Commonwealth to Deploy Election Observers

A Commonwealth Observer Group (COG) will be present during Tanzania's General Elections due to be held on 31 October 2010. The COG will be led by former New Zealand Attorney-General, Rt Hon Paul East QC.

The Group was constituted by Commonwealth Secretary-General, Kamalesh Sharma, at the invitation of the National Electoral Commission of Tanzania.

"The Commonwealth has a history of engagement with Tanzania, and we are pleased to observe these important elections," the Secretary-General said. He went on, "We very much hope that they will further strengthen the democratic process and advance development in the country."

The Group's mandate is to observe the preparations for the election, the polling, the counting and the results process, and the overall electoral environment. The team will be there to assess the conduct of the process as a whole and, where appropriate, make recommendations for the future strengthening of the electoral framework in Tanzania, including the process in Zanzibar.

The Group will act impartially and independently, and will conduct itself according to the standards expressed in the International Declaration of Principles for Election Observation, to which the Commonwealth is a signatory.

The Group's report will be submitted to the Commonwealth Secretary-General, who will in turn send it to the Government of Tanzania as well as to the authorities in Zanzibar, the National Electoral Commission, the Zanzibar Electoral Commission and political parties, and eventually to all Commonwealth Governments.

The Commonwealth Observer Group is expected to comprise 15 experienced persons, including the Chair. The team will arrive in Tanzania on 24 October 2010, and stay until 7 November 2010.

Commonwealth Observer Group - Tanzania 2010

Chair: Rt Hon Mr Paul East, QC, Former Attorney-General, New Zealand

Mrs Judy Hopwood MP, Member of Parliament, Australia

Ms Juliette Maughan, Youth Representative, Barbados

Mr Pierre Paul Martin, Elections Expert, Canada

Hon Omar Jallow, Politician, Gambia

Mrs Pauline Dadzawa, Election Commissioner, Ghana

Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, Politician, Guyana

Mr Akshay Rout, Director General, Election Commission, India

Ms Jane Godia, Media/Gender Expert, Kenya

Ms Cheryl Dorall, Media Consultant, Malaysia

Sheikh (Dr) Abdul Karimo, Co-ordinator, Elections Obsevatory, Mozambique

Mr Charles Munyaneza, Executive Secretary, National Election Commission, Rwanda

Mr Pesi Fonua, Publisher/Editor, Tonga

Hon Irene Ovonji-Odida, Former Member of the East African Legislative Assembly, Uganda

Mr Frank Martin, Former Diplomat, United Kingdom


AllAfrica.com

THIRD SWAHILI FASHION WEEK OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED....

From Left to Right Alex Galinoma from EATV & Radio, Saphia PR & Media SFW, Mustafa Hassanali organiser of SFW, Judith Muya of Southern Sun -Home of SFW and Washington Fashion Coordinator, during the 3rd SFW Launch.

24 DESIGNERS TO SHOWCASE OVER A PERIOD OF 3 DAYS

LAUNCH OF THE FIRST EVER SWAHILI FASHION WEEK SHOPPING FESTIVAL

The third annual Swahili Fashion Week will take place at Karimjee Gardens on the 4th, 5th and 6th November 2010 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

Swahili Fashion Week 2010 will collectively bring together 24 designers from Swahili speaking countries to showcase their creativity in designing a variety of clothing with an assortment of materials.

The Tanzanian designers showcasing at this years event are Ailinda Sawe, Manju Msita, Kemi Kalikawe, Christine Mhando, Shellina Ibrahim, Farha Naaz Sultan, Gabriel Mollel, Robi Morro, Asia Idarous, Zamda George, Khadija Mwanamboka, Jamilla Vera Swai and Made by Africa. Designers from Kenya to showcase are Sonu Sharma, Moo Cow, KikoRomeo, John Kaveke and Kooroo. Stella Atal from Uganda will also show her designs.

“In addition to the Fashion Show presentations, this year Swahili Fashion Week has incorporated Swahili Fashion Week Shopping Festival which will capture the spirit, style and essence of the Swahili coast” said Mustafa Hassanali, organiser of the event.

“Opening Swahili Fashion Week to a new audience, the Shopping Festival will showcase not only traditional Swahili arts and culture but the inspired innovation, and dynamic creativity of the modern Swahili speaking world, offering stalls to all participating fashion designers to exhibit and sell their unique, often hand-made clothing, accessories and products. Stall priority to those not on the runway will be given to artists, crafts-people, etc who are disabled or underprivileged”, added Hassanali.

Throughout the exhibition, there will be a variety of entertainment including performances from different music groups, henna painting and adornment and weaving. There will also be a choice of workshops for designers to participate in.

Swahili Fashion Week has organized several awards in order to recognise the prospective talent showcasing, these include the Emerging Designer Award, Best Runway Model and Best Swahili Fashion Week Shopping Festival stand.

Swahili fashion week 2010 has been sponsored by the home of Swahili Fashion Week - Southern Sun, Origin Africa, USAID Compete, EATV, East Africa Radio, Malaria Haikubaliki, BASATA (Baraza La Sanaa Taifa), Ultimate Security, Monier 2000, Colour Print Ltd, Global Outdoor Ltd, Amarula, Vayle Springs Ltd, ZG Films, Darling Hair, Danish make up designs, Nipashe, Bilicanas, Perfect Machinery Ltd, 1&1 Internet Solutions, Sengi Tours, iFashion and 361 Degrees.

NOTE TO EDITORS

Swahili Fashion week is a platform for designers – both fashion and accessory – from Swahili speaking countries to showcase their creativity, market their art and network with their clientele. This is all aimed at promoting fashion as an income generating, job creating industry while emphasizing a “Made in East Africa” concept.

Swahili Fashion Week is set to be an annual fashion extravaganza showcasing the best of creative talent in the fashion from Swahili Speaking countries. This being the regions highly acclaimed premier Fashion event founded created and conceptualised in year 2008 by Mustafa Hassanali

“Initiating a dynamic and promising platform for the fashion industry in the region, Swahili Fashion Week is geared towards being the most sought out fashion platform in Eastern Africa for the international market”, explained Mustafa Hassanali, founder and organizer of Swahili Fashion Week.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


CONTACT PERSON: Saphia Ngalapi, Media & PR Manager
TELEPHONE NUMBER: +255-712-099834
EMAIL ADDRESS: media@swahilifashionweek.com

Judge Releases Full Ruling That Blocked Terror Trial Witness

Southern District of New York Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on Thursday released his full opinion on the credibility of a critical witness he blocked from testifying at the trial of accused al-Qaida conspirator and U.S. Embassy bomber Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

In his 60-page opinion elaborating on his Oct. 6 three-page public order barring Hussein Abebe from the witness stand, Kaplan called Abebe's testimony "false" and "quite incredible" on the key issue of whether he was coerced into testifying by threat of prosecution either in New York or in Tanzania.

The judge also offered a more expansive review of the law concerning Abebe, a Tanzanian who allegedly sold the explosives to Ghailani used in the truck bomb detonated outside the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, 10 minutes after a similar bomb destroyed the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. In all, 224 people, including 12 Americans, were killed and more than 4,000 were wounded.

The law in this matter was the Fifth Amendment, and the issue was whether Ghailani's right to be free from self-incrimination was violated because the identity and whereabouts of Mr. Abebe were "allegedly extracted by physical and psychological abuse of" Ghailani in a secret CIA prison.

Abebe, who one FBI agent testified "feared the knock at the door" after seeing Ghailani's face on Tanzanian television just after the bombings, was picked up in August 2006 and detained for 11 days.

He was first questioned by Tanzanian authorities and then visited by an FBI team that secured his promise to testify against Ghailani. The last four days of his detention were spent in lockup in Dar es Salaam. He was ultimately released on a bond describing him as having been "accused of committing the offense of conspiring to murder and terrorist acts."

That bond was eliminated over a year later after Abebe's brother-in-law, the chief judge of the Supreme Court of Tanzania, intervened on his behalf.

Abebe, who insists he is willing to testify voluntarily, flew to New York in August.

He was questioned in a two-day hearing before Kaplan in September, and the judge indicated then that his story did not add up. On Thursday, he made that even clearer.

"Abebe testified that he knew he was in trouble by the time he got to Zanzibar, but that he had no idea why he had been arrested until he was asked about the 1998 bombings in Zanzibar two days later," Kaplan wrote in his opinion. "This is quite incredible. Abebe had lived in fear of this arrest for years and understood from the moment he arrived at the police office in Arusha that the arrest related to the embassy bombings. He was very frightened."

The full opinion, the first extended analysis of the consequences of finding a witness through so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," was released to the public Thursday after being vetted by a court security officer.

But the full opinion was delivered to lawyers on Oct. 6, giving the prosecution team led by Michael Farbiarz only a few days to decide whether to make an appeal as of right or finish jury selection and start Ghailani's trial.

The prosecution elected to proceed to a trial that Thursday completed its third day of testimony.

While the government's decision avoided a lengthy delay and the attendant risk that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals might make new law on "poisonous fruit" derived from illegal CIA interrogations of terror suspects, it also left Kaplan's opinion standing, giving it more force as precedent.

The prosecution has sought to avoid a head-on collision with judges over the consequences of the government's detention and interrogation program, a move that might isolate the law made here to the facts presented in Ghailani's case.

To that end, and no doubt for other reasons of strategy, the prosecution has vowed not to Ghailani's statements to the CIA and have admitted that he was abused only for purposes of the argument.

The judge's Oct. 6 decision prompted Ghailani defense lawyer Peter E. Quijano to claim a victory for the Fifth Amendment, telling the media, "This case will be tried upon lawfully obtained evidence only. Not coercion. Not torture."

The trial is being closely watched by people on all sides of the debate over whether terror suspects should be tried in civilian courts or whether trial by military commission is the better route. Ghailani is the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian court.

The judge alluded to this controversy in footnotes in his opinion, United States v. Ghailani, S10 98 Crim. 1023.

"It is very far from clear that Abebe's testimony would be admissible if Ghailani were being tried by military commission, even without regard to the question whether the Fifth Amendment would invalidate any more forgiving provisions of the rules of evidence otherwise applicable in such a proceeding," the judge said.

Military Commissions Act §948r(a) and the Military Commission Rules of Evidence, Rule 304, he said, "preclude or restrict the use of 'statements obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,' and evidence derived therefrom, and could require exclusion of Abebe's testimony."

He added, "Even if they did not, the Constitution might do so, even in a military commission proceeding."

The judge in his opinion said Abebe's decision to testify in New York was not "a free and unconstrained" one.

"He quite plainly is no eager volunteer," the judge said. "He never would have come forward on his own. He is 'willing' to testify now only because he fears that things will go badly for him if he does not."

The judge also found hard to believe Abebe's statement at the hearing that he was coming forward to "cleanse" his heart and soul.

"If indeed Abebe's heart were moved by his having supplied the explosives that killed hundreds and wounded thousands of people, it would be very difficult to understand why he did not come forward on his own," the judge said. "The need for cleansing his heart and soul was at least as strong over the eight years before his arrest as it has been since."

The judge also explored further the distinction between the "deterrence analysis" of suppression under the Fourth and Fifth amendments, saying, "As this is a Fifth Amendment case, the receipt in evidence of Abebe's testimony itself would constitute a violation of the self-executing exclusionary rule inherent in the Constitution, not a matter of compliance with a purely utilitarian judge-made rule that was created in the twentieth century only to deter illegal searches and seizures."

He continued, "The CIA, acting upon the highest authority, used coercive methods to gain intelligence. This court has declined to this point to express an opinion on the constitutionality of such methods, considered in and of themselves. It declines to do so now because that issue is not before it.

"What is before it, however, is the question of whether the Fifth Amendment -- which provides that 'no person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself' -- is violated if a court receives in a criminal case evidence that is the fruit of statements coerced from the defendant, at least where the relationship between the coerced statements and the evidence is as close as it is here."


Law.com

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani profile

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is accused of involvement in the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed more than 200 people.

Mr Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004 and handed over to the US at the beginning of 2005.

He was one of 14 detainees transferred in September 2006 from secret CIA prisons abroad to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

And he is the first former Guantanamo Bay detainee to go on trial in a civilian court in the US.

He pleaded not guilty in June 2009 to charges of conspiring to commit the embassy bombings. If found guilty, he could face the death penalty.

According to a transcript of a closed-door hearing in March 2007, Mr Ghailani admitted delivering explosives used to blow up the US embassy in Tanzania in 1998.

However, he said he did not know about the attack beforehand and apologised to the US government and the victims' families, the transcript said.

'Scouting the embassy'
A short, squat man, Mr Ghailani is said to have had dozens of aliases, including "Foopie" and "Ahmed the Tanzanian".


The bombings in Tanzania and Kenya were almost simultaneous
He is thought to have been born on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar in 1970 or 1974, making him 40 or 36 years old, and is said to speak fluent Swahili and English.

He was number eight on the FBI's most wanted list - his baby-faced photograph belying the severity of the charges on which he was indicted by New York authorities in 1998.

The Tanzanian national is accused of buying the truck that carried the bomb used in the Dar es Salaam attack.

He and his accomplices are also accused of buying oxygen and acetylene tanks used to enhance the force of the explosion.

He is also said to have escorted the bomb maker between Dar es Salaam and the Kenyan city of Mombasa after the bomb was made as well as scouting the US embassy with the suicide bomb driver.

The near-simultaneous bombings in August 1998 killed 213 people in Nairobi and 11 people in Dar es Salaam as well as injuring thousands more. Twelve Americans were among the dead.

Big bounty
Analysts described Mr Ghailani as a very important figure, who was probably sent to East Africa at the time of the bombings by Osama Bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

It is suggested that Mr Ghailani fled to Afghanistan after being indicted in 1998.

According to the US transcript, he admitted visiting an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan after the bombings. But he denied being a member of al-Qaeda.

Mr Ghailani was reported to have been in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in 2001, with another suspect in the embassy bombings, a Kenyan man Fazul Abdullah Mohammed.

The UK's Observer newspaper reported in 2002 that the two men allegedly ran a lucrative al-Qaeda financing operation, trading illegal "blood diamonds" for cash.

The paper said the operation ran into trouble in June 2001, when reports reached al-Qaeda that Mr Ghailani and Mr Mohammed were lavishing money on women, presents and alcohol.

In May 2003, the FBI named Mr Ghailani on a list of seven people it suspected of concocting a fresh al-Qaeda plot, and increased the bounty on his head to $5m.

On 25 July 2004, he was arrested in Pakistan along with his Uzbek wife.

Pakistani officials at the time said Mr Ghailani's arrest was the most significant since the detention in March 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the 11 September attacks on the US.

BBC