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Civil liberties - new material (58)

01 January 2005

Esculca, Observatorio sobre dereitos civís. no. 7, December 2004, http://www.esculca.net . This issue of the Galician-based civil liberties observatory's bulletin looks at two new laws that are in the process of being implemented: the law on domestic violence, which is deemed to continue along the expansion of repressive trends that were prevalent during the last government, and the law on the criminal responsibility of minors, against which an appeal has been filed criticising the absence of educational measures and the harshness of the disciplinary measures it contains. It also focuses on worsening conditions in A Lama prison, and includes an overview of legal proceedings involving the ill-treatment of inmates by prison officers in Galicia (in north-west Spain), an analysis of the use of minor offences occurring during demonstrations or protests by members of social movements to criminalise individuals and groups, and of the "indispensable" role played by judges in this process plus reports of the Terra Lliure case that resulted in Spain being found guilty of failing to adequately investigate torture claims by the European Court of Human Rights, and of court proceedings involving the left-nationalist Basque organisations that are accused of being part of the infrastructure of ETA.

Torture: from Algiers to Abu Ghraib, Neil MacMaster, Race and Class, Volume 46 no 2, 2004, pp. 1-21. MacMaster examines the US policy of torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and considers the "self-serving" arguments used to justify such methods. He concludes that the history of such counter-insurgency techniques "owed much to French warfare in Algeria" and notes that: "while the lessons of the torturer have been assiduously learnt, what has been ignored is the recent open debate in France on the profound damage done by such institutionalised barbarity both to the victims and to the individuals and regimes that deploy it."