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الحرب على الناشطين في السعودية تحولها إلى سجن كبير
في تاريخ ١٠ أبريل ٢٠١٢، حكمت المحكمة الجزائية المتخصصة في جلسة سرية على محمد صالح البجادي (بعد منع محاميه من حضور الجلسة) بالسجن ٤ سنوات تليها ٥ سنوات منع من السفر. بعدها بيوم واحد فقط حكمت المحكمة نفسها على الدكتور يوسف الأحمد، وهو دكتور في الفقه الإسلامي في كلية الشريعة بالرياض بجامعة الإمام محمد بن سعود الإسلامية، بالسجن ٥ سنوات، تليها ٥ سنوات منع من السفر. تمثل الأحكام التي صدرت على الناشطين السياسيين تحولاً في التعامل القانوني مع سجناء الرأي في السعودية. تثير هذه المحاكمات نقطتين أساسيتين: أولاً ظاهرة انتشار استخدام منع السفر كنوع من العقاب. ثانياً محاكمة النشطاء السياسيين في محكمة أسست لمحاكمة متهمي الإرهاب والقضايا الأمنية. كانت وزارة الداخلية المؤسسة الوحيدة التي ...
Keep Reading »قضاة تونس: تعددية للهياكل ووحدة في البرامج
قضاة تونس تعددية للهياكل ووحدة في البرامج:المعايير الدولية لاستقلال القضاء كبوابة لبناء دولة القانون. قرر المجلس الوطني التأسيسي التونسي تخصيص لجنة تتكون من عدد من أعضائه تتكفل بإعداد مشروع الفصول الدستورية التي تتعلق بالقضاء، وتتولى بلورة تصورات لصيغ اصلاح القضاء من خلال آليات تشريعية. وقد انطلقت اللجنة التي سميت لجنة القضاء العدلي والإداري والمالي والدستوري في أعمالها بجلسات استماع شملت القضاة، علاوة على الشخصيات الوطنية التونسية التي عرفت بتخصصها في مجال القانون الدستوري، أو بنشاطها الحقوقي والسياسي ،أو تلك ذات الخبرة في مجال الفعل التأسيسي ممن ساهمت في صياغة الدستور الأول للجمهورية التونسية. وشكل استقبال القضاة بقصر المجلس التأسيسي ودعوتهم لابداء مقترحاتهم ...
Keep Reading »Israel and Palestine: International Law Updates
![[A rally in support of the Palestinian Authority's statehood bid in Ramallah, West Bank. Image by Ali Mustafa.]](/content_images/3/sm_ICC_srs.png "[A rally in support of the Palestinian Authority's statehood bid in Ramallah, West Bank. Image by Ali Mustafa.]")
This brief report provides information related to three recent developments in international law related to Israel and Palestine: The International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s decision as to whether Palestine qualifies as a state for purposes of accepting the court’s jurisdiction; UNESCO’s granting of membership to Palestine; and Ongoing investigations concerning Operation Cast Lead. Israel, Palestine and the International Criminal Court (ICC) On 20 January 2009, the Palestinian Authority issued a declaration recognizing the ad hoc jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in accordance with Article 12(3) ...
Keep Reading »When Protector Turned Killer
![[An F-15E Strike Eagle, one of the aircraft used by NATO forces in combat over Libya. Image from WikiMedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_1024px-F-15E_strike_eagle_91-0304-LN.jpg "[An F-15E Strike Eagle, one of the aircraft used by NATO forces in combat over Libya. Image from WikiMedia Commons.]")
Back in January, Faiz Fathi Jfara of Bani Walid asked a simple question, “I just need an answer from NATO: why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” NATO refuses to answer him. NATO went to war in Libya to protect civilians through a UN mandate (Resolution 1973). The UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court gave legitimacy to NATO's operations, and it began its ten thousand sorties in March 2011. The war quickly exceeded the UN mandate, moving for regime change using immense violence. NATO's actions blocked all attempts to find a peaceful solution, including the attempts of a high-level panel of the African Union to enter Libya as the NATO ...
Keep Reading »برلمان بأياد خارجية في السعودية
![[.غرافيتي على جدار في العوامية، السعودية. تصوير روزي بشير]](/content_images/3/sm_IMG_4684.JPG "[.غرافيتي على جدار في العوامية، السعودية. تصوير روزي بشير]")
لا تريد السلطة في السعودية لشعبها أن يتطلع إلى الأفق ولا أن ينظر إلى الشعوب المتحررة من حوله، وهي تصادر الحريات في الداخل وفي الخارج وتغيب الكلمة وتغتال الأحلام بالسجن والرصاص. وتلفق التهم ضد كل من يرفع صوته عالياً مطالباً بالحرية والكرامة. تمكنت وزارة الداخلية في السعودية من أن تخفي قضية المطالبين بالإصلاح والتغيير بإشغال شعبها بشخوص القضية ومذاهبهم، بدلاً من أن تسعى لتلبية تلك المطالب أو أن تطرحها على طاولة النقاش،وكانت تهمة الخيانة والعمالة حاضرة وسهلة يسيرة وخصوصاً ضد طائفة الشيعة في المنطقة الشرقية والمعزولين قهراً ثقافياً واجتماعياً عن بقية أبناء وطنهم ومجتمعهم.وصدّق أغلب أطياف المجتمع تلك التهم والتلفيقات دونما أدنى تحقق،ذلك لأن بعض فئات الشعب السعودي ...
Keep Reading »O.I.L. Media Roundup (4 June)
![[Side view of the Mavi Marmara Flotilla. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_Mavi_Marmara_side.jpg "[Side view of the Mavi Marmara Flotilla. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]")
[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Occupation, Intervention, and Law and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the O.I.L. Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each biweekly roundup to OIL@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every other week] News "2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate", Charlie Savage The New York Times reports that Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krauss, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel both advised the White House that the United States' ...
Keep Reading »Symbols of Nakba, Visions of Return: Al Majdal Special Issue on the Nakba and Resistance
![[Crop of Image from the cover of the latest issue of al-Majdal.]](/content_images/3/sm_ScreenShot2012-05-25at12.38.39PM.png "[Crop of Image from the cover of the latest issue of al-Majdal.]")
For peoples engaged in struggle, the potency of symbolism is undeniable. In the Palestinian case, the symbols of struggle cover the world throughout which we have been dispersed, and exhibit the depth of a century-old quest for freedom. Among the most potent of these symbols is the kufiyyeh, a headdress associated with the 1936-1939 Rebellion against British occupation and Zionist colonization. Large metal keys have become emblazoned in the Palestinian collective memory, because refugees carried the keys to their homes to which they were sure they would return. Other symbols include Naji al-Ali’s Handhala, a caricature character with the spiky hair of a hedgehog bearing ...
Keep Reading »War Against Activists: Turning Saudi Arabia Into A Big Prison
In a secret session on 10 April 2012, the Specialized Criminal Court in Riyadh sentenced Mohammed Saleh Al-Bajady, who was denied legal representation, to four years in prison followed by a five-year travel ban. A day later, the same court sentenced Dr. Yousif Al Ahmad, dean of the law faculty of Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, to five years in prison, a five-year travel ban, and a 27,500-dollar fine. The sentence of both Saudi political activists demonstrates a recent shift in the legal proceedings of Saudi prisoners of conscience. Not only has the imposition of travel bans as a form of punishment been alarmingly increased; peaceful political ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion
Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hilal Elver (HE): My experience in Turkey in relation to the headscarf is the main reason for writing the book. Turkey is very much a divided society: ninety-nine percent of the population is Muslim and it is a significantly religious society, yet it has also developed a secular legal order and social structure. I felt this duality even in my own family environment. My mother was an educated woman and a devout Muslim. For most of her life, at least when I was growing up, I witnessed the ...
Keep Reading »To Fight Corruption, Egypt Needs a Freedom of Information Law
![[Protesters stormed state security building on 5 March 2011 to uncover information collected in secrecy about activists and political opposition. Image by Mohamed Abd El-Ghany/Reuters]](/content_images/3/sm_egypt_security_01.jpg "[Protesters stormed state security building on 5 March 2011 to uncover information collected in secrecy about activists and political opposition. Image by Mohamed Abd El-Ghany/Reuters]")
Egypt is going through a period of enormous promise through citizen empowerment. For the first time in the country's history, citizens are electing their president through a relatively fair and free process. While there are genuine concerns about the conduct of the elections and the conditions governing them, the mood in the streets is electrifying, as people from all walks of life feel vested in their country’s future. Despite the bumpy post-Mubarak transition, Egyptians deserve to be acclaimed for their perseverance and commitment to democracy. But for Egypt to achieve sustainable democracy, many reforms remain to be implemented. The most important of which is public ...
Keep Reading »Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War
Media reports on Iran oscillate wildly between threats of imminent military action and hopeful reports of diplomatic progress. Amidst this confusing din, there is a constant truth: the United States has not ceased its economic bullying of Iran, nor has the threat of war receded. As Dennis B. Ross, the Obama Administration’s former Iran advisor, told the New York Times, “now you have a focus on the negotiations...It doesn't mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.” This echoes President Obama’s persistent refrain on Iran: “All options are on the table.” We argue that sanctions against Iran are not designed to work as an actual ...
Keep Reading »Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity
![[Palestinians hold photographs of their relatives jailed in Israel during a support rally for Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 5, 2012. Image by Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo.]](/content_images/3/sm_LadiesStriking.jpg "[Palestinians hold photographs of their relatives jailed in Israel during a support rally for Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 5, 2012. Image by Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo.]")
On his seventy-third day of hunger strike, Thaer Halahleh was vomiting blood and bleeding from his lips and gums, while his body weighs in at 121 pounds—a fraction of its pre-hunger strike size. The thirty-three-year-old Palestinian follows the still-palpable footsteps of Adnan Khader and Hana Shalabi, whose hunger strikes resulted in release. He also stands alongside Bilal Diab, who is also entering his seventy-third day of visceral protest. Together, they inspired nearly 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners to go on hunger strike in protest of Israel's policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial. Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel's ...
Keep Reading »The Constitutional Court Rulings and Counter-Revolution in Egypt: An Interview with Lina Attalah
With presidential run-off elections set to take place 16-17 June 2012, Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court affirmed the presidential candidacy of Ahmed Shafiq (Mubarak's last prime minister) and nullified the parliamentary elections from earlier this year (thus dissoliving parliament). Despite ongoing debates about the efficacy of parliamentary and presidential powers vis-a-vis SCAF and other unaccountable centers of power, the rulings represent a major victory for counter-revolutionary forces in ...
Keep Reading »Briefing Note: Adalah's Representation of Arab Knesset Members--Protecting the Right to Political Participation
Adalah is currently representing four Arab members of the Knesset (MKs): Haneen Zoabi, Dr. Ahmad Tibi, SaNaffaa, and Mohammed Barakeh. The political leadership of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel faces sustained and severe attacks and harassment from Israeli government officials and incitement from extreme right-wing MKs. Arab elected representatives have been stripped of their parliamentary privileges, have had their immunity lifted, and now two members are facing criminal indictments for their ...
Keep Reading »On Legal Advocacy and Legitimation of Control
When he was imprisoned, Nelson Mandela utilized his background as a lawyer to begin filing suits on behalf of other prisoners to improve their situation. Some prisoners objected: they viewed Mandela’s action as cooperating with the regime and legitimizing its control over the prisoners. Mandela rejected these claims, contending that his suits were an integral part of the prisoners’ political struggle. The question of whether legal advocacy during the era of apartheid granted legitimacy to the regime was ...
Keep Reading »Words Are Not Enough
During the past two weeks, the United States and the European Union released their annual human rights and progress reports, respectively, on Israel. Each one substantially criticized the state of minority rights in the country. The US State Department called the "institutional and societal discrimination" against Arab citizens of Israel one of the country's top three most significant human rights issues of 2011, and the EU stressed that "progress on the situation of the Arab minority was ...
Keep Reading »Protests in Tahrir; Drones in Turkey's Skies
This week we talk to Egyptian journalist Ahmad Shokr about the political landscape in his country after the pivotal verdict on Hosni Mubarak and members of his regime announced on Saturday, 2 June 2012. We’ll also discuss Turkey’s plans to purchase US armed drones with University of Indiana researcher, Burhan Althuran. Last year, the United States had moved four of its Predator drones from Iraq to Turkey, and now that country is trying to acquire armed drones of its own---the kind used by the US in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Maaike Voorhoeve, Family Law in Islam
Maaike Voorhoeve, editor, Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What led you to edit this book? Maaike Voorhoeve (MV): When I started my PhD on the contemporary application of Tunisian family law by Tunisian judges, my idea was as follows: the Tunisian family code deviates significantly from Islamic law, and therefore it is interesting to examine if judges apply the code, or whether they apply Islamic law instead. ...
Keep Reading »UN Committee 2012 Session Concludes Israeli System Tantamount to Apartheid
[The following was originally published in BADIL's al-Majdal.] Between mid-February and early March 2012, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination held its 80th session, in which it evaluated the compliance of several states with the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Among these states was Israel, which became a party to the Convention in 1979. The Committee’s concluding observations and recommendations are notable because ...
Keep Reading »القضاء على الفساد، مصر تحتاج إلى قانون حرية تناقل المعلومات
تمر مصر بمرحلة مهمة في سبيل تمكين المصريين من المشاركة في العملية السياسية. ولكي تستطيع مصر أن تحصل على الديمقراطية المنشودة، يجب أن ينعم المواطنون بحق الحصول على المعلومات بالحرية التي تتيح لهم مساءلة الحكومة. في ظل حكم مبارك تمتعت الحكومة بسرية كاملة في تعاملاتها، الأمر الذي أدى بدوره إلى تفشي الفساد في المؤسسات الحكومية مما أدى إلى ضياع كثير من موارد الدولة. إن عدم الإفصاح عن المعلومات يتعارض مع أحد أهم مبادئ الديمقراطية والشفافية. لذلك يجب على مصر أن تفعّل قانون حرية تداول المعلومات الذي يضمن ...
Keep Reading »"We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”) Students in Quebec are marking their hundredth day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, 22 May, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movement of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada's Arab Spring. Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Feminism: Between Mama Amreeka and Baba Abdullah
On 9 May 2012, Manal al-Sharif was awarded the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. This came shortly after al-Sharif was honored as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World at a Gala in New York City. Such events have given rise to a pattern: just as numerous pictures and videos of activists attending various conferences and receiving numerous awards surface, waves of criticism pour in. Their motives are viewed with suspicion, worthiness is questioned, and ...
Keep Reading »Should Tunisia Pay Ben Ali's Debts?
The journalist, uneasy, risked his question: “Do you have any fears that there is perhaps a far left movement coming through these revolutions that perhaps want more closed economies? I mean, there have been a lot of pictures of Guevara.” At a press conference on the Arab Uprisings held in April last year at International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters, then-Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn gave a reassuring nod in that direction. “It is a good question,” he responded. “A good question. There ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an ...
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