UN Special Rapporteur EXPOSES Crime Of The Century
Journalism is not a crime – Tell that to the British state
https://www.declassifieduk.org/journalism-is-not-a-crime-tell-that-to-the-british-state/
Why are no national news outlets covering the crackdown on pro-Palestinian journalists in Britain?
“Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy” proclaimed prime minister Keir Starmer in a comment piece for the Guardian at the end of October. “Just because journalists are brave does not mean they should ever suffer intimidation”, he wrote.
Yet 11 days before his article was published, officers from the counter-terrorism unit of the Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under provisions of the UK’s Terrorism Act.
Winstanley was presented with a letter indicating that the raid was part of ‘Operation Incessantness’, a counter-terror initiative about which little is known.
This is not the first use of anti-terror laws to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices in recent months.
It follows the detention at Heathrow Airport of Richard Medhurst and the arrest of Sarah Wilkinson in August 2024, both of whom are independent journalists prominently associated with reporting Israel’s war on Palestinians.
The attacks on journalists are part of a wider pattern of harassment of pro-Palestine activists.
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In response to these outrageous infringements of journalists’ ability to do their jobs, Declassified UK noted back in September that “they are part of a sinister development that has serious implications for civil liberties and freedom of speech, yet it has been ignored by the mainstream media”.
This continues to be the case. Not a single national news outlet in the UK has reported on the policing of British pro-Palestinian journalists. Not one of them has thought to investigate what ‘Operation Incessantness’ might mean for press freedom.
Not one of them has reflected on the precedent set by the use of anti-terror laws for reporting on Gaza.
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https://www.declassifieduk.org/journalism-is-not-a-crime-tell-that-to-the-british-state/
dizzy: Bloggers are journalists and journalists are bloggers. Restrictions are applied to this blog contrary to human rights principles. Comments are not permitted, stats are manipulated. I finally managed to connect to Google Analytics and it told me I had 8 page views on one day, 14 on the following day – at least it’s obviously total BS.
I assume that UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is responsible for this but it could be Germany since this blog is hosted in Germany. I have no idea tbh because I’ve never been told and never been given the opportunity to challenge it.
On the plus side, I think that the Fascist human rights violators may also be paying for my hosting. If I’m reaching a far wider audience than acknowledged, somebody is paying for that bandwidth. Somebody is also paying to hide my name. I used to pay for it – about £20 a year – but decided that I couldn’t afford it one year. My name appeared on the DNS record but was hidden within about 20 minutes.
Protest isn’t harassment, says group suing UK government over law change
Original article by Anita Mureithi republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
| Alberto Pezzali/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Human rights group Liberty says spotlight on MPs’ safety has seen Tories ‘vilify’ Palestine marchers
Ahuman rights campaign group suing the government for forcing through anti-protest laws says people who go on Palestine marches are being “vilified” to “stoke division”.
Liberty is today challenging the home secretary, James Cleverly, in the High Court over a decision by his predecessor Suella Braverman to introduce new legislation targeting protesters that had already been rejected by Parliament.
The case comes in a week where protest rights are in the spotlight. Pro-Palestine marches are being labelled a threat to MPs and the Home Affairs Select Committee has called on the government to force organisers to give more notice.
Speaking to openDemocracy ahead of the hearing, Liberty director Akiko Hart said: “We’re seeing both our fundamental rights of protest being undermined, but also specific protests like the pro-Palestinian marches being vilified.”
Hart took aim at the “incredibly irresponsible rhetoric from senior politicians where protest is equated to intimidation and harassment”.
MPs’ safety fears were raised last week following chaos in the House of Commons over a symbolic vote on a ceasefire in Gaza. Though some MPs have reported an increase in abuse and threats, campaigners warn that peaceful protests are now being associated with terrorism in order to undermine them.
“There were legitimate concerns around MPs’ safety – obviously, two MPs have been murdered in the last ten years,” she said. “We need to take that very, very seriously. I would also say that it’s MPs who are racialised who are most at risk from harassment, and that’s what the evidence shows us.
“But to conflate harassment with protest, which is what’s happening this week, is really dangerous and irresponsible. There are laws in place to deal with harassment and abuse. That isn’t the same as legitimate protest.”
In its recommendations, the Home Affairs Select Committee said more notice was needed ahead of Palestine marches because the size and frequency of the protests is a burden on police resources. But according to the coalition organising the national Palestine marches, the measures would further limit the right to peaceful protest. Hart also said the current notice period of six days is enough for police to prepare for marches.
“Extending that will just restrict people’s ability to be able to make their voices heard. With this, as with any other issue, the point about protest is that it is not about whether or not you agree – it’s about our right to protest,” she explained.
Liberty was given the green light to sue Braverman in October after she used secondary legislation – which doesn’t get the same level of parliamentary scrutiny – to allow police to restrict or shut down any protest that could cause “more than minor disruption to the life of the community”.
“It shouldn’t be the case that you would have to take the home secretary to court with all the time and effort and energy and expertise that that involves,” said Hart. “The reason we are doing so is because of the then home secretary’s egregious act of circumventing Parliament.”
The government previously tried to insert the new powers into the Public Order Act 2023 in January last year, but was blocked by the Lords.
The point about protest is that it is not about whether or not you agree – it’s about our right to protest
Liberty believes a win “would be a powerful check against any future minister or government that intends to do the same thing”.
Hart told openDemocracy that there have already been clear examples of the impact of anti-protest laws that have come through the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts (‘Policing’) Act and the Public Order Act, which both give police more powers to restrict protests.
“There were anti-monarchy protesters who were arrested on the basis that the luggage straps that they were carrying were seen to be tools for locking-on, which was a new offence created under the Public Order Act, but they were carrying them to secure their placards.
“We’re also seeing it in sentencing. Last summer, the Court of Appeal upheld the sentences of the two protesters who scaled the Dartford crossing. And those sentences were two years and seven months, and three years – the harshest sentences ever handed down in modern times around protests around civil disobedience,” she said.
The trial against the home secretary is expected to run for two days at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Hart told openDemocracy that while she and Liberty’s team of lawyers are feeling optimistic, “there’s a level of underlying exhaustion at how this government is conducting itself and responding to the protests that are happening”.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental; the right to disrupt the hard-working public is not.
“We have taken action to give police the powers they need to tackle criminal tactics used by protesters such as locking on and slow marching, as well as interfering with key national infrastructure.
“We work closely with the police to make sure they have the tools they need to tackle disorder and minimise disruption.”
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Original article by Anita Mureithi republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
COVID Cronyism and Mone – The Tip of the Iceberg: Byline Times’ Full Story of the PPE Cash Carousel
Byline Times has been unravelling the dealings behind the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the UK since the very early days of the pandemic. Here’s what we learnt – and what we still need answers to…
Within weeks of the first lockdown, Nafeez Ahmed on Byline Times became arguably the first journalist to break the story of the emerging personal protective equipment (PPE) scandal.
On April 2 2020, he exposed how lucrative contracts were being awarded to Conservative Party associates.
Boris Johnson’s Government had appointed a giant haulage firm with financial ties to the Tory Party to be in charge of a new supply channel for PPE to the NHS. Its founding executive chairman was Steven N. Parkin, a top Conservative Party donor who has attended exclusive ‘Leaders Group’ meetings and donated almost £1 million to the party in the preceding five years.
This set the tone for an extensive investigation into COVID-19 contracts, shedding light on a concerning trend of cronyism.
That May, Stephen Delahunty on Byline Times revealed that another Conservative donor was involved in the COVID-19 contracts.
Europa Worldwide Group – the managing director of which was a personal donor to Johnson – was found to be arranging PPE supplies for the NHS and manufacturing testing kits.
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In July 2020, Delahunty revealed that companies with no prior experience or expertise were inexplicably receiving multi-million-pound contracts. This was despite the looming threat of legal challenges over what was to be dubbed the ‘VIP Lane’: pathways for firms to win government contracts with little oversight and through referrals from well-connected politicians.
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In quick succession, we found that a recruitment firm with just £322 in net assets had received an £18 million Government contract.
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Things got even weirder that August, when Byline Times revealed the companies linked to the exclusive Plymouth Brethren religious sect which were mopping up huge COVID contracts. And still the warning signs kept flashing, as we dug up dormant firms which emerged from seemingly nowhere to win millions in PPE deals.
All these contracts could be justified if they were effective in saving lives. But in August 2020, we began to see the true picture: much of the PPE purchased at vast sums couldn’t actually be used. It wasn’t up to scratch. Meanwhile, NHS staff continued to complain of shortages and shoddy equipment.
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In 2021, the COVID cash machine just kept giving – to a select few.
Pulling together a year of evidence, Byline Times and The Citizens revealed that deals worth at least £2 billion had been awarded to top Conservative Party associates during the Coronavirus crisis.
A firm that gave £400,000 to the Conservatives won a £93.8 million PPE deal. The figures being handed to the Plymouth Brethren sect alone hit £1.1 billion.
And, as before, vast amounts of the PPE were useless.
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This newspaper was the first to reveal Mone’s links to the firm – links which were vigorously denied under threat of libel action, but which we now know to have been true. (Mone and PPE Medpro are under investigation by the National Crime Agency but deny any illegality).
It was one of many companies that were referred by Conservative MPs and peers to the expedited ‘VIP Lane’ for PPE contracts during the pandemic.
PPE Medpro took in the region of £60 million in profits. Much of its PPE was also deemed unusable by the NHS.
Overall, the value lost to dodgy PPE was nearly £9 billion – a quarter of the annual UK budget for housing and the environment put together.
Is there any other country in the world that has witnessed sleaze and scandal on such a scale around COVID contracts?
And did the £200 million-plus COVID ‘bungs’ to the press – the Government’s ‘All in, All Together’ public information campaign subsidising profitable newspapers – help Johnson’s administration get away with it?
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COVID Cronyism and Mone – The Tip of the Iceberg: Byline Times’ Full Story of the PPE Cash Carousel
‘Time to Make Them Pay’: Internal Docs Further Expose Exxon Efforts to Spread Climate Lies
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Climate change isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a crime,” said one climate campaigner in response to documents reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Previously unreported documents published on the front page of The Wall Street Journal Thursday show that ExxonMobil continued to work behind closed doors to cast doubt on climate science, even after the company publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel-driven greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in 2006.
The documents—which detail email exchanges between executives, board meeting conversations, and other company proceedings—reveal that during his tenure as CEO, Rex Tillerson joined other Exxon leaders in questioning “the severity of climate change’s impacts,” the Journal reported.
The company’s scientists, meanwhile, “supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science” despite Exxon’s pledge to stop bankrolling think tanks and other groups peddling climate denial.
After scientists with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sounded the alarm in 2011 about the potentially devastating global impacts of runaway warming, Tillerson told a leading Exxon researcher that the IPCC’s warning was “not credible” and complained about the media’s coverage of the potentially dire scenario, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
“Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC ‘to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info,'” the newspaper reported.
Tillerson also dismissed the Paris Climate Agreement’s 2°C warming target as “something magical” shortly before Exxon endorsed the accord.
“As communities pay an ever-greater price for our worsening climate crisis, it’s more clear than ever that Exxon must be held accountable to pay for the harm it has caused.”
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement that “this damning new evidence of Exxon’s climate lies shows that for decades it has been official company policy for executives to undermine climate science, minimize the dangers of their oil and gas business, and protect company profits at all costs—with no concern for the catastrophic impact their actions would have on humanity.”
Wiles argued that the documents reported by the Journal provide more evidence for the dozens of states, cities, and counties that are currently suing Exxon and other fossil fuel giants over their decades-long effort to deceive the public about climate change.
“As communities pay an ever-greater price for our worsening climate crisis,” said Wiles, “it’s more clear than ever that Exxon must be held accountable to pay for the harm it has caused.”
The new reporting could also heighten pressure on the Biden Justice Department to join the legal fight against Big Oil.
In late July, a group of progressive U.S. senators led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) urged the DOJ to sue fossil fuel giants for violating “federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws.”
It has long been public knowledge that Exxon, the largest oil and gas company in the United States, was aware of the climate impacts of its business model well before it admitted the link between fossil fuels and climate change.
A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year in the journal Science shows that Exxon’s own internal data between 1977 and 2003 contradicted the company’s public statements downplaying and questioning the veracity of climate science.
The Journal‘s reporting confirms that Exxon did not stop working to sow doubt about climate change after it conceded for the first time in 2006 that “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.”
“In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions ‘could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner,'” the Journal noted.
But internal company documents show that “Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts,” the newspaper reported.
The same year the company vowed to stop funding climate-denial organizations, Exxon’s manager of global regulatory affairs said that “Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.”
Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, called the Journal‘s reporting “another massive exposé of Exxon’s strategy to attack climate science and block action.”
“Climate change isn’t just a tragedy,” Henn added, “it’s a crime.”
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).