Fiji lawyer Nazhat Shameem Khan has been elevated to the top prosecutorial position at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The Office of the Prosecutor at ICC has announced that deputy prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang have taken over leadership following chief prosecutor Karim AA Khan KC’s temporary leave of absence.

Khan stepped aside on May 16, 2025, pending the outcome of a UN Office of Internal Oversight Services investigation into alleged misconduct.

• READ MORE: ICC prosecutor to step aside until probe ends

The ICC states the deputy prosecutors will continue to rely on the support and collaboration of the Rome Statute community, and all partners, in carrying the office’s mandate forward.

In 2014, Nazhat Khan was appointed Fiji’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and Vienna, and to Switzerland and took up the ICC post in 2021.

Pacific Media Watch notes that Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza, and also against three Hamas leaders who have been killed in the war on Gaza. In contrast to most of the world’s condemnation and a majority of UN members, Fiji supports Israel and its main backer, United States, in the war.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

Statement by the Presidency of the Assembly of States Parties regarding the situation of the Office of the Prosecutor #RomeStatute #ICC #ASP pic.twitter.com/Tq1eD5N36B

— Paivi Kaukoranta (@PASPKaukoranta) May 18, 2025

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

This is the first time I have had to begin an opinion column with both a journalistic disclosure and a legal disclaimer. But hey ho, these are dystopian times we live in.

The disclosure: I was one of 20 people who contributed expert reports for a recent legal submission to the British home secretary, Yvette Cooper, calling on her to end the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

You can read my submission – on the significant damage done to journalism by Hamas’ proscription – here.

If, as widely expected, Cooper does not approve the application, prepared by the London-based Riverway Law firm on behalf of Hamas, within the 90-day time limit, her decision will be referred to an appeal tribunal for judicial review.

The disclaimer: Nothing that follows is intended in any way to encourage you to take a more favourable view of Hamas. It is not intended in any way to encourage you to support Hamas. It does not endorse opinions or beliefs that are supportive of Hamas, as set out in the submissions calling for the de-proscription of Hamas.

The danger is this: under Section 12 of Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act of 2000, if anything I write, however inadvertently, encourages you to think more favourably of a proscribed organisation like Hamas, I face up to 14 years in jail.

The purpose of this article is to show how the law and the establishment operate together to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli occupation.

The law is so loosely worded that the British government, supported by a counter-terrorism police seemingly only too eager to please, can potentially arrest anyone praising the work of Gaza’s public hospitals in saving lives because Hamas is in charge of the enclave’s government, or prosecute anyone, including media outlets, giving a platform to Hamas politicians trying to advance a ceasefire.

If all this sounds crazy, given both that stating facts should not be illegal and that I cannot possibly know how anyone might receive and feel about any information regarding Hamas, then you are starting to understand why the application to the home secretary is so urgent and important.

Secret meetings

The UK may have declared Hamas’ armed wing a terrorist organisation a quarter of a century ago, but its political and administrative wings were added to the proscribed list much more recently – in 2021.

Which is why Cooper, the current home secretary, was misleading in the way she dismissively responded to the de-proscription application submitted to her office. She told LBC: “Hamas has long been a terrorist organisation. We maintain our view about the barbaric nature of this organisation.”

It was Priti Patel who, as home secretary, added Hamas in its entirety, including its political and administrative wings, to the proscription list shortly after she was rehabilitated and readmitted to Boris Johnson’s government in 2019.

Two years earlier, she had been forced to resign from her post as international development secretary in disgrace.

Why? Because she was found to have held 12 secret meetings with senior Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without disclosing those meetings to her colleagues and while she was supposedly on a family holiday.

It later emerged she had also secretly met other Israeli officials in New York and Westminster.

Patel’s political career, to put it politely, has been distinguished by an evident attentiveness to Israeli concerns.

Undoubtedly her decision to proscribe Hamas’ political and administrative wings, treating them as identical to the armed section of the organisation, was high on Israel’s wish list.

It instantly degraded Britain’s political discourse so that it became all but impossible to discuss Hamas’ rule in Gaza or Israel’s blockade of the enclave in a balanced or realistic way. It resulted in a simplistic black-and-white picture of life in the enclave in which everything Hamas was bad – and therefore, by contrast, everything Israeli was good.

That would spectacularly serve Israeli interests two years later, when, following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel fed the western media entirely fabricated stories of Hamas “beheading babies” and carrying out “mass rapes”.

For months afterwards, as Israel set about murdering Palestinians in Gaza en masse and levelling their homes, the only question media interviewers directed at anyone criticising Israel’s actions was this: “Do you condemn Hamas?”

Even the ever-swelling death toll figures recorded by Gaza’s health ministry – proven to be so reliable in previous Israeli attacks that international bodies and the Israeli military itself relied on them – were suddenly treated as suspect and inflated. Independent research continues to suggest otherwise.

Western media outlets appended “Hamas-run” to the health ministry, and its casualty figures – almost certainly a massive undercount given Israel’s systematic destruction of the health sector – were now reported only as a “claim”.

In turn, these deceptions were implicitly used to justify Israel’s own, far greater atrocities in killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, destroying the enclave’s hospitals and supporting infrastructure, while at the same time starving the entire population.

Eighteen months on, “evil Hamas” is still the story, not Israel’s all-too-obvious genocide.

Bullied into silence

Concerns about Hamas being proscribed in its entirety – not just its armed wing – are far from hypothetical, given the expansive wording of the UK’s Terrorism Act since 2019, when it was amended.

In particular, a revision to Section 12 means that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”, and one that might “encourage support” for that organisation, is liable to arrest by terrorism police, prosecution, and up to 14 years in jail.

For expressing an opinion.

The wording is so vague that, for example, simply criticising Israel for committing greater and more numerous atrocities than Hamas could theoretically have the counter-terrorism police banging on your door.

To avoid prosecution, Riverway Law’s website dedicated to its application to the home secretary carries a legal disclaimer: “By entering this website you acknowledge that none of the contents can be understood as supporting, or expressing support for, proscribed terrorist organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.”

Several independent British journalists and commentators – those whose careers are not dictated, and protected, by billionaires or the UK state broadcaster – have had their homes raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police or been arrested at the border as they return home.

One political commentator, Tony Greenstein – who also happens to be Jewish and a trained lawyer – is currently being prosecuted under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. Others are under prolonged investigation. They have the threat of prosecution hanging over their heads like a sword.

The rest of us are meant to take note, feeling the chilling effect. Do we want the police breaking down the door of our homes at dawn? Do we want to be arrested on return from holiday, our partners and children looking on in horror?

The National Union of Journalists has called the police actions against journalists “abuse and mis-use of counter-terror legislation” and warned that they risk “threatening the safety of journalists”, as well as their sources.

Understandably, you may be barely aware of these repressive police tactics, which have been accelerating since Keir Starmer came to power. He, let us recall, personally approved, as opposition leader, Israel’s crime against humanity of blocking food, water and power to Gaza.

The BBC and the rest of the media have failed to meaningfully report these incidents – which are characteristic elsewhere of police states.

Is that because these media outlets are themselves cowed into submission by the Terrorism Act?

Or is it because they are simply mouthpieces of the same British establishment that made it illegal to express support for objectives which are the same as those sought by Hamas’ political, as opposed to military, objectives?

Let us remember – and it’s easy to forget, given how rarely such things are mentioned by the British media – that the same UK state that proscribed Hamas continues to arm Israel directly, helps ship weapons from other countries to Israel, supplies Israel with intelligence from British spy planes over Gaza, and provides Israel with diplomatic cover – all while Israel carries out what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calls a “plausible genocide”, and while its sister International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks the arrest of Netanyahu for crimes against humanity.

The British government is not a neutral party in the levelling of Gaza, the decimation of its people by bombs, the ethnic cleansing of swaths of the enclave, or the starvation of the population. It is actively assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign.

The UK establishment is also, through its proscription of Hamas and the wording of the Terrorism Act, bullying journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers – in fact, anyone – into silence about the context of its complicity, into an unwillingness to scrutinise its rationalisations for collusion in genocide.

‘No civilians’

There are two main objectives behind Riverway Law’s submission to the home secretary against Hamas’ proscription as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The first concerns the proscription of the entire organisation by the British government. This is the part of the legal submission that has attracted most attention – and which has been used to vilify the lawyers involved

As barrister Franck Magennis has explained, Riverway’s hands were tied because Patel – now the shadow foreign secretary – added Hamas to the list as a single entity in 2021, making no distinction between its different wings. That meant the lawyers had no choice but to petition for the entire group to be deproscribed.

The government set the terms of the legal debate, not Hamas or its legal representatives.

Hamas’ lawyers accept that its military wing meets the definition of a terrorist organisation under the terms of the UK’s Terrorism Act. They argue this law casts the net so wide that any organisation using violence to achieve political ends is covered, including the Israeli, Ukrainian and British militaries.

The establishment media have tried to smear Riverway and its barristers as Hamas “stooges” and supporters of terrorism – amply illustrating why the case is so necessary.

An openly hostile interviewer for LBC appeared to think he had caught out Magennis in some kind of ethical or professional lapse because he chose to represent Hamas without payment – as he must do under UK law because Hamas is a proscribed organisation.

The implication was that Magennis was so enthusiastically supportive of terrorism that he was willing to take on time-consuming and career-damaging work for free – rather than that he is doing so because there are vitally important legal and ethical principles at stake.

Not least, the proscription of Hamas’ political wing, including its governmental and administrative institutions, treats them as extensions of the armed struggle.

It breathes life into Israel’s patently ridiculous claims that all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are really “Hamas command and control centres”, that Gaza’s doctors can be killed or arrested and taken to torture camps because they are “Hamas operatives” in disguise, and that Gaza’s paramedics can be executed because their rescue missions supposedly aid Hamas.

And worse, ultimately proscription supports Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements that there are “no civilians in Gaza”, a place where half the population are children.

Bargaining chips

The proscription of Hamas in its entirety ignores the fact that the group has political goals – ones Gaza’s population voted for 19 years ago to liberate themselves from decades of Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation. Those goals are distinct from Hamas, yet expressing support for the objectives gives rise to the risk of being investigated by the police and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Gaza’s people – the less than half who were old enough to vote two decades ago – were driven down the path of supporting armed resistance in the pursuit of national liberation for an all-too-obvious reason. Because Israel had refused to make any concessions to Hamas’ political rivals, headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, has been using strictly diplomatic means – which Israel also opposes – to achieve statehood.

The proscription of Hamas sweeps out of view the fact that a people under occupation have a right enshrined in international law to use armed struggle against their military oppressors. It makes it perilously dangerous to show support for the armed struggle of Gaza’s Palestinians lest you are accused of breaching Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Proscription sanctions the failure by western politicians and media to distinguish between Hamas actions on 7 October 2023 that accord with international law, such as its attacks on Israeli military bases, and illegitimate actions targeting Israeli civilians.

It reverses reality, treating all those Israelis held in Gaza as hostages who have been kidnapped, even those who are soldiers, while approving of Israel’s kidnapping of Palestinians in Gaza, from medical staff to children.

The latter are supposedly “arrested”. They are referred to by the western media as “prisoners”, even though most have not been charged or put on trial, and the main purpose of their detention seems to be as bargaining chips in an exchange for Israelis captive in Gaza.

And finally, since 2021, Britain’s proscription of Hamas’ political wing has effectively meant the UK has given its backing both to Israel’s refusal to talk to Gaza’s government, and to Israel’s near two-decade-old siege of Gaza that turned it into little more than a concentration camp holding 2.3 million Palestinians, further radicalising the population.

British politicians should understand quite how self-defeating such an approach is. After all, it was only through talking to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the “terrorist” IRA group, that Britain was able to negotiate a peace deal, the Good Friday Agreement, in Northern Ireland in 1998.

Hamas stated in its revised 2017 charter that it is ready to make territorial concessions with Israel – based on the traditional two-state solution.

And it does so again in its application to the home secretary, calling the two-state solution the “national consensus” among Palestinians.

The submission notes that Israel has repeatedly assassinated Hamas leaders, including Ahmed Jabari and Ismail Haniyeh, when they were close to concluding ceasefire agreements, in what looks suspiciously like attempts by Israel to undermine more moderate voices within the organisation.

Through proscription, Britain has handed Israel a permanent licence to refuse to test Hamas’ willingness to compromise.

Attack on lawyers

Robert Jenrick, Britain’s shadow justice secretary, has called for Riverway Law and its barristers to be investigated and struck off for representing Hamas – apparently forgetting the foundational principle in law that everyone, even serial killers, have a right to legal representation if the law is not to become a hollow charade.

The Terrorism Act includes provision for an appeal by proscribed organisations against their inclusion on the list. How are they to go through the legal procedure to appeal their listing apart from through lawyers?

Disgracefully, Starmer’s officials have once again kept their silence as Hamas’ legal representatives in the UK have been turned into targets for establishment abuse. The government is as complicit in the assault at home on basic democratic rights, such as free speech and the rule of law, as it has been complicit abroad in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

How would the Starmer government have reacted had the two British barristers who defended Israel against South Africa’s case against genocide at the ICJ last year been publicly maligned for doing so? Would it have been okay to tar those lawyers with the crimes against humanity committed by their client?

Fahad Ansari, director of Riverway Law, has written to the government, urging it to speak up in defence of this team’s right to challenge Hamas’ proscription, and warning that Jenrick’s “comments are not only reckless and libellous but amount to incitement against our staff members”.

He has reminded the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, of the previous murder of lawyers for taking on cases that challenged the British establishment, including Pat Finucane, who was killed by Ulster loyalists in collusion with the British security services, after he won several human rights cases against the British government.

Hamas’ submission makes the case that Patel provided several false grounds to justify the proscription of Hamas in its entirety.

Hamas disputes Patel’s characterisation of it as a terrorist organisation. It notes that international law allows people illegally occupied and oppressed to resist through military means.

Hamas’ former political bureau chief Mousa Abu Marzouk notes in his witness statement on behalf of Hamas that Hamas’ operation on 7 October 2023 was intended only to strike military targets, and that atrocities carried out by its fighters that day against civilians had not been authorised by the leadership and are not condoned.

It is impossible to know whether that claim is true.

It is also incredibly hard to draw attention to factors which could be said to support Abu Marzouk’s argument without also being alleged to have invited support for Hamas or as expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of Hamas – which would risk being accused of a criminal offence under Section 12.

In addition to the false stories spread by Israel, such as that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out “mass rape”, it is known that other, presumably less disciplined, groups broke out of Gaza that day as well as Hamas. Apparently no effort has been made to determine which groups carried out which atrocities.

And then there is the fact that an unknown number of the atrocities blamed on Hamas were actually caused by Israel’s green-lighting of its Hannibal directive, which authorised the Israeli military to kill its own soldiers and citizens to prevent them being seized. That included firing missiles into kibbutz homes and on vehicles heading towards Gaza, leaving only charred remains of the occupants.

The proscription of Hamas makes it legally dangerous to draw attention to the sickening acts of the Israeli government.

Also worth noting is that Hamas makes clear in its submission that, unlike Israel, it is ready to have its actions that day investigated by international bodies and any of its fighters who committed atrocities put on trial.

“We remain, as always, prepared to cooperate with any international investigations and inquiries into the operation, even if ‘Israel’ refuses to do so,” Abu Marzouk writes.

He calls on “the ICC Prosecutor and his team to immediately and urgently come to occupied Palestine to look into the crimes and violations committed there, rather than merely observing the situation remotely or being subject to the Israeli restrictions.”

Public demonised

Abu Marzouk points out that Britain is not a dispassionate observer of Israel’s genocide unfolding in Gaza. As the colonial power in Palestine for much of the first half of the last century, it permitted European Jews to colonise the Palestinian people’s homeland, effectively leaving the latter stateless.

“Unsurprisingly,” Abu Marzouk writes, “the British state continues to side with the genocidal Zionist coloniser, while proscribing organisations like ours that strive to assert Palestinian dignity.”

Which alludes to the second main purpose of Hamas’ application.

The British state has a legal obligation to prevent Israel’s current crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza. And those in a position to shed light on Israel’s atrocities – and thereby add to the pressure on the British government and international bodies to fulfil their legal obligations – have a duty to do so too.

That means lawyers, journalists, human rights groups, academics and researchers should be as free as possible to contribute information and analyses that hold both Israel to account for its continuing crimes and the British state for any collusion in those crimes.

But as noted earlier, what Hamas’ proscription has done is precisely stifle expert discourse about what is happening in Gaza. Those who try to speak up, from independent journalists to lawyers, have found themselves vilified, bullied or threatened with prosecution by the British state.

Increasingly, this crackdown is being extended to the wider public.

Proscription has paved the way for the arrest and jailing of peace activist groups like Palestine Action trying to stop the UK-based arms manufacturer Elbit producing the quadcopters Israel is using to finish off civilians, including children, injured in air strikes on Gaza.

Proscription has paved the way for demonising mass public marches and student campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocide as pro-Hamas and “hate protests”.

Proscription has paved the way for the police to place ever-tighter restrictions on such demonstrations, to arrest the organisers, and to investigate prominent figures like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who take part in them.

“Rather than allow freedom of speech, police have embarked on a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of journalists, academics, peace activists and students over their perceived support for Hamas,” the application argues.

But while those opposed to genocide find themselves maligned as supporters of terrorism, those actually committing crimes against humanity – whether Israeli leaders or British nationals taking part as soldiers in the genocide in Gaza – are still being welcomed in Britain with open arms.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy met his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, in London last month for a so-called “private meeting”. The British government apparently agreed to Saar’s visit, even though it must have known it would trigger requests from legal groups for his arrest for war crimes.

British officials have also hosted senior Israeli military figures.

Meanwhile, a legal dossier handed to the Metropolitan Police last month against 10 Britons accused of committing war crimes in Gaza, such as killing civilians and aid workers, has made barely any ripples.

Where is the outrage meted out by the media and politicians for Britons who have chosen to travel to Gaza to fight with an army that has killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Palestinian children there?

There is more to say, but saying more risks arrest by the UK’s counter-terrorism police and jail time. Which is why ending Hamas’ proscription needs to happen as soon as possible.

And why the British establishment, from politicians to the media, are so determined to close ranks and foil the application.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

“There has been a systematic erosion of press freedom in Macao, with the denial of entry to journalists and restricted access to public events. The detention of two reporters simply for attempting to cover a legislative session marks a disturbing escalation in the suppression of independent journalism,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “Authorities must drop any potential charges against All About Macau’s reporters and allow journalists to work without interference.”

Macao, or Macau, is a former Portuguese colony, which reverted to Chinese rule in 1999 under a “One Country, Two Systems” framework that promised a high degree of autonomy and wider civil liberties than the Chinese mainland.

On April 17, All About Macau’s editor-in-chief Ian Sio Tou and another reporter were barred from entering the Legislative Assembly chamber to cover a debate on the government’s annual Policy Address. Ian is also president of the Macau Journalists Association.

Police said the case would be transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office for investigation as the journalists were suspected of violating Article 304 of the Penal Code relating to “disrupting the operation” of government institutions, for which the penalty is up to three years in prison.

All About Macau is recognized for its critical and in-depth reporting on political and social issues.

Two days earlier, three All About Macau reporters were barred from entering the chamber to hear Macao Chief Executive Sam Hou Fai’s Policy Address, outlining government proposals for the year.

In a video posted by All About Macau, which quickly went viral online, Ian Sio Tou displayed her Legislative Assembly-issued press card to numerous officials who physically blocked the journalists from the hall.

Police did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The post New York Officials Call for Criminal Prosecution of Fossil Fuel Companies and CEOs appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013. She relays the “sense of freedom and joy” now present on the streets of Damascus, where ordinary Syrians, for the first time in generations, “feel that they are liberated and they are proud of where they are today.” Current estimates put the number of forced disappearances under the Assad government at 300,000 likely tortured in prisons and buried in mass graves. We discuss Syria’s new transitional government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and whether it can fulfill its promises of inclusion and accountability for all Syrians. “There’s no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable, for the sake of reconciliation in the country,” says Sinjab.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“The arrest of journalist Sayed Saber is the latest example of Egypt’s crackdown on journalists and press freedom,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA program coordinator. “CPJ has documented the arrests of six other journalists and writers since the beginning of this year, underscoring the urgency of addressing this alarming trend. This demonstrates yet again the lengths the Egyptian government will go to stifle reporting and commentary it disagrees with. Egypt must release Saber without charges, free the other six journalists, and end its intensified campaign against the press.”

Saber’s arrest is believed to be linked to recent social media posts criticizing military rule in Egypt. He is an established Egyptian journalist and writer with contributions to various media outlets and several published books. Known for his sharp critiques of the current political regime in Egypt, Saber often uses a sarcastic tone to deliver his commentary.

On September 9, CPJ and 34 other human rights and press freedom organizations, issued a joint statement condemning the recent arrests and enforced disappearances of four Egyptian journalists — Ashraf Omar, Khaled Mamdouh, Ramadan Gouida, and Yasser Abu Al-Ela — and called for their unconditional release. On October 23, CPJ documented the arrests of economic commentator Abdel Khaleq Farouk and journalist Ahmed Bayoumi. All six journalists remain in detention.

CPJ’s email to the Egyptian Ministry of Interior requesting comment on Saber’s arrests did not receive an immediate response

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Brazil’s Federal Police released an 884-page report on November 26, laying out the evidence used for its November 21 indictments of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 of his cronies. Among the revelations are evidence showing that Bolsonaro knew about a plot carried out by army special forces officers to assassinate President Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, and proof that Bolsonaro oversaw a complex plan with six working groups to enact a military coup after losing the election in 2022.

This news was covered in media outlets around the world, from the Washington Post, Reuters and AP to the Guardian and Le Monde. Curiously enough, the New York Times, which has given ample coverage to Brazilian politics and the ongoing investigations against Bolsonaro, remained silent.

When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was accused of trying to overthrow the government, the New York Times (11/21/24) reported that “the police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions”—but when the Federal Police released 884 pages of specifics days later, the Times was silent.

Five days earlier, in an article about the indictments, Times reporter Ana Ionova (11/21/24) misleadingly wrote, “The police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions that led to their recommendations.” So why, five days later, when a mountain of material evidence and plea bargain testimony transcripts were released, demonstrating exactly why the police recommended that the attorney general file three criminal charges against Bolsonaro, would the Times not join in with the other media outlets to add clarification?

As I’ve written before (FAIR.org, 7/7/23), the Times has aligned itself with a toxic narrative pushed by Bolsonaro, along with international allies like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, to discredit Brazil’s court system. Most of their efforts have focused on Moraes, the former Electoral Court president and current Supreme Court minister. As the police report shows, delegitimizing Moraes was one of the strategies used to build public support for the 2023 coup attempt.

Furthermore, since the failure of that attempt, the attacks on Moraes have been used by conservatives to build public sympathy for amnesty for Bolsonaro, in a move to pressure Congress to restore his political rights so that he can run for election in 2026.

Moraes’ central position as a target in the strategy is demonstrated in intercepted WhatsApp conversations between members of the group who were indicted in the coup investigation. A review of Times articles covering Moraes over the last two years shows that, at the least, the newspaper has acted as an unwilling accomplice, or “useful idiot” by perpetuating the coup plotters’ judicial overreach narrative.

‘Knowingly false allegations’

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spreading doubts about his country’s electoral system (New York Times, 7/19/22).

On July 19, 2022, Bolsonaro held an event in the Presidential Palace for dozens of foreign diplomats. There he spent over an hour railing against Brazil’s renowned electronic voting system. Without providing any evidence to back up his statements, he announced that if he lost the October 2 presidential election, it would be a sign of voter fraud.

The entire event was broadcast live on TV Brazil, Brazil’s national public television station, in violation of Brazil’s election laws against abuse of power for electoral purposes. It was this event which, months later, caused the Superior Electoral Court to bar Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years.

Thirteen days earlier, according to the Federal Police report (p. 7), the president held a meeting with high-ranking military officers and cabinet ministers. There, he

presented a narrative which had been built to spread knowingly false allegations, without any concrete evidence, suggesting that there would be fraud and manipulation of votes in the Brazilian elections. [He] used the meeting to spread attacks and make insinuations of crimes he said would be committed by current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and, primarily, Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers Luis Roberto Barroso, Edson Faschin and Alexandre de Moraes.

Intercepted communications between the people indicted show that, in the ensuing months, Moraes would become the primary target or, as they proclaimed in military jargon, the “center of gravity” of the coup (p. 14).

‘Going too far?’

The New York Times (9/26/22) attacked the Brazilian Supreme Court’s efforts to rein in the country’s authoritarian far right: “According to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”

Weeks after Bolsonaro’s event, and six days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, the New York Times published a hit piece (9/26/22) on Brazil’s judiciary, called “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?”

As I later wrote for FAIR (5/14/24), the primary target of the article, written by the Times‘ Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, was Moraes. One of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court ministers, Moraes at the time was also serving a four-year term as Superior Electoral Court president. Clearly basing its analysis on US law, the Times described in alarming terms activities that were completely legal in Brazil:

The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on October 2.

This wasn’t original analysis by the Times. As the Federal Police report (p. 11) stated:

The dissemination of false narratives through digital influencers and some members of the traditional media, with strong penetration among a segment of the population aligned with the right-wing of the political spectrum, maintained the discourse of an illicit action by the Judiciary, especially the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, claiming that they overstepped their constitutional limits in order to prevent the re-election of then-President Jair Bolsonaro.

The narrative of Supreme Court overreach continues to be the key pillar of the amnesty movement. As this campaign picked up momentum, the Times spread doubt regarding the judiciary as it oversaw investigations into anti-democratic behavior by the far right. In an article explaining why Bolsonaro had been barred from running for office, the Times‘ Nicas (7/1/23) wrote that the judiciary’s “hands on” approach to investigating election fraud “has also put what some analysts say is too much power in the hands of the electoral court’s seven judges, instead of voters.”

‘Crisis of democracy?’

As time passed, an investigation into illegal use of social media during the 2022 election season, an inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court due to death threats made against its justices and their families, began to draw the attention of the international far right. This was thanks in part to the efforts of Glenn Greenwald, who ridiculously claimed, to his Rumble audience of millions, that Moraes was the de facto ruler of Brazil.

In May 2024, a group of GOP lawmakers held a congressional subcommittee hearing called “Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy, Freedom and the Rule of Law?” As I documented for FAIR (5/14/24), the most-cited source in the GOP’s supporting document for the hearing was the Times‘ 2022 election-season article (9/26/22) about judicial overreach.

For an expert on “free expression,” the New York Times (9/21/24) turned to a far-right influencer under investigation for electoral disinformation.

One of the panelists at the hearing was Paulo Figueiredo. Introduced as an “investigative journalist,” Figueiredo—grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator, Gen. João Figueiredo—is a far-right influencer who relocated to Florida to flee a fraud investigation into the fleecing of Brazilian investors in a failed real estate deal with Donald Trump in 2019. On November 21, Figueiredo was indicted as one of the coup plotters in the Federal Police report (p. 15), which describes how military leaders who refused to join the operation were targeted with disinformation campaigns. The coup plotters

made use of the modus operandi developed by the digital militia, selecting targets to insert into a machine for amplifying personal attacks, using multiple channels and influencers in positions of authority over their “audience.” Economist and digital influencer Paulo Renato de Oliveira Figueiredo Filho was integrated into the core group responsible for inciting military personnel to join the coup, due to his ability to penetrate the military sphere because he is the grandson of former president of the republic, Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo.

In February, 2024, the Federal Police announced that Figueiredo was under investigation for spreading electoral disinformation during the lead-up to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. Many journalists at the time remembered the fact that, before becoming military dictator, his grandfather served as National Intelligence Service chief during the most repressive phase of the government’s death squad and torture operations.

In an article by Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova on Musk’s losing battle with the Brazilian Supreme Court, the Times (9/21/24) turned to Figueiredo for analysis:

Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”

The Times failed to mention why Figueiredo was blocked, or his family ties—a connection it had made before, in the 2019 article “Investors in Former Trump-Branded Hotel in Brazil Charged With Corruption” (1/31/19):

Mr. Figueiredo, the grandson of the last military dictator in the authoritarian government that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985, displayed a picture of himself with Mr. Trump at the Trump Tower in New York, both men flashing a thumbs-up sign.

The different framing illustrates the Times‘ double standard: When it’s useful to attack Trump, Figueiredo is identified as the grandson of an authoritarian. When used to criticize a left-wing Brazilian government as authoritarian, he’s introduced merely as a “right-wing pundit.”

‘I’ll say what I want’

The New York Times (10/16/24) declared that Brazil’s Supreme Court may be “a threat to democracy itself” because it prosecutes violent threats against judges.

The Times‘ Nicas (10/16/24) continued to platform far-right figures with suspect backgrounds while using the story of X‘s ban and reinstatement in Brazil to undermine Brazil’s judiciary in “Is Elon Musk’s Brazilian Nemesis Saving Democracy or Hurting it?” The article opened with:

Daniel Silveira, a policeman turned far-right Brazilian congressman, was furious. He believed Brazil’s Supreme Court was persecuting conservatives and silencing them on social media, and he wanted to do something about it.

So he sat on his couch and began recording. “How many times have I imagined you getting beat up on the street,” he said in a 19-minute diatribe against the court’s justices, muscles bulging through his tight T-shirt. He posted the video on YouTube in February 2021, adding, “I’ll say what I want on here.”

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice immediately ordered his arrest. A year later, 10 of the court’s 11 justices convicted and sentenced him to nearly nine years in prison for threatening them.

While the Times notes Silveira’s YouTube rant against the Supreme Court, it failed to explain the context of his arrest. Silveira, who was kicked out of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police after 60 disciplinary procedures, had been publicly inciting violence against the Supreme Court and its ministers for months, even after receiving warnings.

In one YouTube video, quoted in the Supreme Court case, he says: “When a soldier or a corporal knocks on your door, locking it won’t help. It will be ripped down. Yes, the armed forces will intervene and this is what we want.”

In the US, federal judges can investigate threats against them through the judiciary’s own police forces, such as the US Marshals and US Supreme Court Police. Yet the Times described the Brazilian Supreme Court’s investigation as a “highly unusual move,” while citing Moraes, central target in Brazil’s failed coup attempt, 22 times.

A target omitted

Another target was Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, whom the New York Times has frequently criticized—but the Times (11/19/24) couldn’t bring itself to report his name.

A series of events that unfolded in November have put a halt to the amnesty movement and attempts to prepare Bolsonaro for a Trump-like return in the 2026 elections.

On November 13, a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) detonated bombs in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza. Security footage shows him setting off a car bomb, attacking the Supreme Court with fireworks, and accidentally blowing himself up when his backpack bomb ricocheted off a statue. Several PL officials immediately called him a lone suicide bomber, a narrative echoed by the Times in a piece by Ionova (11/13/24). However, due in part to his links to the PL party, whose president was indicted along with Bolsonaro on November 21, the police are investigating the case as a terrorist act.

On November 19, Federal Police arrested a police agent and four army officers from the “Kids Pretos,” an army special forces division, for plotting to assassinate President-elect Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Moraes in December 2022. Planning reportedly occurred at the home of Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and VP candidate, General Walter Braga Netto. Police said a hit man had been stationed near Moraes’ home on the planned assassination night, but the attempt was aborted due to a scheduling change at the Supreme Court.

Despite outlets like AP (11/19/24) and CNN (11/19/24) naming Moraes as a target, the Times‘ Ionova (11/19/24) omitted his name, stating only that “authorities did not divulge the name of the justice.” Brazil’s largest news outlet, Globo (11/19/24), broke the story hours earlier, listing Lula, Alckmin and Moraes as targets.

Although the Times ignored it, the news that Justice Moraes was an assassination target has undermined the far right’s narrative portraying him as overreaching in his oversight of federal police investigations into threats against Supreme Court justices and their families.

Just three days after the indictments, a November 24 Times article by Nicas and Ionova, headlined “A Corruption Case That Spilled Across Latin America Is Coming Undone,” targeted another Supreme Court minister, Dias Toffoli. It dusted off the discredited Car Wash investigation, an ostensible anti-corruption probe that ended in February 2021 (FAIR.org, 11/14/19, 12/20/23), to further undermine Brazil’s judiciary. The article blamed Toffoli, who discarded tampered evidence and reversed convictions based on new proof from leaked Telegram chats showing collusion between Car Wash Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecution team, for causing an investigation that ended four years ago to “unravel.”

On the same day, the article was published verbatim in Portuguese in Brazil’s third-largest newspaper, the conservative Estado de S. Paulo (11/24/24).

Historic window

The November 21 indictments have opened a historic window of opportunity in Brazil. For the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, the judiciary is poised to hold high-ranking military officials—including those, like Bolsonaro security advisor Gen. Augusto Heleno, who were actors in Brazil’s bloody military dictatorship—accountable for breaking the law. Furthermore, there is a real possibility that Brazil will avoid suffering from the same system failure that led to Trump’s return to the White House, by jailing former President Bolsonaro for crimes that are more serious than anything Trump was indicted for.

Why, at a moment like this, would the Times continue to bolster Brazil’s Trump-aligned far right by delegitimizing one of Brazil’s three branches of government? Could it simply be another, regrettable chapter in the Times’ long history of smear campaigns against leftist governments in Latin America?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Glenn Greenwald’s platform; it is Rumble.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Brian Mier.

“The arrest of Abdel Khaleq Farouk shows once again how far the Egyptian government is willing to go to stifle reporting and commentary it disagrees with,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “Egypt must let Farouk go without charges, release journalist Ahmed Bayoumi, arrested last month, and stop its newly intensified campaign of locking up the press.”

Farouk appeared before the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP) on October 21. an unnamed legal source told The New Arab that his arrest was likely prompted by a series of articles that he published on his Facebook account. These articles were critical of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s economic policies, particularly regarding the construction of Egypt’s New Administrative Capital and Sisi’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war. Farouk was previously arrested in October 2018 after publishing a book which questioned the government’s economic policies.

In a separate incident, journalist Ahmed Bayoumi of the independent media outlet Erem News was arrested September 16 and the circumstances of his arrest and whereabouts have not been disclosed. Bayoumi was previously arrested in December 2017 and charged with joining a terrorist organization and spreading false news. He was held in detention for two years before being released in December 2019.     

On September 9, CPJ, alongside 34 other human rights and press freedom organizations, issued a joint statement condemning the recent arrests and enforced disappearances of four other Egyptian journalists—Ashraf Omar, Khaled Mamdouh, Ramadan Gouida, and Yasser Abu Al-Ela—and called for their unconditional release. The four journalists remain in detention.     

CPJ’s email to the Egyptian Ministry of Interior requesting comment on Farouk and Bayoumi’s arrests did not receive an immediate response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

In a historic decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled on Monday that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The 6-3 ruling by the court’s right-wing majority — including all three justices appointed by Trump — was issued on the final day of the Supreme Court’s term and just four months ahead of November’s presidential election. It will further delay Trump’s criminal trial for leading the January 6 insurrection. The ruling upends more than two centuries of legal precedent, for the first time shielding U.S. presidents from criminal accountability. “In one fell swoop, this court has essentially left the American people to the whims of the president of the United States — any president of the United States, but particularly Mr. Trump,” says Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. We also speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the watchdog group True North Research, who says the Supreme Court’s conservative wing has left the country “unmoored from the rule of law” by adopting such an expansive view of presidential power. “This decision is the most reckless and dangerous decision ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Graves.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Acclaimed author Arundhati Roy could soon face trial under India’s contested “anti-terror” laws in a case that has drawn outrage from free speech advocates in India and beyond. An official from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right ruling Bharatiya Janata Party gave the go-ahead on Friday for Roy’s prosecution over comments she made about Kashmir in 2010. This comes as Modi was sworn in last week to his third term as prime minister after the BJP won the most seats in Indian’s Parliament, but lost its outright majority. “This case is so convoluted, it’s hard to say where it begins and where it ends — and that’s the point. The process is the punishment,” says Indian author and journalist Siddhartha Deb, who teaches at The New School in New York. Deb says Modi is trying to show that “everything is normal” despite the shocking electoral setback, with the case against Roy being used to placate his “rabid attack dogs of Hindu nationalism.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Three Nouméa municipal policemen are now facing a prosecution after a disturbing video was posted in a Facebook neighbourhood watch group, allegedly implicating them in acts of severe violence against a Kanak man they had just arrested.

The municipal police officers are not part of the French security forces that have been sent to restore law and order, RNZ Pacific understands.

Initial investigations established that the violence took place on at 6th Kilometre, on the night of May 25-26, and that it “followed the arrest of several persons suspected of a theft attempt”, Nouméa Public Prosecutor Yves Dupas said in a statement yesterday.

• READ MORE: Footage of French forces officer kicking Kanak man in head surfaces online
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The incident was captured in a brief video, later posted on social networks, being shared hundreds of times and going viral.

“It is the management of municipal police themselves who have signalled this to us”, Dupas said.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office said it had verified the authenticity of the short footage which depicted a “representative of the security forces striking a violent foot kick to the head of a person sitting on the ground after he was arrested”.

On the same video, the other two officers, all equipped with riot gear, are seen to be standing by, surrounding the victim.

Dupas said a formal inquiry was now underway against the three municipal police officers who were now facing charges of “violence from a person entrusted with public authority and failure to assist a person in peril”.

“This case will be treated with every expected severity, being related to presumed facts of illegitimate violence on the part of officers entrusted with a mission of administrative and judicial police”, the statement said.

It added that “this is the first case being treated for this type of act since the beginning of civil unrest in New Caledonia” and further stressed that law enforcement agencies deployed on the ground have displayed “professionalism” in the “difficult management of the law enforcement operations carried out”.

“The victim remains to be approached by investigators in order to undergo medical examination and assess his current health condition.”

The announcement was made as part of the French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc during his daily update on the situation.

“As a follow-up to the end of the state of emergency since Tuesday, 28 May, 2024, the ban on the platform TikTok has been lifted,” a statement said.

The ban was announced on May 15 in what was then described as an attempt to block contacts between rioting groups in the French Pacific territory.

It had since then been widely contested as a breach of human rights.

Doubts had also been expressed on how effective the measure could have been, with other platforms (such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Viber) remaining accessible and the fact that the ban on Tiktok could be easily dodged with VPN tools.

World Cup 1998 winner Karembeu ‘in mourning’
Earlier this week, former footballer and 1998 World Cup champion Christian Karembeu made a surprise revelation saying two members of his family had been shot dead during the riots.

Speaking to French radio Europe 1 on Monday, Karembeu said: “I have lost members of my family, that’s why I remained silent (until now), because I am in mourning.”

“Two members of my family have been shot with a bullet in the head. These are snipers. The word is strong but they have been assassinated and we hope investigations will be made on these murders”, the Kanak footballer said, adding the victims were his nephew and his niece.

Karembeu’s career involves 53 tests for the French national football team, one world cup victory (1998), playing for prestigious European clubs such as Nantes, Sampdoria, and Real Madrid (where he won two Champions League titles), Olympiakos, Servette, and Bastia.

He is now a strategic advisor and ambassador for Greek club Olympiakos.

Reacting to Karembeu’s announcements, Chief Prosecutor Dupas told public broadcaster NC la Première on Tuesday he believed Karembeu was referring to the two Kanak people who were killed earlier this month in Nouméa’s industrial zone of Ducos.

“I do not know what his family kinship relation is with those two victims who were assassinated in Ducos,” he said.

“But concerning these facts, an investigation is underway, it has gotten pretty far already, one (European) company manager has been arrested and remains in custody. The Justice is processing all the facts, crimes, committed.”

“We have, among the civilian victims, four persons of the Kanak community and it is a possibility that some of those could be related to Christian Karembeu”, he said.

Asked on a possibly higher number of fatalities, he stressed the death toll so far remained at seven.

“We have not received any other complaint regarding people shooting civilians”, he maintained, while encouraging members of the public who would be aware of other fatal incidents to come forward and contact his office.

“We arrived in our car, I saw the roadblock, I barely had time to reverse and go back and they started to shoot. About 10 times,” the unidentified witness said, showing two bullet holes on his car.

“I have lodged a complaint for murder attempt and now the investigation is ongoing,” he said.

Two other Kanaks said the following day, on May 16, while in the streets of their neighbourhood, they were shot at by balaclava-clad passengers of two driving by pick-up trucks.

“We started to run and that’s when we heard the first gunshots. My little brother managed to take shelter at a neighbour’s home, and I went on running with the 4WD behind me. When I arrived at my family’s home, I jumped into the garden and that’s when I heard a second gunshot”, he told La Première.

“We never thought this would happen to us”.

Dupas said another, wider investigation, was underway since May 17 in order to identify “those who are pulling the ropes and who led the “planning and committing of attacks that have hit New Caledonia”.

“This means anyone, whatever his/her level of implication, whether order-givers or just actors”.

Latest update
The state of emergency was lifted on Tuesday in New Caledonia following an announcement from French President Emmanuel Macron, who was in New Caledonia on a 17-hour visit last Thursday.

The end of the state of emergency was described by Macron as being part of the “commitments” he made while meeting representatives of New Caledonia’s pro-independence movement last week and to allow leaders to spread the message to people to lift roadblocks and barricades and “loosen the grip”.

However, a dusk-to-dawn (6pm to 6am) curfew remains in place, including a ban on public meetings, the sale of alcohol and the possession and transportation of firearms and ammunition, French High Commissioner Louis Le France said yesterday.

An estimated 3500 security forces (police, gendarmes and special riot squads) remain on the ground.

Taxis have announced they were now resuming service, but bus services remain closed because “too many roads remain impracticable”.

High Commissioner Le Franc said that since the unrest began on May 13, a total of 535 people had been arrested, 136 security forces (police and gendarmes) had been injured and the death toll remained at seven (including two gendarmes, four indigenous Kanaks and one person of European ascent).

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In a leaks probe, Giovanni Tizian, Nello Trocchia, and Stefano Vergine could face up to nine years in prison for articles they published in October 2022, based on confidential documents. Their reporting alleged a conflict of interest concerning Italy’s Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who filed a complaint with the aim of identifying the journalists’ source.

Read the full statement below:

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The prosecution of journalist Stanis Bujakera has been outrageous from the start and should have never reached a stage where he may be convicted to two decades in prison, especially since a technical expert has thrown serious doubt on Bujakera’s involvement in the alleged crime,” said Angela Quintal, Head of CPJ’s Africa Program. “The over six months since Bujakera’s arrest have been a chilling reminder that journalists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are under constant threat of arrest. Authorities should act swiftly to reform the country’s laws to protect, not constrain the press.”

Bujakera, a Congolese citizen and a permanent U.S. resident, worked as a correspondent for privately owned Jeune Afrique and Reuters news agency, while also being deputy director of publication for the DRC-based news website Actualite.cd. He was arrested by police in Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital, on September 8, 2023, and authorities charged him with spreading falsehoods, forgery, the use of forged documents, and distributing false documents under the combined application of the DRC’s penal code and a new digital code and press law.

During a hearing on March 8, the public prosecutor in Bujakera’s case requested that the journalist be convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined one million Congolese francs ($361), one of Bujakera’s lawyers, Ndikulu Yana, told CPJ. During that hearing, the report of a technical expert commissioned by the court presented findings that suggested Bujakera was not the principal source of a document that the DRC intelligence service has said is false, according to media reports.

A verdict is expected in the case on March 20, according to Yana and those reports.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The final day of a critical appeal for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is underway today at the British High Court of Justice, in what could be Assange’s last chance to stop his extradition to the United States. Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the WikiLeaks founder’s health is reportedly deteriorating rapidly, his lawyers are arguing the case is politically motivated to target Assange for exposing “state-level crimes.” Meanwhile, U.S. lawyers are attempting to portray Assange as a hacker rather than a journalist. “It’s clear to everyone that Assange is a journalist. He revealed more criminality by the world’s most powerful country than anyone’s ever done in history,” says Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, who lays out the proceedings so far, what to expect from the British justice system and the precedent an Assange extradition would set for global journalism. “It will be a huge nail in the coffin for investigative journalism, for any kind of publishing of information that state powers don’t like, and it will be used by repressive regimes all around the world.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Donald Trump was in a D.C. court today as a federal appeals panel of judges expressed skepticism that the former president was immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.
• The U.N. General Assembly held a meeting on the recent veto in the Security Council by the United States on a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
• The Supreme Court is considering the case of an Oregon man, Yonas Fikre, who was put on the “no-fly” list, then taken off and told he would not be put back based on current information. Fikre sued, alleging that the FBI violated his rights by putting him on the list. The government argues that the case is moot since he is no longer on the list.
• San Francisco has become the largest city in the nation to approve a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. The vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was 8-3. It came after hours of emotional public testimony at a committee hearing yesterday and before the full board of supervisors last month.
• Bitterly cold nights in the San Joaquin Valley this winter have homeless people struggling to stay warm. In Fresno today people from the Homeless Union pleaded with city officials to expand the hours of warming centers, add more centers, and continue providing free transportation to warm spaces. It’s estimated there are between four and five thousand homeless persons in the city.

Former President Donald Trump waits to take the witness stand at New York Supreme Court, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

The post Appeals panel of judges express skepticism that the former president is immune from prosecution – January 9, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Donald Trump was in a D.C. court today as a federal appeals panel of judges expressed skepticism that the former president was immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.
• The U.N. General Assembly held a meeting on the recent veto in the Security Council by the United States on a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
• The Supreme Court is considering the case of an Oregon man, Yonas Fikre, who was put on the “no-fly” list, then taken off and told he would not be put back based on current information. Fikre sued, alleging that the FBI violated his rights by putting him on the list. The government argues that the case is moot since he is no longer on the list.
• San Francisco has become the largest city in the nation to approve a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. The vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was 8-3. It came after hours of emotional public testimony at a committee hearing yesterday and before the full board of supervisors last month.
• Bitterly cold nights in the San Joaquin Valley this winter have homeless people struggling to stay warm. In Fresno today people from the Homeless Union pleaded with city officials to expand the hours of warming centers, add more centers, and continue providing free transportation to warm spaces. It’s estimated there are between four and five thousand homeless persons in the city.

Former President Donald Trump waits to take the witness stand at New York Supreme Court, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

The post Appeals panel of judges express skepticism that the former president is immune from prosecution – January 9, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Donald Trump was in a D.C. court today as a federal appeals panel of judges expressed skepticism that the former president was immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.
• The U.N. General Assembly held a meeting on the recent veto in the Security Council by the United States on a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
• The Supreme Court is considering the case of an Oregon man, Yonas Fikre, who was put on the “no-fly” list, then taken off and told he would not be put back based on current information. Fikre sued, alleging that the FBI violated his rights by putting him on the list. The government argues that the case is moot since he is no longer on the list.
• San Francisco has become the largest city in the nation to approve a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. The vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was 8-3. It came after hours of emotional public testimony at a committee hearing yesterday and before the full board of supervisors last month.
• Bitterly cold nights in the San Joaquin Valley this winter have homeless people struggling to stay warm. In Fresno today people from the Homeless Union pleaded with city officials to expand the hours of warming centers, add more centers, and continue providing free transportation to warm spaces. It’s estimated there are between four and five thousand homeless persons in the city.

Former President Donald Trump waits to take the witness stand at New York Supreme Court, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

The post Appeals panel of judges express skepticism that the former president is immune from prosecution – January 9, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Lai's international legal team at London's Doughty Street Chambers lodged the appeal with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment over the treatment of Andy Li, among a group of 12 Hong Kong protesters captured by China's Coast Guard as they tried to flee to democratic Taiwan by speedboat.

"Credible evidence is emerging that Andy Li was tortured when in prison in China before confessing to allegedly conspiring with Jimmy Lai to collude with foreign entities to endanger national security," Lai's lawyers said in a statement on Jan. 4.

"Andy Li’s evidence against Jimmy Lai – which it is suspected was coerced and obtained after he endured torture, inhuman and degrading treatment in Chinese detention, with the knowledge of the Hong Kong authorities – is central to the prosecution’s case," it said.

Defense team leader and Kings Counsel Caoilfhionn Gallagher said there are grave concerns that Li's testimony against Lai was "coerced," and that his legal team are arguing that it should be discarded.

"International law prohibits reliance on evidence derived through torture, inhuman or degrading treatment," she said. "Such statements are involuntary, inherently unreliable, violate the right to a fair trial, and reliance upon them indirectly legitimises torture and taints the justice system."

Prosecutors at Lai's ongoing trial appear to be relying on Andy Li's testimony as a key plank in the case against Lai, Gallagher said.

"The Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have so far failed to investigate these concerns, and in any event how could they credibly mark their own homework?" she said. "They must now answer to the United Nations."

‘Collusion with foreign forces’

Replying on Friday to requests for comment from Reuters and the Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper, a Hong Kong government spokesman said it "strongly condemns and firmly opposes" the initiative by Lai's legal team, which it said was designed "to abuse the United Nations mechanisms to interfere with the judicial proceedings".

Amnesty International listed Li and the other speedboat fugitives as being at "imminent risk of torture and other ill-treatment" after their arrest on Aug. 23, 2020, after which they were held in incommunicado detention.

Following his handover to authorities in Hong Kong, Li pleaded guilty to charges of "collusion with foreign forces" alongside Lai in August 2021, after being accused of "conspiring" with Lai's aide Mark Simon and activist Finn Lau, now in exile, to ask foreign governments to impose sanctions on Hong Kong.

In May 2021, Li's family raised concerns that he was being secretly held in the maximum security Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre following his return to Hong Kong from Chinese custody. The center has a history of alleged abuses against inmates, according to media reports at the time.

Meanwhile, the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch called on the British government to impose sanctions on Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, in connection with the naming of its members as "collaborators" or "co-conspirators" in Lai's national security trial.

Hong Kong Watch’s co-founder and Chief Executive Benedict Rogers, the Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC, Luke de Pulford, and Bill Browder, a financier and human rights campaigner who pioneered the introduction of Magnitsky sanctions worldwide – all British nationals – were among those named.

In a letter for Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the six Hong Kong Watch Patrons called Magnitsky-style sanctions on Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, including asset freezes and a travel ban. 

"John Lee has been, and continues to be, involved in activities which amount to a serious violation of the right not to be subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment," the letter said, pointing to Lee's involvement in the transnational repression of prominent Hong Kong activists in exile.

Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi for RFA Mandarin.

• UN Secretary General urges Security Council to call for permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
• Texas judge allows woman with fetus with terminal diagnosis to have abortion.
• Former President Trump appeals ruling denying him immunity from criminal prosecution.
• House rejects EPA emission requirements calling for all new cars sales to be electric by 2032.
• San Francisco homeless rights advocates call on city to conduct accurate homeless head count.
• San Francisco homeless rights advocates call on city to conduct accurate homeless head count.
• Oakland teachers hold pro-Palestinian teach-in despite District warnings against it.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – December 7, 2023 Former President Trump appeals ruling denying him immunity from criminal prosecution. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• UN Secretary General urges Security Council to call for permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
• Texas judge allows woman with fetus with terminal diagnosis to have abortion.
• Former President Trump appeals ruling denying him immunity from criminal prosecution.
• House rejects EPA emission requirements calling for all new cars sales to be electric by 2032.
• San Francisco homeless rights advocates call on city to conduct accurate homeless head count.
• San Francisco homeless rights advocates call on city to conduct accurate homeless head count.
• Oakland teachers hold pro-Palestinian teach-in despite District warnings against it.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – December 7, 2023 Former President Trump appeals ruling denying him immunity from criminal prosecution. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

A delegation of Australian lawmakers has arrived in Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to halt its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange. More than 60 members of Australia’s Parliament from across the political spectrum have called for Assange’s release. We speak to Australian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who co-founded the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, about the growing Australian movement to free Assange and its implications for U.S.-Australia relations. Whish-Wilson warns that Assange’s extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is “something you would expect from a totalitarian regime” and would set a dangerous precedent for press freedoms around the world.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In case you haven’t heard (oh, yes, you’ve heard), former US president Donald Trump faces  criminal charges in various jurisdictions, relating to everything from his business practices to his handling of classified documents to his conduct regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Comes now special counsel Jack Smith, in one of those prosecutions,  asking judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a “gag order” under which Trump would be forbidden to publicly make “certain prejudicial extrajudicial statements.”

I tend toward a dim view of “gag orders” in general, but this proposal is particularly silly and counter-productive. It embodies the same level of evil as any other demand that someone’s public speech be curtailed, but it’s also likely to be ineffectual, or even actually damage Smith’s efforts to convict Trump. To steal a quote incorrectly attributed to French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord concerning an 1804 trial and execution, “it’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”

Smith doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know in attempting to justify the request.

Trump, prosecutors claim, “knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.” His “extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individual — the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors.”

Anyone who’s followed Trump’s career in general or his recent legal troubles in particular knows all that to be true.

“Gagging” him, even if he complied with the order (don’t bet the ranch on that happening,  if you want to keep the ranch) wouldn’t end, or even reduce, the threats or attempts to intimidate.

Trump has plenty of proxies, most of whom he  wouldn’t have to personally ask (and probably doesn’t even personally know), to keep that kind of thing up on his behalf.

Why give him plausible deniability? And why try to prevent him from “tainting the jury pool,” when any such “tainting” will likely be to the prosecution’s benefit rather than his?

Trump never shuts up. Many people believe, with good reason, that he CAN’T shut up. Every time he’s accused of something, he proudly owns it, pronounces it not just non-criminal but “perfect,”  whines that he’s just the little guy facing persecution, and issues open threats against anyone and everyone involved.

How are those chosen as jurors likely to take those threats? As evidence that he should be sent on his merry way to keep doing the same things he’s been doing, or as evidence that perhaps a stiff set of iron bars between him and them is called for?

Because these cases are all inherently political, he’s almost certain to hang any jury anyway —  at least one out of every 12 Americans uncritically buys whatever “AS SEEN ON TV!” goop he’s selling.

But sweeping those threats under the rug will give some otherwise reasonable people time to forget about them. And it’s always better to err on the side of free speech anyway.

Let him talk.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Georgia is intensifying its crackdown against opponents of Cop City, with the state’s Republican attorney general announcing sweeping indictments of 61 people on racketeering charges over protests and other activism related to the $90 million police training facility planned to be built in Atlanta. The RICO charges were approved by the same grand jury that indicted former President Trump and 18 others on RICO charges in the same county by the Democratic district attorney, and come after many of the same people were earlier charged with domestic terrorism and money laundering as part of the Stop Cop City movement, which is still seeking to block construction of the new police complex. “They are choosing to use the legal process in an essentially violent way to target protesters,” says attorney Devin Franklin with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is organizing legal representation for the defendants in the case. We also speak with Keyanna Jones, a Stop Cop City organizer with Community Movement Builders, who notes the indictments are dated from May 25, 2020, the day Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. “Since that date, this country has been upended by governments across the nation trying to build Cop Cities in order to quell protest,” says Jones. “The government is simply upset that people seek to … use their First Amendment right to protest when we see injustice coming from those in authority.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, and Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK, have been arrested for blocking the entrance to the Department of Justice. Cohen and Evans arrived in Washington, D.C. to protest the US government’s prosecution of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, who has been indicted on 18 charges for the publication of the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs, which uncovered war crimes, torture, and civilian deaths perpetrated by the US government.

“It’s outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture….He revealed the truth, and for that he is suffering, and that’s we we need to do whatever we can to help him, and to help preserve democracy, which is based on freedom of the press,” Ben Cohen said during the demonstration. “It seems to me that, right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke.”

"Why do we have freedom of press? Because there needs to be someone reporting the truth about the violence of power….When you don't have freedom of the press and no one's telling the truth, it weaponizes your capacity to feel, to have compassion and empathy. Because if you don't have the full story and if your heart is being manipulated with lies, then we're all lost. How can we have peace in the world if we're just drowning in lies?" Jodie Evans said.

Cohen and Evans asked to enter the Department of Justice to discuss their attack on the freedom of press. Security guards denied them access. They proceeded to sit peacefully in the entrance until DC Metropolitan Police arrested them.

View photographs of the action arrest here, here, here, and here.

Members of Congress, world leaders, as well as major publishers, have urged the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Julian Assange due to the threat it poses to the First Amendment and press freedom.

The Obama administration declined to indict Assange because it would risk criminalizing basic journalistic activities that every mainstream media outlet engages in on a regular basis.

This month, UK High Court Judge Jonathan Swift rejected Assange’s most recent appeal, pushing him ‘dangerously close’ to extradition. The Australian government, where Assange is a citizen, is currently working through diplomatic channels to end Assange’s incarceration, while his legal team continues the appeal process.

Julian Assange is currently confined in Belmarsh's maximum-security prison in London and has been since April 2019. If extradited, he will face up to 175 years in prison.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“The unanimous ruling of three high court judges, including a punitive cost order, is a legal smackdown for former South African President Jacob Zuma and a massive victory for Karyn Maughan to continue her journalism freely without the sustained harassment campaign that Zuma, his family, and his supporters have waged both online and within the legal system,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “We urge the former president not to appeal the judgment. Zuma took an oath to uphold the Constitution when he became president, and he should accept the constitutional right to media freedom that the court has so eloquently upheld.”

The case began in September 2022, when Zuma’s legal team filed criminal charges which launched a private prosecution against Maughan in connection to her August 2021 News24 report on Zuma’s medical condition. The court found that the alleged confidential information that Zuma claimed was unlawfully given to Maughan was in fact public and had already been filed in court three times by the time she published them.

On Wednesday, the Jacob Zuma Foundation, the former president’s personal foundation, tweeted that he would appeal the “bizarre judgment.”

In their ruling, the judges labeled Zuma’s attempt at privately prosecuting Maughan an “abuse of process” and a violation of the right to media freedom recognized in the South African Constitution. The judges also noted that the media’s right to freedom of expression “is not just (or even primarily) for the benefit of the media: it is for the benefit of the public.”

“Such [a] right we agree encompasses the right of journalists to report freely on matters of public interest without threats and without intimidation and harassment,” the judges wrote.  The judges said it was evident in Zuma’s affidavit and tweets by his associates and his daughter that the former president harbors “great hostility” towards Maughan. 

Prosecutors have previously criticized Zuma for his “Stalingrad Strategy” in attempting to delay his trial over alleged corruption in an arms deal for nearly 20 years.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The FBI has reopened an investigation into Australian journalist Julian Assange, according to front-page reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

The news that the FBI is taking fresh investigative steps came as a surprise to Assange’s legal team, given that the U.S. filed charges against the WikiLeaks founder more than three years ago and is involved in an ongoing extradition process from a maximum security prison in the United Kingdom so that he can stand trial in the United States. 

Assange is charged under the Espionage Act with obtaining, possessing, and publishing classified information that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes that themselves have gone unpunished. 

The Morning Herald reporting also comes amid heightened hopes in Australia that a resolution to the case, which has raised serious press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad, was near at hand. The country’s ruling party has spoken in defense of Assange, as has the nation’s opposition party leader. In early May, a cross-party delegation of influential Australian lawmakers met with the U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging that a deal be struck to return Assange to Australia before U.S.-Australian relations were harmed further by the prosecution. 

The U.S. has otherwise complicated its relationship with Australia in recent weeks even as it seeks closer ties in order to compete with China in the region. Australia spent weeks preparing for Joe Biden to make a major visit to the nation in May, only to see him cancel the trip at the last minute to fly back from Japan to continue with debt ceiling negotiations. And this week, the U.S. also warned Australia that some of its military units may be ineligible to cooperate with U.S. forces due to their own alleged war crimes in Australia. It is not lost on the Australian public that Assange is being prosecuted for uncovering and publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

In May, the Morning Herald reported, the FBI requested an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, who was brought on more than 10 years ago to work as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography. The FBI may have thought he would be cooperative because O’Hagan’s relationship with Assange soured; O’Hagan publicly criticized Assange as narcissistic and difficult to work with and published an unauthorized version in the London Review of Books instead. But O’Hagan told the Morning Herald he was not willing to participate in his prosecution. “I might have differences with Julian, but I utterly oppose all efforts to silence him,” he said.

In 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with major papers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents and videos related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, and other documents that exposed corruption on a grand scale. The disclosures helped trigger the Arab Spring, popular revolts against dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. 

The Obama administration considered prosecuting Assange but decided they couldn’t overcome “the New York Times problem”: They couldn’t figure out, in other words, how to prosecute him but not the Times. 

The case is now under the zealous guidance of Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, though the reopening of the investigation suggests the government has doubts that its case will hold up in court. 

A coalition of major newspapers around the world has urged the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. Yahoo News reported that the Trump administration considered ways to kidnap or assassinate the journalist. 

The U.S. State Department was not immediately able to comment.

Update: June 1, 2023, 12:25 p.m.
The original headline of this story said the FBI has reopened a case “against Assange,” though the precise target of the FBI’s new investigation is not publicly known. The FBI relayed to O’Hagan that it wanted to interview him about his participation in Assange’s autobiography.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

• Thousands protest as the Tennessee House votes to expel two members for disrupting the Chamber with a gun control protest
• Idaho’s Republican governor signs legislation creating a new crime of “abortion trafficking” for helping a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent
• Alameda County’s progressive District Attorney seeks to disqualify a judge who refused a plea deal from any criminal cases involving her office
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta warns of the potential consequences of Texas federal ruling on preventive health care
• San Francisco Supervisors ponder office tower to housing conversion to address pandemic-caused downtown vacancies

The post Tennessee House votes to expel two of three Democrats who protested for gun safety following the Nashville school massacre; Idaho threatens adults with prosecution if they help a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent; Lebanese militants fire rockets at Israel following police raid on Palestinian worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 6, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Donald Trump’s bombastic attorney in his defense against his high-profile indictment once donated to the campaign of a Democrat who moved to prosecute Trump during his presidency.

Joe Tacopina, the lead defense attorney in the latest case against the former president, has not been a prolific donor to political campaigns, but those he has made have been bipartisan.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower on April 3, 2023, in New York City.

Photo: Getty Images

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

“In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an order or regulation,” and one charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Notably, Manning was acquitted of an “aiding the enemy” offense that carried a potential sentence of life in prison.

Manning was never charged with any conspiracy offenses, and, unlike the charges against Assange, military prosecutors did not accuse her of attempting to crack a password hash. Even with logs from alleged chats between Manning and Assange, there was scant evidence that Assange or any WikiLeaks staff attempted to enlist her to leak. Prosecutors only expressed disgust that she had independently chosen to become a source and shared more than 700,000 documents.

When Manning’s trial occurred in 2013, WikiLeaks was not yet designated a “hostile intelligence agency” by the CIA. However, by 2019, there was no longer division in the government over whether to treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity or not. The indictment plainly claimed, “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange recruited sources and predicated the success of WikiLeaks in part upon the recruitment of sources” in order to “illegally circumvent legal safeguards on information.”

Prosecutors at the Justice Department (DOJ) would like the public to believe that Assange posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list to the WikiLeaks website in 2009 to solicit leaks from “insiders” like Manning, and Manning used it to determine which documents to provide to WikiLeaks.³

Yet, this conspiracy theory, which forms the basis of criminal allegations against Assange, was promoted by military prosecutors during Manning’s trial, and it was discredited by Manning’s own statement to the court and David Coombs, her defense attorney.

Despite Manning’s statement, DOJ prosecutors concocted their own conspiracy theory to further their political case. Central to this theory is the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

On May 14, 2009, WikiLeaks requested nominations from human rights groups, lawyers, historians, journalists, and activists for documents as well as databases from around the world that the media organization would work to expose.

The list, according to prosecutors, was “organized by country and stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must ‘be likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical, or historical impact on release.’” WikiLeaks suggested the information should be “plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider.”

With little to no evidence, military prosecutors called the list Manning’s “guiding light,” a characterization Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs directly challenged during his closing argument.

“It was WikiLeaks saying, look, tell us, humanitarians, activists, NGOs, fellow reporters, what do you want to know in your country? What in your country is being hidden from the public that you believe the public should know? Give us a list,” Coombs said.

“We are going to compile that list, and we are going to work to obtain that list. What does this sound like? Any journalistic organization that has like a hotline or anything else says, call us. You got a story. Call us. We’ll investigate.”

There were seventy-eight items on the list. As Coombs noted, military prosecutors were only able to “remotely” tie Manning to “four of the things on the list.” She could have used Intelink, which is a US intelligence network of top secret, secret, and unclassified databases, to search for specific items on the list. She did not.

DOJ prosecutors emphasized in their indictment that the list requested “bulk databases,” including Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia for US intelligence analysts. Yet Manning never released this database to WikiLeaks, nor did she release the complete CIA Open Source Center database or PACER database containing US federal court records, which were listed as “important bulk databases.”

Chat logs show Manning brought up the CIA Open Source Center on March 8, 2010, and a user, whom the government claims was Assange, replied, “That’s something we want to mine entirely.” But Manning never engaged in any attempts to download and transfer this database to WikiLeaks.

Manning released four sets that could be labeled “bulk databases.” She released the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the US State embassy cables in the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and the database containing detainee assessments from Joint Task Force Guanta?namo. None of those documents were on the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

DOJ prosecutors contended Manning’s searches on November 28, 2009, for “retention+of+interrogation+videos” and “detainee+abuse” matched up with the “Most Wanted Leaks” list. However, at the time, WikiLeaks was interested in obtaining copies of any of the ninety-two CIA torture tapes that were destroyed as well as “detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.” It is far more plausible that Manning searched for abuse photos or torture videos.

Contrary to Manning’s version of events, DOJ prosecutors insisted that Assange convinced Manning to find the detainee assessment briefs and release them. FBI special agent Megan Brown, of the “counterespionage squad” at the Washington Field Office in the District of Columbia, wrote, “Manning asked Assange, ‘how valuable are JTF GTMO detention memos containing summaries, background info, capture info, etc?’ Assange replied, ‘Time period?’ Manning answered, ‘2007–2008.’”

Assange allegedly responded, “Quite valuable to the lawyers of these guys who are trying to get them out, where those memos suggest their innocence/bad procedure,” and added, “also valuable to merge into the general history. Politically, Gitmo is mostly over though.”

Yet in the messages Brown referenced, Assange never specifically asked Manning to provide the reports to WikiLeaks. He did not say whether WikiLeaks would publish the documents. He certainly did not solicit Manning to leak the detainee assessments. All Assange allegedly did was state his opinion that the documents were in the public interest.

Prosecutors attempted to link Manning’s disclosure of rules of engagement for US military forces in Iraq to the supposed “Most Wanted Leaks” list because it included “Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. Army Rules of Engagement 2007–2009.” They suggested Manning provided the files to WikiLeaks on March 22, 2010, after Assange allegedly wrote on March 8, “Curious eyes never run dry.”

Manning said she uploaded the rules of engagement with the “Collateral Murder” video on February 21, weeks before the alleged exchange with Assange.

One lesser-known Espionage Act charge against Manning involved the alleged disclosure of video showing the Garani massacre by US military forces in the Farah province of Afghanistan. An air strike killed at least eighty-six Afghan civilians on May 4, 2009. She was acquitted, a fact that poses a problem for the DOJ’s theory.

According to evidence presented during the trial, Jason Katz, an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory from February 2009 to March 2010, tried to help WikiLeaks and downloaded an encrypted file with the air strike video onto his work computer on December 15. Katz was unable to use a password-cracking tool to open the file.

WikiLeaks indicated on Twitter on January 8, “We need supercomputer time.” The media organization apparently had an encrypted file of the attack, but they were never able to decrypt the file.

Military prosecutors attempted to connect Manning to Katz. They claimed during their case that Manning’s earliest violations began on November 1, and Manning had provided the video to Katz to decrypt with a supercomputer. Although Manning searched and downloaded “Farah” files, the video Katz had did not match any of Manning’s files.

“Let’s go along with the government and its logic. Pfc. Manning hits the ground in Iraq in mid-November,” Coombs argued. “For whatever reason, [her] motive, I’m now going to use the 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ List as my guiding light. And I’m going to give something to WikiLeaks. I’m going to do it because I’m now a traitor. I’m now an activist.

“So what is the first thing I’m going to choose? What is the very first thing I’m going to give to WikiLeaks and say look, WikiLeaks, I’m for you? Well, I’m going to give you an encrypted video I can’t see. You can’t see. Guess what? We don’t have a password for it. By the way, you never asked for it. That’s not on your 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ list.”

Coombs suggested, “This is kind of like someone showing up to a wedding and giving you something that’s not on the list that you registered for. What do you think Pfc. Manning is doing at this point? According to the government, [she] is like, hey, you know what, I can go to the seventy-eight things that you want, but I don’t want to give you that stuff.”

Military prosecutors seem to have failed to persuade the military judge that Manning used the “Most Wanted Leaks” list as her guide. Lind’s “special findings” show she accepted evidence that Manning viewed a tweet from WikiLeaks on May 7, 2010, which requested a list of as many military email addresses as possible. This led Manning to compile a list of over 74,000 addresses for WikiLeaks. Except Lind did not find that WikiLeaks had solicited Manning to leak any of the more than 700,000 documents that were published.

When the first indictment against Assange was disclosed by the Justice Department on April 11, 2019, the response from some attorneys and advocates was mixed. It was widely viewed as “narrowly tailored” to avoid “broader legal and policy implications.”

The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously.

DOJ prosecutors were already presented with evidence related to these allegations during Manning’s trial. Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.

Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”

James Lewis QC, a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked Eller if he agreed that Manning and Assange “thought they could crack a password and agreed to attempt to crack a password.” Eller told Lewis a hash was provided and that the account user that the US government associated with Assange said they had “rainbow tables for it.” (Using “rainbow tables” is one decryption method for cracking the hash by guessing different password values.) However, Manning never shared where she obtained the hash.

“The government’s own expert witness in the court-martial stated that was not enough for them to actually [crack the password],” Eller added. A user must also have a system file to complete an attempt at password-cracking. During the Manning trial, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that the “hash value” was included in the chat, but it was not the “full hash value.”

Major Thomas Hurley, who was on Manning’s defense team, asked if Manning would have needed more of the hash value to crack the password. Shaver replied, “I mentioned the system file, you would need that part as well.” (This was one of the two files Eller said were necessary for decryption.)

“So the hash value included in the chat wouldn’t be enough to actually gain any passwords or user information?” Hurley asked.

Shaver replied, “Correct.”

Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.

Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.

Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange.

Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavi?k cable, Guanta?namo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred. “Routinely in the course of work,” according to Eller, she downloaded military incident reports to have “offline backups” in the event of “connectivity issues” with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network that hosted the information.

“The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” he said. However, Eller acknowledged, “Manning had authorized access to these documents.” Eller showed that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, constantly tried to crack administrative passwords to install programs that were not authorized for their computers.

Jason Milliman, a computer engineer contracted to manage laptops at the base, testified during Manning’s court-martial that “soldiers cracked his password in order to install a program and then deleted his administrator account.”

As Eller asserted, Manning never would have tried to use a password hash to exfiltrate files for submission to WikiLeaks because she already had a way to anonymously access the files: a Linux CD that allowed her to bypass Windows security features.

Sgt. David Sadtler, a soldier in Manning’s battalion, testified that Manning proposed starting “some sort of hash cracking business.” The idea had already been done in the “open source world.” So “reimplementing it” made sense to Sadtler.

Eller concluded, “While she was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat, she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

During the court-martial, military prosecutors underscored the fact that Manning exchanged messages with a user identified as “Nathaniel Frank,” a name the government believed was associated with Assange.

Assange attorney Mark Summers QC asked Eller multiple times if he found evidence that linked Assange to this account. “No, I did not,” Eller replied.

Summers asked if Eller was aware of the person who sat at the other end of whatever computer terminal “Nathaniel Frank” used. “Of course not. I could not have that personal knowledge,” Eller added.

Major Ashden Fein, a military prosecutor, said during the closing argument, “[Manning] was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability, and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, [she] was not a whistleblower. [She] was a traitor—a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.”

The attacks on Manning’s character were nasty. In addition to questioning her loyalty to the United States, military prosecutors pejoratively labeled Manning an “anarchist” and a “hacker.” But missing from the prosecutors’ narrative of her acts was any explicit claim that she collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or that she engaged in a password-cracking conspiracy.

As Captain Joe Morrow, one of the military prosecutors, declared during her sentencing: “Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for [her] crimes. Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for the impact.”

Manning was not an insider or spy who worked for WikiLeaks to steal US government documents. She had whistleblower motives that inspired her to take action. That is an inconvenient truth for prosecutors, who are compelled to deny her agency to bolster their arguments.

In fact, submitting documents to WikiLeaks was not Manning’s first choice. As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, README.txt, “While I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Manning used landlines, mostly at Starbucks, to reach out to “traditional publications.” She contacted the Washington Post in January 2010. During her court-martial she testified that a reporter she spoke to at the Post had not taken her seriously. Next, she called the New York Times. No one responded to the message she left for the Times’ public editor. She considered going to Politico, but weather conditions hampered plans to travel to its offices in Arlington, Virginia.

WikiLeaks, as she put it in her memoir, was “the publication of last resort.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Gosztola.

Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an order or regulation,” and one charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Notably, Manning was acquitted of an “aiding the enemy” offense that carried a potential sentence of life in prison.

Manning was never charged with any conspiracy offenses, and, unlike the charges against Assange, military prosecutors did not accuse her of attempting to crack a password hash. Even with logs from alleged chats between Manning and Assange, there was scant evidence that Assange or any WikiLeaks staff attempted to enlist her to leak. Prosecutors only expressed disgust that she had independently chosen to become a source and shared more than 700,000 documents.

When Manning’s trial occurred in 2013, WikiLeaks was not yet designated a “hostile intelligence agency” by the CIA. However, by 2019, there was no longer division in the government over whether to treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity or not. The indictment plainly claimed, “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange recruited sources and predicated the success of WikiLeaks in part upon the recruitment of sources” in order to “illegally circumvent legal safeguards on information.”

Prosecutors at the Justice Department (DOJ) would like the public to believe that Assange posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list to the WikiLeaks website in 2009 to solicit leaks from “insiders” like Manning, and Manning used it to determine which documents to provide to WikiLeaks.³

Yet, this conspiracy theory, which forms the basis of criminal allegations against Assange, was promoted by military prosecutors during Manning’s trial, and it was discredited by Manning’s own statement to the court and David Coombs, her defense attorney.

Despite Manning’s statement, DOJ prosecutors concocted their own conspiracy theory to further their political case. Central to this theory is the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

On May 14, 2009, WikiLeaks requested nominations from human rights groups, lawyers, historians, journalists, and activists for documents as well as databases from around the world that the media organization would work to expose.

The list, according to prosecutors, was “organized by country and stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must ‘be likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical, or historical impact on release.’” WikiLeaks suggested the information should be “plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider.”

With little to no evidence, military prosecutors called the list Manning’s “guiding light,” a characterization Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs directly challenged during his closing argument.

“It was WikiLeaks saying, look, tell us, humanitarians, activists, NGOs, fellow reporters, what do you want to know in your country? What in your country is being hidden from the public that you believe the public should know? Give us a list,” Coombs said.

“We are going to compile that list, and we are going to work to obtain that list. What does this sound like? Any journalistic organization that has like a hotline or anything else says, call us. You got a story. Call us. We’ll investigate.”

There were seventy-eight items on the list. As Coombs noted, military prosecutors were only able to “remotely” tie Manning to “four of the things on the list.” She could have used Intelink, which is a US intelligence network of top secret, secret, and unclassified databases, to search for specific items on the list. She did not.

DOJ prosecutors emphasized in their indictment that the list requested “bulk databases,” including Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia for US intelligence analysts. Yet Manning never released this database to WikiLeaks, nor did she release the complete CIA Open Source Center database or PACER database containing US federal court records, which were listed as “important bulk databases.”

Chat logs show Manning brought up the CIA Open Source Center on March 8, 2010, and a user, whom the government claims was Assange, replied, “That’s something we want to mine entirely.” But Manning never engaged in any attempts to download and transfer this database to WikiLeaks.

Manning released four sets that could be labeled “bulk databases.” She released the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the US State embassy cables in the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and the database containing detainee assessments from Joint Task Force Guantánamo. None of those documents were on the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

DOJ prosecutors contended Manning’s searches on November 28, 2009, for “retention+of+interrogation+videos” and “detainee+abuse” matched up with the “Most Wanted Leaks” list. However, at the time, WikiLeaks was interested in obtaining copies of any of the ninety-two CIA torture tapes that were destroyed as well as “detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.” It is far more plausible that Manning searched for abuse photos or torture videos.

Contrary to Manning’s version of events, DOJ prosecutors insisted that Assange convinced Manning to find the detainee assessment briefs and release them. FBI special agent Megan Brown, of the “counterespionage squad” at the Washington Field Office in the District of Columbia, wrote, “Manning asked Assange, ‘how valuable are JTF GTMO detention memos containing summaries, background info, capture info, etc?’ Assange replied, ‘Time period?’ Manning answered, ‘2007–2008.’”

Assange allegedly responded, “Quite valuable to the lawyers of these guys who are trying to get them out, where those memos suggest their innocence/bad procedure,” and added, “also valuable to merge into the general history. Politically, Gitmo is mostly over though.”

Yet in the messages Brown referenced, Assange never specifically asked Manning to provide the reports to WikiLeaks. He did not say whether WikiLeaks would publish the documents. He certainly did not solicit Manning to leak the detainee assessments. All Assange allegedly did was state his opinion that the documents were in the public interest.

Prosecutors attempted to link Manning’s disclosure of rules of engagement for US military forces in Iraq to the supposed “Most Wanted Leaks” list because it included “Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. Army Rules of Engagement 2007–2009.” They suggested Manning provided the files to WikiLeaks on March 22, 2010, after Assange allegedly wrote on March 8, “Curious eyes never run dry.”

Manning said she uploaded the rules of engagement with the “Collateral Murder” video on February 21, weeks before the alleged exchange with Assange.

One lesser-known Espionage Act charge against Manning involved the alleged disclosure of video showing the Garani massacre by US military forces in the Farah province of Afghanistan. An air strike killed at least eighty-six Afghan civilians on May 4, 2009. She was acquitted, a fact that poses a problem for the DOJ’s theory.

According to evidence presented during the trial, Jason Katz, an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory from February 2009 to March 2010, tried to help WikiLeaks and downloaded an encrypted file with the air strike video onto his work computer on December 15. Katz was unable to use a password-cracking tool to open the file.

WikiLeaks indicated on Twitter on January 8, “We need supercomputer time.” The media organization apparently had an encrypted file of the attack, but they were never able to decrypt the file.

Military prosecutors attempted to connect Manning to Katz. They claimed during their case that Manning’s earliest violations began on November 1, and Manning had provided the video to Katz to decrypt with a supercomputer. Although Manning searched and downloaded “Farah” files, the video Katz had did not match any of Manning’s files.

“Let’s go along with the government and its logic. Pfc. Manning hits the ground in Iraq in mid-November,” Coombs argued. “For whatever reason, [her] motive, I’m now going to use the 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ List as my guiding light. And I’m going to give something to WikiLeaks. I’m going to do it because I’m now a traitor. I’m now an activist.

“So what is the first thing I’m going to choose? What is the very first thing I’m going to give to WikiLeaks and say look, WikiLeaks, I’m for you? Well, I’m going to give you an encrypted video I can’t see. You can’t see. Guess what? We don’t have a password for it. By the way, you never asked for it. That’s not on your 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ list.”

Coombs suggested, “This is kind of like someone showing up to a wedding and giving you something that’s not on the list that you registered for. What do you think Pfc. Manning is doing at this point? According to the government, [she] is like, hey, you know what, I can go to the seventy-eight things that you want, but I don’t want to give you that stuff.”

Military prosecutors seem to have failed to persuade the military judge that Manning used the “Most Wanted Leaks” list as her guide. Lind’s “special findings” show she accepted evidence that Manning viewed a tweet from WikiLeaks on May 7, 2010, which requested a list of as many military email addresses as possible. This led Manning to compile a list of over 74,000 addresses for WikiLeaks. Except Lind did not find that WikiLeaks had solicited Manning to leak any of the more than 700,000 documents that were published.

When the first indictment against Assange was disclosed by the Justice Department on April 11, 2019, the response from some attorneys and advocates was mixed. It was widely viewed as “narrowly tailored” to avoid “broader legal and policy implications.”

The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously.

DOJ prosecutors were already presented with evidence related to these allegations during Manning’s trial. Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.

Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”

James Lewis QC, a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked Eller if he agreed that Manning and Assange “thought they could crack a password and agreed to attempt to crack a password.” Eller told Lewis a hash was provided and that the account user that the US government associated with Assange said they had “rainbow tables for it.” (Using “rainbow tables” is one decryption method for cracking the hash by guessing different password values.) However, Manning never shared where she obtained the hash.

“The government’s own expert witness in the court-martial stated that was not enough for them to actually [crack the password],” Eller added. A user must also have a system file to complete an attempt at password-cracking. During the Manning trial, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that the “hash value” was included in the chat, but it was not the “full hash value.”

Major Thomas Hurley, who was on Manning’s defense team, asked if Manning would have needed more of the hash value to crack the password. Shaver replied, “I mentioned the system file, you would need that part as well.” (This was one of the two files Eller said were necessary for decryption.)

“So the hash value included in the chat wouldn’t be enough to actually gain any passwords or user information?” Hurley asked.

Shaver replied, “Correct.”

Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.

Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.

Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange.

Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavík cable, Guantánamo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred. “Routinely in the course of work,” according to Eller, she downloaded military incident reports to have “offline backups” in the event of “connectivity issues” with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network that hosted the information.

“The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” he said. However, Eller acknowledged, “Manning had authorized access to these documents.” Eller showed that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, constantly tried to crack administrative passwords to install programs that were not authorized for their computers.

Jason Milliman, a computer engineer contracted to manage laptops at the base, testified during Manning’s court-martial that “soldiers cracked his password in order to install a program and then deleted his administrator account.”

As Eller asserted, Manning never would have tried to use a password hash to exfiltrate files for submission to WikiLeaks because she already had a way to anonymously access the files: a Linux CD that allowed her to bypass Windows security features.

Sgt. David Sadtler, a soldier in Manning’s battalion, testified that Manning proposed starting “some sort of hash cracking business.” The idea had already been done in the “open source world.” So “reimplementing it” made sense to Sadtler.

Eller concluded, “While she was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat, she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

During the court-martial, military prosecutors underscored the fact that Manning exchanged messages with a user identified as “Nathaniel Frank,” a name the government believed was associated with Assange.

Assange attorney Mark Summers QC asked Eller multiple times if he found evidence that linked Assange to this account. “No, I did not,” Eller replied.

Summers asked if Eller was aware of the person who sat at the other end of whatever computer terminal “Nathaniel Frank” used. “Of course not. I could not have that personal knowledge,” Eller added.

Major Ashden Fein, a military prosecutor, said during the closing argument, “[Manning] was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability, and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, [she] was not a whistleblower. [She] was a traitor—a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.”

The attacks on Manning’s character were nasty. In addition to questioning her loyalty to the United States, military prosecutors pejoratively labeled Manning an “anarchist” and a “hacker.” But missing from the prosecutors’ narrative of her acts was any explicit claim that she collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or that she engaged in a password-cracking conspiracy.

As Captain Joe Morrow, one of the military prosecutors, declared during her sentencing: “Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for [her] crimes. Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for the impact.”

Manning was not an insider or spy who worked for WikiLeaks to steal US government documents. She had whistleblower motives that inspired her to take action. That is an inconvenient truth for prosecutors, who are compelled to deny her agency to bolster their arguments.

In fact, submitting documents to WikiLeaks was not Manning’s first choice. As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, README.txt, “While I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Manning used landlines, mostly at Starbucks, to reach out to “traditional publications.” She contacted the Washington Post in January 2010. During her court-martial she testified that a reporter she spoke to at the Post had not taken her seriously. Next, she called the New York Times. No one responded to the message she left for the Times’ public editor. She considered going to Politico, but weather conditions hampered plans to travel to its offices in Arlington, Virginia.

WikiLeaks, as she put it in her memoir, was “the publication of last resort.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Gosztola.

After his prison term ended in November 2022, “It was a very nice feeling to be among a crowd after being alone for so long,” Türfent told CPJ’s Turkey Representative Özgür Öğret. “I’ve been hosting so many guests.” The rest of the interview, translated from Turkish and lightly edited for clarity and length, appears below.

Though Türfent’s prosecution was openly retaliatory and all 13 of the state’s initial witnesses recanted their testimony against him, he told CPJ that his case received comparatively limited attention in Turkey because he’s Kurdish. Türfent was born on the Turkey’s southeastern edge bordering Iran and Iraq, a predominantly Kurdish area and a stronghold for armed groups seeking autonomous rule. He began reporting on rights violations in local conflict zones for the now-shuttered Dicle News Agency (DİHA) to help victims whose stories never made it beyond the region. Instead, he became one of those stories.

Turkish authorities stepped up such violations in the past year, with the arrest of dozens of Kurdish journalists on suspicion of terrorism, making it the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census.

CPJ emailed Turkey’s Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry for comment but did not receive any responses.  

What led up to your arrest? There were reports that you received threats.

After I [published] a few stories, I was effectively made a target by the people who were violating human rights, as happens to every journalist who reports on similar violations in conflict zones. Without a doubt, one story kicked everything off. [Editor’s note: In 2016, Türfent reported on a violent mass detention of local Kurdish workers by Turkish counter-terror agents.]

[Authorities] from the governor’s office to the [interior] ministry made statements about how an investigation had been opened [into] the police officers involved. Needless to say, that was just a formality.

First, I was followed and verbally assaulted. Then things escalated. I was shot at with plastic bullets and received death threats on social media from [accounts ostensibly associated with Turkish counter-terrorism special forces]. It is not easy to receive death threats directly from the forces tasked with protecting you. [My lawyers] filed criminal complaints, but [the threats were] not even investigated.

Things came to a head when special operations officers detained me. [They] denied it for hours, and it was only confirmed that I was in custody after pressure from the public. I was subjected to intense physical violence. Our complaints about that were ignored, too. This is the far end of Turkey! Nobody would know about it. And what then, even if they do? [The authorities] have a huge culture of impunity backing them up.

How did you feel when the prosecution witnesses withdrew testimonies against you? Did you still expect to be convicted?

I was made to wait [in prison] for 13 months for an indictment, so for more than a year I had no idea what I was being accused of. Then came a farcical trial; a trial in name only. The prosecution witnesses told the court that they were forced to sign their testimonies [against me] by police officers.

I wasn’t shocked exactly, because forced testimonies are in demand around here! [But the prosecutor’s] hands were left empty [when they were withdrawn]. Everybody assumed that I was not going to be sentenced. However, a judge who had voted for me to be released [pending trial] at an earlier hearing was suddenly removed from the court council. At that moment, we understood that these people were acting from political motivations, and that the verdict would not be independent.

Were the witnesses’ claims investigated?

One of the women said officers threatened to rape her if she would not sign the testimony. Another said they removed his teeth with pincers when he refused to sign. The other [accounts] were all similar. The course of the trial would have changed immediately if we were in a normal country – an investigation would be started in a flash. However, [the judges] preferred to play deaf, dumb, and blind.

Why do you think you were targeted?

It was obvious that the free press was being targeted, and [through my treatment] a firm message was being delivered to other journalists on [the authorities’] behalf. [I was] made into an example.

Tell us about your experience in prison.

I was in [five different closed or high security prisons.] I usually spent my days reading and writing. I was arbitrarily kept in solitary confinement for 18 months. Our rights were [constantly being] shelved. Both the state of emergency and the pandemic [provided] strong grounds for that.

There are serious problems with access to medical services in prisons. Sometimes [when] you have a complaint or an illness, your petitions to go to the infirmary can [take] more than a month [to get a response]. Then, my rights to conversation, sports, courses and other social activities, and [my access to] books, newspapers, publications, TV and radio; all were [arbitrarily denied at times].

I was not subjected to physical torture in prison, but being kept isolated for years is torture in itself.

Your trial and conviction did not receive a lot of media attention in Turkey. How would you explain this?

There is a fundamental reason for this harsh punishment to journalism not getting its due in the national agenda, despite all the scandals and legal oddities: national and international press freedom groups display about 10% of the reaction to an arrest in Istanbul for one in Hakkari [in the southeast]. This adds insult to injury. We know journalists whose trials are yet to begin. It was too late for us; let it not be too late for them. It should not be.

Will you continue to practice journalism? What are your plans for the future?

There is no option to not practice journalism. Our profession is our pride; we will not drop the pen because we paid a little penance for it. There is a need for writers and artists to [record the people’s perspective of] the troubles that have been ongoing for over a century in our country. Journalism in Turkey is in its death throes, but I have one life, I humbly intend to keep on writing.

But I intend to give myself some more time and take a breath. I have earned that much, haven’t I?

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret.

As the 90-day trial of 16 pro-democracy figures began Monday in Hong Kong, the global human rights group Amnesty International blasted what it called the "politically motivated" charges against the defendants, while urging authorities to drop the case.

The 16 defendants are part of a group of 47 people including former lawmakers, ex-district councilors, academics, and activists who were arrested in January 2021 and subsequently charged with "conspiracy to commit subversion" in alleged violation of a 2020 national security law. The legislation has been condemned by legal experts and activists as a threat to both human rights and Hong Kong's purported autonomy from Beijing.

The 16 pleaded not guilty Monday; the other 31 previously entered guilty pleas. All of the so-called Hong Kong 47 stand accused of plotting to turn Hong Kong's legislature into a "lethal constitutional weapon" against the Chinese government. In a break with Hong Kong's common law judicial tradition, the case is being tried by a trio of hand-picked prosecutors instead of a jury.

"This case has been an obscene injustice since the unprecedented mass prosecution of the 47 defendants began in March 2021," Amnesty deputy regional director Hana Young said in a statement. "In a trial that lays bare the intrinsically abusive nature of the national security law, some of the defendants face up to life in prison simply for taking part in political party 'primaries.'"

The five defendants accused of being "major organizers" of the plot are: Benny Tai, a legal scholar; Au Nok-hin, an ex-legislator; Chiu Ka-yin and Chung Kam-lun, former district council members; and Gordon Ng Ching-hang, an activist.

“They are forced to make the impossible decision between pleading guilty to a nonexistent crime for a potential reduction in sentence, or fighting a losing battle under the unjust national security law," Young added. "Most of the 47 have been detained for two years without trial, due to the extremely stringent bail threshold which in effect creates an assumption against bail in national security cases. Whatever happens in the trial, that injustice alone can never be undone."

Young continued:

With this mass trial, the Hong Kong government is attempting to shut off all meaningful political participation in Hong Kong. But the fact that people came to the court today to protest against these prosecutions, despite the risks, showed that the Hong Kong authorities will never be able to fully crush dissent.

People must be allowed to freely express their opinions in Hong Kong, without the threat of jail. Peaceful political opposition is not a crime.

"The charges against the 47 are based entirely upon claimed hypothetical threats to national security," Young added. "All those still detained in the case should be immediately released and the charges against all dropped."

There was a heavy police presence outside the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts as the trial got underway Monday. Protesters, including members of the progressive League of Social Democrats, staged small demonstrations outside the building before being dispersed.

"Primary elections are something that happens in every democratic country," one supporter of the defendants toldAgence France-Presse outside the court. "But I don't know why something like this has happened in Hong Kong, that holding primaries is being considered breaking the law."

During both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States—which Beijing accuses of "interference in Hong Kong affairs" and "anti-China destabilization"—imposed sanctions on a handful of Hong Kong and Chinese officials in connection with the crackdown. Biden also recently extended a program that shields Hong Kong residents from deportation.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As the 90-day trial of 16 pro-democracy figures began Monday in Hong Kong, the global human rights group Amnesty International blasted what it called the "politically motivated" charges against the defendants, while urging authorities to drop the case.

The 16 defendants are part of a group of 47 people including former lawmakers, ex-district councilors, academics, and activists who were arrested in January 2021 and subsequently charged with "conspiracy to commit subversion" in alleged violation of a 2020 national security law. The legislation has been condemned by legal experts and activists as a threat to both human rights and Hong Kong's purported autonomy from Beijing.

The 16 pleaded not guilty Monday; the other 31 previously entered guilty pleas. All of the so-called Hong Kong 47 stand accused of plotting to turn Hong Kong's legislature into a "lethal constitutional weapon" against the Chinese government. In a break with Hong Kong's common law judicial tradition, the case is being tried by a trio of hand-picked prosecutors instead of a jury.

"This case has been an obscene injustice since the unprecedented mass prosecution of the 47 defendants began in March 2021," Amnesty deputy regional director Hana Young said in a statement. "In a trial that lays bare the intrinsically abusive nature of the national security law, some of the defendants face up to life in prison simply for taking part in political party 'primaries.'"

The five defendants accused of being "major organizers" of the plot are: Benny Tai, a legal scholar; Au Nok-hin, an ex-legislator; Chiu Ka-yin and Chung Kam-lun, former district council members; and Gordon Ng Ching-hang, an activist.

“They are forced to make the impossible decision between pleading guilty to a nonexistent crime for a potential reduction in sentence, or fighting a losing battle under the unjust national security law," Young added. "Most of the 47 have been detained for two years without trial, due to the extremely stringent bail threshold which in effect creates an assumption against bail in national security cases. Whatever happens in the trial, that injustice alone can never be undone."

Young continued:

With this mass trial, the Hong Kong government is attempting to shut off all meaningful political participation in Hong Kong. But the fact that people came to the court today to protest against these prosecutions, despite the risks, showed that the Hong Kong authorities will never be able to fully crush dissent.

People must be allowed to freely express their opinions in Hong Kong, without the threat of jail. Peaceful political opposition is not a crime.

"The charges against the 47 are based entirely upon claimed hypothetical threats to national security," Young added. "All those still detained in the case should be immediately released and the charges against all dropped."

There was a heavy police presence outside the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts as the trial got underway Monday. Protesters, including members of the progressive League of Social Democrats, staged small demonstrations outside the building before being dispersed.

"Primary elections are something that happens in every democratic country," one supporter of the defendants toldAgence France-Presse outside the court. "But I don't know why something like this has happened in Hong Kong, that holding primaries is being considered breaking the law."

During both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States—which Beijing accuses of "interference in Hong Kong affairs" and "anti-China destabilization"—imposed sanctions on a handful of Hong Kong and Chinese officials in connection with the crackdown. Biden also recently extended a program that shields Hong Kong residents from deportation.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Three activists are facing criminal charges for allegedly painting graffiti on the walls of the Guatemalan congressional building during protests on November 21, 2020. But the case against these protesters has been marked by the manipulation of information and due process. 

"When justice does not apply equally to everyone, that is a selective application; it is not justice."

"This case represents revenge [from the authorities]; there is no other possible explanation," Claudia Samayoa, a human rights defender with the Guatemalan human rights organization UDEFEGUA, tells The Progressive. "They are wanting to manipulate the case to justify [their argument] that marches, particularly of the university students and campesino organizations, are violent."

Nanci Sinto and Dulce Archila are facing charges of "depredation of cultural property" during the November 2020 mobilization, which protested cuts to key social programs included in Guatemala's 2022 budget bill and demanded the resignation of the country's president and ministers. Sinto and Archila were arrested a year later in November 2021. 

During the protest, many gathered at the congressional building, where a small group—which did not include Sinto and Archila—set fire to an office. Riot police deployed teargas to disperse the protesters,drawing others into a violent standoff. During the initial dispersal Sinto was beaten and pushed to the ground before being helped away by a couple photojournalists.

In June 2022, a judge ruled that there was no evidence to prosecute Sinto and Archila, but an appeals court allowed the Public Ministry to proceed with their prosecution. 

"The idea of ​​keeping them [facing charges] is to generate this state of fear and almost terror, to prevent it from happening again," Renzo Rosal, a Guatemalan independent political analyst tells The Progressive.

But while the state goes after these two protesters for allegedly tagging the congressional building, groups of ex-soldiers who burned parts of the congressional building and vehicles in the parking lot in October 2021 remain free and uninvestigated. The former soldiers who were active during Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal armed conflict are demanding that the State pay 120,000 Quetzales, or more than $15,000 dollars, to each of the thousands of soldiers who served during the war. 

"When justice does not apply equally to everyone, that is a selective application; it is not justice," Rosal says. "That is a serious indicator of the deterioration of the democratic model." 

Guatemala has a long history of falsely accusing community activists accused of crimes including land usurpation and kidnapping. Such criminalization has expanded to impact prosecutors and anti-corruption activists in recent years. Amid the rollback of anti-corruption efforts, the Guatemalan government continues to take new steps to reprimand people who protest living conditions in the country. 

"Right now we are in the crack-down period," Samayoa says. "We are at that moment where I believe that society still has to understand where the difference [between authoritarianism and democracy] stands."

The Guatemalan congress has been pursuing a measure that will permit the police and military to use deadly force during protests. As law it would establish an immunity from prosecution for security officers accused of using deadly force. Known as Initiative 6076, the measure was proposed by congressional representatives with the Unión del Cambio Nacional, or UCN, a far-right party that is known to have deep ties with drug cartels. 

The bill was forced through the first two debates, despite outcry from the opposition in congress and communities that have been affected by state violence.

The Indigenous local ancestral government authorities of the municipality of Totonicapán traveled to Guatemala City to request that the legislation be archived. While President of Congress Shirley Rivera stated that the bill would not be brought up again in the rest of the year and that it would go under review, there are still concerns that it will advance. In September 2022, the Guatemalan digital media outlet La Hora reported that supporters of the legislation are preparing to introduce another version of the bill. 

As Samayoa points out, the legislation comes after several high profile prosecutions of police and military for the use of deadly force in protests, including a case against a colonel and nine soldiers for the killing of six protesters in Totonicapán on October 4, 2012, and widespread outcry over the use of force against student protesters in August 2022 and in November 2021 resulting in several protesters losing eyes. 

The proposed legislation suggests that far-right members of the congress are preparing for more confrontations with protesters. This year alone, the Guatemalan National Civilian Police and the Guatemalan military have both made purchases of tens of thousands of teargas grenades and other crowd control equipment. Since the beginning of the Giammattei administration in January 2020, the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior has also purchased tens of thousands of teargas grenades.

"What we can see is that in order to deploy the police [against protesters] they need to give the police and the army some immunity and impunity," Samayoa says. "And that's what that law is."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jeff Abbott.

When Russian forces seized Crimea in 2014, paving the way for President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, a large number of world leaders and international organizations condemned the invasion as illegal. But Putin and other senior Russian officials were never prosecuted in any court of international law for the crime of aggression: the use of armed force against another country without defensive necessity.

Eight years later, Russia did it again, invading mainland Ukraine in February. Last week, Putin declared the annexation of four regions over which his forces have partial control. The invasion and the recent annexation are illegal under international law — as was the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. These actions threaten not only Ukraine but also the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that form the basis for the peaceful coexistence of nations. Yet whether these acts of aggression will be prosecuted this time around remains in question. That’s because prosecuting the crime of aggression would not put a lowly soldier or mid-level officer on the stand, but Russia’s highest ranking military and political officials, all the way to Putin himself.

Over the last eight months, evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Russian forces has piled up. Some officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden, have gone as far as to call Russia’s actions in Ukraine “genocide” — a claim some experts have disputed. Investigations into these alleged crimes are well underway, by Ukrainian prosecutors, foreign countries, international organizations, and the International Criminal Court, among others. But whether anyone will prosecute those chiefly responsible for the aggression itself, and under which jurisdiction, is still unclear.

“It’s a question on everyone’s mind,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a human rights investigator who is analyzing evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine as part of a Yale School of Public Health initiative supported by the U.S. State Department. “What is more important? Is it catching the colonel-level in charge of the artillery assault on Mariupol, or is it Putin?”

“None of this would be happening if Russia had not invaded,” echoed Philippe Sands, a prominent international law specialist. “The danger that we face is that in five years’ time, we will have three or four trials of low-grade, useless sorts of characters that are totally irrelevant, and the top people just get off scot-free.”

“The big elephant in the room in Ukraine is Iraq.”

Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visits a mass grave in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 13, 2022, amid Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.

Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

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Right/Top: Dried bloodstains cover the stairs to the basement where civilian bodies were discovered after the liberation of Bucha from Russian invaders, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 7, 2022. Left/Bottom: A body is discovered in the kitchen of a house in Bucha after the Ukrainian army secured the area following the withdrawal of the Russian army, on April 6, 2022.Photos: NurPhoto via Getty Images

An elderly woman reacts near the exhumed grave of her grandson at the site of a mass burial on Sept. 23, 2022, in Izium, Ukraine. Her grandson Danylo, 19, died on May 4 during Russian shelling.

Photo: Oleksandra Novosel/Global Images Ukraine via Getty

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“How do we make Ukraine a precedent that can apply to other places where accountability is needed, so it’s not just a one-off?”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

Journalists may face decades in prison for “foreign interference” offences unless urgent changes are made to Australia’s national security laws, according to a University of Queensland researcher.

PhD candidate Sarah Kendall from UQ’s School of Law warned that reporting on issues relating to Australian politics, national security or international relations while working with overseas media organisations could place journalists at risk of criminal prosecution under the Espionage and Foreign Interference Act 2018.

“The law could apply to any journalist, staff member or source who works for or collaborates with foreign-controlled media organisations,” Kendall said.

• READ MORE: Other Australian media freedom reports

“There could also be repercussions for journalists working overseas, as any news published in Australia is subject to these laws.”

The Espionage and Foreign Interference Act 2018 covers nine foreign interference offences, with penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years imprisonment.

“While these offences require some part of the person’s conduct to be covert or involve deception, this does not exclude legitimate journalistic activities,” Kendall said.

“Journalists could be acting covertly whenever they liaise with a confidential source using encrypted technologies or engage in undercover work using hidden cameras.”

Public interest protection
In a Foreign Interference Law and Press Freedom briefing paper, Kendall recommended that the government introduce an occupation-specific exemption to protect journalists working in the public interest.

The paper argues that the scope of offences be narrowed to remove “recklessness” and “prejudice to Australia’s national security” as punishable elements.

“For example, a journalist could be accused of recklessly harming national security when they publish a story that reveals war crimes by members of the Australian Defence Force,” Kendall said.

“Journalists and their sources could face up to 20 years in prison if any part of their conduct was covert, even if they are engaged in legitimate, good faith reporting.”

Kendall said the law’s Preparatory Offence, which carries a potential jail term of 10 years, risked creating a dangerous precedent when combined with the offence of conspiracy.

“This offence can capture the earliest stages of investigative reporting so a discussion between a journalist and source about a potential story on Australian politics could see them charged with conspiring to prepare for foreign interference,” Kendall said.

Foreign Interference Law and Press Freedom is the latest report in UQ Law School’s Press Freedom Policy Papers series, a project aimed at laying the groundwork for widespread reform in laws spanning espionage, whistleblowing and free speech as they affect the media.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

As Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas continued over the weekend to defend their plot to put refugees and migrants from Latin America on planes and busses to northern cities and communities, critics of the 'cruel' and 'immoral' have said the two should face investigation and ultimately criminal prosecution for misleading and mistreating the people at the center of their political gamesmanship.

Amid confirmed reports that many of the migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard last week by DeSantis had been misled by officials in Florida about the nature of their trip, immigration rights legal aides have said they intend to push for legal action to stop such abuses. As the New York Times reports:

The lawyers said they would seek an injunction in federal court early next week to stop the flights of migrants to cities around the country, alleging that the Republican governor had violated due process and the civil rights of the migrants flown from Texas to the small island off the coast of Massachusetts.

"They were told, 'You have a hearing in San Antonio, but don't worry, we'll take you to Boston'" said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director for Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) Boston. He said dozens of the migrants had told his team they only had been informed midair that they were going to land in tony Martha's Vineyard rather than Boston.

Representing more than 30 of those people brought to Martha's Vineyard with free legal assistance, LCR said in a statement Saturday that it has "called upon U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to formally open criminal investigations into the political stunt that brought two planeloads of immigrants to Martha's Vineyard earlier this week." 

Detailing "how its clients were induced to board airplanes and cross state lines under false pretenses," the legal aid group said that only after the planes landed did the immigrants "learn that the offers of assistance had all been a ruse to exploit them for political purposes." 

"Particularly given the deliberate, intentional, and concerted nature of the interference by State actors into federal immigration enforcement," LCR said "a strong and coordinated federal response is required."

On Saturday, a second bus from Texas loaded with migrants arrived at Vice President Kamala's Harris' D.C. residence. According to the Texas Tribune:

The bus arrived before daylight outside the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.; a video shared by an NBC News journalist showed migrants wearing masks and carrying pillows walking off the bus and into a city that has declared a public health emergency due to the influx of migrants. A spokesperson for Abbott confirmed that the bus came from Texas. 

On Friday, Abbott's office said it had sent 8,000 migrants to the nation's capital since announcing his busing policy in the spring. The state has also sent 2,500 migrants to New York City and 600 to Chicago. Abbott began targeting the vice president's residency this week after she appeared on Meet the Press and said the border was secure, stoking conservative anger.

In an interview with VICE on Friday, Harris said the behavior of Abbott and Harris was a "dereliction of duty" as elected public servants.

"They're playing games," she said. "These are political stunts with real human beings who are fleeing harm."

While some legal experts contend that Abbott and DeSantis have acted within their authority when shipping refugees and vulnerable immigrants across the country to score political points, demands for prosecution or at least a criminal probe by the Department of Justice have come from California Governor Gavin Newsom and others.

Writing in Jacobin magazine, former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign manager Jeff Weaver argued that DeSantis should be prosecuted for his unlawful conduct and that the American people—especially given the Florida Republican's presidential ambitions—should recognize just how abhorrent this behavior is.

"Like Donald Trump's family separation policy, this issue runs much deeper" than any particular position a lawmaker or politician has one immigration policy. "It's about inhumane and illegal conduct toward vulnerable people that is an affront to the values of every decent human being," wrote Weaver. He continued:

Progressives owe the country—which endured four years of lawlessness under Trump—to tell the truth about Ron DeSantis—an aspirant to the highest office in the land. He has demonstrated that, like Trump, he is willing to break the law to achieve political power.

What DeSantis did is not a political "stunt." It's a clear warning that, as president, he, like his Republican predecessor, would view the rule of law as a principle that is expendable when political expediency calls. And it's a crime. He should be prosecuted for it.

In an opinion column that appeared at Common Dreams on Saturday, progressive radio host and author Thom Hartmann said the behavior of Abbott and DeSantis harkens back to previous racist episodes in the nation's past and that the two Republican governors "should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jon Queally.

The Bank of Papua New Guinea’s Financial Analysis and Supervision Unit has reported more than 5000 cases as a result of anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing investigations still awaiting prosecution.

Acting governor for BPNG Benny Popoitai said the FASU had identified persons of interest and companies and referred them to the Police Fraud Unit for further investigation and prosecution. However, none have yet been prosecuted.

He said at this stage FASU, under BPNG, did not have the powers to prosecute these cases.

• READ MORE: Other PNG money-laundering cases

“We have a real issue, we have not been prosecuting anyone under the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) law.

“We have cases of leaders being prosecuted, that we have sent to the Ombudsman Commission and others to the police.

“If it’s a tax matter we refer them to the IRC [inland Revenue Commission], If it is Customs it goes to Customs.

“The issue is, we do not have the prosecution powers so we send the information to the law enforcing agencies to enforce,” Popoitai said.

Risk of being ‘greylisted’
He also cautioned that FASU was also at risk of being “greylisted” for doing business with corresponding banks.

“PNG joined the rest of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorist Financing with the rest of the world in 2008.

“As a result of their review of our AML, they grey listed us in 2014 and so we got out of the grey list.

“They are going to visit us, to see if we are not ready, they will put us down [on] the grey list and doing business will be really tough because of the correspondence relationship with the banks.

“Some of the international correspondents will walk away,” he said.

Popoitai said the AML business was now under the National Coordination Committee chaired by himself and the Secretary for Justice to oversee what other government agencies do.

Marape calls for prosecutions
Prime Minister James Marape has asked if those who are found to be breaking the AML laws be referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption Act (ICAC) for prosecution.

Popoita said they could only do that once ICAC was established.

AML law introduced a robust regulatory framework consistent with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

Under the Act, the Financial Analysis and Supervision Unit (FASU) collects, analyses and disseminates financial intelligence, and supervises financial institution and Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions (DNFBPs)

Members of Parliament under this Act are classified as the politically exposed persons (PEP) meaning their conduct of business for themselves, their family and employees are important as this is how the Act governs and ensures the PNG economy is protected.

Lorraine Wohi is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman made the case Sunday for prosecuting corporate executives as part of a broader government crackdown on unlawful price gouging and other business practices that have driven up the costs of medicine, groceries, and gas—padding company bottom lines at the expense of consumers.

"Take the massive oil companies, for example," the Democratic candidate wrote in an op-ed for the Pennsylvania Times Leader. "Chevron, Exxon, and Shell have seen their profits increase 200% since last year, but they're still charging us sky-high prices for gas. Companies like Tyson posted over a billion dollars in profits last quarter, while raising prices on meat products our families depend on."

"Out-of-touch politicians got us into this mess, we can't trust an out-of-touch millionaire TV doctor to get us out of it."

"It's gross, and deeply unpatriotic, for the big corporations to be rolling around in cash while charging us record-high prices for gas and groceries," wrote Fetterman, who is currently Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor. "We'll crack down on this by prosecuting the executives of these huge corporations, including the Big Oil companies and meatpacking companies who are artificially driving up prices, gouging consumers at the pump and at the grocery store."

Fetterman's op-ed comes just over a week after he held his first major public event since suffering a stroke in mid-May, days before the Democratic primary contest that he won handily.

The Democrat's general election campaign in the critical battleground Pennsylvania—a state that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate next year—currently enjoys a double-digit polling lead over his Republican opponent, the former celebrity television personality and ultra-millionaire Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Fetterman is looking to press his advantage by continuing to deploy populist messaging that presents Oz as a carpetbagger whose extreme wealth and ties to corporate interests such as Big Pharma render him unfit to deliver for the working class, whose earnings are being eroded by surging prescription drug prices, housing costs, and other inflationary trends.

According to one recent analysis, pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. have raised drug prices more than 1,100 times so far this year.

"Let's be clear: Dr. Oz just isn't connected to the struggles that Pennsylvanians are facing every day," Fetterman wrote in his new op-ed. "While he's been complaining about rising prices from his New Jersey Mansion, I've been meeting Pennsylvanians on grocery store runs, speaking with them about the challenges they're facing, and finding real policy solutions that get stuff done and make their lives better."

"Working Pennsylvanians are getting screwed," he continued. "While costs are rising and wages are failing to keep up, too many of our leaders in Washington simply aren't doing enough. Out-of-touch politicians got us into this mess, we can't trust an out-of-touch millionaire TV doctor to get us out of it."

In addition to prosecuting corporate executives for price-gouging and other abuses, Fetterman voices support for a range of policy solutions aimed at tackling rising costs and inequality, including:

• Enacting a financial transaction tax on trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives;
• Ending the stranglehold of healthcare costs on American families by instituting a cap of a thousand dollars per year on out-of-pocket costs;
• Passing legislation to allow for the importation of lower-priced prescription drugs from other countries; and
• Putting a cap on prescription drug costs.

"If we start getting stuff done, starting with these priorities I've listed," Fetterman wrote, "we can make real change for the towns, cities, and people of Pennsylvania."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The issue of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine highlights the decades-long reluctance of today’s major military powers to support the International Criminal Court.

In 1998, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established by an international treaty, the Rome Statute.  Coming into force in 2002 and with 123 nations now parties to it, the treaty provides that the ICC, headquartered at the Hague, may investigate and prosecute individuals for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.  As a court of last resort, the ICC may only initiate proceedings when a country is unwilling or unable to take such action against its nationals or anyone else on its territory.  In addition, although the ICC is authorized to initiate investigations anywhere, it may only try nationals or residents of nations that are parties to the treaty, unless it is authorized to investigate by the nation where the crimes occurred.

The development of a permanent international court dealing with severe violations of human rights has already produced some important results.  Thirty-one criminal cases have been brought before the ICC, resulting, thus far, in ten convictions and four acquittals.  The first ICC conviction occurred in 2012, when a Congolese warlord was found guilty of using conscripted child soldiers in his nation.  In 2020, the ICC began trying a former Islamist militant alleged to have forced hundreds of women into sexual slavery in Mali.  This April, the ICC opened the trial of a militia leader charged with 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, Sudan.  Parliamentarians from around the world have lauded “the ICC’s pivotal role in the prevention of atrocities, the fight against impunity, the support for victims’ rights, and the guarantee of long-lasting justice.”

Despite these advances, the ICC faces some serious problems.  Often years after criminal transgressions, it must locate the criminals and people willing to testify in their cases.  Furthermore, lacking a police force, it is forced to rely upon national governments, some with a minimal commitment to justice, to capture and deport suspected criminals for trial. Governments also occasionally withdrew from the ICC, when angered, as the Philippines did after its president, Rodrigo Duterte, came under investigation.

The ICC’s most serious problem, however, is that 70 nations, including the world’s major military powers, have refused to become parties to the treaty.  The governments of China, India, and Saudi Arabia never signed the Rome Statute.  Although the governments of the United States, Russia, and Israel did sign it, they never ratified it.  Subsequently, in fact, they withdrew their signatures. 

The motive for these holdouts is clear enough.  In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the withdrawal of his nation from the process of joining the ICC.  This action occurred in response to the ICC ruling that Russia’s seizure of Crimea amounted to an “ongoing occupation.”  Such a position, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “contradicts reality” and the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the court as “one-sided and inefficient.”  Understandably, governments harboring current and future war criminals would rather not face investigations and possible prosecutions. 

The skittishness of the U.S. government toward the ICC is illustrative.  Even as he signed the treaty, President Bill Clinton cited “concerns about significant flaws” in it, notably the inability to “protect US officials from unfounded charges.”  Thus, he did not submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification and recommended that his successor, George W. Bush, continue this policy “until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.”  Bush, in turn, “unsigned” the treaty in 2002, pressured other governments into bilateral agreements that required them to refuse surrender of U.S. nationals to the ICC, and signed the American Servicemembers Protection Act (sometimes called the “Hague Invasion Act”) which authorized the use of military force to liberate any American being held by the ICC. 

Although subsequently the Bush and Obama administrations grew more cooperative with the court, aiding it in the prosecution of African warlords, the Trump administration adopted the most hostile stance toward it yet.  In September 2018, Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that the United States would provide “no support” to the ICC, which had “no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority.”  In 2020, the Trump administration imposed economic sanctions and visa restrictions on top ICC officials for any efforts to investigate the actions of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.

Under the Biden administration, however, U.S. policy swung back toward support.  Soon after taking office, Biden—in line with his more welcoming approach to international institutions― dropped the Trump sanctions against ICC officials.  Then, in March 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine produced widely-reported atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, the U.S. president labeled Putin a “war criminal” and called for a “war crimes trial.”

The ICC was the obvious institution for action.  That March, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution backing an investigation into Russian war crimes in Ukraine and praising the ICC.  Weeks before this, in fact, the ICC did open an investigation.

Even so, it is unclear what the U.S. government can or is willing to do to aid the ICC in Ukraine.  After all, U.S. legislation, still on the books, bars substantial U.S. assistance to the ICC.  Also, Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to action, based on the U.S. government’s long-time fear that U.S. troops might some day be prosecuted for war crimes.

For their part, Russian officials have claimed that the widely-recognized atrocities were a complete “fake,” a “fabrication,” and a “provocation.”  In Bucha, stated the Russian defense ministry, “not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action.”  Not surprisingly, Russian authorities have refused to cooperate with the ICC investigation.

Isn’t it time for the major military powers to give up the notion that their war criminals should be allowed to operate with impunity?  Isn’t it time these countries joined the ICC?

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

On Wednesday, June 22, the Kuwaiti Information Ministry announced that over the last two weeks it had revoked the licenses of 90 news websites, and had referred 73 media outlets to state prosecutors “due to violations of the law” including publishing false news, according to news reports and a statement by the ministry.

“Kuwaiti authorities must reverse their recent decisions to withdraw the licenses of nearly 100 news websites and refer dozens of outlets for prosecution,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Authorities should not use the country’s licensing policies to restrict journalists’ work, and should ensure that false news charges are not levied against media outlets.”

CPJ was unable to immediately confirm which news outlets had been targeted by the Information Ministry. CPJ emailed the ministry and its undersecretary and international media office for comment, but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

As a key witness prepared to testify Tuesday before the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, a growing number of U.S. legal experts argued that one of Donald Trump's recorded phone calls offers ample grounds for the former president's prosecution.

"The tape should provide a simple case for criminal prosecutors to bring against Trump after the hearings."

Writing for MSNBC, Democracy 21 founder and president Fred Wertheimer and Brookings Institute senior fellow Norman Eisen assert that "conclusive proof" of Trump's "illegal effort to steal the presidential election is hiding in plain sight."

"It is the tape of Trump's Jan. 2, 2021, call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to just 'find 11,780 votes,'" the pair argue. Raffensperger is set to testify before the bipartisan House panel Tuesday afternoon.

"Trump has so far enjoyed near-impunity. He has gotten away with abuse after abuse," Wertheimer and Eisen continue. "A case centered on the Georgia phone call, however, provides an antidote to that astonishing record."

"The tape should provide a simple case for criminal prosecutors to bring against Trump after the hearings," they contend. "U.S. District Judge David Carter already has found that Trump and his co-conspirators likely committed federal crimes... Carter concluded that Trump and John Eastman, a key adviser, 'launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,' adding, 'The illegality of the plan was obvious.'"

They write:

Even as the case continues to build in all these dimensions that Trump engaged in leading a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election, the hourlong tape-recorded January 2 phone call Trump made to Raffensperger stands out as a smoking gun. Trump has no legal defense for this action...

When Trump asked Raffensperger to 'find' a specified number of new votes, he was asking him to rig the result. He did this with no concern about the truth and in the face of an initial vote count and two recounts that had already taken place—with all three showing Biden the winner.

"Trump pressed Raffensperger to change the count to a number that would give him Georgia's 16 electoral votes," Wertheimer and Eisen add, "and did so with no legal basis and no facts to justify his claims."

"Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the Justice Department will 'follow the facts wherever they lead' in investigating the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election," the pair note. "If the facts establish that Trump's smoking-gun phone call to Raffensperger violated both state and federal criminal statutes—as we believe it did—private citizen Trump should be treated like any other lawbreaker: indicted and prosecuted to the full extent of the law by both the Justice Department and the Fulton County district attorney."

Citing last week's testimony by former federal judge Michael Luttig—who called Trump and his allies a "clear and present danger" to U.S. democracy, Laurence H. Tribe, Phillip Allen Lacovara, and Dennis Aftergut argue in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that "this historic phrase generates an extraordinary constitutional power of government to act—and a duty to do so."

"Luttig's verdict should be understood as a plea for Attorney General Merrick Garland to proceed toward charging Trump with federal crimes that the public record now amply establishes," the trio writes. "Only then will this nation be able to move forward from the ongoing insurrection."

"Beyond the avalanche of documents and testimony pointing to Trump's guilt and the principle that no one is above the law, there is an additional reason to indict Trump for his multi-faceted conspiracy in 2020 to override the vote," the experts state. "Upon a conviction for inciting insurrection, or being an accessory to insurrection, Trump would be subject to disqualification from acquiring federal office."

The jurists continue:

There is ample evidence that Trump's objective was the insurrection's success. Among that evidence was his three-hour delay in calling on the attackers to go home and his vengeful tweet demeaning Vice President Mike Pence after Trump knew that the savage invasion of the U.S. Capitol had begun. That was "pouring gasoline on the fire," testified former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews.

Even without a direct charge of insurrection, allegations of such insurrectionist activities in an indictment for conspiring to defraud the United States or to obstruct an official proceeding or for seditious conspiracy might suffice for 14th Amendment disqualification if Trump were convicted.

"Holding Trump accountable—and disqualifying him from future office—would not be a partisan act, but one needed to preserve the republic," Tribe, Lacovara, and Aftergut stress.

"Holding Trump accountable—and disqualifying him from future office—would not be a partisan act, but one needed to preserve the republic."

Warning that Trump has floated the possibility of pardoning all January 6th insurrectionists if he is reelected president, the authors argue that "deterrence of future violence depends on judicially imposed sanctions."

"Trump would remove them, signaling that violent extremism in defense of Trump is no vice," they write. "If he returns to the White House, he will install his people in the Justice Department and turn the machinery of prosecution against his enemies and toward protecting his friends and his schemes."

The scholars part with an ominous warning: "And should Trump get an encore, look to pre-World War II Germany for a mirror. A failed coup in 1923 taught Hitler a better route to dictatorship nine years later. Those who repeat history are doomed to learn it. The hard way."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As a key witness prepared to testify Tuesday before the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, a growing number of U.S. legal experts argued that one of Donald Trump's recorded phone calls offers ample grounds for the former president's prosecution.

"The tape should provide a simple case for criminal prosecutors to bring against Trump after the hearings."

Writing for MSNBC, Democracy 21 founder and president Fred Wertheimer and Brookings Institute senior fellow Norman Eisen assert that "conclusive proof" of Trump's "illegal effort to steal the presidential election is hiding in plain sight."

"It is the tape of Trump's Jan. 2, 2021, call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to just 'find 11,780 votes,'" the pair argue. Raffensperger is set to testify before the bipartisan House panel Tuesday afternoon.

"Trump has so far enjoyed near-impunity. He has gotten away with abuse after abuse," Wertheimer and Eisen continue. "A case centered on the Georgia phone call, however, provides an antidote to that astonishing record."

"The tape should provide a simple case for criminal prosecutors to bring against Trump after the hearings," they contend. "U.S. District Judge David Carter already has found that Trump and his co-conspirators likely committed federal crimes... Carter concluded that Trump and John Eastman, a key adviser, 'launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,' adding, 'The illegality of the plan was obvious.'"

They write:

Even as the case continues to build in all these dimensions that Trump engaged in leading a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election, the hourlong tape-recorded January 2 phone call Trump made to Raffensperger stands out as a smoking gun. Trump has no legal defense for this action...

When Trump asked Raffensperger to 'find' a specified number of new votes, he was asking him to rig the result. He did this with no concern about the truth and in the face of an initial vote count and two recounts that had already taken place—with all three showing Biden the winner.

"Trump pressed Raffensperger to change the count to a number that would give him Georgia's 16 electoral votes," Wertheimer and Eisen add, "and did so with no legal basis and no facts to justify his claims."

"Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the Justice Department will 'follow the facts wherever they lead' in investigating the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election," the pair note. "If the facts establish that Trump's smoking-gun phone call to Raffensperger violated both state and federal criminal statutes—as we believe it did—private citizen Trump should be treated like any other lawbreaker: indicted and prosecuted to the full extent of the law by both the Justice Department and the Fulton County district attorney."

Citing last week's testimony by former federal judge Michael Luttig—who called Trump and his allies a "clear and present danger" to U.S. democracy, Laurence H. Tribe, Phillip Allen Lacovara, and Dennis Aftergut argue in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that "this historic phrase generates an extraordinary constitutional power of government to act—and a duty to do so."

"Luttig's verdict should be understood as a plea for Attorney General Merrick Garland to proceed toward charging Trump with federal crimes that the public record now amply establishes," the trio writes. "Only then will this nation be able to move forward from the ongoing insurrection."

"Beyond the avalanche of documents and testimony pointing to Trump's guilt and the principle that no one is above the law, there is an additional reason to indict Trump for his multi-faceted conspiracy in 2020 to override the vote," the experts state. "Upon a conviction for inciting insurrection, or being an accessory to insurrection, Trump would be subject to disqualification from acquiring federal office."

The jurists continue:

There is ample evidence that Trump's objective was the insurrection's success. Among that evidence was his three-hour delay in calling on the attackers to go home and his vengeful tweet demeaning Vice President Mike Pence after Trump knew that the savage invasion of the U.S. Capitol had begun. That was "pouring gasoline on the fire," testified former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews.

Even without a direct charge of insurrection, allegations of such insurrectionist activities in an indictment for conspiring to defraud the United States or to obstruct an official proceeding or for seditious conspiracy might suffice for 14th Amendment disqualification if Trump were convicted.

"Holding Trump accountable—and disqualifying him from future office—would not be a partisan act, but one needed to preserve the republic," Tribe, Lacovara, and Aftergut stress.

"Holding Trump accountable—and disqualifying him from future office—would not be a partisan act, but one needed to preserve the republic."

Warning that Trump has floated the possibility of pardoning all January 6th insurrectionists if he is reelected president, the authors argue that "deterrence of future violence depends on judicially imposed sanctions."

"Trump would remove them, signaling that violent extremism in defense of Trump is no vice," they write. "If he returns to the White House, he will install his people in the Justice Department and turn the machinery of prosecution against his enemies and toward protecting his friends and his schemes."

The scholars part with an ominous warning: "And should Trump get an encore, look to pre-World War II Germany for a mirror. A failed coup in 1923 taught Hitler a better route to dictatorship nine years later. Those who repeat history are doomed to learn it. The hard way."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Papua New Guinea’s policemen and women around the country have been ordered to arrest and charge anyone in possession of illegal firearms — which carries life imprisonment under the amended law — from the May 19 deadline.

Police Commissioner David Manning, who is also the Registrar of Firearms, said that the directives were now being enforced.

Manning is urging all police officers around the country to enforce the law and implement the Firearms Amendment Act 2022 that was tabled and supported by all members of the 10th National Parliament recently.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the PNG elections

“I gave a two-week amnesty period for people to come forward and surrender their firearms to the nearest police station,” he said.

“I am now appealing to anyone who has any information about the existence of any such illegal firearms to please come forward and assist your police force to remove these individuals and firearms from our communities.”

Papua New Guinea faces a general election starting in late July and security is an issue.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

When allegations of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians emerged in the United States, Congress and the White House hit the ground running. They’ve since engrossed themselves in scouring through the legal avenues to hold the Kremlin accountable: war crime tribunals, asset seizures, and sanctions — including collective punishment of the Russian people.

Allegations of American atrocities during the so-called global war on terror have hardly evoked the same desperate calls for justice. The U.S. government has long met international demands for accountability with hostility. Starting late last year, the New York Times’s explosive investigations into civilian deaths in botched U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East arrived just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. No requests for a war crimes tribunal were heard from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., now the Senate’s biggest champion for an International Criminal Court, or ICC, investigation into Russia. And a new reform initiative the Defense Department launched in the exposé’s wake is delayed with minimal pushback from Congress.

The loss of life in Ukraine has been horrific. The United Nations announced Tuesday that it can confirm Russia’s war has killed more than 3,300 civilians since the invasion began February 24, though it expects that the actual figure is thousands higher. For reference, the U.S. war on Iraq killed nearly 8,000 civilians in the first three months following the March 2003 invasion, the Iraq Body Count estimates.

“Like most of the civilized world, I have been absolutely horrified by the … assaults against Ukraine on residential buildings, schools, synagogues and churches, and even critical infrastructure including nuclear power plants,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., chair of Congress’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said during a hearing last week. Citing in particular the discovery of hundreds of bodies, some of whom appeared to be summarily executed, in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Cardin argued: “The scale and pattern of these crimes clearly suggests to me that war crimes are being committed by the Russian military on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin must be held accountable for his unprovoked bloody attacks on the Ukrainian people.”

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, center, and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain’s Karim Khan, right, visit a mass grave on the grounds of the Church of Saint Andrew in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 13, 2022.

Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

The International Criminal Court on March 29, 2022, in The Hague, Netherlands.

Photo: Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sara Sirota.

West Papua National Committee (KNPB) diplomacy commission head Kobabe Wanimbo has appealed to the Papuan people to picket the private residence of the chief public prosecutor in the controversial treason trial of an activist who is seriously ill.

The appeal was made to support a demand that KNPB international spokesperson Victor Yeimo be transferred from the Mobile Brigade command headquarters (Mako Brimob) detention centre to a hospital because his health has further deteriorated.

Yeimo was arrested by security forces because of his alleged link to riots in Papua in 2019.

• READ MORE: Indonesian prosecutors accused of defying court order for Victor Yeimo
• Indonesian court orders hospital treatment for accused Papuan activist Victor Yeimo
• Other Victor Yeimo articles

Since he has been detained, however, his state of health has become critical.

“[His illness] is because of a consequence of his lungs and a chronic [ailment]. Moreover, the doctor has advised that Victor Yeimo must be treated in hospital,” said Wanimbo in a media release received by Suara.com at the weekend.

Although his state of health has worsened, the prosecutor handling his case is said not to care.

Yeimo was forcibly taken back to the Papua regional police Mako Brimob detention centre after earlier being treated at the Jayapura public hospital in defiance of a court ruling.

Hospital treatment ruling
The court ruling on August 26 in Yeimo’s case instructed the prosecutor to postpone Yeimo’s detention and prosecution so that he could be treated at a public hospital in Jayapura.

Moreover, the chief public prosecutor was also ordered to place Yeimo in detention only after his health had improved.

KNPB members and other activists went to the chief public prosecutor’s private residence in the Doc 2 area of Jayapura city to demand that permission be immediately granted for Yeimo to receive medical treatment.

The KNPB also appealed to all Papuan people to gather at the prosecutor’s residence to support the demand.

“We will remain here making this demand of the prosecutor — immediately transfer Victor Yeimo to hospital to obtain treatment for him,” said Wanimbo.

Translated by James Balowski for Indoleft News. The original title of the article was “KNPB Datangi Rumah Kepala Kejati Papua, Tuntut Izinkan Victor Yeimo Dibawa ke RS”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today delivered the government’s apology for the Dawn Raids against Pasifika overstayers.

She apologised for the raids in the 1970s which happened under both Labour and National governments.

“The government expresses its sorrow, remorse and regret that the Dawn Raids and random police checks occurred and that these actions were ever considered appropriate,” she said in the cultural ceremony at the Auckland Town Hall.

• READ MORE: ‘Scarred for life’ – ‘Aupito living through Dawn Raids
• Mainstream media must do better after Dawn Raids apology
• Photo essay: Dawn Raids apology at Auckland Town Hall
• More Dawn Raids articles
• More on the Polynesian Panthers

“Our government conveys to the future generations of Aotearoa that the past actions of the Crown were wrong, and that the treatment of your ancestors was wrong. We convey to you our deepest and sincerest apology.”

The Dawn Raids resulted in the deportation and prosecution of many Pacific Islanders, even those who remotely looked Pasifika, despite many overstayers at the time being British or American.

Both major political parties have accepted that the raids were racist.

RNZ Pacific sat down with the Minister for Pacific Peoples ‘Aupito William Sio earlier today, in his only radio interview before standing alongside Ardern, as she said sorry for the racist immigration policy that tore Pasifika families apart.

Understandably with the long work programme this apology has required of him (there has only ever been two formal government apologies meeting human injustice criteria), a number of portfolios and a pandemic continuing to ravage the Pacific, ‘Aupito said he was nervous for today’s proceedings.

“I feel the weight of responsibility from the government but also the weight of responsibility from our communities,” he said. “So, all of that, I feel.”

A formal request for an apology had been made to the prime minister’s office from the Polynesian Panthers early last year, Aupito said.

Watch the live ceremony:

Jacinda Ardern has made the apology for the raids which occurred under both Labour and National governments.

Today was a poignant moment in our Pacific and New Zealand history. The breaking of a new dawn. I have hope that today’s apology will play an important part in the healing process for our people, our aiga and fanau. @nzlabour pic.twitter.com/HKqSP6LpCl

— Carmel Sepuloni (@CarmelSepuloni) August 1, 2021

“…The first step on the long pathway to healing, must include an apology for the racist and unjust treatment of Pacific people in the Dawn Raid era and since.

So this is a very special moment for the Polynesian Panther party, as well as our communities.” – Rev Alec Toleafoa. pic.twitter.com/SZsU4LAHoI

— RNZ Pacific (@RNZPacific) August 1, 2021

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The fear that has led for years to silence dozens of children, allegedly victims of sexual abuse by a former priest who begins trial today in Timor-Leste’s western enclave, still shrouds the case.

Witnesses, victims and others who knew about the abuse – including people involved in the process – prefer not to speak, pointing in some cases to the feeling of deference to the figure of the accused American Richard Daschbach, 84.

Even after being expelled from the priesthood and officially condemned by the Vatican, Daschbach continues to be venerated by many who call him “master” and who minimise or ignore the crimes he is accused of.

Instead, they highlight his humanitarian action and even the support he gave during the Indonesian occupation, in some cases, mixing truths with myths.

When he recently turned 84, for example, some of his supporters posted a photo of him in traditional Timorese clothing on Facebook.

The publication had hundreds of congratulatory votes and even a “tag” on the page of one of its alleged victims.

Even if the rumours circulated, the matter was rarely more than half conversations or references in secret, a situation that would have continued if one of the victims had not brought her abuse report to the congregation.

Punished by the Vatican
Richard Daschbach, detained in 2019, who has already been punished by the Vatican, is accused of abusing at least two dozen children at the orphanage where he worked, Topu Honis, located in Oecusse.

The prosecutor also charges Daschbach with the crimes of child pornography and domestic violence.

Unprecedented in Timor-Leste, as it involved a former church member, the case has sparked controversy and intense debate.

Current and past sources in the Timorese judicial sector, heard by Lusa, highlight the importance of the process, admitting that the outcome, whatever it may be, can have a significant impact, silencing or giving confidence to other victims.

Part of the debates focuses on the public perception that Daschbach has had support from some individuals in Timor-Leste, namely two former Presidents of the Republic, Xanana Gusmão and Taur Matan Ruak, the latter current prime minister.

Judicial sources indicated to Lusa that Xanana Gusmão was even listed as a defence witness, among a range of people, most of whom were linked to the orphanage where the crimes were committed.

In 2018, for example, after confessing his crimes to the congregation – the Vatican was beginning the process that would end in his expulsion from the priesthood -, Daschbach was visited by Taur Matan Ruak and his wife, Isabel Ferreira, at headquarters SVD in Dili.

Ex-priest’s return to Oecusse
A visit in which, explained Yohanes Suban Gapun, SVD regional supervisor, Taur Matan Ruak had asked them to let the ex-priest return to Oecusse.

“Mr Taur Matan Ruak and his wife came to visit us and spoke to Daschbach. I was also asked if I would please let him return to Oecusse because many people like him there and still respect him a lot. Please let him go to Oecusse too because he is old and let him die there in peace,” he said.

Asked by Lusa in 2019 about the reason for this visit, Taur Matan Ruak said he did it out of respect.

“I had no intention of passing the priest an immunity card. Just as a human being, out of respect, we visited to find out what was going on and to express our concern about the issues,” he said.

Even more evident has been the support given by former President Xanana Gusmão, which began to be publicly noticed in October last year when Juu’s, which represents the victims, introduced a precautionary measure against the Archdiocese of Dili, to stop the publication of a controversial report on the case prepared by the then head of the Justice and Peace Commission.

Xanana Gusmão, who was outside the Dili Court with an organised demonstration in support of the diocese, was listed as a witness because a copy of the report had been given to him and because he later sent a copy to Juu’s.

In his testimony, the Timorese leader ended up deviating several times from the audience’s purpose, questioning the fact that there were accusations against the former priest only recently, despite the fact that he had been in Timor-Leste for a long time.

Justice ‘has to be fair’
“There has to be justice, but justice has to be fair, obey procedures, criteria that dignify justice itself. I realised that there was something in this case that was not in accordance with the rules of investigation”, he told Lusa at the time.

More controversial was the recent visit that Xanana Gusmão made to the house in Dili where Daschbach was under house arrest, at the time of the defendant’s birthday, and about which he informed some East Timorese press, later distributing a statement that was practically published in full in several newspapers .

The visit led the ex-president’s three children to write letters to the alleged victims, regretting that their father visited Daschbach.

The news coverage of this visit drew criticism from the president of the Timorese Press Council, Virgílio Guterres, who considered that the news in the national press tried to “whiten” the former American priest.

Xanana Gusmão has so far not reacted to the controversy, but on Thursday he traveled with an entourage to accompany Daschbach on the ferry that took him from Dili to Oecusse.

Mateus Assunção Mendes, chief superintendent and commander of the National Police of Timor-Leste (PNTL), confirmed to Lusa that Xanana Gusmão, Daschbach and the rest of the delegation are staying at the same hotel in Pante Macassar, capital of the enclave.

“Yes, they are in the same place,” he confirmed.

Lusa tried several times to talk to Xanana Gusmão, without success.

Little Timorese media attention
Another factor that has conditioned the environment around the case has been the reduced attention of almost all Timorese media, which, in some situations, has even been accused by the Press Council of trying to “whiten” Daschbach.

Exceptions are the publication Tempo Timor, the first to report the case of the former priest and who has already presented testimonies of victims and details of the case, and Néon Metin, which has also written about the case, including recently publishing testimonies of victims.

José Belo, the journalist for Tempo Timor who, with journalist Tjistske Lingsma, first reported the case, tells Lusa that it has been difficult to convince people to talk about the case.

“It is very difficult to convince people to speak. When planning interviews, everyone prefers to remain silent. Some people look at this man as a god,” he told Lusa.

The trial, which takes place behind closed doors, begins today at the Oecusse Court in Pante Macassar.

PNTL plans to install a security perimeter around the building.

This article has been translated by an Asia Pacific Report correspondent and is published with permission.