Iran offers IAEA full oversight over its nuclear effort
Voltaire Network – 7 September 2011

Iran is prepared to give the International Atomic Energy Agency “full supervision” of its nuclear programme for five years if UN sanctions are lifted.

“We have proposed that the agency keep Iran’s activities and nuclear programme under full supervision for five years, providing the sanctions are lifted,” the nuclear chief, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, told ISNA news agency on Monday.

Iran is under four sets of UN Security Council sanctions over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment amid international fears that it seeks to build a nuclear weapon – a charge Tehran flatly denies. …source

Bahraini Opposition Figure Discloses Al-Khalifa Torturing Techniques against Revolutionaries
8/29/2011 1:26:17 AM

LONDON (BF)- Ali al-Mashima’, the son of Bahrain’s renowned opposition leader Hassan al-Mashima’, said various torturing techniques are used in the al-Khalifa prisons to extract information and punish the revolutionary forces, and revealed that Bahrain’s prince has a direct role in the torturing and interrogation of the detainees.

“Nasser, the son of the Bahraini king is involved in the torturing of the detainees and this has been revealed and proved to us,” Ali al-Mashima’ told BF on Sunday.

He also reiterated that Sheikh Mohammad al-Meghdad and Sheikh al-Mahrous, two of the opposition leaders, have confirmed the presence of Nasser al-Khalifa in the process of their interrogation and torturing.

Bahrainis have been waging protest rallies since mid-February, demanding an end to the Al Khalifa dynasty, which has ruled the country for over 40 years.

Violence against the defenseless people escalated after a Saudi-led conglomerate of police, security and military forces from the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) member states were dispatched to the tiny kingdom on March 13 to help Manama crack down on peaceful protestors.

Scores of people have been killed and hundreds more arrested in a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in Bahrain, home to a huge American military installation for the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Rights activists in Bahrain have repeatedly said that the government’s harsh tactics and intimidation against opposition forces cannot smother the popular uprising in the Persian Gulf country.

People are being tortured, kidnapped, sexually harassed and assaulted, houses being stolen and raided, villages being raided, and worshipping places are being demolished, the human rights activists reported.

Also, the Muslim Women Movement in a recent statement protested at the brutal and cruel behavior of the Bahraini regime towards women in the country, and revealed that the Al-Khalifa regime has imprisoned innocent pregnant women in horrible dungeons.

“They keep pregnant women in terrifying prisons, martyr their husbands under torture and attack people’s homes at night and create panic and horror,” the statement said in April, addressing UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moo. …source

Detained blogger Abduljalil Al-Singace on hunger strike
Published on Tuesday 6 September 2011. Reporters without Borders

Several detainees in Gurayn military prison, including the blogger Adbuljalil Al-Singace, have begun a hunger strike and have issued a joint letter denouncing their imprisonment and the frequency of arbitrary detention and unfair trials in Bahrain.

Singace, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court on 22 June, is suffering from various ailments affecting his mobility. Reporters Without Borders is very worried about his physical condition and urges the authorities to free him and all the other prisoners of conscience.

The Bahraini authorities lifted a state of emergency in 1 June and began a national dialogue on 1 July. They also announced that cases of civilians pended trial by court martial would transferred to civilian courts. But the convictions of civilians already handed down by military courts were never reviewed.

Bahrain was ranked 144th out of 178 countries in the press freedom index that Reporters Without Borders published in October 2010. It was also included in the “countries under surveillance” in the latest Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet.”

One blogger sentenced to life imprisonment, another to 15 years in jail
22.06.2011

Reporters Without Borders is shocked by the long jail sentences that a military court passed today on 21 activists accused of belonging to terrorist organizations and trying to overthrow the government. Eight of them, including human rights activist and blogger Abduljalil Al-Singace, got life sentences. Thirteen others received sentences ranging from two to 15 years in prison. Ali Abdulemam, a blogger who was tried in absentia, was given 15 years.

“The only crime committed by Abdulemam and Al-Singace was freely expressing opinions contrary to those of the government,” Reporters Without Borders said. “These sentences, handed down at the end of trail that flouted defence rights, are typical of the intransigence that the authorities have been showing towards those identified as government opponents, who have borne the full brunt of their repression. The international community must call the government to account on its strategy of stifling all dissent.”

The head of the pro-democracy and civil liberties movement Al Haq, Singace was rearrested on 16 March after being held from September to February. He was previously arrested in 2009 for allegedly trying to destabilize the government because he used his blog (http://alsingace.katib.org) to denounce the deplorable state of civil liberties and discrimination against Bahrain’s Shiite population.

Abdulemam is regarded by fellow Bahrainis as one of his country’s Internet pioneers and is an active member of Bahrain Online, a pro-democracy forum that gets more than 100,000 visitors a day despite being blocked within Bahrain. A contributor to the international bloggers network Global Voices, he has taken part in many international conferences at which he has denounced human rights violations in Bahrain. He was also detained from September to February but avoided being rearrested and has been in hiding for several months.

Human rights activists reported many irregularities during this trial and have been calling for an end to trials before special military courts now that the state of emergency has been lifted. According to the defendants themselves or their families, some of the defendants were tortured or mistreated while in detention. …source

Front Line Defenders welcomes news that the 12 health professionals who have been on hunger strike in Bahrain for almost two weeks will be released tonight.
Posted on 2011/09/07

Front Line Defenders welcomes news that the 12 health professionals who have been on hunger strike in Bahrain for almost two weeks will be released tonight. “Not before Time” says Front Line Executive Director Mary Lawlor.
Further Information

NEWS FLASH FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DUBLIN -O7- 09- 2011

Welcoming the release of the doctors Front Line Executive Director Mary Lawlor said “ Not before time – It is a travesty of justice that health professionals who had simply honoured their hippocratic oath by providing emergency medical treatment to injured demonstrators should be arrested, tortured and tried before a military court. Their release offers some hope that the Government of Bahrain may at last be willing to address the many legitimate concerns raised by human rights defenders in Bahrain”

As the hunger strike entered its second week concern had mounted that the health of several of the doctors had reached a critical stage.

Three of the 12, Dr Ali Al Ekri, Dr Ghassan Daif and Dr Basim Daif studied at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin

The doctors launched a hunger strike last week in protest at their conditions of detention and the outrageous charges against them. All three were arbitrarily detained, held in incommunicado detention, reportedly tortured, denied access to their families for 2 months and forced to confess under duress. These “confessions” were videotaped while they were blindfolded and are being used in evidence against them. Additionally, Dr Ghassan’s wife Dr Zahra Alsammak, who also studied in Dublin, was detained for 25 days and is also facing charges.

The arrests of the medics took place as part of the violent government response to the demonstrations for political reform which took place in February and March and during which health professionals who had provided medical care to injured demonstrators were arrested and charged with attempts to undermine the authority of the King and the government.

Despite this good news Front Line Defenders remains concerned that the charges against them still stand and that the trials will continue before a military court in which the defendants are denied the opportunity to present witnesses for the defence or to question witnesses for the prosecution. The organisation is continuing to press for the release of all human rights defenders currently in detention, including Front Line’s former Protection Coordinator for the Middle East Abdulhadi Al Khawaja who was sentenced to life imprisonment. Front Line is also calling for all charges to be dropped against blogger Ali Abduleman who was sentened to 15 years imprisonment in absentia. …source

Dark clouds over Bahrain
Posted By Kristian Coates Ulrichsen Tuesday, September 6, 2011 – Foreign Policy Mag.

The killing of a 14-year-old boy by police on the island of Sitra on Aug. 31 has reignited simmering tensions in Bahrain. Ali Jawad Ahmad died while attending an Eid al-Fitr demonstration, one of numerous flashpoints in the daily confrontations between anti-government protesters and the security services. His death triggered widespread protests that rapidly spread to most Shiite villages on the Bahraini archipelago. Some 10,000 people attended his funeral and repeated calls for the overthrow of the ruling Al-Khalifa family. Groups of demonstrators also returned to central Manama where they attempted to reclaim the site of Pearl Roundabout — now a traffic junction after it was bulldozed by the regime in March. Riot police beat them back with tear gas, but the symbolism of the attempted return to the heart of the pro-democracy movement that threatened to topple the Al-Khalifa in March was clear.

Ali’s death and the reactions to it underline once more how Bahraini society remains polarised as never before. Following the lifting of martial law on June 1, King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa convened a National Dialogue and created an ostensibly independent investigation into the springtime unrest. Through these initiatives, the government hoped to begin a process of reconciliation and reach a consensual settlement with the opposition. However, their flawed implementation widened the chasm between the Al-Khalifa and their opponents by casting serious doubt on the credibility of the commitment to political reform. The impasse undercuts goodwill and moderate opinion on both sides while entrenching hard-line attitudes and mutual distrust.
[Read more →]

unconfirmed but reliable tweet – Military court orders release of all the doctors and medical staff on hunger strike in Bahrain and case postponed until the 26th September

cb editor: while good and welcome news, the victory will be in dismissal of charges and release of all opposition leadership and other prisoners of conscience. The question remains can the al Khalifa regime repent, cede absolute power, make genuine concessions toward democratic rule and actually advert a revolution where all sides can leave Bahrain reasonably in tact? The world is wating on you to “do the right thing” King Hamad.

The Democratization of Repression
By Joseph Marks and Aliya Sternstein – 09/06/11 05:46 pm ET – Tech Insider nextgov

Stanford University’s Evgeny Morozov published an interesting New York Times Op Ed Thursday about Western companies’ sales of Internet surveillance technology to the Libyan and Egyptian governments and to other repressive regimes.

Morozov charges that the U.S. and other Western governments are complicit in these sales because many of the surveillance tools were initially developed for sale to Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Here’s his prescription:

“What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically — even if it is checked by the legal system — is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on the domestic surveillance-technology sector, including a reconsideration of the extent to which it actually needs such technology in our increasingly privacy-free world.”

He continues:

“As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western surveillance tools could undermine the “Internet freedom” agenda in the same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments again?”

That conundrum put us in mind of the Cold War debates about selling advanced war planes and arms to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Greece, Turkey, India, Pakistan and, yes, Egypt too.

The argument then was between doves, who charged that the supposedly peace-promoting U.S. had become the world’s chief supplier of deadly arms and often — as in the case of India and Pakistan — was supplying both sides in a bloody conflict, and hawks, who said if the U.S. didn’t sell arms to those countries then the Soviet Union surely would and would gain a strategic advantage in the process.

With spying technology now as with traditional weapons technology then, it seems, the U.S. is fated to arm both sides. The State Department and other government agencies have devoted substantial sums to promoting anonymity software that allows activists and others to surf online without being tracked by their governments.

Global power over new technology has democratized since the Cold War era, though.

An implicit — and accurate — presumption by both sides during the 1970s and 1980s was that developing advanced aircraft, such as the F-15 fighter jet, was beyond the capacity of any nations save the two global superpowers and a few European allies. In other words, if Western nations had abandoned their advanced weapons or refused to share them, the genie might have been, for a few years at least, put back in the bottle.

But Internet surveillance technology is no F-15. Nor, for that matter, is it even an iPad 2. Hacking groups have proved fully adept not just at busting into government’s surveillance technology but also at deploying their own.

At the same time, the civil liberties groups Witness.org and The Guardian Project have collaborated on a camera app for distributing evidence of human rights abuses that will automatically blur protesters’ faces, strip internal data identifying who owns the device and trigger other anonymizing mechanisms to protect dissidents.

Even opponents of stateside domestic surveillance realize that policy cannot keep up with the evolution of tracking-technologies.

As Michael German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says in an Al-Jazeera report: “We have a perfect storm where technology has outpaced how the law protects individual privacy. The law hasn’t been updated, even though much of our lives are spent in an electronic world.”

Leaving aside the morality of domestic surveillance in the West — and of Western companies’ complicity in repressive states’ surveillance — it’s not at all clear that a Western commitment to forswear new surveillance technology could do much more than delay its development elsewhere.

If the conflict between spying states and their citizens is inevitable, the United States may have better luck developing new anonymity tools for citizens of repressive states than denying surveillance technology to their oppressors. …source

Bahrain : Fears that National Safety Appeal Court proceedings violate international human rights standards
7 September 2011 – fidh

On September 6, 2011 the 21 political leaders and human rights activists sentenced on June 22nd to harsh prison sentences appeared before the National Safety Appeal Court.
At the close of this first and penultimate hearing, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) expresses its utmost concern with regard to proceedings, which once again disregard fair trial guarantees, and reiterates its call for the immediate and unconditional release of these activists, and for the end of the proceedings against them, due to the arbitrary nature of these charges and of the entire proceedings.

« According to the information received, this last hearing demonstrates that the Bahraini judiciary cares nothing for the international human rights obligations and commitments of the government of Bahrain. While the judge of the National Safety Appeal Court (NSAC) has rejected all requests of the defence lawyers and, among others, those pertaining to impartial investigation into reports of torture and ill-treatment made by several defendants, he tarnishes once more the credibility of the judiciary » stated Souhayr Belhassen, President of FIDH [1]. FIDH is concerned that lawyers were given only one week to prepare and submit their appeal defense. Such a short notice comes in contradiction with the right to adequate time to prepare defense. In addition, the right to full access to the case file should be granted to the defendants lawyers. The publicity of debates has not been fully guaranteed, as visas have been denied by the Bahraini authorities to FIDH delegates who were given a mandate to monitor and assess the conformity of the trial with relevant international standards. The final verdict will be pronounced on September 28.

This hearing was the first in the appeal launched by 21 political leaders and human rights activists who were given harsh sentences (including life imprisonment) on June 22, 2011. They have been brought to trial before an exceptional court, the National Safety Court of First Instance (NSC), under charges of ”organising and managing a terrorist organisation”, “attempt to overthrow the government by force and in liaison with a terrorist organisation working for a foreign country,” and the “collection of money for a terrorist group” [2]. FIDH and other international human rights organisations have repeatedly denounced what they consider to be politically motivated charges. Moreover, violations of fair trial guarantees have been documented throughout the proceedings before the NSC, which was established to try people accused of crimes committed under the state of emergency.

“In addition to failing to guarantee the most basics of fair trial, the Judiciary dodges today the issue of deciding on the legality and even constitutionality of the Royal Decree (decree no. “28” 2011), which has reversed a previous decision and allows again the prosecution of these defendants before an exceptional court.” added Souhayr Belhassen.

Consequent to the lifting of the State of Emergency on July 1, the King of Bahrain issued a Royal Order that stated that all cases tried before the NSC would be transferred to ordinary courts, putting an end to prosecuting civilians before exceptional courts, a practice which contravenes international standards. However, this decision has been reversed with the adoption of Decree no. “28” 2011. According to this, it has been announced that several cases, including the present case, will be retransferred before the National Safety Courts. The defendants’ lawyers in this case, as well as those in charge of the defence of 20 medics also arbitrary prosecuted as it seems that charges against them mainly aimed at sanctioning them for exercing their professional duty or expressing opinion [3] have challenged the constitutionality of this decree. While the judge of the NSAC has rejected today the request of the lawyers on this issue, the judge of the NSC should determine on it on September 7, after he decided on August 28 to adjourn the hearing as a consequence of a memorandum presented by the defendants’ lawyers on the unconstitutionality of Decree 28. …source

Imprisoned opposition activists on hunger strike in Bahrain
Guardian.uk.co – Sept 6, 2011 – AP

International commission statement says 84 opposition supporters are on hunger strike in prison, and another 17 have been taken to hospital

Investigators say 101 imprisoned activists are on hunger strike in Bahrain after months of anti-government protests and crackdowns.

A statement by the international Bahrain Commission of Inquiry said 84 opposition supporters were on hunger strike in prison. In addition, 17 detained activists have been sent to hospitals by the interior ministry because of their refusal to eat.

The statement said an international expert on hunger strikes would join a panel to visit the striking detainees and evaluate their condition.

Hundreds of activists have been imprisoned in Bahrain since February, when Shia-led demonstrations for greater rights began.

Qabalan calls for “rescuing” Bahraini people
September 7, 2011 – NOW Lebanon

Vice President of the Higher Shia Islamic Council Sheikh Abdel Amir Qabalan on Wednesday called on the Arab people to take action “to rescue the people of Bahrain from the genocides” committed by their government.

“The Gulf Cooperation Council must also resolve the situation [in Bahrain] in a way that satisfies the people without resorting [to violence],” Qabalan added in a reference to the Shia-led pro-democracy protest movement that was crushed earlier this year.

He also questioned “the silence of Arab and Islamic states toward the oppression and killings” of the Bahraini people, the National News Agency reported.

“The people of Bahrain are peaceful and we must protect them.”

Protests calling for political reform broke out on February 14 in the Sunni-ruled, Shia-majority Gulf state. Saudi-led Gulf forces entered the country in late March, freeing up Bahraini troops to crush the uprising. ….more