I CARE - News - Internet Centre Anti Racism Europe

Headlines 29 June, 2007

MUNICIPALITIES REFUSE TO LIST ILLEGALS (Netherlands)

29/6/2007- the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) is opposed to handing over lists of illegal aliens to the government. The umbrella organisation of municipalities thinks this goes beyond the agreements made with State secretary for justice Nebahat Albayrak with regard to the amnesty scheme for asylum seekers that entered the country under the old Aliens Act. "Municipalities do not keep a list of illegal aliens," VNG chairman Wim Deetman said on Friday. "Nor do mayors have the authority to check whether someone is living in the Netherlands legally or not." The VNG chairman was speaking out in response to Groningen mayor Jacques Wallage's urging that municipalities should hand over information on illegal aliens to Albayrak. Hilversum mayor Ernst Bakker said in the Volkskrant today that he will not hand over information to the state on people who are not eligible for the amnesty. The VNG says that municipalities are only required to answer for whether an individual was living in the Netherlands in 2006. They send this declaration to the state secretary, who decides whether someone is eligible for a residence permit or not.

Albayrak wants list of illegal aliens
26/6/2007- State secretary for justice Nebahat Albayrak has asked mayors to submit a list of failed asylum seekers who have signed up for the amnesty scheme but who are not eligible. The state secretary wants to know who these illegal aliens are and where they are living so that they can be deported. Albayrak said this on Tuesday during question time in Parliament. Mayors can contact the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) to register asylum seekers who are eligible for the amnesty but whom the service is unable to trace. The mayor must however declare in writing that the individual in question has been in the Netherlands continuously between 2001 and 2006.
© Expatica News

'CUT BENEFITS TO BURQA WEARERS' (Netherlands)

27/6/2007- A majority in Parliament wants the government to allow municipalities to cut benefits if the recipients are unable to find a job because they wear a burqa. A motion to this effect from Liberal VVD MP Atzo Nicolaï and Labour PvdA MP Hans Spekman was passed on Tuesday. Coalition party PvdA and opposition party VVD are concerned about a verdict from the court in Amsterdam earlier this month. The court found in preliminary proceedings that the municipality Diemen had unlawfully docked the benefits of a Muslim woman who wears a burqa because she had been unable to find a job after four job applications. If this verdict becomes a precedent, Spekman and Nicolaï want to know what state secretary for social affairs Ahmed Aboutaleb plans to do to ensure that municipalities will be able dock benefits in cases like this. The state secretary first wants to wait for the final outcome of the court case before drawing conclusions. But he will "of course" inform Parliament of any steps he plans to take. Aboutaleb has said in earlier debates with Parliament that the case in Diemen should be put in perspective. He says it is just "one case," while there have also been court verdicts that have found in favour of municipalities in cases where the behaviour of the job seeker prevented him or her from finding a job. One of these cases also concerned the wearing of a burqa.
© Expatica News

MUTILATED FEMALES SEEK HELP (Norway)

28/6/2007- More than 250 girls and women have sought help from Oslo's largest hospital in recent years, because of physical problems resulting from female circumcision, also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The mutilation, which many of the female patients were subjected to as young girls in several Muslim African countries and Northern Iraq, has left the women with severe urinary dysfunction, infections and problems after their vaginal openings were sewn shut. Sarah Kahsay, a midwife at Ullevål University Hospital in Oslo, told newspaper Aftenposten that she and her colleagues have tried to help around 260 girls and women during the past three years. Kahsay, of the National Competence Center for Minorities' Health at Ullevål, said that 90 percent of the girls and women are ethnic Somalians. Female genital mutilation has also been found, she said, among female patients from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Gambia and Senegal. The mutilation also seems to have spread to the Kurdish community, with Kahsay mentioning that Norwegian Church Aid has claimed it's a problem for females from Northern Iraq. "Reports we've had from our health stations (in the Oslo area) involve Kurdish girls as young as 11 and 12, who've been circumcised," Kahsay said. The girls and women have almost always said the circumcision, which is illegal in Norway, occurred before they emigrated. Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported over the weekend, however, that an alarming number of young girls born or living in Norway have been taken back to Somalia during school holiday periods and subjected to circumcision. The agonized screams of one young girl being forcibly held down while her genitals were being cut shook Norwegian viewers and has led to a political outcry on the issue. There have been calls for increased enforcement of the law prohibiting female circumciscion, a fatwa against the practice, and regular medical checks of young girls believed to be at risk.

Politicians try to ‘do something’ to stop female circumcision
A 24-hour crisis line, an information campaign at the airport, passport denial and planned health screenings of young girls at risk are among steps being taken by Norwegian officials to prevent female genital mutilation.

29/6/2007- Norway's center-left government unveiled a list of 14 emergency measures they're putting into place immediately, in an effort to keep girls from being sent out of the country for the procedure many describe as barbaric. The measures come after state television channel NRK broadcast a shocking report last weekend that nearly 200 girls living in Norway have been sent by their own families to Somalia in recent years, to undergo female circumcision. The practice is illegal in Norway and the country has had a law for years preventing it. Prosecution has been minimal, however, with only a handful of cases brought to court. Now officials are trying to crack down and enforce the law. That can include preventing girls at risk from leaving the country, if their families are suspected of sending them abroad to be circumcised. "Skin color and travel destinations won’t be enough," Justice Minister Knut Storberget of the Labour Party was quick to point out. "The authorities must have concrete suspicions that circumcision is planned, in order for the family to be denied passports." Storberget promises, tough, "more binding" cooperation between the police and local township officials. The government will also launch a public information campaign in local taxis and on the local public transport system. A 24-hour phone line is being set up to take calls from potential victims or members of the public wanting to report cases of suspected circumcision. The number is 02800. Mandatory genital screenings for girls at risk are proposed, but that must be approved by Parliament, which is currently on summer recess.
© Aftenpost

OBIORA CASE TO BE REOPENED (Norway)

28/6/2007- State officials have ordered a special agency to reopen a probe of alleged police brutality, and investigate more thoroughly the death of immigrant Eugene Obiora. Obiora was a 48-year-old native of Nigeria who died after police in Trondheim used a special maneuver to subdue him, after he'd created a disturbance in a social welfare office. An internal affairs division within the police (Spesialenheten for politisaker) investigated the death, which has prompted public protests and charges of police brutality. The probe concluded that the officers involved hadn't intentionally carried out any measures that would have stopped or hindered Obiora from breathing. No case was brought against the officers. Now the state's Director General of Public Prosecutions (Riksadvokaten) has said it needs more information on the case, and wants more thorough questioning of witnesses, the police officers involved and what the police knew about the risks of using a controversial grip around his throat that led to his suffocation. "The goal is to gather more information... to evaluate whether any offenses have been committed on the part of the police," said state prosecutor Tor-Aksel Busch on Thursday afternoon.
© Aftenpost

COURT CASE OVER SAMI RIGHTS (Norway)

Property owners in Tydal in South Trøndelag County will fight for their right to deny free fishing to Norway's indigenous people, the Sami.

27/6/2007- Property owners insist that Sami must pay for fishing licenses like everyone else, while the Sami argue that they should be able to maintain the tradition of many generations, newspaper Adresseavisen reports. "The Sami culture is built up around hunting, catching and fishing. It has been natural for us to fish for many hundred years. Why should this right be contested now?" asked reindeer herdsman Idar Bransfjell. Bransfjell represents about 40 Sami from the local reindeer grazing district. "I compare this with when the white man came across the water and took the land of the Indians because they had no deeds. The Sami also have very little written down, but as the native people of Norway we have rights above those that are written," Bransfjell argued. Bransfjell also believes that the Sami fishing has no negative effect on the 540 disputed lakes. The dispute has gone on for nearly ten years, and finally the Tydal association of property owners has taken the matter to court. They argue that the fish in the area's attractive lakes are worth a great deal.
© Aftenpost

SWISS POLICE CRITICISED FOR RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

25/6/2007- Amnesty International has accused the Swiss police of human rights abuses and of rarely investigating these incidents or punishing those involved. Swiss police reacted with outrage at Monday's report, "Switzerland: Police, Justice and Human Rights", which they described as unreliable, and vehemently denied the accusations. At the launch of the report on Monday Amnesty said it had uncovered 30 cases in 14 cantons over the past three years in which police had committed often serious human rights violations. At least six civilians, in addition to several police officers, had been killed in these incidents, it added. The organisation also denounced police behaviour against asylum seekers, blacks, anti-globalisation protestors, football fans and minors, who it said were victims of a disproportionate number of interventions, arbitrary detention and degrading treatment. The use of tear gas in enclosed spaces and electroshock weapons such as Tasers were also criticised, as was the use of potentially lethal forms of constraint, such as throat holds or shackling people's hands behind their back while they lay on their stomach. The organisation said there was a "wall of silence" within the police about abuses. "We have ascertained that fallible police officers are almost never punished because there has not been an independent or broad investigation," said Denise Graf of Amnesty International Switzerland. Graf called for the creation of an independent court of appeal, which she said was the only way for complaints against the police to be objectively examined. Amnesty said it was also concerned by the growing number of private security firms, whose staff, it said, had a less than perfect awareness of and interest in human rights. It called for clear conditions on authorisation for these companies.

Police reaction
The Swiss police immediately rejected the Amnesty report. "The report is marked by a mistrust of the police, the criminal authorities and the courts," said Karin Keller-Sutter, vice-president of the cantonal police directors' conference. She said Amnesty was implying the police reacted disproportionately and were latently racist. Dismissing accusations that fallible officers mostly went unpunished, Keller-Sutter said she knew "no other state service that was scrutinised and disciplined in such detail". She admitted that individual cases could exist, but fundamentally the rule of law was working. Beat Hensler, head of the Lucerne cantonal police force, found Amnesty's claims that the courts would go easy on police officers "questionable" and called the report "unreliable".

Institutionalised racism
In March 2006 the Swiss government found itself having to answer a hard-hitting report by Doudou Diène, the Senegalese United Nations special rapporteur on racism, which accused it of racist tendencies. Diène noted that racism, xenophobia and discrimination were "trivialised" in political debate in Switzerland. He also observed strong evidence of institutional racism, including within the police. Allegations continued of ill-treatment, excessive use of force and racist abuse by police officers, and of subsequent impunity for the perpetrators. The government rejected Diène's use of "individual incidents to draw conclusions about the general dynamism of racism and xenophobia in the country as a whole", but said it would seriously examine the report and would step up efforts to combat racism and discrimination.
© Swissinfo

RUSSIA MOST CONCERNED WITH ITSELF IN THE BATTLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

29/6/2007- In a discreet but systematic diplomatic effort, Russia is seeking to weaken international human rights supervision so it can hinder outside scrutiny of its policies at home and in the sphere of influence it claims. One assault is taking place in Strasbourg, where the Council of Europe, established in 1949 to promote democracy and the rule of law, and its European Court of Human Rights, are based. This week, after two years of negotiations among the 47 member states, Russia blocked a crucial reform aimed at improving the court's efficiency. In Vienna, Russia is trying to undermine the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, founded in 1976 when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. It wants to curb the activities of the organization's division that monitors elections. "Russia is using the old language of the Soviet era by accusing international organizations which monitor its human rights as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state," said Markus Kaim, a security expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "The present Russian administration is also defining human rights that would reflect its national interests rather than universal values." At the European Court of Human Rights, the judicial guardian of the European Convention on Human Rights, judges wanted reforms to cope with a backlog of cases. By May of this year, there were 89,000 cases pending even though 90 percent of cases brought before the court are declared inadmissible. Nevertheless, each case has to be considered. During a parliamentary assembly this week of the member states of the Council of Europe, diplomats worked in vain to amend Protocol 14 to the Convention on Human Rights. "The idea was to process all applications within a reasonable period of time by simplifying the procedures," said Jean-Louis Laurens, director general of democracy and political affairs at the Council of Europe. In practice, a committee would filter applications and one judge would issue a judicial decision, leaving the court to deal with important cases.

Russia blocked the reforms.
"A more efficient court would work against Russia's interests," said a Swiss diplomat who requested anonymity. "Cases related to alleged human rights abuses, particularly Chechnya, would reach the court more quickly." Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, recently told the Council that the Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, was holding up reforms. "The Duma sees the European Court of Human Rights as interference in Russia's internal affairs," Laurens said. Since joining the court in 1996 and implementing the European Human Rights Convention in 1998 but not banning the death penalty, more than 48,790 complaints have been filed against Russia, the largest against any one country. In 2006 alone, 10,569 applications were lodged and the court found 96 violations. Lavrov himself is no great fan of the Council of Europe and its court. When Russia was the chairman of the Council last year, he said it should "readjust" its priorities by shifting away from the defense of human rights to education, culture, illegal migration, human trafficking and combating terrorism. In Vienna, Russia is trying to muzzle the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, an autonomous division of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "The office is a real success story because it monitors elections and human rights," said Allison Gill, director of the Russian branch of Human Rights Watch. "But Russia sees it as interference in its internal affairs, the way the former Soviet Union did." Russia stepped up the criticism of the division after it had monitored the elections in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, where Russian-backed regimes had been toppled by pro-democracy revolutions. This intrusion into countries Moscow regards as its sphere of influence made the Kremlin even more determined to curb the office.

Last month, during a closed session of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, Lavrov proposed bringing the office under the direct control of the 55 member states and argued that reports from election monitoring missions required unanimity before they are publicly released. He also proposed further changes, calling for "an update of the organization's agenda." Similar in content to his Strasbourg speech, Lavrov added, "We need to pay closer attention to the issues of countering new challenges and threats," like combating terrorism. Russia's attempt at reinterpreting human rights and democracy reflects more than its new self-confidence bolstered by high energy prices. It is underpinned by a political philosophy emanating from the Kremlin itself. An essay published last November by Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of the presidential administration and the Kremlin's ideologist, said Russia would pursue a "sovereign democracy," in which democratic values would be subordinated to national interests. "This logic is based on the refusal to undergo foreign supervision and meddling," according to Jean-Pierre Massias, law professor at the University of Auvergne in France and a legal adviser to the Council of Europe. "The decisions of the Council of Europe are seen as such in Russia.' Despite Russia's criticisms of the Council of Europe and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, it has no intention of quitting, either. Instead, it is supporting new, parallel structures more in line with its priorities. One is the Collective Security Treaty Organization, set up by Russia in 2003. It includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - all of which have very weak human rights records. Its main purpose is to coordinate military and political cooperation and come to the assistance of any member state that is attacked. Above all, the treaty is based on the strict principle of noninterference in members' internal affairs. Another is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in 2001 and which includes Russia and several Central Asian countries. Its agenda is to fight terrorism and cross-border crime. It also has its own election observer missions, entering into direct competition with the Office for Democratic Institutions. "This is clearly an attempt to create an alternative to the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe and insulate Russia from external intrusion," Gill said. If so, it is a saddening turn-about for a rich and self-confident country that during the 1990s had fought hard to be accepted into Europe's human rights organizations.
© International Herald Tribune

FEAR DRIVES A REPORTER OUT OF NALCHIK (Russia)

29/6/2007- Fatima Tlisova had been beaten, harassed and, she suspects, poisoned while working as a journalist in Nalchik. But she finally decided to flee the country the day she sent her 16-year-old son on an errand last year and he did not come back. Tlisova later tracked him down at a police station in the custody of drunken officers who said they had put the boy's name on a list of suspicious people -- a tactic often used by police in roundups of suspected Chechen sympathizers. Sometimes, human rights advocates say, those caught up in such sweeps are savagely beaten. Sometimes, they vanish forever. "Do you know what these lists are? These are lists of broken lives," Tlisova said. "The fact that a drunken policeman can drag an innocent young man into a police station in broad daylight and put him on such a list -- I didn't want that to happen to my son." Tlisova, who worked for The Associated Press in the North Caucasus region for nearly two years, was speaking Thursday at a U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus roundtable in Washington. She has moved to the United States to study journalism, keeping her hand in her profession while getting far from the dangers of working in her native land. Tlisova said her son's detention came just one day after the killing in Moscow of Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter who, like Tlisova, often had written about civilians being killed, beaten and abused in the North Caucasus. Tlisova said her troubles began in 2002, a few days after writing a story for the newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta documenting soldiers' abuse of Chechens. After a party celebrating her 36th birthday, she walked her friends to the door of her apartment building. After the last guests departed, a hand grabbed her and she says she was dragged around a corner and beaten by two large men. She spent several days in intensive care with broken ribs, a concussion and other injuries.

In 2005, a car with tinted glass pulled up to her on a Nalchik street and she was told to get inside if she wanted to see her children again. She said she then was taken to a forest and held there for three hours. She said several men dragged her about by her hair and extinguished cigarettes on her fingertips, telling her they were doing it "so that you can write better." Tlisova believed reporting her abduction to the police was out of the question because she said she recognized her abductors as local officers of the Federal Security Service. A few weeks after her son's detention in October 2006, Tlisova said she came home one night to find signs that her apartment had been broken into. The next morning, she awoke feeling seriously ill, then fainted. Hospital tests showed she was suffering acute kidney failure, although tests 10 days later showed her kidneys functioning normally. She believes an intruder put poison in her food. Tlisova stepped up her efforts to find a way to get out of Russia but fell ill again. As she lay in a hospital, she vowed she would get out of journalism -- but the decision sat uneasily with her. Then a woman called her and asked her to come to her village to investigate the mysterious illnesses afflicting children at a school there. "I got this urge, this feeling that I had to go, I had to find out what happened," she said, and she went to cover the story. Two months later, she arrived in the United States, relieved to be in a safer place, but frustrated that she can no longer tell the world about the violence in her homeland. Injustices "are happening every day, one cannot be silent about them," she said. Some day, she hopes, she will return.
© Associated Press

ABOUT 98,000 TEENAGERS INVOLVED IN EXTREMIST GROUPS EXPOSED (Russia)

27/6/2007- About 98,000 teenagers, who are involved in antisocial and extremist groups, are exposed in Russia, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said in an interview with the newspaper “Rossiiskaya Gazeta” on Wednesday. He emphasized that 302 informal youth groups totaling more than 10,000 people are registered in police now, Nurgaliyev remarked. “About 150 of them we believe inclined to aggressive actions,” the minister noted. The interior minister believes that “it is useless to fight against this phenomenon (involvement of teenagers in extremist activities – Itar-Tass) only by police, repressive methods.” “A good groundwork for the work with adolescents exists in the country. There are about 180,000 cultural, sport and military patriotic organisations in the country. As many as 8.7 million people attend them every year,” Nurgaliyev said, adding that “it influences considerably the reduction of the crime level among teenagers.” “The measures were taken to attain positive results in the crime prevention among adolescents. This year the number of crimes, which teenagers committed or in which they were involved, reduced by more than eight percent,” Nurgaliyev remarked. However, according to him, “in regions, where there are few foresaid organisations or none of them at all, the criminogenic situation remains tense.”
© ITAR-TASS

RUSSIAN CHRISTIANS "PURGE" GAY CRUISE WATERS

26/6/2007- More than 200 Orthodox and right-wing Russians, including a fiercely anti-gay member of parliament, sailed an icon-bedecked ship down the Moscow River on Sunday to cleanse the waters after a gay cruise took the same route the night before, the Interfax news agency reported. Participants hired a ship and decorated it with church banners, icons, Russian imperial flags and their motto, "We are Russian, God is with us." "Our great Orthodox capital is in spiritual vacuum and experiences ideological aggression from the West. So our aim was to demonstrate that the Russian people's spiritual and moral ideals are alive and will be so forever," Yury Ageschev, coordinator of the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods, told Interfax. He said one of the action's aims was "to purge the Moskva River after a large group of gays, who hired a similar ship to have a party going the same route last night." Participants included state Duma member Nikolay Kuryanovich, who in February introduced legislation to recriminalize homosexuality. Joining him were members of Cossack groups and assorted religious believers. They sung a prayer as they passed the Novospassky Bridge, then listened to a Christian rock band, Interfax said. Gay rights continue to be a sore point in Russia. This month, anti-gays asked Moscow officials to support their nightly patrols aimed at emptying a park where gay people meet. On Friday, Russia's Supreme Court upheld earlier court rulings banning last year's Moscow Pride parade, which had been scheduled to take place in May. Gay activists rallied anyway and were pummeled by right-wing protesters and detained by police.
© Gay.Com

SPAIN OFFERS JOBS AND VISAS TO FIGHT ILLEGAL MIGRATION

26/6/2007- Spanish businessmen have taken a pioneering step towards stemming the waves of illegal African migrants, by travelling to Senegal to hire workers directly and offering them an alternative to a dangerous journey in a rickety boat. Recruits will get contracts, visas and training, instead of paying extortionate sums to trafficking mafias with no guarantee of reaching their destination. Last year around 35,000 Africans arrived on the shores of Spain's Canary Islands, but untold others drowned. "We say to the mafias that we will fight them, and to youngsters that they must come to Spain with the help of Spanish entrepreneurs, not risk their lives in canoes," said the Interior Minister, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, who accompanied the executives to Senegal in the first visit of its kind. Many of the thousands of young Senegalese battling their way to Europe are among the country's brightest, whose relatives see them as a meal ticket to support their family. Amadou, a law student in Dakar, knows the pressure that many young people are under. "I was very close to risking my life on the pirogue boats, but I realised it was a fool's errand," he told The Independent. "But if I could go legally, I would be willing to do any sort of job, however menial. There's only a slim chance of finding a job as a lawyer here so I may at least earn good money by stacking shelves in Spain." Some 40,000 Senegalese already work legally in Spain, and ministers and industrialists alike say they are hardworking, law abiding and - in the words of the Industry Minister, Jesus Caldera - have "noble principles and desire to work".

More than 500 workers from this part of the west African coast have moved to Spain since a pilot scheme was introduced early this year, armed with a contract, a work permit and a residence permit. So far, most have ended up in Galicia as fishermen but now the scheme is to be expanded into the construction, retail, tourism and agriculture industries. Five Spanish vocational training schools are also to open in Dakar, to provide recruits for Spanish companies and also make a dent in Senegal's 65 per cent unemployment rate. Two of the centres will train workers for the airline Air Europa. "The company always needs airport personnel, especially for the heaviest work - loading and unloading - and to make telephone reservations," said Juan Jose Hidalgo, chairman of Globalia, a tourism consortium that includes Air Europa. Spanish executives are also being encouraged to look for investment opportunities in Senegal - an oasis of stability with democratic credentials in an otherwise turbulent region - so that would-be migrants can find work at home. Although increased security, including EU ships patrolling the Atlantic, have cut numbers of migrants by two-thirds this year, experts warn that sea conditions have become calmer in recent days, which may spark another exodus. Analysts say that if illegal migration is to be seriously discouraged, the focus must be on development. "This opening up by Spain, a European country, is an important step that will benefit both sides. But as long as west Africa's socio-economic development is put on ice, then people will keep smuggling themselves overseas," said Armand Rousselot of the International Organisation for Migration in Dakar.
© Independent Digital

SPAIN’S MURKY PAST: THE NAZIS WHO SOUGHT REFUGE IN THE SUN

23/6/2007- A Norwegian Nazi who served in the SS and was awarded the Gold Cross by Hitler has been discovered living in luxury on Spain’s Costa del Sol. Fredrik Jensen, 93, was uncovered living in the urbanisation of Las Belbederes in Marbella with his wife Karin. Jensen served in a number of SS units during the Second World War, including the SS Panzer-Grenadier Der Furher, SS-Panzer-Division -Das Reich, the Panzer-grenadier regiment 9 Germania and the Panzer-Division Wiking. Jensen fought in the front which gained him the rare accolade of being one of the few foreigners to receive the highest decoration granted by Hitler to SS troops, the Gold Medal. He joined the SS after the Norwegian Nazi party seized power under the puppet-regime of Vidkud Quisling in 1942. After the war, Jensen spent time in an American military hospital and then was jailed for ten years for fighting for the Nazis. When he was released from jail he moved to Sweden were he made his fortune after starting up an industrial machine company. Jensen was classed as a war criminal according to the archives of Interpol. In 1994, he was deported to the United States for his war crimes, but then disappeared. In fact Jensen and his wife had moved to a corner of Marbella mainly populated by retirees from Norway, Sweden, Danes or Germans. It was easy for Jensen to disappear among the expat community and enjoy the sunshine and easy life of this corner of the Costa del Sol in a spacious home measuring 800sqm. In an interview with a local Norwegian expat newspaper in 1999, Jensen did not make any apology for serving with the SS during the war.

Investigators came across Jensen while hunting a much bigger fish: the so-called ‘Dr Death of Matthausen concentration camp’ Aribert Heim. Heim is the second most wanted Nazi in the world after Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary. He is said to have been responsible for the death of 500 people, many of them Spanish Republicans, in the Austrian concentration camp. Like the ‘Angel of Death’ of Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele, Heim subjected live prisoners to so-called medical experiments. After the war he set up a gynaecology clinic before he disappeared in 1962. German and Spanish police as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which tracks down Nazis, had been pursuing Heim for years. He was at first believed to be living in Palafrugell, on the Costa Brava, after German police in Baden-Baden traced money transfers from his family to an artist’s studio in the Spanish town. But Heim then appeared to have vanished until new clues suggested he was living in Marbella. Police watched a home in the luxury Royal Nordic Club, at first believing they had finally snared one of the world’s most wanted Nazis. In fact, the elderly gentleman turned out to be Jensen, who at 93, is one year Heim’s junior. German police and the Wiesenthal Centre believe Heim fled to Chile and is living in the home of his daughter Waltraud Bosser in Puerto Montt. But after police travelled to Chile earlier this year, Bosser disappeared, perhaps with her father, to Argentina.
© Expatica News

POLITICIANS STILL USE RACIST LANGUAGE AGAINST ROMA(Romania)

Romas Center for Social Intervention Romani CRISS, Press Monitoring Agency, or PMA and ERGO organization submitted Tuesday, June 9, a complaint to the National Council to Fight Discrimination, or CNCD, considering that Social Democrat deputy Vasile Dancu displayed a racist stance in saying his party “should make a difference between gypsidom and social-democracy.” Dancu’s statement – in a conflict with one of his party colleague – indirectly pertained to Marian Vanghelie, who despite of the fact he did not publicly assumed his origin, he is in fact ethnic Roma. Starting from this premise, the three organizations asked for "public apologizing, this time from the Social Democratic Party. We ask Dancu to apologize as this kind of language is neither admissible nor tolerated and it is time that all of us become aware of that. We hope the ideologist of the Romanian PSD understands the doctrine he enforces refers to «equal opportunities between all country’s citizens», and discrimination is an unconceivable action in a social democracy," Romani Criss said in a press statement. Moreover, Romani Criss CEO Magda Matache said to the press the offence brought against the ethnic Romas through the statement of the PSD vice-president is similar to that of president Traian Basescu against a TV reporter. "A politician makes senseless reference against the ethnic Romas. We feel offended and we hope that PSD head Mircea Geoana takes a stand against Dancu’s statement. He should publicly apologize," Magda Matache said.
© Divers

CZECH MUNICIPALITIES SAY ROMANY ISSUES AGENCY UNNECESSARY

25/6/2007- Representatives of Czech municipalities think that the establishment of a government agency to deal with Romany issues would be an unnecessary step that would bring no fundamental changes, a survey CTK conducted today showed. They are also opposed to the issues of Romanies living in regions being tackled by clerks in the remote capital of Prague. Minorities and Human Rights Minister Dzamila Stehlikova (Green Party) who counts with the launch of the agency explains the mayors' stand as a misunderstanding. She told CTK that the agency would mainly play a methodological role, that is it would provide know-how for those who would seek it. The agency would by no means dictate anything to anyone, Stehlikova said, adding that its members already work within the Government Council for Romany Community Affairs. "Therefore, it will be no new office, but only a new name," Stehlikova said. The mayors said that various social services work in their municipalities already now, and that they would rather welcome new laws on education and employment of Romanies. "Attendance of education programmes is of fundamental importance. In our computing skills project for Romanies attendance was negligible or nil after one or two lessons," said Iva Liedermanova, head of the Pardubice, east Bohemia, town hall's social department. "A legislative measure would be needed here," she said. Jaroslav Rohulan, deputy mayor of Nachod, east Bohemia, said municipalities would also need legislation that "would embed levers for forcing Romanies to work." Radek Vovsik, mayor of Jihlava, south Moravia, said there exist many projects for Romanies and that he would not be opposed to the agency if it were able to coordinate financial aid. He said, however, that the problem does not concern Romanies only, but generally all people who have adaption problems and who can be of various nationalities. The centre-right government of the Civic Democrats (ODS), Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) and Greens, that has ruled the country since January, has embedded the establishment of the agency against social exclusion in its policy statement. The agency should coordinate the steps taken to integrate the socially excluded people back into society. Stehlikova said yesterday the agency should be launched as from January 1, 2008.
© Prague Daily Monitor

CZECH REPUBLIC FACES LAWSUIT OVER ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW

27/6/2007- The European Commission Wednesday sent the last warning to 14 member states, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia, for not having fully embedded the EU directive on racial equality in their legislation due to which they face court proceedings. The EC says that the same rules to prevent discrimination on grounds of race and ethnic origin must be applied in the whole of the EU. The countries must reply to the EC objection within two months, otherwise their case would be proceeded by the European Court of Justice. If the court found the countries guilty, they would face a fine. Along with the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the EC warning was sent to Britain, Estonia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Slovenia. The EU adopted a directive to secure minimal protection against racial discrimination at work and at schools in 2000. All member states were to implement it by mid-2003, or by May 2004 in the case of the EU newcomers. The EC particularly criticises the Czech Republic for lacking the definition of discrimination in laws and points out that its anti-discrimination legislation does not apply to certain areas. In Slovakia, the EC minds a too general definition of putting a group of inhabitants at a disadvantage on grounds of their race or ethnic origin. The Czech government approved the anti-discrimination bill on June 11. If the legislation is passed by parliament and signed by the president, it would take effect as from January 2008.
© Prague Daily Monitor

FORMER CROATIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, AMBASSADOR TO US AND UN ATTENDS NAZI CONCERT

23/6/2007- Croatia's former Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the US and the UN was pictured attending, along with his family, a neo-Nazi concert festival in Croatia's capital Zagreb. Miomir Zuzul is a Croatian diplomat and a politician who was Croatia's deputy foreign minister in 1992-1993, then an ambassador to the United Nations in 1993-1996, ambassador to the United States 1996-2000 as well as foreign minister of Croatia during 2003-2005. The concert that Zuzul and his family was attending was held in Zagreb's largest stadium, Maksimir, and featured a performance by a controversial rock singer Thompson whose songs include a remake of a 1942 Croatian Nazi song glorifying extermination of Jews and Serbs. Simon Wiesenthal Center recently expressed outrage and disgust in the wake of a massive show of fascist salutes, symbols and uniforms at a rock concert by popular ultra-nationalist Croatian singer Thompson. In a letter to the Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, the Center's chief Nazi hunter Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff noted the presence of Croatian dignitaries, including the Minister of Science, Education and Sports, at the event and called for the banning of concerts by singers like Thompson who glorify fascism and racism.

In a response the Croatian government has issued a statement saying that the "Croatian government rejects any attempt at using and displaying insignia and salutes from the World War Two Ustasha regime… Contemporary Croatia rests on the values of the [1990s] Homeland War as well as on the foundations of antifascism and resistance to all forms of totalitarianism." During WWII, Croatian nazi regime killed over 1.5 million Serbs and Jews. In 1995, during the Croatian Homeland War, over 300,000 Serbian civilians have been murdered and expelled by the Croatian forces. Despite the government's denunciation of the Nazi fest, Croatian media is attributing a largely positive buzz on the event. A Croatian website, Lupiga.com, told its readers that missing the concert was a "disaster" because it was a "spectacle above all spectacles". "You cannot even dream what you have missed. Black was once again the ultimate hit, and measuring of corn has not been more massive in no other of European countries," website wrote in a coded phrasing. "Black" is referred to the color of the Croatian Nazi uniforms in the WWII and "measuring corn" is a euphemism for Hitler's Nazi salute. Over 60,000 attended the Nazi concert.
© Serbianna

RACISM IS ALIVE ... AND UNWELL(uk)

28/6/2007- Almost the entirety of black Britain agrees that racism remains an issue in the country, but people differ on the breadth and depth of the problem, depending on their origin, age and, to a lesser degree, gender, a poll commissioned by The Voice has revealed. Moreover, seven out of 10 black persons in the UK believe that racism has either remained the same or worsened over the past three to four years, a period during which the Labour government talked much about confronting the problem and established a new agency to fight discrimination and foster race relations. The survey, done in March by United States-born pollster, Bill Johnson, found that 94 per cent of black people believed that there was racism in the UK, with views differing little according to background. Differences, however, began to emerge, when Johnson sought to test people's perception of the intensity of that racism. For instance, 56 per cent of black people felt that there was a "great deal" of racism in the country, against 37 per cent who suggested that while there was racism, the situation was not overly bad. Another five per cent said there was not much racism. Black people who emigrated from the Caribbean or of recent West Indian descent were more likely than their African or black British counterparts to hold the view that racism runs deep in the country. Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of them said that there was a great deal of racism, against 30 per cent who held that there was racism, but of a less harsh nature.

By contrast, Africans (41 per cent) were least likely to agree that there was oppressive racism in the UK, followed by black British (47 per cent) holding the view that racism runs deep. Black British people (50 per cent) - referring to people whose roots in the country go back at least three generations - had the strongest perception of a more benign form of racism. Forty-seven per cent of Africans held this position. However, given the poll's margin of error of plus or minus three per cent, the position between African immigrants and black British represents a statistical dead heat. At the same time a third (34 per cent) of black people felt that racism had worsened in recent years, a similar amount (36 per cent) to those who said that the situation had not improved, but had stayed the same. In other words, 70 per cent were of the view that racism had either worsened or was the same since before the middle of the decade. Twenty-two per cent said racism had lessened during that period. Again, black people with Caribbean roots (76 per cent) were more likely than their African counterparts (54 per cent) to feel that racism had either worsened or stayed the same in the past three to four years. Eighty per cent of British blacks were of this view, with 50 per cent of those arguing that the situation had remained the same.
© The Voice

ATTACKS ON POLES BLAMED FOR RISE IN HATE CRIMES(uk)

27/6/2007- A growing number of attacks on Polish bar workers is being blamed for race hate crimes rising to new record levels in the Capital. Police are now dealing with an average of three racist incidents every day after another rise in complaints of abuse and attacks. Bar staff and doormen from Eastern Europe are now among the most common victims. Every weekend police are called to incidents in which the workers, usually from Poland, have been physically assaulted because of their nationality or have faced racist insults. The increase follows the attack on Polish worker Patryk Mnich, who was left fighting for his life after being beaten in a street attack in Pilrig. In total, police dealt with 1022 racist incidents in Lothian and the Borders in the 12 months up to April 1 this year - double the amount recorded three years ago, a new report shows. More than a third of the 900 race hate crimes in Edinburgh took place in the city centre, and most of those involved Eastern European victims. Pc Kevin Lawson, a crime prevention officer specialising in racist crime, said: "There's been a big increase in reports of racial crimes involving people from Eastern European countries, especially Poland, who have moved to Edinburgh in recent years. "A lot of them work in the night-time economy, in bars and clubs as barmen and doormen. They are getting racial abuse from people who have had too much to drink." The attack on Mr Mnich in February shocked the city and the Polish community across Scotland. He remains in hospital today - nearly four months after the attack - but has been moved from the Western General to the Astley Ainslie Hospital to recuperate. NHS Lothian said today his condition was "stable". A 26-year-old man has appeared in court charged with attempted murder in connection with the attack.

An estimated 35,000 Polish workers have moved to Edinburgh in the past three years in the biggest mass migration the city has seen for decades. Nina Giles, director of the Edinburgh and Lothians Race Equality Council, called for action to tackle the problem. She said: "We see signs in hospitals, buses and trains saying that aggressive behaviour will not be tolerated. Perhaps we should have a similar campaign to tackle racist behaviour in bars and clubs." Police are now looking into setting up a remote reporting site specifically for Polish people. The initiative, at Polish community centre Swietlica on Leith's North Fort Street, would allow victims of crime to report incidents to police anonymously through third parties. But Karol Chojnowski, general manager of the Haymarket-based portal for the Polish community szkocja.net, said he did not believe anti-Polish sentiments were rife in Edinburgh. Mr Chojnowski, who has been based in Edinburgh for eight years, said he had never been subjected to racism. He said: "Unfortunately, there are people who will give abuse to bar staff regardless of whether they are from Eastern Europe or they are local." Chief Inspector Douggie Forsyth, Lothian and Borders Police's head of diversity, said the force had improved its means of dealing with racism and part of the rise was down to more people reporting crime. Nearly 70 per cent of hate crime is cleared up, compared to just over 40 per cent of general crime. Former city leader councillor Ewan Aitken, whose Restalrig ward has a large Eastern European population, said: "I am concerned that these visitors to our city and new neighbours are facing these insidious and abusive attacks. It is no excuse to say it is part of their job. Any hate crime is unacceptable."
© The Scotsman

WEST 'MUST STOP LOOKING AT ISLAM THROUGH THE LENS OF TERROR' (uk)

28/6/2007- Tony Blair would do well to listen to Akbar Ahmed when he takes up his new role as Middle East envoy in earnest. One of the world's leading authorities on Islam, Prof Akbar says education, rather than violence, is the way to smooth relations between the Muslim world and the west. And it is imperative that it happens sooner rather than later, he told EducationGuardian.co.uk. "Europe is going down in population, whereas the Muslim world is rapidly rising. By the middle of this century a quarter of the world's population will be Muslim. "If that's the case, we can't afford an unending clash between the Muslim world and the west. The world will be consumed by religious turmoil. We are facing a major breakdown in the 21st century. Unless we begin to change now, the chances of us surviving are limited," he said. The 65-year-old anthropologist and Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic studies at the American University in Washington is in the UK to give a series of speeches to academics and religious leaders ahead of receiving an honorary doctorate from Liverpool University on July 6. "How do you bring sanity or rationalism, or people to sit down to talk to each other to overcome this huge chasm between the west and Islam?" Prof Akbar asks. His answer is to get as much information about Islam into the public domain as possible. He has just published a new book, Journeys into Islam; a 12-part lecture series for the internet; an audio series about Islam; and a new play.

"I'm hoping that in time in the west, particularly in the US, where misunderstanding is growing worse, [my work] may help people to understand the culture better, and bring more sanity and good sense all round, so we can face the real issues facing us in the 21st century - like population and climate change rather than ethnic and religious violence," he said. "It's not just 9/11. It started in the 19th century when the first clashes between the west and Islam took place. We're seeing the same patterns being played out today." But it is the west's obsession with Islam, and the tendency to look at Islam "through the lens of terror or security", that worries Prof Akbar most. "That creates alarm, resistance and further distortion," he said. "It's not the best way of looking at a culture which has a long history, 57 nations and 1.4 billion people. "Islam is going through a great period of turmoil and change. Any continued aggression [from the west] will encourage more and more people to join the queues to blow themselves up." Rather than pour all its money into containing Islam, the west should spend more money on schools and education, Prof Akbar says. He advocates the "Aligarh" model, named after a university modelled on Cambridge that was established in British India in the 19th century. Aligarh "took the best from the west but kept the faith and integrity of Islam". Britain and the west should strive to strengthen this moderate, modernist model, he argues. The government is planning to reform Islamic studies in the UK after publishing the Siddiqui report earlier in June. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has £1m to allocate to improve research and teaching of Islamic studies in universities.

For Prof Akbar, it is not about the money, but the approach the government takes that is key. "The [UK] government has to be looking at the long term. Who are the people of substance in this country who can bring change, and how can we work with them to bring change so the [Muslim] community maintains its integrity and yet lives comfortably in society," he said. He admits it's a challenge for both sides and the onus cannot fall solely on the west. "Muslim leaders need wisdom, vision and compassion, and I don't see that in Muslim leadership. There's nothing but mediocrity and military leaders in power," he said. He hopes his efforts to explain Islam will also reach misinformed Muslims. He has a long history of trying. In 1999 he became the first Muslim to be invited to speak at a Jewish synagogue. "It triggered a debate within the Muslim community very close to fatwa territory - but it changed the landscape," he said. Prof Akbar will speak at the Commons on July 2 and at the London School of Economics on July 10. He will deliver a paper at a conference on the 60th anniversary of the independence of India at Southampton University on July 17.
© The Guardian

UK'S FIRST MUSLIM MP QUITS OVER DEATH THREATS

He was the poster boy of the political classes in Scotland's Muslim community, Sarwar faces down death threats

23/6/2007- As the UK's first Muslim MP, he was one of the most high-profile Asian figures in contemporary politics. Mohammed Sarwar may be bowing out of the murky world of public service but he remains defiant despite a series of death threats over his involvement in the Kriss Donald murder trial. The toll of political office appears to have been a high one. His family have faced a flurry of threats over the years from every hue of far-right group. His part in smoothing the wheels of the extradition of the three murderers of Kriss Donald from Pakistan has also triggered a fresh round of death threats. Mr Sarwar said: "Since I became involved in politics I have received death threats. I have received threats from the BNP, Combat 18, various neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan. "I have also been threatened by people upset by my part in the extradition of the Kriss Donald murderers. "All of that has absolutely no bearing on my decision to stand down." This is not the first time that threats to his safety have aroused Mr Sarwar's wide cantankerous streak. In the 2005 general election, he refused to share the platform with an opponent from the British National Party and persuaded other candidates to do the same. The ensuing rumpus meant that the returning officer announced the result from a platform with no candidates, and a victorious Sarwar made a speech from the floor of the hall. For many years, he enjoyed a privileged position as a politician and as a retail tycoon worth an estimated £16m, mainly from his family wholesale cash and carry business. But his career as an MP, which is soon to end after his announcement that he will stand down at the next general election, has been plagued by accusations of sleaze.

Soon after his election as Glasgow Govan MP ten years ago, he was suspended from the parliamentary Labour party over allegations of bribing political opponents, and stood trial for fraud. He was acquitted in March 1999 and restored to the parliamentary Labour Party. More recently, his son was convicted for a major money laundering scheme. Mr Sarwar still often travels to Pakistan where he is involved in a number of welfare activities. His projects include the building of a hospital at Toba Take Singh, which has been running for about a year. He was also involved in the distribution of aid after the Pakistani earthquake in 2005. Mr Sarwar was also in Pakistan to help mediate over the fate of Misbah Rana and the courtroom battle between her parents. Critics could not claim that he has forgotten the red tenements and dusty streets of Govan as Mr Sarwar has arguably become one of the leading Commons advocates of the Scottish ship-building industry. It appeared that no amount of death threats would deter him from what should be his political dotage. Mr Sarwar added: "I will still be active in politics and in the Labour Party. I will never cease to campaign about the cases I feel strongly about. "If anyone does anything silly, I will of course extend my full co-operation to Strathclyde Police. I will not shy away from anyone."
© BBC News

GERMANY'S MUSLIMS ANGERED BY CARDINAL'S REMARKS

25/6/2007- The Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) harshly criticized the Christian churches after high-ranking German clergyman Cardinal Karl Lehmann last week spoke out against Islam enjoying equal status to Christianity. "The (Christian) churches would like to ban Islam to the lower leagues," Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, told the Sunday edition of Berlin's Tagesspiegel. Mazyek also pointed out that Germany's Basic Law ascribes equality to all religions, saying that there were no legal grounds for granting Christianity special legal status.

Neutrality or indifference?
The Council's criticism came in response to comments made last week by Cardinal Karl Lehmann, head of the German conference of bishops, who had warned against interpreting the state's religious neutrality as "uncritical tolerance." Lehmann also expressed concern about all faiths being treated equally, regardless of their historical significance in Europe. "Cardinal Lehmann is mistaken if he thinks that the fact that Europe and Germany were undeniably shaped by Christianity justifies the legal discrimination of other religions," said Volker Beck, head of Germany's Green Party. However, Germany's numerous Muslim organizations have to fulfill the country's legal requirements for becoming a religious group if they are to enjoy the same rights, added Beck. Germany's 3.2 million Muslims are not represented by a single umbrella organization, but by many smaller ones. Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, agreed with Lehmann that Islam should not be granted the same legal standing as Christianity. "Unlike Christianity, Islam is not in Europe's cultural center and is not reflected in everyday life in the same way," Pofalla said in a statement "Only those who are conscious of their cultural and social roots can freely and openly stand up for the rights of people of different faiths," he added.
© Deutsche Welle

GERMANY TO ACCEPT MIGRANT SURVIVORS

29/6/2007- In an unprecedented move, Germany is to assume responsibility for illegal migrant survivors picked up by its two helicopters during the Nautilus II mission in the central Mediterranean. The announcement was made by German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble in reply to a question by Nationalist MEP Simon Busuttil during a meeting of the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament in Brussels. The minister was speaking about the German Presidency's achievements in the areas of justice and home affairs. Referring to the anti-immigration patrols being coordinated by Frontex in the straits between Libya, Malta and Sicily, he said the German government was taking part with two helicopters. During the debate, Nationalist MEP Simon Busuttil asked the minister to explain who is going to be responsible for illegal immigrants saved during the mission in international or third country waters. It did not make sense for Malta to be responsible for all these immigrants as the island's capacity was already stretched, he argued. "There is no doubt that we are all responsible for saving lives," Dr Busuttil said. "But we are also jointly responsible for accepting the immigrants after we save them. Is Malta going to be left alone to act as a buffer for the influx of immigrants?" The German Interior Minister replied that Germany was going to make an unprecedented move in European solidarity in order to help Malta. "I can announce that the German government has decided to start taking responsibility for all the lives saved by its helicopters during the Nautilus II mission. In order to help Malta, we will be flying all the immigrants we pick up in international waters or in third countries who do not collaborate, directly to Germany."

Dr Busuttil told The Times afterwards that he was very satisfied with the German commitment as this was the first time a country forming part of the Frontex mission has adopted this position. He said the German example should prompt other EU member states to show solidarity in concrete terms. Sources close to the Nautilus II mission said the announcement was very well received although they added that "there are serious limitations to how many immigrants a helicopter can save". During the meeting, Dr Busuttil emphasised the need for member states to move from rhetoric to action over the immigration problem on the southern borders. He said that although the Nautilus II mission was a step in the right direction, vessels and other equipment provided by the other member states were conspicuous by their absence. Nautilus II started last Monday with the participation of Malta, Germany, France, Greece, Spain and Italy. However, the lack of naval support means the mission is still ineffective. Italy, a country directly interested in the problem, is only taking part with a token presence through a surveillance aircraft.
© Times of Malta

CASH-STRAPPED DEATH CAMP MEMORIAL SITES STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE(Germany)

27/6/2007- Germany's memorial sites at Nazi concentration camps are in dire economic straits. They are calling for more political responsibility to ensure that they can continue to fulfill their educational task. The Dachau concentration camp memorial site near Munich receives over 800,000 visitors per year. Internationally, it is among the best-known sites commemorating the memory of the millions who perished in the Holocaust in Europe. But faced with an acute cash crunch, memorial centers strewn across Germany, Dachau included, are increasingly struggling to carry out their primary task: educating future generations about the horrors of the Holocaust and the valuable lessons they hold for humanity. Barbara Distel, director of the Dachau memorial site said its education department cannot meet all requests for tours or other educational offers. "The situation in Dachau is unsatisfactory," Distel said. The center only has one full-time educator. Other major sites report of similar problems. The foundation managing the memorials at Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Brandenburg in eastern Germany said funding was only enough to cover operating costs. Buchenwald, also in eastern Germany, has had to work with a capped budget since 1998, despite the increase in costs. "Our back is to the wall," said Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, deputy director of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation. He said the center did not have the means to revise existing permanent exhibitions or conduct youth projects, for example. The latter could only be financed through external sources, such as other foundations.

Charging entrance fees for concentration camps?
The president of the International Dachau Committee, Pieter Dietz de Loos last month sparked a debate on whether memorial sites should introduce entrance fees to alleviate these financial problems. The committee was founded by former prisoners following World War Two and played a decisive role in setting up the memorial site at Dachau. It does not, however, contribute to the site's funding. "The committee will be broke in five years," said Dietz de Loos, a Dutch attorney and son of a Dachau prisoner, at the camp's liberation ceremony in May. But the proposal to charge entry fees for concentration camps has sparked unease among many. "I cannot imagine that visitors to Dachau will have to pay an entrance fee," said Distel. According to the Central Council of Jews in Germany, those sites where history occurred had to be accessible to everyone. "It is only through these concrete places that visitors can thoroughly experience for themselves the presence of historical events," the council's vice-president Salomon Korn told Jewish weekly Jüdische Allgemeine. "Such a visual link of history and an authentic place serves to reinforce and deepen remembrance." Entrance fees would only undermine this, Korn said.

Private investors holding back
American philanthropist Ronald Lauder set up and finances a project to preserve Europe's most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, in present day Poland. But some point out that in Germany, private investors remain reluctant to do the same. Korn said German companies were "elegantly refraining" from contributing to financing, despite "a moral obligation and responsibility" to maintain these memorial sites. Buchenwald's Lüttgenau said this was due to industry concerns that any backing could be misunderstood. "Private companies fear that support for our educational work would be equal to an admission of guilt," Lüttgenau said.
Sites are Germany's responsibility
Distel said the government carried the responsibility for the memorial sites in Germany. The Bavarian state government's ministry of culture finances Dachau, for example. According to a spokesman, it provides the memorial site with some 1.5 million euros ($2 million) annually for personnel and material costs. "I consider it to be Germany's political and cultural task to ensure that these sites are equipped in a way that they can adequately work," Distel said. This view was shared by Korn. He said it was not the memorial sites' obligation, but rather that of those politically responsible to ensure that the memory of these camps stayed alive. "The federal and state governments are obliged to ensure that everyone has access to these sites, which represent the darkest part of German history," Korn said. Thomas Lutz of the Topography of Terror Foundation said, though, that it was not clear whether the political support necessary was present. "The only chance now is to make it publicly clear that there is a significant gap between the demands on the memorial sites and their ability to fulfill these," said Lutz, who heads the foundation's department for memorial sites.

German government has yet to provide a solution
For now, Dachau and the other sites are trying to work as effectively as possible. Lüttgenau said the Buchenwald site had exhausted all savings measures. But it wasn't enough to address the needs of its half a million visitors per year. "We cannot attend to the growing demand for educational services, such as accompanying groups through the site," Lüttgenau said. It has had to turn down 30 to 40 percent of such inquiries. "Considering the need for more educational youth work in eastern Germany, this is a dramatic situation," Lüttgenau said. "The interest is there and we can't fulfill it." The German government has said it is working on a new concept for financing the concentration camp memorial sites in Germany. But it has yet to present a model. "We are caught between a rock and a hard place right now," Lüttgenau said.
© Deutsche Welle

POLAND'S FAR-RIGHT COALITION PARTY REJECTS EU TREATY DEAL

28/6/2007- A far-right party from Poland's three-way ruling coalition on Thursday rejected a deal on a new governing treaty for the European Union, which emerged from a knife-edge summit last week. The League of Polish Families (LPR), which is a junior member of a coalition steered by conservative Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said it did not recognise the mandate of the EU's intergovernmental conference, which is due next month to draw up a reform treaty for the 27-nation bloc. EU leaders meeting in Brussels last Saturday reached a hard-fought deal on the mandate for the conference, which aims to yield an accord on streamlining the expanded bloc's operations. The agreement came after Poland accepted a compromise, after having put up up fierce resistance to changes in the way EU members vote on decisions affecting the entire union because it feared the biggest players, notably Germany, would end up with too much clout. In a statement, the LPR blasted key planks of the planned treaty, such as a charter of rights, a pledge to adopt the euro, the creation of the office of EU president and foreign minister, and what it said was "a voting system which favorises Germany as the dominant state." The ultra-Catholic LPR also said it "could not accept a preamble with no reference to God or to Christianity." Poland had previously demanded a reference to Europe's Christian roots, before letting the pressure slip. "We believe the EU should remain an economic community of sovereign states, instead of transforming itself into a super-state," the LPR added.

In the wake of last Saturday's deal, LPR leader Roman Giertych, who is also Poland's education minister and a deputy premier, blasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her handling of the Brussels summit. Germany currently holds the EU's revolving presidency, and Merkel had threatened to go ahead with work on the treaty without Poland if Warsaw did not give way. Giertych said it was "a situation in which someone tells someone else 'Haende hoch' politically speaking", using the German for "hands up", a term which for non-German speakers is most familiar from World War II films. The European Union "is increasingly submitting to the German political diktat," he added. The LPR was controversially brought into government in the spring of 2006, along with the populist movement Samoobrona (Self-Defence), to help shore up the then minority government of Kaczynski's Law and Justice (PiS) party. Its leaders frequently make statements at odds with the official government line.
© EUbusiness

LOOKING IN THE KACZYNSKIS' REARVIEW MIRROR(Poland/Germany)

If Germany had never invaded Poland, there would be no need to talk about EU voting rights today, says Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. In Brussels there is irritation that Poland is playing the "history card" once again. But Germans in particular should be wary of being too quick to judge.

23/6/2007- In the dispute over the voting rights in the European treaty, the Polish Prime Minister Jarolsaw Kaczynski has now come up with an argument that any German would find it difficult to contradict. "If Poland had not had to live through the (World War II) years of 1939-1945, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million." The Polish leader was attempting to justify his demands for an alternative voting rights system, rather than the one proposed by the German rotating EU presidency. There is no question that not only the history of Poland, but that of every European country, would have been much happier without the German invasion of Poland and its monstrous consequences. It should be remembered that during World War II there were an estimated 6 million Polish victims of the German occupation -- of which 5.7 million were civilians. In Poland alone, 2.4 million Jews were murdered. Kaczynski made the statement on Polish radio on Tuesday but otherwise it didn't really resonate at home. However in Brussels and Berlin the comments were registered with concern and were seen as an indication the Polish government is now doing what it often does when it runs into trouble: plays the history card. And this Thursday evening, when the Polish square-root idea is broached, one can expect this kind of reminiscing again. Warsaw is isolated and is threatening to use its veto. But anyone who thinks that a hopeless cause would make the Polish prime minister or president break out in a sweat doesn't know the Polish mentality. When there's nothing more to be done, that's when things really get going for people like the Kaczynskis.

Caught in the Amber of History
The Catholic twins are caught up in the amber of history. But what we might consider isolationism, and even parochialism, the Kaczynskis and most Poles see as a political defensive fortification. While amber conserves, it also protects from outside blows. Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker has called on the Kaczynskis to make a "leap into the present." "You will not be happy in the long-run if you are always looking in the rearview mirror." Juncker is right. But it is worth looking in the Kaczynskis' rearview mirror. Because what the Polish president and his brother, the prime minister, see there is not the same thing that Tony Blair or Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel or Jose Manuel Barroso see. For the Kaczynskis objects in the mirror appear closer than they really are. In their rearview mirror, for example, it is the end of August 1939, a few days before the German invasion of Poland and a man by the name of Jozef Beck appears in view. He is Poland's foreign minister and he is receiving the US diplomat Joseph K. Davies in his office in Warsaw. The two are discussing the danger of war breaking out. Davies, previously US ambassador to Moscow, is pretty pessimistic, but Beck sees things differently. The Germans should come! If the Wehrmacht attacks, Polish troops will be in Berlin within three weeks. Davies thought Beck was completely crazy. And he turned out to be right. The Wehrmacht marched into Warsaw four weeks later, and the biggest ever program of destruction in the history of mankind got underway. Davies urged Beck to form an alliance with Moscow. That was out of the question for the Poles, just as, in all their quarrels with Brussels, it would be out of the question for the Kaczynskis today. The pattern of thought is certainly similar: Before, it was the Germans and the Russians who occupied us, now the EU wants to pull a fast one on us. But how did the Kaczynskis come to this conclusion? A look in their rearview mirror provides some answers.

No New Beginning, Rather Soviet Occupation
The Kaczynskis' father was badly injured fighting in the Warsaw uprising, while their mother joined the anti-German resistance at the age of 14 and worked as a medic. Several of their uncles died in Nazi concentration camps, on the way to Russian deportation, or in the Soviet mass shootings. For the Kaczynskis and their countrymen there was no new beginning in 1945. Instead, they were occupied by the Soviets. On Stalin's orders the Polish borders were shifted and millions of people were resettled. The suffering of these millions of Poles also belongs to the history of the expulsion of Germans from Polish lands, though it is often forgotten. A country that was on the brink of civil war fell under the Soviet yoke, but the Polish desire for freedom was never broken. And the fierce courage that was fired up during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation in 1944, came back to life in 1980 with the founding of the independent Solidarity trade union. In the end, despite martial law and all that went with it, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke apart. Without the courage of the Poles, there would never have been a new Europe, the constitution of which is being fought over so fiercely today. These facts could have been emphasized, for instance, in an historical preamble to the European constitution -- something that could have possibly avoided the current conflict. The Poles are not just concerned with the specific voting rights, and that they will lose influence in the future (which is difficult to deny), but -- perhaps above all -- about the recognition of their services to history. The bravery paired with obstinacy of people like Beck and the Kaczynskis spawned both: The Warsaw Uprising, Solidarity -- and the blockade in Brussels. For the Poles these all go back to the same unbending attitude. In German sitting rooms people like to hang pictures of a stag in the morning dew -- but over Polish sofas there is an image of the Polish cavalry in 1939, attacking German tanks with raised sabers. Kitschy? Sure. But it causes any German who sees it to go red with shame and be moved to tears.

Poles Are the True Europeans
The martyr-like pose of the Poles has started to get on the nerves of many Europeans -- most of all, because they always adopt it whenever the going gets tough on the international stage. That was the case during the negotiations for Poland's EU membership, it's the case now during the treaty debate, and it will be the case in the future too. Whoever is concerned about this or whoever -- like Jean-Claude Juncker -- cheerfully tells the Warsaw brothers to stop moaning, should definitely bear in mind that the Poles live a more European life, and in particular work in a more globalized way, than most Europeans. While the euros are counted in Luxembourg, tens of thousands of Poles travel by bus every day from Warsaw, Krakow, and Wroclaw to other European countries to find work. Practically every pub in Ireland has Polish staff. No nation is as cosmopolitan as Germany's eastern neighbor. While the Germans regard foreign countries from the comfort of a hotel bar or beach, the Poles are busy cleaning rooms or plucking strawberries. Is this historically just, bearing in mind recent German-Polish history? No. In actual fact, it should all be the other way round. For this reason, the Poles are allowed to be annoying. They have their reasons. And they secretly know that they now have a glowing future in Europe anyway.
© Spiegel Online

POLAND'S VOTE PLEADING IS SHEER HYPOCRISY(comment)

By Anne Karpf

23/6/2007- It was one of those "you couldn't make it up" days. Poland was demanding more votes in the running of the EU on the grounds that, if Germany hadn't murdered 6 million Poles, then the population would be almost double what it is today. One thing is clear: Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's ultra nationalist president and prime minister respectively, have blasted "Don't mention the war" to smithereens. Of course, it's quite understandable if Poland is still mourning its war dead, yet you can't help thinking: the nerve of those boys. Isn't there - how shall I put this Euro-politely? - a dash of audacity here? Hypocrisy even? Let's remember those 6 million dead: half of them were Jews - and the Polish record on Jews is just a mite troublesome. Those Polish Jews weren't exactly living in clover before the war, when the numerus clausus (Jewish quota) restricted their access to the professions. And when they were carted off to the camps, most of their Polish neighbours were at best indifferent, and at worst grateful. Polish nationalism had long been nourished by anti-semitism. Although there were many Poles who exposed themselves to huge risk by hiding Jews, my own mother's experience - denounced to the Nazis by a Polish Catholic - was common, perhaps even typical. And now the Kaczynskis are trying to airbrush away every last speck of Polish complicity in the name of more EU votes! Those same Kaczynskis who are so fervently supported by Radio Maryja, widely criticised as chief purveyor of virulent anti-semitism in Poland today. Those same Kaczynskis who are governing Poland with a coalition including the radical right League of Polish Families, as homophobic as it is anti-semitic. One can't help but be reminded of the joke about the chap who killed both his parents and then demanded leniency from the judge because he was an orphan. In among all the web discussion about this story today, one wag proposed a compromise: give Poland the extra votes and move its boundary back to its 1938 location.
© The Guardian

COUNCIL OF EUROPE MOVES TO PREVENT RELIGIOUS HATRED

29/6/2007- Responding to the scandal caused by caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, the European Council intends to strengthen its efforts to prevent hatred and violence against religious groups, it stated in a resolution passed in Strasbourg Friday. The resolution, which was passed with a large majority, also said that "criticism of religious groups should be tolerated in democratic societies." However, the council put a limit on religious criticism and freedom of opinion: it was not allowed to incite hatred, disturb the public order or be targeted at members of religious groups. The incitement of hatred and violence against religious groups was to be punished in the 47 member states of the European Council, the resolution said. Germany already has laws to that effect, and offending religious convictions is punishable. Enlightened Islamic religious communities in Western countries could play an important role in the fight against extremism, legislators from the Netherlands and from Scandinavia said. "They could help to protect youths from seduction by fundamentalists and to fight customs such as forced marriages," Dutch socialist Anja Meulenbelt said. So far, one had expected Muslim immigrants in European countries to adapt to local customs in a one-sided way, she said. That had to change, she added. "Racism can easily hide behind the protective wall of religious criticism." Independent Russian legislator Anatoly Korobejnikov said Muslims would soon be in a majority in Western Europe due to demographic developments. He demanded more religious studies lessons in schools, which would not interfere with the separation of State and Church. "The Church might be separate from the State, but not from society," he said. In this way, dialogue between Christians, Muslims and other religious groups could be fostered.
© Expatica News

ASSEMBLY SPELLS OUT WAYS TO FIGHT GROWING ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE(CoE)

27/6/2007- Public figures or political parties making anti-Semitic statements should be prosecuted, public financing for anti-Semitic groups blocked and states sponsoring Holocaust-denial firmly condemned, the Parliamentary Assembly said today following a debate on combating anti-Semitism in Europe. The media should take care in their handling of potentially anti- Semitic stereotypes, while hate-speech against Jews on the internet and in sport should be resolutely stamped out, the parliamentarians added. They also called for the fostering of inter-faith dialogue and a more inclusive teaching of history and religions.

Provisional edition
Combating anti-Semitism in Europe, Resolution 1563 (2007)*

1. The Parliamentary Assembly remains deeply concerned about the persistence and escalation of anti-Semitic phenomena and notes that no member state is shielded from, or immune to, this fundamental affront to human rights.

2. Such phenomena, which are a cause of fear for personal safety and a sign of lack of respect for the faith of Jewish citizens of the Council of Europe are unacceptable in Council of Europe member states.

3. Far from having been eliminated, anti-Semitism is today on the rise in Europe. It appears in a variety of forms and is becoming relatively commonplace, to varying degrees, in all Council of Europe member states. This upsurge should prompt Council of Europe member states to be more vigilant and tackle the threat which anti-Semitism represents for the fundamental values which it is the Council of Europe’s role to defend.

4. Anti-Semitism, conveyed frequently – but not exclusively - by extreme-right movements, Islamist ideologists and extreme-left political factions, is reflected in hostility towards the Jews, their religion, their culture or their collective identity. Such hostility, which may extend to overt hatred, is expressed through behaviour and actions of varying types: desecration, vandalism, publications, insults, threats, aggression or outright murder.

5. The Assembly regrets that the Middle East conflict has had an impact on the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe. Although it is not the sole cause, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to fuel anti-Semitic violence in Europe. This is especially the case among immigrants in European cities. This new form of anti-Semitism is a reason for angry reaction among the majority of the population and will cause hatred against immigrants in general, thereby inducing xenophobia.

6. Anti-Semitism represents a danger for all democratic states as it serves as a pretext and justification for violence. It splits the national community by placing one category of individuals against another and one religion against another. It constitutes a serious violation of both fundamental rights and freedoms and the principles of democracy. The political and civilian authorities therefore have a duty to do all they can to halt this growing threat.

7. The Assembly is aware that the fight against anti-Semitism presents democracies with a dilemma, as they must on the one hand guarantee freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association and allow for the existence and political representation of the full spectrum of political views and on the other, defend and protect themselves against a phenomenon which undermines their core values.

8. The Assembly, referring to Recommendation 1222 (1993) on the fight against racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and intolerance and Resolution 1345 (2003) on racist, xenophobic and intolerant discourse in politics, is convinced that states must combat any trivialisation of anti-Semitism and take resolute action against its manifestations by applying or, where such do not exist, adopting all necessary political and legislative measures to preserve the rule of law based on respect for democratic principles and human rights.

9. The Assembly also notes that civil society, with its grass roots experience, is often the first to become aware of the rise of phenomena such as anti-Semitism, and therefore has an important role to play in mobilising public response to it.

10. The Assembly considers that the principles enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination in its Article 4, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in its Article 20 and in the general policy recommendations of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), in particular Recommendation No. 9 on combating anti-Semitism, adopted in June 2004, represent fundamental elements which should guide member states in their fight against anti-Semitism.

11. The Assembly strongly supports the work undertaken by ECRI to encourage all relevant actors in Europe to combine their efforts in order to find an effective and lasting response to anti-Semitism, at all administrative levels (national, regional, local) and by including representatives of different communities, religious leaders, civil society organisations and other key institutions.

12. Accordingly, the Assembly calls on the governments of the Council of Europe member states to:

12.1. robustly and consistently enforce legislation criminalising anti-Semitic and other hate speech, in particular any incitement of violence;

12.2. prosecute any political party which puts forward anti-Semitic arguments in its activities, manifestos or publications;

12.3. make a criminal offence the public denial, trivialisation or condoning, with a racist aim, of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes in accordance with ECRI general policy recommendation No. 7;

12.4. suspend or withdraw public financing, domestically and internationally, for organisations and associations promoting anti-Semitism;

12.5. reinforce their legislation to punish anti-Semitic acts and see to it that anti-Semitic motivations constitute an aggravating factor in criminal cases;

12.6. sign and ratify Protocol No. 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ETS No. 177);

12.7. intensify teaching of the history and culture of the main religions in schools, in accordance with Recommendation 1720 (2005) on education and religion, in order to promote tolerance and to combat ignorance which is so often the source of intolerance; education and training are among the most basic and lasting ways of guarding against anti-Semitism;

12.8. ensure that anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews do not take place in any educational institutions, especially universities;

12.9. promote intercultural and inter-faith dialogue between different communities;

12.10. acquire the means of punishing anti-Semitic statements on the Internet and therefore sign and ratify the Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime concerning criminalisation of acts of a racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer systems (ETS No. 189);

12.11. not endorse the construction of monuments or the holding of ceremonies celebrating those guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity during the second world war;

12.12. take resolute action against any anti-Semitic act in sport in accordance with Committee of Ministers’ Recommendation Rec(2001)6 on the prevention of racism, xenophobia and racial intolerance in sport;

12.13. encourage the media to exercise self-discipline, to promote tolerance and mutual respect and to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices which have entered everyday speech;

12.14. strengthen media self-control mechanisms aimed at preventing anti-Semitism and other forms of hate speech;

12.15. continue the implementation of Recommendation Rec(2001)15 of the Committee of Ministers, in preparing and organising a "Holocaust Memorial and prevention of crimes against humanity Day" in their schools, in order to contribute to global action for the promotion of tolerance, human rights and the fight against all forms of racism;

12.16. make use of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) to alert the public authorities to anti-Semitic activities;

12.17. co-operate more actively with civil society and NGOs and support them in the fight against anti-Semitism;

12.18. support the activities of ECRI, whose role is to combat racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and intolerance throughout Europe and to ensure that member states give practical follow-up to its recommendations;

12.19. actively and vigorously condemn all states sponsoring anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and incitement to genocide.

* Assembly debate on 27 June 2007 (24th Sitting) (see Doc. 11292, report of the Political Affairs Committee, rapporteur: Mr Margelov, and Doc. 11320, opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, rapporteur: Mrs Wohlwend). Text adopted by the Assembly on 27 June 2007 (24th Sitting).
© Council of Europe

HOLOCAUST DENIAL UNDERMINES ISLAM (opinion)

By Hamza Yusuf, Muslim scholar, lecturer and author, and the co-founder of the Zaytuna Institute in California, which is dedicated to reviving the traditions of classical Islamic scholarship.

28/6/2007- Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature and basis of knowledge. How do we know things? It also studies the veracity of “truth.” How do we know the difference between belief, knowledge, opinion, fact, reality and fantasy? The Greek philosopher, Carneades, believed that knowledge of reality, of what is true or false, is impossible, that nothing can be known with certainty; his philosophy is known as skepticism. It does not reject belief altogether; Carneades felt that our belief about any given matter should be subjected to intense scrutiny and then, using a scale of probability, we should accept or reject the likelihood of its truth or falsehood. But we must make no absolute claims to it. Another Greek skeptic, Cratylus, however, was more radical in his approach and believed that nothing could be known at all, and thus no statements could convey anything true or meaningful. He finally gave up talking altogether.

Most of us are neither moderate nor extreme skeptics; we believe what our teachers told us. Although some of us learned later that perhaps a little skepticism was indeed warranted, we survived with our grasp of reality reasonably intact. We live in a world where facts are meaningful and opinions can be assessed, at least to the degree that we deem them sound or unsound. When it comes to religion, those of us who are raised in traditions often reject such assessments and simply believe what we were taught. For many religious people, skepticism is anathema, the work of the devil. However, our Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have always been concerned with and seriously interested in epistemology, because each of these faiths have profound truth claims that need substantiation or “believability.”

Islam, at its advent, developed a sophisticated methodology for the validation of truth claims. One of the greatest achievements of the Islamic scholastic tradition is ‘ilm ar-rijaal, the science of narrators. It is the study of reports of events in the life of the Prophet, especially of his sayings and deeds. Its formulators established a rigid set of criteria to validate the truth claims of those who asserted they saw or heard the Prophet do or say such-and-such. Reports were grouped into two categories: ahad, or solitary reports in which one or a few people claimed to have heard or seen something, and mutawatir, or multiply-transmitted reports narrated in numbers large enough to preclude collusive fabrication. The solitary reports must meet many criteria before being accepted as sound statements that nonetheless contain, depending upon the degree to which the criteria were met, a certain probability of error. On the other hand, firmly established multiply-transmitted reports, in numbers that rule out collusion, are taken as uncontestable fact.

The Quran, the seventh century book narrated by Muhammad, is considered mutawatir, and thus epistemologically undeniable. Whether one believes it is from God or not is another matter, but the Quran in its current form is the same Quran the Prophet taught to his companions more than 1,400 years ago; untold numbers in each generation of Muslims have transmitted the same recitation, making it infallible in its historicity and accuracy. Is-lamic scholars accepted multiply-transmitted reports from Muslims and people of other faiths. Upon this epistemological foundation rests the Muslim faith. Creedal matters are deemed valid only if they are buttressed by multiply-transmitted traditions that can be traced back to the Prophet. Although Islamic jurisprudence is largely based upon solitary evidence (hence the differences of opinion in the various schools), the Quran and the creed of Islam are both founded upon multiple narratives that achieve an undeniable status. Early Muslim scholars would certainly consider much of our current knowledge of history to have achieved such status. For instance, there is consensus among historians that the Normans invaded England in 1066; too many accounts of this momentous event exist and have been recounted in each generation through multiple sources. In the case of any solitary original source, healthy skepticism is warranted. When Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to be a patsy, it led to an entire field of conspiracy studies among Kennedy assassination buffs. Did he act alone or didn’t he? That aspect of the event is debatable. But was John F. Kennedy shot on November, 22, 1963 in a motorcade at Dealey Plaza in Dallas? Far too many accounts of that tragic event exist; to deny it is simply to deny reality and have one’s sanity questioned.

Much of what we know about the world and what we accept as truth comes from multiply-transmitted accounts. Let’s say I claim that Australia doesn’t exist and is merely a figment of our imagination, that its origins lie in a whimsical cartographer in the Middle Ages who decided that such a large ocean needed a land mass. And, when confronted with people who claim to be from Australia and can prove it, I dismiss them as part of a conspiracy of cartographers who wish to perpetuate the myth of their forbearer. I would be laughed at, or ignored, or deemed “certifiable.” While this example seems absurd, many people actually believe things just as fatuous and far-fetched.

Holocaust denial is one such example. As one who has read some Holocaust denial literature, with the poorly reproduced pictures and claims of the orchestration of these scenes in collusion with the U.S. government, I can attest to the tragic gullibility of people who take such literature as historical truth. To return to the Kennedy assassination, if one reads Mark Lane’s version that a rogue element within the CIA killed Kennedy, the “facts” seem overwhelming. But if one reads another version that the Mafia killed Kennedy because of his failure to return Cuba to the gambling lords of Italian America, the “facts” also seem overwhelming. Finally, one can read the version that Mossad killed Kennedy because he wanted to force nuclear inspections in Israel, and again the “facts” seem conclusive. Each of these accounts is presented with utter certainty by the “researchers.” In the end, reality is manipulated to meet the needs of the mythologist. Indeed, we are each entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. And those who present alternative versions of “reality” tend to reject everything that does not suit their theory, and cherry-pick and interpret everything—facts, innuendos or “coincidences”—that does.

In the case of the Holocaust, the facts are clear and transmitted from multiple sources. Tens of thousands of Jewish and other individuals who survived the death camps and other horrors of Nazi Germany lived to tell of it. Nazis were brought to trial, evidence was presented in court, and they were convicted. Mass graves were found, and gas chambers were discovered, which were clearly not delicing rooms as some callously claimed. The ovens exist and cannot be reduced to an efficient way of preventing cholera outbreaks or disposing of victims of starvation. I have personally met many Holocaust survivors and their children. I have seen tattoos. I have also heard firsthand accounts of the horrific events. The numbers and details of such events may be legitimate areas of research and inquiry for scholars, but questioning whether the events took place at all undermines the epistemological basis of our collective knowledge. Muslims, of all people, should be conscious of this as their religion is predicated on the same epistemological premises as many major events in history, such as the Holocaust. To deny such things is to undermine Islam as an historical event. That a “conference” examining the historicity of the Holocaust should take place in a Muslim country hosted by a Muslim head of state is particularly tragic and, in my estimation, undermines the historicity of the faith of the people of that state.

In our inherent contradictions as humans, and in order to validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others. But it is in acknowledging the pain of others that we achieve fully our humanity. A close friend of mine, a professor of religion in a Muslim country for many years, recently told me that his wife, an English teacher in that country, had wanted to use Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a text for her Muslim pupils. But the school administrators repeatedly denied her request because they deemed it inappropriate reading for young Muslims. It is sad that the current political morass in the Middle East has led to this intolerable refusal to confront a people’s collective suffering. Perhaps in acknowledging that immense past of Jewish suffering, in which the Holocaust is only the most heinous chapter, Muslims can better help the Jewish community to understand the current Muslim pain in Palestine, Iraq and other places. In finding out about others, we encourage others to find out about us. It would greatly help our Jewish brethren to know the historical facts of Jewish experience in the Muslim world, which are often heartening and humanizing and very different from their European experience. In our mutual edification, we grow together.
© Tikkun Magazine

Headlines 22 June, 2007

THE FAR-RIGHT IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING (Spain)

Zero tolerance for immigrants - but only of certain races: Lisa Tilley gains an insight into the far-right anti-immigration parties who won more seats than ever in Spain’s local elections this year

21/6/2007- “I used to hate Isabel la Católica. I thought she was awful for throwing out all the Muslims,” said the sweet mannered teacher, while marking exam papers in Extremadura. She glanced around and leaned in closer: “But now I don’t… Now I know she was right.” Such openly racist comments seem somehow more shocking from an educated, middle-class mouth, but it is this kind of sentiment that the much more approachable, user-friendly parties of the far-right in Spain wish to harness. From mild fatigue of increasing immigration, to untapped racism and fear rising from ignorance: the new anti-immigration parties turned these views into votes and gained 50 extra councillors in Spain’s local elections this year.

Crime and disease
The new far-right shun the “ultra” or “neo-Nazi” appendages, which carry such negative connotations; instead their language is toned down, more easily digested by Spaniards of various social standings. They are not, they say, “extreme” but “preferentialist” – the Spanish should come first, they insist, and from this perspective they may have reached an untapped vein in public opinion. Gone are the skin heads and aggressive behaviour. In their place are the suited, articulate middle class. People who look and talk like any teacher or business owner are fighting on their principal battleground: the field of immigration. What is more, they are deliberately aiming for a new demographic – young people and workers are their target voters. Despite the woolly makeover, scratch the surface and the old extreme right is there: single issue anti-immigration parties such as España 2000 blame immigrants for draining Spain’s social welfare and bringing crime and disease. Of course, they do not mention 50 per cent of Spain’s economic growth in the last five years is due to immigrant labour, nor do they bring up the humanitarian issues surrounding the migrants arriving from developing countries. Despite their imbalanced debate, however, they are winning the voters.

Far right mayor
The shock result of May’s local elections was in Talayuela- a town in the Cáceres province of Extremadura, that driest of regions. Talayuela was awarded the ‘Medal of Extremadura’ in 2004 for being a model city in terms of convivencia – the harmonious coexistence of different cultures. Of its 10,000 inhabitants around 3,500 are immigrants, mostly Moroccan, but others hail from various countries including Ecuador, Romania and Senegal. They come to fill informal or seasonal jobs in the surrounding pepper, asparagus and tobacco plantations. Back in 2003, Spain’s governing socialist party, the PSOE, gained over 55 per cent of the town’s votes and won ten seats on the council, while the right-of-centre Partido Popular (PP) won four seats. Then, just one year ago, a new party was formed by the name of Iniciativa Habitable (IH) – it began as a protest group against plans to construct a mosque in the town. Its extreme right-wing stance and inflammatory rhetoric worried local human rights groups and parents’ associations, who filed a petition asking for the IH to be investigated for “maintaining a discourse full of racist and xenophobic prejudices with a large dose of fanaticism.” The PP may have worried a new right-wing party would steal some of their voters in this year’s local elections - but nobody could have predicted the actual outcome. Political hurricane IH struck in earnest winning 27.5 per cent of the votes - enough to gain five councillors, thereby matching the PP (who actually gained an extra seat on 2003) and the PSOE, who lost 5 councillors. The surprise, of course, was that the IH did not so much split the right as cause disaffected socialist voters to jump the divide.
After gaining entrance to the town hall on just an immigration ticket, the leader of the IH, Jorge Gómez, tried to explain his philosophy: “We only say what others don’t dare say; we need to regulate immigration, because you simply cannot overfill the boat without sinking it.” The party also express their dissatisfaction with immigrants owning businesses, claiming their standards of hygiene do not match those of the Spanish. They also argue immigrants bring health problems, citing two cases of tuberculosis they say were brought from abroad.

Tolerance?
Elsewhere in Spain, a flock of similar new far-right parties have emerged over the last five to ten years. The party España 2000 has taken Valencia by storm, winning councillors in three town halls. Its leader is José Luis Roberto, a lawyer with interests in the management association of clubes de alterne (Spain’s neon-soaked motorway brothels). The campaign video of España 2000 shows still after still of pictures of black Africans, arriving by boat, being assisted by the Red Cross, sitting on the street, selling fake designer goods. These images are overlaid by text which reads: “La inmigración masiva (the massive immigration)… What worries you about Spain?” More sentences flash across the faces of Africans: “The invasion of the illegals. Increasing social expenditure. Collapse of hospitals. The rise of delinquency.” And various other emotive generalisations pop up until in big red letters: TOLERANCIA CERO - zero tolerance. Incidentally, the images are only of Africans, there are no retired, white Germans for example, indicating España 2000 is racially selective of the immigrants they campaign against. Meanwhile, the Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) gained 17 councillors in Catalonia by campaigning for all “illegals” to be expulsed. The Partido de Acción Demócrata Española (PADE) won 20 councillors in Madrid and Guadalajara. Their president, Juan Ramón Calero has asked for the immediate expulsion of all illegal immigrants. He did, however, diversify the party’s single policy stance by attacking homosexual unions for being “unnatural.” The Democracia Nacional (DN) won three seats in May and is led by ultra-right Manuel Canduela, founding member of neo-Nazi band División 250. The DN is also a member of Euronat, an ultra-right European network of parties which includes the long prominent Jean Marie Le Pen’s party, the French National Front. In perspective, explicitly anti-immigration councillors still amount to just 50 in 66,162 elected seats in Spain; but the buoyant far-right will be encouraged by the exponential growth of their votes. Expect the 2011 elections to see a further boom in this field - unless Spain manages to combat prejudices and consolidate growing multiculturalism at the community level.
© The Olive Press

OSCE REPRESENTATIVE CALLS SWISS INITIATIVE TO BAN MINARETS UNFORTUNATE

21/6/2007- Ambassador Omur Orhun, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman on Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims, expressed today deep concern about a petition that aims to force Switzerland to hold a referendum on whether minarets should be banned in that country. The petition opened for signatures 1 May. A referendum must be held if the organizers - politicians from the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union - gather 100,000 valid signatures by November 2008. Ambassador Orhun said the Swiss debate was "most unfortunate." "I am astonished that such developments are taking place in a country like Switzerland, which has been an advocate of protection of human rights elsewhere in the world," he said. "We need to facilitate harmony, understanding, mutual respect and dialogue by emphasizing the common values of different cultures and religions. No single culture can or should claim that universal values such as respect for human rights, democracy and rule of law are theirs alone. It is of utmost importance to uphold the inherent dignity of all human beings, including their basic human rights related to freedom of religion or belief." Ambassador Orhun called on global leaders to ensure that public discourse refrains from hate speech and other manifestations of extremism and discrimination. "They should also see to it that the fight against terrorism must not become a fight against Muslims or Islam," he said, adding that responsible journalism also played a role in promoting inter-religious harmony and dialogue. "One cannot possibly achieve these objectives by initiating a blanket prohibition on building of proper prayer places. Minarets are part of mosques, as bell towers are part of churches. And all of them are humanity's common heritage," he said.
© OSCE

TURKISH POLITICIAN LOSES FIRST APPEAL AGAINST SWISS RACISM CONVICTION

20/6/2007- An appeals court has confirmed the sentence against a Turkish politician convicted of racism for denying that the early 20th century killing of Armenians was genocide, his lawyer said Wednesday. Laurent Moreillon said Dogu Perincek, the leader of the Turkish Workers' Party, lost his first appeal at a court in the canton (state) of Vaud, where a lower tribunal in March convicted and ordered him to pay a fine of 3,000 Swiss francs (US$2,450; €1,870). Perincek, who was also given a suspended penalty of 9,000 francs (US$7,360; €5,600) and ordered to pay 1,000 francs (US$820; €620) to an Armenian association, had repeatedly denied during a visit to Switzerland in 2005 that the World War I-era killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians amounted to genocide. Moreillon said Perincek would now appeal to the Federal Tribunal, Switzerland's supreme court. The case was seen as a test of whether it is a violation of Switzerland's anti-racism law to deny that the Turks committed genocide in the killings. The legislation has previously been applied to Holocaust denial. The case has caused diplomatic tension between the Alpine republic and Turkey, which insists Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the tumultuous collapse of the Ottoman Empire and not in a planned campaign of genocide. Turkey has called the case against Perincek "inappropriate, baseless and debatable in every circumstance."
© Associated Press

ACADEMICS LINE UP AGAINST FRENCH 'NATIONAL IDENTITY' MINISTRY

They charge that the new ministry of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development - - created in line with a campaign pledge by Sarkozy - - defines " immigration as a " problem " for France and the French.

22/6/2007- Around 200 academics and intellectuals urged French President Nicolas Sarkozy to rename his controversial immigration and national identity ministry in a petition published Friday. "To link 'immigration' and 'national identity' within a ministry is unprecedented in the history of the republic," the signatories wrote in a text published in the left-wing newspaper Liberation. They charge that the new ministry of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development -- created in line with a campaign pledge by Sarkozy -- defines "immigration as a 'problem' for France and the French." "As citizens, this worries us because it can only reinforce negative prejudice towards immigrants," they wrote. "We strongly protest against the title and powers of this ministry and solemnly appeal to the president of the republic to return to choices more consistent with our democratic traditions." Backers of the petition include French historians, artists, writers and trade unionists as well as several foreign academics. Sarkozy, who was accused during his election campaign of pandering to the anti-immigrant far-right, was responsible as interior minister for a toughening of immigration laws that saw the number of illegals deported annually more than double to 26,000 in 2006.
© The Tocqueville Connection

WOMEN MAKE GAINS IN FRENCH PARLIAMENT, BUT MINORITIES STRUGGLE

France sought to boost the number of women in parliament with a 2000 law obliging parties to field an equal number of men and women candidates, but it has only been partly followed despite heavy fines for offending parties.

19/6/2007- Women hold a record number of seats in the new French parliament, including the first ever black female deputy elected on the mainland, but legislative elections Sunday failed to radically shift the balance in a chamber still dominated by white men.
Political parties on the left and right were under pressure to boost the share of women and black and Arab lawmakers in the National Assembly. They can claim a partial success: 107 of the assembly's 577 seats went to women candidates, a jump of 31 deputies compared to the outgoing chamber. With 18.5 percent of seats now held by women, France lifts its country ranking in terms of women's representation in parliament from an embarrassing 86th to 58th spot, in between Venezuela and Nicaragua. Coming after Segolene Royal's failed bid to become France's first woman president, the result -- which ushers in 61 women lawmakers on the left and 46 on the right -- was greeted as a step in the right direction. It also follows the appointment by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France's first government with gender parity, with seven of 15 cabinet posts held by women, a balance expected to remain following this week's government reshuffle. But Le Monde newspaper said the improved number of women in parliament -- lifting France just above the European average of 17.7 percent -- was in itself "nothing to be proud of." France sought to boost the number of women in parliament with a 2000 law obliging parties to field an equal number of men and women candidates, but it has only been partly followed despite heavy fines for offending parties. The country ranks 15th in the 27-member European Union, and is dwarfed by countries in northern Europe, where women hold an average of 41.6 percent of parliament seats. The opposition Socialist Party's secretary for women's rights, Laurence Rossignol, was quick to point out the higher proportion of women in her party's ranks -- where they make up 25 percent. Of the 318 seats won by Sarkozy's right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), she said, only 14 percent went to women. The party had fielded less than 30 percent women candidates.

Representing ethnic diversity in parliament has also been a frontline issue since the 2005 riots in France's immigrant-heavy suburbs, where black and Arab populations complain they are shut out of mainstream society. Sarkozy made headway last month when he appointed Rachida Dati, a French-born magistrate of north African parents, as justice minister. But despite a record number of black and Arab candidates vying for seats -- Sarkozy's UMP fielded 12, the Socialists 20, and smaller parties several dozen -- only one seat on the mainland went to a minority candidate. George Pau-Langevin, a lawyer born on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, was elected to a seat in eastern Paris on a Socialist ticket. She joins fifteen deputies elected in overseas territories, where the majority of the population is black. Togolese-born Kofi Yamgnane was elected in 1997 to the National Assembly as a Socialist deputy from the northern Brittany region but he lost his seat in 2002. Although France is home to Europe's biggest Muslim community, with about five million people, mainly descendants of immigrants from north and sub-Saharan Africa, no candidates of African origin were elected.
The French Council of Muslim Democrats issued a statement regretting that "the republic's diversity will not be represented in the National Assembly, because political parties did not give it enough importance." Several minority candidates have said major parties were hamstrung by incumbents who did not want to give up a winnable seat in the name of promoting diversity. Azouz Begag, a former minister of Algerian origin who was knocked out of the race for parliament, has said he believes the French were not "quite ready" to elect minorities. "Let's be frank. I think the French people are not quite ready to vote for candidates that they consider foreigners," he said. Other European countries have started to correct the ethnic balance in parliament, including Britain which counts 15 minority MPs out of 646, and Germany with three Turkish and one Iranian MPs in the Bundestag.
© The Tocqueville Connection

SARKOZY MEETS WITH JEAN-MARIE LE PEN AT PRESIDENTIAL PALACE(France)

20/6/2007- President Nicolas Sarkozy held talks Wednesday with far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen -- the first time the nationalist firebrand has been invited to the presidential palace in at least 33 years. Le Pen called the invitation a "democratic gesture," and said the two talked about the European Union. "I told him what he already knew, of our profound differences on this subject," Le Pen said, adding that they also had a "general exchange of views." Sarkozy is preparing for an EU summit in Brussels this week, hoping to push through his idea of a "simplified treaty" to replace the draft EU constitution rejected in 2005 by French and Dutch voters. Le Pen has called for France to pull out of the EU and its common currency, the euro. Sarkozy said in a June 6 interview with Le Figaro newspaper that he would meet with "all political formations" represented in the French and European parliaments. Le Pen is a lawmaker in the European Parliament. "I saw that some people were astonished," Sarkozy said in an interview with TF1 television about his decision to see Le Pen. "I don't understand. Jean-Marie Le Pen has the right to stand for elections. ... He represents millions of people. And I'm supposed to say ... 'I won't see him?"' Former presidents Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterrand always refused to meet with Le Pen. He met twice with Alain Poher, who was president for two brief interludes in 1969 and 1974, according to National Front spokesman Alain Vizier, who could not provide exact dates. Le Pen, who shocked France with his second-place finish in the 2002 presidential race against Chirac, came in a poor fourth in this year's contest. His National Front Party fared so badly in this month's legislative elections that it risks losing up to 60 percent of its state subsidies.
© Associated Press

FAR-RIGHT PARTY LAUNCHES SOS AFTER ELECTION DRUBBING(France)

18/6/2007- French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen Monday launched a plea to bail out his National Front party, saddled with millions of euros in debt after a dismal electoral performance. "What is at stake is the survival of the FN, but also the interests of our people and our country," Le Pen told a press conference near Paris. "The FN's financial situation is very worrying." Making a solemn appeal to party supporters and "French citizens mindful of the elemental rules of democracy," Le Pen said he was launching a national fund-raising drive dubbed "SOS National Front" aimed at hauling his party back from the brink. The far-right National Front had its worst score in more than 25 years in this month's legislative elections, encouraging speculation that it is disappearing as a serious force in French politics. With just 4.3 percent of the first round vote for the National Assembly, the party was back at levels of support not seen since the early 1980s. It had not fared so badly since its 0.3 percent in 1981. The National Front is set to lose more than half of its state subsidy over the next five years, cut back in line with its lower score. It also has to pay back between 3.0 and 4.5 million euros (4.0 to 6.0 million dollars) of debt racked up in campaign costs, since the French state will only reimburse candidates who score above the five-percent mark. Le Pen said the party was planning to slash costs, including by shedding some of its 40 staff, but ruled out selling its headquarters in the upmarket Paris suburb of Saint Cloud. The poor legislative result follows Le Pen's disappointing 10.4 percent in last month's presidential election -- a distinct comedown from his shock second place in the 2002 vote. In a clear sign of the party's failing fortunes, only one candidate -- Le Pen's daughter Marine -- managed to qualify for the second round of the vote on Sunday, where she was easily knocked out by a Socialist rival. Five years ago, 37 National Front candidates passed the 12.5 percent barrier to enter the second round against the mainstream right and left. In 1997, the figure was 134.
© Expatica News

FAR-RIGHT MOBILIZES AGAINST COLOGNE MEGA-MOSQUE(Germany)

A right-wing citizens' initiative is protesting against Germany's largest mosque, which is being built in Cologne. They have enlisted the efforts of the far-right from Austria and Belgium in their fight against the "Islamization of Europe."

19/6/2007- It's a sunny Saturday in the German city of Cologne and the Ehrenfeld district is witnessing a showdown. The Social Democratic member of parliament Lale Akgün, Cologne's mayor Elfi Scho-Antwerpes and Mehmet Yildirim, the general secretary of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), are standing next to a Shell gas station. They are holding red roses and flyers featuring Cologne's famous cathedral, a synagogue and a drawing of a mosque. Fifty meters (164 feet) away, about 150 demonstrators from the citizens' initiative Pro Cologne (Pro Köln) stand waiting. They have assembled on the other side of Venloer Street, not far from the premises where DITIB currently operates a mosque on the site of a former factory and where a new, larger mosque with a dome and minarets is to be built soon. That's what Cologne's politicians have decided, in any case -- all political parties voted in favor of the project. Only Pro Cologne stands opposed. A man in a black suit flits past Scho-Antwerpes. "That's someone from Pro Cologne," the mayor mumbles. "Unfortunately he always says hello to me. It's terrible." She doesn't want to have anything to do with the citizens' initiative, which is under observation from the North Rhine-Westphalia branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, because its "generalizing and sweeping defamation of foreigners is suspected of violating human dignity." The citizens' initiative, which is listed as a far-right organization in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution's annual report, has held five seats in Cologne's city council since 2004.

At this rally, Pro Cologne has recruited help from the far-right fringe of the political spectrum in Austria and Belgium: the leader of Austria's populist right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) Heinz-Christian Strache, and Bart Debie from the extreme right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party in Antwerp. Standing behind the police barriers are Pro Cologne members with very short hair, salon-tanned faces and white armbands designating them as security personnel provided by the organizers of the rally. Several dozen citizens wait for their prominent visitors, armed with German flags and wooden crosses. A few adolescents with Iron Cross necklaces and Pitbull sweatshirts have joined the throng. Asked why they are here, they decline to reply. Others, however, are more than happy to air their views. Pro Cologne's Bernd Schöppe sees the construction of the mosque as "one more step towards the Islamization of Europe." Fellow demonstrator Thomas Bendt also believes the mosque is intended as a symbol of Muslim fundamentalist power. The mosque won't act openly, he believes. "If men and women are going to pray separately in the new mosque, that's not the kind of freedom we want," he says. A woman who prefers to remain anonymous even believes that once the Muslim community has grown sufficiently large, it will attack Cologne's cathedral. She wants to feel at home somewhere, she says, without feeling she is in a foreign city.

'We Want the Cathedral Here, not Minarets'
Ehrenfeld residents watch the activities on the street from their balconies above the demonstration area, which has been closed off by the police. The residents have suspended signs that read "Red Card for Racists." Left-wing counter-demonstrators from an anti-fascist group bellow "Nazis out!" Suddenly the anti-mosque demonstrators grow restless. Smoke rises in the air shortly before Strache, the Freedom Party leader, reaches the rally and walks with swift steps through the crowd of Pro-Cologne sympathizers. The police suspects a smoke bomb at first, but cannot clarify where the smoke is coming from. Round signs showing a red line across a stylized mosque are unpacked, and loud classical music is heard from within the Pro Cologne ranks. The protesters begin marching. Those at the front of the silent march carry a large banner featuring a quote from German writer Ralph Giordano: "There is no fundamental right to the construction of a large mosque." The Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Giordano has sharply criticized the construction of the mosque -- and now the right-wingers have co-opted him for their cause. Giordano, however, is vigorously resisting Pro Cologne's efforts to enlist him for their cause. He has dubbed the right-wing citizens' initiative the "local variety of Nazism." Roughly 1,000 policemen are out in force, and the situation remains mostly calm. Later, it transpires that other right-wing demonstrators organized their own "spontaneous" demonstration. The demonstration was broken up and about 100 people were taken into custody, according to a police spokesman. In contrast, several hundred citizens followed the call from trade unions, political parties and associations to rally in favor of the construction of the mosque. "Freedom of religion means that Muslims are allowed to build a representative mosque in Cologne," says Wolfgang Uellenberg van Dawen, the leader of the Cologne branch of the Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB). But a different tune can be heard in front of Ehrenfeld's local town hall, where Strache is giving a speech. "We want the cathedral here, not minarets," he shouts, adding that "the left-wing counter-demonstrators live off our welfare contributions." Björn Clemens, a Pro Cologne sympathizer from Düsseldorf, also makes his views clear. "Whoever believes himself to be in the grip of Islam should go back to his home country," he shouts. "Pack your bags and go home."

Fear and Loathing
The domed structure, which is to have two 55-meter (180-foot) minarets, will be Germany's largest mosque, with room for about 2,000 believers to pray in. Ever since Giordano has made his views on the mosque public, the issue has been attracting attention in Germany's national media. Most recently, Cologne-based writer Dieter Wellershof weighed up the arguments on both sides in an article entitled "What Does The Mosque Stand For?" published in the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Many citizens who feel skeptical about the mosque, but who don't want to have anything to do with Pro Cologne, seem to be asking themselves the same question. The feeling of fear and uncertainty has increased among the local population, says one Ehrenfeld resident, who is herself in favor of the mosque. But Pro Cologne is inciting people to hatred, she adds. "And yet people in Cologne aren't like that. They want to live in a multi-cultural city." "I feel afraid," confesses one elderly woman with carefully curled hair. "I'm not sure exactly what of -- probably the right-wingers most of all." She says she is not opposed to the Muslims receiving a new mosque, but adds that, as a local resident, she is concerned about the "traffic problems" that would result. "I'm just afraid of fundamentalist Muslims gaining more and more ground," says one female shop assistant. But it's hardly possible to voice this fear because of the risk of immediately being labeled right-wing, she says. "I think Pro Cologne is horrible," she adds. Only the two extremes, "the young, far-left demonstrators and the right-wingers from Pro Cologne," are attracting attention, and that's sad, she says. "It's like an absurd carnival," she says.
© Spiegel Online

BULGARIA FAR RIGHT IN PROTEST OVER ‘DEFAMATORY’ FILM

19/6/2007- Bulgaria’s nationalist Ataka party on Tuesday demanded the resignation of the head of Bulgarian National Television after the station aired a film last Saturday based on the country’s recent history. “On a television station which supports itself with the state budget, meaning our money, the taxpayers, Bulgarian national television showed the loathsome, anti-Bulgarian defamatory film, ‘Stolen Eyes’,” the declaration, signed by the party leader, Volen Siderov, said. The 2005 feature film relates the thwarted love story of a young ethnic Turkish woman and a Bulgarian man in the 1980s, when the authorities were conducting a drive to force Bulgarian Turks to change their Muslim names to Bulgarian ones. Before its first television showing in Bulgaria on Saturday, the film received international acclaim and a number of international and national awards. Neri Terzieva, one of the scriptwriters and a prominent media expert of Turkish descent, said the film had no desire to inflame ethnic tensions. “The desire of the film crew was … to cure the wound, rather than reopen it,” she said, in remarks carried on the webpage of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms party, which represents Bulgaria’s Turks. However, the far-right Ataka party said the film marked the second recent attempt to “crudely falsify” Bulgarian history, the first being a research project by two historians into the 1879 Turkish massacre in Batak, 130 kilometers south-east of Sofia. The two researchers concluded that many Bulgarian intellectuals, whose descriptions of the event have been treated as primary sources, were swayed by the biased and romanticised accounts of an American US journalist and a Polish painter. While the historians did not deny a Turkish atrocity had taken place in Batak, some of the Bulgarian media accused them of doing just that, even claiming that Turkey financed the research. Ataka repeated the accusation. Stoyana Georgieva, editor of the online mediapool.bg and an active participant in discussions on nationalism, said Ataka was primarily seeking publicity. “This is Ataka’s latest attempt to use any pretext to cause a provocation,” she said. “It is nonsense to ask for resignations for showing a feature film that… has been available to the public for years.” She added: “The declaration was consistent with Ataka’s usual behavior. They seek out any easy pretext to play the nationalist card.”
© Balkan Investigative Reporting Network

UEFA ORDER REFEREES TO STOP MATCHES FOR RACISM

22/6/2007- Referees will stop all matches in which soccer fans shout racist abuse at players, starting with Saturday's European Under-21 Championship final, a senior UEFA official has confirmed. The announcement follows the launch of a UEFA investigation into racist chanting and a fight in the players' tunnel after England's 2-0 win over Serbia in the European Under-21 Championship on Sunday. Serbia face the Dutch hosts in Saturday's final in Groningen. "We have decided to step up our actions and take a zero tolerance approach. Referees have been told to stop any games in which there are racist chants from fans," William Gaillard, special advisor to UEFA president Michel Platini told Reuters in a telephone call. "We have spoken to the referees and we have the support of the national associations, the clubs and the players' unions for this measure." Gaillard was speaking after the opening session of the governing body's executive committee in Heerenveen. UEFA and European governments are also currently drawing up new measures to combat an increase in soccer-related racism and violence across the region in the last year. England's FA made a formal complaint to UEFA on Monday over the racist abuse directed at their players from Serbian fans and at least one member of the Serbian team in the tunnel after the match. UEFA said the incidents during and after the match in Nijmegen would be considered by UEFA's disciplinary committee at its next regular meeting on July 12. A message was issued over the public address system during the first half of the game after the referee brought the racist chanting to the attention of stadium officials. "Today's move goes a step further and sends a strong message to fans that the game will be halted if they racially abuse players," Gaillard said. When asked about the economic implications of such a decision such as sponsorship, corporate hospitality and television coverage of competitions such as the top tier Champions League, Gaillard said: "Money is the very last factor to be taken into account in making such a decision. This is about a prinicple and economics or TV rights should not have anything to do with it." Gaillard said the Serbian FA was making "extra security checks" in the distribution of their ticket allocation for Saturday's final.
© Reuters

SERBIAN FA HITS CONDEMNS RACISM

19/6/2007- The president of the Serbian Football Association has hit out at the racist abuse aimed at the England Under 21 team by the Serbian fans during their match on Sunday. Zvezdan Terzic has condemned the behaviour of some Serbian supporters who abused Nedum Onuoha throughout England\'s 2-0 win. The abuse led to UEFA making an announcement over the stadium\'s public address system to try and quell the racist chanting. And Terzic told Belgrade\'s B92 television website, that this kind of behaviour cannot be tolerated. "For all their enthusiasm and patriotism, our fans must understand that outbursts of nationalism and racism will only cause damage to our soccer and our country\'s reputation," Terzic told Belgrade\'s B92 television website. "They have to control themselves and be aware that such behaviour will be of no benefit to our team." But Terzic was left unhappy with England\'s second goal-claiming that Stuart Pearce\'s side should have kicked the ball out of play with a Serbian player down injured, instead of continuing with the move which culminated in a goal. He added: "The whole stadium was shocked because English players have the reputation of being gentlemen who honour the fair-play code. "There is no excuse for the fact that they didn\'t kick the ball out into touch when our entire team stood still expecting them to do so." Matt Derbyshire, who notched the winning goal, explained: "I can understand why they were angry but I didn\'t see the player on the ground. Footballers play to the whistle and the whistle didn\'t go so I carried on playing."
© 24Dash.com

UEFA URGED TO ACT IN RACISM ROW

18/6/2007- Nedum Onuoha last night claimed the racial abuse he suffered from Serbian supporters had been "horrific", as the Football Association sent an official complaint to Uefa over the monkey chants that disfigured England Under-21s' crucial win in Nijmegen. Uefa has launched an inquiry into the conduct of both England and Serbia but it has delayed any debate until July 12, too late to disqualify the Serbs after they advanced to the European Championship semi-finals. The actions of their fans unleashed widespread outrage yesterday, with Uefa under pressure to provide a decisive demonstration of the anti-racism platform built by president Michel Platini. While Manchester City's Onuoha was the prime target of the chants, Arsenal defender Justin Hoyte allegedly endured vicious abuse from Serbian players in the tunnel after the game. Striker Leroy Lita said: "Justin is a quiet lad and I've never seen him like that. But we can't do anything about it." If the players felt a sense of powerlessness, the political backlash was gathering momentum last night, as sports minister Richard Caborn promised to write to his Serbian counterpart to express his "disgust". Onuoha, who confronted the Serbian fans with nothing more than a contemptuous look, expressed regret. "It was horrific and it's not the first time it's happened in my career," he said. "In certain countries racist abuse seems to happen and nothing gets done. It's a strange world." In Onuoha's reflections, there was a sharp sense of an educated man assailed by a mindless faction. The defender is a former accountancy student and some-time musical technician, while his mother holds a doctorate in microbiology. Yet the Serbs' chants were not without precedent. "It has happened before in Switzerland - I thought countries like that would have improved by now." Danny Wallace, the former winger who in 1984 played in the last England Under-21 team to win a European Championship, was more strident in his condemnation. "It's scandalous," he said. "Uefa should investigate now. A fine at the end of the tournament doesn't mean anything." Perversely, the one concrete move Uefa did make yesterday was to England's detriment, as Tom Huddlestone received a two-match ban for his abusive language towards a linesman.
© The Telegraph

HEAD-TO-TOE MUSLIM VEILS TEST TOLERANCE OF SECULAR BRITAIN

21/6/2007- Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. Like little else, their appearance has unnerved Britons, testing the limits of tolerance in this stridently secular nation. Many veiled women say they are targets of abuse. At the same time, efforts are growing to place legal curbs on the full Muslim veil, known as the niqab. The past year has seen numerous examples: A lawyer dressed in a niqab was told by an immigration judge that she could not represent a client because, he said, he could not hear her. A teacher wearing a niqab was told by a provincial school to go home. A student who was barred from wearing a niqab took her case to the courts, and lost. In fact, the British education authorities are proposing a ban on the niqab in schools altogether. David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that Britain has been "too deferential" toward the veil. "I find such garb, in the context of a London street, first ridiculous and then directly offensive," he said. Although the number of women wearing the niqab has increased in the past several years, only a tiny percentage of women among Britain's two million Muslims cover themselves completely. It is impossible to say how many exactly. Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq and at home.

"For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it's an act of faith, it's solidarity," said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, Al Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. "9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims," she said. At times she receives rude comments, including, Shaikh said, when a woman at her workplace told her she had no right to be there. Shaikh said she planned to file a complaint. When she is on the street, she often answers barbs. "A few weeks ago a lady said: 'I think you look crazy.' I said: 'How dare you go around telling people how to dress,' and walked off. Sometimes I feel I have to reply. Islam does teach you that you must defend your religion." Other Muslims find the niqab objectionable, a step backward for an immigrant group that is under pressure after the terror attack on London's transit system in July 2005. "After the July 7 attacks, this is not the time to be antagonizing Britain by presenting Muslims as something sinister," said Imran Ahmad, author of "Unimagined," an autobiography of growing up Muslim in Britain, and the head of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. "The veil is so steeped in subjugation, I find it so offensive someone would want to create such barriers. It's retrograde."

Since South Asians started coming to Britain in large numbers in the 1960s, a small group of usually older, undereducated women have worn the niqab. It was most often seen as a sign of subjugation. Many more Muslim women wear the headscarf, called the hijab, covering all or some of their hair. Unlike in France, Turkey and Tunisia, where students in state schools and female civil servants are banned from covering their hair, British Muslim women can wear the headscarf, and indeed the niqab, almost anywhere, for now. But that tolerance is eroding. Even some who wear the niqab, like Faatema Mayata, a 24-year-old psychology and religious studies teacher, agreed there were limits. "How can you teach when you are covering your face?" she said, sitting with a cup of tea in her living room in Blackburn, a town in the north of England, her niqab tucked away because she was within the confines of her home. She has worn the niqab since she was 12, when she was sent by her parents to an all-girls boarding school. The niqab was not, as many Britons seemed to think, a sign of extremism, she said. The niqab, to her, was about identity. "If I dressed in a Western way I could be a Hindu, I could be anything," she said. "This way I feel comfortable in my identity as a Muslim woman." No one else in the family wore the niqab. Her husband, Ibrahim Boodi, a social worker, was indifferent, she said. "If I took it off today, he wouldn't care." When she is walking, she is often stopped, she said. "People ask, 'Why do you wear that?' A lot of people assume I'm oppressed, that I don't speak English. I don't care, I've got a brain."

Some commentators have complained that mosques encourage women to wear the niqab, a practice they have said should be stopped. At the East London Mosque, one of the largest in the capital, the chief imam, Abdul Qayyum, studied in Saudi Arabia and is trained in the Wahhabi school of Islam. According to the community relations officer at the mosque, Ehsan Abdullah Hannan, the imam's daughter wears the niqab. At Friday prayers recently, the women worshipers were crowded into a small upstairs windowless room away from the main hall for the men. A handful of young women wore the niqab and spoke effusively about their reasons. "Wearing the niqab means you will get a good grade and go to paradise," said Hodo Muse, 19, a Somali woman. "Every day people are giving me dirty looks for wearing it, but when you wear something for Allah you get a boost."
© International Herald Tribune

FEES RULES HURT REFUGEES(uk)

Why do universities make some asylum seekers pay three times more than UK students? Fran Abrams reports

19/6/2007- Mazed Ahmed is 19, and he does the things many bright 19-year-olds do. He dreams of becoming a civil engineer, and when he has a spare hour he watches or plays cricket. He is in the midst of A-level exams in physics, maths and further maths. Yet Ahmed is different from his classmates in one respect. While most hope their A-level grades will secure them a place at university, he faces an uncertain future. For Ahmed is an asylum seeker, and although he has lived in England for five years he is treated by universities as an overseas student. He has been offered places by Salford and Birmingham. But he would have to pay overseas student fees of around £10,000 a year rather than the £3,000 paid by UK students, and would not be eligible for a loan or bursary. That, he says, puts university completely beyond his reach. Ahmed is one of around 100,000 young refugees and asylum seekers in education in the UK. There are no statistics on how many apply each year for university, though the Refugee Council says they tend to be highly motivated. But many find their entry barred by the rules on fees or student support, or even simply by misinformation. Now Ahmed and others living in the Manchester area have launched a campaign to break down the barriers.

Settled status
By law, refugees and asylum seekers who have a "settled" immigration status - that is, there is no limit on their leave to remain here - must be treated as UK students for fee purposes. If they have also been here for three years, they can apply for a student loan. But Ahmed, like many others, does not have that settled status. He was born stateless in Bangladesh, the son of a refugee from Pakistan. Five years ago, his family tried to relocate to Canada but were detained in the UK en route because their papers were out of date. They were refused leave to remain here, but Bangladesh would not take them back. The universities are entitled to charge Ahmed overseas fees, but can waive them if they wish. He says that whatever the rules say, England is his home. "We want to live here," he says. "But the universities are telling us we're international students. We are from very different countries, but we have this one thing in common - we all want an education. But we can't go on studying after further education. For us the door is closed, and we don't have a key to open it." Along with other members of Brighter Futures, a self-advocacy campaign group run with the support of Save the Children, he has written to a number of universities about the issue, as well as to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Some of the universities have replied sympathetically; others less so. The DfES declared itself happy with the current situation: "Higher education institutions ... determine whether to charge students for their tuition fees at the home rate. There are no plans at this present time to change the rules," it said. But even those with a legal right to government support are often thwarted, according to Save the Children. One problem, the organisation says, is that many young people, especially those who arrive alone, are given "discretionary leave to remain" until they are 18, but must then reapply. This leaves their immigration status uncertain just at the time when they hope to apply to university.

David, who does not want his second name used, came here alone from Nigeria two and a half years ago aged 16. He was given discretionary leave to remain in Birmingham, and after he turned 18 he received a letter from the Home Office saying it had a backlog of cases and that for now his status would remain unchanged. The University of Warwick offered David a place to study mechanical engineering, but told him he must expect to pay overseas fees. "From the information on your Ucas form you have been classified as an overseas student for tuition fees purposes and you will be required to register as an overseas student if you accept this offer," its letter said. There was a tick-box immigration questionnaire, but it had no space for David to explain his status. "It isn't a good feeling when you receive a letter like that," he says. "All I want is for the universities to understand I should be paying home fees. It would be hard for me to go if I had to pay overseas fees." David has been supported by the Birmingham Unaccompanied Minors Project, Bump, which is run by Save the Children. His advice and advocacy worker, Victoria Jones, says she fears for those who do not have back-up. "It worries me that there are all these other young people who have no one to advocate for them," she says. "There just doesn't seem to be any clarity in the universities." A spokesman for Warwick University accepted that David should not be treated as a foreign student and said its immigration questionnaire and the notes accompanying it would be amended. "We are going to change the notes to help people to fill out the form. If there's one applicant who's confused by this, we need to make it simpler," he said.

Painful ordeal
Others do not even manage to get to this point. Marie - not her real name - came here three and a half years ago as an unaccompanied minor from Burundi, and took a two-year nursing access course. She has discretionary leave to remain here, and earlier this month was invited to an interview for a nursing diploma at the University of Wolverhampton. But even though the university had seen her immigration documents, she said the admissions officers seemed uncertain of her status. "When I went into the interview they asked me again to produce the letter I'd had from the Home Office explaining my status, which I did," she says. "Then they said they didn't think they could interview me. They went out of the room and I could hear them saying I wasn't allowed to be in the country. It was just horrible." Professor Mel Chevannes, dean of the university's school of health, told the Guardian the university now accepted Marie was entitled to be here. "During the interview, a query was raised as the Home Office letter was not in her file. Her immigration status has now been clarified and she has been sent a letter inviting her for interview in July," she said. Duncan Lane, director of advice and training for Ukcosa, the Council for International Education, says the evidence gathered by the two Save the Children groups is very disturbing. "Those who apply for asylum and get refugee status or leave to enter or remain instead must not be charged 'overseas' fees. It is unlawful for fees assessors to apply any restrictions that are not contained within the relevant regulations," he says. "Refugees have had unimaginable, terrifying experiences in the countries they have fled and have often faced distressing hostility in the UK. To be wrongly denied an education and a chance to rebuild their lives is a tragic waste."
© The Guardian

THREE VERDICTS ANNOUNCED FOR RIGHTWING RADICALS(Russia)

19/6/2007- On June 19, 2007, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, several verdicts were announced in criminal cases against rightwing extremists. In St. Petersburg the jury found a group of young men guilty in the murder of Roland Epassak, a citizen of Congo, who was stabbed to death in September, 2005. This was the second attempt to try the defendants in that case. On July 25, 2006, a jury acquitted all four suspects of the charges, and they were released from custody, but the verdict was reversed on appeal of the prosecution. In the re-trial which followed the appeal, 4 people were convicted of murder with a racist motive and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (from 7 to 14 years). In Moscow, three skinheads, affiliated with the neo-nazi Slavic Union, were convicted of premeditated act of hooliganism, infliction of light bodily harm and assault. They were charged in connection with the attack on the young antifascists, Alexander Ryukhin, who was stabbed to death, and Egor Tomsky, who was also attacked, but who managed to survive. They were sentenced to 4.5 up to 6 years of imprisonment. Thus, nobody was convicted of the murder itself. Three more neo-nazis have still not been detained, but are on the federal wanted list. Those convicted were charged with hooliganism, i.e. an attack with a weapon or with some items which are used as a weapon, and received almost maximum sentences provided for these articles by the Russian Criminal code. There is no hate motive in the verdict, because there is no provision for the ideological hatred in Russian Criminal code (only hate on the basis of race, religion, and gender is considered as an aggravating circumstance). On the same day the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the conviction of rightwing activists Mikhail Klevachov and Vladimir Vlasov in the case of the Grozny-Moscow train detonation of June 12, 2005. The trial lasted for a long time and was accompanied by a lot of scandals. The first jury acquitted them on all charges on November, 2006 , but this verdict was reversed. On April 10, 2007, the second jury found them guilty of attempted murder with a motive of ethnic hatred, terrorism and illegal purchasing and keeping of explosives and sentenced them to 20 and 22 years of imprisonment.
© SOVA Center for Information and Analysis

EXPERT ON RIGHTWING EXTREMISM ATTACKED IN ST. PETERSBURG(Russia)

22/6/2007- One of Russia’s leading experts on racial issues and hate crimes was violently attacked on Tuesday in what her colleagues and human rights advocates see as an attempt to force the expert to change her testimony in a high-profile legal case. Valentina Uzuniva, was attacked by a female assailant, wearing a mask and was dressed in camouflage, who hit Uzunova several times on the head and took a dossier on a court case Uzunova has been working on dealing with charges of extremism. The assailant also took Uzunova’s earrings. Uzunova, 59, who received treatment in the Alexandrovskaya Hospital, sustained a concussion and hematomas on her head. Her condition was described as satisfactory on Thursday. The expert was attacked at about 6 p.m. on Tuesday outside 7 Ulitsa Podkovyrova, when she was on her way back from visiting the relatives of her former colleague, Nikolai Girenko, a prominent expert on ethnic issues, who was gunned down on exactly the same day in 2004. Girenko was shot through the door of his apartment, when he went to answer the doorbell. His killers have not yet been identified. Uzunova had received threats of violence before, her colleagues said. After a recent anonymous nighttime call, in which the caller threatened to execute the expert and her family if she did not help to clear a defendant now facing extremism charges in court, Uzunova appealed for police protection but without success. The request was turned down as the police claimed there was lack of evidence of a credible threat. The police established the location of a phone booth used to make the phone call but failed to establish the identity of the caller.

The case in question concerns a retired submariner Vladislav Nikolsky, who is facing charges of distributing extremist literature and forming a nationalist group. Uzunova had been give expert testimony in the court on Wednesday but the hearing was cancelled because of the attack. The assailant, who attacked Uzunova, took the materials on the Nikolsky case. Uzunova’s colleagues and human rights advocates said they have no doubts that extremists were behind the attack. Alexander Vinnikov, a senior official at the St. Petersburg Union of Scientists and regional coordinator of the nationwide non-governmental movement “For Russia Without Racism,” said the Nikolsky case was coming to an end. “Uzunova had enough evidence in her hands for the judge to convict Nikolsky during the next hearing,” Vinnikov. Yuly Rybakov, a prominent human rights advocate with the St. Petersburg rights group Memorial, is convinced an organized extremist group was behind the attack. “She definitely had been followed, and in all likelihood, her phone had been bugged; the assailants had to know about her plans and visits in great detail to be able to get to her when she would be carrying the case materials, when she would be in a deserted quite place and when she would be on her own,” Rybakov said. “It requires timely and careful preparation with a certain number of people involved.” Rybakov accused law enforcement agencies of a biased and negative attitude towards anti-fascist campaigners. “I am not surprised Uzunova did not get protection after that dangerous threat,” he said and brought his own first-hand experience in to strengthen his point. Several years ago, when Rybakov was a deputy in the State Duma, he learnt that two extremist groups had been planning to assassinate him. The lawmaker contacted the police and, providing all evidence available to him, asked for police protection, or at the very least, for his phone calls to be monitored and recorded. His request was turned down. “I then went public about the threats, and made a speech at the Duma about it to protect myself,” Rybakov said. “In most cases, the prosecutors openly show their contempt to anti-fascists and democrats, sometimes with outright insults.”

His worries are shared by many of his counterparts. Human rights lawyer Olga Tseitlina, who represents the Kacharava family in the case of student anti-fascist campaigner Timur Kacharava, who was stabbed to death in 2005, is bewildered by what she calls “the attemps to present anti-fascists as a radical youth group of extremist character.” “The defendants’ lawyers [in the Kacharava case] almost make it sound as if Timur got what was coming to him and the judge and prosecutors just turn a blind eye,” Tseitlina said. Kacharava was stabbed to death outside the Bookvoyed book shop near the Oktyabrskaya Hotel early on a November evening in 2005 by assailants described as “skinheads.” The student’s activism also included delivering food aid to the homeless. Natalya Yevdokimova, an advisor to Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Council of Federation, urged the authorities to commission an in-depth analysis and assessment of the scope of extremism and nationalism in the city and for the results to be widely publicized. “It does not help that only human rights groups are aware of the issues; ordinary people do not get the picture at all,” she said. “The circumstances of and around these crimes — which are often classified as robberies, hooliganism or homicide [without a hate motive] — remain obscure to them.”
© The St. Petersburg Times

ACCUSED RACIST MASS MURDERER RETRACTS CONFESSION(Russia)

Police Tie Him to 21 Deaths

18/6/2007- A neo-Nazi who confessed last month to 37 racist murders in Moscow has retracted his confession, but police have so far been able to link him to 21 killings and are investigating several others, according to a June 14, 2007 article in the national daily . Artur Ryno--a 17 year old student from Yekaterinburg--allegedly committed the murders out of racial hatred. In addition to his accused accomplice Pavel Skachevsky, who has denied any involvement in the killings, police now believe that other neo-Nazis took part in at least some of the murders and that Mr. Ryno was acquainted with the accused bombers of the Cherkizov market, a deadly terrorist act in August 2006 that targeted non-Russian market traders and took the lives of 11 people. Mr. Ryno reportedly confessed earlier that since childhood "he has hated people from the Caucasus and Asians who come to the capital and push ethnic Russians out." He therefore saw it as his duty to "cleanse the city" of these migrants. His first murder allegedly took place on August 21, 2006 near the Cherkizov market in the company of some unidentified friends. "We were strolling along and I spotted a fight between five of our guys and an Asian man," Mr. Ryno reportedly confessed. "I ran to help out. I took out a knife and stabbed the non-Russian several times."
© FSU Monitor

NGOS CRITICISE PLANNED CHANGES IN CZECH LAW ON ASYLUM, FOREIGNERS

21/6/2007- Czech non-governmental organisations today criticised the planned amendment to the asylum law and the law on foreigners because it would worsen the position of refugees and mixed marriages. The amendment is now discussed in the Chamber of Deputies. Under the planned amendment, foreigners living in mixed marriages would not receive permanent residence permits immediately, but only after two years. Their right to receive social benefits and health insurance would be limited, too, the NGOs said. Moreover, even foreigners with Czech citizenship would be deprived of child allowances and housing benefits. The Czech Interior Ministry says that there has been a marked increase in the numbers of foreigners who marry Czech women or claim to be fathers of their children in order to be granted permanent residence. According to the ministry, such men mostly come from Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam and Nigeria. Tomas Haisman, head of the ministry's asylum and migration policy department, pointed out that under EU regulations a foreigner living in a mixed marriage is to be granted permanent residence within five years from the conclusion of the marriage. But the NGOs say that stricter rules for mixed marriages will not improve the situation. They say that the foreigner police do not efficiently use their legal powers and that corruption plays a role in such cases, too.

Foreigners' police start checking illegal immigrants
Foreigner police carries out an inspection of foreign workers earlier this year in Pardubice region. The Czech foreigners' police have checked some 1000 people within a nation-wide control operation of illegal immigrants staying in the Czech Republic that was launched today, Nova Television reported. The goal of the checks that are connected with the Czech Republic's planned integration with the Schengen area is to limit the number of illegal immigrants. Nova said that of the 1000 people checked dozens will have problems since they did not have proper documents and health insurance. Several wanted persons have been arrested by the police during the checks. Nova said that 300 policemen were involved in the checks that took place in Prague, Ceske Budejovice, south Bohemia, Plzen, west Bohemia, Hradec Kralove, east Bohemia, and the Usti nad Labem region, north Bohemia and will continue on Friday. During the operation, the police checked marketplaces, hostels, construction sites and factories. "Like today's operation many others that will follow in the near future are directly connected with the Czech Republic's entry in the Schengen area," foreigner and border police spokeswoman Katerina Jirgesova told Nova. According to Nova, the operation in Prague lasted about three hours and police arrested seven people - four foreigners lacked personal documents and three were nationally wanted. Two Ukrainians without health insurance were find 500 crowns each.
© Prague Daily Monitor

MOST CZECHS SAY CO-EXISTENCE WITH ROMANIES BAD

16/6/2007- Most, 79 percent, of Czechs consider the co-existence of the Romany and non-Romany populations bad, according to a poll conducted by the polling institute CVVM in May and released today. The opposite view is held by only 16 percent of them. Czechs also believe that Romanies' opportunities are somewhat limited in social areas in comparison with non-Romanies. The situation in employment is considered the biggest problem as 62 percent of Czechs believe that Romanies face worse conditions in this field. Some 48 percent believe that Romanies have worse opportunities in the public life. The poll was conducted among 1132 Czechs. CVVM analysts said that situation had slightly worsened, returning to the state in 2003. In 2006, co-existence with Romanies was considered good by 22 percent and bad by 69 percent of those polled. One half of Czechs said Romanies lived near their residence. They tend to assess negatively their co-existence with Romanies in the place of their residence. It was seen bad by almost three-fifths of Czechs, good by two-fifths. There was also the question of how to improve relations with Romanies. Non-Romanies should be more tolerant and have no prejudices, the respondents said. As far as Romanies are concerned, they should adapt themselves to the rules of the majority society, behave decently and work, most Czechs said.

Co-existence of Romanies and non-Romanies (%):
very bad 26
fairly bad 53
fairly good 16
very good 0
does not good 5
© Prague Daily Monitor

346 SAME-SEX COUPLES REGISTER IN ÈZECH REP. SO FAR

19/6/2007- A total of 346 Czech homosexual couples have closed registered partnership since it was legalised last July, while men prevail among them, according to data from Czech birth registry offices released to CTK. Czech homosexual organisations had been striving for the respective legislation for years. The law on registered partnership defines the establishment and termination of a partnership between two persons of the same sex. The legislation ensures the right to information on the health condition of registered partners and a chance to inherit property just as married couples. It also counts with the mutual obligation to pay maintenance. However the law does not enable same-sex couples to adopt children. Registered partners have no right to widow's or widower's pension or joint property and joint taxation, which married couples can use. The highest number of homosexual couples (126) entered registered partnership in Prague, followed by the Central Bohemian and the South Moravian regions (36 couples in each region) and the Ustecky region (35), north Bohemia. On the contrary, only two couples closed registered partnership in the Karlovy Vary region, west Bohemia. The youngest "registered" partners were 18 years old, the oldest over 80. Some of the couples held a festive ceremony resembling a real wedding with rings and guests invited. In Central Bohemia, same-sex couples need not enter registered partnership in the local town hall only, but they can choose another suitable location, for instance a castle or chateau in the region. Some Czech registered couples have already managed to terminate their registered partnership.

Representatives of the Gay and Lesbian League (GLL), which pushed for the legislation, point out that the current law is not ideal. "We will strive for other amendments to reflect our ideas," Martin Strachon from the GLL told CTK previously. He added that they would not demand changes immediately, but in a long-time horizon. Homosexual couples say that property relations between same-sex partners are still problematic as the law does not enable them to enjoy joint property ownership. Moreover, rights and duties to children are not sufficiently defined in the law as many homosexual couples have their own children. Registered partnership between a Czech citizen and a foreigner is not without administrative problems either. Over two-thirds of Czechs share the view that homosexuals should have the right to registered partnership but not to child adoptions, according to polls. While in 2005, one-third of people agreed with adoptions by same-sex couples, this year it is only 22 percent. Two years ago, 42 percent of Czechs did not mind registered gay or lesbian partnership, but now their share dropped to 36 percent.
© Prague Daily Monitor

RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS GAIN GROUND (Slovakia)

16/6/2007- Right-wing extremism is on the rise in Slovakia. Activists complain not enough is being done, while from Europe fingers are pointed at the left-wing government's controversial alliance with extreme-right nationalists. Throughout the last year several racial incidents have been witnessed in this relatively homogenous five-million strong nation where the mere bearing of extremist symbols is considered a crime. One of the most visible cases came in early March when a group of neo-Nazis attacked a group of Spanish and Mexican students, who afterwards said this was not their first violent encounter with xenophobia. A few days later a 30-year old Nigerian man claimed he was attacked by men calling him "negro", and when seeking help from the police was told he should "shut up" as he was "not in Africa." Slovak police registered 188 racially motivated attacks in 2006, 67 more than in 2005, but there are suspicions these numbers might be low as many of the victims simply do not report to the police. Daniel Milo, head of the People Against Racism association in Bratislava, says that even though "these were well documented and publicised attacks, similar attacks on other groups are quite widespread and on the increase." The main targets of Slovak xenophobia remain the Roma minority, who represent between 2 and 5 percent of the country's population. "They are the group most discriminated against, and the attitude of the majority is mostly negative against them," Milo told IPS. Even though most prejudiced Slovaks do not agree with violent action, the activist says his organisation is "in contact with policemen and victims; and according to our knowledge since the beginning of the summer there is increased activity by right-wing extremists." The Interior Ministry claims to be acting resolutely by monitoring the extremist groups at concerts, soccer matches and protest marches. Government officials have also announced a bill on the fight against extremism and terrorism will be soon completed.

Officials have recognised that far-right extremists have grown in sophistication, developing links to the underworld, and becoming "more radical while trying to expand their member base," police spokesman Martin Korch told the press. The extremists, who often make profit through the organisation of concerts, selling music merchandise and clothing from far-right brands, "are often in groups of organised crime which consist mostly of former neo-Nazis," Milo told IPS. "Sometimes it can be very difficult to differentiate them." But the government has so far only paid lip-service to the fight against extremism. "It is only mentioned in government declarations, but so far there was no single step taken. There is no real response, no methodology, no pro-active approach by the police, and there is even a decrease of police preventive action against them," the activist said. Most Slovaks remain indifferent to the recent incidents as the majority of the population is content with the economic situation and the performance of Prime Minister Robert Fico and his Smer (Direction) Party. Right behind the Prime Minister, Jan Slota, leader of the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), is according to polls the second most trustworthy politician in the country. His party is gaining support, with surveys giving it 13 percent of vote intentions. What worries foreign observers is that with his party's inclusion in Fico's government, Slota has become a figure who publicly legitimises xenophobic attitudes with his frequent statements against minorities. This view precipitated the suspension of Smer from the Party of European Socialists last fall, but the decision will be reconsidered in October. It is estimated that two-thirds of Slovaks find the presence of foreigners in the country overall negative for society, and in spite of having few immigrants, most Slovaks feel there should be even less. The negative trend is unlikely to improve: Slovak schoolchildren, following their parents' example, show the same tendencies in harbouring prejudices towards Gypsies, Hungarians, refugees and the homeless according to a survey published in May by the League for Mental Health. The survey also pointed to schoolchildren growing more aggressive towards these minorities. Slovak xenophobia has been on the rise since the collapse of state socialism in 1989 and the country's independence from the former Czechoslovakia in 1993. With it came the resurgence of intolerant ethnic nationalism which prevails in Central and Eastern Europe.
© Inter Press Service

GAY PRIDE ATTRACTS TENS OF THOUSANDS IN ROME(Italy)

Tens of thousands Saturday staged the Gay Pride parade in Rome, urging the Italian government to fast-track plans to grant homosexual couples legal status and override Vatican objections.

16/6/2007- The raucous and colourful crowd, which included transvestites and lawmakers, marched under a baking sun from Rome's Saint Paul's Gate to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the official ecclesiastical seat of the Pope as Bishop of Rome, where anti-gay protestors had staged a giant rally last month. The marchers held up banners screaming: "For a more European Italy," "Rights for All," and "Equality, Dignity and Secularism," as they called upon Prime Minister Romano Prodi to speed up plans to recognise gay unions. "We are heteros, gays, lesbians and bisexual and we want Romano Prodi to give the same rights to all. Where are all the promises the government made? Evaporated into nothingness?" questioned a drag queen, seated on one of the several floats that went around. Vladimir Luxuria, a transvestite lawmaker who wore a grey and red satin gown, told AFP: "I hope that 2007 will be the year when the rights of gays, lesbians and bisexuals are recognised to give us all more peaceful lives." Several government ministers turned up to demonstrate their support. "I am here to salute the participants of the Gay Pride ... because their demands are positive. They bring up problems and questions which concern all Italians," Social Solidarity Minister Paolo Ferrero said. Prodi's government proposed allowing civil unions, called DICO in Italy, in February. The planned law, which would also give unmarried heterosexual couples more rights, has met with strong opposition from conservatives and centre-left Catholics in parliament. Pope Benedict XVI has recently spoken out against hedonism and the "worrying disorientation" of society, with marriage and the family under attack. He also upheld the traditional values of fidelity in marriage and chastity for priests. Top Italian Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco recently received a bullet and his photograph stamped with a swastika in the mail, apparently for his opposition to civil unions. Bagnasco, who is archbishop of Genoa and also president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, maintains that a family can only be founded on marriage between a man and a woman and has appeared to compare same-sex partnerships to incest or paedophilia.
© Sawf News Connect

WITNESSES TO DESTRUCTION (Kazakhstan)

As Kazakhstan's top religious official tells the OSCE his country is an oasis of religious harmony, the authorities hand out more punishments to members of small sects.
By Felix Corley

15/6/2007- Workers and police arrived the morning of 15 June at a village near Almaty, where the Kazakh Hare Krishna commune is based, to demolish 12 more Hare Krishna–owned homes. "The houses were literally crushed into dust. By 10 o'clock it was all over," Hare Krishna spokesperson Maxim Varfolomeev said. Last November, acting on a court ruling that the commune members were not the legal owners of the properties, authorities in the village of Seleksia bulldozed 13 houses of the 66 belonging to Hare Krishnas on a farm near the commercial capital Almaty. The latest demolitions came a week after Kazakhstan's senior religious affairs official boasted of his country's "religious harmony" and "liberal" religion law – and 10 days after a court on the other side of the country found six Jehovah's Witnesses guilty of participating in an unregistered religious organization. Believers and human rights advocates fear these are the latest manifestations of rising official intolerance of small religious faiths in Kazakhstan.

More Hare Krishna houses demolished
Human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis has expressed his outrage at the destruction of houses in the embattled Hare Krishna commune. "What the authorities are doing is terrible," he told Forum 18 News Service from Almaty on 15 June. "This is wrong from the point of view of justice, and of compromise. The authorities are showing that they will do what they want, despite the international outrage at the earlier demolitions of Hare Krishna–owned homes." Varfolomeev, who witnessed the latest demolitions, said the local administration organized a group of workers the previous evening to prepare for the demolitions. He said mechanical diggers arrived, as well as two buses, one full of workers and one full of police officers. An ambulance and a fire engine were also brought in. Police tried to bar access by outsiders to the village. "The action started just before 7 o'clock on several homes simultaneously," Varfolomeev told Forum 18. "Workers threw personal belongings outside and then started attacking the houses with sledgehammers and crowbars. Then the diggers moved in, turning from side to side, and reduced the homes to rubble. The houses were literally crushed into dust. By ten o'clock it was all over." Over the past three years, the authorities have been determined to destroy the Sri Vrindavan Dham commune, located in the village of Seleksia in Zhetisu rural area of Karasay district. The commune originally had 66 Hare Krishna–owned homes, plus a 47-hectare farm. Amid an international outcry, the authorities bulldozed 13 of the 66 homes in November 2006 and have repeatedly threatened to resume demolitions, most recently in early May.

Varfolomeev said the devotees had prayed that their temple, located in one room of the farmhouse, would not be destroyed. An order was issued on 5 June that the devotees should take down what the authorities claim are "illegally erected constructions" – which include the farmhouse – within 10 days. However, no moves against the temple were made. Yet the devotees fear that this could be the next target for demolition. Forum 18 was unable to reach any officials who could explain why further moves have been taken to destroy Hare Krishna–owned property despite official claims that the authorities are seeking a resolution to the dispute. Officials of the Karasay district Hakimat (administration) said that neither the hakim (administration chief), Bolat-bi Kutpanov, nor the deputy hakim were in their offices. The telephone of Ryskul Zhunisbayeva, the Hakimat's religious affairs official who has been involved in the case, went unanswered. Serik Niyazbekov, the senior religious affairs official for Almaty region, was unable to explain why officials should want to crush the Hare Krishna commune. "They should move to another location," he said. "Here in Kazakhstan the Hare Krishnas are considered to be non-traditional." Asked why this was relevant to the case Niyazbekov did not answer. "Why did they choose to move here?" he eventually asked. "They're from India." Zhovtis, the head of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, believes that Kutpanov, the Karasay district administrator, is backed by people close to President Nursultan Nazarbaev. "The hakim doesn't care what senior officials in the Foreign Ministry and the Religious Affairs Committee in Astana think," Zhovtis said. "He doesn't care about the political damage to Kazakhstan's reputation, or to its desire to chair the OSCE." He added that the Foreign Ministry in particular is highly concerned. "They face strong international pressure."

Papers not in order
Zhovtis said that the devotees' ownership documents do contain some inaccuracies. But he believes their documents are no better or worse than many home owners' documents and the inaccuracies could predate the devotees' ownership. "I don't believe the Hare Krishnas did anything wrong and I don't believe the presence of such minor inaccuracies makes their ownership illegal. Such inaccuracies could be corrected by anyone who genuinely wanted to seek to resolve this." Zhovtis believes that economic reasons are behind the attempts to seize the Hare Krishna–owned property, but adds that religious discrimination is another factor in why they have been targeted. He points out that of the 200 or so homeowners in the village, many of whom privatized their property just as the Hare Krishna owners have done, no one else has had their ownership questioned, let alone had their homes destroyed. "Clearly they are attacking only the Hare Krishnas." Zhovtis said that no similar moves against property owners have been seen elsewhere, except in the case of squatters who put up homes illegally near Almaty. "Even then the police decision to move against the squatters was I believe wrong." Varfolomeev of the Hare Krishna community points out that of the homes demolished last November, piles of rubble still remain today.

Smaller faiths targeted
The tiny local Hare Krishna community is not the only minority religion to come under increasing pressure from the authorities. Fines on Baptists who choose not to register their religious communities are increasing, and government documents have attacked Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Ahmadi Muslims [a sect rejected by some mainstream Muslims], sentiments often echoed by officials and commentators in the state-owned media. On 4 June, six Jehovah's Witnesses in the Caspian Sea port of Atyrau were given huge fines to punish them for their community's unregistered religious activity. They have tried in vain to gain legal status for the past six years. The community's leader Aleksandr Rozinov said all six will appeal. Asked what the Jehovah's Witnesses had done wrong to be fined so heavily, Atyrau Region's religious affairs official Saginbai Turgarin responded: "I don't know. But we're not persecuting them. We're working within the law." The timing of the fines on the Jehovah's Witnesses is embarrassing for the authorities. Yeraly Tugzhanov, the head of the Justice Ministry's Religious Affairs Committee, and Bolat Baykadamov, the human rights ombudsman, were among Kazakhstan's delegation to a conference on combating discrimination held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 7–9 June in the Romanian capital Bucharest. Reached in Istanbul on 6 June while he was on his way to the conference, Tugzhanov declined to answer questions about the fines on the Jehovah's Witnesses or about the 5 June order to demolish the Hare Krishna property. Yet in his address to the OSCE conference on 7 June, Tugzhanov claimed that his country is an "oasis of stability and religious harmony." He added that "It is difficult for manifestations of xenophobia, religious discrimination and anti-Semitism to take root in our country." Kazakhstan's religion law, Tugzhanov said, "is recognized by international experts as the most liberal in the entire post-Soviet area." He said that work is already underway to amend the law yet again, though it remains unclear if new amendments being proposed will make it even harsher. Every time the law has been amended since its first adoption in 1992 it has become more restrictive.

Heavy fines
The fines against the Jehovah's Witnesses in Atyrau came after law enforcement officials raided a community meeting on 6 May. Rozinov, who was not present meeting, was found guilty of leading an unregistered religious organizations and fined 100 times the minimum monthly wage (109,200 tenge, about 666 euros). The five other Jehovah's Witnesses were fined 50 times the minimum monthly wage for participation in an unregistered religious organization. The defendants were given 10 days to appeal to the Atyrau Regional Court. Rozinov said that 50,000 tenge is considered a good monthly wage in Atyrau. He said the six were not surprised by the fines, but would contest them. Jehovah's Witness lawyer Yuri Toporov, who defended the six in court, says Atyrau Region is the only place in Kazakhstan where their communities cannot gain legal status. "We now have 67 registered communities across the country," he said. "Atyrau is the last place where they won't register us." He believes the trials and fines were deliberately staged as an excuse to drag out consideration of the community's fourth registration application. Other religious minorities, especially Protestant congregations, say that Atyrau is a very difficult region for non-Muslim communities to work in.

This article was compiled from two reports published on 7 June and 15 June by Forum 18 News Service. Forum 18 is an Oslo-based group that monitors religious freedom in the former Soviet Union.
© Transitions Online

HR ORGANIZATIONS CALL FOR THE IMMEDIATE CANCELLATION GOVERNMENT’S “NO-FLY LIST” REGULATION(Canada)

16/6/2007- National human and civil rights organizations from across the country are calling on the federal government to immediately halt the implementation of the Canadian “no-fly list”. The groups say that the program, dubbed “Passenger Protect”, is ripe for abuse and represents an unprecedented assault on the rights of Canadian citizens and residents. The group is also calling on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to examine the plan and to hear public submissions. The organizations which have joined together to call for the suspension of the program are: The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA); the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF); the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR); Canadian Labour Congress (CLC); the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF); Centre for Research Action in Race Relations (CRARR); the Coalition of Arab Canadian Professionals and Community Associations (CAPCA); the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC); International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), and the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada (NARCC).

“There are many objectionable parts of this program, not the least of which is the fact that travellers may not find out that they’re barred from boarding a flight until they get to the airport and, even more seriously, the potential sharing of their private information with other countries,” said Dr. Ayman Al-Yassini, Executive Director of the CRRF, speaking on behalf of the group. “The stories about the experiences of travellers under the no-fly list program in the United States are not confidence-builders about this program for Canadians.” “While everyone is obviously keen on public safety, we have to remember that there is no evidence that this program would increase aviation safety at all,” observed Micheal Vonn, Policy Director of the BCCLA. “We are being asked to pay an astounding price in terms of our civil liberties for no quantifiable safety benefit whatsoever. What is worse, there has been no democratic accountability in the process.”

“Clearly, if this program goes ahead as planned, there is a serious danger of making the situation of racial and religious profiling worse,” said Roch Tassé of the ICLMG. “The federal government has a responsibility to ensure the protection of human rights while protecting its citizens and residents, not at the cost of one over the other.” “This program places the rights to privacy and freedom of movement of Canadian residents in the hands of a very few,” added Karl Flecker, National Director of the Anti-Racism and Human Rights department of the Canadian Labour Congress. “That makes it critical that Parliament takes a very close look at its ramifications.”
© The Canadian Race Relations Foundation

MEPS URGE ADOPTION OF A LEGAL FRAMEWORK TO COMBAT RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA(EUrope)

The EUropean Parliament adopted a report on taking effective action racism and xenophobia in all Member States. MEPs say that minimum harmonisation at European level is needed to defend one of EU's most important common values. MEPs evaluate the progress of negotiations conducted at Council on this framework decision and expect to be formally re-consulted by Council in the coming months on the basis of the political agreement reached by Ministers of Justice last 19 April.

21/6/2007- The aim of the draft decision as it stands now is to ensure that all Member States will impose harmonised criminal sanctions -from one to three years of prison- to any public incitement to violence and hatred against persons of a different race, colour, religion, national or ethnic descendent, dissemination of writings with such content, public approval, denial or gross trivialisation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The draft legislation does not forbid specific symbols per se --such as swastikas-- and does not mention specific historic events, but it appeals to the definitions of war crimes or genocide contained in the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945. Parliament's report aims to send a strong political message on the need to ratify this framework decision as soon as possible and recommends Council to "recognise" in the final text the fact that "some Member States have criminalised the denial or flagrant trivialisation of genocide" like the holocaust. Criminal sanctions should be more severe in the case of public figures and representatives of the authorities, as their status should constitute an aggravating circumstance, MEPs stressed in the text. Other recommendations by Parliament are focussed on fixing common definitions on terms such as "racist and xenophobic offences" or "public order offence". The Chamber finally requested EU governments to issue an evaluation report on this framework decision at the latest 3 years after it enters into force. The fact that this legislation will be a framework decision implies that the general provisions adopted by the EU will have to be transposed into different national laws afterwards, allowing Member States the necessary degree of flexibility to maintain their specific constitutional traditions regarding the right to freedom of expression.
© EUropean Parliament

PUT HATE CRIMES ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA(Europe, opinion)

By Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First.

20/6/2007- In February 2006, Ilan Halimi was found just outside Paris, half-naked, stabbed, and burned with cigarettes and acid. He died soon after — tortured and murdered for being a Jew. Stories of this nature rightfully horrify people everywhere. The disturbing truth is that we are living in a time of growing European antisemitism. France recorded a 6.6% rise in attacks against Jews for 2006. Ukraine saw a notable rise in attacks on Jewish individuals, as well as increasing vandalism of synagogues, cemeteries and Holocaust memorials. And the police chief of Berlin reported that neo-Nazi attacks had nearly doubled in his city over the course of 2006. The situation is urgent. European governments have been burying their heads in the sand, failing to address a steady, steep rise in antisemitic crime that began in the late 1990s. But as we consider the significance of these events, it is vital we note that the Jewish community is not alone in its suffering and that its fight against antisemitism is not best done in isolation. Among the victims of German neo-Nazis, the majority today are non-Jews. Indeed, during the World Cup soccer tournament last year, Germany’s Africa Council produced a “No-Go” guide for nonwhite visitors, warning them away from areas known for extremist violence. Former German government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye was blunt in his assessment, saying that there were parts of his country where “anyone with a different skin color… would probably not get out alive.” Likewise, in Russia Jews are under threat every day, but the vast majority of those being attacked, battered and murdered are the so-called dark-skinned people of the Caucasus or foreign visitors of African or Asian origin.

Hate crimes of all kinds are on the rise throughout the world. The ideologies of extremist nationalist movements find much to despise in anyone who does not fit their brutally narrow worldview, and developing news events often serve to provoke and shape violence. Attacks against innocent Muslims increase in the wake of extremist Muslim violence; anti-gay crime rises during gay pride events, and antisemitic violence spikes during periods of political animosity toward Israel, as during last summer’s war in Lebanon. Russian citizens from Chechnya face everyday threats in northern cities in a violent ripple effect spurred by the distant conflict in their homeland. Most European governments have failed to establish official mechanisms to systematically monitor and report these offenses. While community-based organizations have compensated somewhat for these failures, the absence of a broader approach also makes it difficult to place hate crimes solidly on the international human rights agenda — and let there be no doubt, hate crimes are human rights violations. In the wake of the ravages of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations drew up a document calling on every nation to acknowledge and protect the dignity of all human beings, everywhere. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights affords everyone on earth “the right to liberty and security of person” and forbids “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” When a neo-Nazi kills a Senegalese man in the Russian Federation, when a pregnant Malian nanny and her 2-year-old charge are murdered by a Belgian anti-immigrant extremist, when feces are thrown at gay-rights activists in Riga — when such incidents occur, governments have failed to meet their obligations to defend against discrimination. These hateful acts demand that the world’s governments, and not just the communities affected, take heed.

This was first brought home to me in 2001, at the U.N.’s International Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban, South Africa. The rancorous attacks against many Jewish representatives was, for me, a wake-up call that addressing antisemitism on the international stage must be made a central piece of the anti-racist, human rights agenda. It is appropriate and important for there to be an open debate about Israeli policies and practices that lead to human rights abuses. Yet, just as anti-gay religious teachings can never justify crimes against the gay community, and bombings in New York, Madrid and London must not excuse attacks on anyone who happens to be Muslim, so must the world community understand that legitimate debate about Israeli government actions cannot be allowed to devolve into violent antisemitism. Moreover, violence against a feared “other” is often driven by prejudices that involve multiple factors: race and gender, physical appearance and religion, sexuality and national origin. Antisemitism involves a uniquely toxic cocktail of factors and has continued to mutate into new forms. Its ancient and modern dimensions together provide ideological glue that unites a broad spectrum of European extremists. Hatred of Jews is a uniting force in the equal-opportunity racism that makes many European streets a gantlet to be run by minorities of all religions and hues. The skinhead pack that attacks Jews and is inspired by antisemitic screeds will also hunt for dark-skinned immigrants, gay men and members of a Muslim community. The “Russia for the Russians” nationalists who predominantly attack ethnic Georgians or Chechens today may tomorrow make Russia’s vulnerable Jewish community a primary target. Extremist movements in Europe attack people who stand out from the majority — and antisemitism is too often a core belief and an organizing principle. Such acts are part of the same continuum that includes ethnic cleansing and genocide. They are crimes against all humanity.

Individuals of goodwill and governments alike must begin to act firmly to stop antisemitic violence and all racist and religiously motivated crimes. They must be vigilant about condemning, reporting and monitoring hate crimes; enact laws to punish them as more serious crimes; provide the necessary resources for law enforcement; speak out loudly and often against intolerance and bigotry, and, not least, work together with others across the globe in coalition and common cause. In America, we are lucky to have comprehensive, nationwide reporting systems and a functioning criminal justice system. But there is much that the American government still must do, together with its friends and allies, to hold back a worrisome, rising tide of hatred. Individual communities will themselves always need to be aware of the threats to their own, and the world’s Jews must always remain vigilant against violent antisemitism. Yet it behooves all the world’s citizens to take a firm stand against hate crimes. In a world of differences, no one should face violence or fear because of where they came from or who they are.
© The Forward

EAST VS. WEST (Europe)

Eastern countries may just have to accept the divisions within the European Union over how to deal with Russia.
by Katie Bates

18/6/2007- Facing a human tide of immigrants seeking a better life, Malta, Spain, and Sweden have been clamoring for European Union–wide help to guard their borders. But to the east, national leaders have been calling for a more assertive EU policy toward Russia, sparked by allegations that Moscow was behind recent cyber attacks in Estonia and by the ongoing ban on the importation of Polish meat. In both cases, critics say, the EU has failed to use its economic muscle and political sway to stand up for member states. And some of these fissures are likely to break open again as EU leaders gather in Brussels for their 21–22 June summit led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds the rotating presidency of the union. In the lead-up to the summit, Merkel was trying to extinguish another controversy with Poland over voting rights under a proposed new EU treaty. "Each year 600 immigrants are dying on the threshold of Europe," Maltese Justice Minister Tonio Borg told the Associated Press news agency on 10 June, as the country appealed for help to stop a flood of North African immigrants to the tiny islands. "It is unbelievable that on the doorstep of Europe we are having this tragic situation and not enough is being done." Thousands of Iraqi refugees have fled to Sweden, and the United Nations estimates that 40,000 more Iraqis will seek to emigrate to the EU this year. Sweden appealed to other EU countries for help. Spain and Italy have appealed for union-wide assistance in dealing with their immigration challenges from Africa.

Old vs. new Europe -Again
Eastern states cite fundamental differences in the way Brussels wants to deal with Russia, with the dividing lines often marked between “old” and “new” Europe. States like Germany, recalling Russia’s decision in the winter of 2005–2006 to interrupt natural gas supplies to Ukraine, seek a careful balance in dealing with Russia. The eastern states want tougher action in what they see as bullying from the successor state to the former Soviet ruler. In the words of President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, the “two European goals are incompatible: European integration and appeasement of a roguelike and threatening Russia.” Outsiders in the intra-EU debate also want the EU to get tough. At a conference on democracy and security held in Prague in early June, Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and now an opposition leader in Russia, and Belarusian rights activist Irina Krasovskaya urged European countries to be more assertive in their dealings with what they see as the bad boys to the east, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Kasparov urged Western democracies to deny Putin a place at their gatherings, while Krasovskaya said the EU needs to wield a bigger stick. “The situation in Belarus is linked to the same deterioration of values and society which is growing absurd in Putin's Russia,” she said.

The differences in how to deal with Russia are also epitomized by a resolution adopted by the often-restive European Parliament on 10 May, a week before the EU-Russia summit. The parliament simultaneously criticized Russia over its democratic record and the Polish meat embargo and declared support for greater economic cooperation and for Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization. The resolution was hardly a show of solidarity for embattled Georgia, which is lobbying to block Russia's WTO membership for Russian embargos on its wine, bottled water, and other products. The Georgian government sees these acts as retaliation for Tbilisi’s efforts to seek increasingly closer ties with both the EU and NATO. Traditionally, the biggest EU founder countries, France and Germany, have guided the European policy of prioritizing relations with Russia, anchored by a few remarks chiding Russia for its recent record on democracy. Karl-Theodor von Guttenburg, a deputy in the German Bundestag, borrowed a line from U.S. President George W. Bush, who described America's relationship with Russia “a complex friendship.” Guttenburg said it was also a fitting euphemism for European relations. Speaking at the Prague democracy conference, he also argued that bilateral agreements between Eastern and Central European countries and the United States weaken European cohesion. One example is the missile defense system the Bush administration wants to build in Poland and the Czech Republic. Surveys show that many Europeans say the system is unnecessary and counterproductive, leading to a harder line from Russia. Russia sees the missile system as a threat to its own strategic arsenal.

Healthy competition
Defenders of the EU say regional differences over policy are not a threat to the bloc’s cohesion. They point out that within states, there are regional differences that help balance national decision-making. Since joining the EU in 2004, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia have been particularly strident in trying to change the European line on Russia. This is not so much a matter of lingering historical gripes as perceived Russian interference in the former satellite states. Poland’s influence is significant – as the largest of the new EU states and with close ties to the United States, it has sought to wield its power. In advance of the summit, Merkel and Polish President Lech Kaczynski were locked in a sharp disagreement over how to calculate the number of votes each member country casts in EU decision-making. Poland strongly objects to a proposal backed by Germany and other states to revise the complicated system, saying it would tilt voting in favor of the largest countries. Merkel has sought to find a compromise, but Kaczynski was unyielding. Despite such restiveness, the East is no more likely to get what it wants than Malta and other nations grappling for help with illegal immigration. Even though Kasparov and other activists were barred from going to Samara, where the Russia-EU summit was held in May, Merkel and EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso affirmed their commitment to a strong partnership with Russia. An EU press statement said the EU leaders exchanged very "open, honest and frank" discussions with Putin but underscored the need “to maintain strong relations.”
© Transitions Online

AT U.N., ABUSERS IN CHARGE(editorial)

A new human rights panel is no better than its predecessor, but the U.S. is in no position to criticize.

22/6/2007- Score one for the torturers, ethnic cleansers and despots. The new and improved United Nations Human Rights Council, which was created to replace the widely discredited Human Rights Commission, has after a year in existence proved to be nearly as worthless as its predecessor. The council met this week in Geneva to draft rules on how to conduct its work. Its main accomplishments were as follows: Cuba and Belarus were removed from the list of 12 countries subject to special investigation by the council — not because of any improvement in their dismal human rights records but because of objections by some of the many other human rights abusers on the panel, led by China, to the monitoring process itself. Israel was singled out as the only country whose human rights record will be a permanent item on the council's agenda. Investigations of the ongoing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region were allowed to gather dust. And Libya — a nation that awarded its annual Moammar Kadafi Human Rights Prize in 2002 to Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, and that detains women for the social crime of being rape victims — was named to head an anti-racism panel that will convene in 2009.

The United States played no part in any of these decisions because, in a fit of pique after its suggestions on how to reform the old commission were rejected last year, it declined to seek a seat on the new council. Then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton had sought to make it harder for abusive countries to become members by requiring a two-thirds vote by the General Assembly. When his obstructionism threatened to derail the entire reform process and keep the old commission in place, this page urged the U.N. to proceed with the best compromise it could get. That compromise is now looking like a rotten deal. Bolton was right about one thing: The U.N. can't possibly monitor human rights abuses when those doing the monitoring are themselves abusers. Yet what doubtless never occurred to the former ambassador is that the U.S. is in a singularly bad position to preach about such matters to the rest of the world, given that it is itself a human rights abuser and probably wouldn't qualify for a seat on the council under Bolton's own criteria. As long as the U.S. continues to deny due process of law to "enemy combatants" detained indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, and as long as it commits extrajudicial kidnappings of terrorism suspects and ships them to countries known to torture detainees, it will remain guilty of cruel and tyrannical behavior. The U.S. would be in a much better position to assert its views on human rights if it weren't so clearly violating its own principles. Once we have our own house in order, we can get on with the important business of fixing what's wrong with the Human Rights Council.
© Los Angeles Times

CANADA CONDEMNS U.N. RIGHTS COUNCIL'S ACTIONS

22/6/2007- Canada, filling a vacuum created by the U.S. boycott of the controversial U.N. Human Rights Council, has stepped forward as a defender of democracy, blasting the Geneva-based council for its a decision last week to end ongoing scrutiny of Cuba and Belarus while renewing it for Israel. In another blow to the United Nations' credibility on human rights, Libya was elected to chair the panel preparing for the 2009 World Racism Conference, a development that has been in the works for weeks. As the council's first year closed with a compromise resolution, human rights groups, U.S. lawmakers and even council member Canada criticized the council for protecting or conspiring with repressive governments. "Canada is very disappointed that the Human Rights Council, in the important decisions that affect its future work, did not fully respect the principles upon which it is founded," chided Foreign Minister Peter MacKay in a statement. "In our view, the council has failed to meet the test of its principles of universality, impartiality, objectivity and non-selectivity," he said in language that is unusually blunt for diplomatic circles. That view was shared by U.S. lawmakers. Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, yesterday amended the Foreign Operations Appropriations legislation to withhold the roughly $3.3 million U.S. contribution to the Human Rights Council, which she called "a poisonous charade." Monday's "embarrassing decision confirms the worst fears about the council's direction since its inception a year ago, and further hobbles U.N. efforts to credibly investigate human rights abuses," she said. "The structure and work of the council, whose membership includes some of the world's most notorious human rights abusers, is hopelessly flawed and thoroughly compromised by gross political manipulation."

The Human Rights Council was created by the General Assembly last year to replace its deeply politicized and compromised predecessor. But despite high hopes for a clean slate, many repressive regimes were voted onto the council, offering others cover and watering down resolutions. Member Algeria, for example, tried to persuade moderate African nations to vote against a resolution to censure Sudan. When they refused, Algiers and Khartoum co-scripted a resolution that narrowly passed calling for more study but no outright condemnation. Among its 47 members are Pakistan, China and Saudi Arabia, as well as other countries of concern. But many observers were plainly surprised that the council would refuse to renew the mandates for Belarus and Cuba. Even U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delicately chided the council, noting on Wednesday that both nations are required to honor their obligations under international humanitarian law. He also added, somewhat optimistically, that the "universal periodic review" of national human rights situations will start with the council members themselves. "No country — big or small — will be immune from scrutiny," Mr. Ban said. But Canada was not mollified. "We are ... distressed that the human rights situations in a number of countries whose human rights records are of concern, including Belarus and Cuba, will not get the attention that we believe they warrant, as the council failed to renew these two country-specific mandates. Lack of cooperation with the full range of U.N. human rights mechanisms should not be rewarded," Mr. MacKay said. According to diplomats and observers, Canada was the lone holdout Sunday evening and Monday, as the council tried to reach a compromise on the renewal of mandates for its human rights rapporteurs. Ottawa finally agreed to the deal, in which country mandates were renewed for North Korea, Haiti, Liberia and Burma, among others, after it was agreed that Belarus and Cuba would be subject to periodic review of their records, much the same as every other nation. The special rapporteur for Palestinian territories, however, is in effect "until the end of the Israeli occupation," according to a U.N. mandate.
© World Peace Herald

Headlines 15 June, 2007

LIMITED NEWS SERVICE DUE TO TRAVEL IN JUNE

14/6/2007- Due to extensive travel in the month of June, the ICARE newsfeed with articles from 'regular' media will be limited. Regural updates of the news section will resume in July. The I CARE News Team is reporting live from Preparatory Committee for the Durban Review Conference to be held in Palais des Nations, Geneva from 25 to 29 June.

Greetzzz,

Suzette Bronkhorst
© I CARE News

COLD COMFORT IN SWEDEN FOR IRAQI REFUGEES

13/6/2007- Walking down the carpeted aisle of Sodertalje's low-slung St. John's Church one recent morning, Anders Lago's broad, blond features looked out of place among the hundreds of black-clad Iraqi mourners at a memorial service. Lago is the mayor of this scenic Swedish town of 60,000 people, which last year took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire United States, almost all of them Christians fleeing the religious purge taking place amid Iraq's anti-American insurgency and sectarian strife. So the mourners are now part of Lago's constituency, and their war is rapidly becoming Sodertalje's war - to the mayor's growing chagrin. Sodertalje, he says, is reaching a breaking point and can no longer provide newcomers with even the basic services they have a right to expect. About 9,000 Iraqis made it to Sweden in 2006 - almost half of the 22,000 who sought asylum in the entire industrialized world. This year, when the United States has promised to take in 7,000 Iraqis, around 20,000 are expected to seek asylum in Sweden. Many of them are expected to find their way to this thriving town about 30 kilometers, or 18 miles, southwest of Stockholm. During 2006, following a migration route for Middle Eastern Christians laid down almost half a century ago, more than 1,000 Iraqis arrived here. This year, up to 2,000 are expected.

Now areas like Ronna and Hovsjo, with the seven-story, boxlike apartment buildings typical of these Swedish versions of France's blighted immigrant neighborhoods or America's urban housing projects, are being nicknamed Little Baghdad and Mesopotalje, with shops hawking Iraqi delicacies, crowded apartments and innumerable stories of carnage and loss. In one Ronna apartment, where newly arrived refugees gathered recently for an introduction to their new homeland as part of a municipal program, tragic stories were abundant. Mariam, a 36-year-old teacher from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, came to Sodertalje in late March. She told of being grazed by a gunman's bullet while trying to leave Mosul with her family and seeing one of her sons shot in the stomach. "We left everything to be safe, and we came here to start a new life," said Mariam, an Assyrian Christian who did not want her full name used because her husband and two of her three sons had not yet left Iraq. "In Iraq, we were deprived of even the simple right to go to church, and we want to hold on to our religion."

Sweden grants asylum to all Iraqis except those from the relatively stable Kurdish areas, and the immigration authorities do not even register their religious affiliation. But Sodertalje has been a magnet for Christian refugees since the late 1960s, when Assyrian immigrants from Lebanon, Syria and Turkey established a thriving community here. After the 1991 Gulf war and now, as extremists in Iraq step up their persecution of non-Muslims, more and more are trying to get here. "They come here to survive," said Jalal Hammo, the chairman of St. John's, a Chaldean Catholic church, who arrived from Iraq in 1994. "The terrorists do all they can to make all Christians leave Iraq." Culture shock for newly arrived Iraqis is far less here than it would be practically anywhere else in Sweden - or the West, for that matter. They can speak their native Arabic almost everywhere and have their choice of churches catering to the Christian denominations common in Iraq: Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic. In addition, they can see the games of two successful Assyrian soccer teams at the local stadium, as well as Suroyo TV, an Assyrian satellite station. But even though Sodertalje is the choice for many Iraqi Christians, it is becoming clear that their lives present many challenges - partly as a consequence of Sodertalje's status as a haven of choice.

Most who make it here were affluent - almost all have paid $10,000 to $20,000 for the papers they need to get out of Iraq - and they are often highly educated. But work in Sodertalje is scarce, especially for those who cannot speak Swedish, and Iraqis who arrive now will have to wait several months to start regular Swedish classes. Housing is also a problem. Like most of the refugees, Mariam has been living with friends and worries that she has greatly overstayed her welcome. "After everything I had in Iraq, I have to suffer this humiliation," she said. "I want to work, I want to provide for my family, but what can I do here?" Town officials are wondering that themselves. "The Swedish system for taking in refugees is broken," Lago said. He said Sodertalje faces an overwhelming burden of providing housing, schooling and work. When language classes overflow and as many as 15 people share a two-bedroom apartment in Ronna and Hovsjo, "those who suffer the most are the refugees themselves," he said. And even here, 2,000 miles from Iraq, the war makes its presence felt, as with Hazim, a wealthy, 50-year-old businessman who fled Baghdad in March. Sitting with compatriots in a Ronna apartment recently, he received a threatening cellphone call from Baghdad. "For us, Iraq is a never-ending story," he said. "We came here, and we are still followed by the war." And then there are Swedes like Lago, who learn about the horrors of Iraq as part of their jobs. The service in St. John's Church, where Lago was a guest, was held in memory of the Reverend Ragheed Ganni, 35, a Chaldean Catholic priest from Iraq who worked at the church until last fall. In November, he decided to return to Iraq. On June 3, Ganni was shot to death, execution style, after celebrating Mass at the Holy Spirit Church in Mosul.
© International Herald Tribune

HARSH REACTION FROM RUSSIAN OFFICIAL TO UN REPORT ON RACISM

12/6/2007- The head of Russia's delegation to the UN Human Rights Council, Valery Loshchinin, reacted harshly to a report by the UN's rapporteur on racism, according to a June 13, 2007 report by the Russian Jewish web site Jewish.ru. The UN rapporteur, Doudou Diene, announced at the UN Human Rights Council meeting that there was a "deep dynamic of racism and xenophobia in Russian society which articulates itself in the spread of racist crimes notably perpetrated by neo-Nazi groups... Racist violence constitutes the most serious threat to the democratic process in the Russian Federation." While none of these assertions differ substantially from past statements by President Putin and other Russian officials, Mr. Loshchinin reacted by characterizing the report as a politically motivated hatchet job ("politichesky zakaz"). "A range of problems in the sphere of racism and xenophobia was extrapolated [in the report] that which for our country either don't exist at all or aren't really that serious or systematic," the Russian official stated. "There is no need to comment because the report is inappropriate, both in content and conceptually." He then added that: "We do not deny that, unfortunately, there have been incidents of racist or ethnic intolerance. However, to make far-reaching conclusions based on this fact about allegedly dominant tendencies within [Russian] society and then, based on unproven data and falsifications, to assert that there are certain sins within the Russian political system, the justice system and the education system, is absurd."
© FSU Monitor

RUSSIAN ACTIVISTS TARGET "GAY" PARK

13/6/2007- Religious and nationalist groups in Moscow have said they will patrol a small park in the city that they claim is used by gay men as a meeting place. Intelfax news agency reports that around 50 people gathered yesterday to "reclaim" the park and launch their campaign. The activists said they will ask people they suspect are gay to leave the park during their nightly patrols. A spokeswoman for a Russian Orthodox youth group told Intelfax they wanted to target gay men:
"They boldly demonstrate their non-traditional orientation, persuading everyone that it is normal. "We believe that it is a vice and want to remove all this from this site, which is sacred to Russians."
The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, is being asked to confirm that the patrols are legal. He banned last month's gay Pride march, and has made a string of homophobic statements in the past few years. When gay activists tried to deliver a letter of protest to his office last month, they were pelted with eggs and assaulted by a small mob of anti-gay Russians. The organiser of Moscow Pride, Nicolas Alexeyev, said he was not worried by the park patrol, commenting that the small number of people involved meant it was likely to be short-lived.
© Pink News

UNHCR CONCERNED BY RISE IN ATTACKS ON ASYLUM SEEKERS, REFUGEES(Ukraine)

This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson William Spindler – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at the press briefing, on 8 June 2007, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

9/6/2007- We are extremely concerned at what seems to be an increasing trend in the number and seriousness of racist attacks against asylum seekers, refugees and other foreigners in Ukraine. At the same time, a number of incidents of police violence against people seeking protection in Ukraine have been reported. In the latest incident, an Iraqi asylum seeker who was seeking protection in Ukraine after fleeing his war-torn homeland was killed in Kyiv on 3 June. The motives for this act are not yet known, and a police investigation is currently under way. But the number of attacks and harassment against foreigners in Ukraine in the last few months make it necessary to investigate the motives of this murder carefully, including racist motivations. UNHCR has requested that the Government of Ukraine keep the office informed of the outcome of the investigation. UNHCR first voiced concerns over what appeared as xenophobic acts in Ukraine on 13 July 2001, after a refugee from Rwanda was beaten to death outside his home in Vinnitsa. In March 2005, a former refugee of Iraqi origin, employed by a UNHCR partner organization, was severely beaten in Kyiv by a gang of youngsters. Since then, UNHCR's office in Kyiv has been receiving on a regular basis, first-hand reports of racially motivated incidents, unprovoked attacks, beatings, verbal insults and other acts of xenophobia against refugees and asylum seekers in different regions of Ukraine. There are also regular media reports of attacks and harassment of foreigners in Kyiv, including members of the diplomatic community. UNHCR acknowledges the important steps taken by the Ukrainian authorities to address this problem, including high-profile public statements by the Minister of the Interior. UNHCR also appreciates the openness of the authorities in Kyiv to discuss these problems. UNHCR encourages the Ukrainian authorities to increase their efforts to put an end to these attacks and to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, as a matter of urgency. UNHCR is working together with other UN agencies, the diplomatic community and human rights organizations in Ukraine to counteract xenophobia and racism. As part of this effort, a number of advocacy activities designed to promote tolerance have been organized and free legal aid to victims of xenophobia and racial violence is provided.
© UNHCR News

ANGER OVER DAY RELEASE FOR NAZI(Italy)

13/6/2007- Jewish groups and Italian politicians have expressed anger at the decision to grant day release to a convicted Nazi criminal under house arrest in Rome. Erich Priebke, 93, is serving a life sentence for the murder of 335 people at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. The 1944 massacre was a reprisal ordered by Adolf Hitler after partisans killed a patrol of 33 German soldiers. The judge's decision also outraged the capital's mayor who said the city would never forget the massacre. "At this time the city of Rome's solidarity goes out to all the victims of the Nazi-Fascist barbarity," Walter Veltroni said. Priebke was one of several officers present during the killing of over 300 men and boys, 75 of whom were Jewish, at the caves south of Rome. He spent most of his life in Argentina before being extradited to Italy in 1994, where he was allowed to serve his life sentence under house arrest due to his age and health problems.

'No mercy'
He will now be allowed to leave his flat, lent to him by a lawyer who campaigned for his freedom, during the day. The decision allows him to go to his lawyer's office "every day, freely" and also to "go out to satisfy, at nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable necessities of life". His lawyer, Paolo Giachini, said that since his arrest Priebke had been writing a book and would probably use the time to consult documents and continue research. The head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities said the move was another concession to a man who did not deserve it. "This is clearly another act of leniency towards a man who showed no mercy in killing 335 innocent civilians and has shown no remorse since," Renzo Gattegna told the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
© BBC News

THE FAR-RIGHT IN MALTA

Dismal launch for Josie’s far-right party
10/6/2007- The former Nationalist MP Josie Muscat yesterday returned into the full swing of national politics with the formation of his new party – Azzjoni Nazzjonali – amid much pomp and breast-beating, but with little to show for in terms of candidates. Flanked by construction magnate Angelo Xuereb and the university lecturer Philip Beattie, who in 2005 led an anti-immigration protest with his right-wing formation Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana, Muscat presented no further candidates or other members of his political team yesterday. Just under 200 people were in attendance at the Phoenicia Hotel’s ballroom, where AN flags, floral displays, and a sprawling Malta flag welcomed an largely middle-aged, male audience. Speeches by Angelo Xuereb, Philip Beattie and a rousing oratory by Josie Muscat gave an outline of the party’s political direction. “Neither left nor right. Ideologies are a thing of the past. We’ll be realistic,” Muscat declared. But despite the feeble disclaimer, Muscat’s invectives yesterday were unambiguously anti-foreign, staunchly pro-life and pro-family, calling for greater public order, and appealing to “real Maltese” to come forward.
Muscat said the new party will campaign for fewer MPs, fewer electoral districts, a directly-elected president, a seven-minister Cabinet, four technocratic appointees, and a one-month maximum stay for irregular migrants who then have to be apportioned to the rest of the EU’s member states. He also proposed five regional councils. Angelo Xuereb appealed to patriotism in a long speech in which he outlined the reasons – 58 in all – he was entering politics. Among these was his belief that Malta needs more people who have made a success of their careers and “who are ready to sacrifice their precious time, and who are ready to contribute their abilities granted unto to them by the grace of God Almighty, for the better future of our country and present and future generations.”
Beattie, unambiguously right wing himself, declared his belief in “traditions and national pastimes” – his plug for hunters’ votes, whose representatives Lino Farrugia, Joe Perici-Calascione and Joe Buttigieg were also in the audience yesterday. “My personal opinion is that the values of this new party should be based on the natural order and the Catholic order,” Beattie said.

The new face of the far right (By Matthew Vella)
Fusty, middle-aged, chauvinist – the acerbic flavour of Dr Josie Muscat’s new right-wing formation was there for all to savour. A mainly male audience, and just a dozen youths: Muscat’s rousing oratory yesterday was all about “the people of 1964 and 1979”, those who witnessed Malta becoming a sovereign nation, “but whose state of decay today would be regrettable to people like Gorg Borg Olivier and Dom Mintoff”, the leaders who gave Malta independence and the republic, respectively. And with that introductory remark, Muscat set the tone to his tribute to Malta’s past as a genteel island ruled by clerics. To Josie Muscat, the doctor and private hospital owner, political hygiene, decay and cleanliness are part of his organic politics. Cleaning up the country, bringing back the profusely fertile families of yore (Muscat himself has six children), and re-instilling civic and patriotic values in today’s dissipated youth: Muscat may have been feeble in his disclaimer that ideologies belonged to the past, but here were the unmistakable ingredients of the new face of the right-wing in Malta (smaller government, anti-immigration, and an emphasis on public order).
Professor Roger Griffin, an academic expert on the far right, has spoken of the “fascist’s obsession with the nation’s current decadence and imminent rebirth in a nebulously conceived post-liberal new order”.

If Muscat mourned the demise of youth to one torn by the ravages of alcohol, drugs, and “sexual depravity” (it-telqa taz-zghazagh ghas-sess), certain young members of his audience were not strangers to this life of debauchery. But that was just one of the instances in which Muscat, whose return to politics was marked by his election as Marsaskala councillor last year, seemed out of synch. His definite hallmark was the exaltation of the past: the proliferation of children in bygones families that bred like guinea pigs (qishom fniek ta’ l-indi) which he hailed as the envy of so many other societies. Unlike this past Muscat still hankers after, today’s youth no longer cherishes a work ethic, but instead has turned into a bleary-eyed mess who resent waking up for work, “because they spend their nights drinking”, Muscat bawled. And the family, Muscat hollered, “the basis of Maltese society”, was neatly compartmentalised by “the sweetness that our mother gives us” and “the discipline our father instils in us”. “For it’s men that we need to be!” Muscat suddenly shouted in an impassioned plea to his confreres and onlookers at the Phoenicia Hotel ballroom, his fleshy features darkening into a scowl. “You see men who don’t even know their own address, and who ask their wife ‘where do we live?’ Their wife! He asks his wife!” Muscat chirped, charming his audience with the well-worn, macho mirth so typical of the small island he was proud of. The delusion yesterday was palpable at the unveiling of his new party – Azzjoni Nazzjonali. Glorious marches trumpeted merrily from the tannoy. The flags with the AN logo – two crescents, blue and red, pointing at each other – were draped everywhere and a large Maltese flag hung from above. As the AN’s speakers – Josie Muscat, Angelo Xuereb, Philip Beattie – and two unnamed co-founders sat down to address their audience, Ravel’s Boléro was cut short into its triumphalist crescendo. Despite claims of having a vast team, no candidates or political members were presented. And with only 200 people in attendance for the party which Muscat so boldly claimed was to be a new chapter in Malta’s history, the whole big bluff had been played even before the game started. People nod their heads, just like one of those American movies in which the “decent” folk rise up against biker gangs invading their town: so far there is nothing here to support Muscat’s contention that the AN will prove a major force in politics.

George Tabone, a Smash TV talk-show host, whose family business is Gram Jewellers, presented the speakers. Paul Salomone, notorious for his inflammatory speech in the anti-immigrant march two years and his verbal attack on MaltaToday editor Saviour Balzan, was up on the top floor balcony, releasing blue, white and red balloons as the speeches came to a close. Two other co-founders who sat by the sides of the three speakers remained eerily silent. When I asked one of them, a man with in an ill-fitting suit and gold earring (alongside the dapper Angelo Xuereb, the conspicuousness was painful), who he was and what his role was, he answered “Kenneth”. “Have you a got a surname, Kenneth?” I asked. “No, it’s just Kenneth. You can write that,” he replied sternly. So I did. Silent Kenny, courageously standing for election at a polling station near you. Josie Muscat, 62, born in Qrendi, is representing a new kind of disgruntled voter, and is the most vocal former Nationalist to rally against his old party. He is known as one of the few Nationalists with balls who fearlessly campaigned in Labour strongholds in the south. He was elected to parliament in 1966 at the age of 21, withdrawing in 1986. “I don’t like it one bit that a prime minister who succeeds another prime minister, decides to appoint his predecessor President within the next days,” was his dig yesterday at the appointment of his former party leader Eddie Fenech Adami as president. He was blatant in his appeal to voters: “If your party has turned you away, AN is the party to unite all these voters. That’s why we have taken up the red and blue colours.”

The roly-poly Philip Beattie, 43, who lectures banking and finance at the University of Malta, had a more charismatic, classroom appeal. “I believe in the natural order and the Catholic order, which can create a genuine progress… I believe in the right to life, the right to the family (heterosexual), right to private property, right to defend national/cultural identity… I believe in tradition and national pastimes.” Hunters’ lobby reps Lino Farrugia, Joe Perici-Calascione and Joe Buttigieg were listening eagerly in the audience.
Beattie exemplified “the large segment of unrepresented voters in Malta” with the National Bank of Malta shareholders, who remain up to this day without a penny in compensation for the forced nationalisation of the bank back in 1974. It is a lazy example: surely there are more unrepresented voters than the rich and noble Cassar Torregiani, Busietta, and Montalto families.
Angelo Xuereb, 54, the self-made construction magnate and former Naxxar mayor, listed 58 reasons why he was entering politics: “because I am a patriot… because Malta needs more people who have made a success of their careers… who are ready to contribute their abilities granted unto to them by the grace of God Almighty… because I can get more EU funds.”
He will fight for better roads, more public-private partnership projects, public transport reform, more tourist facilities for the Grand Harbour, rebuilding the Royal Theatre to its former glory, licensing building contractors, reducing bureaucracy at MEPA… all proposals drawn not just on his own experience, but also his private interests. And, he complained, not enough attention was being given to architecture and the quality of development – a claim he will have to answer to after his development of The Palace Hotel in Sliema resulted in structural damage to the Stella Maris chapel.

Josie Muscat, his physical presence less convincing than the angry timbre of his soapbox rhetoric, gave the more impassioned speech. Medium height with a slight paunch, greying hair, his round face scowling as he shouted rhetorical questions such as “which of you has faith in our Courts?” to the yea-sayers in his midst. His proposals are all Constitutional, in that they require two-thirds of the House to pass (granted that AN are elected to power, and recognised as the formidable power-broker they have already made themselves out to be). And yet the mistake is that in their fixation to curb over-spending or prune unaccountable officials, Muscat’s response is to reduce political representation (and consequently, democracy): a parliament of 55 MPs, 45 of whom will be elected from five regional districts, whilst the other 10 elected from a nationwide constituency; a seven-minister Cabinet appointed by a directly-elected President who must have been absent from politics for two years prior to taking up power; another four technocrats co-opted as non-voting members; abolishing local councils, to be replaced instead by five regional councils. Councillors cannot be party-affiliated (just like Josie of course, but before he launched his own party). Then there were reasonable proposals: levelling MPs’ pensions, a Whistleblower Act, regulation of party financing, reform in the appointments of commissions and the Broadcasting Authority.
On immigration, Josie wants our EU cousins to take in our asylum seekers after one month of us having fed and clothed them. And what if they don’t, Josie? Will you slam your handbag on Frattini’s desk and ask for your money back?

But it was the right-wing invectives which charmed the shorts off all those whooping participants. Muscat attracting his first roaring applause when he asked: “have you heard any minister ever say a word about those soldiers and police in physical danger of certain illegal immigrants, and the diseases they face?” “We have two types of immigration – that coming in by boat, and the one by visa… about one-third of all Maltese are married to foreigners… in 20 to 30 years’ time, we’ll be overruled by foreigners,” he warned, saying his team had “studied” all these aspects. But who was this team? Was it the members of the Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana, the anti-immigration platform which had now been given safe harbour by the respectability of Dr Josie Muscat and Angelo Xuereb?
They were all there. Joe Meli, the self-declared Mussolini admirer who ran for the Valletta council on a Labour ticket before being shown the door, was busy snapping photographs of the new party. “You should join us,” he told me, grinning. “Because this is a party for real Maltese.” With his black sunglasses, which seemed permanently stuck to his face, and his black shirt and tie, he looked like a character straight out of The Matrix. “No thanks,” I replied. “I don’t need your sort to make me feel Maltese.” Next to us was Angelo Xuereb, a respectable man now consorting with people with self-avowed fascist sympathies. I asked him whether he felt comfortable with people like Philip Beattie and Paul Salomone, the ANR exponents, and their anti-immigrant platform. “Well, what Beattie said were his personal opinions. We’ll all have to bow our heads to the general ideas of the party,” he answered, offering a hope that the dark side of the people with whom he was associating himself would not overpower his plans for a level-headed compromise.
Martin Degiorgio, another ANR member, was busy filling out a membership form. Along with Joe Meli, he had been part of the Moviment Socjali Repubblikana, a right-wing organisation set up in the mid-1980s and which looked to Almirante’s post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano as its reference point. Meli himself based the MSR’s manifesto on the document “Il MSI – dalla A alla Z” (The MSI – from A to Z).

This was indeed a tight-knit family. All the admirers of Carmelo Borg Pisani had come out to party. Beneath this veneer of respectability, a pattern of intolerance remains clearly visible. Everyone applauded to old Mintoffian virtues: “Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox!” With God’s own blessing – “Mulej! Seddaq l-ghaqda fil-Maltin u l-Ghawdxin!” – Josie Muscat was bringing strongman politics back to the fore with his slogan of “Sovereignty, Seriousness, Justice”. He is out to right all the wrongs, a party for everybody with a grievance: hunters, building contractors (Sandro Chetcuti from the GRTU’s building section was there to applaud the new party), and all those who long for the secure, idealised past which only someone like Josie seems to understand. Because Josie sure doesn’t understand the present.
© Malta Today

DUAL CITIZENSHIP DILEMMA(Croatia, commentary)

Croatia’s political parties are divided over a ruling that allows Bosnian Croats the right to vote.
By Tihomir Loza, deputy director of TOL.

12/6/2007- Croatia’s interest in Bosnian Croat affairs has steadily declined in recent years. But a decision of the Croatian Constitutional Court to restore the right of Croatia’s non-resident citizens to vote in a referendum made Bosnia’s Croats, most of whom hold dual citizenship, the focus of political debate in Zagreb. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, who leads the conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), welcomed the court's 5 June ruling. But Zoran Milanovic, the newly elected leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which leads in opinion polls ahead of parliamentary elections later this year, voiced his displeasure. If the SDP forms the next government, he pledged to introduce constitutional changes that would end the right of ethnic Croats from Bosnia to vote in Croatia’s elections as well as referendums. Sanader replied that if he remain in power, he would see to it that both rights that the Bosnian Croats now enjoy are enshrined in the constitution.

Electoral asset
At one level the issue is simple and rather mundane. Bosnian Croats overwhelmingly vote for the HDZ and the turnout among them is regularly higher than among the rest of the electorate. In other words, they are an electoral asset for the HDZ. No wonder the SDP is not too keen on them. But it would be wrong to suggest that electoral calculations are the sole motivation here. Croatia’s attitudes toward Bosnia and Bosnian Croats very much concern the country’s overall identity, its takes on the recent past in particular, as well as its sense of future direction. Bosnian Croats were at the forefront of efforts to create an independent Croatia in the 1990s. President Franjo Tudjman’s key ministers and generals were often from Bosnia. Bosnian Croat officials were the most loyal to the cause and the autocratic leader and more often than not were among the most extreme nationalists. Through bogus privatizations or outright misappropriation of public funds, many of them converted their patriotism into personal fortunes. Tudjman and his Bosnian Croat allies originally hoped that Bosnia would fall apart – just as Yugoslavia did – and that parts of its territory held or conquered by Croats would be annexed by Croatia. When this proved unrealistic, they sought to form a Croat state inside Bosnia that would function as an unofficial extension of Croatia. But this also turned out to be unfeasible. In 1994, they reluctantly settled under U.S. pressure for an entity inside Bosnia, the Federation, which they shared with the much more numerous Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims), who were by then wining the war against the Croats on most fronts. The Bosnian Croat population continued to rely entirely on Croatia. While the Bosnian Croat ruling class managed for years to take advantage of both the postwar chaos in Bosnia and the loopholes in Croatia’s law enforcement to simultaneously milk both countries, Croats continued to leave Bosnia. It is now assumed that the overall population of Bosnian Croats has shrunk by as much as 50 percent since the early 1990s. Most people left during the war. But Bosnian Croats have also been leaving the country since 1995, probably in a significantly larger proportion than the Bosniaks and the Serbs. The fact that most members of Bosnia’s smallest ethnic group hold dual citizenship is an important element here. Croatia is far more attractive economically and socially, especially to the young and educated.

The tide turns
Meantime, Croatia’s attitudes toward Bosnian Croats have swung from enthusiasm to open animosity. While most of Croatia’s urbanites always grumbled about the often coarse manners of Bosnian Croats, during the war few objected to their disproportionate presence in public life. At times it felt as if the nation as a whole tolerated the presence of somewhat embarrassing cousins, for the cousins were willing – indeed often very keen – to do the dirty jobs required for fulfilling the independence dream. But since the Tudjman era ended in 1999 and Croatia embarked on a path to become a European Union state, Bosnian Croats have increasingly become unpopular. Blaming them for all sorts of social ills became both the norm as well as the vogue. For post-Tudjman politicians across the political spectrum, Croatia’s Bosnian adventure from the early 1990s became an unwanted burden. Many behaved as if it never happened. While those on the right maintained links with the Bosnian Croat political scene, often at arms length, those on the left often pretended as if Bosnia were just any country. But issues such as dual citizenship as well as the right of Croats living in Bosnia to vote in Croatian elections have kept popping up to annoyingly remind the whole society of one part of its recent past that no one now seems to be proud of. Milanovic and other liberal politicians are, though, right in principle when they argue that the Croats living in Bosnia should vote only in Bosnia. They did not leave Croatia to settle temporarily, but have lived in Bosnia for a thousand years, hence Bosnia is their country, Milanovic said recently. This would, among other things, help their reintegration into Bosnian society, he said. Except that one can no longer be sure what is meant by Bosnian society. The country at best has three quite separate societies organized strictly along ethnic lines. The Bosnian society that Milanovic and many other non-nationalist Croats seem to have in mind is the pre-war one, which indeed could in many ways be thought of as a single society. Croatia’s own role in destroying that society was second only to that of Serbia’s.

Tenuous position
While the right to vote in elections in Croatia will obviously have to be done away with at some point, the right time for what makes the rest of Milanovic’s argument was precisely the very early 1990s. That’s when Zagreb could have successfully played a leading role in persuading Bosnian Croats to take their own country seriously – yet it did the very opposite. While the SDP, which then was in opposition just as it is today, never actively participated in Tudjman’s Bosnian project, it never excelled at protesting against it. For Croatia to wash its hands today simply by saying that Bosnian Croats have their own country is not only a bit unfair, but also quite unhelpful. For the Bosnian Croats as a group are in a difficult position now. Thanks to their dwindling overall numbers they now find themselves increasingly sidelined by the more numerous and institutionally better positioned Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs in discussions on the country’s future. They are also quite disorientated and burdened by their own animosity to things Bosnian. In a way, they need Croatia more than ever before. They need Croatia’s help to find their place and voice in Bosnia, for on their own they are now very unlikely to be able to do so. In order to be able to provide such assistance Croatia’s liberal politicians must engage with the realities of today’s Bosnia, and not just with high-minded principles.
© Transitions Online

DUTCH MPS BACK IMMIGRANT AMNESTY

12/6/2007- The Dutch parliament has agreed to an amnesty for some 30,000 illegal immigrants, reversing the previous government's policies. The move means residence permits will be given to people who applied for and failed to get asylum before 2001. The previous immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, ordered the deportation of 26,000 asylum seekers. Anyone convicted of war crimes or sentenced to more than a month in jail is excluded from the new measure. It was first proposed by parliament after last November's elections, which led to the centre-left Labour party entering the governing coalition at the expense of the Liberal VVD party. The coalition is led by the Christian Democrats (CDA). The third partner is the small Christian Union. The previous administration collapsed last June after a row over the handling of the disputed citizenship of Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The immigration issue has gripped Dutch politics since the murders of two prominent campaigners against Muslim extremism - independent politician Pim Fortuyn and film-maker Theo van Gogh.
© BBC News

GERMAN POLICE UNDER SCRUTINY AFTER NEO-NAZI ATTACK

14/6/2007- A bungled police response to a brutal neo-Nazi attack on a troupe of actors in eastern Germany has shocked the country and raised questions about the effectiveness of the police in fighting far-right crime. Officers in the city of Halberstadt have admitted they made mistakes after the attack early on Saturday which left the victims with broken noses and teeth and bruised ribs. The assault on the 14 actors, who were going to a pub to celebrate their premiere of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, comes as worries mount about the rise in far-right crime in Germany, more than 60 years after the end of Hitler's Nazi regime. "Someone could be dead. If someone is lying unconscious on the ground and getting their head kicked in with heavy boots, I would say that is attempted murder," Halberstadt theatre director Andre Bruecker told German DLF radio. Politicians have condemned the attack, and the spotlight is turning on the police, accused by victims of being slow to respond. The police acknowledge they failed to arrest one of the main assailants even though he returned to the scene while the victims were being questioned. The 22-year-old has since been arrested but police are still searching for other suspects. "Several mistakes were made," said Christiane Marschalk of the Halberstadt police. "The main culprit, who is known, should have been arrested."

Groups which work with crime victims have long said the country's right-wing culture is institutionalised and criticise police and prosecutors for being slow to bring cases to court. "For many police officers, right-wing extremism is a red rag for quite simple reasons. They have to put down these attacks as crimes relating to state security. That means a huge amount of bureaucracy. Many don't want to do that," said Karl-Georg Ohse, who helps victims of far-right crime. He also said police were understaffed and badly equipped in some areas and unable to cope with right-wing violence. Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to combat right-wing violence but critics say the 19m euros a year spent on campaigns to draw young people away from radical ideology and involve them in democracy is inadequate. Right-wing violence in Germany last year reached its highest level since reunification in 1990. The Halberstadt region has had several high-profile crimes, including the burning of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank last July. "In light of these events it is natural that people will ask themselves whether they want to live in a place where this kind of thing happens," said theatre director Bruecker, who is thinking of staging a play about the attack.
© Reuters

NEO-NAZIS ATTACK THEATER GROUP IN EASTERN GERMAN TOWN

A group of actors were beaten up by neo-Nazis in the eastern German city of Halberstadt and have accused the police of being slow to respond. The region's premier says he is appalled by the attack.

12/6/2007- A group of actors who were attacked and injured by neo-Nazis in the eastern city of Halberstadt on Friday night have accused the police of handling their case too hesitantly. The theater group of 14 actors were on their way to a pub after a debut performance on Friday when they were attacked and beaten up by eight far-right youths. Several of the victims had teeth knocked out and required medical treatment for broken noses, injured ribs and jaws and eye injuries. Police failed to arrest the 22-year-old main assailant even though he returned to the scene while the victims were being questioned, a regional government official said. "The man was checked by police but released before they found out about his prior convictions," Rüdiger Erben, interior ministry secretary for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, told Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper. The man, a known neo-Nazi, was arrested again on Sunday evening. Police are still searching for seven other assailants. A number of people witnessed the attack and did nothing to help. The theater group had just finished a performance of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and one of the actors had a punk hairstyle in keeping with his role. That appears to have been enough to provoke the neo-Nazis they came across, newspaper reports said. The premier of Saxony-Anhalt, Wolfgang Böhmer, said he was appalled by the case. "It's a sad fact that far-right extremists are becoming increasingly brutal. If people are attacked and injured just because of their appearance it's an appalling crime," Böhmer said.
© Spiegel Online

DEBATE BETWEEN GERMAN LUTHERANS AND MUSLIMS

12/6/2007- German Muslim leaders have robustly criticized a forthright "position papier" issued last November by the EKD, the umbrella body for 23 Lutheran churches in Germany. In characteristically Protestant fashion, the document suggested Muslims should be more critical about themselves and it starkly set out why Lutherans disagree with Islam. Coming at a time when Germans were heavily preoccupied with an alleged Islamic threat, the paper caused strains that have still not been overcome between EKD and Islamic leaders. Ayyub Axel Koehler, chairman of the Council of Muslims, and Bekir Alboga, spokesman for the DITIB religious authority, were blunt in a debate with Lutheran leaders at a church congress this week in the German city of Cologne. More than 2,000 Lutherans crammed a hot, sweaty pavilion in Cologne to hear the debate on religious freedom. The politically correct may have expected compliments and blurring of differences, but it was not to be. Koehler told the church-people that Europe should be ashamed of the "trail of blood" that it had left throughout the world down the centuries. He said it was a step in the right direction that the two sides were talking, but he finished by slamming the EKD chairman, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, for "unnecessarily driving a wedge between Christians and Muslims." Koehler, a German who converted to Islam in 1963, questioned why the Protestant leader was repeatedly and unnecessarily saying that the two religions worship a different God. He said Lutherans were still moving up the "learning curve" and their paper last November contained the "language of separateness and trying to make yourself look good." Huber, who heads the Berlin Lutheran Church, gave a dramatic speech in defence of the Lutheran stance that it is "every Christian's duty" to speak up for his own beliefs when meeting with a person of another religion. He added that Christians respected the right of other religions to do the same thing, and denied that this zeal for the Christian faith had anything to do with conducting a mission to convert Muslims.

Earlier this year, Muslim groups charged that Lutherans were smearing more than 3 million German Muslims by alleging that they were susceptible to violent Islamism. Koehler, whose trade-mark bow-tie marks him out from Lutheran churchmen wearing long ties, made one remark, perhaps overlooked in the cut and parry of debate, suggesting a way out of the conflict. "I am hoping that we have a dialogue by our actions," he said in a suggestion for a pragmatic approach to co-existence between the religions on German soil. In Germany, a country of more than 80 million people, there are about 26 million Protestants and about the same number of Catholics. A joint appeal for a more just world issued by Christians, Muslims and other major religions during the Lutheran congress to the G8 summit meeting in northern Germany showed what was possible, he said. Huber, still sweating from the heat, told a reporter for Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa after the Thursday speech that the passionate debate might not have settled the differences "but at least it establishes where we all stand." Alboga said that despite the sharp differences since the paper was issued, Protestants could count on Muslims to keep the lines of communication open. Senior figures from both sides met in May in a mosque in the city of Mannheim, but made no progress. The Lutheran church was continuing to reject the establishment of a joint commission to discuss faith differences, Alboga charged.
© Expatica News

SIKHS FIGHT FRENCH LAW ON TURBANS

11/6/2007- Sikhs have gone to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to challenge a French law banning the wearing of turbans for ID documents. The United Sikhs organisation filed a complaint on behalf of French national Shingara Mann Singh, 52, who was refused a replacement driver's licence. By law applicants have to remove all headgear for security reasons. A French law adopted in 2004 also bans the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in state schools. Several Sikh boys have been expelled from schools in France for defying the ban, which also applies to Muslim headscarves.

Stolen
Mr Singh was twice refused a replacement driver's licence - in 2005 and 2006 - because he insisted on wearing his turban for the photograph. He has been a French national for more than 20 years. "I will give up my head but not my turban, which covers my unshorn hair," he said, quoted by United Sikhs. His licence was stolen two years ago, he said, and "before the robbery, at no time was I asked to substitute the photograph with one showing me without a turban". The Sikh religion requires males to wear their hair unshorn and covered at all times by a turban - a key aspect of their identity.
© BBC News

FRENCH 'NOT QUITE READY' TO ELECT MINORITIES TO PARLIAMENT

12/6/2007- A former minister of Algerian origin who was knocked out of the race for parliament lamented on Tuesday that French voters were not "quite ready" to elect minorities to the National Assembly. "Let's be frank. I think the French people are not quite ready to vote for candidates that they consider foreigners," Azouz Begag told French radio. Begag, who ran for the centrist Democratic Movement party, failed to win enough votes in the first round to stand in Sunday's runoff in his constituency of Lyon, France's second city. A former minister for equal opportunities who was born in France to Algerian parents, Begag said he was the target of racist comments during his campaign in Lyon. He caused a sensation in April when he quit the rightwing government to join the presidential campaign of centrist Francois Bayrou and published a book in which he charged that Nicolas Sarkozy had threatened to "smash" his face in. A record number of candidates from France's Arab and black minorities ran for seats in the first round on Sunday and a dozen qualified for the runoff. Among those who stood a chance of winning a seat were Algerian-born cardiologist Salem Kacet in the northern region of Roubaix and Caribbean-born lawyer George-Paul Langevin, who is running as a Socialist in one of the Paris seats. None of the outgoing deputies in the 555 seats from mainland France are from visible minorities even though France is home to Europe's biggest Muslim community of about five million. Promoting diversity in politics became an issue in France after the 2005 riots in the immigrant-heavy suburbs, where descendants of north African and African immigrants complain they are shut out of mainstream society.
© Expatica News

COLLAPSE OF NATIONAL FRONT COULD SPELL END FOR FRENCH FAR-RIGHT PARTY

11/6/2007- The far-right National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen had its worst score in more than 25 years in Sunday's legislative elections, encouraging speculation that it is disappearing as a serious force in French politics. With just 4.3 percent of the first round vote for the National Assembly, the party was back at levels of support not seen since before it emerged as a major political player in the early 1980s. It has not fared this badly since its 0.3 percent in 1981. In a clear sign of its failing fortunes, only one candidate -- Le Pen's daughter Marine -- had sufficient backing Sunday to qualify for the second round of the vote next Sunday. By contrast in the 1997 legislative elections, FN candidates in 134 constituencies passed the 12.5 percent barrier to enter the second round against the mainstream right and left. In 2002, the figure was 37. After Le Pen's disappointing 10.4 percent in last month's presidential election -- a distinct comedown from his shock second place in the 2002 vote -- analysts said the party's long period as a destabilising influence on French politics is all but over. "For a quarter of a century the National Front has played a baleful role in our politics, trying to popularise -- with growing success -- its xenophobic and racist message.... This long, excessively long, interim is now drawing to a close," Le Monde newspaper said. Credit for the FN's eclipse is largely attributed to President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose campaign strategy -- with tough talk on law and order, immigration and national identity -- was aimed at drawing far-right voters back into the mainstream political fold. "The president exercises a high degree of fascination for the far-right electorate, not just because of his policies but also because his whole way of governing and the determination he has shown to push through reforms are exactly what many of them want," said Le Figaro newspaper.

Many analysts compared Sarkozy's emasculation of the National Front with Socialist president Francois Mitterrand's deft handling of the Communist Party, which began to disapear as a serious force in the 1980s after it was embraced in an alliance with the Socialists. If the decline of the Communists gave the Socialists a distinct numerical advantage for many years, the erosion of the FN could do the same now for Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) as it monopolises right-wing politics in France. With Le Pen, who turns 79 later this month, unlikely to stand in another presidential election, his disappearance from what has always been a highly personalised poltical machine will deal another blow to the FN's fortunes. Though Marine Le Pen has done her best to pose as a modernising successor, she lacks her father's charisma and her position as heir-apparent is contested by other factions in the party. Not the least of the repercussions from Sunday's debacle is its impact on the FN's finances. By failing to reach the five percent mark in the elections, the party is to lose much of the state subsidy on which it depends.
© Expatica News

IMMIGRANTS TO FACE EXAM ON BEING FRENCH

14/6/2007- Foreigners who want to join their families in France will soon have to pass a test on the French language and national values before leaving their home countries under the first move by President Sarkozy to curb immigration. Rights groups and the Socialist opposition have denounced the draft law, which will go to Parliament next month, as populist and xenophobic. It aims to tighten curbs on family reunification that were imposed by Mr Sarkozy when he was Interior Minister before his election to the presidency. These included an integration test for applicants for long-term residence permits. The Bill, which is being vetted this week by the Council of State, is the first from the new Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity, headed by Brice Hortefeux. The link between national identity and immigration caused a storm and unsettled some of Mr Sarkozy’s party colleagues when it was proposed this year. Would-be immigrants will now be “tested in their country of residence on the degree of their knowledge of the language and values of the Republic,” the draft says. A two-month training course will be provided in some countries. It was also announced that families who receive relatives must sign a “host contract” in which they undertake to ensure the integration of children into French society. Failure may be punished by the suspension of child allowances, which are generous in France. Host families must also prove that they have the income to support arriving relatives. The Socialists said that the planned law would breach the rights of immigrant workers to lead normal family lives. “This law is a politically motivated, populist ploy based on stigmatising immigrants and their families,” Faouzi Lamdaoui, the Socialists’ immigration spokesman, said.

The language and values tests have not yet been defined but they are likely to resemble a new Initial Diploma in the French language, which new resident foreigners have been obliged to obtain in France since this spring. They must be able to read instructions, tell the time, interpret public signs, discuss prices in a shop, explain a health problem or make an appointment. In a move similar to steps in Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, would-be citizens are also to be tested on history and “republican values” such as “social solidarity” and fraternity. Family ties with residents account for about 90 per cent of the 100,000 annual legal immigants to France from outside the European Union. Most are from former French colonies in black and northern Africa, but the numbers from Asia are increasing. One of Mr Sarkozy’s projects – attacked on the Left as unFrench – is to promote selective immigration by well-qualified people from outside the EU. His plans to curb immigration and oblige non-European families to adopt a French way of life helped him to siphon votes away from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far Right leader. Mr Le Pen’s National Front was routed in last Sunday’s first round of parliamentary elections, which saw a landslide towards Mr Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement. Throughout the spring presidential campaign, Mr Sarkozy pinned blamed for crime and social breakdown on ghetto-like estates on the failure of immigrant families from the Muslim and black African states to embrace French values. “If some people are annoyed by being in France, they they should not hesitate to leave a country that they do not like,” he said. His harsh language caused the desertion from the last Government of Azouz Begag, the Minister for Equal Opportunities. Mr Begag joined the centrist opposition of François Bayrou and wrote a book attacking Mr Sarkozy. Its title, The Sheep in the Bath, was an allusion to his attacks on immigrant customs such as the home slaughter of sacrificial sheep by some Muslim families. Mr Begag, who is of Algerian origin, deplored yesterday the failure of nonwhite French candidates to reach the parliamentary run-off this Sunday. “The French people are not quite ready to vote for candidates that they consider foreigners,” Mr Begag said.
© The Times Online

SARKOZY MOVES QUICKLY TO TIGHTEN IMMIGRATION LAWS(France)

12/6/2007- President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to make it harder for foreigners to bring their families to France and he wants to do so quickly. This week, his immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, put the finishing touches to a bill that would require family members of immigrants from outside the European Union to learn basic French before coming into the country and to acquaint themselves with French history and customs. According to extracts of the draft law published by the newspaper Le Figaro on Tuesday, it would also require immigrants to sign a contract agreeing to promote the integration of their families into French society. The bill is still subject to possible modification by the Council of State, the highest French administrative court that must rule on draft legislation before it is submitted to Parliament. Hortefeux's office confirmed that it would be one of the first bills debated in a session this summer. "The spirit of the text won't change but there could be technical modifications," said the minister's spokeswoman, Nadia Angers-Diébold. The aim of the draft law, officials said, was to improve the integration process and to reduce the numbers of unskilled immigrants.

Since Sarkozy was elected last month, attention has been largely focused on his plans to revive the economy and reform the labor market. But the speed with which this bill was drawn up indicates that immigration will remain high on the political agenda, analysts said. Sarkozy, who was interior minister during the riots that shook France in 2005, gained a reputation for toughness after setting ambitious quotas for the deportation of illegal immigrants and passing two laws to restrict immigration. Last year he made waves by echoing a slogan of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the anti-immigration leader of the far-right National Front: "France, love it or leave it." Hortefeux, who announced Monday that for the second year in a row the government's deportation target would be 25,000 people, is one of the president's closest allies. His ministry, which focuses on immigration and "national identity," caused controversy during the presidential campaign when Sarkozy proposed it. Reuniting families is the largest source of immigration in France and has increasingly caught the attention of policymakers struggling to promote the integration of minority groups. In 2005, 94,500 French residency permits were issued to family members of immigrants, compared with 14,000 for foreigners arriving on work visas, government statistics show. Last July, the government passed a law requiring immigrants to prove that they could support family members without aid from the state. The French legislation follows a trend also observed in other European countries, although the measures differ widely.

In Austria, the government passed a law restricting the number of family members immigrants are allowed to bring into the country. In the Netherlands, family members have to learn Dutch before their arrival. In Germany, Britain and Italy, resident immigrants have to demonstrate adequate housing and financial provisions to care for any family members arriving from abroad. Denmark, too, has tightened the rules on family reunification, insisting that a spouse from abroad must be at least 24-years-old to qualify for entry. Danish officials said the rule, which has been criticized by Muslim groups, was introduced to clamp down on arranged or forced marriages in which young Muslim women were being brought into the country, sometimes against their will. But migration specialists warn that tougher rules on family immigration may be ineffective in limiting immigration and might also conflict with other government objectives.

International conventions signed by EU countries grant immigrants the right to bring their families to their host country and national rules can delay, but not prevent, families from coming, said Jean-Pierre Garson, an immigration expert at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Such a delay tends to have a negative impact on integration because it deprives children of valuable years in school. And it carries the risk of inciting family members to try to circumvent the rules, increasing illegal immigration. "Governments would like to choose immigrants on the basis of their skills rather than accepting family members, but there is a limit to these policies," Garson said.
© International Herald Tribune

CZECH GOVERNMENT APPROVES ANTI-DISCRIMINATION BILL

11/6/2007- The Czech government approved the anti-discrimination bill, Minister Dzamila Stehlikova (Greens) who is in charge of the agenda on human rights and minorities confirmed to CTK during a cabinet meeting today. The Czech Republic still lacks the anti-discrimination law for which the country faces EU sanctions since the legislation should have been adopted with the Czech EU entry in 2004 and at the latest by the end of last year. Stehlikova said she believes that the country needed legal protection against discrimination even if Brussels would not demand it. She said that the Czech Republic faces four administrative proceedings due to the non-existence of the law. If the case gets to the European court, the Czechs may be fined tens of millions of crowns, she added. The anti-discrimination law is to guarantee equal treatment and equal access to education, work, health care, welfare and housing and prevent discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, physical disability, language, religion, political conviction, property, marital status as well as membership in political parties and trade unions. If the bill is passed in the parliament and singed into law by the president, it is to take effect as from January 2008. The senior opposition Social Democrats (CSSD) have prepared their own draft. Representatives of Czech NGOs criticised the government-proposed bill, saying it did not include a number of issues. Stehlikova defended the bill. She said that it enables to impose high fines because of discrimination. The government also wants the ombudsman to supervise the anti-discrimination law's observance. But Czech Ombudsman Otakar Motejl said he believes that a special institution should be formed to monitor cases of discrimination. The previous Czech governments also prepared the anti-discrimination bill. The latest draft was vetoed by the Senate last year and the Chamber of Deputies then did not vote on the legislation again before the last June general election. The current bill is based on the previous drafts.
© Prague Daily Monitor

CZECH POLICE HANDLE 12 COMPLAINTS ABOUT CUNEK'S ROMANY POLICY

13/6/2007- The police in Vsetin continue investigating 12 criminal complaints lodged against Deputy PM Jiri Cunek mainly over his resettlement of local Romanies when the mayor of Vsetin, police spokeswoman Lenka Javorkova told CTK today. In addition, Cunek (Christian Democrats, KDU-CSL) has faced corruption accusation since February. He is suspected of accepting a half-a million-crown bribe in 2002. The police received 13 criminal complaints against Cunek last year, but they have already shelved one concerning the alleged abuse of power. In the remaining 12 complaints people accuse Cunek of slander, extortion, oppression, abuse of power and other crimes. Most complaints were lodged by Vsetin Romanies whom the Cunek-led Vsetin hall last autumn moved from a dilapidated house and resettled elsewhere in north Moravia. Most inhabitants of the dilapidated house, that needed to be pulled down, were settled in container-like flats on the town outskirts. Individual complaints may take even several months to completely investigate. The cases are extensive and require gathering of further documents such as expert assessments and contracts, Javorkova said. Moreover, the Vsetin police cooperate with the state attorney who consults Cunek's case with them, she added. Cunek, who was elected a senator and KDU-CSL chairman last autumn, and became deputy PM and local development minister in the coalition government in January, pleads not-guilty and refuses to step down over the corruption accusations.
© Romano vodi

CZECH OMBUDSMAN: EVICTION OF ROMANIES IN VSETIN WAS MISTAKE

13/6/2007- The town hall of Vsetin, north Moravia, made a mistake when it moved out Romany rent-defaulters from the town's centre in the autumn, Czech Ombudsman Otakar Motejl told journalists today. However, Vsetin town hall rejects the criticism. The town hall was then headed by Jiri Cunek, now Christian Democrat (KDU-CSL) leader and Local Development Minister. Motejl said that the export of socially excluded families from municipalities in which the families have long been living cannot be accepted as an efficient solution. He said that a good solution can be achieved through cooperation between social workers, NGOs, Romany families and local authorities. Cunek said he agreed with this, but said that the town hall did its utmost in the case. He added that "the ombudsman should have rather deal with the problem what to do with a rent-defaulters who is evicted, irrespective of the colour of their skin." The ombudsman's report will be available on the website www.ochrance.cz. The Ombudsman Office checked the conditions under which the demolition of the ramshackle apartment house where the Romany families lived was permitted. It concluded that Vsetin authorities acted against the construction law as they did not care for the house for more than ten years, allowing it to become dilapidated. The office challenged the town hall's argument that the families had to leave the house due to unhealthy living conditions. Motejl said that the state of the houses to which the Romanies moved was no better than that of their original home. Some of the Romany families were moved to container flats on Vsetin outskirts, while others were sent away from Vsetin and resettled elsewhere in Moravia.

The report writes that the resettlement violated the basic rights for respecting family and private life. Motejl said that Vsetin should allow the families to return to the town and let them request a municipal flat. The town hall dismisses the criticism. "The ombudsman's report has some 50 pages and it positively assesses some of our steps. We disagree with the simplified interpretation that we erred," Eva Stejskalova, spokeswoman for the town hall, told CTK today. The step provoked a lot of controversy. It was strongly criticised by NGOs focusing on human rights, Romany associations and a number of politicians. Motejl's office also focused on how social benefits were paid to the Romanies and whether they were satisfied in their new homes. Cunek faces strong criticism also over a police accusation of bribe taking. The opposition demands his leave as cabinet minister. The government position of Cunek was further affected when he made statements about Romanies in March that some call xenophobic while far-right extremists welcome them.
© CTK

SITUATION OF CZECH, SLOVAK ROMANIES STILL WRONG - REPORT

12/6/2007- Romanies in Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia, are still being pushed to the edge of society, according to a study, worked out with support of the EU, the World Bank and billionaire George Soros, which was presented in Sofia today. The study says that the countries would have to determine and fulfil binding goals to improve the integration of the Romany minority into society. Two years ago, eight Eastern and Central European countries, including the Czech Republic an Slovakia, launched "The Decade of Roma Inclusion" (2005-2015) international programme to improve the situation of Romanies. The study says that trustworthy data on Romanies are still missing along with the assessment of the achieved goals in Romany integration. Philanthropist Soros called on the governments of the countries participating in the programme to better use resources in order to improve the living conditions of Romanies and create more opportunities for them. Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovakia, where some 10 million Romanies live in total, according to estimates, pledged to pass new anti-discrimination laws and improve the access to education and health care for Romanies at the summit in Sofia two years ago. However, in spite of that, thousands of Romanies are still living in very poor conditions in deprived settlements without electricity and running water, being segregated from the majority population. Romanies have worse access to health care and other social services and more difficulties to find jobs, the study says.
© Prague Daily Monitor

SATIRICAL TV PROGRAMME SPARKS CONTROVERSY AMONG FINNISH ROMA

YLE believes show will incite debate on tolerance issues

14/6/2007- The Finnish Roma Forum has asked the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) to suspend broadcasts of the summer comedy series Manne-TV. In an appeal sent to the YLE, the series, which aired its first programme on June 2nd, is denounced as demeaning to the Roma, or Gipsy population. The organisation claims that it is racist, that it underscores prejudices, and that it could undermine the results of years of work to change attitudes. Other fears include a prospect of increased violence between the Roma community and other Finns, as well as an increase in ethnically based school bullying. YLE Programme Director Harri Virtanen stands behind the show, most of whose producers and actors are Roma themselves. He says that Manne-TV will not be cancelled, and that it would continue to air on Saturday and Sunday evenings. "If the series really increases school bullying, for instance, I would naturally be very sorry, but it is not the purpose of the series", Virtanen says. "The target of the series is the population at large and its prejudices. If someone watching the series thinks ‘is that how I think?', or ‘do I have attitudes like that?', then we will be fairly close to the aim of the series". Nevertheless, changes are planned in the content of Manne-TV. In the future there will be a greater effort to specifically deal with prejudices of the majority population toward the Roma. "Finland is said to be a tolerant society, but this series has again raised the racism of the majority population. If the topic is this big, it is good that it has been raised, and is being debated", Virtanen says.

The Roma Forum, which called for the cancellation of the show, is an umbrella organisation of Finnish Roma organisations, focusing on equal treatment under the law for the Roma population. According to the group's vice president Mertsi Lindgren, Manne-TV contains overt incitement against a population group. The Roma Forum is actually considering the possibility of submitting a criminal complaint on the matter. "First we need to meet with the Minority Affairs Ombudsman and to discuss it with [YLE Director-General] Mikael Jungner." Minority Affairs Ombudsman Mikko Puumalainen has not yet studied the appeal of the Roma Forum. "I want to discuss the matter with representatives of the forum before I form an opinion on the matter", Puumalainen says. Lindgren says that the Roma Forum took action on the basis of negative feedback from the Roma community. "We have also heard from the majority population that the programme does not work", Lindgren adds. Response received by YLE on the programme has been more negative than positive. "We get feedback from all programmes, but it dies not shake our decisions", Harri Virtanen says.
© Helsingin Sanomat

MORE TEACHERS NEEDED FOR IMMIGRANTS (Finland)

Working group wants about 650 new teachers by 2012

14/6/2007- About 650 new teachers will be needed by 2012 to meet the needs of school pupils with immigrant backgrounds. The estimates by a working group at the Ministry of Education are based on projections for the increase in the number of pupils who speak a foreign language at home, as well as on the prospect of large numbers of teachers retiring, and the sizes of classes. The calculations also assume that immigration will continue to grow at the same rate that it has in recent years. At the end of last year 2.3 per cent of the population of Finland were citizens of another country - 122,000 individuals. The number of residents with an immigrant background was greater. There are also to be efforts to encourage immigrant children to continue beyond comprehensive school, into vocational school or upper-level secondary school. Evaluating the need for more teachers was not easy, because many different kinds of groups of teachers take part in the education of people with immigrant backgrounds, and the statistics on them are inadequate. There is considerable variation in the teachers' educational backgrounds, and the criteria for competence have not always been defined.

The greatest estimated need for teachers is in integration training, in preparatory classes for basic education, and in the teaching of the immigrants' mother tongues. The working group notes that the teacher shortage can be alleviated by increasing teachers' training, improving opportunities for those with immigrant backgrounds to become teachers, and by increasing possibilities to supplement teaching degrees earned abroad. The working group has not made any separate estimates on how many teachers with immigrant backgrounds would be needed, but the group wants measures to improve the possibilities of students with immigrant backgrounds to be accepted into teacher training. The training programme for class teachers at the University of Helsinki has had an immigrant quota for a few years now. The Hämeenlinna Teachers' College also organises teachers' training for immigrants. The working group also feels that those who are currently teaching pupils with immigrant backgrounds need supplementary training, which should be offered to at least 1,500 people a year. The working group submitted its recommendations to Minister of Education Sari Sarkomaa (Nat. Coalition Party) on Tuesday.
© Helsingin Sanomat

TEACHERS WANT TO CAP NUMBERS NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING MIGRANT PUPILS IN CLASS(uk)

11/6/2007- Teachers have called for a cap on the number of non-English speaking pupils allowed in the classroom, amid fears that their education is suffering. The annual conference of Scotland's biggest teaching union, the EIS, was told that increasing economic migration, particularly from the new EU member countries, has created classes without a single child who speaks only English. A majority of delegates at the conference in Perth on Saturday passed the motion for the union to negotiate an agreed national limit. Many teachers say they are finding it increasingly difficult to balance teaching those with no English, while still educating the remainder within the curriculum, without sufficient specialist support. The motion to limit the number of pupils without English in any one class was proposed by the union's Glasgow branch, where swathes of Eastern Europeans have enrolled in the last year. East Renfrewshire has seen high migration levels, with pupils who speak 40 different languages. The North-east and Aberdeen area has also been affected with large numbers of Polish children enrolling in schools. Their parents have travelled to work in the fishing and agricultural industries, and Edinburgh also has a growing Polish community. Scottish Executive figures, released in February, show there are more than 37,700 children of an ethnic origin other than British enrolled in Scottish schools. Despite the influx, primary schools where dozens of languages are spoken often have to share just two or three specialist "English as an additional language" teachers.

Marjorie Bell, who proposed the motion, said: "There are large numbers of children of migrant workers arriving over a short period of time. If a school like mine, which has years of experience teaching bilingual children, is struggling to cope, how are others with less experience coping? "How many local authorities are facing up to the realities and providing sufficient and appropriate support?" She added that although her school was coping at the moment, if numbers of non-English speaking children increase, other pupils could suffer, and parents were starting to show concern. Mrs Bell said: "A disproportionate amount of time is spent dealing with these children and there are increasing murmurs of discontent from parents. There is a need in mainstream schools for a limit in the number of non-English speaking children in one class." Seconding the motion, Carolyn Ritchie, from the Glasgow association, said her school had Polish, Iraqi, Libyan and Dutch children. Some aged nine had never attended a class before coming to Scotland. And she criticised the former Scottish Executive for not acting before the new EU rules, which allowed more people to live and work here, came into force. She said: "The Scottish Executive knew that many children with no English would be coming to Scotland - it was no surprise." Another motion, also proposed by the Glasgow branch, was passed, calling on the Scottish Executive to provide significant extra funding for English as an additional language, and bilingual services, in every council in Scotland where it is needed. The conference heard the example of one bright pupil whose lack of English meant his potential was being held back. Although he was reading Chekhov in his own language, in English he was limited to reading Harry Potter.

Lesley Atkins, of the Glasgow association proposing the motion, said: "We must ensure these pupils are not excluded from the curriculum. It is their fundamental right to receive an education. "Without support from the Scottish Executive to support bilingual pupils, the structures of institutional racism will prevail." Larry Flanagan, incoming convener of the EIS education committee, said there are 137 first languages spoken by more than 28,000 pupils in Scotland, and called for them to be given the same support as Gaelic speakers. He told delegates there are twice as many Arabic speakers, three times as many Chinese speakers, six times as many Urdu speakers, and eight times as many Punjabi speakers as people who speak Gaelic in Scotland. He added: "They also need investment just as the Gaelic speakers do. This is a problem where only lip-service is being paid by politicians." Graham Dane, of St Augustine's High School in Edinburgh, said: "We are witnessing a major democratic change and they [children of economic migrants] are not receiving a satisfactory education. We are quite happy to take their taxes and they deserve something in return." A Scottish government spokesman said: "We want to deliver more opportunities for Scots from all backgrounds to succeed. We are planning to work with education professionals to stretch every child to achieve their full potential, providing them with the individual attention and support they need to flourish."

• The amount of official material being translated by bodies such as councils should be cut to encourage immigrants to learn English, Ruth Kelly has said. The UK communities secretary said that there were cases - such as in a casualty ward - where translation was necessary. But she said learning and using the English language was "key" to helping migrants to integrate.

• In Marjorie Bell's primary-four class in Annette Street Primary School in Glasgow's Govanhill, there are no white, "monolingual" pupils who speak only English. The school has a long tradition of serving a predominantly Asian community and is, therefore, well experienced in teaching bilingual children. In the school's official inspection report in December, it was noted that 25 per cent of the roll had joined from Eastern Europe in the past year, and meeting the needs of non-English speaking pupils was noted as a key strength. But increasing economic migration to Scotland from a wide range of countries means the school is stretched to its limit. Of Mrs Bell's 32 pupils, half joined the class without any English. There are six Malaysian pupils, ten Slovakians, and until last week, one Somali pupil, as well as bilingual Urdu and Punjabi speakers. Many of the non-English speakers are now beginning to develop a good level of English, but Mrs Bell believes creating an "immersion unit", where they could focus on learning English first, would allow them to access the curriculum more quickly. She said: "It is frustrating. The more time you have to spend with these children, the less time you have to spend with other children who also have needs. You go home at the end of the day and feel you haven't done right by any of them." The school has two full-time English language assistants and a principal teacher in English as an additional language, who comes to the school three days a week, but Mrs Bell feels it is not enough. She said: "The new Scottish Executive should be looking at this on a national basis urgently."
© The Scotsman

THE CONTEMPORARY FIGHT AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM (uk, debate)

Is an academic boycott ever justified, and is this particular boycott anti-Semitic? Two distinguished academic lawyers explain why they say "Yes" to both
By Anthony Julius and Alan Dershowitz

13/6/2007- The University College Union on May 30 passed two boycott resolutions. Resolution 30 endorsed the call for an academic boycott of Israel by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). It also committed union funds to promoting it on campuses. But it did not commit the union of university teachers itself to a boycott. Resolution 31 condemned the USA and EU boycott of the Palestinian Authority (that is, the “suspension of aid”). There is symmetry here. Thirty calls for a boycott; 31 calls for the ending of a boycott. Israel’s universities, which are liberal institutions, are to be shunned; the government of the PA, which is governed by a party committed to the destruction of Israel, is to be embraced. These resolutions are the successors to boycott resolutions passed by the predecessor academic unions, the AUT in 2005, and NATFHE in 2006. The AUT resolutions purported to justify a boycott of named Israeli universities by making specific - though false - allegations against them. The NATFHE resolution, which was much like UCU resolution 30, “invited members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals and to consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies.” The AUT resolutions were reversed following a special conference; the NATFHE resolution lapsed upon the union’s dissolution only a few days later. The UCU resolutions are in a 2007 series of boycott resolutions. They follow the National Union of Journalists resolution, and precede the UNISON resolutions. The NUJ resolution called for “a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa”. One of the UNISON resolutions affirms the union’s “right and desire to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people”. These resolutions open with a very one-sided, hostile account of events in the Middle East. Britain has become the boycott nation of the world – but in relation to Israel alone. It is an ugly obsession.

There are two contexts relevant to the passing of the UCU resolutions.
First, the union context. The UCU and its predecessor unions have been failing for some time to defend the interests of their members. According to Shalom Lappin, a London University professor and longstanding Peace Now activist who has just resigned from the UCU, “the rise of the boycott campaign in British professional unions coincides with their precipitous decline as effective agents of collective bargaining and industrial democracy. The constituent predecessors of the UCU, the AUT and NATFHE, had consistently failed to address the long-term decline in academic salaries and deep under-investment in UK universities. They showed themselves to be largely impotent in their attempts to protect their members' wages and working conditions. While tuition fees have soared, the Government has made no serious attempt to correct the deterioration that threatens British institutions of higher education. It has also recently imposed deep cuts on research funding. The impresarios of the annual boycott hunt ? have substituted the campaign against Israel for serious union activity addressing these issues.”

Second, the Middle East context. There are two aspects here. There is the character of the political opposition to Israel, and there is the condition of the Palestinian national movement. As for the former, the boycotters have aligned themselves with Hamas, a frankly anti-Semitic party, Hezbollah, another frankly anti-Semitic party, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a frankly anti-Semitic politician. All are unreconciled to Israel’s existence, wish it harm and are committed to an account of its power and standing that is utterly dependent on classical anti-Semitic tropes and texts. As for the latter, the Palestinians have never been further from possessing the collective self-discipline, and the constructive engagement in building state institutions, that are necessary to achieving statehood. The collapse of Palestinian morale may prove irreversible. (We hope not – we remain committed to a two-state solution.) In combination, these two aspects explain the re-emergence of the “one-state solution” favoured by most boycotters – the destruction of Israel, and an implicit acknowledgment that the Palestinians are incapable of building their own state.

It has been noted, not least because the boycotters themselves loudly insist upon it, that the boycott cause has Jewish supporters. Though not advancing fresh arguments in favour of a boycott, these Jews have made two distinctive contributions to the boycott campaign. First, they maintain that as Jews they are under a moral duty to campaign for a boycott. Their Jewish conscience requires them, they believe, to side with Israel’s enemies. Second, they give cover to non-Jewish boycotters accused of anti-Semitism. An anti-Semitic position, they believe, ceases to be anti-Semitic when adopted by a Jew. These absurd, ignominious beliefs have attracted only a few Jews (the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta, for example, and some secularists), though they have been much exploited by the boycott movement.

Are academic boycotts ever justified?
What happens when people are boycotted? The ordinary courtesies of life are no longer extended to them. They are not acknowledged in the street; their goods are not bought, their services are not employed; invitations they hitherto could rely upon dry up; they find themselves isolated in company. The boycott is an act of violence, though of a paradoxical kind – one of recoil and expulsion rather than assault. It announces a certain moral distaste; it is always self-congratulatory. “I am too fine a person to have anything to do with those people,” the boycotter says to himself. “They will have to reform themselves before I am ready to admit them back into my circle. They are indecent.” Boycotting is thus an activity especially susceptible to hypocrisy. It implies moral judgments on both boycotter and boycotted.

It follows that all boycotts are problematic. Academic boycotts are especially problematic, however. This is because they violate two important principles. One of these principles is peculiar to academic life, the other principle is best represented in academic life. The first principle is known as “the universality of science and learning”; the second principle is freedom of expression, which here implies freedom of association too. We will refer to them collectively as “the two academic principles”. Universality of science and learning: This is the principle that academics do not discriminate against colleagues on the basis of factors that are irrelevant to their academic work. There are three justifications of this principle: the advance of science is potentially of net benefit to all mankind; the value of a given contribution to science ought to be judged on its own merits; scientists’ co-operation valuably transcends boundaries of race, citizenship, religion. Freedom of expression: Expression is one of the principal means by which we realise ourselves. It is by speaking or writing that we discover who we are. To limit or deny self-expression is thus an attack at the root of what it is to be human. Now freedom of expression must incorporate freedom of address. It is not sufficient for my freedom of expression for me simply to be free to speak. What matters to me is that people should also be free to hear me. There should at least be the possibility of dialogue. Boycotts put a barrier in front of the speaker. He can speak but he is prevented from communicating. When he addresses another, that other turns away.

These values are serious – even, momentous. When they are given their due weight, can an academic boycott ever be justified? We suggest that the answer is yes – though only rarely. Prima facie, a boycott may be justified:

* When the person or institution to be boycotted does not meet the criterion of being a scholar or place of learning: This is a criterion with minimal content, but it would exclude, for example, the Holocaust-denying “Institute of Historical Review” and the professional anti-Semites who contribute to its defamatory activities. It is not a place of learning, and they are not scholars. They are mere impersonators. They may therefore be “boycotted” without fear of compromising either of the two principles.
* When the person or institution to be boycotted violates either or both of the two principles: For example, where freedom of research is denied to the employees of the institution. Another application of this exception is the counter-boycott. It meets the boycotter with a reciprocal gesture of rejection. A counter-boycott is justified in the face of a boycott. It is not open to the same objections as the boycott itself.

These are the two exceptions. Do Israeli institutions or academics come within either one of them?
Is the academic boycott of Israel justified?
Beyond formulaic denunciations of Israel, the boycotters rarely offer a rational account of why it is right to shun Israel or its academic institutions. The supporters of the UCU resolutions, for example, relied instead upon the unargued assertions that a boycott was justified because:

* First, Israel's universities are complicit in its misdeeds. Some boycotters allege active complicity; others, a complicity that arises either through failure to condemn the State’s misdeeds or because the universities are themselves organs of the state.
* Second, Israel’s misdeeds justify the boycott regardless of the universities' own complicity in them. The universities are an important aspect of the prestige that Israel enjoys in the world, and this prestige is not deserved because of its treatment of the Palestinians.

Israel’s misdeeds for these purposes (according to PACBI) comprise the “ethnic cleansing” during the 1948 War, the “military occupation and colonisation” following the 1967 War, and the “entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel.” That is to say, the “misdeeds” are constitutive of the State itself, and can only be remedied by Israel embracing its own extinction. (That these “misdeeds” are either false accounts of the relevant facts, or consequences of much more complex processes in which Arab aggression played a significant part, is of no concern to PACBI or its fellow travelling supporters in Britain.) PACBI desires academics worldwide to boycott Israel’s universities until Israel itself disappears. It does not wish to remedy an injustice, it wants instead to perpetrate a greater one. The PACBI model resolution, to remind ourselves, is the one endorsed by the UCU.

Even if true, which they are not, these assertions would not justify a boycott. Complicity in the state’s misdeeds, still less the mere fact of those misdeeds, violates neither of the two academic principles. In any event, it is the utter irrationality of the boycotters’ position, its disconnectedness from the ordinary canons of argument – the marshalling of evidence, the advancing of coherent theses, the acknowledging of objections, and so on – that must strike, urgently and forcibly, any disinterested person of good will. Consider, for example, the “complicity” complaint. It does not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Any doubts on the matter would be dispelled by reading the “Open Letter from Faculty Members” at Courage to Refuse. Or consider the boycotters’ explanation that they are merely responding to a request for assistance from another trades union – in this case, a Palestinian one. First of all, this is just not true – the PACBI call was itself a response to the activities of British boycotters. But in any event, requests for assistance have to be judged on their merit – trades union solidarity does not trump considerations of justice. Furthermore, if the boycotters limit themselves to responding to formal requests for assistance, they exclude from consideration the very parts of the world that should be of greatest concern to them – that is, those nations in which autonomous organisations such as trades unions are not free to operate. Or consider the boycotters’ defensive position, in response to the citing of (say) Iran or North Korea or Saudi Arabia, that Israel should be held to a higher standard than those other nations because it is a democracy. The position in turn exists in two versions:

* First, because Israel is a democracy the entire people are to be associated with the actions of the Government. The effect is to give a free pass to tyrannies and to disclose a basic misunderstanding of the nature of democratic accountability. Democracies make rulers accountable to the people; they do not make the people accountable to third parties. To think otherwise is to embrace a pseudo-democratic version of the belief in collective national guilt.
* Second, because Israel purports to respect law and human rights, it should be sanctioned if it fails to do so. But there is not a single state in the world that does not purport to respect law and human rights. No nation is exempt from judgment on its human rights record, and every nation is to judged by reference to the same criteria. When the boycotters exclude from consideration the many nations with far worse human rights records than Israel, they are merely practising sophistry in defence of their own double standards.
We have chosen just three arguments made by the boycotters. There are others. But not one has any more substance than the three we have analysed here. Indeed, it would appear that there is not a single, bad cause in contemporary times that has been more poorly advocated than the boycott of Israel. Given the essential irrationality, then, of this cause, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also tainted by anti-Semitism.

Is the academic boycott of Israel anti-Semitic?
It may be enough to say, “the boycotters are wrong.” They fail to make out their case; their reasoning is not “philosophically respectable” (the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for example, says this). And one may leave it at that. But this does not quite meet the case. One senses that more is involved here. The boycotters are not just adopting bad politics, which is in turn derived from faulty thinking. There is an edge of malice to their campaign. Their desire to hurt, to punish, outstrips their ability even to identify with any precision their targets – all Israeli universities without exception? All academics within those universities? Israeli academics in non-Israeli universities? They cannot say. And so the question arises – does this malice have a name? To be blunt – is it anti-Semitic?

There are two reasons for regarding the boycotters’ position as an anti-Semitic one.
First, the academic boycott resonates with earlier boycotts of Jews. The history of anti-Semitism is in part the history of boycotts of Jews. Consider three representative moments.
* In Medieval times, Christians were not allowed to enter a Jewish synagogue; they were not allowed to celebrate a holiday with Jews; they were not allowed to go as guests to Jewish banquets and anyone thus “defiled by their impieties” was in turn to be shunned by Christians (to quote from a canonical collection). It would be wrong to have “fellowship with God’s enemies”. Medieval England was especially active in excluding or “boycotting” Jews. For example, at the 1222 Canterbury Council, Archbishop Langton threatened with excommunication any Christians who had any familiar dealings with Jews or even sold them provisions. In his first pastoral circular following election as Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste enjoined his archdeacons, “as far as you are able, study to prevent the dwelling of Christians with Jews”.
* In the very first weeks of the third Reich, on April 1, 1933, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores. Signs were posted “Don’t Buy from Jews” and “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”. Uniformed Nazis, some armed with rifles, stationed themselves in front of Jewish business premises, and barred customers from entry. Cars circulated in the street broadcasting slogans condemning buying from Jews. The Nazi boycott was intended to isolate German Jews from their non-Jewish fellow citizens. In mid-March, upon the Anschluss with Germany, Austria’s Jewish merchants faced a boycott, enforced by thugs in brown shirts or by marauding youths wearing the swastika armband, ready to take savage reprisals against those who ignored or defied them.
* And in 1945, barely 12 years later, the Arab League initiated a boycott of Jewish Palestinian businesses. It prohibited Arab States from doing business both with “Zionists”, and with any third parties who themselves might be doing business with Zionists. The object was to isolate and weaken the Palestinian Jewish community. One year later, the ban was extended to prohibit contact with “anything Jewish” (as the Palestine Post reported, quoting a League announcement). This economic warfare continues to the present day. In the 1970s, the USA made compliance with the boycott illegal; most European states, on the other hand, colluded with it.

Each boycott derives from a principle of exclusion: Jews and/or the Jewish State, are to be excluded from public life, from the community of nations, because they are dangerous and malign. We therefore see an essential continuity here, but even if we are wrong about this, there is no doubt that the boycott has indeed been an essential tool of anti-Semites for at least a thousand years. And who but the crassest of individuals, those least sensitive to the burden of anti-Semitism’s history on Jews, would wish to impose precisely that sanction on the Jewish State today?

Second, it is predicated on the defamation of Jews. The Jewish State, in pursuance of its racist ideology, is perceived as pure aggressor, and the Palestinians are perceived as pure victims. The PACBI boycotters and their UCU fellow travellers would deny to Jews the rights that they upholds for other, comparable peoples. They adhere to the principle of national self-determination, except in the Jews’ case. They affirm international law, except in Israel’s case. They are outraged by the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, but are untroubled (say) by the Islamic nature of Iran or of Saudi Arabia. They regard Zionism as uniquely pernicious, rather than as merely another nationalism (just as earlier generations of anti-Semites regarded Jewish capitalists as uniquely pernicious, rather than merely as members of the capitalist class). They are indifferent to Jewish suffering, while being sensitive to the suffering of non-Jews. They dismiss anti-Semitism as a phantasm exploited by Jews to pursue their own goals. They overstate, on every occasion, and beyond reason, any case that could be made against Israel’s actions or policies, and wildly overstates the significance of the Israel/Palestinian conflict in world affairs – indeed, they put Jews at the centre of world affairs. Many of these “anti-Zionists” are either anti-Semites or fellow travellers with anti-Semitism; longstanding anti-Semites now embrace “anti-Zionism” as a cover for their Jew-hatred. This is because, in relation to Israel, the anti-Semite finds a protected voice. The desire to destroy Jews has been reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish State.

Boycotters may have Jewish friends, some may be Jews themselves – but in supporting a boycott they have put themselves in anti-Semitism’s camp. It is tempting to say: “The boycotters’ intentions may not be anti-Semitic, but the effects of a boycott are.” This lets the boycotters off the hook. Take a step back, and ask the most fundamental of questions. What is anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism consists, first, of beliefs about Jews that are both false and hostile, and second, of injurious things said to or about Jews, or done to them, in consequence of those beliefs. It is no enlargement at all to rewrite this definition as follows. Anti-Semitism consists, first, of beliefs about Jews or the Jewish State that are both false and hostile, and second, of injurious things said to or about Jews or the Jewish State, or done to them, in consequence of those beliefs. Anti-Semites wrong Jews and the Jewish State, and they are wrong about Jews and the Jewish State. Many anti-Semites also want to hurt Jews and the Jewish State or deny to them freedoms or rights enjoyed by non-Jews or the generality of States.

The fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism.

Anthony Julius is a consultant at the legal firm Mishcon de Reya and Visiting Professor in the English Department at Birkbeck College, London University. Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
© The Times Online

VERDICTS 'NOT AFFECTED' BY RACISM(uk)

13/6/2007- Jurors are influenced by the race of defendants, but this does not affect final verdicts, a report has suggested. Researchers recreated a real trial but varied the ethnicity of defendants to test juries for prejudice. Some jurors were more lenient towards a defendant of the same ethnic group, but the system of 12 jurors ironed out individual prejudices, the study found. Race did not impact on the verdict of mixed-race juries - but not enough is known about all-white juries, it said. Ministers ordered research into jury attitudes amid fears of institutional racism raised by the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Research into juries in the UK is difficult because of a ban on probing what goes on in the deliberation room. In 2001 Lord Justice Auld suggested ethnic minorities were under-represented on juries and that steps could be taken to rebalance them in cases where race was an important factor. But in a four-year study published by the Ministry of Justice, researchers say they were able to debunk a series of myths, including who was called to serve and the decisions they took.

Juries monitored
However, they did not answer whether all-white juries also do not discriminate. Researchers looked at the verdicts of almost 16,000 real jurors in Reading, London and Manchester and monitored who was being called to serve. In the third part of the study, they recreated an actual case - but varied the race of the defendant to see if it affected decision-making. The simulated case was filmed in a real court with real lawyers and judge using evidence from the original prosecution. Some 27 juries, all of whom had served in real cases, watched the case and then considered verdicts. All of the juries were drawn from one crown court in London. The study found the verdicts of racially-mixed juries did not discriminate against defendants based on their race. But in certain cases, the race of the defendant did have an impact on the votes of individual jurors. Some jurors demonstrated "same race leniency" - but personal prejudices did not affect the final verdict that would have been delivered in court. Report author Professor Cheryl Thomas said this contrast between some individual attitudes and collective decision underlined the importance of having 12 people consider a case. "Jury verdicts are the result of the process of group consensus and it appears the dynamics of these racially mixed juries helped to ensure that any individual jury biases were not allowed to dictate the verdicts of these juries," she said. "In their own individual ways, BME [ethnic minority] and white jurors serving on these racially mixed juries appeared to be particularly sensitive to the position of a black person in a criminal court, either as a defendant or victim. "What remains to be answered is whether all-white juries, which decide a large proportion of jury cases in this country, also do not discriminate against defendants based on race."
© BBC News

TEST TO REVEAL ‘INNER RACISM’ IN JOB APPLICANTS(uk)

10/6/2007- A test is being developed to detect "hidden" racism in job applicants. It is intended to unmask negative associations that potential employees could have towards ethnic groups. Candidates are asked to put images of black and white faces into categories of "good/positive" and "bad/negative" using arrow keys on the keyboard. By getting them to respond to prompts as quickly as possible, the test aims to side-step what is known as "cognitive control" - the brief, but significant time lapse needed to give an "acceptable" answer rather than an instinctive or "honest" one. The programme then automatically calculates a "response-index" that indicates a level of racial bias. The test is being developed at London Metropolitan University and is aimed at the public sector and multinational companies. Its developers say it is harder to deceive than many of the psychometric tests used to gauge personality type. The test was condemned last night as a potential "Kafkaesque nightmare" where individuals are penalised for thoughts in their deep subconscious. Philip Hammond, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "This sounds like an idea from the 'thought police'. What we require from employees is good work and decent behaviour. To start saying that we are going to discriminate against people because of some perceived subconscious bias is completely the wrong approach. "We are already a heavily monitored society with people being watched in all kinds of ways. A test to delve in to the subconscious mind is frightening. You have to ask, where does it stop?"

However, Nigel Marlow, the principal lecturer in psychology at London Metropolitan who is developing the test, defended its use and said that organisations should take practical steps to screen for subtle "implicit attitudes" and beliefs about racism. "When implicit attitudes are applied, often unwittingly, they can become stereotypical attitudes; a belief that members of some groups have certain negative and positive attributes, often not based on truth or fact," he said. "The test, which we hope will be available within the next 12 months, is a subtle way to catch racists out. It is based on the implicit attitude theory, which suggests that sometimes people are not even aware of some of their deep-seated biases." Academics have raised concerns about the test's fairness, however, and warn that it could put at a disadvantage candidates who are conscious of stereotypes and take measures to reject them. Mark Parkinson, the author of books of psychometric testing, said: "It is true that the emotional part of the brain reacts first, so that part of the argument I can swallow. "But how do the test developers know if they are reacting to the colour of the person, rather than if they are good looking or ugly, for instance? "Someone may hold associations for all kinds of reasons, historical baggage, the way they were brought up, they might have just been mugged. "But it is only if you have self-insight that you can do something about it. I think there is a fairness issue here." Some organisations have already made efforts to unmask racist attitudes. In the wake of a BBC documentary in 2003 revealing racism among police recruits, the Home Office introduced tests designed to uncover racial prejudice. About 5 per cent of recruits fail the tests.
© The Daily Telegraph

RACISM SHAME OF MONKEY CHANTS(uk)

10/6/2007- Dunoon is a rarity among rural Scottish communities. The presence of a US naval base at Holy Loch during the Cold War accounts for most of the black people living in the town. So Paul Omoniyi, a born and bred Scot of Nigerian parentage, might have expected a warmer welcome when he travelled to the Cowal peninsula on October 2, 2005, with his under-13s Bishopbriggs boys' team West Park United. The 11-year-old was excited about making an impression for a team he had joined only two months earlier, and hoped it would help him realise his dream of becoming a professional footballer like his brother. In the stand at Cowal Stadium that day, there was a crowd to watch the Scottish Youth Club Association (SYCA) league match, made up of players from the under-14s Dunoon team who had played earlier. A few minutes after kick off, Paul got his first touch of the ball - and was promptly greeted by monkey chants from the stand. "I heard the first monkey chant and I did feel hurt and wanted to do something," said Paul. "I was going to speak to the referee at half-time but when it happened again, he put the boys doing it out. He came up and said how sorry he was about it." The referee that afternoon was Ian Cunning, a local man who shared the training facilities with various Dunoon teams. "I thought my ears must have been deceiving me, so I played on," he said. A minute later, Paul sent the ball for a corner and even louder monkey chants pierced the air. "I was absolutely raging and held up play, ran from the field to order the boys in the stand out of the park, and told them in no uncertain terms their behaviour was appalling."

West Park coach Martin Rafferty said: "I was bemused when I heard the first chanting. The referee came over to me and said: 'Am I hearing things?' 'Depends on what you are listening to?' I replied. 'If it is noises coming from the stand then you are hearing monkey chants.' A brief time later, no one could be in any doubts that there were monkey chants coming from that part of the ground and that was why the referee went through the boys who were making them and sent them out." Despite the trouble he knew it might cause in his own community, Cunning did not pull any punches in his report to the SYCA. "I was positive in hearing the 'monkey' chant," he wrote. "I left the field of play and ordered the boys out of the stand... I also voiced my disgust." Cunning concluded his report by stating he mentioned the incident to a committee member of Dunoon Youth Football League the next day and was assured the member would "deal with it accordingly". But 20 months later, there is little evidence that anyone in authority has done anything about the abuse Paul suffered that day. Despite a supposedly zero-tolerance approach to racism in all forms across society, youth football organisations appear to have tried to bury the issue in a maze of bureaucracy. Despite a ceaseless campaign by Rafferty involving countless letters, e-mails and phone calls to the SYCA and its governing body the Scottish Youth Football Association (SYFA), the case remains in a bizarre limbo. Paul said: "I am angry nothing has been done. I want something to be done about this and I am really glad my coach won't let it go." Rafferty is not even seeking punitive measures against those responsible. He said: "I simply want what happened acknowledged and for all clubs to be informed in writing that such abuse would not be tolerated. "I don't see what was so difficult about that. Instead, I have been sent all round the houses and unable to do right by Paul and do right by every ethnic minority player. None of them should have to put up with what he has without there being some sort of comeback."

Comeback began - and ended - at a SYCA disciplinary meeting on December 15, 2005, attended by Rafferty, Paul and the then under-13s Dunoon coach. The three-man committee decided the case was "too big for us, we'll have to send it to Hampden", a reference to the national stadium offices of the SYFA. The SYFA stated that all issues pertaining to league games held under the auspices of the SYCA, including crowd conduct, are outside its jurisdiction. The case has been stuck in no-man's land since. For Paul, this is particularly disappointing given the Dunoon incident was not his last taste of racism in football. This year, West Park laid another allegation of racist abuse against a rival player after Paul claimed he was called a "black bastard" by a Maryhill Harp player on February 18. The SYCA delivered a "not proven" verdict. Paul said: "The second incident maybe affected me more than the first because they wouldn't believe my team-mate, but both have made me stronger. That is how I have been brought up. My mum has taught me not feel put down by racism and that people who say things have problems in their own lives. I am devoted to football and won't let these things stop me making it my career." Paul is determined to follow in the footsteps of his brother, Gabriel, 21. Currently playing in Serie C in Italy, the former Partick Thistle player is the oldest of parents Joe and Anne's four children. The couple came to London from Nigeria in the early 1980s. After Joe completed studies in engineering and a stint lecturing in Brunel University, they moved to Glasgow's southside when he was recruited by Babcock. A difficult period, they resettled in Bearsden 11 years ago to escape racism that had become a daily part of their lives. "Our car was vandalised, everything we had was vandalised," said Joe. "We had to call in the police and have cameras put in our house before eventually moving to somewhere we felt was safe for our children." It is little wonder then that the engineer sees Rafferty as a potential agent for much-needed change in refusing to let the abuse suffered by his son 20 months ago go unrecognised. "Martin is trying to make football youth development organisations tackle racism at the most junior level. He is raising awareness of the authorities' appalling failure to do anything about it. They are in denial and Martin is forcing them to confront that denial.

"We need to deal with these issues in Scotland and, in my son's case, have people take the responsibility to act in obvious cases of racist abuse. Nobody is doing that. Who is responsible here? "Paul isn't the only black or non-white player who has suffered this type of treatment. There are lots of Asians in this country who love football. Yet no one has stopped to ask why few of them play football. Might it be because when things happen as they have to Paul, it doesn't seem anyone will be dealt with and face penalties because these aren't set out?" The SYCA concedes "there is no dubiety" over the fact that there were monkey chants directed towards Paul. It also admits that it did not know how to handle it and looked to the SYFA for "guidance". SYFA national secretary David Little says the paperwork for the case was lodged by his association but did not merit a response because only once the SYCA had carried out an investigation and reached a decision could the SYFA become involved. "The protocols are all in the handbook," Little says. "We only come in if there is an appeal or, as could still happen, if a club makes a formal complaint against the activities of the league."
Off the ball

October 2, 2005: Omoniyi racially abused.
October 15: After consultation, referee Ian Cunning files a report to the referees' association and the SYCA.
December 5: Officials from Westpark and Dunoon are cited by the SYCA to appear.
December 13: SYCA decides case "too big for us".
May to July 2006: Hearing nothing further, West Park coach Martin Rafferty contacts both the SYCA and SYFA. He claims he was told SYFA remembered the matter but there was "no case to answer".
July: SYFA apparently changes tack, saying as the game came under the auspices of the SYCA, it was its responsibility.
February 18, 2007: Rafferty writes to the SYCA and SYFA after a West Park team-mate claims he hears Paul Omoniyi being called "a black bastard" by a Maryhill Harp opponent.
March 1: The SYFA tells Rafferty "the allegation from Dunoon was referred to the SYFA by the SYCA, with the SYCA recommending 'no action'".
April 16: At a disciplinary meeting over the Maryhill Harp incident, it is decided no action can be taken since it is one player's word against another.
April 29: Rafferty e-mails SYCA again over the Dunoon incident.
April 30: SYCA claims the case has already been dealt with.
It states: "I believe we re-cited both teams to the committee and all the evidence was heard. I remember the committee's decision was reached and both parties were informed of the decision that night and that they had the right of appeal, which neither team took up."
May 1: Rafferty says he was never informed of any further hearing over Dunoon and the referee was never contacted.
June 8: SYCA tells Scotland on Sunday that it had in fact referred the issue to the SYFA rather than deal fully with it.
© The Scotsman

CRRF RESPONDS TO UN BODY’S CRITICISM OF THE USE OF 'VISIBLE MINORITIES' (Canada)

Term implies homogeneity of racism experiences while classifying them as “the other”, says Executive Director

14/6/2007- The Canadian Race Relations Foundation has submitted a commentary to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) supporting, in principle, its observation that the use of the term “visible minority” by Canada implies that those so classified are “the other” and that there is homogeneity of experiences among them. The Foundation, instead, recommends that Canada discontinue its use and use the term “racialized” persons or groups because it better reflects the realities of racism. “The CRRF believes that the term ‘visible minority’ is no longer appropriate, in today’s context, because it oversimplifies the experiences of racism,” observes Dr. Ayman Al-Yassini, Executive Director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. “When it was originally coined, it had a specific purpose: to identify groups of people, who were disadvantaged, for special corrective measures. It still has that purpose within the Employment Equity Act, but it takes on a different interpretation when used outside of that area.”

In reviewing Canada’s report, the CERD asked Canada to “reflect further, in line with article 1, paragraph 1 of the Convention, on the implications of the use of the term ‘visible minorities’ in referring to ‘persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non‑Caucasian in race or non‑white in colour’”. The CRRF response notes that there is value in the use of “visible minorities” such as: It does identify a group of people who have been the target of racism and racial discrimination vis a vis a dominant group; it facilitates an all-encompassing language for those targeted with racism and racial discrimination, and it provides an opportunity to capture quantitative data on non-White and non-Aboriginal, data that would be otherwise unavailable. On the other hand, the term places those who are so branded on the margins ? a sense of inferiority inn relation to the dominant group, with a feeling of permanency. The term “visible minority” also assumes a commonality of experiences, that all racial groups in the category experience racism and discrimination equally, including the application of gender, age and class among other things.

“The term also ignores or denies the sense of identity associated with country of origin, race and culture. The fact is that the term, as it is now used, essentially removes the impact of racism from its meaning,” added Yassini. “It is for these reasons that the Foundation urges that the term “racialized” individuals/groups be used. It places the matter of race as a social construct front and centre, reflecting more honestly the power relationship - economic, social, political and cultural - implicit in racism and racial discrimination.”

The Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) was founded as part of the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement to shed light on the causes and manifestations of racism and to play a leading role in the elimination of racism and racial discrimination, and in bringing about a more harmonious Canada. The CRRF has registered charitable status and has Special NGO Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
© The Canadian Race Relations Foundation

Headlines 8 June, 2007

MALTA SAYS WILL NOT BE EU'S MIGRANT HOLDING CAMP

8/6/2007- Malta, which has been harshly criticised by the European Union over its handling of shipwrecked migrants, will tell the EU it will not be made a holding camp for people trying to get to Europe illegally. Foreign Minister Michael Frendo said the tiny Mediterranean island state will ask the other 26 EU member countries to take a share of migrants rescued at sea outside Maltese waters as they try to cross the sea from Africa. "The responsibility is of the whole EU," Frendo told Reuters by telephone. "I would not accept that Malta should be the holding place for the whole of Europe." The EU's top official in charge of migration issues, Franco Frattini, told an Italian newspaper at the weekend that Malta had violated its obligation to save lives at sea when it hesitated in picking up shipwrecked migrants that Malta said were in Libyan waters. "You can't hide behind a type of legal-bureaucratic argument while letting people die," Frattini said. But he acknowledged Malta faced unique problems, being positioned between the southern tip of Italy and the north African coast and being so small. At a meeting of EU justice and interior ministers in Luxembourg next week, Frattini said he would urge other states to provide boats and helicopters for an EU patrol of the area and also seek an undertaking from Malta that it would not leave shipwreck victims stranded in future. Last week, 27 people spent three days clinging to tuna nets while Malta and Libya argued over who should rescue them. Thousands are believed to die each year attempting perilous sea crossings to Europe. Frendo said Libya was failing to rescue people in its own waters and that the EU should not expect Malta to welcome migrants picked up off the Libyan coast. "What we are proposing is very clear, when we save people in a search and rescue area of a third country -- in this case it would only arise with Libya -- then there should be a system where all the 27 members of the EU should very clearly take responsibility," he said. "It does not mean that five seconds after they land they are transported somewhere else, that's not what we say," he added.
© Reuters

MOSCOW 'TO CUT MIGRANT WORKERS'(Russia)

7/6/2007- Moscow city authorities are planning to reduce the number of migrants working in the Russian capital. Mayor Yury Luzhkov says the demands for foreign labour should be lowered in favour of "our own workers". Rights groups argue few Russians would choose to do the difficult, dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs that are often the migrants' main source of work. The World Bank says that Russia is home to more migrants than any other country except the United States. Moscow is unrecognisable from the city that was once the capital of world communism. A boom driven by rising prices for Russia's abundant mineral wealth has made it into a thriving capitalist metropolis. The growth has created countless new jobs - in both the official and unofficial economies. Workers from poorer countries have flocked to fill them. Many of them have come from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia whose citizens do not need entry visas. Not all of them are welcome. Russia has been dogged by outbreaks of racist violence. One response from the authorities has been to limit migrants' access to jobs. Since 1 April, they have been banned from working in markets and other retail outlets. Now Mayor Luzhkov says there must be greater reductions, starting from next year.
© BBC News

NGOS: ONLY OVERALL CHANGES CAN IMPROVE CZECH ROMANIES' SITUATION

6/6/2007- The social situation of Czech Romanies can only be improved through comprehensive changes, civic associations that cooperate with the minority told journalists today. The associations interviewed in the past few months 33 Romany families to see what weight incomes have in Romany households and how money flows in the families, Petr Visek from Socioklub, one of the study authors, said the results have confirmed the previously known facts. Romanies orientate themselves on quick consumption. They spend every months twice as much they earn or get in benefits, and they have to borrow the rest from someone else from the family who gets money on another day. As soon as they get their wage or benefits, they return the money, so lending and running into debt is an eternal process within the broader family. The Romanies also often spend the money gained uneconomically. They often buy baguettes for children's school snacks though they are more expensive than food prepared at home. They throw away the lunch they do not eat because the Romany tradition has it that heated up food is bad or poisonous, Visek said. A strong solidarity functions within Romany familise. When a family member finds a job, he/she is eventually left with the same amount of money as if he/she did not work and lived on benefits, because his income is divided among the broad family members. The research was part of the Mikrobus project that aims at helping Romanies find work. It was launched in 2006 and will run for another year. The final report will include a recommendation for a change in legislation, Mikrobus coordinator Svatava Vaculova said. She said the difference between the social benefits and minimal wage should be raised. Jobs have been found for about 120 Romanies within Mikrobus since last year. Personal advisers will now help the Romanies keep their jobs.
© Prague Daily Monitor

POLISH POLICE SEIZE NEO-NAZI BOMB ATTACK GUIDES

5/6/2007- Polish police on Friday announced they had detained a far-right activist and seized neo-Nazi material including guidelines for bomb attacks on refugees, Jews and homosexuals. The operation, in the central Polish town of Bialobrzegi, targeted a
municipal employee in his thirties identified only as Adam P., who had ties with the international Blood and Honour skinhead movement, police said in a statement. During the raid, officers discovered material "with an anti-Semitic content, as well as instructions for neo-Nazi groups in Poland, notably detailing methods of intimidation and terrorist-style acts such as arson or bomb attacks." Suggested targets included "refugee centres and meeting places of the Jewish community or sexual minorities," the statement said. Last year, during what it dubbed operation "Redwatch", the Blood and Honour network called on its members to gather information on "people involved in anti-fascist and anti-racist activists, as well as coloured immigrants, left-wing activists and supporters, and the homosexual and pedophile lobby." Blood and Honour subsequently splashed its various websites with details of the individuals it was tracking. The website of the movement’s Polish branch, which was hosted by a server based in the US state of Arizona, was blocked by the FBI in July 2006 after a joint operation with Polish police. Three people working on the Polish site were arrested.
© EJP

CONTESTANT THROWN OFF UK BIG BROTHER FOR RACISM

8/6/2007- A contestant on the latest series of UK's Big Brother was thrown off the show for using a racially offensive word, just days after bosses were forced to apologise for a racist row on the show's celebrity version. Student Emily Parr, 19, was removed from the house in the early hours after she was heard to say: "Are you pushing it out, you nigger?" to black contestant Charley Uchea, 21, Channel 4 said in a statement. Parr said she did not mean the comment to be offensive and Uchea, who listed racism as one her dislikes on her Big Brother profile, said she had not taken it personally but was shocked at the language used. Channel 4 said the exchange was not screened live and was immediately reported to senior production staff who took the decision to remove Parr from the camera-filled house on the grounds that she had broken the rules governing behaviour. Angela Jain, who heads Channel 4's Big Brother commissioning team, said viewers would agree that the comments were careless rather than malicious. "She (Parr) understands why her involvement in Big Brother has had to come an end and she very much regrets what she said," Jain said in a statement. Parr had been up for eviction from the house after being chosen to be one of two housemates who would have to face a public vote. The incident comes after this year's "Celebrity Big Brother" was overshadowed when eventual winner, Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, was racially abused by other housemates. "Intolerance of any form has to be debunked. For a change (Channel 4) has done some good," Shetty told reporters at the International Indian Film Academy awards in Sheffield.

Channel 4 was ordered by the TV regulator Ofcom to issue an apology for its handling of Shetty row before the current, eighth series of the popular reality show started nine days ago. "In the wake of Celebrity Big Brother, we must consider the potential offence to viewers regardless of Emily's intentions and her housemates' response, Jain said. "The word 'nigger' is clearly racially offensive and there was no justification for its use. We have removed Emily from the house to once again make it clear to all housemates and the viewers at home that such behaviour won't be tolerated." The Commission for Racial Equality said it welcomed Channel 4's swift action. N' word is clearly offensive," the CRE said in a statement. "This will show everyone that racism must never be tolerated in any way, shape or form. We can see from this incident that there is no stereotype of a racist, they come from all walks of life, education and social background."
© Reuters

COALITION TO DEFEND FREEDOM OF RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL EXPRESSION LAUNCHED(uk, press release)

6/6/2007- Political figures, religious leaders, trade unionists and human rights campaigners are amongst the individuals that have signed up to a new coalition aimed at defending freedom of religious and cultural expression. Speakers at the launch included the Mayor of London; peace campaigner and activist Bruce Kent; writer Ismail Patel from the British Muslim Initiative; Dr Daud Abdullah, Deputy General Secretary, Muslim Council of Britain; Edie Friedman, Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality; Andrew Stunell MP; and Steve Sinnott, National Union of Teachers. The coalition is being set up in the light of continuing media and other claims that different communities and faith groups openly expressing their culture or faith threaten community relations in Britain. Such claims have been most recently and strongly directed at the Muslim community, particularly focusing on the right of Muslim women to wear the veil. But such attacks have also recently included a high profile case where a staff member at British Airways was prohibited from wearing a crucifix. The established rights of Sikh community to wear turbans have also come under assault.

The new coalition will bring together people of all faiths and none, to counter these assaults and to actively make the case that all communities should be allowed to express their culture or faith, as long as this is within the law and does not impact on the rights of others to express themselves similarly. A Greater London Authority commissioned report into Islamophobia in the media showed that 90 per cent of reports on Islam were negative. However, the majority of Londoners – 94 per cent - support freedom of thought, conscience, speech and religion. The coalition will put the case that that multiculturalism, especially in London, enriches society and that division will flow from repression of these rights, not their expression. And that it is necessary for individuals and different communities to come to gether to defend freedom of religious and cultural though that have been established over hundreds of years. The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said: 'I am proud of London's reputation as the most diverse city in the world where the contribution all communities is celebrated and people’s freedom of religious expression is respected as it is one of the most essential of our civil liberties. Attacks on the rights of Muslim people to express their faith as they choose are ultimately a threat to everybody's rights to freedom of religious and cultural expression. It should be the right of every individual to be able live their life as they wish, so long as it does not do harm to any other individual. This ability to be who you are and live as you choose is what has made London a magnet for people bringing their ideas and energy to make this the successful and dynamic city that it is.'

Statements of support
Dr Daud Abdullah – Deputy Secretary General – MCB
The MCB welcomes this important initiative. It constitutes a major step toward the protection of religious rights that have become increasingly under threat in the name of security. Millions of Europeans paid a high price to acquire the fundamental human right to freedom of belief and worship. The great challenge of our time is to secure it as we had inherited.

Rajnaara Akhtar – Chair, Protect-Hijab
This coalition is a necessity in order to maintain and defend values that we in Britain hold dear. Britain has always celebrated its multiculturalism and has led the way in establishing the integration of non-indigenous communities. This has come under threat with the increasing intolerant attitudes being displayed in political, media and other circles. A coalition to defend freedom of religion and cultural expression will act as a counter balance to this, and for this reason alone, I am proud to be a part of it.

Sir Geoffrey Bindman – Chair British Institute of Human Rights
Throughout my career in the law I have campaigned for human rights, including the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Hostility to individuals and groups by reason only of their identification with particular beliefs violates these fundamental principles, which are enshrined in international law and in our own Human Rights Act. Recent violence and hostility towards Muslims has been particularly shocking and must be firmly resisted by all who value decency and the rule of law. I welcome and am proud to support the Mayor's initiative.

Milena Buyum – National Assembly Against Racism
We welcome the establishment of the coalition to defend religious and cultural freedom. Its breadth is in itself a demonstration of the overwhelming support for a positive agenda for multiculturalism and a society in which all can practice their religious beliefs. The current rise of Islamophobia is the latest expression of the wave of racism that sees extreme right wing groups gain electoral ground on the back of vicious attacks on the Muslim community. The anti-racist movement will continue to campaign against Islamophobia, for the defence of multiculturalism and for religious and cultural freedom.

Karen Chouhan – 1990 Trust
The 1990 Trust welcomes the launch of this important coalition to defend the freedom of religious and cultural expression. In an environment where multiculturalism and civil liberties are under increasing attack from politicians and sections of the media, it is crucial that organisations come together in forums such as this to resist this worrying trend. We must work together to widen this broad-based coalition, demonstrating that any attempt to curtail our rights of religious and cultural expression doesn't affect just one group, but affects the whole of society.

Edie Friedman – Jewish Council for Racial Equality
In 1888 the Manchester City News described the Jewish immigrants as follows:
“Their unclean habits, their wretched clothing and miserable food enable them to perpetuate existence upon a pittance…these immigrants have flooded the labour market with cheap labour to such an extent as to reduce thousands of native workers to the verge of destitution….Surely our own people have the first claim upon us”.
More than 100 years later, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, wrote “I’ve been trying to imagine what it must be like to be a Muslim in Britain. I guess there’s a sense of dread about switching on the radio or television, even about walking into a newsagent. What will they be saying about us today? Will we be under assault for the way we dress?, or the schools we go to, or the mosques we build. His article concluded with these words: “I try to imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’. Jews creating apartheid, Jews whose strange customs and costume should be banned. I wouldn’t just feel frightened; I would be looking for my passport.”

His words articulate what many in the Jewish community have an understanding of. That is, how myths, misunderstandings and stereotypes are used to victimise and demonise whole groups of people. Of how certain groups are defined as one monolithic community without being allowed the same diversity that some of the more established communities are allowed. How we are told in an endless variety of ways that we haven’t passed the ‘cricket’ test and thus our allegiances are being constantly challenged. In order to counter these trends we all need to join together and to create a positive agenda with human rights at the centre of it. We need to participate not only in these large campaigns, but also to look at the grass roots; our religious institutions, the workplace, the classroom and the dinner table and reassess ways of positively challenging the stereotypes and misinformation which can thrive in these settings. There is no more fitting time than now, for all communities to come together to confront the demons of stereotyping, inequality, social exclusion and racism, and also to challenge ourselves to build the kind of society to which of us can feel a sense of belonging.

Lindsey German – Stop the War
The growth of Islamophobia in Europe has been one of the most disturbing facets of politics in recent years. The Muslim community in Britain, already suffering economic and social deprivation as well as racism, has come under increased attack since the events of 9/11. Anti Muslim racism reached a crescendo last year with the remarks by Jack Straw about his discomfort with women who wear the veil. Government ministers who took us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan are now trying to scapegoat the Muslim community, which did so much to oppose these disastrous wars in the first place. This rise in Islamophobia is connected with the war on terror and should be opposed by all those who oppose the war. We organised a People's Assembly on Islamophobia last autumn with this intention. The Stop the war Coalition had as one of its founding demands that we should oppose the racist backlash arising from the war. We are therefore very proud and pleased to support this coalition in defence of religious freedom, and see it as part of the campaign against Islamophobia and racism which is so important to British politics today.'

Bruce Kent – Chair of the Coalition and Pax Christi
I am pleased and honoured to have been invited to share in the work of this new Coalition. We all have a right to fair comment about us from others. Islamophobia, evidence of bias and hatred, must be challenged, not just by Muslims but, even more strongly, by non-Muslims. The Coalition will do its best to make that challenge effective.

Ken Livingstone – Mayor of London
I am proud of London's reputation as the most diverse city in the world where the contribution all communities is celebrated and people’s freedom of religious expression is respected as it is one of the most essential of our civil liberties. Attacks on the rights of Muslim people to express their faith as they choose are ultimately a threat to everybody's rights to freedom of religious and cultural expression. It should be the right of every individual to be able live their life as they wish, so long as it does not do harm to any other individual. This ability to be who you are and live as you choose is what has made London a magnet for people bringing their ideas and energy to make this the successful and dynamic city that it is.

Dr Caroline Lucas MEP
I am delighted to support this coalition, which I hope will make a real difference in the struggle for human rights for all. Through the war on Iraq, its refusal to fully engage with the democratically-elected Palestinian Authority, its approach to the 'war on terror' - and its failure to object to the illegal incarceration of Muslim British residents in Guantanamo Bay - this Government has made life harder for religious and ethnic groups in the UK and beyond. This coalition is a vital step towards undoing some of the damage done and rebuilding respect for all human rights and genuine equality in future.

Cristina Odone – writer and broadcaster
The so-called war on terrorism is inciting Britons to bury their belief in tolerance. As a result, Muslims and other people of faith are treated as suspect extremists. This is dangerous: by hounding even the most moderate of believers, we risk alienating them, and pushing them into a defensive attitude that will spawn resentment, apartheid, and ultimately rebellion. Tolerance is the most effective weapon against terror.

Ismail Patel – British Muslim Initiative
This coalition is not about the short-term problems for Muslims, it is about the long-term problems that any community may face if unfairly targeted and oppressed. It is a coalition that seeks to uphold freedoms and values which we fought wars to attain. This is a clear voice that refuses to concede these rights and freedoms because some politicians are deliberately creating a climate of fear and intolerance

Sikh Federation UK
The Sikh Federation (UK) is delighted to be a member of the steering group to defend freedom of religious and cultural expression. Unfortunately, it is not possible for there to be a representative at the launch on Wednesday 6 June as Sikhs are commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the June 1984 Indian army assault on the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest Sikh shrine. We are duty bound as Sikhs to stand up for fundamental human rights including the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and cultural expression. In recent times these rights have increasingly come under threat in the UK and mainland Europe. However, we should not forget that different minority communities have and continue to suffer immensely in other parts of the world.

Steve Sinnott – General Secretary, National Union of Teachers
The National Union of Teachers welcomes the establishment of this broad, multi faith, cross party coalition at the initiative of the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) and other faith organisations. Our cultural and religious diversity is a great asset and strength. It combines and unites a multiplicity of talents, abilities, insights and skills without which we would be deprived of an essential part of our humanity. At the same time, it constantly challenges us to become what we are supposed to be – human beings united in diversity. Schools are at the heart of promoting social progress, equality and justice and thus of enhancing the lives of future generations. We believe that schools play a vital role in challenging stereotyping and discrimination on religious grounds. At the same time schools also play a crucial role in defending human rights for all. This coalition is timely in the light of world events and the rise of hostility to various religious groups at home. Individuals and organisations should respond to the inspirational words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

“Religion can be a source of discord. It can also be a form of conflict resolution. We are familiar with the former; the second is far too little tried. Yet it is here, if anywhere, that hope must lie if we are to create a human solidarity strong enough to bear the strains that lie ahead. The great faiths must now become an active force for peace and for the justice and compassion on which peace ultimately depends. That will require great courage, and perhaps something more than courage: a candid admission that, more than at any time in the past, we need to search - each faith in its own way - for a way of living with, and acknowledging the integrity of those who are not our faith. Can we make space for difference?”

Andrew Stunell MP
I am delighted be part of the Coalition to Defend Religious and Cultural Expression on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. For centuries, Britain’s society, economy and culture has been enhanced and strengthened from integrating new communities, new ideas and new religions. A healthy, open, plural society, based on fair play and the mutual respect for different beliefs is the hallmark of Britishness. People of all religions and none, and people of all political persuasions must work together to build the next stage of a peaceful, tolerant and free Britain, where strongly held beliefs can coexist and contribute to a richer society.

Cllr Salma Yaqoob
Attacks on the freedom of religious and cultural expression have become intertwined with a rising tide of racism. This fear of difference and diversity has to be challenged if we are to defend basic principles of democracy. I defend the rights of those of all faiths and none, to their own freedom of conscience.

COALITION TO DEFEND FREEDOM OF RELIGIOUS & CULTURAL EXPRESSION
STATEMENT
'We believe that our most fundamental human rights include the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and cultural expression. 'These rights, which must be defended for all groups in society, are presently severely threatened by the rise in hostility and attacks against the Muslim communities – echoing in many ways experiences of religious groups and communities such as different Christian faiths, Jewish people, Sikhs, Hindus and others. 'It took hundreds of years of struggles, including international and civil wars, to establish the freedoms of religious and cultural expression and these must be vigorously upheld subject only to the proportionate protection of the human rights and freedoms of others. 'We believe that at this time it is necessary for democrats, of all faiths and none, to come together to defend these fundamental freedoms, which are the cornerstones of liberal and democratic society.'

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
1. To work to defend the right of every individual to freely pursue their beliefs, regardless of creed, gender or ethnicity, subject only to their conscience and to the necessary and proportionate protection of the rights and the freedoms of others.
2. To raise awareness of violations of freedom of religious and cultural expression.
3. To challenge through constructive means, encroachments upon freedom of religious and cultural expression, and promote mutual understanding and respect among individuals of all faiths and none.
4. To monitor and raise awareness of the existence and extent of Islamophobia throughout society - in political discourse, media, education, employment, service provision, and in day-to-day life.

STEERING GROUP MEMBERS
Anas Altikriti – The Cordoba Foundation
Andrew Stunell MP
Billy Hayes – Communication Workers Union
Bruce Kent (Chair)
Caroline Lucas MEP
Cllr Salma Yaqoob
Cristina Odone
Diane Abbott MP
Dr Abdul Bari – Secretary General, Muslim Council of Britain
Edie Friedman – Jewish Council for Racial Equality
Harpartap Singh - Sikh Federation representative
Ismail Patel – British Muslim Initiative
Jon Cruddas MP
Karen Chouhan – 1990 Trust, Black Londoners Forum
Kate Hudson – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Lindsey German – Stop the War
Lord Nazir Ahmed
Milena Buyum – National Assembly Against Racism
Mohammad Sawalha- British Muslim Initiative
Paul Mackney - National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education
Rajnaara Akhtar – Prohijab
Ruqqayah Collector – NUS Black Students Officer
Sir Geoffrey Bindman – Chair, British Institute of Human Rights
Soumaya Ghannoushi – Islam Expo
Steve Sinnott – National Union of Teachers
© The Greater London Authority

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BRITISH?

5/6/2007- Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly will set out plans for a national "Britain" day to celebrate Britishness and promote stronger national ties. So what does it mean to be British? A conference on Islam and Muslims has been considering this question. Religious leaders taking part this week in the two-day debate on Islam And Muslims In The World Today in London had an idea of what they believed being British was - encompassing core values such as freedom of expression and respect for others. But they also acknowledged Britain had a long way to go before all its communities were united in common purpose. US Muslim convert Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, founder of the California-based Zaytuna educational foundation and who has advised the White House on Islam, said he saw little national cohesion in Britain. "People have more allegiance to football teams than they have to Great Britain. What is the glue that is going to hold society together?" Britishness cannot be imposed on communities, he said, but Britain did have the ability to lead by example. "It has to be organic - how do we facilitate this sense of Britishness. But I am optimistic because of that moral compass a lot of British people have. That gives me a lot of hope. "Britain can do a lot of things to teach mainland Europe about how to respect and engage minority communities - and it could help the US as well." Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain's inter-faith relations committee, said the first step in building a common identity was to identify what it was to be British. "There is no single definition," he said. "And every person has a different idea of what it means. But, having said that, I believe there are common issues we all subscribe to." According to Mr Mogra, these include - respect for other people and the rule of law, freedom of expression and religious practice, participation in the democratic system and valuing education. Most of all, to be British, for Mr Mogra, is being tolerant and respectful towards others while at the same time being able to embrace and celebrate difference. "To give a simple example, which is a bit stereotyped I know, but what British people love is fish and chips. I think that is a great way to cook potatoes and it is a favourite with my family. "Many white Anglo Saxons like chicken tikka masala. Therefore, we have enriched our lives by taking the best from each other."

'British pride'
But more needs to be done before people feel they belong to one united society, he said. "We are getting there. But there is too much focus on the Muslim community as Muslims and not as citizens. "I have issues about the NHS and transport - but why is it whenever I am engaged, I am engaged as a Muslim? I don't demand anything more than others, neither do I expect anything less." But he remains proud of being British and what that means. "Every day I live as a British person I am proud to be British. This is a country I am extremely proud of. I am privileged to belong to it. I think there is no better country for Muslims to live in." The Rt Rev Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, warned that although it was important to establish an idea of Britishness, it should not just become a series of concepts. "Those great concepts have to be embodied in the community - so we are looking for ways we can engage with one another," he said. He believed this would prevent people forming "cartoon images" of each other. And any British identity would have to acknowledge people's "multiple identities", he said. He added: "Many people are very proud of being Scottish, Welsh, as well as being Catholics and Muslims. "But some kind of national story of the peoples of this western European island has to be developed that doesn't deny people's rights or how we came to be where we are."
© BBC News

AZERBAIJANIS SUFFER MOST FROM RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA INCIDENTS IN RUSSIA

5/6/2007- 120 incidents on racism and xenophobia were recorded in Russia in January-May which killed 32 and injured 120. Director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights Alexander Brod said these results were achieved during the regional monitoring, APA reports quoting Russian press. He said that Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Armenians and Africans suffered most according to the facts recorded on xenophobia. Brod said racist attacks mostly occurred in Moscow (21 died and 42 wounded). Three were killed, 19 were injured as a result of xenophobia cases in St. Petersburg and 22 were injured in Nijegoridsk province. Rights defender underlined that these facts are increasing. Seven died and about 100 were beaten in Russia in the first half of 2004, 10 died and 200 were beaten in 2005, 17 died and 130 were beaten in 2006. The facts of xenophobia recorded within the first five months of 2007 were more than those recorded in the first half of 2006. Brod underlined that rights defenders are anxious about the criminal cases on xenophobia in Russia.
© APA

NETHERLANDS SUED OVER SREBRENICA

4/6/2007- Relatives of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have filed a case against the Dutch state and the UN, saying they allowed it to happen. The Bosnian town of Srebrenica was a UN safe haven under the protection of Dutch peacekeepers at the time. About 8,000 Muslims were killed after Bosnian-Serb forces overran the town. The case was filed before The Hague district court. Dutch officials say compensation claims should be directed at the perpetrators of the massacre. Two-hundred women from the group known as the Mothers of Srebrenica carried banners in a silent march outside the Dutch parliament. Their lawyers said the Dutch were to blame for refusing to give air support to their own troops defending Srebrenica, claiming that would have prevented Bosnian-Serb forces from advancing. The Dutch cabinet resigned in 2002 after a report blamed politicians for sending the Dutch UN troops on an impossible mission. The Bosnian-Serb troops were under the command of General Ratko Mladic and the former leader Radovan Karadzic, the war crimes tribunal's most wanted fugitives.
© BBC News

TRIAL WITH ANONYMOUS JOB APPLICATIONS (Netherlands)

5/6/2007- Employment agency Manpower is launching a national trial with anonymous job applications. In proposing candidate employees to businesses, only relevant information and experience will be passed on and the name of the candidate will not be mentioned. The experiment is aimed at helping more people of minority background find a job. The employment agency and the Taskforce on youth unemployment are presenting the plans on Tuesday. Experiments with anonymous job applications have been held locally in the past, but this is the first time that this kind of initiative is being held on the national level. Studies show that unemployment among minorities is 3.5 times as high as among native Dutch, the AD reports. Discrimination continues to be one of the most significant obstacles to minorities on the labour market. A survey by TNS Nipo, commissioned by the Taskforce for youth unemployment and Manpower, shows that 30 percent of employees and employers think anonymous job application is a good idea. Just over one in five employers is willing to work on this basis.
© Expatica News

PROTEST AGAINST RACISM RECRUDESCENCE (Romania)

3/6/2007- The discriminatory and racist stance of Romania’s president Traian Basescu towards a journalist points to a recrudescence of ethnic racism in Romania, the Civic Alliance of Romas, or ACRR, and Soros Foundation has said during a joint press conference. The two organizations asked in a joint press conference for the urgent enactment of public policies to fight racist stances. "Silence means approving racism. We need to reprobate the recent public outburst of the present and public policies targeting racist, xenophobic and discriminatory stances," the president with Soros Foundation Renate Weber said. Weber also noticed that Traian Basescu’s personal website had a link diverting to a website on "Protest against ethnic Romas." The message was withdrawn from the website www.basescu.ro. "The link was removed from the website in less than two hours since our warning during public debate. Hence, the Forum of this website includes other racist opinions," the organizations also said. ACRR and Soros Foundation said they will inform UEFA after the organizers of Romania’s Football Coup Finals surprisingly annulled last week an anti-racist manifest at the end of the game. The reaction of the two non-governmental organizations is related to press comments on the fact the anti-racist event had been eliminated upon the Traian Basescu’s request, who attended the game. He wanted to avoid getting involved in any anti-racist action, after he had called a journalist with Antena 1 a “stinky Gipsy“. Moreover, the two non-governmental organizations want to ask the Romanian Football Federation and the National Council to Fight Discrimination explanations on the action annulment.
© Dzeno Association

BERLIN WILL BUILD MEMORIAL TO GAY VICTIMS OF NAZI REGIME(Germany)

4/6/2007- The German government announced plans Monday to erect a memorial in Berlin dedicated homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Nazis. The sculpture should be completed this year. The memorial, to be located in Tiergarten Park, will stand adjacent to the Holocaust Memorial built to honor the lives of the 6 million jews killed under the Nazi regime. Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian Ingar Dragset were selected last year to design the memorial. Their design consists of a large concrete structure with a square opening inside which a film projection will be visible.

A New Memorial
The original plan was to feature a looped video of two men locked in an endless kiss but this plan was dropped after complaints that the film ignored lesbians. Like the Holocaust Memorial, designed by architect Peter Eisenman, the new monument will have the shape and texture of a concrete slab. Bernd Neumann, Germany's culture secretary, made the announcement on Monday after meeting with supporters of the memorial. According to a his statement the film will now alternate every two years between a clip of men kissing and a clip of women kissing. “With the installation of a memorial in the middle of our capital, the resolution by the German government to commemorate the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime is realized,” said Neumann in a statement. The statement went on to state that the memorial should be completed by the end of this year. The German parliament approved the memorial's construction in December 2003 and about 600,000 euros ($800,000) has been pledged to build it.

Homosexuality in Germany
Under the Nazis, between 5,000 and 10,000 homosexuals were shipped off to concentration camps. During its crackdown the Nazi regime also began 100,000 legal proceedings against homosexuals. After the war, 44,231 homosexuals were prosecuted in what was then West Germany. Legal discrimination of homosexuals was outlawed in 1994, four years after unification. East Germany had abolished its anti-gay legislation in 1968.
© Deutsche Welle

SEVERE ANTI-SEMITISM HITS YOUTH FOOTBALL IN GERMANY

2/6/2007- They were two teams of 14-year-olds. But that didn't seem to matter. Right-wing fans rained anti-Semitic and racist insults down on a youth-league game in Eastern Germany last month. Police are investigating, but it's far from an isolated incident. The Ascension Day holiday was to be a big day for the football community in Wurzen, a small town of 15,000 near Leipzig in former Communist-ruled East Germany. The local junior league had a match scheduled with a team from the industrial city of Chemnitz, formerly known as Karl-Marx-Stadt and located near the Czech border. A number of fans had found their way to the stadium and by the time the whistle blew for kick-off, they were in high spirits, swilling beer and chanting supporters' songs. The usual horde of young neo-Nazi skinheads and xenophobes were in the stands, looking for trouble. Then the taunts began. The fans struck up a welcoming chorus for the visiting junior soccer team: "We'll build a subway from Chemnitz to Auschwitz..." You "Fiji pigs," they yelled at two 14-year-olds who were subbed in. You "foreigner pigs!" They made monkey noises every time they touched the ball. They also targeted the 14-year-old goalkeeper from the visiting team: "Jewish pig, go fuck your Jewish mother," they yelled.

'They're Making Us Look Like Such Monsters'
The crowd didn't just target the visitors. A linesman flagged an offside call, earning him a torrent of abuse including: "Get it right, Jew, or we'll come and pull your foreskin off." Despite a number of attempts by the referees to get the crowd under control, the insults continued. The kids from Chemnitz were not to be put off their game, eventually winning 2-0. But referee Christine Weigelt was not going to let matters rest there. From notes made during the game, she compiled a report on the anti-Semitic and racist abuse and handed it to district police chief Bernd Merbitz. Her deputy referee Henry Lickfeldt added his protest. But some sport functionaries sided with the rabble, branding Weigelt and other accusers as liars tarnishing Wurzen's reputation. Sports Association President Heiko Wandel said Weigelt had lost control of the match: "They're making us look like monsters," he said. "We've got Vietnamese and Russians among our players. They should stop putting on such a show." Many of the insults also came from the players on the field. Indeed, one player from the Wurzen team was barred from playing while the league looked into accusations that he had racially assaulted a Chemnitz player with a Vietnamese background. Wandel was not impressed. "That is going too far," he said. "I'll cover for him. He promised me that he didn't say anything. One is allowed to insult the Germans, but as soon as a Vietnamese is insulted, it is exaggerated." The Vietnamese boy in question, son of a communist-era immigrant family, was given a red card just as the game was ending for shoving the player he accuses of having insulted him. "I would like too apologize for doing that," the boy said later. "But I won't put up with remarks like that." On the other side of the ball, a father of one of the Wurzel players apologized to the Chemnitz team for the insults.

Far Right Fixtures
But how could such a thing happen, and that at a children's league game? That is exactly the question that Harald Sather, chairman of the Committee of Referees in the state of Saxony is asking. "We have to get to the bottom of all this," he said. "Abuse is going too far. Foreign players deserve respect. How could this happen at a juniors' game?" For Germany's amateur sports world, the involvement of 12- to-14-year-old kids in incidents during the game at Wurzen is a worrying new trend, while abuse by far-right fans at soccer fixtures in East Germany is a fact of life. After major disturbances in amateur football in Saxony last February, 60 matches were cancelled on a single day as a punishment. Police have promised to press charges. But Germany's Federation of Active Soccer Fans claims no police action would have been taken had referee assistant Lickfeldt not taken the initiative to call the police. Indeed, after the game, Lickfeldt says that the referee supervisor from Wurzen said he had seen nothing out of the ordinary and warned the referees against filing a report. He also says that the Wurzen trainer told him: "If you write something, then play it down. The German Football Association has their eyes out for such things." Martin Endemann from the fans' association says that is what normally happens. "Referees often look the other way in such situations in order not to have any trouble. We have seen this again and again over the years." His group, based in Hanau in Western Germany, is running a campaign against intolerance and xenophobia in the country's football stands. Wurzen -- which has 1,700 unemployed among its 15,000 residents and is famed for a cookie factory, the poet Joachim Ringelnatz and a mail-order firm specializing in far-right music and clothes -- was put on the map by its neo-Nazis and anti-Semites after communism collapsed in 1989. Skinheads and hard-right thugs chased Portuguese workers through the streets and attacked a hostel for asylum-seekers in the 1990s. Wurzen's mayor Jürgen Schmidt, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic party (CDU), is keeping silent about the Ascension Day soccer match. He happens to be vice-president of the Wurzen club and shares a council administration table with local functionaries of the far-right NPD party.
© Spiegel Online

SWISS MAGISTRATE:FIRE AT GENEVA SYNAGOGUE WAS CRIMINAL

2/6/2007- A fire that swept through part of a synagogue in the Swiss city of Geneva last week was of criminal origin, local investigating magistrate Michel Graber said Friday. However, Graber said in a statement that all leads were being followed and an arson attack by extremist circles was not the only theory being looked at. Investigations,which continued during all this week, have ruled out technical or accidental causes for the fire on May 24, he added. Initially police had indicated that the fire had likely been set deliberately, but officials later backtracked. Forensic experts were hoping to take DNA samples from a cigarette butt found in the debris. But water and fire have jeopardized the quality of the genetic sample. The Geneva magistrate said all the leads were followed but he added that the act of extremists is not a privileged one. "In the case of anti-Semitic acts, one find frequently racist signs on the walls and extremist groups sometimes claim their acts," one source said. The fire, which appeared to have taken hold around the entrance, severely damaged part of the Sephardi Hekhal Haness synagogue in the residential area of Malagnou of Geneva in the early hours of May 24. It took place during the Jewish holiday of Shavouot which marks the giving of the Torah, the Jewish holy book, by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Building empty
The building was empty at the time and no one was injured in the blaze. A police spokesman said last week there was no sign of graffiti or hate messages in the vicinity of the synagogue. The Hekhal Haness synagogue, one of six in the western Swiss city, is owned by wealthy international commodities and property magnate Nessim Gaon. Alfred Donath, the head of the Federation of Jewish communities, told Swiss radio RSR after the announcement that the anti-Semitic nature of the attack was "undeniable", underlining that whoever carried it out "did not target the skating rink or the station." Johanne Gurfinkel, secretary general of a Geneva anti-semitism campaign group, CICAD, said she was very concerned about the "odious" attack. Urging authorities to get to the bottom of the motive behind the blaze, Gurfinkel told the Swiss news agency ATS that there could be other reasons than anti-Semitism. It is the second fire of a synagogue in two years in Switzerland. In April, 2005 vandals sprayed swastika graffiti on the exterior of another synagogue in the city. There have been sporadic incidents elsewhere in Switzerland over the past few years, including the breaking of windows of a Lausanne synagogue on March 31 last year. In March 2005, a fire caused by Molotov cocktails gutted the library of a synagogue in the southern city of Lugano.
© EJP

HOMOPHOBIC ATTITUDES REMAIN ENTRENCHED (Latvia)

A relatively peaceful pride march is overshadowed by conservative views in the Latvian capital.
By Aleks Tapinsh, freelance journalist based in Riga.

4/6/2007- Hundreds of gay rights marchers took to a park in the Latvian capital on 3 June in an event marked more by what did not happen – there was no repeat of the homophobic mayhem that occurred a year earlier, and no violent clashes like those at a similar event in Moscow in May. Two rows of metal fences were erected and more than 200 police officers were on hand for the march as several hundred onlookers, ultra-nationalists, and religious zealots followed the parade from across the fencing. The police provided buses to move marchers to a safer location elsewhere in the city. Gay pride marchers – including representatives from Amnesty International, the human rights organization – held placards with messages such as "Love is a human right," "Equality is a human right," and "No to hatred, we love Latvia." But organizers conceded that turnout was low, saying that next year they hope to attract more local gays and lesbians to the event. In a display of public opposition to gay rights, about 1,000 people, including many families, gathered in Riga for a concert called “World Against Homosexuality.” The organizers collected signatures for a referendum to prevent distribution of information on gay rights to schools. Latvian Minister of Integration Oskars Kastens, who is part of the center-right Latvia’s First Party, said he wasn't sure if the gay rights parade showed increased tolerance in Latvian society toward homosexuals. “You can describe it as an event by the local sexual minority, in which only a few dozen people were from Latvia, mainly there were foreigners and journalists," he told the LETA news agency. Gay pride marches were banned in both 2005 and 2006 out of fear the events would spark violence, but courts overturned the decisions. Last year, the police were widely criticized by international rights organizations for standing by while marchers were attacked by counter-demonstrators tossing eggs and excrement.

Attitudes run deep
There were concerns that two recent events would spark violence in Riga: anti-gay violence in Moscow on 27 May, in which police briefly detained several members of the European Parliament, and the decision by Lithuanian authorities to ban a European Union–sponsored bus promoting tolerance from entering in the Baltic nation. Both actions were condemned by EU officials. Last year, Latvian Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis said he could not condone the parade of sexual minorities in the capital – prompting the ban that was later overturned by a court. Gay rights activists have acknowledged they have a big struggle ahead of them to change attitudes in Latvia, where conservative social values still hold sway. While homosexuality has been decriminalized, public attitudes are reserved.
In the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, advertisements promoting tolerance toward gays and lesbians were taken down after trolleybus drivers refused to drive vehicles carrying the ads, which read: “A gay can serve in the police” and “A lesbian can work at school.” A survey conducted in April by the SKDS marketing and public opinion research agency and the Web portal Dialogi.lv showed that Latvians' support for homosexuals' lifestyle decreased from 62 percent last year to 51 percent this year. At the same time, the survey showed there is little public sympathy to expand rights for gays and lesbians, as has been done in other EU countries. Ilze Brands Kehris, the head of the Latvian Center for Human Rights, says many Latvians still believe that homosexuality is a disease, an attitude she says is a legacy of 50 years of Soviet rule. Since the country's independence in 1991, no public discussion on this subject has been held, she said. Adverse reactions by politicians to gay rights events are a sign that homophobic attitudes run deep in the country. "It's not only homophobia, but a complete misunderstanding of the principles of equality," Kehris said.

Anti-gay organizer
Prompted by the 2006 gay pride parade, Latvian businessman Igors Maslakovs started the No Pride organization and a website opposing what he calls gay propaganda. He wants, according to the website, "to fight against the opinion that the homosexual lifestyle is proper and even recommended, which is enforced on Latvian society by the EU through mass media, various political parties, and nongovernmental organizations sponsored by the EU." However, Maslakovs says that last year’s disorder wasn’t the fault of his organization. “It wasn’t my goal,” he said in a recent interview. “My goal was to stop the gay pride parade.” Maslakovs says he opposes the gay pride parades because from his experience with similar events in other countries, they are mostly about exhibitionism that can be offensive to conservative Latvians. He also says foreigners are mostly behind the parades. “Latvian gays are not obsessed with these problems,” he says.
© Transitions Online

US GROUP CLAIMS HATE CRIME RISING IN EUROPE

5/6/2007- Hate crimes have increased sharply over the last decade throughout Europe, according to a lengthy report by a US-based human rights group. The 2007 Hate Crime Survey by Human Rights First, out tomorrow, records a rising tide of attacks against Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians. It notes rises in recent years in the UK, France, Germany, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. "In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, governments have made serious efforts to combat hate crimes in recent years, although more needs to be done," the report says. Human Rights First, which is based in New York and Washington, adds that there was a dramatic rise in racist and religiously-motivated violence in the UK after the London bombings in 2005. "Overall, in 2006, hate crimes in the United Kingdom continued at a historically high rate." On attacks on Jews, it says: "Anti-semitism, a particularly pernicious form of racism and religious intolerance, has persisted at a high level throughout Europe and North America, while tending to surge in response to international events involving Israel." Anti-semitic incidents in the UK in 2006 rose dramatically, with the highest annual toll since the collection of statistics began in 1984. Muslims too have suffered according to the data. "In 2006, discrimination and violence against Muslims persisted throughout much of Europe. Though the number of registered incidents decreased from a peak level in 2005, after the subway bombings in London, the number of violent incidents remains high."
© The Guardian

EDUCATION, DATA COLLECTION, MONITORING KEY TOOLS IN OSCE COUNTRIES' FIGHT AGAINST DISCRIMINATION

8/6/2007- Legislation, law enforcement, research and monitoring as well as education and constructive public discourse are important tools all OSCE countries should use to combat discrimination and promote respect and understanding, participants in a high-level meeting concluded today. A statement by the Spanish OSCE Chairmanship, entitled the "Bucharest Declaration", called on OSCE countries to find effective ways to promote mutual respect, understanding and equality. OSCE Ambassador Carlos Sanchez de Boado of Spain read the declaration during the closing session of the two-day conference, held in Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament. The declaration said that participants had "gathered in this Conference to sustain and strengthen efforts to foster tolerance, mutual respect and understanding, building on the 2005 (OSCE) Cordoba Conference on Anti-Semitism and other forms of Intolerance and on previous tolerance-related conferences." It also said that OSCE participating States "reiterate their common understanding that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, democracy and the rule of law is at the core of the OSCE comprehensive concept of security and declare that acts stemming from intolerance and discrimination pose a threat to democracy and security in the OSCE region and beyond, and cannot be justified on any ground." The declaration noted that all countries that are part of the OSCE have committed themselves "to ensure respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for everyone within their territory and subject to their jurisdiction and to provide to all persons equal and effective protection of the law." The declaration also said that cultural and religious diversity should be seen as factors enriching society. In addition, it recognized that "civil society continues to be a key partner in the fight against discrimination and intolerance", and called on OSCE countries to develop closer dialogue with civil society.
© OSCE

OSCE STATES MUST DO MORE TO PROMOTE TOLERANCE, CHAIRMAN TELLS HIGH-LEVEL MEETING

7/6/2007- Intolerance and discrimination could threaten global security, and the OSCE's participating States need to strengthen efforts to avert this threat, the Organization's Chairman-in-Office, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, told a high-level meeting today. "This conference shows the OSCE's unwavering commitment to promote freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief," Minister Moratinos said, addressing participants of the two-day conference. More than 600 participants will discuss what steps the Organization and its 56 participating States and 11 Partners for Co-operation could take to promote tolerance and reduce discrimination. They will also review progress made since previous OSCE meetings focused on tolerance. The Chairman called on participants to handle intolerance and discrimination with a common approach, using legislation and its implementation, data compilation, education, intercultural and interreligous dialogue, and communication. Speaking about freedom of the media, Moratinos said journalists had an important role to play by not spreading violent language, hate speech, provocations and rumours. "The OSCE is firm, it does not hesitate in condemning vigorously aggression imposed by anti-Semitism speeches and by those who obscurely deny the Holocaust," he said. The Chairman-in-Office raised the "Alliance of Civilizations," an initiative of the United Nations and co-sponsored by Spain and Turkey. "The 'Alliance of Civilizations' is an initiative intended to heal the wounds of sharing a globalize society, which is diverse and independent, and it is path for reaching a global contract for the cultures of the world," he said. Romanian President Traian Basescu warned against considering acts of hatred "isolated incidents". "If we are complacent, we might wake all the demons that have troubled Europe's life: racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism can spread as fire each time the vigilance of our governments and civil society loses intensity," he said at the opening ceremony. Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu noted "with concern" the increase in racist violence in Europe" despite a firm commitment not to accept such acts. "We have to acknowledge that manifestations of discrimination, racism, xenophobia and intolerance remain active at some levels of our societies, despite the fact that political commitment to fight against them stands unchanged," he said. Intolerance must be battled with dialogue, education, political leadership and co-operation, he added.
© OSCE

OSCE PARTICIPATING STATES MUST MAKE REAL THEIR COMMITMENT (ENAR press release)

7/6/2007- Today and tomorrow, participating states of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are gathering at a high-level conference in Bucharest to discuss how best to combat discrimination and promote mutual respect and understanding. The conference provides an opportunity for participating states and civil society to present examples of best practices and to assess implementation of existing OSCE commitments related to tolerance and non-discrimination. “ENAR urges OSCE participating states to fulfil their commitment to promote tolerance and non-discrimination and to combat violent manifestations of hatred and intolerance, and to take account of the recommendations made by NGOs during the Preparatory Meeting”, said Pascale Charhon, ENAR Director. “In this context, we call on the German and upcoming Portuguese Presidencies to ensure a rapid formalisation of the framework decision on racism and xenophobia, which introduces criminal provisions to combat public incitement to violence and hatred against persons of different race, colour, religion, or national or ethnic descent across the EU.”

ENAR participated in the Civil Society Preparatory Meeting preceding the conference on 6 June, which aimed to review the existing cooperation between civil society and public authorities in the field of tolerance and non-discrimination and to formulate concrete recommendations. ENAR Director Pascale Charhon gave an overview of the manifestations of racist violence and the responses to this problem, as well as some concrete recommendations. In particular ENAR urged OSCE participating states to allow data collection concerning ethnicity/religion that can capture incidents of racist crime and violence against minorities and to establish or improve existing criminal justice data collection mechanisms for racist crime and violence in each EU member state. She called for a multi-stakeholder approach involving all actors and suggested cross-fertilising best practices on combating hate crimes on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, disability, race and ethnic origin. In the context of increasing racist violence, ENAR also denounced the anti-Roma comments made recently by Romanian President Traian Basescu as unacceptable and urged Romania to respect its EU obligations in the field of anti-discrimination.
© EUropean Network Against Racism

NEWS - Archive June 2007

Headlines 29 June, 2007

Headlines 22 June, 2007

Headlines 15 June, 2007

Headlines 8 June, 2007

Headlines 29 June, 2007

MUNICIPALITIES REFUSE TO LIST ILLEGALS (Netherlands)

'CUT BENEFITS TO BURQA WEARERS' (Netherlands)

MUTILATED FEMALES SEEK HELP (Norway)

OBIORA CASE TO BE REOPENED (Norway)

COURT CASE OVER SAMI RIGHTS (Norway)

SWISS POLICE CRITICISED FOR RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

RUSSIA MOST CONCERNED WITH ITSELF IN THE BATTLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

FEAR DRIVES A REPORTER OUT OF NALCHIK (Russia)

ABOUT 98,000 TEENAGERS INVOLVED IN EXTREMIST GROUPS EXPOSED (Russia)

RUSSIAN CHRISTIANS "PURGE" GAY CRUISE WATERS

SPAIN OFFERS JOBS AND VISAS TO FIGHT ILLEGAL MIGRATION

SPAIN’S MURKY PAST: THE NAZIS WHO SOUGHT REFUGE IN THE SUN

POLITICIANS STILL USE RACIST LANGUAGE AGAINST ROMA(Romania)

CZECH MUNICIPALITIES SAY ROMANY ISSUES AGENCY UNNECESSARY

CZECH REPUBLIC FACES LAWSUIT OVER ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW

FORMER CROATIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, AMBASSADOR TO US AND UN ATTENDS NAZI CONCERT

RACISM IS ALIVE ... AND UNWELL(uk)

ATTACKS ON POLES BLAMED FOR RISE IN HATE CRIMES(uk)

WEST 'MUST STOP LOOKING AT ISLAM THROUGH THE LENS OF TERROR' (uk)

UK'S FIRST MUSLIM MP QUITS OVER DEATH THREATS

GERMANY'S MUSLIMS ANGERED BY CARDINAL'S REMARKS

GERMANY TO ACCEPT MIGRANT SURVIVORS

CASH-STRAPPED DEATH CAMP MEMORIAL SITES STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE(Germany)

POLAND'S FAR-RIGHT COALITION PARTY REJECTS EU TREATY DEAL

LOOKING IN THE KACZYNSKIS' REARVIEW MIRROR(Poland/Germany)

POLAND'S VOTE PLEADING IS SHEER HYPOCRISY(comment)

COUNCIL OF EUROPE MOVES TO PREVENT RELIGIOUS HATRED

ASSEMBLY SPELLS OUT WAYS TO FIGHT GROWING ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE(CoE)

HOLOCAUST DENIAL UNDERMINES ISLAM (opinion)

Headlines 22 June, 2007

THE FAR-RIGHT IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING (Spain)

OSCE REPRESENTATIVE CALLS SWISS INITIATIVE TO BAN MINARETS UNFORTUNATE

TURKISH POLITICIAN LOSES FIRST APPEAL AGAINST SWISS RACISM CONVICTION

ACADEMICS LINE UP AGAINST FRENCH 'NATIONAL IDENTITY' MINISTRY

WOMEN MAKE GAINS IN FRENCH PARLIAMENT, BUT MINORITIES STRUGGLE

SARKOZY MEETS WITH JEAN-MARIE LE PEN AT PRESIDENTIAL PALACE(France)

FAR-RIGHT PARTY LAUNCHES SOS AFTER ELECTION DRUBBING(France)

FAR-RIGHT MOBILIZES AGAINST COLOGNE MEGA-MOSQUE(Germany)

BULGARIA FAR RIGHT IN PROTEST OVER ‘DEFAMATORY’ FILM

UEFA ORDER REFEREES TO STOP MATCHES FOR RACISM

SERBIAN FA HITS CONDEMNS RACISM

UEFA URGED TO ACT IN RACISM ROW

HEAD-TO-TOE MUSLIM VEILS TEST TOLERANCE OF SECULAR BRITAIN

FEES RULES HURT REFUGEES(uk)

THREE VERDICTS ANNOUNCED FOR RIGHTWING RADICALS(Russia)

EXPERT ON RIGHTWING EXTREMISM ATTACKED IN ST. PETERSBURG(Russia)

ACCUSED RACIST MASS MURDERER RETRACTS CONFESSION(Russia)

NGOS CRITICISE PLANNED CHANGES IN CZECH LAW ON ASYLUM, FOREIGNERS

MOST CZECHS SAY CO-EXISTENCE WITH ROMANIES BAD

346 SAME-SEX COUPLES REGISTER IN ÈZECH REP. SO FAR

RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS GAIN GROUND (Slovakia)

GAY PRIDE ATTRACTS TENS OF THOUSANDS IN ROME(Italy)

WITNESSES TO DESTRUCTION (Kazakhstan)

HR ORGANIZATIONS CALL FOR THE IMMEDIATE CANCELLATION GOVERNMENT’S “NO-FLY LIST” REGULATION(Canada)

MEPS URGE ADOPTION OF A LEGAL FRAMEWORK TO COMBAT RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA(EUrope)

PUT HATE CRIMES ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA(Europe, opinion)

EAST VS. WEST (Europe)

AT U.N., ABUSERS IN CHARGE(editorial)

CANADA CONDEMNS U.N. RIGHTS COUNCIL'S ACTIONS

Headlines 15 June, 2007

LIMITED NEWS SERVICE DUE TO TRAVEL IN JUNE

COLD COMFORT IN SWEDEN FOR IRAQI REFUGEES

HARSH REACTION FROM RUSSIAN OFFICIAL TO UN REPORT ON RACISM

RUSSIAN ACTIVISTS TARGET "GAY" PARK

UNHCR CONCERNED BY RISE IN ATTACKS ON ASYLUM SEEKERS, REFUGEES(Ukraine)

ANGER OVER DAY RELEASE FOR NAZI(Italy)

THE FAR-RIGHT IN MALTA

DUAL CITIZENSHIP DILEMMA(Croatia, commentary)

DUTCH MPS BACK IMMIGRANT AMNESTY

GERMAN POLICE UNDER SCRUTINY AFTER NEO-NAZI ATTACK

NEO-NAZIS ATTACK THEATER GROUP IN EASTERN GERMAN TOWN

DEBATE BETWEEN GERMAN LUTHERANS AND MUSLIMS

SIKHS FIGHT FRENCH LAW ON TURBANS

FRENCH 'NOT QUITE READY' TO ELECT MINORITIES TO PARLIAMENT