Tag: InternationalNews

{UK’s highest court upholds ruling that denies displaced islanders the right to return home.}

Thousands of former residents of the Chagos Islands, who were forcibly removed by Britain to make way for a US military base, have lost their latest legal bid to return home at the UK’s highest court.

Judges at the UK’s Supreme Court dismissed the islanders’ appeal by a majority of three to two on Wednesday, dashing their hopes of returning to the tropical paradise they were forced to flee exactly 50 years ago.

More than 2,000 people once lived on the islands in the Indian Ocean, which had thriving villages, a hospital, a church, and a railway, before Britain in 1966 leased the main island of Diego Garcia – then part of British-controlled Mauritius – for 50 years to the United States in return for a discount on buying Polaris nuclear missiles.

Today, Diego Garcia is believed to be one of the largest US military bases in the world, and home to an estimated 4,000 US troops.

Richard Gifford, a lawyer representing the Chagossians, told Al Jazeera that the battle for the islands’ former inhabitants to return home was far from over.

“In reality all five judges have said, in different ways that they should never have had their right of abode taken from them, and that should all now be reconsidered by the government.”

The judges highlighted a study commissioned by the government in 2015 that concluded that it would be possible and affordable to return the islanders.

Olivier Bancoult, the President of the Chagos Refugees Group and the man who brought the legal challenge, told Al Jazeera that the ruling highlighted the need for the UK to “shoulder its responsibilities.”

“There is a very strong signal given to the UK government to shoulder its responsibilities towards the Chagossians. I think we’ll move now to the next direction, a political way which is approaching the prime minister to ask him to make as soon as possible the resettlement taking place on Chagos,” Bancoult said.

Hundreds of families were forced to leave the archipelago in the early 1960s, with many Chagossians herded into cargo boats and ditched in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were forced to live in dilapidated shacks and slums.

In 2000, the UK’s High Court ruled that the islanders could return to 65 of the islands, but not to the main island of Diego Garcia. But in 2004, the government nullified the High Court’s decision by invoking the royal prerogative. But this in turn was overturned three years later when judges rejected the government’s argument that the royal prerogative was immune from scrutiny.

In 2008, the government won an appeal in the House of Lords, which ruled that the exiles could not return.

In recent years, the US has been accused of using the base, whose lease expires this year, for acts of illegal rendition during the so-called War on Terror.

In 2014, sources told Al Jazeera that British authorities were in “full cooperation” with US intelligence to use the island as a “black site” prison to detain high-value suspects, secretly operated by the CIA.

Since 9/11, CIA black sites have been set up all over the world, with suspected terrorists subject to brutal abuses including sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, auditory overload, rectal rehydration, waterboarding and stress positions, as well as other forms of treatment designed to humiliate and degrade.

{Two countries tied in vote after Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Sweden are chosen for non-permanent seats.}

In a symbolic gesture for European unity, Italy and the Netherlands have proposed to split a two-year term on the UN Security Council, after the two countries tied in a contested race for a non-permanent seat on the council.

The proposal came on Tuesday, after five rounds of voting at the 193-member UN General Assembly, where neither of the countries could attain the two-thirds majority vote needed.

Each received 95 votes in the last round.

In earlier voting, Bolivia and Ethiopia – both running unopposed – and Kazakhstan and Sweden secured their two-year council mandates in the most contested elections in years.

Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said the proposal of a shared seat was symbolic because it was a “message of unity between two European countries”.

A European diplomat, who spoke to DPA news agency on the condition of anonymity, called the decision a “truly European gentlemanly agreement”.

The diplomat said the two countries will need to come up with an agreement allowing one to attain the official two-thirds majority in the General Assembly vote, with the understanding that it will hand the post to the other country after a year.

The elected countries will begin a two-year stint on the council on January 1, taking their seats alongside the five permanent council members – Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States.

The other five non-permanent members are: Egypt, Japan, Senegal, Ukraine and Uruguay.

As the most powerful body of the United Nations, the Security Council can impose sanctions, endorse peace accords and authorise the use of military force.

It also oversees 16 peacekeeping missions in the world, with a budget of about $8bn.

Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden were competing for two spots while Kazakhstan and Thailand were squaring off for a seat reserved for Asia.

Italy was lobbying fiercely for a council seat, portraying itself as a crossroads country in the Mediterranean and touting its experience dealing with the refugee crisis.

Italy was also seen as a player in efforts to pull Libya out of chaos.

The Netherlands, home to the International Criminal Court and other world tribunals, played up its commitment to international justice while Sweden highlighted its role as a major aid donor.

Vying for a council seat for the first time since its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has been criticised for cracking down on journalists and political activists.

Thailand’s rights record has also been questioned, after the military leadership, which seized power in May 2014, has banned political activity and ramped up prosecutions under tough sedition and royal defamation laws.

{Legal challenge to police profiling of North Asian country’s Islamic population dismissed by Supreme Court.}

Tokyo, Japan – Mohamed Fujita used to host religious study groups at his home that were open to all Muslims. But today he’s afraid to invite strangers, in case they’re police informants.

Extensive surveillance has put many people of his faith on edge, he says, sowing mistrust.

A native of Japan who converted to Islam more than two decades ago, Fujita was one of 17 plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged blanket monitoring of the country’s followers of Islam. His name has been changed in this story to protect his identity, after police documents labelling him a possible security threat were leaked online.

“They made us terrorist suspects,” he says. “We never did anything wrong – on the contrary.”

Fujita’s wife first noticed the couple was being followed by law enforcement in the early 2000s. He says he would go out of his way to cooperate with officers when they would occasionally approach him. But they eventually asked that he report on other members of his mosque and he refused.

Then came the leak in 2010 of 114 police files, which revealed religious profiling of Muslims across Japan. The documents included resumé-like pages listing a host of personal information, including an individual’s name, physical description, personal relationships and the mosque they attended, along with a section titled “suspicions.”

The files also showed by the time the 2008 G8 summit was held in Hokkaido, northern Japan, at least 72,000 residents from Organisation of Islamic Conference countries had been profiled – including about 1,600 public school students in and around Tokyo.

Police in the capital had also been surveilling places of worship, halal restaurants, and “Islam-related” organisations, the documents showed.

Within a few weeks of the leak, the data had been downloaded from a file-sharing website more than 10,000 times in over 20 countries.

Fujita and the other plaintiffs, many of whom were originally from Middle Eastern or North African countries, sued in the hope the courts would deem the police practices illegal. Their lawyers said police had violated their constitutional rights to privacy, equal treatment, and religious freedom.

After two appeals, the Supreme Court dismissed the case on May 31.

The justices concurred with a lower court that the plaintiffs deserved a total of ¥90 million ($880,000) in compensation because the leak violated their privacy. But they did not weigh in on the police profiling or surveillance practices, which a lower court ruling had upheld as “necessary and inevitable” to guard against the threat of international terrorism.

“We were told we don’t have a constitutional case,” says Junko Hayashi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “We’re still trying to figure out, how is it not constitutional?”

Law enforcement mostly ignored the case. One of the few public statements they made came at a United Nations human rights committee hearing on the matter in 2014. An official from the National Police Agency said “details of information gathering activities to prevent future terrorism could not be disclosed”, but that “police collected information according to the law”, according to UN records.

Some have defended the surveillance of Muslims, including Naofumi Miyasaka, a professor at the National Defense Academy of Japan. He describes the data leak as “the biggest failure in the history of Japan’s counterterrorism” because it would have hurt the ability of law enforcement to gather intelligence on potential threats through “mutual trust and cooperation between police and informants”.

The Supreme Court decision generated few headlines and little public debate in Japan. Local media outlets had covered the legal proceedings by focusing on the leak of information, tiptoeing around the police surveillance issue.

The most prominent public figure to comment on the Supreme Court decision was NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spoke via video linkup at a symposium on government surveillance in Tokyo on June 4.

“People of the Islamic faith are more likely to be targeted … despite not having any criminal activities or associations or anything like that in their background, simply because people are afraid,” said Snowden, who once worked in western Tokyo at a liaison facility between American and Japanese intelligence services.

“But in Japan, let’s look seriously at that. The Aum Shinrikyo was the last significant terrorist event in Japan, and that was over 20 years ago,” he added, referring to the 1995 sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway that killed 13 people and injured 6,000 others.

“This wasn’t a fundamental Islamic extremist group, this was a crazy doomsday cult that wanted to make their founder the new emperor of Japan.”

Other observers have also questioned whether monitoring a particular religious group en masse is an effective counterterrorism strategy.

“Germany had a similar programme, and they investigated and maintained files on 30,000 Muslims in Germany and didn’t find, apparently, a single terrorist among them,” says Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo. “So it’s not clear that this indiscriminate surveillance is useful.”

Hiroshi Miyashita, a law professor at Chuo University who’s an expert on privacy issues, says he believes the lawsuit was the first major legal case in Japan to focus on mass surveillance. However, he adds a state secrets law that came into force in 2014 would shield the issue from scrutiny by the public and the courts in future.

“Even judges cannot access information” about police practices under the new law, he says.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the National Police Agency declined a request to comment on the court decision, and would not confirm whether they continue to profile and monitor the Japan’s Muslim community.

But the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Hayashi, who is Muslim, says she believes the surveillance has only intensified.

“It’s a really, really difficult thing to deal with, especially for the kids growing up here,” she adds. “The police have been dealing with them as future terrorists.”

While the lawsuit wasn’t successful, Fujita says he has learned from the experience. To him, the top court’s unwillingness to weigh their constitutional arguments shows that Japan’s judiciary isn’t an independent branch of government.

And years after the police surveillance came to light, he says it continues to rob many Muslims of a sense of trust, which he describes as “the foundation of human relationships”.

{Politicians denounce suicide bombings that killed 36 people and wounded dozens more at Istanbul’s largest airport.}

Politicians around the world have expressed shock and condemnation after three suicide bombers attacked Istanbul’s largest airport, killing at least 36 people and wounding many more.

Turkish officials said Tuesday evening’s attack at Ataturk Airport was likely carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq of the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

There has been no claim of responsibility.

“The attack, which took place during the holy month of Ramadan, shows that terrorism strikes with no regard for faith and values,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement.

“If states, as all humanity, fail to join forces and wage a joint fight against terrorist organisations, all the possibilities that we dread in our minds will come true one by one.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the “terrorist attack” and called for the perpetrators to be identified and brought to justice.

In the US, White House spokesman Josh Earnest expressed Washington’s “steadfast support” for Turkey in the wake of the attack, while US Secretary of State John Kerry said: “This is daily fare and that’s why I say the first challenge we need to face is countering non-state, violent actors.”

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement that “all Americans stand united with the people of Turkey against this campaign of hatred and violence”.

“Today’s attack in Istanbul only strengthens our resolve to defeat the forces of terrorism and radical jihadism around the world,” she said. “And it reminds us that the United States cannot retreat.”

Her rival Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, said the threat of attacks “has never been greater.”

“We must take steps now to protect America from terrorists, and do everything in our power to improve our security to keep America safe,” he said in a statement.

Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Turkey said at least seven Saudis were injured in the attack and all were in stable condition.

European Union leaders on Tuesday held a summit on Britain’s departure from the bloc in Brussels, where two suicide bombs ripped through the Belgian capital’s airport in March, killing 16 people.

ISIL claimed responsibility for that attack, as well as a subsequent explosion at a Brussels metro station that killed 16 more people.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel tweeted from the meeting:

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was shocked by the news.

“We grieve for the victims and with the relatives. We stand by Turkey.”

{Senior UN official says rising racism and xenophobia following UK referendum is “unacceptable”.}

The United Nations raised alarm as a series of racist incidents against minorities and foreigners were reported in the United Kingdom, following the country’s decision to leave the European Union.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on Tuesday that “racism and xenophobia are unacceptable in any circumstances” around the world.

“I urge the UK authorities to act to stop these xenophobic attacks and to ensure that all those suspected of racist and anti-foreigner attacks and abuses are prosecuted,” Hussein said.

“All of us must refuse to tolerate discriminatory acts in our daily lives – to ensure that there is nothing ‘everyday’ about discrimination.”

Violence, intimidation and calls of “Go home” directed at minorities – from Europeans in England to non-white Britons – have surged since the referendum last Friday.

The Muslim Council of Britain has compiled social media reports of more than 100 racist incidents since Thursday, when a majority of Britons voted for exiting the EU.

In the latest incident widely reported on social media on Tuesday, three young British men in Manchester were caught on video shouting racist abuses against an American tram passenger, calling him “little f**king immigrant” and demanding that he “get off the f**king tram now. Get back to Africa”.

In another incident, a man was seen getting out of his car, as he confronted another person, who apparently shouted racist words.

‘Rising intolerance’

The Polish Embassy in London earlier said it was “shocked and deeply concerned” by incidents of abuse directed at Poles and other Eastern Europeans living in England.

They reportedly include the posting of laminated cards reading “Leave the EU – no more Polish vermin” to members of the Polish community in Huntingdon, near the eastern city of Cambridge, on Saturday.

There were also reports of racist graffiti scrawled on a Polish community centre in Hammersmith, west London. The Metropolitan Police Service said it was investigating the claim.

Following the incidents, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government “will not tolerate intolerance”.

Cameron said he had spoken to his Polish counterpart Beata Szydlo to express his concern and to reassure her that Poles in Britain would be protected.

Sadiq Khan, the newly-elected mayor of London, said he had placed the city’s police force on high alert for racially motivated attacks.

Politicians lobbying for the so-called Brexit had argued it would allow Britain to curb immigration.

Mutuma Ruteere, the independent UN investigator on racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, said some of the abuse and comments reported since the vote “certainly are xenophobic and racist”.

“I also note that the government and the prime minister has been very categorical in denouncing those practices as well as what has taken place,” Ruteere told a news briefing.

He said the incidents would be a test to Britain’s watchdog institutions that monitor racism.

“I’m quite confident and hopeful that actually the institutions that exist can address this problem and nip it in the bud before it becomes a bigger problem.”

{Binali Yildirim says suicide bombers who killed at least 36 at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport likely linked to ISIL.}

At least 36 people have been killed in attacks at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, which the Turkish prime minister said was likely carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq of the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group.

Binali Yildirim said three suicide bombers were involved in the attack late on Tuesday evening.

“According to the most recent information, 36 people have lost their lives,” Yildirim told journalists at the scene.

“The findings of our security forces point at the Daesh organisation as the perpetrators of this terror attack,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIL.

The prime minister added that there were “many injured”. Other officials gave numbers ranging from 60 to nearly 150.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack and Yildirim said efforts to identify the attackers, who arrived to the airport in two taxis, were continuing.

The attackers opened fire at airport guards at the terminal entrance, and a shootout erupted before they blew themselves up one by one at around 10pm (19:00 GMT), authorities said.

Security camera footage shared on social media appeared to capture two of the blasts. In one clip, a huge ball of flame erupts at an entrance to the terminal building, scattering terrified passengers.

Another video shows a black-clad attacker running inside the building before collapsing to the ground – apparently felled by a police bullet – and blowing himself up.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a ‘joint fight’ against terror after the attack [EPA]
Most of the casualties were Turkish citizens, a senior government official said.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a “joint fight” against terror after the attack.

“If states, as all humanity, fail to join forces and wage a joint fight against terrorist organisations, all the possibilities that we dread in our minds will come true one by one,” he said in a statement.

“It is clear that this attack is not aimed at achieving any result but only to create propaganda material against our country using simply the blood and pain of innocent people.”

One of the attackers “randomly opened fire” as he walked through the terminal building, shortly before three explosions, a witness told Reuters.

“We came right to international departures and saw the man randomly shooting. He was just firing at anyone coming in front of him. He was wearing all black. His face was not masked. I was 50 metres away from him,” said Paul Roos, 77, a South African tourist on his way back to Cape Town with his wife.

“We ducked behind a counter but I stood up and watched him. Two explosions went off shortly after one another. By that time he had stopped shooting,” Roos said.

“He turned around and started coming towards us. He was holding his gun inside his jacket. He looked around anxiously to see if anyone was going to stop him and then went down the escalator … We heard some more gunfire and then another explosion, and then it was over.”

Ataturk Airport is one of the busiest ports in the world, serving more than 60 million passengers in 2015.

There has been a string of bombings around Turkey over the past year, some of them blamed on ISIL, others claimed by Kurdish groups.

Earlier in June, at least 11 people were killed in central Istanbul following a bombing attack targeting a police vehicle.

The armed group Kurdistan Freedom Hawks, also known by its Kurdish-language acronym TAK, claimed responsibility for that attack.

{Supreme Court hands a major victory to abortion-rights campaigners, striking down Texas’ contentious 2013 abortion law.}

The US Supreme Court has struck down a contentious abortion law in the state of Texas that imposed strict regulations on the procedure that made it harder for women to get an abortion.

In the court’s biggest abortion case in nearly a quarter of a century, justices voted 5-3 on Monday in favour of Texas clinics that protested against the regulations.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and violated a woman’s constitutional right to obtain an abortion.

Breyer wrote that “the surgical-centre requirement, like the admitting privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so”.

The rules required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that abortion clinics must be fitted with hospital-like surgical centres.

The law effectively forced dozens of abortion clinics in the state to close, with the number of providers shrinking from 41 to seven, most of them located in major cities.

Many clinics are now expected to reopen.

Texas had argued that its 2013 law and subsequent regulations were needed to protect women’s health.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington DC, said the Supreme Court ruling was a “massive victory” for people campaigning for abortion rights.

“As the Supreme Court finally waded into this issue after nearly 10 years of silence … there were a lot of people who thought that this would come down to a split decision, with four Conservatives and four Liberals on the court. But the swing vote by Conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, and his decision to side with the Liberals, effectively ended this issue.”

Some US states have pursued a variety of restrictions on abortion, including banning certain types of procedures, prohibiting it after a certain number of weeks of gestation, requiring parental permission for girls until a certain age, imposing waiting periods or mandatory counselling, and others.

Americans remain closely divided over whether abortion should be legal. In a Reuters/Ipso online poll involving 6,769 US adults conducted from June 3 to June 22, 47 percent of respondents said abortion generally should be legal and 42 percent said it generally should be illegal.

{Angola tops the list worldwide with 157 of 1,000 children under age five dying annually from “preventable causes”.}

Every day, 13-year old Birhanu Haftu walks four hours to fetch water in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. Severe drought has hit this year and children such as him struggle to get an education being so stuck in poverty.

“We catch the water in cups, then we carry it back using jerry cans,” Haftu said. “I don’t study at night because I’m too exhausted.”

Haftu is among 247 million children from sub-Saharan Africa facing extreme poverty who are deprived of basic education and other needs to survive and break the cycle of hardship, the UN said.

In a report released on Tuesday, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) also said by 2030, as many as 69 million children could die from “preventable causes” before the age of five if political leaders fail to address global inequality.

The report – State of the World’s Children 2016 – said children are affected “disproportionately” by violent conflicts, humanitarian emergencies, natural disasters, as well as health crises.

Nearly half are from Africa. Angola tops the list worldwide with 157 of 1,000 children under five years old dying annually as of 2015. It is closely followed by Chad at 139 and Somalia at 137 child deaths for every 1,000 children.

Additionally, 167 million children face poverty and 750 million could become child brides globally unless action is stepped up.

“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures. By fuelling inter-generational cycles of disadvantage, it imperils the future of their societies,” Anthony Lake, UNICEF’s executive director, said in the report.

“We have a choice: Invest in these children now, or allow our world to become still more unequal and divided.”

‘Investment on education’

Since the 1990s, under-five mortality rates have been cut in half while extreme poverty worldwide has been reduced by almost 50 percent.

But despite that “significant progress”, the report said, the improvements are neither even nor fair.

Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost three times more likely to die before age five than those born to mothers with a secondary education.

And girls from the poorest households are 2.5 more likely to marry as children than girls from the wealthiest households.

Today, about 124 million children do not go to primary and lower-secondary school. Two in five kids who do finish primary school have not learned how to read, write, or do simple math.

The report said investment in education is critical to cut the poverty and mortality rates.

By 2030, the report estimates that $340bn a year will be needed to fund education to the secondary level in low-income areas.

Currently, there is a “global shortfall” of $8.5bn a year in education funding for the 75 million children in the worst-hit crisis areas, translating to an average $113 per child, according to the report.

On average, each additional year of education a child receives increases his or her adult earnings by about 10 percent. For each additional year of schooling completed, that country’s poverty rate falls by 9 percent on average.

“When we provide education, shelter and protection for children caught in conflicts, we help mend their hearts and their minds – so that, someday, they will have the ability and the desire to help rebuild their countries,” Lake said.