Category Archives: Cuba

Undocumented Teachers in Your Child’s Classroom

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So, no U.S. citizens with teaching certificates? Perhaps the mission is to lower payroll costs and meet quotas? Or join unions and teach selected history…

Is there a state left that can define what citizenship is? Is there a state that is protecting ‘the pursuit of happiness’? Apparently teaching, a noble profession, or at least used to be is no longer noble.

For reference, Tashfeen Malik, the female San Bernardino killer could have been a teacher in your child’s classroom, she came into the United States under false documents…no documents? What is the difference?

NY to let undocumented workers become teachers

ALBANY — Undocumented immigrants in New York will be able to apply for teacher certifications and professional licenses, according to the state Board of Regents.

The board that oversees education policies in New York voted Wednesday to allow people who can’t get legal residency because of their parents’ immigration status to seek teacher certifications. They also will be able to apply for a license from among the 53 professions overseen by the state Education Department, including a variety of medical professions.

“These are young people who came to the U.S. as children,” state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said in a statement. “They are American in every way but immigration status. They’ve done everything right.  They’ve worked hard in school, some have even served in the military, but when it’s time to apply for a license, they’re told ‘Stop. That’s far enough.’ We shouldn’t close the door on their dreams.”

The Board of Regents pointed to a June 2012 policy by the Obama administration called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that allows individuals who came to the U.S. as children and meet certain guidelines to request consideration of “deferred immigration action” for two years that can be renewed.

The federal policy, the board said, applies to young people who usually get their immigration status from their parents, many of whom are undocumented.

“As a result, most of these individuals have no current mechanism to obtain legal residency, even if they have lived most of their lives in the U.S.” the Board of Regents said in a statement.

But people in the system are prohibited from obtaining teaching certification and licenses in certain professions, the board said, including pharmacy, dentistry and engineering.

The regulation by the Board of Regents will be finalized after a public-comment period.

Sen. Terrence Murphy, R-Yorktown, Westchester County, ripped the policy.

“Allowing lawbreakers to teach, or practice medicine, says a lot about how backwards our priorities truly are in New York,” Murphy said in a statement. “This is another example of why rule-making by unelected bureaucrats is what is ruining New York state. Will they next unilaterally enact free college tuition for illegal immigrants?”

He said New York doesn’t allow a military spouse with an equivalent license in another state to teach in New York, so “Elia should be focusing on reciprocity and interstate licensure for those who have earned it, instead of doing further harm to our already broken immigration system and rewarding lawbreakers.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he has yet to review the new education policy to determine its legality.

“It depends on how they write the policy, as to whether or not it’s legal and constitutional, and I haven’t seen anything,” Cuomo said when asked about the policy by reporters Thursday in Albany.

Democratic lawmakers praised the action. Democrats have been pushing for the Dream Act in New York, which would allow immigrants in the country illegally to access state financial aid for college. Republicans have opposed the measure.

“This is a tremendous win for New York’s students,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, said in a statement. “The Assembly majority has always led the charge to expand opportunities for every student, and we have championed issues like the DREAM Act and greater investment in higher education to show our commitment to all of the families who have made New York their home.”

 

216heppcd1

Obama Placing Legacy Above Truth in Cuba

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First of 8,000 stranded Cuban migrants cross into US

MEXICO CITY (AP)— The first of 8,000 Cuban migrants recently stranded in Central America have crossed the Mexican border into the United States.

Some 180 migrants flew from Costa Rica to El Salvador, and have been making their way to the U.S., with the first reaching Laredo, Texas, on Thursday night.

“I’m a Cuban who has just acquired the American Dream,” said Daniel Caballero, one of the first to cross into Laredo, according to a Facebook posting of the sponsoring non-profit group, Cubans in Liberty.

***

 Cuban migrants are seen at an immigration facility after arriving by plane from Costa Rica to Nuevo Laredo

U.S. sees new wave of Cuban migrants

 

In Part from Panama City (AFP): The first flight left from Panama’s international airport. The foreign ministry said in a statement it would land in Juarez, a Mexican city on the US border. Other flights would follow this week.

It emphasized that the flights were a “limited” and “exceptional” measure.

They mirrored flights Costa Rica has been carrying out since January, for some 8,000 Cubans who had been stuck on its territory.

The Cubans aim to get to the United States where a Cold War-era law allows them easy entry and a fast-track to residency.

But their journey, to South America, up through Central America and then Mexico and the US border, was frustrated in November last year when Nicaragua — a Cuban ally — closed its borders to them, and Costa Rica dismantled a people-smuggling ring they had been relying on.

Costa Rica in December closed its own border to any more Cuban arrivals as it struggled to clear the migrants from its territory.

Cuban State Media: Obama Visit ‘Disproves Human Rights Violations’ by Communists

Cuba’s communist propaganda newspaper Granma has published an article claiming that President Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Havana in March “disproves” decades of evidence that the Cuban government violates the human rights of its citizens, on a weekend in which Cuban state police arrested almost 200 dissidents for peaceful marches against communism.

Breitbart: In a column titled “Four Myths Obama’s Trip to Cuba Disproves,” the newspaper cites “Cuba violates human rights” as the top “myth” that President Obama is helping to eradicate by visiting the island. The article calls the fact of Cuba’s rampant human rights violations “the mantra of those who want to justify as a philanthropic crusade the politics of aggression begun in 1959 before the advance of a socialist Revolution in their own backyard.” The fact that Cuba violates international human rights law on a routine basis, the article continues, “permeated realpolitik previous to the December 17, 2014 announcement,” referring to the day President Obama announced a number of concessions to the Raúl Castro regime in exchange for, in Castro’s words, “nothing in return.”

Granma also claims that President Obama’s decision to endorse the legitimacy of the Castro regime with his presence dismantles the allegation that “the ultra-right in Miami, especially legislators of Cuban origin, had totally held hostage the United States’ politics towards Cuba.” Cuban state propaganda often insults ethnic Cuban voters in Miami as “ultra-right” extremists, using terms like “the Miami Mafia” in an attempt to alienate Republican-leaning voters in the region. Cuban-American voters in Miami have also been consistently mocked and derided in American left-wing media, particularly the cable news pundits associated with NBC.

While Granma is open to using President Obama’s visit to promote the lie that the Cuban government does not oppress its dissidents, it continues to condemn the United States for defending human rights internationally. In a separate column published Saturday, the propaganda outlet condemns President Obama for not using executive orders to lift trade bans on Cuba, accusing his inaction of “keeping alive politics of aggression.”

President Obama is expected to meet with dictator Raúl Castro and “other Cuban people” during his visit, though it remains unclear whether he will be present in meetings with Cuban civil society or pro-democracy activists.

Whether any of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents will be out of jail during President Obama’s visit remains to be seen. If this weekend is any indication, there is little hope that the leaders of dissident groups will be allowed to attend events involving the President. Various dissident groups, including the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and the Ladies in White, staged multiple events across the island this weekend. More than 170 dissidents were arrested, including dozens of Ladies in White arrested for attending Sunday Catholic Mass. An estimated 40 Ladies in White are still in custody after their prayer march in Havana.

The silent marches against the Castro regime this week were dedicated to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience who died during a hunger strike in 2010, and the four men killed in 1996 when the Cuban government shot down a plane belonging to the pro-democracy group Brothers to the Rescue, which included one U.S. citizen.

Cuban dissidents have called President Obama’s decision to visit the island “an error” and warn that “these sorts of visits bring a lot of collateral damage” with them. They note that more than 250 pro-democracy activists were arrested in September during Pope Francis’s visit to Havana, including one man who was beaten and arrested in front of Pope Francis for saying the word “freedom” too loudly near the Pontiff. (The Pope denied having seen the event occurring before him.)

According to the NGO People in Need, President Obama’s efforts to warm up to the Castro regime have significantly deteriorated conditions for dissidents on the island. “There has been no substantial improvement in regard to human rights and individual freedoms on the island. … [The Cuban government] has adapted its repressive methods in order to make them invisible to the scrutinizing, judgmental eyes of the international community, but it has not reduced the level of pressure or control over the opposition,” the group said in a report in December.

Plan B for Gitmo? Plan A in Garbage Can

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White House mum on Plan B after GOP rejects Gitmo plan

Examiner: A White House spokesman isn’t saying whether President Obama will try on his own to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in light of Republicans’ promise to ignore the closure plan he sent to Congress on Tuesday.

Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration wants to work with lawmakers on the details of closing down the facility built to hold suspected terrorists caught in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks dragnet. He underscored that Obama has already said that is his preference, rather than taking unilateral action.

“What we’re focused on right now is congressional consideration of a plan that they specifically asked for so that we can have a discussion about the best path forward,” Earnest said hours after the White House met the congressionally mandated deadline.

Earnest said the White House plan was lacking key details, such as where prisoners would be moved to, because Congress has barred the administration from spending money on seeking alternatives.

“What they have done thus far… is put in place barriers that have prevented the administration from moving forward,” Earnest lamented. “But by putting those barriers in place, they have led us down the path of a policy that wastes taxpayer dollars and makes the United States of America more vulnerable to terrorist organizations.”

Earnest said the immediate rejection of the administration’s plan by many Republicans is just the latest sign of the GOP’s unwillingness to work constructively on any issue.

“[T]here is this emerging trend … where Congress isn’t simply in a position of just saying, ‘No,'” he said. “Congress is actually refusing to engage … They’re refusing to do the basic function of their job,” Earnest said. He pointed to Republican intransigence on other matters, such as an authorization for use of military force against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the president’s budget or expected inaction once he nominates someone to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

“They’re doing just about everything, except for fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities,” Earnest said.

****

BI: There’s nothing subtle about Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts’ reaction to President Obama’s idea to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Roberts literally threw it in the trash.

Pat RobertsVerified account ‏@SenPatRoberts 6h6 hours ago

., this is what I think of the “plan” to close and send terrorists to the United States.

***

Even Obama’s New Plan to Close Gitmo Can’t Say How It Will Happen

DailyBeast: The report states that detainees could be transferred to one of 13 U.S. other prisons, but it doesn’t say which ones. It also doesn’t explain how the administration calculated the $475 million price tag for building a new facility in the U.S. to hold detainees. Nor did it explain why moving detainees to U.S. soil reduce criticism across the world that the U.S. should stop holding such prisoners all together. Any construction of a new prison is unlikely to be completed in the next year, and any executive order would require funding and congressional approval. Moreover, none of the proposed costs associated with moving detainees to the U.S. are allocated in the current defense budget. For those reasons, the prison in Guantanamo is likely to remain open when Obama leave office in January 2017. Full article here.

Defense Department: The United States obtains two types of assurances from a receiving country: security assurances

(i.e., measures to sufficiently mitigate the threat posed by the detainee) and humane treatment

assurances (i.e., measures to ensure that the transfer comports with the U.S. Government’s

humane treatment policy). These assurances are obtained following consultations among

diplomatic, military, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals from the United States and

the receiving country.

This Administration works extensively with receiving governments to obtain their assurances

that appropriate security measures will be in place to substantially mitigate the risk that the

transferred individual will engage or reengage in any terrorist or other hostile activity that

threatens the United States or U.S. persons or interests. In particular, the Administration seeks

assurances from receiving governments that they will take certain security measures that, in the

U.S. Government’s experience, have proven to be effective in mitigating threats posed by former

detainees. The specific measures that are ultimately negotiated vary depending on a range of

factors, including the specific threat a detainee may pose, the geographic location of the

receiving country, the receiving country’s domestic laws, the receiving country’s capabilities and

resources, and, where applicable, the receiving country’s international legal obligations.

Importantly, the Administration will transfer a detainee only if it determines that the transfer is in

the national security interest of the United States, the threat posed by the detainee will be

substantially mitigated, and the transfer is consistent with our humane treatment policy. The

security assurances obtained from receiving countries generally cover:

  • restrictions on travel, which can include the denial of travel documents and other

measures to prevent transferred detainees from leaving the country (or specific cities or

regions in the country) for a specified period of time;

  • monitoring of the detainee, which may include physical and electronic monitoring, or

other measures available under the receiving country’s domestic laws;

  • periodic sharing of information concerning the individual with the U.S. Government,

including any information regarding attempts to travel outside of the receiving country;

and

  • other measures to satisfy the United States’ national security interests and to aid the

detainee in reentering society, such as medical support, skills training, language training,

enrollment of the detainee in a reintegration or rehabilitation program, family relocation,

and assistance in accessing a variety of public services.

 

In each case, the specific security assurances negotiated take into account the individual facts

and circumstances of the transfer, including the detainee’s specific threat profile, as well as the

capabilities and domestic legal authorities of the receiving government.

Approach to Transfers. Of the 147 detainees transferred during the current Administration: 81

have been transferred to countries in the Middle East, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula; 47 have

been transferred to countries in Europe and Asia, 13 have been transferred to the Americas; and

6 have been transferred to the South Pacific. The Administration generally aims to transfer

detainees to their home countries. Where that is not feasible, the Administration seeks

resettlement opportunities in third countries. The Administration intends to continue working to

secure transfer and security commitments from countries around the world, including transfers to

rehabilitation programs, so long as these arrangements satisfy security and humane treatment

requirements.  Full Pentagon summary here.

 

35 and 56…Watch Out, Ask Lots of Questions, Gitmo

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The White House Guantanamo Detention Center plan calls for transferring another 35 detainees to other countries and shifting the remaining 56 to US-based facilities. These guys really want to give up top notch healthcare, food, housing and soccer?     

In 2009: TheHill: The House instructed conferees negotiating with the Senate on a final version of the Homeland Security spending bill to include language prohibiting the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to U.S. soil. The bill already includes a provision prohibiting the detainees from air travel within or to the United States.

Appropriators have placed Guantanamo provisions into at least four other bills. The Senate Defense spending bill, which has yet to pass the chamber, and the House-approved version would also block the use of federal money for the transfer of detainees to the United States. The House Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill and the State Department spending bill would block 2010 federal funding for the closure of the prison. Those bills have been passed by the House and are awaiting Senate action. *** The Senate did confirm and Obama signed it into law as it was in the spending bill. Note the year, this was a Democrat controlled Congress. If Obama does move forward in any method, he will have to sign a waiver of the law and then a Constitutional crisis begins as the military knows this is a law. Does the military comply with the Commander in Chief or do they comply with the law?

Then again in 2010:

Congress Bars Gitmo Transfers  

WSJ: Congress on Wednesday passed legislation that would effectively bar the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial, rejecting pleas from Obama administration officials who called the move unwise.

A defense authorization bill passed by the House and Senate included the language on the offshore prison, which President Barack Obama tried unsuccessfully to close in his first year in office.

*** Then again this month, February 2016:

Military Tells Congress It Can’t Send Gitmo Detainees to U.S.

Bloomberg: Just as President Barack Obama is planning to send Congress his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison this year, leaders of the military say it will not transfer any detainees to the U.S., unless the law prohibiting such transfers is changed.

Lt. General William Mayville Jr., the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as much in a letter to Congress last week, which I obtained. Mayville’s letter gets to the heart of a knotty constitutional issue on Guantanamo: Does President Obama have the authority to close the facility without the consent of Congress?

Writing to 16 House members who served in the military, Mayville writes: “Current law prohibits the use of funds to ‘transfer, release or assist in the transfer or release’ of detainees of Guantanamo Bay to or within the United States, and prohibits the construction, modification or acquisition of any facility within the United States to house any Guantanamo detainee. The Joint Staff will not take any action contrary to those restrictions.”

Start here and this was today further telling how reckless the whole release thing really is:

4 Arrested in Spain, Morocco for IS Armed Group Ties

ABC: Spanish and Moroccan police on Tuesday arrested four suspected members of a jihadi cell that sought to recruit fighters for the Islamic State group, including one described as a former Guantanamo detainee who once fought with militants in Afghanistan.

Three people were arrested in Spain’s North African enclave city of Ceuta while a Moroccan was arrested in the Moroccan border town of Farkhana, next to Melilla, Spain’s other North African enclave, statements from the two nations’ interior ministries said.

One of those detained in Ceuta was the former Guantanamo detainee who was not named by Spanish authorities but described as “a leader who was trained in handling weapons, explosives and in military tactics.” After being captured in 2002 and held in Guantanamo, he was returned to Spain in 2004, said Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz.

Another suspect was the brother of a fighter who blew himself up during an attack in Syria and man detained Tuesday “was inclined to do the same thing,” he said.

The suspects had set up contacts to try to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials and were aiming “to carry out terrorist acts in Spanish territory,” the Spanish ministry statement said, without specifying possible targets.

They also worked to recruit teenagers from Ceuta to join IS in Iraq and Syria, the Spanish statement said.

Spanish police arrested about 100 suspected Islamic extremists last year and more than 600 total since the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and injured nearly 2,000.

Rubio: Today, In the Senate, I have sponsored and supported legislation to prohibit dangerous detainee transfers, block funds for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and prevent the return of the facility to Cuba. And I have stood with Senators Tim Scott (R-SC), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Pat Roberts (R-KS) to oppose bringing terrorists to facilities in South Carolina, Colorado, and Kansas, because it is unnecessary, expensive and, most importantly, dangerous.

 

 

Is There a Future for Gitmo?

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For the Obama administration when it comes to terrorists or enemy combatants, the title of the playbook is ‘Let Some Other Country Handle It’.

Guantánamo parole board OKs release of Osama bin Laden bodyguard

Majid Ahmed at Guantánamo in a photo from his 2008 prison profile provided to McClatchy Newspapers by WikiLeaks.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba

MiamiHerald: The national security parole board, in just a month, has approved a former Osama bin Laden bodyguard for release to another country as the Pentagon-run panel works on accelerating reviews.

The board has six more hearings scheduled into May — two of them so-called “forever prisoners” like the man whose approval to go was disclosed Friday and four of them who were at one time considered candidates for war-crimes trial.

In the latest decision, the board recommended release of Yemeni Majid Ahmed, 35, to an Arabic-speaking country with security precautions. An intelligence assessment concluded that he was recruited to join the Taliban at age 18 or 19 and became a bin Laden bodyguard at 21, a month before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The decision to approve the release of Ahmed means that, of Guantánamo’s 91 captives, 35 are approved for transfer, 10 are in war crimes proceeding and the rest are either forever prisoners or candidates for war crimes trial.

The board said Ahmed “has been relatively compliant during his time at Guantánamo, although he has been largely uncooperative with interrogators.” The intelligence profile said he “still harbors anti-U.S. sentiments and holds conservative Islamic views that may make transfer and reintegration to many countries difficult.”

The board’s three-paragraph statement disclosing Ahmed’s approval for transfer, dated Feb. 18, recommended release to resettlement in an Arabic-speaking country, “with appropriate security assurances.” It was available on the Pentagon’s parole board website Saturday, a month after his Jan. 19 hearing. Full story here.

*** What will a new U.S. president do on the war on terror and will there be an approval for capturing future terrorists?

What to do if U.S. begins capturing more suspected terrorists?

MilitaryTimes: WASHINGTON — President  Obama has refused to send any suspected terrorists captured overseas to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. But if the U.S. starts seizing more militants in expanded military operations, where will they go, who will hold them and where will they be tried?

Those are questions that worry legal experts, lawmakers and others as U.S. special operations forces deploy in larger numbers to Iraq, Syria and, maybe soon, Libya, with the Islamic State group and affiliated organizations in their sights.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, suspects have been killed in drone strikes or raids, or captured and interrogated, sometimes aboard Navy ships. After that, they are either prosecuted in U.S. courts and military commissions or handed over to other nations.

This policy has been enough, experts say — at least for now.

“If you’re going to be doing counterterrorism operations that bring in detainees, you have to think through what you are going to do with them,” said Phillip Carter, former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee policy. “If the U.S. is going to conduct large-scale combat operations or large-scale special ops and bring in more detainees, it needs a different solution.”

Rebecca Ingber, an associate law professor at Boston University who follows the issue, warns that if the U.S. engaged in a full ground war in Syria, “chances are there would need to be detention facilities of some kind in the vicinity.”

Obama has not sent a single suspected terrorist to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many have been detained for years without being charged or tried — something the president says is a “recruitment tool” for militant extremists.

He is to report to Congress this month on how he wants to close Guantanamo and possibly transfer some of the remaining detainees to the United States. That report also is supposed to address the question of future detainees.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., believes that the absence of a long-term detention and interrogation facility for foreign terrorist suspects represents a “major shortcoming in U.S. national security policy.”

Republican candidates who want to succeed Obama are telling voters that they would keep Guantanamo open.

“Law enforcement is about gathering evidence to take someone to trial, and convict them,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “Anti-terrorism is about finding out information to prevent a future attack so the same tactics do not apply. … But, here’s the bigger problem with all this: We’re not interrogating anybody right now.”

That’s not true, said Frazier Thompson, director of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. The tight-lipped team of interrogators from the FBI, Defense Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies gleans intelligence from top suspected terrorists in the U.S. and overseas.

“We were created to interrogate high-value terrorists and we are interrogating high-value terrorists,” Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Since it was established in 2009, that team has been deployed 34 times, Thompson said, adding that other government agencies conduct independent interrogations as well. “We are designed to deploy on the highest-value terrorist. We are not going out to interrogate everybody,” he said.

Thompson would not disclose details of the cases his team has worked or speculate on whether he expects more interrogation requests as the battle against IS heats up.

“If there is a surge, I’m ready to go. If there’s not, I’m still ready to go,” Thompson said.

The U.S. has deployed about 200 new special operations forces to Iraq, and they are preparing to work with the Iraqis to begin going after IS fighters and commanders, “killing or capturing them wherever we find them, along with other key targets,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said.

Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter IS, told Congress this month that in the final six months of 2015, 90 senior to midlevel leaders were killed, including the IS leader’s key deputies: Haji Mutazz, the top leader in Iraq, and Abu Sayyaf, the IS oil minister and financier.

Sayyaf was killed in a raid to rescue American hostage Kayla Mueller; his wife, known as Umm Sayyaf, was captured.

Her case illustrates how the Obama administration is prosecuting some terrorist suspects in federal courts or military commissions or leaving them in the custody of other nations.

Umm Sayyaf, a 25-year-old Iraqi, is being held in Iraq and facing prosecution by authorities there. She also was charged Feb. 9 in U.S. federal court with holding Mueller and contributing to her death in February 2015.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated and supervised international terrorism cases, including the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen the 1990s, said sending suspected terrorists through the American criminal justice system works. He said the courts are more effective than military commissions used at Guantanamo that have been slow in trying detainees who violate the laws of war.

“The current practice of investigating and prosecuting terror suspects has proved incredibly effective,” Soufan said, noting that since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, only seven people have been tried and convicted under military commissions. “During that same time period, hundreds of terrorists have been convicted in federal courts and almost all are still in jail.”

But it’s hard to evaluate the effectiveness of the system.

The Justice Department declined to provide the number of foreign terrorist suspects who have been prosecuted or the number handed over to other countries, or their status. Lawmakers, including Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., have asked the Defense Department for the numbers.

Reports on how other countries handle the suspects are classified.

Raha Wala, senior counsel at Human Rights First, also is concerned about detention operations abroad.

“The government needs to be more transparent to the American people — and to the world — about who it is transferring overseas, and what procedures are in place to make sure we are not transferring individuals into situations where human rights will be abused,” he said.