Tunisia woman accused of indecency after alleged rape by police

Hundreds of protesters thronged to a Tunis courtroom Tuesday as a woman and her fiance who accused police officers of rape and extortion defended themselves against allegations of indecency.

The case has outraged Tunisian feminists and human rights groups, who said the charges are an attempt to humiliate and frighten the couple, discouraging others from reporting police abuse. It has focused new attention on police impunity and the rights of women in the North African country, the birthplace of the "Arab Spring" uprisings, as it tries to set its path after the ouster of autocratic President Zine el Abidine ben Ali.

Last month, the couple said that two police officers stopped them and raped the woman in the back of their car while a third officer took her fiance to an ATM and tried to extort money from him. After the police officers were arrested and charged with rape and extortion, the officers alleged that they found the couple in an “immoral position.” The couple could now face indecency charges punishable with up to six months in prison.

The two were questioned Tuesday at the courthouse to decide whether the woman would be prosecuted for immoral behavior, according to the Associated Press. No decision was immediately announced.

Immorality charges have been used over the last year and a half to quiet government critics, Amnesty International said, arguing  that  the case against the couple should be dropped. Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni said the Interior Ministry, by holding a news conference to announce the indecency allegations, “tried to manipulate the public opinion and to make them forget the real scandal:  the rape.”

Senior British police officer faces charges in phone-hacking scandal

LONDON -- A senior British counter-terrorism officer appeared in court Monday to face charges tied to the police investigation into phone hacking by tabloid journalists.

In a brief pretrial hearing, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, the former head of Scotland Yard's National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit, was accused of breaching Britain's Official Secrets Act.

Authorities allege that in September 2010 Casburn took home secret police documents relating to an inquiry into phone hacking and contacted the News of the World tabloid, offering it information on the police probe, then known as Operation Varec. 

Police at the time had new information from the New York Times concerning illegal phone tapping by journalists from the News of the World, although authorities did not reopen the phone-hacking investigations until July 2011.  

Casburn, 53, is also charged with misconduct in public office following a police investigation into illegal payments to public officials by journalists in return for information. That probe, known as Operation Elveden, is one of three police inquiries into the suspected widespread use of phone and computer hacking by the media over the past decade.

Casburn, who is reported to be the first defendant facing charges related to the Elveden probe to appear in court, was released on bail and ordered to appear in the Central Criminal Court on Nov. 2. She has been suspended from duty.

Trials are just beginning after more than a year of investigations and civil inquiries into illegal communication interceptions by the news organizations, which have resulted in more than 70 arrests of high-profile figures in the media and public service.

Last week saw the pretrial appearance in court of a dozen high-profile editors and executives from Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World and from News International, the paper’s publisher and the British branch of the huge News Corp. conglomerate.

The tabloid was closed down by the Murdoch family following public outrage over revelations that News of the World journalists in 2003 had hacked into the mobile phone messages of a missing teenager who was later found slain.

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 Ex-tabloid editors Brooks, Coulson in court for British phone-hacking case

 -- Janet Stobart

Photo: pril Casburn arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in London on Monday. Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press

 

 

Expelled South African activist Malema in court on corruption case

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Firebrand activist Julius Malema traded his usual revolutionary beret and T-shirt for a crisp business suit Wednesday when he appeared in a South African court to face charges of money laundering.

Malema, tossed out of the ruling African National Congress in April for sowing divisions, is accused of receiving in a family trust about $500,000 tied to fraudulent government tenders. He appeared in a court in Polokwane, capital of Limpopo, his home province.

He denied the charges and was freed on $1,250 bail. Outside the court he claimed the charges against him were pushed by senior government officials and mounted a virulent attack against South African President Jacob Zuma, a man he helped propel to the leadership of the ANC.

Malema called Zuma the illiterate leader of a banana republic and said Zuma had been charged on 700 counts of corruption and fraud, compared with only one count against him. The charges against Zuma were dropped by prosecutors just weeks before the 2008 election, won by the ANC.

Ex-tabloid editors Brooks, Coulson in court for British phone-hacking case

LONDON -- A dozen defendants in a landmark phone-hacking inquiry tied to Rupert Murdoch's News International newspaper group appeared Wednesday in London's Central Criminal Court for pre-trial hearings.

Andy Coulson, former press secretary to British Prime Minister David Cameron and ex-editor of the defunct tabloid News of the World, and Rebekah Brooks, another former News of the World editor and onetime News International CEO, were among those who crowded into the 45-minute hearing.

Other defendants present included five other erstwhile News of the World editors and journalists and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who allegedly intercepted private phone communications on behalf of journalists.

PHOTOS: British phone-hacking scandal

A prosecution spokesperson said 12 of the 14 defendants in the case attended the hearings in Court No. 1 to hear the charges in connection with the alleged conspiracy to intercept voice mail messages, mostly those of celebrities and their associates. Presiding Judge Adrian Fulford granted bail to all the defendants until the proposed opening trial date on Sept. 9, 2013.

Brooks, who socialized with Cameron while she was on Murdoch's executive staff, was also charged during a separate hearing with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in the phone-hacking inquiries, as were her husband, Charlie Brooks, and five members of her staff. The allegations in that matter include attempting to hide and remove evidence of phone hacking from police and making illegal payments to public officials.

Wednesday's hearings came amid ongoing legal and civil investigations into media practices after revelations in July 2011 that News of the World journalists illegally hacked into the phone of missing teenager Milly Dowler, who was abducted in March 2003 and later found murdered.  

Investigations have revealed that illegal phone hacking by Murdoch-owned tabloids has affected hundreds of celebrities and people in the public eye, including actors Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jude Law and Sienna Miller. Other targets included J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, and politicians, crime victims and their families and associates.

News International has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements in the matter and is openly collaborating with police, who have arrested dozens of journalists, media executives and public officials in connection with the investigation.

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 -- Janet Stobart

Photo: Rebekah Brooks leaves London's Central Criminal Court. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Accused Mexican drug ring posing as media on trial in Nicaragua

 

MEXICO CITY — The 18 Mexicans said they were journalists from their country’s main television broadcaster, Televisa. They wore the company T-shirt, and the six vans they drove into Nicaragua bore the orange Televisa logo.

The vans contained equipment including computers and cameras. Oh, and also $9.2 million in cash hidden in secret compartments and traces of cocaine.

The mysterious caravan apparently plied the length of Central America, from Mexico to Costa Rica, in the last couple of years, never raising more than passing suspicion until Nicaraguan authorities stopped it in August at Las Manos, a Nicaraguan post on the border with Honduras.

Authorities suspect the group was part of a drug-trafficking network that moved cocaine and money throughout the region. Nicaraguan Judge Julio Cesar Arias this week ordered the group of 18 — 17 men and one woman — to stand trial in December on charges of money-laundering, drug-smuggling and organized crime.

The exposure of the 18 has proved one of the most vivid illustrations to date of the well-known but often unseen spread of Mexican drug operations deep into Central America, long a conduit and increasingly a base of storage, production and marketing for Mexican cartels.

It has also proved dicey for Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish-language TV network, which quickly disavowed any knowledge of the group. In a statement, the broadcaster said the people were not its employees and the vans did not belong to the company. Televisa says it will ask for an investigation and hoped to take legal action against the 18 for falsifying its logo.

Televisa got backing from Mexico’s top legal official, Atty. Gen. Marisela Morales, who said in a television interview (with Televisa, of course), that the suspects falsely used Televisa’s name as a cover for their criminal doings, part of a “machination.”

But journalists in Mexico (real ones) turned up paperwork that they say shows that the vans, or at least their license plates, were in fact registered to Televisa.

Already in progress in Managua was a separate trial of Nicaraguan businessman Henry Fariña or Fariñas, who is accused of aiding Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel move cash and coke to and from Colombia through neighboring Costa Rica. His alleged operations came to light when he survived an assassination attempt in Guatemala last year that instead killed a chance companion, renowned Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral.

It is not known if there is a connection between that case and the 18 Mexicans, who have since their arrest been reported to have made numerous trips through Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday, the Mexican suspects sat rather forlornly and heard Judge Arias read the charges and set a date for the trial, Dec. 3.

The lone woman in the group, who has been identified as Raquel Alatorre, 30, of Merida, has been called the leader. She often tries to shield herself from cameras, lowering her head or hanging back in the crowd of suspects.

Nicaraguan prosecutor Rodrigo Zambrana said the suspects gave conflicting and rather improbable accounts of what they were up to when they drove into Nicaragua. At one point they said they were doing a special report on Nicaragua; another time it was a story on a Mexican accused of money-laundering in Managua, according to Zambrana. Neither scenario explains the need for an 18-member TV team, nor why they needed more than $9 million.

They were nabbed when an anonymous caller notified police that he heard the group in Honduras talking suspiciously about their mission in Nicaragua, officials have said.

And speaking of the money, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is apparently already spending it. He says it will go toward buying new patrol cars for police and building and remodeling prisons.

Ortega pretty much publicly condemned the suspects, praising in a speech earlier this month the national police for capturing a crew that, as he put it, took large amounts of drugs north and money south.

Using the Televisa vans, Ortega added, gave the 18 “impunity.” “Because,” he said, “it is not easy to detain supposed journalists to investigate them."

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— Tracy Wilkinson, with a contribution from a special correspondent in Managua, Nicaragua

Photo: Some of the Mexican suspects are escorted to a court hearing in Managua on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. Credit: Esteban Felix / Associated Press

Europe tackles torture allegations that were swept aside in U.S.

When CIA agents nabbed an Egyptian cleric on the streets of Milan, Italy,  and whisked him off for interrogation in a country that turned a blind eye to torture, they violated international law and were justly sentenced to prison, Italy's highest court has ruled in a landmark case against the U.S. counter-terrorism tactic known as "extraordinary rendition."

The final judgment by Italy's Court of Cassation on Wednesday upheld the convictions of 23 American operatives for their roles in the 2003 abduction of Hassan Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Their five- and seven-year prison terms meted out by a lower court three years ago were not only upheld but extended by two years, although it appeared unlikely that  any of the convicted U.S. operatives would be surrendered to serve their time.

Human rights advocates concede that  the legal judgment against rendition is mostly symbolic. Unless Italy seeks extradition -- something Washington has been fighting fiercely, leaked diplomatic cables suggest -- the only punishment the Americans are likely to face is the threat of arrest if they travel to Europe or nations elsewhere that might elect to fulfill commitments under the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Despite the limited reach of the Italian court's decision, rights advocates have applauded the ruling as evidence that European courts are willing to bring to justice those who violate the law in the so-called war on terror, even though the U.S. government has declined to do so.

Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, who brought the case against the Americans and a few Italian intelligence agents complicit in Nasr's abduction, declared that the high court ruling is a definitive judgment that rendition is "incompatible with democracy." He said a government decision on whether to seek extradition wouldn't be expected until the high court issues its full written opinion, which could take two to three more months.

The CIA did not respond to a call and email from The Times asking for comment on the Italian court ruling and whether the agency is advising the convicted Americans against foreign travel.

The United States has an extradition treaty with Italy, and any request for Washington to deliver the Americans to serve their prison terms would be difficult for the U.S. government to ignore, said former Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay war-crimes tribunal who was forced to retire after criticizing U.S. handling of terrorism suspects.

"If the Italians were to submit an extradition request, there would be no legal basis for us not to comply," Davis said. "I’m sure there’ll be a lot of behind-the-scenes diplomatic wrangling on the Italian government not to submit the request."

The Italian case isn't the only one threatening to spotlight legal breaches by American agents since Sept. 11, Davis said. He pointed out that most of the legal actions abroad in defiance of the Obama administration's decision to "look forward, not back" on counter-terrorism excesses are coming from allied countries, "not Iran or Cuba or Venezuela."

A Spanish judge in 2009 ordered an investigation of torture allegations at Guantanamo Bay. Polish authorities are demanding full disclosure of the former government's complicity in CIA detention and interrogation of rendition subjects at a remote secret prison there. The British government has paid compensation to citizens and legal residents released after abusive CIA interrogations, including plaintiffs whose cases were thrown out of U.S. courts when the George W.  Bush and Obama administrations claimed that to try them would expose "state secrets." In Canada, the government has apologized to and compensated Maher Arar, a citizen nabbed by U.S. agents while traveling home from Tunisia in 2002 and sent to Syria for "enhanced interrogation."

Nasr, an Egyptian-born imam, was suspected of recruiting men from his Milan mosque to fight U.S. and other foreign troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the impetus for his Feb. 17, 2003, abduction and delivery to a secret interrogation site in his homeland. He said he was beaten, bound and blindfolded for months in a cold cell and subjected to electrical shocks to his genitals while being questioned.

A lower Italian court found the 23 Americans guilty in 2009 and sentenced former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady to seven years in prison and the others to five years' detention. The high court stiffened those sentences by two years and sent back to the lower court several cases against Italian agents involved in the Nasr rendition that had been dismissed on immunity claims.

While the Italian judiciary, like that of the United States, has no power to enforce its rulings if the government fails to request extradition, the rendition judgment serves a powerful symbolic purpose in branding those who would violate laws against torture as criminals, said Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program of the American Civil Liberties Union. He pointed out an array of other legal challenges to rendition and warrantless detention brought by former terrorism suspects that are making their way through foreign and multinational courts.

The Italian ruling this week, Dakwar said, "sent a strong message that if the United States fails to hold accountable its own officials for human rights violations that European countries will do so."

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Follow Carol J. Williams at www.twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

Photo: A police officer stands guard at the Milan trial of 23 Americans involved in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian cleric. European and international courts are prosecuting cases of alleged torture of terrorism suspects despite the U.S. government's policy against exposing its counter-terrorism practices to the judgment of the courts. Credit: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP/Getty Images

Insert: Egyptian-born cleric  Hassan Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, says he was kidnapped in Milan and tortured in an Egyptian prison. Credit: Amr Nabil / Associated Press

Germany's supreme court OKs European bailout fund

BERLIN -- Germany's supreme court has rejected petitions to block ratification of Europe's $640-billion rescue fund, giving the go-ahead for a key element of European leaders' strategy for combating the continent's long-running debt crisis.

The constitutional court was petitioned by 37,000 Germans who argued that the European Stability Mechanism, or ESM, contravened the country's constitution.

In what was viewed as one of the most important decisions in the court's 61-year history, the justices dismissed the petitions but imposed some significant conditions on the use of the ESM, namely a limit to Germany's liabilities.

The court ruled that a cap of 190 billion euros, about $245 billion, had to be set on Germany's contribution before the ESM was ratified. If the German parliament decides to back further funds, it can still do so. But the court's proviso will go some way to appease German taxpayers whose enthusiasm for the euro has waned significantly over their growing dissatisfaction that their money is being used to prop up debt-laden, reform-shy economies in southern Europe.

“The review has concluded that the laws that were challenged, with high probability, do not violate the constitution,” Andreas Vosskuhle, the court's president, said as onlookers in the courtroom stood to hear the verdict read out. “Hence the motions for a temporary junction are to be rejected."

Markets reacted positively to the news, with the euro reaching a four-month high against the dollar out of apparent relief that some of the conditions to be imposed on the bailout fund appear to be less cumbersome than had been feared.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to react to the ruling when she addressed the Bundestag later in the day. The ruling amounts to a considerable boost for her and her government, which championed the rescue fund.

Members of the German parliament expressed relief that the Bundestag's backing of the bailout fund and Europe's fiscal pact, which imposes budgetary discipline on its signatories, had not been toppled by the court.

“Finally the ESM can start to operate,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, head of the opposition Social Democrats, said.

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-- Kate Connolly

Photo: Andreas Vosskuhle, the president of Germany's constitutional court, arrives at the court Wednesday ahead of a key ruling on the legality of Europe's permanent bailout fund. Credit: Thomas Kienzle / AFP/Getty Images

Former police official linked to China scandal faces charges

BEIJING -- Wang Lijun, the Chinese police official who sought refuge at a U.S. consulate early this year, was formally charged Wednesday with defection, abuse of power, bribe-taking and what was described by the state media as “bending the law for selfish ends."

The charges were filed with the Intermediate Peoples’ Court in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province where Wang had taken refuge in the consulate in February, the New China News Agency reported. Typically, such an announcement precedes a trial by a few weeks.

Wang’s flight to the consulate unveiled the underside of Chinese officialdom, as he spilled an almost unbelievable tale of murder and deception -- accusing the wife of Politburo member Bo Xilai of poisoning a British business associate.

Bo was ousted from his party posts after the scandal broke. His wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted last month of the murder.

The indictment of Wang was widely anticipated, although some had thought he might be charged with more serious crimes, such as treason for turning to the Americans or for involvement in the murder. Instead, the charges filed appear to be relatively minor -- the equivalent in U.S. law of dereliction of duty.

Rebekah Brooks appears in court on phone-hacking charges

LONDON -- Rebekah Brooks, former News International executive and editor of the now defunct Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World, appeared in court Monday to hear three charges against her relating to illegal phone hacking.

Brooks, 44, was charged earlier this year along with a private investigator and seven other executives, editors and journalists of the paper. The group was charged with conspiring to hack into the phones of 600 potential victims.

In Brooks’ case she faces two more specific charges of hacking into the phones of murdered teenager Milly Dowler who died in March 2003, and of Andy Gilchrist, a former militant leader of the Fire Brigades Union who lead a controversial firefighters’ strike in 2002. She has denied the charges.

Brooks, wearing a short-skirted dark suit, made no comment as she walked to and from Westminster Magistrates court in central London. Throughout the brief hearing she listened in silence as presiding judge Howard Riddle Brooks read out the three charges.  

Her seven former colleagues who appeared in court last month, included Andy Coulson, former chief press officer to Prime Minister David Cameron, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator.

Gambia, Iraq executions buck worldwide abolitionist trend

Human rights advocates the world over have been shocked and outraged by Gambia's first executions in 27 years and an escalation in hangings in Iraq that has already sent 91 to their deaths this year.

The rash of executions in the two countries -- nine in Gambia last week and 21 in Iraq on Monday alone -- are particularly disturbing for the targeting of prisoners convicted on what appear to be politically instigated charges in secretive and unfair trials, international law experts said.

Yet as lamentable as the recent death row purges may be to those who monitor and censure human rights abuses, they are in stark contrast to a global trend toward abolition of the death penalty and de facto moratoriums on executions in an ever-larger number of countries.

About two-thirds of the 196 countries tracked by Amnesty International  have renounced the death penalty in law or in practice, the London-based rights champions calculate. That has grown from only 16 countries that had outlawed executions before Amnesty launched its global campaign to eradicate the death penalty in 1977.

"Even in countries like China, while we don’t know how many they have executed, we do know that they have reduced the number of crimes that can be punished by death and they have reduced the number of people executed in recent years dramatically," Christof Heyns, assigned by the United Nations to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a telephone interview from his home in Pretoria, South Africa.

On behalf of the world body's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Heyns delivered a message to Gambian President Yahya Jammeh this week to "strongly condemn" the autocrat's proclaimed intent to execute all 48 death row inmates in the tiny West African country by mid-September. Nine were executed last week, Jammeh's government confirmed Monday, and the remaining 39 condemned prisoners have been moved from their cells to the execution site.

Heyns' letter demanded that Gambia refrain from any further executions, calling last week's deaths "a major step backwards for the country, and for the protection of the right to life in the world as a whole.” The U.N. agency rebuke joined others from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, European nations and an expression of "great concern" from the United States, which itself ranks high on annual rights agencies' lists of countries with the most executions.

Gambia had last executed a prisoner in 1985, and had adhered to the practice increasingly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa of reducing the list of crimes for which the death penalty can be applied as well as the number of capital sentences, noted Sandra L. Babcock, a law professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Center for International Human Rights.

Babcock attributes the Gambia executions to "the whim of an unpredictable and, by all accounts, unbalanced dictator," and she sees little threat of Jammeh's crackdown inspiring emulation.

"It's an exception to the general rule that once a nation heads down that path of refusing to carry out executions, that it leads to abolition as a matter of law over time," said Babcock, whose center maintains a database on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

Iraq's mounting zeal for executions is the more disturbing, Babcock said, as many of the 1,000-plus condemned Iraqis were convicted of treason or terrorism, often "thinly disguised justification for prosecuting political opponents."

Iraq has long featured in the dubious ranks of the Top Five countries carrying out the most executions each year. In 2011, China led Amnesty's list with executions estimated at more than 1,000, but it also eliminated the death penalty for 13 crimes that previously could draw the ultimate punishment. Iran acknowledged executing at least 360 people, followed by Saudi Arabia with 82 reported executions, Iraq with 68 and the United States 43.

Despite the rise in executions in some of the most active "retentionist" nations, as the rights groups refer to those that haven't signed on to the international covenant that defines the death penalty as a human rights violation, there are positive trends even in areas where the death penalty long enjoyed broad public support, the law experts said.

The Philippines abolished capital punishment six years ago, and all republics of the former Soviet Union except Belarus have renounced the death penalty or ceased carrying it out. Malaysia and Singapore are reconsidering whether all drug-trafficking crimes should be death-penalty eligible, and China is conducting a review of all death sentences, Babcock said. All of Europe is abolitionist, and most of Latin America -- with the glaring exception of the Caribbean states -- have ceased executions.

The only two highly developed democracies that continue to execute are the United States and Japan, the rights groups note. And abolitionists are regaining traction in Japan that was lost 17 years ago when the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo subway riders with sarin gas, killing 13 and poisoning 6,000.

Moving the United States into the execution-free category is going to take time because of the 50 separate state penal codes and popular support for the death penalty in some regions, Babcock said.

But she pointed out that the rising cost of keeping the death penalty on the books in states like California, with 729 on death row, is beginning to make inroads with death penalty supporters who have been unmoved by the moral arguments against the state taking lives.

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--Follow Carol J. Williams on twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

 Photo: Protesters gathered outside the Gambian Embassy in Senegal on Thursday to demand President Yahya Jammeh halt the mass execution of prisoners. Two of those executed by Gambia last week were Senegalese, including a woman. The banner reads "Gambia. Stop the reign of fear." Credit: Seyllou / AFP/Getty Images