from Crikey .....

Who stopped Robinson? The inhibition of responsibility

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

AIR TRAVEL, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, DFAT, JENNIFER ROBINSON, JULIAN ASSANGE, TRANSPORT SECURITY, WIKILEAKS

Twenty four hours on, we now have a clearer idea of the circumstances in which Australian human rights lawyer Jen Robinson was stopped at Heathrow Airport on her way home to Australia, told she was on an "inhibited persons" list and that she would not be permitted to board her flight without approval from the Australian High Commission.

But not why she was stopped and on whose authority.

Robinson touched down in Sydney this morning and was looking forward to seeing Attorney-General Nicola Roxon at the Commonwealth Lawyers' Association conference, where both are speaking.

Robinson, who has spent most of the last day in the air, has clarified that she understands no call was made from Heathrow to Australia House before her check-in was approved, despite Virgin Airlines staff and a security guard insisting she was an "inhibited person" who had evidently done something "controversial" and that approval was required before she could be checked-in.

So what is an inhibited person? It's not a term used by Australian agencies. But Dean Procter on Twitter directed me to an agency that does use it - the Department of Homeland Security. According to one of DHS's operating manuals for airlines,

"Travellers receiving an inhibited response must be further vetted prior to receiving a boarding pass authorization. The response message returned will provide a contact number that must be called to determine if a resolution can be accomplished."

That sounds exactly like what happened to Robinson. Another DHS document says:

"'Inhibited status', as defined in this rule, means the status of a passenger or non-traveling individual to whom TSA has instructed a covered aircraft operator or a covered airport operator not to issue a boarding pass or to provide access to the sterile area."

In March, as part of the US government's seemingly remorseless attempt to impose its laws on the rest of the world, the UK agreed to new rules that required airlines to provide the Department of Homeland Security with details of passengers even if they weren't travelling to the United States, but to countries near the US, such as Canada, Mexico and Cuba.

Robinson, plainly, was going to none of those. But it raises an interesting scenario for when Robinson next seeks to travel to the US.

DFAT yesterday said it knew nothing of what happened. ABC journalist Jeff Waters last night contacted a spokesman for the UK Border Agency, who denied that they had stopped Robinson.

Which leaves the airline - Virgin. But the only circumstances in which an airline would stop a passenger in the manner Robinson was stopped is if she was not a citizen of the country she was flying to and there was a risk the airline would have to return her to her point of origin if she was refused entry, costing the airline money.

Plainly a government agency is either lying or knows far more than they are letting on.

But because of the tangled web of responsibility for international travel, it's impossible to do more than speculate. Different agencies within government, different government, and private companies all have different but related functions. It's a particularly egregious example of how governments can deflect responsibility and scrutiny because decision-making is outsourced into a nebulous mix of systems and separate decision-makers, leaving no one person or agency ultimately responsible. And international air travel has long since become a Kafkaesque mix of Security theatre, institutionalised paranoia and irrational bureaucracy in which any semblance of logic is not merely dismissed but might even be considered a threat.

This outsourcing of responsibility enables governments and politicians in particular to operate with complete deniability. Ministers, who used to be considered responsible for what happened in their portfolios, can place their hands on their hearts and swear they know nothing, that they have sought advice and that it is nothing to do with them.

Meantime, lawyers, activists... hell, let's call them what they are, troublemakers -- get harassed without anyone with any authority having to front up and accept responsibility. It's all part of the constant process of delegitimising dissent.

back at the main game .....

Rundle: pursuit of Assange a product of fraught Swedish sex crime politics

Guy Rundle writes:

AMNESTY, JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS, WIKILEAKS NEWS

Within weeks or days, WikiLeaks supremo and now TV host Julian Assange will find out from the UK Supreme Court whether he is to be extradited to Sweden for further questioning on four accusations (no charges have been laid) on sexual matters - two misdemeanour "annoyance" accusations, one of sexual coercion and one of third degree sexual assault/rape.

Now, in a case already mired in controversy, new evidence has come to light, which suggests that the testimony of one of the complainants has been fabricated in order to supply sufficient evidence to "fit" a criminal charge.

Comparison between the evidence given by Anna Ardin, the complainant attached to the first three accusations, and the legal wording of the key complaint by her against Assange, show that it is suspiciously similar to a paragraph in a high-profile 2009 Amnesty International Report on s-x crimes in the Nordic countries.

The passage in question is significant because it establishes the minimum degree of physical coercion required to make a felony charge of sexual coercion in Sweden.

Here is the passage from the Amnesty report, first published in 2009:

"In Norway and Sweden, the letter of the law allows even slight use of force to be interpreted as constituting rape: it may be sufficient for the perpetrator to "impede the victim's movements" for example by holding the victim's arms to pin her/him down, by applying body weight or by forcing the victim's legs apart."

And here is the accusation made by the Swedish prosecutor, as part of the process of investigation, after the case was re-opened in September 2010:

Claimed offence one.

"On 13th-14th August 2010, in the home of the injured party [AA] in Stockholm, Assange, by using violence, forced the injured party to endure his restricting her freedom of movement. The violence consisted in a firm hold of the injured party's arms and a forceful spreading of her legs while lying on top of her and with his body weight preventing her from moving or shifting."

Ardin's evidence, which forms the ostensible basis of the above accusation, follows the itinerary of the Amnesty paragraph fairly closely (I've excerpted it below)*.

The similar nature of the accusations in the Amnesty report and Ardin's evidence (something that sites such as Swedenversusassange.com have earlier pointed to), is significant due to both the atrocious and corrupt and/or incompetent conduct of the investigation of Assange, and of the wider political context in which the accusations have been made.

In summary (a detailed account is below), the near identikit police record/accusation/Amnesty report come amidst a police investigation characterised by an investigation begun peremptorily by an untrained prosecutor, dismissed the next day by a senior prosecutor, reinstated by a prosecutor known for advocating the expansion of the "s-x crimes" remit, following the involvement of former government ministers as legal counsel, the destruction and alternation of evidence by Anna Ardin, allegations of police coercion by the other complainant (Sofia Wilen), the close involvement of a police officer, Irmeli Krans, who was a political associate of Ardin's in the initial investigation, her public commenting on the process (during prosecution), and a reprimand and investigation by the police board, and conflicting evidence of collusion between the complainants and others in subsequent witness statements to the police.

The correspondence between the Amnesty report and the accusation against Assange can only increase speculation that the pursuit of Assange has become politically motivated as part of the fraught politics of s-x crime in Sweden. The country has a respectable level of s-x crime prosecution -- around 4.7 convictions per 100,000 people, nearly triple the Europe average of 1.8, and far in excess of some countries (Portugal's rate is 0.5, for example).

However, Sweden also has one of the highest rates of inquiry about and report of s-x crimes -- the rate of s-x crime reporting has gone up more than 500% since 1975. In particular, it leapt sharply when a new s-x crimes bill was introduced in 2005-6 -- inaugurated by a dying Social Democrat administration, brought in by the new Moderate Party government.

Since then, different parts of the Swedish state have been at loggerheads. The law, despite cliched views of Sweden, is actually less transformative than the UK-Australian s-x crime laws on which it is based. In the latter, active consent has become the centre of the law, without physical coercion. In Sweden, bizarrely, coercion of some sort must be present, but non-duress consent does not rule out prosecution.

This has created an enormous mess -- on the one hand it raises the evidentiary demand for incidents such as acquaintance rape, yet on the other it removes agency from women in a whole series of grey areas - rough sex, drunk (but conscious) sex, sex in exchange for drugs, etc. The result has been some hair-raising convictions in cases that may be no more than fraught encounters - and acquittals in acquaintance rape cases that would have gained convictions elsewhere. Indeed, since the law, the acquittal rate in Swedish sex crime trials has gone up, from 22% to 33% of tried cases.

This has created a complex cultural-social war in Sweden. The ample feminist state apparatuses in the country allege that the Moderate party has underfunded investigation of sex crimes, thus allowing for the prosecution and conviction gap. Others argue that prosecuting authorities bring too many cases of insufficient evidence.