Civil liberties - new material (67)
01 January 2007
A nightmare without end, Victoria Brittain. Guardian 1.3.07. This newspaper article describes the "nightmare" of Shahajan Janjua, a British Asian caught up in the increasingly indiscriminate war on terror when he visited Somalia to attend a friend's wedding. Shahajan's "crime" was to be visiting the country at the time of the US-instigated Ethiopian attack - the US aided them with spy planes and a special operations unit. Shahajan was taken ill during the onslaught and forced to flee, ending up in Kenya where he was beaten, suffering a broken nose and other injuries caused by being hung from the wrists, his feet tied to buckets of freezing water. Later he was taken to expensive hotels and interrogated by six different British security officials who, despite being easily able to confirm his account, offered him no assistance. He was fortunate that he persuaded a Kenyan policewoman to lend him her phone and contacted lawyers in London. Since being flown back to London Shahajan has been questioned by police, but not charged.
Community Responses to the War on Terror. IRR Briefing Paper no. 3 (February) 2007, pp. 10. This report emerged from the Institute of Race Relations' conference Racism, Liberty and the War on Terror held in September 2006 and consists of four speeches "which outline the challenges for four very different community organisations". The first report is from Shobha Das (Support Against Racist Incidents, SARI, Bristol) on combatting racist violence, which has increased since the 11 September attacks in the USA and the 7 July attacks in the UK, in an atmosphere "where communities are encouraged to be suspicious of each other." Das argues that one offshoot of the war on terror is a "vigilante approach" that legitimises racist prejudice and "can even transform racist acts into acts of patriotism". Beena Faridi (caseworker for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, IHRC) argues that official figures of hate crimes against Muslims are "a gross underestimate" and commended the data-logging work carried out by the IRR and The Monitoring Group as means of building "a more realistic national picture of the problem of racial harassment of Muslims." The third paper, by Celius Victor (Newham Monitoring Group, NMP) identifies some of the ways that the war on terror "is being used by a range of bodies to inform general policing." In particular, he focuses on the massive armed police raid in Forest Hill on the home of Mohammed Abdul Kahar and his brother Abdul Koyair - in which the former was shot and wounded before both men were totally exonerated of any links to terrorism. Celius, who is a volunteer trustee of the community-based NMP, observes that: "When the raid took place, local agencies just melted away. Local councillors weren't around. The local policing team...seemed to disappear...The Borough Commander admitted in public he didn't know what was happening... Effectively Scotland Yard took over." He concludes by describing the war on terror as "a new shield for the police, a way of providing another level of opaqueness, a means of undermining any notion of community accountability." The final paper, by Anne Gray, (Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, CAMPAC) argues that "terrorism is defined far too broadly in the UK measures and in EU legislation and in ways which criminalise legitimate political activity". There are serious concerns that the UK legislation is incompatible with Article 10 of the ECHR, which protects the right to freedom of expression. This important document records the transition, under a Labour government, from principles such as the right to a fair trial to a presumption of guilt and the ensuing restraints on liberty. Available from: IRR, 2-6 Leeke Street, London WC1X 9HS.
Ghost Prisoner: two years in secret CIA detention. Human Rights Watch February 2007, pp. 48. This report documents the case of Marwan Jabour who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Lahore in May 2004. He was move