Meanwhile in Bahrain...

The Independent reports that a Bahrain military court has sentenced 20 doctors, nurses and paramedics who treated protesters injured during pro-democracy rallies earlier in the year to up to 15 years in prison.

The harsh sentences, handed down by a military judge, are likely to anger Bahrain's Shia Muslim majority and torpedo hopes of dialogue between them and the reigning Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty. The court's action may be a sign that hardliners within the royal family have taken control.

A statement from the official Information Affairs Authority is headed "Bahraini Doctors Sentenced for Plotting Overthrow of Government". It quotes the Military Prosecutor, Colonel Yussef Rashid Flaifel, as saying that 13 medical professionals had been sentenced to 15 years in prison, two to 10 years, and five to five years. It goes on to say that the doctors, in addition to plotting a revolution, "were charged with the possession of weapons and ammunition, forcefully taking over control of Salmaniya hospital and its personnel, stealing medical equipment, and fabricating stories to disturb public security".

The sentenced include Rola al-Saffar, the head of Bahrain's nurses' society, and Ali al-Iqri, a distinguished surgeon who was arrested in an operating theatre on 17 March. None of the defendants was in court to hear the sentences read out and the hearing was attended only by their lawyers and relatives. Defendants say that the military judges refuse to listen to allegations that they had been tortured.

The medical staff worked in the Salmaniya Medical Complex in the capital, Manama, and treated those injured in fighting between protesters and security forces after pro-democracy rallies started on 14 February. After the government crackdown in mid-March, doctors and nurses were accused of planning an armed insurrection in league with Iran.

Ali Salman, the leader of al-Wifaq, the main Shia political party, said that the medical professionals sentenced yesterday alleged "they had been tortured". He said he suspected that hardliners within the royal family were using the trials "to send a message to [President] Obama", who last week at the UN called on the Bahraini government to negotiate with al-Wifaq.

An utter bloody disgrace. Perhaps it's time for another bunch of Arab despots to be consigned to the dustbin of history... Oh wait a minute they are on our side. With friends like that ...

Chinese food scandal protestor jailed

Today’s Telegraph reports that Zhao Lianhai, who created a website to highlight the plight of children poisoned in a major food adulteration scandal in China, has been jailed for 2 1/2 years.


Zhao created the site in 2009 after his son was poisoned after being fed adulterated formula milk. He was one of about 300,000 Chinese toddlers who were poisoned (of which at least six of them died) by milk that contained melamine, an industrial chemical that was added to make the milk appear to contain more protein than was actually the case.

The website quickly became a focal point for thousands of parents who were outraged at the crisis, and that the issue had initially been covered up.

As more and more parents began to call for justice and compensation, and Mr Zhao began to press their case publicly, he came to the attention of the Chinese authorities.

Last November, he was arrested by the police and then charged in March with "creating a disturbance". His lawyer, Li Fangping, said the evidence for the charge had been that Mr Zhao had given a media interview on a public pavement, held a dinner in a restaurant for a dozen parents of other victims, and that he had held up a small sign in protest outside a trial of milk company executives responsible for the poisoning.

As his sentence was announced, Mr Zhao protested in court, stripping off his prisoner's uniform and refusing to be handcuffed. "I am not guilty!" he said. Mr Li said he would appeal the sentence, and that Mr Zhao was in "quite good health, but anxious. He has not seen his wife and two children for almost a year."

Mr Zhao has already served one year of his sentence, and will now have another year-and-a-half of prison time.

Three people have been sentenced to death for their role in the toxic milk case, and the general manager and chairwoman of Sanlu, the milk company at the heart of the scandal, was given a life sentence. Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers have been punished for allowing the contamination to take place.

What to say? Words fail.

Iranian "King of the bloggers" sentenced to 19 1/2 years

For me Hossein Derakshan falls in to the category "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". From what I have read of his work ( mainly his Comment is Free articles in the Grauniad) he could certainly write utter rubbish.

What he certainly doesn't deserve is a huge prison sentence. 19 1/2 year prison sentence followed being convicyed of "cooperating with enemy states, making propaganda against the Islamic system of government, promoting small anti-revolutionary groups, managing obscene web sites and insulting Islamic sanctities,".

He had been in detention in Evin prison in Tehran since his arrest on November 1, 2008,

Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, condemned the sentence. "This is the longest sentence issued against a blogger in Iran, and it is solely because of his opinions and blogging. The sentence is meant to send a chilling message to the Iranian youth to stay away from the internet in practicing their freedom of expression,"

A journalist working on a reformist newspaper before emigrating to Canada in 200,Derakhshan set up a blog , titled Editor Myself on i.hoder.com. It gained worldwide attention, particularly for his blog start up guides for fellow Iranians.

He was no stranger to controversy: in 2006 he became what must have been the traveled to Israel on his Canadian passport.

Shortly before his imprisonment Hossein Derakhshan began writing in support of of the regime, However this was not enough to save his skin.

To get an idea of Derakhshan's later work try this index at Comment is Free. Proof positive that a volte face will not save you from a regime like Iran's.

Even if I think much of the CiF writings are utter drivel (check out his critique of Persepolis for a corker of twisted logic!) there is no way the man deserve 19.5 seconds in custody, let alone the appalling sentence handed down by the regime.

And yet some brave people are still prepared to pay the price

This article appeared in today’s Telegraph. Despite the clear and present danger to life, some people are still prepared to document human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Tatyana Lokshina has slowly watched her colleagues die. One by one, they have fallen to anonymous assassins protected by powerful forces whose appetite for murder seems to know few bounds.

Last week, in a ritual that has become all too familiar, Mrs Lokshina donned a black head scarf to bid farewell to one of her closest friends. Accompanied by other mourners, she walked in slow procession behind a open-backed lorry carrying the body of Natalya Estemirova, a fellow member of a dwindling group of female human rights campaigners dedicated to exposing the horrors they say the state has sanctioned in one of Russia's darkest corners.

Lokshina and Estemirova had been working jointly to expose the ordeal of a Chechen man who was publicly executed earlier this month by forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen president who has been accused of presiding over a reign of terror in the republic. The man had been accused of providing rebels lurking in the southern mountains with a sheep, a crime considered sufficient to warrant an extra-judicial execution in Chechnya.

Mrs Estemirova's murder was undoubtedly linked to her work. But according to fellow campaigners, its brazen nature was intended as an unmistakable message to the women who seek to complete her mission."The manner of her death was symbolic," said Allison Gill, the head of Human Rights Watch in Russia. "She worked on hundreds of cases of people who were kidnapped, shot and killed, or disappeared. And here she is, suffering the same fate. They did it to say: 'You could be next'."

Many inheriting Mrs Estemirova's mantle are women. The risks they face are self-evident and some organisations are considering the wisdom of exposing their staff to such danger. Yet the idea of surrender, for all the peril, seems out of the question.

Mrs Lokshina had little interest in Chechnya until she was sent there for a meeting by a US-funded rights organisation."One has to see it with one's own eyes to understand the immensity of the tragedy, the immensity of the injustice," she said. "Once I saw it with my own eyes, I felt on a human level that the only way not to feel complicit, not to be complicit, was to do something to stop them directly."

Like Mrs Estemirova, Tatyana Lokshina has been one of the principal characters who has woven the narrative of the of Chechnya in recent years. Most of the others are dead. One such was the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya (Below). Who played a pivotal role for foreign correspondents seeking to understand Chechnya. Often, just as she did in print, she would excoriate Vladimir Putin, the man she held responsible for the callous disregard for human life in Chechnya.



One Saturday morning in October 2006, Mr Putin's 54th birthday, she was shot four times as she returned to her flat in Moscow from her local supermarket.

Another was Stanislav Markelov (below), a lawyer, human rights defender and colleague of Mrs Politkovskaya, was felled by an assassin's bullet shortly after speaking at a press conference in January. Known for his sunny disposition and dirty jokes, Mr Markelov was another crucial figure in the Chechnya activist community. Shot with him was Anastasia Barburova, the fourth reporter at Mrs Politkovskaya's Novaya Gazeta newspaper to meet a violent end since Mr Putin came to power in 2000.



Then there was Mrs Estemirova herself. Working from a tiny office off Vladimir Putin Avenue in central Grozny, Natalya investigated and chronicled the parlous state of human rights in Chechnya. Along with a small but dedicated team, it was her work more than anyone's that held the Kremlin-backed regime to some account.

For Mrs Estemirova, the only prominent activist who lived in Grozny full-time, it was far more than just a story. To anyone who saw her in action, it was evident how passionately she cared about every victim whose cause she championed."She completely gave her heart to every person she spoke to," said Mrs Lokshina. "I often saw Natasha crying when interviewing victims."

Mrs Lokshina is aware that, in continuing her friend's crusade, the powers ranged against her and her colleagues is immense. None is more powerful than Ramzan Kadyrov. In a secret affidavit to the European Court of Human Rights, his former bodyguard painted a chilling picture of the Chechen leader. According to Umar Israilov, Mr Kadyrov would wander around a gym that doubled as a secret jail, administering electric shocks to prisoners bound to exercise machines while casually kept up a game of billiards with his friends.

In January, as western reporters were preparing to publish his allegations, Mr Israilov was shot dead on a busy Vienna street as shoppers dived for cover. "I will be killing as long as I live," Mr Kadyrov once boasted to a reporter, although he consistently denied involvement in all the individual murders linked to his name.

Butcher Kadyrov and his puppet master

He is especially indignant about such allegations that he targets female activists. "I do not kill women," he has insisted. Yet women in Chechnya seem increasingly at threat. One of the cases Mrs Estemirova was struggling to expose when she died was the murder of eight women whose bodies were dumped in different parts of Chechnya one day last November.

Mrs Estemirova's death will only increase the fear of ordinary people in Chechnya. Not a single murder of any significant opponent of Mr Kadyrov has ever been solved, a failure critics say suggests the acquiescence – perhaps even the complicity – of Mr Putin, Russia's most powerful man. The Kremlin has consistently denied such allegations, blaming the deaths on Russian exiles intent on besmirching Mr Putin's reputation.

Natalya Estemirova

Since Mrs Estemirova's death, the responsibility for exposing the abuses she dedicated her life to revealing have largely fallen to women like Mrs Lokshina. But in the culture of impunity that reigns unfettered in Chechnya, it has become an almost impossible task.

Iran - the high price of free speech continued

Jila Baniyaghoob (above)who was arrested with her husband Bahaman Ahamadi Amoee on 20 June. Their whereabouts are unknown but probably they are held in the security wing of Tehran’s Evin prison.

According to Reporters Sans Frontières (via the Guardian) the media crackdown in Iran means that the country now imprisons more journalists than any other country

In the space of two weeks Iran has beaten both China and Cuba to the top spot with more than 33 journalists in jail in Iran (the figure will almost certainly rise further). At least 25 journalists arrested since the disputed election remain in prison, the Paris-based organisation said on Friday.

This clampdown has also seen Iran jump above Burma, which RSF claims has 14 journalists in jail, Eritrea, which has 17 jailed reporters, Cuba with 24 and even China, where 30 reporters – out of the 166 that RSF claims are imprisoned worldwide.

RSF fears for the safety of those imprisoned in Iran. "Several witness accounts make us fear that torture and ill-treatment are being systematically inflicted on prisoners who have demonstrated against the regime," RSF added."Several journalists and bloggers were brutally treated by the guards and by men employed by the state prosecutor, Saaed Mortazavi."

Amnesty International today called for the Iranian authorities to release the journalists arrested since the elections.

"It is shocking that journalists whose job it is to provide information to others are being detained, on top of all the other draconian measures the authorities have taken to restrict the free flow of information about what is really happening in Iran," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, the deputy director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa programme.

"Rather than trying to investigate alleged abuses, the only message the authorities are sending is that they are seeking to hide the truth, both from their own citizens and the rest of the world."

I wonder if George Galloway or Seumas Milne will be protesting the incarceration of their comrades in Iran? Shall I hold my breath?

One thing is for sure Jila Baniyaghoob and her husband are worth a million Galloways

Meanwhile in Burma Suu Kyi supporters are jailed for praying

A Burmese court has sentenced two supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months in prison simply for praying for her release.

According to the BBC Chit Pe and Aung Saw Wei were arrested in April after leading prayers at a pagoda in Twante, about 40km (30 miles) south of Yangon. They were convicted of insulting religion after leading prayers at a pagoda for Ms Suu Kyi and other activists to be freed
Supporters traditionally pray for the release of Ms Suu Kyi and other activists at Buddhist pagodas. But prison sentences for insulting religion were rare in Burma until the law was resurrected in 2007 to jail monks demonstrating against the military authorities, and has since been largely used to prosecute political cases.

As if we really needed it here is more proof that the Burmese regime is evil

Burmese regime find new excuse to extend Aung San Suu Kyi's detention

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, given the nature of the Burmese regime, that Aung San Suu Kyi has been charged with violating terms of her house arrest following the arrest last week of John Yettaw. She could face a prison sentence of up to five years.

Suu Kyi was taken to a prison compound where she will be tried in connection with Yettaw’s (for the want of a better word) trespass. He was arrested on 6 May after swimming across a lake to her house and staying there secretly for two days. Suu Kyi’s trial will almost certainly be used to justify another extension of Suu Kyi's illegal detention which officially ends on 27 May.

"Everyone is very angry with this wretched American. He is the cause of all these problems," a Suu Kyi lawyer, Kyi Win, told reporters. "He's a fool." The lawyer said the incident was merely a breach of security in the lakeside area where authorities normally keep close watch over Suu Kyi and her household.

Kyi Win said Suu Kyi would be held in a house inside Insein compound, a prison holds both common criminals and political prisoners and where, according to human rights groups, torture and mistreatment of prisoners are common. Also to be tried are Suu Kyi's two helpers, Khin Khin Win, 65, and her daughter Win Ma Ma, 41, who have lived with her since her current detention began in 2003.

Suu Kyi, 63, has spent more than 13 of the last 19 years including the past six in detention without trial for her non-violent promotion of democracy, despite international pressure for her release

I daresay that Yettaw is viewed as a godsend by the Burmese regime given that they were probably down to using “wearing a loud shirt in a built up area at night” as a justification for her continued detention ... not that they needed an excuse I suppose.

Zimbabwe: Solidarity with Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions - for human rights and the rule of law

Laboutstart has launched a campaign to show support for our brothers and sisters in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (see below).

The crisis in Zimbabwe has its origins in President Mugabe's autocratic regime and its mismanagement of the economy. Since the disputed re-election of President Mugabe in 2002, there has been a steady deterioration in human rights and the economy, reducing Zimbabwe to a land of penury and starvation. In 2005, more than 30,000 arrests were made and hundreds of urban dwellings were demolished under the guise of "a clean-up campaign" aimed at workers in the informal economy who had been increasingly turning to the trade unions. In September 2006, a large number of trade unionists and human rights activists were arrested and brutally assaulted following a peaceful protest over the state of the economy and shortages of essential medicines. Alarmed at the growing willingness to oppose the regime openly, including from within the ruling ZANU-PF party, the regime has banned political protests for three months, especially to prevent protests against the Government's economic failures. But the ZCTU and others have responded by stepping up their criticisms and protests, and a general strike has been announced for 3-4 April. Over the weekend of 10-11 March, the security services violently attacked opposition leaders and on 13 March, raided the offices of the ZCTU to seize materials about the strike.

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