Amnesty (UK) and pre-occupation with Chinese prisoners
Note: On 12 June 05, a letter was sent to Director Kate Allen of Amnesty (UK) with copy to ND Forum. Below is an extended version.
1. For the second time within a few months, many British householders have received an information pack about Chinese persons unlawfully held in detention. The latest one concerns one Zheng Enchong, a community helper, "a kind and principled family man locked up in a brutal Shanghai prison". We are urged to sign up a standard letter addressed to the Chinese Minister of Justice, asking for Enchong's release.
2. This is indeed a cause worthy of support. AI obviously considered this case important enough to warrant the despatch of the action pack to hundreds or thousands of people.
But there are other deserving cases and one wonders how AI decides priorities. I would have thought that Amnesty would start with individual cases nearer home, especially those detainees languishing under British anti-terror laws. The Guardian (12Dec03) recalled that "14 people have being detained as suspected international terrorists at high security jails. Six of these will have been in detention for 2 years on 19 Dec 03."
3. In the AI International Report (May2003), Secretary General Irene Khan had written:
"We call on governments to protect people in accordance with the law. However, Governments are not entitled to respond to terror with terror. They are obliged at all times to act within the framework of international human rights and humanitarian law."
The UK has arguably among the scariest anti-terror measures in place and Amnesty (UK) did admit that the Home Office had created a "Guantanamo Bay in our own backyard". AI Director Kate Allen rightly noted the anti-terror act "effectively allows non-nationals to be treated as if they have been charged with a criminal offence, convicted without a trial and sentenced to an open-ended term of imprisonment".
4. Children of Asylum seekers also detained
BBC online (14 March 03) posted an item headed 'Bishops condemn asylum disgrace'
"The Catholic Church in Scotland is to mount a national campaign against the detention of asylum seekers' children. Bishops said it was "a disgrace" that children were being held in prison-like conditions at the Dungavel Detention Centre (opened in Sept 01). They want Home Secretary David Blunkett to end the practice and find more humane ways of dealing with families. However, the government stressed that the detention of children was a "last resort". Dungavel was opened as a detention centre for asylum seekers in September 2001.It is thought that about a quarter of the 80 people currently detained at the facility near Strathaven, in Lanarkshire, are children. They include Beriwan Ay, a 14-year-old Kurd from northern Iraq. She has been there since last summer, along with her 11-year-old brother Dilovan and sisters Nevrooz, 12, and Medya, seven. The family lived in Kent for four years before being transferred to Dungavel.
She told BBC Scotland that her mother and her siblings cried almost every day. "We ask my mother what is going to happen to us but she says she doesn't know," said Beriwan. "We can't do anything. It is just like a prison." Bishop John Mone, the president of the Catholic Church's Justice and Peace Commission, recently visited the centre. "I feel it is a disgrace that young children from perhaps the age of five to 14 are held in a prison environment and are deprived of many of the rights that are enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights."
-----------------------------------------------------5. Query 1
6. What they say
Why doesn't Amnesty send packs to British households to sign up a standard letter addressed to the Home Secretary demanding that specific suspects detained in the UK are brought up for trial or else released?
Why is this approach restricted to prisoners outside the UK, creating the false impression that UK does not have such prisoners?
Query 2
a) In June 05, the pack AI recently sent to the general public reminded British citizens:
"Unlike Chinese citizens, we are free to express our opinions."
Express opinions to whom?
Which authority or institution will listen to the common man? Will a letter to a minister on justice, equality, war, etc yield an honest response without the spin?
Most British papers are rightwing anyway and will summarily reject anti-establishment views outright.
The tabloids can rant & rave against the weakest (asylum seekers etc) and nobody can stop them. The Home Office does not correct their views or figures. Whom do victims go for redress?
b) In June 2003, the AI advertised for new members in some papers with the heading 'What is your excuse?'
The following message also appeared:
In this country (meaning UK), you face no danger whatsoever. Here you are free to show you care about human rights. You are free to join AI - the world's largest human rights org.'
How safe and secure are Muslims & asylum seekers & minorities?
What is their experience of street and institutional racism? What is the police record on race attacks & murders? Suspected terrorists are picked in the early hours of the morning and detained in unknown places with no charges made and no access to lawyers.
George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian (03 Aug 04):
"The Terrorism Act 2000 was so loosely drafted that it could be deployed against almost anyone seeking political change, the government told us we were being hysterical. Since then, peaceful protesters all over Britain have been arrested as potential terrorists. At the Fairford air base, for example, the police used the act to terrorise the peace campaigners protesting against the Iraq war. The protesters were repeatedly stopped and searched: often one team of police would let someone go after a full body search, and another one would immediately seize her and repeat the whole procedure (this happened to one protester 11 times in one day). On March 22 last year, the police seized three coaches carrying people to a peaceful demonstration at Fairford, held them for two hours, confiscated their possessions, then sealed off the entire motorway network between Gloucestershire and London, and escorted them back to the capital."
Human Rights lawyer Gareth Peirce commented on the new Terror Bill (March 05)
"This is the worst, most frightening piece of legislation that I have ever seen in this country. It is a complete entrenchment of a totalitarian state."There is a mad stampede to put this legislation through, the most important challenge to our unwritten constitution we have seen. This is peacetime, but we are getting the worst of wartime legislation.
"They are taking [our rights] away on the pretence that there is an emergency. It is all rubbish, smoke and mirrors, lies. Laws like this are the real threat to the nation, not terrorism. The life of potentially every single person living in this country is at risk, at the whim of the executive. "
Sure China can be repressive. But is AI telling us the whole truth about Britain? Are certain groups safe and secure enough?
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7. UK & US response to AI criticism
While western governments are happy to denounce the violation of human rights in other countries, it resents criticism made a few brave NGOs against its own violations. Below are the reactions of UK and the US to AI criticism.UK response to critical AI Report 2003
On 11 Dec 03, AI issued its report headed: UK: Justice Perverted under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001
Instead of accepting the criticism, Home Secretary David Blunkett threatens to resign his membership.
He retorted: "It's a very sad day for Amnesty International and a very sad day for me as a patron. I didn't join Amnesty in order to see them support those who, through every part of the system that we have set up, have been accorded and recognised as being correctly certificated as being a threat to us."
Asked if he was going to resign his membership of AI, he said: "I'm weighing this up - I'm a great believer in positive engagement." An Amnesty spokesman said: "We hope he will not conclude that it is incompatible to be home secretary and a member of an organisation that champions human rights, fair trials and international standards of justice."US response to critical AI Report 2005
CounterPunch reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had this to say (May 30 CNN interview)"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously. Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world ..."
President George W. Bush reacted at a press conference (May 31)
"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world [We have] investigated every single complaint against the detainees It seemed like [Amnesty International] based some of their decisions on the word and allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic] that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is."William Schultz, head of Amnesty's U.S. section noted that "this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam." Indeed U.S. administrations routinely reference AI reports when they want to attack some foreign foe. So the Cheney-friendly Wall Street Journal lashes out at the "moral degradation" of Amnesty International, debased so low as to compare the U.S.'s global network of detention centers including those in allied countries that routinely employ torture, with a "gulag." Neocons David Rivkin and Lee Casey condemn AI's "extravagant and unfounded claims" in the National Review without attempting to refute any particular claim. "Groups like Amnesty persistently state that American policy at Guantanamo Bay is illegal," they declare, "even though this is simply not true." [As Chomsky has pointed out, the state & media officials can only rant and condemn, but cannot refute charges made on state terror.]
According to the editor of the Progressive magazine Matthew Rothschild, the politically moderate Executive Director of Amnesty USA, William Schulz, is now essentially calling for other countries to indict and try our leaders.
As Rothschild summed it up, Schulz called
"on officials in other countries to apprehend Bush and Rumsfeld and other high-ranking members of the administration who have played a part in the torture scandal. Foreign governments should ‘uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment...'References
CounterPunch 03 June 05
Tom Dispatch 31 May 05