The Human Rights Blog

The Alabama newspaper Birmingham News has published a collection of photographs taken by Birmingham News photographers during the civil rights movement and previously unpublished. The photographs, which were found in a forgotten cardboard box in a closet at the newspapers offices, depict the history of the movement in Alabama from 1956 to 1965 and include images that the editors thought too controversial to publish back then.

In all 5,000 photographs were found. The newspaper published over 30 of the photographs in its print edition and has set up a multi-media website where many more of the images appear, along with explanatory captions and interviews with photographers and other protagonists of the era.

OMCT urges the U.S. Government to implement the Concluding Observations of the Human Rights Committee

Geneva, July 31, 2006

The United Nations Human Rights Committee adopted on July 28 2006, strong Concluding Observations after the consideration of United States report on human rights in the U.S. under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which was submitted seven years late.

“This report issued following consideration of the initial U.S. report contained blatant refusal to comply with many of these recommendations and denotes a complete unwillingness to cooperate with the United Nations and more precisely with the Human Rights Committee” said Patrick Mutzenberg from the World Organization Against Torture - OMCT.

Civil liberties suffered an historic setback this week, when President Bush signed the un-American Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The president now has Congress's blessing to hold people indefinitely without charge, take away protections from horrific abuses, use hearsay to put people on trial, authorize death penalty trials based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for those accused, lifting our time-honored habeas corpus rules.

An investigation is starting into France's alledge role in the Rwandan genocide. Survivors of the genocide claim to have witnessed French soldiers allowing Hutu extremists to enter Tutsi camps.

Meanwhile, AFP reports that German authorities learned a few
weeks after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001
that terror suspects were held and mistreated at a US base
in Bosnia

The US administration is responding to allegation of torturing prisoners, by admitting the actions but claiming they are not torture. Torture is defined under the International Convention Against Torture as:

"any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession..."

The UN Committee Against Torture has already condemned the use of waterboarding as constituting torture or cruel or degrading treatment, and a violation of the Convention against Torture, to which the US is a part.

Waterboarding, called submarino in Spanish, is a common torture technique. The victim has their face introduced in water until he is almost close to drowning.

US: Immigrants May Be Held Indefinitely
- By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on
suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in
civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new
legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

November 14, 2006
NYT
German Prosecutor Asked to Investigate Rumsfeld

By MARK LANDLER FRANKFURT, Nov. 14 -- Emboldened by the resignation
last week of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, lawyers today
asked a German prosecutor to investigate Mr. Rumsfeld on allegations
of war crimes, stemming from the treatment of prisoners held in
military jails in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Cherif Bassiouni is one of the most important figures in international human rights and humanitarian law. He's the former Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan, appointed by the UNHCHR. He's been in a number of UM Human Rights Commissions. He has even been nominated for the Nobel Prize. And he's being watch by the FBI. And according to an appeals court, at least, well they should. A view that the US Supreme Court seems to agree with.

If Bassiouni, as important as he is, and as open as his work is (after all, he is reporting to the UN) is under constant observation - what can be said about the rest of us? We've heard about police departments infiltrating local peace organizations, and most of us in the human rights world, I imagine, assume are being observed as well. The FBI probably knows an awful lot about my fights with my husband, my frustrations with my kids and my views on local politics. They probably know much less about my actual sources and work - PGP is a wonderful tool -, but still, it could be never wracking to know they are watching you. And they are doing so while you pursue perfectly legal, morally imperative activities.

Apparently there isn't much we can do about it, at least legally.

Court Documents Allege Lengthy Detainment at Guantanamo Is Part of Deal With
Beijing
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 5, 2006; A13

Attorneys for a group of Chinese Muslims held for nearly five years in the
U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed suit yesterday, asking that
the men be released immediately and alleging that they have been held as
part of a political deal between the United States and China.

This letter from a prisoer currently imprisoned at Guantanamo was published in the LA Times today. Once again I wonder about its timeliness.

Last week US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that the US Constitution does not guarantee the right to habeas corpus because it didn't say so explicitly. His reasoning would seem comical, were it not for the fact that the administration takes it all too seriously. Indeed, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 eliminated habeas corpus for all non-citizens, and, as Parry explains below, arguably for citizens as well. In the mind of the Bush Administration, the Executive is all powerful and the Constitution provides no rights against executive power. Once again, it's incumbent upon the courts to restore the rule of law to the United States - and incumbent on the electorate to do away with the Bush administration in the next election.

Mon Jun 11, 2007 5:07PM EDT

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush cannot order the military to indefinitely imprison a suspected al Qaeda operative, who is the only foreign national held in the United States as an "enemy combatant," a court ruled on Monday.

The 2-1 appellate ruling was a major setback for Bush's contention in the war on terrorism that he has the power to detain people in the United States without charging them.

The Associated Press
Friday, June 22, 2007

US May Move Detainees to Afghan Prison

By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON, June 22 (AP) -- The United States is helping build a prison in Afghanistan that would take some prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay,
but the White House said Friday that it was not meant as an alternative to the detainee facility in Cuba.

The Bush administration wants to close Guantanamo Bay and move its terror suspects to prisons elsewhere, but says no decision about the status of the facility is imminent. White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said the United States has released about 80 of some 375 detainees, and hopes to transfer several dozen Afghans back to Afghanistan in the near future.

Washington D.C., June 21, 2007 - The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

January 8, 2009

CONTACT:
Elizabeth Chertoff, Media Coordinator, 415-544-0444, ext. 303, echertoff@cja.org

COURT RULES SOMALI EX-GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL CAN BE SUED IN U.S. COURTS FOR VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Court's decision paves way for individuals to be sued for violating human rights

(Richmond, Virginia). Today, January 8, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed a federal district court's decision dismissing the human rights lawsuit filed against former Somali General Mohamed Ali Samantar. As a result, the case against General Samantar for his role in overseeing the widespread and systematic use of torture, rape, prolonged arbitrary detention and mass executions committed against the civilian population of Somalia in the 1980s, has been reinstated.

By Osha Neumann

Thursday January 15, 2009

Oh Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.

—Barack Obama, from Dreams from My Father

The silence of Obama is deafening. Continents of misery are swallowed in his silence.

On the deaths of Palestinian children, the murder of mothers, the dismemberment of grandfathers, on the pools of blood on the hospital floor, the bombed and mangled ambulances, the screams of terror—he is silent.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6055

From Foreign Policy in Focus

President Barack Obama has reversed a few of the Bush administration's most egregious policies violating human rights and international law, such as the announced closure of the detention center in Guantánamo. But it remains to be seen to what extent he will lead the military toward respect for human rights, and change the institutional impunity to which American commanders and U.S. military allies have become accustomed.

Last month, combatant commanders came before Congress to make their case for funding. Southern Command Chief Admiral James Stavridis didn't hesitate to say how critical funds are for military training, especially the former School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). "The camaraderie developed among our military officers at these institutions," Stavridis said, "and the schools' strong emphasis on democratic values and respect for human rights are critical to creating military establishments capable of effective combined operations."

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who accused a Bay Area company of flying him to foreign torture chambers for the CIA is at the center of a bizarre new case, in which his lawyers face possible jail sentences for writing a letter that asked President Obama to disclose how brutally he was treated.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2009%2F04%2F20%2FBA68172JDM.DTL

From the Center for Constitutional Rights
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/383/t/6374/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27088

We need your help to impeach one of the legal architects of the Bush administration Torture Program who is now, incredibly, a federal judge.

Last week, President Obama released four torture authorization memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under the Bush administration that devised a legal framework for the justification of the Torture Program. The memos were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the Center for Constitutional Rights helped file with the ACLU and other organizations.

Over 70 Mexican human rights organizations have written to the US Congress expressing their concern over the military aid to fight the drug traffic that the United States is providing Mexico. The US Congress is considering increasing that aid significantly. The organizations request that human rights be put in the agenda of any conversation between the US and Mexico.

The following is the letter they've sent.

There has been much criticism of Obama's Bushesque human rights policies in recent days and weeks in the American press. However, I'm not sure that the extent of Obama's continuation of Bush's repressive and illegal policies is commonly known outside the US. For those of us who maintained even a glimpse of hope that Obama would be significantly different than Bush, what is happening is very disappointing. In short, the administration wants to limit habeas corpus, leave open the door for continuing the use of torture and forced disappearances, maintain the power of the president to arbitrarily detain people indefinitely and spy on them without judicial oversight. Not surprisingly, the administration also wants to solidify the impunity of those responsible for committing such vile acts.

I don't need to explain to you how these policies are not only violative of the human rights of the people involved, but also how they profoundly threaten the core of any liberal democracy, of justice and therefore peace. As the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law". And, in the United States, the rule of law has been broken - and, according to the deeds of the current administration, it will stay that way.

What I find most insidious, most dangerous, is that Obama is covering his repressive policies in the language of human rights. He pronounces the importance of the rule of law, while at the same time he undermines it. Doublespeak, if you will.

The following is a brief overview of the human rights that continue to be threatened under the Obama administration:

FYI

The U.S. has a relatively new "Human Rights Violator and War Crimes Unit" responsible for investigation persons in the US who have been involved with genocide, torture, war crimes, murder and other serious human rights violations.

Anyone with information about a person who has committed such crimes and has entered or will attempt to enter the United States can call ICE with a tip. The phone number is 1-866-347-2423. Calls can be anonymous.

Victims can call 1-866-872-4973 for assistance.

More info at http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/hrvc1.htm