Torture tools for sale at EU-supported exhibition

I have just learned a new euphemism. Weapons used by police against political demonstrations are now being called “interior protection technology” by some of their traders and manufacturers.

The latest innovations in this technology were displayed at the Milipol exhibition in Paris last month. The fair garnered some coverage in the business press; French paper Les Echos cited estimates that the global “security” market was worth 420 billion euros in 2010, a rise of 5.5% over the previous year. It is scandalous in itself that this blood-stained trade is growing at a time when health and education expenditure are being slashed in many countries. What’s even more scandalous is that the media failed to notice how some of the instruments on display have only one practical application: torture.

On Stand 3J019, the Chinese company Jiangsu Anhua was trying to drum up interest in its catalogue of “police equipment”. This included leg fetters - metal rings that are screwed together and used to shackle a prisoner. The firm appears to have no qualms about selling these items, even though rules approved by the 47-country Council of Europe stipulate that no prisoner should be restrained with irons or chains.

Another Chinese firm Mily Link International was assigned Stand 3G024. Both it and Jiangsu Anhua offered spiked batons, thumb cuffs and combination hand and leg cuffs. Chilling images of the “inquest” chairs they sell can be found on the internet. This metal contraption looks like the most uncomfortable seat ever made; it is impossible to see how it could have any benign purpose.

On Stand 1H135, Israel’s TAR Ideal Concepts was giving customers the possibility to buy its electroshock shield. It found a refuge in Paris that had been previously denied to it in London. In 2005, the firm was kicked out of the UK’s Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) exhibition because its brochures solicited orders for stun guns, batons and leg cuffs. TAR founder Tomer Avnon complained at the time that it was hypocritical to single out his firm. “Don't forget we were among booths offering everything from sniper rifles to silencers, cluster bombs and all sorts of nasty stuff,” he told The Jerusalem Post.

Nasty stuff

In the unlikely event that some of the Milipol guests in Paris had decided to respect Palestinian calls to boycott Israeli goods, they could instead enquire about buying electroshock shields from Korea’s Dae-Sung Tech at Stand 1D 136. That firm brought some samples of this “nasty stuff” along with it.

As the European Union is nominally opposed to torture wherever it occurs, surely this equipment should be banned. Yet while a law regulating the trade in instruments designed for torture or the death penalty came into effect in 2006, it contains wide loopholes. The equipment I have mentioned, particularly the spiked batons, should be added to the list of items covered by this law without further delay, in order to prohibit their exportation and importation.

Although the law is an important advance for human rights as it is the first of its kind in the world, it does not stop companies from outside the Union travelling here to advertise tools of torture. The loopholes also allowed Britain to export a batch of the drug sodium thiopental to the US last year, knowing full well that it would be used to execute Jeffrey Landrigan in Arizona. By authorising those exports, the UK government became an accomplice to a state-sponsored murder.

This is a classic case of the EU having exemplary policies on paper but not taking proper steps to enforce or strengthen them. One explanation for this reluctance is that the Union is formally committed to nurturing the industry devoted to “interior protection” (also known by the deceptively anodyne term “homeland security”).

Vast market

Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the EU’s then commissioner for scientific research Philippe Busquin assembled a “group of personalities” from the arms trade. The fruit of the group’s extensive chin-rubbing was a 2004 report called “Research for a Secure Europe”. It stated that there is a “vast” market for “security products” and recommended that 1 billion euros should be allocated to “security research” each year from 2007 onwards.

Realpolitik meant that the group’s wish wasn’t entirely fulfilled. Rather than grabbing 1 billion euros per annum, it had to make do with 1.4 billion euros stretched out between 2007 and 2013. Yet the introduction of a “security” theme to the Union’s research programme was highly significant. Israeli arms companies have proven especially adept at drawing down funds from this pot of gold (Israel takes part on an equal basis in the programme alongside EU member states). Those firms include Motorola Israel, which has installed the kind of surveillance equipment being financed by the EU’s programme in illegal settlements in the West Bank. Last week, the European Commission claimed (unconvincingly) it had no information about Motorola’s activities in the settlements.

The manufacture and marketing of torture instruments cannot be viewed separately from the broader arms trade. All companies involved in that trade rely on violence and repression to prosper.

It is noteworthy that Europol, the Union’s police office, was an official partner and an exhibitor at the Milipol fair. Europol is legally bound to respect the Union’s human rights policy. Perhaps there should be an investigation, therefore, into why it was giving a veneer of respectability to a bazaar for the torture trade.

●First published by New Europe, 31 October 2011.

EU in denial about aid for Motorola Israel

“I know nothing” is a catchphrase associated with the TV sitcom Fawlty Towers. Less amusingly, it also sums up the line of defence from European Union officials when quizzed about how they are facilitating Israel’s crimes against humanity.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s scientific commissioner, this week attempted to give an assurance that the technology firm Motorola Israel’s participation in research activities financed by the Union did not pose any legal or ethical problems. She stated that her aides do not have “any information about any radar systems Motorola Israel might or might not have installed in the West Bank.”

Her statement -- made in response to a query from a British member of the European Parliament (MEP) -- smacks of either dishonesty or incompetence. If the officials who drafted her reply had done a little searching beforehand, they would have learned that the European Commission has been recently appraised of Motorola’s work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

In May, the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall sent a detailed paper to Geoghegan-Quinn outlining how a number of Israeli beneficiaries of EU science grants are abetting human rights abuses. Point (d) on that paper was devoted entirely to Motorola Israel. It said: “Motorola has created at least four surveillance systems used in at least 20 illegal Jewish-only settlements and military camps throughout the occupied West Bank.”

Treating Palestinians as “intruders”

Motorola Israel is taking part in two EU-funded research projects, with a combined value of over €9 million, at the moment. One of them, named iDetect 4All, relates to the development of equipment designed to raise the alarm when an “intruder” approaches a building or resource considered economically important.

The technology involved in this project appears to bear many similarities to the “virtual fence” that Motorola has installed around a network of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. A 2006 report in The Jerusalem Post noted that this radar system uses thermal cameras to identify “intruders” to the settlements. Reading between the lines, that means Motorola is helping to keep Palestinians away from illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

According to Geoghegan-Quinn, “checks” have taken place to ascertain that Motorola Israel is based within the state of Israel. These found that it was eligible to benefit from EU science grants.

Yet the checks cannot have been too profound. The “association agreement” covering EU-Israel relations explicitly says that both sides must respect human rights. If Motorola Israel is – as can be proven – enabling human rights abuses, then it should be kicked out of the research programme immediately.

Call for action

Motorola Israel is one of numerous Israeli firms taking part in the EU’s research programme, which has a total budget of €53 billion for the 2007 to 2013 period. Last week, several groups representing Palestinian academics and students protested at how many of the activities under this programme connect European universities with Israeli arms manufacturers and others who profit from the occupation of Palestine. A call for action signed by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urged third-level students and teachers in Europe to devise a strategy for ending cooperation between their colleges and Israel.

Palestine solidarity activists based in King’s College London have already begun a campaign against an EU nanotechnology project linking their university with Ahava, a firm producing cosmetics in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. The campaign has drawn support from the renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky and the poet Remi Kanazi.

Details of EU-funded science projects can be found on a database called Cordis. If you work or study in a university, enter the name of your college into its search engine, along with the word “Israel.” There is every likelihood that the resulting information can be used to challenge your university’s authorities about their links with Israel. Don’t be shy in kicking up a fuss on campus. Institutions that cooperate with Israeli apartheid must be confronted.

●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 27 October 2011.