Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Human Rights (Page 33 of 40)

64 words for Aung San Suu Kyi

27 May 2009 / / 6 Comments

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:

On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.

Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project. Citizens of the world are invited to leave a 64 word message for Aung San, in honour of her 64th birthday on 19th June. Alternatively, you can leave a 64 character twitter instead, using the hashtag #assk64.
http://64forsuu.com/
The project is led by the Burma Campaign UK and was created in only six days, which is a remarkable feat. In addition to Salman Rushdie, the site carries messages from Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and George Clooney. Why not add your message, and then let others know that you’ve done so?

Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap

Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap

Doctorow at the Convention on Modern Liberty

17 May 2009 / / 0 Comments

The English PEN evening plenary was a fanastic way to round up the Convention on Modern Liberty.  For me, it was the writer and blogger Cory Doctorow’s contribution that really caught the imagination. With his laptop on his knee, he seemed to be pulling snippets and sound-bites from all corners of Teh Intertubes:

Later, the panel were asked what piece of art had inspired them to think about freedoms and liberty:

So here’s what’s really inspired me about our capacity as a society, to enforce (or rather, claim) the rights that are our due – not that the state gives us, but belong to us from the beginning: Its the rise of internet culture, and the rise, for all the bad and all the good, its the rise of a system in which we are all part of a single dialogue, in which we can make any kind of art, and in which any person can communicate with any other person, without any third party intervening, has given rise to a global dialogue that, I think, beggars the imagination of even the most optimistic philosophers of a generation ago. 
And I mean that literally – you read the science fiction of the 1960s and the closest they come is they think maybe we would have a really good video on demand service with some video-phone on the side.  No-one predicted just how, just, the fantastic Cambrian explosion of genres, of forms, of ideas, and of participation from every corner of the globe, that the Internet has enabled.  And that’s for me, why keeping the network free is the first step to keeping us all free.

Its better in video! Billy Bragg, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy, Henry Porter and English PEN’s President Lisa Appignanesi also answer:
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Lobby the UN for Aung San Suu Kyi

14 May 2009 / / 1 Comment

Activists marked the 12th anniversary of the house arrest of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi by protests outside Chinese embassies worldwide, this one in London. Photo by lewishamdreamer

Activists marked the 12th anniversary of the house arrest of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi by protests outside Chinese embassies worldwide, this one in London. Photo by lewishamdreamer


As any news report worthy of the name will have told you this morning, the Burmese military junta have imprisoned the democracy campaigner and PEN Honorary Member Aung San Suu Kyi. The reason given in an apparent breach of her house arrest conditions, after an American man swam a lake and visited her.  As a correspondent at the Burma Campaign UK HQ just put it to me in an e-mail:

It seems Burma is the only country in the world where you can be sent to jail for someone breaking into your house.

Aung San Suu Kyi was nearing the end of her ‘term’ of house arrest.
The Burma Campaign have a handy form that allows you to quickly lobby the UN Secretary General, asking him to send an envoy.

Filming the Police, Filming Us

16 April 2009 / / 8 Comments

Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009

Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009. Photo by PublicCCTV.


At the CentreRight blog (via LibCon), Graeme Archer has posted some ideas for reform of the police in light of the appalling Ian Tomlinson incident.
He begins

The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state. Some reforms are therefore long overdue

Of the suggestions he lists, I have mixed feelings about this pair:

  • Just as the storage of DNA from wholly innocent citizens is an outrage, so is the routine video-ing of members of the public by police officers. This must stop.
  • In contrast, members of the public must never be prevented from recording the activities of police officers.

I recall a point made by the former pedant Cleanthes, commenting on my Notes for Michael, who cited Robert Peel’s principles for policing:

An agent of the state???? That, Robert, in one succint phrase is the most daming indictment of the damage that has been done to the ethos of the Police over the last few decades.
Read Peel’s Principles here. Especially no.7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Libertarian Ian Parker-Joseph made a similar point in the comments to the CentreRight post.
On the issue of filming, it seems to me we can’t have it both ways. If the police are indeed simply citizens in uniform, then they surely have the same rights to film people in public, as the rest of the citizenry? If we are allowed to film them, surely they should be allowed to film us, no? Placing a different set of restrictions on the police on this issue would violate Peel’s principle.
And before anyone brings up CCTV, Cleanthes and I have already discussed the difference between automated and eyeball policing at The Select Society.

Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre. CC Licence.

Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre.

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