Brazil passes groundbreaking Internet governance Bill. Brazil has made history with the approval of a groundbreaking post-Snowden Bill which sets out principles, rights and guarantees for Internet users. Last night (25), an overwhelming majority of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of the Marco Civil da Internet and its provisions around net neutrality, right to privacy and freedom of expression online. The Bill, which now needs to be cleared by the Senate before it is sanctioned by president Dilma Rousseff, had its voting postponed several times in the last three years. It gained prominence after the NSA spying scandal and became the center of a political minefield due to disagreement over several crucial points. The provisions around net neutrality are a key reason why the Bill is considered a major victory for the civil society and activists alike. In order to speed up the progress of the Bill, the government gave up on the local storage requirements last week.
I Love You, America, But This List Should NOT Make You Uncomfortable. The New Zealand sex-work model. ‘Sex workers are as much entitled to protection from sexual harassment as those working in other occupations.” So said a recent ruling by New Zealand’s Human Rights Tribunal, which awarded a sex worker sizable damages for sexual harassment by a brothel owner. A progressive decision that upholds sex workers’ rights in this manner is only conceivable in jurisdictions such as New Zealand, where sex work was decriminalized 10 years ago when the Prostitution Reform Act came into operation. In Canada, we’ve been sold a false dilemma that presents only the possibility of a “Nordic” or “Swedish” regime or, alternatively, “Dutch” approach that regulates prostitution in our country. Since the Supreme Court struck down criminal laws prohibiting communication in public for the purpose of prostitution, living off the avails of prostitution and keeping a common bawdy house, the Nordic regime appears to be the approach the federal government is favouring.
Civil Rights. Canadian Indian residential school system. There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early 21st century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, sterilization, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students, and enfranchising them forcibly.
History[edit] The foundations of the system were the pre-confederation Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869). These assumed the inherent superiority of British ways, and the need for Indians to become English-speakers, Christians, and farmers. At the time, many Aboriginal leaders wanted these acts overturned.[9] St. Mortality rates[edit] Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a truth and reconciliation commission organized by the parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.[1] The commission is part of an overall holistic and comprehensive response to the Indian residential school legacy. It was officially established on June 2, 2008. After their closing, Indian residential schools became notorious for allegations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and neglect.
The commission will look at activities perpetrated within residential schools, as well as the negative impacts of the schools' stated aim, to forcibly assimilate First Nations children. The matter of student deaths at these institutions, and their burial in unmarked graves without the notification or consent of the parents, is an additional item on the agenda. On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the government's role in their administration of the residential schools. Amnesty International Slams Quebec Values Charter For Limiting 'Fundamental Rights'
MONTREAL - Amnesty International is wading into the debate over Quebec's controversial charter of values, arguing that the plan would limit "fundamental rights" and further stigmatize vulnerable women. The Canadian branch of the human-rights organization says the Parti Quebecois proposal would violate Canadian and international law for infringing on freedom of expression and religion. The PQ plan announced earlier this month would prohibit public employees from wearing obvious religious symbols, including the hijab. Amnesty took particular issue with one of the stated goals of the proposed charter — that it would promote equality between the sexes.
"For people, and particularly for women, who might be coerced into wearing a religious symbol, prohibiting them from wearing it will not solve the problem," the group said in a statement. The group has voiced concern over Quebec policies before. "Women must not be forced to wear a scarf or a veil, neither by the government nor by individuals. Conservative Victims’ Bill of Rights smacks of medieval justice.
Many of us had hoped the recent Speech from the Throne would herald a new direction in justice and corrections. Sadly, it was not to be. The emphasis on a proposed Victims’ Bill of Rights, in particular, is not simply a distraction from the real crisis in Canadian justice, but also holds the promise of yet further regress. The real crisis lies in the congestion and delays in our courts, together with the crowding in our prisons and remand centres, which threaten our capacity to respect fundamental principles of justice and Charter-guaranteed protections. It is time for Canada to recognize, as have the U.S. and several European countries, that the old “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” approaches have proven both costly and ineffective.
What we need instead is to develop a less expensive, evidence-based and more effective means of addressing crime. Victims’ rights certainly have an immediate, intuitive appeal. Catherine Latimer is executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.
Privacy. Drug Laws. Women's Rights. Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath. But are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals? I think not. Not just because the police have a special inclination toward confabulation, but because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie. In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so. That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the matter more bluntly. Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law.
The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique. Mr. Jury Finds Occupy Wall Street Protester Innocent After Video Contradicts Police Testimony [Updated: VIDEO] In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors. Premo, an activist and community organizer who has in recent months been a central figure in the efforts of Occupy Sandy, was one of many hundred people who took part in a demonstration in Lower Manhattan on December 17 of 2011, when some protesters broke into a vacant lot in Duarte Square in an attempt to start a new occupation. For a more detailed account of Premo's trial, read this update: Read More OWS Coverage: - New York Post Helps NYPD Slander Occupy Wall Street (Again) - With the Rolling Jubilee, Debt Activists Strike a Nerve - Human Rights Body Criticizes U.S. for NYPD's Policing of Occupy Wall Street But Premo, facing felony charges of assaulting an officer, maintained his innocence.
"That was really important," Maurus said. Watch The Cops. Matt Gurney: Lapel cameras for Toronto cops is good news for everyone. Toronto’s police force announced Tuesday that it will join several other large city forces across Canada and the United States in adopting lapel cameras — video cameras worn as part of the uniform that keep a video record of everything that an officer does while on duty. This is in response to several recent reports regarding incidents in which police officers have used force against members of the public. While many details remain to be settled, the police have said that they hope to start the project before the year is out.
The union that represents the police officers doesn’t sound wildly enthusiastic about the plan. But it hasn’t totally rejected it, either. Mike McCormack, who heads the police association, said that he worries it may be diverting scarce funds away from more pressing needs, such as hiring more officers and equipping front-line cops with less-lethal taser weapons. Some resistance from the union was arguably inevitable — but even Mr. National Post. The British Police: getting away with murder since 1969.
Total corruption: Organised crime infiltrated and compromised UK courts, police, HMRC, Crown Prosecution Service, prisons, and juries. A leaked Scotland Yard report disclosed in The Indepedent documents the near-total corruption of the British government and justice system by organised criminals. The report documents "Operation Tiberius," which dates to 2003, and contains a series of explosive allegations about corruption, including the sale of £50,000 "get out of jail free cards," the buying off of juries, and the "at will" infiltration of Scotland Yard by gangs. The report quotes a Senior Investigating Officer who said, "I feel that at the current time I cannot carry out an ethical murder investigation without the fear of it being compromised.
" It claims that a Metropolitan Police detective's son was employed as a torturer for one gang, and that the detective impeded any investigations into the gang his son worked for and the crimes he committed. There's no reason to suspect that the crimes documented in Tiberius stopped there, nor that they couldn't take place today. The chickens come home to roost | The World Breaks Everyone. Christopher Dorner LAPD (Photo credit: www.YoVenice.com) This article also appeared on Counterpunch, and was profiled on the front page of Reddit. My first experience of the LAPD was as a child back in Wales, staring at the TV screen in horror and fascination, watching a grainy image of police officers beat a black man to a pulp.
I’d never seen anything like it. None of us had. Six thousand miles away, in a tiny village in Wales with only five hundred inhabitants, we talked about Rodney King and racism in Los Angeles. T-shirts sprang up on local market stalls bearing the slogan LAPD – treat you like a King! Los Angeles seemed like a place of horrors, a place so utterly backward and corrupt that none of us would ever want to even visit, let alone live there. And then I moved to Los Angeles in my twenties, and I became exposed to a different kind of policing. The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. . - Christopher Dorner These are not isolated incidents. Nova Scotia’s awful cyber abuse law makes bullies of us all - Blog Central, Jesse Brown. Jeff Chiu/AP I’ve written before about the problems involved in legislating against cyberbullying. I focused on the impossible issue of reaching a definition. Rape, assault, harassment: these are crimes with established parameters.
All of them could also be called “bullying.” They could also be described as “mean,” and I suppose we could enact a law against being mean. The problems with anti-cyberbullying laws don’t end there. Someone feels that you’re cyberbullying them. If this is the standard, I don’t know a person who isn’t a cyberbully. The issuing of a protection order is an ex parte process between your accuser and the court. But wait, there’s more. If your kid is found to be a cyberbully, you are deemed to be a cyberbully as well for not stopping them, unless you can prove that you tried really hard to. The act also modifies the Nova Scotia Education Act to make school principals somewhat responsible for what their students do online.