Peace and Justice Post

A written statement submitted by the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organisation with general consultative status

ALRC, Feb 24, 2011

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) wishes to again bring the Human Rights Council’s attention to the widespread and endemic nature of the use of torture in Pakistan. The ALRC has raised this issue repeatedly with the HRC and the Commission on Human Rights before it, as well as the Special Procedures and the UPR process. International action concerning grave human rights abuses in Pakistan, including torture, forced disappearance and the like, remains elusive.

The recent situation in Egypt, in which violations of human rights perpetrated over prolonged periods have led to a historic popular uprising to overthrow the system of abuse, must bear lessons for the international community. No longer can the members of the Human Rights Council expect to continue with business as usual, trading in the rights of their citizens as expendable commodities to be haggled away for political gain as part of a diplomatic game in Geneva. As the battle to advance the enjoyment of human rights and democracy plays out on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, will the Human Rights Council find itself increasingly out of touch and isolated from a reality that demands progress and tangible change?

As the 2011 review of the Human Rights Council reaches its culmination, member-States must re-consider their misconstrued approaches that seek to limit the capacity of the international system to fulfil its role in upholding rights on the ground. The HRC must be able to go beyond the ritual expression of concern at flashpoint crises around the globe, which typically remain either too timid or go unheeded, and begin to tackle the fundamental components of the systems of human rights abuses that pervade the world. The fact that members of the HRC, such as Pakistan, can hold membership in the world’s apex rights body while endemic torture persists within their borders, shows how much progress is still required.

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Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, Feb 20, 2011

Last Friday the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank. The resolution didn’t question Israel’s legitimacy, didn’t declare that “Zionism is racism,” and didn’t call for a boycott or sanctions. It just said that the settlements were illegal and that Israel should stop building them, and called for a peaceful, two-state solution with “secure and recognized borders. The measure was backed by over 120 countries, and 14 members of the security council voted in favor. True to form, only the United States voted no.

There was no strategic justification for this foolish step, because the resolution was in fact consistent with the official policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson. All of those presidents has understood that the settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace, and each has tried (albeit with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm) to get Israel to stop building them.

Yet even now, with the peace process and the two-state solution flat-lining, the Obama administration couldn’t bring itself to vote for a U.N. resolution that reflected the U.S. government’s own position on settlements. The transparently lame explanation given by U.S. officials was that the security council isn’t the right forum to address this issue. Instead, they claimed that the settlements issue ought to be dealt with in direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and that the security council should have nothing to say on the issue.

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Gunfire in the suburbs – and fear, hunger and rumour in the capital Thousands race for last tickets out of a city sinking into anarchy

Robert Fisk, with the first dispatch from Libya’s war-torn capital, reports

AP: A fire burns in a street in the Libyan capital Tripoli in the early hours of yesterday morning 

Up to 15,000 men, women and children besieged Tripoli’s international airport last night, shouting and screaming for seats on the few airliners still prepared to fly to Muammar Gaddafi’s rump state, paying Libyan police bribe after bribe to reach the ticket desks in a rain-soaked mob of hungry, desperate families. Many were trampled as Libyan security men savagely beat those who pushed their way to the front.

Among them were Gaddafi’s fellow Arabs, thousands of them Egyptians, some of whom had been living at the airport for two days without food or sanitation. The place stank of faeces and urine and fear. Yet a 45-minute visit into the city for a new airline ticket to another destination is the only chance to see Gaddafi’s capital if you are a “dog” of the international press.

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The USA does not stand for international law, Washington does not follow an ethical foreign policy, the Obama administration’s pledge to produce change has to all intents and purposes been assimilated. In vetoing the UNSC resolution condemning the Israeli settlements, the USA takes the dark side in an act of crass stupidity by the State Department.

The United States of America does not stand for international law, Washington does not follow an ethical foreign policy, the Obama administration’s pledge to produce change has to all intents and purposes been assimilated by the Clinton/AIPAC axis. In vetoing the UNSC resolution condemning the Israeli settlements, the USA takes the dark side. A black day for the rule of law. And an act of crass stupidity by the State department.

Shortly after taking office, Barack Obama stated in Cairo: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements [colonies]. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements [colonies] to stop”.

On Friday, the United States of America vetoed the Arab-sponsored draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council condemning the Israeli settlements in the illegally-held West Bank, territory seized and held by Israel against international law in defiance of countless UN Resolutions.

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At least 15 people were killed today in a new flurry of US drone strikes against Pakistani tribal areas. The first strike killed seven people in South Waziristan, while a second strike killed another eight in North Waziristan.

The strikes were the first in nearly a month, an atypical lapse that has fueled reports that the detained CIA spy and US ‘consulate worker’ Raymond Davis, who police say was captured with GPS tracking devices on him, played a key role in the strikes.

As is always the case in such strikes, Pakistani officials immediately termed everyone slain in the strike a “suspect,” but provided no indications to suggest that any of the slain were “high value” targets, nor indeed any indication that they were militants at all, beyond the fact that missiles hit their homes.

Such strikes have killed over a thousand people in the last two years, but only a trivial number of them have ever been conclusively tied with militant factions, and the vast majority of them appear to have been simply innocent tribesmen.

Written by: Alan Hart, Eurasia Review

Never before has an American President’s fear of offending the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress been so exposed as it was by Obama’s decision to veto the Security Council resolution condemning continued, illegal Israeli settlement activities on the occupied West Bank and demanding that Israel “immediately and completely cease” all such activities. In a different America – an informed America – some might think, I do, that Obama should be impeached. The charge? TREASON.

After she had exercised the Obama administration’s first veto, the plea made by U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice for understanding of America’s position could not have been more absurd. “Our opposition to the resolution before this Council today should not be misunderstood to mean that we support settlement activity. On the contrary, we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.”

Palestine

So why the veto? Ambassador Rice said:

“The United States has been deeply committed to pursuing a comprehensive and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, In that context, we have been focused on taking steps that advance the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, rather than complicating it. That includes a commitment to work in good faith with all parties to underscore our opposition to continued settlements.”

What nonsense! If the Obama administration really wanted to underscore its stated opposition to Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem, there was no better or more effective way of doing so than voting for the resolution or abstaining. In either case the resolution would have passed and that would have opened the door to real global pressure on Israel if it continued to defy international law.

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2011 has already proven lie to the idea that the Arab world ever needed foreign help in order to achieve democracy; and now it could prove false the notion that the American administration and other Western governments ever cared about human rights or self determination. Unfortunately, this will be done through the massacring of hundreds if not thousands of innocent Libyans.

It has already become apparent that fear and apathy no longer cripple the Arab world, the volcano that is the Middle East of today is no longer dormant, and as it begins to erupt, those who foolishly continue to try and suppress it eventually burn or melt away.

For decades, the Arab world has settled for corrupt, ignorant, treacherous despots as their leaders. For a generation, and in some cases two, Arabs lived in constant fear of expressing dissent, a fear so crippling it deemed them useless, incompetent and ultimately irrelevant . But the region has now been revived by its youth who have shown in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya that they know no fear, that they would rather die standing than live on their knees.

But still, like with Egypt, the West fails to see the inevitability of freedom, America and Britain fail to understand that they can not continue to do business with dictators and still say they are “friends of the people”.

The European Union buys 79 per cent of Libya’s oil. American companies and expats have practically taken over parts of Libya in recent years as the “free world” began to flirt with Gaddafi in the most scandalous of relationships. How can Europe put pressure on the Libyan government (freezing personal assets of Gaddafi for example) to immediately stop the butchering of innocent civilians when 10 per cent of Europe’s oil originates in Libya?

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“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like a pressure cooker. People are boiling up inside. I’m not even afraid any more. Once I wouldn’t have spoken at all by phone. Now I don’t care. Now enough is enough.”

These are the words of a young woman in Libya — a student, a blogger and a member of the youth protest movement in Libya that is part of a growing uprising against the tyrannical 41-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Speaking to the Guardian by phone from her home on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city where the revolution in Libya began just six days ago, and where hundreds of protestors have been killed by Gaddafi’s security forces, she said, “I’ve seen violent movies and video games that are nothing compared to this. I can hear gunshots, helicopters circling overhead, then I hear the voices screaming. I can hear the screeching of four-by-fours in the street. No one has that type of car except his [Gaddafi’s] people. My brother went to get bread, he’s not back; we don’t know if he’ll get back. The family is up all night every night, keeping watch, no one can sleep.”

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In what appears to be as close to a consensus as the world community can ever hope to achieve, the United States reluctantly stood its ground on behalf of Israel and on February 18, 2011 vetoed a resolution on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that was supported by all 14 of the other members of the UN Security Council. The resolution was also sponsored by 130 member countries before being presented to the Council. In the face of such near unanimity the United States might have been expected to some respect for the views of every leading government in the world, including all of its closest European allies, to have had the good grace to at least abstain from the vote. Indeed, such an obstructive use of the veto builds a case for its elimination, or at least the placement of restrictions on its use. Why should an overwhelming majority of member countries be held hostage to the geopolitical whims of Washington, or in some other situation, an outlier member trying to shield itself or its ally from a Security Council decision enjoying overwhelming support? Of course, this American veto is not some idiosyncratic whim, but is an expression of the sorry pro-Israeli realities of domestic politics, suggesting that it is Israel that is the real holder of the veto in this situation, and the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Lobby are merely designated as the enforcers.

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A four day NATO offensive in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province has left at least 64 innocent civilians dead and several others wounded, according to both the provincial governor and the provincial police chief.

Gen. Ziayi, the police chief, said that of the slain, 15 were men, 20 women and 29 were children. The governor later confirmed the overall total but reported only 26 children, with 16 men and 22 women.

The public health director for Kunar says that eight civilians are still being treated for major injuries sustained in the offensive, including four children. He also said that officials have called on the Red Cross to investigate the attacks.

NATO has also promised an investigation, but insisted that they had video showing their ground troops killing “36 armed insurgents.” Since this was just one incident over the course of four days of offensives, it is unclear why they thought the existence of such a video would refute the claims of massive civilian deaths.