AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Group 23, Houston
NEWSLETTER
FEBRUARY 2008

P.O. Box 130901, Houston, TX 77219-0901
281-587-5386
http://www.amnestyhouston.org
mail@amnestyhouston.org

Monthly meeting first Wednesday of every month (except holidays).

NEWS AND NOTES

Monthly Meeting Agenda:

       Introductions
       Reports by Coordination Groups:
       Group case (Avdo Palic)
       Death Penalty
       Radio Committee
       Stop Violence Against Women Campaign
       Denounce Torture Campaign
       South Asian Regional Action Network (SARAN)
       Refugees
       Out Front Campaign
       Who Will Bring Letter Next Meeting
Old Business:
       New POC Case?
       Houston International Festival
New Business:
       Texas State Meeting
       Rolling Forum
 

Local Group 23 News:

• Madeline Latorre and Phivan Wright tabled at the TCADP 20008 annual conference. Phivan was also a resource person for one of the conference workshops (chapter building and developing).
• Phivan Wright gave two talks at Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church in The Woodlands, at the request of Anne Geyer, Group 516 coordinator.

• Phivan Wright would like to have someone assist her with tabling the concerts. It would entail getting volunteers to sit at the table, communication with the venue and AI concert ladies and making sure that someone picks up the tabling materials. If you are interested, please contact Phivan at pvlwright@mindswithoutborders.org.
• We also have openings for Group Coordinator, Refugee Committee coordinator and New Member coordinator.

Join us at the 3rd Annual Amnesty International Texas State Meeting for a day of innovative workshops and discussions on various human rights topics, including torture, international justice and accountability, and the death penalty. The meeting will take place at the University of Texas - Austin campus on Saturday, Feb. 23. This year, we will be offering an Augusto Boal Image-Theatre workshop as well as a training geared specifically towards local group members. Below is the schedule for the day's meeting:


9:00 – 9:50 Registration*

10:00 – 10:20 Welcome

10:30 - 12:00 Workshop Block I
• National Week of Student Action – Denounce Torture
• Local Group Leadership Training – Part I
• Deepening Concepts, Strengthening Commitment: Using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to Support AI Abolition Work – Part I

12:00 – 1:15 Lunch Roundtable Discussions
• Amnesty & Human Rights 101
• Managing a Healthy Group
• Campaign to Save Darfur
• Open Discussion

1:15 – 2:45 Workshop Block II
• International Justice and Accountability
• Local Group Leadership Training – Part II
• Deepening Concepts, Strengthening Commitment: Using Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to Support AI Abolition Work – Part II

2:45 – 3:00 Break

3:00 – 4:00 Speaker



The Registration Fee* ($5 – students/limited income; $10 – everyone else) helps to offset the cost for food, conference materials, speakers, etc.)

The great Texas sun is rising on a cool summer morning as the Rev. Carroll Pickett, a minister who once ushered condemned men into the execution chamber and watched them die, speaks of redemption. His Sunday school students, middle-aged and elderly couples from a gated community just north of Houston, contemplate the message of repentance given by the former prison chaplain of Texas’ most notorious penitentiary, a prison whose name is synonymous with hard time: Huntsville.

Pickett, a Presbyterian minister, wears a mint-green suit and a tie dotted with gold crosses. Tucked under his arm is a hand-tooled leather case containing a Bible, a gift from the inmates who once sought his counsel and lent their voices to his prison choirs. During the course of his career, this soft-spoken man with a good-ole-boy twang has witnessed prison officials pump poison into the veins of 95 men.

Pickett reads aloud the warning delivered by an angel in the final book of the Bible, Revelation: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot . . . So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.”

“In other words, get off the fence,” Pickett tells his class. “Every Christian has got to get off the fence.”

It took decades—nearly a lifetime— but Pickett made that jump himself. After his retirement in 1995, he spoke out against the death penalty. Since then, his unique insider’s perspective and “Texas gentleman” manner has made him a potent force within the movement to abolish the death penalty. Few men can claim to have witnessed the first execution by lethal injection in the world, as he did 25 years ago. Even fewer have sat in prayer, listened to the confessions and final requests of men on the last day of their lives, heard their final words and their last gasp.

In Pickett’s 2002 book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, he described in poignant detail his personal journey from death penalty supporter to ardent abolitionist. A documentary film about the possibly wrongful execution of Carlos De Luna and Pickett’s final moments with him, At the Death House Door, is slated to air on the Independent Film Channel in the spring. Pickett has testified before Texas lawmakers, taken his abolitionist message to Rotary clubs and to big-city and small-town congregations alike. On an issue that imposes absolute and final judgment, he injects nuance.

“I was for [the death penalty] because I saw the injustice,” explained Pickett after Sunday school. “I began to change because the system was so bad. I saw 17-year-old killers and the mentally retarded [executed], and the fact that nobody had any education.”

In 2002, six years after Pickett’s retirement from the Huntsville Prison, the Supreme Court ruled against executing the mentally retarded; in 2005, the Court exempted juvenile offenders from capital punishment. In September, as Texas carried out its 400th execution, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether the mixture administered in lethal injections amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment,” thus violating the Constitution. The case will be argued in February 2008.

Amnesty International is gravely concerned by the potential implications of the decision by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Saadi v UK, handed down on 29 January. The decision appears to give states a broad discretion to detain people who are fleeing persecution, and are often in fear for their lives, for no other reason than the administrative convenience of the state in which they have sought asylum or international protection.

Amnesty International urges the UK, and other states who might view this decision as a green light to the routine detention of asylum-seekers, to recognize instead that detention should always be a last resort, and that it can only be justified in the most exceptional circumstances. Seeking asylum is not a crime, and it should not be treated as if it were.

The UK and other states should build a strong presumption against detention into the system for deciding claims for asylum. Any decision to detain an individual who has sought asylum must be based on a detailed assessment of that individual, including an assessment of their personal history and of the risk that they might abscond. There should be no routine detention of whole categories of asylum-seekers; detention must be a last resort, not a first response.

Amnesty International recognizes that it is in the interest of both states and individual asylum-seekers that claims for asylum or international protection should be assessed as promptly as they can thoroughly and fairly be. The organization nonetheless considers that a legitimate policy objective -- ensuring that claims are processed promptly -- does not justify the routine deprivation of the liberty of asylum-seekers.

In this light Amnesty International welcomes the strong and compelling arguments put forward by the minority of judges of the European Court of Human Rights who dissented from part of this decision (which was reached on an 11-6 split between the judges of the Court).

The six dissenting judges described the position adopted by the majority of the judges, that the detention of individual asylum-seekers was in their own best interests, since it facilitated the prompt processing of their claims, as "exceedingly dangerous". They criticized the failure of the judges in the majority to give proper consideration to the question of whether less intrusive alternatives than detention were available to the UK, and went on to note (emphasis added):

As regards detention generally [that is, in contexts other than the detention of asylum-seekers], the requirements of necessity and proportionality oblige the State to furnish relevant and sufficient grounds for the measure taken and to consider other less coercive measures, and also to give reasons why those measures are deemed insufficient to safeguard the private or public interests underlying the deprivation of liberty. Mere administrative expediency or convenience will not suffice. We fail to see what value or higher interest can justify the notion that these fundamental guarantees of individual liberty in a State governed by the rule of law cannot or should not apply to the detention of asylum seekers.

Amnesty International shares the concerns of the dissenting judges. Asylum-seekers are entitled to the same level of protection against arbitrary detention as everyone else, and they must not be detained solely because it is convenient for the state in which they have sought asylum or international protection while it assesses their claims.

Amnesty International is deeply concerned by yesterday's decision by Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz that police officers who shot and killed 13 demonstrators at the beginning of October 2000 will not be indicted. Twelve Israeli Arabs and one Palestinian were shot dead while protesting the killings of other Palestinians by Israeli security forces in Jerusalem and in the rest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at the start of what became known as the al-Aqsa intifada (uprising).

The Attorney General's legal opinion, issued on 27 January 2008, effectively endorses a decision to close all investigations into the case made by the Police Investigations Department of the Ministry of Justice in September 2005. That decision, like the Attorney General's opinion, was made despite the conclusions of the Orr Commission, which Ehud Barak, the Prime Minister at the time, set up to investigate the events surrounding the killings of the Israeli Arab demonstrators in October 2000. As such, they are a further example of the impunity routinely afforded by the Israeli authorities to members of the security forces who resort to the excessive use of lethal force in a manner that is both inconsistent with international standards and violates Israel's obligations under international law to respect the right to life.

The Orr Commission took almost three years to complete its work and reported in September 2003 that in a number of the incidents it had reviewed "the police reaction was excessive given the circumstances, since there was no real danger that required a lethal response" and that "the police response escalated, in some cases to the point of using lethal ammunition, as an almost immediate reaction after one of the policemen or commanders was injured by stones thrown at them from the unruly crowd" (paras 44-47)

An Amnesty International delegation visited the scenes of several of the shootings in early October 2000 within days of their occurrence. The delegation, which included Dr Stephen Males, a former senior police officer in the United Kingdom and a specialist in sensitive public order policing, concluded that Israeli police used excessive force and resorted to live fire when neither the lives of security forces nor others were at serious risk, and unlawfully killed demonstrators. Amnesty International also received evidence that Israeli security forces had impeded access of the wounded to medical assistance.

There was no indication that the demonstrators who were shot had used firearms or posed any serious risk to the lives of well-equipped and protected Israeli police, even though some protestors apparently tried to make petrol bombs and many threw stones. The Israeli forces invariably had taken up well-defended positions at a distance from the demonstrators in blockhouses, behind wire and were equipped with riot shields. Police generally used more extreme military-type measures rather than policing methods involving the protection of human lives and although a wide variety of non-lethal means of dispersing the demonstrators were available to them, they rapidly escalated their response and resorted to lethal weaponry -- plastic-coated metal bullets and live ammunition. As Dr Males commented: "These are good tactics if one wants to wipe out an enemy, they are not policing".

In other contexts, the Israeli police have shown themselves capable of dispersing violent demonstrations without using live fire. Israeli police have faced a number of violent demonstrations by Jewish groups -- for example, those mounted by Ultra-Orthodox Jews in July-August 1999 in Jerusalem -- but have never used live fire or even rubber bullets against such demonstrators, preferring to use non-lethal means to disperse them.

Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Israeli authorities to ensure that members of the security forces alleged to be responsible for excessive use of force which resulted in unlawful killings are brought to justice in trials that are consistent with international standards of fairness; and to make reparation, including payment of compensation, to the victims' families.

Amnesty International today issued an urgent action calling on the government of Kenya to protect several Kenyan human rights defenders and activists who have received serious death threats.

The group, which includes six men and three women -- some of whom are prominent members of human rights organizations -- have received a number of anonymous threats in the form of text messages, phone calls and emails. They are now taking precautions for their safety, including moving, and not making any public statements.

The threats include accusations that they are "traitors" to their ethnicity.

All but one of the activists are of Kikuyu ethnicity.

The individuals have all spoken out about what they believe to have been irregularities in Kenya's recent elections or about human rights abuses being committed by police and armed gangs -- including Kikuyu gangs -- throughout the country.

Four of the human rights defenders are also named in an anonymously authored leaflet that has been circulated within the Kikuyu community. The leaflet lists more than 25 people by name, calling them "traitors [who] live among us in peace", and issues a veiled threat that they should be killed.

Amnesty International called on the Kenyan government to ensure the safety and protection of all human rights defenders in Kenya, investigate the threats being made against them and bring those found responsible to justice.

"Military commissions are a tool of justice" -- US Department of Defense, 24 August 2004

Today, 5 December 2007, Salim Ahmed Hamdan is facing a pre-trial military commission hearing at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, more than three years after the first commission system he appeared before was abandoned, and more than six years after he was taken into US custody.

To look back over the past six years of Salim Hamdan's life is to trace the failure of the USA to put respect for human rights and the rule of law at the heart of its response to the attacks of 11 September 2001. Indeed, the US government has effectively treated this Yemeni national as little more than a human guinea pig in its experiment with military commissions, the "tool of justice" it is still trying to wield in Guantánamo.

Salim Hamdan was captured by Northern Alliance forces in November 2001 during the international armed conflict in Afghanistan. He was sold into US custody, and held in Afghanistan for several months. He would later tell his US military lawyer that during this time he was "beaten, that he was held for about three days in a bound position, cold... dragged, kicked, punched".

According to his current lawyers, US forces in Afghanistan initially designated Salim Hamdan as an "Enemy Prisoner of War", consistent with US Army Regulation 190-8 and the Third Geneva Convention. In a memorandum issued on 7 February 2002, however, President Bush determined that no alleged Taliban or al-Qa'ida member taken into US custody would qualify as a prisoner of war, and that Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions -- prohibiting among other things unfair trials, torture, cruel treatment and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" -- would not apply either. This presidential decision had followed advice from the then White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, that such a decision would "preserve flexibility" in a "new kind of war" which "places a high premium on...the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors" and "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners". He also advised that it would "substantially" reduce the threat of future domestic criminal prosecutions of US agents for war crimes.

By transforming detainees into individuals from whom information could be taken rather than to whom process was due led to the removal of these detentions from the scrutiny of the courts, the erosion of protections against torture and other ill-treatment, and the creation of administrative review schemes and military commission trial systems lacking independence from the executive and that could rely upon information obtained under unlawful conditions.

Salim Hamdan was transferred to Guantánamo in June 2002 as an "enemy combatant", a status as used by the USA that is unrecognized in international law. In July 2003, he was made eligible for trial by military commission under a Military Order signed by President Bush on 13 November 2001.

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