Open Democracy
Palestinian-Israeli talks in the balance as IDF locks down West Bank,
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak ordered Israeli security forces to close down parts of the occupied West Bank on Friday, following reports that there would be further Palestinian protests at the Al-Aqsa mosque after prayers. Additional forces are likely to be deployed to the Temple Mount as an additional precaution. Last week, Israeli forces confronted dozens of Palestinian protesters around the site after they began to throwing stones. Tensions have been high since the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to classify two religious sites in the occupied West Bank as Israeli heritage sites.
The move came a day after Vice President Joe Biden called for a prompt resumption of talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. At this point it is uncertain whether Mahmoud Abbas, President of the PA, will participate in talks scheduled to be held next week. In the wake of Israel’s announcement that 1,600 new housing units are to be constructed in East Jerusalem, the secretary general of the Arab League, Amir Moussa, stated that Abbas had pulled out of the talks.
But both the Israelis and the Americans seem confident that the talks will go ahead, with PJ Crowley, a spokesman for the US state department, saying that ‘we’ve heard nothing to indicate that they’ve pulled out’ and Netanyahu stating that ‘the crisis is behind us’. It was reported that late on Thursday, Abbas was urging the US to put more pressure on Israel to cease the construction of the proposed settler housing, while at the same time being strongly encouraged by both Biden and the US middle east envoy, George Mitchell, not to abandon the talks. Biden is reported to have told Abbas that Washington would disapprove of any delay in the talks.
The openSecurity verdict: US diplomacy in this latest debacle has been the subject of scathing criticism. Akiva Eldar, of Ha’aretz, highlighted the fact that a great deal of US anger over the decision to announce the increase in settlement housing relates to little more than its timing. Biden has lauded the fact that Netanyahu, in an apparent concession, said that the construction in Ramat Shlomo would not begin for several years. This constitutes nothing less than a green light for further settlement construction.
As to Netanyahu’s guarantees that there would be ‘no recurrence’ of the incident, it is difficult to avoid concluding that what he meant was that such announcements of settlement activity will continue, but that the Planning and Building Committee will have the common sense not to make them during a high profile visit of a senior US official. The emphasis remains on PR, on style over substance. Regarding next week’s talks, the US has supported Israeli demands that security tops the agenda, while the Palestinians wish to discuss borders, an issue that would include East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu is a seasoned political infighter who cannot afford to make concessions regarding settlement activity and long remain head of a coalition government that includes such ultra-right factions as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu. He has calculated, seemingly astutely in light of Biden’s visit, that the US will do little more than verbally chastise Israel, appealing for concessions. Biden’s voyage has been torpedoed by the housing announcement, and he returns to Washington with the fate of the much feted ‘proximity talks’ hanging in the balance, after the Arab League withdrew its recommendation that Abbas attend. Nevertheless, in his Tel Aviv speech, the vice president dutifully announced that the US ‘has no closer friend than Israel.’
The PLO is left with an unenviable choice. If Abbas attends, it will further erode his already moribund credibility with Palestinians, as well as with the wider Arab world. It will leave him open to accusations from within his own party and from Hamas, the political party that controls the Gaza strip, that he is a collaborator with the US and Israel. If he does not, then Netanyahu’s claims that Israel has ‘no partner for peace’ will gain credibility and acceptance, and the US may further relinquish whatever constraints upon the Israeli cabinet it still exerts. With religious tensions rising around the al-Aqsa mosque, the place where the Second Intifada began, there is now a very real prospect of renewed conflict.
Security crackdown in Thailand ahead of mass protest
On Friday, the Thai government was bracing itself for potential clashes as protesters around the country began mobilising for a rally in Bangkok. The protesters are led by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, popularly known as the ‘Red Shirts’. Their aim is to mobilise as many as 600,000 people in a protest, due to be held on Sunday, in the hope of forcing the government to hold fresh elections.
In response, the government has said that 30,000 security officials will be deployed with an additional 46,000 civilian defence ‘volunteers’ in reserve. The ‘Red Shirts’ comprise supporters of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed in the 2006 by the coup that brought Abhisit Vejjajiva to power.
UN Special Rapporteur calls for human rights investigation in Burma
On Thursday, Tomas Ojea Qintana, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, submitted a draft report to the UN human rights council in which he heavily criticised ‘a pattern of gross and systematic human rights abuses’ in the country. Noting that this abuse had been on-going for years, he claimed that violations of human rights might be so severe as to ‘entail categories of crimes against humanity or war crimes’. Qintana recommended that a commission be established by the security council to investigate whether international law had been breached.
The report was submitted on the same day that the Burmese military junta published a number of additional election laws. These restrict the ability of opposition parties to run in the forthcoming elections and establish as a government prerogative the ability to annul or prevent voting in any given geographical location for ‘security reasons.’ One impact of the new laws has been to effectively prevent imprisoned human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters from standing.
Although the report has been hailed by human rights organisations as a major step forward, there is little confidence that it will lead to increased pressure on the military regime from the United States. President Obama has pursued a policy of engagement with Burma since coming to power and it seems unlikely that he will alter this stance. Washington is motivated by concerns that pressure may lead to greater co-operation between Burma and North Korea, possibly resulting in the transfer of nuclear weapons technology to Burma.
Gambia detainees ‘do not know why they are being held’
A Gambian opposition leader has criticised a wave of arrests carried out in recent days, saying that the detainees, which include the former fisheries minister, do not know why they are being held. Haifa Sallah, a member of the national alliance for democracy and development, said that the detainees have been forbidden access to lawyers and members of their family.
This is the latest controversy in the career of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who came to power following a coup in 1994. As well as curtailing press freedom and arresting opposition figures, Jammeh has threatened to kill homosexuals and has repeatedly expelled senior international development officials. The head of UNICEF was thrown out of the country last month and, in a 2007 incident, the head of the UNDP was asked to leave the Gambia for doubting Jammeh’s claim that he could cure HIV/AIDs with traditional herbal remedies.
oD-wide classification Country: Myanmar Thailand Israel Gambia City: Jerusalem Topics: Conflict Democracy and government International politics Section style: openSecurity Sections to display in: openSecurityThe English: a people without a history?,
According to A. J. P. Taylor, in 1934 Oxford University Press commissioned its History of England series on the basis that ‘England’ was still “an all-embracing word”. It meant “indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire” (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, OUP 1965). Looking back from the 1960s, AJP still believed this to be the appropriate historiographical perspective to take, and in private correspondence he made this very clear. “I am obsessed with England”, he wrote to his editor G. N. Clark in 1961, “to hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!” (A. J. P. Taylor to G. N. Clark: 20 May 1961, Clark Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Box 30.). One wonders if he thought Ireland even worth sending to hell.
Taylor never sought to conceal his Anglocentrism. He revelled in it. But having penned the fifteenth volume of the History of England series, he was far from being alone in assuming that England – its people, economy, government and monarchy – provided the central storyline for the history of these islands. The assumptions of English dominance inherent in J. R. Seeley’s famous lectures on The Expansion of England have resonated across the last century of historical writing. In fact, although a follow up series to the one begun in 1934 was commissioned by OUP – with the first volume appearing in 1992 – the editors still plumped for the title New Oxford History of England.
Professor Brian Harrison’s Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990 is the latest volume in that series, and – as the title implies – the story of the United Kingdom is central to the period in question, covering as it does the beginnings of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the development of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the entry of the UK into the EEC in a supposedly post-imperial age. Harrison’s book provides an admirable synthesis of the cultural, social, economic and political history of the period, but this is not ‘four nations’ history. Although the constituent parts of the UK do feature, England remains the central reference point.
For many professional historians then, England has, and often continues to be the primary historical mover and shaker in the history of these islands, and hence by implication the history of the expansion and contraction of the British Empire. This is unsurprising, for the historical profession in some sense owes a great debt to the national dimension of history writing. Leopold von Ranke, the ‘founder of the science of history’, often took the history of nations as his reference point. In the nineteenth century and beyond, the musings and memoirs of national elites and the politics of the nation-state constituted the historical archive, and in an important sense constituted the historical discipline as unified field of inquiry.
Much has changed since then. There are possible narratives about the history of these islands which go beyond national frameworks of analysis towards a new transnational history: narratives of exchange, of contact, of interaction, of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’ to be measured not on a balance sheet, but by the traces they have left behind, the legacies they have left for our present. A great deal of work has already been done, and yet arguably we still have only a very limited understanding of the ways in which the history of empire has shaped our politics, culture, economy and society. But this raises the question, do we still need ‘national history’?
If the nation is a fundamentally modern repository for collective identity, then are we living in a post-modern, post-national world, in which national history might lose its resonance? The evidence here is mixed, but it may be that our sense of selfhood today is more complex and multi-layered than it has been in the recent past. If so, then the place of national history seems to be an increasingly pressing question connecting professional historians with teachers of history in schools and with policy-makers in government concerned with the nature of citizenship and belonging.
Perhaps a starting point is a better understanding of the function that history – and especially the teaching of history – has performed in sustaining collective identities over time. It is precisely this that the timely History in Education project, currently underway at London’s Institute of Historical Research (IHR) under the guidance of David Cannadine, seeks to explore. But this kind of research still leaves open the question of whether national history is English or British, and this points toward the possibility of a looming paradox.
Debates about the English question, English votes for English laws and the problem of English identity can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis of confidence about the place of England within an increasingly disunited kingdom. And, for all the centrality of England to the history of Britain, if the break up of Britain should actually occur, it may be the English who are left as the ‘people without history’, for the history of England is a hostage to the fortunes of the United Kingdom.
Why should this be the case? As Krishan Kumar has perceptively and persuasively argued, the appropriate frame for understanding English national identity is not the distinction between ethnic or civic bases for nationhood, but England’s ‘missionary imperialism’: the expansionist fervour of the English people. Crucially, Kumar claims, this moves the emphasis of an English national identity from the ‘creators to their creations’ (K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (CUP, 2003), p. x.). If Kumar’s thesis concerning the source of England’s national identity is correct, then, as Kumar points out, the implications of the loss of those ‘creations’ – let us suppose Alex Salmond were successful in persuading the Scottish people to turn A. J. P. Taylor on his head and say “to hell with England” – are quite disturbing.
It is my view that complete severance is less plausible than a reconfiguration. But whether we are looking ahead to ‘Scotland the brave’, ‘England alone’ or some reinvention of the Union, what is certain is that the empire is gone for good, industrial supremacy is a thing of the very distant past and the Westminster model of politics has been found increasingly wanting. In addition, the monarchy under a future Charles III looks not just unpalatable but positively unconstitutional.
If the foundations of ‘Great Britain’ have either ceased to exist or are crumbling around us, it might be said that all histories working on the assumption – explicit or implicit – that the history of England equates to the history of England’s expansion and impact on the world – that is histories of England’s ‘creative work’ – are ultimately histories of decline and loss. This is why Niall Ferguson’s efforts to re-narrate a comforting island story about ‘how Britain made the modern world’ amount to little more than nostalgia. From the perspective of our twenty-first century present, there seems to be an absence of meaning at the heart of England’s history, and we need a great conversation about what to put it is place.
oD-wide classification Country: England UK Topics: Culture Ideas Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomIs Russia’s judicial system reformable?,
OC: A fairly prevalent approach today views the Russian judicial system as dysfunctional: unwieldy law and shadowy governmental interference. To what extent is this caricature justified?
AL: Let’s start with the positives. With respect to the basic legal code, the Russian Constitution is one of the most exemplary documents of its kind anywhere in the world. In general terms, too, much Russian legislation would pass any test of legal expertise. The problem is when we start talking about coherence and consistency. Alongside a lot of really good legislation you have overregulation — both in terms of high administrative barriers and old regulation that has yet to be annulled or taken out of circulation. You also see a patchy and unpredictable way of implementing legal norms or legal decisions.
In other words, overregulation plus under-enforcement — that’s the short formula.
In terms of administrative pressure, the judicial system is clearly exposed to the broader set of informal practices, unwritten rules and loyalty bonds that dominate Russia’s model of governance. These influences are what Russians collectively refer to as “the system”, sistema. Broadly speaking, the expert consensus is that while it would certainly be a caricature to suggest that every court case in Russia is decided according to directives from above, it is certainly possible to imagine a way sistema can produce “correct” judgments for the government.
OC:How are such “correct” judgments delivered in practice? Is it simply a matter of a telephone call from Kremlin to judge? Or are indirect considerations — perhaps the prospect or otherwise of career growth — more important?
AL: Oral commands from above certainly play their part. This is the most literal manifestation of telefonnoye pravo, or “telephone justice”, a term you sometimes find in the media today. On the other hand, as you say, informal pressure does not have to be directly communicated. It can be the kind of pressure that reins you back from stepping outside the system. The dependence judges have on court chairmen, their managers. The self-censorship. The need to play by unwritten rules in order to function or prosper within the judicial system.
These are the kinds of pressure I focus on in my research. Unfortunately, they are also the most difficult ones to get at, since people themselves have trouble identifying it. Insiders don’t want to “flag” it. It is only really thanks to the whistleblowers who speak out that we have some knowledge of it. Judge Olga Kudeshkina is one good example, though she isn’t alone: Pashin, Morshchakova, and most recently Yaroslavtsev and Kononov have all provided important information for the record.
One thing that my informants consistently bring up is the central role of krugovaya poruka within this professional community. What they mean is a feeling of mutual accountability and control. In other words, judges feel corporate about what they do. They don’t want to spill things out. Of course, all this makes disciplinary review by judicial committee very difficult. Judges understand that they too could find themselves under the same spotlight, and so they act accordingly. A 2001 reform tried to reduce some of these contradictions by introducing outside legal experts on to judicial qualification committees — the ones that decide on promotions, appointments and disciplinary proceedings. By all accounts, this was actually a progressive and successful reform.
OC:The process of appointments is a crucial chapter in any story of dependence. Do we have any data on how judges are recruited? Who are they? What kind of areas are they recruited from?
AL: From the interviews that I have done with judges and other experts, it is clear that appointments are subject to clearance from government agencies and certain officials within the executive. Very often, that clearance test or series of interviews are informal negotiations or ways to communicate to the judge certain expected alliances and loyalties. As Judge Kudeshkina said, it is very difficult for an independent official to get appointed. If you don’t play loyalty games, you’re not even in the running.
The situation with appointments generally is that there have been an enormous number of vacancies in the judicial system. This started with the 1990s reforms, which created jury trials and additional court tiers. In 2000, 8% of judges’ benches were vacant: there just weren’t enough people with adequate qualifications. In the event, the vacancies were frequently filled by former clerks of the court, who were fast-tracked to appointment after completing evening courses.
Unsurprisingly, many of the appointments were far from perfect. On the other hand, as the former deputy chairman of the Constitutional Court Tamara Morshchakova has argued, with weak appointments comes dependence. This is quite important. Even if you give inexperienced people all the independence you want, they will not know how to use it. They would be lost without a hint or tip-off from the court chairman.
OC: So this would, perhaps, be an intentional policy?
AL: In part, it is the workings of sistema. If you want to have people who are compliant with the chairman of the court, you have to have them weak, defective and non-professional. Because then they are easy to guide. That is certainly part of the story. The other part is all the things we have talked about before: corporate responsibility, the threat of compromising disclosures and so on. Dmitry Medvedev is himself is to some extent a product of sistema. Putin chose him for the presidency both because of his personal loyalty and because of his lack of experience of public — as opposed to backroom — office.
OC: And yet, despite being a product of sistema, Medvedev has somewhat turned his back on it. He has talked at great lengths about tackling government corruption, ‘telephone justice’ and appointment nepotism. How much of this is actually genuine? Is any of it significant?
AL: I would argue that the rhetoric is actually hugely significant. It is the first time that systemic defects of this kind have been publicly acknowledged at the presidential level. Medvedev has even said they represent a threat to national security. The very fact of such acknowledgements counts.
It would be wrong to say that Medvedev’s actions have been limited to words. He has also put forward reforms that are, in essence, a profound challenge to the operations of sistema. His proposals for reforming the appointment system for top bureaucrat positions, for example, are quite radical. Today, these appointments largely rest on personal contacts and cash.
Medvedev has suggested two basic reforms: first, the creation of a national database of governmental officials; and second, the introduction of a presidential quota for appointments. The first hundred nominees of this planned 1000-strong “golden” list of candidates were published in February last year; and a further 500 were announced very recently. Most of them are young, dynamic and successful. Of course, critics rightly point out the lack of transparency in the creation of the list — who chose the names and under what criteria? On the other hand, the database introduces many new faces who could help run against the principles of sistema.
OC: Does Medvedev have sufficient power base within the Kremlin to tackle vested interests in the way you describe?
AL: We don’t know. What is interesting is that Medvedev seems to be developing a rather different power base to Putin’s. Whereas, in broad terms, Putin’s constituency is the ex-military and ex-security men, the siloviki, Medvedev’s natural constituency is with his former colleagues in the civil law department of the Leningrad State University, the “civiliki”. Where Putin signified a transfer of power from criminal gangs to siloviki, Medvedev may well yet herald a transition from siloviki to civiliki.
You do see that, under Medvedev, the legal elite is generally operating with increasing independence. Most famously, you have the 2008 Boyev vs Solovyov libel case, which brought together Valery Boyev, the head of the rewards department in the Kremlin, and Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent broadcaster who made statements alleging the Kremlin’s control of the arbitration courts. This was a run-of-the-mill case that everyone expected Boyev to win, given his governmental seniority. That was until a dramatic intervention by Yelena Valyavina, the first deputy chair of the Supreme Arbitration Court, who made an extraordinary statement in support of Solovyev’s claims.
OC: Stating that she had, in fact, been pressed by Boyev to return certain judgments ...
AL: Exactly. Her evidence was hugely decisive and Boyev withdrew the case. Indeed, the statement has since been used in British courtrooms as proof of governmental pressure in the Russian system.
Valyavina’s statement was quite unprecedented. While I can’t be sure about the Soviet period, at no point during recent times has a senior woman judge taken to the witness box to make a statement of this sort. Moreover, one can certainly imagine that prior to making it she consulted with the head of the Supreme Arbitration Court, Anton Ivanov; and that Ivanov in turn consulted with his friend and co-author, Dmitry Medvedev.
The Valyavina statement is as clear a signal as you can get that the president does not want bureaucrats interfering in the work of the courts.
OC: Then again, some commentators have highlighted the fact that no action followed: no one has been prosecuted. Their suggestion is that the whole story amounted to little more than PR on Medvedev’s part...
AL: Well, you need perspective. Let’s just go back for to 2005 a moment. Then you had a case where a woman was prosecuted for making a prank call to the court. She had pretended she was the secretary of the chairman of the Supreme Arbitration Court; and because she had worked in the judiciary and knew all the small-talk, she wasn’t identified immediately. When they realised it was a prank call, the woman was tracked down and a whole show case about telefonnoye pravo was instigated against her.
That was a strange trial. It punished an outsider for an unsuccessful attempt to use telefonnoye pravo, while asking no questions of the system, which seemed to continue working for insiders.
So, in that perspective, you have to say Valyavina’s statement represents huge progress.
OC: You mentioned the arbitration courts. These have attracted considerable attention in Russia, both for the links between Anton Ivanov and the president, but also for an increase in caseload: in Medvedev’s first year, there were 36% more cases. Is there much variation between the different types of court?
AL: There are three main types of courts in Russia. You have courts of general jurisdiction, topped by a Supreme Court. You have the arbitration courts and the Supreme Arbitration Court. You have a Constitutional Court, consisting of nineteen judges, which defines the appointment procedure for all of those three. In terms of the Courts of General Jurisdiction you have an amazing number of court tiers — about five in total.
Of all the courts, the arbitration courts, the courts that settle commercial disputes, do enjoy the best reputation. First, they are new, post-Soviet institutions: they did not exist as such in Soviet times, so the judges are newly trained and recruited. Second, these are courts that require real expertise, meaning judges tend to be better and more efficient at what they do. The US scholar Kathryn Hendley has done quite a lot of work on these courts. When she analysed the cases, she came to the conclusion that by and large their decisions were entirely professional. She could not find much that either contradicted the law or pointed to informal influence on judges’ decisions.
OC: Hendley also has an interesting perspective on reform generally, saying that pressure from below will be as important in Russian judicial reform as any top-down effort. Does your research show that Russian public is in any way engaged in the judicial process? Is there any real consensus at the top?
AL: Kathryn Hendley would certainly feel there is a growing demand for law. Indeed, her data shows that as many as three in ten Russians revert to the courts whenever they face a problem. The same surveys also show that the courts are, in fact, the most trusted official institution in Russia — ahead of the police and so on.
This is not, however, the same thing as saying there is any sort of sustained pressure from below. For that, you would need civil society to organise itself along the lines of housing associations, or motorist organisations. In the judicial sphere, you just don’t have that kind of association. Sure, people who lose their cases do sometimes get together with other people who lose cases, but their situations are usually different. There is no foundation for protest, and certainly no civic movement. As is well known, human rights campaigners find it notoriously difficult to operate. They do what they can, but aren’t in any position to change the system.
As regards consensus at the top, what we can say is there is consensus on strategy. In terms of strategy, the entire government is for improving the investment climate, for deciding cases inside the country rather than in Strasbourg, for judicial reform and for the creation of an independent judiciary. That is not an issue. The issue is tactics, and there they certainly differ.
OC: To finish with the crucial question, is it at all likely that Medvedev’s reforms can succeed against sistema?
AL: In all probability, the reforms will only be partially successful. One problem is that elite-initiated, top-down efforts are very difficult to sustain. Being a legalist is not necessarily in Medvedev’s favour here. He believes that it is possible to change the system by changing the law, whereas what actually needs to be changed is culture, institutional culture. Specifically, you need to combine mechanisms that increase risk for non-normative behaviour, but also create protection for those who want to go professional, like Olga Kudeshkina. That has proven, so far, to be very difficult to achieve.
Second, any change in the formal rules introduces yet another constraint to be dealt with informally. If Medvedev really wants to make changes, ultimately he will be forced to work through sistema. He will, for example, have to use oral commands and make sure they are followed. One way of interpreting the Valyavina affair, indeed, is that it sent a new signal: one which instructs officials and businessmen not to interfere with the courts. The last time a formula such as this came into play was with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who ignored an oral command not to meddle in politics and was sent to prison as a result. It will be interesting to see what — if any — sanctions will be applied in relation to those who break this latest settlement.
Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at SSEES University College London
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:Selected articles (available online) and books by Alena Ledeneva
Medvedev’s crackdown on corrupt courts. Russia Profile June 6
Leadership and Corruption in Russia, 2000-2004. Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe: Working Papers series, 2005
Ambiguity of Social Networks in Post-Communist Contexts. Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe: Working Papers series, 2004
Informal Practices in Changing Societies: Comparing Chinese Guanxi and Russian Blat. Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe: Working Papers series, 2003
How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-soviet Politics and Business (Culture and Society After Socialism), by Alena V. Ledeneva, Cornell University Press, 2006, 270 pages
Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge Russian, Soviet & Post-Soviet Studies) (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) by Alena Ledeneva, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 256 pages
The complete list of recent and forthcoming publications of Professor Alena Ledeneva can be found here
Related stories: Tackling Russia’s legal nihilism Tackling corruption in the Russian economy How Russia really works Legal Nihilism in Russia oD-wide classification Country: Russia Topics: Civil society Section style: oD Russia Sections to display in: oD RussiaBarack Obama and America ,
When Barack Obama was elected United States president in November 2008, he was instantly compared with Franklin D Roosevelt: a leader who would use the deep financial and economic crisis he had inherited to transform American politics. The moment seemed propitious to fuse his inspiring human qualities with the clever political calculation expressed by his chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel: "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things."
Even at the time, it seemed to me that a more relevant comparison was with Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ had assumed the presidency at a time of perceived national crisis after the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963. After eleven months in the White House, the former vice-president was re-elected by what is still the highest proportion of the popular vote in American history.
By spring 1965, violent confrontations over desegregation in the south coincided with Johnson’s first and fateful moves to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. Johnson’s presidency was set on a course that would eventually rob it of forward momentum. In March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in that year’s election - an event that can be seen in retrospect as having opened the door to Richard Nixon and (two instances of ineffectual Democratic leadership excepted) forty years of Republican ascendancy.
In a concentrated period of decisive leadership that lasted less than two years, Johnson passed two important acts of healthcare reform, Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor); two historic civil-rights statutes (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965); a groundbreaking series of environmental measures; and dozens of education bills, which together secured a substantial role for the federal government in elementary and secondary schools for the first time in American history.
This record, in light of Obama's current predicament and my earlier view that he might usefully be compared with LBJ, invites a closer look at the two presidencies and their contexts.
The verdictBarack Obama’s extraordinary campaign offered the prospect of an ambitious portfolio of legislative proposals were he to reach the White House. He has now been in office for a little longer than half of that extraordinarily creative period of statesmanship under Lyndon Johnson. So far, his record in persuading Congress to accept them has been dismal. Now his Democratic Party faces the serious danger of comprehensive losses in the congressional elections in November 2010.
There are many ways to register the gap between promise and reality. Here are just three.
First, Obama pledged to restore the United States’s reputation in the international arena by making it plain that the country opposed torture and supported fair trials, due process and the rule of law. The signal of this commitment was a promise to close the Guantánamo prison-camp within a year. But the camp remains open, the administration’s declared intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged architect of the 9/11 atrocities) according to US laws is uncertain, and concern with morale in the CIA seems to trump human rights.
Second, Obama the campaigner voiced doubts over the war in Afghanistan. In practice his new strategy there increases the US’s military involvement and extends its range to Pakistan, albeit as part of a plan that envisages eventual withdrawal. In other areas of foreign policy, the president has been unable to effect a rapprochement with Iran and been treated with disdain by China at the Copenhagen climate-change summit (see “Barack Obama: imperial president, post-American world, 7 December 2009).
Third, Obama’s ambitious domestic projects included cutting America’s dependence on imported energy and intensifying efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. His carbon-trading plan will not reduce total emissions and is unable even to offer guaranteed business opportunities.
The picture is more mixed over two major domestic policy priorities, but even here no outstanding success can be claimed. First, Obama did succeed in pushing through Congress a vast stimulus package that has restored the profitability of the financial-services sector, but does not insist that it perform its social function by lending to individuals and small businesses. Unemployment remains high and corrosive. Second, his healthcare-reform plans have become a shadow of his original proposals and even this is reliant for progress on a parliamentary device (“reconciliation”). Washington is now waiting to see whether that will work (see “The United States: democracy, with interests”, 14 August 2009).
The contextThe conclusion is unavoidable. Barack Obama, for all his integrity and talent, genuine charm and rhetorical brilliance, has - so far - failed as a president. Perhaps the most clinching evidence for the claim is that this man who sincerely wanted to bring Americans together, to “reach across the aisle” to Republican opponents, and to find common ground in the centre, has overseen a situation where America’s partisan political divisions are more acerbic than ever.
Many would argue that this summary is exaggerated, and that Obama may yet redeem some of his election promises and achieve some of his proclaimed goals. I do not accept, however, that it is unfair: the verdict could be, and often is, stated in far more critical terms.
The point of a comparison with Lyndon Johnson’s record is not to denigrate Barack Obama, still less to airbrush Johnson’s warts. It is rather to hold up a lens to the ways in which American public life has changed, and for the worse, in the years of the conservative ascendancy.
It can be said that Johnson was lucky - that he took advantage of a “window of opportunity” afforded by a national yearning for reconciliation after the Kennedy assassination. It is true too that some (not all) of Johnson’s legislative achievements had been proposed by Kennedy before his death. But it took Johnson’s own great political qualities - his legislative skill, his understanding of Congress and its individual members, as well as his sheer force of personality - to pass an immense portfolio of legislation, especially the two great civil-rights acts (see Robert Dallek, Lyndon B Johnson: Portrait of a President [Oxford University Press, 2005]).
But other important realities of American public life made Johnson’s achievements possible. They include the assumptions of the period, and the temper and tone of the country’s institutions - not least the news media.
During the cold-war years, and especially after the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, public life in the United States was dominated by what I have called “the liberal consensus” (see America In Our Time: From World War II to Nixon - What Happened and Why [1976; Princeton University Press, 2005]). This does not mean (as conservative commentators occasionally try to suggest) that America was subject to the will of a liberal elite indifferent to the feelings and interests of “ordinary” Americans; it means that the public sphere, and in particular the mood of Congress, was ruled by a vast if unspoken compact in which the different political sides accepted elements of the other’s doctrine.
Thus, most liberals (who could equally be described as social democrats and progressives) shared the conservative, anti-communist ideology of the era; this was as true of the labour unions as it was of the Kennedy administration. At the same time, most conservatives accepted, if often grudgingly, the underlying principles of Roosevelt’s new deal; this could be said of the majority of elected Republicans, and the dominant figures and thinkers in corporate business-management and the law.
The Kennedy-Johnson years saw many “outliers” to both left and right: union leaders, black leaders, intellectuals on the left, and old Taftite or new Goldwaterite conservatives. But it is possible to speak, without doing violence to the truth, of a liberal consensus in American public philosophy in the period. In broad terms, Americans accepted social-democratic government and a mixed economy at home and the containment of communism as the chief principle of foreign policy.
Since 1968, everything has changed - in such a way that the world in which Lyndon Johnson could dominate the political scene has disappeared into the “urns and sepulchres of mortality”.
Before 1965, each of the two parties that dominated American politics was a coalition of ideologically and demographically distinct elements. The division between them was rooted in the events of the 1860s: civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the reconstruction of the south and its ending. The legacy of these events was that the core cleavage in American party politics was not a straightforward left-right one.
But since Richard Nixon’s years in power (1968-74), and even more since Ronald Reagan’s (1980-89), the division between the parties has become as ideological - and as much a conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” - as in Europe. The pivot was the events of the 1960s: the civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam war, the early women’s movement, and the decade’s social libertinism (see Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America [Scribner, 2008]).
The changeA less obvious but just as influential movement took place in the intellectual assumptions of the time. In 1950, the eminent liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling could write that there were no conservative ideas as such in America: “[The] conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Even two decades later, Richard Nixon could say (in an echo of Milton Friedman’s “we are all Keynesians now”) that he was a Keynesian.
Friedman, to be fair, went on to say that in another sense there were no Keynesians left. The pioneering monetarist’s presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1967 helped propel the thought into reality: the subsequent decades saw an inexorable retreat of Keynesian ideas in the academy, in influential institutions such as the federal reserve and the Council of Economic Advisers, finally in Wall Street and corporate management.
The large shift in the intellectual history of the United States in the late 20th century continued as conservative ideas advanced in the law schools and eventually the Supreme Court. The court, once controlled by a liberal majority that accepted the doctrine of social activism inherited from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D Brandeis, came to acquire a more or less reliable five-to-four permanent majority on the right. A single example can stand for many: the Buckley vs Valeo judgment in 1974, which held that political ads were free speech and thus protected by the first amendment to the constitution. This ended attempts to reform the electoral-finance system (see “The American political system: ruin and reform”, 11 February 2010).
Perhaps even more important in America’s large-scale move to the right was the changing profile of the news industry. The fashionable depiction of a liberal media establishment had always been exaggerated; the majority of journalists may long have been liberals, but most of their bosses were always conservatives. If the news media had once sustained the “liberal consensus”, however, there has been a steady change over the last half century in the direction of more variety and then more conservatism.
A few landmarks indicate the trend. William F Buckley’s founding of the National Review in 1955 broke the monopoly of liberalism in the intellectual magazines. Robert Bartley’s promotion to head of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 (for which he had worked since 1964) allowed him to make it the vehicle of undiluted conservative propaganda. Between the the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the three television networks found their New-York-liberal tone gradually diluted - first by the appearance of cable (albeit the pioneering Atlanta-based CNN was relatively liberal), then by the foundation of Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch and controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes.
The result of this overall social and intellectual progression (or regression) has been a profound change in the United States’s ideological weather. The difference helps to explain why Lyndon Johnson could preside over a monsoon of liberal legislation that completed and in some ways transcended the achievements of his hero Franklin Roosevelt, whereas Barack Obama’s more modest reform efforts have become mired in frustration amid bitter polarisation and populist resurgence (see “It’s the presidency, not the president”, 20 January 2010).
President Obama reached office on the promise of changing America. But the country had already changed. It is time to shift attention from the individual personality and specific failures of the president to what has happened to the United States’s public philosophy and its political-media climate.
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. His most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009)
His earlier books include The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press, 2006), A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007)
Sidebox:openDemocracy writers on Barack Obama and the world:
John C Hulsman, "Memo to Obama: the middle east needs you" (9 November 2008)
Zaid Al-Ali, "What Obama means for Iraq" (13 November 2008)
Prince Hassan of Jordan, "The failure of force: an alternative option" (16 January 2009)
openDemocracy, "Barack Obama: hope, fear... advice" (21 January 2009)
Pervez Hoodbhoy, "Barack Obama's triple test" (21 January 2009)
Fred Halliday, "The greater middle east: Obama's six problems" (21 January 2009)
Peter DeShazo & Johanna Mendelson Forman, "Open veins, closed minds" (8 May 2009)
Tarek Osman, "The Islamic world, the United States, democracy" (15 May 2009)
Akiva Eldar, "Barack Obama: Israel's true friend" (25 May 2009)
Robert G Rabil, "Barack Obama's middle east: pragmatism and hope" (3 June 2009)
Nader Hashemi, "What Obama must say (and do) in Egypt" (3 June 2009)
openDemocracy, "East-central Europe to Barack Obama: an open letter" (22 July 2009)
Adam Isacson, "Honduras: time to choose" (27 July 2009)
Johanna Mendelson Forman, "The Baghdad bomb, the United Nations, and America" (20 August 2009)
Ali Reza Eshragh, “Iran and America: Obama and the ‘velvet coup’” (22 October 2009)
Kerry Brown, “Chimerica: Obama visits Beijing” (27 October 2009)
Fawaz A Gerges, “America and Israel-Palestine: dangerous disarray” (27 November 2009)
Paul Rogers, “Afghanistan: new strategy, old problem” (3 December 2009)
Kerry Brown & Jiyoung Song, “North Korea’s fate, Chimerica’s test” (7 December 2009)
Paul Rogers, “Bush to Obama: a toxic legacy” (8 January 2010)
Ten reasons to feel uneasy,
I went to launch this evening of Keith Ewing's important new book Bonfire of the Liberties and the Institute of Employment Rights new booklet Ruined Lives on blacklisting in the UK construction industry, also written by Ewing. I was expecting the usual drinks party. But no, it was a serious meeting of trade unionists at the NUJ headquarters. We heard from Henry Porter, who I find it hard to disagree with. He talked about the expansion of what he called "State patrolled space" and how each one of us is being made to feel that both we and everyone else are persons who may "harbour bad intentions". (Or, as John Berger <!--break-->wrote in Meanwhile, we find ourselves living as prisoners.)
Then the photo journalist Marc Vallée spoke about how he discovered the police were storing a private photo-database of everyone then can get pictures of at demonstrations, while intimidating us from taking pictures in public.
Then Pennie Quinton spoke about how the police used section 44 of the anti-terrorism act to stop her photographing a demonstration outside a London arms fair, even though she was an accredited photographer, and how the House of Lords supported the police and how Liberty helped her and her colleague go to the European Court to get a ruling that the police action was illegal.
Then we heard from Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group about how he was blacklisted in the construction industry as a 'troublemaker'. He waved his 30-plus page file. Afterwords he told me that the Home Office has helped to fund a National Dismissal Register which will become another database for employers. I couldn't believe it. We know that the government's aim is to gradually link up its databases, now our health and tax records could be mashed with an informal, private but state sponsored database that reports whether someone has been sacked (implicitly because they are "trouble") that is accessible to companies. I checked on the web when I got back, here is part of a description of it from PersonnelToday:
It appears that an employee can be included on the register if they have caused loss to the relevant organisation or a third party, although it is not clear whether this act needs to be dishonest, or whether a mere mistake is enough.
Since individuals can be included on the register without any trial or criminal conviction, there is a risk that it could be abused by employers, and individuals could be 'blacklisted'. Although an employee has the protection of unfair dismissal claims and could ask for their inclusion on the register to be changed or removed, this takes time, and the damage could already have been done.
This register has the potential to seriously damage an employee's work opportunities
Then we heard from a gentleman who had been subjected to a Control Order and he described his semi-confinement for years without knowing the charges or reasons, until a judge dismissed the case.
What was powerful was hearing at first hand, the testimony and experience of regular people caught up in a machinery driven by our government. The fight for modern liberty is no 'abstract' cause.
Finally, the author himself spoke. There are ten reasons to be worried about what is happening, and they need to be taken together.
1. Increase in stop and search
2. Increase in the powers of search and arrest
3. Increase in surveillance and intrusion by officials
4. Increase in CCTV
5. Massive increase in phone tapping
6. The retention of the illegal DNA database
7. The push for ID cards
8. Militarisation of the police
9. Development of Control Orders
10.Complicity in torture
oD-wide classification Country: UK Topics: Democracy and government Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomClimate science: a peace-studies lesson,
The articles in this series try to throw light on recent or current developments in international security. Just occasionally an element of personal experience creeps in. This is one of those.
The last weeks of 2009 were difficult for the public face of scientific research into global warming. The failure of the climate-change conference in Copenhagen, the identification of minor flaws in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s) published documentation, and the exposure of email exchanges centred on the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia - all raised doubts about those charged with presenting scientific evidence about climate change and renewing efforts to address the phenomenon. In the case of the email affair - given an extra conspiratorial frisson by being called “climategate” - the careful selection of damaging details by an evidently well-resourced group made it possible to erect a narrative of deception that found an uncritical welcome among climate “sceptics” and “deniers”.
Soon after the furore, Associated Press tasked a team to examine 1,073 emails from the CRU material in order to provide an independent view of what had happened. The result showed no evidence that climate change was faked (see “’ClimateGate' Doesn't Show Global Warming Was Faked, AP Reports”, Huffington Post, 12 December 2009); but amid a deluge of negative comment this attracted little attention, and the impression persists that the whole case for human-induced climate change has been severely hit.
For many of the researchers involved, the period of late 2009-early 2010 has been traumatic; they may have had to contend with controversy over the years, but this is something outside their experience.
The intensity of the coverage, and the zealotry of many sceptics in pressing their case, stem in part from changing global circumstances. There has long been deep opposition to any international move towards a low-carbon economy, from reasons both ideological (free-market true-believers) and commercial (the more retrograde transnational corporations, especially fossil-fuel companies). There was no great risk of such a move as long as George W Bush was in the White House; but the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of Copenhagen agreeing a successor to the Kyoto protocol made 2009 potentially a dangerous year. In this context, “climategate” has been a gift.
The peace benefitThe lesson of my own experience in the 1980s suggests that the longer-term impact might be rather different from what the architects of this affair intend. I got into working in the field of international security from teaching environmental science and resource-conflict at Huddersfield Polytechnic, west Yorkshire, in the early 1970s (and recently came across some of my thirty-five-year-old lecture notes dealing with rising atmospheric CO² levels!). I moved to Bradford’s department of peace studies at the end of the decade, just as the cold war was entering a particularly tense period; from around 1980 onwards, several of us there saw the need for independent research and writing on nuclear issues.
An early outcome (with co-authors Malcolm Dando and Peter van den Dungen) was a book about the risks and consequences of nuclear war: As Lambs to the Slaughter: The Facts About Nuclear War (1981). It struck a chord; 25,000 copies were sold in a few weeks, and that year around 500,000 people purchased an accompanying leaflet published by the environment group Ecoropa.
As Lambs... was part of a wider body of writings, much of it for an academic rather a general readership. This was the case with A Guide to Nuclear Weapons (1981) which ran to several editions and led eventually to a reference work: The Directory of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms and Disarmament 1990. The core purpose of this writing was to be as accurate as possible; this meant (for example) always analysing Soviet as well as western systems and postures, and having a particular focus on the actual consequences of a nuclear war.
What strikes me in retrospect - and when thinking about the problems that climate scientists now face - is how widely varied were the reactions to our work. Military officers, for example, were actually very interested in it and very ready to engage in intensive debates. I was first invited to lecture at the Royal Air Force staff college in 1982 and have continued frequently to lecture at defence colleges to the present day. Senior civil servants in Britain’s ministry of defence were also willing to discuss our work.
The reaction on the political right - then very much in the ascendancy during Margaret Thatcher’s long premiership (1979-1990) - was very different; it was bitter and sustained opposition to what we were doing. In the Thatcherite view of the world, peace studies was “appeasement studies”, indulgent to official enemies and undermining of the nation’s moral fibre. Many articles and pamphlets were written about the Bradford department’s dangerous and subversive nature; one noble member of the House of Lords (the upper chamber of Britain’s parliament) even described us as a “rest home for urban guerrillas”. Some critics preferred a more personal touch: I was called “Dr Death”, and we regularly got abusive mail (which, on one or two occasions, went as far as death-threats).
It was known that Margaret Thatcher wished “something to be done” about peace studies; but this was politically difficult, since universities still retaine considerable independence (a situation that subsequent governments have done much to redress). than now. But the University Grants Committee (UGC) came under pressure to investigate us and to its credit agreed to do so only if Bradford’s vice-chancellor allowed it; he too was prepared to say yes, but - also to his credit - only if the peace-studies staff gave their consent. We certainly would! What followed was the equivalent of today’s “subject review”. It was thorough and exacting, and the UGC made public its verdict - that the department was maintaining high standards.
That outcome lifted the pressure off peace studies for the rest of the 1980s. With the end of the cold war by the end of the decade, much of the other work our staff and research students already did - on peacekeeping, environmental conflict, and mediation, among other issues - came to the fore; this created the foundation for an expansion of our work in the 1990s.
The landscape after battleHow does this relate to “climategate”? A key factor is that we were exposed to intensive criticism and persistent scrutiny of our work virtually from day one, and this in direct consequence made us hugely aware of the need for very high levels of accuracy and impeccable referencing of sources. Access to a wide range of military and defence journals, and a huge amount of information in the public domain, meant that this was actually not so difficult; but under so much external pressure we learned to be very cautious in our analysis at a time when exaggeration on the issues we addressed was common enough.
Many of us now think that the experience made us better academics. If almost everything you write is going to be exposed to detailed examination by relentless and often politically-motivated critics, then you have to set unusually exacting standards for your work. The likely - and beneficial - implication is that climate researchers who have gone through their own test-by-fire will in future take even greater care over published assessments and analyses.
In many ways we were luckier than today’s climate researchers: for there was an intense focus on our peace-studies work from the very beginning - whereas critics of climate science are able to retrieve work published a decade and more ago, when the issue was far less controversial, in order to pinpoint a minor laxity and use it to great effect to damn the whole enterprise.
The overall effect of the setbacks to climate-science’s public face may amount to the loss of a year in the transition to a low-carbon future, but the good work being done in this area offers many grounds for optimism. The New Economic Foundation’s The Great Transition project, and Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan 2009) are but two examples. Alongside the evidence that continues to emerge about the accelerating impact of climate change, the flow of impressive research and compelling argument based on even more rigorous standards will ensure that the refusenik stance will in future become harder to make.
In the end, peace studies was made stronger by those who sought to expose it. In a similar way, the travails of climate researchers may well end up reinforcing the integrity of the science and the necessity of the low-carbon transition.
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:Department of peace studies, Bradford University
Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan 2009)
New Economics Foundation, The Great Transition
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia
Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Policy Network / Centre for the Study of Global Socety - research programme / politics of climate change
Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Sidebox:Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001
Bradford’s peace-studies department now broadcasts regular podcasts on its work, including a regular commentary from Paul Rogers on international-security issues. Listen/watch here
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
Paul Rogers’s books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed; and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010)
Paul Rogers's report Global Security after the War on Terror is published by the Oxford Research Group (November 2009)
Related stories: A new security paradigm: the military-climate link The climate peril: a race against time Climate change and global security A world in need: the case for sustainable security Climate protest: rock the state, save the planet The politics of security: beyond militarism oD-wide classification Topics: Civil society Democracy and government International politicsCan lobbying colour our whole UK democracy? ,
One of the really insistent questions raised throughout the Convention of Modern Liberty one year ago was the one Anthony Barnett signalled in his opening invitation to participate: " What is the problem to which the database state and the surveillance society is... the solution?"
I made this the first real article in the CML book because it struck me that the rest of the book (and the event itself) is really a set of different attempts at an answer, coupled with some early exploration of what to do about it. Anthony kicks off with a list of potential candidates. Helena Kennedy puts it differently - "What do they put in the water in the Home Office? ". Simon Jenkins asks what happens to perfectly reasonable liberal types when they get into high office... etc. etc.
Maybe Simon Jenkins gets close to the truth with the shocking passing reference to the fact that, 'We now apparently spend more money on surveillance equipment of all sorts than on arms." If you have quarter of an hour this week, I recommend that you listen to this aptly named, undersung BBC 4 radio programme called Thinking Allowed on the theme of "military futurology" while it's accessible.
The conversation involves Matt Carr who recently wrote an article for Race and Class entitled,'Slouching towards dystopia: the new militarism', and Stephen Graham, whose book, Cities Under Siege: the new military urbanism is shortly to be published by Verso. The speakers agree that an amazing degree of 'pessimism' seems now to characterise the work of military futurologists in the various university departments which, following the pioneer faculty in Houston, have become dedicated to an endeavour which they also agree is highly influenced by science fiction writers, particularly, a sub-genre they refer to as cyberpunk science fiction.
Analysing the threats of the future has moved on considerably since the days in which DARPA counted nuclear warheads, thought the unthinkable, and assessed the survivability of the USA if the Cold War turned hot. Now they are much more concerned about 'urbanism, demographics and cultural and social trends'. So now the same technofiliac obsession with something that will maintain US and western hegemony in the world is turned towards a much more elusive enemy.
Who can that be? Well, this is where the conversation takes a turn that makes 'pessimism' sound distinctly euphemistic. It circles round and round a similar question to Anthony's - why are cities regarded as so threatening - one' s own cities that is, not foreign cities? It appears that the new danger comes from urban insurrection, not confined to the far-off 'feral cities' associated in this discourse with the southern hemisphere, but much closer to home. In the global economic downturn, it is pointed out, 'homeland security' has become one of the few huge new growth areas for US, British and Israeli companies, thanks to the cosy relationship between companies selling simulations, think tanks and the military.
This merging of military and policing scenarios, it seems, has long since left the pages of fiction. The Liverpool police, we are told, will be among the first to adopt their own surveillance drones as modelled in Afghanistan and piloted there from the outskirts of Las Vegas. Kent police are also the proud new owners of similar drones deployed this time to survey the English channel. And apparently the London Olympics will be a 'massive test ground' for a whole slew of the security technologies which have emerged from military futurology 'thinking'. No wonder they seem so excited by these Olympics...
We begin to see, I think, a very clear and chilling picture of what is happening to UK democracy as a direct result of its disastrous military alliances... Next week, as it happens, there is the launch of a rather different project which also deploys 'futures thinking'. For this group of thinkers, it is also obvious that a radical claiming back of people power is on the cards. More of this project here on openDemocracy shortly. But in what Stephen Graham calls, ' the transformation of Western militaries into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces', my point is that these campaigners for a better democracy just happen to be on the other side. Is this scary undeclared war already changing the way we live now?
oD-wide classification Topics: Democracy and government Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: openSecurity OurKingdomPutting money where our mouths are,
“Equality between men and women is a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and is also a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for equality, development and peace.” – Beijing Platform for Action.
We said this in 1995, when we penned one of the most holistic and far-reaching international accords ever authored to affirm the unique experience and rights of women: the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
Five years later, we had another global declaration: the Millennium Declaration, wherein we committed ourselves to a time-bound plan of action to eradicate poverty and achieve equality through the internationally-agreed Millennium Development Goals. Two of them were specific to women.
At the same time, we were beginning to see more and more research coming out of places like the World Bank and the Economist—well respected sources of economic research and analysis—showing that investing in women is the best way to achieve broader development goals and stimulate economic growth. One such statistic is that women invest up to 90% of their income in the family, as compared to 30-40% by men (World Bank).
And it’s not just the ending poverty target that can be achieved by investing in women. Increasingly, we’re realizing that investing in women to achieve MDG3 - gender equality - can truly be the key to achieving all 8 Millennium Development Goals. Consider the following:
According to the World Bank, “Greater economic and educational opportunities for women mean her daughters are more likely to go to school, her babies are more likely to survive infancy and her family is more likely to eat nutritious meals.” That’s progress on MDGs 2, 4 and 1, respectively, all through investment in the mother.
Also according to the World Bank, the children of educated mothers are 40% more likely to live beyond the age of 5 and 50% more likely to be immunized. That’s MDG 4.
We also know that women are the stewards of and the closest to the environment (MDG 7), and they are the fastest-growing population infected with HIV/AIDS (MDG 6). And we know that the MDG that has made the least progress-nay, that has not moved-is MDG 5, on maternal health.
Or consider the words of Theres M’Canunani, a Congolese woman who had this to say after participating in a year-long training in rights and economic empowerment at Women for Women International: “I did not know that a woman has the right of defending herself anywhere, the right of inheritance, the right of giving childbirth, the right of standing in good health.” That one statement touches on MDGs 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
This is all evidence of how critically increased investment in women is needed. So one might imagine that fifteen years after Beijing and ten years into the Millennium Development Goals—a mere 5 years remaining on that charter—we would be making some real strides in doing just that.
One would be wrong. As of 2009, it was estimated that the U.S. was spending less than 4% of its foreign assistance funds on women and girls. 15 years after Beijing and 10 years after the penning of the MDGs, women still do 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the world’s food (up to 90% of the world’s staple food crops such as maize and wheat), yet earn 10% of the world’s income and own less than 2% of its land (UN). Clearly, our investments have failed to keep pace with our rhetoric.
And that’s just the problem the Secretary General of the United Nations points to in a recently-released report on member-state progress on the Beijing Platform and the MDGs. Looking at global trends, lack of resources was identified as the major hindrance to implementation in almost all areas. A quick examination of efforts on poverty, education, health and environment (the areas where BPfA and MDGs explicitly intersect) shows this.
On poverty, for instance, member states had made much progress in drafting national-level policies and action plans to address poverty for women and girls, but insufficient resources were allocated to implement them. Unequal access to employment and markets for women were also identified as major obstacles, as was women’s illiteracy and the lack of development cooperation across sectors—which is to say, member-states were good at investing in anti-poverty measures for women and girls in areas like health and education, but slow to recognize that equal investment had to be prioritized in areas such as agriculture, infrastructure and finance.
On education, 2/3 of member-states had achieved gender parity in primary school enrollment rates, but most saw uneven implementation across regions or even within states. Again illiteracy was marked as a major challenge, with women still accounting for 2/3 of illiterate adults worldwide.
On health, again national-level policy and action plans to implement were largely promising, but insufficiently resourced. Much progress had been made on expanding health infrastructure—the availability of clinics and hospitals and the capacity of health professionals to deliver quality health services to women and girls—but reproductive health issues such as pregnancy complications still are the leading source of women’s ill health and death worldwide. Widespread violence against women and malnutrition aggravated by the financial and food crises were also supreme challenges.
Finally, on environment, not only were resources insufficiently allocated to gender programs, but policy recognizing women’s unique experience in environmental degradation, agriculture, energy and climate change was largely nonexistent, owing to a severe lack of awareness on the topic. Gender is not only absent from environmental policy, but women are also largely excluded from relevant discussions.
Between the Secretary General’s report and the stories the statistics continue to tell us about women’s perennial obstacles to empowerment and equality, the outlook seems quite bleak for achieving our commitments to gender equality and development on schedule. It is estimated that one billion people will still live in poverty by 2015, our target gate for achieving the MDGs. While we didn’t set a date to realize the Beijing Platform, we can still see how far we have to go. As we close the 54th UN Commission on the Status of Women, there’s no mystery as to what it takes to close this tremendous gap between policy and practice: money. Best-laid plans are moot if not resourced. So, on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, we at Women for Women International are coordinating a pledge encouraging member-states to invest in women to achieve the MDGs. We will deliver these signatures to the UN General Assembly this September, and make plain our concern that our promises are critically off-track. Join us today at www.womenforwomen.org/bridge and sign the pledge. As the UN motto reminds us, It’s our world.
Sideboxes Related stories: Haven't we said so already? oD-wide classification Topics: Equality International politics Section style: 50.50 Sections to display in: 50.50Haven't we said so already?,
"The globalization of the world's economy and the deepening interdependence among nations present challenges and opportunities for sustained economic growth and development, as well as risks and uncertainties for the future of the world economy. The uncertain global economic climate has been accompanied by economic restructuring as well as, in a certain number of countries, persistent, unmanageable levels of external debt and structural adjustment programmes.... transformations in the world economy are profoundly changing the parameters of social development in all countries."
These thoughts originate from the Beijing Platform for Action 1995, a gender roadmap resulting from the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. Reading the Beijing declaration now, I am disconcerted by its far-reaching analysis. I am disconcerted not because I am surprised, but because I am dismayed that the policy insights at Beijing failed to capture the attention of decision-makers. Women are talking, but who is listening?
Looking back at the Beijing declaration, I am struck by two sections addressing economic questions: on women and poverty and women and the economy. The first describes the pervasiveness of women’s poverty, the generalised absence of specific gender-responsive policy, and provides an analysis of women’s vulnerability to poverty. The second calls for a macro-economic framework that strengthens state action and accountability, and which facilitates opportunities for women - as it does for social development programming.
Under the heading women and the economy, the accent on women’s agency is widened and deepened with more language on the need for productive factors to be made accessible to women - information, technology, credit, and resources. There is also the call for the harmonisation of family and work responsibilities between women and men. In these two sections, and the rest of the Beijing Platform for Action 1995, the strategic advance was the recognition that gender equality and women’s empowerment is a goal which traverses state action in all spheres; that the responsibility of gender equity went well beyond national women’s machineries.
Beijing methodically carves out mutually reinforcing roles and actions of state and non-state actors. Gender “mainstreaming”, for many, is something of a cursed phrase today – denounced as the scourge of women’s empowerment programming. But at the time the rationale was clear and compelling. Women and men, whatever their commonalities, also had very diverse needs, responsibilities and opportunities because of roles, expectations and unequal access to resources determined by gender. These inequalities were, and continue to be, expressed in women’s limited access and control over productive resources - land, credit in particular, and in the differential valuing of women’s and men’s labours. Women’s work in the domestic or reproductive sphere is not monetised, yet fundamental and taken for granted. In the public or productive sectors of the economy, women’s work is under-valued and often compartmentalised in low paying sectors of the economy. Pay inequity is a global phenomenon. Women’s formal labour market participation is lower than that of men’s in most places. This has consequences for many areas, and in particular for access to contributory social protection schemes, especially important for the economic security of the elderly.
Beijing became a rallying call for the incorporation of gender analysis in public sector planning and policy development. This also became a call on those government agencies charged with advancing gender equality – the national women’s machineries – to lead the discussion and commitment for the development and implementation of policy and programmes that addressed inequality between women and men.
Beijing recognized the institutional limitations under which some national women’s machineries function. Many are less optimally funded, staffed and located and may wield little sustained political clout. And yet, the task of gender mainstreaming is a daunting one. It requires significant technical capacity across a number of areas, as well as the capacity to monitor and influence policy directions. Even the boldest of us gender advocates may need, from time to time, to take a deep breath of courage to step forward and demand accountability and action for our equality agenda. The persistence of patriarchy can be paralysing. The challenge of ‘attention capture’ is particularly acute in the area of macroeconomic policy making. Macro-economics evokes insecurity for those of us who are not economists – even the term is distancing. But it is a challenge which we must not avoid.
The current global economic crisis has further complicated the gender equality agenda. An economic crisis that developed in the wealthiest economies has and will continue to have far-reaching consequences for poorer countries. The trickle down or, more accurately, cascading effects are unavoidable. We are focusing on the current fiscal crisis now, but feminist economists and those who are concerned with other equity agendas have been arguing that neo-liberal economic arrangements are the problem – that chronic crisis for the majority of people the world over is an accompanying experience of market-led growth, particularly where there is little interest in redistribution and equity.
If we think back to the discussions around structural adjustment programmes, the critique of market-led growth was that it was predicated on exploitable inequalities – both within and between countries – and that a strong state presence with a redistributive mandate was an essential re-balancing mechanism to ensure growth alongside equity. The women’s movement and other social justice movements lost that advocacy fight to some extent, with state expenditures on health, education and social services put under pressure, as well as the dismantling of state regulatory frameworks. Many countries in the 1990s were forced into currency devaluations that contributed to chronic indebtedness, in particular in small open economies such as the Caribbean.
The Beijing Declaration speaks to this context:
“Recent international economic developments have had in many cases a disproportionate impact on women and children, the majority of whom live in developing countries,” it relates. “For those states that have carried a large burden of foreign debt, structural adjustment programmes and measures, though beneficial in the long term, have led to a reduction in social expenditures, thereby adversely affecting women, particularly in Africa and the least developed countries. This is exacerbated when responsibilities for basic social services have shifted from governments to women.”
The next big macro-economic critique from women’s rights advocates focused on trade liberalization. According to the theory, all trade barriers should be removed to allow free movement of goods and services, except people. The argument for free trade is based on the economic theory of comparative advantage: each region should concentrate on what it can produce most cheaply and efficiently and should exchange its products for those it is less able to produce economically. And so the trade liberalization agenda requires states to eliminate tariff and non-tariff barriers to imports even from countries with more advantageous economies of scale. In the Caribbean the negotiation and signing of an Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and Caribbean countries was accompanied by much discussion around the bargaining asymmetries between well developed, mature economies and small, open, dependent, vulnerable economies.
For many countries the comparative advantage may seem to be poverty and the existence of high levels of unemployment which guarantee depressed labour costs, keeping the costs of commodities low at the point of export, though not at the point of re-entry, as downstream product imports. Even low wages however are not guarantees of comparative advantage where there are dramatic resource and power asymmetries. And here I think of Haiti which even in the 1980s was self-sufficient in rice. With the removal of rice industry protection mechanisms, cheap imported rice flooded the market driving Haitian farmers out of business. Without competition, it was only a matter of time before retail prices rose above the price of the imperilled Haitian rice industry.
Beijing had little to say about trade liberalization, though there seemed to have been an awareness of the need to secure protection from deleterious effects of trade arrangements. It called on governments to ensure that national policies related to international and regional trade agreements do not adversely impact women's new and traditional economic activities.
But by 2005, in the Beijing+10 review, many governments recognized the negative impacts of major global and regional trends, such as globalization and trade liberalization on the situation for women and gender equality. These included “increased poverty, particularly in rural areas, decreased social protection and basic services, increased violence against women, including in situations of armed conflict, decreased participation of women in political decision-making and a digital divide between women and men.” That review also drew attention to rural women, especially in developing countries, who “continued to be disproportionately affected by trade liberalization, commercialization of agriculture and the increasing privatization of resources and services.
Although some studies are showing that the global financial crisis is having differential gender impacts depending on labour market participation and economic structures of countries, I am not sure that I find it compelling to tally up who is more affected. Is it a he-cession or a she-cession? I want to take as a given that both men and women are harshly affected, especially those already affected by class, poverty and exclusion. But gender analysis does help us with prescriptions for appropriate action.
And so, I would argue that there is a particularity to women’s poverty in many parts of the world that demands attention. What is this particularity? Whether or not countries have a high coincidence of female headed households, as is the case in the Caribbean and growing in other parts of the world, global studies show that on average more of women’s resources and capital are dedicated to familial well-being, less on recreation, less on discretionary spending.
This attention is needed because of the negative multiplier effects of women’s poverty. Where children are women’s responsibility, then women’s poverty is children’s poverty and in this transmission of intergenerational poverty, societies are impoverished and vulnerable to the host of social challenges associated with poverty. It is because of this negative multiplier of women’s poverty that women’s organisations were dismayed by what they saw as the limitations of Millennium Development Goals framework. In the context of poverty, the MDG has taken a narrow approach, whereas, as Beijing shows, addressing poverty must include very specific support to women in addition to changing the culture of reproductive responsibility between women and men.
More plainly, women’s rights advocates have been consistently arguing that poverty has structural dimensions – that an economic system that prioritises economic growth without redistribution of wealth through decent wages, through social protection programmes for example, ends up reproducing inequalities and economic vulnerability. At an individual level, they argue that women’s poverty and household poverty should be addressed through creating economic and productive opportunities as well as ensuring that men make regular, consistent and predictable contributions to the care of children and other dependents, thereby reducing the demands on women’s income and time resources.
Women’s rights activists and economists are demanding a response to macroeconomic trends that exacerbate inequality within and between countries such as unregulated transnational capital flows, debt service payments, inequitable trade patterns and the shrinkage of public resource expenditures on livelihood needs.
So what can government agencies, the national women’s machineries, do in this context? There are policy and programmatic responses. At the micro or individual levels, facilitating women’s access to productive resources; at the meso level they can monitor and advocate for a better realignment of state resources to meet the needs of women and their families. And at a macro level they can use evidence to influence policies which take into account the need to redress inequalities.
In its essence, gender mainstreaming is political as well as technical work. To secure attention, respect and response, a range of skills is required that include sector knowledge, but more so, advocacy, persistence, strategy, partnerships - and most of all the vision for alternative policy models that are more aligned to development and equity.
Our vision must be for a more inclusive macro-economic framework. We must start answering the challenge of participating in the construction of alternative models of economy: models that promote global inter-dependence but do not undermine state capacity for food security, for the meeting of social and economic rights obligations. Models that promote the idea of comparative advantages, where the definition of such advantages do not include the exploitation of labour. Models where the state is strongly invested in its redistributive role and where the benefits of national resources are equitably available to all.
In November late last year at the United Nations in New York, nine independent experts from different regions of the world and 15 international observers re-examined the Beijing declaration and its role in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. They concluded that all the Millennium Development Goals could be met if the actions first recommended under Beijing were honoured. I agree. But haven’t we said so already?
(This article is based on the keynote address to the 2010 meeting of the Commonwealth National Women's Machineries in New York)
oD-wide classification Topics: Economics Equality International politics Section style: 50.50 Sections to display in: 50.50Race, human rights and religion: the UK's Jewish free school decision,
How is it that the President of Britain's new Supreme Court has been quoting the Book of Deuteronomy in reaching an important judgement?
I have been involved with equality law in Britain – law which seeks to restrain unfair discrimination - for example by those who control the allocation of employment, housing, education, and other benefits and services since I was appointed legal adviser to the Race Relations Board in 1965.
Since then we have had a lot of piecemeal legislation – hopefully soon to be consolidated. It has extended the law against discrimination into new areas: gender, disability, sexual orientation, and, recently, religion.
Many major problems of interpretation have been resolved in the courts but new and unforeseen ones always continue to arise. Issues of race remain the most intractable form of discrimination and the recent extension of the scope of equality law to religious discrimination has exposed this. It raises very important and interesting larger questions as the secular processes of the state collide with religious practise. These issues can be intensely divisive in our increasingly pluralistic society.
The recent Jewish Free School (JFS) case, one of the first to be decided by the Supreme Court in December 2009, exemplifies many of these issues.
In 2006 discrimination on religious grounds was prohibited by the Equality Act. But faith schools were granted an exemption: in selecting their pupils they were allowed to prefer those of the faith adopted by the school. What the exemption did not permit was discrimination on other prohibited grounds.
JFS is of course a Jewish school, entitled as a result of the exemption to prefer children of the Jewish faith in its highly competitive selection process. A boy's application was rejected on the ground that he was not a member of the Jewish faith according to the criterion laid down by the school. On the face of it this was surprising. The boy and both his father and mother actively practised the Jewish faith. The father was of Jewish descent and the mother had converted to Judaism . The problem was that the school’s criterion of “Jewishness” - the orthodox one adopted by the Chief Rabbi - required descent from a mother who was herself Jewish by descent or who had been converted under the auspices of the orthodox synagogue. The mother of the boy in the case had been converted in a non-orthodox synagogue.
The irony of the situation was that the boy’s exclusion was not an issue of faith at all. For the school acknowledged that any child who satisfied the test of descent from a Jewish born (or acceptably converted) mother would qualify, even if a practising Catholic or Muslim, or indeed an adherent of one of the non-orthodox synagogues, the Liberal, Reform, or Masorti.
But the criterion of descent from a Jewish mother falls squarely within the scope of the Race Relations Act 1976. Section 17 of the Act makes it unlawful for a maintained school (of which JFS was one) “to discriminate – on the grounds of colour, race, nationality, or ethnic or national origins - against a person in the terms on which it offers to admit him to the establishment as a pupil.” So the boy's father challenged the exclusion by seeking judicial review.
The matrilinear test of Jewishness is clearly one based on race or ethnic origins. Jews have always rightly claimed the protection of the Race Relations Act and to argue, as the school and its supporters felt driven to do, that Jewish descent was outside the statutory definition of racial grounds is to offer a welcome gift to the British National Party.
The reluctance of the school and the authorities of the orthodox Jewish community to acknowledge the anomaly of the racial or ethnic character of their test of membership is hardly surprising. They can claim that it has been part of the Jewish heritage since biblical times. Indeed, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who gave the main judgement that dismissed the school’s appeal, identified the origin of the test in the seventh chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. There, Moses instructs the people of Israel not to intermarry with the children of other nations then occupying the promised land. “for they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods:so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.”
It is a very good judgement. You can read it here in full (pdf).
Lord Phillips explains why at first he was minded to find for the JFS and why he was led to change his mind. In doing so he has insisted on behalf of our society that faith must be defined in terms of faith, when claims are being made on the public purse, and not in terms of racial descent irrespective of actual belief.
It is profoundly paradoxical that this notion of preserving racial exclusivity has survived. It seems primitive and out of touch with modern reality. But religious freedom is also a human right protected by the European Convention and the Human Rights Act. Of the 13 judges who considered the case first in the High Court, then the Court of Appeal, and finally the Supreme Court, 10 concluded that the school had violated the Race Relations Act. (The remaining judges sought to maintain that the manifestly racially discriminatory impact of the school’s policy on those not of Jewish descent was in some way insulated from the Race Relations Act because it was an aspect of religious belief.)
Anti-discrimination law impacts on the public sphere not the private. JFS is a state-funded school and it is right to subject it to the requirements of the Race Relations Act. The case aroused a great deal of emotion. Even the Chief Rabbi made the exaggerated claim that the courts were usurping the prerogative of the religious authorities to determine the eligibility of their members. He failed to distinguish between the private and self-contained area of a religious community and how a faith school may act in the public arena. The judges were only concerned, as they made clear, with the public sphere of school admission.
Where religious freedom collides with other freedoms, such as the right to equal treatment, a balance may need to be struck. The principles at stake in the JFS case are likely to continue to reverberate. The Catholic Church, for example, is allowed exceptionally to exclude homosexuals when it employs priests. But should it be allowed to discriminate in other appointmants? Should we allow polygamy or female circumcision for those who treat them as issues of faith? Does religious freedom prevent a school from denying its teachers the right to wear the niqab or burka while teaching? Within the private sphere, a high degree of tolerance may be acceptable. In the public, religious bodies must abide by a general law that upholds the fundamental right to equal treatment.
oD-wide classification Country: UK Topics: Equality Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomTackling Russia’s legal nihilism,
Dmitry Medvedev has stated that he wants to see the creation of an independent, impartial and fair judicial system. It is a source of regret that, despite 20 years of reform, we are still some way from this goal. Surveys and sociological research consistently show that the courts have become neither a source of justice nor a defence of legal rights for the majority of Russia’s citizens. The politically motivated cases of the past decade are but evidence of this decay.
Although legislation is in place that supposedly guarantees the independence of the courts and the judiciary, President Medvedev has himself acknowledged that Russia has neither. By his own admission, Russia still needs to rid itself of decisions based on “pressure, telephone calls and ... outright bribery”. He recognises that Russia still suffers from “legal nihilism”, pressure on judges, and the corruption, dependence and injustice that come out of such disregard for the law — “practices and attitudes that stand in the way of building a new, powerful and affluent Russia”.
Anyone who wants to see Russia thrive could not fail to agree with Medvedev’s words. The problem is how these good intentions can be transformed into reality.
Olga Kudeshkina: I personally witnessed open violation of judicial independence
Overt pressure on the courts: The Three Whales case
In 2004, while still a judge of the Moscow City Court, I attempted to inform the public and then-President Putin about the pressures judges were facing.
The previous year I personally witnessed open violation of judicial independence while examining the case of Pavel Zaitsev, an investigator at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Zaitsev was facing criminal charges of abuse of office following his investigation into alleged furniture smuggling at the “Grand” and “Three Whales” shopping centres in outer Moscow.
The state prosecutor who instigated the case, Dmitry Shokhin, behaved very strangely in court. From the outset, he tried everything to ensure his evidence was examined in a way that favoured the prosecution. When, however, he realised that the court would only examine objectively and impartially, he began to disrupt proceedings. In violation of the law, for example, he refused to provide evidence. He asked for the hearing to be deferred on the pretext that he was participating in “more important” cases. He finally also demanded that I, the lay assessors and the entire composition of the court resign and step down from the case (and he did so in a way that was gratuitously offensive).
The most outrageous influence on the course of the trial was not, however, the behaviour of the prosecutor, but that of the chairwoman of the Moscow City Court, Olga Yegorova. Summoning me to her office, she demanded — in quite abusive terms — that I tell her “who was asking the questions” and why I, as judge, had taken certain decisions and not others. In my presence, she phoned the deputy Prosecutor General. From her words I soon understood that she and the deputy Prosecutor General were working as a tandem. This explained the strange behaviour of Prosecutor Shokhin.
Yegorova went on to demand that I falsify case materials by disposing of written statements by lay assessors, who had decided to withdraw from the case. These statements detailed the “disgraceful” conduct of the prosecutor, and interpreted it as having the express aim of pressurising the court into reaching a decision that favoured the prosecution. I was also instructed not to take any decision in response to these statements; to eliminate any discussion of the prosecutor’s behaviour from the court record; and to make sure that the lay assessors no longer attended the trial.
I declined to carry out the instructions. As a result, and in direct violation of the law, Yegorova took the case away from me and gave it to another judge. In my 18 years working in the courts it was the first time I had come across such open and cynical pressure. Pressure that can only be described as making a mockery of the law.
I went public because it was impossible to discuss these issues freely within the profession. For me, it was a moment when public interest outweighed considerations of professional solidarity. Because I decided to call a spade a spade, however, I was dismissed as a judge of the Moscow City Court before I had completed my term of office.
In its public statement, the Moscow Judicial Council wrote:
“Following a period of judicial reform, the judiciary in Russia has become genuinely independent, self-reliant and democratic. Judge Kudeshkina’s so-called ‘revelations’ have seriously undermined public confidence in the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.”
My claims were dismissed as lies — first by the Moscow Judicial Council, then by the Moscow Supreme Qualification Collegium of Judges, the Moscow City Court and the Federal Supreme Court. I had, in their words, “deliberately disparaged the authority of the judiciary and disseminated fabricated and offensive allegations about Russian judges”. None of the claims were investigated.
Independent Studies
In fact, what I was saying was in all but name confirmed a year later by the President’s own Advisory Council on Civil Society and Human Rights. Publishing a comprehensive report into the state of Russia’s judicial system, this body identified concrete examples of abuse. It is worth noting some of their conclusions here:
- “Formally, judges are independent and must be guided solely by the law. In practice they do not possess genuine, as opposed to declared, independence”
- “A judge who violates the law in reaching a decision may not be punished for that infringement, and usually does not face punishment. In this way, the judge becomes dependent on the disposition of the court’s chairman, and on the protection afforded by the profession’s organisations and the neutrality of the prosecutor’s office. Such judges are, therefore, vulnerable in their subsequent work”
- “The powers of a judge who does not agree to carry out requests may be prematurely terminated. In such a situation the conscientious judge finds himself open to pressure from within the judicial system and has no chance of defending his or her own rights”
- “As a result, fewer conscientious judges remain in service; their colleagues fear to cross the court chairman and take decisions based on the law; and the dependence of judges on officials within the judicial system is intensified. There is also evidence that conscientious judges are being expelled from the profession under the guise of simulated “violations”
Another important report, The Judicial System in Russia: Current State and Problems, was published in October 2009 by the Centre for Political Technologies. This report was the result of an extensive sociological investigation and brought together specialists from all over Russia. It was commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Development, whose board of trustees is headed by President Dmitry Medvedev.
The report found that, contrary to popular belief, the Russian judicial system’s main problem is not corruption, which “does not exceed the levels that affect society as a whole”. Instead, its prime defect is the extent to which the courts are dependent on government and state officials. It found that Russian courts routinely defend the interests of such officials and not the rights of those who should have the law on their side.
The investigation identified an entire arsenal of weapons for reinforcing judicial dependence from within the system. The most important factor, it notes, is judges’ fear and dependence upon chairmen of the court.
In Russia, court chairmen have very powerful weapons at their disposal. They can decide how to treat a plea, which judge to assign to a case, and whether, for example, to transfer cases to more loyal judges. They hand out bonuses, deal with housing issues and decide how rapidly someone’s career may advance. They can also initiate disciplinary proceedings against a judge, up to and including the loss of his or her right to preside in court.
The problem is that chairmen and chairwomen are themselves appointed by the President, which in turn renders them dependent on the authorities.
Moreover, any judicial ruling that runs counter to the interests of high-ranking officials is very likely to be overturned by a court of higher instance, and sent back for reconsideration. The more often this occurs, the greater the legal grounds for removing a judge from office. Judges internalise these unspoken rules and reach conclusions about which decisions they should and should not make. As the report says, the most sought-after qualities among Russian judges are that they be amenable, adaptable and quick to take a hint.
Legislative initiatives to reform the judicial system
There is no doubt that that a great deal of legislative energy is currently being expended on reforming the judicial system. President Medvedev has himself recognised that attempts to improve the investment climate depend on such reform. He understands the need to keep appeals to international courts at an absolute minimum. Indeed, his efforts to secure ratification of Protocol 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights offers great hope that the authorities do want to reform the country’s judicial system.
At the same time, many doubt the Kremlin’s capacity to implement reform given its record.
Take, for example, a recent amendment to the Law “On the Constitutional Court of Russia”, which deprived the Court’s members of the right to select their own chairman and deputy chairmen. Many interpreted this an attempt to consolidate Kremlin control over the judicial system. Remember, too, that at no point has the judicial bureaucracy acknowledged the existence of any problems, other than those relating to the material needs of the courts.
Unfortunately, twenty years of reform have not brought about any significant renewal of personnel within the judicial bureaucracy. Court chairmen, including the Chairman of the Supreme Court, remain people of unreconstructed outlook, never fully accepting of democratic values. Recent interviews with Judges Vladimir Yaroslavtsev and Anatoly Kononov — both members of the Constitutional Court and well informed thanks to their professional and life experience — are testimony to the situation. Both criticise the lack of independent judges and dependence of the judicial system (not only on the country’s leading officials, but also on the law-enforcement, security, intelligence and defence agencies). Yaroslavtsev’s comments are particularly enlightening, given that he was a member of the Presidium of the Russian Judiciary Council. Evidently, he feels that even a body as distinguished as this has limited influence.
Many serving judges do not want to tolerate the defects that prevent Russian courts from becoming truly independent forums, respected nationally and internationally. However, they keep silent because they can see what happens to those judges bold and courageous enough to speak out.
Kudeshkina v Russia at the European Court of Human Rights
Having failed to find truth and justice in Russia’s courts, I, like many of my fellow citizens, was forced to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Their eventual ruling, issued in February 2009, established that I did have grounds for criticising the work of the judicial system and, in particular, the pressure exerted on Russia’s courts.
The ECHR ruling established that the chairwoman of the Moscow City Court had interfered in a fair and just hearing of a criminal case; also that I was prevented from taking part in a judicial hearing in my professional capacity. The arguments and facts I put forward to the courts and professional bodies within Russia — which were ignored — found full confirmation in the ruling.
The text of the ruling noted that the pressure exerted on Russian judges was a problem “demanding serious attention in order to ensure the independence of the judicial system and preserve public trust”. The Court also established that, by prematurely removing my right to practice as a judge at the Moscow City Court and depriving me of the First Qualification Class [awarded in 2002], my right to free expression had been violated.
The European Court’s insistence afforded me the chance to read the findings of an investigation into Chairwoman Yegorova’s behaviour, drawn up by Oleg Sviridenko of the Supreme Qualifying Collegium of Russian Judges. This investigation had followed statements by myself and the lay assessors that outlined unlawful interference in the activities of judicial hearing. My previous request to familiarize myself with its contents was turned down.
What was interesting was that even this investigation acknowledged in writing that Yegorova had removed the case from me and given it to another in 2004, i.e. before I was prematurely stripped of my status as a judge. Yegorova supported this decision with various incoherent, unsubstantiated and clearly fabricated reasons that had no foundation in law. The European Court took the view that “the mere hint that such [untoward] grounds could be the reason for transferring a case under examination by one judge to another is sufficient to confirm the accusations voiced by the plaintiff”.
Sviridenko, who now heads the Moscow Arbitration Court, for some reason came to the conclusion that Yegorova had acted in this way because I had “gone on vacation”; and that “therefore [she did] not exceed the powers of the court chairman nor act against the law”. In response to this, the ECHR ruling noted: “The Supreme Qualifying Collegium failed to pay sufficient attention to this circumstance and did not provide reliable, factual grounds for its arguments. Moreover, this omission was not made good by any of the subsequent courts”.
Why did neither the chairman of the Supreme Qualifying Collegium nor the chairman of the Supreme Court pay any attention to such serious discrepancies? Could neither of these chairmen appreciate that such an investigation not only undermined the authority of the judicial system in Russia — and of their respective professional bodies — but also placed Russian judges in a state of yet greater and undefended dependence on the court chairman? Of course, their actions are but a vivid illustration of the state of the Russian judiciary.
On 11 December 2009, I applied to the Moscow City Court for a re-examination of the decision that removed me from the judiciary. I cited the European Court’s ruling that this decision constituted a violation of my right to free expression. The application was, however, turned down seven days later, thereby ignoring the terms of international agreements. The public response given by chairwoman Yegorova was particularly astounding: “this struggle with the system has much akin to someone tilting at windmills”. While my experience taught me how easily the law is disregarded within the judicial profession, it did not prepare me for the possibility that the ruling of an international court would be so brazenly ignored.
It is clear that what is required today are real deeds and not just words. The success with which judicial reform can be implemented depends upon real actions taken by the authorities to strengthen the independence of judges and the judiciary.
Olga Kudeshkina’s talk was originally delivered at a round table event organised by the EU-Russia Centre and All Party Parliamentary Russia Group in conjunction with the Foreign Policy Centre.
This translation originally appeared on www.eu-russia.org
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:Investigation: How Whales Were Turned Into Mice , Roman Shleinov, Novaya Gazyeta, July 7th, 2008
Moscow: Third Rome, Model Communist City, Eurasian Antagonist - and Power as No-Power? Bill Bowring, London Metropolitan University
The Case of Judge Kudeshkina, The Rights in Russia
Related stories: The European factor in Russian justice Russia and its Death Penalty How Russia really works Legal Nihilism in Russia oD-wide classification Country: Russia Topics: Civil society Section style: oD Russia Sections to display in: oD RussiaSpain's politics of memory,
The centre-left Spanish government led by prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced in mid-February 2010 that it was going to “repair” the memory of the poet Miguel Hernández, a Republican former goatherd who died in prison in 1942 - the third year of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship - at the age of 31.
The deputy prime minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega explained the decision in terms of a pledge to “offer Miguel Hernández the tribute, the memory and the admiration that his work merits”. She continued: “We all share that same rejection of any form of oppression, that same rebellion in the face of injustice and that determination to dream and create a decent country and a better world.”
The news of this homage to a man venerated by the left, whose books were destroyed by Franco’s fascist regime, is both a reminder of the brutal aftermath of Spain’s civil war of 1936-39 and but one episode in Spain’s ongoing “history wars”.
Indeed, the political contest over national memory in Spain has been a permanent reality since the country’s transition to democracy after the death of the Franco’s death in 1975. The civil war and its legacies (including mass graves and public monuments) remain the most potent source of historical division between the country’s left and right. But many later events too - most prominent and tragic among them, the train-bombings in Madrid on 11 March 2004 (“11M”) which killed 191 people and injured almost 1,900 - have demonstrated Spain’s capacity to polarise over the past.
An embittered polityThe Islamist terrorists whose bombs exploded on commuter-trains approaching Madrid’s Atocha station that day created horrific carnage that has left a deep imprint on Spanish society. The sixth anniversary, like its predecessors, is an occasion for national mourning and remembrance. But the way the painful episode is marked is accompanied by a struggle over its meaning whose signs were apparent even in its immediate aftermath.
The atrocity took place three days before the general election in which the conservative Partido Popular (Popular Party / PP) of then prime minister José María Aznar (which had been in power since 1996) was expected to win a second term. But its instant response to the bombings, amid an enormous outpouring of national grief over the intense pre-election weekend, triggered an angry social reaction.
Aznar’s government insisted that the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), against whom it had taken a hard line, had perpetrated the attack. There was no direct evidence of ETA’s involvement, and it quickly began to seem that blaming ETA might be politically convenient - since to see the hand of al-Qaida in the bombings would invite the argument that they were a punishment for Spain’s (deeply unpopular) support for the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As indications grew that 11M was the work of Islamists, many voters concluded that Aznar’s government had made Spain a target of terrorism and then lied about the consequences for political advantage. The result was a clear election victory for the opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
The Popular Party adapted to being ousted from power by seeking to undermine Zapatero’s legitimacy as the country’s new leader - and the events surrounding 11M were a prime weapon in the effort (see Mariano Aguirre, "Spain's 11-M and the right's revenge", 10 March 2006). Some PP politicians claimed that the socialists had circulated lies on the internet about the party’s handling of the attack, and thus “engineered” Zapatero’s victory; others, backed by some media outlets, even insinuated that bombings were the result of a bizarre conspiracy between jihadists and Basque militants, which had been covered up by the police, the judiciary and the government itself.
The influence of such fantasies in Spain’s post-2004 political discourse has meant that the horror of 11M acted not to heal but to compound the country’s already deep political and ideological splits. There is a contrast here with ETA’s armed campaign, in that the group’s assassinations of (for example) policemen and local councillors in the 1980s and 1990s had often united Spaniards across political boundaries in repudiation of terrorism. Such consensus over the Atocha bombings proved impossible; even now, many people still subscribe to the jihadi/ETA conspiracy theory. The regret here is that in so many ways the events of 11-14 March 2004 - from Spaniards’ dignified response to tragedy to their peaceable replacement of a government they felt had let them down - were a healthy affirmation of the nation’s democracy, yet cannot be remembered as such (see Ivan Briscoe, "A victory for Spain, not al-Qaida", 18 March 2004)
Zapatero has dealt well with this bitter political inheritance, especially by pushing through much of his progressive social agenda (including gay marriage and adoption, easier access to abortion) and by promoting more women to his cabinet. Perhaps equally controversial has been his “law on historical memory”, which seeks to provide moral redress for victims of the civil war (essentially Republican) and the ensuing repression by Franco. This law and the social reforms have enraged the political right, including the Catholic church - though its opposition has not been enough to stop Zapatero winning a second term in office, albeit his election victory on 9 March 2008 was by a narrower margin (see Ivan Briscoe, "From the shadows: Spain's election lessons", 11 March 2008). It is the severe economic recession that has buffeted in Spain in 2008-10 which has put Zapatero under the most acute political pressure.
The combination of an embittered right and a left determined to tackle previously taboo issues, in the context of unresolved disputes over history, has in the six years since 11M tended to coarsen public debate in Spain and entrench the country’s political tribal warfare.
A split countryThe enduring potency of Spain’s deep political schism is evident again in a current dispute over the country’s best-known high-court judge, Baltasar Garzón. In October 2008, Garzón attempted to bring surviving members of the Franco regime to trial to face justice over human-rights violations under the dictatorship (including the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people). This approach sought belatedly to emulate what several Latin American countries had done after the military dictatorships of the 1970s-1980s (and Germany after 1945); what made it harder in Spain is that the country - via the mechanism of the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) - had already chosen a different model in the post-1975 years as it sped from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy (see Sebastian Balfour & Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy [Oxford University Press, 2007]).
Garzón soon halted his own investigations and passed them on to regional courts. But his effort had inflamed opponents of his initiative, and now the only person to have attempted to investigate the dictatorship’s atrocities finds himself facing a private prosecution for overstepping his powers.
The initial writ against Baltasar Garzón - a former member of the PSOE who has nonetheless zealously pursued politicians of all stripes - was brought by a far-right group, which has since been joined by Francisco Franco’s own Falange party. There is an element of revengeful glee in the effort - Garzón’s near-celebrity status as well as his political leanings have made him a hate-figure for many on the right. But the more worrying aspect of this case is that it again highlights Spain’s inability - or refusal - to face the truth of its past. The writer Rosa María Artal, in reference to the Garzón case, says: “If the untouchable wounds of the war have not healed in three-quarters of a century, their only hope for healing is surgery”. That surgery, it seems, is still too painful to contemplate.
The idea of two Spains - left and right, liberal and reactionary, European and parochial - often descends into cliché. But the enduring struggle over the country’s past makes Miguel Hernández’s use of the image in Llamo al toro de Espana (I Call the Bull of Spain) more pointed and melancholy than ever:
“Split in two parts, this centuries-old bull,
This bull that lives inside us:
Split in two halves, with one it would kill
And with the other it would die fighting.”
La Matanza del 11M - El País
11-M, Masacre en Madrid - El Mundo
Sebastián Balfour, The Politics of Contemporary Spain (Routledge, 2005)
Sebastián Balfour & Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Paddy Woodworth, Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL, and Spanish Democracy (Yale University Press, 2nd edition, 2003)
Sidebox:Guy Hedgecoe is co-editor of the website Qorreo.com, which provides news, comment and analysis of Spain and the Iberosphere. He was previously editor of the English-language edition of El Pais, and founded and edited the Ecuador Focus weekly bulletin
Also by Guy Hedgecoe in openDemocracy:
"Losing Ecuador" (26 April 2005)
"Ecuador's energy-fuelled politics" (28 June 2006)
"Ecuador's election surprise" (17 October 2006)
"Ecuador: protest and power" (28 November 2006)
"Ecuador’s politics of expectation" (1 February 2006)
"Ecuador's hyper-political wave" (30 September 2008)
"Rafael Correa: an Ecuadorian journey” (29 April 2009)
“ETA and the Basque labyrinth” (20 August 2009)
“Spain, Europe and the world: Zapatero’s moment” (11 January 2010)
Turkey and Ergenekon: from farce to tragedy ,
The sprawling, chaotic, all-consuming “Ergenekon” investigation into the activities of Turkey’s so-called derin devlet (“deep state”) shows no sign of abating. Indeed, its tentacles are spreading ever further as it moves from enveloping its politicians and public to polarising the state’s core institutions.
The reverberations of a seemingly permanent yet ever-elusive political scandal have reached a decisive stage at the highest level of official politics. Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and head of the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice & Development Party /AKP) intends to bring a thirteen-part constitutional-reform package to parliament by the end of March 2010. Its passage would enable oversight of the party’s key institutional adversary, the Hakimler ve Savcılar Yüksek Kurulu (supreme board of judges and prosecutors / HSYK). But Ergenekon’s corrosive effect is equally evident in the longer-term divisions it is fomenting within Turkey’s military and judiciary, which the latest developments in the affair are sharpening (see Soner Cagaptay, “What's Really Behind Turkey's Coup Arrests?”, Foreign Policy, 25 February 2010).
A conflict of shadowsThe frenzy surrounding Ergenekon has begun to focus primarily on one of the overarching conspiracy’s many sub-plots: namely, the extraordinary 5,000-page Balyoz (Sledgehammer) plan. This was revealed in January 2010 by the Turkish journal Taraf, the leakers’ outlet of choice. The plan - approved by the military elite in 2003, following the AKP’s election victory of November 2002 - was modelled on the orchestrated disruption that preceded the “generals’ coup” of 12 September 1980. Its aim seems to have been to generate an atmosphere of crisis in Turkey in order to prepare the ground for a military takeover (see Gareth Jenkins, Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation [Silk Road Studies, August 2009]).
The Balyoz plan’s detail mixes the fantastical and the deeply serious. It envisaged the bombing of Istanbul mosques during Friday prayers; the deliberate shooting down of a Turkish warplane over the Aegean to provoke a crisis with Greece; names of friendly and hostile journalists; and lists of bureaucrats, ambassadors, and regional governors to be targeted for arrest.
The military elite insists that the plan is no more than a war-game scenario; its voluminous documentation was dismissed by the chief-of-staff Ilker Basbug as amounting to a “piece of paper”. This stance ran into trouble over a single scrawl on one such piece. The signature of an army colonel, Dursan Cicek, was found on a document (published by Taraf in June 2009) outlining ways to discredit the AKP and the Fethullah Gülen movement; Basbug said that the signature was forged, though civilian forensic and police agencies declared it authentic - a finding now acknowledged by an internal military investigation.
This incident is emblematic of how each story-line in the wider Ergenekon chain of disclosures tends to unfold in a way that intensifies the pressure on the Turkish military. For example, the signature of a retired general, Cetin Dogan, is now also alleged to appear in the Balyoz archive. Dogan was charged on 26 February 2010 as part of the Balyoz investigation - along with the former special-forces commander Engin Alan, the most senior of around fifty active and retired officers detained in the most recent round-up (see Gareth H Jenkins, “Defense against documents: the Turkish military’s rearguard action”, Turkish Analyst, 23 November 2009).
Dogan suggests that the former chief-of-staff General Hilmi Özkök should confess what he knows about the affair; Özkök in turn claims to have had no knowledge of Balyoz, and insists the then land-commander General Aytac Yalman should take responsibility; Yalman agrees, but refuses to speak until given permission from the current chief-of-staff Ilker Basbug. The unsettled Basbug seems more concerned with identifying whistleblowers from within the ranks than with assisting the investigation, and is increasingly shrill in his warnings about the morale of the armed forces (see “Başbuğ: 'A demoralized military is a national problem'”, Hürriyet Daily News, 11 February 2010).
A landscape of plotsThe agitation surrounding the Balyoz plot has to fight for space in Turkey’s media with the equally convoluted Kafes (Cage) “operation action-plan”. This subterranean project was exposed in April 2009 after the discovery in Istanbul’s Poyrazköy district of an illegal arms-cache provoked a police-raid on the home of a retired Turkish army major.
The Kafes plan, allegedly (that word again) conceived within the navy command, compounds the multifariousness of Ergenekon and the scale of Balyoz with an ambition all of its own. Its bizarre features include an operation to assassinate non-Muslims (along the lines of the killing of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007) in the hope that international and domestic blame would attach to the AKP government; the use of prostitutes to blackmail unreliable senior naval officers; and the concealment of explosives inside a submarine exhibited at Istanbul’s Rahmi M Koc museum supposedly intended for detonation during a visit of schoolchildren. In the latter case, the police’s retrieval of the explosives in July 2009 was followed by an internal military investigation which concluded that a navy unit had been tasked to remove them - and “forgot” to do so.
The Kafes and Balyoz controversies have overshadowed even the arrest of two special-forces command-officers in December 2009; they were detained outside the home of deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc on suspicion of plotting his assassination. The investigation into this incident led to the military making an unprecedented concession: that a civilian judge could conduct a thorough search of a super-sensitive military facility: in this case the special-warfare department’s Ankara headquarters, known as the “cosmic room”. The judge concerned received death-threats; if that was predictable, the arrest of seven military officers who had been tailing him was - even by Turkey’s “new” standards - more startling (see Steven A Cook, “The Weakening of Turkey's Military” [Council on Foreign Relations, 1 March 2010]).
The army for its part continues to dismiss officers suspected of Islamist sentiment, if so far none alleged to have been involved in Ergenekon-related activities (though in February 2010 a military tribunal did give a four-year prison sentence to a lieutenant-colonel who had kept at home weapons belonging to the armed forces). More typical of its attitude is that on 3 March 2010, the third army chief General Saldiray Berk - who has to date refused to appear before a court for questioning over his supposed political plotting - led the military’s biannual, high-profile military exercises. The event - “Sarikamis 2010 Winter”, referring to its location in the eastern province of Kars - was, somewhat unusually, not graced with the presence of any representatives of the Turkish government.
Turkey’s fracture-zoneThe avalanche of revelations associated with the Ergenekon investigation carries several “unknown unknowns” in its thunderous train. A major one is the impact it might be having on Turkish public opinion, which is traditionally well-disposed towards the armed forces. An effect of the long crisis has been to strip the military (for the time being at least) of its untouchability, as the detailed exposure of its disruptive plans alternates with embarrassing personal dramas (such as the dispute between teams of doctors as to whether three indicted retired generals - Levent Ersöz, Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon - are fit enough to stand trial).
In these circumstances the tensions between Turkey’s military, judiciary and political leaders are becoming acute. They were on display when on 4 February 2010 the Ankara government rescinded the longstanding protocol (Emasya) granting the military the right to assume responsibility for public order in the event of a breakdown (see Omer Taspinar, “Turkey’s Difficult Democratization”, Brookings, 15 February 2010); and again after the chief prosecutor of Erzurum in eastern Turkey ordered the arrest of his Erzincan counterpart Ilhan Cihaner on 17 February for Ergenekon-related activities - and was himself dismissed almost immediately by the judges’ supreme board (HSYK).
The latter is far more than a local affair. The moderate-Islamist AKP government regards the HSYK as a bastion of the secularist-Ataturkist order, and suspects it of being the agent of a concerted attempt to undermine the Ergenekon prosecutors. This underlines the significance of the government’s presentation of its constitutional-reform proposals to the Ankara parliament; these include measures (first outlined in 2007) to restructure the HSYK in conformity with the process of accession to the European Union. In turn the HSYK is conducting an enquiry into whether the government might be culpable of illegitimate pressure on the judiciary - and if the answer is “yes”, the AKP could share the fate of its Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) predecessor in 1998 and find itself closed down by the constitutional court.
Turkey’s lawyers and politicians are in dispute too about the ramifications of a constitutional-court ruling of January 2010, again part of the requirement to make Turkey’s legal order compatible with the European Union’s acquis communautaire. The ruling overturns a law passed in July 2009 which had given civilian courts the right to try military officers for non-military crimes. This outcome alone has the capacity to tip the entire Ergenekon investigation into an even deeper abyss.
Turkey is surpassing itself in its capacity for the absurd - and soon also, perhaps, in its capacity for the tragic.
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:Gareth H Jenkins Political Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East? (Palgrave, 2008)
Erik J Zürcher, A History of Modern Turkey (IB Tauris, 2004)
Gareth H Jenkins, Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation, Silk Road Studies, August 2009)
Turkey’s Dark Side: Party closures, conspiracies and the future of democracy, European Stability Initiative, (April 2008)
Sidebox:Bill Park is a senior lecturer in the department of defence studies at Kings College London
--------
Among openDemocracy's many articles on Turkey’s politics:
Fadi Hakura, "Europe and Turkey: sour romance or rugby match?" (13 November 2006)
Katinka Barysch, “Turkey and the European Union: don't despair” (27 November 2006)
George Schöpflin, “Turkey’s crisis and the European Union” (23 July 2007)
Gunes Murat Tezcur, “Turkey's political opening” (24 July 2007)
Gunes Murat Tezcur, “Turkey’s Kurdish challenge” (8 November 2007)
openDemocracy, “Turkey and a new vision for Europe” (12 December 2007)
Hasan Turunc, “Turkey and Iraqi Kurds: the politics of military action” (25 February 2008)
Mustafa Akyol, "Turkey's ‘Islamic reform': roots and reality" (4 March 2008)
openDemocracy, “Turkey’s risk, Europe’s role” (2 April 2008)
Katinka Barysch, “Turkey: the constitutional frontline” (14 April 2008)
Cem Özdemir, “Turkey’s clash of values: memo to Europe” (29 April 2008)
Hakan Altinay & Kalypso Nicolaïdis, “Why the European Union strengthens Turkish secularism” (3 September 2008)
Max Farrar, “Anatolian Muslimhood: humanising capitalism?” (29 October 2008)
Mustafa Kibaroglu, "Turkey-Israel relations after Gaza" (26 January 2009)
Hakan Altinay, "Recep Tayyip Erdogan: the Mandela test" (17 March 2009)
Gunes Murat Tezcur, "Turkey in transition: reality and image" (24 April 2009)
Carsten Wieland, “Turkey's political-emotional transition” (6 October 2009)
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, “Armenia and Turkey: forgetting genocide” (12 October 2009)
Vicken Cheterian, “Armenia-Turkey: genocide, blockade, diplomacy” (13 October 2009)
Kerem Oktem, “Turkey and Israel: ends and beginnings” (10 December 2009)
The long war on stop and search,
In 2003, two people were stopped and searched outside London’s Excel Centre and prevented from attending a peaceful protest against the arms fair taking place inside. Journalist Pennie Quinton was forced to stop filming despite showing her press card, and Kevin Gillian was stopped for 20 minutes when riding his bike.
Together with pressure group Liberty, the pair refused to accept this horribly commonplace police interference and challenged the government over the legal basis for this stop and search – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
The case went through several defeats in the domestic courts, but in January 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the use of Section 44 violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to privacy.
“I was personally quite confident – I seemed to be the only one,” laughs Corinna Ferguson, Liberty’s legal officer on the case. “Logically when you’ve lost every attempt in the domestic courts then there’s not much grounds to be confident in the European Court, but we always said that the House of Lords judgment was wrong and took a particularly narrow view of the concept of privacy.”
If the ruling had simply found against the government then it would not have caused such a big stir, but the ruling was broad and heavily critical of the government. The court held that “the safeguards provided by domestic law have not been demonstrated to constitute a real curb on the wide powers afforded to the executive, so as to offer the individual adequate protection against arbitrary interference.”
The court added that “there is a clear risk of arbitrariness in the grant of such a broad discretion to the police officer.” Powers under Section 44 were “neither sufficiently circumscribed nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse.”
Though couched in legal language it was a dressing down of the government over the sweeping powers granted to the police under Section 44.
Problems of scope and scaleThe main problem was not necessarily even the concept of stop and search without suspicion, which even Liberty feels maybe necessary in certain extreme cases, but the sweeping way in which Section 44 was applied.
The 28 days for which an area could be covered under a Section 44 order – enabling police to stop and search people there without suspicion – became increasingly irrelevant as areas were simply re-designated to provide rolling coverage.
Through the litigation it also emerged that areas as large as Greater London were designated on the quiet.
The often intimidating nature of these stop and searches also meant that people rarely knew what power they were being stopped and searched under, and had little prospect of redress if they felt it was unfair.
The authorisation process for a Section 44 order is sketchy – oral consent can be given and then later confirmed in writing, and authorisation only has to come from a rank of Assistant Chief Constable or above.
Authorisation for Section 44 currently rests on the fact that it is “expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”. According to the ECtHR ruling however, “expedient means no more than ‘advantageous’ or ‘helpful’.
“There is no requirement at the authorisation stage that the stop and search power be considered ‘necessary’ and therefore no requirement of any assessment of the proportionality of the measure.”
The Metropolitan Police and eleven other police forces make, and have made, regular use of the power; it seemed to become a regular tool of policing, replacing stop and search with suspicion. From 33,177 stop and searches nationwide in 2004 to 117,200 four years later, the increase was meteoric.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said that despite the ruling, “the use of stop and search powers under Section 43 and 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 remains an important tactic in our counter terrorism strategy.
“The threat remains real and serious and stop and search can deter and disrupt terrorist activity and create a hostile environment for terrorists.”
There has been a notable lack of progress of any stripe from these stop and searches. Nationally from April to June 2009, during the Met’s reduction in use of the power, 36,060 people were searched. Of those only 29 were processed further, breaking down into just three charged, 14 released and 14 ‘other’ (normally cautioned).
Race statisticsAn even more unfortunate feature of the stop and searches was that black and Asian men were between five and seven times more likely to get stopped under the powers.
Following the attempted attack on the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Haymarket in 2007, the number of black people searched went up 322 per cent and the number of Asian people searched went up 277 per cent, compared to a 185 per cent rise for white people.
This has had a very divisive effect. Lord Carlile, the government’s reviewer of anti terror legalisation, said during a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank: “Section 44 continues to have a disproportionately bad effect on community relations, with the often inaccurate but genuinely felt belief that it is used in a discriminatory way.”
Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has reduced operational use of the powers, starting in April 2009. From January to March that year there were 61,954 stop and searches, from April to June 36,060 took place, and from July to September just 29,396 were carried out.
“Refined tactics were introduced across the Met in July 2009,” a Scotland Yard spokesman told The Samosa, adding: “This means that Section 44 powers are now only deployed at pre-identified significant locations such as iconic sites and crowded places, and when specific operations have been agreed for specific areas.”
Former Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair defended the need for powers allowing stop and search without suspicion. In his Comment is Free blog in the Guardian he wrote: “The whole point of Section 44 is that that is not required: this is a process akin to an airport search, designed to make clear to terrorists that they are risk, however covert their behaviour of being searched and having their details logged at random.”
But as Liberty’s Corinna Ferguson passionately explains: “The power to stop and search without any suspicion is something that is not in accordance with traditional notions of policing in this country where normally you have to have reasonable suspicion if you’re going to bother someone who is going about their normal business.”
The road aheadDespite the government losing the case of Gillian and Quinton, the first thing to point out is that the judgment will not have an immediate effect; the government has until 12th April to lodge an appeal.
“Stop and search under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is an important tool in the package of measures in the ongoing fight against terrorism,” a Home Office spokesman told The Samosa.
“We are disappointed with the European Court of Human Rights ruling in this case as we won on these challenges in the UK courts including the House of Lords. We are considering the judgement and will seek to appeal.
“Pending the outcome of this appeal the police will continue to have this power available to them.”
Corinna Ferguson, legal officer for pressure group Liberty on the case, said: “There are some grounds for optimism here in that there’s been a fair amount of support from the Metropolitan Police for our campaign as it were, because they agree it’s been over used and it’s become a sort of everyday policing tool.
“Police are human beings and they can quite readily understand that if they’re stopping people without reason that’s likely to be a problem for many people. They would rather it was tightened up and there was less resulting criticism of them.”
Legal and government sources have suggested that the appeal is unlikely to succeed. Ferguson agreed, saying that the government’s chances are “pretty slim”.
“It’s not actually strictly speaking an appeal, but they can ask the European Court to refer the case to the Grand Chamber and then you get 17 judges, rather than seven looking at it.
“Out of 47 judges in the entire court you normally only have a seven-judge court, so only the most important cases are actually referred to the Grand Chamber.”
She smiled and added: “I would be quite surprised if it went to the Grand Chamber. If it does though, we’ll fight it and I’m pretty confident we would win.”
Ideal worldsLiberty has presented amendments to the Crime and Security Bill currently making its way through the Commons, which seek to address the problems with the current law.
Oral authorisation for stop and search would be scrapped, and only written authorisation from the area’s most senior officer, rather than an Assistant Chief Constable, would be acceptable. The powers would be limited to a square kilometre area, and more than six continuous renewals would require a statement to parliament explaining the necessity.
To make it more open and accountable, the police would also be required to publish notification of stop and search.
The document says that government foot-dragging on the issue will mean “that we will continue to see the law used in a clumsy and discriminatory way.”
These considerations may be swept away by new developments.
What if the appeal fails?Lord Carlile, a Liberal Democrat peer, is the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation. Though he believes Liberty’s complaints, especially the geographical area issue, “weren’t germane to the real issue”, he has been critical of the way that Section 44 was used.
At a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank he said: “The power given by Section 44 continues to have a disproportionately bad effect on community relations, with the often inaccurate but genuinely felt belief that it is used in a discriminatory way. It has certainly been used in some instances without reason, let along suspicion.”
“Nothing changes pending the appeal,” he told The Samosa, “so at the moment we are looking what would happen if the Grand Chamber confirmed the Court’s ruling.”
He has confirmed however that should the appeal fail the most likely government course would be to use beefed up Section 43 powers. The powers, with the added allowance to search vehicles, work on “reasonable suspicion” rather than Section 44’s “without suspicion”.
According to the Metropolitan Police it has also become their preferred stop and search power, after Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson reduced the operational use of section 44 from April 2009.
Lord Carlile said that this would still leave the police sufficient powers, and that stop and search without suspicion would only “focus around an iconic event, eg an FA Cup Final, or critical national infrastructure, for example Parliament or major power stations.”
Section 44 could then be repealed or it could remain on the statute books and simply be derogated to Section 43.
The police already have a wide range of stop and search powers, under the Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) for example, but Lord Carlile wholeheartedly supports the government position that “counter-terrorism stop and search powers are absolutely necessary because of the very nature of the terrorism.
“For example, they [the police] may not have firm evidence but the situation on the ground provides suspicion. The PACE powers are simply insufficient.”
A beefed up Section 43 would still provide a sweeping power to stop and search, but the key point is that it removes the “without suspicion” clause. Liberty’s Corinna Ferguson said that she thought Section 43 was “unlikely to generate as many complaints because it’s unlikely to be used nearly as often.
“If you’re can demonstrate that you were stopped and searched without suspicion you at least have the option of appeal.”
Political issueThere is a final political dimension to this legal wrangling; if an appeal were granted, by the time it came through then there may be a new, possibly Conservative, government.
After the European Court ruling in January, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling told the Guardian: “We have long said that anti-terror laws should not be used as a way of conducting normal, day to day policing.”
Grayling refused to comment on the new developments or the future of section 44 under a Tory administration, so the depth of Conservative support for stop and search without suspicion is difficult to gauge.
They could drop an appeal and accept the court’s original ruling, or simply ignore it and drag the situation out.
ConclusionTo many people this will seem like an argument about the fine print of legislation, but it’s the fine print that affects many people. “With” and “without” suspicion seem nit-pickingly difficult to quantify, but they are important. That the Met Police is willing to scale back the use of Section 44 - one of the most powerful pieces of legislation it can use - seems tacit admission that Section 44 is a divisive power which targets certain communities and is counterproductive to fighting terrorism.
Liberty is encouraging anyone who has been stopped and searched under Section 44 to send it details of the incident. You can find a link to an incident report form at the top right hand side of Liberty's website here.
oD-wide classification Country: UK Topics: Democracy and government Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomVirtual worlds: disappearance through pervasiveness,
But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?
The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.
Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. I have been working with them since the text muds, for over 15 years, which doesn’t exactly put me in the true old dino category where Richard Bartle and Randy Farmer reside, but I think it is fair to say that I have been closely identified with the space for a long long time now.
And I think that they aren’t over, but the form that they have taken is.
Most of the classic definitions of virtual worlds have centered around the following:
- a simulation of places
- synchronous user interaction
- users represented by avatars
In addition to these, a cluster of common features, some from games but not all, have come to be tightly associated with the medium — more as praxis than because they are intrinsic to the form. Examples include:
- pseudonymity, aka “handles”
- formal group identity, aka guilds
- numerically quantified reputation, aka ratings, rankings, and reputation systems
- publicly visible profile data, often including abstracted historical activity, aka levels and achievements — and equipment and avatar clothing
- formalized user roles, aka classes and skills — and also “gods” versus “players”
- in-world dispute resolution and customer service
- a fairly common assumption of malleability of environment
- strong tie interdependence via things like group and party dynamics and live chat
Farm Town - a true massively multiplayer Facebook farming game
It’s hard to think of virtual worlds where these elements are not included to some degree. And yet, the commonest mental model of a virtual world is probably still best articulated as “a non-real place that exists independent of my imagination.” The common element here is that Second Life, Star Trek Online, whatever — they are there even when I am not, thanks to the computer simulation. Whereas countless other imaginary worlds, both simulated and not, do not have that sense of independent existence — worlds ranging from a detailed simulation as in Half-Life 2, or even a local Renaissance Faire, do not provide that sense.
There’s a reason why Facebook labels games like Farmville, which are completely lacking in synchronous avatar-based interaction, as “virtual world games” on their games directory page. Farmville meets this test via the same manner that something like Animal Crossing did — it doesn’t run a continuous real-time simulation, but it sure feels like it does to a user. And both Farmville and Animal Crossing feel like they are worlds with independent existence.
In fact, many of the competitors to Farmville do in fact offer avatars and “massively multiplayer” spaces. YoVille is the most obvious example of a true virtual world on Facebook, but there are others, including some in the farming genre such as Farm Town, which offers a true massively multiplayer marketplace area where users can go to chat. (Except they don’t chat… more on that later.)
But it’s clearly not the majority. Yet.
A lot of the praxis around virtual worlds — and indeed, games in general — has been co-opted by social media. Enough, in fact, that we are starting to see worry that too much has been co-opted. And I can’t really complain, since I have done my share of evangelizing this stuff to web people!
- Formal group identity is taken to a level well beyond that of the typical virtual world on social networks. (We’ve been saying for years that we should support multiple guild membership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)… check out the typical number of groups a Facebook user belongs to…)
- Points and quantified reputation are rampant. Arguably, excessive.
- Similarly, publicly visible profile data has become the defining characteristic of much of the social web. Facebook is a collection of “avatar” pages where you can browse only one’s clothing, achievements, guild memberships, and skills — in a manner of speaking.
- Formalized user roles are also the norm, on the admin-vs-user level.
- And perhaps most pleasantly, malleability of environment is also a key characteristic. Even the most simplistic of farming games on Facebook ranks higher on the “affect your world” scale than World of Warcraft does… and this sort of personalization of the environment is standard not only in social games but across the social web today.
But just as telling are the parts of the praxis that are left out. Let’s take a look at some of these practices and what has happened to them:
Pseudonymity is taking a lot of hits lately. Not only does Facebook insist on real identities, but we have seen Second Life moving to having real life profile data alongside the pseudonym — in the new viewer, your profile shows both of them, right next to each other. And today, Twitter (still pseudonymous) started rolling out discovery via real identity as well:
Today, Twitter took the wraps off a new feature of the site. When logging in, it prompts the user to set defaults on being discovered with their email address or mobile phone number. It’s called “Be Found on Twitter”. Our contact at Twitter told us that, like many new features, this will show up for some users today and others soon.
– ReadWriteWeb, “Be Found on Twitter: Connecting Our Dots in the Social Graph”
The pressure is towards real life identities instead. In fact, towards singular identities. Speaking as someone who consciously ditched pseudonymous handles a few years ago, this was inevitable once you had a sufficiently connected set of databases. And really, the strong ties implicit in virtual worlds have been always been pushing towards real life ties — it’s even in the Laws, so it’s a phenomenon recognized for over a decade now.
I just got done writing the other day about how placeness is a feature and not the point. Given that placeness is the chief characteristic of virtual worlds, this is a bit of a blow to the traditional conception of virtual worlds as a destination. One characteristic of a social-game-as-virtual-world (or indeed, non-placey things that people like labelling as “virtual-world-like” that really aren’t worlds at all, such as Twitter, and so on) is that they are not destinations in their own right; they are being seen as adjuncts to other activities.
The part of formalized user roles that is best described as the class system is outright gone. Classes are essentially a game system oriented around forcing people into strong-tie teams for synchronous activity. They are the same game mechanic as having a quarterback, a linebacker, and a kicker, or players on offense and defense. They are about complementarity.
But the social web has evolved into more of a classless system, in the end, perhaps because teams with rigid roles have always been a very artificial construct. It may be that the social games will start to include this sort of mechanic, but… I am unsure they will, given that…
Weak ties have supplanted strong ties as the default social link. Asynchronicity rules the roost, not real-time interaction. Real-time is a feature, a perk, something used occasionally. It’s not the norm.
It is hard to overstate how big a deal this is.
So what’s left for virtual worlds? Two of the three key elements in the definition have fallen out of favor in a lot of ways, and the common practices around the last one have been co-opted in radically different forms.
The principal places where virtual worlds offer benefits over these flatter means of participation will have to do with preserving spaces where these qualities can still occur. Applications where:
- placeness is intrinsic (and herein lie the things that many Second Life advocates argue for, such as academic uses involving 3D visualization, or artistic expression that requires 3D)
- pseudonymity is intrinsic (such as anything involving identity exploration, artificial roles, and wish fulfillment)
- synchronous interaction and strong ties are intrinsic (team activities, real-time problem-solving, real-time social activities)
The most obvious answer is games.
Any application where you can “pick two” will likely migrate away from virtual worlds, because the presence of the third is a barrier, not a benefit.
Kids’ Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) are thriving because they don’t use strong ties (they don’t use chat!).
Roleplaying forums on sites like Gaia and Deviant Art are doing well because the barriers implicit in heavy representations of placeness are absent.
Something like Second Life struggles to gain mainstream adoption because flatter pseudo-places can offer so much of what it does, and the very real benefits it offers are only benefits to a segment of the audience that wants either the pseudonymity, the placeness, or the chat.
And Facebook games? Hey, there’s a place that feels like a world, strongly weak-tie driven, without pseudonymity issues, and yet they carry with them all that praxis, all that other stuff that was elaboration on the core virtual world concept. It’s like a virtual world, “with the bad bits removed” — which is, of course, a phrase we have heard before, when discussing why World of Warcraft does so much better than the other MMORPGs.
Instead, I think we will see the co-option process continue. These flatter environments will learn to use placeness, pseudonymity, and synchronicity and strong ties as features. Then they will fall perfectly into the technical definition of “a virtual world.” But when we connect to them, we’ll have trouble recognizing it, because they won’t be the defining features.
They will be add-ons to the core experience — which will be worldy in the imaginary sense, not the simulation sense. Arguably, worldy in the real sense, because by then, these “connected society applications” will partake deeply of the real world.
Short form: virtual worlds are dead, long live the world, virtual. And it isn’t the picture that we painted for ourselves, as we thought about the way in which virtual worlds would evolve, all those dreams of richer simulations and Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that talk to you, of simulated societies and of immersive experiences.
But it doesn’t mean virtual worlds are over. They are metamorphosing, and like a caterpillar, on the path to mass market acceptance, they are shedding the excess legs and creepy worm-like looks in favour of something that doesn’t much resemble what it sprang from, but which a lot more people will like. And which will be a bit harder to pin down.
This change is bigger than the addition of graphics, bigger than the shift to AAA games, bigger than the shift towards kids’ worlds, and bigger and more complex than the use of web clients (though web clients are an inescapable and intrinsic element of the change).
It may not be the last change. It may be that the prevailing currents away from these things change — it happened now, it will happen again. It may be that as tech barriers fall, placeness becomes easy; or that the privacy pendulum swings back the other way and pseudonymity comes back to the Internet.
In the meantime, I would be betting against all the “native client” worlds — AAA game worlds included. Against anything that involves too much of a fantasy identity. Against anything that relies on people playing together in real time. It’s just not where the action is for the next several years. Virtual places as they exist now cannot be a mass medium any more than a single restaurant can.
For those of us who dream of a place we can’t possibly be, doing things we couldn’t do, as someone else, with friends… well, we’re a little bit out of luck. We’ll always have our Avalons and our Lost Worlds. They’re just not the future anymore.
Sideboxes Sidebox:This article originally appeared as a post on Raph Koster's website.
Related stories: Click to harvest Facebook is the message inside humanity's envelope oD-wide classification Topics: InternetEfforts to revive middle east peace talks overshadowed by Israeli settlement construction in east Jerusalem,
US Vice-President Joe Biden is meeting Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, in Ramallah on Wednesday in a visit aimed at reviving lapsed Israeli-Palestinian talks. The initiative comes a day after Biden condemned Israel's announcement of 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem.
The Israeli interior ministry's announcement of the new housing units drew sharp criticism from Biden and came only hours after he had personally met with and congratulated President Benjamin Netanyahu for 'taking risks for peace.' Biden had stressed the close relationship that binds Israel and the US, stressing Washington's commitment to Israel's security in an attempt to allay fears surrounding Iran's nuclear programme.
After learning of the housing announcement later on Tuesday however, Biden condemned the ill-timed move to expand the east Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo, adding that it undermined the trust needed to restart negotiations in the region. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is expected to visit Israel and the occupied territories later this month, echoed Biden's sentiments and reiterated that settlements are illegal under international law.
The Palestinian Authority welcomed Biden's strongly worded rebuke and said that Israeli actions undermined confidence in the prospects of a lasting political settlement. Mahmoud Abbas has refused to enter into direct negotiations with Israel until it puts a stop to settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem. On Wednesday, Israel apologised for the timing of the announcement but not for its substance, insisting that the government's ten month moratorium announced in November last year on the construction of housing units in the West Bank does not apply to Jerusalem. Leaders from Arab states are scheduled to meet in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss a response to the Israeli decision to build homes in the Ramat Shlomo neighbourhood.
The openSecurity verdict: The timing of Israel’s announcement to continue with settlement expansion in east Jerusalem is highly damaging and embarrassing for the Obama administration. Israeli officials maintain that discussions surrounding the authorisation of new housing units in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo have been underway for three years. The Israeli interior minister, Eli Yishai, insists that the timing of the announcement was not politically motivated and that he would have postponed the relevant district committee's authorisation to avoid ‘provoking anyone.’ But according to the BBC’s middle east editor, Jeremy Bowen, Biden's rebuke suggests that the US government has not accepted Israel’s defence of the announcement as part of a normal bureaucratic process that bears no connection with Biden’s visit.
Palestinians meanwhile will see the expansion of Ramat Shlomo as further evidence of Israel’s refusal to put an end to the relentless growth of illegal settlements. The recent announcement by Israel will only add to the cycle of mistrust and exacerbate frustrations among members of the PLO, who will have to compromise their demands for a complete freeze in construction if they wish to sit down at the negotiating table. On Monday for instance, Israel announced the construction of 112 new homes in the ultra-orthodox settlement of Beitar Illit. Israel insists that these housing units were approved before the one year moratorium on new builds was announced in November last year.
The rapid expansion of settlements continues to infuriate Palestinians, who see it as an attempt to squeeze them out of their homeland and undermine the existence of the Palestinian state. Repeated disturbances at the al-Aqsa mosque threaten to spark a wider uprising if fruitless negotiations discredit the PLO. Biden's visit to the Ramallah on Wednesday could not come at a better time for the Palestinians who will no doubt stress that the Netanyahu government is not serious when it says it wants peace. In the game of one-upmanship, in which both the Israelis and Palestinians are keen to disprove and undermine the others intentions about wanting peace, the decision to expand the settlement of Ramat Shlomo has played into the hands of Palestinians eager to win over a comparably sympathetic US administration.
Israel has been repeatedly criticised for only engaging in token measures that give the appearance of harsh restrictions but turn a blind eye to illegal settler activity and construction. So far, the Israeli government has approved thousands of housing units and public buildings beyond the green line that divides east and west Jerusalem. Some point to similarities between settler development and expansion in Jerusalem and Hebron, a city where combative settlers operate with near-impunity.
Acknowledging the 'Hebronisation' underway in Jerusalem, last month Chatham House published a report in which it stated that the 'cost of failure in Jerusalem is very high' and that 'current Israeli policies of segregation and exclusivity are leading to the 'warehousing' of Palestinian residents of the city and the abandonment of neighbourhoods.' It pointed to the insecurity and mistrust fostered as a result of Israel favouring divisive groups and the inability of Palestinians to obtain building permits from Israeli authorities. What happens in Jerusalem is key to the peace process in the middle east sincea successfully negotiated agreement between Israelis and Palestinians will be contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and Israeli access to Jewish holy sites. This latest row has created unwelcome difficulties for the Obama administration, for whom a general Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement would mark a significant achievement.
Tibet marks anniversary of 1959 uprising
China has tightened security in Tibet ahead of Wednesday's anniversary marking a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 and bloody riots in 2008. The Times reports that hundreds of Tibetans have been held in a pre-emptive crackdown by the authorities. Armed paramilitaries are reportedly patrolling the streets in a bid to avoid a repeat of the anti-Chinese riots that broke out two years ago. A moratorium is in place on the issue of travel permits required by all non-Chinese wanting to visit the area.
In a speech marking the anniversary, the Dalai Lama accused China of trying to 'annihilate Buddhism', adding that 'whether the Chinese government acknowledges it or not, there is a serious problem in Tibet.' In addition, the Dalai Lama expressed his solidarity with the Uighurs, an ethnic minority in China's troubled Xinjiang province. He referred to the Xinjiang province as 'East Turkestan', a name given to it by pro-independence allies, no doubt further antagonising Beijing. China has accused Dalai Lama of fomenting separatist sentiment and unrest in the Tibetan region.
Ahmadinejad in Afghanistan for talks
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived for talks with his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, on Wednesday as US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates departed following a three-day visit to the country. Early on Wednesday, Gates accused Iran of playing a 'double game' in Afghanistan whereby it professes support for Karzai's government but tries to undermine the US-led military involvement. Speaking to reporters shortly before his departure, Gates said that Washington wanted Kabul to have 'good relations with all its neighbours' but that these neighbours needed to 'play an up front game' when dealing with Karzai's government.
At a joint press conference later on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad accused the US of playing a ‘double game’, adding that foreign military presence was not a recipe for peace in Afghanistan. He voiced criticism of the US military build-up in the country, saying ‘your country is located on the other side of the world, so what are you doing here?’ Later on Wednesday, Hamid Karzai is expected to visit Pakistan to meet the leadership of another crucial stakeholder in the region.
Governor of Plateau State blames Nigerian army for killings
Plateau State Governor Jonah John Jang has blamed the Nigerian army for last Sunday's killings near the city of Jos which left nearly 500 people dead. Jang claims that the military failed to take action on the intelligence he provided about suspicious people with weapons hours before the violence began. The army's response to the violence has also been criticised after it was revealed that they took two hours to react after receiving a distress call. The army has so far not responded to the criticisms. Yesterday Plateu’s state government announced the arrest of 100 suspects in connection with Sunday’s attacks.
Elsewhere, hundreds of Nigerians protested in Abuja on Wednesday to demand the appearance of Umar Yar'Adua, the country's ailing leader. Yar'Adua returned from Saudi Arabia two weeks ago after undergoing three months of treatment in Jeddah for a heart condition. The 58-year-old leader however has not been seen in public since, adding to fresh concerns and doubt over his capacity to lead his troubled nation.
Aung San Suu Kyi barred from polls
A new election law announced by the Burmese government has barred Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's detained opposition leader, from standing in elections expected later this year. Under the terms of the Political Parties Registration Law, announced on Wednesday, anyone convicted of a crime cannot join a political party and therefore contest elections. The move will include Suu Kyi who has spent 15 years in detention and is now serving 18 months in house detention for breaching security laws.
The new law will mean that up to 2,000 political prisoners, many of whom are members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), will be excluded and barred from standing in elections. Reuter’s reports that most opposition parties refuse to recognise the new constitution, claiming it is part of a broader effort to cement the military's grip on power. Whilst an election is expected later this year, there has been no announcement of the official date. The NLD has not said that it will run in the elections.
Aid workers killed in Pakistan
Unidentified gunmen attacked the offices of the American Christian charity World Vision in Pakistan on Wednesday, killing six people and wounding several others. The attack took place in the town of Ogi, a district situated in the North West Frontier Province which has been a recipient of long-term relief following the October 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which left more than 70,000 people dead. World Vision has announced that it is suspending all its operations in Pakistan, adding that those who targeted humanitarian workers were killing 'people seeking to improve the lives of victims of poverty and injustice.' The Taliban, who have in the past issued statements saying such organisations are working against Islam, are widely suspected of being behind the attack.
oD-wide classification Country: Israel Afghanistan Iran Tibet China Nigeria Myanmar Pakistan United States City: Jerusalem Topics: Conflict Democracy and government International politics Section style: openSecurity Sections to display in: openSecurityThe Tories get the burglar vote...,
...according to this Labour attack ad:
So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...
1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.
<!--break-->2) It goes without saying that the burglar into whose mouth Labour puts the arguments of its opponents is a straw man - there can rarely have been so definitive an example of one! Would the advert have been so persuasive had it featured a stronger opponent, such as Henry Porter or for that matter the European Court of Human Rights?
3) Criminals aren't necessarily the only ones worried about the new system, either. Yesterday's Metro reported that fears of being added to the database are reducing organ and blood donations.
4) Last but not least, the attack dishonestly suggests that Labour's DNA database covers only criminals, whereas it in fact includes 850,000 people who should still be presumed innocent as Guy Aitchison eloquently explained ;here at OurKingdom:
Their new campaign site offers six reasons why we should stick to nurse, one of which is the "Tories on DNA". It quotes Chris Sims, ACPO lead on forensic science and West Midlands Chief Constable, who is "absolutely certain" there are cases where removing "un-convicted people" from the DNA database would have meant there would be "quiet serious crimes that weren't saved by police and offenders who could still be out there committing further serious offences."
That the Labour party should so loudly trumpet its contempt for personal privacy and the presumption of innocence, parading its violation of the European Court on Human Rights ruling on DNA retention as one of the top six reasons to vote for it, tells you everything you need to know about its attitude to civil liberties and the rule of law. If the Tories were in power, we are told, nasty horrible "un-convicted" people would be running around everywhere committing crimes.
Un-convicted. Un-con-vic-ted. Didn't we use to have another word for that at one time before we became suspects to be tagged, tracked and monitored? And did it not underpin some legal principle of one kind or another generally thought essential to a free society? Clearly I'm getting muddled up. Un-convicted people are just people who haven't been convicted. Yet. They will be. Just so long as the Tories aren't there to give them back their DNA.
(Credit due to the invaluable Big Brother Watch for pointing to several of these facts.)
oD-wide classification Country: UK Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomGrozny: Rebuilt, Fearful and (Almost) Forgotten by the West,
The year 2010 is already well under way. Spring is not far off, but the centre of Grozny is still bathed in the New Year illuminations. It’s about 9 in the evening and a friend from “Memorial” and I, both here for work, are walking along the main street, which is today called Putin Prospect. Multi-coloured fairy lights twinkle and shop windows blaze.
We are faced with a very complicated problem: we need to buy a pair of tights. The shops are still open, but the purchase turns out to be an unreal quest. The place is awash in foreign cosmetics. Posh leather, bags, coats, boots – take your pick, though when you see the prices you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming. But when you ask for a pair of tights, the young sales girls titter disdainfully, tapping their stiletto heels on the highly polished floor impatiently. Putin Prospect is clearly not meant for people with everyday needs.
We lose heart and go into a dark café, where we sit down on a comfortable red sofa and have a coffee. Pop music is playing, but not too loud, and bright images flash across the huge, modern flat screen TV. There’s a choice of espresso, cappuccino, mocha, latte or Viennese coffee with whipped cream. As we sip the hot foam out of china cups, for a moment we lose any sense of where we are. The stored memories of years bear no relation to the Chechen capital today. Grozny is now a completely different city.
But, most important, Natasha isn’t here. Coming to terms with this is proving completely impossible. For those of us who came to Grozny to work, Memorial’s Natasha Estemirova was an integral part of both the work and the city. We stayed at her flat and spent whole nights sitting up in the kitchen talking. We helped her little daughter with homework, rushed all over Chechnya together, spent nights in villages and tried to heave out of the impassable mud our car that had got stuck there.
Now, as we wander about the city, we seem to see Natasha’s perennial black coat just round the corner or hear her rapid, impatient talk. We have to wrench ourselves back to the present so as not to call out to her. How can Natasha be here if two hours ago we were standing in the Koshkeldi village cemetery and, following local tradition, putting our palms on the snowy mound so that up there in heaven the dead person would somehow feel our touch and know that she isn’t forgotten?
She can’t be here, because when we got back from the cemetery we suddenly realised that it was exactly 7 months ago that she was killed. We’ll never see her, never hear her again or spend the night in the one bedroom on the tenth floor of that high-rise in Hippodrome Street. We can't bear to go back there. This was where Natasha was bundled into a car, right at the bus stop, and driven away to be shot…. On 28 February she would have been 52, but this birthday went uncelebrated.
We ought to go back to Grozny, ought to try and get used to working there without Natasha and stop looking for her silhouette. And it's not only Natasha who isn't there: several close friends and relatives had to be sent abroad quickly, because they themselves were under threat. For us the new Grozny without so many dear friends has become a ghost town, more terrible somehow than when it lay in ruins.
We come out of the café and go to meet another «guest» of Grozny, who by sheer coincidence is in the city at the same time. Lord Judd, all the way from Britain, is waiting for us in the recently completed new hotel Arena City.
Frank Judd is an iconic figure in these parts. From 1999 to 2003 he was rapporteur on the situation in Chechnya for the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE). During that period Lord Judd, with commendable enthusiasm, came to war-torn Grozny nine times. He had meetings with victims and civil activists, people from «Memorial» and, indeed, with Natasha…. Judd accused Russia of some of the worst human rights violations that were the hallmark of that war: kidnapping, murdering civilians and torture.
In 2003 the Kremlin carried out a referendum in Chechnya on the new constitution, which would confirm the country as a constituent republic of the Russian Federation. Judd declared that the vote had been rigged: of all the people he had seen «no one had even read the draft Constitution», people were herded into the polling stations by force, often simply putting their signature on the voting paper. At that point Lord Judd stood down as a sign of protest. Since then he has tried to come to Chechnya many times, but the Russian authorities have not seen fit to let him do so. Now, after 7 years, he has managed to get to Grozny as the head of a tiny delegation from the UK Parliament.
Lord Judd and his parliamentary colleagues have already been driven through the brightly lit city centre and are animatedly discussing their impressions. It's one thing to hear about the reconstruction of Chechnya, but quite another to see it for real. Still, the exalted guests are not interested in the miracles of reconstruction only, so for the next three hours we try to answer all their questions. Judd continued to follow events in the region even though he stopped coming here. Last year he said on Radio Liberty: «If there is some kind of stability there, it's the stability of tyranny: Chechnya is still awash with fear, anxiety and intimidation..». Now he wouldn't mind being disabused of some of these unflattering opinions, but we have no grounds for that.
We tell him about the paralysing fear, that people are afraid to say anything against the authorities and that on the whole relatives of people kidnapped by law enforcement and security agencies under President Kadyrov's de facto control no longer even complain because any attempt to seek justice by talking to journalists or appealing to the General Prosecutor can have irreversible consequences for the whole family. Members of alleged militants' families are persecuted. They are beaten up, their houses burnt down and their sons kidnapped. Collective punishment and extrajudicial executions are promoted on Chechen TV by the highest-ranking officials in the republic.
We talk of «Memorial» and how the organisation has been courageous enough to speak out about these crimes. Local authorities heap vicious criticism on it. The Human Rights Ombudsman for Chechnya is particularly vitriolic. We try to explain about the total legal vacuum and the situation where the only rules that work are the President's. The federal centre turns a blind eye to his oral instructions that contravene Russian legislation. Investigators from the prosecutor’s office working on abduction cases tend to refuse to question rank-and-file servicemen of the Oil Regiment or the Patrol and Inspection Brigade, which are known as particularly close to the president. The reason given is that the servicemen wouldn’t show up anyway and might even beat up the investigators for daring to summon them in the first place.
Last November «Memorial», which had suspended work in Chechnya after Natasha was murdered, was trying to decide whether it should reopen its office there. Russian human rights organisations started sending people to Grozny to work in a coordinated mobile group on a shift system. People came in on rotation from various regions of Russia. They undertook the most dangerous case, just like the ones that Natasha had been working on. The group’s help enabled «Memorial» to open up again with some sort of support on the ground. It is dealing with six ongoing cases, all to do with people who disappeared in the second half of 2009. It carries out independent investigations and demands that essential investigative work be done by competent authorities. It goes to court to fight illegal refusals to appeals and tries to protect clients who have taken the risk of fighting a legal battle to find out what happened to their disappeared relatives.
We promise to bring some of these to people to meet the good Lord Judd and his colleagues the next day, so they can see for themselves and hear it from the horse's mouth, as it were. Most important, the British parliamentarians are meeting Ramzan Kadyrov tomorrow evening, so they will be able to ask him specific questions about these cases.
One of the cases involves the top brass of the infamous Oil Regiment and another the Shali District Department of Internal Affairs. Just about a week ago, the leadership of the Shali police detained three members of the coordinated mobile group and kept them hanging about all night with questions about what they were actually doing in Chechnya and why they were poking their noses into other people's business.
The third case concerns the disappearance of Anti Zeylanov, who was accidentally discovered by his relatives in Achkhoi-Maratan Hospital with gunshot wounds and hastily removed by unidentified law-enforcement officials to an unknown location. Natasha Estemirova was working on this case during the last week of her life. Another case is that of a local staff member of the Danish Refugee Council, Zarema Gaisanova, who was kidnapped and disappeared at the time of the special operation in Grozny which, according to official police reports, was personally supervised by the President.
The British parliamentarians' programme was changed at the last moment, most probably not by chance. They rang up and asked us to make the meetings with the relatives in the «Memorial» office several hours earlier. We somehow managed to get everyone there. The women were crying and asking for something to be done and for the issue to be raised in conversation with Kadyrov. Kidnap victims are sometimes released after several months, so their hope is that perhaps their children are still alive.
Seventy-year old Danilbek Askhabov was beaten up by the Shali police right in the village square. He was presented with the bloody corpse of his son, who had been shot for being a militant, and he refused to disown him. Two months later, in August 2009, members of the secret service took away his second son, Abdul-Ezit, who also disappeared. «He's partially sighted, almost blind. He couldn’t possibly be involved in anything. What did they take him for?» asked the old man, with eyes only for Judd, a man the same age as himself. «If I'm completely honest, I think the West has a lot to do with it. Do you know why? Because the West turned a blind eye to all this from the beginning of the war. It continues to do so now and gives us no protection. After all, it's your responsibility too. Help us – or take us all away from here..»
Lord Judd made no promises to take anyone away, which would be outside his sphere of competence, but he did promise that he would discuss what he had heard with the President and that he would talk tough. But there was no talk. Ramzan Kadyrov suddenly cancelled his meeting with the British visitors. He was obviously too busy for unpleasant questions.
Tanya Lokshina is Russian researcher for Human Rights Watch
Sideboxes 'Read On' Sidebox:
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/russia/chechnya/
http://www.chechnyaadvocacy.org/media.html
Gilligan Emma, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in the War, Princeton University Press 2009
Politkovskaya Anna, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Chicago University Press, new edition 2007
Related stories: Natalia Estemirova, champion of ordinary Chechens Natalya Estemirova: kidnapped and murdered Chechnya: the torchings oD-wide classification Country: Russia Topics: Civil society Section style: oD Russia Sections to display in: oD RussiaMPs WANTED: FOR CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY,
Power2010's campaign to bring change to UK politics is stepping up a gear.
With just a few weeks left until a general election is announced, it's time to call out those MPs who have consistently stood against reform of our democracy preferring the corrupt, top-down politics of the past.
If we want a reforming Parliament and a new politics out of the next election we need to ensure the people who want to represent us take seriously the need for change.
That means identifying who the main culprits are amongst sitting MPs.
You know the ones. The dinosaurs in Parliament who tell us reform isn't needed, whilst clinging to their perks and privileges; the MPs who never miss a chance to vote away our civil liberties, whilst telling us it's for our own good.
We want to hear about MPs from any party who have stood against reform and the spirit and ideas embodied in the five-point Power Pledge drawn up with the participation of tens thousands of people across the country.
Our aim is for a list of MPs from all major parties who we will then call out for their "crimes against democracy" and launch major campaigns in their constituencies, highlighting their poor record on democratic reform and civil liberties.
Nominate your MP and we may just end up paying them a visit - you can nominate them here or write their name in the comments.
Ex-minister Tony McNulty is first in our sights.
The former minister, who resigned in disgrace last year following allegations over his expenses, is a well-known champion of the government's unpopular ID card scheme and an opponent of a transparent Parliament.
In June 2009 the MP for Harrow East resigned having claimed expenses on a second home, occupied by his parents, just 8 miles away from his primary residence. He had previously supported MPs' bid to keep their expenses secret by exempting Parliament from freedom of information.
Power2010 volunteers and organisers are planning to descend on Harrow East, beginning next week, plastering "Wanted for crimes against democracy" posters across town, whilst thousands of "swing" voters in the constituency will receive targeted campaign literature highlighting his opposition to a cleaned up reformed politics.
You'll be hearing more about the campaign in Harrow East in the days to come, but for now we want to know who should be next after McNulty.
Who are the main roadblocks to reform, from any party, who we should pay a visit to?
Nominate an MP through our website or write their name here in the comments.
oD-wide classification Topics: Democracy and government Section style: OurKingdom Sections to display in: OurKingdomComment moderation - technical glitch,
Apologies to those of you who have commented in the last twenty four hours and seen your comments disappear. We have had a rare site-wide technical mishap which means that many of the comments from the last day have been deleted. Commenting from now on should be fine so please do continue to leave comments. Many thanks for your patience.
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