What a damn shame. One private firm that engages in thuggery is shunned by the British government: The private security firm G4S said tonight that it was “extremely disappointed” to lose a multimillion-pound government contract to forcibly deport foreign nationals. A decision to award the lucrative contract to a rival firm was announced today, two…
Showing all posts tagged Britain
It’s not easy backing death squads in Iraq
This is what we have created in Iraq by our own actions; turning a blind eye to torture, murder and abuse. In the name of “liberation”, of course: One: During the foreboding months of 2005, one police unit struck more fear into Iraqis than the entire occupying US army. They were known as the Wolf…
Are we allowed to violently assault asylum seekers? Just asking
Maybe one day, Western governments will ask themselves whether private companies should be tasked (and paid) to do the dirty work of removing refugees. Out of sight and out of mind: The government’s deportation policy has been thrown into confusion after it emerged that the Home Office banned private security firms from forcing detainees on…
Colombo is being watched and we won’t stop
At least some Western countries want to hold Sri Lanka to account. Australia remains silent, gutless as ever: David Cameron made clear today that given the serious allegations and alleged evidence that continues to surface in relation to war crimes during the closing weeks of the civil war in Sri Lanka an independent investigation was…
UK shows us civilised folk how to enforce nakedness
Iran tortures people and makes them suffer in detention. We in the West are nice and pure, believing in the rule of law. Oh, but wait a minute: The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian…
Finding Serco staff involved in unaccountable abuse; all in a day’s work
The reach of private company Serco is global and its human rights record remains abysmal. Yet it continues receiving lucrative contracts. That should stop: Prison campaigners last night called for a review of a North-East secure unit after revelations that 21 children had suffered injuries while being restrained. The injuries were sustained by children at…
What Wikileaks should cause; rage at our criminal leaders
Wow. The kind of column that most Western newspapers would never run. But here’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in yesterday’s Independent on the justified and burning rage caused by Wikileaks: Bad boy Julian Assange, the pretty, blondish founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks was hugely admired when he uncovered oppressors and political chicanery in places like China…
Saddam taught them well (and we knew)
Let’s face it. Australia and Britain are also likely to have blood on their hands, handing over suspected terrorists (aka insurgents) to Iraqi forces: Fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks. The 400,000 field reports published by the whistleblowing website…
Serco and G4S are peas from the same pod
In Australian political life, only the Greens are hammering away against the privatisation of detention centres: Australia’s immigration detention system is failing, and this makes the need for transparency greater than ever, according to Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Senator Hanson-Young, Greens spokesperson on Immigration, says she is concerned at reports that immigration service provider SERCO may…
Does Obama really want to know that his army kill innocents?
What a government with accountability would do is determine what its soldiers may have done in war and investigate. Not stonewall or ignore or deny. “Our boys”, from Britain, America and Australia, have committed countless abuses in the last ten years in the “war on terror”: The UN has called on Barack Obama to order…