UN called for asylum seeker Sayed Abdellatif’s release – as featured in the Guardian

December 7, 2015December 7, 2015 sarahbmalikLeave a comment

Front page of the Guardian Australia website.

Exclusive: ‘Arbitrary’ detention of Egyptian asylum seeker, his wife and six children is ‘clearly disproportionate’, UN human rights council tells Australia.

By Ben Doherty and Sarah Malik
Sayed Abdellatif, an Egyptian asylum seeker falsely condemned as a terrorist by political leaders, should be immediately released from his “arbitrary” and “disproportionate” detention, which breaches international law, the UN has told Australia.

Abdellatif, his wife and six children have been held in detention for more than three years without charge.

In a seven-page formal communication sent in June and obtained by Guardian Australia, the UN’s human rights council – which Australia is seeking to join in two years – directed Australia to immediately release Abdellatif and his family. .

“Under international law Australia has a duty to release Mr Abdellatif, his wife and and their six children and accord them an enforceable right to compensation,” the council said.

But Abdellatif and his close-knit family – his wife and children daily endure the trial of wristbands, metal detectors and reinforced doors to see their husband and father in the high-security wing of Villawood detention centre – have said compensation is far from their minds.

“Freedom,” Abdellatif told Guardian Australia quietly amid the chaos of the detention centre visitors area. “We are only thinking about our freedom. We are not thinking about compensation.”

Abdellatif’s detention has exposed consistent and wilful failings within several government agencies. Asio, the Australian federal police and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection have collectively displayed “a lack of coordination, a duplication of effort and a lack of urgency”, in handling the family’s case, Australia’s statutory inspector general of intelligence and security, Vivienne Thom, found.

Abdellatif fled Egypt in 1992, having been tortured under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. He was arrested from a mosque by the state security investigations service as part of a crackdown on Islamic political opposition to Mubarak’s rule.

He has remained in exile from his country since, living as a refugee in Albania, the UK, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia and – finally – Australia.

All his children were born during that exile. His youngest, a five-year-old boy, has never lived a day free, only knowing life in detention in Indonesia and Australia.

Abdellatif and his family arrived in Australia in May 2012. Australia assessed his claim for protection and found that he and his family had legitimate claims to refugee status.

But while the family were in immigration detention in 2013 Australian authorities were alerted to an Interpol red notice that said that in 1999 Abdellatif was convicted – in a mass show trial in Cairo of 107 men – of premeditated murder, destruction of property, and possession of firearms and explosives. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The trial, criticised by rights groups at the time, was later found to have been fraudulent. Evidence against Abdellatif was obtained by “severe torture”, including electric shocks.

But the case became the centre of a political firestorm when the red notice became known publicly. The opposition leader, later prime minister, Tony Abbott labelled Abdellatif a “convicted jihadist” and a “pool-fence terrorist”, in reference to the low-security fencing at the Inverbrackie detention centre in South Australia. George Brandis, now the attorney general but then shadowing that position, said he was “plainly a convicted terrorist”.

The Abdellatifs were moved to the higher security Villawood detention centre in Sydney, where they have remained.

In a two-year investigation, the Guardian has shown:

Allegations of murder, firearms offences and property destruction were never made against Abdellatif at his Cairo trial and were wrongly attached to the Interpol red notice. After the Guardian’s investigation, which included examining the Egyptian court records and transcripts, Interpol took the extraordinary step of withdrawing those charges from the red notice.

The remaining convictions against Abdellatif, for “membership of a terrorist group” and “providing forged travel documents”, relied on evidence obtained under “severe torture”. Abdellatif was convicted in absentia, without any chance of defending himself against the allegations. He has denied both charges in a letter to the Guardian.

The Australian federal police were provided with evidence, in Arabic, that Abdellatif’s convictions for violent crimes were false, and had been withdrawn by Interpol, but took six months to translate the document – then failed to tell Asio or the immigration department of this new information.

A report by Australia’s inspector general of intelligence and security said Abdellatif had not been convicted of any terrorism-related charges and made clear he was not a threat to national security.

Scott Morrison, when immigration minister, defied the advice of officials from his own department, who had recommended Abdellatif be allowed to apply for a visa, and refused to allow Abdellatif to make an application.
In June this year, the UN human rights council’s working group on arbitrary detention wrote to the Australian government: “The detention is clearly disproportionate … the deprivation of liberty of Mr Abdellatif, his wife and their six children is arbitrary,” it said.

“Under international law Australia has a duty to release Mr Abdellatif, his wife and and their six children and accord them an enforceable right to compensation.”

Guardian Australia has made repeated attempts to seek information about Abdellatif’s case from the immigration department. After promising to provide answers to a series of questions, it declined to comment.

Abdellatif’s wife and family have previously been offered community detention but the family have consistently said they do not want to be separated from their husband and father.

Nearly six months after the UN direction, and after more than three and a half years in detention, the Abdellatifs remain incarcerated – Sayed Abdellatif in the high-security wing of Villawood detention centre, his wife and children in the family compound.

This year the department wrote to the family informing them that the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, had “lifted the bar” on their application for a protection visa. The family submitted a visa application in July, which has been acknowledged by the department as a “valid application”. But there has been no communication since.

Abdellatif says he feels that his life and those of his children are being slowly destroyed by their continuing detention and separation. “It’s been six months since the Australian government received [the UN] report but they did nothing, they ignored it completely,” he said.

“No one in the department is [taking] responsibility for our detention. We’re losing our lives by the immigration department of Australian government and no one cares. Who will take responsibility for this wasting of our lives?”

Abdellatif said he was constantly frustrated in his efforts to communicate with the department. He believed it was embarrassed by its handling of his case.

Analysis Sayed Abdellatif: asylum seeker trapped in detention by callous disregard
This man and his family remain locked in Australia’s detention system, despite recommendation from immigration department to grant visa

“They keep us in detention because we are found to be innocent,” he said. “They don’t want to say, ‘We were wrong’. They think, ‘We should keep them in detention to avoid embarrassment.’”

His children were suffering and the government was not interested in redressing its past mistakes, he said. “They think, ‘You can prove your innocence, but we are going to destroy you, every one of you.’”

The human rights council is one of the UN’s most powerful bodies, mandated with “the protection and promotion of all human rights around the globe”.

The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, told Guardian Australia in September the government was “strongly committed” to a bid for a seat on the council for 2018-20.

Australia will compete against Spain and France for two seats from its poli-geographic group in 2017.

feminism · human rights · injustice · interview · islamic law · media · muslim women · politics · religion

Heroes and heretics

February 27, 2010November 25, 2012 sarahbmalikLeave a comment

Islamic scholar Amina Wadud has been branded both a heroine and a heretic.

Heroine for her academic framework for Muslims in legal and policy reform around the world; heretic for leading a mixed gender prayer in New York in 2005 which made worldwide headlines.

The prayer session propelled the 58-year-old African American into celebrity Muslim reformer status, a position the theologian does not seem entirely comfortable with.

“I try to keep my sense of humour about it,” she said, speaking in Sydney after engagements in Melbourne and Canberra.

“I didn’t play into it. I didn’t stoke the sensationalism of it.

“The time was a little bit comical but I could not live along those lines. I like the basic parts of my life where you have anonymity.”

Asked if the controversy had obscured her long-time activism and scholarship on Islam and gender issues, she said: “I regret things being obscured for any reason. But I do not regret the prayer if that is reason why people obscure things. People have not been pleased with my work for a long time. So the prayer is just a ruse … and … excuse for not listening to what you have to say.”

Dr Wadud is the author of several books, including Quran and Women: Re-reading the sacred text from a woman’s perspective and Inside Gender Jihad: Women’s reform in Islam.

Her central thesis is that for centuries Islam has been interpreted by male scholars which has obscured its essentially egalitarian ethos. This ethos, Dr Wadud says, has inspired her reform work particularly around Islamic family law.

While her religious detractors accuse her of heresy, other criticisms of Dr Wadud involve the charge that she feeds into the never-ending contestation of religious texts which has no purpose in the modern era within a secular framework. However, her books have worked as a framework for Muslim activists, particularly through lobby groups and her organisation, Sisters in Islam in Malaysia.

One of Dr Wadud’s central ideas is that as a believer she accepts the divinity of the Qur’an, however, its readings must always be open to scrutiny and re-evaluation. This is particularly important if laws are to be based on its precepts and have impact in the real world on women’s lives.

Born in the American South, in Maryland in 1952, to a Methodist preacher father, Dr Wadud converted to Islam at university at the age of 20 after a brief stint as a practicing Buddhist.

“I was a practicing Buddhist for a year,” she said.

“I came across Islam and it grew exponentially and I came to an understanding of the universe that worked for me.”

The liberation theology of the black leaders of the civil rights movement and her own upbringing also influenced her.

“My family situation was one where the relationship between social injustice and faith was explicit. You do not oppress. Oppression is against God’s will,” she said.

“I grew up in the era of black consciousness. I lived in a transformative time as a young person- you could hear and feel you had a certain sense of social responsibility – a mandate to fight to remove injustice as it was being established in the context of our lives as African Americans.

“I was brought up in the revolutionary spirit of justice and it was common sense to transfer that in terms of Islam and gender justice.”

Dr Wadud, a devout and thoughtful woman, finds much of the hype around her work distasteful, so much so that at one point she eschewed the label ‘feminist’ altogether.

“There are obviously large sectors of non-Muslim and Muslim population who think Islamic feminism is an oxymoron,” she said.

“I am less concerned now about whether or not I make everyone comfortable in terms of the self designation (of being feminist) than at another point.”

She said the term ‘feminism’ often led people to dismiss her work.

” … I feel a little bit more comfortable in my own skin being able to say feminist. At another point [I would avoid the label] in order to avoid the politics of the discussion and to avoid the marginalisation of my work into those politics,” Dr Wadud said.

This perceived incompatibility is incongruous with her own study of Islamic thought and philosophical thinking.

“They are limiting feminism from its own intellectual and political history,” she said. “They are also limiting Islam from its own egalitarian trajectory.”

Dr Wadud has found crowd hostility toward her more pointed in Sydney than Melbourne, where the largely Muslim audience seemed much more engaged.

Her lecture this week at the University of Technology, Sydney, involved several heated exchanges with young men.

“Some people in the Australian audiences, they come because they’ve heard there is something wrong or bad or evil about me,” she said.

“They come because they will set me straight. When they get here and I don’t say anything outrageous for them to pick up on – they make up stuff.”

Dr Wadud finds arguments with those who have not even read her ideas tiring and is now focussed on reaching out to those who have.

“In the past I felt a much greater responsibility to be understood by as many people as possible,” she said.

“You spent all your time trying to convert people who are absolutely unconvinced about where you’re going.

“Then there are some people who are trying to understand certain things and have a nominal level of agreement and maybe want to go further and engage with your ideas. That’s a more interesting level to engage.”

There have been rumours of death threats, but Dr Wadud is quick to clear the air.

“I never received any death threats,” she laughs.

“There was this thing where people got into saying I had death threats. But I never had anyone actually threaten me.”

From SMH

divorce · injustice · islamic law · law · muslim women · struggle

Living in Limbo Land

August 6, 2007August 8, 2007 sarahbmalik6 Comments

A never-published investigative feature where I explore the problems faced by Muslim women in gaining an Islamic divorce in Australia and the anguished limbo status these women face in getting their rights recognised by a legal system which ignores their cultural and religious concerns.

Nuzhat’s Story

Nuzhat Mukhtar* sits on the lounge of her Sydney flat gesturing for me to eat. Her twenty- one year old son Junaid walks to the kitchen and brings out a smorgasboard of dishes- Turkish pizza, profiteroles with cream, cherry topped cake, three bottles of soft drink, as well as plates and glasses.

She won’t talk until I eat at least one gargantuan slice of Turkish pizza.

Her son sits beside her supportively his somber face creased with worry.

Nuzhat was eighteen years old when she came to Australia as a new bride from Pakistan in 1982. Within three months she knew there was something drastically wrong with the marriage.

“The place I came from was a medium type of family and here where I come was very strict. At home there was no TV, no radio, no bed, no nothing. I was not even allowed to go on the balcony without covering myself completely. Everything was changed for me so much…. But I tried,” recalls Nuzhat.

The fact that she was unable to communicate or seek help from anyone in her new country was particularly difficult.

“In couple of months it was so bad that I was really badly homesick. And I was losing weight heaps, within 3 months time I was thirty- seven kilos. I could not say anything to anybody . Hardly anybody here was Pakistani and could speak my same language,” says Nuzhat.

This reality for women stuck between two different cultural systems is not uncommon. Many women cope with the abuse in silence, reluctant to seek help or advice. The situation is heightened when religious considerations come into play, changing the dynamics of marriage and divorce proceedings.

Continue reading “Living in Limbo Land” →