RSS FeedReview of Dennis Edney’s Lecture, “The Rule of Law in an Age of Terror”
“Human rights have a dysfunctional relationship with justice. The language is certainly beautiful, but it’s all dressed up with nowhere to go,” charged Dennis Edney in a scathing lecture at the Faculty of Law at UBC on September 15.
Edney worked from 2004 to 2011 on Omar Khadr’s defence against charges stemming from the July 2002 firefight death of a US soldier. Khadr, who is Canadian, was 15 at the time. American forces interrogated him for three months in the US-operated Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in Afghanistan, before transferring him to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains. In 2005, Khadr’s chief interrogator from Bagram, US Sergeant Joshua Claus, was found guilty of offences relating to the routine torture and homicide of Bagram prisoners. Claus received a five-month prison sentence. He testified at Khadr’s military trial in 2010.
In April 2009, the Federal Court ruled that Canada was complicit in the US’s torture of Khadr and ordered Ottawa to seek his repatriation. The Federal Court of Appeal concurred, but the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that though Canada was violating Khadr’s human rights, it was not obliged to seek his repatriation.
In October 2010, after insisting on his innocence for years, Khadr pled guilty in a military trial to terrorism-related offences, in exchange for a promise from Canada to repatriate him by October 2011 to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Canada. On September 20, the Conservatives tabled the controversial omnibus Bill C-10, which adds “additional criteria” to decisions about “whether or not to allow the transfer of a Canadian offender back to Canada to serve their sentence.”
Shortly after the trial, Edney declared that Khadr “would have confessed to anything, including the killing of John F. Kennedy, just to get out of this hellhole” and that if he had refused, Khadr would have been faced with “an unfair [military] trial based on evidence that would be inadmissible in a real court.” On Thursday, Edney said the detainees are entitled “to all kinds of international protections, but our governments are not asking for them. And by not asking, we become complicit.” There are nearly 800 prisoners in Guantanamo, but only 4 have been charged and given a trial. Detainees cannot see the evidence used against them.
In his lecture, Edney denounced the Canadian government for perpetuating a culture of fear in the camp’s defence. Edney stated that “since there has always historically been terrorism, and since there will always be terrorist threats, this war on terror – if allowed to be one – is unlike any other, because it is never-ending.” Thus, last decade has been marred by “habeas corpus being abandoned, secret courts being created to hear secret evidence, guilt inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified.”
“I went into Guantanamo Bay as a lawyer and I came out as a broken father,” said Edney. “I never thought that in my lifetime I would go to such an evil place and see such evil being done.” Of the infamous cages, Edney said that “people go into those cages thinking they’re having a holiday in there.” He drew attention to Camps 5, 6, and 7. The first two are “designed for enhanced interrogation tactics: torture.” He said about Camp 7 that “We are not allowed to talk about it. We have prisoners in there who came from Europe, about a year and a half ago, and they’re going to be there forever, because there’s no one there to help.”
Edney discussed the 9/11 witch hunt, in which “the US government detained hundreds, if not thousands, of people of colour on the suspicion of terrorist activity, some of them up to a year, all without charges.” He continued that “almost none of those individuals were found to have been in any way connected with terrorism. Yet many continue to be held without being formally charged with any crime or immigration violation.” In this way Guantanamo “provides powerful evidence of how America and the West are making war on terror synonymous with the war on Islam. No white Anglo-Saxon goes to Guantanamo Bay. Any American picked up for terrorism offences gets due process in a federal court system in New York.”
One audience member suggested that the camp must serve some purpose, because otherwise US President Barrack Obama would have followed through on his promise to shut it down. Edney responded that the camp primarily functions as “an important propaganda tool.” He argued the Obama administration has in fact “systematised” the culture of torture normalised under George W. Bush, for instance by disallowing victims of extraordinary rendition from suing Washington for torture suffered overseas.
Edney was also critical of “lazy” media and academics who have persisted in “slotting events into a sort of juicy clash of civilisations story,” as exemplified by mainstream media coverage of Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorist attack in Oslo. He killed 69 people in July, avowedly to protect Europe from Muslims. Edney said, “as soon as the bomb went off, media organisations began reporting on jihadist organisations.” This, he said, “fit perfectly the story we have all been telling each other since 9/11 that who else, who else could be so hateful, so crazy, so disrespectful of life but Muslims.” He pointed out that though Breivik is a white Norwegian Christian, “we don’t hold Christians or conservatives or liberals responsible for Brievek’s despicable acts.”
He said that “since September 11 2001, race, ethnicity, and religion have become proxies for suspected terrorist activity, which in turn has become a pretext for the application of Canadian immigration laws in an unequal manner towards Arabs, South Asians, Muslims and so on.” In an apparent nod to Bill C-4, the anti-refugee bill that the Conservatives tabled on Tuesday despite widespread condemnation, he noted that “we just have to listen to media descriptions coming out of Ottawa when we talk about refugees today. We call them queue jumpers and potential terrorists.”
Edney also expressed anger at the public’s willingness to be lulled into complicity. He described the transfer of the prisoners to Guantanamo “in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic” as similar to eighteenth century slave ships. He maintained that for “the watching world, no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions is needed to understand that what was being witnessed was simply unlawful.” He blamed public apathy for “allowing anti-Muslim sentiment to become part of our mainstream conversations.” He said, “I say to you we cannot tackle manifestations of intolerance, unless we learn and understand how the constant use of fear pervades our everyday life, and how that fear is being used to influence how you and I think and how you and I act. It’s that same manipulation of fear that has allowed military escapades into countries beyond those who bombed the twin towers. It is that same message that has been exploited by participating countries to reduce civil liberties and infringe upon human rights by allowing such places as Guantanamo Bay to exist.”
The need for action had been a prevailing theme throughout the lecture. Edney returned to it at his lecture’s close: “Not only does it [Guantanamo] continue to exist, they continue building it. Guantanamo is going to be there for a long, long time, unless you do something. Unless you really do something about it.” He concluded that “the only crime equal to wilful inhumanity is the crime of indifference, the crime of silence, the crime of forgetting.”
In that vein, we cannot afford to forget that Guantanamo Bay’s precedents in the West include Canada’s own internment camps, built in BC expressly to detain Japanese-Canadians during WWII. Similarly, Bill C-4’s predecessors include the Chinese head-tax policy.
Credit rating agencies as courts of international finance
As I am writing this, President Obama announced a deal to avoid default on US government debt. If lawyers think in terms of courts, then what would be the legal consequences of the US default? While the legal issues of government’s failure to pay its debt to domestic lenders are unique and complex, the default in respect of foreign nation-state lenders such as China is probably even more interesting. There are no courts of international jurisdiction that can declare the US bankrupt, administer its assets, or enforce their judgment. The US is an independent country subject no one’s will despite the international law. But since the international law is a legal system, there must be some consequences for the US. One such factor is international rating agencies. You could hardly hear about the debt crisis in the US without learning that its excellent credit rating would likely suffer as a result. Apparently, private international rating agencies are filling some of the void in the international legal system that courts usually occupy within nation-states.
The three most important international credit rating agencies are Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s, and Fitch Group. S&P and Moody’s are American, and Fitch Group is controlled by a French corporation.
The biggest difference between credit rating agencies and courts is that rating agencies do not adjudicate disputes. But under the surface this difference is not so important. We can view events affecting credit ratings as disputes between the debtor and the lending community. Such events include defaults, budget deficits, and so on. The lending community wants some objective basis, for example, to charge a different interest rate as a result of one of the events above. And the debtor government wants to minimize its borrowing cost. Often these interests would come into conflict giving rise to the need for a third party to establish an objective basis for new lending terms. It sounds awfully like adjudication.
In theory, credit ratings are such independent, impartial, and objective assessments of the most optimal relationship between lenders and a borrower in accordance with generally accepted rules. Credit ratings basically result from applications of such rules and principles to a given debtor.
In practice, credit agencies are hardly accountable to anyone. They are for-profit, private organizations whose decisions are final and are not subject to review. The ratings’ impact is fast and powerful, and it usually directly affects interest rates available to the borrower. There is a good overview of other criticism of rating agencies on Wikipedia.
When countries, which desire to keep as much of their independence as possible, fail to establish formal and binding international governance and adjudication bodies, private organizations fill the legal void. It’s not necessarily a bad or a good thing, but it’s important to recognize the legal and enforcement role that these organizations play. Their existence also supports the view that international law exists.
Pulat Yunusov is a Toronto litigation lawyer.
(Post sponsored by AdviceScene)
EU Arms Exports to Libya
Complete table data here.
The “responsibility to protect” invoked by those demanding intervention in Libya is applied so selectively that the word hypocrisy doesn’t do it justice. And the idea that states which are themselves responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in illegal wars, occupations and interventions in the last decade, along with mass imprisonment without trial, torture and kidnapping, should be authorised by international institutions to prevent killings in other countries is simply preposterous. The barefaced cheek of William Hague’s insistence that there would be a “day of reckoning” for the Libyan regime if it committed crimes or atrocities took some beating.
The reality is that the western powers which have backed authoritarian kleptocrats across the Middle East for decades now face a loss of power in the most strategically sensitive region of the world as a result of the Arab uprisings and the prospect of representative governments. They are evidently determined to appropriate the revolutionary process wherever possible, limiting it to cosmetic change that allows continued control of the region.
Show Me Ghadafi’s Money
See Slate on whether the U.S. can now spend this money any way they want.
Free Internet to Citizens of Oppressed Nations: Genuine Interest in Democracy or Attempts to Monopolize Information?
Uncle Sam has $30M to bypass Chinese, Iranian ‘Net filters
By Nate Anderson
Need to get around a Chinese government firewall? Burning to smuggle your samizdat writings past Iranian Internet censorship? Hoping to blog with impunity in Burma? Uncle Sam wants to help. The US government has a $30 million pot of money to spend on “Internet freedom” programs around the world, and it’s not afraid to make a few enemies.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year gave a major speech on Internet freedom and the new “Information Curtain” of censorship that has fallen in some parts of the world. In that speech, she said that State would support development of tools that can bypass Internet censorship. She also outlined a program in which State would fund mobile phone apps that allow people to rate government ministries on responsiveness and efficiency and that can ferret out corruption through crowdsourcing. The hardware is already in the wild, she said; all what’s needed is some money to make it worth developers’ time.
This year, State has $30 million for such projects, and it’s asking interested parties to apply for the cash. Top on its list of wants: “counter-censorship technology” that can bypass firewalls and filters. Such tools may be general (like Tor) or can be specific to individual governments. China and Iran can probably look forward to some US-funded encryption and circumvention tools coming their way in the near future.
The grants will focus on “East Asia, including China and Burma; the Near East, including Iran; Southeast Asia; the South Caucasus; Eurasia, including Russia; Central Asia; Latin America, including Cuba and Venezuela; and Africa.” North America and Western Europe get a pass.
In addition to circumvention tools, State wants to fund secure mobile communications tech that can make mobile phone usage safer. The government will also help nonprofits and digital activists build communication platforms, and it wants to establish “virtual open Internet centers” that exist outside of closed countries and provide a spot to post and archive censored content.
If you’re part of a nonprofit or a university (and are not an affiliate of a “designated terrorist organization”), you have a month to submit an online statement of interest.
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Interesting comment by a reader:
“govt, doesnt give anything away to anyone (except themselves and their filthy bosses).it smells like a trick to start the censorship and as usual in the name of democracy.
I had heard many years ago that they are planning to introduce the Internet 2 and shut this one down.in any case the problem in USA and the West is Not the censorship the problem is Monopoly on info!
the rest of the world gets its info from this monopolized source!”
Excerpts from Open Letter to the Head of Judiciary: the Islamic Republic of Iran re the imprisonment of 7 Iranian Baha’is on baseless and unproved charges and other human rights violations of followers of Iran’s largest religious minority
7 December 2010
BAHÁ’Í
INTERNATIONAL
COMMUNITY
UnitedNationsOffice
866UnitedNationsPlaza, Suite120, NewYork, NY10017USA
Telephone: 212-803-2500, Fax: 212-803-2566, Email: uno-nyc@bic.org
Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq Larijani
Head of the Judiciary
Islamic Republic of Iran
Your Honor,
You are undoubtedly aware of the outcome of the trial and the subsequent appeal of Mrs. Fariba Kamalabadi, Mr. Jamaloddin Khanjani, Mr. Afif Naimi, Mr. Saeid Rezaie, Mrs. Mahvash Sabet, Mr. Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Mr. Vahid Tizfahm—the seven individuals who before their arrest were responsible, as the members of the group known as the Yaran, for administering the social and spiritual affairs of the Bahá’í community in Iran…
Alongside their professional pursuits and family duties, they have rendered, on a purely voluntary basis, distinguished service to the people of that land, as, for example, in the advancement of women, in the promotion of literacy among the country’s general population, and in the provision of the means of education for the thousands of Bahá’í youth who have been denied admission to Iranian universities since the inception of the Islamic Revolution.
Azar Nafisi, New York Times Best Seller Author Discusses Baha’is’ Human Rights Violations in Iran
Azar Nafisi is the author of the New York Times 117-week bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran. In this video she discusses the widespread violations of Baha’is’ human rights in Iran as well as her personal experience with Baha’is in light of the baseless accusations that they bear. Ms. Nafisi is not a Baha’i.
Political Prisoner in Iran – A letter to the supreme leader
Mr. Ali Khamenei,
I am a first year law student in a Canadian Law School. I lived in Iran until the age of thirteen. My family and I immigrated to Canada in 1997 because of the lack of freedom of expression in Iran. As immigrants, we were not always treated well and we suffered discrimination and were pushed back to work within our own small Iranian community in Toronto. We loved Iran but actions by some Iranians have embarrassed our people at an international level. In this letter, I will explain to you how I have personally suffered as a result of these actions. If you and I, as Iranians do not treat each other well, how can we expect the international community to truly and genuinely respect our people?
One of the latest actions that bring disrepute to all Iranians all over the world is in regards to Blogger Hossein Derakhshan, 35, a dual Canadian-Iranian national. He has been unfairly tried and sentenced on 28 September 2010 to 19 and a half years’ imprisonment on vaguely worded charges relating to national security. He was detained without charge for about 19 months prior to trial and denied regular access to his family and lawyer. Amnesty International believes he is likely held solely for the peaceful expression of his views, and if so should be immediately and unconditionally released.
I have personally seen that in Europe, the situation is even worse for Iranians. In addition, videos of Iranian refugees in places like Greece and Australia speak to the failure of our 1979 revolution. In my opinion, you and your government are partly responsible for ensuring the well-being of all Iranians. Your actions, though it highlights some of the malfunctions in the Iranian culture, have nevertheless followed innocent Iranians everywhere we have sought refuge. Most Europeans and North Americans today look down on Iranians because we have created a bad image of ourselves. We have been intolerant to women, homosexuals, bloggers, religious minorities, racial minorities and almost every other group that is different than the majority.
I was born in Iran but see myself as belonging to the 6.8 billion people on Earth, and yet, the actions of the Iranian government constantly undermine my attempts personally to make a good living. Mr. Khamenei, this is how your actions at the macro level results in problems for an Iranian like me at a micro level. It is time to address the negative image that Iranians have created for us. Iran was the first country in the world and Iranians are a warm and passionate people who have many beautiful cultures. You as an Iranian and selected leader need to promote the positive aspects of our culture. It is easy to shout and be critical of individual bloggers and exploitative foreigners. Maybe it is time to pick the difficult path of self-reformation. Why divide people based on their differences such as religion, race, and way of thinking when we can bring them together through our similarities? We don’t need enemies in this world; we don’t need to shout “death” at others; what we need is to show that we can respect people who think different, act different, and live different than the majority. The strongest people are the most merciful and the kindest.
Releasing Hossein would be a first micro step that would help all Iranians show how we are a kind people. As the leader you are responsible for reforming a positive image for all Iranians especially in Europe and North America. The world watches how we treat one another as Iranians, and they treat us in the same way that we choose to treat each other. Please act in a way that Iranians will be treated better from now on inside and outside of the land where both you and I opened our eyes to this world.
Iran Propaganda debunked in 7 minutes
If London (England) was Occupied
Cyber Offence as the Best Defence
Jim Geovedi has this interesting presentation from the National Defence Technology Seminar 2010:
Omar Khadr’s Lawyer Dennis Edney Speech at FNC
Omar Khadr’s Lawyer Dennis Edney Speech at FNC from Ezra Winton on Vimeo.
