Archive for category Civil liberties

Time to get shot of Nato

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Civil liberties on February 7, 2011

Is it wrong for the authorities to gun down protesters? It depends, apparently, on who is protesting and where.

Nato's warped world view

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, was asked today about the killing of four Albanian protesters, shot with live rounds, during anti-government demonstrations on Jan 21.

Albania is a Nato member and the Alliance can be pretty preachy about human rights when it suits, usually when talking about Afghanistan*, so it was a fair question.

The Albanian journalist asked Rasmussen, Denmark’s former PM, how he would have reacted if Danish police/security forces had gunned down Nordic protesters.

“It could never happen in Denmark,” sniffed the Nato chief. He then added sagely: “Danish people are much more calm than those further south.”

In the Nato worldview, Albania’s authorities, members of the free world’s alliance, are not in the wrong. In fact, self-evidently for the bureaucratic-military mind, Albanians, unlike the Aryan Nordic Danes, are the wrong type of people.

Clearly, for Rasmussen, using live ammunition on calm and rational Danes would be deeply shocking, unthinkable in fact. Gunning down turbulent and irrational Albanians is another matter altogether, much more understandable.

There used to be a word for these kinds of double standards – the word was racism. And, this man is in charge of the world’s most powerful military structure…

* What is Nato for anyway?

An Alliance set up by the US for post-WW2 Europe in the Cold War claims it is, through its disastrous and appalling war in Afghanistan,  to be building a nation state on the other side of the world.

The idea that Nato, or any other power, should, or can, build nation states for “subject peoples” is one that, like the Alliance, should be thrown into the dustbin of history.

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Prohibido prohibir – Ban the bans

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Ban nothing, Civil liberties, Democracy, EU on October 22, 2010

Europe’s smoking bans have always been emblematic for me of the bureaucratic mentality’s spreading mistrust of the public and the drive to regulate informal relations between people, especially in the social realm.

Prohibido prohibir - Ban the bans

What could be more European than the bars, pubs and cafes where we meet and socialise? But over the last six or seven years there has been growing state intolerance of these precious public spaces.

The first public smoking ban was introduced in Ireland in 2004, Norway joined in the same year, Italy and Sweden in 2005, Britain in 2006, Estonia and Finland in 2007, and France, Germany, Holland and Portugal in 2008.

Last month French officialdom moved to ban patio-heaters by next year because the Gitanes infused café-clope ambiance of Paris had spilt from the bars into the streets.

Last year Nuit Vive, a group of musicians, DJs and nightclub owners warned that new anti-noise regulations were turning Paris, the City of Light, into “the European capital city of sleep”.

“The situation has again deteriorated with the implementation of the anti-smoking law which has caused part of our audience to spend time outside,” the group noted.

Spain – even more than Belgium, another haven – has remained the place where bar owners and patrons can decide themselves whether smokers can enjoy a cigarette with their wine, coffee or beer.

All this will change for the Spanish if the country’s government gets its way on 2 January 2011, when it plans to introduce brings a total ban that rivals the strictness of those in Ireland and backward Britain.

Spain faces some pretty serious problems at present, its economic crisis springs to mind as a more suitable arena of state intervention. But never mind, I’ll let Josie Appleton take up the argument.

She writes: The war on ‘passive smoking’ is a metaphor rather than a question of medical fact. The metaphor of passive smoking is this: one person’s enjoyment is damaging to others. Your smoke gets in their eyes, and it is the role of the state to protect one person from another. The spread of smoke through a bar is seen as a kind of poison or pollution. Ultimately, this is the pollution of social life itself. It is this kind of euro-elite mentality that has had European cities producing ‘noise maps’, with every audible aspect of social life – children shouting, a band playing, a demonstration chanting – rendered as mere ‘noise’, and a form of environmental pollution of public space. It is the officials’ job to turn down the volume of social life.

What lies behind the bans, Josie explains, is the growing trend for the authorities to directly intervene in order to settle questions that are best left for people to informally work out themselves.

We’re quite good at it, as she observes most of us deal with the smoking issue in our homes all the time and we’re are usually more tolerant than the ban-happy prigs who seem to gravitate towards the world of officialdom.

She and the Manifesto Club are rallying support for the Club fumadores por la tolerancia (club of smokers for tolerance). The Spanish opposition group, which campaigns under the slogan, Prohibido Prohibir or Ban the Bans, understands – and this important – that the issue is not about smokers versus non-smokers.

As an organisation, it represents ‘Smokers and non-smokers who believe in tolerance as a fundamental principle for living together’. In an interview, a representative from the club said that the supposed ‘war’ between smokers and non-smokers only existed in the media and the politicians’ imagination. In reality, he said, the division is between ‘politicians who think it is profitable to ban things, and the people who have had enough of bans’.
The club’s second key insight is that smoking bans cannot be fought solely on the grounds of tradition. It is not enough to say that smoking is traditional – that this old man has smoked in this Irish pub for 30 years, or that the existentialists smoked in left-bank Parisian cafes. Instead, this Spanish movement takes on these modern rules in a modern way, not only looking backwards to preserve something, but looking forwards to new ways of citizens negotiating their public spaces, at a time when the majority of people do not smoke.

Josie concludes that “the call of the Spanish ‘Ban the Bans’ movement is for the rules to be negotiated by citizens rather than set from above by elites”. We should offer our support.

We may not share the same national symbols on our passports but in the face of growing state intolerance and bans we do all share, what I believe is, a common European interest in freedom.

¡No Pasarán! – and to further quote from La Pasionaria’s famous speech – “all must rise to their feet.. to defend the people’s freedoms”.

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The state that hates YOU

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Civil liberties on May 11, 2010

In today’s Europe, the state is out of control.

Sometimes the witless, viciousness of officialdom makes me reach for a trusty AK47 – or rather, makes me yearn that one was readily to hand.

This is a blog not a gun

The latest depressing case comes from Britain, a country that has fallen into the grip of dysfunctional officials over the least 20 years or so.

The Paul Chambers story is real sign of our times. The Times takes up the sorry tale – read it all here and feel your trigger finger itch.

A trainee accountant who made a joke bomb threat on Twitter after his local airport was closed by heavy snow was found guilty yesterday of sending a menacing electronic message. Paul Chambers, who used the social networking website to express frustration at the potential disruption of romantic travel plans, becomes the first person in Britain convicted of posting an offensive tweet. Chambers, 26, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, told his 600 Twitter followers: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” … Chambers, who lost his job as a company finance supervisor after his arrest and prosecution, said that it never crossed his mind that anyone would take the message seriously… Chambers was arrested under the Terrorism Act, and questioned by detectives for almost seven hours. His mobile phone, laptop and home computers were confiscated. The court was told that police printed 460 tweets posted by Chambers over eight days in January. They included a number of foul-mouthed tirades that prompted stifled laughter in court.

Now his joke may not have been in good taste – or even funny. But it was made to his “followers” on the Twitter site, a comment made in an essentially social internet setting by people who know each other.

It seems to be self-evident that Chambers has committed no act that should be a crime. The legal magazine The Lawyer takes up the tale.

“What he was charged and prosecuted for suggests that a significant injustice may be occurring, and which may occur again for other bloggers, twitterers, commenters, and other users of the internet.  Indeed, it may affect anyone who sends an email, even if there is a delivery failure.”

Chambers was arrested in January by police on suspicion of communicating a bomb hoax under legislation, from 1977, that prohibits inducing “a false belief that a bomb or other thing liable to explode or ignite is present in any place or location.”

Back to The Lawyer: “The silly joke had been reported to the police and the airport by a third party; it would appear that no one who saw the tweet regarded it as serious.  The airport later confirmed no inconvenience had been caused, other than in respect of the investigation.”

The British prosecution service then indicted Chambers for a different offence to the charge he had been arrested under.

“The CPS had decided to charge him, but not with the offence which Parliament actually legislated for in the 1977 Act, which would require them showing evidence of Paul Chambers intending others to believe there was a bomb hoax. Instead the CPS decided to charge him under the little-known – and in many ways worrying – offence under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.  The 1977 Act, with its protection for defendants, was effectively side-stepped… Chambers was prosecuted under section 127(1) – for sending a “menacing” message – not section 127(2), in respect of, say, causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another. Now this is a different offence than for which Paul Chambers was arrested.”

Do read the full article here by Allen Green, who writes the Jack of Kent blog – it’s good and it’s an important piece of work.

Voicing his anger after his conviction, Chambers, again using Twitter, wrote: “I’d like to thank the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) for their level-best efforts in fucking up the life of an ordinary citizen. I love Britain”. (Hat tip England Expects).

Today’s state, and the officials who run it and enforce its laws, increasingly run the administration, including its coercive powers, against the people – you and me.

This is never clearer than when the mantra of “security” is invoked.

Here is a case that is not merely unjust or a travesty of due process. It is not just damaging to free speech or a violation of an informal civil space. It is all of these things but it is more.

The Chambers case is an indication of the malevolence and hatred that the state and its officers now show to the citizen in the name of safeguarding security.

It makes me want to reach for an AK47 – I am joking, of course, but after what happened to Chambers perhaps I should be more careful what I say on this blog.

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An infantile Belgian burka ban

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Ban nothing, Belgium, Civil liberties on April 29, 2010

Belgium has become the first country in Europe to ban the Islamic burka.

Is this the real threat to Belgium? (Photo: superblinkymac)

MPs voted for the ban despite being unable and unwilling to get to grips with a real problem: the latest Flemish-Walloon crisis over the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde electoral boundaries.

It is clearly easier to play childish games with civil liberties over a fictitious “national security” issue – the alleged danger posed by the few dozen cranky Muslims who wear the full veil – than it is to address the real problems facing the nation.

The outbreak of infantilism was universal. In rare display of unity, out of 136 Flemish and Walloon MPs in the chamber, not a single one of them voted against. There were two abstentions.

An earlier attempt to debate a solution to the latest Belgian crisis was not possible after cowardly French-speaking MPs ducked out of discussion by sounding a procedural “alarm bell” blocking debate they described as a Flemish “aggression”.

This is a warped sense of priorities to say the least, more evidence (if any were needed) that the Belgian political class is completely out of touch with reality.

The ban will be imposed in streets, public gardens and sports grounds or buildings “meant for public use or to provide services”.

Those who ignore the ban could face fines of 25 euros and a jail sentence of up to seven days unless they have written police permission to wear the garments.

Most analysts agree that the wearing of the full veil is a “marginal phenomenon” among the 400,000 or so Muslims living in Belgium.

Human Rights Watch research found that in 2009, a tiny number of 29 women were stopped by police in the eight Brussels municipalities that already banned the full Muslim veil.

The ban is based on an invented problem. It is also illiberal.

Amid the generally moronic debate surrounding the issue, Isabelle Praile, part of the Muslim Executive of Belgium, made a good point.

“Today it’s the full-face veil, tomorrow the veil, the day after it will be Sikh turbans and then perhaps it will be mini-skirts,” she said.

The burka does not pose a threat to Western civilisation, nor does Islam.

Nor did jazz, rock and roll, mini-skirts, the bikini or punk outfits – all trends or forms of clothing that have, in the past, got the “something must be done” banning brigade hot under the collar.

Guy Harpigny, Catholic bishop of Tournai asked rightly: “Does the state really have the right to regulate the symbols of personal beliefs?”

The answer should be a resounding No.

If people want to put a veil or a nun’s wimple over their head because of religious belief, fashion or sheer cussedness let them be.

John Dalhuisen, of Amnesty International, said:  “The Belgian move to ban full face veils, the first in Europe, sets a dangerous precedent.”

Societies, whether Belgian, French, Dutch or British, that get their knickers in a twist over the burka are self destructively proclaiming their inability to define problems or keep a moral sense of proportion.

Laws, like this one, that sacrifice freedom to sate hysterical and groundless fears are far greater threat to us all – whether we wear the burka or not.

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