johninnit

Malaysian blogger, lawyer and human rights activist Charles Hector is in court for a second day today. Good Electronics report that he’s being sued for $ 3.3 million in damages in a defamation case by electronics component manufacturer Asahi Kosei.

The case hinges on comments he made on behalf of a group of Burmese migrant workers in the country, who alleged they had been promised much better pay and conditions by the company than they eventually received. When they complained, they were threatened with termination and deportation.

Worryingly, the trial looks to be stacked against Hector, with the court issuing a statement in advance that the blog posting under discussion was factually incorrect, and refusing to allow the migrant workers affected to join the suit. (more…)

Photos of the four detainees (via Iraqi Communist Party site)

Worrying news from Iraq that four young leaders of the country’s recent waves of protests were arrested today and are being held in an undisclosed location. As students Ahmed Alaa al Baghdaddi, Moyaid Fasil al Taib and Ali Abdul-Khaliq, and worker activist Jihad Jalil – members of the 25 February protest movement – walked to join a peaceful mass protest in Tahrir Square in Baghdad this morning, plain clothes police in an ambulance seized them, beating them and threatening them with machine guns before taking them away. (more…)

Whilst today’s terrible plane crash is obviously being reported from the perspective of the loss of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski – one of the leading figures of Poland’s Law and Order Party (the nationalist, and severely homophobic, former governing party, which sits with the Tories’ far right friends in Europe), also on the plane was the 80 year old Anna Walentynowicz.

In 1980, Anna was coming up for retirement in the shipyards of Gdansk, where she’d worked for 30 years as a welder and crane operator. She’d become disillusioned with Polish communism, after seing how it restricted workers’ rights to organise, and she took up editorship of the propaganda flyer, “The Coastal Worker”, campaigning against sexism in work,corruption in management and the government licensed trade unions, and in favour of the country’s free trade union movement. (more…)