Promoting human rights from Salisbury UK
We are pleased to attach the monthly death penalty report prepared by group member Lesley. It contains news of death sentences and penalties from around the world. Note that China does not appear because although it is believed to execute more of its citizens that the rest of the world combined, the data is a state secret.
the monthly group meeting takes place this evening but note it is in Attwood Road not Victoria Road. Starts at 7:30 and members and supporters welcome.
Readers of this site will be familiar with Mr Gearty as we reviewed his book On Fantasy Island a few years ago. In this article*, Mr Gearty discusses the current state of human rights.
Anyone looking at the current state may conclude that little has improved since the end of the war. The atrocities committed during the war, most notably the holocaust, although millions also died in Soviet Russia during the Stalin era, led to the formation of the UN and ultimately the signing of the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. There was a strong hope at the time of ‘never again’.
Currently, we have terrible events in Myanmar with the killing and driving out of Rohingyas. Syria has seen massive destruction and civil war and the use of chemical weapons. The Uighur people in China are being persecuted for their faith and about one million are being forcibly ‘re-educated’. We have seen genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. The treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis is disgraceful. All these and many more are carried on with little sign of realistic intervention by the UN. It is as though the Declaration was never agreed all those years ago.
Reasons
Conor Gearty discusses some of the reasons for this decline in human rights around the world. His first argument is that the responsibility was placed on governments. It was no doubt assumed at the time that governments could be relied on to be the police so to speak. Experience has shown that it is governments which are the problem and who are all too keen to deny the human rights of their citizens. Several of the Gulf states are prime examples of denial of basic liberties and the rule of law. Abuses and the use of torture are routine.
The problem with the reliance on states is the UN principle of non-interference in the affairs of states. So acting through them, but being inhibited from interfering with them, means the UN is largely neutered when it wants to take action. He also makes the point that non-state actors are not controlled by human rights considerations. He instances the World Bank and IMF which both impose conditions on state’s finances which in turn can leave them to handle the human rights consequences.
We can add to this the rise in corporate power. There are many corporate actors now which are bigger than many of the states they operate in. The large resource companies and banks are able to act with impunity in many countries. They can extract wealth corruptly with ease and deny the host country the proceeds. The UK is a major centre for this corruption and Transparency International has published a number of reports giving the details. Recently, there has been a series of revelations concerning Isabel dos Santos alleged looting of Angola. She was helped in this activity – which involved complex entities and transactions in several countries – by one of the UK’s big four accountancy firms PwC. It is difficult for countries stricken by this plunder of wealth to improve the well being and human rights of its citizens while vast sums are stolen from them. But human rights only appear in the background and the corporate and City firms are not a direct part of the UN Declaration.
Austerity is something which has hit the poorest the hardest. Gearty argues that this has led some to argue that human rights are no longer ‘fit for purpose’. Many of these factors are economic in nature and seem outside the remit of human rights laws – at least directly.
9/11
Another factor which has acted against the interests of human rights he argues and left many organisations ‘stuck of the wrong’ side were the attacks on the Twin Towers and elsewhere in America by al Qaeda. America launched its ‘war on terror’ and a whole series of human rights infringements followed. The development of black sites and Guantanamo Bay enabled the US to hold large numbers of people incommunicado and without due process and to institute regimes of torture [warning: the pictures are distressing]. This left many human rights organisations seemingly defending the rights of terrorists. Terrorism has never been defined he argues. Guantanamo Bay is still a blight on the politics of the USA: out of the 780 held there and subjected to harsh treatment over several years, 731 were released without trial (source: Human Rights Watch).
Additionally, in the UK, we have seen a concerted press campaign to argue that human rights are being used to defend criminals, terrorists and ‘citizens of nowhere’ as he terms them. They are not for ordinary people but for the ‘unworthy’ is the message increasingly portrayed.
This has enabled the current Conservative government to argue for the Human Rights Act to be abolished although a number of years have passed since David Cameron first promised to do so. It has never been clear what it is that the Conservatives want repealed or removed from the HRA, a question we asked the Salisbury MP Mr John Glen but without a clear answer. This year (2020) we may get to find out.
There is clear evidence that commercial and trading considerations outweigh human rights. This is another example of states – who should be the guardians – are in fact cheerleaders for arms firms. We have highlighted on this site the UK’s role in selling arms to the Saudi government to carry out its hideous destruction of Yemen. The government also supports the annual DSEI arms fair and goes to great pains to exclude human rights representatives from attending. There is little doubt that to ensure the success of post Brexit Britain, little regard will be given to human rights in the rush to secure trade agreements around the world. In our last post, we highlighted a Salisbury firm which is alleged to sell spyware equipment to enable regimes with poor human rights records to penetrate the phones, emails and computers of those it does not like.
Conclusions
The basic issue is that with governments the custodian of human rights, the protection of basic rights would always be on shaky ground if governments are themselves not committed to upholding them. Nowhere is this more relevant than with the plight of refugees: it being governments which place them in a perilous position in the first place and then other governments which close their borders and fail to help them.
Politicians are more concerned with securing and holding on to power that on maintaining the rights of its citizens. The right wing press and some politicians have portrayed these rights as somehow the preserve of criminals, terrorists and the like who use them to escape justice. So abolishing the act cannot come soon enough for them.
Another crucial factor is the increasing pressure of external factors which impinge on people’s rights. These are the drivers and it is rights which suffer at the end. Responses to these pressures have led several leaders to act in denial of human rights.
New threats, such as inequality, climate change, and the replacement of manual work by AI and machines, mean those who fear that the old social contract is no longer in their interests are making their voices heard. They say, “these are our jobs”, “this is our land”, “our community has certain shared values”, and “people like us are the only real citizens”. These sentiments, echoing around the presidency of Donald Trump or during Brexit, are in direct opposition to human rights.
States don’t much like rights – they’re an annoyance or an embarrassment. The survival, and flourishing, of human rights requires people, the citizenry, the populace, to say that these rights are important and to demand that their governments observe them. And by that same logic, the people can sink them, too. In the end it is us, we – however we define that problematic term – who will make the difference between the failure or success of human rights, whatever the external and internal threats we face. The Conversation, October 23 2018
If we accept that a reliance on governments to be the custodian of our rights, then their future is unlikely to be positive. As pressures build, whether from economic, climate or AI, then the rights of its citizens will be the first to go. These arguments point to viewing human rights in a more nuanced way. Rights are now influenced by a range of factors beyond straightforward considerations of what the state and judiciary do. The City of London for example, plays a key role internationally in helping move vast quantities of wealth out of the reach of governments thus making improving the living standards of its citizens harder if not impossible for them to achieve.
The central problem seems that by placing the protection of human rights entirely in a legal setting, it risks becoming bound up in a too narrow frame of reference. There needs to be a shift in thinking away from the state and the law and towards more ethical considerations. We need to move towards a society structured around the well-being of individuals not one where people have to fit in with the demands of the state. Since the state only has partial power in any particular country, citizens are at the mercy of non-state organisations, international companies, the climate, and ever changing technology. Recent events in China, show that even with the enormous power of the communist party, it became the victim of a virus. The sum of these forces frequently (nearly always in fact) act against the rights and well-being and rights of its citizens.
*Is the Human Rights Era Drawing to a Close? European Human Rights Law Review, Issue 5, 2017
February 2020
Considerable interest has been aroused in the last month or so concerning the use of Huawei technology to provide 5G connectivity in the UK. Other countries in the ‘Five Eyes’ group – USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – will not use this equipment because of fears of intrusion by the Chinese state. The worry is that the Chinese will gain a backdoor entry into our messages, emails and the like thus compromising our security. For weeks, the issue has been discussed and could well have repercussions as far as our relationship with the Americans is concerned.
It was not that long ago that the UK and USA were revealed to be invading people’s messages on an industrial scale via the Prism and Tempora programmes. 21 petabytes of data are downloaded a day and there is huge process involved in sifting and selecting the messages which have been intercepted. It therefore seems inconsistent to be worrying about Chinese intrusion when our own governments are heavily involved in doing the same thing. The difference is one is our own people and the others are Chinese. It is claimed that only metadata is collected by GCHQ.
The UK government sponsors an exhibition of security equipment at an event called Security and Policing held at Farnborough. It is a similar exhibition to DSEI which takes place in London – also supported by the UK government – where arms firms exhibit their wares. The guest list of both events reveal a range of authoritarian regimes as customers keen to get access to weapons and security equipment with which to maintain their hold on power. Huawei has achieved considerable publicity for something they claim does not and will not happen while, by contrast, surveillance which is happening receives almost no coverage at all.
What do we mean by … ?
Of course, a lot depends on what we mean by ‘police’ and ‘security’. Police forces around the world need equipment with which to tackle organised crime, drug smuggling, people trafficking and the like. Countries might legitimately need equipment to intercept and interdict attempts to commit terrorist offences or attack their citizens. The difference occurs when this equipment is used to silence critics of the regime, arrest and mistreat them or cause them to disappear. If people who are peacefully protesting, seeking democracy, acting as human rights defenders or pursuing human rights, have their communications, emails and computers intercepted and compromised using UK manufactured kit then it can be argued this is wrong. The government goes to great lengths to keep this activity confidential running the only closed event in the country, suggesting it knows that it is potentially damaging. A member of the parliamentary Arms Export Committee, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, was barred from entering the 2019 exhibition which he said was deeply alarming.
Meanwhile, here in Salisbury …
In the village of Porton, just outside Salisbury – the same village as in Porton Down – is a firm, Gamma TSE which makes this equipment Finfisher and the aptly called Finspy. What it does was hard to discover exactly but thanks to Wikileaks, details of its equipment are available for all to see. A pdf which provides comprehensive details of the firm’s spying capabilities to covertly extract data from a computer system, bypass password protection and obtain information from a bank are all described in great detail. Examples of its extensive interception capabilities are described in information sheets:
The FinIntrusion Kit was used to break the WPA encryption of a Target’s home Wireless network and then monitor his Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, …) and Social Network (Facebook, MySpace, …) credentials, which enabled the investigators to remotely monitor these accounts from Headquarters without the need to be close to the Target.
Several customers used the FinIntrusion Kit to successfully compromise the security of networks and computer systems for offensive and defensive purposes using various Tools and Techniques.
The password ‘sniffer’ is described thus:
LAN/WLAN Active Password Sniffer
Captures even SSL-encrypted data like Webmail, Video Portals, Online-Banking and more.
It’s ability to gain access remotely:
Usage Example 1: Covert Operation
A source in an Organized Crime Group (OCG) was given a FinUSB Dongle that secretly extracted Account Credentials of Web and Email accounts and Microsoft Office documents from the Target Systems, while the OCG used the USB device to exchange regular files like Music, Video and Office Documents.After returning the USB device to Headquarters the gathered data could be decrypted, analysed and used to constantly monitor the group remotely.
A worrying feature is the ability of Finspy to operate around the world:
FinSpy has been proven successful in operations around the world for many years, and valuable intelligence has been gathered about Target Individuals and Organizations.
When FinSpy is installed on a computer system it can be remotely controlled and accessed as soon as it is connected to the internet/network, no matter where in the world the Target System is based. [our italics]
Since many dissidents or people in opposition to a particular regime have fled to Europe including the UK, it leaves open the question of whether this equipment is being used to monitor people now living in the UK. This was a point made by Privacy International.
The firm also offers training and the list of courses tell their own chilling story:
Sample Course Subjects
· Profiling of Target Websites and Persons
· Tracing anonymous Emails
· Remote access to Webmail Accounts
· Security Assessment of Web-Servers & Web-Services
· Practical Software Exploitation
· Wireless IT Intrusion (WLAN/802.11 and Bluetooth)
· Attacks on critical Infrastructures
· Sniffing Data and User Credentials of Networks
· Monitoring Hot-Spots, Internet Cafés and Hotel Networks
· Intercepting and Recording Calls (VoIP and DECT)
· Cracking Password Hashes
The literature refers several times to ‘organised crime groups’ and this equipment is likely to be of value to police forces acting to stop such activity in their country. The problem is that countries like Bahrain are likely to use these methods against democracy and human rights campaigners.
Implications
The law firm Leigh Day in London launched a claim in 2019 on behalf of four Bahraini nationals who had been targeted using information obtained using this technology. Privacy International identified Gamma as having sold this technology to Bahrain:
In 2012, Citizen Lab, a think-tank operating out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, came across evidence suggesting that Gamma International, a multinational technology corporation with offices across the world, sold a form of malware called FinFisher to Bahrain. Bahraini activists, amongst others, were seriously concerned: FinFisher gives its operator complete access to a target’s computer and mobile phone. That kind of technology in the hands of a state like Bahrain, with its record of human rights abuse, would put at risk a great many people’s lives.
Gamma emphatically denied selling this kit to Bahrain. However, documents subsequently discovered provided evidence that they had already done so. The cruel treatment of these elderly individuals is described in an Amnesty report and includes the denial of medical treatment and medication. A solicitor acting for Gamma says there is no evidence of the firm being involved in human rights abuses and they will defend the claim being made against them.
Gamma are not the only firm selling this equipment. The UK government has been, and is planning to again, to run the secretive exhibition keeping close control over who attends and keeping anyone away who might question its ethics. The UK government has made no comment on the actions of the Bahraini authorities, or the allegations of Gamma’s alleged involvement. If the surveillance by the Bahraini authorities is carried out on computers located within the UK, it is unlawful.
It appears to be a worrying sign of increasing indifference by the UK government of the effects on ordinary people living under oppressive regimes who suffer from the use of arms and surveillance equipment supplied by firms based here in the Britain. It is inconceivable that GCHQ is unaware of what this firm is doing and its client list around the world which includes several of these regimes. This indifference is damaging to our reputation and parliamentarians should be asking searching questions of the minister. The British government has many relationships with the Bahraini royal family. The Queen and other members of the royal household meet quite regularly. Today, (10 February 2020) it was reported that Liam Fox met the Bahraini crown prince to lobby on behalf of Petrofac, the owner of which is a major Conservative party donor (£800,000). It seems quite clear that trade considerations trump human rights issues in government thinking.
Sources: Amnesty International; Campaign Against the Arms Trade; Citizen’s Lab (Canada); WikiLeaks; Gamma; VICE; the Guardian; Privacy International
If you want to join the Salisbury group you would be most welcome. We meet every second Thursday (except August) in Victoria Road at 7:30. Otherwise keep an eye on this site, on Facebook or Twitter and make yourself known at one our events.
This is a current urgent action concerning a boy in Sudan. Magai was trying to stop his cousin fighting with another boy in the neighbourhood. He took his dad’s gun and fired it at the ground to scare the boy away. But the bullet ricocheted and hit his cousin, who later died in hospital.
In his trial Magai was not allowed a lawyer. He told the judge he was just 15, but he was sentenced to death regardless. This is illegal by both international and South Sudan law.
This is just to let you know that yesterday’s Guardian featured an AI ad with a text Action for Magai.
If you would like to do this, you just need to text 70505 with SAVE1, followed by your first and last name.
If you are able to do this, many thanks.
This is an urgent action from Amnesty.
Magai was trying to stop his cousin fighting with another boy in the neighbourhood. He took his dad’s gun and fired it at the ground to scare the boy away. But the bullet ricocheted and hit his cousin, who later died in hospital.
In his trial Magai was not allowed a lawyer. He told the judge he was just 15, but he was sentenced to death regardless. This is illegal by both international and South Sudan law.
If you are able to spare a moment to add your name to the petition that would be appreciated.
Bahrain continues to attract attention on the human rights front and we have posted several items over the years. In 2011, Hussain Ali Moosa and Mohamed Ramadhan took part in an uprising against the Bahraini monarchy. Three years later in 2014, they were sentenced to death for killing a policeman. The main piece of evidence used during the trial was Hussain Ali Moosa’s forced “confession” extracted from him under torture. This “confession” was also used to incriminate Mohamed Ramadhan. The picture is courtesy of BahrainRights.org
If you are able to support this action it would be appreciated.
There is also a report published by Amnesty on this country.
If you are interested in joining the group and you live in the Salisbury/Amesbury/Wilton area you would be most welcome. The best thing is to come to one of our events which can be found at the end of recent minutes or posted on Twitter and Facebook and make yourself known. It is free to join the Salisbury group.
We attach an urgent action concerning Omoyele Sowore and Olawale Bakare who have both been under arrest since August last year on trumped up charges. If you have time to write that would be most appreciated.
Justice for Kris Maharaj has been denied again in Florida. After all the work that was done to prove that he was innocent, he still languishes in gaol after 33 years. It was hoped his hearing – already delayed by several months – would have been heard this month and he would be freed. But now it has been delayed again, this time indefinitely. You can read the full story by Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve who must be close to despairing that this rotten US justice system will ever admit its mistake and release him.
Lively meeting this month and we were pleased to welcome another new member. We discussed the death penalty report; North Korea; the UK government’s possible changes to the Human Rights Act and forthcoming events. We also discussed the closure of the neighbouring New Forest group which we hope may not be permanent. Next meeting on 13 February.
If you are interested in human rights and would like to join us you would be very welcome. You will see our events at the end of the minutes so making yourself known at one of those would be a way to join. It is free to join the Salisbury group. One of our concerns is the new government’s plans to possibly weaken human rights especially when we leave the EU so helping us with that would be appreciated.
Amnesty in Salisbury & South Wiltshire 