Brazilian Indians 'win land case'

Indigenous leaders in Brazil say they have won an important victory for the rights of their community, at a key hearing of the Supreme Court.

Eight of the court's 11 judges voted to keep a reservation in the Amazonian state of Roraima as a single territory.

However the case is not expected to be formally concluded until next year as one judge asked for more time to consider his ruling.

The judgement will lead to the eviction of non-indigenous farmers.

There are more than 100 similar cases before the Supreme Court but it is thought this ruling will establish an important legal precedent, which touches on a number of sensitive issues.

'Half a celebration'

Outside the court, indigenous lawyer Joenia Battista de Carvalho said she was satisfied with the votes so far, but she was disappointed the formal outcome would be delayed.

"I was expecting the case to be concluded today - unfortunately our feeling is one of half a celebration, because what we wanted to see was the practical result of this - to see our land free of any invaders," she said.

But local Mayor Paulo Cesar Quartieiro said the government was using it support for indigenous rights to hand over control of parts of Brazil to foreign groups.

Unbroken territory

At the centre of this case is a large area of land in the far north of Brazil, known as Raposa Serra do Sol, which is home to 19,000 Amazonian Indians and which was approved as an official reservation in 2005.

Indian leaders said that if the court ruled against them it would send a signal to land grabbers, prospectors and loggers that it would be acceptable to invade indigenous territory.

However, around 200 rice producers who also live and work in the area said that would force them to leave and would undermine economic development in the state of Roraima.

To add to a complicated dispute, one indigenous group in the reservation supports the farmers, and the issue has been the subject of growing tension and conflict.

Some military leaders say they fear a large, almost autonomous Indian reservation running along a lengthy section of Brazil's frontier would have implications for national security - a claim strongly contested by indigenous communities who say it would remain Brazilian territory.

To ally this fear some of the judges made clear in their rulings that the army and police should have full access to the region without having to consult indigenous leaders.

But the BBC's Gary Duffy in Brasilia says it will only be clear in the months ahead if the court has done enough to ease the still simmering tensions surrounding this debate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7774895.stm

Chevron Faces Suit Over Nigerian Violence

Larry Bowoto's left arm is still scarred and numb where a soldier's bullet struck it in 1998 while he was aboard a Chevron oil platform in Nigeria. During the course of the incident, Bowoto was shot several more times, another man was wounded and yet another was killed.

[Larry Bowoto protests in front of Chevron headquarters in San Ramon after he attended a shareholders meeting in May. (Paul Sakuma / AP)]Larry Bowoto protests in front of Chevron headquarters in San Ramon after he attended a shareholders meeting in May. (Paul Sakuma / AP)
On Monday, in only the second trial of its kind, a federal jury will convene in San Francisco to decide whether Bowoto and his companions were violent hostage takers or innocent victims - and whether a U.S. corporation, whose foreign subsidiary summoned the security forces, is responsible for the bloodshed.

"I'm not a violent person," Bowoto, 44, said through an interpreter during a recent Bay Area visit. "We were peaceful protesters" who "never expected Chevron to be so brutal."
Chevron denies claim

The San Ramon oil company paints a different picture: Bowoto, the company says, led a group of armed men who seized the platform, demanding jobs and money, and held 200 employees captive during three days of fruitless negotiations before Chevron's Nigerian subsidiary - Chevron Nigeria Ltd. - called for military help.

"This is a case of right versus wrong, legal versus illegal, peaceful negotiation versus violent extortion," Chevron said in a statement.

In May, after Bowoto appeared at Chevron's shareholders' meeting and said the company "must give up violence as a way of doing business," CEO David O'Reilly called his remarks "outrageous" and said Bowoto was guilty of "a criminal act."

Nineteen plaintiffs, including Bowoto, accuse Chevron of colluding with a notoriously violent military force to quell the protest. The case represents a 21st century application of one of the nation's oldest laws, the Alien Tort Claims Act.

Passed by the first Congress in 1789, the law lets foreigners file damage claims in U.S. courts for international human rights violations anywhere in the world. Originally focused on sea piracy, the law took on new life with rulings in the 1980s that allowed survivors of foreign torture to sue military leaders who entered the United States.

A 2004 Supreme Court ruling limited the law's scope to the most serious abuses of internationally accepted legal standards but left the door open for suits against multinational companies that allegedly collaborate with repressive governments.

In the only such case to go to trial, a federal jury in Alabama last year absolved the Drummond coal company of responsibility for the killings of three union leaders by paramilitary forces in Colombia. Judges have dismissed several other suits, under the Supreme Court's stringent standard, and a few have been settled.
Unocal settled Burma suit

A suit against Unocal by Burmese villagers, who blamed the company for forced labor, rape and torture by soldiers at a natural gas pipeline, was scheduled for trial in Los Angeles in 2005, but the company settled it for an undisclosed amount of money. A suit similar to Bowoto's, filed against Royal Dutch Shell by Nigerians including relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer and activist hanged by the military regime in 1995, is scheduled to go to trial in New York in February.

"Courts have been vigilant in allowing only the most well-founded cases to go forward," said attorney Marco Simons of the nonprofit advocacy group EarthRights International, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. A victory in this case, he said, would send a message to corporations operating abroad that "if they are complicit in human rights abuses, they can expect to be held accountable."

Chevron, while maintaining the villagers' claims are unfounded, also says that the 1789 law "provides a financial incentive to attack U.S.-based corporations with international operations" and that the plaintiffs "are using the U.S. courts to intervene in Nigerian affairs."

The events date from May 1998, when members of the Ilaje tribe in the Niger Delta went to Chevron Nigeria's Parabe platform, 9 miles off the Atlantic coast, to protest the company's employment practices, and what they described as the destruction of fresh water, farm lands and fishing by oil drilling and dredging.

"It now takes four or five hours to find any usable water," Bowoto said in his recent interview with The Chronicle, describing the conditions that he said still exist. "It takes days to find any significant fish. The same thing has happened to farming."
Threat of 'mass riot'

Chevron, in court papers and public statements, described the protesters as a group of "armed youths" carrying machetes, knives and clubs and demanding jobs and money. The company cited letters from "Concerned Ilaje Citizens," including Bowoto, to Chevron earlier that month warning that refusal to allocate jobs fairly "could lead to mass riot" and asking, "Which language do you understand? Is it violence or sea piracy, war or peace?"

But plaintiffs' lawyers have a faxed message sent by a company official to the U.S. Embassy on the third day of the protest, describing the villagers as unarmed and saying the situation "has remained calm since their arrival."

Soldiers arrived the next morning on helicopters leased from Chevron. One villager, Arolika Irowarinum, was shot to death. Two men were wounded - Bowoto, who was shot several times, and Bassey Jeje. A fourth man, Bola Oyimbo, allegedly was beaten and tortured, and later died of unrelated causes.

Chevron says its subsidiary was simply reporting a crime when it contacted security forces and had no reason to anticipate violence. The plaintiffs counter that the company was well aware of the soldiers' violent reputation and approved the plan that led to the attack.

Those are factual disputes that a jury must resolve, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said in a pretrial ruling. She said jurors also must decide whether Chevron's control over its subsidiary was so extensive that it should be held responsible for any wrongdoing.

The trial is scheduled to last five weeks.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/26-2

Max Specktor, of the RNC 8, to plead not guilty to terrorism charges

A University student arrested preemptively before the Republican National Convention will be one of the first people prosecuted under a terrorism clause in the Minnesota Patriot Act since it was passed in 2002.

Cultural studies junior Max Specktor is charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.

Monday, Specktor’s hearing was postponed until at least November.

Specktor and seven other defendants facing the same charge will be heard together, and face a maximum of seven and a half years of jail time.

The eight suspects, calling themselves the RNC 8, plan to plead not guilty to the charges, defendant Nathanael Secor said.

Max Specktor

As a housemate fried long strips of sweet potato in the kitchen, Specktor sat on the front stairs of his Minneapolis house and dwelled on the prospect of seven-and-a-half years in jail, and the guarantee of cost and worry from a yearlong trial.

Specktor, a graduate of Minneapolis South High School, got involved with activism by planning protests against the Iraq War.

“After doing that kind of work in high school, I was kind of burned out on trying to change something with a big protest,” Specktor said. “I was getting into local community work.”

He got involved with a now-closed Jackpine Community Center on Lake Street in Minneapolis, where many people were planning protests with the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anti-authoritarian activist group.

“The RNC, obviously I didn’t want it to come to my town,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, maybe this is a chance to learn some skills and build community.’ ”

The group, which typically fluctuated between 20 and 30 people, took inspiration from mass mobilizations from the “anti-globalization movement” of the late 1990s, like the protests that helped shut down the World Trade Organization’s conference in Seattle in 1999.

“I got a lot of inspiration from that,” he said. “Our movement, especially the radical anti-war and social justice, needs a big event to keep it going.”

The RNC Welcoming Committee wasn’t planning any illegal actions, Specktor said; instead they set up housing, meals and legal support for other protesters, some of whom might engage in civil disobedience.

“Basically, we provided the infrastructure for people to survive in the city while they’re protesting,” he said.

But authorities pointed to the group’s website, which urged a strategy called “swarm, seize, and stay” that used civil disobedience to try to shut down the convention.

Civil disobedience, while illegal, can be traced back to the foundation of the United States and is very different from terrorism, Specktor said.

“[Civil disobedience is] consciously making a decision to disobey for a higher purpose,” he said. “It’s a time-honored tradition that we celebrate in our history books, the people in the civil rights era who sat in at the lunch counters and wouldn’t get out of their seats.”

Preemptive raids

The weekend before the protests, activists’ houses, including Specktor’s, were raided by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department and other law enforcement agencies.

Six members of the RNC Welcoming Committee were arrested Saturday, Aug. 30, while Specktor and another man were arrested the following Monday morning — Sept. 1, the first day of the RNC.

Protesters had yet to unfurl the first banner during protests in St. Paul.

During raids, police said they found throwing-style knives, fireworks, a box containing gas masks and lock picking kits, according to the criminal complaint.

They also seized activist literature concerning the RNC, maps of St. Paul, paint and electronics, the complaint stated.

After Specktor’s arrest, police found a backpack containing a plastic bottle of Mylanta, black gloves, and a paper entitled: “St. Paul and the RNC burn 9/1/08.”

In Specktor’s vehicle, police found a pry bar, two boxes of firecrackers, five assorted black helmets and a roll of unused caution tape, the police complaint stated.

The actions police and authorities took were ridiculous, said Ted Dooley , one of the lawyers representing the RNC 8.

“Anything is a weapon if it is used as a weapon,” he said.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s department spokesperson did not return multiple phone calls requesting comment.

After the raids, Specktor was the only one of the RNC 8 who was held in the psychiatric ward of the Ramsey County Law

Enforcement Center, he said.

“I was in a cell by myself; the whole time I was only released for an hour to walk along this short hallway and make a few phone calls,” he said. “I felt powerless, but I didn’t feel threatened.”

After three days, he was released after being charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.

The Case

Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said the terrorism charges trivialize real acts of violence and potentially violate the First Amendment.

“This is an attempt to criminalize political dissent,” he said. “It has a chilling effect on anybody planning political activities.”

However, University law professor Dale Carpenter said if the state can prove the RNC 8 had intent to commit violence, the state has a pretty good chance of winning the case.

The state doesn’t have to wait for people to riot or endanger lives in order to make arrests, Carpenter said.

“If someone is threatening to punch you, a police officer doesn’t have to wait until he actually punches you to arrest him,” Carpenter said.

After lawyers obtained copies of search warrants, Welcoming Committee members discovered that the group had been infiltrated by law enforcement and paid informants for about a year.

Information obtained by paid police informants is often inaccurate or made up, Nestor said.

“There’s a history of paid informants actually being provocateurs,” Nestor said. “Meaning they commit illegal acts or encourage illegal acts to increase the value of their information.”

During a raid on an unrelated house during the RNC, information provided by one of the FBI’s informants was inaccurate, Nestor said.

The informant said there would be boxes of weapons delivered to a house in St. Paul, but the boxes turned out to contain literature instead, Nestor said.

“If that’s one of the informers that the FBI is relying on, I have no more reason to trust the informers being used by the Ramsey County Sheriff,” he said

Specktor said it was strange to realize people he’d worked with for more than a year were being paid by police.

“We went through all this organizing aware that we might be surveilled,” he said. “It’s kind of creepy when you find out who those people were.”

Community reactions

Specktor said his friends, family and neighbors have been nothing but supportive.

“You might read blogs that say we’re terrorists and people comment and say we should be hung up,” Specktor said, “but my friends and everyone I’ve talked to since these events have gone down have had nothing but positive things to say.”

Mordecai Specktor , Max Specktor’s father and the editor of American Jewish World said he and Specktor’s mother are proud of their son’s activism.

“My wife and I are worried about Max; of course we don’t want to see our son go to prison,” he said. “We’re glad that he’s idealistic and that he has ideas about social betterment and uplifting people.”

As a journalist, Mordecai Specktor said the media mostly failed to critically examine police claims about activists.

“In the case of the RNC 8, there’s all these wild claims [in the police’s complaint] of kidnapping delegates,” he said. “Journalists should be investigating the case and finding where the truth lies; we’re not just like the record and playback buttons on the tape recorder.”

The arrests and charges facing the RNC 8 are designed to intimidate people from demonstrating, Mordecai Specktor said.

“We saw this dress rehearsal for the police state during the RNC,” he said. “[It’s] designed to make people nervous about articulating their views.”

Gus Ganley , a University film student who was found innocent during his own trial for an arrest at a protest last year, said facing prison time for activism can interfere with relationships and self-esteem.

“The nature of this crime, it’s a thought crime,” Ganley said. “You’re constantly thinking about it, constantly looking over your shoulder.”

Ganley, a friend of Specktor’s, said Specktor tries not to let the charges affect his life.

“With Max, I’ve noticed if anything he’s more energized,” Ganley said. “That just speaks to his character, that he’s somebody with such a vast reserve of energy that he’s able to tap into.”

Specktor said he’s trying to focus on the importance of his case as an educational tool.

“It might inspire people if we win. It might inspire people if we lose,” he said. “If people see we’re going to jail for their belief it’s going to inspire people.”

The price of losing the case would be balanced by this educational benefit, Specktor said.

“I’m not saying I want to go to jail,” he said. “If you stand up for your beliefs and they arrest you for it, I don’t think you should stop standing up for your beliefs.”

http://www.mndaily.com/2008/10/12/u-student-plead-not-guilty-terrorism-charges

US Supreme Court rejects new trial for Mumia

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Supreme Court Monday refused to hear arguments for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther accused of killing a police officer who has become an icon for anti-capital punishment campaigners.

His lawyer Robert Bryan has already said he will seek to bring a second Supreme Court appeal -- on the grounds of racism -- for the 54-year-old former radio journalist accused of the 1981 murder of Daniel Faulkner.

Abu-Jamal's death sentence was overturned in March by a federal court in Philadelphia, which found that the jury in the case had been incorrectly instructed. The judges voted two-to-one to uphold his conviction, however.

Having escaped death row, his lawyers are now fighting a life sentence and want to bring him back before a jury for a new trial.

They had asked the Supreme Court to approve a re-trial because of unreliable testimony from witnesses.

Bryan has said he will not rest until his client is freed. "Even though the federal court granted a new trial on the question of the death penalty, we want a complete reversal of the conviction," he said in July.

As part of his defense, Abu-Jamal has argued he was denied a fair trial in 1982 because the prosecution barred 10 qualified African-Americans from sitting on the jury, which in the end consisted of 10 whites and two blacks.

The Philadelphia appeals court had rejected his arguments on lack of evidence of any racist intent on the part of the prosecution.

The US penal code bans the exclusion of potential jurists because of the colour of their skin.

Abu-Jamal's campaign has attracted support from Nelson Mandela, Hollywood celebrities Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon and British parliamentarians, according to campaign group Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition.

Abu-Jamal was serving as the president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists at the time of his arrest. He was a founding member of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Black Panther Party as a teenager.

The Black Panther Party was a Leftist African-American organization from the 1960s and 70s established to promote black power and self-defense.

Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown's name on the plant's chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.

The plan to build a successor to the power station is likely to be the first of a new generation of coal-fired plants. As coal produces more of the carbon emissions causing climate change than any other fuel, campaigners claim that a new station would be a disastrous setback in the battle against global warming, and send out a negative signal to the rest of the world about how serious Britain really is about tackling the climate threat.

But the proposals, from the energy giant E.ON, are firmly backed by the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks. Some members of the Cabinet are thought to be unhappy about them, including the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn. Mr Brown is likely to have the final say on the matter later this year.

During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, who had flown from American to give evidence, appealed to the Prime Minister personally to "take a leadership role" in cancelling the plan and scrapping the idea of a coal-fired future for Britain. Last December he wrote to Mr Brown with a similar appeal. At the trial, he called for an moratorium on all coal-fired power stations, and his hour-long testimony about the gravity of the climate danger, which painted a bleak picture, was listened to intently by the jury of nine women and three men.

Professor Hansen, who first alerted the world to the global warming threat in June 1988 with testimony to a US senate committee in Washington, and who last year said the earth was in "imminent peril" from the warming atmosphere, asserted that emissions of CO2 from Kings-north would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.

He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine, who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.

The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed – the point at issue was the motive.

The defendants who scaled the 630ft chimney at Kingsnorth, near Hoo, last year were Huw Williams, 41, from Nottingham; Ben Stewart, 34, from Lyminge, Kent; Kevin Drake, 44, from Westbury, Wiltshire; Will Rose, 29, from London; and Emily Hall, 34, from New Zealand. Tim Hewke, 48, from Ulcombe, Kent, helped organise the protest.

The court heard how, dressed in orange boiler suits and white hard hats bearing the Greenpeace logo, the six-strong group arrived at the site at 6.30am on 8 October. Armed with bags containing abseiling gear, five of them scaled the chimney while Mr Hewke waited below to liaise between the climbers and police.

The climbers had planned to paint "Gordon, bin it" in huge letters on the side of the chimney, but although they succeeded in temporarily shutting the station, they only got as far as painting the word "Gordon" on the chimney before they descended, having been threatened with a High Court injunction. Removing the graffiti cost E.ON £35,000, the court heard.

During the trial the defendants said they had acted lawfully, owing to an honestly held belief that their attempt to stop emissions from Kingsnorth would prevent further damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming. Their aim, they said, was to rein back CO2 emissions and bring urgent pressure to bear on the Government and E.ON to changes policies. They insisted their action had caused the minimum amount of damage necessary to close the plant down and constituted a "proportionate response" to the increasing environmental threat.

Speaking outside court after being cleared yesterday, Mr Stewart said: "This is a huge blow for ministers and their plans for new coal-fired power stations. It wasn't only us in the dock, it was the coal-fired generation as well. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are John Hutton and Malcolm Wicks. It's time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership and embraced the clean energy future for Britain."

He added: "This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. When a jury of normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave Government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy. It's time we turned to them instead of coal."

Ms Hall said: "The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?"