RIO DE JANEIRO: A panel of Brazil’s Supreme Court justices will gather on Tuesday to determine whether former President Jair Bolsonaro and close allies will stand trial on five counts, including attempting to stage a coup.
Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet charged Bolsonaro last month with plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election to his opponent and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Part of that plan allegedly included poisoning Lula and killing Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a foe of Bolsonaro.
Five Supreme Court justices – including de Moraes, the rapporteur – will meet from 9:30 a.m. local time in Brasilia to rule on the charges leveled by Gonet. If a majority votes in favor, the accused will become defendants in a criminal case.
Bolsonaro and his alleged accomplices also stand accused of participating in an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, damage qualified by violence and a serious threat against the state’s assets, and deterioration of listed heritage.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and says that he’s being politically persecuted.
Under Brazilian law, a coup conviction alone carries a sentence of up to 12 years, but combined with the other charges, he could be sentenced to decades behind bars.
Observers say that it’s likely that the charges will be accepted.
“There is no shadow of a doubt that there are very clear elements” that crimes were committed, said Thiago Bottino, a law professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank and university. “The current tendency is that there will be a criminal trial.”
Gonet filed charges against a total of 34 people in February. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will analyze whether to accept charges against eight of them. As well as Bolsonaro, the court will vote on the accusations faced by former Defense Ministers Walter Braga Netto and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira and ex-Justice Minister Anderson Torres, among others. The court will decide on the others’ fates later on.
Bolsonaro has sought to shore up political support before the possible trial, including by holding a protest on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on March 16.
Local media reported that around 18,000 people attended the rally, based on figures from a monitoring project linked to the University of Sao Paulo. Bolsonaro’s allies had hoped to draw a crowd of 1 million, which led some analysts to say that his ability to mobilize voters is diminishing.
Bolsonaro called on social media Sunday for a new demonstration on April 6, to be held on one of Sao Paulo’s main arteries, Avenida Paulista.
As with the protest earlier this month, the former president and his allies will push for Congress to grant amnesty to those in jail for their roles in the Jan. 8, 2023 riot, when Bolsonaro’s die-hard fans stormed and trashed the Supreme Court, Presidential Palace and Congress a week after Lula took office.
In his indictment of Bolsonaro and others linked to him, Gonet said that the rampage was a last-ditch attempt to hold onto power.
Bolsonaro, a former military officer who was known to express nostalgia for the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship, openly defied Brazil’s judicial system during his 2019-2022 term in office.
He has already been banned by Brazil’s top electoral court from running in elections until 2030 over abuse of power while in office and casting unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system.
Brazil’s Supreme Court poised to decide if Bolsonaro will stand trial over coup attempt accusation
https://arab.news/9n4zg
Brazil’s Supreme Court poised to decide if Bolsonaro will stand trial over coup attempt accusation
- Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet charged Jair Bolsonaro last month with plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election to his opponent
- Bolsonaro and his alleged accomplices also stand accused of participating in an armed criminal organization
Cambodia welcomes Japanese navy ships to naval base that US suspects is for China’s special use
China and Cambodia have close political, military, and economic ties
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Two Japanese naval ships docked Saturday at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, whose recently completed Chinese-funded upgrade has heightened US concerns that it will be used as a strategic outpost for China’s navy in the Gulf of Thailand.
The visit by the two minesweepers, the 141-meter (463-foot) -long Bungo and the 67-meter (219-foot) -long Etajima, part of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, marks the first foreign navy visit since the base’s expansion project was completed earlier this month.
Tokyo has developed increasingly close ties with Cambodia in recent years, seeking to offset China’s influence in the region, and Cambodia invited it to make the renovated port’s first port call, widely seen as an attempt to allay Washington’s concerns.
Both Japanese ships, making a four-day port call with a total of 170 sailors, docked at the base’s new pier, where Cambodian officials, including Rear Adm. Mean Savoeun, deputy commander of the base, held a welcome ceremony.
Concerns about China’s activities at the Ream base emerged in 2019 following a Wall Street Journal report alleging a draft agreement that would grant China 30-year use of the base for military personnel, weapon storage, and warship berthing. The US government has publicly and repeatedly aired its concerns.
China and Cambodia have close political, military, and economic ties. They commenced the port project in 2022, which included the demolition of previous naval structures built by the US at the base.
Cambodia has stated that warships from all friendly countries are welcome to dock at the new pier, provided they meet certain conditions. When Japanese Defense Minister Gen. Nakatani announced the planned visit on Tuesday, he said Japan’s port call symbolizes friendship with Cambodia and is key to regional stability and peace.
He stated that the visit would help ensure Cambodia has an open and transparent naval port, while noting the concerns over China’s growing efforts to secure overseas outposts for military expansion.
The port call came just one day after Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded a two-day state visit to Cambodia aimed at further strengthening China’s strong ties with its closest ally in Southeast Asia.
A statement on Saturday from Japan’s embassy in Cambodia stated that the two vessels are on a mission that began in January to visit 11 countries across Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. The port call in Cambodia is considered a “historically significant event for Japan-Cambodia relations,” it said.
The embassy emphasized that the journey of the Japanese vessels “underlines the importance of freedom of navigation, free and open international order based on international law, and its development.”
In December last year, a US Navy warship called at the nearby civilian port of Sihanoukville on a five-day visit. The visit by the USS Savannah, carrying a crew of 103, was the first in eight years by a US military vessel to Cambodia.
A US citizen was held for pickup by ICE even after proving he was born in the country
- It is unclear if Lopez Gomez showed documents proving he is a citizen to the arresting officers
- Court records show Judge Lashawn Riggans found no basis for the charge
MIAMI, USA: A US citizen was arrested in Florida for allegedly being in the country illegally and held for pickup by immigration authorities even after his mother showed a judge her son’s birth certificate and the judge dismissed charges.
Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, 20, was in a car that was stopped just past the Georgia state line by the Florida Highway Patrol on Wednesday, said Thomas Kennedy, a spokesperson at the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
Gomez and others in the car were arrested under a new Florida law, which is on hold, making it a crime for people who are in the country illegally to enter the state.
It is unclear if Lopez Gomez showed documents proving he is a citizen to the arresting officers. He was held at Leon County Jail and released after his case received widespread media coverage.
The charge of illegal entry into Florida was dropped Thursday after his mother showed the judge his state identification card, birth certificate and Social Security card, said Kennedy, who attended the hearing.
Court records show Judge Lashawn Riggans found no basis for the charge.
Lopez Gomez briefly remained in custody after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested he remain there for 48 hours, a common practice when the agency wants to take custody of someone. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
The case drew widespread attention because ICE is not supposed to take custody of US-born citizens. While the immigration agency can occasionally get involved in cases of naturalized citizens who committed offenses such as lying on immigration forms, it has no authority over people born in the US
Adding to the confusion is a federal judge’s ruling to put a hold on enforcement of the Florida law against people who are in the country illegally entering the state, which meant it should not have been enforced.
“No one should be arrested under that law, let alone a US citizen,” said Alana Greer, an immigration attorney from the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “They saw this person, he didn’t speak English particularly well, and so they arrested him and charged him with this law that no one (should) be charged with.”
Money, power, violence in high-stakes Philippine elections
- The country’s elections commission, Comelec, recorded 46 acts of political violence
- Comelec said “fewer than 20” candidates have been killed so far this campaign season, which it notes is a drop
MANILA: Philippines election hopefuls like mayoral candidate Kerwin Espinosa have to ask themselves whether the job is worth taking a bullet.
The country’s elections commission, Comelec, recorded 46 acts of political violence between January 12 and April 11, including the shooting of Espinosa.
At a rally this month, someone from the crowd fired a bullet that went through his chest and exited his arm, leaving him bleeding but alive.
Others have been less lucky.
A city council hopeful, a polling officer and a village chief were among those killed in similar attacks in the run-up to mid-term elections on May 12.
Comelec said “fewer than 20” candidates have been killed so far this campaign season, which it notes is a drop.
“This is much lower, very low compared to the past,” commission spokesperson John Rex Laudiangco told AFP, citing a tally of about 100 deaths in the last general election.
Analysts warned that such violence will likely remain a fixture of the Philippines’ political landscape.
The immense influence of the posts is seen as something worth killing for.
Holding municipal office means control over jobs, police departments and disbursements of national tax funds, said Danilo Reyes, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines’ political science department.
“Local chief executives have discretion when it comes to how to allocate the funding, which projects, priorities,” he said.
Rule of law that becomes weaker the farther one gets from Manila also means that regional powerbrokers can act with effective impunity, said Cleve Arguelles, CEO of Manila-based WR Numero Research.
“Local political elites have their own kingdoms, armed groups and... patronage networks,” he said, noting violence is typically highest in the archipelago nation’s far north and south.
“The stakes are usually high in a local area where only one family is dominant or where there is involvement of private armed groups,” Arguelles said.
“If you lose control of... city hall, you don’t just lose popular support. You actually lose both economic and political power.”
In the absence of strong institutions to mediate disagreements, Reyes said, “confrontational violence” becomes the go-to.
Espinosa was waiting for his turn to speak at a campaign stop in central Leyte province on April 10 when a shooter emerged from the crowd and fired from about 50 meters (164 feet) away, according to police.
Police Brig. Gen. Jean Fajardo told reporters this week that seven police officers were “being investigated” as suspects.
Convictions, however, are hard to come by.
While Comelec’s Laudiangco insisted recent election-related shootings were all making their way through regional court systems, he could provide no numbers.
Data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project show that in 79 percent of violent acts targeting local government members between 2018 and 2022 the perpetrators were never identified.
National-level politicians, meanwhile, reliant on local political bases to deliver votes, have little incentive to press for serious investigations, said Reyes.
“The only way you can ensure national leaders win positions is for local allies to deliver votes,” he said.
“There are convictions but very rarely, and it depends on the potential political fallout on the national leaders as well as the local leaders.”
It’s part of the “grand bargain” in Philippine politics, Arguelles said.
Local elites are “tolerated by the national government so long as during election day they can also deliver votes when they’re needed.”
Three days after Espinosa’s shooting, a district board candidate and his driver were rushed to hospital after someone opened fire on them in the autonomous area of Mindanao.
Election-season violence has long plagued the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, known as the BARMM.
Comelec assumed “direct control” over the municipalities of Buluan and Datu Odin Sinsuat after municipal election officer Bai Maceda Lidasan Abo and her husband were shot dead last month.
Since last year, Comelec has held the power to directly control and supervise not only local election officials but also law enforcement.
Top police officials in the two municipalities were removed for “gross negligence and incompetence” after allegedly ignoring requests to provide security details for the slain Comelec official.
Their suspensions, however, will last only from “campaigning up to... the swearing-in of the winners,” Comelec’s Laudiangco said.
The commission’s actions were part of a “tried and tested security plan” that is showing real results, he said.
But he conceded that the interwoven nature of family, power and politics in the provinces would continue to create a combustible brew.
“You have a lot of closely related people in one given jurisdiction... That ensures polarization. It becomes personal between neighbors.
“We all know Filipinos are clannish, that’s our culture. But we’re improving slowly.”
Afghan FM tells Pakistan’s top diplomat deportations are ‘disappointment’
- Pakistan has launched a strict campaign to evict by the end of the month more than 800,000 Afghans
- “Muttaqi expressed his deep concern and disappointment over the situation and forced deportation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan,” Ahmad said
KABUL: Afghanistan’s foreign minister expressed “deep concern and disappointment” to his Pakistani counterpart on Saturday over the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Afghans since the start of April.
Pakistan has launched a strict campaign to evict by the end of the month more than 800,000 Afghans who have had their residence permits canceled, including some who were born in Pakistan or lived there for decades.
Pakistan’s top diplomat Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul for a day-long visit on Saturday where he held discussions with Afghan Taliban officials, including Prime Minister Hasan Akhund and Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
“Muttaqi expressed his deep concern and disappointment over the situation and forced deportation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan,” the Afghan foreign ministry’s deputy spokesperson Zia Ahmad said on X.
“He strongly urged Pakistani authorities to prevent the suppression of the rights of Afghans living there and those coming here.”
Ahmad added that Dar reassured officials that Afghans “will not be mistreated.”
Afghans in Pakistan have reported weeks of arbitrary arrests, extortion and harassment by authorities as they ramp up their campaign to expel migrants.
Islamabad has said nearly 85,000 have already crossed into Afghanistan, with convoys of Afghan families heading to border crossings each day fearing raids, arrests or separation from family members.
On Friday, Pakistan’s deputy interior minister Tallal Chaudhry told a news conference that “there will not be any sort of leniency and extension in the deadline.”
“When you arrive without any documents, it only deepens the uncertainty of whether you’re involved in narcotics trafficking, supporting terrorism, or committing other crimes,” he added.
Analysts, however, say it is a politically motivated strategy to put pressure on Afghanistan’s Taliban government over escalating security concerns.
The relationship between the two neighbors has soured as attacks in Pakistan’s border regions have soared, following the return of the Taliban government in Kabul in 2021.
Last year was the deadliest in Pakistan for a decade, with Islamabad accusing Kabul of allowing militants to take refuge in Afghanistan, from where they plan attacks.
The Taliban government denies the charge.
Chaudhry said on Friday that nearly 85,000 Afghans have crossed into Afghanistan since the start of April, the majority of them undocumented.
More than half of them were children, according to the United Nations refugee agency, entering a country where girls and women are banned from education after secondary school and barred from many sectors of work.
Afghanistan’s refugees ministry spokesman told AFP on Saturday the Taliban authorities had recorded some 71,000 Afghan returnees through the two main border points with Pakistan between April 1 and 18.
In the first phase of returns in 2023, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans were forced across the border in the space of a few weeks.
In the second phase announced in March, the Pakistan government canceled the residence permits of more than 800,000 Afghans and warned thousands more awaiting relocation to other countries to leave by the end of April.
Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades to flee successive wars, but tensions with the Afghan community have risen as Pakistan’s economic and security concerns have deepened.
The move to expel Afghans is widely supported by Pakistanis.
“They are totally disrespectful toward our country. They have abused us, they have used us. One can’t live in a country if they don’t respect it,” said Ahmad Waleed, standing in his shop on Friday in Rawalpindi, near the capital.
Despite small diaspora share, Gulf-based Indians send home 40% of remittances
- India’s diaspora is one of the largest, accounting for 35.4 million people
- Most Indians in Gulf countries do not plan to settle there and focus on earning
New Delhi: Despite making up only about one-quarter of India’s overseas population, Indian nationals in Gulf states send almost 40 percent of the country’s bank remittances, the latest data shows.
India’s diaspora is one of the largest, accounting for 35.4 million people, based on last month’s estimates submitted to parliament by Minister of State for External Affairs Pabitra Margherita.
Members of the diaspora are a key source of India’s foreign currency inflows and, in the fiscal year 2023–24, sent home $118.7 billion, according to a remittances survey released in March by the Reserve Bank of India.
Indians living and working in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries accounted for almost 40 percent of this amount, led by those in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — 19.2 percent, 6.7 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively.
The 40-percent remittance share from Gulf-based Indians is disproportionately high compared to their share of the overall diaspora. Of the 35.4 million Indians living abroad, only 9.7 million — just slightly more than one-quarter — reside in GCC countries, according to data from India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Dr. S. Irudaya Rajan, chair of the International Institute for Migration and Development in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, attributes the imbalance to the nature of Indian migration in the Middle East.
“People who go to work in the Gulf don’t plan to settle there, but work and bring money home and support the family ... they are coming to make money and secure their future in India,” Rajan told Arab News.
“They went to earn money with double work, midnight work, evening work, overtime work to send it back home.”
The reason why many of them are able to save and send more is that most travel to Gulf countries alone, focusing on work as there are no prospects of obtaining citizenship — unlike in other major migration destinations like the US and UK.
Out of the 4.3 million Indians living in the UAE, 2.65 million in Saudi Arabia, 1 million in Kuwait, 830,000 in Qatar, 665,000 in Oman and 350,000 in Bahrain, the majority were either unmarried or had their family waiting for them back home.
“Eighty percent of them are living alone ... they are not taking their wives, they are not taking their children,” Rajan said.
“Either they are unmarried and are sending money to their parents, or they are married and sending it to their wives and their parents, or they are sending it to their children studying in some other country.”
The actual amount of remittance coming from overseas Indians was likely much higher than what the central bank indicated. While the RBI’s survey covered 30 banks, two money transfer operators and two fintech companies in the cross-border remittance business, inward remittances from the Gulf also reach India through informal means.
Given the region’s proximity and frequent and cheap flights, money can be easily brought from places like Dubai without relying on bank transfers — unlike remittances from Europe, Singapore, or the US.
“From the informal channel, it can be as much as the formal channel,” Rajan said.
“All estimates on remittances are underestimated. The government of India, the World Bank, the RBI — all will underestimate the remittance because they can calculate it only from the formal channel.”
While the central bank’s data has shown an increase in the remittance share from the West and a drop from the Middle East compared with the previous survey in 2016-17, Rajan forecast that the Gulf will still continue to play a major role.
“These remittances coming from Canada, Australia (and the US), are more because they are vacating the place and coming home. People who are coming from America will bring all their savings, all that they had in America, so this is a short-term trend,” he said.
“I think the Gulf will bounce back ... the future will be very uncertain for migration, but Gulf migration will continue for at least the next 15 to 20 years.”
