Background & Membership: The UK’s Chatham House, like the CFR and the Brookings Institute in America, has an extensive membership and is involved in coordinated planning, perception management, and the execution of its corporate membership’s collective agenda.
Individual members populating its “senior panel of advisers” consist of the founders, CEOs, and chairmen of the Chatham House’s corporate membership. Chatham’s “experts” are generally plucked from the world of academia and their “recent publications” are generally used internally as well as published throughout Chatham’s extensive list of member media corporations, as well as industry journals and medical journals. That Chatham House “experts” are submitting entries to medical journals is particularly alarming considering GlaxoSmithKline and Merck are both Chatham House corporate members.
No better example of this incredible conflict of interest can be given than the current Thai “red” color revolution being led by Chatham House’s Amsterdam & Peroff with consistent support lent by other corporate members including the Economist, the Telegraph and the BBC.Notable Chatham House Major Corporate Members:
Amsterdam & Peroff BBC Bloomberg Coca-Cola Great Britain Economist GlaxoSmithKline Goldman Sachs International HSBC Holdings plc Lockheed Martin UK Merck & Co Inc Mitsubishi Corporation Morgan Stanley Royal Bank of Scotland Saudi Petroleum Overseas Ltd Standard Bank London Limited Standard Chartered Bank Tesco Thomson Reuter United States of America Embassy Vodafone Group
Notable Chatham House Standard Corporate Members: Amnesty International BASF Boeing UK CBS News Daily Mail and General Trust plc De Beers Group Services UK Ltd G3 Good Governance Group Google Guardian Hess Ltd Lloyd’s of London McGraw-Hill Companies Prudential plc Telegraph Media Group Times Newspapers Ltd World Bank Group
Notable Chatham House Corporate Partners:
British Petroleum Chevron Ltd Deutsche Bank Exxon Mobil Corporation Royal Dutch Shell Statoil Toshiba Corporation Total Holdings UK Ltd Unilever plc
In Libya, many positive signs are emerging from the debris of battle. A year on from the uprising that would end Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s repressive regime, civil organisations are mushrooming, political parties are being formed in the run-up to fresh elections and journalists in the newly liberated media are beginning to ask hard questions of officials and aspiring politicians.
But much remains to be done, in particular with regard to security, justice and human rights. Hundreds of heavily armed militias, mainly composed of former opposition fighters, continue to operate outside any legal framework and in defiance of orders from the National Transitional Council to disband or join the army and security forces.
The transitional authorities have so far been unable or unwilling to hold militias to account for widespread abuses – including unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, and revenge attacks. Gangs have targeted entire communities, forcibly displacing residents and looting and burning their homes to make it impossible for them to return.
Victims have mostly been suspected Gaddafi loyalists and sub-Saharan African migrants accused of involvement in the former regime’s repression. But more recently detainees accused of minor offences such as stealing or drinking alcohol have been mistreated in the same way. Others are detained simply to extort money or property from them.
The National Transitional Council has been plainly unwilling to risk losing political capital by enforcing the law in relation to opposition fighters who committed war crimes against known or suspected Gaddafi loyalists or African migrants. Indeed, not a single effective investigation has been carried out.
Such impunity has increased instability, with militias increasingly challenging the transitional authorities, refusing to transfer detainees to state custody, to hand over or even register weapons, or to relinquish control of key installations.
Trust in institutions and their legitimacy depends on their ability to deliver the services they are supposed to provide. With the judiciary largely paralysed and in the absence of an authority able to hold militias to account, many people are left feeling they have no recourse to justice. Not surprisingly, some are turning to militias to solve problems that should be settled in courts of law. Others are joining militias hoping to reap political and material benefits which derive from the use of force.
The gradual consolidation of militia rule has been an impediment to the establishment of the rule of law, an issue for too long neglected by the National Transitional Council and its supporters in the international community, notably the countries which participated in Nato’s military operations. The latter missed the opportunity to press for greater respect for human rights earlier in the conflict, when their support was crucial and when abuses were on a smaller scale and corrective measures could have been enforced more easily.
The Libyan transitional authorities face momentous challenges on many fronts, but this is no excuse for inaction on human rights. Concrete measures must be urgently undertaken to get the judiciary back to work and to ensure that it does so effectively and impartially. Unless abuses committed by all sides before, during and after the conflict are investigated and the perpetrators held to account, it will not be possible to restore confidence in the judiciary. So-called judicial parallel and unaccountable structures set up by militias should be disbanded immediately.
As efforts get under way to integrate former fighters into the army and security forces, it is crucial that robust vetting and screening mechanisms are put in place – both by the National Transitional Council and by those countries providing training and support to the Libyan security forces – to ensure that those who committed, ordered or condoned human rights abuses are excluded from posts that would allow them to repeat such crimes.
Efforts are also needed by the international community, especially through the UN Support Mission in Libya, to invest in both capacity-building and support for local authorities while also strengthening the mission’s human rights monitoring capacity. The latter is most urgent, as exposing and challenging abuses by all-powerful militias remains a difficult endeavor for new civil society organisations, who fear reprisals or of accusations of anti-revolution bias.
Donatella Rovera is senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International.
¡VIVA LIBYA! 