PN staff
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continue hunger strikes against their indefinite detention without trial and against their conditions of imprisonment (see PN 2546).
On 21 November, Samer Issawi, on intermittent hunger strike for 118 days, began refusing water as well as food. His condition was unknown as PN went to press.
On 26 November, it was reported that Ayman Sharawna had declared…
The Indonesian people pay £50m a year on £300m of debts contracted in past decades to pay for military imports from the UK, according to information released by the British government on 5 November, after a long campaign by the Jubilee Debt Campaign. For more on ‘export credit guarantee’ debts:
www.tinyurl.com/peacenews780
In early November, British army surgeons received training in Denmark, by operating on 18 pigs that had been shot by snipers in such a way as to injure their organs but not kill them.
After the surgery, the animals were put down.
Animal rights group PETA pointed out that this exercise is banned if performed in the UK under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, and is also banned in 22 other NATO countries.
Six years of unsatisfactory ‘peace process’ have not delivered a new democratic constitution for Nepal, or a human rights accounting for crimes committed during ten years of brutal civil war.
The country is without a parliament as the supreme court ruled in May that the constituent assembly/parliament elected in 2008 could not extend its term any further. Elections scheduled for the end of November have been deferred until April. As PN went to press, the president was setting a tight…
In late September, Spanish solidarity activists persuaded Spanish canning company Jealsa to stop using sardines from the waters of Western Sahara, which has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975.
Jealsa was profiting from the occupation by operating a sardine cannery in Laayoune.
After years of protests at outlets of the Spanish Mercadona supermarket chain and at the company itself, Jealsa has moved the cannery to A Coruña in…
Nepali politics, after six years of 'peace process', seems to be well and truly stuck. The country is without a parliament as the supreme court ruled in May that the constituent assembly elected in 2008 (which also functioned as a parliament) could not extend its term any further.
There is no agreement between the major parties on whether or how to hold new elections, and no agreement on the shape of the constitution.
There is enormous pressure for a new constitution to…
On 19 September, Italy's supreme criminal court, the 'court of cassation', upheld abduction and 'rendition to torture' convictions against 23 Americans, all but one CIA officers. The charges related to an Egyptian imam, Osama Mustapha Nasr, abducted from Italy to Egypt in 2003 and held for four years before being released. The court also ordered €1.5m in damages to be paid to Nasr and his wife. The Italian government may now seek extradition of the 23.
The US government is still allowed legally to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, after a ruling by the US court of appeals on 2 October. A lower court order had earlier barred indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act.
The court of appeals has allowed the US president to continue detaining indefinitely anyone 'who was a part of or substantially supported' al-Qa'eda, the Taliban or 'associated forces'.
On 20 September, four Palestinian youth, Taka Mohammad, 17, Mohammad Amir, 16, Yosouf Shtaiwi, 20, and Nadir Amer, 23, were arrested by the Israeli security forces ahead of the weekly demonstrations at the Palestinian village of Kufr Qaddoum in the West Bank.
On 21 September, four international human rights defenders were…
On 21 September, the US justice department released the names of 55 men held at the Guantánamo detention centre on Cuba, who have been cleared for release.
On the list were British residents Shaker Aamer and Ahmed Belbacha. A previous request for this was rejected in 2009, so the disclosure, while not signalling any imminent releases, is being seen as a positive step.
On 27 September, Alex Haigh, 21, became the first person to be sentenced under a new law that bans squatting in residential properties. Alex was arrested by police on 2 September, the day after section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 came into force. Police battered down the door without first informing the housing association who owned the flat, which had reportedly been empty for a year.
A postgraduate course in peacemaking through sport starts this month in Spain at the Open University of Catalonia, supported by the UN cultural body, UNESCO, and FC Barcelona Foundation.
The master's degree in 'Sport as a Tool for Social Coexistence and Conflict Resolution' is designed to be useful in contexts with 'high levels of conflict'.
Back in the UK, a group called 'The Intruders' managed to gatecrash two high society events, first giving the former head of the government tax body HMRC a 'lifetime achievement award for services to corporate tax avoidance' on 27 September. Dave Hartnett was accused of being…
Over 700 boats laid 'siege' to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu, India on 8 October, in the latest demonstration by the People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE; for background, see PN 2550).
PMANE is demanding the withdrawal of police from local villages (police killed one protester in September), the…
