The UN refugee agency condemned the deportation.

“The forced return of asylum-seekers without a full examination of their asylum claims is a serious breach of international refugee law,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.

Agency spokeswoman Kitty McKinsey said her agency had sent staff to Phnom Penh’s main airport on Saturday to try to physically stop the deportation, but authorities circumvented this by using a military airport.

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Thousands of people, including relatives of UK citizens, have gone missing in Pakistan after becoming victims of “enforced disappearances”, campaigners have claimed.

[...]

According to estimates by campaigners in the UK and Pakistan, hundreds of British families have relatives who have just “vanished”.

They are believed to be “enforced disappearances” – people are being picked up and detained by the state because they are thought to be associated with terrorist activity.

Official figures that are held by the Pakistani Supreme Court list almost 1,000 cases of missing persons, which are being investigated as “enforced disappearances”.

The report says some of these individuals are relatives of British Pakistani families who ’supported the Taliban’. That is besides the point. Arbitrary arrest and detention, and detaining someone without charge, whatever his or her views, is a descent into barbarism. Given leaks of videos showing the Pakistani army beating up ‘Taliban suspects’ and reports of mass killings in Swat, it isn’t hard to imagine these suspects may have been tortured or maybe even killed.

Some of the families want the British government to intervene:

“I am a British National and I have always worked hard. I would like the British government to help its citizens find answers and make sure human rights are not violated in Pakistan…”

I don’t expect the British government to be that concerned, especially given revelations that MI5 colluded in the torture of terror suspects in Pakistan.

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Wajiha Al-Huweidar, a Saudi human-rights activist, said the move was nothing short of hypocritical. “Since when is interfering in people’s private lives part of the human-rights agenda?” she asked The Media Line rhetorically. “It reflects what they do. They harass people all year long and during holidays they give away candy to people.”

“The religious police know very well that most Saudis want to see them disappear from streets and public places, because they only represent aggressiveness and oppression,” Al-Huweidar said. “I think the Saudi government has realized that its reputation is damaged worldwide and its image is ruined among Saudis, so now they are trying to beautify this repressive institution by using a new slogan… The religious police have to understand their time is over and they have to go.”

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It is fair to ask questions about Cage Prisoners and any other organisations, and who they associate with, but some of the n-th degree associations being used to castigate Sunny seem a bit ridiculous (one can draw a link of this kind from one of his critics, The Spittoon bloggers, straight to Robert Spencer!). Some of the commentators, including a former Pickled Politics blogger now at The Spittoon, raised the point about what to do with ‘known terrorists’, or those who were held with ‘unpleasant’ views, and whether the rights of such people should be taken seriously given their disdain for the rights of others. Within the English legal tradition at least, this difficult challenge (yes, it is difficult) was answered superbly by David Hope, one Britain’s senior judges, in the case of Abu Qatada (pdf link):

209. Most people in Britain, I suspect, would be astonished at the amount of care, time and trouble that has been devoted to the question whether it will be safe for the aliens to be returned to their own countries. In each case the Secretary of State has issued a certificate under section 33 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Immigration Act 2001 that the aliens’ removal from the United Kingdom would be conducive to the public good. The measured language of the statute scarcely matches the harm that they would wish to inflict upon our way of life, if they were at liberty to do so. Why hesitate, people may ask. Surely the sooner they are got rid of the better. On their own heads be it if their extremist views expose them to the risk of ill-treatment when they get home.

210. That however is not the way the rule of law works. The lesson of history is that depriving people of its protection because of their beliefs or behaviour, however obnoxious, leads to the disintegration of society. A democracy cannot survive in such an atmosphere, as events in Europe in the 1930s so powerfully demonstrated. It was to eradicate this evil that the European Convention on Human Rights, following the example of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, was prepared for the Governments of European countries to enter into. The most important word in this document appears in article 1, and it is repeated time and time again in the following articles. It is the word “everyone”. The rights and fundamental freedoms that the Convention guarantees are not just for some people. They are for everyone. No one, however dangerous, however disgusting, however despicable, is excluded. Those who have no respect for the rule of law – even those who would seek to destroy it – are in the same position as everyone else.

211. The paradox that this system produces is that, from time to time, much time and effort has to be given to the protection of those who may seem to be the least deserving. Indeed it is just because their cases are so unattractive that the law must be especially vigilant to ensure that the standards to which everyone is entitled are adhered to. The rights that the aliens invoke in this case were designed to enshrine values that are essential components of any modern democratic society: the right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to liberty and the right to a fair trial. There is no room for discrimination here. Their protection must be given to everyone. It would be so easy, if it were otherwise, for minority groups of all kinds to be persecuted by the majority. We must not allow this to happen. Feelings of the kind that the aliens’ beliefs and conduct give rise to must be resisted for however long it takes to ensure that they have this protection.

Although Hope refers to the specifics of a particular Act, the general principle is that, yes, some men illegally incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay or Bagram or Belmarsh are unlikely to be cuddly liberals, but depriving even them of their rights is a descent into barbarism. (In other words, ‘they’ have won.)

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More anti-hegemons:

The new disciplinary actions came as officials reported that a presidential panel has begun an investigation of the humanities curriculums at universities, the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported. Although the panel was formed a year ago, it did not start work until after recent calls to purge universities of professors and curriculums deemed “un-Islamic,” based on the fear that the teaching of secular concepts helped fuel the political unrest following the June 12 election.

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Divestment

The Norwegian Finance Ministry has announced that the government of Norway will be divesting from Elbit, a major Israeli defense contractor with operations in Asia, North America and the Middle East. Speaking at a Oslo press conference Sept. 3, the Norwegian Finance Minister, Kristin Halvorsen, said that the decision had been recommended by Norway’s Ministry of Finance council on ethics, charged with assuring that government investments abroad meet ethical guidelines, because the Israeli arms firm was providing the technology used in the construction of the West Bank separation barrier (referred to as the “fence” in the Israeli media).

Boycott

The Israeli cosmetics company, Ahava, which illegally manufactures and appropriates its products in occupied Palestinian territory, has dropped its spokesperson ‘Sex & the City’ star Kristin Davis amid a public relations debacle sparked by the peace group CODEPINK’s Stolen Beauty campaign….

Davis’ dismissal, and the accompanying blow to Ahava’s image, follow the successful launch of CODEPINK’s Stolen Beauty campaign designed to spread word of Ahava’s illegal practices — its products are falsely labeled as “Made in Israel” but in actuality are made in an illegal settlement in occupied Palestinian territory, and often contain resources appropriated from occupied land, in clear violation of international law.

Tagging this ‘hegemony of human rights discourse‘ to highlight how these campaigns are largely undertaken by non-Muslims to help Muslims as an expression of their participant’s commitment to universal human rights.

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Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking them to reconsider releasing information — such as “a list of names, citizenship, length of detention, [and] capture location” — about detainees held at the detention facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

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It is also worth reading this piece by Andy Worthington:

At the heart of the matter are two simple questions: whether it is acceptable for the government to deprive anyone of the right to a fair trial on the basis of secret evidence that is not disclosed to them, and, if so, what conditions should be imposed on those regarded as a threat on the basis of that evidence?

Last month, the law lords ruled unanimously – in the case of three detainees subjected to control orders – that depriving people of the right to a fair trial on the basis of secret evidence was unacceptable. As Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, explained: “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him.”

(This is the the evil Hegemony of Human Rights Discourse helping out Muslims like Mahmoud Abu Rideh.)

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Discovered a new group blog, The Grenada Blog, where I found a post on, “Iran’s elections and the Third Wave of cultural imperialism.”

Mu’adh writes:

Today however, we are confronted with the third wave of imperialism, one which is far more subtle and insidious as it possesses a much greater potential to entice members of our Muslim ummah. This updated form of imperialism, rather than telling us we are too backward to have agency over our societies, tells us that we are advanced enough by asserting that we are just like the West….

For the Muslims, this process is reinforced by well-intentioned (insha’allaah) Muslims who seek to advocate the continued relevance of Islam in the era of modernity. These (overwhelmingly Western university educated) Muslims take great time and effort in order to show how the neoconservatives and other overtly anti-Islamic groups have got it wrong and that Islam shares a commitment to ‘human rights’ (in a manner similar to the UN’s ‘Universal’ Declaration on Human Rights), democracy and even in some cases a separation between religion and state.

The response to the Iranian elections is the greatest example of the ‘Third Wave’ especially all those pictures of “‘French manicured half-hijab wearing young women carrying designer handbags.” ‘Fair assumptions” are asserted that “the majority of the protesters are not represented by this.”

Furthermore, if the desire of the protesters really is to acquire nothing more than opulent forms of pointless distraction, is this really something we as Muslims want to be associated with?

“Fair assumptions” and “opulent forms of pointless distraction” – who is writing the ‘imperial narrative’ now?

And the takeaway point:

It is important for us as Muslims to be aware of imperialism in all its forms as we are a people under constant threat, economically, ideologically and militarily. We need to be aware of the perils and challenges facing our ummah in order to devise effective means of countering them.

This is an excellent example of how demagoguery prompts a morbid preoccupation with difference from the West (different to meet some fear-induced state of being ‘uncolonized,’ rather than different because the Quran and the Sunnah actually requires something different).

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There was some lying involved, of course. The article criticizing HRW was published first on a blog then on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

Though the WSJ version didn’t, the original version of Bernstein’s post on the website ‘the Volokh Conspiracy’ linked to the Arab News story on the dinner, on which the post appears to largely be based.

Noting criticism of Israel, the Arab News story says, “Keeping with its mission of even-handed criticism, Human Rights Watch has also leveled criticism at other states in the region, including Saudi Arabia.”

However, the WSJ article by Bernstein says, “Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record.”

Bernstein goes on to claim that HRW doesn’t have “the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis’ manifold human rights violations”.

Not only were Saudi human rights violations discussed but, “there was far more interest in our work in Saudi Arabia than we expected,” Whitson said. “We thought there would be much more caution and sensitivity about our work on Saudi Arabia.”

(via)

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