Australia

Australia Restores UNRWA Funding as Israel Kills Aid Workers, Starving Gazans

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong speaks in Canberra on August 8, 2023. (Photo: Penny Wong/Facebook)

“Restoring UNRWA funding is the bare minimum,” said one Australian Green senator. “The Labor government must publicly pressure Israel to allow aid into all parts of Gaza.”

Australia said Friday that it would reinstate funding for the United Nations United Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in international financing due to unsubstantiated Israeli claims that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

“The best available current advice from agencies and the Australian government lawyers is that UNRWA is not a terrorist organization,” Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in Adelaide while announcing a new funding package for the agency, which works to aid Palestinians forcibly displaced during the Nakba, or “catastrophe” through which the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, as well as their descendants.

In addition to restoring $6 million in UNRWA funding, Wong said Australia would contribute another $2 million to the United Nations Children’s Fund and would deploy a C-17 Globemaster transport plane to assist humanitarian airdrops over Gaza.

Sen. Mehreen Faruqi of New South Wales and the Australian Greens welcomed the shift, asserting that “restoring UNRWA funding is the bare minimum” Australia should do.

“The Labor government must publicly pressure Israel to allow aid into all parts of Gaza,” Faruqi stressed. “Starvation is a weapon of war, and Israel is blocking aid to reach the people of Gaza in brazen contravention of the [International Court of Justice’s] ruling” ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts.

“I hope this is the start of the Labor government breaking away from their unquestioning and immoral support for Israel,” the senator added.

Simon Birmingham, leader of the center-right Liberal opposition in the Senate, said his party does not support the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “acting without and ahead of the United States in terms of decisions around this funding.”

Following Israeli claims—reportedly extracted from Palestinian prisoners in an interrogation regime rife with torture and abuse—that 12 of the more than 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attack, Australia and nine other nations including the United States cut off funding to the largest humanitarian aid organization operating in the besieged coastal enclave.

UNRWA subsequently terminated nine employees in response to the unfounded Israeli claims, without any evidence to support their firing. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini later called the move an act of “reverse due process.”

The European Union and nations including Canada and Sweden have also reinstated funding for UNRWA, which Lazzarini said “is facing a deliberate and concerted campaign to undermine its operations.” The agency has been struggling to provide shelter, aid, and other lifesaving services to Gazans facing not only Israeli bombs and bullets but also a genocidal siege and blockade that are starving Palestinians to death.

Australia’s decision came as Israeli attacks on aid convoys, food distribution centers, and desperate, starving Palestinians in Gaza continued. On Thursday, Israeli forces killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 150 others as they awaited delivery of humanitarian aid at the Kuwait Roundabout in Gaza City. The previous day, a UNRWA staffer was among five people killed and more than 20 wounded in an attack on a food distribution center in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. Israeli officials claimed the slain man was a Hamas commander.

According to UNRWA, at least 165 of the agency’s staff members have been killed since October 7. Over 150 UNRWA facilities have been attacked by Israeli forces, while more than 400 Palestinians have been slain while seeking shelter under the United Nations flag.

UNRWA also says its workers have been tortured by Israeli troops trying to force them to falsely confess to participating in the October 7 attacks.

Gaza officials said earlier this week that at least 400 Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid have been killed by Israeli forces since the February 29 “Flour Massacre,” in which at least 118 people were killed and more than 760 others wounded while waiting for an aid convoy in Gaza City.

More than 112,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in Gaza since October 7, including people missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the strip’s hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. The majority of the dead are women and children. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Disease and starvation are rampant, and a growing number of Palestinians—mostly children but also elders and other vulnerable people—are starving to death.

After 161 days of near-constant slaughter, there is still no cease-fire in sight.

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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Australian lawmakers call for Julian Assange’s release ahead of extradition appeal

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Original article by Tanupriya Singh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The motion in parliament, which was supported by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has called for the return of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to his family in Australia. Assange is days away from a final court hearing in the UK against his extradition to the US.

On February 14, lawmakers in Australia’s parliament voted 86-42 in support of a motion calling on the UK and the US to return arbitrarily imprisoned WikiLeaks founder and journalist, Julian Assange, to his home and family in Australia.

The move, which was also supported by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, came just days before the High Court of Justice in London will decide if Assange can continue to contest his extradition to the US through the UK’s legal system.

The US has indicted Assange on 18 charges, 17 of which are under the notorious Espionage Act, in relation to the publication of confidential documents on WikiLeaks that exposed the war crimes and atrocities committed by US forces during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. If convicted, Assange would face up to 175 years in a maximum security prison.

The 52-year-old journalist has already been held at the UK’s high security Belmarsh prison for nearly five years, without charge or conviction, amid serious concerns over his mental and physical health.

“Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.” Nils Melzer, the former UN Special Rapporteur on torture, had said of the journalist’s condition back in 2019.

Addressing a press conference on February 15, Assange’s partner, Stella, stated that his “life is at risk every single day he stays in prison– and if he is extradited he will die”, warning that Assange could be “on a plane within days”.

The public hearings on February 20 and 21 will mark the culmination of a protracted legal battle for Assange. A two-judge bench of the High Court will review a June 6, 2023 decision by Justice Jonathan Swift, in which he had rejected all eight grounds of appeal filed by Assange’s legal team.

If approved, the appeal will challenge the extradition order approved by the UK Home Office in June 2022.

Read more: Assange completes four years in UK jail, struggle against US extradition continues

On Wednesday, independent lawmaker Andrew Wilkie introduced a motion in the Australian parliament, calling on the US and the UK to bring “the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia”.

“This will be the time for all of us to take a stand, to stand up and to take a stand, and to stand with Julian Assange, stand for the principles of justice, stand for the principles of media freedom and the rights of journalists to do their job…This has gone on too long, that it must be brought to an end.”

Commenting directly on the matter in Parliament on February 15, PM Albanese stated that there was a “common view” that “enough is enough”. “People will have a range of views about Mr. Assange’s conduct… but regardless of where people stand, this thing cannot just go on and on indefinitely.”

He went on to state, “I hope it can be resolved amicably. It’s not up to Australia to interfere in the legal processes of other countries, but it is appropriate for us to put our very strong view that those countries need to take into account the need for this to be concluded.”

The Prime Minister’s ambiguous statements throughout the legal proceedings, including a refusal to outrightly call for a withdrawal of the extradition order, has been criticized by progressive, anti-imperialist forces, with the late renowned journalist John Pilger having called it a “betrayal” in March 2023.

Read more: The betrayers of Julian Assange 

Addressing reporters outside Parliament House on Thursday, Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, warned that his extradition would mean that “all the ties to his family, his lifeline that are keeping him alive inside that prison will be cut off and he’ll be lost into a horrific prison system in the United States”.

He added that the vote in parliament had given the Australian government a “real mandate to advocate very, very strongly for a political solution” to bring Assange home.

“It’s not just about being extradited. Julian should never have been put in prison in the first place,” Stella Assange implored on Thursday, as journalists and activists across the world have warned of the impact Assange’s case could have on the press.

“We are seeing a critical attack on press freedom worldwide. It is like a disease, an anti-press pandemic, creeping up on us that has been incrementally taking shape over the years”, said WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, adding that Assange had been the “canary in the gold mine”.

Read more: Julian Assange case: 4 things that the media doesn’t tell you

Assurances about conditions in US prison are “dubious”, say advocates

This was reiterated by over 35 law professors in the US in a letter sent to the Department of Justice on February 14, stating that Assange’s prosecution posed an “existential threat” to the freedom of speech and press enshrined under the First Amendment.

These “constitutional implications” could “extend beyond the Espionage Act and beyond national security journalism [to] enable prosecution of routine newsgathering under any number of ambiguous laws and untested legal theories.”

Assange’s extradition to the US was approved on the basis of supposed “assurances” given by the US regarding his safety, including the avoidance of what are called “special administrative measures” (SAMs) — a horrific punitive measure that combines “the brutality and isolation of maximum-security units with additional restrictions that deny individuals almost any connection to the human world”.

However, human rights organizations and observers had immediately warned that these “assurances” were unreliable and could be arbitrarily revoked.

“The US assurances cannot be trusted. Dubious assurances that he will be treated well in a US prison ring hollow considering that Assange potentially faces dozens of years of incarceration in a system well known for its abuses, including prolonged solitary confinement and poor health services for inmates,” stated Julia Hall, the international expert on counter-terrorism and criminal justice in Europe at Amnesty International.

If the High Court of Justice in London does not rule in favor of Julian Assange next week, Stella Assange has stated that he will then approach the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), seeking urgent measures to halt his extradition under Rule 39— granted when there is an “imminent risk of irreparable harm” — pending a full consideration of his case.

The present UN Special Rapporteur Dr. Alice Edwards, has also pointed out that outside of the legal process, the ultimate decision to actually proceed with the extradition will lie with the US Secretary of State. Antony Blinken, for his part, had rebuffed calls by the Australian government last year to drop the prosecution.

“The UK is a party to the UN convention against torture as well as the European convention on human rights, both of them have Article 3 which prohibits states from sending people to where they may face this type of treatment [torture],” Edwards said.

Original article by Tanupriya Singh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingAustralian lawmakers call for Julian Assange’s release ahead of extradition appeal

Australia’s largest-ever civil disobedience protest stops half a million tonnes of coal exports

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https://priceofoil.org/2023/11/27/australias-largest-ever-civil-disobedience-protest-stops-half-a-million-tonnes-of-coal-exports/

Image: Rising Tide

They are calling it the largest civil disobedience climate protest in the history of Australia.

This weekend, thousands of activists, young and old, from across the country descended on the world’s largest coal port at Muloobinba (Newcastle), on Awabakal and Worimi land and water.

The organizers labeled it a family-friendly event with live music and speeches. The plan also included blockading the plant by a sea blockage by kayak, boat, or even surfboard. It was the first time a blockage was planned overnight.

The protest was a huge success. In the end, some three thousand people prevented coal ships leaving for thirty-two hours and stopped half a million tonnes of coal from being exported.

Some tweets from the action:

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In total, one hundred people were arrested, including 97 year old Reverend Alan Stuart who said: “I am doing this for my grandchildren and future generations.” He became the oldest person ever to be arrested in Australia.

…

https://priceofoil.org/2023/11/27/australias-largest-ever-civil-disobedience-protest-stops-half-a-million-tonnes-of-coal-exports/

Continue ReadingAustralia’s largest-ever civil disobedience protest stops half a million tonnes of coal exports

‘Draconian and undemocratic’: why criminalising climate protesters in Australia doesn’t actually work

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Police officers dispersing a protestor during a Blockade Australia rally in Sydney this week. AAP Image/Flavio Brancaleone

Robyn Gulliver, The University of Queensland

A man who drove through a climate protest blocking the Harbour Tunnel this week has copped a A$469 fine, while multiple members of the activist group were arrested. The protest was among a series of peak hour rallies in Sydney by Blockade Australia, in an effort to stop “the cogs in the machine that is destroying life on earth”.

Disruptive protests like these make an impact. They form the iconic images of social movements that have delivered many of the rights and freedoms we enjoy today.

They attract extensive media coverage that propel issues onto the national agenda. And, despite media coverage to the contrary, research suggests they don’t reduce public support for climate action.

But disruptive protest also consistently generates one negative response: attempts to criminalise it.

Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales have all recently proposed or introduced anti-protest bills targeting environmental and climate activists. This wave of anti-protest legislation has been described as draconian and undemocratic.

Let’s take a look at how these laws suppress environmental protesters – and whether criminalisation actually works.

How do governments criminalise protest?

The criminalisation of environmental protest in Australia isn’t new.

Tasmania provides a compelling example. The Tasmania Workplaces (Protection from Protestors) Act 2014 sought to fine demonstrators up to $10,000 if they “prevent, hinder, or obstruct the carrying out of a business activity”. Described as a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, it was subsequently voted down by the Tasmanian Legislative Council.

The bill was resurrected in 2019, but also voted down, an outcome described by the Human Rights Law Centre as a “win for democracy”.

But yet again in 2022, the freedom to protest in Tasmania is under threat. The Police Offences Amendment (Workplace Protection) Bill 2022 proposes fines of up to $21,625 and 18 months jail for peaceful protest.

Activities such as handing out flyers, holding a placard or sharing a petition could fall within the offences.

Heavy police presence is often a feature at Extinction Rebellion blockades.
Julian Meehan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Tasmania is not an outlier. After the Port of Botany and Sydney climate blockades in March this year, NSW passed the Roads and Crimes Legislation Amendment Bill 2022.

Almost 40 civil society groups called to scrap the bill, which used vague and broad wording to expand offences with up to two years in jail and a $22,000 fine.

Similarly, the Andrews government in Victoria is introducing the Sustainable Forests Timber Amendment (Timber Harvesting Safety Zones) Bill 2022, which raises penalties on anti-logging protest offences to $21,000 or 12 months imprisonment.

Other ways Australia criminalise protest

Legislation isn’t the only tool in the toolbox of protest criminalisation. The expansion of police and government discretionary powers is also often used. Examples include:

Corporations also use discretionary powers. Adani/Bravus coal mining company reportedly used private investigators to restrict Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners’ access to their ceremonial camp.

It also reportedly bankrupted senior spokesperson Adrian Burragubba in 2019, sued one climate activist for intimidation, conspiracy and breaches of contract, surveilled his family, and is pursuing him for $600 million (now reduced to $17m) in damages.

In statements to the ABC and the Guardian, Adani says it is exercising its rights under the law to be protected from individuals and groups who act “unlawfully”.

Another tool for suppressing protest is the use of “othering” language. This language seeks to stigmatise activists, de-legitimise their concerns and frame them as threats to national security or the economy.

We see it frequently after disruptive protest. For example, ministers have recently described Blockade Australia protesters as “bloody idiots”, who should “get a real job”.

The Queensland Premier has described protesters as “extremists”, who were “dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, selfish and stupid”.

Why do governments feel the need to implement harsher penalties?

Some politicians have argued that anti-protest laws act as a “deterrent” to disruptive protest. Critics have also argued that government powers are used as a shield to protect corporate interests.

In its new report, for example, the Australian Democracy Network shows how corporations can manipulate government powers to harass and punish opponents through a process called “state capture”.

Non-profit organisations have also demonstrated the powerful influence of the fossil fuel industry, particularly in weakening Australian environmentalists’ protest rights.

But it’s not only civil sector groups and protesters sounding the alarm. Increased repression of our rights to engage in non-violent protest have also been voiced by lawyers, scholars and observers such as the United Nations Special Rapporteur.

Does criminalisation reduce protest?

Numerous organisations have highlighted how criminalising protest and silencing charities threaten democratic freedoms that are fundamental to a vibrant, inclusive and innovative society.

But more than that, these strategies don’t appear to work.

Courts have used anti-protest legislation to instead highlight the importance of peaceful protest as a legitimate form of political communication. They have struck down legislation, released activists from remand, overturned unreasonable bail conditions and reduced excessive fines.

Police, too, have refused to remove cultural custodians from their ceremonial grounds.

And in general, research shows the public does not support repressive protest policing.

Indeed, rates of disruptive protest are escalating, while protesters vow to continue despite the risk.

The majority of Australians support more ambitious climate action. Many agree with Blockade Australia’s statement that “urgent broad-scale change” is necessary to address the climate crisis.

Politicians may be better served by focusing their efforts on this message, rather than attacking the messengers.The Conversation

Robyn Gulliver, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue Reading‘Draconian and undemocratic’: why criminalising climate protesters in Australia doesn’t actually work