It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever.
Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges?
When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene?
Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t The New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection?
If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no. At very least, it’s more complicated than that.
To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place.
Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, Britain, on April 11, 2019. His shaving gear had been confiscated. Image: The Conversation/EPA/Stringer
That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.
What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018:
I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!
Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”
Cover of The Trial of Julian Assange … “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. Image: Verso
The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council directly appoint special rapporteurs on torture. The position is unpaid — Melzer earns his living as a professor of international law — but they have diplomatic immunity and operate largely outside the UN’s hierarchies.
Among the many pleas for his attention, Melzer’s small office chooses between 100 and 200 each year to officially investigate. His conclusions and recommendations are not binding on states. He bleakly notes that in barely 10 percent of cases does he receive full co-operation from states and an adequate resolution.
He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests.
Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”.
What he finds is stark and disturbing:
The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.
It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.
Collateral murder
The dirty secrets of the powerful are difficult to face, which is why we — and I don’t exclude myself — swallow neatly packaged slurs and diversions of the kind listed at the beginning of this article.
Melzer rightly takes us back to April 2010, four years after the Australian-born Assange had founded WikiLeaks, a small organisation set up to publish official documents that it had received, encrypted so as to protect whistle-blowers from official retribution.
Assange released video footage showing in horrifying detail how US soldiers in a helicopter had shot and killed Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in 2007.
Apart from how the soldiers spoke — “Hahaha, I hit them”, “Nice”, “Good shot” — it looks like most of the victims were civilians and that the journalists’ cameras were mistaken for rifles. When one of the wounded men tried to crawl to safety, the helicopter crew, instead of allowing their comrades on the ground to take him prisoner, as required by the rules of war, seek permission to shoot him again.
As Melzer’s detailed description makes clear, the soldiers knew what they were doing:
“Come on, buddy,” the gunner comments, aiming the crosshairs at his helpless target. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”
The soldiers’ request for authorisation to shoot is given. When the wounded man is carried to a nearby minibus, it is shot to pieces with the helicopter’s 30mm gun. The driver and two other rescuers are killed instantly. The driver’s two young children inside are seriously wounded.
US army command investigated the matter, concluding that the soldiers acted in accordance with the rules of war, even though they had not. Equally to the point, writes Melzer, the public would never have known a war crime had been committed without the release of what Assange called the “Collateral Murder” video.
The video footage was just one of hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks released last year in tranches known as the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and cablegate. They revealed numerous alleged war crimes and provided the raw material for a shadow history of the disastrous wars waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, in Aghanistan and Iraq.
Julian Assange in 2010. Image: The Conversation/ Stefan Wermuth/AP
Punished forever Melzer retraces what has happened to Assange since then, from the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden to Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in an attempt to avoid the possibility of extradition to the US if he returned to Sweden. His refuge led to him being jailed in the United Kingdom for breaching his bail conditions.
Sweden eventually dropped the sexual assault charges, but the US government ramped up its request to extradite Assange. He faces charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, which, if successful, could lead to a jail term of 175 years.
Two key points become increasingly clear as Melzer methodically works through the events.
The first is that there has been a carefully orchestrated plan by four countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and, yes, Australia — to ensure Assange is punished forever for revealing state secrets.
Assange displaying his ankle security tag in 2011 at the house where he was required to stay by a British judge. Image: The Conversation/Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The second is that the conditions he has been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to if the US’s extradition request is granted, have amounted to torture.
On the first point, how else are we to interpret the continual twists and turns over nearly a decade in the official positions taken by Sweden and the UK? Contrary to the obfuscating language of official communiques, all of these have closed down Assange’s options and denied him due process.
Melzer documents the thinness of the Swedish authorities’ case for charging Assange with sexual assault. That did not prevent them from keeping it open for many years. Nor was Assange as uncooperative with police as has been suggested. Swedish police kept changing their minds about where and whether to formally interview Assange because they knew the evidence was weak.
Melzer also takes pains to show how Swedish police also overrode the interests of the two women who had made the complaints against Assange.
It is distressing to read the conditions Assange has endured over several years. A change in the political leadership of Ecuador led to a change in his living conditions in the embassy, from cramped but bearable to virtual imprisonment.
Since being taken from the embassy to Belmarsh prison in 2019, Assange has spent much of his time in solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours a day. He has been denied all but the most limited access to his legal team, let alone family and friends.
He was kept in a glass cage during his seemingly interminable extradition hearing, appeals over which could continue for several years more years, according to Melzer.
Julian Assange’s partner, Stella Morris, speaks to the media outside the High Court in London in January this year. Image: The Converstion/Alberto Pezzali/AP
Assange’s physical and mental health have suffered to the point where he has been put on suicide watch. Again, that seems to be the point, as Melzer writes:
The primary purpose of persecuting Assange is not – and never has been – to punish him personally, but to establish a generic precedent with a global deterrent effect on other journalist, publicists and activists.
So will the new Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, do any more than his three Coalition and two Labor predecessors to advocate for the interests of an Australian citizen? In December 2021, Guardian Australia reported Albanese saying he did “not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” and that “enough is enough”.
Since being sworn in as prime minister, he has kept his cards close to his chest.
The actions of his predecessors suggest he won’t, even though Albanese has already said on several occasions since being elected that he wants to do politics differently.
Melzer, among others, would remind him of the words of former US president Jimmy Carter, who, contrary to other presidents, said he did not deplore the WikiLeaks revelations.
They just made public what was the truth. Most often, the revelation of truth, even if it’s unpleasant, is beneficial. […] I think that, almost invariably, the secrecy is designed to conceal improper activities.
In their new book Atmospheres of Violence, organizer and University of California Berkeley gender studies professor Eric A. Stanley describes how the United States political system depends on violence against trans people.
Stanley argues that to stay in power, U.S. institutions and the people behind them — including politicians, their corporate benefactors, and the armed guard forces that police the rest of us — consolidate power and wealth through the constant precarity experienced by marginalized people.
The attacks continue to creep out of capitol buildings like spilled oil, contributing to jumps in mental health emergencies and death: ATrevor Project study released in May 2022 found 45 percent of TLGBQ youth had seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
While conservatives scapegoat trans people to rally their bases, liberals spit out toothless speeches supporting trans people at the same time as they push spending bills to enrich police, the military and various other policing departments too numerous to name. These, the country’s most well-funded institutions, are notorious for reinforcing gender binaries and stereotypes, high rates of assault and rape, and near-immunity from repercussions for harm they cause.
March 31 marked the first time the White House celebrated the annual Transgender Day of Visibility. In the press briefing room, aprerecorded message from President Joe Biden played, and officials announced more funding for the Transportation Security Administration to install gender-neutral surveillance scanner technology at airports. The White House’s other announcement: It will start issuing nonbinary passports in April, a positive change, but one that will mostly affect a narrow slice of trans U.S. citizens who plan to travel internationally soon. (It’s also a late change, given thatalmost half of U.S. states already offer nonbinary IDs.)
Atmospheres of Violence Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer UngovernableDuke University Press
Atmospheres of Violence details stories of pain and resistance from the past half-century that have mostly been lost to history. Some are shocking in their cruelty and proximity to the U.S. political machinery — as when the government used the chaos of HIV/AIDS to sap energy from radical trans liberation movements of the 1980s and 1990s while it propped up the nonprofit-industrial complex and pharmaceutical companies. As these system-enabled tragedies unfold, the book offers moments of relief as it describes trans people working against and around the system’s rules.
By its end, the book provides a figurative version of the mace “bomb” that the Black trans revolutionary Marsha P. Johnson described carrying before her still-unsolved death in 1992. It’s one of the book’s inscriptions: “If they attack me, I’m going to attack them, with my bomb.”
Johnson was prepared for the everyday war that continues against Black trans people. The book gives readers more reasons to organize against the U.S. empire, and to do away with attempts to incrementally bring progress to a country built on the bodies of trans people. As the fog of the mace subsides and the rubble of the empire settles, Stanley points readers to futures that are independent of concentrated physical and psychic violence. Truthout interviewed the author in May.
Toshio Meronek: During an online launch for Atmospheres of Violence, one of your mentors, Angela Davis, was on the panel. She said she was especially moved by the book’s insistence that we “unlearn ideas” that reproduce or strengthen the forces we are fighting against. Can you speak more on “unlearning” assumptions most of us have internalized from when we were young? What assumptions do we need to unlearn?
Eric A. Stanley: Learning must also be a practice of unlearning, this is something Angela continues to model for us. I think specifically she was referring to one of the major claims of the book, that inclusion is not evidence of freedom. To begin, I should also say that this book is as woven from collective struggle as much as it is from more traditional texts. Much of the organizing that I’ve been involved with has been pushing back against the logic that assimilation for trans/queer people will provide us with the world we want and need. It was also organizing, mostly around housing, HIV/AIDS and various prison abolitionist projects that led me to understand that inclusion does not provide the relief we are taught it does, but even worse, it’s one of the ways harm is reproduced under the name of safety.
Eric A. StanleyCourtesy of the author
Perhaps a way to think about this is through the push to include gender and sexuality in federal hate crimes enhancement laws. While many mainstream LGBT organizations have long argued for such expansion, trans/queer prison abolitionists have shown how the law itself is foundationally racist, as it is transphobic/homophobic. So, while hate crimes laws claim to be deterrents to the very real violence people endure, they grow the state’s capacity to terrorize the very same people they purport to protect.
Through this, and other examples, the book demonstrates how racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to the United States. I make this argument through analyzing attacks against trans/queer people and also forms of structuring neglect, like inaction around HIV/AIDS that destroys people and their communities. While these, and many other forms of brutality directed toward Black, Brown and/or Indigenous trans women persist, the law appears as the sole avenue of redress. What we have then is a circular trap. Structural violence, like policing, is offered as the remedy to personal harms.
Right. The government and its biggest cheerleaders — Democrat-leaning organizations like the Center for American Progress — put their energy into studying how to make the justice system “more just.” They offer solutions like shifting tax money to go to “transgender sensitivity” training for police, or funding for lawyers’ fees for people who can’t afford specialized lawyers.
Severalconversations in Atmospheres of Violence point to the storytelling of the book and the way you write with care around people and topics that are potentially soul-deflating, which asks how society allows and even abets so many tragedies of violence against trans people. For a book published by an academic press, they mention the writing as a way in for non-academic readers. Do you purposefully write to reach non-academic audiences?
I think writing produces audiences as much as it finds them. What this means is that when I write, I don’t know in advance who will be drawn to the work. When writing is accused of being “too theoretical,” which mine sometimes is, it’s more often than not an accusation made on behalf of an imagined other. As a person with an intellectual disability, I’m acutely aware of the ways we are all captured differently by language. For me, writing, not unlike other expressive practices like dance, poetry, or conceptual art, is an invitation for both form and content to forge a path toward new understandings. Of course, not everyone might be into it. Just like we might not all be into noise music or science fiction, and that’s OK. But one thing I’m emphatic about is that we need more ways to explain the unexplainable world we are trying to survive, not less.
Something I’ve noticed with this book so far is that most of the feedback I’ve received has been from high school debaters and Black trans/queer people who have formed reading groups in prisons. I think this is rad, and I feel lucky that people are engaging with the text. In the end, as our friend Tourmaline reminds us, theory is simply another name for people fashioning words to describe their lives. We are all making theory, all the time.
On March 31 of this year, the federal government observed Trans Day of Visibility for the first time. In a previous book you co-edited, Trap Door (2017), you and your co-editors, Johanna Burton and Tourmaline, argued against the allure of mainstream cultural visibility, and against the idea that visibility is a shortcut to easier lives for gender nonconforming people.
In the anthology I had a conversation with Miss Major and CeCe McDonald, who said that more inclusion in mainstream media hasn’t benefited the community at large. That was five years ago. Has your view of representation changed?
As a filmmaker and organizer, I know the transformative possibility of representation. That said, mainstream visual culture’s flirtation with trans/queer characters does not necessarily change the material conditions of our lives. Holding these contradictions forces me to examine how film’s form, following scholars like Jemma DeCristo and David Marriott, is not only anti-Black, but it is also anti-trans. This seems important to explore as we live in the reality where increased representation is not providing the transformation we need, so staying with these questions is vital.
I’m also interested in tracking how radical demands for an entirely different social order get flipped into primarily wanting more trans people in movies. It’s not that I’m against trans people in movies, but I think we must hold open this question if we are to produce liberatory images. What this means for me is that we rethink the entire production, distribution and consumption of visual culture. That’s an overwhelming task, and yet it can also mean the difference between life and death.
Luckily, lots of other people have also been thinking through these questions and dreaming up ways to weaponize their practices toward collective liberation. We are not alone, and we have generations to connect with, but that these histories are hidden is not an accident.
What’s the significance of the photograph on the cover: a picture by Every Ocean Hughes of the remains of New York City’s Chelsea Piers?
Every’s image is a beautiful mix of sorrow and possibility, which reflects the tone of the book. It’s a black and white photograph of what remains of the Christopher Street piers in New York City. The pierces were an otherwise hidden place on the edge of the city where trans/queer people cruised and mostly Black and Brown young people built underground networks of care. Not far from there is also where Marsha P. Johnson’s body was found, further anointing the sacredness of the space.
I’m also drawn to Every’s photograph as it’s in conversation with Alvin Baltrop’s work. Baltrop was a Black gay man who documented the queer sexual cultures of the piers in the 1970s and ‘80s. I am moved by the image’s referential history, how it brings this past into the present. Its view of the horizon also offers a bit of hope, or something like it. Even after much community organizing by groups like FIERCE and others, the piers have mostly been destroyed by the relentless gentrification of Manhattan, and yet, trans/queer life continues. The photograph holds these contested realities.
I became close with Miss Major through working with her on your film with Chris Vargas, Criminal Queers. You met her years before in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood in San Francisco that was a lot more welcoming to trans and queer people than the Castro district, which is the city’s famous gayborhood.
The Tenderloin holds a somewhat mythic place in both my personal biography and the larger stories of trans history in the United States. Of course, it’s where the anti-police Compton’s Cafeteria riots were in August of 1966, and it’s also where I first encountered Miss Major when she was working at TARC. The neighborhood has long been under siege by the tech-fueled gentrification threatening to destroy it from every side.
Even under such duress, it’s still a place of much trans of color life, where people who are mostly low income and/or unhoused continue to scavenge a life out of the ruins of “latest capitalism“ (a term Angela Davis once used when I was her student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to describe the constant transformation of how we describe “late capitalism“). This is not to be overly romantic, but to name the forms of ungovernability, or what I call living in refusal, that might otherwise fall out of social movement histories. That is one of the commitments of the book, to archive these practices as forms of riotous theory.
The Tenderloin, like the piers, is a spatial reminder of the racialized anti-trans/queer violence that is everywhere. And yet, life remains there. The book ends not with a prescription, but with another set of questions: If we know that the law (and by extension the settler-state) cannot end anti-trans/queer violence, then what forms of solidarity might be intensified so that we find more than survival?
In a moving series of interviews with those fleeing persecution, the authors expose the appalling conditions in Greek refugee camps
In this timely book,Helen Benedict, a British-American professor, and Eyad Awwadawnan, a Syrian writer and refugee, expose the appalling conditions of the overcrowded Greek camps where desperate people fleeing war, persecution, poverty and violence are confined and denied their legal rights under the watch of the west.
As a consequence of the 2016 deal the EU made with Turkey, Greece has become “a trap” for those detained in camps while they wait to be granted refugee status or returned to Turkey, which many consider unsafe. Since 2020, thousands have been left in limbo in a country that does not want them and cannot accommodate them.
The last 18 months have been deeply challenging from a human rights perspective, with the COVID pandemic exposing and exacerbating inequalities, human rights defenders continuing to face deadly threats and choking restrictions to their work, and some governments working to undermine the accessibility and effectiveness of human rights mechanisms and multilateral processes. But it’s also been a period over which sparks have been lit on key issues which we must now nurture and ensure fires of progress that long burn bright.
ISHR invites you to discover our latest annual report, outlining our key impacts during the last year and our vision for 2022 and the years ahead.
What did we achieve in 2021?
Here are just a few examples of our collective impact: Together with human rights defenders fighting racism, we celebrated the establishment of a historic expert mechanism to advance racial justice and equality in law enforcement, as well as a commission to inquire into the root causes of conflict and violence against the Palestinian people. Together with defenders promoting women’s rights, we were inspired by the widespread mobilisation and calls for accountability in cases of sexual harassment and assault, as well as the release from arbitrary detention of a number of prominent women human rights defenders. Together with defenders working on the environment and the climate crisis, we commended the landmark recognition under international human rights law of the right to a healthy and sustainable environment, as well as the mandating of a new UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change. Together with defenders working to make governments accountable, we rejoiced in seeing an increased number and diversity of persons prepared to speak up and take action against widespread and systemic violations in States including China, Egypt, Nicaragua, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, while in other States in Africa, Asia and Latin America progress was made in the legal recognition and protection of defenders. See more achievements by clicking on the two videos below and visiting our website!
On 2 May 2022 – for the 30th year – the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has put forward its review of the state of human rights in the country and the measures that should be taken to reduce human rights violations in the country. The main takeaway from the report is that there were blatant and unrelenting attempts to crack down on dissent, with at least nine journalists having faced harassment in an attempt to silence them in their work. As happens every year, violence against women took every possible form: from rape to domestic abuse to horrific murders to honour killings. The report has noted that 478 honour killings were reported in the country in 2021, although the number is almost certainly much higher with many never reaching the press, and over 5000 cases of rapes were reported by the media. Overall, violence in the country appeared to have increased quite dramatically. The HRCP has especially noted the case of Nazim Jokhio, and the mob lynching of Sri Lankan national Priyantha Kumara in Sialkot. These are but just a few examples of the disturbing trend of increased violence in the country. Just a few months back, research had revealed how many of these cases of violence are perpetrated by young people. The past few years we have watched in horror as Pakistani society has increasingly grown more violent — bringing nightmare-inducing optics straight to our phones. This is a direct result of the extremist tendency prevalent in society, an inevitable consequence of consistent state policies.
The report has also noted the way the previous government used ordinances to push through laws, some of them highly detrimental to freedom of expression. The HRCP has also noted that religion was used multiple times over the years to try and stop various acts of legislation from being passed. One of the most difficult issues human rights defenders in Pakistan have faced over a number of years has been that of missing persons or enforced disappearances. In 2021, says the HRCP, the highest number of enforced disappearances was reported to have been in Balochistan, with the government having failed to resolve concerns of families of the missing despite sit-ins in Islamabad.
From missing persons to the Gujjar and Korangi nullah evictions to sectarian violence to violence against transgender persons — the HRCP’s State of Human Rights 2021 is a timely reminder to the current government that it must do better on all these counts and more. It is on the Shehbaz Sharif led government to ensure that media freedom is upheld, there are no more arbitrary anti-journalism laws, and journalists are not harassed for doing their jobs. The incumbent government must not make the mistake of taking human rights issues lightly during its tenure. This report card on human rights by the HRCP comes out every year but each successive government has failed to take suggestions from rights activists seriously. It is hoped that with a change in government there will finally be a change in how citizens’ rights are treated and that all citizens from all communities and regions in the country can feel safe and less vulnerable to injustice and state or non-state violence.
In the face of the multiple crises of our time, ECCHR continues to stand for human rights and climate justice. To outline the scope of our aims, Joshua Castellino, a member of the ECCHR Advisory Board, authored a piece for its Annual Report that clearly emphasizes how we must think collectively about the future. For us, “collectively” means that our actions as human rights lawyers are to be guided by global solidarity and cooperation.
In her series Contagion – Colour on the Front Line (whose pieces she and the Autograph Gallery allowed us to reproduce in this report), Aida Silvestri uses cocoa, tea, tobacco, sugar and coffee to draw a connection between colonial exploitation and those who were carelessly exposed to danger during the pandemic while providing largely low-paid services with almost no protection.
The collaborative work by CSHR [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2018/06/27/new-global-center-for-sport-and-human-rights-created-to-address-abuses/] and Clifford Chance is an independent report recognising highlights from each city’s human rights strategy, providing a view across numerous human rights factors addressed by the cities, including anti-discrimination, human rights-related environmental impact, and workers’ and housing rights. The report recognises proposed initiatives to advance human rights promotion and protection at a city-by-city level, highlighting commitments made in the respective candidate city bids. It also identifies opportunities for ongoing dialogue and peer-learning within and among the cities and stakeholders.
CSHR experts worked with a team of 13 Clifford Chance lawyers from New York, Washington, DC and London to review and analyse submissions from all 22 cities, from three countries, over nearly a three-month period. The report’s release comes in the run up to FIFA, the world’s governing body of football, selecting the host cities and will complement FIFA’s assessment of the cities’ human rights plans.
The Promise of a Positive Legacy includes a compelling colour-coded heatmap that offers an at-a-glance view of where cities have placed the greatest emphasis on human rights issues most salient to their own contexts.
The report: The Promise of a Positive Legacy: The 2026 FIFA World Cup Host City Candidates’ Human Rights Plans
4Mins Read Robert Downey Jr. has announced he is writing a book to help readers lower their carbon footprint. It will be written in partnership with bestselling environmental author Thomas Kostigen. Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time has been picked up by Blackstone Publishing, via president and CEO Josh Stanton. The book […]
On 12 April, 2022, the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices was made public. The Human Rights Reports 2021 cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements. The U.S. Department of State submits reports on all countries receiving assistance and all United Nations member states to the U.S. Congress in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Trade Act of 1974. For nearly five decades, the United States has issued the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, – in 2021, covering 198 countries and territories. The preface states that: “The Biden Administration has put human rights at the center of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. We have also recognized our nation has not always succeeded in protecting the dignity and rights of all Americans, despite the proclamations of freedom, equality, and justice in our founding documents. It is through the continued U.S. commitment to advance human rights, both domestically and internationally, that we best honor the generations of Americans who are Black, Brown, or other people of color, indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ persons, immigrants, women and girls, and other historically marginalized groups whose advocacy for their rights and for others has pushed America toward a “more perfect union.
President Biden has called the defense of democracy and human rights the defining challenge of our time. By convening the first Summit for Democracy in December 2021 – bringing together representatives from 100 governments as well as civil society and the private sector – he sparked global attention and vigor toward democratic renewal and respect for human rights. Participating governments made significant commitments to revitalize democracy at home and abroad at the first Summit on which we expect meaningful progress during the current Year of Action and before the time of a second Summit.
The reports paint a clear picture of where human rights and democracy are under threat. They highlight where governments have unjustly jailed, tortured, or even killed political opponents, activists, human rights defenders, or journalists, including in Russia, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, and Syria. They document abuses of peaceful protestors demanding democracy and fundamental freedoms in countries such as Burma, Belarus, Cuba, Hong Kong, and Sudan. They highlight worrying cases of transnational repression – where governments reach across borders to harass, intimidate, or murder dissidents and their loved ones – as exemplified in the dangerous forced diversion by Belarus of an international commercial flight for the sole purpose of arresting a critical independent journalist.
But they also contain signs of progress and glimmers of hope, as the indomitable will to live freely can never be extinguished. In Iraq, people cast their votes to shape the future of their country in more credible and transparent parliamentary elections than in 2018. In Botswana, a court advanced the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons by upholding the decriminalization of same-sex relations. In Turkmenistan, all imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses conscientious objectors to military service were pardoned, a win for freedom of religion or belief. The stability, security, and health of any country depends on the ability of its people to freely exercise their human rights – to feel safe and included in their communities while expressing their views or gender, loving who they love, organizing with their coworkers, peacefully assembling, living by their conscience, and using their voices and reporting from independent media to hold governments accountable. There is much progress to be made, here in the United States and globally. But I know that by working together in the Year of Action and using resources like the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, we can come closer to building a world where respect for human rights is truly universal.
In a reaction on the report human rights activists focused on China said theat they want the State Department to reboot the report’s format to address documentation blind spots and connect it to policy and initiatives to stop the violations and provide accountability for victims.
“It’s a descriptive, objective document but largely of human rights developments that had been already extensively reported by the media, by NGOs, and by human rights bodies within the UN and in many cases at greater detail and length. … It is essentially a recap,” said Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York City-based nonprofit Human Rights in China. “Since it appears to take quite a bit of resources to produce each year, I’d say that going forward, they reference and aggregate some of the developments within three very important, bigger trends like digital authoritarianism, [foreign] influence operations, and [China’s] growing extraterritorial reach.” [from https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/13/china-activists-state-dept-human-rights-00024876]
Many OA publishers have simply shifted expenses to authors. They often must pay upfront “article processing charges” [APCs] and “book processing charges” [BPCs], which still impedes the circulation of knowledge, albeit in different ways. The Radical Open Access Collective thinks there are better ways. That’s why it came together in 2015 to form a community now comprised of 70 scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. ROAC is committed to developing and championing “non-commercial, not-for-profit and/or commons-based models for the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge.” “What brings the scholar-led projects of the Radical Open Access Collective together,” its website declares, “is a shared investment in taking back control over the means of production in order to rethink what publishing is and what it can be.
Emily Pontecorvo a reporter for GRIST published on 6 April 2022 a piece about a new report by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre which states that the renewable energy sector is unprepared for the protection of land rights defenders.
In April of last year, José de Jesús Robledo Cruz and his wife Maria de Jesús Gomez Vega were found dead in the desert in Sonora, Mexico. In July, Fernando Vela, a doctor in Coqueta, Columbia, was shot to death by two men on a motorcycle while he was in his truck. In September, Juan Macababbad, an attorney in the Philippines was shot dead outside his home.
“Our data shows almost the tip of the iceberg,” Christen Dobson, senior program manager for the BHRRC and an author of the new report. “Many attacks are not publicly reported. And so we know the problem is much more severe than these figures indicate.”
According to the report, human rights defenders who spoke out against mining projects consistently experienced the greatest number of attacks over the past seven years. The authors say this is especially concerning considering the expansion of mineral production required by a transition to clean energy. All those batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines are going to require a lot of cobalt, nickel, zinc, lithium, and other minerals.
“We’re already seeing this level of attack, and we’re not seeing major producers of transition minerals have strong policies or practices in place about protecting defenders,” said Dobson. “There’s a real risk there and I think it’s an area that we’re very concerned about.”
…
The report urges investors to publish a human rights policy and require that companies begin disclosing human rights and environmental-related risks. But Dobson said that voluntary actions from companies and investors was not enough. She said there was some momentum building behind mandating that companies report on measures they are taking to respect human rights, including legislation proposed in the European Union and Canada.
“It is concerning to see a vast majority of companies and investors, including major renewable energy companies, do not have policies expressing zero-tolerance against reprisals in their operations, supply chains and business relationships,” said Dobson in a statement. “It’s time for companies and investors to recognise the energy transition cannot be effective if it is not also rights-respecting.”
Glenn Greenwald’s book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, opens with his recollection of a conversation in which Carl Bernstein, the US journalist of Watergate fame, told him that he’d never get another scoop as “big or impactful” as the Snowden archive (p. viii), for which Greenwald was the principal journalistic source.
Not so. On Mother’s Day 2019, just a few months into the administration of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Greenwald, the US-born, Rio de Janeiro–based journalist (and endless source of Twitter controversy), would receive his second “once-in-a-lifetime scoop” (p. vii). The scoop arrived from a source who had hacked a massive archive of leaks that would go on to transform Brazilian politics. The archive contained years of conversation on the Telegram app by the key prosecutors and judge of the Brazilian “anti-corruption” task force known as Lava Jato (Portuguese for “Car Wash”). Securing Democracy tells the story of the reporting on those leaks by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of all this for Brazil. While the massive, multi-year Lava Jato investigation was receiving rapturous praise in Brazilian and foreign media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21), it was releasing illegally obtained and misleading wiretaps to the media that created the conditions for the soft coup that unseated President Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Workers’ Party) in 2016. And then Lava Jato put the PT’s 2018 presidential frontrunner, former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, behind bars, securing Bolsonaro’s election. The work done by Greenwald and his colleagues (and, later, by Lula’s defense team, once they got the archive) showed all this to be deliberate and farcical: Lava Jato was operating illegally with a key goal of destroying the electorally successful left.
Working in secrecy, Greenwald and his colleagues simultaneously releasedthreearticles at the Intercept in June 2019, all based on those Telegram conversations. Cleverly named “Vaza Jato” (vaza means “leak” in Portuguese), the series in its first installments showed that Sergio Moro, the key judge involved in Lava Jato (who by then was Bolsonaro’s security minister), had been acting unlawfully as “clandestine chief of the prosecution” (p. xiv).
Those early releases also showed that, despite their denials, the “task-force members openly plotted how to use their prosecutorial powers to prevent Lula’s Workers’ Party from winning the 2018 election” (p. xv). And they showed that the task force brought criminal charges against Lula despite “an absence of evidence…secure in the knowledge that Moro would be the one adjudicating the charges” (p. xv).
Over the coming months, the explosive revelations kept on coming, released by the Intercept Brasil and a variety of Brazilian journalistic partners. To name just a few sordid examples discussed in Securing Democracy: Moro instructed the task force to protect Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former center-right president, because he was “an important political ally”; the task force mocked the death of Lula’s seven-year-old grandson; and they “conspired to conceal information from the Supreme Court” (pp. 158-159).
The work that Greenwald recounts in Securing Democracy leaves no reasonable doubt about the corrupt and politicized character of the “anti-corruption” operation that took down the left and brought the far-right to power in Brazil through extra-democratic means. The book also offers harrowing accounts of the dangers and threats (both legalistic and violent) that Greenwald and his collaborators faced from Bolsonaro’s government and followers for their journalistic work.
For all this, the book is well worth reading, and provides a fundamental service to democracy and freedom of the press in Brazil and globally. But the omissions in the book about the sources that Greenwald utilized are also telling and important.
The missing US connection
As Brian Mier (Brasilwire, 2/18/21) noted, the Intercept and its partners had already published 95 articles based on the Vaza Jato archive, over the course of nine months, before releasing the first article examining the frequent appearance of US government officials in that archive. This, and the series of articles that followed, “The FBI and Lava Jato,” would go on to win Brazil’s Vladimir Herzog Prize. Greenwald’s earlier Vaza Jato reporting had also won this prize, and he refers to it in Securing Democracy as “the most prestigious and meaningful prize a journalist can receive in Brazil” (p. 222), although Securing Democracy does not mention this second Vladimir Herzog Prize.
Intercept Brasil (3/12/20): “Lava Jato did everything to help American justice—including circumventing the Brazilian government.”
This second award-winning part of the larger Vaza Jato series examines how the United States government collaborated with Lava Jato at all phases of its existence, often in secrecy, and under both Obama and Trump administrations. These facts have received criticism from majorscholars and politicalfigures, yet not from Greenwald. The first article examining US involvement was released by the Intercept Brasil (3/12/20), drawing on Greenwald’s archive, but only after Greenwald had stopped publishing articles based on that archive. Greenwald does not examine the US role in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy.
Greenwald and his colleagues had shared sections of the archive with some of Brazil’s major journalistic outlets, such as Folha de São Paulo and Veja, both because of the assistance they could offer and to help provide a shield against persecution by Bolsonaro’s government (p. 150). The Intercept reported on the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato, however, with the partnership of a smaller outlet, Agência Pública.
In July 2019, Brazil’s Federal Police apprehended Walter Delgatti Neto, the hacker who had accessed the Telegram archive and contacted Greenwald. Delgatti currently faces the possibility of a lifelong prison sentence. Brazil’s supreme court released parts of the archive to Lula’s defense team in 2021, and the entire archive in January 2022.
It’s from this later examination of Delgatti’s archive that we know that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, referred to Lula’s arrest as a “gift from the CIA” (Progressive International, 12/2/21), a fact that was published after the release of Securing Democracy. It is worth noting that Bolsonaro and Moro, the Lava Jato judge–turned–security minister, made an unusual visit to CIA headquarters during Bolsonaro’s first presidential trip to the US.
‘Born in the Department of Justice’
I read Securing Democracy with deepening surprise at the lack of analysis of US involvement in Lava Jato. I read the book carefully, and have done searches on the e-book since, worried I had missed something. It’s not there.
Its absence is especially surprising because Greenwald has long been a critic of US foreign policy; because the first bit of the archive that Greenwald examined involved the US Department of Justice (p. 58), although Greenwald does not follow up on this; and because US involvement received passing mention at the very start of the Vaza Jato series.
The Telegram transcripts published in the first Vaza Jato release by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept (6/12/19) included a 2016 comment that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, made to Moro about something that “depends on articulation with the Americans.” It is not precisely clear from the context what the comment means, although Moro and Dallagnol were discussing the prosecution of Lula and other figures. This first appearance of the US at the start of Vaza Jato received analysis at the time in Portuguese (Revista Forum,6/13/19) and in English (Brasilwire, 6/13/19), but Greenwald never followed up on the thread.
In Vaza Jato releases that came after Greenwald’s involvement with the series, but before the publication of Securing Democracy, his colleagues show that US investigators from the Department of Justice and FBI met frequently with Lava Jato prosecutors (Intercept, 3/12/20). This team, which at times included at least 17 agents, met with Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil for several years (Agência Pública, 7/1/20), and worked on cases including the investigation that removed Lula from the 2018 presidential elections (Agência Pública, 2/12/21). These US investigators were working in Brazil without the authorization of the country’s minister of justice, which is required by treaty to oversee foreign law enforcement in Brazil (Intercept, 3/12/20).
Prior to Vaza Jato, there had been some knowledge of and reporting on US participation with Lava Jato (New York Times, 12/21/16), and Lula’s defense team had filed a motion arguing that this was a violation of Brazilian law (ConJur, 3/16/18).
Additionally, according to the hacker Delgatti, Greenwald only accepted a small portion of the full archive that Lula’s defense team eventually received (Brasilwire, 2/18/21). I’m not sure what to make of that claim, which I find strange. But I do want to flag that the Vaza Jato archive is not the only source of information about US participation in Lava Jato, and Greenwald may never have possessed the full archive.
However, we know of the extent and duration of US participation in Lava Jato because of the work Greenwald’s colleagues did with the archive that he did possess. And their publications are what made US participation in Lava Jato a matter of wide public significance.
For example, Lula responded on Twitter to the reporting by Greenwald’s colleagues with the allegation:
The goal was Petrobras [Brazil’s state-owned oil giant]. It was the Pre-Salt [Brazilian offshore oil]. And the Brazilian companies that were winning bids from US companies in the Middle East.
Lula’s claim, which he has elaborated elsewhere, is that the idea of Lava Jato was “born in the Department of Justice in the United States,” with the aim of destroying Brazilian competitors to US companies (in petroleum, naval construction and civil engineering, all sectors targeted by Lava Jato) (PT, 7/9/20). Perhaps Greenwald disagrees with Lula here. Then surely Lula’s claim deserves a refutation, especially because its principal evidentiary basis is Greenwald’s own archive.
Securing Democracy does note that Greenwald’s work on the Snowden archive “proved that the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK were spying on [Petrobras,] the state-owned oil company whose proceeds fund Brazil’s social programs” (p. 125). But the question of foreign intervention in Brazil appears principally in the past tense in Securing Democracy, and never in relation to Greenwald’s own Vaza Jato archive.
I should note that I have not seen enough evidence to weigh in with confidence on Lula’s assertion about the economic intentions of the Lava Jato team and its US collaborators, but he is correct about Lava Jato’s economic effects. Brazilian scholars have shown that Lava Jato did severe damage to Brazil’s major companies, and, consequently, to the economy and to employment in Brazil. In contrast, most of the US financial corporations responsible for the fraud that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis were protected as “too big to fail.” Whatever the mix of intentions involved, Lava Jato was part of an asymmetrically structured global politics of corruption that disables companies from the Global South and frequently protects those from the Global North, contributing to global inequality.
From ‘inevitable’ to unmentionable
Despite Greenwald’s silence about US participation in what he convincingly shows to be a regime change operation in 21st century Brazil, Securing Democracy runs through the long history of US regime change operations in Latin America. Discussing US support for the 1964 coup against a center-left Brazilian government that was replaced by a 21-year military dictatorship, Greenwald notes that US “refusal to tolerate any form of leftism in Latin America’s largest country—even if it meant the imposition of despotism where democracy had been taking root—was virtually inevitable” (p. 3). Greenwald also mentions Brazil’s enduring “colonial relationship with the United States” (p. 12), and notes that he learned from Edward Snowden that Brazil has the “largest CIA presence in the hemisphere” (p. 12).
So why doesn’t Securing Democracy examine US involvement in the process that removed the elected left from power in that country in 2016 and brought an admirer of right-wing despotism to power in 2018? What changed between 1964 and 2016 that made US involvement in left-to-right regime change operations in Brazil noteworthy, even “inevitable” then, but not worth mentioning now?
As Greenwald acknowledges in the book, to the United States, the PT governments’ forging of a “foreign policy in a way that diverged from US dictates was intolerable” (p. 14). Fortunately for the US officials who found the PT’s independent foreign policy intolerable, Lava Jato resolved this problem for them. Upon inauguration, Bolsonaro assumed a posture of alignment with Trump’s government in matters of foreign policy.
Although Greenwald does not examine the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy, this involvement has become politically important in Brazil and the United States. (One can find further English-language examination of the US role, drawing on both the Vaza Jato archive and other sources, in Le Monde and Brasilwire.) Besides Lula himself, Brazilian public figures ranging from members of Brazil’s supreme court to politicians from Brazil’s so-called “big center” have been critical of the US/Lava Jato collaboration.
In the US, 13 congressmembers wrote a 2019 letter to then–Attorney General William Barr demanding an explanation for the Department of Justice’s collaboration with Lava Jato. That letter was followed up in 2021, when 23 congressmembers sent a similar letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, noting that “it is a matter of public record that US DOJ agents provided support to Brazilian prosecutors that were part of the Lava Jato operation.”
That statement links to a 2017 speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco, in which he exults in DoJ collaboration with Lava Jato and in Lava Jato’s conviction of Lula. The congressmembers’ letter also notes that members of the DoJ and FBI were briefed by Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil, linking to Agência Pública’s reporting (3/12/20) on the Vaza Jato archive. No hint of this appears in Securing Democracy.
I think there is still room for debate about the intentions behind US involvement in Lava Jato—a Brazilian “anti-corruption” investigation that, as Greenwald shows, pursued aims consistent with the history of US policy towards Latin America that Securing Democracy outlines. However, I see no justification for the complete omission of US involvement in a book that is largely about the politics of Lava Jato, and that draws on the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role. Whatever Greenwald’s position is here, it deserves clarification, and the failure to examine the US role in Lava Jato is a significant flaw in an important book.
The Greenwald wars
Tucker Carlson interviewing Glenn Greenwald (screenshot via Salon)
I have no perfect theory of why Greenwald chose to omit evidence, stemming from his own “once-in-a-lifetime scoop,” that Lava Jato worked with support from the United States, some of it clandestine. Greenwald is hard to figure out. He’s a former hero of the left (he spoke at FAIR’s 25th anniversary benefit alongside Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Michael Moore) who is now a regular and chummy guest of Trump-favorite Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whom Greenwald has absurdly referred to as a “socialist,” along with Steve Bannon and “the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump.” His merciless polemics against US liberalism often hit the mark, yet he can be dumbfoundingly credulous when conservatives espouse “working-class, anti-imperialism, anti-corporatist politics.”
Securing Democracy was released back in April 2021. (A Brazilian edition will be released at the end of April 2022.) Since then, English-language media outlets have largely ignored it. I was sent a review copy by a highbrow US publication, but they canceled the review before I had written a word, because (they told me) of Greenwald’s brutal feud with his former colleagues at the Intercept. The book got a few reviews in non-US publications, and some from the ideological peripheries of mainstream US politics. But there isn’t much else. In contrast, his book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, had been covered in pretty much every publication that reviews books of political journalism within weeks of its publication.
Although he is now spurned by most of the mainstream, Greenwald knows how to pick an underserved market niche for his polemics, and to serve that niche relentlessly. Perhaps addressing US collaboration in Lava Jato is inconsistent with the niche he is aiming for in Brazil. Or maybe that interpretation is too cynical.
Greenwald does have considerable courage, and he remains an important critic of US foreign policy. He is nearly alone today among English-language journalists of major reach in his principled critiques of the deepening liberal/neoconservative embrace in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 1/25/22)—work that has become especially crucial as a flood of war propaganda (Glenn Greenwald, 2/27/22) raises the horrific peril of nuclear war, and as tolerance for dissent on matters of foreign policy diminishes in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 3/15/22).
So I offer no theory of Greenwald, or of Securing Democracy’s strange omissions. But I’ve decided to publish this belated essay because the book’s flaws (as well as its substantial virtues) have been underacknowledged, and because Greenwald, with his 1.8 million Twitter followers and boundless appetite for battle, has a major influence on how foreigners understand Brazilian politics.
I want to make it clear that I haven’t written this review to argue that every analysis of Brazil’s sad political trajectory over the second half of the 2010s must include analysis of the role of the US in this process. There are many domestic factors to examine, and many excellent scholars and journalists examining them.
But because of Greenwald’s influence, his perspective is probably the most important source from which English speakers will form impressions about Lava Jato’s role in Brazil’s recent history (whether they read Securing Democracy or not). Greenwald had unique access to the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role, and his silence about that role leaves a misleading impression for the US public—the only public with any hope to affect US foreign policy.
In a critique of Greenwald, Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson (6/17/21) concedes that “there is a good case to be made that for his role in freeing Lula da Silva from prison and exposing the reach of the US surveillance state, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most consequential reporters in the world.” Yet while the pinnacles of Greenwald’s work have been his exposures of the Brazilian right and US surveillance (and security) state, which deserve high praise, Securing Democracy is also notable for its strange silence about the connections that Greenwald’s own sources of evidence revealed between the Brazilian right and the US security state.
Featured image: Glenn Greenwald author photo, Haymarket Books
The human rights organisation looks back on 2021, “a year of dashed hopes“. According to Amnesty International, the digital sphere is increasingly becoming a space for activism — and repression.
Despite promises and pledges to the contrary, at almost every turn, leaders and corporations opted for a non-transformative path, choosing to entrench rather than overturn the systemic inequalities behind the pandemic. Yet, people the world over have made it abundantly clear that a more just world, grounded in human rights, is what they want
Agnès Callamard SG AI
Here is how Deutsche Welle summarized it:
Every year, Amnesty International looks at developments around the world and compiles an analysis of the most important global trends in human and civil rights. In its latest annual report, Amnesty Middle East and North Africa research and advocacy director Philip Luth says: “2021 was a year of really quite significant promises. … The reality was completely otherwise.”
There had been hope that the world might emerge from the pandemic equitably, Luther told DW, but richer countries in particular have prevented the widespread manufacture and distribution of vaccines. The annual report cites the facts: Fewer than 8% of the 1.2 billion people in Africa were fully vaccinated at the end of 2021 — the lowest rate in the world and far from the WHO’s 40% vaccination target…..The study also found that many governments have used the pandemic to suppress opposition and civil society. “It’s across regions and that’s one of the reasons we highlighted it in our global analysis,” Luther said. “Some governments very specifically used the smoke screen of the pandemic to restrict freedom of expression.” Examples of countries where protests have been broken up and human rights defenders are at risk include Cambodia, Russia, China and others.
According to Amnesty and other international organizations, the pandemic is also having an effect on civil society. “There are various strategies that are making it increasingly difficult for civil society to operate in different regions of the world,” Silke Pfeiffer, head of the department for human rights and peace at the Christian-affiliated aid organization Brot für die Welt (Bread for the World), told DW. “This is quite specifically directed at individual activists, who are discriminated against, threatened, persecuted and in some cases murdered.” In many countries, Pfeiffer said, governments cultivate a hostile environment. “It becomes increasingly difficult for civil society organizations to work,” she said. “That goes as far as the closure of NGOs; we see that again and again.” To cite just one example: In late March, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had 25 nongovernmental organizations closed. One of them is the Nicaraguan partner organization to Brot für die Welt.
Governments and NGOs are increasingly doing their work online. Luther describes the development as a “double-edged sword.” Authorities clandestinely use technology in ways that have a negative impact on people’s human rights, he said: “Governments in many cases were also then trying to shut down and disrupt tools that enable civil society to better communicate with each other and spread information.”
Amnesty International’s annual report cites multiple examples of this: the internet shutdown from August 4, 2019, to February 5, 2021, in the India-controlled regions of Jammu and Kashmir; the use of facial recognition technology at protests in Moscow; and the use of Israel’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, opposition figures and human rights activists. Pfeiffer said the internet was an important way for civil society to organize and mobilize. But she added that, around the world, “governments and other actors have completely upgraded digitally and are now also taking very strong action against freedom on the internet — through censorship, by shutting down internet services, through mass surveillance.”
Across the world, Amnesty noted, people took to the streets to fight for their rights and the rights of others in 2021 — in Russia, India, Colombia, Sudan, Lebanon and at least 75 other countries. in the words of AI Secretary General: “The palpable and persistent resistance offered by people’s movements the world over is a beacon of hope. Uncowed and undaunted, theirs is a clarion call for a more equal world. If governments won’t build back better – if they seemingly are intent on building back broken – then we are left with little option. We must fight their every attempt to muzzle our voices and we must stand up to their every betrayal. It is why, in the coming weeks, we are launching a global campaign of solidarity with people’s movements, a campaign demanding respect for the right to protest. We must build and harness global solidarity, even if our leaders won’t.”
She also said:
Global trends to stifle independent and critical voices gathered steam in 2021 as governments deployed a widening gamut of tools and tactics. Human rights defenders, NGOs, media outlets and opposition leaders were the targets of unlawful detention, torture and enforced disappearance, many under the smokescreen of the pandemic.
At least 67 countries introduced new laws in 2021 to restrict freedom of expression, association or assembly. In the USA, at least 36 states introduced more than 80 pieces of draft legislation limiting freedom of assembly, whilst the UK government proposed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would drastically curtail the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, including by expanding police powers.
Global trends to stifle independent and critical voices gathered steam in 2021 as governments deployed a widening gamut of tools and tactics. Human rights defenders, NGOs, media outlets and opposition leaders were the targets of unlawful detention, torture and enforced disappearance, many under the smokescreen of the pandemic.
At least 67 countries introduced new laws in 2021 to restrict freedom of expression, association or assembly. In the USA, at least 36 states introduced more than 80 pieces of draft legislation limiting freedom of assembly, whilst the UK government proposed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would drastically curtail the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, including by expanding police powers.
On March 25, 2022 the Stimson Centre published a wide-ranging piece by Helen Nolan on Human Rights Defenders and what their possibilities are in an international environment: “Protecting Those Who Protect Human Rights: Opportunities and Risks for Action at the UN“
The extensive article starts with the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders in 1998. Then it examines possibilities for further state action at the UN to increase the safety and security of human rights defenders. It outlines major trends, gives an overview of UN efforts, and sets out key instruments and state commitments in relation to human rights defenders. It then explores key risks and opportunities for strengthening UN action, offering recommendations for member states to advance this agenda and better ensure that human rights defenders everywhere are able to freely and safely undertake their vital work.
Helen Nolan is an international human rights lawyer. Through the International Service for Human Rights and ILGA World, as well as working for Front Line Defenders and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Helen Nolan has expertise in human rights defender protection. Helen Nolan has in-depth knowledge of the UN human rights system and advocacy before its mechanisms. She worked most recently with the United Nations Development Programme in Viet Nam. Helen Nolan holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and Essex University, United Kingdom.
When Jerry Craft’s New Kid was banned from school libraries in Katy, Texas earlier this year for “pervasively vulgar” content, I defended his book and advocated against this inexplicable censorship. After that, school board meetings in Texas only intensified. After months of persistent demands for intellectual freedom being outnumbered by conservatives and drowned out by […]
A recent case study by Freedom House focuses on programming that offers holistic protection, support, and services, tailored to the needs of human rights defenders in their host country. This case study focused on the most current wave of migration of HRDs and CSOs who were forced to flee after anti-government protests in April 2018.
The Nicaraguan government continues to violate freedoms of expression, assembly and information and thwart the work of HRDs, including journalists and CSOs. Ortega-Murillo’s recent actions against potential presidential candidates and opposition figures demonstrate that the country will continue to see an outpouring of critics, activists, and HRDs to Costa Rica, among other countries. Nicaraguans continue to flee based on the attacks and harassment they face as HRDs and members of CSOs that champion democracy and human rights. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/21/nicaragua-death-in-detention-and-sham-trial/
Of those 20 Nicaraguan HRDs who were surveyed, almost 90% stated that harassment and surveillance was a primary reason for leaving Nicaragua, followed by violence (65%) and threats (50%). Costa Rica provides comparatively ample protection for migrants, and recently launched a new asylum category for those fleeing from authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The flow of migration since 2018 has persisted until March 2020 when the border shut due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, migrant flows have begun to increase in recent months. However, Costa Rica is struggling to recover economically from the pandemic, particularly within the tourist, service, and commercial industries where most migrants and refugees find work. Most Nicaraguan refugees find themselves in a precarious economic situation, unable to find steady work, forcing many to resort to informal work with low salaries. HRDs are often not recognized as having different needs or characteristics from the larger refugee population, either by organizations or the Costa Rican population in general. Even for those who continue to work in human rights describe their ability to continue work is difficult, and many express experiencing severe trauma as an exile, with remorse for not being able to stay and remain fighting for human rights at home. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/24/vilma-nunez-human-rights-defender-who-stays-in-nicaragua/] However, many Nicaraguan HRDs try to carry out their work by investigating the laws and procedures in Costa Rica, accompanying their compatriots in their efforts, sharing knowledge, and giving advice. There are support and protection options for HRDs and CSOs in exile in Costa Rica, including a network of organizations and institutions facilitated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that provide access to vital services.
All available support and protection options for Nicaraguan HRDs are operating at full capacity and cannot keep pace with the growing demand. We believe that it is necessary to seek support and accompaniment mechanisms for HRDs that facilitate their subsistence and enhance the implementation of their work to defend the human rights of exiles and other Nicaraguan migrants who lack mechanisms for complaint and demand for their rights in Costa Rica.
Witness stands with the victims of Russia’s unlawful attacks. In a conflict that is rife with disinformation, false narratives, and manipulated media, the importance of capturing and preserving trusted, authentic accounts of human rights crimes cannot be underestimated. They are sharing resources for those on the ground in Ukraine and Russia – who are navigating immense risks as they capture and share video documentation of potential human rights violations and war crimes. And, they are sharing resources for those of us witnessing from a distance, so that we amplify grassroots truths and decrease the spread of mis/disinformation.
Guidance for Frontline Documenters working with and learning from activists documenting and preserving visual evidence of war crimes and human rights violations from Syria and Yemen to Brazil, it developed its peer-reviewed and field tested Video As Evidence Field Guide. Earlier they also worked with Ukrainian civil society and human rights groups during the 2014-15 conflict to prepare versions in Ukrainian and Russian
In Ukrainian: ПОЛЬОВИЙ ПОСІБНИК “ВІДЕО ЯК ДОКАЗ” Field Guide: Video as Evidence wit.to/VAE-UA
In Russian: ПОЛЕВОЕ ПОСОБИЕ «ВИДЕО КАК ДОКАЗАТЕЛЬСТВО» Field Guide: Video as Evidence wit.to/VAE-RU
With massive new flows starting in the wake of the Russian attack on Ukraine, the new book announced on 28 February 2022 by UNHCR –People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge – is most timely.
People Forced to Flee draws on the lessons of history to probe how we can improve responses to forced displacement. Tracing the roots of asylum from early history to contemporary times, the book shows how the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees turned the centuries-old ideals of safety and solutions for refugees into global practice. It highlights the major achievements in protecting people forced to flee since then, while exploring serious setbacks along the way.
Published at a time when over 84 million people in the world are forcibly displaced, it examines international responses to forced displacement within borders as well as beyond them, and the principles of protection that apply to both: reviewing where they have been used with consistency and success, and where they have not. At times, the strength and resolve of the international community seems strong, yet solutions and meaningful solidarity are often elusive.
Most forced displacement is experienced in low- and middle-income countries and persists for generations. People forced to flee face barriers to improving their lives, contributing to the communities in which they live, and realising solutions. Responding better is not only a humanitarian necessity but a development imperative.
The book shows how this work gained momentum with the international affirmation in December 2018 of the Global Compact on Refugees; and it illustrates how it is being supported by a growing group of partners encompassing forcibly displaced people, local communities and authorities, national governments, international agencies, non-governmental organisations and the private sector.
People Forced to Flee also examines how increased development investments in education, health and economic inclusion are helping to improve socio-economic opportunities both for forcibly displaced people and their hosts. Alongside this are greater investments in data, evidence and analysis pointing to what works best. And it discusses the wide array of financing mechanisms that can support sustainable responses.
As noted by Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in his foreword, the book highlights with great clarity the enormous challenges to preventing, mitigating, and finding solutions to forced displacement. “The drivers of displacement are unrelenting; the demands placed on humanitarian funding are growing,” Grandi notes. Yet he adds that while “the challenges are enormous, history has repeatedly demonstrated the potential for, and power of, positive change”.
People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge, takes up the mantle of a series of UNHCR publications, stretching back to 1993, that were previously entitled The State of the World’s Refugees. This book was written by Ninette Kelley.
Following here is an assignment: Find some object you hold near and dear. Something that can leap you into a backward narrative. Something to hold you as a memoir writer, going back, reflecting back. That thing, you can hold or touch. You find meaning in it. And, that object holds stories. Try and do this under ten pages.
I plugged the community/continuing education class I designed for the local community college, Oregon Coast, CC, here, at the local twice-a-week rag: “The art of remaking-retelling a story” (Newport News Times)
I’m big on writing narratives. Almost every person I have met and spent time with has told me their story. That story is sometimes a series of disconnected events. Many times people open up, and tell me about significant emotional events (SEE’s) that changed their lives, one way or another.
And, it’s never that simple, no, the death of a child or a newfound love. Change occurs over time, and that event changes through the sieve that is memory. How I was when confronted by federalies in Chiapas 40 years ago is a different story and memory landscape now compared to then, when I was telling all my buddies/compas about that event at Palenque.
So, below, I took the assignment I gave the 7 students to heart. Except, I was angry, I was riffing off of something completely unrelated to the assignment at first: I was asked to review a new novel, in manuscript form, from a fellow who is getting it published. And, man, after reading 200 manuscript pages of the 350 total, I was ready to punch out the world.
Without giving away the author and the press, here is that email to one of my editor friends:
Howdy — I really do hope you didn’t tell the author I was a “for sure thing” to review his novel. I’m sorry to say that what I’ve been reading thus far (200 pages) I can’t really do any good as a positive reviewer. I know we crossed this bridge before, me having major hiccups with the work of another book (that other novel, remember) . . . and I know you all have this book in the line-up.
But, shit, guys, I just can’t get into the book at all. I am not going to give you a big rush of negative comments about the bad dialogue, the incongruent characterization, the cut-out characters, and the dead-end plot, and the absolutely wrong way to start a book, and all the dialogue to move along a story, and the lack of verisimilitude. Look, I know I am just a flunky out here in Oregon, but I have been in the fiction game, even with all the rejections over the years, for a very long time. I’ve taught fiction, too. And, I am a deep reader of fiction. I was not expecting Ivan Doig or Jim Crumley or Tom McGuane or Robert Stone, you know, but, seriously, I can’t find anything literary about the book, and I can’t find much to say that would make a review helpful for him or as a way to highlight your new Press’ addition. You know I want to help you all, but there isn’t a decent poetic or literary hook in it, nor is there a hellava plot, nor is there a helluva cast of characters. There is no electrical charge in the writing.
I hate to do this to you since you both have been good at going with my stuff, and publishing my work in the past. I just wouldn’t be able to pull this one off, without it being just a marketing promo, and I know you do not want that from me. I am sure Mr. S has a following and a slew of people ready to read this book. That bodes well for potential sales, for sure.
I want to be honest and upfront, since I respect you both. I am not your man in Havana for this project. While I have reviewed a hundred books for the El Paso Times years ago, I remember Leslie Ulman giving me a Pam Houston book to review, since she was a guest at UTEP, that is, a visiting author. A friend of hers, as well. I know my clear look at and pugnacious reviewer’s response to that book, once it hit the newspaper (and was syndicated out further afield), caused some rumbling and grumbling with Leslie and Pam, but shit, I didn’t do a hatchet job on it — just some cogent and pithy writing myself as reviewer to point out some of the westerny sort of overkill.
Mr. S’s book is what it is — you all have him on contract and you all have it planned for publication. I just do not want to do a heavy heavy heave ho of my own principles as well as disregarding my own history as a writer and reviewer by attempting something positive. I could have a hell of a fistfight with the book, but that’s not what you all are after.
I see K is on the jacket with kudos. He seems to be your man, really, for this assignment.
I’m not being snarky or elitist or any of that, as you well know me.
It’s not a good book, guys. Not well written. It’s canned dialogue. Cliche. Off the mark. Boring. Not going anywhere. And, yes, he was a journalist, but I can tell you these folk in the book are not real, and as you know, fiction has to be more than pedestrian recording of events. One of the rules is to not move the plot and story and tension with dialogue. That’s most of the book. So much is bad in the book.
Yet, there is that adage that one person’s cup of tequila is another person’s buttermilk. I gotta stick with tequila. Others love the heavy tasteless milk.
Thanks for thinking of me.
Good luck with it and to him.
It’s not just a slam dunk me writing that criticism above. Really. I’ve been hawking my long form, that is, novels, short story collections, essay collections, for a very long time. New York agent named Jack Ryan, and he went to bat for, and he was also waylaid by many a female editor who thought my stuff was too male, too regional, too dark. The list goes on. Cancel culture 1986-2010.
So, really, putting out a review of this book was not possible for me without really eviscerating the words, the plot, the entire book, which for me would be a public spiritual homicide. That’s not in my inner core, though I can be super critical and pugnacious when it comes to, well, beautiful people, or those who have made it and are resting on their laurels.
Here, a quick note from the editor in response to my decline —
Paul,
This is the most magnificent decline I have ever read! So glad you are here to keep us honest.
Others had troubles with the book too.
For some reason, I just liked the narrator, but overall that’s probably not enough.
So it goes. This world we live in, the one we always have lived in. Lives interrupted, derailed, denuded, and of course, enhanced by surviving.
Funny how my students are opening up after just three sessions, sharing all manner of things that they want to add to their larger memoir. Here, a bit of Memoir 101:
Memoir vs Autobiography Basics
1. Autobiography usually covers the author’s life — the entire life up to the point of the writing, while memoir focuses only on a part of the author’s life.
There are going to be exceptions to every point on this list, but generally speaking, autobiography aims to be comprehensive, while memoir does not. Autobiographers set out to tell the story of their life, and while some parts will get more detail than others, they usually cover most or all of it.
I do use Mary Karr’s work, the Art of Memoir, in the class. And, Tritine Rainer’s Your Life as Story.
Here, just one slice of the definition and connotation:
Okay, so here we go with my two-hour entranced writing which fit my class’s assignment. I had to write about Montana (where the guy’s book was set), to get it — that bad manuscript read — off of my chest or at least partly out of my system. And I sent it to the editor, and he came back with this:
Loved the essay.
Reminds me of the time my girlfriend Lois and I drove from Tucson to the coast in a lark. We picked up a hitchhiker in Big Sur. We dropped him off at a compound of Hobbit cabins in the hills above the surf where his father – Stephen Stills’ dope supplier – gifted us the most potent weed I’d ever smoked. One puff and I fell down on the ground paralized. He said he wanted to give me a couple bags in thanks for bringing his son home, but I was paranoid with the paralysis. Lois helped me walk to his cabin where we would get our “reward.” He opened a wooden trunk that I was sure held a shotgun that would start a Manson-like killing spree beginning with Lois and me. Instead we got three or four bags of this wild dope that later in our circle in Tucson was called “killer weed”and taken out and smoked on only the most sacred occasions.
Okay, then, you the reader now have me the writer in your sights. Enjoy the flow of memoir, in this “literary” essay. God help us all!
+–+
Grizzly Country, a .44 magnum, a Thrown- Away Suitcase, a Cleveland Woman’s Life Scattered
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
— opening line, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“Did you hear? Catina is going to Mexico with some guy with long hair and earrings in both ears in his old pick-up truck. Can you believe that?”
Not the best opening line for a book but I couldn’t get it out of my head all the way up to that Last Good Kiss bar in Missoula where James Crumley had invited us to sip Patron.
My girlfriend’s North Dakota cousin’s words couldn’t top this: An orange Samsonite suitcase was the gaping open evidence of some meth-ed out former boyfriend who snatched the dark-haired woman in a Montana town and found a lonely path frequented by bruins in order to dump her body along with all her earthly belongings somewhere in that dark dripping night in Big Sky country.
Okay, not Jim Crumley prose, but I wasn’t writing it, just thinking it after we found the two high school yearbooks wet from the afternoon drizzle. The mud that led to our dry campsite held a couple of dozen color snapshots spread around like flattened lives. There was a cool leather fringed leather jack, two pairs of jeans laid out like a running ghost. The lacey underwear I saw first. Half was left in the suitcase, the other half flung around where the case spilled open.
We were twenty miles from Missoula, after heavy tequila toasts with Crumley, and we were in THAT pre-Mexico pick-up truck with the small camper snuggly attached holding all our gear. We wanted to have a campfire, hot coffee and flapjacks in the morning.
It was getting dark, and bear prints were around this mess of scattered things in a woman’s life. Two pink bras, a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a bunch of personal letters in envelopes bound by hair bands. This was 1985. There were no cell phones. We were out in the boondocks. It was just me and my girlfriend. We both were friends of Crumley since he was both a professor and my thesis advisor at UT-El Paso of all places.
We had been in his classes, and we taught alongside him as graduate students. He wanted the thrill of Juarez and the West Texas mountains. He was a heavy drinker, liked coke and he dated students. I was able and ready to get him the white stuff. He liked my wild man freedom. He was especially curious about my work in a refugee center helping Central Americans – mostly Guatemalans – get political asylum.
The word was he got sacked (not rehired for his year-to-year visiting writer contractor) because some students complained old Dancing Bear Jim came to the workshops three sheets to the wind. That was 1984, before #metoo. There were accusations of dating graduate students, not a no-no, but at UTEP, with a prude of a president, these rumors were enough to get the writer fired.
My girlfriend, Catina, wasn’t really freaking out at the sight of the splayed suitcase. She had a few theories about why this woman’s personal belongings were about. There was a domestic violence sort of vibe I could feel, the light was diminishing in May, and large snowflakes floated down from the purple sky. I was more paranoid than Catina. I knew I had to be the asshole that might have to pull out both guns and get our asses out of some fucking Gary Gilmore situation. Back then, in my 20s and 30s, I courted such things, literally and in my mind.
“You know, it looks like this girl just tossed this suitcase out as if she was jettisoning part of her life. You know, high school years, busted friendships. Fuck, high school can be like a mind fuck. The shitty girls and the rape-minded motherfucking football players. I guarantee, this girl did not just have the one suitcase. But this one, with photos and journals and letters, that’s my theory. One life gone, a new life in Montana. Maybe Canada. There’s no foul play.”
I liked the way Catina plotted out a story from her personal point of view. I would have never thought of a scenario so close to the female perspective.
We came to Crumley, to get my thesis approved, and now, here, after drinks and buffalo burgers, to see bears. Hell, wasn’t that the irony, Dancing Bear and all, his novel? Make no bones about it, we saw two brown bears when we approached the muddy road down into this killer of an empty campground. Grizzly Campground was the name. It was part of Rock Creek, located in the Ranch Creek drainage. Several campsites bordered the creek, and we picked this one. We had it all to ourselves, and we were high and drunk, and we wanted to pitch a tent, and then this scene unfolded like ball lightning in our veins, right there where we were about to pitch our tent.
I still had a revolver and lever action pair of weapons on my mind. The four-inch buck knife on my leg, well, just for cutting apples and cheese.
We barely touched some of this girl’s things, and we agreed to not rifle through the personal notes and journals. Not just yet. As I said, I had two guns in the camper, and Catina had camped with her Colorado family all over the west her whole life. We were not afraid of wild things. Just men with uppers, booze and sinister thoughts in their blood.
We were in awe of the ferns, the boggy smell reminded me of my mom’s birthplace in British Columbia. Then there was that amazingly metallic and citrus odor in the air, fresh conifer growth. And the water heartbeats of a nice clear creek hitting boulders. We could see the quicksilver flow draping rocks, granite heavy with moss and lichen.
“Hell, I guess we have to let the cops know about this when we head out. But for now, it’s fire, tent, booze.”
Catina took a few Missoulians and spread them out over the scene of some crime. It was a crime in anyone’s books – to chuck personal correspondence and two high school yearbooks into the mud.
Making camp was a quiet time for us, a rarity. Catina was in her thoughts. Her own family demons. I was just stunned with the possibility of having to do some sort of bullshit thing if anyone returned to the scene of the scattering. A crime? My theory was the opposite of Catina’s.
I got the half full bottle of Juarez tequila from the back, tucked in a nice colorful serape from Juarez we were going to gift to Crumley. I took swigs from the bottle. Warm, dry earthy draws back to hot desert. Being up here — with Crumley, and thinking about my own prodigious dance with booze, drugs, adventure and recklessness never seemingly coming to a bad end, even when I got in a few pickles out in the wilderness with no gas and a hot motorcycle I had to push to find some place to put down a bedroll — I was invincible with my girlfriend and my guns.
Man, the time I was 18 with my scuba buddy Brian, in the Sea of Cortez, and we had just run out of gas after hours of diving and snorkeling (he continued to say, I told you so . . . we shoulda bought another gas tank). Shit, I told him to stay put, and I went madly swimming toward a marlin fisherman who also happened to be out in the middle of the Sea of Cortez near Tiburon Island. I swam and swam with rocket fins and snorkel-mask. I got there in 30 minutes.
Typical for me: Bad situation turned into a free tow, a party at their condo and still my buddy complained, as he stayed in the one room hotel and pouted. Tequila, steaks, amazing stories, and even getting laid. That’s what running out of fuel in a 16 foot barely-sea worthy boat will get you.
Or get me.
I had promised Catina’s parents back in El Paso that no harm would come to her on this camping trip. The clearly anxious and chaotic nature of the Samsonite toss and the large area of disarray felt like a foreboding.
Yeah, my own 23-yea- old sister came to mind when the fire was roaring with the agave spirit burning my esophagus. Barely dead a few years.
Roberta was wild, adventurous and killed driving her Harley out of Kamloops south to see me, our sister, mother and father in Arizona. Call us the half brother and half sister. The Army stepdad was on his way out of the country to Saudi Arabia. Robbie insisted on coming down by road, to Tucson, with two male buddies on their rides.
That was 1978 when we got the call that she had hit the pavement after some fucker passed out at the wheel and crossed the lane into her bike.
Another set of adventures, a burial, a wake, after a crazy sea plane into Hyder, Alaska. My mother was there, with her fragile lungs, coming into Alaska on a cold night, which was bright in June. I was her escort, the only other family there. I met her biological dad Rod there, a guy I had met years earlier in Vancouver, when my sister sent me a bus ticket to visit her.
As I write this (and almost everything), her squash blossom turquoise bracelet is by me, sort of a talisman, a reminder, or some ethereal message bugging me to keep plugging away. Here I am sixty-five, writing about a forest haunting when I was 28.
Those years, man, 28, Crumley had my book, something I thought would sell: the great American novel set in Mexico. That was what centered in my head then, and even now, almost 40 years later, it’s like a rheumatoid disease, a stupor at times, enchanting me into believing I have the impetus still, now, to push through all the bloody hurdles and walls to get something big published.
That disease lasted for 30 years since that week with Crumley. It’s untreatable. It’s terminal for some. I am one of the unlucky suckers still believing in some fucking New York publishing miracle.
We got the tent set up, as snow slowly powdered the ground. The campground was amazing, the greenest, most jungle like since we had been camping in deserts, along the north rim of the Grand Canyon. In Utah. In New Mexico. Coming from El Paso, we decided to hit the Colorado route.
But this, Grizzly Campground we claimed to ourselves. Hours with Crumley and then my interview at the Missoulian (I never got the job – a dozen out of work PhDs in Missoula looking for writing work, even newspaper work, way ahead of me on the prospect list). We were heading to Livingston, to Chico Hot Springs, to hang out with Crumley and the director of some film Jim was helping script-fix.
The guy – director of Black Beauty, I think — had an option on Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss. Time magazine had just done a piece on the up and coming noir writers, and Crumley was one on that list as a killer detective fiction guru. He was from Texas, did shit in the Army, got an MFA from the Iowa writers workshop, and learned from Richard Hugo to study Raymond Chandler in order to become fluent and real and poetic as a novelist.
At 28 with my own suitcase full of real life, adventures, travels, I was an admirer but not a fan boy, really, of the complete Crumley, though he did resist paying taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War. I was all life, fiction, journalism, politics and considered myself left of Che.
That suitcase, the fire Catina had stoked well, the waning light, the creepy icy white on all the ferns and low limbs of amazing conifers made for a Crumley noir setting. Then, juxtaposed with our own plans to take this Datsun pick-up all the way to Guatemala loaded with scuba gear and typewriters. Then, we’d be heading to the Yucatan after hitting every Mexican state. Stories for the two dailies in El Paso. Rolls of film sent to the editors.
There is something about the personal belongings of someone – a woman’s make-up accouterments, the undergarments, the letters, hair brush and berets – spread out all over the place in the open. No tire tracks to speak of, except ours. And, to be sure, I did make a head-lamp and hand-held flashlight recon of the area within a mile of the camp.
The idea Catina had was she just lost it. Threw the shit away in a rage. Something about the past, all those journals and yearbooks. Mind you, we had not rifled through anything yet, and we did not pull things out of the suitcase. We did, however, bring the scattered remains of the orange travel case back to the center of the dirt road.
The newspapers were getting covered in snow. We were shivering. The tent was perfect near the fire. I drank Juarez tequila and Catina sipped a bottle of merlot. Granola and gouda we consumed while we were deep in our literary and gumshoe thoughts.
The pile of belongings I kept pointing the strong flashlight at (actually, a diving light, with a huge veronica of bright beams) — the covered-up life of this woman. And, I saw eyes, in the distance. Bear whiskers. We had the food in the camper sealed up. We tried to keep crumbs away from everything. Nothing in the tent would attract a bear. I even had a big can of bear spray. And the fucking .44 magnum and 30.30 Marlin.
There were bears out there. That’s what we came for, but we didn’t count on the broken suitcase and a life strewn all over the place.
There was some essence of Cherri Halister the next morning. That’s what her name was. We looked hard and long in the yearbooks. She was there, circled, with “The best one at the party. . . . three-fisted drinker . . . why do we have to graduate now, now that we are just becoming friends?” Other tributes and benedictions from her graduating friends. She looked like Barbara Hershey – Remember her, in The Last Summer, Boxcar Bertha, The Baby Maker? Catina knew Barbara, and, of course, later, she did Hannah and Her Sisters, and played Mary Magdalena in The Last Temptation of Christ.
Hell, my younger sister Heidi was an extra in a movie with Charlton Heston, The Last Hard Men. Barbara Hershey took a liking to my kid sister. Heidi was nine years old; it was shot at Old Tucson, the movie lot that burned down. I took her to the set many times. I watched Heston and Hershey plod along in some of the scenes that needed the old western cutout town. I told Catina that, and she laughed, telling me that I would be famous one day for being just this far on the edge of fame – she put both her hands out and sized up that fame around 18 inches.
She was right.
This is a place I never heard of, Mayfield High School, in Cleveland. The Wildcats. The year books were for 1968 and 1969. If she was 18 upon graduation, this Cherri Halister would be 34 when we found her stuff all over the forest.
We were entranced by the pile of belongings, but I had pangs of paranoia that something bad really did happen to her . . . or some fuckers might be coming back. I had the Ruger holstered on my hip and the Marlin fully loaded and on the front seat of the Datsun.
I sort of knew those two firearms would be added props for the story I was going to tell Crumley, and all the friends I had back in El Paso, in Tucson, and doctor family back east. Guns, long-haired guy with earrings in both ears, a blue Datsun king cab pickup, a girlfriend who knows how to get a campfire going in sleet and rain, and some flagging belief that a guy like Crumley would actually help me get a novel published.
Sure, a few hours with Peter Fonda and some other notables at Chico Springs was filed away in my Irish storytelling satchel. Crumley introduced me to him. Then the lore of, well, Richard Brautigan who, after meeting Thomas McGuane (another Montana writer), he would eventually visit Montana’s Paradise Valley and buy a 40-acre ranch in Pine Creek, near Livingston. All that lore, man, and yet, the trip, the entire trip we made was punctuated by Cherri’s disappearance.
We did stop at Deer Lodge and call the Sheriff about what we found. I did rip-off a photo of her: a nice color photo of Cherri Halister, at a pool, in a blue bikini. She must have been around age 16 or 17. Nothing creepy. Just a captured moment in time, when she looked like a really young and budding Barbara Hershey.
When that suitcase was still in her family’s garage. When the light of life was just seeping a bit out of her young life. Barbara Hershey would have been jealous of Cherri. She looked like a star.
If you want the facts about meat consumption, and some practical tips on how to reduce yours, and even a few recipes to get you started, the following eight vegan books will get you there. Best of all, if you start to feel overwhelmed, you can just stick a bookmark in and come back later. This is your journey, so don’t rush it.
1. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Published in 2009, Eating Animals feels as fresh as it did back then. The book details the process of meat production, taking the reader from farm to plate and beyond. It was written to inform U.S. meat-eaters about the processes of the meat industry. Safran Foer interjects personal insights into objective research. There is no underlying motivation to push readers towards a meat-free life, instead, the writing is entirely focussed on helping people understand where their food comes from.
Perfect for: When you want to let the science do the talking.
2. This Is Vegan Propaganda: (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You) By Ed Winters
Winters, or Earthling Ed as he is known to many in the vegan world, offers a no holds barred look at current food systems. Naturally, as a leading vegan figurehead, he focuses on meat production and details how as a global industry it is responsible for devastating environmental and ethical consequences. You’ll find interviews from surprising individuals in This Is Vegan Propaganda, including slaughterhouse workers and animal rights activists. This 2022 release is designed to offer new information but it is most definitely skewed towards driving a shift to veganism.
Perfect for: Existing vegans with a reading habit and skeptics who fancy getting into vegan books.
3. Think Like A Vegan by Emilia A. Leese and Eva Charalambides
Taking things further than just food, Think Like A Vegan applies vegan ethics to wider society and life, demonstrating the benefits of increased compassion. It’s an interesting concept purely because it asks a lot of questions, giving the reader a chance to consider their own answers before reading the authors’. Why don’t vegans eat honey? Why is adopting animals better than buying? Do you have to be a feminist to be a vegan? Fascinating synaptic connections come at every turn in this book that is never ashamed to centre around personal experiences.
Perfect for: Dipping in and out and getting a broader feel for veganism as a movement.
4. The China Study by T. Colin Campbell PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II MD
Forget emotion because The China Study has no time for anything other than scientific facts. Irrefutable, clearly explained scientific facts about why not eating meat is the best way to protect your health. It grapples with proven correlations between high animal protein intake and cancer rates and has been updated consistently since its release in 2005, to include new research. At no point does this book try to appeal to anything other than your intelligence and ability to comprehend proven information, though it is considered one of the first really influential vegan books.
Perfect for: Quieting the naysayers and meat fanatics at dinner parties.
5. Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals: The Future Of Food by Roanne van Voorst
While most books try to educate the reader about making a change now, Once Upon A Time We Ate Animals adds a little whimsy into the mix. It takes the position of being set in the future, where animals are no longer exploited for food, clothing or entertainment. It offers an insight into what such a world would look like, how it could work and more importantly, how odd it will seem that once we did use our animal friends for more than planetary companionship. By no means a fictional tome, this 2022 release is more of a guidebook for navigating a potential future.
Perfect for: A different perspective and some existential hope.
Published in 1975, Animal Liberation is hailed as the bible of the liberation movement. And for good reason. The entire book is predicated around one question: How should we treat non-human animals? Singer weaves a complex variety of testing facility case studies, factory farming exposés, and simple facts together to present a dispassionate yet undeniable case for doing better. He paints the world as an unethical and unfeeling landscape for non-humans and his words sparked a fire in activists around the globe.
Perfect for: Understanding the status quo before planning affirmative action to change it.
7. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy Ph.D.
Easily one of the most evocative titles to have ever been released, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows looks at the system of animal exploitation that consumerism has created. A combination of cold hard facts and piercingly emotive language calls for speciesism to end and a kinder world to prevail. Practical solutions and tools for critical thinking will be a lasting gift when you finish the final page. Still as powerful as when it was first released in 2010.
Perfect for: When you know you want to make a change and a difference.
To me, Carlo was the activist who swept me off my feet. Only years later did I discover that nothing he told me had been real – and that he was a spy cop and already married
It’s September 2015 and my mum and my sister have come by train from Scotland to visit me at home on the Kent coast, hoping to catch the last of the autumn heat. They live in the rainiest part of the UK, and I’ve moved to the corner with the most sun.
I close the kitchen door on my twin daughters playing in the living room, shushing the dogs away.
“Even if we don’t see a written-out master plan, the banning of books, the attacks on teaching real US history, the efforts to push out professors with views that transgress official US policy: In their myriad forms, these actions tell us that it’s important to powerful people to restrict what ideas people can access. It’s the land of the free and the home of the brave—except if you want to know what’s happened, and happens, here, or to tell people about it.
It all shows us the power of ideas. As infuriating and sad and enervating as it all is, it reminds us that knowledge is power.”
The past two years have been filled with ups and downs, but these must-reads reminded our staff why we’re in this fight and inspired them to keep pressing forward in challenging times.
Our staff named these their most powerful books of 2021. The list includes books by scholars, lawyers, exonerees, and children of incarcerated parents. The writing included touches on everything from the history of the flawed death penalty system to the 1971 Attica Prison uprising to an allegorical sci-fi story about a post-prison abolition world.
If you’re looking to take your understanding of justice and equity to the next level, you’ll want to read these and even consider them as holiday gifts.
New Releases
1. Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty by Maurice Chammah
Texas has shown a dogged commitment to carrying out executions, most of which unfairly target Black men, people with intellectual disabilities, and those in poverty, for more than 100 years. Prior to 2003, when Texas executed Larry Allen Hayes, the state had not executed a white man convicted of murdering since 1854, when a white man was executed for killing another white man’s favorite slave. Maurice Chammah’s book investigates the use of the death penalty in the state, which is responsible for about one-third of all executions in the U.S.
“It’s about the history of the death penalty in Texas and shares the stories of many individuals who have been part of this history, for better and for worse,” said Emma Bratman, Innocence Project’s post-conviction litigation paralegal. “It’s my favorite book that I have read.” Available to purchase here.
2. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones
If you have not caught up with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, first published online and in the New York Times Magazine in 2019 you can now read the expanded version of the Pulitzer Winning-project in book form. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work is foundational in understanding the societal, cultural, and economic impact that slavery had and continues to have in the United States, including its impact on mass incarceration. Available for purchase here.
3. Redeeming Justice by Jarrett Adams
Exoneree and former Innocence Project Post-conviction Legal Fellow Jarrett Adams reflects on his journey from wrongly convicted teenager to jailhouse attorney to exoneree in this moving memoir.
While in prison, Adams devoured every legal book he could get his hands on, hoping to chart a pathway to freedom. In the process, he became the go-to legal scholar in the prison and assisted others with their cases. Today, Adams is an attorney who represents wrongfully convicted people and the founder of Life After Justice, an organization that supports exonerees through the challenges of re-entry.
“This right here is a blockbuster,” said Christina Swarns, Innocence Project’s executive director, of the memoir. Available to purchase here.
4.Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice by Yusef Salaam
Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, arriving to court. (Image: New York Daily News Archive)
Innocence Project board member and member of the Exonerated Five, Yusef Salaam is a prolific writer, but this is his first memoir reflecting directly on what he experienced as a teenager wrongly convicted in the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger case.
“His inspiring story is motivational and highlights the need for criminal justice reform in America,” said Nigel Quiroz, Innocence Project’s community organizer.
While the case has been written about extensively, is the subject of a documentary, and was most recently dramatized by Ava Duvernay in the series When They See Us, in this poignant memoir we hear straight from Dr. Salaam. He brilliantly illustrates what it was like to be an innocent Black child, ferociously attacked in the court of public opinion in what amounted to one of America’s most polarizing media and political assaults. Available to purchase, here.
5. Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha Blain
Keisha Blain thoughtfully positions Fannie Lou Hammer’s impact as a civil rights advocate alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks. Hammer, co-founder of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the National Women’s Political Caucus, led efforts to register thousands of disenfranchised Black voters and organized movements to advance women’s rights. Facing immeasurable challenges as an impoverished and disabled Black woman from Mississippi, Hammer was nonetheless willing to make sacrifices to win equality for others, which is why Innocence Project executive director Christina Swarns keenly recommends the book. Available to purchase here.
6. Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
Stories about incarceration are often centered on the person in prison and the victim of the crime, leaving aside the deeply damaging impact of incarceration on families and communities. In her memoir, Ashley Ford reflects on her father’s incarceration and complicated relationship with her mother.
“This memoir of the author’s childhood and growing up with an incarcerated father explores the consequences of the criminal legal system from the perspective of family,” said Tara Thompson, Innocence Project’s senior staff attorney. “If you want to know why the old adage that ‘when someone does time, their family does the time with them’ is true, read this book.’” Available to purchase here.
7. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
If you have ever wondered what the economic cost of racism is and how it touches all of us, Heather McGhee writes a brilliant analysis that examines history, politics, and economics to answer this question. Her writing takes a deep look at just how much racism has set us back as a society and assesses its consequences on each and every one of us. Available to purchase here.
Must-Reads
8. I Am Troy Davis by Jen Marlowe, Martina Correia-Davis, and Troy Davis
Troy Anthony Davis entering Chatham County Superior Court on Aug. 22, 1991, during his trial. (Image: AP Photo/Savannah Morning News)
It’s been a decade since Troy Davis was executed in Georgia for a crime he always maintained he did not commit. Davis’ case galvanized support from around the world and inspired thousands of advocates to join the anti-death penalty movement. The book provides an intimate view into the loving person Davis was and the racially charged world around him that led to his wrongful execution. Available to purchase here.
9. Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S. Klinger
To prepare for her externship at the Innocence Project, Natalie Tamblyn found this collection of stories of wrongful conviction helpful. “I feel it really highlights how important it is for law enforcement to do their homework in investigating crimes but also how important the work we do at the Innocence Project is,” Tamblyn said.
The riveting anthology includes the stories of 14 exonerees as told to mystery and thriller writers, including Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, and Laurie R. King. Available to purchase here.
10. A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays by Marc Bookman
Marc Bookman has dedicated his career to fighting the death penalty as the executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and a former public defender in Philadelphia. In this collection of essays, Bookman makes compelling arguments to end the death penalty based on the many ways it has shown itself to be flawed, innacurate, racist, and ineffective.
“He weaves an unflinching portrait of twelve cases that illustrate in painful detail why the death penalty remains one of the greatest stains on the moral fabric of our society,” Innocence Project board member and ambassador Tony Goldwyn said. “These essays will make your blood run cold.” Available to purchase here
11. Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
In Akwaeke Emezi’s whimsical novel, Black transgender teen Jam, is on the hunt for a child abuser in her fictional town of Lucille — inspired by the depiction of similar settings in Toni Morrison’s novels. Jam joins forces with a creature who comes alive from her mother’s painting in her quest to uncover the truth.
“This book is actually about prison and police abolition and what justice could look like in a post-abolition world,” said Laurie Gottesman, Innocence Project staff attorney. “I can’t stop recommending this book to adults even though it’s a young adult book. Available to purchase here.
12. The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Richard Rothstein, a leading voice in housing policy, ”describes how our government deliberately segregated America,” according to Rebecca Brown, Innocence Project’s director of policy. His book examines how practices intentionally administered through the laws and policy decisions made by our local, state, and federal government continue to harm us today and prevent racial equity, even though redlining policies have been banned. Available to purchase here.
“Blood in the Water”
13. Blood in the Water about the Attica Uprising of 1971 by Heather Ann Thompson
Fifty years ago, over 1,300 people incarcerated in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility organized an uprising to protest years of gross mistreatment within the institution. Imprisoned people held guards hostage while they negotiated for more humane living conditions over the course of four days. On the fourth day, the state sent armed troops to overthrow the revolt, killing 39 people and injuring hundreds. In the end, only those incarcerated were prosecuted, and the state failed to support the families of those they had killed.
In her book, Heather Ann Thompson amplifies the voices of the people impacted by the atrocity and their fight for justice. “It’s riveting and so well researched,” Ed Boland, Innocence Project’s director of development, said of the Pulitzer Prize winning book. Available to purchase here.
14. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas
Fred Hampton.
In November, Innocence Project clients Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam were exonerated from the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Their exoneration was based on evidence that supported their innocence and pointed to other suspects, which the NYPD and FBI hid at the time of their trial. Files unearthed in the investigation into their cases showed that law enforcement had information that could have prevented their wrongful conviction and years of incarceration.
Seeing justice delayed for Aziz and Islam, Natalie Baker, an Innocence Project fellow, was reminded of the government’s killing of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. His murder, orchestrated by the FBI and Chicago police who perceived the Black liberation group as a threat to national security, was depicted in the 2021 Netflix’s film Judas and the Black Messiah. “[It’s] a timely reminder of who actually murdered another revolutionary Black leader and organizer — a powerful must-read,” Baker said. Available to purchase here.
15. Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea Ritchie
Andrea Ritchie’s book examines the racial profiling of and police brutality against Black, Indigenous, and brown women in America, an often overlooked demographic. She focuses on the experience of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and Mya Hall, who were all killed by police, and Dajerria Becton and Monica Jones who survived violent and unwarranted altercations with police. Ritchie centers women and trans women’s voices in the larger conversation of mass incarceration and police brutality, ensuring that they are not forgotten.
“This is a critical book in 2021,” said Denise Tomasini-Joshi, Innocence Project’s chief of staff. Available to purchase here.
Freedom on the Net 2021 finds that while some democratic governments have made good-faith attempts to regulate the technology industry, state intervention in the digital sphere worldwide has contributed to the 11th consecutive year of global decline in internet freedom.
Governments around the world are increasingly asserting their authority over technology platforms, forcing businesses to comply with censorship and surveillance and contributing to an 11th consecutive year of global decline in internet freedom, according to Freedom on the Net 2021, the annual country-by-country assessment of internet freedom released today by Freedom House.
Global norms shifted dramatically toward greater state intervention in the digital sphere over the past year. Of the 70 states covered by Freedom on the Net 2021, 48 pursued legal or administrative action against technology companies. Some measures reflected legitimate attempts to mitigate online harms, rein in misuse of data, or end manipulative market practices. Many governments, however, proposed new policies that obliged businesses to remove content and share personal data with authorities, at great cost to free expression, privacy, and public accountability.
This change in the balance of power between companies and states has come amid a historic crackdown on freedom of expression online. In 56 countries, officials arrested or convicted people for their online speech. Governments suspended internet access in at least 20 countries, and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms, most often during times of political turmoil such as protests and elections. Authorities in at least 45 countries are suspected of obtaining sophisticated spyware or data-extraction technology from private vendors.
“The rights of internet users around the world, especially the rights to free expression and privacy, are being massively violated as a result of recent state actions,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House. “Instead of using regulation to curb the immense power of tech companies, many governments are wielding it for their own repressive purposes.”
The decision by several platforms to deactivate the accounts of outgoing US president Donald Trump—in the wake of the January 6 assault on the Capitol—intensified concerns about the arbitrary power of a few firms to shape political debate, as well as their responsibility to stem offline violence. The move sparked a plethora of new regulatory and legislative proposals, including bad-faith attempts to prevent companies from moderating the accounts of politicians and state-run media. Tech companies faced high-profile showdowns with illiberal and authoritarian leaders in India, Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey that will have global implications for the future of free expression online.
“In these high-stakes battles between governments and tech companies, human rights risk becoming the main casualties,” said Adrian Shahbaz, director for technology and democracy at Freedom House. “Given the examples to date, you can hardly blame people for being skeptical that government regulation will lead to greater protection of their rights online. Regulations should ensure that power does not accumulate in the hands of a few dominant actors, whether in government or the private sector.”
Internet freedom plummeted by 14 points in Myanmar—the largest annual decline ever recorded on Freedom on the Net’s 100-point scale—after the military refused to accept the results of the November 2020 general elections and launched a deadly coup in February 2021. Electoral disputes also led to major internet freedom declines in Belarus, where authoritarian incumbent Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed victory in a fraudulent presidential election in August 2020, and Uganda, where authorities shut off the internet and blocked social media platforms during marred general elections in January 2021. In addition, officials in both Myanmar and Belarus sought to silence independent online media by shutting down news outlets and harassing, assaulting, and torturing online journalists.
“Governments everywhere are invoking a vague need to retake control of the internet—whether from foreign powers, multinational corporations, or even civil society,” said Shahbaz. “In the absence of a shared vision for a free and open internet, many states are imposing restrictions on the free flow of information across borders, denying people access to life-changing tools based solely on their location. This fragmentation is diminishing the emancipatory power of the internet.”
“The daunting complexity of internet regulation makes it all the more important for democracies to take the lead and set a high bar by introducing regulatory approaches that protect human rights online and preserve a free and open internet,” said Allie Funk, senior research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House. “The laissez-faire approach to the tech industry spurred some forms of innovation, but it has also created opportunities for authoritarian manipulation, data exploitation, and widespread malfeasance. Democratic governments should pursue well-crafted regulations that tackle these problems while protecting people’s rights to express themselves, share information across borders, and hold the powerful to account.”
KEY FINDINGS:
Global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year. The greatest deteriorations were documented in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, where state forces cracked down amid electoral and constitutional crises.
Governments clashed with technology companies on users’ rights. Authorities in at least 48 countries pursued new rules for tech companies on content, data, and competition over the past year. With a few positive exceptions, the push to regulate the tech industry, which stems in some cases from genuine problems like online harassment and manipulative market practices, is being exploited to subdue free expression and gain greater access to private data.
Free expression online is under unprecedented strain. More governments arrested users for nonviolent political, social, or religious speech than ever before. Officials suspended internet access in at least 20 countries, and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms. Authorities in at least 45 countries are suspected of obtaining sophisticated spyware or data-extraction technology from private vendors.
China ranks as the worst environment for internet freedom for the seventh year in a row. Chinese authorities imposed draconian prison terms for online dissent, independent reporting, and mundane daily communications. The COVID-19 pandemic remains one of the most heavily censored topics. Officials also cracked down on the country’s tech giants, citing their abuses related to competition and data protection, though the campaign further concentrated power in the hands of the authoritarian state.
The United States’ score declined for the fifth consecutive year. False, misleading, and manipulated information continued to proliferate online, even affecting public acceptance of the 2020 presidential election results. The new administration took promising steps to enforce stronger protections for internet users.
State intervention must protect human rights online and preserve an open internet. The emancipatory power of the internet depends on its egalitarian nature. To counter digital authoritarianism, democracies should ensure that regulations enable users to express themselves freely, share information across borders, and hold the powerful to account.
Freedom on the Net 2021 assesses internet freedom in 70 countries, accounting for 88 percent of internet users worldwide. The report focused on developments that occurred between June 2020 and May 2021. Detailed country reports, data on 21 internet freedom indicators, and policy recommendations can be found at freedomonthenet.org.
Freedom on the Net 2021: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech
In the high-stakes battle between states and technology companies, the rights of internet users have become the main casualties, according to Freedom on the Net 2021, the annual country-by-country assessment of internet freedom released by Freedom House. Read the Report
On 5 October 2021 FORUM-ASIA presented its new publication, “Summary Report: 9th Asian Human Rights Defenders Forum”, an abridgement from an event that facilitates human rights defenders (HRDs) and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) to discuss work and advocacy efforts, and share the experiences and challenges they face.
From 2019 to date, the situation of defenders and civil society organisations across Asia has grown increasingly challenging. Harassment and violations perpetrated against those defending human rights continue to increase and most perpetrators continue to benefit from impunity.
The global COVID-19 crisis, which started in 2020, exacerbated the already worrying situation for defenders. In the past one year alone, from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021, at least 760 cases of abuses and violations against defenders were recorded across 19 Asian countries, based on FORUM-ASIA’s monitoring. More than half of the cases recorded were related to judicial harassment (409 cases), which is often followed by arbitrary arrest and detention (323 cases). The number of killings is alarming at 55 cases, most of which took place in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Afghanistan.
Despite the restrictive atmosphere, human rights defenders and people from across Asia continue to bravely fight for their rights. Emblematic examples can be seen within the wave of pro-democracy protests that have been taking place in Thailand, the Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar, the Farmers Protest in India, and the anti-Omnibus Law protest in Indonesia, which have been held under the banner of the Milk Tea Alliance, alongside peoples’ movements from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Such movements show people’s determination to continuously find new ways to resist the shrinking civic space, and the rise of a new generation of defenders emerging to push for the realisation of human rights.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first AHRDF, and despite all the challenges this year posed, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions on travel, FORUM-ASIA organised the event in an online format from 14 to 17 June 2021. This publication, “Summary report: 9th Asian Regional Human Rights Defender Forum,” highlights the key points discussed and provides the key recommendations made at the Forum.
Delivering this year’s HG Wells lecture, the author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World celebrates the late science fiction author’s dedication to fighting inequality
The first time I got my hands on a book written by HG Wells, I was a student in Turkey. I found an old edition in an arcade of little secondhand shops that I visited often to buy novels and fanzines, and to check the latest heavy metal albums. Its cover stained by damp, its pages slightly tattered, the book showed signs of previous ownership. The First Humans in the Moon, the title read. Later, I would discover that the Turkish translation was gender neutral but that the original, The First Men in the Moon, wasn’t.
At the time, I was not much interested in science fiction. I had purchased the book because it had intrigued me for a reason I could not quite comprehend. But reading it was not a priority. Back then, I was enamoured with Russian literature; Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House and The Brothers Karamazov had permanently shifted something within me. I wanted to read the kind of literature that dealt with what I saw as “the harsh socio-political realities”. Hence, I underestimated and ignored HG Wells, and his novel remained on my shelf unread and unloved for a long, long while.
Delivering this year’s HG Wells lecture, the author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World celebrates the late science fiction author’s dedication to fighting inequality
The first time I got my hands on a book written by HG Wells, I was a student in Turkey. I found an old edition in an arcade of little secondhand shops that I visited often to buy novels and fanzines, and to check the latest heavy metal albums. Its cover stained by damp, its pages slightly tattered, the book showed signs of previous ownership. The First Humans in the Moon, the title read. Later, I would discover that the Turkish translation was gender neutral but that the original, The First Men in the Moon, wasn’t.
At the time, I was not much interested in science fiction. I had purchased the book because it had intrigued me for a reason I could not quite comprehend. But reading it was not a priority. Back then, I was enamoured with Russian literature; Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House and The Brothers Karamazov had permanently shifted something within me. I wanted to read the kind of literature that dealt with what I saw as “the harsh socio-political realities”. Hence, I underestimated and ignored HG Wells, and his novel remained on my shelf unread and unloved for a long, long while.
“If attention is directed towards the dynamism of social movements and human rights activism around the world, a different set of views of the cathedral emerges“ says Gráinne de Búrca on 9 September 2021 about her book “Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era“.
In the book, she examines a number of human rights campaigns around the world and their degree of success as well as their limitations. “I argue that even in a very turbulent and difficult era when human rights are under challenge from all sides, human rights approaches not only retain vitality and urgency for activists, but have also delivered substantive results over time. I suggest that if attention is directed away from a predominant focus on a handful of prominent Global North NGOs, and towards the dynamism of social movements and human rights activism around the world, a fuller set of views of the cathedral—of the landscape of human rights—emerges. The book advances an experimentalist theory of the effectiveness of human rights law and advocacy which is interactive (involving the engagement of social movements, civil society actors with international norms, networks and institutions), iterative (entailing ongoing action) and long-term (pursuing of social and fundamental changes that are rarely rapidly achieved).“
Yet there is little reason for complacency or sanguinity. These are highly challenging times for human rights, and for human rights defenders, activists and advocates everywhere. The tide of illiberalism continues to surge around the world, and liberal democracy is in an increasingly unhealthy state. Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated existing inequalities, corporate power continues to grow and to elude governmental control, while powerful new alliances of religious and political actors have been moving not only to repress the rights of disfavored communities and constituencies, but also to try to reshape understandings of human rights in highly conservative, exclusionary and illiberal directions. Repression of civil society, and of freedom of assembly, expression and protest continues apace, with the number of killings of environmental and other activists growing each year.
At the same time, long-standing critiques of human rights from the progressive left have become popular and mainstream, with influential books in recent years deriding the weaknesses, failures and dysfunctions of human rights, and their complicity with colonialism and neoliberalism. Many of these critiques have been powerful and important, and several have prompted reflection and proposals for reform on the part of human rights practitioners and scholars.
But several of the most prominent critiques go beyond a call for rethinking or reform. They argue that the age of human rights is over, that its endtimes are here, that human rights law and the human rights movement are ill-suited to address the injustices of our times, that the failure of human rights approaches to seek or bring about structural change or economic justice highlights their deeply neoliberal character or companionship, and that human rights advocates should perhaps no longer seek to preserve human rights, but should make way instead for more radical movements.
In my book, I argue that some of the more damning critiques are exaggerated and partial. Like the proverbial view of the cathedral, several of the sharpest criticisms focus only or mainly on one particular dimension of the human rights system, and tend to caricature and reduce a complex, plural and vibrant set of movements to a single, monolithic and dysfunctional one. At the same time that the most pessimistic of the critics are writing obituaries for human rights, multiple constituencies around the world are mobilizing and using the language and tools of human rights in pursuit of social, environment, economic and other forms of justice. From #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice and Indigenous movements to reproductive rights marches in Poland, Argentina, and Ireland, to protest movements in Belarus, Myanmar, Nigeria and Chile, the appeal of human rights at least for those seeking justice (even if not for academic critics) seems as potent as ever.
None of this is to suggest that human rights advocates should not constantly scrutinize and reevaluate their premises, institutions and strategies. On the contrary, hard-hitting critiques of human rights for failing to tackle structural injustices and economic inequality have helped to galvanize change and a reorientation of priorities and approaches on the part of various relevant actors and institutions. Human rights activists and movements should exercise vigilance to ensure that they serve and are led by the interests of those whose rights are at stake, that they do not obstruct other progressive movements and tactics, and that their approaches are fit for the daunting and profoundly transformative challenges of these pandemic times, including accelerated climate change, digitalization, ever-increasing inequality and illiberalism. With attention to these risks and dangers, the diverse and heterogeneous array of actors that make up the international human rights community have an indispensable role to play, in a turbulent era, within the broader framework of progressive social, economic, environmental and cultural movements.
Since 2012, Global Witness has been gathering data on killings of land and environmental defenders. In that time, a grim picture has come into focus – with the evidence suggesting that as the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases. It has become clear that the unaccountable exploitation and greed driving the climate crisis is also driving violence against land and environmental defenders.
As ever, these lethal attacks are taking place in the context of a wider range of threats against defenders including intimidation, surveillance, sexual violence, and criminalisation. Our figures are almost certainly an underestimate, with many attacks against defenders going unreported. You can find more information on our verification criteria and methodology in the full report. Downloads
In 2020, over half of attacks took place in just three countries: Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines.
For the second year in a row, Colombia saw the highest number of killings in 2020, with 65 land and environmental defenders murdered. These took place in the context of widespread attacks on human rights defenders and community leaders across the country, despite the hopes of the 2016 peace agreement. Indigenous peoples were particularly impacted, and the COVID pandemic only served to worsen the situation. Official lockdowns led to defenders being targeted in their homes, and government protection measures were cut.
In Mexico, we documented 30 lethal attacks against land and environmental defenders in 2020, a 67% increase from 2019. Logging was linked to almost a third of these attacks, and half of all the attacks in the country were directed against Indigenous communities. Impunity for crimes against defenders remains shockingly high – up to 95% of murders do not result in prosecution.
In the Philippines, the deteriorating human rights situation has received increasing international condemnation. Opposition to damaging industries is often met with violent crackdowns from the police and military. In our data, over half of the lethal attacks were directly linked to defenders’ opposition to mining, logging, and dam projects.
President Duterte’s years in office have been marked by a dramatic increase in violence against defenders. From his election in 2016 until the end of 2020, 166 land and environment defenders have been killed – a shocking increase for a country which was already a dangerous place to stand up for the environment.
Forest defenders under threat
In instances where defenders were attacked for protecting particular ecosystems, 70% were working to defend the world’s forests from deforestation and industrial development. In Brazil and Peru, nearly three quarters of recorded attacks took place in the Amazon region of each country.
Almost 30% of the attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation (logging, mining and large-scale agribusiness), and hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure. Of these, logging was the sector linked to the most murders, accounting for 23 cases. Mexico saw a large rise in logging- and deforestation-related killings, with 9 in 2020.
An unequal impact
Much like the impacts of the climate crisis itself, the impacts of violence against land and environmental defenders are not felt evenly across the world. The Global South is suffering the most immediate consequences of global warming on all fronts, and in 2020 all but one of the 227 recorded killings of defenders took place in the countries of the Global South.
The disproportionate number of attacks against Indigenous peoples continued, with over a third of all fatal attacks targeting Indigenous people – even though Indigenous communities make up only 5% of the world’s population. Indigenous peoples were also the target of 5 out of the 7 mass killings recorded in 2020.
As has been the case in previous years, in 2020 almost 9 in 10 of the victims of lethal attacks were men. At the same time, women who act and speak out also face gender-specific forms of violence, including sexual violence. Women often have a twin challenge: the public struggle to protect their land, and the less-visible struggle to defend their right to speak within their communities and families.
[Defenders are] at risk because they find themselves living on or near something that some corporation is demanding. That demand – the demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation – seems to translate eventually into the understanding, somewhere, that the troublemaker must go. – Bill McKibben
Business is responsible
Many companies engage in an extractive economic model that overwhelmingly prioritises profit over human rights and the environment. This unaccountable corporate power is the underlying force that has not only driven the climate crisis to the brink, but which has continued to perpetuate the killing of defenders.
In too many countries, rich in natural resources and climate critical biodiversity, corporations are operating with almost complete impunity. Because the balance of power is stacked in the favour of corporations, it’s rare that anyone is arrested or brought to court for killing defenders. When they are it’s usually the trigger-men – the ones holding the guns, not those who might be otherwise implicated, directly or indirectly, in the crime.
Governments must stop the violence
Governments have been all too willing to turn a blind eye and fail in providing their core mandate of upholding and protecting human rights. They are failing to protect land and environmental defenders, in many cases directly perpetrating violence against them, and in others complicit with business.
Even worse, states around the world – from the US to Brazil, Colombia and the Philippines – used the COVID pandemic to strengthen draconian measures to control citizens and close civic space.
There is a clear link between the availability of civic space and attacks against defenders – the most open and tolerant societies see very few attacks, whereas in restricted societies, attacks are much more frequent.
The majority of killings took place in states with limited civic freedoms
Data on civic freedoms via CIVICUS Monitor Open Narrowed Obstructed Repressed Closed 0 50 100 150 killings Killings in closed civic spaces are likely to be underreported about:blank
Recommendations
As the climate crisis intensifies, so too does its impact on people, including on land and environmental defenders. Meaningful climate action requires protecting defenders, and vice versa. Without significant change this situation is only likely to get worse – as more land is grabbed, and more forests are felled in the interest of short-term profits, both the climate crisis and attacks against defenders will continue to worsen.
Governments can turn the tide on the climate crisis and protect human rights by protecting civil society, and through passing legislation to hold corporations accountable for their actions and profits. Lawmakers have relied too much on corporate self-reporting and voluntary corporate mechanisms. As a result, companies continue to cause, contribute to, and benefit from human rights abuses and environmental harms, particularly across borders.
The United Nations, through its member states, must formally recognise the human right to a safe, healthy, and sustainable environment, ensure that commitments to meet the Paris Agreement integrate human rights protections, and implement the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders and the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights.
Statesmust ensure national policies protect land and environmental defenders and scrap legislation used to criminalise them, require companies to conduct human rights and environment due diligence in their global operations, and investigate and prosecute all actors involved in violence and other threats against defenders.
The European Commission is currently preparing to publish binding due diligence legislation, including an initiative on Sustainable Corporate Governance. They must ensure this initiative requires all companies doing business in the EU, including financial institutions, to identify and address human rights and environmental harms along their value chains. This legislation must include robust liability regimes and penalties to hold companies accountable for failing to do so.
Finally, companies and investors must publish and implement effective due diligence systems to identify and prevent human rights and environmental harms throughout their supply chains and operations, adopt and implement a zero-tolerance stance on reprisals and attacks on land and environmental defenders, and provide effective remedy when adverse human rights and environmental impacts and harms occur.
People sometimes ask me what I’m going to do, whether I’m going to stay here and keep my mother’s fight alive. I’m too proud of her to let it die. I know the dangers – we all know the dangers. But I’ve decided to stay. I’m going to join the fight. – Malungelo Xhakaza, daughter of murdered South African activist Fikile Ntshangase
Defenders are our last line of defence against climate breakdown. We can take heart from the fact that, even after decades of violence, people continue to stand up for their land and for our planet. In every story of defiance against corporate theft and land grabbing, against deadly pollution and against environmental disaster, is hope that we can turn the tide on this crisis and learn to live in harmony with the natural world. Until we do, the violence will continue.
Those murdered included South African Fikile Ntshangase, 65, who was involved in a legal dispute over the extension of an opencast mine operated by Tendele Coal near Somkhele in KwaZulu-Natal province. She was shot dead in her own living room. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/fikile-ntshangase/
