Tag: Human rights

State Security threatens blogger

Blogger Mohamed Gamal, who posts under the name Mr. GEMYHOoOD, has been receiving threats from State Security recently.
During the last Kefaya sit-in, Gamal told me he received phone threats from State Security officers, who asked him to take down a posting, where he drew a caricature of Hosni Mubarak urinating on the map of Egypt.
Gamal refused to take it down, and continues to receive the daily phone threats. Yesterday, Gamal was on his way to the Kefaya conference at the Lawyers’ Syndicate, when he was stopped by a security agent who checked his ID, and few minutes later Gamal received another phone threat from security, that he broadcasted to his friends via the mobile phone speaker.

Mr.GEMYHOoO demonstrating against Mubarak

You can read Gamal’s account of the threats, in Arabic, here.
Ma3lesh ya Mr. GEMYHOoOD… You have all my solidarity…

… and welcome to Canada

arar_maher.jpg

A man got beaten into a false confession. The internal security agency lied to the government and to the public to cover up their brutality and incompetence. The government lied to the public to cover up their culpability. When the man complained, government officials told lies to the press in an attempt to discredit him.

Sure sounds familiar, but the country could come as a surprise: Canada.

Maher Arar was picked up by US officials acting on intelligence ineptly gathered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (yep, the guys in the little red uniforms) while transiting the US on a Canadian passport and exported to Damascus for interrogation where (surprise!) he was tortured. After he returned to Canada and complained, as yet unnamed “government officials� started a campaign to smear him in the national press.

Here, however, the parallels to countries closer to the home come to an end. See, we know all this because an independent commission was set up under a judge—a judge who was going to get his full salary whether or not he came up with the real facts of the matter—and that commission was able to impel the testimony of a range of key players and make most of its findings known.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that internal security operatives are a breed that transcends cultural and national identity, but here’s the silver lining: a willful, independent judiciary can be an effective counterweight. Something to remember next time there’s a demo outside the Judges’ Club.

Arab NGOs want Israel out of UN

A coalition of Arab human rights organizations are starting a movement to freeze Israel’s UN membership. I looked quickly through the list, and while some major ones are missing, the list does contain some of the most courageous rights groups in the region. Here’s an excerpt from their statement, and links to download the press release containing the full list of NGOs.

It is not longer possible that Arab human rights organizations ignore the governmental approach, both Arab and western, towards the Israeli practices considering them in isolation and overlooking the systematic policy they follow.
It is time we consolidate a more progressive and positive approach towards those practices and the continuous violations by the successive Israeli governments throughout their history.
We look forward to serious and tangible actions that aim to expose this Israeli state, isolate it and work towards freezing its membership in the UN.
We realize that this is a difficult and long term task that has to being by simple and slowly mounting, although clear and solid, actions.
We take this statement to be an initial and simple step on the way towards this achievement of this task. We wish it to be the beginning of an international campaign that may involve, among others, regional and international meetings and joint actions.

I leave it to readers to debate whether this is useful or not. You may want to keep in mind the current situation in Gaza.

English:
It is time to freeze Israel’s membership in the UN (1)-1.doc

Arabic:
تجميد عضوية اسرائيل-1.doc

What can make you an enemy combatant

One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers. Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.

As if we needed more evidence that Guantanamo is useless, farcical and cruel, there comes this article in today’s Washington post that details how six Algerians were kidnapped from Bosnia in 2002 despite being completely exonerated by the Bosnian authorities for allegedly planning an attack on the US Embassy. Not a proud moment for the US government, which threatened Bosnia with the withdrawal of peacekeeping troops to have legally innocent men handed over to them.

Coptic conscript tortured to death?

There had been emails circulating among the Egyptian leftist Yahoo! Groups demanding an investigation into the death of a Coptic army conscript. The emails had links to The Free Copts website, which alleges Private Hani Sarofim was tortured to death by his commander to force his conversion to Islam.

The article included a statement by the deceased family and contact numbers, which when I tried, I could not get through.

I am extremely troubled by this, and can not validate what happened. The Free Copts have previously reported on some serious abuses that did indeed happen, but there were other cases which they blew out of proportion. I don’t know if this case is true, but if so, then one can safely say we are still living in the Medieval Ages. Please if anyone has more information about this subject, or if you managed to get through to the family on the phone numbers, fill us in.