Scotland's release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, was supposed to be Gaddafi's ultimate international relations coup in a year when, at times, Libya held the chairmanship of the African Union and the presidency of both the UN Security Council and of the General Assembly. But Megrahi's homecoming did not go as smoothly as planned.
Last week's release of four top-secret United States Justice Department memos on torture demonstrates the readiness of the new administration to swap the secrecy and lies that have surrounded the treatment of terrorism suspects by the US Government in the past six years for some transparency and truth. But that should not be the end of it. Truth is no substitute for accountability.
The Labour government has every reason to be proud of the Human Rights Act. In 1997, Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, described the Act's passage through Parliament as "an historic day" for rights in Britain. Yet, last December, Straw, now Justice Secretary, declared in an interview that he was "frustrated" by the way that the courts had interpreted the Human Rights Act, encouraging a perception that it is "a villain's charter".
Located in the region of the world that has been hit the hardest by the AIDS epidemic — southern and eastern Africa — Kenya made antiretroviral treatment for AIDS free of charge in 2006, and has been lauded for its prevention measures. Yet research that Human Rights Watch conducted there last year shows that the government is not doing nearly enough to treat HIV-positive children, the most vulnerable patients.
On October 16, 1998, London police arrested General Pinochet on a warrant from a Spanish judge for human rights crimes. In the ten years since, the world has become a smaller place for brutal despots.
This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain’s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission at Guantanamo.
Kenya is one of the first beneficiaries of "Operation Monogram," the British government's counter-terrorism training and equipment foreign assistance program, because it shares a border with war-torn Somalia and because of its own experience of terrorist attacks. Research by Human Rights Watch has now provided hard evidence of abuses by Kenyan security forces that received British training. The British government should be working proactively to ensure that these security forces act according to the law. The US, which is involved in the same places for the same reasons, should follow suit.
It is not just in the United States that aggressive counterterrorism measures have raised serious human rights concerns. This month, the UK House of Lords began debating a draft counterterrorism law that would institute a number of harmful proposals, including granting police the power to detain terrorism suspects for up to six weeks without charge.
When Gordon Brown met Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua in London this week, improving the security of energy supplies from the Niger Delta was high on the agenda. Unless there is a determined effort to address the root problem of political and financial corruption, the violence in the Niger Delta will continue to have a disastrous impact on energy security – and on the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
The UK's Iraqi asylum seekers are now being forced to return not only to the more stable northern region, but to central and southern Iraq. Whatever responsibility UK citizens might feel for them is clearly not shared by those taking these decisions. How then do they decide?
Scotland's release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, was supposed to be Gaddafi's ultimate international relations coup in a year when, at times, Libya held the chairmanship of the African Union and the presidency of both the UN Security Council and of the General Assembly. But Megrahi's homecoming did not go as smoothly as planned.
Last week's release of four top-secret United States Justice Department memos on torture demonstrates the readiness of the new administration to swap the secrecy and lies that have surrounded the treatment of terrorism suspects by the US Government in the past six years for some transparency and truth. But that should not be the end of it. Truth is no substitute for accountability.
The Labour government has every reason to be proud of the Human Rights Act. In 1997, Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, described the Act's passage through Parliament as "an historic day" for rights in Britain. Yet, last December, Straw, now Justice Secretary, declared in an interview that he was "frustrated" by the way that the courts had interpreted the Human Rights Act, encouraging a perception that it is "a villain's charter".
Located in the region of the world that has been hit the hardest by the AIDS epidemic — southern and eastern Africa — Kenya made antiretroviral treatment for AIDS free of charge in 2006, and has been lauded for its prevention measures. Yet research that Human Rights Watch conducted there last year shows that the government is not doing nearly enough to treat HIV-positive children, the most vulnerable patients.
On October 16, 1998, London police arrested General Pinochet on a warrant from a Spanish judge for human rights crimes. In the ten years since, the world has become a smaller place for brutal despots.
This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain’s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission at Guantanamo.
Kenya is one of the first beneficiaries of "Operation Monogram," the British government's counter-terrorism training and equipment foreign assistance program, because it shares a border with war-torn Somalia and because of its own experience of terrorist attacks. Research by Human Rights Watch has now provided hard evidence of abuses by Kenyan security forces that received British training. The British government should be working proactively to ensure that these security forces act according to the law. The US, which is involved in the same places for the same reasons, should follow suit.
It is not just in the United States that aggressive counterterrorism measures have raised serious human rights concerns. This month, the UK House of Lords began debating a draft counterterrorism law that would institute a number of harmful proposals, including granting police the power to detain terrorism suspects for up to six weeks without charge.
When Gordon Brown met Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua in London this week, improving the security of energy supplies from the Niger Delta was high on the agenda. Unless there is a determined effort to address the root problem of political and financial corruption, the violence in the Niger Delta will continue to have a disastrous impact on energy security – and on the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
The UK's Iraqi asylum seekers are now being forced to return not only to the more stable northern region, but to central and southern Iraq. Whatever responsibility UK citizens might feel for them is clearly not shared by those taking these decisions. How then do they decide?