NGOs ask for UN monitoring of US elections

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Oct. 20 (AGR) — A coalition of US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has petitioned the United Nations (UN) seeking international observers to monitor the upcoming US presidential elections, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a labor coalition have raised legal challenges to what they say are inevitable rejections of legitimate ballots in Florida.

Nearly six million votes were left uncounted in the 2000 presidential elections; irregularities included the disenfranchisement of minority voters — mostly in Florida. A final decision on the outcome of the 2000 election was made by the US Supreme Court.

In July this year, a group of US legislators asked for UN monitoring. UN spokesperson Marie Okabe said that the “general policy and practice has been that the United Nations responds to requests from national governments, not from legislative bodies.”

Told of the possible hurdle, a spokeswoman for the NGO coalition, Grace Ross, said, “NGOs go through a different body of the United Nations, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). We have legal standing there.” That is the primary reason why an NGO request stands a better chance of getting a favorable response from the UN, she argued.

“George W. Bush... was anointed for that office by five justices of the United States Supreme Court,” said Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, in “an act of judicial usurpation of the American Constitution that was unprecedented in the history of the American republic.

“Had it occurred in a developing country, such subversion of democratic processes would have been greeted with knowing derision throughout the western world.”

In August the Bush administration agreed to accept a team of international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a first in US presidential elections.

Based in Vienna, the OSCE is described as the largest regional security organization in the world, counting 55 states from Europe, Central Asia, and North America. It is active in early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.

“We strongly support the presence of European monitors,” Ross said, but without the level of authority of the UN, “it is not clear to us that the European observers will be in a position to assist us in exposing governmental abuses of the right to vote.”

Legitimacy of Florida’s voting process challenged

An ACLU examination involving 10 counties in Florida revealed that of the 2,151 “provisional ballots” cast in six elections across Florida from 2002 through 2004, 7.3 percent of the ballots were rejected because they were cast in the wrong precinct locations. When taking into account the overall number of rejected ballots from those same elections — 1,077 — 14.5 percent were thrown out for that same reason.

According to a Florida statute, a voter whose eligibility cannot be determined at a polling station is entitled to a provisional ballot; the county canvassing board will determine if the person was entitled to vote. But the statute requires the state to discard as “illegal” the entire provisional ballot of otherwise eligible voters who cast them in a precinct other than the one assigned by elections officials.

During the September 2002 elections in Miami-Dade County, for example, 10.1 percent of the provisional ballots cast in incorrect precincts were rejected. In Orange County, 15 percent were rejected during the November 2002 election, while in Brevard, the figured jumped to 19 percent.

The ACLU released its analysis on Oct. 12, just days after filing a “friend-of-the-court” brief asking the Florida Supreme Court to strike down the statute in question. The court declined to hear the ACLU’s argument that rejecting ballots by eligible voters is an illegal restriction of the right to vote.

“Provisional ballots were meant to address problems revealed in 2000 when eligible voters were turned away from the polls if elections officials were unable to find their names on the voter rolls,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU in Florida. “Yet, here we are four years later, faced with a state law that does the exact opposite of what it was intended to address by suppressing the right to vote of large segments of the population.”

According to the ACLU, a major source of complaints from voters during the Aug. 31, 2004 primary election dealt with polling place locations. Such problems will only be exacerbated on Nov. 2 because there have been substantial changes in both the numbers and locations of precincts in areas hardest hit by hurricanes. Population changes in Miami-Dade and Broward also mean hundreds of new precincts, as well as significant changes in precinct locations, further assuring that some qualified voters who show up at the wrong precinct and cast a provisional ballot will have their ballots rejected.

In a related development, coalition of unions sued Florida elections officials Oct. 12, arguing that thousands of voters have been disenfranchised by the rejection of their voter registration forms.

The lawsuit is similar to one filed by Democrats last week. It accuses Secretary of State Glenda Hood of violating federal law for telling the state’s 67 elections supervisors that they should reject the registration forms of voters who failed to check a box confirming they are US citizens, even if they signed an oath on the same form swearing they are.

In a separate case, Florida’s Volusia County said Oct. 12 that it will expand the number of early voting sites, less than a week after a lawsuit alleged the county would disenfranchise blacks by offering only one site — in an area where few minorities live.

In Missouri, a federal judge ruled Oct. 12 that residents who vote from the wrong polling places, despite directions to go elsewhere, cannot have their votes counted.

Sources: ACLU, Associated Press, Inter Press Service

Your old mobile is destroying the planet

By Geoffrey Lean

Oct. 17 — Governments from around the world will meet next week to tackle the latest toxic waste crisis: mobile phones.

The handsets (a billion are in use around the world) are packed with dangerous chemicals and metals that can endanger people and the environment once they have been thrown away. Developing countries complain that they are being dumped on, contaminating whole communities.

Next week, 160 governments — meeting in Geneva under the auspices of the Basel Convention, the United Nations treaty regulating trade in toxic waste — will address the growing crisis.

Users trade up to a new handset on average every 18 months. As a result, some 105 million handsets are discarded in Europe each year, enough, if placed end to end, to stretch from London to a point 150 miles beyond Perth in Australia. 130 million are thrown out annually in the United States.

Tests by both the US and the Californian environmental protection agencies have established that they should be classified as toxic waste. The cadmium in a single battery from an old phone could seriously contaminate 200,000 gallons of water, enough to fill a third of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Cadmium is being phased out of new batteries, but many other poisonous materials remain. Lead — which affects the immune, endocrine and central nervous systems, and causes serious damage to children’s brains — is used to solder components to the printed wiring boards. Brominated flame retardants, used in wiring boards and plastic cases, have been associated with cancer, liver damage and problems with the neurological, immune and endocrine systems. Beryllium, which can cause serious lung damage, is used in contacts and springs and highly toxic dioxins can be emitted if the phones are incinerated in waste plants.

Experts add that many phones at the end of their lives are exported to developing countries such as India, Pakistan, and China where they are broken up for recycling in rudimentary conditions, threatening workers’ health and their communities. Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Botswana, Uganda, Namibia, and Kenya all voiced alarm at the impact of discarded phones on their countries at a previous Basel Convention meeting.

The convention is now working closely with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and mobile phone manufacturers to tackle the crisis. It is working on designing new phones with safer components, collecting discarded phones, and recycling and disposing of them safely.

In Britain, over the past two years, a partnership between the Government, network operators and major retailers, called Fonebak, has collected and recycled more than 3.5 million phones — about one tenth of those discarded.

They are recycled in Bucharest, Romania. Nickel is recovered from batteries for use in saucepans, irons and new batteries. Small amounts of platinum, gold, silver, and copper are recovered for jewelry and pipes. And the plastic is sent to Sweden where it is burnt to provide central heating for a village.

Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s executive director, says that the growing partnership with the industry should “serve as a model and an inspiration” for other businesses.

Critics hope that next week’s meeting will impose legal controls on the trade in old phones. The Basel Action Network, a coalition of environmental groups, wants exports of all hazardous waste from rich countries to poor ones to be banned.

Source: Independent (UK)

Israeli army killings under investigation

Compiled by Bob Strott

Oct. 18 (AGR) -- Two separate official investigations are under way into the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old girl in Gaza by the Israeli army after soldiers testified that their company commander “emptied his magazine” into her after she had been shot and was presumed dead.

The army has already admitted that the killing of Iman al-Hams in the town of Rafah a week ago was a mistake and that her bag, which soldiers thought carried explosives, contained school books.

Soldiers have come forward to explain that her body was riddled with 20 bullets because their immediate commander “confirmed the killing” by shooting two bullets at her already prone body before withdrawing a short distance and then firing a burst of automatic gunfire at the corpse.

The Judge Advocate General, Brigadier General Avi Mandelblit, has instructed the military police to launch a criminal investigation against the commander in the Givati Brigade’s crack Shaked Battalion as a result of the claim.

Unusually, the investigation was ordered even though the army inquiry is incomplete.

The move follows interviews with soldiers serving in the company published in the Israeli newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot. It quoted them as saying the commander should have been stood down immediately after the incident.

One soldier told the newspaper: “The company CO who sprayed the girl with bullets turned us all into vicious animals and besmirched us all ... If he is not dismissed, we will not agree to serve under him.” Another said the commander had “desecrated the body.”

According to figures produced by 11 UN agencies, more than 30 Palestinians under the age of 17 have been killed since Sept. 28, when the army entered northern Gaza. A nine-year-old girl was among 11 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip over the weekend.

Witnesses said Israeli troops with armored bulldozers demolished at least 16 houses in Rafah before withdrawing.

The military described it as a “routine” operation to destroy firing positions used by Palestinian gunmen.

During the incursion, the army bulldozed large swathes of land, including hundreds of trees, and several roads, witnesses said.

The army did not immediately comment on the destruction. The area is known for being used by Palestinian militants who fire crude home-made rockets at the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. Two Israeli children in Sderot were recently killed by such an attack.

Israel says the north Gaza operation, code-named “Days of Penitence,” was launched to wipe out the threat of the Qassam rockets being fired.

The investigations opened as security sources told the newspaper Haaretz that the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had rejected a request from army commanders to withdraw from the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on the grounds that the fortnight-old operation was endangering troops and that militants had now removed rockets to positions outside the camp.

Israel Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has said that some Israeli army units remain in the Gaza Strip after completing the operation.

Mofaz said Oct. 17 at a Cabinet meeting that Israeli forces will remain in Khan Yunis, adding that the Israel Defense Forces have been ordered to be ready to return to the area immediately if attacks continue.

The United Nations criticized Israel for Palestinian casualties caused by the Gaza offensive.

A UN Security Council resolution called upon Israel to stop its military operation and withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip. The US vetoed the draft resolution earlier this month.

The two-week-old Israeli operation is the deadliest in Gaza since the start of the Palestinian uprising four years ago.

The Israeli paper Haaretz quoted unidentified Palestinian and UN officials as saying that the Israeli offensive killed at least 140 people and wounded 500.

Reports say 57 militants have been killed, but most of the rest are thought to be civilians, including many children.

One Israeli soldier was killed and 13 wounded during the operation.

Palestinian residents also accused the Israeli army of massive destruction, saying that the large-scale military offensive targeted crowded areas which were never used to launch missiles, and that the tiny alleyways made it impossible to launch rockets.

A Palestinian legislator, Hanan Ashrawi, also said that “there was the basic issue of vindictiveness and cruelty.”

“It’s like telling the Palestinians, for every Israeli killed, we’ll kill 20, 50, 100, whatever.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia described the operation in northern Gaza as a “part of a series of planned Israeli attacks to bring our people to their knees, but this will never happen.”

The Israeli army has killed as many as 630 Palestinian children and minors in the past four years.

Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist has denounced the deliberate killing of hundreds of Palestinian children by Israeli forces, saying that these killings make the Israeli military a terrorist army.

Levy often writes about the crimes and violations of the Israeli army in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

He said in an article published in Ha’aretz that the Israeli military was evading the problem and trying to cover up the killings.

“With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians…, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves and the hell with the statistics,” he wrote.

He also said that the explanations and justifications made by the Israeli military and Foreign Ministry were far from convincing.

“The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No explanation by the army spokesman’s office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the foreign ministry about how Palestinian are making use of children will change that fact.

“An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.”

Levy also criticized the Israeli claims that Palestinian children are often killed during clashes with Palestinian resistance fighters. He said that most of the children were killed either inside or in front of their own homes.

Israel has occupied the Gaza Strip since capturing it in the 1967 war.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government intends to evacuate 8,000 Jewish settlers now living there along with the troops who protect them from Gaza in 2005 as part of a disengagement plan.

The Israeli army will keep control over Gaza’s borders, coastline and airspace.

Sources: Al-Jazeera, BBC, Independent (UK)