The Atlantic Monthly: “Are Women Being Targeted in Syria?”
Lauren Wolfe | Monday, December 10, 2012

“When Syrian armed forces have used indiscriminate air bombardment or artillery to attack civilian areas, these are war crimes,” said Sunjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Full article here or below.

“Are Women Being Targeted in Syria?“

The Atlantic Monthly
Monday, December 10, 2012
By Lauren Wolfe

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/are-women-being-targeted-in-syria/266079/

The exhaustive attempt to track and catalogue war crimes by the Assad regime

The baby’s body was found near a checkpoint on the road that connects Homs with the ancient city of Palmyra, in central Syria, in January. At four months old, she was said to have been given over to a paternal uncle, dead, with bruises on her back, abdomen, and hands. Her parents were missing — the family had gone to the coastal city of Tartus 16 days before, according to a video that shows her lifeless. Male voices on the video accuse Bashar al-Assad’s security forces of torturing and killing the infant after she was arrested along with her family.

We don’t know what really happened, whether her death was intentional or a byproduct of war. We don’t know who the perpetrators were for sure. But we do know that this baby is one of the many that has died in Syria’s ongoing conflict. And we know that no matter how many bodies we count, or don’t, that she is a civilian, one of many documented to have been killed in more than 20 months of fighting.

Nearly a year ago, the United Nations gave up on keeping track of Syria’s dead. Over the summer, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared the conflict a civil war. That means intentional attacks on civilians are now officially considered war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The question then becomes: How will we know what to prosecute when the fighting dies down if we don’t keep track of crimes against civilians, which are, in most cases, women and children?

That’s where various groups of citizen journalists and social scientists come in. One such crowdsourcing effort, called Syria Tracker, has documented more than 36,000 killings from multiple types of sources as of mid-October, including the above story about the baby killed. I will keep the names of those who run Syria Tracker, which is run by high-level social scientists, anonymous out of respect for their safety. Groups doing this kind of work have already been threatened. But their painstaking documentation, cited by USAID, can potentially tell us a great deal about what may be happening to Syria’s civilians.

One way that Syria Tracker has broken down its catalogue of deaths is by gender. On average, according to the group, about 9 percent of the documented killings across Syria are of women, who are unlikely to have picked up arms in the conflict, and girls, who are inherently noncombatants. That means that, at minimum, nearly one casualty in 10 is likely a civilian, their statistics show. These women and girls are being killed in various ways — everything from stabbing to shelling to gunshots — many of which may be considered prosecutable internationally. “When Syrian armed forces have used indiscriminate air bombardment or artillery to attack civilian areas, these are war crimes,” said Sunjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The Syria Tracker reports contain a higher proportion of women killed since February, the group says, when there was a renewed attack on Homs. This spike has not subsided since the agreed-upon ceasefire in October. “Government forces now routinely bomb and shell towns and villages using battlefield weapons which cannot be aimed at specific targets, knowing that the victims of such indiscriminate attacks are almost always civilians,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s senior crisis response adviser, said in September .

Beyond bombs, however, which make up 44 percent of Syria Tracker’s documented killings of women and girls (vs. 23 percent for men), the group has found that the lead causes of deaths of females break down as such: 14 percent gunshot wound (vs. 31 percent for men), 5 percent shot by sniper (vs. 4 percent for men), and 3 percent “slaughtered,” which, Syria Tracker told me, means “beaten or stabbed, something up close and personal” (vs. 1 percent for men).

About 9 percent of the documented killings across Syria are of women and girls.

Does this indicate the targeting of civilians? We don’t know — Are women caught in crossfire not meant for them? But it certainly begs the question. The head of Syria Tracker certainly thinks it does. “In places where you have massacres, where the military or shabiha [plainclothes militia forces] have gone in and massacred people, there’s definite evidence of targeting, such as in Homs,” says the group’s founder, who is an epidemiologist, a physician, and a statistician. “All were hung or all slaughtered, or all were handcuffed and killed the same way. You suddenly have a big spike in one group, like women. It’s very methodological. These people knew what they were doing when they went in.”

He also points out that the areas with greater deaths of women and girls appear to correlate to where there have been more media reports of paramilitary, or shabiha, activity. In Homs, Syria Tracker has found, the percentage of women and girls reportedly killed since the start of the war is at nearly 40 percent, compared to the 9 percent average across the country. A woman, in their estimation, is 10 times more likely to die a violent death in Homs than in Damascus.

This violence against women in Homs corresponds to the data we have gathered at the project I direct at the Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege, which is mapping how sexualized violence is being utilized in Syria. Our data show higher levels of sexual assaults in Homs than any other city in Syria, with 35 percent of our total reports taking place there. Also, 70 percent of Syria Tracker’s recorded female deaths by beatings and stabbings happened in Homs, the majority in May 2012.

Around 60 percent of Syria Tracker’s thousands of reports have at least one video or picture. Over 85 percent have a name of a victim. All have a location of the attack, down to the neighborhood or county. All have an exact date and are corroborated by at least one other source. Over 80 percent of the reports have context about what happened, describing whether an individual death was part of a massacre or something else. Which is to say that this documentation could help toward the assemblage of evidence for potential prosecutions.

Dr. Sandro Galea, chair of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health’s department of epidemiology, said he considers crowdsourcing like Syria Tracker’s an “innovative approach that can be used for surveillance during wars or in unstable situations.”

Regardless, this kind of human rights data gathering has amassed its share of criticism, the gist of it being that there is no way to know what portion of the overall violence you’re collecting.

“Those reports are important and useful as case studies, but any analysis of that observed data must also take into account what has not been reported — when and where might violence be happening that is not witnessed by anyone or is witnessed by individuals who do not feel comfortable reporting the violence?” says Megan Price, a statistician with the human rights program at Benetech, a Palo Alto, California-based nonprofit technology organization that has done humanitarian data gathering from Guatemala to East Timor. The data, she says, are more supportive of qualitative conclusions and specific contextual details rather than aggregate conclusions about patterns.

The head of Syria Tracker agrees. “Imagine if after every single massacre you could interview every single person — that would be great,” he says. “But you can’t do that.” There’s bias in the data collection in a statistical sense, he freely admits. Who can get on the Internet? Who then knows about Syria Tracker and feels comfortable using it? But trying to gather reports of killings in a hot war is not about looking for the needle in the haystack. Rather, he says, it is about modeling the haystack. What does the warzone look like? In this case, what does life — and death — look like for civilians stuck inside Syria?

We can’t conclude from Syria Tracker’s data whether the 9 percent of female deaths represents the proportion of women killed in the overall conflict or just the proportion of those reported to Syria Tracker. But we do know that civilians are dying and that “the price Syrian women and families are paying is often invisible,” says Dr. Karestan Koenen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the lead epidemiologist on WMC’s mapping project. “Every woman who dies is a sister, mother, wife, or daughter, and her death leaves a gaping hole in her family and erodes Syrian culture, which is based on extended family structures.”

We don’t have time to wait, she says, to gather the stories of Syria’s war, to collect information about human lives, which are disappearing day by day into the rubble. “Academics can sit around and argue methods, but meanwhile people are dying and journalists are left to rely on very little,” says Koenen. “Is it really the case that we can’t make any conclusions? Or do we, with appropriate caveats, have a moral obligation to try?”

…“The behavior of an anti-Islam propagandist, as hurtful as it may be to the religious sensitivities of some Muslims, should not be used as a justification to curtail core freedoms or justify potential government repression,” said Sanjeev Bery, an advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International USA.

Full article here or below.

“Muslim-led nations seek global ban on insults of Muhammad”

The Washington Times
Monday, September 24, 2012
By Guy Taylor

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/24/muslim-led-nations-seek-ban-on-insult/#ixzz27UhBDqSp

As the U.N. General Assembly convenes this week in New York, several leaders of mostly Muslim nations are suggesting that the world body consider sanctions on blasphemy, amid widespread protests against an amateur movie that denigrates Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he will focus at least part of his remarks on the film when he addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.

“I am the prime minister of a nation, of which most are Muslims, that has declared anti-Semitism a crime against humanity. But the West hasn’t recognized Islamophobia as a crime against humanity. It has encouraged it,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters last week.

Turkey heads the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a body of 57 nations, which has long pushed for a U.N. resolution condemning the “defamation of religion.”

Nonbinding versions of the resolution have been adopted, but the effort was crushed last year by religious groups and human rights activists who argued that it represented a dangerous step toward an international law against free speech.

The debate has been reignited by “Innocence of Muslims,” a crudely produced film made in the United States that has sparked fury in the Muslim world. Protesters have breached the walls at U.S. embassies and desecrated American flags in sometimes violent demonstrations. A protest in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi ended with the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed Monday to Muslims to show “dignity” and not resort to violence as they protest the film, the Associated Press reported.

“Dignity does not come from avenging insults, especially with violence that can never be justified,” Mrs. Clinton said at her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative. “It comes from taking responsibility and advancing our common humanity.”

In New York on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alluded to the film and accused the United States and others of misusing freedom of speech and of failing to speak out against the defamation of people’s beliefs and “divine prophets.”

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose country boasts the world’s largest Muslim population, has condemned the film and called on “the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the U.N. to mull over international protocol to prevent such things like this from happening again.”

Pakistan’s parliament passed a resolution condemning “Innocence of Muslims” and demanding the nation’s leaders to call on the United Nations to take action against those who made the film.

Nonbinding resolution

At least one politician has gone a step further in Egypt, where the anti-American protests were triggered after a Salafist Muslim TV network broadcast Arabic-dubbed clips of the film.

“We call for legislation or a resolution to criminalize contempt of Islam as a religion and its prophet,” Emad Abdel Ghaffour, who heads the ultra-orthodox sect’s Nour political party, told Reuters over the weekend.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will address the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, and many are waiting to see whether he will echo Mr. Ghaffour’s remarks.

While the Nour party holds the second-largest bloc in Egyptian parliament to Mr. Morsi’s more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, doctrinal and political differences exist between the two.

Mr. Morsi may be more likely to use his first appearance as president before the U.N. to focus on other regional issues, such as Egypt’s potential role as a mediator in Syria’s civil war.

Free-speech and human rights advocates were watching the United Nations closely in anticipation of a charged debate about free speech within the context of the “Innocence of Muslims” film.

“The behavior of an anti-Islam propagandist, as hurtful as it may be to the religious sensitivities of some Muslims, should not be used as a justification to curtail core freedoms or justify potential government repression,” said Sanjeev Bery, an advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International USA.

His comments echo a statement that the U.S. government issued to the U.N. in 2008, asserting that “the concept of ‘defamation of religions’ is not supported by international law.”

“There have been numerous reports that this concept is being used in some member states to justify torture, imprisonment and other forms of abuse,” said the statement, which was made after the General Assembly’s 2007 passage of a nonbinding resolution titled “Combating defamation of religions.”

The resolution stated that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” and put forth a wide set of conditions under which such freedom could be curtailed.

“[It] should be exercised with responsibility and may therefore be subject to limitations, according to law and necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others; protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals; and respect for religions and beliefs,” the resolution stated.

‘The film is an excuse’

The language pitted the U.S. and much of Europe against Middle Eastern and some African and Latin American nations that had pushed for the measure and ultimately paved the way for a carefully reworded 2011 U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution that focused less on defamation and more on prohibiting discrimination.

The 2011 resolution is titled “Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.”

While some conservative groups in the United States criticized the Obama administration for backing the 2011 resolution, free-speech advocates generally have embraced it.

Courtney C. Radsch, program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House, said the 2011 development shifted the discussion at the U.N. away “from this attempt to create an international blasphemy law and instead focused it on combating religious intolerance at the ground level.”

The problem with the earlier resolution, Ms. Radsch said, was that it equated “religious discrimination, which is a real human rights issue, with this vague concept of defamation, not to mention the issue of who decides what constitutes blasphemy or what constitutes defamation.”

She said it “remains to be seen” whether Muslim leaders will try to renew calls for a blasphemy law this week. “I think there’s a lot of talk about it because of everything that’s been happening with this video being used as an excuse to insight violence on the ground,” she said.

“The film is an excuse,” Ms. Radsch said. “The film did not incite violence. There were intermediaries who used the film as a pretext to manipulate the public and public opinion that has resulted in mass violence. But there’s no causal link between the video itself and the violence that has occurred.”

Monday, September 10, 2012

… Also in August, Amnesty International’s blog Livewire was targeted by another pro-Assad hacker group that accused the rebel army of committing massacres that have been linked to government forces. The attack, which was not claimed by any specific group of hackers, included a false blog post lamenting that “it is clear the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels are not going to stop their crimes. And with no accountability and a steady supply of weapons, why should they given they have come this far under NATO protection?”

Another one of the false posts was titled “Amnesty Calls on UN to stop the US, Qatar and Turkey funding and arming Syria Rebels,” and created the impression that Amnesty International was condemning NATO and the US for meddling in the Syrian civil war. Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International’s USA advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa, explained the attack in an article published on the group’s website:

“It’s entirely possible that, given that we’ve been so forthright in criticizing the Syrian government for its crimes against humanity; that could conceivably make us the target of some kind of campaign.”

Full article here.

But there are troubling signs that the draft language for the Tunisian constitution does not adequately protect women’s human rights.  You can help at this critical moment by signing this important Amnesty International statement to the Tunisian government.

In September, Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly (NCA) will hold final discussions on draft constitutional language that has been prepared by its committees.  That’s why the coming days are so important.  The NCA had been elected in October of 2011 to write Tunisia’s post-dictatorship constitution.

As my Amnesty International colleagues in London have stated:

Amnesty International is calling on the NCA to ensure that the constitution includes the basic guarantees that would protect Tunisians from the abuses they suffered in the past … Under [past dictator] Ben Ali, the constitution lost its power to protect people against human rights violations, and instead the authorities passed new laws which repressed Tunisians even more…While the rights of women were trumpeted by Ben Ali , in reality discrimination remained entrenched in law and in practice.

With regards to women’s rights, my colleagues have noted troubling developments in Tunisia’s constitution drafting process:  “Recent proposals within the NCA that describe women as partners to men and their complementary role in the family are a threat to women’s rights and gender equality in Tunisia.”

It is troubling to learn of such developments in the aftermath of the very freedom movements that women have played such a significant role in.  From Tunisia’s streets to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, women put their lives at risk in order to demand their rights and better governments for all.

In 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize committee recognized as much when it included Yemeni woman Tawakkol Karman among the three prominent women who received its award.  In receiving her award, Ms. Karman dedicated her prize to “all of the youth and all of the women across the Arab world, in Egypt, in Tunisia.”

As new decisionmakers draft rules for new governments, we must do our part to make sure that women’s fundamental rights are enshrined in law.  Current and future generations will be profoundly affected by the decisions that are being made today.

You can help push the outcome in the right direction.

Excerpt:

“Amnesty International has been very blunt in the reporting that we’ve done and the eyewitness accounts that we’ve collected in Syria,” said Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa. “It’s entirely possible that, given that we’ve been so forthright in criticizing the Syrian government for its crimes against humanity, that could conceivably make us the target of some kind of campaign.

Bery said Amnesty’s position on the civil war in Syria has been clear.

“We are deeply concerned both about the continuing crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Syrian government through its forces as well as concerned by war crimes that have been committed both by the Syrian government armed forces and by some opposition forces,” he said.

Full article linked and pasted below.

Amnesty International Web site hacked by supporters of Syrian government

By James Ball
Washington Post
Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Supporters of the Syrian government hacked the Web site of Amnesty International, posting items that falsely accused the rebels of a string of atrocities.

The sophisticated cyberattack, which occurred Monday, was similar to the targeting this month of blogs operated by Reuters news service.

In Amnesty’s case, the primary target of the hacking appeared to be the group’s Livewire blog, which offers first-person perspectives and commentary from Amnesty researchers and field workers.

According to Amnesty officials, social-media users began posting false items accusing the Syrian rebels of committing massacres that had been linked to government forces.

One fake blog post claimed rebel groups were responsible for a massacre in the town of Houla in May that killed 108 people, including 49 children. Amnesty’s actual position, shared by Western governments, is that Syrian government forces and militias were responsible for the killings.

The blog post concluded: “It is clear the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels are not going to stop their crimes. And with no accountability and a steady supply of weapons, why should they given they have come this far under NATO protection?

“Russia must immediately use its influence to end this violence and support the UN Security Council to end NATO’s reign of terror upon Syria and refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court. Amnesty supporters have not forgotten the people of Syria and will continue to demand accountability for these horrific crimes against humanity.”

The post, headlined “Amnesty Calls on UN to stop the US, Qatar and Turkey funding and arming Syria Rebels,” also portrayed the group as condemning NATO and the governments of Turkey and Qatar for supplying rebel forces in Syria.

The blog post included some accurate information, including that Amnesty had just produced a report based on firsthand fieldwork in the country.

Amnesty struggled through Monday evening to delete the posts from its site. According to a spokesman for the group, entries removed by technical-staff members would rapidly reappear on the site over the course of several hours.

A spokesman from Amnesty International in London said the system on which the blog ran did not contain sensitive data on activists or others. By Tuesday morning, the blog was back to its usual appearance.

“Amnesty International has been very blunt in the reporting that we’ve done and the eyewitness accounts that we’ve collected in Syria,” said Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa. “It’s entirely possible that, given that we’ve been so forthright in criticizing the Syrian government for its crimes against humanity, that could conceivably make us the target of some kind of campaign.”

Bery said Amnesty’s position on the civil war in Syria has been clear.

“We are deeply concerned both about the continuing crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Syrian government through its forces as well as concerned by war crimes that have been committed both by the Syrian government armed forces and by some opposition forces,” he said.

Pro-Syrian-government Web sites and Twitter users continued to cite and promulgate the false information after it was taken down, claiming the post had originated from individuals within Amnesty “who no longer can handle the lies and outright propaganda of media outlets.”

There is no way to establish whether the Twitter accounts, which were mostly anonymous, were linked with the cyberattack, but pro-Syrian hackers have targeted the social network’s users before.

Reuters’s blog network was targeted on three occasions, with inserted stories portraying the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in positive ways. Some entries said the rebels were retreating, and one post on Aug. 17 falsely claimed that Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister was dead.

The attack on the news service is believed to have taken advantage of vulnerabilities in blogging software. Reuters blogs remained offline more than 10 days after the most recent attack.

Several Reuters Twitter accounts were also compromised, and spoof accounts using the Reuters branding were also created. One, @ReutersME, posted messages suggesting rebel forces in Aleppo were on the brink of defeat, including: “Syrian army source anonymously states that Aleppo battle is like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’, says victory is near,” and “FSA source reveals that 2200 of their fighters were killed in Aleppo, demanding extra support from the ‘free world’.”

No one has claimed responsibility for either attack. The best known pro-Assad hacking group calls itself the Syrian Electronic Army.

Contact: Carolyn Lang, clang@aiusa.org, 202-675-8759

(Washington, D.C.) — Amnesty International condemns an Israeli court’s verdict that the government of Israel bears no responsibility in the death of Rachel Corrie, saying the verdict continues the pattern of impunity for Israeli military violations against civilians and human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The verdict shields Israeli military personnel from accountability and ignores deep flaws in the Israeli military’s internal investigation of Corrie’s death.

“Rachel Corrie was a peaceful American protestor who was killed while attempting to protect a Palestinian home from the crushing force of an Israeli military bulldozer,” said Sanjeev Bery, Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.

“More than nine years after Corrie’s death, the Israeli authorities still have not delivered on promises to conduct a ‘thorough, credible and transparent’ investigation. Instead, an Israeli court has upheld the flawed military investigation and issued a verdict that once again shields the Israeli military from any accountability,” Bery said.

The verdict, issued by Judge Oded Gershon in the Haifa District Court, maintains that the Israeli military is not responsible for ‘damages caused’ because the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer was engaged in a combat operation in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003.

International humanitarian law prohibits the destruction of property unless required by imperative military necessity, and requires that in any military operation, constant care is taken to protect civilians.

“Rachel Corrie was clearly identifiable as a civilian, as she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest when she was killed,” said Bery. “She and other non-violent activists had been peacefully demonstrating against the demolitions for hours when the Israeli military bulldozer ran over her.”

By upholding the flawed Israeli military investigation, completed within one month of Rachel Corrie’s death in 2003, the verdict seems to have ignored substantial evidence presented to the court, including by eyewitnesses. The full military investigation has never been made public, but US government officials have stated that they do not believe the investigation was ‘thorough, credible and transparent.’

Amnesty International has made similar criticisms of Israel’s system of military investigations for many years. For example, the organization has monitored the investigations carried out by IDF commanders and the Israeli military police into violations during Operation ‘Cast Lead’, launched by Israeli forces on December 27, 2008, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip were killed.

Israel’s military investigations have lacked independence, impartiality, transparency, appropriate expertise and sufficient investigatory powers. The failure of both Israel and the Hamas de facto administration to conduct credible investigations into violations committed during the conflict led Amnesty International to call for the Gaza situation to be referred to the International Criminal Court.

Palestinian civilians from the OPT are killed or injured by the Israeli military all too frequently, but they face significant barriers in accessing Israeli civil courts, which means that Israeli civil courts rarely examine the killings of civilians in the OPT, particularly those in Gaza. Steep court fees required of claimants before the case can begin are beyond the means of most Palestinians. As part of Israel’s continuing closure of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli authorities deny Palestinian victims or witnesses from Gaza permission to enter Israel to testify in court, lawyers from Gaza cannot represent clients before Israeli courts, and Israeli lawyers cannot enter Gaza to meet with clients.

Amnesty International has repeatedly condemned Israel’s policy of demolishing homes and other structures in the OPT, but demolitions are still routine in the occupied West Bank. Over 600 structures were demolished in 2011, resulting in the forcible eviction of almost 1,100 people. In the first seven months of 2012, the Israeli military demolished 327 structures in the West Bank, displacing 575 people, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 3 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.

Excerpt:

Amnesty International said that the court upheld a “flawed Israeli military investigation, completed within one month” of Corrie’s death and that the “verdict seems to have ignored substantial evidence presented to the court, including by eyewitnesses.”

“Rachel Corrie was clearly identifiable as a civilian, as she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest when she was killed,” said Sanjeev Bery, Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.

Full article linked and pasted below.

Israeli court: American protester Rachel Corrie’s death an accident

By Frederik Pleitgen
CNN
August 28, 2012

Nine years after an American activist was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer, an Israeli civil court ruled Tuesday that Rachel Corrie’s death was an accident.

Corrie, 23, was killed in 2003 while trying to block the bulldozer from razing Palestinian homes.

Her parents filed suit against Israel’s Ministry of Defense in a quest for accountability and sought just $1 in damages. But Judge Oded Gershon ruled Tuesday that the family has no right to damages, backing an earlier Israeli investigation that cleared any soldier of wrongdoing.

“I believe this was a bad day not only for our family, but a bad day for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law and also for the country of Israel,” her mother, Cindy Corrie, said after the verdict.

“Rachel’s right to life and dignity were violated by the Israeli military,” she said, adding that her daughter and her family deserve “accountability.”

“A civil lawsuit is not a substitute for a credible investigation, which we never had. This lawsuit was our only recourse as a family,” Cindy Corrie explained.

But the state prosecutor’s office said the driver of the bulldozer couldn’t see Corrie.

“The death of Rachel Corrie is without a doubt a tragic accident,” the office said in a statement. “As the verdict states — the driver of the bulldozer and his commander had a very limited field of vision, such that they had no possibility of seeing Ms. Corrie and thus are exonerated of any blame for negligence.”

Hussein Abu Hussein, the Corrie family attorney, regards the decision as a “bad ruling” for the family and all activists. He said the Corries intend to appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev countered criticism of the verdict by saying that “the whole idea that this was not a serious procedure is simply non-factual.”

“They (the Corries) have lost a loved one, and we can all empathize with them,” Regev said. “But I thik their criticism of the Israeli judiciary is unfounded. The Israeli judiciary is known for its independence, which they fiercely guard.”

Corrie was nonviolently protesting the demolition of Palestinian civilian homes in Rafah, Gaza, when she died. She was working with the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement at the time.

Corrie’s parents say they have searched for answers in their daughter’s death for years.

“The more we found out, the more likely that the killing was intentional, or at least incredibly reckless,” father Craig Corrie said in 2010.

“As a former soldier, I was even in charge of bulldozers in Vietnam. … You’re responsible to know what’s in front of that blade, and I believe that they did.”

Craig Corrie said the soldiers, too, are victims. He does not view them with disdain.

“So I’m not full of hatred for this person, but it was a horrendous act to kill my daughter, and I hope he understands that.”

In 2010, the Israeli soldier who drove the bulldozer testified publicly for the first time — from behind a partition.

The driver’s identity has never been revealed, and he was not charged after a monthlong Israeli investigation found that no Israeli soldier was to blame. Corrie’s parents cannot take him to court because the Israeli Supreme Court has upheld a decision to shield him.

The driver testified repeatedly that he did not see Corrie before he struck her, saying there was a pile of rubble impeding his vision.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee and head of the PLO Department of Culture and Information, also condemned the ruling. She said that the evidence shows Corrie was “deliberately murdered” and that the Israeli court has victimized her again.

“We must make sure that Rachel Corrie’s death is not a senseless incident,” Ashrawi said in a statement. “It must be stressed that Israel’s habit of blaming the victim and exonerating the criminal is not (only) applied to Palestinian victims, but also it has extended its reach to international solidarity activists and victims of Israeli violence.”

Amnesty International said that the court upheld a “flawed Israeli military investigation, completed within one month” of Corrie’s death and that the “verdict seems to have ignored substantial evidence presented to the court, including by eyewitnesses.”

“Rachel Corrie was clearly identifiable as a civilian, as she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest when she was killed,” said Sanjeev Bery, Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the United States has worked with the Corries “all through this process and we will continue to provide consular support. “

“We understand the family’s disappointment with the outcome of the trial. Under Israeli law the family has the right to appeal the verdict and we’ve seen reports that they are considering doing that. So we will see how this proceeds going forward.”

Since Corrie’s death, soccer players in Gaza have honored the activist with an annual memorial tournament.

“Rachel Corrie: The Palestinian People Won’t Forget Their Highly Respected Friends,” a wall near the makeshift concrete soccer field reads.

“There’s never closure,” Cindy Corrie said, “when you have a family member killed in such a way.”

By Sanjeev Bery

July 6, 2012

Despite an outpouring of global concern, news reports indicate that the Government of Bahrain has still not dropped its charges against 11 year old Ali Hassan.

As I wrote earlier this week, Bahraini police arrested the young boy in mid-May on a street that is both near his home and the site of a protest.  The police denied him access to a lawyer for 23 days of his nearly one month of detention.

Amnesty International is confirming the details of yesterday’s court decision regarding the young boy’s sentence.  According to news reports, the Government of Bahrain has allowed Ali to live at home, but is requiring him to be subjected to government monitoring for a year. The reports also indicate that the original charge of “illegal gathering” and disturbing “public security” has still not been dropped.

On the one hand, the young boy appears to have been spared the worse case scenario of several years in jail.  This demonstrates the power of the global human rights spotlight, in which worldwide concern for Ali put pressure on the Government of Bahrain to keep him out of prison.  But at the same time, Ali appears to still be facing criminal charges.

As I previously described, Ali’s arrest, interrogation, and denial of access to an attorney for so long are likely violations of both Bahraini law and the Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Government authorities must drop all charges against him immediately and let the boy return to a normal life.

In a press release issued yesterday, the Government of Bahrain attempted to put a positive spin on its actions. The release described Ali’s sentence to one year of government monitoring as intended for “his safety and wellbeing.”   It described the place where he was detained for nearly a month as a “Juveniles’ Care Center.”  The release even tried to portray his detention as a beneficial time when he “received social services and tutoring for his schoolwork.”  Nowhere in the statement was there any mention that he was denied access to a lawyer for 23 days.

With the combination of harsh media coverage and worldwide concern, Bahraini authorities are likely to have realized that convicting an 11 year old of disturbing public security would not go over so well.  So it appears that they have split the difference for now — allowing him to stay out of detention, but maintaining the charges against him.

Unfortunately, these reported actions merely continue the violation of Ali’s human rights.  You can still help young Ali by letting the Government of Bahrain know that you are watching.

 Click here to tell the Government of Bahrain to drop all charges against Ali Hassan and to stop violating his human rights.