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.
Tag: Human Rights (Page 29 of 40)
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. Continue reading
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.