stf na mídia - Supremo Tribunal Federal

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STF NA MÍDIA
Supremo Tribunal Federal
Clipping da imprensa
Brasília, quinta-feira, 6 de outubro de 2011 às 06:15
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL
6 de outubro de 2011
Matérias do dia 29/09/2011
ABC COLOR (PY)
Despenalización del aborto sigue dividendo opiniones en América Latina ......................................................... 7
El alcalde de São Paulo crea un nuevo partido para enfrentar al PT .................................................................... 8
Lo condenan por comprar facturas ....................................................................................................................... 9
Marco Rector: Acusan de “cobarde” al MEC ...................................................................................................... 9
México: Suprema Corte ratifica normas antiaborto ........................................................................................... 10
Para Catastro, tierras del caso Barthe no se superponen con las de Ñacunday .................................................. 11
Paraguayos en el exterior no podrán candidatarse a diputados, dice TSJE ........................................................ 12
Poca competitividad e inseguridad jurídica impiden crear más empleos ........................................................... 13
AMBITO FINANCEIRO (AR)
Zaffaroni ratificó que piensa en el retiro e insiste con una reforma constitucional ............................................ 14
CLARÍN (AR)
Límites y convivencia en la escuela ................................................................................................................... 15
DIÁRIO DE NOTÍCIAS (PT)
Isaltino Morais foi preso .................................................................................................................................... 16
Isaltino Morais foi preso .................................................................................................................................... 16
EL PERUANO (SP)
Evalúan 87 magistrados de diversos distritos judiciales .................................................................................... 17
EL UNIVERSAL
Cárcel de 1 a 4 años implica desacatar fallo en caso López ............................................................................... 17
LA NACION (AR)
Desde la cárcel, Carrascosa acusó a la masajista ............................................................................................... 18
Intolerancia: de izquierda o derecha, es el peor vicio ........................................................................................ 19
Lorenzetti pidió cambios y más jueces para agilizar las causas ......................................................................... 20
Rechazan los ataques de Moreno a un juez ........................................................................................................ 21
LE FIGARO (FR)
Le Niger n'extradiera pas Saadi Kadhafi ............................................................................................................ 22
Iran: un trafiquant de drogue pendu ................................................................................................................... 22
Gaccio: 500.000 ? requis contre Canal............................................................................................................... 23
Bien mal acquis: 16 véhicules saisis .................................................................................................................. 24
LE MONDE (FR)
Le Parlement européen favorable à la reconnaissance de la Palestine ............................................................... 24
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (BL)
Streit um Gesundheitsreform: Obamas wichtigste Reform kommt vor Gericht ................................................ 26
THE GUARDIAN (LO)
South African prosecuted for helping his mother to die..................................................................................... 27
Saudi woman driver saved from lashing by King Abdullah .............................................................................. 30
Saudi woman s lashing sentence undermines voting breakthrough ................................................................... 31
UK not monitoring safety of Tamils deported to Sri Lanka ............................................................................... 32
Libyans seek justice, but who goes and who stays? ........................................................................................... 33
Kenya s deputy prime minister denies planning ethnic attacks .......................................................................... 35
Fugitive Black Panther socialised with US envoy in Guinea-Bissau ................................................................. 36
Fears for civilians trapped in besieged Libyan city of Sirte ............................................................................... 38
Iran: live free – and die ...................................................................................................................................... 39
STF NA MÍDIA • 6 de outubro de 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PÁGINA 1
Asylum seekers prevented from lodging cases .................................................................................................. 40
Bahrain doctors jailed for treating injured protesters ......................................................................................... 41
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US)
Bahrain Court Hands Down Harsh Sentences to Doctors and Protesters........................................................... 43
Advocate’s Visa Delay Stirs Questions.............................................................................................................. 44
An Icy Political Vision ....................................................................................................................................... 45
China Fires 12 After Inquiry on Adoptions........................................................................................................ 46
China: Alternative to Peace Prize Is Canceled ................................................................................................... 47
Judge Delays Blagojevich Sentencing Indefinitely ............................................................................................ 47
Fatal Accident Puts Focus on Deportation Program .......................................................................................... 48
U.S. and Uzbekistan Discuss More Supply Routes ............................................................................................ 50
Saudi Men Go to Polls; Women Wait ................................................................................................................ 50
Some Common Ground for Legal Adversaries on Health Care ......................................................................... 51
Strauss-Kahn and French Accuser Are Questioned ........................................................................................... 53
The Dismal Ruling in Alabama .......................................................................................................................... 54
Prisoner Protest Restarts in California ............................................................................................................... 55
Playing the Inmate Card Skews Redistricting .................................................................................................... 56
Optimism of Intellectuals Ebbs in Iraq............................................................................................................... 57
Pepper Spray and a Police Dept. Whose Power Grows Unchecked .................................................................. 59
ULTIMA HORA.COM (PY)
El TSJE todavía duda de los partidos políticos .................................................................................................. 61
ABC COLOR (PY)
Dilatan juicio por lesión de confianza ................................................................................................................ 62
Dos ministros se apartaron ................................................................................................................................. 62
La Corte rechaza hábeas corpus de condenado por crimen de abogada ............................................................. 63
TSJE ya cuenta con proyecto de ley para reglamentar voto en el exterior ......................................................... 64
Ratifican la ley de amnistía brasileña ................................................................................................................. 64
AFP (LO)
Michael Jackson: ex-paciente de Murray diz ter sido abandonado .................................................................... 65
Colaboradores de Michael Jackson descrevem cena de caos na casa do cantor................................................. 66
CLARÍN (AR)
Lorenzetti recorrió en Tucumán centros clandestinos ........................................................................................ 67
EL UNIVERSAL
ONGs salen en defensa de la Corte Interamericana ........................................................................................... 67
Jugando a la destrucción .................................................................................................................................... 68
Cumplir la Constitución ..................................................................................................................................... 68
El TSJ ya nombró a quien revisará el fallo de López ......................................................................................... 69
HERALD TRIBUNE (US)
Ex-employee accuses Sarasota County of discrimination .................................................................................. 70
JORNAL DE ANGOLA (AN)
Procurador renova o apelo para o registo dos cidadãos...................................................................................... 71
LA NACION (AR)
Otro presupuesto, la misma obligación .............................................................................................................. 71
Lorenzetti recorrió un centro de la represión ..................................................................................................... 72
LE FIGARO (FR)
Karachi: fin de l'audition d'Hortefeux ................................................................................................................ 73
L'adjointe de Courroye porte plainte .................................................................................................................. 74
Un livre sur Ribéry pas interdit .......................................................................................................................... 74
PORTUGAL DIGITAL (PT)
Justiça condiciona trem-bala à regularização de todas as linhas de transporte interestadual ............................. 75
Correios pedem ao TST suspensão da greve dos trabalhadores ......................................................................... 76
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
Cuba reitera compromisso de integração América Latina.................................................................................. 77
California: Court Says Ban on Gay G.I.’s Is Moot Issue ................................................................................... 78
El TSJE abre paraguas ante posible boicot de los partidos ................................................................................ 78
Hay dudas sobre destino de datos de parlamentarios ......................................................................................... 79
Juez dice que la mensura no anula títulos de terceros ........................................................................................ 80
Indert advierte que políticos están incitando al desacato ................................................................................... 81
LE FIGARO (FR)
Le meurtre d'Aulaqi légal ................................................................................................................................... 82
Justiça do Trabalho proíbe Correios de descontar salário de grevistas .............................................................. 82
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
Encotur, Feira do livro em semana uruguaia ...................................................................................................... 83
Bolívia:Acordo entre guaranis e governo marca semana ................................................................................... 84
Grenzen des Grundgesetzes: Wegweiser zu den europäischen Sternen ............................................................. 85
LA NACION (AR)
Argentina pierde una fortuna por piratería de software...................................................................................... 86
Crecerá el 35% la colocación de cámaras .......................................................................................................... 88
LE FIGARO (FR)
Émirats/procès: 5 militants boycottent ............................................................................................................... 90
Un homme pendu pour un viol en Iran............................................................................................................... 91
Ato lembra 19 anos de Massacre do Carandiru .................................................................................................. 91
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
Bolívia: Publicarão lista de candidatos ao poder judiciário ............................................................................... 92
Bolívia: Publicarão lista de candidatos ao poder judiciário ............................................................................... 92
New State Rules Raising Hurdles at Voting Booth ............................................................................................ 93
ABC COLOR (PY)
Presentan libro sobre Gastón Gadin ................................................................................................................... 96
Prueba de TREP sin problemas .......................................................................................................................... 96
Referéndum: TSJE realizó con éxito simulacro del sistema de transmisión ...................................................... 97
Berlusconi pide la suspensión del juicio “Ruby” por conflicto de competencias .............................................. 97
El Indi gestiona tierras para cumplir las condenas impuestas a Paraguay.......................................................... 98
Estudian conmutar penas carcelarias por ir a misa ............................................................................................. 99
EL PERUANO (SP)
La función fiscalizadora del JNE ..................................................................................................................... 100
Defensor de la celeridad de la justicia .............................................................................................................. 101
LA NACION (AR)
Las argentinas aún sufren postergaciones en el ámbito laboral........................................................................ 102
LE MONDE (FR)
La Cour pénale internationale autorise une enquête sur la Côte d'Ivoire ......................................................... 103
Procès des Khmers rouges : les juges instructeurs auraient failli à leur devoir ................................................ 104
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
Pesquisarão crimes na Costa do Marfim .......................................................................................................... 105
THE GUARDIAN (LO)
Police investigate alleged assault on Nigerian mother on deportation flight ................................................... 105
Theresa May plans clampdown on criminals who resist deportation ............................................................... 107
Meredith Kercher murder: break-in and handprint clues at isolated cottage.................................................... 109
George Osborne plan to charge workers for tribunals angers unions............................................................... 110
David Davis looks beyond coalition with Blue Book of Tory policy ideas ..................................................... 112
As Justices Get Back to Business, Old Pro Reveals Tricks of the Trade ......................................................... 113
After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town.............................................................................................. 115
Alabama’s Shame............................................................................................................................................. 117
Hooray for Federal Loans! ............................................................................................................................... 118
For Justices’ First Day Back, a Knotty Case Involving Medicaid Cutbacks.................................................... 119
Interim Tunisian Leader With Ties to Old Ruler Defends a Gradual Path ...................................................... 121
Judge Allows Trial on Terrorist’s Challenge to Prison Rules .......................................................................... 123
Judge Is Asked to Allow Review of Police Dept. Monitoring of Muslim Communities ................................. 125
The Cronyism Behind a Pipeline for Crude ..................................................................................................... 126
The Hague: Court Will Investigate War Crimes in Ivory Coast Violence ....................................................... 128
The Killing of a Qaeda Leader in Yemen ........................................................................................................ 128
Universities in Scotland to Charge Other Britons ............................................................................................ 130
Plea Deal in PTA Theft Case Stalls Over Terms of Restitution ....................................................................... 132
ABC COLOR (PY)
Policía no fue a resguardar propiedad .............................................................................................................. 133
Jarvis Pavão opera desde Tacumbú, según reportaje ....................................................................................... 134
Fiscalía solicita juicio oral contra funcionario judicial .................................................................................... 135
Fiscales denuncian violación de Constitución en desafuero de Martínez ........................................................ 135
Continuarán acomodos en justicia de Ñeembucú............................................................................................. 136
Contra desafuero .............................................................................................................................................. 136
Enemigo político número uno de Chávez pide solidaridad .............................................................................. 137
CLARÍN (AR) • POLÍTICA
Un juez votó a favor de Moyano desde la sala de terapia intensiva ................................................................. 139
EL PAIS (ES)
El papel de Latinoamérica en Oriente Próximo ............................................................................................... 140
Cuando el "interés del menor" es salir en una procesión ................................................................................. 142
EL PERUANO (SP)
Nestor Sagüés diserta hoy ................................................................................................................................ 143
TC refortalece al sindicalismo.......................................................................................................................... 143
EL UNIVERSAL
"La última tentación de Cristo" ........................................................................................................................ 144
CAP recibirá honores en El Paraíso hasta el jueves ......................................................................................... 145
LA NACION (AR)
Duhalde sobre Rodríguez Saá: "Estamos en una etapa de dirigentes muy livianitos y saltarines" .................. 146
Un camarista firmó una sentencia a favor de Moyano en terapia intensiva ..................................................... 146
LE MONDE (FR)
Seif Al-Islam dirige les opérations à Bani Walid, selon le CNT ...................................................................... 147
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
Japão reinicia caça de baleias apesar de oposições .......................................................................................... 148
Parlamente in Europa: Lehren aus Vichy und Weimar .................................................................................... 148
THE GUARDIAN (LO)
The dreams of Afghan women can t die now ................................................................................................... 149
High court rules it unlawful to put hood over suspect s head........................................................................... 151
China urged to release wife of jailed Nobel peace prize laureate .................................................................... 152
Beware this new mixed-race love-in ................................................................................................................ 154
Amanda Knox case is typical of Italy s inconclusive justice ........................................................................... 155
An Appeal Gone Astray Catches the Supreme Court’s Attention.................................................................... 157
Citing Police Trap, Protesters File Suit ............................................................................................................ 158
Brother of Jailed Chinese Dissident Reports Prison Visit ................................................................................ 159
Invitation to a Dialogue: Human Rights Since 9/11......................................................................................... 159
Jury Begins Deliberating in the Killing of a Husband ..................................................................................... 160
Tenderness and Violence as Portrayed in a Murder Trial ................................................................................ 161
Turkey Detains 140 in Inquiry on Kurds.......................................................................................................... 162
Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood? ................................................................................................................... 163
Puerto Rico Prodded to Get Tough on Police .................................................................................................. 164
Oviedo Matto defiende su reacción ante la Caminera ...................................................................................... 167
Una medición judicial que acaba convertida en papelón político .................................................................... 168
ABC COLOR (PY)
Piden aclarar denuncia de senadora y vicepresidente....................................................................................... 169
Rechazan modificar el fallo de fusión LAN-TAM........................................................................................... 169
Fiscales piden se extradite a los detenidos en Argentina ................................................................................. 170
Anuncian huelga en Poder Judicial .................................................................................................................. 170
El Gobierno recibe más evidencias sobre tierras .............................................................................................. 171
AMBITO FINANCEIRO (AR)
En Chile reclaman "reciprocidad" en el intercambio de asilados políticos ...................................................... 172
La Corte rechazó la extradición de Astiz ......................................................................................................... 173
Rebeldes libios planean ataque "final" contra ciudad natal de Gadafi ............................................................. 174
Piden peritaje a la Corte por campañas ............................................................................................................ 175
WikiLeaks: pedido de auxilio a EEUU de un exministro de la Corte .............................................................. 176
EL PAIS (ES)
Marx, Martí y la Cuba del siglo XXI ............................................................................................................... 177
Morales acusa a la Policía de represión a indígenas......................................................................................... 179
Inmunidad ........................................................................................................................................................ 180
Constituirán empresas en solo 48 horas ........................................................................................................... 180
Políticas públicas serán adecuadas a los DD HH ............................................................................................. 182
Respaldan iniciativa de crear un registro virtual de robos................................................................................ 183
EL UNIVERSAL
Desacato a Corte Interamericana evita ingreso a Mercosur ............................................................................. 184
LA NACION (AR)
Reunión en Trabajo para destrabar el bloqueo de Camioneros en Ezeiza y Aeroparque ................................. 185
LE FIGARO (FR)
Roland Dumas votera Hollande ....................................................................................................................... 186
Regras do processo eleitoral de 2012 não podem mais ser mudadas ............................................................... 186
Regras do processo eleitoral de 2012 não podem mais ser mudadas ............................................................... 187
PRENSA LATINA (AR)
ONU pedirá que se pesquise assassinato de jornalistas em Honduras ............................................................. 188
THE GUARDIAN (LO)
Conservative party: a touch of the cat .............................................................................................................. 189
Syria attacks media fabrications by showing beheaded woman alive on TV................................................... 190
Syrian Woman Says Reports of Her Death Were Mistaken............................................................................. 191
Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at 89 .................................................. 193
Religious Groups and Bias Get the Justices’ Attention.................................................................................... 195
Details of Home Sale Emerge in Consultant’s Trial for Theft ......................................................................... 197
Appeals Court Allows Ban on Assault Weapons ............................................................................................. 198
Accountability Avoidance ................................................................................................................................ 198
Bahrain Orders Retrials for Medical Workers.................................................................................................. 199
Breyer and Scalia Testify at Senate Judiciary Hearing .................................................................................... 200
Monitor Must Oversee Fire Dept. Hiring Practices, Judge Rules .................................................................... 201
Liberia: Ruling Favors President...................................................................................................................... 203
Gleaming City Rising From Ruins Can’t Hide Psychic Scars of a War .......................................................... 203
Habrá control sobre bebidas alcohólicas y aglomeraciones ............................................................................. 205
La Corte promete su apoyo para investigar tierras de los Barthe ..................................................................... 206
Campesinos exigen una decisión del Poder Judicial ........................................................................................ 207
JUSTIÇA NO EXTERIOR •
ABC COLOR (PY) • INTERNACIONALES • 29/9/2011
Despenalización del aborto sigue dividendo opiniones en América Latina
BOGOTÁ. Gobiernos, defensores de los derechos humanos y feministas de América Latina se manifestaron este miércoles, en el Día por la Despenalización del aborto, en favor
y en contra de esta práctica que, según la OMS, tiene una tasa media para el sur del continente de 33 casos por cada 1.000 mujeres.
Uno de los organismos que
primero alzó su voz fue Amnistía Internacional (AI) al
considerar que despenalizar
el aborto es una tarea “ urgente ” para Latinoamérica y
el Caribe e instó a los Gobiernos a promover “planes
concretos que aseguren el
acceso a los derechos sexuales y reproductivos de las
mujeres y niñas”.
“Forzar a una mujer o niña
violada a continuar con un
embarazo es cruel, inhumano
y degradante”, dijo AI, ya
que algunas “intentan suicidarse ” y, en ocasiones, “
toman otras medidas desesperadas e intentan practicarse
un aborto a sí mismas ” .
Precisamente, el estudio
“Embarazo no planeado y
aborto inducido en Colombia: causas y consecuencias”
determinó que el 99,9 % de
los abortos realizados en el
país son ilegales.
También estimó que en 2008
se hicieron unos 400.400
abortos en Colombia, lo que
se tradujo en una tasa anual
de 39 por cada 1.000 mujeres
entre los 15 y 44 años.
Según el estudio, esta tasa
supera la media del conjunto
de países de América del Sur
que la Organización Mundial
de la Salud (OMS) calculó en
33 abortos por 1.000 mujeres para 2003.
Las cifras en Colombia también están por encima de
México, con 33 abortos por
cada 1.000 mujeres en 2006;
Guatemala, 24 por 1.000 en
2003; y Perú, 54 por 1.000
en 2000.
De acuerdo a la legislación
colombiana, el aborto es
legal en tres casos: cuando la
vida o salud de la madre está
en riesgo, el feto presenta
una malformación o el embarazo resulta de una violación
o incesto.
Perú, país en el que anualmente se practican 370.000
abortos, miembros de organizaciones sociales y feministas realizaron hoy un plantón frente a la sede del Congreso para exigir que se incluya en la agenda pública la
despenalización.
Y es que, según datos del
Ministerio de Salud peruano,
el 44 % de las mujeres que
interrumpen su embarazo
acude a personas no calificadas, el 37 % a una obstetriz y
el 17 % a un profesional de
la medicina.
En cambio, en México la
jornada la protagonizó la
Suprema Corte de Justicia
de la Nación (SCJN) que
avaló la ley antiabortista del
estado de Baja California
(noroeste) , que estipula que
el derecho a la vida queda
protegido desde el momento
de la concepción.
Al respecto, la Academia
Mexicana
de
Ciencias
(AMC) aseguró esta semana
que las leyes antiaborto “
van en contra del legítimo
derecho que tienen las mujeres a decidir sobre cuestiones
que atañen a su cuerpo y a su
dignidad personal, y no prestan atención al delicado problema de salud pública que
pueden provocar ” .
Sobre el polémico tema se
pronunció igualmente el presidente mexicano, Felipe
Calderón, al solicitar al Senado que retire un posicionamiento que presentó su
país al adherirse en 1981 al
Pacto de San José sobre Derechos Humanos en torno a
que la nación no está obligada a legislar para proteger la
vida desde la fecundación.
El mandatario consideró que
el retirar la Declaración Interpretativa del Pacto le permite a México refrendar un “
compromiso con el derecho a
la vida como un bien jurídicamente tutelado por el derecho mexicano ” .
Más al sur del continente las
cifras conocidas hoy dejaron
en evidencia que en Argentina cada dos días se produce
la muerte de una mujer por
un aborto clandestino, que
se calcula es realizado unas
460.000 veces al año.
Mientras tanto, en Uruguay,
según organizaciones feministas, se cree que se recurre
a la práctica ilegal cada 20
minutos.
Por su parte, la activista de la
organización Salud Mujeres,
Andrea Vela, alertó que en
Ecuador hay alrededor de
125.000 abortos anuales e
indicó que las mujeres más
humildes utilizan métodos
como “ las agujas, detergente
o el veneno de ratas ” , mientras que algunas “ consiguen
una clínica cuando tienen
más recursos, pero no tienen
condiciones de salubridad ” .
Por coincidencia, en Brasil,
nación en la que hay condenas de entre uno y tres años
de cárcel para la gestante y
de uno a cuatro años para el
médico, una comisión parlamentaria rechazó hoy cuatro
propuestas legislativas que
pretendían endurecer las penas aplicadas a la mujer que
aborte y a quien la auxilie.
En Centroamérica, feministas, organizaciones defensoras de los derechos de la mu-
jer, entre otros, salieron a las
calles en El Salvador y en
Nicaragua para exigir la despenalización del aborto.
La activista salvadoreña Sara
García, dirigente de la Articulación por el Derecho a
Decidir, aseguró que hay “
23 mujeres encarceladas porque está penalizado el aborto
”.
Mientras que las nicaragüenses demandaron la restitución
en la legislación nacional del
aborto terapéutico, prohibido en el Código Penal desde
2006.
El alcalde de São Paulo crea un nuevo partido para enfrentar al PT
BRASILIA (AFP). El nuevo Partido Social Democrático (PSD), fruto del éxodo de la dividida oposición brasileña, se presentó ayer miércoles ante la opinión pública de Brasil
tras haber sido aprobado el martes por el Tribunal Electoral con 500.000 firmas de electores.
El partido es de centro”, anunció su creador, el conservador Gilberto Kassab, alcalde de São Paulo, la mayor y
más rica urbe brasileña, en
una entrevista al canal Globonews.
La nueva sigla surgió principalmente de disidentes del
partido de derecha DEM, que
había ido perdiendo fuerza
desde que compartió el poder
con el gobierno socialdemócrata entre 1995 y 2002, aunque también de otras formaciones de una oposición que
busca desesperadamente arrebatarle la presidencia de
Brasil al Partido de los Trabajadores.
El PSD nace con fuerza y
asegura que está llegando a
50 diputados, lo que lo convertiría en el tercer o cuarto
mayor partido en el Congreso.
La agrupación política, que
también suma dos gobernadores y figuras como la poderosa jefa del agro brasileño
y senadora, Katia Abreu,
pretende participar en las
elecciones municipales de
2012, antesala de las presidenciales de 2014.
El nuevo partido afirmó que
no será directamente ni oposición ni apoyo al gobierno.
“Nuestra relación será de
independencia para que los
parlamentarios que se adhirieron al partido continúen
teniendo libertad para votar”,
dijo Kassab.
Entre las principales propuestas del Partido Social Democrático (PSD), que no ha
presentado ni programa ni
ideología, está la convocatoria de una asamblea constituyente para 2014, destinada a
reformar la Constitución e
impulsar las grandes reformas que el país no consigue
aprobar: de seguridad social,
administrativa, laboral y política.
Por otro lado, advierten que
la asamblea constituyente no
implicaría la disolución del
Congreso.
ABC COLOR (PY) • JUDICIALES • 29/9/2011
Lo condenan por comprar facturas
El director de la empresa
Prosalud SA, Cristhian Rienzi Grassi, fue condenado con
un procedimiento abreviado
por haber comprado facturas
“fantasmas” de la contadora
María de los Angeles Chaparro, propietaria de la consultora Consult Managers.
El juez Tadeo Fernández
decretó un año de pena con
suspensión más la multa de
G. 200 millones, dinero que
debe ser distribuido 50%
para el Poder Judicial y el
otro 50% para el Ministerio
Público.
El fiscal Arnaldo Giuzzio se
allanó a esta condena abreviada, pero pidió que el sentenciado repare el daño a la sociedad.
En ese sentido, se ordenaron
donaciones de G. 30 millones
a la Fundación Asoleu (G. 10
millones), Fundación Fudapi
(G. 10 millones) y Fundación
Pa’i Puku (G. 10 millones).
El condenado reconoció que
en su calidad de director de
la empresa Prosalud SA utilizó facturas que fueron proveídas por Chaparro (quien
también enfrenta un proceso
penal). Las facturas justificaban supuestos proveedores y
figuraban en la contabilidad
de 2009 y 2010. “Los referidos proveedores no habían
tenido ninguna relación comercial con Prosalud, tal es
así que se realizaron rectificaciones en la Subsecretaría
de Tributación”, dice el fallo.
ABC COLOR (PY) • LOCALES • 29/9/2011
Marco Rector: Acusan de “cobarde” al MEC
Organizaciones de feministas
y defensoras de los Derechos
Humanos acusaron al Ministerio de Educación de cobarde y de tener una actitud criminal por haber dado marcha
atrás en la implementación
del Marco Rector Pedagógico para la Educación Integral
de la Sexualidad.
El “Marco Rector” es un
documento elaborado con
aportes del Ministerio de
Salud, la Secretaría de la
Mujer y sectores de la sociedad civil, con un enfoque de
derechos. Fue objetado por
las iglesias Católica y Evangélica, especialmente por sus
sectores más conservadores,
autoproclamados en defensa
de la vida y la familia, porque defendía la “ideología de
género”. Sus representantes
llegaron a decir que era la
antesala de la legalización
del matrimonio homosexual
y del aborto, lo que fue
desmentido.
“Rechazamos enérgicamente
esta decisión, en que se demuestra una profunda cobardía del MEC, puesto que ante
la oposición de grupos fundamentalistas y religiosos
prefiere tirar por la borda una
propuesta de política pública,
fruto de varios años de traba-
jo y en la cual se recoge el
principio de igualdad y no
discriminación, garantizado
en la Constitución”, señala
un comunicado firmado entre
otros por el Comité de América Latina y el Caribe para la
Defensa de los Derechos de
la Mujer – Paraguay; Coordinación de Mujeres del Paraguay; Centro de Documentación y Estudios; Comisión
Internacional por los Derechos Humanos para Gays y
Lesbianas; Kuña Róga; Las
Ramonas; Paragay; y Sociedad Paraguaya de Estudios
sobre Sexualidad Humana.
Estas organizaciones manifestaron su repudio al accionar del Consejo Nacional de
Educación y Cultura donde,
“de la mano de un sacerdote
de la Iglesia Católica (Jesús
Montero Tirado) se pide ‘dejar sin efecto’ el proceso en
vez de implementarlo, cediendo a las presiones de grupos fundamentalistas y religiosos, que buscan obstaculizar las políticas que garanticen el derecho a la información, y a la salud sexual y la
salud reproductiva de los y
las jóvenes”.
Aireana, un grupo por los
derechos de las lesbianas,
emitió un comunicado al que
tituló “El triunfo de la inquisición” donde señala que con
la decisión se retornó a la
Edad Media. “El ministro (de
Educación, Luis Alberto Riart) se dejó presionar por las
iglesias, que olvidó la función que les toca desempeñar
dentro de un Estado laico. No
es posible que un grupo someta al pensamiento medieval a toda una población, al
negársele información básica
sobre sexualidad (...). Nos
parece que el ministro tembló
de miedo”, dice.
La Cladem envió una nota al
ministro Riart en la que le
informan que rechazan la
decisión tomada “que atenta
y pone en peligro la vigencia
de los derechos humanos” de
los niños, que pierden la oportunidad de recibir en escuelas y colegios una educación sexual integral científica, que les permita evitar así
situaciones de vulnerabilidad
como la violencia, el abuso,
la explotación, el embarazo
no planificado. Le pidieron
también que revise su posición.
México: Suprema Corte ratifica normas antiaborto
MEXICO. La Suprema Corte de México ratificó hoy que las normas contra el aborto aprobadas en más de la mitad de los 32 estados del país están en sintonía con la Constitución, a pesar de que la mayoría simple de sus miembros se opuso a este fallo.
Se necesitaba el voto de por
lo menos 8 de los 11 magistrados (mayoría calificada)
para que la legislación en el
estado norteño de Baja California fuera declarada inconstitucional, lo que podría
haber afectado a las normas
en los otros estados.
Sin embargo, sólo siete de
los jueces apoyaron esta posición, que dividió a la clase
política del país, por lo que la
Corte decidió avalar la legislación antiaborto que protege el “derecho a la vida desde la concepción” y es cuestionada por grupos civiles
pro derechos humanos y otros sectores sociales.
El 25 de abril del 2008, la
Asamblea Legislativa del
Distrito Federal aprobó la
despenalización del aborto
hasta las 12 semanas de gestación, por lo que surgió de
inmediato una ola de reformas antiaborto en 17 estados, ante el temor de que el
ejemplo se extendiera.
La Suprema Corte ya había
avalado la constitucionalidad de la ley en la ciudad de
México, por lo cual se esperaba que actuara en forma
consecuente esta vez.
La jerarquía católica se pronunció previamente a favor
del “derecho a la vida”, como
se califica a la posición anti-
aborto, mientras el propio
presidente Felipe Calderón y
su esposa Margarita Zavala y
otros dirigentes del oficialismo hicieron lo propio.
Los miembros de la Suprema Corte habían señalado
que no iban a someterse a la
“presión de nadie por poderoso que fuera”.
La decisión de ratificar la
constitucionalidad del aborto fue adoptada en una
tercera jornada de debates
consecutiva, en la cual los
jueces que apoyaron la constitucionalidad de las leyes
antiaborto dijeron que la
Constitución “no establece
en qué momento inicia la
vida”.
Por lo tanto, argumentaron
que las legislaciones provinciales “están en libertad de
hacerlo”, como lo dijo el juez
Jorge Pardo, cuyo voto fue
decisivo y quien asumió su
cargo apenas en febrero pasado.
“Nuestra Constitución Federal sí reconoce como titular
de derechos al producto de la
concepción per se, con independencia de los derechos de
la madre”, afirmó Pardo,
quien insistió en que el tema
a discusión no era la penalización del aborto.
La petición de inconstitucionalidad fue elevada por la
minoría parlamentaria de
Baja California. El juez Arturo Zaldívar fue uno de los
que se pronunció con mayor
vehemencia en contra de las
leyes antiaborto.
“Criminalizar a la mujer,
sobre todo a la mujer más
pobre, no es la solución,
condenarla a la cárcel, a la
clandestinidad, a poner en
riesgo su salud, su vida, es
profundamente injusto, inmoral y profundamente inconstitucional”, dijo.
ABC COLOR (PY) • ECONOMÍA • 29/9/2011
Para Catastro, tierras del caso Barthe no se superponen con las de
Ñacunday
El Servicio Nacional de Catastro tiene un estudio preliminar en el que se descarta
que las tierras discutidas en
el juicio del caso Barthe estén superpuestas con los inmuebles de Ñacunday. Con
esto, ni física ni jurídicamente son las mismas tierras.
La directora de los Registros
Públicos brindó ayer más
detalles, en declaraciones a
Radio Cardinal, sobre la discusión que se ha generado en
torno a la intención del Estado de mensurar una gran
extensión de tierra de
257.000 hectáreas, que se
extienden sobre al menos
ocho departamentos.
Las autoridades del Instituto
Nacional de Desarrollo Rural
y de la Tierra (Indert), con su
presidente Marciano Barreto
a la cabeza, aseguran que una
porción importante de las
tierras de Ñacunday (donde
el Grupo Favero es uno de
los mayores propietarios)
forma parte de los inmuebles
que en 1958 volvieron a manos del Estado, tras un largo
litigio con los descendientes
de Domingo Barthe.
Registro jurídico
Registros Públicos ya había
concluido su trabajo de investigación
del
caso
Ñacunday. Encontró que la
finca 4036, de la que se desprenden numerosas propiedades –entre ellas, las del
Grupo Favero–, tiene su origen en una venta que hizo el
Estado a un particular luego
de la Guerra Grande, que a
su vez las vendió en 1885 a
Carlos Casado, y este, personalmente, las enajenó en favor de Domingo Barthe en el
año 1891. Se trata de tierras
que también fueron legadas a
los descendientes de Barthe,
pero que no formaron parte
del largo juicio con el poder
administrador que se había
iniciado en 1921.
En el caso de las tierras reivindicadas y ganadas por el
Estado tras un fallo de la
Corte Suprema en 1958
(son seis folios que contienen
siete fracciones), fueron vendidas en principio en 1888 a
cuatro personas, que luego de
varias enajenaciones llegaron
a manos de Domingo Barthe,
entre los años 1912 y 1913.
Como se aprecia, en ningún
caso las historias jurídicas de
ambos grupos de inmuebles
se cruzaron.
Registro físico
González también refirió
ayer que el Registro Público
hizo un cruzamiento de datos
con el Servicio Nacional de
Catastro. Dijo que esta última entidad, que tiene a su
cargo el registro físico de los
inmuebles del país, tiene un
estudio preliminar que indica
que ambas fincas (caso juicio
a Barthe y Ñacunday) no
están superpuestas y se encuentran a una distancia impor-
tante (habría unos 50 kilómetros).
Esta versión, una vez que sea
oficialmente
confirmada,
echará por tierra el argumento sostenido por Indert, debido a que ambas instituciones
–las que tienen responsabilidad del registro jurídico y el
registro físico de las propiedades– descartarían la existencia de la situación conocida como “títulos de dos o tres
pisos”. Este diario intentó
hablar con Catastro, pero ello
no fue posible.
Venta de tierras
Registros Públicos se encuentra abocada en estos momentos al análisis de lo que
pasó con las 257.000 hectáreas que volvieron a manos
del Estado en 1958. González explicó que en 1963 se
inscribió la resolución judicial pertinente en los registros
(seis folios que contenían
siete fracciones), de la siguiente manera: en la finca 2826
de Jesús y Trinidad (cuatro
fracciones), en la finca 81 de
San Joaquín (dos fracciones)
y en la finca 183 de Hernandarias (una fracción). De esta
última derivó la que ahora se
conoce como finca 39 de
Irala.
Explicó que tanto la finca
2826 (de 188.000 ha) como
la 39 contienen numerosas
ventas realizadas por el Estado (desprendimientos). Aún
falta terminar el trabajo a fin
de conocer si quedó algún
remanente de inmuebles que
aún pertenezca al Estado.
ABC COLOR (PY) • POLÍTICA • 29/9/2011
Paraguayos en el exterior no podrán candidatarse a diputados, dice TSJE
No se ampliarán los distritos electorales en caso de que en el referéndum triunfe el SÍ, lo
que habilitará a los paraguayos que residen en el extranjero a votar en las elecciones
nacionales. Esto significa que los compatriotas de afuera no podrán candidatarse a diputados,
gobernadores
e
intendentes.
Algunos sectores aseguran
que con la enmienda constitucional, que permita a los
compatriotas que viven en el
exterior votar en los comicios
nacionales, se ampliarán los
distritos electorales del Paraguay a nivel mundial, por lo
que habrá diputados por Argentina, Brasil, España, China o cualquier otro país donde haya concentración de
connacionales. Esta afirmación es mentira, aseguró el
asesor del Tribunal Superior
de Justicia Electoral (TSJE),
Carlos María Ljubetic. “Eso
no es cierto. La Constitución
establece la diputación por
capital y los departamentos.
No está previsto eso en la
modificación. La representación siempre es departamental, no existe esa ampliación.
Algunos creen que automáticamente se va a ampliar y
eso no es así”, dijo.
Agregó que la Carta Magna
es bien clara al establecer
que el diputado se elige por
colegio departamental, donde
el derecho a elegir y ser elegido solamente corresponde
al inscripto en ese departamento. “Los paraguayos que
están en el exterior no van a
poder votar por los diputados, pues la Constitución
dice que no es de colegiatura
nacional, lo mismo que para
gobernador, pues repito, la
suprema ley dice que es colegiatura
departamental”,
explicó.
Ljubetic comentó que los
connacionales que residen en
otros países sí se podrán candidatar a senadores, parlamentarios del Mercosur y
vicepresidente. “Esto siempre que cumplan con todos
los requisitos que establece la
ley, como ser elegido en unas
internas partidarias. Si para
el efecto se crea un movimiento o partido, eso también
tiene sus requisitos”, resaltó.
Poca competitividad e inseguridad jurídica impiden crear más empleos
La Cámara de Anunciantes del Paraguay (CAP) pidió al Gobierno una mayor seguridad
jurídica, a fin de incentivar las inversiones y de preservar y multiplicar las fuentes de
empleo. Plantean también aumentar la competencia del país mediante la fijación salarial
por
la
productividad.
Carlos Jorge Biedermann,
presidente de la CAP, señaló
que la falta de seguridad jurídica en el país impide que
las empresas sigan invirtiendo y generando fuentes de
empleo. En este contexto se
reunieron ayer el directivo,
socios del gremio y el ministro de Justicia y Trabajo,
Humberto Blasco, a quien
expresaron este y otros puntos.
El empresario señaló que la
principal preocupación del
sector son los diversos fallos
que emite el Poder Judicial.
Apuntó que estos fallos son
absolutamente incomprensibles sin dejar en claro si se
trata de demandas de trabajadores u otros.
“Recurrentemente socios de
la CAP dicen que no se puede invertir en empleo por
problemas en la justicia”,
señaló al reconocer que el
Poder Judicial escapa de las
atribuciones de dicha cartera.
Más competitividad
Otro punto tratado fue el
debate de pagar al trabajador
a base de lo que produce y la
necesidad de capacitar a la
ciudadanía en las especialidades que la industria requiera.
Biedermann acotó que el
único fin de dicha propuesta
es buscar una mayor competitividad estructural en el país
y salir de los últimos lugares
en los que se encuentra el
Paraguay en esta materia
mediante
entrenamiento,
motivación y capacitación.
Para ello pidieron mayor
participación en los programas de capacitación laboral
que realizan los entes SNPP
y Sinafocal, a fin de llenar
los puestos de trabajos disponibles en mandos medios.
Inician diálogo
El ministro Blasco señaló
que acordaron participar en
la mesa de diálogo social en
la que plantearán nuevos
paradigmas para el salario
mínimo.
Indicó que la propuesta, lejos
de atentar contra las reivindicaciones laborales, es liberarlo de su uso como referencia
en el pago de tasas, multas y
otros ya que lo vuelven un
elemento inflacionario en sí
mismo.
“También creemos que el
salario mínimo tiene que
tener el componente del reconocimiento de la productividad que figuran entre las
conclusiones de la OIT y así
establecer los incrementos
salariales correspondientes”,
finalizó el secretario de Estado.
El salario mínimo vigente es
de G. 1.658.232.
En nuestro país, unas
620.000 personas perciben
entre uno y dos salarios mínimos. Sin embargo, más de
1.913.000 trabajadores perciben cifras inferiores como
cuentapropistas o subempleados.
AMBITO FINANCEIRO (AR) • POLÍTICA • 29/9/2011
Zaffaroni ratificó que piensa en el retiro e insiste con una reforma constitucional
El juez de la Corte Suprema
Eugenio Zaffaroni ratificó
que piensa en dejar el máximo tribunal porque ya cumplió "una etapa" en esa función, e insistió en que le gustaría "participar del debate"
por una reforma constitucional que imponga un sistema parlamentario en el
país.
"Ya llevo ocho años en la
Corte Suprema y pienso que
en todo se cumple una etapa", señaló Zaffaroni, al confirmar que analiza renunciar
al máximo tribunal.
El magistrado dijo que "todavía no" le puso fecha a su
renuncia y señaló que no
dará un paso al costado "ahora" en la Corte, ya que no
quiere que la decisión se vincule al revuelo que generó la
noticia de que en departamentos de su propiedad se
ejercía la prostitución.
"Si renunciara ahora daría
una impresión de vulnerabilidad a una operación política
y eso no lo voy a aceptar",
enfatizó Zaffaroni.
En declaraciones al programa
Jungla Política en Vivo, por
Canal 26, el juez explicó:
"No sé lo que voy a hacer
cuando deje la Corte, en
principio voy a volver a la
vida universitaria".
En forma paralela, Zaffaroni
dijo que le "gustaría partici-
par de un debate" sobre una
posible reforma constitucional que imponga un sistema parlamentario en el
país.
El magistrado defendió la
idea de un cambio de sistema
y advirtió que "la idea de que
el presidencialismo es fuerte
es falsa, porque un gobierno
con una minoría en el Congreso encuentra muchas dificultades para gobernar".
"Un gobierno parlamentario
es fuerte siempre, porque
tiene que tener mayoría en el
parlamento para sostenerse.
Y también tiene un sistema
de controles más estricto",
subrayó el juez.
Además, al ser consultado
sobre su vinculación con el
ministro de Economía, Amado Boudou, reconoció que es
"amigo" del candidato a vicepresidente pero advirtió
que no lo "asesora políticamente ni nada que se le parezca".
Sobre el escándalo con los
departamentos de su propiedad, el juez insistió en que se
trató de "una maniobra política perfectamente orquestada" en su contra.
Confirmó que los departamentos fueron "desocupados" y que ahora cambió de
inmobiliaria para volver a
alquilarlos.
Rechazó que tuviera responsabilidad sobre lo que ocurría
en los departamentos y
señaló que en cualquier propiedad se puede montar "un
fumadero de opio" sin que el
propietario lo sepa.
Advirtió que se trata de una
cuestión "civil, de consorcio", pero que no pensó en
iniciar un juicio por considerarse perjudicado.
Por otra parte, el juez advirtió que "el Congreso está
violando la Constitución
Nacional" cuando sanciona
leyes penales que, según dijo,
implican la "destrucción del
Código Penal".
"La Constitución no dice
que el Congreso puede legislar en materia penal como
quiere. Dice que tiene que
sancionar un Código. Hoy
asistimos a la destrucción del
Código Penal, tenemos los
escombros de lo que fue un
buen Código Penal", se quejó.
Advirtió en el mismo sentido
que para la ley en la Argentina "vale más la propiedad
que la vida".
Al ser consultado sobre el
caso que se investiga en la
Fundación Madres de Plaza
de Mayo, Zaffaroni consideró que "las Madres cometieron una ingenuidad" en la
administración de esa entidad.
CLARÍN (AR) • OPINIÓN • 29/9/2011
Límites y convivencia en la escuela
Por Ricardo Roa: EDITOR
GENERAL ADJUNTO DE
CLARIN
Violencia escolar o evidencias en la escuela de una sociedad violenta? El director de
un colegio de Pergamino fue
brutalmente golpeado por un
alumno de 15 años y su madre, que lo tajeó en la cara
con un cuchillo de cocina.
Tuvo que ser hospitalizado.
Anoche hubo una marcha de
repudio en esa ciudad y los
gremios docentes decidieron
no dar clases hoy (Ver: Por la
violencia escolar, paran hoy
los docentes de Provincia).
La violencia escolar solía
estar asociada a la ejercida
por los maestros hacia los
estudiantes. Y a la de los
alumnos entre sí. Pero desde
hace tiempo se ha instalado
un nuevo fenómeno: la violencia contra los profesores .
Ahora, son los maestros el
blanco. La vieja alianza entre
padres y docentes para educar a los chicos ha dejado
lugar a otra, de padres y chicos contra los maestros .
sociedad es violenta, la escuela no puede ser pacífica.
La agresión de Pergamino
tiene una historia detrás. El
director, Ricardo Fusco, había denunciado a la madre y
al hijo porque lo amenazaban
y la Justicia desestimó su
reclamo. El chico tiene serios
problemas de conducta y por
eso los dos fueron citados de
nuevo . Ahí se desencadenó
el ataque.
Nadie podría decir que una
cosa tenga que ver directamente con la otra. Pero e l
discurso intolerante que baja
desde los niveles más altos
del Gobierno hasta los piquetes y escraches, como el del
martes contra el mismísimo
presidente de la Corte Suprema, son datos de una
sociedad que vive crispada y
que no necesariamente sanciona la violencia como una
falta grave .
Según los gremios docentes,
en la provincia tres maestros
son agredidos por día. Es una
enormidad. Y eso que ocurre
en las escuelas no es casual:
la violencia atraviesa sus
puertas porque está fuera de
ella . No son islas. Replican
lo que pasa demasiado a menudo en la sociedad: si la
Dar clase es una tarea ardua.
Y lo es mucho más cuando la
violencia se propaga sin que
existan límites , que no es
absolutamente lo mismo que
represión, y la escuela se
convierte en un espacio donde en lugar de imperar el
saber lo hace la ley de la selva.
STJ • TJ •
DIÁRIO DE NOTÍCIAS (PT) (PT) • NACIONAL • 29/9/2011
Isaltino Morais foi preso
Isaltino Morais foi preso esta tarde pelo Grupo de Investigação Criminal da PSP de Oeiras e está detido na cadeia anexa à PJ.
Isaltino Morais, presidente da
Câmara Municipal de Oeiras,
foi detido, por volta das 20
horas, pelo Grupo de Investigação Criminal da PSP de
Oeiras, no "cumprimento de
um mandado de detenção". O
autarca foi levado para a zona prisional anexa à Polícia
Judiciária (PJ), na Rua Gomes Freire, em Lisboa, onde
deverá cumprir os dois anos
de cadeia a que foi condenado pelo Supremo Tribunal
de Justiça, por fraude fiscal,
abuso de poder, corrupção
passiva para acto ilícito e
branqueamento de capitais.
Fonte da autarquia adiantou à
Agência Lusa que Isaltino
Morais já não compareceu à
inauguração de um conjunto
escultórico de autoria de Pedro Cabrita Reis, que estava
prevista para as 20:00 horas,
no Forum Oeiras.
O presidente da Câmara de
Oeiras foi detido ao abrigo
de um despacho do procurador de Oeiras, que considerou que o caso Isaltino Morais transitou em julgado,
disse hoje à Agência Lusa
fonte próxima do processo.
A Agência Lusa soube, entretanto, que a defesa de Isaltino Morais advoga que o
autarca está detido ilegalmente porque o Supremo
Tribunal de Justiça (STJ)
havia considerado que a ação
judicial estava suspensa. Assim sendo, a defesa deverá na
sexta-feira intentar um pedido de habeas corpus para que
este tribunal se pronuncie
sobre a legalidade ou não da
detenção. Fontes contactadas
pela Agência Lusa disseram
que há um prazo de 48 horas
para o STJ se pronunciar
sobre o pedido de habeas
corpus .
Em análise está o despacho
do procurador de Oeiras (tribunal de primeira instância
onde correu o processo), que
considera que o caso Isaltino
Morais transitou em julgado,
apesar de a defesa do autarca
entender que não há ainda
uma decisão definitiva dos
tribunais superiores, designadamente
do
Tribunal
Constitucional.
STJ • TJ •
DIÁRIO DE NOTÍCIAS (PT) (PT) • NACIONAL • 29/9/2011
Isaltino Morais foi preso
Isaltino Morais foi preso esta tarde pelo Grupo de Investigação Criminal da PSP de Oeiras e está detido na cadeia anexa à PJ.
Isaltino Morais, presidente da
Câmara Municipal de Oeiras,
foi detido, por volta das 20
horas, pelo Grupo de Investigação Criminal da PSP de
Oeiras, no "cumprimento de
um mandado de detenção". O
autarca foi levado para a zona prisional anexa à Polícia
Judiciária (PJ), na Rua Gomes Freire, em Lisboa, onde
deverá cumprir os dois anos
de cadeia a que foi condenado pelo Supremo Tribunal
de Justiça, por fraude fiscal,
abuso de poder, corrupção
passiva para acto ilícito e
branqueamento de capitais.
Fonte da autarquia adiantou à
Agência Lusa que Isaltino
Morais já não compareceu à
inauguração de um conjunto
escultórico de autoria de Pedro Cabrita Reis, que estava
prevista para as 20:00 horas,
no Forum Oeiras.
O presidente da Câmara de
Oeiras foi detido ao abrigo
de um despacho do procurador de Oeiras, que considerou que o caso Isaltino Morais transitou em julgado,
disse hoje à Agência Lusa
fonte próxima do processo.
A Agência Lusa soube, entretanto, que a defesa de Isaltino Morais advoga que o
autarca está detido ilegalmente porque o Supremo
Tribunal de Justiça (STJ)
havia considerado que a ação
judicial estava suspensa. Assim sendo, a defesa deverá na
sexta-feira intentar um pedi-
do de habeas corpus para que
este tribunal se pronuncie
sobre a legalidade ou não da
detenção. Fontes contactadas
pela Agência Lusa disseram
que há um prazo de 48 horas
para o STJ se pronunciar
sobre o pedido de habeas
corpus .
onde correu o processo), que
considera que o caso Isaltino
Morais transitou em julgado,
apesar de a defesa do autarca
entender que não há ainda
uma decisão definitiva dos
tribunais superiores, designadamente
do
Tribunal
Constitucional.
Em análise está o despacho
do procurador de Oeiras (tribunal de primeira instância
EL PERUANO (SP) • REGIONES • 29/9/2011
Evalúan 87 magistrados de diversos distritos judiciales
Se evalúan a jueces y fiscales de Ica, Callao, Áncash, La Libertad
El pleno del Consejo Nacional de la Magistratura inició
las entrevistas a los magistrados citados al proceso de
evaluación integral y ratificación en el marco de la
Convocatoria N° 008-2010CNM, que trabajan en diversos distritos judiciales del
país.Los magistrados a evaluar en esta convocatoria
laboran en los distritos judiciales de Lima, Ica, Callao,
Áncash, La Libertad, Lambayeque, Arequipa, Cajamarca, Lima Norte, Cusco y San
Martín.En dicha convocatoria se encuentran comprendidos un juez supremo, 32 jueces superiores, 22 jueces
especializados, un fiscal supremo, una fiscal adjunta
suprema, 16 fiscales superiores, un fiscal superior adjunto, cinco fiscales provinciales
y ocho fiscales adjuntos pro-
vinciales.A la fecha se ha
procedido a evaluar al juez
supremo Víctor Roberto Prado Saldarriaga, integrante de
la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la República; y a los
jueces superiores del Distrito
Judicial de Lima: Dora Zoila
Ampudia Herrera, Luis Carlos Arce Córdova y Araceli
Denyse Baca Cabrera, que
fueron ratificados en sus cargos.
EL UNIVERSAL • NACIONAL Y POLÍTICA • 29/9/2011
Cárcel de 1 a 4 años implica desacatar fallo en caso López
Apelar al TSJ la sentencia de la Corte Interamericana es un "subterfugio"
ELVIA GÓMEZ
Casi cuarenta académicos
expertos en distintas áreas
del Derecho y que constituyen referencia nacional por
sus trayectorias, alertaron
que el país está a punto de
ser colocado junto al único
caso del continente de desacato a la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos,
como fue el del expresidente
de Perú, Alberto Fujimori.
En 1999 Fujimori desconoció
una sentencia de la Corte
IDH a favor de dos presos
por terrorismo. Hoy Fujimori
purga condena de 25 años en
su país por delitos contra los
DDHH. En rueda de prensa
se dio a conocer un documento de tres cuartillas en el
que los especialistas se refiri-
eron detalladamente a la sentencia de la Corte IDH a favor de Leopoldo López y a
las reiteradas amenazas de
voceros de los Poderes Públicos de desconocer el fallo
que ordena restituirle de inmediato al líder de Voluntad
Popular sus derechos políticos, incluyendo el de postularse a la Presidencia de la
República.
Enumeran los varios artículos tanto de la Constitución
como de la Carta Democrática Interamericana que resultarían vulnerados de persistir
la actitud resistente del oficialismo.
Alfredo Morles fue el portavoz y leyó el documento en
el que se ratifican criterios ya
expuestos por otros especialistas, en el sentido de que
esas sentencias son "de ejecución obligatoria y vinculante". Le acompañaron Gerardo Fernández, Jorge Pabón, Enrique Sánchez Falcón, José Antonio Maes y
Juan Carlos Gutiérrez.
Precisaron que alegar, como
hacen los voceros del oficialismo, la "soberanía y la lucha contra la corrupción"
como razones para no acatar
la decisión a favor de López,
constituye "un grave error
jurídico inexcusable".
Indican que el Gobierno nacional debe solicitar a la
OEA el envío de una misión
de observación en 2012 y
ésta debe verificar la realización de elecciones "libres,
iguales, justas y competitivas" según los estándares
internacionales. En caso contrario, esa misión tendría que
informar del desacato al
Consejo Permanente de la
OEA.
También hablan en el extenso documento de que quienes
incurran en el desacato de la
citada sentencia, incurren en
los supuestos previstos en el
Artículo 155.3 del Código
Penal venezolano y pueden
ser sancionados con "pena de
arresto por tiempo de uno a
cuatro años".
Precisado sobre lo expresado
por varios funcionarios de los
poderes públicos que alegan
estar a la espera de una opinión de la Sala Constitucional del TSJ y actuar según
ese criterio, Morles fue tajante al indicar que "todos" los
funcionarios que no pongan
en práctica de inmediato lo
ordenado por la Corte IDH
incurren en delito, lo que
vale para las autoridades del
Poder Electoral, la Fiscalía y
la Procuraduría, entre otros.
El abogado Gerardo Fernández añadió que cualquier
acción ante el TSJ que intente cualquier funcionario público venezolano "no es más
que un subterfugio para ponerse al margen del sistema
interamericano de protección
de los DDHH y no es más
que una forma de subvertir el
orden constitucional y crear
un fraude a la Constitución".
LA NACION (AR) • INF. GENERAL • 29/9/2011 • 13:33:00
Desde la cárcel, Carrascosa acusó a la masajista
El viudo de María Marta dijo que Beatriz Michelini es "la principal encubridora"; el 4
de noviembre se dará a conocer el fallo contra los seis acusados
Cuando falta poco más de un
mes para que se de a conocer
el fallo del juicio por el encubrimiento del crimen de
María Marta García Belsunce, el viudo de la víctima,
Carlos Carrascosa, acusó,
desde la cárcel, a la masajista
"Quiso enchastrar a la familia, pegar a la familia. ¿Por
qué?, porque ella es la principal encubridora. Si hay
alguien acá que encubre es
ella, porque en este juicio
hay un asesino defendiéndo-
se y quien lo está encubriendo es ella", aseveró.
El juicio por el encubrimiento llegará a su fin el próximo
4 de noviembre, cuando el
Tribunal Oral en lo Criminal
1 de San Isidro resuelva si
son inocentes o culpables los
familiares y amigos de la
socióloga, para quienes se
pidieron penas de hasta seis
años de prisión.
La masajista llegó al juicio
imputada de haber lavado la
escena del crimen, pero la
Fiscalía pidió su absolución.
Desde la cárcel de Campana,
el viudo de María Marta confesó en una entrevista al canal 360TV: "Si hay algo que
me atormenta en sí es estar
preso por haberla matado a
ella, que es una de las dos
mujeres que más quise, mi
madre y ella. Es totalmente
inédito", consignó DyN.
Carrascosa confió en que
saldrá en libertad para buscar
al asesino de su esposa y
aceptó que no le sorprendería
que
Guillermo
Bartoli,
cuñado de María Marta, y
Horacio García Belsunce,
hermano, terminen en prisión.
"¿Cómo no va a estar preocupado si yo estoy acá y no
hice nada? ¿Qué puede esperar él con la experiencia que
tenemos nosotros?", reflexionó sobre la situación de
Bartoli, a quien los fiscales
intentaron imputarle, junto
con su esposa, Irene Hurtig,
la coautoría del homicidio.
"No me quiero suicidar, quiero vivir y el día de mañana
salir de acá, ser querellante y
seguir con la investigación y
todavía tengo la esperanza de
saber quién mató a Maríaà
Pienso en ella, desde ya, como que me siento en la obligación de descubrir quién la
mató, tengo una asignatura,
es como mi objetivo", concluyó.
delito de "encubrimiento",
pero la Cámara de Casación
Bonaerense agravó la calificación y lo consideró coautor
del homicidio de la socióloga
y ex directiva de Missing
Children.
El fallo está ahora en etapa
de apelación ante la Suprema Corte bonaerense, y tiene por delante todavía una
instancia más, la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación.
Carrascosa reconoció que
una eventual absolución a su
favor sería "por el beneficio
de la duda, porque hasta que
no se descubra el asesino
tiene que ser así", y reconoció con pesar: "Nunca voy a
poder gritar soy inocente, por
más que la Corte me deje
salir"..
Carrascosa fue condenado
por un tribunal oral por el
LA NACION (AR) • POLÍTICA • 29/9/2011 • 00:00:00
Intolerancia: de izquierda o derecha, es el peor vicio
Por Adrián Ventura | LA
NACION
La intolerancia es el vicio
más letal de toda sociedad
libre; por su culpa, derechas
e izquierdas cometen torpezas o excesos que desmerecen cualquier política o reclamo.
En los últimos siete días, esa
enfermedad social, propia de
un país crispado y atrapado
en un falso debate ideológico
que encubre otras ambicio-
nes, volvió a emerger. El
secretario de Comercio Interior, Guillermo Moreno; el
juez Alejandro Catania y el
Poder Ejecutivo, pero también los familiares de militares
y policías que, desde la derecha,protestaron contra el presidente de la Corte Suprema, Ricardo Lorenzetti, fueron carcomidos por ese vicio:
Es intolerante el Gobierno
cuando castiga con falta de
publicidad a los periódicos y
canales que no adhieren a la
línea oficial. En 2010, la
Corte condenó al Poder Ejecutivo a darle publicidad
oficial a Editorial Perfil, pero
nunca cumplió: Télam sólo le
entregó ocho avisos muy
pequeños, por lo cual la empresa evalúa denunciar hoy
mismo al Gobierno, para
pedirle al juez que le aplique
una multa.
El Poder Ejecutivo hizo de la
discriminación a los medios
una política: Tiempo Argentino y Página 12 se beneficiaron con el 42% de toda la
pauta entregada a los diarios
capitalinos durante los primeros cinco meses del año,
mientras que Canal 9 y Telefé se llevaron, respectivamente, el 47 y el 28% de la
torta entregada a los canales
de aire. Canal Trece se queda, apenas, con 0,5 por ciento.
Tal vez, también Moreno
obró con esa miopía cívica
cuando sancionó a las consultoras económicas por difundir índices de inflación
ajustados a la realidad o cuando denunció una irreal
maniobra en la que serían
cómplices consultoras, bancos y medios para transmitir
aquellos índices, con el objeto de engañar a la sociedad.
Para peor, Moreno se valió
del juez Alejandro Catania
para pedir que se cite a periodistas. Las casualidades no
existen. Fue también Moreno
quien, hace tres días, presionó al juez comercial Fernando Durao, durante una audiencia judicial, para que suspendiera varias asambleas de
accionistas de Papel Prensa.
Como la Justicia no suspendió esas asambleas de accionistas, el Estado decidió no
concurrir a la primera de las
dos reuniones sociales convocadas para anteayer. Entonces, en la votación el Estado salió derrotado. Pero el
Gobierno no acepta derrotas
y, por más que las votaciones
se hagan conforme lo ordenan las leyes y los jueces,
buscó instalar una versión
irreal: los diarios están echando a los representantes
del Estado del seno de Papel
Prensa. No es cierto, pero el
Gobierno, socio minoritario
de la empresa, pretende colocarse por encima de las leyes
que les exige a todas las empresas.
Pero fueron también muy
intolerantes los integrantes
de la Agrupación Hijos y
Nietos de Presos Políticos al
reclamar que se respeten las
garantías procesales de sus
familiares -militares y policías enjuiciados por gravísimas
violaciones de los derechos
humanos-, que escracharon a
Lorenzetti durante un acto en
la Facultad de Derecho.
El titular de la Corte, con un
discurso apropiado para un
juez pero usando un tono
enérgico, propio de un político avezado, ratificó que esos
juicios no tienen marcha atrás y aseguró que rige el
Estado de Derecho. El país
dio un paso judicial y cultural adelante, del que no se
puede regresar.
Ninguna razón puede justificar que desde la derecha o
desde la izquierda se intente
silenciar al otro. Pero los
familiares resultaron aún más
intolerantes cuando, sin recordar que viven bajo un
régimen constitucional, reivindicaron la guerra sucia,
El país, así, se aleja cada vez
más del verdadero pluralismo..
Lorenzetti pidió cambios y más jueces para agilizar las causas
El presidente de la Corte minimizó los incidentes con familiares de detenidos
Un día después de ser insultado por un grupo de familiares de detenidos por causas
de lesa humanidad, el presidente de la Corte Suprema
de Justicia, Ricardo Lorenzetti, admitió que "la gente
tiene razón cuando exige una
justicia más rápida", pero
advirtió que para ese fin son
necesarios "la modificación
de la legislación y más cantidad de jueces". Para despejar
cualquier duda, ratificó el
compromiso del máximo
tribunal con las causas por
violaciones a los derechos
humanos de la última dictadura militar.
"La población tiene razón al
exigir una justicia más rápida, pero eso requiere además
la modificación de legislación y más cantidad de jueces;
los tres factores deben ir juntos, con el apoyo de los poderes Legislativo y Ejecutivo", sostuvo Lorenzetti, ayer,
en Tucumán, donde participó
de las XXIII Jornadas Nacionales de Derecho Civil.
Anteayer, durante la presentación de su libro Derechos
humanos: justicia y reparación , en la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de
Buenos Aires, el titular del
máximo tribunal había sido
abucheado e insultado por
una docena de jóvenes autodenominados
Agrupación
Hijos y Nietos de Presos Políticos, que defendían a los
represores enjuiciados.
Ayer, Lorenzetti intentó minimizar el incidente. "No me
pareció importante. Importante fue la presentación del
libro y el proyecto actual,
que es la institucionalización
definitiva de los juicios de
lesa humanidad", dijo, antes
de anunciar que hoy visitará
los centros clandestinos de
detención El Pozo de Vargas
y el ex Arsenal Miguel de
Azcuénaga, donde el Equipo
Argentino de Antropología
Forense trabaja en la recuperación y reconocimiento de
restos de víctimas de la última dictadura militar.
Repudio y disculpas
La agresión al juez generó el
repudio de políticos, sindicalistas y organismos de derechos humanos. "Fue bastante
sorpresivo, nos dio mucho
pudor ver cómo lo insultaban
a Lorenzetti", dijo la titular
de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, quien
reivindicó la trayectoria del
magistrado y la respuesta
que, desde el escenario, les
dirigió a los manifestantes:
"No vamos a retroceder en
los juicios de lesa humanidad".
También lamentó el episodio
Taty Almeida, integrante de
la línea fundadora de Madres
de Plaza de Mayo. "Me da
mucha pena por estos jóvenes que se han criado en la
mentira, que no han sido capaces de analizar que están
defendiendo a genocidas y
que los juicios que se están
realizando se ajustan a derecho", afirmó.
Similar postura asumieron el
secretario de Derechos Humanos de la Nación, Eduardo
Luis Duhalde; el secretario
general del sindicato de los
judiciales, Julio Piumatto; la
diputada del Frente Amplio
Progresista Victoria Donda y
el legislador porteño de Proyecto Sur Julio Raffo.
Ayer, a través de su página
web, el grupo de jóvenes que
insultaron al juez pidió disculpas por los agravios, aunque los justificaron por la
"impotencia de la situación"
y por una supuesta reunión
que Lorenzetti les habría
prometido hace más de un
año. Lo mismo dijo en una
entrevista radial Aníbal Guevara, hijo del teniente coronel homónimo condenado a
cadena perpetua por delitos
de lesa humanidad.
En el sitio web de la agrupación, los jóvenes reconocen
que "se cometieron errores,
abusos y seguramente hubo
víctimas inocentes" durante
la última dictadura militar,
aunque sostienen que las
Fuerzas Armadas "ganaron la
guerra" y "gracias a ello se
pudo restablecer la democracia". Explícitamente, rechazan que hubiera existido terrorismo de Estado.
Rechazan los ataques de Moreno a un juez
El Colegio de Abogados de
la Ciudad de Buenos Aires
rechazó las acusaciones del
secretario de Comercio Interior de la Nación, Guillermo
Moreno, seguidas del intento
de intimidación al juez Fer-
nando Durao para que suspendiera la asamblea de accionistas de la empresa Papel
Prensa.
Como informó anteayer LA
NACION, el funcionario
acusó al magistrado de ser
amigo de uno de los abogados de la empresa durante
una audiencia en la que finalmente el juez se excusó de
seguir interviniendo en la
causa.
En un claro tono intimidatorio, Moreno le recordó al
juez Durao que el Estado
impulsa una denuncia penal
contra Papel Prensa por supuestas violaciones de los
derechos humanos. Al igual
que en otras ocasiones, mostró esa actitud, pese a que el
Estado jamás pudo aportar
prueba alguna sobre sus denuncias.
En una declaración aprobada
por el Directorio, la institución advirtió que se trata de
"un hecho grave contra la
independencia del Poder
Judicial" y que el ataque
intimidatorio del funcionario
constituye un "severo atropello al ejercicio de esa magistratura en la República
Argentina".
"Esta circunstancia, tan lamentable como censurable,
no se agota en el exabrupto.
Significa mucho más porque
reitera la concepción autoritaria del ejercicio del poder
público que la inspira",
señaló la institución, que
preside el doctor Raúl Aguirre Saravia.
"La preocupante cuestión de
fondo que subyace en este
caso -añade la declaraciónexcede lo anecdótico y debe
señalarse sin eufemismos:
exhibe un manifiesto desprecio por el cumplimiento de la
Constitución nacional y las
leyes; como también del hostigamiento a derechos y garantías de los particulares."
El Colegio de Abogados de
la Ciudad de Buenos Aires
hizo público, así, su repudio
"a este modo de ejercer el
poder, que socava los fundamentos básicos de nuestro
Estado de Derecho", y reclamó el "cese inmediato de
esa clase de conductas antidemocráticas y antirrepublicanas".
LE FIGARO (FR) • ACTUALITÉ • 29/9/2011 • 13:21:00
Le Niger n'extradiera pas Saadi Kadhafi
Le Premier ministre du Niger, Brigi Rafini, a réitéré
dans l ouest de la France le
refus de son pays d extrader
Saadi Kadhafi, après la requête d Interpol d arrêter le
fils de l ex-dirigeant libyen à
la demande des nouvelles
autorités libyennes. "Saadi
Kadhafi est en sûreté, en sécurité à Niamey, dans les
mains de l Etat du Niger", et
il n est "pas question" de l
extrader "en Libye pour l
instant", a déclaré M. Rafini
à l AFP à Saint-Brieuc, ou il
se trouvait pour des entretiens sur la coopération décentralisée. Pour l extrader en
Libye, il faut un accord avec
ce pays, et "il faut être sûr qu
il aura droit à une défense
équitable" et à "un traitement
équitable", a expliqué lepremier ministre. "Est ce que
ces conditions sont rassemblées aujourd hui? Non", a-til ajouté. Par ailleurs, Saadi
Kadhafi et les autres responsables libyens qui ont fui au
Niger "ne sont pas à notre
connaissance poursuivis par
la Cour Pénale internationale", a-t-il souligné. "Peutêtre le seront-ils un jour, c est
possible", mais ce n est pas le
cas actuellement, a-t-il souligné.
L
organisation
policière internationale Interpol a annoncé jeudi avoir
émis une "notice rouge" pour
demander à ses 188 pays
membres l arrestation de Saadi Kadhafi, l un des fils de l
ex-dirigeant libyen Mouammar Kadhafi, "à la demande
des autorités libyennes".
Iran: un trafiquant de drogue pendu
Un Iranien, condamné à mort
pour trafic de drogue a été
pendu hier matin à Qom (150
km au sud de Téhéran), rapporte aujourd hui le quotidien
gouvernemental Iran. Il a été
pendu à la prison centrale de
la ville. Cette pendaison porte à 204 le nombre des exécutions en Iran depuis le début de l année, selon un décompte de l AFP réalisé à
partir des informations parcellaires publiées par les médias locaux. En 2010, 179
personnes avaient été pendues, d après un comptage similaire de l AFP. L organisation
internationale de défense des
droits de l Homme human
rights Watch (HRW) avait
pour sa part recensé 388 exécutions alors qu Amnesty
International en avait compté
252. L Iran est l un des pays
qui procède au plus grand
nombre d exécutions dans le
monde, avec la Chine, l Arabie saoudite et les Etats-Unis.
En vertu de la charia (loi
islamique) le meurtre, le viol,
le vol à main armée, le trafic
de drogue et l adultère y sont
passibles de la peine capitale.
Gaccio: 500.000 ? requis contre Canal
Une amende de 500.000 euros a été requise ce jeudi devant le tribunal correctionnel
de Paris contre la chaîne Canal , responsable, selon le
parquet, de l espionnage dont
a été victime au début des
années 2000 le père des
Guignols de l Info, Bruno
Gaccio. C est "pour le compte et pour l intérêt" de la
chaîne cryptée qu ont agi les
cinq autres prévenus de cette
affaire d une "gravité extrême", aux yeux de la procureure Anne de Fontette. La
magistrate a réclamé des
condamnations entre six
mois et un an de prison ferme
à l encontre de ces cinq prévenus parmi lesquels les anciens responsables de la sé-
curité de Canal , Gilles Kaehlin et son adjoint Gilbert
Borelli. "Peut-on imaginer
que MM. Kaehlin et Borelli
aient imaginé seuls, dans
leurs petites têtes de voyous",
de constituer un dossier sur
M. Gaccio - qui menait alors
une contestation interne contre le licenciement du patron
de la chaîne Pierre Lescure sur la base de filatures, d
écoutes et d interceptions de
courriers électroniques, s est
interrogée Mme de Fontette.
Pour la représentante du
ministère public, c est bien la
chaîne Canal "qui avait intérêt à connaître toutes les activités de M. Gaccio". "Il ne s
agit pas de savoir si la chaîne
a donné telle instruction à
telle personne" pour que sa
responsabilité en tant que
personne morale soit engagée, a soutenu le parquet. Canal
, qui a toujours réfuté avoir
fait espionner l auteur des
Guignols, encourait une amende de 1,8 millions d euros pour "recel de violation
du secret professionnel" et
"complicité d atteinte à la vie
privée". L affaire avait éclaté
en 2005 lorsqu un exemployé des services de sécurité de la chaîne, Pierre
Martinet, avait révélé dans
un livre avoir filé et photographié Bruno Gaccio à la
demande de sa hiérarchie. Le
procès s achève vendredi
avec les plaidoiries de la défense.
Bien mal acquis: 16 véhicules saisis
Les avocats français de la
République de Guinée équatoriale envisagent d engager
une action contre la France
auprès de la Cour Internationale de justice (CIJ) après
la saisie en France de 16 voitures de luxe qui appartiendraient au fils du président
Teodoro Obiang. Cette saisie
de 16 voitures de luxe, dont
au moins une Bugatti Veyron, dont la valeur marchande est supérieure au million d euros, a été ordonnée
par les juges d instruction
saisis de l affaire dite des
biens mal acquis, a-t-on précisé de sources judiciaires.
Cette confiscation constitue
"une atteinte à la souveraine-
té d un Etat étranger", a déclaré jeudi à l AP l une des
avocats de ce pays, Me Isabelle Thomas Werner. La
Cour Internationale de justice règle les litiges et différends juridiques qui lui sont
soumis par des Etats. La justice enquête sur les conditions d acquisition en France
de biens au patrimoine de
trois chefs d Etat africains,
feu Omar Bongo (Gabon),
Denis Sassou Nguesso (Congo-Brazzaville) et Teodoro
Obiang
(GuinéeEquatoriale). Cette enquête
"qui vise à juger de l usage
fait par un Etat étranger de
ses fonds publics, viole les
principes les plus établis du
droit international et notamment le principe d égalité
souveraine des Etats", ont
dénoncé dans un communiqué Me Olivier Pardo, Isabelle Thomas Werner et Ludovic Landiveaux. En novembre 2010, la Cour de
cassation a jugé recevable la
plainte d une association anti-corruption, Transparency
International, qui visait les
familles de trois chefs d Etat
africains. Par deux fois, le
parquet de Paris avait classé
sans suite les plaintes de cette association avant qu elle
ne dépose plainte avec Constitution de partie civile, ce
qui désigne automatiquement
un juge d instruction.
LE MONDE (FR) • INTERNATIONAL • 29/9/2011 • 09:27:25
Le Parlement européen favorable à la reconnaissance de la Palestine
Le Parlement européen a
demandé aux gouvernements
de l UE, jeudi 29 septembre,
de répondre favorablement à
la demande palestinienne de
reconnaissance d un Etat,
présentée la semaine dernière
à l Onu par le président de l
Autorité
palestinienne,
Mahmoud Abbas. Les eurodéputés ont qualifié cette
demande de "légitime".
Le demande déposée vendredi par le président Mahmoud
Abbas est a priori vouée à l
échec en raison du veto américain. L Union européenne,
divisée sur la question, n a
pas officiellement pris position face à la demande de M.
Abbas.
HUIT VOIX SUR QUINZE
Les Palestiniens ont pourtant
revendiqué jeudi les voix de
huit des quinze membres du
Conseil de sécurité de l ONU
en faveur de leur demande d
adhésion d un Etat de Pales-
tine. "Et nous travaillons d
arrache-pied pour en avoir un
neuvième et un dixième", a
déclaré le ministre palestinien des Affaires étrangères
Riyad al-Malki. Car ce soutien est encore insuffisant : il
leur faut obtenir au moins
neuf voix pour que leur requête puisse faire l objet d
une "recommandation" du
Conseil de sécurité puis d un
vote de l Assemblée générale
de l ONU.
Six membres du Conseil de
sécurité, permanents ou non,
ont déjà dit qu ils approuvaient la demande palestinienne:
Chine, Russie, Brésil, Inde,
Liban et Afrique du Sud. M.
al-Malki a indiqué qu il avait
reçu des assurances du Nigeria et du Gabon qu ils voteraient en faveur d un Etat
palestinien. Plusieurs membres du Conseil de sécurité
sont indécis ou n ont pas révélé leur position: la GrandeBretagne, la France, l Allemagne, le Nigeria, le Gabon,
la Bosnie et le Portugal.
Certains Etats, dont la France, seraient favorables à l
octroi aux Palestiniens du
statut intermédiaire d Etat
observateur, avec renoncement à poursuivre Israël dans
l immédiat devant la Cour
Pénale internationale. L
Union européenne a uni vendredi sa voix à celle des autres membres du Quartette
(Etats-Unis, ONU et Russie)
pour appeler Israël et les Palestiniens à reprendre leurs
pourparlers de paix, avec l
objectif d aboutir dans un an.
ÉVITER LES DIVISIONS
Le Parlement "demande aux
Etats membres, en les appu-
yant, d être unis dans leur
attitude face à la demande
légitime du peuple palestinien à être représenté en tant
qu Etat aux Nations unies
présentée par l Autorité palestinienne, et d éviter les
divisions entre Etats membres", affirme-t-il dans une
résolution adoptée à une large majorité.
Réaffirmant son "appui sans
réserve à la solution de deux
Etats, sur la base des
frontières de 1967, avec Jérusalem pour capitale des
deux entités", il demande à
Israël de mettre un terme à l
extension des colonies et aux
Palestiniens de cesser les tirs
de roquettes depuis la Bande
de Gaza.
"L ensemble des coûts imposés par l économie israélienne à l économie palestinienne
a été de 6,89 milliards de
dollars (5,04 mds d euros) en
2010, soit un effarant 84,9%
du PIB total palestinien",
affirme ce rapport préparé
par le ministère palestinien
de l Economie et un institut
de recherches économique de
Jérusalem.
"En d autres termes, si les
Palestiniens n avaient pas été
soumis à l occupation israélienne, la taille de leur économie aurait presque doublé", souligne le document.
Sans l occupation israélienne,
l économie palestinienne
aurait presque doublé
Ce rapport accuse au premier
chef le blocus de la bande de
Gaza, les restrictions sur l
eau et le manque d accès des
Palestiniens aux ressources
naturelles, comme la mer
Morte et les carrières.
L occupation israélienne a
coûté à l économie palestinienne cinq milliards d euros
en 2010, l équivalent de près
de la moitié de la croissance
des Territoires palestiniens,
selon un rapport publié jeudi
à Ramallah.
Selon un récent rapport de la
Banque mondiale, la croissance
palestinienne
a
régulièrement progressé en
2009/2010 et devait atteindre
7% en 2011. Cette croissance
est alimentée par les dons de
la communauté internationale
plutôt que par le secteur privé.
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (BL) • POLITIK • 29/9/2011 • 14:57:00
Streit um Gesundheitsreform: Obamas wichtigste Reform kommt vor
Gericht
Showdown vor dem Supreme Court: Der Oberste Gerichtshof soll den Streit um Barack
Obamas wichtigstes Projekt schlichten - die gesetzliche Krankenversicherung. Eine Entscheidung dürfte erst 2012 fallen, ausgerechnet in der heißen Wahlkampfphase.
Von Reymer Klüver, Washington
Barack Obamas hochumstrittene Gesundheitsreform dürfte erneut zum Wahlkampfthema werden. Das USJustizministerium hat den
Supreme Court des Landes
gebeten, über die Entscheidung eines Berufungsgerichts
in Atlanta zu befinden. Dieses hatte die in der Reform
verankerte
Pflicht,
eine
Krankenversicherung
abzuschließen, als verfassungswidrig verworfen.
Die US-Regierung hätte den
Rechtsstreit auf dem Instanzenweg
hinauszögern
können, hat sich aber offensichtlich dagegen entschieden. Ein Urteil des höchsten
Gerichts in den USA dürfte
aller Voraussicht nach erst
im Juni kommenden Jahres
ergehen, also in der heißen
Phase des Wahlkampfs für
die
Kongressund
Präsidentschaftswahlen im
November 2012.
Die US-Regierung äußerte
am Mittwoch Zuversicht,
dass die obersten Richter die
Krankenversicherungspflicht
nicht als unstatthaften staatlichen Eingriff in die Freiheitsrechte der Bürger ablehnen
würden. Noch am selben Tag
reichten 26 Bundesstaaten
ebenfalls eine Petition beim
Supreme Court ein mit der
gegenteiligen Bitte, die Versicherungspflicht zu untersagen.
In einer Erklärung des Justizministeriums hieß es, der
Streit um die Reform sei eine
"Angelegenheit von ernster
nationaler Bedeutung" und
müsse daher rasch entschieden werden. In der jüngeren
US-Geschichte habe es vergleichbare Versuche gegeben, weitreichende gesetzliche Regelungen des Bundes
mit Klagen zu verhindern.
Als Beispiele wurden die
Einführung der gesetzlichen
Rentenversicherung in den
dreißiger Jahren des vorigen
Jahrhunderts und die Bürgerrechtsgesetze in den sechziger Jahren genannt. "All diese Versuche sind gescheitert."
Im Kern geht es nicht so sehr
um inhaltliche Fragen, ob
etwa eine allgemeine Krankenversicherungspflicht angesichts von 50 Millionen
Unversicherten
angezeigt
wäre oder nicht. Erörtern
werden die Richter vielmehr
eine in der amerikanischen
Geschichte immer wieder
heftig umstrittene scheinbar
abseitige Verfassungsfrage:
Die sogenannte commerce
clause (Handelsklausel) der
Verfassung gibt dem Kongress in Washington das Recht, Fragen des Wirtschaftsverkehrs zwischen den einzelnen Bundesstaaten zu regeln.
Die Frage ist nun, ob sich aus
dieser Klausel das Recht ableitet, die Versicherungspflicht einzuführen. Die Regierung sagt, ganz klar, weil
die Einführung der allgemeinen
Krankenversicherung
"direkte, deutlich wahrnehmbare und gut dokumentierte
Auswirkungen
auf
den
Wirtschaftsverkehr zwischen
den Bundesstaaten" habe.
Dahinter steckt das Argument, dass in den USA im
Notfall zwar auch die Unversicherten behandelt würden.
In den meisten Fällen
könnten sie aber die Kosten
dann nicht tragen. Die müssten auf die Allgemeinheit
umgelegt werden. Insofern
habe diese ein Recht auf eine
gesetzliche Regelung, die sie
von diesen Kosten entlastet,
die Unversicherte verursachen.
Hauptargument des Berufungsgerichts in Atlanta, das
die Reform verworfen hat,
war es hingegen, dass die
Versicherungspflicht
eine
"vollkommen neue und potentiell
grenzenlose
Machtanmaßung des Kongresses" sei, die von der
commerce clause nicht gedeckt sei. Dieser Meinung
schlossen sich 26 Bundesstaaten an, in denen die Republikaner die parlamentarische
Mehrheit haben. Es sei ohne
Beispiel
in
der
USGeschichte, sagte Paul Clement, oberster Rechtsberater
der Regierung unter George
W. Bush und nun Vertreter
dieser 26 Bundesstaaten vor
Gericht, dass eine so große
Zahl einzelner Bundesstaaten
eine Gesetzesinitiative Washingtons anfechte. In der
Tat zeigt es zumindest, wie
tief diese Frage das Land
politisch gespalten hat.
Es wird erwartet, dass der
Supreme Court das Verfahren aufgreift und im kommenden Sommer ein Urteil
spricht. Worüber, ist weniger
klar. So könnte es sein, dass
die neun Richter eine Entscheidung über die zentrale
Frage der Versicherungspflicht auf die Zeit nach Inkrafttreten des Gesetzes vertagen:
2014. Indes haben alle Beteiligten das Gericht gebeten,
auch in der Sache zu entscheiden.
Das Kalkül der Regierung,
das Verfahren zu beschleunigen, ist nicht völlig klar, zumal die Entscheidung des
Gerichts völlig im Ungewissen liegt. Vier konservative
Richter stehen vier linksliberalen Richtern gegenüber, ein
in Wirtschaftsfragen eher
konservativ urteilender Richter bildet die Mitte zwischen
den Lagern. Die Washington
Post zitiert indes einen hochrangigen Mitarbeiter des
Justizministeriums, dem zufolge die Reform bis 2014
noch so viel Vorbereitungen
auf Seiten der Regierung in
Washington, der Bundesstaaten und der Wirtschaft bedürfe, dass eine endgültige Entscheidung durch das Gericht
dringend nötig sei und nicht
länger hinausgezögert werden dürfe.
THE GUARDIAN (LO) • NEWS • 29/9/2011
South African prosecuted for helping his mother to die
Sean Davison, on trial next month in New Zealand, talks about how he supplied the morphine and a moment of joy
As the sun set over the bay
Sean Davison crushed "a
good dozen" morphine tablets. Mixing the powder into
a glass of water, he told his
cancer-ravaged mother: "If
you drink this you will die."
Six hours later, on 25 October 2006, his mother did die,
in her sleep, at the age of 85.
"It was a moment of joy,"
Davison said.
It is Davison s candidness
about helping his mother die
that has exposed him to death
threats, split his family and
on 26 October will see him
stand trial in New Zealand on
a charge of attempted murder.
Speaking at his house in Cape Town, he said: "No one
has the right to judge me
until they have been in exactly the same position. What
would I have done? That is
the question an individual
must ask themselves before
sending me a death threat by
text message."
Davison, 49, is head of the
forensic DNA laboratory at
the University of the Western
Cape. In the years since his
mother died he has transformed from a quiet, doting son
to a campaigner for the legalisation of euthanasia. "There
should be a mechanism whereby a person who is terminally ill can say they want to
have a dignified death, and
society should respect that,"
he said. "What is important is
kindness."
His mother, Patricia Ferguson, was a Protestant, halfScots, half-Irish, born in Istanbul in 1921. She was the
daughter of a journalist and
became a doctor. She met her
husband, Patrick, a Northern
Ireland-born Protestant, at
medical school in London.
During the blitz she was a
radar operator. Patrick served
11 years in the army and
navy. They then emigrated to
the west coast of New Zealand, and practisedin the
town of Hokitika, which had,
as a principal feature, .
"We were four children,"
said Davison, the youngest
son, whose living room is
lined with his mother s watercolour landscapes. "It was
a fantastic place to grow up,
with beech trees, rivers, lots
of rain and tropical forest. I
have great memories of going out with her into the
countryside. She d paint while I would look under rocks
for things."
While Patrick enjoyed socialising with the local Catholic
priest, Patricia was more for
art and reading. The family
did not attend church but it
was seen as important to understand the Bible, so the
children were sent to Sunday
school.
After Patrick died – a quick
death in 1996, two weeks
after he was diagnosed with
lung cancer – Patricia moved
to a house on the rocks at
Broad Bay, near Dunedin, to
be closer to her daughter,
Joanna, a teacher. By then
the eldest son, Fergus, a biomedical scientist, was living
in London. Mary, another
daughter and gerontologist,
was in Australia. Sean had
settled in South Africa.
"Mum had an active retirement with art classes and a
small but loyal group of friends. She was an avid reader
and she enjoyed travel-
ling.With Fergus we spent
her 80th birthday in Kathmandu. The next big trip, for
her 85th, was going to be to
Peru."
In 2004, at the age of 83,
Patricia was diagnosed with
cancer. She thought she was
going to die, and the children
rushed to New Zealand. She
responded to treatment but
two years later, in August
2006, the cancer was found
to have spread from the colon to her lungs, liver and
cerebellum. The children
returned to say goodbye.
"Mum wrote a living will, in
longhand, saying she wanted
to be in control of her death,"
said Davison. "She was going on hunger strike, did not
want to be force-fed or given
antibiotics. This did not come as a surprise to us. She
had always said she would
rather take an overdose than
become a burden. I decided
to stay on in New Zealand
until the end. I had no idea
how awful it would be."
Davison describes the horror
of watching his mother, over
33 days, weaken yet fail to
die. "She was bedridden and
she soon lost the ability to
move her legs. I attached
strings to her feet so that she
could use her arms to move
her legs from time to time.
Then she lost the use of her
arms. I had to lift her out of
bed on to the commode.
"I had to do everything for
her. Our lives were completely intertwined. Then came
the bed sores. In the last few
days I found that when I mo-
ved her she would bruise
from the touch of my hands.
Her flesh was actually rotting.
"On the 12th day she asked
me to find out how long it
had taken IRA prisoner
Bobby Sands to die: 67 days.
But I told her he was a
young, fit, man. I found another case, from a hospice in
New Zealand where a hunger-strike patient died after
22 days. She was horrified it
was going to take so long. I
would open the curtains in
the morning and, with her
acerbic sense of humour, she
would exclaim: I m immortal
.
"I found out she d asked her
best friend s son, a biochemist, who came to visit us, to
help her die. But he couldn t
for religious reasons. Then
she asked me."
Initially Davison refused. "At
her request I had hoarded the
morphine prescribed by her
GP," he said. I did not discuss it with anyone because
there was nothing to discuss
or to understand. "It was my
mother s choice. She was
lucid. The situation had been
forced on us and there was
no stepping back from it."
The evening of his mother s
death was happy, he said.
"After I gave her the drink,
she said: You are a wonderful son. She was smiling.
After so much suffering in
the hands of medical staff
who wanted to prevent her
from dying, she had achieved
dignity. It was a small but
mighty victory."His mother
died at midnight and a dark
veil of loneliness descended
on her youngest son s life. "I
felt abandoned."
Over the next few months, he
edited his diary. His book,
Before We Say Goodbye,
was published in New Zealand in June 2009. But the
book did not include the
chapter on the morphine overdose. That information
was leaked to New Zealand s
Sunday Herald newspaper.
Davison was arrested in Dunedin in September 2009,
and he was charged with
attempted murder.
In an unprecedented move
for a defendant in an attempted murder case, Davison
was released on bail. He has
been able to return to Cape
Town to work and spend
time with Raine Pan, the 38year-old Chinese woman
with whom he settled after
his mother s death. They have two small sons, Flynn and
Finnian.
He will appear at Dunedin
high court on 26 October for
a trial that is expected to last
three weeks. Members of the
New Zealand Voluntary Euthanasia Society have told
Davison they plan to demonstrate outside the court
wearing T-shirts printed with
the slogan "Every mum
should have a Sean."
Euthanasia is illegal in New
Zealand, though two parliamentary attempts in the past
20 years got close to putting
it on a similar legal footing to
laws in the Netherlands,
Switzerland and Oregon.
A few days ago Davison addressed the launch of Dignity
South Africa, to campaign
for a change in the law there.
Davison s book s publication
split the siblings. Fergus, 60,
said: "The fact that Sean had
given mum a little bit too
much morphine so that she
died a few days earlier than
she might have done did not
surprise us. What surprised
me was to see the family s
dirty linen hung out in public. Mary has taken it the
worst."
Since his mother s death,
SeanDavison has settled with
a Chinese woman, Raine
Pan, 38, with whom he has
two sons. He regrets the rift
the book caused. "I also regret being in a situation where I had to help my mother to
die," he said. But he does not
regret the morphine overdose. "She just wanted to die at
home. It is such a simple
request, you have to respect
it." Law around the world
The law governing assisted
suicide in England and Wales
is more than 50 years old and
has been criticised for being
unclear. Under the Suicide
Act 1961, anyone who assists
or encourages suicide in England and Wales could face
up to 14 years in prison.
But in 2009 Debbie Purdy
brought a court challenge
that helped clarify when
charges will be brought. There have been no prosecutions
in the past 18 months since
the Crown Prosecution Service issued fresh guidance.
The director of public prose-
cutions says, however, there
is no "blanket policy" not to
prosecute.
Around the world the trend
in legislation suggests a gradual shift towards decriminalisation.
Switzerland, Luxembourg,
Belgium, the Netherlands
and the US states of Oregon,
Montana and Washington
have all legislated to allow
assisted suicide in clearly
defined situations.
The European court of human rights ruled this year
that while an individual has a
right to decide how and when
to die, the state is not obliged
to provide the means to do
so.
Last year Germany s highest
Criminal Court overturned
a lawyer s conviction for
attempted manslaughter, ruling that assisted suicide is
legal in cases where it is based on the prior request of
the patient.
Some countries have specific
legislation outlawing assisted
suicide, including Italy, Ireland and Canada, while others prosecute cases using
manslaughter charges, such
as Sweden. In Canada a proassisted suicide group is seeking to change the law following the high-profile case
of Sue Rodriguez, whose
two-year legal battle ended
when the Canadian Supreme
Court ruled against her in
1991.
The French senate voted against proposed legislation ear-
lier this year which would
have permitted assisted suicide if requested by an adult.
In 2009 a Constitutional
debate in Italy erupted over
the case of Eluana Englaro,
who was in a coma following
a car crash. Italian prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi
intervened after consultation
with the Vatican in a bid to
keep her alive.
Saudi woman driver saved from lashing by King Abdullah
Shaima Jastaina was sentenced to be lashed 10 times after being found guilty of driving a
car without permission
Sam Jones
A Saudi woman sentenced to
be lashed 10 times for defying the country s ban on
female drivers has had her
punishment overturned by
the king.
The woman, named as Shaima Jastaina and believed to
be in her 30s, was found
guilty of driving without
permission in Jeddah in July.
Her case was the first in which a legal punishment was
handed down for a violation
of the ban in the ultraconservative Muslim nation.
Although there has been no
official confirmation of the
ruling, Princess Amira alTaweel, wife of the Saudi
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal,
tweeted: "Thank God, the
lashing of [Shaima] is cancelled. Thanks to our beloved
king. I am sure all Saudi
women will be so happy, I
know I am."
She later added that she and
her husband had spoken to
Shaima, who told them: "The
king s orders washed the
fears I lived with after this
unjust sentence."
Jastaina was sentenced on
Monday — a day after King
Abdullah promised to protect
women s rights and said
women would be allowed to
participate in municipal elections in 2015. He also promised to appoint women to the
all-male Shura council advisory body.
The moves underline the
challenge facing Abdullah,
known as a reformer, as he
pushes gently for change
while trying not to antagonise the powerful clergy and a
conservative segment of the
population.
ditions and religious views
that hold that giving freedom
of movement to women
would make them vulnerable
to sins.
Police usually stop female
drivers, question them and let
them go after they sign a
pledge not to drive again. But
dozens of women have continued to take to the roads
since June in a campaign to
break the taboo.
Saudi Arabia is the only
country in the world that
bans women — both Saudi
and foreign — from driving.
The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers,
and those who cannot afford
the $300-$400 (£190-£255) a
month for a driver must rely
on male relatives to drive
them.
Although there are no written
laws that restrict women
from driving, the prohibition
is rooted in conservative tra-
Saudi woman s lashing sentence undermines voting breakthrough
Rights groups say decision to flog Shaimaa Justaneyah for driving car payback for allowing women to take part in elections
Martin Chulov
Saudi rights groups have
claimed that a decision to
sentence a woman to 10 lashes for driving her car was
payback by the ruling class
for this week s landmark
speech by King Abdullah,
which cleared the way for
women to participate in elections.
The sentence is believed to
be the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia that has not involved a violation of Islamic
law. It was handed down in
the wake of around 20 women being arrested over the
past few months for taking to
the wheel as part of a campaign to showcase their lack
of rights in the rigidly conservative society.
On Tuesday it was reported
that King Abdullah had intervened to revoke the sentence. The news came in a
tweet from Princess Ameerah, wife of billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Earlier the convicted woman,
Shaimaa Justaneyah, was
reportedly in shock at the
sentence. "I cannot think
straight because of what I
have had to go through,"
Justaneyah told the website
Arab News.
Another female driver, Najla
Hariri, is due to stand trial in
front of the same prosecutor
early next month.
Justaneyah s friend Samar
Bedawi, who also drives her
car around the Red Sea city
of Jeddah, said the sentence
undermined the king s speech, which had won plaudits
from the international community.
"She is depressed and doesn t
want to talk about it, mainly
because of the tribal rules
which forbid using our names like this in the media,"
said Bedawi. "She is very
scared. The king s speech
was intended to quieten the
religious current in Saudi
Arabia. Both the judges reacted to this and want to show
that they clearly hold the
reins.
"It was a big breakthrough
when the king announced
that women could vote …
There was joy felt all around
the country. But then reality
sunk in and it was clear that
he was just postponing what
should be a basic right by
another four years."
Earlier this week the 87-yearold king decreed that women
could take part in the next
council elections in 2015.
However, women will not be
able to cast votes in the 2011
ballot, which will be held
across Saudi
Thursday.
Arabia
on
Another Jeddah-based woman, Sulafa Kurdi, said the
Saudi establishment was fighting back. "They are trying
to say that they don t want to
give us rights even though
the king gave women the
right to vote and to join the
congress of Saudi Arabia."
The king s announcements
have been many years in the
making and are expected to
meet resistance from a ruling
class that is underpinned by a
conservative clerical base
which staunchly opposes a
broader role for women.
The sentence, handed down
by a court in Jeddah on Tuesday, was a sharp escalation
from earlier punishments
handed down to female drivers over the past month.
"All of them had to sign statements that they wouldn t do
it again," said rights campaigner Waleed Abdul alKheir. "This sentence is the
first time anything like this
has happened."
Justaneyah was arrested around the same time as several other female drivers took
to the streets during the
summer in a show of defiance that was broadcast around
the world and on social media sites. The mini rebellion
soon took on the feel of a
campaign and tapped into the
current of self determination
which is sweeping the Middle East as part of the Arab
spring.
The themes of the regional
revolt, such as popular participation, have resonated with
some in Saudi Arabia, where
the Muslim holy book, the
Qur an, acts as the Constitution, but few had dared to
take to the streets to push for
change. "The world is mistaken, however, if it thinks the
right to drive is our most
important demand," said
Saudi journalist Rima alMukhtar, who has covered
the plight of female drivers.
"There are many others that
need to be addressed even
before that. It s the time for
Saudi women to shine, time
to start investing in themselves, time to prove that they
are up to taking responsibility. It can be done within the
parameters of our religion
and culture. We must not
give ground to those who
claim that women s rights are
a western intrusion into our
way of life."
Several women interviewed
said they did not believe the
sentence of 10 lashes would
be carried out. They said the
threat of flogging women for
driving was likely to deter
many from continuing the
campaign to drive. "I would
love to continue driving,"
said Kurdi. "But I don t want
to rush back. I have my mother s state of mind to consider."
After handing out plaudits
earlier in the week for Saudi
Arabia s apparent readiness
to allow women a greater
role in civic life, international groups have renewed
their strident criticism in the
wake of the court decision.
"Belatedly allowing women
to vote in council elections is
all well and good," said Amnesty International s Middle
East and north Africa deputy
director, Philip Luther. "But
if they are still going to face
being flogged for trying to
exercise their right to freedom of movement then the
king s much-trumpeted reforms actually amount to
very
little."
UK not monitoring safety of Tamils deported to Sri Lanka
Admission came hours before up to 50 people denied asylum were flown back despite
warnings they risk torture or even death
Ian Cobain
The government has conceded that it is doing almost
nothing to establish what is
happening to scores of Tamils who are being forcibly
removed from the UK, despite concerns for their safety in
Sri Lanka.
A flight chartered by the UK
Border Agency was due to
depart on Wednesday with
up to 50 failed asylum applicants on board, 24 hours after
several human rights groups
warned that they could face
detention without trial, torture or even death.
As lawyers for some of the
individuals
lodged
lastminute appeals, the Home
Office claimed that arrangements to monitor the welfare
of the deportees had been
sub-contracted to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental body. "They
do it on our behalf," a spokesman said.
When the IOM denied this,
the Border Agency conceded
that the only measure being
taken to ensure the safety of
Tamils who are forcibly removed from the UK to Sri
Lanka is to give them the
telephone number and address of the British high
commission in Colombo.
In a letter to Keith Best, head
of Freedom from Torture,
one of the NGOs expressing
concern about the deportations, Rob Whiteman, chief
executive of the UK Border
Agency, said: "Individuals
are provided with the contact
details of the high commission in Colombo and may
contact them if they require
any assistance."
Best had asked Damian Green, the immigration minister,
to explain whether any arrangements were in place to
monitor the safety of deportees.
The Foreign Office believes
that the humanitarian and
security situation has improved for both Tamils and the
majority Sinhalese population since civil war ended in
May 2009.
However, Freedom from
Torture, human rights Watch and Amnesty International
are all expressing concern
about the safety of Tamils
forced to return, saying there
is evidence that they are con-
tinuing to suffer severe mistreatment or are being "disappeared".
There is also concern among
human rights groups and
immigration lawyers that the
Border Agency is taking decisions on the basis of assurances given by Sri Lankan
intelligence officers – the
very people accused of perpetrating many of the alleged
abuses.
In its latest report on the risks
faced by Tamils imprisoned
by the government, the Border Agency says it has relied
in part on an assurance that
the UK high commission in
Colombo obtained from senior intelligence officials.
The report quotes an official
at the mission as saying last
May: "I asked the senior government intelligence officials if there was any truth in
allegations that the Sri Lankan authorities were torturing
suspects. They denied this
was the case and added that
many Sri Lankans who had
claimed asylum abroad had
inflicted wounds on themselves in order to create scars to
support their stories."
A number of Tamils who had
been taken into detention in
recent weeks after the failure
of their asylum applications
were told at the last moment
on Wednesday that they
would not be put on the flight due to depart that afternoon, as had been planned.
After several hours of protracted legal wrangles, which
saw several Tamils taken off
the aircraft and returned to
detention centres, the flight
left from Stansted airport in
Essex at around 8pm, five
hours later than planned.
Libyans seek justice, but who goes and who stays?
A purge of Gaddafi collaborators to end corruption and cronyism risks putting on trial
people needed to help run the country
Ian Black
Libya s National Oil Corporation is housed in an imposing building near Tripoli s
old royal palace, its concrete
and mirrored glass facade a
monument to the country s
wealth and a face of modernity in a ramshackle capital.
And many of its employees
are furious.
In the courtyard outside,
hundreds gathered one hot
morning this week to demand
that the principles of the revolution that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi be implemented in their own workplace – and across free Libya. "No to corruption," they
chanted, as armed rebels looked on. "Purges before reconstruction," went their
punchiest slogan.
Najwa Bishti, of the NOC
contracts department, was
suspended and interrogated
by the secret police in 2009
for complaining about irregularities in the sale of an oil
refinery. "What we are against is corrupt people who
loot our wealth and trade in
our blood," she raged. "Now
we need clean people who
didn t have a relationship
with the previous regime.
The worst of them must be
tried and put in prison."
Complaints about corruption,
cronyism and mismanagement are rife and, although
Libyans are still euphoric at
the downfall of the man they
call "the tyrant", many warn
that building a better future
needs to start with exposing
past misdeeds.
Next in line for a reckoning
are what they call mutasaliqeen (climbers or opportunists), Gaddafi loyalists who
now paint themselves as supporters of the revolution.
"These are people who were
completely green [the signature colour of the old Jamahiriya (Gaddafi s "state of the
masses")] and they want to
change colour like chameleons," laughed activist Ahmed
al-Ghazali.
There is anger too at Gumhouria Bank, the country s
biggest bank. Employees are
calling for the sacking of
general manager Abdulfatah
Ghaffar, who managed the
finances of the "brother leader" until the very end and
bankrolled petrol-smuggling
from Tunisia. "He treated us
like slaves and gave Gaddafi
everything he needed," said
spokesman Kamal Ahmed.
"This man is a symbol of the
old regime and he must go."
Protesters like these are targeting executives at the mobile-phone provider Libyana,
in hospitals, universities and
at other state entities all over
Libya.
Charges of collaboration
with Gaddafi echo the experience of eastern European
countries after 1989. Resentment of the August revolutionaries is Libya s equivalent of those French résistants de la dernière heure
who fought the Nazis only at
the very end. And then there
is the familiar settling of scores under the cover of justice.
"I know a very efficient bank
manager who was removed
purely for vengeance," sighs
a man who was himself a
regime trusty and now keeps
a sensibly low profile.
Issa Koussa, younger brother
of the more famous Moussa
– the former foreign minister
and intelligence chief who
defected to Britain in March
– was a senior Gaddafi aide
who tried and failed to reinvent himself as a democrat.
He is now locked up in a
grim-looking former drug
rehabilitation centre near his
palatial home in Tajoura, east
of the capital.
Thousands more Gaddafi
loyalists, including many
members of the hated revolutionary committees, are behind bars, some at Tripoli s
Mitiga air base. Koussa senior is in Qatar and unlikely to
be coming back any time
soon.
Libya s western supporters
are anxious to avoid the errors – only belatedly acknowledged – that were made in
postwar Iraq, where the dismantling of Saddam Hussein
s army and the wholesale
sacking of Ba ath party officials caused a breakdown in
security, government and
administration and helped
fuel years of insurgency.
And the Libyan version,
which is "owned" by the
Libyans themselves, as Nato
governments keep repeating,
looks like being a far more
limited programme of compulsory redundancies in sectors like the old regular army,
now being sidelined by the
ragtag but better-equipped
rebel brigades.
Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the widely respected president of
the National Transitional
Council (NTC), has set the
non-retributive tone, saying
that any Libyan who killed or
stole public money under
Gaddafi must be held to account. Having served as minister of justice until going
over to the opposition in February, he has won plaudits
for pledging that he is ready
to face trial himself.
For some, though, this approach is too lenient. "The
NTC is bending over backwards to be conciliatory but
it s ridiculous when it involves people who only joined
the opposition in the final
days," argues one disgruntled
supporter. "This is going to
create problems. The revolutionaries didn t fight and see
their friends die to see the
same people stay in power."
Sami Khaskhusha, a university lecturer, is even blunter:
"We cannot behave like
Gandhi or Jesus Christ," he
sneers. "You can t kill Al
Capone and leave all the other hooligans running a-
round. A revolution has to
mean a new start." Others
warn darkly of a loyalist "fifth column".
The obvious risk though is
that too comprehensive a
purge will cull experienced
managers and experts. And
the fact is that almost everyone had dealings with and
was tainted by Gaddafi and
the system he dominated.
It is a black mark against
Mahmoud Jibril, the NTC s
unpopular prime minister
designate, that he worked on
economic development with
Saif al-Islam, the leader s
second son, London School
of Economics postgraduate
and erstwhile reformist, who
is now leading diehard resistance in Bani Walid.
So the criteria for who goes
and who stays will, in the
end, have to be a matter of
judgment. "Everyone worked
in a Gaddafi entity," argues
Salam Tekbali, a US-Libyan
legal adviser. "It s a question
of what their attitude was and
what they did when they were there."
In one area, however, there
are no shades of grey. Those
with "blood on their hands"
will stand trial and face punishment, probably the death
penalty. No one speaks of
leniency for Gaddafi, for Saif
al-Islam or for the hated intelligence chief Abdullah alSenussi, all wanted by the
international
Criminal
Court for crimes against
humanity.
And Libyans also want to see
them in the dock at home. "In
the Hague they will only try
Gaddafi for what he did here
in February and March," said
Mustafa Driza, a retired ambassador. "But he needs to
face justice for what he did to
this country for 42 years."
Hanna al-Gallal, a law lecturer from Benghazi, believes
there could, one day, be some kind of Libyan truth and
reconciliation commission to
confront the past and heal
wounds. But not yet. "We
need transitional justice to
deal with long-term abuses,"
she said. "You can t just ask
Libyans to forgive. It s not
only what people did in the
past. It s what they are still
doing now."
Activists monitoring the progress of the revolution are
adamant that trials for Gaddafi loyalists are a nonnegotiable demand. "The
Libyan people need to see
that there is justice," warned
Mustafa Ghariyani, a telecoms engineer. "If criminals
from the old regime are hanged then people will be satisfied – and the opportunists
will
be
scared."
Kenya s deputy prime minister denies planning ethnic attacks
Uhuru Kenyatta appears at international criminal court charged with crimes against
humanity over 2007-08 election violence
Xan Rice
Kenya s deputy prime minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, took the
witness stand at the international Criminal Court to deny
planning ethnic attacks during the 2007-2008 election
violence, in a case that will
help define the country s
political future.
Kenyatta, the son of Kenya s
founding president, Jomo
Kenyatta, hopes his testimony will persuade judges to
dismiss charges of crimes
against humanity against him
before the trial begins. He is
the highest profile of six
Kenyans accused by the ICC
prosecutor of fomenting the
bloodshed that left at least
1,133 dead.
Kenyatta, who is from the
Kikuyu ethnic group, is ac-
cused of paying the notorious
Mungiki criminal gang to kill
non-Kikuyu civilians during
attacks in January 2008.
dings on television, after all
the channels cleared their
schedules to broadcast live
from The Hague.
"I have never been a member
of Mungiki," Kenyatta said
under questioning from the
chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. "I have no association with Mungiki. I have
no idea why they would give
false evidence against myself."
The current hearings are the
final step before the cases
move to full trial next year.
The first hearing, already
completed, involved three
men accused of stoking the
initial violence against Kikuyus in the Rift Valley. In the
second case, Kenyatta s coaccused are former police
chief Mohamed Hussein Ali
and the cabinet secretary,
Francis Muthaura. All six
deny wrongdoing.
The ICC decided to investigate the post-election violence after the government in
Nairobi failed to take steps to
try the main perpetrators of
the ethnic attacks. Though
the Kenyan authorities tried
to block the international
action, there is broad support
among ordinary Kenyans,
who hope that the country s
decades-long cycle of impunity may be broken.
Millions of Kenyans have
been following the procee-
Kenyatta, 49, is the only one
to have taken the witness
stand in his defence – and the
man with the most to lose.
His family is among the richest in Kenya, and he is its
political heir.
Picked by former president
Daniel arap Moi as his successor, Kenyatta failed in his
presidential bid in 2002. Five
years later he fell in behind
President Mwai Kibaki, who
is also from the Kikuyu ethnic group, the country s biggest. But with Kibaki retiring, Kenyatta is expected to
be the main Kikuyu candidate in late 2012, making him a
serious candidate for the presidency.
Despite the ICC charges,
Kibaki has refused to sack
Kenyatta, who is also the
country s finance minister, or
Muthaura. But if the charges
against them are confirmed,
and the cases begin next year, Kibaki will have little
choice.
Kenyatta has insisted he will
be cleared, and his British
lawyers have criticised Moreno-Ocampo, saying his
evidence is based on "gossip
and rumour". The prosecutor
says that the case will serve
as deterrent to political violence in other countries.
Fugitive Black Panther socialised with US envoy in Guinea-Bissau
Convicted killer George Wright went undetected while living under his real name in Africa, former US ambassador says
George Wright pictured in
2000 in Praia das Maçãs,
Portugal. The convict had
links with the Black Liberation Army after escaping jail
in 1970. Photograph: AP
An American fugitive, who
hijacked a plane in the 1970s,
lived openly in GuineaBissau during the 1980s un-
der his real name, a retired
US ambassador to the African nation claims.
The former ambassador, John
Blacken, said the embassy
knew of George Wright, who
was captured this week in
Portugal, but had not known
he was a fugitive.
Blacken said he remembered
meeting Wright socially in
Guinea-Bissau. He added
that embassy officials would
have taken action if they had
known the man had been an
escaped convict.
"If we had received such a
cable, we would have responded," said Blacken, who
said he was stunned upon
hearing the news of Wright s
detention on Monday in Portugal.
Wright was convicted of the
1962 murder of Walter Patterson, owner of a petrol station in New Jersey. Eight
years into his prison term, on
19 August 1970, Wright and
three other men escaped from
Bayside state prison in Leesburg, New Jersey. While on
the run Wright joined the
underground militant group
the Black Liberation Army
and lived in a communal
family with them in Detroit,
the FBI said.
In 1972, dressed as a priest
and using an alias, Wright
hijacked a Delta flight from
Detroit to Miami, along with
four other Black Liberation
Army members. The hijackers identified themselves as
a Black Panther group to
passengers, police said. After
releasing the plane s 86 passengers in exchange for a
$1m ransom, the hijackers
forced the plane to fly to
Boston, then to Algeria, where they gained asylum.
At the request of the US government, Algerian officials
returned the plane and the
money to the US, briefly
detaining the hijackers before
allowing them to stay. The
group left Algeria, possibly
late in 1972, and settled in
France, according to Mikhael
Ganouna, producer of the
2010 documentary Nobody
Knows my Name.
Members of the group were
convicted in Paris in 1976.
Wright remained at large but
his case became a top priority when a New Jersey fugitive taskforce was formed in
2002.
Blacken, who was US ambassador to Guinea-Bissau
from 1986 to 1989, said: "All
this was a big surprise, my
goodness, murder and everything else. No one imagined
him being a murderer – of
course we didn t know him
that well. He seemed like an
ordinary person, not radical
at all."
Until his arrest on 26 September by the Portuguese
authorities and at the request
of the US government, Wright had been living in Almocageme, 28 miles west of
Lisbon. He had worked in
various jobs, most recently as
a nightclub bouncer, according to neighbours. There
was a sudden breakthrough
in the case last week when
police matched his fingerprint to a resident ID card.
Blacken could not recall
what sort of work Wright did
in Guinea-Bisseau. He said
he remembered his Portuguese wife better because she
had worked as a translator
for either the US embassy or
for a Guinea-Bissau trade
and investment project that
started up in 1993. "He was
known as George Wright
here, and it s strange that [US
officials] never tracked him
down here," Blacken said.
Wright, 68, is now being
held in Lisbon, pending US
extradition hearings. If an
extradition request were
granted, he could appeal against it to Portugal s Supreme
Court and then to the Constitutional court, a process
likely to last months.
The Guinea-Bissau embassy
in Lisbon said no one was
available to comment on
whether Wright had got citizenship from the African
nation.
The fugitive has lived in Portugal for at least 20 years but
a photocopy of his Portuguese residency card listed his
home country as GuineaBissau. While living in the
former Portuguese colony
Wright used his own name.
Blacken said it probably
would not have been hard for
Wright to have obtained citizenship in Guinea-Bissau. "A
person living here for over a
period of time who wants to
apply for citizenship can
normally get it regardless of
his background."
Fears for civilians trapped in besieged Libyan city of Sirte
Indiscriminate fire continues after National Transitional Council forces retake airport
Libyan interim government
forces recaptured the airport
in Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi s
birthplace, on Thursday, amid mounting concern for
civilians trapped inside the
besieged city.
National Transitional Council fighters took full control
of Sirte airport, Reuters witnesses said. They had taken it
two weeks ago, but then lost
it again. Sirte s pro-Gaddafi
defenders have used sniper,
rocket and artillery fire to
fight off two NTC assaults
on the city in the past week.
Each side has accused the
other of endangering civilians.
"They re shelling constantly.
There s indiscriminate fire
within individual neighbourhoods and from one area to
another," said Hassan, a resident who escaped the city.
Civilians have been fleeing
the coastal city of 100,000
that is also under Nato aerial
attack. Libyan authorities
have asked the UN for fuel
for ambulances to evacuate
wounded people, a UN source in Libya said.
The UN is sending trucks of
clean drinking water for civilians crammed into vehicles
leaving Sirte for Benghazi in
the west or Misrata in the
east, the source said. But
fighting has prevented aid
workers reaching Sirte and
Bani Walid, another town
held by Gaddafi loyalists.
"There are two places we d
really like access to, Sirte
and Ben Walid, because of
concern on the impact of
conflict on the civilian population," the source told Reuters in Geneva.
UN officials do not have any
direct contact with proGaddafi forces holed up in
Sirte, where both sides accuse the other of cutting off
water and electricity, he said.
Aid agencies said on Wednesday a humanitarian disaster was looming in Sirte amid
rising casualties and shrinking supplies of water, electricity and food. Fighting on
Sirte s eastern and western
approaches was less intense
on Thursday than on previous days, but the NTC said it
had cleared a route between
the two fronts, allowing its
forces to link up – a strategic
boost along with retaking the
airport.
More than a month after
NTC fighters captured the
capital Tripoli, Gaddafi remains on the run, trying to
rally resistance to those who
ended his 42-year rule, although some of his family
members have taken refuge
in neighbouring Algeria and
Niger.
Interpol issued an alert calling for the arrest of Gaddafi
s son Saadi who fled to Niger
three weeks ago. The Lyonbased police agency said it
was acting at the request of
the NTC, which accuses Saadi of leading military units
responsible for crackdowns
on protests and of misappropriating property.
Interpol has already issued
"red notices" for the arrest of
Gaddafi, his son Saif alIslam and his intelligence
chief Abdullah al-Senussi, all
wanted for the international
Criminal Court for alleged
crimes against humanity.
Gaddafi s former prime minister, Al-Baghdadi Ali alMahmoudi, who had fled to
Tunisia, only to be arrested
for illegal entry, has started a
hunger strike in prison in
protest at a Libyan request
for his extradition, his lawyer
said.
Tunisian prosecutors say
Mahmoudi will stay in jail
pending an extradition decision, even though he won an
appeal against a six-month
prison sentence for entering
Tunisia illegally.
Libya s new rulers are trying
to get a grip on the whole
country, rein in their own
unruly militias and get on
with reconstruction and democratic reform.
US Senator John McCain,
visiting Tripoli, said Gaddafi
s overthrow had set an example to people all over the
world, adding that US investors were keen to do business
with oil-exporting Libya once fighting there had stopped.
"We believe very strongly
that the people of Libya today are inspiring the people
in Tehran, in Damascus, and
even in Beijing and Moscow.
They continue to inspire the
world – and let people know
that even the worst dictators
can be overthrown and be
replaced by freedom and
democracy," he told a news
conference.
THE GUARDIAN (LO) • COMMENT IS FREE • 29/9/2011
Iran: live free – and die
The proposed hanging of Youssef Nadarkhani is an outrage. It is also a terrifying glimpse
of the injustice and arbitrary cruelty of the present Iranian regime
The proposed hanging of
Youssef Nadarkhani is an
outrage. It is also a terrifying
glimpse of the injustice and
arbitrary cruelty of the present Iranian regime. This
paper opposes the death penalty always and everywhere,
but at least when it is applied
for murder or treason there is
a certain twisted logic to the
punishment. But Mr Nadarkhani s crime is neither murder nor treason. He is not
even a drug smuggler. He is
just a Christian from the city
of Rasht, on the Caspian Sea,
who refuses to renounce his
faith. There is a pure and
ghastly theatricality at the
heart of this cruel drama
which goes to the heart of
religious freedom.
There is no question that Mr
Nadarkhani is a Christian,
and an inspiringly brave one.
That is, in theory, legal in
Iran. The particular refinement of his persecution is
that he is accused of "apostasy". The prosecution claimed he was raised as a Muslim, which is why his present
Christian faith merits death.
He was convicted last year.
Mohammad Ali Dadkhah,
the lawyer who was brave
enough to defend him, was
himself sentenced to nine
years on trumped-up charges
this summer. Both these sentences are offences against
natural justice. Both were
appealed. The Supreme
Court in Tehran last week
announced its judgment on
one: Mr Nadarkhani might
save his life if he publicly
renounced Christianity. This
he has twice this week refused to do. A third refusal –
due at any moment – might
spell his death sentence.
Apostasy, even more than
blasphemy, should never be a
crime. The right of an adult
to choose his or her own beliefs is the freedom which
above all others makes them
adults. That is one of the
great discoveries of civilisation – the awkward and often
painful process of learning to
live together in larger and
more inharmonious groups
than families or clans. All
across the Middle East, this
foundation of tolerance is
systematically denied.
Whether by torture, pogrom,
or the occasional judicial
murder, the persecution of
religious minorities in Iran,
in Saudi Arabia, and in Pakistan, is a recognised way
for failing authoritarian regimes to appeal to the more
revolting instincts of the people they hold down. Christians, Jews and Bahá ís are
persecuted everywhere. In
Iran the Sunni minority has
no mosque in Tehran, where
a million Sunnis live. In
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
the Shias in their turn are
persecuted and suppressed.
Everywhere, the general terror of a people who can make
up their own minds freely
about anything is blended
with a horror of people who
can make up their own minds
about religion. These laws
are an insult to God, to Islam,
and to our humanity. The
sentence against Mr Nadarkhani shames Iran.
Asylum seekers prevented from lodging cases
Law Society claims Asylum Screening Unit are preventing claimants lodging claims unless lawyers threaten legal action
Owen Bowcott
Asylum seekers are being
prevented from lodging claims for permission to stay in
the UK unless their lawyers
threaten legal action, according to the Law Society.
In a strongly worded criticism of shortcomings at the
Asylum Screening Unit (ASU) in Croydon, south London, the body which represents solicitors complains of
"degrading treatment", telephones constantly engaged or
rarely answered and individuals who arrive in person
being sent away.
The letter, sent to the head of
the ASU and the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), highlights concerns voiced by other groups about facilities in
Croydon – the only place in
the whole of the UK where
asylum claims can be made.
Mark Paulson, head of the
Law Society s family and
social justice section, said
that the only certain means of
securing an appointment was
for solicitors to send in "preaction protocol" letters on
behalf of clients announcing
they were instigating judicial
review proceedings.
In July, Law Society representatives met ASU officials
to raise concerns about problems. The situation, they
claim, has deteriorated since
then: "In recent months [we
have] received reports of
asylum seekers who are finding it increasingly difficult,
if not impossible, to register
their claim for asylum, or
who experience what appear
to be quite unnecessary difficulties ..."
"Our members experience
and others reports … have
highlighted the negative and
sometimes quite degrading
treatment of people on their
arrival at the ASU and the
appalling nature of the physical environment which they
expected to be in for often
prolonged and indeterminate
periods of time."
informing her that she was
too late to be seen that day.
The Law Society said there
was a conflict between the
UKBA s role as protector of
the nation s borders – keeping people out – and its international treaty responsibilities under the 1951 UN
Convention on refugees.
The coalition s commitment
to reduce net migration to
tens of thousands in the current parliament s lifetime
meant that the first duty was
being given primacy, Paulson
suggested.
Registering asylum applications as soon as possible is
vital for claimants. Any delay undermines the credibility of their case. Without
registering, they cannot gain
access to benefits or support
for accomodation.
The UKBA s website acknowledges that it experiences
delays, explaining that: "The
Asylum Screening Unit operates an appointment system
and will also accept applicants on a walk-in service. If
you choose to use the walkin service, you should be
aware that depending on your
personal circumstances, there
will be no guarantee that you
will be seen. Therefore, it is
strongly recommended that
you book an appointment."
The letter contained nine
case studies. One detailed the
experience of an elderly
Zimbabwean woman who
caught a bus at 3am in order
to arrive at Croydon by 7am
where she was given a letter
A number of solicitors raise
similar complaints about the
ASU in the latest issue of the
Law Society Gazette. Alice
Boyle, an immigration partner at the law firm Duncan
Lewis, said: "It always takes
the whole day to get through
(to the ASU) – if you manage
at all. Our public law team
has considered judicial reviews, but on each occasion an
appointment has been secured before any further action
was taken."
Alison Stanley, head of immigration at Bindmans solicitors, described her Kafkaesque dealings with the ASU.
She said: You have secretaries sitting all day pressing the
redial button, but never get
through, and so you turn up
without an appointment. You
queue for hours and then get
sent away. Telephone us,
they say, and make an appointment."
Russell Blakely, an immigration specialist at the law firm
Wilson, said: "The ASU has
suddenly become more chaotic which, by coincidence,
suits the UKBA. If it s harder
to claim asylum, then fewer
are going to do so – bringing
the statistics down."
In response to the Law Society s letter, the UK Border
Agency said: "We are confident that the care provided to
asylum seekers at the Asylum Screening Unit in
Croydon is of a good standard.
"Asylum seekers are given
access to interpreters and
information regarding the
asylum process and how to
contact legal representatives.
UKBA takes complaints very
seriously and has processes
in place for those using the
unit to raise any concerns
they may have."
The UNHCR said that it had
been working with the UKBA since 2004 on the Quality Integration Project which
is designed to improve the
agency s processing of asylum claims. It declined to
comment on the letter.
Bahrain doctors jailed for treating injured protesters
Doctors and nurses given up to 15 years in jail for treating people injured during uprising in Gulf kingdom
Martin Chulov
Twenty Bahraini medics who
treated activists wounded
during anti-government protests were jailed for between
five and 15 years in sentences that were immediately
denounced by medical bodies
and human rights groups
around the world.
The sentences were handed
down by a military court set
up to handle the trials, which
stemmed from an Arab spring-inspired uprising in the
country in February and
March. It was crushed with
the help of armies from Sau-
di Arabia and the Gulf states.
Thirteen of the doctors and
nurses received sentences of
15 years in prison, while another seven received terms of
five to 10 years.
All of the accused were
charged with committing
crimes against the state, during an uprising they insist
was peaceful and popularly
inspired.
Most worked at the Salmaniya Medical Centre in Manama, which became a focal
point of the tiny Gulf kingdom s uprising. Government
officials claimed it had been
transformed into a base for a
plot to overthrow the 200year-old monarchy.
The formal charges were for
stealing medicine, possessing
weapons and occupying a
government hospital. The
medics were also accused of
"inciting hatred to the regime
and insulting it, instigating
hatred against another sect
and obstructing the implementation of law, destroying
public property and taking
part in gatherings aimed at
jeopardising the general security and committing crimes."
The doctors, all of whom
denied the charges, were
among dozens arrested for
joining protests led by Bahrain s Shia majority against the
government headed by the
country s ruling Sunni minority.
The protests were quickly
cast by Bahrain s government
as a sectarian plot ordered by
Iran. The crackdown that
followed the demonstrations
led to the imposition of martial law and the Gulf Cooperation Council sending
troops to the island state.
Amnesty International described the sentences as ludicrous. "It appears that the
real reason for targeting these
health workers was the fact
that they denounced the government crackdown on protesters in interviews to international media," said the
group s Africa and Middle
East deputy director, Philip
Luther. "The ruling government clearly wants to send a
message that anybody perceived as advocating political
reforms will be dealt with
severely."
British Foreign secretary
William Hague led the international
condemnation.
"These sentences appear disproportionate to the charges
brought," he said. "These are
worrying developments that
could undermine the Bahraini government s moves towards dialogue and the reform needed for long-term
stability in Bahrain."
Several of the doctors, interviewed by the Guardian this
year, say they were cast into
a political role by an increasingly violent crackdown
launched by government
troops in mid-February in an
attempt to oust protesters
from their hub in central Manama — a roundabout then
known as Pearl Square.
A medic who was sentenced
on Thursday said the events
of 17 February – a particularly savage assault on the
roundabout – had changed
the nature of the uprising.
"That day changed my life,"
the medic said. "I felt bad
seeing my own people treated like animals.
"In April, my fears came true
and I was taken from my
house by more than 30 masked men with guns in front of
my son, whom I had to leave
alone.
"I was physically and emotionally abused, blindfolded
and handcuffed. They beat
me – with their hands and
legs, with a hose, and gave
me electric shocks. They
threatened to rape me. They
threatened to kill me so that I
would confess to false accusations. I was sexually harassed and humiliated."
Britain joined international
bodies in attacking a lack of
transparency in the military
court, which was set up using
emergency powers. "I call on
the Bahraini judicial authori-
ties to follow due process
carefully and transparently.
Cases before the special tribunals should be transferred
to regular civilian courts,"
said Hague.
In a separate case before the
military court, a man was
sentenced to death for running down and killing a policeman. The sentences came a
day after the tribunal upheld
an appeal by 21 activists,
including senior figures from
the main opposition bloc, alWefaq, against life sentences
they received for allegedly
plotting to overthrow the
monarchy.
Around 30 people have been
killed in a series of clashes
with security forces this year.
At least 1,000 people have
been detained. Bahrain s
king, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa
Al Khalifa, called for dialogue during the summer. This
was immediately boycotted
by opposition groups.
He has also announced a
commission of inquiry into
claims of mass discrimination against the country s Shia
majority, which is banned
from much of the establishment.
Hundreds of Shia demonstrators who joined sweeping
pro-democracy demonstrations in February have complained that they have since
been sacked or suspended
from their jobs in both the
private and public sector.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • INTERNATIONAL • 29/9/2011
Bahrain Court Hands Down Harsh Sentences to Doctors and Protesters
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
A court in Bahrain sentenced
a protester to death on
Thursday for killing a police
officer in March, and it issued harsh prison terms to medical workers who treated
protesters wounded during
the months of unrest there
this spring, according to the
official Bahrain News Agency. The punishments
drew strong criticism from
rights groups.
The agency reported that
eight people it identified as
doctors who worked at a central hospital in the capital,
Manama, received 15-year
sentences. Other medical
personnel at the hospital, the
Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public
hospital, were given terms of
between 5 and 15 years.
The sentences were the latest
sign that the country’s Sunni
monarchy would continue to
deal severely with those involved in widespread protests this year, mostly held
by members of its repressed
Shiite majority. Much of that
effort has been focused on
the doctors and nurses who
treated demonstrators.
At the height of the protests,
security forces commandeered the Salmaniya hospital
and arrested dozens of doctors and nurses. Rights acti-
vists have since accused the
government of having made
systematic efforts to deny
medical services to wounded
protesters. The international
relief organization Doctors
Without Borders stopped
working in Bahrain last month after its offices were raided.
Reacting to the verdicts and
punishments
announced
Thursday, Physicians for
human rights, an advocacy
group in Cambridge, Mass.,
called on the government of
Bahrain to set them aside.
“These are medical professionals who were treating
patients during a period of
civil unrest, as their ethical
duty requires them to do,”
the group’s chief policy officer, Hans Hogrefe, said in a
statement on the group’s
Web site. “To imprison them
as part of a political struggle
is unconscionable.”
The Bahrain News Agency,
in describing the sentences
handed down by a security
court on Thursday, said the
medical workers had taken
over the hospital and used it
as a base for antigovernment
activity. They were convicted
of possessing fuel bombs and
light weapons, confiscating
medical equipment, and “fabricating stories and lies.”
The medical professionals
have said it was their duty to
treat anyone who arrived at
the hospital and have rejected
accusations that treating protesters was akin to supporting
their cause.
In the case of the officer’s
death, the court said the convicted man, identified as Ali
Yusuf
Abdulwahab
alTaweel, had run down the
officer with his car during
antigovernment protests in
Sitra, an oil hub just south of
the capital, and was guilty of
an act of terror. Another
man, driving a second car,
was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement.
Sitra, known for its activist
Shiite population, was a stronghold of antigovernment
activists at the height of the
demonstrations.
The government of Bahrain,
with help from Saudi Arabia,
violently quashed the country’s peaceful protest movement in March. Despite the
crackdown, demonstrations
still occur regularly, especially in places like Sitra, where
youths battle security forces
after sundown. Graffiti clutters almost every wall there.
“We will only kneel before
God,” one slogan reads.
“The government has turned
to using the law for repression,” said Mohammed alMaskati, the head of the Ba-
hrain Youth Society for human rights.
On Wednesday, the security
court upheld life sentences
for eight prominent political
leaders, The Associated Press
reported. Earlier in the week,
the court sentenced 32 people, including at least two
members of the Bahrain national handball team, to 15
years in prison for protesting
illegally.
“They are sending a very
negative message to the international community that
Bahrain is not moving in the
right direction in terms of
respecting human rights,”
Mr. Maskati said.
Human rights groups say that
since the unrest began in the
Persian Gulf kingdom of
only about 525,000 citizens,
34 people have been killed,
more than 1,400 have been
arrested and as many as
3,600 people have been fired
from their jobs. Four people
also died in custody after
torture, the rights groups say.
Anthony Shadid contributed
reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • NATIONAL • 29/9/2011
Advocate’s Visa Delay Stirs Questions
By KIRK SEMPLE
Kerim Yildiz, a leading human rights advocate for the
Kurdish people, was for two
decades a frequent visitor to
the United States. A British
citizen living in London, he
regularly lectured at American universities, caucused
with other human rights
advocates and briefed government officials in Washington.
But something changed.
Where before he was admitted to the country without a
problem, he has now waited
nearly a year for the Obama
administration to approve a
visa. Officials have not explained the delay to him.
“It’s a surprise,” Mr. Yildiz
said this week in a telephone
interview from London, where he is executive director of
the Kurdish human rights
Project. “I know no reason
why my application is still
pending.”
Civil libertarians and human
rights advocates in the United States have taken up his
cause, and some suspect the
government may be stalling
for political reasons.
The case echoes those involving Tariq Ramadan, a prominent scholar of the Islamic
world from Switzerland, and
Adam Habib, a Muslim academic from South Africa,
who were barred from entry
by the Bush administration
under the Patriot Act. Their
advocates contended that the
men had been singled out
because of their political views and criticism of American foreign policy.
The American Civil Liberties
Union sued on behalf of the
two academics, arguing that
the exclusions were an illegal
form of censorship. Secretary
of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton lifted the bans last
year.
Since then, the civil liberties
group has lobbied on behalf
of two other human rights
advocates whose visitor visas
were denied: Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist,
and Malalai Joya, an Afghan
politician and writer. In those
cases, the Obama administration quickly reversed course
and issued the visas.
A State Department spokeswoman, citing confidentiality
laws, said administration
officials were forbidden to
comment on Mr. Yildiz’s
visa application, which he
filed last fall.
“The longer the delay stretches out, the more we have
to ask what the reasons for
the delay might be,” said
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal
director at the American Civil Liberties Union, which
posted a notice about Mr.
Yildiz’s case on its blog under the title “Ideological Exclusion Again?”
“I hope it doesn’t have to do
with Mr. Yildiz’s human
rights advocacy,” Mr. Jaffer
continued. On Sept. 15, the
civil liberties group, joined
by the American Association
of University Professors and
the PEN American Center,
sent a letter to Mrs. Clinton
and Janet Napolitano, the
homeland security secretary,
urging them to expedite Mr.
Yildiz’s visa.
“Permitting him to visit the
United States would serve
the public interest, particularly because his area of specialty — Kurdish rights — is
one of obvious relevance to
current public debates, including those about the United
States’ relations with Iraq
and Turkey,” the letter said.
Mr. Yildiz said his tentative
itinerary in the United States
included briefings with donors and supporters, a mee-
ting with State Department
officials to discuss Kurdish
issues, lectures at City University of New York and
Harvard, and a ceremony in
Philadelphia, where his human rights organization is to
receive a prize from the Peter
and Patricia Gruber Foundation, a philanthropic group
promoting social justice.
“This delay has effects on
our human rights work,”
Mr. Yildiz said. “Who knows
how many people will be
affected by this?”
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • EDITORIALS, OP-ED AND LED • 29/9/2011
An Icy Political Vision
Taxes, spending and jobs
dominate the conversation in
Washington, but there is a
great deal more at stake in
next year’s election, as Republicans know well. It sometimes seems as if they are
the only ones who talk about
their values, but they put
forward an elitist and narrow
vision that largely favors the
upwardly mobile, the healthy, the native-born American and the needs of the corporation.
This cold message is disguised, of course, cloaked in
warm-sounding talk of solid
American traditions and values. Democrats, including
President Obama, have shied
away from these issues or
have been too late and too
weak in providing voters
with an alternative vision,
with their own larger goals
for the nation.
In the last few days, however, Mr. Obama has finally
begun to broaden his challenge to Republicans. He is
taking on their obeisance to
wealth and refusal to reanimate the economy, as well as
their callousness. “This is a
contest of values,” Mr. Obama said on Sunday. “This is
a choice about who we are
and what we stand for. And
whoever wins this next election is going to set the template for this country for a
long time to come.”
The Republican template has
been in stark view at presi-
dential debates lately. It is a
program to wind down the
government’s longstanding
guarantee of health care to
the elderly and the poor and
incinerate the Democrats’
new promise to cover the
uninsured; to abolish the Department of Education and its
effort to raise national standards; to stop virtually all
regulation of the environment and the financial industry; to reimpose military discrimination against gays and
lesbians, deport immigrants,
cut unemployment insurance
and nutrition programs, raise
taxes on the poor and lower
them for the rich.
The candidates who pander
to their party’s lowest instincts are often egged on by
the heartlessness of audience
members at the debates. “Has
anybody been watching the
debates lately?” Mr. Obama
asked in San Jose, Calif. He
added: “You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect
of somebody dying because
they don’t have health care
and booing a service member
in Iraq because they’re gay.
That’s not reflective of who
we are.” (Mr. Obama might
also have mentioned the lusty
cheers for Gov. Rick Perry’s
record of presiding over 234
executions in Texas.)
There are many voters who
are understandably dispirited
or disillusioned with the
Democrats. They might consider following a presidential
suggestion and spending an
evening or two watching the
Republican debates. The
Democrats lose their nerve at
times. They are divided and
factionalized and unsure, but
they largely do not share
what Mr. Obama called “a
cramped vision that says
you’re on your own.”
In making this long-overdue
statement of contrast, Mr.
Obama is animated by more
than his own re-election.
Should he be returned to office along with Republican
majorities in the House or
Senate, the country will have
to endure years more of torturous partisan battles, as
many or more steps backward as forward. At every
level of the ballot, Republican candidates should be
asked if they really want this
to be a country where we’re
all on our own.
China Fires 12 After Inquiry on Adoptions
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING — Twelve government employees have
been fired and stripped of
their Communist Party membership after an investigation
into allegations that family
planning officials kidnapped
children in an impoverished
rural area in the southern
Chinese province of Hunan,
People’s Daily, the party’s
official newspaper, reported
Thursday.
While investigators concluded that the government
workers did not engage in
“baby trading,” they did find
“severe violations” of regulations, according to the
newspaper’s Web site, Peo-
ple’s Daily Online. A Hunanbased Web news portal said
the officials were guilty of
“negligence and handling
work in a simplistic way.”
In a scandal that has drawn
widespread coverage, parents
and grandparents claim that
officials from Longhui, a
county that is administered
by Shaoyang, illegally seized
at least 16 children between
1999 and 2006 because of
allegations that family planning rules were violated.
Caixin Century Weekly, a
Chinese magazine, reported
in May that some were later
adopted by foreigners.
Government
investigators
examined 14 cases. In one,
parents voluntarily surrende-
red their child because they
were unable to provide care.
Five other children were deemed abandoned because the
facts about their parentage
were hidden by “involved
persons,” People’s Daily
reported. Eight more were
taken because they had been
illegally adopted by local
families.
Investigators found no evidence that the city’s orphanage, the Shaoyang Social
Welfare Institute, paid kickbacks to officials who delivered babies, according to the
newspaper’s report.
Edy Yin contributed research.
China: Alternative to Peace Prize Is Canceled
By EDWARD WONG
The Ministry of Culture has
canceled a prize that a group
of Chinese had come up with
as an alternative to the Nobel
Peace Prize, which was given
to an imprisoned dissident,
Liu Xiaobo, last year. The
organizers of the Chinese
version of the Nobel, the
Confucius Prize, had inten-
ded to give it in December to
one of eight nominees, among them Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and a young Tibetan man
whom the Communist Party
had appointed to be the Panchen Lama. But the Culture
Ministry said the group, called the Traditional Culture
Protection Department of the
Association of Chinese Indigenous Arts, was in violation
of ministry rules and had to
disband. Last year, the Confucius Prize was given to
Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician who had supported
greater ties between China
and Taiwan. He learned of
the award only when journalists called him
Judge Delays Blagojevich Sentencing Indefinitely
By STEVEN YACCINO
CHICAGO — Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor
of Illinois who tried to sell
President Obama’s Senate
seat, has waited three months
to learn his fate after being
convicted on multiple corruption charges. Now he will
have to wait longer.
This week, Judge James Zagel of United States District
Court indefinitely delayed
Mr. Blagojevich’s sentencing, which had been set for
Oct. 6. He offered no explanation. Representatives for
Mr. Blagojevich could not be
reached for comment.
One possible reason for the
delay is that next week Judge
Zagel is to begin overseeing
the trial of a co-defendant in
the sweeping federal investigation against Mr. Blagojevich and others. The codefendant, the businessman
William Cellini, who faces
extortion charges, was a
lobbyist and fund-raiser for
the governor. In June, Mr.
Blagojevich was convicted
on 17 counts of wire fraud,
attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to
commit extortion and conspiracy to solicit and accept
bribes. Legal experts say he
could be sentenced to decades in prison.
For now, Mr. Blagojevich is
busy fending off a state agency that has moved to suspend his law license, beginning a process that could lead
to disbarment. An Illinois
Supreme Court petition
filed by the state Attorney
Registration and Disciplinary
Commission, which regulates
lawyers, accused the exgovernor in late August of
“moral turpitude” and asked
the court to prevent him from
practicing law as he awaits
his sentencing. Mr. Blagojevich’s legal team has until
next month to convince the
court that his license should
not be suspended.
Mr. Blagojevich, a selfprofessed C student at Pepperdine University’s law
school, became a lawyer in
1984 and practiced for more
than a decade before taking
an “inactive” status in 2000.
He was elected governor of
Illinois in 2002 and re-
elected in 2006. He was arrested in late 2008.
tion of returning to the legal
profession.
If his license is suspended,
Mr. Blagojevich will be unable to reactivate it until a
disbarment investigation is
completed. The loss of his
license would eliminate an
income option for the former
governor, who has said he is
short on cash and has appeared in commercials for pistachios to make money.
According to court documents, Mr. Blagojevich’s
lawyer sent a letter to the
Attorney Registration and
Disciplinary
Commission
asking that his name be “withdrawn” as a licensed lawyer in Illinois. His request
was rejected, and the agency
sent him forms to file for
disbarment, according to
James J. Grogan, deputy administrator and chief counsel
for the agency.
Still, aside from a short period in early 2010 when Mr.
Blagojevich temporarily reactivated his lawyer status,
he has not shown any inten-
Disbarring himself would
require Mr. Blagojevich to
admit guilt before sentencing
begins.
A felony conviction in Illinois does not result in an
automatic disbarment, though it is common, Mr. Grogan
said. His agency, however,
cannot pursue legally disbarring Mr. Blagojevich until
after he is sentenced and a
full disbarment investigation
is conducted.
“That could take years,” Mr.
Grogan said.
“There’s a protocol to follow,” Mr. Grogan said.
Fatal Accident Puts Focus on Deportation Program
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
BOSTON — A fatal accident
that the police say involved
an illegal immigrant driving
drunk has stirred outrage in
Massachusetts and put Gov.
Deval Patrick on the defensive for his resistance to a federal program intended to
deport criminals.
According to the police, the
immigrant, Nicolas Guaman
from Ecuador, struck and
killed a young motorcyclist
in Milford last month while
intoxicated, dragging him for
a quarter of a mile. Mr.
Guaman has a previous criminal record, the police said,
and many here have pointed
to his case as an example of
why the federal program,
known as Secure Communities, is necessary.
Under Secure Communities,
the fingerprints of anyone
booked into jail by the state
and local police are sent through the F.B.I. to the Department of Homeland Security, which tracks immigration violations. Immigration
agents then decide whether to
deport immigrants flagged by
such checks.
Mr. Patrick, a Democrat,
announced in June that Massachusetts would not participate in Secure Communities,
citing concerns that it casts
too wide a net and leads to
the deportation of immigrants with no criminal histories. Two other Democratic
governors, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew M. Cuomo
of New York, have also rejected the program, though
the Obama administration
has announced plans to expand it nationwide, with or
without states’ support, by
the end of 2013.
The Guaman case and several others — including that of
Onyango Obama, a Kenyan
uncle of President Obama
who was arrested last month
outside Boston on drunkendriving charges and found to
be in violation of a 1992
deportation order — have
become part of a growing
debate over whether Massachusetts is too easy on illegal
immigrants.
Critics, including some Democrats, are also asking why
Mr. Patrick, a close ally of
Mr. Obama’s, would reject a
program central to Mr. Obama’s immigration enforcement plan. The Obama administration has taken steps
recently to focus its deportation strategy on illegal immigrants who have been convicted of violent and drugrelated crimes.
“Unfortunately, the governor
doesn’t think it’s a serious
enough problem to deal with,” said State Senator Richard T. Moore, a Democrat
whose district includes Milford. “We’re hearing from
the public constantly: what
are we going to do about this
problem?”
Mr. Moore is co-sponsoring
new bipartisan legislation
meant to crack down on illegal immigration, in part by
imposing tougher penalties,
including possible jail time,
for driving without a license
and not registering cars properly. Mr. Guaman was not
carrying a license at the time
of his arrest.
Onyango Obama, the half
brother of the president’s
father, who did have a driver’s license, was taken into
custody on an immigration
detainer after his arrest in
Framingham on Aug. 24.
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement released him on
Sept. 8 but has refused to say
why, citing federal privacy
laws.
In another recent case, a Mexican immigrant was arrested
on a charge of drunken driving last weekend in Boxborough, and the police said he
had five previous drunkendriving convictions. The
man, Eduardo A. Torres, had
been deported three times
previously, according to immigration officials.
On Wednesday, Mr. Moore
joined three county sheriffs
at a State House news conference calling for Mr. Patrick
to embrace the Secure Communities program immediately. Also on Wednesday,
Senator Scott Brown, a Republican facing re-election
next year, urged Janet Napolitano, the homeland security
secretary, to “proceed with
the full activation” of the
program in Massachusetts.
He also suggested that Mr.
Patrick’s resistance would
delay the program’s activation in Massachusetts; it currently operates only in Boston. But a spokesman for the
immigration agency, which
runs the program, said that
would not be a factor.
The sheriffs of Bristol, Plymouth and Worcester Counties, all Republicans, said
they were working with federal officials to adopt elements
of the program in their counties immediately. Mr. Patrick
said on Wednesday that the
state already sends fingerprints of arrestees to the
F.B.I., which is free to share
them with immigration agents. The state also sends
fingerprints of convicted
criminals directly to the immigration agency once they
arrive in state prisons, he
said.
“This is about grandstanding
and headlines,” Mr. Patrick
said of his critics on the issue. “Meanwhile, the public
should know that every fingerprint is sent to the federal
government; they should
know that every felony is
referred to the federal government.”
It is far from certain that Mr.
Moore’s bill will pass both
houses of the legislature;
similar crackdowns in recent
years have passed the Senate
but not the more liberal House of Representatives. But
Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said she was
worried.
“We seem to continue to lose
supporters,” she said.
Ms. Millona added that it
was unfair to connect drunken driving with illegal immigration. “Drunk driving is
another issue, and people
should be punished for it,”
she said. “But immigration
status has nothing to do with
it.”
U.S. and Uzbekistan Discuss More Supply Routes
President Obama and Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, discussed expanding
use of the Central Asian
country as a route to supply
troops in Afghanistan, a United States official said
Thursday, amid growing
concern about the viability of
Pakistan as a transit route.
Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton also met
with her Uzbek counterpart
on Thursday, and Congress is
considering legislative changes that would allow more
military aid to Uzbekistan
despite its poor human rights record. Mr. Obama’s
outreach came as the United
States and Pakistan are locked in a diplomatic crisis
over accusations linking Pakistan’s chief intelligence
agency to militant attacks on
Americans in Afghanistan.
Rising tension between Washington and Islamabad has
raised questions about Pakistan’s role as a major supply
route for American forces
fighting in Afghanistan.
Saudi Men Go to Polls; Women Wait
By LIAM STACK
CAIRO — Saudi men voted
in local elections on Thursday for just the second time
in the history of the conservative kingdom, but the polls
remained closed to a majority
of the Saudi population, including women, who were
promised the right to vote in
municipal elections scheduled for 2015 in a royal decree
issued last week.
The elections were for local
advisory councils with no
lawmaking authority or ability to alter the status quo in
one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies.
Also barred from voting were
men employed by the police
and security forces as well as
all men under the age of 21.
Official figures estimate the
number of eligible voters to
be 1.2 million out of more
than 18 million Saudi citizens.
“These elections are not representative of Saudi society,” said Ibrahim alMugaiteeb, the director of
the human rights First Society, a Saudi organization.
“Only 5 to 8 percent of the
population is able to vote.
That is very small.”
Official figures for the turnout were not available on
Thursday, according to The
Associated Press, which reported that the Saudi news
media and activists said it
was low.
The vote took place two years behind schedule; it was
postponed in 2009 by King
Abdullah. The first-ever vote
was held in 2005, at which
time rights activists said the
king promised that women
would vote next time around.
The vote and the renewed
promise to allow women
greater future political participation demonstrate the careful steps that Saudi rulers
appear to be taking to preserve the prerogatives of absolute rule and shield their kingdom from greater demands
for democracy that have spread through the region.
Saudi Arabia has tried to
inoculate itself against the
wave of upheaval challenging autocrats across the Arab world.
This year, it has spent billions of dollars to pump up
salaries, build housing and
finance religious organizati-
ons, among other outlays, in
a bid to preserve public stability. In March, it sent troops
into neighboring Bahrain to
help a fellow monarch crush
an uprising whose popular
nature and Shiite sectarian
overtones were deemed a
threat to the country’s regional interests and stability.
Saudi Arabia has no penal
code and no elected legislature at any level of its government. The national counterpart to the toothless local
advisory councils is the Shura Council, whose members
are appointed by King Abdullah. Last week, he also
vowed to name women to the
council during its next round
of appointments in 2012.
Many saw those pledges as a
promising move, but optimism was quickly tempered
two days later when a court
convicted Shaimaa Ghassaneya, a woman from the Red
Sea port city of Jidda, of violating the country’s ban on
women’s driving. She was
sentenced to receive 10 lashes for the crime, a surprisingly harsh sentence that
provoked an outcry that threatened to overshadow the
promise of women’s suffrage
in 2015.
King Abdullah revoked that
sentence on Thursday, an act
of clemency that, for many,
remained a reminder of the
arbitrary power of the Saudi
monarchy.
“Can you imagine a local
council member or a Shura
Council member who cannot
drive her own car to the grocery store?” asked Mr. Mugaiteeb, whose organization
abandoned plans to boycott
Thursday’s vote after the
pledge to allow women to
vote. “It is a disgrace.”
Others celebrated the news of
Ms. Ghassaneya’s royal pardon. Ameerah al-Taweel, a
prominent Saudi philanthropist and member of the royal
family, applauded on Twitter.
“Thank God, the lashing of
Shaima is cancelled. Thanks
to our beloved King,” she
wrote. “I’m sure all Saudi
women will be so happy, I
know I am.”
Some Common Ground for Legal Adversaries on Health Care
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The
2010 health care overhaul
law has provoked an unprecedented clash between the
federal government and 26
states, dividing them on fundamental questions about the
very structure of the federal
system. But the two sides
share a surprising amount of
common ground, too, starting
with their agreement in briefs, filed on Wednesday, that
the Supreme Court should
resolve the clash in its current term.
Until just days ago, it was
hardly clear that the Obama
administration would agree
with the states on the need
for prompt review, as there
were good political reasons
for moving slowly. The
court’s decision is now most
likely to come just months
before the 2012 presidential
election.
Their briefs also reflect agreement on matters of substance. The two sides, along with
the judges in the majority in
the appeals court decision
most likely to be reviewed by
the justices, all said the dispute is about means rather
than ends. There are other
ways, they said, for Congress
to achieve near-universal
health coverage, some of
them more expansive than
what was enacted.
“Both sides agree that Congress has the Constitutional
power to enact a national
health care system that raised
taxes to support a single government agency that pays
all medical bills, just like
Medicare,” said Walter Dellinger, who served as acting
solicitor general in the administration of President Bill
Clinton and supports the law.
Randy E. Barnett, a lawyer
for some of the plaintiffs
who on Wednesday sought
Supreme Court review, made essentially the same point.
“What I’ve said from Day 1,”
he said, “is that if Medicare
is Constitutional then Medicare-for-everyone is Constitutional.”
Mr. Dellinger said there was
irony in this harmony. “The
Constitutional attack is focused on a mandate that was
necessary if the new system
was to utilize the existing
private market, which had
traditionally been a conservative and Republican proposal
for how to deal with health
care,” he said.
To be sure, the two sides
dispute whether Congress
has the power under the
Constitution’s
commerce
clause to require people to
buy insurance through what
the federal government calls
a minimum coverage provision and the plaintiffs call an
individual mandate. But they
agree that Congress could
have achieved much the same thing through a slightly
different mechanism, as Judge Stanley Marcus wrote in
his dissent from the 2-to-1
decision issued in August by
a panel of the United States
Court of Appeals for the 11th
Circuit, in Atlanta.
“The plaintiffs and, indeed,
the majority have conceded,
as they must, that Congress
has the commerce power to
impose precisely the same
mandate compelling the same class of uninsured individuals to obtain the same kind
of insurance, or otherwise
pay a penalty, as a necessary
condition to receiving health
care services, at the time the
uninsured seek these services,” Judge Marcus wrote.
Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, one
judge on the United States
Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in the majority in a
2-to-1 decision in June upholding the law, said the
difference between the concededly proper approach and
the disputed one was not
enough to strike down a major piece of legislation.
“Requiring insurance today
and requiring it at a future
point of sale amount to policy differences in degree,
not kind, and not the sort of
policy differences removed
from the political branches,”
Judge Sutton wrote.
Other judges have acknowledged the distinction but
found it legally significant.
“Congress cannot require
individuals who choose not
to purchase health insurance
or individuals who are not
currently seeking or receiving services in the health
care market to purchase health insurance in order to stabilize the health insurance
market,” Judge Christopher
C. Conner of Federal District
Court in Harrisburg, Pa.,
wrote this month. “Congress
cannot mandate or regulate in
anticipation of conduct that
may or may not occur in the
future.”
The decision of the 11th Circuit is the one most likely to
be reviewed by the Supreme
Court, if only because it is
the one that involves 26 states. It also helps that Solicitor
General Donald B. Verrilli
Jr. on Wednesday urged the
justices to grant a review of
that decision rather than the
one from the Sixth Circuit. It
does not hurt, either, that the
states are represented by Paul
D. Clement, who served as
solicitor general in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Mr. Verrilli and Mr. Clement
appear to have areas of agreement about what should
follow if the Supreme Court
strikes down the requirement
to purchase insurance. Both
sides have questioned whether the court can surgically
remove the heart of the current law without also killing
parts of the rest of it.
The 11th Circuit majority, on
the other hand, left in place
every part of the law except
the requirement to purchase
insurance, even as it noted
that Congress had found the
requirement essential to the
operation of two other provisions — one forbidding insurers to turn away applicants,
the other barring them from
taking account of preexisting conditions.
Lawyers for the federal government have called the
three provisions “absolutely
intertwined.” In his brief
filed Wednesday, Mr. Clement wrote that the 11th Circuit’s decision “erroneously
leaves the entire act in place
— even provisions that the
federal government concedes
cannot be divorced from the
mandate — notwithstanding
compelling evidence that
Congress intended the mandate to function as the act’s
essential lynchpin and would
never have passed the act
without it.”
sweep, ambition and complexity.
There is agreement on some
broader points, too, including
that the law, the Affordable
Care Act, is one of unusual
Mr. Clement said much the
same thing, but more vigorously. The law, he wrote, “is
a massive collection of sweeping changes that impose
In his brief for the administration, Mr. Verrilli said the
law was “a comprehensive
program of economic regulation and tax measures.”
substantial new federal obligations on every corner of
society and compel financial
action from nearly every citizen of the United States.”
The two sides have a final
point in common. Each seems quite confident that it
will win in the Supreme
Court.
Strauss-Kahn and French Accuser Are Questioned
By MAÏA de la BAUME
PARIS — Dominique Strauss-Kahn was brought
face to face on Thursday
with the French writer who
has accused him of trying to
rape her eight years ago. In
two hours of police questioning, Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the
former managing director of
the International Monetary
Fund, continued to deny any
wrongdoing, one of his lawyers said.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn and his
accuser, Tristane Banon,
were questioned together at a
French police station as investigators sought to compare their versions of events
and extract further information on the case.
They met for the first time
since Mr. Strauss-Kahn was
arrested in the United States
in May on charges of sexual
assault. In that case, New
York prosecutors decided to
drop charges because of credibility problems with the
accuser, a hotel housekeeper.
“Mr. Strauss-Kahn repeated
that there had been neither
aggression nor violence in
this case,” one of his lawyers, Frédérique Beaulieu,
said afterward. “He didn’t
apologize and had no reason
to do so.”
Ms. Banon maintained her
version of the facts, said her
lawyer, David Koubbi, and
insisted that Mr. StraussKahn had lied to investigators. “Ms. Banon continues
to tell the truth,” Mr. Koubbi
said, “and Mr. Strauss-Kahn
continues to lie.”
Lawyers were not present at
the questioning on Thursday.
In July, Ms. Banon, 32, filed
a criminal complaint of attempted rape against Mr.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, who she
said tried to assault her during an interview in 2003 for
a book she was writing. Ms.
Banon said Mr. Strauss-Kahn
had thrown her to the ground,
tried to undress her and put
his hand in her underwear.
Before filing her complaint,
Ms. Banon said, she had been advised not to press charges by her mother, a prominent member of the Socialist
Party, as is Mr. StraussKahn. She said she changed
her mind after his arrest in
New York.
After her complaint, the Paris
prosecutor’s office opened a
preliminary investigation and
questioned several highprofile people over the summer.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn called Ms.
Banon’s allegations “imaginary and slanderous” in an
interview two weeks ago, his
first since the New York arrest.
The magazine L’Express
reported this month that in
speaking with the police, Mr.
Strauss-Kahn admitted having made a pass at Ms. Banon and trying to kiss her.
Thursday’s joint questioning,
a normal part of sexual assault cases in France, could
represent a last legal step for
prosecutors before either
bringing formal charges or
dropping the case, French
news media reported.
On Monday, Mr. StraussKahn’s lawyers asked a State
Supreme Court in the
Bronx to dismiss a civil sexual assault lawsuit against
him, saying he was entitled
to immunity under a United
Nations convention that protects the heads of specialized
agencies.
This article has been revised
to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 30,
2011
An earlier version of this
article erroneously referred
to Frédérique Beaulieu, one
of
Dominique
StraussKahn"s lawyers, as Frédé
Beaulieu.
The Dismal Ruling in Alabama
A federal judge has upheld
most of Alabama’s new immigration law, the nation’s
harshest and most radical
attempt to harness a state’s
power to find and punish
illegal immigrants. The consequences for Alabamans
will be serious — not just for
the undocumented, but for
their blameless citizen children, for those who are mistaken for unauthorized immigrants and for farmers and
other business owners ensnared in the law.
The statute cracks down on
everything from traffic stops
to apartment rentals to elementary school enrollment. It
was passed in June and
promptly challenged by three
lawsuits — from the Obama
administration, from civil
rights groups and from church leaders. Judge Sharon
Lovelace Blackburn of Fede-
ral District Court in Birmingham blocked some provisions, like one that made it a
crime to harbor or transport
illegal immigrants and another that barred illegal immigrants from public universities. And she enjoined a section that sought to prevent day
laborers from seeking work.
papers. And she left untouched a section that requires
elementary and secondary
schools to collect data on the
immigration status of incoming students and their parents, a clearly unlawful attempt to frighten families
into keeping their children
out of school.
But her mixed ruling was
most discouraging for what
survived. Judge Blackburn
upheld the “papers, please”
section, an echo of Arizona’s
notorious attempt to require
state and local law enforcement officials to check a person’s immigration status during traffic stops if they have
“a reasonable suspicion” that
someone is here illegally.
In the absence of a broad
federal reform of immigration laws, states have been
trying to outdo one another
in such crackdowns. Their
zealotry will now be encouraged further, as will the racial-profiling, discrimination and other ills that accompany it. Federal courts in
other states have struck down
many of the same provisions
that survive, for now, in Alabama, a split that ensures this
sprawling national mess of
laws will land in the Supreme Court.
She upheld a section that
criminalized the “willful failure” of an illegal immigrant
to carry federal immigration
The Justice Department —
which chose to challenge
noxious laws in Arizona and
Alabama but not Utah, Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina — needs to press on with
an emergency appeal of the
Alabama ruling.
Prisoner Protest Restarts in California
By ERICA GOODE
SAN FRANCISCO — Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that
they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger strike to protest conditions in the state’s
highest-security
prisons,
where some prisoners have
been held in virtual isolation
for decades.
More than 4,200 inmates at
eight prisons have been refusing state-issued meals since
Monday, according to the
California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation. The hunger strike, the
second this year, is the latest
problem to face state prison
officials, who are under a
Supreme Court order to
reduce the state’s prison population by more than 30,000
people.
A memo was distributed to
prisoners at the state’s 33
correctional institutions warning that if they took part in
the hunger strike, they would
be subject to disciplinary
action that could include con-
fiscation of canteen items
like food they had bought.
Prisoners identified as leaders of the strike would also
be removed from the general
population and “placed in an
administrative
segregation
unit,” according to the memo.
A hunger strike in July, which involved 6,600 inmates at
its peak, ended after the department agreed to consider
adjustments in the way inmates are assigned to the state’s
three security housing units,
where they are held in tightly
controlled conditions that
minimize human contact.
Scott Kernan, the under secretary of operations for the
department, said that after
the strike in July, the department “determined there was
some validity to what the
inmates’ concerns were.”
The department is reviewing
its procedures, he said.
But on Monday, inmates
resumed the strike, saying
that the department had not
yet fully addressed their demands.
Those demands included
modifying the practice of
sending prisoners to security
housing units for indefinite
periods based on the judgment that they were involved
in gang activities, and also
abolishing the practice of
“debriefing,” in which inmates are encouraged to gain
release from the unit by renouncing their gang affiliations and providing information about them.
At Pelican Bay State Prison,
in a remote northern region
of the state, the average length of confinement for the
1,111 inmates in the security
housing unit is 6.8 years,
according to the department.
Most inmates in the unit are
confined in windowless cells,
7.6 feet by 11.6 feet, for 22
hours or more a day.
Donald Specter, director of
the Prison Law Office in
Berkeley, which provides
free legal services to prisoners, said that given the standoff between the inmates and
the prison officials, “I don’t
really see how this can end
happily or without tragedy.”
Playing the Inmate Card Skews Redistricting
By ROSS RAMSEY
Texas prison inmates can’t
vote, so most counties ignore
them. But they can change
the value of your votes for
Congress and the State Legislature.
In Anderson County — and
in Bee, Karnes or Walker
Counties — a significant part
of the population is in prison.
State prisoners in each of
those places account for at
least 19 percent of the total
county population. Each Texas county has four county
commissioners, elected from
districts of equal size.
Inmates can’t vote, so counties can ignore the prison
populations when they draw
those districts. For redistricting purposes at the county
level, the prisoners simply
don’t exist.
The state, on the other hand,
counts them, adding to the
populations of districts that
have large prisons. Because
rural legislators like Representatives Jose Aliseda, Byron Cook, Tim Kleinschmidt and John Otto, all Republicans, have prisons in
their districts, they each have
big populations of ineligible
voters — criminals who aren’t included in county
maps, who can’t vote, and
who don’t really have a stake
in local affairs.
And maybe they shouldn’t:
The prisoners don’t come
from those counties. They
tend to come from the state’s
populous counties, like Harris and Dallas. And in Harris
County’s case, not counting
them as residents means one
state representative fewer in
the local delegation.
As far as state elections are
concerned, Houston criminals are counted as Houston
residents unless they’re in
prison — even though they’ll
be returned to their home
county upon release.
Other states — like New
York and Maryland — have
relatively new laws that require prisoners to be counted
where they lived before prison. Texas uses a kind of bed
check, counting them where
they sleep.
It’s a math problem — with
consequences. To draw legislative districts, the state divides the population by the
number of House seats, 150,
and draws maps with districts
of approximately equal size.
Harris County, without its
criminals, has enough people
for 24 districts. If the 29,798
Houstonians currently incarcerated throughout the state
were included in the count,
the county would have enough people to justify the 25
districts it currently has. On
the new maps recently approved by the Legislature,
lawmakers drew Representatives Scott Hochberg and
Hubert Vo, both Democrats,
into the same district, knowing only one can survive
the election year. The additional seat could rescue both
men.
Of course, we’re talking about felons — not voters.
But the state’s political redistricting maps are drawn from
overall populations, not from
voter populations. And the
prison thing skews the results. Representative Harold
V. Dutton Jr., Democrat of
Houston, said the counting
method
cheated
Harris
County out of a House seat.
He sued — his was one of
several claims made against
the new political maps —
saying that the prison padding makes it easier to get
elected in those rural districts, since the politicians
don’t have to win over as
many people to be elected.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
Mr. Dutton thinks the practice violates the “one person,
one vote” standard in federal
law, and said the Legislature
approved the new maps because the victims were Democrats. (It’s worth pointing
out that 10 years ago the
House voted on a map with
only 24 seats in Harris
County and that Mr. Dutton
voted for it; the 25-seat plan
was drawn by the Legislative
Redistricting Board, which
added a Republican seat.)
David Richards, a lawyer
representing Mr. Dutton and
others in the federal redistricting case, said that changing
where prisoners were counted would require changes in
the State House map and
“would undo the entire Congressional map,” which requires each of the state’s 36
districts to be approximately
the same size.
Federal judges in Texas ruled
against them this month,
though they can still appeal.
According to the Texas
Constitution, the federal
census sets the numbers for
state maps, and the census
counts prisoners in their cells.
As a practical matter, the
challenge would require an
overhaul of the State House
and Congressional maps and
some significant nips and
tucks to the State Senate
map.
Instead, the courts dodged
the question. Prisoners, when
they count at all, will count
as prisoners.
[email protected]
Correction: September 30,
2011
An earlier version of this
article erroneously included
one state among those that
require prisoners to be counted in the district where they
lived before being incarcerated. While New York and
Maryland have that requirement, Virginia does not. (It
allows some counties to exclude prisoners from their
counts.)
Optimism of Intellectuals Ebbs in Iraq
By TIM ARANGO
BAGHDAD — In a note to
friends brimming with defiance and poetic musings,
citing as inspiration Jesus,
Imam Hussein, Gandhi, Che
Guevara and the Buddha,
Hadi al-Mahdi prophesized
his own murder.
“I will sleep in peace. I want
to rest so long, and dream of
my name written on my grave, dream that my son will
come and visit me, even once, my son who does not
speak Arabic well. I hope
that he will be able to read
his father’s name, the lover
of freedom and its martyr.”
That letter was written in
June, and by September he
was dead from an assassin’s
silenced pistol, another journalist killed in Iraq. But perhaps none of the killings has
resonated so deeply in a nook
of society that welcomed war
with such eagerness.
The murder has reverberated
through Baghdad’s community of journalists, artists and
writers, spurring a moment
of deep introspection for a
cadre of secular intellectuals,
many of whom fled repression under Saddam Hussein
and returned to their homeland after the invasion with
the hopes of being the liberal
conscience of a new nation.
Many kept their optimism
during the worst years of the
war. But now, as the American military leaves and they
witness scenes of triumph
from homegrown revolutions
in neighboring Arab countries, they are reconsidering
their country’s own experience with overturning a dictatorship.
“For me, I was still optimistic a year ago,” said Ali Sumari, a newspaper editor and
film director who returned to
Iraq in 2003 from Jordan and
was a close friend of Mr.
Mahdi’s. “Even during the
sectarian war, I thought
things would settle down.
Nowadays, I am starting to
fear that Iraq will never become a stable country.”
In Iraq, where there is sometimes little distinction between a journalist, an artist and
an activist, Mr. Mahdi, 45
when he was killed, hosted a
popular radio show, becoming a powerful voice for
those disenchanted with their
government, often criticizing
officials by name and receiving frequent death threats.
He also produced films and
wrote plays and columns,
and became a leader of a
small band of protesters who
since February have gathered
most Fridays at Baghdad’s
Tahrir Square to protest against the government.
Just as former political opponents of the government followed American tanks into
Iraq, intellectuals did too,
hoping to shape an architecture of ideas to buttress their
new democracy. Their experience has been starkly different. The politicians returned
to preside over a state, the
journalists to suffer under
tactics that they, and human
rights activists, say mimic
those wielded by the former
government.
In February, Mr. Sumari was
arrested alongside Mr. Mahdi
after a protest against the
government in Baghdad. The
two were beaten and interrogated and accused of being
sympathetic to the Baath
Party — the worst kind of
insult in Iraq, especially for
two men who had fled the
country under Mr. Hussein’s
Baathist government.
“You can accuse me of anything, even of being a terrorist, but don’t call me a Baathist,” said Mr. Sumari. “You
humiliate my humanity.”
Other friends of Mr. Mahdi’s
never left, and recalled jubilant scenes of reunion after
the fall of the government on
Mutanabbi Street, a bustling
pedestrian thoroughfare of
booksellers’ stalls that is a
hub of intellectual life in the
old quarter of the capital.
Those thinkers and writers
who returned represented a
powerful counternarrative to
the exodus of this country’s
educated middle class, many
of whom have yet to come
back, leaving a fissure in
Iraq’s social structure between an often corrupt political
elite and a vast underclass.
“We were so happy to have
him back in Iraq,” said Karema Hashim, a friend of his
since the 1980s when they
both worked in cinema and
media in Baghdad. “And he
was happy to be back because he thought it was liberated.”
Mr. Mahdi had fled to Syria
and then Denmark, where his
children remain. Mr. Sumari
had been in Jordan. Another
close friend, Ahmed Hussein,
a newspaper editor, lived in
Syria, Lebanon and Canada
before the American invasion. He was a college mate of
Mr. Mahdi’s in Baghdad, and
introduced him to his first
wife.
Ms. Hashim, who manages a
fine arts high school in Baghdad, spoke recently outside
a mosque during Mr. Mahdi’s funeral, near a table
where men were setting out
plates of fruit for the mourners. She was dressed in
black, a tissue in her hand to
blot out the tears. “I was so
happy because all of my friends came back to Iraq,” she
said. “We were full of power
and ambition.”
When he returned, Mr. Hussein said: “I was very optimistic. I thought Americans
were smarter than they turned out to be.”
He had communicated on
Facebook with Mr. Mahdi
just hours before he was killed, discussing an upcoming
protest. “Hadi was not only
optimistic, but a dreamer,” he
said. “He thought Iraq would
become liberal and secular.
Even until his last days he
was dreaming this dream.”
Now, she said, “Iraq is in its
worst time. I know I’m going
to get killed one day.”
Another friend, Satar Muhsin, came to intellectual life
after the fall of the government. “The best years of my
life I wasted in the army under Saddam,” said Mr. Muhsin, now a bookseller on Mutanabbi Street. “It was war, it
was killing, it was hunger
and fear.”
He met Mr. Mahdi in Najaf
at a conference featuring the
liberal Iraqi writer and cleric
Ahmed al-Qabbanji, and the
two bonded over Mr. Qabbanji’s message. “His idea is
that Islam is not the solution,” he said. “The modern
state of technocrats and secularism is.”
For some, Mr. Mahdi’s murder has elevated the level of
fear so high that they are
even reconsidering their
work as journalists. Mr. Sumari said he might stop writing temporarily.
“We’ve become so afraid of
what we do and what we
write,” he said. “We’re changing where we meet, we’re
not sleeping at home.”
Mr. Mahdi was the 93rd
journalist murdered in the
last decade — many more
died from indiscriminate acts
of war — and in not a single
case has anyone been brought to justice, according to
the Committee to Protect
Journalists.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • NEW YORK • 29/9/2011
Pepper Spray and a Police Dept. Whose Power Grows Unchecked
By JIM DWYER
As a leading expert in government
management,
Raymond W. Kelly did not
disappoint on Wednesday
when he was asked about the
actions of a senior police
commander who peppersprayed four protesters standing on a sidewalk, then
walked away without a glance as they rolled on the
ground, screaming in pain.
Mr. Kelly, showing the deftness of a man who has served
as police commissioner for
12 years, drop-kicked the
matter of the commander,
Deputy Inspector Anthony
Bologna, and his use of pepper spray as far and as fast as
humanly possible.
“This case has been referred
to the Civilian Complaint
Review Board, who will do
an investigation and make a
recommendation as to what
their findings are,” Mr. Kelly
said.
All senior commanders know
that at high altitudes in the
Police Department, the laws
of municipal gravity are suspended. Above the rank of
captain, civil service rules
have no force: police inspectors, chiefs and their deputies
all serve at the pleasure of
the commissioner, who must
keep the mayor happy.
No one in history could be
more aware of this than Mr.
Kelly, who has held every
rank in the department, from
patrol officer to commissioner. In fact, it was Mr. Kelly
who promoted Captain Bologna to deputy inspector.
The commissioner could
have called in Inspector Bologna and sent him home as a
captain, his last civil service
rank; on the other hand, Mr.
Kelly knows full well that
there is surely more to Ins-
pector Bologna’s life and
work than five ugly minutes
on 12th Street. (He ran a deli
on Staten Island, tried to become a schoolteacher during
the fiscal crisis, and was a
cop in the 72nd Precinct in
Brooklyn during the years
when buildings burned but he
discovered, after a while,
“that it wasn’t nearly as bad
as it looked,” according to a
profile in Downtown Express.)
Before saying that the episode, which took place on Saturday at the end of a march
against financial injustice,
would be investigated by the
complaint board, Mr. Kelly
implied that the people who
were sprayed had it coming
because of earlier “tumultuous” behavior unseen by the
video cameras.
Mr. Kelly rarely strikes a
note so badly off-key — but
did so by seeming indifferent
to what anyone could see on
any computer. For all its contact with the public, his department has moved into new
terrain.
On “60 Minutes” this week,
Mr. Kelly said that the Police
Department had the capability to shoot down certain
unspecified aircraft. In collaboration with the Central
Intelligence Agency, the department has conducted wide-ranging surveillance on
Muslims and specifically
Moroccans in the metropolitan area, at times with no
indication of a threat, according to reports by The Associated Press and by the blogger Len Levitt on NYPDConfidential.com.
For more than a year before
the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York,
undercover police officers
infiltrated many law-abiding
groups that were planning to
demonstrate during the convention, creating thousands
of pages of reports. The intelligence division filed reports
on elected officials who were
participating in “anti-R.N.C.”
activities.
Under David Cohen, a former C.I.A. official, the division created a database of the
political views of people ar-
rested during protests against
the Iraq war in 2003.
democratic processes. It exists in a world apart.
TO date, there has been virtually no scrutiny of this expansion of police powers,
and Mr. Kelly and Mr. Cohen have said that the information is too delicate to make public.
Perhaps that is why no one in
the department — even Mr.
Kelly — has grasped that
many decent people who
support the police have been
shocked by the videos of the
pepper-spraying.
It may be highly prudent for
the police to have the ability
to shoot down aircraft, but
who, for instance, would give
the order?
Maybe that’s why neither
Mr. Kelly nor his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg,
realizes that this is just the
kind of thing that you say
you’re sorry for.
Until 2003, the Police Department had a small panel
that included individuals
from outside government to
review plans for surveillance
of people engaged in activities protected by the First amendment. Today the only
people on the panel work for
the Police Department.
Over the last decade, the
number of police officers has
shrunk about 15 percent, and
crime has continued to drop.
Working from scratch, Mr.
Kelly created a counterterrorism force and an intelligence
division to do for the city
what the federal government
was incapable of in September 2001: provide protection.
Yet it has done so in a bubble
of isolation from ordinary
E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt
Correction: October 1, 2011
The About New York column on Friday, about the
New York Police Department’s expanding powers,
misstated, in some editions,
the year that federal government’s counterterrorism and
intelligence divisions failed
to prevent an attack on the
city. It was September 2001,
not 2011.
ULTIMA HORA.COM (PY) • POLÍTICA • 29/9/2011
El TSJE todavía duda de los partidos políticos
El Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral todavía tiene
dudas de la capacidad movilizadora de los partidos políticos para el referéndum,
pese a que ellos firmaron el
martes último un compromiso para promover la participación de los electores.
El vicedirector de Registro
Electoral, Sergio López, informó que las autoridades
electorales, que recorren el
país, no observan ningún
entusiasmo de los partidos.
Agregó que ante dicha situación, el TSJE está poniendo
en marcha su plan B en su
totalidad. Este plan consiste
en convocar a los funcionarios de la institución y realizar
convenios con instituciones
públicas y privadas para
promover la participación del
electorado en la consulta
popular.
López señaló que el TSJE ya
tiene asegurada la integración de las 5 mil mesas de votación, que serán habilitadas
el 9 de octubre, aún cuando
los representantes de los partidos políticos, habilitados
para ejercer esa función, no
se presenten. Estarán los funcionarios atentos e inclusive
personas particulares, informó.
La Dirección de Registro
Electoral firmó convenio
ayer con la Dirección de Registro Civil y el Instituto Superior de Enseñanza (ISE)
para promover el referéndum. Los acuerdos señalan
que tanto funcionarios como
alumnos,
respectivamente,
estarán listos para integrar las
mesas, en casos de que sean
necesarios.
RESPALDO DE OBISPOS.
La Conferencia Episcopal del
Paraguay (CEP) exhortó a
todos los fieles católicos y a
la ciudadanía en general a
participar con su voto en el
referéndum previsto para el
domingo 9 de octubre. En
esta fecha, los electores deberán aprobar o rechazar la
modificación de la Constitución para dar derecho a voto
de los paraguayos residentes
en el exterior. Los obispos
sostienen que es importante
que los ciudadanos participen
activamente, acudiendo a los
locales de votación para expresar su voluntad al respecto.
Dilatan juicio por lesión de confianza
El juicio oral y público para
el ex comisario Hermes García Balmaceda y otros cuatro
acusados por el negociado
con la compra de carne para
comisarías de la capital e
interior, en el 2003, fue dilatado debido a que la defensa
del ex jefe policial insiste en
apartar a los miembros del
tribunal de sentencia.
Los abogados Jorge Bogarín
y Bettina Legal, representantes de García Balmaceda,
impugnaron ante la Sala Penal de la Corte Suprema de
Justicia la confirmación de
los jueces Gloria Hermosa,
Héctor Capurro y Sandra
Farías, quienes fijaron el
inicio del juzgamiento para el
próximo martes 4, por el
término de 45 días.
La defensa insiste en que
existe “animadversión” de
los magistrados, debido a que
los profesionales de derecho
denunciaron a los tres ante la
Superintendencia de la Corte,
por presuntas irregularidades
en la condena al ex titular de
la Caja Municipal, Edgardo
Moazir Gómez Zaputovich.
Los fiscales Silvia Cabrera y
René Fernández acusaron por
un
perjuicio
de
G.
1.249.768.000 al Estado al ex
jefe policial, además de los
comisarios Juan Silverio
Melgarejo Villalba y Carlos
Sánchez Cano, ex giradores
de la Intendencia; al subcomisario Francisco Benítez
Figueredo, ex ayudante de
Giraduría y al comerciante
Milciades Dionisio Sanabria
Cantero, propietario de la
empresa MS Import Export.
La referida acusación fue
presentada por el Ministerio
Público el 26 de febrero del
2009, y desde ese entonces se
dilata el juzgamiento de los
uniformados. Solo la preliminar fue suspendida en ocho ocasiones.
Dos ministros se apartaron
La Corte Suprema de Justicia no ha resuelto aún los
hábeas corpus presentados a
favor de los seis acusados
por el secuestro y crimen de
la hija del ex presidente Raúl
Cubas Grau, Cecilia Cubas
Gusinky, debido a que la
Sala Penal está desintegrada.
La referida sala está conformada con los ministros Alicia Pucheta, Sindulfo Blanco
y Luis María Benítez Riera,
quien se inhibió del caso por
amistad con el abogado querellante, José Ignacio González Macchi.
Posteriormente, el expediente
fue derivado al ministro Víctor Núñez, quien también se
apartó.
Los hábeas corpus en estudio
son dos: uno, presentado por
la abogada María José Durán, de la Coordinadora de
Derechos Humanos del Paraguay (Codehupy), a favor de
Basiliano Cardozo y Arístides Vera, y el segundo, planteado por los defensores públicos Jorge Zayas y Analía
Yinde, por Agustín Acosta,
Simeón Bordón, Gustavo
Lezcano y Roque Rodríguez.
Estas personas llevan 5 años
y 4 meses presas en la cárcel
de Tacumbú. La defensoría
pública sostiene que la medida no debió sobrepasar los
dos años, mientras que la
abogada de Codehupy afirma
que solo hasta 5 años podían
permanecer presos, por ser la
pena mínima por los hechos
punibles por los cuales están
acusados.
Cecilia, de 31 años, fue secuestrada el 21 de setiembre de
2004 y su cuerpo sin vida,
hallado el 16 de febrero del
2005, en Ñemby.
La Corte rechaza hábeas corpus de condenado por crimen de abogada
La Corte Suprema de Justicia rechazó el hábeas corpus reparador presentado a favor de
José Marcial Samaniego Godoy, condenado a 25 años de prisión por el homicidio de la
abogada Sarah Riva de Vasconsellos, ocurrido en 1993. No obstante, instó al juez de
ejecución de sentencia Isacio Cuevas a arbitrar las medidas necesarias para dar trámite
a
los
pedidos
de
la
defensa.
En ocasión de presentar el
recurso, los abogados Ramón
Ortega y Juan Carlos Ramírez alegaron que su cliente
cumplió las dos terceras partes de su condena en julio de
2010 y por tanto tiene derecho a la libertad condicional.
Los letrados alegan que han
presentado la petición correspondiente ante el juzgado
de ejecución referido que no
se expide aún sobre el particular, pese a los reiterados
urgimientos realizados.
Un informe de la Penitenciaría Nacional de Tacumbú
señala que Samaniego está
recluido en dicha institución
desde el 23 de junio de 1993,
en cumplimiento de la condena de 25 años de prisión
dictada por el juez Carlos
Ortiz Barrios el 26 de abril
del 2002, la cual se encuentra
firme a la fecha.
En su contestación a la Corte,
el juez Cuevas explicó que le
era imposible realizar el
cómputo correspondiente con
la exactitud que requiere el
otorgamiento de la libertad
condicional, debido a que
faltan hojas en el expediente.
Agregó que por este motivo
está abocado a la revisión de
los cuatro tomos para poder
elaborar el informe y dar
trámite al pedido.
Requisito incumplido
La ministra Alicia Pucheta de
Correa, a cuyo voto se adhirieron los Dres. Sindulfo
Blanco y Luis María Benítez
Riera, sostuvo que el hábeas
corpus reparador es una garantía prevista para que una
persona que se encuentre
privada de libertad en forma
ilegal recupere su libertad.
Como Samaniego está preso
en cumplimiento de una condena, no se cumple por lo
tanto el principal requisito
para la procedencia del hábeas corpus.
“Atendiendo a los informes
remitidos por los distintos
jueces de ejecución penal que
han intervenido en la causa,
exhortamos al juez competente arbitre las medidas necesarias a fin de dar trámite a
los pedidos realizados por la
defensa del señor José Marcial Samaniego Godoy, en
relación a la libertad condicional solicitada y expedirse
sobre la misma en la brevedad posible, conforme a derecho”, concluye el fallo.
Hermanos condenados
La abogada Sarah Riva de
Vasconsellos fue ultimada de
un balazo el 3 de junio de
1993 al resistirse a un asalto
cuando se disponía a ingresar
a su casa, ubicada en el barrio Herrera. Tras ultimar a la
letrada, los asaltantes se alzaron con su automóvil Mercedes-Benz.
José Marcial Samaniego y su
hermano Jonás fueron condenados a 25 años de prisión,
por homicidio agravado con
fines de robo. Marcial compurga su pena el 22 de noviembre del 2018, y Jonás, el
17 de febrero del 2024.
TSJE ya cuenta con proyecto de ley para reglamentar voto en el exterior
La Justicia Electoral presentará el 10 de octubre, un día después del referéndum, un
proyecto de ley que reglamenta el voto de los compatriotas en el extranjero. Para el TSJE es un hecho que ganará el SÍ en la consulta nacional.
Aún no se sabe en qué cámara del Congreso se presentará
el proyecto ni a qué grupo
parlamentario se le solicitará
que promueva el estudio y
aprobación del reglamento,
dijo ayer el asesor del TSJE,
Carlos María Ljubetic. “Paralelamente, el Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral (TSJE) va a dar a conocer otro
reglamento vía resolución
para establecer el sistema de
inscripción en el Registro
Cívico Permanente (RCP) de
los compatriotas que residen
en el extranjero”, anunció el
funcionario.
Al ser consultado si el proyecto de ley contempla a qué
cargos electivos se podrán
presentar los paraguayos que
viven en el exterior, Ljubetic
dijo que no. “Eso ya está
bien explicado en la Consti-
tución. Los compatriotas que
residen en el exterior no pueden candidatarse a diputados,
intendentes y gobernadores.
Para lo demás, sí”, manifestó.
RCP. “La mayoría ya no tiene cédula de identidad, sino
pasaporte. Hasta ahora, la
cédula es el único documento
válido, según la ley”, dijo el
asesor.
Agregó que el reglamento vía
Parlamento deberá primero
aprobar un periodo especial
de inscripción al RCP. Las
inscripciones normalmente
van hasta el 30 de diciembre.
Entonces, van a quedar 70
días nomás ya para inscribir
a todos los paraguayos que
están en el exterior. El que
no se inscribe en el 2011 no
podrá participar de las internas partidarias porque los del
exterior podrán votar en esas
elecciones también si están
afiliados”, explicó Ljubetic.
Autoridades del TSJE aseguran que una vez que los migrantes tengan el derecho al
voto, el segundo paso será
conseguir que tengan representantes parlamentarios en
el Congreso.
“En Italia o Ecuador, los migrantes tienen un cupo en las
bancas parlamentarias. Para
que eso ocurra en Paraguay
se deberán cambiar algunos
artículos de la Constitución
Nacional, supongo que por
vía de la reforma”, explicó
Ljubetic.
Agregó que también hay que
reglamentar con qué documento se van a inscribir en el
STF •
Ratifican la ley de amnistía brasileña
BRASILIA (ANSA). La
Cámara
de
Diputados
brasileña ratificó la Ley de
Amnistía sancionada por la
dictadura, con lo cual rechazó una iniciativa impulsada
por la diputada Luiza Erundina, que acusó al gobierno
de “presionar” para impedir
la realización de juicios contra los militares.
Los voceros del bloque de
diputados del Partido de los
Trabajadores (PT), oficialista, sostuvieron que debe ser
ratificada la Ley de Amnistía
dado que ésta fue convalidada por el Supremo Tribunal
Federal.
A fines de 2010 la máxima
corte brasileña sostuvo que la
Amnistía contribuyó a la
“pacificación” y la “reconciliación” entre los militares y
quienes los enfrentaron, y no
hizo lugar a una acción de la
Orden de Abogados de Brasil, que cuestionó la “constitucionalidad” de esa norma.
La Ley de Amnistía fue promulgada en agosto de 1979
por el general João Baptista
Figueiredo, el último presidente de la dictadura militar
que se extendió entre 1964 y
1985.
“No se puede seguir hablando todavía hoy de Ley de
Amnistía, en Brasil lo que
hubo, para decirlo claramen-
te, fue una autoamnistía impuesta por los militares que
estaban aprestándose a salir y
preparaban el terreno para la
impunidad”, declaró Luiza
Erundina en entrevista con
ANSA.
AFP (LO) • MEIO AMBIENTE • 30/9/2011 • 18:23:00
Michael Jackson: ex-paciente de Murray diz ter sido abandonado
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Um
ex-paciente de Conrad Murray, o médico de Michael
Jackson, disse nesta sextafeira diante da Suprema
Corte de Los Angeles que se
sentiu "abandonado" pelo
médico quando este se despediu de seus pacientes para
atender exclusivamente o
cantor.
No quarto dia do julgamento
de Conrad Murray, acusado
do homicídio culposo do "rei
do pop", Robert Russell descreveu o atendimento que
recebeu de Murray, cardiologista em Las Vegas, depois
de sofrer um ataque do coração em março de 2009.
Disse que estava contente
com o médico Murray entre
essa data e meados de junho
de 2009. "Sente que ele salvou sua vida?", perguntou a
promotora Deborah Brasil.
"Sim", respondeu Russell.
Mas declarou que tudo mudou quando Murray disse a
ele que teria de deixar seu
consultório para "se ocupar
de um paciente no Reino
Unido". Uma consulta com
Russell foi cancelada em 15
de junho de 2009 e outra em
22 de junho.
"Eu me senti um pouco frustrado. Era minha vida que
estava em jogo, e eu queria
saber exatamente como estava. Senti que ele me devia
uma resposta", disse Russell
diante do tribunal.
Em 25 de junho, dia da morte
de Michael Jackson, Russell
ligou para o consultório do
médico Murray e ameaçou
processá-lo caso o médico
não respondesse. O paciente
recebeu depois disso uma
mensagem de Murray - que
ligou para ele enquanto estava na casa do cantor na manhã de sua morte - para dizer
que seu coração estava "consertado".
"Me pareceu estranho porque
ele tinha me dito que depois
de um ataque cardíaco, o
coração não se recupera".
Russell também afirmou que
no consultório de Murray,
que tinha seu histórico clínico, não lhe deram o contato
de nenhum outro cardiologista que pudesse substituir
Murray.
"Eu me senti abandonado",
disse.
A previsão é que este quarto
dia de julgamento continue
com o depoimento dos paramédicos enviados à mansão
de Michael Jackson.
O artista morreu de uma
"grave intoxicação" de propofol, um potente anestésico
que ele usava para dormir.
Conrad Murray, acusado de
homicídio culposo, enfrenta a
possibilidade de ser condenado a até quatro anos de
prisão.
AFP (LO) • MEIO AMBIENTE • 30/9/2011 • 09:19:00
Colaboradores de Michael Jackson descrevem cena de caos na casa do
cantor
Alberto Álvarez, diretor de
logística de Jackson
LOS
ANGELES,
EUA
(AFP) - Colaboradores de
Michael Jackson descreveram nesta quinta-feira - durante o julgamento do médico do cantor, Conrad Murray,
por homicídio culposo - uma
cena de caos, em que Murray
pediu a um segurança que
retirasse material médico da
casa de Jackson, em quem
aplicava uma massagem cardíaca com apenas uma das
mãos.
Alberto Álvarez, diretor de
logística de Jackson, contou
que Murray lhe pediu que o
ajudasse a retirar ampolas e
uma bolsa de soro que continha uma "substância leitosa".
O sedativo Propofol, que
causou a morte por intoxicação de Jackson, tem a cor
branca, o que levou o cantor
a se referir ao medicamento
como "meu leite".
Quando Álvarez entrou no
quarto de Jackson no dia de
sua morte, 25 de junho de
2009 - porque Murray havia
alertado que o cantor havia
tido uma "reação ruim" -,
encontrou o artista "deitado
na cama com os braços estendidos, os olhos entreabertos e a boca aberta". O médico lhe aplicava uma massagem cardíaca apenas com a
mão esquerda, contou o co-
laborador, na Suprema Corte de Los Angeles.
Por trás de Álvarez chegaram
dois dos três filhos de Jackson - Paris e Prince. "Paris
gritou: Pai! Estava chorando", descreveu o colaborador, num momento em que a
emoção tomou conta do julgamento, que pode durar
cinco semanas.
O assistente disse que tirou
as crianças do quarto e, ao
retornar, o médico "recolheu
um punhado de ampolas e
pediu que elas fossem colocadas em uma bolsa". Em
seguida, Murray lhe pediu
que retirasse uma bolsa marrom de soro que continha
restos de uma solução leitosa. Ao pegá-la, Álvarez percebeu que havia um frasco
dentro, que identificou como
uma embalagem de 100mg
de Propofol.
"Achei que estivéssemos nos
preparando para ir para o
hospital", comentou o colaborador, olhando para o médico, sentado à sua frente.
O tribunal ouviu a gravação
do telefonema que Álvarez
deu ao serviço de emergência
pedindo uma ambulância,
seguindo ordens de Murray.
"Ele não está respirando.
Está inconsciente, está na
cama, não responde", disse o
colaborador ao atendente.
O advogado de Murray, Edward Chernoff, questionou a
possibilidade de Álvarez ter
feito tudo o que contou antes
de chamar a emergência,
como retirar as crianças do
quarto e recolher ampolas.
"Sou muito eficiente", respondeu o colaborador.
Outra testemunha do terceiro
dia de julgamento foi Kai
Chase, chef de Jackson. Ela
contou que, naquela manhã,
viu "Murray descer as escadas até a cozinha, em pânico
(...) Ele gritava: Procure ajuda, chame a segurança, procure Prince (filho mais velho
do cantor) ".
O advogado de defesa Michael Flanagan questionou:
"Você viu Murray frenético,
com os olhos arregalados,
gritando. Percebeu que alguma coisa estava errada, e
foi procurar uma criança de
12 anos?" "Fiz o que me pediram", respondeu a chef.
Parte do clã Jackson compareceu ao tribunal, incluindo
seus pais, Katherine e Joe, e
os irmãos do cantor La Toya,
Janet e Randy.
O juiz não permite a divulgação da ordem das testemunhas convocadas, mas, até o
momento, ela coincide com a
ordem das audiência preliminares. Para esta sexta-feira,
estão sendo esperados os
depoimentos dos paramédicos.
CLARÍN (AR) • POLÍTICA • 30/9/2011
Lorenzetti recorrió en Tucumán centros clandestinos
El presidente de la Corte
Suprema, Ricardo Lorenzetti, recorrió ayer dos centros
clandestinos que funcionaron
en Tucumán durante la dictadura y afirmó que al menos
en uno “se quemaron cuerpos” de detenidos. Se trata
del ex Arsenal Miguel de
Azcuénaga y del Pozo de
Vargas, donde hallaron restos
humanos.
ONGs salen en defensa de la Corte Interamericana
Afirman que el desacato al tribunal es ataque contra la soberanía popular
JUAN FRANCISCO
LONSO
A-
Soberanía. Ese el argumento
que las autoridades han esgrimido para anunciar que no
cumplirán la decisión de la
Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos que le ordenó al Estado permitirle al
exalcalde de Chacao, Leopoldo López, presentarse a
las elecciones previstas para
2012. Sin embargo, 29 organizaciones no gubernamentales pro Derechos Humanos y
once personalidades replicaron, en un comunicado difundido ayer, que el verdadero atentado contra la soberanía se producirá si se materializa el desacato al tribunal
regional y no si se cumple la
resolución donde se estableció que las inhabilitaciones
impuestas por la Contraloría
General de la República violan los derechos a elegir y ser
elegido de los venezolanos.
"La soberanía popular es a la
vez fundamento y garantía de
las instituciones de protección de los derechos humanos,
nacional e internacional. Lo
que constituye una violación
de la soberanía popular es la
vulneración de los derechos
inherentes a cada persona,
cotitular como es de la soberanía popular", se lee en el
documento, en el cual se recuerda a las autoridades que
el pueblo que votó la Constitución en diciembre de 1999
estuvo de acuerdo con que
ella estableciera que los tratados internacionales de Derechos Humanos tienen rango constitucional y que las
decisiones de los organismos
creados por dichos pactos
son de obligatorio cumplimiento.
Tras exigir del Gobierno, del
Tribunal Supremo de Justicia
(TSJ), de la Asamblea Nacional y de los órganos del
Poder Ciudadano que cesen
sus ataques contra el juzgado
con sede en San José (Costa
Rica), los activistas denunciaron que el actual comporta-
miento de los funcionarios
venezolanos perjudica a los
sectores más débiles de la
sociedad.
"Todo proceso orientado a
debilitar la protección de los
derechos humanos afecta a
las víctimas de violaciones y
potenciales usuarios de los
mecanismos internacionales
existentes para exigir protección y justicia. Su debilitamiento afectaría a todas y
todos más allá de las inclinaciones políticas, condición
social, raza, sexo, edad", se
lee en el escrito.
Sin cuidado
El hecho de que el TSJ se
encuentre revisando el fallo
que favoreció a López fue
cuestionado por el expresidente de la Corte Interamericana, Pedro Nikken, quien
afirmó: "El TSJ inventó una
teoría que no existe, según la
cual las sentencias de la Corte necesita un pasavante y
sino no se pueden ejecutar.
Eso es un mecanismo para
desconocer la efectividad de
la jurisdicción internacional".
EL UNIVERSAL • OPINIÓN • 30/9/2011
Jugando a la destrucción
La AN legisla para vulnerar la Constitución y los principios básicos de la democracia
GERARDO FERNÁNDEZ
El régimen destruye jugando
con la Constitución y el estado de derecho. En el plano
interno y en el internacional
al país le cuesta caro las vulneraciones jurídicas, el quiebre de la institucionalidad. El
desasosiego institucional y
jurídico sólo trae desolación
y atraso. En estos días se
profundiza tal situación, quizás porque evidencian que
los días están contados. El
Gobierno se enfrenta a la
comunidad internacional y al
sistema interamericano de
protección de los derechos
humanos al pretender desconocer la sentencia de la CIDH que condena las inhabilitaciones políticas. El desconocimiento de la decisión de
la CIDH deja en evidencia
las debilidades del régimen al
mostrarse autoritario y de-
muestra que los órganos del
poder público carecen de
autonomía e independencia
con relación al Poder Ejecutivo. Esto es tan grave que el
Ministerio Público en el año
2006 sostenía en el informe
anual del Fiscal que las decisiones de la CIDH eran vinculantes para la república y
que las instituciones venezolanas se sometían a sus decisiones. Hoy, sostiene, a conveniencia, lo contrario. El
Presidente por su parte manifiesta temor frente a un proceso electoral al no permitir
que el elector decida, necesita inhabilitar para ganar.
Los inconstitucionales arrebatos a las industrias y empresas privadas con las mal
llamadas expropiaciones y
ocupaciones previas sólo
traen desolación y retraso.
Las "expropiaciones" crean
incertidumbre y desmejoras
en los trabajadores, anulan la
inversión, daña a los consumidores y enriquecen a los
corruptos. Acaban con el
parque industrial venezolano
y la libre empresa. Esto trae
desempleo y miseria.
La AN sólo legisla para vulnerar la Constitución y los
principios básicos de la democracia. El ejemplo típico
es la Ley de Arrendamientos.
Destruye la propiedad y el
esfuerzo de muchos ciudadanos trabajadores y dejará a
los inquilinos desamparados
y sin vivienda. Sólo traerá
problemas, angustias, inseguridad y frustración. El remedio es definitivamente peor
que la enfermedad.
[email protected]
Cumplir la Constitución
Las sentencias de la Corte son vinculantes
FERNANDO
NÁNDEZ
M.
FER-
Los pactos internacionales
deben acatarse, cumplirse y
hacerse cumplir. Esa es la
máxima del derecho internacional en todos los temas que
han permitido fortalecer a la
comunidad internacional en
su meta de paz mundial. El
Derecho Internacional de los
Derechos Humanos se ha
convertido en el área en la
cual este compromiso se ha
hecho más obligante: se trata
de un esfuerzo mancomunado desde que se publicó la
Declaración Universal de los
Derechos Humanos en 1948.
Luego, la Convención contra
el Delito de Genocidio, el
Pacto de Derechos Civiles y
Políticos, en el contexto de la
ONU, y muchos más, para
tutelar los derechos humanos
de todos y todas por igual.
Sin discriminaciones.
En el plano hemisférico, la
Convención Americana de
Derechos Humanos es el
documento regional de mayor importancia al cual se
adscribió Venezuela, con
toda su carga de deberes en
el campo interno e internacional. Especialmente, al
someterse, de forma voluntaria y soberana a la jurisdicción de sus instituciones: las
sentencias de la Corte son
vinculantes.
Lo más trascendente ocurrió
en 1999 al constitucionalizarse los Tratados Internacionales de Derechos Humanos y viabilizar su aplicación
preferente y directa en el
territorio venezolano. Su
acatamiento y cumplimiento
son obligatorios para todos
los funcionarios públicos.
Así, las Leyes Aprobatorias
pasaron a ser normas internas. Muy simple: se superó la
vieja discusión académica
sobre el carácter supraconstitucional de los Tratados en Derechos Humanos.
Tienen jerarquía constitucional ¡Bravo por el Constituyente!
El complemento de esto fue
la sentencia de la Sala Constitucional del TSJ que estableció que los derechos humanos y los derechos fundamentales son la misma cosa.
Amén.
El TSJ ya nombró a quien revisará el fallo de López
Arcadio Delgado estudiará si decisión de la Corte IDH viola la Constitución
EL UNIVERSAL
El Tribunal Supremo de Justicia (TSJ) ya puso en marcha su maquinaria para revisar la decisión de la Corte
Interamericana de Derechos
Humanos que le ordena al
Estado permitirle al exalcalde de Chacao, Leopoldo López, postularse a las elecciones de 2012. Ayer se conoció
que la Sala Constitucional
resolvió encomendarle al
magistrado Arcadio Delgado
Rosales la tarea de analizar la
petición que la Procuraduría
General de la República interpuso el lunes, en la cual se
afirma que el dictamen viola
la Constitución y por tanto
no se puede acatar.
La decisión podría considerarse como un mal augurio
para las pretensiones de López, pues Delgado fue quien
estudió la decisión del tribunal regional relacionada con
la destitución de los miembros de la Corte Primera de
lo Contencioso Administrati-
vo y quien redactó el fallo en
el que se declaró "inejectuable" la dicha resolución.
En la polémica sentencia
1.939, el magistrado acusó al
juzgado con sede en San José
(Costa Rica) de invadir competencias del TSJ, al ordenarle reenganchar a los funcionarios removidos; y le recomendó al Gobierno Nacional
que se retirara de dicho organismo. JFA
HERALD TRIBUNE (US) • NEWS • 30/9/2011 • 16:57:12
Ex-employee accuses Sarasota County of discrimination
By Carrie Wells
A former deputy Sarasota
County administrator has
filed a federal discrimination charge against the county,
alleging she was treated unfairly based on age and gender.
Susan Scott, 61, says in her
complaint that she was never
given a description of her
position, endured "ageist
remarks" and was demoted
and forced to resign without
having been told of any performance issues.
Scott filed her complaint
with the U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity
Commission. If the case cannot be resolved, the EEOC
can file suit against the
county.
In her complaint, Scott wrote
that after she became deputy
administrator in 2003, under
former County Administrator
Jim Ley, her job assignments
were given to her by the other deputy administrator,
Dave Bullock, and she was
not allowed to initiate assignments on her own.
In 2010, Scott was demoted
to director of communications after she was told by
Bullock the county needed to
get rid of an executive-level
position.
"It is important to note that
about a year earlier, Mr. Bullock created an executivelevel position for a twentysomething female employee," Scott wrote in her complaint. "He gave her many
duties that he could have
given to me. I have the skills
to perform those job duties."
Scott was referring to Mary
Sassi-Furtado, who was, under Ley, the executive director of strategic operations, on
the same management level
as Bullock.
Sassi-Furtado was hired in
2004 as a budget analyst after a year-long post-graduate
fellowship with the county.
She was promoted to the
executive position in 2007,
but under interim County
Administrator Terry Lewis,
she was moved to a lowerlevel job in the administrative services department.
Scott received a letter of termination on July 15 from
Bullock, saying the county
needed a different skill set
for the position. She formally
resigned on July 18 and filed
her complaint in late August.
"I believe Mr. Bullock used
this opportunity to get rid of
an older female," Scott wrote
in the complaint. The document notes that Bullock is
61, the same age as Scott.
Bullock and Lewis declined
to comment on the accusations.
"A dismissed employee is
entitled to due process,"
Bullock wrote in an email.
"That process is now underway."
Scott could not be reached
for comment.
Records show Scott in 2005
was making an annual salary
of $140,000, less than Bullock"s salary of about
$163,000. She also had fewer
employment benefits.
At the time of her resignation, Scott was making about
$110,000 a year. Her personnel file had no written performance evaluations.
PROCURADORIA GERAL •
JORNAL DE ANGOLA (AN) • POLÍTICA • 30/9/2011
Procurador renova o apelo para o registo dos cidadãos
O procurador-geral da República, João Maria de Sousa, apelou ontem, em Luanda, aos cidadãos para afluírem aos postos de registo
eleitoral, no sentido de reconfirmarem os dados do
cartão eleitoral.
João Maria de Sousa, que
falava à imprensa depois de
ter efectuado a reconfirmação dos seus dados eleitorais,
justificou a sua presença no
posto de registo instalado no
edifício da Imprensa Nacional com o facto de ser o local
onde vai votar nas próximas
eleições, previstas para 2012.
“O registo eleitoral é um
dever cívico que eu não podia deixar de cumprir. Agora,
sinto-me em condições de
participar no pleito eleitoral
do próximo ano”, disse, antes
de apelar a todos os cidadãos
com mais de 18 anos para
que se dirijam aos postos de
registo.
O procurador-geral da República garantiu que mais de
400 funcionários do Ministério Público foram mobilizados para a actualização do
registo eleitoral, tendo lembrado que este acto vai permitir aos cidadãos escolherem os dirigentes do país,
Tanto a nível da Presidência
como do Parlamento. A actualização dos dados eleitorais
do procurador-geral da
República foi testemunhada
pelo vice-ministro da Administração do Território para
os Assuntos Institucionais e
Eleitorais, Adão de Almeida.
Segundo a directora dos Registos de Luanda, Maria do
Céu, o dia de hoje é dedicado
aos membros do governo da
província e seus funcionários. Para esta fase devem
dirigir-se aos postos os mais
de oito milhões de eleitores
já registados e todos que
completar 18 anos até 31 de
Dezembro do corrente ano.
LA NACION (AR) • ECONOMÍA • 30/9/2011 • 00:00:00
Otro presupuesto, la misma obligación
Por Alfonso Prat - Gay
El tratamiento del presupuesto nacional encarna una
trampa para la oposición.
Está planteado de forma tal
que pretende hacernos elegir
entre el menor de dos males:
ser cómplices de una mentira
o ser acusados de obstaculizar la gestión de un gobierno
constitucional. Esto no debería ser así, claro. Pero lo es
desde 2003, cuando el Poder
Ejecutivo inauguró la metodología de armar un presupuesto con premisas falsas que
subestiman los recursos, presentándolo al Congreso sólo
para su aprobación o rechazo.
La subestimación de recursos
le deja toda la discrecionalidad posterior en la decisión
de cómo gastar el inevitable
excedente entre la ficción y
la realidad. Desaparece así la
saludable discusión presupuestaria que opera en cualquier democracia y que es primordial en el caso de la llamada "ley de leyes". A los
diputados propios se les exige subordinación en la complicidad; a los ajenos, una
decisión envenenada y, en
última instancia, inútil: a
diferencia de lo que ocurre
en las provincias y en cualquier lugar del mundo, aquí
el presupuesto nacional se
puede aprobar por decreto.
El año pasado, por primera
vez toda la oposición decidió
rechazar el proyecto oficial.
Ocho bloques de la Cámara
de Diputados nos pusimos de
acuerdo y presentamos un
presupuesto alternativo que
mantenía la estructura de
gastos propuesta por el Ejecutivo, pero que para el cálculo de los recursos empleaba supuestos macroeconómicos realistas en reemplazo de
los supuestos falsos del Gobierno (inflación del 8,9%,
por ejemplo).
Y tuvimos razón. El aumento
de la recaudación durante los
primeros 8 meses de 2011
(31,7%) apunta a un incremento para todo el año casi
idéntico al 33,8% que calculábamos a partir de nuestras
proyecciones de crecimiento
e inflación. Este aumento
implica $ 35.000 millones de
más para gastar que los estimados por el presupuesto
oficial, finalmente aprobado
por decreto. Proponíamos en
aquel momento que esos excedentes se destinaran a elevar la jubilación mínima al
82% del salario mínimo vital
y móvil, a aumentar el resto
de las jubilaciones según el
criterio establecido por la
Corte Suprema de Justicia
en el caso Badaro, a bajar el
impuesto a las ganancias para
los asalariados de clase media a través de un aumento
del mínimo no imponible y a
incrementar el monto y el
alcance de la Asignación por
Hijo. Nuestro presupuesto
hubiera mejorado la situación
de 6 millones de jubilados,
casi 1 millón de asalariados y
más de 1 millón de niños.
Era verídico y más progresista.
También era menos inflacionario, ya que no utilizábamos
las reservas del Banco Central para financiar al Gobierno. Y en estos días en que el
mundo desarrollado tiembla
y el Banco Central no para de
perder reservas, es más perceptible la sabiduría de aquel
camino que proponíamos.
Ni cómplices ni obstruccionistas, sino responsables y
republicanos. Eso fuimos. El
Gobierno cargó las tintas
acusándonos de que poníamos "palos en la rueda" (mientras aprobaba incólume su
presupuesto por decreto) y
muchos otros nos criticaron
porque "sin presupuesto ahora tienen más arbitrariedad
para usar los fondos públicos" (quizás ignorando que a
los 10 días el Poder Ejecutivo ¡ya había modificado su
propio presupuesto con otro
decreto!).
Si bien el tiempo demostró
que teníamos razón, caló tan
hondo aquel mensaje de desaprobación que algunos
destacados diputados opositores evalúan optar esta vez
por la complicidad y aprobar
lo que venga del Poder Ejecutivo porque "no podemos
dejarlos sin presupuesto".
Como si al kirchnerismo le
cambiara en algo tenerlo o no
tenerlo. O como si sostener
que la inflación es 9% fuera
menos mentiroso con el 50%
de los votos que con el 30%.
Mi opinión es que ese cambio de actitud sería una injustificable claudicación. No se
puede confundir una regla de
validez con un criterio de
verdad: los votos no dan razón. No convierten lo que es
falso en algo cierto. Debemos seguir siendo coherentes, además de responsables
y republicanos. Es nuestra
obligación y nuestro mejor
aporte.
El autor es presidente de la
Comisión de Finanzas de
Diputados
Lorenzetti recorrió un centro de la represión
Estuvo en el Arsenal Azcuénaga, donde se hallaron restos humanos
Por José Ignacio Sbrocco
San Miguel de Tucumán."Es un lugar donde se asesinaban y quemaban personas.
Es importante para que se
entienda", declaró el presidente de la Corte Suprema
de Justicia, Ricardo Lorenzetti, durante una visita al
Arsenal Miguel de Azcuénaga. Allí funcionó durante la
dictadura un centro clandestino de detención y un centro
de exterminio, según lo definió el juez federal Daniel
Bejas, que acompañó a Lorenzetti durante el recorrido.
El titular de la Corte Suprema no podía creer lo que
escuchaba con extrema atención. Selva Varela, del Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF), le relataba los hallazgos de restos
humanos, de vainas, monedas, entre otros elementos, en
una trinchera donde se que-
maban cuerpos. Entre Bejas
y Mario Racedo, juez federal
subrogante, reconstruyeron
que ese centro clandestino
era el destino final de la mayoría de los detenidos en
otros centros que funcionaron en esta provincia. "Acá
se los fusilaba o se los blanqueaba, y se los llevaba a la
cárcel de Villa Urquiza", dijo
Bejas.
Lorenzetti llegó a Tucumán
luego de presentar un libro
sobre derechos humanos y de
reafirmar que juicios por la
represión no se detendrán.
Fue el martes, en una presentación en la que fue insultado
por familiares de ex militares
procesados.
El galpón
Según las investigaciones,
los detenidos llegaban al galpón N° 9 a través de un camino alternativo y luego los
llevaban a trincheras donde
se los fusilaba y quemaba
junto con otros elementos,
como su documentación.
Rastros de biblioratos encontrados en el lugar así lo confirmaron. En el galpón, los
presos eran ubicados en unos
tabiques de 1,5 metros cuadrados, algunos esposados a
la pared. Por allí pasaban
alrededor de 40 personas por
día, según la investigación
judicial.
Cuando Lorenzetti consultó
sobre la cantidad de personas
que habían pasado por ese
centro de detención, Racedo
respondió: "Según los testimonios, unas 900 personas".
"Está demostrado que el acceso al centro clandestino se
habría encontrado a unos dos
kilómetros de la entrada
principal de la unidad militar
Compañía de Arsenales 5.
Para su ingreso, debía recorrerse una calle de tierra para-
lela a la ruta nacional 9, y se
accedía al campo clandestino
a través de una tranquera.
Dicho lugar estaba a cargo de
la V Brigada de Infantería y
custodiado por Gendarmería,
el puesto de guardia 1",
señala un informe judicial.
Es la primera vez que la
prensa accede al lugar donde
funcionó un centro clandestino, y es la primera vez que
un juez de la Corte visita este
predio. Lorenzetti llegó a
Tucumán para entregar el
título honoris causa a Eugenio Llamas Pombo, de la
Universidad de Salamanca, y
para inaugurar las XXIII Jornadas Nacionales de Derecho
Civil. En ese contexto, visitó
ayer el Arsenal Azcuénaga y
la fosa común conocida como Pozo de Vargas. Era un
pozo de agua, ubicado en una
finca limonera a la vera de la
vía del tren, en la que se encontraron restos óseos.
Karachi: fin de l'audition d'Hortefeux
L audition de Brice Hortefeux, entendu par la police
comme témoin sur ses conversations téléphoniques avec un mis en examen dans
le volet financier de l affaire
Karachi, s est achevée aujourd hui peu avant 11 heures, selon un communiqué de
l ex-ministre. "Brice Hortefeux, comme il l avait souhaité, a été entendu, ce matin,
comme témoin, par l autorité
judiciaire. Il a, ainsi, pu pré-
ciser et démontrer, en toute
transparence, qu il ne disposait d aucun élément provenant du dossier de la procédure judiciaire", indique ce
communiqué. M. Hortefeux a
été entendu dans l enquête
ouverte par le parquet de
Paris pour violation de secret
professionnel et recel après la
divulgation de ces conversations avec Thierry Gaubert,
un ex-conseiller de Nicolas
Sarkozy mis en examen la
semaine dernière par le juge
Renaud van Ruymbeke. Dans
une conversation téléphonique du 14 septembre, M.
Hortefeux avait indiqué à M.
Gaubert que sa femme,
Hélène de Yougoslavie, interrogée quatre jours auparavant par le juge Renaud van
Ruymbeke, "balançait beaucoup". "Qu est-ce que tu as
comme infos là-dessus, toi,
parce qu elle me dit qu elle
dit rien?", avait répondu Thi-
erry Gaubert. "Ça m embête
de te le dire par téléphone. Il
y a beaucoup de choses, hein", avait assuré l ex-ministre
de l Intérieur. A la suite de la
révélation de ces écoutes, le
parquet de Paris a ouvert une
enquête pour violation de
secret professionnel et recel,
confiée à la Direction centrale de la police judiciaire
(DCPJ). Après cette mise en
cause, M. Hortefeux avait
demandé à être entendu par
la justice, niant "catégoriquement avoir eu quelque
information issue de la procédure judiciaire en cours"
sur le volet financier du dossier Karachi, expliquant n
avoir eu connaissance que de
rumeurs journalistiques.
L'adjointe de Courroye porte plainte
Le bras droit de Philippe
Courroye, Marie-Christine
Daubigney, mise en cause
dans l enquête du Monde sur
la violation des sources dans
l affaire Bettencourt, a porté
plainte vendredi pour dénonciation calomnieuse contre le
quotidien,
a-t-on
appris
auprès de son avocat. Me
Olivier Baratelli a également
adressé trois courriers à la
présidente du tribunal de
grande instance de Paris,
Chantal Arens, au Premier
président de la cour d appel
de Paris, Jacques Degrandi,
et au procureur général de
Paris, François Falletti, pour
s étonner, selon lui de la méconnaissance d une disposition pénale qui pourrait
entraîner l annulation de l
enquête.
Un livre sur Ribéry pas interdit
Le juge des référés du tribunal de Paris a rejeté la demande d interdiction de parution de l ouvrage "La face
cachée de Franck Ribéry",
déposée par le footballeur,
qui a été condamné à verser
3.000 euros à la maison d
édition, ont indiqué les parties concernées. "Le juge a dit
n y avoir lieu à référé, c està-dire qu il a rejeté notre demande" d interdiction du
livre motivée par l atteinte au
droit à l image (le footballeur
figure en couverture), a déclaré à l AFP l avocat de l
attaquant international français, Me Carlo-Alberto Brusa. "Nous avons gagné, le
livre n est absolument pas
interdit", s est réjoui une porte-parole des Editions du
moment, société éditrice du
livre controversé. "M. Ribéry
a été condamné à nous verser
3.000 euros au titre de l article 700", qui stipule que la
partie perdante doit rembourser à son adversaire les frais
engagés, a ajouté la porteparole. "Nous allons interjeter appel car les motivations
du juge sont erronées", a
assuré Me Brusa. Il a précisé
qu il allait déposer un second
référé demandant l interdiction du livre, cette fois pour
atteinte à la présomption d
innocence, dès lundi au tri-
bunal de Paris. Par ailleurs,
le footballeur a chargé son
défenseur de "déposer une
plainte pénale en se constituant partie civile pour violation du secret de l instruction
et recel contre tout auteur ou
complice", indique Me Brusa, selon qui "la rédaction de
la plainte est en cours". "Je
ferai tout ce qui est nécessaire" pour bloquer la diffusion
de l ouvrage, a indiqué l avocat. Le livre "La face cachée
de Franck Ribéry" est sorti
jeudi. Des passages, dont des
procès-verbaux d audition
avec des détails scabreux,
portent sur l "affaire Zahia",
dans laquelle le footballeur a
été mis en examen.
TRF • MINISTÉRIO PÚBLICO •
PORTUGAL DIGITAL (PT) • NOTÍCIAS • 30/9/2011 • 12:00:00
Justiça condiciona trem-bala à regularização de todas as linhas de transporte interestadual
Brasília - A Justiça Federal
acolheu pedido do Ministério Público Federal no DF
(MPF/DF) e determinou a
suspensão imediata de quaisquer procedimentos administrativos que visem a licitação
para exploração do trembala, que pretende ligar a
cidade do Rio de Janeiro a
Campinas (SP), até a completa regularização do serviço de transporte público interestadual em todo o país.
A decisão obriga a Agência
Nacional de Transportes Terrestres (ANTT) a publicar, já
no próximo mês, editais de
licitação para a concessão de
novas outorgas de exploração
de todas as linhas do transporte rodoviário interestadual
e internacional, com extensão
superior a 75 km.
O prazo está previsto no cronograma apresentado pela
própria agência à Justiça.
Depois disso, serão necessárias outras três etapas até a
completa regularização do
serviço, que deve ser concluída em setembro de 2012.
Caso descumpra o prazo de
qualquer uma das etapas, a
agência terá de pagar multa
diária de R$ 5 mil.
A decisão também condiciona a liberação do trem-bala à
apresentação de projeto básico que permita a completa
caracterização da obra. Enquanto isso, a União fica
proibida de conceder subvenção econômica para a
implantação, concessão ou
exploração do trem de alta
velocidade, seja por equalização de juros ou qualquer
outra forma.
Prorrogações
A necessidade de licitação
prévia para exploração do
serviço de transporte público
foi prevista na Constituição
de 1988. Desde então, por
mais de uma vez, o Tribunal
de Contas da União e a própria ANTT estabeleceram
cronogramas para regularizar
o problema. Sucessivamente,
porém, as metas foram descumpridas.
A apuração do MPF/DF aponta que, até hoje, as empresas que operam centenas
de linhas do transporte interestadual mantém o serviço
de forma contrária à Constituição. Algumas, inclusive,
sequer mantém contratos
administrativos com a União,
operando o serviço com base
em meras autorizações, de
forma totalmente precária.
Diante desse histórico, a licitação do sistema rodoviário
interestadual de transporte de
passageiros deve ser considerada um passo decisivo para
a melhoria da qualidade do
serviço de transporte público
no país, entendem os procuradores responsáveis pela
ação. As informações são da
Procuradoria da República
no Distrito Federal.
TST •
Correios pedem ao TST suspensão da greve dos trabalhadores
A empresa instaurou o dissídio coletivo no TST com
pedido de liminar para suspensão da greve, sob a pena
de multa diária de R$ 100
mil. Da Redação, com agência Brasília - Para tentar chegar a um acordo com os trabalhadores em greve há 16
dias, a direção dos Correios
recorreu ao Tribunal Superior do Trabalho (TST)
para fazer a Conciliação com
os funcionários. A empresa
instaurou o dissídio coletivo
no TST com pedido de liminar para suspensão da greve,
sob a pena de multa diária de
R$ 100 mil. Caso o TST
decida não suspender a greve, os Correios pedem que o
tribunal determine que a Federação Nacional dos Trabalhadores de Correios e Telégrafos e Similares (Fentect)
garanta o percentual de 70%
de empregados em cada uma
das unidades operacionais da
empresa, como agências postais, terminais de cargas e
garagens e centros de triagem. O processo será encaminhado à vice-presidenta do
TST, ministra Cristina Peduzzi, que deverá promover
uma audiência para tentar
chegar a um acordo entre as
partes. O pedido dos Correios chegou ao TST na noite
de ontem (29) e classifica a
paralisação como um “movimento atentatório à ordem
pública”. Os Correios pedem
que, no julgamento do mérito, a greve seja considerada
abusiva. A empresa requer
também que, durante o movimento, os grevistas garantam o acesso de usuários e
empregado às unidades dos
Correios, assim como a entrada e saída de veículos, e
que seja impedida a realização de piquetes e atos que
resultem em depredação do
patrimônio público. Em nota,
os Correios informam que a
busca de Conciliação por
meio do TST foi feita depois
de esgotadas todas as tentativas diretas de acordo com a
representação dos trabalhadores. “Os Correios continuam abertos ao diálogo e conclamam novamente os trabalhadores parados a reavaliar
sua posição e fechar o acordo
coletivo de trabalho, em benefício da população brasileira e de todos os 110 mil empregados da empresa”, diz o
comunicado. A principal
divergência entre a empresa e
os funcionários é sobre o
desconto dos dias parados.
Ontem, a direção dos Correios apresentou uma proposta
de descontar os dias não tra-
balhados na proporção de um
dia de greve por mês. Mas os
trabalhadores não aceitam o
desconto e se propõem a
compensar os dias de greve
com horas extras e mutirões
para colocar o serviço em
dia. A empresa também manteve a proposta de aumento
linear de R$ 80 a todos empregados, reajuste salarial e
dos benefícios em 6,87% e
abono imediato de R$ 500. A
reivindicação dos trabalhadores é por um aumento linear
de R$ 200, além de reposição
da inflação de 7,16% e aumento do piso salarial de R$
807 para R$ 1.635. A categoria também exige a contratação imediata de todos os aprovados no último concurso
público dos Correios. Para
Saul da Cruz, do comando de
negociações da Fentect, a
empresa só tomou a iniciativa de recorrer ao TST depois
de muita pressão dos trabalhadores. “Eles só chamaram
a gente depois de 13 dias
para fazer um acordo devido
à pressão que os trabalhadores fizeram na porta da empresa”. Segundo ele, a entidade ainda não recebeu a
notificação do TST para
marcar a Conciliação. As
informações são da ABr.
PRENSA LATINA (AR) • NOTÍCIAS • 30/9/2011 • 19:06:00
Cuba reitera compromisso de integração América Latina
Assunção, 30 set (Prensa
Latina)
O chanceler cubano, Bruno
Rodríguez, reiterou hoje nesta capital o compromisso de
seu país com a causa da integração regional e subregional, e o desenvolvimento dos vínculos entre os povos da América Latina. Em
coletiva de imprensa oferecida junto a seu par paraguaio,
Jorge Lara, na sede da chancelaria, destacou os laços
muito profundos e históricos
entre os povos cubano e paraguaio, que se expressam
hoje na coincidência de ambos os governos na difícil
conjuntura internacional.
Tenho vindo -sublinhou- a
reiterar nosso compromisso
com a agenda regional que
será muito nutrida no que
resta de ano, com ênfase nas
reuniões preparatórias e a
própria cimeira da Comunidade de Estados Latinoamericanos e Caribenhos .
Assinalou que sua visita oficial a este país foi também
para expressar sua gratidão
ao presidente Fernando Lugo
e a seu chanceler pela permanente companhia de Paraguai em defesa do Direito
Internacional, a liberdade de
comércio e navegação.
A isso se somam, disse , a
oposição à aplicação extraterritorial de leis a terceiros
Estados e ao bloqueio norteamericano contra Cuba, que
é, ademais, decisão da Assembléia Geral das Nações
Unidas.
Nesse sentido, manifestou
que esta medida impositiva a
mais de 50 anos contra a ilha
caribenha é, ao mesmo tempo, ou uma violação flagrante dos direitos humanos dos
cubanos, que provoca dificuldades ao desenvolvimento
e sofrimentos a nosso povo .
Sentimos-nos alentados pelo
desenvolvimento crescente e
muito satisfatório das relações bilaterais entre Paraguai
e Cuba, enfatizou o chanceler.
Rodríguez expressou que a
maior das Antilhas ou participará com todo compromisso ou na XXI Cimeira de
Chefes de Estado e de governo, que terá por sede a este
país nos dias 28 e 29 de outubro próximo. Nos sentiremos muito honrados e muito
bem representados ou , assegurou.
O ministro do Exterior paraguaio, por sua vez, elogiou a
relação estreita, de confiança
e compromisso de ambos os
governos face às responsabilidades da América Latina e
de nossos povos .
Recordou que coincidiram
em 66 Assembléia Geral das
Nações Unidas na qual Paraguai teve posições compartilhadas e similares com Cuba.
Manifestamos-nos e pronunciamos contra o bloqueio,
que consideramos uma situação injusta do Direito Internacional e propomos também o reconhecimento ao
Estado de Palestina , comentou.
California: Court Says Ban on Gay G.I.’s Is Moot Issue
A three-judge panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in
San
Francisco
refused
Thursday to decide the Constitutionality of the nowrepealed “don’t ask, don’t
tell” policy, saying the issue
has been resolved since gay
men and women can serve
openly in the armed forces.
The court tossed out a lawsuit that had challenged the ban
as a violation of civil rights.
In doing so, it also dismissed
a trial judge’s year-old ruling
that the policy was unconstitutional. Dan Woods, a lawyer for the gay rights group
Log Cabin Republicans, which filed the lawsuit in 2004,
said he would ask the full
Ninth Circuit to review the
decision. The group recently
argued that the lower court
ruling, which also barred
enforcement of “don’t ask,
don’t tell,” should remain in
effect despite this month’s
repeal because future administrations and lawmakers
could reintroduce a ban. The
three judges disagreed, saying the case is moot because
there is nothing left to challenge. The panel rejected the
group’s assertion that it
should decide the underlying
Constitutional issues to prevent future limits or bans.
El TSJE abre paraguas ante posible boicot de los partidos
El Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral intensifica la
ejecución de su plan B para
el referéndum y pide constantemente la cooperación de
instituciones públicas y privadas para integrar las mesas
de votación, por temor a que
los representantes de los partidos no se presenten.
Lo normal (plan A) es que
los miembros de mesas sean
los propuestos por los partidos políticos. Sin embargo,
el TSJE no confía que ellos
puedan estar presentes, porque los trabajos partidarios
para la consulta popular prácticamente son nulos.
El TSJE realiza actos de firmas de convenios con las
Gobernaciones y Municipali-
dades, para que los funcionarios de estas instituciones se
presenten a ocupar las mesas,
antes de las 7 de la mañana
del 9 de octubre, día de la
consulta popular.
El TSJE, todos los días, firma acuerdos con instituciones públicas y privadas para
que su personal esté disponible para esa fecha, en que se
necesitará de 15.000 miembros de mesas titulares e igual cantidad de suplentes.
El vicedirector de Registro
Electoral, Sergio López, confirmó que las autoridades
electorales ven poco entusiasmo de los partidos para el
referéndum y que por eso se
intensifica la ejecución del
Plan B.
REQUISITO MÍNIMO. El
Código Electoral exige que
para las votaciones deben
integrarse el 51 % de las mesas receptoras de votos.
El artículo 238 del Código
establece: "Las elecciones
deben practicarse en todos
los distritos, incluidos en la
convocatoria (todo el país).
Si ellas no se hubieren realizado en por lo menos el cincuenta y uno por ciento de
las mesas habilitadas para el
efecto, deberá convocarse a
nuevas elecciones. En los
distritos en que no se hubieren realizado las elecciones o
se hubieren anulado, las
mismas deberán celebrarse
dentro de los treinta días siguientes".
El artículo 239 agrega que
"cuando en un distrito electoral no se hubieran realizado
las elecciones en el 51 % por
lo menos de las mesas receptoras de votos, se convocará
a nuevas elecciones en el
mismo".
HOY EN ITÁ. Hoy a las
09.30 se realiza un acto de
firma de convenio entre la
Justicia Electoral y la Municipalidad de Itá. El convenio
tiene por objeto permitir a los
funcionarios de la Municipalidad que participen como
monitores y miembros de
mesa en el referéndum a celebrarse el 9 de octubre.
La votación se hará para confirmar o rechazar la modificación de la Constitución,
que permitirá a los paraguayos que viven en el extranjero votar en las elecciones.
Hay dudas sobre destino de datos de parlamentarios
La Cámara de Diputados
aprobó un pedido de informe
a la Contraloría General de la
República, consultando si las
declaraciones juradas de bienes de los diputados fueron
entregadas a personas que no
son parte de la institución.
La moción fue presentada
por el diputado colorado Óscar Tuma, quien maneja la
versión de que los documentos fueron entregados al líder
del Partido Unace, Lino César Oviedo, para solicitar el
embargo de los bienes de los
exoviedistas Víctor Yambay,
Artemio Barrios y Tuma.
La intención sería cobrar los
800 millones de guaraníes
del pagaré de fidelidad que
firmaron los legisladores que
hoy forman parte del movi-
miento Honor Colorado, sector interno de la ANR.
Tuma duda del resguardo que
tengan las declaraciones juradas de los diputados, estando al frente del organismo
el contralor Rubén Velázquez, de extracción oviedista.
La Cámara Baja estableció
un plazo de quince días para
la remisión de los informes.
El diputado señaló que si se
comprueba que fueron entregadas las declaraciones de
los legisladores, impulsarán
una denuncia ante la Fiscalía.
DENUNCIA. Tuma anunció
que junto con Yambay y Barrios presentarán en forma
individual una denuncia penal por coacción y extorsión
contra Oviedo. Consideran
que si salen victoriosos de
esa demanda el líder oviedista no podrá beneficiarse con
la medida sustitutiva, pudiendo decretar su prisión.
También informó que presentarán otra demanda, esta
vez para pedir la nulidad de
los pagarés. Entienden que
no existe mandato imperativo
y que el Partido Unace pide
que la justicia se superponga
a la Constitución Nacional.
EMPLAZAMIENTO.
El
abogado Óscar Tuma, padre
del legislador, emplazó a
Oviedo a que devuelva los
cinco pagarés, en un lapso de
48 horas, que se cumple hoy.
Sin embargo, el diputado ya
anunció que impulsarán una
demanda.
Juez dice que la mensura no anula títulos de terceros
El juez en lo Civil Alberto Martínez Simón explicó que es un error suponer que la realización de una mensura judicial, como la que solicitó el Indert, producirá la anulación de
cualquier otro título que exista sobre la misma propiedad.
Alberto Martínez Simón,
juez del primer turno en lo
Civil y Comercial, dijo que
es un error frecuente suponer
que la realización de una
mensura judicial otorga o
anula derechos de propiedad.
Explicó que esto ocurre porque las leyes anteriores incluían en una misma fase la
mensura y el deslinde de la
propiedad, lo que supone
determinar no solo el lugar
que ocupa una propiedad
según el título expuesto, sino
la validez de este con relación a otros.
Hoy, dijo, estas fases están
separadas y en el proceso de
mensura solo se procede a
ubicar la propiedad en el
terreno de acuerdo con los
datos contenidos en el título.
En comunicación con Radio
Monumental y consultado
sobre la polémica generada
en torno a la mensura que
solicitó el Indert, Martínez
explicó que la medición planteada es solo al efecto de
determinar espacialmente la
ubicación de las fincas cuyos
títulos detenta el Estado.
Insistió en que la determinación del lugar donde se ubican las propiedades no implica en absoluto la validación
de los títulos mensurados ni
la anulación de cualesquiera
otros títulos que posean terceros con relación a las mismas propiedades.
El magistrado explicó que la
definición sobre cuáles títulos son los válidos y cuáles
no, deberá ser consecuencia
de otro proceso judicial, posterior a la mensura.
La explicación del magistrado coincide con la versión
que había dado el propio
presidente del Indert, Marciano Barreto, quien aseguró
en repetidas ocasiones que la
medida no fue solicitada contra ningún productor en particular, ni supone la anulación masiva de los títulos de
terceros, como advirtieron
algunos sectores.
UNA OBLIGACIÓN. Barreto refirió que la vigencia de
una sentencia de la Corte
Suprema de Justicia que
restituyó al Estado tierras que
habían sido vendidas en 1888
les obliga, como responsables del Indert, a iniciar las
acciones que correspondan
para saber dónde están ubicadas esas fincas y qué se
hizo con ellas.
El funcionario dijo que la
mensura es apenas la primera
parte de un proceso que busca la regularización de la
propiedad de las tierras.
PROCESO TRABADO
La mensura judicial solicitada por el Indert sigue trabada
luego de que una de las empresas afectadas por la medida solicitara la suspensión,
alegando que la medición
debe ser realizada por el Juzgado de la localidad de Santa
Rita, y no por la de Iruña, tal
como lo planteó la entidad
estatal. El caso está en manos
de ambos magistrados.
Indert advierte que políticos están incitando al desacato
El asesor jurídico de la entidad recordó que la mensura solicitada por el Instituto se realizará por orden judicial y que cualquier llamado a impedirla por vías no legales, supone
una incitación a rebelarse contra las leyes; un delito.
Por Luis Bareiro y Patricia
Vargas
El asesor jurídico del Instituto de Desarrollo Rural y de la
Tierra (Indert), Héctor Sosa,
advirtió que quienes convocan a la comisión de acciones
no jurídicas tendientes a impedir la mensura judicial
solicitada por la entidad, o
apoyan públicamente esas
acciones, están incitando a
una rebelión contra la ley.
El abogado dijo que cualquier intento por impedir la
mensura supondrá, en la
práctica, un desacato a una
orden judicial, con todas las
consecuencias que esto implica.
Sosa se refirió a la mensura
judicial solicitada por el Indert para identificar sobre el
terreno dónde están ubicadas
unas 257.000 hectáreas de
tierras que el Estado recuperó, merced a un fallo definitivo de la Corte Suprema de
Justicia de 1963.
Son tierras que el Estado
había vendido hacia 1888 y
que recuperó seis años después, debido a que los compradores nunca pagaron por
ellas.
De acuerdo con las estimaciones iniciales realizadas por
el Indert, las fincas que se
pretende mensurar se encuentran entre los Departamentos de Alto Paraná, Caaguazú
y Canindeyú.
REACCIONES. El anuncio
de la medición desató la airada reacción de la Unión de
Gremios de la Producción
(UGP), de los intendentes de
varias de las localidades de la
zona afectada y de miles de
productores asentados en la
región, quienes fueron convocados para participar de
una multitudinaria manifestación en contra de la mensura que se realizó el pasado
miércoles.
Del evento participaron varios políticos como el senador
Miguel Carrizosa y el diputado Carlos Soler, del Partido
Patria Querida; Javier Zacarías Irún, precandidato presidencial; el senador Hugo
Estigarribia, el gobernador
del Alto Paraná, Nelson Aguinagalde; y el gobernador
de Itapúa, Juan Afara, todos
de la ANR, entre otros.
En todo momento, los disertantes, en especial los representantes de los municipios y
de los gremios de producto-
res, dijeron que no permitirán
que se realice la mensura
judicial.
Alguno, como el intendente
de Santa Rita, Concepción
Rodríguez, llegó a decir que,
de ser necesario, se recurrirá
a la violencia para impedir la
medición.
EL DERECHO A LA SOLICITUD
El asesor jurídico del Indert,
Héctor Sosa, recordó que,
como cualquier otra persona
física o jurídica que tenga un
título de propiedad, la entidad tiene todo el derecho de
solicitar a un juez que determine la ubicación espacial de
sus fincas, de acuerdo con los
datos obrantes en sus documentos, y que esa medición,
como cualquier otra, se realizará necesariamente por una
orden judicial. En consecuencia -explicó-, nadie puede
impedir que se realice la
mensura sin incurrir en la
comisión de un delito; el
desacato a una orden judicial".
Sosa reiteró que la mensura
no implica de ninguna manera la anulación de los títulos
que posean terceros sobre la
misma propiedad.
Le meurtre d'Aulaqi légal
L élimination de l imam extrémiste américano-yéménite
Anwar al-Aulaqi au Yémen a
été approuvée par un document secret du département
américain de la Justice, a
indiqué le Washington Post
hier. Aulaqi a été tué hier par
une frappe d un drone de la
CIA, ont rapporté CNN et le
Washington Post. La Maison
Blanche a refusé de donner
des détails sur l opération
couverte par le secret qui
entoure les actions antiterroristes.
Un haut responsable des services secrets a cependant
affirmé au Washington Post
que la CIA n aurait pas tué
un citoyen américain sans un
accord écrit du département
de la Justice. Le document a
été rédigé après que des juristes de l administration de
Barack Obama ont examiné
les questions légales concernant l élimination d un citoyen américain. Les responsables ont indiqué au quotidien
qu il n y avait pas eu de désaccord sur la légitimité de l
élimination d Aulaqi, le premier citoyen américain à
figurer sur la liste "à tuer ou
capturer" de la CIA.
L élimination de l iman a
soulevé une controverse aux
Etats-Unis sur le droit ou non
du président d autoriser le
meurtre d un ressortissant
américain à l étranger au
nom de la lutte contre le terrorisme. "D un point de vue
général, il serait tout à fait
légal pour les Etats-Unis de
prendre pour cible des dirigeants haut placés de forces
ennemies, de quelque nationalité que ce soit, qui conspirent pour tuer des Américains", a indiqué un haut responsable sous couvert de l
anonymat.
Pardiss Kebriaei, avocate
auprès de l association Center for Constitutional Rights, a cependant déclaré que
"si cela s est fait en l absence
d une menace imminente ou
d un danger de mort, c est un
meurtre illégal au regard de
la Constitution américaine
et du droit international".
TST • TRT •
Justiça do Trabalho proíbe Correios de descontar salário de grevistas
Segundo o desembargador, a
Empresa de Correios e Telégrafos (ECT) determinou a
suspensão do pagamento dos
grevistas sem negociação
prévia e sem levar em conta
que o salário tem natureza
alimentar. Da Redação, com
Agência Brasil Brasília – O
desembargador Macedo Caron, do Tribunal Regional
do Trabalho da 10ª Região
(TRT10), que engloba Brasília e o Tocantins, proibiu os
Correios de descontar o salário dos trabalhadores que
estão em greve. A decisão foi
tomada ontem (30) pelo magistrado e cassa entendimento da juíza substituta da 3ª
Vara de Trabalho de Brasília,
que não impediu que a ECT
cortasse os vencimentos. De
acordo com o desembargador, a Empresa de Correios e
Telégrafos (ECT) determinou
a suspensão do pagamento
dos grevistas sem negociação
prévia e sem levar em conta
que o salário tem natureza
alimentar. Para Caron, isso
foi uma “verdadeira pressão
para que os grevistas voltem
ao trabalho, resultando em
efetiva afronta ao próprio
direito de greve”. O desembargador acredita que há possibilidade de uma solução
menos prejudicial para ambas as partes, como o descon-
to mais ameno dos dias parados ou a compensação com
horas trabalhadas. Além de
proibir a suspensão do salário
até o fim do movimento grevista, ele determina que haja
devolução dos valores já de-
bitados em folha suplementar, sob pena de multa. Ainda
cabe recurso ao Tribunal
Superior
do
Trabalho
(TST).
Encotur, Feira do livro em semana uruguaia
Montevidéu , 1 out (Prensa
Latina)
Acordos comerciais com o
Brasil, a celebração do VIII
Encontro de Comercialização
de Turismo (Encotur) e o
início da 34 Feira Internacional do Livro, destacaram na
semana informativa uruguaia. Uruguai solucionou o deferendo comercial com oBrasil iniciado na semana passada, o qual gravava com 30
por cento às exportações de
veículos deste país.
Enquanto o setor automotriz
está excluído dos acordos do
Mercosul, Uruguai tem uma
quota sem impostos e o pacto
atingido entre delegações de
ambas as nações, manteve
esta preferência comercial.
O presidente uruguaio, José
Mujica, celebrou o convênio
e assinalou que expressa a
vontade política de seu par
brasileira, Dilma Rousseff.
Acrescentou o chefe de Estado que só restam aspectos
jurídicos, os quais podem
demorar em alguns dias.
Héctor Lescano, ministro de
Turismo e Esporte, inaugurou a oitava edição de Encotur, Feira Internacional do
Uruguai, que desenvolveu
suas atividades no Hotel Vitória Praça da capital..
A instalação dispôs para a
exposição de seus produtos
de 40 stands institucionais,
de agências de viagem, linhas aéreas e hotéis, da Argentina, Brasil, Cuba, Paraguai e a sede.
O evento esteve antecedido
por uma jornada de habilitação na qual Luis Felipe Aguilera, Diretor do Escritório
de Turismo de Cuba para
Cone Sul, expôs sobre "O
Turismo como fator de desenvolvimento econômico e
integrador cultural".
Outro acontecimento de Corte Internacional, a 34 Feira
do Livro do Uruguai, abriu
suas portas até 9 de outubro,
com mais de uma centena de
atividades na ampla programação da festa cultural das
letras.
Como sede figuram o átrio e
o largo da Intendência de
Montevidéu , lugares onde se
efetuam apresentações de
novidades literárias e debates
.
Esta edição conta com a presença do escritor uruguaio
Daniel Chavarría, radicado
em Cuba, quem ganhou o
Prêmio Bartolomé Hidalgo
2010 por sua novela "Viúvas
de sangue".
TSE •
Bolívia:Acordo entre guaranis e governo marca semana
La Paz, 1 out (Prensa Latina)
Na semana noticiosa que
fecha hoje esteve marcada cá
pelos primeiros acordos do
encontro entre uma comissão
do governo boliviano integrada por cinco ministros de
Estado e a Assembléia do
Povo Guarani (APG). O pacto, assinado na comunidade
de Urundaytí, província oriental de Camiri, estabelece
elementos preparatórios para
a elaboração de uma agenda
sobre as exigências desses
originários .
Também sobre a necessidade
de ultrapassar o âmbito apresentado depois da intervenção policial à marcha indígena que se opõe à construção
da estrada Vila Tunari-San
Ignacio de Moxos.
Os guaranis propuseram criar
uma comissão humanitária
para ajudar a afetados no
protesto e outra para aprofundar na investigação do
agir policial na passeata. Assim mesmo, comprometeram-se a levantar toda medida de greve de fome e bloqueio de caminhos.
Na semana, o presidente boliviano Evo Morales denunciou que por trás da marcha
indígena há um plano para
fazer fracassar as eleições
judiciais de 16 de outubro
próximo.
Por sua vez, o Tribunal Supremo Eleitoral (TSE) da
Bolívia confirmou que as
eleições do ?"rgão Judicial
estão garantidas. De acordo
com o titular do máximo
organismo comicial, Wilfredo Ovando, nessa entidade
não se considerou nem a hipotese de suspender ou adiar
o sufrágio .
Para o Executivo, para além
da rejeição por supostos prejuízos ao meio ambiente, por
trás da mobilização escondem-se interesses políticos e
vínculos com Organizações
Não Governamentais e a embaixada dos Estados Unidos
em La Paz.
Sobre essa via o próprio presidente Morales anunciou
que se suspendia sua construção até não se realizar
uma consulta com os povoadores de Cochabamba e Beni.
Morales adiantou ademais a
promulgação de uma lei que
proíbe os assentamentos ilegais nessa zona, um dos reclamos dos originários que
pedem a estrada.
Respeitante à marcha disse
que tem sinais políticos e
está influenciada por pessoas
que não querem que os indígenas melhorarem sua situação econômica e social.
Nestes últimos sete dias, o
chefe do Estado Plurinacional deu posse a Wilfredo
Chávez como ministro de
Governo, em substituição de
Sacha LLorenti; e a Rubén
Saavedra à frente da carteira
de Defesa, em substituição
de María Cecilia Chacón.
Morales criticou à imprensa
por difundiram relatórios
sobre quatro falecidos, entre
eles dois menores de idade,
durante a intervenção à passeata.
De outra parte, o governo
chamou de desnecessário o
desemprego cívico nacional
que convocou a Central Operária Boliviana (COB) em
apoio a marchistas indígenas
e um documentos de demandas sindicais.
Conforme o ministro de Trabalho, Daniel Santalla, o protesto carece de motivos pois
a principal razão foi limpada
com a decisão de submeter a
consulta a construção da via
amazônica entre Cochabamba e Beni.
Do mesmo jeito, os setores
da saúde e educação da Bolívia serão beneficiados com
um incremento salarial de 11
por cento. De acordo com o
ministro de Economia, Luis
Arce, a medida terá caráter
retroativo desde janeiro deste
ano.
Nesta semana divulgou-se
aliás que se registraram 302
casos positivos de gripe
AH1N1, com maior incidência na região oriental de Santa Cruz (234) de uns mil 341
suspeitos.
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (BL) • POLITIK • 1/10/2011 • 12:02:00
Grenzen des Grundgesetzes: Wegweiser zu den europäischen Sternen
Mit der Ausweitung des Euro-Rettungsschirms ist Deutschland am Ende des alten
Grundgesetzes angelangt. Es reicht nicht mehr aus, um immer höhere Milliardenbürgschaften zu gewähren und damit die europäische Zukunft zu sichern. Noch mehr Europa
wird es nur mit einer neuen Verfassung geben - und mit der Zustimmung der Bürger. Ein
Volksentscheid ist unabdingbar.
Ein Kommentar von Heribert Prantl
knarrt, Griechenland ächzt
und Italien stöhnt.
Geschichte ist, wenn es kracht: Früher wurden historische Tage von Kanonaden
eingeleitet; historische Tage
hatten stets etwas mit Krieg
und Sieg und Niederlage zu
tun. Weil das so im kollektiven Gedächtnis gespeichert
ist, hat man den vergangenen
Tagen ihre Historizität nicht
unbedingt angemerkt: Es
kracht nichts - nur der Euro
Um den Euro zu stützen, hat
der Bundestag eine Bürgschaft für eine ungeheuerliche
Summe geleistet; es ist nicht
die erste dieser Bürgschaften.
Sie alle dienen nicht nur der
Stabilisierung, sondern auch
der
Erweiterung
der
Europäischen
Währungsunion; aus ihr wird
eine Wirtschaftsunion, eine
Sozialunion, eine Transferunion - also ein Staat.
Der Weg dahin ist offensichtlich mit Bürgschaften gepflastert. Es ist aber dies ein
Weg, der den Boden des
Grundgesetzes verlässt, der
also eine neue Verfassungsrechtliche
Grundlegung
braucht. Ist das schlecht?
Nein. Im Gegenteil: Es ist
gewiss nicht das Schlechteste, was man über Deutschland sagen kann, wenn auf
diese Weise die europäische
Solidarität den Vorrang vor
nationaler Selbstbehauptung
erhält.
LA NACION (AR) • ECONOMÍA • 2/10/2011 • 23:25:00
Argentina pierde una fortuna por piratería de software
Por Monserrat Guitart Piguillém
Siempre que tomamos posición ante determinada cuestión, uno de los problemas
con que nos enfrentamos es
el de las justificaciones, el de
dar argumentos de por qué
esto se debería hacer o no
hacer y saber si para ello se
tienen cimientos sólidos o si
el edificio se cae al primer
soplo de vientos contraargumentales. Ese ensayo haremos respecto de la piratería.
En primer lugar, hay que
hacer una digresión terminológica. La palabra piratería se
usa para designar la copia sin
autorización de una obra objeto de los derechos de autor
aparentemente desde el siglo
XVIII, por lo que su utilización con este sentido tiene
una larga tradición.
La RAE relaciona el término
piratear con los derechos
intelectuales: "Cometer acciones delictivas contra la
propiedad, como hacer ediciones sin permiso del autor
o propietario, contrabando,
etc.". Incluso la propia legislación incorpora el término,
dado que el Código Aduanero contiene una referencia
específica a la misma en su
Art. 46.
A pesar de ello y aun cuando
su uso está difundido en todo
el mundo, existe una tendencia a considerar esta palabra
como peyorativa o inadecua-
da, cuando quienes se sienten
ofendidos por la misma la
incorporan expresamente en
los sitios donde "comparten"
contenidos protegidos por
derechos de autor.
Aquí utilizaremos indistintamente las expresiones copia indebida y piratería, con
el convencimiento de que el
uso de una u otra no quita
ilicitud a un acto que claramente se encuentra prohibido
en gran parte de las legislaciones y con el objetivo de
que la semántica no nos haga
perder de vista el acto significado.
Sabido es que en el derecho
de autor existe una tensión
permanente entre los derechos del titular de la obra y el
de los usuarios a acceder a
bienes culturales. Sin embargo, dada la equivalencia de
los mismos, esa tensión no
debe implicar en ningún caso
la negación del derecho del
autor al ejercicio de sus facultades, entre el que se cuenta la de autorizar la reproducción de su obra.
En este sentido, el derecho
del usuario ha de entenderse
como la prohibición injustificada de acceso a bienes de
cultura, y está claro que el
ejercicio del derecho de autor, tal como está concebido
en las leyes vigentes, no es
una restricción ilimitada o
injustificada, sin perjuicio de
que el usuario se sienta con
más derechos o desee disfrutar las obras. Los deseos,
todavía, no son fuente de
derechos.
En consecuencia, en el estado de la legislación actual el
derecho de reproducción es
un derecho exclusivo que
hace que cualquier copia no
autorizada califique como
ilícita, salvo los casos determinados legalmente, como el
derecho de cita o de back up
en el caso de los programas
de computación. En ese contexto, ¿hay justificación para
la piratería?
Ciertamente no, puesto que
la creación innovadora de
unos no puede ser vulnerada
ilegítima e irracionalmente
por otros, por más que tengan
toda la buena voluntad de
compartir y hacer extensible
esa creación a otros usuarios.
No pueden explotarse creaciones sin el consentimiento
de su autor simplemente porque no podemos compartir
algo que legalmente no nos
pertenece, y esa regla general
del derecho está vigente aun
cuando no compartamos filosóficamente la justificación
del derecho del autor o nos
disguste su forma de encarar
los negocios o el precio que
este cobra por sus derechos.
Desconocerla
significaría
retroceder a los tiempos en
que la justicia estaba en manos de los particulares.
La creación intelectual implica esfuerzo, dedicación,
inversión, etc., de alguien
sobre algo; esa creación que
llamamos obra intelectual y
que la misma Constitución
Nacional reconoce en el Art.
17 no puede ser negada bajo
un supuesto derecho a compartir. En definitiva, ser un
buen samaritano con los bienes de otro no tiene demasiado merito.
Tampoco es válido el argumento de que no se lucrará
con la copia realizada, ya que
en nuestro país no disponemos del derecho a copia privada, consistente en aquella
acción de hacer copias para
uso privado sin obtener de
ello beneficios económicos,
por lo que no existe un derecho a realizar más copias que
las autorizadas por el autor,
salvo el derecho de copia de
salvaguardia ya mencionado
y siempre y cuando este reúna los requisitos que enumera
la Ley 11.723.
En Argentina la tasa de piratería de software es del 70%,
6 puntos por encima del
promedio
latinoamericano
(64%) y 29 puntos sobre el
promedio mundial (41%).
Aunque dicha tasa tenga saltos eventuales y positivos de
disminución, ya que se ha
reducido en 3 puntos en el
período 2005-2010, las pérdidas llegan a los US$ 681
millones.
Estas cifras, graves en sí
mismas por su magnitud y
por la cantidad de empleos e
ingresos en impuestos que se
pierden, evidencian un problema mucho mayor de la
sociedad Argentina, que es la
falta de respeto a las normas
vigentes. La propiedad intelectual no escapa a este fenómeno social y si a ello
sumamos la falsa creencia de
que todo lo que circula en
Internet es libre o gratis, la
situación empeora mucho
más.
Aún más: la piratería origina
enormes pérdidas no sólo a la
industria de software nacional sino, también, a la internacional. Según el último
estudio elaborado por IDC y
publicado por la BSA, las
pérdidas a nivel mundial en
2010 aumentaron a US$ 58.7
mil millones, un 14,2% más
que en 2009.
Ante este panorama poco
alentador pero no por eso
terminante, junto con la educación en el respeto de los
derechos debería abogarse
por un Estado que tenga la
capacidad de hacer cumplir
las normas vigentes que rigen
en estas materias, complementado, a su vez, con un
eficaz régimen jurídico que
sostenga en su seno las obligaciones y responsabilidades
de las personas. Sin obligaciones ni responsabilidades,
no sólo la propiedad intelectual convive con sus delitos,
sino todo régimen jurídico
que se precie de ser tal.
www.carranzatorres.com.a
r
La autora es abogada y
socia de Carranza Torres
& Asociados
Crecerá el 35% la colocación de cámaras
Se distribuirán en los municipios de San Martín, Vicente López, San Isidro y Tigre, y en
la ciudad de Buenos Aires; hoy hay más de 4000
Por Loreley Gaffoglio
la articula dentro de un sistema integral y sincronizado
de seguridad y judicial.
La patente de un vehículo
que participa de un secuestro
exprés "leída" por el zoom de
una cámara de alta definición. La fisonomía identificada
de un hombre que charla en
el andén con la joven que
luego violará, aunque el ultraje no logre verse. El delincuente empeñado en destruir
el domo que lo otea en vivo
para poder delinquir en San
Martín.
Así lo aseguran jueces y responsables de la seguridad en
la Capital y en distritos del
conurbano. Allí, en los últimos dos años creció exponencialmente el número de
videocámaras insertas en
centros de monitoreo y de
almacenamiento de datos,
articulados con sistemas de
comunicación.
Esos son algunos delitos que
la Justicia logró esclarecer
mediante el aporte de grabaciones, enarboladas como
elementos probatorios. Hoy
miles de "ojos electrónicos"
actúan contra el delito en el
espacio público. A fines de
este año la ciudad de Buenos
Aires y comunas como San
Martín, Vicente López, San
Isidro y Tigre sumarán un
35% más cámaras a las alrededor de 4000 en funcionamiento.
"Hay que decirlo: son eficaces sólo si están insertas dentro de un sistema de comunicación integral, con capacidad de respuesta policial rápida. Si no, estás sólo filmando el delito. Aunque esa
ayuda es invalorable para la
Justicia ya que, probada la
materialidad del hecho, pasás
a discutir la calificación penal", afirma el ex juez y actual ministro de Justicia y
Seguridad porteño, Guillermo Montenegro.
En la esfera privada hay cada
vez más usuarios de esos
"ojos de halcón". Según expertos, el principal atributo
de las cámaras radica en su
poder disuasivo del delito,
pues la grabación resulta una
prueba irrefutable.
"Nosotros recién logramos la
eficacia esperada en marzo al
inaugurar el Centro Unico de
Comando y Control (CUCC),
de donde se despacha a la
policía y al sistema de emergencias, que en las comunas
12 y 15 demoran 4 minutos
en llegar. Nos falta integrarlo
con bomberos, tránsito y
personal de seguridad de la
Policía Federal".
Convertida en un fenómeno
global, la videovigilancia
obedece a la eficacia que
suma la tecnología cuando se
Desde su instrumentación,
las cámaras de la ciudad detectaron 2600 delitos en flagrancia. Sus correspondientes filmaciones engrosan
ahora igual número de causas
judiciales.
"Desbaratamos desde redes
de punguistas en la peatonal
Florida, organizaciones de
trata de personas en Constitución y de drogas en la Villa 31; previnimos casos de
pedofilia y evitamos suicidios", enumera Eugenio Burzaco, jefe de la Policía Metropolitana. "Resuelven, sobre todo, los delitos sistémicos, ya que es difícil prevenir
un hecho aleatorio. Parece un
chiste, pero los delincuentes
repiten hábitos y conductas y
así, con mirada entrenada, los
detenemos".
El gran reparo que apunta a
la invasión de la privacidad y
al resguardo de los datos
personales (la imagen y la
voz de las personas) no se
tradujo, hasta ahora, en un
reclamo. En Tigre y San Isidro, por ejemplo, la instalación de cámaras tiene 93 por
ciento de aceptación ciudadana, según datos oficiales.
El gobierno porteño se previno de posibles controversias
con un software especial que
ensombrece la pantalla cuando la cámara panea delante
de una ventana. Los datos allí
se almacenan por 60 días y
por 30, en la provincia de
Buenos Aires.
El Poder Judicial es el ámbito donde mayor uso se les
da a las filmaciones: por mes,
en San Isidro, donde se producen 700 detenciones según indica el subsecretario
de Seguridad, Héctor Alcántara- se responden 300 oficios judiciales; en Tigre, 100
y en la Capital, unos 50.
"Tenemos un promedio de
240 eventos diarios, que moviliza al personal policial",
explica el secretario de Seguridad de Tigre, Diego Santillán. "No se puede cuantificar
la prevención, pero sí las
veces que utilizás el sistema.
En nuestro caso son más los
eventos preventivos que los
esclarecimientos. Y cuando
hubo ilícitos, como el intento
de robo al blindado en Benavídez, se difundieron."
Un caso resonante sentó
"precedente" en ese distrito.
Fue cuando, alertada por las
cámaras, la policía detuvo a
un ladrón por intento de robo
y el fiscal Marcelo Lloret
consideró que la grabación
no acreditaba el delito, por lo
que lo liberó.
"La filmación nunca puede
reemplazar un testimonio",
argumentó Lloret, quien fue
separado de la causa por el
fiscal general Julio Novo.
Este, además, revocó su dictamen. "Acá hubo graves
errores de interpretación y de
concepto", dijo Novo. Luego,
el nuevo fiscal, Mariano Magaz, logró el procesamiento
del autor del hecho.
El propio intendente de San
Martín desafió a quienes las
rechazaban en su partido:
"Son necesarias. Y, aunque
los delincuentes las rompan
una y otra vez, las cámaras se
van a instalar igual".
Municipio de Tigre
800
Habrá esa cantidad en funcionamiento para diciembre
próximo.
Mun. de Esteban Echeverría
150
Alrededor de 50 cámaras
están ubicadas en zonas comerciales.
MAYOR VIGILANCIA
Municipio de Morón
Ciudad de Buenos Aires
182
2800
Será el total de las cámaras
que estarán instaladas para
fines de año.
Es la cantidad total prevista
para antes de fines de año.
Municipio de Quilmes
210
Municipio de San Isidro
Para 2012, prevén extender
la instalación de cámaras.
900
Prevén tener instaladas en
diciembre. Hoy funcionan
620.
Émirats/procès: 5 militants boycottent
Cinq
militants
prodémocratie des Emirats arabes unis ont refusé de
comparaître à leur procès,
dont l audience aujourd hui
était pour la première fois
ouverte à la presse.
Le policier chargé d amener
les cinq prévenus a expliqué
devant le tribunal que ces
derniers avaient "refusé de
venir", sans fournir d explication. Dans une lettre mise
en ligne hier, l un des accusés, Nasser ben Ghaïth, avait
annoncé qu il avait décidé de
boycotter les audiences,
après avoir acquis avec ses
camarades la conviction qu
ils ne bénéficieraient pas d
un "jugement équitable".
L audience s est ouverte,
malgré l absence des prévenus, devant la Haute cour
fédérale de justice à Abou
Dhabi, en présence pour la
première fois de journalistes
ainsi que de représentants d
organisations de défense des
droits de l Homme, alors que
quatre audiences précédentes
s étaient tenues à huis clos.
Procès inéquitable
Quatre de ces ONG avaient
appelé aujourd hui à la libération des militants émiratis.
"Le procès de cinq activistes
détenus depuis près de six
mois pour avoir insulté publiquement le président émirati et d autres responsables
est injuste", ont affirmé human rights Watch (HRW),
Amnesty International, le
réseau Arabic Network for
human rights Information
(ANHRI) et Front Line Defenders. Soulignant que le
procès des activistes a été
"entaché par des irrégularités", elles ont demandé aux
autorités "d abandonner toutes les charges et libérer les
cinq activistes".
Les cinq militants jugés depuis le 14 juin sont Ahmed
Mansour, ingénieur et blogueur, membre du comité
consultatif de la division
Moyen-Orient de HRW et du
réseau ANHRI, Nasser Ahmad ben Gaïth, professeur et
partisan de la réforme politique, ainsi que les blogueurs
militants Fahd Salem Dalak,
Ahmed Abdel Khaleq Ahmed et Hassan Ali alKhamis.
Arrêtés en avril, ils sont accusés d avoir "commis des
actes menaçant la sécurité de
l Etat et portant atteinte à l
ordre public", de s être "opposés au système de gouvernement" et d avoir "insulté le
président, le vice-président et
le prince héritier d Abou
Dhabi", accusations qu ils
ont rejetées en bloc. Le blogueur Ahmed Mansour et le
professeur Nasser ben Gaïth
sont de plus accusés d avoir
utilisé un forum politique sur
internet pour "conspirer contre la sécurité du pays en
association avec des parties
étrangères". Certains des
militants jugés sont aussi
signataires d une pétition
publiée en mars et réclamant
des réformes politiques, en
particulier l élection au suffrage direct et l élargissement
des pouvoirs du Conseil national fédéral.
Un homme pendu pour un viol en Iran
Un homme condamné à mort
pour viol a été pendu aujourd
hui dans la ville de Sari, dans
le nord de l Iran, rapporte l
agence de presse Isna. L
homme avait menacé et violé
sa victime en se faisant passer pour un policier, a ajouté
l agence sans plus de détails.
Cette dernière pendaison
porte à 207 le nombre des
exécutions en Iran depuis le
début de l année, selon un
décompte de l AFP réalisé à
partir des informations parcellaires publiées par les médias locaux. En 2010, 179
personnes avaient été pendues, d après un comptage similaire de l AFP. L organisation
internationale de défense des
droits de l Homme human
rights Watch (HRW) avait
pour sa part recensé 388 exé-
cutions alors qu Amnesty
International en avait compté
252. L Iran est l un des pays
qui procède au plus grand
nombre d exécutions dans le
monde, avec la Chine, l Arabie saoudite et les Etats-Unis.
En vertu de la charia (loi
islamique) le meurtre, le viol,
le vol à main armée, le trafic
de drogue et l adultère y sont
passibles de la peine capitale.
TJ •
Ato lembra 19 anos de Massacre do Carandiru
No dia 2 de outubro de 1992,
cerca de 360 policiais invadiram, durante uma rebelião, a
Casa de Detenção e mataram,
com uso de metralhadoras,
fuzis e pistolas, 111 presidiários.Da Redação, com agência São Paulo – Dezenas entidades da sociedade civil
realizaram no final da tarde
de domingo (2) um ato para
lembrar os 19 anos do assassinato de 111 presos que
cumpriam pena na Casa de
Detenção de São Paulo, no
bairro do Carandiru, conhecido como Massacre do Carandiru. No dia 2 de outubro
de 1992, cerca de 360 polici-
ais invadiram, durante uma
rebelião, a Casa de Detenção
e mataram, com uso de metralhadoras, fuzis e pistolas,
111 presidiários. A ação dos
policiais é considerada um
dos mais violentos casos de
repressão a rebelião em presídios. O ato de hoje foi realizado no Parque da Juventude, no mesmo local da antiga
Casa de Detenção, implodida
em 2002. “O massacre não
terminou e continua em nossas periferias com chacinas
de população de rua e pessoas pobres. Com o ato de hoje,
queremos dar início a uma
grande discussão, durante
todo o ano, até completar os
20 anos do massacre, sobre a
segurança que temos e a segurança que queremos”, destacou o padre Valdir João
Silveira, coordenador nacional da Pastoral Penitenciária.
Na última sexta-feira (30), o
Tribunal de Justiça de São
Paulo negou recurso da defesa e decidiu manter a decisão
de levar a júri popular os 76
acusados pelo crime. Único
membro da operação julgado
até agora, o coronel Ubiratan
Guimarães, comandante da
Polícia Militar, foi inocentado.
PODER JUDICIÁRIO • TSE •
Bolívia: Publicarão lista de candidatos ao poder judiciário
O Tribunal Supremo Eleitoral (TSE) da Bolívia anunciou hoje que o próximo passo para eleições judiciais será
a publicação nos recintos da
listagem de 115 candidatos.
De acordo com o porta-voz
Ramiro Paredes, a apresentação dessa lista dos postulantes, a cargo dos nove tribunais eleitorais departamentais, terá lugar no próximo
domingo, uma semana dantes
da inédita votação. Em 16 de
outubro pouco mais de cinco
milhões de bolivianos decidirão nas urnas aos magistrados titulares e suplentes que
integrarão
os
Tribunais
Constitucional (18), Supremo
de Justiça (14) e Agroambiental (14); bem como o Conselho da Magistratura (10).
Paredes reconheceu que até a
data se cumpre com o calen-
dário estabelecido para essa
sondagem, no que a difusão
de méritos apresentou dificuldades.
Explicou que essa etapa é
uma das novidades neste
processo e substitui a campanha ou propaganda eleitoral,
disposta pela Constituição
Política do Estado (2009) e a
Lei do Regime Eleitoral.
PODER JUDICIÁRIO • TSE •
Bolívia: Publicarão lista de candidatos ao poder judiciário
O Tribunal Supremo Eleitoral (TSE) da Bolívia anunciou hoje que o próximo passo para eleições judiciais será
a publicação nos recintos da
listagem de 115 candidatos.
De acordo com o porta-voz
Ramiro Paredes, a apresentação dessa lista dos postulantes, a cargo dos nove tribunais eleitorais departamentais, terá lugar no próximo
domingo, uma semana dantes
da inédita votação. Em 16 de
outubro pouco mais de cinco
milhões de bolivianos decidirão nas urnas aos magistrados titulares e suplentes que
integrarão
os
Tribunais
Constitucional (18), Supremo
de Justiça (14) e Agroambiental (14); bem como o Conselho da Magistratura (10).
Paredes reconheceu que até a
data se cumpre com o calen-
dário estabelecido para essa
sondagem, no que a difusão
de méritos apresentou dificuldades.
Explicou que essa etapa é
uma das novidades neste
processo e substitui a campanha ou propaganda eleitoral,
disposta pela Constituição
Política do Estado (2009) e a
Lei do Regime Eleitoral.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • THE FRONT PAGE • 2/10/2011
New State Rules Raising Hurdles at Voting Booth
By MICHAEL COOPER
Since Republicans won control of many statehouses last
November, more than a dozen states have passed laws
requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration
drives.
With a presidential campaign
swinging into high gear, the
question being asked is how
much of an impact all of these new laws will have on the
2012 race.
State officials, political parties and voting experts have all
said that the impact could be
sizable. Now, a new study to
be released Monday by the
Brennan Center for Justice at
New York University School
of Law has tried to tally just
how many voters stand to be
affected.
The center, which has studied the new laws and opposed
some of them in court and
other venues, analyzed 19
laws that passed and 2 executive orders that were issued
in 14 states this year, and
concluded that they “could
make it significantly harder
for more than five million
eligible voters to cast ballots
in 2012.”
Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new
election laws, say they are
necessary to prevent voter
fraud, and question why photo identification should be
routinely required at airports
but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new
laws are a solution in search
of a problem, since voter
fraud is rare. They worry that
the laws will discourage, or
even block, eligible voters —
especially poor voters, young
voters and African-American
voters, who tend to vote for
Democrats.
The Justice Department must
review the new laws in several states to make sure that
they do not run afoul of the
Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law
in 2008, saying that while it
found no evidence of the
fraud the law was intended to
combat, it also found no evidence that the new requirements were a burden on voters.
“This year there’s been a
significant wave of new laws
in states across the country
that have the effect of cracking down on voting rights,”
said Michael Waldman, the
executive director of the
Brennan Center, who noted
that five million votes would
have made a difference in
both the 2000 and 2004 pre-
sidential elections. “It is the
most significant rollback in
voting rights in decades.”
Just how much of an impact
the new laws will have is a
matter of some dispute. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who held a
hearing on the new laws last
month, said they “will make
it harder for millions of disabled, young, minority, rural,
elderly, homeless and lowincome Americans to vote.”
Republicans note that states
like Georgia and Indiana
moved to require photo identification from voters and
that turnout there improved.
Some of the new laws have
been introduced by Republicans for years, but passed
only this year after the party
made so many gains at the
state level. Others have been
promoted vigorously by conservative groups. But there is
little doubt that they will
alter the voting landscape.
Five states passed laws this
year scaling back programs
allowing voters to cast their
ballots before Election Day,
the Brennan Center found.
Ohio passed a law eliminating early voting on Sundays,
and Florida eliminated it on
the Sunday before Election
Day — days when some African-American
churches
organized “souls to the polls”
drives for members of their
congregations. Maine voted
to stop allowing people to
register to vote on Election
Day — a practice that had
been credited with enrolling
some 60,000 new voters in
2008. Voters in Maine and
Ohio are now seeking to overturn the new laws with
referendums.
While other groups have made similar estimates in the
past, Hans von Spakovsky, a
senior legal fellow at the
Heritage Foundation who
oversaw elections at the Justice Department during the
administration of President
George W. Bush, argued that
the number is too high.
The biggest impact, the
Brennan Center said, will be
from laws requiring people to
show
government-issued
photo identification to vote.
This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it
— a flurry of activity that
Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures,
called “pretty unusual.” Before this year, only two states, Indiana and Georgia, had
“strict” photo identification
requirements for voters, according to the conference.
This year, five more states —
Wisconsin, Kansas, South
Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — passed laws to join
their ranks.
But there is little dispute that
the new laws will have an
effect on a large number of
voters.
Under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable
form of identification to vote,
but not student ID cards.
The Brennan Center estimates that 11 percent of potential voters do not have stateissued photo identification.
By that measure, it finds that
the new laws would affect
3.2 million voters in the states where the change is scheduled to take effect before
the 2012 elections.
South Carolina and Texas
estimate that between them
they have more than 800,000
registered voters who may
not have acceptable forms of
photo identification. While
both states will offer free
identification cards that
would be acceptable at the
polls, critics of the new laws
worry that the added barrier
to voting could discourage
people from going to the
polls. South Carolina estimates that 8 percent of its voters
— 216,596 people — do not
currently have the proper
identification.
Texas calculated that at least
95 percent of its registered
voters have a driver’s license
or valid identification card,
but could not say for sure
whether the 605,576 names
on its voter list that do not
appear on its lists of people
with driver’s licenses or state-issued identification cards
have them or not. The Department of Justice, which
must approve the changes in
Texas and South Carolina,
recently asked both states for
more information to make
sure the changes do not violate the Voting Rights Act.
Representative Terri A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama,
said her state’s new voter
identification law, which is
set to take effect in 2014,
would strike close to home.
Her father, who uses a wheelchair, has let his driver’s
license lapse, she said, and
used his Social Security card
as identification when he
voted for her — something
that will no longer be allowed.
“My mom will find a way to
get my dad a photo ID, but a
lot of my constituents don’t
have the same capability,”
Ms. Sewell said. “Given the
relatively low turnout that we
see in modern-day elections,
we should be encouraging
people to go to the polls to
exercise their rights, and not
discouraging them.”
The Brennan Center argues
that the type of fraud that
such laws are intended to
combat — impersonation —
is extremely rare. The South
Carolina
State
Election
Commission “knows of no
confirmed cases of voter identification fraud, defined
as a person presenting himself to vote as someone he is
not,” Chris Whitmire, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.
But proponents of the stricter
identification laws say they
make sense.
“The left always says that
people who are in favor of
this claim there is massive
fraud,” said Mr. von Spa-
kovsky, of the Heritage
Foundation. “No, I don’t say
that. I don’t think anybody
else says that there is massive fraud in American elections. But there are enough
proven cases in the past, throughout our history and
recently, that show that
you’ve got to take basic steps
to prevent people from taking
advantage of an election if
they want to. Particularly
close elections.”
Some of the laws restricting
voting are aimed at illegal
immigrants. Kansas, Alabama and Tennessee passed
laws this year requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship before they can register to vote.
While most of the states that
moved to require photo identifications are controlled by
Republicans, there was an
exception: Rhode Island,
where a new voter identification law passed a legislature
controlled by Democrats and
was signed into law by an
independent governor, Lincoln Chafee.
The Brennan Center notes
that between one million and
two million people voted on
days that are being eliminated by states that are scaling
back early voting. But whether turnout will go down as
a result of the change is unclear. Curtis Gans, the director of the Center for the
Study of the American Electorate at American University, said that states with early voting did not always have
better turnout relative to states that did not. “It’s a mixed
picture,” he said, noting that
early voting benefited De-
mocrats in 2008 and Republicans in 2004.
In Florida, a new law imposing restrictions on voter
registration drives has led the
state’s League of Women
Voters, a nonpartisan group
that had registered voters for
72 years, to call a moratorium on new registration drives in the state, citing the
penalties that groups can face
under the law.
Independent groups that register voters — like the league — face fines of $50 to
$1,000 per applicant if they
fail to turn in the applications
to elections officials in a timely manner.
“It’s too cumbersome,” said
Deirdre Macnab, the league’s
president. “There is too much
red tape and regulation.”
ABC COLOR (PY) • ESPETACULO • 3/10/2011
Presentan libro sobre Gastón Gadin
Hoy, a las 19:00, se lanzará el libro “El caso de Gastón Gadin. El último fusilamiento
judicial en Paraguay”, en el Aula Magna de la Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de
la Asunción (Independencia Nacional y Comuneros). Este libro fue escrito por los abogados Juan Marcos González García y Atilio Fernández Celauro.
El profesor Gabriel Benítez
escribió el prólogo y lo presentará el presidente de la
Corte Suprema de Justicia,
Luis María Benítez Riera.
Esta historia tiene más de
noventa años, y pondrán luz
sobre tantas leyendas, aportando documentos y pruebas.
Relata la historia del último
fusilamiento que hubo en el
Paraguay, en el siglo XVII,
en donde perdió la vida el
francés Gastón Gadin y el
ciudadano paraguayo Cipriano León.
El lunes 26 de julio de 1915
son asesinados con golpes de
hacha Jean Laurent Gadin y
Marie Emma Lacour, los
cuerpos posteriormente son
quemados, desatándose un
incendio en una quinta familiar de la Villa Morra.
Durante la investigación surge la autoría del hijo de los
mismos, Gastón Gadin, y de
un ex peón llamado Cipriano
León. La ciudadanía y la
prensa exigieron justicia, es
decir aclamaron la aplicación
de la pena de muerte. Durante el controvertido proceso
Gastón Gadin alegará su minoría de edad para evitar la
última de las penas, de acuerdo al Código Penal de la
época. Sin embargo, fue ejecutado el 1 de diciembre de
1917.
Con la obra se expondrá el
fin de la duda de si era menor
de edad, mostrando el certificado de nacimiento del francés Gastón Gadin.
A los escritores les tomó seis
años investigar este suceso
histórico. La idea de investigar este material les surgió
cuando los autores leyeron
una columna de periodista
Luis Verón, de la revista dominical de nuestro diario, en
la sección llamada “Entérese”, y que tenía el nombre de
“El último fusilamiento”.
Afirman que fue la chispa
que encendió la investigación.
Prueba de TREP sin problemas
Con el despliegue de alrededor de 1.500 funcionarios, el
Tribunal Superior de Justicia
Electoral (TSJE) llevó a cabo
ayer un simulacro de Transmisión de Resultados Electorales Preliminares (TREP) en
242 distritos a nivel país con
miras al referéndum a realizarse el domingo 9. La con-
sulta nacional definirá si los
compatriotas que residen en
el exterior podrán o no votar
en las elecciones nacionales.
Sobre el simulacro de TREP,
Delia Mora, directora del
área de Informática de la
Justicia Electoral, aseguró
que de forma exitosa fue
llevada a cabo la prueba de
transmisión de resultados en
1.009 locales habilitados a
nivel nacional.
Agregó, además, que, a diferencia de elecciones pasadas,
para el referéndum solo será
utilizada la transmisión vía
voz.
“Para estas justas electorales
venideras, el sistema TREP
se abocará a los resultados
del referéndum constitucional, que determinarán la modificación o no, del Artículo
120 de la Constitución Nacional. Los resultados serán
publicados desde el cierre de
las mesas receptoras, paulati-
namente, hasta alcanzar el
92% del total de los votos”,
explicó la funcionaria.
ABC COLOR (PY) • NACIONALES • 3/10/2011
Referéndum: TSJE realizó con éxito simulacro del sistema de transmisión
Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral (TSJE) informó que llevó a cabo con éxito un
simulacro de Transmisión de Resultados Electorales Preliminares (TREP) en 242 distritos a nivel país. Esto se realizó una semana antes del referéndum del próximo 9 de octubre.
Delia Mora, directora del
área de Informática de la
Justicia Electoral, explicó
que el simulacro de transmisión de resultados en 1009
locales habilitados a nivel
nacional fue un éxito, de acuerdo al portal web del TSJE.
Mora comentó que a diferencia de elecciones pasadas,
para el referéndum solo será
utilizada la transmisión a
través de comunicación verbal.
El sistema de transmisión
rápida se abocará a los resultados del referéndum del
próximo 9 de octubre que
determinará la modificación
o no, del Artículo 120 de la
Constitución Nacional. Los
resultados serán publicados
desde el cierre de las mesas
receptoras, paulatinamente,
hasta alcanzar el 92% del
total de los votos.
Berlusconi pide la suspensión del juicio “Ruby” por conflicto de competencias
ROMA. La defensa del primer ministro italiano, Silvio Berlusconi, pidió hoy la suspensión del juicio por el “caso Ruby”, en el que está acusado de incitación a la prostitución
de menores y abuso de poder, hasta que el Tribunal Constitucional se exprese sobre un
supuesto
conflicto
de
competencias.
Los abogados de Berlusconi
realizaron la petición durante
la primera sesión de la fase
oral de este juicio, después
de que el pasado mes de julio
el Tribunal Constitucional
admitiese a trámite un supuesto conflicto de atribuciones
entre poderes del Estado y se
comprometiera a tratar el
asunto el próximo 7 de febrero.
El recurso fue planteado por
la Cámara de los Diputados,
y posteriormente ratificado
por el Senado, contra la Fiscalía y contra el juez de investigaciones preliminares de
Milán, que condujeron las
pesquisas en el caso Ruby.
La Fiscalía atribuye a Berlusconi un delito de abuso de
poder por la llamada a una
comisaría de Milán el 27 de
mayo de 2010 para que dejaran en libertad a la joven
marroquí Karima El Mahroug,
conocida
como
“Ruby” y detenida por robo,
alegando que era la sobrina
del entonces presidente egipcio, Hosni Mubarak.
Pero, según explicó la mayoría gubernamental en su recurso, Berlusconi en esa llamada actuó por “motivos
institucionales”,
pensando
que Ruby era verdaderamente sobrina del entonces presidente de Egipto, y por tanto
debe ser el Tribunal de Ministros el que se encargue del
caso.
La fiscala adjunta Ilda Boccassini insistió hoy durante la
vista en que “no hay razones
oportunas por las que se deba
suspender el proceso” y recordó que “el Código de Pro-
cedimiento Penal no prevé la
obligatoriedad de suspender
estos casos”.
Por su parte, los abogados
del primer ministro italiano,
Niccoló Ghedini y Piero
Longo, aseguraron que “no
hay urgencia para procesar a
Berlusconi porque no está
detenido” y anunciaron su
intención de plantear una
cuestión de inconstitucionalidad en el caso de que el
tribunal decidiera seguir adelante con el proceso.
Los letrados explicaron que
la ley sería “inconstitucional
en la parte en la que no prevé
la obligatoriedad de suspen-
der procesos como este porque no vendrían tuteladas las
prerrogativas del jefe de Gobierno”.
Boccassini aseguró, sin embargo, que “nunca podría
pesar el concepto de oportunidad política” porque “no es
un argumento que pueda ser
afrontado en un tribunal”.
Los jueces de la sección cuarta de lo Penal, presidida
por Giulia Turri, se han reunido aparte para valorar la
propuesta de la defensa de
Berlusconi, quien no acudió
a la vista, pero todavía no
han adoptado ninguna decisión.
ABC COLOR (PY) • LOCALES • 3/10/2011
El Indi gestiona tierras para cumplir las condenas impuestas a Paraguay
El Instituto Paraguayo del Indígena (Indi) gestiona la compra de dos propiedades para
responder a la condena de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, que obliga al
país a restituir a los nativos sus territorios. Los inmuebles se encuentran en el departamento de Presidente Hayes, Chaco. Los casos tienen más de 20 años.
La presidenta del Indi, Lida
Acuña, apuntó que las negociaciones van por buen camino. Uno de los casos, San
Fernando, en el departamento
de Presidente Hayes, ya fue
solucionado.
Actualmente están en trámites de solución los casos Sawhoyamaxa y Yakye Axa.
Para la primera comunidad se
adquiriría 14.000 hectáreas
de Heribert Roedel.
Este proceso está muy adelantado porque ya se firmó
un acuerdo, un acercamiento
de voluntades. El siguiente
paso sería la tasación y si hay
acuerdo se pagará. En princi-
pio, los propietarios pidieron
a 2.700 dólares la hectárea,
pero el Estado no puede pagar ese monto cuando que en
el Chaco las tierras están
entre 400, 500 y 600 dólares
la hectárea, como máximo.
En cuanto Yakye Axa, la
reubicación es la alternativa.
Los indígenas aceptaron la
propuesta y actualmente se
negocia la compra de una
propiedad en las proximidades de la hacienda El Algarrobal, departamento de Presidente Hayes, que es territorio de los enxet. Esta comunidad había solicitado la
compra de parte de la Estan-
cia Loma Verde, de los Domínguez Dibb, pero al negarse la familia a la venta, continuaron a la vera de la ruta
que une Pozo Colorado con
Concepción. La superficie
que quiere adquirir el Estado
totaliza 15.963 hectáreas para
más de 100 familias.
ONG se opone
Otra comunidad que recurrió
a las instancias internacionales es Xakmok Kasek, que
también está en negociaciones. El Indi planteó pagar
este año las indemnizaciones,
pero la ONG que asesora a
los aborígenes, Tierraviva,
quiere que se espere el pró-
ximo año. “Yo le dije al líder
que quería pagar porque hay
plata, pero nos dicen que la
ONG se opone, no sabemos
con qué intenciones”, remarcó.
Dos décadas de lucha
Todos estos casos tienen más
de 20 años. Los gobiernos
colorados no pudieron solucionar, pero con el actual
gobierno se abre la posibilidad de encontrar una salida y
responder a las exigencia de
la Constitución que obliga al
Estado a restituir a los nativos sus territorios ancestrales.
En ese sentido, la Carta
Magna dice en su Capítulo
V, artículo 64, que “Los pueblos indígenas tienen derecho
a la propiedad comunitaria de
la tierra, en extensión y calidad suficientes para la conservación y el desarrollo de
sus formas peculiares de vida. El Estado les proveerá
gratuitamente de estas tierras,
las cuales serán inembargables, indivisibles, intransferibles, imprescriptibles, no
susceptibles de garantizar
obligaciones contractuales ni
de ser arrendadas. Asimismo,
estarán exentas de tributo. Se
prohíbe la remoción o traslado de su hábitat sin el expreso consentimiento de los
mismos”.
Estudian conmutar penas carcelarias por ir a misa
MIAMI. Las autoridades de Alabama están estudiando cómo implementar una propuesta
para presos por delitos menores que prevé conmutar la pena por asistir regularmente a
la iglesia.
Esta fue una de varias ofertas
alternativas que molestaron a
líderes civiles en este estado
del sureste de Estados Unidos.
El programa impulsado por
el departamento de policía de
la ciudad de Bay Minette, en
Alabama, se denomina “Restauremos nuestra comunidad” y ofrece a aquellos delincuentes no violentos y que
cumplen penas por delitos
menores cambiar la celda por
asistir semanalmente a la
iglesia de su culto preferido,
indicó un comunicado. La
asistencia a los templos religiosos sería supervisada por
la policía local o autoridades
competentes.
El programa debía empezar a
aplicarse esta semana pero
fue aplazado debido a la molestia que causó entre algunos líderes sociales, entre
ellos a la Unión de Derechos
Civiles (ACLU). Para esta
organización, la propuesta es
una violación “flagrante” a la
Constitución de Estados
Unidos, que establece la separación de la iglesia y el
Estado.
“Es bueno escuchar que están
dilatando la propuesta”, dijo
la directora ejecutiva de ACLU Alabama, Olivia Turner, al portal en línea
www.al.com.
“Nunca se obligará a ninguno
de los participantes a sumarse a cualquiera de las opciones que incluye el programa
con el componente de la fe”,
explicó un comunicado del
Departamento de Policía.
Por el momento, las autoridades no quieren dar declaraciones a la prensa sobre este
tema “hasta que no se haya
completado la revisión del
programa”, indicaron tras
precisar que la alcaldía de
Bay Minette pedirá a la Fiscalía General de Alabama
revisar la polémica propuesta.
EL PERUANO (SP) • OPINIÓN • 3/10/2011
La función fiscalizadora del JNE
Si bien la demanda es declarada fundada en parte, consideramos que esta sentencia
resulta sumamente importante y valiosa porque disipa
cualquier cuestionamiento y
reafirma la función fiscalizadora del JNE, función que se
ejerce también respecto de la
actuación de otros organismos constitucionales que
integran el sistema electoral,
como la ONPE y el Registro
Nacional de Identificación y
Estado Civil (Reniec).El TC
reconoce que el JNE tiene
competencia constitucional
para ejercer funciones administrativas, destacando las
indirectas o supervisoras, ya
que el propio TC reconoce
que son estas las que predominantemente ejerce el JNE
respecto del sistema electoral
en su conjunto, confiriéndosele de esta manera la labor
de ser garante o promotor de
los principios de unidad y
coordinación entre todos los
órganos integrantes del sistema electoral.Es precisamente en virtud de estas funciones administrativas supervisoras que ni la ONPE ni el
Reniec se encuentran exentos
del control o supervisión que
tiene, no la potestad, sino el
deber de realizar el JNE respecto de la actuación de los
primeros. Por ello se menciona claramente que: "[...],
tanto la ONPE como el Reniec tienen la obligación constitucional de adoptar todas
las medidas necesarias para
que el JNE pueda ejercer
debidamente las referidas
funciones
administrativas
supervisoras".Esto
último
reviste singular relevancia
debido a que, si bien el TC
declara que la regulación y
ejecución de la franja electoral constituye una competencia de la ONPE, ello no impide que el JNE ejerza las
correspondientes competencias administrativas supervisoras y jurisdiccional que la
Constitución le confiere.Asimismo, dicha importancia reside también en que
resulta conforme a la Constitución que el JNE ejerza sus
funciones de fiscalización
respecto de la actuación de la
ONPE en materia de supervisión de fondos partidarios,
siendo que ello no supone en
modo alguno un menoscabo
en las atribuciones de esta
última.La reafirmación y
reconocimiento de la función
fiscalizadora que ejerce el
JNE resulta sumamente trascendente, puesto que ello
permitirá que, con la colaboración de los otros organismos del sistema electoral,
pueda liderar el proceso de
optimización de los principios de transparencia, legalidad
y, fundamentalmente, legitimidad,de los procesos electorales, garantizando de esta
manera el respeto de la voluntad popular, así como de
los derechos fundamentales
de todos los actores que intervienen en los procesos
electorales, lo que supondrá
la implementación de mecanismos de control intra e
interórganicos de los actos
tanto de la ONPE como del
Reniec. El camino de la consolidación democrática y la
interiorización de los valores
que esta comprende por parte
de la ciudadanía aún es largo.
Sin embargo, con esta sentencia, el TC ha brindado un
aporte importante y el JNE,
consciente de la responsabilidad y trascendencia que la
Constitución le otorga, reafirma su compromiso democrático de velar por el cumplimiento de las normas en
materia electoral.
EL PERUANO (SP) • OPINIÓN • 3/10/2011
Defensor de la celeridad de la justicia
El doctor Velasco Gallo pertenece a una distinguida familia de Piura. En 1937 se
graduó de abogado en la
Pontificia Universidad Católica y poco después optó el
grado de doctor, exponiendo
su tesis sobre Derecho Minero, trabajo de investigación
que fue favorablemente comentado entre los juristas de
la época, por tratarse de un
aporte a la legislación de la
realidad nacional.Su notable
vocación por la justicia lo
llevó al Poder Judicial,
donde se desempeñó como
juez en lo Civil del Quinto
Juzgado Civil de Lima, dictando sentencias que constituían verdaderas piezas jurídicas por los fundamentos
que contenían.El doctor Velasco Gallo, juez, jurista y
maestro dedicó su talento,
vocación y virtud a enseñar a
los estudiantes universitarios
muy temprano, antes de las
labores de la magistratura.En
1961 fue magistrado fundador de la Corte Superior del
Callao, de la cual fue presidente. Su carrera judicial
continuaba y en 1975 ocupó
la presidencia de la Corte
Suprema de la República,
iniciando su gestión con palabras que nos recuerdan a
Legaz y Lacambra, cuando
dijo que no hay un solo
hombre que pueda moverse
por motivos exclusivamente
jurídicos, porque lo jurídico
no es una norma última del
obrar ni una magnitud rigurosamente autónoma en el
orden práctico de la conducta: "se puede obrar -afirmópor respeto a la ley moral
misma, se puede ser religioso
por pura religiosidad, pero
aunque esto pueda sonar a
paradoja (no lo es ciertamente), la razón del obrar jurídico es siempre meta jurídica,
porque va regulada por una
luz inextinguible que va más
allá de todo derecho positivo".Es que el magistrado y
profesor no dejaba de
enseñar, como lo hacía en las
aulas de la Universidad Católica y en las de San Marcos.
El doctor Raúl Porras Barrenechea decía que la universidad peruana era una, y es que
en esa época en Lima solo
enseñaban Derecho en San
Marcos y en La Católica, y
eran los mismos maestros en
ambas
universidades.Decíamos que el doctor
Velasco Gallo enseñaba Derecho Procesal Civil y uno de
sus temas centrales era el de
la "celeridad" en los procesos
judiciales. Señalaba, con
mucha atención, el carácter
improrrogable y perentorio
de los plazos para respetar el
derecho de todos.Recordaba
a Montesquieu al precisar
que "la injusticia cometida
contra uno solo, es una amenaza contra todos". Es que no
admitía que la democracia
fuera una palabra hueca. Su
contenido tenía que estar
enriquecido por los principios de la igualdad y la libertad, soportes de la justicia.El
doctor Velasco Gallo fue
padrino de la promoción
1961 de La Católica, hace 50
años. Cuando pasamos lista y
algunos estaban ausentes
declaró que ellos nos
acompañan con sus diplomas
de triunfo que les dio la vida,
por haber sido justos.Fue una
ceremonia memorable de
varias generaciones de abogados y juristas, quienes aplaudieron a nuestro querido
maestro.
Las argentinas aún sufren postergaciones en el ámbito laboral
A pesar de que estudian más que los hombres, sólo ocupan el 34,2% de los puestos directivos
Por Soledad Vallejos | LA
NACION
Hay avances concretos y
muchos logros. Pero la brecha aún es grande y la desigualdad de género en la Argentina existe en todos los
ámbitos. Las estadísticas así
lo confirman. En la actualidad, las mujeres asisten un
30% más que los varones
tanto al nivel terciario como
al universitario. Estudian más
y acceden con mayor facilidad al conocimiento académico, y, sin embargo, los
puestos jerárquicos siguen en
manos de ellos, y los mayores ingresos también.
De hecho, en 1999 el porcentaje de mujeres al mando era
de 37,1%. Diez años después, según datos recabados en
2009, las mujeres sólo ocupan el 34,2% de los puestos
directivos. Así lo señala Gabriela Catterberg, una de las
investigadoras del Programa
de las Naciones Unidas para
el Desarrollo (PNUD), que
presentó el informe "Género
en cifras: mujeres y varones
en la sociedad argentina", un
diagnóstico de la situación
actual en todo el país en términos de igualdad de género.
Es el cuarto número de la
serie "Aportes para el desarrollo humano", que cuantifica y analiza la situación de
género y el desarrollo huma-
no en relación con otros países; ofrece un análisis desde
una perspectiva territorial
subnacional, y realiza un
diagnóstico de la situación de
mujeres y varones en siete
ámbitos: trabajo, educación,
salud, salud sexual y reproductiva, familia y hogar, violencia contra las mujeres y
participación política.
Es cierto que hay progresos.
Pero materias pendientes
sobran. En la actualidad, y
entre uno de los principales
hallazgos, los ámbitos del
trabajo y la educación han
presentado importantes modificaciones. Catterberg, del
área de Desarrollo Humano
del PNUD Argentina, señaló
diversos aspectos recurrentes
de la participación femenina
en el mundo del trabajo.
"Continúa la persistencia en
la denominada segregación
horizontal, donde ciertas ocupaciones son consideradas
emblemáticamente femeninas, como el servicio doméstico, la atención de personas,
la enseñanza y las actividades secretariales", puntualizó. También se refirió a la
segregación que persiste "de
tipo vertical", que refiere la
concentración de mujeres en
puestos de menor jerarquía,
aunque tengan la misma calificación que los varones que
los ejercen.
Por otra parte, la investigadora reconoce la mayor aceptación que hoy tienen las trabajadoras madres en el mercado
laboral. Sin embargo, señaló
que el trabajo doméstico sigue bajo su órbita. "Tienen
tareas más heterogéneas que
los hombres, que tienen una
distribución del tiempo más
compacta y se dedican a trabajar, principalmente. Las
mujeres, en cambio, tienen
una dinámica diaria más relacionada con sus hijos y
deben ajustar su carga horaria de jornada laboral." La
estadística confirma la tendencia: el 75% del cuidado
infantil en una familia es
provisto por mujeres, y sólo
el 25% por varones.
La presentación del informe
contó con un panel de especialistas de destacada trayectoria, entre las que estuvieron
Eva Giberti, coordinadora del
programa Las Víctimas contra las Violencias, del Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos
Humanos de la Nación; Marita Perceval, subsecretaria
de Promoción de Derechos
Humanos del Ministerio de
Justicia y Derechos Humanos
de la Nación, y Rosalía Cortés, secretaria académica del
Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, que puso
énfasis no sólo en las desigualdades entre hombres y
mujeres.
Menos capacitación oficial
Para Cortés, "la inequidad
entre mujeres en el mercado
de trabajo es un campo para
analizar". Como ejemplo,
menciona la disminución que
hubo en la participación en
programas de capacitación de
mujeres de bajos ingresos
bajo la órbita del Estado. "En
2006, el porcentaje registrado
llegó al 80%, y el año pasado
apenas alcanzó el 50 por ciento".
Es un flagelo en la sociedad
argentina, difícil de desterrar
y con estadísticas que espantan. La violencia contra las
mujeres tiene fuertes raíces
en la desigualdad de género.
De las 16.600 denuncias realizadas a la Oficina de Vio-
lencia Doméstica de la Corte
Suprema de Justicia de la
Nación entre septiembre de
2008 y agosto de 2010, ocho
de cada diez personas afectadas fueron mujeres. De ellas,
el 15% eran menores de 18
años. La violencia psicológica y la física son las más
recurrentes, seguidas por la
económica y la sexual, donde, según precisó Giberti, "el
62% de las violaciones se
produce en el círculo cercano
de la víctima y no en la calle".
Afortunadamente, otros escenarios muestran un panorama más alentador. El viejo
reclamo de la mayor participación política de las mujeres
ha tenido eco. Claro que la
promoción femenina se vio
beneficiada desde que, en
1991, se aprobó la ley de
cuotas o cupo femenino, que
condicionó "a las listas que
se presenten a tener mujeres
en un mínimo del 30% de los
candidatos a los cargos a
elegir y en proporciones con
posibilidades de resultar electas", según la normativa.
En los municipios, en cambio, la participación es bastante
marginal. "Podría decirse que
es el ámbito con menores
avances. Entre 1995 y 2010
el porcentaje de mujeres electas como intendentas pasó
del 6,4% al 10%, lo que denota una participación muy
limitada", concluyó el informe.
La Cour pénale internationale autorise une enquête sur la Côte d'Ivoire
La Cour Pénale internationale (CPI) a autorisé, lundi 3
octobre, l ouverture d une
enquête sur d éventuels crimes commis en Côte d Ivoire
durant la guerre civile entre
les forces de Laurent Gbagbo
et les partisans d Alassane
Ouattara, après l élection
présidentielle de fin 2010. Le
procureur de la CPI, Luis
Moreno-Ocampo, avait demandé en juin le droit d ou-
vrir une enquête sur d éventuels crimes de guerre commis par les deux camps. Selon lui, le conflit a fait au
moins 3 000 morts et 520
personnes ont été détenues de
manière arbitraire durant
cette période. La guerre a
pris fin en avril avec la capture à Abidjan de Laurent
Gbagbo, qui refusait de céder
le pouvoir à Alassane Ouattara, désigné vainqueur du s-
crutin présidentiel selon des
résultats certifiés par les Nations unies. Les juges ont par
ailleurs demandé au procureur de leur "fournir toute
information supplémentaire à
sa disposition sur des crimes
qui pourraient relever potentiellement de la compétence
de la cour et qui auraient été
commis entre 2002 et 2010".
Procès des Khmers rouges : les juges instructeurs auraient failli à leur
devoir
Les deux juges d instruction
– un Allemand et un Cambodgien – du procès des quatre plus hauts responsables
du régime khmer rouge encore vivants, qui s est ouvert en
juin, "doivent démissionner",
a déclaré, lundi, human rights Watch (HRW).
Les quatre dirigeants jugés
sont Nuon Chea, ex-numéro
deux du régime ; l ancien
président Khieu Samphan ; l
ex-ministre des
affaires
étrangères Ieng Sary ; son
épouse, Ieng Thirith, qui fut
la ministre des affaires sociales du régime. Ils sont accusés, entre autres charges, de
"crimes de guerre", de "crimes contre l humanité" et de
"génocide" en ce qui concerne quelques minorités ethniques.
PRESSIONS POLITIQUES
Les deux juges instructeurs
auraient, selon l ONG, failli à
leur devoir en ne conduisant
pas d enquête "véritable, impartiale et efficace" dans
deux dossiers qui font l objet
de fortes pressions politiques.
Les observateurs du tribunal
parrainé par l ONU craignent
l abandon des poursuites
dans ces affaires, concernant
cinq cadres du régime (19751979) sous lequel quelque
deux millions de personnes
sont mortes. Le premier ministre cambodgien Hun Sen,
lui-même ex-cadre khmer
rouge, qui s était finalement
retourné contre le régime,
répète régulièrement son
opposition à la tenue d autres
procès.
exercer leurs fonctions de
manière indépendante". Les
juges d instruction avaient
annoncé au printemps la fin
de l enquête concernant deux
suspects dans l affaire "numéro trois", sans dévoiler
leurs conclusions. Ils ont
refusé les demandes de nouvelles investigations réclamées par le coprocureur international, laissant craindre
un classement pure et simple
de l affaire.
L absence totale de procédure "serait choquante pour un
crime ordinaire, mais c est
inimaginable concernant certaines des pires atrocités du
XXe siècle", a encore dénoncé HRW, qui ajoute : "Le
peuple cambodgien n a aucun
espoir de voir la justice pour
des meurtres de masse tant
que ces juges sont impliqués."
Dans le cas "numéro quatre",
ils ont émis en août de "sérieux doutes" sur le fait que
les trois suspects, à leurs
yeux
trop
subalternes,
relèvent du mandat de la
cour. HRW a appelé l ONU à
agir "rapidement" sans quoi
"le tribunal perdra ses derniers lambeaux de crédibilité".
"LE TRIBUNAL PERDRA
SES DERNIERS LAMBEAUX DE CRÉDIBILITÉ"
Le porte-parole du tribunal,
Lars Olsen, a rejeté ces accusations, assurant que les magistrats "continueraient à
Une seule personne y a pour l
instant été jugée : Kaing
Guek Eav, alias Douch, exchef de la prison de la capitale. Il a été condamné en juillet 2010 à trente ans de prison et attend un verdict en
appel.Le Monde.fr (avec
AFP)
Pesquisarão crimes na Costa do Marfim
Abiyán, 3 out (Prensa Latina)
A Promotoria do Corte Penal Internacional (CPI) recebeu a autorização para
pesquisar crimes cometidos
durante a onda de violência
post-eleitoral 2010-2011 na
Costa do Marfim. Os juízes
deram via livre aos promotores para a pesquisa de supostos crimes de guerra e contra
a humanidade cometidos
durante o período que sucedeu às eleições presidenciais
de novembro passado.
Com tais fatos violentos relaciona-se ao ex-presidente
Laurent Gbagbo.
Segundo meios de imprensa,
às forças que apoiam ao outrora presidente atribui-selhes assassinatos, violações,
desaparecimentos e torturas.
Calcula-se que milhares de
pessoas morreram e perto de
um milhão fugiram de seus
lugares de residência pelos
confrontos entre os seguidores do ex-presidente e os do
atual presidente, Alassane
Ouattara, o candidato vencedor das eleições.
Depois da detenção de
Gbagbo, os combates cessaram e recentemente o governo criou uma Comissão para
a Verdade e a Reconciliação
com o fim de avaliar o ocorrido e impulsionar a concórDia Nacional, afirmam fontes oficiais em esta capital
econômica.
No entanto, para a CPI, sua
intervenção requer-se por "a
ausência de procedimentos
nacionais contra quem têm a
maior responsabilidade em
os crimes".
A Promotoria terá em um
mês para contribuir qualquer
informação adicional sobre
os
delitos
perpetrados.
Police investigate alleged assault on Nigerian mother on deportation flight
Escorts allegedly attacked failed asylum seeker in front of her young children on plane
bound for Italy
Diane Taylor
A police investigation has
been launched into an alleged
assault on a Nigerian asylum
seeker in front of her three
young children on a plane
bound for Italy.
The alleged incident occurred just two weeks after the
launch of the government s
new family-friendly removal
policy. The family are one of
the first to be detained under
the new arrangements.
The woman, Faith, 39, said
six of the eight escorts on the
flight beat her on the arms
and legs, twisted her hand
and put hands around her
neck. She said she was left
spitting blood and had still
not recovered.
Her claims have raised concerns among human rights
campaigners about the treatment of asylum seeker families during the revamped
removals process.
Faith and her three children,
aged four, six and eight, were
taken by surprise when they
were arrested by a group of
10 to 12 uniformed officers
in a 5.30am raid at their home in Birmingham on 19
September and driven to the
government s new secure
pre-departure accommodation at Pease Pottage near
Crawley, West Sussex – an
experience which Faith said
terrified them all.
"I feel so bad. Why have all
these things happened to
me?" said Faith, who has
asked for her surname not to
be revealed. "When they came to arrest us at 5.30am at
our home in Birmingham,
they kept banging on the
door. The children were very
upset and were crying. They
wouldn t even allow me any
privacy to wash myself in the
bathroom before we left."
Emma Ginn, co-ordinator of
the charity Medical Justice,
which campaigns to end
child detention, said: "Some
politicians claim the coalition
agreement promise to end the
immigration detention of
children has been fulfilled.
They should come clean and
admit the promise has been
broken. The government
should now do what they say
they would and actually end
the detention of children."
The deputy prime minister,
Nick Clegg, announced in
December 2010 that child
detention was going to end in
May of this year. He said the
government was ending the
"shameful" practice in which
"children are literally taken
from their homes without
warning and placed behind
bars". He added: "Our reforms will deliver an approach to families that is compassionate and humane."
Once the family were detained in Pease Pottage, the UK
Border Agency (UKBA)
made three failed attempts to
remove them on flights to
Italy, the country where Faith
had been living for more than
a decade, where she had
permission to work and where her children were born.
She said she fled Italy following persecution by her family and local community
members and claimed asylum in the UK in November
2010.
The failed removal attempts
took place even though high
court judges have granted
several injunctions against
the removal of refused asylum seekers to Italy in recent weeks. The injunctions
have been granted until a
decision has been made in a
case about whether or not it
is acceptable to forcibly remove asylum seekers to Italy. A decision is due on 14
October.
In the first attempted removal
from the UK on 22 September, Faith and her children
were taken to London s Heathrow airport and put on to
the 7.30am Alitalia flight AZ
201 to Rome. Faith said she
became distressed and kept
saying "Oh my God, I can t
make this journey", while
strapped into her seat. At that
point, the alleged assault by
six of the eight escorts accompanying the family took
place and the pilot ordered
the escorts to take the family
off the plane.
"I thought I was going to
die," said Faith. "The escorts
beat me on the chest and
legs, pulled my hair, twisted
my left hand and put their
hands around my neck. I
thought they were about to
strangle me. We were sitting
at the back of the plane with
five male escorts and three
female ones. Two of the
women didn t touch me but
the five men and one woman
assaulted me.
"I couldn t breathe and afterwards I was spitting blood.
My children were crying
mummy is dying, mummy is
dying. Someone needs to talk
to my children; they are very
traumatised by all this. One
of them said When I grow up
I m going to tell the queen
what they did to my mum. "
A second deportation attempt
was made the following day.
The family were taken to
Gatwick but were unable to
board the flight to Italy as
there were no seats available.
By 26 September, the family
had been in Pease Pottage for
seven days, the maximum
time allowed for a family to
be detained under the new
rules. In order to remove the
family, the UKBA booked a
private charter flight from
Stansted airport to Italy. But
the family s lawyer intervened the day before they were
due to leave and obtained a
judicial review in the high
court citing the pending case
about forced removals to
Italy. The court granted an
injunction halting the planned removal. The family was
subsequently released and is
now back in Birmingham.
Faith said she was still in
pain following the assault,
was finding it hard to raise
her arm or leg and has difficulty opening her mouth.
"On my life, since I was born
I have never received such a
beating," she said. "And to
do it in front of my kids. One
of the escorts called me an
animal and said he was doing
his job. I replied: If you kill
me you will go to jail and
lose your job. "
She said one of the passengers filmed the assault on his
mobile phone and she urged
him and any other passengers
who witnessed the incident to
come forward.
Faith s asylum claim was
refused in January and the
family was asked to report to
the airport in March to board
a flight to Italy. Instead, they
absconded because Faith said
she feared further abuse in
Italy if they were returned
there.
The children s charity Barnado s has attracted controversy
after accepting a government
contract to work with families at Pease Pottage.
Barnado s said: "We have
publicly set out our red lines
in regards to the use of the
pre-departure accommodation and we are committed to
speaking out if these are breached. We are confident that
we are able to balance this
with our responsibility to
maintain confidentiality around individual families."
The Home Office declined to
make an official statement
about the case but a spokesman confirmed West Sussex
police and its own professional standards unit were investigating a serious misconduct complaint. He said the
family were expected to return to Italy and that every
assistance had been offered
to help them do so.
Reliance took over the contract to escort immigration
detainees from G4S in May
of this year. The company
declined to comment. Its
website states: "Reliance will
oversee the safe custody and
welfare of detainees."
Theresa May plans clampdown on criminals who resist deportation
Home secretary to announce move to limit power of Human Rights Act at Conservative
conference
Nicholas Watt
Britain s immigration rules
are to be amended to curb the
ability of foreign criminals to
resist deportation by invoking their right to a family
life under the human rights
Act, the home secretary, Theresa May, is to announce on
Tuesday.
In a move that will appeal
across the Conservative
party, whose members are
overwhelmingly opposed to
the human rights Act in its
present form, May will say
the changes are designed to
ease the deportation of terror
suspects.
Convention of human rights.
She will make the announcement to the Tory conference shortly after Kenneth
Clarke, the justice secretary,
unveils a new payment-byresult system to improve
drug treatment programmes
for short-term prisoners. The
pro-European justice secretary is expected to leave the
human rights Act to the
home secretary – he has said
there "isn t the faintest chance" that Britain will withdraw from the European
May s announcement will
have been carefully crafted to
reassure the Liberal Democrats who are determined to
retain the act. She will tell
the conference that secondary legislation will be introduced to make clear that foreign nationals can be deported when they:
• Are convicted of a criminal
offence.
• Have breached immigration
rules.
• Have established a family
in Britain while living in the
country illegally.
• Have to rely on benefits to
house their family.
The home secretary is acting
after a series of cases in which foreign criminals have
successfully avoided deportation by invoking article eight
of the European Convention
on human rights, incorporated into the human rights
Act, which guarantees a right
to family life.
May will tell the Tory conference that this right is not
absolute. But she will add
that immigration rules will
have to be amended to "tilt
the balance" and make it more difficult for foreign criminals to argue against deportation in court.
The home secretary made
clear her determination to act
in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on the eve of
the conference. May said: "I
see it, here in the home Office, particularly, the sort of
problems we have in being
unable to deport people who
perhaps are terrorist suspects.
Obviously we ve seen it with
some foreign criminals who
are in the UK."
May s speech comes after
she and David Cameron confirmed over the weekend that
they are committed to replacing the human rights Act
with a British bill of rights.
But the prime minister has
had to settle for establishing
a commission to examine the
future of the act under the
coalition agreement with the
Liberal Democrats.
Cameron told the Andrew
Marr Show: "It would be
good to replace the human
rights Act with a British bill
of rights. That was the Conservative policy at the last
election. That is I think the
right thing to do. We re in a
coalition. In that coalition we
have a very clear agreement
to set up a commission to
look at the idea of a British
bill of rights, but obviously
it will go more slowly than
Theresa or I would want.
Now are we going to just sit
back and go, tough, nothing
we can do? No, not a bit of
it."
May will make her announcement after negotiations
with the Liberal Democrats
who are likely to argue that
the plans are acceptable because they do not involve
changing the human rights
Act. May s proposal is designed to signal to the courts
that they can override human rights if foreign criminals are guilty of serious breaches of the new immigration
rules.
The human rights Act says,
in article 8: "Everyone has
the right to respect for his
private and family life, his
home and his correspondence… There shall be no interference by a public authority
with the exercise of this right
except such as is in accordance with the law and is
necessary in a democratic
society in the interests of
national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the
prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of
health or morals, or for the
protection of the rights and
freedoms of others."
In his announcement, Clarke
will put forward a two-point
plan to help improve the treatment of short-term offenders for drugs. The justice
secretary will propose:
• Drug recovery wings that
will provide rehabilitation for
short-term prisoners. A pilot
scheme has already begun at
five prisons – Manchester,
Holme House, High Down,
Bristol and Brixton.
• Providers will be paid according to their success in
weaning prisoners off drugs
for good.
Clarke will say that 55% of
offenders arrive at prison
with a serious drug problem,
and that the drugs trade in
prisons is worth up to £24m
a year.
Meredith Kercher murder: break-in and handprint clues at isolated cottage
It began as a night out, but the horror and accusations around student s murder have
reverberated around the world
Tom Kington
Four years on from Meredith
Kercher s murder in Perugia,
student drinkers at the Merlin, tucked down an alley
near the court building, often
look blank when the British
woman s name is mentioned.
But co-owner Pasquale Alessi still vividly recalls serving
the popular, engaging student
from Coulsdon, south London, who joined friends at a
Halloween night party at the
bar on 31 October 2007, a
few weeks after enrolling at
the University for Foreigners
in the town.
It was a big night out, commemorated by the photographs posted online of Kercher,
21, in a vampire mask. It was
also her last night out.
The following evening she
opted to watch a video and
eat pizza with her English
friends at a flat in town, as
the Italian students who usually fill the piazzas of Perugia headed home for a long
holiday weekend.
At 9pm Kercher s friend Sophie Purton was walking her
home through the dark streets
to the cottage Kercher was
renting with two Italian women – who were away that
night – and Amanda Knox,
21, a student from Seattle.
Isolated and clinging to a
slope that falls away from the
road circling the hill town,
the cottage commands spectacular views over the Perugian hills, but is easy to miss
from the road above. What
happened next has been the
subject of four trials and a
Supreme Court hearing,
thousands of pages of reports
and rulings by police, magistrates and judges, and a media frenzy that culminated in
last night s drama in the Perugia court.
The investigation began the
next morning when a local
woman heard a phone ringing at the end of her garden.
She called the police, who
traced the phone to one of
Kercher s Italian flatmates.
Arriving at the cottage, officers found Knox and Italian
IT student Raffaele Sollecito,
then 24, whom Knox had
been dating since meeting
him a week earlier at a classical music concert.
Knox said she had returned
from a night at Sollecito s
flat to find the cottage door
unlocked, a window broken,
blood in the bathroom and
Kercher s bedroom door locked. After the door was kic-
ked down, police found Kercher – a physically strong
woman who had taken karate
lessons – dead on the floor
under a duvet, partially undressed with three deep knife
wounds to her neck.
Police grew suspicious of the
broken window in the bedroom of one of the Italians. A
rock was found on the floor
but investigators doubted it
could have been thrown from
outside during a break-in,
and later learned the shutters
had been left closed.
The break-in had probably
been staged, they concluded,
by someone who knew Kercher, and the mobile phones
they found had most likely
been discarded as the murderers fled.
Forensic investigators from
Rome were soon on the scene, taking over from local
police and barring the town
coroner from checking the
body until around midnight,
preventing an accurate time
of death being determined.
Knox, meanwhile, behaved
oddly, the police believed,
turning up in a lingerie shop
the following day, where she
looked at G-strings and was
overheard promising Sollecito "wild sex".
Kercher s English friends,
who later testified to a frosty
relationship between Kercher
and the ostentatious Knox,
said that as she awaited questioning at Perugia police station, Knox had appeared untouched by Kercher s death.
What Knox told officers in
the early hours of 6 November convinced investigators
they had their murderer.
Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini
questioned Knox about a text
she sent on the night of 1
November to Patrick Lumumba, the manager of the
bar where Knox worked,
saying: "See you later."
Knox is said to have confessed she was at the cottage on
the night of the murder and
saw Lumumba enter Kercher
s room. "In my mind I saw
Patrick in confused images,"
she allegedly said, adding: "I
was in the kitchen with my
hands over my ears because
in my head I heard Meredith
scream."
Sollecito, Knox and Lumumba were promptly arrested, but the last was freed
when a customer at his bar
gave him an alibi. Knox withdrew her statement, claiming she made it as officers
yelled and cuffed her round
the head.
By then a bloody handprint
in Kercher s room had led
police to Rudy Guede, an
Ivory Coast-born drifter who
was doing odd jobs after being adopted by a well-to-do
local family.
Tracked down in Germany,
he was flown back to Italy in
handcuffs after being arrested by coincidence by local
police for travelling on a
train with no ticket. He was
sentenced to 16 years for his
role in the murder.
Prosecutors sought to establish a link between Guede,
Knox and Sollecito, alleging
the three killed Kercher during a sexual assault.
A knife found in Sollecito s
kitchen that allegedly bore
Kercher s and Knox s DNA
was cited as the murder weapon, while Sollecito s DNA
was allegedly found on Kercher s bra clasp. The DNA
findings were challenged by
court-appointed experts during Knox and Sollecito s
appeal.
Knox and Sollecito have
claimed that on the night of
the murder they were at Sollecito s flat watching a video,
cooking a meal and having
sex.
George Osborne plan to charge workers for tribunals angers unions
Chancellor unveils plans at Conservative conference as he positions himself as inheritor
of Blairite mantle
Patrick Wintour
George Osborne moved to
deregulate the labour market
by announcing big fees to
deter workers bringing employment tribunal action such as unfair dismissal and
race discrimination cases.
In a move condemned by the
unions as an attempt to silen-
ce the vulnerable, workers
will face a £150 to £250
charge to make any employment tribunal application and
a further £1,000 for starting a
hearing. The sums would be
higher for compensation claims of more than £30,000.
The charges, recoverable if a
case is won, come on top of a
move to deprive access to
tribunal for all workers with
less than two years continuous employment.
The announcements came
alongside a novel plan to
avoid a second credit crunch
by the Treasury buying corporate bonds from small businesses, the first time it has
intervened so directly to get
money to business. Details of
the credit easing plan suggest
a Treasury-underwritten multibillion pound line of credit
to small firms – an admission
that Britain s battered banks,
assaulted by the euro crisis,
are simply not in a position
to deliver.
In a sombre speech Osborne
repeatedly insisted Britain
can ride out the economic
storm so long as the government does not retreat from its
determination to cut the deficit.
Addressing the Keynesians
in his own cabinet and in the
Labour party, he said: "Borrowing too much is the cause
of Britain s problems not the
solution. Let s say we added
to the structural deficit with
more borrowing. We d be
gambling the priceless fiscal
credibility that this government has earned with the
international markets on the
bet that borrowing a few billion pounds would make all
the difference. We d be abandoning the deficit plan
that has brought the stability
other nations today crave for
say five, 10, 20 billion
pounds of borrowed spending on the illusion that such
sums would transform our
economy when we re already
spending £3tn over the next
few years."
ted that difficult days lay
ahead, but insisted he did
have a growth plan, as well
as a deficit plan. He described low interest rates as "the
most powerful stimulus that
exists".
Andrew Tyrie, one of Osborne s pre-conference critics on
growth, was taken into a sideroom after the speech by
Downing Street strategists
Steve Hilton and Craig Oliver, and emerged to say how
pleased he had been by the
speech.
Osborne also sought to dispel
suggestions that he was stubbornly sticking to his deficit
plan, saying he had explored
every option and thought
hard about what more could
be done. The deficit plan, he
said, was flexible enough to
respond to good times and
bad.
He also argued the best route
to growth lay in a solution to
the euro crisis, urging eurozone leaders to decide what
they re going to do with Greece and stick with it. He has
set a deadline of next month
s G20 summit in Cannes to
resolve the crisis.
In a neat moment of theatrical timing, the credit ratings
agency S&P selected the
halfway point during Osborne s speech to reaffirm the
UK s triple A credit rating.
In an audacious piece of political positioning he offered
himself as the true inheritor
of the Blairite mantle, arguing that the moment last
week when the Labour conference booed its former leader marked an end to the era
when Labour made its peace
with middle Britain.
Offering a mix of resolve and
confidence, Osborne admit-
He said it was not just Blair
they were booing. "They
were booing the millions of
voters who once turned to
Labour because they thought
Labour had changed."
In a controversial passage
condemned by green groups,
Osborne reaffirmed he had
inserted an escape clause in
the fourth carbon budget that
allowed him to downgrade
their carbon emission targets
if the EU failed to be as ambitious as Britain. "We are
not going to save the planet
by putting our country out of
business," he said. "So let s
at the very least resolve that
we are going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but
also no faster than our fellow
countries in Europe."
Government policy is to increase from 20% to 30% the
cuts in emissions by 2020,
based on 1990 levels, as part
of a longer term legal mandate to cut emissions by 80%
by 2050. But Osborne said
that if by 2014 other EU governments were lagging behind, he would be ready to
ditch the target.
He also confirmed plans to
freeze council tax for another
year, announced two further
enterprise zones and set aside
a further £150m to extend
mobile phone coverage to
99% of the population by
building more phone masts.
Vince Cable, the Lib Dem
business secretary, said the
changes to unfair dismissal
rules could save business
nearly £6m a year. The GMB
union released figures showing only about 5,000 claims
succeed at tribunals each
year in UK – a successful
claim for one in every 5,000
workers with a median level
of compensation of £4,900.
The GMB said in the year to
March 2010, 57,400 unfair
dismissal claims were made
to an employment tribunal, a
quarter of all the 236,100
claims that were accepted by
employment tribunals on all
grounds in that year.
In the year to end March
2010 there were 95,200 claims relating to the working
time directive, 75,500 for
unauthorised deduction from
wages, 38,310 for discrimination on grounds of sex,
disability, race, religion or
gender
orientation
and
37,400 for equal pay.
ted claim that we are all in
this together." He accused
Osborne of "trying to silence
the very people who see through him and his government, workers and their unions".
But Len McCluskey, general
secretary of the Unite union,
said: "He is a chancellor who
wants to make it easier to
hire and fire at will while
making it harder for workers
to challenge bad bosses. George Osborne then has the
nerve to repeat the discredi-
The Institute of Directors
welcomed the employment
tribunal reforms, saying the
announcement was "a vital
step to ending the no win, no
fee employment law culture
that has frightened so many
businesses into recruitment
inertia".
David Davis looks beyond coalition with Blue Book of Tory policy ideas
Former leadership contender seeks to inject new ideas into Conservative conference debate
Allegra Stratton
A referendum on rewriting
Britain s relations with Europe, scrapping the human
rights Act, abandoning a
high-speed London to Birmingham rail link and selling
off state-owned banks were
among ideas floated at the
launch of a new book on
Conservative thinking on
Monday.
David Davis, the former leadership contender, launched
a book of essays setting out
Tory thinking by MPs and
commentators, the second of
two books seeking to inject
new ideas into the debate
during the Conservative conference. Alongside Davis s
Blue Book, five of the 2010
intake of Tory MPs have
produced a similar book called After the Coalition. All
have been emboldened after
Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet
Office minister, said Tory
ministers were so preoccupied by the work of government it would be up to backbenchers to produce fresh
ideas for the next manifesto.
Both books argue that the
party stands a better chance
of winning an outright majority at the next election if it
embraces a purely Conservative philosophy, shorn of
Liberal Democrat influences.
Launching his book, Davis
said Tories had a "duty" to
battle excessive Lib Dem
influence over coalition policy, accusing the Lib Dems
of "batting" policy backwards and forwards to impo-
se their philosophy. Davis
told a fringe meeting he supported the power-sharing
deal, but went on: "Because
we are in coalition and the
Liberals feel that they are
free to criticise whichever
government policy they don t
like, it is not just OK for us
to take the mainstream Conservative stance and say it
publicly, it is our duty to take
that stance and say it publicly.
"What this book is about is
kicking off the debate, about
getting the party to engage in
what sort of country we
want, what sort of election
campaign we are going to
fight next time, what sort of
future we want for Britain.
"If we take this debate forward and do this constructively and intelligently, not by
the sort of batting backwards
and forwards we are seeing
from the Liberal party, we
will go into the next election
equipped to win and equipped to do the best possible
for Britain."
what they believe to be a
cumbersome system of environmental regulation with a
carbon tax. However, while
John Redwood calls in Davis
s book for income and corporation tax cuts, After the
Coalition proposes new fiscal
rules policed by the Office
for Budget Responsibility.
Both books call for the introduction of a British bill of
rights and the replacement of
In the Blue Book, Therese
Coffey suggests an investment in high-speed broad-
band is more efficient than
high-speed rail, and Steve
Baker suggests Britain s motorways should be privatised
and road charging introduced. In After the Coalition,
the five MPs ideas include
replacing maternity pay with
a lump-sum "baby bonus"
that would be easier for
companies to administer.
As Justices Get Back to Business, Old Pro Reveals Tricks of the Trade
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — Justice
John Paul Stevens was always courtly, but he could be
a little terse and wary in interviews while he was on the
Supreme Court. Since his
retirement last year, he has
shed some of that reticence,
and he was in an expansive
and reflective mood the other
day as he greeted a visitor to
his chambers.
He has come full circle, he
explained, returning to the
quarters first assigned to him
when he joined the court in
1975. His old chambers, now
occupied by Justice Elena
Kagan, were perhaps a little
grander, but there are worse
offices in Washington than
his current one, which overlooks the plaza in front of the
courthouse and has a striking
view of the Capitol.
In time for the start of a new
term on Monday, Justice
Stevens has just published an
engaging and candid memoir.
It is called “Five Chiefs,” for
the five chief justices he has
known — as a law clerk,
lawyer, judge and justice.
Perhaps its most surprising
element is the high praise
Justice Stevens has for Chief
Justice John G. Roberts Jr.,
who was often his ideological adversary in the five
terms the two men served
together.
In the interview, Justice Stevens also offered behind-thescenes glimpses of how opinions are assigned, and he
criticized aspects of Brown
v. Board of Education, the
1954 decision requiring the
integration of public schools.
The book is not a series of
puff-piece profiles. Chief
Justice Warren E. Burger,
who was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and
served from 1969 to 1986,
gets fairly rough treatment,
for instance, coming off as
vain, insecure and in some
ways incompetent.
Chief Justice Burger was,
Justice Stevens wrote, not
very careful in assigning majority opinions.
“A lot of people assumed he
was making strategic assignments and that sort of
thing,” Justice Stevens said.
“I think he was just not as
careful a scholar as he should
have been, and he didn’t do a
careful job keeping track of
exactly how everyone voted
and the reasons why.
“Burger would sometimes
assign an opinion to someone
who really didn’t have a majority on every issue,” Justice
Stevens continued, leading to
confusion, inefficiency and
frustration.
Chief Justice Burger was
strategic in one sense, though. Alert to the attention paid
to First amendment decisions, he would assign opinions ruling in favor of free
speech to himself, hoping for
good press.
“If you look through his First
amendment cases, I think
you’ll find that when the
First amendment claim was
upheld, he might well write
it,” Justice Stevens said. “But
where it was denied, Byron
White would get it.” Justice
Byron R. White, who served
from 1962 to 1993, did indeed gain a reputation of hostility to the First amendment.
Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist, who led the court
from 1986 to 2005, gets better reviews in the book. Justice Stevens called him able
and fair, if at times a little
peremptory, cutting off lawyers the moment their time at
the Supreme Court lectern
expired. And Justice Stevens
did not approve of the chief
justice’s decision to add gold
stripes to the sleeves of his
robes, a move that struck
many as frivolous or pompous or both.
Chief Justice Roberts, by
contrast, combines the best
qualities of his predecessors,
Justice Stevens said.
“He’s generally across the
board a very competent and
personable guy,” Justice Stevens said. “Burger was a fine
representative of the court —
handsome guy, and he spoke
well, and he could be very
gracious. I really think John
Roberts combines all those
virtues — he’s very, very
smart, and he’s very, very
fair.
“The chief is conscious of
granting more time to advocates,” Justice Stevens said
of Chief Justice Roberts’s
courtesy in occasionally allowing lawyers extra time to
respond to the barrage of
questions from the justices.
“He didn’t put stripes on his
robe.”
In his years on the Roberts
court, Justice Stevens was
the most senior justice, which meant he had the power to
assign opinions when he was
in the majority and the chief
justice was not. He admitted
to a little strategic behavior
of his own.
“Basically it was who would
do the best job writing it,” he
said. But he was also savvy
enough to know that keeping
an interesting case to himself
meant that he would avoid
being assigned a boring and
complicated one from the
same batch. “I have to confess,” he said, “that now and
then I would take an assignment because I wanted not to
be eligible for something that
I didn’t want to write.”
And then there was the important task of locking in the
crucial vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the current court’s swing justice.
“There were cases I think
that I may have asked Tony
to write,” Justice Stevens
said, “because I thought if he
wrote it out himself he was
more sure to stick to his first
vote.”
A majority is important, Justice Stevens said; unanimity
less so. He said the court
erred in moving too slowly in
the Brown case in order to
speak with one voice. The
court ended up instructing
the states to move toward
integration with “all deliberate speed” in a 1955 sequel.
“A more decisive, prompt
decision might have avoided
some of the resistance that
developed,” Justice Stevens
said. “I don’t think the world
would have come to an end if
there had been members of
the court who disagreed.”
Justice Stevens said he
spends much of the year in
Florida now, but he keeps up.
“I remain very much interested in the court,” he said.
“I’ve read all their opinions,
which I wasn’t sure I would
do.”
He added that he is not eager
to serve on appeals court
panels, a common practice
among retired members of
the court, who also include
Justices
Sandra
Day
O’Connor and David H. Souter. “David and Sandra have
enjoyed it,” Justice Stevens
said. “I kind of like not having to read a lot of briefs
and get reversed by my former colleagues.”
After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town
RO-
the immigration status of
children at registration time.
ALBERTVILLE, Ala. —
The vanishing began Wednesday night, the most frightened families packing up
their cars as soon as they
heard the news.
When Judge Blackburn was
finished, Alabama was left
with what the governor called “the strongest immigration law in this country.” It
went into effect immediately,
though her ruling is being
appealed by the Justice Department and a coalition of
civil rights groups.
By
CAMPBELL
BERTSON
They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for
a thousand dollars or even
less. Or they just closed up
and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a
neighbor. Dogs were fed one
last time; if no home could
be found, they were simply
unleashed.
Two, 5, 10 years of living
here, and then gone in a matter of days, to Tennessee,
Illinois, Oregon, Florida,
Arkansas, Mexico — who
knows? Anywhere but Alabama.
The exodus of Hispanic immigrants began just hours
after a federal judge in Birmingham upheld most provisions of the state’s farreaching immigration enforcement law.
The judge, Sharon Lovelace
Blackburn, upheld the parts
of the law allowing state and
local police to ask for immigration papers during routine
traffic stops, rendering most
contracts with illegal immigrants unenforceable and
requiring schools to ascertain
In the days since, school superintendents have reassured
parents — one even did so on
television in Spanish — that
nothing had changed for
children who were already
enrolled. Wary police departments around the state
said they were, for now, awaiting instructions on how
to carry out the law.
For many immigrants, however, waiting seemed just too
dangerous. By Monday afternoon, 123 students had
withdrawn from the schools
in this small town in the northern hills, leaving behind
teary and confused classmates. Scores more were absent.
Statewide, 1,988 Hispanic
students were absent on Friday, about 5 percent of the
entire Hispanic population of
the school system.
John Weathers, an Albertville businessman who rents
and has sold houses to many
Hispanic residents, said his
occupancy had suddenly
dropped by a quarter and
might drop further, depending on what happens in the
next week. Two people who
had paid off their mortgages
called him asking if they
could sell back their homes,
Mr. Weathers said.
Grocery stores and restaurants were noticeably less
busy, which in some cases
may be just as well, because
some employees stopped
showing up. In certain neighborhoods the streets are
uncommonly quiet, like the
aftermath of some sort of
rapture.
Drawn by work in the numerous
poultry processing
plants, Hispanic immigrants
have been coming to Albertville for years, long enough
ago that some of the older
ones gained amnesty under
the immigration law of 1986.
But the influx picked up over
the last decade, and the signs
on Main Street are now mostly bilingual, when they include English at all.
What the new immigration
law means on a large scale
will become clearest in a
place like Albertville, whether it will deliver jobs to
citizens and protect taxpayers
as promised or whether it
will spell economic disaster
as opponents fear.
Critics of the law, particularly farmers, contractors and
home builders, say the measure has already been devastating, leaving rotting crops
in fields and critical shortages of labor. They say that
even fully documented Hispanic workers are leaving, an
assessment that seems to be
borne out in interviews here.
The legal status of family
members is often mixed —
children are often Americanborn citizens — but the decision whether to stay rests on
the weakest link.
Backers of the law acknowledge that it might be disruptive in the short term, but
say it will prove effective
over time.
“It’s going to take some time
for the local labor pool to
develop again,” said State
Senator Arthur Orr, Republican of Decatur, “but outside
labor shouldn’t come in and
just beat them every time on
cost and put them out of business.”
Mr. Orr said there were already signs that the law was
working, pointing out that
the work-release center in
Decatur, about 50 miles to
the northwest, was not so
long ago unable to find jobs
for inmates with poultry processors or home manufacturers. Since the law was enacted in June, he said, the center has been placing more
and more inmates in these
jobs, now more than 150 a
day.
On Monday morning, one of
the poultry processing plants
in Albertville had a job fair,
attracting
an
enormous
crowd, a mix of Hispanic,
black and white job-seekers,
lining up outside the plant
and down the street.
“This needed to be done years ago,” Shannon Lolling,
36, who has been unemployed for over a year, said of
the law.
Mr. Lolling’s problem seemed to be with the system
that had brought the illegalimmigrant workers here, not
with the workers themselves.
“That’s why our jobs went
south to Mexico,” he said.
“They pay them less wages
and pocket the money, keep
us from having jobs.”
Not far from the plant, in the
Hispanic neighborhoods, it is
hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the
silence of abandonment or
the silence of paralyzing fear.
Many Hispanics have chosen
to stay for now, saying, with
little apparent conviction,
that the law will surely be
blocked by the president, the
judge, “the government.”
Until then, they are not leaving their homes unless absolutely necessary. They send
others to buy their groceries
and tell their children to quit
the soccer team and to come
home right after school. Rumors of raids and roadblocks
are rampant, and though the
new law has nothing to say
about such things, distrust is
primed by anecdotes, like
one told by a local Hispanic
pastor who said he was pul-
led over outside Birmingham
on Wednesday, within hours
of the ruling. His friend who
was driving — and who is in
the United States illegally —
is now in jail on an unrelated
misdemeanor charge, the
pastor said, adding that while
he was let go, a policeman
told him he was no longer
welcome in Alabama.
“I am afraid to drive to church.,” a 54-year-old poultry
plant worker named Candelaria said, adding, “The lady
that gives me a ride to work
said she is leaving. She said
she felt like a prisoner.”
All summer long, Allen Stoner, a lawyer in Decatur, has
been helping his Hispanic
clients fill out forms appointing friends or family members as guardians of their
children, who are in many
cases American-born citizens. This way, the children
would not be transferred to
social services if the parents
were arrested and deported.
Much of this was done by the
time the judge’s ruling came
down, though last week Mr.
Stoner’s clients began to contact him immediately to ask
what they should be doing.
Monday was quiet.
“We had a lot of phone calls
Thursday and Friday,” Mr.
Stoner said, “but it has
plummeted.”
He did not know for sure, but
he figured his clients were
gone.
Alabama’s Shame
Only about 3.5 percent of
Alabama’s population is foreign-born, according to the
Census Bureau. Undocumented immigrants made up roughly 4.2 percent of its work
force in 2010, according to
the Pew Hispanic Center. But
the drafters of Alabama’s
harsh immigration law wanted to turn their state into the
country’s most hostile territory for illegal immigrants.
They are succeeding, as
many of Alabama’s most
vulnerable residents can attest.
The law went into effect over
the weekend, after being largely upheld by a federal district judge. Volunteers on an
immigrant-rights group’s hot
line said that since then they
have received more than
1,000 calls from pregnant
women afraid to go to the
hospital, crime victims afraid
to go the police, parents afraid to send their children to
school.
School superintendents and
principals across the state
confirm that attendance of
Hispanic children has dropped noticeably since the
word went out that school
officials are now required to
check the immigration status
of newly enrolled students
and their parents.
That rule is part of the law’s
sweeping attempt to curtail
the rights and complicate the
lives of people without papers, making them unable to
enter contracts, find jobs,
rent homes or access government services. In other
words, to be isolated, unemployable, poor, defenseless
and uneducated.
The education crackdown is
particularly senseless and
unconstitutional. In 1982, the
Supreme Court found that
all children living in the United States have the right to a
public education, whatever
their immigration status. The
justices’ reasoning was shaped not by compassion but
practicality: it does the country no good to perpetuate an
uneducated underclass.
Officials in Alabama — some well meaning, others less
so — insisted that nothing in
the new law is intended to
deny children an education.
School districts, they noted,
are supposed to collect only
numbers of children without
papers, not names.
“I don’t know where the misinformation’s
coming
from,” Alabama’s interim
state school superintendent,
Larry Craven, told NPR. “If
you have difficulty unders-
tanding the language anyway, then who knows what
they’re being told?” With
comments like that, it’s not
surprising that any of “them”
would be frightened.
The Obama administration
was right to sue to try to stop
the Alabama law. It needs to
press ahead with its appeal of
the ruling and challenge similar laws in Utah, Georgia,
Indiana and South Carolina.
President Obama needs to
show stronger leadership in
defending core American
values in the face of the hostility that has overtaken Alabama and so many other states. He can start by scrapping
the Secure Communities
program, which encourages
local immigration dragnets
and reinforces the false notion that most undocumented
immigrants pose a threat to
this country’s security.
As for Alabama, one has to
wonder at such counterproductive cruelty. Do Alabamans want children too frightened to go to school? Or
pregnant women too frightened to seek care? Whom
could that possibly benefit?
Hooray for Federal Loans!
By JOE NOCERA
In the firestorm over Solyndra, three main criticisms
have emerged.
The first is that Solyndra
wasn’t ready for prime time
and that the Department of
Energy, which gave it a $535
million federally guaranteed
loan, should have known as
much. The second is that
Solyndra used political influence to land a loan that was
destined to blow up. And the
third is that Solyndra’s bankruptcy case shows why government
bureaucrats
shouldn’t be picking technology winners and losers — or
making risky investments
that the private sector won’t.
I think we can now safely
concede the first point. Although what sunk Solyndra
was the unsustainably high
price of its innovative solar
panels, The Washington
Post, The Los Angeles Times
and Megan McArdle’s blog
at The Atlantic’s Web site
have all made a convincing
case that, internally, the
company was a mess.
The second argument, on the
other hand, strikes me as
utterly bogus. Yes, there are
a few e-mails from inside the
government that questioned
the loan guarantee. And, yes,
Solyndra hired — shocker!
— lobbyists. But you can
always find, after the fact,
“bad documents” that can be
twisted to make something
innocent sound nefarious.
“I suspect that when all the
information finally comes
out, there will be very little
that is scandalous,” said Jonathan Rothwell, who has
studied the Solyndra case as
a senior research analyst at
the Brookings Institution.
Although Republicans will
surely try to keep Solyndra in
the news until, oh, next November, the scandal will eventually evaporate because
there is very little there.
The third criticism is the one
that really matters: government “is a crappy vc,” as
Obama’s former economic
adviser, Larry Summers, put
it in another embarrassing email that was recently released as part of a Congressional investigation into Solyndra.
“VC,” of course, stands for
venture capitalist; the notion
is that government is not
equipped to play that role. A
corollary point, voiced by
Holman Jenkins Jr. in The
Wall Street Journal, is that
solar projects that make financial sense get financed by
the private sector and those
that don’t are the ones that
need federal backing.
But if you spend any time
actually looking into how the
Department of Energy doles
out the loan guarantees, you
quickly realize that it’s not
acting like a venture capitalist. Rather, it is funding projects that have already attracted private capital — lots of
it. The private sector, in other
words, is still the one picking
winners and losers.
What the program is essentially doing is moving alternative energy innovations to
full-scale development. Why
is the government doing this?
Because this is precisely
where the private sector fails.
As Rothwell puts it, “The
program is supposed to overcome the commercialization
valley of death.”
In this country, it is relatively
easy to get venture capital for
a good idea — and alternative energy has attracted billions in the past few years.
What is hard to come by is
money to fund the far more
expensive process of commercializing the innovation.
Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel (and still
one of the great business
minds in America), has been
sounding the alarm about
this, pointing out that one
reason so many American
innovations wind up being
manufactured in China is that
the Chinese are more than
happy to finance the commercialization process.
One company that has received three federally guaranteed loans, totaling more than
$3 billion, is First Solar. That
money is going to help the
company build three solar
power plants in California
and Arizona. The plants already have long-term contracts
with utilities. They have locked-in cash flows. The risk is
minimal.
Shouldn’t banks be making
these loans? Sure, but they
are still paralyzed by the financial crisis and don’t understand the economics of
solar power. Can you really
argue that the government
should, therefore, also sit on
its hands? Indeed, one goal
of the loan guarantee program is to show private capital that these loans make sense — so that the banks can
eventually step in and replace
the government.
The Republicans know all
this, surely. In 2005, when
the Energy Policy Act was
first proposed by the Bush
administration, they made
some of these same arguments in support of the loan
guarantee program, which
was part of the bill. The bill
passed the House with overwhelming Republican support. Most Democrats voted
no.
Today, the Republican-led
Energy
and
Commerce
Committee is investigating
Solyndra, forcing its executives to take the Fifth amendment, and releasing
embarrassing White House emails. I looked it up: every
single Republican on that
committee who was in office
in 2005 voted for the loan
guarantee program that they
are now so gleefully condemning.
I wonder why.
•
Many readers have asked if
Harold Burson’s Nuremberg
trial scripts, which were the
subject of my last column,
are available online. Although they are not, Harold has
posted a small sampling at
www.haroldburson.com/nure
mberg.html. I hope you enjoy
them as much as I did.
For Justices’ First Day Back, a Knotty Case Involving Medicaid Cutbacks
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court started its new
term on Monday with arguments in a difficult and consequential case over California’s attempt to cut Medicaid
payment rates.
The justices were not focused
on the ultimate question of
whether state officials were
entitled to address the budget
crisis there by lowering payments to medical providers.
Rather, they considered the
threshold question of whether the providers and Medicaid recipients were entitled
to sue over the move.
The answer was obscured by
a tangle of legal doctrines
and practical concerns. Medicaid is a joint federal-state
program that provides health
care to poor and disabled
people. States are not obligated to participate. If they do,
they receive federal money
and in exchange agree to pay
rates “sufficient to enlist enough providers” to ensure
that care available under Medicaid is similar to that available to other local residents.
There is no question that
federal authorities can enforce the law and that states that
fail to comply with their o-
bligations face the loss of
federal money. Almost as
soon as the argument was
under way, though, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said
such enforcement standing
alone was problematic.
“That’s a very drastic remedy
that’s going to hurt the people that Medicaid was meant
to benefit,” she said of the
potential loss of federal
funds.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
suggested that private lawsuits may serve a valuable role
in supplementing federal
enforcement, referring to a
friend-of-the-court brief filed
by former officials of the
Department of Health and
Human Services that said,
“Fewer than 500 federal employees are today tasked with
supervising 56 different Medicaid programs administering nearly $400 billion in
federal funds every year.”
It followed, the former officials said, that exclusive enforcement by the federal agency was “logistically, practically, legally and politically
unfeasible.”
Lawyers for California and
the Obama administration
disagreed, urging the justices
not to allow private lawsuits.
“I don’t think it is more efficient to have 700 district
court judges interpreting a
statute that does not have any
objective standard,” said Karin S. Schwartz, a deputy
state attorney general.
The Medicaid law does not
mention such private lawsuits. But the United States
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco,
ruled that private parties
could sue under the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which makes federal
law “the supreme law of the
land.” By reducing payments, the appeals court said,
California violated the federal Medicaid law and threatened access to “muchneeded medical care.”
At the argument on Monday,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said
private lawsuits under the
supremacy clause have been
commonplace since 1824.
Edwin S. Kneedler, a deputy
United States solicitor general, responded that the federal government did not seek
to bar all such suits, only
those challenging what he
called “cooperative federalstate” programs that resemble “a contractual relationship.”
The administration’s position
in the three consolidated cases heard Monday, including
Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, No. 09-958, disappointed some of its allies. Democratic members of Congress — including Senator
Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House
minority leader — filed a
brief urging the justices to
allow the private lawsuits.
They were joined by civil
liberties and business groups.
More than 30 states lined up
on the other side.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer
described several possible
approaches in the case and
seemed to find none of them
satisfactory. “I see a practical
problem,” he said, “and the
practical problem is millions
of rates all judged by the
term ‘sufficient’ and instead
of the agency in charge deciding what’s sufficient, we do
have a lot of judges.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. expressed concern
that allowing private lawsuits
under the supremacy clause
could amount to “a complete
end run” around barriers to
private lawsuits in other settings. “We have wasted a lot
of time trying to figure out
whether there’s an implied
right of action under a particular statute,” he said, “if
there has always been one
under the supremacy clause.”
Justice Breyer added that he
was worried that too broad a
ruling would allow individuals who asserted a conflict
between a federal law and a
state one to “run right into
court.”
Carter G. Phillips, representing the providers and beneficiaries, said his clients
would have been content
with a court injunction that
simply froze rates while an
administrative process under
the Medicaid law went forward. He added that his clients did not seek a “roving
commission” to identify and
sue over conflicts between
federal and state laws.
“My people have a life-anddeath problem, Justice Breyer,” Mr. Phillips said.
Before the argument got under way, Chief Justice Ro-
berts noted a significant anniversary: Justice Antonin
Scalia, the court’s longestserving member, joined the
court a quarter-century ago,
hearing his first arguments in
October 1986.
“The place,” the chief justice
said, “has not been the same
since.”
Interim Tunisian Leader With Ties to Old Ruler Defends a Gradual Path
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
TUNIS — As the country
that kicked off the Arab Spring prepares for its first
free election this month, Tunisia’s transitional prime
minister, Beji Caid Essebsi,
has some advice for his
counterparts in Egypt, Libya
or other former Arab autocracies dealing with impatient public demands unleashed by the revolutions.
“When someone is hungry
asking for food, you only
give him what he needs,” Mr.
Essebsi said, describing his
go-slow approach to meeting
protesters’ demands for jobs
and freedoms. “You don’t
give him more, or else he
might die, so we offer a stepby-step approach.”
Mr. Essebsi, 84, was picked
as prime minister in February
because during a long career
as an official of the Tunisian
dictatorship he built a record
of trying to change the system from within. But as interim leader he found himself
obliged to deal with continuous eruptions of protests demanding jobs, wages and
immediate retribution against
members of the former ruling
elite.
He said he often let the protesters express themselves —
but sometimes found the need to crack down.
Mr. Essebsi said it was a
choice between yielding to
chaos, or loosening the grip
gradually, defending his occasional reliance on riot police and tear gas to keep order.
His approach has won him
broad support but also led a
few activists to compare him
to the ousted dictator Zine elAbidine Ben Ali.
“Sometimes the proponents
of freedom have demands
that go beyond logic,” he
said, “and it is more difficult
to protect freedom from the
proponents of freedom themselves than from the enemies.”
Mr. Essebsi spoke during an
hour-and-a-half interview in
an ornately tiled parlor in the
centuries-old complex known
as Tunis’s casbah, on the eve
of a visit this week to the
White House and weeks before the election, on Oct. 23,
of a new constituent assembly that will govern Tunisia
while drafting a new Constitution. It promises to be the
first free and fair election of
the Arab Spring, offering
him the historic chance to
hand over power in a peaceful, democratic transition —
a rare event in the history of
the region.
“It is a duty and an honor,”
he said.
But sounding at times like a
political candidate just beginning a new campaign, he
also acknowledged that he
was not yet ready to retire
and hoped for a continued
role in the new government
— perhaps as its prime minister.
“Why not?” he asked. “When
you are a politician, it means
to work for the benefit of the
country, not to stay home. In
politics, it ends only when
one dies.”
For Mr. Essebsi, politics began in the early 1950s under
French colonial rule. He was
a young lawyer representing
members of the independence movement around Habib
Bourguiba, who in 1956 became Tunisia’s first president. Mr. Essebsi served him
as an adviser, interior minister, defense minister and ambassador to Paris. After Mr.
Ben Ali’s 1987 bloodless
coup, Mr. Essebsi served in
Tunisia’s rubber-stamp Parliament until 1994.
But he was known since the
1970s as a voice within the
ruling elite pushing for more
democracy. That combination of experience and relative
liberalism is what earned him
the job of interim prime minister after Mr. Ben Ali fled
on Jan. 14 and mounting street protests forced the sitting prime minister to resign
soon after.
Mr. Essebsi’s supporters say
he exemplifies the intertwined Western and Arab influences distinctive to Tunisia
and its modern founding father, Mr. Bourguiba. Mr.
Essebsi often quotes the Koran from memory, his admirers note, but until a few years ago, his family owned a
wine store. (Alcohol is prohibited in Islam. Mr. Essebsi
could not be reached for
comment on this point, but
his spokesman said he had
never seen him drink alcohol.)
Some activists, though, call
him “a new Ben Ali” who
has failed to deliver fast enough on the revolution’s
promises of new jobs and
dignity.
“The only ones who have
legitimacy are those who
struggled for change before
Jan. 14 and are still struggling,” said Assia Haj Salem,
a lawyer who helped organize a recent protest.
“If he stays in the coming
government, I will assassinate him and declare that I
did,” she said. “He is rejected
by the people.”
Mr. Essebsi has responded to
the continuing protests and
occasional violence in the
capital and around the country by alternately pushing
back and giving in. When a
former Ben Ali justice minister was released from prison
around the same time that a
wealthy family ally fled the
country in August, thousands
took to the streets of Tunis
and other cities to demand
legal action, if not a new
revolution.
Police used tear gas to break
up the protests. But they also
re-arrested the former justice
minister, who Mr. Essebsi
said remained behind bars.
In early September, as protests and violence continued,
Mr. Essebsi announced a
broad security crackdown,
including authorizing the
Interior Ministry to ban meetings deemed to threaten stability and to put individuals
under house arrest.
He also banned the police
trade unions, accusing them
of statements making “insinuations to insurgency.”
While 97 percent of the police were “honest men,” he
said, 3 percent were “monkeys.” (As a former interior
minister, he should know, he
said in the interview.)
Hundreds of angry police
officers demonstrated the
next day outside his office in
the casbah. A few passers-by
took his side and reportedly
threw bananas at the officers.
But a vice prime minister
quietly told the officers that
Mr. Essebsi intended to ban
only unauthorized unions,
not the existing ones, regaining their support, Montasser
el-Matieri, a spokesman for
the police union, said last
week in an interview.
Through it all, many observers say, Tunisia appears to
have stayed on track — especially in comparison with
the muddle after the season’s
second Arab revolution, in
Egypt, where the interim
military government is still
ironing out a complicated
multistage plan that could
delay full civilian control
until 2014.
After a gradual process of
street protests, official accommodations and the inclusion of new voices in the
interim government, Mr.
Essebsi had established enough credibility that by June he was able to persuade
the public and the parties to
accept a postponement in the
election for technical reasons
from its originally scheduled
date in July to Oct. 23. Even
Tunisia’s Islamists, who had
the most to lose because of
their head start in organizing,
accepted the deferral.
An independent commission
to oversee the transition had
included a growing number
of political groups, who recently agreed together on a
one-year deadline for the
constituent assembly in order
to limit its power. Another
independent commission is
investigating crimes by officials and allies of the Ben Ali
government, with a mandate
to recommend prosecutions
and publicize its findings.
And to begin rectifying the
notoriously brutal police force left by the Ben Ali government, Mr. Essebsi has
appointed a second interior
minister, to study steps toward reform.
Tunisians remain angry about soaring unemployment,
especially among college
graduates, and an economic
growth rate flattened by the
revolutions here and in neighboring Libya, Mr. Essebsi
said. But their protests are
tempered by “respect,” he
said, giving himself some of
the credit.
For a successful transition,
“the major element is that
these countries have to be led
by someone who is trustworthy, who has the confidence
of the people,” Mr. Essebsi
said, adding that when he
assumed office the protesters
who had occupied the casbah
square for weeks agreed to
leave voluntarily, without
police coercion.
“If the people trust their leaders, they will wait.”
Judge Allows Trial on Terrorist’s Challenge to Prison Rules
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
and BENJAMIN WEISER
A convicted terrorist’s First
amendment challenge to
rules barring him from almost all communications
with outsiders has been allowed to proceed to trial, in a
ruling that appears to be a
rare setback to the government in cases involving the
treatment of high-security
inmates.
The prisoner, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, was convicted in Manhattan in 2001 of
taking part in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is serving a life
sentence at the federal Ad-
ministrative Maximum prison, or Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where he has been
held under what are known
as special administrative measures, or SAMs.
Fewer than 50 federal prisoners, including many charged
in terrorism cases, are being
held under the strict confinement rules, court documents show, including 27 in
the Colorado prison.
Prisoners have brought unsuccessful legal challenges to
strict confinement rules in
the past, arguing that the
conditions violate Constitutional prohibitions against
cruel and unusual punishment.
But in the case of Mr. Mohamed, Judge Marcia S. Krieger of United States District
Court in Colorado ruled on
Thursday that a court could
hear Mr. Mohamed’s claim
that his First amendment
rights were being violated.
Mr. Mohamed’s communications with lawyers and courts
are relatively unrestricted. He
can communicate with only a
small number of family
members under close monitoring, and phone calls must
be conducted in English unless an interpreter can be
arranged. Written communications with family members
are restricted to three sheets
of paper.
His mail can be held for 14
business days if written in
English, and 60 if other languages are used, or if the
government has reason to
believe that code has been
employed.
“The government’s general
justifications for SAMs —
involvement in terrorist activities and dangerous communication by others during
incarceration — do not address Mr. Mohamed’s conduct or his particular risks,”
wrote Judge Krieger, who
was appointed by President
George W. Bush. She made
no findings on the merits of
Mr. Mohamed’s First amendment claim; that would
be addressed at trial.
The government had argued
that Mr. Mohamed possessed
a “longstanding commitment
to jihad,” and that it was likely he “would advocate
violence in communications
with the outside world, if
permitted to do so,” the judge
noted.
The government also cited
the need to monitor his
communications with a brother, who, according to the
government’s correspondence with Mr. Mohamed, “is
suspected of previously helping you obtain a fraudulent
passport and visa.”
David A. Ruhnke, a lawyer
who represented Mr. Mohamed at trial, said Judge Krieger’s opinion made it clear
that “the Bureau of Prisons
has offered very little justification for these very draconian restrictions on Mr. Mohamed’s freedoms.”
“I see the significance of the
ruling as saying that the government, without more,
can’t simply lock somebody
down for life, restricting their
ability to interact with other
human beings, based on conduct growing older and staler,” Mr. Ruhnke added.
“The government’s hype is
not living up to the reality.”
The Justice Department and
the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the ruling.
Mr. Mohamed initially challenged his conditions of confinement in a handwritten
complaint in 2007. The government sought dismissal
on grounds that there was
“no genuine issue for trial,”
and that the conditions were
“reasonably related to the
legitimate penological objectives of national and institutional security.”
Prosecutors have said that
Mr. Mohamed, now in his
late 30s, helped prepare the
bomb used in the Tanzania
attack, which was carried out
by Al Qaeda and killed 11
people. Mr. Mohamed, who
also spells his name Mohammed, received life imprisonment after the jury failed
to reach a unanimous verdict
on capital punishment, deadlocking 9 to 3 in favor of
death.
During sentencing hearings,
prosecutors also presented
evidence that Mr. Mohamed
had assisted his cellmate,
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, in
an attack on a federal jail
guard, Louis Pepe, at the
Metropolitan
Correctional
Center in Manhattan in 2000
that left the guard braindamaged. Mr. Mohamed’s
lawyers denied he helped in
the attack.
Stewart A. Baker, a top Homeland Security official in
the Bush administration, said
the restrictions on Mr. Mohamed made sense because
“this is a very dangerous guy,
backed by an enormously
dangerous organization.”
Anthony S. Barkow, a former
federal terrorism prosecutor
who runs a center on criminal law at New York University, said that Judge Krieger
seemed “to pay more scrutiny than judges typically do”
when reviewing such measures, and that she had demanded more specific allegations
of dangerousness than is typically required.
He cited, for example, the
claim that Mr. Mohamed’s
communications with family
members could be dangerous
without close monitoring.
“Her reaction was not deference, but ‘Prove it,’ ” he
said.
Judge Is Asked to Allow Review of Police Dept. Monitoring of Muslim
Communities
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Lawyers in a federal lawsuit
that has governed how the
New York Police Department investigates political
and religious groups for more
than 25 years asked a judge
on Monday to let them collect information to see if the
department had violated his
orders in how they monitor
Muslim communities.
In papers filed in federal
court, the lawyers cited a
series of recent news articles
that detailed the use of undercover officers and informants to gather and maintain
information about political
activity among Muslims in
circumstances in which there
was no indication that crimes
had occurred.
“These accounts, if true, suggest that the N.Y.P.D. is
conducting surveillance and
maintaining records of such
surveillance in violation of
the terms of the Modified
Handschu Guidelines,” the
lawyers wrote, referring to
the court-ordered guidelines
in effect as a result of the
class-action lawsuit. The
guidelines were first set forth
in a 1985 consent decree and
significantly loosened in
2003 after the Police De-
partment asked that they be
thoroughly revamped because of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The lawyers on Monday also
asked the judge in the case,
Charles S. Haight Jr. of United States District Court in
Manhattan, for an order requiring the department to
preserve its records and databases.
The changes to the original
1985 Handschu Guidelines
allowed law enforcement
agencies to exchange information more freely and no
longer required the police to
file statements on its investigations of political and religious activity with the
Handschu Authority, a panel
made up of two senior police
officials and a civilian. To
ensure that Constitutional
rights are respected, the guidelines require the police to
follow a 22-page set of F.B.I.
guidelines issued in 2002.
Judge Haight said in 2003
that he would allow greater
police powers because the
nature of public peril had
changed. His ruling led to a
rewriting of the decree that
established the original guidelines governing police investigations of political activity, which were known for
the name of the original plaintiff in the 1971 lawsuit,
Barbara Handschu.
In their court papers, the
lawyers said the news articles
— two lengthy and detailed
articles published by The
Associated Press in August
and September and two columns by the blogger Leonard Levitt on his NYPD
Confidential Web site —
described a Police Department policy of focusing on
Muslim communities in New
York to identify “hot spots,”
including mosques, social
gathering places and student
organizations based on college campuses.
One of the lawyers, Jethro
M. Eisenstein, noted in the
papers that the surveillance
of political activities detailed
in the articles might not violate the Modified Handschu
Guidelines, which say that
for “the purpose of protecting
or preventing terrorist activities, N.Y.P.D. is authorized
to visit any place and attend
any event that is open to the
public, on the same terms
and conditions as members
of the public generally.”
But he wrote that keeping
records about “protected speech and behavior heard and
seen during those operations
is a violation of the Modified
Handschu Guidelines,” as
“no information obtained
from such visits shall be retained unless it relates to
potential unlawful or terrorist
activity.”
Celeste Koeleveld, the executive assistant corporation
counsel for public safety,
who is representing the city,
said through a spokesman
that her office had just received the papers and was evaluating them.
Paul J. Browne, the Police
Department’s chief spokesman, did not respond to a
telephone call and an e-mail
seeking comment.
The relaxed guidelines initially went into effect in early
2003 as internal department
rules, leaving the class-action
plaintiffs with what they said
were no means to enforce
them; previously, they could
go to Judge Haight if they
thought the department had
violated the consent decree.
But in August of that year,
just six months after the new
guidelines went into effect, it
was revealed that the department had been debriefing
arrested Iraq war protesters
about their political views
and affiliations and recording
their responses on a debriefing form, a violation of the
new rules.
Judge Haight then incorporated the new guidelines into
the consent decree, prompting a lengthy battle over
whether the plaintiffs’ lawyers had the power to bring
what they believed were violations of the guidelines to
the attention of the court.
The department opposed any
role for the court, but Judge
Haight ruled that the plaintiffs had the power to complain about Police Department policies that they believed violated the modified
guidelines. If they prove the
policies violate the guidelines, the court has the power
to order their end.
The Cronyism Behind a Pipeline for Crude
By BILL McKIBBEN
LATE last month, the Obama
administration unveiled a
new tool that lets anyone
send a petition to the White
House; get 5,000 signatures
in 30 days and you’re guaranteed some kind of answer.
My prediction: it’s not going
to stop people from trying to
occupy Wall Street. After the
past few years, we’re increasingly unwilling to believe
that political reform can be
accomplished by going through the “normal channels” of democracy.
It’s easy to understand why.
In the first few months of the
Bush administration, the vice
president’s staff held a series
of secret meetings with energy company executives to
come up with a new energy
policy that, essentially, gave
big oil everything it asked
for. When journalists learned
about the secret sessions,
they became a scandal —
environmental groups complained long and loud, right
up to the Supreme Court,
and rightly so. Important
decisions should be made in
the open, not behind closed
doors by cronies scratching
one another’s backs.
In 2008, Barack Obama
promised to turn things around with new ethics guide-
lines and promises of transparency. But if two batches
of e-mails released via the
Freedom of Information Act
— the first last month and
the second on Monday — are
any indication, he’s not delivering on that promise.
The e-mails, made available
by the environmental group
Friends of the Earth, show
something just as tawdry as
Dick Cheney’s backroom
dealing: the State Department working with lobbyists
to advance the interests of
TransCanada, the company
trying to build the Keystone
XL pipeline from the tar
sands of Canada across the
center of the continent. Even
as the State Department was
supposedly carrying out a
neutral evaluation of the pipeline’s environmental impact, key players were undermining the process.
One of the stars of this sordid
drama was Paul Elliott,
TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist for its pipeline project. Back in 2008, he
was the deputy national campaign manager of Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid. Around the time she
became secretary of state, he
was hired by TransCanada.
Why did he get the job? Just
ask Marja Verloop, a member of the diplomatic staff at
the United States Embassy in
Canada who oversaw environmental and energy issues.
In one of the friendly e-mails
between the diplomat and the
lobbyist, Ms. Verloop reassured Mr. Elliott about an article that mentioned his possible conflicts of interest: “it’s
precisely because you have
connections that you’re sought after and hired.”
And how neutral was the
State Department about the
plan it was supposedly evaluating? Here’s Ms. Verloop
again, in response to an email from Mr. Elliott relaying the good news that he
had persuaded Senator Max
Baucus of Montana to back
the pipeline: “Go Paul!” Cle-
arly, these guys are on the
same team, never mind that
one of them works for the
energy company and the other for the government agency overseeing it.
This comes, in one sense, as
no big surprise. In a 2009
cable obtained by Wikileaks,
another State Department
higher-up was caught advising Canadian officials on
how to spin their message to
win favorable media coverage of Canadian crude. And
when the State Department
picked a consulting firm to
help carry out the environmental impact statement on
the Keystone pipeline, it chose a company called Cardno
Entrix that listed among its
chief clients ...TransCanada.
The final report, which came
out in late August, decided
the pipeline would have “no
significant impact” on the
nearby land and water resources.
This is laughable — we’re
talking about connecting a
pipe to one of the largest
pools of carbon on earth.
Twenty of the nation’s top
scientists sent the administration a letter this summer explaining what a disaster it
would be. According to NASA’s chief climate scientist,
James Hansen, if we tapped
the tar sands heavily, it
would be “essentially game
over” for the climate.
But instead of listening to
bright people like Mr. Hansen who know what they’re
talking about, our government’s staffers are blowing
kisses at lobbyists. That’s
exactly why cronyism is such
a problem. The people writing these e-mails don’t have
expertise — they have connections. If this is happening
in the State Department, why
should we not assume it’s
also going on in the Treasury
Department’s dealings with
the big banks, and just about
everywhere else in government?
It really does seem extra
shocking in the Obama administration. Dick Cheney’s
sitting down with the energy
barons was almost expected
— he’d just quit as chief executive of the drilling company Halliburton, after all.
But Barack Obama said he
would “end the tyranny of
oil”; he also said he was going to end back-room dealing. His decision about the
Keystone pipeline project,
which is expected by year’s
end, seems like one last
chance to show he actually
meant it.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in
residence in environmental
studies at Middlebury College, is a spokesman for tarsandsaction.org, an organization that opposes the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Hague: Court Will Investigate War Crimes in Ivory Coast Violence
By MARLISE SIMONS
Judges at the International
Criminal Court in The Hague have given the prosecutor the go-ahead to investigate war crimes in Ivory Coast
after the country’s disputed
presidential elections last
year. The prosecutor has said
that both sides in the conflict,
the forces backing the ousted
leader Laurent Gbagbo and
those backing his successor,
Alassane Ouattara, had killed
civilians and committed other crimes, including rape.
Less than a week ago, the
new government also formed
a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to help establish
peace, after the killing of an
estimated 3,000 people and
the destruction of vast numbers of homes.
The Killing of a Qaeda Leader in Yemen
It defies logic for some people to argue that Anwar alAwlaki, an American-born
leader of Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula, was denied “due process of law” as an
American citizen when drones attacked and killed him
in Yemen (“Judging a Long,
Deadly Reach,” news analysis, front page, Oct. 1).
If a person took hostages and
threatened to kill them in an
American city, authorities
unable to negotiate their release might have to use deadly
force to try to free them. Mr.
Awlaki openly vowed to kill
Americans and urged others
to do so. He had operated
unencumbered and inaccessible for years in lawless
Yemen.
The United States is in a war
like no other. Al Qaeda and
its followers, strong or weak,
are the enemies at the gate
now.
President Obama, after due
deliberation, did what was
right to fulfill his Constitutional oath to protect the
American people.
HERB LINNEN
Washington, Oct. 1, 2011
gally put to death unless a
court was satisfied that he
had contemplated the king’s
death.
The fact that it was easier to
summarily execute Anwar alAwlaki and Samir Khan than
to capture and try them is a
poor excuse to violate the
due process clause, which is
as basic a guarantee of liberty as anything in the United States Constitution. Until we restore it to its rightful
place, we are back in the
Middle Ages.
To the Editor:
PETER WEISS
The Treason Act, passed by
the English Parliament in
1351, defined treason as
“when a man doth compass
or imagine the Death of our
Lord the King.” But even
then a man could not be le-
Vice President
Center for Constitutional
Rights
New York, Oct. 1, 2011
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 1,
2011
To the Editor:
Regardless of whether Anwar al-Awlaki was a serious
loss for Al Qaeda, killing
him adds up to a serious loss
for us.
The action fuels a growing
perception that we, like Al
Qaeda, are violent and lawless. In Mr. Awlaki’s case,
it cheapens American citizenship. And using drones to
take down human targets
looks more like computer
gaming, with other people’s
lives at stake, than responsible international behavior.
For all these reasons, attacks
of this kind strengthen our
adversaries.
To the Editor:
Legal and moral objections
to the targeted killing of an
American citizen who has
joined the enemy in wartime
could easily be resolved by
the passage of legislation that
would give the president,
after appropriate review, the
power to revoke that person’s
citizenship. Such legislation
should give a person whose
citizenship is revoked the
right to challenge the action
in federal court, but only if
he appears personally before
the judge.
MICHAEL B. GOTKIN
Our strongest suit as a nation
is our tradition of respect for
the rule of law and for the
rights of our fellow human
beings. The cost of this attack is far higher than any
return it could possibly offer.
MARY R. HOLBROW
The “classified memorandum” that supports the extrajudicial killing of American
citizens by drones may satisfy the consciences of those
permitted to see it. But such
secret justifications recall the
torture memorandums of a
previous administration.
What will it profit us if we
reduce “risk” and “cost” but
in doing so lose our soul as a
nation?
PHILIP FRIED
To the Editor:
When a person threatens to
murder you, it is wise to believe him, and to take the
appropriate steps to protect
yourself.
MARVIN WAXNER
To the Editor:
Re “Yemen Strike Reflects
U.S. Shift to Drones as Cheaper War Tool” (front page,
Oct. 2):
Plainview, N.Y.,
2011
Oct.
1,
Universities in Scotland to Charge Other Britons
By SUZANNE DALEY
EDINBURGH — When Britain decided last December to
impose a steep increase in
university tuition, Scotland,
proud and independent as
usual, flatly rejected the idea.
Instead, it held firm to its
long tradition of virtually
free university education.
For Scots, that is.
Government officials here
soon decided that they were
at liberty to charge more to
students from the rest of Britain, quite a bit more. Starting next September, those
students are to pay the same
tuition as the new rates going
into effect in England, up to
$14,000 a year.
The move has incited outrage
south of the border, where
heading to the blustery campuses of Edinburgh and St.
Andrews has been an appealing option for generations of
English students, including
Prince William and his wife.
“If it is not illegal, then it is
immoral,” Baroness Ruth
Deech, a lawyer and academic, fumed on Lords of the
Blog, a Web site for members of the House of Lords.
An editorial in The Daily
Telegraph complained that
the Scottish treatment of other British students was an
“injustice” — “especially
galling” since all British taxpayers contribute to Scotland’s treasury.
“After all,” it asked, “if Scotland was independent and
relied solely on its own taxes
would it be able to continue a
policy that is no longer affordable south of the border?”
The sting was sharpened by
the fact that under European
Union law, Scotland cannot
charge students from other
European Union countries
more than it charges its own.
So next year, students from
France, Denmark and Greece
will be offered a free education in Scotland, even as those from England, Wales and
Northern Ireland will have to
pay as much as $56,000 for a
four-year degree.
The plan is likely to be challenged in both British and
European courts, where the
cases will be closely watched
both for what they say about
the relationship between the
parts of the United Kingdom
and for the measures that
European countries can take
in these lean times.
Generally, the European
courts try to stay out of nations’ internal matters, and
they may see this case in that
light. But some experts say
they may be willing to recognize students from England, Wales and Northern
Ireland as European Union
students, entitled to the same
benefits as Bulgarian or Finnish ones when it comes to
tuition.
“It’s a genuinely intriguing
question,” said Niamh Nic
Shuibhne, a professor of Eu-
ropean Union law at the University of Edinburgh.
One prominent human rights lawyer in England, Phil
Shiner of Public Interest
Lawyers, has promised to
challenge the Scottish policy
in court. In Northern Ireland,
Jim Duffy, also with Public
Interest Lawyers, is preparing a similar case.
“This cannot be right,” Mr.
Duffy said. “If you are from
Bucharest, it’s free. But if
you live just over the border
in Carlisle, it could cost
36,000 pounds. That cannot
be right.”
The decision to raise tuition
in Britain, from about $5,600
a year, was greeted in December with a wave of violent protests in which demonstrators attacked government buildings and battled the police on the streets
of London for days, at one
point surrounding Prince
Charles and his wife as they
headed to the theater in their
Rolls-Royce limousine.
Education experts say the
increase in Britain pushed its
university system much closer to the American model,
where education is seen as an
individual benefit that should
be paid for.
But Scotland is trying to adhere to a different principle,
more aligned with the rest of
Europe: that education is a
public good, like highways
or bridges, and is worthy of
public investment. Still, vir-
tually free education may be
hard to sustain in the coming
years, experts say, in part
because more and more European students are seeking
university degrees.
“In Europe, a university education is broadly seen as part
of the social contract,” said
Ellen Hazelkorn, an expert
on higher education in Europe at the Dublin Institute of
Technology. “But when you
start approaching 50 percent
participation, how do you
fund that from the public
purse?”
Scottish officials say the decision to raise rates for nonScots was borne of necessity,
not spite. Officials feared a
flood of bargain-seeking English students pushing Scots
out of their own universities.
Admissions are blind to
country of origin.
The fee increase will also
help offset the expense of
educating non-Scots, now
that Westminster has cut
back its financing for higher
education.
For now, Scottish officials
are brushing off threats of
lawsuits, saying they believe
they are on solid legal
ground. “They won’t happen,” said Michael Russell,
Scotland’s education minister.
In fact, Mr. Russell said he
was looking into ways to
charge higher fees to the
11,000 European students
who study in Scotland, though he has had little success
so far in his discussions with
European Union officials.
There have been skirmishes
over the European Union
education regulations before.
When Belgium found its medical schools overwhelmed
by French students looking
for a bargain, it fought back
in court, arguing that it was
not able to train enough Belgian doctors. It won the right
to limit the number of foreign students.
Whatever the eventual outcome here, officials at Scottish universities say the new
tuition structure has turned
this admission season into an
uncomfortable guessing game. Stephen Magee, a vice
principal at the University of
St. Andrews, where about
one-third of the students are
from England, said he found
the situation “utterly bizarre.”
He wondered whether more
English students would decide to stay home, where a
three-year degree, the norm
in England, would end up
costing less than a four-year
Scottish degree. Will only
the wealthy come north, tipping the balance of student
life here?
“It is almost impossible to
model this thing,” Mr. Magee
said.
St. Andrews has come up
with a complicated system of
financial support to mitigate
the cost for English students
who cannot afford the new
tuition. Students who are
already enrolled in Scottish
universities this year will not
have to pay the higher fees as
long as they remain enrolled.
Non-European students will
continue to pay the highest
fees of all, about $20,000 a
year.
But even Scottish students,
many of whom rode buses to
England last December to
protest the tuition increase
there, are unhappy with Scotland’s two-tier solution.
“It may be understandable,”
said Matt McPherson, 23, the
student body president at the
University of Edinburgh.
“But it is unfair.”
Plea Deal in PTA Theft Case Stalls Over Terms of Restitution
By FERNANDA SANTOS
A Brooklyn judge refused on
Monday to revise a plea offer
to a former PTA treasurer
accused
of
embezzling
$82,000 from her daughter’s
school, putting her one step
closer to going to trial.
The offer, from the Brooklyn
district attorney’s office, called for the former treasurer,
Providence Hogan, to admit
the theft and then pay back
what she took from the PTA
at Public School 29 in Cobble Hill between May 2008
and September 2010.
The agreement called for an
immediate $40,000 payment
and spread out the balance
over four years.
Ms. Hogan’s lawyer, Stephen
Flamhaft, made a counteroffer to the court on Monday
calling for a $30,000 down
payment followed by installments that would have had
her pay the balance in three
years. But Justice Suzanne
Mondo of State Supreme
Court in Brooklyn turned it
down; according to Mr. Flamhaft, Justice Mondo said
his client could afford to pay
more.
“That’s her opinion,” he said.
“That’s not accurate, though.”
Prosecutors have said Ms.
Hogan, who owns Providence Day Spa on Atlantic Avenue, took the money to pay
for fertility treatments and
for the rent on her apartment
and business, which stands
10 blocks from the school.
She hid the theft by falsifying documents and writing
unauthorized checks to herself from the PTA’s account,
the authorities have said.
Ms. Hogan faces up to 15
years in prison if she is convicted of second-degree
grand larceny, the top charge
she faces.
Under the terms of the deal,
Ms. Hogan would avoid prison and, instead, serve five
years of probation once she
had made full restitution to
the school. If she failed to
make all the payments in
four years, though, she would
face two to six years in prison.
Mr. Flamhaft said that he
was “somewhat surprised”
by the judge’s refusal of his
proposal, but that the negotiations were not over yet.
“We’re still hopeful there
will be a meeting of the
minds,” he said.
Policía no fue a resguardar propiedad
ÑACUNDAY, Alto Paraná
(de nuestra redacción regional). Fuentes confidenciales
señalaron a esta corresponsalía que el envío de cien efectivos de la Policía Nacional
al distrito de Ñacunday, la
semana pasada, sería al mero
efecto de resguardar a los
funcionarios del Instituto
y de la Tierra (Indert), que en
breve iniciarán una mensura
judicial sobre 257.000 hectáreas, distribuidas en diversos
distritos de Alto Paraná e
Itapúa. Desde que se hiciera
pública esa intención del
Indert, bajo presidencia del
cuestionado Marciano Barreto, los productores alzaron su
voz de protesta, señalando
que no permitirían la realización de la mensura. La decisión del Indert de solicitar la
mensura de las 257.904 hec-
táreas se debe a la existencia
de una sentencia de la Corte
Suprema de Justicia, del año
1958, que ratifica y reivindica esas tierras a favor del
Estado. Sin embargo, el juez
de primera instancia de la
localidad de Santa Rita hizo
lugar a la “cuestión de competencia” planteada por la
empresa ganadera Campobello SA en el marco del expediente “Estado paraguayo s/
replanteo de mensura judicial
sobre las tierras reivindicadas
de los herederos de Domingo
Barthe en referencia a la Finca Nº 81 del distrito de San
Joaquín y Finca Nº 39 de
Domingo Martínez de Irala”,
suspendiendo de esa manera
la realización de la mensura.
Tensión La situación es de
tensión en Ñacunday. Por un
lado, están los productores,
quienes anunciaron que no
permitirán la realización de
la mensura; por el otro, los
carperos, quienes indicaron
que reanudarían las invasiones en el lugar, además de
“acompañar de cerca” a los
profesionales del Indert.
Consultamos en la Jefatura
de Policía de Alto Paraná, en
donde el comisario Erven
Lovera, jefe del Grupo Especial de Operaciones GEO,
apenas indicó que los policías fueron enviados a
Ñacunday “por precaución”.
El mismo indicó que es trabajo de la institución policial
resguardar el orden e impedir
que personas o grupos cometan desmanes en el lugar.
Lovera, durante la invasión
de los carperos en las tierras
de Favero, había declarado
que “solo recibía órdenes del
presidente Lugo”.
Jarvis Pavão opera desde Tacumbú, según reportaje
Una extensa nota publicada recientemente por la revista brasileña Época ubica al
reo Jarvis Chimenes Pavão como el segundo narcotraficante más poderoso del vecino
país. También asegura que el “pez gordo” sigue controlando sus negocios desde una
celda de la cárcel de Tacumbú, donde está recluido desde el mes de diciembre de
2009, tras ser capturado por la Senad.
La nota periodística presenta
una lista de los diez narcotraficantes más poderosos que
operan en el Brasil, muchos
de ellos a través del territorio
paraguayo.
El fugitivo Luiz Carlos Da
Rocha, alias “Cabeza Branca”, requerido por la justicia
de ambos países por el delito
de narcotráfico, ocupa el
primer lugar.
Según la reciente publicación
“Cabeza Branca” es mucho
más poderoso que el tenebroso Fernandinho Beira Mar,
quien actualmente está recluido en una prisión de máxima
seguridad de Río de Janeiro,
Brasil.
Mientras que Chimenes Pavão ocupa el segundo lugar
de la lista, pese a que desde
el 2009 está recluido en la
cárcel de Tacumbú.
El presunto “pez gordo” del
narcotráfico fue capturado
por efectivos de la Secretaría
Nacional Antidrogas, Senad,
durante un procedimiento
efectuado en un establecimiento de Pedro Juan Caballero, departamento de Amambay, limítrofe con el Brasil.
Según la nota periodística,
Chimenes Pavão maneja
desde su celda de Tacumbú
la venta en su país de importantes cargamentos de cocaína. La droga que sería de
origen colombiana ingresa al
Brasil a través del territorio
paraguayo, según indicaron.
Por su parte, la abogada Laura Casuso, defensora del presunto capomafioso, aseguró
que la publicación es falsa.
La profesional indicó que se
trata de una maniobra de los
organismos de seguridad del
Brasil, que en los últimos
tiempos han inventado todo
tipo de acusaciones contra su
cliente.
La extradición voluntaria de
Chimenes Pavão al Brasil fue
ratificada en dos instancias y
actualmente está pendiente
en la Corte Suprema de
Justicia.
Su hijo también fue investigado
José Martínez Mendi Pavão,
hijo de Jarvis Chimenes Pavão, fue capturado en el 2007
por la Senad, también en
Pedro Juan Caballero, pero
liberado durante un juicio
oral y público tres años después. Supuestamente, no se
pudo comprobar fehacientemente su participación en el
delito de tráfico de drogas y
delitos conexos.
Fiscalía solicita juicio oral contra funcionario judicial
El Ministerio Público pidió juicio oral para un funcionario del Poder Judicial de Ciudad
del Este, por supuestamente desviar millonarios montos a su cuenta personal, adulterando documentos de la sección de tasas judiciales, según un informe de la Fiscalía
La Fiscalía formuló acusación contra un funcionario del
Poder Judicial que supuestamente desviaba millonarios
montos a su cuenta personal,
adulterando documentos de
la sección de Tasas Judiciales
de la Sexta Circunscripción
Judicial de Alto Paraná.
producción inmediata de
documentos públicos de contenido falso y exacción.
El acusado por el Ministerio
Público es Roberto Carlos
Santos Ávalos (34), licenciado en Ciencias Contables y
Administrativas, quien será
juzgado por hurto agravado,
sabotaje de computadoras,
estafa, alteración de datos
relevantes para la prueba,
La denuncia fue presentada
el 18 de marzo pasado por el
abogado Raúl Saguier, en su
calidad de encargado de la
Dirección Regional del Registro de Automotor.
La fiscala Natalia Montanía
presentó la acusación ante el
Juzgado Penal de Garantías,
a cargo de Norma Gamarra
de Martínez.
Según un sumario administrativo, de unos 1.000 expe-
dientes verificados se detectaron 110 casos irregulares,
arrojando millonarios faltantes que Santos Ávalos habría
desviado a su cuenta personal.
El acusado se desempeñaba
como funcionario de Tasas
Judiciales desde el 28 de
febrero de 2007, hasta que
fue separado del cargo, tras
ser imputado el 30 de marzo
pasado. Existe igualmente
una disposición judicial que
prohíbe al encausado a gravar bienes.
Fiscales denuncian violación de Constitución en desafuero de Martínez
La Asociación de Agentes Fiscales del Paraguay emitió un comunicado a través del cual
denuncian que la decisión adoptada por el Jurado de Enjuiciamiento de Magistrados de
levantar los fueros de la fiscala Teresa Martínez, es una violación a la Constitución Nacional.
A través de un comunicado,
la Asociación de Agentes
Fiscales del Paraguay refiere
que la decisión del Jurado de
Enjuiciamiento de Magistrados, de levantar los fueros a
la fiscala Teresa Martínez, es
una flagrante violación de los
artículos 255 y 270 de la
Constitución Nacional, como una garantía del agente
fiscal para el ejercicio independiente de su rol constitucional.
“Esta decisión establece un
preocupante precedente que
atenta en contra de la independencia en el ejercicio de
las funciones de los Agentes
Fiscales; pudiéndose llegar al
absurdo de que el imputado
en una causa penal podrá
promover una querella por
calumnia contra el funcionario fiscal encargado de la
investigación con la finalidad
de separarlo de la misma, con
lo cual todo agente fiscal se
encuentra expuesto a este
tipo de acciones temerarias”,
refieren.
En el texto, los fiscales instan
al Jurado de Enjuiciamiento
de Magistrados, a la rectificación inmediata de la medida tomada; a los Magistrados
Judiciales, a valorar y fundar
debidamente sus resoluciones
en este tipo de casos, más
aún teniendo en consideración la naturaleza y gravedad
de los hechos punibles investigados por la fiscala Teresa
Martínez, vinculados a la
trata y explotación sexual de
niños, niñas y adolescentes.
El viernes 30 de septiembre,
el Jurado de Enjuiciamiento
de Magistrados resolvió desaforar a la fiscala de la unidad de Trata de Personas,
Teresa Martínez, a pedido
del juez Manuel Aguirre,
para ser juzgada por una acción de difamación, calumnias e injurias.
Durante la misma jornada del
viernes, la Mesa Interinstitucional para la Prevención y
Combate a la Trata de personas en el Paraguay solicitó a
los miembros del Jurado de
Enjuiciamiento de Magistrados reconsiderar la postura y
las medidas respecto al desafuero de la fiscala Martínez.
ABC COLOR (PY) • INTERIOR • 4/10/2011
Continuarán acomodos en justicia de Ñeembucú
PILAR (Clide Noemí Martínez, corresponsal). Los acomodos y nombramientos
políticos continuarían en la
Circunscripción Judicial de
Ñeembucú, pese a las promesas del actual presidente de la
Corte Suprema de Justicia,
Dr. Luis María Benítez Riera. El titular de la Corte había
anunciado durante su presencia en esta ciudad que se estimularía a los practicantes,
priorizando la inclusión de
los mismos en las listas de
contratos de personal.
Sin embargo, los hechos muestran lo contrario, conside-
rando que de los 25 contratos, solo 5 habrían favorecido
a los pasantes. La gran mayoría de los contratados jamás
habría pisado el Palacio de
Justicia de Pilar, desplazando
a los que desde hace varios
años vienen practicando y
colaborando con los funcionarios.
Los “paracaidistas” serían
cercanos a líderes políticos y
a camaristas de la Circunscripción
Judicial
del
Ñeembucú, y no contarían
con los méritos académicos
para acceder a los contratos.
Según nuestras fuentes, los
que cortaron la torta fueron
los magistrados Carlos Domínguez (actual presidente
de la Circunscripción Judicial), Rubén Arcadio Franco y
un porcentaje menor correspondió al tercer integrante de
la Cámara, Dr. Carlos Torres.
Para tratar de aliviar el malestar existente y evitar las
protestas públicas, los popes
del Poder Judicial en la zona han vuelto a endulzar los
oídos de los pasantes, con
nuevas promesas de ser incluidos en un próximo contrato.
Contra desafuero
La Asociación de Fiscales
del Paraguay cuestionó el
desafuero de la fiscala Teresa
Martínez, de la Unidad de
Trata de Personas, para ser
sometida a un proceso por
supuesta difamación, calumnia e injuria impulsado por
Anastacio Gómez Romero,
cuya casa fue allanada.
En un comunicado firmado
por los fiscales René Fernández y Teresa Sosa, presidente
y secretaria del gremio, se
señala que la decisión del
Jurado ha plasmado una flagrante violación de la inmunidad de opinión consagrada
en los artículos 255 y 270 de
la Constitución Nacional,
como una garantía del agente
fiscal para el ejercicio independiente de su rol constitucional.
Señalan que, según las normas referidas, los magistrados y fiscales no pueden ser
acusados ni interrogados
judicialmente por opiniones
emitidas en el ejercicio de
sus funciones.
“Esta decisión establece un
preocupante precedente que
atenta en contra de la independencia en el ejercicio de
las funciones de los agentes
fiscales; pudiéndose llegar al
absurdo de que el imputado
en una causa penal podrá
promover una querella por
calumnia contra el funcionario fiscal encargado de la
investigación, con la finalidad de separarlo de la misma,
con lo cual todo agente fiscal
se encuentra expuesto a este
tipo de acciones temerarias”,
concluye.
Finalmente, el gremio insta
al Jurado a rectificar la medida y a los jueces a valorar y
fundar debidamente sus resoluciones.
Enemigo político número uno de Chávez pide solidaridad
por Hugo Ruiz Olazar
Leopoldo López, el principal
opositor al presidente Hugo
Chávez, instó a las autoridades políticas de nuestro país
a pronunciarse a favor del
fallo de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos
por el cual se le restituyen
sus derechos políticos y se le
rehabilita a competir en las
presidenciales del 2012. En
principio, el dictador venezolano se niega a acatar la decisión.
López realizó una visita relámpago a nuestro país para
conversar con las autoridades
del Senado, la Cámara de
Diputados y miembros del
Poder Ejecutivo, a quienes
informó de la decisión de la
Corte Interamericana al tiempo de pedirles solidaridad
y apoyo a su causa para quedar completamente habilitado.
“No es invencible”
Durante una entrevista en la
redacción de ABC, el político venezolano, un economista de 40 años, dijo ayer que
Chávez “no es invencible” y
que con el fallo de la Corte
Internacional, hace un par
de semanas, debería estar en
condiciones de enfrentarlo en
los comicios de octubre de
2012.
El mandamás caribeño lo
marginó en 2008 cuando se
postuló como candidato a
alcalde de Caracas, tras acusarlo de desviar fondos públicos durante su administración como alcalde de El
Chacao, una de las intendencias de la capital venezolana,
donde se desempeñó por 8
años.
Lo sacó de la carrera
“Tenía el 70% de las intenciones de voto para lograr la
victoria y fui inhabilitado por
el Gobierno. Reclamé la restitución de mis derechos políticos a la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos
(CIDH). Esta se pronunció y
sentenció que para inhabilitar
a un ciudadano, tiene que
haber una sentencia penal
definitivamente firme. Eso lo
establece no solo la Constitución venezolana, sino lo
establece la Convención
Americana de Derechos Humanos. La firmaron todos los
países del continente, menos
Cuba”, explicó.
“Logramos esta victoria y en
este momento estamos buscando que el Estado venezolano acate”, precisó.
La CIDH no vale nada
El presidente Chávez dijo en
sorna días atrás que el fallo
de la Corte Interamericana
“no vale nada”.
Al respecto, López respondió
a ABC: “Es lo mismo que
decían Videla y Pinochet del
sistema interamericano. Es lo
mismo que decía Fujimori.
Todos ellos tuvieron denuncias de violaciones de derechos humanos y la respuesta
fue siempre la misma, planteando la soberanía por encima de los derechos humanos. Todos sabemos que los
derechos humanos son universales. Si un avance importante hubo en el siglo XX,
fue precisamente la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos, que no le
pone una frontera, ningún
límite a lo que son los
DD.HH.”.
Chávez no acata
“Mi caso es uno entre centenares. La Corte se ha pronunciado también sobre los
ataques y cierres de medios,
contra la libertad de expresión. Pero no ha habido acatamiento a esas decisiones”,
observó.
Preguntado sobre si Chávez
acataría esta vez, contestó:
“Somos miles y cada vez
más los venezolanos que
estamos determinados a hacer valer nuestros derechos”.
Señaló en ese sentido que la
coalición que lo sustenta ya
inició la campaña electoral
con miras a las primarias
programadas para el 4 de
febrero.
Las presidenciales, en las que
se volvería a postular Chávez, serán en octubre.
Solidaridad
La sentencia de la CIDH
ordena al Gobierno de Venezuela a restituir en forma
inmediata los derechos políticos del principal rival de
Chávez y que debe permitirle
su inscripción a cualquier
candidatura de elección popular que se plantee a partir
del momento de la publicación del fallo.
López inició ayer una gira
por Paraguay y Brasil (hoy
estará en São Paulo), que
luego extenderá a otros países sudamericanos buscando
solidaridad con su causa.
“Lo que corresponde a los
países es ser solidarios con el
sistema del cual forman parte, como firmantes”, puntualizó.
Nadie se hizo eco
Dijo que el apoyo debió haber sido ya de oficio, pero
que ninguno de los gobiernos
sudamericanos se hizo eco
hasta ahora.
“Ha habido pronunciamiento
de parlamentos, de grupos,
pero no de gobiernos todavía.
No reaccionar frente a esto es
el fin de la integración humanitaria
interamericana.
Cómo se puede desconocer
que los mejores jueces del
continente electos en la Corte
Humanos sean catalogados
hoy como agentes de la CIA
y agentes del imperio”,
señaló López en una larga
entrevista.
“En la misma silla...”
“En la CIDH yo me senté en
la misma silla en la que se
sentaron las víctimas de Videla, de los familiares de los
desaparecidos de Pinochet,
en la misma silla de las víctimas de Fujimori, de las
víctimas del Caracazo. Evidentemente eso lo marca a
uno”, describió, antes de reiterar que su experiencia de
perseguido lo hace asumir un
compromiso “más profundo”
con la democracia y la vigencia de los DD.HH.
Dijo que aquellos países firmantes de la Convención de
Derechos Humanos tienen
hoy la posibilidad de manifestarse.
Elogió la posición “activa y
pro activa” de los paraguayos
(de oposición) en torno a la
situación de su país.
CLARÍN (AR) • POLÍTICA • 4/10/2011
Un juez votó a favor de Moyano desde la sala de terapia intensiva
El fallo anuló una sentencia favorable a Alimentación en una pelea con Camioneros
Por Daniel Santoro
En un hecho sin precedentes
cercanos, un miembro de la
Cámara de Apelaciones del
Trabajo firmó desde una sala
de terapia intensiva un fallo
que favorece al sindicato de
Camioneros en una disputa
con el de la Alimentación por
la encuadración gremial de
cien trabajadores.
El 15 de julio, justo el último
día hábil antes de la feria
judicial, el camarista Néstor
Miguel Rodríguez Brunengo,
emitió ese voto polémico.
Era una resolución redactada
por la única miembro de la
sala III de ese tribunal, Diana
Cañal, que anuló una medida
de no innovar dictada por un
juez de primera instancia en
el conflicto por los trabajadores de la Gate Gourmet Argentina que beneficiaba al
gremio de Rodolfo Daer. Se
trata de la empresa suiza que
brinda servicio de catering
aéreo y a la cual Moyano le
bloqueó su entrada al aeropuerto para que pase sus trabajadores a Camioneros.
Cañal, quien fue nombrada
camarista por el Senado con
el aval del líder de los camioneros, Hugo Moyano, y del
diputado Héctor Recalde,
entre otros, envió el proyecto
de resolución a Rodríguez
Brunengo, que estaba internado en la sala de terapia
intensiva del hospital Italiano
para “un ajuste de su marcapasos”.
Como al empleado judicial
no lo dejaron ingresar a esa
sala, el mismo viernes 15 de
junio la hija de Rodríguez
Brunengo “llamó por teléfono a Cañal” para que le volviera a mandar el expediente
de casi 400 fojas al nosocomio. Pero el camarista le
pidió al empleado “únicamente el proyecto de sentencia para su firma, sin leer el
expediente ”, afirmó el abogado de Daer, Luis Martínez,
a Clarín . Rodríguez Brunengo es de otra sala y había
sido convocado como suplente en esta causa.
“Votó, no un su despacho,
sino en una ¡sala de terapia
intensiva! Ni Kafka pudo
imaginarlo ”, agregó el letrado de Alimentación.
Entre otras supuestas irregularidades, Ramírez sostuvo
que Cañal debería haberse
excusado de intervenir porque la causa “ involucra a
Moyano y al estudio del diputado Héctor Recalde” ,
quienes la apoyaron para su
ascenso a camarista. Por estas razones, Ramírez pidió a
la cámara que anule su fallo.
Clarín consultó al diputado
Recalde quien negó haber
hablado con la camarista
durante el proceso y luego
desde su estudio se envió el
fallo de Cañal y Rodríguez
Brunengo que rechazó la
solicitud de nulidad.
En un fallo de 9 carillas,
Cañal habló primero de una
supuesta “sucia estrategia de
los medios” en contra de su
ascenso a camarista. “No
dejemos de ver que estas
estrategias defensivas (la del
gremio de la Alimentación)
podría ellas mismas constituir (NdeR presiones), aunque
no haya sido su intención”,
agregó luego de defender su
actuación.
A su turno, Rodríguez Brunengo adhirió al “minucioso
e impecable voto” de Cañal y
habló de “excesos ditirámbicos” de los abogados. Luego
negó haber pedido licencia
durante su internación que
fue para “una operación menor y superficial que solo
requirió sedación , en ningún
momento anestesia total, ni
perdí el conocimiento ni la
lucidez, como insinuaron los
nulidicentes”. Ante este rechazo, Ramírez presentó un
recurso extraordinario para ir
a la Corte Suprema sobre
este fallo firmado en terapia
intensiva.
EL PAIS (ES) • OPINIÓN • 4/10/2011
El papel de Latinoamérica en Oriente Próximo
JORGE CASTAÑEDA
Cuando la Organización de
Naciones Unidas votó a favor
de lo que se conoce como la
partición de Palestina, creando así el Estado de Israel
hace 64 años, para luego admitirlo como miembro de
pleno derecho en la flamante
organización, varios países
de América Latina se abstuvieron -Brasil, El Salvador,
Argentina, Colombia, Chile,
Honduras- o votaron en contra de las resoluciones pertinentes -Cuba-. México se
abstuvo sobre la partición,
pero votó a favor de admitir a
Israel en las Naciones Unidas
pocos meses después y, más
tarde, reconoció el Estado
judío. De hecho, el Gobierno
mexicano confesó que prefería no tomar partido en el
embrollo de Oriente Próximo.
Hoy, con el fin de convertirse
en miembro cabal de la ONU, la Autoridad Palestina
(AP) ha solicitado al Consejo
de Seguridad que recomiende
a la Asamblea General su
admisión. Esto puede o no
suceder; de no darse, el simple cambio del estatuto actual
de la Autoridad Palestina a
uno igual al del Vaticano le
permitiría a la AP participar
en varios organismos de la
ONU, incluyendo la Corte
Penal. Para ello solo se necesitan dos tercios de los votos
en la Asamblea.
Ahora bien, la sustancia estrictamente jurídica o burocrática no es lo esencial en
este caso. Obligar a Estados
Unidos a utilizar su veto en
el Consejo de Seguridad, u
obtener más de unos 150
votos de los 193 Estados
miembros de la ONU en la
Asamblea, implicaría una
enorme derrota para Israel y
Washington. De ahí que todos los votos cuenten y que
los de América Latina sean
especialmente importantes.
Los dos miembros latinoamericanos del Consejo ya
han expresado cómo piensan
votar: Brasil, a favor de la
admisión; Colombia se abstendrá. La mayoría de los
países de América Latina
probablemente votarán a
favor de algún tipo de fortalecimiento del estatuto de la
Autoridad Palestina, aunque
Chile y México aún no han
definido su postura. La comunidad judía en Estados
Unidos y, en menor medida,
la Administración de Obama,
han intentado convencer a
estos países de que no se
ganaría nada mediante el
aislamiento de Israel (y de
Washington, para el caso) en
este tema -poco cambiaría en
el terreno, incluso con el reconocimiento pleno del Estado palestino, si Israel y Estados Unidos no lo aceptan- y
mucho podrían perder México y Chile al distanciarse de
un aliado importante, en cuestiones que le importan.
La moraleja de toda esta historia es que la región no ha
hablado con una sola voz
sobre estos temas cruciales.
Tampoco lo hizo hace más
de medio siglo, en 1947, cuando América Latina quizá
pesaba menos que hoy en la
economía mundial, pero mucho más en las Naciones Unidas, ya que casi la mitad de
los miembros de la ONU que
votaron en las dos decisiones
antes mencionadas pertenecían a Iberoamérica. Ni entonces ni ahora, la mayoría de
estos países ha adoptado una
postura de principio -a favor
o en contra de Israel, a favor
o en contra de los palestinos-.
Han actuado más bien por
conveniencia,dependiendo
entonces y ahora del peso
relativo y de la estridencia de
las comunidades de judíos o
árabes en cada sociedad, y de
la insistencia de Washington,
del bloque socialista o del
ALBA integrado por Cuba,
Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia y Paraguay.
Esta falta de convicción de
los latinoamericanos en asuntos tan graves -con la excepción de los países del ALBA,
que poseen las convicciones
equivocadas, pero tienen la
virtud de creer en ellas casi
religiosamente- ha excluido a
la región de otros temas internacionales
importantes,
como la reciente crisis en
Libia y la actual en Siria. En
lo que respecta a la resolución de la ONU para el esta-
blecimiento de una zona de
exclusión aérea y de protección civil en Libia, Brasil,
junto con los otros BRICS y
aspirantes a potencia mundial
como India, se abstuvo, al
igual que China y Rusia;
Sudáfrica votó a favor a
regañadientes y debido a una
presión personal de Barack
Obama. Y ahora en el intento
de europeos y norteamericanos para imponerle sanciones
de la ONU a Bachar el Assad
de Siria, los BRICS han ido
de mal en peor.
En primer lugar enviaron una
misión de tres países (Brasil,
India y Sudáfrica) a Damasco, en una lamentable analogía con el camino de San
Pablo, para "persuadir" a El
Assad de dejar de asesinar a
su pueblo. Huelga decir que
el dictador dinástico no respondió que "sí, efectivamente, había matado a unos cuantos miles aquí y allá, pero
ahora que lo mencionaban
sus amigos, trataría de ser
más cuidadoso". Siguió haciendo lo mismo.
Luego emitieron declaración
tras declaración afirmando
que Siria no era Libia, que no
permitirían otra intervención
de Occidente para lograr un
cambio de régimen en otro
país árabe, bajo el pretexto
de la responsabilidad de pro-
teger y de consideraciones
humanitarias, solo porque su
gente parecía molesta con el
dictador local.
En palabras de Ken Roth,
director ejecutivo de human
rights Watch: "Están castigando al pueblo sirio, ya que
no estaban contentos con que
la OTAN haya tomado la
iniciativa de proteger a los
civiles en Libia y la haya
transformado en un mandato
para el cambio de régimen.
Acertada o no esa decisión,
constituye un grave error
penalizar al pueblo sirio por
ello. Ese no es el tipo de liderazgo que se espera de posibles futuros miembros permanentes del Consejo de
Seguridad".
Las naciones más grandes de
América Latina, junto con
los demás BRICS, buscan un
papel más destacado en el
mundo, pero este no es el
camino para lograrlo. Seguir
invocando tesis como la no
intervención o la primacía de
la soberanía nacional sobre
todo lo demás fue muy válido para estos mismos países
en otra época, y lo sigue siendo para otras naciones aún
en la era actual. Pero es incompatible con la transformación de algunos en potencias mundiales en el ámbito
diplomático.
China e India son ya potencias económicas mundiales,
por la fuerza misma de los
hechos. Pero traducir esa
jerarquía a posiciones de
fuerza o prestigio en la arena
política internacional es otra
cosa. Para ello, resulta imperativo asumir responsabilidades en momentos críticos
como las coyunturas libia y
siria, como la creación del
Estado palestino, en temas
cruciales como el programa
de enriquecimiento nuclear
de Irán o de las violaciones
de los derechos humanos en
múltiples países. Ello no implica alinearse con las potencias occidentales, pero tampoco mantener las posiciones
de antaño.
América Latina, por una parte, y los BRICS por la otra,
solo podrán alcanzar el papel
internacional al que aspiran
si cumplen con los compromisos que dicho papel
entraña. Hay alguna que otra
señal alentadora, pero son
solo eso: señales. Falta mucho más.
Jorge Castañeda fue canciller
mexicano y es profesor de la
Universidad de Nueva York
y de la Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México.
EL PAIS (ES) • SOCIEDAD • 4/10/2011
Cuando el "interés del menor" es salir en una procesión
Acusado de prevaricar un juez de Sevilla que alteró el régimen de visitas de un niño para
que participara en la Semana Santa
V. CORTÉS - Granada
El titular del Juzgado de Familia número 7 de Sevilla,
Francisco Serrano, se sentó
ayer en el banquillo del Tribunal Superior de Justicia de
Andalucía (TSJA) acusado
de un delito de prevaricación
dolosa al modificar el régimen de visitas de un niño
para garantizar su salida en
una procesión de Semana
Santa junto a su padre en
2010, por lo que el fiscal le
pide 10 años de inhabilitación. El juez Serrano esgrimió
ayer ante el tribunal el "interés del menor" y su intento
de no "hacer daño" a las partes implicadas para justificar
su decisión.
Serrano es un juez que se ha
hecho conocido por sus enfrentamientos con la Audiencia de Sevilla -por retrasar
intencionadamente la ejecución de sentencias dictada
por la Sala Sexta y con las
que no estaba de acuerdo- y,
más recientemente, por sus
virulentos ataques a la Ley
Integral contra la Violencia
de Género y la denuncia contra la vocal del Consejo General del Poder Judicial y
presidenta del Observatorio
contra la Violencia de Género, Inmaculada Montalbán.
El juez, al que el CGPJ le
abrió expediente en 2010 por
haber compaginado su puesto
con la presidencia de una
asociación beligerante contra
la legislación contra el machismo, llegó a hablar de
"dictadura del feminismo
radical" y de "genocidio"
entre los hombres por la retirada de la custodia de los
hijos. Serrano cuenta con
numerosos aliados -los jueces de las Audiencia de Sevilla le han mostrado su apoyo hasta en dos ocasiones en
este caso- y algunas asociaciones contrarias a la legislación contra la violencia machista le colocan como su
mascarón de proa.
para que enviará una carta al
decanato ante la "urgencia"
que el juez veía en el asunto.
Posteriormente, él mismo
llamó al juez decano de Sevilla para advertirle de la
necesidad de resolverlo cuanto antes. Tras varias incidencias, entre las que la defensa
cita un "problema informático", el caso volvió al juzgado
de Serrano esa misma
mañana y él acordó que el
menor se quedará con su
padre para procesionar y "no
perdiera el sitio en la hermandad".
FE DE ERRORES
En el caso que se ve estos
días en Granada, se acusa al
juez de maniobrar para conseguir hacerse primero con el
caso y luego dictar la prolongación forzosa del menor con
el padre para que pudiera
procesionar. Serrano negó
ayer que tuviera conocimiento previo del asunto y contó
que fue un abuelo y su nieto
los que llegaron a las puertas
de su juzgado ante el temor
del pequeño a recibir una
negativa de su madre para
salir en procesión, según un
correo electrónico que el juez
-admite- no llegó a ver. El
régimen de visitas estaba
fijado en el proceso de divorcio en un juzgado de Violencia de Género. Serrano, que
comparte abogado -Joaquín
Moeckel- con el padre del
menor, instruyó al abuelo
En la información sobre el
juez Francisco Serrano publicada en la página 32 del 4
de octubre se decía incorrectamente que este compartía
abogado (Joaquín Moeckel)
con el padre del menor al que
el magistrado prolongó el
régimen de visitas para que
pudiera procesionar. Moeckel fue el abogado del padre
del menor en el proceso de
separación y también lo fue
de Serrano en su denuncia
contra la vocal del CGPJ y
presidenta del Observatorio
contra la Violencia Doméstica y de Género, Inmaculada
Montalbán. En el juicio ante
el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucía, el letrado
de Serrano es Miguel GarcíaDiéguez.
EL PERUANO (SP) • DERECHO • 4/10/2011
Nestor Sagüés diserta hoy
El jurista argentino Néstor
Pedro Sagüés diserta hoy
sobre la incidencia de la jurisprudencia de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos
Humanos (CIDH) en la jurisprudencia peruana dentro del
marco de la sétima sesión de
la Cátedra de la Corte Suprema.La disertación se llevará a cabo a las 18:00 horas
en el Salón Vidaurre del Palacio Nacional de Justicia.El
presidente del Poder Judici-
al, César San Martín Castro,
entregará al jurista argentino
un presente recordatorio al
culminar la actividad académica.
TC refortalece al sindicalismo
Generó la dación de dos normas sobre afiliación y negociación
AfiliaciónSerá el empleador
estatal el que tendrá sindicatos más masivos o un mayor
número de sindicatos. ¿Cómo
así? Recuérdese que, a raíz
de la acción de inconstitucionalidad interpuesta contra
el Decreto Legislativo N°
1057 que regula la situación
de los trabajadores sujetos a
un contrato administrativo de
servicios (CAS), el TC determinó en la sentencia
00002-2010-PI/TC que estos
trabajadores están sujetos a
un contrato de trabajo y que
como tales pueden sindicalizarse.Para viabilizar el referido derecho se ha emitido el
Decreto Supremo 065-2011PCM, en cuyos artículos 11A, 11-B y 11-C establece que
los trabajadores CAS pueden
constituir sus propios sindicatos o podrán afiliarse a los
sindicatos ya existentes en la
entidad estatal para la cual
trabajan.Si consideramos que
en la actualidad existen 150
mil trabajadores CAS en un
universo de un millón 200
mil trabajadores estatales, es
previsible que el soporte sindical estatal aumente. Y, al
tener los trabajadores CAS
un catálogo limitado de beneficios laborales, es posible
que el número de las huelgas
aumente, salvo que se les
homologue los referidos beneficios de manera progresiva.
Negociaciones colectivasEn
cuanto a este punto, todo
nació con el control difuso
del TC en la inaplicabilidad
de la segunda oración del
artículo 45 de la Ley de Relaciones Colectivas de Trabajo, que establecía que si las
partes no acuerdan el nivel
del convenio colectivo a suscribir (de empresa, de rama o
de gremio) se aplicará a nivel
de empresa.El TC en la sen-
tencia 03561-2009-PA-TC
determinó que el arbitraje es
el medio que debe establecer
el nivel del convenio y no
por imposición legal, porque
ante la falta de acuerdo, y
manifestada la voluntad de
una de las partes de acudir al
arbitraje, la otra tiene la obligación de aceptar esta fórmula de solución del conflicto.Es por ello que recientemente se ha publicado el
Decreto Supremo 014-2011TR, con el cual se regula el
arbitraje no solo para los
casos en que las partes no se
ponen de acuerdo en el nivel
o contenido, sino también
para los casos en que se adviertan actos dilatorios en el
trato directo.Esta norma reglamentaria regula el procedimiento arbitral, y dispone
la creación del Registro Nacional de Árbitros de Negociaciones Colectivas. Ademas, le reconoce el estatus de
laudo arbitral a la resolución
que emita el Ministerio de
Trabajo y Promoción del
Empleo (MTPE) en los casos
en que las huelgas se prolonguen excesivamente o sean
violentas.Si
consideramos
que a la fecha poquísimos
conflictos entre los sindicatos
y empresas se han resuelto a
través del arbitraje porque las
partes prefieren solucionar
directamente sus pliegos o
mediante extraprocesos o
conciliaciones ante el MTPE
que no tienen costo, esta nueva herramienta irá ganando
terreno en la medida que
existan buenos árbitros especializados con costos accesibles.
(*)Abogado del
Muñiz de Trujillo.
Estudio
Apuntes adicionales1 Algunos de los 53 artículos aún no
consensuados en el Proyecto
de Ley General del Trabajo
están referidos a la negociación por rama de actividad.
2 El Decreto Supremo 0142011-TR trae un adelanto al
respecto a través del arbitraje.
3 Sin embargo, la propuesta
legislativa no contiene regulación sobre los trabajadores
sujetos al CAS, lo cual la
convierte en un proyecto
normativo no omnicomprensivo respecto a todos los regímenes laborales existentes
en nuestro país.
4 Esto le quitaría a la iniciativa legislativa la característica de ser una ley general
propiamente dicha.
"La última tentación de Cristo"
Se encuentra la posibilidad de que Venezuela continúe o no el camino de los Estados
forajidos
LUIS IZQUIEL
La sentencia de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos
Humanos que ordena al Estado venezolano dejar sin
efecto la espuria inhabilitación que pesa sobre Leopoldo
López, resulta propicia para
recordar el estricto acatamiento que la gran mayoría de
los países del continente le
otorgan a estos fallos, ante
los cuales incluso se han visto en la obligación de reformar su Constitución. A
principios de 1997, el Consejo de Calificación Cinematográfica de Chile aprobó la
exhibición de la película "La
última tentación de Cristo",
filme que en su momento
causó mucha controversia
por el enfoque particular que
hizo de la vida de Jesucristo.
Pues bien, antes de que la
cinta fuese mostrada públicamente en los cines chilenos, un grupo de abogados
interpuso un recurso de protección alegando que la película afectaba los derechos de
libertad de conciencia y de
religión, consagrados en la
Constitución. Ante la acción
presentada, la Corte de Apelaciones de Santiago decidió
prohibir la exhibición de la
película, sentencia que posteriormente fue ratificada por
la Corte Suprema. Había
surgido un claro caso de censura previa.
Habiéndose agotado la vía de
los recursos internos, una
serie de ciudadanos chilenos
que se consideraban afecta-
dos por la prohibición judicial de exhibición de la película, acudieron ante la Comisión Interamericana de DDHH,
alegando fundamentalmente
la violación del derecho de
libertad de expresión, consagrado en el artículo 13 del
llamado "Pacto de San José".
Posteriormente, el caso fue
admitido por la Corte Interamericana de DDHH, bajo
la denominación "Olmedo
Bustos y otros vs. Chile".
La sentencia emitida el 5 de
febrero de 2001 por la Corte
Interamericana de DDHH,
mediante la cual se condenó
al Estado chileno, permitió la
exhibición del filme "La última tentación de Cristo" en
las salas de cine y ordenó la
modificación del texto cons-
titucional que establecía un
sistema de censura para la
producción cinematográfica.
El 25 de agosto de 2001,
mediante la Ley 19.742, Chile reformó su Constitución
en acatamiento de la decisión.
Como puede colegirse, el
Gobierno venezolano no puede alegar preceptos constitucionales o legales para desconocer el fallo de la CIDH
que restablece plenamente
los derechos políticos de Le-
opoldo López. Por el contrario, el propio artículo 23 de
nuestra Constitución señala
que los tratados relativos a
los derechos humanos, suscritos y ratificados por Venezuela, tienen jerarquía constitucional y prevalecen en el
orden interno.
La suscripción y ratificación
de un tratado genera una serie de compromisos para un
Estado. Así lo señala el artículo 27 de la Convención de
Viena sobre Derecho de los
Tratados, el cual establece:
"los Estados deben cumplir
sus obligaciones convencionales de buena fe" (pacta
sunt servanda).
En manos de los magistrados
de la Sala Constitucional del
TSJ, quienes se arrogaron la
posibilidad de "validar" las
decisiones del sistema interamericano de DDHH, se
encuentra la posibilidad de
que Venezuela continúe o no
el camino de los Estados
forajidos.
CAP recibirá honores en El Paraíso hasta el jueves
El padre Luis Ugalde oficiará la misa de cuerpo presente en La Chiquinquirá
EL UNIVERSAL
Desde la noche de hoy y hasta la mañana del jueves 6, la
dirigencia y militancia de
Acción Democrática estarán
rindiendo honores póstumos
a quien fuera dos veces Presidente de la República, Carlos Andrés Pérez (19741979/1989-1993). Desde el
retorno de sus restos mortales, esperados a últimas horas
de esta noche en Maiquetía,
la planificación oficial de las
exequias
comprende
su
acompañamiento inmediato
con una caravana a la sede
seccional de Acción Democrática en El Paraíso.
Desde el principio, el secretario general de AD, Henry
Ramos, informó que las decisiones sobre las honras fúnebres son controladas por la
familia del exmandatario,
limitando el partido su tarea
al acompañamiento, que esperan sea multitudinario. El
partido designó en comisión
a los diputados Edgar Zambrano (Lara), jefe de fracción
y a Oscar Ronderos (Distrito
Capital) para acompañar el
féretro desde Miami, informó
un boletín de prensa.
Desde su llegada a El Paraíso
la noche del martes, comenzarán los actos velatorios,
que se prolongarán hasta el
jueves 6 de octubre. Se tiene
previsto que el miércoles 5
los militantes y dirigentes de
Acción Democrática rindan
su último adiós, así como
cualquier venezolano que
desee hacerlo.
El alcalde metropolitano de
Caracas, Antonio Ledezma
(ABP) y el secretario general
de AD, Henry Ramos, ofrecerán discursos. También lo
hará el gobernador de Táchira, César Pérez Vivas (Copei), en nombre del terruño
del fallecido. No se descarta
que lo haga también el gobernador del Zulia, Pablo
Pérez (UNT).
El jueves en la mañana será
trasladado el féretro a la Iglesia de la Chiquinquirá, en La
Florida, donde se realizará
una misa de cuerpo presente
que será oficiada por el sacerdote Luis Ugalde, S.J, ex
rector de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
Posteriormente se llevará el
cuerpo del ex Presidente al
Cementerio del Este, donde
será inhumado al lado de
Rómulo Betancourt. Allí
hablarán Virginia Betancourt, hija del fundador de
AD, y el historiador Germán
Carrera Damas, sobre la obra
y legado de CAP.
Carlos Andrés Pérez fue expulsado de su partido, Acción Democrática, en 1996,
tras haber sido sentenciado
por la Corte Suprema de
Justicia a reclusión domicili-
aria durante 2 años y 4 meses
por malversación genérica
agravada. En el año 2007 se
le restituyó su militancia.
Entonces expresó su deseo de
volver al país. EG
Duhalde sobre Rodríguez Saá: "Estamos en una etapa de dirigentes muy
livianitos y saltarines"
El candidato presidencial de Unión Popular dijo que eran "hermanos inseparables" hace
unos meses; además, dijo que dirigentes opositores "buscan el calor oficial" porque creen que Cristina Kirchner ya ganó
El candidato presidencial de
Unión Popular, el ex mandatario Eduardo Duhalde, criticó con dureza a su ex socio
político Alberto Rodríguez
Sáa y lo acusó de haber "arreglado" con el Gobierno.
"Desgraciadamente,
están
todos convencidos de que
Cristina [Kirchner] ya ganó y
buscan el calor oficial. [Rodríguez Sáa] tiene una de-
manda de 900 millones de
pesos de la Suprema Corte.
Han arreglado, lo van a anunciar después del 23 de
octubre y ¡oh, casualidad! lo
empieza a atacar a Duhalde,
cuando éramos hermanos
inseparables hace cinco meses", lanzó. "Hay que acostumbrarse: estamos en una
etapa de dirigentes muy livianitos y saltarines. Hay que
preguntar: «¿Con quien está
hoy?» Es así, desgraciadamente", agregó, en diálogo
con radio 10. "Ahora se ha
comercializado todo. Todo se
maneja con dinero, tenemos
que acostumbrarnos. Las
mismas personas que antes
militaban por ideología, hoy
no. Por eso hay estos cambios que a uno le sorprenden y
le dan pena", concluyó. .
Un camarista firmó una sentencia a favor de Moyano en terapia intensiva
Néstor Rodríguez Brunengo, de la Cámara de Apelaciones del Trabajo, falló a favor del
sindicato de Camioneros en una disputa con el de Alimentación
Un miembro de la Cámara de
Apelaciones del Trabajo firmó desde una sala de terapia
intensiva un fallo que favorece al sindicato de Camioneros en una disputa con el de
la Alimentación por la encu-
adración gremial de cien trabajadores.
El 15 de julio último, justo
antes de la feria judicial, el
camarista Néstor Rodríguez
Brunengo estaba internado
en terapia intensiva en el
Hospital Italiano para ajustar
su marcapasos. Su hija habría
llamado por teléfono a la
jueza Diana Cañal, de la sala
III de la Cámara de Apelaciones del Trabajo, para pedirle el expediente de 400
fojas, según publica el diario
Clarín en su edición de hoy.
Era una resolución de Cañal
que anulaba una medida de
no innovar dictada por un
juez de primera instancia en
el conflicto por los trabajadores de la empresa Gate
Gourmet Argentina que beneficiaba al gremio de Rodolfo Daer.
Gate Gourmet Argentina es
una empresa que brinda servicio de catering aéreo. Moyano bloqueó su entrada a los
aeropuertos Jorge Newbery y
Ezeiza para que sus trabajadores pasaran al gremio de
Camioneros.
Según consigna Clarín ,
Cañal fue nombrada camarista con el aval del líder de los
camioneros, Hugo Moyano,
y del diputado Héctor Recalde, entre otros. A pedido de
Rodríguez Brunengo, quien
es de otra sala pero había
sido convocado como suplente, ella le envió el proyecto de resolución.
Rodríguez Brunengo también
falló en favor de Camioneros. Adhirió al "minucioso e
impecable voto" de Cañal y
explicó que tuvo "una operación menor y superficial que
solo requirió sedación". Se
encargó de aclarar: "En ningún momento [hubo] anestesia total ni perdí el conocimi-
ento ni la lucidez, como insinuaron los nulidicentes".
El abogado de Daer, Luis
Ramínez, dijo a Clarín : "Votó, no un su despacho, sino
en una ¡sala de terapia intensiva! Ni Kafka pudo imaginarlo".
Ramírez sostuvo que Cañal
debería haberse excusado de
intervenir porque la causa
"involucra a Moyano y al
estudio del diputado Héctor
Recalde" , quienes la apoyaron para su ascenso a camarista. La defensa del gremio
de Alimentación pidió que se
anule el fallo de la Cámara y
presentó un recurso extraordinario para ir a la Corte
Suprema.
Seif Al-Islam dirige les opérations à Bani Walid, selon le CNT
Le fils le plus en vue du colonel Mouammar Kadhafi,
Seif Al-Islam, se trouve à
Bani Walid, où il dirige les
opérations militaires contre
les combattants du Conseil
national de transition (CNT),
a affirmé mardi un commandant du nouveau régime libyen. Située à 170 km au sudest de Tripoli, Bani Walid est
l un des derniers bastions
fidèles au "Guide" libyen
déchu. Malgré près d un mois
de combats, les forces proCNT ne parviennent pas à
progresser dans cette vaste
oasis au relief accidenté, en
raison de la résistance acharnée des pro-Kadhafi mais
aussi d un manque de coordination et de moyens du
côté des combattants du nouveau régime. "Nous avons
capturé un général des brigades pro-Kadhafi et il nous a
affirmé que Seif Al-Islam se
trouvait à Bani Walid et dirigeait les opérations militaires", a déclaré ce commandant, Adel Beniour. Ce dernier a précisé qu une offensive est prévue sur la ville dans
"les deux prochains jours".
"La majorité des habitants
ont quitté la ville et cela va
faciliter notre offensive dans
les deux prochains jours", at-il ajouté. Seif Al-Islam, fils
le plus influent de Mouam-
mar Kadhafi auquel il semblait appelé à succéder, était
présenté comme un "réformateur" et l artisan de l ouverture de la Libye, avant de
devenir le porte-parole officieux du régime et le symbole de la répression du
soulèvement populaire. Sous
le coup d un mandat d arrêt
de la Cour Pénale internationale (CPI) pour crimes
contre l humanité, Seif AlIslam est considéré par le
procureur de la CPI comme
le "premier ministre libyen
de facto" et accusé d avoir
joué un "rôle-clé dans la mise
en œuvre d un plan" conçu
par son père visant à "répri-
mer par tous les moyens" le
soulèvement populaire enta-
mé en février.
Japão reinicia caça de baleias apesar de oposições
Tóquio, 4 out (Prensa Latina)
As autoridades japonesas
decidiram reiniciar a captura
de baleias em zonas da Antártida apesar a oposição das
organizações ecológicas e de
diversos governos. Esta vez,
o ministro japonês de Agricultura e Pesca, Michihiko
Kano, anunciou que os barcos para a caça de baleias
serão seguidos por um navio
militar, medida nunca antes
aplicada.
Nosso objetivo, disse Kano,
é fazer importar o jeito de
pensar de nosso país, em uma
conferencia de imprensa e
direta alusão a aqueles que
acusam ao Japão de ocultar a
caça comercial de baleias sob
pretextos científicos.
Além da oposição de organizações ecologistas como
Greenpeace, Sea Shepard,
Japão enfrenta a do nomeado
Grupo de Buenos Aires, integrado por Argentina, Bra-
sil, Chile, Costa Rica, Equador, México, Panamá, Peru e
Uruguai.
Em declarações recentes, os
integrantes do Grupo pediram para Japão por fim a essa
caça cientifica e ligaram a
essas declarações um relatório apresentado pela Austrália na Corte Internacional
de Justiça da Haia, para deter
a caça na Antártida.
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (BL) • KULTUR • 4/10/2011 • 10:51:00
Parlamente in Europa: Lehren aus Vichy und Weimar
Nur keine Illusionen, Europa ist eine antiparlamentarische Veranstaltung. Das ist so gewollt. Denn die Geschichte zeigt deutlich: Zu viel Macht für die Volksvertreter tut nicht
gut. Und Misstrauen kann die Demokratie stärken.
Von Jan-Werner Müller
Noch rätseln viele Juristen,
Politiker und nicht zuletzt
Bürger über die Bedeutung
des jüngsten Europa-Urteils
des Bundesverfassungsgerichts - insbesondere die Frage, ob sich Eurobonds mit
dem Grundgesetz vereinbaren lassen. In einem aber
scheinen sich alle einig zu
sein: Karlsruhe hat den Bundestag gestärkt, und das ist
auch gut so.
Wer weniger europäische
Integration möchte, kann nun
auf das Parlament als weiteren Hüter deutscher Demokratie hoffen. Wer mehr Integration will, kann immer
noch besonders europafreundliche Parteien wählen, im
Vertrauen darauf, dass die
Abgeordneten dann europafreundliche Entscheidungen
treffen. Aber sogar wer den
ganz großen Sprung ins Ungewisse - die Vereinigten
Staaten von Europa - will,
fordert für gewöhnlich eine
stärkere Volksversammlung nämlich ein Europaparlament, das der Europäischen
Kommission klare Vorgaben
macht und sie effektiv kontrolliert. Egal welches politische oder rechtliche Spiel
man in Europa spielen will:
Der Parlamentarismus erscheint immer als Gewinner.
Dabei wird völlig übersehen,
dass die Gründungsväter der
Europäischen Gemeinschaft
ebenso wie die Architekten
der westeuropäischen Verfassungen nach 1945 in kaum
eine Einrichtung weniger
Vertrauen hatten als in
Volksvertretungen. Das politische Gebäude Europa, in
dem wir leben, beruht geradezu auf einem antiparlamentarischen Grundriss. Diejenigen Institutionen, welche
sich fast überall im Nachkriegseuropa durchsetzten, dienten vor allem dazu,
Volkssouveränität - und ihren Ausdruck in Parlamenten - einzuhegen: An erster
Stelle das Verfassungsgericht, das 1919 von dem
österreichischen Rechtstheoretiker Hans Kelsen erfunden
wurde und sich nach 1945 in
fast allen westeuropäischen
(und nach 1989 in fast allen
osteuropäischen) Demokratien etablierte. Ein Verfassungsgericht ist keine Kopie
des amerikanischen Supreme Court, sondern eine Institution, die größtenteils nichts anderes betreibt als "negative Gesetzgebung" - also
primär das Parlament in seine
Schranken verweist.
Was erklärt dieses tiefe Misstrauen gegenüber Volksvertretungen? Vor allem die
Lehren, welche die Europäer
aus dem katastrophalen Verlauf
der
ersten
Jahrhunderthälfte
zogen:
Was der Staatsrechtler Hugo
Preuß, ein Vater der Weimarer Verfassung, einmal "Parlamentsabsolutismus" nannte, lief stets auf die Gefahr
hinaus, dass Volksvertretungen ihre ganze Macht an einen Hitler oder an einen
Marshall Pétain, den Führer
des Vichy-Regimes, übertrugen. Bis dahin hatte vor allem das britische Modell
suggeriert, moderne Demokratie heiße repräsentative
Demokratie - und je weniger
Restriktionen
die
Repräsentanten unterlagen,
desto demokratischer. Noch
in der Weimarer Republik
hatte das Reichsgericht dem
Gesetzgeber "Selbstherrlichkeit" zugestanden.
gewählte
Institutionen
können eine Demokratie
stärken, ja den Erfolg einer
Demokratie erst ausmachen.
Zugespitzt gesagt: Der Antiparlamentarismus im Nachkriegseuropa ist eine Form
von Antitotalitarismus, nicht
von Antiliberalismus; und
sein Musterland ist die Bundesrepublik, vor allem wegen
eines Verfassungsgerichts,
das spätestens seit 1989 zu
einem globalen Exportschlager für junge Demokratien
geworden ist.
Die Europäische Menschenrechtskonvention und die
Konstitutionalisierung
des
Europarechts durch den
Europäischen Gerichtshof in
Luxemburg sind prägnante
Beispiele dafür, wie auch die
Delegierung von Macht an
supranationale Institutionen
nationale Demokratien festigen sollte - unter bewusster
Ausschaltung der Parlamente.
Nach dem Krieg setzte sich
eine andere Idee in den
Köpfen fest: Gerade nicht
direkt von den Bürgern
The dreams of Afghan women can t die now
Afghan women would not be where we are without British support. Do not let the Taliban
take our cherished rights away
Fawzia Koofi
This Friday marks the 10th
anniversary of the intervention of British and American
forces in Afghanistan. The
Afghan people, against all
odds and with the help of our
international supporters, have
delivered a baby called democracy. The role of western
governments has been crucial, but without continuing
support this 10-year-old won
t survive.
Afghans have been here before. We had our first democratic election in 1965; millions, including women, voted
in a poll that – while deeply
flawed – was widely viewed
as free and fair. But our "democracy decade" ended in
1973 when civil war erupted,
and six years later the Soviets invaded. My family paid
a high price for my father s
involvement in politics: like
thousands of Afghans, my
father and my brothers were
killed; our houses were looted.
It angers me to hear commentators claim we are a
tribal society and not ready
for democracy. Despite intimidation from the Taliban,
millions of Afghans turned
out to vote in our last presidential election. Many Afghans gave their lives to be
where we are now.
Politics remains a dangerous
vocation here. I have watched bullets flying past my
vehicle more times than I
care to remember. Despite
the attempts on my life I always remind myself that I
will die one day, maybe today or tomorrow. All I hope
is that I leave behind a better
society than the one I was
born into. If I am assassinated I need to believe that my
work has paved the way for
others.
I was a medical student when
the Taliban took control of
the country, and female education was deemed immoral.
The chance to study, to better
ourselves and to improve the
lives of our families ended.
On the day Taliban rule came
to an end the dreams of millions of Afghan women were
reborn. Now we have women
in government and prominent
positions in civil society,
with 69 female MPs in parliament, 27% of the total –
some achievement when you
consider that only 22% of
UK MPs are women. Of the
7 million children who go to
school, 40% are girls.
But Afghanistan remains the
worst place to live as a mother and as a woman, according to UN studies. Any Afghan will tell you that security is their primary concern.
Without security you cannot
implement an economic strategy, expand education and
health or tackle deep-rooted
problems such as corruption,
drug trafficking and violence
against women.
While many of us would
acknowledge there can be no
security without a peace settlement with the Taliban, a
recent survey by ActionAid
found that 86% of Afghan
women are worried about the
return of Taliban-style government. The Taliban s definition of women s rights
meant no rights for women.
But the right to go to school
or work, the right to access
health facilities without a
husband s or father s permission, increased social freedom and political participation, are cherished by us.
The not-so-secret negotiations between the Taliban and
government will continue
despite the assassination of
Burhanuddin Rabbani. There
is a real danger that women s
rights will be traded away:
only nine of the 70-member
peace council are women.
But make no mistake: if the
Taliban s leadership states
clearly that it will accept our
red lines around women s
rights, the Constitution, equal opportunities, civil rights for all Afghan people
and freedom of speech, we
will welcome them warmly
and, as is traditional, throw
flowers on them. However, if
they continue to place conditions on the government, and
if the latter negotiates from a
position of weakness, this
will, rightly, alarm millions
of women.
We wouldn t be where we
are today without Britain s
support. We urge its government not to abandon us
now.
High court rules it unlawful to put hood over suspect s head
Judges recommendation follows case of Iraqi man subjected to hooding when in custody
of British soldiers in Iraq
Ian Cobain
Regulations permitting the
hooding of detainees by intelligence officers during
interrogation are unlawful
and should be rewritten, the
high court has ruled.
But a second, more fundamental, challenge to the policy issued to British officers
attempting to obtain information from prisoners held by
countries known to use torture was rejected by the court.
The decisions follow publication last month of the official inquiry into the death of
the Iraqi Baha Mousa. Sir
William Gage s investigation
concluded that British soldiers inflicted an "appalling
episode of serious, gratuitous
violence" on a number of
Iraqi civilian detainees leading to the death of Mousa, a
26-year-old Basra hotel worker, and the abuse of nine
others.
Monday s judgment deals
with two separate judicial
review applications challenging the legitimacy of the
government s Consolidated
Guidance to Intelligence Officers and Service Personnel,
which was published in July
2010.
One challenge was brought
by Public Interest Lawyers
(PIL) on behalf of an Iraqi,
Alaa Nassif Jassim alBazzouni, who was subjected
to hooding when detained by
British soldiers in Iraq in
2006.
Launching the case, Phil
Shiner observed that introducing the "barbaric practice of
hooding" detainees was unlawful since it had been banned by Edward Heath, when
prime minister, in 1972 because of abuses in Northern
Ireland but had nonetheless
contributed to the death of
Mousa in 2003. On hooding,
the judges said that the limited use envisaged for hooding in the guidance was
"unworkable and, in our view, officers on the ground
should not be encouraged or
required to make any judgment which might possibly
enable them to go along with
it".
The other challenge was
brought by the Equalities and
human rights Commission
(EHRC), which argued the
redrafted instructions issued
last year fail to meet the UK
s obligations in both international and domestic law.
wed senior MI5 and MI6
officials were expected to
weigh the importance of the
information sought against
the severity of the torture
likely to be used to extract it,
and that they knew what they
were doing "could be judged
to be unlawful".
In particular, the EHRC alleged, the policy failed to prevent suspects being harmed
because intelligence officers
and military personnel were
only prohibited from proceeding with an interrogation or
intelligence-sharing operation when they "know or believe" it will lead to torture.
The commission said the
instructions should prohibit
any action where there was a
"real risk" of torture, and that
the words "know or believe"
set the threshold too high.
The EHRC argued that requesting an individual be
detained by an overseas intelligence agency known to use
torture could lead to British
personnel being charged with
complicity in torture.
The existence of the policy
had come to light as a result
of inquiries by the Guardian
the previous year.
This argument was dismissed
by Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen s bench
division, and Mr Justice Keith.
When a copy of the secret
policy was obtained and published last August, it sho-
"At one level, this is lawyers
dialectic," they said. "The
document is intended to give
practical guidance to officers
on the ground. It is not a treatise on English criminal law."
Welcoming the decision on
hooding, Shiner said: "This
judgment represents the final
nail in the coffin of the MoD
s desperate and morally corrupt efforts to keep hooding
alive as a permissible interrogation technique.
"Sir William Gage s first
recommendation in the Baha
Mousa inquiry report is that
there must be an absolute
prohibition on hooding.
"The MoD s position has
been that it is still legally
permissible for security reasons. This judgment slams
the door shut forever on hooding involving UK personnel
anywhere in the world."
The judgment means the government will have to revise
the guidance in relation to
hooding. It is possible that
using blacked-out goggles, as
opposed to putting a hood
over someone s head, could
be deemed permissible.
Lawyers for Bazzouni had
argued that placing a bag
over someone s head renders
it impossible for any interrogator to make a sensible assessment of whether hooding
poses a risk to health.
The court had delayed its
judgment until after the conclusion of the public inquiry
into the death of Mousa. Last
month the inquiry chairman,
Sir William Gage, recommended an absolute prohibition on hooding.
The EHRC said it was disappointed by the ruling, but
added: "Our intention at all
times was to ensure that Bri-
tish officers in the field weren t exposed to the threat of
personal criminal liability
and that counter terrorism
operations weren t tainted by
torture. This case has highlighted these issues and has
helped to guarantee that the
guidance will be applied correctly in the future."
Another controversial interrogation tactic currently
permitted is harshing , where
soldiers scream and shout
close up to a detainees face
in order to intimidate the
suspect and break down his
or her psychological resistance.
Public Interest Lawyers are
launching a separate legal
challenge against the practice
of harshing. That case has yet
to be heard.
China urged to release wife of jailed Nobel peace prize laureate
Campaigners call on foreign governments to pressure Beijing to free Liu Xia, who has
been held incommunicado for a year
Tania Branigan
Campaigners have urged
foreign governments to press
China to release Liu Xia, the
wife of jailed Nobel peace
laureate Liu Xiaobo, after a
year of silence.
The demand came as Liu
Xiaobo s brothers said they
had been allowed a rare visit
to the dissident writer last
week, and that he appeared to
be in good health.
In a text message to Associated Press, the three men also
said he had been taken to the
family home in Dalian, north-east China, last month to
mourn his father s death.
They added: "He s fine. It is
not convenient to accept an
interview."
The Hong Kong human rights Centre said it was the
first time they had been allowed to visit their brother
since July 2010. It added that
Liu Xia could be allowed to
visit her husband this month
– the first time since October
last year when she told him
he had won the Nobel prize.
The critic and former academic is serving an 11-year
sentence for inciting subversion of state power, after coauthoring Charter 08, which
calls for democratic reforms
in China, and other online
essays.
The fate of his wife has caused particular concern. Liu
Xia has been out of contact
since a few days after the
Nobel committee announced
they were awarding her husband the peace prize, to Beijing s fury. Some thought it
might be a temporary measure to prevent her collecting
the prize, but she has remained incommunicado and is
believed to be under house
arrest, although it is thought
she has been allowed to see a
handful of relatives. Her only
known contact with the outside world came in February,
when she managed to get
online briefly and told a friend that she was miserable,
that no one could help her,
and that "my whole family
are hostages".
"The Chinese government
denies there are any restraints
on Liu Xia. [Foreign governments] say We asked
about Liu Xia and they say
she is free . Given that she
isn t, they should take the
next step: publicly, clearly
and forcefully call for her
release," said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher
for a spokeswoman for human rights Watch.
"Clearly the main concern of
the government is information about Liu Xiaobo and his
case coming out. She hasn t
anything to do with these
political activities; it is vindictive."
In an interview with the Observer last year, Liu Xia said
of her husband: "I m not so
interested in politics and I
don t have much hope of
changing society… But when
you live with such a person,
even if you don t care about
politics, politics will care
about you."
Songlian Wang, of the Chinese human rights Defenders network said, that while
putting the families of dissidents and activists under
house arrest or soft detention
appeared to have become
more common in the last few
years, Liu Xia s case was an
extreme one.
"I think it s simply because
Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel
and the Chinese government
doesn t want people to be
reminded of him at all," she
said.
She urged the international
community to speak out s-
trongly about the couple s
treatment, adding: "A lot of
governments have quarantined human rights issues
within human rights dialogues. One of the most important things is to talk about
this case in all interactions
with the Chinese government."
Corinna-Barbara Francis, of
Amnesty International, said:
"Because Liu Xia has no
legal status, in some ways
she is at an even greater disadvantage; she cannot even
get a lawyer. They decide on
an ad hoc basis what her access to the outside world will
be, and it has been extremely
restricted."
Calls to police in Beijing,
where the couple lived before
Liu Xiaobo s arrest, went
unanswered. Liu s lawyer,
Shang Baojun, could not be
reached.
Activists and lawyers have
warned that proposed changes to China s criminal procedure law would give police
new powers to hold suspects
at secret locations for long
periods without having to tell
their families.
Activist Hu Jia, recently released from a three-and-ahalf year sentence, said in an
open letter that it would legitimise illegal detentions by
police.
Beware this new mixed-race love-in
I m glad that attitudes to mixed-race people have changed. But does it all mask a subtler
kind of racism?
Joseph Harker
Why does everyone want to
be like me? According to
scientific research (yes, really) I m not only more beautiful than, but also biologically
superior to, other humans.
Advertisers use people like
me all the time – to show
how cool they are, how modern, how cutting-edge. People like me win world championships, X Factor, and even the keys to the White
House. Yes, in today s world
it s great to be mixed race. If
Nina Simone were alive,
surely she d be singing: "To
be young, gifted and mixed".
This week the BBC is marking the 10th anniversary of
the ethnic category being
included on the UK census
with a three-part documentary, Mixed Britannia, part of
its mixed race season (in
which I ve had a small role).
Between 1991 and 2001 there was a 150% increase in
those identifying themselves
as "mixed". Young people in
particular are keen to adopt
this label, and with more than
50% of Caribbean-origin
children having one white
parent, and other racial mixes
on the rise too, the figures for
this year s census look set for
another huge leap.
This love of mixedness is a
recent phenomenon. When I
was growing up in the 1960s
and 70s – the child of a black
father and white mother –
interracial relationships were
relatively rare, and children
like me could often be rejected by one parent and abandoned by the other, ending
up being heavily overrepresented in children s homes. To be mixed race was
to be pitied – neither black
nor white, unloved and rootless.
racist struggle and of mixedrace people themselves.
So I m happy that attitudes
have changed, and that people who want to express their
own dual-race parentage feel
comfortable doing so. But
young people especially
should beware getting caught
up in the love-in. More and
more, it seems that mixedrace people have become the
acceptable face of diversity:
white people don t have to
face up to their prejudices
against black and Asian people because, look, here s someone who s got a bit of
European blood in them: a
model who doesn t need "lightening up"; a man who
doesn t look quite so threatening. Indeed, could Barack
Obama have been elected
were both his parents black?
Of course, racism today is
nowhere near as stark as in
the 1970s. We live in a multicultural society, don t we?
And we have laws against
discrimination. But from
unemployment figures to
stop-and search rates to school exclusion statistics, it s
clear that all races are far
from truly equal. This year
an academic even felt confident enough to publish research claiming that black women are ugly. We should
beware of legitimising this
two-tier racism.
I can see why young people
may want to adopt this identity – but there s also a certain naivety to it, in that it ignores the history of anti-
I was brought up in an allwhite school, and from my
earliest years it was made
clear I didn t belong to their
group. Neither did the fact
that my mother was white
temper the abuse: I was never called just a half-blackie,
a half-wog or a half-sambo
(not even by my teachers,
some of whom joined in).
Alongside this search for a
separate identity seems to be
the unquestioning acceptance
that other races are "pure".
But from the first days that
Europeans, Africans and Asians traded with each other,
through to slavery, colonialism and beyond, men and
women have produced children of dual heritage. In so-
me cases, as in brownskinned Jamaicans, or the
coloured population in South
Africa, mixed groups have
formed a separate social
class. In others, they have
reintegrated in a black group,
such as in the US – or integrated into a white group,
such as in London in the
1700s, where traces of its
slave-trade-era black population have all but disappeared.
The biggest delusion of all,
which props up this whole
debate, is the notion that
black and white people forming loving relationships
proves racism is being defeated: that the quality of life for
Britain s minorities can be
measured by the number of
interracial relationships. But
this is fantasy. Compare it
with gender equality. Would
anyone seriously claim that,
because men and women feel
attraction for each other, sexism cannot exist? From the
days of master-slave girl
couplings, it s always been
clear that what people do in
the bedroom is completely
separate from what they do
in the outside world.
Ultimately, it s clear that
there is no single "mixedrace" experience – it varies
with age, gender, geography
and the type and number of
ethnic origins a person has.
And I d never dictate to anyone what they should call
themselves. But if we want to
see an end to discrimination, prejudice and inequality
based on skin colour, in all
forms, then there is no doubt
that black and mixed-race
people have to be on the same side.
Amanda Knox case is typical of Italy s inconclusive justice
Knox s case highlights one of the many failings of the Italian court system – it never delivers door-slamming certainty
Tobias Jones
Amanda Knox and Raffaele
Sollecito last night won their
appeal against their conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher. But if many
doubted the first verdict, just
as many will doubt this one.
It s one of the many failings
of Italian justice that it never
delivers conclusive, doorslamming certainty. What
usually happens is that the
door is left wide open to take
the case to the next level,
first to appeal and then to the
cassazione, the Supreme
Court. The score in the public imagination, at the moment, is simply one-all.
It s always been that way.
There s barely one iconic
crime from the post-war years that has persuaded the
country that, yes, justice has
been done: the murder of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Ustica crash, the Bologna railway
station bombing, the Piazza
Fontana atrocity, the Monster
of Florence murders, the
murder of Luigi Calabresi,
the "caso Cogne" … none
has ever been satisfactorily,
convincingly resolved. Instead the country seems to split
into innocentisti and colpevolisti (those who believe in
the innocence or guilt of the
accused) and the heated debates continue for decades.
Part of the reason that the
Knox trial has captivated
media attention isn t just the
"Foxy Knoxy" thing, the fact
that Knox was attractive and
allegedly sexually adventurous. It isn t just because of
the cosmopolitanism of the
crime, the fact that here was
a foreign victim and, it was
thought, a foreign assassin.
Its appeal, if that s not too
gruesome a word, lies in the
fact that there was sufficient
doubt about both the prosecution and defence cases.
Italy is divided down the
middle, meaning that the
case is, in a way, perfectly
set up for a media circus, for
debate and deconstruction.
Already the Kercher case has
spawned, at the last count, 11
books and a film.
Dietrologia – literally "behindery" or conspiracytheorising – is a national pastime precisely because the
courts don t offer convincing
verdicts. It allows every
journalist, magistrate and
barfly to try their hand. The
result is that everyone with
an active imagination has a
go at explaining the truth
behind the mystery, and inevitably the truth only gets
further buried beneath so
many excited explanations.
The media plays an active
role in keeping the circus
going: in no other country
are cronache nere – "black
chronicles" – so much the
mainstay of the evening
news. There s always a case
on the go. Between 2005 and
2010, the seven national
channels aired, in the evening news alone, 941 stories
about the Meredith Kercher
murder in Perugia, 759 about
the Garlasco murder, 538
about the murder of little
Tommaso Onofri and 508
about the murder in Cogne.
Often studio shows in the
afternoons talk about the ins
and outs of these cases for
hours, interspersing expert
witnesses with short location
reports. And because such
cases often have one trial
then another, they re like
stories that never end, so that
the speculation and the spectacle can continue untramelled. As one journalist recently wrote in La Repubblica,
these cases are popular because they "generate anxiety
but, at the same time, they
reassure. They brush up against us, but touch others. It s
like leaning over the edge of
a precipice to step back at the
last moment. You feel giddiness. Anxiety. But also relief.
It s a subtle pleasure".
It s a truism that fact and
fiction often overlap, but in
Italy it really is the case. Two
of the best crime novelists –
Giancarlo De Cataldo and
Gianrico Carofiglio – have
both worked as judges and
draw on real life; and the
godfather of Italian crime
writing, Loriano Macchiavelli, has often revisited real
crimes like Ustica and the
Bologna bombing. Occasionally writers even get caught
up in the weird wheels of
Italian justice: the great writer Massimo Carlotto was
accused of murder back in
the 1970s and the American
novelist, Douglas Preston,
has been vociferous in his
defence of Knox because the
prosecutor in the case had
previously turned his ire on
Preston when he was writing
about the Monster of Florence case. In Italy, true and
fictional crime stories blur
into one another and, as Luigi Pirandello warned almost
a century ago, in this land of
illusionism you could go
mad searching for the missing truth.
There are also, however, more mundane reasons that Italian justice never seems to
resolve anything. It s partly a
question of meritocracy: in a
land in which appointments
are invariably made through
nepotism rather than competence, it s perhaps inevitable
that any investigation has
holes in it and that decent
lawyers are able to find them.
A fair trial is often impossible because there s no jury
(at least not in the sense that
we understand the term) and
there s no sense of sub judice: the juiciest bits have always been leaked to the press
long before trial. The judiciary, no one really doubts it, is
in desperate need of reform.
The trouble is that the one
man most desperate to reform it, the prime minister, is
coincidentally the man most
desperate to avoid it.
An Appeal Gone Astray Catches the Supreme Court’s Attention
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — Cory R.
Maples, a death row inmate
in Alabama, had what turned
out to be the bad fortune to
be represented by one of the
most prominent law firms in
the nation. The Supreme
Court heard arguments in his
case on Tuesday, and Justice
Samuel A. Alito Jr. described
where matters stood.
“Mr. Maples has lost his right to appeal through no fault
of his own,” Justice Alito
said, “through a series of
very unusual and unfortunate
circumstances.”
When an Alabama court sent
two copies of a ruling in Mr.
Maples’s case to the New
York offices of the law firm,
Sullivan & Cromwell, its
mailroom sent them back
unopened and marked “Return to Sender.” A court clerk
in Alabama filed the returned
envelopes and did nothing
more.
Mr. Maples’s deadline to
appeal the ruling came and
went, and so far every court
to hear his case has said, in
effect, tough luck.
Mr. Maples was convicted of
murdering two companions
after a night of drinking, and
his guilt is not in serious dispute. His main argument is
that his court-appointed trial
lawyers in Alabama failed to
present important evidence
about his background at the
penalty phase of the trial.
Several justices seemed inclined to find a way to help
Mr. Maples and appeared to
be frustrated by the conduct
of Alabama officials.
Justice Alito, for instance,
pressed John C. Neiman,
Alabama’s solicitor general,
about why the state had opposed Mr. Maples’s efforts to
have the deadline waived
instead of addressing his claims on the merits.
“Why push this technical
argument?” Justice Alito
asked.
Mr. Neiman did not give a
direct answer.
Justice Elena Kagan wondered whether the court clerk
should have done more to
make sure the ruling was
actually received by Mr. Maples’s lawyers in New York.
“Is this what somebody
would do if they actually
wanted to accomplish notice,
if they actually wanted the
person to get that letter?”
Justice Kagan asked.
“So you send off this letter,”
she added, “and you get it
back from the principal attorneys, and you ask your-
self: ‘Huh, should I do anything now?’ What would you
say?”
Mr. Neiman responded,
“Your Honor, I suspect that
in those circumstances I might well personally do something else.”
Justice Antonin Scalia proposed a wrinkle. “The clerk
has to believe it’s an important letter,” he said.
That caveat did not trouble
Justice Kagan. “Justice Scalia is right,” she said. “I am
assuming that a letter disposing of a ruling in a capital
case issued after 18 months
when nobody knew that that
letter was coming, that that’s
an important letter for a death row prisoner to get.”
The ruling came in response
to a filing by two lawyers
from Sullivan & Cromwell,
both associates, who argued
that Mr. Maples’s trial lawyers had been ineffective.
But the associates had left
the firm by the time the state
court ruled, and neither they
nor the firm had informed the
court or, seemingly, the
firm’s own mailroom.
Mr. Maples, now represented
by Gregory G. Garre of Latham & Watkins, argued that
the lawyers from Sullivan &
Cromwell had abandoned
him and that their mistakes
should therefore not be imputed to him.
At one point, Mr. Garre said,
the state seemed to acknowledge that Mr. Maples’s
lawyers had disappeared.
When the deadline for appeals had passed, an Alabama
prosecutor wrote directly to
Mr. Maples in prison to tell
him so, Mr. Garre said,
“which would have been
unethical if the state had
known or believed that he
was represented by counsel.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to find that
letter both significant and
offensive.
“Why did he do it?” Chief
Justice Roberts asked. “Just
gloating that the fellow had
lost? What was the point of
it? He must have thought
there was a problem, right?”
Mr. Neiman said only that
the prosecutor knew that Mr.
Maples’s lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell had failed
to file an appeal.
Mr. Maples’s case, Maples v.
Thomas, No. 10-63, is complicated by the fact that a
third lawyer, in Alabama,
had indisputably received the
crucial document.
That lawyer said in a sworn
statement that he was Mr.
Maples’s lawyer in name
only, serving as local counsel
because the New York lawyers were not licensed to
practice in Alabama. He added that he had not passed
the ruling along to his cocounsel or to his client.
That did not satisfy Justice
Scalia. “He’s the counsel of
record, right?” Justice Scalia
asked. “I’m counsel of record, but I don’t even do so
much as to forward notices to
the guys that are doing the
real work?”
Citing Police Trap, Protesters File Suit
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
A group of people arrested
on the Brooklyn Bridge as
part of the Occupy Wall Street protests last week filed
a suit against New York City
on Tuesday, alleging that
officers had violated their
Constitutional rights by luring them into a trap and then
arresting them.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal
District Court in Manhattan,
says that protesters who marched to the Brooklyn Bridge
on Saturday were led onto
the bridge’s roadway by
commanding police officers.
Once protesters were on the
bridge, the complaint says,
officers prevented them from
leaving. More than 700 people were arrested.
After the protesters were
taken into custody, the police
released videos showing an
officer with a bullhorn warning protesters that they
would be arrested if they did
not get off the roadway. But
those warnings “could not be
heard mere feet away,” the
suit says.
“We believe the N.Y.P.D.
engaged in a premeditated,
planned, scripted and calculated effort to get the protesters off the street,” said Mara
Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership
for Civil Justice Fund, which
is representing the protesters.
The class-action lawsuit,
which says such tactics have
been ruled illegal in other
cases, seeks to ban similar
measures in the future. It also
demands that the arrests be
expunged and requests unspecified damages.
On Tuesday evening, the
city’s Law Department said it
had not been formally served
with the suit, which also names Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Raymond W.
Kelly, the police commissioner. The Police Department
did not immediately respond
to a request for comment.
“The police did exactly what
they were supposed to do,”
Mr. Bloomberg said on Sunday.
Brother of Jailed Chinese Dissident Reports Prison Visit
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Three brothers
of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident writer who was
given the Nobel Peace Prize
last year, were allowed to
visit him in a prison in northeast China on Sept. 28, one
of the brothers told Agence
France-Presse on Tuesday.
The brother, Liu Xiaoxuan,
said Mr. Liu “was looking
very well” and had been al-
lowed to attend a memorial
service for his father in the
northeastern city of Dalian
on Sept. 18. The brothers
visited Mr. Liu in a prison in
Jinzhou, Liaoning Province.
Mr. Liu was sentenced to 11
years in prison for inciting
subversion of the state for his
essays and a manifesto he
helped draft, Charter 08,
which demands political reform, human rights guaran-
tees and an independent judicial system.
Last October, the Nobel
committee announced that he
was being given the Peace
Prize, but the Chinese authorities did not allow him to
travel to Oslo for the ceremony in December. Liu Xia,
his wife, has effectively been
under house arrest in Beijing
and is not allowed to meet
with journalists.
Invitation to a Dialogue: Human Rights Since 9/11
In recent weeks there has
been much discussion about
how to judge America’s human rights record in the
decade after 9/11, and the
balance between civil liberties and security.
Could things have been worse? No doubt. We did not, for
example, experience anything on the scale of the Japanese-American internment
during World War II, and the
government backed off some
of its more Orwellian plans
in the face of public opposition, including a huge database of personal information
chillingly entitled the Total
Information Awareness program.
But we should not underestimate the damage that has
been done to our values, our
reputation and the rule of law
in the past decade.
The response to 9/11 included torture, extraordinary
rendition, prolonged detention without charges or trial
and secret imprisonment.
Those grave abuses are an
indelible part of our human
rights legacy, even if they
primarily occurred at Guan-
tánamo and other overseas
sites.
As recent events show, the
government claims the unreviewable right to kill American citizens far from any
battlefield based on uncertain
standards and secret evidence.
Thousands of Americans
now find themselves on government watch lists with no
meaningful way to challenge
their designation or have
their names removed.
An enormous increase in
government surveillance reaches far beyond those suspected of terrorism, inviting
ethnic and religious profiling.
And, with each passing year,
the risk increases that legal
changes adopted after 9/11
that erode our civil liberties,
like the Patriot Act, will become permanent fixtures of
our legal system.
Finally, 10 years after 9/11,
we have yet to hold accountable those who violated
human rights in our name,
or provide any meaningful
remedy for those who suffered as a result.
STEVEN R. SHAPIRO
Editors’ Note: We invite readers to respond to this letter
for our Sunday Dialogue. We
plan to publish responses and
Mr. Shapiro’s rejoinder in
the Sunday Review. E-mail:
[email protected]
National Legal Director
American
Union
Civil
Liberties
Jury Begins Deliberating in the Killing of a Husband
By DAN BILEFSKY
An alternate juror in the case
of a Queens woman who
killed her husband in a hail
of 11 bullets while he was
shaving said Tuesday that
she would have voted to acquit the woman of murder.
Asked for her verdict as she
sped away by foot from State
Supreme Court in Kew
Gardens, Queens, the juror, a
young woman who declined
to give her name, was emphatic: “Not guilty,” she said.
The defendant, Barbara Sheehan, who is free on $1 million bail, said in an interview
that she was hopeful that the
jurors, who began deliberating her fate on Tuesday,
meeting for about five hours
before adjourning, would
agree. Ms. Sheehan, a school
secretary, shot her husband,
Raymond Sheehan, a former
police sergeant, in their Howard Beach home in 2008.
“I am very happy that she
saw the truth for the truth,”
Ms. Sheehan said. “I hope
that they see it the same way.
I am going to go pray and
hope that they do.”
During the nearly monthlong
trial, the defense portrayed
Ms. Sheehan as a battered
wife who had defended herself against a sadistic tormenter after he pointed a gun at
her head. But the prosecution
described Ms. Sheehan as a
pathological liar who executed her husband because she
despised him, and then cloaked herself in a false narrative of chronic abuse to escape
justice.
Minutes after the deliberations began, the jury members
asked the judge if they could
review several pieces of evi-
dence, including the 911 calls made on the day of the
shooting; a video animation
of the bullet trajectories; a
transcript of Ms. Sheehan’s
testimony about what happened on the day of the killing;
and a photograph of Ms.
Sheehan on a 2007 vacation
to Jamaica during which, she
said, her husband had smashed her head against a cinder-block wall.
The jury also asked the judge
whether, if Ms. Sheehan were found not guilty of murder, she could be found
guilty of the lesser charge
against her: that of illegally
possessing two guns. The
judge, Acting Justice Barry
Kron, replied that the verdict
on one charge did not determine the verdict on the other.
In response to their requests,
the jury members were allowed to listen to the 911 calls
made on the day of the shooting: one by a UPS deliveryman, and another by Robin
Catanzarite, Ms. Sheehan’s
sister. Both arrived at the
Sheehans’ house on the day
of the shooting.
In the 911 call made by Ms.
Sheehan’s sister, a frantic
woman could be heard in the
background saying: “He was
laughing at me. Boom! Boom! Boom!” During the trial,
the prosecutor contended the
voice was Ms. Sheehan’s,
and suggested she had shot
her husband because he had
mocked her when he saw her
holding a gun.
But Ms. Sheehan testified
that the voice on the recording was not hers, and she
said that she had shot her
husband because she feared
for her life.
Tenderness and Violence as Portrayed in a Murder Trial
By JIM DWYER
On the morning she shot her
husband five times with a
revolver, then grabbed a second pistol and pumped six
more bullets into him, Barbara Sheehan had proofread an
essay on Genesis 22, written
by her son for his freshman
religion class.
The day before, she and her
husband, Raymond Sheehan,
had driven to their son’s college in Connecticut with a
load of clean clothes. Coming home to Queens, the
Sheehans stopped at an emergency room for treatment
of Ms. Sheehan’s freshly
broken nose, an injury that
she later said was the result
of her husband’s slamming
her face with the back of his
hand.
And so it went, in life and for
the last month at Ms. Sheehan’s trial on murder charges
in State Supreme Court in
Queens, where accounts of
upper-middle-class
rituals
alternated with stories of
hellish brutality, like clips
from different films, simultaneously unspooling.
Up until the last moment
before the jury disappeared
to begin deliberations on
Tuesday, lawyers for Ms.
Sheehan argued that evidence going back years — of
blackened eyes, a split forehead and a bruised body —
should not be eclipsed by the
scenes from a life of material
privilege. She says she acted
in self-defense out of fear for
her life; the prosecutor says
Ms. Sheehan, stuck in a sexless, dysfunctional marriage, vindictively acted as an
executioner, using two guns.
Just before the matter of the
People v. Barbara Sheehan
was turned over to the jury,
Michael G. Dowd, one of
Ms. Sheehan’s lawyers, urgently insisted that the judge,
Acting Justice Barry Kron,
had omitted a portion of the
standard instructions for jurors that was at the heart of
the case.
The law in New York tolerates the use of deadly physical
force in self-defense in narrow circumstances.
It was not enough, Mr. Dowd
said, that the judge had told
the jurors that they could find
his client not guilty if she
honestly believed that Mr.
Sheehan was about to attack
her, and that a reasonable
person in her shoes would
have also believed that.
“You left out the portion of
the justification defense that
the deceased engaged in violent acts,” Mr. Dowd told
Justice Kron.
Indeed, it turned out that the
jurors had not been given
part of the instruction on how
they should use evidence of
Mr. Sheehan’s violence. The
judge called them back. Regardless of a person’s worth
to the community, everyone
“has the right to live undisturbed by an unlawful assault,” Justice Kron said.
“The character of Ray Sheehan is thus not in issue.”
But in deciding whether Ms.
Sheehan reasonably believed
she was in mortal peril, the
jurors could look at what she
knew about Mr. Sheehan’s
violence, and whether that
made it reasonable for her to
believe she was in danger.
So the jurors went away to
figure out how the end of Mr.
Sheehan’s life — killed in
his bathroom — fit into all
that they had heard, and how
the laws of New York could
apply to such starkly different narratives.
In Reel 1, Ray Sheehan coaches his children’s teams,
gives a Sweet 16 party for his
daughter at Russo’s on the
Bay in Howard Beach, sends
his son on a high school trip
to Hawaii, gets him a car for
college, and appears in a
photograph kissing his wife
on a trip to California the
way the sailor kissed the
woman in Times Square in
the famous picture at the end
of World War II. “Looking
rather lovey-dovey,” the prosecutor, Debra Pomodore,
said to the jury.
It ended in the bathroom,
where Mr. Sheehan, his wife
said, had his gun as he was
shaving, and threatened to
kill her after she told him that
she would not go with him
on a planned trip to Florida.
She fetched another of his
weapons, she testified, and
fired first when he pointed
his Glock at her head, then
kept shooting.
In Reel 2, Barbara Sheehan is
discovered by a security
guard weeping in a bathroom
at the school where she worked as a secretary, eyes blackened; she arrives for a vacation dinner with friends, head
wrapped in a bloody towel;
her children find her covered
in scalding-hot pasta sauce
flung at her by their father;
he passes around crime scene
pictures from his job as a
police sergeant, including
those of body parts recovered
from the World Trade Center.
That morning, before the
killing, Barbara Sheehan had
read an essay by her son on
Yahweh’s test of Abraham,
ordering him to slay his beloved son Isaac, and make a
burnt offering of him. Ancient or modern, stories of intimate violence and tenderness still vex humankind.
E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt
Turkey Detains 140 in Inquiry on Kurds
By SEBNEM ARSU
ISTANBUL — The Turkish
police detained more than
140 pro-Kurdish political
activists in a nationwide
sweep on Tuesday, including
a number of elected mayors
in Turkey’s predominantly
Kurdish southeast.
The detentions, reported by
NTV television and other
news outlets, were carried
out as part of an investigation
into suspected links between
activists and Kurdish separatist insurgents who have escalated attacks on Turkish
targets in recent weeks.
Hundreds of pro-Kurdish
political activists are already
in jail awaiting trial on charges of supporting the P.K.K.,
the Kurdistan Workers Party,
which has been fighting for
Kurdish autonomy in Turkey
since the 1980s. Turkey, as
well as the United States and
the European Union, has
classified it as a terrorist organization.
Many of the people detained
on Tuesday, along with those
already awaiting trial, are
members of the Union of
Kurdistan
Communities,
which prosecutors contend is
the political wing of the
P.K.K., in charge of recruitment and financial support.
Amid escalating P.K.K. violence since July, the governing Justice and Develop-
ment Party ordered an intensive military air and artillery
operation against the group’s
bases nearby in northern Iraq, while it still urges political dialogue with parties that
have denounced the P.K.K.
The pro-Kurdish Peace and
Democracy Party has refused
to condemn the P.K.K., but
ended a parliamentary boycott last week to join efforts
to draft a new Constitution,
which is expected to grant
more ethnic rights to the about 15 million Kurds in
Turkey.
Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood?
By PETER DECHERNEY
IN 1998, in a controversial
piece of legislation, Congress
extended the length of copyright protection in the United States by 20 years, freezing the entrance of works
into the public domain. Four
years earlier, however, Congress took a less well-known
but even more drastic step: it
shrank the public domain.
With the 1994 Uruguay
Round Agreements Act,
Congress restored the copyrights of many foreign
works that previously had
been freely available.
Among the potentially millions of creations that lost their
public-domain status were
Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter
and the Wolf,” Picasso’s
“Guernica,” the British films
of Alfred Hitchcock, Astrid
Lindgren’s earliest Pippi
Longstocking books, stories
by H. G. Wells, the drawings
of M. C. Escher, Fritz Lang’s
“Metropolis,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” and Leni
Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of
the Will.” Artists and others
now have to rely on the permission of copyright holders
to make use of such works.
In my own field — film —
the effects of the 1994 law
have been palpable. Distributors of classic foreign films
have seen their catalogs diminished. Students can no
longer get copies of many
films. Archivists have postponed the preservation of
important films. And of
course filmmakers have lost
access to works of literature
that they might have adapted
and music that might have
enhanced soundtracks.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today in Golan v. Holder, a
case challenging the copyright provision of the 1994 act.
There are many reasons the
justices should conclude that
Congress went too far in altering the copyright system.
For one thing, restoring the
copyright of works in the
public domain is a different
and more profound act than
the extension of copyright
terms. By removing works
from the public domain,
Congress has destabilized it.
If foreign works can have
their copyrights restored,
why not works made in the
United States? Filmmakers,
producers and others who
regularly rely on the public
domain will become wary of
using it.
More important, for Hollywood and every other American cultural industry, access
to a stable and growing public domain has been essential to innovation. Unfortunately, even representatives of
the American film industry
don’t always recognize this
truth. In a friend of the court
brief filed in the Supreme
Court case, the Motion Picture Association of America
applauds Congress for “reinforcing the United States’
position as a proponent of
strong copyright protection
throughout the world.” The
M.P.A.A. contends that the
expansion of copyright is
good for its industry.
But history tells a different
story. Filmmakers have con-
sistently used public domain
works to anchor artistic and
technological innovation. In
the 1930s, when Walt Disney
decided to make one of the
first feature-length animated
films, he turned to the Brothers Grimm’s version of the
tale of Snow White. When
asked why he chose that
story, Disney explained that
“it was well known.” He understood that “Snow White”
was a trusted property, and
because he knew that at least
the story and characters
would be familiar to audiences, he could take an artistic
risk with the form.
Disney is only the most famous example of a filmmaker who relied on the public
domain to expand the art of
film. Starting with Thomas
Edison in 1910, filmmakers
have adapted Lewis Carroll’s
“Alice’s
Adventures
in
Wonderland” in movies that
have accompanied the transition to feature films, the establishment of the studios,
the switch to sound, the introduction of color, the advent of television and the
adoption of widescreen aspect ratios.
Most recently, Tim Burton’s
3-D reimagining of “Alice in
Wonderland” became one of
the 10 highest-grossing films
in history amid an otherwise
mixed public response to
new 3-D technology.
Despite their official position
in this case, Hollywood producers have long realized the
value of the public domain,
and they have taken steps to
manage the use of the shared
resource. The M.P.A.A. continues to maintain a registry
in which its members can
claim a limited, industrydesignated right to public
domain works. The registry
allows filmmakers to draw
from the cultural storehouse
of stories and characters without fear of an immediate
challenge from their closest
competitors.
Because of Congress’s transformation of the copyright
system, filmmakers and producers today do not have the
same access to the public
domain as their predecessors.
Technical, artistic and industrial innovation are at risk.
Let’s hope that the Supreme
Court restores the public
domain to full strength, for
Hollywood’s sake.
Peter Decherney, an associate professor of film studies at
the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of the forthcoming book “Hollywood’s
Copyright Wars.”
Puerto Rico Prodded to Get Tough on Police
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
SAN JUAN, P.R. — The
discrepancies in the Puerto
Rico police logs were hard to
miss. Burglaries, including
stolen plasma televisions and
jewelry, were coded as mere
breaking and entering. Largescale thefts of telephone
company cables were labeled
property damage.
After months spent investigating, it was clear to Norman
O. Torrens, an internal affairs
agent for the Puerto Rico
Police Department, that scores of felony crimes in Vega
Alta, in the north, were being
intentionally recorded as
misdemeanors. The result
was that these crimes were
not counted in statistics released by the Police Department to support its claim that
while the murder rate was
higher than ever, other felonies were declining.
“They are lying to the people
of Puerto Rico by telling
them that crime statistics are
going down,” said Officer
Torrens, 37, who was abruptly demoted this summer
after presenting his findings,
first to his supervisor and
then to officials in Puerto
Rico’s Justice Department.
“The bosses are the ones who
push this to happen. The culture here is if you don’t produce, you get nowhere.”
The manipulation of statistics, long suspected by Puerto Ricans, is just one of the
systemic failures that the
Police Department must reverse after a blistering report
last month from the United
States Department of Justice
outlined widespread dysfunction and civil rights violations.
For decades, the Police Department has operated without much oversight and
officers have maneuvered
with little supervision, training or accountability. The
failings, detailed not only in
the Justice Department report
but also by the governor’s
own monitor, are glaring:
Until recently, not one police
precinct had instructions for
handling domestic violence;
civilian complaints piled up
by the thousands, unaddressed; hate crimes went unrecognized; continuing training
for police officers was unheard of; officers went unpaid
for long stretches; and the
Police Department was not
connected to the national
crime database, which meant
that criminals from the 50
states could easily slip through the cracks here.
Gov. Luis G. Fortuño, a Republican, said in an interview
that he was well aware of the
department’s turbulent history and that the problems
were worse than anticipated
when he took office in 2009.
“Most of the problems occurred before my time,” Mr.
Fortuño said. “I accept responsibility. My mandate is to
change that. But this will
take time. It was years in the
making, and it will take years
to fix.”
Rooted in the dictate of “la
mano dura” — the Puerto
Rican version of “get tough
on crime” — the department
operated for decades under a
system that rewarded arrests
much more than community
policing, criminologists say.
The result, they say, is that
most Puerto Ricans do not
trust or respect the police,
including claims that most
violent crime is down.
“This was all predicted 15
years ago, this problem,” said
Dora Nevares-Muñiz, a criminologist and law professor
at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico who
sat on a commission that
evaluated the Police Department in 2008. “The vision of
the police is not a vision of
prevention. The vision is a
vision of control, of intervention after the crime is committed. And even at that they
are not efficient. And then
every time the government
changes here, they want to
reinvent the wheel.”
Ms. Nevares-Muñiz said the
public’s views about the police force had further deteriorated under Mr. Fortuño,
whose New Progressive
Party won supermajorities in
the 2008 election. There is a
sense, Ms. Nevares-Muñiz
said, that the governor further politicized the Police
Department — already an
established tradition — and
installed people who were
overly eager to please.
This was one reason that illtrained police officers used
too much force on demonstrators last year in front of
the Capitol, she said. The
demonstrators were protesting government layoffs and
college fee increases. The
other reason is that Puerto
Rico lacked an explicit policy on when and how to use
force. The governor was widely criticized for his handling of the protest.
Favoritism in the department,
Ms. Nevares-Muñiz said, had
reached the point that many
supervisors no longer relied
on exams to promote officers.
This is why, in part, Officer
Torrens chose to speak publicly. Rather than being
promoted for his diligence —
he had been assigned the task
of investigating the department’s statistics in the Bayamón District — he was
returned to patrol duty in the
precinct he had investigated,
a tricky turn of events for an
internal affairs officer. He is
suing the Police Department
for what he said was his
wrongful transfer.
“An officer knows he can get
a special job if the boss is
able to say that crime is going down,” said Officer Torrens, who has a record of
positive evaluations. “So
with traffic cops, you give
tickets. With drug busts, you
make arrests, whether the
person has drugs or not. If
you don’t arrest, you’re out.”
The governor said he was
already working to change
the culture of the Police Department along with its operational nuts and bolts long
before the Justice Department report. Last month, he
announced that the police
and prosecutors would now
work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives on
armed robberies, carjackings
and other crimes in five regions. Those cases will be handled in federal court, and the
regions have been assigned
six special prosecutors to
expedite the cases.
Mr. Fortuño said he recognized that the department needed outside assistance last
year, so he contracted Robert
Warshaw, a career police
chief who specializes in overhauling police departments.
The same year, Puerto Rico
finally looped into the national crime database.
Mr. Fortuño said he and his
aides also had sought out
experts in New York City.
One day after the June 30,
2010, demonstration in front
of the Capitol, during which
the police struck protesters
with truncheons and used
pepper spray, the governor
called to ask Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Raymond W.
Kelly for help, he said. The
city complied.
The governor began in internal investigation of his own
last September, when he appointed an independent monitor to investigate the scope
of the failures, a precursor to
the Justice Department report. The conclusion: the
department was in disarray.
Four months ago, Mr.
Fortuño replaced the police
chief and began phasing in
some of the changes, including better training — 2,000
officers so far have received
it — and a detailed “use of
force” policy. The tactical
squad, which was often at the
center of abuse accusations,
has been cut by half. And
promotions are reverting
back to an exams-based system.
Other changes will follow in
the next year, including the
retraining of all supervisors
and police officers and new
software to track statistics
and complaints.
But a few things are not likely to change soon. While
police officers finally received the pay they were due,
their salaries — the lowest in
the United States — are not
likely to rise with the economy still struggling. The
median salary for a police
officer in Puerto Rico is
$31,000; in Orlando, Fla., for
example, starting salaries are
nearly $42,000. Still, police
jobs are coveted on an island
where college graduation
rates are low and unemployment is high.
The governor’s critics say
they wonder whether the
flurry of changes will amount
to anything lasting. After all,
they say, the findings did not
come as a surprise.
“There had to be pressure
from outside for this to change,” said Osvaldo Toledo
Martinez, the president of the
Puerto Rican Bar Association
and a vocal critic of Mr.
Fortuño. “So it will change
because he is now obligated
to comply. We have to believe that people will trust in
the police again. But they
have to see positive action
right away. If that happens,
they will have confidence.”
Oviedo Matto defiende su reacción ante la Caminera
El titular del Congreso Nacional, Jorge Oviedo Matto,
se declaró ayer un transgresor de las leyes de tránsito y
sostuvo que el fuero parlamentario que posee le permite no ser detenido por ninguna barrera policial.El oviedista salió al paso de la denuncia dada a conocer la víspera
por el jefe de la Policía Caminera, Eduardo Petta, quien
acusó al legislador de amenazar a los agentes con recortarle el presupuesto de la
institución para el año entrante, tras el adelantamiento
indebido en el cual fue sorprendido el domingo pasado.
Oviedo Matto fue detenido y
multado por dicha infracción.
También fue sometido a la
prueba de alcotest, aunque
esta dio negativo.
El congresista se defendió y
criticó el accionar de la Policía Caminera. Señaló que
nadie lo puede detener por
contar con fuero parlamentario, argumentando el artículo
191 de la Carta Magna, que
estipula que si un parlamen-
tario es sorprendido en flagrante delito, la autoridad
correspondiente lo pondrá
bajo custodia.
Oviedo Matto intentó excusarse por violar las normas
de tránsito señalando que,
debido a las malas condiciones de las rutas, ya pasó de
contramano en, al menos, 50
ocasiones.
El congresista aclaró que el
domingo pasado volvía a
Asunción tras verificar algunos puestos militares fronterizos, como el destacamento
Mayor Infante Rivarola, y no
del Rally, como se anunció
en principio.
"Pagué la multa, no tuve ningún problema para pagarla,
pero lo que sí me molestó fue
el trato que me dieron por el
tema del alcotest, que si yo
no me sometía al examen,
llamarían a la Fiscalía para
detenerme. A mí no pueden
hacerme eso, yo tengo fueros", manifestó.
Asimismo, el presidente del
Congreso criticó el hecho de
que los agentes porten armas
en la vía pública.
PENDIENTE. Actualmente,
en la Cámara de Diputados
se encuentra pendiente el
estudio de un proyecto de ley
que prohíbe a la Policía Caminera retener la habilitación, la cédula verde y el registro de conducir de una persona que transgredió las leyes
de tránsito, presentado por el
diputado liberal César López.
El mismo fue modificado en
Senadores y devuelto a la
cámara de origen, para su
ratificación o rechazo.
LO QUE DICE LA Constitución
El artículo 191 de la Carta
Magna establece que ningún
senador o diputado puede ser
detenido, salvo que fuese
hallado en flagrante delito
que merezca pena corporal.
Luego la autoridad interviniente lo pondrá bajo custodia
en su residencia. Oviedo
Matto fue sorprendido en
flagrante falta al violar leyes
de tránsito.
Una medición judicial que acaba convertida en papelón político
La simple ubicación en el
terreno de unas tierras que el
Estado recuperó judicialmente se transformó en un bochornoso espectáculo del
Gobierno, que ni siquiera
logró consensuar datos oficiales sobre la propiedad.
La decisión del presidente
Fernando Lugo, de suspender
la mensura judicial que el
Instituto de Desarrollo Rural
y de la Tierra (Indert) pretendía realizar entre los departamentos de Alto Paraná,
Caaguazú y Canindeyú, para
ubicar unas tierras recuperadas judicialmente por el Estado de los herederos de
Domingo Barthe, es el corolario de una serie de contradicciones y discusiones mediáticas entre representantes
de diferentes dependencias
del propio Estado.
La polémica arrancó cuando
el Indert anunció la intención
de mensurar una propiedad
que se encuentra bajo ocupación del empresario brasileño
Tranquilo Favero; la finca n.°
4036 de Jesús y Trinidad,
ubicada en el distrito de
Ñacunday, en el Alto Paraná.
Según los técnicos del Indert,
en la propiedad, de unas
59.000 hectáreas, había excedentes de tierra fiscal.
Registros Públicos, sin embargo, realizó un estudio
sobre los desprendimientos
de la finca original y concluyó que la totalidad de las
tierras tenía un destino determinado en los registros
jurídicos, y que, por lo tanto,
no había allí excedente de
tierra fiscal alguna.
Extraoficialmente, la Dirección de Catastro informó
que, de acuerdo con sus registros, tampoco había excedentes.
La mensura se encontraba así
prácticamente
suspendida
cuando, el 15 de setiembre
pasado, el Indert pidió el
replanteamiento de la medición, sobre la base de un fallo de la Corte Suprema de
1963 que restituyó al Estado
257.000 hectáreas de tierras
que habían sido vendidas en
1888 y recuperadas 16 años
después por mora de los
compradores.
La sentencia creó tres fincas
a favor del Estado que, según
los técnicos del Indert, inclu-
ían las tierras ocupadas por
Favero.
La hipótesis del Indert se
basó en el hecho de que la
finca de Favero había sido
originalmente una propiedad
heredada de Domingo Barthe, el mismo que había
comprado entre 1912 y 1913
las tierras que el Estado ya
había recuperado en 1894.
Una investigación de los Registros Públicos demostró,
sin embargo, que la propiedad de Favero, que también
provenía de Barthe, había
sido comprada de la firma
Carlos Casado, que la adquirió a su vez del Estado en
1884, mucho antes de las
compras anuladas en 1894.
El Indert respondió calificando el informe de falso.
Sin embargo, Catastro salió a
confirmar la versión de Registros Públicos.
Ahora la atención se centraba
en las tierras recuperadas por
el Estado. Un informe de
Registros confirmó que la
mayor parte sigue siendo
pública. Esa era la discusión
cuando el presidente decidió
suspender todo el operativo.
Piden aclarar denuncia de senadora y vicepresidente
El Tribunal Ético contra la
Impunidad (TECI) remitió
una nota al presidente del
Senado Jorge Oviedo Matto
expresando preocupación y
pidiendo que se aclaren las
expresiones de la senadora
Ana Mendoza de Acha, con
las que coincidió el vicepresidente Federico Franco, sobre la supuesta tolerancia del
presidente de la República
hacia el Ejército del Pueblo
Paraguayo (EPP).
En la nota, que firman Antonio Palazón y Alberto César
Granada, presidente y secretario respectivamente del
TECI, señalan que esta acusación compromete el mantenimiento del orden y la paz
pública y que sus consecuencias pueden llevar, en cualquier momento, a desbordes
sociales y enfrentamientos
lamentables.
Señalan también que el TECI
considera que es de alta prio-
ridad el análisis minucioso
del contenido de estas expresiones y sugieren al presidente del Senado, basándose en
el artículo 195 de la Constitución, la conformación de
una comisión bicameral de
investigación para esclarecer
lo que han denunciado públicamente estos funcionarios
nacionales. Expresan finalmente que aguardarán una
respuesta.
Rechazan modificar el fallo de fusión LAN-TAM
SANTIAGO (Reuters). La
Corte Antimonopolios de
Chile rechazó ayer una solicitud de la aerolínea LAN
para que rectifique tarifas
incluidas en la aprobación
con condiciones de su fusión
con la brasileña TAM.
LAN, una de las mayores
aerolíneas de América Latina, había solicitado al Tribunal de Defensa de la Libre
Competencia (TDLC) que
aclarara supuestos errores
respecto del cálculo numéri-
co de “yields” de la
compañía (tarifas por kilómetro en cada ruta). Pero el
TDLC aseguró que no hay
“errores de cálculo manifiestos pues los resultados obtenidos se realizaron a partir de
información entregada por
LAN y de acuerdo a las fórmulas y procedimientos establecidos en el Plan de Autorregulación)”.
“Las discrepancias existentes
entre estos resultados y lo
planteado por la aerolínea se
deben a que entregó dicha
información en forma distinta a la requerida”, agregó.
Más temprano, LAN y la
brasileña TAM informaron
que objetaron en la Corte
Suprema de Chile tres de las
condiciones fijadas por el
tribunal antimonopolios para
que se concretara la fusión,
que daría paso a uno de los
diez mayores grupos de aerolíneas del mundo.
Fiscales piden se extradite a los detenidos en Argentina
La fiscalía antisecuestro pidió ayer al juez Gustavo
Amarilla que solicite la extradición de dos implicados
en el caso de Dalia Scappini.
En el pedido se señala que
ambos fueron los encargados
de custodiar a Dalia durante
los seis días de cautiverio.
“Ya en horas de la noche,
Julio César Fernández Muller, acompañado de otras
personas con acento rioplatense, se dirigió hasta la vivienda ubicada en la calle A-
mistad c/Constitución Nacional, barrio Caacupemí de
la ciudad de Capiatá, donde
lo aguardaba Benito Luis
León y una pareja con acento
río platense compuesta de un
hombre y una mujer, para
trasladar a Dalia María Scappini Campos hasta donde
sería su segundo lugar de
cautiverio, sito en la ciudad
de Itauguá, villa CONAVI,
Lote Nº 8, manzana 26,
Mbo’y, Km. 25”. Así refiere
parte de la imputación en la
que se alude a la pareja de
argentinos.
El escrito lleva la firma de
los fiscales Francisco Ayala
y Federico Delfino.
Nuevo fiscal antisecuestro
El fiscal Delfino pasó a conformar parte de la unidad
antisecuestro, por resolución
de la Fiscalía General del
Estado.
Hasta hace poco era fiscal
penal de la ciudad de Concepción.
Anuncian huelga en Poder Judicial
El Sindicato de Funcionarios
Judiciales del Paraguay (Sifjupar) anuncia para el martes
18 de octubre una huelga en
tribunales, que se extendería
hasta el 20 de diciembre, en
reclamo de aumento salarial,
como lo vienen haciendo
desde hace varios años.
Porfiria Ocholaski, secretaria
general del Sifjupar, manifestó que ya se reunieron con
los delegados sindicales del
interior del país. Agregó que
durante la huelga judicial se
evaluará si el Congreso confirma o no el aumento salarial.
Ocholaski dijo que el próximo lunes comunicarán oficialmente el inicio de la medida de fuerza al Ministerio de
Justicia y Trabajo, al juzgado
laboral de turno y a la Corte.
Los funcionarios judiciales
reclaman un reajuste del seguro médico a G. 200.000, ya
que los G. 85.000 que perci-
ben actualmente les resultan
insuficientes.
El principal pedido de reivindicación del sindicato es
la obtención de un 20% de
aumento salarial para los
funcionarios judiciales y
25% para los magistrados.
Piden igualmente la creación
de unos 917 cargos para las
diferentes circunscripciones
judiciales del país y que 400
personas ganen el salario
mínimo vigente.
El Gobierno recibe más evidencias sobre tierras
El presidente Fernando Lugo
dio precisas instrucciones
para investigar todos los documentos, papeles, archivos
e informes relacionados con
títulos de tierras en conflicto
que afectan a varios departamentos del país, anunció
ayer por la tarde el procurador general, Enrique García.
Fue al término de una reunión de la cual participaron
autoridades del Indert, con su
titular Marciano Barreto; el
presidente de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, Luis María Benítez; el ministro de la
Corte Antonio Fretes; el titular de Hacienda, Dionisio
Borda; la directora de Registros Públicos, Lourdes González; el titular de Catastro,
José Tomás Villarejo; y el
escribano mayor de Gobierno, Justo Germán Denis.
El tema tiene que ver con una
mensura judicial impulsada
inicialmente por el Indert,
que pretende dibujar en el
terreno unas 257.000 hectáreas reivindicadas por el Estado a los sucesores de Domingo Barthe en el año 1958.
El ente agrario sostiene que
esas tierras están en la zona
de Ñacunday donde se sitúan
los inmuebles del Grupo Favero y otros propietarios.
El presidente Lugo desea que
se tenga “toda la información
técnica que nos permita tener
la mayor aproximación a la
certeza. Ha tomado el camino de conseguir nuevos elementos técnicos, llámense
mensura u otro tipo de instrumento, que nos permita
tener certeza jurídica de esa
documentación en los Registros Públicos”, sobre las tierras que fueron objeto de
mensura en el Alto Paraná,
manifestó el procurador García.
Tras sostener que “la reunión
fue muy provechosa“, el procurador afirmó que el titular
del Poder Ejecutivo paraguayo dispuso además la participación del Instituto Geográfico Militar en las tareas de
investigación y ubicación de
los inmuebles.
El Jefe de Estado dispuso “la
profundización de los archivos” de las instituciones esta-
tales que registran los títulos
de las tierras, como la Dirección de Registros Públicos, el
Indert y el Servicio Nacional
de Castastro, a fin de conocer
a quiénes realmente pertenecen los inmuebles, indicó el
procurador García.
“La reunión no tiene conclusión en el sentido de acciones
a tomar de inmediato, salvo
de la profundización de la
investigación”, puntualizó el
funcionario.
Traspié del Indert
Tanto la Dirección de los
Registros Públicos como el
Servicio Nacional de Catastro han confirmado ante el
Presidente que las tierras de
Ñacunday no tienen relación
alguna con las fracciones del
Grupo Favero y otros. Además, tienen informaciones
que confirman que las tierras
ganadas en el caso Barthe ya
fueron vendidas a lo largo de
los años por el anterior Instituto de Bienestar Rural (IBR).
En Chile reclaman "reciprocidad" en el intercambio de asilados políticos
El partido del oficialismo
chileno, la Unión Demócrata
Independiente (UDI), exigió
este miércoles que el gobierno de Sebastián Piñera proponga a la Argentina un canje de asilados políticos y prófugos de la justicia radicados
en ambos países.
"Como nosotros hemos expulsado a un excoronel argentino acusado por violaciones a los Derechos Humanos, ellos deben entregar al
principal inculpado por el
asesinato del senador Jaime
Guzmán", dijo el secretario
general de la UDI, el senador
Víctor Pérez.
El legislador lanzó el pedido
luego que el gobierno de
Piñera expulsó al represor
Alejandro Duret, acusado de
asesinar a Carlos Labolita, un
militante peronista y amigo
de la juventud de Néstor y
Cristina Kirchner.
Duret viajó al país vecino
país un día antes de que la
justicia argentina lo condenara a 15 años de prisión por
crímenes de lesa humanidad
cometidos durante la última
dictadura militar.
El senador Pérez, quien acusó a la Argentina de "no actuar con reciprocidad", pidió
al gobierno chileno proponer
un canje con el prófugo juez
Otilio Romano, otro acusado
por crímenes de lesa humanidad. "Creo que es fundamental que en el caso del
juez Otilio Romano, el gobierno (de Piñera) planteé una
salida diferente y busque los
mecanismos para lograr que
a cambio de esta persona
requerida por la Justicia argentina, se entregue a Galvarino Apablaza", planteó el
senador.
Argentina otorgó asilo político a Apablaza el 30 de septiembre de 2010, después de
que la Corte Suprema de la
Nación autorizara la extradición del exfrentista a Chile,
acusado del asesinato del
senador de derecha Jaime
Guzmán en 1991, fundador
de la UDI. Sin embargo, el
máximo Tribunal condicionó
su decisión a la resolución
del pedido de refugio que
Apablaza había solicitado en
2004, tras residir nueve años
en la Argentina.
La causa por el asesinato de
Guzmán fue reabierta en Chile después de que el exlíder
del FPMR Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, detenido
en Brasil por un secuestro,
revelara nuevos datos del
caso. En una entrevista periodística, Hernández asumió
el crimen y atribuyó la coau-
toría del asesinato del senador Guzmán a Apablaza y
otros integrantes del Frente,
también prófugos. Entre ellos, Ricardo Palma Salamanca, "El Negro", quien admitió
y defendió el asesinato en un
libro publicado tras su fuga
en helicóptero de una cárcel
chilena en 1996.
El senador Guzmán, fundador de la UDI, fue el ideólogo de la cruenta dictadura del
fallecido exgeneral Augusto
Pinochet (1973-1990) y la
Constitución de 1980, aún
vigente.
A mediados de septiembre
pasado, el ministro de Justicia de Chile, Teodoro Ribera
Neumann, ya había descartado el intercambio en diálogo
con Ámbito Financiero. "No
va a haber carta de cambio,
lo descartamos", dijo el funcionario trasandino, ante la
pregunta sobre la posibilidad
de que el Gobierno argentino
devuelva al asilado chileno
Apablaza y que, a su vez, el
de Chile entregue al juez
Romano, que cruzó la cordillera a fines de agosto, horas
antes de ser destituido, acusado en 103 causas de connivencia con violación de derechos humanos y delitos de
lesa humanidad.
La Corte rechazó la extradición de Astiz
La Corte Suprema de Justicia denegó hoy el pedido de extradición a Francia del ex marino Alfredo Ignacio Astiz, que fue pedido por el estado francés por el caso de la desaparición de las monjas Alice Domon y Léonie Duquet, ocurrido en 1977.
El máximo tribunal destacó
que a diferencia de otras tiempos, "la jurisdicción penal
argentina se está ejerciendo
sobre la base del principio de
territorialidad, ya que el ex
militar afronta un juicio oral
en el país a cargo del TOF
5". Con la firma de los ministros Ricardo Lorenzetti, Elena Highton de Nolasco, Juan
carlos Maqueda y Eugenio
Zaffaroni, la Corte declaró
"improcedente" el pedido de
extradición formulado por la
República de Francia respecto de Astiz por los delitos de
complicidad en la detención
ilegal seguida de torturas de
las religiosas francesas. El
juicio contra Astiz y otros 17
represores de la ESMA "se
desarrolla luego de que fueran removidos los obstáculos
que impedían el ejercicio
pleno de la jurisdicción de la
República Argentina para
investigar y, en su caso, sancionar a los responsables de
las graves violaciones a los
derechos humanos registradas entre el 24 de marzo de
1976 y el 10 de diciembre de
1983", sostuvo el fallo. Esos
obstáculos, añade, "fueron
superados luego de la sanción de la ley 25.779, que declaró insanablemente nulas
las leyes 23.491 y 23.521, y
cuya validez constitucional
fue afirmada por la Corte
Suprema en el fallo "Si-
món..." (328:2056)". Domon
y Duquet fueron secuestradas
en diciembre de 1977 junto
al llamado grupo de la Santa
Cruz, la iglesia de la congregación pasionista donde funcionaban las primeras Madres de Plaza de Mayo, también secuestradas en un operativo donde Astiz se hizo
pasar como familiar de un
desaparecido para identificar
al grupo. El reclamo por la
aparición de las religiosas fue
asumido desde un primer
momento por el gobierno de
Francia, que no sólo realizó
gestiones diplomáticas sino
que designó un abogado en la
causa, ahora en etapa de juicio oral.
AMBITO FINANCEIRO (AR) • INTERNACIONALES • 5/10/2011
Rebeldes libios planean ataque "final" contra ciudad natal de Gadafi
Las fuerzas del Gobierno interino libio se preparaban el martes para un ataque final
contra Sirte, la ciudad natal de Muamar el Gadafi, cuyo exprimer ministro dijo que cree
que el depuesto líder sigue en el país y luchará hasta el final.
"Creo que Gadafi (...) no se
ha ido del país. Creo enérgicamente, basado en mi conocimiento sobre él, que está
luchando con sus armas y
junto a sus hombres", indicó
Al-Baghdadi
Ali
alMahmoudi, preso en el país
vecino Túnez, en comentarios transmitidos por su abogado. "No se va a rendir y no
va a abandonar sus armas
hasta el final", agregó el exprimer ministro. Los libios
pusieron fin al Gobierno de
42 años de Gadafi en agosto,
cuando combatientes rebeldes atacaron la capital. Gadafi y varios de sus hijos están
prófugos y sus seguidores
tienen el control de Sirte y la
ciudad de Bani Walid, en el
sur de Trípoli. Fuerzas gubernamentales, que durante
tres semanas han quedado
arrinconadas por fuego de
artillería y misiles en los límites orientales de Sirte,
lograron avanzar varios kilómetros hacia la ciudad el
lunes, capturando el distrito
sureño de Bouhadi. Automóviles con civiles aterrorizados, enfermos y con hambre
intentaban salir de Sirte. Agencias de asistencia dicen
que están preocupadas por el
bienestar de los civiles dentro
de la ciudad, atrapados por
los combates y quedándose
sin alimentos, agua, combustible y medicamentos. Comandantes de las fuerzas
leales al gobernante Consejo
Nacional
de
Transición
(CNT) hablan ahora de un
gran ataque "final" para tomar el control de la ciudad
mientras continúan su bombardeo de posiciones proGadafi dentro de esa localidad, apoyados por aviones de
guerra de la OTAN. El exprimer ministro de Gadafi,
que sigue en prisión mientras
las autoridades tunecinas
consideran un pedido de extradición del CNT, dijo que
está listo para colaborar con
los nuevos líderes si éstos
ceden en su demanda. "Estoy
dispuesto a cooperar con el
consejo de transición, pero
con la condición de que abandone todos los pedidos de
extradición y todas las
campañas en mi contra", afirmó. "Espero ser parte de la
solución en Libia y no parte
del problema", añadió. Las
preocupaciones sobre la crisis humanitaria se han enfocado en el hospital de Ibn
Sina. Trabajadores sanitarios
que huyeron de Sirte dijeron
que los pacientes se están
muriendo en el quirófano
porque no hay oxígeno y
combustible para los generadores del centro médico. "Es
un desastre", dijo una doctora
que se identificó como Nada
mientras huía el martes de la
ciudad. "Están atacando el
hospital. Dos niños murieron
allí. Hay tiroteos aleatorios
contra el hospital desde ambos lados", agregó. En el este
de la ciudad el martes, combatientes del CNT dijeron
que estaban intentando despejar un corredor hacia el
hospital pero que se les dificultaba por los francotiradores
pro-Gadafi.
AlMahmoudi, que no está en la
lista de exfuncionarios libios
buscados por la Corte Penal
Internacional, se distanció
de la represión conducida por
el viejo régimen. "Le digo
una cosa: a mi me odiaba
todo el entorno de Gadafi",
dijo. "Estoy convencido de
que no hice nada malo a los
libios", afirmó, agregando
que su rol era garantizar el
suministro de alimentos para
el pueblo, sobre todo durante
la crisis. Por su parte, un portavoz de Gadafi, y algunos
civiles que dejaban Sirte,
culparon a los bombardeos
de la OTAN y los disparos
del CNT por la muerte de
civiles y la destrucción de
edificios en la ciudad. La
OTAN y el CNT dicen que
son los seguidores de Gadafi
quienes representan la mayor
amenaza para los civiles,
diciendo que sus fuerzas han
estado ejecutando a los que
creían que eran simpatizantes
del CNT y estaban forzando
a otros a combatir. Un convoy de la Cruz Roja entregó
el lunes al hospital oxígeno y
otros suministros médicos
que se necesitaban con urgencia, después de que un
intento anterior debió ser
abortado debido a fuertes
enfrentamientos. "La situación en el terreno era muy tensa con los continuos enfrentamientos", dijo el delegado
de la Cruz Roja Hichen Khadraoui. Los civiles que salieron de la ciudad el martes
parecían en peor estado que
los que huyeron en los días
anteriores. Varias personas
dijeron que estaban enfermas
y un hombre mostró cómo
sostenía su pantalón con un
cordón para que no se cayera
por lo poco que había comi-
do en las últimas tres semanas. Al partir de la ciudad
junto a varios parientes, Ali
Durgham dijo que su padre
murió y su tío resultó gravemente herido por un proyectil
cuando caminaban hacia una
mezquita el lunes. "Mi padre
murió en mis brazos", contó
llorando. "Lo enterré ayer",
agregó. Un portavoz del Ejército del Gobierno interino
dijo a la televisión que Muttassim, uno de los hijos de
Gadafi, se estaba escondiendo en el hospital Ibn Sina.
"Nuestros
revolucionarios
(en Sirte) están combatiendo
a aquellos que son cómplices
del tirano en crímenes contra
el pueblo libio", dijo Ahmed
Bani a Libia TV, con sede en
Doha. "Son un grupo de asesinos y mercenarios liderados
por Mutassim Gadafi que
ahora están en el hospital de
Ibn Sina en Sirte para evitar
ser atacados, según la última
información recibida", agregó. Sirte, una ciudad de
75,000 habitantes, tiene una
importancia simbólica. Gadafi transformó su lugar de
nacimiento desde un tranquilo pueblo de pescadores a la
segunda capital de Libia.
Piden peritaje a la Corte por campañas
Por: Mariano Martín
Cinco empresas que hicieron
aportes para la campaña del
Frente para la Victoria en
2007 serán sometidas a un
peritaje de la Corte Suprema de Justicia. El informe
fue pedido por el juez federal
Ariel Lijo sobre compañías
de medicina y droguerías,
algunas de ellas ligadas a la
causa por la denominada
«mafia de los medicamentos», que instruye su colega
Norberto Oyarbide. Una de
las compañías es Droguería
Urbana, del empresario Marcos Hendler, principal proveedor de medicamentos de
alto costo de la obra social de
los camioneros, que preside
Hugo Moyano.
El juez Lijo envió la semana
pasada el pedido al Cuerpo
de Peritos Contadores de la
Corte Suprema. Con el informe el magistrado buscará
indagar sobre las presuntas
inconsistencias que halló en
la investigación respecto de
los aportes para la campaña
que llevó a la presidencia a
Cristina de Kirchner, con
Julio
Cobos
como
compañero de fórmula.
La denuncia data de 2008 y
fue iniciada por la Coalición
Cívica a partir de sospechas
de que los aportantes serían
en realidad meros dadores de
cheques para permitirles a los
recaudadores del FpV justificar ingresos de dinero. La
investigación de Lijo está
orientada al posible delito de
lavado de dinero.
Las empresas que el magistrado pidió investigar son:
Droguería Urbana, de Marcos Hendler; la prestadora de
servicios médicos Iter Medicina; la droguería Bristol
Park; Multipharma, de Néstor Lorenzo, y Seacamp junto
con su sucesora, Sanfor Salud, relacionadas con el empresario asesinado Sebastián
Forza y su mujer, Solange
Bellone.
Todas
las
compañías fueron señaladas
por la denuncia de la Coali-
ción Cívica por haber realizado aportes cercanos a los
310.000 pesos, el máximo
permitido para las campañas
electorales por parte del sector privado.
El expediente, que atravesó
controversias de competencia
entre varios jueces, volvió a
cobrar velocidad a partir de
la semana pasada con la orden del magistrado. Para
entonces, Lijo ya había obtenido el detalle de las composiciones societarias de todos
los aportantes privados de la
campaña del FpV y apartado
aquellas empresas en las que
había encontrado posibles
inconsistencias.
De hecho, Oyarbide instruye
una causa con puntos en común derivada de su expediente por la mafia de los medicamentos, en la que figuran
mencionados el exsuperin-
tendente de Servicios de Salud Héctor Capaccioli junto a
los funcionarios Sebastián
Gramajo y Hernán Diez como responsables de la recolección de fondos para la
campaña de 2007.
Para avanzar en el pedido de
la pericia a la Corte Suprema, Lijo apeló también a una
serie de Reportes de Operaciones Sospechosas (ROS)
que le había enviado la Unidad de Información Financiera (UIF) con movimientos
presuntamente irregulares de
cambios de cheques por parte
de las droguerías y las prestadoras de salud.
Las sospechas habían arrancado a partir de los montos
aportados. Los denunciantes
alegaron que no sólo había
preeminencia de empresas
del rubro sanitario, sino que
dentro de ese ámbito había
compañías de mucha mayor
importancia que habían dado
menos dinero a los recaudadores del FpV.
El empresario Gabriel Brito,
expropietario de Global
Pharmacy y protagonista de
la causa por la mafia de los
medicamentos, le dijo a este
diario
que
«hay
más
compañías que hicieron aportes irregulares» y que, según
estimó, saldrán a la luz en el
expediente que investiga
Lijo. Brito fue decisivo en el
avance de las causas ligadas
a los medicamentos y a los
aportes, luego de que confesara ante la Justicia que un
monto que se le atribuyó
como colaborador del FpV
nunca llegó a entregarlo,
aunque figuró de ese modo
en los registros del partido
que luego se impuso en los
comicios generales de 2007.
WikiLeaks: pedido de auxilio a EEUU de un exministro de la Corte
Por: Sebastián Lacunza
El ex ministro de la Corte
Suprema de Justicia Antonio
Boggiano acudió varias veces a la Embajada de Estados
Unidos para solicitar ayuda
en una demanda presentada
por él contra el Gobierno
argentino ante la Comisión
Humanos (CIDH), según se
desprende de un cable de la
delegación estadounidense
emitido el 11 de marzo de
2008 y dado a conocer ahora
por la organización WikiLeaks.
El cable diplomático refleja
que la figura de Boggiano le
despertaba serias dudas al
entonces embajador Earl
Anthony Wayne. Una prueba
de que el juez destituido no
medía bien el grado de recep-
tividad que podía tener su
pedido de auxilio lo da el
hecho de que años antes, no
bien asumió Néstor Kirchner
en la Casa Rosada, la propia
Embajada utilizaba la denominación "mayoría automática" para referirse al grupo de
la Corte Suprema que integraba Boggiano.
El ex juez supremo se había
presentado ante la CIDH en
2006 porque consideraba que
sus derechos habían sido
vulnerados un año antes,
cuando el gobierno impulsó
su desplazamiento por supuestamente fallar contra derecho en las causas conocidas
como Meller, Macri y Dragonetti de Román. Tras aceptar el caso, la CIDH no había
vuelto a dar noticias sobre el
expediente.
El pedido de Boggiano se
había tornado recurrente.
Tres veces había abordado a
Wayne por el mismo tema,
según explica el propio embajador en el texto, pero el
diplomático no estaba muy
dispuesto a actuar.
Ante todo, Wayne reflexionaba que la demanda de
Boggiano ante la CIDH podía no prosperar. "Los derechos individuales de Boggiano no parecen haber sido
violados" y "el impeachment
en su contra no parece causar
enojo público", medita Wayne en dos fragmentos del
cable.
Entre los argumentos que el
ex magistrado transmitió a la
Embajada para declararse
perseguido por el Gobierno
argentino, Wayne menciona
su voto a favor de que "todo
acto de terrorismo debería ser
clasificado como crimen de
lesa humanidad, sea cometido por el Estado o por grupos
guerrilleros". "Entre otras
razones", según el embajador, Boggiano también adujo
un prejuicio de Néstor Kirchner en su contra "por sus
vínculos con la Iglesia Católica y el Opus Dei".
Wayne cierra el cable pidiendo instrucciones al Departamento de Estado sobre qué
responderle al ex ministro
supremo.
EL PAIS (ES) • OPINIÓN • 5/10/2011
Marx, Martí y la Cuba del siglo XXI
RAFAEL ROJAS
En la segunda década del
siglo XXI, la sociedad cubana, cada vez más globalizada
y heterogénea, sigue estando
regida por una Constitución
que en sus artículos 5º y 39º
establece, como ideología de
Estado,
el
marxismoleninismo y el "ideario martiano". Un país cuyo orden
social se vuelve cada vez
más multicultural, como cualquiera del planeta, es gobernado desde las premisas
ideológicas del republicanismo decimonónico de José
Martí y del marxismoleninismo más ortodoxo que
conoció el siglo XX: aquel
que se armó doctrinalmente
durante la Unión Soviética de
Stalin y que colapsó, en la
teoría y en la práctica, desde
1989.
Muy pocos países del mundo
establecen en sus cartas
magnas el principio constitucional de una ideología de
Estado. De hecho, fuera de
las teocracias islámicas, los
únicos que lo hacen son los
cinco países comunistas que
quedan en el planeta: China,
Corea del Norte, Vietnam,
Laos y Cuba.
En China, por ejemplo, el
Partido Comunista asume
como ideología oficial, rectora de la educación y la cultura, el pensamiento marxista-
leninista-maoísta, el cual
presupone que lo que Mao
aportó a dicha doctrina "sintetiza", a su vez, tradiciones
filosóficas, religiosas, políticas y jurídicas nacionales y
milenarias, que se remontan
a las Analectas de Confucio
y el Tao Te Ching de Lao
Tsé.
En el país gobernado por el
principal aliado de Fidel y
Raúl Castro, Venezuela, por
ejemplo, no existe el principio constitucional de una
ideología de Estado. La
Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela,
de 1999, vindica en su preámbulo el "ejemplo histórico
de nuestro Libertador, Simón
Bolívar, y el heroísmo y sacrificios de nuestros antepasados aborígenes y de los
precursores y forjadores de
una patria libre y soberana",
pero en sus artículos 99 y
109 reconoce la "autonomía
de la administración cultural"
y la "autonomía universitaria", con lo cual queda constitucionalmente cancelada la
posibilidad de una ideología
de Estado que rija la vida
intelectual y educativa.
La crítica de ese principio,
típicamente totalitario, no
debería concentrarse en las
limitaciones que, como en
cualquier otro pensador de
los dos últimos siglos, podrían encontrarse en la obra de
Marx o de Martí. A estas
alturas del desarrollo de las
ciencias sociales pocos ponen en duda que sin Marx es
difícil comprender cómo
funciona el capitalismo moderno o que sin sus brillantes
diatribas es casi imposible
articular una crítica seria a
dicho sistema económico.
Las virtudes de José Martí
como político y como organizador de laúltima guerra de
independencia de Cuba o su
talento literario, en poesía y
en prosa, como renovador de
la literatura modernista hispanoamericana, también están fuera de dudas.
La relación, sin embargo,
entre las ideas políticas de
Karl Marx y José Martí es,
cuando menos, problemática,
si se quiere traducir en una
mezcla doctrinal trasmisible
a la ciudadanía por medio de
la educación y la cultura.
Como muchos liberales y
positivistas de su época,
Marx tuvo ideas prejuiciadas
sobre las repúblicas hispanoamericanas y sobre su resistencia a la hegemonía regional de Estados Unidos, tema
central en la obra de Martí.
Este último, por su parte,
dejó escritas sus diferencias
con el socialismo europeo de
su época cuando suscribió la
profecía de Herbert Spencer
de que el mismo se convertiría en una "futura esclavitud", en la que el "hombre,
de ser siervo de sí mismo,
pasaría a ser siervo del Estado", o cuando en su nota a la
muerte de Marx para La Nación de Buenos Aires señaló
que "aunque Marx merecía
honor", porque "se puso del
lado de los débiles", "no
enseñó remedio blanco al
daño" y se dio a la tarea de
"echar a los hombres sobre
los hombres".
Durante el último siglo, algunos de los mejores marxistas cubanos (Diego Vicente
Tejera, Julio Antonio Mella,
Juan Marinello, Mirta Aguirre, Antonio Martínez Bello,
Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, Fernando Martínez Heredia...)
han intentado sobrellevar las
contradicciones ideológicas
entre Marx y Martí. Pero ese
esfuerzo de mixtura no ha
pasado de una solución compensatoria, en la que se toma
del primero su crítica del
capitalismo y su apuesta por
la lucha de clases, y del segundo, su defensa de la soberanía nacional cubana y sus
objeciones al expansionismo
norteamericano. La síntesis
no pasa de una mecánica
compensación porque no hay
manera de extraer un nacio-
nalismo descolonizador de la
obra de Marx, así como no
hay forma de encontrar la
idea del partido único o de la
dictadura del proletariado en
Martí.
Tan curioso es que esta síntesis imposible de Marx y Martí haya producido una vastísima literatura política de
pésima calidad y escaso rigor, en las instituciones culturales de la isla, como que la
misma pase de largo sobre el
punto de posible convergencia entre el alemán y el cubano. Me refiero a lo que, desde distintas cosmovisiones,
compartieron el comunismo
y el republicanismo del siglo
XIX, esto es, una idea homogénea de la comunidad en la
que el ciudadano no posee
más identidad que la que le
asegura la igualdad de derechos. Marx imaginó una sociedad sin diferencias de clases, compuesta por individuos libres y asociados; Martí,
una república con "todos y
para el bien de todos", en la
que la condición de ciudadano no estaría determinada por
identidades raciales, religiosas o sociales, sino por la
dotación universal de derechos.
Marx y Martí fueron animales públicos de la modernidad, que defendieron la libertad de expresión y asociación, la abolición de la esclavitud, la igualdad social y la
separación de la Iglesia y el
Estado. En esa vocación moderna, uno y otro siguen siendo contemporáneos imprescindibles. Pero en la proyección de ciudadanías homogéneas, ambos parecen
afincarse en un tiempo ajeno
al de las comunidades multiculturales del siglo XXI.
nadie se le ocurre agregarlos
al artículo 39º de la Constitución.
Una sociedad como la cubana, cada vez más estratificada desde el punto de vista
económico, regional o social,
y cada vez más envuelta en la
afirmación de alteridades
raciales, generacionales, religiosas, sexuales, genéricas y
migratorias, encuentra pocas
respuestas en el pensamiento
de un comunista europeo o
un republicano caribeño del
siglo XIX. Fernando Ortiz y
su teoría de la transculturación tendrían más que decir a
la Cuba del siglo XXI y a
Lo objetable, por tanto, no es
ese desencuentro histórico,
sino el principio constitucional que garantiza que algunos
pensadores y sus obras integren una ideología de Estado.
Si mañana el Gobierno cubano rompiera definitivamente
con la tradición soviética y
redefiniera su marxismo,
acercándose a cualquiera de
las muchas corrientes críticas
del mismo producidas en
Europa o América en el último medio siglo, tal vez tendría mayores posibilidades
de dialogar con la heterogeneidad que se reproduce en la
isla, pero nunca podría asegurar que la complejidad
social no lo rebase en la práctica diaria. Por algo Cuba,
símbolo según algunos del
"socialismo del siglo XXI",
está al margen del debate
constitucional sobre multiculturalismo, plurinacionalidad y democracia que tiene
lugar en la izquierda latinoamericana actual.
Rafael Rojas es historiador
cubano.
EL PERUANO (SP) • INTERNACIONAL • 5/10/2011
Morales acusa a la Policía de represión a indígenas
Asegura que existe "una mano negra" detrás de los hechos
[La Paz, Efe] El presidente
boliviano, Evo Morales, culpó ayer a la Policía de haber
reprimido a los indígenas de
la Amazonía para perjudicarlo, luego de que acusara de lo
mismo en las últimas semanas a personas y organismos
nacionales e internacionales."Creo que hay algunos
oficiales de la Policía que no
nos quieren, maltratan a unos
indígenas para echarnos la
culpa", señaló Morales sobre
el operativo policial que disolvió brutalmente en la Amazonía el pasado 25 de setiembre una marcha de indígenas que se opone a la construcción de una carretera a
través de una reserva natural.El mandatario hizo un
discurso en la localidad de
Taraco, en el departamento
de La Paz, donde insistió en
que él jamás instruyó ese
operativo que ha provocado
una ola de reacciones en su
contra y la renuncia de dos
ministros, un viceministro y
otros altos cargos.En otras
declaraciones realizadas el
lunes,
Morales
también
señaló que hay "una mano
negra" detrás de los hechos e
incluso acusó a la Policía de
filtrar las imágenes de la represión a la prensa para que
la difusión dañe a su Gobierno. Acusaciones En las últimas semanas, Morales y otros funcionarios han acusado también a diversas personas e instituciones de confa-
bularse a propósito del creciente conflicto con las organizaciones indígenas.Entre los
acusados han estado las asociaciones de las etnias, las
organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG), algunas
exautoridades de su Gobierno y exmilitantes del oficialismo, la derecha, los medios
de comunicación, la embajada de Estados Unidos y, en
concreto, a la agencia de cooperación de ese país, USAID.El mandatario también
ha defendido la construcción
de la carretera a través del
Territorio Indígena Parque
Nacional Isiboro Sécure
(Tipnis) con el argumento de
que es una oportunidad contra la pobreza de las etnias
que viven en esa región del
centro del país.Los líderes
indígenas se oponen frontalmente a la carretera porque
aseguran que esa reserva
natural, de 1.2 millones de
hectáreas, será invadida por
madereros y campesinos
productores de coca, planta
usada en Bolivia sobre todo
para fabricar cocaína. Los
indígenas que realizan la
marcha, que hoy se encontraba a más de 250 kilómetros de La Paz, quieren llegar
a esta ciudad para presionar a
Morales hasta conseguir que
apruebe una ley que vete
definitivamente la construc-
ción de la ruta por el Tipnis.
Elecciones garantizadas La
columna llegará en las próximas horas al pueblo de
Sapecho, tras recorrer 10
kilómetros desde Palos Blancos, donde los indígenas
permanecieron, señaló el
presidente del Tipnis, Fernando Vargas.La movilización arribará días antes del 16
de octubre cuando se celebrará la elección de los magistrados de los cuatro órganos
del Poder Judicial, entre
ellos el Tribunal Supremo y
el Constitucional.El mandatario señaló que hasta ahora
la elección está garantizada,
pero también apuntó que
aplazarla no depende de él,
sino del Tribunal Supremo
Electoral.Para hacer una demostración de respaldo al
mandatario ante los amazónicos, los sectores sociales
oficialistas convocaron a una
movilización para el 12 de
octubre, lo que ha sido calificado por la oposición como
una "contramarcha" con fines
"antidemocráticos" y contra
los derechos de los indígenas.Al respecto, Vargas dijo
que los indígenas no llegarán
a La Paz "a buscar enemigos" sino a reclamar sus derechos.
EL PERUANO (SP) • POLÍTICA • 5/10/2011
Inmunidad
El legislador y segundo vicepresidente de la República,
Omar Chehade, presentó ayer
una iniciativa legislativa que
propone modificar la Constitución Política y eliminar
completamente la inmunidad
parlamentaria por considerar
que se ha convertido en un
escudo contra la justicia. "La
inmunidad parlamentaria se
ha constituido en un meca-
nismo eficaz a la hora de
impedir detenciones por delitos comunes y resulta siendo
un escudo frente a la ley y la
justicia", dijo.
Constituirán empresas en solo 48 horas
Notarios esperan visto bueno del Indecopi para usar firma digital
El reto del actual Gobierno
es alcanzar el mayor desarrollo con inclusión social.
Desde la labor notarial, ¿es
posible coadyuvar en dicho
objetivo?–Sabemos que esto
es un tema prioritario en la
nueva gestión. Dentro del
notariado hemos implementado diversas acciones para
coadyuvar en dicho objetivo,
entre ellas, tenemos el sistema digital de Constitución
de empresas en línea en 72
horas, que facilita la creación
de empresas, en forma directa y vía web, en las notarías
de Lima Metropolitana, Callao, San Martín y Lambayeque. Este servicio, que beneficia principalmente a la My-
pe, con miras al acceso a
créditos, ha permitido desde
2008 a la fecha, la formalización de más 19 mil empresas.¿En qué consiste el servicio?–Está adscrito al sistema
de Constitución de empresas
en línea de la Presidencia del
Consejo de Ministros, y está
destinado a modernizar y
descentralizar el Estado mediante la simplificación de
trámites administrativos. El
programa facilita la Constitución de una empresa en 72
horas, al realizar la mayoría
de los pasos a través del internet. Así, se reducen los
errores en la digitalización de
documentos, se minimiza su
falsificación y adulteración, y
disminuyen los costos asociados a abogados y tramitadores, entre otros.Pero buscan
reducirlo hasta 48 horas, ¿no
es cierto?–Sí. Estamos desarrollando una nueva versión
informática del programa, de
modo que la Constitución de
empresas se realice en tan
solo dos días. El objetivo es
que con el uso de la firma
digital, se pueda suprimir el
envío del parte notarial o la
escritura en físico a la notaría, que tarda 24 horas. De tal
forma que el Registro Público solo reciba la escritura
pública por vía electrónica
acompañada de la firma digital del notario. Esperamos la
conformidad del Indecopi
para implementar el sistema
con el uso de la firma electrónica.¿Las municipalidades
están interesadas en el programa?–Todo empezó con el
convenio suscrito con la Municipalidad de Santa Anita
para optimizar la formalización de las Mype en ese dis-
trito. Así, el usuario, por intermedio de la comuna, recibe información y es derivado
a algunas de las notarías asignadas al distrito, donde
podrá acceder a un programa
de Constitución de empresas
en línea. Esta experiencia ha
generado buenos resultados y
ya empieza a despertar el
interés de otras comunas como Surco, Surquillo, San
Martín de Porres e incluso
Lima Metropolitana. Ahora
queremos ampliar este sistema a otros actos jurídicos
como la otorgación de poderes.
Control y fiscalización¿Qué
acciones de control realizan?–Nuestras acciones de
control son permanentes,
tenemos la obligación de
realizar inspecciones anuales,
casi como una auditoría. Ya
hubo sanciones para corregir
ciertas deficiencias en el ejercicio de la función. También hubo sanciones por razones de condenas. Según
nuestra legislación, si algún
notario tiene antecedentes
penales, cesa automáticamente en la función. Se identificaron notarios que omitieron dicha información, procediéndose al cese inmediato.
Estamos siendo mucho más
estrictos al respecto, porque
somos los depositarios de la
fe pública y quien la incumple no puede tener una sanción leve.
Nuevas plazas¿Existe capacidad para una fuerte dinámica de nombramientos de más
notarios?Este año se han incorporado en Lima más o
menos 15 notarios a diversas
plazas convocadas. Si bien la
ley habla de un número de
notarios en relación directa
con el aspecto demográfico,
no necesariamente es así. Por
ejemplo, en Carabayllo pese
a tener casi un millón de pobladores y dos notarios, hace
poco renunció uno de ellos
porque no existe mucha actividad notarial. Entonces, hay
sectores que si bien son densos en población, no tienen
contratación notarial. Mientras que, hay otros lugares
donde ya rebalsó el número
de notarios, como Miraflores
y San Isidro.¿Dónde se necesitan?–La prioridad deben ser
las provincias. El Consejo
del Notariado está abocado a
eso y nos ha solicitado información sobre el número
de plazas disponibles y los
concursos
recientemente
convocados a efectos de tomar alguna decisión al respecto.
Mayores competenciasLos
notarios solicitan atender el
arbitraje y el matrimonio
notarial, ¿por qué confiarles
estos asuntos?–Porque contamos con la confianza de la
ciudadanía. Nosotros atendemos hasta 13 asuntos no
contenciosos, como la separación convencional y divorcio ulterior, la certificación
de las uniones de hecho, la
convocatoria a la junta ordinaria anual, si no se hubiese
realizado, o la junta general
de accionistas, entre otros.
Vamos a insistir en el Congreso con nuestro proyecto
para realizar matrimonios
notariales, tal como sucede
en otros países donde funciona muy bien. Igualmente,
estamos capacitados para
realizar el arbitraje, al ser
profesionales del derecho y
actuar siempre con imparcialidad, con lo que se aportaría
una herramienta altamente
efectiva en la solución de
conflictos.
Legalización de firmasEn los
últimos meses, con la utilización del sistema biométrico
de lectura y la verificación de
huellas dactilares, por parte
de los notarios de Lima, se
ha evitado la suplantación de
personas en un 100%, informó Romero Valdivieso, quien agregó que estas acciones
también han sido fortalecidas
con el apoyo del Reniec.Mediante un acuerdo entre
ambas entidades, las notarías
pueden acceder a la base de
datos de todas las personas
para verificar la identidad de
quienes solicitan sus servicios. "El problema es que
dicho servicio puede resultar
muy oneroso para las provincias, por eso se solicitará
reducir los costos o hacerlo
de forma gratuita, como ocurre con la judicatura", di-
jo.Otra dificultad es que el
servicio solo está implementado para actos protocolares,
como escrituras públicas,
pero existen otros actos no
protocolares, como la legalización de la firma, que también requieren dicho control,
afirmó el notario, quien adelantó que solicitarán atender
esta situación.
Ausencia de una carrera para
la profesiónLa función notarial cuenta con una nueva
legislación, la cual fue inmediatamente observada por el
colegio, ¿cómo avanzan las
enmiendas?–Cuando se promulga la Ley del Notariado
con el D. Leg. 1049, esta fue
objeto de una acción de inconstitucionalidad porque
teníamos reparos a varias de
sus disposiciones. El Tribunal Constitucional declaró la
inconstitucionalidad de algunas, pero igual nos preocupa el que se haya eliminado lo que conocíamos como
la carrera notarial, que existe
en todas las legislaciones de
corte latino. Los notarios de
lugares muy apartados sabían
que podían ir ascendiendo
hasta llegar a la capital de la
provincia, del departamento
y de la República, como una
legítima aspiración. Esto ya
no existe.¿Observarán eso?–
Lo estamos preparando en el
ámbito del colegio. Otra observación es que nuestra ley
sigue hablando del instrumento público, cuando esta
nominación ya fue superada,
porque el instrumento es el
documento escrito, y nosotros cada vez desarrollamos
más el soporte digital, entonces, lo apropiado es hablar de
documentos
notariales.¿El
cese de notarios por límite de
edad quedó bajo vigilancia
del gremio?–Claro, eso fue
uno de los temas cuestionados. La ley sigue vigente, en
cuanto a que cuando el notario no tiene capacidad cesa
automáticamente, esa es una
vigilancia constante del colegio. Todos los años pedimos
a los notarios un certificado
médico de capacidad mental,
que no siempre está relacionado con la edad.
EL PERUANO (SP) • POLÍTICA • 5/10/2011
Políticas públicas serán adecuadas a los DD HH
Buscan realizar una reingeniería que destaque estos derechos
El ministro de Justicia, Francisco Eguiguren, señaló ayer
que el objetivo del Gobierno
y de su portafolio es que los
derechos humanos se plasmen en la formulación de
políticas públicas de inclusión social."Con esta perspectiva, bajo este nuevo concep-
to de derechos humanos,
creemos que se puede contribuir a que la ciudadanía tome
conciencia de que su cumplimiento y realización son
responsabilidad del Estado,
pero también un compromiso
de la sociedad, que tiene que
ser el principal beneficiario
de una política de derechos
humanos",
aseveró.Eguiguren consideró que
el Consejo Nacional de Derechos Humanos, por su
composición, debe ser el
organismo que cumpla un rol
rector, "para que las políticas
públicas se adecuen a estos
estándares de derechos humanos"."Esperamos que muy
pronto el Congreso apruebe
la ley modificatoria que nos
convierta en el Ministerio de
Justicia y Derechos Humanos, tras lo cual podremos
realizar una reingeniería de la
institución que potencie y
coloque en el lugar que esperamos a los derechos humanos", indicó.
Carga procesalPor su parte,
el secretario ejecutivo del
consejo, José Burneo Labrín,
comentó la necesidad de que
se elabore el Plan Nacional
de Derechos Humanos 20112016, y que el mismo sea
conocido y difundido."Se
debe aplicar un conjunto de
actividades que traduzcan
que los derechos humanos
beneficien a todos y no se
excluya a nadie", enfatizó.A
su turno, el procurador supranacional, Luis Alberto
Salgado, comentó que el Perú es uno de los países con
mayor carga procesal en el
Sistema Interamericano de
Derechos Humanos.El Consejo Nacional de Derechos
Humanos está integrado por
los ministerios de Relaciones
Exteriores, Interior, Defensa,
Educación, Mujer y Desarrollo Social, Salud, Trabajo y
Promoción del Empleo, Energía y Minas, Ambiente y
Justicia, que lo preside; Poder Judicial, Ministerio Público y la Presidencia del
Consejo de Ministros.
Sesión ordinariaEl ministro
Eguiguren participó en la
primera sesión ordinaria del
Consejo Nacional de Derechos Humanos, donde además estuvieron presentes el
titular del Poder Judicial,
César San Martín; y el fiscal
de la Nación, José Peláez
Bardales.También los viceministros de Gestión Pedagógica, José Martín Vegas;
de Políticas para la Defensa,
Lizandro Maycock; de Orden
Interior, Luis Otárola.El
Consejo Nacional de Derechos Humanos cuenta además con la Defensoría del
Pueblo y la Conferencia Episcopal, entre otros.
EL PERUANO (SP) • ACTUALIDAD • 5/10/2011
Respaldan iniciativa de crear un registro virtual de robos
Alcalde de Pueblo Libre sustentó su proyecto, al que consideró más que viable
La creación de un registro
nacional virtual de delitos
contra el patrimonio, propuesta por el alcalde de Pueblo
Libre, Rafael Santos, recibió
el apoyo de la mayoría de los
integrantes de la Comisión
Especial de Seguridad Ciudadana, que trabajarán en su
perfeccionamiento para presentarla, luego, como una
iniciativa
multipartidaria,
según comentó el titular de
este grupo de trabajo, Renzo
Reggiardo.El burgomaestre,
junto con la asesora Virginia
Ibarra, expusieron el proyecto del registro virtual que
busca acumular los actos
delictivos por robo para luego sancionar con conocimiento de causa. En él se mostraría -en cada comisaría del
país- la conducta de los infractores. Perfeccionar iniciativa El congresista Luis Iberico (APGC) destacó la participación del alcalde y dijo
que los delitos contra el patrimonio incrementan la inseguridad. A su turno, el parlamentario José León (AP)
calificó de positiva la medida, pero pidió la participación directa de la policía.El
legislador Teófilo Gamarra
(NGP) propuso perfeccionar
la propuesta incluyendo la
participación integral de instituciones relacionadas con el
tema, como la PNP, Poder
Judicial, Ministerio Público
y el Registro Nacional de
Identificación y Estado Civil
(Reniec).El exministro del
Interior, Gino Costa, en su
calidad de directivo de la
asociación civil Ciudad Nuestra, expuso sobre violencia
y delincuencia en el Perú y
recomendó la creación de un
Observatorio Nacional de
Seguridad Ciudadana que
tendrá como objetivo recoger, sistematizar, analizar e
integrar el sistema de seguridad (Policía, Fiscalía, Poder
Judicial, Inpe, Mindes, y
otros).
Desacato a Corte Interamericana evita ingreso a Mercosur
La alerta viene de Paraguay, el último país que falta por aceptar la adhesión
EL UNIVERSAL
La incorporación de Venezuela al Mercado Común del
Sur (Mercosur) luce cada vez
más lejana, al menos así lo
advirtieron funcionarios paraguayanos, los cuales ayer
dejaron en claro que si las
autoridades nacionales insisten en desacatar abiertamente, otra vez, a la Corte Interamericana de Derechos
Humanos entonces ellos no
darán su visto bueno a la
adhesión del país al bloque
regional. La alerta la lanzaron el expresidente de la
Cámara de Diputados y el
vicepresidente
del
país
sureño, Enrique Salim y Federico Franco, respectivamente; quienes este martes
recibieron al exalcalde de
Chacao, Leopoldo López, el
cual se encuentra de gira por
los Estados del Mercosur
explicando el fallo del tribunal regional que ordenó que
se le permita postularse a las
elecciones de 2012 y la actitud de los funcionarios venezolanos, los cuales ya han
anunciado que no la cumplirán.
"Para nosotros es un requisito indispensable para el ingreso al Mercosur el respeto
de los derechos humanos",
afirmó Buzarquis, reseñó el
comunicado de Voluntad
Popular. quien agregó: "Hemos visto con preocupación
cómo en reiteradas oportunidades el Estado venezolano
ha vulnerado los Derechos
Humanos de decenas de ciudadanos como es el caso de
los presos políticos venezolanos que desde Paraguay
hemos denunciado. Ahora,
con el caso de Leopoldo López, el Gobierno del presidente Hugo Chávez tiene la
oportunidad de colocarse del
lado de la democracia y por
ello esperamos que, en respeto a esos valores bolivarianos
que tanto profesa, Venezuela
acate sin titubeos la sentencia
y le permita a López medirse
en las elecciones".
En 2005, el primer mandatario suscribió junto a sus colegas del bloque regional una
declaración donde se comprometía a fortalecer tanto a
la Corte como a la Comisión
Humanos. Sin embargo, en
los últimos años ha amenazado en varias ocasiones con
retirarse de esas instancias.
México respalda a la Corte
El Tribunal Supremo de Justicia cada día se queda más
solo en la región con su posición de que los fallos de la
Corte Interamericana se aplican en el país, solo después
de que él las haya revisado.
La Suprema Corte de México en julio pasado declaró
que ella "no es competente
para analizar, revisar, calificar o decidir si una sentencia" dictada por el juzgado
regional y que lo único que
puede hacer "es acatar y reconocer la totalidad" de la
misma.
Por último, el máximo organismo judicial azteca resolvió que dichos dictámenes
son "vinculantes" para todos
los jueces de ese país. JFA
Reunión en Trabajo para destrabar el bloqueo de Camioneros en Ezeiza
y Aeroparque
Los trabajadores exigen que se acate un fallo de la Justicia que benefició al gremio de
Moyano; los encargados de la logística impidieron la llegada del catering y complicaron
a las aerolíneas durante todo el día
El gremio de Camioneros
realiza un bloqueo en las
terminales de Ezeiza y Aeroparque. La medida pone en
dificultad la operatoria de los
vuelos, ya que los empleados
son los encargados de la logística del catering e impiden
la llegada de mercadería.
Desde Ezeiza, informaron a
LA NACION que hasta ahora los vuelos no presentan
demoras, ya que se paliando
la dificultad con personal de
aprovisionamiento. Adviertieron que los problemas podrían llegar a la noche, cuando están programados más
vuelos internacionales.
Para las 14 fue convocada
una reunión en la sede que el
ministerio de Trabajo de Callao al 100, para destrabar el
conflicto, a la que se espera
que asista Pablo Moyano.
Según confirmó el sindicato
mediante un comunicado,
130 trabajadores de la empresa Gate Gourmet exigen
ser encuadrados en el convenio del gremio de Hugo Moyano, y continuarán con la
medida de fuerza "hasta que
la empresa cumpla con el
acuerdo".
"Exigimos que acaten la sentencia judicial favorable a los
trabajadores de catering aéreo, para que pasen a Camioneros", señaló uno de los
delegados del gremio LA
NACION.
El sindicalista indicó que,
por la protesta, no se están
brindando los servicios de
logística y se bloquea la entrega de mercadería a los
aviones.
Ayer, un miembro de la Cámara de Apelaciones del
Trabajo firmó un fallo que
favorece al sindicato de Camioneros en la disputa por la
encuadración gremial de más
de cien trabajadores del gremio de Alimentación.
La sentencia beneficiaba al
gremio de Hugo Moyano,
quien exigía que los trabajadores de Gate Gourmet Argentina, una empresa que
brinda servicio de catering
aéreo, pasaran al gremio de
Camioneros.
La defensa del gremio de
Alimentación ayer pidió que
se anule el fallo de la Cámara
y presentó un recurso extraordinario para ir a la Corte
Suprema.
Roland Dumas votera Hollande
Roland Dumas, ancien ministre des Affaires étrangères de
François Mitterrand, a annoncé ce mercredi qu il voterait François Hollande à la
primaire socialiste. Interrogé
au Grand Journal de Canal
sur le fait de savoir s il était
"toujours de gauche", il a dit
l être "depuis 1942". "Vous
votez pour qui aux primaires
?", le relance-t-on. "François
Hollande", répond Roland
Dumas. Ministre des Affaires
étrangères de 1984 à 1986 et
de 1988 à 1993, Roland Dumas a présidé le Conseil
Constitutionnel à partir de
1995 avant d en démissionner en 2000 après avoir été
accusé d avoir favorisé l embauche de son ancienne
maîtresse, Christine DeviersJoncour, pour des salaires de
complaisance dans des sociétés d Elf. Condamné en
première instance dans cette
affaire à six mois ferme et
deux ans avec sursis, il a été
relaxé en appel en 2003.
STF • TSE •
Regras do processo eleitoral de 2012 não podem mais ser mudadas
O objetivo, de acordo com o
TSE, é evitar mudanças de
última hora motivadas por
conveniências políticas (casuísmo eleitoral) e preservar
a segurança do processo eleitoral. Da Redação, com Agência Brasil Brasília – O
Tribunal Superior Eleitoral
(TSE) informou ontem ( 4)
que toda e qualquer lei sancionada este ano que alterar o
processo eleitoral não valerá
para as eleições de 2012. O
chamado princípio da anterioridade eleitoral está previsto
no Artigo 16 da Constituição
Federal e entra em vigor na
próxima sexta-feira (7). O
objetivo, de acordo com o
a segurança do processo eleitoral. O mesmo ocorreu em
2006 com o fim da chamada
verticalização, princípio in-
troduzido por meio da Emenda Constitucional 52, no
qual as coligações partidárias
não eram mais obrigadas a se
repetir nos âmbitos nacional,
estadual, distrital ou municipal. Em outubro do mesmo
ano, o Supremo Tribunal
Federal (STF) julgou procedente a Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade
(ADI)
3685, reconhecendo que,
como foi promulgada em
março de 2006, a Emenda 52
havia afrontado o princípio
da anterioridade eleitoral.
Portanto, o teor da emenda
não deveria valer para as
eleições daquele ano. Com
isso, as regras da verticalização só passaram a valer a
partir do pleito de 2010. Com
a chamada Lei da Ficha
Limpa, não foi diferente.
Sancionada em junho do ano
passado, a nova lei estabelecia novas hipóteses de inelegibilidades e chegou a ser
aplicada pelo TSE nas eleições de 2010. Porém, o STF,
em março deste ano, ao julgar o Recurso Extraordinário
633.703, concordou que a
norma afrontava o Artigo 16
da Constituição. Por esse
motivo, o entendimento foi o
de que a Lei da Ficha Limpa
não teve validade no pleito
de 2010. Sancionada em setembro de 2009, a Lei
12.034, que alterou diversos
dispositivos nas leis eleitorais brasileiras, conhecida
como minirreforma eleitoral,
teve validade no pleito posterior ao ano da sanção. Isso
porque a sanção ocorreu
pouco mais de um ano antes
das eleições de 2010, o que
permitiu que as alterações no
processo eleitoral previstas
na lei pudessem ser aplicadas
integralmente no pleito do
ano passado.
STF • TSE •
Regras do processo eleitoral de 2012 não podem mais ser mudadas
O objetivo, de acordo com o
a segurança do processo eleitoral. Da Redação, com Agência Brasil Brasília – O
Tribunal Superior Eleitoral
(TSE) informou ontem ( 4)
que toda e qualquer lei sancionada este ano que alterar o
processo eleitoral não valerá
para as eleições de 2012. O
chamado princípio da anterioridade eleitoral está previsto
no Artigo 16 da Constituição
Federal e entra em vigor na
próxima sexta-feira (7). O
objetivo, de acordo com o
a segurança do processo eleitoral. O mesmo ocorreu em
2006 com o fim da chamada
verticalização, princípio in-
troduzido por meio da Emenda Constitucional 52, no
qual as coligações partidárias
não eram mais obrigadas a se
repetir nos âmbitos nacional,
estadual, distrital ou municipal. Em outubro do mesmo
ano, o Supremo Tribunal
Federal (STF) julgou procedente a Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade
(ADI)
3685, reconhecendo que,
como foi promulgada em
março de 2006, a Emenda 52
havia afrontado o princípio
da anterioridade eleitoral.
Portanto, o teor da emenda
não deveria valer para as
eleições daquele ano. Com
isso, as regras da verticalização só passaram a valer a
partir do pleito de 2010. Com
a chamada Lei da Ficha
Limpa, não foi diferente.
Sancionada em junho do ano
passado, a nova lei estabelecia novas hipóteses de inelegibilidades e chegou a ser
aplicada pelo TSE nas eleições de 2010. Porém, o STF,
em março deste ano, ao julgar o Recurso Extraordinário
633.703, concordou que a
norma afrontava o Artigo 16
da Constituição. Por esse
motivo, o entendimento foi o
de que a Lei da Ficha Limpa
não teve validade no pleito
de 2010. Sancionada em setembro de 2009, a Lei
12.034, que alterou diversos
dispositivos nas leis eleitorais brasileiras, conhecida
como minirreforma eleitoral,
teve validade no pleito posterior ao ano da sanção. Isso
porque a sanção ocorreu
pouco mais de um ano antes
das eleições de 2010, o que
permitiu que as alterações no
processo eleitoral previstas
na lei pudessem ser aplicadas
integralmente no pleito do
ano passado.
ONU pedirá que se pesquise assassinato de jornalistas em Honduras
Tegucigalpa, 5 out (Prensa
Latina)
O relator das Nações Unidas
sobre a Liberdade de Expressão, Frank La Rue, solicitará
autorização ao governo hondurenho para pesquisar a
morte de 16 jornalistas ocorridas desde o golpe de estado
de 2009. O servidor público
anunciou à imprensa que
amanhã iniciará gerenciamentos ante as autoridades
para que lhe seja permitido
realizar uma visita oficial de
investigação sobre os comunicadores assassinados.
Honduras ocupa o segundo
lugar em homicídios de profissionais da imprensa, depois do México, e isto é "um
fato crítico, condenável e
inaceitável", assinalou.
Também considerou que
conhecer a verdade é um
mecanismo para conseguir a
reconciliação entre os hondu-
renhos, e que em direitos
humanos o acesso à informação é um pilar fundamental.
O porta-voz disse que é importante o direito das vítimas
de saber a verdade e que se
prenda e sancione aos responsáveis.
A este respeito, elogiou o
trabalho das duas comissões
da verdade integradas no país
para pesquisar os fatos que
seguiram ao golpe de estado
contra o ex-presidente Manuel Zelaya em 2009.
No entanto, esclareceu que
para conseguir uma verdadeira reconciliação deverão ter
em conta as recomendações
emitidas pelas ditas comissões.
La Rue destacou o direito do
povo a estar informado, sob
um esquema de pluralismo,
diversidade e absoluta liberdade dos meios.
Por esta causa criticou as
recentes declarações do presidente Porfírio Lobo, quem
disse que alguns setores pretendem desprestigiar a Honduras se amparando em denúncias a violações dos direitos humanos.
O servidor público da ONU
encontra-se no país centroamericano por motivo da
oficina "Impunidade, liberdade de expressão e justiça",
organizada pela Agência de
Cooperação Holandesa (Hivos) e outros organismos
afins, e que começará hoje
em Tegucigalpa.
A reunião está auspiciada,
ademais, por outras instituições como o Centro pela
Justiça e o Direito Internacional, a Associação de Juízes pela Democracia, e a
Equipe de Reflexão, Investigação e Comunicação.
Conservative party: a touch of the cat
The home secretary should be confronting her party s prejudices, not flattering them
It has been many years since
a Conservative home secretary – or a Tory shadow home secretary – has had much
to fear from the once terrifying annual ordeal of the
party conference law and
order speech. For years, the
debate was an X-rated political event. It required the
party s home affairs person
to set aside any personal scruple and throw political red
meat to the angry hang- emand-flog- em lions in the
conference hall. These days,
the law and order session –
they don t do debates at Tory
conference any more – is a
shadow of its former self.
Yet it is still a tricky assignment even for a generally
safe pair of political hands
like Theresa May, as yesterday in Manchester proved.
So there is something fitting
about the fact that yesterday
the home secretary was humbled not by a lion but by a
pussy cat.
Mrs May has only herself to
blame. She arrived in Manchester telling the Sunday
Telegraph that she would like
to scrap the human rights
Act, a daft policy which discredits the Conservative
party. She then used her conference speech yesterday to
pander to the party s prejudices against the act – prejudices which are rooted in antiEuropean instincts at least as
much as in opposition to
human rights as such – in a
passage of such shallowness
that she should be ashamed
of herself. "We all know the
stories about the human rights Act … " she started,
before proceeding to recycle
a classic piece of anti-Human
Rights Act mythology: the
claim that the courts refused
to deport an illegal immigrant because he had a pet
cat. "I am not making this
up," Mrs May assured the
conference. But, unfortunately for her, this was exactly
what she was doing. She was
drawing on rightwing newspaper stories rather than the
facts about the court judgment. It was an undignified
episode. Doubtless some
lowly speechwriter has already been handed a glass of
whisky and a loaded revolver
for embarrassing the home
secretary. But it is Mrs May s
misjudgment that matters in
the end. At the very least, the
woman who once bravely
coined that phrase about "the
nasty party" ought to learn
her own lesson. She should
be confronting her party s
prejudices, not flattering
them.
Mrs May s problems over the
cat are nevertheless symptomatic of a wider disjunction
in the coalition government s
law and order policies. Thirty
years ago, the Tory party s
sole concern in home affairs
was to dominate the political
argument by reiterating authoritarian solutions and ever-higher spending on police and prisons. In recent years, though, significant parts
of the party have gone on a
different and often welcome
journey. This has partly involved the rediscovery of the
Tories own liberal and libertarian traditions. But it has
also meant facing up to the
unsustainable financial costs
of the strong state policies of
the Thatcher and the New
Labour eras. Sadly, this is a
journey which Labour is still
reluctant to make. In a politically skilful performance in
the hall yesterday, the justice
secretary Kenneth Clarke
boldly told the conference
that it was no longer possible
to follow "the old brain-free
policy of throwing money at
the problem". It is not just
the Tories, but Labour, who
need to listen to that message.
The Tory party remains conflicted about many aspects of
the justice and home affairs
agenda. It likes the rule of
law. But it dislikes the judges, especially foreign ones.
It likes the idea of fundamental freedoms. But it squirms
about conceding them to people it does not approve of. It
thinks of itself as the party of
the police. But it finds the
police resistant to its reforms
and cutbacks. It wants to be a
more multiracial party. But it
craves the stronger immigration controls which were at
the heart of Mrs May s speech yesterday. Mr Clarke,
quoting Iain Macleod yesterday, reminded the party that
it had work to do. But, as
yesterday in Manchester
showed, the Tories remain
deeply ambivalent about
what that work should be.
Syria attacks media fabrications by showing beheaded woman alive on
TV
Zainab al-Hosni went missing in July and her body was returned to her family and buried. Now Damascus says she is alive
Ian Black
Syria s government has sought to score a propaganda
coup with the mysterious TV
appearance of a young woman who had been reported
to have been beheaded and
mutilated by state security
agents.
The macabre story was revived on Tuesday when the
main state TV channel screened a brief interview with a
woman claiming to be Zainab al-Hosni.
International human rights
groups and Syrian opposition
activists said Hosni had been
killed after being detained in
July.
The station described the
interview as intended to discredit foreign "media fabrications".
Hosni s family confirmed
that it was her in the film, but
they could not say whether
she was alive or had in fact
been killed after the interview. The episode thus ended
up posing troubling new
questions.
Last month Amnesty International described Hosni, 18, as
the first woman to have died
in Syrian state custody, after
her mutilated body was discovered by her family at the
military hospital in her home
town of Homs, having apparently been tortured and partially dismembered.
In the interview, a black-clad
young woman who identified
herself as Hosni and flashed
her identity card said she had
run away from home in July
because her brothers had
abused her.
She said that her family did
not know that she was alive
and asked her mother for
forgiveness.
"I am very much alive and I
have opted to tell the truth
because I am planning to get
married in the future and
have kids who I want to be
registered," she told her interviewer, calmly but slightly
hesitantly.
Relatives confirmed that the
woman they saw on TV was
indeed her, said Nadim
Houry of human rights
Watch.
"They were relieved to know
their sister is alive, or hope
that she is still alive. At the
same time, they are angry
and confused because they
feel they have been tricked.
All this confusion should
highlight the need for the
Syrian authorities to allow
human rights observers into
the country.
"This is a strange story that
just got stranger. Let s establish some facts. There is a
decapitated body of a woman
that was buried by the Hosni
family. Who is this dead girl
who was buried?"
Amnesty said in a statement:
"If the body was not that of
Zainab al-Hosni, then clearly
the Syrian authorities need to
disclose whose it was.
"We are trying to determine
the exact circumstances of
the case and will release
comprehensive information
as soon as we can."
The story may have been an
error or, some suspect, a hoax perpetrated by Syria to
embarrass media, opposition
and human rights groups
who have been reporting on
President Bashar al-Assad s
brutal crackdown: nearly
3,000 people have been killed in six months.
"I wouldn t put it past the
Syrian authorities to have
fabricated the whole thing,"
said a western diplomat.
"They can be cynical and
manipulative to an extraordinary degree."
News of the interview was
quickly tweeted by the press
attache at the Syrian embassy
in London.
Nabil al-Halabi of the Lebanese Institution for Democracy and human rights told
al-Jazeera: "Syrian TV represents a state which is killing
its own people."
Maysaloon, a Syrian blogger,
commented: "First, the body
her family received is still a
person who has been viciously murdered, or at least her
body has, and she must have
a family somewhere.
"Second, the date on which
she was paraded on television was the day the UN security council draft resolution
was to be voted on. Like Iran, the Syrian regime is remarkably sensitive to the
political calendar … So,
wherever, and whoever, Zainab al-Hosni is, many things
don t add up about the way
this whole story developed."
The Damascus government
routinely blames the unrest
on a foreign conspiracy and
accuses the international me-
dia of spreading lies – although most journalists are
banned from the country, and
the few who are there operate
under crippling restrictions.
State media allots much of its
time and resources to dismissing what it says as media
fabrications and lies.
Human Rights Watch had
said Hosni vanished in late
July and that the Syrian authorities returned her "dismembered body" to her family on 17 September.
It said that the killing and
mutilation of the woman "highlights the need … for an
international
investigation
into rampant killings and
torture in Syria".
The Syrian human rights
Network, a loyalist organisation, demanded an apology
for Hosni and the Syrian people.
Syrian Woman Says Reports of Her Death Were Mistaken
By NADA BAKRI
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The
family of a Syrian woman
who was reported to have
been killed by armed men
loyal to the government of
President Bashar al-Assad,
with her body later found
decapitated, skinned and armless, said Wednesday that
they now thought she was
still alive.
The woman, Zainab alHosni, 18, a resident of the
restive city of Homs in central Syria, quickly became a
symbol of the uprising against Mr. Assad and his government’s brutal crackdown
on antigovernment activists.
Ms. Hosni’s picture was carried in demonstrations in
Syria in recent weeks, and
sympathizers across the Arab
world held vigils for the
woman who came to be
known as “the flower of Syria” and who was thought to
be the first woman to have
died in detention.
But on Tuesday night, Ms.
Hosni appeared on Syrian
state television, dressed in
black and her face uncovered, flashing her identification card and saying that she
was alive and that she planned to marry and have chil-
dren. She said that her family
did not know her whereabouts and that she had run
away from home and stayed
with a relative because her
brothers had been abusing
her.
Amnesty International and
human rights Watch said
last month in statements that
Ms. Hosni’s mother had
found her body in a morgue
after Ms. Hosni vanished in
late July. The organizations
said that the mother had come across the body while
looking for her son Mohammed, a protester who was
reported to have been arrested on Sept. 10. His body had
multiple gunshot wounds to
the head and chest when his
mother claimed it, human
rights Watch said.
“We have no doubt that the
woman who appeared on TV
is my sister Zainab,” said
Youssef al-Hosni, a brother
who fled from Syria to Lebanon and was reached by telephone. But he talked about
how a mistake had been made earlier. “My mother identified her in the morgue,” he
said. “She knows her daughter. She said, ‘This is my
daughter,’ and the authorities
in the morgue told us her
name was Zainab and she
was 18. So we took her and
buried her.”
Amnesty International and
human rights Watch said
the family had confirmed to
them that Ms. Hosni was
indeed alive. In a joint statement, the organizations said
they “regret any inaccuracy
in the misidentification of the
body.”
Amnesty International said
that its initial statements on
Ms. Hosni’s death were “based on information provided
by sources close to the incident itself, who passed Amnesty International video
footage of a dismembered
body.”
“If the body was not that of
Zainab al-Hosni, then clearly
the Syrian authorities need to
disclose whose it was, the
cause and circumstances of
the death, and why Zainab alHosni’s family were informed that she was the victim,”
Amnesty International said.
Ms. Hosni’s case underscored the depth of the propaganda war between the prodemocracy protesters and the
government, in which both
sides have made claims that
later proved false.
Last month Syrian state television broadcast an interview
with Lt. Col. Hussein Harmoush, the highest-ranking
military defector to date who
was captured by the authorities. In the interview, he retracted every critical remark
he had made only a few months earlier. The episode highlighted the murkiness of
events in Syria, which has
largely barred foreign journalists from entering the country.
“This shows the need to allow independent observers,
journalists, human rights
activists into the country to
get to the bottom of things,”
said Nadim Houry, a senior
researcher with human rights Watch on Lebanon and
Syria.
Mr. Houry said that his
group believed that the mother had made an “honest
mistake” when she identified
the woman in the morgue as
her daughter.
“I could see the features of
my daughter under the
burns,” human rights Watch
quoted the mother as saying
in the initial statement last
month. “Her jaw, her cheekbones, the shape of her legs. I
have no doubt it was her.”
The report said one of her
brothers had taken video of
the body.
Mr. Hosni, the brother who
fled to Lebanon, said he had
received a telephone call
from a man about 10 days
after his sister disappeared,
saying that he was holding
her in custody and would
release her in return for another brother who was wanted
for his involvement in organizing and leading protests
against the government. The
human rights Watch report
said that all six of Ms. Hosni’s brothers had been active
in protests in Homs.
“I told him, ‘We don’t have
anyone to give you, you can
keep her,’ ” Mr. Hosni recalled telling the caller. “We
were not going to give him
another family member,
knowing that they would
never release her.”
In the interview, he seemed
bewildered by the turn of
events.
“I don’t know what to think
anymore,” Mr. Hosni said.
“My thoughts are unclear,
and I don’t know what to
believe and what not to believe anymore.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • OBITUARIES • 5/10/2011
Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at
89
By JON NORDHEIMER
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights
leader who survived beatings
and bombings in Alabama a
half-century ago as he fought
against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala.
He was 89.
He died at Princeton Baptist
Medical Center, his wife,
Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in
Birmingham.
It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally
of Dr. King, organized two
tumultuous weeks of daily
demonstrations by black
children, students, clergymen
and others against a rigidly
segregated society.
Graphic scenes of helmeted
police officers and firefighters under the direction of T.
Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner,
scattering peaceful marchers
with fire hoses, police dogs
and nightsticks, provoked a
national outcry.
The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as
did the Ku Klux Klan’s
bombing of a black church in
Birmingham that summer,
which killed four girls at
Sunday school. Those events
led to passage of the civil
rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965,
after the historic Alabama
marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which
Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were
the bedrock of civil rights
legislation.
“Without Fred Shuttlesworth
laying the groundwork, those
demonstrations in Birmingham would not have been as
successful,” said Andrew M.
Manis, author of “A Fire You
Can’t Put Out,” a biography
of Mr. Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham led to Selma, and
those two became the basis
of the civil rights struggle.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth, he added,
had “no equal in terms of
courage and putting his life
in the line of fire” to battle
segregation.
Mr. Shuttlesworth joined
with Dr. King in 1957 as one
of the four founding ministers of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the
engine of Dr. King’s effort to
unify the black clergy and
their flocks to combat Jim
Crow laws. At the time, Mr.
Shuttlesworth was leader of
the Alabama Christian Movement for human rights,
which he had helped form in
1956 to replace the Alabama
offices of the N.A.A.C.P.,
shut down for years by court
injunction.
Outside their roles as men of
the cloth and civil rights
advocates, however, Mr.
Shuttlesworth and Dr. King
stood in sharp contrast to
each other in terms of background, personality and strategies.
Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a
Ph.D. in systematic theology
from Boston University. Fred
Shuttlesworth was a child of
poor black Alabama whose
ministerial degree was from
an unaccredited black school.
(He later earned a master’s
degree in education from
Alabama State College.)
Where Dr. King could deliver thunderous oratory and
move audiences by his reasoned convictions and faith,
Mr. Shuttlesworth was fiery,
whether preaching in the
pulpit or standing up to Bull
Connor, who dueled with
him for years in street protests and boycotts leading up
to their historic 1963 showdown.
Diane McWhorter, the author
of “Carry Me Home,” the
Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001
book about the struggle in
Birmingham, wrote in an email that Mr. Shuttlesworth
was known among some civil
rights activists as “the Wild
Man from Birmingham.”
“Among the youthful ‘elders’
of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther
King’s most effective and
insistent foil: blunt where
King was soothing, driven
where King was leisurely,
and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of
the white public.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate,
and championed action and
confrontation over words. He
could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind
closed doors.
But few doubted his courage.
In the years before 1963 he
was arrested time and again
— 30 to 40 times by his
count — on charges aimed at
impeding peaceful protests.
He was repeatedly jailed and
twice the target of bombs.
In one instance, on Christmas
night 1956, he survived an
attack in which six sticks of
dynamite were detonated
outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The
wall and the floor were
blown out,” Ms. McWhorter
wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting
Shuttlesworth like a magic
carpet.”
When he tried to enroll his
children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains
and brass knuckles. When a
doctor treating his head
wounds marveled that he had
not suffered a concussion,
Mr. Shuttlesworth famously
replied, “Doctor, the Lord
knew I lived in a hard town,
so he gave me a hard head.”
Freddie Lee Robinson was
born on March 18, 1922, in
rural Mount Meigs, Ala. He
took the surname Shuttlesworth from a man his mother, Alberta Robinson, later
married. He had eight siblings, and the family supplemented its income by sharecropping and making moonshine liquor, an activity for
which Mr. Shuttlesworth was
sentenced to two years’ probation in 1940.
He was a truck driver in the
early 1940s but was soon
drawn to pulpits in Selma
and Birmingham. He became
pastor of Bethel Baptist
Church in Birmingham in
1953 and joined the Alabama
chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
before it was outlawed from
the state in 1956. He and
others established the Alabama Christian Movement
for human rights to carry on
the chapter’s work and came
to challenge the white power
structure on many fronts.
In 1963 he welcomed Dr.
King to Birmingham to take
part in the protests. They
planned a boycott of white
merchants coupled with large
marches that they expected
would provoke overreaction
by city officials and show the
world the depth of white resistance.
“We wanted confrontation,
nonviolent confrontation, to
see if it would work,” Mr.
Shuttlesworth later said. “Not
just for Birmingham — for
the nation. We were trying to
launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the
pace for the nation.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth suffered
chest injuries when the
pummeling spray of fire hoses was turned on him. “I’m
sorry I missed it,” Mr. Connor said when told of the
injuries, The New York Times reported in 1963. “I wish
they’d carried him away in a
hearse.”
After 1965, with the new
civil rights legislation on the
books and Dr. King turning
his attention to poverty and
black problems in the urban
North, Mr. Shuttlesworth
remained focused on local
issues in Birmingham and
Cincinnati, where he had
moved to take the pulpit of a
black church. He traveled
frequently between Ohio and
Alabama before returning
permanently to Birmingham
in 2008 for treatment after
suffering a stroke the previous year.
Besides his wife, Mr. Shuttlesworth is survived by four
daughters, Patricia Massengill, Ruby “Ricky” Bester,
Carolyn Shuttlesworth and
Maria Murdock; a son, Fred
Jr.; a stepdaughter, Audrey
Wilson; five sisters, Betty
Williams, Truzella Brazil,
Ernestine Grimes, Iwilder
Reid and Eula Mitchell; 14
grandchildren; 20 greatgrandchildren; and one greatgreat-grandchild.
With the death of Dr. King,
and later Dr. King’s chief
aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Mr. Shuttlesworth eventually assumed the role of
elder statesman in the civil
rights movement. In 2004 he
was named president of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he stepped down the same year,
complaining that “deceit,
mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have
eaten at the core of this oncehallowed organization.”
He also came under criticism
by gay rights advocates in
2004 when he lent his name
to a campaign in Cincinnati
to stop the city from passing
a gay rights ordinance.
He remained an honored figure in Birmingham, however. In 2008, the city renamed its principal airport
Birmingham-Shuttlesworth
International Airport.
In 2009, in a wheelchair, he
was front and center among
other dignitaries in an audi-
ence of about 6,000 at the
city’s Boutwell Auditorium
to watch a live broadcast as
the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was
sworn in.
He had encountered Mr. Obama, then a senator from
Illinois, two years earlier,
along with former President
Bill Clinton, during a commemoration in Selma of the
Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. As a
crowd crossed the Edmund
Pettus Bridge, where demonstrators were beaten and
tear-gassed on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Mr.
Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair.
Religious Groups and Bias Get the Justices’ Attention
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — If laws
forbidding discrimination in
employment applied fully to
religious groups, the government could insist that the
Roman Catholic Church allow women to serve as priests. If such laws do not apply to religious groups at all,
a church could fire a janitor
because he is black.
At Supreme Court arguments on Wednesday, the
justices struggled to find a
theory that would strike the
right balance between avoiding government interference
in the internal affairs of religious groups while protecting employees from discrimination. They often seemed frustrated by the available approaches.
There was widespread agreement, for instance, that the
federal government’s proposed approach, which gives
limited weight to the First
amendment’s religion clauses in disputes between religious groups and their employees, is too narrow.
Leondra R. Kruger, a lawyer
for the government, said the
court’s analysis should be
essentially the same whether
the employer accused of discrimination was a labor union or a church.
“That is extraordinary,” Justice Antonin Scalia responded. “We are talking here
about the free exercise clause
and about the establishment
clause, and you say they have
no special application?”
Justice Elena Kagan agreed.
“I, too, find that amazing,”
she said.
The case, Hosanna-Tabor
Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion, No. 10-553, was brought by Cheryl Perich, who
had been a teacher at a Michigan school run by a Lutheran church when she was
given a diagnosis of narcolepsy. She said she was fired
for pursuing an employment
discrimination claim based
on her disability.
a minister. Justice Sonia Sotomayor added a worry about
the sweep of Mr. Laycock’s
approach.
Ms. Perich taught mostly
secular subjects but also taught religion classes and attended chapel with her class.
Mr. Laycock said there were
other ways to ensure that
abuses were reported. But, he
went on, “a discharge claim
by a minister presents the
question why she was discharged, and the court should
stay out of that.”
Douglas Laycock, a lawyer
for the church, argued that
the court should recognize,
as many lower courts have, a
“ministerial exception” to
employment discrimination
laws, one that forbids the
government from interfering
in the relationship between
religious groups and those
employees whose duties include religious ones.
He said it would not be hard
to define the category of affected employees in most
cases. “If you teach the religion class,” he said, “you’re
clearly a minister.”
But several justices appeared
uncomfortable with the task
of deciding who is and is not
“How about a teacher who
reports sexual abuse to the
government and is fired because of that reporting?” she
asked.
The Supreme Court has in
recent terms been sympathetic to retaliation claims in
employment discrimination
suits, and Ms. Kruger, the
government lawyer, pressed
that point, urging the justices
to allow Ms. Perich to pursue
her claim.
“There is an important distinction to be made between
the government’s general
interest in eradicating discrimination from the workplace and the government’s
interest in ensuring that individuals are not chilled from
coming to civil authorities
with reports about
wrongs,” she said.
civil
That distinction also appeared to leave some justices
unsatisfied. “It isn’t obvious
to me that one is more important than the other,” said Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
“Then you have to say,” he
added, “that it’s more important to let people go to court
to sue about sex discrimination than it is for a woman to
get a job. I can’t say that one
way or the other, so I’m
stuck.”
Justice Breyer proposed avoiding the First amendment questions in the case
and limiting religious groups
to a defense specified in the
Americans With Disabilities
Act, which says, “A religious
organization may require that
all applicants and employees
conform to the religious tenets of such organization.”
Walter Dellinger, one of Ms.
Perich’s lawyers, said that
defense did not apply to retaliation claims.
Details of Home Sale Emerge in Consultant’s Trial for Theft
By JOHN ELIGON
It was December 2008 when
John F. Haggerty Jr. agreed
to buy out his brother’s stake
in their dead father’s home in
Queens.
But many months later, Mr.
Haggerty had yet to close the
deal. And a clause was eventually inserted into the real
estate contract that said that
if the sale was not completed
by the middle of December
2009, Mr. Haggerty could
lose his down payment.
That testimony came on
Wednesday from John Kramer, a real estate lawyer who
represented the estate of Mr.
Haggerty Sr. Prosecutors will
most likely use that evidence
to argue that Mr. Haggerty, a
political consultant, needed
money fast, and so stole a
contribution by Mayor Mi-
chael R. Bloomberg that was
supposed to be used for pollwatching operations on Election Day 2009.
Mr. Haggerty, 42, faces
charges of grand larceny and
other crimes in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. His
trial has roiled the New York
political establishment as it
has delved into the inner
workings of Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign,
which cost more than $100
million.
Prosecutors say that Mr.
Haggerty promised to work
with the Independence Party
to provide ballot security
with a $1.1 million contribution that Mr. Bloomberg made. Instead, prosecutors said,
Mr. Haggerty spent about
$600,000 of the money on
the house in Queens.
In fact, according to evidence
introduced in court on Wednesday, on Nov. 24, 2009,
around the time a down
payment of $80,000 was due,
Mr. Haggerty e-mailed Thomas S. Connolly, the vice
chairman of the Independence Party, and said he needed
$83,000 wired to his personal
account. Mr. Connolly testified that Mr. Haggerty said
he needed reimbursement for
his expenses for ballot security. Prosecutors said Mr.
Haggerty spent only around
$30,000 for those operations.
On Dec. 9, 2009, Mr. Haggerty e-mailed Mr. Connolly,
saying he needed $750,000
in the next two days, according to a document introduced on Wednesday. On Dec.
17, Mr. Haggerty paid more
than $700,000 to close the
home sale.
Appeals Court Allows Ban on Assault Weapons
The District of Columbia can
bar residents from owning
assault weapons and require
them to register their handguns without violating the
Second amendment, but the
district must explain further
why some of its handgun
registration requirements are
necessary, a federal appeals
court ruled Tuesday. A divided three-judge panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Colum-
bia Circuit did not strike
down any of the district’s
gun laws, which were approved after a landmark 2008
Supreme Court decision
that struck down a 32-yearold handgun ban in the district. The appeals court held
that the bans on assault weapons and magazines containing more than 10 rounds
were Constitutional. However, it said the district must
show “an important or subs-
tantial government interest”
in maintaining what it called
“novel” registration requirements. Those include barring
residents from registering
more than one firearm per
month; requiring gun owners
to undergo fingerprinting,
vision tests and background
checks; and requiring the
registration of shotguns and
rifles.
Accountability Avoidance
By a 6-to-6 vote last month,
the United States Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit cleared the way for a
legal challenge against a dubious legacy of the George
W. Bush administration: the
wiretapping of Americans’
international communications without a warrant or adequate judicial supervision
in antiterrorism investigations.
The tie decision, which allowed an earlier ruling to
stand, was a well-deserved
setback to the Justice Department’s
accountability
avoidance strategy. This Catch-22 says that because the
wiretaps are secret, no one
knows for certain whether
they have actually been tapped, and that means no one
has a right to sue the government.
We hope the Obama administration does not appeal to
the Supreme Court, and
allows the legal challenge to
go forward. Given its dismal
record on this matter, we are
not holding our breath.
Specifically at issue is the
Constitutionality of a 2008
law that amended the Foreign
Intelligence
Surveillance
Act. The measure, in effect,
gave retroactive approval to
President Bush’s decision to
ignore that law and approve
warrantless wiretapping. It
also gave immunity from
prosecution to the telephone
companies that cooperated in
the program.
It lowered the burden of proof for government wiretapping of suspects and weakened longstanding judicial
supervision, increasing the
likelihood that the government would intercept the
communications of Americans with no criminal involvement. “It is the glory of
our system that even our elected leaders must defend
the legality” of their conduct,
wrote Judge Gerard Lynch.
The most troubling opinion
on the other side was filed by
the court’s chief judge, Dennis Jacobs, but joined by none of his colleagues. Judge
Jacobs launched into a gratuitous attack on the plaintiffs and their lawyers, whom
he charged with bringing the
“frivolous” case “to act out
their fantasy of persecution,
to validate their pretensions
to policy expertise, to make
themselves
consequential
rather than marginal, and to
raise funds for self-sustaining
litigation.” He likened the
suit to a plaintiff’s claim that
the C.I.A. was controlling
him “through a radio embedded in his molar.”
Judge Jacobs has expressed
similar contempt before. He
embarrassed the appeals
court he is supposed to lead
and cast serious doubt on his
judicial impartiality.
Bahrain Orders Retrials for Medical Workers
By RICK GLADSTONE
Bahraini judicial authorities
on Wednesday nullified the
convictions and harsh prison
terms given to 20 medical
workers last week by a special security court prosecuting cases arising from civil
unrest in the country. The
medical workers were ordered released from custody,
with new trials scheduled in
a civilian court.
The decision appeared to be
at least a tactical retreat by
Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy in
the face of strong international protests over the punishments, including criticism
from the secretary general of
the United Nations, Ban Kimoon. The special court had
sentenced some doctors and
nurses among the defendants
to terms as long as 15 years
because they had treated demonstrators who were wounded by security forces. Most
of the protesters are members
of the Shiite majority in the
tiny Persian Gulf country.
Bahrain’s attorney general,
Ali Alboainain, said in a statement carried by the official
Bahrain News Agency that
he had studied the judgment
that the security court rendered Thursday and had “determined that the cases
should be retried before the
ordinary courts.”
Citing his department’s authority to ensure “rightful
application of the law,” Mr.
Alboainain said: “No doctors
or other medical personnel
may be punished by reason
of the fulfillment of their
humanitarian duties or their
political views. Pending the
outcome of the retrials, the
accused shall not be detained.”
The security court found that
during the height of the protests, the medical workers
took over the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s
largest public hospital, and
used it as a base for antigovernment plots, including the
storage of fuel bombs and
other weapons. The defendants were also accused of
stealing medical equipment
and “fabricating stories and
lies.”
Supporters of the defendants
denied those charges and said
the medical workers were put
on trial simply because they
had treated wounded protesters, out of a duty to treat
anyone who came to the hospital.
In what seemed a tacit acknowledgment that the special
court had denied the defendants their rights, the attorney general said, “By virtue
of the retrials, the accused
will have the benefit of full
re-evaluation of evidence and
full opportunity to present
their defense.”
The prosecution of the medical workers has become a
signature theme in the course
of the Bahrain conflict, and a
delicate issue for the monarchy, an important American
ally and the host to the United States Fifth Fleet’s naval
base. Rights groups have
accused the monarchy’s security forces of systematically trying to deny medical
services to wounded protesters by mistreating and intimidating doctors and nurses.
Physicians for human rights, an advocacy group that
has criticized the Bahrain
government’s behavior in the
protests, reacted cautiously to
the attorney general’s announcement. “We are glad
for any kind of review of the
grossly unjust convictions,”
said Hans Hogrefe, the
group’s Washington director.
At the same time, Mr. Hogrefe said, “The proof will be in
the pudding.”
Mr. Hogrefe said he believed
that the attorney general’s
announcement reflected a
“response to the international
outcry.”
He and others also noted that
the announcement came as
Congress began to evaluate
the planned American sale of
$53 million worth of weapons to Bahrain, including
bunker-busting missiles, night-vision technology and
dozens of Humvees. human
rights groups have written to
Congress urging that the deal
be blocked because of rights
abuses in Bahrain.
Rights groups estimate that
since the unrest began, at
least 34 people have been
killed, more than 1,400 have
been arrested and as many as
3,600 have been dismissed
from their jobs.
J. David Goodman contributed reporting.
Breyer and Scalia Testify at Senate Judiciary Hearing
testified about judicial security and independence in
2007.
trictive than the life of any
other member of the government.”
WASHINGTON — Justices
Stephen G. Breyer and Antonin Scalia of the Supreme
Court crossed Constitution
Avenue on Wednesday to
testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the
role of judges under the
Constitution, offering unscripted responses on issues
like conflicts of interest and
cameras in the courtroom.
Seizing on the unusual opportunity to question the justices, senators set the agenda
question by question. Senator
Richard J. Durbin, Democrat
of Illinois, asked whether the
Supreme Court should be
required to follow the Judicial Conference Code of Conduct, which is currently used
as “guidance.”
Justices rarely appear before
the Senate panel after their
confirmation hearings. The
last such occasion was when
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
“Every asset has to be listed
in depth, and it’s all filed,”
Justice Breyer said. “I don’t
think that the life of the judge
in terms of ethics is less res-
The ethical conduct of the
Supreme Court has been
under growing scrutiny.
Questions have been raised
over Justice Clarence Thomas’s appearances before
Republican-backed groups
and his acceptance of favors
from a contributor in Texas,
Harlan Crow, as well as over
his wife, Virginia Thomas,
and her job as a conservative
advocate.
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN
House Democrats sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee leaders last month,
calling on the panel to review
a bill introduced this year
that would require justices to
withdraw from cases in which they have a political or
financial conflict. The letter
also singled out Justices Scalia and Samuel Alito for appearing at political events.
Justice Breyer said he had
not seen a decision influenced by politics in his 17 years
on the court. But he drew a
line between politics and
judicial philosophy.
“By the time you have 40 or
50 years in any profession,
you begin to formulate very,
very general views,” he said.
“What is America about?
What are the people of America about? How in this country does law relate to the average human being? How
should it? And it’s a good
thing, not a bad thing that
people’s outlook on that
court is not always the same.”
Testifying before an audience largely composed of high
school, college and law students, the justices often struck a professorial note in
their responses, acknowledging that it is difficult for
Americans to understand the
court. Justice Breyer offered
a suggested reading list,
mentioning the Federalist
Papers and Alexis de Tocqueville.
“In some ways, I feel like
I’m back in my favorite seminars in law school,” said
Senator Patrick J. Leahy,
Democrat of Vermont, the
committee chairman.
Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, said Americans needed to know
that the judges would adhere
strictly to the Constitution.
“The American people do
care,” Mr. Sessions said.
“They have a high opinion of
the court. They believe that
you should follow the law,
and the greatest threat to the
court, in my opinion, is if the
American people believe that
judges are consistently redefining the meaning of the law
to advance their agenda.”
The hearing coincided with
the first week of the Supreme Court’s new term and
the recent celebration of
Constitution Day, which
recognizes the anniversary of
the signing of the Constitution in 1787.
Justice Scalia expounded on
what sets the United States
apart from other countries:
not the bill of rights, which
“every banana republic has,”
but the separation of powers.
Americans “should learn to
love the gridlock,” he said.
“It’s there for a reason, so
that the legislation that gets
out will be good legislation.”
Monitor Must Oversee Fire Dept. Hiring Practices, Judge Rules
By ALAN FEUER
In a lacerating decision that
accused Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg of willfully ignoring the racial imbalance in
the New York Fire Department, a federal judge ruled
on Wednesday that a courtappointed monitor would be
installed to oversee the department’s recruitment efforts and ensure that more
minority candidates are hired.
The decision by the judge,
Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, comes at the end of
four years of bitter litigation
in which the city and the Fire
Department stood accused of
allowing the department to
remain almost 97 percent
white for decades, despite the
fact that the city’s population
is about 25 percent black.
Judge Garaufis’s ruling was
remarkable for both its language and its substance. He
accused the city of “blameshifting” and “accountabilityavoidance” in ignoring the
department’s
longstanding
racial inequities. “The city
still doesn’t get it,” he wrote.
The judge ruled that the only
way to combat this official
intransigence was to appoint
a monitor with wide-ranging
powers and a tenure of at
least 10 years.
“The evidence adduced in
this case gives the court little
hope that Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg or any of his senior leadership has any intention of stepping up to the
task of ending discrimination at the F.D.N.Y.,” Judge
Garaufis wrote. Later in the
ruling, he continued, “Instead
of facing hard facts and asking hard questions about the
city’s abysmal track record
of hiring black and Hispanic
firefighters, the Bloomberg
administration dug in and
fought back.”
Even though the department
undertook an unprecedented
effort this year to increase
minority recruitment, Judge
Garaufis decided that the
monitor, who has not been
named, should have numerous powers. The monitor
will help oversee the writing
and administration of firefighter entrance exams, which
were previously deemed to
discriminate against minority
candidates; will have the
authority to audit and investigate the department’s hiring
practices; and will guide the
city in overhauling its policies to prevent acts of discrimination or racially motivated retaliation.
This is not the first time a
federal judge has tried to
remedy the department’s bias
in hiring. In 1973, a judge
ordered the city to hire one
black firefighter for every
three white ones; that effort
foundered on what Judge
Garaufis called “34 years of
intransigence and deliberate
indifference, bookended by
identical judicial declarations
that the city’s hiring policies
are illegal.”
Declining to impose racial
quotas, Judge Garaufis nonetheless ruled that a systemic
effort was required. “It is the
court’s view that nearly 40
years of discrimination will
not be cured by a few simple
tweaks to the city’s policies
and practices,” he wrote.
This round of litigation began in May 2007 when the
federal Justice Department
sued the city, claiming that
two Fire Department entrance exams, in 1999 and 2002,
were biased against black
and Hispanic test takers. The
Center for Constitutional
Rights and the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization
of black firefighters, quickly
joined the suit; they have
more or less led the charge
against the city ever since.
“It’s incredibly gratifying
that a federal court has recognized, deeply, what the
city has done here — turned
a blind eye to a major problem of racial discriminati-
on,” said Richard Levy, the
Vulcan Society’s lawyer.
“We have tried for five years
to get them to the table to
resolve this case.”
In a news conference on
Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg
said that the fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano,
and his predecessor, Nicholas
Scoppetta, had “worked tirelessly on outreach to all of
the city’s communities, and it
resulted in the most successful and most diverse recruitment campaign in the history
of the F.D.N.Y.”
“More than 61,000 people
applied — half of them minorities, shattering any previous record for minority
applicants,” he continued.
In response to a second question, the mayor said, “The
judge was not elected to run
the city, and you can rest
assured that we’ll be in court
for a long time.”
Officials from the Fire Department declined to comment on the case.
Much of the judge’s opinion
was directed at Mr. Bloomberg, who, Judge Garaufis
wrote, repeatedly ignored
warnings about the failures in
recruitment. The judge noted
the individuals and official
bodies that had advised the
mayor of the problem: the
list included the city’s Equal
Employment
Practices
Commission; Mark Green,
the former public advocate;
and several members of
Congress and of the City
Council.
Judge Garaufis did not, however, lay blame entirely at
Mr. Bloomberg’s feet.
“That this discrimination
has been allowed to persist in
New York City for so long,”
he wrote, “is a shameful blight on the records of the six
mayors of this city who failed to take responsibility for
doing what was necessary to
end it.”
be suitable to hold the role of
special monitor.
David W. Chen and Kate
Taylor contributed reporting.
The parties in the lawsuit
have until Oct. 19 to make
suggestions to the judge of
people who they think would
Liberia: Ruling Favors President
By ADAM NOSSITER
Uncertainty hanging over
Liberia’s imminent presidential election ended Wednesday when the Supreme
Court threw out a challenge
to the incumbent, Africa’s
first woman to be elected as
head of state, Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf, left, along with her
principal rivals. The civil war
here, lasting more than a decade, had scattered the country’s political class, and a
small opposition party said
that Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf
violated a Constitutional
clause requiring candidates
be residents for 10 years before the election, which is
next Tuesday. But the court
said the Constitution’s authors could not have foreseen
the extended conflict into
which the country plunged.
“We considered the suit frivolous from the beginning,”
a spokesman for the president’s party said; the opposition politician who filed it,
Simeon Freeman, criticized
the decision as “political.”
Gleaming City Rising From Ruins Can’t Hide Psychic Scars of a War
By SETH MYDANS
GROZNY, Russia — A
spectacular complex of highrise towers was inaugurated
Wednesday in what once was
the war-torn city of Grozny,
with banners and flashing
lights and celebrity guests
including Vanessa-Mae on
the violin.
The new Grozny City development is the centerpiece of
a transformation that has
changed the capital of Chechnya from the charred
wreckage that was left after
the wars of the 1990s and
remained until only a few
years ago.
In place of bombs and artillery, Moscow is pouring billions of rubles into a postwar
Chechnya to support and
mollify its chosen leader,
President Ramzan A. Kadyrov, a former guerrilla who
once fought against Russian
troops.
The buildings look out from
as high as 45 stories over an
entirely new city, with parks
and broad avenues, fountains
and flower beds, and hardly a
scratch to remind it of more
than a decade of separatist
warfare.
In place of the shattered and
empty carcass that the war
left behind, a sort of fantasy
Grozny is almost complete,
including a fairground and
ice-skating rink and plans for
a water park, a racetrack, a
cultural center and a ski resort.
“They finally realized that
the war cost more,” Andrei
Mironov, who works with
the Moscow-based human
rights group Memorial, said
of the Kremlin. “The Chechen regime looks like a
winner who gets money from
a defeated country.”
The binge of construction
and the emergence of a bright new Grozny are extraordinary developments in a
republic with hardly any economy of its own. Unemployment stands at 85 percent, said Lyoma Turpalov,
editor of Groznensky Rabochy, an independent weekly
newspaper. But Chechnya
subsists on huge subsidies
from Moscow that are not
publicly accounted for, he
said.
No matter how much the city
is remodeled, however, the
trauma of the war continues
to torment its residents, said
Taisa Isayeva, 40, a former
journalist who now reports
on human rights abuses.
“You are judging by all this
beautiful architecture but not
by the psychology of the
people,” she said. “Everyone
talks about the new buildings. For 15 or 16 years we
all lived through war. We
were just about ruined. Ninety percent of Chechens are
psychologically sick.”
For all the superficial trappings of peace and prosperity, Grozny can still be dangerous. It has been brought to
heel by Mr. Kadyrov’s strongman rule but its peaceful streets thrum with suppressed violence.
Police officers dressed in
blue camouflage uniforms
carry automatic rifles as they
patrol the parks and coffee
shops, the Academy of Beauty and Shoe Heaven, the
pizza parlors and the tour
agencies with posters advertising Mediterranean vacations.
Security was reported to be
tight for Wednesday’s celebration, which also marked
Mr. Kadyrov’s 35th birthday.
Major roads were closed and
there were reports that the
police had gone house to
house checking documents.
The Colombian singer Shakira denied in a Twitter message that she had been booked
to attend the grand opening
of Grozny City, but Mr.
Kadyrov insisted that she had
been and said she was frightened away by human rights
groups that report continuing
kidnappings and torture.
“Rights activists wrote a letter to Shakira telling her not
to come to us, because the
authorities here kill people,
human rights are breached
here,” he said in a statement
reported by Agence FrancePresse. “Only enemies of the
people could write this.”
In return for its largess, the
Kremlin has enjoyed relative
stability in Chechnya in what
is viewed in Moscow as a
success for Prime Minister
Vladimir V. Putin’s policy of
Chechenization.
The government in Moscow
has ceded effective autonomy to Mr. Kadyrov and he
is enforcing his own mandate
that includes the imposition
of Islamic standards, including a ban on alcohol and
gambling and pressure on
women to adopt Islamic
dress.
“They enjoy the current situation,” said Andrei Piontkovsky, a political commentator in Moscow. “They enjoy the fact that they are independent, plus getting generous money from Moscow.”
Mr. Kadyrov and his men,
many of whom have themselves come in from the forests, have succeeded in suppressing much of the insurgency, making Chechnya
now one of the more stable
republics in the restive North
Caucasus region.
The epicenter of violence has
shifted east to Chechnya’s
neighbor Dagestan, where
the independent Internet
news site Caucasian Knot
calculated that 315 people
had been killed and 224 had
been wounded in the first
nine months of the year. The
numbers in Chechnya were
81 killed and 103 wounded, a
steep reduction from just a
few years ago.
Grozny’s builders are upbeat.
“Our city now is characteristic of a metropolis on the
level of Moscow and St. Petersburg,” said the chief architect, Nasukhanov Shadid.
But for many of those who
lived through it, the conflict
continues.
Zarema Utsiyeva, 38, a journalism professor, said the
loss of both her son and her
husband continued to haunt
her. “Each person has his
own war inside,” she said.
Habrá control sobre bebidas alcohólicas y aglomeraciones
El Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral impartió instrucciones a la Policía Nacional
para ejercer fuerte control en los locales de votación y en sus alrededores, durante las
votaciones y el escrutinio del próximo domingo.
Las aglomeración de personas cerca del local de votación y las bebidas alcohólicas
estarán prohibidas durante
las votaciones del referéndum, el próximo domingo.
Sobre estas prohibiciones, la
Policía Nacional deberá ejercer el mayor control, según la
disposición del Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral
(TSJE).
"La Justicia Electoral dio una
orden taxativa de prohibir
reuniones y manifestaciones
públicas, a 200 metros de
cada local de votación, y
prohibir la bebida alcohólica", informó el vocero del
TSJE, Carlos María Ljubetic.
Aclaró que, para el referéndum, las pohibiciones no
serán totales, como suelen
ser en los comicios generales. Por ejemplo, indicó que
"una actividad colegial no se
prohíbe".
Con respecto a deportes,
principalmente fútbol, informó que "no habrá problemas
porque no está previsto ningún partido de primera para
el 9 de octubre. El comercio
no está prohibido, salvo la
venta de bebida alcohólica,
porque el Código establece
expresamente esta prohibición", agregó.
El artículo 195 del Código
Electoral establece que "en el
día de los comicios queda
prohibida la aglomeración de
personas o la organización de
grupos en un radio inferior a
doscientos metros de los centros en que funcionen las
mesas receptoras de votos,
que directa o indirectamente
puedan significar cualquier
presión sobre los electores, a
menos que se trate de electores formando filas delante de
las mesas para sufragar".
Además prohíbe "la portación de armas, aun mediando
autorización acordada anteriormente por autoridades administrativas, en el mismo
radio señalado.
El mismo artículo prohíbe
también "la celebración de
espectáculos públicos hasta
dos horas después de finalizar los comicios, el expendio
de bebidas alcohólicas y la
instalación de mesas de consulta por parte de los partidos, movimientos y alianzas,
en el radio de 200 metros del
local de votación.
HUELLAS DACTILARES.
La Justicia Electoral probará
la votación con huellas dactilares en locales donde votarán algunos de los principales
referentes del Gobierno, como ser, el presidente Fernando Lugo, en la Escuela Talavera Richer (Lambaré); el
vicepresidente
Federico
Franco, en la Escuela República Dominicana (Fernando
de la Mora); el titular del
Congreso Nacional, Jorge
Oviedo Matto, en el Colegio
General Díaz (capital); el
titular de la Cámara Baja,
Víctor Bogado, en el Colegio
San Alfonso (Asunción), y el
presidente de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, Luis Benítez Riera, en el Colegio
Dante Alighieri (Asunción).
Además, fueron invitados a
votar con huellas digitales
algunos presidentes de partidos políticos, periodistas y
personajes de la farándula.
AFLORA EL VOTO POR
EL NO
El Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral ya no oculta su
información que recoge sobre la intención de muchos
que quieren votar por el No.
El vocero de la institución,
Carlos María Ljubetic, a través del Canal 4, Telefuturo,
dijo que pensó que el No era
solo rumor, y que ahora resulta que no es tan así.
"Yo siempre decía que el No
era subterráneo y ahora em-
pieza a aparecer. Hay políticos y partidos inclusive que
no tienen mucha simpatía por
el SÍ, pero como no es muy
simpático ponerse mal con el
electorado, entonces hay un
disimulo; hay un "Sí, pero
no" y entonces eso empieza a
aflorar", expresó Ljubetic.
El vocero no especificó a qué
partido se refería. En la práctica se observa que la ANR y
el Unace son los que no realizan ninguna campaña a
favor de la modificación de
la Constitución para dar
derecho al voto a los paraguayos del exterior.
La Corte promete su apoyo para investigar tierras de los Barthe
Registros Públicos, Catastro e Indert van a cruzar información para determinar física y
jurídicamente qué pa- só con las 257.000 hectáreas que recuperó el Estado, según acordaron Lugo y el titular del Poder Judicial.
Luis Bareiro y Patricia
Vargas
El presidente de la Corte
Suprema de Justicia, Luis
María Benítez Riera, comprometió ayer el apoyo del
Poder Judicial para realizar
una investigación conjunta
con el Instituto de Desarrollo
Rural y de la Tierra (Indert),
la Dirección General de Catastro y el Instituto Geográfico Militar, que permita determinar la situación física y
jurídica de las tierras que
recuperó el Estado de los
herederos de Domingo Barthe, en 1963.
Se trata de unas 257.000 hectáreas, ubicadas entre los
departamentos de Alto Paraná, Caaguazú y Canindeyú,
según informó anoche el procurador general de la República, José Enrique García.
El ministro participó de una
reunión que se realizó en la
tarde de ayer en Mburuvicha
Róga, junto con la directora
de los Registros Públicos,
Lourdes González; el presidente del Indert, Marciano
Barreto; el director del Catastro Nacional, José Tomás
Villarejo; el asesor jurídico
de la Presidencia, Emilio
Camacho; y el procurador
general.
ción física y jurídica de estas
tierras, cruzando la información de los archivos jurídicos
con los apuntes de los archivos físicos que corresponden
al Catastro, y con los títulos
y registros oficiales que obran en el Indert, incluyendo,
de ser necesario, informaciones del Instituto Geográfico
Militar.
García informó que, durante
la reunión, la directora de los
Registros Públicos, entidad
dependiente de la Corte Suprema, explicó cuál es exactamente la información que
obra en los archivos jurídicos
sobre el derrotero de estas
propiedades recuperadas judicialmente por el Estado, y
el método de investigación
aplicado por su oficina.
García explicó que, lamentablemente, el Estado no tiene
una sola institución que concentre toda la información
sobre la situación física y
jurídica de las propiedades
inmobiliarias del país. "Necesitamos agotar todas las
instancias técnicas para determinar cuál fue el destino
que recibieron estas tierras
recuperadas legítimamente
por el Estado, para, una vez
definida esa cuestión, tomar
las decisiones que correspondan, con el fin de regularizar la situación de esas propiedades", refirió.
El procurador dijo que el
propio presidente de la Corte
comprometió a los Registros
Públicos para profundizar la
investigación sobre la situa-
Las tierras en conflicto tienen
por origen varias ventas de
tierras públicas que se realizaron hacia 1888 y que derivaron, dos décadas más tarde, en un juicio que habría de
durar casi medio siglo. Ocurrió que los compradores originales solo pagaron una
parte de la propiedad, lo que
permitió al Estado recuperarlas a fines de 1894. Los
compradores morosos, empero, igual lograron vender sus
títulos entre 1912 y 1913 a
un inmigrante francés, Domingo Barthe.
Los herederos de Barthe pretendieron hacer valer esos
títulos a comienzos del siglo
pasado, obligando al fiscal de
la época a iniciar un juicio en
su contra. El caso culminó
con una sentencia definitiva
de la Corte, en 1963, restituyendo al Estado las tierras,
las mismas que el Indert pretendía ubicar mediante una
mensura judicial.
CONSECUENCIAS. Diputados tratará mañana como
primer punto del orden del
día el proyecto de resolución
que cita e interpela al titular
del Indert, Marciano Barreto,
por supuestas irregularidades
en las mensuras judiciales.
La normativa lleva la firma
de 25 diputados de los partidos políticos, y su proyectista, el diputado patriaqueridista Carlos Soler, espera que
sus colegas acepten el pedido, que requiere de 41 votos
para que el funcionario de
Estado sea interpelado por
los diputados.
Campesinos exigen una decisión del Poder Judicial
Las principales organizaciones campesinas, de indígenas
y sintechos del país, exigen
en un pronunciamiento que la
Corte Suprema de Justicia
"resuelva la jurisdicción de
jueces y la aplicación efectiva de la mensura judicial"
propuesta por el Instituto
y de la Tierra (Indert).
Manifiestan
preocupación
"por la manera en que autoridades políticas, empresarios
transnacionales y terratenientes se manifestaron el pasado
28 de setiembre en el Alto
Paraná, pidiendo públicamente que no se cumpla con
lo que disponen la Constitución Nacional y las leyes".
"Resulta repudiable que representantes de partidos políticos tradicionales y hasta un
candidato a presidente, como
es el caso de (el senador Miguel) Carrizosa, se den cita al
lugar de manifestación para
reclamar la no utilización de
mecanismos ajustados a derecho que permitan definir la
legalidad de la propiedad e
identificar a los verdaderos
dueños, sean estos particulares o el propio Estado paraguayo".
RESPALDO. Las organizaciones expresan apoyo al
presidente del Indert, Marciano Barreto, "por su justo y
valiente posicionamiento en
lo que hace a la recuperación
de tierras, como los casos de
Ñacunday y Antebi Cué".
Igualmente, reclaman la recuperación de tierras malhabidas, que, según el informe
de la Comisión de Verdad y
Justicia, asciende a 7.851.285
hectáreas.
"Los más peligrosos delincuentes, mafiosos y terroristas
no se encuentran en nuestras
organizaciones, sino más
bien entre los terratenientes,
que se han enriquecido a
costa del sacrificio y el sufrimiento de miles de compatriotas", indican.
El comunicado está formado
por la Mesa Coordinadora
Nacional de Organizaciones
Campesinas (MCNOC), Organización de Lucha por la
Tierra (OLT), Organización
Nacional Campesina (ONAC), Movimiento Agrario
y Popular (MAP), Movimiento Agrario del Paraguay
(MOAPA),
Coordinadora
Nacional de Mujeres Rurales
e Indígenas (CONAMURI),
Frente Patriótico y Popular
(FPP), Coordinadora de Productores Agrícolas-San Pedro Norte (CPA-SPN), Cen-
tral Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas Indígenas
y Populares (CENOCIP),
Organización indígena Mai-
numby y la Asociación de
Agricultores del Alto Paraná
(ASAGRAPA).
ÍNDICE REMISSIVO DE ASSUNTOS
Direito Internacional, 77, 188
Justiça Federal, 75
Ministério Público, 71, 75
Ministério Público Federal, 75
procurador-geral da República, 71
Procuradoria da República, 75
Recurso Extraordinário, 186, 187
STF, 0, 64, 186, 187
STJ, 16, 17
Supremo Tribunal Federal, 0, 64, 186, 187
TJ, 16, 91
TRF, 75
Tribunal de Justiça, 16, 17, 91
Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, 186, 187
TRT, 82
TSE, 84, 92, 186, 187
TST, 3, 76, 82, 83

stf na mídia - Supremo Tribunal Federal

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