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Pro-Palestine group wins UK High Court battle over ‘terrorist’ label

MEMO | January 21, 2019

In a blow to Israel, a British high court has ordered World-Check, a subsidiary of Reuters, to pay compensation and offer an apology to a pro-Palestine organisation listed as a terrorist group on its global online database.

A two-year legal battle concluded with World-Check offering a public apology in open court and a legal settlement of $13,000 plus legal costs to Majed Al-Zeer, the chairman of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), for classifying them as “terrorists”.

It was found that Israel’s designation of PRC and its chairman as terrorists was adopted by World-Check which supplies private information on potential clients for corporations, businesses and even governmental agencies, such as police and immigration.

With more than 4,500 clients including 49 of the world’s 50 largest banks and 200 law enforcement and regulatory agencies, World-Check has become essential in satisfying statutory requirements towards due diligence obligations. However their failure to carry out satisfactory checks and independent verification has raised concerns over the misuse and falsification of data that can have severe consequences for victims.

Declaring his victory over World Check service today at a London press conference as “a precedent for those who are on the forefront of human rights and justice” Al-Zeer said he had been a “victim of an organised campaign waged by Israel and its spin machine of propaganda and false information.”

Pointing to World-Check’s failure to carry out independent verification he said that “companies and [news] outlets are failing utterly in protecting the basic ethics of media and reporting by adopting false fabrications often reiterated by Israel propaganda doctors” while claiming that they are “often wittingly or unwittingly mislead by the Israeli propaganda which aims at damaging the reputation and fine image of human rights defenders”.

The PRC has been granted consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Over the past 30 years the centre has advocated for Palestinian refugees at international forums like the UN and EU. In addition to producing reports on the situation of Palestinian refugees; hosting conferences to defend their human rights, the UK organisation has been leading parliamentary delegations to refugee camps across the Middle East. Following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2009 during operation “Cast Lead” in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands more were wounded, the centre organised the largest European parliamentary delegation to the besieged enclave.

In the case summery it was pointed out that Al-Zeer is a British citizen and the PRC is a UK company. The centre has never faced any issue with British authorities let alone being charged with terrorism.  They are subject to very high levels of scrutiny with a particular focus on security and any possible links that they may have to terrorists.

Al-Zeer’s lawyers pointed out that he “has never been subject to any charge or even suspicion of terrorism. However, Israel has made this extremely serious and damaging allegation without bringing any proof, thereby subverting the sovereignty of England and are manipulating the banking sector to carry out their policies in an underhand way.”

Al-Zeer’s lawyers described the victory as “shedding light into the secretive and unknown world of regulatory agencies” and the potential for their abuse. During their press conference, both expressed the urgent need to develop mechanisms for independent verification of entries that may have a “crippling effect” on people’s lives. “Such a company has a moral and ethical duty (at least from the perspective of the Media) to provide its clients with verified and real information,” said Al-Zeer, “yet, it has chosen to ignore that and stuff its database with merely politically motivated information.”

“Instead of providing risk management solutions service to expose heightened risk individuals and organisations including corruption and financial crimes,” as they are meant to, Al-Zeer charged World-Check of Reuters Limited of going after people and organisations defending human rights and subjecting themselves to politically motivated campaigns. It was also pointed out that several Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt have taken advantage of regulatory agencies such as World Check to go after political oppositions.

In his comments to MEMO Al-Zeer said that the PRC was targeted because of its long campaign for the rights of Palestinian refugees. Israel has never accepted responsibility for the 750,000 Palestinians that were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948 and the hundreds of Palestinian villages that were razed to the ground to make way for the state of Israel. Under International Law, refugees have a right to return to their land and seek compensation. Both have been denied to Palestinians.

Al-Zeer explained that the refugees issue is crucial to resolving the conflict but Israel has continually rejected to address this historical crime against the Palestinian people. PRC’s work in exposing Israel’s responsibility for the plight of refugees and its legal duty under international law has made the centre a target of the Israeli government.

Israel has gone to great length to discredit the PRC, he said, pointing to its efforts to classify the organisation as a terrorist group. He insisted he will not be intimidated by Israel’s disinformation campaign and “vowed to continue working for [my] people and the mission of refugees right of return to Palestine”.

PRC’s legal team believe that hundreds if not thousands of individuals and organisations may have been placed on World-Check’s list without their knowledge. They pointed to several cases including that of a British mosque which also won an apology and compensation after being designated “terrorists” by the risk screening agency.

January 21, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Privatization of Terrorism Blacklists Will Damage Innocent Lives

By Hugh Handeyside | ACLU | February 5, 2016

A private service that banks, employers, and government agencies use to screen customers and clients is blacklisting thousands of people as terrorists, sometimes based on nothing more than inaccurate and bigoted materials online, according to a VICE News article.

Thomson-Reuters’ “World-Check” database slaps a “terrorism” designation — and a picture of a red balaclava — on the profiles of individuals, charities, and religious institutions. Many of them are Muslims who have never been charged or even accused of terrorism-related offenses. The results are far-reaching and can include closure of the blacklisted individuals’ bank accounts, inability to get a job, or denial of government benefits. (And World-Check isn’t the only company chasing billions of dollars in the risk mitigation industry.)

Blacklisting by private companies isn’t new. Banks and insurance companies have long “redlined” neighborhoods in order to deny services to racial or ethnic minorities.  The entertainment industry used the infamous Hollywood blacklist to deny employment to actors, writers, and directors with suspected communist sympathies.

World-Check, however, appears particularly zealous in its effort to cash in on widespread fear of terrorism and a regulatory system that raises the stakes for banks and other companies desperate not to be accused of financing terrorism. Its confidential database includes more than 2.7 million individuals and entities, over 93,000 of whom it has designated as terrorists. According to a World-Check fact sheet, the company contracts with “49 of the world’s 50 top banks,” over 300 government agencies, and “9 of the top ten global law firms.” The Department of Homeland Security uses World-Check, as does HireRight, an employment screening company that conducts background checks for more than 40,000 organizations in 240 countries.

This kind of blacklisting for profit raises serious concerns about discrimination and the lack of meaningful appeal process that parallel our longstanding criticisms of government blacklisting. Just as the U.S. government uses a low, exception-ridden standard for its master watchlist — indeed, a single Facebook post or Tweet can provide all the “reasonable suspicion” necessary to watchlist someone — World-Check apparently labels people “terrorists” based solely on allegations from anti-Muslim zealots like Steve Emerson, who, according to the Center for American Progress, has “a history of fabricating evidence that perpetuates conspiracies of radical Islam infiltrating America through Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations.”

Like the government, which blacklists people even after acquittal or closure of a terrorism-related investigation, World-Check uses its “terrorism” designation for people who have not been charged with a crime but may be accused, questioned, or investigated for terrorism offenses — a vast body of innocent people. And World-Check apparently shares the government’s lack of concern about stale information. Just as the government has used decades-old, unproven allegations to place some of our clients on the No Fly List, VICE reports that World-Check has failed to update some of its terror-designated profiles for as long as eight years.

Both World-Check and government watchlists also impose severe consequences on the people they label as terrorists. Inclusion on a government watchlist can cause detention at the border, harassment, and inability to travel by air or sea — to say nothing of the shame and fear that comes with being a terrorism suspect. World-Check’s terrorism designation can prompt banks to close people’s accounts, convince prospective employers not to hire a candidate, and cause funding sources for organizations or contractors to dry up.

There’s even the alarming possibility of a growing feedback loop between government and private blacklists. The Department of Homeland Security’s Analytic Framework for Intelligence, a massive data-mining project, uses “commercial data aggregators” like World-Check to analyze “individuals of interest” and identify “non-obvious relationships” with others. That not only broadens the government’s lens of suspicion, but it could also intensify the focus on affected individuals, potentially leading to more and more blacklisting — both public and private.

World-Check is similar to the government in another way that compounds all the other problems: lack of a meaningful process to challenge inclusion. The government has steadfastly refused to inform people why they’ve been watchlisted and stigmatized as terrorists, denying them a viable way to challenge wrongful watchlisting and clear their names. People erroneously blacklisted by the government can now turn up in private blacklists like World-Check’s.  And World-Check, too, offers no means of redress. In fact, VICE reports that senior World-Check employees have never seen someone successfully challenge inclusion in its database.

The government is already aware of the unfairness and discrimination that databases like World-Check can cause. In a May 2014 report on big data, the Executive Office of the President wrote, “Because of this lack of transparency and accountability, individuals have little recourse to understand or contest the information that has been gathered about them or what that data, after analysis, suggests.”

It shouldn’t be a controversial proposition that any information private companies sell to others that could damage people’s lives and reputations must be accurate, timely, and fairly contestable. And the government must apply those same principles to itself.

February 8, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment