fashion beach

Amid all the news of war and torture and bombings around the world, every so often civilisation takes a small step forward for a change. In July 2007 Rwanda became the 14th African country to abolish the death penalty, while in Europe only Belarus now retains it. Now New Jersey is becoming the first US state to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court reinstated its use in 1976. Good for them!

The number of executions in other US states is also decreasing, as is the number worldwide, although the USA still ranks sixth behind those other great champions of human rights, China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan, in the use of capital punishment. Between them, these six countries accounted for 91% of all known executions in 2006.

Incidentally, there is something I never understand: why is it that many of those who define themselves as "pro-life" are often strongly in favour of capital punishment? It seems they value unborn lives more highly than born ones. There is an interesting debate on the religious ethics of this here.

Making It Better:
Amnesty International

On further thought about my post of yesterday, a better analogy to Giulani's deliberately ambiguous statement would be, "It's OK to be left-handed so long as you only use your right hand". Being gay, like being left-handed or having ginger hair or blue eyes, is part of the hand dealt to some people in life - an innate characteristic, not a choice. For many years, left-handed people were forced to use their right hand; today we know better.

In his latest convoluted attempt to gain votes from both sides of the fence, US presidential hopeful and serial publicity-seeker Rudolph Giulani is quoted as saying that homosexuality is not aberrant. "The way somebody leads their life isn't sinful. It's the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the orientation that they have."

If this makes any sense at all, I think it's saying that it's OK to be gay so long as you don't act on it. Which is a bit like saying that it's OK to be a carnivore so long as you don't eat meat. Or maybe that it's OK to be black so long as you don't have dark skin. But I guess what he's really saying is, "I want both gays and the religious right to vote for me, so I'll try to please both sides by talking nonsense and hope each side interprets it as agreeing with them".

Hong Kong, December 2007
In McDonald's at City One Shatin, the manager is walking around overseeing the staff and helping out during a busy lunchtime session, when he covers his mouth with his hand to cough. Knowing the poor general level of food hygiene in Hong Kong, I was pleasantly surprised to see him immediately walk over to the antiseptic handwipe dispenser and disinfect his hands.

Quite a contrast to another scene I was reminded of:

Shanghai, December 2001
A girl in a glass-fronted kitchen in the old town area near the Yuyuan Garden is energetically picking her nose, in between assembling hand-made Shanghai dumplings with the same unwashed finger. Needless to say, we chose to eat elsewhere.

Hmmm - I never thought I'd be comparing McDonald's favourably with anywhere else!

The verbal personal attack on newly-elected Anson Chan by Secretary for Home Affairs Tsang Tak-sing in yesterday's Legislative Council meeting was not only gratuitously ill-mannered, but also revealing of Tsang's political ignorance.

In describing Mrs Chan as a "sudden supporter for livelihood" who had not displayed such concern during her past service as Chief Secretary under British rule, Tsang appeared not to understand the difference between Chan's past and present roles. As a legislator, she now has a responsibility to speak out on policy matters; as a senior civil servant before, she was expected to implement whatever policy the government decided, not to express her own views on it. Neither we nor Tsang have the right to assume that Chan did not care about these matters before, but it would have been unprofessional of her then to say what she thought personally - and Mrs Chan has never been less than professional in her work.

If Tsang, once praised for his "profound and sensitive grasp of Hong Kong and mainland affairs", does not understand such simple distinctions, is he really qualified to hold a top government post?

It is apparent to anyone with half a brain that the Bush regime in the USA generally wants to have everything both ways. They control more weapons of mass destruction than any other power on earth, but insist that other countries should not be allowed to acquire or hold such weapons.

They insist that they are fighting a "War on Terror", but refuse to give their captured enemies in that war (many of them kidnapped from third countries in defiance of international law) the internationally recognised status of prisoners of war. Now, facing yet another attempt to gain some legal rights for these unfortunates, the government once again undermines its own case by self-contradiction.

The US Supreme Court will today hear appeals from two detainees in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp arguing that the 2006 US law removing their habeas corpus rights (following an earlier Supreme Court judgement upholding them) is unconstitutional. To quote the BBC report, the prisoners "say that habeas corpus does extend to Guantanamo Bay because, even though the territory is not under formal US sovereignty, it is under US control", to which "US government lawyers have responded by saying in their brief that the US does not own Guantanamo Bay and therefore the writ of habeas corpus does not run there".

Now pardon me if I'm too dense to understand the subtleties of the argument here, but if the US doesn't own Guantanamo Bay, which is a corner of Cuba that the US clung on to after Castro's Cuban revolution, then it must be either international territory, in which case international law should apply (as it does, for example, to ships outside territorial waters), or it must be Cuban territory held illegally by the USA (since the Cubans certainly didn't lease it to them, unlike say Diego Garcia which the US leased from Britain). There are other types of territory - for example, territories under a UN mandate pending resolution of their status - but Guantanamo Bay is not in any of these categories.

What this means is that the US is effectively arguing that it has no right to Guantanamo Bay, in which case the US prison there cannot be a legal establishment. So what they are saying is that the Guantanamo prisoners have no legal rights because they are being held in an illegal prison in the first place. Or am I missing something?


P.S. In case we forget we are dealing with human beings here, not just legal principles, here are the stories of the two men concerned.