Ten Questions for the Government of the Maldives

It has been very interesting to observe how the Government of the Maldives has responded to its defeat at the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. A close review of Toby Cadman’s recent oped in the Maldives Independent, “The UN Working Group Opinion: Next Steps,” is a case in point and deserves closer scrutiny. Here are our ten questions for the Government of the Maldives, based on what he wrote, which is in italics.

This is a dramatic understatement. It isn’t merely that some “international personalities” have criticized the Government. These people and organizations include the UN Secretary-General, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, US Secretary of State John Kerry, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, the European Parliament (in a unanimous resolution urging his immediate release), Amnesty International, Asian Human Rights Commission, International Commission of Jurists, and Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, among others.

1.Can you name any independent intergovernmental institution, government, or non-governmental organization which has agreed with your assessment of President Nasheed’s case?
 

2.Why should President Nasheed trust a legal system which, by the Government’s own admission, would reject the admissibility of the appeal but decide the case on the merits without hearing legal arguments from either side?
 

3. What independent intergovernmental institution, government, or non-governmental organizations have agreed with the Government’s assessment the judiciary in the Maldives is independent and impartial?

4.How can Nasheed be provided a “full right of appeal” when his first appeal was rejected without hearing any arguments from either side?

5.Will the Government commit, unequivocally, to provide Nasheed access to counsel at anytime, like every other prisoner in the Maldives?


6.How is Nasheed supposed to appeal the High Court’s ruling to the Supreme Court when he has not been provided a copy of the Prosecutor General’s legal brief?


7.Yes or no, does the Government of the Maldives consider itself bound by the ICCPR? If no, then why did the Government submit a periodic report to the Human Rights Committee about a treaty to which it now claims it was not bound?

8.What international tribunal or quasi-judicial body has an “enforcement mechanism of its own”?


  9.  What specific evidence have does the Government have that the adoption of this opinion, unanimously, by the five independent experts of the WGAD from Australia, Benin, Mexico, South Korea, and Ukraine was based on anything other than its assessment of the facts and law in the case?

   10. Does President Yameen support MP Abdulla Riyaz’s bill and believe that all MDP MPs should be imprisoned? How is this bill compatible with the right to freedom of opinion and expression guaranteed under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights? @maldivesindependent.com