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<H1>Edward Snowden And The Right To Travel</H1></DIV>
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<A href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/snowden/" rel=tag>Snowden</A>
</SPAN><BR><SPAN class=cat-date-line4>By Carmen Russell-Sluchansky, <A
href="http://www.mintpressnews.com/edward-snowden-and-the-right-to-travel/187753/"
target=_blank>www.mintpressnews.com</A><BR>March 30th, 2014</SPAN><BR></DIV>
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<P><EM>Above: Activists wearing masks of former NSA analyst Edward Snowden,
right, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, center, and President Barack Obama
perform with an oversized passport outside the foreign ministry to demand
Snowden be granted asylum in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2014.
(AP/Eraldo Peres)</EM></P>
<H2>Supporters are pushing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to revalidate
Snowden’s right to travel, but the NSA whistleblower is probably going to stay
stuck in Russia for some time.</H2>
<DIV>
<P dir=ltr id=docs-internal-guid-41310412-0c02-a3d8-2e88-87e17c382b24>On June
23, 2013, Edward Snowden boarded a plane from Hong Kong — where he had fled from
his home and life in Hawaii — to Moscow. Moscow was not his intended
destination, but rather a stop in transit to another country — maybe Iceland,
maybe Ecuador — where Snowden planned on seeking political refuge.</P>
<P dir=ltr>U.S. officials were disappointed when Hong Kong authorities failed to
heed their requests to stop Snowden from leaving the island. To remedy this,
they revoked his U.S. passport. By the time Snowden landed, he lacked a valid
travel document and found himself stuck in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International
Airport.</P>
<P dir=ltr>U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned against letting Snowden
leave on another flight and called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to
extradite the National Security Agency whistleblower and leaker of classified
materials back to the United States.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“I would urge them to live by the standards of the law because that’s
in the interests of everybody,” Kerry told reporters.</P>
<P dir=ltr>Russia did not extradite him, and Snowden has yet to board another
plane for Iceland, Ecuador or anywhere. After 39 days stuck in an airport
terminal, Snowden accepted asylum in Russia, which he has maintained was not his
intent.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“Although I am convicted of nothing, [the U.S. government] has
unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person,” he
said <A href="http://wikileaks.org/Statement-from-Edward-Snowden-in.html"
target=_blank>in a statement through WikiLeaks</A>. “Without any judicial order,
the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that
belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.”</P>
<H2 dir=ltr><STRONG>Political refugee or common criminal?</STRONG></H2>
<P dir=ltr>On March 26, several Snowden supporters delivered petitions to the
U.S. Department of Justice and State Department. <A
href="http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9274"
target=_blank>The petition to the Justice Department</A> called on Attorney
General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama to “make an unequivocal public
commitment not to interfere with the travels or political asylum process of
Edward Snowden. The U.S. government must not engage in abduction or any other
form of foul play against Mr. Snowden.”</P>
<P dir=ltr><A
href="http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8711"
target=_blank>The petition to the State Department</A> called on Kerry to
restore Snowden’s passport so he can seek asylum, which supporters say is his
right under international law.</P>
<P dir=ltr>The petition to Kerry reads, “Your revocation of Mr. Snowden’s
passport contradicts the words of many U.S. leaders who have often criticized
other government for violating the principle of freedom to travel.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>“He has the indisputable right to seek asylum under international
law,” Ray McGovern, a former CIA intelligence analyst of 27 years who delivered
the petitions, told MintPress News.</P>
<P dir=ltr>Snowden, he says, took an oath “to defend the Constitution against
all enemies both foreign and domestic.” Though the former NSA contractor broke
federal laws, McGovern will not be deterred in his support of Snowden, who
believed the agency was breaking the law.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“That oath supersedes any minor contract the purpose of which is to
protect national security, not to protect crimes against our Constitution,”
McGovern said. “So it was a no-brainer for Edward Snowden.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>University of Michigan Law School professor James Hathaway, a leading
authority on international refugee law, agreed that it made sense for Putin to
grant Snowden asylum, but mostly because the U.S. has not made it clear what
penalty would await Snowden should he be returned. A treason conviction could
mean the death penalty, a fate from which one can seek refuge.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“The U.S. has been unwilling to make clear how he would be prosecuted
for what he had done,” Hathaway told MintPress. “So, understandably, other
countries would be nervous that they would be dumping him into a system that
might be unfair.”</P>
<H2 dir=ltr><STRONG>International refugee law</STRONG></H2>
<P dir=ltr>McGovern presented the petitions along with Coleen Rowley, a former
FBI special agent-turned whistleblower on the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, and
Norman Solomon, founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy whose
RootsAction.org sponsored the petitions.</P>
<P dir=ltr>The international law that McGovern and others cite starts with the
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was approved at a special
conference of the United Nations in 1951 and includes the addition of the 1967
Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. To date, 147 countries, including
the United States and Russia, have signed on and agreed to their tenets.</P>
<P dir=ltr>While the convention was written in response to the atrocities of
World War II, various states have used the text as a motivation — and sometimes
as pretext — for resettling nationals from other nations, usually ones that
don’t share political beliefs. The U.S. accepts tens of thousands of refugees
each year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an “independent,
nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of
the movement of people worldwide.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>During the Cold War and up to the fall and dissolution of the Soviet
Union, the vast majority of refugees accepted by the U.S. came from Soviet bloc
countries and Southeast Asia, where Cold War proxy battles such as the Vietnam
War were occurring. In 2012, far fewer came from Europe, with more than 70
percent of refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma), Bhutan and Iraq.</P>
<P dir=ltr>However, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, Russian citizens now globally comprise the second largest group of
asylum-seekers after Syria, which is in the midst of a brutal civil war. The
greatest share of Russians leaving the Russian Federation find refuge in the
European Union.</P>
<H2 dir=ltr><STRONG>Asylum and travel</STRONG></H2>
<P dir=ltr>Among other requirements, the convention states, “No Contracting
State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers
of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or
political opinion.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>Snowden supporters argue that as a whistleblower, Snowden is a
political refugee protected under the convention. But the Justice Department
says he is a criminal who broke federal law when he leaked classified documents,
which would make him ineligible for refugee status under the convention.</P>
<P dir=ltr>However, Hathaway, the law professor, said that doesn’t really matter
when it comes to Snowden’s passport.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“Traditionally, a state can simply decide whether to issue someone a
passport,” he said. “That’s solely their decision and no one could say
anything.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>Hathaway further explained that nations are obliged to offer their
citizens “freedom of movement,” but that only means they have the right to
leave.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“He has already left his country of citizenship,” Hathaway said. “So,
there’s a question of whether the U.N. would even agree that there was any sort
of violation in not revalidating his passport now.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>Hathaway also expressed concern that Snowden might actually be giving
up his refugee status, since Russia would no longer have an obligation to
provide protection.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“You can’t say both ‘my nation is too dangerous and is persecuting’
and ‘by the way, I would like them to issue me a passport,’” he said. “A
passport is a document that says to the world that the United States, in this
case, is your protectorate.”</P>
<H2 dir=ltr><STRONG>Leaving Russia</STRONG></H2>
<P dir=ltr>According to Hathaway, international law only goes so far in
protecting asylum-seekers, and Snowden doesn’t actually have the right to go to
another country. But what if he still wanted to seek asylum in Iceland or
Ecuador? Hathaway said, “Too bad.”</P>
<P dir=ltr>“The rules of the game are that once you request a country to
recognize your refugee status, no other country owes you any duty of protection
unless you can show that, in this case, Russia breached its duties under the
convention,” he said.</P>
<P dir=ltr>One of those duties is to provide Snowden with a travel document
themselves, unless they believe there is a security concern, though it remains
unclear if they have done so. Additionally, other nations could provide Snowden
with a travel document to their own territory, but the incident regarding the
plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales suggests it may be nearly impossible for
Snowden to leave Russia.</P>
<P dir=ltr>Shortly after Snowden found himself in the Moscow airport, Morales
was visiting Russia on official business. After he departed, his plane was
forced to land in Vienna because France, Spain and Portugal all refused to let
it through their airspace due to suspicions that Snowden was on board.</P>
<P dir=ltr>McGovern argued that Snowden ended up in Russia in the end because
Putin adhered to international law, but also because of “strong-arm tactics”
used by the U.S.</P>
<P dir=ltr>“When Putin decided to adhere to his request, he took the high road,”
McGovern said. “Putin was an intelligence officer. He knows what it’s like to
have leakers, right? The last thing in the world Putin would have wanted to do
is hold up as an example someone who could do this kind of stuff and get away
with it.”</P>
<P>McGovern added that having Secretary of State Kerry continue to demand that
Russia turn Snowden over didn’t help matters. “You could see Putin sitting
around saying, ‘Who is this guy to say I must do
anything?’”</P></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>