Civil liberties - new material (72)
01 July 2008
“The forgotten Italian residents of Guantánamo”, Reprieve, June 2008, pp 27. This report looks at the plight of “at least six” Tunisians who have resided in Italy for several years and are currently in detention in Guantánamo, most of whom have been cleared for release but refuse to return to Tunisia as they would be subjected to torture, preferring to await permission to return to Italy despite suffering further abuse in the Cuban-based US prison camp’s isolation cells. Reprieve notes that the Italian government’s involvement in the cases so far has been “on the side of the US military”, with connivance including the sending of interrogators to Guantánamo on at least three occasions (thus contravening the UN Convention against Torture), adding that “the Italian residents are virtually certain to have been rendered through Italian jurisdiction, with Italian government consent, en route to Guantánamo”. According to the report, the Italian government “appears to have been complicit in the transfer of at least 680 prisoners to Guantánamo” and, on the basis of flight logs from Spanish and Portuguese air traffic authorities, it is considered “highly likely” that at least 28 aeroplanes travelling to Guantánamo transited through Italian jurisdiction (airspace) between 2001 and 2006. The personal stories of the detainees before and during their detention are detailed, and Reprieve calls on the Italian government to “accept its responsibility to help the US close Guantánamo by bringing the Italian residents home”. http://www.reprieve.org.uk/documents/08.06.17theforgottenitalianresidentsinguantanamo.pdf and:
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/documents/08.06.17residentiitaliani.pdf (Italian version)
Annual Report 2007. Biometrics Assurance Group, June 2008, pp 19. The Biometrics Assurance Group (BAG) was set up at the recommendation of the Home Affairs Select Committee to monitor the increasingly widespread technologies around the biometric identification of people. In its annual report BAG suggests that the dependence of the government’s £4.5 billion ID-card scheme on fingerprint matches and facial-recognition biometrics exposes the system to error and that “exception handling” (mismatched or unclear prints) would occupy a large amount of the National Identity Scheme’s resources. See: http://www.ips.gov.uk/passport/downloads/FINAL-BAG-annual-report-2007-v1_0.pdf
“Cuando lo público no es público. Por qué se necesita una ley de acceso a la información pública en España?”, Eva Moraga, Access Info Europe, October 2008, pp 24. Report on access to information requests and cases in Spain in relation to the Spanish law and the practices of public administrations. It argues that the right of access to public information is “precariously” regulated in Spain, with “defects and gaps” that represent real obstacles for citizens to know “what public administrations do with their money” or how decisions that affect them are made. Drawing on a wide range of cases and 41 requests, the report notes how the legislation in force makes it easy for a public institution that is unwilling to provide a document or piece of information to find a legal basis not to do so. In 78% of cases, the requested information was not supplied (43% were answered by informing the applicant that they were denied the information, and 35% were met by administrative silence), whereas 22% were answered by supplying the information sought. Eleven appeals were filed, three of which resulted in the information being disclosed. The report concludes that the right of access to public information is not fully recognised in Spain, and it is largely unknown among the citizens and professional groups for which it is especially relevant such as politicians and journalists. It includes a set of recommendations calling for the approval of a specific access to information law that takes international standards and principles in this field into account. Available at: http://www.access-info.org/
Information Law Update, Dr David McArdle. SCOLAG Legal Journal no. 371 (September) 2008, pp 223-225. Review of the law relating to data protection, freedom of information and the media.
Secrets of Iraq’s death chamber, Robert Fisk. The Independent, 7.10.08, pp 22-23. One of the reasons used in to justify the British government’s support for the illegal US invasion of Iraq, was the hardly new information that Saddam Hussein had been involved in acts of torture and the extra judicial murder of his opponents. In this article Fisk discusses the summary executions carried out in prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki’s US-backed “democratic” government. The hangings take place in Saddam’s former high-security intelligence headquarters, at Kazamiyah, and Fisk observes that “there have been hundreds since America introduced democracy”.