refugees

Speech ban ruled unlawful: Palestinian doctor wins in German court

Spread the love

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

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and other health workers hold press conference after Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, October 2023. Source: Ghassan Abu-Sittah/X

A judge in a German court ruled that the ban on activity imposed on renowned Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah was unlawful.

The Palestine Congress in Berlin, which was organized in mid-April of last year, was violently shut down by the police on its first day, just minutes after it began. The pretext for this action, which was deemed unlawful by attorneys, was a live-stream of Palestinian historian Dr. Salman Abu Sitta.

His nephew, the doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, was banned from entering Germany on the morning of April 12, 2024. He had arrived on a flight from the UK, was detained and questioned for hours at Berlin airport, and then deported. He was also told that he was banned from practicing any political activities in Germany for the month of April, even from abroad. The organizers of the conference are taking legal action against the dissolution of the event, the trial of which is ongoing.

Witness to the genocide wins in Berlin

But Ghassan Abu-Sittah won a victory on Tuesday, July 15, at Berlin’s Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgericht). From the UK, the doctor had filed a lawsuit against the actions of the German authorities. The surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow has worked as a doctor in a dozen war and crisis zones over the course of his life, including the Gaza Strip. Shortly after the genocide began in October 2023, he went there again as part of a “Doctors Without Borders” mission to provide aid at Al-Shifa Hospital. The hospital was repeatedly attacked and ultimately destroyed by the Israeli army in November 2023 and again in March/April 2024. Israeli forces massacred hundreds of doctors, patients, and refugees.

The court’s judge ruled that the ban on activity imposed on Abu-Sittah was unlawful. According to a spokeswoman for the court, there was no sufficient evidence that Abu-Sittah’s statements posed a threat to Germany’s constitutional order or public safety. In particular, the authorities were unable to produce any statements by the renowned doctor that referred positively to the Palestinian resistance’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation or even to possible war crimes committed by the Palestinian resistance. Even if such a danger had existed, a preventive ban on the doctor’s activities would have been disproportionate.

The spokesperson also pointed out that Abu-Sittah was heard as an eyewitness to the genocide in the International Criminal Court proceedings against Israeli government politicians, and was also announced as such at the Palestine Congress.

Racist repression

His lawyer, Alexander Gorki, explained on request: “The hearing showed that the ban on activities was unlawful from start to finish. What was to be sanctioned via the residency rights were opinions expressed by my client, who knew the situation on the ground in Gaza very well as a Palestinian and a doctor.” The court “put a stop to the abuse of immigration law”. However, the ruling will not prevent the immigration authorities from abusing their power in the future, warns the migration law expert. To counter this, “political pressure is needed”.

In fact, the repressive authorities in Germany have been using all kinds of tricks and legal means for years to bypass the courts and exert pressure on the Palestinian solidarity movement and Palestinians in Germany: from expulsions and deportations, to bans on organizing, employment bans and the cancellation of welfare benefits. Migrants and refugees with a precarious status are particularly affected. Just two weeks ago, on the orders of a court, Musaab Abu Atta, a Palestinian refugee and political activist, was released from four months of custody. The public prosecutor’s office is trying to lock him up again because of an alleged “flight risk”, even though he has a fiancée and a job in Berlin. At the same time, there are indications that they want to deport him to Syria.

Leon Wystrychowski is a former member of the Palästina Solidarität Duisburg (Palestine Solidarity Duisburg, PSDU).

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

Continue ReadingSpeech ban ruled unlawful: Palestinian doctor wins in German court

NEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity

Spread the love
(left to right) Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner clap their hands during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, September 22, 2024

NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) president Sarah Kilpatrick slammed Labour’s renewed austerity today, telling the NEU annual conference that Tory welfare cuts had killed her disabled father.

She accused ministers of “perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching-down and finger-pointing” by “balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”

On the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, she described how her father had died at the age of 56 after being stripped of his disability benefits under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

She said that she had experienced poverty as a working-class child in Newcastle upon Tyne and was his carer for a number of years.

“As Iain Duncan Smith gleefully applauded the welfare cuts, I represented my father in a tribunal against the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] decision to remove his disability benefits,” she told delegates.

“He’d had his gas cut off. Couldn’t afford groceries. His elderly mother was adding tins of food to her shopping to bulk up what I was buying for him, but he isolated himself further still.

“He lost a lot of weight during that time and never really recovered.”

In 2013, her father became one of an estimated 120,000 people who died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme, she said.

“When Wes Streeting brags to the Tories across the benches that Labour have done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean,” said Ms Kilpatrick.

“Let’s be clear. Nearly two decades of economic permacrisis has not been caused by disabled people.”

Nor has it been caused by the elderly, refugees, the trans community or children in poverty, she said.

…

Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neu-president-slams-labours-renewed-austerity

Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Continue ReadingNEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity

Morning Star Editorial: Double standards on refugees: the Trump-Starmer conundrum

Spread the love

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-double-standards-refugees-trump-starmer-conundrum

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, February 12, 2025

DOUBLE standards. The Prime Minister vows to close a “loophole” that allowed a Gaza family, whose home was destroyed by Israeli bombing, to claim asylum under a scheme designed for Ukrainian refugees.

There are deserving and undeserving refugees. Ukrainians are white, and fleeing from an army we don’t like, Russia’s. Palestinians aren’t and they are fleeing from an army we advise, fund and equip.

Labour’s anti-immigrant braggadocio won’t shorten NHS waiting lists or lower housing costs. Its zeal for action contrasts with its foot-dragging over employment rights and its indifference to rising energy and water bills. Keir Starmer only punches down: he cowers before the corporate crooks bleeding this country dry but talks tough when it comes to the powerless and penniless.

Most of all he cowers before Donald Trump. British laws can be amended if they offend the US president: an online safety Bill may be reshaped to please Elon Musk, and proper taxation of the digital sector’s huge profits may be permanently shelved.

…

Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-double-standards-refugees-trump-starmer-conundrum

Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA

Continue ReadingMorning Star Editorial: Double standards on refugees: the Trump-Starmer conundrum

‘A dark moment in British history’ as government blocks refugees from gaining citizenship

Spread the love

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/a-dark-moment-in-british-history-as-government-blocks-refugees-from-gaining-citizenship

A group of people are brought in to Dover, Kent, by the RNLI Dungeness Lifeboat following a small boat incident in the Channel, December 28, 2024

IMMIGRATION rule changes blocking refugees from gaining citizenship are counterproductive and a dark moment in British history, campaigners warned today.

Under the updated Home Office “good character” guidance which took effect on Monday, applicants who entered Britain illegally will “normally” be refused citizenship, regardless of how long they have lived here.

The new rules specifically target those who arrived via dangerous routes, stating: “A person who applies for citizenship from February 10 2025 who has previously arrived without a required valid entry clearance or electronic travel authorisation, having made a dangerous journey, will normally be refused citizenship.”

A dangerous journey, the guidance adds, includes but is not limited to travelling by small boat or being concealed in a vehicle.

The change comes as Labour’s new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which scraps the previous Tory government’s Rwanda plan, passed its first hurdle in the Commons on Monday.

The Bill includes new criminal offences and grants counter-terror-style powers to police and enforcement agencies in a bid to crack down on people-smuggling gangs in the Channel.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/a-dark-moment-in-british-history-as-government-blocks-refugees-from-gaining-citizenship

Continue Reading‘A dark moment in British history’ as government blocks refugees from gaining citizenship

Will Elon Musk Do to the Federal Government What He Did to Twitter?

Spread the love

https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government

An unchecked, unelected oligarch is yanking wires out of the machinery that powers American life—and there’s no telling how many people will get hurt.

Michael Tomasky

It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.

Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.

What does Elon Musk want with control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and its computers that write the federal government’s checks? Maybe it’s benign. Maybe he and his team just want to scrutinize the hundreds of millions of payments the government makes to individuals, businesses, other governments, nonprofits, and so on and root out inefficiency.

It seems awfully unlikely that it’s benign. Musk tweeted over the weekend that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has existed for six decades and spends billions on poverty relief, disaster aid, economic development, and more, is a “criminal organization.” But Musk’s motives aren’t even the main point here. The main point is that even if it is benign, it’s unprecedented and antidemocratic.

…

Will Musk do to the federal government what he did to Twitter? The plundering of that platform was a crime, metaphorically, but at least it was (more or less) victimless. Here, there will be victims—immigrants, refugees, poor people, sick people, and many others who interfere with the schemes of the world’s richest man, who believes Germany should stop apologizing.

Read the complete original article at https://newrepublic.com/article/191037/elon-musk-destroy-federal-government

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingWill Elon Musk Do to the Federal Government What He Did to Twitter?