Petition against the Death Penalty in Belarus - Sign

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SAY NO TO THE DEATH PENALTY IN BELARUS - SIGN

Belarus is the last country in Europe and former Soviet Union that is still carrying out the death penalty. Amnesty International, Human Rights Centre “Viasna”, Belarusian Helsinki Committee and other human rights defenders in Belarus oppose the death penalty in all cases without exception. The death penalty is a violation of the right to life, guaranteed by the Constitution of Belarus and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nothing can justify the purposeful and ruthless taking of a human life by State.

The death penalty is a destructive and divisive public policy that has been shown to have no special deterrent effect on crime. It distracts from effective measures being taken against criminality through promoting simplistic responses to complex human problems. It denies the possibility of rehabilitation and reconciliation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim’s family, and extends that suffering to the relatives of the condemned prisoner. Amnesty International, Human Rights Centre “Viasna”, Belarusian Helsinki Committee does not seek to belittle the suffering of the families of murder victims, and recognizes and endorses a government’s duty to protect the rights of all people under its jurisdiction. However, executions are a symptom of a culture of violence rather than a solution to it. By executing a person the state commits a premeditated killing and shows a similar readiness to use physical violence as the criminal.

In Belarus the use of the death penalty is compounded by a flawed criminal justice system that administers capital punishment in a manner that violates international laws and standards pertaining to the death penalty. There is credible evidence that torture and ill-treatment are used to extract “confessions”; condemned prisoners may not have access to effective appeal mechanisms; and the inherently cruel, inhuman and degrading nature of the death penalty is compounded for death row prisoners and their relatives by the secrecy surrounding the death penalty. Neither prisoners nor their families are told the execution date in advance and prisoners must live with the fear that every time their cell door opens they may be taken for execution.

We call on the President and Parliament of Belarus to immediately declare a moratorium on death sentences and executions as a first step towards full abolition of the death penalty.

Europe must not mimic Australia's tough talk on asylum seekers the worst thing it could do now is to start acting like it

The Guardian
Language is not an afterthought or addendum to policy. Increasingly militaristic rhetoric about asylum seekers drives governments in only one direction

An Indonesian police officer carries an exhausted boy during 

a rescue operation after a fishing boat carrying mostly 

asylum seekers to Australia sank off Indonesia's Java

Language is important. Words are powerful, especially when discussing people who have no voice of their own, no place in the debate, and whose identities are shaped by the words others use about them.

The language that is used now by governments to describe asylum seekers who arrive on their borders, is a demonstration of why the debate has become so polarised, so emotive, and so intractable.

The evolution of Australian government language on asylum seekers has been a tortuous one.

In the late 1970s, when the first post-colonial asylum seekers (“boat people”) turned up on Australian shores fleeing conflict in Indochina, the then-immigration minister Michael MacKellar publicly welcomed them, drawing attention to their “harrowing” ordeals in their home country and promising “Australia would offer sanctuary”.

He publicly read statements prepared by the asylum seekers, which asked Australia to “please help us for freedom”.

The issue of asylum, MacKellar and then-foreign minister Andrew Peacock said in a statement, must not be politicised “because the basic question of human suffering involved transcends partisan advantage in an election context … we will not risk taking action against genuine refugees just to get a message across”.

“That would be … utterly inhuman,” they said.

As the 70s drew to a close, and as more boats continued to arrive, public unease with the arrivals began to grow louder. Echoing it, government rhetoric began to change.


Against the backdrop of the success of the Orderly Departure Plan – the multilateral UN-run program which, in 1979, began intercepting boat-borne asylum seekers in their first country of refuge and resettling them all over the world, including Australia – there emerged a sense that for people to turn up on boats was the “wrong” way of arriving.

It was improper if not unlawful, a “soft” invasion of a complacent Australia. New boat-borne arrivals began to be dismissed as “queue jumpers” and “economic migrants”.

In the 1990s, the term “illegal” – previously used to describe a person who had overstayed a visa (still a far larger number) – was re-fashioned to refer to boat arrivals in the country (by now, coming from post-war Cambodia).

It was a crucial semantic shift: the “illegal” construction gave the government the imprimatur, almost the obligation, to enact more punitive policies against asylum seekers.

Australia also saw the introduction of mandatory detention. Originally intended as a temporary policy for time-limited administrative detention, it has since been converted to a permanent policy involving indefinite detention.

Any boat-borne asylum seeker is now referred to as “illegal”. However, Australia is a party to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which affords any person the right to present to the country’s borders – by any means and without a visa – and claim asylum.

In 2001, asylum became terror. Within 48 hours of al-Qaida’s attack on the World Trade Centre, government ministers claimed terror groups were using asylum boats to infiltrate Australia.

Defence minister Peter Reith saidunauthorised boats “can be a pipeline for terrorists”: parliamentary secretary Peter Slipper claimed “there is an undeniable link between illegals and terrorists”.

The government’s most senior security adviser, Asio chief Dennis Richardson, dismissed the concerns as “extremely remote” and said he had “not seen evidence” of terror links – but the rhetoric remained, and consciously so.

The government was anxious to present those coming by boat as an undifferentiated mass (of potential terrorists), not as individual people; the defence department issued a diktat that “no personalising or humanising images” be taken of asylum seekers, lest they find their way into the public domain.

By 2013, the language of asylum had become conflated with that of war: the Australian government was “engaged in a war” with those organising boat journeys.

This became the justification for the government keeping secrets from its own people: “if we were at war we wouldn’t be giving out advice that is of use to the enemy, just because we have an idle curiosity,” Tony Abbott said.

Australia is held up by some as an exemplar of how to deal with asylum seekers – and how to speak about them. The federal government is promoting itself as such. Abbott counselled in April that Europe must “urgently … adopt very strong policies” like Australia’s.

What exactly is Australia offering? Australia’s avowal to stop the boats is untrue. The boats have not stopped, they are still coming, they are still being stopped: 46 Vietnamese asylum seekers were intercepted at sea last month and secretly returned to Vietnam, some reportedly to detention; undenied allegations the crew of an asylum boat travelling to New Zealand were paid (in US dollars) by Australian officials to turn around; a boat forced back to Indonesia crashing and breaking up on a reef.

Offshore processing is mired in scandal – two deaths, including a murder, on Manus Island; allegations Australian workers raped a local woman and were spirited off home to escape prosecution; yet another parliamentary inquiry into child sexual assault and other abuses on Nauru.

And in onshore detention, healthcare failures, hunger-strikes, and deathscontinue to plague a broken, benighted system.

All this, despite Australia only ever dealing with a fraction of the numbers of asylum seekers of European countries. Who would want to buy a suite of policies with these outcomes?
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But the UK and Europe appear to be following the Australian lead. Certainly, they are beginning to sound like Australia.

David Cameron’s “swarms of people” comment this month echoes Australian immigration minister Phillip Ruddock’s warnings years earlier of a “pipeline” of asylum seekers and of “whole villages” bound for Australia.

When Theresa May wrote that most of those on boats in the Mediterranean had come from Eritrea and Somalia as “economic migrants who’ve paid criminal gangs” she used the exact terminology of Australia’s foreign minister Bob Carr three years earlier, who dismissed Tamil asylum seekers as “a whole bunch of … economic migrants”.

The EU, similarly, is adopting militaristic and secretive language to outline its response to irregular migration across the Med.

Leaked documents out of the EU show proposals for a “military operation” to “seek and destroy” boats and “disrupt the migrants smuggling business model”.

It is familiar rhetoric to those who’ve heard a succession of Australian government ministers propound a “military-led border security operation” to “disrupt the people smuggling trade”.

The Australian government has long refused to “comment on operational matters”. The EU is proposing an “information strategy” which includes no information at all: “rescue operations should not be publicised”.

This language is significant. It is not an afterthought or addendum to policy. Rhetoric establishes an agenda. The problem with aggressive, oppositional language – beyond the crude political distortion of a complex global issue – is that it drives policy in only one direction, leaving no option of more humanitarian policies.

Aggressive, militaristic rhetoric constrains governments (or supra-national organisations like the EU), forcing them to respond with aggressive, militaristic action.

The issue of asylum is no longer one of humanitarian responsibility, or international legal obligation. It frames the issue as a threat to national security or a violation of sovereignty.

By speaking in such a way, governments make a rod for their own backs, and are forced, by their own hand, into more and more punitive actions, to make the policies match the threat they’ve created.

Stoking domestic fears of disordered migration is electorally successful, but it leaves governments with few policy options.

Solutions do need to be found to the current crises around the world. Where it can be, order should be brought to the current disorder.

The chaos that has been seen at Calais, the drownings on the Mediterranean, or the forcible push-back of boats in the Andaman are problems too acute to be allowed to continue or reoccur.

And a perfect solution to the world’s forced migration issues may be an impossibility. But governments that believe their unilateral actions can “solve” the problem are being wilfully ignorant. The forces that drive people to move are far greater than any power they have to stop them.

By talking tough against asylum seekers – by abusing and dehumanising them, by casting their movement as some amorphous threat rather than a natural and rational human instinct – political leaders are doing nothing to solve the problem, and are only making it worse.

Europe is starting to sound like Australia on asylum, the worst thing it could do now is to start acting like it.
Guardian journalist Ben Doherty is a 2015 Thomson Reuters Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. During Oxford’s 2015 Trinity term he studied the way governments and the media in Australia have changed the narrative and language around people arriving by boat. His paper, Call me illegal: The semantic struggle over asylum in Australia, can be read here.

History of Europe - 6013 years in 3 minutes - Video

Graph of major refugee-hosting countries mid-2013 no European country

EU must open doors to avoid Syrian refugee catastrophe, says UN

The Guardian
Colin Firth, Michael Palin and Grayson Perry condemn lack of British action over what David Milliband calls 'the defining humanitarian crisis of our time'

The crisis posed by millions of refugees from Syria's civil war flooding into neighbouring countries is becoming a humanitarian and political catastrophe that can only be eased if Europe opens its doors, the UN and European commission have warned.

More than 2.1 million refugees have been registered by the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) in Syria's four neighbouring states; hundreds of thousands more are known to be living outside Syria's borders without access to aid.

The scale of the crisis is perhaps the most acute since the end of the second world war. David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), described the ever-deteriorating situation in Syria as "the defining humanitarian crisis of our time".

The UNHCR, European commission and British Refugee Council have urged EU leaders to acknowledge the exceptional crisis posed by the Syrian civil war and accept the temporary settlement of Syrian refugees inside their borders – relaxing "fortress" policies designed to keep migrants out of Europe.

The UN has issued an urgent call to resettle 30,000 of the most vulnerable Syrians worldwide – a call that remains unmet as the exodus from Syria into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq fast outpaces the capacity to provide for them. The UK government has refused to take part in the resettlement scheme, calling the idea tokenistic and stressing the importance of the £500m of aid it has sent to the region.

António Guterres, UN commissioner for refugees, told the Guardian: "While countries neighbouring the conflict are being asked to keep their borders open, I find it disconcerting how many Syrians struggle to find protection in Europe, with reports of people being pushed back from a number of borders. And all this is happening although the overall numbers are small in comparison – Turkey alone has received 10 times the number of Syrian refugees as all EU member states together.

"I have been repeatedly calling on all countries, particularly in Europe and the extended Middle East, to allow Syrians to access asylum and enjoy quality protection."

Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the European commissioner for home affairs, said member states could not be coerced to accept the resettlement programme, but the commission had offered €6,000 (£5,000) towards every refugee a country accepted. "If all member states would get involved into an EU resettlement exercise and make available a proportionate number of places, we would be able to resettle thousands people more from refugee camps."

The EU has stressed the importance of aid but has resisted sharing the vast burden of refugees. While it has applied enormous pressure on Turkey to keep its borders open – Turkey has so far accepted about 600,000 people – it is working as quickly as possible to create a network of fences, patrols and policies to keep them from entering Europe. The EU has spent millions on border controls between Turkey and Greece.

About 64,000 Syrians – 2.4% of the total number who have fled – have sought asylum in Europe, with 60% of those applications made in Sweden and Germany.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, revealed last week that the UK had taken in 1,500 displaced Syrians through regular asylum routes, but that number falls far short of demands of the UN.

"The neighbouring countries are beyond what in the west would be considered the breaking point," Miliband said. "The refugee influx into Lebanon – more than 800,000 out of a population of 4.5 million – is the equivalent of 60 million people coming to the US. The cost of the crisis to the Lebanese economy alone is estimated by the World Bank at $7.5bn (£4.5bn). It is time for the rest of the world to step up and for the US to lead by example."

Frustrated by the government's position, the Refugee Council has published a strongly worded letter in the Guardian addressed to David Cameron, stating "aid is not enough". The letter – signed by Colin and Livia Firth, Emma Thompson, Michael Palin, Dame Vivienne Westwood, Grayson Perry and Juliet Stevenson – says: "So far, 18 countries have responded by pledging resettlement places for Syrian refugees. We're ashamed Britain isn't one of them."

Vincent Cochetel, the director of UNHCR for Europe, described the UK's response as "timid" and "not good enough". Refugees - Afghanis and Somalis as well as Syrians - fleeing some of the most violent conflicts of our aged are simply being pushed into dangerous, illegal journeys to find safety.

As the inevitable exodus into Jordan, Turkey and the Kurdish north of Iraq continues, so enormous humanitarian demands grow.

The unresolved refugee crisis has been particularly destablising inLebanon, whose fragile sectarian mix is being increasingly unsettled by the influx of primarily Sunni Muslim refugees. The Lebanese government has refused to allow refugee camps or anything resembling a permanent shelter to be constructed on its territory, fearing deeply ingrained sectariantensions will be inflamed.

As the war has intensified, regional backers have increasingly shored up support for their proxies. The Alawite-led regime of Bashar al-Assad is resolutely backed by Iran and Russia, while the predominantly Sunni opposition is supported equally strongly by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and other Gulf states.

Syria has become an unflinching contest for regional supremacy, anchored largely by the ancient regional power struggle between Tehran and Riyadh, but fuelled by more contemporary grievances.

The volatile sectarian power tussle leaves little concern for the health and safety of millions of refugees, the majority of whom are women and children.

"We are talking about people that are in dire need," Maurice Wren, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said, arguing that the British government was being led too strongly by domestic pressures onmigration. "[What] we are seeing from the camps is eye-wateringly scary. It is just not a sustainable environment for people who cannot look out for themselves."

In a cafe in Istanbul, the Guardian found Syrian refugees discussing the response of Europe to the crisis, and the options available to them as a result. Because Turkey offers sanctuary but no permanent residency, refugees cannot work legally. Men in the cafe talk about travelling illegally to countries such as Germany or Sweden, which have very generous policies towards Syrians who make it to their borders. But there are almost no legal routes to either country from Syria or Turkey. At least Britain's position is honest, says one man: "They don't want any Syrians."

One man, Tarek, describes how he has tried and failed three times to cross into Europe through Bulgaria, each time being caught by Bulgarian border guards and "pushed back" into Turkey. If this was on Bulgarian territory, it was a breach of international refugee law. Illegal push backs from Greece and Italy have been widely reported by human rights groups.

This journey has separated Tarek from his wife, Yasmin, who is nine months' pregnant and their four-year-old son.

The Guardian found Yasmin in Harmanli detention camp in Bulgaria where she and her son are living in a portable building with three other families, surviving on one meal a day.

Back in Istanbul, Tarek says he will keep trying to get into Bulgaria to find his wife: "We suffer twice, first in Syria and now as refugees. I feel like I'm fighting the world to be with my family."

Syrians are not alone in their perceptions of the European asylum system as a giant trap. For refugees from across Asia and North Africa, including Afghans, Somalis and Eritreans, it is now almost impossible to appeal for asylum in Europe without travelling illegally along dangerous routes.

Those who do reach Europe are further confined by the Dublinagreement, which stipulates that asylum seekers must remain in their first country of entry, despite the differing conditions that refugees face across the EU. Italy, Greece and Bulgaria have all been widely criticised for their treatment of asylum seekers, but they say their geographical position means they are bearing an unfair share of responsibility for coping with refugee flows.

Cochetel said traumatised refugees were being put at risk by European policy. He argues that there must be wider reform of asylum policy in Europe, as Syria's neighbours cannot be expected to bear the full humanitarian weight of a conflict that offers little hope resolution.

"It's not good enough; its timid," Chochetel said: "Five hundred in France, 10 in Hungary, 90 in Ireland, none in the UK. We need to wake up to the situation. Everybody was hoping for a quick fix, but the reality of the conflict is that we know many people will never go home, not just because their house is gone but because the infrastructure is gone."