A reminder that the film Hooligan Sparrow will be shown next Thursday 14 June at 7:30 pm. This is FREE but there is a parting collection to help cover our rental and other costs. It’s at the Salisbury Arts Centre in the White Room upstairs. Tickets can be obtained from the front desk.
Market stall
UPDATE 23 June
Hugely successful morning and we were kept busy from before 8 until we closed. Many thanks to members who came and did a stint on the stall – Andrew; Fiona; Diana; Ria; Tony; Lesley and Peter. Helped by having a good range of stock including plants. Despite a refill of stuff mid morning – we did not have much left at the end of the day.
Photos from this morning will be posted within 24 hours.
Stock and volunteers needed!
On Saturday 23rd June we shall be having our annual stall in the market place and we would welcome items for sale. Popular are clothes, bric-a-brac, good quality books only, CDs and plants. No electrical items please. We shall be setting up at 7:45 so if you do have something, you can bring it along any time after that although earlier the better as people congregate early.
If you can spare an hour to volunteer that would be appreciated.
Death penalty report, May – June
We attach the latest death penalty report with thanks to group member Lesley for compiling it. It features, Malaysia, Algeria, USA, Mauritania, Sudan and Belarus. Note that China is believed to execute more of its citizens than the rest of the world combined but details and statistics are a state secret.
May meeting minutes
We have pleasure in enclosing the minutes for the May meeting.
The June meeting takes place tonight (7 June) – not next Thursday as is usual – because we shall be showing a film at the Arts Centre.
Data protection
Readers will have no doubt been inundated with email requests following the start of the new GDPR regulations which have just come into force. If you have received one from us we hope you will have replied (or reply if not). Thank you.
We’d like to remind you that you have the right to unsubscribe from any of our communications.
You will be reassured to know that your details are stored on a password-protected computer and that all group emails are sent BCC.
We will not share your data with third parties.
We will not send you data from other organisations unless requested by you.
We do not retain petition emails on our data base. These are viewed only by the recipient of the petition.
The number of our followers is steadily increasing which is gratifying.
Belhaj settlement
Readers of this blog will know of the appalling treatment the Belhaj family received in Libya and the role of the British government in their abduction and torture. The settlement as far as it goes is welcome therefore.
Windrush and immigration
Last week’s events were dominated by the mounting scandal of the Windrush generation and how they were treated by the Home Office. It ended with the resignation of the Home Secretary Amber Rudd following her various lapses concerning the policy of targets for removals. The policy – set in place by her predecessor as Home Secretary, Theresa May – was an avowedly aggressive one and as we have seen in Salisbury, catches out all manner of people.
Last year, the acting group Ice and Fire performed for us at Sarum College using testimonies of people who had worked for the Border Agency. A disgraceful element of their performance was the use of a toy monkey which was placed on an officer’s desk if he or she allowed someone to stay in the country.
A fuller description of their performance can be accessed here as it seems timely to reprise the post. We hope you will take time to read it.
Death penalty report – April
We attach the death penalty report for April thanks to group member Lesley for compiling it.
Saudi Arabia: Executions for Drug Crimes
Crown Prince Signals Possible Limit on Non-Murder Executions
April 2018
Saudi Arabia has executed 48 people since the beginning of 2018, half of them for nonviolent drug crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Many more people convicted of drug crimes remain on death row following convictions by Saudi Arabia’s notoriously unfair criminal justice system.
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman said in an interview with Time magazine on April 5 that the Saudi authorities have a plan to decrease the number of executions, but that they would not limit executions to people convicted of murder. Nearly all executions in Saudi Arabia that are not for murder are for non-violent drug crimes. The prince said the country would consider changing the penalty from death to life in prison in some cases, but not in murder cases.
It’s bad enough that Saudi Arabia executes so many people, but many of them have not committed a violent crime, said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. Any plan to limit drug executions needs to include improvements to a justice system that doesn’t provide for fair trials.
Saudi Arabia has carried out nearly 600 executions since the beginning of 2014, over 200 of them in drug cases. The vast majority of the remainder were for murder, but other offenses included rape, incest, terrorism, and “sorcery.” In Saudi Arabia, death sentences for murder are usually based on the Islamic law principle qisas, or eye-for-an-eye retributive punishment, while judges hand down death sentences for drugs at their own discretion (the Islamic law principle ta’zir). Judges rely on a 1987 fatwa by the country’s Council of Senior Religious Scholars prescribing the death penalty for any “drug smuggler” who brings drugs into the country, as well as provisions of the 2005 Law on Combatting Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which prescribes the death penalty for drug smuggling. The law allows for mitigated sentences in limited circumstances.
International standards, including the Arab Charter on Human Rights, ratified by Saudi Arabia, require countries that retain the death penalty to use it only for the “most serious crimes,” and in exceptional circumstances. In 2012, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions stated that where used, the death penalty should be limited to cases in which a person is intentionally killed and not used to punish drug-related offenses.
Human Rights Watch has documented numerous cases in which Saudi courts sentenced defendants to death following unfair trials. In one such case, a Saudi court sentenced a Jordanian man, Waleed al-Saqqar, to death in December 2014 for smuggling drugs across the Saudi border from Jordan in his truck.
Poor trials process
The judgment following al-Saqqar’s trial reveals that the trial lasted only one day, and a source with direct knowledge of the case told Human Rights Watch that the entire trial lasted about five minutes. The source said that a judge asked al-Saqqar to confirm his identity and state whether the truck belonged to him, then issued the death sentence. Al-Saqqar did not have a defense lawyer. The source said that the judge did not allow al-Saqqar a chance to explain the circumstances, which he viewed as a mitigating factor. The source said that in April 2013 al-Saqqar met a Saudi man at the Jordanian Free Zone near Zarqa city who offered to pay him 300,000 Saudi Riyals (US$80,000) to smuggle several bags of agricultural hormones to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi man said that his workers were urgently waiting for them and would need them before he could get permission from the Saudi Heath and Agricultural Ministries to legally import them. Al-Saqqar agreed to the arrangement.
On April 11, 2013, Saudi authorities stopped al-Saqqar after he entered Saudi Arabia from Jordan at the al-Haditha border crossing and searched the truck. According to the trial judgment, the authorities discovered 144,000 pills identified as captagon (fenethylline), a banned substance in Saudi Arabia. According to the official judgment al-Saqqar assisted Saudi authorities in an attempt to locate and apprehend the person inside Saudi Arabia responsible for receiving the drugs, but authorities were not able to apprehend him. The source said that the case remains on appeal.
Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding due process violations in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system that makes it difficult for a defendant to get a fair trial even in capital cases. In cases Human Rights Watch has analyzed, authorities did not always inform suspects of the charges against them or allow them access to evidence, even after trial sessions began. Authorities generally did not allow lawyers to assist suspects during interrogation and often impeded them from examining witnesses and presenting evidence at trial. The problems were compounded for non-Arabic speaking foreigners, who in the absence of a lawyer face overwhelming obstacles to understanding court procedures and submitting defence documents.
The Death Penalty Worldwide Database, which collects information on executions across the globe, shows that Saudi Arabia has one of the highest execution rates in the world and applies the death penalty to a range of offenses that do not constitute “most serious crimes,” including drug offenses, adultery, sorcery, and apostasy. Saudi Arabia trails only Iran in the Middle East in in the number of its executions. Saudi Arabia regularly features in our monthly reports.
Human Rights Watch along with Amnesty, opposes capital punishment in all countries and under all circumstances. Capital punishment is unique in its cruelty and finality, and it is inevitably and universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error. In 2013, following similar resolutions in 2007, 2008, and 2010, the UN General Assembly called on countries to establish a moratorium on the use of the death penalty, progressively restrict the practice, and reduce the offenses for which it might be imposed, all with the view toward its eventual abolition. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also called on countries to abolish the death penalty.
Text from Human Rights Watch – 24 April 2018
Rights after Brexit
How will our rights be affected post Brexit?*
UPDATE: 26 April
An article in the current edition of Prospect by Vernon Bogdanor entitled ‘Brexit will erase your rights’ (May 2018) discusses
in detail the effects of leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court, the avowed government policy. One of the important effects is that the ability of judges to disallow legislation which conflicts with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights will no longer be possible. Bogdanor makes the point that we shall be moving away from a codified and protected system to an unprotected one. This is probably the first time this has happened.
For people keen on the sovereignty issue and see all things European to be harmful, then this is what they seek. For them the supremacy of parliament is a key principle. But what has been happening over many decades – and preceding our entry into what was then called the Common Market – was that judges were becoming more willing to interfere in some aspects of legislation. Because we have signed up to the European Charter, where our legislation conflicts with that, then judges are willing to rule against it. The fundamental problem the UK has is a lack of a constitution. The charter was a kind of stand-in constitution against which the legislative process could be tested.
The Human Rights changed that. In regards to the HRA, Professor Gearty stated that:
In the breadth of its ambition and in the potential reach of its terms, British Law has never seen anything like this piece of legislation’. The way in which the Human Rights Act 1998 changed the legal landscape was by inserting a new method of interpretation into British Law which required the courts to read and give effect to legislation in a way which is compatible with the Convention rights ‘so far as it is possible to do so’(s3); requiring that the courts take into account decisions of the Strasbourg Court when determining a question concerning a Convention right (s2); allowing the Court to make a declarations of incompatibility (s4); making it unlawful for public authorities to act incompatibly with the Convention (s6); and by creating a cause of action for breaches by a public authorities and providing for remedial damages for breaches. (s7 and s8). (Church Court Chambers)
For critics of the involvement of the European Court, there is a kind of misty eyed reverence to the British system which does of course have many strengths and has evolved over many centuries. This was particularly noticeable during the Magna Carta celebrations two years ago. But historians will know that it has been a struggle for some simple rights and laws of benefit to ordinary people, to be enacted. Legislation such as the factory acts and public health for example, took decades to enact against fierce resistance by vested interests in parliament. Full enfranchisement itself did not happen until 90 years ago in 1928.
Recent events surrounding the Windrush scandal have shown a legislature and an executive all too willing to inflict misery on thousands of people. The idea that parliament is there to protect the welfare of ordinary people such as those who came here in the ’50s, does not stand up to examination. There is thus a real concern that once we exit the ECJ and the Withdrawal Bill becomes law then some of our rights will be taken away. This will not happen straight off but over time using the infamous Henry VIII powers. The role of the courts will be weakened. The Charter of Fundamental Rights will no longer apply and we will be at the whim of parliament. The key issue behind the scandalous treatment of the Windrush generation was that although there were two immigration acts, a lot of the day to day nastiness was done administravely. So the idea that parliament is sovereign is flawed.
One of the curious anomalies of our political discourse is that people do not usually trust politicians. If someone at a public meeting said ‘I think we should trust politicians’ it would likely engender laughter and ridicule. But by removing our country from the aegis of the charter we will be giving power to politicians and the executive which amounts to trusting them with our rights. Since parliament is rife with self-interest, secretive lobbying by special interest groups, the revolving door enabling ministers and others to take up lucrative positions with organisations which they were supposedly in control of, and behind closed door influence from powerful media barons: to expect it to take interest in the rights of ordinary individuals is a big ask. There are honest politicians and many with consciences but they are few against the party machines.
Bognador ends his piece by saying that ‘the tide of history is towards greater protections, but the coming change threatens to make us more lawless. And it may well be that a country, which wasn’t primed for this sort of change, will not be content with that.’
The arguments over the role of European law and the remit of the ECJ might seem esoteric, the sort of thing lawyers get enthused about and no one else is the least bit interested in. But the effects of a loss of control over the executive and a dysfunctional parliament will eventually be experienced by all and there won’t be anyone to protect us.
Update: See the Amnesty blog post on the reaction of young people to the threat to human rights post Brexit.
*Amnesty has no position on whether to remain or leave the EU: this blog is just about human rights if we leave
