Locking horns over human rights

 

Human rights matter: Demonstrators protesting the shooting death of 16-year-old Pierre Loury confront police after shutting down the Eisenhower Expressway during a march in Chicago, Illinois recently. — Getty Images/ AFP

• Examining the Record of the “Defender of Human Rights”

• Examining the Record of the “Defender of Human Rights”.

  
  

http://english.cntv.cn/2016/04/17/VIDE0l4zwWjzir4IqZ8mEs9m160417.shtml

It’s April and time for the usual tit-for-tat exchange between China and the United States over their human rights practices.

APRIL is the month when the two biggest economies in the world – the United States and China – lock horns in an annual exchange over each other’s human rights practices.

Since 1977, the United States has been releasing its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, giving its review of human rights issues in countries around the world (but not its own).

And in a retaliatory fashion, Beijing would follow up the next day with its Human Rights Record of the United States in response to the criticisms piled on China.

The Chinese tradition began in 1998 and functioned like a “mirror” for the United States to examine its own human rights flaws. In the words of this year’s document: “Since the US government refused to hold up a mirror to look at itself, it has to be done with other people’s help.”

This year’s collision happened last week.

In the US 2015 report, Washington criticised China’s repression of people involved in civil and political rights advocacy and China’s crackdown on the legal community.

It also highlighted the disappearance of five men in Hong Kong’s publishing industry, believing that Chinese security officials were responsible.

Among others, the report also drew attention to the repression of the minority Uighurs and Tibetans, and tight control on the Internet and media.

As expected, the comments did not go down well with Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang accused the United States of politicising the human rights issues in China to undermine the country’s stability and development.

“It’s nothing new for the United States to find fault with the internal affairs of other countries in the name of human rights,” he said.

China’s report, on the other hand, curtly labelled the US human rights record as “terrible”, “no improvement”, and plagued with “numerous new problems”.

Citing statistics, surveys and news reports, it zeroed in on the gun violence and excessive police violence, corrupt prison system and the prevailing money and clan politics in the United States.

Racial relations are “at their worst in nearly two decades,” it added.

And, most notably, Beijing reprimanded the United States for violating human rights outside its borders. Examples cited were the deadly Iraqi and Syrian air strikes, drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, and bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan.

The United States is “treating citizens from other countries like dirt,” the report said.

One of the sections in China’s report was reserved for the economic and social rights of US citizens, which Beijing said did not record substantial progress.

A gloomy picture of the United States was painted: “Workers carried out mass strikes to claim their rights at work. Food-insecure and homeless populations remained huge. Many US people suffered from poor health.”

When the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Lu rejected the US report last week, he pointed out that China’s efforts in promoting human rights have resulted in “great achievements that have attracted worldwide attention”.

While he did not elaborate on the great achievements, China has always been championing eradication of poverty as “one of the greatest human rights successes a country could hope for,” as state news agency Xinhua put it early last month.

In an article to dispute the West’s attack on China’s human rights record at the United Nations, Xinhua pointed out that lifting people out of poverty is an area of human rights that is often overlooked by Western countries, in particular the United States.

“China’s achievements in alleviating immense poverty along with its other human rights feats are victim to the West’s selective amnesia,” it stated.

China has a “moderately prosperous society” goal to lift all of its poor out of poverty by 2020. Among the efforts by the Government, according to Xinhua, are increasing the budget to relief poverty by 43%, improving infrastructure in regions with minorities, and reforming the healthcare system.

By rolling out these facts and figures, Xinhua hoped it could change the West’s “tired and dated view” of human rights in China, but added that it won’t hold its breath.

Till next April, then.

By Tho Xin Yi Check-In-China, The Star

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Chinese hacker pleads guilty, deserves respect whether guilty or innocent

A Chinese national named Su Bin pleaded guilty in the US on Wednesday to conspiring to hack into the computer networks of several major US defense contractors to obtain sensitive information, according to a US Department of Justice statement. The information allegedly includes technical files about F-22 and F-35 fighter jets and C-17 military transport aircraft.

The statement says "Su Bin admitted to playing an important role in a conspiracy, originating in China," where he has two accomplices. Some US media have conjectured that the two accomplices must be Chinese military personnel.

Su was arrested in Canada in July 2014, and was handed over to the US this February. The Chinese government has denied any involvement in Su's case, and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked the US to ensure the privacy and legal rights of Chinese citizens on US soil.

Plea bargaining is a common US judicial practice. Defendants can plead guilty in exchange for softer punishments. The disadvantage of this practice is that it is hard to know what the defendants truly think, and whether there might be any wrongs in the judgments.

Every country is gathering intelligence. The largest and most well-known information-collecting agencies are the CIA and FBI in the US. The FBI has even listed China as their top target. Recent years have seen the FBI arresting quite a few "Chinese spies," but most of them proved to be innocent. In the meantime, China has kept a low profile in reporting the exposure of US spies out of various considerations.

In most cases, governments won't acknowledge these spies after they have been caught. For example, whenever China intercepted spies from Western countries, the governments they served routinely denied any connection and even mobilized the Western media to attack China's human rights and win over sympathy.

We have no reliable source to identify whether Su has stolen these secrets and transferred them to the Chinese government. If he has, we are willing to show our gratitude and respect for his service to our country. On the secret battlefield without gunpowder, China needs special agents to gather secrets from the US. As for Su, be he recruited by the Chinese government or driven by economic benefits, we should give him credit for what he is doing for the country.

If Su was wronged and forced to plead guilty, he should have our sympathy. As the "war of information" between China and the US continues, there will probably be more Chinese framed as spies and jailed in the US. This is a tragedy of the times, and we hope the Chinese working in sensitive professions in the US can protect themselves.

At the helm of international public discourse, the US is able to define whether certain activities are espionage or not. When US espionage is exposed, the US media will try to divert public attention and tone down the case. But when the CIA or FBI catches suspects, hyperbole about these cases makes headlines in US media.

The most infamous case is that of Edward Snowden, who revealed the global US surveillance program PRISM. The whistleblower is wanted by the US government, which refuses to reflect on its behavior, but keeps criticizing China for espionage without solid proof.

China lags behind the US in technology. The existence of US cyberspace military forces is openly known to the public, and its capability is way higher than Chinese "hackers." But it doesn't mean that China cannot fight back in the face of ill-founded US accusations of Chinese spies. China should uncover Washington's brazen hypocrisy with concrete evidence. - Global Times

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http://t.cn/RG38MOa

Chinese documentary reveals US hypocrisy on human rights

A TV documentary highlighting the US’s double standards on human rights issues was aired by China’s State-run CCTV on Sunday. The series, by illustrating the true human rights situation in the US, exposed its hypocrisy over the issue.

Citing media reports both inside and outside the US, the documentary called “the human rights record of global police” revealed how the superpower tramples on US citizen's human rights. The prisons, for example, are rampant with corruption, torture of prisoners and sexual abuse. Career women are subject to discrimination and sexual harassment at work.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI, forces Internet companies to provide clients' information without court approval, the documentary said.

The airing of the documentary came days after the US, along with 11 other countries, pointed fingers at China’s human rights record at the UN Human Rights Council.

Since the 1970s, the US State Department has been submitting annual reports on human rights to its Congress, poking its nose into other countries' human rights records while leaving many of its own problems unaddressed.

The country that prides itself as the “global police” was blamed that what it did is just to serve its own strategic interests.

Ji Hong, s researcher with the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that the US always holds a sense of superiority. It considers itself a global leader with the best system and human rights record.

The documentary exposed the US’s lack of willingness and capability to improve its record. The documentary also echoed China’s position on human rights that all countries should face up to their own problems and have more dialogues with others to advance the progress of human rights in the international arena.

Based on extensive media reports both inside and outside the U.S., and interviews of many human rights experts from China, the U.S., France, Canada, Russia and Switzerland, the 45-minute TV program revealed the U.S. trampling on American people's human rights in all walks of life.

In 2015, more than 560,000 people across the United States were homeless, 25 percent of whom were under age; the country's primary women's prison Lowell Correctional Institution, where 2,696 convicts are held, is rampant with corruption, torture of prisoners, and sexual abuse; women are subject to sexual harassment and sexual assaults of different forms, and career women subject to discrimination at work, the documentary showed, citing media reports.

Of teenagers aged 15 and above who succumb to injuries in the States, one quarter die in shooting incidents; the Federal Bureau of Investigation forces Internet companies to provide clients' information without a court approval, according to the documentary.

The United States has been using double standards on practically every human rights-related issue, which is showcased both by its invasion of citizens' privacy through online surveillance and civilian deaths caused by its drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries, it showed.

For a very long time, the United States has been quite condescending, with the belief that it has the best system and human rights record, and as a result, it tends to find fault with other countries, Ji Hong, researcher with the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in the program.

By Yang Xun (People's Daily) 

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US Human Rights Violations, do Black

The United States' confrontational attitude toward China on human rights serves only its national interests, and it also harms global governance and the cause of international human rights, China's top human rights researchers, Liu Hainian, director of the human rights research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.

In a news conference in Beijing on Monday that was organized by State Council Information Office, four human rights researchers from think tanks and a university criticized the US for duplicity on the human rights issue.

The US, 10 other Western countries and Japan released a joint statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday. The statement expressed their concerns over what it called "the deteriorating human rights record" in China, saying that Beijing has not only contravened its own laws but also breached its commitments to the international community.

'Selective blindness'

Liu Hainian, director of the human rights research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US is selectively blind to its own human rights problems, as well those of its allies, in racial and gender discrimination, gun violence, the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility and illegal monitoring of citizens' private activities.

"The US' invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its subversive movements in North Africa and the Middle East, directly harm local residents' human rights," said Liu.

The UN replaced the former Commission on Human Rights with the current Human Rights Council in 2006 to promote joint efforts in human rights protection and to avoid politicizing such efforts. Since then, the US has attempted 11 times to pass an anti-China resolution in the council. But all of these attempts have failed because of opposition from most member states.

'Cold War mindset'

"The US regards human rights as a political and diplomatic tool to realize its own purposes, as it did toward the Soviet Union after World War II," said Chang Jian, director of the human rights research center at Nankai University in Tianjin. "The Cold War strategy and mindset are outdated. The decline of its national power, especially in comparison with China, makes the US decision-makers nervous and they resort to their old tricks," Chang added.

Liu Huawen, a researcher of international law at CASS, said, "China is committed to peaceful development, constantly improving its human rights conditions and strengthening dialogue and cooperation with the other countries on human rights.

"But the US stands on the wrong side of history," he added. "What it wants is confrontation. The US has not yet signed some UN treaties in protecting children's, women's and disabled people's rights. It is ridiculous that it still plays the role of a judge of international human rights."

Li Yunlun, a professor of international studies at the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC, said: "China faces up to its problems in human rights. China's poverty alleviation project will help the poorest citizens, and the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), if it comes true, will see comprehensive progress in China's human rights.

 - (China Daily)

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Western hegemony & violence: ousting democratically-elected leaders in Ukraine and elsewhere!

City on fire: Anti-government protesters clashing with police in the centre of Kiev in Ukraine. — AFP

The ousters of democratically-elected leaders have often been carried out directly or indirectly by champions of democracy themselves.

IF Ukraine is on the brink of a catastrophe, it is mainly because the present regime in Kiev and its supporters, backed by certain Wes­tern powers, violated a fundamental principle of democratic governance. They ousted a democratically-elected president through illegal means.

President Viktor Yanukovich, who had come to power through a free and fair election in 2010, should have been removed through the ballot box.

His opponents not only betrayed a democratic principle. They subverted a “Peace Deal” signed between them and Yanukovich on Feb 21 in which the latter had agreed to form a national unity government within 10 days that would include opposition representatives; reinstate the 2004 Constitution; relinquish control over Ukraine’s security services; and hold presidential and parliamentary elections by December.

According to the deal, endorsed by Germany, France and Poland, Yanu­kovich would remain president until the elections.

His co-signatories had no intention of honouring the agreement.

Without following procedures, the parliament – with the backing of the military – voted immediately to remove Yanukovich and impeach him. The parliamentary speaker was elected interim president and after a few days a new regime was in­­stalled.

One of the first acts of parliament was to proclaim that Ukrainian is the sole official language of the country, thus downgrading the Russian language, the mother tongue of one-fifth of the population.

Anti-Russian rhetoric which had become more strident than ever in the course of the protest against the Yanukovich government has reached a crescendo in the wake of the overthrow of the government.

The protest gives us an idea of some of the underlying issues that have brought Ukraine to the precipice.

There was undoubtedly a great deal of anger in the western part of the country, including Kiev, over the decision of the Russian-backed Yanu­kovich to reject closer economic ties with the European Union (EU) in favour of financial assistance from Moscow.

It explains to some extent the massive demonstrations of the last few months. Police brutality, corruption within the government and cronyism associated with Yanu­kovich had further incensed the people.

But these legitimate concerns tell only one side of the story. The protest movement had also brought to the fore neo-Nazis and fascists sworn to violence. Armed and organised groups such as the Svoboda and the Right Sector provide muscle power to the protest.

They are known to have targeted Jewish synagogues and Eastern Orthodox Christian churches.

It is the militias associated with these groups that are in control of street politics in Kiev.

Elites in Germany, France, Britain, the United States and within the Nato establishment as a whole are very much aware of the role of neo-Nazi and fascist elements in the protest and in the current Kiev regime.

Indeed, certain American and European leaders had instigated the demonstrators and were directly involved in the machinations to bring down Yanukovich.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland had in her infamous telephone conversation with the US Ambassador to Ukraine admitted that her country had spent US$5bil (approximately RM16bil) promoting anti-Russian groups in Ukraine.

For the United States and the Euro­pean Union, control over Ukraine serves at least two goals.

It expands their military reach through Nato right up to the doorstep of Russia, challenging the latter’s time-honoured relationship with its strategic neighbour. It brings Ukraine within the EU’s economic sphere.

Even as it is, almost half of Ukraine’s US$35bil (RM115bil) debt is owed to Western banks, which would want the country to adopt austerity measures to remunerate them.

It is largely because of these geopolitical and geo-economic challenges that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin is flexing his military muscles in Crimea, in the eastern Ukraine region, which not only has a preponderantly Russian-speaking population but is also home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Besides, Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilisation.

This is why Putin will go all out to protect Russian interests in Ukraine, but at the same time, there is every reason to believe that he will avoid a military confrontation and try to work out a political solution based upon the Peace Deal.

The catastrophe in Ukraine reveals five dimensions in the politics of the ouster of democratically-elected governments:

•  The determined drive to overthrow the government by dissidents and opponents, which is often un­­compromising;
•  The exploitation of genuine people-related issues and grievances;
•  The mobilisation of a significant segment of the populace behind these mass concerns;
•  The resort to violence through militant groups often with a pronounced right-wing orientation; and
•  The forging of strong linkages between domestic anti-government forces and Western governments and other Western actors, including banks and non-governmental organisations, whose collective aim is to perpetuate Western control and dominance or Western hegemony.

Some of these dimensions are also present in Venezuela where there is another concerted attempt to oust a democratically-elected government.

Some genuine economic grievances related to the rising cost of living and unemployment are being manipulated and distorted to give the erroneous impression that the Maduro government does not care for the people.

President Nicolas Maduro, it is alleged, is suppressing dissent with brutal force.

The truth is that a lot of the violence is emanating from groups linked to disgruntled elites who are opposed to the egalitarian policies pursued by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

They are disseminating fake pictures through social media as part of their false propaganda about the Venezuelan government’s violence against the people – pictures which have now been exposed for what they are by media analysts.

Support for this propaganda and for the street protests in Venezuela comes from US foundations such as the National Endowment for Demo­cracy (NED). It has been estimated that in 2012 alone, the NED gave more than US$1.3mil (RM4mil) to organisations and projects in Vene­zuela ostensibly to promote “human rights,” “democratic ideas” and “accountability.”

The majority of Venezuelans have no doubt at all that this funding is to undermine a government which is not only determined to defend the nation’s independence in the face of Washington’s dominance but is also pioneering a movement to strengthen regional cooperation in Latin Ame­rica and the Caribbean as a bulwark against the US’ hegemonic agenda.

It is because other countries in the region such as Bolivia, Brazil, Argen­tina, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Paraguay know what the US elite is trying to do in Venezuela that they have described “the recent violent acts” in the country “ as attempts to destabilise the democratic order.”

A third country where a democratically-elected leader is under tremendous pressure from street demonstrators at this juncture is Thailand.

Though some of the issues articulated by the demonstrators are legitimate, the fact remains that they do not represent majority sentiment which is still in favour of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her exiled brother, former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

As in Ukraine and Venezuela, violence – albeit on a much lower scale – has seeped into the struggle for power between the incumbent and the protesters. However, foreign involvement is not that obvious to most of us.

Both Yingluck and the protest movement are regarded as pro-Western. Nonetheless, there are groups in Washington and London who perceive the current government in Bangkok as more inclined towards China compared to the opposition Democratic Party or the protesters.

Is this one of the reasons why a section of the mainstream Western media appears to be supportive of the demonstrations?

There are a number of other instances of democratically-elected leaders being overthrown by illegal means.

The most recent – in July 2013 – was the unjust ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt. In 1973, President Salvador Al­­lende of Chile was killed in a coup engineered by the CIA.

Another democratically-elec­ted leader who was manoeuvred out of office and jailed as a result of a Bri­­tish-US plot was Mohammed Mosad­degh of Iran in 1953.

It is only too apparent that in most cases the ouster of democratically-elected leaders have been carried out directly or indirectly by the self-proclaimed champions of democracy themselves! It reveals how hypocritical they are.

What really matters to the elites in the United States, Britain and other Western countries is not de­­mocracy but the perpetuation of their hegemonic power. Hegemony, not democracy, has always been their object of worship. 

By Chandra Muzaffar - The Star/Asia News Network
> Dr Chandra Muzaffar is president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.
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Mass Knife Attack in China Kills 29 People by 8 terrorists armed with knives rampaged through a train station in southwestern China killing dozens of people and injuring 130 others 

China vows to crackdown on violent terrorist attacks

• < Video

  
  

  .Washington encourages attackers by downplaying terrorism
  
  For the world's "most active human rights defender," the latest random killing of 29 innocent civilians at a crowded Chinese train station is too insignificant to be a terrorist activity.
  
  The U.S. Embassy in China has downplayed the severity of the bloody carnage in southwestern Kunming City, calling it on its official Weibo account a "horrible and totally meaningless act of violence," short of calling the murderers "terrorists."
  
  The wording is the continuation of the government's ambiguous stance on China's counter-terrorism drive in Xinjiang, the northwestern autonomous region haunted by suicide bombs and deadly assaults.
  
  In a related development, CNN, which apologized after its biased news photo editing in reporting of the March 14 riot in Tibet's capital of Lhasa in 2008, has again showed its doubts and disbelief, if not irony, by using quotation marks around the word "terrorists" in its latest reportage of the Kunming slaughter.
  
  How the U.S. government and some media described the terrorist attacks in China has revealed their persistent double standard in the global fight against terrorism.
  
  Their leniency for the terrorists is sending signals of encouragement to potential attackers.
  
  This is not the first time they have adopted this double standard on terrorism.
  
  In October, CNN published an op-ed article titled "Tian'anmen crash: Terrorism or cry of desperation?" after separatists in a vehicle slammed into the Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, killing five and injuring 40.
  
  The latest train station killings, which evidence pointed to politically motivated Xinjiang separatists, is the latest in a spate of terrorist attacks carried out by them.
  
  It is perpetrated by non-state entities, involves violence and designed to have psychological impact far beyond the immediate victims.
  
  It is China's "9/11," only on a smaller scale.
  
  The latest civilian slaughter conforms with any typical terrorist attack and bears striking similarities with what happened in Boston and Nairobi, which the U.S. government condemned as terrorism without a minute's hesitation.
  
  Behind its wording is the entrenched U.S. belief that the Xinjiang murderers were the "ethnically oppressed seeking autonomy."
  
  Nothing, however, justifies the act of realizing political and religious motives by slaughtering the innocent.
  
  Washington is once again playing its "counter-terrorism card." For the U.S. government and biased media like CNN, the only standard for terrorist activities is whether it happened within the territories of its own or its allies.
  
  The U.S. government and biased media should know that their double standard on terrorism will one day backfire and hurt their own interests.
  
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Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013

Video:

China published a report on the United States' human rights record on Friday, in response to U.S. criticism and "irresponsible remarks" about China.

"The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013" was released by the Information Office of the State Council, China's cabinet, in response to "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013" made public by the U.S. State Department on Thursday.

China lashes out at US human rights record 

Press TV
China's report states that there were serious human rights problems in the U.S in 2013, with the situation deteriorating in many fields. Once again posing as "the world judge of human rights", the U.S. government "made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks" on almost 200 countries and regions, the report says.

The United States carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems, according to the report.

THE WORLD THROUGH PRISM

The U.S. government spies on its own citizens to a "massive and unrestrained" degree, the report says.

The report calls the U.S. PRISM surveillance program, a vast, long-term mechanism for spying on private citizens both at home and abroad, "a blatant violation of international law" and says it "seriously infringes human rights."

The U.S. intelligence services, by virtue of data provided by Internet and telecom companies -- including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo -- "recklessly" track citizens' private contacts and social activities.

KILLER ROBOTS AND DEAD CONVENTIONS

The report quantifies drone strikes by the U.S. in countries, including Pakistan and Yemen, which have caused heavy civilian casualties. In Pakistan alone, since 2004, the U.S. has carried out 376 drone strikes killing 926 civilians.

The U.S. has not ratified, or participated in, a series of core UN conventions on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT

Solitary confinement is prevalent in the U.S., the report says.

In U.S. prisons, inmates in solitary confinement are enclosed in cramped cells with poor ventilation and little or no natural light, isolated from other prisoners; a situation that takes it toll on inmates' physical and mental health.

About 80,000 U.S. prisoners are in solitary confinement. Some have been held in solitary confinement for over 40 years.

RAMPANT GUN VIOLENCE

The rampant U.S. gun culture breeds violence that results in the death of 11,000 Americans every year.

The report cites figures from the FBI that state firearms were used in 69.3 percent of the nation's murders, 41 percent of robberies, and 21.8 percent of aggravated assaults.

In 2013, 137 people were killed in 30 mass murder events (four or more deaths each).

A rampage in the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington D.C. left 12 people dead, according to the report.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND HOMELESSNESS

"The U.S. still faces a grave employment situation with its unemployment rate still high," the report says.

Unemployment for low-income families has topped 21 percent. The homeless population in the U.S. has climbed 16 percent from 2011 to 2013.

There are also many child laborers in the agricultural sector in the U.S. and their physical and mental health is seriously compromised, the report says.

Friday's report was the 15th such annual report published by China in response to U.S. attacks.

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BEIJING, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese idiom says that all will follow one who is personally upright, even though he does not give orders; but if he is not personally upright, they will not follow, even though he gives orders.

Attributed to Confucius (551 BC-479 BC), one of the greatest Chinese philosophers in history, the idiom is an important tenet for the Chinese. Full story

	Full text of Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013
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It's not about rights or peace

There are many reasons why crimes happen, but let us not get befuddled by the view that we have to sacrifice our rights in order to live in peace.

Murder victims: Police personnel bringing out the bodies of the five men who were gunned down at an apartment in Sungai Nibong.

It is quite nice to hear the Prime Minister declare that any future development in criminal laws will not infringe upon human rights. Well, let’s hope that is true.

The thing is, by this statement there is an unsaid implication that human rights and crime are something that are somehow related. One retiree for example said that the price for more freedom is higher crime.

I wondered if this is true. After all, in our country, we respect the old, so perhaps there is some wisdom in this octogenarian’s statement.

So, I decided to poke around the information superhighway (Hah! Bet you haven’t hear that term for a while), and I chanced upon a study done by the United Nations office on drugs and crime in 2012. The study was a comprehensive survey of homicides around the world.

If greater freedom equates with greater crime (here the crime in question is murder), then we should see countries with the greatest civil liberties leading the pack. Crickey, a place like Denmark should, theoretically, be littered with dead bodies everywhere. You shouldn’t be able to walk to your corner shop to buy your poached cod or whatever is eaten in those parts, without having to step over cadavers riddled with bullet holes.

After all, they have ratified about thirty human rights treaties (including one against the death penalty); their criminals must be running around high on Carlsberg and whacking every Thor, Dag and Hagen that they come across.

But, this is not the case. They have one of the lowest murder rates in the world. 0.9 per every 100,000 people. To give that some sense of perspective, our murder rate is 2.3 per every 100,000 people. In fact, looking at the study, we see that there is simply no correlation between civil liberties and crime. The regions with the highest homicide rate tend to be those which are desperately poor.

Now this is of course a cursory amble of the Internet on my part and not some serious academic study, but it seems to me that it is very clear that to equate more human rights to more crime is simply not supported by the facts.

The reason I raise this is that we are often faced with the argument that it is one or the other. Rights or peace. This is simply not the case.

In the light of the recent spate of high profile and horrific crimes that we have faced and the police force’s “war” on gangsters, let us not get befuddled by the view that we have to sacrifice our rights in order to live in peace.

There are a myriad of reasons why crimes happen and these must be examined and studied so that any “war” on crime has to be fought on the correct “battlefield”.

For example, poverty and the vast disparity of wealth between the haves and the have not’s seem to be one of the things that the world’s most murder ridden nations have in common.

It sure as heck is not their observance of human rights principles.

So, yes, let us make all efforts to ensure that this country of ours has the least crime possible, but leave our rights (what little of them we have) well enough alone.

 Brave New World by AZMI SHAROM
Azmi Sharom (azmisharom@yahoo.co.uk) is a law teacher. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

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No privacy on the Net !

Revelations about PRISM, a US government program that harvests data on the Internet, has sparked concerns about privacy and civil rights violations. But has there ever been real privacy and security on the WWW?

 Demonstrators hold posters during a demonstration against the US Internet surveillance program of the NSA, PRISM, at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Germany, ahead of US President Barack Obama’s visit to the German capital.

IMAGINE a time before email, when all your correspondence was sent through the post. How would you feel if you knew that somebody at the post office was recording the details of all the people you were corresponding with, “just in case” you did something wrong?

I think quite a few of you would be upset about it.

Similarly, some Americans are furious over revelations made about a system called PRISM. In the last few weeks, an allegation has been made that the US government is harvesting data on the Internet by copying what travels through some of its Internet Service Providers.

The US Director of National Intelligence has said that PRISM “is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program”, but its detractors are not convinced that this doesn’t mean no such program exists.

I think there are mainly two kinds of responses to this revelation: “Oh my God!” and “What took them so long?”.

The Internet has never really been secure. Because your data usually has to travel via systems owned by other people, you are at their mercy as to what they do with it. The indications are that this is already being done elsewhere.

Countries such as China, India, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom allegedly already run similar tracking projects on telecommunications and the Internet, mostly modelled on the US National Security Agency’s (unconfirmed) call monitoring programme. For discussion, I’ll limit myself for the moment to just emails – something that most people would recognise as being private and personal.

I find many people are surprised when I tell them that sending email over the Internet is a little bit like sending your message on a postcard. Just because you need a password to access it, doesn’t mean it’s secure during transmission.

The analogy would be that your mailbox is locked so only you can open it, but those carrying the postcard can read it before it reaches its final destination. Of course, there are ways to mitigate this. One has to be careful about what one put in emails in the first place. Don’t send anything that would be disastrous if it were forwarded to someone else without your permission.

You could also encrypt your email, so only the receiver with the correct password or key could read it, but this is difficult for most end users to do. (For those interested in encrypting emails, I would recommend looking at a product called PGP.)

The analogy holds up for other Internet traffic. It’s easy to monitor, given enough money and time. And as easy as it is for the Good Guys to try to monitor the Bad Guys, it’s just as easy for the Bad Guys to monitor us hapless members of the public.

But who do we mean by the Bad Guys? Specifically, should the government and law-enforcement agencies be categorised as ‘Bad Guys’ for purposes of privacy? Generally, the line oft quoted is “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about”.

Yet, I think we all accept that there should be a fundamental right to privacy, for everybody from anybody. An interesting corollary to being able to express your thoughts freely is that you should also be able to decide when and how you make them public.

The fault in relying on organisations that say “trust us” isn’t in the spirit of their objectives, but in how the humans in them are flawed in character and action.

An example quoted regularly at the moment is how the FBI collected information about Martin Luther King because they considered him the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country”.

One way of defining the boundaries are by codifying them in laws. For example, the Malaysian Personal Data Protection Act prohibits companies from sharing personal data with third parties without the original owner’s consent.

However, this law explicitly does not apply to the federal and state governments of Malaysia. Another clause indicates that consent is not necessary if it is for the purpose of “administration of justice”, or for the “exercise of any functions conferred on any person by or under any law”.

In relation to the revelations of PRISM, several questions come to mind: Can Internet traffic (or a subset of it) be considered “personal data”? Is it possible for government agencies to collect and store such data without your consent?

And if so, what safeguards are there to ensure that this personal data is accurate, is used correctly and is relevant for storage in the first place?

This should be a sharp point of debate, not just in terms of which of our secrets the government can be privy to, but also of which of the government’s information should be readily accessible by us.

True, there is so much data out there that analysing it is not a trivial task. However, companies such as Google are doing exactly that kind of work on large volumes of unstructured data so that you can search for cute kittens. The technology is already on its way.

Perhaps I am being over-cautious, but it seems a bit fantastical that people can know your deepest and darkest secrets by just monitoring a sequence of 1’s and 0’s. But, to quote science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, “It’s strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then”.

Contradictheory
By DZOF AZMI

> Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Speak to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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