AR-News: help 298 macaques"HORROR" Covance Undercover

[סמדר]

----- Original Message ----- 
From:  "bunny" rabbit at iinet.net.au

animal_net at yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2004 12:44 AM
Subject: [animal_net] Digest Number 971
Message: 1         
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 12:30:29 +0800
From: "bunny" Subject: Fwd: Help defend the  298 Macaques awaiting delivery to vivisection

http://www.covance.backfire.dk/

Onderwerp: Re: FW: help 298 macaques"HORROR" Covance Undercover

TO DEFEND THE 298 MACAQUES THAT ARE IN CAMARLES WAITING TO BE 

DELIVERED TO A GERMAN LABORATORY FOR VIVISECTION


http://www.altarriba.org/camarles/010.htm


in different languages

 
Covance Undercover
If you want, you can skip all this and proceed to Covance Undercover. 

Covance is a multinational biomedical testing company which abuses
animals and attempts to quash free speech. This site now contains
evidence regarding both of these despicable behaviors. 

Some animal-rights activists in the city of Münster, Germany obtained
photographs, video, and other evidence of Covance's abuses of monkeys
and other animals and created a website called Covance Undercover.
Rather than respond directly to the allegations contained therein,
Covance corporation has attempted to intimidate, through lots and lots
of lawyers, the ISPs which people are using to get the site in question
onto the internet. 

Their primary legal person seems to be one Thomas de Weerd, of the firm
Houthoff-Buruma in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This is somewhat odd, as
Covance does not otherwise have any offices in the Netherlands - it
seems they want to insulate their lawyers from public protest. Indeed,
Covance is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, not 60 miles
(100 km) from the location of the owner of this particular mirror, and
yet they have yet, it seems, to hire any American lawyers to work on the
case. 

So, first, some documents about the legal efforts to shut down this site
and other mirror: 

A complaint to my ISP (text file, in English) 
My reply (text file, in English) 
(Note: in a brief email not reproduced here, my ISP decided that it is
not their responsibility to enforce German law, and so my website will
remain up for the time being.) 
Despite Mr. de Weerd's assertions, Covance Undercover remains legal in
Switzerland, according to this ruling of a high court in Geneva. (1.23MB
PDF file en français) 
A well-known Swiss professor of law has written a paper opining that,
under Swiss law, the Covance Undercover website is quite legal. (40.7kB
PDF file auf Deutsch) 
Covance has hired some lawyers in Hong Kong to threaten ISPs there.
(237kB PDF, in English) 
The regional court in Münster ruled on 7 January 2004 (141kB PDF, in
English translation) that Friedrich Mülln is forbidden to distribute the
photos and video contained in Covance Undercover. Note, of course, that
this decision is not binding on anyone but Mr. Mülln, and certainly not
on non-Germans. (also: Original, auf Deutsch, 503kB PDF) 
A report on a demonstration in Basel written for Covance's lawyers
(76.8kB PNG image auf Deutsch) 
Update! As of May 21, 2004, the Bezirksgericht (District Court)
Münchwilen in Switzerland has ruled that vgt.ch is not forbidden to
publish the photographs contained in Covance Undercover. The latest news
in this situation is available from c9c.info, and now we have the ruling
itself available (2.65MB PDF, auf Deutsch). 
Swiss television's nightly news had also a TV news piece (11.6MB WMV
movie; auf Deutsch) about the incident. 
(Legal documents above are listed in the order I post them, not in
chronological or any other sensible order.)

Covance's free-speech-quashing lawyers include:

Thomas de Weerd of the firm Houthoff-Buruma in Amsterdam 
Robert Clark of the firm Deacons in Hong Kong 
Peter Pestalozzi and Clara-Ann Gordon of the firm Pestalozzi Lachenal
Patry in Zurich 
Thomas Schierack, Barbara Schramm, Dr. Christoph Anger, Anja Bornemann,
and Nikolaus Schulz, all of the firm Arcon in Köln 
And, now, please proceed to judge for yourself by visiting Covance
Undercover... 
If you'd like to set up your own mirror, you can download a ZIP file
(10.7MB) and put it on some webspace that you control. Also available: a
package of the legal documents offered here (ZIP; 4.52MB) 

The following other mirrors are known to exist: 

http://www.tierversuche-muenster.org/ (the original source for the site;
currently unavailable) 
http://www.covance.backfire.dk/ 
http://rkaufman.free.fr/covance/ 
http://www.geocities.com/krast0r/Covance 
http://www.radiolivre.org/covance_undercover/ 
http://nocompromise.org/covance_undercover/ 
http://www.Mtl2600.org/covance 
http://www.columbinepaintball.com/scams/covance/ 
http://covance.topsight.net/ 
http://covance.elfnet.org/ 
http://tigerstyle.sytes.net/covance/ 
http://www.hackerheaven.org/covance/ 

There is also a video, some 24 minutes long and narrated in English,
giving more details of the abuses. Due primarily to bandwidth
constraints, it is not made available here; however, you can get it from
the eDonkey file-sharing network, if you have the proper client software
installed, by following this ed2k link. People who cannot get the file
through this method but require a copy can contact me (details below) to
work something out. 

Some study reports and other interesting internal Covance documents were
posted to the original Covance Undercover website just before it was
shut down. Although the mirror above does not include these documents, I
was able to obtain a copy of them. You can browse through these
documents or grab a ZIP file (6.03MB) of them all. 

Questions? Comments? New mirrors? Vague legal threats? Email me. Faxes
and voicemail to +1 (530) 686-8623, or you can email me and ask for my
real phone number. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last Modified: 21:26 UTC, May 24, 2004, Mike Castleman (PGP Public Key) 

Covance is a trademark, presumably registered, of Covance, Inc., and all
its international subsidiaries. For the very dense: this site is not an
official publication of Covance. In fact, they'd rather this site didn't
exist at all. 






the wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. he is in front of it - axel munthe

"Never doubt that a small group of dedicated citizens can change the world. 
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."      Margaret Mead
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