Human Rights Glance
Human rights campaigners accused the British government of possible war crimes yesterday for failing to secure the release of a man held without trial for eight years by the Americans.
Yunus Rahmatullah, 30, was captured by UK special forces following the invasion of Iraq and handed over to the Americans, who eventually transferred him to Bagram air base. Despite US assertions that he is no longer considered a “security threat” he remains incarcerated in Afghanistan.
Britain accused of war crimes over man held by US for eight years without trial
African migrants 'denied entry' to Israel
Israel has turned away dozens of African asylum-seekers, mostly Eritreans trying enter the country from Egypt, human rights groups have said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and two Israeli NGOs said that "since June, Israeli forces patrolling Israel's newly constructed border fence with Egypt's Sinai region have denied entry to dozens of Africans, mostly Eritreans".
Are US drone strikes a war crime?
Earlier this year, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terror operations, warned that the US may have committed war crimes with drone strikes that have killed civilians in Pakistan. On Thursday, he announced that a special investigations unit is being established to look into the legality of such strikes.
But all evidence suggests that far from being concerned, the Obama administration is actually increasing the ferocity of what it calls a "targeted killing programme".
The Washington Post has revealed that the US government has compiled a database called the 'disposition matrix' to "augment" the existing "kill lists", which will focus on suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
VIDEO: Pastor delivers passionate speech against gay rights - with a shocking twist
The crowd at a City Council hearing in Springfield, Miss., didn’t expect to be surprised when Rev. Phil Snider took the podium to speak out against a proposed piece of gay rights legislation this summer, as his words initially seemed to echo the sentiments of many right-wing conservatives on the issue.
“I worry about the future of our city,” Snider said in August, of an ordinance that would have protected individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender.
Where Israeli Settler Terrorism Comes From
Following a series of violent incidents involving settler and pro-settler Jewish Israeli extremists, including the attempted lynching of a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, many Israelis expressed concern about the rise in violent hatred within their society and wondered where it was coming from.
Several incidents over the weekend demonstrated that this trend is only intensifying and clearly pointed to why. For the answer, Israelis need look no further than across the Green Line: settler terror is an inevitable consequence of the occupation and the myriad policies of the Israeli state that enable this extremism.
UK police secretly handed the FBI evidence on Babar Ahmad while claiming their own case against him was collapsing due to lack of evidence
Metropolitan Police detectives agreed to nine separate requests from FBI agents to provide information on Babar Ahmad at a time when the case against the long-imprisoned terror suspect was collapsing because of a lack of evidence, The Independent can reveal.
Court documents unearthed in the United States reveal how senior detectives involved in the initial investigation of Mr Ahmad regularly carried out searches and enquiries on behalf of the FBI and even sent American agents two encrypted floppy disks that were found at the south Londoner’s home.
European Court Ruling Opens Door for Extradition to Torture Conditions in US Federal Prisons
The decision by the European Court of Human Rights last week to refuse to block the extradition of the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and four others to the United States on terrorism charges removes one of the last external checks on our emerging gulag state.
Masri and the four others, all held in British jails, will soon join hundreds of other Muslims tried in Article III federal courts in the United States over the last decade. Fair trials are unlikely. A disturbing pattern of gross infringements on basic civil liberties, put in place in the name of national security, has poisoned our legal system.
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