This weekend, the streets of Tehran erupted in violent protests against Friday’s presidential election results declaring incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinejad the winner. Here’s a firsthand look at Iran’s worst unrest in 10 years:
For more photographs of the protests, click here.
Samah Choudhury contributed to this post
It’s not only the war zone in northern Sri Lanka where people are at risk. On May 7, Stephen Sunthararaj was abducted in Colombo, the capital, by five men dressed in military uniform and carrying pistols. At the time, he was traveling in his lawyer’s car with his wife and two children, when two men on motorcycles pulled up in front of the car to stop it. As the car stopped, a white van pulled up next to it and the five men emerged and forced Sunthararaj into the van which then drove off. There’s been no word from Sunthararaj since then. The police haven’t started any investigation and the Sri Lankan authorities haven’t provided any information as to his status or whereabouts.
Sunthararaj’s enforced disappearance may be due to his work as a Project Manager at the Centre for Human Rights and Development, a Sri Lankan human rights organization. At the time of his abduction, he had just been released hours earlier from police custody. He had been arrested by the army on February 12 in Colombo and later transferred to the police. He was never charged with any offense.
Sri Lanka’s security forces have been responsible for tens of thousands of enforced disappearances over the past thirty years. Last year, the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances expressed concern about the high number of recent cases of enforced disappearances reported from Sri Lanka.
Please write to President Rajapaksa (Presidential Secretariat, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka, email: priu@presidentsoffice.lk or modadm@sltnet.lk) on behalf of Sunthararaj. Ask that the government carry out an independent investigation into his enforced disappearance and prosecute those responsible. If he is found to be in custody, he should either be promptly charged with a recognizable criminal offense or else immediately released; while he is detained, he should be treated humanely and given access to his family, lawyer and medical care. Ask that the government ensure that human rights defenders are able to carry out their work without fear of harassment or intimidation. Thanks.
Today, Holland starts a one-year trial of arming police with Tasers. This sounds like a familiar story, but here’s the twist: The Dutch police don’t want the them. According to Dutch Public TV, the Federal Police issued a statement documenting their objections to using a weapon so rife with problems.
And why should they want to use this weapon? The controversy surrounding Tasers is well-documented. Between July 2001 and August 2008, Amnesty International studied more than 334 deaths that occurred after police-use of Tasers. So many of the deaths were needless. Police frequently used Tasers inappropriately, especially considering that in well over 90% of the cases, the person on whom the Taser was used did not even have a weapon. Medical examiners have cited Taser as a primary or contributory cause of death in at least 50 cases. And disturbingly, in far too many cases where people died after being shot with police Tasers, the cause of death is listed as a homicide.
The police in Holland got it right. While Dutch police and concerned citizens try to fend off the American Taser export, perhaps we can import something from Holland where policing is concerned: common sense.
Another unarmed teen has died after being Tased by police.
Brett Elder, 15, from Bay City, Michigan died after police used Tasers to break up a fight between him and another teenager.
Disturbingly, Brett is already the second teenager to die after being Tased this year. In January, an unarmed 17-year-old boy in Virginia died after police responding to a minor street incident shocked him in his apartment. As of today, the total number of deaths after the use of Taser guns in the U.S. has surpassed 334 since June 2001 and it keeps rising. Perhaps what’s most unsettling is that in over 90% of those cases, the person shocked didn’t even have a weapon.
The news of these teen deaths comes soon after the unveiling of a new Taser weapon, the Taser Shockwave, capable of shocking entire crowds at once. Clearly, this money could have been better spent conducting rigorous safety testing and research into why so many have died after being shocked with a Taser. Amnesty International has called on U.S. law enforcement departments to cease using the weapons, pending further safety studies, or to strictly limit their use to a weapon of last resort.
Tegucigalpa is quite a dangerous place these days for transgender people. As if being marginalized by the larger society and frequently harrassed by police weren’t enough, the transgender community in the Honduran capital now faces a much graver threat. With two transgender women killed in the area in the last three months, and another who is an HIV/AIDS activist severely beaten by police (who had initially tried to rob her), fear is surely in the air. The HIV/AIDS activist, who was beaten in late December, was so afraid that she specifically asked Amnesty not to make her name public. It’s high time the Honduran government fulfills its obligation to protect all its citizens. You can take action online, or write your own letter.
Has anyone ever faced violence or harrassment because of sexual orientation or gender identity? What did you do about it? Did anyone help you?
Today is Oscar Grant’s funeral. He is the latest in a long string of unarmed black men to be killed by police. The night he died, Oscar, 22, was out celebrating New Year’s Eve. At around 2 a.m., he and friends were pulled off of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train- Northern California’s subway system- by police officers. He was unarmed and cooperative, even telling friends to calmly oblige the police. That did nothing to save Oscar Grant. Within minutes, without cause, a police officer would shoot him in the back, execution-style.
Watch the video yourself. You’ll see Oscar sitting up against a wall with several other young men, cooperating with police instruction. Eyewitnesses report that “the cops were hitting, yelling and cussing at the guys”, while dozens of people called out about the mistreatment. Oscar put his palms up, a clear indication of compliance. Then officers dragged him from the wall and pushed him onto his stomach, his face pressed to the floor.
Oscar feared for his life. Witnesses describe Oscar pleading for police not to taser him, begging, “Please, please, don’t tase me.” Instead, one police officer pressed his knee onto the back of Oscar’s neck. A second officer, Johannes Mehserle, leaned over him, reached for his gun, pointed it within about a foot of Oscar’s body and shot him in the back. The officers look at each other as Oscar writhes in pain and turns to look at the man who killed him. On video, you can see Oscar speaking to the officer. Witnesses tell us that he cried, “You shot me! I got a four-year-old daughter!” The video doesn’t show the officers immediately administering first aid to the man they shot. Instead, it appears to show police handcuffing Oscar, who wouldn’t live to see the sun rise on a new year.
I take the killing of Oscar Grant personally. Not because it happened in the area of my birthplace. Not because I’m a person of color who, like many people of color in the country, has experienced police abuse of power, first-hand. Not because I grew up in fear of the police after my father, the safest driver I know, was told by a police officer on a bogus stop, that the cop was considering shooting my dad. Not because of the fact, that despite the shield of my lawyer’s license, my heart still pounds at the sight of a police badge.
Oscar’s killing is personal because his death offends the fundamental principles of justice, every notion of dignity and the idea that through those threads, all of our lives are connected. As human beings, we are responsible for each other. His death means that we must work for his justice.
Taser International is busy promoting a new product. It’s called Taser Shockwave, meant to cast something of an electroshock net over an area. It belongs in my “You’ve Got to Be Kidding” file along with Taser International’s leopard-print MP3 player that doubles as a taser and their employment of Playboy Bunnies for promotion- but those are stories for another day.
This week, Taser International showcased their latest in potential human rights violations to your local police chief at the International Association of the Chiefs of Police annual gathering. I wish I could have been there to talk to those officers about our latest statistics. Since the summer of 2001, Amnesty International has been tracking the deaths that have occurred after police have used the taser weapon- we are at 320 and counting. In over 90% of those cases, the person shocked didn’t even have a weapon. And now Taser International wants police to have the ability to spray tasers over a crowd, hitting individuals, all at once.
Aside from taser’s questionable track record, the frightening trend in police crackdowns on dissent should make us particularly wary of the latest in taser technology. Forget disastrous preventative detentions at the RNC and tear gas at WTO protests. There is something new for protestors. Here is what Taser International has to say about it: With the push of a button at a stand-off distance of up to 100 meters, the Shockwave unit deploys multiple standard TASER® cartridges that are oriented across an area arc. Full area coverage is provided to instantaneously incapacitate multiple personnel within that region.
Development of weapons that allow police to tase en mass is not good news. This flies in the face of good law enforcement. Police shouldn’t be shocking entire crowds. Given the problems with tasers, especially among vulnerable groups like the mentally ill, police need to assess the appropriateness of taser use on particular individuals and should only elect to use the taser in dire circumstances when lesser alternatives aren’t available.
Coming off of years of crushing police responses to dissent, giving departments the technology to take down multiple people with just one pull of a trigger is a dangerous idea. I wonder what the chilling effect will be on public dissent. Would you be willing to go to a protest knowing that police on the scene were armed with Taser Shockwave? I wouldn’t bring my daughter, which means that I might have to stay home. Maybe that’s the point.