radiofree.asia 
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radiofree.asia 

Category: UK news

  • Uyghurs subjected to genocide by China, unofficial UK tribunal finds

    Independent report says crimes include torture and the systematic suppression of births

    Uyghur people living in Xinjiang province in China have been subjected to unconscionable crimes against humanity directed by the Chinese state that amount to an act of genocide, an independent and unofficial tribunal has found.

    Hundreds of thousands and possibly a million people have been incarcerated without any or remotely fair justification, the tribunal’s chairman Sir Geoffrey Nice QC said as he delivered the tribunal’s findings in London. “This vast apparatus of state repression could not exist if a plan was not authorised at the highest levels,” Nice said.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • China says Australia, UK and US will ‘pay price’ for Winter Olympics action

    Beijing accuses nations of using Games ‘for political manipulation’ amid diplomatic boycotts

    China has said that Australia, Britain and the US will pay a price for their “mistaken acts” after deciding not to send government delegations to February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, in the latest warning demonstrating China’s escalating diplomatic tensions with the US and its major allies.

    The US was the first to announce a boycott, saying on Monday its government officials would not attend the February Games because of China’s human rights “atrocities”, weeks after talks aimed at easing tension between the world’s two largest economies.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Home Office urged to stop housing asylum seekers in barracks

    Housing survivors of torture or other serious forms of violence in barracks ‘harmful’, all-party report says

    A cross-party group of parliamentarians is calling on the government to end its use of controversial barracks accommodation for people seeking asylum, in a new report published on Thursday.

    The report also recommends the scrapping of government plans to expand barracks-style accommodation for up to 8,000 asylum seekers. It refers to accommodation, including Napier barracks in Kent, which is currently being used to house hundreds of asylum seekers, as “quasi-detention” due to visible security measures, surveillance, shared living quarters and isolation from the wider community.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Pretty extreme’: readers respond to UK proposals to target ‘lifestyle’ drug users

    Six readers share their views after the government says ‘middle-class’ drug users could lose passports

    “Lifestyle” users of class A drugs will be targeted as part of the government’s strategy as it argues that their demand for drugs fuels exploitation.

    The proposal to target “middle-class” drug users by taking away their passports or driving licences has been met with criticism by campaigners, who view the focus on punitive sentences as regressive.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Observer view on Priti Patel’s fake migrant crisis | Observer editorial

    The home secretary fans rhetorical flames on asylum seekers and refugees, but the numbers disagree

    Home secretaries from both main parties have scapegoated asylum seekers in attempts to endear themselves to voters in recent decades. But none with the fervour of Priti Patel, who in her two-year tenure at the Home Office has announced a series of initiatives to put people off seeking asylum in the UK. Wave machines in the Channel, flying asylum seekers to inhospitable islands thousands of miles away to be processed, criminalising those who rescue people drowning at sea: all are recent measures proposed by the home secretary regardless of their compatibility with international law and Britain’s moral obligations.

    Patel gives the impression that there is an escalating crisis in terms of the numbers of people arriving in the UK and trying to illegitimately claim refuge. This is not true. There is absolutely a crisis for asylum seekers trying to reach British shores by making the treacherous Channel crossing in small boats and dinghies. The British government should be doing all it can to clamp down on the people traffickers making a fortune by charging desperate people to attempt the crossing. But the number of people coming to the UK to claim asylum fell by 4% last year and stands at less than half what it was in the early 2000s. Britain receives a fraction of the asylum applications of Germany and France and fewer per resident than the EU average. Low-income countries host nine out of 10 displaced people worldwide.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • New bill quietly gives powers to remove British citizenship without notice

    Clause added to nationality and borders bill also appears to allow Home Office to act retrospectively in some cases

    Individuals could be stripped of their British citizenship without warning under a proposed rule change quietly added to the nationality and borders bill.

    Clause 9 – “Notice of decision to deprive a person of citizenship” – of the bill, which was updated earlier this month, exempts the government from having to give notice if it is not “reasonably practicable” to do so, or in the interests of national security, diplomatic relations or otherwise in the public interest.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Winter Olympics top sponsors ‘silent’ over China’s human rights record

    Human Rights Watch says it only received one reply after writing to 13 companies involved in Beijing Games

    Corporate sponsors of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have been accused of “squandering the opportunity” to pressure China to address its “appalling human rights record”.

    The Games’ top level sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Procter & Gamble, Intel and Visa, were on Friday accused of ignoring China’s alleged “crimes against humanity against Uyghurs” and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang as well the repression of free speech in Hong Kong.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Asylum seekers in UK housed in converted hostel with prison cells

    Experts say Home Office risks traumatising refugees by housing them in courthouse turned into hostel

    Asylum seekers are being housed by the Home Office in a former courthouse turned hostel which promised nights in “an authentic prison cell” to backpackers.

    Hundreds of people are understood to be in the facility – which appears to have been a form of court and prison cell “theme park” accommodation – including some who were imprisoned in the past in their home countries, including Libya.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Abortion was legalised in Northern Ireland in 2019 – so why are we still waiting for it? | Elizabeth Nelson

    The Northern Ireland Office move to uphold our human rights is welcome. But it shouldn’t have come to this

    • Elizabeth Nelson is a writer and activist based in Belfast

    Just over two years ago I was in a pub in Belfast celebrating the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. This heady day of vindication came after decades of campaigning by countless activists. There was a feeling of relief, not only for campaigners, but for those who have endured the trauma of being forced to travel to access basic healthcare that was readily available throughout the rest of the UK. The end was finally in sight. Our fundamental human rights would be enshrined in law, though it had taken Westminster to step in where our own government would not. At last, free, safe, legal, local abortion was imminent.

    But the promises of that day have yet to materialise. For two years the Northern Ireland Department of Health has failed to commission abortion services. Access to abortion in Northern Ireland remains piecemeal, with much of the support delivered by charities like Informing Choices NI. When they had to stop their work due to excessive pressure on resources, access to abortion again became practically nonexistent in Northern Ireland. In the midst of a once in a generation pandemic, people needing abortions – UK citizens and residents – are still forced, at personal and financial cost, to travel to Great Britain for care.

    Elizabeth Nelson is a writer and activist based in Belfast

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  • Allow us the option of a humane, painless death | Letters

    Readers share their perspectives on Baroness Meacher’s assisted dying bill

    Jane Campbell says disabled people need more help to live, not to die (22 October). As a disabled person myself, with a condition which will continue to deteriorate but which won’t kill me, I say we need both.

    We do need help to live and we may need help to die, if that’s what we want. People talk about dying with dignity; help with living doesn’t always include dignity. Having your arse wiped by someone else, whoever they are, isn’t very dignified and that is one of the aspects of my own future I don’t look forward to. What we need in help with living and with dying is humanity, kindness and, certainly for me, humour.
    Kathryn Hobson
    Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Why the witch-hunt victims of early modern Britain have come back to haunt us

    The women killed as witches centuries ago are starting to receive justice. But let’s not glamorise the murder of innocents

    Lilias Addie’s body was piled into a wooden box and buried beneath a half-tonne sandstone slab on the foreshore where a dark North Sea laps the Fife coast. More than a hundred years later, she was exhumed by opportunistic Victorian gravediggers and her bones – unusually large for a woman living in the early 18th century – were later put on show at the Empire exhibition in Glasgow. Her simple coffin was carved into a wooden walking stick – engraved “Lilias Addie, 1704” – which ended up in the collection of Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world.

    It was no sort of burial, but from the perspective of the thousands of women accused of, and executed for, witchcraft in early modern Britain, Lilias’s fate had a degree of dignity.

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  • Lawyers to submit Yemen war crimes dossier to UK police

    Key figures in Saudi Arabia and UAE accused of crimes against humanity include investors in Britain

    A group of human rights lawyers will on Wednesday file a legal complaint in the UK accusing key figures in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of being involved in war crimes relating to the war in Yemen.

    They plan to submit a dossier to British police and prosecutors alleging that about 20 members of the political and military elite of the two Gulf nations are guilty of crimes against humanity, and call for their immediate arrest should they enter the UK.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Drop Chinese investments, MPs and peers tell parliament’s pension fund

    Letter from 137 lawmakers urges fund to drop stakes in firms accused of human rights violations or linked to Chinese state

    A cross-party group of more than 137 parliamentarians, including 117 MPs, have called on parliament’s pension fund to disinvest from Chinese companies accused of complicity in gross human rights violations or institutions linked to the Chinese state.

    The signatories include Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, and former Conservative cabinet ministers Liam Fox, Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Tebbit. Others include the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, Layla Moran, and shadow foreign affairs minister Stephen Kinnock. The Conservative MP David Amess was also a signatory, one of his last political acts before his death on Friday.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ICO to step in after schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue

    Privacy campaigners raise concerns after nine schools in North Ayrshire scan faces of pupils to take payments

    The Information Commissioner’s Office is to intervene over concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK.

    Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times. More schools are expected to follow.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Labour urges Dominic Raab to tackle justice system ‘chaos’

    David Lammy says justice secretary should focus on courts after proposal to undermine human rights law

    The shadow justice secretary, David Lammy, has urged Dominic Raab to tackle the “chaos” in the justice system before unpicking human rights law, after Raab said he wanted to curb the power of the European court of human rights over the government.

    Raab used an interview with the Sunday Telegraph to signal that he would be reviewing the Human Rights Act, which brought the European convention on human rights into UK law, with a view to constraining the influence of the Strasbourg court.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Shadow minister criticises Kathleen Stock for being LGB Alliance trustee

    Taiwo Owatemi says group should be ‘rejected by all those who believe in equality’ but fellow trustee calls comments a ‘catalogue of lies’

    The shadow equalities minister has entered the controversy over the Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, criticising the academic’s role as a trustee of an activist group accused of anti-trans campaigning.

    Stock has attracted protests over her views on gender identification, and last week was the victim of a poster campaign at the university’s campus in Brighton that accused her of transphobia and called for her to be sacked.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UK ‘colluding in torture’ by leaving women and children in Syria camps

    Rights watchdog accuses Britain of turning a blind eye to degrading treatment of those who lived under IS

    Britain is colluding in torture and degrading treatment by refusing to repatriate women and children held in indefinite detention in Syrian prison camps, according to a report from a human rights watchdog.

    The assessment by Rights and Security International (RSI) accuses the UK and others of turning a blind eye to lawless and squalid conditions in two camps that contain 60,000 women and children, many held since the collapse of Islamic State.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Send us home,’ beg Afghan refugees stuck in UK hotels

    Thousands who fled Taliban are living in hotels with inadequate healthcare in Operation Warm Welcome

    Afghans who recently arrived in the UK after fleeing the Taliban takeover have asked to be sent back, casting doubt over the success of Operation Warm Welcome, the government’s Afghan resettlement programme.

    It was launched by Boris Johnson on 29 August to help Afghan refugees arriving in the UK by providing support so they could “rebuild their lives, find work, pursue education and integrate into their local communities”.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Jonathan Cooper obituary

    Human rights barrister at the forefront of the fight to decriminalise homosexuality around the world

    The barrister Jonathan Cooper, who has died suddenly aged 58, was the driving force behind numerous human rights campaigns over the past 30 years. Exuberant, knowledgable and admired by a wide circle of friends, he was at the forefront of efforts to decriminalise homosexuality around the world and a pivotal figure in educating a generation of civil servants about the Human Rights Act.

    Cooper may not have been a prominent public figure or a highly paid QC, but as a barrister he was a tireless crusader, devising ingenious legal challenges and campaign strategies. Geoffrey Robertson QC, joint head of Doughty Street Chambers, where Cooper practised for most of his working life, described him as a brilliant scholar providing “ammunition” for advocates to win courtroom battles.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Human rights lawyers call on UK government to ban ‘conversion therapy’

    Experts say all practices, including prayer, aiming to change sexual orientation or gender identity must be criminalised

    Leading human rights lawyers and experts have called for swift action to outlaw so-called conversion therapy, which they say is degrading and harmful, and should not be tolerated in a civilised society.

    The Forum, chaired by Helena Kennedy QC, says all practices, including prayer, that seek to suppress, “cure” or change sexual orientation or gender identity must be criminalised. There should be no defence that a victim appears to have consented.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Judges criticise Met police after woman wins spy cop case

    Tribunal rules in favour of Kate Wilson over breach of human rights, citing ‘lamentable failings’

    Police have been been severely criticised by judges who ruled that they grossly violated the human rights of a woman who was deceived into a long-term intimate relationship by an undercover officer.

    The judges ruled overwhelmingly in favour of Kate Wilson, an environmental and social justice activist, who has pursued a decade-long campaign to uncover the truth.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Child refugees were ‘dumped’ in unsafe hotel, claims Brighton council

    Law firm says attempts to evaluate a 15-year-old Afghan held in a hotel had been prevented, breaching the child’s rights

    Fresh concern over the plight of thousands of refugees living in UK hotels has emerged after a council requested that the Home Office shut down temporary accommodation housing child refugees over “safeguarding concerns” and a lawyer revealed how he had been blocked from assessing unaccompanied minors.

    Brighton and Hove city council has asked the Home Office to stop using a hotel holding scores of child refugees, claiming that no initial Covid-19 risk or safeguarding assessment had been carried out. Meanwhile, a law firm said that attempts to evaluate a 15-year-old Afghan held in a hotel had been prevented, breaching the child’s rights, with other unaccompanied minors subject to “unlawful forced imprisonment”.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Haitians fleeing and Hotel Rwanda case: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Pollutionwatch: the fight to protect children from dirty air

    Rather than relying on court cases, is it time for the right to clean air to be enshrined in UK and US law?

    Last week the high court ruled that the UK Environment Agency must do more to protect a five-year-old boy from dangerous fumes leaking from a nearby landfill site. It was among recent legal cases focusing on air pollution.

    In 2020 the coroner’s court concluded that air pollution was a factor in the death of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah, who lived alongside London’s South Circular road, and in 2021 French courts halted the deportation of a Bangladeshi man due to the risks posed by air pollution in his home country.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Top Thai union leader ‘targeted’ with jail for rail safety campaign

    Case is ‘major blow’ in country with weak workers’ rights and puts trade deals in question, says Human Rights Watch

    One of Thailand’s most prominent union leaders is facing three years in prison for his role in organising a railway safety campaign, in a case described as the biggest attack on organised labour in the country in decades.

    Rights advocates say the case involving Sawit Kaewvarn, president of the State Railway Union of Thailand, will have a chilling effect on unions and threatens to further weaken workers’ rights in the country.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Britain’s equality watchdog ‘colluding in denial of institutional racism’

    Exclusive: Former employee accuses Equality and Human Rights Commission of ‘racial gaslighting’ in letter sent to colleagues

    A former employee of Britain’s equality watchdog has accused it of failing to support the human rights of ethnic minorities and colluding in the denial of structural and institutional racism.

    In an email sent to colleagues just before she left the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the member of staff also accused the watchdog of “racial gaslighting”.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Labour fears Dominic Raab will target rights act in new justice post

    Justice secretary called this year for government to be more ambitious as it seeks to reform act

    Labour and senior legal figures have raised concerns that Dominic Raab was appointed as justice secretary in order to enact wholesale changes to the Human Rights Act.

    Labour has unearthed footage of the former foreign secretary saying he did not support the act, which he will now be expected to enforce or overhaul. In messages sent to ministers earlier this year, Raab urged the government to be more ambitious as it sought to reform human rights law and judicial reviews.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Medics urged to drop opposition to assisted dying before crucial vote

    Exclusive: more than 100 leading doctors call for British Medical Association to adopt neutral stance to law change

    Read the doctors’ letter here

    Medics are being urged to drop their opposition to assisted dying before a landmark vote on the issue by Britain’s biggest doctors’ union.

    As its members prepare to debate the issue at their annual representative meeting on Tuesday, the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents 150,000 doctors, is facing calls to adopt a neutral stance. It has opposed legalising assisted dying since 2006.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Six countries invited to arms fair are on Foreign Office human rights list

    Department for International Trade sent invitations even though nations are of ‘particular concern’

    Six nations listed by the Foreign Office as “human rights priority countries” have been invited by the British government to send delegations to Europe’s biggest arms fair, which begins in London’s Docklands on Tuesday.

    Among those invited is Saudi Arabia, to which the UK has allowed the export of £20bn of arms that could be used in the war in Yemen, a bloody seven-year conflict that the UN says has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Labour party pledges ethical core to Britain’s foreign policy

    Shadow international trade secretary Emily Thornberry will outline plans in a report published at the TUC annual congress

    The Labour party on Sunday pledged to end what it calls the Conservative government’s “corporate-centred approach” to trade and rebuild policy around protecting workers’ rights and interests both in the UK and abroad.

    In an echo of the late former foreign secretary Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” plan, Emily Thornberry, the shadow international trade secretary, outlines the new plans in a report published at a special session of the TUC’s annual congress.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.