Peace and Justice Post

The Asian Human Rights Commission which has documented over 1500 cases of torture and ill treatment by the Sri Lankan police has now compiled a report of 323 cases. In this presentation Mr. Basil Fernando, the Director of Policy and Programmes explains the causes of police torture in Sri Lanka and the consequences of having a policing system that has lost its internal control structure. Fernando also explains how the CAT Act, Act No 22 of 1994 is no longer being implemented in the country and how there is no credible complaint mechanism or witness protection law available to the citizens. The overall consequence of losing a law-based policing system is the creation of extra-legal measures to control crime. These extra-legal measures include torture, and extra-judicial killings. “Wide spread torture is only a symptom of the much larger problem of lawlessness created by the operation of 1978 constitution”, tells Fernando.

This video is available at: http://blip.tv/asian-human-rights-commission/a-report-on-323-cases-of-police-torture-in-sri-lanka-5280908

By Harvey Thompson , wsws.org, 17 June 2011

The upsurge of industrial struggle by Egyptian workers that preceded the January revolution shows no sign of diminishing.

Workers are now in a mounting conflict with the post-Mubarak military regime in Cairo.

With workers pressing their demands on pay, conditions and official corruption―demands that accompanied the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak and remain unmet―the military regime is employing ever more repressive measures.

On June 8, the government confirmed that the law it approved in April criminalising protests, strikes, public gatherings and street assemblies, is now to be enforced.

Al Masry Al-Youm notes, “The law stipulates that protesters or strikers disrupting work at state institutions, public authorities, and public or private institutions will be arrested, fined and/or imprisoned, with fines ranging from LE30,000 to LE500,000 (from US$5,000 to US$83,000), and prison sentences of one year or more. Even those promoting strikes or protests but not participating in them are subject to imprisonment and fines reaching up to LE50,000 (around US$8,300)”.

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by Sheldon Richman, fff.org, June 17, 2011

President Obama demonstrates his utter contempt for the American people — and the law — when he says the War Powers Resolution does not apply to his intervention in Libya because, as the White House put it, “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

Apparently bombing military forces and government facilities while taking sides in a foreign country’s civil war no longer constitutes participation in hostilities. Obama apparently read Orwell’s 1984 … and learned the wrong lesson.

Thus the president thumbs his nose at a lawsuit filed by several members of Congress aimed at forcing him to comply with the law.

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Just as in past periods of rising struggle, the democratic social and anti-imperialist movement in Egypt is up against a powerful reactionary bloc. This bloc can perhaps be identified in terms of its social composition (its component classes, of course) but it is just as important to define it in terms of its means of political intervention and the ideological discourse serving its politics.

In social terms, the reactionary bloc is led by the Egyptian bourgeoisie taken as a whole. The forms of dependent accumulation operative over the past forty years brought about the rise of a rich bourgeoisie, the sole beneficiary of the scandalous inequality accompanying that “globalized liberal” model. It is a class of some tens of thousands — not of “innovating entrepreneurs” as the World Bank likes to call them but of millionaires and billionaires all owing their fortunes to collusion with the political apparatus (corruption being an organic part of their system). This is a comprador bourgeoisie (in the political language current in Egypt the people term them “corrupt parasites”). They make up the active support for the integration of Egypt in contemporary imperialist globalization as an unconditional ally of the United States. . . .

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by Jacob G. Hornberger, fff.org, June 14, 2011

Sometimes it’s good to look at foreign dictatorships to see what the president and the U.S. military have done to our country. Consider, for example, the trial of 20 doctors that is currently taking place in Bahrain.

As most everyone knows, Bahrain is ruled by a brutal dictatorship, just as many other countries in the Middle East are. Bahrain is also besieged by anti-government demonstrations, just as other countries in the Middle East are. Like other dictatorships in the Middle East, Bahrain’s dictatorial regime is using brute force to suppress the protests.

What distinguishes the Bahrain dictatorship from, say, the Libyan or Syrian dictatorships, is that the U.S. government supports the dictatorship in Bahrain while opposing the Libyan and Syrian dictatorships. Thus, not only does U.S. foreign aid flow into the Bahrain dictatorship, the U.S. military also has a major base there.

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By Ramzy Baroud, Foreign Policy Journal, June 17, 2011

For most Palestinians, leaving Gaza through Egypt is as exasperating a process as entering it. Governed by political and cultural sensitivities, most Palestinian officials and public figures refrain from criticizing the way Palestinians are treated at the Rafah border. However, there is really no diplomatic language to describe the relationship between desperate Palestinians—some literally fighting for their lives—and Egyptian officials at the crossing which separates Gaza from Egypt.

“Gazans are treated like animals at the border,” a friend of mine told me. She was afraid that her fiancé would not be allowed to leave Gaza, despite the fact that his papers were in order. Having crossed the border myself just a few days ago, I could not disagree with her statement.

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By Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia-Pacific Director, Amnesty International, June 15, 2011

Far from the lenses of television cameras and the print of news headlines that typify war reporting today, tens of thousands of civilians – perhaps as many as 40,000 – were killed in the last terrible phase of fighting of Sri Lanka’s civil war between the brutal Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government.

No reporters were allowed near the war zone, blocked by the Sri Lankan Government in an attempt to hide the death and destruction from the world.

But in this era of mobile phones and digital technology, hiding the truth is difficult.

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Richard Falk, The Palestine Chronicle, June 15, 2011

Israel aims to force Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to leave the enclave through a strategy of pressuring them and making their living conditions hard, says a UN special rapporteur.

“One of the tactics I think is to demoralize the Palestinians to an extent that at least a large number of them will seek to leave,” Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told Press TV in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

“And … I think it is also a way of keeping the situation under a permanent form of control that eliminates any possibility of real political challenge from the Palestinians,” Falk went on to say.

The UN’s special rapporteur made the remarks after the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees announced that Israel has “deliberately” impoverished Palestinians in the Gaza Strip through its strict siege on the enclave.

On Tuesday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said Gaza was beset with a 45.2 percent unemployment rate in late 2010 — an increase from the jobless figure of the first half of the year.

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By Stephen Soldz, ZNet, June 16, 2011

Those of us who opposed the Bush administration torture program have been demoralized by the lack of accountability for the numerous abuses committed as part of that program. President Obama decried torture, and said he would end it, but he also said he wanted to “look forward, not back,” apparently precluding investigations of the abuses committed by the previous administration.

The Obama administration has not merely refused to initiate criminal investigations of those who approved and ordered the Bush-Cheney torture program. They have declined even to support a Commission of Inquiry to explore what happened in a non-judicial forum. Further, the administration used every legal tool available – including spurious arguments about national security in US courts and diplomatic pressure on foreign governments – to stymie efforts at accountability through ethics complaints, domestic civil trials, and foreign criminal cases for the crimes committed by predecessors.

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According to local sources, Israeli forces attacked a non-violent action by Palestinian men, women and children trying to block Israeli bulldozers from bulldozing their farmland and orchards on Wednesday.

Israeli troops fire tear gas at anti-Wall protest (archive photo)

Eyewitnesses reported that the injured protesters were beaten by the soldiers with clubs and rifle butts, knocking two young men unconscious and sending seven to the hospital for treatment. The injured were not identified, but local sources report that they all appeared to be young men in their late teens and early 20s.

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