Our NLG Chicago Legal Observer Program volunteers are in Ferguson, supporting demonstrators and monitoring police. We have been working in cooperation with attorneys in Missouri on a Mass Defense of those persecuted by this insane system that has befallen the citizens of Ferguson .
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Introducing our Newsletter for the 2nd Quarter of 2014. Please enjoy and catch up on all the work the Chicago NLG and its committees have been up to! The newsletter is interactive, so all of the links (email addresses, web sites, Convention pic) actually work if you click on them.
The following was submitted to the editors of the Opinion section of the Chicago Tribune as the official Chicago National Lawyers Guild response to their own piece on the NATO 3 case to further the public discourse. The Tribune has not published our response.
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On Friday, February 7, 2014, a Cook County jury acquitted the NATO 3 of all terrorism charges, opting instead to convict them of lower level offenses. The acquittal of the terrorism charges is the culmination of the tireless efforts of the defense team, most of whom are members of the National Lawyers Guild. It is also a victory for the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, who organized the NATO Legal Support project, providing round-the-clock support for activists leading up to the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.
On Monday, February 10, 2014, just days after the announcement of the jury’s verdict, the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune published a piece hailing the actions of police and prosecutors and calling for stiff sentences for the three young men. (http://www.chicagotribune.
In an attempt to drum up fear, the Tribune editorial asks readers to “[r]emember the masked agitators, dressed in black, snaking their way to the front of the parade ranks.” However, it fails to mention that two of those masked agitators were undercover Chicago Police Officers, Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygun. The editorial piece argues that “[w]hen a 20-year-old calls himself an anarchist in such a setting,” police and prosecutors are justified in treating him like a terrorist. Markedly absent from the piece, is the fact that this “setting” was one manufactured by undercover police officers. Recordings played at the NATO 3 trial revealed that Chikko and Uygun supplied the defendants with alcohol on multiple occasions, suggested the idea of making the Molotov cocktails and even assisted in building them by cutting up their own bandanas to use as wicks.
The problem is not, as the Tribune suggests, that these young men may have identified as anarchists. The problem is that accepting the position of the Tribune’s editorial board means condoning a reversion to the days of widespread illegal spying through the resurrection of operations like the Chicago Police Red Squad, which targeted political activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Unfortunately, this seems to have already begun; Even before becoming involved with the NATO 3, and lacking any training in undercover work, Chikko and Uygun spied on activists in cafes, at concerts, and at peaceful protests.
Rather than respecting the decision of the jury to acquit these young men of terrorism charges, the editorial board of the Tribune published a reprehensibly misinformed piece that is a continuation of the political prosecution beget by the City and the State’s Attorney. By comparing the heavy-handed suppression of political dissidence to the Boston Marathon bombing attacks, Alvarez and the Tribune are trivializing terrorism, something that, fortunately, the jury in the NATO 3 case refused to do.
Introducing our Newsletter for the 1st Quarter of 2014. Please enjoy and catch up on all the work the Chicago NLG and its committees have been up to!
Introducing our Newsletter for September 2013. Please enjoy and catch up on all the work the Chicago NLG and its committees have been up to!
Jan Susler, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild International Committee’s Puerto Rico Subcommittee, presented a paper on Monday, June 17 to the United Nations Decolonization Committee during its annual hearing on the status of Puerto Rico.
Susler’s comprehensive presentation addresses Puerto Rico’s ongoing colonial status, federal intervention and repression in Puerto Rico, other challenges to civil and human rights in Puerto Rico, the economy, the environment, the death penalty, Vieques and the role of the military, and the ongoing confinement of Puerto Rican political prisoners in US jails.
Susler’s presentation concludes with recommendations that the General Assembly pass a resolution calling upon the US government to:
* immediately cease the brutality, criminalization and harassment of, and attacks on, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and all those who exercise their fundamental rights to expression and association;
* immediately release Puerto Rican political prisoners Oscar López Rivera, who has served more than 32 years in U.S. custody, and Norberto González Claudio;
* identify and hold criminally liable all those responsible for the assassination of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos (2005), Santiago Mari Pesquera (1976), Carlos Muñiz Varela (1979), and other militants of the Puerto Rican independence movement; * withdraw the FBI, the U.S. court, and all other U.S. police, repressive and military forces and agencies from Puerto Rico;
* withdraw from Vieques, formally return legal property of the land to the people of Vieques, cease detonating unexploded ordnance, completely clean up the pollution left by the U.S. Navy’s 60 year occupation through the use of proven, environmentally friendly clean-up methods, foster and support a sustainable economy, and compensate the people of Vieques for the damage to their health done to them by the same;
* cease and desist from the application of the death penalty in Puerto Rico;
* formally commit to negotiate in good faith with the people of Puerto Rico a solution to the colonial condition; and recognize the proposals that emanate from a Constitutional Assembly, initiated by the people of Puerto Rico, such as that called for by the Puerto Rico Bar Association, as the true expression of the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico, and respond to them accordingly.
The National Lawyers Guild will be holding its 76th annual Law for the People convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico October 23-27, the Guild’s first international convention. The Puerto Rico subcommittee that Susler co-chairs with Judith Berkan and Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan is working with a team of Puerto Rican lawyers, law students and legal workers to host the Convention.
Click here to download presentation: Presentation to UN Decolonization Committee on Puerto Rico
For more info: http://www.nlginternational.org/news/article.php?nid=536
