RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12879/mauritania-slavery

The arrest of Abeid — a prize-winning human rights activist whose latest “crime” was being a candidate in an election — should sound alarm bells in Washington.

The Trump administration needs to demand Abeid’s immediate release and make any further financial aid to Mauritania conditional upon proof of concrete moves to eradicate slavery and indentured servitude.

To state that Mauritania is engaged in the kind of “reform” that is “needed to improve people’s living standards” is both false and unconscionable. Not only are Mauritania’s minorities so impoverished that being enslaved is often their only perceived alternative to starving, but its deceitful government is responsible for perpetuating the situation.

Although referred to as the “world’s last country to abolish slavery,” it actually remains “slavery’s last stronghold.”

On August 7, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania arrested Biram Dah Abeid, the founding head of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), a human rights organization dedicated to eradicating slavery in the west African nation. Abeid described the police waking him in his home in the capital city of Nouakchott, and taking him into custody without charges.

Abeid and those petitioning for his release have good reason to suspect that his arrest – one of many over the past few years — is related not only to his persistent anti-slavery activism and critique of Islamic texts, but to the fact that he is running for a seat in parliament in the legislative elections slated for September 1.

Abeid, a member of the Haratin, Mauritania’s largest minority group, established the IRA in 2008, the year in which Mauritania’s first democratically elected president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, was ousted in a coup led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who has been in power ever since. Abeid has been described as a “thorn in the side” of Aziz, particularly when he challenged Aziz in the 2014 presidential election, and came in a “distant second.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12882/germany-deported-jihadist

Aidoudi’s asylum request was rejected in 2007 after allegations surfaced that he had undergone military training at an al-Qaeda jihadi camp in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2000. During his training, he had allegedly worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

“What we are currently experiencing is not a struggle for the rule of law, but a power struggle between an obviously ideologically oriented judiciary and unpopular political representatives.” — Tomas Spahn, writing for Tichys Einblick.

“Confidence in the rule of law is not undermined by a ruling such as that of the Gelsenkirchen Administrative Court, but by the fact that it took almost twelve years for Osama bin Laden’s ‘alleged’ bodyguard finally to be deported.” — Henryk Broder, columnist, Die Welt.

A court in Germany has ruled that the recent deportation to Tunisia of a failed asylum seeker — an Islamist suspected of being a bodyguard for the former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — was unlawful and that, at taxpayer expense, he must be immediately returned to Germany.

The ruling has cast yet another spotlight on the dysfunctional nature of Germany’s deportation system, as well as on Germany’s politicized judicial system, one in which activist judges are now engaged in a power struggle with elected officials who want to speed up deportations.