Tag: InternationalNews

{{A Thai magazine editor was jailed for 10 years on Wednesday for insulting the royal family under the country’s draconian lese-majeste law, a sentence that drew condemnation from international rights groups and the European Union.}}

Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, editor of “Voice of the Oppressed”, a magazine devoted to self-exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was found guilty of publishing articles in 2010 defaming King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The articles criticized the role of a fictional character meant to represent the king, public prosecutors said in a July 2011 report. Discussions about the role of the monarchy are forbidden.

“The accused is a journalist who had a duty to check the facts in these articles before publishing them.

He knew the content defamed the monarchy but allowed their publication anyway,” a judge said in passing sentence.

The European Union Delegation to Thailand said the verdict and sentence undermined the right to freedom of expression.

“At the same time, it affects Thailand’s image as a free and democratic society,” it said in a statement.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the ruling was “more about Somyot’s strong support for amending the lese-majeste law than about any harm incurred by the monarchy”.

Rights groups say the lese-majeste law is used by Thailand’s powerful elite to silence political opponents, including supporters of pro-Thaksin groups.

“The lese-majeste law works against the long-term interests of the Thai monarchy,” said David Streckfuss, a Thailand-based independent scholar and lese-majeste expert.

“To a society that is becoming ever more politically conscious, the holding and trying of defendants seems arbitrary, petty and a clear violation of human rights.”

Somyot, who was jailed for an additional year on an unrelated defamation conviction, was arrested on the lese-majeste charge while Oxford-educated, pro-establishment Abhisit Vejjajiva was prime minister.

Current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister, promised to amend the law during her 2011 election campaign but has rowed back on that since coming to office, causing divisions among her supporters.

Websites accused of defaming the royal family are frequently shut down.

“Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crimes Act effectively muzzles those who want to express an honest opinion and 75 percent of websites shut down since it came into force have been because of so-called anti-monarchy content,” said Sawatree Suksri, a criminal law lecturer at Thammasart University in Bangkok.

Convictions under the law carry a maximum jail term of 15 years.
The 85-year-old king, who has been in hospital since 2009, is seen by many in Thailand as a unifying, semi-divine father figure.

National unease over what follows his reign has contributed to tensions in the country since before Thaksin was toppled by the military in 2006, leaving the country divided broadly between royalists and nationalists on the one side and Thaksin’s mostly lower-class supporters on the other.

Reuters

{{Russia said Monday it is sending two planes to Lebanon to start evacuating its citizens from Syria, the strongest sign yet that President Bashar Assad’s most important international ally has serious doubts about his ability to cling to power.}}

The Russian announcement came as anti-government activists reported violence around the country, including air raids on the town of Beit Sahm near Damascus International Airport, just south of the capital.

Russian officials said about 100 of the tens of thousands of Russian nationals in the country will be taken out overland to Lebanon and flown home from there, presumably because renewed fighting near the airport in Damascus has made it too dangerous for the foreigners to use that route out of the Syrian capital.

Assad has dismissed calls that he step down. He has proposed a national reconciliation conference, elections and a new constitution, but the opposition insists he play no role in a resolution to the conflict.

The U.N. says more than 60,000 people have died in the civil war since March 2011.

Russia has been Assad’s main ally since the conflict began, using its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to shield Damascus from international sanctions.

Russia recently started to distance itself from the Syrian ruler, signaling that it is resigned to him losing power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that he understands Syria needs change and that he was not protecting Assad.

{{Britain said on Monday it would give Algeria counter-terrorism and intelligence aid to help dismantle the Islamist network that carried out last week’s hostage attack at a desert gas complex.}}

Prime Minister David Cameron pledged a “strong security response” to the attack, in which 37 foreigners were killed, and said North Africa was becoming a “magnet for jihadists”, but did not promise any military intervention.

At least three Britons were among those killed, and another three are feared to be among the dead.

“We will contribute British intelligence and counter-terrorism assets to an international effort to find and dismantle the network that planned and ordered the brutal assault at In Amenas,” he told parliament.

Cameron compared the threat of terrorism from northern Africa to that emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and pledged to boost Britain’s contacts with the region.

Separately, Cameron’s spokesman ruled out any British combat role in Mali, where French troops are currently battling Islamist militants.

{{The trial of five men accused of the rape and murder of a student aboard a bus in New Delhi will begin Thursday and should have none of the long delays commonly associated with India’s justice system, a defense lawyer said after a brief hearing.}}

Judge Yogesh Khanna denied a defense motion to make the proceedings public, ruling that the courtroom must remain closed because of the sensitive nature of the crime, said V.K. Anand, the lawyer for one of the defendants, Ram Singh.

The extreme brutality of the attack has sparked weeks of protests and focused global attention on India’s rarely discussed crisis of violence against women.

Monday’s hearing was the first since the case was moved to a new fast-track court set up specifically to handle such crimes.

The five defendants’ faces were covered by woolen scarves as they arrived in the court, surrounded by a phalanx of police. A sixth suspect in the attack claims to be a juvenile and his case is being handled separately.

The judge told the lawyers to prepare for opening statements to begin Thursday and agreed to a defense motion to hold the trial every day throughout the week, instead of allowing the gaps of weeks and months between hearings common in other courts, Anand said.

Defense lawyers are awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court on their motion to move the trial outside New Delhi because of the strong emotions in the city.

Police say the victim and a male friend were heading home from an evening movie Dec. 16 when they boarded a bus, where they were attacked by the six assailants.

The attackers beat the man and raped the woman, inflicting massive internal injuries with a metal bar, police said.

The victims were eventually dumped on the roadside, and the woman died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.

Lawyers for the accused say police mistreated their clients and beat them to force them to confess.

Another defense lawyer, A.P. Singh, asked the judge to allow a special bone test on one of his clients to ascertain whether he is also a juvenile, the lawyer said. The judge reserved his ruling, he said.

The attack has sparked demands for wholesale changes in the way the country deals with crimes against women. Many families pressure relatives who have been assaulted not to press charges, police often refuse to file cases for those who do and the few cases filed often get bogged down in India’s court system, which had a backlog of 33 million cases in 2011.

In a sign of the sluggish pace of justice, only one of the 635 rape cases filed in the capital last year has ended in a conviction so far.

Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat cautioned that many other cases remained pending and said it was not realistic to expect crimes committed late last year to have wound their way through the system yet.

{{President Barack Obama delivered a full-throated defense of the nation’s safety net programs and vowed to tackle the issues of climate change and gay rights in his second inaugural address Monday afternoon.}}

“We reject that Americans must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future,” Obama told the crowd of hundreds of thousands of spectators who descended on the National Mall Monday morning.

“The commitments we make to each other–through Medicare, and Medicaid and Social Security–these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.

They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

The president also warned in the approximately 2,000 word speech that the country cannot succeed if a “shrinking few” succeed economically while the middle class suffers.

As the president began to exit the Capitol stage area after giving his speech, he stopped, turned around and stared out at the crowd gathered on the National Mall.

I want to see this “one more time” he appeared to say to his family, according to video of the moment. “I’m not going to see this again.” He smiled, lingering for several seconds.

{Agencies}

{{Afghan authorities are still torturing prisoners, such as hanging them by their wrists and beating them with cables, the United Nations said, a year after it first documented the abuse and won government promises of detention reform.}}

The latest report shows little progress in curbing abuse in Afghan prisons despite efforts by the U.N. and international military forces in Afghanistan. The report released Sunday also cites instances where Afghan authorities have tried to hide mistreatment from U.N. monitors.

The slow progress on prison reform has prompted NATO forces to once again stop many transfers of detainees to Afghan authorities out of concern that they would be tortured.

In multiple detention centers, Afghan authorities leave detainees hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beat them with cables and wooden sticks, administer electric shocks, twist their genitals and threaten to shove bottles up their anuses or to kill them, the report said.

In a letter responding to the latest report, the Afghan government said that its internal monitoring committee found that “the allegations of torture of detainees were untrue and thus disproved.”

The Afghan government said that it would not completely rule out the possibility of torture at its detention facilities, but that it was nowhere near the levels described in the report and that it was checking on reports of abuse.

The findings, however, highlight the type of human rights abuses that many activists worry could become more prevalent in Afghanistan as international forces draw down and the country’s Western allies become less watchful over a government that so far has taken few concrete actions to reform the system.

As one detainee in the western province of Farah told the U.N. team: “They laid me on the ground. One of them sat on my feet and another one sat on my head, and the third one took a pipe and started beating me with it. They were beating me for some time like one hour and were frequently telling me that, ‘You are with Taliban and this is what you deserve.’”

More than half of the 635 detainees interviewed had been tortured, according to the report titled Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghan Custody: One Year On. That is about the same ratio the U.N. found in its first report in 2011.

It’s a troubling finding given the amount of international attention and pledges of reform that came after the first report. At that time, the NATO military alliance temporarily stopped transferring Afghans it had picked up to national authorities until they could set up a system free of abuse.

Though it said the findings were exaggerated, the Afghan government promised after the first report to increase monitoring.

But little appears to have changed. Once NATO forces resumed the transfers and decreased inspections, torture quickly returned to earlier levels, the report said.

And even though the international military force was making a serious effort to delay transfers if there was risk of torture, about 30 percent of 79 detainees who had been transferred to Afghan custody by foreign governments ended up being tortured, the report said.

That’s higher than in 2011, when the U.N. found that 24 percent of transferred detainees were tortured.

“Torture cannot be addressed by training, inspections and directives alone,” said Georgette Gagnon, the head of human rights for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, explaining that there has been little follow-through by the Afghan government.

In particular, the U.N. report found that the Afghan government appeared to be trying to hide the mistreatment and refusing to prosecute those accused of torturing prisoners.

The U.N. team received “multiple credible reports” that in some places detainees were hidden from international observers in secret locations underground or separate from the main facility being inspected.

Also, the observers said they saw what appeared to be a suspicious increase in detainees held at police facilities when an intelligence service facility nearby was being monitored.

And particularly in the southern province of Kandahar, the U.N. received reports that authorities were using unofficial sites to torture detainees before transporting them to the regular prison.

In a letter responding to the U.N. report, Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that his staff had written letters to Afghan ministers urging them to investigate more than 80 separate allegations of detainee abuse during the past 18 months.

“To date, Afghan officials have acted in only one instance,” Allen said in the letter. In that case Afghan authorities did not fire the official in question, but transferred him from Kandahar province to Sar-e-Pul in the north.

The report documents what it called a “persistent lack of accountability for perpetrators of torture,” noting that no one has been prosecuted for prisoner abuse since the first report was released.

Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the Afghan president, said torture and abuse of prisoners was not Afghan policy.

“However, there may be certain cases of abuse and we have begun to investigate these cases mentioned in the U.N. report,” he said. “We will take actions accordingly.”

But he said that while the Afghan government takes the allegations in the report very seriously, “we also question the motivations behind this report and the way it was conducted.” He did not elaborate.

The NATO military alliance responded to the most recent report by stopping transfers of detainees to seven facilities in Kabul, Laghman, Herat, Khost and Kunduz provinces — most of them the same facilities that were flagged a year ago.

The transfers were halted in October, when the U.N. shared its preliminary findings with the military coalition.

“This action is a result of concerns over detainee treatment at certain Afghan detention facilities,” said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the international military alliance in Kabul.

He said there has been no suspension of transfers to the massive detention center next to Bagram Air Field outside of Kabul. That facility has been particularly contentious because the U.S. has held back from transferring all the detainees it holds there to Afghan custody.

But as international troops draw down in Afghanistan, there will be fewer people to monitor the Afghan detention centers. Allen said in his letter that the NATO military alliance planned to focus on monitoring only a subset of Afghan facilities in the future.

And even the manner in which the U.N. report was compiled and released shows the waning influence of Western allies over the Afghan government. Both last year and again on Sunday, the report was released without a news conference.

Instead, it was quietly posted on the U.N. website in what appeared to be an effort to avoid publicly antagonizing the Afghan government that it criticizes in the report.

“I think it’s being dealt with in the appropriate way. Maybe we don’t need to do it publicly,” Gagnon said, noting that there have been plenty of discussions with the Afghan government about how to improve the prison system.

Asked what actual improvements have been made to prisoner conditions since 2011, Gagnon was at a loss to give an example. But, she stressed: “There has been quite a lot of effort.”

aGENCIES