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Pakistan and India will experience ‘durable peace’ only if the two nations resolve their 57-year-old dispute over the Himalayan state of Kashmir, Pakistan’s foreign minister said here.
   And Kashmiris must be included in the peace process for the matter to be resolved, the Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, told reporters after meeting his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice for more than an hour at the state department.
   Kasuri said Rice asked how the dialogue between Pakistan and India was going.
   ‘I told her that we needed to resolve this issue (Kashmir) so that there could be durable peace between Pakistan and India,’ he said.
   ‘Pakistan and India need to guard against other issues raising their ugly heads because 57 years of Kashmir is enough,’ Kasuri said.
   ‘In order that it is resolved we need to include the Kashmiris in the peace process,’ he said. ‘There can be no resolution to the dispute if the Kashmiris are not involved.’
   ‘It’s like trying to solve the Palestinian problem without the Palestinians.’
   The Himalayan region is divided between Pakistan and India and is claimed by both in full. It has caused two of the three wars between the nuclear-armed neighbours since their independence from Britain in 1947.

Britain’s detention without trial of foreign terror suspects subjected some of them to ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’, the European watchdog on torture said in a hard-hitting report on Thursday.
   The Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture, which visited the detainees in February 2002 and March 2004, said detention without trial caused mental disorders in most of the detainees.
   The conditions under which some detainees were held ‘could be considered as amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment’.
   Foreigners in Britain suspected of involvement in international terrorism were held at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons and Broadmoor high-security hospital under legislation passed in 2001.
   Last March they were freed from custody and put under control orders restricting their liberty after the law lords ruled that their detention breached human rights laws.
   The CPT report is the second within two days from institutions of the Council of Europe to condemn Britain for human rights failings.
   Its findings are even more strongly worded than a scathing report on Wednesday from the European commissioner for human rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, which criticised the UK’s human rights record on terrorism, asylum and anti-social behaviour and said control orders which impose conditions of house arrest on terror suspects ‘flout the right to the presumption of innocence’.
   The government received the CPT report in July 2004, but waited nearly a year – until after the law lords had heard the detainees’ challenge to the lawfulness of their detention, new legislation was pushed through parliament and last month’s general election – before agreeing to its publication.
   Britain was forced to amend the law after the law lords ruled last December that the powers of indefinite detention without trial for foreign terror suspects but not UK nationals breached the European convention on human rights.
   The Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 was passed after a bitter parliamentary battle, and last March the detainees were put under control orders which allow them to live at home, subject to stringent restrictions on their liberty.
   Gareth Peirce, a solicitor for several terror suspects, and Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights organisation Liberty, said the government’s delay in publishing the CPT report had deprived the law lords and parliamentarians of important information which could have affected their decisions.
   ‘From the time of the House of Lords judgement, they kept all the detainees in custody, knowing it had been condemned as inhuman and degrading treatment, until the last-ditch stand in March, and deprived parliamentarians of the information when they were debating the legislation,’ said Ms Peirce.
   Ms Shakrabarti said: ‘Why have we not seen this before now? Parliament should have seen this when they were debating the control order legislation, because it highlights the cruelty of punishment without trial, which is just as relevant for control orders.

One of Britain’s most eminent judges on Friday accused the British and US governments of whipping up public fear of terrorism, and of being determined ‘to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures’.
   Lord Steyn, one of the longest-serving law lords in Britain’s top court, the House of Lords, made the accusation while delivering his first public comments on the lords’ ruling in the Belmarsh case.
   He was forced to step down last year from the panel of judges hearing the challenge to the lawfulness of detention without trial for foreign terrorist suspects after the government took exception to earlier remarks he had made on the subject.
   Last December the law lords ruled by 8-1 that the detention without trial of foreign nationals in Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons and the Broadmoor high security hospital breached human rights laws.
   Lord Steyn’s remarks yesterday came a day after a damning report from the Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture, which concluded that the treatment of some detainees ‘could be considered as amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment’.
   He was giving the keynote address to an audience of judges and lawyers at the annual meeting in central London of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, whose chairman is Lord Bingham, the senior law lord.
   The session was chaired by the appeal court judge Dame Mary Arden. The audience included Lord Brown, another law lord, Judge Luzius Wildhaber, president of the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, Sir Franklin Berman QC, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned over the attorney general’s advice that the Iraq war was legal.
   Lord Steyn hailed the Belmarsh ruling as ‘a great day for the law’, and ‘a vindication of the rule of law, ranking with historic judgements of our courts’.

Russia’s scrapped atomic submarines pose a serious nuclear threat, a British report published Friday said, as a leading Russian environmental activist praised the country’s authorities for ‘unprecedented’ openness in assisting the report’s authors.
   Russia must act to prevent a nuclear accident in northwest Russia’s Barents Sea region, home to 118 scrapped nuclear submarines as well as spent nuclear fuel storage sites, said Mark Gerchikov, coordinator of the report from British consulting firm National Nuclear Corporation, funded by the 60-nation European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
   ‘Certain nuclear installations are in such a state that we cannot exclude a chain reaction’ leading to a nuclear accident, Gerchikov said at the report’s presentation.
   The report is notable for having been written with the cooperation of Russia’s nuclear energy ministry, after years in which the Russian state tried to quash discussion of the abandoned nuclear submarines and waste sites littering the Barents Sea area.
   It focuses on two sites in Murmansk province as being of particular concern, including the Gremikha naval base, where spent nuclear fuel from Alfa class submarines is unloaded.
   Radiation levels at the sites are several times higher than recommended limits, yet workers often lack adequate protective clothing, Gerchikov said.
   Higher rates of illness noted among children in such areas should be studied in depth, he said.
   The 40-page report won ringing endorsement at the presentation from Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer who spent 11 months in jail on charges of treason and espionage after he published articles about the nuclear threat posed by the northern fleet.
   The report is ‘a real turning point,’ Nikitin said.
   ‘The atomic energy ministry has for the first time made unprecedented sacrifices, publishing secret documents for the first time,’ Nikitin said.
   ‘This is the first attempt at dialogue with society on this sensitive problem,’ said Sergei Baranovski, president of the Russian branch of the Green Cross, an environmental group set up by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Demonstrators who forced the resignation of Bolivia’s president Friday warned the country’s interim leader of new street protests unless he takes quick action to nationalise the natural gas industry.
   The warning came as an immediate challenge to the Supreme Court chief, Eduardo Rodriguez, who took over from president, Carlos Mesa, late Thursday and promised general elections before the end of the year in a bid to end weeks of unrest.
   Mesa was the second president in 20 months to be forced to resign by the poor masses seeking a greater share of the wealth from Bolivia’s energy resources.
   While some roadblocks were taken down, thousands of people took part in marches in the capital, La Paz, and a high profile community leader, Abel Mamani, said street protests would start again unless nationalisation was started in 72 hours.
   Mamani is a leader of activist groups in El Alto, a teeming impoverished city outside La Paz, which played a key role in ending Mesa’s term in office.
   The groups held a meeting at which they warned of new road blocks and other action unless their demands were met.
   ‘There has only been a changing of the guard,’ said Miguel Zubieta of the mine workers’ federation, highlighting how the authorities had not made any concession on calls for the nationalisation of oil and gas reserves.
   Evo Morales, a left wing leader of coca leaf farmers, began agitating on the gas issue even before Rodriguez was sworn in.
   Rodriguez ‘must nationalise the gas and commit himself to call a constitutional assembly,’ said the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism.
   Meanwhile, neighbouring Argentina, Brazil and Chile looked into alternative sources of gas, should protests in Bolivia continue, especially if protesters repeat their takeovers of pipelines out of the country.
   Rodriguez, 49, was sworn in hurriedly in Sucre, without the presidential sash and regalia, before a session meeting of legislators as protesters clashed with police outside. In La Paz, he held meetings with Mesa at the presidential palace and sought to ease tensions that had led Mesa to warn of a civil war earlier in the week.
   Some demonstrators lifted roadblocks in a tentative truce after Mesa resigned and Rodriguez was sworn in late Thursday at an emergency session of Congress in the southern city of Sucre.
   Rodriguez did not set a date for polls, but the constitution stipulates that he must organise new elections within six months.
   For three weeks, tens of thousands of farmers, workers and indigenous people in the Andean country of nine million clamoured in La Paz and other cities for the nationalisation of the gas and oil industry as part of a more equitable distribution of wealth.
   The protests began after Congress passed a law last month forcing oil and gas companies to pay extra taxes and royalties. Protesters said that the measure did not go far enough.
   Bolivia’s crisis pits poorer Andean regions in and around La Paz against the more prosperous eastern and southern plains, where most of the natural gas is located. The political system is dominated by people of European descent while the indigenous majority struggles with grinding poverty.
   One miner was killed in the hours before Mesa’s resignation and four other protesters died in a road accident, but they were the only deaths reported in the unrest.
   Coro Mayta, 52, described as a leader in a militant miner union, was shot dead as he and other miners tried to overwhelm an army checkpoint in the small town of Yotala, just outside Sucre, a union official said on a Quechua-language radio station.

A Buddhist monk legislator called off a death fast Saturday, a day after Sri Lanka’s president promised to consult the clergy amid growing opposition to her plan to share tsunami aid with Tiger rebels.
   But a bigger threat to Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government loomed with a threat by the Marxist JVP party to pull out of the ruling coalition, setting the stage for its possible collapse, unless she abandons the aid-sharing plan by next Wednesday.
   Opponents of the aid-sharing plan fear it will grant legitimacy to the rebels’ separatist campaign.
   Buddhist monk Omalpe Sobitha from the all-clergy National Heritage Party ended the fast outside the Temple of the Tooth in the central town of Kandy, a protest organiser said.
   Officials in Chandrika’s office said the end to the monk’s protest eased tension around the temple, regarded by Buddhists as one of their holiest shrines, but the threat to her government remained.

Japan’s education minister said Saturday that Japanese children should be taught about the country’s sovereignty over uninhabited rock islands at the centre of a diplomatic row with South Korea.
   ‘It is the most fundamental among basics to teach to what location a country’s territory stretches,’ Nariaki Nakayama told a meeting with citizens in the provincial city of Shizuoka, according to Kyodo News.
   The education minister was referring to the group of islets, known as Takeshima by Japanese and Dokdo by Koreans, in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
   Two days earlier, a local assembly in South Korea passed a ruling designating October as ‘Dokdo Month’ to underline South Korean claims to the islets after the territorial dispute flared in recent months.
   The action countered a resolution passed by the Japanese prefecture of Shimane to designate February 22 as ‘Takeshima Day’ to emphasise Japan’s claims to the islets which have been occupied by South Korean armed guards since 1954.

Germany, India, Brazil and Japan have enough votes to land permanent seats on the UN Security Council, but they will still seek more support before pushing for a vote, ambassadors for two of the so-called G4 nations said.
   However, Pakistan, which opposes the change because of its rivalry with India, said that if the General Assembly ever votes on it, ‘they’ll lose.’
   Speaking with reporters after a meeting with the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, on Friday, German Ambassador Gunter Pleuger and Indian Ambassador Nirupam Sen said they still envision putting their proposal to enlarge the Security Council from 15 to 25 seats to a vote by the end of June.
   The proposal calls for the creation of six new permanent seats and four non-permanent seats on the Council.
   Holders of the six new permanent seats would be identified later, in a second resolution, but it is already known that they would go to members of the G4 and two African countries to be chosen by the African Union in a summit in early July.

Italy has hit a new record of prisoners with nearly 60,000 people behind bars—a situation denounced as ‘explosive’ by prison workers Saturday and ‘alarming’ by the justice minister, Roberto Castelli.
   Prison doctors called on the government to ‘act to decongest the prisons that at this point are an explosive mixture,’ the head of the prison doctors association, Francesco Ceraudo, said Saturday.
   ‘We are registering human rights violations, overcrowded dormitories, bunk beds, mattresses on the floor, the most basic hygienic conditions are missing,’ Ceraudo said.
   Even Castelli admitted that the number of prisoners had reached an unprecedented 59,000, adding that the government was ‘working to urgently address this alarming situation.’
   According to figures published by the government, the number of prisoners rose from 56,000 in December to 59,000 on June 1 — that compares to 42,500 in 1995.

UN to check Syria exit from Lebanon
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, was to send a UN mission back to Lebanon to ensure all Syrian forces have withdrawn, amid reports that Syrian intelligence agents remain. The US president, George W Bush, also stepped up pressure on Damascus after a key Lebanese opposition figure said that Syrian intelligence agents remain in Lebanon and additional political murders could be expected. The UN mission will check on the status of implementation of Resolution 1559, passed by the Security Council in September, demanding the pullout of all Syrian forces from Lebanon, Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard said Friday.

US dismisses Iran election as rigged
The United States has not waited for the first ballot to be cast before dismissing Iran’s presidential election as rigged and exhorting the Iranian people to rise up for democratic reform. US officials took no pains to hide their concern after Iran’s hardline clerical regime barred more than 1,000 hopefuls from next Friday’s poll and narrowed the field to a handful of mostly conservative candidates. ‘There are questions about an election where it’s the mullahs, the unelected few, who are really the ones that make the decision about who can actually run,’ State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday.

Ex-Myanmar PM shifted to prison
Myanmar’s ousted premier Khin Nyunt has been shifted from house arrest to Yangon’s Insein prison, a strong suggestion that he will soon face trial in a secret court, a source close to the junta said Saturday. ‘Former prime minister Khin Nyunt has been taken from his house to Insein jail where he most probably will be put on trial,’ a reliable source close to the junta’s intelligence apparatus said. The transfer to the notoriously secretive and high-security jail in suburban Yangon was made Thursday, the source said. General Khin Nyunt, who announced military-ruled Myanmar’s ‘roadmap to democracy’ in 2003 and favoured dialogue with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, was sacked and arrested in a purge last October that the junta has described as a crackdown on corruption.

12 killed in Afghanistan
At least 12 Afghan passengers were killed when a minibus and a US military vehicle were in collision Saturday in southern Afghanistan, officials said. The accident occurred on the Kandahar-Spin Boldak highway near the Pakistani border and US troops immediately cordoned off the area, Spin Boldak’s police chief Abdul Wasay said. ‘Today, a minibus had an accident with a US military vehicle on the Kandahar-Spin Boldak highway, in which 12 civilians have died,’ Wasay said. He said the US troops had taken control of the area and were not allowing anyone to enter it.
— AFP