An open letter to my MP, Sadiq Khan, MP [but now see update appended below]: Dear Sadiq, Here is an appeal with which you, as a former civil rights lawyer of great distinction, will surely sympathise. As a minister in the government, you won’t be able to speak or vote openly to kill off the [...]
During and after the recent conflict in and around Gaza, the media in the UK and many other commentators commonly referred to Israel’s ‘blockade’ of Gaza, imposed by closing the frontier crossing-points between Gaza and Israel. Lifting this blockade has been one of the principal demands of the Hamas régime in Gaza. Now Dave, who [...]
In an uncharacteristically short letter published in today’s Guardian I have compared the outrage of our system of indeterminate sentences with Cuba’s practice of locking people up on the charge of being a “social danger” — a survival from the Napoleonic code, long pre-dating the Castro revolution. The Guardian made only a very few cuts [...]
Some things won’t change as much as we had hoped, even under President Obama: The Americans are still holding more than 14,000 Iraqi detainees in other facilities [besides Abu Ghraib], in conditions that have been radically revised since the Abu Ghraib scandal. Under the new status of forces agreement with Iraq, the prisoners are being [...]
Two and a half years ago I posted on this blog a provocative extract from a BBC interview with Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the issue of proportionality. It prompted, predictably, a lively debate in comments on it. Now ‘mazal tov’ has posted a new comment on that 2006 [...]
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Today’s Guardian publishes yet another letter from me calling for a fully-fledged federal system for the UK (if you have a sense of déja vu, please re-read this, from November 2007). As always, some of what I originally wrote has got lost in the Guardian‘s compulsive [...]
Twitter isn’t the tedious waste of time and energy that Facebook is (in my view, anyway). Twitter is like a shared mini-blog in which every item posted is short and pithy and you decide for yourself which pieces posted by other people you choose to glance through, and if you want to, you can also control [...]
Eagle-eyed Matt, frequent and welcome contributor to these columns, has sent me this disturbing message, which needs to be read with the Los Angeles Times article mentioned in the first sentence. (The article is headed: “Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool” and, as Matt shows, is well sourced.) Here is what Matt wrote: Did you [...]
There’s been a lot of snow today in our corner of south-west London: around 6 or 7 inches (I still can’t quite come to grips with snow in centigrade) from the stuff that fell overnight last night, plus the stuff that has been falling all day; and more is forecast for this evening and tonight. [...]
