Nine members of Force 100 investigated over allegations of sexual assaulting prisoner at Sde Teiman detention camp
An Israeli military unit that has been accused of human rights abuses against Palestinian detainees is reportedly under investigation by the US state department in a move that could lead to it being barred from receiving assistance.
The inquiry into the activities of Force 100 was instigated following a spate of allegations that Palestinians held under its guard at a detention centre have been subject to torture and brutal mistreatment, including sexual assault, Axios reported on Monday.
After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the term international rules-based order would be repeated by Washington officials almost daily to describe Moscow’s action. Then a curious thing happened when Israel invaded Gaza in 2023. The term virtually disappeared as the U.S. sought to protect its close ally Israel. But the U.S. itself has a long record of violating the international rules-based order with its invasions, occupations, coups, assassinations, sanctions and UN vetoes. Compliant corporate media consistently fail to point out this brazen hypocrisy. Since the leader of the so-called free world and its allies are not held to account the rules-based order is in total disorder. From Washington’s perspective, the rules are for thee but not for me. Recorded at Socialism 2024.
This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.
São Paulo, October 17, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Paraguayan President Santiago Peña to reject a law that would impose burdensome restrictions on nonprofit news outlets and threaten their independence.
On October 9, Paraguay’s Congress approved the Establishing Control, Transparency, and Accountability of Non-Profit Organizations Act and passed it to Peña, who has two weeks to sign it into law or veto it.
The legislation, reviewed by CPJ, would require all nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive public or private money to submit financial reports to the Ministry of Economy and Finance every six months. It would also require NGOs to list the people and legal entities that they work with. Organizations that fail to meet the requirements could be shut down.
“Many independent media in Paraguay are nonprofits that rely on international funding and this law would force them to disclose information and data about people who work for them could seriously hamper their work,” said CPJ Latin America Program Coordinator Cristina Zahar. “It could deter news outlets from speaking out against the government or investigating public interest matters.”
In July, three United Nations special rapporteurs warned that the bill “could unduly restrict the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association.”
The Human Rights Coordinating Committee of Paraguay (Codehupy), an NGO network, sent a letter to Peña, reviewed by CPJ and signed by 66 organizations, asking him to veto the bill and work with civil society to draft a new one.
The legislation comes as Congress is investigating allegations that NGOs have been involved in money laundering by funding political campaigns.
Santiago Ortiz, secretary general of the Paraguayan Journalists Union, said Congress’ investigation, in which journalists personal data made public, was part of a broader push by the conservative government to harass journalists and civil society. “It was a deliberate attempt to discredit their work and that of civil society,” he told CPJ.
CPJ requested comment from the President’s Office via messaging app but did not immediately receive a response.
Labour has backtracked on plans to push for formal recognition of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide in the run-up to David Lammy’s trip to the country this weekend.
The foreign secretary is expected to arrive in Beijing on Friday for high-level meetings before travelling to Shanghai on Saturday.
More than 60 NGOs including Holocaust memorial group tell Donald Tusk region’s volatility ‘doesn’t exempt us from humanity’
Human rights and a Holocaust memorial group have urged the Polish prime minister to shelve plans to temporarily suspend the right to asylum, telling him that the region’s volatility “doesn’t exempt us from humanity”.
The intervention from more than 60 NGOs including Amnesty International and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation comes after Donald Tusk told his party of plans to introduce a new migration strategy.
Hopes of pardon dashed for Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, who were cleared of collaboration with US
Two young female journalists who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini have been cleared of charges of collaborating with the United States government but will still spend up to five more years behind bars, the Iranian authorities have announced.
Concerns are growing that funds from the migration deal are connected to abuses by the repressive regime in Tunis
The EU will be unable to claw back any of the €150m (£125m) paid to Tunisia despite the money being increasingly linked to human rights violations, including allegations that sums went to security forces who raped migrant women.
The European Commission paid the amount to the Tunis government in a controversial migration and development deal, despite concerns that the north African state was increasingly authoritarian and its police largely operated with impunity.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who is still in jail in Egypt despite completing his five-year sentence, was selected by PEN Pinter winner Arundhati Roy
British-Egyptian writer, software developer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been named this year’s PEN writer of courage. The 42-year-old is still in prison in Egypt, despite having completed his five-year sentence for allegedly “spreading false news”.
“Let’s remember that this is an innocent man who has committed no crime, but even so, he will have served his time on 29 September,” Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, said last month.
My friend Keith Lomax, who has died aged 75, was a tenacious, talented and principled human rights lawyer whose court victories often benefited not only those he directly represented, but thousands more.
His success in Connors v United Kingdom in the European court of human rights (ECHR) in 2004 led to UK legislation giving Gypsies and Travellers living on local authority-run sites security of tenure. In 2007 the Labour government allocated £150m to improve medical help for vulnerable people in custody. It followed Keith’s victory in the ECHR representing the family of Judith McGlinchey, who died in prison after medical staff failed to monitor her drug withdrawal symptoms. From 2006 to 2011, Keith defended against eviction Travellers living on the Dale Farm site in Essex. He was declared legal aid lawyer of the year by the Legal Aid Practitioners’ Group in 2017.
Over the past three years, the world has watched in horror as women and girls in Afghanistan have had their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away.
In the face of inaction by the international community, a campaign for the conditions being imposed on Afghan and Iranian women to be made a crime under international law as gender apartheid was launched last year. What does the term mean and will it make a difference?
When Sima Samar and other Afghan women came up with the term “gender apartheid” in the 1990s to describe the systematic oppression faced by women and girls under Taliban rule, she never imagined it would have become a key weapon in the fight to hold a second Taliban regime to account for their crimes two decades later.
“When the first Taliban regime fell, the idea that we would once again see the persecution, isolation and segregational and systematic repression of half the Afghan population on the basis of their gender seemed impossible,” says Samar, who served as the minister for women’s affairs after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and now lives in exile. “But now, in 2024, it is happening again and this time we must find a way to fight for justice.”
The bill would create a federal shield safeguarding reporter-source confidentiality and prevent government access to unreported source material. The legislation previously passed the House twice but has languished in the Senate.
The letters, authored by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, urged members of the Senate to pass the bill during this critical time and requested the House support the measure if it is returned to that chamber.
Leader of north African country expected to win second term after jailing opponents and changing constitution
Polls have closed in Tunisia’s presidential election as the president, Kais Saied, seeks a second term, while his most prominent critics are in prison and after his main rival was jailed suddenly last month.
Observers see the election, which Saied is expected to win, as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s experiment with democracy.
The mission met with civil society representatives and political and institutional leaders and heard the testimony of journalists who cited a growing climate of fear amid a deeply polarized environment, increasingly authoritarian governance, and escalating attacks against the press. Journalists expressed grave concern over their ability to continue operating in the country following the enactment of a Russian-style “foreign agents” law earlier this year.
The mission concluded with a press briefing and will be followed by a detailed report with recommendations.
Move over European convention on human rights likely to put pressure on Tory leadership candidates to follow suit
Boris Johnson has called for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European convention on human rights, a move likely to increase pressure on those vying for the Conservative leadership to follow suit.
The former prime minister told the Daily Telegraph there was a “strong case” for a vote on the ECHR, which some Tories blame for hampering their efforts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Pen used in assault on Manahel al-Otaibi, who has been imprisoned for 11 years for ‘terrorist’ tweets after secret trial
A Saudi Arabian fitness instructor and influencer has been stabbed in the face in prison after being jailed in January for promoting women’s rights on social media.
WikiLeaks founder says he pleaded ‘guilty to journalism’ in deal for his release and calls for protection of press freedom
Julian Assange has said he chose freedom “over unrealisable justice” as he described his plea deal with US authorities and urged European lawmakers to act to protect freedom of expression in a climate with “more impunity, more secrecy [and] more retaliation for telling the truth”.
In his first public statement since the plea deal in June ended his nearly 14 years of prison, embassy confinement and house arrest in the UK, the WikiLeaks founder argued that legal protections for whistleblowers and journalists “only existed on paper” or “were not effective in any remotely reasonable time”.
The former security minister Tom Tugendhat has criticised the claim by one of his Conservative leadership rivals that UK special forces are “killing rather than capturing” terrorism suspects, saying they were a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the law of war.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, has defended his claim on Tuesday, and said it echoed those of the former defence secretary Ben Wallace because of fears that European laws would free any detained assailants.
The Tory leadership candidate made the claim in a campaign video calling for the UK to leave the European convention on human rights
Robert Jenrick is facing condemnation for claiming that UK special forces are “killing rather than capturing” terrorists because of fears that European laws would free any detained assailants.
In a campaign video launched on X, the Conservative leadership candidate made the statement while listing reasons for leaving the European convention on human rights.
Alan Miller, 59, second person in US to be executed via controversial technique, shook and trembled on gurney
Alabama has carried out the second execution in the US using the controversial method of nitrogen gas, an experimental technique for humans that veterinarians have deemed unacceptable in the US and Europe for the euthanasia of most animals.
Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was pronounced dead at 6.38pm local time at a south Alabama prison.
Washington, D.C., September 24, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Egyptian authorities to release Alaa Abdelfattah, a prominent Egyptian-British blogger and writer, upon completion of his five-year prison sentence this Sunday, September 29. Abdelfattah was arrested on September 28, 2019, and in December 2021, he was sentenced to five years in prison, starting from his arrest date, on accusations of spreading false news and undermining state security.
“After serving his five-year sentence, Egyptian-British blogger Alaa Abdelfattah must be released immediately, and all remaining charges against him must be dropped. He deserves to be reunited with his son and family,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “The Egyptian authorities must uphold their own laws and stop manipulating legal statutes to unjustly imprison Abdelfattah. It is a profound disgrace for Egypt to silence such a vital voice of conscience behind bars.”
Abdelfattah’s family and his campaign for release wrote on social media platform X, “We hope that the law will be respected and Alaa will be freed and reunited with his son, Khaled.”
However, Abdelfattah’s lawyer, Khaled Ali, told the independent media outlet Al-Manassa that Abdelfattah is “being subjected to abuse, oppression, and manipulation of legal texts.” Ali said prosecutors calculated the start of the sentence from the date it was ratified on January 3, 2022 — not from the date of his arrest — which means Abdelfattah’s release date is now set for January 2027.
Egyptian authorities’ failure to release Abdelfattah by September 29 would be in violation of articles 482 and 484 of the country’s Criminal Procedure Law.
In April 2024, CPJ and 26 other press freedom and human rights organizations sent a letter to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) urging the UNWGAD to determine whether Abdelfattah’s detention is arbitrary and violates international law.
The 2019 arrest, which took place about six months after Abdelfattah was released after serving a previous five-year sentence, occurred amid a government crackdown on protests demanding that President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi resign. Abdelfattah had posted about the protests and arrests on Facebook and wrote about politics and human rights violations for numerous outlets, including the independent Al-Shorouk newspaper and the progressive Mada Masr news website.
Authorities in Hong Kong have jailed three people for wearing a ‘seditious’ T-shirt and making protest-related graffiti and social media posts, the first imprisonments under the Article 23 security law.
The West Kowloon Magistrate’s Court handed down a 14-month jail term to Chu Kai-pong, 27, the first person to be sentenced under the new law, on Sept. 19.
Chu was found guilty of wearing a T-shirt and a mask emblazoned with a banned slogan of the 2019 protest movement, “Free Hong Kong, Revolution now!” and “Five Demands, Not One Less,” a reference to the five demands of the protest movement that included calls for fully democratic elections.
The court jailed a second defendant, 29-year-old Chung Man-kit, for 10 months after he pleaded guilty to three charges of sedition. Chung had repeatedly scrawled slogans in support of independence for Hong Kong, as well as the “Free Hong Kong” protest slogan, on the back of bus seats in March and April, the court found.
A day later, the same court handed a 14-month jail term to defendant Au Kin-wai, after finding him guilty of “knowingly publishing publications with seditious intent,” based on posts he made to YouTube, Facebook and X calling on ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee to step down.
What is the Article 23 legislation?
The Safeguarding National Security Ordinance was passed on March 23, 2024, fulfilling the Hong Kong government’s obligations under Article 23 of the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, which gives the law its nickname.
The law covers many of the same offenses as the 2020 National Security Law, but with expanded definitions, new crimes and penalties.
It adds the crime of “treason,” “theft of state secrets” and “external interference” to the statute book, while expanding maximum sentences for “sedition” from to 7 years’ imprisonment, 10 if the person is found guilty of “collusion with external forces.”
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, government officials and lawmakers applaud following a group photo, after the Safeguarding National Security Bill, also referred to as Basic Law Article 23, was passed at the Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, in Hong Kong, China March 19, 2024. (REUTERS/Joyce Zhou)
Previously, the charge of “sedition” under colonial-era laws carried a maximum penalty of just 3 years in jail.
Suspects can be detained for up to 16 days before being charged, and be prevented from seeing a lawyer in some circumstances.
In May 2024, police arrested six people under the law for making “seditious” Facebook posts mentioning the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, including vigil organizer Chow Hang-tung.
Rights activists have warned that the law gives officials too much power, especially when it comes to defining what is meant by “collusion with foreign forces” or “state secrets,” or what constitutes subversion.
It is the second national security law to be passed in the city since 2020, and, like its predecessor, applies to speech and acts committed by anyone, of any nationality, anywhere in the world.
Why the need for a second security law?
The Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, also known as Article 23, has been described by Hong Kong-based former Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong, who served a five-year prison sentence in China for “espionage” for doing his job, as a “sword of Damocles” over Hong Kongers’ heads.
According to Ching: “Essentially this law is the culmination of a long-running attempt to graft the ideology, political ideas, and behavioral patterns of the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian system onto a pro-Western capitalist society that respects universal values.”
While the 2020 National Security Law was an emergency response from Beijing to what it saw as chaos and instability during the 2019 protests, the Article 23 law was always inevitable, dating back as it did to Sino-British negotiations ahead of the 1997 handover, in which the people of Hong Kong had no say or control.
But the process faced mass popular anger and opposition.
The Hong Kong government was supposed to have passed national security legislation decades ago, but officials shelved the bill following a mass protest in 2003 that took leaders by surprise.
What was the point of the first security law?
The Article 23 legislation remained on ice throughout the mass pro-democracy movements of 2014 and 2019.
Protesters take part in a rally in solidarity with Hong Kong residents, as the Article 23 national security laws come into force, in London, Britain, March 23, 2024. (REUTERS/Hollie Adams)
But when protesters started defacing the emblems of Chinese rule in 2019, both in the Legislative Council and outside Beijing’s Central Liaison Office in Hong Kong, Chinese officials started calling for a crackdown on dissent to prevent “hostile foreign forces” from destabilizing Hong Kong.
At 11.00 p.m. local time on June 30, 2020, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee imposed the Hong Kong National Security Law on the city by inserting it into one of the annexes of its constitution, bypassing the Legislative Council, or LegCo.
More than 10,000 people have been arrested and at least 2,800 prosecuted in a citywide crackdown in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, mostly under public order charges.
Nearly 300 have been arrested under 2020 National Security Law, according to the online magazine ChinaFile.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Joshua Lipes.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jasmine Man for RFA Mandarin, Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.
Despite his convictions for corruption and human rights abuses, many see the president who has died at 86 as the country’s greatest leader
At 11.45 on Thursday morning, six white-gloved pallbearers carried a coffin holding the body of the most divisive, beloved and reviled Peruvian politician of the last four decades. They passed the mourners, the cameras and the flag-topped lances of the Húsares de Junín cavalry regiment, and set it down in the hall of Lima’s brutalist culture ministry.
Behind the coffin, holding hands and dressed in black under a pale but warm spring sky, came its occupant’s eldest daughter and youngest son. A crowd of ministers, political allies and military top brass awaited them at the ministry.
‘Dismal’ lack of progress leaves women and girls facing litany of abuses – with no country on track to achieve equality
More than 850 million women and girls are living in countries rated as “very poor” for gender equality, says a new report, subjecting them to a litany of potential restrictions and abuses, including forced pregnancies, childhood marriage and bans from secondary education.
Labour is wrong to put on hold a law that aims to protect staff from external pressures
Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), has for several years taught a “data detectives” masters module on research methods that teaches students to critically appraise the use of data. One exercise involves discussing a Global Slavery Index finding that China has the second highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world, to help students understand the flawed nature of the data on which it is based.
Last October, one Chinese student complained that the example was a “horrible provocation”. Shipworth was asked by her head of department to remove the example from her course. A few weeks later, she was told complaints had been raised about her “bias” against students from China, based on the fact that two Chinese students had been expelled from the university after she discovered they had been cheating; she was told she could no longer teach her module and she should not post on social media about “educational issues about only one country”. The email expressed concern that if there was perception or misperception of bias, this could threaten the commercial viability of UCL courses.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
The Taliban government in Afghanistan is drawing renewed outrage over a new law banning women’s voices in public, forcing them to completely cover their bodies and faces out of the home, and more. This comes after the Taliban banned women from working in most fields and ended girls’ education past primary school following their takeover of the country in 2021. We speak with Sima Samar, an Afghan human rights advocate and doctor who chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission from 2002 until 2019; she also briefly served as minister of women’s affairs in the interim Afghan government in 2002, after a U.S.-led coalition toppled the first Taliban government for its support of al-Qaeda. “You cannot see such a law in any other regime on this planet,” she says. “This is a crime against humanity. It is gender apartheid.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Absence of legally binding targets for greenhouse gas reductions from 2031-49 deemed unconstitutional
South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that part of the country’s climate law does not conform with protecting the constitutional rights of future generations, an outcome local activists are calling a “landmark decision”.
The unanimous verdict concludes four years of legal battles and sets a significant precedent for future climate-related legal actions in the region.
New vice and virtue restrictions offer ‘a distressing vision of Afghanistan’s future’, says UN
New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.
The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.
Exclusive: ‘Loophole’ in England and Wales from Sexual Offences Act is being challenged in human rights court
Thousands of women who were sexually abused as children could be unable to obtain justice because of an anomaly in the law of England and Wales that is being challenged at the European court of human rights.
The case has been brought by Lucy (not her real name), who was 13 when a man 22 years her senior began having sex with her. Despite him admitting it, police told her charges could not be brought because she did not report the alleged offence in time.
