Yale's actions and the rule of law, Kannan Srinivasan, March 12th 2025

In suspending Helyeh Doutaghi, an eminent Palestinian legal scholar,

because an artificial intelligence-directed website   https://jewishonliner.org/p/member-of-us-designated-terror-group had termed her a terrorist https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/us/yale-suspends-scholar-terrorism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare (on the claims inter alia that she had been present at public gatherings where terrorists so designated were also present and also that terrorists so designated had interviewed her and that what she had said was replayed at gatherings of terrorists so designated)

--  without even giving her the right to be heard –

Yale seems to have adopted the extraordinary legal technology pioneered by India, namely that audi alteram partem is simply not necessary.

In a statement Tuesday, Yale Law School described the allegations against Dr. Doutaghi as reflecting “potential unlawful conduct.”

“We take these allegations extremely seriously and immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts,” said the statement, issued by Alden Ferro, a spokesman for Yale Law. 

This of course coincidentally follows at least in part the rule of the felicitously named “Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (sic)”  of 1967 of India as amended in 2008 and in 2019, which allow an individual to be designated as a terrorist, and the ratio of the Ahmad Shah Watali case, https://digiscr.sci.gov.in/view_judgment?id=MTI3MDk= by the Supreme Court of India, that what the National Investigative Agency said must be presumed to be true and the burden of proof lay on the accused therefore to disprove allegations rather than that guilt must be proven at all.

Section 43D(5) in The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 says at (5) that Notwithstanding anything contained in the Code, no person accused of an offence punishable under Chapters IV and VI of this Act shall, if in custody, be released on bail or on his own bond unless the Public Prosecutor has been given an opportunity of being heard on the application for such release:Provided that such accused person shall not be released on bail or on his own bond if the Court, on a perusal of the case diary or the report made under section 173 of the Code is of the opinion that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the accusation against such person is prima facie true.

See also The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act 2008: Repeating Past Mistakes

Author(s): South Asia Human RIghts Documentation Centre and Ravi Nair

Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Jan. 24 - 30, 2009, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Jan. 24 - 30,

2009), pp. 10-14

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empire & Secrecy   Even as empires ended, the transfer of wealth to the West continued.   This   was enabled by two key policies.    By the first , the US allowed Britain to effectively default (https://thewire.in/banking/how-india paid-to-create-the-london-of-today) on its  wartime debt to India (including Pakistan) & Egypt of money owed for exports to the United States &  expenditure on Allied war effort in Italy North Africa the Middle East Burma Malaya & Japan, by secretly working out a deal in 1947 to allow the UK post War Labour Government to renege on its formal commitment to convertibility of the pound sterling upon which those countries had predicated their agreements with the UK (https://thewire.in/history/independent-india-secret-uk-us-deal-britain-wartime-debt).            As a result, the UK not only very gradually drew down its worldwide colonial commitments over the next two decades, but bank...
Read more
  Is this the Nobel Prize for property rights --- or for how  genocide  is the pre-condition for economic growth? Acemoglu Johnson & Robinson  https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369   seem to argue that in those countries where colonial settlement having  followed genocide  in replacing the native aborigine, public institutions were set up mirroring those back home, thereby ensuring life expectancy outcomes for their descendants comparable to their own countries of origin. These were markedly superior to the populations of other countries where by contrast, insalubrious conditions having made settlement unattractive for European settlers,  aborigine populations were allowed to survive.  Yet since democratic representation & welfare measures towards that end were  not considered necessary for subject peoples, the colonial powers employed such territories purely for the purpose of the extraction & the t...
Read more
Fascism might be better than the Left, suggests the New York Times:  " Some voters consider France Unbowed, which has members who have been accused of antisemitism, to be at least as dangerous as the far right.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/world/europe/france-election-new-popular-front-far-right.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Given the unsubstantiated claims of Melenchon's anti-Semitism which match those that removed Corbyn, one might wonder about the dogwhistle of "Soros & rootless people without culture" (the traditional anti-Semitic reference to the Jewish people):  https://youtu.be/o-3-lN3bA9w?si=G3zQLvJUm35X4s8a Why does this not trouble the Western leaders-- https://www.youtube.com/live/avIs4YrtM00?si=fWZQmC73J5rWCwYR https://www.governo.it/en/articolo/g7-summit-president-meloni-meets-president-biden-united-states/25999 https://youtu.be/AYz88B_N10U?si=WUCbohnhiy_xE0nW --- who embrace Italy’s Meloni today? Why  isn’t she...
Read more