August 11 2005

Jordan, Britain Deportation Accord

After the terrible London bombings, more security procedures have taken place, and many critical decisions were taken as well. One of these decisions was deporting Muslims who are in suspicion. The reaction of the world was mostly supportive to this decision, among the supporters were many Arab Muslim Bloggers who are pro deportation of suspects. I for one believe that Britain has the right to do that of course, but my fear is the grounds on which Muslim British Citizens would be selected for deportation. Who is exactly a suspect? And so my personal opinion was: identify suspects, investigate, if proven guilty then they should be punished, if not guilty then they have the right to stay where they are. Anyway, and regardless of what I think, the decision to deport “suspects” is now on its way to action. One of the first steps was: signing a deportation accord with Jordan that allows for undesirables to be deported from one country to the other, and under which both countries guarantee the civil rights of Jordanian and British deportees without the fear of torture or mistreatment. Britain pointed out that agreement has been formulated for one-and-a-half years and had no links with the terrorist attacks that hit London recently.
This accord faced a lot of opposition from some politicians and activists in Jordan. Also rights group Amnesty International slammed the agreement as “not worth the paper it’s written on”.
Sources: Middle East Online, and Jordan Times.

What hurts me the most is the fact that torture and mistreatment of prisoners has become a common practice in most of the world.
I’Â’m sure that if torture is crossed out of our dictionaries the world will be taking a big step towards civilization, development and reform, and it will become a better place to live.



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Posted August 11, 2005 by Eman Abukhadra in category "General", "Jordan", "Media, International