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Gaza aid convoy ignores Israel order to turn back

May 31, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

(Reuters) – Pro-Palestinian activists aboard a six-ship convoy sailing for the Gaza Strip have ignored orders by the Israeli navy to turn back, an Israeli official said Monday.

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The official, who declined to be named, said Israeli naval vessels told the activists by radio that their only other option was to head for the Israeli port of Ashdod to unload the some 10,000 tonnes of aid, which Israel would then transfer to Gaza.

“We communicated with them using the radio, clarifying that they are heading toward an area that is closed to maritime traffic,” the official said.

The convoy, led by a Turkish vessel with 600 people on board, set off in international waters off Cyprus Sunday in defiance of an Israeli-led blockade of the Gaza Strip and warnings that it would be intercepted.

“We told them that they are welcome to dock in Israel where all their humanitarian goods will be transferred to the Gaza Strip,” the official said. “The flotilla ignored the warnings.”

Live video footage from one of the boats showed activists wearing life vests and one said he could see Israeli naval vessels in the vicinity. He said the Israeli navy had contacted the ship’s captain and ordered him to turn back.

Three Israeli naval vessels set out from Haifa to meet the convoy, a journalist aboard one of the ships said.

Israel has said it would prevent the convoy from reaching the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Islamist Hamas group.

Hamas has been preparing to receive the convoy at the small harbor in the city of Gaza.

The activists face arrest and deportation, and their cargo will be confiscated and examined before a possible transfer by Israel to Gaza, Israeli military officials have said.

Israel has set up a holding camp for the activists at the coastal city of Ashdod.

The flotilla was organized by pro-Palestinian groups and a Turkish human rights organization. Turkey has urged Israel to allow it safe passage and says the 10,000 tonnes of aid the convoy is carrying is humanitarian.

Israel and Egypt tightened a blockade on Gaza after Hamas took over the territory in 2007. Israel launched a devastating military offensive in Gaza in December 2008 with the aim of halting daily rocket fire toward its cities.

Most of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza rely on aid, blaming Israel for imposing restrictions on the amount and type of goods it allows into the territory.

The United Nations and Western powers have urged Israel to ease its restrictions to prevent a humanitarian crisis. They have been urging Israel to let in concrete and steel to allow for postwar reconstruction.

Israel denies there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying food, medicine and medical equipment are allowed in regularly. It says the restrictions are necessary to prevent weapons and materials that could be used to make them from reaching Hamas.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr, Jihan Abdallah and Alastair Macdonald in Jerusalem, Michele Kambas in Cyprus and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Writing by Joseph Nasr)

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Australian opposition gets tough on refugees

May 27, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

The opposition coalition on Thursday promised to pay other countries to take asylum seekers off Australia’s hands if it wins elections this year.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott made Australia’s response to a burgeoning number of asylum seekers traveling to Australia by boat an election issue by launching his conservative coalition’s new policy. An election date has yet to set.

Its centerpiece is a revival of the so-called Pacific solution in which Australia paid impoverished island neighbors Nauru and Papua New Guinea to keep asylum seekers in detention centers.

The message to asylum seekers was that they would never set foot on the Australian mainland. However, many were eventually settled in Australia after sometimes spending years in offshore camps.

Human rights groups attacked the policy as punitive when the previous coalition government introduced it in 2001, months ahead of an election.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd scrapped the policy when his center-left Labor Party won government in 2007, but he continues to keep most boat arrivals in a crowded camp on the remote Australian Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island while their refugees claims are assessed.

Abbott has blamed the government’s softening of Australia’s asylum seeker stance for more than 4,000 people arriving by boat in the past year, many of them Afghans and Sri Lankans who paid Indonesian people smugglers to ship them to Australia.

“I am a big risk to people smugglers,” Abbott told reporters. “If I get elected, people smugglers will go out of business.”

Abbott declined to identify the countries he planned to negotiate with or estimate how much they would be paid to house the overflow of asylum seekers from Christmas island.

Rudd attempted to slow the flow earlier this year by imposing a three-month freeze on processing asylum claims from Sri Lankans and Afghans – a development condemned on Thursday in the annual report of London-based human rights organization Amnesty International.

Abbott also promised to revive another measure scrapped by Rudd – temporary protection visas.

Under the visas, bona fide refugees would have to prove after three years that they would still face persecution if they returned to their homelands.

Under the current permanent visas, asylum seekers only have to prove their refugee status once.

During their temporary stay, refugees would also have to work for their welfare benefits, an opposition statement said.

Human Resources Minister Chris Bowen said refugees were already required to work, study English or train to gain employment skills.

The work obligations “are actually rules that we introduced, toughened from the previous government’s arrangements,” Bowen told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Arguments about which side of politics is tougher on asylum seekers have raged in Australian election campaigns since the first wave of Vietnamese refugees fled to Australia from the aftermath of Vietnam War in the late 1970s.

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Israel accuses HRW of hitting a new low by hiring expert who collects Nazi memorabilia

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Jerusalem, Sep.10 (ANI): Human Rights Watch’s employment of a man who trades and collects Nazi memorabilia as its “senior military expert” is a “new low” for the organization that frequently criticizes Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy director Ron Dermer said Wednesday.

“I thought that nothing could top a human rights organization trying to raise money in Saudi Arabia, but I was apparently wrong,” said Dermer.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Dermer was referring to reports, both in the blogosphere and the press, that Marc Garlasco, HRW’s senior military expert, who has written numerous reports condemning Israel, is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

Omri Ceren, on a blog called Mere Rhetoric, wrote that Garlasco was “obsessed with the color and pageantry of Nazism, has published a detailed 430-page book on Nazi war paraphernalia, and participates in forums for Nazi souvenir collectors.”

Dermer said the revelations made it “easier to understand how an organization that was initially called Helsinki Watch, and was dedicated to helping brave Soviet dissidents fight against tyranny, has turned into an organization that facilitates the assault of some of the worst regimes and terror groups against the very democratic countries that uphold human rights.

HRW issued a statement saying that Garlasco’s family experience on both sides of WWII – his grandfather was in the German army and his great-uncle was in the US air force – led him to collect military memorabilia from that period.

HRW emphatically denied that Garlasco was a Nazi sympathizer because he “collected German [as well as American] military memorabilia.”

HRW said the “accusation is demonstrably false and fits into a campaign to deflect attention from Human Rights Watch’s rigorous and detailed reporting on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by the Israeli government.” (ANI)

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HRW’s Saudi Arabia fundraising mission is like asking Taliban for donation: Israel

July 15, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Jerusalem, July 15 (ANI): Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office has criticized the Human Rights Watch (HRW) for sending a fundraising delegation to Saudi Arabia, and likened the situation to a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for donations.

“A human rights organization raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation. For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev, as saying.

Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, responded by saying that there was a need to distinguish between a government and its people, and to conflate the two was “misguided at best.”

“Certainly not everyone is tainted by the misconduct of their government. There are private individuals in Saudi Arabia who are not part of the ruling government,” she said.
Comments from Netanyahu’s office on HRW come in the wake of reports that a delegation from HRW recently visited Saudi Arabia to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting the group’s activities against Israel.

Two weeks ago, Israel was ripped for alleged misconduct during Operation Cast Lead in reports issued by HRW and Amnesty International.

Israel has decided to take a much more aggressive stance toward future reports issued by these organizations, according to sources.

“We will make a greater effort in the future to go through their reports with a fine-tooth comb, expose the inconsistencies and their problematic use of questionable data,” one senior official said.

“We discovered during the Gaza operation and the Second Lebanon War that these organizations come in with a very strong agenda, and because they claim to have some kind of halo around them, they receive a status that they don’t deserve,” he said.

Recently, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had said that his ministry was currently involved in a reform that would place a much greater emphasis on dealing with NGOs. (ANI)

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Persistent and serious human right violations continue in Zimbabwe: Amnesty

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Harare, June 19 (ANI): Zimbabwe continues to face human rights violations on a “persistent and serious” scale, as elements in the nation’s newly formed coalition are still using violence as a tool to crush democratic voices, Amnesty International has said.

“Persistent and serious human rights violations continue. Some elements of Zanu-PF see use of violence as a legitimate tool to crush political opponents and retain power and are paying only lip service to reforms, biding their time until the next elections,” The Telegraph quoted Amnesty International Secretary General, Irene Khan, as saying.

It is the human rights organization’s first visit to the country in a decade, but Khan says the virtually improved political climate must pave way for socio economic reforms.

“The human rights situation in Zimbabwe is precarious and the socio- economic conditions are desperate for the vast majority of Zimbabweans. The lack of clear commitment of some parts of government are real obstacles that need to be confronted by the top leadership of Zimbabwe,” she said.

Khan said the coalition between Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic change, after a violence-wracked election, had failed to reform the police, army or security forces.

The unity government led by aging dictator completely “ignores human rights concerns for the sake of political expediency,” she said.

Her comments clearly reflect how badly perceptions of Mugabe have changed since he was seen as a freedom fighter in the 1970s, when the then Rhodesia was ruled by Ian Smith’s racist government.

The “culture of impunity” in Zimbabwe persisted from that time, Khan said, when Amnesty classed Mugabe as a prisoner of conscience. (ANI)

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7000 prisoners awarded capital punishment in Pak : Amnesty international

May 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 29 (ANI): About 7000 prisoners have been awarded the death sentence in Pakistan, among which 36 were awarded the capital punishment last year alone, the international human rights organization, Amnesty International has said.

The international organization, its annual report for the year 2009, said that a total of 236 prisoners were awarded death sentences, but only 36 of them could be actually hanged to death, The News reports.

The report further stated that at least 1102 persons are missing from Balochistan, and the committee formed to recover those missing has only managed to gather information about 43 persons.

It may be noted that last year, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had advocated substituting the death penalty with life imprisonment.

President Asif Ali Zardari, however, issued an ordinance canceling Gilani’s orders and recommending death sentence for cyber crimes too. (ANI)

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Pakistani government fiddling as NWFP burns: Amnesty International

April 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Peshawar, Apr.24 (ANI): Concerned at the plight of thousands of people who are at the mercy of the ‘abusive and repressive’ Taliban in the NWFP’s Buner district following the insurgent’s invasion of the region, the international human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) has severely criticized the Pakistan Government for its callous attitude towards the issue.

“The Pakistani government is fiddling as the North-West Frontier Province burns,” AI’s Asia-Pacific director Sam Zarifi said.

“The government has not given any sense of how it intends to protect the rights of hundreds of thousands of people who are now subject to the repressive rule of the Taliban, just in the shadow of the capital,” a statement issued by the organization stated.

The statement further stated that the people of the region needed support from the government, but certainly do not want any inconclusive military offensive.

“The people of Buner are desperate for government support, but they don’t want another inconclusive army operation that destroys what it can’t protect,” The Daily Times quoted the statement, as saying. (ANI)

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Amnesty International condemns UN racism conference boycott

April 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London – Amnesty International Monday condemned the decision by leading nations to boycott the Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva and urged governments not to “politicize” the meeting.

In a public statement on the conference issued in London, Amnesty said it was “dismayed” that Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland had decided to “disengage from” the conference.

The human rights organization said it also “regrets that Italy and the United States have confirmed their decisions to stay outside the Review Conference.”

The withdrawal of Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland and the refusal of Italy and the US to join the conference was “very disappointing in light of the long and difficult negotiations” required to reach agreement, said Amnesty.

“True conviction in combating racism requires governments to be there to stand up for what is right and to reject forcefully what is objectionable,” said the statement.

Amnesty International urged all governments participating in the Durban Review Conference to remain engaged.

“Governments committed to combating racism and a successful Review Conference must strenuously resist and respond to any renewed efforts to politicize the Conference or to detract from the over-riding objective of addressing all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia or related intolerance in all parts of the world,” it said. (dpa)

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China announces human rights action plan

April 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Beijing – China has published an action plan to protect the rights of its citizens, including protecting detained crime suspects from torture and forced confessions, the official Xinhua news agency reported Monday. In addition, the 54-page plan is to extend citizens’ rights to express complaints against injustices and arbitrary treatment, the report said.

In the plan, the government of China said the country of 1.3 billion people “has a long road ahead in its efforts to improve its human rights situation,” but that it would continue to “raise the level of ensuring people’s civil and political rights.”

The document follows the recent deaths of several detainees in police custody. It states that physical and verbal abuse of detainees as well as the forced extraction of confessions are illegal, and further provides means for detainees to complain of abuse in writing as well as obtaining access to legal representation.

The plan however gives precedence to rights to “subsistence and development” over political rights.

In accordance to these economic rights, the plan foresees the creation of 18 million jobs in the cities by 2010, a 6-per-cent increase in net income for nearly 800 million people in the countryside as well as increasing the number of people with medical insurance and pensions.

Despite strict censorship in China, the action plan states that journalists are to have the “right to gather materials, criticize, comment and publish.”

The international human rights organization Reporters Without Borders criticizes China as the country with the greatest number of journalists, cyber-dissidents, internet users and activists detained for demanding freedom of expression. (dpa)

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