SACC adds an African country to the reform SACC won't acknowledge

On Sep 27, when the deportations of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to America's supermax solitary confinement jail system were still preventable, I had to post on here how the campaign most prominently fighting their cause to Scottish supporters, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, was wilfully ignoring an outstanding multi-country democratic reform that it has never denied is real and that could help fight their case.

The court change, which is also explained in my submission to the first independence consultation in 2010 whose non-publishing prompted this blog. So that if the same Scottish government as this week has been caught wasting many thousands of public money on a now abandoned court fight to hide legal advice that never existed, had been open that the court change exists and had ended its now 13 year long cover up by the media and the political class, it could have prevented the deportations too.

Incredibly, today SACC has circulated to its Facebook supporters a link to a Daily Mail story telling another really important story that the court change contributes to - and by it SACC has added another country to the list of those whose people can lay claim to the court change. Mahdi Hashi is a British citizen of Somali origin who has been stripped his citizenship arbitrarily whole abroad, by Theresa May by a dangerous power of decree that she does not need to take through the courts. In the past he had refused pressures to join MI5 to spy on his own community to monitor which way their geopolitical sympathies were going. It is feared he is being secretly held in a rendition camp in Jibouti.

By rebuffing enquiries into this, both (1)by the action of rebuffing them and (2)by it being part of Hashi's case consequently that there is unrefuted potential evidence he is there, Jibouti has taken part in Hashi's case. It is a legal case that overlaps into 4 countries that are already court change: Britain, the US, Somalia, Somaliland. By this, the open ended non-finality of case outcome that the court change carries is introduced into a matter of Jibouti's legal system dealing with. By this, Jibouti too becomes a court change country. The court change now applies to Jibouti.

It may be that Jibouti was already court change through an unpublicised earlier case. But that Jibouti is a court change country as from now, from Hashi's case, we know thanks to SACC. Yet SACC still won't refer to the court change in its own writings or say a word acknowledging it is real, will it?

Another bad day for SACC

If we were independent, if we already were now after not waiting until 2014, would the American-British extradition treaty of 2004 apply to Scotland? not unless we signed up to it in our own right. So can we get all the pro-independence parties' intentions on that?

This is the treaty signed as part of the War on terror, that allows America to demand extradition of British citizens to be put on trial in America for actions committed in Britain, while no equivalent power exists in the reverse direction. it lies behind the news, on Monday, of the European Court of Human Rights rejecting an appeal application to review in Grand Chamber the decision it had already taken, to allow 5 British citizens to be deported with the prospect of life sentences in the ADX Supermax jail at Florence, Colorado.

The media have concentrated on the one who has a racial hatred conviction and is easily linked with terrorism in public awareness, Abu Hamza, and by this they have made the whole decision sound good. But less publicised, you would only hear of them at all if you read the Independent, were Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, who the CPS in England had earlier decided it lacked evidence to charge for anything, who have never been charged with anything in Britain, and what America wants them for concerns entirely the geopolitical views of a website in the late 1990s that has no longer existed for years.

Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, a local campaign in the Central Belt that originated to defend the asylum seekers sent there and to publicise some other personal injustice cases that seemed to have happened because of racism, has taken a strong interest in the Ahmad-Ahsan case and its implications for the safety of us all, it has led the awarenss campaigning on it in Scotland. It has written on its own blog on the bad agenda the media is purusing this week, this post called "Another bad day for the media". It shows really well, anyone who doubts should read it, how it is implausible to think there was any actual error by the BBC in exposing the queen's views, that exposing them suited the impression the media wanted to give, of turning the public mood against all 5 of the folks in the case.

BUT - get this, BUT.

SACC has been told all about the court change, many times. The court change originated in the ECHR. The court change is what Ahmad and Ahsan most critically need now. The court change, itself deliberately ignored by the media and political class for 13 years, measns no court decision is any longer final. Every decision is faultable, and nobody any longer needs to apply for permission to appeal anything, the entitlement to fault the content and basis of every court decision is an absolute. Including this one. That is what Ahmad and Ahsan's supporters need to keep doing - speaking out that the court change exists and how, and laying claim to use the faulting power it creates. Telling as many ears as possible that the ECHR acts knowingly illegally every time it ignores the court change's existence, including every time it rejects any Grand Chamber application at all.

SACC writes "Why do journalists leave their best stories for their children to write? We need the truth now, while there is still time to act upon it. Why then does SACC not share the truth about the court change? SACC has never offered any argument against the reasons why the court change is real. Nor has anyone else, and that is unsurprising, because to deny the court change is real you have to be willing to claim that a factually impossible finding, a finding that 2 dated events happened in reverse order than their dated order in time, stands as a final decision by a court. By saying that you would abolish all factuality for any court outcome ever, you would openly abolish justice entirely. But the only alternative to that is to admit that the court change is real. I have explained this on this blog many times before.
SACC know all this, and expresses strong views on betrayal - yet in the blog post linked to, it still described the ECHR decision as final!!!

Work that out. What does that say about SACC itself having an agenda?

Back in May, SACC told me the court change "just hasn't been raised as an issue in cases going through the courts that we've been concerned with. We're not lawyers and we don't get to to decide how cases are argued. It's a bit abstact for a group like ours unless/until it comes up in a case we are concerned with." It was already as obvious then as it is now, that the court change comes up right in the heart of this case. It is part of the facts submitted to the court, emailed to the court president Nicolas Bratza, so that whether the court responded to it is key to whether its decision has any legitimacy as a decision or ignored part of the facts put in front of it. It is a tool for laying claim to prevent the deportations - DOES SACC WANT EVERY TOOL TO PREVENT THE DEPORTATIONS, TO BE USED, OR BY ANY CHANCE NOT?

WHY DOES SACC DO THIS? ARE THEY CAREERIST ENOUGH TO BELIEVE SCRATCHING POWERFUL BACKS WILL GET THEIR BACKS SCRATCHED IN RETURN? WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.

Oct 8: Amnesty International: USA must respect rights of individuals extradited from the UK

will innocent lives be sacrificed to torture to censor the referendum?

The campaign for Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, 2 British citizens held at Long Lartin prison in Englandwho are under threat of extradition to America under the treaty of 2003 where America does not have to give the British courts any evidence, is in a particularly urgent crunch phase coming up to a European Court of Human Rights ruling on a referral to the court's "Grand Chamber", on Jul 10.

In that campaign's meeting and film-showing in Glasgow yesterday, at the centre for Contemporary Arts in Sauchiehall street, we were told something that unsurprisingly has never been prominent in the media: that the European Court has had meetings with folks from the American courts, experience swap and education, that type of meeting - but when it was coming up to taking the decision it originally took in April to allow the extraditions, and in visible disregard of piles of evidence to find against American Supermax solitary confinement being torture. When the decision was taken there was also a decision coming up in Europe on reform of the court itself and there is a perception that the decision was made to please the British government in exchange for the court's role and jurisdiction not getting reduced. We may remember the Tories and tabloids had gone through a long period of ranting against the court for being too liberal. Which probably got many liberals lured into becoming fans of the court, only now to see it throw away the lives and futures of these folks who not even a prima facie criminal case has ever been made against.

This humanitarian emergency is the most perfect instance you could ever need of how the court change could prevent the court getting away with politically bent humanitarian wrongs, and why we need the court change for that purpose. For what are any of the campaigns for these political prisoners doing, unless they are FAULTING what the court has done to date? and what the American system will do. too? The court change creates a power of fault finding against all court rulings, it abolishes their finality.

Yet campaign flyers have still been printed talking about July 10 as a final decision. Public exposure of the proven fact that it is not a final decisison, because of the court change, is a humanitarian emergency. What is Scotland Against Criminalising Communities' stance on this? The whole emergency campaign from them only makes any sense if they have got a stand on this.

The situation's crunch humanitarian weight now weighs heavily upon the SNP government too. Not because they have any formal power, this is a British government issue and you would write to your MP about it not MSP. But because the Scottish government knows all about the court change, see the record so here, and by deciding to accept and welcome that the court change is real and make it big time public, before July 10, they can stop the European Court or anyone else from claiming that a decision to deport is final.

The humanitarian record of whether the SNP does it will weigh over the ethics and standards of their referendum campaign. The question asked here before, will they campaign acknowledging the court change or going along with the British political class in hushing it up? Knowing now that unless they choose the right course before July 10, it may mean EXPEDIENTLY SACRIFICING REAL PEOPLE TO TORTURE CONDITIONS avertably? Would you find their new Scotland healthy as a state, if a key legal fact about its courts was publicly unknown at the time of its creation and knowingly avertably by its creators innocent folks were sitting in perpetually lit white cells in supermax jails being psychologically destroyed? with communication only through screens and not face to face?