Category: Uncategorized

Brilliant lecture in Southampton


Lecture by Prof Phillippe Sands at Southampton University
Phillippe Sands

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. 

Hersch Lauterpacht. Picture: the Guardian

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

Raphael Lemkin.  Picture: The London Globalist

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).

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December meeting minutes


We are pleased to attach the minutes of the December meeting thanks to group member Lesley for preparing them.

December minutes

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Film – ‘Mustang’


It’s less than a week until the Arts Centre in Salisbury is showing the film Mustang set in Turkey.

Pic: weekendnotes.com

This 2015 internationally co-produced film is directed by Turkish-French film director Deniz Ergüven.  Set in a remote Turkish village it depicts the lives of five young orphaned sisters and challenges they face growing up as girls in a conservative society.  In a Turkish village, the orphaned sisters (Günes Sensoy, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan) live under strict rule while members of their family prepare their arranged marriages.  The event that triggers the family backlash against the five sisters at the beginning of the film is based on Ergüven’s personal life.

Starts at 7:30 and doors open at 6:45.  Tickets £8 with concessions.  It has a 15+ rating.

 

 

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Urgent action: Iran


Further information on UA: 72/16 Index: MDE 13/5217/2016 Iran Date: 25 November 2016

Young man at risk of execution in Iran

Himan Uraminejad has been warned by prison officials that he is at risk of execution as Iran’s Head of Judiciary has approved the implementation of his death sentence. He has been on death row since 2012 for a crime committed when he was 17 years old.

Image result for iran flagAmnesty International has learnt on 21 November that Himan Uraminejad, aged 22, was informed by prison officials on 6 October that the Head of Judiciary had approved the implementation of his death sentence and his family should intensify their efforts to seek a pardon from the family of the deceased because his execution could be carried out at any moment.  He was sentenced to death in August 2012 after a criminal court in Kurdistan Province convicted him of murder over the fatal stabbing of a boy during a group fight. He was 17 years old at the time of the crime.

In September 2014, the Supreme Court quashed his death sentence and granted him a retrial, based on new juvenile sentencing provisions in Iran’s 2013 Islamic Penal Code.  In June 2015, however, he was sentenced to death again.  The criminal court presiding over his retrial referred to an official medical opinion that found “no evidence of a disorder at the time of the crime that would remove criminal liability”. The court also referred to Himan Uraminejad’s statements that he had no “mental illness or history of hospitalization” and understood killing someone was “religiously forbidden” (haram). The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in November 2015 and rejected a subsequent request for retrial.

Grossly unfair trial

Himan Uraminejad (pictured, left) was sentenced after a grossly unfair trial that relied on evidence obtained through torture. He was arrested on 22 April 2012 when he was 17 years old. He was subsequently transferred to an undisclosed detention centre where he was held for 20 days, without access to his family and lawyer. He has said that during this period, he was tortured, including by repeated beatings that left scars and bruises all over his face and body, and suspension from the ceiling by a rope tied to his feet. He has said that police also raped him with an object shaped like an egg, threatened to cut off his testicles and walked over his body with boots. Himan Uraminejad’s trial was held before an adult court, without special juvenile justice protections. The court ordered no investigation into his allegations of torture.

Please write immediately in English, Persian, Arabic, French and Spanish or your own language:
 – Urging the Iranian authorities to halt any plans to execute Himan Uraminejad, and commute his death sentence without delay;
 –  Urging them to ensure that his conviction is quashed and that he is granted a fair retrial in accordance with the principles of juvenile justice, in particular ensuring that no statements obtained through torture and other ill-treatment
are admitted as evidence;
 – Urging them to ensure his allegations of torture are investigated and those responsible are brought to justice;
 – Immediately establish an official moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 6 JANUARY 2017 TO:
Head of the Judiciary
Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani

Prosecutor General of Khoy
Hojatoleslam Alizadeh
And copies to:
President
Hassan Rouhani

PLEASE SEND YOUR APPEALS FOR THE ATTENTION OF THE AUTHORITIES IN IRAN VIA THE UK EMBASSY:
H.E. Hamid Baeidinejad, Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 16 PRINCES GATE LONDON SW7 1PT, Tel: 02072254208 or 02072254209 Email: iranconsulate.lon@mfa.gov.ir

Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date. This is the first update of UA 72/16.

Further information: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/3722/2016/en/

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
The minimum age of criminal responsibility in Iran is set at nine lunar years for girls and 15 lunar years for boys. From this age, a child who is convicted of murder or crimes that fall in the category of hodud (offences that carry inalterable punishments prescribed by Shari’a law) is generally convicted and sentenced in the same way as an adult. However, since the adoption of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code, judges have been given discretion not to sentence juvenile offenders to death if they determine that juvenile offenders did not understand the nature of the crime or its consequences, or their “mental maturity” is in doubt.

The criteria for assessing “mental growth and maturity” are unclear and arbitrary. As illustrated by the case of Himan Uraminejad, judges often conflate the issue of lesser culpability of juveniles because of their lack of maturity with the diminished responsibility of people with mental illness, concluding that the juvenile offender was not “afflicted with insanity” or was “in a healthy mental state”, and therefore deserved the death penalty. Sometimes, judges focus exclusively on whether the juvenile could tell that it is wrong to kill a human being, and disregard interdisciplinary social science studies on the relationship between adolescence and crime, including neuroscientific findings on brain maturity, which have informed juvenile justice principles considering juveniles less culpable than adults due to their developmental immaturity and cognitive limitations (see Growing up on death row: The death penalty and juvenile offenders in Iran, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/3112/2016/en/).

As a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Iran is legally obliged to treat everyone under the age of 18 as a child. This is different from the minimum age of criminal responsibility, which is the age below which children are deemed not to have the capacity to break the law. This age varies between countries, but it must be no lower than 12 years, according to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. People who have broken the law who are above the minimum age of criminal responsibility, but under 18, may be considered criminally responsible, prosecuted, tried and punished. However, they should never be subjected to the death penalty or life imprisonment without the possibility of release.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reviewed Iran’s implementation of the CRC in January 2016. The Committee’s Concluding Observations expressed “serious concern” that the exemption of juvenile offenders from the death penalty is “under full discretion of judges who are allowed, but not mandated to seek forensic expert opinion and that several persons have been resentenced to death following such retrials”. Beside Himan Uraminejad, Amnesty International is aware of several other cases, including Salar Shadizadi, Hamid Ahmadi and Sajad Sanjari, who have been retried, found to have sufficient “mental maturity” at the time of the crime and sentenced to death again. Amnesty International is also aware of at least 15 juvenile offenders who have been sentenced to death for the first time since the adoption of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code.

Amnesty International has recorded at least 75 executions of juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2016, including two in 2016. One of them was Hassan Afshar, who was hanged in July. Iran’s lack of transparency on its use of the death penalty means that the total number of executions of juvenile offenders could be much higher. According to a UN report issued in 2014, at least 160 juvenile offenders are now on death row. Amnesty International has been able to identify the names of 78 of these juvenile offenders. Some of them have been on death row for over a decade and are either unaware of their right to seek a retrial based on the new provisions of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code or do not have the means to retain a lawyer to seek it for them.

The Head of the Judiciary must provide a type of approval known as estizan in all cases where the death penalty has been imposed under the Islamic principle of “retribution-in-kind” (qesas) before the sentence can be implemented.

Further information on UA: 72/16 Index: MDE 13/5217/2016 Issue Date: 25 November 2016

Download PDF

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!  Please let us know if you have taken action on this case.  You can either include us – iar@amnesty.org.uk – in the email you send to the authorities or send us a separate email if you’ve sent your appeal by post or fax.  Tell us any way you like!  All we need to know if that you’ve sent an appeal and the UA number – which is at the top of each email.  Thank you.

We are now on twitter, follow us for information on Urgent Action cases: @AmnestyUKUrgent

You can view all UAs on our website here.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook – salisburyai

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Happy Birthday ECHR!


The Human Rights Act is under threat by the Conservative government and they want to withdraw from the European Convention which we helped found.  It is timely therefore that we celebrate the achievements of the ECHR which receive too little attention by our media and by politicians such as the prime minister and our local MP Mr John Glen.

Watch this short video by Rights Info

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook – salisburyai

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Good news from Iran


Good News!  Iranian woman saved from execution
Zeinab Lokran.  Picture: Amnesty France

There has been a world wide campaign to stop the Iranian authorities from executing Zeinab Lokran.

We have received a message from Amnesty which says

By standing up to the Iranian authorities, you have helped to keep 22-year-old Zeinab alive. Thank you for defending her right to life.

Her execution, which was scheduled to go ahead as early as 13 October is no longer imminent. Zeinab now has a new lawyer working on her case. Together they will submit an application for a retrial – which is Zeinab’s right under Article 91 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code.

While this is extremely good news, her death sentence remains in place until a retrial is granted by the authorities.

Please share: Continue to put pressure on Iranian authorities not to execute Zeinab

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Human rights and armed forces


Claire Perry writes in the Salisbury Journal
Claire Perry MP. Picture: thedrum

Claire Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, said in her piece in the Salisbury Journal that:

[at the recent Tory party conference] … there were other important announcements to celebrate including the news that the government will put an end to the vexatious and damaging legal claims against members of the Armed Forces that arise from applying European Court of Human Rights judgements in the battlefield.

It is scandalous that highly trained and professional soldiers have been subjected to vexatious legal claims second-guessing their decision-making and that since 2004, the MoD has spent over £100 million on Iraq-related investigations, inquiries and compensation – money that should be spent on our troops not lawyers.   Salisbury Journal 27 October 2016

The problem with Claire Perry’s piece – largely copied from the statement by the Defence Minister at the conference – is that it is highly selective and largely untrue.  The picture painted is of our soldiers, operating in difficult and extremely dangerous environments, being pursued by lawyers, sorry ‘vexatious lawyers’, on the make.  The reality is quite different.

Firstly, it is part of a consistent and long running campaign by the right-wing media and tabloids against the Human rights Act and the European Court.  They do not like it because it provides protections for ordinary citizens and in particular, against the invasion of privacy by those self-same papers.  So at a party conference, appealing to that part of the media is only to be expected.

But more specifically, to take one element the statement: ‘claims against members of the armed forces …’ gives the impression that the claims are only about the soldiers themselves.  Many of the claims are against the MoD for not taking sufficient or reasonable care of their men.  So one claim for example was on behalf of a soldier who died of heatstroke serving in 50 degrees of heat in Iraq.  There is also the whole business of Deepcut and the soldiers who died there.  Others involve the Army sending men off in insufficiently protected land rovers.

The phrase ‘applying European Court of Human Rights judgements in the battlefield’ is doubly disingenuous.  Firstly, it is the application of the Human Rights Act which is causing the problem.  Adding the ECHR is just to appeal to those who do not like Europe and trying to shift the blame to Strasbourg who often have little if anything to do with it.  ‘Battlefield’ is also slipped in to create the impression of brave soldiers being pursued by lawyers (keep forgetting – vexatious lawyers) with outrageous claims.

What many of the claims are about is how prisoners are treated once they are taken captive, not on the battlefield.  One such claim was a man thrown into a canal in Baghdad and left to drown.  Many others relate to beatings and other mistreatment of prisoners.  If the courts have investigated claims and the MoD has been forced to pay compensation it argues that something is adrift.

Perhaps Claire Perry should ask herself why do we go to war in the first place?  Part of the answer is to promote our values.  We want to promote democracy and the rule of law.  We become involved in part to try and instill those values.  If our soldiers – not on the battlefield but back at base – are mistreating prisoners then those are not our values.  Although there was a lot of nonsense about weapons of mass destruction, one reason we went into Iraq was because Sadam Hussein treated his people abominably.  The results of bad treatment in places like Syria are visible to us every day with the refugee crisis.

It is a great pity that nonsense like this is both written and then published without challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

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Liam Fox and Azerbaijan


Minister’s close association with this dreadful state

Azerbaijan is ruled by a dictator Ilham Aliyev and is renowned for being a brutal state where torture is common and human rights flagrantly abused.  In the words of Human Rights Watch:

Azerbaijan’s government has escalated repression against its critics, marking a dramatic deterioration in an already poor rights record. In recent years , dozens of human rights defenders, political and civil activists, journalists, and bloggers have been arrested or imprisoned on politically motivated charges, prompting others to flee the country or go into hiding. Bank accounts of independent civic groups and their leaders have been frozen, impeding their work, or in some cases forcing them to shut down entirely. New legal regulations make it almost impossible for independent groups to get foreign funding. While criticizing the increasing crackdown, Azerbaijan’s international partners have failed to secure rights improvements.

The problem is that the country is rich in oil and so there is a rush by western and other governments to secure contracts.  Hundreds of millions of dollars of the country’s wealth sit in overseas bank accounts controlled by the Aliyev family and they like owning large amounts of real estate in London as well.  (Daily Mail 21 December 2012)

Where oil and money are concerned of course, it is too much for western countries including the UK, to concern themselves with human rights especially as we know that the emphasis now is on trade.  Prince Andrew is a regular visitor to the country and Tony Blair was paid £90, 000 for a twenty minute speech.  They have been using ‘sports wash’ to improve their image and hosted the recent Formula 1 race.

Image result for dr liam foxAnother visitor is the Secretary of State for International Trade, the disgraced MP, Dr Liam Fox pictured left (Bing images).  In the words of the New Statesman, ‘he is in the most literal sense, shameless and should never hold high office again.’ (23 December 2016)  He was sacked for breaking the ministerial code.

According to the Observer (7 August 2016) he has been paid £5,700 for the right to translate his book Rising Tides into Azerbaijani.  He was paid a further £3, 500 or so to fly out there to promote it. Few read the book in English and no other country has translated it.  One passage from the book, referring to Burma, is interesting:

[…] freedom from fear and freedom of expression, including a free press and broadcast media and the right to dissent within the law. It requires an inclusive political solution that addresses the underlying causes of the conflict and takes into account the legitimate grievances and aspirations of all the people of a land. Until the rights, identities and hopes of all …, whatever their ethnic origins or religion, are treated as equal, peace and reconciliation will not be achieved.”

The reviewer of the Conservative Home site remarks:

A clear thread throughout the entire book is Fox’s emphasis on the values of liberty, democracy and human rights, and he makes a compelling case. He is not blindly idealistic, or reliant solely on the moral virtues of the argument – rather, he makes the case in terms of self-interest

It seems extraordinary that with these sentiments Dr Fox should consort with, and take money from, such a vile regime, beyond the needs of diplomacy.  It fits with a government reluctant to tackle abuses in Saudi Arabia for example as we have commented frequently before.  Final word to the Observer:

Dr Fox is a man for our debased times because his record with Azerbaijan shows the international trade secretary would not want to raise [human rights concerns] even if he could.  Our future is not going to be proud and independent, but grubby and murky and filled with bad deals with worse governments; a future, in short, where the foxes rule the henhouse.

 

 

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Urgent Action: USA


Execution set after 34 years on death row

It seems hardly credible that someone who has spent 34 years on death row should now be at risk of execution but that is the case with John Wayne Conner in Georgia.  The details are below and if you are able to write we would be grateful.  This is URGENT however.

Urgent Action details

Amnesty is opposed to the death penalty.  China remains the country which executes more than any other country.  See our monthly report.

 

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