Israeli authorities deny Palestinian prisoners access to lawyers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/28/israel-denies-lawyers-palestinian-prisoners
A Palestinian man sits blindfolded under guard of Israeli troops. He is unlikely to receive any legal advice before signing a confession. Photograph: Tsafrir Abayov/AP
(Guardian)-Palestinian detainees are systematically denied the right to meet a lawyer during interrogations by Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, according to a report published today by an Israeli and a Palestinian rights group.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club say detainees from the occupied West Bank are cut off from the rest of the world in Israeli detention facilities. The report also cited cases of “systematic violence” and torture.
Between 70% and 90% of the detainees in the years 2005 to 2007 were not allowed to meet a lawyer able to provide advice and assistance prior to signing a confession, say the organisations. The average time prisoners represented by the group were isolated from the outside world was 16.7 days. Irit Ballas, a lawyer and one of the report’s authors, said the situation has remained the same for the past three years. “The information we receive from our lawyers tells us that the incommunicado detention has not decreased,” he said.
Shin Bet refuses to reveal the number of detainees who had no access to legal services. Asked about the report, the agency said: “One of the tools, used in accordance with the law, is the authority to prevent meetings with a lawyer for a period of time established within the law.” Shin Bet added: “The accusation that denying access to lawyers was being used to prevent the monitoring of ‘mental and physical abuse’ is completely baseless.”
In Israel, the legal period for detention in isolation is 48 hours for so-called regular violations and up to 21 days for “security” violations. In cases where military law applies, it can reach 90 days.
“All the detainees who testified reported grave negative consequences of being held incommunicado, emphasising the feelings of fear, helplessness, confusion and despair,” says the 67-page report.
The document lists other forms of ill-treatment during the interrogation: “painful and prolonged shackling to a chair, painful cuffing of the hands, sleep deprivation, repeated threats to harm the detainee and his family, the conditioning of meeting an attorney with confession, giving of false information to the detainee and intentional deception of the detainee”.
The report reproduces, among others, the testimony of Ziad Shanti, 32, from Qalqilya in the West Bank, who was arrested in October 2006 while walking down the street with his friends. He was seriously injured during the arrest by two bullets. He was forbidden contact with his family or with a lawyer for 40 days, even during his stay in hospital and later while in a cell with no windows.
“I asked [repeatedly] for them to inform my mother that I am alive. The interrogator said he would allow this only after I confess … the interrogator took me to the interrogation room and shackled me to the chair with handcuffs. I stayed until 3am and was then returned to the isolation cell. Around 8am I was taken to interrogation.”
The sessions were repeated for several days. Shanti confessed. He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for stealing a truck and harbouring activists from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.
Julian Assange to be questioned by British police
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-julian-assange-police
Julian Assange is to meet British police after a new European extradition warrant was issued over alleged sexual assaults in Sweden. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
(Guardian)-Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to appear in a UK court today after his lawyers said he would meet police to discuss a European arrest warrant from Sweden relating to alleged sexual assaults.
As the legal net continued to close around the whistleblowers’ website and the US attorney general, Eric Holder, said he had authorised “a number of things to be done” to combat the organisation, Assange appeared to be reconciling himself to a lengthy personal court battle to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Jennifer Robinson, a solicitor with Finers Stephens Innocent, which represents the Australian freedom of information campaigner, told the Guardian: “We have a received an arrest warrant [related to claims in Sweden]. We are negotiating a meeting with police.”
Another lawyer representing Assange, Mark Stephens, added: “He has not been charged with anything. We are in the process of making arrangements to meet the police by consent, in order to facilitate the taking of that question and answer that is needed. It’s about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law.”
Stephens explained that the interview would happen in the “foreseeable future” but he could not give a precise time. According to other sources, it is thought that Assange would appear before a court to negotiate bail .
Assange is seeking supporters to put up surety and bail for him. He said he expected to have to post bail of between £100,000 and £200,000 and would require up to six people offering surety, or risked being held on remand.
In recent days, Assange, 39, has told friends he is increasingly convinced the US is behind Swedish prosecutors’ attempts to extradite him for questioning on the assault allegations.
He has said the original allegations against him were motivated by “personal issues” but that Sweden had subsequently behaved as “a cipher” for the US.
Pentagon says no to ’sanitized’ WikiLeaks release
The headquarters of the Pentagon are seen in Washington, DC.
(AFP) – The Pentagon has contacted a lawyer purporting to represent WikiLeaks but said it would not negotiate a “sanitized” release of a huge cache of classified documents held by the whistleblower’s website, a recently released letter has shown.
The Pentagon released the letter from its general counsel after WikiLeaks said the US military was willing to discuss the removal of sensitive data from the 15,000 unreleased Afghan war documents in the website’s possession.
WikiLeaks has already released nearly 77,000 leaked US military documents about the war and is preparing to publish the remaining ones despite criticism that doing so could endanger lives of informants or others named in the documents.
Jeh Charles Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, sent the letter dated August 16 to a post office box in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the name of Timothy J Matusheski.
In the letter, Johnson says he understood WikiLeaks wanted a conversation with someone at the Pentagon about “harm minimization” in reference to the documents, but that he had been unable to reach Matusheski at an agreed upon time to convey the Pentagon’s position.
“Thus, the Department of Defense will not negotiate some ‘minimized’ or ’sanitized’ version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional US government classified documents. The Department demands that nothing further be released by WikiLeaks,” the letter said.
Iran stoning case lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei’s relatives arrested
The lawyer of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who faced death by stoning, now faces re-arrest and his wife and brother-in-law have also been held by Iran's authorities. Photograph: AP
(Guardian)-Authorities in Iran have issued an arrest warrant for an acclaimed Iranian lawyer and arrested his wife and brother-in-law over his involvement in the case of a woman sentenced to death by stoning.
Lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei’s office in Tehran was ransacked, and he was interrogated in Evin prison for four hours on Saturday over his human rights activities and involvement in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother of two who was convicted of adultery and whose plight in Iran has drawn international attention since her children launched a campaign for her release almost a month ago.
Mostafaei called Sakineh’s stoning sentence “a bogus conviction” and “absolutely illegal” in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month.
He was released, then called back for further questioning before being set free. Authorities then issued an arrest warrant.
When they were unable to find him the authorities arrested his wife, Fereshteh Halimi and her brother Farhad Halimi to try to force him to surrender. However, it is still unclear whether Mostafaei has been arrested or he has managed to evade officials.
“It is ridiculous that they [officials] have taken Mostafaei’s family as ransom, they have somehow taken them hostage. This confirms what Sakineh’s son wrote in his public letter, that there’s no justice in Iran,” said Mina Ahadi, a human rights activist for Iran Committee against Stoning (ICAS), based in Germany who spoke to Mostafaei after he was interrogated.
“Mohammadi Ashtiani’s sentence is not Mostafaei’s first stoning case, he has defended many others against execution by stoning but it was Sakineh’s story which took world attention and made the Iranian authorities angry,” she said.
Mostafaei initially wrote an open letter about Sakineh’s death by stoning after her sentence was handed down. He then tried to publicise her case by giving interviews to international media and helping her children launch the campaign for their mother’s release.
Don’t delay deportation flight, government warns judges
Damian Green: 'The government is determined to save taxpayers money and remove those with no right to be here as quickly as possible.' Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
(Guardian)-Government lawyers have warned high court judges that last-minute legal challenges should not be allowed to “disrupt or delay” a deportation flight to Baghdad due to leave Britain early tomorrow.
A letter from the Treasury Solicitor’s Department asks high court judges to facilitate the special scheduled charter flight by refusing to consider last-minute judicial review applications by detainees due for deportation. The flight is only the second of its kind to go to Baghdad.
In a letter dated 2 June, Andrea McMahon of the department says: “Because of the complexities, practicalities and costs involved in arranging charter flights, it is essential that these removals are not disrupted or delayed by large numbers of last-minute claims for permission to seek judicial review.”
The disclosure of the “special arrangements” around the charter flight to Baghdad sparked strong concern from immigration legal experts, who said that government lawyers were trying to tell high court judges how to do their jobs.
The department’s letter says that to “ensure the viability of this latest operation to Iraq” the usual rules, under which a judicial review will normally result in a removal being deferred, may not apply and the deportation will still go ahead.
McMahon tells the judges that those facing deportation have been told that only a full-scale injunction will block their removal, but she adds that the UK Border Agency (UKBA) does not believe there can be any good reason for late applications for judicial review, or for out-of-hours applications for injunctions.
The provincial lawyer who is helping plot an emirate coup
Solicitor Peter Cathcart leaving his office in Uxbridge. Photograph: Sam Frost
(Guardian)-A bloodless coup to take control of an Arab Gulf state is being plotted by an unlikely alliance that includes a powerful firm of US lobbyists and a provincial English high-street solicitor.
Peter Cathcart, a 59-year-old lawyer from Farnham, has been hired by the ousted crown prince of Ras al-Khaimah (RAK) in the United Arab Emirates to co-ordinate the plot aimed at returning him to power after seven years in exile.
Documents seen by the Guardian show that Cathcart has acted as a paid agent for Sheikh Khalid bin Saqr al-Qasimi in a multimillion-pound campaign to “undermine the current regime’s standing” and to force the leadership of the UAE in Abu Dhabi, which has powerful influence over the emirate, to “make a change”.
RAK is a strategically important part of the UAE, 50 miles from Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, through which 17 million barrels of oil are shipped each day. Sheikh Khalid, 66, was ousted by his father and brother as de facto leader in 2003.
Government attempts to keep torture case secret
The government wants a case being taken by seven men, including Binyam Mohamed, seeking damages for their 'extraordinary rendition' to be held in secret. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP
(guardian)-The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law.
This morning a case will come before three appeal judges in London in which seven men are seeking damages against the government for mistreatment during what they say was their “extraordinary rendition” and torture facilitated by the British security services.
The men include former Guantánamo Bay detainees Binyam Mohamed and Moazzam Begg. But the government is seeking to have the case held in secret, less than two weeks after the court of appeal ruled that seven paragraphs of secret evidence in the case of Mohamed should be made public.
Lawyers for the men say that if successful, the government’s application would extend closed proceedings into findings of fact in the civil courts for the first time.
“This would set a very serious precedent,” said Louise Christian, a partner at Christian Khan who represents Martin Mubanga, one of the claimants, who was also detained at Guantánamo Bay. “If you allow evidence in ordinary civil cases to be kept secret, there is no doubt it will be endlessly used by the government. As the Binyam Mohamed case illustrated, this is really about the government avoiding embarrassment for the reality of their collaboration with the US and all that happened, rather than any real national security issues.”
The claimants have never been charged with an offence and are pursuing a claim for a range of civil wrongs including torture, false imprisonment and misfeasance in public office.
Last month the court of appeal heavily criticised the security services in a ruling in Mohamed’s case. Publicising their judgment after an attempt by government lawyers to have damaging remarks about the security services edited out, three of England’s most senior judges said British agents “appear to have a dubious record when it comes to human rights and coercive techniques”.
The government responded furiously to the comments, and to the court’s decision to release the seven paragraphs, which it said had damaged intelligence-sharing with the US.
Tarnished courtroom dreams – Study reveals difficult lives of young lawyers
November 16, 2009 Filed under Feature
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By Venus Lee
Being a lawyer sounds heroic: you use your wit and eloquence to defend innocent clients, then earn a reputation as “a defender of jutice.” The attractive income does not hurt either; no wonder more and more students are choosing to major in law.
But how does real life measure up to expectations? A group of junior college students at Northwest University of Political Science and Law in Shaanxi Province published a report concerning the life of young lawyers in the capital Xi’an — a revelation that deflated the dreams of many law students and revealed the career is lesprestigious than imagined.
The law profession has repidly developed since the country instituted economic reforms in 1978. CFP Photos
A worrying lifestyle and trend
A young lawyer’s suicide in Baoji, Shaanxi Province, two years ago made seven law students curious about the life of young lawyers in Xi’an, where their universitis located. Early this year, they approached the news magazine Southern Window for help conducting a study on the subject after taking part in an annual university students’ survey sponsored by the publiation. Their findings were released last month.
From April to October, they visited 79 law offices, interviewed 19 young lawyers and received 190 responses to the 435 questionnaires they handed out. Their subjects were lawyers under age 40 who have been practicing for one to five years.
“Income” was a word the researchers heard again and again from their respondents: more than 30 percent earned only 800 yuan a month; the rest earned ls than 2,500.
“If you subtract case acceptance fees, taxes, the cost of insurance and the law office’s commission, their salary is only enough to meet basic expenses. One-third cannot even make ends meet,” Dai Dandan0, one of the researchers, said.
“I almost had no income my first year at a law office. With only an intern’s 300-yuan salary, you can imagine how hard it was to survive in the city. Basically, in the first two years, still needed to ask for my family’s financial support. It was only after obtaining my law license in the third year that I began to earn 30,000 yuan a year,” Yang Mian, a 31-year-old lawyer, said.
“The income among lawers is uneven: 20 percent take almost 80 percent of the money in the market. The more famous, savvy and clever a lawyer is, the less he has to worry about clients, and vice versa,” he said.
The report mentioned several factors for the difficulties faced by young lawyers. Among them were their limited network of clients, lack of knowledge in marketing themselves and the country’s relatively young legal system.
“The number of cases thatyoung lawyers handle is very limited. More than half of them handle less than 10 cases each year, and 30 percent handle less than five,” Dai said.
“Most clients are introduced by relatives and friends … It’s hard toarn clients’ trust because of their lack of name and experience, so many young lawyers only land cases that can’t pay well,” she said.
The investigation revealed that more than 50 percent of respondents worked at least eight hours a day, and that only 13 percent took leave or holidays.
Nearly 30 percent wanted to work in the government or in the academe.
