Mission & Justice

9/10/08

Up to 300 Chinese are allegedly entering Papua New Guinea as executives for the Ramu nickel mine every week without being checked by customs, security officers and immigration. These Chinese are coming into the country as engineers and other authoritative positions of this company without security, customs and immigration checks because they have been given special check exemptions by the Government. The fact that these people are travelling in and out of the country without being checked has irked the country’s national security frontliners, the National Intelligence Organisation and the Transnational Crime Unit because they say it sets a bad example for other groups. The Post-Courier is in receipt of protest letters sent by concerned security agency executives to the Labour Department boss David Tibu with copies to the Immigration Office, Foreign Affairs, Chief Secretary’s office and police, basically disputing the Government’s actions to exempt checks on these people coming in from a foreign land to work in PNG.

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9/10/08

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has got its first woman judge with Khulood Ahmed Jawan Al-Dhaheri being sworn in to the coveted post in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Al-Dhaheri was sworn in at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, UAE’s minister for presidential affairs and chairman of the Abu Dhabi Judiciary Department, the official WAM news agency reported. “The appointment of a woman judge is certainly a unique experience in the UAE,” Sheikh Mansour said. “The department will provide all necessary support to Al-Dhaheri, who made history by becoming the first woman judge in the country,” he added.

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Fatima Sidiya; 9/10/08

The two young Saudi sisters who offered their kidneys for sale two months ago are expressing their “loss of hope” as they have not received any help from the social security office in Madinah. “Nothing has happened for two months now. Though they (the Ministry of Social Affairs) promised to give us immediate help,” one of the young women told Arab News yesterday. Arab News received a fax signed from the ministry on Aug. 11, a day after publishing the story, asking for the contact information for the family to investigate the case and provide them with help. Officials from the Riyadh branch of the ministry contacted the family. Later Atiyah Abu Dangar, head of the social security office in Madinah, investigated the case.

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Rana Husseini; 9/10/08

The criminal prosecutor on Wednesday charged a 25-year-old man with the premeditated murder of his father in the Jordan Valley a day earlier, official sources said. The suspect, a farmer, turned himself in to the police and reportedly confessed to murdering his father at dawn on Tuesday to prevent him from killing his sister, one official source told The Jordan Times. “The victim, who was released recently from prison as part of an amnesty before the Eid holiday, had been jailed for almost seven years for killing two of his daughters in so-called honour crimes,” the source told The Jordan Times. The suspect also told interrogators that he “killed his 65-year-old father because both his teenage sisters who were murdered were innocent of any wrongdoing”.

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Khetam Malkawi; 9/10/08

When Rawdha Sarhan first suspected that she might have breast cancer, she was afraid of seeing a doctor and being diagnosed with the disease. The 62-year-old breast cancer survivor, however, overcame her fears and immediately consulted a doctor. “Being diagnosed with breast cancer was difficult and I needed a lot of patience to live with the situation and undergo the required treatment,” Sarhan told The Jordan Times. But The early detection helped her survive cancer, and she went on to advise women of all ages to have regular check-ups to avoid succumbing to the disease. Their experience with breast cancer led Sarhan and other survivors to establish “Sanad”, a support group for breast cancer patients at the King Hussein Cancer Centre (KHCC).

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Yassir Harib; 9/10/08

This is a familiar scene that is witnessed every time you enter a commercial center. A Gulf man is walking along and a Gulf woman, dragging a number of children, is following him at a distance of a few meters. You might assume that the people have no connection with each other until they exit the mart and approach their car. Then and only then will you twig that this is a married couple with their children. The woman might be the mother or sister of the man. When I see such a scene, I ponder it for a long time in a desperate attempt to understand: Why does the man wants to escape from his wife? Or why does he apparently want people not to know that she is his wife? The man will usually walk quickly when he sees a group of men sitting at a café in order not to tie him to the woman walking behind him at a distance. He will not care if the men stare at the woman. His main concern is that these men do not think that she is his wife or relative. In contrast, you see a non-Gulf person taking his child by one hand and holding his wife by the other. Regardless if the woman is veiled or not, he will proudly walk side by side with her or at least he will not escape from the eyes of other people or feel ashamed if they link the two together.

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Arjuwan Lakkdawala; 9/10/08

Misyar marriages are usually clandestine and the women in most cases forfeit all their rights. Why should any women accept such conditions? The reason is usually a lack of options to get married traditionally. Some may have passed the most-sought-after marriage age and others may be widows or divorcees. In the majority of such marriages, the woman always seeks a stable married life. But the kinds of men who seek misyar are usually married and want a second wife without disrupting their first marriage. As expected, the first wife would object to the marriage and things could get complicated, eventually the misyar would end up in divorce.Men who don’t have enough income to be the breadwinner for two families also seek misyar, instead of taking a second wife through a traditional marriage.

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9/10/08

A New York-based human rights group accused Jordan’s security services Wednesday of carrying out widespread torture in the country’s jails. The Human Rights Watch report comes a year after the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said he found evidence of systematic abuse in at least two Jordanian detention facilities but did not believe torture was widespread in the country. “Torture in Jordan’s prison system is widespread, even two years after King Abdullah II called for reforms to stop it once and for all,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. Jordanian officials have repeatedly denied torture claims.

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9/10/08

A US judge’s order for the release of 17 Chinese Muslim detainees at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been blocked by the Bush administration. An emergency stay of the order was issued by the US Court of Appeals following an emergency request by aides to George Bush, the US president, on Wednesday. The move came a day after US district judge Ricardo Urbina said there was no evidence that the men, Uighurs from the Xinjiang province in western China who have been held for seven years, were a security risk and that the US constitution prohibits indefinite detention without cause. He had ordered that the prisoners be brought to his courtroom for a hearing on Friday morning, when they were to be freed and allowed to live with Uighur families in the US. But the three-judge panel in Washington said it granted the temporary stay on the order to give the appeals court more time to consider the dispute.

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Mark Dodd; 9/10/08

The Australian Defence Force is rightfully proud of its work in refurbishing the Tarin Kowt provincial hospital in the war-scarred Oruzgan province of Afghanistan. Visitors to the nearby Australian base at Camp Holland, the sprawling joint facility shared with the Dutch military, inevitably will be briefed about the showcase project, an outstanding example of winning Afghan hearts and minds. Australian soldiers in an International Security Assistance Force mission patrol the town of Tarin Kowt in the war-torn Oruzgan province of Afghanistan. Nobody in their right mind would argue that a hospital is not needed: Afghanistan has one of the lowest levels of life expectancy in the world, just 43 years. For the Diggers there is a sense of pride in delivering a desperately needed hospital in a country where access to proper medical care is a scarce luxury. Sadly, no foreign aid organisation has been willing to staff the hospital or provide the sort of support envisaged when the army’s valiant Reconstruction Task Force began the project. Security is regarded as being too poor, even though the hospital lies within sight of the main Dutch-Australian base.

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