Tag: activism

#JungleRepublic: Where a Facebook Status Can Cost You Your Freedom

by Reina Wehbi

12 APR 2017

An enraged young Lebanese activist, Ahmad Amhaz, was detained in March over this Facebook status: “Three kinds of animals currently rule our country: a donkey, a crocodile and a third whose kind is yet to be discovered.” Referencing the Lebanese president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament, Ahmad used the popular social media network to express his dissatisfaction with what he perceives as the “incompetency” of the country’s leaders, using the hashtag #JungleRepublic. After being stopped at a check point by intelligence officers for an alleged traffic violation, Ahmad was driven to a police station where he was later told he was arrested for online libel. Ahmad was then transferred to the Bureau of Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Rights for investigation. One week later, the investigative judge confirmed charges of libel and defamation against Ahmad who was kept in detention. Meanwhile, popular outrage from Lebanese civil society and human rights organizations—including Human Rights Watch and the Lebanese Center for Human Rights—grew stronger, propelling the release of a statement condemning the “arrest, detention and prosecution of Ahmad,” which constituted a violation of Lebanon’s human rights obligations under International Law. The fury of human rights defenders led the president and the prime minister to relinquish their personal rights regarding the case and the activist was released on bail after 9 days of detention. However, Ahmad is still on trial and could face up to two years in jail for violating Article 852 of the Lebanese Penal Code, which prohibits defaming the office of the President and national emblems.

The wave of arrests targeting journalists and activists in Lebanon over online statements— especially those made on Twitter and Facebook—during the last few years has escalated at an alarming rate. The Penal Code that the Cybercrime Bureau relies on to prosecute those who commit online libel, slander, and defamation dates back to the Ottoman Era, and thus does not comprehensively cover online crimes, modern norms of free expression and punishable dissemination of information. In the absence of clear law regulating cyberspace, the credibility of the Cybercrime Bureau, which was established by the Internal Security Forces in 2006 following the rise of cybercrimes, continues to be tested. Moreover, the broad and vague language of Lebanese criminal laws allows for discretion in applying the law. The Bureau enforces these vague laws against those with no political power as a way of intimidating the public. The legality and proportionality of pre-trial detention prior to conviction also remains in question and puts at stake the right to due process.

Article 13 of the Lebanese Constitution guarantees freedom of expression “within the limits established by the law.” Although the article seems to protect this basic freedom, it grants public officials immunity against criticism and results in “self-censorship” of journalists, activists and civilians who often use social media to voice their concerns and respond to officials’ activity. Although it is hard to draw a line between protected speech and extreme speech, Lebanon remains in a dire need of updated laws that are compatible with modern modes of communication. In the opinion of the young activist Ahmad, “officials should not be immune to criticism or defamation when they are not diligently serving the public.”

Reina Wehbi is an LLM student at Texas Law, concentrating in Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law, and member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

What Do We Do With What We Know? The War on Terror and Human Rights

by Natalie Davidson

9 DEC 2015

We at the Rapoport Center were privileged last month to hear journalist Mark Danner talk about human rights and the War on Terror at the inaugural Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, titled “Spiraling Down: Human Rights, Endless War.” Danner offered an incisive analysis of the current state of the United States’ War on Terror, an analysis that should not only sound alarm bells among European leaders as they choose military strikes as their response to the latest attack by ISIS in Paris, but also raises difficult questions about the part a human rights framework could play in putting an end to torture, indefinite detention, targeted assassinations and wiretapping by the U.S. executive.

Danner nostalgically described the Watergate scandal, which exposed the Nixon administration’s illegal activities against political opponents and led to the president’s resignation under threat of impeachment, as his political coming-of-age. Watergate, in Danner’s view, is a demonstration of “how the system is supposed to work”: a revelation of governmental wrongdoing by journalists, followed by investigations by Congressional committees and the courts, and finally punishment when the President resigns.

For Danner, contemporary American politics operate according to a very different logic. Instead of cycles of injustice-revelation-justice, human rights are now in a state of “frozen scandal.” Torture by and at the instigation of the U.S. military has been widely written about, including in a long Senate report. The practice has been denounced by President Obama, but other forms of gross human rights violations soon emerged. The Obama administration has made extensive use of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, killing between 3,500 and 5,000 individuals. Meanwhile, prisoners cleared for release continue to languish at Guantánamo under the legal fiction that they can neither be tried nor released, for they are prisoners held captive until the end of hostilities. Although these governmental abuses are well-known, there is no change, no expiation. The liberal assumption that exposing injustice will lead to its correction has not been borne out. This insight leads Sissy Farenthold to ask, when introducing Mark Danner: “what are we going to do about what we know?”

Danner sees the “frozen scandal” of human rights violations as one facet of the state of endless war inaugurated in September 2001 when Congress authorized the use of military force in the aftermath of September 11. The War on Terror has not only failed spectacularly to reduce terrorism, as the rise of ISIS and reemergence of the Taliban indicate. It has also provided the key infrastructure for torture, for it transforms “prison without trial” into “wartime detention,” and “torture” into “enhanced interrogation technique.” The war, though indiscernible in Americans’ everyday life, allows gross governmental violence to appear legal. Drone killing is permitted by government lawyers when there is a “continuous imminent threat”. Danner reports that lawyers in the Obama administration are now developing the concept of “elongated imminence” to further detail the conditions under which targeted killings is justified.

Where do we go from here? Sitting in the audience and listening to Danner, it seemed to me that it is not only the Watergate model that seems to have waned. If exposure and knowledge of human rights abuses do nothing to curb their commission, the traditional model of human rights reporting also seems insufficient. Or perhaps these two models are not so much broken as inapt to address violence committed by Americans against foreigners. The Watergate model assumed governmental abuses of American citizens; the human rights model traditionally targets repression by a foreign government of its own citizens. The human rights abuses in the War on Terror, in contrast, mainly affect foreigners living outside U.S. territory. What avenues of justice-seeking can address this sort of violence?

One path currently popular among international human rights activists around the world for addressing state-sponsored violence is criminal prosecution. Yet Danner does not think that prosecutions of offenders, whether high-ranking officials or low-level torturers, are feasible. Nor will they achieve much change in his view. He suggests instead that a truth commission might lead to a profound political acknowledgment and rejection of torture. Most importantly, Americans must combat the politics of fear fueling their country’s permanent war.

What part should law and human rights activism play in pulling the United States out of the state of exception? Danner asks how we can return to legality – but the story he tells can also be understood as one in which law, with its indeterminacy and malleability, its sometimes absurd fictions and bureaucratic vocabulary, plays a key role in reassuring government officials that even acts such as torture and execution are acceptable. Is talk of “continuous imminent threat” to justify targeted killings a perversion of law, or is this legal logic at work? What tools do human rights activists have at their disposal to effectively combat such uses of legal discourse? If denunciation is insufficient, and what is needed is political mobilization, how does human rights activism retain its relevance?

Natalie Davidson is a PhD Candidate at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law, and  a 2015-16 research fellow at the Rapoport Center where she chaired the WPS Editorial Committee.