human rights

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

From today’s Ha’aretz:

Palestinian lawmakers probing the death in custody of a preacher from the
Islamist Hamas movement said on Thursday he had been “tortured to death” by security men loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.

A self-appointed investigation team comprising six independent lawmakers determined that Majd al-Barghouthi died as a result of torture and said the head of the Fatah-run intelligence services, Tawfiq Tirawi, should be held to account. Another commission which Abbas appointed in late February to investigate the matter has not yet delivered its verdict, although a pathologist working on behalf of Fatah said he had not found signs of torture on Barghouthi’s body. …

Human rights groups accused Hamas of torturing to death four Palestinians in Gaza since it took control of the Strip. Both Fatah and Hamas accuse each other of arresting and torturing their supporters in the enclaves.

I hadn’t heard of these last incidents, but as far as I know, this is the first independent accusation and confirmation from Palestinians of this sort of thing happening on an intra-Palestinian level. The BBC is also reporting on this. I wonder if these incidents will bring back to light the conflict between the two different Palestinian societies: the West Bank, dominated by the old-guard, better established, (mostly) secular nationalist, and internationally acknowledged as the ‘legitimate’ representative of the Palestinian people, against the younger, militantly Islamic, and poorer Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

There are several by-elections happening all over Canada today, including one in Vancouver Quadra. The riding is considered to be very safe Liberal territory, but party leader Stéphane Dion and deputy leader Michael Ignatieff (remember, the ones that the PM is suing) came out here to forestall fears that low turnout could harm elections results. The NDP candidate Rebecca Coad is a UBC student in philosophy; I met her some time ago, and she seemed pretty on the ball. The Green candidate, Dan Grice, is a UBC graduate in classical archaeology, which I think is fantastic. The Georgia Straight endorsed him, reasoning that they could not endorse the NDP candidate because of systemic problems with the NDP, the Conservative candidate didn’t even bother to show up to debates and meetings, and the riding is safe Liberal territory anyway, so people could be safe and vote their conscience to send a message to the Liberals about what issues they’d like to see on the party agenda. I think this is not a bad strategy, provided that it doesn’t skew the elections results, as Dion and the party leadership are obviously afraid of. Of course, if elections were held in accordance with an alternative system such as Single Transferable Vote, as I have argued, people could vote for the Green or NDP candidate to vote their conscience and send a message, and then mark the Liberal candidate as their second choice, thereby voting both ideologically and practically.

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’

The BBC is reporting that twelve men who had been Coptic Christians, converted to Islam, and re-converted to Christianity will be afforded state recognition of this choice:

The decision overturns a lower court ruling by a lower court, which said the state need not recognise conversions from Islam because of a religious ban.

Translation: Islam forbids apostasy, and many countries impose the death penalty if Muslims convert to any other religion (though see this recent article in the Guardian for a very interesting perspective on recent religious permissiveness in Egypt). However, it is very important to note that what is making the apostasy of these twelve Christians in Egypt possible is the fact that they were originally Christians before they converted to Islam:

This suggests that Egyptians born Muslim will still be unable to convert to other faiths and have those conversions recognised on their identity cards. Many Muslims believe that converting from Islam is wrong, and some believe it is punishable by death.

What a shame. It should be one’s own decision what religion to profess, if one wants to profess any at all, and the state has no business denying people the right to change their minds—and especially should not be allowed to execute them if they do. This issue goes to the heart of free speech and freedom of belief. This particular ruling is worthy of congratulation, but it is worth very little if total freedom of belief is denied.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that a county school district in Maryland has implemented a controversial—even illegal—new policy that ‘directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant’. Way to go, Howard County, to ensure that more girls who need medical help will be even less willing to seek it out.

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

Ugly, gross, crazy, and stupid. The way to help pregnant high schoolers is to provide them with medical assistance and the love and support of their community, not to sic their parents, their school officials, and the full weight of The Law on them.

Tip of the hat to Cara at The Curvature, via Ann at Feministing.

Excellent news today for gay rights in the States! First, an appellate judge in New York has ruled that the state must recognise marriages performed in Canada between two people of the same sex. Excellent news for both Canadians in America and American gays who came up here to get married when Canada legalized gay marriage earlier this decade. Of course, the judgment recognises that a law might eventually be passed that would deny recognition to those marriages, but until such a law is on the books the marriages must be legally recognised in New York. This is a terrific victory, because it marks the first time any entity at the Federal level in the United States has afforded recognition in this kind of situation.

Second, and more legally interesting, a judge in Oregon has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a law passed by the legislature last year allowing the official recognition of domestic partnerships, allowing the law to come into effect immediately. The point being argued in court was whether or not one has a constitutional right, if one signs a petition, to have that signature officially tabulated. There had been a petition circulating in Oregon to put a referendum before the voters to ban any other form of union between two people of the same sex (read: gay marriage), but it barely did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. The judge concluded that it is not a constitutional right to have one’s signature counted on a petition, which sounds like a counterintuitive position, but it is very soundly argued in the (surprisingly readable and understandable) ruling (PDF). Here’s the interesting bit from the ruling (pages 15–16):

I believe the State, through a variety of sources, has demonstrated to the average signer of a petition that it’s not making any promise that your signature ultimately will be counted. Some of those we’ve talked about. Some have to do with the fact that when you sign a petition, there are any number of ways in which your petition may never see again the light of day.

Now, admittedly, some of the most common of those have nothing to do with anybody acting on behalf of the State. The chief petitioner can simply give up and go home or raise some question in his or her own mind about a particular sheet and throw that sheet away just to save themselves the trouble of a challenge later. There are any number of ways when you sign a petition that you have no reasonable expectation that the State is promising it will make it all the way to home plate. …

If you’ll forgive kind of a folksy example, if one of my kids claims I promised them a Lamborghini when they graduated from high school, the fact that I cannot do so is some evidence that I never promised I would. And if the State is being said to have promised something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do, that’s some evidence, in my view, that it never promised it in the first place; it’s not within the original entitlement.

Legally, at least from the point of view of the common law, impossibility excuses a party from failing to fulfil a contract. But there was no contract here; the specific objection raised by the plaintiffs is that the state denied due process to those people who signed the petition expecting their signatures to count, and in doing so violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the ruling found that the state never created the entitlement to having their signatures counted in the first place.

The upshot is that gay people can now go ahead and register their domestic partnerships in Oregon and receive many (but not yet all) of the benefits conferred by marriage in other situations. Thank goodness for two happy outcomes to cap off the week.

Today marks twenty years since the Morgentaler decision in Canada, affirming a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. As usual, Jill at Feministe has the whole story more eloquently and comprehensively than I could do.

Canada is very progressive in many ways, but, like most countries, it still has a long way to go when it comes to abortion rights. To all the Canadians out there, I wish you a very happy anniversary — and best of luck in making next year even better.

A heartfelt amen to that. Feministe is also linking to this article from the Globe and Mail, highlighting the problems in the Canadian ‘choice’ system—specifically, that there often is no choice, or at least that alternatives are scarce and treatment options are few, for hundreds of thousands of women: drug-induced abortion (think RU-486) isn’t even available in this country! This just blows my mind—you can buy Allegra and codeine over the counter here, but you can’t even get something a hundred times as essential by a doctor’s prescription. I can’t wait to see the web-based Canadian pharmacy companies illegally importing drugs from America to fill this void in the system.

So yeah. Both countries have a long way to go, it would appear. We are making progress, slowly, on the legal, ethical, and medical fronts, but it’s going to be a while before we can put this issue to bed, especially given how out of the spotlight abortion is in Canada, as compared to in the States.

Today’s New York Times has an article predicting that Turkey will introduce changes to a law known as Article 301, which forbids publicly insulting Turkey and ‘Turkishness’, among other things. These restrictions on free speech constitute one of the most significant barriers to Turkey’s acceptance, in general, by the community of nations as a modern enlightened country, and in particular to its chances of getting accepted by the European Union. Several high-profile cases involving Article 301 have brought international attention to focus on Turkey, most memorably the prosecution of the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who had mentioned in the Swiss Das Magazin that ‘thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody dares to talk about it’.

But the alterations that the government appears ready to make to Article 301 only go so far, the New York Times reports. Given the conservatism and nationalistic pride of many modern Turks, the government will not abolish the law; they will only ‘weaken’ it to try to reduce frivolous prosecutions under it. Furthermore—and possibly more importantly—the whole corpus of laws restricting free speech are spread over the legal code, and some of them are not even part of it. Liberals in Turkey apparently wanted the government to take some action to clean up this confusing legal patchwork, but the government won’t go there.

As I have noted previously, a nation cannot truly be called a democracy if it restricts the free speech of its citizens. If Turkey has any aspirations to being known as a democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, it will have to give up these insulting and xenophobic restrictions on questioning the official history of the state. Let’s hope that this weakening of Article 301 is only the first step in a process leading to true freedom of speech in Turkey.

Today, in the United States, is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which essentially held that women may elect to have an abortion for any reason up until the point when the fetus becomes ‘viable’. Ever since this ruling, social and religious conservatives have attempted to curtail or even reverse this crucial right, and unfortunately have been seeing some successes in various parts of the country with measures like parental-notification laws, laws mandating waiting periods before the abortion may be carried out, and laws restricting particular kinds of abortion techniques.

Jill Filipovic has an excellent post up at Feministe, which is also posted in the Huffington Post, outlining ‘10 Reasons to Support Reproductive Justice on Roe Day’. There’s nothing there I feel I can improve upon—just go read it. Also check out her roundup of the best Roe Day commentary out there.

A couple of sources in the (Western) media are starting to pick up the story of Wei Wenhua, a blogger who was beaten to death in central China. Municipal inspectors—a sort of minor league city-level police force—were engaged in a confrontation with villagers over government waste-dumping in the vicinity. The confrontation turned violent, with inspectors beating villagers. Wei took out his mobile phone to use its camera to take pictures of the confrontation, whereupon fifty inspectors descended on him, beat him for five minutes, and rendered him unconscious. He was taken to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.

CNN is reporting that twenty-four inspectors were detained and over a hundred others are under investigation, but it seems clear that even this swift response, obviously designed by the Chinese government to try to prevent civil unrest, is not having the desired effect. People around the world, but especially in Internet-restricted China, are using the Internet to express their outrage:

After the Web site sina.com published news of Wei’s beating, readers promptly expressed their outrage. In one day alone, more than 8,000 posted comments. Bloggers inside and outside China bluntly condemned the brutal killing.

“City inspectors are worse than the mafia,” wrote one Chinese blogger. “They are violent civil servants acting in the name of law enforcement.”

Another blogger asked, “Just who gave these city inspectors such absurd powers?”

It’s not exactly news that the Chinese government has an awful record when it comes to free speech on the internet, or an equally awful record on police and government treatment of its own citizens. The perspective article linked to above contains several examples of criticism from various ranks of people in China: from academics to bloggers to regular old folks, there seems to be a significant amount of resentment at this scandal. It won’t be a catalyst, and this event won’t be a significant trigger, for large-scale changes in governmental policy. But hopefully Wei Wenhua won’t be forgotten, and his cause will be taken up and championed by people both in China and in the rest of the world.

In Israel, the Jerusalem Post is reporting that a bill that would hold owners and editors of web sites legally liable for everything posted on their sites, including things in comments or talkback forums, has passed through committee phase and is on track to being approved by the full Parliament. The bill was introduced by the number-two member of Parliament from the Israel Beiteinu party, which is full of neoconservatives, hard-line right-wing immigrants, and modern revisionist Zionists. But the bill helpfully provides an out: sites can absolve themselves of responsibility by incriminating the offending posters. In other words, if you reveal your users’ private details, you’re off the hook.

This is, naturally, completely against the spirit of the open and free exchange of ideas—something that needs to be protected legally if a democracy is to be a true democracy. Just think back to the controversy last year in which Bill O’Reilly appeared to hold the Daily Kos responsible for comments posted on its site, equating the Kos with Nazism because of things that were pulled from the comments section. It’s simply common sense that you can’t make this inference: if it were valid, you could prove that Bill O’Reilly supported death threats against Senator Hillary Clinton, for example. But it’s more than a matter of common sense: it must be enshrined in law that speech belongs to the speaker, and therefore only the speaker can be held responsible for it. Otherwise, calling it ‘free speech’ is a useless term at best and doublespeak at worst.

If this bill passes and becomes Israeli law, it should be reckoned as confirmation—for those who still need it—that the modern Israeli ‘democracy’ is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the assertion that Israel is a democracy is for the most part a myth peddled to Jews in the Diaspora for political and fundraising purposes. A democracy that inhibits its inhabitants’ free speech does not deserve to be called a democracy. We seem to hold other so-called enlightened Western countries—or at least aspiring enlightened Western countries to these standards. Israel must not be an exception.

[Hat-tip: Jerome, via Shmarya.]

His most royal majesty King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, has most graciously pardoned a woman, the so-called Qatif Girl, who was found guilty of being in the same car as a man she was not married to. Both the woman and the man were gang-raped by a group of seven men, but the two of them received penalties for being together and unmarried. Both ‘participants’ received sentences of ninety lashes, but in the woman’s case this was increased to two hundred lashes, plus six months in jail, when she appealed her sentence. Commentary, by and large, on this issue has highlighted the backwardness of this aspect of the Saudi justice system—a point echoed, if somewhat undercut, by the White House—but has also focussed a little on the gender inequality inherent in a system that sentences the man and the woman to different penalties for the same ‘offence’. But it’s still funny, at least to my mind, that we didn’t observe the same kind of reaction to the Sudanese teddy bear named Muhammad incident, which provoked genuine worldwide outrage, in this case in Saudi Arabia.

Today, the Saudi King Abdullah has generously pardoned and set free the woman. No doubt this is being done as something of a goodwill gesture at the beginning of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. There is of course plenty of reason for the Saudi government to want to appease various elements in the Western world, especially at this time (which was, in fact, the actual justification—’serving the public interest’—offered by the king as his reason for the pardon). Yet the king is still being criticized, apparently, by the religious-conservative elements in the Muslim world:

The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West. (from the article cited above)

Of course, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is one of the most important in the international community, what with the extensive trading (read oil trading) relationship between the two nations. And of course, who can forget Bush’s hand-holding incident with then-Crown Prince Abdullah?

So Abdullah finally made the right decision, but with a thinly veiled motivation, fearing some sort of recrimination by the West. But—and this is a more general question—what leverage can the West really exert on these oil-producing nations? Do they even really want to? Can the West risk their vital oil supply going ever upward in price, not to mention the threat of it being cut off? Of course not. (History has proven, however, that rising oil prices are not deterring oil purchasing and use, contrary to general economic rules. But this is a different topic.) As long as the relationship between the oil exporters and importers continues the way it currently does, there will be very little possibility in the future to prevent the next Qatif Girl from being sentenced for a ‘crime’ of this nature. We got lucky this time; next time may be very different.