Social Europe: The climate verdict of the German Constitutional Court

Legislators must therefore organise the path to zero emissions—which the court sees as required under constitutional and international law—in a way that is as forward-looking and freedom-friendly as possible. In doing so, each generation must do its fair share if there is to be a timely shift to zero fossil fuels—in sectors such as electricity, buildings, transport, cement, plastics and agriculture—and to greatly-reduced animal husbandry. In any event, following the ruling the Paris-agreement goal of keeping global heating within 1.5C above preindustrial times is on the way to becoming a constitutionally binding norm. 

The Federal Constitutional Court made it clear that legislators must not allow the entire remaining budget for greenhouse-gas emissions, as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be used up in the next few years as the German government planned more or less to do. Formally, the government has been obliged by the court to define the emissions-reduction targets for the period after 2030 more precisely. [...]

The Court of Justice of the European Union recently rejected a similar complaint. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the other hand—an institution of the Council of Europe—has relevant lawsuits pending. And it may also be that the complainants in our first climate lawsuit, just decided in Karlsruhe, will continue to the ECHR. Although we are very pleased with the ruling, it does not actually go far enough in terms of climate protection, given the above-mentioned criticism of the IPCC budget approach.

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openDemocracy: Poland vs. Azamat Baiduyev: how an EU member state deported a Chechen refugee back to face the Kadyrov regime

That same day, Baiduyev was flown to Moscow. He then flew to Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Soon after, according to contacts of Akhmed Gisayev, head of the Human Rights Analysis Center, reported that “roughly a hundred people with weapons, portable radios and police vehicles” surrounded a house belonging to Baiduyev’s uncle.

According to witnesses, some of these men spoke Russian without a Chechen accent and had a Russian appearance, which indicates that the Russian FSB was involved in the operation alongside the Chechen Interior Ministry. Azamat was abducted by force. It is not known where he is currently located. [...]

This final question is important because, according to Jacek Białas, a lawyer from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, regardless of the fault of the individual, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights indicates that the decision to deport to a country where they are threatened with torture or death is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the Polish Law on Foreigners. [...]

If the Polish authorities did not ask Russia to guarantee the security of Azamat Baiduyev, this is a serious charge in light of international law. If they did, it shows the kind of importance Russia attaches to these guarantees.

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The New York Review of Books: Scrubbing Poland’s Complicated Past

On February 7, Andrzej Melak, a Law and Justice member of parliament, called for Medallions to be provided with editorial commentary. He had discovered that Nałkowska uses phrases the recent Polish legislation was designed to combat. In the last piece in the collection, “The Adults and Children of Auschwitz,” Nałkowska writes: “Not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of human beings underwent manufacture into raw materials and goods in the Polish death camps.” And a few paragraphs later: “The Germans promised Jews arrested in Italy, Holland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia prime working conditions in Polish camps.” (My italics, in both cases.) There is the phrase, not mentioned in the recent law but reflecting precisely the language against which the amendment is aimed. Nałkowska is beyond the reach of a legal suit, and the wording of the law suggests it will not be applied to historians or artists, but this only raises the question of how and to whom it will be applied. In a statement in English on its website, the IPN points to “the media” as chiefly responsible for what it considers the repeated slander of Poland, but the fact that many scholars and artists involved in the debate on Polish-Jewish history are also regular contributors to media outlets makes it clear that they, too, may be liable for prosecution if their views receive a sufficiently wide airing. [...]

In Poland, as in virtually every country that has been occupied by hostile powers, the dead are unsettling presences not just because they are dead but also because invoking their real presences means acknowledging the humiliation involved in the kind of choices people were forced to make in wartime. In their statement, the historians at the IPN make the astonishing assertion that “the truth never humiliates.” But as much as we want them to sit still for us as martyrs (or criminals), the dead contain a discomfiting mixture of guilt and innocence. Some of the Polish soldiers who fought the Nazis and the Communists also engaged in murderous actions against Jews. Those whose identity and national pride are bound up with those soldiers may well feel humiliated by that fact. In a democracy, these complicated realities of human history cannot be left for state officials to adjudicate. These moral knots are the stuff from which the greatest Polish literature has sprung. This is why the kind of insidious ideological control that has returned to Poland under the Law and Justice party is so disturbing and bizarre. [...]

To try to fix a country’s history and victim status by force of law is both foolish and futile. Like Holocaust denial laws, the Polish law will not stop people from saying things the Poles find offensive. It also leads the government immediately into inconsistencies. The Polish government resents the judgment laid upon it by the European Court of Human Rights for facilitating the CIA’s torture program—both by making available a building in the town of Stare Kiejkuty that was used to interrogate terror suspects, brutally and unlawfully, in 2002 and 2003, and by letting the US use an airport to fly detainees in and out. But when it is the United States that Poland is helping, turns of phrase suggestive of complicity (“Polish black sites”) do not excite the same legislative fervor.

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The Washington Post: Yes, the Kremlin is worried — about Russia’s own presidential elections

Putin’s regime represents what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way term “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers. [...]

In his book “Patronal Politics,” Henry Hale points out that authoritarian regimes deploy every available resource to dominate elections, even when opposition candidates would not win a free and fair contest. Competitive, if unfair, elections send a potent message about the power of incumbent regimes. [...]

The “great power of expectations,” as Hale labels this phenomenon, drives Russian politics — and the Putin regime has set a high bar for itself. Last year, the Kremlin’s top political technologists established a “70 at 70” objective for Putin’s reelection in March 2018 — 70 percent of the vote with 70 percent turnout. In a recent interview, Russian political expert Tatyana Stanovaya remarked, “Putin just needs to be elected quietly and quickly, without fuss, with good turnout, and a good result.” [...]

A Reuters report, meanwhile, suggests the Kremlin ordered major energy and utility companies to supply the Presidential Administration with news items that cast Russia’s leadership in a positive light. A memo to industry leaders requested stories “where it’s possible to say that state support helped lift the economy out of crisis” and benefited local residents. State-run media outlets are supposed to disseminate the stories to the public. [...]

According to a Levada Center poll from late November, 67 percent of likely voters would vote for Putin, with anticipated turnout between 53 and 55 percent — not the 70 percent figure the Kremlin hopes to see. Trailing far behind are the nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the Russian Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov, each with just four percent.

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openDemocracy: Do we still need human judges in the age of Artificial Intelligence?

Before going any further, we should distinguish algorithms from Artificial Intelligence. In simple terms, algorithms are self-contained instructions, and are already being applied in judicial decision-making. In New Jersey, for example, the Public Safety Assessment algorithm supplements the decisions made by judges over bail by using data to determine the risk of granting bail to a defendant. The idea is to assist judges in being more objective, and increase access to justice by reducing the costs associated with complicated manual bail assessments.

AI is more difficult to define. People often conflate it with machine learning, which is the ability of a machine to work with data and processes, analyzing patterns that then allow it to analyze new data without being explicitly programmed. Deeper machine learning techniques can take in enormous amounts of data, tapping into neural networks to simulate human decision-making. AI subsumes machine learning, but it is also sometimes used to describe a futuristic machine super-intelligence that is far beyond our own.

The idea of  AI judges raises important ethical issues around bias and autonomy.  AI programs may incorporate the biases of their programmers and the humans they interact with. For example, a Microsoft AI Twitter chatbot named Tay became racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic within 24 hours of interactive learning with its human audience. But while such programs may replicate existing human biases, the distinguishing feature of AI over an algorithm  is that it can behave in surprising and unintended ways as it ‘learns.’ Eradicating bias therefore becomes even more difficult, though not impossible. Any AI judging program would need to account for, and be tested for, these biases. [...]

The AI judge was able to analyze existing case law and deliver the same verdict as the ECHR 79 per cent of the time, and it found that the ECHR judgments actually depended more on non-legal facts around issues of torture, privacy, fair trials and degrading treatment than on legal arguments. This is an interesting case for legal realists who focus on what judges actually do over what they say they do. If AI can examine the case record and accurately decide cases based on the facts, human judges could be reserved for higher courts where more complex legal questions need to be examined. [...]

Even so, AI judges may not solve classical questions of legal validity so much as raise new questions about the role of humans, since—if  we believe that ethics and morality in the law are important—then they necessarily lie, or ought to lie, in the domain of human judgment. In that case, AI may assist or replace humans in lower courts but human judges should retain their place as the final arbiters at the apex of any legal system. In practical terms, if we apply this conclusion to the perspective of American legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, for example, AI could assist with examining the entire breadth and depth of the law, but humans would ultimately choose what they consider a morally-superior interpretation.

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Politico: Hungary ignoring court orders to improve border camp conditions: watchdog

The Hungarian government repeatedly ignored international legal orders to improve conditions for asylum seekers in a controversial border zone camp, according to a human rights group and an asylum seeker held inside the camp. [...]

Since the Hungarian parliament approved the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in March, the transit zone has been criticized by watchdogs and international bodies concerned about the legality of automatically detaining asylum seekers, including children.

In March, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the detention of two Bangladeshi asylum seekers who were confined to the compound for three weeks before being sent back to Serbia amounted to a “de facto deprivation of their liberty.” [...]

Under new Hungarian rules introduced in the spring, authorities do not have to provide food to asylum seekers whose first application was rejected or canceled. R, who was separated from his family during the journey to the EU and went back to find them, falls into this category.

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openDemocracy: Scrapping human rights is as great a threat to democracy as terrorism

Such arbitrary and authoritarian behaviour would be a clear breach of this country’s obligations as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, but, nothing daunted, Theresa May, no friend of the Convention when she was Home Secretary, added: “And if human rights laws stop us from doing it, we will change those laws so we can do it”. [...]

The policy lasted until December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were interned, of which 1,874 were nationalists and only 107 loyalists, even though loyalist paramilitaries carried out numerous acts of violence against Catholics and Irish nationalists. Indeed, it was not until February 1973 that any loyalists at all were interned.   [...]

This ruling was to have truly momentous consequences. When lawyers in the United States Attorney General’s office prepared legal advice to pave the way for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation programme”, they reached straight for the Ireland v UK case, and it came subsequently to be used as justification for the Bush administration’s infamous “torture memos” outlining what interrogation techniques could and could not be used on detainees in Guantanamo and other such centres. [...]

In December 2014 the Irish government announced that it would ask the European Court of Human Rights to revise its judgment in the “Hooded Men” case, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, stated that on the basis of the new material, the government would contend that the ill-treatment should be recognised as torture. Nine of the survivors, backed by the Irish government, are now seeking to take their case back to the European Court. Given that the original judgement has become the benchmark by which countries calculate the legality under international law of their “enhanced interrogation” techniques, the stakes could not be higher. [...]

As Sir Keir Starmer recently put it: “If we start throwing away our adherence to human rights in response to what has happened in the last three months, we are throwing away the values at the heart of the democracy, everything that we say we believe in”.

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openDemocracy: Charting Russia’s most dangerous cities for LGBT people

n Russia, the first LGBT pride march was held in 1991 on the square before Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre as part of the Soviet Union’s first LGBT festival. The more modern history of LGBT parades in Russia began in 2006 when LGBT activist Nikolay Alekseyev attempted to officially organise a pride march in Moscow. Years passed, and the city authorities still haven’t found the guts to permit a march for LGBT human rights through the capital’s streets and provide security for its participants. However, other banned marches have been successfully challenged in the European Court for Human Rights and Alekseyev has generated support in other regions of the country. He and his colleagues have applied for permission to hold pride marches in Blagoveshchensk, Cherkessk, Cherepovets, Kazan, and Nizhny Tagil among many other cities across Russia, though they have always been rejected and sued city governments in response. A notable exception came in 2013, when the governor of St Petersburg did not forbid the city’s LGBT pride parade, although it did encounter violently homophobic protesters who tried to obstruct the march.

In fact, these violent far-right groups keep close tabs on LGBT activists in Russia and the events they hold – or try to. While the government fights some homophobic campaigners and inciters of hatred, it supports others. After all, instigating violence against LGBT people is essentially the Russian state’s official policy towards sexuality. For example, the 2013 law banning “propaganda” of “non-traditional sexual orientations” sparked a wave of hatred against LGBT people across the country. As we discovered from court decisions last year, after the “propaganda” bill was signed into law, the number of hate crimes against lesbians and gay men doubled.  [...]

After facts came to light about the systematic torture of gay men at secret detention camps in Chechnya, the republic’s press secretary immediately retorted that “you cannot repress those who are not and cannot be here in the Chechen Republic.” Despite the justified focus on Chechnya, these claims are hardly specific to one culture or region within the Russian Federation – officials in other regions speak in much the same manner. For example, the mayor of Svetogorsk in Leningrad Region declared his city “free from gays.” He subsequently argued that LGBT issues and rights are irrelevant there, neither an LGBT community nor LGBT people exist in the small city. [...]

One of the effects of Russia’s “propaganda” law was not simply the rise in violence against LGBT people. It also led to more frequent ewspaper publications on LGBT topics, hence public discussion on a topic which still remains taboo for many people. This was not entirely what legislators intended. We benefitted from this situation by researching the details and contexts of violence against LGBT in Russia as they were reported in media. The Sexuality Lab studied almost 4,500 media publications about violence against LGBT people in Russia between 2011 and 2016. We categorised all newspaper articles in accordance with the sexuality of the victims reported and the locations of crimes committed. All cities were then classified by population, making it possible for us to calculate an index of safety for every urban settlement.

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BuzzFeed: Russia's "Gay Propaganda" Ban Violates International Law, Top Human Rights Court Rules

Some regional governments in Russia adopted versions of this legislation beginning in 2003, and it was enacted nationwide in 2013, setting up a showdown over LGBT rights ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The law technically prohibits "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors," but authorities have also used the rule to justify shutting down LGBT rights protests, and to fine a newspaper for reporting on LGBT issues. The law led to an investigation of Apple after the company rolled out gay-friendly emojis for the iPhone, and has been invoked in bizarre campaigns against everything from a statue of a pair of dolphins, to a video of a tiger befriending a goat. [...]

"Above all, by adopting such laws the Court found that the authorities had reinforced stigma and prejudice and encouraged homophobia, which was incompatible with the values – of equality, pluralism and tolerance – of a democratic society," the ECHR wrote in an opinion agreed to by six of the seven judges who reviewed the case. [...]

"The Court found that the Government had been unable to provide any explanation of the mechanism by which a minor could be enticed into '[a] homosexual lifestyle', let alone science-based evidence that one’s sexual orientation or identity was susceptible to change under external influence," the judges wrote. [...]

The Russian Ministry of Justice vowed to appeal the ruling, which is supposed to bind the courts of Russia under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. But Russia has repeatedly thumbed its nose at the ECHR's authority in recent years, including adopting legislation in 2015 allowing for ECHR rulings to be ignored when they contradict the Russian Constitution.

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VICE: Why It Took So Long for Labour to Address Gay Rights

Depending on your views towards illegal wars, the introduction of tuition fees and the expansion of PFI, things largely didn't get that much better. However, in the 13 years that Blair and Brown held office, one thing certainly did: LGBT rights. By the time the Conservatives took back the keys to Downing Street in 2010, the age of consent had been equalised, civil partnerships had been introduced and out gay men were no longer barred from serving in the British Armed Forces.

But is it too easy to look back on those years with glittery, rose-tinted glasses? Labour won in an electoral landslide and yet took years to implement legislation that protected and legally validated LGBT lives. They made no Parliamentary effort to scrap Section 28 – the legislation that banned local authorities from "teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality" – until February of 2000. It remained in place until 2003. What's more, when voters gave Brown's government the boot, equal marriage – and the scrapping of the lifetime ban on men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood – was yet to pass through the Commons. [...]

Blair oversaw government lawyers fighting to defend British statutes that banned gay men from serving in the military at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They tried a similar trick with equalising the age of consent. Labour wasn't in power when these cases started, but, says Tatchell, they failed to retreat. He adds that the prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace – eventually passed in 2003 – only materialised after the European Union ordered Britain to end its lack of protection for LGBT employees. When it came to decriminalising gay sex at 16 Blair gave his MPs a free vote. The last Labour government failed to introduce LGBT-inclusive HIV and sex-and-relationship education. Blair presided over a system where queer refugees could be locked away in asylum detention centres for months on end.

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Al Jazeera: 'My biggest regret': Being a migrant worker in Greece

It is estimated that 90 percent of Greece's agriculture wage labourers are migrants. Farm work is often the only option for them when they arrive in the country without accommodation, money or legal status.

Razza's gang is one of four in the village of Poullakida visited by Al Jazeera. Along with the testimony of former workers - who are often more willing to speak openly - they paint a depressing picture of the exploitation and indignity of undocumented migrant labour in Greece. [...]

Pakistani workers say they are paid 22 euros ($23.3) per 100 crates of oranges they fill, usually a day's work, but that the amount varies between nationalities, with Albanians receiving 28 euros ($29.6) for the same number of crates. [...]

Charged 50 euros ($52.9) a month per person for their accommodation, and inflated amounts for food and even cigarettes, some workers soon find themselves in debt to their foreman. [...]

For close to a decade, Greece has experienced an economic and social crisis of unparalleled proportions for an advanced economy in peacetime conditions; the Greek economy has collapsed, living standards have plummeted, and unemployment and child poverty is endemic. The country has been subjected to severe austerity meaures and has struggled to cope with an unprecedented influx of refugees. 

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Al Jazeera: European court: Swiss Muslim girls must swim with boys

The European Court of Human Rights upheld a decision of a Swiss court backing fines on Muslim parents who refused to allow their daughters to take part in mixed swimming lessons on the basis of their religion. [...]

While the court acknowledged that the requirement was an interference with the freedom of religion, it ruled that the interference represented a "legitimate aim" to protect foreign pupils from social exclusion.

It said that schools played an important role in encouraging social integration, especially regarding children of foreign origin.

It also noted that the authorities in Basel, Switzerland, had tried to reach a compromise with the parents, including allowing the girls to wear burkinis for the lessons.

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Politico: Orbán’s ‘war of attrition’ against churches

 Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is fond of presenting himself as a defender of Christian civilization. But critics say he’s waging a crusade against religious institutions — including the church of the pastor who baptized his two eldest children.

The Hungarian government, which has historically subsidized churches, in 2011 stripped about 300 mostly smaller churches and religious groups of their legal status — and, as a result, of access to state-endorsed funding programs and subsidies. Only the institutions on a government-approved list are now eligible for such schemes, including one that lets Hungarians divert 1 percent of their income taxes to a church recognized by the state. [...]

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2014 that the law violates freedom of religion and should be amended, but the Hungarian government has done little to comply. To critics of the long-ruling prime minister, the pressure on the religious groups is part of an overall push to control and stymie independent institutions that pose a potential threat to his rule.  [...]

The refugee crisis highlighted the divergence between the political positions of some of the recognized churches and the churches that had lost their status.

At the height of the flow of migrants into Hungary last year, Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and the highest-ranking Catholic official in Hungary, said the Hungarian Catholic Church would not take in any refugees, arguing that providing shelter to them constitutes human trafficking.

Small unrecognized churches, meanwhile, took a leading role in both providing assistance and advocating on behalf of refugees. The Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, for example, cooked 600-800 meals per day at its central Budapest compound and provided shelter for 80-200 refugees every night. Even now, with Hungary’s borders largely closed, the Fellowship provides temporary lodging to small numbers of refugees.

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The Intercept‎: Europe's Top Human Rights Court Will Consider Legality of Surveillance Exposed by Edward Snowden

Ten organizations – including Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Amnesty International – are taking up the landmark case against the U.K. government in the European Court of Human Rights (pictured above). In a 115-page complaint released on Thursday, the groups allege that “blanket and indiscriminate” surveillance operations carried out by British spy agencies in collaboration with their U.S. counterparts violate privacy and freedom of expression rights.

The case represents the first time Europe’s top human rights court has been asked to consider the legality of surveillance exposed in the Snowden documents. Its judgments are legally binding and could potentially have ramifications for how surveillance is conducted by U.K. agencies. [...]

The complaint argues that the scale of the surveillance “is unprecedented in terms of (a) the number of individuals whose communications are potentially affected; (b) the quantity of communications content and related communications data that is actually initially intercepted, extracted, filtered, stored, analysed and/or disseminated by the U.K. intelligence agencies.” It adds that the “the operation of sophisticated covert surveillance powers without adequate safeguards is ipso facto disproportionate.”

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Deutsche Welle: Europe's rights court upholds French burqa ban

Judges in the eastern French city of Strasbourg also ruled that the 24-year-old Frenchwoman who bought the case had not been a victim of discrimination. The court ruled that respect for the conditions of "living together" was a legitimate aim of French authorities. [...]

The French government insisted that the ban was necessary to ensure gender equality, human dignity and "respect for the minimum requirement of life in society."

The court dismissed the first two arguments but upheld the third, saying it was "able to understand the view that individuals might not wish to see, in places open to all, practices or attitudes which would fundamentally call into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships." [...]

The ECHR has already upheld France's 2004 ban on headscarves in state schools, and its regulation requiring the removal of scarves, veils and turbans for security checks.

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