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A short fuse
As we keep hearing about how “reasonable” and “measured” – even “nice”! – the police are during the current Extinction Rebellion demonstrations (despite the regular footage of people being dragged across pavements by their legs), it may be useful to remind ourselves how nasty it will undoubtedly get if demonstrators don’t listen to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick (she who was in charge when her officers killed Brazilian Jean-Paul Menezes on his way to work just a few short years ago) telling us to behave ourselves. So Le Monde quotes today the French government’s response to UN criticism of police violence against the gilets jaunes, in particular their use of “defensive fire” weapons (LBD). First the denial of misuse of weapons and the characterisation of demonstrators as a violent mob:
“At no time is an LBD used against even vehement demonstrators if they have not committed physical violence, particularly against the forces of order, or caused serious damage. But in that case it is no longer a question of demonstrators but of participants in a violent and illegal gathering … The police have recourse to the LBD when it is necessary to dissuade or stop a violent or dangerous person. In terms of the weapons used, the 40mm LBD is capable of causing significant wounds if the people targeted are hit at distances of less than 3 or 10 metres … Although misuse is unfortunately possible, this does not put in question the regular use of these weapons when necessary.”
There then follows a call to the UN to respect French legal processes:
“Inasmuch as enquiries have not yet finished, it is not possible to determine today whether the people injured by the firing of these LBDs were in a situation justifying the use of these weapons or whether such use was abusive or questionable.”
So the message to the UN is not only “Don’t jump to conclusions” but, further, “Don’t interfere – we will be judges in our own case.”
Lesson for us here? The “nice” police officer is on a short fuse.
[“A aucun moment le LBD n’est utilisé à l’encontre de manifestants, même véhéments, si ces derniers ne commettent pas de violences physiques, notamment dirigées contre les forces de l’ordre ou de graves dégradations. Mais alors il ne s’agit plus de manifestants, mais de participants à un attroupement violent et illégal. »
Quatre pages sont consacrées spécifiquement à la défense du LBD, rappelant son objectif premier :
« Les policiers ont recours au LBD lorsqu’il est nécessaire de dissuader ou de stopper une personne violente ou dangereuse. » Les spécificités de l’arme sont décrites par le menu et sa dangerosité est en partie reconnue : « En fonction des munitions utilisées, le LBD 40 mm est susceptible de causer des lésions importantes si le tir atteint des personnes situées à moins de 3 ou 10 mètres. »
Les nombreuses blessures engendrées par des tirs de LBD, largement répertoriées, ne sont pourtant nullement évoquées au fil du document, qui prend des pincettes avant d’évoquer de possibles dérapages :
« Si des cas de mésusages sont toujours malheureusement possibles, (…) ils ne sauraient remettre en cause l’utilisation régulière de cette arme en cas de nécessité. »
Et d’appeler à respecter le temps judiciaire :
« Tant que les enquêtes en cours n’auront pas abouti, il n’est pas possible de déterminer, à ce jour, si les personnes blessées par des tirs de LBD l’ont été dans une situation justifiant le recours à cette arme, avec les conséquences malheureuses qui s’y attachent, ou dans une situation d’usage abusif, critiquable. »]
An attack on human rights posing as a clampdown on “terrorists”
Here’s a translation of part of a story in the French newspaper Libération[1]:
They call it the optimisation of security. Or how to do still more, on the cheap, with an existing system that is already not exactly lax. So on Monday the government responded to the damage caused in the Champs-Élysées during the gilet jaunes’ “Act XVIII”. The new measures, intended to stamp out these actions once and for all, have been announced from the desk of the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, at his desk in Matignon [the prime minister’s Paris residence]. He chose, incredibly, a martial tone for the occasion.
The most spectacular measures concern the banning of gilets-jaunes demonstrations “each time it is necessary” “in the areas which have been most affected”, whenever the authorities “know that extreme elements will be present willing to cause damage”. Let’s be clear, this means in fact banning all gatherings of the gilets jaunes, by its nature a very heterogeneous movement and reticent from its very beginnings to organise hand in hand with the authorities. Until now, the authorities have shown indulgence in the first hours of demonstrations but called in the forces of law and order at the first signs of conflict. After Saturday the shape of things looks quite different: if there is a publicly declared ban police and gendarmes will be ordered to question everybody present in the places named – Édouard Philippe mentioned the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Capitole Square in Toulouse, Pey-Berland Square in Bordeaux. Such an operation has already been tested, notably on the celebrated Parisian avenue during the “Demonstration for All” during the presidency of François Hollande.”
You get the picture. On a pretext of knowing the unknowable, they will deny everybody their right to protest. This, in the land of human rights. This, in the EU with its much-vaunted human-rights guarantees. We must be careful when we ask for clampdowns and bans on the people we don’t like – such bans are easily extended to people we do like and to ourselves.
It is also interesting to note that no mention is made by the French prime minister of the policeman caught looting on Saturday during the demonstration,[2] no sign of “questioning” him for being “present in the place named” and caught looting, or charges being made, or court hearings to come. Remember, the “authorities” are after us, never after them.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/03/18/gilets-jaunes-l-executif-montre-ses-muscles_1716016?xtor=EPR-500001&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=quot
[2] A policeman was videoed looting clothes from a shop in the Champs-Elysees during the gilets-jaunes demo. A second police officer then struck the camera operator with a truncheon. The first officer apparently nicked a Paris-St-Germain football jersey! – https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/03/17/gilets-jaunes-l-igpn-saisie-apres-une-video-montrant-un-policier-prenant-des-vetements_5437508_3224.html?fbclid=IwAR0qfiwyAgpS8N1pgOjqnNEurAI1rmRNiL-O3ZkmKBFO4y_U_-XrmhxXoYo
No answers, please – just bring on the clowns
An exchange between Emily Thornberry and Boris Johnson today in parliament slowly degenerated into yah-boo childishness. She shouldn’t let him draw her into his antics. Speaker John Bercow, after some incoherent yelling from Johnson, then joined in the circus: “I cannot believe the right honourable gentleman behaved in this way in his schooldays – or perhaps he did, which may explain a lot now.” He then told Thornberry off for calling the foreign secretary “Boris”.
Meanwhile, anyone in the real world who wanted answers to serious questions could be forgiven for despairing: the Foreign Office team got away with defending the rule of law in Spain (by which they meant the police beating up voters and wrecking polling booths) and refusing to say they would oppose Sudan joining the Commonwealth on the grounds of that country’s human rights abuses: any decision, apparently, would be up to the other Commonwealth members. But as many of them are human rights abusers themselves, we’d better not hold our breaths.
So at the beginning of this afternoon I am in favour of closing down our useless parliament and dismembering the “Commonwealth”. As for the EU, don’t ask. In any case it got lost amid the Johnson-Thornberry double act.
“Rapidly improving” technology may be bad for your health
scan the faces of those passing by and flag up potential matches against a database of custody images. The database will be populated with images of individuals who are forbidden from attending carnival, as well as individuals wanted by police.
On oaths
The government may make new British citizens swear an oath of allegiance to “British values”. In my Christian youth we used to argue about whether it was right to swear an oath, even in court. Jesus had said that we shouldn’t and that anything more than just Yes or No “comes from evil”. I think it was because he rejected the assumption that everyone was a lying bastard unless they swore otherwise under some kind of threat from on high.
In later years, when I went to refugees’ citizenship ceremonies, I discovered that they were required to swear allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all her successors”. I realised then that I could never have become a naturalised citizen if I’d had to even just declare such allegiance, never mind swear it. Tony Benn famously found a way round it. Faced with the necessity of swearing allegiance to said Queen and said descendants at the opening of each Parliament, he read out the form of words – but prefaced them with his own: “I, Tony Benn, under protest, and in order to serve my constituents, do swear … ”
But I don’t suppose the new oath makers will put up with any ploys of that kind when they’re registering oaths from today’s new citizens as they swear blind that they are totally committed not only to Her Majesty (even if her governments did try to bomb their home countries to buggery), but to cricket, or knitting, or Manchester United or anything else that they already subscribe to. I saw one list of British values that included “family values”. Unfortunately, our government’s own allegiance to the “right to family life” found in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is more than doubtful. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never tried to assist already-naturalised citizens to negotiate the obstacles deliberately put in their way to thwart their attempts to reunite their families on good old British soil.
Oaths? I’ll give you oaths.
No charm, no mercy
Theresa May is, apparently, on a “charm offensive” towards Donald Trump. What that means can only be guessed at. But President-elect Trump won’t be displeased with the decision of Theresa’s Home Secretary in the case of Lauri Love.
As The Guardian reports today, Lauri is accused of “stealing large amounts of data from US government agencies such as the Federal Reserve, the army, the Department of Defense, Nasa and the FBI in a spate of online attacks in 2012 and 2013.” He hacked, so it is said, into all those websites. And the US government wants him extradited to stand trial in America.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that America prosecutes people who penetrate their secret parts, although I have to confess I wish I was clever enough to do it myself. And Lauri “is accused of causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage”. I’m not sure how that could be true, but if it is you can see how it would make them cross.
The problem, though, is that Lauri is not only a clever man, he’s also a very unwell man. He suffers from Asberger’s syndrome, and he suffers from depression and eczema. If he is extradited, his lawyers say, he could face up to 99 years in prison. It is argued that the process of extradition, trial in a foreign country and the prospect of a long prison sentence would have a detrimental effect on his mental health and could lead to suicide. The danger of this is undoubtedly increased by the fact that he could face proceedings, not just once, but in three different US jurisdictions.
What’s the alternative? He could be tried here, be allowed bail, and have the support of his close family and support network.
On 16 September Lauri lost his legal challenge against extradition. District judge Nina Tempia said that, while she agreed that he had mental health problems and physical problems, he could be cared for by the “medical facilities in the United States prison estate”, and that they were adequate for the task. One possible problem with that, of course, is that he might be dead before he got to the medical facilities or they got to him.
However, Home Secretary Amber Rudd had the humanitarian solution to this problem in her own hands. She could block the extradition. She even had an example to follow. In 2012, Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary, blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon, who was also charged with hacking into American secrets, and who also suffered from Asberger’s syndrome. At that time, Joshua Rozenberg explained in The Guardian that Article 3 of the Human Rights Convention “says that no one shall be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” He argued that she had little choice but to block the extradition. Today, Theresa May’s own Home Secretary did the opposite: Amber Rudd signed an order for the extradition of Lauri Love. There was no sign of Article 3. She did this in spite of the following appeal to her from Lauri’s solicitor, Karen Todner:
“We … urge you to recognise that this is a case where the risk to Mr Love’s life arising from extradition is so great that it would be entirely justified for you to make your own representations to your US counterpart to withdraw the extradition request because a domestic prosecution in England would permit justice to be done and remove the severe risk to Mr Love’s life.”
Plea ignored.
Do I think this was part of Theresa’s charm offensive towards Trump? Not really. I do think it’s a sign of the harsher world we live in and the clear move to the Right we are seeing on both sides of the Atlantic. We need to find a way to stop it getting worse.
Lauri has 14 days to lodge an appeal. Let’s hope he wins.
Here’s the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/nov/14/amber-rudd-approves-lauri-love-extradition-to-us-on-hacking-charges?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=199726&subid=12991040&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
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