Cebo.org is a collegial approach to information sharing between ethics-based
organizations with NGO status at the United Nations. Please contact member parties regarding the
positions of their respective organizations on matters expressed in this online journal.
Posted 8:13 PM
by Mary
TURTLE BAY:
To listen to Shirin Ebadi's story is to grasp how dramatically Iran has changed in recent months. The Nobel laureate has not been back to Iran since the country's disputed June election. In November, authorities confiscated her Nobel Peace Prize medal from a bank safe-deposit box. After Christmas they arrested her sister in Tehran. Her husband, who is still there, had his passport taken away. Authorities then returned it, only for him to discover that the returned passport was a forgery. I recently had the chance to speak with Ebadi in depth about developments in her country. Now, Iran's most famous dissident tells me she has no doubt that she would be arrested if she returned home.
Last summer the thousands of protesters who poured into Teheran's streets were chanting, "Give us our vote back." But it's no longer just about a fraudulent election. Today crowds in various locations across the country shout "Death to the supreme leader," and reform clerics who had previously insisted that the system remain untouchable now call for free elections, free media, and freedom of speech and assembly.
Posted 8:11 PM
by Mary
Colin Lynch: A group of four independent U.N. rights investigators has just published a detailed history of global secret detention practices that accuses the Bush administration of violating international law in its global war on terror by hauling its enemies into a network of clandestine prisons, and in some cases, torturing them.
The 221-page report constitutes the most exhaustive U.N. study of secret detention practices, examining abuses by the United States and dozens of countries, including Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, and Sri Lanka. It places the United States in the company of a long line of despotic regimes, from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, that have used secret prisons -- although the scale of alleged U.S. abuses is infinitesimally small in comparison.
The report traces the modern use of secret detentions to the Soviet Gulag system and the Nazis' "night and fog decree," which provided for the arrest of suspected resistance movement members in occupied Europe and their secret transfer to Germany "under cover of night."
During the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American military regimes, including Argentina, Chile, and Peru also used secret detention centers as part of a wider counterterrorism strategy. "Thousands of Latin Americans were secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by national security services," the report notes.
The report focuses primarily on CIA practices -- including the use of secret detention facilities and harsh interrogation techniques for "high value" detainees. The authors say the Bush administration's defense of its detention practices in recent years undercut international efforts to pressure other states to stop the practice. In Asia, for instance, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have all invoked anti-terror rhetoric to justify their secret detention policies.
In spite of America's position as "a global leader in the protection of human rights," the United States "embarked on a process of reducing and removing various human rights and other protection mechanisms," including the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the report states. The report says that the U.S. bears responsibility for abuses committed against individuals it handed over to foreign states, particularly those with poor human rights records.
