The Saudi Regime's attachment to corruption is odious, but its gender apartheid is far worse

Riazat Butt posts this piece about her experiences in Saudi Arabia whilst reporting on the Hajj; may I commend it and the comment thread to you.

You know, I can’t help thinking that if the discrimination that was going on in Saudi Arabia was race based (and I know that there is race based discrimination in Saudi, but it is not hardwired into the law like it is for women) then it would be impossible for our Government to cosy up to the Saud family like they do. Instead of inviting them to tea and bribing them to buy our armaments we would be boycotting them and refusing to allow the ruling family to travel in Europe, like we do with African regimes that we disapprove of.

I was and still am tremendously proud of Vince’s stand back in October by refusing to meet members of the Saud family on their visit. The government’s stance over the BAe investigation and Saudi corruption is odious. And of course, we always tag on the end ‘..and they treat women appallingly’ in the way that everybody did when justifying the invasion of Afghanistan.

However, I would prefer if our elected representatives in the Liberal Democrats (or any other party for that matter) did not fell they needed corruption as the hook on which to hang their criticism of the Saudi regime’s treatment of women. It should be a big enough hook for a campaign in itself. The apartheid practised in Saudi Arabia is a gender apartheid not a racial one yet it is just as abhorrent and just as damaging to human rights. Successive UK governments tolerance of it should put us all to shame.

What's all this cultural relativism about then?

Gillian Gibbons is freed and the Sudanese Government hasn’t made any contribution to the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion and that followers of Islam are not all fanatics ready to take umbrage at the slightest slur to their religion.

In the UK, it has been pleasing to see that the majority of people commenting, irrespective of their religion or lack thereof have been appalled by the actions of the Sudanese government; at all points there were choices both around the interpretation of the offence and the law and at every point the Sudanese establishment chose the most extreme action.

There has been though, throughout this, whether on BBC comments, Blogs or Any Answers a significant minority of people who have suggested that Gillian Gibbons only had herself to blame, as she should have known the law. She was in fact naive.

I think there is an enormous difference between causing offence and invoking the displeasure or irritation of whoever has been offending (and therefore being marked out as someone you wouldn’t want to spend time with) and being put in prison or lashed for it. The naming of a teddy bear does no physical harm to anybody.

I’m pretty much an atheist and don’t have much time for religion, but I’ve no real interest in going around deliberately causing offence to other people for the sake of it; I think that’s a waste of time, energy and just not very nice. But I believe passionately in free speech and therefore in my right to cause offence without being punished by a state for it.

I’ll give you an example from my own experience where, as an acutely left handed person, I am in danger of causing offence every time I go to the Middle East and without realising it pick up my bread to scoop up some food with my left hand. This is really, really bad table manners; I mean I might as well start picking my nose at the table (in fact, it’s much, much worse than that…but I don’t want to put you off your dinner). Should I be lashed or sent to prison because I have, with no malicious intention broken, in Meral Ece’s words, ‘a few of the cultural 'rules' we learn to live with’,? Sure, don’t invite me to dinner again, suggest I use a knife and fork rather than my hand (as people have) or just tell me plainly not to use my left hand (as an ex-fiancé’s brother once decreed), explain to me the error of my ways, but please don’t send me to prison for it!

Another analogy: this time looking the young woman the other week in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes for being in the company of a man she wasn’t related to ahead of being gang raped. Now, she is a Saudi, not just a visiting teacher, she surely knew the law? Do we all then sit back, fold our hands on our laps and say: ‘Well, she knew what the law was…how naïve of her!’. No, we don’t, because we know that her punishment under that law is an infringement of human rights, just as the response to Gillian Gibbons was by no means reasonable or just a harmless cultural difference. I make this point not out of a lack of respect for the rule of law in a given country but out of my greater respect for human rights.

Perhaps if Gillian Gibbons had got the lashings she was at risk of, instead of a very short prison sentence and pardon, then not as many people would have found it so easy to slip back into an ‘oh, well, it’s different there’ mentality; but remember it’s not just western primary school teachers that have no freedom of speech or apostasy in Sudan, is it?

Lots of people, from all religions or none know and understand this, I am sure, but lets not forget that human rights are for everybody, absolute and not subject to cultural relativism.

Is mysogyny on the rise across the world? And how would we tell if it was?

Chris K , Rob Knight on Liberal Review and Jonathan Calder have all blogged on the horrific news that a gang rape victim had her punishment, yes, her punishment of 90 lashes increased to 200 for having the cheek to appeal her sentence.

And last week, we heard reports from the Chief of Police in Basra that 42 women in the city had been murdered between July and September for not covering up; which makes me wonder how many women had been beaten or assaulted for the same ‘crimes’? This is not just happening to Muslim women but Christian women as well.

And there! We can see the game is given away; because this sort of behaviour towards women is not as a result of religion as often assumed, but, as a result of militant misogyny.

The UN undertakes country comparisons related to Gender as part of their reports on Human Development. There is the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and also the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GDI measures all the same things as the Human Development Index but just splits them by gender, male and female. The second, GEM, looks at the proportion of women that work as political representatives, or are managers, senior officials or work in professional or technical positions. Now, it very easy to pick many, many holes in these two measures and some of the assumptions around what is deemed as being ‘developed’; but they’re there and they’re better than nothing.

But they miss out the day to day impact, which the two examples of rampant misogyny above, have on normal women’s lives. ‘Cos, you see, wonderful though it is that 33% of Iraq’s MPs are women (just under twice as many as in the UK), that doesn’t seem to be helping the women of Basra right now. There will be no direct reduction in the GEM of Iraq as a result of these killings even though, I would suggest that women are seriously less empowered now than they were 4 years ago, as a result.

And of course, Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to be empowered at all, but there is a different between a woman getting gang raped and given 90 lashes and one being given 200 lashes. Again, I can’t see where this sort of degradation in women’s rights and quality of life are being measured – although, if anyone does, then do let me know!

I think its time we have a different sort of measure of women’s freedom and rights; one that measures the qualitative impact of misogyny on women’s lives. So one might be able to see that in recent years, Afghanistan’s has gone up as women are at least now allowed out of the house but Iraq’s has gone down because of the type of thing that is happening in Basra. I am not suggesting that this would be easy to do, but we need more than a clutch of newspaper reports to measure these things.

And in the UK, well how does the fact that so few reported rapes actually end in any sort of conviction (5.3% this year, when it used to be 33% in the 70’s) figure in any UN measure of women’s empowerment? Or the fact that so many people think that a women who goes out late at night holds some sort of responsibility for her rape, if she is raped.

Next Saturday, 24^th November will be the ‘Reclaim the Night” march in London at 6pm; last time over 1200 women marched in support of women’s right to go out onto the street free from fear of violence or rape.

Our misogyny may not be hard coded into our penal system as in Saudi and thankfully the women of London are not subject to militia’s going around killing us for being ‘inappropriately dressed’ as in Basra but there’s still plenty of misogyny here, if 1 in 8 men think it’s Ok to hit a woman if she’s been nagging or if a third of us, both men and women, think a women is partly responsible for her own rape if she flirts, has been drinking or is dressing sexily.

Sometimes, it feels to me that as Liberal Democrats see feminism as surplus to requirements, because as liberals we would not discriminate against anybody of whatever sex; but on days like today I know that if we are going to achieve better lives for women all over the world we have to be clear and say that feminism has a vital role to play and has a long way to go before misogyny is overcome; we need to be proud to be feminsts!! Laws (of the legal rather than the David kind) help but they are not enough.

UK's DNA Database Shame

There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Radio 4 PM Blog about the impact of the new stop and question powers that the government want to bring in. My concern is particularly on the impact that it will have on the DNA database and I see I am not the only Lib Dem concerned about this today.

If one assumes that the purpose of new stop and questioning powers is to identify, arrest and convict more potential terrorists or just 'ordinary' criminals, then the police will be able to take more DNA and put them on the DNA database.
Some DNA database facts from Lynne Featherstone’s blog:
· 25% of the people on the database innocent of any crime
· In London, 57% of the innocent people on the database are in fact non-white.
· A third of all the black population in England & Wales is already on the database.

And now, Lib Dem Research suggests that in 3 years half of all black men will be on the database whether they have been convicted of a crime or not.

As I've blogged before, the DNA database is racially skewed, to mirror a racial skew in the police’s stop and search/questioning policy. This will eventually mean that an even higher proportion of convicted people are non-white (hence the Lib Dem researched projections).

The obvious inability to identify potential terrorist subjects by sight and therefore the need to use crude indicators based on colour of skin, or length of beard or dress underlines why these things are so pernicious. A leap is made from appearance to behaviour and then, in the UK, it gets hard coded into data on databases.

I consider myself very fortunate to be living in Britain and I love my home, the country and the city I live in but when I think about how we as a nation are the world leaders in compiling databases on our citizens such as the DNA database I hang my head in shame.

"Those who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security." (Benjamin Franklin)

Chavez and Livingstone: a tawdry alliance

More reports today than Hugo Chavez has an eye on yet another TV station that he doesn’t like. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, watching someone pulling the switch on such foundations of democracy as free speech.

But here in London of course, Mr Chavez is our great friend, since the deal done by our Mayor, Mr Livingstone with Mr Chavez back in February for cheap oil to fuel our buses. Yes, Venezuela, a developing country is helping to subsidise the travel of one of the most prosperous cities in the world.

So, what’s in it for Venezuela? Apparently part of the deal is that we are giving them advice on recycling and waste management! Us! In that case one might expect that we are a best practice City for recycling; but we’re not. In fact our recycling figures in London are some of the worst in the world, far behind such cities as Berlin, San Francisco or Seattle.

Not only that, but recycling isn’t even within Ken’s powers at the GLA. He has failed to get his own Government to include in the GLA bill provisions for a pan London waste authority. So presumably Ken is providing advice on the basis of what he’s like to be doing as opposed to what is actually happening in London.

A raw deal for Mr Chavez, perhaps? For Venezuela, maybe; for their increasingly despotic leader, no.

Because what Mr Chavez gets are signed contracts with one of the greatest cities in the world, which he can tout around other countries just like service organisations provide in their sales pitches their list of blue chip clients. London’s business is in effect a loss leader for Mr Chavez.

What Mr Livingstone has given him is an air of respectability that he does not deserve.

Woman forced to divorce husband

More human rights abuses from Saudi Arabia, well, what a surprise!!

Fatima A has been forced to divorce her husband because her half-brother, her legal guardian, has claimed and won in court that her husband failed to disclose that he was from a tribe with a lower status than his wife to be. This is effectively, under Saudi Law, a breach of contract.

Both Fatima and her husband wish to remain married to each other; they have two children. Fatima is currently staying in al-Dammam Prison with one of her children rather than return to the house of her half-brother. If she contacts her now ex-husband then she will, by law, be guilty of adultery and subject to the death penalty.

In Saudi Arabia, a woman is not a human being but just a possession of her nearest male relative; having asking permission from a male guardian to travel is just the start of it.

I have been trying to imagine what my life would be life if it were to be lived at the whim of my nearest male relative; but it is impossible to compare. In the west we are lucky, with our relatively small families, that we can have close relationships with our male relatives. But neither, my uncle living in Thailand, my two cousins in Australia nor my Step-Dad would ever contemplate telling me what I could or could not do, firstly because the culture we have all grown up in means that they view me as an equal; secondly, frankly, they wouldn’t dare!! Although that last bit may be a function of the first; perhaps my character and my confidence would be altogether different if I were brought up in Saudi Arabia. So, it is hard to imagine any of them ordering me to break up my family against my wishes even if they had that legal power! I tell you something, I wouldn’t want to have been living at the whim of my (ex-)father in law; he certainly wasn’t one of my fans! Apparently he thought I was ‘too bossy’, I can’t imagine why.

But I have acquaintances, who are from traditional Bedouin families (not from Saudi Arabia, I might add, so they don’t have such direct legal power) that have up to 30 siblings – so you might end up hardly knowing the person who has effectively the power of life and death, happiness or misery!

And, no, I can’t even begin to imagine the constraints that one half of the population of Saudi Arabia have to live under. To my mind, this is surely a form of slavery.

And this is a country that we are so eager to do business with, that we suppress investigations into corruption with BAe in order to keep on the ruling Saud family’s good side.

You can find more details on Fatima’s case and how you can help from Amnesty.

Girls are humans too!

The Johann Hari column in the independent this morning, got me going again…I have hardly been blogging of late but every now and then a topic comes up that inspires in me the hopeless desire, in an almost Liberal Polemic type way, to write a series of essays on a subject – an urge almost completely missing from my university career more’s the pity!

There are lots of things in politics that get me quite excited, especially when I am applying them in a practical sense, for example, as a school governor instead of just proselytising on them. BUT there are two subjects that to me a so big and important that I metaphorically pace up and down in my head, I get so worked up about them. One is the current assault on our civil liberties (and anybody else’s, for that matter) and second, and related, is human rights and specifically the lack of human rights that are attributed to women all over the world.

Hari makes a compelling case for the fact that too much respect for multiculturalism makes us blind to what is often a blatant disregard and contempt for the human rights the female half the world. So often our analysis of a situation is based on the experience and sensibilities of men; the experience of a woman is invisible or silenced. But in every oppressed, minority or dispossessed group or culture, the women will be there, at the bottom of the pile.

One of the courses I took at University, as part of my degree in International Relations, was entitled ‘Feminist Theories of International Relations’; at the time it was the only course available in the UK on such a subject. In fact I must have been writing an essay, after all, because I remember my Step Dad’s surprise, as he looked at my pile of books brought home for the holidays from the university library, that it was possible to find enough to say on such a subject to fill one book, let alone the six that were on the kitchen table.

That was during the first round of the Balkans wars and only then was rape becoming recognised, in mainstream as opposed to just feminist dialogue, as a bona fide weapon of war. Of course, it always has been from the Vikings to the fall of Berlin, but it’s only in the last 20 years or so that academic discourse has included it along side analysis of, say, military hardware and intergovernmental organisations. Until that point the experience of women in war, beyond keeping the home fires burning and knitting socks, was yet again invisible.

It’s not just war; a different set of human rights standards exists in everything - from the fact that women in Iran often spend far longer in jail for political crimes than men (see www.wafe-women.org for more info on this topic), for no other reason that I can identify other than a deep seated misogyny, to the approach to educating women in countries and cultures, we may consider as highly educated. It is often just the elite that is so; I have a friend, from the Sinai, whose sister was taken out of school aged 9 to help her mother look after the rest of the kids, whilst he went off to university to study English. Such an education is an impossible dream for her as she can’t actually read. When travelling in Egypt, much is made of experiencing traditional Bedouin culture. I’m sure there’s not many women tourists who would really like to experience it, in all its glory – there’s a lot more to it than camels and tea!

And then, don’t even get me on to the topic of Saudi Arabia! We are all so rightly repulsed by the idea of BAe bribes, hardly blink at their human rights record as it pertains to women, but again are rightly outraged when a western contractor is flogged for smuggling in alcohol.

Human rights and respect for others cultures includes everybody, women and men…and, as Hari points out, we must not allow any fear of appearing racist or intolerant of other cultures get in the way of that.

Sydenham got there first...

This morning Radio 4 did a piece on a pilot scheme in Middlesbrough where anti social behaviour is be dealt with by the use of ‘talking CCTV’.

So much for Middlesbrough being first; this has already been happening at Sydenham Station, although I don’t know how frequently! One evening last summer, I came into the station to go into town where a couple of young lads were sitting on the back of a bench on the platform, with their feet on the seat. All of a sudden a voice came over the platform speaker, saying something like ; ‘Will the young men on platform one take their feet off the bench. Yes, YOU!’

The effect was immediate, they got down and the rest of us in the station just sort of smirked at them; minor piece of anti social behaviour dealt with.

But as I crossed the bridge over to the London platform I was aware that, although instantly very effective, this did not bode well. It’s also not so hard to extrapolate from John Reid’s latest plans a world where our behaviour is monitored and controlled by the state. If that’s the case, we’re not really that far from 1984, are we? The thing to remember is as well, how easy to implement state surveillance is in this country, as we have more CCTV cameras per head than any other country.

However, it is not enough just to demonize CCTV; I know from my work with the local Safer Neighbourhoods Team in Crystal Palace that a CCTV camera, well advertised and pointing at the right place can transform the quality of lives of residents on estates. And let’s not forget that it can also serve the defence of human rights and civil liberties as Liberty’s calls for an IPCC investigation of the treatment of a woman by the police in an underground car park in Sheffield illustrate.

It is, though, a very typical response from the government, in the face of antisocial behaviour, to resort to a centralised state delivered solution; and how much more centralised do you have to get than a faceless voice over a loud speaker?

If however, we want a solution to low level anti-social behaviour we need to look to ourselves.

If we don’t like the behaviour of our fellow citizens such as putting feet on seats or littering we actually have a choice. We can either leave it to the government to sort out and hence not be surprised when we find ourselves being treated like children, or we can start to set examples and take responsibility as individuals and a community for the behaviour of our young people.

I’m not suggesting any sort of vigilantism and it is for the police and the safer neighbourhood teams to deal with violent, threatening or criminal behaviour.

But many times the situation is quite benign, so, instead of tutting (or as often happens with me ‘fuming’) to ourselves because someone has dropped litter or a young person has their feet up on the seat in the train, we should say something, do something, just provide a different model of behaviour for them to follow. It may not always be successful, our request may be initially ignored but even a failed request will have a bigger impact on future behaviour than none at all.

Anyhow, in many cases with teenagers it is a lack of awareness that such behaviour is antisocial than any deliberate intent. And OK, so maybe their parents should be teaching them how to behave, but that doesn’t absolve us from our community responsibility. That is certainly not an excuse that would have entered our heads 30 or 40 years ago - or even 20, if you happened to be an adult in the village where I grew up!

If each one of us just undertook one action, provided some sort of role model just once a week, then we would surely start to make a difference. This is not a policy but grass roots action, that I am advocating and it is a slow burn not an overnight solution - obviously!

I firmly believe that people don’t drink and drive as much now, not because they think they’ll get caught by the police, but that it is no longer socially acceptable – I’m looking forward to when speeding becomes an equal taboo.

We have an opportunity as individuals to have an impact on our community and I am convinced that the world most of us would prefer to live in is one where the community regulates itself rather than leaving it to someone a bunch of private security employees to bawl at us through a loud speaker.

I just don’t want naming and shaming; I want a strong, supportive and free community.

A letter from Tony

Aaaargh! So now we know, what's in store for us if we sign up to a 10 Downing street petition.

Yesterday, horror of horrors, I got an email from Tony Blair, making the case for ID cards. I have so far resisted the temptation to clamp my hands over my ears and sing 'I'm not listening, I can't hear you, la, la, la...' and despite the rather scary proposition of the police 'fishing' for fingerprints at whim, as highlighted on The Today Programme this morning, I'm not going to go into here what's wrong with ID cards.

But, what does interest me is this whole online political engagement 'thing' that has arisen with these petitions. Even though it means I have to receive emails from Tony Blair, I do find it all rather exciting because some of these petitions are involving more than us 'usual suspects'; and if you're reading my blog, then unless you're my Mum or my friend Ali in Holland, you know I mean you!!!

The 'Scrap the ID cards petition' got 28,000 signatures, the road pricing one 1,500,000 and each one of those 1,500,000 is going to get an email dropping into their inbox arguing for the Government Policy. Now, I wouldn't normally wish this on my worst enemy, but actually, I think it is more important that people start to be politically engaged first and then politically engaged with me and the Lib Dems, on the basis that that first bit is harder to achieve than the second.

I got the viral email asking me to sign the road pricing petition via a non political friend, who had sent it on to a number of others. They all probably vote but that's as far as they go; the only regular political discussion they seem to take part in is 'Jo-baiting', an unsurprisingly easy thing to do, perhaps they save the interesting stuff for when I'm not there!

It's also likely that those who are going to get their letter from Tony, were on average younger than the voting population; just that group who seem so disillusioned and disengaged with the political process - this has got to be a good thing for politics and the taxpayers and voters, surely?

I'm not the only one that is really excited about the potential that viral campaigning has, even if it is the Downing St that's got all the email addresses, am I?

Just because I'm paranoid....

Well, yes, but just because I may be being paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us! There I was reading, on the suggestion of the Free Think Blog a perfectly innocent article on free will and neurology and then more came up against the implications of a DNA database that captures innocent people’s DNA.

From the Economist – on their article on neurology and free will.

“At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.”

I suppose I’m getting some comfort from the fact that I keep picking up references to the wider implications of this DNA database in the media and so hopefully, it might start to snowball into something, but am I the only person noticing how close we’re getting to Big Brother (and that’s the Orwellian version) here?

You do have something to fear

Two items in the news today have got me back up on my civil liberties soap box; one from the Today programme and one picked up from my reading of someone else’s discarded Metro on the Victoria Line but both about Government databases.

At 6.30am this morning there was concern around the fact that everybody’s medical records were going to be put on the national NHS Patients Records database for all health professionals to see and the only way you could have your personal information excluded from this process was to plead that you would suffer considerable ‘emotional distress’ – although whether that is more or less than the amount of emotional distress required to explain why you would have emotional distress, I don’t know. All getting a bit ‘yes, minister’ around here….

Or at least, if it was the slightest bit funny, it would.

The second is about the DNA database and the numbers of ‘innocent’ people on it. Having googled the whole subject, I have discovered (from Lynne Featherstone’s website) that not only are 25% of the people on the database innocent but that in London, 57% of the innocent people on the database are in fact non-white. A third of all the black population in England & Wales is already on the database.

These databases, at first thought, which might be the only one that most of us give them, might seem to be attempting a general good. After all a database is only recording fact, isn’t it? And after all, in both cases the innocent have nothing to fear do they?

But it’s not that simple – already we can see that the DNA database is becoming racially skewed, to mirror a racial skew in the police’s stop and search and questioning policy. It is also at risk of being used for research purposes to racially profile suspects DNA. If the DNA were being collected in a random fashion it would not be as potentially socially explosive.

Ok, as one contributor to the BBC message board put it today, so what if someone over the other side of the country can see I’ve got a problem with my leg or my kidneys? But what happens when a record gives an indication of a more socially loaded condition, such as alcoholism, what then? What if the concerns around security do come true, what then?

If information is power then we are giving more and more power to government employees and governments and fundamentally changing the relationship between the state and the citizen.

Yet, as Shami Chakrabarti points out time and again, this is something we are sleep walking into. Why do so many of my non political friends not care, or feel slightly uncomfortable about it but shrug and accept it? I think, mainly, because they don’t think it will ever happen to them. And just like they can’t imagine ever needing to flee their country and claim asylum or not being able to get a visa for anywhere in the world they may choose to visit; they can’t imagine getting on the wrong side of a database.

“First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me”

Martin Niemöller

I’ve probably rambled a bit and tried to get too many ideas into this blog and perhaps when I’ve been going for years I might be able to control my desire to get everything out at once. It is something gets me really exercised, as you can probably tell.