lithuania
The Pratasevich Case Is an Urgent Reminder That Europe Fails to Protect Exiles
The operation to detain Raman Pratasevich is a call to action to protect journalists, dissidents and people seeking protection in Europe—at all costs.
It was just a few minutes before the Ryanair jet was set to cross into Lithuanian airspace when it diverted suddenly towards Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
A sliver of time and space, of international and national jurisdictions, that decided the fate of one of the passengers: Raman Pratasevich, 26, journalist and co-founder of NEXTA, a popular and influential Belarusian opposition Telegram channel which rose to prominence in the wake of last year's tumultuous presidential elections.
"The death penalty awaits me here," Pratasevich reportedly said as he was taken off the plane in Minsk, back into the clutches of a system that put him on a terrorism watchlist for his journalism. Pratasevich's girlfriend, Russian student Sofia Sapega, was also detained.
Details are still emerging about how the Belarusian authorities managed to get the plane to land in Minsk, though Ryanair has now called it a case of "state-sponsored hijacking." Pratasevich is now in custody, and faces up to 15 years in prison over charges of "organising mass riots", "disorder" and "raising social hostility to law enforcement."
Since election fraud and police violence brought people out on Belarusian city streets last year, NEXTA, now with some 1.2 million subscribers, has documented the country's post-election mobilisation in detail, rising to become one of its foremost information sources--and political factors. The authorities have since declared the channel "extremist". In March this year, the outlet released a film exposing the luxurious and wealthy lifestyle of president Alyaksandr Lukashenka, which, three days later, had already garnered three million views online.
NEXTA was founded by Pratasevich, who now runs a different Telegram channel, and fellow Belarusian journalist, Stsiapan Putsila, and is run from neighbouring Poland, alluding to the extreme difficulty of conducting journalism, or political activity, in Belarus. At least three demonstrators were killed in the aftermath of Belarus' August 2020 election, with 6,700 people detained, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people deliberately tortured or injured by the police. Ensuing criminal investigations have followed many participants of the protest wave, forcing them to leave their country and seek new lives outside Belarus. Pratasevich had, for example, been granted asylum in Lithuania.
"The Protasevich case is part of Lukashenka's general policy of restricting the media landscape," said Vadim Mojeiko, from the Belarusian Institute of Strategic Studies, who highlights recent changes to the country's law on mass media and last week's police raid on TUT.by, a major independent news outlet, over alleged 'tax evasion'. "Many journalists and bloggers are already behind bars, and now the danger is felt by those who are abroad or even flying over Belarus or Russia," he said.
"Protecting those who have already received asylum in Europe, as well as EU citizens, is a minimum task for European countries."
Indeed, European states are supposed to be 'safe havens' for journalists, exiles and dissidents from authoritarian regimes. Values of political pluralism and freedom of speech, rights-based protection for persons fleeing dangerous situations, together with supposedly neutral law enforcement and migration services are meant, in principle, to protect persons at risk from the long arm of their home country's security services.
But a steady stream of harassment and attacks, extraditions, deportations and kidnappings against those fleeing authoritarian states has put that idea under serious strain in recent years--as well as raising questions about how European states are reacting to transnational repression. The European Union may now have its own version of the Magnitsky Act, which imposes asset freezes and travel bans on individuals and entities suspected of human rights violations, but it is yet to stop repression in EU states. And while the Pratasevich case is clearly unprecedented--grounding an EU plane with EU citizens with a fighter jet is new territory--it points to the huge challenge of how states can respond to these acts.
Earlier this year, for example, an Azerbaijani blogger, Mahammad Mirzali, was beaten and stabbed in broad daylight in Nantes, France--in an attack he connected directly to his criticism of the Azerbaijani authorities. Meanwhile, since March, five Chechen exiles seeking asylum in France and Germany have been deported to Russia, where they face likely torture and fabricated criminal investigations.
"What would the EU be doing if Pratasevich were a prominent French journalist?" asked John Heathershaw, professor of politics at the University of Exeter, who researches how authoritarian states target dissidents abroad.
He pointed to the situation of Sharofiddin Gadoev, a Tajik political refugee and Dutch resident. In February 2019, Gadoev, a businessman and exile, was arrested by Russian officials in Moscow and forced onto a plane to Tajikistan, where he faced politically motivated prosecution.
Several weeks after Gadoev was "rendered" to Tajikistan, Heathershaw noted, the Netherlands "successfully demanded his return"--an example, he says, of "what the European Union should do" in the Pratasevich case.
"More broadly, we need to see recognition that anti-immigrant policies within the EU, encourage countries like Tajikistan and Belarus that they can get away with this without a vehement response," said Heathershaw. "They do it because they see Western countries as weak."
"Protecting those who have already received asylum in Europe, as well as EU citizens, is a minimum task for European countries," said Mojeiko. "If regimes like Lukashenka are able to hijack the planes of European airlines with impunity, then this will also be a signal to Putin and other authoritarian leaders that they can do more in relation to European countries they dislike."
"The EU needs to stop treating Belarus like a state with due process and recognise it as a kleptocracy where a cabal of Lukashenka's people keep control of wealth production, both legal and illegal, through vicious means," said Heathershaw. "If they do not step up with a flight ban to and from Belarus, and for the country's airline, then they will have failed."
More practically, it appears that this dramatic case has not only put Belarus back on the political agenda--it's also become a tragic reminder of the potentially extreme risks that journalists and exiles face even after they leave their homes.
"Expressions of 'deep concern' will not be enough," said Mojeiko. "Real action is necessary."
Federal Judge Blocks Trump Order Targeting Lawyers Supporting ICC Afghan War Crimes Probe
"National security concerns must not become a talisman used to ward off inconvenient claims, a 'label' used to 'cover a multitude of sins.'"
A federal judge in New York on Monday issued an injunction against President Donald Trump's June executive order sanctioning human rights lawyers cooperating with an International Criminal Court investigtion of alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in Manhattan issued a preliminary injunction (pdf) barring the Trump administration from targeting four law professors with criminal or civil penalties for supporting the work of the ICC in its investigation of alleged extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, and other potential war crimes committed by military and CIA personnel and allied forces during the ongoing 19-year war in Afghanistan--the longest campaign of the so-called War on Terror.
"The executive order is misguided and unconstitutional, violating our fundamental rights to free speech."
--James Goldston,
Open Society Justice Initiative
"The court is mindful of the government's interest in defending its foreign policy prerogatives and maximizing the efficacy of its policy tools," Failla wrote. "Nevertheless, national security concerns must not become a talisman used to ward off inconvenient claims, a 'label' used to 'cover a multitude of sins.'"
The ruling came in a case filed last October by the Open Society Justice Initiative and professors Diane Marie Amann, Margaret deGuzman, Gabor Rona, and Milena Sterio, who argued that Trump's order violates their constitutional rights.
Failla determined that Trump's order unconstitutionally prohibits free speech "so as to induce [ICC officials] to desist from their investigation of U.S. and allied personnel."
James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, welcomed Failla's decision, saying in a statement that the injunction "affirms what we have said from the start: the executive order is misguided and unconstitutional, violating our fundamental rights to free speech."
\u201c\ud83d\udce2 Win! Thanks to @OSFJustice for leading challenge to Trump admin's dangerous effort to interfere with #ICC work. Now, @Transition46 @JoeBiden must rescind the Executive Order, which still threatens a broad swathe of HR lawyers, ICC staff, advocates, victims- & int'l justice.\u201d— Katherine Gallagher (@Katherine Gallagher) 1609818622
The lawsuit came a month after Trump imposed sanctions targeting Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, the ICC's chief prosecutor and prosecution jurisdiction division director, respectively, in retaliation for their scrutinty of U.S. wartime conduct.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared at the time that "the United States has never ratified the Rome Statute that created the court, and we will not tolerate its illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction."
In April 2019, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II announced it would not grant a request by Bensouda to open an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including deliberate attacks on civilians and child soldier conscription by Taliban militants, torture and sexual violence by members of Afghan National Security Forces, and torture of prisoners held in U.S. military and secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.
The decision was condemned by human rights advocates, many of whom accused the ICC of bowing to intense pressure from the Trump administration after it barred Bensouda, a Gambian national, from entering the United States. The administration threatened further retaliation, including travel bans and economic sanctions, against the ICC.
In December 2019, the ICC convened a three-day hearing in The Hague, Netherlands at which prosecutors and Afghan victims of alleged U.S. and Afghan government torture pleaded with court officials to reverse their April decision and conduct a war crimes probe. The ICC unanimously ruled in March 2020 that the investigation could proceed. Pompeo condemned the decision, calling the ICC "an unaccountable political institution masquerading as a legal body."
In July 2020, top Trump officials were further incensed after prominent Canadian jurist William Schabas submitted a request to the ICC to investigate senior U.S. and Israeli officials for alleged war crimes committed against the Palestinian people.
Looking ahead to Trump's January 20 departure from the White House, Goldston asserted that "rather than spending time defending an order in direct conflict with Washington's historic support for international justice, the incoming administration should rescind it on day one."
According toReuters, the incoming Biden administration may consider lifting sanctions against the ICC officials, pending an evaluation of the role of sanctions in U.S. foreign policy.
Trump's Latest Tweets Are Not Just Racist, But Part of a Broader Reactionary Attack on the Left
Trump hates immigrants and he hates people of color. But it doesn't stop there. He hates worker rights. He hates journalists, and scientists, and educators. He hates democracy.
This week Donald Trump, the awful man who currently occupies the U.S Presidency, brought his racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian campaign against liberal democracy to a new low, taking to Twitter both to denounce four Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives, women of color all, and to imply that they are "aliens" who don't belong in the country:
So interesting to see "Progressive" Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, the four women in question, are of course U.S. citizens--as the Constitution requires of all members of Congress. The first three are indeed "from" the U.S., having been born here--it is worth remembering that the Trump administration has endorsed the idea of eliminating "birthright citizenship"--and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, who first arrived in the U.S. in 1992 as an asylum-seeking refugee from Somalia, has been a naturalized citizen since 2000.
[Trump] must be removed from office. For I do not think that constitutional democracy can survive another four years of his awfulness.
Trump's despicable tweets, like so many of his statements, were immediately and rightly denounced as racist and xenophobic by a wide range of journalists and virtually all Democrats, though no major Republicans. (Of his many hundreds of racist comments, these tweets perhaps most resembled his 2018 comments about immigrants "from shithole countries.")
Yet while these comments surely further fueled the vicious, racist right-wing attacks against AOC and her colleagues in "The Squad," it would be a mistake to reduce them to their racism. For they also articulated a broader reactionary agenda that goes beyond racism and that targets the left in general.
This was made clear this past weekend by the remarks of Trump's Sycophant Number One, Senator Lindsey Graham, who went on television to defend Trump from the charges of racism:
We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel, they hate our own country. They're calling the guards along our border, Border Patrol agents concentration camp guards. They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They're anti-Semitic. They're anti-America. Don't get down, aim higher. . . We don't need to know anything about them personally. Talk about their policies.
This morning Trump followed Graham's lead, slightly shifting his rhetorical ground while doubling down on his attack:
When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!
In so doing, Trump made clear that his racism, powerful as it is, is linked to a broader hostility to the left, and to a campaign of red-baiting that has been central to his Presidency--only a few short months ago, in his February 2019 State of the Union address, he declared that "we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country"--and that will clearly loom ever larger as November 2020 approaches.
How far will this campaign against the broader political left go in the months to come? What forms might it take if Trump were to win re-election in 2020, and have another four years to do his damage?
Trump's recent Tweets are clearly motivated by xenophobic racism. But they also raise the specter of an even broader targeting of individuals because of their ideas, with a special emphasis on those who either are or might be considered "socialist."
It is worth recalling that a hundred years ago another woman of the left drew the ire of another President, this one, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. As the Jewish Women's Archive explains: "On December 21, 1919, Emma Goldman, along with 248 other radical 'aliens,' was deported to the Soviet Union on the S.S. Buford under the 1918 Alien Act, which allowed for the expulsion of any alien found to be an anarchist."
Goldman, born in 1869 in Kovno, Lithuania, came to the U.S. in 1885, as did millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants during the closing decades of the 19th century. Goldman was an anarchist; a crusader for worker rights, women's rights, and sexual freedom; and, as both a supporter of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and an outspoken opponent of U.S. entry into World War One in 1918-19, she became a target of government surveillance and repression. The "Palmer Raids," launched by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in late 1919 to arrest and deport "foreign radicals," took place in over 30 cities in 23 states; arrested between 6000 and 10,000 individuals; and led to deportation of almost six hundred resident aliens. Goldman was one of them. Along with her collaborator (and lover), Alexander Berkman, she was convicted; imprisoned; briefly detained, ironically, on Ellis Island; and then expelled from the country (while at Ellis Island, they co-wrote a powerful pamphlet, "Deportation, its Meaning and Menace: Last Message to the People of America"). While she was not originally "from here," she was expelled less because of her ethnicity than because of her ideas.
Deportation and denaturalization is currently making a comeback. Rafia Zakaria, writing last year in The Nation on "How Trump is Stripping Immigrants of their Citizenship," drew links between the administration's tactics and those used a century ago against Goldman:
The Trump administration's push to pursue denaturalization should be considered as one piece of the jigsaw that is closing off the United States to nonwhite individuals. Beginning with the Muslim ban, now upheld by the Supreme Court, extending to the vastly sped up ICE raids in areas with large Latino populations, to the detention and separation of asylum-seeking families at the border, these bits and pieces come together to reveal a worldview that accords with white nationalism.
Emily Pope-Obeda, writing last year in Jacobin on "Expelling Dissent," described the ways that the Trump administration was upgrading the effort to deport immigrants active in the sanctuary and immigration rights movements:
This string of deportations and detentions, while appalling, are anything but unprecedented. For well over a century, the US government has used its deportation powers to suppress opposition, intimidate movements, and silence critics. Frequently, it has acted in especially targeted ways, cracking down on individual leaders to send a message to any foreign-born activists who might consider speaking out.
While both Zakaria and Pope-Obeda recall the treatment of Goldman and other "alien" dissenters, they center their accounts on the ways that Trump seeks to close borders and to enforce a racially and ethnically exclusive conception of citizenship, using the power of the state to deport "dangerous aliens" and thus to undermine immigrant rights.
Trump's recent Tweets are clearly motivated by xenophobic racism. But they also raise the specter of an even broader targeting of individuals because of their ideas, with a special emphasis on those who either are or might be considered "socialist." In this way, they bring to mind not simply the horrible treatment meted out to Goldman, but the treatment meted out to thousands of other WWI dissenters, most famously Eugene V. Debs, who could not be told to "go back to where you came from"--Debs was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Terre Haute, Indiana--but could be told to stop criticizing the government nonetheless. Debs did not run afoul of the 1918 Alien Act. But he did famously run afoul of the 1917 Espionage Act; his widely-publicized anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio in June 1918, led to his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment, and was part of a massive wave of anti-socialist repression (On this topic, I strongly recommend Ernest Freeberg's Prisoner of Democracy: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent).
Trump's racist Tweets are ominous both because of their xenophobia and because of their hostility to democracy. What Emma Goldman said at her deportation hearing on October 27, 1919, is worth quoting at length:
Every human being is entitled to hold any opinion that appeals to her or him without making herself or himself liable to persecution. Ever since I have been in this country--and I have lived here practically all my life--it has been dinned into my ears that under the institutions of this alleged Democracy one is entirely free to think and feel as he pleases. What becomes of this sacred guarantee of freedom of thought and conscience when persons are being persecuted and driven out for the very motives and purposes for which the pioneers who built up this country laid down their lives? And what is the object of this star chamber proceeding, that is admittedly based on the so-called Anti-Anarchist law? Is not the only purpose of this law, and of the deportations en masse, to suppress every symptom of popular discontent now manifesting itself through this country, as well as in all the European lands? It requires no great prophetic gift to foresee that this new Governmental policy of deportation is but the first step towards the introduction into this country of the old Russian system of exile for the high treason of entertaining new ideas of social life and industrial reconstruction. Today so-called aliens are deported, tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom Democracy is not a sham but a sacred ideal should be exiled. To be sure, America does not yet possess a suitable place like Siberia to which her exiled sons might be sent, but since she has begun to acquire colonial possessions, in contradiction of the principles she stood for over a century, it will not be difficult to find an American Siberia once the precedent of banishment is established. . .
I strenuously protest against this despotic law and its star chamber methods of procedure. I protest against the whole spirit underlying it--the spirit of an irresponsible hysteria. . . the people can only profit by a free discussion of the new ideas now germinating in the minds of thinking men and women in society. The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society. In truth, it is such free expression and discussion alone that can point the most beneficial path for human progress and development. But the object of deportations and of the Anti-Anarchist law, as of all similar repressive measures, is the very opposite. It is to stifle the voice of the people, to muzzle every aspiration of labor.
Trump hates immigrants. He hates people of color. He hates worker rights. He hates journalists, and scientists, and educators. He hates democracy. He must be removed from office. For I do not think that constitutional democracy can survive another four years of his awfulness.