Showing posts with label solitary confinement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solitary confinement. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 October 2012

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?

Thursday, 28 June 2012

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?