Bringing Human Rights to the Midwest

Friday, March 26 - Sunday, March 28, 2010

DePaul University College of Law

Chicago - Loop

Featuring Panels & Workshops On:

•    Guantanamo to Chicago: Advocating Against Torture at Home and Abroad
•  Giving Voice to Those Unheard: Representing "Unpopular" Clients
•  Economic Rights as Human Rights
•  Power & Politics in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
•  Defending a Political Criminal Trial
•  Dangerous Inheritance: The Ongoing Criminalization of Dissent in America
•  Military Law Workshop
•  Being a Progressive Attorney & Paying the Bills
•  Working With Criminalized Communities: Strategizing Rights & Remedies  

The work of the National Lawyers Guild toward the end that human rights shall be held more sacred than property interests is more urgent than ever in this moment of global economic and environmental crisis. Help us define how our work in the Midwest can re-conceptualize economic rights as fundamental human rights; how we can end torture (and conditions of confinement that amount to torture) here in Illinois; and how we can use the law as tool for people's liberation, not opperssion. Finally, join us to learn from lawyers how they practice people's law: serve their clients well, maintain their integrity, keep their visions of a better future, and still pay the bills!

The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

by Jeffrey Hass

It’s around 7:00 A.M. on December 4, 1969, and attorney Jeff Haas is in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancée. She is describing how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, “He’s still alive.” She then heard two shots. A second officer said, “He’s good and dead now.” She looks at Jeff and asks, “What can you do?”

The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Hampton in a new light as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration in the fight against injustice.

Jeffrey Haas is an attorney and cofounder of the People's Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, community activists, and a large number of those opposed to the Vietnam War. He has handled cases involving prisoners' rights, Puerto Rican nationalists, protestors opposed to human rights violations in Central America, police torture, and the wrongfully accused.

For information about ordering this book about an important piece of Chicago history, written by an NLG attorney, please visit www.chicagoreviewpress.com/catalog/showBook.cfm.

Update! ~ Abdallah Abu Rahmah's Letter from Prison

Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the coordinator of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall and the Settlements, was arrested on 10 December 2009.

He is one of several detained Palestinian civil society leaders and organizers of the nonviolent civil resistance, for whose release the Guild has called.

This letter, conveyed from Abdallah Abu Rahmah's prison cell by his lawyers, received international circulation in late February, 2010:

Dear Friends and Supporters,

It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil'in's land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. For those of us in Ofer, imprisoned for our protest against the wall, this victory makes the suffering of being here easier to bear. After actively resisting the theft of our land by the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements every week for five years now, we long to be standing alongside our brothers and sisters to mark this victory and the fifth anniversary of our struggle.

Ofer is an Israeli military base inside the occupied territories that serves as a prison and military court. The prison is a collection of tents enclosed by razor wire and an electrical fence, each unit containing four tents, 22 prisoners per tent. Now, in winter, wind and rain come in through cracks in the tent and we don't have sufficient blankets, clothes, and other basic necessities.

Food is a critical issue here in Ofer: There's not enough. We survive by buying ingredients from the prison canteen that we prepare in our tent. We have one small hot plate, and this is also our only source of warmth. Those whose families can put money in an account for us to buy food, do so, but many cannot afford to. The positive aspect to this is that I have learned how to cook! Tonight I made falafel and sweets to celebrate the news about our victory. I cannot wait to get home and cook for my wife and children!

I was arrested in my slippers, and to this day my family has been unable to get permission to supply me with a pair of shoes. I was finally given my watch after repeated requests. For me this is an essential way to keep oriented; it was unbearable not being able to see the rate at which time passes. Receiving it, I felt so overjoyed, like a child getting his first watch. I can barely imagine what it will be like to have a pair of proper shoes again.

Because of our imprisonment, the military considers our families to be a security threat. It is very hard for our wives, children, and extended families to visit. My friend Adeeb Abu Rahmah, also a political prisoner from Bil'in, cannot receive visits from his wife and one of his daughters. Even his mother, a woman in her eighties who is currently in bad health, is considered a security threat! He is afraid that he will not see her before she dies.

I am a teacher and before my arrest I taught at a private school in Birzeit and also owned a chicken farm. My family had to sell the farm at a loss after I was arrested. I don’t know if I will have my position at the school when I am released. Adeeb's family of nine is left without their sole provider, as are many other families. Not being able to care for our loved ones who need us is the hardest part of being here.

It is the support that I receive from my family and friends that helps me go on. I am grateful to the Palestinian leaders who have contacted my family, the diplomats from the European Union, and the Israeli activists who have expressed their support by attending my hearings. The relationship we have built together with the activists has gone beyond the definition of colleague or friend: We are brothers and sisters in this struggle. You are an unrelenting source of inspiration and solidarity. You have stood with us during demonstrations and court hearings, and during our happiest and most painful occasions. Being in prison has shown me how many true friends I have, I am so grateful to all of you.

From the confines of my imprisonment it becomes so clear that our struggle is far bigger than justice for only Bil’in or even Palestine. We are engaged in an international fight against oppression. I know this to be true when I remember all of you from around the world who have joined the movement to stop the wall and settlements. Ordinary people enraged by the occupation have made our struggle their own, and joined us in solidarity. We will surely join together to struggle for justice in other places when Palestine is finally free.

Missing the five-year anniversary of our struggle in Bil'in will be like missing the birthday of one of my children. Lately I think a lot about my friendBassem whose life was taken during a nonviolent demonstration last year and how much I miss him. Despite the pain of this loss, and the yearning I feel to be with my family and friends at home, I think that if this is the price we must pay for our freedom, then it is worth it, and we would be willing to pay much more.

Yours,

Abdallah Abu Rahmah
From the Ofer Military Detention Camp

For more info: NLG Free Palestine Subcommittee ~ www.nlginternational.org/com/main.php ~ and ~ Popular struggle Coordination Committee ~ www.popularstruggle.org/freeabdallah.

NLG Free Palestine Subcommittee Letter to President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton & Other U.S. Government Officials

Re: Israel must free Abdallah Abu Rahmah, leader of the nonviolent resistance in Bil'in, Occupied Palestinian Territory

Dear Mr. President:

The National Lawyers Guild's Free Palestine Subcommittee supports the nonviolent popular resistance struggle by the Palestinian village of Bil'in and requests that you demand Israel free its leader, Abdallah Abu Rahmah.

In a recent nighttime raid by the Israeli army on his Ramallah home, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher and the Coordinator of Bil'in's Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, was seized (without charges) and detained in an attempt to silence a popular resistance movement gaining international attention and inspiring other Palestinian communities. This West Bank agricultural village, known for its weekly protests against the Israeli apartheid wall, has become a symbol for the Palestinian popular resistance to Israel's ongoing military occupation.

While many are quick to condemn Palestinians when they resort to armed resistance, Israel has been left free to harass, imprison and sometimes kill Palestinians who nonviolently resist the confiscation and destruction of their land in Bil'in and elsewhere.

Abu Rahmah is among the leaders of Bil'in's nearly five-year nonviolent struggle of protests, lawsuits, and boycotts aimed at saving the village's land from Israel's wall and expanding settlements. Abdallah Abu Rahmah joins Mohammed Othman from the village of Jayyous, Adeed Abu Rahmah from Bil'in, and many other Palestinians (most of them under 18) who are currently jailed by Israel for building the mass nonviolent struggle for justice.

As a statement issued by the Bil'in Popular Committee declared, these leaders of the Palestinian popular struggle "are being targeted because they mobilize Palestinians to resist nonviolently. Israel is stealing our land from us and then prosecuting us as criminals because we struggle nonviolently for justice."

In September 2007, after four years of Friday afternoon protests in Bil'in that underscored the violence and injustice of the Israeli occupation, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the village. Contrary to the opinion of the International Court of Justice, the Israeli Court did not find the apartheid wall was illegal. But it did find the wall's route through Bil'in was not designed to separate settlers from potential Palestinian terrorists; it was designed to make Mod'in Illit, the giant Orthodox Jewish settlement next to Bil'in, bigger by about 2,000 dunams of farmland owned by Bil'in villagers. The Court ordered the army to reroute the fence and give the people of Bil'in back at least part of the land taken from them. That has yet to happen.

The very next day, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to legalize the Israeli settlement of Mattiyahu East (part of Modi'in Illit's expansion), built on Bil'in's land to the west of the wall, which separates the village from 60 percent of its farming land. The village of Bil'in vowed to continue its resistance against the wall and settlements on its land and hundreds of Bil'in villagers, other Palestinians, together with international and Israeli supporters, are still protesting every week, and Israeli soldiers are still injuring them every Friday afternoon with billy clubs, tear-gas canisters fired at close range, and rubber bullets. With no justice from Israeli courts, the villagers of Bil'in continue to protest and have turned to the international arena where, with the help of Canadian lawyers and backed by the Canadian solidarity movement, they have filed litigation in Canada.

At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, which came hours after Abu Rahmah's arrest, President Obama said, "there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice ... the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women -- some known, some obscure to all but those they help -- to be far more deserving of this honor than I." Abdallah Abu Rahmah is one of those people.

In President Obama's June speech in Cairo, he called on Palestinians to resist nonviolently. In order for his words to have any meaning, the U.S. Government must intervene on behalf of Palestinians who do so are are wrongly harassed, beaten, and even killed.

Abu Rahmah has now joined an estimated 10,000 Palestinian prisoners -- including over 400 children -- detained by Israeli authorities, many without charge or trial. According to a recent report from Amnesty International, many Palestinian prisoners "face medical negligence, routine beatings, position torture, and strip searches by Israeli prison authorities." According to the Palestinian section of Defense for Children International, "each year, hundreds of Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated, abused, and imprisoned by the Israeli military authorities, and are subjected to acts often amounting to torture."

Abu Rahmah is likely to join Mohammad Othman, another leader of the nonviolent campaign to save Palestinian land from Israel and an advocate of the global boycott campaign against Israel, who has been held in administrative detention without charges since September 22nd. As of November 9, Israel held more than 322 Palestinians in administrative detention, 132 of them for more than a year, according to Human Rights Watch. International human rights law permits some limited use of administrative detention, but it must be in emergency situations. Moreover, the authorities are required to follow basic rules for detention, including a fair hearing at which the detainee can challenge the reasons for his or her detention. As the occupying power in the West Bank, Israel is also bound by the rules governing occupation, which require it to use administrative detention only for imperative reasons of security, not politically-motivated grounds.

Inspired by their commitment and dedication, the National Lawyers Guild will continue to support the Bil'in resistance movement and the Palestinian struggle for justice. Israel's efforts to crush all forms of Palestinian resistance and Israel's continued settlement construction stand as a direct challenge to the U.S. and to the entire international community. We request your urgent intervention by demanding that Israel immediately release Abdallah Abu Rahmah and abide by international standards of justice. We further request that the U.S. demand that Israel end all harassment -- including by the judiciary -- of Palestinian nonviolent resistance fighters and human rights defenders. More generally, we urge you to insist that Israel ensure in all circumstances respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, in accordance with international human rights instruments ratified by Israel, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights and the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Sincerely,
FPSC Co-Chairs

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