Tag Archives | Human Rights

Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal Finds Bush and Cheney Guilty

By on May 15, 2012 in News 9

Kuala LumpurOh, if only it were the Hague. Or better yet, the U.S. Supreme Court. I guess it’s a start, though. Via Common Dreams:

Former President George W Bush, his vice president, Dick Cheney, and six other members of his administration have been found guilty of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia.

Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five of their legal advisers were tried in their absence and convicted on Saturday.

Victims of torture told a panel of five judges in Kuala Lumpur of their suffering at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the evidence, Briton Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee, said he was beaten, put in a hood and left in solitary confinement. Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi said she was stripped and humiliated in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Transcripts of the five-day trial will be sent to the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and the Security Council.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 9

UN Investigator Says U.S. Should Return Stolen Land To Indian Tribes

By on May 9, 2012 in News 47
"The Treaty of Penn with the Indians" by Benjamin West (1771)

"The Treaty of Penn with the Indians" by Benjamin West (1771)

Says a new UN report on the conditions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Chris McGreal writes in the Guardian:

A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.

James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and “numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination”.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 47

Pope or Hitler: Who Said This?

By on May 8, 2012 in News 79

Pope Or HitlerThanks to jasonpaulhayes for the comment. As Pope or Hitler explains:

This is a response to the Pope’s claim that the Nazi movement was atheist. When it was nothing of the sort.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”

Please share what you learned from Pope or Hitler… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 79

Blind Chinese Activist Escapes House Arrest

By on May 1, 2012 in News 13

Chen GuangchengHe slipped past 100 security guards, scaled a wall and swam across a river to freedom. Reports Olivia Katrandjian on ABC News:

The U.S. State Department is being tight-lipped on the whereabouts of blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who escaped house arrest last week, but the organization that helped him escape says he’s in the hands of U.S. diplomats.

Chen, a 40-year-old human rights activist who has campaigned for disabled rights and against forced abortions, scaled a wall and slipped past around 100 security guards surrounding his house. Bob Fu, the founder and president of ChinaAid, which aided Chen in his getaway, called the escape an “extraordinary adventure.”

“He walked for hours from his own home in the middle of the night. He was wounded, wet, covered in mud. He swam across a river,” Fu told ABC News. Chen was picked up by supporters and driven to Beijing on April 23.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 13

U.S. Drones Killed 2,800 Civilians in Pakistan in 7 Years

By on April 29, 2012 in News 21

Drone FiringVia Press TV:

A Pakistani human rights lawyer says over 2,800 of the 3,000 people killed over the past seven years in non-UN-sanctioned US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians, Press TV reports. Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, told Press TV on Saturday that only 170 of the people killed in the aerial attacks on the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan have been identified as militants.

That means that “over 2,800 people were civilians, whose identities are not known, and they have just been killed on suspicion of being militants,” he added. US President Barack Obama publicly confirmed for the first time in late January that drone aircraft have struck targets inside Pakistan. Obama said “a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA”, the acronym for Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistan contends that the drone strikes are counterproductive. “We are of the firm view that these are unlawful, counterproductive and hence unacceptable,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said on January 31.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 21

Guantanamo Watchdogs Say Obama Gets Away With Legal Moves Bush Wouldn’t Have

By on April 23, 2012 in News 25

3-6-12-obama-press-conference-cropped-proto-custom_28As we assess Barack Obama’s first term, why hasn’t his reneging on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay stirred more outrage? TPMMuckraker writes:

Bryan Broyles, the Pentagon’s deputy chief defense counsel at Guantanamo, and other observers believe that some policy changes instituted under the Obama administration would have sparked outrage if President George W. Bush was still in the White House.

Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system. “There is nothing about this system that the average American, if they were caught up in it, would see as being fair,” Kammen said. “The Republicans have an interest in keeping this process going and the Democrats have an interest, to a certain extent, in not embarrassing Obama.”

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 25

UC Davis Pepper Spray Report Faults Police, Administration

By on April 18, 2012 in News 18

2011-11-22-10-55-05-11-this-is-lt-john-pike-who-pepper-sprayed-studentsThe Infamous Brad on the damning report just released by UC Davis regarding the infamous police brutality (involving illegal, military-grade pepper spray) against students engaging in (entirely legal) protests this past year:

You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we’re told that we should “wait until the facts are in” before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet meme by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. The university just released that report, along with their summary, and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.

You probably weren’t aware that the protesters warned the university that they were going to be protesting two weeks in advance, were you?

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 18

The Hunger Games In North Korea

By on April 9, 2012 in News 11

imagesGrimly close to a real-life version of everyone’s favorite dystopian novel/movie? Guernica on author Shin Dong-hyuk, who in 2005 slipped out of North Korea through a hole in an high-voltage fence:

Born into one of North Korea’s six “complete control districts” (labor camps), which have remained virtually unnoticed by the global community despite their visibility on Google Earth, Shin was born stripped of his humanity. Classified as “irredeemable” because of an uncle’s crime against the state (fleeing the country after the Korean War), Shin was regularly overworked, abused, and starved. In Camp 14, an isolated compound about 30 miles long, Shin was taught to believe that violence was normal and snitching a duty.

When. at the age of 13, he discovered that his mother and older brother were planning an escape attempt, he promptly told a prison guard. Shin’s mother and brother were brought in front of the crowded camp and shot.

Continue Reading · 11

High School Students Suspended After Demanding ‘An Education’

By on March 31, 2012 in News 9

Detroit Public SchoolsChastity Pratt Dawsey writes in the Detroit Free Press:

About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes to protest a host of issues at the all-boys school.

The concerns included a lack of consistent teachers and the removal of the principal.

The boys, dressed in school blazers, neckties and hoodies, chanted, “We want education!” as they marched outside the school.

Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school’s future. As recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym, library or cafeteria due to a lack of teachers, parents said. Worries escalated after district offices moved into part of the building in January, and the school was not listed as an application school for next year…

Continue Reading · 9

Racial Profiling is Legal in Germany

By on March 31, 2012 in News 8

PolizeiVia the Local:

The young black German whose refusal to show police his ID led to a court ruling that cops could use skin colour as a criteria for spot-checks, says he will fight the case all the way.

Speaking to The Local, the 25-year-old student said he was disappointed by the verdict which has provoked a storm of outrage. One human rights lawyer called for the judge to be dismissed, while his own lawyer says he will take the case to the Constitutional Court if necessary.

“I don’t want to believe it — that my country now supports this, it is terrible,” the student said.

“The police have been told they can do this — no-one is thinking of the person getting hurt. I just wish every kind of racism would stop; it is horrid how people are treated by those who think they are lesser.” The student, who asked not to be identified, said he often took the train from Kassel, where he studies, to visit family in Frankfurt.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 8