Group meeting on Thursday 8th July starting at 7pm (note slightly earlier time) via Zoom. All supporters welcome. If you would like to attend, reply to this (or on Facebook, or Twitter) and we will send you a link. You can see the minutes of the previous meeting here.
Positive news on the human rights front
Investigators using a range of modern technology to keep track of human rights violations
Looking at the scale and extent of human rights abuses around the world, it is hard not to feel in despair. The ‘never again’ optimism after the Second World War seems to have melted away with wholesale abuses taking place in Syria, Egypt, China, Myanmar and many other places. China executes more of its citizens than any other country in the world and is incarcerating a million Uyghurs in a form of ethnic cleansing. The treatment of Rohingyas in Myanmar is another massive tragedy. Egypt is on an execution spree – 16 in one day – and abuses are evident in nearly all the Gulf states.
It seems that nearly all the perpetrators escape justice. Evidence is difficult if not impossible to obtain. Western governments are more than willing to look the other way. The countries concerned are major buyers of weapons – Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest customer for example – which makes them complicit in the crimes.
But it seems as though there may be cause for optimism with an organisation using a range of modern technology to track down the perpetrators and collect evidence with a view to a future trial. Soon to be launched Investigative Commons will be acting as a kind of hub to enable this work to be done. People are familiar with Bellingcat which used similar methods to track down the two Russian GRU agents who came here to Salisbury in an attempt to murder Sergei Skripal.
A significant advance is made possible by Forensic Architecture who are able to match events to individual arms firms. This is truly ground-breaking and in the case of Yemen, they are assembling evidence which may enable individual politicians and others to be put on trial for breaches of International Human Rights.
Up until now, human rights work has depended on people working in the country concerned which of course is extremely risky. Many human rights defenders, lawyers and other activists have been arrested or executed during the course of trying to look into violations.
A potential game changer
This relatively new method enables information to be collected from a wide range of sources and can be put together for a trial. This represents a major leap in the ability of human rights organisations to keep track of what is happening around the world and may in addition, act as some kind of deterrent to abusers.
The organisation is based in the same office block in Germany as the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, ECCHR which has had some success in Syria. The use of open source information and assembling it into a potential case for the International Court does look like a potential game changer.
No doubt we shall be referring to this organisation in the future.
Source: The Observer 27 June 2021
China’s oppression of Uighurs spreads overseas
China reported to be using its financial muscle to secure the arrest of ex-patriot Uighurs in foreign countries
This is an extract from the Uyghur* Human Rights Project. China is much in the news recently and the arrest of journalists and the closure of a popular newspaper in Hong Kong has featured strongly in the west. The systematic repression of Uighurs continues unabated however, both within the country and as this report discusses, overseas.
The report is the product of an effort to understand the means by which China targets Uighurs beyond its borders to silence dissent. In partnership with the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs gathered cases of China’s transnational repression of Uyghurs from public sources, including government documents, human rights reports, and reporting by credible news agencies to establish a detailed analysis of how the scale and scope of China’s global repression are expanding.
Since 1997, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has engaged in an unprecedented scale of transnational repression that has reached 28 countries worldwide. The China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset examines 1,546 cases of detention and deportation from 1997 until March 2021 and offers critical insight into the scope and evolution of the Chinese government’s efforts to control and repress Uyghurs across sovereign boundaries. Our data finds instances of at least 28 countries across the world complicit in China’s harassment and intimidation of Uyghurs, most notably in much of the Middle East and North Africa with 647 cases, and in South Asia with 665 cases. The dataset contains 1,151 cases of Uyghurs being detained in their host country and 395 cases of Uyghurs being deported, extradited, or rendered back to China.
China’s transnational repression of Uyghurs has been consistently on the rise and has accelerated dramatically with the onset of its system of mass surveillance in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) from 2017, showing a correlation between repression at home and abroad. In the first stage of China’s evolving system of transnational repression, from 1997 to 2007, a total of 89 Uyghurs from 9 countries, mostly in South and Central Asia, were detained or sent to China. In the second phase (2008–2013), 130 individuals from 15 countries were repressed. In the ongoing third phase (2014 to the end of our data collection in March 2021), a total of 1,327 individuals were detained or rendered from 20 countries. Unreported cases would likely raise these figures substantially, with our database presenting just the tip of the iceberg due to our reliance on publicly reported instances of repression.
International organizations and host governments, particularly those with close political and economic ties to the PRC, can often be complicit in China’s use of transnational repression against Uyghurs, many of whom have sought refuge abroad. China’s transnational repression exists as part of a wider trend of global authoritarianism that threatens to erode democratic norms worldwide. Stopping China’s transnational repression is a moral imperative and crucial to maintaining state sovereignty and the integrity of international organizations like Interpol and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
States that host Uyghur diaspora communities can take concrete steps to combat China’s transnational repression and protect Uyghurs and other vulnerable populations. Governments can refuse to extradite Uyghurs, increase refugee and emigration quotas, and restrict networks of enablers, including tech companies, as well as diaspora groups and organizations acting as fronts for the Chinese government.
This report describes transnational repression and the key actors and methods used by the Chinese government. It then traces the evolution of China’s campaign of repression, showing how that campaign has shifted in emphasis from Central and South Asia, to Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, following the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. The full report can be read by following the link above.
*There are different spellings
The Weekly Round-Up: Rape Report and damning findings from the Morgan Inquiry — UK Human Rights Blog
This is a republished piece:
In the News: On Friday 18 June, the Ministry of Justice published the End-to-End Rape Review Report on Findings and Actions, which assesses how the system is currently failing rape complainants, and sets out a plan to return the volume of cases progressing to court to pre-2016 levels. In the two years it took to…
The Weekly Round-Up: Rape Report and damning findings from the Morgan Inquiry — UK Human Rights Blog
Minutes: June
Minutes of the June 2021 meeting via Zoom
We are pleased to attach a copy of the June minutes thanks to group member Lesley for preparing them. It was a full meeting marked by a decision to end the North Korea campaign which has run for over a decade. The group thanked Tony for his work on this campaign over the years. Although no longer a specific campaign, we will carry out actions from time to time if the opportunity arises.
Jihyun Park. Pic: Salisbury Amnesty 
North Korean speaker in Salisbury
Current concerns
The group remains concerned about current government plans and bills with a human rights element to them. There is a suggestion that the government continues work to undermine our Human Rights, and the right to protest on policy decisions being one aspect of that.
Reviews of the HRA and Judicial Review process are still continuing and nothing definite has been reported. The results are expected in the late summer.
A recent report by the EHRC tracker highlights a lack of UK government progress on human rights: It concludes that no progress has been made in the category of ‘political and civic participation, including political representation’ and its ‘equality and human rights legal framework’. This is due in part to the New Immigration Act, Police Crime Bill, the reviews of the Human Rights Act and the legal process of Judicial Review.
Common Sense: Conservative Thinking in a Post-Liberal Age.
Early in May a group of sixty Conservative backbench MP’s published a book outlining Conservative values and long-term policy for the party. Though not mainstream Conservative policy, the book provides a disturbing insight into core Conservative thinking. Among the policies proposed are the revoking the HRA, break-up of the BBC, taking on internet giants, scrapping the Supreme Court and defeating ‘woke-ism’. We have attempted to review one chapter by the Devizes MP Danny Kruger.
Webinar – Police Crime Bill
A short webinar organised by AI confirmed the position that: Losing the right to protest and therefore resist government policy will result in further UK Human Rights violations.
Besides the issue of restrictions concerning protesting, the webinar included discussion on crime, Roma communities, minorities, discrimination and police intimidation. Although participants emphasised the need for resistance to the Police Crime Bill no clear action was proposed.
In the Commons the Labour Party submitted amendments to the Police Crime Bill, particularly the deletions of sections concerning restrictions on protest. However, with a strong Conservative majority these amendments were defeated. Amendments to the Bill in the House of Lords are also likely to be rejected.
The group is maintaining a watching brief on these proposals and will consider campaigning actions when details are known.
.
Death penalty report: May – June
We are pleased to attach the current monthly death penalty report prepared by group member Lesley. Contains a lot of information: Iran, Saudi, Belarus, Canada, Egypt and the US. Note that China – the world’s largest executioner – is absent because details of its massive execution activities are a state secret.
Good news! Pakistan
This is to let you know that on Thursday a Pakistani Court acquitted Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar, the Christian couple, who had been sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy in 2014, and ordered their release from prison. The resolution stated that the evidence against the couple was ‘deeply flawed’ as, since both were ‘illiterate’, they would have been unable to send the text. It called for them to be released immediately and unconditionally, and for their death sentences – and those of all others on death row for allegedly violating the Country’s ‘draconian’ blasphemy laws – to be speedily reviewed.
Curious insight into Conservative view of the Human Rights Act
Devizes MP Danny Kruger has written a chapter in a book by the Common Sense group
May 2021
In recent years some members of the Conservative party seem to have a problem with the Human Rights Act and some would like to see it abolished. Far right newspapers typify the act as being a means by which terrorists, murderers and others escape justice because the act provides lawyers with a range of loopholes to get their clients off. They call it a ‘criminal’s charter’. Many of the stories, on closer examination, turn out not to be true or wanton exaggerations.
The current corpus of human rights law started life after the Second World War and there were a number of Conservative politicians who were active proponents, including Sir Winston Churchill and David Maxwell-Fyfe.
Since 2015, the tone has changed and in the manifesto of that year, David Cameron promised to scrap the act. Little happened and by the time of the 2019 manifesto, ‘scrap’ had gone and a review was promised. What is to be reviewed and how a new act would look and what it would contain has never been clear. At the time, the Salisbury group raised the matter with our MP Mr John Glen, but we were not much clearer what they wanted it replaced by. The review of the act is currently underway.
A new book has just been produced by a group of backbench Conservatives called Common Sense: Conservative Thinking For a Post-Liberal Age. In it, is a chapter written by the Devizes* MP Danny Kruger entitled Restoring rights: Reclaiming Liberty.
His chapter contains odd reasoning and some curious logic. His first claim is that the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted by British Lawyers after World War II [lawyers from other countries were involved so it is incorrect to say ‘British lawyers’] ‘sits uncomfortably with the English tradition of preventing tyranny’. This will come as something of a surprise to the millions of people who were enslaved and were worked to death in the sugar plantations or those who worked in fearful conditions in nineteenth century factories. The acquisition of Empire also has many horror stories. Quite where this ‘prevention of tyranny’ was taking place is not made clear.
Human rights are misnamed he claims. ‘The rights we really need, and the only ones we really have, derive from something higher and something lower than mankind. They derive from the idea of God, and from the fact of nations: from a Christian conception of law …’ It would be difficult to locate in the Bible many of the principles enshrined in the ECHR or HRA if only because these ideas and principles were a long way from a society colonised by the Romans and where practices like slavery were common. There are many favourable references to slavery in the Bible for example. The ‘lower than mankind’ element is not explained.
He quotes approvingly of the American author Patrick Deneen who wrote Why Liberalism Failed (2018). Many do not agree with Kruger’s admiration of Deneen’s book regarding his blame of a huge range of society’s ills on excessive liberalism to be odd not to say ridiculous.
His analysis seems to go seriously awry however with the following passage:
“And so, from an early stage we came to think of rights as the means by which we are set free from external pressure, set free from obligations to others; and from there it is a small step to the hypocritical assumption that rights confer obligations on others to satisfy us” (p49).
It is incorrect to say that requiring the state to act in a lawful and reasonable way towards its subjects is in anyway hypocritical. What is hypocritical about requiring the State not to torture us? What is hypocritical about having a fair trial? Nor is it true to argue that rights set us free from external pressure. This seems to go to the heart of the objections raised by some Conservatives about the HRA, and the attempts to weave in duties. The argument seems to be you only deserve these rights in limited circumstances and in a conditional way.
This argument is further developed in this passage:
“This conception of rights must be rooted in the existence of a community – a real community, not the abstraction of ‘humankind’. A real community entails reciprocal duties, situated in institutions that can enforce them and mediated by the conventions of people who know each other and share a common culture. This is the nation. We derive our rights from our citizenship (or more properly, our subjectship)”. p52 (our italics)
The problem all along with the objections to the HRA is trying to tie them down to specifics. In an earlier Conservative document Protecting Human Rights in the UK, the examples seem to be stuck on deporting foreign criminals as an example of obligations.
The Human Rights Act, brought in following cross party consensus – and falsely characterised as ‘Labour’s Human Rights Act’ – represented a significant shift in power. Ever since the Norman conquest, power rested with the elites: the king, the barons and gradually the landowners and aristocracy. Concessions were drawn from them as a result of unrest, riots or events such as the Peterloo massacre. Magna Carta sought to restore some of the rights enjoyed during Saxon times. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ brought further changes. The Great Reform Act some more.
We were subjects not citizens. The HRA changed that and gave citizens a range of fundamental rights (some of which are conditional). It would appear that for a small number of Conservative backbenchers in the Common Sense group this is troubling. Yet Mr Kruger’s chapter never gives solid reasons for change, only rather nebulous arguments which crumble away on close reading.
*Devizes is a small town 25 miles north of Salisbury.
UK government accountable for a lack of progress on human rights.
A recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission highlights a lack of UK government progress on human rights: It concludes that no progress has been made in the category of ‘political and civic participation, including political representation’ and its ‘equality and human rights legal framework’. This is due in part to the New Immigration Act, Police Crime Bill and the reviews of the Human Rights Act and the legal process of Judicial Review.
The report also covers the topics of ‘educational attainment’, ‘hate crime and hate speech’, ‘human trafficking and modern slavery’ and ‘mental health’. It concludes that: “Women, ethnic minorities and disabled people remain under-represented in politics and diversity data is inadequate. Candidates sharing certain protected characteristics are disproportionately subject to abuse and intimidation, and long-term funding is needed to ensure disabled people’s equal participation.”
The EHRC considers that there has been a severe regression of human rights with The Coronavirus Act and the removal of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights from domestic law after Brexit.
The United Kingdom is signed up to seven UN human rights treaties. The EHRC’s report clearly demonstrates the UK government’s lack commitment to ensure its citizens’ rights are properly protected. The EHRC’s full report: Check on UK Government progress | Human Rights Tracker
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 