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HRW slams Saudi Arabia after 7 ‘tortured’ men jailed for ‘inciting protests’ on Facebook
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| Reuters / Stringer |
Human Rights Watch has slated Saudi Arabia for violating international human rights obligations after it jailed seven people for up to 10 years for ‘inciting protests’ via Facebook. The indicted denied charges and said they were tortured into confession.
The sentencing after a two-month long trial took place on June 24, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which it has obtained the court judgment, and revealed the procedure “violates international human rights principles.”
The seven men were arrested between September 23 and 26, 2011. They have been kept in the General Investigations Prison in the capital of Saudi’s Eastern Province, Damman for a year-and-a-half without being charged. They have been tried by Specialized Criminal Court, set up in 2008 to deal with terrorism-related cases. The trial began on April 29.
The charges against the seven vary. However, they all have been accused of joining Facebook pages aiming to “incite protests, illegal gathering, and breaking allegiance with the king” and “of assisting and encouraging these calls are corresponding with the Facebook pages’ followers and concealing them,” the HRW cited the court judgment.
They have been also convicted of violating Article 6 of the Anti-Cyber Crime Law, which bans producing, sending, or storing any material via an information network that “harms public order.”
“Breaking allegiance [with the king] comes by way of arms and it comes by way of protests, marches, and writing articles and publications … the behavior of the [second] course … is sometimes the more dangerous and more malicious method,” the presiding judge concluded in the judgment.
None of the seven was accused of directly participating in protests, nor of using or advocating violence.
Abd al-Hamid al-Amer has got harshest sentence – 10 years in prison for founding two Facebook groups in early 2011 which supported of a prominent Shia sheikh and religious leader Tawfiq al-Amer, arrested for publicly calling for a constitutional monarchy.
Prosecutors said that those pages were used to call for followers “to join the movements” and “gave them ideas and guidance on the important sites in which to protest and set the timing [of the protests].”
All seven accused have admitted they participated in Facebook pages titled “al-Ahsa March 4 Youth Movement” and “The Free Men of al-Ahsa”, but did not know that was unlawful. Therefore, they denied accusations of having intentions to break allegiance with the king or harm public order, but the prosecution produced signed confessions.
During the trial, the accused reported to the court that confessions were signed under torture by the intelligence officers, but the judge overruled the claim as “not acceptable,” due especially to “their inability to prove the allegations of coercion and torture.”
According to one of the seven convicts’ family members, the men had not lawyers as they could not afford them. Under Saudi Arabia’s Criminal Procedure Law, unlike in many countries, there is no provision for a public defender for those who cannot afford a lawyer, HRW reported.
Moreover, as Saudi Arabia has no written penal code, prosecutors and judges tend to criminalize acts based on their own interpretation of Islamic law.
HRW insists the whole procedure lacks clearness and violates “international human rights principles, such as those that prohibit arbitrary arrest and guarantee fair trials.”
The men intend to appeal their sentences.
The HRW has stressed that the trial also comes against Article 15 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights, which Saudi Arabia ratified in 2009.
“No crime and no penalty can be established without a prior provision of the law. In all circumstances, the law most favorable to the defendant shall be applied,” the article states.
The HRW has called on the European Union’s High Representative Catherine Ashton and EU member states’ representatives, who are meeting with their Gulf region counterparts in Bahrain on June 30, to condemn the convictions and publicly “press Saudi Arabia to stop jailing human rights activists and peaceful dissidents.”
“Sending people off to years in prison for peaceful Facebook posts sends a strong message that there’s no safe way to speak out in Saudi Arabia, even on online social networks,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “If the EU doesn’t raise these cases with Saudi officials this weekend, its silence will look like craven compliance with the rights abuses of an authoritarian state.”
The latest conviction of the seven followed a wave of similar cases of convictions of peaceful dissidents and human rights activists in June, according to HRW.
Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom mulls legal action over Leaseweb ‘data massacre’
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| AFP Photo / Getty Images / Rainier Ehrhardt |
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom may be suing server hosting company Leaseweb over a “data massacre." The Dutch company says it deleted files from 630 servers due to lack of interest in them, but Dotcom has revealed letters proving otherwise.
The revelation comes a week after Dotcom accused the US government and Leaseweb of deleting millions of personal files without warning, including “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property.”
Most of the permanently deleted data came from European users, with servers then re-provisioned to other customers – despite the fact that Megaupload had specifically requested that the hosting provider preserve the information.
“They deleted petabytes of data in the face of Megaupload’s data preservation notices. Our legal team asked them multiple times not to delete the data while the US court is deciding the pending cases including the rights of our users,” TorrentFreak quoted Dotcom as saying.
But Leaseweb’s senior regulatory counsel, Alex de Joode, said his company deleted the data and re-provisioned the servers “after a year of nobody showing any interest” in them.
“We did inform Megaupload about our decision to re-provision the servers,” de Joode said in a June 19 statement, thus disputing Dotcom’s accusation that the decision was made "without warning.” De Joode said that Leaseweb received no answer from the Megaupload team, so they “commenced the re-provisioning of the servers in February 2013.”
“To minimize security risks and maximize the privacy of our clients, it is a standard procedure at Leaseweb to completely clean servers before they are offered to any new customer,” he said.
To back up his accusations, Kim Dotcom has published an email which was sent from Megaupload’s legal counsel to Leaseweb in March 2012. The letter allegedly shows that Megaupload did, in fact, request preservation of the files.
"Megaupload continues to request that Leaseweb preserve any and all information, documentation and data related to Megaupload - as destruction by Leaseweb would appear to be in violation of amongst other things the applicable civil litigation data preservation rules and would interfere with evidence in a criminal matter [...]," said the letter. The email is signed by Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken and addressed to Leaseweb’s A.H. Bram de Haas van Dorsser.
The email adds that “the Mega data on the servers at Leaseweb contain private and sensitive customer data and is subject to applicable privacy and data retention laws.”
“Megaupload is negotiating with the United States to discern feasibility of consumer data access and the conditions for the same," Rothken wrote in the letter.
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| Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (AFP Photo / Michael Bradley) |
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) representing the file-sharing website in court made a similar request to Leaseweb USA in April.
“We now write to formally request that you preserve that material both for purposes of contemplated future litigation and as a matter of obligation and courtesy to the innocent individuals whose materials have unfortunately been swept up into this case,” the EFF letter reads.
According to Dotcom, Megaupload’s legal team is analyzing whether Leaseweb violated the law.
“I can tell you that we are contemplating legal action against Leaseweb,” he told TorrentFreak on Wednesday.
“We believe that Leaseweb acted inappropriately under the circumstances when they destroyed data,” Rothken told the blogging website. “Ultimately we blame the United States who exercised constructive control over Megaupload’s assets and who had the obligation, resources, and ability to preserve all relevant and exonerating evidence including the data located at Leaseweb and failed to do so,” he added.
But Leaseweb claims it done nothing wrong. In a June 26 statement, the company stressed that “the contract between Leaseweb B.V. and Megaupload was governed by Dutch law.”
“This means the termination, and subsequent data retention needs to be valid under Dutch law. As there was no claim from the Dutch authorities on the data, the data was not subject to evidence rules. Also Dutch and European Privacy legislation prohibit giving third parties (i.e. MegaUpload customers, or Instra) direct access to their data,” the statement read.
Dotcom, who made a fortune from his file-sharing service Megaupload, is currently under a federal investigation, launched by the US Department of Justice after police raided his home. He is currently free on bail in New Zealand, with an extradition trial set for August.
The US has charged the Megaupload founder with facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale, racketeering, and money-laundering, which carries maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.
Authorities claim Megaupload has cost copyright holders upwards of $500 million in lost revenues, due to content being illegally uploaded to its servers. The Department of Justice also believes Dotcom illegally earned $175 million by selling ads and subscriptions on the site.
On the anniversary of his arrest last January, Dotcom launched a new file-hosting site called ‘Mega.’
Facebook denies sharing user information with Turkish govt
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| AFP Photo / Leon Neal |
Facebook says it has not provided any user data to Turkish authorities in response to protest-related requests. It comes after a Turkish minister said the social media site has been cooperative “for a long time,” and that Twitter will likely comply too.
“Facebook has not provided user data to Turkish authorities in response to government requests relating to the protests,” the company said in a statement. “We reject all government data requests from Turkish authorities and push them to formal legal channels unless it appears that there is an immediate threat to life or a child.”
Facebook has expressed concerns over a draft bill on social media which would require companies to share data with Turkish authorities. Executives plan on raising the issue during this week’s meeting with Turkish officials in the US.
Earlier on Wednesday, Turkish Minister of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications, Binali Yildirim, said the country’s government was satisfied with Facebook’s assistance.
“Facebook has been working in coordination with the Turkish authorities for a long time. They have a unit in Turkey. We don’t have any problem with them,” Yildirim said. The statement sparked outrage among Turkish social network users.
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| Turkish protesters stand in Red Crescent square during a 'duranadam' (standing person) protest in Ankara (AFP Photo / AdemM Atlan) |
Yildirim added that Twitter has not shown such “positive approach” despite “necessary warnings” from Turkey. He said that the Turkish government has asked Twitter, along with other social media sites, to set up a representative office inside the country.
“We have told all social media that...if you operate in Turkey you must comply with Turkish law…When information is requested, we want to see someone in Turkey who can provide this...there needs to be an interlocutor we can put our grievance to and who can correct an error if there is one,” he said.
“Twitter will probably comply too. Otherwise, this is a situation that cannot be sustained,” Yildirim stressed. His statement was presumably referring to social media’s role in the country’s recent anti-government protests. He added that the government seeks only to “turn down the volume of the social media,” rather than restricting it.
Another ministry official told Reuters that Turkey has asked Twitter to reveal the identities of users who posted messages which were considered insulting to Prime Minister Erdogan or the Turkish government. It was not immediately clear if Twitter responded.
Prime Minister Erdogan called social networking sites a “nuisance” during the anti-government protests in June, after local media reported that dozens were arrested for “inciting unrest” via social media.
The country's interior minister previously announced that Ankara was working on new regulations that would target so-called "provocateurs" on social media. A source told Reuters that the justice ministry had proposed that any Turk wishing to open a Twitter account would have to enter his or her national identification number. This was reportedly turned down by the transport ministry for being technically infeasible.
Turkey has a long record of legislative moves which rights groups believe fall under internet censorship. Ankara banned YouTube for more than two years in 2008 after a video clip ‘insulted’ the Turkish Republic’s founder, Ataturk.
