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Iran: Is the Short Honeymoon of Media Freedom Over?
On July 31, a prominent Iranian journalist tweeted, “Saba’s mother has now joined Twitter.” Saba’s mother Akram Mohammadi, had just given an interview about her daughter Saba’s agonizing 65 days of pretrial detention at an unknown location. Unidentified security officials had arrested Saba Azarpaik, a Tehran-based journalist, on May 28.
A few hours later, the Twitter account linked to her posted this message: “Mr. Rouhani, you promised that our children would no longer be arrested for writing articles and reporting… So what happened?”
Standing Up for Girls’ Education in Nigeria
It took Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan 18 days to set up a rescue committee to find the 276 girls who were kidnapped from their school last month.
Let’s say that one more time: it took the Nigerian government the better part of a month to respond to the violent kidnapping of girls who were just trying to get an education. Girls who, despite incredible poverty and a widespread cultural belief that girls should not go to school, get up every morning and go to where they hope will be a safe space to learn.
“I am frustrated,” said one Nigerian activist and Global Fund for Women ally who requested anonymity. Many of her fellow activists are being detained and questioned by police for speaking out about the horrific crime. “The response has been slow, too little, too late, or none at all. Citizens are demanding information—basic, accurate information that will reassure the public that something tangible is being done about the attacks.”
Guatemala: Suppressing Dissent at Home and Abroad
It’s a rare occasion when the president of a small Central American country tries to get a U.S. Senate aide fired. But Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina is not having the typical term.
Pérez Molina presided last year over the sharpest escalation in targeted attacks on human rights defenders since Guatemala’s armed conflict ended in 1996. Attacks on human rights defenders—a term encompassing journalists, judicial workers, unionists, indigenous leaders, and others working for basic rights—increased last year by 126 percent, by far the greatestjump recorded in any year in post-war Guatemala. Eighteen human rights defenders were assassinated, a 72-percent increase over 2012, even as the country’s general murder rate has decreased. Also last year, President Pérez Molina was accused of participating in genocide. A former soldier testifying during the trial of former dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt swore under oath that President Pérez Molina had committed atrocities.
Still, Otto Pérez Molina was hoping that the United States would restore military aid to Guatemala, which has been restricted for decades because of human rights abuses. He achieved a measure of success. The United States recently lifted the outright ban on military aid to Guatemala for the first time in 24 years.
Conservatives Use Moral Relativism to Blame Progressives for Genital Mutilation
The neo-conservative camp, always eager to wrestle with imaginary positions of their opponents, is now bravely challenging another belief that no one holds, which is that “all cultures are equal.” George Mason University Professor Walter Williams has jumped aboard the “Western values are superior to all others” bandwagon and asks, “Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan Africa and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value?” The neoconservative Clarion Project’s Douglas Murray takes the campaign directly to progressives by asking, “How many young girls’ clitorises had to be mutilated while they busily curated their left-wing credentials?”
This arrogant cultural trope is nothing new. The neo-conservatives who brought us the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay have promoted the “inequality of cultures” idea throughout the War on Terror to justify militarism, invasion, torture, and systematic violation of international law. Sliding from “culture” to politics to statecraft, their ideological conceit is that “we,” the West, have an enduring tradition of protecting women, while “they,” the Middle Easterners, are so barbaric that they cut the clitorises off of women, and therefore our “culture” should govern their “culture.” But their sudden passion for Middle Eastern women’s rights—indeed, any women’s rights—must be taken with a shaker of salt.
Obviously, not all cultural values are equal in a moral sense. For example, a political culture of militarism and war, the kind that produced hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Iraq War, is inferior to a culture that prefers non-violence, diplomacy and peace, the kind that you might find in, say, Canada. Furthermore, where it occurs, in both Islamic and non-Islamic communities, female genital mutilation is indeed barbaric, savage, and backward and should be condemned as such.
But neo-conservative fake-feminists only play the “pro-woman” game when it comes time to bash fanatical Islamists who happen not to be on our side in whatever war the neo-conservatives are pushing.
North Korea: UN Should Act on Atrocities Report
A new United Nations report has found that crimes against humanity are occurring in North Korea and calls for an international tribunal to investigate and hold perpetrators to account.
The report, by a UN Commission of Inquiry appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2013, recommends that the UN Security Council refer the situation in North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights carry out investigations.
By focusing only on the nuclear threat in North Korea, the Security Council is overlooking the crimes of North Korean leaders who have overseen a brutal system of gulags, public executions, disappearances, and mass starvation.Photo: A North Korean prison policewoman stands guard behind fences at a jail on the banks of Yalu River near the Chongsong county of North Korea, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong on May 8, 2011. © 2011 Reuters
19 Feb 2014 / Reblogged from humanrightswatch with 152 notes / north korea human rights human rights violations crimes against humanity reblog
U.S. Aid and Human Rights Violations in Philippines
As the human rights situation in the Philippines has deteriorated, U.S. military aid has ramped up.