Amnesty International has been working in recent weeks to highlight the impact of the planned withdrawl by the UN from Eastern Chad. Much more on this can be read at the Amnesty International Ireland site.
Amnesty International has a research mission on the ground in Chad at the moment and one of my colleagues, Alex Neve for Amnesty International Canada is a member of the team. Alex has blogged about the mission and I thought his perspective on this was compelling and so decided to add it here.
If you feel strongly about this, and I hope yo do, the please follow the link to the AI Ireland site and take action.
Abandoned Again? Chad Forces the UN Out of the Country
Abeché, Eastern Chad
May 23, 2010
We have begun our work on the ground in eastern Chad and in early days much of our focus is on the impending decision of the UN Security Council about the future of the critical UN mission here. Under pressure from the Chadian government, and with the conspicuous absence of the usual strong influence of Chad’s former colonial power, France, the Security Council is poised to agree to begin a pull out of UN troops from the east of the country, to be completed by mid-October. It could very well prove disastrous for human rights protection, development projects and overall security. And at this point in time it seems near irreversible.
My friend Celine Narmandji, a remarkably tenacious women’s human rights defender who I’ve worked with on missions here in the past, put it very well when we met for lunch right after my arrival in Chad. She said: “We were abandoned before. We’re going to be abandoned again. The good news is that in between, for a short while, the world did care about the situation in eastern Chad.”
Right she is, but we need better news than that.
I have been going back in my own mind, repeatedly, to the many women, men and young people I met during my first Amnesty mission to eastern Chad, in late 2006. They too talked about abandonment: in the face of a relentless wave of violence, much of it orchestrated from across the border in Darfur, hundreds of villages were razed, thousands of people killed, untold numbers of women and girls raped, and close to 200,000 Chadian chased from their homes. They felt abandoned by their own government and the rest of the world. And they were – there was no UN mission on the ground at that time. And Chadian authorities, who have long neglected and played politics with the east of the country, did nothing to prevent or respond to the devastating human rights violations. Abandonment was the right word.
Amnesty and others worked hard to end that abandonment. AI members – in Canada and worldwide – wrote letters, signed petitions and spoke out. And in March 2008 a UN mission, complete with military troops, began to fan out across this isolated and troubled region with a strong Security Council mandate to protect civilians. It was not easy. The UN mission faced numerous challenges and shortcomings – many of which Amnesty publicized, including after a mission I was part of back to the east last year. But now, just as the mission has begun to solidify and truly make a difference – the Chadian government has pulled the plug and the Security Council has meekly gone along for the ride.
The mandate of the current mission is set to expire on Wednesday of this week – May 26th; just 72 hours from when I’m recording this message. The writing is on the wall – a draft of the new resolution is circulating widely now, laying out a timetable for the UN’s quick withdrawal and taking away from the reduced numbers of UN troops that will remain for the next several months their mandate to take action to protect civilians. It is expected to be adopted before Wednesday.
Even as the hours draw to a close we must continue to press key governments – particularly France – to step back from the brink and refuse to go ahead with a precipitous UN pull out from a country that is, at best, beginning to enjoy fragile and very tentative improvements in human rights protection and security on the ground. I hope you will respond to AI’s email action targeting French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
It does appear that minds are made up.
But we are activists.
We certainly do not believe in abandonment.
And we do not remain silent – whatever the odds.
An opinion piece first published in the Irish Daily Mail on Jan 20th 2010
To find out more or to support Amnesty International click here.
On the 22nd of July 2002 a Gulfstream jet, registration number N379P, landed at Shannon Airport. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Service, a front company operated by the CIA. Its crew overnighted in Shannon and flew out to Washington the next day, no doubt well rested.
This was not a normal stop over, like hundreds that take place every day at Shannon, this was a getaway.
A few months before this a young man called Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi Airport. He was handed over to US custody and the CIA sent this jet to pick him up. It flew him to Morocco, where he was held in a secret detention centre for 18 months and brutally tortured, before flying home through Shannon.
“I tried to put on a brave face,” he said later. “But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. They took a razor to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest.
“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.”
Eventually Binyam would end up in Guantánamo. Last February he was released after a total of nearly nine years in detention. He was never convicted of any crime.
‘Extraordinary rendition’ is one of those phrases like collateral damage that tries to hide what it is by sounding like something official, something legitimate but it is not.
It actually means CIA agents kidnap people in one country, sometimes using others to do their dirty work, and then secretly smuggle them to another country where they are generally held in secret. Once there they are interrogated, often tortured, either on the direct instructions or with the active participation of members of British and American intelligence.
While Guantánamo and renditions are the responsibility of the US, other countries made it possible. They allowed people to be transferred through their airports, took part in illegal detentions and kidnapping or, as in Ireland’s case, they allowed their territory to be used as a staging area for rendition operations.
The Irish Government says that no prisoners have ever been transported through Irish airspace. It knows this because President Bush says so. As our then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, put it in 2006, “I looked at the great President Bush and said to him, I wanted to be sure, to be sure, and he assured me”.
I doubt many were as convinced. The British Government was given the same assurances Bertie was. They were told prisoners were not being transferred through their territory. However in 2008 the US Government admitted that planes carrying prisoners had landed at a British air base on at least two occasions.
The simple fact is this. We don’t know whether the CIA has transported boys and men through Shannon Airport to be imprisoned and tortured elsewhere. Neither does the Irish Government. No one knows because suspected rendition flights are not searched by the Gardaí. Planes known to be involved in kidnapping boys and men have routinely used our airspace and airports but we are told that checks are not necessary. Imagine if planes known to be involved in drug smuggling were passing through Shannon and the Gardaí didn’t inspect them?
What we do know, and what we can say for certain, is that Shannon Airport was used as a launching pad for four rendition operations involving the kidnappings of at least four people, Abu Omar, Khaled al Maqtari, Khaled el Masri and Binyam Mohamed. We have the dates and the flight logs to prove it.
Yet the Irish Government has consistently refused to address the issue and seems uninterested in whether CIA agents were breaking the law while flying through Shannon Airport.
For some people, this is all in the past, the legacy of the Bush administration and its so-called ‘war on terror’. There is a widespread belief that President Obama ended the practice of renditions but this is not the case.
One year ago President Obama signed an order to close Guantánamo Bay and to end the CIA’s programme of long-term secret detention. But he did not end extraordinary rendition.
So is Ireland still being used as a stop over for the CIA? We don’t know. But we do know that suspect planes are still using Shannon.
Only last month human rights activists monitoring planes landing at Shannon announced they have identified five planes that were previously involved in renditions operations using Shannon since March of last year, some of them on multiple occasions.
The UN Human Rights Committee, the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe have all called on the Irish Government to inspect suspect flights using Shannon Airport.
In November 2008 the Government responded to growing public pressure by setting up a Cabinet committee to review the law and ensure Gardaí had the power to board and search suspected rendition flights.
Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe said at the time that, “This marks a sea change in the way the Irish Government intends to approach the issue. It is a signal that this Government is taking human rights seriously”.
Over a year later there is still no sign of this review and the committee has only met twice. It is essential that the Government puts in place a procedure for inspecting flights through Irish airports. It is simply not good enough to rely on a foreign government to tell us what’s happening in our airports.
This week marks eight years since Guantánamo was opened. It must be closed and the remaining 200 or so prisoners released or given a fair trial. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. At least three dozen people believed to have been held in secret US detention centres are still missing. Neither their friends, nor their families know, where they are or what has happened to them.
The US has admitted that it has detained boys as young as thirteen in Guantánamo. Fathers and sons, bothers and loved ones, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured with no access to their families, and denied a fair trial.
Another 500 prisoners remain in limbo at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is appealing against the decision of a US judge to allow these men to challenge their ongoing detention.
No one has been brought to justice for acts of torture or enforced disappearances – both crimes under international law – committed by CIA agents.
Amnesty International Ireland has always been clear. Diplomatic assurances from President Bush were not good enough. They would not be good enough from President Obama. The responsibility to ensure Ireland is not used for illegal acts rests entirely with our Government.
We need to see the promised review of legislation governing searches of suspected rendition flights. The Taoiseach must announce when it will take place, ensure it is comprehensive, commit to making the findings public and to changing the law if necessary.
It is time to ensure we are never again accessories to kidnapping, imprisonment and torture.
I was moved to my core by the depth of isnight in the letter copied below from today’s Irish Times.
It is searing in its insight, but also in the hope central to the demand Christopher sets us all as individuals who make up our families, communities, institutions and societies.
the problem is best described as the abuse of power, in all its forms, from the personal to the institutional, for control or profit. Resolving this will protect children, and much more, in the future. It is linked in essence to all struggles for liberty, and must be at the heart of and visibly resolved in any decent, healthy society that dares to call itself decent.
Donnacha O’Connell, former Dean of Law at NUIG speaking at an Amnesty International event a few months back described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted in direct response to the horrors of Wordl War II as “wisdom distilled through trauma”.
His description of the UDHR rushed to my mind upon reading Corneilius Crowley’s words.
Madam, – I spent my childhood in Irish Catholic boarding schools, ranging from the very top schools to reformatories, from age five-and-a-half to 17, and as a ward of court, I was during holidays, in custody of my relatives. Who were less than empathetic.
Thus, as a child there was no one for me to turn to talk to about my experiences. I grew up believing those experiences, and my shame, were normal.
I believed my low self-esteem was my own fault, that I was evil, a sinner and at heart a disgusting, filthy and ugly person, even though I could pass myself off as reasonably affable.
My life has been pretty much ruled by those experiences and how I “‘adapted” to them, how I internalised the values of those who abused me, and took on the image they projected on to me as my own identity.
Years and years of unhappiness, dysfunction, insecurity and a nameless rage (for which, for a long time I had no target – and that meant I turned the rage upon myself and those close to me) have dogged my life.
I have struggled as best I can to heal this for myself, and to understand, to fully comprehend the dynamics of abuse operating at such a huge scale, such that it might be classed a societal problem, if not the societal problem, simply because the problem is tractable, because the cycles can be broken, and because this should never happen to any child. I, and many others are living proof of this.
And the problem is best described as the abuse of power, in all its forms, from the personal to the institutional, for control or profit. Resolving this will protect children, and much more, in the future. It is linked in essence to all struggles for liberty, and must be at the heart of and visibly resolved in any decent, healthy society that dares to call itself decent.
And that is the only path which I as a survivor deem plausible if we as a society and as parents are to honour all children, for all time.
It is time, well past time actually, to clean up our collective and centralised acts. – Yours, etc,
CORNEILIUS CROWLEY
London, England.
The article below is my response to an opinion piece in the Evening Herald a week or so ago, link to that here, and comments by Cardinal Sean Brady at the weekend, link to that story here.
I thought it might be worth posting here as well.
Irish people want equality for everyone — gay or straight. It’s time Cardinal Seán Brady caught up
Originally appeared in The Evening Herald on Tuesday August 25 2009
Speaking on the proposed Civil Partnership Bill, Cardinal Sean Brady has stressed the importance of providing children with an “ideal environment” in which to grow.
But the real problem with the legislation as it stands is that it denies that environment to the children of same-sex couples. It undermines their right to a family.
Adoption is a children’s rights issue and not an issue of the human rights of the adults who parent them. Nobody has the ‘right’ to adopt. Adoption must only be considered from the perspective of the rights of children. Children are not objects to be acquired by adults.
Gay people can already adopt in Ireland and have done so. There is no restriction on adoption in this State based on sexual orientation. But a gay couple cannot jointly adopt a child. This is not because they are gay. It is because they are unmarried. An unmarried couple, gay or straight, cannot jointly adopt either. But a straight couple can choose to get married. They can then jointly adopt a child. This is a choice denied to gay couples here but not to couples in the North.
In Europe, joint or second parent adoption by same-sex partners currently exists in the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Britain.
For me, the whole issue raises a number of questions.
Why is it okay for a gay person to adopt a child by him or herself but not to jointly adopt a child as part of a couple in a loving relationship? Why is it acceptable that a gay couple can raise a child together and give that child a loving family home, but not for the child to have a legal, secure relationship with both parents?
And, perhaps most importantly, why should the children of gay couples have inferior rights to the children of a married, heterosexual couple? Is that truly in the best interests of the child? Will this create an “ideal environment” for those children? In all the speeches and arguments on this issue, I have never seen those who are arguing against equality answer any of these questions. I’ve never even seen them try.
Denial
How can we in conscience allow the denial of the rights of children cared for by same-sex parents to be deliberately written into Irish law?
The issue at the heart of Minister Ahern’s proposed legislation is not gay marriage or ‘gay’ adoption. It is discrimination. It is saying that the right to marry only applies to some people and not to others. But that’s not true.
The right to marry is contained in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Both treaties have very strong anti-discrimination clauses that make it crystal clear that the rights contained in them apply to all people, regardless of their status.
This was reiterated by the 1994 decision of the UN Human Rights Committee, charged with interpreting the ICCPR, in Toonen v Australia, which found that sexual orientation was a protected status in human rights law, the same as race or gender.
So let us be very clear on this. Refusing to allow a couple to marry because they are gay is a violation of their human rights.
Opponents of equality try to deny marriage rights to gay couples by arguing that marriage is about children, about creating and supporting secure families for children. But then these same people oppose extending the same security and care to children parented by same-sex couples as other children.
The argument is so illogical it seems to be based on denying the very existence of children parented by same-sex couples. Surely we have learned the cost of denying rights and protections to any particular group of children?
Some commentators, and Minister Ahern seems to agree with them, have made the argument that Ireland is not ready for equality. Thing is, the Irish people themselves seem to disagree.
According to a Lansdowne survey carried out for Marriage Equality earlier this year, 81pc of Irish people believe that everyone living in Ireland should receive equal treatment from the state regardless of whether they are lesbian, straight or gay.
Significantly, 75pc believed that the children of same-sex couples should have the same family rights as other children.
Six out of 10 believe that denying marriage to lesbians and gay men is an act of discrimination.
Marriage is a fundamental human right to which we are all, gay and straight, entitled. Those arguing against equality are profoundly out of touch with mainstream Irish opinion.
Maybe it’s now time that they caught up.
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Article 27: Everyone has the right to take part in the cultural life of their community and the right to benefit from scientific and artistic learning
History has shown how economic hardship can bring out the worst in human beings. As Ireland deals with the new economic climate, Colm O’Gorman urges for a greater collective effort to work for a truly global recovery
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Article 26: Everyone has the right to education and to free primary education
Our Constitution says that the state has a responsibility to provide for education. That is to provide for, but not to provide. After attending a local school fundraiser, Colm O’Gorman asks why we don’t demand that the state lives up to a higher responsibility and ensures that every child is entitled to, and receives, the highest possible standard of education.
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
23rd May 2008
Article 3: Everyone has the right to life and the right to live in freedom and safety
Imagine a world where stopping to play with a can by the side of the road can cost you your legs and your cousin his life. Colm O’Gorman speaks about meeting Soraj, a 17-year-old survivor from Afghanistan who is playing a pivotal role fighting for an international treaty to ban the use of cluster bombs.
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that human rights begin in ‘small places’. In the first of a series of Drivetime radio columns celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Colm O’Gorman introduces the UDHR and explains how our human rights begin in the home, the school, the hospital and our local community.
Colm O'Gorman
