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NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD URGES ISRAEL TO PERMIT RICHARD FALK TO ENTER ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, April 23, 2008Contact:
David Gespass, NLG International Committee, thepasss@aol.com, 205-323-5966 or 205-566-2530
Jeanne Mirer , NLG International Committee, mirerfam@earthlink.net, 212-473-8700
Abdeen Jabara, NLG International Committee, amjabara@aol.com
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD URGES ISRAEL TO PERMIT RICHARD FALK TO ENTER ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
New U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Barred from Entry
New York. The National Lawyers Guild calls on Israel to permit Richard Falk, an eminent and widely-respected law professor and scholar, to enter Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories it seized forty years ago and has held illegally ever since. Professor Falk was recently appointed as the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Israel has barred entry to Professor Falk, claiming he cannot be fair because of his prior condemnation of persistent and pervasive human rights violations carried out by Israel in the Occupied Territories. In fact, Professor Falk made no claims any different from those made by John Dugard, the man he was to replace, in several reports on conditions in the Occupied Territories.
The National Lawyers Guild is familiar with the Israeli practice of avoiding criticisms of its practices. The Guild has sent several delegations to the Middle East to investigate conditions there. The Israeli government has refused to meet with the Guild’s delegates because of their claimed hostility to the State of Israel. In fact, Guild delegations, like Professor Falk, are hostile only to violations of human rights and international law.
Over the years Israel has sought to deny admission to a host of academics, activists, and political figures, former President Jimmy Carter being the most recent. Others are subjected to long processing delays and humiliating body searches. A 1977 National Lawyers Guild Delegation to the Middle East saw four of its members singled out for strip searches. Many others had research and written materials confiscated either upon entry or leaving the country.
Professor Falk is not unlike many others, including Mr. Dugard, who have criticized the horrendous Israeli human rights record that has continued for more than forty years. It is this ongoing and escalating practice of human rights violations which Israel carries out with the blessing of the United States despite condemnation by the rest of the world that Israel must confront. It cannot do so, and should not be permitted to do so, by excluding its critics.
Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
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NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO, WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES
UPDATE:http://nlg.org/news/statements/CCR stat ... ements/CCR
Letter from the Center for Constitutional Rights supporting the Guild's position. (PDF)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 9, 2008
Contact:
Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, marjorie@tjsl.edu; 619-374-6923
Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, director@nlg.org; 212-679-5100, x11
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO, WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES
New York. In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo said the Department of Justice would construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war.
The federal maiming statute, for example, makes it a crime for someone "with the intent to torture, maim, or disfigure" to "cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person." It further prohibits individuals from "throwing or pouring upon another person any scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance" with like intent.
Yoo also narrowed the definition of torture so the victim must experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result; Yoo's definition contravenes the definition in the Convention Against Torture, a treaty the US has ratified which is thus part of the US law under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause. Yoo said self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding the Torture Convention's absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances, even in wartime. This memo and another Yoo wrote with Jay Bybee in August 2002 provided the basis for the Administration's torture of prisoners.
"John Yoo's complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of prisoners constitutes a war crime under the US War Crimes Act," said National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.
Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country's premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.
The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 28, 2008
Contact:
Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, director@nlg.org, 212-679-5100, ext. 11
Zachary Wolfe, NLG Amicus Committee, zwolfe@gwu.edu, 202-994-3053
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD DECRIES THIRD CIRCUIT DECISION IN
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL V. MARTIN HORN APPEAL
Culture of Police Corruption and Judicial Bias Infected Trial and Appellate Proceedings
New York. The National Lawyers Guild is gravely disappointed by the decision of the three-judge panel of the Appellate Court in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal v. Martin Horn. In a 118-page written decision, two of the three judges denied the defense’s Batson v. Kentucky claim, namely that the prosecution was motivated by racial discrimination when it struck blacks from the panel of prospective jurors. Dissenting from the opinion, Justice Thomas Ambro questioned why the court chose this case to announce a new procedural requirement and wrote that he would have ordered a hearing and required the prosecution to explain its challenges of black jury panelists. “It is merely to take the next step in deciding whether race was impermissibly considered during jury selection in his case,” he wrote.
The court also ruled that the death penalty could not be reinstated unless a new penalty hearing is held within 180 days.
Executive Director Heidi Boghosian said, “Yesterday’s decision is a somber reminder that the criminal justice system has been unable to eradicate the continuing impacts of racism. Despite evidence that racial bias influenced all stages of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s trial and appeals, an award-winning journalist has been denied the chance to prove the extent that overt racial animus colored his day in court.”
From its inception, a climate of racial animosity within the Philadelphia criminal justice system has plagued the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. After a 1993 police corruption scandal in which 300 convictions were thrown out as improper, the Philadelphia District Attorney revealed that juries had routinely been selected with an eye toward excluding blacks. Numerous brutality suits and an FBI probe resulting in the conviction of thirty police officers for corruption greatly damaged the Police Department’s image. The 1985 police department bombing of the MOVE Organization’s West Philadelphia residence and the burning down of two city blocks, resulted in additional federal investigations into brutality and corruption. Earlier, in 1979, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against former police commissioner and then Mayor Frank Rizzo for police brutality, citing nearly 300 fatal police shootings of civilians in a three-year period.
Amidst this culture of police corruption and brutality toward African-Americans, in 1982, Judge Albert Sabo, who issued Abu-Jamal’s death sentence and presided over his appeal, was overheard in chambers to have said “I’m going to help them fry the nigger.” Sabo was widely known as the “hanging judge” for sentencing 33 people to death (all but two of them persons of color), more than twice as many as any other sitting judge in the United States.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild. Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
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NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD WELCOMES DISCUSSION OF RACISM OCCASIONED BY SENATOR BARACK OBAMA'S HISTORIC SPEECH
For Immediate Release, March 24, 2008NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD WELCOMES DISCUSSION OF RACISM OCCASIONED BY SENATOR BARACK OBAMA'S HISTORIC SPEECH
Contacts:
Marjorie Cohn, NLG president, marjorie@tjsl.edu; 619-374-6923
Heidi Boghosian, NLG executive director, director@nlg.org; 212-679-5100 x. 11
In response to highly-publicized sound-bites from sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Sen. Barack Obama delivered an historic speech on racism, titled "A More Perfect Union."
Rev. Wright had strongly criticized the U.S. government for putting Indians on reservations, Japanese in internment camps, and Africans into slavery. He said, "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." Rev. Wright did not justify the 9/11 attacks; he explained they were blowback for a vicious U.S. foreign policy.
Rev. Wright's words were not unlike those uttered by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. about the Vietnam War in 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place."
In his speech, Sen. Obama credited the civil rights movement for the progress we have made in overcoming racism. "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," he said, citing segregated, inferior schools that continue to exist 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
Yet last term, the Supreme Court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, limited the ability of public school districts to address segregation by prohibiting the use of race-conscious measures as a tool to promote integration. Chief Justice John Roberts based his plurality opinion on the myth of "colorblindness," equating the exclusion and segregation of children by race with the inclusion of different races in the same schools. He ignored the decades of racial discrimination caused in part by segregated schools. Roberts ended his opinion with the flip comment, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Vast disparities with respect to race continue to pervade every aspect of American life. Latinos and African Americans are disproportionately concentrated in poor residential areas with sub-standard housing conditions, limited employment opportunities, inadequate access to health care, under-resourced schools and high exposure to crime and violence.
Racial profiling from the initial police stop to the charging process and trial through the sentencing procedure has been widely documented. Mandatory sentences of life imprisonment are imposed disproportionately on minority defendants. Non-whites are much more likely than whites to be charged with and sentenced to death for substantially similar crimes.
In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote, "Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Sen. Barack Obama has injected this critical discussion into the national discourse as a means of tackling the problems of inferior schools, health care, jobs and economic opportunities for all races. He said, "It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper."
The National Lawyers Guild welcomes this long overdue opportunity for a national dialogue on the pernicious racism and class oppression that the U.S. government continues to perpetuate.
Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 11, 2008
CONTACT:
Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, libertad48@san.rr.com, 858-204-3565
Heidi Boghosian, NLG Exec. Director, director@nlg.org, 212-679-5100, ext. 11
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON CONGRESS TO OVERRIDE BUSH VETO OF INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION BILL
New York. The National Lawyers Guild calls on Congress to override George W. Bush’s veto—in direct contravention of the advice of military commanders—of the Intelligence Authorization Bill that contained a provision limiting the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to engage in the torture technique known as waterboarding. The practice is currently prohibited by both military and law enforcement agencies. The bill would have limited U.S. interrogators to techniques permitted in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation. Senator John McCain voted against the bill, reversing his previous position on torture.
Torture is illegal under domestic and international law. The U.S. Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and the United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which makes it part of U.S. law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. That convention prohibits torture even in wartime. Torture is also unlawful under the U.S. Torture Statute (18 USC 2340) and the U.S. War Crimes Act (18 USC 2441).
The Guild calls Congress to override Bush’s veto, and to submit reports detailing the extent to which the United States is engaging in the practice of torture. Eight years ago, in his June 26, 2003 statement on UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, George Bush said that the United States is leading by example in prohibiting torture: “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.”
Under the Convention Against Torture, all State parties are obliged to submit regular reports on their compliance with the treaty mandates. "The Committee Against Torture has criticized the United States for failing to comply with its legal obligations under the convention. By vetoing the anti-torture bill, Bush is signaling his clear intent to continue violating the law," said Guild President Marjorie Cohn.
Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
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