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	Choose justice, Africa by Desmond Tutu International Herald Tribune South Africa   March 3, 2009   The expected issuance of an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court on Wednesday presents a stark choice for African leaders - are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor?   The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful.   Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.   In response to news last July that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court"s chief prosecutor, was seeking an arrest warrant for Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the African Union issued a communiqué to the United Nations Security Council asking it to suspend the court"s proceedings. Rather than condemn the genocide in Darfur, the organization chose to underscore its concern that African leaders are being unfairly singled out and to support Bashir"s effort to delay court proceedings.   More recently, the Group of 77, an influential organization at the UN consisting of 130 developing states and including nearly every African country, gave Sudan its chairmanship. The victory came after African members endorsed Sudan"s candidacy in spite of the imminent criminal charges against its president.   I regret that the charges against Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system - and in particular, the international court - is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West demeans Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent.   It"s worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa. That the court"s four active investigations are all in Africa is not because of prosecutorial prejudice - it is because three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) themselves requested that the prosecutor intervene.   Only the Darfur case was referred to the prosecutor by the Security Council. The prosecutor on his own initiative is considering investigations in Afghanistan, Colombia and Georgia.   African leaders argue that the court"s action will impede efforts to promote peace in Darfur. However, there can be no real peace and security until justice is enjoyed by the inhabitants of the land. There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice.   As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative - allowing accountability to fall by the wayside - is worse.   The issuance of an arrest warrant for Bashir would be an extraordinary moment for the people of Sudan - and for those around the world who have come to doubt that powerful people and governments can be called to account for inhumane acts. African leaders should support this historic occasion, not work to subvert it.   * Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Visit the related web page
	Parents of children killed in China earthquake still waiting for answers. by NPR / Amnesty & agencies China   May 2009   Parents of children killed in China earthquake still waiting for answers.   The parents of children killed in last May’s earthquake in China have been detained and harassed when attempting to investigate suspicions of shoddy building standards, according to a new report from Amnesty International.   Many of the parents who lost their only child, crushed to death when more than 7,000 classrooms collapsed in the 7.9 magnitude tremor on May 12, have abandoned hope of redress. Last month a 33-year-old Communist Party official in Beichuan county, which was razed by the earthquake, hanged himself out of grief for the loss of his eight-year-old son.   Other parents have struggled to be heard and to find out whether the schools that crumbled were constructed with sub-standard materials or by authorities that cut costs to skim off funds for their own benefit.   The Amnesty report says that some parents and relatives have been detained for as long as 21 days for trying to seek answers from officials about why their children died. Some have been held repeatedly and the youngest relative was only 8 years old.   Officials have provided a variety of accounts, some saying that schools appeared to have been built with shoddy materials and others saying that the only reason for their collapse was the might of the earthquake. This has failed to satisfy parents who saw other buildings left standing while schoolrooms were flattened.   The report says: “Many of these parents’ lives were devastated when they lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake. It’s completely understandable that they would want to know why their children died and who was responsible. For the Chinese authorities to react by locking up parents, whose only crime was to demand some answers, is beyond belief.”   The report issues an appeal: “The Government of China must stop harassing earthquake survivors, and allow lawyers and civil society to hold those responsible to account.”   * 69,227 people were killed and nearly 18,000 are still missing after the devastating earthquake. For more visit the National Public Report (NPR) via the link below.   Feb 2009   China cracks down on human rights lawyers, by Peter Ford. Beijing - One of China"s most prominent human rights law firms is fighting a government closure order, as authorities here step up a crackdown on troublesome lawyers.   At a hearing next week the Yitong law firm, which has been at the center of several high-profile political cases, will appeal a ruling by a local Justice Department in Beijing suspending the practice for six months, according to managing partner Li Jinsong.   "That would kill the firm," says Mr. Li. "They are distorting facts ... to get revenge" for the way the firm"s lawyers have criticized or defied government agencies, he charges.   The closure order, which activists here say is unlikely to be overturned at the hearing, is part of "a wider effort to stifle and intimidate lawyers who aspire to defend human rights and the public interest," says Albert Ho, chairman of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group in Hong Kong. "This is really a very serious matter."   The Yitong partnership is well known for having represented some of China"s most famous dissidents, including Hu Jia, an AIDS activist who received the European Parliament"s top human rights award last year and is now serving a three-year sentence for inciting subversion.   The firm also has a reputation for taking up legal cudgels on behalf of ordinary citizens who claim to have been mistreated by the authorities.   Yitong has been a leading light in the "rights defense movement," through which "increasing numbers of citizens are using the legal system as a means of redress for violations of their rights," states a 2007 report by Human Rights in China, a New York-based watchdog group.   The result, according to the report, is that "lawyers are increasingly being attacked for defending them."   A spokeswoman for the Justice Department in Haidian, the Beijing district where the firm is headquartered, says she could not comment on the Yitong case because it had not yet been finally decided.   Mr. Li, however, says the closure order accuses his firm of illegally employing a lawyer who does not have a professional license to practice law. He denies the charge, saying the employee dealt only with administrative, not legal matters.   The allegation, however, underscores a major hindrance to the practice of law in China.   The lawyer in question, Li Subin, a former deputy director of the firm, was denied the chance to renew his professional license by the provincial authorities in Henan, whose judicial bureau he had successfully sued for overcharging.   The Henan authorities refusal to process Li Subin"s paperwork when he moved to Beijing made it impossible for him to practice law.   Chinese lawyers must renew their licenses every year, a regulation that critics say offers officials great scope to put pressure on them. "The system is designed to intimidate," argues Mr. Ho.   Li Jinsong says that after having gone up against the Shanghai police, a senior Beijing judge, and the Minister of Railways among others, either in court or in forthright public denunciations, "a lot of powerful officials hate me."   "We have been involved in many cases that challenged the authorities," he points out. "They are killing the chicken to warn the monkeys," he says, "trying to close us down to suppress other lawyers."   At the same time, he says, a number of lawyers in his practice have been very vocal in a campaign to hold free elections for the leadership of the Beijing Law Association, the state-controlled local bar.   After the association issued a "stern statement" last September warning that the campaign was "illegal" and "a total repudiation of China"s current [system for managing lawyers], judicial system, and even political system," Li asked several of his activist colleagues to resign from Yitong.   "I did it to save the law firm and to save them," he says now, though the gesture does not appear to have been enough to prevent the closure.   If the judicial authorities insist on stage-managed elections to the bar, "it raises very troubling questions about the capacity for independent lawyers to develop in China," worries Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China.   "We have to ask whether it is possible to defend rights if there is no independent bar association," she adds.   China has appeared truculent recently in the face of challenges to its human rights record. Beijing reacted to a critical report by the UN Committee Against Torture last November by angrily denying all the charges, and rejected almost all the recommendations that other countries made during a review of its record earlier this month by the UN Human Rights Council.   "Internationally, China denies there is any problem, and domestically it takes punitive action against those who point out the problems," says Ms. Hom.   Yitong"s partners are the latest casualties in a growing list of rights lawyers to have suffered at the hands of the Chinese authorities.   Gao Zhisheng, whose own law firm was closed by official fiat in 2005, has not been seen since police took him from his family home three weeks ago. Barefoot lawyer Yuan Xianchen was put on trial last month for "inciting subversion of state power" after having assisted land rights activists. Zheng Enchong, a veteran rights defense lawyer, is under house arrest for signing "Charter 08," a public appeal for democratic reforms.   These cases "show there is a long way to go to the rule of law," which Chinese leaders say is their goal, says Ho. "Lawyers are treated as subservient to the system. Any who are not obedient run the risk of being penalized." Visit the related web page
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