Free Cuban prisoners of conscience Dr. Eduardo Cardet Concepción and Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola.

120 identified political prisoners: spotlight on two prisoners of conscience

The Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation reported in June 2018 that there were 120 political prisoners in Cuba with some the longest serving in the Western Hemisphere. Twenty one of them have served between 15 and 27 years in prison.

In this entry will focus on two political prisoners who are recognized by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. A prisoner of conscience is anyone imprisoned for the non-violent exercise of their beliefs.  Their names are Dr. Eduardo Cardet Concepción and Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola.
Cardet is a doctor of medicine and Ruiz is a PhD in biology.

Dr. Cardet in addition to being a medical doctor is also the national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement. He has been arbitrarily detained since November 30, 2016 under conditions that qualify as cruel and unusual treatment. He has been subjected to beatings, denied medical treatment and family visits.

On June 21, 2018 the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) reported that "despite the fact that the result of the biopsy was already done, they have not yet informed Eduardo Cardet or his family. Neither did he [Cardet] have knowledge of the denial of his parole, he learned about it through his family in a call today." MCL has a campaign underway on social media to send messages demanding Eduardo Cardet's immediate and unconditional release.

Freedom for #EduardoCardet
Send an email to President #Cuba
IT TAKES LESS THAN ONE MINUTE
Subject: Immediate and unconditional release of human rights defender Eduardo Cardet to: cuba@un.int, correominint@mn.mn.co.cu
Copy to: info@oswaldopaya.org https://t.co/Gm3vX4s5P1

— MCL (@oswaldopaya) June 23, 2018

Dr Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, a former university professor and an environmental activist, was arrested on May 3, 2018 and sentenced in Cuba to one-year imprisonment for contempt when he asked two forest rangers to show him their identification. The officials left the area and later in the evening three police officers came with a warrant, arrested and took Ariel to the police Station in Viñales. 

The case of Dr. Ruiz has taken on a new urgency for two reasons.  First the Cuban biologist is on the seventh day of a hunger and thirst strike demanding that he be freed. He is already hospitalized and refusing an intravenous feed. Secondly, there are concerns that his sister suffering from cancer is not being provided proper treatment. There is a social media campaign using the hashtag #FreeAriel underway on twitter.

Rosa María Payá over twitter anounced the stakes in the plight of the biologist and his sister. "The Dictatorship tries to eliminate Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola. Ariel is in critical condition at the Abel Santamaría hospital, under harassment from the political police who keep coercing his sister Omara, a cancer patient."

#SOSAriel #Cuba
La Dictadura intenta eliminar al Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola

Ariel se encuentra en estado crítico en el hospital Abel Santamaría, bajo hostigamiento de la policía política que se mantiene coaccionando a su hermana Omara, paciente de cáncer.#LiberenAAriel #FreeAriel pic.twitter.com/iKPrjxKU77

— Rosa María Payá A. (@RosaMariaPaya) June 23, 2018

Ortega continues the violent crackdown as Nicaragua's bishops place themselves in harms way calling for nonviolence

The Ortega regime unmasked.

Pro-government sniper in Masaya on June 20 reports Tim Rogers.

Situation in Nicaragua continues to worsen with violence escalating along with the number of extrajudicial killings carried out by snipers and paramilitary gangs working in concert with the police. Most likely over 200 have been killed and more than a thousand injured. The Ortega regime has revealed its true colors.

Another video clearly showing police working with hooded paramilitary. This was the combination that burnt alive a family of six on Saturday, according to eyewitnesses; again spreading terror through Masaya today #SOSNicaragua pic.twitter.com/8SjAb93PYA

— Toby Stirling Hill (@TobyStHill) June 21, 2018

Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International explains the sinister nature of the Nicaraguan regime's call to dialogue: "The upsurge of violence and attacks against civilians by Nicaraguan government agents and pro-government armed groups acting with their acquiescence in recent days highlights President Ortega’s insincerity and lack of commitment to resolving this crisis peacefully."

Freedom House yesterday over social media placed the tally in lives taken and people injured. "Two months after the start of the protests in Nicaragua, there are at least 178 dead and more than 1,000 injured. International organizations such as the IACHR have warned of possible extrajudicial executions."

"Time is running out for Ortega," @mateojarquin tells @FrancoisF24 as unrest continues to destabilize #Nicaragua. @France24_en pic.twitter.com/kU9mGkRaTz

— Van Meguerditchian (@ReelPolitiks) June 20, 2018

The international community is reacting and demanding an end to the violence. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva is calling for an international commission to investigate the political violence in Nicaragua. 

Meanwhile the Catholic Church in Nicaragua in taking on a heroic role.  This morning over social media the auxilary bishop of Nicaragua tweeted that "Cardinal Leopoldo J. Brenes, Archbishop of Managua, and this servant, Silvio J. Báez, as Auxiliary Bishop, and all the clergy of Managua, will go this morning to Masaya and Monimbo. We want to stop another massacre, comfort our people and pray with them."

At 6:18pm Silvio J. Báez, the auxilary bishop of Nicaragua, tweeted images from their visit to the city targeted in recent days for massacres by the Ortega regime explaining that "the bishops of Managua and the Nuncio this morning visited the suffering city of Masaya, we prayed with our people and we brought them the consolation of God."

Catholic bishops visit Masaya to comfort and pray with the residents.

Agence France Press (AFP) provided the following reporting on what had led to the visit.

Funerals were held for three people killed in clashes in the flashpoint city on Tuesday, bringing to 187 the number killed since protests against Ortega's government began on April 18. At least 23 people have been killed in Masaya, 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the capital Managua. Riot police and paramilitaries had deployed Tuesday in the historically combative city after its declaration of rebellion.

Bishop Silvio J. Báez brought a message of non-violence and a call for an end to the killings that AFP reported as follows.

Managua's auxiliary bishop Silvio Baez called on the crowd not to take justice into their own hands, "not to imitate the same attitudes and criminal acts" as the government forces. "We do not want more criminals in Nicaragua," said Baez, a harsh critic of the government. "I want to remind you of one of God's commandments." "Thou shalt not kill." "To the snipers, to Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo: Not one more death," he said. 

A powerful message backed with the courageous action of accompanying a people under threat of imminent government violence.  

On human rights and wrongs in Switzerland and Nicaragua

Reflections on the US leaving the UN Human Rights Council and the continuing bloodshed in Nicaragua today.

The decision of the United States to leave the United Nations Human Rights Council today is a mistake. This is not to say that the United Nations Human Rights Council is not a flawed instrument made more ineffective by the dictatorships that sit on the international human rights body. This is not to say that UN bureaucrats have not behaved poorly and are deserving of criticism and at times ridicule, but the answer is not disengage and leave the UN Human Rights Council to all these bad actors but challenge them and present a principled alternative.

The first time the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland was in 2006 and they did not return until 2009, but few remember it. So do the bad actors vying for a seat on the Council.

Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and China are currently on the UN Human Rights Council despite their horrid human rights records. North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Nicaragua have also been member of this human rights body and will be again. They will be able to further leverage their influence on a Council without the United States. It will be a tougher going for victims of repression world wide.

Speaking of victims of repression, while many focused on events in Geneva and in Washington, DC, in Central America a bloody and increasingly dangerous human rights crisis continued to unfold.

In Nicaragua since April 18, 2018 over 200 people have been killed for political reasons. It happened again today in the town of Masaya. The town was once a bastion of support for Ortega and his Sandinista rebels when they overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979, but today it has become a center of resistance to the Ortega regime.

Human rights have been in retreat worldwide for the past twelve years and things are getting worse in many quarters. The United States leaving the UN Human Rights Council does not help to change these trends and only encourages the worse actors to further cripple what was once an august human rights body.

Nicaragua's strongman Daniel Ortega must be stopped https://t.co/aURFRq3f4E pic.twitter.com/AgO6DsCxWx

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) June 19, 2018

The Dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba: A Reflection

There is a need for moral clarity when confronting totalitarians

The spectacle in North Korea was distasteful. When the President of the United States shakes hands with a mass murderer and engages in moral equivalence the cause of liberty suffers from the lack of clarity.

Detente is a false peace that morally compromises democracies.

Nevertheless, one must recall that the current Administration returned North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2017.

On January 6, 2016 North Korea announced that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb. This wasn't supposed to happen. North Korea had been cheating on a deal it had made over 20 years earlier and brazenly announced nearly a decade earlier on October 9, 2006 that it had conducted its first underground nuclear test.

How did the United States respond? In October of 2008, the Bush Administration took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in the hopes that it would “salvage a fragile nuclear deal” by appeasing the totalitarian regime. George W. Bush was doubling down on the policy set by Bill Clinton. This approach continued to be a failure and on  May 25, 2009 North Korea conducted a second underground test with an explosion that was the equivalent to U.S. bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.  North Korea had also tested a long-range missile in April of 2009.  In 2013, North Korea conducted a third nuclear test claiming to have miniaturized the bomb in order to place it on a long range missile with ability to reach the U.S. mainland.

On October 18, 1994 President Bill Clinton announced to great fanfare that his administration had achieved a long term objective for the United States in an agreement with North Korea: "an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula."

It is the same claim made by President Donald Trump in 2018 following his meeting with the North Korean tyrant. Only time will tell if President Trump's claims today will ring as hollow as President Clinton's claims in 1994.

Boneheaded political calculations are a bipartisan affair.

There is now a debate over Trump in North Korea and Obama in Cuba, but no one seems to be talking about the relationship between the Cuban dictatorship and the North Korean dictatorship.

The Cuban government was caught red handed on July 15, 2013 providing technology that could aid North Korea's efforts to develop a delivery vehicle to drop their nuclear weapons on the United States mainland.  This was confirmed by a March 6, 2014 report by a panel of experts for the United Nations Security Council that reported:

 6. In addition, various parts for three SA-2 and six SA-3 missiles were in the cargo, such as the nose cones housing proximity fuses, auto-pilots and transponders, transmitter antennas and some actuators (figure 4). 4 __________________ 4 The Panel notes that some of the SA-2 and SA-3 parts could also meet the criteria defined in the list of items, materials, equipment, goods and technology related to ballistic missile programmes (S/2012/947), whose export and import by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are prohibited. See in particular the Category II, Item 9 of S/2012/947 covering “instrumentation, navigation and direction finding”

Back in 2010, the late Fidel Castro reappeared in public warning of a possible nuclear conflict between the United States and Iran. Left out in the media coverage surrounding the story were the two times, once in 1962 and a second time in the early 1980s, when Fidel Castro lobbied the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear first strike on the United States. The Castro brothers arming their North Korean allies by smuggling tons of weapons in violation of international sanctions speaks volumes about both their agendas.

Meanwhile North Koreans suffer some of the worse human rights violations on Earth, and demand that it be a topic on the bilateral agenda between the United States and North Korea.

Video highlight of @NKHumanRights shown at #DemAward https://t.co/upPJfb4Dt1 pic.twitter.com/tcJoW5dsxZ

— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) June 13, 2018

Amnesty International: Environmental activist sentenced to one-year in prison for contempt.

Cuban environmental activist and prisoner of conscience.

URGENT ACTION
Environmental activist imprisoned


By Amnesty International, Caribbean Team
     Americas Regional Office, International Secretariat

Dr Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, an environmental activist, was sentenced in Cuba to one-year imprisonment for contempt. He is a prisoner of conscience and must be released unconditionally and immediately.
Ariel Ruiz Urquiola is a doctor in biological sciences who previously worked as a researcher at the University of Havana. In 2015, he bought a house in the Sierra del Infierno area, in Viñales’ National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Pinar del Río province, western Cuba. After acquiring the right to farm the state land surrounding his house, in 2016 he started an environmental project with his family and friends to preserve local species and to develop sustainable agricultural projects.

On the morning of the 3 May 2018, two forest rangers (a national body in charge of the protection of “forest, wildlife and hunting”) visited Ariel’s land. According to witnesses who spoke with Amnesty International, they asked whether he had the corresponding permits for the construction of a fence around the land, for cutting trees, and for owning a chainsaw. Ariel invited them to come with him to the house to check the permits. On the way, Ariel asked the rangers to show him their identification and after one of them refused to do so, he referred to them as “rural police”. That term was interpreted by the officials as “rural guards” which has a negative connotation in Cuba since it refers to officials from the Batista dictatorship. The rangers left the area and later in the evening three police officers came with a warrant, arrested and took Ariel to the nearby police Station in Viñales.

Based on the judicial documents that Amnesty International was able to review, Ariel was charged with contempt – or disrespecting the rangers - and sentenced on 8 May to one-year imprisonment (the maximum sentence under article 144.1 of the Criminal Code) by the Municipal Court of Viñales .

The decision was confirmed on appeal by the Popular Provincial Court of Pinar del Río on 22 May. According to the family, Ariel’s lawyer only had access to the case file and to Ariel on the same day of the trial. He was first imprisoned at the Provincial Prison of Pinar del Río and on 11 June, the family was informed that he was transferred to the nearby Correctional Cayo Largo. His sister, Omara Urquiola, informed Amnesty International that prison officials threatened her to stop speaking with the international press or they would suspend Ariel’s visits and communication with his family. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola has a history of publicly criticizing Cuban authorities in relation to environmental issues.

Please write immediately in Spanish or your own language:

• Urging the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Ariel Ruiz Urquiola as he is a prisoner of conscience, imprisoned solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression;
• Urging them to ensure that, pending his release, he is not ill-treated, intimidated or threatened; and that he is granted regular access to family and lawyers of his choosing;
• Calling on them to guarantee the right to freedom of expression, assembly and association including for critical voices and to repeal all legislation which unduly limits these rights.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 20 July 2018 TO:
President of the Republic
Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez
Presidente de la República de Cuba
La Habana, Cuba
Fax: +41 22 758 9431 (Cuba Office in Geneva); +1 212 779 1697 (via Cuban Mission to UN)
Email: cuba_onu@cubamission.com (c/o Cuban Mission to UN)
Salutation: Your Excellency

Attorney General
Dr. Darío Delgado Cura
Fiscal General de la República
Fiscalía General de la República
Avenida 1ra, Nº 1801 e/ 18 y 20. Reparto Miramar, Municipio Playa
La Habana, CP 11 300, Cuba
Email: relaciones@fgr.cu
Twitter: @FGR_Cuba
Salutation: Dear Attorney General

And solidarity copies to:

Ariel Ruiz Urquiola
Correccional Cayo Largo
Municipio Consolación del Sur
Provincia de Pinar del Río, Cuba
Email: omaraurquiola509@gmail.com

Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Ariel Ruiz Urquiola has a long history of environmental activism, but according to his family, does not identify as a political opponent of the government. In 2008, during his participation in an international seminar in Mexico as researcher of the University of Havana, he publicly expressed criticism against the alleged illegal fishing of sea turtles in Cuba. In 2009, the University’s authorities suspended his work on sea turtles. Between 2010 and 2013, he continued his work at the University of Havana but switched his research to the study of fauna in the Sierra de los Órganos’ area in the Pinar del Río province. After disagreement with management, he was first downgraded in his position and salary, and in 2016, he was dismissed from the University after alleging repeated absences. Following his dismissal, Ariel publicly criticized the decision saying his dismissal was “an abuse of power.” The dismissal was confirmed by the Municipal Popular Court of Old Havana in a judgement in 2016.

Cuban legislation provides that the state is the owner of most of the land in Cuba. However, usufruct rights on unused state-lands can be acquired by individuals giving them some right to use it for specific reasons provided under the law. In 2016, Ariel Ruiz Urquiola secured such rights over the land in the area surrounding the house that he bought in 2015.

Ariel Ruiz Urquiola’s family believe that authorities have deliberately imprisoned him as reprisal for his environmental activism and as a strategy to deprive him of the state-owned land on which he runs his environmental project. Under national legislation, a user of state-owned land loses the right to use it after being absent from the land, meaning if Ariel is imprisoned for a year he stands to lose the right to cultivate the land.

Amnesty International opposes laws prohibiting insult or disrespect of heads of state or public figures, the military or other public institutions or flags or symbols (such as lèse majesté and desacato laws). Amnesty International also opposes laws criminalizing defamation, whether of public figures or private individuals, which should be treated as a matter for civil litigation.

The offence of “desacato” (contempt) (article 144.1 of Cuba’s Criminal Code) is an undue restriction on the right to freedom of expression, as public officials should tolerate more criticism than private individuals. The use of defamation laws with the purpose or effect of inhibiting legitimate criticism of government or public officials violates the right to freedom of expression.

Name: Doctor Ariel Ruiz Urquiola
Gender m/f: male

UA: 109/18 Index: AMR 25/8541/2018 Issue Date: 11 June 2018