COUNTRIES AT THE CROSSROADS GOVERNANCE BLOG

The SSSC: Syria's Rule of Law Black Hole

The Syrian court system recently came into the limelight with a detailed report issued by Human Rights Watch focused specifically on the notorious Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), which prompted a re-examination of Syria by a number of European newspapers such as the Guardian. The primary shift inducing this re-examination is the latest “thaw” in relations between Syria and the western world, and the fear that the power of foreigners to alter Syria’s internal conduct remains uncertain but is likely quite limited. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has received a number of very high-profile visitors, including John Kerry, Nicolas Sarkozy, and various EU foreign ministers, yet he continues to judge that due to realpolitik considerations Syria’s external relations will remain the focus of diplomatic engagement. Thus can Bashar continue to defy calls for domestic liberalization, be it political, economic, or social.

The HRW report maintains that the court, which was founded during the state of emergency declared in 1963 and is the lead instrument in Syria’s persecution efforts, continues to incapacitate the rule of law in Syria. More specifically, the SSSC is utilized as political tool to suppress the opposition and political minorities through the use of unjust trials.Coupled with Syria’s emergency decrees, the SSSC is authorized to take any civilian into its military-style system, where any rights the defendant may theoretically have had quickly disappear. The court is exempt from Syria’s rules of criminal procedure. Furthermore, SSSC decisions cannot be appealed to any higher judicial body – a requirement under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Syria became a signatory in 1969. Due to the fact that the SSSC was created as an exceptional court, it is accountable solely to the Minister of the Interior.

The frightening amount of power delegated to the court has had serious ramifications for the rule of law. Where the SSSC is concerned, respect for the equality before the law simply does not exist. In fact, the SSSC has been utilized almost exclusively to attack and punish political opponents through the exercise of arbitrary justice. First and foremost, the SSSC has been used to target ‘Islamists,’ but recently the state has set its sights on political activists, including journalists and bloggers. In doing so, the state has ardently attacked freedom of expression in the country.

Persecution of political and human rights activist by the state broadly falls into four classifications: Article 278 is evoked when acts and/or speeches (supposedly) expose Syria to aggressive acts; Article 285 is cited when people (supposedly) weaken national sentiment; Article 286 is evoked for (supposedly) spreading false information that in turn weakens national sentiment; and Article 307 is used for inciting strife between various domestic groups.

Of the recent arrests, the highest profile were those of twelve pro-democracy activists detained last year for having taken part in an anti-government coalition. Habib Saleh received three years for ‘weakening national sentiment’ under Article 285 and ‘broadcasting false or exaggerated news which could affect the morale of the country’ – Article 286. The evidence used against him was a number of internet articles on domestic political issues. Mohammed Amin al-Shawa and nine other men were arrested by military intelligence in August, and five months later, still in military custody, al-Shawa died from torture.

Even the scope of arrests has widened. In the last year even mildly insulting the state, president, or government officials in private conversations, with no political involvement from any party, warrants three year jail sentences.

For the Kurds – 9% of the population – the situation is even direr. The Kurds have been frequently attacked through the SSSC and the greater justice system. The state does not even pretend to serve their needs, and the Kurds’ persecution is conducted on various levels. According to the Human Rights Watch report, the SSSC frequently convicts Kurdish citizens on charges of undertaking “acts, speeches, writings or other means to cut-off part of Syrian land to join it to another country.” Several Kurds have received this sentence after protesting in favor of expanding the rights awarded by the Syrian government to the traditionally marginalized and repressed Kurdish population. This conduct is particularly extreme considering that Syria’s Kurds do not partake in the fierce Islamism the state considers its greatest internal security threat. Both of the most recent Kurdish victims in the state’s judicial system, Hassam Hussein and Mustafa Jum’ah, were arrested for exercising their right to freedom of expression and association; neither are bellicose advocates of violent secession – the Syrian state’s primary fear from its Kurdish community. They are merely members of the Kurdish political party: however, as the ruling Ba’ath party is the sole party allowed to operate in Syria, all others are classified as illegal organizations.

Due to the fact that the SSSC exists mainly to carry out these political purges, due process guarantees are foreign concepts within its walls. As the 2007 Countries at the Crossroads Report on Syria explains, legal assistance is often denied to those citizens tried in the security courts. According to the Human Rights Watch report, defendants are often detained for months before being informed of the charges against them. In addition, both during and after their trials, defendants are rarely given the opportunity to consult with their lawyers. The experience of the twelve democracy activists mentioned above serves as evidence of this conduct. According to Amnesty International, the twelve were detained without trial and tortured into signing false confessions, while their lawyers were denied access to the accused and vital information was withheld.

The negative consequences that this dismal situation poses for governance are endless. As long as the SSSC lords over Syria’s judicial system, the rule of law will persist in its weak, debilitated state. Political dissidents, ethnic minorities, and ordinary citizens will continue to be held prisoner to a dangerous, compromised system which is dominated by powerful political puppet-masters. As both the Human Rights Watch and the Countries at the Crossroad reports argue, the only effective and permanent solution to the crisis of justice which has plagued Syria in recent years is the dissolution of the SSSC through the revocation of the state of emergency. While this is certainly a tall order, increased international pressure could go a long way towards getting the ball rolling. This will require patient engagement, but also the willingness to move beyond basic realpolitik concerns and challenge the totality of Syrian misconduct, including inside its own borders.

Photo credit: Flickr user madmonk

Turkey's Slow Road Toward EU Rights Standards

In March, Turkey’s state-run Islamic body announced that it would translate the Koran into Kurdish. Kurds, who comprise at least 12 million of Turkey’s 70 million people, are not a recognized minority in the country. Officially, they are not distinct from the Turkish majority, and expressions of cultural uniqueness are banned. They are discriminated against economically, subject to violence, and may even be jailed for using their language in large groups or on paper. The Koran translation step is thus a positive step, but a small one compared with the changes that will be necessary to bring Kurdish rights to acceptable levels.

Since Turkey began EU accession talks began ten years ago, the EU has published convergence requirements that Turkey must meet, and thus far the country has demonstrated at least some efforts to comply. The requirements include measures for the equality and economic inclusion of Kurds, the defense and education of women, drastically reduced persecution and abuse of the press, and significant reductions in violence perpetrated by the security forces. A look at these issues reveals that in each case the reform record is mixed.

On the first issue, although Kurds and other minorities are still not recognized by the government, the government has created a Kurdish-language channel on state television, along with other programming in languages spoken by unrecognized minorities. Establishing a TV network or enabling the translation of religious texts in Kurdish can be done with a wave of a pen from Ankara. Dismantling systemic de facto and de jure discriminations against Kurds cannot. In the early 1920s, as Turkey took the place of the Ottoman Empire, the principal of national unity was the dominating concern, and no linguistic or cultural differentiation was permitted between the country’s Muslim populations. Since then the government has echoed Brazil’s stance: “What racism? There are no races – we are all the same.” In Turkey, a strongly complicating factor has been the existence of a terrorist separatist movement, the PKK, which has been at war with the government for decades. The group’s activity has provided the government with a rationale for its discrimination. In the name of unity, use of the Kurdish language in official communications or political speeches can result in imprisonment, as can public or printed expressions of support – or even sympathy – for the PKK.

Excessive violence and lengthy prison terms are routine facets of Kurdish affairs in Turkey. In December, a journalist was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for writing that the PKK should not be considered a terrorist organization. While this may be morally objectionable – and groups as diverse as NATO and Human Rights Watch feel the same about the PKK – doing so makes for a questionable criminal offense. Also that month, a court decided that making pro-PKK speeches was functionally equivalent to membership, and convicted an MP of being part of a terrorist organization, for which he will serve ten years in prison. Even more shocking was the government’s violent response to last year’s illegal Kurdish New Year celebrations, which left three people dead and others severely beaten. As remains all too typical of police brutality in Turkey, no investigation was ever carried out. The law also permits children as young as 15 to be tried as adults, and in 2006-2007 almost 200 children under 18 were convicted. Despite the efforts of Ankara’s EU accession ministry, the government’s encouragement and condoning of abuses remains well-documented.

With respect to women’s rights, the European Commission’s enlargement commissioner praised a new women’s rights bill, but said it had yet to be implemented in any meaningful way. Women’s rights in Turkey have been subject to similar lip-service improvements, although conditions have improved somewhat. The EC concedes that the legal framework for protecting women’s rights represents real progress. Ankara has had difficulty convincing the rest of the country to follow the law, however. Especially in poorer, rural, religious areas tradition has tended to triumph over law. The ban on “honor killings” – where a woman or girl is killed by her brother or father to cleanse the family after she has been raped or has refused to marry – has resulted in a dramatic increase in so-called suicides, which run from family coercion to murder concealed with the help of local authorities. This is not to say that no progress at all has been made – the existence of these laws is certainly an improvement over their absence, and the gender gap in education has narrowed to 2.3%. Nonetheless, the country has far to travel by both EU and international human rights standards.

As far as media freedom, violence and politically-motivated charges and detentions against journalists and civilians actually increased markedly in 2008. In December, Turkey opened the negotiation chapter with the EU on “information society and media.” This has always been a sensitive topic in Turkey, whose laws on insulting Turkey, Turkishness, the government, or Ataturk have been used to imprison and intimidate countless journalists, authors, and other public figures. According to BIA Media Monitoring, International PEN, and Reporters Without Borders, 2008 saw a marked increase in censorship and charges against writers. The sincerity of Turkey’s commitment to European standards of freedom of speech is thus particularly questionable. Even more disturbing is a fine of nearly $500 million levied by the government on Dogan Media. It is hard not to connect the penalty to Prime Minister Erdogan’s months of verbal attacks on the company, which published detailed accusations of corruption against the PM and his AK party.

As many analysts have noted, Turkey’s hopes of joining the EU anytime in the medium-term seem rather implausible for reasons unrelated to internal rights, including the status of Turkish-controlled Cyprus and the fear of admitting a majority-Muslim state to the EU. However, the Turkish government would certainly help its cause, while at the same time moving toward compliance with international human rights treaties to which it is a party, by continuing the reform process. Some of the aforementioned progress in Ankara is unprecedented – the government has never before guaranteed women’s rights or promoted use of the Kurdish language. Yet they remain superficial. Thus, those concerned with tolerance and pluralism in Turkey must hope that where ethical-moral calls for change have failed, geopolitical interest will be successful.

Returning Hutus are Another Test for Rwandan Justice

In January the Rwandan government took the dramatic step of sending troops to the DRC to aid their former foes’ suppression of the Hutu-comprised Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). The short strategic incursion – already finishing – has had a ripple-effect in the country. Not only was their three-way mission successful in targeting the FDLR, but recently, with renewed vigor, Congolese-UN forces have launched further military operations against the Rwandan Hutus.

Besides bringing clear political and economic benefits to the DRC, the amplified fighting is increasing the rate of Hutu refugees returning to Rwanda. Many of these are forced: the Congolese government has deported nearly 3,000 Hutus – rebels and civilians alike – in the last month. Others are leaving simply because they no longer have a place in the DRC, encouraged by the low-intensity but sustained human rights abuses committed by the Congolese soldiers. The Rwandan government is very actively encouraging the return of Hutus so that it may continue to forge a “post-tribal” Rwandan nation; indeed, it is only now, when the survivors of both sides of the Rwandan genocide have returned, that one can truly learn what the social cost of 1994 and its aftermath has been.

The stories of the returnees are very interesting, and hold a glimpse into what is to come. Hitherto many had been dissuaded from returning by rebel Hutu leaders who told them that the Tutsis in Rwanda would surely kill or imprison them; instead, what has come from the state is a massive education and socialization drive to create ‘Rwandans’ with none of the other classifications that led to the 1994 slaughter. The first step in this process is a stint in one of a series of camps where the returnees at taught how to be citizens of their new nation. Subsequently, they are told to live in mixed villages: Hutus and Tutsis side-by-side. This top-heavy integration process has had limited success in inducing reform, even though some initiatives, such as police officers receiving training in community relations to make them impartial, have been undertaken.

However, the legal system in particular has confounded the government’s efforts to maintain power and build a nationalism-based state while simultaneously suitably punishing those responsible for Rwanda’s notorious recent history. The major issue is the Gacaca court system. This is a community-based tribunal arrangement that was reformulated in 2004 with great power to punish people involved in Rwanda’s civil war. While the courts handed down hundreds of thousands of sentences in a period far faster than the ordinary court system could ever hope to achieve, they are rife with government manipulation, corruption, preferential treatment, and the tolerance of torture. Furthermore, to maintain their hold on power, the Tutsi-led state has effectively silenced evidence given of their own massacres: there have been no prosecutions to date against Rwandan Patriotic Front personnel – now the country’s governing party – and this lack of judicial impartiality is severely hampering efforts at fostering unity. As a result, Amnesty International has specifically called for countries not to extradite people accused of war-crimes currently detained in their countries, stating that they should rather begin the proper legal process themselves.

Many of the Hutus now returning are in a particularly weak position. Their very flight may be viewed as evidence of culpability, even though some portion of those who fled did so due to fear of unjust persecution. Meanwhile, few will be able to muster the resources necessary to defend themselves – or bribe court officials, as so many others have done. With the Gacaca courts scheduled to finish by the summer, treatment of these returning Hutus will serve as one of the final legacies of the system. The debate over whether justice has been achieved – and more broadly, over how much credit President Paul Kagame’s government deserves for reconstruction, given its weak record on democracy – will long rage in Rwanda. In this light, it will be well worth keeping an eye on what happens to these long-exiled returnees. Their fate may well symbolize the success of the reconciliation enterprise more generally.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Boyznberry

Mexico's Calderon, in His Own Words

A new feature on the Crossroads blog will feature translations of governance-related articles from their original foreign language sources. The following translation provides excerpts of a long interview with Mexican president Felipe Calderon published last week by Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper. The interview was conducted by Jorge Zepeda Patterson, El Universal’s editorial director and formerly a very incisive weekly columnist for the paper.

From a governance perspective, several things stand out in the interview. First of all, Zepeda’s questions are very well-targeted and hit on real points of weakness within the Mexican government, including human rights issues, corruption, institutional stagnation, and the question of how political will can be translated into concrete achievements.

Calderon’s answers are of variable quality. He deserves credit for his forthrightness about the scale of the crime problem as well as his dual acknowledgments that institutional reconstruction is necessary and that previous administrations – including that of his National Action Party colleague, Vicente Fox – were overly lax in their attitude toward drug traffickers. However, some of his other answers are suboptimal from a human rights and governance perspective. For instance, while even the most idealistic activist understands that isolated incidents of abuse are inevitable in a conflict on the scale of Mexico’s war against the cartels, Calderon is overly mild in discussing the issue, and in fact comes close to adopting a “to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs” attitude. This is unfortunate: Mexico continues to suffer from severe deficits in human rights, and in 2008 the military received hundreds of complaints from civilians about its actions. Signals matter, and it would have been far more encouraging for the president to firmly state that human rights abuses are unacceptable and will be investigated.

Indeed, this gets at the most significant missing concept in the interview: impunity. One of the key drivers of Mexico’s rule of law problems is the fact that criminals are hardly ever punished for their crimes. Likewise with corruption, which is why Zepeda does well to bring up the embarrassing fact that no major political figure has been convicted of corruption since 1999, a reality that no Mexican would attribute to a newfound zeal for probity among public officials. Calderon’s statement that new institutions are needed is welcome, but it would have been even better had he explicitly noted the obvious thread running between crime, human rights abuses, and corruption: impunity.

The excerpts are long, so the rest can be found below the fold.

Migration: Another Pressure Point for China's System

The global economic crisis that has resulted in 20 million Chinese migrant workers losing their jobs, in combination with the prominence of last summer’s Beijing Olympics, have resulted in somewhat sustained attention to the issue of freedom of movement in China. While the economy was strong and the dollars pouring in, officials were able to occasionally place on the reform agenda the ancient and cumbersome hukou, a household registration system greatly restricting travel and maintaining a huge rural-urban divide (discussed here in January). The strong demand for Chinese goods also served as an incentive to allow millions of migrants to come to urban centers and work factory jobs. No more.

As of 2008, the hukou system continued to deny Chinese migrants public benefits such as education for children and medical care. The government did introduce temporary household registration for migrant workers, but only a small percentage of workers have been able to obtain it. At the Third Plenum of the 17th Party Congress held on October 12, 2008, it was announced that the “old rural-urban divide” can now give way to “a combined development of urban and rural areas.” Recently, some cities, such as Jiaxing City in Zhejiang, abolished the designation of “agricultural households,” and Yunnan province eliminated the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural hukou. Despite the changes, however, critics note that discrimination against migrants in terms of what types of benefits they receive still exists. The recent creation of 20 million jobless migrant laborers and the current lack of an adequate welfare system serve to highlight this fact.

Members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority have been particularly notable victims of movement restrictions: they have faced oppression for years, and existing travel restrictions became even tighter in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics. During this time, Uighurs were discouraged or in some cases, barred from air travel and access to Beijing was limited. Every year during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, Uighur passports are confiscated by the Chinese government, forcing Uighurs to join government-run tours to Mecca, rather than traveling there on their own, which is illegal. Today almost no Uighurs have passports, an especially problematic issue for business owners. Similarly, Tibetans face strict limitations on their movement and are required to have travel permits to leave the areas in which they are registered to live. 

Besides increasing travel restrictions, the Beijing Olympics resulted in forced evictions so that new stadiums could be built. A common estimate, noted in this post, put the number at 1.5 million Chinese moved to make way for Olympic construction, though it notes this has occurred over an eight year period leading up to the games. “Undesirables,” migrants and the homeless were also removed from the city in preparation for the Olympics. In addition, the games were used as a pretext to arrest an estimated 1,500 members of China’s Falun Gong movement. Many members were removed from the sites of Olympic venues and sent to labor camps.

It seems clear that as the financial crisis worsens and attention to reform is diverted, hukou will continue to pose a problem in 2009. Many of the millions of Chinese workers who lost their jobs no longer possess the skills to work in the agriculture sector; in some cases, they simply do not want to return to rural life and its low-paying, backbreaking jobs. The clock is ticking for China to comprehensively enact reforms to ensure that migrant laborers in the cities have access to the same benefits as traditional urban dwellers. If not, the millions of unemployed and bitter migrants may pose a dangerous challenge to Chinese authorities. After all, as has been mentioned innumerable times by advocates of greater democracy in China, the rigidity of the country’s political system means there is little in the way of escape valves – among the most important one in a democratic system being elections and a free press. Without these valves, this may be the moment when the system’s internal contradictions are laid bare.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Kongharald

Another Dark Day for Iranian Justice

On January 20, Iranian doctors Kamyar and Arash Alaei were sentenced to three and six years, respectively, in prison for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Iranian state. The brothers are renowned in the international AIDS-prevention community for their passionate advocacy of harm reduction programs and noted for their apparent patriotism. Two other defendants were also found guilty of plotting to overthrow the state, although the Iranian government refused to reveal their identities.

The Alaei brothers studied in the US, at the schools of public health at SUNY-Albany and Harvard, and have participated in AIDS conferences hosted by institutions such as the Aspen Institute. They are regarded as leaders in the harm reduction approach, and were instrumental in establishing Iran as a world leader in HIV-prevention, according to the UN AIDS program. Their approach confronts two realities about which Iran’s government is in very public denial – homosexuality and drug use. They distribute needles and condoms freely at their clinic, ask no questions, and take no names. In 2006, UN AIDS coordinator Hamid Setayesh praised harm reduction programs in Iran’s prisons, ranking the country among the top ten in the world.

Little has been said by the Iranian government about the crimes that the Alaeis allegedly committed. In August, Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, Hassan Haddad, accused them of training people abroad to promote a velvet revolution. The oddly-phrased accusation of trying to start a “velvet revolution” is one which has frequently been applied to citizens with foreign contacts over the past three years, especially following the (at least initially) successful citizen uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. While promoting democracy, giving unauthorized interviews, or even meeting or accepting funding from pro-democracy organizations are dangerous activities in Iran, the brothers have no known contact with any foreign political organization; they were even described by Physicians for Human Rights’ Sarah Kalloch as highly patriotic and deeply involved in Iranian culture.

The Alaeis’ incarceration and trial was typical of Iran’s inhumane justice system, and their six month pretrial detention was illegal even under the country’s lax laws. Dr. Arash was arrested on charges of communicating with an unnamed “enemy government” on 22 June, and Dr. Kamiar the next day. The trial was not held until 31 December, and they were denied access to their lawyer until that date. At the trial it was announced that they faced secret charges, against which they had neither the time nor the knowledge to prepare a defense. It is now clear that they were secretly charged with trying to overthrow the state. They were convicted in a trial which lasted only half a day, with the sentence announced on 20 January. The conviction was based on the doctors’ alleged confession; in Iran, a confession indicates a high likelihood that the defendant was tortured before the trial. The least bad part of this grim saga is that the doctors only face a few years in Iran’s notorious Evin prison – where political prisoners are deprived of sleep and medical treatment, and housed with violent criminals – rather than the slow and public strangulation by crane that Iran reserves for more serious crimes, like being sixteen and alone with a boy.

The injustices of the Alaeis’ imprisonment represent a laundry list of abuses common to the Iranian system: extended pre-trial detention without access to legal defense; secret proceedings and secret charges; incommunicado incarceration, and likely torture: all are common in the Islamic Republic. The suggestion that these particular individuals, as proud nationalists, were especially unlikely and inappropriate victims of the system only highlights its absurdities. Where justice is skewed, arbitrary and non-transparent, such seemingly farcical outcomes become far more likely. While the authorities doubtless insist that their evidence is sound, the regime’s record is such that any potential benefit of the doubt was ceded long ago. Nor should one overlook the implications of the attack on medical science, which comes only sixteen months after President Ahmadinejad called scientists “shining torches who shed light in order to remove darkness and the ambiguities around us in guiding humanity out of ignorance and perplexity.” In the future, scientists, including American ones that are “officially invited” to share their work with their Iranian counterparts, may decide that they are likely to pay far too high a price for sharing that “divine gift.”

Photo Credit: Flickr user Daniella Zalcman

Peru's Search for Truth and Justice Faces Another Test

Among the principal actors in Peru’s long fight against subversive groups between 1980 and 2000 were the security forces, both police and military. While much of their effort was laudable, it is undeniable that the conflict, which killed over 69,000 people, included grave human rights violations, including massacres, disappearances, rape, and torture, at times committed by agents of the state. Dealing with the conflict’s legacy has long been a thorny issue in Peru. Now a new chapter has opened with the efforts of several lawmakers to promote new amnesty or pardon laws that could lead to the search for justice being subsumed by politics and procedural questions in a way that seriously obscures the truth about the responsibility of state agents for serious human rights violations.

In 2003 Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – considered a model of its kind – presented evidence of atrocities to the relevant judicial authorities. However, the cases have proceeded at a very slow pace, with few convictions and many cases stuck in the preliminary investigation phase. Meanwhile, an influential sector of Peruvian society, including some politicians, journalists, elements of the Catholic Church, and armed forces members, have been claiming in ever-louder voices that the processes represent persecution of the security forces – a form of vengeance by closet subversives who wish to defeat in court the soldiers who won the war.

Considering the tiny number of police and soldiers implicated in human rights violation relative to the overall size of the security force sector, the idea of a generalized persecution is implausible. Those favoring amnesty or pardon have one legitimate complaint: like many Peruvian legal cases, the processes have been very slow. However, as both domestic and international human rights groups constantly point out, the primary cause of the delays is the failure of the very armed forces to deliver the necessary information for the cases to move forward. If they are truly interested in rapid resolution of the cases, an end to stonewalling on information requests is clearly the place to begin.

There are two projects in the congress, both sponsored by members of the ruling APRA party. One would provide amnesty to members of the security forces, and is aimed specifically at those who participated in the liberation of hostages at the Japanese Embassy in 1996, an operation that may have led to extrajudicial killings of many of the hostage-takers. This project is unlikely to prosper as it blatantly violates Peru’s international commitments: under the Inter-American system, crimes against humanity are not subject to amnesty. In addition, the bill’s sponsor was somewhat discredited when he claimed that over 100 ex-soldiers were facing charges, when in reality only 4 notoriously brutal and/or corrupt cronies of ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori are under scrutiny.

The other project, promoted by one of APRA’s most powerful parliamentarians, Mercedes Cabanillas, would establish a pardons commission to evaluate which ex-security force members are being prosecuted on the basis of weak evidence and should therefore have the charges against them dismissed. The logic is that a number of people convicted of being subversives received pardons in the early 2000s. However, a significant number of the thousands who were convicted were undeniably innocent and had been convicted by hooded judges in kangaroo courts. There is no evidence that the processes ex-soldiers currently face are being held under remotely similar anti-defendant conditions.

If this process goes through and a large number of pardons are eventually issued, it will represent a severe setback for human rights, the rule of law, and the fight against impunity in Peru. It will also almost inevitably engender a major fight between human rights groups and the government, both within Peru and in the Inter-American system. Most ironically, many representatives of the soldiers and police under investigation don’t even want to be pardoned or amnestied: they want to prove their innocence in court. This has raised suspicions that the whole point is to benefit high level political operatives who are potentially implicated in human rights cases. The best way to allay such suspicions will be to make sure that whatever bill, if any, that eventually passes puts justice and the armed conflict’s victims ahead of politics and expediency.

Photo Credit: Flickr user moonbird

Same Old Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in Tunisia

Tunisia is widely known for its stunning beaches and plentiful tourist locales. While visitors are delighted by the sunny climate and the wonderful scenery, foreign leaders praise the country’s political stability, its economic performance and its role as faithful ally in the war against against terrorism. But the sunny surface masks a darker political reality in North Africa’s most westernized state.

Conflict in the Niger Delta Simmers on and Flares Up

When President Umaru Yar’Adua came to power a year and a half ago in Nigeria, a country with 140m people speaking some 250 languages, he detailed a seven-point agenda (energy, security, wealth creation, education, land reform, mass transit, and the execution the Niger Delta plan) to propel development via good governance. Topping President Yar’Adua’s agenda was achieving progress in the Niger Delta Region, where 23 percent of Nigerians reside and where instability reigns, with frequent inter-ethnic clashes over the allocation of oil wealth and resources. The Delta has always been a source of conflict: since initial oil deposits were founded in 1956, residents have been paid pittances, lost their lands, and suffered environmental degradation. Though there have been a few encouraging signs of incremental decreases in tensions, the complexity of the problem means that there is still little hope of an imminent resolution.

Guatemala Seeks Answers in a Larger Army

With no end in sight to the lawlessness plaguing Guatemala, the government has unveiled a plan to increase the army from 15,500 to 25,000 soldiers by 2010 in order to combat criminality. Given that the military is blamed for most of the killings during Guatemala’s civil war, which lasted from 1960-1996, this is a somewhat controversial proposition. However, many Guatemalans are so upset by rampant crime that they accept the need for the army’s growth and its internal deployment.