Category: Human Rights

  • Freedom House Logo - Torch next to words Freedom House

    On this International Day of Political Prisoners, the NGOs mentioned below stand together to affirm a simple truth: no one should be imprisoned for exercising their fundamental rights or for peacefully expressing their beliefs. Yet around the world, there are an estimated one million political prisoners, who are unjustly detained for political reasons. These individuals—journalists, human rights defenders, democratic opposition leaders, religious leaders, artists, and ordinary citizens—represent the conscience of their societies. Their imprisonment is an assault not only on their freedom, but on the shared principles of human dignity and justice.

    The International Day of Political Prisoners originated in the Soviet Union in 1974, when  political prisoners collectively held a one-day hunger strike. Soviet prisoners of conscience repeated this protest every October 30, supported by demonstrations of solidarity in major cities. In response to Vladimir Putin’s ongoing and deepening repression, Russian political prisoners rekindled the tradition in 2021. In the years since, it has become an international day of solidarity with political prisoners worldwide.

    Political imprisonment corrodes the rule of law, silences dissent, undermines press freedom, and weakens the foundations of democracy. Authoritarian governments use it to suppress opposition, instill fear, and consolidate control. Each unjust detention sends a chilling message to others who seek to speak truth to power.

    We, as organizations who advocate on behalf of those unjustly detained around the world, call on democratic governments to continue to make the release of political prisoners a global priority—to raise these cases consistently in bilateral and multilateral forums, to request information and specific actions be taken on the prisoners’ behalf, to support accountability mechanisms, and to continue to provide support to organizations that advocate on behalf of those unjustly detained and provide legal and humanitarian assistance to them and their families. Solidarity with the unjustly detained must be sustained, coordinated, and visible.

    We also stand in solidarity with the families, lawyers, and civil-society organizations who continue to advocate for freedom in the face of repression. Their courage reminds us that the defense of liberty is a collective responsibility.

    On this day, and every day, we reaffirm our shared commitment to the universal right to freedom of thought, expression, association, and belief. The world’s political prisoners must not be forgotten—and their freedom must remain a global cause.

    Signed:

    1. Freedom House
    2. Free Russia Foundation
    3. McCain Institute
    4. National Endowment for Democracy
    5. Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran
    6. Al-Tahreer Association for Development (TAD)
    7. Amnesty International
    8. Center for Civil Liberties
    9. Committee to Protect Journalists
    10. Freedom Now
    11. George W. Bush Institute
    12. Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign
    13. Human Rights Center Viasna
    14. Human Rights Defense Center Memorial
    15. Human Rights First
    16. Human Rights Foundation
    17. Human Rights Watch
    18. International Republican Institute
    19. James W. Foley Legacy Foundation
    20. Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice
    21. Oma Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Promotion
    22. Organization for Community Civic Engagement
    23. OVD-Info
    24. Political and Governance Development Academy
    25. Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP)
    26. The 30 October Foundation
    27. The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights
    28. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
    29. World Liberty Congress

    https://freedomhouse.org/article/joint-statement-international-day-political-prisoners

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion Irene Khan
    UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion Irene Khan
    Mary Lawlor UN Special Rapporteur for human rights defenders
    Mary Lawlor UN Special Rapporteur for human rights defenders

    On 5 August 2025 a group of United Nations human rights experts has written to the Kenyan government over allegations of serious human rights violations.  These violations include the killing of protesters, the arrest and detention of human rights defenders, the deportation of a Ugandan lawyer, and the suppression of media freedom during the June 25 protests across the country.

    The letter (referenced AL KEN 3/2025,) was sent by four UN Special Rapporteurs, namely Mary Lawlor (Human Rights Defenders), Matthew Gillett (Arbitrary Detention), Irene Khan (Freedom of Expression), and Gina Romero (Freedom of Assembly and Association). 

    Copies of the letter were also shared with the governments of Uganda and Tanzania, given their involvement in the alleged incidents. The Kenyan government was given 60 days to respond to the communication before being made public on the UN’s human rights website.

    By October 22, Kenya had not responded to the contents of the letter. The experts expressed grave concern over what they described as “an emerging pattern of criminalisation and harassment of human rights defenders in Kenya.”

    According to the communication, nationwide protests on June 25, 2025, left 16 people dead and hundreds injured. The demonstrations, which marked the first anniversary of the 2024 anti-Finance Bill protest, were allegedly met with excessive police force.

    During the protests, several major media houses reportedly had their transmission centres raided by police and communication officials who switched off live broadcasts. The Communications Authority of Kenya allegedly issued a directive barring media outlets from airing live coverage of the protests,  a decision later suspended by the High Court in Milimani, which termed it “potentially unconstitutional” pending a hearing scheduled for October 24, 2025.

    Kenyan youth confronts UN with tough questions in Geneva forum [VIDEO]

    The letter cites the arrest of Mark Amiani, John Mulingwa Nzau, and Francis Mutunge Mwangi, all members of the Social Justice Centres Working Group, who were detained by police on June 27 while travelling to work in Mombasa.  They were later charged with incitement of violence, damage to property, and theft, though the experts said no credible evidence was presented in court.

    They were held for five days before being released on bail on July 2, with conditions requiring them to report to the police twice weekly. Their next court hearing was scheduled for August 21, 2025.

    Prominent activist and photojournalist Boniface Mwangi was also arrested at his Nairobi home on July 19, where police allegedly confiscated electronic equipment and even tear gas canisters.  He was charged with unlawful possession of ammunition and released on bail two days later.

    The UN experts noted that Mwangi had previously been arrested several times and was abducted in Tanzania in May 2025, before being found in Kenya’s coastal town of Ukunda days later.

    The letter further highlighted the deportation of Ugandan lawyer Martin Mavenjina, a senior legal advisor at the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), who was expelled from Kenya on July 5 despite having a valid residency and a Kenyan family. 

    He was allegedly detained at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and forced onto a flight to Kampala without being informed of the reason or given access to legal counselADVERTISEMENT

    A day after Mavenjina’s deportation, armed men reportedly stormed a press conference hosted at the KHRC offices in Nairobi, where women and widows were calling for an end to police brutality and enforced disappearances.  The assailants allegedly destroyed journalists’ equipment and accused the women of organising protests. Despite reports being filed, no investigations have been launched, according to the letter.

    UN calls for action and accountability: The UN experts urged the Kenyan government to clarify the legal basis for the arrests, detentions, and deportations, and to end the intimidation of journalists and human rights defenders. 

    They also demanded investigations into the killings and injuries from the protests.

    The experts warned that the events “constitute blatant violations” of international human rights laws, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees freedoms of

    https://www.pulselive.co.ke/articles/news/local/why-un-experts-are-calling-out-kenya-in-scathing-letter-to-government-2025102704150886531

    https://nation.africa/kenya/news/abductions-kenya-risks-sanctions-for-ignoring-un-queries-on-human-rights-abuses-5245882

    https://eastleighvoice.co.ke/national/231234/east-africa-law-society-warns-of-eroding-rule-of-law-as-kenyan-activists-tanzanian-diplomat-go-missing

    https://nation.africa/kenya/news/kenya-responds-to-un-on-abductions-after-media-highlight-5249510

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • ANALYSIS: By Lamis Andoni

    The rift between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is real. However, to understand it, one must see it for what it is — not a clash of principles, but of priorities.

    Trump and the US establishment seek to expand the Abraham Accords, especially to bring Saudi Arabia on board. Tel Aviv, meanwhile, is fixated on accelerating its settlement project, beginning with annexations across large swathes of land in the West Bank.

    Beneath this lies another tension. Israel wants to erase any talk of a Palestinian state, while the US, though never serious about Palestinian sovereignty, insists on keeping the illusion alive.

    For Washington, that illusion is useful leverage with Arab capitals; for Israel, it is an obstacle.

    Trump’s plan even hinted at this illusion in its nineteenth clause: after certain “conditions,” a state might someday emerge. Yet annexation would shatter even that mirage.

    Trump, a man known for lying, is sincere in one thing: his promise to Arab states to restrain Israel from annexing land in the West Bank. But his sincerity is tactical, not moral.

    The restraint he offers is temporary, a pause meant to preserve the path toward expanding the Abraham Accords. It is not a strategic position, only a calculation.

    Natural next step
    Netanyahu, meanwhile, wants to force the world to accept that the West Bank is part of Israel, beyond the reach of UN resolutions or international law. For him, annexation is not a bargaining chip but the natural next step in completing the Zionist project.

    Both men seek Arab submission to Israeli hegemony. Yet Washington has learned that Arab leaders, while complicit, remain wary. They fear that deepening normalisation, meant to evolve from official policy to popular acceptance, could backfire after Gaza’s devastation, Israel’s ongoing assaults, the seizure of Syrian and Lebanese land, and the aggression against Qatar.

    Annexing the West Bank now, they worry, could blow up the illusion of peace that underpins normalisation itself.

    For the US, that illusion is vital. The Abraham Accords are not just about recognition but about institutionalising a regional order, a military and security alliance led by Israel, with Arab acquiescence to its sovereignty over all of historic Palestine.

    Netanyahu, however, sees no need for Arab consent. He believes force, not diplomacy, will impose Israel’s supremacy. His political survival depends on it: projecting strength, showing no retreat, proving that Arabs, defeated and divided, will ultimately rush to make deals with him.

    And so far, he has reason to believe he’s right. The war on Gaza has not halted normalisation; no Arab state has suspended trade or energy ties.

    On the contrary, cooperation, especially with the UAE, has expanded. Israeli analysts track this closely, confident that annexation may delay the process, but it will not derail it.

    No Arab threats
    Israel has concluded that no Arab state that normalised relations has threatened to suspend them, not even after the war of annihilation in Gaza, the incursions into Syria and Lebanon, or the demolition and settlement campaigns across the West Bank.

    Still, Zionist and pro-Israel circles in Washington continue to warn the Trump administration that Netanyahu’s recklessness could destroy everything. They know Arab leaders find it difficult to deepen normalisation while Israel endangers regional stability and shows open contempt for their security concerns.

    These leaders do not trust that their agreements can restrain Netanyahu’s excesses and take seriously his threats of expansion into Syria, Lebanon, and even Jordan, threats that have already begun to materialise.

    Arab governments have managed, for now, to contain public sympathy for Palestinians and suppress popular opposition to ties with Israel. Yet they remain aware of the anger simmering beneath the surface, which could erupt if Israel’s aggressions continue.

    It was this fear that drove pro-Israel circles in Washington to pressure the Trump administration to block, or rather, postpone, Israel’s annexation of West Bank land.

    Trump was ultimately persuaded. Arab leaders had delivered the message to him directly: annexation would make normalisation politically impossible. He therefore pledged to prevent it, at least temporarily.

    This exchange, Arab opposition to annexation and Trump’s tactical response, reveal that the Arab position can still influence Washington.

    US needs cooperation
    The United States cannot simply threaten every Arab government or sever all aid. It needs their cooperation to secure its regional goals, and that cooperation depends on a degree of stability.

    If chaos benefits Washington, popular anger can be tolerated, but if stability is the goal, unchecked Israeli aggression becomes a liability even for the United States.

    Trump’s response to the concerns of Arab leaders, especially those of Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt, revealed that they could have done more but chose not to. That, however, is another story.

    What matters here is that Trump understood two key conditions for sustaining the Abraham Accords: maintaining a ceasefire and preventing Israel from annexing West Bank land.

    The normalisation project aims to integrate Israel into the region and present it as an “indigenous” state, not a colonial one that expands by uprooting the land’s original population.

    This has long been Israel’s dream, but Netanyahu no longer seems concerned with appearances. He imagines himself on the verge of a sweeping historic victory.

    That fantasy is not his alone; Trump shares it as well.

    Trump’s ego greater
    Yet Trump’s own ego is greater. He now sees Netanyahu as an obstacle to his ambitions, a man jeopardising what Trump believes he has built and protected. Many within Zionist and pro-Israel circles agree: they want Trump to save Israel from Netanyahu.

    Trump’s anger is therefore genuine. He and his aides, backed by influential figures from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, one of the central bastions of Zionist influence in Washington, are determined not to let Netanyahu endanger both US and Israeli interests.

    This rift should be used by Arab states wisely, without illusion: it will not alter Washington’s strategic bond with Israel. However, I am under no illusion that they will do anything.

    Still, Arab states, however weak-willed, can take a minimum position, to publicly reject Israeli annexation of West Bank land and any territory from Gaza, and to reaffirm their refusal to recognise Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian land.

    They can at least reclaim the language of rights as a peaceful weapon: legal, diplomatic, and moral.

    That weapon gains power if Arab states act by filing a case against Israel and its settlements as violations of international law. Not to defend Palestine alone, but to defend themselves.

    For if they fail to act, the threat will not spare their regimes, nor the region they claim to protect.

    Lamis Andoni is a Palestinian journalist, writer and academic who launched The New Arab as its editor-in-chief.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    A national pro-Palestinian advocacy group has accused the New Zealand government of providing political cover and rewarding the Israeli genocide by deploying a “liaison officer” to the US-brokered peace plan for the besieged enclave.

    “It’s a knee-jerk reaction for New Zealand to send in the troops to the Middle East to back Israel and the US,” said Maher Nazzal, co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

    “A liaison officer deployment is political cover to assist and reward Israel for its
    genocide in Gaza. The US makes bombs and bullets for Israel to fire.

    “It’s a shameful betrayal of Palestine and the Palestinian steadfastness in the face of unbelievable depravity and cruelty,” Nazzal said in a statement.

    He said it was ominous that the liaison officer would be based inside a US military office in Israel.

    “Instead, we should be working with the United Nations in the region. Trump plans to perpetuate the Israeli occupation under a figleaf of it being multinational. That is what we are supporting.”

    “This is more of the same complicity with the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza,” he said.

    ‘Joined at hip’
    Nazzal said that for two years Foreign Minister Winston Peters had joined New Zealand “at the hip” to a country whose Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] was wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

    “There have been no sanctions on Israel, but we frequently impose new sanctions on Russia and Iran,” he said.

    “The NZDF was there in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government sent the army up to the Red Sea to fight with the Americans early last year to keep Israeli sea lanes open.”

    Nazzal said the government should focus on aid, ensuring Palestinians’ rights and representation, and fact-finding.

    “There should be a cross-party Parliamentary fact-finding mission assembled urgently, which could get into Gaza safely before Israel ramps up its murderous assault again.”he said.

    “MPs should see for themselves, instead of signing off on a soldier whose job it is to ‘implement’ the Trump plan.”

    Jordan rejects US plan
    The King of Jordan had recently rejected the US proposal to join in patrolling Gaza to implement Trump’s vision.

    “Palestinians have no say in the Trump plan. Trump decides who is going to
    implement it. He’s picked Tony Blair,” Nazzal said.

    “When he was British Prime Minister, Blair, and US President Bush, invaded Iraq to destroy the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. More than a million Iraqis died.

    “In Gaza, more than 20,000 children have now been murdered by Israel in
    indiscriminate killing across Gaza.”

    “The New Zealand people stand with Palestine – the government stands with Israel.”

    Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Palestinians in Gaza say they are losing hope in the ceasefire after Israel’s deadliest violation yet killed more than 100 people, mostly women and children, on Wednesday.

    Israel’s military carried out another deadly attack in northern Gaza last night, killing two people, despite claiming to resume the fragile ceasefire, which had already been teetering from a wave of deadly bombardment it waged the night before.

    US President Donald Trump said the ceasefire was “still strong” while mediator Qatar expressed frustration but said the mediators were looking forward to the next phase of the truce.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • On 13 October 2025, Nina Lakhani, climate justice reporter the Guardian, published this interview with Mary Lawlor, UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders, who presented her final annual thematic report during an interactive dialogue at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly’s Third Committee. The Special Rapporteur’s report focused on the contributions of human rights defenders addressing climate change and working to realise a just transition from fossil fuels, and the risks they face in carrying out this work.

    Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders since 2020, has documented hundreds of cases where states have sought to smear and silence climate defenders engaged in peaceful protest, non-violent civil disobedience and litigation.

    “Attacks against climate defenders have surged over the course of the mandate, and we now see outright repression against people who are organizing for climate action. It’s some of the states that have claimed to be the strongest supporters of human rights defenders including the UK, Germany, France and the US, that are most often repressing climate activists and where the right to protest is being denigrated and delegitimized.

    “These big countries spew out the rhetoric about 1.5C, but they don’t mean it. They are playing the game to suit themselves. It’s business as usual,” Lawlor said in an interview with the Guardian.

    Lawlor will present the penultimate report of her six-year mandate, “Tipping points: Human rights defenders, climate change and a just transition”, to the UN general assembly on 16 October.

    It documents state repression including police violence and surveillance, civil litigation deployed to deliberately wear down and silence climate defenders known as Slapp (strategic lawsuits against public participation), as well as bogus criminal charges ranging from sedition, criminal defamation, terrorism and conspiracy to trespass, to public disorder and to disobedience.

    One trend documented by Lawlor is the conflation of non-violent climate action with terrorism. In 2022, the French minister of interior at the time, and current minister of justice, accused the national environmental movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre of “ecoterrorism”. The government sought to close down the group, but the country’s highest administrative court eventually overturned the effort.

    Lawlor is adamant that climate activists are human rights defenders. They use non-violent protest, disruptive civil disobedience and litigation to stop fossil fuel projects and pressure elected officials to take meaningful action precisely because they are trying to protect the right to food, clean water, health, life and a healthy environment.

    But it’s not just fossil fuels. Human rights are now being targeted in the rush for critical minerals and new sources of non-fossil energy. The same repressive playbook is being used by governments and private companies involved in land grabs, pollution and Indigenous rights violations in pursuit of a green transition.

    Governments are repressing human rights defenders and the current trajectory is incompatible with the realization of human rights for all. It’s just a road to destruction … I think states are behaving in a criminal fashion,” Lawlor said.

    No system, no power, no government, no big company seeking profit should trump the rights of billions of people in the world. And that’s what’s happening. It’s the rich, the powerful that are creating such a disaster for humanity.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/climate-defenders-mary-lawlor-human-rights

    https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/unga-80-special-rapporteur-urges-states-to-protect-environmental-defenders-working-towards-a-just-transition

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • This blog is now closed, you can read more of our UK political coverage here

    Mark Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary and former national security adviser, goes next. He is now a peer, and a member of the committee.

    He says the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Collins, thought there was enough evidence for the case to go ahead. But the CPS did not agree. Who was right?

    In 2017, the Law Commission flagged that the term enemy [in the legislation] was deeply problematic and it would give rise to difficulties in future prosecutions.

    And I think what has played out, during this prosecution exemplifies and highlights the difficulties with that.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Nigel Farage is once again wasting everyone’s time. He is presenting a 10-minute bill in parliament on Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

    According to the Daily Mail, AKA the Daily Fail, Farage vows to ‘take back our borders’. But does he realise that the ECHR has fuck all to do with our borders?

    The Daily Mail said:

    The Reform UK leader told the Daily Mail that Britain’s membership of the treaty had ‘totally neutered’ the Government’s ability to deport illegal migrants.

    European Convention on Human Rights

    The ECHR protects our rights to:

    • life, freedom and security
    • respect for private and family life
    • freedom of expression
    • freedom of thought, conscience and religion
    • vote in and stand for election
    • a fair trial in civil and criminal matters
    • property and peaceful enjoyment of possessions.

    It also prohibits:

    • the death penalty
    • torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
    • slavery and forced labour
    • arbitrary and unlawful detention
    • discrimination in the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms secured by the Convention
    • deportation of a state’s own nationals or denying them entry and the collective deportation of foreigners.

    The ECHR does not stop the UK from deporting people, apart from in exceptional circumstances.

    For example, if someone will face torture when returned to their country of origin, they can challenge their removal under Article 3, Prohibition of Torture. 

    What the ECHR does is set the minimum human rights standards that governments must adhere to when deporting someone.

    The ECHR does not give people a right to enter or remain in a country they are not a citizen of. It also does not provide a right to claim asylum. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has previously said that it’s up to individual states to control the entry and residence of foreign nationals. Those states have the power to deport people convicted of criminal offences.

    So, as usual, Farage is chatting shit.

    No-rights Nigel clearly doesn’t care about our right to life or a fair trial, or our right to freedom from torture and slavery. He’s clearly willing to give up his own right to those things, too.

    But let’s face it, a white, privileged man like Farage is not going to need the ECHR in the same way that so many of us do to protect us from state violence.

    All of us

    You’d think from the way Farage carries on, he just wants to strip foreigners of these rights. But nope. Make no mistake, he is coming after the rights of every single one of us.

    The kind of legislation the Canary can get behind:

    Rule 39 orders are urgent injunctions which the ECHR can issue in ‘exceptional circumstances’ when there’s an ‘imminent risk of irreparable harm’. They are very rarely issued against the UK. This is what prevented the first deportation flights to Rwanda in 2022.

    Since 1980, there have been only 29 UK cases at the ECtHR that have been related to deportation or extradition. In 16 of these, the court found that the UK did not breach the convention. The deportation or extraditions went ahead.

    This means that in 45 years, the ECHR has only prevented 13 individuals from being removed from the UK.

    Farage is really barking up the wrong tree. Not only is his nonsense completely racist, but he wants to waste everyone’s time and the country’s money by leaving a convention that isn’t actually doing what he says it is. Either he is completely brainless, or he thinks the rest of us are.

    Once again, he is preying on people’s frustrations of years of austerity to lodge a bill which will strip everyone of their human rights.

    Featured image via HG

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has challenged Defence Minister Judith Collins over her “can’t be trusted” backing for controversial BlackSky Technology satellite launches and called on the Prime Minister to withdraw approval.

    National co-chair John Minto today wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon — who is currently in Korea for the APEC meeting — in response to what he described as a “shocking” TVNZ 1News interview with Collins last Friday that revealed the satellite launches could be used by Israel in its genocidal attacks on the besieged enclave of Gaza.

    Minto asked Luxon to “overrule” Collins and end the BlackSky satellite launches

    He said PSNA had requested the Prime Minister direct Collins to withdraw approval for forthcoming Rocket Lab satellite launches for BlackSky Technology from Mahia, which could be used by Israel in Gaza.

    Collins “can’t be trusted to uphold New Zealanders’ values”, Minto said in a statement.

    “She went for any excuse to justify approving the launches, and the Prime Minister must rein her in.”

    ‘Free hand’ claim
    Collins had said in the 1News report that the UN Security Council did not encourage sanctions, so she believed New Zealand had a “free hand to be militarily complicit” in Israel’s resumed genocide in Gaza, PSNA said as the ceasefire remained shaky today with Israel’s renewed attacks on the enclave.

    “But New Zealand has complained for decades about the veto powers of one country in the Security Council,” Minto said.

    “Then, our government uses the very same US veto — which it opposes — to justify licensing the launch of spy satellites to target Gaza.”

    Defence Minister Judith Collins warned over satellites, reports TVNZ's 1News
    Defence Minister Judith Collins warned over satellites, TVNZ’s 1News reported last Friday. Image: 1News screenshot APR

    Minto said New Zealand government was ignoring the International Court of Justice(ICJ), which has directed countries to do what they could to prevent Israel’s illegal occupation from continuing.

    “Signing off on delivering the technology, which the IDF [Israeli military] uses for its bombing runs on a civilian population, can hardly be interpreted as helping Israel end its occupation of Gaza.”

    Minto said Collins’ alternative excuse was that New Zealand was “not at war with Israel, so can’t sanction it” was “equally nonsensical”.

    “It may come as news to the Defence Minister, but New Zealand is not at war with Iran or Russia either,” Minto said.

    “Yet the government routinely imposes sanctions on both of these countries, with putting new sanctions on Iran just a few days ago.”

    Israel kills 91 people
    Meanwhile, Israeli forces have killed at least 91 people in Gaza overnight, including at least 24 children, according to medical sources, in violation of the US-brokered ceasefire.

    Al Jazeera reports that US President Donald Trump said Israel had “hit back” after a soldier was “taken out” but he claimed “nothing was going to jeopardise” the ceasefire, Al Jazeera reports.

    Trump also said Hamas had “to behave”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • bill gates climate change
    6 Mins Read

    Bill Gates has warned against climate alarmism, calling for policies that shift focus from temperature and emission reductions to improving lives ahead of COP30.

    This week, the head of the UN said the world has missed its 1.5°C target, warning of “devastating consequences” yet outlining that emissions cuts are still critical.

    A day later, the most comprehensive report of its kind found that rising heat is causing the death of one person every minute globally.

    So it’s more than surprising that Bill Gates, a man who has spent many of his billions raising alarms about the climate crisis, is now cautioning against climate alarmism.

    In a new memo published on his website, Gates Notes, less than two weeks before the UN’s annual climate conference begins in Brazil, the Microsoft co-founder suggested that global climate strategy should pivot from tackling temperature rises to preventing disease and poverty.

    He criticised the “doomsday outlook” of the climate crisis, which he believes focuses “too much on near-term emissions goals” and diverts resources from effective measures that can improve lives.

    “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” he wrote.

    Gates’s memo can be seen in several ways. 1. He really has softened his stance on climate change and limiting emissions, 2. he’s trying to curb hostility by leading with optimism and repositioning a politically charged and culturally sensitive debate, or 3. he wants to focus more on filling the gap left by President Trump’s aid cuts.

    The truth likely lies somewhere between these three intentions. And Gates knows it. “I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits), or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously,” he said.

    COP30 must focus on spending money on the ‘right things’

    food tech investment
    Courtesy: Eitan Bernath

    The billionaire, who is skipping COP30, said the global climate summit was “an excellent place to begin” adopting a “different view” and adjusting our strategies. The annual event is notorious for convening thousands of fossil fuel and livestock lobbyists, who have ensured that their industries – the two most polluting ones – are protected from any declarations.

    Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them, it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare,” he argued.

    “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

    Gates reiterated that climate change is “a very important problem” that “needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition”. “Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives,” he wrote.

    It is especially important to get the most out of every dollar spent on supporting the least affluent populations. “The pool of money available to help them – which was already less than 1% of rich countries’ budgets at its highest level – is shrinking as rich countries cut their aid budgets and low-income countries are burdened by debt,” he said.

    “I urge everyone at COP30 to ask: How do we make sure aid spending is delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people? Is the money designated for climate being spent on the right things? I believe the answer is no.”

    Bill Gates’s ‘three tough truths’ about climate change

    bill gates climate change memo
    Courtey: Gates Notes

    Climate, disease and poverty are all major problems, and for the philanthropist, there are “three truths” that can help deal with them with maximum impact.

    First, he said, climate change is a “serious problem”, but won’t be “the end of civilisation”. Gates acknowledged that we’re falling far short of our climate goals – most scientists think the world will exceed its 2°C budget by 2100. But innovation can help usher in change, with green energy and electric vehicles helping lower estimated emissions by 40% in the last decade.

    Second: temperature isn’t the best way to measure climate progress. Instead, look at the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). The 30 countries with the lowest HDI scores are home to one of every eight people, but produce just about “one-third of 1% of global GDP”. That inequity, in his mind, is why climate strategies need to prioritise human welfare.

    “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future,” said Gates. Poverty-related health problems, like malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, and complications from childbirth, kill about eight million people a year.

    Finally, Gates believes health and prosperity are the best defence against climate change, citing research showing that projected deaths from climate change are halved when accounting for the economic growth of low-income countries. “The faster people become prosperous and healthy, the more lives we can save,” he said.

    Gates suggested that “improvements in agriculture” should be at the top of our priorities, but instead of lower-emission production, he pointed to strategies to increase yields, develop climate-resilient crop varieties, and use AI to forecast weather and change cultivation plans.

    “Lower emissions will eventually lead to fewer devastating losses, but today’s farmers don’t have time to wait for the climate to stabilise. They need to raise their incomes and feed their families now,” he said.

    Gates offers priority climate solutions amid shifting priorities

    bill gates vegan
    Courtesy: Gates Notes

    With COP30 on the horizon, Gates notes that governments always announce commitments to lower emissions, but don’t outline the technologies that will help them do so. Innovations in each economic sector – electricity, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing and buildings – must get more visibility.

    Industry representatives should report on progress towards affordable and practical zero-carbon innovations using the Green Premium – described as “the cost difference between clean and dirty ways of doing something” – as their yardstick.

    He argued that the Green Premium should be reduced to zero, and asked governments to protect funding for clean technologies and the policies that promote them.

    Gates also called for a more rigorous approach towards measuring impact. “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he said, explaining how they can cost as little as $1,000 per life saved. “Every effort in the world’s climate agenda should undergo a similar analysis and be prioritised by its ability to save and improve lives cost-effectively.”

    Here’s the thing, though: the tech pioneer has been slowly moving away from his climate initiatives. His green venture firm Breakthrough Energy announced significant cuts in March, including gutting its climate policy group. Two months later, he brought forward the planned closure of the Gates Foundation, which has pumped billions into the fight against climate change, including $1.4B in adaptation finance for farmers in low-income countries.

    Infamously, despite a pledge to divest from the industry, his stake in fossil fuels increased by 30% between 2019 and 2030. The sector is also dear to Trump, and one philanthropy expert said Gates’s call to transition away from emissions reduction could likely be “a continuation of wanting to move to the centre and not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration”.

    His new stance is at odds with that of UN secretary-general António Guterres. “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah,” he said this week.

    “But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

    The post Climate Change Kills A Person Every Minute, But Bill Gates Says It Won’t Cause ‘Humanity’s Demise’ appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • By Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent

    A Marshall Islands lawmaker has called on Pacific legislatures to establish and strengthen their national human rights commissions to help address the region’s nuclear testing legacy.

    “Our people in the Marshall Islands carry voices of our lives that are shaped by this nuclear legacy,” Senator David Anitok said during the second day of the Association of Pacific Island Legislatures (APIL) general assembly in Saipan this week.

    “Decades later, our people still endure many consequences, such as cancer, displacement, environmental contamination, and the Micronesian families seeking safety and care abroad. Recent studies and lived experience [have shown] what our elders have always known-the harm is deeper, broader, and longer lasting than what the world once believed.”

    Anitok said that once established, these human rights commissions must be independent, inclusive, and empowered to tackle not only the nuclear testing legacy but also issues of injustice, displacement, environmental degradation, and governance.

    “Let’s stand together and build a migration network of human rights institutions that will protect our people, our lands, our oceans, our cultures, our heritages, and future generations,” he said.

    “Furthermore, we call upon all of you to engage more actively with international human rights mechanisms. Together, it will help shape a future broadened in human rights, peace, and dignity.”

    Marshall Islands Senator David Anitok
    Marshall Islands Senator David Anitok . . . “Let’s stand together and build a migration network of human rights institutions that will protect our people . . . and future generations.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Mark Rabago

    To demonstrate the Marshall Islands’ leadership on human rights, Anitok noted that the country has been elected to the UN Human Rights Council twice under President Dr Hilda Heine — an honour shared in the Pacific only once each by Australia and Tahiti.

    Pohnpei Senator Shelten Neth echoed Anitok’s call, demanding justice for the Pacific’s nuclear testing victims.

    “Enough is enough. Let’s stop talking the talk and let’s put our efforts together — united we stand and walk the talk.

    “Spreading of the nuclear waste is not only confined to the Marshall Islands, and I’m a living witness. I can talk about this from the scientific research already completed, but many don’t want to release it to the general public.

    “The contamination is spreading fast. [It’s in] Guam already, and the other nations that are closer to the RMI,” Neth said.

    He then urged the United States to accept full responsibility for its nuclear testing programme in the Pacific.

    “I [want to tell] Uncle Sam to honestly attend to the accountability of their wrongdoing. Inhuman, unethical, unorthodox, what you did to RMI. The nuclear testing is an injustice!” Neth declared.

    Anitok and Neth’s remarks followed a presentation by Diego Valadares Vasconcelos Neto, human rights officer for Micronesia under the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who discussed how UN human rights mechanisms can support economic development, health, and welfare in the region.

    Neto underscored the UN’s 80-year partnership with the Pacific and its continuing commitment to peace, human rights, and sustainable development in the wake of the Second World War and the nuclear era.

    He highlighted key human rights relevant to the Pacific context:

    • Right to development — Economic progress must go beyond GDP growth to include social, cultural, and political inclusion;
    • Right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment — Ensuring access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental matters; and
    • Political and civil rights — Upholding participation in governance, freedom of expression and association, equality, and self-determination.

    Based in Pohnpei and representing OHCHR’s regional office in Suva, Fiji, Neto outlined UN tools available to assist Pacific legislatures, including the Universal Periodic Review, special procedures (such as thematic experts on water, sanitation, and climate justice), and treaty bodies monitoring state compliance with human rights conventions.

    He also urged Pacific parliaments to form permanent human rights committees, ratify more international treaties, and strengthen legislative oversight on human rights implementation.

    Neto concluded by citing ongoing UN collaboration in the Marshall Islands-particularly in addressing the human rights impacts of nuclear testing and climate change-and expressed hope for continued dialogue between Pacific lawmakers and the UN Human Rights Office.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    A former National MP has launched a petition calling for “equality and respect” in New Zealand’s immigration visa treatment of Pacific Islanders, saying “many are shocked when they learn the truth”.

    In a full page advertisement in The New Zealand Herald newspaper today, Anae Arthur Anae condemned the New Zealand government’s visa settings that discriminated against Pacific peoples visiting the country and recalled the “dark days of the Dawn Raids“.

    The petition calls on the government to allow Pacific people to enter New Zealand on a three-month visitor visa issued on arrival.

    “While 90 percent of New Zealanders value and respect the contribution that Pacific peoples have made to this beautiful nation, most are unaware of the unfair treatment we continue to face,” Anae declared.

    “Many are shocked when they learn the truth.”

    “Currently, citizens from 60 countries aroundn the world — representing a combined population of 1.65 billion peopole — can arrive at any New Zealand airport and receive a three-month visitor visa arrival, free of charge,” he said.

    “In contrast, the 16 Pacific Island Forum nations, with a total population of fewer than 16 million, are denied this privilege.

    ‘Lengthy, expensive’ process
    Anae, who recently discussed his proposal on Radio Samoa, said that instead Pacific people needed to go through a “lengthy and expensive” visa application process — “preventing many from attending family funerals, emergencies, graduations and other important family events”.

    Until recently, he said, New Zealand’s Immigration Office in Samoa had been open for just an hour a day, “serving over 200,000 people with deep family and historical ties to New Zealand”.

    Anae said this lack of accessibility was “unacceptable for nations bound to New Zealand through treaties of friendship and shared sacrifice”.


    Former MP Anae Arthur Anae discusses his petition with Radio Samoa.

    “Let us reflect: Is this how we treat nations who have stood beside New Zealand through war, loss and shared history?” he said.

    The "Pacific Justice:" advertisement in the New Zealand Herald
    The “Pacific Justice:” advertisement in today’s New Zealand Herald. Image: NZH screenshot APR

    “We have shown loyalty, worked hard to build this country since the 1940s, and contributed immensely to its growth. Yet, we were once hunted in the dark days of the Dawn Raids, a shameful chapter that should never be repeated.

    “Pacific peoples have proven time and again that, when given the opportunity, we can achieve and contribute equally to anyone else.”

    The petition has received at least 24,000 signatures and closes on November 7.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • On Tuesday 28 October, Defend Our Juries and Prisoners For Palestine jointly announced plans to launch what they aim to be the:

    most widespread mass civil disobedience across the UK in modern British history.

    Defend our Juries and Prisoners for Palestine: plans for mass civil disobedience

    Defend Our Juries has plans for actions in 18 towns and cities across every nation in the UK. The group will be challenging the ‘terror’ ban on Palestine Action ahead of and during the judicial review (25–27 November). Protesters will hold Lift The Ban demonstrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Oxford, Leeds, Aberystwyth, Nottingham, Northampton, Gloucester, and Truro on Tuesday 18 November. Following this, the group will host protests in London (Thursday 20, Saturday 22, Monday 24, Wednesday 26), Belfast (Saturday 22), Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge, Bristol, Sheffield, Exeter and Lancaster (Saturday 29 November).

    So far, the state has arrested over 2,000 people under terrorism legislation for taking part in these actions in which people sit silently holding handwritten cardboard signs saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. Around 170 of these, police have so far charged with section 13 offences under the Terrorism Act 2000. These offences carry a maximum six month prison sentence.

    Time for a ‘significant escalation’

    At the Court Of Appeal ruling on 15 October, Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori won two more grounds for her Judicial Review. This was at the same time as the government lost its attempt to block the legal challenge of the ban. Defend Our Juries said this made the Judicial Review “twice as likely to succeed” as she now has four grounds on which to appeal rather than two.

    Last week the UN issued its draft report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime. It detailed the complicity of states including the UK in the destruction of Gaza. Amongst other things, the UK continued to supply arms including components for F-35 stealth bombers, undertook daily surveillance flights over Gaza for Israel, maintained normal trade relations, and enabled Israel to undertake international crimes with impunity.

    A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said:

    Today, we’re announcing a significant escalation. This is set to be the most widespread mass civil disobedience across the UK in modern British history, stretching from city centres to small towns across the country, in open defiance of this authoritarian and unjust ban.

    These historic mobilisations will honour those already imprisoned for risking everything to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel and stands in unwavering solidarity with them.

    As the latest UN report makes devastatingly clear, both Conservative and Labour governments have been shamefully complicit in the horrors unfolding in Gaza. The use of counter-terror legislation to silence and criminalise people acting to save lives and expose the UK Government’s violations of international law must end now. The Filton 24 and Brize Norton 5 must be granted immediate bail and full access to the evidence they need to defend themselves.

    Our movement to defy this draconian ban is growing by the thousands and we will not stop until it is overturned.

    Different nations, wildly different responses

    The action in Belfast Saturday on 22 November will be the first Lift The Ban action in the city. Local campaigners have held regular independently-organised sign-holding actions in Derry, but police have brought no arrests or charges to date in the North of Ireland. Legal experts say that Police Service Northern Ireland need the proscription “like a hole in the head”. They suspect that the home secretary did not consult PSNI on the proscription.

    Police Scotland have similarly made no arrests at Lift The Ban actions in Edinburgh. However, they have subsequently arrested and charged a seemingly random ten people from the 85 who took action in September. The Scottish Counter-Terrorism Board CONTEST has concluded that Palestine Action:

    has not been close to meeting the statutory definition of terrorism.

    Earlier this month, former diplomat Craig Murray filed a legal challenge against the ban in Scotland. It means there is the potential for a constitutional crisis if Scottish and English courts reach different decisions.

    In Cardiff, Welsh police took an alarmingly extreme approach back in July. Cops arrested sign-holding sitters originally under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (maximum penalty of 14 years in prison). They held the protesters in custody while raiding their houses. The same sitters were subsequently charged with lesser section 13 offences (maximum penalty of six months in prison).

    Palestine Action prisoners prepare to hunger strike

    In tandem, Prisoners for Palestine have announced that prisoners the state is holding in British jails without trial will go ahead with a rolling hunger strike on 2 November. The decision comes after the home secretary failed to respond to their demands. This included immediate bail, access to documents necessary for the right to a fair trial, and the de-proscription of Palestine Action.

    The prisoners are part of the Filton 24 and Brize Norton 5 who are alleged to have taken part in actions in the name of Palestine Action designed to save lives by degrading weapons and machinery facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    The Crown Prosecution Service claims there is a “terrorism connection” to the alleged offences. This is despite the fact that the state has brought no charges under the Terrorism Act against them, and the activists carried out their actions before the government proscribed Palestine Action.

    Francesca Nadin, spokesperson for Prisoners for Palestine said:

    It’s no great surprise that the government has ignored the prisoners’ demands, this is simply a continuation of the corruption and violence enacted by the British state – not only upon the prisoners, but most importantly on the Palestinian people. It seems that they believe that they can act against the wishes of the people, but we are here to tell them otherwise. The prisoners lead the way with their resolve and moral clarity and we must heed their call. We are here today with Defend Our Juries to show the British state that we will not be intimidated into silence, on the contrary, we are fighting for the same cause and will continue to escalate. For justice, for freedom, to stop the genocide in Palestine.

    T Hoxa, one of the Filton 24 who ended a 28-day hunger strike on 7 September after winning most of her demands, said:

    For me, the hunger strike is about autonomy. Your body is one way you can fight against the system, because in every other way they’ve taken everything from you. They lock you up when they want, give you red warnings just because they’ve got that power. So, for me, hunger strike is a very important and necessary tool, and the notion that this is one area they can’t control gives me strength.

    Hunger strike to bring violence of UK carceral system into ‘sharp focus’

    Dr Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE International, who are negotiating partners for the hunger strikers alongside Prisoners for Palestine, said:

    This hunger strike will be the first of its kind in at least two decades. It brings into sharp focus the violence of the carceral system in the UK, a violence we often associate with places afar. From Guantánamo to Gaza, the infrastructure of authoritarian terror laws built to imprison, silence, and suppress action for Palestine and voices challenging wars and genocide must be dismantled. Prisoners are the beating heart of our movement for justice. We must honour their sacrifices and stand up to challenge the injustices they face.

    The hunger-strikers are members of Prisoners for Palestine, which include the Filton 24 and Brize Norton 5. Some of these prisoners have now spent over a year in custody without trial. With their treatment having deteriorated following the proscription of Palestine Action, they feel they have no option but to go on hunger-strike to fight for their rights.

    The prisoners will start their hunger strike on 2 November, Balfour Day, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It will also mark just two weeks before the start of the first of the three Filton 24 trials. The hunger-strike aims to highlight the conditions of the prisoners’ incarceration, and set out a series of demands to the British government. These demands include the right to a fair trial, release on bail, and the dropping of all terror-related charges.

    The Filton 24 are alleged to have been involved in an action on the Research, Development, and Manufacturing Hub of Israel’s biggest weapons maker Elbit Systems, located at Filton, Bristol. During the August 2024 action, a group of activists drove a modified prison van through the facility’s perimeter fence, and on through the shuttered entrance. Six activists then entered the building, and began dismantling production machinery, as well as Elbit-produced quadcopter drones, which Israel has used throughout the Gaza Genocide.

    Police arrested the six activists at the site. However later, while in police custody, they re-arrested them under counter-terrorism legislation. This allowed the authorities to extend their detention period. Police later charged them with non-terror offences, and remanded them in custody.

    Shocking abuse of terror laws and police powers

    Over the following months, in a series of dawn raids, police arrested a further 18 activists, often along with family members, who they later released. The police again used counter-terror laws, and while they never charged them with terrorist offences, the prosecution have alleged a ‘terrorism connection’. All have been denied bail, and been subject to various abuses by the prison authorities. The treatment of the Filton 24 has been widely condemned, not least by the United Nations.

    In June of this year, activists entered RAF Brize Norton, and sprayed blood-red paint on 2 Voyager aircraft leased by the RAF. Brize Norton has served as a transport and re-fuelling hub for flights to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, from where daily flights have been dispatched to spy over Gaza. The former home secretary Yvette Cooper cited the Brize Norton action in proscribing Palestine Action as a supposed terrorist group.

    However, evidence shows the government had been planning the proscription for some time previously. Five people have been remanded in custody in relation to Brize Norton, with the police following a similar modus operandi to the Filton case.

    The state is currently holding 33 prisoners on remand in British prisons for Palestine-related actions.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Deal between federal government and Nauru expected to last 30 years and apply to around 350 people released under high court’s NZYQ ruling

    Australia has commenced its $2.5bn deal with Nauru to offload more than 350 people from the NZYQ cohort after the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, confirmed the first arrival had landed on the tiny Pacific island last week.

    Burke said Nauruan authorities had confirmed the arrival on Friday, as reported by the ABC, triggering the first yearly instalment of $408m.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

    When the Pacific Islands Forum concluded in Honiara last month, leaders pledged regional unity under the motto “Iumi Tugeda” “We are Together”.

    Eighteen Pacific heads of government reached agreements on climate resilience and nuclear-free oceans.

    They signed the Pacific Resilience Facility treaty and endorsed Australia’s proposal to jointly host the 2026 COP31 climate summit.

    However, the region’s most urgent crisis was once again given only formulaic attention. West Papua, where Indonesian military operations continue to displace and replace tens of thousands of Papuans, was given just one predictable paragraph in the final communiqué.

    This reaffirmed Indonesia’s sovereignty, recalled an invitation made six years ago for the UN High Commissioner to visit, and vaguely mentioned a possible leaders’ mission in 2026.

    For the Papuan people, who have been waiting for more than half a century to exercise their right to self-determination, this represented no progress. It confirmed a decades-long pattern of acknowledging Jakarta’s tight grip, expressing polite concern and postponing action.

    A stolen independence
    The crisis in West Papua stems from its unique place in Pacific history. In 1961, the West Papuans established the New Guinea Council, adopted a national anthem and raised the Morning Star flag — years before Samoa gained independence in 1962 and Fiji in 1970.

    Papuan delegates had also helped to launch the South Pacific Conference in 1950, which would become the Pacific Islands Forum.

    However, this path was abruptly reversed. Under pressure from Cold War currents, the Netherlands transferred administration to Indonesia.

    The promised plebiscite was replaced by the 1969 Act of Free Choice, in which 1026 hand-picked Papuans were forced to vote for integration under military coercion.

    Despite protests, the UN endorsed the result. West Papua was the first Pacific nation to have its recognised independence reversed during decolonisation.

    Systematic blockade
    Since the early 1990s, UN officials have been seeking access to West Papua. However, the Indonesians have imposed a complete block on any international institutions and news media entering.

    Between 2012 and 2022, multiple UN high commissioners and special rapporteurs requested visits. All were denied.

    More than 100 UN member states have publicly supported these requests. It has never occurred. Regional organisations ranging from the Pacific Islands Forum to the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States have made identical demands. Jakarta ignores them all.

    International media outlets face the same barriers. Despite former Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s 2015 declaration that foreign journalists could enter Papua freely, visa restrictions and surveillance have kept the province as among the world’s least reported conflicts.

    During the protests in 2019, Indonesia shut down internet access across the territory.
    Indonesia calculates that it can ignore international opinion because key partners treat West Papua as a low priority.

    Australia and New Zealand balance occasional concern with deeper trade ties. The US and China prioritise strategic interests.

    Even during his recent visit to Papua New Guinea, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made no mention of West Papua, despite the conflict lying just across the border.

    Bougainville vs West Papua
    The Pacific’s inaction is particularly striking when compared to Bougainville. Like West Papua, Bougainville endured a brutal conflict.

    Unlike West Papua, however, Bougainville received genuine international support for self-determination. Under UN oversight, Bougainville’s 2019 referendum allowed free voting, with 98 per cent choosing independence.

    Today, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea are negotiating a peaceful transition to sovereignty.

    West Papua has been denied even this initial step. There is no credible mediation. There is no international accompaniment. There is no timetable for a political solution.

    The price of hypocrisy
    Pacific leaders are confronted with a fundamental contradiction. They demand bold global action on climate justice, yet turn a blind eye to political injustice on their doorstep.

    The ban on raising the Morning Star flag in Honiara, reportedly under pressure from Indonesia, has highlighted this hypocrisy.

    The flag symbolises the right of West Papuans to exist as a nation. Prohibiting it at a meeting celebrating regional solidarity revealed the extent of external influence in Pacific decision-making.

    This selective solidarity comes at a high cost. It undermines the Pacific’s credibility as a global conscience on climate change and decolonisation.

    It leaves Papuans trapped in what they describe as a “slow-motion genocide”. Between 2018 and 2022, an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people were displaced by Indonesian military operations.

    In 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that violence had reached levels unseen in decades.

    Breaking the pattern
    The Forum could end this cycle by taking practical steps. For example, it could set a deadline of 12 months for an Indonesia-UN agreement on unrestricted access to West Papua.

    If no agreement is reached, the Forum could conduct its own investigation with the Melanesian Spearhead Group. It could also make regional programmes contingent on human rights benchmarks, including ensuring humanitarian access and ending internet shutdowns.

    Such measures would not breach the Forum’s charter. They would align Pacific diplomacy with the proclaimed values of dignity and solidarity. They would demonstrate that regional unity extends beyond mere rhetoric.

    The test of history
    The people of West Papua were among the first in Oceania to resist colonial expansion and to form a modern government. They were also the first to experience the reversal of recognised sovereignty.

    Until Pacific leaders find the courage to confront Indonesian obstruction and insist on genuine West Papuan self-determination, “Iumi Tugeda” will remain a beautiful slogan shadowed by betrayal.

    The region’s moral authority does not depend on eloquence regarding the climate fund, but on whether it confronts its deepest wound.

    Any claim to a unified Blue Pacific identity will remain incomplete until the issue of West Papua’s denied independence is finally addressed.

    Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star Mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He holds a Master of Arts in international relations from Flinders University – Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Starmer’s announcement on visit to Ankara comes as jailed opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu faces fresh charges

    Britain has agreed to sell 20 Typhoon fighter jets to Turkey in an £8bn deal despite concerns about alleged human rights violations by its government.

    Keir Starmer signed the deal during a visit on Monday to Ankara to meet the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The prime minister said the deal would boost the Nato alliance, despite criticism of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian administration.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • At the heart of the Gaza scene today, the features of daily life are changing dramatically. Instead of talking about job opportunities, investment, and growth, people are talking about water, bread, and sleeping safely.

    It has moved from a production economy to what can be described as a ‘survival economy’. More than two million people are living in temporary tents, searching every morning for a way to survive another day that promises nothing.

    This term accurately sums up the reality of Gaza today: an economy without factories, salaries, or banks, based on what humanitarian aid or bartering within the camps can provide. The only law of the market is the law of scarcity, and the only goal is to secure the bare minimum for survival.

    Gaza: life between ashes and tents

    In one of the displacement camps in the centre of Gaza City, Asaad Salama sits in front of his worn-out tent, contemplating the ruins of his home that was destroyed in the north. Before Israel’s genocide, he had a job that provided for his family, but today he lives on whatever bags of flour or bottles of water he can get his hands on. He said:

    We used to live a simple but dignified life. Now we live day to day, waiting for a bag of flour or a litre of water. The tent does not protect us from the heat or the cold, and the children get sick without medicine.

    From dawn, Asaad stands in line for water, and sometimes he does not have the strength to stand for long. Then he starts looking for firewood to cook what little he has. Even charging his phone has become a luxury in this fragile economy.

    A few metres away, Sultan Sami lives with his family of seven after his home was destroyed. He said:

    We search for water like people search for gold. Sometimes we wait a whole week for a single water tanker, and the aid is not enough for everyone.

    He added:

    Every tent has become a small market: one person sells bread, another charges phones, and a third exchanges oil for rice. This is our economy now, an economy of those who have nothing but patience.

    An economy without productive spirit

    Field reports show that Gaza’s economy has completely collapsed. Markets are closed, factories have shut down, and farms have dried up. More than 95% of the population suffer severe food insecurity, and nine out of ten people live below the poverty line.

    Society has been transformed into one of forced consumption, with no production or investment, only limited exchange within a closed circle of need and deprivation.

    In the absence of oversight, the black market has taken root as the main channel for securing goods, with essentials sold at double the price, which most people cannot afford.

    People began selling or bartering the items they received from aid to meet their daily needs, while prices on the black market rose by more than 400% for some basic commodities.

    This reality has produced a fragile, informal economic model based not on value or production, but on bartering and scarcity.

    One trader said:

    There is no longer a fixed price for any commodity; value is determined by scarcity. A kilo of flour may be equivalent to a box of medicine or a phone battery. No one deals in cash alone.

    The lack of electricity and fuel has also disrupted refrigeration and transport networks, exacerbating the food crisis at a time when thousands of trucks are being prevented from entering through Israeli crossings.

    An uncertain future and a temporary life

    From a humanitarian perspective, some 2.2 million people in Gaza are living under unprecedented pressure, in tents that lack the basic necessities of life. This is at the same time that psychological and health crises are on the rise, and education and employment are lacking.

    Aid organisations warn that the continuation of this situation could turn the ‘economy of survival’ into a permanent way of life, meaning the loss of an entire generation of children and young people.

    One Palestinian in Gaza said:

    We don’t dream of a job or a salary, we just dream of electricity and water coming back, and of sleeping one night without fear of hunger or cold.

    In Gaza today, every day is a new battle for survival, and every tent is a story of patience and human resilience in the face of collapse.

    It is an economy without prospects, but it still retains one thing that has not yet been destroyed: the will to live.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • An investigative report by The Intercept, based on internal documents and emails, has revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided cloud computing services and advanced artificial intelligence technologies to two leading Israeli arms manufacturers: Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Notably, it did so throughout Israel’s two-year war of extermination in 2024 and 2025, during periods of the genocidal state’s extensive air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

    Amazon Web Services: supplying cloud computing for Israeli arms suppliers

    These transactions are part of a broader framework known as Project Nimbus, which connects cloud providers to the Israeli government and military.

    Internal documents and emails showed Amazon’s direct dealings with Rafael and IAI. In particular, the investigation from The Intercept unearthed Amazon’s sale of software services and artificial intelligence packages in 2024 and 2025. This included providing access to advanced language models and machine learning tools available through the AWS platform. The investigation identified that Rafael purchased access to Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ language model, in addition to Amazon Bedrock tools and advanced processing and storage services.

    The documents also refer to discounts and special pricing terms. Reports mention a discount of up to 35% for the Israeli Ministry of Defence. This reflected a privileged commercial relationship between Amazon and the Israeli military.

    The investigation materials additionally showed that cloud services have reached other problematic Israeli institutions. This included facilities linked to Israel’s nuclear programme and West Bank administration offices. Of course, these are deeply enmeshed in Israel’s military occupation settler colonial practices, illegal under international law.

    Cloud computing to arms company pipeline

    Arms experts’ reports show that companies such as Rafael and IAI have developed munitions and systems used in the bombing of civilian areas in Gaza. This has included guided missiles such as SPICE guidance kits, Spike missiles, drones (Heron and others), and targeting and intelligence technologies that contribute to the planning of military operations.

    Cloud computing and artificial intelligence tools can accelerate image and satellite analysis, the compilation of geographic intelligence databases, and targeting information. Meanwhile, arms companies could use the testing of linguistic models or decision support algorithms to improve targeting accuracy.

    The tech-military alliance here raises serious red flags about the link between the provision of digital infrastructure and Israel’s genocide on the ground.

    Human rights policies not worth the paper they’re written on

    Amazon, like other major technology companies, hold – if only nominally – human rights principles and guidelines.

    However, The Intercept noted that the company declined to answer whether it had conducted human rights assessments of its contracts with Israeli arms companies or its provision of services to intelligence and military agencies. It refused to comment on a detailed list of questions.

    Rafael, IAI, and the Israeli Ministry of Defence also did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Their silence exacerbates concerns about a regulatory and ethical vacuum around Israel’s genocide.

    International law and human rights expert, and visiting professor at Harvard Law School Ioannis Kalpouzos told The Intercept that:

    Amazon’s work with Israeli weapons makers could potentially create liability under international law depending on “whether it is foreseeable that it will lead to the commission of international crimes.”

    According to Kalpouzos, it is not necessary for the supplier to have “intent” to “commit genocide” in order for a company to be held liable. It is sufficient that its supply of services could be expected to contribute to acts that constitute international crimes.

    Of course, when arms companies are using technological products to improve targeting or surveillance capabilities that have already led to widespread civilian casualties, this exacerbates the problem.

    Documenting evidence of Amazon’s complicity

    The Israeli government, Google, and Amazon have ostensibly aimed the Nimbus project at modernising the Israel’s cloud infrastructure. However, according to the documents, it includes elements that support the military and intelligence branches and require or facilitate the sale of services to local arms suppliers.

    The investigation raises fundamental questions for Amazon and other cloud infrastructure providers. Notably, how do technology companies regulate their relationships with government and military customers? How effective are due diligence mechanisms for protecting human rights?

    Documentary evidence points to an actual commercial relationship between AWS and Israeli arms companies. Israel has used these arms firm’s products in military operations that have resulted in civilian casualties. It therefore raises ethical and legal issues that require independent investigation and effective accountability.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In a hospital in Israeli besieged Gaza, Turkish surgeon Taner Kamaci found himself facing the most difficult decision of his professional and humanitarian career. Two children were born suffering at the same moment. Both were in need of urgent surgery, one with liver damage and the other with a perforated intestine. However, the only operating theatre available could not save them both.

    Turkish surgeon: doctors making harrowing life and death decisions in Gaza

    Kamaci, who volunteered to work in Gaza, told Anadolou Agency how he had to choose one child to save and leave the other to die. It was an experience he had never had before. He recounted:

    I have never made a more difficult decision in my life.

    He added:

    Gaza is not only a wound on the body, but a wound on the human conscience.

    During his two weeks of work in March 2024, Kamaci witnessed the tragic reality behind the casualty figures on the screens. Children and women were the main victims, while Israel bombed hospitals and rendered ambulances unable to transport the wounded. Many families were living in hospital corridors under makeshift covers or in tents made of cloth, without food or water.

    Kamaci added that the lack of beds and equipment sometimes forced doctors to stitch wounds on the floor. He told the outlet harrowingly that:

    Children who lose their limbs live in pain for months.

    Testifying at the Gaza Tribunal

    The Turkish surgeon described the situation as “a campaign that amounts to genocide”, noting that the international community has failed to protect civilians in Gaza.

    It was why Kamaci was at the ‘Gaza Tribunal’ in Istanbul last week. The independent international initiative aims to document violations and achieve symbolic justice.

    Former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Richard Falk presided over the four-day public hearings. On Sunday 26 October, the tribunal issued its unofficial, but vital moral verdict. It ruling condemned Israel’s genocide and war crimes in Gaza, including:

    the mass destruction of residential properties, the deliberate denial of food to the civilian population, torture, and the targeting of journalists.

    As Andalou Agency reported, Kamaci testified on his experience operating as a surgeon in Gaza.

    TV screens show not even ‘one percent’ the reality of life in Gaza

    At this, Kamaci emphasised that what appears on television screens:

    is not even one percent of reality.

    Witnessing the human suffering first-hand has left a deep mark on his conscience. War is not just numbers, but the faces and tears of children living a daily struggle between life and death, in a city suffocating under the weight of destruction and loss.

    In the cramped hospital beds in Gaza, the cries of children mingled with the cries of pain, and the corridors became temporary shelters for bereaved families, while doctors stitched the wounded up on the floor due to a lack of equipment.

    Here, Kamaci faced the most difficult decision of his life: choosing who would live and who would die. He saw with his own eyes the human devastation that television screens do not show. Gaza is not just a city: it is a constant cry to the world. Its grief is engraved in the heart of every doctor and every civilian soul living amid the rubble and suffering.

    Featured image via TRT World/Youtube.

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • To weave a magnificent tapestry like the one James W. Douglass has created with Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK takes a steady hand, a hopeful heart, and a steadfast dedication to seeking truth and telling it through factually based and interwoven stories.

    Because of its brilliant complexity and documented details, it is difficult to review, but I will say at the outset that it is a masterpiece, the culmination of Douglass’s life of writing about and fighting for peace and justice for our human family.

    It is a book that could only be written by a man sustained by a spiritual faith that inspired his four subjects to face their own deaths without flinching, so that others might be saved. It is a testament to four leaders violently gunned down, written by a man whose faith in nonviolence is unshakeable.

    Douglass grasps the prophet and artist’s secret that we all live by stories, and the martyred heroes’ tales he recounts in this book are sorely needed in this darkest of times when the death of our planet is at stake and the spiritual sustenance to prevent it is desperately needed.

    The truths he recounts through these stories are sad and joyous, for they convey both the agony of terrible deaths but also the ecstasy of the hope that is resurrected through grasping the courage of four great men who defiantly dared to confront the unspeakable lies of their government and society. Four men who died trying to open others’ eyes to terrible truths hard to swallow.

    The Tapestry

    All tapestries take patience and a meditative eye to discern the deepest possible meanings that are woven into their intricate designs. I remember once standing for ten minutes in front of a series of very famous and confusing medieval tapestries at The Met Cloisters in NYC – The Hunt of the Unicorn – puzzling over their meaning. Ten minutes left me stumped.

    The same is true of a review of this book, which can barely scratch the surface of its cumulative spiritual and political power and relevance; nor the thousands of threaded details that make it whole. But I will nevertheless scratch away to induce you to enter the ways of justice and compassion Douglass tells through the lives of these martyrs for truth. It takes time, but the spent time will tell you a story that is beyond time – it is eternal.

    It is imperative, moreover, that one do something very unusual in these days of Internet skimming where manifold specious claims about who killed these four men, and why, are bandied about like Halloween candy for childish masked minds: One must slowly and carefully immerse oneself in the entire book with an open heart and mind and let the tales enter you.

    It is commonly known that John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated long ago; but it is the intricacies of their personal and political tales, how they dealt with betrayals, threats, and lies, and how their lives and missions intersected, where the meaning manifests itself. The facts are essential, but they are lumps of inert clay until the spirit moves them. These men, despite all their frailties, were moved by the spirit of compassion for others; they were men for others despite the risks to themselves. If this sounds too gushy to you, it could be because you are confusing them with most public figures whose primary concern is power, prestige, and self-survival at all costs.

    Douglass’s genius is to cut to the heart of the matter – to find redemptive meaning in the great mishmash of facts and awaken this compassionate spirit in the reader, just as his subjects had to discover it in the circumstances into which life had tossed them. Just as we do.

    Life is always what comes next.

    One Story Out of Four

    Douglass creates one story out of four – or more – and it is a story of hope despite the near despair the deaths of these men brought. As one who lived through them as a young man, I can attest to that despair, as I recall the time, place, even the weather and smaller details when first hearing the news, and how my heart sank into a dark pit. Deaths at mid-day, late afternoon, evening, and late at night, alarm bells to shatter the spirit. Angelus bells in reverse, or as Edgar Allen Poe puts it in “The Bells”:

    Hear the loud alarum bells—
    Brazen bells!
    What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
    In the startled ear of night
    How they scream out their affright!
    Too much horrified to speak,
    They can only shriek, shriek,
    Out of tune,
    …………………………………………………………….

    Keeping time, time, time,
    In a sort of Runic rhyme,
    To the throbbing of the bells—
    Of the bells, bells, bells—
    To the sobbing of the bells

    Yet despite the tolling of the devil’s bells, Douglass tells a tale of hope rooted in the similarities between kindred souls who lived their lives so courageously in full awareness that they would probably be killed for trying to bring peace on earth and good will to people everywhere. It was courage rooted in a faith most real, seeding for us the challenge that love can conquer hate if, as Douglass puts it, we “discern a way to walk with our martyrs out of the darkness.” That is a very hard task, rooted in the heart but dependent on a commitment to political non-violent resistance.

    Because he is a theologian as well as an historian, it is important that I point out that this work is not a hagiography or a mythic creation, for the stories, while extraordinary, are factual, not fictional, and Douglass supports all his textual claims with extensive footnotes that source and clarify. The reader, when wondering, need just look down the page for elucidation and sources. The fact that he and his editor at Orbis Books, Robert Ellsberg, have returned to this esteemed and crucial – but largely abandoned – publishing tradition of footnotes on nearly every page, not endnotes, is most commendable and an example of their transparency and dedication to the truth. So challenge this, if you dare, the notes say! We are not putting these at the end of the book where you will have to go back and forth, working to connect them to the text. Just look down, and follow the factual trail yourself.

    No, this is not a hagiography; it is a book about human transformation, the ways these men changed over time. For example, Douglass makes it clear that in the early 1960s John and Robert Kennedy were supporters of counterinsurgency policies in Vietnam and around the world. But they grew to see that they were wrong. They grew to see their earlier inclinations were right and they had taken a wrong path. So they changed. By 1965, with his brother dead as a result of such changes, Robert Kennedy gave a speech to the International Police Academy (IPA) on the occasion of the graduation of 146 CIA (AID)-recruited police trainees in which he rejected the Johnson administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam. He was subjected to harsh criticism for this and was soon called a traitor for his opposition to the escalation of the war. When he was assassinated in 1968, he was adamantly opposed to the war.

    Douglass, beside being a fastidious researcher, is an astute psychologist. He knows that human change is hard, halting, and complex, but it happens.

    Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK is a companion volume to Douglass’s bestselling JFK and the Unspeakable, a book (first published in 2008) that made it  very clear that JFK was assassinated by the CIA because he had turned redemptively toward peacemaking, not war. That book, so meticulously documented and told so compellingly, showed why his life and death matter today because a message was sent from the streets of Dallas to every president since. They have all bowed to the message’s threat: You must support the nuclear warfare state – or else.

    Those who have read that groundbreaking volume have been waiting for a sequel for a long time. Martyrs to the Unspeakable is it.

    The End Is Our Beginning

    So let me begin at the end with Douglass’s Epilogue that is not an afterthought, where in a few pages he tells the story of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swede, who during WW II had led a Swedish Red Cross expedition that freed thousands of Jews and other prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. In 1948 he was appointed the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Because he was attempting to fairly resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, he was assassinated by the Zionist Stern Gang, also known as LEHI, at a roadblock in Jerusalem. The Stern Gang’s command included Yitzhak Shamir, a future prime minister of Israel. The assassin was Yehoshua Cohen, who would become the closest friend and security guard for the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

    Douglass clearly wants the reader to know that there are other great courageous souls whose names are barely known and have been erased from history, unlike JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK, whose stories he is resurrecting. These unknown martyrs to the unspeakable are a latent stream of hidden hope once one learns their stories.

    Bernadotte’s companion in the car when he was assassinated was also killed. He was Colonel Andre Serot, a French observer for the U.N. team, who was in the car by chance since Ralph Bunche, Bernadotte’s close American assistant, had been delayed, and Bernadotte asked Serot, who was talking to him from the outside, to join him in the car. The assassins assumed Serot, who was dark complexioned, was Bunche, who was African-American and whom they had targeted with Bernadotte.

    In a simple twist of fate that presaged today’s role-reversals with the genocide of Palestinians being carried out by Israel, Serot’s wife was one of the people Bernadotte had saved from a Nazi concentration camp.

    “What we call the beginning is often the end /And to make an end is to make a beginning. /The end is where we start from,” wrote T. S. Eliot.

    The Start

    So let me now return to the ostensible beginning. The book, like Gaul, but unlike Caesar’s militaristic usage since it concerns the ways a modern empire murders its prophets of peace, is divided into three parts (est omnis divisa in partes tres): The Witness, The Way, and The Why, comprised of nine chapters, with the first and last containing important material about JFK, Israel, Russia, and nuclear weapons, much of which supplements what was provided in JFK and the Unspeakable. There is little new detail provided about the CIA’s assassination of John since that was covered extensively and proven definitively in the first book, but there is much about the CIA/FBI assassinations of Malcolm, Martin, and Bobby, thereby creating a trinity of shorter Unspeakables within this present longer volume. Douglass begins unequivocally:

    [When a modern empire murders hope,] “it acts with the same resolve the Roman Empire did with roadside crucifixions to deter rebellion and thievery. Crucified with slaves and prophets who resisted the empire were common criminals. . . . In our day, the slaves and criminals are merged and said to have killed the prophets. We are given enslaved scapegoats with criminal backgrounds so we can feel like we have accused and punished someone for our government-led assassinations . . . . Lee Harvey Oswald . . . . ‘Black Muslims’ . . . . James Earl Ray . . . . Sirhan . . . . The scapegoats, set up by government agencies to take the onus off the empire, are an odd bunch. Yet, through compliant media, they are filtered into our consciousness as marginal culprits. A mighty movement for change has been derailed at crucial moments of our history, yet without credible motivations by the apparent perpetrators.”

    JFK, RFK, and Israel

    The stunning opening chapter recounts JFK’s fierce battle with David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Perez, and other Israelis to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons – nuclear disarmament being Kennedy’s obsession after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 nearly led to full-scale nuclear annihilation –  and sets the stage for all that follows. Douglass documents the ways John and Bobby Kennedy, united in purpose, tried assiduously to derail Israel’s development of nuclear weapons at its Dimona nuclear reactor, but, in the end, were defeated by Israel’s lies, deceptions, and delaying tactics. And as Douglass points out, they were ably assisted by the CIA’s treacherous counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who provided Israel with covert assistance in acquiring nuclear weapons.

    The Kennedys were seeking a non-nuclear and neutralist Israel in opposition to Cold War Washington, as they pursued an Arab-Israeli peace within a larger U.S.-Soviet one. One aspect of this was their efforts to create a relationship with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Israelis thwarted them in all their efforts. JFK knew the Israelis were lying to him – as he told the journalist Charles Bartlett – “The sons of-bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.”

    Additionally, his Justice Department, led by RFK, was trying to enforce the Foreign Agency Registration Act against the American Zionist Council (AZC) whose influence in the U.S. was enormous (as the Israel Lobby is more so today). But that effort also failed, as the AZC fought the Justice Department until JFK had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson had replaced him, when the AZC prevailed. We are living with the consequences.

    The chapter follows the CIA’s Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and Richard Helm’s plot to kill JFK and cover it up, and after that to assassinate RFK. Elected a Senator from New York State in 1964, Senator Robert Kennedy gave a maiden speech in the U.S. Senate on June 23, 1965 that was a direct challenge to Israel’s secret nuclear program and caused great consternation in Israel. A year later, despite RFK’s efforts, Israel secretly attained nuclear capability on November 6, 1966. Dedicated to the same peaceful pursuits as his brother and to fully investigate his brother’s assassination if he could get elected president and have the power to do so, RFK was marked out for death. After MLK, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 and Bobby was running for the presidency, he responded to the Rev. Walter Fauntroy telling him that he’d be the nominee of the Democratic Party. “Kennedy said, ‘Yes, that’s possible.’ He paused, then added, ‘But there are guns between me and the White House.’ Fauntroy was shocked.” Two months later the guns did their job – Bobby lay dead.


    Chapter One also includes extensive interviews with his alleged assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, the hypnotized real Manchurian Candidate (see Shane O’Sullivan’s brilliant documentary, The Real Manchurian Candidate), concluding by drawing the threads together to show how they picture a beautiful dream of peace deferred as it exploded in violent protest clashes in many U.S. cities in the summer of 1968.

    And that, dear reader, is just Chapter 1, but it should give you a sense of how deep into the darkness Douglass goes, contrary to so many writers who go not too far in but just far enough to say they’ve been there and who never pin the tail on the donkey, or if they do, it’s the wrong donkey. They play the jackass’s game and take those who follow them on a trip to nowhere on one of the CIA’s false trails.

    Douglass knows that in order to find truth and hope, one must penetrate all the way to hell if one is ever to reach heaven. He has nothing to do with those who claim we will never know the truth, that we must endlessly debate the minutiae, and that in any case it doesn’t matter anymore. To those, he says: Here it is, and it damn well does matter today, for the U.S. intelligence forces that assassinated JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and Bobby are still at it.

    To those who claim it was not the CIA, but Israel who was the culprit, he reminds us of Angleton’s (who was the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence and held the Israel desk) revelation of the CIA’s method of creating diversionary false trails in many directions, “the intent [of which] is to draw us more deeply into the false layers of the official story, each sending us farther into the intelligence world’s wilderness of mirrors . . . . all have the trappings of a CIA scenario with implications of possible Israeli involvement and other trapdoors for investigators to fall through.”  He adds: “The CIA controls its assassination plots and cover-ups. The clues the Agency dispenses tempt us into a boundless wilderness of false trails.”

    However, they all lead back, like the tentacles of an underwater monster, to the CIA with its military intelligence, and police allies. The monster is a military-industrial-intelligence system whose goal is to become total global control. The Kennedys, like Malcolm and Martin, are then murdered with systemic vengeance for their having presumably become Cold War traitors. In reality, they are martyrs committed to realizing the most unspeakable reality of all  – a global vision of justice, peace, and unity.

    Since Douglass’s opposition to Israeli’s long-time genocide of the Palestinians is adamantine (as is mine), no one can accuse him of being Israel’s defender. Yet today, with so many writers and commentators having fallen through a trapdoor and claiming Israel killed the Kennedys, one can expect them to criticize this book on that score. It is best not to follow their lead. I would recommend that readers judge for themselves, for in this reviewer’s informed opinion, Douglass is clearly correct, and Martyrs to the Unspeakable, building upon JFK and the Unspeakable, makes an irrefutable case.

    Since I am writing a book review, not a book about a book, I will simply touch on what I find most compelling in the rest of the book, whose heart I have yet to mention, although the book’s trinitarian construction suggests the heart must be connected to the head and soul.

    Chapter Two, “Malcolm Dances with the Unspeakable,” by far the shortest in the book at thirty pages, introduces the reader to Malcolm X’s family background, his entry into the fray for racial justice, the CIA plot with the FBI and the New York Police Department to kill him, and his growing internationalism, including his friendship with Fidel Castro and other anti-colonial leaders.

    Despite its brevity – intentional, I think, as Douglass shrewdly lures the reader deeper into his profound story – it is extremely important since many readers, especially Caucasians, probably know far less about Malcolm than they do about the other three, and what they do know is no doubt tinged with afterimages of Malcolm’s militancy, distorted by a media that lied about him because they feared him and were doing the government’s bidding, as usual, something I remember vividly from my youth in NYC. Because he was so eloquent, justifiably angry, sartorially natty, and gave off a whiff of danger (celebrated by the culture at the time in famous rebel “angry white boy” film images, e.g. Marlon Brando, James Dean, et al.), they distorted his battle against white racism and violence. That he was Muslim was the coup de grâce (as today), and so Malcolm was crucified in the press.

    The remainder of Part One, “The Witness,” is devoted to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s long harassment of MLK, Jr. and his family, the plot to kill him and assassinate his character, his support for and relationship with the Kennedy brothers, their growing involvement in the civil rights struggle, and Bobby Kennedy’s run for the presidency fueled by his trips through Latin America and Mississippi and his growing defense of the poor (“So a revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.”), and his assassination in Los Angeles. Of special note is the connection of the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department in his murder and coverup, as well as the courageous testimony of the witness, Sandra Serrano. All these threads are woven together, ending with the Kennedys’ turn toward dialogue with Fidel Castro.

    Into the Heart 

    The middle section, “The Way,” about the ways Malcolm, Martin, and Bobby walked, despite knowing they would be killed, is, I would say, the heart of the book, its spiritual center. It is powerful and very moving. In the name of succinctness, let me quote a bit.

    The Way of Malcolm

    “J. Edgar Hoover’s solution to the problem [the international system of racial exploitation] – to pit the rising leaders of Black people against one another – was not new. They knew it as their master’s tactic. In the United States, it would mean selling guns to the ghetto, as brothers shot one another into emergency rooms and the grave, or ended up behind bars for the rest of their days.”

    Returning from his transformative trip to Mecca, Malcolm wrote: “I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” (emphasis in the original)

    Malcolm: “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level – to the level of human rights.”

    In his struggle for human rights, he was undermined by treacherous lies, personal betrayals, government infiltration, spying, and paid informers, that led to his assassination, which he knew was coming as he walked his way to martyrdom.

    “Malcolm could confront the Unspeakable with courage because of his total faith in Allah.”

    “Malcolm X, who spoke truth to power with his life, pushed the U.S. security state up against the wall with his human rights campaign to the United Nations. It struck back with vengeance. He accepted the consequences of his truth-telling with serenity, saying to a friend two days before he died, “It’s time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”

    The Way of Martin

    “Martin King became a hard enemy of Washington on April 4, 1967, when he said in “Beyond Vietnam,” his Riverside Church Address, ‘I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.’”

    “’Beyond Vietnam’ took the speaker beyond civil rights, beyond political calculation, and as a citizen of conscience, beyond protection from the violent system he lived in.”

    In this section on MLK, Douglass makes it very clear that this speech and his poor people’s campaign to follow – his revolutionary turn toward linking civil rights to war and economic justice for all – sealed his death warrant, and that he knew it. It did not, however, deter him. He knew his way, and where the way was leading him, but his deep religious faith led him on.

    Many know this, but few know what Douglass writes in this section where through his interview with Glenda Grabow, a key witness in King’s assassination, he makes significant connections between the government’s assassinations of King and John Kennedy through the shadowy figure of a man named Raul, who was connected to Jack Ruby. The links Douglass makes, based on facts not conjecture, will make the reader’s head spin.

    MLK to Harry Belafonte: “I made my peace with death.”

    Belafonte: “You made your peace with death?”

    King: “Yeah. It no longer preoccupies me. It doesn’t threaten me.”

    As with all wonderful tapestries, this one is so multifaceted and deep, that when you turn a page and read closely, you are constantly startled by what you see through the pictures Douglass draws with his words. One after another, the connections he makes take your breath away.

    The Way of RFK

    “While Martin Luther King, Jr. was turning toward a way of life crowned by his death, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was on his halting journey of truth into the horror of the Vietnam War, the threatened nuclear destruction of the world, and his own murder.”

    “As we have seen, the CIA was in covert control of the RFK murder investigation from the very morning of RFK’s shooting, June 5, 1968. Senior Los Angeles FBI official Roger LaJeunesse and the FBI were immediately elbowed aside by LAPD Chief of Detectives Robert Houghton with the support of the federal government. Houghton installed instead at the head of Special Unit Senator (SUS) an elite unit of his own officers. It was commanded by covert CIA operatives. LaJeunesse knew the detailed CIA history of his friend, Lieutenant Manuel Pena, who had become the SUS officer-in-charge.”

    Douglass provides detailed evidence of the CIA’s assassination of RFK and its coverup, the former, as with all these assassinations, requiring the latter.

    He provides testimony of the coroner, Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, that Bobby was shot from behind his right ear from a distance of “one to one and a half inches,” ruling out Sirhan, who was feet in front of him, as his killer.

    Douglass jumps to RFK and JFK’s relationship with French President Charles De Gaulle, who luckily escaped the CIA’s coup and assassination attempts, and whose advice on Vietnam Bobby sought on January 31, 1967 when they met in France. As befits his method, he intersects this strand into the big picture, as Penelope in The Odyssey describes the great fabric she weaves around a violent interruption – “fine of thread and very wide”.

    “The most obvious, least spoken truth about the killing of John and Robert Kennedy, comes from looking at their assassinations side by side. Not only can their assassinations be seen as serial murders, but they are also linked by necessity. Killing JFK meant killing RFK . . . or else. . . . Killing John Kennedy to keep the Cold War going meant killing Bobby Kennedy for the same reason.”

    De Gaulle knew the CIA had killed JFK, and so did Bobby.

    “By making the crucial decision to run for president in 1968, RFK chose a still deeper way. The depth of his compassion compelled him to seek the office through which he could help most . . . those most in need . . . while knowing the risk in taking such a step. By embarking on his last campaign for the sake of the living, but at the risk of his own death, Bobby Kennedy chose to live out a way of compassion and justice for all—by living and taking his chances.”

    Part Three: The Why is devoted to the convergence of an analysis with the martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin. They came to see all the connections between the genocide on which the U.S. was founded, its history of slavery, its racism, the capitalistic economic system of injustice affecting all races – the issue of human rights – and colonialism.

    “The assassinations of Malcolm and Martin have close parallels, because they can be traced to the same source: their government’s covert action protocol. Both men were set up.”

    Both men were executed by the U.S. government.

    Investigating the assassinations of Martin and Malcolm over the past six decades has been a pilgrimage in their lives of witnessing to the truth. From it, I have learned how naïve I was about systemic evil. While there is nothing new about prophets being murdered by the system, I was not aware how thoroughly our own system carries out such murders—and why. I believe the key to this untold history is the fact that our government was the first to develop and use nuclear weapons. . . . The rise of our national security state after World War II, as justified by the Cold War that our nuclear weapons created, was the effective end of democracy in this country. It was climaxed by the execution of President Kennedy, which foreshadowed the state killings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., together with Robert Kennedy’s.

    So it is fitting that Douglass’s final chapter – a tour de force – is “The Kennedys, the Russians, and the Bomb.” No one who lived through the near nuclear end of the world that occurred in the few weeks of mid-October 1962 – the Cuban Missile Crisis –  will forget it. Or should. As a young college freshman at the time, it is seared in my memory despite the beer, girls, and basketball that were my conscious pursuits. If today’s college students read just this chapter, they would immediately understand how tenuous a hold we all have on life because of nuclear weapons. And they would see how shallow and dangerous are the men who have assumed the presidency since then with their devotion to nuclear weapons.

    Douglass opens Chapter Nine, as if it is the month for giving birth to all the gravid tales that led to it, with words that remind one of the poet T. S. Eliot’s question –  “. . . were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” – as follows:

    The intertwined stories of John and Robert Kennedy take us into the depths of our human story.

    The president, with the support of his attorney general brother on behalf of the American people, risked committing the darkest evil one can imagine, initiating a nuclear war. [during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis]

    In an enlightened reversal, the Kennedy brothers then turned toward peace with their Russian and Cuban enemies, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, who emerged from the nuclear darkness with them.

    As a result, JFK and RFK were assassinated as Cold War traitors by their own national security state, with RFK’s murder delayed until his last campaign turned him, at his California primary victory, June 4, 1968, toward the prospect of becoming president himself.

    The moral consequences of our denial of the truth of their martyrdom for peace have included our country’s waging perpetual war around the world and the ever-more-likely extinction of our species. [my emphasis]

    And between this beginning and his end, he gives a detailed history lesson – both wonderful and dreadful – of how the Kennedys, despite their advisers and maniacal generals such as Edward Lansdale, Curtis LeMay, and Lyman Lemnitzer, were able to make friends of their enemies and prevent nuclear war.

    Douglass concludes as follows:

    We can see the hope of life in our valley of death through the testimony of our prophets. Because they asked why, kept turning, and were willing to die, JFK, Malcom, Martin, and RFK all had to go. That is our story now. We are on the same bloody, glorious path of humanity they blazed for our long night’s journey into light.

    May we learn on that way to bow to the light in every human personality on Earth until we see it in communion with the lives of all creatures.

    Martyrs to the Unspeakable is a masterpiece, a tapestry of profound importance. It is a testament to the martyrs who died trying and to its author who has lived to tell their tales. It is a breathtaking and inspiring book.

    The post Martyrs to the Unspeakable: A Luminous Tapestry of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australian authorities have been accused of copying the ‘worst tactics of ICE’ in their treatment of the NZYQ cohort

    Adnan* says he had never heard of Nauru when Australian Border Force officers showed up at his door in the middle of the night to inform him Nauru had granted him a 30-year visa.

    Initially believing Nauru was part of Australia, Adnan felt a brief sense of relief before he realised he was being sent back to a place he had become uncomfortably familiar with – immigration detention.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    Middle East political analyst Zeidon Alkinani says Israel’s military is continuing “business as usual” to the east of the yellow line in Gaza in spite of the ceasefire deal.

    The military withdrew behind the yellow line as part of the ceasefire deal, while the government works to ensure “absolute gains” in the enclave and the continuation of its “political, economic and military occupation”, Alkinani told Al Jazeera.

    While “the attacks are much more minimised” compared with before the ceasefire, Israel’s political establishment was still trying to exert leverage over Gaza’s future — including the makeup of an international security force.

    Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank, said that the Israelis had been putting a lot of pressure on mediators, specifically the United States.

    “They’re saying they’re not ready for any talks on phase two or what’s next of this deal until the remaining 13 bodies of captives are brought back from Gaza,” she said.

    “Hamas has said they don’t know where those bodies are, and they need assistance on the ground in the form of specialised teams and heavy machinery.”

    Israel had been reluctant at first to allow this to happen.

    Turkish team barred
    “In fact, there was a Turkish team of about 80 people who were on the other side of the border just last week, whom Israel denied entry to,” Salhut said.

    “But now they have allowed in an Egyptian team, alongside the Red Cross. Hamas too are now searching in areas that are technically under Israeli control, outside that yellow line perimeter where Israeli forces withdrew from.”

    Meanwhile, an emergency doctor at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital says her team is treating a growing number of Palestinians who have been injured by unexploded ordnance when they return to their homes following their displacement by the war.

    “As people come back to the north after the heavy bombardment . . . they’re moving into their old homes, they’re setting up tents in the rubble, and there are so many unexploded missiles,” said the doctor, who gave her name as Harriet.

    She said children were among those being injured by the ordnance left scattered across the territory, adding her team had recently treated siblings aged five and seven who had sustained blast and shrapnel injuries from a bomb.

    About 66,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance remain lying around Gaza, and at least 53 people have been killed by the bombs so far.


    The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) says Israel is continuing to block its international staff and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

    Still, about 12,000 of its local staff are pushing ahead with the delivery of “healthcare, psychosocial support, and education to the people, often under unimaginable conditions”, the agency said in a post on X.

    Israel had banned UNRWA from operating in territory it controls last year, claiming a number of its employees were members of Hamas.

    The International Court of Justice ruled last week that Israel, as an occupying power, must support relief efforts provided by the UN and its entities, including UNRWA. It also found that Israel had not substantiated its claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees were Hamas members.

    In its post, UNRWA said “a ceasefire alone is not enough.

    “Food, hygiene kits, tents, and other supplies are desperately needed,” it added.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • COMMENTARY: By Ian Powell

    On October 17, I received a brief email from a former Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) vice-president: “Can’t wait for your blog covering the reception of Simeon Brown at conference yesterday!!”

    The context was the aggressive address of Minister of Health Simeon Brown to the ASMS annual conference.

    As reported by Radio New Zealand’s Ruth Hill (October 16), Brown accused senior doctors of crossing an “ethical line” by taking strike action involving non-acute care.

    Health Minister Simeon Brown
    Health Minister Simeon Brown . . . his ‘unethical’ accusation against doctors. Image: RNZ screenshot APR

    His accusation was made in the lead up to the “mega strike” of around 100,000 senior doctors, nurses, teachers and public servants on October 23.

    It included misleadingly Brown claiming that patients were paying the price for the strike action and that ASMS had walked “away from negotiations”.

    Further, he added, “Patients should never be collateral damage in disputes between management and unions.” He urged ASMS to call off the strike action and return to negotiations (conveniently ignoring that it never left them).

    Clicking my heels – but how?
    As the ASMS executive director until 31 December 2019, what could I do but click my heels and obey the former vice-president. But this left me with a problem of what to focus on in a short blog.

    The Health Minister had raised several options.

    Judith Collins
    Attack dog Judith Collins published a strident and inaccurate open letter. Image: otaihangasecondopinion.wordpress.com

    One was the fact that his address, reinforced by Public Services Minister Judith Collins’ stridently inaccurate “attack dog open letter” attack on the health and education unions (October 19) is the most aggressive and hardline government approach towards health unions, at least, since I first became involved with the newly formed ASMS in 1989.

    Another was the deliberate use of misleading claims such as Brown accusing ASMS of not being prepared to negotiate while, at the same time, Health New Zealand was refusing to meet ASMS to discuss negotiations. Also deliberately misleading was his false claim about senior doctors’ average salaries.

    Eventually I landed on the accusation that triggered much of the media interest and most of the criticisms from ASMS conference delegates — Brown’s claim that senior doctors were crossing an ethical line.

    Understanding medical ethics
    As Ruth Hill reported there were “audible cries of disbelief” from the delegates. Also see Stuff journalist Bridie Witton’s coverage (October 16).

    Let’s get back to basics. Ethics is the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

    Following on, medical ethics is the disciplined study of morality in medicine and concerns the obligations of doctors and healthcare organisations to patients as well as the obligations of patients.

    Hippocrates
    Hippocrates developed the oath that formed the original basis of medical ethics. Image: otaihangasecondopinion

    Medical ethics starts with the Hippocratic Oath beginning with its first principle of ‘first do no harm’.

    As part of an earlier post on the ancient Oath and this principle (5 February 2022) I argued that not only were they still relevant today, but that they should be applied to the whole of our health system, including its leadership.

    Who really crossed the ethical line?
    Dr Elizabeth Fenton is a lecturer in bioethics at Otago University. On October 22 she had an article published in The Conversation that shone a penetrating analytical light on Simeon Brown’s ethical line crossing claim.

    Her observations included:

    Bioethics lecturer Dr Elizabeth Fenton
    Bioethics lecturer Dr Elizabeth Fenton gets to the core of whether striking senior doctors are crossing an ethical line. Image: otaihangasecondopinion

    “Striking is an option of last resort. In healthcare, it causes disruption and inconvenience for patients, whānau and the health system – but it is ethically justified.

    “Arguably, it is ethically required when poor working conditions associated with staff shortages, inadequate infrastructure and underfunding threaten the wellbeing of patients and the long-term sustainability of public health services.

    ” . . . The real ethical issue is successive governments’ failure to address these conditions and their impact on patient care.”

    In response to the health minister’s implication that striking doctors are failing to meet their ethical obligations to provide healthcare, she noted that:

    “These are the same doctors who, alongside nurses, carers and allied health professionals, kept New Zealand’s health system functioning during the COVID pandemic in the face of heightened personal risk, often inadequate protections and substantial additional burdens.

    “While the duty of care is of primary ethical importance, codes of ethics also recognise doctors’ duties to all patients, and responsibilities to advocate for adequate resourcing in the health system. These duties may justify compromising care to individual patients under the circumstances in which industrial action is considered.”

    Further, doctors:

    “. . . are striking because their ability to meet these obligations [to provide high quality care] is routinely compromised by working conditions that contribute to burnout and moral injury – the impact of having to work under circumstances that violate core moral values.

    “A key goal of the industrial action is to demand better conditions for clinical care, such as safe staffing levels, that will benefit patients and staff and improve the health system for everyone.”

    The penultimate final word
    In the context of Dr Fenton’s incisive analysis, as reported by Ruth Hill in her above-mentioned RNZ item it is appropriate to leave the penultimate final word to the response of senior doctors at the ASMS annual conference to Simeon Brown’s ethical line crossing accusation. These comments were made in among their boos and groans.

    Dr Katie Ben
    Dr Katie Ben . . . operating lists routinely being cancelled. Image: The Press

    ASMS president and Nelson Hospital anaesthetist Dr Katie Ben said:

    “We have now taken to putting the number of times the patient has been cancelled on the operating list to ensure the patient doesn’t get cancelled for the fourth, fifth or sixth time. Non-clinical managers were cancelling planned care because they could not fill rosters.”

    Waikato Hospital rheumatologist Dr Alan Doube said many people (with crippling chronic conditions) did not even get a first specialist appointment (FSA).

    “In Waikato, we decline regularly 50 percent of our FSA so we can provide some kind of sensible ongoing care.”

    Emergency medicine specialist Dr Tom Morton at Nelson Hospital added:

    “Our ED waiting time have blown out with more than doubling of patients leaving without being seen, which I think is a significant marker of unmet need that’s not being recorded or reported on officially.”

    The ultimate final word: nailing who crossed an ethical line
    In a subsequent RNZ item (October 17), the Health Minister threatened a law change to remove senior doctors’ right to strike: Right to strike threatened.

    Malcolm Mulholland
    Patient advocate Malcolm Mulholland . . . nailing who crossed an ethical line. Image: otaihangasecondopinion

    The reported response of leading patient advocate Malcolm Mulholland nailed who was crossing the ethical line. Describing Simeon Brown’s threat as “pathetic”, he added:

    “I think the reason why our doctors and our nurses are striking is because there’s just simply not enough staff. I don’t know how many times they have to tell him until they are blue in the face.

    “You know, all this talk about crossing an ethical line, I would say, ‘take a look in the mirror, minister’.”

    Indeed Health Minister — look in the mirror! It is the striking doctors who are acting in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath and adhering to the principle of “first do no harm”. It is the Health Minister who is not.

    Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ministers hope to secure a deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council that could add £1.6bn to the UK economy

    Rachel Reeves will lead a delegation of senior business leaders to Saudi Arabia on Monday as she hopes to deepen the UK’s relationship with a state that has been widely criticised for human rights abuses.

    She is the first UK chancellor to visit the Gulf in six years and is expected to meet senior Saudi royals, US administration representatives and global business figures.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • A new law under discussion in the Israeli occupation’s Knesset  has spread fear among Palestinian families and human rights organisations. On 28 September 2025, the Knesset’s National Security Committee approved draft legislation imposing the death penalty on any Palestinian who intentionally or negligently causes the death of an Israeli citizen “out of racial or ideological hatred, or with the aim of harming Israel.” The prisoner execution bill passed with 4–1 of the vote.

    Prisoner execution bill reintroduced by Ben-Gvir

    The prisoners’ execution bill is not new; it has been proposed repeatedly over the years. Most recently, in 2022, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party and an illegal settler who is responsible for the systematic torture of Palestinian prisoners — reintroduced the bill with amendments.

    The bill passed a preliminary reading in 2023, and was approved by the Knesset’s ‘National Security Committee’ on September 28, in preparation for its first reading. Though the law requires two further readings in the Knesset to pass, for Palestinians under occupation this announcement marks a clear escalation in a system long built around mass arrests, indefinite detention, and an apartheid justice system.

    The Israeli regime aims to legitimise the killing of Palestinian prisoners

    The bill’s advancement during Gaza’s ongoing genocide has raised alarm among Palestinian detainee organisations. Both the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs warned that the law seeks to legitimise and institutionalise the continued killing of prisoners held in Israeli custody — effectively granting a formal licence for execution in a system that already differentiates between the rights afforded to Israeli and Palestinian detainees.

    They denounced the law, calling it a codification of “systematic crimes”, and stated:

    The occupation has reached unprecedented levels of brutality… Despite international law’s clear position criminalising the death penalty, the occupation’s ongoing efforts to legalise this crime and grant it a ‘legitimate’ status once again underscore that the occupying state acts above the law and beyond accountability… The occupation is now working to codify the crime of execution through specific legislation. This bill adds to a repressive legal system that has, for decades, targeted nearly every aspect of Palestinian life — particularly the rights and lives of prisoners and detainees.

    If the bill becomes law, the death penalty would be mandatory, not optional

    The draft bill, as outlined in a detailed statement by the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan, mandates the death penalty for any detainee “convicted of murder motivated by racism or hostility toward a particular public, and under circumstances where the act was committed with the intent to harm the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in their homeland — mandatorily, not optionally or at the court’s discretion.”

    The law removes the possibility of reducing a death sentence and makes it easier to impose one, allowing judges to order execution by simple majority rather than by unanimous decision.

    Ben- Gvir not only calls to ‘open the gates of hell upon Gaza’ but says executing Palestinian ‘terrorists’ would free up prison space

    Ben-Gvir’s rise in politics has been marked by aggressive language and direct threats targeting Palestinians. In June 2024, he publicly said that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head”, and called for them to receive only minimal sustenance until a death-penalty statute is passed. In another provocative statement in April 2024, he argued that the “right solution” to overcrowding in Israeli occupation prisons is executing Palestinian “terrorists”.

    Earlier this week, on 20 October 2025, Ben-Gvir also threatened to withhold his party’s support for coalition legislation unless the prisoners’ execution bill is brought to a vote within three weeks. His claim rests on a coalition agreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which he says stipulates that a prisoner-execution law should be passed during the current Knesset term. He called on Netanyahu to “return to intense fighting, to conquer, to crush, to win.”

    Now that the Israeli colonial settlers detained in Gaza have been returned, Ben-Gvir has again called — on Hebrew news channel TV 14 — for the genocide in Gaza to continue, saying:

    “We must now stop everything (cancel the ceasefire). Now that we have received the (Israeli) captives from Gaza, we must return to war and open the gates of hell upon Gaza. The captives were the only reason we stopped the war. We must continue the war on Gaza, whether the Qataris and the Turks are there or not. Qatar and Turkey are our enemies.”

    In Gaza and the West Bank, news of this bill is extremely worrying for the many families whose loved ones are already imprisoned under indefinite detention or military court systems, very often deprived of medical care and subjected to isolation and abuse. For them, the prisoners’ execution bill marks a profound shift — from fearing a long sentence or uncertain release to fearing execution.

    Families of prisoners such as Marwan Barghouti, a popular Palestinian political leader held in Israeli occupation prisons since 2002 and serving multiple life sentences, are particularly alarmed. Barghouti has faced continued abuse, reportedly being beaten unconscious in September 2025 by eight prison guards during a transfer, suffering multiple broken ribs and days of incapacitation, according to his son. In August, Ben-Gvir visited Barghouti in prison and posted a video taunting him — an act widely interpreted as politicised intimidation.

    State-sanctioned killing

    This proposed execution law comes amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza and heightened repression in the West Bank. Thousands have been arrested since October 2023 and 80 detainees dying in custody — often amid allegations of medical neglect or abuse.

    The bill is now set to go before the Knesset for its first reading. If passed, the law would convert what is already structural oppression into state‑sanctioned killing. For Palestinians, it would mark a huge shift — a future in which the cell does not just imprison, but kills.

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A protest over Pine Gap’s claimed role in genocide has refocused attention on the secretive US satellite base near Alice Springs

    Straight and bare, Hatt Road runs south-west from Mparntwe-Alice Springs before it suddenly swings north through a narrow gap in the MacDonnell Ranges.

    It is what lies beyond that draws protesters here time and time again.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The New Arab

    A Palestinian horror film inspired by folklore is moving forward, with journalist and author Plestia Alaqad joining the cast alongside American-born Kuwaiti-Palestinian journalist and media personality Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

    Titled The Visitor, the feature is written and directed by Palestinian-American filmmaker Rolla Selbak and produced by Black Poppy Productions.

    The story follows a young Palestinian man in Jerusalem who must protect his family after a “Ghouleh” — a female demon from local folktales — emerges in his town.

    Production is scheduled for a 25-day shoot in Jordan in 2026, with US-based Watermelon Pictures joining as executive producer and financier. The company, which supported From Ground Zero, Palestine’s first Oscars submission, will collaborate with Jordan’s Imaginarium on the production.

    Watermelon Pictures’ head of production, Munir Atalla, told The Hollywood Reporter that Selbak’s vision “marks a bold new foray into genre films for Palestinian cinema“.

    Alaqad, a Palestinian author, journalist, and poet, gained international attention for her daily social media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    Her memoir, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience, was published earlier this year by Pan Macmillan and was released in the United States in September.

    Human rights, Arab identity
    Shihab-Eldin, an Emmy-nominated journalist and actor of Palestinian descent, is best known for his work on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and various independent media projects focusing on human rights and Arab identity.

    Selbak told The Hollywood Reporter that The Visitor “is about erasure, and the deep human need to be seen”, adding that “living under occupation can be scarier than the monsters in our folktales”.

    Atalla told The New Arab in June that Watermelon Pictures was founded in response to censorship and the lack of representation facing Palestinian storytellers in global cinema.

    “The [Gaza] genocide put into stark relief the extent to which the existing systems we have will never serve us,” he said. “We have to build our own cultural power and financial power to compete and fight in this ideological battle that we’re in.”

    He added that the company’s new streaming platform, Watermelon+, was designed as “a living archive of Palestinian cinema”, protecting films from being erased or deplatformed.

    Alaqad also told The New Arab earlier this year that her work had sought to preserve Palestinian life and memory beyond the violence.

    “The media only shows Gaza when it’s being bombed,” she said. “We’re seeing how Palestinians are getting killed, but we don’t see how Palestinians lived.

    “That’s where the dehumanisation comes in.”

    Republished from The New Arab.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pacific Media Watch

    Pulitzer Prize–winning US journalist Chris Hedges joins Antoinette Lattouf on We Used To Be Journos to unpack his time in Australia, including some fraught interactions with sections of the Australian media.

    The pair also discuss what he flew all this way to talk about — how Western journalists are betraying their colleagues in Gaza.

    Hedges also offers some honest advice for young people who still want to tell stories and speak truth to power.


    The We Used To Be Journos interview.                     Video: ETTE Media

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has warned of the growing danger posed by tens of thousands of tonnes of unexploded munitions left behind by the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip, stressing that it poses a direct threat to the lives of civilians and hinders rescue and rubble removal efforts.

    In a statement received by the Canary on Friday, the centre explained that preliminary estimates indicate the presence of around 20 thousand unexploded bombs, rockets and missiles dropped by the occupation army during its ongoing aggression. It noted that these remnants are scattered among approximately 70 million tonnes of rubble resulting from the destruction of homes and infrastructure in the Strip.

    Unexploded munitions making Gaza a minefield

    Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence Authority, added that approximately 71 thousand tonnes of explosives remain buried in the rubble, making every recovery operation a deadly task. He pointed out that rescue workers face real dangers while performing their duties, as any wrong move could lead to a deadly explosion.

    The PCHR noted that a number of fatal accidents have been recorded in recent months as a result of unexploded munitions, the latest of which was in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, where a buried shell exploded, killing three civilians, while another explosion in Nuseirat camp injured four workers clearing rubble.

    The centre called for the formation of a specialised international committee under the supervision of the United Nations to conduct a comprehensive survey of unexploded munitions sites in Gaza. The committee would need to send international engineering teams equipped with the necessary equipment and expertise to remove them and secure populated areas. It also demanded that the occupation authorities disclose maps of the locations where bombs and ammunition were dropped during the war.

    The statement stressed the need to immediately open the crossings to allow the entry of heavy machinery and equipment needed for debris removal and body recovery operations, emphasising that the international community’s continued silence in the face of this catastrophic situation constitutes indirect complicity in the suffering of the people of Gaza.

    Featured image by the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Pacific Media Watch

    United States top diplomat Marco Rubio says the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) “is not going to play any role” in aid delivery in Gaza, reports Al Jazeera.

    He also rejected the possibility of Hamas being involved in any future governance of the besieged enclave.

    Speaking during a news conference while on a visit to Israel yesterday, the US Secretary of State claimed UNRWA had become “a subsidiary of Hamas”, echoing an Israeli government line that has been discredited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

    In response, UNRWA insisted that its presence “remains vital to meeting urgent humanitarian needs” across the bombarded and starved enclave, where a deadly Israeli offensive has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in two years.

    In a statement posted on X, the agency also highlighted that the ICJ had recognised that “no organisation can replace the UNRWA’s role in supporting the people of Gaza”.

    Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, also dismissed Rubio’s characterisation.

    “You’ve already heard us talk about how UNRWA is not linked to Hamas,” he told reporters at the UN. “UNRWA is the backbone of our humanitarian operations in Gaza.”

    Israel banned the agency from operating after accusing some of its staff of taking part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack without providing evidence.

    Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the proclamation by Rubio that UNRWA was a Hamas “subsidiary” was “quite shocking” and “devastating” for UNRWA and all who were involved in Gaza.

    UNRWA exonerated by ICJ
    UNRWA was not only exonerated by the ICJ and two separate commissions of inquiry, but also had the largest, most extensive aid mechanism in Gaza, Odeh said.

    “It has thousands of employees, it has the data to distribute aid to Palestinians with dignity and in an orderly fashion,” she said.

    “Nobody has that kind of infrastructure and history in Gaza.”

    Despite a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect earlier this month, Israel has continued launching attacks across Gaza. At least two people were killed in shelling east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza yesterday, a source at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic.

    Israel has also kept the Rafah crossing near Egypt sealed, blocking large-scale aid deliveries that were stipulated in the truce agreement.

    In his remarks on Friday, Rubio voiced hope of soon putting together an international security force to police the ceasefire in Gaza and said Israel, which opposes including Turkiye, could veto participants.

    In Suva, The Fiji Times reports that Israel says Fiji’s “neutral and highly skilled military” could play a valuable role in future peacekeeping efforts once negotiations on Gaza’s next phase were complete.

    The indication came as Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said discussions between Israel, the United States and Arab nations would determine the structure and participants of any peacekeeping arrangement.

    “I have to say that we do trust the Fijian forces,” Haskel said during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka before she left for her controversial visit to New Zealand.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Asia Pacific Report

    Fiji opening an embassy in Jerusalem last month in defiance of United Nations resolutions on Occupied Palestine and hosting a visit by a senior Israeli minister from the paraiah state this week has revived condemnation by Pacific human rights groups and Palestinian advocates.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.

    She also faced controversy in New Zealand over the trip.

    Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.

    The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has condemned Fiji’s coalition government for “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza”, saying it was being “deliberately orchestrated” by Israel in a statement.

    The statement was issued before the opening of the embassy and the declaration of a Gaza ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump and three mediating Middle East countries.

    While Israel has violated the fragile ceasefire several times in the past two weeks, killing at least 100 Palestinians, the International Court of Justice has made a nonbinding ruling that Israel must support UN relief efforts in Gaza, including those conducted by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

    Embassy entourage
    The NGOCHR statement by chair Shamima Ali, dated September 9, criticised widespread reports in Fiji media that Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would take “an entourage of 17 government officials and spouses” to officially establish the residential Fijian embassy.

    “The coalition government appears to be callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel,” she said.

    “This very same Fiji government previously defended the destruction, killing, and maiming of scores of thousands of innocent civilians — 70 percent of them women and children — by Israel at the International Court of Justice [in an earlier and ongoing case on genocide].”

    Shamima Ali highlighted the visit in August by two World Elders — Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand and former Head of UNDP) — to the Rafah crossing into Gaza from Egypt.

    They had witnessed how Israel was preventing the flow of food, water, and medicine to the suffering people of Gaza, and declared it as an “unfolding genocide” — “this is not the chaos of war, nor the result of an environmental disaster. It is intentional.”

    Ali said Prime Minster Rabuka, and ministers Lynda Tabuya and Pio Tikoduadua had made “rather unconvincing arguments” about opening of the Fijian embassy in Jerusalem on September 18 amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

    “Whether they like it or not, in the eyes of the world, Fiji will be seen as a country that supports the apartheid and pariah state of Israel, and its genocide in Gaza,” the statement said.

    ‘Not in our name’
    Ali said the NGOCHR reiterated its “Not in our name” opposition to Fiji’s defence of Israel at the ICJ in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.

    It also declared its strongest “Not in our name” opposition to the establishment of the Fiji Embassy in Jerusalem.

    “Neither action reflects the wishes of all citizens of Fiji. It does not reflect well on Fiji for the present coalition government to be effectively supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine.”

    Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.

    Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.