Category: “Human rights”

21st Vigil video


The 21st Vigil took place on Saturday 27th April

May 2024

The conflict continues although it has largely dropped down the running order in recent weeks. The war in Gaza is causing great fury on US university campuses with close to riotous events taking place. It does not seem either productive or appropriate to perpetuate the violent behaviour in Gaza on the streets of American universities.

We attach a short video film of the last Salisbury vigil – the 21st – in which just over 30 took part, expertly put together by Peter Gloyns. The focus is on ending the violence and features images of weapons used by the Israelis which they purchase from western – mainly US but also UK companies – which cause so much damage in the territory.

As we write, President Netanyahu has said they are planning on a military attack on Rafah, currently packed with people who have fled other parts of Gaza because of the bombing. The current death toll stands at 34,000.

The Salisbury group was established 50 years ago this year

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Hugh Grant settles


Hugh Grant settles his privacy action against NGN

April 2024

The actor Hugh Grant has finally agreed to settle his case against NGN, the Murdoch owned group and publishers of the Sun newspaper. The accusations involved phone hacking, unlawful information gathering, landline phone tapping, bugging his phone, burgling his home and office and blagging medical records. This activity, carried on on an industrial scale not just against Hugh Grant but a host of other celebrities, sports stars and politicians, is described in detail in Nick Davies’ book Hack Attack (Chatto & Windus, 2014) following years of investigation by him. The book describes in detail the failure of the media, parliament and the police to tackle the flagrant abuse of power by a media baron in the pursuit of newspaper sales.

The need to settle is another example of the failure of the British Judicial system to achieve justice and a hearing of the allegations in open court. The potential risk to Grant, even if he won his case, would be around £10m because if the damages were less than what NGN have paid into court, he would be liable to both side’s costs. He has won substantial damages which go along the £51m already paid in 2023 in settlements to keep the activity from being aired in court. The group is thought to have paid around £1bn to keep this out of the courts.

The interest from a human rights perspective, apart from the lack of justice and the abuse of power, is the light it shines on the right wing press and their campaigns to end the Human Rights Act and to come out of the ECHR. This is discussed in detail in Francesca Klug’s book A Magna Carta for all Humanity (Routledge, 2015, chapter 5). She points out that prior to the HRA coming into force, ‘our only remedy against press intrusion were torts such as breach of confidence, libel or malicious falsehood, none of which protected us from long-lens cameras or door-stepping journalists’ (p265). The ‘somewhat inflated’ boasts about the wonders of common law, privacy was not a principle it recognised.

Nick Davies was a journalist on the Guardian and it was that newspaper which the Metropolitan Police – senior officers of which has accepted large sums from the Sun for articles that were never published and whose officers revealed and sold confidential information to the hackers – attempted to prosecute the newspaper to get them to reveal their sources. Despite the scale of the wrongdoing, unbelievably, this was the only attempted prosecution. It was the HRA which played a part in stymying that attempt because again, the common law does not protect journalists and their sources.

As we pointed out in a previous post concerning anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, and the current arguments concerning Rwanda and the proposed deportation of the boat people, there are still politicians who wax lyrical about the Common law despite its many defects and the sometimes egregious failings of our judicial system to protect the innocent, the powerless and the victims. They argue, with plentiful support from sections of the media, that we do not need a foreign court to protect our rights and secure justice. Yet this case is yet another example where, despite the payment of a massive sum to Hugh Grant, the justice system failed and continues to fail and that it was and is the HRA and ECHR which are crucial weapons victims can use to achieve at least a smidgeon of justice.

The Salisbury group was established 50 years ago this year
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Hillsborough


Today, 15 April 2024, is the 35th anniversary of the tragedy

April 2024

Thirty five years ago today, 97 people died at the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough stadium during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Once the immediate shock of the death toll had passed, much of the media and South Yorkshire police put the blame on the supporters and in particular those from Liverpool for the tragedy. This blame became the standard narrative and was part of the judicial narrative as well. Plentiful lies were told and a headline in the Sun newspaper has meant the paper is no longer sold in Liverpool to this day.

The copious lies told by the police meant inquests were thoroughly unsatisfactory and the families of those who died spent decades in an attempt to get justice. Why it has appeared on this site is because justice was not achieved until the right to life provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights, now part of UK law, came into force. That, together with funding support, meant the police could be cross questioned and a jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Previous poor decisions by judges and a coroner were overturned. A report by the Hillsborough Independent Panel said:

“The disclosed documents show that multiple factors were responsible for the deaths of the
96 victims of the Hillsborough tragedy and that the fans were not the cause of the disaster.
The disclosed documents show that the bereaved families met a series of obstacles in their
search for justice“.

Today, in the light of the government’s desire to deport refugees to Rwanda – a final decision on which might be made in parliament this very week – will find that it is in direct conflict with ECHR. The Conservatives are divided on this and some, like local Devizes MP Danny Kruger, do not believe we need the court and object to Strasbourg effectively overriding our judicial system. He and others believe our system of justice based on the Common Law is sufficient protection. The prime minister Rishi Sunak in a recent statement believes that controlling immigration is more important than ‘membership of a foreign court’.

Common law, or indeed any law at all, did not save the Hillsborough families the decades of distress, dire judicial decisions, police lies and media denigration they have had to endure. The judicial system also failed to make anyone accountable for the wrongdoing and bad decisions which led to the disaster. It is interesting in researching this post and looking at the reports of the anniversary, how little or no mention is made of the ECHR in the the right-wing papers. Yet it was crucial in achieving justice for the families. Mr Kruger and others have a rosy view of our justice system despite what Conor Gearty refers to in a discussion of a succession of miscarriages of justice in his book On Fantasy Island*, ‘The role of judges in all this was either passive legitimisers of state abuse or – more scandalously – as drivers of wrong convictions in the first place’ (p40). He goes on to refer to how they seem somewhat impervious to ‘a succession of judicial debacles’ (ibid).

Hillsborough showed conclusively that we need the protections of the ECHR since our own legal system so often fails to offer protection to the ordinary citizen.

*Oxford University Press, 2016

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March minutes


March 2024

We are pleased to attach the minutes of the group’s meeting in March thanks to group member Lesley for producing them. As we have explained before, they are lengthier than one would expect from normal minutes but as we do not produce a newsletter, they provide information of possible interest for recipients and supporters.

Due to a misunderstanding of WordPress statistics, previous reports of visitor numbers were erroneously reported and in fact are at a much higher level than realised. This arose because ‘visits’ are in fact visits by new people. Existing visitors – those whose IP address will be recognised – are not included in the figure.

March 2024 minutes (Word)Download
The Salisbury Group was established 50 years ago this year.
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Scrap anti-protest laws


The government should scrap the anti-protest laws it has passed

February 2024

This call was made in the current edition of the Amnesty magazine and refers to various laws the government has passed to curb or prevent protests taking place. The first is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the second is the Public Order Act 2023. They were introduced mainly as a result of climate change protestors who carried out a range of protests and campaigns which were not popular with the government, the right wing media or some of the public. 

Protests, violent or otherwise, have been a feature of Britain’s political life for centuries. Indeed, the Conservative politician Ian Gilmour, who served in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, wrote a book Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England, (Pimlico, 1993) which described the considerable number of such things which were a regular feature of life at the time. So the activities of Extinction Rebellion are neither new nor especially harmful in the light of history. It’s possible that the two Home Secretaries who pushed through this legislation were both daughters of immigrants who may not have been aware of this history. 

It is also ironic that both politicians, who are female, owe their right to be an MP – or to vote at all – to the actions of suffragists and latterly, the suffragettes who campaigned violently for those rights It is also ironic that the suffragists campaigned peacefully for around four decades and made little progress – arguably none. There were many campaigns which have led to positive change viz: ending Apartheid in South Africa, the Chartist movement, ending slavery and protests leading to the Great Reform Act. It is true to say that many of the rights we enjoy today, owe their existence to a protest of some kind to achieve them. 

It is also a sad fact of life that peaceful protests usually get ignored. There are many marches, some quite large involving many thousands, which get no coverage. But once violence erupts, it becomes news. Governments do not like protest and see them as some kind of threat to their right to govern. But protest is about the only way ordinary people to make their concerns heard or to promote change.

Both acts should be scrapped.  

The Salisbury group was established 50 years ago

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Nigerian protest


Members of the Salisbury group took part in Humanist protest in 2022

February 2024

Pictured: Humanists UK’s #FreeMubarakBala protest outside the Nigerian High Commission, London, 2022. Two members of the Salisbury group can be seen, centre. Picture: Humanists

MPs have raised the case of Mubarak Bala, imprisoned President of the Nigerian Humanist Association, at a debate in Westminster Hall on Freedom of Religion or Belief in Nigeria. The debate was secured by Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party), Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Freedom of Religion or Belief (APPG FoRB) – of which Humanists UK is a stakeholder. 

Humanists UK has been calling for Bala’s release since he was arrested in April 2020. Two years later, Bala was convicted and sentenced to 24 years’ imprisonment for posting ‘blasphemous’ content on Facebook following an unfair trial: it was repeatedly delayed and the charges against him were duplicated. Procedural irregularities were rife. Bala remained incarcerated without charge for well over a year. He was denied access to his lawyers and family for an extended period. He was denied medical attention. The Abuja High Court’s ruling that he be released on bail was ignored by Kano State authorities. His case exemplifies the need to abolish blasphemy laws, which intrinsically contravene the right to freedom of religion or belief.

During the debate, Jim Shannon said that he, alongside other members of the APPG FoRB has visited Nigeria in 2022:

‘We used our visit to speak to some of the judiciary and judges in Nigeria… and made a very good case for the release of Mubarak. We thought we had made some headway on that, and the indications coming from the judiciary seemed to say that, but he is still in prison.’

Shadow Foreign Minister Lyn Brown said:

‘I can understand the anxiety about states in Nigeria continuing to imprison people for exercising religious freedoms. We all know the case of Mubarak Bala.’

Humanists UK campaigns for freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) around the world, particularly for non-religious people facing persecution. In many countries it is impossible to be openly non-religious. Laws that criminalise blasphemy and apostasy are often the source of such persecution – as they were in Mubarak Bala’s case. The repeal of such laws is therefore a vital step in guaranteeing FoRB for all.

Director of Public Affairs and Policy Kathy Riddick commented:

‘We thank Jim Shannon MP for securing the debate and raising the case of our colleague Mubarak Bala who has been imprisoned simply for expressing his humanist beliefs. 

‘The situation for humanists in Nigeria is dire. Blasphemy and apostasy are punishable by death and this is used to falsely justify the social persecution of the non-religious. Particularly worrying is that Nigeria is on the ‘safe country list’ under the Illegal Migration Act, which means that non-religious asylum seekers may face great risks if they are deported there.

‘We continue to call on the government to use all channels available to advocate for the repeal of all blasphemy and apostasy laws, and to secure not only the release of Mubarak, but the release of those convicted or imprisoned under such laws.’

Pictures: Salisbury Amnesty

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UN Rapporteur ‘seriously concerned’ at crackdown in UK


UN Rapporteur on environment matters expressed ‘alarm’ ‘distress’ and ‘serious concern’ at the crackdown on environmental activists in UK

January 2024

Between 10 – 12 January 2024, David Forst, made his first visit to the United Kingdom since he was elected as UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention in June 2022.

On 23 January he issued a statement in the light of the extremely worrying information he received in the course of meetings regarding the increasingly severe crackdowns on environmental defenders in the United Kingdom, including in relation to the exercise of the right to peaceful protest.

“These developments are a matter of concern for any member of the public in the UK who may wish to take action for the climate or environmental protection. The right to peaceful protest is a basic human right. It is also an essential part of a healthy democracy. Protests, which aim to express dissent and to draw attention to a particular issue, are by their nature disruptive. The fact that they cause disruption or involve civil disobedience do not mean they are not peaceful. As the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear, States have a duty to facilitate the right to protest, and private entities and broader society may be expected to accept some level of disruption as a result of the exercise of this right“.

Peaceful protests

During his visit, however, he learned that, in the UK, peaceful protesters are being prosecuted and convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for the criminal offence of “public nuisance”, which is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. He was also informed that the Public Order Act 2023 is being used to further criminalize peaceful protest. In December 2023, a peaceful climate protester who took part for approximately 30 minutes in a slow march on a public road was sentenced to six months imprisonment under the 2023 law. That case is currently on appeal, but it is important to highlight that, prior to these legislative developments, it had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK.

He also expressed alarm to learn that, in some recent cases, presiding judges have forbidden environmental defenders from explaining to the jury their motivation for participating in a given protest or from mentioning climate change at all. It is very difficult to understand what could justify denying the jury the opportunity to hear the reason for the defendant’s action, and how a jury could reach a properly informed decision without hearing it, in particular at the time of environmental defenders’ peaceful but ever more urgent calls for the government to take pressing action for the climate.

He also received highly concerning information regarding the harsh bail conditions being imposed on peaceful environmental defenders while awaiting their criminal trial. These have included prohibitions on engaging in any protest, from having contact with others involved in their environmental movement or from going to particular areas. Some environmental defenders have also been required to wear electronic ankle tags, some including a 10pm – 7am curfew, and others, GPS tracking. Under the current timeframes of the criminal justice system, environmental defenders may be on bail for up to 2 years from the date of arrest to their eventual criminal trial. 

Such severe bail conditions have significant impacts on the environmental defenders’ personal lives and mental health and he seriously questioned the necessity and proportionality of such conditions for persons engaging in peaceful protest. In addition to the new criminal offences, he was deeply troubled at the use of civil injunctions to ban protest in certain areas, including on public roadways. Anyone who breaches these injunctions is liable for up to 2 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Even persons who have been named on one of these injunctions without first 2 being informed about it – which, to date, has largely been the case – can be held liable for the legal costs incurred to obtain the injunction and face an unlimited fine and imprisonment for breaching it. The fact that a significant number of environmental defenders are currently facing both a criminal trial and civil injunction proceedings for their involvement in a climate protest on a UK public road or motorway, and hence are being punished twice for the same action, is also a matter of grave concern to him.

Media derision

He was also distressed to see how environmental defenders are derided by some of the mainstream UK media and in the political sphere. By deriding environmental defenders, the media and political figures put them at risk of threats, abuse and even physical attacks from unscrupulous persons who rely on the toxic discourse to justify their own aggression. The toxic discourse may also be used by the State as justification for adopting increasingly severe and draconian measures against environmental defenders. In the course of his visit, he witnessed first hand that this is precisely what is taking place in the UK right now. This has a significant chilling effect on civil society and the exercise of fundamental freedoms.

As a final note, during his visit, UK environmental defenders told him that, despite the personal risks they face, they will continue to protest for urgent and effective action to address climate change. For them, the threat of climate change and its devastating impacts are far too serious and significant not to continue raising their voice, even when faced with imprisonment. We are in the midst of a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Environmental defenders are acting for the benefit of us all. It is therefore imperative that we ensure that they are protected.

A spokesperson for the UK Home Office, the government department that tackles policing and other elements of national security, said that “while decisions on custodial sentences are a matter for the independent judiciary, the Public Order Act brings in new criminal offences and proper penalties for selfish, guerrilla protest tactics.”

Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said: “The UN special rapporteur offers a damning indictment of the repressive crackdown climate activists in the UK face for exercising their right to peacefully protest.”

“The UK Government seems more intent on creating a climate of fear than tackling the climate crisis.“

The full report can be accessed here: Aarhus_SR_Env_Defenders_statement_following_visit_to_UK_10-12_Jan_2024.pdf (unece.org)

Sources: CNN; Guardian; UN, Mail on Line. [There does not seem to be a report on this in the Daily Telegraph]. All accessed 25 January 2024

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75th anniversary


Today – 10 December – is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

December 2023

Today marks the 75th anniversary of one of the world’s most ground-breaking global pledges: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This landmark document enshrines the inalienable rights that everyone is entitled to as a human being – regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

In one sense, we should be celebrating what was a great event. Yet surveying the world today, one wonders to what extent its aspirations are being followed. In many parts of the world, people are denied rights because of colour, race, religion or social status. Millions have been displaced and live in camps with only limited facilities. A war rages in Gaza. In China, around a million Uyghurs suffer persecution because of their faith.

Here in the UK, instead of celebration, we await a vote this week to see if parliament will agree to disapplying parts of the Human Rights Act – a child of the Declaration – and some within the Conservative party wish to see us leave the European Convention. Parts of the media carry out a regular assault on the act blaming it for many of our ills and allegedly providing a safety net for terrorists and criminals. There are many in positions of power who would like to see the act abolished or at least seriously curtailed. A sad commentary after three quarters of a century.

Today (10th) we shall be in the Cathedral for our annual Christmas signing for prisoners of conscience. From 10:00 till noon.

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Suella Braverman’s speech


Home Secretary, Suella Braverman’s speech to the Tory party conference in Manchester

October 2023

Suella Braverman made a speech on the fringe of the Conservative Party conference on 3 October in which she said the Human Rights Act should be renamed the ‘Criminal’s Rights Act’. The speech as a whole – covering areas such as immigration and the threat that Britain will ‘go properly woke’ under Labour – received a standing ovation by a packed auditorium. She said that Britain was ‘enmeshed in a dense of set of rules designed for another era’ and that these rules acted against the interests of the country. The speech was dubbed a ‘red meat address’ by the Daily Mail.

Hostility to the HRA has a long history in the Conservative Party and many of its members would like to see it abolished and for us to come out of the European Convention. Plans to reform the act seem to have been shelved for the moment but may well reappear in the manifesto for the next election.

Commentators have seen the speech, together with one given in Washington on 26 September, as part of her leadership campaign ahead of a possible Conservative defeat and an election for a new party leader. But an attack on the HRA and the reception given to her remarks on this and other topics are of concern. A standing ovation suggests an element of the party still wish to see the legislation abolished. In some ways it is hardly surprising such has been the remorseless denigration of the act and its supposed iniquities by the right wing press. The impression has been firmly planted that the act is a criminal’s charter and enables such people to escape justice. This despite our gaols being crammed full to bursting and news that foreign prisons may have to be rented to house yet more.

People’s rights need protection like never before. We have witnessed example after example of wrong convictions, unarmed people shot by the police, criminal activities by the police themselves and a steady trail of mistrials and overturned convictions that to argue that we need less protection by abolishing our rights is perverse. The positive effects of the act seldom gain a hearing. In the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster for example, that it was the Human Rights Act which enabled families to gain justice scarcely got a mention in reporting by the right wing press.

Miscarriages of justice, police errors and overturned convictions, all weaken the public’s faith in the justice system. It is therefore depressing to see the Home Secretary make these remarks and receive a standing ovation for them. She seems to ignore the fact that terrorists and criminals are only alleged terrorists and alleged criminals until due process has found them guilty (or not) a fact which, as a barrister, she well knows.

Sources: APnews, Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Evening Standard

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Detention centre report published


Enquiry into the the shocking treatment of immigrants at Brook House published

September 2023

In September 2017, BBC Panorama broadcast a programme, Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets, into the shocking treatment of detainees at the Brook House detention centre near Gatwick in Sussex. It followed months of undercover filming to expose a wide range of wrongdoing at the centre. Those who watched the programme were treated to examples of what the report refers to as ‘the use of racist, abusive and derogatory language by some of the staff towards those in their care, the effects of illicit drugs and the use of force by staff on on physically and mentally unwell people’. An enquiry was commissioned in November 2019 and it was published today (19 September 2023) in three volumes.

It showed one custody officer place his hands around the neck of a detained person and say “you fucking piece of shit, because I’m going to put you to fucking sleep” (para 14). Using force to restrain detained people who were physically or mentally ill was common (43).

Conditions at the centre were extremely poor. It was run at the time by G4S and then by Serco both given contracts the report explains, based largely on price with little regard to quality aspects. Misgivings about the tenders were not put into practice (19). The Senior Management Teams were poor and largely invisible to junior staff.

Although conditions were poor to begin with, and the proximity to Gatwick added noise to the problems, the Home Office carried on adding numbers of inmates thus sometimes increasing to three the number of occupants in the cells. The cells had no privacy concerning toileting (25).

The report opens by saying that it was a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The combination of hostile attitudes to immigrants and refugees, the use of contractors who were unequal to the job, Home Office failures and seemingly no sign of inspections or visits from outsiders to see what was going on, combined to create a toxic mix of arrogance, cruelty and gratuitously bad treatment of people many of whom had suffered trauma and in some cases torture. Indeed, it is reported today that Suella Braverman, the current Home Secretary, stopped inspections taking place at all. Detainees were isolated from the outside world. Language barriers made things worse. Basic freedoms were curtailed the report said. This took place here in Britain.

Priti Patel was the Home Secretary during this time and in her many speeches and interviews she has made no secret of her hostile attitude to refugees and immigrants. She talked up the crisis and played a part in creating an atmosphere of disdain for those arriving, increasingly at the time, in small boats. One of her proposals for example was to install wave machines to prevent boat people from landing on our shores. That Britain took a far smaller proportion of refugees than many other nations was seldom mentioned.

It is sometimes easy in situations such as this to focus on the front line individuals behaving badly and one thinks of other undercover programmes in care homes and institutions where people with disabilities are living and where bullying and other failures have been exposed. They are the visible end result but their behaviour is in turn a result of failings further up the food chain by people less visible. It is the politicians who set the tone and agree the funding or more usually, the cuts to funding. It is the system which prefers outside contractors employed largely on who will do the cheapest job, who have weak management systems and whose main interest is turning in a profit. It is the media which perpetuates myths of ‘invasions’ and that immigrants are not really refugees but ‘economic migrants’ or even coming here to enjoy our bounteous benefit system. The combined effects of this hostility and disinformation was that someone poorly trained on the front line of an overcrowded detention centre feels it is acceptable to treat vulnerable people in the way they did.

Immigration, and in particular those crossing the Channel in small boats, is a political hot potato at present. The temperature is only going to rise as the election date gets nearer with attempts to ‘weaponise’ the issue for political advantage. We should all be aware however, that it is people we are dealing with in centres such as this and the majority are genuine migrants from war or persecution. A majority win their appeals.

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