Check out the Take Back Parliament website to keep up to date.

I'm reading her book The Silent State at the moment, which is a real eye-opener.

When, following the recent fiasco around Trafigura, I saw Carter-Ruck partner Andrew Stephenson at a Parliamentary committee meeting, he seemed utterly unrepentent.

Carter Ruck’s attempt, on behalf of Trafigura, to ban the media from reporting a question in the British Parliament, had triggered calls for the company’s Directors to be dragged to the bar of the House of Commons and formally reprimanded. Justice Minister Bridget Prentice had reiterated that the 1688/9 Bill of Rights, gave the media an absolute privelege to cover the proceedings of Parliament, and that this was essential for the effective functioning of our democracy.

In seeking to explain his firm’s behaviour to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, Stephenson certainly appeared defensive, but he didn’t seem in the least bit sorry. He did, though, seem keen to reassure us that the injunction secured by his company on Trafigura’s behalf had been intended merely as an interim holding measure, and that the original purpose had never been to gag the reporting of Parliament.

So it seems very surprising to read in today’s Sunday Times that Stephenson appears to have gone out of his way to persuade the Commons authorities that the law does, after all, allow for the gagging of Parliamentary procedure:

In a submission to a Commons select committee, Carter-Ruck, a law firm that specialises in libel, argues that newspapers and publishers would be in contempt of court if they published parliamentary questions, answers or debates that fell under super-injunctions.

Advisers to John Bercow, the Speaker, are understood to have informed the culture, media and sport committee that Carter-Ruck’s position is correct. MPs regard the position as a serious threat to free speech and the proper functioning of democracy.

Super-injunctions — under which even reporting the existence of the injunction is banned — are increasingly being used to stop the media publishing information. MPs are now concerned that they threaten the media’s right to report what MPs can freely say in parliament, a privilege affirmed in the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840…

At the time of the disagreement, Bridget Prentice, the justice minister, said Carter-Ruck was wrong to claim super-injunctions applied to the reporting of parliamentary proceedings.

However, in a submission to the culture committee published last week, Andrew Stephenson, a senior partner at the firm, said the minister was under a “misapprehension”.

He said that while MPs were guaranteed the right to free speech under the 1688 Bill of Rights within the House of Commons, the reporting of parliament remained subject to court orders.

The Speaker’s counsel declined to comment, but is understood to agree with Stephenson’s assessment.

So it seems, after all, that Parliamentary democracy is still under attack, and that Carter-Ruck may be making headway in their attempt to overturn a centuries-old democratic freedom.

What I think this demonstrates, again, is that Carter-Ruck is not just an ordinary law firm, doing what ordinary law firms do. They are actively engaged in lobbying the government to curtail our liberties in the interests of their clients. They are behaving, in other words, like a right-wing activist group.

Presumably if the goverment takes this issue seriously enough, they will table emergency legislation which makes the absolute right to report Parliament fully explicit. In the meantime, judges could presumably ensure that any secret injuction they do grant includes a statement spelling out that the measure does not apply to the reporting of Parliament.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, there’s also a pretty clear-cut ethical case for (peaceful, legal) direct political action against Carter-Ruck. The idea that a lawyer – or indeed any other professional – should be exempted from the moral consequences of their professional choices is, in my view, a self-serving myth.

Lawyers who seek to apply an unjust law – be that the law that jailed Oscar Wilde or the laws being used today to suppress freedom of speech – don’t evade moral accountability simply by hiding behind the fact that what they’re doing is ‘legal’. I can’t help but wonder if we might have avoided some of the trouble we’re now in if more had been done to challenge unethical companies like Carter-Ruck at an earlier stage.

But lastly, there has to be a question here about practicality. However much Carter Ruck and their corporate clients might like to suppress free speech through the use of one secret injunction after another, the recent Twitter-storm around Trafigura has shown that this can sometimes be impossible in practice.

If Carter-Ruck are right and Bridget Prentice is wrong, then it seems that I may, after all, have been in contempt of court when I posted the ‘banned’ Parliamentary Question on Twitter back in October. Would I be willing to do so again? I wouldn’t rule it out. And it strikes me that now would be a good time to get a head-count of bloggers and Tweeters prepared to consider engaging in peaceful civil disobedience should Carter-Ruck – or anyone else – attempt to gag the reporting of Parliament again. You can leave a comment here or email me via richardcameronwilson AT yahoo DOT co DOT UK.

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As in Vietnam, Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still are – and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election.

And now we are still trying to persuade his opponent to join a national unity government, an administration led by the man whose vote-stuffing was the very reason that same leader of the opposition – the good pseudo-Pashtun Abdullah Abdullah – refused to run in a second round of elections. And Karzai got his fawning congrats from the Obama-Brown twins. So that's OK then. Wagons Ho. For Westmoreland, read McChrystal. Send in the brave 40,000 to join the rest of the US cavalry as it fights its way west – or rather south-west – to the Khe Sanh of Afghanistan in Year Eight of the War on Terror.

The March of Folly was Barbara Tuchman's title for her book on governments – from Troy to Vietnam-era America – that followed policies contrary to their own interests. And well may we remember the Vietnam bit. As Patrick Bury, a veteran British soldier of our current Afghan adventure, pointed out yesterday, Vietnam is all too relevant.

Back in 1967, the Americans oversaw a "democratic" election in Vietnam which gave the presidency to the corrupt ex-General Nguyen Van Thieuman. In a fraudulent election which the Americans declared to be "generally fair" – he got 38 per cent of the vote – Thieu's opponents wouldn't run against him because the election was a farce.

In 1967, Washington needed the elections to give legitimacy to this revolting dictator – and thus provide credibility to its own military occupation of Vietnam in the war against Communism. As in Vietnam – where Saigon was a lonely kingdom of brutal power totally isolated from the rest of the country – Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption, protected by US mercenaries while the Americans perform their familiar role of propping up a dictator.

As ex-Lieutenant Bury sagely points out, the Afghan war is "campaigning on a par with the 19th-century British colonial army trying to manage the unwinnable... What was or is the strategy behind these long, bloody conflicts?" Well, in 1967, it was the possible communisation of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Now it is Pashtunistan, Baluchistan, Waziristan. For us, the vast ignorant "plebes", it's supposed to stop the Taliban/al-Qa'ida beasts from attacking our looming towers all over again, albeit that the 2001 murderers in question largely hailed from that friendly, moderate, brutal, oligarchical monarchical dictatorship called Saudi Arabia where – thank the good gods – they don't hold elections.

But it's part of a dreary pattern. US forces were participating in a civil war in Vietnam while claiming they were supporting democracy and the sovereignty of the country. In Lebanon in 1982, they claimed to be supporting the "democratically" elected President Amin Gemayel and took the Christian Maronite side in the civil war. And now, after Disneyworld elections, they are on the Karzai-government side against the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan among whom the Taliban live. Where is the next My Lai? Journalists should avoid predictions. In this case I will not. Our Western mission in Afghanistan is going to end in utter disaster.

Evidence of election rigging in AfghanistanExclusive footage obtained by the Guardian of ballot papers pre-marked for Hamid Karzai that were seized by monitors. The ballots appear to be stamped with the monitors' seal and ready to cast. The monitors filmed then destroyed the papers to stop them being used.

Taliban militants cut off the ink-stained fingers of two Afghan voters in the militant south during the presidential election, the country's top election monitoring group said today.

Two voters who had dipped their index fingers in purple ink – a fraud prevention measure – were attacked in Kandahar province shortly after voting on Thursday, according to Nader Nadery, the head of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan.

Rumours that militants would cut off voters' ink-stained fingers spread before the vote following threats from the Taliban.

Nadery said his group also saw widespread problems with election officials pressuring people to vote for certain candidates. Election monitors also saw voters carrying boxes of voter cards to polling sites, he said, allowing them to vote multiple times. There were also problems with underage voting and election officials being ejected from polling stations by representatives of candidates.

Western powers yesterday rushed to declare Afghanistan's presidential elections a success despite evidence of irregularities and violence on polling day and growing uncertainty about whether the vote would return a credible result.

Both the leading candidates, Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, declared they had won Thursday's poll, generating concerns of a full-blown dispute. Election officials warned that it would take several days to determine the result and the extent to which voting had been marred by corruption and low voter turnout.

Last night Barack Obama described the election as "an important step forward" in attempts by Afghans to take control of their future. Referring to attempts by the Taliban to derail the democratic process, he said: "Even in the face of this brutality, millions of Afghans exercised the right to choose their leaders and determine their own destiny. I believe that the future belongs to those that want to build, not those who want to destroy."

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general, said the poll was a "clear demonstration that the Afghan people want democracy, they want freedom and reject terrorism".

Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, said the Taliban had "utterly failed to disrupt these elections", despite a day of clashes. Other western diplomats were also bullish about a poll they said could have been "far worse" in terms of Taliban attacks. US military officials have already qualified the vote as a reasonable success.

Democracy and rights groups offered a more sober assessment. The Washington-based International Republican Institute, said: "Unfortunately, such issues as lower turnout, fraud and abuse of state resources brought these elections to a lower standard than the 2004 and 2005 Afghan elections."

Human Rights Watch also questioned whether "one of the most violent days witnessed in Afghanistan in the last eight years" could be described as a success.

Rachel Reid, an HRW researcher in Afghanistan, said the claims would "not ring true" for Afghans living in the south and east, where Taliban attacks were most severe. "They deserve an honest assessment … If international standards are dropped, there risks being a serious credibility gap, which will only serve to increase disillusionment with the efforts to create a democracy."

A senior Nato envoy cautioned against being too quick to welcome results that could turn sour if examples of mass fraud were detected. Western powers with more than 60,000 troops in Afghanistan are eager to avoid the elections being deemed a sham or a muddle, compounding a worsening security situation in which dozens of foreign troops are dying each month. The post-election uncertainty is not helping to calm tension. The Independent Election Commission said today it would not publish any official data until Tuesday.

Glenn Cowan, an observer from Democracy International, said the delay was "probably a mistake". "Almost all elections add somewhat to political tension and this one is not different," he said. "The best way to relive that tension is to provide information to people about an already uncertain election."

That uncertainty has stemmed from three principal factors: violence, intimidation of voters and candidates, and allegations of fraud. The election complaints commission said it had received around 120 complaints so far, mostly relating to allegations of voter fraud, intimidation of voters and ballot-box stuffing, but the main candidates were unwilling to criticise the process, with Abdullah saying the vote had been "quite good".

Voters wash ink from their fingers using detergent outside Naderia high school in Kabul. Photograph: Jon Boone

The main safeguard against fraud in today's elections in Afghanistan has failed at some polling stations in the capital, as millions of Afghans headed out to vote.

Hours after polls opened at 7am, members of the Abdullah Abdullah campaign found they were able to remove the supposedly indelible ink that election workers put on the fingertips of people who have cast their ballot.

The ink is meant to help stop double voting, which election officials fear could be widespread, with as many as 3m illegal voting cards believed to be in circulation.

By washing their fingers with a domestic detergent, half a dozen voters at Naderia high school in Kabul cleaned the mark from their fingers while Abdullah was voting inside. A local journalist working for the Guardian removed the ink from his finger in just a couple of minutes.

Jon Boone reports from Kabul as voters go to the polls
Link to this audio

It is difficult to underestimate the embarrassment this will cause election organisers after a failure to buy the correct ink for the 2004 poll led to widespread multiple voting. The so-called ink scandal of 2004 caused fury among many voters and election organisers vowed it would never happen again.

In a recent attempt to bolster confidence in the election, the local UN chief Kai Eide invited journalists to watch him attempt to remove ink from his finger with a range of domestic cleaners.

Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman in Kabul, said he could not comment on reports of the ink failing but said the indelible marking was "just one of the many measures in place designed to stop voter fraud". He said the presence of hundreds of thousands of observers working for individual campaigns and for the UN and the Independent Election Commission would ensure the election was fair.

Kamaludin Nazami, an engineer and Abdullah campaign official, said the ink problem was also being reported in south Kabul and in Herat.

The campaign team of another presidential candidate, Ashraf Ghani, said they had seen many people cleaning their right index finger. "It's completely delible," said a spokeswoman for the campaign.

She said she was more concerned about reports from the south that ballot box stuffing began last night in insecure areas.

"They know they can do this [ballot stuffing] because no one is going to go to these sorts of areas to check up on it," the spokeswoman said. "This wouldn't matter if just one of the safeguards worked — if the ink stuck, if polling stations were secure and if people had not been given more than one voter card each. But with all three of them so compromised, people can abuse the process."

In Kandahar city, Haji Padshah, a tribal elder, told the Guardian there had been overnight tampering with election material in the southern province.

Widespread fraud meant huge numbers of voting cards were issued in the name of non-existent people during the electoral registration process this year.