Nadine Shah - Instore at Reflex Records
18 minutes ago
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Abuse in the Name of Treatment - Drug Detention Centers in Asia
According to estimations, there are hundreds of thousands of people kept in compulsory drug detention centers in Vietnam, China, Thailand and Laos. It is easy to get in to one of these centers. Some people enter voluntarily in the hope of kicking their drug habit, others are sent there by their families who pay for their “treatment”; but in some cities, it often happens that the military police just collect street children, drug users, sex workers and other groups on the street considered “deviant” by the authorities and detains them in a camp for years, without any due process or right of appeal. It’s easy to get in – but it’s hard to get out. Detainees are often forced to work for free, starved, beaten, tortured and raped – but they don’t get any treatment or rehabilitation. If they finally leave the camps, they feel more disintegrated from society than at any time before. The vast majority of detainees who leave the camps start to use drugs again or engage in other illegal activities. The governments of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand received millions of dollars from Western governments to build camps to treat drug addicts. Tax payers in donor countries had no idea what is happening in these camps before Human Rights Watch documented the widespread human rights abuses. One of the centers – Koh Kor – was closed thanks to human rights advocacy but there are still too many in operation. HCLU, along with international organizations such as UNAIDS or UNODC, is calling for the closure of these camps. We hope after watching our new movie more people will join us and put pressure on these governments to stop the abuse in the name of drug treatment.
If you want to learn more read the related reports of Human Rights Watch:
Sarosip @'DRUG reporter'
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
What the officer and the minister said about hacking ... and what they didn't
Asked if there would be another investigation: "We have always said that if any new material, new evidence, was produced, we would consider it."
This precisely misses the point, which is that since 2006, Scotland Yard has been sitting on a mass of evidence which it has not investigated and not disclosed. It needs no new evidence to reopen an inquiry which was never completed in the first place.
Asked if the only reporter he talked to at the News of the World about the hacking allegations was the royal correspondent: "No. That is not the case."
This looks misleading. All of the available information confirms that Scotland Yard failed to interview any reporter or editor or manager from the News of the World other than the royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. And that includes failing to interview reporters who were explicitly identified in evidence as having handled intercepted voicemail messages.
Asked if the Met had talked to Sean Hoare, the former News of the World reporter who has said that Andy Coulson was aware of widespread hacking at the tabloid during the original investigation: "This is the first time we have heard of Mr Hoare or anything he's had to say. He wasn't part of the inquiry … We are surprised that the New York Times did not avail us of this information earlier than they did."
Hoare is one of a dozen reporters who spoke to the New York Times about phone hacking under Andy Coulson. A dozen have also spoken to the Guardian. It is not clear why Scotland Yard detectives would need American reporters to introduce them to journalists in London. As stated above, they have chosen not to approach any serving or former reporters other than Clive Goodman.
Asked why the Met had not told people that their phones were targeted despite the fact that a police memo suggested that a "vast number" of mobile numbers had been hacked or potentially hacked: "I think there is a misunderstanding here, that just because your name features in a private investigator's files, that your phone has been hacked."
This misrepresents the memo, disclosed by the Guardian, in which, during the original inquiry, the Metropolitan Police told the Crown Prosecution Service unequivocally: "A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority."
It also fails to reflect the underlying failure by police to stick to their agreement with the director of public prosecutions to approach and warn "all potential victims". They warned a small number during the original inquiry, and a small number more after the Guardian revived the story last July. The mass of those whose names and/or personal details showed up in the police investigation have never been told.
Asked if John Prescott's phone was hacked: "I believe that there is no evidence that his phone was hacked. I made that very clear on a number of occasions."
This misses the point. Scotland Yard has no evidence on this matter, because it failed to investigate it. In August 2006, it seized material which showed that four months earlier, the deputy prime minister had been targeted by a man who specialised in intercepting voicemail. They could have warned Prescott and asked if he had noticed interference with his messages. They didn't. They could have gone to his mobile phone company for data that would have identified any caller who had attempted to access Prescott's voicemail. They didn't. That data is held for only 12 months, and has now been destroyed.
Statements by Theresa May
"That investigation has already been reviewed by the Metropolitan Police."
This is misleading. On the morning of 9 July last year, when the Guardian published its first major story on the affair, the Metropolitan commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, asked John Yates "to establish the facts". Less than 12 hours later, Yates announced that there was no basis for reopening the inquiry. Yates himself has repeatedly denied that what he conducted was a review.
"The Crown Prosecution Service had full access to all the evidence gathered."
The Guardian discovered that Scotland Yard failed to pass the Crown Prosecution Service an email, which they had found in Glenn Mulcaire's property, and which clearly identified two News of the World reporters handling voicemail that had been intercepted from the phone of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association.
Scotland Yard has dismissed this accusation by insisting that the barrister who presented the case for the CPS "had access to all the material". What it does not say is that it took its own officers three months to go through it all; and moreover, the barrister himself has said that he does not remember seeing the crucial email.
"The police have made clear that during the investigation, there was early and regular consultation with the CPS, so that the lines of inquiry followed were likely to produce the best evidence."
That is not the story told by paperwork from the CPS, which shows the police persuading prosecutors to "ring-fence" evidence in order to conceal the identities of "sensitive" victims of the hacking.
"At the time the investigation took place, the Metropolitan Police made it clear that those who they believed had been intercepted were contacted by members of the Metropolitan Police."
This is incorrect. The police failed, for example, to contact Taylor's legal adviser, even though they had transcripts of voicemail taken from her phone; or Coulson himself, who had been hacked by his own private investigator, and in relation to whom the evidence was sufficiently clear that Scotland Yard contacted him within 24 hours of the story being revived last year. Scotland Yard still refuses to say how many it warned in 2006/7, how many it warned after the Guardian story, and how many others remain unwarned.
Nick Davies @'The Guardian'
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