Jersey's appalling human rights record again...but who cares?

We tried to post this on the SSTAG - Social Security and Tenants Action Group - blog but Google seems to have played around yet again with the password.
If anybody knows how to communicate with Google or how to rectify the problem please make contact....

So we are looking at the European Social Charter of the Council of Europe which almost every other place in Europe has signed up to....
but not Jersey of course....
and we doubt if any of the current COM have ever heard of it or care to find out.....

Council of Europe Social Charter….

A recent Daily Mail headline predictably screamed against the Council of Europe
“Double your dole, Eurocrats tell UK”.

For the average reader it would have been just another poke at the EU – but in fact the Council of Europe is not the EU at all but another organisation entirely.

Not that this would bother the Daily Mail too much with its insular view of the world and its policy to oppose any progressive trends – especially those that seek to improve the lives of ordinary working people…

So this latest rant was aimed to ridicule the most recent report from the Council of Europe arising under the European Social Charter which was signed up to by the UK in 1962.

The Charter is the companion document to the European Convention on Human Rights so that alone is reason for the Daily Mail to reach for the reject button.

Unfortunately, the paper is popular in Jersey so many thousands of the local electorate devour its contents and absorb its prejudices along with those so readily published by the JEP.

It was the Anti-Torture Committee from the Council of Europe that visited La Moye Prison a few years ago and issued a report that required Jersey to improve some conditions and practices which potentially caused “human rights violations.”

It’s easy to guess what the Daily Mail might have written about that sort of interference because the violation of rights is just an everyday journalistic tool at the Mail and other “National rags” – as the Press Inquiry and current court cases have revealed…

But unlike the Convention against Torture - Jersey has not even signed up for the European Social Charter – so the latest criticisms against the UK do not apply here.

This does not mean that similar conclusions might not be made about Jersey’s social policies – it’s just that, yet again - nobody is submitting them for independent examination and scrutiny in accordance with international standards.

Of course, there is no “dole” in Jersey just a weird system of “Income support” – but so far as the UK is concerned the Council report said that “Jobseekers Allowance” (for example) should be increased by £71 per week and many other allowances and pensions should be increased by similar amounts too because they are “manifestly inadequate.”

So how would Jersey fare if examined by these “Eurocrats”?

The UK has signed-up for 60 of the 72 articles of the Social Charter and submitted 32 Reports to the relevant Council of Europe Committee since 1962.

These deal with such matters as;

Children and family protection,

The protection of children from sexual exploitation,

Employment and labour rights,

Trades Unions,

Non-discrimination

Education, training and equal opportunities,

Health and Social Security provision

Maternity,

Migrant workers,

Etc.

The whole document is hugely important but like the Convention on Human Rights, is not popular with the current UK Government or other regressive institutions such as the Daily Mail. They would like to scrap any legislation or obligations that interfere with the capitalist priority of making profit.

In Jersey, as already indicated, the European Social Charter has not even been ratified.

It is unlikely that CM Gorst has ever heard of its existence and the Jersey Scrutiny system is incapable of submitting social policies to critical examination.

The Jersey Scrutiny System simply does not have an international obligations dimension – nobody routinely asks if human rights are being complied with!

How might such a complacent attitude be challenged?  Shall any of the candidates in the current St Helier By-Elections or in the whole Island elections in the autumn be proposing to change things for the better?

Jersey Holocaust Memorial Day 2014 - still seeking the baddies?

Once again Holocaust Day has been marked in Jersey with some short speeches, a few prayers and wreath-laying.

For the families of the 21 with Jersey origins who died in the “death camps” there are personal and painful reasons for participating in these proceedings but why members of the government and other VIPs turn out each year is not so clear.

This year we were told that MIND was laying a wreath for the first time in recognition of all the physically and mentally sick people who were persecuted by the “Nazis” and Senator Routier, who has a disabled son, was chosen to represent them.

Quite why his son or any other disabled person was not allowed to lay the wreath was not explained and it may not be relevant because the Senator has had his own health challenges.

Yet he declined to be interviewed for this blog on the ground that it was too emotional and he would not be drawn into the wider deficiencies of the prevailing and active discrimination against disabled persons in Jersey.

Nor would he comment on Jersey’s continuing failure to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People or the fact that even Guernsey has now agreed to a whole Strategy on Disability which includes Ratification of International standards and many other progressive measures for that Bailiwick….

Jersey’s Chief Minister, Senator Gorst also declined to be interviewed in order to update last year’s somewhat inadequate Human Rights message as did the Dean who spoke at the indoor ceremony, said a prayer and lit a candle as usual. His brief address included the rhetorical question – What am I doing here?

The Dean meant at the ceremony rather than here on earth (I presume) but if there is any confusion he still refused to be drawn into a discussion in front of my little camera on the ground that he had to leave to attend a meeting.

Strangely he was talking to influential friends in the miserable outside weather long after I had retreated to somewhere warmer but I still failed to find anybody prepared to speak on camera…

It was the “history” aspect that I particularly wanted to examine since a special wreath laying guest was an historian who had only recently discovered that his grandfather from Jersey had died in a prison camp for failing to surrender a radio. His “crime” had been revealed by the Jersey Attorney General and the St Saviour Police during 1943 and so his fate was sealed along with others of the 21 who died because information was supplied by locals to the occupying forces….

It was this omission from the 2014 Memorial proceedings that bothered me because it is evident that more and more information is leaking out from restricted archives and other sources in Jersey and elsewhere. So just when and how will Channel Islanders deal with the more unpleasant facts of collusion? Who will ultimately decide whether the names of collaborators should be made as public as the identities of those who died or were persecuted as a result of their unfortunate actions?

Channel TV a few years ago, named the two sisters who shopped a whole family for listening to a radio during the Occupation. Their selfish action caused a brother and sister to be sent to the death camps and only the man returned.

In other countries there was immediate post-war justice and rough retribution for those who collaborated. Trials are still taking place for those few ancient survivors who have long-concealed war crimes to answer for.

But nothing has been done so far in the Channel Islands.

As always, it is easier to blame somebody else for the ills in society rather than looking too closely at ourselves.

Thus The Germans aka NAZIS are a very convenient label to stick on the wrongs that occurred during and after the 1930s and it is interesting at least that the various speakers listed the victim groups – Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Disabled and Sick, Gypsies, Homosexuals – but in every instance could not utter the word - Communists….

It was the Communists after all who started this particular deathly and discriminatory ball rolling in the 1930s and the rest of the world did little or nothing then because their extermination satisfied a wider capitalist game plan….

Unfortunately, after a brief dalliance with respectability it is the Communists who are once again even more “despised” than all the other groups put together in our Capitalist dominated world.

So, although the speakers such as the Dean claimed that we are ALL children of the same God and that we have to respect the rights even of those that we do not agree with – he and they do not really mean it….

History has a strange ability to reveal itself. Secrets have a habit of seeping into the public domain.

Last year there were 22 names on the Jersey Holocaust roll-call but one has now been removed because the person did not die.

Even a trained historian did not realise that his grandfather was a victim along with so many millions of others from diverse groups and world-wide origins.

The record – officially or otherwise – is constantly subject to revision.

Jersey’s Holocaust Memorial ceremony needs to extend its terms of reference soon if it is to be taken as seriously as the subject deserves.