mcgillianaire | Entries tagged with human rights

Tuition fees are making law conversion courses less attractive by Alex Alridge | The Guardian [18 August 2011]
From a selfish perspective this is good news because I could do with less competition in the race to securing a training contract, but generally speaking it would be a sad state of affairs if it were at all true.

It is David Cameron who is 'twisting and misrepresenting' human rights by Benjamin Ward | The Guardian [17 August 2011]
The UK already has a British Bill of Rights. It's called the Human Rights Act. Like seriously, end of.

Who are the real looters – rioters or MPs? by John Harris | The Guardian [18 August 2011]
I made a similar argument a few days ago. The author provides better examples and finishes it off with a fantastic suggestion from a letter to the editor. Worth a read for that alone.

India's Selective Rage Over Corruption by Manu Joseph | The New York Times [18 August 2011]
The odd thing about corruption in India is that everybody takes part in it (not always by choice) yet there is no dearth of moral posturing from its worst offenders. For many, some forms of corruption are worse than others.

Kaushik Basu Says Make Bribe Giving Legal (in India) by Subhadip Sircar | The Wall Street Journal [30 March 2011]
A fascinating proposal from the government's chief economic advisor. At present the law punishes the bribe giver and bribe taker, but he argues that for "harassment bribes", only the bribe taker should be punished.

late 15c. (implied in torturous), from M.Fr. torture "infliction of great pain, great pain, agony," from L.L. torture "a twisting, writhing, torture, torment," from stem of Latin torquere "to twist, turn, wind, wring, distort" (see thwart). The verb is 1580s, from the noun. Related: Tortured; torturing. [via Online Etymology Dictionary]

Current Music: Charlie Winston - Like A Hobo (Hobo)

The British government has (grudgingly) decided/been forced to end a 140 year-old ban on voting rights for prisoners, following a 2004 decision by the European Court of Human Rights which ruled that the blanket ban was discriminatory and breached the European Convention on Human Rights. Under the Forfeiture Act 1870, prisoners sentenced for felonies were denied the right to vote and this ban was retained in the Representation of the People Act 1983. Prisoners on remand, fine defaulters and those imprisoned for contempt of court can still vote. In addition, the Court allowed individual governments to decide which offences should carry restrictions on voting rights.

For several months, the government's lawyers tried to find a way to avoid enfranchising a potential 70,000 British inmates. But after exhausting every potential avenue the government realised lifting the ban was the only viable option, else taxpayers faced paying huge sums (upto £50 million possibly) in compensation from prisoner claims, and potential legal action from the EU. Most other European nations allow some prisoners voting rights. And despite two separate public consultations, the previous Labour government failed to implement any changes. The news has polarised the country with Tory and Labour supporters upset, though many acknowledge the government had no choice, while many Lib Dems are happy because they campaigned for the law to change. I too wanted the change. But what do you think?

[Poll #1639898]

WORLD:
1. Foul play: how al-Jazeera's live World Cup football coverage got in a jam [29 Sep]
2. How evil is Facebook? | Film Preview of The Social Network [29 Sep]
3. It's right to boycott the Commonwealth Games [28 Sep]
4. Indian papers pioneer talking adverts [28 Sep]
5. TripAdvisor could face legal action over reviews [24 Sep]
6. Compared to a lootfest like London or Beijing, Delhi is just an also-ran [23 Sep]
7. Let's put a stop to this cliche – "right now" | Mind Your Language column [22 Sep]

UK:
1. Thieves on the line: copper raids on railways hit record levels [28 Sep]
2. Barclays launches prisoner bank accounts scheme [28 Sep]
3. UK transport mapped: Every bus stop, train station, ferry port & taxi rank in Britain. The ultimate transport data. [27 Sep]
4. Human rights lawyers condemn English tests for spouses coming to UK [27 Sep]
5. Legal aid: Who qualifies and how much help can you get? [25 Sep]
6. Reviewed – the CycleStreets navigation iPhone app [24 Sep]
7. 1.5% of Britons say they are gay or bisexual, ONS survey finds [23 Sep]

And what's more, after doing his undergrad at Alberta he studied law at McGill. Now he teaches human rights law in London. Sound.

It is exactly 63 years since the Raj ended and exactly 23 years since my family set foot in Muscat for the first time. Fittingly perhaps I have chosen today to return to the land of my birth. And to mark the former occasion, something different, naturally from The Guardian:

"India's racist visa rule is an irrational response to the tragic attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 [...] Under UK, European and international human rights law, suspicion of potential to commit a crime must be based on an individual's own conduct, not on their racial or ethnic origin. India should apply the same security check to all British citizens applying for visas. If the check reveals no cause for concern, the visa should be issued. Being born in Pakistan, or the child of a person born in Pakistan, is not a crime, nor evidence of predisposition to commit terrorist acts in India."Robert Wintemute is Professor of Human Rights Law at King's College. 171 comments and counting. No surprise there, really! Jai Hind?

"This judgement should be celebrated as a victory for progressive thought; but it is nothing more than justice being done." [LINK]

Until yesterday, gay asylum-seekers could be deported under a controversial Home Office policy, even if they faced persecution in their home country. But in a unanimous ruling that mirrors a 2002 decision by the High Court of Australia, five of the country's senior-most judges have upheld the right of gay refugees to live in Britain, if they can establish that they faced persecution in their home countries.

The case of the two unnamed men (one from Cameroon and the other from Iran) was heard by the Supreme Court after their applications had been rejected on the basis that they could choose to keep their sexual orientation a secret upon deportation. However Lord Hope, deputy president of the court, who headed the panel of five justices said that to compel a homosexual to pretend that their sexuality does not exist or can be suppressed was to deny him his fundamental right to be who he is. Lord Rodger added that the normal behaviour of gay people must be protected as it was for heterosexual people, while Lord Walker noted that "the notion a gay man could (and so, some might say, should) avoid trouble by adopting a "discreet" lifestyle (or leading an entirely celibate life) is not limited to the context of asylum law. It is the way in which hundreds of thousands of gay men lived in England before the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act 1967."

The Home Office's 'reasonable tolerability' test (that was also used by the Court of Appeal) has been rejected in favour of a new three/four-stage test, in which asylum tribunals must first ask if the appellant is gay or would be treated as someone who is gay by potential persecutors in his/her home country. Second, is there evidence that someone who lived an openly gay life would be at risk of persecution in that country? Third, how would the appellant actually live if returned? If they would live openly then clearly they are not a refugee. But if they would live discreetly, a fourth question must be asked: why will they exercise discretion? The justices offered a distinction between discretion on grounds of persecution and discrimination. If for example an appellant simply wanted to avoid social pressures or family shame, the asylum tribunal would have to reject the application. Persecution means more serious harm, for example: prison, rape, torture or death.

There was also an interesting reference to pop culture by Lord Rodger who said: "To illustrate the point with trivial stereotypical examples from British society: just as male heterosexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates." And you thought senior judges were cricket-loving, wig-wearing, out-of-touch, senile old farts.

Well done Supreme Court for correcting a series of wrongs. It's decisions like these that reaffirm one's confidence in our legal system.

This article by Soumitro Das (a Kolkata-based writer) is taken from the Hindustan Times, an Indian English-language daily newspaper:

Exactly 21 years ago today, on February 19, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of what he proclaimed to be a blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses. While this act instantly galvanised — and radicalised — the protests from Muslim communities in various quarters against Rushdie, it was in India that The Satanic Verses was first banned in end-October 1988 by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government, months after the novel was first published. For all purposes, the ban on Rushdie’s novel marked the beginning of the State gagging artistic freedom in India under the guise of ‘protecting the sentiments’ of various groups.

We are a very sentimental people. The abolition of sati in the 19th century, for instance, hurt Hindu sentiments. But that did not make the abolition less necessary. It was down to Hindu reformers supported by the British administration who finally overturned the tyranny of tradition.

Offensiveness comes in two categories: involuntary and voluntary. M.F. Husain’s depiction of Hindu deities in the nude is an example of offence given involuntarily. Husain’s nudes are not pornographic. The Nude is a particular genre of painting that has been rendered famous in art. The aim is to celebrate the human form and not to titillate. The intention is not erotic and Husain is not undressing women. Besides, in painting goddesses in the nude, Husain is divesting them of human accoutrements and enhancing their divine quality. (Why on earth should goddesses dress in saris anyway?)

But what about voluntary offensiveness, where the artist goes out of his way to provoke if not cause offence? Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses falls into this category.

The modern novel has arrogated to itself the right to offend. Its source lies in the literary revolution that swept through France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Mallarme and Apollinaire took literature out of the salons and into the streets and the bordellos of Paris. They attacked bourgeois culture and repudiated all bourgeois forms of success: fame, wealth, power, etc.

Every individual surrenders a part of his freedom and his self when he acknowledges any form of social or political authority in order to enjoy the security and the other benefits that society bestows upon him. The literary revolutionaries mentioned above reneged on this social contract and reclaimed for themselves the freedom and the selfhood that had been sacrificed on their behalf by their mentors.

They all suffered from a condition that, after Nietzsche and Freud, could be called 'unheimlichkeit', or homelessness. Homelessness was the price they had to pay for attacking family, country and religion. This is borne out literally in the case of Rushdie and also Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. Rushdie, after the fatwa, had to literally hop from safe house to safe house for 10 years, without being able to call any place his home. Nasreen, on her part, was hounded out of 'India’s cultural capital' (sic) Calcutta by Muslim hoodlums and is now flitting from country to country, returning occasionally to India to renew her visa, but without being able to return to her 'home'.

More than a political condition, 'unheimlichkeit' refers to a psychological state where it is not possible to obey any authority but that of one’s own self. Art, revolutionary art, is the highest value, the highest expression of what Nietzsche calls "the will to power". The worship of beauty for its own sake is much more demanding than the worship of God. It is from this point of superiority that Art is able to mock at, insult or humiliate religious faith.

India is, of course, a poor country and all such things are incomprehensible here, where politics is the highest expression of 'the will to power'. The poor look towards the State for succour and the State does or does not do them justice. This is a black and white world, a world of Manichaean extremes. While Truth, to which Art is intimately linked, is full of ambiguity and ambivalence, and is, as Nietzsche puts it so finely, "beyond good and evil".

It's a victory for civil liberties but it's a sad indictment of the state of affairs in this country, that but-for the intervention of the Strasbourg court, we would certainly be living in an elected dictatorship. Stop-and-search powers, enacted under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, have been abused by British police, particularly in London. This case involved two people who were detained by police outside the Defence Systems and Equipment International exhibition in London Docklands in 2003. One of the claimants was detained for about twenty minutes as he was cycling to join a protest outside the arms fair. The other claimant, a journalist from London, had come to film the protests and was detained for what she felt was about thirty minutes, though police records claimed it was just five minutes. The Strasbourg court were not impressed and said the pair's rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to respect for a private and family's life) had been violated. This was because stop-and-search powers were "not sufficiently circumscribed" and there were not "adequate legal safeguards against abuse". It also concluded that "the risks of the discriminatory use of the powers" were "a very real consideration". The pair were awarded £30,400 ($49,400) to cover legal costs.

Naturally the British government are disappointed with the result and the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has said the government will appeal against the decision. The police are also disappointed and according to Chief Constable Craig Mackay of the Associaion of Chief Police Officers, officers will continue using the powers while the appeal was pending. Though perhaps most disappointingly of all is the fact, as pointed out by Policing and Security Minister David Hanson, that the government had won all previous challenges in the UK courts. This included a High Court ruling in 2003, subsequently upheld by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, that the powers, and any consequent violation of human rights, was proportionate under the European Convention on Human Rights and justified in the light of the threat of terrorism. For the sake of the future of civil liberties in this country and a potential ejection out of the EU* (if the Eurosceptics had their way!), let's hope this was just a minor blip on the part of our highly esteemed and liberty-friendly judiciary.

* IMPORTANT NOTE: Many Brits often complain that decisions like these illustrate the deplorable extent to which the UK has had its powers usurped by the EU. But it is worth remembering that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg that decided the above case, has absolutely no connection with the European Union. It is in fact an institution belonging to the Council of Europe, of which the UK is a member along with forty-six other countries, including Russia, Armenia and Norway who are not members of the EU. The main court of the EU is the European Court of Justice (ECJ) located in Luxembourg. Its role is to decide on matters affecting EU Law, (ie: disputes between Member States or involving other legal entities only within Member States). The ECJ does not concern itself with human rights issues, which is the sole purview of the ECtHR. I wonder how many people are actually aware of this.

Since August last year I have made three trips to India (via Bahrain, Dubai and Mumbai) and two trips to Oman (via Bahrain and Doha). I started each journey from four different airports (Heathrow Terminal's 3 & 4, Gatwick, Muscat and Chennai). In all those journeys the thing that stood out the most was the sharp contrast in security checks in each airport. It stood out for three main reasons.

Firstly, London's two biggest airports had been in a heightened state of alert since 9/11, 7/7 and particularly 10/8 (The August 2006 Transatlantic Aircraft Plot). Secondly, India had been victim to several terrorist attacks in recent years and were in the midst of an intelligence crisis involving a potential conspirator in the Mumbai Attacks of November 2008, who had allegedly made several trips to India, including one to Mumbai days before the attack. And thirdly, that the so-called police-state dictatorships of the Middle East had a more than passing interest in the current climate of the global terrorist threat and significantly, its implications on their security.

You'd think that most, if not all the airports I flew through would have had a fairly standardised (ie, stringent and thorough) system of security checks. Wrong. The gulf in security particularly that for hand-luggage, between the London airports and their Middle Eastern and Indian counterparts struck me as ironic. Here was a liberal democracy inconveniencing and invading the privacy of every passenger in the name of security, while in the authoritarian East there was a comparatively negligent and indifferent attitude to security.

In London, pat downs were performed on every single passenger, regardless of whether the metal checker detected anything or not. Rarely was one allowed to walk through the detector with their shoes and belt on. All liquids/sprays had to be in 100ml (or less) containers and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. Laptops and jacket-like clothings also had to be taken off/out and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. And following the alleged incident on Christmas Day, the authorities now want to rush in the body scanners. Civil liberty campaigners have challenged the government on whether the scans will contravene our child pornography laws.

In comparison, the security in the Middle East and India was almost non-existent. Few pat downs, hardly any of them as thorough as the ones in London. If the metal detector beeped and the security area was not teeming with passengers, the security guy would perform a token check with a handheld detector, but most of the time they seemed uninterested. None of the airports necessitated liquids/sprays to be held in transparent ziploc bags and not once did I see any container above 100ml disposed of. On every transit journey via Bahrain, Doha and Dubai, I was able to keep the 500ml+ bottle of water with me that I had picked up in either Mucat, Chennai or London Duty Free. And until Heathrow nabbed my 150ml deodorant on my latest trip last month, not even London's airports detected its illegitimate passage across the world and back in twelve separate journeys between August and November.

Unfortunately, I'm still not sure how strongly I feel about airport security. On the one hand I want air travel to be safe, especially as my family, friends and I frequently use it. On the other hand, I don't feel true to my liberal ideals by accepting these erosions into our personal spaces and civil liberties for the sake of protecting air travel. I'm not even sure the security in London's airports are as effective as they are made out to be necessary, especially when one considers that the more relaxed security regime in the Middle East and India has not resulted in any incident till date. Yet I get the distinct impression that the halcyon era of stress-free air travel has disappeared forever. Each new attack will erode the few existing liberties that remain and it could have a huge impact on global travel.

I've copied a speech made by the Lib Dem Shadow Home Sec, Chris Huhne, at the British Institute of Human Rights on 5 May. For someone who isn't a trained lawyer I was thoroughly impressed with his knowledge of the Law and how to reform it. I also found it useful how he distinguished between human and citizens' rights. A very important distinction. Too bad they won't come to power anytime soon.

Introduction
Thank you very much for your introduction, and for inviting me here to speak today. Lectures such as this, and the wider work of the British Institute of Human Rights, are vitally important in the current climate. Global terrorism is a challenge. The global economic downturn is unlikely to improve the climate of tolerance. Our commitment to human rights will come under fire on a near daily basis.

Of course, this lecture does not happen in a vacuum or coincidentally. As Michael Wills pointed out here just weeks ago, this is an important time to be discussing human rights in this country. I too believe that we are at a potentially great turning point in the history of human rights in Britain. This has ignited debate on the subject – what rights we should have, how they should be legislated for, and indeed what the very essence of a right really is. These are extremely important questions to ask ourselves, and I am very glad to be here today to contribute to the debate.

I want to discuss two closely related topics. The first is the Human Rights Act and the recent Green Paper launched by the Government on a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. The second is the Liberal Democrats’ Freedom Bill. The aim of this draft Bill is to claw back some of the many civil liberties and freedoms that have been eroded over the last 20 years. I see the two as being connected in one vital way. Rights are fundamental to how we live our lives – to enabling us to live our lives freely. The Freedom Bill aims to remove the obstacles to the free enjoyment of these rights that have been erected by successive Conservative and then Labour Governments.

( Read more... )

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Articles Worth Reading
Torture
UK Prisoners To Get Voting Rights
14 Guardian Articles of the Week
Robert Wintemute is Canadian
India's visa rule is unfairly persecuting innocent Pakistanis
UK Supreme Court Rules In Favour of Gay Refugees
Our Right to Offend
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) Bans UK Police Stop-and-Search Powers
The Contrast in Airport Security
The Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and the role of a Freedom Bill

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That Bloke In The Big Smoke

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life..." -Samuel Johnson

Entries tagged with human rights

Articles Worth Reading

Torture

UK Prisoners To Get Voting Rights

14 Guardian Articles of the Week

Robert Wintemute is Canadian

India's visa rule is unfairly persecuting innocent Pakistanis

UK Supreme Court Rules In Favour of Gay Refugees

Our Right to Offend

European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) Bans UK Police Stop-and-Search Powers

The Contrast in Airport Security

The Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and the role of a Freedom Bill