Somalia: Peacekeeping
3.15 pm
Lord Avebury asked Her Majesty’s Government:
What representations they have made to the Government of Somalia concerning the possible deployment of peacekeeping forces by the African Union or a coalition of African states, and what is their assessment of the legality of such a force.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Triesman): My Lords, the African Union has approved a proposal by members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development—IGAD—to deploy a peace-support mission to Somalia. On 13 July 2006, the UN Security Council confirmed its willingness to consider whether a peace-support mission would contribute to peace and stability in Somalia on receipt of a detailed plan from IGAD. We will participate actively in this consideration. I have had discussions with the transitional federal government representatives on this subject and the subject of trying to sustain current peace negotiations.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, has not the situation changed since the Islamic Courts Union declared a jihad against any foreign forces entering Somalian territory, including the deployment of IGADSOM, as has been decided by the African Union Peace and Security Council? Does the Minister consider there to be any scope for a discussion between the AU and the Islamic Courts Union on a variation of the proposal that would be acceptable to them, either in terms of the states that are providing forces or the terms of reference of the mission? Will it be explained clearly to the Islamic Courts Union that if it does not agree to such a mission, the likelihood is that President Abdullahi Yusuf will call on the Ethiopian forces to help to protect him?
Lord Triesman: My Lords, the peace discussions in Khartoum are about to enter a third phase, and there have also been useful contacts in the past couple of weeks in Nairobi. The aim of the peace discussions is to provide the conditions under which a peace-support operation would work successfully with the agreement of all parties in Somalia. It remains quite
11 Oct 2006 : Column 255
clear to me that if the Islamic Courts Union cannot accept peace proposals, the Security Council will have to consider very urgently the decisions taken by the frontline states on security in the region.
The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, are the Americans supporting the warlords in Somalia? If so, will Her Majesty’s Government make representations to them to stop? The trouble in Somalia was caused by gangs of warlords shooting people up and engaging in total mayhem. Even a strongly Muslim government would be more peaceful and more preferable to what has gone before.
Lord Triesman: My Lords, I think the noble Earl is referring to an allegation some while ago that the United States had supported several warlords and their armed militias. Whether or not people think that this is the best outcome for Somalia, the move of the Islamic Courts Union against the warlords has more or less taken them out of any part of the equation, as matters stand. The problems now lie principally between the transitional federal government of President Yusuf—the only government who are supported by the United Nations as the legitimate government—and the Islamic Courts Union.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, what is the Minister’s assessment of the Islamic Courts Union and its medium-term aims? It has been suggested that it wants to create an Islamic state, and that it has links with various fundamentalist extremist groups, including al-Qaeda. Is that a danger? Are we seeing the emergence of yet another failed state and source of terrorism, or could the Islamic Courts Union provide the stability that my noble friends have suggested?
Lord Triesman: My Lords, I do not think that the Islamic Courts Union is a homogenous body in any sense. It contains some elements which are moderate and plainly disposed towards the peace negotiations that I have described. It contains some elements—they may be in the ascendancy at the moment—which I would describe as being on the end of the politics of al-Qaeda and very dangerous. The reality is that we must make sure that moderate parties on both sides—the transitional government and the Islamic Courts Union—engage in discussions and try to get to a new balance between the different forces. It would be of no benefit to this country to see the kind of takeover of Somalia which would create a further serious international security problem.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, is the mandate of the African Union in such a situation solely to observe, as it has been in Darfur where it has not been able to protect the people at all? Is it in any way likely that either it or any subsequent force would have any power of intervention? Is it only to observe and report what we are constantly hearing?
Lord Triesman: My Lords, there are two important questions in the noble Baroness’s supplementary question. First, the precise purpose of an IGAD force, were it to be introduced in Somalia, would have
11 Oct 2006 : Column 256
to be agreed with the Security Council. Its mandate could include anything that the Security Council deemed appropriate. If it is introduced, I would hope that it would be sufficiently robust to do the job properly. On the second question, which requires some comment, the mandate that the AMIS force has in Darfur could and should have been used far more extensively than observation. At the beginning it was.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Thursday, October 05, 2006
BandarGate
Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a press conference given by Dr Salah al-Bandar, a British citizen who was expelled from Bahrain on September 13, in Committee Room 3A, House of Lords, at 11.00 on Thursday October 5, said:
Dr al-Bandar, a British citizen who had lived in Bahrain for 16 years was expelled from Bahrain for blowing the whistle on a dirty tricks gang run by the Minister of Cabinet Affairs and head of the Central Information Organisation, Sheikh Ahmed bin Attiyatallah al-Khalifa.
According to Dr al-Bandar, the Minister paid five main operatives a total of more than $2.7 million to run:
1. a secret intelligence cell spying on Shi’as
2. ‘GONGOS’ – government operated bogus NGOs like the ‘Bahraini Jurists Society’ and the ‘Bahraini Human Rights Watch Society’
3. internet forums and websites that foment sectarian hatred
4. subsidisation of ‘new converts’
5. payments for election rigging
Under the heading ‘Bandargate’, The Gulf Daily News has verified the signatures on some of the many documents published by Dr al-Bandar, and the Bahrain Tribune says the report contains hundreds of pages of supporting material, apparently authentic.
There have been no challenges to the authenticity of the documents, and the Minister himself has made no response other than personal attacks on the author. This week, the public prosecutor has announced Dr al-Bandar is being charged with theft and illegal possession of state documents, and will be tried in absentia. This is an admission that Dr al-Bandar’s evidence is genuine.
We can’t say, as Palmerston did in 1850, that “a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong”. But we can give a voice to our citizens when they suffer injustice and wrong, especially when they are being punished for upholding high standards of governance and exposing serious misconduct.
Dr al-Bandar is a brave man who deserves the support of his fellow-citizens, and especially at a time when the government of Bahrain – ie the royal family, of which this Minister is a member – is busy silencing its critics. The Public Gatherings, Processions and Assembly Code, ratified on July 20, is the latest attack on freedom of expression, but it is part of a steady erosion of people’s rights. The Foreign Office say that ‘democracy, good governance and human rights are major objectives’ of their policy, and we shall see what they have to say when one of our own citizens is a victim of oppression.
Dr al-Bandar, a British citizen who had lived in Bahrain for 16 years was expelled from Bahrain for blowing the whistle on a dirty tricks gang run by the Minister of Cabinet Affairs and head of the Central Information Organisation, Sheikh Ahmed bin Attiyatallah al-Khalifa.
According to Dr al-Bandar, the Minister paid five main operatives a total of more than $2.7 million to run:
1. a secret intelligence cell spying on Shi’as
2. ‘GONGOS’ – government operated bogus NGOs like the ‘Bahraini Jurists Society’ and the ‘Bahraini Human Rights Watch Society’
3. internet forums and websites that foment sectarian hatred
4. subsidisation of ‘new converts’
5. payments for election rigging
Under the heading ‘Bandargate’, The Gulf Daily News has verified the signatures on some of the many documents published by Dr al-Bandar, and the Bahrain Tribune says the report contains hundreds of pages of supporting material, apparently authentic.
There have been no challenges to the authenticity of the documents, and the Minister himself has made no response other than personal attacks on the author. This week, the public prosecutor has announced Dr al-Bandar is being charged with theft and illegal possession of state documents, and will be tried in absentia. This is an admission that Dr al-Bandar’s evidence is genuine.
We can’t say, as Palmerston did in 1850, that “a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong”. But we can give a voice to our citizens when they suffer injustice and wrong, especially when they are being punished for upholding high standards of governance and exposing serious misconduct.
Dr al-Bandar is a brave man who deserves the support of his fellow-citizens, and especially at a time when the government of Bahrain – ie the royal family, of which this Minister is a member – is busy silencing its critics. The Public Gatherings, Processions and Assembly Code, ratified on July 20, is the latest attack on freedom of expression, but it is part of a steady erosion of people’s rights. The Foreign Office say that ‘democracy, good governance and human rights are major objectives’ of their policy, and we shall see what they have to say when one of our own citizens is a victim of oppression.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Heiligendamm Two
Lord Avebury, speaking at the Joint Parliamentary Meeting on EU developments in the area of freedom, security and justice at the European Parliament at 11.00 on October 2, said:
After Madrid, the European Council issued a Declaration on combating terroriem, which called for the simplification of exchanges of information and intelligence between law enforcement agencies of Member states, and in June 2004 the Commission proposal for enhancing access to information, including ‘European information systems’ by those agencies. The impetus for these developments was the need to combat terrorism, but the scope had widened by then to cover not just organised crime but crime in general .
By September 2004, at the JHA meeting under the Netherlands Presidency, the principle of availability had emerged in its present form. It appeared in the first draft of the Hague Programme in October, and the whole package including the principle of availability went through without debate at the Summit in November
Under these proposals, from the start of 2008 a law enforcement officer in any Member state who wants information held by a law enforcement agency in another Member state is to be given it, subject to a few conditions. The data to be covered is:
DNA profiles; fingerprints; ballistics; vehicle registration; telephone numbers and other communication data, and data in civil registers.
That, in a nutshell, is the principle of availability. At the time, Commissioner Frattini, addressing the Joint Supervisory Authorities under the Third Pillar, called for the involvement of data protection agencies from the outset. He warned, that linking the adoption of new forms of police and judicial cooperation with the adoption of data protection guidelines was still to be hammered out, and there was no deadline for this in the Hague Programme .
The Commission were invited to bring forward proposals for implementing the principle of availability in which ‘key conditions should be strictly observed’. These would include a guarantee of the integrity of the data; confidentiality of the data; common standards for access; respect for data protection; protection of the individual from abuse of the data, and the right of the individual to seek correction of incorrect data. The Commission produced a draft Data Protection Framework Decision , at the same time as the draft on the principle of availability, thus emphasising themselves the importance of the two going forward together. The DPFD would ensure that information had been processed legitimately, in accordance with privacy rights and data quality standards. It would see that exchanges between competent authorities were not prejudiced by different levels of data protection.
Unfortunately, the Ministers of the 6 largest EU countries – France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and UK, the G6 – decided to go ahead with availability without data protection. At their meeting at Heiligendamm last March, they jettisoned the principle that the two decisions should proceed in parallel, and decided to implement data exchange on DNA, fingerprints and vehicle registration, irrespective of whether the DPFD had come into force or not.
The existence of informal groups of Member states is not objectionable or indeed avoidable, and there are quite a few of them, either based on regional interests such as the Nordic Cooperation Group, or particular characteristics, such as the Common Law Group. What is peculiar about the G6 Group and the Prüm Group, which gave birth to the Prüm Convention , is that they seek to preempt EU decision-making processes, by making arrangements of their own, and offering them to other Member states on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Thus the Prüm Convention, agreed by Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany Austria, France and Spain, which concerns transfers of the same types of data that were later considered by the G6, provides that other Member states may accede to it, and says the aim of the signatories is to incorporate the Convention into the legal framework of the EU. When the principle of availability is implemented in the domestic law of the Prüm states, therefore, it will have to be a superset of the Prüm Convention, to avoid any incompatibility with their existing obligations. The other 18 EU Member states, which had no part in the discussions on the Convention or the technical work of drafting it, will have no choice but to accept it as part of the EU justice and home affairs acquis.
In the case of Heiligendamm, other Member states were to be fully informed about the proposals after they had been decided, and were condescendingly told they could take part in their implementation. But, like members of the public in general, they were not to be given the agenda or papers for G6 meetings, let alone to be consulted about the proposals to be made. Our Committee said it would be desirable to publish agendas and working documents, though we stopped short of criticising the failure to do so. This could be explored further with the Parliaments of non-G6 Member states, if we could find a web-based mechanism for doing so.
At the very least, we said that the results of future G6 meetings should be fully publicised, rather than merely being put on the website of the Interior Ministry of the host country. This month we will see whether the UK Government have complied with that recommendation, since they are hosting the next meeting of the Group at Stratford-upon-Avon in three weeks’ time. So far, the Home Office have posted no information about the meeting on their website.
The Heiligendamm meeting decided that the police should have access to Eurodac, the fingerprint database established under the first pillar to help determine which country is responsible for considering asylum applications, and to the Visa Information System, which gives states common knowledge of visas granted by each other to third country nationals. In the case of the VIS there is a separate Commission proposal for access by law enforcement agencies, with safeguards. In particular, the DPFD applies to the data, and access will not commence until the DPFD has entered into force. On Eurodac, however, there is a problem, because the legal basis on which its Regulation stands would not allow access for purposes other than vetting asylum applications. Presumably there could be a new proposal relying on Article 66 TEC as the VIS does, but the Commission has no such proposal on the table.
The European Commission says that implementation of the principle of availability will change the quality and intensity of personal data exchanges between Member states, and greatly affect the right to data protection. Direct automated access, in particular, will increase the risk of transferring illegitimate, inaccurate or out-of-date information, and the data controller will not be able to verify the legitimacy of a transmission or the accuracy of the data in each individual case. For these reasons the DPFD must be developed hand in hand with availability . For the G6 to undermine the Commission, and even worse, to do it as our report says, behind closed doors, and behind the backs of the other 19 Member states, is insufferable and must be opposed.
But if the Finnish Presidency is getting on with the drafting of the DPFD, especially in the light of the comments by the European Data Protection Supervisor in his Opinion last February , do we need to worry?
There used to be a Council Working Party on Data Protection, but it last reported in April 2001 and was then abolished. The task of polishing up the DPFD has been given to the Multidisciplinary Group on Organised Crime (MDG), whose primary interest is to make life difficult for criminals, not to have regard to the interests of data subjects. The membership of the Group is not published, so we cannot say whether it includes anyone with expertise on data protection. But not surprisingly with a title like that, the MDG had actively watered down the DPFD by the time they finished their first reading on September 21. The Presidency tabled an Issues Paper at that meeting, and in the light of the discussion they have weakened the first three chapters of the document still further in a second reading draft presented at the MDG meeting on Wednesday and Thursday this week. That document and Issues Paper were inaccessible on the Council’s website last week, but they have since been posted on the site of Statewatch, whose valuable evidence greatly helped our Committee in its inquiry on Heiligendamm.
The Issues discussed are of course only those which concern EU governments, and not their civil societies. However, the European Parliament does have the power to give civil society a voice, by requiring the Commission to resubmit the Council’s final text if it differs substantially from the original, as it already does . That will cause a delay beyond the end of 2006, and it may be objected that the DPFD is required for SIS II, due to go live in 2007. But since there has been an unannounced slippage, and SIS II, now being scrutinised by the Lords EU Committee, will not be operational until some time in June 2008 , there is no need for urgency. We as national Parliamentarians, as well as our MEP colleagues have a responsibility to examine the DPFD in its final shape, and particularly of looking at the answers to the ten major questions now addressed to the MDG by the Presidency . In the original version, for instance, data subjects were to be told when information about them was processed or transferred, subject to exceptions on grounds of security. In the latest draft, there is no right to notification, and Member states are being asked by the Presidency whether they wish to retain some form of obligation to tell a person when data relating to her is being processed. The subject can still get certain information held, which the Presidency say should be as limited as possible, on request, but this means she has to know or suspect that she is under surveillance.
In his mid-term review of Finland’s Presidency last Thursday, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen did not mention these questions, but he did say (and I quote):
“Parliamentary accountability in EU affairs is a strong constitutional obligation - and living practice - in the Finnish political system. Parliamentary scrutiny is an inseparable part of all Finnish EU policy”.
There has been no scrutiny of the whittling away by the Council and the shadowy MDG of the data protection safeguards that will apply to the millions of exchanges of personal information that will ultimately be dealt with under the principle of availability, but as Parliamentarians we still have a chance to remedy the omission.
After Madrid, the European Council issued a Declaration on combating terroriem, which called for the simplification of exchanges of information and intelligence between law enforcement agencies of Member states, and in June 2004 the Commission proposal for enhancing access to information, including ‘European information systems’ by those agencies. The impetus for these developments was the need to combat terrorism, but the scope had widened by then to cover not just organised crime but crime in general .
By September 2004, at the JHA meeting under the Netherlands Presidency, the principle of availability had emerged in its present form. It appeared in the first draft of the Hague Programme in October, and the whole package including the principle of availability went through without debate at the Summit in November
Under these proposals, from the start of 2008 a law enforcement officer in any Member state who wants information held by a law enforcement agency in another Member state is to be given it, subject to a few conditions. The data to be covered is:
DNA profiles; fingerprints; ballistics; vehicle registration; telephone numbers and other communication data, and data in civil registers.
That, in a nutshell, is the principle of availability. At the time, Commissioner Frattini, addressing the Joint Supervisory Authorities under the Third Pillar, called for the involvement of data protection agencies from the outset. He warned, that linking the adoption of new forms of police and judicial cooperation with the adoption of data protection guidelines was still to be hammered out, and there was no deadline for this in the Hague Programme .
The Commission were invited to bring forward proposals for implementing the principle of availability in which ‘key conditions should be strictly observed’. These would include a guarantee of the integrity of the data; confidentiality of the data; common standards for access; respect for data protection; protection of the individual from abuse of the data, and the right of the individual to seek correction of incorrect data. The Commission produced a draft Data Protection Framework Decision , at the same time as the draft on the principle of availability, thus emphasising themselves the importance of the two going forward together. The DPFD would ensure that information had been processed legitimately, in accordance with privacy rights and data quality standards. It would see that exchanges between competent authorities were not prejudiced by different levels of data protection.
Unfortunately, the Ministers of the 6 largest EU countries – France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and UK, the G6 – decided to go ahead with availability without data protection. At their meeting at Heiligendamm last March, they jettisoned the principle that the two decisions should proceed in parallel, and decided to implement data exchange on DNA, fingerprints and vehicle registration, irrespective of whether the DPFD had come into force or not.
The existence of informal groups of Member states is not objectionable or indeed avoidable, and there are quite a few of them, either based on regional interests such as the Nordic Cooperation Group, or particular characteristics, such as the Common Law Group. What is peculiar about the G6 Group and the Prüm Group, which gave birth to the Prüm Convention , is that they seek to preempt EU decision-making processes, by making arrangements of their own, and offering them to other Member states on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Thus the Prüm Convention, agreed by Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany Austria, France and Spain, which concerns transfers of the same types of data that were later considered by the G6, provides that other Member states may accede to it, and says the aim of the signatories is to incorporate the Convention into the legal framework of the EU. When the principle of availability is implemented in the domestic law of the Prüm states, therefore, it will have to be a superset of the Prüm Convention, to avoid any incompatibility with their existing obligations. The other 18 EU Member states, which had no part in the discussions on the Convention or the technical work of drafting it, will have no choice but to accept it as part of the EU justice and home affairs acquis.
In the case of Heiligendamm, other Member states were to be fully informed about the proposals after they had been decided, and were condescendingly told they could take part in their implementation. But, like members of the public in general, they were not to be given the agenda or papers for G6 meetings, let alone to be consulted about the proposals to be made. Our Committee said it would be desirable to publish agendas and working documents, though we stopped short of criticising the failure to do so. This could be explored further with the Parliaments of non-G6 Member states, if we could find a web-based mechanism for doing so.
At the very least, we said that the results of future G6 meetings should be fully publicised, rather than merely being put on the website of the Interior Ministry of the host country. This month we will see whether the UK Government have complied with that recommendation, since they are hosting the next meeting of the Group at Stratford-upon-Avon in three weeks’ time. So far, the Home Office have posted no information about the meeting on their website.
The Heiligendamm meeting decided that the police should have access to Eurodac, the fingerprint database established under the first pillar to help determine which country is responsible for considering asylum applications, and to the Visa Information System, which gives states common knowledge of visas granted by each other to third country nationals. In the case of the VIS there is a separate Commission proposal for access by law enforcement agencies, with safeguards. In particular, the DPFD applies to the data, and access will not commence until the DPFD has entered into force. On Eurodac, however, there is a problem, because the legal basis on which its Regulation stands would not allow access for purposes other than vetting asylum applications. Presumably there could be a new proposal relying on Article 66 TEC as the VIS does, but the Commission has no such proposal on the table.
The European Commission says that implementation of the principle of availability will change the quality and intensity of personal data exchanges between Member states, and greatly affect the right to data protection. Direct automated access, in particular, will increase the risk of transferring illegitimate, inaccurate or out-of-date information, and the data controller will not be able to verify the legitimacy of a transmission or the accuracy of the data in each individual case. For these reasons the DPFD must be developed hand in hand with availability . For the G6 to undermine the Commission, and even worse, to do it as our report says, behind closed doors, and behind the backs of the other 19 Member states, is insufferable and must be opposed.
But if the Finnish Presidency is getting on with the drafting of the DPFD, especially in the light of the comments by the European Data Protection Supervisor in his Opinion last February , do we need to worry?
There used to be a Council Working Party on Data Protection, but it last reported in April 2001 and was then abolished. The task of polishing up the DPFD has been given to the Multidisciplinary Group on Organised Crime (MDG), whose primary interest is to make life difficult for criminals, not to have regard to the interests of data subjects. The membership of the Group is not published, so we cannot say whether it includes anyone with expertise on data protection. But not surprisingly with a title like that, the MDG had actively watered down the DPFD by the time they finished their first reading on September 21. The Presidency tabled an Issues Paper at that meeting, and in the light of the discussion they have weakened the first three chapters of the document still further in a second reading draft presented at the MDG meeting on Wednesday and Thursday this week. That document and Issues Paper were inaccessible on the Council’s website last week, but they have since been posted on the site of Statewatch, whose valuable evidence greatly helped our Committee in its inquiry on Heiligendamm.
The Issues discussed are of course only those which concern EU governments, and not their civil societies. However, the European Parliament does have the power to give civil society a voice, by requiring the Commission to resubmit the Council’s final text if it differs substantially from the original, as it already does . That will cause a delay beyond the end of 2006, and it may be objected that the DPFD is required for SIS II, due to go live in 2007. But since there has been an unannounced slippage, and SIS II, now being scrutinised by the Lords EU Committee, will not be operational until some time in June 2008 , there is no need for urgency. We as national Parliamentarians, as well as our MEP colleagues have a responsibility to examine the DPFD in its final shape, and particularly of looking at the answers to the ten major questions now addressed to the MDG by the Presidency . In the original version, for instance, data subjects were to be told when information about them was processed or transferred, subject to exceptions on grounds of security. In the latest draft, there is no right to notification, and Member states are being asked by the Presidency whether they wish to retain some form of obligation to tell a person when data relating to her is being processed. The subject can still get certain information held, which the Presidency say should be as limited as possible, on request, but this means she has to know or suspect that she is under surveillance.
In his mid-term review of Finland’s Presidency last Thursday, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen did not mention these questions, but he did say (and I quote):
“Parliamentary accountability in EU affairs is a strong constitutional obligation - and living practice - in the Finnish political system. Parliamentary scrutiny is an inseparable part of all Finnish EU policy”.
There has been no scrutiny of the whittling away by the Council and the shadowy MDG of the data protection safeguards that will apply to the millions of exchanges of personal information that will ultimately be dealt with under the principle of availability, but as Parliamentarians we still have a chance to remedy the omission.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Report on the seminar in today's Daily Star
Committed to PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW
Vol. 5 Num 834 Sat. September 30, 2006
Front Page
Prospects for free, fair polls in Bangladesh bleak
Avebury tells seminar in London
Staff Correspondent
UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group said the prospect for free and fair general elections in Bangladesh is looking bleak with only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office.
Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the group, made the comment while chairing a seminar on 'Bangladesh: Logjam on the Road to Free and Fair Elections' in the House of Lords on September 27.
"The US National Democratic Institute (NDI) has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the Election Commission (EC), all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government," a House of Lords press release from London said.
Referring to the manipulation in preparing the recent voters list, Lord Avebury said, "This is mass-produced fraud which must be exposed and corrected. The NDI commented on the 'rampant and escalating violence' of recent times, including the assassination of former finance minister Shah AMS Kibria, the attempt on the life of British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition Sheikh Hasina, the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.
In addition, he also mentioned about 800 people killed by the Rapid Action Battalion forces during encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents.
Avebury also criticised last month's escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators that left Saber Hossain Chowdhury, political adviser to Sheikh Hasina, and two other lawmakers -- Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim -- injured.
"We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union," he said.
Referring to the attacks on two women leaders -- Motia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun injured in police attack on September 12 -- the Lord said, "It may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women."
Eminent jurist Dr Kamal Hossain, who also addressed the seminar in the House of Lords, said, "The current regime of BNP-Jamaat is blatantly involved in engineering every election mechanism to ensure victory at the next election."
Referring to the curtailment in police training period, Dr Kamal said, "Recently appointed police officers, most of whom were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, were responsible for carrying out assaults on opposition leaders."
Kamal also questioned the rise of the number of voters in the voter list prepared by the regime from 70 million to 93 million within the last five years.
He said, "Free and fair election is not a matter of choice. The government has to uphold the rule of law in order to ensure free and fair elections."
The seminar was also attended by representatives of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Survival International, International Crisis Group, International Bangladesh Foundation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Commonwealth Secretariat, Bangladesh High Commission to UK, Hudson Institute USA and The Times Newspaper.
Vol. 5 Num 834 Sat. September 30, 2006
Front Page
Prospects for free, fair polls in Bangladesh bleak
Avebury tells seminar in London
Staff Correspondent
UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group said the prospect for free and fair general elections in Bangladesh is looking bleak with only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office.
Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the group, made the comment while chairing a seminar on 'Bangladesh: Logjam on the Road to Free and Fair Elections' in the House of Lords on September 27.
"The US National Democratic Institute (NDI) has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the Election Commission (EC), all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government," a House of Lords press release from London said.
Referring to the manipulation in preparing the recent voters list, Lord Avebury said, "This is mass-produced fraud which must be exposed and corrected. The NDI commented on the 'rampant and escalating violence' of recent times, including the assassination of former finance minister Shah AMS Kibria, the attempt on the life of British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition Sheikh Hasina, the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.
In addition, he also mentioned about 800 people killed by the Rapid Action Battalion forces during encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents.
Avebury also criticised last month's escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators that left Saber Hossain Chowdhury, political adviser to Sheikh Hasina, and two other lawmakers -- Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim -- injured.
"We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union," he said.
Referring to the attacks on two women leaders -- Motia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun injured in police attack on September 12 -- the Lord said, "It may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women."
Eminent jurist Dr Kamal Hossain, who also addressed the seminar in the House of Lords, said, "The current regime of BNP-Jamaat is blatantly involved in engineering every election mechanism to ensure victory at the next election."
Referring to the curtailment in police training period, Dr Kamal said, "Recently appointed police officers, most of whom were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, were responsible for carrying out assaults on opposition leaders."
Kamal also questioned the rise of the number of voters in the voter list prepared by the regime from 70 million to 93 million within the last five years.
He said, "Free and fair election is not a matter of choice. The government has to uphold the rule of law in order to ensure free and fair elections."
The seminar was also attended by representatives of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Survival International, International Crisis Group, International Bangladesh Foundation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Commonwealth Secretariat, Bangladesh High Commission to UK, Hudson Institute USA and The Times Newspaper.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Bangladesh elections
Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a seminar on Bangladesh: logjam on the road to free and fair elections in Committee Room 3A, House of Lords, September 27, 2006 at 11.00, said:
With only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office for the period leading up to the elections in January 2007, the prospects for free and fair elections in Bangladesh are looking bleak.
The US National Democratic Institute has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the National Electoral Commission, all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government. After being ordered to compile a new voters’ register based on a house-to-house canvass, the EC has come up with a list containing 11 million more names than there were on the 2001 register plus the young people who reached the age of 18 during those years. But there are also millions of eligible voters who haven’t been canvassed or recorded. This is mass-produced fraud in the making, which must be exposed and corrected.
I am glad to see that the prospects for a dialogue between government and opposition on electoral reforms have brightened, and I hope they can be widened to include the manipulation of the retirement age of judges, to secure the appointment of a former BNP activist, Justice K M Hasan, as head of the caretaker government. The BNP say that he was never criticised for bias as a supreme court judge, and if he had got to the top position by a normal process of succession, perhaps his party political past would have been less controversial. But he stands at the apex of a system of manipulation and violence designed to keep the coalition in power. How much of this can be dismantled, so late in the day, and is there the will to reverse the politicisation of the EC, police, army and administration?
And that’s not all. The NDI commented on the ‘rampant and escalating violence’ of recent times, including the assassination of Shah AMS Kibria, a former Finance Minister; the attempt on the life of our High Commissioner; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, which killed 24 people; the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.
In addition to those terrorist atrocities, 800 people have been killed by the ‘Rapid Action Battalion’ forces in encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents. Last week the Home Minister Lutfozzaman Babar issued instructions to the police to wind up inquiries into the RAB killings before the caretaker government assumes office in a month’s time, making it virtually impossible for any prosecutions to be mounted against RAB officers.
And in the last month, there has been an escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators, including the notorious attack on Mr Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, causing him injuries that were so severe that he had to come here to seek advice from a neurologist.
Two MPs were also badly injured in attacks by the police - Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim. We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We also know of at least two women who suffered injuries at a demo on September 12: Mothia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun, and it may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The police must have been given orders to target opposition leaders, as Amnesty International highlighted in a recent press release. The violence has got even worse since then, and I believe it is part of a deliberate campaign to incapacitating opposition leaders and activists in advance of the election.
There have been other sinister developments in the last month. 821 recently appointed police officers, whose basic training was curtailed so that they could be deployed during the caretaker administration, have now been appointed as sub-inspectors without the in-service 18 months’ training normally required for command posts. Most of the men were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, and some had been arrested for extremist activities including a bomb outrage. These are the men who will be responsible for law and order during the campaign, and the mayhem they will let loose on opposition candidates and activists can readily be imagined.
The NGO Affairs Bureau, which controls aid agency funds granted to Bangladeshi NGOs, has been established to financially strangle any independent NGOs which might blow the whistle on malpractices and violence, while at the same time the BNP and Jamaat are busy registering bogus election observation NGOs, whose verdict can be predicted in advance. Proshika, a secular development NGO which had attracted substantial foreign aid for their programmes including micro-credit and agriculture, was raided on September 9 and 180 of its staff arrested, effectively closing it down and causing losses of tens of thousands of pounds.
At the end of last week a European Union mission returned from Dhaka, where they were looking into the advisability, feasibility and usefulness of an EU observation of the election when the time comes. If they do send observers, they will be vetted for acceptability by the Secretary of the EC, a former Jamaat activist, and it will be interesting to see whether they accept that condition.
The Commonwealth Secretariat are also sending a pre-election assessment mission, if they can get the agreement of the authorities in Dhaka. An earlier attempt to send a mission in June had to be aborted because the BNP said that Ministers were too busy to receive them.
Unfortunately, the advice given by NGOs or intergovernmental bodies on clean elections will be ignored. The last thing the coalition want is a free election which they would almost certainly lose, and in the next three months there is likely to be a crescendo of violence and malpractice designed to ensure they stay in power. But its still important that friends of Bangladesh tell the world how the election is being hijacked, and send a message of solidarity to the democrats who are under siege.
With only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office for the period leading up to the elections in January 2007, the prospects for free and fair elections in Bangladesh are looking bleak.
The US National Democratic Institute has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the National Electoral Commission, all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government. After being ordered to compile a new voters’ register based on a house-to-house canvass, the EC has come up with a list containing 11 million more names than there were on the 2001 register plus the young people who reached the age of 18 during those years. But there are also millions of eligible voters who haven’t been canvassed or recorded. This is mass-produced fraud in the making, which must be exposed and corrected.
I am glad to see that the prospects for a dialogue between government and opposition on electoral reforms have brightened, and I hope they can be widened to include the manipulation of the retirement age of judges, to secure the appointment of a former BNP activist, Justice K M Hasan, as head of the caretaker government. The BNP say that he was never criticised for bias as a supreme court judge, and if he had got to the top position by a normal process of succession, perhaps his party political past would have been less controversial. But he stands at the apex of a system of manipulation and violence designed to keep the coalition in power. How much of this can be dismantled, so late in the day, and is there the will to reverse the politicisation of the EC, police, army and administration?
And that’s not all. The NDI commented on the ‘rampant and escalating violence’ of recent times, including the assassination of Shah AMS Kibria, a former Finance Minister; the attempt on the life of our High Commissioner; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, which killed 24 people; the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.
In addition to those terrorist atrocities, 800 people have been killed by the ‘Rapid Action Battalion’ forces in encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents. Last week the Home Minister Lutfozzaman Babar issued instructions to the police to wind up inquiries into the RAB killings before the caretaker government assumes office in a month’s time, making it virtually impossible for any prosecutions to be mounted against RAB officers.
And in the last month, there has been an escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators, including the notorious attack on Mr Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, causing him injuries that were so severe that he had to come here to seek advice from a neurologist.
Two MPs were also badly injured in attacks by the police - Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim. We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We also know of at least two women who suffered injuries at a demo on September 12: Mothia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun, and it may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The police must have been given orders to target opposition leaders, as Amnesty International highlighted in a recent press release. The violence has got even worse since then, and I believe it is part of a deliberate campaign to incapacitating opposition leaders and activists in advance of the election.
There have been other sinister developments in the last month. 821 recently appointed police officers, whose basic training was curtailed so that they could be deployed during the caretaker administration, have now been appointed as sub-inspectors without the in-service 18 months’ training normally required for command posts. Most of the men were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, and some had been arrested for extremist activities including a bomb outrage. These are the men who will be responsible for law and order during the campaign, and the mayhem they will let loose on opposition candidates and activists can readily be imagined.
The NGO Affairs Bureau, which controls aid agency funds granted to Bangladeshi NGOs, has been established to financially strangle any independent NGOs which might blow the whistle on malpractices and violence, while at the same time the BNP and Jamaat are busy registering bogus election observation NGOs, whose verdict can be predicted in advance. Proshika, a secular development NGO which had attracted substantial foreign aid for their programmes including micro-credit and agriculture, was raided on September 9 and 180 of its staff arrested, effectively closing it down and causing losses of tens of thousands of pounds.
At the end of last week a European Union mission returned from Dhaka, where they were looking into the advisability, feasibility and usefulness of an EU observation of the election when the time comes. If they do send observers, they will be vetted for acceptability by the Secretary of the EC, a former Jamaat activist, and it will be interesting to see whether they accept that condition.
The Commonwealth Secretariat are also sending a pre-election assessment mission, if they can get the agreement of the authorities in Dhaka. An earlier attempt to send a mission in June had to be aborted because the BNP said that Ministers were too busy to receive them.
Unfortunately, the advice given by NGOs or intergovernmental bodies on clean elections will be ignored. The last thing the coalition want is a free election which they would almost certainly lose, and in the next three months there is likely to be a crescendo of violence and malpractice designed to ensure they stay in power. But its still important that friends of Bangladesh tell the world how the election is being hijacked, and send a message of solidarity to the democrats who are under siege.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Letter in today's SCMP
South China Morning Post
Monday, September 25, 2006
BN(O) limbo
In February, British Consul-General Stephen Bradley cryptically explained to readers of the South China Morning Post that "an anomaly that amounts to a piece of unfinished business" had resulted in 600 ethnic Indian holders of British National (Overseas) passports in Hong Kong being wrongly denied full British citizenship ("Indians in HK win the right to British passports", February 10). Home Office ministers subsequently made commitments to Parliament that extra resources were being allocated to this task, and that the average processing time for reconsiderations would take about five weeks.
Months after the matter has been officially clarified, why are so many wrongly refused applicants still waiting in limbo for their British citizenship to be granted? We were advised on September 14 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that close to half of the reconsideration requests submitted between February and July were awaiting a decision. Of the decisions that were finalised in the same period, nearly 7 per cent of the citizenship certificates received in Hong Kong have had to be returned to Britain because they contained errors.
It is high time that Mr Bradley and his team finished this business. It is unfair and unreasonable to delay attempts by ethnic minorities to acquire full British citizenship. Some of these applicants have been patiently waiting for more than nine years. They are not, and should not be treated as, second-class citizens deserving second-class treatment.
LORD AVEBURY, House of Lords, and TAMEEM A. EBRAHIM, London
Monday, September 25, 2006
BN(O) limbo
In February, British Consul-General Stephen Bradley cryptically explained to readers of the South China Morning Post that "an anomaly that amounts to a piece of unfinished business" had resulted in 600 ethnic Indian holders of British National (Overseas) passports in Hong Kong being wrongly denied full British citizenship ("Indians in HK win the right to British passports", February 10). Home Office ministers subsequently made commitments to Parliament that extra resources were being allocated to this task, and that the average processing time for reconsiderations would take about five weeks.
Months after the matter has been officially clarified, why are so many wrongly refused applicants still waiting in limbo for their British citizenship to be granted? We were advised on September 14 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that close to half of the reconsideration requests submitted between February and July were awaiting a decision. Of the decisions that were finalised in the same period, nearly 7 per cent of the citizenship certificates received in Hong Kong have had to be returned to Britain because they contained errors.
It is high time that Mr Bradley and his team finished this business. It is unfair and unreasonable to delay attempts by ethnic minorities to acquire full British citizenship. Some of these applicants have been patiently waiting for more than nine years. They are not, and should not be treated as, second-class citizens deserving second-class treatment.
LORD AVEBURY, House of Lords, and TAMEEM A. EBRAHIM, London
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Eventful day
Cynthia and Richard Cashore, our friends from Williamsburg, left us this morning after a whirlwind visit of two days, en route to Florence. Then Lindsay set off for Nottingham with a carload of JW's stuff, and his bicycle strapped on the back with a special harness. Half way up on the M1, harness and bicycle fell off. She stopped and rang the police, who said later that both had disappeared without trace. Then she ran into a monster traffic jam. And when she finally reached Nottingham she took ages to find JW's new house. So a journey that should have taken two and a half hours lasted seven hours, and she didn't set off on the return journey until 22.00!
Had a good talk with Maurice on Skype this evening, and also this afternoon with Victoria, who is getting into practice so that she can use Skype from Laos, Cambodia etc during the winter.
There are two more bouts of ping-pong to record, 1-1 and then 2-1 to me on Wednesday, so the final tally before he went back to Nottingham was 50-49 to JW.
Had a good talk with Maurice on Skype this evening, and also this afternoon with Victoria, who is getting into practice so that she can use Skype from Laos, Cambodia etc during the winter.
There are two more bouts of ping-pong to record, 1-1 and then 2-1 to me on Wednesday, so the final tally before he went back to Nottingham was 50-49 to JW.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Bangladesh: letter to FCO Minister Dr Kim Howells MP
From Lord Avebury P0620093
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 20, 2006
Dear Kim,
I expect you have seen the report of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) pre-election delegation to Bangladesh’s 2006/07 Parliamentary elections, published September 11 and available on their website www.ndi.org. Among their many disturbing findings, they reported evidence that the police react violently and disproportionately to public demonstrations, and as you know, there have been a number of examples only this month, highlighted by Amnesty International in their Press Release ASA 13/008/2006, Bangladesh: Police target outspoken opposition leaders and beat them violently (web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGASA130082006).
Among those badly injured in these attacks was Mr Saber Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, who has had to come to the UK for medical treatment. I met him this evening and he gave me an account of the circumstances in which he was attacked. The police barricaded the Mirpur Road near the Road No 27 intersection in Dhanmondi, to prevent demonstrators getting to the Election Commission Secretariat. Saber Chowdhury was in a small group of about twenty people separate from the crowd, and some 50 m from the barrier. They were doing nothing that would have justified the use of force, and some police were standing near them, taking no action. Then some other police in riot gear crossed from the other side of the barrier, and ran towards the group with batons drawn. The others in the group tried to protect Mr Chowdhury and when the police attacked, they suffered 17 head injuries and some broken bones. He was crouching in the middle of the group when one of the police shouted ‘We’ve got him’, and the TV picked that up. He received a kick in the abdomen, went down, and was repeatedly kicked and hit as he lay on the ground, until he lost consciousness. He was taken to hospital, then flown to Singapore, and finally to London, where he is being treated in King’s College Hospital for neurological problems arising from the blows to his head including abnormalities of vision which may, unhappily, be permanent.
There were many eye witnesses of the event, and sworn statements are available. However, there has been no investigation of the criminal misconduct be the police, and their repeated use of violence on other occasions since then indicates that their behaviour was not that of a few rogue officers, but a concerted policy ordered at very senior level. Will you please ask the Bangladesh government whether there is to be any inquiry into violence by the police? Will you also ask whether there is to be any investigation of the remarkable statistics of RAB operations, in which some 800 people have been killed, but not a single person has been injured or captured?
Over the last 4 ½ years, some 27,000 police have been recruited, entirely from the ranks of BNP and Jamaat activists, and the training period has been reduced to six months. When the caretaker government takes office at the end of October, the force will consist entirely of men loyal to the present coalition government, and the mayhem they will inflict on opposition candidates and supporters can readily be imagined.
The Saturday before last, there were mass arrests of some 180 staff employed by Proshika, an NGO which campaigns for human rights and women’s rights in particular, good governance, and democracy, allegedly on suspicion of their intention to take part in the 14-party opposition demonstration at the Prime Minister’s office on September 12. They apparently had no intention of participating in that event, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been committing any offence.
As you will recall, the Supreme Court ordered the Chief Electoral Commissioner (CEC) to prepare a new register, based on a house to house canvass. The CEC finally pretended to comply with this order, but there have been widespread protests from people who have not been enumerated. Nevertheless there are 11 million more names on the register than the number of eligible voters as calculated from the 2001 census. In one polling district, where there were 1,600 registered voters in 2001, there are 2,100 on the new register, but 1,200 of the people on the 2001 register have not been recorded.
In 2001 there was a computerised register, and the NDI have recommended that the register should be computerised now, and placed on the web so that voters could check that their names had been properly recorded. The reaction of the CEC to this and oter recommendations by the NDI was that Bangladesh is a sovereign country. The current Secretary of the EC is a Jamaat loyalist, who has just said that the EC are planning to regulate the work of both foreign and domestic observers, vetting them for acceptability and prohibiting them from making any public statements.
Apart from the CEC, other members of the EC are Hassan Mansuur, formerly Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, whose Minister is Begum Zia herself; Zakaria, a loyalist who served Ershad and Zia ur Rahman before taking office under the BNP, and a judge with known BNP sympathies. The game plan of the coalition may be to sack the CEC just before the caretaker government takes over, leaving the three remaining commissioners to run the Commission for the benefit of the coalition, but appearing to have made a concession to the universal criticism of the present CEC.
Another sinister development is that the NGO Affairs Bureau controls funds entering Bangladesh provided by aid agencies. This will enable the government to strangle financially any independent NGOs which might have been able to play a useful role in countering or exposing malpractices during the campaign
The NDI report makes a number of recommendations, providing others with a useful checklist for their own assessments of the state of readiness of Bangladesh for a free and fair electoral process. It will be interesting to compare their assessment and recommendations with those of the EU Mission, which has no doubt been informed by the EU Heads of Mission in Dhaka. I checked with the Commonwealth Secretariat today, and they are still planning an assessment mission, though no date for it has yet been agreed. Will you ask the Bangladesh government if they intend to respond to each of the NDI recommendations, or is the statement by the CEC the last word on the matter?
It certainly doesn’t appear that there is the remotest chance of the government, political parties and civil society working together to address deficiencies and build confidence in the electoral process as the NDI suggests. If this is to happen, it must be the government that takes the lead, by dealing promptly and effectively with the criticisms of the Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Commissioner in particular; by giving firm orders to the police on the use of minimum force at political demonstrations; by reining in RAB, and by creating the necessary conditions for dialogue with the opposition. We must take a firm line on these matters, if Bangladesh is not to become a failed state,
Dr Kim Howells MP,
Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
London SW1A 2AH.
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 20, 2006
Dear Kim,
I expect you have seen the report of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) pre-election delegation to Bangladesh’s 2006/07 Parliamentary elections, published September 11 and available on their website www.ndi.org. Among their many disturbing findings, they reported evidence that the police react violently and disproportionately to public demonstrations, and as you know, there have been a number of examples only this month, highlighted by Amnesty International in their Press Release ASA 13/008/2006, Bangladesh: Police target outspoken opposition leaders and beat them violently (web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGASA130082006).
Among those badly injured in these attacks was Mr Saber Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, who has had to come to the UK for medical treatment. I met him this evening and he gave me an account of the circumstances in which he was attacked. The police barricaded the Mirpur Road near the Road No 27 intersection in Dhanmondi, to prevent demonstrators getting to the Election Commission Secretariat. Saber Chowdhury was in a small group of about twenty people separate from the crowd, and some 50 m from the barrier. They were doing nothing that would have justified the use of force, and some police were standing near them, taking no action. Then some other police in riot gear crossed from the other side of the barrier, and ran towards the group with batons drawn. The others in the group tried to protect Mr Chowdhury and when the police attacked, they suffered 17 head injuries and some broken bones. He was crouching in the middle of the group when one of the police shouted ‘We’ve got him’, and the TV picked that up. He received a kick in the abdomen, went down, and was repeatedly kicked and hit as he lay on the ground, until he lost consciousness. He was taken to hospital, then flown to Singapore, and finally to London, where he is being treated in King’s College Hospital for neurological problems arising from the blows to his head including abnormalities of vision which may, unhappily, be permanent.
There were many eye witnesses of the event, and sworn statements are available. However, there has been no investigation of the criminal misconduct be the police, and their repeated use of violence on other occasions since then indicates that their behaviour was not that of a few rogue officers, but a concerted policy ordered at very senior level. Will you please ask the Bangladesh government whether there is to be any inquiry into violence by the police? Will you also ask whether there is to be any investigation of the remarkable statistics of RAB operations, in which some 800 people have been killed, but not a single person has been injured or captured?
Over the last 4 ½ years, some 27,000 police have been recruited, entirely from the ranks of BNP and Jamaat activists, and the training period has been reduced to six months. When the caretaker government takes office at the end of October, the force will consist entirely of men loyal to the present coalition government, and the mayhem they will inflict on opposition candidates and supporters can readily be imagined.
The Saturday before last, there were mass arrests of some 180 staff employed by Proshika, an NGO which campaigns for human rights and women’s rights in particular, good governance, and democracy, allegedly on suspicion of their intention to take part in the 14-party opposition demonstration at the Prime Minister’s office on September 12. They apparently had no intention of participating in that event, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been committing any offence.
As you will recall, the Supreme Court ordered the Chief Electoral Commissioner (CEC) to prepare a new register, based on a house to house canvass. The CEC finally pretended to comply with this order, but there have been widespread protests from people who have not been enumerated. Nevertheless there are 11 million more names on the register than the number of eligible voters as calculated from the 2001 census. In one polling district, where there were 1,600 registered voters in 2001, there are 2,100 on the new register, but 1,200 of the people on the 2001 register have not been recorded.
In 2001 there was a computerised register, and the NDI have recommended that the register should be computerised now, and placed on the web so that voters could check that their names had been properly recorded. The reaction of the CEC to this and oter recommendations by the NDI was that Bangladesh is a sovereign country. The current Secretary of the EC is a Jamaat loyalist, who has just said that the EC are planning to regulate the work of both foreign and domestic observers, vetting them for acceptability and prohibiting them from making any public statements.
Apart from the CEC, other members of the EC are Hassan Mansuur, formerly Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, whose Minister is Begum Zia herself; Zakaria, a loyalist who served Ershad and Zia ur Rahman before taking office under the BNP, and a judge with known BNP sympathies. The game plan of the coalition may be to sack the CEC just before the caretaker government takes over, leaving the three remaining commissioners to run the Commission for the benefit of the coalition, but appearing to have made a concession to the universal criticism of the present CEC.
Another sinister development is that the NGO Affairs Bureau controls funds entering Bangladesh provided by aid agencies. This will enable the government to strangle financially any independent NGOs which might have been able to play a useful role in countering or exposing malpractices during the campaign
The NDI report makes a number of recommendations, providing others with a useful checklist for their own assessments of the state of readiness of Bangladesh for a free and fair electoral process. It will be interesting to compare their assessment and recommendations with those of the EU Mission, which has no doubt been informed by the EU Heads of Mission in Dhaka. I checked with the Commonwealth Secretariat today, and they are still planning an assessment mission, though no date for it has yet been agreed. Will you ask the Bangladesh government if they intend to respond to each of the NDI recommendations, or is the statement by the CEC the last word on the matter?
It certainly doesn’t appear that there is the remotest chance of the government, political parties and civil society working together to address deficiencies and build confidence in the electoral process as the NDI suggests. If this is to happen, it must be the government that takes the lead, by dealing promptly and effectively with the criticisms of the Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Commissioner in particular; by giving firm orders to the police on the use of minimum force at political demonstrations; by reining in RAB, and by creating the necessary conditions for dialogue with the opposition. We must take a firm line on these matters, if Bangladesh is not to become a failed state,
Dr Kim Howells MP,
Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
London SW1A 2AH.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Paperwork
Having been away for the best part of two weeks, I'm trying to catch up on paperwork.
Wrote to an offical at the Department of Health about further inquiries they had promised to make about the effect of the Data Protection Act on access to personal information by chaplains looking after prisoners who are transferred to special hospitals.
Wrote to the Cyprus High Commissioner about a case in the High Court between a Brit who bought some property in the Turkish-occupied part of northern Cyprus, and the former owner of the property, who was forced to leave when the Turks invaded in 1975.
Wrote to Patricia Scotland at the Home Office about the Prison Service's failure to establish effective arrangements for security vetting of prison chaplains. They keep losing the forms containing confidential information, and sometimes manage to spin the process out for over a year. Its a wonder they get anyone to volunteer.
Telephoned Monterrico Matals in Lima, Peru, to ask whether they were ready to accept a visit by a representatives of the Peru Support Group, of which I'm President. The three executives I asked to speak to were all in meetings, and none of them have returned my call.
Had time for ping-pong, 2-1 to JW, and yesterday it was 1-1. Cumulative score since my operation 48-46 to JW. He goes back to Nottingham to start his final year on Thursday, so we have probably come to an end of the competition until next spring.
Wrote to an offical at the Department of Health about further inquiries they had promised to make about the effect of the Data Protection Act on access to personal information by chaplains looking after prisoners who are transferred to special hospitals.
Wrote to the Cyprus High Commissioner about a case in the High Court between a Brit who bought some property in the Turkish-occupied part of northern Cyprus, and the former owner of the property, who was forced to leave when the Turks invaded in 1975.
Wrote to Patricia Scotland at the Home Office about the Prison Service's failure to establish effective arrangements for security vetting of prison chaplains. They keep losing the forms containing confidential information, and sometimes manage to spin the process out for over a year. Its a wonder they get anyone to volunteer.
Telephoned Monterrico Matals in Lima, Peru, to ask whether they were ready to accept a visit by a representatives of the Peru Support Group, of which I'm President. The three executives I asked to speak to were all in meetings, and none of them have returned my call.
Had time for ping-pong, 2-1 to JW, and yesterday it was 1-1. Cumulative score since my operation 48-46 to JW. He goes back to Nottingham to start his final year on Thursday, so we have probably come to an end of the competition until next spring.
Silbury Hill
English Heritage are to carry out excavations at Silbury Hill to find the 'invert level' of the Atkinson tunnel, beginning October 9 and talong about a week. The main work, decided following Skanska's seismological survey, will be carried out in 2007, see www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.5390. For general information on Silbury Hill see www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.4011
The photograph below was taken on May 17, 2004, when I was interviewed on the successful application to the Inspector against the designation of Silbury Hill as 'Open Access' under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. As the nominal owner of Silbury Hill, I was the only person who could lodge the appeal, though it was effectively supported by EH.
The photograph below was taken on May 17, 2004, when I was interviewed on the successful application to the Inspector against the designation of Silbury Hill as 'Open Access' under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. As the nominal owner of Silbury Hill, I was the only person who could lodge the appeal, though it was effectively supported by EH.
Springhill, Sunday September 18
On Sunday we celebrated the 15th anniversary of the opening of the first Buddha Grove to be established in a British prison. There were more guests, officers and inmates there than at any of the previous anniversaries. The Ven Khemadhammo told the story of Angulimala, after whom the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy was named, and also the history of the first Buddha Grove, built by the prisoners themselves, and mainly by two of them who were doing ten and fifteen years respectively. The example of Angulimala, a murderer who became a monk, and that of the two prisoners who led the construction of the Buddha Grove, showed that people could and did change.
At the ceremony, the Ven Khemadhammo, Head of the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy, launched Let Go, a new organisation whose purpose is to help Buddhist ex-prisoners when they return to outside life. Bobby Cummines, the Chief Executive of Unlock, supported this initiative, and spoke eloquently of the debt he owed to the Ven Khemadhammo for helping him personally to change during his 13-year sentence. He also referred very kindly to my correspondence with him at that time.
For more information about Angulimala, see www.angulimala.org.uk/
For Unlock, see unlock.org.uk/main.aspx
At the ceremony, the Ven Khemadhammo, Head of the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy, launched Let Go, a new organisation whose purpose is to help Buddhist ex-prisoners when they return to outside life. Bobby Cummines, the Chief Executive of Unlock, supported this initiative, and spoke eloquently of the debt he owed to the Ven Khemadhammo for helping him personally to change during his 13-year sentence. He also referred very kindly to my correspondence with him at that time.
For more information about Angulimala, see www.angulimala.org.uk/
For Unlock, see unlock.org.uk/main.aspx
Monday, September 18, 2006
Blickling Hall
Blickling Hall, 'a sumptuous confection of local red brick and Ketton limestone, Dutch gables and turrets', was built between 1619 and 1626 by Sir Henry Hobart, a successful lawyer who invested in property (like other Norfolk men such as Sir Thomas Coke of Holkham and John Heydon of Baconsthorpe). His descendants, Earls of Buckinghamshire in the 18th century had 'Auctor pretiosa facit' as their family motto, the same as the Lubbocks. I wonder if this was a coincidence? The second Earl had only daughters, one of whom married the 6th Marquess of Lothian, so that Blickling came into the Kerr family. The 11th Marquess left the house and contents to the National Trust, which only left his descendants with a house in Scotland and Melbourne Hall. I lived in Melbourne in the 50s, and have fond memories of Marie Kerr, also of Howard and his wife Christina, who was Maurice's godmother.
Another daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire married William Assheton Harbord, 2nd Lord Suffield, whose father was patron of one of the livings to which the Rev Henry Willis was appointed. He was thefather of Richard Lubbock (willis), who emigrated to Augusta, GA, in 1791. Most of the American Lubbocks are descended from him.
Another daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire married William Assheton Harbord, 2nd Lord Suffield, whose father was patron of one of the livings to which the Rev Henry Willis was appointed. He was thefather of Richard Lubbock (willis), who emigrated to Augusta, GA, in 1791. Most of the American Lubbocks are descended from him.
Eritrea
Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a meeting on Eritrea at the Human Rights Center of Amnesty International at 17-25 New Inn Yard, London SE2A 3EA on September 18, 2006 at 17.00 said:
It is a matter of great regret to me that we need to be holding this meeting to discuss political and religious persecution in Eritrea, and the prolonged incommunicado detention of the victims. I was chair of the Eritrea Support Group in the 70s and 80s, when the people of Eritrea under Isaias Afewerke, now the President, were fighting their heroic war of liberation against the occupation by Ethiopia, and I remember well a visit to the front line just after the Ethiopian 6th offensive, when I met Comrade Isaias. I observed the successful referendum on independence in 1993, and I visited the front line during a lull in the war against renewed aggression by Ethiopia at the beginning of 2000. I have consistently upheld the findings of the international commission that was appointed with the agreement of both countries to solve their border dispute, and Eritrea’s right to insist that the international community carry that settlement into effect. The unnecessary war over the boundary led to the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides, the internal displacement on the Eritrean side of further tens of thousands, and the deportation from Ethiopia of 66,000 people of Eritrean origin.
With that background, I am extremely unhappy to acknowledge that the people of Eritrea have lost many of the freedoms they fought so hard to achieve. But the facts have to be faced. As Amnesty International have reminded us in the statement issued today, this is the fifth anniversary of the incommunicado detention of 11 former members of Parliament, 10 journalists, and hundreds of others, whose only crime was to call for democratic reforms. The MPs have been accused of treason, and the journalists labelled as spies and mercenaries, but none of the detainees have been charged in court, and none have had access to lawyers. In many cases, relatives don’t even know where they are detained.
In the case of the 11 MPs, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ rights found three years ago that Eritrea was in breach of four major Articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. They urged the government of Eritrea to release the detainees and grant them compensation. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, at its most recent meeting in May, condemned the incommunicado detention of the Members, and appealed to the African Union to do everything possible to secure their release. The case will be considered again at the IPU Assembly meeting in Geneva on October 16.
The persecution of worshippers belonging to non-registered churches, and particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is of great concern. In 2005 I wrote four times to the Eritrean Ambassador about particular cases including 20 conscientious objectors to military service, who had been detained since September 24, 1994 without charge or trial, though the maximum sentence under the law for refusing military service is three years. I mentioned reports by Amnesty International that the authorities had taken to arresting the fathers, mothers and other relatives of young men reaching the age of 18 who failed to report for military service and holding them as hostages, the allegation that some detainees were held in metal shipping containers, and the lack of an inquiry into the alleged killing of over a dozen conscription evaders at the Adi Abeto army camp on November 54, 2004.
I also took up the severe restrictions on freedom of expression, highlighted by the US State Department in their report on Eritrea. The Committee to Protect Journalists had described Eritrea as the worst country in Africa for detaining journalists, and they have just now repeated their critique of what they describe as Eritrea’s ‘brutal crackdown on the independent press’. CPJ did manage to speak to a presidential spokesman, Yemane Gebremeskel, who said the 13 journalists detained without trial since they were arrested in 2001 were involved in ‘acts against the national interests of the state’, but gave no indication of what the evidence was. Unconfirmed reports posted on websites indicate that the journalists had been moved to a secret prison, where three of them had died. The CPJ have been no more successful than I have in getting answers from Eritrean diplomats or government officials in Asmara, and the same goes for the Foreign Office. Ministers tell me that they continue to monitor human rights and religious freedoms in Eritrea closely, and raise their concerns with the Eritrean government whenever possible. But they appear to rely, as we do, on the reports of Amnesty International, the CPJ, and the international representatives of persecuted religious minorities.
I certainly think the Eritreans would get more active support from democratic states than they do in their just cause against Ethiopia if they took positive steps in the direction of freedom and the rule of law, in the name of which presumably they were fighting over the thirty years of the liberation war. Replacing the oppression of Addis Ababa with the home-grown dictatorship of the former hero of the independence struggle was not the objective for which a generation sacrificed their lives. Nor is it consistent with the statement by the Commission for Africa, which nobody has challenged, that ‘the issue of goof governance’’’ lies at the core of Africa’s problems’. There is huge potential in Eritrea, based on the ingenuity and tenacity of its people, and even more so that the rest of Africa, it could have today its best opportunity for change for decades. But it reminds me of the question about the number of psychiatrists needed to change a light bulb. The answer is one, but he has to be willing to change. I hope that Isaias is willing, and that he will listen to the message being sent by the true friends of Eritrea meeting tonight.
It is a matter of great regret to me that we need to be holding this meeting to discuss political and religious persecution in Eritrea, and the prolonged incommunicado detention of the victims. I was chair of the Eritrea Support Group in the 70s and 80s, when the people of Eritrea under Isaias Afewerke, now the President, were fighting their heroic war of liberation against the occupation by Ethiopia, and I remember well a visit to the front line just after the Ethiopian 6th offensive, when I met Comrade Isaias. I observed the successful referendum on independence in 1993, and I visited the front line during a lull in the war against renewed aggression by Ethiopia at the beginning of 2000. I have consistently upheld the findings of the international commission that was appointed with the agreement of both countries to solve their border dispute, and Eritrea’s right to insist that the international community carry that settlement into effect. The unnecessary war over the boundary led to the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides, the internal displacement on the Eritrean side of further tens of thousands, and the deportation from Ethiopia of 66,000 people of Eritrean origin.
With that background, I am extremely unhappy to acknowledge that the people of Eritrea have lost many of the freedoms they fought so hard to achieve. But the facts have to be faced. As Amnesty International have reminded us in the statement issued today, this is the fifth anniversary of the incommunicado detention of 11 former members of Parliament, 10 journalists, and hundreds of others, whose only crime was to call for democratic reforms. The MPs have been accused of treason, and the journalists labelled as spies and mercenaries, but none of the detainees have been charged in court, and none have had access to lawyers. In many cases, relatives don’t even know where they are detained.
In the case of the 11 MPs, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ rights found three years ago that Eritrea was in breach of four major Articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. They urged the government of Eritrea to release the detainees and grant them compensation. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, at its most recent meeting in May, condemned the incommunicado detention of the Members, and appealed to the African Union to do everything possible to secure their release. The case will be considered again at the IPU Assembly meeting in Geneva on October 16.
The persecution of worshippers belonging to non-registered churches, and particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is of great concern. In 2005 I wrote four times to the Eritrean Ambassador about particular cases including 20 conscientious objectors to military service, who had been detained since September 24, 1994 without charge or trial, though the maximum sentence under the law for refusing military service is three years. I mentioned reports by Amnesty International that the authorities had taken to arresting the fathers, mothers and other relatives of young men reaching the age of 18 who failed to report for military service and holding them as hostages, the allegation that some detainees were held in metal shipping containers, and the lack of an inquiry into the alleged killing of over a dozen conscription evaders at the Adi Abeto army camp on November 54, 2004.
I also took up the severe restrictions on freedom of expression, highlighted by the US State Department in their report on Eritrea. The Committee to Protect Journalists had described Eritrea as the worst country in Africa for detaining journalists, and they have just now repeated their critique of what they describe as Eritrea’s ‘brutal crackdown on the independent press’. CPJ did manage to speak to a presidential spokesman, Yemane Gebremeskel, who said the 13 journalists detained without trial since they were arrested in 2001 were involved in ‘acts against the national interests of the state’, but gave no indication of what the evidence was. Unconfirmed reports posted on websites indicate that the journalists had been moved to a secret prison, where three of them had died. The CPJ have been no more successful than I have in getting answers from Eritrean diplomats or government officials in Asmara, and the same goes for the Foreign Office. Ministers tell me that they continue to monitor human rights and religious freedoms in Eritrea closely, and raise their concerns with the Eritrean government whenever possible. But they appear to rely, as we do, on the reports of Amnesty International, the CPJ, and the international representatives of persecuted religious minorities.
I certainly think the Eritreans would get more active support from democratic states than they do in their just cause against Ethiopia if they took positive steps in the direction of freedom and the rule of law, in the name of which presumably they were fighting over the thirty years of the liberation war. Replacing the oppression of Addis Ababa with the home-grown dictatorship of the former hero of the independence struggle was not the objective for which a generation sacrificed their lives. Nor is it consistent with the statement by the Commission for Africa, which nobody has challenged, that ‘the issue of goof governance’’’ lies at the core of Africa’s problems’. There is huge potential in Eritrea, based on the ingenuity and tenacity of its people, and even more so that the rest of Africa, it could have today its best opportunity for change for decades. But it reminds me of the question about the number of psychiatrists needed to change a light bulb. The answer is one, but he has to be willing to change. I hope that Isaias is willing, and that he will listen to the message being sent by the true friends of Eritrea meeting tonight.
Heydon
The Heydon memorial, in St Mary's Church, Baconsthorpe, commemorates Sir William Heydon and his wife, facing south rather than east, probably because the memorial was originally in the chancel before being moved to the window at the east end of the south aisle. Sir William was a later generation than Sir Henry, my 14G granfather, whose daughter Bridget married Sir William Paston in 1495
Failure of the Government's 'Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy'
From Lord Avebury P0615091
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 14, 2006
Dear Tony,
Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.
The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?
On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?
I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?
In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?
From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.
I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.
You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.
Tony McNulty Esq MP,
Home Ofice,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 14, 2006
Dear Tony,
Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.
The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?
On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?
I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?
In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?
From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.
I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.
You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.
Tony McNulty Esq MP,
Home Ofice,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
Detention of breastfeeding mothers
Letter to the Minister about the detention of breastfeeding mothers. I would have posted the Minister's letter to which this is the reply, but Blogger doesn't accept .tif files generated by IrfanView.
From Lord Avebury P0616094
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 16, 2006
Dear Mr Byrne,
Thank you for your letter of September 8, about the case of Mrs Gulten Pirbudak, which I have just seen on returning from holiday.
First, I would hope that whenever you receive a letter from a Peer or an MP, the case in question would need to be examined, and I don’t accept that it was reasonable for this process to take four months.
Second, in Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Communications House, she says that she repeatedly told the officer that she was breast feeding her son, and after a while this became obvious because her breasts were leaking, a fact that she says was remarked on by officers. You say the IND has no record of Mrs Pirbudak advising them that she was breast feeding her son, and I would be grateful if you would obtain whatever record was made of the interview and let me have a copy. If indeed it doesn’t refer to any statement by Mrs Pirbudak that she was breast feeding, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that she didn’t make such a statement, but it could be that the officer failed to write it down. Did you ask for the interpreter to be questioned on the matter, and if not, will you now do so?
Third, you say it isn’t ‘standard procedure’ to allow individuals to communicate with family members while they are at Communications House, but this presumably means that exceptionally calls are allowed, and Mrs Pirbudak says that another detainee was in fact allowed to use the telephone. She says she begged to use the telephone and explained the situation with the carer, without success. Please let me know under what circumstances detainees are permitted to make calls, and whether the IND have any instructions about mothers who need to make arrangements for their children to be looked after?
There are further discrepancies between Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Yarl’s Wood, and the recital in your letter, which need to be resolved. She doesn’t refer to the doctor, though it could be that the ‘female officer’ who gave her some pills on Friday evening was in fact the doctor. It could be also that the clean shirt and change of underwear she got on Friday evening also arose from the doctor’s instructions. Could you please let me know whether officers at Yarl’s Wood have any instructions about issuing changer of clothing, and whether they are required to give particular attention to the needs of lactating mothers?
You say that removal directions had been cancelled prior to Mrs Pirbudak’s detention, but the record on the computer hadn’t been updated, a matter of concern as you acknowledge. Thus in both the cases I have drawn to your attention, errors were made, resulting in needless anguish and suffering. I pointed out that both these cases came via one solicitor, and it was reasonable to assume that there were others. I have now asked you three times if you will look to see whether there are other cases of a similar nature – most recently in my emailed letter of August 27 – and I now repeat this request for a fourth time.
You tell me that IND staff are currently updating guidance and are reviewing all aspects of the process for effecting family removals. Will you ask the IND to consult on the draft updated guidance, particularly asking for the comments of the Children’s Commissioner before the new guidance is finalised?
Yours sincerely,
Liam Byrne Esq MP,
Home Office.
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
From Lord Avebury P0616094
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 16, 2006
Dear Mr Byrne,
Thank you for your letter of September 8, about the case of Mrs Gulten Pirbudak, which I have just seen on returning from holiday.
First, I would hope that whenever you receive a letter from a Peer or an MP, the case in question would need to be examined, and I don’t accept that it was reasonable for this process to take four months.
Second, in Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Communications House, she says that she repeatedly told the officer that she was breast feeding her son, and after a while this became obvious because her breasts were leaking, a fact that she says was remarked on by officers. You say the IND has no record of Mrs Pirbudak advising them that she was breast feeding her son, and I would be grateful if you would obtain whatever record was made of the interview and let me have a copy. If indeed it doesn’t refer to any statement by Mrs Pirbudak that she was breast feeding, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that she didn’t make such a statement, but it could be that the officer failed to write it down. Did you ask for the interpreter to be questioned on the matter, and if not, will you now do so?
Third, you say it isn’t ‘standard procedure’ to allow individuals to communicate with family members while they are at Communications House, but this presumably means that exceptionally calls are allowed, and Mrs Pirbudak says that another detainee was in fact allowed to use the telephone. She says she begged to use the telephone and explained the situation with the carer, without success. Please let me know under what circumstances detainees are permitted to make calls, and whether the IND have any instructions about mothers who need to make arrangements for their children to be looked after?
There are further discrepancies between Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Yarl’s Wood, and the recital in your letter, which need to be resolved. She doesn’t refer to the doctor, though it could be that the ‘female officer’ who gave her some pills on Friday evening was in fact the doctor. It could be also that the clean shirt and change of underwear she got on Friday evening also arose from the doctor’s instructions. Could you please let me know whether officers at Yarl’s Wood have any instructions about issuing changer of clothing, and whether they are required to give particular attention to the needs of lactating mothers?
You say that removal directions had been cancelled prior to Mrs Pirbudak’s detention, but the record on the computer hadn’t been updated, a matter of concern as you acknowledge. Thus in both the cases I have drawn to your attention, errors were made, resulting in needless anguish and suffering. I pointed out that both these cases came via one solicitor, and it was reasonable to assume that there were others. I have now asked you three times if you will look to see whether there are other cases of a similar nature – most recently in my emailed letter of August 27 – and I now repeat this request for a fourth time.
You tell me that IND staff are currently updating guidance and are reviewing all aspects of the process for effecting family removals. Will you ask the IND to consult on the draft updated guidance, particularly asking for the comments of the Children’s Commissioner before the new guidance is finalised?
Yours sincerely,
Liam Byrne Esq MP,
Home Office.
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
Saturday, September 16, 2006
The surrender of the Castle Acre Priory
The priory of Castle Acre was surrendered voluntarily to Henry VIII November 22, 1537, and granted by the king to the Duke of Norfolk on December 22, 1537. The monks were given a redundancy payment of £2 and quarterly pensions, the first time this had happened during the Reformation. (G W Bernard, The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church, Yale University Press, 2005, 448) Together with the monastery of Lewes, of which it was the dependent cell, it was the first of the large houses to surrender (ibid, 558)
Friday, September 15, 2006
Paston Church
'Not a single fiftenth century Paston tomb survives', Helen Castor tells us (Blood and Roses, Faber and Faber, 2004,302). But the 17th century tomb of Katherine Knevet makes up for the absence of previous generations, starting up from her elaborate monument on which thereis an inscription by John Donne:
'To the Reviving Memory of the virtuous and right worthy Lady, Dame Katherine Paston, daughter unto the Right Worp'll Sir Thomas Knevitt, Knt, and wife to Sir Edmund Paston, Knight, with whom she lived in wedlock 26 years and had yssue two sonnes yet surviving, vizt. William and Thomas. She departed this life the 10th day of March, 1622, and lyeth here intombed expecting a Joyful Resurrection'
And on the pedestal:
'Can a man be silent and not Praise find
For her that lived the praise of womankind
Whose outward frame was sent this world to gess
What shapes our soules shall weare in happiness
Whose vertue did all ill so overswaye
That her whole life was a communion daye.
And on another panel:
'Not that she needeth monument of stone
For her well-gotten fame to rest uppon
But this was reared to testifie' etc
Several generations earlier - in 1495 - 'the Paston-Heydon feud was decisively consigned to history' as Helen Castor says, when Sir William Paston IV (d February 16, 1544/45) married Bridget Heydon. Their daughter Eleanor Paston (12G grandmother) married Thomas Manners ist Earl of Rutland, and at least her tomb still exists, see earlier posting.
'To the Reviving Memory of the virtuous and right worthy Lady, Dame Katherine Paston, daughter unto the Right Worp'll Sir Thomas Knevitt, Knt, and wife to Sir Edmund Paston, Knight, with whom she lived in wedlock 26 years and had yssue two sonnes yet surviving, vizt. William and Thomas. She departed this life the 10th day of March, 1622, and lyeth here intombed expecting a Joyful Resurrection'
And on the pedestal:
'Can a man be silent and not Praise find
For her that lived the praise of womankind
Whose outward frame was sent this world to gess
What shapes our soules shall weare in happiness
Whose vertue did all ill so overswaye
That her whole life was a communion daye.
And on another panel:
'Not that she needeth monument of stone
For her well-gotten fame to rest uppon
But this was reared to testifie' etc
Several generations earlier - in 1495 - 'the Paston-Heydon feud was decisively consigned to history' as Helen Castor says, when Sir William Paston IV (d February 16, 1544/45) married Bridget Heydon. Their daughter Eleanor Paston (12G grandmother) married Thomas Manners ist Earl of Rutland, and at least her tomb still exists, see earlier posting.
Lynn and the German Hanse
Dr Paul Richards, whose knowledge of Lynn's history is encyclopaedic (see 800 glorious years of King's Lynn history, a Lynn News special publication to mark the 800th anniversary of the town's royal charter, 2005)very kindly showed us some of the town's wonders including the Kontor, a combined warehouse and dormitory constructed by the merchants of the German Hanse in 1475 following the Treaty of Utrecht, February 28, 1474. Edward IV was prepared to make concessions to the Hanse because he intended to invade France and needed to settle disputes with the Hanse arising from his failure to honour the promises he had made to secure their help in regaining the kingdom in 1471. (see Charles Ross, Edward IV, Yale University Press, 1997, 211-212. For the importance of Lynn in trade with the Hanse see T H Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Failure of the Government's 'Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy'
From Lord Avebury P0615091
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 14, 2006
Dear Tony,
Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.
The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?
On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?
I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?
In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?
From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.
I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.
You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.
Tony McNulty Esq MP,
Home Ofice,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0603084
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
August 2, 2006
Dear Mr Reid,
Thank you for your letter of July 19 about your intended programme of Home Office reforms, based on six key priorities.
I note that you intend to concentrate especially on drugs-related crime, and I wonder if that includes alcohol-related crime? As you will no doubt recall, the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report for the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy of September 2003 estimated that the crime/public disorder costs of alcohol misuse then amounted to £7.3 billion a year, but since, as that Report pointed out, alcohol is widely associated with socialising, relaxing and pleasure, we are reluctant to adopt measures that would interfere with excess consumption. If people drink too much, and then behave in ways that are dangerous to themselves and others, we pick up the pieces half-heartedly, but deliberately avoid tackling the underlying problem. Thus your reform programme mentions alcohol twice: first, in the context of a visit by Patricia Scotland to an existing Drug and Alcohol Treatment Service, and second, where reference is made to the continuation of work with other Departments. There is also a photograph of you with a police officer in Soho, which implies an interest in the phenomenon of late night binge drinking, but nothing more.
The lack of any effective intention to reduce alcohol harm is exemplified by the Government’s failure to update the estimates in the Strategy Unit report, including not only the crime and disorder figure, but the whole of the £20 billion worth of harm to society. If you were genuinely embarking on a programme to reduce this appalling figure, the first thing you would do would be to provide periodic statistics so that you and the public could measure the success of the policies you adopt. In respect of the Licensing Act, it was agreed after a lot of pressure that a ‘robust methodology’ (Patricia Scotland in a letter to me of August 24, 2005) would be used to assess the effects of the Act in five areas where extensions of hours were granted, matched with five areas in which the hours were unchanged. I could find no mention of this assessment on the Home Office website and would be obliged if you could let me have the URL. As a ‘valued partner of the Home Office’ I would also be grateful for replies to my two previous letters on alcohol-related harm, dated June 25 and July 1, copies of which are attached for ease of reference.
Yours sincerely,
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0601071
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
July 1, 2006
Further to my letter of June 25 about alcohol harm, may I please draw your attention to the enclosed BBC item on the report published yesterday by the Information Centre for health and social care (IC), and on the comments made by several experts on the figures.
These alarming figures relate to a period before the Licensing Act came into operation. But it is generally acknowledged that the reason for the increase in harm caused by alcohol is that, as Professor Ian Gilmore says, the stuff is too inexpensive and readily available.
A genuine alcohol harm reduction strategy would not be concerned predominantly with picking up the pieces afterwards, but reducing the consumption of a substance that your own research showed was already causing £20 billion worth of harm in 2000. This report shows that alcohol consumption per capita increased further between 2000 and 2002 (Table 2.17), and that the mean alcohol consumption by secondary school children increased slightly between 2000 and 2005 (Table 3.2). Alcohol-related deaths increased between 2000 and 2004 (Fig 5.2), and hospital admissions where there was either a primary or secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05 (Table 5.2)
The amount of alcohol-related harm must certainly have increased markedly since the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report, which produced the figure of £20 billion related to 2000. Why is the Government not willing to produce an annual update of that analysis? Is it because you want to conceal the extent of the strategy’s failure?
The IC report shows that the problem is even worse in some other EU member states. We should seek to align the duties on alcohol upwards throughout the EU, to reduce the harm suffered by all European citizens, and to ensure that differences in alcohol pricing between member states are not an encouragement to smugglers.
An effective strategy for combating alcohol-related harm would mean better coordination between the Home Office, DCMS, ODPM, DH, DEFRA, the FCO and the Treasury. This strategy would not deal only with binge drinking, just because it’s the most noticeable aspect of the problem, but would set out to reduce all dangerous drinking, which affects many more than the highly visible young people vomiting, fighting and passing out in city centres.
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
--------------------------------------------------------------------
BBC NEWS
Record levels of alcohol illness
Alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on millions of lives each year
Drink-related hospital admissions in England have reached record levels, NHS statistics show.
Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease
more than doubled in a decade, reaching 35,400
in 2004/5. Alcoholic liver disease deaths
increased by 37%.
Admissions for alcoholic poisoning increased to
21,700 from 13,600 over the same 10-year
period.
The Information Centre report also highlights
England's binge and underage drinking problem.
Nearly one in four secondary school children aged 11-15 reported that they had drunk alcohol in the past week when surveyed in 2005.
The average amount of alcohol consumed by this age group doubled between 1990 and 2000 and currently remains at 10.4 units (or about 10 small glasses of wine or five pints of beer) per week.
Young adults are the most likely to binge drink - a third of men and a quarter of women aged 16-24 said they had drunk more than double the recommended number of units on one day of the previous week, typically Saturday, when surveyed in 2004.
Rising consumption
In comparison, older adults, aged 45-64, are more likely to drink smaller amounts regularly, on five or more days of the week.
The report also looked at the alcohol consumption levels of the European Union countries, with the UK's four home nations ranked as a group.
Although high, the UK's consumption levels ranked middle against other European Union countries in 2001. Luxembourg topped the table, with its residents drinking an average 17.54 litres per capita per year compared to the UK's 10.39 litres.
But unlike other countries in Europe, the UK's alcohol consumption is still rising. There are serious concerns about the impact of this across the UK.
Professor Denise Lievesley, Chief Executive of The Information Centre, said it was important not to underestimate the effect of alcohol on health.
"By presenting this data we hope that health professionals will be better equipped to put their work in context and to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol misuse," she said.
Anne Jenkins of Alcohol Concern said the statistics presented "compelling evidence of the devastating impact of excess drinking on the nation's health."
She added: "In 2004, the government laid out a national strategy for tackling alcohol misuse. These statistics underline the need for a major push for the government to meet the targets it set itself."
Regulation
Professor Ian Gilmore of the Royal College of Physicians said: "Whilst today's figures are shocking they are not really surprising."
He questioned whether current measures to reduce alcohol misuse were enough.
"There is going to be a need for regulation. The drivers of alcohol-related health problems are price and availability."
He said alcohol was too inexpensive and readily available in supermarkets around the clock.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "We know that alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on millions of lives each year. And that is why we are working with the drinks industry, police and health professionals to increase awareness of the dangers of excessive drinking and make the sensible drinking message easier to understand.
"We will also be launching a joint campaign with the Home Office later this year to promote sensible drinking amongst young people."
Shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the figures were deeply concerning. "The government's failure to adequately address binge drinking, and ill-thought though 24 hour licensing policy will do nothing to help the situation," he added
"The government must start to prioritise public health and not cut back on rolling out programmes because of deficit problems."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/5132856.stm
Published: 2006/06/30 16:31:07 GMT
© BBC MMVI
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0625061
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
June 25, 2006
If The Observer reported you accurately on drinkers who commit violent crimes being forces to undergo rehab treatment, where are you going to find the places?
You say there is no evidence that the extension of drinking hours led to an increase in drink-related crime, and I would be grateful if you could let me know what evidence you have looked at. Since the Government has decided to compare the incidence of crimes of violence against the person, and ambulance call-outs, on or in the vicinity of licenced premises, over a period of a year before and after the Act came into force, you haven’t yet got the figures.
Surely the way to deal with alcohol-related crime is to persuade drinkers to reduce their consumption of alcohol, rather than to pick up the pieces after they have committed offences. Can you point to any measures the Government have taken to reduce drinking?
Presumably the Government take no responsibility for the behaviour of British football fans, who cause trouble everywhere they go in Europe. But they have got into the habit of drinking too much in England, so they do the same when in Stuttgart or wherever. That is the most visible product of successive governments’ failure to develop a genuine and effective alcohol harm reduction strategy, and there are plenty of others, adding up to the £20 billion damage caused in the year 2000, according to the Cabinet Office.
Please don’t tinker with compulsory rehab, but do something positive to combat alcohol harm. Ask Gordon Brown to raise alcohol duties and thus reduce drinking, and campaign for other EU member states to do the same.
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drink offenders may face compulsory rehab
Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday June 25, 2006
The Observer
Drinkers who commit violent crimes could be forced to undergo rehab treatment, the Home Secretary suggested yesterday amid warnings from senior police officers about the impact of relaxing drinking laws.
John Reid said he was considering whether the fast-tracking of drug addicts into detox to stop them reoffending could be extended to those who offended when drunk. On a visit to police on night duty in Soho he was told by Commander Chris Allison, the Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman on licensing, that he still had 'concerns' about the relaxation in licensing laws.
Reid said there was no evidence that the change had increased drink-related crime as some had predicted, but that he was considering ways of tackling the causes of violence, including drinking. He endorsed schemes to stop addicts reoffending to get money for drugs, and added: 'We don't at the moment have anything similar to that on alcohol but if the drugs intervention proves worthwhile, then we can look at the other driver of violent crime.'
About 40 per cent of crime is thought to be alcohol-related: the arrest of 122 British fans in Germany yesterday drew attention back to British drinking.
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
September 14, 2006
Dear Tony,
Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.
The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?
On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?
I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?
In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?
From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.
I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.
You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.
Tony McNulty Esq MP,
Home Ofice,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0603084
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
August 2, 2006
Dear Mr Reid,
Thank you for your letter of July 19 about your intended programme of Home Office reforms, based on six key priorities.
I note that you intend to concentrate especially on drugs-related crime, and I wonder if that includes alcohol-related crime? As you will no doubt recall, the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report for the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy of September 2003 estimated that the crime/public disorder costs of alcohol misuse then amounted to £7.3 billion a year, but since, as that Report pointed out, alcohol is widely associated with socialising, relaxing and pleasure, we are reluctant to adopt measures that would interfere with excess consumption. If people drink too much, and then behave in ways that are dangerous to themselves and others, we pick up the pieces half-heartedly, but deliberately avoid tackling the underlying problem. Thus your reform programme mentions alcohol twice: first, in the context of a visit by Patricia Scotland to an existing Drug and Alcohol Treatment Service, and second, where reference is made to the continuation of work with other Departments. There is also a photograph of you with a police officer in Soho, which implies an interest in the phenomenon of late night binge drinking, but nothing more.
The lack of any effective intention to reduce alcohol harm is exemplified by the Government’s failure to update the estimates in the Strategy Unit report, including not only the crime and disorder figure, but the whole of the £20 billion worth of harm to society. If you were genuinely embarking on a programme to reduce this appalling figure, the first thing you would do would be to provide periodic statistics so that you and the public could measure the success of the policies you adopt. In respect of the Licensing Act, it was agreed after a lot of pressure that a ‘robust methodology’ (Patricia Scotland in a letter to me of August 24, 2005) would be used to assess the effects of the Act in five areas where extensions of hours were granted, matched with five areas in which the hours were unchanged. I could find no mention of this assessment on the Home Office website and would be obliged if you could let me have the URL. As a ‘valued partner of the Home Office’ I would also be grateful for replies to my two previous letters on alcohol-related harm, dated June 25 and July 1, copies of which are attached for ease of reference.
Yours sincerely,
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0601071
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
July 1, 2006
Further to my letter of June 25 about alcohol harm, may I please draw your attention to the enclosed BBC item on the report published yesterday by the Information Centre for health and social care (IC), and on the comments made by several experts on the figures.
These alarming figures relate to a period before the Licensing Act came into operation. But it is generally acknowledged that the reason for the increase in harm caused by alcohol is that, as Professor Ian Gilmore says, the stuff is too inexpensive and readily available.
A genuine alcohol harm reduction strategy would not be concerned predominantly with picking up the pieces afterwards, but reducing the consumption of a substance that your own research showed was already causing £20 billion worth of harm in 2000. This report shows that alcohol consumption per capita increased further between 2000 and 2002 (Table 2.17), and that the mean alcohol consumption by secondary school children increased slightly between 2000 and 2005 (Table 3.2). Alcohol-related deaths increased between 2000 and 2004 (Fig 5.2), and hospital admissions where there was either a primary or secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05 (Table 5.2)
The amount of alcohol-related harm must certainly have increased markedly since the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report, which produced the figure of £20 billion related to 2000. Why is the Government not willing to produce an annual update of that analysis? Is it because you want to conceal the extent of the strategy’s failure?
The IC report shows that the problem is even worse in some other EU member states. We should seek to align the duties on alcohol upwards throughout the EU, to reduce the harm suffered by all European citizens, and to ensure that differences in alcohol pricing between member states are not an encouragement to smugglers.
An effective strategy for combating alcohol-related harm would mean better coordination between the Home Office, DCMS, ODPM, DH, DEFRA, the FCO and the Treasury. This strategy would not deal only with binge drinking, just because it’s the most noticeable aspect of the problem, but would set out to reduce all dangerous drinking, which affects many more than the highly visible young people vomiting, fighting and passing out in city centres.
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
--------------------------------------------------------------------
BBC NEWS
Record levels of alcohol illness
Alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on millions of lives each year
Drink-related hospital admissions in England have reached record levels, NHS statistics show.
Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease
more than doubled in a decade, reaching 35,400
in 2004/5. Alcoholic liver disease deaths
increased by 37%.
Admissions for alcoholic poisoning increased to
21,700 from 13,600 over the same 10-year
period.
The Information Centre report also highlights
England's binge and underage drinking problem.
Nearly one in four secondary school children aged 11-15 reported that they had drunk alcohol in the past week when surveyed in 2005.
The average amount of alcohol consumed by this age group doubled between 1990 and 2000 and currently remains at 10.4 units (or about 10 small glasses of wine or five pints of beer) per week.
Young adults are the most likely to binge drink - a third of men and a quarter of women aged 16-24 said they had drunk more than double the recommended number of units on one day of the previous week, typically Saturday, when surveyed in 2004.
Rising consumption
In comparison, older adults, aged 45-64, are more likely to drink smaller amounts regularly, on five or more days of the week.
The report also looked at the alcohol consumption levels of the European Union countries, with the UK's four home nations ranked as a group.
Although high, the UK's consumption levels ranked middle against other European Union countries in 2001. Luxembourg topped the table, with its residents drinking an average 17.54 litres per capita per year compared to the UK's 10.39 litres.
But unlike other countries in Europe, the UK's alcohol consumption is still rising. There are serious concerns about the impact of this across the UK.
Professor Denise Lievesley, Chief Executive of The Information Centre, said it was important not to underestimate the effect of alcohol on health.
"By presenting this data we hope that health professionals will be better equipped to put their work in context and to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol misuse," she said.
Anne Jenkins of Alcohol Concern said the statistics presented "compelling evidence of the devastating impact of excess drinking on the nation's health."
She added: "In 2004, the government laid out a national strategy for tackling alcohol misuse. These statistics underline the need for a major push for the government to meet the targets it set itself."
Regulation
Professor Ian Gilmore of the Royal College of Physicians said: "Whilst today's figures are shocking they are not really surprising."
He questioned whether current measures to reduce alcohol misuse were enough.
"There is going to be a need for regulation. The drivers of alcohol-related health problems are price and availability."
He said alcohol was too inexpensive and readily available in supermarkets around the clock.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "We know that alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on millions of lives each year. And that is why we are working with the drinks industry, police and health professionals to increase awareness of the dangers of excessive drinking and make the sensible drinking message easier to understand.
"We will also be launching a joint campaign with the Home Office later this year to promote sensible drinking amongst young people."
Shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the figures were deeply concerning. "The government's failure to adequately address binge drinking, and ill-thought though 24 hour licensing policy will do nothing to help the situation," he added
"The government must start to prioritise public health and not cut back on rolling out programmes because of deficit problems."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/5132856.stm
Published: 2006/06/30 16:31:07 GMT
© BBC MMVI
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Lord Avebury P0625061
Tel 020-7274 4617
Email ericavebury@gmail.com
June 25, 2006
If The Observer reported you accurately on drinkers who commit violent crimes being forces to undergo rehab treatment, where are you going to find the places?
You say there is no evidence that the extension of drinking hours led to an increase in drink-related crime, and I would be grateful if you could let me know what evidence you have looked at. Since the Government has decided to compare the incidence of crimes of violence against the person, and ambulance call-outs, on or in the vicinity of licenced premises, over a period of a year before and after the Act came into force, you haven’t yet got the figures.
Surely the way to deal with alcohol-related crime is to persuade drinkers to reduce their consumption of alcohol, rather than to pick up the pieces after they have committed offences. Can you point to any measures the Government have taken to reduce drinking?
Presumably the Government take no responsibility for the behaviour of British football fans, who cause trouble everywhere they go in Europe. But they have got into the habit of drinking too much in England, so they do the same when in Stuttgart or wherever. That is the most visible product of successive governments’ failure to develop a genuine and effective alcohol harm reduction strategy, and there are plenty of others, adding up to the £20 billion damage caused in the year 2000, according to the Cabinet Office.
Please don’t tinker with compulsory rehab, but do something positive to combat alcohol harm. Ask Gordon Brown to raise alcohol duties and thus reduce drinking, and campaign for other EU member states to do the same.
The Rt Hon John Reid MP,
Home Office,
2 Marsham Street,
London SW1P 4DF
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Drink offenders may face compulsory rehab
Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday June 25, 2006
The Observer
Drinkers who commit violent crimes could be forced to undergo rehab treatment, the Home Secretary suggested yesterday amid warnings from senior police officers about the impact of relaxing drinking laws.
John Reid said he was considering whether the fast-tracking of drug addicts into detox to stop them reoffending could be extended to those who offended when drunk. On a visit to police on night duty in Soho he was told by Commander Chris Allison, the Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman on licensing, that he still had 'concerns' about the relaxation in licensing laws.
Reid said there was no evidence that the change had increased drink-related crime as some had predicted, but that he was considering ways of tackling the causes of violence, including drinking. He endorsed schemes to stop addicts reoffending to get money for drugs, and added: 'We don't at the moment have anything similar to that on alcohol but if the drugs intervention proves worthwhile, then we can look at the other driver of violent crime.'
About 40 per cent of crime is thought to be alcohol-related: the arrest of 122 British fans in Germany yesterday drew attention back to British drinking.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Thursday, on the Eye
Barbara and Hattie's last evening with us, we went on the Eye, and then to an adaptation of Brecht's Galileo at the Gielgud Theatre. Most of the time it was hard to disentangle what was Brecht and what was the adaptation, but in the first Act there were references to Giordano Bruno as an example of what happened to anybody who said the universe was heliocentric. As I remembered it, the heresies for which Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 were more concerned with his espousal of Hermes Trismegistus and the works of Ficino
Hattie went off to Venice yesterday, and Barbara returned to Charlottesville, after spending a few days with us. They realised how much there was to do, and we hope they will come back soon to fill in the blanks, they were such delightful guests.
Ping pong yesterday 2-0 to me, so I'm only one behind JW at 45-44.
Hattie went off to Venice yesterday, and Barbara returned to Charlottesville, after spending a few days with us. They realised how much there was to do, and we hope they will come back soon to fill in the blanks, they were such delightful guests.
Ping pong yesterday 2-0 to me, so I'm only one behind JW at 45-44.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Man's inhumanity to woman
Had a letter today from the mother of an 18-year old waman who died at Styal Prison in 2003 after taking an overdose, though she was on suicide watch. Staff didn't call medical attention in time, and the inquest found that she had died as a result of a series of failures of the duty of care. When the young woman, S, swallowed an overdose of prescription tablets, it was a clear 'cry for help' yet S was one of six women who died within a few months at Styal. The Chief Inspector or Prisons made nyumerous recommendations, not all of which had been implemented by the end of 2005. But even if the Prison Service had acted promptly and effectively on this report of the Chief Inspector, it wouldn't solve the underlying problem, that it would be impossible for the staff to carry out their duties effectively and humanely with 80,000 people in the system., half of them mentally ill or drug and alcohol abusers. S had psychiatric problems and had been a drug abuser, though at the time of her death it was said that she had been clear for 8 months. Prison is utterly the wrong environment for a vulnerable young woman with these problems, but the Home Office doesn't have any programme for more residential places where they could be given proper treatment. Probably that would be very expensive, but the courts will go on sending them to prison repeatedly if there is no alternative. In the long run this will be even more costly - and inhumane.
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