Albert Woodfox: 41 Years in Solitary Unjustly (tags)
police state
Torture by Design: Saying No to the Architecture of Solitary Confinement (tags)
Friday, August 16 marked the 40th consecutive day of a multi-ethnic statewide prisoner hunger strike initiated from inside the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California's Pelican Bay State Prison. As the horror of solitary confinement comes under increasing scrutiny in the US and around the world, human rights activists are confronting this public health and safety epidemic from a variety of angles. One group, called Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility has challenged solitary confinement in US prisons by recently launching a Change.org petition asking the American Institute of Architects to amend its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to prohibit the design of spaces for killing, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Do US Prisons Violate European Human Rights Law? --Interview w/ Hamja Ahsan & Aviva Stahl (tags)
An important ruling is expected early in September from the European Court of Human Rights, regarding whether or not US prisons respect human rights enough for the UK to extradite ‘war on terror' suspects to the US. We interview activist/journalist Aviva Stahl from CagePrisoners.com alongside Hamja Ahsan, the brother of Talha Ahsan, one of the appellants that will be seriously affected by the September ruling, imprisoned since 2006.
Mumia Abu-Jamal in General Population (tags)
Our phone calls and petition signatures finally got Mumia out of solitary and into the general population where he can hug his wife and much more. Now we need to free Mumia as he is innocent. We also need to abolish solitary confinement eveywhere as it is torture by definition.
The Torture of Mumia Abu-Jamal Continues off Death Row --Supporters Demand Transfer (tags)
After being transferred from death row in December, Mumia was put in ‘the hole’ at SCI Mahanoy’s ‘Restrictive Housing Unit,’ where the conditions are actually more restrictive than when he was on death row. Supporters, including the National Lawyers Guild (for whom Mumia serves as Vice President) who has set up an online petition, are calling for his immediate transfer to general population, so that among other things, he will be able to touch his family for this first time in about 30 years.
Complete Interview Transcript with Richard Falk from May 31st 2010 (tags)
DB "The Israelis say that these commandos who they say were armed with hand guns and paint guns were only defending themselves from armed and dangerous attacks by people on the boat. Your response to that? RF: There are two lines of response, and this is an area where the facts are contested and difficult to disentangle at this stage. The witnesses on the boats themselves, particularly the Turkish boats where most of the violence took place, claim that the commandos landed shooting, and that it was only after the initiation of that violence that there was some attempt at defense on the basis of very contrived and primitive weapons, as opposed to the kind of weaponry that the Israeli commandos were carrying. Beyond that, it’s fairly clear if unlawful attack of a vessel on the high seas is occurring, the passengers on that ship have some sort of right to self defense. So that’s one aspect of it. The second aspect is that even if there was some kind of defensive violence on the ship, that’s no excuse for an unprovoked attack carried out in this manner. If Israel didn’t want the ships to go to Gaza, they could have diverted them, and if they did what the other boats did in the Freedom Flotilla, except for the larger Turkish one, it seems pretty clear that this was a deliberate attack designed, I suppose, to punish the effort to carry out this humanitarian mission, which would obviously have disclosed the brutality of the blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has gone on now for almost three years. The Israeli arguments are not really seriously plausible. Given the overall circumstances it’s very difficult to give them any kind of serious credibility, and this seems to me to be as clear a violation of international humanitarian law, international law of the seas, and international criminal law, as we’re likely to see in the early part of the twenty-first century." RF
Sunsara Taylor on The Michael Slate Show (tags)
Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution newspaper, and Richard Falk, Special UN Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories.
PHILIPPINES: Melissa Roxas' fighting stance against Arroyo regime (tags)
Melissa Roxas, member of BAYAN-USA and the cultural group Habi Arts in Los Angeles, California, returned to the country on July 20 to face head on those who abducted and tortured her and her two companions and pursue the cases she has filed against them. She attended a Court of Appeals hearing on her petition for a writ of amparo. She also testified before the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and the Committee on Human Rights of the House of Representatives regarding her abduction and torture.
MELISSA ROXAS: As Palparan Fails to Break Roxas in Manila, US Legal Team Files Complaint.. (tags)
While former Philippine military leader-turned-lawmaker Jovito Palparan fails to break the credibility of American citizen Melissa Roxas’ testimony that it was the Philippine military that tortured and abducted her last May during a hearing before the Philippine House Committee on Human Rights in Manila, official complaints of torture have already been filed by Roxas’ US legal team with the United Nations in Geneva and United States State Department.
Melissa Roxas Submits Torture Case Before UN in Geneva (tags)
Melissa Roxas Submits Torture Case Before UN in Geneva. Visit Justice for Melissa Roxas Website at http://justiceformelissa.org
MELISSA ROXAS SUBMITS TORTURE CASE BEFORE U.N. IN GENEVA (tags)
Melissa Roxas, the first known American Citizen under President Obama’s presidency to have become a victim of abduction and torture by military agents in the Philippines, filed through her counsel, Arnedo S. Valera, of the Migrant Heritage Commission’s Legal Resources program, her torture claim by way of “An Urgent Appeal and Allegation vs. the Philippine Government, before the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture , Professor Manfred Nowak under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland . The case was received at the Geneva Office at 4:15 P.M today , July 28, 2009. Among the specific answers in response to the questionnaire on the torture of Melissa C. Roxas, 31 years old, where the dates of May 19 through May 25, 2009 as the date on which the incident of torture occurred; and Kapanikian, La Paz, Tarlac , the Philippines identified as the place of abduction. The victim believes the torture was carried out in a military camp in Nueva Ecija, known as Fort Magsaysay. Fort Magsaysay, about 150 kilometers north of Manila, is the largest military camp of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It is home to the Army’s 7th Infantry Division. It also named the Special Operations Group (SOG) and those wearing military uniforms as interrogators and torturers.
Resolution adopted unanimously by the IPU Governing Council (tags)
Referring to the case of Mr. Crispin Beltran, Mr. Saturniño Ocampo, Mr. Joel Virador, Mr. Teodoro Casiño, Ms. Liza Maza and Mr. Rafael Mariano, who, apart from the latter, are all incumbent members of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, as outlined in the report of the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians (CL/182/12(b)-R.1), and to the resolution adopted at its 181st session (October 2007),
Satur Ocampo details UN report on HRVs in Canada speech (tags)
Philippine Rep. Satur C. Ocampo (Party List, Bayan Muna), Deputy Minority Leader in the House of Representatives of the Philippines, appealed to the Canadian government to urge the Philippine Government to seriously consider the recommendations of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the spate of extrajudicial killings that have been going on at an alarming rate in the Philippines over the past six years. In a speech delivered to the Filipino community at the Carr Hall of St. Michaels College of the University of Toronto, Ocampo spoke about the report submitted by Prof. Philip Alston to the United Nations on November 28, 2007.
PROSTITUTION " Military personnel are prostituting Mexican women in Chiapas. Soldiers pay 100 pesos for virgins, 50 pesos for other girls, the prettiest are sold to high-ranking officers. Girls, 11-13 year olds, are sold by their fathers into prostitution. The girls are dishonored, while their fathers are not.