Freedom of expression only for you or also for me?: BPE Submission To 2012 OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting In Warsaw
STATEMENT BY BÜRGERBEWEGUNG PAX EUROPA
OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting
Working Session 9
Tolerance and non-discrimination I
Prevention of violence against women
Warsaw, September 28, 2012
Freedom of expression only for you or also for me?
BPE expresses its grave concern about recent reports coming from the United Kingdom about the thousands of predominately Pakistani Muslim gang rapes of white English girls in the Rotherham area. The “Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board” appears to have known about this monstrosity since 1996 but in the interests of “Community Cohesion” set out to wilfully cover up the details. It also appears that the British police have failed in their duty to uphold the law. The Times (Sept. 24, 2012) reported the following:
Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively. Police left, leaving three men at the house with two more girls.
Two terrified girls who were dragged into a car and driven to Bristol to be used for sex as part of a drugs deal phoned support workers to seek help… officers rescued them and returned them to Sheffield… South Yorkshire Police did not question them about the incident.In two cases, police officers responded to missing persons reports but left the young women with the suspected abuser, concluding she was safe. When the parents attempted to intervene they were threatened with arrest and charged with breach of the peace.
A girl’s mother copied the names, addresses and text messages of 177 Asian men, including a police officer, from her daughter’s mobile phone after the 13-year-old went missing for five days. Police said that using the information would infringe on the girl’s and the men’s human rights.
In 2002, the confidential report of a Home-Office funded research project considered a series of Rotherham case studies. It criticised police for in all cases treating young victims as deviant and promiscuous while the men they were found with were never questioned or investigated.
Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham, said he was appalled that in several meetings with senior South
Yorkshire police officers to discuss internal trafficking ‘no one has ever revealed or even hinted at the important allegations made by The Times’…Throughout this period, Rotherham council has failed to accept the role of ethnicity and culture in such group offending. Earlier this year, this newspaper revealed how the town’s safeguarding children board censored a report into the murder of a 17-year-old girl to conceal the ethnicity of the British Pakistani men suspected of using her for sex from the age of 11.
Violence against women, and in this case we must tragically speak of girls, continues to pose a serious problem in the OSCE area. The Ministerial Council Decision 15/05 on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women acknowledged this, stating that governments and law enforcement agencies have a responsibility to prevent, investigate, and punish perpetrators, and provide protection to victims […].
The above case highlights that British police obviously did not live up to their responsibility and neither prevented nor investigated properly nor punished the perpetrators. This is disgraceful and a tragedy for the girls, their families and friends.
Relevant links:
The Daily Mail
ITV
The Star
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
To OSCE United Kingdom Delegation
We urgently call on the OSCE delegation of the United Kingdom (and, by extension, the government) to take the necessary measures so that these cases never happen again.
To OSCE Participating States and Civil Society
We urge participating States and civil society actors to ensure that underage and vulnerable girls in the OSCE area are protected by the very law enforcement agencies that failed and that these victims receive the proper support.
PDF on OSCE website
Other BPE submissions on OSCE website
Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE)
Sharia Watch UK