Ex-Guantánamo detainees arrive in Ireland

Last weekend two Uzbek nationals who had been detained in Guantánamo Bay for seven years but who were found not to be a threat to national or international security arrived in Ireland (Irish Times article). The former detainees could not be returned to their own country because of a real risk that they would be subjected to persecution there. The former detainees are, it seems, to be granted leave to remain by the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern.
As a legal status, leave to remain is normally granted where someone has been unsuccessful in an asylum application but there are also humanitarian reasons for not returned the person to their country of origin. This is provided for under s. 17 of the Refugee Act 1996. However, leave to remain can be granted in broader circumstances than this as it is a discretionary status.
What is somewhat unusual about the present circumstances is that normally leave to remain is granted where an individual is already within the territy of the state and is a means of avoiding deportation (see the interesting paper by Brian Ingoldsby here). In the case of the former detainees who arrived in Ireland this weekend, however, the Minister had announced that he would grant them the right to reside here by means of leave to remain before they ever entered the territory of the state or made an application for asylum. In the Irish Times article yesterday, however, it provides that "[b]oth men will be given leave to remain" (my emphasis) suggesting that the status will formally be given post entry to the state, although the entry to the state was clearly facilitated by the government itself. The process seems, therefore, somewhat irregular.
In addition, persons with leave to remain do not have a right of family reunificiation but in the case of these two individuals the prospect of freeing them from Guantánamo Bay and from seven years without their families and then not permitting their families to come and reside here with them seems a cruel irony. The Department of Justice has not, as far as I know, made any announcements as to the status of these persons' families but it is to be hoped that family reunification will be facilitated in these cases.
The decision by the Irish government to accept former detainees is an important one that ought to be welcomed; it has by now become clear that the United States has no intention of allowing former detainees to reside within the US itself and therefore other countries' co-operation is neeed to facilitate the closure of the prison there. Thus, this action is a very positive one by the government. Putting that aside, however, this use of leave to remain and the means of deploying that status in this particular case is a little curious.

(Cross-posted at Human Rights in Ireland)

Sovereign Democracy?

In a couple of earlier posts (here and here), "Grace O'Malley" [IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann] and I discussed the fact that “democracy” has many meanings. Judy Dempsey writes in the Herald Tribune that Russia is now openly advocating a repressive political philosophy it calls “sovereign democracy”: subordinating democratic values to national interests. According to this “philosophy”, the foreign supervision Russia is subject to as a member of the Council of Europe (COE) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is nothing more than foreign meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. Thus, Russia is currently blocking reforms at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) (at right), the court established in Strasbourg, France to hear human rights claims from individuals living in the 47 COE member states. Judges at the Court are seeking reforms to help deal with the 89,000-case backlog (while 90% of ECHR claims are dismissed as inadmissible, they still must be examined individually). Russia joined the court in 1996 and implemented the European Human Rights Convention in 1998. Since then, over 48,790 complaints have been filed against Russia – more than against any other country. Of those, 10,569 were lodged in 2006 alone, when the ECHR found 96 violations. As COE chair last year, Russia suggested the Council shift priorities away from human rights to education, culture, illegal migration, human trafficking and combating terrorism. Russia is also trying to curb election-monitoring activities undertaken by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Vienna. A division of the OSCE founded in 1976, the Office monitored elections in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in which Russian-backed regimes were toppled by pro-democracy revolutions (below). Despite its criticisms of these organizations, however, Russia is not renouncing membership. Instead, it created the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2003, which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Political cooperation and collective security are the main purposes; interference in member states' internal affairs is strictly forbidden. Russia is also supporting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. which was founded in 2001 to fight terrorism and cross-border crime and, again, includes Russia and several Central Asian countries. This organization also directly competes with the Office for Democratic Institutions in observing elections. As Dempsey points out, this is a sad turn-around “for a rich and self-confident country that during the 1990s had fought hard to be accepted into Europe's human rights organizations”. While I cannot help but agree, I also cannot help but note that “Guantánamo”: from the camp itself to the Patriot Act, NSA wiretapping, CIA renditions and secret detention camps, abuse and disappearance of Muslim prisoners within the US, and withdrawing from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to avoid scrutiny of our application of the death penalty to foreign citizens are all signs of a return to sovereign democracy here at home.