Civil liberties - new material (68)
01 October 2007
Abandon Military Commissions, Close Guantanamo. Amnesty International, 4.7.07 (AI Index: 51/118/2007), pp. 10. Amnesty's latest report on at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, focuses on the military commissions that were ordained, by presidential dictat, four years ago. Six unconvicted prisoners of the war on terror were deemed eligible for trial by Bush's military "kangaroo court", which was ruled unlawful by the US Supreme Court in June 2006. Three months later Congress passed the Military Commissions Act authorising a revised system of commission, under which the US courts were stripped of the jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus appeals from the so-called "enemy combatants". To date only one of the 800 "bad men" who have been held at the base has been convicted: David Hicks who pleaded guilty under a pre-trial agreement that meant he could leave the base and return to his native Australia to serve a nine month sentence. The report concludes: "Any detention facility which is used to hold persons beyond the protection of international human rights and humanitarian law should be closed." Available at:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/pdf/AMR511182007ENGLISH/$File/AMR5111807.pdf
Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state, Henry Porter. The Guardian 5.8.07, p. 25. Porter considers Home Office plans to introduce "mass DNA testing by stealth". He argues that "taken in the context of the ID card database, the national surveillance of vehicles and retention of information about every individual motorway journey, the huge number of new criminal offences, the half million intercepts of private communications every year, the proposed measures to take 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to go abroad, which will include powers to prevent travel, this widening of the DNA database for minor misdemeanours confirms the pattern of attack on us all." Porter concludes that "Britain is on the way to becoming a police state."
The Use of Drugs as Weapons: the concerns and responsibilities of healthcare professionals. British Medical Association/Board of Science May 2007, pp 35 (ISBN 1-905545-16-9). This report, which starts from the case of the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002 in which approximately 120 people died, expresses doctors' fears that public safety could be compromised by "the widespread interest expressed by governments in the use of drugs as weapons". It points to ambiguities in the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993) that "leaves open the possibility of the use of a drug as a weapon for the purposes of law enforcement including domestic riot control." The primary conclusion of the report is that the use of drugs as weapons is "not feasible without generating a significant mortality among the target population...The agent whereby people could be incapacitated without risk of death in a tactical situation does not exist and it is unlikely to in the foreseeable future.": http://www.ciomr.org/en/node/587
Esculca bulletin. No 18 (Summer) 2007. Continues its ongoing efforts to oppose the involvement of institutional authorities in religious acts in spite of the state's secular character. It also features an analysis of the use of photographs as ultimate "truth" in spite of their subjective portrayal of events, or parts of them. News items on the lawsuit filed by Mamadou Kane against the re-admission of four local police officers found guilty of ill-treating him into the Vigo local police, on practices and regulations in Portugal that contravene the principle of the secular nature of the state and an appeal before the Supreme Court against the repealing of a Health and Consumption ministry order to establish a database of HIV carriers by the Audiencia Nacional on privacy grounds. Other matters reported on in this issue include cases brought against the illegal video recording of police interventions, CCTV cameras installed by private parties, on the punishment of trade unionists for criticising a judge, of El Jueves sati