Dubai: 69 labour protests in six months:
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thabet
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thabet
Githu Muigai, a UN human rights expert, visited the UAE this past week:
“I came here with the desire to obtain a better understanding of the UAE, to engage in a constructive dialogue with the Government and to prepare a report with positive recommendations,” he said..
Another UN representative, Najat M’jid Maalla, is expected to visit this week. She specialises on working to prevent the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
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thabet
Inayat Bunglawala writes on a topic which will get him panned amongst most Muslims:
The ongoing change of Bunglawala is quite interesting (consider his admission that he was wrong about the publication of The Satanic Verses). I wonder how the hierarchy in the Muslim Council of Britain see him?
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Sikh police offer ‘humiliated’:
There seems to be a simple solution for these sorts of situations: where genuine health and safety issues arise (usually related to protection of the head), religious believers should give up any rights they have against their employer. This way they can keep working, wearing the symbol of their faith, without placing any liability on the employer.
The police officers in this incident seem like a nasty bunch though. If reports are true they were also fantasising about ‘gunning down’ Muslims celebrating Eid (not possible in practice given coppers don’t have firearms).
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Labour protests in Dubai:
Workers from Al Habtoor Engineering stopped work on its sites in Deira as well as in the Jebel Ali port area. More than 2,000 protesting labourers in Deira stopped work at about 8am and walked on to the road, briefly halting traffic and creating chaos. Dubai police and labour officials immediately reached the work site and started controlling the crowd.
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200 people are questioned by the police following the murder of Pakistani Christians by a rioting mob.
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Bahrain ends its sponsorship law:
The government now takes over responsibility for the sponsorship of hundreds of thousands of expatriates in the Gulf island kingdom previously held by foreign workers’ employers.
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A new report by the Open Society Institute finds ‘[p]ervasive use of ethnic and religious stereotypes by law enforcement across Europe’ and goes onto criticise this as harmful to Europe’s ability to combat crime and terrorism.
The report seems to focus on details of widespread profiling in France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands.
(Via Martijn de Koning, who discusses the report in more detail.)
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Using religion to justify torture:
The man was in his 40s, very elegant, polite and quiet. I noticed a prayer mark on his forehead. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and I asked him, “In which department do you work?”
He hesitated for a second, then he replied: “State Security.”
We both kept silent, and he turned his face away from me and started to watch the other guests. My mind was torn between two conflicting options: Should I resume the previous polite conversation, or should I express my opinion candidly on the State Security Investigations department? In the end, I couldn’t help but challenge him, and I will reconstruct the conversation that followed to the best of my ability:
“Excuse me. You are religious, it seems,” I said.
“Thank God.”
“Don’t you see any contradiction between being religious and working in State Security?”
“Where would the contradiction arise?”
“People detained by State Security are beaten, tortured and raped, though all religions prohibit such practices.”
He started to get emotional and said: “First, those who are beaten deserve to be beaten. Second, if you study your religion thoroughly, you will find that what we do in the State Security department is fully compatible with Islamic teachings.”
“But Islam is a religion that safeguards human dignity.”
“That’s a generalization. I have read Islamic jurisprudence, and I am well aware of its provisions.”
“There’s nothing in Islamic jurisprudence that makes it legitimate to torture people.”
“Listen to me until I finish, please. Islam has nothing to do with democracy or elections. Obedience to a Muslim ruler is a duty for his subjects, even if he has usurped power, is corrupt or unjust. Do you know how Islam punishes those who rebel against their rulers?”
I kept silent.
He continued enthusiastically: “They face the haraba punishment, which is amputation of the left hand and the right foot. All those we detain at State Security have rebelled against the ruler, and by Islamic law we should cut off their limbs, but we do not do this. What we do is much less than the Islamic punishment.”
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thabet
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) has published the second of its reports on the experiences of discrimination by immigrants and ethnic minorities across the European Union. This report concentrates on Muslim ethnic groups living within the EU. An interesting note in the summary of the findings:
Of those Muslim respondents who experienced discrimination in the past 12 months, the majority believed that this was mainly due to their ethnic background. Only 10% stated that they thought the discrimination they experienced was based solely on their religion. In fact, wearing traditional or religious clothing (such as a headscarf) does not appear to increase the likelihood of being discriminated against.
The full report can be downloaded from the FRA website (pdf).
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thabet
About 50 Muslim men took their prayer rugs to the Sliema front yesterday after the planning authority sealed off their place of worship.
I found the language of ‘rights’ from both sides interesting: one Muslim interviewed called the public gathering an expression of a ‘fundamental human right’ to pray, while a Maltese onlooker is quoted as saying that as Muslims don’t have a ‘right’ to pray in public because Malta is a Catholic country.
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thabet
The revolt of India’s child brides.
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Here’s a piece on the silence of Pakistan’s lawyers movement, politicians and religious establishment on the Taliban’s moves against minorities in the areas they now control.
I have quoted near enough the whole thing below the fold; well worth a read.
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razib, murtad fitri
if i remember my john rawls correctly even within his utilitarian framework he admitted to some “basic rights” which existed outside of utility calculations. that is, these were not means, but ends in and of themselves. many of these debates about “hegemonic human rights” (to borrow a phrase) operate on the margins of what cultures perceive universal rights to be, or exactly how important a “basic right” is. for example, i think there is more worldwide agreement that slavery should be banned and stamped out, even if it violates local norms or state sovereignty. there is less consensus when it comes to female suffrage, since of course there are some states which selectively give the right to vote only to males (though since the right to vote is limited in various other ways it might seem less pernicious, especially in light of the existence of non-democratic regimes). even within “western” culture there are differences; freedom of speech from an american perspective is just far more thoroughgoing than even in other anglo-nations, who themselves are more radical than continental europeans.
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A serious threat to Our Way Of Life: Inquests deemed a risk to national security by the government may be held in secret under proposed powers to come before the House of Lords this autumn. This undermines the “right to a public inquiry into a death – a centuries-old mainstay of British justice”. Elsewhere, local government and health authorities will be given the right to access email and internet records, under new surveillance powers to be introduced next year.
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Sometime ago, Aziz wrote in a comment:
Is this true? Should this be true?
Discuss.
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Jim Crow healthcare: Kuwaiti politicians want the government to adopt a “separation between Kuwaiti citizens and expatriates in medical services, especially at casualty departments and outpatient clinics at public hospitals”.
(Thanks AE.)
