Human rights

Wednesday

Martin Bright

The Foreign Office responds

I have just received some answers from the Foreign Office about the Bangladesh war crimes tribunal. I asked if William Hague had sent a letter to his counterpart in Bangladesh saying that there were no war criminals from the 1971 independence war in Britain. A spokesman said that while they did not comment on leaked documents, the following points could be made with reference to the war crimes trials currently taking place in Bangladesh: 1) The UK wants to see all war criminals brought to justice. It is essential that all war crimes’ tribunals are held to internationally accepted standards and that anyone accused of a war crime is given

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Could Burma’s sham election bring real change?

For the first time since 1990, Burma went to the polls. Though the final results have not been released, most regard the election as a sham meant to cement military rule, with complex election rules put in place to exclude opposition candidates as well as interference from the junta in the campaign and a ban on foreign reporting.   Senior General Than Shwe and his camouflage-clad cohorts are likely to get away with the electoral theft. Nearly all of Burma’s neighbours -– Thailand, India and China included -– are willing to ignore the regime’s failings to obtain commercial benefits.  As The Telegraph has reported, Chinese investment in Burma stands at

Wednesday

Ed Holmes

When public safety is threatened, strikes should be banned

The Fire Brigade’s Union (FBU) have called for strike action in London during the busiest firefighting night of the year: Bonfire Night.  Attempts to renegotiate work patterns (already changed in several fire brigades but unchanged in London for thirty years) have been hysterically termed ‘sacking’ all London firefighters by the union.  Rather like the threatened British Airways strike during Christmas 2009, this is a clear attempt by a trade union to use its monopoly power to force an employer into accepting its terms by inflicting maximum possible damage on the general public.   This is clearly worse than a normal strike, however.  If, say, all Asda employees went on strike,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Preparing for a Nuclear Iran

That’s the message of the US’s forthcoming $60bn arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. Or so says David Rothkopf anyway: [T]he reason that the U.S. government — that would not have done a deal like this in the years right after 9/11 — is willing and even a little eager to move ahead with the deal now is that the War on Terror is being overtaken among top U.S. concerns by the advent of a nuclear Iran.  Now, you may quibble by pointing out that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. But this is a purely academic argument. This deal is the latest example of behavior suggesting that the nuclearization of

Monday

David Blackburn

The coalition’s inept EU referendum lock

At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant. The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The body in the snow

A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice. A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice. It shines out of his story of the murder of the 17-year-old Tibetan nun, Kelsang Namtso. It happened on 30 September 2006, at the base camp on Cho Oyu in Tibet, the sixth highest peak in the world. Forty teams of Westerners, who had paid up to $20,000 each for the trip, waited there for their turns to climb. To make the wait more comfortable, hundreds of yaks and porters had carried quantities of wine, sushi, TV films, pregnancy-testing kits, condoms and M&Ms to

Thursday

David Blackburn

Gary McKinnon should convert to radical Islam

The European Court of Human Rights is an essential check on executive excess, but today it has perverted justice. It has halted Abu Hamza’s extradition to the US, where he was to be tried for colluding with al Qaeda. Its view was that Hamza would likely be subject to inhumane and degrading incarceration. In other words, the ECHR has decided that the US prison system is not compatible with the standards agreed by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. Fine. Except, of course, it has not. There is a pernicious double standard at work here. Gary McKinnon, the aspergers sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, is

Monday

James Forsyth

Sign of the times | 28 June 2010

This week’s New Yorker has a little piece about Cherie Blair’s efforts to get an International Widows’ day recognised. Most of it is about Blair doing the diplomatic rounds, she compares the process to the one for trying to win the Olympics for London. But there is an interesting anecdote about what happened when the Blairs were both looking for chambers to join: “When Tony and I were looking for jobs, they said they had a boy and a girl and they couldn’t possibly take another girl, so I went to another chambers, and Tony was taken on.” It is easy sometimes to forget just how much things have changed

Friday

David Blackburn

May calls for culture change towards LGB&T groups

Theresa May has called for ‘culture change’ in wider society to ease the equality and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender minorities. Abstractions are the executive’s favoured metier these days. I’ve read and re-read May’s article in Pink News and nowhere does she define ‘culture change’. The end product of a culture change towards LGB&T groups might be envisaged, but how is it initiated? The government cannot answer that question, beyond suggesting that supporting pride marches is positive. True, but society is more than a pride march. It exists in the daily confusion caused by ill-defined laws, such as who B&B owners let into their homes/businesses. Or whether it

Monday

Daniel Korski

A Human Rights Minister?

Britain’s role in protecting the downtrodden and protecting the weak has significant historical pedigree. The British role in abolishing the international slave trade was one of the first liberal interventions. And as Abigail Green’s biography shows, Britain’s Sir Moses Montefiore was not just a pre-eminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century, but his pioneering approach to the problem of Jewish persecution helped transform the international response to abuses of human rights. No party, though, is going to the election with the kind of commitment to promote human rights abroad as Robin Cook did when he unveiled his ideas for an “ethical” foreign policy. This is hardly a surprise. Ten years

Tuesday

Martin Bright

The Gita Saghal Saga Continued

I have no doubt that history will vindicate Gita Sahgal in her decision to challenge Amnesty International over its relationship with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg and his organisation Cage Prisoners.  She has now left her job, as The Times reports today. This will be a great loss to Amnesty, which has lost a deeply respected figure in international human rights, especially in the field of women’s rights and the threat of authoritarian Islam.  I can’t really better Oliver Kamm’s analysis of how damaging this is for Amnesty: “Its critics charge that it has diluted its defence of universal human rights by allying with a group that rejects that principle.

Sunday

David Blackburn

What should be in the British Bill of Rights?

The success or failure of Cameron’s EU policy rests in part on the promised British Bill of Rights. What is clear is that Tories are unclear what should be included in it. One question that is yet to be answered is whether aspects of the constitution should be entrenched? Writing on the Blue Blog today, Michael Howard writes: ‘Any decision about these rights requires a balancing of competing rights. The fundamental question is who should be responsible for striking that balance: elected MP’s or unelected judges? On terrorism, Parliament twice, after great debate, reached its view. Yet twice the judges have held that Parliament got it wrong. In doing so,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Does Obama Care About Human Rights in Iran?

As readers know, in general terms I think the Obama administration has taken a fairly sensible, moderate approach towards Iran. Nevertheless, it’s possible to take this too far. And this seems, on the face of it, to be one example of when carefulness crosses the line and becomes craven: For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Aung Sang Suu Kyi, a victim of the post-American world

Today the Burmese junta convicted pro-democracy campaigner Aung Sang Suu Kyi to a further 18 months under house arrest after a U.S. man swam uninvited to her lakeside home in May and stayed there for two days, breaching the terms of her house arrest. Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy have led the world’s outrage, urging the UN Security Council and European Union to impose tougher sanctions on the regime.   Unfortunately, not much is likely to happen to the Burmese generals. They remain protected not only by their neighbors, but by China and India who have both economic and strategic interests in keeping the regime intact. Like China, power-hungry India