Via the blog, Under The Same Sun, on location at the World Tribunal on Iraq:
… Dee Dee Haleck from Deep Dish TV and David Barsamian are chatting in front of me about how to organize an interview … Dahr Jamail. Deep Dish has made daily broadcasts available for free to all media outlets in the U.S. The opening session featured Arundhati Roy, Richard Falk, Hans Von Sponeck and Phil Shiner … On my left, Samir Amin is being interviewed by a fairly mainstream newspaper in Turkey.
This [is] a hopeful environment, seeing so many good, smart people trying to do so much. But the truths they speak of are hard and depressing. Phil Shiner, a British human-rights attorney, read testimony from a torture survivor who testified on behalf of one of Shiner’s clients who had been tortured to death. I have a few such “clients,” he sadly informed us, and described how some died, his voice shaking. … [W]e will not forget, and hopefully, we will find a way to make it stop….
In the meantime, from PR Watch:
British public relations consultant Liz Harrop, who specializes in “public awareness activity for human rights campaigning organisations and humanitarian projects,” has written a report that analyzes the relationship between war propaganda and human rights, focusing on the U.S. and British governments in relation to the Iraqi rabbit hole. “States wage war in the name of peace and democracy … war propaganda can violate human rights and undermine the democratic principles it seeks to champion. [I]t is rarely acknowledged, by the media, governments, or even anti-war campaigners, that war propaganda is illegal under international human rights law. … As a point of optimism, although war propaganda diminishes human rights, so respect for human rights can diminish the effects of war propaganda. Accurate and timely human rights investigations can dispel the propaganda and rumours which fan the flames of conflict.”
The World Tribunal on Iraq, from Istanbul, Turkey: Catch news via the tribunal’s site and its audio/video. The Istanbul tribunal runs through June 27 (schedule).
“The work of the Tribunal is divided into a Panel of Advocates and a Jury of Conscience,” says Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of Int’l Law & Policy at Princeton University. The “Panel of Advocates [documents] these charges through analysis and witnesses in a persuasive manner, and [appeals] to a Jury of Conscience, composed of distinguished moral authority personalities from around the world, to pass judgment on the actors and their actions from the perspective of international law.”
