Promoting human rights from Salisbury UK
The minutes of the September meeting are now available thanks to Lesley. We discussed North Korea, the death penalty (see separate post on this), the forthcoming vigil on 17 October and agreeing to write to John Glen concerning his failure to reply to our letter of 5 August.
The death penalty report for September is now available thanks to Lesley for compiling it. Links to other blog posts and in particular the continuing correspondence with John Glen MP concerning the government’s policy change on the death penalty.
Death penalty report, September
Report on possible reductions in the use of the death penalty by India and China. This is to be welcomed although we cannot verify the situation in the latter country because the numbers executed are a state secret.
UPDATE 17 September
Government declines to release the evidence. Echoes of Iraq?
The rights organisation Rights Watch UK has begun legal action on
the government to release the advice of the Attorney General following the drone strike which killed a jihadi in Syria. The killing was announced by David Cameron in parliament on 8 September. The killing took place in Syria with which we are not at war.
This is a story the true facts of which are likely to unfold over the coming months. Questions have been asked about the legality and how real the threat to the people of Britain was to justify an execution by drone attack.
Rights Watch is in the list of links at the bottom of this site. Amnesty International post.
We attach an urgent action on behalf of a man called Glossip (52) who is due to be executed on 16th of this month. The case against him is circumstantial and seems quite flimsy. He has been on death row since 1998 – around 17 years. If you can find time to write or email, that would be appreciated. Full details are here: Case file (pdf)
There is also a web site the accuracy of which we cannot warrant:
See also USA death penalty site with further information and a petition [You will find it on their Facebook page and there is a wealth of statistical information on the site as well. There is a permanent link to the site at the bottom of this site]
Letter in today’s Guardian (8 September):
The government would do much better to raid the export credit guarantee scheme [rather than the overseas aid budget] and other subsidies to the arms trade. This would raise funds for refugee provision and reduce arms sales to Middle Eastern states, impacting directly on the latter’s ability to wage war on their and other populations in the region.
Benjamin Selwyn, Director, Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex
Last month, we wrote to John Glen MP asking that his government take a more robust line with the Saudi Arabian government in view of the large increase in executions and floggings, many of which are carried out in public. We noted that the French president Francois Holland had spoken publicly against the practice despite large arms sales in the offing. The British government has said it prefers to lobby in private and to pursue a policy of quiet diplomacy. By contrast, the Swedish government has ended arms exports to the country. As policies go, it is one which is conspicuous by its failure to achieve anything at all and in other contexts would be declared ‘not fit for purpose’.
A recently published report by Amnesty shows that Saudi Arabia is one the top three world executioners after China (which executes thousands but the statistics are a state secret) and Iran. Between January 1985 and June 2015, 2,208 were put to death. 102 have been executed in the first 6 months of 2015. Crimes include ‘witchcraft,’ ‘sorcery’ and ‘apostasy’. In some cases relatives are often not notified of the execution.
The FCO’s July in-year update on Saudi says:
We remain concerned about the continued use of the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, including the fact that trials and executions do not meet the minimum standards which the EU advocates in countries where the death penalty is applied. We regularly raise the issue with the Saudi authorities, bilaterally and through the EU, and will continue to do so. There has been a significant rise in the number of executions this year. While no official figures are published, according to statistics reported by NGOs over 100 people have been executed since 1 January. NGOs report that the majority of executions were for murder and drug-related offences
In response to our letter to Mr Glen, we received a letter from a FCO minister, Mr Tobias Ellwood, which assured us that the Foreign Office was doing all it could to end the practice and that ‘the abolition of the death penalty is a human rights priority for the UK’. The HMG Strategy for Abolition of the Death Penalty (2010 – 2015) states:
Promoting human rights and democracy is a priority for the UK. It is a long standing policy of the UK to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle (p2)
Within days of receiving this letter however, we discovered that it is no longer an explicit FCO policy. The new policy has dropped any reference to abolishing the death penalty. We also noted that Private Eye had a piece on the very same Mr Ellwood who had been a guest of the Saudi Government on a £6,000 fact-finding visit sponsored by a defence forum.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that defence sales matter far more than the dreadful human rights situation in countries like Saudi Arabia which – apart from public floggings and beheadings – tortures its citizens and has severe restrictions on the lives of its women. Saudi Arabia is the leading destination for UK arms sales amounting to £1.6bn in 2014.
Nicholas Gilby of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) reported on the high level of corruption in this industry:
This paper examines the Government’s approach to corruption within the UK arms industry and shows it has very dirty hands …
… civil servants told to ‘look the other way’ and not ask awkward questions.
Chemring, which has one of its factories just outside Salisbury, had sales to Saudi Arabia of £47.8m last year and £97.6m in 2013 (source: annual report).
UK governments have invested a lot into the arms trade. Support includes marketing support via DESO (Defence Exports Services Organisation); export credit guarantees; around £26m in R&D costs and something called ‘launch customer support’ which is buying weapons from a UK supplier even though overseas suppliers are cheaper. There are also missions by ministers and members of the Royal family to foreign countries like Saudi.
Could it be that the Foreign Office was embarrassed by such an explicit policy in the face of a rising tide of executions in countries such as Saudi Arabia; Pakistan and India, all countries where arms sales are important?
Successive governments have claimed a devotion to human rights and a commitment to end the death penalty. The reality it seems is that arms sales trump this commitment and in dropping the express statement of policy, the FCO is at least being honest.
Following the change of wording by the FCO which seemed to be in contradiction to the assurances given to us by the minister and Mr Glen, we wrote again asking why the policy had changed. We await a reply…
The government is proposing to issue a public consultation on scrapping the Human Rights Act sometime in the autumn.
Rights Info has only been going four months but has already begun to establish itself in the human rights world. It is dedicated to providing accurate information on the subject of human rights. This is extremely important now because the present government would like to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) and replace it with their own Human Rights and Responsibilities act (or whatever it may be called). This has been promised for several years and we await details in due course.
The government is egged on by a media which regularly produces inaccurate or exaggerated stories of the workings of the act, often tying it into the European Convention on Human Rights, presenting it as an unwarranted intrusion into our legal processes. The fact that it was British and French lawyers who prepared the ECHR – at Churchill’s behest – based on basic principles of justice established over many years, seems to have been forgotten. As we have noted before, the act is of great benefit to ordinary citizens in the UK who use it to secure justice from authorities.
Rights Info has been providing a source of information to counter the tide of misinformation from newspapers and some politicians. They have just launched a similar exercise to provide information about the European Court which also gets a bad press. It is called The European Court of Human Rights Uncovered. One of the examples it gives concerns the total number of applications and judgements. There have been 22,781 applications against the UK. Number of judgements is just 513 of which the court found at least one violation to be 301. 301 over 22,781 is 1.32%. The Sun newspaper reports this as ‘UK loses 60% of cases’.
Terrorism cases get a lot of publicity with the impression given that they are winning cases all over the place. In 40 years (1975 – 2015) out of 297 cases, just 14 were terrorists. 203 were ‘other people’ that is ordinary citizens in their fights against authorities of one kind or another.
Over the coming months we are likely to see an increase in bad news stories about the HRA and the European Court as the government seeks to soften up the public ahead of its plans to abolish it. It is useful to know that there is a source of accurate information to go to.
Below is the death penalty report for August thanks to Lesley for its preparation. It links in part to other items on this blog and in particular the decision by the UK’s Foreign Office to drop explicit reference to the abolition of the death penalty from its list of policies.
We attach an urgent action concerning Iran, which along with Pakistan, China and Saudi Arabia are the world’s leading executioners of its citizens. This concerns a juvenile who was 15 at the time of the alleged crime. He was charged with the murder of a friend but was denied access to a lawyer at the investigation stage and he alleges he was tortured in custody.
His execution has been delayed to 10 August so this case is urgent. It is believed that an astonishing 72 juveniles have been executed between 2005 and 2014 and around 160 are currently on death row.
Please write if you have time.
In a previous post (20 July) we reported on the correspondence we had with Mr Glen MP concerning the government’s policy towards Saudi Arabia. This was prompted by the increasing number of executions and public floggings taking place in that country. Both are at high levels and are greater than the previous year. We noted that the president of France had made public statements condemning this practice. We might also have noted that Sweden has suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Mr Glen forwarded a letter from a FCO minister Mr Tobias Ellwood saying that these matters were raised with the Saudi authorities and that it was a ‘human rights priority for the UK government’. Because it was part of Sharia law they did not anticipate change in the near future however.
There the matter might have rested. But on 3 August it was reported widely in the press that the FCO has dropped any explicit reference to the abolition of the death penalty. In response to the cuts, they are relabelling its six global thematic priorities of which the abolition of the death penalty world wide was one. There are now to be three, relating to human rights; democratic values and the rule of law. Reference to the death penalty has gone. The ‘human rights countries of priority’ is to be replaced with the more anodyne ‘human rights priority countries’.
We noted at the end of the last blog that the reason for the lack of open criticism by the government was almost certainly connected with arms sales to Saudi.
Then, in the current issue of Private Eye (6 August No 1397) they report that Tobias Ellwood had accepted Saudi hospitality to a attend a £6,000 a head fact-finding visit organised by the arms industry lobby group UK Defence Forum. This took place in 2013 when there were bribery allegations concerning Saudi defence deals and the defence giant EADS. The Private Eye piece was in connection with Mr Tobias’s complaint at having to ‘watch the pennies’ on his MP and ministerial salary.
So in just over a week after sending us the letter, the FCO seems to have downgraded its policy on the death penalty. This is deeply disappointing and it seems strange that Mr. Ellwood appeared unaware that the policy was to change only days after sending his reply to us. We shall be raising these matters with Mr. Glen.
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 