Saturday, Oct 25th
Last update04:04:40 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
There was much praise for the UN investigations into war crimes committed in Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone. However, I feel that this report did not go far enough to investigate some other more serious allegations that were made.
Mohammed Jawad, widely considered the prison's youngest detainee, is back home in Afghanistan after a judge ordered him freed. He is angry and confused. Many U.S. officials are unhappy he's free.
He was about 12, he says, and had spent the day helping his uncle dig a well before heading out to buy some tea. He says he was grabbed by police who beat him and threatened to kill his family unless he put his thumbprint to paper and admitted he'd tried to kill two U.S. soldiers. The Pashto speaker, largely illiterate, didn't understand their Persian and had little idea what he'd agreed to, he says. A U.S. judge would later agree.
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It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.
Israeli Nobel Prize for chemistry laureate Professor Ada Yonath on Saturday said all Hamas prisoners held in Israel should be released in order to bring Gilad Shalit home.
"I don't understand why we incarcerate them in Israel in the first place," the professor told Army Radio Saturday. She added that "all prisoners should be returned to Palestine regardless of a deal for Gilad Shalit's release." She said that holding Palestinians captive encourages and perpetuates their motivation to harm Israel and its citizens.
Today the Spanish Senate, acting to confirm a decision already taken under pressure from powerful governments accused of grave crimes, will limit Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction. Yesterday, ahead of the change of law, a legal case was filed at the Audiencia Nacional against four United States presidents and four United Kingdom prime ministers for commissioning, condoning and/or perpetuating multiple war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Iraq.
A military watchdog has adjourned public hearings into the alleged torture of Afghan prisoners for a week while lawyers battle over the scope of its investigation. The chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, Peter Tinsley, stopped the hearings into complaints filed by two human-rights groups hours after they began Wednesday.
The probe is looking into what military police in Kandahar knew – or should have known – about the possible abuse of prisoners Canadian soldiers handed over to Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service for interrogation.
Hundreds of Negev residents, Jews and Arabs, as well as friends and supporters from all over the country, gathered Saturday afternoon in the lands of el-Malichi el-Arakib, near the Lehavim-Rahat junction in the Negev.
They have gathered to support the struggle of el-Turi, el-Ukbi, el-Talalka and other Bedouin tribes - with the support of the el-Arakib Land Defence Committee and the Recognition Forum - against the government of Israel and the Jewish National Fund, which seek by force and deceit to take over the Bedouin land in the Negev.
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