HumanRightsTV

Downshall Centre Closure: Disgraceful abuse of vulnerable people.

2011-03-18T13:51:00.002Z

News from Redbridge CVS

Concern at Downshall Centre Closure, Petition Launched
17 March 2011

Voluntary and community groups are deeply concerned about the closure of the Downshall Centre.

The Centre is owned by the Council and is used by over a dozen groups for a wide range of activities. Now the Council plans to close it so that they can use the building for a "free school". Most of the community groups using the centre say they will not be able to afford space elsewhere and will have nowhere to go.

Lofty Matters: Media Impartiality in Middle East Reporting.

2011-02-24T05:18:00.007Z

by
Felix Columbidae
author, poet, journalist, middile east expert, experienced liar

Often those who support the Palestinians make ludicrous assertions about media bias and even go so far as to make outrageous claims that the Israeli government are a bunch of proven psychotic liars. Recent events in Gaza and the Israel prove beyond any reasonable doubt the lack of merit such claims hold.

Screen shot of BBC report into dreadful rocket attack.

The above article by the wholly impartial BBC details a dreadful rocket attack in which absolutely no-one at all was hurt. This atrocity is adequately and fairly covered by a BBC journalist who also tells us that the honest Israelis reasonably retaliated with an aircraft strike that injured three militants.

As we know, everyone in Gaza is a militant so that is probably how the pilot was able to state that those injured by the missile launched from his aircraft were definitely militants. The journalist reporting, one would assume from Israel, would have been able to verify this report of the known militancy of the victims because, one would assume, the honest Israeli military media advisors would have affirmed the injured as militant.

Let's be honest ourselves, if they weren't militant before the missile injured them they probably were after they started bleeding. Therefore the report that they were militant, at the time of writing, has to be seen as accurate and responsible journalism.

The report goes on to state that this thoroughly outrageous and unprovoked rocket attack, which fortunately injured no-one, appears to have co-incidentally happened a few hours after a tank opened fire in Gaza and killed a Palestinian, almost certainly a militant. The biased and untrustworthy Palestinians' have suggested that 11 other people were injured including three children. Perhaps this will help to stop the children growing up as militants.

As the report helpfully explains this tank action was the result of militant action:

"The Israeli army said a group of militants had been planting explosives on the border in an attempt to attack their patrols."

Thankfully we receive the full truth of the situation from the Israeli Army so there is no need for any further journalistic enquiry. Clearly it now transpires that there is also a high probability that the children involved were actually militants as well otherwise the tank would never have taken the risk of opening fire with them around.

The unbiased BBC journalism quite rightly leaves the issue of one dead militant, seven injured militants and three injured militant children as covered and then goes on to focus on the damage to the Israeli house. The article adds a description of the type of missile used, information our clever journalist has obviously checked, and includes a shocking picture of a hole in the street. Quite dreadful imagery there as people look into the hole clearly in a state of shock that such damage can wantonly be done to an Israeli road.

Thankfully for transparency and openess the report then goes on to make sure we all understand the truth behind the situation in the Mddle East.

"The Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Israel had largely halted hostilities since the 2009 war in Gaza, but skirmishes often break out around the border area."

I am sure that many of us will be very grateful to the BBC for the impartial way it clears up the confusion many people feel about this tragic conflict. Like many others I thought that Hamas was the democratically elected government of Gaza, a mistake I have probably gleaned from listening to reports from the discredited and bias reporting of Al Jezeera or the like. Clearly they are just an Islamist Group up to no good and it is best they are reported as such and thus maintain the highest of BBC journalist standards.

We have a lot to thank the editors at the BBC for in their tireless effort to ensure these incredible standards of journalistic craft which are the mainstay of the legend which is BBC impartiality. You would have to be a complete amateur incompetent to represent an Islamist Group as an elected government.

In addition I was labouring under the opinion that the massive mechanised troop assault with full scale state of the art air support against a civilian population, including the use of illegal phosphorus bombing, was a massive breach of Human Rights and International Law. My debt to the impartial BBC and the high journalistic standards it employs only increases as I now realise that the killing of defenceless women and children is actually a legitimate "war". Once again I must have been misled by the false reporting of such suspect organisations such as the United Nations.

This should be an object lesson to us all to be very, very careful about who we listen to and believe. There are a lot of cynical liars out there who will exploit our good faith and try to trick us into believing that in some way Israel is the "bad guy" when it is an innocent democracy, excluding its militant Arab citizens from voting of course, just trying to keep the peace.

There is no greater dishonest broker at the moment than Ken O'Keefe. This well known trouble maker is the same person who assaulted the peace loving forces of the Israeli military and police by hitting his head recklessly against their batons when they tried to save the Mavi Marmara from committing a crime in international waters. You simply cannot trust a word this man says and the recent examples of his reports from Gaza are clearly fabrications made on a film set in downtown Hollywood.

Thankfully again, the BBC tells it like it is! Click on the screenshot below to see the truth about the credibility of BBC reporting.

The BBC; reporting on the Middle East with fairness, openness and transparency, covering all the major issues in the region.

ASNET Designs for Web Site

2011-02-21T01:15:00.003Z

I am placing the templates for the ASNET web iste design here so that the members of ASNET can get a good look at them. This is just so there is a central image scheme giving an idea of the colours. Click on each image to see a larger version of the image, then click back to return to this blog page.

Version 01

Version 02

Version 03

At this time Mike favours Version 03 and Akane likes Version 02. This merely illustrates the fact that colour choice is truly subjective, except where the scheme has been devised by someone who is colour illiterate, and the choice for the charity is really down to making a decision.

Aboriginal Eyewitness to Murder of Bingo Dawson Threatened by Vancouver Police

2011-02-12T00:12:00.005Z

The following article has been supplied by Kevin Annet. I first came into contact with Kevin after I was on the Tony Legend show on Radio Manchester on Line in the autumn of 2010. Kevin was also a contributor that night and after the show we spoke and have been in communication ever since.

Indigenous Rights is not just important to HumanRightsTV but is the inspiration behind its creation and the work is dedicated by the team to Indigenous peoples everywhere and specifically to the memory of Aunty Maureen Watson and the Indigenous Australians. Therefore we are very pleased to help support the voice of the indigenous people in Canada.

This article is disturbing because, as an Englishman, there is a perception of Canadians of being everything Americans espouse to be. The idea that police beat up a person and he subsequently dies from his injuries would probably just receive a nod of the head if it was reported from the U.S.A. but that this story emanates from Vancouver is a bit of a shocker. But then we are talking about the abuse of indigenous peoples and that is a story which is consistent throughout all of the world originally settled by the British Empire.

The key campaign Kevin works on is the abuse of children in church schools. I know from my time in Australia that this same story is repeated there. The abduction of indigenous Australian children, as a matter of state policy, and their "training" in church run schools was the arena of dreadful abuse and suffering. There is evidence that this practice was funded by church organisations based in the U.K. and so as British citizens it simply is not good enough for us to say this is an Australian or Canadian matter.

Indigenous peoples suffered every form of genocide defined by the United Nations at the hands of our ancestors. Further, the wealth of our countries, in part, a great part, and the comfort of our lives today rests on the back of our historic exploitation of indigenous peoples in order to gain control of the resources in their lands. There is no disconnection from this past, there is no separation from this shame and there is no escaping our responsibility today to see that justice is not given but delivered to the indigenous peoples of our planet.

Jack Adams
Tokyo 2011

"I gave Kevin Annett his Indian name, Eagle Strong Voice, in 2004 when I adopted him into our Anishinabe Nation. He carries that name proudly because he is doing the job he was sent to do, to tell his people of their wrongs. He speaks strongly and with truth. He speaks for our stolen and murdered children. I ask everyone to listen to him and welcome him." Chief Louis Daniels - Whispers Wind Elder, Turtle Clan, Anishinabe Nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Aboriginal Eyewitness to Murder of Bingo Dawson Threatened by Vancouver Police
A Special report by Kevin D. Annett

Johnny Bingo Dawson

February 10, 2011:
Vancouver, Canada The sole witness to the deadly beating of a front line indigenous activist by policemen last year in Vancouver says he's been told he'll be arrested if he speaks about it. Rick Lavallee of the Cree Nation claims that a Vancouver policeman came to his home last week and threatened to have him arrested if Rick persisted in his claim that he witnessed a group of Vancouver policemen beat activist Johnny Bingo Dawson so badly that he died two days later, on December 6, 2009. In a videotaped interview yesterday in Vancouver, Rick recalled, I got threatened by a police sergeant ... and he came to my place and he asked me what I knew happened about Johnny Bingo and he said he didn't believe me. Then he told me he could arrest me ... He asked me if I had any papers about Johnny Bingo and he asked me about Kevin Annett's files. When asked about what he witnessed happen to Bingo, Rick said, I seen four police officers beat him up behind the police station, one sergeant and some rookies. This is sickening what they're doing now to people.

Rick Lavallee far left Kevin Annett far right

Another aboriginal witness, who wishes to remain unnamed after hearing of Rick's harassment, stated today, They said Bingo died of being drunk but I seen him the day before he died and he was sober. He was hurting too much from that beating they gave him to drink. He had front teeth missing, his shoulder was out of joint, his face was all bloody and his nose got broken. He said some cops did it to him. The Vancouver Coroner's office took five months to issue their report on Bingo's death. Their report cites as his cause of death "alcohol withdrawal". The accompanying toxicology report, however, states that no alcohol or drugs were found in Bingo's blood. Bingo Dawson was a targeted man. A survivor of systematic torture at Anglican and United Church residential schools, he won the hatred of local police by regularly speaking out about their brutality and racism against Indians. He also led protests and occupations of downtown Vancouver churches to demand the return of children killed in Indian residential schools. I personally saw a Vancouver police sergeant threaten Bingo at the corner of Main and Hastings, about two months before he died. The cop said to Bingo, "You're a fucking troublemaker and people like you go missing." Perhaps this was the same police sergeant who recently threatened to arrest Rick Lavallee if he continues to speak about Bingo's fatal beating. The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) has been sent copies of Rick's statement and will be asked to investigate the apparent involvement of Vancouver police in the murder of Johnny Bingo Dawson: and many other native people. More people die in police custody in Vancouver than in any city in Canada - and most of the victims are aboriginal. ITCCS investigators will be working across Canada starting in early March to gather evidence for possible criminal indictments against policemen, church and government officials. The ITCCS de jure proceedings will commence on September 12, 2011 in London, England, coinciding with local ITCCS forums across Canada and the world. For more information see: www.itccs.org (still under construction) and contact the ITCCS at genocidetribunal@yahoo.ca 10 February 2011 .............................................................................................................................. See the evidence of Genocide in Canada at www.hiddennolonger.com Watch Kevin's award-winning documentary film UNREPENTANT on his website www.hiddenfromhistory.org "We will bring to light the hidden works of darkness and drive falsity to the bottomless pit. For all doctrines founded in fraud or nursed by fear shall be confounded by Truth." - Kevin's ancestor Peter Annett, writing in The Free Inquirer, October 17, 1761, just before being imprisoned by the English crown for "blasphemous libel"

Miscarriage of Justice: Sue May articulates a catalogue of errors.

2011-02-11T16:23:00.009Z

When you first meet Sue May, as I did at the Innocence Network UK Conference at Freshfields last November, she seems a completely unremarkable woman. Quietly spoken, northern accent, casually dressed, the sort of woman you would expect to have a history of family, home and traditional English community stability. The last thing you would expect is that she is a convicted murderer.

That is exactly what Sue May is, legally, to this day, a murderer who has served a sentence and been released. The fact that she has maintained her innocence at every single step of the way is just the first opening you receive into the life of what is a truly remarkable human being. Not remarkable because she has a great achievement to her name, not remarkable because she has attained a celebrity status on a desert island performing inane tasks for the benefits of television ratings, not remarkable because she is a convicted murderer but wholly remarkable because against the full force of the state, the police and the legal system this woman has stood firm and stands firm. She says she is innocent and she will not rest until the state says so as well.

The energy that position takes to maintain is formidable. However it is the articulacy with which she presses her claim that really leads an audience not just to question but to stand up and applaud as they did at Freshfields last November. This was an audience of legal professionals, legal academics, legal journalists and law students and so to see them stand as one and applaud this woman has to tell you something about the case she is making, after all the audience is not one pre-disposed to accept testimony on face value!

Sue May positively condemns the Criminal Case Review Commission and exposes the hopeless conflict of interest it has allowed itself to be neutered by. Sue May questions the process of prosecution, directly challenges the veracity of the police investigation and positively persecutes the appeals process. Her insights into the psychological processing of inmates, like the testimony of Paul Blackburn, is a withering condemnation of the system. Yet the most shocking thing about Sue May is not the story she tells but who she is and who her history says she is.

Paul Blackburn, by his own admission was a scallywag, a bit of trouble to all around him, in many ways a target waiting to be hit. In many other miscarriage of justice cases the victims will openly tell you that they are no angels but that they did not commit the crime they were convicted of. This allows us (the general unconvicted public) the room to shrug our shoulders and say, "Well there is no smoke without fire and if they had been good boys perhaps they wouldn't have gotten themselves into hot water." Sue May exposes such thinking as the unwarranted smugness it actually is.

If what Sue May is saying is true, and we will leave you to decide on her testimony which you will be able to see here, then she was sent to prison for murder through the actions of a police force that lied, a police officer that tampered with the evidence, a legal defence that was incompetent and a faith in British justice which was unfounded. In other words, if it could happen to Sue May it can happen to any one of us. Sue May proves that you do not have to have a "bad boy" past to be channelled into prison on bad police practice, tampered evidence and an inadequate legal process. That is why Sue May is a remarkable person, because in any other life she would probably be, like most of us, unremarkable.

Everyone should be concerned about the implications of this case, especially the legal profession. A profession which protects its mistakes at the expense of its integrity is not a structure which will survive a world in which information is freely available, a world where people will demonstrate to bring about democracy and a world where transparency is becoming the mantra not the sub codicil. If the legal profession is not up to this challenge, the challenge Sue May presents, then the dangers should be apparent to all who believe that the rule of law is what defines civilisation.

Click on image above to play video
See Sue May continue her talk.

ROMA CHILDREN PERISH IN FIRE IN ITALY

2011-02-11T02:46:00.002Z

The following article was published by the Everyone group. This is a very disturbing article about the suggested persecution of Roma people in Italy. What we find absolutely incredible beyond belief is the claim that after a rascist firebomb attack on a Roma camp in which children died, the parents were convicted and imprisoned for child neglect. The whole tone of this article is deeply disturbing and investigation of just exactly what is going on needs to be pressed home.

We need to remember that we are in a time of severe financial hardship, governments are in danger of going bankrupt and currencies are moving towards collapse. This is exactly the scenario which brought the Second World War into being. Whilst global conflict might be an attractive economic and demographic solution to some twisted minds within elite hierarchies surely it is not a future any human being with a soul can sign up to.

Rome, Italy, February 10th, 2011

URGENT ACTION FOR THE ATTENTION OF EU INSTITUTIONS AND UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

by EveryOne Group - www.everyonegroup.com

ROMA CHILDREN PERISH IN FIRE IN ITALY: EVERYONE GROUP, "THE CHILDREN WERE ABANDONED BY THE ITALIAN INSTITUTIONS"

THE NGO CRITICIZES THE MAYOR OF ROME, MR. GIANNI ALEMANNO: "TAKING CHILDREN FROM THEIR LEGITIMATE PARENTS IS THE “FINAL SOLUTION TO THE ROMA QUESTION”

The parents and 18-year-old sister of Raul, Fernando, Sebastian and Patrick, the four Roma children burnt alive in the fire on February 6th, in Rome (the cause of which has still to be established) have been accused of "abandonment of minors", a punishable offence under Article 591 of the Italian Penal Code. The prosecutor's office in Rome announced yesterday that they have opened a case against the victims’ family for the aforementioned offence.

"To accuse the children's parents and sister - who are already distraught over their death - of neglecting them” say Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau, co-presidents of the humanitarian organization EveryOne Group, "would be a serious judicial contradiction. This form of persecution has been applied to Roma people several times before in Italy: we remember the emblematic case of the fire in Livorno, where the parents of four children who perished in the fire in the squatter camp (presumably caused by a petrol bomb - the racist group GAPE claimed responsibility for the attack) were imprisoned, prevented from attending their children's funeral, and forced to plea bargain in order to avoid a conviction that would have sent them to jail for several years. This methodology, which we hope will not be applied to this family (which has already been torn apart by the loss of four well-loved children) would represent a subversion of the dynamics of a tragedy caused by social exclusion and racial discrimination" say the human rights defenders. "We must remember that in the early days of the Holocaust the Jews were starved, deprived of their property and work. Forced to beg, steal and send their children out to seek means of survival, the Jews were accused of being thieves, beggars, idle and neglectful of their children. Rumours that over time led to their extermination. Today we witness a similar persecution of the Roma people, and it is not only human rights defenders who say so, but also Holocaust survivors such as Piero Terracina, Nedo Fiano and Tamara Deuel, Jews who experienced for themselves the persecution and the denial of all fundamental rights.”

The Mayor of Rome, Mr. Gianni Alemanno, after hearing about the fire, gave the Roma community an ultimatum: either you accept the conditions imposed by the local authorities or "we may decide to take your children into custody", at the same time ruling out any possibility for the Roma to have access to public housing. "Taking children from their legitimate parents" say the representatives of EveryOne Group, "is nothing but the ‘final solution to the Roma question’, where Roma families who are persecuted suffer the further anguish of having their children taken from them. Such laws ignore the rights of children to grow up in their own family, aided by the institutions to counteract poverty and social exclusion".

EveryOne Group asks the Public Prosecutor of Rome not to condemn and pursue the parents and the sister of the four victims, and appeals to the Italian President, Mr. Giorgio Napolitano, to ensure that, after his commendable words suited to the occasion, the Roma family really is protected from further discrimination. "We ask Mrs. Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Mrs. Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, to ensure that the Italian authorities and institutions do not press legal charges against the family of the four children, but instead protect and offer them concrete help, along with all the other Roma people living in unacceptable conditions of hardship in a civilized country. In Italy there have already been numerous cases of children being taken from Roma families due to poverty” conclude the co-presidents of EveryOne, "yet the real neglect is perpetrated by the Italian institutions, who carry out inhumane evictions, failing in their duty to supply assistance and protection in cases of severe hardship, both in terms of sanitation and safety. We recall that only a few days ago in Florence, a Romanian Roma man forced to sleep in the open - among the indifference of the local authorities - died from cardiovascular complications from pre-existing pneumonia. The Italian Red Cross has long been proposing concrete and effective plans to the institutions for the protection and inclusion of Roma families. These programmes have been developed in cooperation with specialized organizations in this delicate social emergency: it is now time to implement them.”

For further information:

EveryOne Group

+39 393 4010237 :: +39 331 3585406

info@everyonegroup.com :: www.everyonegroup.com

Miscarriage of Justice: Unique Event

2011-02-07T08:53:00.003Z

HumanRightsTV has been working with Dr Michael Naughton and Gabi Tan of the Bristol University Innocence Project for several years now. Just before Christmas Dr Naughton suggested we consider recording a unique event, a gathering in Cincinatti, Ohio of exonorees from all over the world. This will be the first, and in the opinion of Dr Naughton (due to the logistics) possibly the last time such an event will happen.

We felt that this was a very interesting legal and sociological moment and were interested straight away. With Naughton's help we have spoken with the organiser Professor Mark Godsey and after negotiation received permission to go and record the event. This negotiation took sometime because the privacy of the exonorees is something that has to be protected at all times. Previous experiences with "the media" led Godsey to be highly sensitive about our approach.

However, we were able to not only convince him but demonstrate two things, one, that we are not a "media/journalistic organisation" but historians documenting moment, and two, that we have worked with vulnerable people and victims of miscarriage of justice extensively whilst placing their rights before our own perceived needs. In addition we would be working with the two exonorees who will be attending from this country, Paul Blackburn and Gerry Conlon.

Our intention is to document the journey of these two men as they meet others from different cultures and jurisdictions who have suffered the same fate in life, to be wrongly imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. During the course of this journey Paul and Gerry will share their conversations and discuss how even when released the sentence still remains; who do they turn to for support, only their peers understand their issues.

We need financial support and quickly to make this film happen. We were notified very late in the day regarding this project and now need to raise an amount close to £10,000 to make this happen. That's 1000 people giving £10 or a law firm or a barrister sharing some of their earnings in the belief that miscarriage of justice needs to be addressed and the process of contesting a conviction requires detailed examination.

If you can help us make this important film then we will all be grateful for any support we receive. You can donate on the button on this page or you can contact us at info@humanrightstv.com requesting any further information or ways of paying.

Dr Michael Naughton after the rejection by the Court of Appeal of the recent Simon Hall appeal. Here, Dr Naughton speaks plainly about what appears to be a shocking case of miscarriage of justice where one man is in prison on the most tenuous and discredited of evidence whilst other more compelling evidence remains undisclosed. The issues behind this film are not just of academic or legal interest, they are an issue for a democratic society and the need to create as much material as possible about this issue is pressing.

Jack Adams.

For this journey not to be documented as record

University of Bristol Innocence Project response to Simon Hall judgment by the Court of Appeal

2011-01-21T20:21:00.005Z

Press release issued 21 January 2011
Following a three-day appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice between 7-9 December 2010, the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) handed down its judgment last week dismissing the appeal of Simon Hall and upholding his conviction for the murder of 79-year-old Joan Albert.

The University of Bristol Innocence Project has worked on Simon Hall’s case since 2006 and contributed significantly to the referral of his case back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The University of Bristol Innocence Project first went public with their thoughts on the inherent unreliability of the fibre evidence in the last ever BBC Rough Justice documentary aired in April 2007 and made two specific submissions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on the problem with the fibre evidence during its review.

Simon Hall’s appeal centred on the reliability of the fibres evidence claimed to link him to the murder. Specifically, new defence expert Tiernan Coyle gave evidence that nylon black flock fibres and polyester fibres found in addresses and vehicles relating to Simon Hall, claimed by prosecution expert at trial, Judith Cunnison, to be ‘indistinguishable’ from those found at the scene of crime and the deceased’s body could be discriminated utilising the more sensitive First Derivative technique.

In addition, Coyle also found that the polyester fibres claimed at trial by Cunnison to be ‘green’ are, in fact, carbon black in colour and of much less evidential value than was posited.

Dismissing Simon Hall’s appeal, Lord Justice Pitchford held that: "While we have concluded that the fibre evidence given at trial was incomplete in its description and analysis of the available source material, and in its identification of green polyester fibres, wrong, we are quite satisfied that the scientific support for the assertion that the appellant was the source of the fibres found at the crime scene is compelling. We have no reason to doubt the safety of the jury's verdict and the appeal is dismissed."

click on image to play video

Dr Michael Naughton and Gabe Tan of the University of Bristol Innocence Project said: “For the following reasons we find the decision to uphold Simon Hall’s conviction untenable.

“First, in summing up Cunnison’s evidence at trial, Justice Rafferty noted that ‘tests on the flock, plus the two different polyester fibres…gave extremely strong, robust, scientific evidence that they have originated from a similar source’. However, Coyle proved that Cunnison was wrong in her identification of the colour of the polyester fibres. In fact, what Cunnison described as ‘green’ polyester fibres are carbon black and relatively commonplace, which undermines the probative value of Cunnison’s testimony at trial that underpinned Simon Hall’s conviction. This was acknowledged and accepted by the new prosecution expert, Ray Palmer, during the appeal.

“Second, the only reason Simon Hall was convicted was the claimed strength of the fibre evidence linking him to the murder. Indeed, although there was a wealth of other evidence at the crime scene that was subjected to forensic analysis, including hair and fingerprints, none of it related to Simon Hall. In addition, stomach content analysis and witness accounts from Joan Albert’s neighbours pointed to a much earlier time of death, a time at which concrete alibi evidence proves Simon Hall could not have committed the crime.

“Third, the defence at trial did not seek the opinion of a specialist fibre expert. Instead, a general forensic scientist was consulted who was unable to identify or challenge Cunnison’s errors and, hence, was not called to counter Cunnison’s evidence during the trial. As such, the evidence heard by the jury was misleading and one-sided, to say the least. Whilst we acknowledge that the overriding role of the Court of Appeal is to decide whether or not the conviction is unsafe and not to second guess how the jury would have approached the fresh evidence, it remains highly questionable whether the jury would have reached the same conclusion had they known that the fibres were in fact not indistinguishable as claimed by Cunnison, particularly in light of all of the other evidence that supports Simon Hall’s claim of innocence.

“For these reasons, we fail to understand why the Court of Appeal did not at least order a re-trial and let a jury decide whether Simon Hall is guilty or not with a more complete grasp of the strengths and the weaknesses of the fibre evidence.

“The University of Bristol Innocence Project is critical of the way in which the Criminal Cases Review Commission had handled its review of Simon Hall’s case.

"Private Eye in November 2009, made public that other evidence which could positively prove Simon Hall’s innocence was uncovered by the University of Bristol Innocence Project investigation. This relates to another burglary which occurred on the night of Joan Albert’s murder, just ten minutes away from where she lived.

"Crucially, students uncovered a statement by a witness, who did not give evidence at trial, who identified the murder weapon as similar, if not identical, to the one that had gone missing from the burgled house: it had the same colour handle, length of blade and rivets on the knife handle. Simon Hall, who has evidence that he was out all night with his friends on the night/morning of Joan Albert’s murder could not have committed the burglary and obtain the knife which could have been used to kill her.

"In addition, the schedule of unused material made reference to DNA profile(s) belonging to ‘more than one person’ that were found on the handle of the knife. This DNA evidence has never been disclosed, despite requests from Simon Hall’s original defence solicitor. It is our contention that if it incriminated Simon Hall the DNA profile(s) would have been disclosed and used at trial by the prosecution.

"However, within weeks of the University of Bristol Innocence Project highlighting the existence of this evidence, the Criminal Cases Review Commission announced that it was referring his case back to the Court of Appeal on grounds of the possible unreliability of the fibre evidence.

"But, the Criminal Cases Review Commission did not fully investigate the possible evidential value of the DNA profile(s) and the witness who identified the murder weapon prior to referring Mr Hall’s case.

"This undoubtedly diminished the possible impact that the evidence could have had on the appeal had it been fully explored. As such, although the evidence of the knife and burglary was included as a supplementary ground of appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, it is perhaps not surprising that it did not feature at all in Simon Hall’s appeal.

"The failure to fully investigate the DNA profile(s) and the identification of the murder weapon as stolen from the other burglary highlights the extent to which the criminal justice system is not concerned with innocence or guilt.

"The Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Court of Appeal generally only consider evidence that was not available or adduced at the time of the trial or in previous appeals. Under the existing system the evidence relating to the other burglary will not be able to be used in any subsequent applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission or feature in any future appeals.

"Until such time as the criminal justice system takes claims of innocence seriously and seeks the truth of whether alleged victims of wrongful convictions are innocent or not, it seems that the door is closed on the evidence which could exonerate Simon Hall entirely and potentially even lead to the conviction of the real perpetrator(s) of Joan Albert’s murder."

click on image to play video

Further Information:

The University of Bristol Innocence Project (UoBIP), the first innocence project in the UK, is an extra-curricular pro bono legal clinic which teaches law through working on real cases of alleged wrongful convictions. Established in January 2005 by Dr Michael Naughton, the UoBIP undertakes thorough and objective investigations into cases of prisoners maintaining innocence who have exhausted the normal appeals process and legal aid with the aim of ascertaining the validity of their claims of innocence. Intensely supervised by academic staff and assisted, where appropriate, by forensic scientists and criminal appeal lawyers, the UoBIP assists those who are found to be potentially innocent by making applications and submissions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to support a referral of the case back to the Court of Appeal. The UoBIP is also the founding member of the Innocence Network UK (INUK) which has actively supported the establishment of 30 innocence projects based in universities across England, Scotland and Wales.

Dr Michael Naughton is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He has specialised in the area of wrongful convictions for over a decade and has written extensively on the subject. He is the Founder and Director of the University of Bristol Innocence Project (UoBIP), through which he directs student investigations into real cases of alleged wrongful convictions. He is also the Founder and Director of the Innocence Network UK (INUK) which he established in September 2004 to facilitate casework, research and communications in the area of wrongful convictions.

Ms Gabe Tan is a Research Assistant at the School of Law, University of Bristol. She is the Assistant Director of the University of Bristol Innocence Project (UoBIP) and the Innocence Network UK (INUK). She is one of the founding members of the UoBIP and has led the investigation of Simon Hall’s case since 2006. She has made various submissions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on the unreliability of the fibres evidence and other evidential aspects of Mr Hall’s conviction which contributed significantly to the referral of his case back to the Court of Appeal.

LawWorks Student Pro Bono Conference 2010 in Birmingham

2011-01-21T19:35:00.002Z

Mark George of Amicus talks about the Death Penalty
From The LawWorks Student Pro Bono Conference

The LawWorks Student Pro Bono Conference 2010 in Birmingham, England was a very successful and well received event. The first edition of material from the LawWorks channel on HumanRightsTV is now available for viewing.

To assist this distribution you may obtain an interactive pdf file from HumanRightsTV. This file is particularly useful as it catalogues the video content and provides live links to each piece of video. This means that you can store it on your desktop and look directly at the prime source material as and when you need to.

Lecturers use this tool to easily select items which they can use to start a lecture with as a discussion point. Students use the tool to archive on their own systems valuable information which they can refer to for use in their academic work. For charity and NGO use, this form of archiving helps to select specific items of video content which they can then use when lobbying on behalf of their cause.

To access the pdf please click here and download the document from the bottom of the page.

Representing the Gypsy and Traveller Communities.

2011-01-20T10:08:00.001Z

This article is provided by the Dale Farm Action Group and all content is the opinion of that group. Any statement made is an allegation and all responsibility for proving veracity lies with the Dale Farm Action Committee.

STAND WITH THE "illegals" AND THE
HOMELESS - OPPOSE THE BIGGEST
EVICTION IN RECENT BRITISH HISTORY!

NEXT MEETING: 7pm School of Oriental and African Studies,

Russell Square, London, 27 January. Remembering the

Nazi Genocide; opposing racism today

The Dale Farm Solidarity campaign is helping to coordinate activists' response to an appeal by residents facing eviction from Dale Farm, the largest Traveller community in Britain.

Together we are making a stand against what we feel is an act of ethnic-cleansing against Gypsy people equal in its brutality and racist motivation to the clearances of Roma camps in Italy and France, and the neo-fascist murders of Roma in Hungary, Romania and the Czech republic.

Travellers, once the most marginalist, now see themselves as part of a growing, broader upsurge of opposition to the present Coalition Government. Homeless? We have no legal place to live. Jobless? Dependent on self-employment. Going to university? Even primary school is a problem when you are moved on constantly by the police.

Remember the warning? "First they came for the Gypsies ... and I did nothing." More than 500,000 Roma died in the Nazi genocide; 100,000 were expelled from Kosova under the eyes of NATO.

This is our chance to fight back. Dale Farm Solidarity is organising human rights monitors, legal and arrestee support, action training, media and outreach. As eviction approaches, Camp Constant will be set up to provide an around-the-clock human rights watch and instant resistance to the £13m two-week eviction operation.

EXPLOITING RACISM
　
The UK's largest Traveller community, Dale Farm, is under imminent threat of eviction. Tory Basildon Council appear to want to force all illegal Gypsies out of Essex. Travellers have always experienced systemic persecution, and now Tory council-leader Tony Ball may appear to be exploiting the rise of anti-Gypsy and anti-migrant racism, whipped up by the worst of the tabloid press, to mount the largest eviction in recent British history.

The Gypsy-clearance specialists Constant & Co, are under contract to do the dirty-work. Their bailiffs allegedly have been investigated for arson and looting after past evictions in Hertfordshire and Essex. More recently they have had to face formal complaints over breaches of Health and Safety law where children have been endangered by alleged careless use of heavy machinery.

Travellers own the land at Dale Farm and it would cost nothing to grant them planning permission. Basildon claims it has no location for an alternative site yet it has been offered ample land for this purpose by the Homes and Communities Agency. The Travellers' own Dale Farm Residents Association has itself put in for a permit to move families to HCA ground at Pound Lane.

Instead Basildon appears to be intent on driving men, women and children out onto the road with nowhere to go. Those already evicted by Constant from homes at Hovefields, Wickford, including two pregnant women and a boy with learning difficulties, are being continually harassed by the police, using powers under the Criminal Justice Act.

There are no pitches available on council-run caravan sites and most Travellers want to provide for themselves. Everyone at Dale Farm is refusing council-house accommodation because it would mean the breakup of their community and the end of a life-style their have clung onto for centuries. But they feel Communities secretary Eric Pickles has kicked them in the teeth by removing a duty placed on Basildon under the Housing Act 2004 to allow 62 new pitches to be built in the district by the end of this year.

Dale Farm has been under siege for ten years. Now the community is calling out for help in the final showdown, a confrontation against establishment violence underpinned by a cultural intolerance that attempts to hide its ugly face behind a smokescreen of planning regulations and law-and-order victim-seeking rhetoric. This bulldozer attitude must be challenged and defeated.

Join our mailing list and text service, and prepare groups to come down to Dale Farm. Pledge to spend a night at Camp Constant when the long eviction operation, expected to last three weeks, kicks off in March or April (Tony Ball vows to have cleared all illegals by the May 8 local elections).

We can provide films and speakers for info nights and discussions - get in contact if you can help.

Dale Farm Solidarity
http://dalefarm.wordpress.com/
Facebook Pledge - If they start to bulldoze Dale Farm, I'll spend the night there.

Traveller Support Network
http://dalefarm.wordpress.com/
info, resources & text alert sign-up
tsn@lists.aktivix.org / savedalefarm@gmail.com
Facebook Group: Dale Farm Solidarity
Contact: dale.farm@btinternet.com

DALE FARM CHILDREN IN DANGER

2011-01-17T21:55:00.004Z

Open letter to Her Majesty's Principal Inspector of Health and Safety concerning the dangers to children posed by the Dale Farm eviction

11/01/2011

Dear Mr Scoggins,

Let me say first that we are depending on people like you and your chair Judith Hackitt at HSE to safeguard our children, and other vulnerable persons, including pregnant mothers, the elderly and chronically ill at Dale Farm when the planned large-scale forced eviction by Basildon District Council takes place.

However, from your failure to report back to us as the originators of the complaints against Constant & Co., it appears that rather than keeping your focus strictly on the need to ensure the safety of the children by zero tolerance towards those breaching safety and health regulations, you are colluding with Basildon District Council.

If this is so, and we hope you will deny it and moreover show by future actions that safety is your only aim, you would be disregarding the dangers into which children, and of course entire families, will be thrust should they be forced out onto the road.

The latest information is that this unprecedented operation, involving the bulldozing of 52 properties and displacement of some 400 people, will take place in March. The destruction is likely to continue for two or three weeks and cost as much as £13 million in fees to Constant & Co., the bill for policing, and legal and administrative expenses. As you will be aware, the Home Office has been requested to provide special funding to Essex police.

The Billericay Primary Care Trust has warned of inevitable trauma and injury to children in particular, and in the light of their report the Children’s Commissioner has asked Basildon to take measures to safeguard Dale Farm children, both in regard to the eviction itself and their future security.

The operation, which contains a clear threat to the lives of Traveller children, has been denounced as an act of ethnic-cleaning by both Labour and Lib-Dem councillors, and clergy of the Catholic, Anglican and free churches. It is drawing opposition in many quarters. Media interest grows weekly, with television coverage already extensive and film units from Germany, France, Spain and Hungary, as well as domestic channels and freelance journalists, asking to be embedded at Dale Farm before commencement.

The situation has attracted the concern of the Essex University Human Rights Clinic, which plans to deploy a team of Legal Observers. They expect to be in a position to provide instant text and picture, and video evidence of safety breaches by Constant and others during the demolition of walls and buildings, ground extraction of electricity cables, and the many other hazardous jobs to be undertaken. The observers will watch for and report all incidents where there is clear and imminent danger to children and adults on the five-acres site.

We urge that in view of the scale of this demolition operation and the numerous dangers identified, the HSE send one or more field inspectors to oversee each phase of the work when residents, and their children, are present. It will be useful to have that inspector identified and made known to us in advance.

Bearing in mind the legal duty under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and
Occurrences Regulations l995 (RIDDOR) of all persons in control of premises to report work-related dangerous incidences, including near-miss accidents, the Legal Observers will be briefed by Dale Farm owners and occupiers (in control of premises) to make reports directly to the contacts provided on your website:

riddor@connaught.plc.uk 0843009923 and/or the Duty Officer at 01519229235

Such reports could include, i) dangerous occurrences (machinery operated close to children), ii) flammable gas incidents (hundreds of gas-containers on site), iii) electric-cables (numerous cables and meter-boxes), iv) asbestos (identified on several premises).

As indicated, and if necessary, reporting would take place out of hours in accordance with HSE guidelines where “incidents causing major disruption, such as evacuation of people, closure of roads” are taking place.

Road closures are expected and an evacuation to church halls has been proposed, while the forced ejection of families onto nearby roads must itself be treated as an evacuation, since several hundred persons would at that point have had their homes, and personal property demolished and burned.

Thank you for your letter of 15 December 2010 and your apology for the lateness of the response to our original multiple complaints concerning the serious breaches of safety law by Constant & Co., including the major incidents where children’s lives were put in danger through the movement of heavy machinery and demolition of buildings. We presume you have seen the 26-page dossier entitled Complaint Against Constant sent earlier to Mr Podger, as well as the follow-up correspondence. If not a further copy can be provided.

We cannot consider that our primary concerns, as you claim, have been dealt. Here some reasons:
a) on 7 September 2010 Constant & Co were again observed operating a heavy digger close to children (although for the first time some safety fencing had been erected)
b) while you have consulted with Constant & Co and the Local Authority (meaning Basildon District Council), you have failed to furnish the Dale Farm Housing Association with a report of your investigation or any explanation as to why Mr Brian Constant is not being prosecuted

In addition, we must note that our attempts to contact Basildon District health and safety officers have been thwarted and interfered with by senior management staff including Mrs Dawn French, who is insisting correspondence with safety officers go through her. It is necessary therefore the HSE bear in mind that you are in this case dealing with co-regulators in the local authority who are themselves tied into the authority, Basildon District Council, which is itself organizing the demolition and clearances about which our complaints are being made.

In view of this, we must request herewith under the FOI Act and Environmental Information Regulations (EIRS) that you provide us copies of:

a) our original complaints as defined and filed by the HSE
b) the Report of your investigation, particularly in relation to the incident at
Hovefields Avenue, Wickford, Essex, on 29 June 2010 when a child was inside a utility unit shortly before it was demolished by an H.E.Services digger, hired by Constant & Co (as agents of the BDC). Photographs of which incident were supplied to the HSE
c) the Risk Assessment Reports provided to you by Constant and BDE
in respect of the operations and incidents about which we complained,
and most importantly the Risk Assessment furnished for the upcoming
Dale Farm operation

As chair Judith Hackitt states on the HSE website your mission is to prevent injuries and deaths and “to prosecute those who put others at risk”. She says herself, “our job is to protect people against risks to health and safety.” We urge that you fulfil that comment.

To do so effectively you will need, as the independent watchdog for safety at work, to consult more closely with us; to hear the voice of those who are to be subject to acts of violent destruction, demolition and forceful removal, involving giant diggers, low-loaders and hard-hat bailiffs using sledgehammers. This on a site densely inhabited by women, several of whom are pregnant, small children, elderly and sick individuals; and where numerous gas-containers, electricity cables and buried cess-tanks, as well as some asbestos, are present, as notified to the HSE in earlier correspondence.

You say in that you are satisfied that arrangements are in place to enable any future work (including the Dale Farm eviction) to be carried out in a manner that is as safe as is reasonably practicable. If you believe that it is because you have been misled by Basildon Council representatives and the directors of Constant & Co., including Mr Constant.

With children’s lives at stake “reasonably practicable” is just not good enough and does not meet the commitments of the HSE code and charter. A similar view was taken before three children were burned to death in a trailer caravan in Walsal and another child killed on wasteland at Brownhills.

Please suggest a time and date for us to meet with you and discuss the Dale Farm eviction operation from the point of view of heath and safety law. We have much to tell you and are anxious to work with you for the aims which we both share.

Yours sincerely,
Grattan Puxon
Secretary DFHA.

Link: http://euyouthspeak.org/roma/?p=15981

Gratton Puxon talks about the Dale Farm Issue
See more at The Siege of Dale Farm channel
on HumanRights|TV

Simon Hall and Solomon Disatisfied

2011-01-15T01:42:00.006Z

The case of Simon Hall is not one that challenges the intellect of justice but it clearly challenges the judgment of judges. How is it that the word indistinguishable tests minds paid very well by the taxpayer to be astute?

Today in the Royal Courts of Justice the Lord Chief Justice denied an innocent man his freedom, a grieving family their son and the taxpayer the release from the burden of paying for injustice. There is no doubt that there is a fine legal argument why the conclusive evidence of this man's innocence could not be presented in court. Equally, there are other case precedents where a duty solicitor without murder charge experience represents a client charged with that serious crime. As the pre-notified media gathered their footnote story of law satisfied and left to post their copy who asked questions about why an innocent man remains in jail whilst a murderer walks free? Who asks why taxpayers are funding miscarriage of justice and paying for a criminal to wander our streets?

Click on image to play video

See More Here

Video courtesy of The Innocence UK Channel
on HumanRightsTV

Innocence UK in Observer Article 09 01 2011

2011-01-09T10:49:00.005Z

Innocence UK has an article about miscarriage of justice written by Sarfraz Manzoor published in The Observer Newspaper today. This article provides an interesting insight into the issue of miscarriage of justice and the work of Innocence UK.

Michael Naughton, who set up the British arm of the Innocence Project in 2004,
with Gabe Tan, assistant director of the Bristol University project.
Photograph: Jim Naughten for the Observer

"The criminal justice system does not allow for the possibility that the courts sometimes get it wrong," Michael Naughton tells me, "but there has to be an allowance that some of those in prison are innocent. People think that miscarriages are a thing of the past, but the sad truth is that they're not."

Source: The Innocence Project: the court of last resort http://tiny.cc/8fsl4

The Innocence Project UK has material on HumanRightsTV in its own channel and in the LawWorks channel. The story of Paul Blackburn, whilst not actually an Innocence UK case, highlights many of the issues in miscarriage of justice from a very personal position.

click on image to play video

See Innocence UK Web Site

See Innocence channel on HumanRightsTV

LawWorks Student Conference 2010-Latest News

2011-01-02T12:40:00.003Z

The videography of the 2010 Conference is now starting to become available via the LawWorks channel on HumanRightsTV. The first release is of the keynote speech by Andrew Phillips (Lord Phillips of Sudbury) and is available here: Andrew Phillips

Andrew Phillips talks about altruism.
(video via LawWorks channel on HumanRightsTV)

News of each set of new videos published will be announced here during January 2011. For more information and archive download information please go to Student Conference 2010

In the two years since the last LawWorks Student Conference in Nottingham, all signs point to continued growth in activity at all levels. We’ve seen applications for the LawWorks & Attorney General Awards rise year on year and the outcome of the 4th LawWorks Student Pro Bono Report shows a large growth in the number of law schools engaging in pro bono, when compared to the last report in 2006.

Much is owed to those pioneering law schools that were quickest to pick up the baton, and then to those that followed, involving students on an ever increasing scale and generously sharing their knowledge.

Eventually student pro bono activity must be viewed as a law school norm rather than a fancy extra for a lucky few. Working together we stand a far better chance of making that come true.

This Conference could not happen were it not for our hosts and sponsors and the fantastic commitment of all the volunteer speakers. We are also grateful to our President, Andrew Phillips, for giving up his Saturday to inspire the next generation of up and coming lawyers.

Two years ago we launched a new dedicated website, www.studentprobono.net. Today
the database contains information on over 225 different student pro bono activities and
has been through a facelift in recent weeks.

The site, together with the linked Facebook
group, represents an opportunity for you to build a much larger and better integrated network of information on student pro bono and clinical legal education.

Martin Curtis
Head of Projects 2, LawWorks

Defending the Human Rights Act

2010-12-31T12:03:00.004Z

The following article is a massively important piece on the perverse attack on the Human Rights Act by reactionary forces in the media and politics. This article comes by courtesy of Open Democracy, an excellent resource for all committed to a healthy democracy, and is written by Geoffrey Bindman who is a former chairman and vice-president of the Society of Labour Lawyers. He is currently chairman of the British Institute of Human Rights.

Defend the Human Rights Act: the Aso Mohammed Ibrahim case
shows the need for a strong response

It is time not only to defend the Human Rights Act but to counter-attack the falsehoods and distortions of those who misrepresent it. Regrettably these include the Prime Minister as well as more predictable elements of the media, particularly the Daily Mail. Furthermore, it is time for Labour to speak up for the Act which it courageously introduced in the face of bureaucratic opposition to enable people to defend their fundamental rights from arbitrary power - including, of course, the despotic power of the press.

The current incident that has unleashed misdirected criticism against the Act (HRA) is the tragic death of a child run down by a reckless motorist seven years ago. After a long campaign by the child's father, the Border Agency recently tried to have Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, the motorist, deported. But an immigration tribunal turned down their application. This produced an angry outburst from the Prime Minister "that this was allowed to happen...We have an Iraqi asylum seeker who has killed a child and there is no way he can be sent back." In a letter to the distressed father he repeated his promise that a future Conservative government would repeal the Act. Like the father, he held the HRA responsible for the decision.

The Daily Mail highlighted the Ibrahim case in support of its long running campaign against the Act. But blaming the Act for Ibrahim being allowed to remain in the United Kingdom is perverse. The Human Rights Act itself provides a set of reasons why Ibrahim could have been deported if the tribunal thought it right to order it.

The child, Amy Houston, was knocked down in 2003 and died six weeks later. The callous cruelty of Ibrahim, whose car mounted the pavement and who abandoned her lying under its wheels is no less shocking after seven years. Yet he was prosecuted only for the minor offences of fleeing the scene and driving without a licence - and not for murder, manslaughter or even dangerous driving, as one might have expected.

Why wasn't he? The family has obvious cause for complaint here, but not against the Human Rights Act. To make it worse, the court took a remarkably lenient view by sentencing him to only four months imprisonment. And this in spite of his having a whole string of previous convictions.

Understandably, the bereaved father is outraged. He has therefore campaigned over the years for Ibrahim to be deported. The immigration tribunal, which just ruled that Ibrahim should be allowed to stay in the UK, went out of its way to spell out that had deportation been sought at the end of Ibrahim's prison sentence, it would certainly have been allowed. Again, it is not the fault of the Human Rights Act that the authorities chose not to make this obvious request at the time.

The legal process has failed Amy and her family but its failures have nothing whatosever to do with the Human Rights Act.

Finally, after a far too lengthy delay, and perhaps thanks to political pressure as a result of Amy's father's campaign, the Border Agency requested deportation. But over the seven years this took Ibrahim has married a UK citizen, fathered two children and acquired two step-children.

The Human Rights Act embodies the European Human Rights Convention, Article 8 of which protects the right to family life. The impact that his expulsion would have on these members of Ibrahim's family is what has kept him here. It is the right of the innocent children to have their father that the tribunal has upheld. Nowhere in the media accounts, or the Prime Minister's response, has this simple fact been recognised.

Article 8, which the UK has been committed to since 1950, does not put family life ahead of all other considerations. It states explicitly that an individual's right to family life can be overridden "in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, and for the protection of the rights and freedom of others."

The judges decided,rightly or wrongly, they had to put the family first. To defend the Human Rights Act is not to defend Ibrahim's appalling conduct.

The Daily Mail's distortions may be par for the course. The Prime Minister's suggestion that he will repeal the HRA to prevent anything like this happening again flatly contradicts the coalition agreement and would leave us still bound by the European Convention. He has already been told this by his lawyers

Before the Human Rights Act came into force in the year 2000, the rights which it protects could be enforced ultimately only in Strasbourg. To repeal the Act in its entirety would only mean reverting to the cumbersome and very expensive process of taking such cases there, adding even more years of litigation. The LibDems have firmly supported the Act. The coalition agreement managed the conflict between the Lib Dems and the Tories by proposing a commission "to investigate the creation of a UK Bill of Rights" which "incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European Human Rights Convention and ensures that these rights continue to be enshrined in British law and protects and extends British liberties".

Thus, notwithstanding Cameron's promise, the coalition is not seeking to remove the obligation to protect the right to family life contained in Article 8 of the Convention or the qualifications to which the obligation is subject. And the coalition has agreed to ensure that our obligations under the Convention will continue to be enshrined in British law. It follows that our tribunals and judges will retain the function of deciding how Article 8 should be applied in any individual case.

The Human Rights Act embodies principles of fair treatment and humane behaviour that seek to protect the innocent, particularly the old,the sick, and the vulnerable. These principles can be traced back in our law to Magna Carta. Occasionally criminals try to take advantage of them. They nearly always fail. The concept of human rights is central to our democracy and builds on our tradition of liberty. When those who seek to discredit the Act distort the facts, as in this case, we need to put the record straight. What is at stake is not some 'foreign' imposition that distorts justice; it is the rule of law itself. If we do not defend our liberties we will lose them.

Geoffrey Bindman, 29 December 2010

All intellectual copyright: Geoffrey Bindman
Source: Open Democracy 29 12 2010

Support HumanRightsTV by buying the excellent book by Human Rights by Edwin Shorts

Conviction

2010-12-30T10:44:00.004Z

CONVICTION is the inspirational true story of a sister’s unwavering devotion to her brother. When Betty Anne Waters’ (two-time Academy® Award winner Hilary Swank) older brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) is arrested for murder and sentenced to life in 1983, Betty Anne, a Massachusetts wife and mother of two, dedicates her life to overturning the murder conviction.

Convinced that her brother is innocent, Betty Anne puts herself through high school, college and, finally, law school in an 18 year quest to free Kenny. With the help of best friend Abra Rice (Academy Award nominee Minnie Driver), Betty Anne pores through suspicious evidence mounted by small town cop Nancy Taylor (Academy Award nominee Melissa Leo), meticulously retracing the steps that led to Kenny's arrest. Belief in her brother ? and her quest for the truth ? pushes Betty Anne and her team to uncover the facts and utilize DNA evidence with the support of Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project, NY in the hope of exonerating Kenny.

In the United Kingdom, Innocence UK represents those claiming a miscarriage of justice. Video material on this issue and the work of INUK can be found on the Innocence UK channel on HumanRightsTV. In the following video Dr Michael Naughton talks about this work:

"Small change, Why business won't change the world"

2010-12-29T22:36:00.004Z

In 2007, I experienced one of those fork-in-the-road moments that seem to occur when you least expect them. It was another day at the office, sifting through e-mails in the Ford Foundation’s glass palace in Manhattan, where I worked as one of the organization’s six directors. As usual, half of my inbox was ﬁlled by advertisements for books, conferences, and consultants promising to solve society’s problems by bringing the magic of the market to nonproﬁts and philanthropy — the masters of the universe, it seemed, also wanted to be saviors of the world — and the other half was ﬁlled by complaints from those experiencing the negative consequences of doing exactly that.

It suddenly struck me that this was more than a simple clash of cultures — it had potentially profound implications for the success of our efforts to transform the world in the image of love and justice. And in the rush to embrace new approaches to philanthropy, some very important older questions were in danger of being buried under hype and adulation — questions of deep social change and social transformation, of democracy versus plutocracy, and of people’s willingness to work together on common problems as full and equal citizens, not as clients or consumers.

This is not an anti-business or anti-market argument. Any successful recipe for social transformation must include a wellfunctioning market economy that creates wealth — broadly distributed throughout the population — and fosters technological innovation, directed at socially useful ends. When business puts its own house in order in this way, it can have an enormously positive impact by increasing the social and environmental value of the goods and services it produces, improving the quantity and quality of the jobs and incomes it creates, and acting as a good corporate citizen — which means paying taxes, obeying regulations, ending monopolies, and removing lobbying from politics.

But how is that to happen? It has always been civil society and government that have pressed businesses to do these things; and to exercise their inﬂuence effectively, both government and civil society need to be strong and independent. Only then can they exert sustained pressure for accountability and act from a different set of values and priorities. Otherwise, “organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy,” as Matt Taibbi puts it. It’s the difference that makes the difference to society. In fact, real transformation will occur when business behaves more like civil society, not the other way around.

The problem comes when businesses and markets undertake tasks for which they are not well designed — like rebuilding the cohesion of communities, strengthening the ways in which people care for each other, and pushing for fundamental changes in the economic system itself. Expecting price competition, the proﬁt motive, short-term deliverables, and supply-chain control to bring about a world of compassion and solidarity is, to say the least, a little strange.

Despite these seemingly-obvious points, the business-is-best philosophy remains a powerful and seductive hook. It promises to supply a new magic bullet that removes the messiness of social change, and a route to doing good for others while doing well for yourself without any of the sacriﬁces that have been necessary for progress in the past. That’s an attractive proposition, and also a dangerous mirage. Can we compete ourselves into a more cooperative future, or consume our way to conserve the planet’s scarce resources, or grow our way out of deep-rooted poverty and oppression, or ﬁght our way to peace? Such ideas are disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. The claim that business thinking can save the world is a convenient myth for those who occupy positions of great wealth and power; and the constant celebration of rich and famous individuals is a dangerous distraction from the hard, public work of ﬁnding solutions, all of us together.

There are four key points in my argument:

First, neither philanthrocapitalism nor transformative approaches to social change are monolithic. Both contain many different strands, and they engage and overlap in the middle, sometimes with positive effects and sometimes not. These various strands and hybrids have different costs and beneﬁts, so rather than tilting at windmills by writing off one approach or the other, it is more useful to identify where business thinking can advance social change and where it can’t, separating out the use of business tools from the underlying ideology of the market.

Second, the hype that surrounds philanthrocapitalism runs far ahead of its ability to deliver real results. There is little hard evidence that these new approaches are any better at reducing poverty and injustice than the governments, foundations, and civil society groups that have been working away more quietly in the background for a generation and more. Yes, they get much-needed drugs, microcredit loans, solar-rechargeable light bulbs, and the like to people who really need these things, but they don’t change the social and political dynamics that deny most of the world’s population the hope of a decent life.

Third, among the reasons for these disappointing results, one seems especially important: the conﬂicts and trade-offs that exist between business thinking and market mechanisms on the one hand, and civil society thinking and social transformation on the other. There have always been areas of life that we deliberately protect from the narrow calculations of competition, price, proﬁt, and cost — such as our families and community associations — but in the rush to privatize and commercialize social action and activity, there is a danger that these ﬁrewalls will be forgotten. Lasting damage can be done to society if these distinctions are eroded.

Fourth, the increasing concentration of wealth and power among philanthrocapitalists is unhealthy for democracy. When the production of public goods like health and education becomes the province of private interests, fundamental questions of accountability apply. Why should the rich and famous decide how schools are going to be reformed, or what kinds of drugs will be supplied at prices affordable to the poor, or which civil society groups get funded for their work? “I remember a day,” lamented Robert Reich in American Prospect Online, “when government collected billions of dollars from tycoons like these, and when our democratic process decided what the billions would be devoted to . . . I don’t want to sound like an ingrate or overly sentimental, but I preferred it the old way.” He has a very important point. Weak accountability is the Achilles’ heel of all systems for ﬁnancing social change — new or old, public or private — and philanthropy of all sorts needs to be reconfigured so that it can be more useful and supportive to long-term structural change.

One clear message emerges from these four points: Social transformation is not a job to be left to the whims of billionaires. Perhaps if we supported the energy and creativity of millions of ordinary people, we could create a foundation for lasting progress that will never come through top-down planning by a new global elite, however well intentioned. When this principle is accepted and philanthropy is reconﬁgured to be less technocratic and more supportive of people’s own self-development efforts, then change will come — larger than we can control, quicker than we can imagine, and deeper than we could ever hope for by reducing everything to market forces.

Article courtesy of Open Democracy

All intellectual copyright owned by Michael Edwards

Buy Michael's Book Here

Michael Edwards is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action, in New York, and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. He was formerly a director at the Ford Foundation. His website is www.futurepositive.org

Notes for Authors to follow on signing up

2010-12-29T18:16:00.005Z

These notes are for those who have been invited to become an author on this blog. They apply only for people invited to write here. This may take you 2 minutes or it may take you 7 minutes but once you have done this once there is no need to do it again.

Why bother? Well by using this system you will be accessing our social media network marketing campaign.

Everything you post here, from articles, notifications of events, publication of job opportunities, calls for interns etc., will then be disseminated firstly through our established social media marketing network and then again into specifically targeted audiences for your particular subject matter.

You will have all of this behind your work by simply pasting what you have already written into this blog. The following notes are to assist you in the log in process:

The first item you will receive is an invitation e-mail and it will look like this:

From: Jack no-reply@google.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 3:29 PM
To: This will be your email address

The Blogger user Jack has invited you to contribute to the blog: HumanRightsTV.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://www.blogger.com amp;blogID=2961151463880352871

You will need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you do not have a Google Account yet, we will show you how to get one in minutes.

The first step is to follow the link highlighted in the invitation e-mail.

The link will take you through to a page that looks like the image above (click on it to see a larger version).

If you do not have a Google account you will need to set one up. This will take a couple of minutes but will prove well worth your time. There is the option to "Create your account now" shown on the page illustrated above.

If (and when) you have a Google mail account then you just need to enter your password for your google mail account and click on accept invitation.

You will then be taken to a page which looks like the one below:

If you then click on the "New Post" button then you will arrive at a page which looks like the image below:

As you can see this page is very simple to use. You can chose a document which you have already written, copy it and then paste it into the text box, click on publish post and job done.

Alternatively, you can chose to write an article straight into the text box and then use the Publish Post button to publish.

An important point to note is that the box entitled Labels for this post should be filled in.
As an example of how to do this, you use your general heading e.g. housing or disability rights or miscarriage of justice etc., and your organisation and your author name.

For example

Disability Rights, Arthritis Care, D. Wynne-Fitzgerald

Tips: Bookmark/Favourite the url for this blog so that you can go straight to it. You will need to sign in and once you have done it once, if you are using a decent browser, your username and password should then automatically be remembered. Nevertheless, it is always good practice to save your username and password somewhere safe to safeguard against the unexpected.

If you have any problems then e-mail me and I will assist.

Best

Jack.

Miscarriage of Justice; Paul Blackburn

2010-12-28T15:53:00.006Z

For many people miscarriage of justice is a rather exotic topic in legal process and carries little weight in terms of being a priority issue. The work of Innocence UK demonstrates that this issue is far from being a matter of low agenda and their work raises serious concerns about the process of law which should be of massive concern to all in the legal profession, the judiciary, the legislature and the public.

The main problem with this issue is that until it impacts on your own life in some way it is difficult to understand its relevance. We are presenting here Paul Blackburn's story in his own words. This is a highly personal narrative which is powerfully emotive. The feedback from many people who were at the INUK Conference at Freshfields where Paul spoke has been that it has profoundly changed their view of the issue. Many who have seen this talk on video also state that it has changed the way they think about justice in the UK.

Blackburn's story is a shocking tale about a legal process which at many points and for varied reasons failed this individual and effectively destroyed his life. Many in the legal profession are uncomfortable with this topic because they feel it is a biased critique of the system they administer. Such a view is counter to the idea of a progressive and dynamic legal system.

Surely there has to be an understanding that legal process, as with all human activity, can never be perfect and in that knowledge there should be an understanding that change is an intrinsic element of the process. Some would say that it is the defence of a flawed process in order to protect an illusory integrity which keeps people like Paul Blackburn in prison when they are actually innocent.

In a mature society we should have the moral strength and conviction collectively to admit our errors, correct flawed process and release those who are legally and factually innocent. This is not happening with the speed necessary to provide justice and that more than anything is what needs to change. Sadly Paul is not an isolated example of miscarriage of justice but he is an articulate example of the damage done to human lives by the preservation of a system rather than the defence of morality.

Jack Adams
28 12 2010

In this video Paul uses strong language, as he has every right to do, and if such language offends you then please do not make your own choice to watch this content.

Video from the Innocence UK Channel on HumanRightsTV

Removing the mask

2010-12-19T04:05:00.000Z

This is an audio visual blog entry. Let the videos play however as some are embedded from YouTube then there may be some advertising linked to them. Bill will tell you about that.

As Human Beings we are gifted with art, guile, craft, intelligence but most of all creativity. Our Global Human Identity needs us to break away from dependency and come into our our own authority.

So essentially this is a "BLOGFILM", the pieces have been selected to tell a story and like any story you can flick the pages and move forward and backwards. You can enjoy the moment and you can savour the words. Most of all savour the words.

In 2008 I stood on Omaha Beach. The overwhelming feeling was that, as the tide lapped around my feet, 19 to 30 year old men had given their lives on that beach so that I could live mine. For as certain as the sun rising, in a Fascist world I would not be alive to do the things I do.

These Americans, British and Canadian young men fought for us and our freedom
and at tender ages gave their lives in the belief that the world would be a better place for their sacrifice.

Forget the politics, forget the machinations of financial institutions, these young men surrendered their life for us and are we now going to let them down?

For many years now we have been emerging from the culture of the local interest into the evolution of the global interest. The voices which are coming to the fore today are not a sudden surprise, this is a cultural shift and the shift requires that everyone comes on board.

We cannot perpetuate an "Us and Them" conflict scenario, we have to agree that globalism means everyone or it doesn't actually mean globalism.

That is our challenge and we are up to that challenge.

Tell the truth, are you happy about what is happening in our world? Do you sometimes feel that war is the only future? Or do you turn away and eat your Christmas Dinner. Asking the right question is the most important stage of the Arthurian Grail Quest psychological model.

We are all asking the right question?

We all know the suffering cannot go on, we all know we don't want global war, we all know we want our children to have opportunity and chance in life.

You note that on this video from HumanRightsTV there is no advertising or marketing springing up.
That's because at HumanRightsTV we believe that you cannot put a dollar sign on a human life...radical, we know, but we'll keep with it.

Bill would probably be the very first person to say that "kill yourself" is not actually what he meant, he was using a metaphor. He was telling us about what was wrong with the world not advocating more dying. Bill would have preferred someone who made the Road to Damascus change. Yeah he made us laugh but he also made us think, there is no X Factor there!

The musicians take the opportunity to state the obvious but Frankie took it over the edge. As a satire, making prime time television, making chart topping success, you wonder why it is we seem to have forgotten the message.

You will probably note here that the audio goes out of synch towards the end.
Sorry about that but, and we will sort that out, does it detract from the meaning?

We are in a Global Age, no matter how long it takes the politicians and "leaders" to catch up to that idea. They need to and most importantly we need them to. As stated earlier, the global model doesn't work unless we are all in it together.

Anything else is not a global model.

So what we have to do is to present the case and present it clearly.

We need a just civilisation and that doesn't mean that there will be no hierarchies or rich people, it just means that everyone's future is seen as a common goal. If you can see that then we can change a localised war economy to a planetary economy. A very different paradigm but the underlying structures of social power remain.... it's just that they have to be demonstrably transparent.

A hell of a shift of thinking, but then that's what a cultural evolutionary shift requires.

HumanRightsTV: The Law/Lore is Coming Strong

We need to bring everyone forward or it is not globalisation.

The philosophical significance of UK-Uncut

2010-12-18T11:14:00.002Z

Alan Finlayson, 17 December 2010

When activists under the banner of UK Uncut protest outside high-street shops tomorrow they will be doing something of great political importance. But they will also be demonstrating and articulating something of immense philosophical significance. The political mainstream - journalists, commentators and Parliamentarians - is trying to ignore this. Certainly they are confounded by it. For with UK Uncut what that mainstream thought impossible has come to pass: ethics and ideology are once more at the forefront of political contest in Britain.

The demand that corporations cease exploiting the tax loopholes government created for them is ethical in a precise way. It addresses itself to the quality of the actions of Philip Green and others like him. It finds those actions at odds with the principle that ‘we are all in this together’. It then publicly declares those actions unjust. The purity, simplicity and accuracy of all this confounds the political mainstream. Confronted by it they systematically mobilise the argument that since tax avoiders are doing nothing illegal, there is therefore nothing to be said against them. That was the line pursued by Tom Watson MP when he debated with Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass, on The Today Programme after the first Top Shop demonstration. It was repeated by Gavin Esler on Newsnight as part of a challenge put to Daniel Garvin of UK Uncut and again by Sarah Montague, on Today, questioning Murray Williams, also of UK Uncut. The frequency with which this line appears suggests it is either an organised ‘talking point’ or simply indicative of a shared outlook - an ideology.

Consider for a moment the real implications of the proposition that no act can justly be criticized unless it is against the law. The implication is that law is a full and total expression of moral values. Only totalitarians think that. Everybody else recognises that, while certainly informed by morality, the function of the law is to provide a framework within which civil society can function and can debate the rights and wrongs of actions. And it would be a cold and brittle society that relied on the law for the expression and support of all values, and that could not tolerate citizens sorting things out between themselves. Just as in sport we recognize that something can be within the rules yet still condemned as unsporting, so too most people recognize that behaviour can be wrong even when it isn’t actually illegal.

In fact only one social group regularly seeks to justify actions simply by insisting that they don’t break the formal rules. And that group is the one that rules us. MPs justified themselves in the expenses scandal by protesting that they hadn’t broken a rule; maybe they didn’t need to claim for a second house but doing so was allowed and therefore no wrong was perpetrated. Bankers may have wrecked a financial system while accruing vast personal fortunes but so long as nothing they did broke a rule they think themselves the victims. And our former Prime Minister thought that the only thing needed to justify a reckless war was someone to ensure it wasn’t strictly illegal. In refuting this self-justifying logic UK Uncut exposes the moral vacuity of our contemporary establishment.

It also exposes a fundamental error of ruling political theory. A second criticism routinely made of UK Uncut is that if they think there is something wrong in tax rules then they should protest only through Parliament. It is somewhat surprising to hear this kind of argument today, especially from Labour MPs who, if they had any awareness of their own history and tradition, would know instinctively that, fundamental as it is, there is more to politics than Parliament. Rights and protections for workers, women, ethnic and sexual minorities were won through general forms of public protest. Furthermore, these required not only the force of law but continued action in civil society promoting and affirming the culture that could sustain them. That included directly challenging persons and institutions in society at large that sought to marginalize and contain minorities. To put it plainly, Rosa Parkes refused to go to the back of the bus. She didn’t sit there and compose a polite letter to her Congressman. Racism is kept at bay not only by the law but by decent people standing up to racists wherever they are. The harm caused by greed and excessive self-interest can be prevented only if decent citizens, instead of relying on politicians, themselves stand up against it.

But the point is larger even than this. Parliament is not the central and not the only power in the nation. Imagining that it was, was one of the most fundamental errors made by New Labour and its sympathisers. They thought that they could end inequality just by passing a law to ban it. They thought that they could improve people’s diets, literacy or savings behavior through regulations and more agencies. It seemed not to occur to them that the purveyors of bad food, junk culture and excessive loans might also be powerful forces and that they might need to be contended with directly.

The activists in UK Uncut clearly understand what many do not: that power in society does not only flow vertically but also horizontally, and that some of the most important of social relations are transversal. Media corporations, polluting industries and greedy banks take actions that affect us directly. In challenging or resisting those effects why dilute energies by diverting them through the Whitehall bureaucracy? Government matters. Of course it does. But seeking to inform our fellow citizens directly matters just as much. And challenging excessive power, wherever it takes form, matters even more.

The way UK Uncut is organised reflects this more sophisticated political theory. Political parties have atrophied as every branch has been tightly managed from the centre. The self-declared ‘army of citizen volunteers’ mobilized under the banner of UK uncut is structured but not controlled. Groups are able to adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Communication between them isn’t filtered through a central directorate. Through online means everybody can speak to everybody else, which also means that everybody can learn from listening to everyone else. That - and not the coalition in Whitehall - is the new politics.

All of this did not come from nowhere. It has roots in the radical tradition not only of the UK but of Europe and the rest of the world. Today’s activists are in touch with and learn from their colleagues all over the globe. There are also precedents in the achievements of the Citizens Organizing Foundation, which has been effective in organising campaigns to put pressure directly on local interests and powers. The ideas shaping movements such as UK Uncut also have formal intellectual expression in currents of contemporary continental philosophy that draw from Marxism and post-Marxism but also from science and complexity theory, yet which resist being contained by any of these. Such philosophy is a tool in politics not the driving force.

That all of this is now expressing itself on the streets indicates the coming-of-age of a range of political, cultural and intellectual tendencies that have long been in ferment. It also indicates the emergence of a generation which knows that it needs to call to account Thatcher's children, too many of whom have grown up with nothing in the way of a philosophical, ethical or political compass and now find themselves adrift. Faced by a challenge from young people who believe in something, our political and media mainstream is confounded. It is also scared. And it should be.

See other articles in OpenDemocracy by this author

All intellectual copyright owned by Alan Finlayson
Article copied here with the kind permission of Open Democracy

West Papua: from morning star to mourning

2010-12-17T10:58:00.005Z

by Jason MacLeod, 15 December 2010
Subjects:

* Civil society
* Conflict
* Democracy and government
* International politics

Inspired by the US civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the movement for democratic self-determination in West Papua is using new tactics of nonviolent action to advance its cause.

About the author
Jason McLeod is a researcher and trainer at the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, in Brisbane, Australia. He is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland.

Raising the "Morning Star" flag is high-risk in West Papua. On December 1, Independence Day, a new tactic emerged in the territory’s forty-seven year long struggle for independence. Small groups of Papuans still raised the banned Morning Star flag. The Indonesian security forces still responded with characteristic overreaction. But this year Forum Demokrasi (ForDem), the same group that organised the July 8-9 2010 occupation of the Provincial Parliament, did something different. In the past week several hundred Papuans dressed in black appeared around the capital Jayapura and in the Sentani district surrounding the airport. Instead of raising the Morning Star flag, ForDem asked people to observe December 1 as a day of mourning, fasting, prayer and to boycott Indonesian owned and run shops. Benny Giay, Moderator of the Kingmi Church, the largest indigenous church in West Papua, and member of ForDem says, “We are fasting, praying and wearing black to mourn the death of democracy in West Papua and to mourn Papuans killed by the Indonesian security forces.”

ForDem leaders Frederika Korain and Benny Giay alongside student activists.The group was responsible for an imaginative change in tactic in the Papuan fight for independence, leading a "dressed in black" action in symbolic mourning for the death of democracy.

Despite the fact that the Indonesian constitution theoretically supports freedom of expression and that the flag-raisings are nonviolent, raising the Morning Star Flag is still high risk. Agence France Presse reports that in the lead-up to December 1, police arrested and beat up eight unarmed civilians (one woman and seven men) who raised the flag in the highlands. According to a doctor working at the hospital in Wamena, one of the eight later died as a result of injuries sustained in police custody. Then on the day, police from Kapolres Jayawijaya (the regional police command in the central highlands) and soldiers from Kodim 1702 (the Wamena based regional military command) raided the small village of Bolakme where the previous flag raising took place and shot dead two Papuans, Asli Wenda and Elius Tabuni. The police are trained by the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The military are also trained and armed by the United States and Australia. Questions asked in parliament by the Australian Green Party reveal that Detachment 88, the Indonesian counter-terrorist police force involved in repression of unarmed activists in the Malukus and West Papua receives 44 million dollars of funding from the Australian government alone. When I asked West Papuan student organisers in Jayapura what they thought of this kind of support for the Indonesian security forces they said in unmistakable English: “Australia, New Zealand and U.S government go to hell!”

Flag-raisings concentrate people in one place. Participants and organisers are routinely arrested and charged with rebellion, subversion and hate-sowing against the State, charges that date back to the colonial Dutch era. The antiquated criminal code, elevated by the former Indonesian dictator Suharto in order to repress dissent, is anathema in Indonesia’s new democratic era. The absence of free speech highlights the fact that Indonesian is one country with two systems: democracy in the rest of Indonesia and semi-authoritarian rule in West Papua.

In contrast the ‘dressed in black’ action was dispersed. It was something Papuans could do wherever they lived. Consequently it is lower risk, supports greater participation by ordinary people and could proceed for longer – Papuans wore black for the whole first week of December.

ForDem’s inspiration is Mkhuseli Jack and his colleagues’ anti-apartheid United Democratic Front in South Africa, the U.S civil rights struggle, and other nonviolent struggles around the world, particular those led by Black and indigenous populations in resistance. ForDem also draws on the long history of unarmed resistance inside West Papua to animate civilian mobilisation. ForDem hopes to maximise the participation of Papuans in a mass civilian-based movement that systematically uses nonviolent action to achieve tangible victories on a path toward greater freedom.

The method is in contrast with other ways Papuans are working for change. Salmon Yumame, former civil servant and private businessman turned civil resistance leader, explains, “There are three distinct approaches to creating social change in West Papua. For years there has been an armed struggle in West Papua but there numbers are few and they are outgunned by the Indonesian military. Then there are Papuan leaders wanting political dialogue.” Benny Giay chimes in: “Dialogue is like boiling a stone. Papuans want political dialogue but Jakarta does not. Jakarta wants Papuans to bury their anger and accept Indonesian rule but Papuans cannot. You can boil and boil the stone but it will never cook.” Yumame continues: “Dialogue as a way of solving the problems in Papua is good but it won’t happen unless we organise nonviolent struggle. Not just a struggle of a few leaders but a struggle by all Papuans around the whole country. And not a struggle that tries to achieve freedom in one go. That won’t work. ForDem needs to be part of a much larger alliance. As Papuans we need to build our power slowly and achieve small goals that make a difference for ordinary people, not just in the cities, but in the villages as well.”

“Freedom is not just shouting slogans on Independence Day” says Benny Giay, “the struggle has to be carried out by all Papuans, not just once a year, but every day. It is a long journey but it is one Papuans have to walk.”

Jason MacLeod, 15 December 2010

All intellectual copyright owned by Jason Macleod
Article copied here with the kind permission of Open Democracy

HumanRightsTV is set up in the memory of Aunty Maureen Watson and is specifically dedicated to the indigenous peoples of Australia and all indigenous peoples as an act of reconciliation.

HumanRightsTV: We are established to "empower the voice seldom heard". We recognise that those who have suffered abuse often suffer further indignity by remaining unheard. In making the individual story, told by the individual in their own words and their own way, visible, accessible and freely available we can offer some support to those who need it most.

Five years of denial: the UK government’s reckless pursuit of a punitive asylum policy

2010-12-16T13:22:00.003Z

Five years of denial: the UK government’s reckless pursuit of a punitive asylum policy — never mind the evidence of harm

Clare Sambrook, 15 December 2010
About the author

Clare Sambrook, novelist and journalist, is a pro-bono co-ordinator of End Child Detention Now. She is the winner of the Paul Foot Award 2010 for investigative journalism.

Maybe deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is poised to end for good the scandal of child detention by the immigration authorities in his pre-Christmas statement. Maybe not.

Perhaps they’re making Clegg the bagman for the latest load of Home Office trickery regarding a policy that for years has been characterised by both brutality and deceit. I hope not.

But this is a moment to gather together the shameful evidence of the last five years so that it will not be forgotten. The campaign End Child Detention Now has done this and is publishing it here as an openDemocracy-Our Kingdom Dossier (opens as pdf).

For years, the UK government has knowingly harmed between 1,000 and 2,000 children of asylum-seekers a year, sending dawn hit squads to raid family homes, to search children in their beds and lock them up (sometimes for weeks and months) in places known to harm their mental and physical health. All in the name of ‘border control’, driven by a political desire to look tough on immigration — and executed in venal disregard of a startling truth that the UK Border Agency let slip in evidence to Parliament last year: absconding is not an issue.

The citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now has gathered some of the compelling research that the Home Office has variously ignored, misrepresented and buried these past five years. The research provides irrefutable evidence of damage done to children by detention and by other harmful and state-sanctioned practices.

Some of this research also offered viable alternatives to detention that the government chose to ignore, preferring dangerous and punitive practices that helped politicians look tough at the expense of children’s health and sanity.

Some of the authors whose work is represented here — respected academics and hard-working physicians — have endured Home Office attempts to undermine their work and trash their professional reputation. The report includes a selection of the government’s countless routine denials and misrepresentations (there is insufficient time and space for them all).

End Child Detention Now calls upon the coalition government to break away from ideologically-driven asylum policy, break with Phil Woolas-style thinking at the Home Office and pursue a proper asylum policy based on evidence and embracing respect for human rights and human dignity. The immediate end of child detention is essential but it is only the first step of a long walk towards decency.

Clare Sambrook is coordinator of End Child Detention Now

All intellectual copyright owned by Clare Sambrook
Article copied here with the kind permission of Open Democracy

Representation of Asylum Seekers Remains an Issue

2010-12-11T23:21:00.006Z

The video above is the unedited testimony of an asylum seeker in this country. He gave testimony to the Independent Asylum Commission Public Hearing in Leeds in 2007. No-one who hears this testimony can be failed to be moved by the content but what this man has to say about representation in our legal system highlights exactly how people who claim sanctuary from persecution find themselves unrepresented in an alien legal system.

Some things have changed but too much remains the same and we need to be aware, especially in the coming years, of the impact of changes in legal aid and budget cuts in provision for all vulnerable people.

"Good quality legal advice is rarely available at the start of an asylum claim, even though this is the very moment that someone needs expert guidance through an extremely complicated process. There is an additional risk that women will be left to negotiate the appeals process on their own, as there is little incentive under the current legal aid system for representatives to help appeal decisions on the most complex and time-consuming claims. There is no trained counsellor or support worker on hand for a woman who claims asylum after experiencing rape and sexual violence - and several studies show that this will be the majority. Local community groups for women seeking asylum are endangered by the spending cuts seen across the board. Three years ago, the UK Border Agency promised to build trust and continuity by ensuring that a single Case Owner handled an asylum application from beginning to end. But many, many asylum seeking women are still left to negotiate the system alone."

Extract from “We weren’t born asylum seekers” by Debora Singer published by Open Democracy 10 December 2010

See whole article here: Open Democracy

Since our work with The Independent Asylum Commission we have been very much aware of the problems of representation facing asylum seekers. Gabrielle Nkwelle describes here some of the issues asylum seekers face (note this video takes a while to start)

BID is an organisation which arranges Bail for Immigration Detainees

Latest News From Dale Farm Campaign

2010-12-11T14:20:00.003Z

DALE FARM SCAPEGOAT
IN UK RIOT CRACKDOWN

Gypsies fear they could again be

become scapegoats as the UK

establishment prepares to crack

the law-and-order whip over growing

unreast and rioting around Britain.

The request by police to Home

Secretary Teressa May for special

funding to cover the planned Dale Farm

eviction must be regarded as a test

case of the Government's intentions

in this regard.

A decision is expected by next month on

whether to spend 15m euro on an operation

- already dubbed ethnic-cleansing by the

opposition Labour Party - to drive a hundred

families from their homes.

Against the harshed criticism of Labour

councillors, Tory leader Tony Ball told

Basildon Council this week that he would

clear all unauthorized Travellers from the

district by spring if the Government gives

him the money.

Meanwhile, hundreds of students at

Essex University participated in a

Human Rights Week dedicated to

furthering the cause of Roma across

Europe, and particularly the Travellers

at Dale Farm, situated some 60km from

their campus.

Speaking at their Human Rights Day

meeting on 10 December, which also

marked the 44th anniversary of the

Gypsy Council, Grattan Puxon said

that while students protested cuts in

higher education, Dale Farm residents

like Gypsies all over the UK were

fighting just to allow their children to

complete primary education.

"We see now that we share a common

cause with students, the homeless,

and everyone else suffering from the

present crackdown on the less well-off

and the marginalized," said Puxon.

Further meetings are planned in

London, Chelmsford, Cambridge,

Bristol and Brighton to sign up

legal observers for Camp Constant, the

support camp which will be set up

at Dale Farm if Basildon signals

it's finally calling in the bailiffs, the

bulldozers and riot police.

If you want to join or would like

more information on Camp Contant

and upcoming support meetings

email dale.farm@btinternet.com

Gratton Puxon speaking from Dale Farm in 2009

See More on Dale Farm

Facilitate Global and Global Media.

2010-12-09T10:20:00.013Z

The draught of a talk
by
Jack Adams,
Project Leader, HumanRightsTV,
for the charity
Facilitate Global
at their fundraising event
in London, 10.12.2010.

90 years ago Britain was gripped by an urgent debate which captured the imagination of every serious commentator. In the village halls, community centres, church reading groups, polite society meetings and even parliament the question of the time raged and yet less than 100 years later almost everyone has forgotten almost every detail of this debate. I am deliberately not pinning a tail to this particular donkey at this point because I would like you all to try and think, try and drag even a scintilla of memory into play and guess the question which absorbed a whole nation.

Oh yes, and as a piece of advice, Google will not be able to help you so you can put your android phones away.

90 years is a very short time, if I look back to 1920 then my grandparents were alive and young people, my great grandparents were all mercifully alive though the men were in trauma after their time fighting the war to end all wars. True it was a very different time and the culture of a global identity did not exist, merely an inferior prototype named the British Empire but that was born of aggression, warfare, domination, enslavement, torture, rape of people and resources and, it has to be said, elements of wonderful creativity. However this form of identity establishment now belongs in the past no matter how its death grip reaches into our time now.

But that twentieth century was potent with the seeds of change. That was the century in which the movement away from the past saw the Sumo-Babylonian Cultural Complex (based on the notion of War Economies) finally and irrevocably disgraced itself before the global view of humanity in those smoking chimneys of Aushwitz.

Together with the mass murders of non-combatants in the Dresden, Hamburg and the Tokyo fire raids, the pre-planned incineration of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (all acts, in my opinion, of the unparalled evil possessed by those lacking in insight, imagination or humanity, but declaring themselves to be the leaders of people) these historic moments gave created to the instant when that old Sumo-Babylonian idea of state was mortally and fatally wounded and the global identity drew its first breath giving out the cry of life.

This moment of birth was the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this declaration globalisation begins. I say this because it is the very first moment in human history when law is enacted with the specific intention of being global and sitting above the laws of the old intellectual corpses of the past, those Sumo-Babylonian Nation States.

In our human cultures we define ourselves by our laws, these are a set of common beliefs encoding our social behaviour, whether they be written by parliament or sung by tribal elders, they instruct us on the minimum expected standards of behaviour. Law/lore is precisely what sets our behaviour apart from other animal species.

So a Universal Declaration, and the key word, though somewhat inaccurate, is "universal", opens the door to the incoming cultural age of Global Humanity.

In the 63 years since that first moment of birth, we could be presented with an argument that the Gulags of Siberia, the Cultural Revolution of China, the insane genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda let alone the Korean, Vietnamese, Afghani and Iraqi "wars" prove that Global Humanity is a failed idea.

Any such argument is the province of the intellectually challenged. This Global Humanity does not demand change, this Global Humanity is effecting cultural change every single day.

In the area of cultural change new forms do not simply evolve overnight or appear in the shops at Christmas like some sort of latest gadget we can strap into our lives. A small cultural shift can take a generation but a larger shift can take longer to embed.

But we must remember that we are talking of a global change of the behaviour that has embedded itself in the collective human consciousness for 6000 years .

In terms of "historical mass" this is a huge bulk of history which will not simply stop in a couple of years. This effect of historical mass on change is something I call the Supertanker Theory of History and it works very simply like this:

If you stand on a coast line and look out to sea there will be supertankers coming and going; some smaller, some larger and some gigantic.

From where you stand you cannot tell if any one of those tankers is traveling under its own power and gaining momentum or has switched its engines off and is gliding along under a decaying momentum.

You just see these huge structures as they appear in your own horizon.

So too with cultural change and this move from the old antiquated nation states to a global identity.

This cultural change is the largest supertanker of history there has ever been and therefore carrying the greatest historical mass. The size of this mass means that the concept of nation states and war economies wont simply melt away in moments, too much human energy and self interest is invested in these ancient titans of times past.

Equally, to get the even greater supertanker of Global Humanity going full speed there has to be a tremendous effort just to move an inch forward; at the moment this supertanker of history is still in the docks with the propellers churning around and trying to move forward.

As we stand on the shore line of our own individual lives looking out on the historical sea, there the great supertanker of nation states appears to be ploughing its way across our horizon in 2011.

But in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights switched the engines of that particular vessel off and irreversibly...and I will say that again... irreversibly put the brakes hard on.

The nation state supertanker is losing momentum year by year before it screams and strains rustily into the breakers yard; useful only as historical scrap.

For those of us who have good eyesight and looking in the right direction, we can see the Global Humanity supertanker churning up the waters with its mighty propellers and creating year by year the momentum which will bring it out to sea for the benefit of all.

63 years ago the Global Humanity Cultural Paradigm began.

90 years ago the debate which gripped our great grandparents was the future of the horse!

All across our nation people debated the future of the horse in the context of having seen the use of the petrol engine in the First World War. They stood on their historical shore line and looked out at a little coastal chugger called Equine, this vessel had been around for some time and they simply couldn't envisage a world without it.

The arguments presented were that the petrol engine was unreliable and therefore there would always be a place for the horse. Some said that it would be impossible to set up the infrastructure for this fad of technology to replace the horse. Others proposed that the petrol engine would be used to carry heavy transport but the horse would remain as a primary mode of travel for most people.

Very, very few actually argued that the horse in its transportation role was obselete and their voices were mostly regarded as the voices of dreamers, idlers, fools or the insane.

History is very clear about what happened to the horse. The horse heretics who said its days were done were correct.

"London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time."

source: The Freeman

This position of the heretic is an essential one in understanding history for there is a specific cycle in human intellectual behaviour which runs like this:

heresy...theology...dogma...heresy...theology...dogma...heresy.....ad infinitum

This does not mean that all heresy is actually correct, what it does mean is that it takes a heresy to break the hold of a dogma. The heretic propounds the heresy (usually then gets burnt at the stake), the rest of humanity starts to catch up and the priests of society then codify the heresy as a theology, this theology then becomes so embedded in the collective consciousness as to start to strangle insight whereupon it is a dogma awaiting the transformation process of a heresy.

Today, Julian Assange is the heretic and is awaiting to be burnt at the stake. A public execution of every idea he represents is all the dogmatic intellectually dysfunctional illiterates of the old Sumo-Babylonian States can do to a man who claims....well claims what exactly?

"WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest."

source: Julian Assange http://tiny.cc/dq8oa

So Assange's heresy is that government should be honest, transparent and directly accountable for what they say. No wonder the traders of journalist horse manure who pander to the old Sumo-Babylonian War Lords claim that such a position amounts to espionage and treachery!

Truth has never ever been a tool of the old nation state governance.

But we have to remember that the heretic is merely the messenger not the message to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Assange is not the issue of the day and, what has been somewhat forgotten in the whole Wikileaks saga is that Assange is not the person who leaked the U.S. Embassy Cables merely the man who created the system which distributed those documents.

The importance of this is about the evolution in the way people communicate with each other and the levels of connectivity this creates. The technologies are what we all to often focus on, yearly shepherded into the corporate consumer slaughter yards to buy an i-phone or i-pad each corporate feast day (such as the coming Christmas Consumer Cull). But it is not the tools of the technologies that are driving change it is us and how we use those tools and most importantly how we connect together.

Assange the heretic can burn, we don't want him to and we need to prevent any unfounded action against him, but the flames which could consume him will not envelop the structure he has created nor stop the process. In the past you could murder the heretic and nine times out of ten crush the heresy.

Today because we are Global Humanity and have tools which produce the highest level of inter personal connectivity ever known millions have to be murdered to stop the process of change....and even then human extinction is a more likely outcome than retaining the Sumo-Babylonian status quo.

Inter personal connectivity is massively important for very good reasons. Research is very, very clear on this and shows that the more interpersonal connections within a community the greater likelihood of a high level of reported "happiness" amongst community members.

HumanRightsTV recently covered the report into WECH, a resident led community housing organisation and the report by Professor Peter Ambrose clearly shows this relationship between happiness and connectivity.

Imagine the idea that this connectivity of communication we are experiencing in the twenty-first century could actually engender greater happiness on a global scale!

Now there is an idea to develop, something of real value and if Assange's assertion that truth is the bedrock of better governance is also an idea we can invest in then surely our future is one filled with massive positive potentials.

The argument against coming from the antiquated minds of the souless artists of terror is that the people do not want to hear the truth; this is of course a lie! Their clarion call is that government cannot function on a basis of truth; this is of course a lie! Their justification of these lies is that they are protecting the truth; this is of course a lie!

These people are of the past in human history and need to be quickly confined to the dustbin of that history before they start a genocidal global conflict in order to maintain the justification for their own miserable uninspired way of "thinking".

This talk may seem to have wandered off line from its title of Facilitate Global and Global Media but I can assure you that it has not. When the horse debate was raging 90 years ago in London many people stood and spoke at meetings but where are their voices now? This little talk of mine is already on the HumanRightsTV blog, posted on other blogs, distributed around the world, and yes I know for certain that it has been read in Tunisia, Gaza, California and Peru as I stand here tonight talking to you.

You are not the only people listening to my words. When we put the video of tonight up on the Facilitate Global channel on HumanRightsTV then the other speakers Dr Swee Ang, Dr Anicee van England, Thomas Nash and Danial Machover, speakers of much more interest than myself, will all be heard beyond this room, they will be heard by Global Humanity will share these messages and grow stronger.

Facilitate Global makes this possible and the work of the founder Soraya Boyd and her team is, in my own opinion, outstanding, visionary and relevant not just to today but to the future of all of those to come. In the works of this charity and many other organisations around the world, in the connectivity we possess we all now have the chance to see Global Humanity reach maturity after a long and difficult birth, a murderous adolescence and painful climb onto the ladder of truly conscious beings.

Finally I say again, the dreadful slaughtering self interest of nation states has had its time, it is a decaying force, Global Humanity will assert itself as the dominant form of social structure and we will be heard, we will not be governed by the past we will be represented in the future.

Facilitate Global works hard towards that future which your children, my children, their children and our children need and demand of us, please support this worthy charity with all your heart.

Jack Adams is the Project Director of HumanRightsTV which is an independent initiative run mostly by volunteers who believe in trying to make the world a better place for the children of humanity.

INUK Conference at Freshfields 19 11 2010

2010-11-23T08:30:00.002Z

UK Housing Policy: Time for Action

2010-10-13T13:32:00.001+01:00

The Editor

The Times

3 Thomas More Square

London E98 1TY By e-mail to: letters@thetimes.co.uk

Sir

We believe that decent housing, a sound economy and improved public health, including tackling inequity in health, are inter-twined. This entails both an adequate supply of genuinely affordable and secure housing and ensuring that the current housing stock is both healthy and safe.

Investment in housing can improve public health and reduce demand on the NHS. Recent research indicates that poor housing costs the NHS in excess of £1 billion a year, of which £750 million a year is attributable to cold homes, but the full cost to society of poor housing is significantly more. Enquiries by WHO and the Marmot Review of health inequalities indicate that between 70% and 90% of all ill-health derives from social and living conditions, we therefore urge the Government to address the following inter-related issues.

The house building industry has suffered as have the supply industries, and these involve jobs and materials largely created in this country – it does not rely on imports. Serious investment in ‘social housing’ production will help to solve these problems and create many thousands of jobs.

Many employers face severe recruitment and retention problems due to high housing costs in a number of 'growth regions' plus the resulting reduction in the mobility of labour. Even so-called “affordable housing” can very often be afforded only at the expense of other needs or increased personal debt. As the IMF has warned, in the UK “house prices are over- valued and vulnerable to a fall” and that remains so even with the recent drop reported by the Halifax. Our economic problems have arisen largely from the 'housing bubble' and action is required to ensure there is no recurrence of this. It has been shown that over the period 1980-2005, £800billion more was lent to fund house purchases than would have been the case had the loan figures simply increased in line with inflation. Such a situation is not consistent with “sustainable development”, and this money could have been better used.

Poor housing and home conditions not only adversely affect health (including mental health) outcomes but also reduce the cost-effectiveness of educational spending; impeding those educational outcomes crucial to addressing inequalities.

There has been a failure to make our existing housing stock 'green' enough or environmentally efficient on anything like the required scale. The energy efficiency of much of our housing is poor and the average is improving only slowly. Housing contributes 27% of our carbon emissions. The ‘Green Deal’ announced by the Government in September would cost only a tiny fraction of that ‘additional’ £800billion lent to boost house prices.

This must be recognized in the Comprehensive Spending Review and future government policies. As Disraeli said “the health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend”.

Yours

Dr Stephen Battersby, President, CIEH; president@cieh.org; 07884491609.(other signatories page 2)

Other signatories

Professor Peter Ambrose, Visiting Professor of Housing and Health, University of Brighton.

Marianne Hood OBE, Chair, National Housing Forum whose members include:

Chartered Institute of Housing, Commission for Rural Communities, National House Builders Council Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Royal Town Planning Institute Shelter and Tenant Participation Advisory Service

Angela Mawle, Chief Executive, UK Public Health Association

Professor David Ormandy; WHO Collaborating Centre for Housing Standards and Health, University of Warwick

Peter Archer, Chair, Care and Repair England

John Bryson, Chair, Standing Conference on Housing and Health (CIEH)

Gaza Flotilla Raid by IDF Illegal: 56-page report by the UN panel of three international lawyers

2010-09-23T02:56:00.002+01:00

HumanRightsTV are supplying the report as a pdf download so that people can decide for themselves the value of the content. The Israeli government claims the report is one sided and biased and denies that the raid on the Gaza Flotilla was illegal. The Israeli government and the IDF have consistently claimed that they acted in self defence and that the death of nine civilians in international waters was not the fault of their armed commandos who boarded the vessel.

To download the report so that you can know what you are talking about by reading the document go to:

Gaza Flotilla Raid by IDF Illegal: 56-page report by the UN panel of three international lawyers

Our article on the raid "Who is telling the truth" is also available.

Welfare Reform: Wealth without Responsibility.

2010-09-07T02:41:00.006+01:00

swings and roundabouts

Democratic representative government is a wonderful thing as long as one is not too fussy over whose interests exactly are being represented. Over the past twenty years banks have thrown out the most basic wisdom of their previous 6000 years of commercial philosophy and elected to lend money to people who cannot afford to pay it back. The reason why they choose to re-write, or in most cases simply abandon, their lending critera was that they realised that huge amounts of money were to be made before any loan contract ran its course. In other words wealth was available without responsibility. This is the sole cause of the economic collapse in 2008.

Economists, politicians and self made business men may all argue strongly that this reductionist account of the economic collapse is simplistic, un-realistic, without foundation and fails to take into account the more complex theories of economics. These objectors are of course the same people who said that abandoning regulation, lending to people who could not pay back and taking massive amounts of cash for establishing complex finance contracts that were fundamentally flawed was good for the global economy.

In addition, when things went very badly wrong, as any observer who didn't have an interest in lining their own pockets predicted, warned and signposted would happen, these very same people demanded that the governments take money from the people and pay off the astronomical losses made by the banks. This strategy has the obvious advantage that those who had successfully piled up huge wealth mountains in the process of artificially inflating asset values through unethical lending would not have to pay for their actions. In other words wealth was retained without responsibility.

Naturally, as the amount of debt created was so vast then someone had to be made accountable for the cost. The obvious solution presented itself to these economists, politicians and self made business men, reduce government spending on welfare; make the poor responsible for the debts created by the rich. In other words wealth gets wealthier and the poor gets the responsibility to maintain that wealth at the expense of their own lives.

Any astute reader could be forgiven in thinking that the path of this narrative leads to something like a communist manifesto! Certainly the terminology being employed so far seems to suggest such a direction of thought. However, as an historian of any salt will tell, the end result of communist revolution (and this is the only way communism has of coming to power) is that the poor get poorer whilst the rich get richer. So if we could be so good as to dump the ideologies of the late nineteenth century and start to consider the needs of the twenty-first century perhaps we can see a light at the end of the tunnel which isn't a cattle train heading for Siberia.

In the UK we have a major housing crisis which is going to become ever more serious as the waves of unemployed begin to lose their over mortgaged homes and find there is no room for them in the social housing sector. Whilst we are an absolute minimum of TWO MILLION homes short of our nation's need at this time there still exists no long term strategy for housing provision.

The situation is that the wealthy bankers, business people and politicians all made wealth from over inflating the value of homes and treating them as investment vehicles. This treats housing as an asset class which can be traded in the short term. The core problem with this is that as an asset class housing has substantively different qualities to any other asset class; families live and grow economies in a home, they don't do this in a car or a gold bar! In addition, if another asset class fails it doesn't necessarily produce the extraneous costs to the tax payer that badly managed housing assets do.

Housing has to be treated as a fundamental of a sound economy and as a fundamental of a sound economy the asset class has to be taken seriously and protected from predatory speculation without responsibility. What government would allow a corporation to buy roads and then proceed to tear them up? Why then should a government allow speculation on homes which tears up families and economies?

What we have to ask of our government is not how they govern but who they actually represent? Do they represent wealth without responsibility because if they do then we need to question not only our government but our whole body politic.

There is a desperate need for leadership and those who have acquired wealth need to demonstrate responsibility but more importantly they need to demonstrate a vision that sees past their immediate wealth today.

Let's stop the swings and roundabouts and start them off again spinning in the other direction. What we need first is a body of wealthy, very wealthy, committed people who are prepared to stand up and say that housing needs a long term holistic strategy for the good of the economy and the future of the nation. Let's see if any of the wealthy feel any responsibility!

We are never going to get rid of the imbalance that wealth creates, we are never going to get rid of wealth but we can call for wealth to own responsibilities to more than just itself. The key term here has to be Responsible Wealth and we need to make Irresponsible Wealth something akin to a crime against humanity.

Call for a Royal Commission on Housing: circulated to all MPs and Peers, housing charities and some NGOs

2010-09-06T23:53:00.004+01:00

‘Many commentators on housing and social policy have made the point that the recently announced cuts in Housing Benefit will cause widespread additional hardship to some of the most vulnerable in our society.

We feel that the calls being made by some observers for ‘transitional arrangements’ to ease the burden do not go anywhere far enough. There have been deep-seated and systemic problems with our housing arrangements for many decades and the present financial crisis is but one outcome of these.

The Zacchaeus 2000 Trust is arguing now for a Royal Commission on Housing on the 12 grounds set out below.

We can move towards less damaging and more cost-effective housing policies only on the basis of the evidence provided by an independent commission of enquiry.’

Z2K is proposing a Royal Commission on Housing, which touches the heart of the UK economy and the well being of our citizens. It provides an opportunity to address the intrinsic inequality in the distribution of wealth and incomes governing the ownership of land and the provision of housing, which produces poor, sometimes even disastrous, social and economic outcomes. We are advised by Peter Ambrose, Visiting Professor of Health and Housing at the University of Brighton.

I have sent this proposal to the SSAC and the W&P Committee both of whom are enquiring into the recent decision to cap housing benefit, and various MPs and Peers.

Proposal for a Royal Commission on Housing.

It is apparent that the UK has a financial crisis of its own making. The deficit, currently expected to be £165 billion in 2011, and the housing benefit cost of £21 billion are the consequences of governmental action and inaction since 1979. It is necessary to understand how we got to where we are.

The financial deregulations of the early 1980s allowed house purchase lending to spiral out of control thus driving house prices to unprecedented levels in a market in short supply, and with them rents, which by various mechanisms reflect house price movements and consequentially the annual cost of housing benefit. Simultaneously, the Housing Act 1988 allowed landlords to charge a market rent, thus allowing rents to spiral after 15th January 1989. This removed rent controls from the Rent Act 1977 scheme, yet again inevitably increasing housing benefit and the cost to the tax payer.

One cause of the problem was the huge house-purchase lending 'spike' from 1997 to 2007 with gross mortgage lending rising to £363 billion leaving the total housing debt outstanding at around 18 times the 1980 level. Upswings of this nature are not new - they have happened several times in recent history so one should not be surprised. This one was additionally fuelled by new financial products reaching deep into a 'market' of sub-prime borrowers in a 'get on the housing ladder at all cost' atmosphere promoted by government. One distressing consequence of this has been increased repossessions.

None of the rise in the price of houses or rents is the responsibility of housing benefit claimants, but they are being punished for the errors of successive governments by the requirement to pay the balance of rents above arbitrary caps on housing benefit out of means tested wages or unemployment benefits, or be threatened with eviction and consequent misery. The Local Housing Allowance, introduced by the last government, began this policy of ignoring the means test when paying housing benefit; the cap continues it. These are the deeply unjust and regressive consequences of bad housing policies introduced by the 1979 government, allowed to continue by the 1997 government and then blamed on the most vulnerable members of society.

This is a result of a regressive effect in housing finance, support and fiscal regimes. For at least three decades buying a house has been much more heavily supported than renting a council house or RSL. The 70% who were better off to start with, and capable of buying and building up an asset base for their children, have received more help from public finances that the 30% who cannot possibly enter into purchase. This trans-generational effect is self-evidently regressive and may help to explain the persistence and worsening of our incidence of inequality and poverty. It is likely that anti-poverty measures designed to reduce inequalities are being more than outweighed by the regressive effects of housing finance and fiscal regimes.

The financial hardships and insecurity generated by the HB cap, and currently by the Local Housing Allowance, will adversely affect health, children's capacity to progress at school, family stability, labour mobility and produce other adverse outcomes from indebtedness that will produce huge cost increases on the NHS mental health services, policing and educational budgets. The pain will be non-existent among those who profited from the boom and extreme for those who did not - with inevitable effects on public finances.

There has to be something wrong with 30 years of housing policy which produces a huge bailout of the banks, a consequently severe public finance deficit, a very large housing benefit bill, five million people in overcrowded housing and five million on local authority waiting lists, the lowest output of housing in all sectors for 70 years - and then asks the poorest citizens to pay rents they cannot afford.

Therefore the time has come for a careful examination of the entire workings of the housing system by a Royal Commission which can propose a coherent housing policy which will prevent another financial crisis similar to the present one and protect the poorest citizens from carrying the cost.

The examination must be on the linked grounds of social equity and economic cost-effectiveness in the use of public funds.

The Commission should examine the following issues and make appropriate recommendations.

1.      The balance of need for both home ownership and rented accommodation.

2.      Changes over the last three decades in the supply/demand balance of total housing support and consideration of what would be an optimally cost-effective balance.

3.      Rent-setting regimes in the LA and RSL sectors that could achieve rent rises below the rate of inflation

4.      The regulation of lending institutions to ensure responsible lending and the avoidance of serious financial crises.

5.      The continual decline over two decades or more in the funding of LA and RSL construction which inhibit a rapid increase the supply of affordable rented housing including the promotion of community land trusts.

6.      The amount of unused land and empty housing and the use of land value tax in other countries to encourage the productive use of unused properties.

7.      The reasons why the UK house building industry is out-performed by that of, for example, Japan.

8.      The combined redistributional effect of local and national taxation regimes and housing benefit and allowance arrangements on the various tenure groups and on households at different points on the income scale, and their regressive or progressive consequences.

9.      The relationship between poor, overcrowded and insecure housing on the educational achievement of children.

10. The relationship between household debt (much of it related to housing costs) and mental illness and the consequent cost to the health service.

11. The failure over a very long period to enunciate a set of aims for housing policy and consequently the lack of any coherent and holistic set of policies.

12. The effect on labour mobility, recruitment and retention - and thus on the efficiency of the economy - of the drastic shortage of genuinely affordable rented housing.

Until the commission has reported and the government decided on a policy the Local Housing Allowance and the Housing Benefit caps should be suspended and the means test rules applied in full.

With very best wishes,

Paul

Rev Paul Nicolson, Chairman,
Zacchaeus 2000 Trust,
34 Grosvenor Gardens,
London SW1W 0DH

PaulNicolson@z2k.org
www.z2k.org

Peter Ambrose, Z2K Housing Adviser.
Visiting Professor in Housing and Health
University of Brighton
Mayfield House
Brighton BN1 9PH

ambrose@cumulusnine.net

See UK Housing Policy channel on HumanRightsTV

Go to Video Archive at UK Housing Policy Channel

Massive Cost to Taxpayer of Current Housing Policy

2010-09-06T23:49:00.003+01:00

Letter published by The Observer 5 September 2010

Two major facts have been missed in suggesting the poor should fund their own salvation. First, the lowest levels of income in unemployment or in work are already creating high levels of misery and debt, which lead to household mental and physical ill-health which, in turn, create massive costs to the taxpayer.

Second, there is no affordable rented accommodation in the private sector in which the highest housing benefits are paid; the Labour government, with the local housing allowance, and now the coalition, with housing benefit caps, have created more debt by forcing the poorest households to pay rent out of already inadequate income.

Meanwhile, confidence in welfare reformers is undermined by the immediate evictions in the county courts of powerless households unable to find legal aid due to the same obsession with cuts, rather than justice, which created their unpayable rent arrears.

Rev Paul Nicolson
Zacchaeus 2000 Trust
London SW1

See UK Housing Policy channel on HumanRightsTV

Go to Video Archive at UK Housing Policy Channel

Call for a Royal Commission on Housing

2010-09-06T23:41:00.004+01:00

The following letter was published in both The Times and The Independent on 30 August 2010. Bad housing policies in the past 30 years have led to an unjust system of benefits and a greater burden on the taxpayer.

Sir,

The Institute of Fiscal Studies rightly decides that welfare cuts are regressive, (report, Aug 25, and letter, Aug 27) but the Government is concerned about the £21 billion annual cost of housing benefit to the taxpayer.

The financial deregulations of the early 1980s allowed house purchase lending to spiral out of control, driving house prices to unprecedented levels, and with them rents, which reflect house prices and consequentially the annual cost of housing benefit. Simultaneously, the Housing Act 1988 allowed landlords to charge a market rent, allowing rents to spiral after January 15, 1989. This removed rent controls from the Rent Act 1977 scheme, again increasing housing benefit and the cost to the taxpayer.

None of this is the responsibility of housing benefit claimants, but they are being punished for the errors of successive governments by the requirement to pay the balance of rents out of means-tested wages or unemployment benefits, or be threatened with eviction. The Local Housing Allowance began this policy of ignoring the means test when paying housing benefit; the cap continues it.

These are the deeply unjust and regressive consequences of bad housing policies introduced by the 1979 government, allowed to continue by the 1997 government and then blamed on the most vulnerable members of society.

Peter Ambrose
Visiting Professor in Housing and Health, University of Brighton

Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

See UK Housing Policy channel on HumanRightsTV

Go to Video Archive at UK Housing Policy Channel

Peter Ambrose response to Department of Work and Pensions

2010-08-15T16:28:00.002+01:00

Question “The Government is committed to delivering more affordable homes. How could reform best be implemented to ensure providers can continue to deliver the new homes we need and maintain the existing affordable homes?”

"An increased supply of affordable housing is a vital need and a pre-condition to increased labour mobility and thus to the more efficient working of the economy. Circle Anglia recently calculated the cost to the economy in terms of labour immobility deriving from lack of affordable housing as £542 million per year. In addition there are serious consequences for health and wellbeing outcomes. When housing costs take too much a share of household incomes the outcome is either benefit dependency - which costs the country £21 billion per year and complicates the transition into work - or reduced expenditure on key items to protect health such as adequate nutrition, recreational activity, community participation and indoor warmth.

A socially meaningful definition of the word 'affordable' is a prerequisite to responsible discussion of the issue. Currently the adjective 'affordable' is used with no evidence base and simply to mean 'below market prices and rents'. A debate conducted on this premise is meaningless. A rigorous test of affordability was developed in 2008 by Professor Ambrose using an adaptation of the MIS methodology developed by JRF. This method operationalises the definition of affordable in the 2005 Z2K Memorandum to the Prime Minister on Unaffordable Housing.

In brief, this definition specifies that housing is affordable if it can be afforded once all other household expenditures required to live a safe, healthy and participative life have been met. For a specified household living in a specified area of east London this figure was calculated at £135 per week in 2008. This means that 'social rented housing', whether LA or RSL, was locally affordable to this household but not any housing in the private rented or LCHO sectors. The affordable figure can be calculated for any household type and for any local area.

All four candidates for London Mayor agreed to adopt this definition and methodology at a London Citizens hustings meeting in London in April 2008 but so far this undertaking has not been honoured by the London Mayor.

The evidence-based affordable figure, known as the Z2K Housing Affordability Standard (HAS), is a target for housing producers to meet in terms of rental levels. This rent/purchase level can be met by a combination of increased producer subsidy (in low cost land by means of CLTs or in other forms) and innovative construction techniques and management systems (such as those pioneered by TEAM Homes and other progressive housing developers)."

Tired of Government Subsidies in Housing?

2010-08-12T12:26:00.003+01:00

Imagine if the world was turned upside down for a moment, what do you think would actually drop out into plain view? In the area of housing policy in the United Kingdom there is a common misconception that people in social housing are the worst drain on the state finances. If you just think about this for a moment I am sure you will be nodding your head and saying, "Well it is obvious isn't it!".

Actually not! Here is a note by Professor Peter Ambrose which clearly demonstrates that it is owner occupiers who have been most subsidised by the tax payer and cost the UK Economy dearly at every stage.

'Under-occupancy' in council housing (Guardian 7 August, p4)

Kensington and Chelsea housing officers are cold-calling tenants who are 'under-occupying' their homes to warn them to find somewhere smaller now or risk being forced to later. The context is that according to the DWP 456,000 households are 'under-occupying' - meaning they have more than one spare room.

The first question to ask is whether or not this 456,000 includes owner-occupiers. Presumably it does not because a very large number of owner-occupiers probably have at least one spare room for visiting friends and family and would not take kindly to being warned as to their occupancy behaviour. This difference in value judgement reflects the popular fiction that somehow tenants in 'social housing' (whether local authority or RSLs) are 'subsidised', and therefore can reasonably be pushed around, whereas owner-occupiers have 'stood on their own two feet', got themselves properly indebted and consequently live independently of public support.

This picture is 100% wrong on several counts. Since the 1920s at least purchasing owner-occupiers have been massively subsidised by exemption from capital gains tax, Schedule A Tax and, until very recently, by mortgage interest tax relief. In fact through the period up to about 2000, when most current owner-occupiers were in the buying stage, each owner-occupier was receiving about twice the state subsidy per household compared to households in the public rented sector. Moreover, depending on when they enter and exit the market, purchasers stand to make capital gains that at times far exceed the income from their actual work. This route to wealth, at least on paper, is denied to those not in a position to buy - i.e. those in the poorest third of households. How much more regressive could the system be?

In recent changes in public sector housing finance have meant that a reverse subsidy is at work - 'daylight robbery'. In recent years much more than £1 billion has been abstracted annually from the council housing sector accounts as rent policy has shifted from the former 'pooled historic cost' principle that delivered low rents with minimal subsidy to a formula that feeds local private house values into public rent levels. This is another effective way to penalise lower income households living in high housing value areas - and to subsidise the rest of society from the rents of the poorest third.

And how do house prices rise much faster than other economic indicators (give or take the periodic downturns)? After all, had house prices risen with general inflation since 1980 the average house price now would be about £60,000. The answer lies with the lending institutions who get into periodic bouts of excessive and highly profitable lending from which, if it all goes wrong, they can be sure of massive public funding bail outs. These have the inevitable impact on the very public spending programmes that most help the vulnerable. So home owners paper wealth comes at the expense of increased stress and hardship among those who can never aspire to play the home ownership game. We see it all around us. Everywhere one looks there are regressive effects.

So a widow who has lived in her two-bedroom council flat in west London for 22 years receives a phone call from the council warning her about her 'under-occupancy'. Her misdemeanour is that she has a spare bedroom so that her grandchildren can visit - like the vast majority of people in this country. Now she is understandably worried, fears for her future and cannot sleep.

This government of middle-aged white millionaires appear to have little compunction in penalising the poorest, whether they be widows, children or the elderly. Knaves or fools?

Criminal Law in Israel

2010-07-21T16:37:00.005+01:00

A story has surfaced today about an Arab man who had sex with an Israeli woman and has now been convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in prison. the report of this story appears here:

Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with jew.

Now what is truly disturbing about this story is that it criminalises the act of deception during the process which leads towards sex. The position established by this case is that if a man makes a claim to be something that he is not and, as a result of that claim, a woman then agrees to have sex with him, then that is an act of rape through deception.

We can forget all of the racial connection here; of course if this had been a Israeli man pretending to be an Arab in order to sleep with a Palestinian woman the Israeli court would have heard the case and found with the same judgement. No, let us not make this a racial issue, let's just consider this case in the only way it merits consideration, as a legal precedent.

"The sex therefore was obtained under false pretences, the judges said. "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated," they added."

quoted from The Guardian articled linked above.

So the case has established that obtaining sex under false pretences is an act of criminal rape.
One would assume that this line of thought would establish that prostitution, obtaining sex for an agreed amount of money as a verbal contract, is therefore not a criminal act of rape. Prostitution may be criminalised in another form, maybe as a morally unacceptable contract, but as there is clearly no deception about the act of sex the judge in the case quoted could not find it criminal on the same basis.

Let us now consider a phenomenon in England today. The situation with young women in night clubs going around and looking for professional footballers to sleep with in the hope of marriage and a comfortable and status rich life. My own son was in a night club last year when one of these hopeful maidens came up to him and asked "Are you a footballer?". He had the honesty to say he was not but in the spirit of brotherhood, pointed to his friends who, unlike himself, did not have girlfriends and said, "But they are!"

Clearly, In Israel, this would have to be the crime of Conspiracy to Facilitate an Act of Rape through the use of Deception. Fortunately, after the young men concerned had spent a fortune on drinks for the young ladies involved, on arriving back at their flat in Camden it was so clearly not the home of footballers that the young ladies left immediately. A lucky escape then for my son but his friends lost nearly £200 collectively in "trying to deceive these young girls into bed".

I am sure that you can all see the point I am making; for the last 4 million years the human animal has successfully mated and procreated using deception as part of the mating ritual. And we need to be very clear here, when women slap on a load of make up, slide into a low cut dress and go hunting for a likely male victim could they be subject to claims of misrepresentation?
Is make up a deception? Would such women be serving 18 months in prison for "raping" a man who thought that actually she was interested in him as a fully rounded person with a culture and integrity?

This case is an affront to the tradition of justice, it is an insult to intelligence and it is as clear a case of racial prejudice as ever was seen in a German court! A complete disgrace and
yet more proof that there is in the world a government which believes it has no responsibility to either history or humanity.

Gideon Levy, a liberal Israeli commentator, was quoted as saying: "I would like to raise only one question with the judge. What if this guy had been a Jew who pretended to be a Muslim and had sex with a Muslim woman?

"Would he have been convicted of rape? The answer is: of course not."

quoted from The Guardian article linked above.

Thank god this man was not in the Southern United States of the early nineteenth century because there would have been a good chance he would have just been dangling from the nearest tree for this crime. But that has to be a very small compensation.

Women Speaking: The launch of an important voice

2010-07-21T01:15:00.004+01:00

Women Speaking is the new channel on HumanRightsTV produced by Imen Yacoubi.

This is a channel dedicated to producing the unhindered voice of women, initially in North Africa but with wider aspirations as it progresses. Imen has been working in collaboration with Jack Adams of HumanRightsTV on a number of different ideas over the past year. This collaboration has led to a very meaningful exchange of ideas and words.

See Women Speaking Video Channel

Peace & Freedom Activist Ibrahim Amireh Imprisoned

2010-07-12T23:54:00.002+01:00

Contact Saheed, Ibrahim's son.

My father Ibrahim has been sentenced to two years imprisonment for organizing and participating in non-violent protests against the Apartheid-wall that cuts us off from our land and our olive groves and therefore robs us of our livelihood.

Without your support my father will stay in jail in very harsh conditions. It is even very likely that his prison sentence will be extended, since he refuses to enter a plea bargain with the Israeli authorities which ask him to admit crimes he did not commit.

He has been charged with the following offenses:

"being present in a declared military zone". The so-called 'military zone' are our olive groves, which Israel declared a military zone, once they started building the wall, ignoring international law that declares the wall to be "contrary to international law".

"organizing illegal and violent demonstrations". My father is a strong opponent to violence and in fact has discouraged others to react violently whenever we have been attacked by the Israeli military.

"incitement to throw stones and use other means of violence" claiming also that my father paid money to demonstrators to throw stones at soldiers, their jeeps and the wall. This charge is completely absurd. Right after my father got involved with the non-violent protests in 2008, the Israeli authorities revoked his work permit. Therefore, since then he was unemployed and struggled to put enough food on the table for me, my six siblings and our mother. To claim that he was paying others to throw stones or cause damage to the wall mocks reality.

All of these charges are based on forced confessions of two Ni'lin youth, one of them mentally ill. There will be another court date on Monday, 12th July. The military court offered to reduce my father's sentence if he admits to the allegations. My father refused the deal and intends to continue to do so, since he will not admit crimes he has not committed. We have serious concerns that the Ofer Military Court might extend his sentence at the next hearing.

My father is worried, mostly for us, his family. Not only because it is even harder now, without him, to cover our bare necessities, but also because our family is being intimidated regularly by the Israeli military. They have raided our house already 25 times in the middle of the night (8 times out of that since my father has been imprisoned). Sometimes they just come to harass, mock and threaten us. At other times they come with dogs, unleash them inside the house, turn everything upside down and cause a lot of damage. Due to the repeated abuse we are going through, both of my 5-year-old twin brothers suffer are terrified and suffer from nightmares.

My father wishes for nothing but peace and freedom and he believes that a lasting peace can only be reached with peaceful methods. In his opinion, violence will only add to the hatred and confusion and further worsen things. This is why he taught us children, not to look at violence as a solution in our struggle to restore our rights.

However, he does believe, that it is not only a necessity, but instead a duty to protest a terrible wrong that destroys the very existence of all villagers of Ni'lin. Hence, when Israel started marking the course of the wall that led straight through our olive groves in May 2008, the inhabitants of Ni'lin came together and formed the "Ni'lin Popular Committee Against The Wall", a group that non-violently resists the construction of a wall that cuts us off from more than one-third of our land and steals it from us. The Committee chose my father to be part of the leadership as well as its official representative, because they want the world to see the truth about us: we are peaceful people who object violence and we do not intend to harm anybody. We believe in freedom, peace and justice for every human being on earth and we dream to spread it from Ni'lin throughout the entire world.

We started with our protests on May 27, 2008, walking towards the bulldozers that were uprooting our olive trees. We walked our hands raised, so that the Israeli soldiers could see that we were unarmed. Initially, our protests were succesful and we managed to delay the construction. But very soon, they started to shoot sound bombs, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and even live ammunition to disperse our peaceful demonstrations.

Since our protests have started, more than 500 people have been detained, and five persons were killed by Israeli soldiers (among them a 10-year-old child Ahmed Moussa). We have endured curfews, destruction of our property, snipers shooting demonstrators in the legs from the roofs of Ni'lin houses, in order to discourage them to take part in non-violent protests. My sister Sammer, who is 12 years old, has been shot in her hand with live ammunition for no reason other than participating in the protests. My sister Rajaa, who is only 10 years, was shot with a sound bomb in her leg, while she tried to prevent snipers from climbing on our rooftop to shoot at other villagers.

Ni'lin, our village, our home is being turned into an open-air prison. The current entrance to the village will be closed, and will be replaced by a tunnel that will be built under route 446 - a road which only Jewish settlers are allowed to use. The tunnel will not only divide Ni'lin into two parts. It will also give the Israeli military the power to decide on indiscriminately to open or close the gate whenever they please, and therefore cut us all off of the outside world.

Still, my father maintains that non-violent protests are the only solution. Please join this group to show your support for Ibrahim Amireh and your objection to his illegal imprisonment.

Go To Facebook Group

i fram test

2010-07-10T12:23:00.001+01:00

Flowplayer: Seeing is believing

2010-07-09T15:42:00.003+01:00

An article on Open Source
and the
flowplayer as used by HumanRightsTV

Jack Adams M.A.,C.F.,
Founder HumanRightsTV

At HumanRightsTV we have used flowplayer as our web video player from the outset. We chose it initially because we, as an organisation, are deeply committed to the promotion of Open Source rather than support the exploitation which most proprietory coding actually represents.

Our coder, Mike Smith, checked out several options and decided that flowplayer represented the best option in his opinion. He liked the look of the coding, he liked the way the project was constructed and he could see the ambition behind it.

That was back in 2007, we think!, seems a long time ago now. What we have been able to watch is how, as HumanRightsTV has grown so too has flowplayer. That has given us great satisfaction.

More importantly, we have found our relationship with the flowplayer team to be excellent. These are guys who know what they are doing and deliver both a product and service which is an example of why chosing Open Source products is far superior to most proprietory brands.

What we know through very sad experience is that when we have bought proprietory products in the past they perform badly and any idea of customer support is a mirage. Where companies seek to make money from the consumer by closing their code (restricting what their product works with thus ensuring you have to buy more expensive software and updates) then the consumer is simply thrown to the wolves the nano-second after purchase.

That is a model of code and software development which only serves the God of PROFITS to SHAREHOLDERS. A business model that sees customers as nothing more than cattle in the consumer slaughteryard.

The proprietory business model smothers and supresses the potential of humanity and the promise of the future. Their only ambition is to provide luxury lifestyles for the few. This is a business model which is of the past not of the global future.

The flowplayer and its development team are of the future and provide both a product and service to their customers which seeks to see that future promise come alive. Remember that Open Source is free but as we like to say in England, "Free as in freedom not as in beers!"

Personally I fail to see how the proprietory model of coding, software and even hardware development holds any attraction to an entrepreneur or business. In my opinion, the future of any business model is Open Source as this provides your business with its needs as defined by your business model. What commercial sense does it make to purchase proprietory products that are closed to the world of development and improvement except at additional cost, need to be individually licensed across a workforce and then only provide a very narrow relationship with all the potentials available? If you consider the woeful performance of customer support to those products and the fact that performance is very often questionable then consequently the decision to buy simply cannot be made on cost effectiveness or efficiency.

Now is the time that the Open Source community should be advocating the commercial sense of their business model. That commercial sense is absolutely clear in the case of flowplayer.

The customer support to your coder is live, ongoing and rapid. The forums at the flowplayer web site provide a continuous support which looks to solve your developer needs and provide solutions that work for you. The product is under continuous development and improvement.

With Open Source products like flowplayer you only pay for the product and the performance your business needs demand. Your business employs its own coder to adapt and build exactly what that business requires or can employ a coder through the flowplayer forums. This is a product to demand concept with a full customer service back up.

At HumanRightsTV we don't indulge in marketing, we don't do advertising, we believe that human rights is far too important an issue to taint with commercial agendas. However, we do believe in supporting models of behaviour and ethics which provide benefits to human society and look towards a more equal global future. We are not against business, we are against exploitation and poor product and poor service. Open Source offers hope to developing nations, human communities which are costed out of the digital future and marginalised groups around the world, that is what we believe and we are happy to support flowplayer as an example of that ethos.

Open Source is the only business model which makes sense to a business owner.

Proprietory software is the business model which makes sense to proprietory shareholders.

flowplayer, watch our world change.

See flowplayer web site

Japanese Artist Mari joins HumanRightsTV

2010-07-09T01:59:00.003+01:00

The Japanese artist Mari explores ideas of anamistic iconic deconstruction.

The relationships between human life and animal life are not always obvious. How animals are treated in modern societies varies from culture to culture with only one consistency; our own self obsession, our all consuming anthropocentric viewpoint.

Perhaps in Buddhism we find a sense of equivalency, an idea of sameness, an understanding that life is a shared experience whilst form is just an expression of structure. But in the monotheist religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there exists that idea of separation from the natural world, the belief that the human animal is in a fundamental way superior to all of the other animal forms.

All of these ideas can be challenged when the visual images of being human are animalised, when our own iconic mirror in which our anthropocentric eye sees "not animal" reflects our deepest animal nature.

New Housing Channel on HumanRightsTV

2010-07-08T21:06:00.002+01:00

Promotional poster for new channel

The UK Economy is facing the toughest challenge since the depression of the 1930's. There is a need to reduce the national debt, an urgent need, and there is a real crisis in the need to promote economic growth; if we increase taxation, increase unemployment, weaken our currency and have no substantial manufacturing base how then is it possible to create real, sustainable growth?

The promotion of an holistic policy for UK Housing provides a very real and pragmatic opportunity to address all of these issues and yet government policy looks set to remain piecemeal. The reason for this is very clear, at the political level decisions regarding housing favour the free market solutions and that market will never ever consider national strategy and national interest before shareholder profits.

This cannot be an acceptable approach in the area of housing because housing is a fundamental of our social infrastructure. In addition, whilst shareholders can draw profits it is left to the tax payer to pick up the bill for poor housing provision. This is not an analysis or view, this is the obvious conclusion of the experience of the last twenty years and beyond for anyone who actually knows the subject.

As Professor Peter Ambrose, the leading UK expert on Affordable Housing, states, "What we need is evidence based policy not policy based evidence."

This is a key point because too often the experts call for an holistic housing policy is interpreted by many in government and the establishment as an anti free market stance. Wholly incorrect, in the twenty-first century we are moving ever further away from the politics of the left versus the right, we are a developing nation in every sense of those words, and it is impossible for any commentator to advocate the historic forms of economic government, the centralised economy or the free market economy. We need the pragmatic economy and that will include the free market because that is an economic part of our national identity.

The point Ambrose is making is that we cannot cede policy making to the free market any more than we can remove the free market from the implementation of policy. The costs to the economy in terms of health provision, policing, education, environmental costs and lost opportunities are numbered in billions of pounds tax expenditure each and every single year. The national infrastructure is weakened by those costs and the national performance is shackled by this national housing blight.

If a government were to formulate a cross party national housing policy the savings to the economy would not only pay for the effort but are actually calculable before hand.A government which formulated an holistic housing policy based on the future of an environmentally sound economy with environmentally sound housing stock would create new economic segments of production and could develop new industries.

If a government were to adopt an holistic housing policy then employment could be created and tax revenues increased.

If a government were to adopt an holistic housing policy then savings could be made in the National Health Service and funding redirected into improved provision rather than paying the cost of the consequence of poor housing.

The list of benefits can continue but the point is that these opportunities, all known and cost calculated by many institutions and professionals across the land are being ignored.

UK Housing Policy channel on HumanRightsTV is an initiative led by Professor Peter Ambrose to bring together the voices that call for change in housing policy in order to present to government the compelling case.

See UK Housing Policy channel on HumanRightsTV

UK Housing Policy

2010-07-07T18:21:00.005+01:00

UK Housing Policy is the channel which seeks to bring together institutions, NGO's, Charitable Bodies, Academic Institutions and Professional Institutions which have an interest in promoting clear, well thought out, holistic housing policy for the United Kingdom.

This page is the entry menu into the archive system which is held on HumanRightsTV. The menu separates the channel in the hierarchy of content as follows:

Section Heading
to
Organisation
to
Topic
to
Video Series

You may access each level of the hierarchy by clicking on the relevant term.The links provided should enable you to navigate forewards and backwards through the menu structure. Included in this navigation facility is the ability to search for material by content type or author.

As an alternative you may go directly to the master menu for the channel at:

UK Housing Policy

UK Housing Policy Hierarchical Entry Menu

UK General Policy and Housing Strategy

UK Housing Management

UK Housing Review

UK Housing Health

Search by term

Housing policy should be at the centre of the political debate in the UK since housing is the most crucial form of infrastructure for human activity. Housing supply, affordability and quality affect both the efficient functioning of the economy and also the health, wellbeing and stability of the society. However since the days of Bevan in the 1940s or maybe Macmillan in the 1950s there has been no holistic approach to housing policy and a rapid turnover of, on the whole, mediocre and uncommitted housing ministers.

Too often the debate, and therefore the policy, is segmented, marginalised and under developed. Policy has been marked by ideological considerations (such as the obsession with home ownership) or short term knee-jerk crisis management. There has been no thought-out and explicit set of aims for housing policy and no medium or long-term strategy.

The results of these failures are all around us. These include among others

massively increased costs to the tax payer via additional NHS costs

periodic poorly regulated cycles in house prices and rents

consequent destabilising effects on the land market

consequent effects in producing financial crises as at the moment

adverse effects on labour mobility, recruitment and retention in some areas

a huge and costly increase in benefit dependency

poor returns to educational investment since poorly housed children cannot reach their potential at school

the stereotyping of millions living in poorly maintained social housing and the ultimate catastrophes of home repossession and street homelessness

These effects arise from widespread and deeply embedded inefficiencies in housing policy and they have significant and sometimes devastating impacts on personal, social and economic life within our nation. This channel seeks to bring the housing debate to life by making a wide range of evidence-based material and discussion available to educational establishments, policy makers, journalists and housing professionals and practitioners.

THE DALE FARM EVICTION PLAN MAY BE A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY

2010-06-28T13:26:00.001+01:00

Plans to destroy the Dale Farm Travellers'
community, the biggest in Britain, may amount
to a criminal conspiracy, it was alleged at a meeting
with top Essex police officers last week.

That such a conspiracy already exists was
suggested by Prof. Thomas Acton, of Greenwich
University. He told Assistant Chief Constable
Derek Benson breaches of safety which could
endanger the lives of children were almost
certainly inherent in Basildon's secret operational
blue-print for the mass clearance of ninety
Gypsy families.

It was likely that the local council, which has
brushed aside a legal memorandum on forced
clearances of the kind envisaged, is ignoring
important aspects of international law, Prof Acton
said. That law states violent evictions without provision
of alternate homes are illegal and have been outlawed
by the United Nations.

"We are still seeking a way out for all parties,"
commented Prof.Acton after the meeting, which
took place on 25 June at Basildon central police
station. "There's no need for this eviction and I
don't believe the police want to see it happen."

Residents are being left in the dark as to Basildon
council's intentions, Grattan Puxon, secretary of
the Dale Farm Housing Association told the
meeting. Clarification on several important points,
including the fate of the community's chapel and
holy shrines, is still missing and there had been
outright refusal to reveal details of the contract with
bailiff agents Constant & Co., which in the past
have bullied eviction victims and burned their
caravans.

"We have sought details of the contract, information
on risk assessment and clear guidance regarding
removal of property," Mr Puxon said. "All have been
declined - which suggests the council have a lot
to hide."

However, he said it has been admitted that the
council went ahead with the clearance of Gypsy
properties at Hovefield, Wickford, without carrying
out a risk assessment as required by law. This was
a serious breach of safety in itself, Mr Puxon claimed.

Bob Watt, of Essex University Law School,
informed the Assistant Chief Constable and police
solicitor Adam Hunt that an appeal against refusal to
disclose contract details would be lodged shortly with
the UK Information Commissioner.

He then went on to forewarn the police of the
many legal pitfalls in regards to the rights of the
legal residents at Dale Farm and the behaviour
of bailiffs towards property owners. "We expect the
police to intervene when bailiffs break the law," Watt
emphasised. "That includes not using machinery
near to children."

As serious is the failure of the council to respond
to an offer by Wickford churches to provide shelter
in church halls to those wishing to avoid the trauma
of seeing their homes bulldozed. Ann Kobayashi, a
member of the Catholic parish of Our Lady of Good
Counsel, said Travellers made up a large proportion
of the congregation and their forced dispersal might
be regarded as a breach of equality law aimed at
sustaining communities.

"Basildon intends to smash this community,"
said Kobayashi. "This will have a horrific impact on
our parish where the Travellers are well integrated.
Six members from Dale Farm are eucharistic
ministers."

It should be noted that a British judge last week
quashed plans to demolish homes and an indoor
market in north London as no proper account had
been taken of the impact on the ethnic communities
involved in terms of race quality law.

Speaking for Dale Farm, Mary Ann McCarthy
said she feared for her two recently married
granddaughters, both now expecting babies. "How
will they cope if we're thrown out on the road?
I can't believe you'll do this."

"That is something you must take up with
the council," Benson answered. "We're not
intending to take charge of this eviction and
will be imparial to both sides. I would like to
see more talks between you and Basildon
council to settle this matter between you."

Before the end of the meeting, the Assistant
Chief Constable assured Traveller representatives
that he viewed their intented deployment of human
rights monitors and legal observers, including a
UN-linked team, as fully acceptable and legitimate.
He also promised that members of the media
invited by residents would be able to go about
their business unhampered by the police.

It was agreed the parties should meet again
in the event that Basildon council decides to issue
the 28-days warning notice of an eviction operation.

The Cost of Poor Housing

2010-06-28T11:28:00.006+01:00

See the rest of this talk

Simon Nicol talks about the major report into the Cost of Poor Housing by the BRE. This talk was delivered at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health at their conference

Mavi Mamara: Who is telling the truth?

2010-06-27T20:41:00.015+01:00

(Don't forget you can go full screen here)

At HumanRightsTV we have worked with Ken O'Keefe to develop an idea of "Safe Trade", trade that does not involve the supply of any material which could be used for violence. When Ken left for the flotilla his stated aim was to make contact with Palestinian merchants who would like to conduct "Safe Trade". The ambition of the mission was summed up in four simple concepts:

Safe Trade Develops Prosperity
Prosperity Fosters Stability
Stability Builds Security
Security Promotes Peace

The key to this approach of his company, Aloha Palestine, was that if trade was safe then who could object? In his business plan he not only allowed for Israeli inspection of this trade but actually made it an ambition of that trade. Ken's reasoning was that if Safe Trade could be established, Safe Verifiable Trade, a trade mechanism in which all parties could see prosperity, stability, security and peace, then who could possibly object?

You can see for yourself here: Aloha Palestine Web Site

So when the Israeli Government branded Ken as a known terrorist, a supporter of Hamas and declared that his intention was to travel to Gaza to train terrorists then someone is clearly not telling the truth. Here at HumanRightsTV we do not under any condition support violence, we do not advocate violence and we do not get wittingly involved with anyone who is involved in violence. Ken O'Keefe's life is, as he says, an open book and for many years he has put his life on the line in support of the victims against the aggressor. He has always placed himself in that position unarmed except with what he sees as the truth. Now whether his truth is your truth is something you can only decide for yourself but you also have to decide who is telling lies.

You can call him many things, maybe an idealist, maybe mistaken in his ideas, maybe someone who doesn't understand grand politics but to brand him as a terrorist has to be , at the very least, a statement to question with extreme and real vigour. The video above shows the condition in which he was released from Israeli detention. As you can see, he is not in good condition. But more surprising is that the Israeli government condemned him as a terrorist and a trainer of terrorists 24 hours before they released him from custody. Now if they were so certain why on earth did they not put him on trial?

How does a nation state declare publicly to the world that a man is a known terrorist and then release him from their custody? Who is telling the truth?

As with all material on HumanRightsTV it is left for you to judge who exactly is telling the truth and who is simply telling lies.

Here is some published testimony allegedly from Commandos who boarded the Turkish ship.

The attackers had already seized two pistols from the commandos, and fired repeatedly at them. Facing more than a dozen of the mercenaries, and convinced their lives were in danger, he and his colleagues opened fire, he said. S. singlehandedly killed six men. His colleagues killed another three.

On Thursday, S. sat down with The Jerusalem Post at the Shayetet’s base in northern Israel for an exclusive interview, during which he described the dramatic events aboard the Mavi Marmara on Monday; he is being considered for a medal of valor.

“When I hit the deck, I was immediately attacked by people with bats, metal pipes and axes,” S. told the Post. “These were without a doubt terrorists. I could see the murderous rage in their eyes and that they were coming to kill us.”

S. does not look like a hero. Well-built, like all commandos in the Shayetet, he is also soft-spoken and stingy with words, but his commander Lt.-Col. T. fills in the blanks.

“S. did a remarkable job,” T. said. “He stabilized the situation and succeeded in hitting six of the terrorists.”

Read More at Free Republic

As an alternate view Cultures of Resistance have managed to present video evidence to the U.N. which they claim shows blood from people shot before the commandos boarded and the laser sighting lights from Israeli snipers trying to locate targets.

Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara, May 31st 2010 // 15 min. from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.

"Eyewitness reports and photographic evidence have proven that Tel Aviv has been completely dishonest about the Israeli military attack on the unarmed international civilian flotilla of humanitarian and aid ships going to the Gaza Strip. Israel has also been caught doctoring evidence. New video evidence has now been presented dispelling what little credibility Tel Aviv had left.

When the Israeli military attacked and took over the civilian ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, it had its forces collect and destroy all media devices on the civilian ships. This included laptops, video cameras, cell phones, photography cameras, and other electronic media devices. Using the same Israeli tactic applied in the occupied Palestinian Territories, international journalists were also systematically sought and attacked by Israeli forces.

Yet, the journalists aboard the Mavi Marmara managed to smuggle one hour worth of video evidence proving that Israel has been giving a false account of what happened. The video was released at a United Nations press conference held at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Library in New York City. Iara Lee, a filmaker from Cultures of Resistance, proves that the passengers accounts are the ones that conform to reality."

Read more at Global Research

Our main question is this; who is continually and deliberately telling lies? Is Ken O'Keefe a liar and a terrorist? Is the man who formed the human shield in the second Iraq War, where civilians stood without weapons before a military strike in order to defend schools, hospitals and other civilians a person who advocates terrorism in word, deed or action? If we look at the record of Ken O'Keefe and then look at the record of the Israeli government can we see who is telling the truth and who is telling lies?

You must answer that question for yourself, you must look at the evidence, consider the context of this history, consider the events of this history and decide exactly who it is you believe is telling the truth.

Only you can decide.

Stephen Battersby talks about future needs in housing policy.

2010-06-27T20:14:00.003+01:00

Stephen Battersby proposes how change and development of Environmental Housing Policy can happen. About the CIEH The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) is a registered charity and the professional voice for environmental health. It sets standards, accredits courses and qualifications for the education of members and other environmental health practitioners. It provides information, evidence and policy advice to local and national government and environmental and public health practitioners in the public and private sectors. A s an awarding body, the CIEH provides qualifications, events, and support materials on topics relevant to health, wellbeing and safety to develop workplace skills and best practice. As a campaigning organisation, the CIEH aims to promote improvements in environmental and public health policy. It is based in the UK with offices in London, Northern Ireland and Wales. The trading arm of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is a wholly owned trading subsidiary which is charged with promoting the mission of the CIEH through its trading activities and its profits are gift-aided to the CIEH to support its charitable objectives. It organises conferences, seminars and produces a comprehensive range of public health publications. It also provides over 50 certification training programmes which include food safety, health and safety, environmental awareness through a network of over 10,000 registered trainers and 6,000 registered training centres across the UK.

Defenders of the Mavi Mamarra

2010-06-05T15:22:00.012+01:00

Update 24.09.2010 See UN Panel Report: Gaza Flotilla Raid by IDF Illegal: Gaza Flotilla Raid by IDF Illegal: 56-page report by the UN panel of three international lawyers

This item was sent by Ken O'Keefe from Istanbul at 10.00hrs 05.06.2010 and provides an eyewitness account of events on the Mavri Mamarra when Israeli commandos stormed the vessel.

Ken O'Keefe Arriving in Istanbul 04.06.2010

by Ken O’Keefe from Istanbul

I have for many years understood that we, people of conscience, are the true holders of power in this world. Frustratingly however we have largely relinquished that power and failed to reach our full potential. Our potential to create a better world, a just world. Nonetheless I have conspired with others of like mind to reveal and exercise our true power.

In 2002 I initiated the TJP Human Shield Action to Iraq because I knew that the invasion of Iraq had been planned well in advance, that it was part of a ‘Global Spectrum Dominance’ agenda as laid out by the Project For A New American Century. I knew that protests had no chance of stopping the invasion, and that largely these protests were just a way of making us feel better about the coming mass murder; by being able to say I protested against it.

With that understanding I argued that the only viable way to stop the invasion was to conduct a mass migration to Iraq. A migration in which people from around the world, especially western citizens, would position themselves at sites in Iraq that are supposed to be protected by international law, but which are routinely bombed when it is only Iraqi, Palestinian, generally non-white, western lives who will be killed. I felt 10,000 such people could stop the invasion, or at the very least, expose the invasion for what it was from the start, an act of international aggression, a war crime and a crime against humanity.

When our two double decker busses travelled from London to Baghdad through Turkey, it was ever clear that the people of Turkey also could sense the power of this act, and they were the biggest participants in it. In the end we did not get the numbers required to stop the war, with at least one million Iraqi’s dead as a result, but I remain convinced that it was within our power to prevent the invasion. A massive opportunity lost as far as I am concerned.

In 2007 I joined the Free Gaza Movement with its plan to challenge the blockade of Gaza by travelling to Gaza by sea. From the moment I heard of the plan I knew it could succeed and ultimately I served as a captain on the first attempt. The Israeli government said throughout our preparation that we were no better than pirates and they would treat us as such. They made clear we would not reach Gaza. And still I knew we could succeed. And we did. Two boats with 46 passengers from various countries managed to sail into Gaza on August 23, 2010; this was the first time this had been done in 41 years.

The truth is the blockade of Gaza is far more than three years old, and yet we, a small group of conscientious people defied the Israeli machine and celebrated with tens of thousands of Gazans when we arrived that day. We proved that it could be done. We proved that an intelligent plan, with skilled manipulation of the media, could render the full might of the Israeli Navy useless. And I knew then that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

So participating in the Freedom Flotilla is like a family reunion to me. It is my long lost family whose conscience is their guide, who have shed the fear, who act with humanity. But I was especially proud to join IHH and the Turkish elements of the flotilla. I deeply admire the strength and character of the Turkish people, despite your history having stains of injustice, like every nation, you are today from citizen to Prime Minister among the leaders in the cause of humanity and justice.

I remember being asked durýng the TJP Human Shield Action to Iraq if I was a pacifist, I responded with a quote from Gandhi by saying I am not a passive anything. To the contrary I believe in action, and I also believe in self-defence, 100%, without reservation. I would be incapable of standing by while a tyrant murders my family, and the attack on the Mavri Mamara was like an attack on my Palestinian family. I am proud to have stood shoulder to shoulder with those who refused to let a rogue Israeli military exert their will without a fight. And yes, we fought.

hen I was asked, in the event of an Israeli attack on the Mavri Mamara, would I use the camera, or would I defend the ship? I enthusiastically committed to defence of the ship. Although I am also a huge supporter of non-violence, in fact I believe non-violence must always be the first option. Nonetheless I joined the defence of the Mavri Mamarra understanding that violence could be used against us and that we may very well be compelled to use violence in self defence.

I said this straight to Israeli agents, probably of Mossad or Shin Bet, and I say it again now, on the morning of the attack I was directly involved in the disarming of two Israeli Commandos. This was a forcible, non-negotiable, separation of weapons from commandos who had already murdered two brothers that I had seen that day.

One brother with a bullet entering dead center in his forehead, in what appeared to be an execution. I knew the commandos were murdering when I removed a 9mm pistol from one of them. I had that gun in my hands and as an ex-US Marine with training in the use of guns it was completely within my power to use that gun on the commando who may have been the murderer of one of my brothers. But that is not what I, nor any other defender of the ship did. I took that weapon away, removed the bullets, proper lead bullets, separated them from the weapon and hid the gun.

I did this in the hopes that we would repel the attack and submit this weapon as evidence in a criminal trial against Israeli authorities for mass murder. I also helped to physically separate one commando from his assault rifle, which another brother apparently through into the sea. I and hundreds of others know the truth that makes a mockery of the brave and moral Israeli military.

We had in our full possession, three completely disarmed and helpless commandos. These boys were at our mercy, they were out of reach of their fellow murderers, inside the ship and surrounded by 100 or more men. I looked into the eyes of all three of these boys and I can tell you they had the fear of God in them. They looked at us as if we were them, and I have no doubt they did not believe there was any way they would survive that day. They looked like frightened children in the face of an abusive father. But they did not face an enemy as ruthless as they.

Instead the woman provided basic first aid, and ultimately they were released, battered and bruised for sure, but alive. Able to live another day. Able to feel the sun over head and the embrace of loved ones. Unlike those they murdered. Despite mourning the loss of our brothers, feeling rage towards these boys, we let them go. The Israeli prostitutes of propaganda can spew all of their disgusting bile all they wish, the commandos are the murders, we are the defenders, and yet we fought. We fought not just for our lives, not just for our cargo, not just for the people of Palestine, we fought in the name of justice and humanity. We were right to do so, in every way.

Ken O'Keefe's injuries which he claims were sustained whilst in custody.

While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted. Access to food and water and toilets was denied. Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs. We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands. We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really.

We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell. In all this what I saw more than anything else were cowards… and yet I also see my brothers. Because no matter how vile and wrong the Israeli agents and government are, they are still my brothers and sisters and for now I only have pity for them. Because they are relinquishing the most precious thing a human being has, their humanity.

In conclusion; I would like to challenge every endorser of Gandhi, every person who thinks they understand him, who acknowledges him as one of the great souls of our time (which is just about every western leader), I challenge you in the form of a question. Please explain how we, the defenders of the Mavri Mamarra, are not the modern example of Gandhi’s essence? But first read the words of Gandhi himself.

" I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour."

And lastly I have one more challenge. I challenge any critic of merit, publicly, to debate me on a large stage over our actions that day. I would especially love to debate with any Israeli leader who accuses us of wrongdoing, it would be my tremendous pleasure to face off with you. All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns, so I am ripe to see you in a new context. I want to debate with you on the largest stage possible. Take that as an open challenge and let us see just how brave Israeli leaders are.

Ken O'Keefe in Istanbul airport speaking with the press.

Gaza Flotilla May 2010: 27th Latest News

2010-05-27T19:49:00.002+01:00

Thursday 27 May 2010 – Antalya Port, Turkey

Departing for Gaza by Sea Once Again

After what has been at least 18 months of preparation by organisers from Turkish and European groups, the Freedom Flotilla’s contingent from Turkey is just about to set of for Gaza. There are 9 ships/boats within the flotilla, 10,000 tonnes of cargo, and citizens from more than 60 nations. Cargo includes pre-fabricated homes, cement, steel, electric wheel chairs, educational materials and medical supplies and more. As it stands the Israeli Government is putting its best brave face forward, threatening to seize the vessels and passengers, take all of us against our will to Israel, and then deport us to our countries of origin.

The Israeli’s can say this all they like, but the truth is they are besides themselves with a hopeless problem. Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister has said the Israeli Navy will stop the flotilla “at any price”. As one of the passengers I have to say that I get a real chuckle inside when I think about this, I really do. The best Israel can do is nothing, not easy for a bully with enormous military power and all the big bull kids behind him. But bully’s can be dealt with, like we did with the Free Gaza Mission back in August of 2008. With that journey we managed with two small boats with 46 passengers to be the first arrivals by sea in 41 years, simply because we commanded enough attention and international participation to make it so. The scale and level of participation in the Freedom Flotilla is in a completely different league; for Israel to be aggressive is for Israel to commit its second biggest public relations disaster, number one being last years invasion and bombardment of Gaza.

We will succeed, no matter what. We will prove that we the people, people of conscience from around the globe, can achieve whatever we set our sights on. We will end the blockade, whether this year or next. And as always the politicians and United Nations and the prostitutes of propaganda and all the others who protected the status quo if injustice and suffering will then “get involved”. Of so predictably they will attempt to take credit for what the people compelled. That is always the case, governments never lead in the cause of justice; they always follow.

It is people who allow corruption and injustice to be par for the course in politics, and it is us who can change it. All it will take is for us to realise our power.

Do not forget that the most powerful government/nations on Earth are 100% behind Israel’s horrendous policies. The EU stands by and does nothing, other than 25 billion Euros a year in trade with Israel; all the while feigning empathy and desire for peace. The United States bankrolls everything Israel does, or should I say the American taxpayer does. Other corrupt governments in the Arab world and beyond do nothing, often times speaking with a sickeningly, transparently false commitment to justice. And yet we cannot blame them, we have allowed this circus; the clowns are simply doing what clowns do.

But the tide has changed, and the Freedom Flotilla is the continuation of a new way of dealing with injustice and war. It is the right way, the way of humanity transcending the circus we call politics.

Have noticed that seeming all the governments these days seem to campaign on change? What a laugh. Let the politicians act like the clowns they are, and let us act like the human beings we yearn to be. All will be sorted much quicker than we know.

Ken O'Keefe

Managing Director

Aloha Palestine CIC

ken.okeefe@AlohaPalestine.com

http://AlohaPalestine.com

Message from the Freedom Flotilla

2010-05-23T14:43:00.001+01:00

Aloha to all of you,

I just want to send a quick message to share the fact that I will be making my fourth journey to Palestine, this being my second to Gaza. I served as a captain on the first mission to arrive in Gaza in 41 years, that was with the 'Free Gaza' mission that arrived on August 23, 2008. Subsequent journeys have succeeded in making it to Gaza but the last few have been stopped by Israel. I am sure the reason for this is the later trips were fairly small in scale and the lack of attention (primarily in the West) made them vulnerable to Israeli strong arm tactics.

I have however joined the 'Freedom Flotilla' which will be setting off for Gaza in the next couple of days. The flotilla will have 10 ships/boats, hundreds of tonnes of cargo and 600 people from over 40 countries. This is the kind of scale that makes for a no lose situation. No matter what happens we will further the cause of justice in our world. That is the power we have. When I think of how much energy we spend on tired tactics that show little to no positive results, I cannot help but long for the day when we reach our potential. The world is what we make of it and we can indeed make a better world; much faster than most think/believe.

Nonetheless you will see the powers that be and their minions in the corporate media once again ignore or downplay the historic importance and power of such actions. Think about the magnitude of what we are doing, 600 people facing a political quagmire that has relegated the 1.5 mission people of Gaza, 800,000 of which are children, to a Medieval type siege for years now. We are openly defying Israeli crimes that politics seemingly protects, and that is exactly what I see we as people of conscience must spend more time doing. Let us stop waiting for the saviour(s) who in truth are ourselves, we are our own saviours and we can save ourselves, our human family, whenever we make it so.

And if you are wondering, I will be making efforts in Gaza to further the mission of Aloha Palestine. Specifically to develop trading partners for the import and export trade mission that makes Aloha Palestine's mission both unique and complimentary to the wider aid missions.

TJP (Truth Justice Peace),

Ken O'Keefe

--
Managing Director
Aloha Palestine CIC
ken.okeefe@AlohaPalestine.com
http://AlohaPalestine.com

How we can solve the Social Housing Crisis

2010-05-19T22:09:00.003+01:00

How we can solve the Social Housing Crisis
by
Jack Adams M.A.
Project Leader HumanRightsTV

There is absolutely no truth in the idea that the so called Credit Crunch was either unpredictable or unpredicted. Professor Peter Ambrose predicted it very clearly in 2005 to the British Government and in a meeting with Treasury officials was told, “Well this is all plausible but as long as the markets work everything is ok and as the markets are working there is nothing to worry about.”
When the consequences of massive and irresponsible bank lending into the housing market, which inflated the prices of homes beyond the ability of ordinary people's pockets, created an economic disaster then suddenly it is all “unforseen” and we are paying the cost of a “global economic problem” rather than rank arrogance and stupidity both in banks and government.

Naturally, this unforseen economic disaster can now be rectified by giving the banks the money they have lost for abandoning their historically fundamental lending principle: don't lend to people who can't afford to pay the money back, with cuts in public services, ramping up tax incomes and above all else making sure that property prices do not crash back to anything approaching fiscal reality. Surely there has to be another way. Are we simply going to allow those who have been complicit in both government and opposition to strap the public to the whipping post and thrash the skins off of them because they cannot think of anything better to do. Perhaps we can consider a lesson from an indisputable source and one that comes from the halcyon days of Dame Shirley Porter's approach to social housing.

Obviously Westminster Council were only concerned with property development and shedding the costs to the taxpayer of expensive social provision by allowing sensitive property developers to take on the responsibility of housing. In order to make this attractive there had to be a premium to those stout souls willing to risk the onerous task of looking after housing stock as the costs of maintaining homes for families was not immediately attractive to shareholders. In a leap of the imagination Dame Shirley and her public service orientated council realised that it was worthwhile for the Westminster Council to more or less give the properties away to any responsible property developer in order to relieve the taxpayer of the dreadful burden of housing. Fortunately there were many business people willing to chance a bid for this opportunity to serve the communities and peoples which Westminster Council held statutory responsibility for. Unfortunately for this marvellous innovation of social engineering some of the tenants simply were not having any of it.

Enter here the story of WECH: Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, a group of residents who resisted having their homes taken over by property developers, mounted a campaign and turned the policy of the council on its head by acquiring the whole estate for themselves, after many legal challenges, for no cost at all. We are talking three tower blocks and over 400 houses together with £20,000,000 in cash from Westminster Council in recognition of the degradation the whole estate had been allowed to fall into. Maybe there is no surprise that after this heavily resisted campaign succeeded the government of the day, led by one Margaret Thatcher, enacted laws to ensure such a move couldn't happen again. So what happened on the Walterton and Elgin Estate, did anarchy break out, was it the end of civilisation, exactly how did the common people manage a huge and highly valuable swath of real estate?

Well 25 years later the World Health Organisation have valued it as the third best resident housing scheme in the world. The anecdotal evidence is that the population live longer than the national average, the local Primary Health Care Trust produce fewer prescriptions for the population than similar groups and the crime rate is dramatically different to surrounding areas. Enter Professor Ambrose, a team of researchers from the London School of Economics and HumanRightsTV to put together an evidential base substantiating the anecdotal claims. This report will be ready some time in August 2010 but the personal testimony from the estate is already on line at:

http://www.humanrightstv.com/uk-housing-management

This prime source testimony makes startling viewing and covers views from the tenants, the staff and the researchers. The archive will build and will be used to substantiate the findings of Ambrose's report. But just how does this all provide a solution to the needs of our time?

Well simply put, if because of the rampant idiocy of allowing bank debt to inflate house prices in order to claim economic growth we are, rather than the banks, required to pay the debt which exists between the average wage and the average house price, then massive savings in tax expenditure are absolutely required. This means that the genius's in government will have to wield the axe across the whole of society. However, in WECH we have a model of social housing management that produces quantifiable savings to the taxpayer, reduces crime, increase population health, is efficient, is effective, is controlled by the people who are resident and has massively increased the value of the properties. Obviously it has several major flaws which make the whole model completely unworkable as government policy, firstly there are no shareholders, secondly there are no large local government salaries, thirdly there are no subsidies or tax breaks to Social Housing Enterprises, in other words it seems to be completely in control of the residents and the bureaucracy hasn't a single finger in any pie. But at a time when fingers are being withdrawn from pies surely this all has to be a good idea?

Maybe, but when a four bedroom house for a family of six in the heart of London is rented out for £140 a week that simply is no good for the economy. Professor Ambrose's much ignored Affordability Standard, where he had the insight to use government figures to calculate exactly what the value in cash is of an affordable rent when no-one else had a figure but waved the term around merrily, shows that the rents on the WECH estate are affordable for ordinary people but where is the profit in that to the economy? Well actually it is in the savings in externalities of cost made consequent on the fact that people have proper homes, security and less stress than the rest of the population.

All of this is all well and good in theory but really, you have to look at what this group of people have done. When you see it you simply will not believe it and then you will have something in common with all the politicians who are busy shoving tax payer money into corporate pockets to “solve the social housing problem.”

Links:

http://www.humanrightstv.com/uk-housing-management/maintanence/the-difference

http://www.humanrightstv.com/uk-housing-management/jonathan-rosenberg/conditions

http://wech.co.uk/

http://www.z2k.org/search/node/affordability%20standard

http://www.z2k.org/search/node/memorandum%20to%20government%202005

Please feel free to use the embed code beneath the video content to spread this around blogs and web sites. HumanRightsTV is a not for profit project which carries no advertising and uses no data marketing practices. All material is the copyright of the contributor and each contributor has editorial control over their own content. info@humanrightstv.com

The WECH project

2010-05-19T18:43:00.001+01:00

Most of the videography of the WECH project has now been completed. This has been a fascinating project which challenges the conventions of social housing management in the UK.

The project is led by Professor Peter Ambrose, a leading expert on Affordable Housing, who is looking to provide an evidential base to advocate the replication of the WECH model for social housing projects. The role of HumanRightsTV is to support the academic work with an archive of prime source personal testimony which can be used to manifestly support the conclusions of the report.

This role in underlining reports by allowing those who see them, policy makers, bureaucrats, journalists and academic institutions, is a key role of HumanRightsTV. An example of the importance of this work is can be seen in the similar support given to The Independent Asylum Commission and the subsequent success of their report to the Home Office. Perhaps for the first time, a quasi judicial investigation was able not only to provide conclusions but also allow the policy makers the chance to see the evidence on which that report was based.

In the world of mulit-media marketing the opportunities which present those who would seek to influence policy are of enormous importance. As yet the NGO's, academic institutions and charity organisations are only just becoming alert to the possibilities of controlling their own media distribution in ways not available to them just six years ago.

Creating on line archives, creating social media connections and use of the world wide web is a developing resource and HumanRightsTV offers the chance to place an archive within a system which is constantly being technically developed in order to keep up with the ever faster changing landscape of mutli-media. The WECH project will be presented as an example not just of an exceelent model of social housing management but also a powerful model of impact marketing.

Housing as a Human Right

2010-05-11T15:15:00.003+01:00

We have been working on a fascinating project about housing. The big question in terms of Human Rights is the use of housing as an investment vehicle rather than homes. Housing is an essential component of the infrastructure of society and poor housing produces massive costs to the taxpayer in terms of health, policing, education and social services budgets.

These externalities of cost are a major issue when governments like those trying to form in the UK at this time are promising savage budget cuts in order to pay for the bail out of the international banking system. Irony is too light a word to use in this situation when we consider that the primary cause of the financial crisis is precisely the fact that housing was used as a means to generate profits rather than a means to provide social infrastructure.

The project we are working on examples this in shocking detail and the interview below begins to tell the story:

See More

Also See the WECH Project

Fred Halliday 1946 – 2010

2010-04-26T19:02:00.002+01:00

Anthony Barnett, 26 April 2010

Fred Halliday, great scholar and openDemocracy columnist, has died. We are posting appreciations here
About the author Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy.net and the editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom.

Fred Halliday died this morning in Barcelona where he had been battling with cancer. His twenty plus books (there are more to come), his compelling lectures, his wide ranging, powerful essays and journalism, provided a constant source of inspiration for many of us around the world. He was a like a one-man international: dedicated and passionate in the cause of justice; hard-headed in insisting upon the obstacles that had to be overcome; scathing about the stupidities of those who proclaimed they were the force of progress; constantly aware of the deeper levels of cultural and religious irrationality and its shaping power – and capable of making astoundingly well-informed judgments about almost anywhere on the planet.

His urge to judgment, clarity and laying out a view that was also a challenge, made him an exemplary political intellectual. He investigated on the ground, read widely, learnt fluent Arabic, Farsi, German, French, Russian and Spanish and set out his views in lucid prose. An important contributor to openDemocracy, he saw his columns as a source of renewal. He intended to deepen his writing, to make it more personal and profound, and to take on the prevailing shallowness and loss of a sense of history in current affairs. It is a tragedy for us all that he did not live to intensify our understanding as he hoped. For me personally he was the comrade of a lifetime. I aim to write something for him in due course. Those of you who knew him, or his work and writing, and wish to pay tribute may do so below or by writing to us directly as we open our space for your appreciations.

===

If you would like to send us your thoughts, appreciation or memories of Fred Halliday, please send an email to fred-appreciation (at) opendemocracy.net

Rwandan opposition leader appears in court

2010-04-24T09:26:00.002+01:00

Josephine Whitaker, 22 April 2010

Victoire Ingabire, leader of Rwandan opposition party the United Democratic Forces party was arrested yesterday on charges of denying the 1994 genocide and collaborating with a terrorist organisation. Ingabire later appeared before Gasabo Intermediate Court to answer the charges.

Ingabire is accused of promoting “genocide ideology”, denial of the genocide and ethnic divisionism, all considered crimes in Rwandan law since the 1994 genocide that left 800,000 Tutsis and opposition Hutus dead. Most damningly, according to the pro-government New Times newspaper, the prosecution are also claiming that Ingabire has been in “constant contact” with Rwandan rebel groups based in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and regularly visited a rebel commander in Kinshasa while living in Europe. In a recent interview with Radio Netherlands, a spokesman for the Rwandan prosecutor general also claimed that Ingabire is attempting to establish an anti-government militia with the aim of destablising the country.

Ingabire recently returned to Rwanda after sixteen years in Europe, to begin campaigning for the August presidential elections. Since arriving in the country, she has come under sustained attack from Rwandan politicians and pro-government press. She and an aide were attacked by a mob in Kigali on 3 February, a move described by New York-based Human Rights Watch as likely to have been premeditated.

The United Democratic Forces Support Committee, based in Brussels, has said it “condemns in the strongest terms possible” Ingabire’s arrest. In the same statement, the committee also said thar the arrest “will not deter her determination”.

The openSecurity verdict: Despite Rwanda’s favourable position as an investment destination, Ingabire’s arrest seems to confirm a worrying trend in Rwandan politics. Although most commentators are loathe to use the word ‘authoritarian’, it does seem that the government is using laws criminalising “genocide ideology” and “ethnic divisionism” – intended to avoid a repeat of the 1994 genocide – to discredit and undermine any opposition and consolidate its own position. In recent months, analysts and human rights organisations have expressed concern about intimidation of opposition leaders in the run-up to August’s presidential elections. The incumbent president, Paul Kagame, head of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, won 95% of the vote in 2003 elections. Kagame, president since 2000, has been in a position of de facto power since July 1994, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front finally brought the genocide to an end.

Although Rwanda scored relatively well in the recent Global Integrity Report 2009, many commentators remain concerned that Rwanda might be sliding towards “one-man-rule.” Rwanda-watchers are concerned about the extent to which “the Rwandan government tightly controls political space.” As one analyst pointed out, “the Rwandan Patriotic Front dominates political life in Rwanda.”

Ingabire’s arrest demonstrates the government's determination to deny opposition parties a chance to contest the forthcoming elections. The nine formally registered political parties are not expected to put up much of a fight, and may well simply continue to endorse Kagame’s rule. Ingabire and her party, who have made no secret of their intention to contest the elections, have yet to be granted formal registration as a political party. Her arrest appears to be another attempt to discredit the United Democratic Forces, and deny it registration. But these tactics are not reserved for Ingabire. Rwanda’s Green Party, also hoping to contest the election, has thus far been refused registration. Bernard Ntaganda, leader of the Ideal Social Party, has previously been called before the senate to answer accusations of propagation of genocide ideology.

This intimidation and repression is not confined to the opposition. The media has also been subject to a government crackdown, which has seen two newspapers, vocal in their criticism of the government, the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the military, recently suspended. After their two editors were sentenced to prison time, many other journalists have fled the country. The move has been described by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists as “robbing Rwandan voters of crucial alternative voices during the presidential election campaign”.

Kagame and his government are keen to keep Rwanda at the forefront of investment and technological development in Africa, but as researcher Norah Mallaney asks, can Rwanda’s democratisation keep pace with its thirst for economic development?

This article is published by Josephine Whitaker, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it without needing further permission, with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. These rules apply to one-off or infrequent use. For all re-print, syndication and educational use please see read our republishing guidelines or contact us. Some articles on this site are published under different terms. No images on the site or in articles may be re-used without permission unless specifically licensed under Creative Commons.

Dale Farm Evictions Latest News

2010-04-11T17:31:00.001+01:00

--- On Sun, 11/4/10, Dale Farm wrote:

From: Dale Farm
Subject: UK GYPSY EVICTION DRAWS UN CONCERN
Date: Sunday, 11 April, 2010, 11:14

ustiben report
UN BACKS CALL TO HALT
BIG UK GYPSY EVICTION
By Grattan Puxon

THE UK GOVERNMENT must shortly answer
concerns expressed by the UN over plans to
evict hundreds of Gypsies from their own land.
UN special rapporteur on adequate housing
Raquel Rolnik has delivered a letter to the UK
Permanent Mission in Geneva following a
complaint that the accommodation rights of
Gypsy and Traveller families are being violated
by a local authority.
The complain refers to large-scale direct
action eviction operations being prepared by
Basildon District Council against so-called
illegal Travellers' communities at Dale Farm,
Crays Hill, and Hovefields, Wickford, Essex.
It was submitted by Essex University Human
Rights Clinic on behalf of the Dale Farm Housing
Association, which has been attempting for five
years to legalize the situation. Dale Farm is the
biggest Travellers' settlement in Britain.
The effect is likely to be heightened attention
by British authorities to a situation which has
been deteriorating for more than a decade. Since
the l994 Criminal Justice Act ended the obligation
on local councils to provide caravam sites, many
thousands of Gypsies have been thrown off their
own plots and thereafter constantly moved on.
Driven to desperation, Gypsies are now
making a final stand at Dale Farm. Despite
repeated enforcement notices, some 90 families
and more at nearby Hovefields have refused to quit
unless acceptable alternative locations for
their caravans and mobile-homes are sanctioned
by Basildon council.
So far, the response of Basildon has been
to create a war-chest of four million euro and
engage a notorious private security company,
Constant & Co.,to cleanse the Gypsies and
Travellers from the district. A dozen Gypsy-
owned plots at Hovefields have already been
bulldozed.
While talks between Traveller representatives
and council officials are still ongoing, neither
side is backing down. Residents at Dale Farm
have been told to leave voluntary or face force.
None have done so.
This week Gypsy Council president Richard
Sheridan said if families were ejected and their
properties destroyed they would have no choice
but to occupy other land in Basildon and take
their case to the Court of Human Rights.
"We own several pieces of land in the
area where we pasture our horses," said
Sheridan. "We won't move more than a mile."
Sheridan further explained that in recent
weeks doctors have been issuing Traveller
patients with three months' supply of
medication, saying this will be needed as
they are to be evicted in June.
In one case a small boy with learning
difficulties has had his application for
special schooling rejected because the
educational authorities felt it was too much
trouble to process it when his family was
about to be moved away.
"I have told the council we don't need the
extra medication," commented Sheridan.
"Neither will our children be leaving local
schools - because we'll still be here no matter
what they do with us."
The Travellers hope the UN will follow up
with an urgent appeal to halt the eviction.
They also point out that large amounds of
public money, as well as much human misery,
could be saved by granting them permits
to live where they are on their own land.
All could soon be decided by British
justice. Basildon council is mounting a
challenge in the high court against a
Government requirement that it provide
land for 62 pitches by 2011 and a further
52 pitches between 2011 and 2010.
The case is to be heard on 25 May
and Travellers intend to stage a mass
demonstration outside the court.

Potential compromise over renminbi may avert US-China trade war

2010-04-10T13:44:00.006+01:00

by Oliver Scanlan, 9 April 2010

Oliver Scanlan works for a local NGO in Parbatipur, Bangladesh, which advocates the rights of indigenous peoples.

Subjects:

* Conflict
* Democracy and government
* Economics
* China
* Iraq
* Israel
* North Korea
* United States
* Security Briefings

Signs of a compromise in the long-running dispute between the US and China over the renminbi. The followers of Moqtada al Sadr reject both of the leading candidates for the Iraqi premiership. The Israeli Prime Minister pulls out of a US nuclear summit. Kim Jong-il is absent from the annual meeting of the North Korean parliament. All this and more, in today’s security update.

On Thursday, the US treasury department announced that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had held talks with Chinese Vice-Premier Wang Qishan in Beijing. No details of the meeting have been released by either side, but it is understood that at least one of the discussion points was the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, and its effect on the US trade deficit. The US views the value of the yuan as unfair and the result of Chinese government efforts to keep it artificially low in order to boost Chinese exports.

The discussion comes after literally years of US agitation regarding the renminbi, with concerns having reached fever pitch in the wake of the global financial crisis. In turn, this has led to much speculation over a potential US-China trade war, with the Chinese Commerce Minister, Chen Deming, warning in March that such a war would harm the US more than China.

But there are signs of progress. The US has made conciliatory moves in agreeing to delay the publication of a report into whether China is manipulating its currency until after a series of bilateral and G20 meetings. One of the most important will be a meeting between Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao, scheduled for next week. On the Chinese side, analysts have speculated that concessions may be offered. Although it is unlikely that the yuan would be allowed to float, the Chinese may be persuaded to at least depeg it from the US dollar, and to permit a moderate appreciation in value.

The openSecurity verdict: ‘You don’t solve the trade deficit by hectoring the Chinese over their exchange rates’ was the verdict of former US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake at the time of the 2004 US Presidential election. At the time, he bemoaned the fact that there was no debate between the candidates on the national security implications of being the most indebted country in the world and having China as your largest foreign creditor. This fact underscores the truth in Chen Deming’s assertion that the US would lose a trade war. The economic facts suggest his speculation that the concern over the exchange rates is more to do with forthcoming US mid-term elections than with the trade deficit itself is also valid.

As the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia pointed out in a recent Financial Times article, the US trade deficit is multilateral; more than ninety countries exported goods to the US of a higher cumulative value than the goods they imported. Thus, Stephen Roach argues, if the value of the yuan does rise against the dollar, the trade deficit would likely to remain the same, all that would happen is that China’s share would be reduced, to the benefit of other nations. Moreover, there would likely be an increase in the prices of consumer goods in the US, which would hit consumer spending, upon which the US recovery and economy in general is based.

Roach cites the structural nature of the US economy as being the reason for the current deficit: the US has extremely low saving rates, which necessitates the import of other countries’ savings to finance its growth. He also mentions off-shoring as being a contributing factor, with China chief among those nations which boast a skilled labour force that will work for a fraction of the cost of labour in the US.

The policy prescription for the US is simply to encourage higher savings rates. In addition, sustained investment in high technology and green industries is required, along with the training and education of American workers that such industries would employ. This will remove any future need to risk a calamitous trade war in a specious attempt to score political points among unemployed and economically insecure US workers ahead of mid-term elections.

Sadrist movement rejects leading candidates for post of prime minister

A referendum held by the Sadrist movement in Iraq has resulted in a rejection of both leading candidates for the post of prime minister, further complicating the task of forming a stable government. The movement have instead voted for former prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The movement, led by the Shi’ia cleric Moqtada al Sadr, performed strongly in the election, winning 39 seats in the 325 seat parliament, and could hold the potential balance of power within any future government.

The 7 March election resulted in Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya party winning the most seats, with incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s State of Law bloc trailing by only two seats. Both men were keen to secure Sadr’s backing. Analysts are pointing to the referendum, nominally open to all Iraqis, as being an adroit, populist move on the part of Moqtada al Sadr that will give him a popular mandate to withhold support from Maliki.

Netanyahu pulls out of US nuclear summit

Israeli officials have announced that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided against attending a major summit on nuclear security due to be hosted by US President Barack Obama in Washington on Monday. Netanyahu reached this decision after learning that Egypt and Turkey are planning to use the occasion to demand that Israel join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In Netanyahu’s stead, Israel's Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor will attend the two-day summit, which will include representatives from over forty other countries.

Israel has never confirmed or denied that it possesses nuclear weapons. For years, however, Jerusalem’s deterrent has been referred to by analysts as ‘the bomb in the basement’. After the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, regarding the scope of his country’s weapons programme, the fact that Israel is a nuclear weapons state has been considered to be an open secret.

Kim Jong-il absent as North Korean parliament convenes

Analysts are anxiously awaiting the outcome of Friday’s convening of North Korea’s parliament. The Supreme People’s Assembly, considered to be a ‘rubber stamp’ institution, is the arena where personnel changes within the secretive nation’s ruling elite are made. In light of long standing rumours of Kim Jong-il’s deteriorating health, it is thought that the formation of this parliament may reveal his successor. Intelligence sources speculate that this could be his youngest son, the 26 year old Kim Jong-un. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has reported that Kim Jong-il has not attended the session, but that in itself is not unprecedented.

Last year’s parliament saw the DPRK’s leader make his first public appearance since his rumoured stroke in 2008. He appeared gaunt, with thinning hair; though state depictions of the ‘dear leader’ since then have shown his health apparently improving. A potential change in the country’s leadership comes at a sensitive time for the DPRK, with mounting pressure to resume nuclear disarmament talks, as well as a recent controversy surrounding the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel in disputed waters off the DPRK’s coast two weeks ago. Although the South Korean government has generally called for calm pending the result of an inquiry into the sinking, the country’s defence minister has suggested that the sinking could have been caused by a North Korean torpedo.

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HumanRightsTV

Joseph Marinus, the beauty of poetry.

2010-03-03T19:16:00.003Z

I met Joseph Marinus at about 21.00hrs on February 20th 2010. There he stood with his spread of candles and brightly coloured envelopes of poems spread on the ground in a gentle patchwork quilt. How could I not go and talk to this man.

As I discovered more I learnt about his ongoing battle with council officials who, with all the insight of freshly poured concrete, had tried to prosecute him as an "illegal street vendor".

Here in this gentle man's art and sense of community is encapsulated the story of our times in Britain today. We have lost our souls to the mindless bureaucracy of government; the pre-eminence of the paperwork kings of institutional dullness who now suppress in an inquisition like manner all spontanaity and artistic freedom.

The very idea that a man delivering poetry on the streets of London has been hounded into the courts by local council officials screams out to us that something has gone badly wrong. The fact that this softly spoken poet had to mount a legal defence of his right to deliver art to the public, that his time was engaged in paperwork and the rituals of complaint and appeal is bad enough. However the fact is that we the taxpayers are funding this absolute nonsense and NON SENSE it is.

We are paying for council officials to badger a street poet. We are paying for the bureaucracy of prosecution, we are paying for the courts, the lawyers and the judiciary who are being asked to hear a legal case based on the idea that a man dispensing poetry in the streets is an unofficial street vendor. After appeal and complaint this case was rejected and Joseph Marinus remains. But where is the refund to the tax payer for this shocking waste of money?

What is worse is that this is not an isolated case of the rank stupidity by which we have allowed our society to become governed. All over our country there are people enforcing idiocy at cost to the tax payer. Only recently a man who had for years and years been planting daffodils in a verge and mainting some sense of beauty in his community was threatened with prosecution by his local authority for a supposed breach in Health and Safety regulations. Utter madness!

We have to stand against this advance of the souless administration of regulation. We have to make a stand against the cultural poverty that is being imposed on us all by City and Town Halls aggrandising their status through the establishment of kingdoms of self importance wherein art is to be forever banished.

Maybe you are saying; "This is a bit strong, it's not that bad." but you would be so wrong. We have a very famous artist called Banksy, his medium is graffitti, and his work is now world famous. Yet some person within a local authority decided that a piece of this now historic work had to be removed because it was graffitti.

Allegedly, he dispatched council cleaners and using the best chemicals, paid for by the tax payer, they removed forever a piece of art. You can see the problem here, a council official with a regulation about graffitti makes a final and condemning judgment on art. There is no reference, there is no discussion, there is no consideration beyond the dry and inhuman regulation.

Long live Joseph Marinus and all he represents.

Joseph Marinus, the beauty of poetry.

2010-03-03T19:16:00.000Z

As I discovered more I learnt about his ongoing battle with council officials who, with all the insight of freshly poured concrete, had tried to prosecute him as an "illegal street vendor".

What is worse is that this is not an isolated case of the rank stupidity by which we have allowed our society to become governed. All over our country there are people enforcing stupidity at cost to the tax payer. Only recently a man who had for years and years been planting daffodils in a verge and mainting some sense of beauty in his community was threatened with prosecution by his local authority for a supposed breach in Health and Safety regulations. Utter madness!

We have to stand against this advance of the souless administration of regulation. We have to make a stand against the cultural poverty that is being imposed on us all by City and Town Hall menials aggrandising their status through the establishment of kingdoms of self importance wherein art is to be forever banished.

He dispatched council cleaners and using the best chemicals, paid for by the tax payer, they removed forever a piece of art. You can see the problem here, a council official with a regulation about graffitti makes a final and condemning judgment on art. There is no reference, there is no discussion, there is no consideration beyond the dry and inhuman regulation.

Long live Joseph Marinus and all he represents.

The Bulahdelah Mob's Guardian Tree

2010-02-22T18:10:00.000Z

The video here is all about the Bulahdelah Mob in New South Wales and their attempts to save their sacred land from a road construction plan.

Meeting Professor Peter Ambrose

2010-02-04T15:23:00.002Z

Thomas Pankovas started work today with HumanRightsTV. he will be publishing articles over the coming months in relation to the work of Professor Peter Ambrose in the area of housing policy.

Hollis Whiteman Lecture on Forensic DNA

2010-01-30T12:26:00.002Z

Dr Michael Naughton of Innocence UK opens the lecture. He describes how Hollis Whiteman have been supporters of Innocence UK since 2006. Michael advises that he will be critical about the cultural failure within the legal profession in the understanding of the work of Innocence UK.

See the rest of the presentation

See Hollis Whiteman Web Site

More about this event

Where is the myth?

2010-01-25T01:40:00.002Z

This is a marvellous example of the history of folk music as intelligent protest and thoughtful confrontation. David Rovic's fluency in lyrics and music is well known globally and in this song, Reichstag Fire, the artist reveals the connections between the past and the present.

McAfee HumanRightsTV

2010-01-25T01:01:00.003Z

Ah yes, this is because we all run Ubuntu as the top preferred OS for our team and we operate Open Source philosophy with Linux systems throughout. Nice of you to check to see if we have any security issues though and we are very pleased with our tick.

Making the World a Better Place

2010-01-24T17:14:00.000Z

This is the moment of inspirational voice in 1998 which led to the creation of HumanRightsTV.

See the full series here

The Human Rights Blog

2010-01-24T15:30:00.000Z

This facility is now open for all those concerned about human rights and especially those who want to see globalisation serve all people and not just corporate interests.

HumanRightsTV

Downshall Centre Closure: Disgraceful abuse of vulnerable people.

News from Redbridge CVS

Concern at Downshall Centre Closure, Petition Launched17 March 2011

Lofty Matters: Media Impartiality in Middle East Reporting.

ASNET Designs for Web Site

Aboriginal Eyewitness to Murder of Bingo Dawson Threatened by Vancouver Police

Miscarriage of Justice: Sue May articulates a catalogue of errors.

ROMA CHILDREN PERISH IN FIRE IN ITALY

Miscarriage of Justice: Unique Event

University of Bristol Innocence Project response to Simon Hall judgment by the Court of Appeal

LawWorks Student Pro Bono Conference 2010 in Birmingham

Representing the Gypsy and Traveller Communities.

DALE FARM CHILDREN IN DANGER

Simon Hall and Solomon Disatisfied

Innocence UK in Observer Article 09 01 2011

LawWorks Student Conference 2010-Latest News

Defending the Human Rights Act

Conviction

"Small change, Why business won't change the world"

Notes for Authors to follow on signing up

Miscarriage of Justice; Paul Blackburn

Removing the mask

The philosophical significance of UK-Uncut

West Papua: from morning star to mourning

Five years of denial: the UK government’s reckless pursuit of a punitive asylum policy

Representation of Asylum Seekers Remains an Issue

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Facilitate Global and Global Media.

INUK Conference at Freshfields 19 11 2010

UK Housing Policy: Time for Action

Gaza Flotilla Raid by IDF Illegal: 56-page report by the UN panel of three international lawyers

Welfare Reform: Wealth without Responsibility.

Call for a Royal Commission on Housing: circulated to all MPs and Peers, housing charities and some NGOs

Massive Cost to Taxpayer of Current Housing Policy

Call for a Royal Commission on Housing

Peter Ambrose response to Department of Work and Pensions

Tired of Government Subsidies in Housing?

Criminal Law in Israel

Women Speaking: The launch of an important voice

Peace & Freedom Activist Ibrahim Amireh Imprisoned

i fram test

Flowplayer: Seeing is believing

Japanese Artist Mari joins HumanRightsTV

New Housing Channel on HumanRightsTV

UK Housing Policy

THE DALE FARM EVICTION PLAN MAY BE A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY

The Cost of Poor Housing

Mavi Mamara: Who is telling the truth?

Stephen Battersby talks about future needs in housing policy.

Defenders of the Mavi Mamarra

Gaza Flotilla May 2010: 27th Latest News

Message from the Freedom Flotilla

How we can solve the Social Housing Crisis

The WECH project

Housing as a Human Right

Fred Halliday 1946 – 2010

Rwandan opposition leader appears in court

Dale Farm Evictions Latest News

Potential compromise over renminbi may avert US-China trade war

Joseph Marinus, the beauty of poetry.

Joseph Marinus, the beauty of poetry.

The Bulahdelah Mob's Guardian Tree

Meeting Professor Peter Ambrose

Hollis Whiteman Lecture on Forensic DNA

Where is the myth?

McAfee HumanRightsTV

Making the World a Better Place

The Human Rights Blog

Concern at Downshall Centre Closure, Petition Launched
17 March 2011