Syria: Barrel Bombs Kill Civilians. World Report 2015 News Conference. Human Rights Watch | Defending Human Rights Worldwide. Azerbaijan: Investigative Journalist Arrested. (Berlin) – The arrest of Khadija Ismayilova, Azerbaijan’s leading investigative journalist and ardent government critic, is a devastating blow to critical voices in Azerbaijan. The Sabail District Court of Baku on December 5, 2014, ordered Ismayilova held for two months in pretrial custody, pending investigation on charges of allegedly driving someone to attempt suicide.
“Khadija Ismayilova is an inconvenient messenger, and her arrest fits squarely among the Azerbaijani government’s concerted efforts to silence dissenting voices,” said Giorgi Gogia, senior South Caucasus researcher at Human Rights Watch. “She should be released immediately.” The prosecutor’s office pressed charges against Ismayilova a day after the head of the presidential administration, Ramiz Mehdiyev, published an article calling the country’s nongovernmental groups a “fifth column” and openly accusing her of treason. Ismayilova’s arrest is the latest move in the government’s systematic crackdown on independent voices. Eric Garner death: UN fears over no-charge jury decisions. US: Release Torture Report. (Washington, DC) – The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today.
The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications. “Last minute attempts to delay the release of the Senate torture report show just how important this document is to understanding the CIA’s horrific torture program,” said Sarah Margon, Washington director at Human Rights Watch.
“US foreign policy is better served by coming clean about US abuses rather than continuing to bury the truth.” On December 5, 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry denied media reports that he had asked Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein to delay the report summary’s release. 1.630349?utm_source=dlvr. Take Action Now - Amnesty International USA. We, the undersigned, support passage of the Ordinance to provide reparations to survivors of torture by the Chicago's police: - From 1972 to 1991, officers of the Chicago Police Department systematically tortured over 100 suspects, under the direction of Police Commander Jon Burge at Area 2 and 3 police stations.
In addition to beatings, individuals alleged that they were subjected to electric shocks; had plastic bags placed over their heads and threatened with mock executions. - Although Burge was convicted in federal court for perjury and obstruction of justice, neither he nor any of the detectives he supervised have been prosecuted for committing torture. - Statutes of limitations not only prevent the ability to obtain justice for these crimes but also financial reparations for survivors. . - It has been more than twenty years since these allegations of torture first came to light. Calls Grow For Dick Cheney and George W. Bush To Be Prosecuted For Torture.
A top international official is calling for the criminal prosecution of top members of the Bush administration for torture and other war crimes. United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson called for prosecutions of former Bush administration officials at the highest levels, It is now time to take action. The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.
The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. International law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture. As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice. It is no defence for a public official to claim that they were acting on superior orders. The Architect. The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a blistering, 500-page report on the CIA's controversial detention and interrogation program, a document that committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said represents the most significant oversight effort in the history of the US Senate. The $40 million, five-year study concluded that CIA officials exaggerated the value of the intelligence they gleaned from dozens of "high-value detainees" held at black site prisons, where they were subjected to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding.
The committee reviewed more than 6 million pages of top-secret CIA documents and found that the architect of the interrogation program was a retired Air Force psychologist named James Mitchell, an agency contractor who — according to news reports — personally waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Senate report does not identify Mitchell by name. Applauds Release of Senate Intelligence Committee Report Summary. WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association welcomed the release today of the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the George W.
Bush administration. The document’s release recognizes American citizens’ right to know about the prior action of their government and is the best way to ensure that, going forward, the United States engages in national security programs that safeguard human rights and comply with international law. The new details provided by the report regarding the extent and barbarity of torture techniques used by the CIA are sickening and morally reprehensible.
Two psychologists mentioned prominently in the report under pseudonyms, but identified in media reports as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are not members of the American Psychological Association. Jessen was never a member; Mitchell resigned in 2006. Casey sur Twitter : "This is what war criminals look like: #p2 #TortureReport... Casey sur Twitter : "Bush: Perhaps his only purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others. #p2 #TortureReport... VICE News sur Twitter : "We went to Guantanamo Bay to get a first-hand glimpse at the detention center: Guantanamo: Blacked Out Bay (Part 1) Andrew Stroehlein sur Twitter : "Why is #Azerbaijan so afraid of this woman? Azerbaijan: Investigative Journalist Arrested. Steven W Hawkins sur Twitter : "Peaceful protest is a human right no matter where you live. #NYC #Ferguson #Ayotzinapa #HongKong.
Kenneth Roth sur Twitter : "Who says the dead can't be resurrected? @Chappatte on #Egypt Pres Sisi's magic. Backing C.I.A., Cheney Revisits Torture Debate From Bush Era. Photo As vice president, was the most enthusiastic sponsor for the brutal interrogation program used on Al Qaeda suspects, protesting when President scaled it back in his second term. Now that a Senate Intelligence Committee report has declared that the C.I.A.’s methods, later prohibited, violated American values and produced little or no useful intelligence, Mr. Cheney is fiercely defending not just the agency’s record, but his own as well. “I would do it again in a minute,” Mr. Cheney said in a spirited, emotional appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general have agreed with his view. “Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Continue reading the main story OPEN Document The NBC host, Chuck Todd, pressed Mr. “I can’t tell from that specifically whether it was or not,” he replied. In a sense, Mr. Mr. Mr. OPEN Graphic Mr.
Mr. U.N. panel criticizes U.S. policy on police shootings, tortures. A United Nations panel on Friday sharply criticized how the United States handles a variety of criminal justice-related issues, such as the police shooting of unarmed African Americans, the imprisonment of terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the application of the death penalty. In a 16-page report, its first such review since 2006, the U.N. Committee Against Torture condemned U.S. policies in handling how police dealt with issues of brutality against blacks and Latinos. It did not specifically mention events in Ferguson, Mo., but the parents of Michael Brown, fatally shot by a white police officer, spoke to the commission before the findings were released. “There are numerous areas in which certain things should be changed for the United States to comply fully with the convention,” Alessio Bruni of Italy, one of the panel's chief investigators, said at a news conference in Geneva.
In all, hundreds of arrests have been made from New York to Los Angeles and throughout the St. More Than 1,000 Schools In Pakistan Have Been Attacked By The Taliban In The Last Five Years - BuzzFeed News. William Pfaff: America Didn’t Just Prosecute Torturers, We Executed Them. The wartime Western allies, their judges sitting in judgment on war crimes in the city of Nuremberg, ordered hanged until dead eleven major World War II criminals at Spandau Prison in Germany on October 6, 1946. Those judged were not hanged because their crime was that they were themselves torturers; they were too highly placed for that. They were people who had ordered that the gloves be taken off.
It was the people under their orders who took the gloves off and tortured and murdered. For many years preceding the Second World War torture of a human being was widely accepted as being a heinous crime. It was not formalized in international law as such, because it was taken as part of the General Law of Humanity, which is to say law that was taken to be obvious to humans in Western Civilization. It has widely become adopted into national as well as international legal codes. The United States has also incorporated it into the Code which binds all men and women serving in the forces. Prosecute the Torturers - John Sifton - POLITICO Magazine.
“We tortured some folks,” President Barack Obama said in 2014. Indeed. And now, from the December 9 Senate Intelligence Committee report, we know more about how it was done. Prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation. The beatings and painful shackling. Legally, the U.S. government now is obliged to act against the torturers under international law.
The CIA and its defenders suggest that the tactics used were justified by the CIA’s reliance on legal opinions issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, so prosecutions are unwarranted, and would fail if they occurred: CIA officers can invoke a defense of “good faith reliance on counsel.” This argument is wrong, and also partially misses the point. The truth is that the conduct described in the report was torture—there is no doubt about it—and it simply is not true that the CIA thought otherwise, or was relying in good faith on legal advice. The fact is, senior officials knew the conduct was illegal. Senate Panel Faces New Obstacle to Release of Torture Report - NYTimes.com. WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday faced a new obstacle in its efforts to make public its report on the torture of prisoners once held by the after last-minute warnings from the Obama administration that the report’s release could ignite new unrest in the Middle East and put American hostages at risk.
The warnings were delivered on Friday during a phone call between Secretary of State and Senator , the California Democrat who leads the committee. According to congressional officials, Mr. Kerry warned that allies were concerned that the report could incite violence in the Middle East. Ms. Feinstein had planned to make the report public next week, but it is uncertain whether the call from Mr.
The exchange between Mr. Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said Mr. The phone call between Mr. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said the administration backed making the report public next week. If there are any new delays, Mr. Human Rights Watch: U.S. laws defy basic rules of justice. Momentum to reduce mass incarceration continues to rise as a variety of U.S. laws that require disproportionately severe punishment defy basic rules of justice, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
Legislators for years have passed laws that ignore other forms of punishment in favor of incarceration, according to Nation Behind Bars: A Human Rights Solution, a 36-page report published Tuesday. Nearly three decades of harsh sentencing laws have left the country with more than 2.2 million men and women behind bars, most for nonviolent crimes. Penal criminal justice policies have been the preferred fix to a range of social problems for at least 30 years, the report said. The behavior includes drug trafficking, increases in illegal immigration and youth crime, growing economic inequality, and an eroded safety net.
More than half – 53% – of inmates in state prisons with a sentence of at least a year serve time for a nonviolent offense, such as low-level drug dealing. Russia: Human Rights Climate Unrecognizable from a Decade Ago. (Moscow) – Dramatic deterioration in the past decade has made Russia’s human rights landscape virtually unrecognizable, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said at a news conference in Moscow today. Roth is on his first visit to the country since May 2005. “Starting in the early 2000s, many in Russia have been wary about increasing pressure on critics, but now there is full alarm about autocratic rule,” Roth said. “The rights retrenchment has been most pronounced following Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012.”
Critics of Putin’s rule have borne the brunt of the government’s crackdown, Roth said. Independent human rights groups have been particularly targeted, initially by burying them in bureaucracy. In the past two years, the government has branded these groups “foreign agents,” understood in Russia as “spies,” if they accept foreign funding. Several of these groups were forced to close, and more are fighting for their survival. Thailand Toxic Water Tainted Justice. Two years after Sandy Hook, the gun control movement has new energy. Mementos for 20 students and six educators, killed in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hang from a tree in Newtown, Connecticut December 14, 2014.
Parents of almost half the young children killed by a gunman at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, two years ago on Sunday have taken initial steps toward filing lawsuits tied to one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. For a second straight year the leafy suburb has planned no public events to commemorate the massacre, which left 20 first graders and six educators dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an incident that inflamed the U.S. debate over gun control. REUTERS/Adrees Latif Washington State voters last month defied the gun lobby and approved a measure extending firearm background checks private transfers.
For the gun reform movement, the victory was not only a policy success but also potentially a strategic one, offering a roadmap for activism to come. First, consider the federal bureaucracy.
Wisdom. Drug policy reform. LBGT. Women's rights. Poverty, Homeless, Mental Health, Cdnpoli. Quotes, Nietzsche, Einstein, George Orwell, etc... Sex Workers. Wars. Equity of cost in servises. Racism / Police Brutality.