Saudi Arabia: Assaulting human rights in the name of counter-terrorism (AI report)

Amnistía Internacional publicou esta semana un informe sobre as violacións dos Direitos Humanos no sistema xudicial de Arabia Saudí. Destacan pola súa frecuencia e gravidade a pena de morte, a detención en réxime de incomunicación sen cargos nin xuízo e os “presos de conciencia” (detidos por “delictos” de opinión e similares). O informe leva por título “Saudi Arabia: Assaulting human rights in the name of counter-terrorism”. Copio un extracto da súa introducción:

[...] Since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA, carried out by a group which included Saudi Arabian nationals, and in the wake of a series of attacks by armed groups and individuals inside Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Arabian authorities have imposed a range of counter-terrorism measures that have worsened what was already a dire human rights situation. Combined with longstanding and severe repression of any perceived dissent and an extremely weak human rights institutional framework, these measures have swept aside embryonic legal reforms and left people in Saudi Arabia almost completely devoid of fundamental freedoms and protection of their human rights.

Old and new laws prescribe harsh and cruel punishments for terrorism-related offences, including beheading and flogging, yet they are so vaguely written that they can be, and are, used to punish and suppress expression and activities that are recognized and protected as legitimate the world over. The security forces fail to respect even these laws, however, routinely committing human rights violations in the knowledge that their actions are unlikely ever to be investigated let alone punished. In the rare instances when the laws are enforced in practice, this is done by a secretive, all male judiciary that lacks independence yet possesses very wide discretion to impose sentences of death or flogging.

Thousands of people have been detained in recent years on security grounds, including religious scholars and people suspected of belonging to or supporting Islamist groups such as al-Qa’ida or other groups, opposed to the Saudi Arabian government and its links with the USA and other Western countries, who are officially dubbed as “misguided.” Most were arrested in Saudi Arabia but others were forcibly returned, often secretly, from countries such as Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen. Typically, they have then been detained in prisons for months or even years in conditions of virtual secrecy, held without charge or trial and without any means of challenging their detention or obtaining remedy. Most have been held in prolonged incommunicado detention for interrogation and have been denied access to lawyers, medical assistance and family visits for long periods. All have been held in places where torture and other ill-treatment of prisoners are rife. Some, it appears, have been tried secretly, and sentenced to prison terms but then have continued to be detained once their sentences have expired. Others, according to the government, are being held for “re-education”.

Caught up in the sweeping security-related repression are an unknown number of human rights defenders, peaceful advocates of political reform, members of religious minorities and many others who have committed no crime recognized as such by international law. Some of these are prisoners of conscience.

The minority of security detainees who have been charged and brought to trial have faced grossly unfair and secret proceedings. These have included brief sessions before a panel of three inquisitors who simply questioned the accused about confessions or other statements they made, or were alleged to have made, under interrogation while held incommunicado in pre-trial detention. Some of those convicted after such sessions have reportedly been sentenced to flogging in addition to prison terms.

In October 2008 the government announced that a special criminal court was being established to try detainees held in connection with terrorism and that the files relating to some 991 detainees had been completed and that they were to stand trial on capital charges, including murder and causing bomb explosions. The government provided no further information, however, until March 2009, when the Minister of the Interior disclosed that the trials had begun. He gave no further details, neither disclosing the names of any defendants nor whether they were being permitted access to or representation by defence lawyers.

Three months later, such information was still being withheld; the trials, if they were proceeding, remained shrouded in secrecy and it was unclear how many defendants had been convicted, what sentences had been imposed, and whether defendants have a right of appeal to a higher judicial tribunal, as required by international standards for fair trial. It was expected that the defendants would include eight men who were paraded on Saudi Arabian television in 2007 and shown “confessing” to planning terrorist attacks, undermining their right to fair trial, but at the time of writing this report, June 2009, this too had not been confirmed by the Saudi Arabian authorities. The secrecy surrounding the entire trials process raised the chilling prospect that hundreds of men may now or soon be facing execution after summary, unfair trials. [...]

Enlaces relacionados:

• Coalición Mundial contra a Pena de Morte
• “Affront to Justice: Death Penalty in Saudi Arabia” (Amnesty International report, 14 – X – 2008)
• “Precarious Justice: Arbitrary Detention and Unfair Trials in the Deficient Criminal Justice System of Saudi Arabia” (Human Rights Watch report, 24 – III – 2008)

Mercurio na ría de Pontevedra

Din que unha imaxe vale máis que mil palabras. Copio esta do artigo “Incremento en el contenido en mercurio por las obras de dragado en El Musel” (Ecologistas en Acción de Asturias, 18 – VI – 2009). Mete medo a concentración de mercurio na ría de Pontevedra…

Se non fose tan grave a intoxicación por mercurio e se non se acumulase na cadea trófica non habería campañas para retiralo das baterías e dos termómetros, non habería recomendacións das autoridades sanitarias para reduci-lo consumo de certos peixes nin polémicas coas vacinas.

Desgraciadamente, teremos que seguir informándonos e actuando.

Geoff Pullum’s Five Golden Rules for giving academic presentations

Xa o sei. Non fago máis que copiar textos doutras páxinas. Antes de que houbese internet eu recortaba noticias dos xornais… unha vana ansia de construír unha hemeroteca particular. Na casa os papeis sempre desaparecían porque alguén con sentido común facía limpeza. Na internet é diferente. Os enlaces ráchanse (broken links) porque os aloxamentos mudan de enderezo ou, como GeoCities, cerran… :-(

Geoffrey K. Pullum é Professor of General Linguistics na School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences (University of Edinburgh) e estas “regras de ouro para facer unha exposición académica (oral)” parecéronme moi agudas e útiles:

Geoff Pullum’s Five Golden Rules (well, actually six) for giving academic presentations

1. DON’T EVER BEGIN WITH AN APOLOGY. Everyone has seen speakers beginning a presentation by apologizing for how unworthy they are, how little of their work is really conclusive, how they hope people will forgive them and so on. No one has ever seen a case in which this improved the reception of the paper or the mood of the audience. If you’re going to be bad, they won’t be pleased that they showed up, and if you’re not then you are just wasting air time. Pieter Seuren has pointed out to me that the tradition of beginning with an apology is so old that it has a name in Medieval rhetoric: it is called the captatio benevolentiae, the capturing of the audience’s good will. My point is that an apology simply doesn’t work as advertised. Opening up with an apology is like trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Don’t ever do it.

2. DON’T EVER UNDERESTIMATE THE AUDIENCE’S INTELLIGENCE. Few sins are worse than making the audience think you think they are stupid. An audience who sees a presentation somewhat too high-powered for them may still grasp some of it, and at the very least its members will feel that they have been flattered with the assumption that they are smart. But the members of an audience who hear a talk pitched too low for them have both wasted an hour and been treated as if they were dumb. It truly adds insult to injury. So while you should always worry that perhaps you are being confusing, you should worry somewhat less about whether what you are saying is difficult. There are many worse things than a difficult and demanding lecture, and a patronizing and superficial lecture is one of them.

3. RESPECT THE TIME LIMITS. It is sad to be cut off when you are just about to make your major point. Or even a minor one. Plan your time, and don’t let it happen. The mood of the audience is not going to improve from seeing someone ramble on when they should have been stopped by now so that questions can begin. A good chair will stop you dead at the agreed time, but don’t wait for that: wrap up before the chairperson has to stand up (or the students who are late for their next class have to get up and leave).

4. DON’T SURVEY THE WHOLE DAMN FIELD. You need to make a few assumptions clear before you get going on your main point, but you don’t need to begin by summarizing the whole prior content of the discipline, explaining what grammars are, what phonemes are, etc etc. Even in a job talk, where giving your whole dissertation in 55 minutes is the awful temptation, don’t do it. Assume a reasonable amount of background, and then present something that can be delivered in a reasonable amount of time. A good rule of thumb if using transparencies is that each one should be up there for three minutes, or at the very least two. Treating each display on a handout as the equivalent of one transparency gives you a rule of thumb for handouts, too.

5. REMEMBER THAT YOU’RE AN ADVOCATE, NOT THE DEFENDANT. It’s your idea that’s being presented, not you. The reason for not feeling nervous is that you are not what’s up for consideration (not even at a job talk; they consider you later!). This isn’t about you (that’s why you shouldn’t begin with an apology: that’s about how you feel). It’s the ideas that are going to get scrutiny. If those ideas don’t survive after today, too bad for them. You can’t work miracles. But for today, you’re there to do as fair a job as you can for them during their twenty minutes in the spotlight. You’re a vehicle, an advocate, a public defender. These ideas might have been unfairly dismissed without a trial. No matter what the ultimate verdict, you will have served the court of scholarly opinion if you defend them effectively.

Finally, though this concerns not the talk but the questions afterward, the sixth of my five rules: during the question session EXPECT QUESTIONS THAT WILL FLOOR YOU. You’d better hope some of the questions to be hard ones. If the combined wits and backgrounds of the audience can’t yield a question that really gives you some trouble, or can’t come up with any questions at all, you should feel mildly annoyed; they really can’t have been seriously thinking about what you said. Or else you’re giving talks at events that are way beneath you. It’s actually a bit sad to give a presentation so perfect that it leaves no crevice for the critical knife, so that the question period is an embarassing two minutes of silence. It’s as if the talk had died. And since it is no great shame to be temporarily flummoxed, it’s better if things go in that direction. Listen closely to the question, think, and if it’s a great question you had never considered before and you don’t know the answer, simply say, “That’s a great question that I had never considered before. I don’t know the answer.”

God bless you for sharing your knowledge!

Windows 7

Microsoft está a traballar duramente para que o lanzamento do sistema operativo Windows 7 resulte un éxito. Xa o enviaron aos fabricantes de computadoras e prevén que chegue ao mercado o 22 de outubro.

Non será difícil millorar o lamentable inicio do Windows Vista, sistema operativo que rexeitaron miles de usuarios corporativos e que para millóns de usuarios domésticos foi unha tortura. De feito, nunca chegou á sola do zapato do XP… No mes de maio do 2009 estes foron os sistemas operativos máis usados, segundo Market Share by Net Applications:

• Windows XP: 61,54%
• Windows Vista: 24,35%
• Mac OS X 10.5: 6,39%
• Mac OS X 10.4: 2,49%
• Windows 2000: 1,06%
• Linux: 0,99%

Aínda que é probable que os consumidores do “primeiro mundo” nos beneficiemos con estes esforzos de Microsoft, permítome dubidar do seu afán filantrópico. O mercado dos netbooks precisaba dun sistema operativo lixeiro e Vista non cumpría os requisitos. No circo comezaron a medrar os ananos, principalmente Linux.

Ademais, un dos principais competidores de Microsoft, Google, anunciou que está a desenvolver un sistema operativo gratuíto e de código aberto, Google Chrome OS. E este movemento do mercado, que tampouco é tan filantrópico como parece, quizá manque un pouco máis. Repito: o cambio máis apreciable será que no “primeiro mundo” habemos ver un Windows millor e máis barato, xa confirmaron que teremos family packs…

P. S. (4 – IX – 2009). As estatísticas de Market Share by Net Applications aparecen agora de forma diferente. Houbo un cambio retroactivo na súa metodoloxía, que reequilibra as cifras segundo o peso relativo dos distintos países.

Copio as cifras máis recentes (agosto). Non se poden comparar coas de maio debido ao mencionado cambio de metodoloxía, pero tamén mostran claramente que, a dous meses do lanzamento de Windows 7, Windows Vista non conseguiu vender como Windows XP. Chama a atención que Windows 7 ocupe o cuarto posto so coas versións beta, ¡antes de saír ao mercado! Realmente había usuarios cansos do Windows Vista…

• Windows XP: 71,79%
• Windows Vista: 18,80%
• Mac OS X 10.5: 3,45%
• Windows 7: 1,18%
• Mac OS X 10.4: 0,99%
• Linux: 0,94%
• Windows 2000: 0,93%

P. S. (12 – VIII – 2010). En so nove meses desde o lanzamento oficial, Windows 7 superou a Windows Vista… era visto. Cifras de xullo do 2010 segundo a mesma fonte…

• Windows XP: 61,87%
• Windows 7: 14,46%
• Windows Vista: 14,34%
• Mac OS X 10.6: 2,48%
• Mac OS X 10.5: 1,82%
• Linux: 0,93%