Undercover journalist arrested

BBC journalist Arifa Farooq, who went undercover as a carer to expose flaws in the system in the care of elderly in their own homes, has been arrested earlier this month and is facing criminal prosecution.

The Panorama documentary, Britain's Homecare Scandal, which was aired in April, revealed malpractice in companies caring for older people at home.

Arifa Farooq, 30, who works with the BBC Scotland investigations unit, was one of several reporters who went undercover for two months to research the story.

She was arrested and questioned earlier this month in relation to allegations of making a false disclosure in the course of her investigation.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has called on the prosecuting authorities in Scotland to use common sense and to rule out the prosecution of a Glasgow-based journalist.

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “We are strongly urging the authorities to use their common sense and rule out prosecution. The work undertaken by Arifa Farooq was clearly in the public interest and it is now in the public interest for the case to be dropped.

“The only people who would benefit from legal action in these circumstances are those who want to stop the kind of vital journalism that has been undertaken by Arifa."

The Local Government Committee at the Scottish Parliament has been investigating issues around elderly care provision that were raised by the Panorama programme.

Rape and violence against women as weapon of war: one DRC woman speaks out

One gorilla vs 500,000 women

"We ask: 'Why the silence of the developed countries? When a gorilla is killed in the mountains, there is an outcry, and people mobilize great resources to protect the animals. Yet more than five hundred thousand women have been raped, and there is silence."

This is what Democratic Republic of Congo's journalist Chouchou Namegabe testified at a hearing on sexual violence in the DRC before the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations in May.

“The women ask WHY? Why such atrocities? Why do they fight their war on women’s bodies? It is because there is a plan to put fear into the community through the woman, because she is the heart of the community. When she is pushed down, the whole community follows. The rapes are targeted and intentional, and are meant to remove the people from their mineral-rich land through fear, shame, violence, and the intentional spread of HIV throughout entire families and villages.

After all of this you will make memorials and say 'Never Again.' But we don't need commemorations; we want you to act now,” continued Namegabe, visibly anguished and angry.

She is founder of the South Kivu Women’s Media Association, known as Association des Femmes des Medias du Sud Kivu (AFEM-SK). The organization gives a voice to thousands of voiceless women. They use radio to give women the space to express what has happened to them, begin their healing and seek justice.

We don't need memorials, but actions

"We have interviewed over 400 women in South Kivu, and their stories are terrifying. In fact, the word rape fails to truly describe what is happening, because it is not only rape that occurs, but atrocities also accompany the rapes. That is what makes the situation in the eastern Congo so different, and horrible. Of all the testimonies we recorded there are two that stay in my mind that I will share with you.

I met a woman who had 5 children. They took her into the forest with her 5 children, and kept them there for several days. As each day passed the rebels killed one of her children and forced her to eat her child's flesh. She begged to be killed but they refused and said, “No, we can't give you a good death.

Last month, after the joint operation between the Congolese army and the Rwandese army to break down the FDLR1, in their running away the FDLR raped more women. Our journalists were told that after they raped the women, they put fuel in their vaginas and set them on fire, and then extinguished the fire. This was done not to kill them, but to let them suffer. There were many other horrible atrocities."

Why our silence and inaction? What are we waiting for? Namegabe is right to say that the international community would have never let so many gorillas suffer in this way.

To read about the six actions Namegabe is requesting, go to the full transcript of the hearing.

And to watch her testimony on YouTube:

Iran - a poem

I've met Majid through a poem. I had written an article a few months ago for www.iranian.com on Tehran authorities destroying the site of mass graves the district of Khavaran in southeast Tehran. In these unmarked graves lie thousands of political prisoners killed by the Islamic regime in the 1980s - most of them during a secret mass massacre in the summer of 1988. In response, Majid sent me a poem.

Since then, he has sent me more poems, punctuating the events in his native country, creating something beautiful out of pain and violence. I love them. Here is his latest offering:

A Poem: Three Gifts
by Majid Naficy
Published on July 29 in Foreign Policy in Focus in response to the repression and violence in Iran

In Memory of Saeed

One day my father called us and said:
I have three gifts for you —
A red heart, an hourglass, and...
O God, I don't remember the other one.

Mehdy took the heart
Opened its two halves
And strummed the strings of its chambers.

I took the hourglass
And along its white sands
I fell from one half to the other
Asking myself:
What can be done in three minutes?

And Saeed
At age ten went to Paris
For heart surgery
And at age twenty-nine

He was executed in Tehran.
I remember him.
He had red cheeks
And strong hands.

March 1994

Majid Naficy, who is the author of more than 20 books written in Persian, fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife Ezzat in Tehran. He has published two collections of poetry "Muddy Shoes" (Beyond Baroque Books 1999) and "Father and Son" (Red Hen Press 2003) as well as his doctoral dissertation "Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature" (University Press of America 1997) in English. He lives in Los Angeles.

Iran - Show Trials and database of detainees

Show Trials
Today, Iran's opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami are denouncing "show trials" of politicians and activists charged with fomenting unrest after the disputed presidential election on 12 June . Both men accused the Tehran regime of using forced confessions to charge senior opposition figures of "acting against national security" and "conspiring with foreign powers to stage a velvet revolution".

Database of dead and detained
Hundreds, probably thousands, have been arrested in Iran since the election. Human rights and campaign groups such as Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran and Reporters Without Borders have been collecting and publishing the names of those dead or detained.

The Guardian newspaper have brought those lists, and reports from trusted media sources, into a database. They are asking readers and those elsewhere on the internet to contribute too.
Since they launched this exercise, they have had hundreds of emails, photographs and names sent to us. Keep them coming. Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on their Flickr group or mail them at datastore@guardian.co.uk

Berlin - Hunger strike for release of detainees in Iran

Ex-political prisoners of the Islamic Republic of Iran are staging a 48-hour hunger strike tomorrow in Berlin to request the release of all political prisoners in Iran – particularly those arrested in the aftermath of the elections, including human rights activist Shadi Sadr.

Eighty-four former political prisoners will start their hunger strike tomorrow morning, Friday July 24, at 9am in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. They’ll conduct a press conference at 11 am.

Here is an edited version of their statement:

We, ex- political prisoners of the Islamic Republic, stand in solidarity with the people struggling for basic human rights in Iran, in demanding the release of all political prisoners, in particular those who have been arrested in recent weeks, including human rights activist Shadi Sadr.

The recent peaceful demonstrations by the Iranian people following the rigged elections have been met by cruelty and violence at the hands the police and security forces in Iran.

So far dozens of people have been killed, many have been injured and 3,000 to 5,000 have been arrested or have simply vanished.

The attacks on the university dormitory by the police, the raids to the homes of families of students and journalists, the increase in arbitrary arrests, abduction and disappearances are alarming, and once again bring back the memory of the bloody 1980's.

We demand: Immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners in Iran,

We demand: The abolition of capital punishment in Iran.

Signed by 84 participants, 697 supporters and 108 organisations/NGO’s/societies/ foundations

Amir Atiabi, a former political prisoner and survivor of the 1988 massacre in Iran, says ex-prisoners will do whatever they can to free the detainees because they know the terrible conditions they are facing in prison.

We are all very concerned about the conditions of the detainees based on our knowledge and own experience on what’s going on behind the walls of the Islamic Republic’s prisons. The level of torture and violence against the detainees is beyond imagination.

Those who work for the system can do anything they like without questioning. There are no laws and no rules. The country is filled with lies, propaganda, horror, terror, threats, tapping phone calls, monitoring Internet activities, censorship, daily arrests and crimes against any active opponent and journalists.

We have to act now. Tomorrow will be too late.

10th-year anniversary of Falun Gong persecution in China

Tomorrow, July 20th, marks the 10th-year anniversary of the baffling, but ruthless persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Falun Gong, which counts millions of members mostly in China, but also elsewhere in the world, is a holistic practice guided by the principles of “truthfulness, compassion and tolerance”, based on slow-moving exercises and meditation.

Falun Gong has no formal structure and is not a religion, yet it was banned as “an evil cult” in China ten years ago by then Chinese Communist Party president Jiang Zemin. It is believed Jiang felt threatened by the growing popularity of the practice. It is banned only in China, but practiced freely in 80 countries.

On July 20th 1999, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, and over the next few days tens of thousands were detained throughout China. When all the police stations and detention centres were full, many were held in sports stadiums and other public facilities.

“Like any normal day, I went to do Falun Gong exercises in Yuyuantan Park in the centre of Beijing at 6am,” says Cambridge resident Jingwen Wang, who lived in Beijing at the time. “I heard the government had banned Falun Gong, so I decided to appeal. At 7am I arrived at the Appeals Office, but I was swiftly forced onto a coach, along with other practitioners. After driving a long time, we arrived at Shijingshangymnasium. There were already about 4,000 practitioners there. It was very hot, about 37 degrees. Thousands of people stayed there without any water, food or fresh air for the whole day.”

Since then, hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong followers have been imprisoned in labour camps and prisons across the country. They account for the largest single population of prisoners of conscience in China, according to Amnesty International. Tens of thousands have been tortured and over 3,200 have lost their lives. Millions others face destitution, job loss, expulsion from school and other form of discrimination.

Annie Yang, a former antique trader in Beijing who now lives in London, was arrested in 2005 and sent to two years in labour camp for being a member of Falun Gong.

“Every day I was forced to sit for over 18 hours, in a strict sitting posture: both legs and knees pressed tightly against each other; both hands rested over the knees, the back kept straight, and eyes open. After a week or two, many people’s bottoms started to rot. After endless days of both mental and physical persecution my eyesight became bad and my memory weak. My hair turned white and mentally I almost reached total collapse. Every day the only thing I thought about, when I was able to have a moment to think, was how to end my life. Was it better to smash my head on a radiator or to drink washing powder?”

Now, ten years later, the brutal repression shows no signs of abating.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Falun Gong repression and attract attention to their plight, members are staging a press conference at noon at Westminster in London and a peaceful protest in Parliament Square all day-long. They are also hosting an art exhibition nearby in Palmer Room, 1 Great George Street, SW1 3AA from 11 am to 4 pm. The exhibit Uncompromising Courage, which has toured more than 40 countries since 2004, portrays the beauty of the traditional Chinese meditation practice, Falun Gong, and at the same time depicts the personal experiences of the artists and others who have been persecuted under the Chinese Communist Party."

Children of prisoners have rights

I’ve read a very interesting story in the Guardian recently on Albie Sachs, the South African judge who ruled not to send a woman to jail because it would infringe the human rights of her three children.

The woman was facing four years in jail for up to 40 counts of credit card fraud that she had committed while under a suspended sentence for similar offences. At first, Sachs wanted to jail the mother, but a female colleague urged him to consider the rights of the woman’s children separately. Here is how the 74-year-old judge explained his decision to an international audience of human rights lawyers in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago:

"She said: 'There is something you are missing. What about the children? Mrs M has three teenage children. She lives in an area that we politely call fragile, an area of gangs, drug-peddling and a fair amount of violence. The indications are that she is a good mother, and the magistrate gave no attention to the children's interests.'

"The minute my colleague spoke to me about the importance of the three teenage children of Mrs M, I started to see them not as three small citizens who had the right to grow up into big citizens but as three threatened, worrying, precarious, conflicted young boys who had a claim on the court, a claim on our society as individuals, as children, and a claim not to be treated solely as extensions of the rights of the mother, but in their own terms."

As a result, Sachs created a legal precedent in 2007: now in South Africa at least in borderline cases, primary caregivers of children should not be sent to jail. And if the court decided to jail a primary caregiver, it had to take some responsibility for what happens to the children. "The court can't simply say that she should have thought of that before she committed the offence, or that she can't hide behind her children."

Judge Sachs did not know it at the time, but similar ideas were being framed in Scotland in a report by the then children's commissioner, Kathleen Marshall.

The report, Not Seen, Not Heard, Not Guilty, argues that the rights of offenders' children to family life under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are systematically ignored by the court system. The report found that almost two-thirds of prisoners in the Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling had children under 18, but there was no provision to take their rights into account during sentencing.

This is fascinating. A new way of thinking is emerging within the criminal justice system. Children have rights on their own, which the court system should take into account. And children don’t forfeit their rights because their parents have committed a crime. Of course, it is not a one-fit-all answer: some convicted mothers and fathers are terrible parents and being a parent shouldn’t be a license to commit a crime with impunity. But the principle is important and, if we think about it, rather basic: children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ crimes. Both the children and society would benefit.

I wonder if the same argument could be made about unborn children – the children of pregnant women in prison. Many years ago, fellow journalist Loren Stein and I worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco on a year-long investigation (published in the Progressive and Boston Herald magazine) into the alarming number of miscarriages among pregnant women in US prisons. Packed into routinely overcrowded, understaffed and ill-equipped facilities, pregnant inmates were often denied essential pre-natal and emergency care, although their health needs were both greater and more specialized. As a result, more than 30 percent of pregnancies in prison ended up in miscarriage (often during the third semester, which is very rare among the general population) or the loss of the baby during or after birth.

For many of these inmates’ unborn children, a prison sentence actually meant a death sentence.