Civil liberties, justice, crime

19 year old Tony Robinson was shot dead by a police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday 9 March. Tony, a biracial man, was unarmed. Police had been called to an incident involving an “African-American man” jumping in and out of traffic and a reported assault. The lone responding officer broke into an apartment and shot Tony after what the police say was a scuffle. Protests against the killing continued overnight on Monday. Slogans on demonstrations highlighted stark inequality in Madison. The city prides itself on being a good place to live. However, a report released in 2013 showed that...

Almost half of Syria’s population now requires humanitarian assistance of some kind. Almost three million people have fled Syria, with Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey dealing with increasing numbers of refugees. Both the Assad government and Daesh (ISIS) in eastern Syria have suffered sporadic defeats. Daesh has come under pressure from other fighters and the US led airstrikes. On Monday 16 February the Egyptian airforce began air strikes against Daesh strongholds in Libya, after the group made a gruesome show of their strength in the country, filming the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian migrant...

We are living in a time when freedom of expression is being curtailed on many different fronts. On February 14 in Copenhagen, a meeting debating blasphemy and the right to offend was cut short by a gunman apparently determined to execute Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist known for his cartoons of Muhammad. The gunman managed to kill a 55 year old audience member and followed this by killing a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue the following day. Is this going to be the inevitable consequence of doing things considered blasphemous by some fanatics? Will the political and cultural...

Rotherham's council cabinet resigned en masse on 4 February after a report into child sex exploitation in the borough heavily criticised the running of the council. Labour council leader Paul Lakin said he would quit as leader and also as councillor. Shortly afterward communities secretary, Eric Pickles, announced his department has sent commissioners to take over the council, pending elections in 2016. The report, commissioned by Pickles' department, concluded that “The council’s culture is unhealthy: bullying, sexism, suppression and misplaced ‘political correctness’ have cemented its...

Every year Reporters Without Borders produce a World Press Freedom Index, looking at how 180 countries rate on press freedom and the degree to which journalists and bloggers are targetted by militias, criminal gangs and the armed far right (both fascists and extreme Islamists). It is a window on how dangerous and unfree the world is. The 2014 Index highlights the effects of the Syrian crisis. 130 journalists were killed between 2011 and the end of 2013; more since then have been killed, arrested or intimidated by Bashar Al Assad, ISIS and Kurdish PYD militia. In the last two years there has...

Should Ched Evans have been given a job at Oldham Athletic Football Club? No, of course not! Should he have the chance to rehabilitate, be employed, live his life? Yes. But rehabilitation for a convicted rapist should not mean walking into a £2,500 a week job where he is, because in the public eye, a role model for boys and young men. If this crime can be so easily forgotten about then it also sends a message that rape is a trivial matter. Ched Evans claims he is innocent. On TV, Gordon Taylor, the head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, claimed that sometimes people who seem to be...

After the murder of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, we are once again having to deal with questions of free speech, of Islamism, and reprisal attacks by the neo-fascist far-right. The first job of any principled socialist should be to unequivocally condemn the attacks on the journalists. Some have accused the newspaper of being needlessly provocative or even Islamophobic. But the cartoonists who were murdered at their place of work were killed for no other reason than they drew images that were considered blasphemous by the killers, and the right...

The French revolutionary socialists of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) have denounced the attack on the office of the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo (7 January 2015) and called on people to join the protest demonstrations across France. Barbaric, reactionary madness To the attack at the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo , we respond with indignation and anger at this indiscriminate, murderous violence against journalists and workers. The attack was about deploying terror against freedom of expression and freedom of the press, in the name of reactionary and obscurantist prejudices...

Following the success of the national demonstration for free education on 19 November, which saw 10, 000 students march across London in an energetic rebirth of the student movement, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts called for further days of action on 3 and 6 December. Actions took place in Teesside, Manchester, Bath, Sussex, Warwick, Birmingham and on various other campuses on 3 December, calling for free education by taxing the rich, and for the liberation and diversification of the curriculum. We reject the idea that people should get a degree merely for the sake of serving the...

Yet more evidence has emerged which highlights the shocking injustice committed by failing to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, USA. A report by Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC journalist and broadcaster, showed that St Louis County prosecutors supplied the Grand Jury with outdated information about the law on police officers’ rights to use deadly force. They only corrected their mistake three days before Darren Wilson testified, and then without substantial explanation or elaboration. Much of the Grand Jury’s...