Human rights and justice

This petition will be delivered to the U.S. government, the International Criminal Court, the President of the UN General Assembly, the President of the Human Rights Council and the European Court of Justice. Petition initiated by two former UN Assistant Secretaries-General, UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq: Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday. On 9 December 2014, the US Senate released its CIA torture report. The investigation confirmed what globally has been known for many years: the US Central Intelligence Agency and US-outsourced national authorities in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere have been involved in an extensive range of torture applications. Compelling evidence has become available, especially since 2001, the beginning of the Afghanistan war, through investigations by the European Parliament and national judicial authorities, as well as two major reports presented by Swiss Senator Dick Marty in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe, on secret CIA detention...

TFF wants to express its gratitude to Yoshikazu Sakamoto who served for many years as TFF Associate. Prefatory Note This post is dedicated to my remembrance of Yoshi Sakamoto who died recently. Yoshi was a deeply valued friend and an important public intellectual in Japan who exerted a strong influence on the post-war generation. His political orientation, rejecting extremes of right and left, while questioning the militarist premises of the Cold War and Japan’s willingness to become America’s Asian poodle, gave him a distinctive political profile. I am sharing these words of appreciation, and hope that anyone from Japan who comes across this text will contact me, especially if they have a way of putting me in touch with either Yoshi’s family or Japanese media. I would like to believe that ‘an American appreciation’ of Professor Sakamoto would be of interest to those who knew and admired him. I first...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Over 15,000 foreign jihadists from 80 countries are believed to be fighting alongside militants in Syria, the CIA says. The Syrian war is estimated to have mobilized more European Islamists than all the foreign wars of the last 20 years combined. What to do when the jihadists try to return home? Many of them might be trained to wage jihad against their home countries. The danger is, as Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the returned fighter seasoned by battle acquires a new authority among his old friends and followers on social media – a street cred that allows him to recruit and radicalize others and send them into the fray.” On the other hand because of the use of social media where the returnee sometimes brags about his exploits and adventures it becomes easy for the intelligence services both to track...

Kuala LumpurIAIS-International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies & IIUM-International Islamic University of Malaysia Yes, Islam and Christianity are on old Buddhist lands; with Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Sri Lanka, Myanmar. Occident is the big space of the three Abrahamic religions Judaism-Christianity-Islam, with the secularisms of the first two, excluding each other. Indonesia-Philippines are in the Occident. Orient is a big space spanned by Buddhism, which does not exclude others, not even violent state power; hence more complex. There are pure Buddhist countries: Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam; and mixed Buddhist countries, with other non-exclusive world views: in China with Daoism-Confucianism, in Japan with Kami shinto-Confucianism, and in Korea with Confucianism and Christianity. The world religioscape started with

When Nehru was taking a train on his return to India after studying abroad he read of the Japanese victory over Russia in the 1904-05 Russo Japanese War. At that moment he had an epiphany, realizing the hitherto unthinkable, that the British Empire was vulnerable to Indian nationalism. An earlier understanding of the colonial reality by native peoples generally subscribed to the postulates of hard power primacy making it futile or worse to challenge a colonial master, although throughout history there were always pockets of resistance. This soft power attribute of colonial hard power by way of intimidation and a façade of invincibility is what made colonialism efficient and profitable for so long at the great expense of colonized peoples. A traditional colonial occupation assumes that the foreign domineering presence, while oppressive and exploitative, refrains from ethnic cleansing or genocide in relation to the indigenous population. When settler versions of...

“Countercyclicity” means that both move through history in cycles, up and down; with one moving up when the other moves down. Christianity started with its founder crucified, like the first pope St Peter; Christians were tortured, killed, expelled from Jewish Palestine. But then indeed up, as religio licita in the Roman Empire in 313, defined in Nicaea in 325 by Emperor Constantine. The Empire split in 395, with a Catholic Church in the West – contracting, monastic after the Western Empire fell in 476 – and an Orthodox Church in the East, till Constantinople became Istanbul in 1453 – Moscow became “the Third Rome”. Islam started with the Prophet’s hizrat, migration from Mecca to Medina as city-state under Mohammed till he died in 632. From then till the end of the umayyad Damascus dynasty in 750, Islam covered the lands from Iberia (not Asturias) as the caliphate of Cordoba in...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> October 28th 2014 A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticizes the CIA under President George W. Bush of conducting torture of Al Qaeda suspects. However, it doesn’t assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, the 6,000 page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US.” The report shows that the CIA did not provide accurate information to Congress and also provided misleading information. The report also concludes that the CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. While the report was being prepared the CIA penetrated the Senate Committee’s computers, arousing the fury of its members. Bush and Cheney were deeply involved in initiating the torture program.

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] On November 9, it is 25 years the Berlin Wall came down. Seventeen months later, Yugoslavia’s dissolution began and various concepts and policies were introduced that fundamentally changed international politics ever since – more so than the fall of the Wall. These features can be seen in the conflict (mis)management in later conflicts. By now we should have accumulated enough evidence of how effective the various ”teatments” of the ”patient” called Yugoslavia were. To put it crudely: A unique country was destroyed – yes from the inside too, but that doesn’t reduce the responsibility of the West/NATO in its role as ”peacemaker”. Today, Croatia is ethnically much more clean; Kosovo remains a failed state; the constituencies of the Dayton Accords for Bosnia (1995) still won’t live together as one state, as elections have just shown us. Macedonia’s problems have only deepened. The split between Serbia and Montenegro was enigmatic....

By Farhang Jahanpour Part 1 of this series A shorter version of this article has been published by IPS When Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai adopted the name of Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Husseini al-Quraishi and revealed himself to the world as the Amir al-Mu’minin (the Commander of the Faithful) Caliph Ibrahim of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the whole world had to sit up and take notice of him. The choice of the long title that he has chosen for himself is most interesting and symbolic. The title Abu-Bakr clearly refers to the first caliph after Prophet Muhammad’s death, the first of the four “Orthodox Caliphs”. The term Husseini presumably refers to Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and Imam Ali’s son, who was martyred in Karbala on 13 October 680. His martyrdom is seen as a turning point in the history of Islam and is mourned in elaborate mourning ceremonies by the Shi’ites throughout...

Prefatory Note The post below is a somewhat revised version of a text published by The Nation. I should also point out that in these proceedings in Brussels under the auspices of the Russell Tribunal I served as a member of the jury. In a special session of the Russell Tribunal held in Brussels on September 24th, Israel’s military operation Protective Edge was critically scrutinized from the perspective of international law, including the core allegation of genocide. The process featured a series of testimonies by legal and weapons experts, health workers, journalists and others most of whom had experienced the 50 days of military assault. A jury composed of prominent individuals from around the world, known for their moral engagement with issues of the day that concerned their societies, and also the wellbeing of humanity, assessed the evidence with the help of an expert legal team of volunteers that helped...

It is misleading to describe ‘world order’ as consisting exclusively of sovereign territorial states. This misimpression is further encouraged by the structure of the United Nations, whose members are states, and only states. The UN was established in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II, reflecting a West-centric orientation that emerged at the time, quickly morphing into the Cold War rivalry between the two states that were geopolitically dominant and ideologically antagonistic: the United States and Soviet Union. Even in the UN, however, this surface allegiance to statism is misleading. The geopolitical dimension was highlighted in the UN Charter by conferring a veto power on five winners in the recently concluded war, which amounted to the grant of a right of exception with respect to international law. But there are differences in hard and soft power that make the interactions among states within the UN exhibit more inequality than...

Before ISIS The beheading of American and British journalists who were being held hostage by ISIS creates a truly horrifying spectacle, and quite understandably mobilizes the political will to destroy the political actor who so shocks and frightens the Western sensibility, which is far from being free from responsibility for such lurid incidents. Never in modern times has there been a clearer example of violence begetting violence. And we need to ask ‘to what end?’ Political leaders in the West are remarkably silent and dishonest about what it is that they wish to achieve in this region beset since 2011 by a quite terrifying outbreak of political extremism, whether from above as in the cases of Syria, Egypt, and Israel or from below as with ISIS and al-Nusra. It is difficult to recall that at the start of 2011, just three years ago, progressive voices around the world were inspired...