4 July 2017
Haaretz: In Jerusalem, a Far-right Jewish Gang Frequently Attacks Arabs - and the Police Do Almost Nothing
The recent attack on three Palestinians in downtown Jerusalem, allegedly by participants in a march organized by the far-right, anti-assimilationist Lehava group, joins dozens of such attacks in recent years in the city center. Organizations and activists monitoring such incidents have long complained about the inaction of the police during actual incidents and subsequent investigations. [...]
According to lawyer Orly Erez-Lahovsky, head of IRAC’s legal department, another problem is the lack of faith Palestinians have in the police “when they see that they file a complaint and the case is closed without being dealt with.”
In May 2015, left-wing activist Aviv Tatarsky was an eyewitness to a similar incident when he saw a young Palestinian running from young Jewish men.
“They were running through the police and they [the police] didn’t care. I approached policewomen who were there and told them I had seen the whole thing. They responded, ‘Stand aside and don’t interfere.’” [...]
“A patrol car was driving by and there were drivers who stopped it,” said Abu Jabneh’s lawyer, Eitay Mack. “But the police said they couldn’t intervene because they were on their way to another incident. During the attack, people were calling the police all the time but they didn’t come.”
3 July 2017
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”.
openDemocracy: Reconstructing the power vertical: the authoritarian threat in Ukraine
The hopes inspired by the first peaceful protests in Kiev were connected with the idea that authoritarian trends in Ukrainian politics could be stopped, that Ukraine could move towards European integration, and that there could be a return to political and economic pluralism in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region. However, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine, combined with the rise in extreme forces on the Maidan and perception of western support in ousting former president Viktor Yanukovych, meant that EuroMaidan’s liberal agenda has faced an uphill battle. [...]
2016 was a critical year for Ukraine’s development. EuroMaidan’s democratic potential was finally exhausted and its civil revolution finally ended. Rather than a flourishing democracy and civil society, 2016 brought the non-democratic and non-legal consolidation of power by and around the president. [...]
By law, the president controls the security services, army, diplomacy and prosecutor's office. Poroshenko has chosen to appoint loyal people to these institutions, regardless of their skill or experience. An extreme example of this is Yuri Lutsenko who was appointed general prosecutor in May 2016 despite having no legal background. The president went to extreme lengths to get a majority of deputies in parliament first to change the legal requirements for the job and then to vote for his ally. [...]
Ukraine’s judiciary cannot be considered an independent branch of government. Little has changed since the mid-1990s: the judiciary remains an integral part to the power base of Ukraine’s leading clans — currently, Poroshenko’s. As a result, public trust in Ukrainian courts is at an all-time low. Shortly after EuroMaidan, the judiciary became one of the first targets of lustration. However, attempts to lustrate corrupt judges have failed miserably, as there are legitimate concerns about the competence and independence of those involved in lustration efforts. Indeed, lustration has had rather unexpected consequences: the judiciary has become even more obedient to the ruling clans who saved them from civil society pressure. [...]
But this assessment seems to have been unrealistically positive. Media independence is actually in decline. In 2016, Ukraine witnessed a number of attacks on major TV channels that constitute the major source of information about politics for Ukrainians. This trend started in May 2016 with the leak of foreign journalists’ personal information by nationalist cyber-activists. Several weeks later, the highly respected journalist Pavel Sheremet was murdered.
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