Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights First’

U.S. Lawmakers Try to Block New Abuse Photos

May 11, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, May 11 (IPS) – Civil libertarians are condemning a call by two influential U.S. senators for the White House to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees being abused by U.S. military personnel at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at other U.S. detention facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The plea to intervene to stop the expected May 28 release of the photos came in a letter to President Barack Obama from Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.

“The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform,” the Senators wrote.

Release of the photos is expected in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures,” the senators wrote.

Their letter said, “We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on al Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

As a result of the ensuing actions by Congress, “America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have made great progress in improving detention and interrogation procedures,” they wrote.

Senator Graham is a conservative Republican from South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee, and a military lawyer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat until he lost his party’s primary contest in 2006, after which he ran and won as an Independent from Connecticut. He is chairman of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee. The two senators were among the most ardent supporters of the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

Civil libertarians were virtually unanimous in their opposition to withholding the photographs.

Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, told IPS, “Sen. Lieberman and Graham’s claims might carry more weight had the U.S. government been consistently honest about the mistreatment it authorised.”

“But as long as the American people are kept in the dark about what crimes were committed in their name, they cannot intelligently exercise their democratic right and obligation to call for corrective measures,” he said.

Rona added, “To elevate fear of al Qaeda’s reactions over faith in our democratic ideals and structures is unfortunate and counterproductive.”

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “The more evidence that emerges to document the Bush policy of torture and abuse, the more likely that investigations and prosecutions will take place.”

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School told IPS, “The release of these photos will further document torture, abuse and other war crimes inflicted by U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the orders for which go all the way up the military chain of command to the Commander in Chief President Bush, the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, none of whom has yet been held accountable.”

He said, “Senators Lieberman and Graham are simply running interference for all three of them. Yet under the terms of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Convention against Torture, the Obama administration has an obligation to open an investigation and to prosecute them. Failure to do so is a war crime in its own right.”

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said attorney Amrit Singh of the ACLU, the organisation that originally brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorising or permitting such abuse,” she said.

Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, now retired, served as the V Corps commander of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When he retired in November 2006, he called his career a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The disagreement over release of the photos reflects conflicting assessments of which is more dangerous and objectionable – the release of the photographs or the abusive behaviour that they depict.

It also turns on unresolved questions concerning the scale of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel, and the nature of the public accounting that can or should be required.

The original Abu Ghraib photos were first exposed to the public in a 2006 segment of the television program, “Sixty Minutes,” and shortly thereafter in an extensive article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine.

The images showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, with electrodes attached to their bodies, being menaced by dogs, forced to walk with dog collars around their necks, and made to form pyramids of naked bodies. Existence of the images was first reported by a low-level U.S. Army soldier.

The military conducted more than a dozen investigations of the abusive practices, which then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attributed to the aberrations of “a few bad apples.” A number of low-level soldiers were convicted and sentenced to terms in military prisons, a few others were given official reprimands, and the brigadier general who was in charge of the prison was demoted to colonel.

The Defence Department investigations concluded that no one higher up in the military or civilian leadership of the Pentagon bore any responsibility for the abuses.

While the contents of the new photos have not been made public, it is known that members of Congress viewed them in a classified setting when the original Abu Ghraib images were released. Some have said publicly that the new photos paint an even grimmer picture of prisoner abuse, not only at Abu Ghraib but also at other U.S.-controlled prisons in the Middle East.

It is unclear whether the new crop of photos includes those taken by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, he had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves.

Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts, and guards posing with decaying corpses.

The original Abu Ghraib photos were broadcast around the world long before it became known that U.S. authorities, including the Central Intelligence Agency, were using waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the Navy detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan, and at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

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U.S.: Calls Mount for Obama to Appoint “Truth Commission”

February 20, 2009

By Jim Lobe* | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (IPS) – Eighteen U.S. human rights groups Thursday joined a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a retired top diplomat in calling on President Barack Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission of leading citizens to examine and report on the treatment of detainees held by the United States during President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”

In a joint statement, the groups, which included Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights First (HRF), said members of such a commission “should be persons of irreproachable integrity, credibility, and independence” with “reputation for putting the truth and the respect for our nation’s founding principles ahead of any partisan advantage.”

Such a commission should also report on the consequences of alleged abuses committed by U.S. officials against detainees and “make recommendations for future policy in this area,” according to the statement, which was also signed by ret. Maj. General Antonio Taguba, the senior military officer whose 2004 report and subsequent Congressional testimony on abuses committed by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq drew headlines and outrage around the world.

The statement comes amid a growing public clamour, particularly from Obama’s Democratic base, for some forum that will determine responsibility for some of the more notorious abuses sanctioned or committed by U.S. official personnel during Bush’s war on terror and help inform the detention and interrogation policies of the new administration.

“The abuses carried out over the past eight years have not only undermined America’s moral authority, but also jeopardised its national security,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counter-terrorism counsel at HRW. “We need to understand exactly what happened in order to protect our fundamental freedoms and keep the country safe.”

To date, Obama and his top officials, including his attorney general, Eric Holder, have been ambiguous about their views on the question. Obama has said he believes that “nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.”

Democratic lawmakers, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, have made a number of suggestions, including creating a “truth commission” that could summon witnesses, including high-ranking Bush administration officials who authorised interrogation techniques that rights groups consider to be torture, and make recommendations, but could not bring criminal charges.

The plan appears, at least in theory, to enjoy not insubstantial public support. A Gallup poll conducted late last month found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favoured some form of investigation into alleged administration abuses, including the torture of detainees. While a quarter of respondents said they favoured investigations without criminal charges, almost 40 percent indicated support for criminal prosecutions if the investigations found evidence that laws had been violated.

“There’s a growing sense both in Washington and the country at large that people don’t want these abuses swept under the carpet,” said Tom Parker, policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights for Amnesty International USA, one of the statement’s signatories. “They want to know what’s been done in their name; and, if they don’t approve of what was done in their name, they want to see people held accountable.”

Republicans, however, appear united in strongly opposing the creation of any independent forum, least of all one that could result in criminal prosecutions.

They have argued that Congress has already held a number of hearings on detainee abuse and that appointing an independent commission would amount to a “political vendetta” that would not only make bipartisanship more difficult but could also set a damaging precedent.

“If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” warned Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who had himself frequently complained about the Bush administration’s denial of habeas corpus and authorisation of aggressive interrogation techniques for detainees, last month. “This is not Latin America,” he added.

But rights groups have long claimed that Congress’s hearings that have looked into the alleged abuses have been far too limited in their scope and have provided only a partial picture of how specific policies authorising the alleged abuses were derived and implemented. Moreover, the hearings were mostly conducted in a highly politicised context.

The signatories of the new statement stressed that the president should solicit recommendations from both parties’ Congressional leaders before choosing members of the commission.

Among the kinds of members who should be considered, according to the statement, are “leading academics, retired judges and government officials, retired military officers and intelligence officials, and human rights experts.”

“We need people of the stature of John McCain or John Kerry who have knowledge of military service, people with a great deal of experience with the intelligence community,” said Parker. “It isn’t just about morality; it’s about the right policy, whether these kinds of methods worked. We don’t think they do,” he added.

In addition to Taguba, who last year accused the Bush administration of having committed war crimes in its treatment of detainees, individual signatories of the statement included ret. U.S. Amb. Thomas Pickering, who served as Washington’s envoy to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush and is among the highest-ranking and most-decorated diplomats of his generation; and Judge Williams Sessions, who served as FBI director under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Also signing was Juan Mendez, president of the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice and former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organisation of American States. Mendez, an Argentine native who gained asylum in the United States, has advised truth commissions that were established in Latin America and elsewhere around the world to investigate abuses committed by military and other authoritarian governments.

In addition to HRW, HRF, and AIUSA, other institutional signatories included the National Institute of Military Justice, the Centre for Victims of Torture, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Open Society Institute, and Physicians for Human Rights, among others.

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) also called this week for the Obama administration to conduct an investigation into abuses against terrorism suspects.

“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years,” former Irish President Mary Robinson told reporters. “Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats.”

Robinson was one of several members of an ICJ panel that looked into abuses committed during the war on terror. The panel also included Stella Rimington, the former head of Britain’s MI5.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

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RIGHTS: Politics Still Reign Over Principles at U.N.

December 11, 2008

By Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 (IPS) – The United Nations Wednesday commemorated the 60th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) against the backdrop of widespread political repression — most notably in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma (Myanmar), Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Israeli-occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza.

But a sharply divided Security Council has remained politically impotent against continued atrocities worldwide, in violation of humanitarian law and international conventions, including the UDHR.

Andrew Hudson, a senior associate with the Human Rights Defenders Programme at Human Rights First, singled out U.N. member states, primarily Security Council members, “who have frequently failed to prevent or address gross violations of the UDHR.”

The United Nations, he said, should redouble its efforts to demonstrate that the human rights contained in the UDHR are universal and allow for translation into specific local contexts.

“The new Universal Periodic Review mechanism at the Human Rights Council demonstrates that the UDHR applies universally to all states,” he stressed.

The U.N. human rights system should engage in objective, impartial and universal evaluation of the human rights records of all states, Hudson told IPS.

More recently, at a political level, the Security Council has remained deadlocked because of the partisan role of the five veto-wielding permanent members.

The United States, France and Britain have continued to protect Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan while Russia and China continue to shield Zimbabwe, Sudan and Burma (Myanmar) against any strictures or sanctions for human rights violations.

Article 1 of the UDHR, which was adopted by the General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

But in reality human rights abuses are increasingly becoming the norm in most developing nations. And in developed countries, including the United States and Britain, violations are being justified in the name of fighting terrorism.

Speaking at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the UDHR on Wednesday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: “We see human trafficking, the exploitation of children, and a host of other ills plaguing millions of people,” he added.

The “host of other ills”, according to human rights organisations, includes torture, disappearances, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, surveillance, defamation and administrative and judicial harassment. The victims also include journalists and human rights defenders.

Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters that tens of millions of people around the world are still unaware that they have rights that they can demand, and that their governments are accountable to them, to a wide-ranging body of rights-based national and international law.

“Despite all our efforts over the past 60 years, this anniversary will pass many people by, and it is essential that we keep up the momentum, thereby enabling more and more people to stand up and claim their rights,” she added.

Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute, pointed out the failure of nation states and governments in fulfilling their obligation to ensure human rights for all.

For instance, she said, in the United States, where homelessness, hunger and poverty — particularly among children and seniors — abound, it is the failure of the government to fulfill its obligation to its people.

“The United Nations could have done more in terms of emphasising the relevance of human rights treaties, insisting on these treaties taking precedence over, say, trade agreements or other social economic policies that might conflict with human rights of people,” Mittal told IPS.

Asked where the United Nations has succeeded or failed in helping implement the UDHR, Julie Gromellon of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) told IPS the objective of the founders of the U.N. to add a human dimension to international law through the UDHR has become a reality.

She said international law, and especially the UDHR, has become an important tool to promote respect for and observance of human rights.

The Universal Declaration has also served as a starting point for further standard-setting activities through eight core human rights conventions, whose implementation is monitored by so-called treaty bodies, a more advanced system of supervision.

In this framework, the United Nations has contributed to the recognition of the accountability of all states for compliance with their human rights obligations as laid down in the UDHR, she added.

But important lacunae need to be filled to implement the UDHR. States should be continuously urged by the U.N. to ratify all relevant international human rights treaties and to accept and implement the supervisory procedures.

In particular, they should be urged to ratify the relevant individual complaint procedures, Gromellon added.

She also said the crucial role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) should be recognised by the U.N. “They have contributed in a most significant way to the development and enforcement of the international human rights system,” she noted.

And such organisations should also be given a consultative status with other organisations, including the international financial institutions and the World Trade Organisation.

Rob Wheeler of the World Alliance for Transforming the U.N. said the United Nations, in failing to ensure that all people’s rights are met, is actually violating several articles of its own founding Charter.

“We thus urge the United Nations to organise and hold a U.N. Charter Review Conference, under Article 109 of the Charter, in order to determine what can and must be done to ensure that the charter is upheld and that all people’s most basic human rights are indeed provided and met,” he said.

Unfortunately, he said, most of the provisions included in the Universal Declaration have still not been met even after 60 years — 830 million people still do not have enough food to eat, 1.1 billion lack access to clean water, 2.6 billion to basic sanitation, and 2.0 billion to essential drugs.

Hudson of Human Rights First said that the United Nations, especially the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has played a critical role in education, outreach and awareness-raising about the universality of the UDHR.

“However, U.N. member states fail to implement aspects of the UDHR by suggesting that human rights do not acknowledge cultural difference — a specious argument used to avoid human rights scrutiny,” Hudson told IPS.

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