Two big wins in the fight for human rights

Hi everyone, 

You don’t have to be a legal eagle to understand the notion of human rights. It’s a pretty straightforward concept, right? A set of rights and freedoms that we’re all entitled to, whoever we are, wherever we are from, whatever we believe in, and however we choose to live.

You also don’t need to look further than the daily news cycle to see that ensuring those rights are upheld is sadly anything but simple.

Long-time Spark fans – ‘Sparkies’ perhaps? Send in your own suggestions – will remember that I spoke to the journalist Edwin Okoth in one of the very first editions. Edwin has been working with the team at the Bureau for over a year exposing shocking allegations of deaths and disappearances on Del Monte’s pineapple plantation outside of Thika, in central Kenya.

Situated in an area rich with ochre-red soil and green vegetation but blighted by poverty and unemployment, the 80 sq km mega-farm has long been a target for local pineapple thieves. Locals say the thieves are just trying to get by, but their raids have led to violent clashes with security guards. The guards, it's alleged, brutally took the law into their own hands.

Among local communities, feelings were mixed when Edwin first arrived to begin his reporting. There was scepticism about what he could really achieve. Here, Del Monte is king. The farm is the single largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world. That kind of financial muscle comes with political clout. There were warnings too. “Be careful,” he was told by a former local leader who had tried to confront Del Monte before. “You will either end up very rich, in exile, or dead. We know very few people [to] stand against this company and sustain it.”

Those who’ve worked with Edwin tell me he’s an unflappable and determined journalist, not easily deterred or defeated. But even he admits there were times he felt like giving up. One thing kept him going.

Edwin and the team’s reporting brought to light a string of shocking allegations, stretching back over a decade, including deaths, brutal beatings, and rapes.

As a result, some of Del Monte’s main UK customers, such as Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, and Morrisons have stopped purchasing its Kenyan pineapple products. (Iceland, however, continues to stock them).

A commercial response on that scale is an obvious sign that reporting is getting noticed and big bosses are feeling the heat. But for me, what’s really important is that the hopes of those mothers that Edwin spoke to – who lit the fire under him to keep going – are showing signs of being fulfilled.

In response to the first investigation, Del Monte issued a statement saying that it took the findings “extremely seriously” and acknowledged the allegations represented a violation of its commitments to human rights. It ordered a human rights assessment to be conducted by the NGO Partner Africa. Since then, as TBIJ has continued reporting, the company has overhauled the security at the farm, firing more than 200 guards and bringing in the contractor G4S to take over the operation.

And although the violence has not stopped altogether, Edwin’s been told the deaths have. “We have not heard of a death in the past six months, which is unique,” Mbuthia Njoroge, a shopkeeper in Makenji village told him last month. “The last deaths we heard of were in December and you guys have kept reporting about it … you should just continue.”

Knowing Edwin, he will. Six months without a death is a positive first step compared to what’s come before. But those who suffered these alleged human rights atrocities, their families, and the surrounding community deserve much, much more.

You can read more of Edwin’s reflections on a year of reporting on Del Monte as well as further analysis on what’s changed in that time – and the story that kicked it all off here.

“The term ‘black site’ conveys the idea quite powerfully. This was really intended to be a completely secret detention and torture programme.

The rendition and torture programme was set up in the aftermath of the horrendous 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. It was intended to provide spaces for the interrogation of people that had information in relation to that attack or possible future attacks.

[Vice President] Dick Cheney said at the time, we have to not tie the hands of our intelligence agencies. In other words, set up secret sites where people could be interrogated beyond the bounds of the law – that is, to facilitate torture, and that's unfortunately what happened.

I said to a European court in a hearing years later, “We were never meant to be able to have this hearing. The world was not meant to know.”

~Lucy here: Abu Zubaydah was suspected of being a senior Al Qaeda operative and was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and sent to a black site in Thailand. He was water-boarded 83 times in one month, forced into stress positions, and confined in small boxes. After Thailand, he was sent to secret detention locations in Poland, Morocco, Lithuania and Afghanistan. He lost an eye while in CIA custody. He is no longer accused of being a member of Al Qaeda.~

I’ve been the international legal representative of Abu Zubaydah since around 2009.

He was brutally tortured over several years and then transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, where he’s still held today. More than 22 years after being detained by the CIA, he remains in arbitrary detention, without charge or trial.

I’ve brought a number of cases on his behalf, on the international level, against the many states that participated in that secret rendition and torture program, including in the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions.

At the earliest stages of these proceedings, evidence was really elusive. We had to present all of our case based on public information and there was very little in the public domain. It was a huge challenge; we really had to rely on the work of investigative journalists in a substantial way.

~Crofton Black investigated CIA black sites for nine years while working at Reprieve and TBIJ. In 2016, TBIJ published exclusive documents showing how the Lithuanian authorities helped the CIA set up a black site near the capital, Vilnius, where Zubaydah was detained between 2005 and 2006.~

What Crofton and others managed to do was lift the veil of secrecy. They penetrated the smoke screen of false names, false flight plans, front companies and circles of contracts that were all just designed by the CIA to make it impossible to find anything out.

Over the years, they elicited huge amounts of valuable information, but also analysed it and put it together in ways that are almost impossible for me as a lawyer to ever do. They showed which secret sites were operative and when, and tracked which individuals were at which sites.

This was an essential piece of evidence for bringing any kind of legal action. And also beyond legal action, just for any form of political and public accountability for the governments that had readily signed up to this programme.

I used the research of Crofton and others in my proceedings. Crofton was also called by the European Court of Human Rights to provide evidence as an expert, which is quite an unusual step. So he directly inputted that expertise and the fruits of his investigative journalism into the legal proceedings.

It was really invaluable for the public to understand more about this programme that we were never meant to know about. And invaluable for me, as a lawyer, to be able to bring the cases that we were never meant to be able to bring.

~In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered the Polish government to pay Abu Zubaydah. Four years later, in what Amnesty International described as “landmark rulings”, the ECHR issued further fines to Lithuania and Romania for their complicity in the CIA programme and the violation of Abu Zubaydah’s rights. Yet Abu Zubaydah – who’s become known as the ‘forever prisoner’ – remains detained, despite a UN working group declaring there is no lawful basis for this and calling for his immediate release.~

The European Court of Human Rights hearing was the first time that our client had a day in court. It was the only opportunity that he had to state his case and to be recognised as a victim and as a human being. The compensation was certainly not the point of the litigation, but it has its own symbolic value in recognising his rights and recognising the responsibility of many states around the world.

It’s an ongoing fight. Litigation rarely actually solves problems. We have not achieved the outcomes that we should have if law was given effect and Abu Zubaydah’s rights were respected. But we certainly got stronger tools to keep fighting with.

I’ve worked with Abu Zubaydah for 15 years and I don’t intend to stop whilst he’s still in the same conditions of arbitrary detention and torture that he was when I first made contact. He’s a human being who deserves to have his basic rights respected. That’s a huge motivation for me.

I also think there are important lessons to learn from the war on terror. It has been a disaster for the rule of law and human rights. If individuals and states can commit atrocities and completely get away with it, that only contributes to the commission of more atrocities in the future, right?

The CIA told Abu Zubaydah that he would never be released; that he would never have the opportunity to communicate with the outside world. Those were the words used before he was tortured. And unfortunately, that’s remained true. But what hasn’t remained true is that the outside world doesn't know what happened. And I think that’s the message for the future. You cannot guarantee secrecy and complete impunity anymore.”

You can find out more about Crofton’s work investigating black sites on his website and to keep up with Helen’s incredible work, find her on X.

That’s it for this week, Sparkies (again, suggestions welcome for a better nickname). As a busy year at ballot boxes around the world continues, I’ll be keeping an eye on the Venezuelan election this weekend. 

Have a great week!