Sunday, Nov 24th
Last update08:57:41 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade.
Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans.
The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.
I invited Abdullah Almalki to breakfast in Ottawa but he only took coffee. And while I wolfed down my all-English breakfast in the Chateau Laurier Hotel (beloved of Churchill and Karsh of Ottawa fame), he sipped gingerly at his cup with much on his mind. Snooped on by the Canadian secret service and then tortured in Syria while the Canadian authorities did nothing for him – save supplying his perverted torturers with questions – he had much to think about. A carbon copy of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who had his penis cut up while the Brits sent questions to his perverted Moroccan torturers.
In a brief filed Thursday evening, Obama Justice Department lawyers extended many of the same arguments made by Bush attorneys – that top government officials have qualified immunity from prosecution and that Guantanamo detainees do not have constitutional rights to due process.
The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa's best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema.
The Supreme Court of Israel has banned a Palestinian human rights activist from traveling to Amsterdam to receive a prize. Shawan Jabarin, the West Bank-based director of Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq, hoped to travel to the Netherlands Friday to receive the Geuzenpenning Prize on behalf of his organization.
But spokeswoman Ayelet Filo says the court ruled there was real evidence that he is involved with terror organizations, and therefore he will not be allowed to leave for security concerns.
Despite a unanimous federal appeals court panel ruling last year that ordered the Bush administration to do just that, the outgoing administration asked the full court to rehear the case. But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has yet to do so, according to a statement released Tuesday by the ACLU.
"The Obama administration's commitment to transparency is commendable," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "We want to make sure that this rhetoric becomes reality." The Obama administration has not weighed in on the case.
The whole point of giving the accused a trial is to sort the guilty from the innocent. While the effectiveness of torture is highly doubtful (American experts claimed it doesn't work but were ignored by the Bush administration), there's no denying that torture must include accidental torture of innocents if it is to be done in a timely manner. You simply can't wait for a trial before the torture commences.
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