Robert Sharp

Sam Leith on the Bulger killers:

it is precisely when the crimes are terrible that you most need the law. if anyone harmed my daughter, I would want them tortured to death – which is why I am the last person who should sit on thy jury.

This is a point that can never be reinforced enough, and I am glad Leith’s sub-editor chose this turn-of-phrase as the article’s ‘pull’ quote in the print edition of the Evening Standard.

Human Rights are inconvenient and much maligned, as I have said before. I wonder whether they could do with a bit of a freshening up, a rebrand? They are the perfect issue for a Sir Humphrey-style poll, where the phrasing of the question pre-determines the answer. Ask people whether we should strip all rights, protections an anonymity from child killers, many would answer in the affirmative. Ask the same people whether we should introduce Deep South Style lynch-mobs, they would certainly answer in the negative.

Perhaps it’s time for politicians to talk less about ‘Human Rights’ and more about ‘Anti-Lynching’ measures. They would be referring to the same laws, of course, but spun in a way that emphasises their key purpose, which is to maintain a level of human decency in times of intense human emotion and popular outrage.

That, and more comprehensive teching of Human Rights issues in schools, as part of citizenship classes. These principles need to be at the core of what we tell our youngsters about politics.

I was talking about free expression at an event the other day, when the subject of incitement to violence cropped up.  I mentioned the formulation that Aryeh Neier (President of the Open Society Institute) gave at GFFEx last year, regarding whether the person doing the violence agreed with the person whose speech provoked it.

Blasphemy or religious defamation are essentially insults against a person or group of persons on the basis of one’s religious, or it could be another form of group defamation, where one is attacking or insulting members of a particular race or a particular nationality.  But it doesn’t have the effect of inspiring the supports of the speaker to engage in violence; rather it is the opponents of the speaker who might engage in violence.  So hate speech incites; blasphemy and religious defamation provoke.

That seems to me very important.  I think there limited circumstances in which it may be appropriate to punish those who engage in hate speech.  I think there are virtually no circumstances where it is appropriate to punish those who engage in in blasphemy or religious defamation, that is the circumstances in which they have provoked others to attack them.

An interesting retort to this, was to ask whether King Henry V was engaging in incitement to violence when he gives his famous, rousing speech?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

My only response was to suggest that, yes, the French would probably consider Henry’s speech an ‘incitement to violence’ and worthy of censorship, if only they could!  But in practice, such political speech is usually seen as exempt when matters of war and national survival are at stake.  Governments and their populations are usually comfortable with placing extra restrictions on our human rights during times of crisis.

However, there are times when this special exemption might not be as clear cut as we think.  Who, on 14th September 2001, objected to President George W. Bush giving a memorial speech for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre just three days earlier?  Yet it was in that speech that he first used the phrase ‘War on Terror’, a formulation that has become hugely problematic and inciting.  The following week, when America was still reeling from the shock and in need of rousing leadership, the word ‘crusade’ slipped into the President’s remarks, which not only provoked the Islamic world, but certainly had the effect of inciting certain elements of American society to violent, disproportionate action.  The last film I went to see, My Name is Khan, deals with the aftermath of such words.

On Tuesday I was at the demonstration for Simon Singh outside the Royal Courts of Justice.  He is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, and the latest court appearance was an appeal over meaning.

Here’s a slideshow of my photos from outside the court, all with a Creative Commons Licence:

Inside the court, the judges apparently became quite exhasperated with some of the arguments put forward during the hearing. Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship reported first-hand:

Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge said he was “troubled” by the “artificiality” of the case. “The opportunities to put this right have not been taken,” Lord Judge said.

He continued: “At the end of this someone will pay an enormous amount of money, whether it be from Dr Singh’s funds or the funds of BCA subscribers.”

He went on to criticise the BCA’s reluctance to publish evidence to back up claims that chiropractic treatments could treat childhood asthma and other ailments.

“I’m just baffled. If there is reliable evidence, why hasn’t someone published it?”
…
Rogers conceded that had Singh written that there was “no reliable evidence”, the defamation suit might never have happened.

But Lord Justice Sedley suggested “isn’t the first question as to whether something is evidence that it is reliable?”

I see that the assassins of the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh used fake British passports while plotting the deed.  The Daily Mail has an interview with one of the people who had his identity cloned.

A British man in Israel with the same name as an alleged member of a hit squad that assassinated a top Hamas militant in Dubai said his identity had been stolen.

Melvyn Adam Mildiner said he was ‘angry, upset and scared’ over what he called a misidentification.

During the recent debate about MI5 complicity in torture, I noted with dismay how many people used the phrase ‘terror suspects’ quite comfortably when discussing people they might put on a waterboard.  This incident in Dubai is a timely reminder that ‘terror suspects’ covers day-tripping British tourists.  Anyone who endorses torture due to a hypothetical ticking bomb scenario must also endorse the torture of innocent British holiday makers.  That a British tourist might be mistaken for a terrorist is also a hypothetical – but one that is just as probable, if not more probable, than the ticking bomb thought-experiments.

Endorsing the water-boarding of innocent tourist is the only consistent position for those who would justify the torture of other ’suspects’ such as Binyam Mohammed.  It is this internal consistency, taken to its logical conclusion, which highlights the ultimate absurdity of the pro-torture posturing.

I’m sick of people equating ’sleep deprivation’ in the torture/interrogation sense, with the lack of sleep that many people suffer as as a result of their job. The two are incomparable.

My speech at Goldsmiths was part of a wider campaign to make life easier for visiting artists and academics.  The Manifesto Club, who produced the report ‘UK Arts and Culture – Cancelled, by Order of the Home Office‘ have today published a sequel: ‘Fortress Academy‘. This new report looks specifically at the impact of the points-based visa system on universities and their students.

Students were rejected by the UKBA for a variety of trivial reasons, including having written ‘Malaysian’ instead of ‘Malaysia’ under country, or for the colour of the background used in their photograph.

The view from the panel

Last Monday night I spoke on behalf of English PEN alongside Tony Benn at a meeting a Goldsmiths College Student Union, on the problem of the UK’s new points-based visa system.  The system has caused hundreds of writers and artists to be refused entry to the UK, even for short-term visits such as a one-off gig or book launch.  Academics and university support staff are particularly concerned with how the system affects relationships with their students:  The system places new monitoring requirements on professors to log attendance at individual lectures and inform the UK Border Agency of any ’suspicious behaviour’.

It was clear that, at Goldsmiths at least, neither staff nor students support the new measures.  The general mood is that staff should boycott any extra tasks that the UKBA demands they perform.  Many were frustrated that such a boycott is not already in operation.  However, co-ordinating such action – which really amounts to a simple work-to-rule action, because there is nothing about surveillance of students in any staff contract – nevertheless requires organisation and a sense of momentum.

From the floor, we heard the story of a student who has been harassed and harried at every turn in her bid to stay and study at the college.  She has spend over £2,600 in legal costs and ‘fees’ for processing various immigration applications.  The university cannot give her much help, since they do not want to “act as solicitors”, and she even had to represent herself and an immigration tribunal.  The ‘helpline’ she has been given to assist with her problems costs £1.20 per minute to call… and she is frequently put on hold whenver she calls.

Belle Ribeiro, the NUS Black Students officer, said that in general, international students do not get enough support when they come to study in the UK, despite contributing a huge amount in fees.  The new rules that insist that foreign student carry an ID card will mean that BME students are likely to be disproportionately hassled to identify and justify themselves.  And when ID card fraud inevitably occurs, it will be the overseas students who suffer.

My own speech was a jeremiad (hat-tip James Fallows for that word) on how this country was sending itself into a horrible cultural decline.  The approximate text, corrected for grammar and general semantic sense, is reproduced below.   You can check it against an recording.  The Rt. Hon. Tony Benn was also on the panel:  I’ve put an MP3 of his remarks online too. (more…)

The problem of extra-judicial killings of journalists in Mexico is one of the major threats to free expression around the world.  News of fresh violence seems to drop into my PEN inbox with increasing frequency.  In November, I mentioned the case of Bladimir Antuna García, who was “killed for writing too much.”

In The Independent, Terence Blacker warns that complacency in rich countries can help sustain this violence:

Only some of this nastiness can be explained by the poisonous air of the blogosphere. There is now a genuine confusion in the minds of many between the tawdry journalistic froth of our own decadent celebrity society and the courageous investigative reporting happening in countries such as Mexico.

It is vain and self-deluding to believe that the killing of writers in other parts of the world has nothing to do with our own lives and attitudes. As Cacho herself has said, “a corrupt political system is only sustained by a corrupt and complicit culture“.

Exactly three years ago, I attended an event with Clive Stafford-Smith, the Director of Reprieve who has worked with the prisoners at Guantanamo.  I asked him how many of them he thought were innocent:

During the Q&A session, I ask him if he thinks there are any genuine terrorists at the camp. He says there were probably about two or three to begin with. Now there are probably about fourteen, he thinks. The rest have very tenuous evidence against them. Even if some had fought for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in 2001/02, that does not mean they were Al Qaeda operatives, or that they were a genuine threat to western interests.

Now, while I am sure that Stafford-Smith’s claim is based on hard legal analysis, it nevertheless has an anecdotal air when he tells it.  As a long-time activist against the death penalty, and therefore a regular critic of the US Government, it is easy for politicians to pigeon-hole his complaints.  In the cynical merry-go-round of political debate, it is easy to dismiss such claims as the exaggerations of someone trying to win the argument.  A dismissal of the well he would say that wouldn’t he? variety that is tricky to argue against, without sufficent airtime and column inches.

Well, here is some more evidence to back-up Stafford-Smith’s claim.  British journalist Andy Worthington has been compiling The Guantanamo Files, a list of all 779 men who were incarcerated at the prison:

… at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism

And the British Government – a Labour Government, ostensibly on the side of the poor and marginalised around the world – provided succour and support to the Bush Administration as this prison was established and maintained.

Islam4UK want to march through Wooten Basset in a provocative protest against the British presence in Afghanistan. It is, as Dave Osler says on Liberal Conspiracy, a huge “headache” for the principled secular left who want defend free speech. Also at LibCon, Scepticisle points out that Anjem Choudry, who leads Islam4UK, is a “media troll” who is being deliberately provocative.  He wants to provoke a violent reaction, and the best course of action is to not give him one.  This means allowing the march to proceed, however offensive the message.  The small numbers it will attract will demonstrate just how fringe and ridiculous Choudry and his ideas actually are.

I’m surprised by the illiberal line taken by James Alexander at Progress:

This planned event will turn to violence and lead to a counter-response by the English Defence League. Then the BNP will begin to stir up divisions in the surrounding localities.

Even if you disagree with the actions of the brave soldiers who fight to protect British security, it is wrong to antagonise the families of the fallen. This is hateful and evil. I am writing to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson MP, to call for Islam4UK to be also banned.

I don’t buy into the meme that a provocative march will necessarily be met with violence from outraged Britons.  Politicians and public figures should seize this as a ‘teaching moment’ and now use their influence to condemn in advance such actions, and inspire people to a more tolerant approach.  Gordon Brown has failed to do this so far.

Alexander’s Progress piece seems to have been seized upon by the sort of comments that one usually sees on tabloid comment boards.  I’ve just posted my own comment which sums up what I think:

I disagree with James Alexander … in suggesting that the Islam4UK march should be banned. That would be anti-free speech. If our troops are fighting for anything in Afghanistan, it is human rights, including the right to free expression (something sadly lacking in that country at the moment). The greatest tribute to our soldiers, living and fallen, would be to maintain our principles consistently at home and abroad: This means allowing the Islam4UK march.

The idea that the British people en mass cannot control themselves when confronted with a sorry band of Islamists is ridiculous and divisive. Locals and others who disagree with Islam4UK’s ridiculous ideas are perfectly capable of staging a bigger, peaceful counter-march, without any of the pathetic threats of violence that the other commenters here are so keen to see realised. It is this, and only this course of action that is consistent with the British spirit of tolerance and democracy. Progress members should be using their power and influence to bring this course of action about. Anything less is to sink towards the level of the fundamentalists.

A Wootten Basset memorial procession, 17th Nov 2009. Photo by Robin Hodson on Flickr.