Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire
Promoting human rights from Salisbury UK
Over a thousand refugees and migrants are being exposed to disease and inhuman living conditions by the Serbian authorities who are failing to provide accommodation, food and healthcare to them. They are being forced to endure the extreme cold winter temperatures by lighting fires and squatting in derelict warehouses in the capital.
If you can find time to write that would be appreciated.
Three men were executed today, 15 January 2017, in Bahrain. This has taken place in a country which likes to claim its commitment to human rights. The convictions were allegedly procured using torture which – according to local human rights groups – included suspension from the ceiling, beatings, electric shock to the genitals and elsewhere, food and sleep deprivation. Violent demonstration are said to have broken out.
The human rights situation in Bahrain is described as ‘dismal’ and in addition to the use of torture, there has been an orchestrated crack-down on the right to free speech and human rights activists and opposition politicians face arrest and repression.
Britain is closely involved in the Kingdom and Theresa May visited the country recently as part of a bid to boost trade. This has raised the issue of our relationship with a country with such poor human rights. She was quoted as saying:
There will be some people in the UK who say we shouldn’t seek stronger trade and security ties with these countries because of their record on human rights. But we don’t uphold our values and human rights by turning our back on this issue. We achieve far more by stepping up, engaging with these countries and working with them
It doesn’t seem to be going so well. There is indeed something to be said for engagement if it does over time secure better standards. It was reported today that Yarls Wood detention centre received a visit by Bahraini officials from the very prisons where torture is alleged to take place. The funding was from the secretive Conflict Stability and Security Fund which a select committee of MPs has been unable to find out much about. But once again it looks like fine words when in reality there is no improvement and all that seems matter is securing business. The UK has just opened a naval base in the state so our ability to apply pressure is further limited.
A Salisbury based firm has allegedly been supplying spyware equipment to enable the Bahraini security forces to penetrate mobile phones and computers.
Sources:
Mail Group Newspapers; Guardian; Observer; Amnesty International; Reprieve; Bahrain Center for Human Rights
On 12 January 2017 the House of Commons debated the war in Yemen for the second time in less than a month having already had a debate on it on 19 December. This has been called the ‘forgotten war’ for some time since all the media and political attention has been focused on Syria. So it is to be welcomed that this war is now getting its share of attention. This was an opposition debate led by Stephen Twigg MP.
This is a complex war difficult to summarise but essentially the two main actors are the Saudis and the Houthi rebels. Both have committed atrocities: the Houthis with massacres, the use of child soldiers and shelling across the border into Saudi territory. The Saudis by bombing civilian targets and using cluster weapons. The December debate focused on the use of these weapons, supplied by the UK before their use was banned. One thing we learned from that debate was that the UK government has offered to exchange cluster weapons for more modern Paveway bombs but it appears the Saudis have not taken up this offer.
To an extent it is a proxy war: part of the long-running Sunni/Shia feud being fought between Iran and Saudi. There are also tribal politics mixed in. Although the role of the Houthi rebels was criticised, the point was made that it was we who were arming the Saudis and RAF personnel involved at the command and control centre.
It was lengthy running to just under 3 hours. A number of points were made. A major concern was the allegations of abuses against International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the slow pace of investigations (‘glacial’ was the word used by Stephen Twigg) by the Saudis into them. Various figures were bandied about but over a hundred seems to be the consensus but only 9 investigations have been carried out in 14 months.
There were many tributes to DFID and its contribution to Yemen but as Stephen Twigg noted:
There is a paradox at the heart of the UK’s approach to Yemen: generous on aid but we contribute to the conflict with our arms sales.
It is interesting that during the writing of this blog, the headline of the Mail on Sunday was the result of a survey which apparently revealed that 78% of people want to end overseas aid and put the funds into the health service which is experiencing a crisis at present. The Coalition government and now the Conservatives must be praised for maintaining the levels of overseas aid despite considerable pressure from some of their backbenchers and some of the media.
Chris White MP – who is chair of the Arms Export Control Committee – said that the UK should be an example to the rest of the world in terms of our licensing regime. He reminded the House of rule 2(c) which ‘forbids the authorisation of arms sales if there is a clear risk of a violation of international humanitarian law’.
Comments
It is of course welcome that the House of Commons should have given such time to this debate on Yemen – indeed as we’ve noted the second in less than a month. The government has had something of a free ride, able to do little to end the conflict and carry on allowing our arms to be sold to Saudi – some £3.3bn worth so far. It seemed to be SNP (Scottish National Party) members who were the most forthright in condemning the arms sales. Tasmina Ahmend-Sheikh saying:
If Saudi Arabia and Iran are the puppeteers, we are the quartermasters
There were several calls for a peace process but one seems unlikely at present. It was alleged that the Saudis are resisting the process, a claim denied by Tobias Ellwood the minister in FCO.
The link between our sale of arms and the devastating effects of those weapons on the people of Yemen although made, was not strongly emphasised. Part of the problem of course is that although the Conservatives are in power now, many arms sales were made as well during the Labour administrations. So both parties are tainted.
The government is in something of a bind. The value of our exports to the region and to Saudi is considerable. One is reminded of the old adage – variously attributed to John Maynard-Keynes or John Paul Getty – that if you owe the bank a million pounds you have a problem, if you owe the bank a hundred million pounds, the bank has a problem. Because billions of pounds of weapons are sold, we are not in a position to exert much control: we are too dependent on the business. One can imagine polite words being spoken but it was clear from the debate that the Saudis think they can win this so are in no haste to agree peace terms and little more than token efforts are made to limit sales of arms. Such is the murky world of arms sales anyway, that brokers can quite easily circumvent controls certainly for the more every day weapons.
In the December debate, the Defence Secretary Michael Fallon insisted the Saudis were:
on the cusp of a major reform programme of its economy and society
The debate shone a light on the problems of the country and also on the pusillanimous nature of our foreign policy. Speaker after speaker referred to the terrible state the country was in and the enormous distress of its residents as a result of the war. It was interesting to note that at least two of the MPs said they were born there presumably from when it was known as Aden. Worries were expressed about ISIS moving in.
But the fundamental moral issue of our sale of arms to a country which uses them to wreak such havoc on another nation was not rigorously pursued. The FCO and the MoD would not be seriously disturbed by this debate.
It also provides a clue to life once we leave the EU. There will be a major push to achieve business with whichever countries we can and the morality of our dealings will not get a look in. It’s good for business they will say but not good for human rights.
The debate ended with calls for an urgent independent (ie not by the Saudis who are dragging their feet) investigation into reports of breaches of IHL on both sides of the conflict.
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Attached are the minutes of the January meeting thanks to group member Lesley for preparing them. We discussed the death penalty, forthcoming events including the film Fire at Sea, talk by a North Korean, the stall and the music festival.
The latest monthly death penalty report for December – January is now available thanks to group member Lesley for doing the research and compiling it.
Report (Word)
It was a pleasure to attend the annual lecture organised by the Romsey and Southampton Amnesty group given by Phillippe Sands (the link is to several of his articles). It was based on his book East West Street concerning in part the city of Lviv which was known at Lemberg in the nineteenth century and was also known as Lwów. Under the Soviets it was called Lvov. Its importance in his story was that two people came from the town who were very influential in the post-war developments of human rights.
First was Hersch Lauterpacht who was born just north of Lemberg and moved there in 1911, and the second was Rafael Lemkin who was born in Ozerisko and moved to Lemberg in 1900. They both worked behind the scenes during the Nuremberg trials. But their claims to fame are that Lauterpacht was instrumental in getting the world to agree the need for action on crimes against humanity and Lemkin on the concept of genocide. It is surprising that these two concepts are fairly recent and both date from 1945: one assumes they have been around for a lot longer. But that they both emanate from two men from the same town in east Poland is even more remarkable. Despite this and despite the fact they worked in the same field, they never met as far as is known.
Lauterpacht it was who wrote the International Bill of the Rights of Man which invoked Churchill’s commitment to the ‘enthronement of the rights of man.’ His book was key in the development of the UN declaration.
Sands discussed the arguments concerning whether ‘genocide’ should be included and in
the early years it was sometimes in and sometimes dropped. It met resistance because of legal doubts. Lemkin was keen to introduce this as a crime largely because of the German’s crimes in the war an in particular the activities of Hans Frank who oversaw the slaughter in his former town and Poland generally. Frank was hanged after the Nuremberg trials.
He finished his lecture by discussing briefly, the current state of affairs with regard to human rights. He expressed an ‘acute sense of anxiety at what stirs in our midst’ referring part to the far right groups in eastern Europe especially as they suffered so much under the Nazis.
He said he had a ‘sense of going backwards’ with our own politicians wanting to come out of the European convention which he thought was ‘unbelievable’. The platitudes of many of the current politicians seems to reflect a lack of knowledge of post-war events.
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20).
UPDATE 15 March 17
Extract from a recent University of Toronto report:
[…] Far from using this spyware solely to track what might be considered legitimate targets, these countries and their shadowy agencies have repeatedly used them to get inside the computers of human rights activists, journalists, opposition politicians, and even health advocates supporting a soda tax in Mexico. Some of the victims of these campaigns have found themselves arrested and tortured. Leaked emails from certain companies reveal that, despite public assurances by executives, the vendors seem cavalier about these type of abuses, have few internal checks in place to prevent them, and, indeed, knowingly court the clandestine agencies responsible for such abuses. Despite these alarming incidents, however, the dynamics of and participants in the market at large remain opaque.
While arguments rage in the USA concerning the alleged interference by Russia of the
presidential elections, a secretive Salisbury based firm, Gamma TSE, has been accused by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of supplying software called FinFisher or FinSpy to the authorities in Bahrain and elsewhere. This software enables intelligence agencies to insert Trojan software into computers and mobile phones. This in turn enables people critical of the regime to be tracked and if necessary arrested by the security services. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab is documenting the widespread use of this spying software.
Privacy International, Bahrain Watch, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and Reporters Without Borders lodged a complaint with the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights. They allege that the equipment is used by repressive regimes to harass and target dissidents, politicians and human rights activists.
Our involvement with repressive states – especially those in the Gulf – is well-known and Theresa May recently visited Bahrain to promote business interests in the kingdom. As we have noted many times before, there seems little interest in the consequences of our arms and security companies activities on the ordinary people who live in those countries, the death and destruction in Yemen being particularly awful.
Gamma is again in the news today (9 January 2017, p13) in a Times article entitled ‘No 10 linked to spyware in human rights row’ which reveals that despite the criticism by the OECD, they have been invited to the Home Office sponsored International Security and Policing exhibition in London. Amnesty reports show that the human rights situation in Bahrain is very poor with reports of torture and other forms of abuse:
[it] details dozens of cases of detainees being beaten, deprived of sleep and adequate food, burned with cigarettes, sexually assaulted, subjected to electric shocks and burned with an iron. One was raped by having a plastic pipe inserted into his anus.
It said the report showed torture, arbitrary detentions and excessive use of force against peaceful activists and government critics remained widespread in Bahrain.
The OECD report was not conclusive about Gamma as it was a ‘reluctant participant in the proceedings refusing to productively engage in a September 2013 mediation and employed stalling efforts.’
Privacy International say:
Gamma has proven itself to be and irresponsible corporate actor that is indifferent to the human rights impacts of its activities.
The Amnesty report also says:
The government [of Bahrain] continued to curtail freedoms of expression, association and assembly and cracked down further on online and other dissent. Opposition leaders remained imprisoned; some were prisoners of conscience. Torture and other ill-treatment remained common. Scores were sentenced to long prison terms after unfair trials. Authorities stripped at least 208 people of their Bahraini nationality. Eight people were sentenced to death; there were no executions.
A firm helping regimes with a record of mistreating its citizens and regularly using torture, is based in the village of Porton, near Salisbury, Wiltshire.
The Conservative government has long disliked the European Convention and is now proposing to put withdrawal in the next manifesto. This will be a serious mistake and will affect the human rights of many individuals in the UK. It will also send a message to many other countries around the world whose record on human rights leaves a lot to be desired.
One of the problems with discussing this issue is that it is clouded by a programme of disinformation by the tabloid press. Being a European creation it is damned by association. It is also, in their eyes, a serious threat because it gives people some rights concerning privacy. Since large parts of the British press are concerned with the private lives of celebrities and profit from such stories (which to be fair have an avid readership), anything which inhibits their ability to publish such material is going to harm profits. There has thus been a continuous series of stories which rubbish the Human Rights Act and the European Convention (ECHR). Small wonder therefore that politicians follow this line and brave it is for those few who stand up for the Act.
Theresa May has a particular animus against it and is famous for her fatuous remark about someone not being deported because of a cat. “I’m not making this up” she famously said: only she was. The person involved was a Bolivian who wasn’t an illegal immigrant anyway but was a student who had overstayed his visa. At the tribunal and later at appeal, part of the evidence for his right to stay, was his relationship with a British woman, various other domestic matters, and their ownership of a cat.
A more serious case which caused Mrs May angst whilst at the Home Office was the case of Abu Qatada. The Home Office spent many years trying to deport him and the HRA was blamed by her and the right wing media for being unable to do so. In simple terms, he could not be deported because either he – or the witnesses against him – would be tortured by the Jordanian authorities. He was eventually deported following diplomatic negotiations which led to Jordan agreeing to renounce torture. It was never really explained during all the months of dispute about the need to deport him, why he was never put on trial here.
In a speech in April last year Theresa May (then Home Secretary) set out her reasons for wishing to depart from the ECHR:
[…] The ECHR can bind the hands of Parliament, adds nothing to our prosperity, makes us less secure by preventing the deportation of dangerous foreign nationals – and does nothing to change the attitudes of governments like Russia’s when it comes to human rights. So regardless of the EU referendum, my view is this. If we want to reform human rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court. (26 April 2016)
Almost every part of this paragraph is nonsense but one element is ‘[it] does nothing to change the attitude of governments like Russia’s’. We have just seen the brutal activities of Russian forces in action in Syria and prior to that, in Ukraine and Chechnya. Human rights in Russia are at a low ebb and the murder of opposition leaders and journalists a fairly frequent occurrence. But Russia has been subject to the ECtHR for some years and something like half their judgements are against Russia, Turkey, Romania and Ukraine. It is, in a small way, a civilising influence. It has had an effect on their activities.
On the other hand there has been a miniscule number of judgements against the UK – 10 in 2012 for example. Indeed if one looks at the statistics, between 1959 and 2015 there have been 525 judgements concerning the UK of which 305 decided that there was at least one violation. That is 305 over a period of 56 years. From all the sturm and drang in the media you would imagine it was at least ten times greater.
The chief worry is that if we – one of the founders of the European Court – pull out it will give the Russians the perfect excuse to do so as well. One of the lawyers acting for the survivors of the Beslan massacre in Russia said:
It would be and excuse for our government to say we don’t want it either. Putin would point at the UK straight away. It would be a catastrophe. [the UK] has to understand; we all live in the same world and we all have impact on one another. (quoted in A Magna Carta for all Humanity by Francesca Klug, Routledge, 2015, p193)
At the end of the extract from Theresa May’s speech she goes on to say ‘if we want to reform human rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court.’ But what laws do we want to reform? We still wait after more than five years for sight of the British Bill of Rights although it is still promised.
There are two aspects to the proposed withdrawal: internal and external. Internally, it will reduce the rights of individuals in their claims against the state. People like the Hillsborough survivors would never have succeeded in their quest for justice without article 2. The parents of the Deepcut shooting would never have received justice without the ECHR. On that subject, Theresa May also wants to remove the armed services from the act, a view echoed by the local MP for Devizes.
Behind all this anti-ECtHR rhetoric, are the assumptions that all EU rulings are wrong and that we have a superior and infallible legal system. We do indeed enjoy a very good system – witness the low number of rulings against us by the European Court – but it is not perfect and judges have shown themselves to be too keen on supporting the establishment. There is also the issue of sovereignty and a belief that it is only our parliament who should decide our laws. The problem here is the weakness of parliament in challenging the executive.
Externally, it will send a harmful message to countries like Russia and Turkey where human rights are fragile. It is astonishing to recall that it was a conservative, Sir Winston Churchill who was instrumental in forming the Convention. Yet now it is the same conservatives who want to abolish it because, now and again, we fall foul of it and have to change our procedures or right a wrong.
Coming out of the European Convention would be a serious error and a backward step. Our influence in the world would be diminished. As a result of Brexit, we will be desperate to secure trade deals with whoever we can. Such limited concerns as we do have for human rights will all but disappear in the rush to sign a deal. Witness our activities in the Yemen where we are more concerned with selling £3bn of arms than we are with the results of the bombing. In the UK, the ability of ordinary people to uphold their rights in every day situations will be diminished.
The local group hopes to campaign in favour of the Human Rights Act and related issues as when we get some details from government. If you believe these matters are important, as we do, both for people’s rights in this country and our influence overseas, you would be welcome to join us. Details will be here and on twitter and Facebook
We are pleased to say that the Methodist Church in Salisbury has agreed to host a display of four cases from our current ‘Write for Rights’ campaign and this display will be in place until 14th of January. Visitors to the church will be able to read the cases and if they wish, send a card which is available from the coffee shop. The church is open from 10 in the morning and often for much of the day. They serve coffee (which is very good value and can be recommended!).
A YouTube video about the programme can be seen here (2 mins).
A happy New Year to our readers around the world!
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 