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Law - new material (65)

01 July 2008

Security and Human Rights: counter-terrorism and the United Nations. Amnesty International (Index: IOR 40/019/2008) September 2008, pp 54. This report, timed to coincide with the UN General Assembly’s review of its global counter-terrorism strategy which was published on 8 September, says that governments have failed to uphold human rights standards, concluding that there is a huge gap between government rhetoric and human rights observations on the ground. It says that since 11 September 2001 a wide range of counter terrorism laws, policies and practices have eroded human rights practices and that some governments have argued that “the security of some can only be achieved by violating the rights of others.” See: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/IOR40/019/2008/en/7c2b7a4d-7a71-11dd-8e5e-43ea85d15a69/ior400192008en.pdf

Legal Aid Mind Games, Jon Robbins. Legal Action June 2006, pp 7-9. This article discusses fixed fees, which came into force for mental health work in January 2008 and “will disproportionately hit lawyers acting for some of society’s most vulnerable people.”

Genocide in Iraq, David Model. Counterpunch 21.5.08. This article discusses the US doctrine of “pre-emptive war” in light of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, “a country already decimated by Desert Storm, sanctions and no-fly-zones”. Model believes that the US government is guilty of genocide using the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which sets out criteria to evaluate whether or not a war crime attains the magnitude of genocide. The full article is available on the excellent Counterpunch website: http://www.counterpunch.org