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Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul
These are the two young UK citizens from Tipton who are held by the US at Guantanamo Bay. The Observer carried a narrowing account of their detention by their lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, an English-born lawyer who has made his civil rights career in the United States, check him out. All judicial processes have failed, their applications rejected. The UK Government must now assert their rights by taking political action, within the framework of its close political relationship with the United States Government.
- That is what SoCLA seeks now. Check SoCLA Policy
Jury Trial under threat
Juries can be awkward, obstinate, even
perverse in the eyes of professional lawyers and prosecuting authorities. But they reflect a
unique perception of the role of lay citizens in the administration of
justice. SoCLA asserts the
central importance of the jury as a vital institution of participatory
democracy. While juries retain their importance in American and
Commonwealth judicial systems, there is no comparable institution in
European judicial practice.
SoCLA, while acknowledging the force of many of the Government's planned changes, will seek to argue against any reduction in the deployment of jury trial, whether for the threat of intimidation or the deemed complexity of evidence. Where these issues arise, they should continue to be managed and resolved, as at present.
Check SoCLA Policy
Volunteers
Rule OK
SoCLA Membership is open only to Members of the Labour Party. There is no intention to employ professional staff, and the Association will remain an association of active members, paying just £5 per annum for membership.
SoCLA will seek to promote greater understanding of human rights principles within the Party, and will highlight human rights issues as they arise in the course of current policy development and future political action.
HR v
CL SoCLA does not seek
to make a formal differentiation between
human rights and civil liberties, conditioned as both
concepts are by their “Western” linguistic
overtones. We have used the term civil liberties in our title
because in the UK it is the older term, with the strongest historical
resonance. But our aim is to identify the primary zones of entitlement
which every society should be expected to assure to its people, in a civilised
and civilising world. And SoCLA is committed to the assertion, as a matter of
entitlement, the wide range of economic and political rights without which no
real personal freedom or self-fulfilment is possible. We conceive our
objectives as universal, even though we are principally concerned with the UK,
and the conduct of UK institutions. The challenge to the human rights lobby is to
generate a generic framework of entitlement, as part of any new world order.