• Court: Kenyans tortured by colonial regime can sue UK despite passage of time

    Leon Neal / AFP - Getty Images

    Lawyer Martyn Day, left, Agnes Gitau, daughter of a Mau Mau veteran, center, and other supporters of three Kenyans who were tortured by British colonial authorities celebrate as they leave the High Court in London on Friday after the group won the right to proceed with their legal claims against the U.K. government.

    By NBC News' Ian Johnston and wire reports

    LONDON -- A U.K. court decided Friday that three elderly Kenyans who were victims of torture during British rule of their country in the 1950s can claim compensation despite the passage of time, in a landmark ruling that could clear the way for thousands of other cases.

    Judge Richard McCombe rejected the British Foreign Office’s argument that the events took place too long ago for a fair hearing to take place and ordered that the case should proceed to a full trial.

    During an earlier hearing in July, the U.K. government admitted for the first time that people were tortured during the “Mau Mau” uprising. Guy Mansfield, a lawyer representing Britain, told the three claimants that he did “not want to dispute the fact that terrible things happened to you."

    Colonial sins return to haunt former world powers

    Paulo Muoka Nzili told that hearing he was castrated after his arrest by the colonial authorities; Wambuga Wa Nyingi said he was beaten unconscious as 11 others were beaten to death; and Jane Muthoni Mara said she was beaten with sticks and sexually assaulted with a glass bottle containing hot water after she gave food to Mau Mau fighters.

    McCombe wrote in his judgment Friday that he had concluded a fair trial still remained possible. "The documentation is voluminous ... the governments and military commanders seem to have been meticulous record keepers," he said.

    Express Newspapers / Hulton Archive via Getty Images

    British police examine suspects for the seven initiation cuts on the body that marked a member of the Mau Mau secret society in November 1952.

    Obama's grandfather detained in camp
    President Barack Obama wrote in his book "Dreams From My Father" that his Kenyan grandfather Onyango was held for six months in a detention camp by the colonial authorities, returning "very thin and dirty" and with "difficulty walking" and his head "full of lice."

    Britain previously argued that the claimants should actually sue Kenya’s government, which took over from the colonial regime on independence in 1963, but that was also rejected by the court.

    Friday’s ruling appeared to remove the last remaining argument against paying compensation, though the U.K. Foreign Office later issued a statement saying it planned to appeal.


    There were joyous scenes at the Kenya Human Rights Commission in Nairobi, when Nzili, 85, Nyingi, 84, and Mara, 73, and supporters heard the judge’s decision.

    “Thank you God, you’ve heard our prayer, you heard our cry for mercy,” they could be heard singing, according to a translation, during a phone call to a commission official.

    They are seeking the creation of a welfare fund for victims of colonial oppression and an apology from Britain.

    From ITV News: Tutu urges UK to show compassion to Kenyan torture victims

    Martyn Day, a British lawyer representing the trio, said in a statement that despite Britain’s admission that the claimants were “brutally tortured by the British colony” it had been “hiding behind technical defenses for three years in order to avoid any legal responsibility.”

    “This was always morally repugnant and today the judge has also rejected these arguments,” he added. “Following this judgment, we can but hope that our government will at last do the honorable thing and sit down and resolve these claims.”

    'Reverberate' worldwide
    Day, noting the age of the claimants, said he hoped the British government would settle out of court as it could take a year for the full trial to be heard. A fourth claimant, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua, died after the case began.

    Day described the ruling as “a historic judgment which will reverberate around the world and will have repercussions for years to come.”

    Ben Stansall / AFP - Getty Images, file

    Wambugu wa Nyingi, pictured in London on April 6, 2011, previously told the court he was beaten unconscious as 11 others were beaten to death by colonial authorities in Kenya in the 1950s.

    “There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care,” Day said.

    Dan Thea, 69, who took the Mau Mau oath at the age of eight and who now runs the Mau Mau Justice Network, told NBC News that there were 40,000 surviving veterans in Kenya who would take hope from the ruling.

    More news about Africa from NBCNews.com

    Thea, who said his late sister had been raped by British officers when she was about 20, said he was “bitter, still very angry” about the actions of the British colonial authorities.

    “It was totally, totally criminal. It was basically racist and the whole point was to ensure that Kenya became … a permanent white settlement, just as had happened in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,” he said.

    “Kenya was not going to be like other African states, free after a certain time. It was identified as the ‘England of East Africa,’ that’s what they called it, ... because of its climate and rich agricultural land,” he added.

    'Not terrorists'
    Agnes Gitau, a Kenyan whose father was a member of the Mau Mau movement, said victory in the case would show that “my people were not just bad guys, were not militants, were not terrorists -- these were people fighting for a cause” and that “Africans are not barbaric.”

    “I was made to believe they were terrorists from a history book, but now this sets me free,” she told NBC News outside the court.

    A statement issued by the U.K. Foreign Office said the British government was “disappointed” by the ruling.

    “The judgement has potentially significant and far reaching legal implications,” the statement said. “The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is 3 to 6 years. In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their account of what happened.”

    “At the same time, we do not dispute that each of the Claimants in this case suffered torture and other ill treatment at the hands of the Colonial Administration,” it added. “We have always said that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those, on all sides, who were involved in the divisive and bloody events of the Emergency period in Kenya, and it is right that those who feel they have a case are free to take it to the courts.”

    The case stems from the so-called Kenyan "Emergency" of 1952-1961, during which fighters from the Mau Mau movement attacked British targets, causing panic among white settlers and alarming the authorities in London.

    Tens of thousands of rebels were killed by colonial forces and an estimated 150,000 Kenyans, many of them unconnected to the Mau Mau, were held in detention camps likened by a leading historian of the period to Soviet gulag labor camps.

    Mau Mau movement illegal until 2003
    The Mau Mau insurgency caused deep trauma on all sides and remains controversial in Kenya, where the first two presidents after independence in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi, tried to minimize its role in the national fight for freedom.

    The Mau Mau split Kenya's most numerous ethnic group, the Kikuyu, between those who joined the insurgency and so-called "loyalists" who sided with the British.

    Many former Mau Mau fighters endured a lifetime of poverty after coming out of their forest hide-outs, never having won the land they fought for as it was given mostly to their loyalist foes.

    A legal ban on the Mau Mau movement was lifted only in 2003, after President Mwai Kibaki came to power.

    Complete World coverage on NBCNews.com

    David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford University, who wrote a book called “Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire,” told NBC News that the ruling was “amazing,” saying “this moment has been a long time coming” for the British government.

    “It astonishes me they do not have the political acumen to understand this matter could be settled,” he said. “If we go to full trial, the revelations in that hearing will be even greater than what we have heard so far.”

    Reuters contributed to this report.

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  • Report: 211 die during drugs trials in India

    By NBC News staff

    Some 211 people died during clinical trials for new drugs in just six months in India, an official reportedly said.

    The Times of India newspaper said investigations were underway to see how many of the deaths were caused by the drugs or by diseases affecting the trial subjects, such as cancer.

    The Times said that in 2011 some 438 cases of serious adverse events were reported, with 16 later found to be due to clinical drugs trials.

    India’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organization has now proposed ways to reduce the number of problems and a new formula for compensation, the paper reported.

    Compensation is currently decided “according to the will” of the drug company, the Times added. Previous compensation payments of families of people who died during trials amounted to just a few dollars.

    "When a 70-year-old patient who is terminally ill dies during a clinical trial due to an adverse reaction of the drug, the compensation should be less than that given to a 22-year-old man in the first stage of the same disease who dies of the same drug," a CDSCO official told the paper.

    "The youth could be the sole bread-winner of the family and would have lived longer but for the adverse drug reaction. So, the guidelines quantify accordingly who should get how much compensation. At present, both could get the same amount and it could be abysmally low if decided by the pharmaceutical company,” the official added.

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  • Wrecked cruise ship passengers offered $14,460 plus travel, medical costs

    The company that owns the Costa Concordia is offering $14,460 per passenger to cover the cost of cruise tickets and travel expenses, but many passengers have declined the deal. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

    By msnbc.com news services

    Updated at 2:35 p.m. ET: ROME -- Passengers who were on the Costa Concordia are being offered $14,460 apiece to compensate them for their lost baggage and psychological trauma after the cruise ship ran aground and capsized off Tuscany when the captain deviated from his route.

    In addition to the lump-sum indemnity, Costa, a unit of the world's biggest cruise operator, the Miami-based Carnival Corp., also said it would reimburse uninjured passengers the full costs of their cruise, their return travel expenses and any medical expenses they sustained after the grounding.

    The deal does not apply to the hundreds of crew on the ship, many of whom have lost their jobs, the roughly 100 people who were injured in the chaotic evacuation or the families who lost loved ones. Sixteen bodies have already been recovered from the disaster and another 16 people who were on board are missing and presumed dead.

    The agreement was announced Friday after a day of negotiations between Costa representatives and Italian consumer groups representing 3,206 people from 61 countries who suffered no physical harm when the Costa Concordia hit a reef on Jan. 13.

    Passengers are free to pursue legal action on their own if they aren't satisfied with the deal and it was clear Friday — two weeks after the grounding — that some would.

    Survivors of the Costa Concordia are realizing the limits of their legal claims, as they signed away their rights when they bought their tickets. NBC's Kerry Sanders reports on what travelers should know.

    "We're very worried about the children," said Claudia Urru of Cagliari, Sardinia, who was on board the ship with her husband and two sons aged 3 and 12. Her eldest child, she said, is seeing a psychiatrist: He won't speak about the incident or even look at television footage of the grounding.

    "He's terrorized at night," she told The Associated Press. "He can't go to the bathroom alone. We're all sleeping together, except my husband, who has gone into another room because we don't all fit."

    As a result, she said, her family has retained a lawyer because they don't know what the real impact — financial or otherwise — of the trauma will be. She said her family simply isn't able to make such decisions now.

    "We are having a very, very hard time," she said.

    Some consumer groups have already signed on as injured parties in the criminal case against the Concordia's captain, Francesco Schettino, who is accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all those aboard were evacuated. He is under house arrest.

    In addition, Codacons, one of Italy's best-known consumer groups, has engaged two U.S. law firms to launch a class-action lawsuit against Costa and Carnival in Miami, claiming that it expects to get anywhere from $164,000 to $1.3 million per passenger.

    German attorney Hans Reinhardt, who currently represents 15 Germans who survived the accident and is in talks to represent families who lost loved ones, said he is advising his clients not to take the settlement.

    Instead, he, like Codacons, is working with the U.S. law firm to pursue the class-action suit in Miami.

    But Roberto Corbella, who represented Costa in the negotiations, said the deal provides passengers with quick and "generous" restitution that consumer groups estimate could amount to some $18,500 per passenger when it includes the other reimbursements.

    "The big advantage that they have is an immediate response, no legal expenses, and they can put this whole thing behind them," he told AP.

    Passengers who want to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts over the cruise ship disaster will likely face choppy seas. That's because the ticket contract includes what's known as a "choice of forum" clause stating that lawsuits must be filed in Italy.

    Depending on each country's laws, passengers can be at a sharp disadvantage compared to the U.S. legal system. Italy, for example, requires plaintiffs to post a judiciary tax that is a certain percentage for larger amounts of damages, said attorney Bob Peltz, chairman of the Cruise Line Committee of the Maritime Law Association.

    Maritime law experts say that similar attempts to sue in the U.S. despite these clauses have been turned away by the U.S. Supreme Court and that the expense of filing a lawsuit in a foreign court has deterred many plaintiffs in the past.

    "It's well-settled law," said Jerry Hamilton, a maritime attorney who regularly defends cruise lines against lawsuits. "The Supreme Court has said those clauses are valid clauses. They will be upheld."

    The clauses in the cruise industry are not as common in other forms of travel. Lawsuits against airlines, for example, can be brought virtually anyplace they do business for domestic flights; for international flights, lawyers can generally sue in the airline's home location or where the flight departed, among other venues.

    In an exclusive interview, the captain of the Costa Concordia says he feels as if his company has abandoned him as new video emerges from the day of the ship disaster. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.

    At least one lawsuit has been filed against Carnival and Costa in U.S. courts, by Peruvian crew member Gary Lobaton. That case, filed in Chicago federal court on Thursday, seeks class-action status to represent all passengers and 1,000 crew members. It blames the companies for negligence because of an unsafe evacuation and seeks at least $100 million in damages, attorney Monica Kelly said in an email to the Associated Press on Friday.

    Peltz said that case has two big problems: The passengers are covered by the forum clause, and crew members likely have contracts requiring them to submit first to arbitration.

    "I think they are going to have a difficult time," he said of the Chicago lawsuit. 

    The lawsuit sought to determine whether Carnival deviated from international safety standards when operating the cruise ship.

    "Costa Concordia's Captain, Francesco Schettino, delayed the order to abandon ship and deploy the lifeboats," Lobaton's lawyers said in the filing.

    Schettino has admitted he had taken the ship on "touristic navigation" near Giglio but has said the rocks he hit weren't charted on his nautical maps.

    Codacons has called for a criminal investigation into the not-infrequent practice of "tourist navigation" — steering huge cruise ships close to shore to give passengers a view of key sites.

    The chief executive of Costa, Pier Luigi Foschi, told Italian lawmakers this week that "tourist navigation" wasn't illegal, and was a "cruise product" increasingly sought out by passengers and offered by cruise lines to try to stay competitive.

    Neither Costa nor Carnival would comment about potential lawsuits. The case is Gary Lobaton vs Carnival Corp, Case No. 1:12-cv-00598, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

    Authorities have now identified the bodies of three German passengers recovered from the Costa Cruises ship that capsized off the coast of Italy earlier this month. Meanwhile, the children of a American couple still missing after the disaster have released a new statement. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.

    Search efforts for the missing resumed Friday as salvage crews set up to begin extracting some 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil on Saturday before it leaks into the pristine waters surrounding the ship. That pumping operation is expected to last nearly a month.

    Italy's civil protection office on Friday released a list of some of the other possibly toxic substances aboard the cruise liner, including 50 liters of insecticide and 41 cubic meters of lubricants, among other things.

    But so far, even though some film has been detected in the waters around the ship, tests on the waters indicate nothing outside the norm, according to Tuscany's regional environment agency.

    "Toxic tests have all resulted negative," the agency said.

    The crystal clear seas around Giglio are a haven for scuba divers and form part of a marine sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales.

    Slideshow: Luxury cruise ship runs aground

    DigitalGlobe

    The Costa Concordia, carrying more than 4,200 passengers, ran aground Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy. At least 15 people died in the accident, and rescuers continue to search for others missing.

    Launch slideshow

     

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    The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.