The Israeli use of administrative detention, a controversial practice that allows the Israeli occupation to hold suspects without trial for months or even years, has reached its highest level since 2003, according to a report by an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.
B’Tselem said that as of November 2021, there were 1,128 Palestinians in administrative detention, including 10 minors and two women. The group said this was the largest number of such detainees since the end of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2003.
The group accused the Israeli occupation of using administrative detention as a “tool of oppression” and a “means of collective punishment” against Palestinians, especially those involved in political or social activism. It said that most of the detainees were held based on secret evidence that they and their lawyers could not challenge in court.
April 2023 Surfers Against Sewage and Extinction Rebellion protests in St Agnes, Perranporth, Truro and Charlestown which unveiled spoof Blue Plaques to the MPs and Conservative Government who allowed raw sewage to be dumped in the sea (Image: Surfers Against Sewage)
On Wednesday 5 to Thursday 6 July, the High Court will hear a legal challenge that aims to force the Government to toughen up its plan for reducing sewage dumped in England’s rivers and seas. Good Law Project is supporting the Marine Conservation Society, Richard Haward’s Oysters and surfer and activist Hugo Tagholm as they argue that the Government’s strategy is inadequate, allowing water companies to pollute waters and beaches for another 27 years.
England’s sewers were designed with 14,500 storm overflows to stop them becoming overwhelmed, allowing a mixture of surface water and sewage to be discharged during heavy rainfall. But according to the Environment Agency, these overflows are now used on a routine basis. Water companies discharged untreated sewage through storm overflows more than 300,000 times in 2022 for a total of 1.7 million hours.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published the Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan to tackle this in August last year. It imposed a deadline of 2035 for reducing the sewage flowing into bathing waters and areas of ecological importance, but gave companies until 2050 to stop discharges elsewhere.
This legal challenge, which has been backed by cross-party MPs, aims to force the Government to bring forward these deadlines and introduce tougher targets.
The CDP’s Oil and Gas Benchmark report assessed 100 oil and gas companies on low-carbon transition and just transition indicators.
Top oil and gas companies have made “almost no progress” in reaching the climate goals agreed as part of the 2015 Paris climate summit, environmental disclosure non-profit CDP said on Thursday.
The CDP’s Oil and Gas Benchmark report, published with the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), assessed 100 oil and gas companies. The assessment was based on low-carbon transition and social and just transition indicators.
While none of the companies perform well on all indicators, Finland-based Neste is ranked first, followed by French company Engie, oil giant TotalEnergies, Spain’s Naturgy Energy and Italy’s Eni. In May this year, TotalEnergies announced its plan to keep its scope 3 emissions below 400 million tonnes. However, the company scored 19.4 out of 60 on CDP’s low-carbon transition indicator, and 9.4 out of 20 on just transition.
According to the report, the operating emissions from the oil and gas sector added up to 5.1 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ in 2022. None of the companies assessed by CDP can cut their emissions “at a rate sufficient to align with a 1.5°C pathway over the next five years”, it said.
The report observes that most companies fail to disclose their capital investment in low-carbon technologies. Currently Neste is the only one with investments sufficient to meet the climate goals. Further, despite seven major oil companies disclosing a profit of $380bn in 2022, investments in low-carbon transition fall short significantly.
Extinction Rebellion UK protest at Wood Group Aberdeen 3 July 2023
Extinction Rebellion are protesting the Wood Group’s Aberdeen and Staines offices after Wood Group significantly reduced it’s renewables operations and expanded it’s fossil fuel operations weeks after receiving a £430m government-backed “green transition loan” in 2021.
… After receiving the £430m loan, Wood grew its upstream oil and gas business by 17% so that it accounted for more than $3bn (£2.4bn) in revenue in 2022, up from $2.6bn in 2021, according to an analysis of the company’s financial results by the Guardian and the investigative journalism organisation Point Source.
Over the same period the company reduced the size of its renewable, hydrogen, and carbon capture business units by 35% so that they only accounted for revenues of $222.8m in 2022, down from $344.6m in 2021.
The five-year loan, which was the first of its kind and was designed to help Wood transition away from fossil fuels, was announced in August 2021 by Liz Truss when she was international trade secretary.
At the time, Truss said the engineering company had “already made great strides in repositioning its business for a low-carbon future”.
After being awarded the loan, Wood announced a string of at least 20 major contract awards for work on oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks in front of the U.S. Capitol on July 28th, 2022. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
‘There also must be impeachment on the table’
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Sunday warned of an “authoritarian expansion of power” by the Supreme Court and demanded that lawmakers on Capitol Hill use all of their oversight authority to probe and stop the corruption inside the Supreme Court.
“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.’
“Which is what we are seeing now, from the overturning of abortion rights to the ruling that discrimination and, frankly, stripping the full personhood and dignity of LGBTQ people in the United States. … These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” the New York Democrat said.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “Are you saying that the justices’ power should somehow be limited?”
Ocasio-Cortez said, “I truly do. And this is not new; this is not a new development in history. This is part of our system of checks and balances. The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and frankly dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court, which is what we are seeing now from overturning abortion to the ruling for discrimination and frankly stripping the full dignity and personhood of LGBTQ people in the United States.”
She added, “There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach, and abuse of power and the Supreme Court which has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy. And in the process, being themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”
