ayatollah who was also a fierce critic of the nation's leadership -- to take to the streets in mourning.

Fearing that mourners could quickly turn into antigovernment protesters, Iranian authorities tightened security across the country. In Tehran, crowds held up pictures of the dead cleric and chanted, "This is the month of blood, the regime is coming down," according to eyewitnesses and videos posted on YouTube.

But the death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who passed away in his sleep, was only one of two surprises to shake Iran over the weekend.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Appeals Chamber reverses Bemba's release

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court unanimously has reversed Pre-Trial Chamber II's grant of interim release to Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo.
Bemba has been in ICC custody since July 3, 2008. On July 15, 2009, Pre-Trial Chamber II confirmed charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes against Bemba for his alleged command of Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo forces, who purportedly murdered, raped and tortured Central African Republic civilians during attacks from October 26, 2002, to March 15, 2003.

Read More at the IntnlLawGrrls Blog

Human Rights Watch: 'Pakistan is notorious for its use of torture'

Afua Hirsch, legal affairs correspondent, on Human Rights Watch report claiming British complicity in Pakistani torture

Download the mp3 at the Guardian

Church photographer stopped under terror law

Seven officers sent to check on Grant Smith, who was taking pictures of Christ Church in City of London

One of the country's leading architectural photographers was apprehended by City of London police under terrorism laws today while photographing the 300-year old spire of Sir Christopher Wren's Christ Church for a personal project.

Grant Smith, who has 25 years experience documenting buildings by Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, was stopped by a squad of seven officers who pulled up in three cars and a riot van and searched his belongings under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which allows police to stop and search anyone without need for suspicion in a designated area.

Read more at the Guardian

U.S. citizen charged with conspiring to aid terrorists in 2008 Mumbai attack

Federal prosecutors charged a Chicago resident Monday with serving as an advance man for Islamist terrorists who carried out the deadly 2008 Mumbai bombing, underscoring what they said is the potential for international terrorists to gain a foothold on American soil.

David C. Headley, 49, a U.S. citizen, is accused of conspiring to help the 10 men who mounted an armed siege of India's financial district over three days in November last year. Using firearms, grenades and improvised explosive devices, the attackers overtook luxury hotels, a Jewish cultural center and a train station, killing nearly 170 people, including six Americans.

Read more at the Washington Post

Obama urges Myanmar to free democracy leader Suu Kyi

Singapore (CNN) -- President Obama on Sunday called for the release of Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.

"There are clear steps that must be taken: the unconditional release of all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi; an end to conflicts with minority groups; and a genuine dialogue between the government, the democratic opposition and minority groups," according to Obama, who said the regime should work to ensure its people's needs are met.

Read more at CNN

African immigrants drift toward Latin America

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Stowed away on cargo ships and unsure where their dangerous journeys will take them, increasing numbers of African immigrants are arriving in Latin America as European countries tighten border controls.

Some head to Mexico and Guatemala as a stepping stone to the United States, others land in the ports ofArgentina and Brazil. Though many arrive in Latin America by chance, once in the region they find governments that are more welcoming than in Europe.

Read more at Yahoo News

Law firm's scam reopens hundreds of asylum cases

For years, Sacramento's Sekhon & Sekhon law firm was renowned as a beacon of hope.

The firm, boasting a 95 percent success rate, helped more than 1,000 immigrants from a half-dozen nations get political asylum in the United States based on a fear of persecution.

Many of those new asylees now stand to be deported, because as many as 700 – coached by the firm's lawyers and interpreters – told phony stories of torture and rape to immigration judges and asylum officers.

Read more at the Sacramento Bee

Pinochet soldiers ready to confess

Hundreds of former Chilean military conscripts have offered to reveal details of crimes they committed and witnessed during the late General Augusto Pinochet's rule.

The former soldiers, who served in the army during Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the then president of Chile, made the offer to talk during a demonstration on Sunday to seek financial and medical benefits from the state.

Read more at Al Jazeera

Italy convicts former CIA agents in rendition trial

MILAN/ROME (Reuters) - An Italian judge sentenced 23 Americans to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric, in a symbolic condemnation of the CIA "rendition" flights used by the former U.S. government.

The Americans were all tried in absentia because the United States refused to extradite them.

Read more at Reuters

Brazil to probe its military past

Twenty four years after the military left power in Brazil, the government is to create a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed by the security forces between 1964 and 1985.

Brazil is the only country in Latin America which has not investigated deaths, disappearances and torture which took place during its dictatorship, or put alleged perpetrators on trial.

Read More at BBC

The torture never stops: death by a hundred decibels

What do these artists have in common? AC/DC, the Bee Gees, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Don McLean, Eminem, James Taylor, Pink, Prince, Queen, Metallica and Nine Inch Nails.

Their music, along with many other songs — such as theSesame Street theme and theStar Spangled Banner — and the works of other performers have been used as implements of torture. This is not the age-old war between teenagers and parents played out in homes. This is serious. Loud rock music has been used by the US in the war against terror, specifically against inmates at Guantanamo Bay. It was labelled "futility music".

Read More at the Sydney Morning Herald

Fatah-Led PA Admits It Tortures Prisoners

(IsraelNN.com) The Palestinian Authority, led by the Fatah party, admitted to a British newspaper that its security forces commonly use torture on prisoners, as charged by the Hamas terrorist organization. The PA is heavily funded by overseas contributions as well as taxes collected for it by the Israeli government.

“This is a shame on the Palestinian Authority,” Haitham Arar, head of the human rights department of the PA Interior Ministry, told the Mail. She admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial murders have been common in the Abbas administration.

Read More at Artuz Sheva

Afghan Leader Said to Accept Runoff After Election Audit

KABUL, Afghanistan — Under heavy international pressure, President Hamid Karzai appears set to concede as early as Tuesday that he fell short of a first-round victory in the nation’s disputed presidential election, but the path to ensuring that the country has credible leadership remains uncertain, American and European officials said Monday.

The officials said Mr. Karzai was moving toward accepting the findings of an international audit that stripped him of nearly a third of his votes in the first round, leaving him below the 50 percent threshold that would have allowed him to avoid a runoff and declare victory over his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah.

Read More at the New York Times

British Court Orders Release of Guantanamo Bay Document

Binyam Mohamed spent four years in Guantanamo Bay, and claims that British and American authorities were aware of acts of torture he suffered while he was in Morocco.

A trial was held to determine if an American document that summarizes the accounts of the alleged torture should be released to the public. A British High Court ruled Friday that the documents should be released to the public.

In issuing the ruling, the court noted overwhelming public interest for the documents, and also noted that the report may shed light on illegal activities involving both the U.S. and British governments.

The British government immediately announced an appeal after the decision was announced. As a result, public disclosure of the documents will wait until after the appeal hearing resolved.

"The Government is deeply disappointed by the judgment handed down today by the High Court which concludes that a summary of US intelligence material should be put into the public domain against their wishes," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told reporters.

Source: To The Center

In a Guinea Seized by Violence, Women Are Prey

CONAKRY, Guinea — Cellphone snapshots, ugly and hard to refute, are circulating here and feeding rage: they show that women were the particular targets of the Guinean soldiers who suppressed a political demonstration at a stadium here last week, with victims and witnesses describing rapes, beatings and acts of intentional humiliation.

“I can’t sleep at night, after what I saw,” said one middle-aged woman from an established family here, who said she had been beaten and sexually molested. “And I am afraid. I saw lots of women raped, and lots of dead.”

Read more at The New York Times

RIGHTS-INDIA: Kerala Women Are Battered Wives

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, Oct 6 (IPS) - Kerala, the south Indian state which has the highest literacy levels and excellent social development indicators, has an unsavoury side - a land of violent husbands.

An IPS analysis of the data of domestic violence which was recorded in the Kerala State Crimes Records Bureau (KSCRB), under the state government's home department, has revealed a nearly 50 percent increase in wife-beating complaints registered at police stations in the state during the period 1998- 2008.

The number of incidents of crimes relating to spousal assaults on women was 2,333 in 1988 and reached up to 4,143 in 2008.

Read more at Australia.To News

Blast at U.N. Office in Pakistan Kills 5

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bomber dressed in the uniform of one of Pakistan’s security forces struck the United Nations World Food Program offices in Islamabad on Monday, killing at least five people in what the police said was a serious breach in a building tightly guarded by private security officers.

The Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, said that the bomber asked for permission to use the bathroom, walked inside, and detonated about 16 pounds of explosives in the lobby just after noon, when the compound was filled with people.

Read more at The New York Times

Zimbabweans sued for torture case

Nine Zimbabwean human rights activists and others tortured in custody are suing government officials for $510,000 (£322,000), their lawyer has said.

Jestina Mukoko and eight others are suing two cabinet ministers and various police officers.

The Supreme Court on Monday ordered that terrorism charges against her be dropped because she had been tortured.

Read more at BBC News

Berkeley agrees to U.N. rights treaties

(09-29) 23:08 PDT BERKELEY, CALIF. -- Berkeley became the first city in the United States, and possibly the world, to agree to international human rights treaties on Tuesday night, after the City Council approved a measure usually reserved for countries.

After a brief but spirited debate, the City Council voted unanimously to allow unpaid interns to report to the United Nations on how, or whether, Berkeley complies with treaties on civil liberties, racial discrimination and torture.

Read more at SFGate.com

U.N. Investigator Presents Report on Gaza War

GENEVA — The lead investigator in a recent United Nations inquiry into the Gaza conflict warned on Tuesday that the lack of accountability for war crimes in he Middle East has “reached a crisis point” and is undermining any hope of peace.

The investigator, Richard Goldstone, made his comments here as he presented the Human Rights Council with his final report on violations of human rights and international law in the three-week war in Gaza last winter, which accuses both Israel and Palestinian groups of committing atrocities.

“A culture of impunity in the region has existed far too long,” Mr. Goldstone said. “The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence.”

Read more at the New York Times

Tbilisi Started '08 War, but Moscow Also at Fault, EU Finds

BRUSSELS -- Both Russia and Georgia claimed vindication Wednesday after a nine-month European Union investigation into last year's war in the Caucasus found that Tbilisi triggered the conflict, but that Moscow acted illegally in the extent of its invasion of Georgia and allowed "ethnic cleansing."

The roughly 1,000-page report, released on Wednesday by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, found no evidence to support Russian claims Georgia committed genocide the night of Aug. 7-8, 2008.

The conflict, which briefly brought the U.S. and Russia into Cold War-style confrontation, left hundreds of people dead and 35,000 displaced, and severely weakened Europe's security agreements. Russian forces remain in occupation of two Georgian territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow has recognized them as independent states.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Clinton to chair Security Council session on sexual violence

Washington - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton takes her campaign against sexual violence in conflict to the United Nations Wednesday, just as political strife in Guinea provides a fresh example of the kind of grisly actions she wants the world organization to stop.

Secretary Clinton, who has committed to making women's issues a "centerpiece" of her work as the Obama administration's chief diplomat, will chair a session of the UN Security Council on women, peace, and security. At the session Wednesday, she'll promote a US-sponsored resolution that seeks to expand and strengthen a measure approved last year, which condemns the use of rape in conflict and characterizes it as a threat to peace and security.

Read More at CS Monitor

Rethinking Our Terrorist Fears

WASHINGTON — Eight years after 9/11, the specter of terrorism still haunts the United States. Just last week, F.B.I. agents were working double time to unravel the alarming case of a Denver airport shuttle driver accused of training with explosives in Pakistan and buying bomb-making chemicals. In Dallas, a young Jordanian was charged with trying to blow up a skyscraper; in Springfield, Ill., a prison parolee was arrested for trying to attack the local federal building. Meanwhile, the Obama administration struggled to decide whether sending many more troops to Afghanistan would be the best way to forestall a future attack.

But important as they were, those news reports masked a surprising and perhaps heartening long-term trend: Many students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.

Read more at the New York Times

Are displaced Kashmiri Hindus returning to their homeland?

Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, locally known as Pandits, fled their ancestral homes in droves 20 years ago after a bloody rebellion broke out against New Delhi’s rule in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Now encouraged by the sharp decline in rebel violence across the Himalayan region, authorities have formally launched plans to help Pandits return home.

Will Pandits, who say they “live in exile in different parts of their own country” return to their homeland in Kashmir where two decades of violence has left nothing untouched and brought misery to the scenic region, its people and its once easy-going society?

Read more at Reuters

Cambodians in U.S. recall Khmer Rouge terror

LONG BEACH, Calif. - The tiny Cambodian woman trembled slightly and stared blankly ahead as she told the story that has haunted her for half a lifetime: Her parents and brother died in Khmer Rouge labor camps. Her baby perished in a refugee camp.

Roth Prom has wanted to die every day since and had never spoken those words so publicly until last week, when five minutes became the chance for justice she has longed for silently for so many years.

"I'm depressed in my head, I'm depressed in my stomach and in my heart. I have no hope in my body, I have nothing to live for," she said quietly. "All I have is just my bare hands."

Read more at MSNBC

The Tortured Brain

While we wait for Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, or the CIA to release evidence that "enhanced interrogation techniques" produced useful, truthful intelligence that could not be obtained without torture, neuroscientists are weighing in on how likely torture is to elicit such information—and they are not impressed.

It's become the conventional wisdom that the tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that "anything" need not be truthful as long as it is what the torturers want to hear. But years worth of studies in neuroscience, as well as new research, suggest that there are, in addition, fundamental aspects of neurochemistry that increase the chance that information obtained under torture will not be truthful.

Read more at Newsweek

Freed, Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Alleges Torture in Prison

Hours after his release from prison, the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former President George W. Bush said Tuesday that he had been tortured while in jail.

He said that he was beaten with pipes and steel cables, and that he received electric shocks while in custody. He added that there were many who would like to see him dead, including members of unidentified American intelligence agencies. Mr. Zaidi did not take questions after his brief remarks.

His brother Uday said that Mr. Zaidi flew to Greece, where he would receive medical and psychological care. Part of the reason he fears for his life, his brother said, is that he plans to identify the people who played a role in his mistreatment, including high-ranking security officials.

Read More At the New York Times

When scholars face threats, this global networker helps

NEW YORK – Robert Quinn has a plane to catch. He also has to write a speech for a conference in the Netherlands. But first he has to help a student from Azerbaijan get to a safe place. Because that’s what Mr. Quinn does: He saves scholars from danger.

“I just help the people who are helping other people,” says Quinn. As founder and executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR), Quinn and his small staff match scholars with a network of more than 200 universities and colleges in 26 countries. The goal? To find a place where academics can work free from threats to their physical, emotional, and professional safety.

The SAR team takes threats to scholars seriously. As in the case of Taslima Nasrin, who first had her life threatened in 1994 in her native Bangladesh. Her crime? Writing about women’s rights. Later, in 2008, while living in her adopted country, India, she again had her life threatened by religious fanatics when she continued to write and speak about women’s freedom. She cannot return to either country. Now a SAR scholar at New York University (NYU), she says, “SAR came to my aid by helping me to survive in a new land.”

Read More At Despardes

France Closes Immigrants Camp

ECtHR’s interim measures ignored

In Saadi v Italy, the European Court of Human Rights held in 2008 that article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits expulsion of individuals to states where they would face a “real risk” of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. In other words, the Court held that serious threats to the community presented by the suspected terrorist cannot be given priority over the risk of potential ill-treatment of this person in a state which is not a party to the ECHR.

Read more at the International Law Observer

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