Alain Berset acknowledged growing criticism of the 75-year-old treaty, but said any changes must also respect ‘our core values’
The European convention on human rights (ECHR) must adapt while continuing to uphold its core values, the head of a European rights council has said.
Alain Berset, the secretary general of the Council of Europe (CoE), acknowledged growing criticism of the 75-year-old treaty, but said reform should be approached with care and rooted in shared democratic principles.
In Islamic culture, Eid al-Adha carries deep meanings of compassion and solidarity. This celebration, which begins this year on June 6 and lasts four days, commemorates Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail in obedience to a divine vision, before God intervened and provided a ram instead. When we distribute the meat of the sacrificed animals, a share must go to the poor and the…
Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi will be suspended for 21 days, and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke suspended for seven days, taking effect immediately.
Opposition parties tried to reject the recommendation, but did not have the numbers to vote it down.
Te Pati Maori MPs speak after being suspended. Video: RNZ/Mark Papalii
The heated debate to consider the proposed punishment came to an end just before Parliament was due to rise.
Waititi moved to close the debate and no party disagreed, ending the possibility of it carrying on in the next sitting week.
Leader of the House Chris Bishop — the only National MP who spoke — kicked off the debate earlier in the afternoon saying it was “regrettable” some MPs did not vote on the Budget two weeks ago.
Bishop had called a vote ahead of Budget Day to suspend the privileges report debate to ensure the Te Pāti Māori MPs could take part in the Budget, but not all of them turned up.
Robust, rowdy debate
The debate was robust and rowdy with both the deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger and temporary speaker Tangi Utikare repeatedly having to ask MPs to quieten down.
Flashback: Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipa-Clarke led a haka in Parliament and tore up a copy of the Treaty Principles Bill at the first reading on 14 November 2024 . . . . a haka is traditionally used as an indigenous show of challenge, support or sorrow. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone/APR screenshot
Tākuta Ferris spoke first for Te Pāti Māori, saying the haka was a “signal of humanity” and a “raw human connection”.
He said Māori had faced acts of violence for too long and would not be silenced by “ignorance or bigotry”.
“Is this really us in 2025, Aotearoa New Zealand?” he asked the House.
“Everyone can see the racism.”
He said the Privileges Committee’s recommendations were not without precedent, noting the fact Labour MP Peeni Henare, who also participated in the haka, did not face suspension.
MP Tākuta Ferris spoke for Te Pāti Māori. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Henare attended the committee and apologised, which contributed to his lesser sanction.
‘Finger gun’ gesture
MP Parmjeet Parmar — a member of the Committee — was first to speak on behalf of ACT, and referenced the hand gesture — or “finger gun” — that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made in the direction of ACT MPs during the haka.
Parmar told the House debate could be used to disagree on ideas and issues, and there was not a place for intimidating physical gestures.
Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said New Zealand’s Parliament could lead the world in terms of involving the indigenous people.
She said the Green Party strongly rejected the committee’s recommendations and proposed their amendment of removing suspensions, and asked the Te Pāti Māori MPs be censured instead.
Davidson said the House had evolved in the past — such as the inclusion of sign language and breast-feeding in the House.
She said the Greens were challenging the rules, and did not need an apology from Te Pāti Māori.
Foreign Minister and NZ First party leader Winston Peters called Te Pāti Māori “a bunch of extremists”. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
NZ First leader Winston Peters said Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party speeches so far showed “no sincerity, saying countless haka had taken place in Parliament but only after first consulting the Speaker.
“They told the media they were going to do it, but they didn’t tell the Speaker did they?
‘Bunch of extremists’
“The Māori party are a bunch of extremists,” Peters said, “New Zealand has had enough of them”.
Peters was made to apologise after taking aim at Waititi, calling him “the one in the cowboy hat” with “scribbles on his face” [in reference to his traditional indigenous moko — tatoo]. He continued afterward, describing Waititi as possessing “anti-Western values”.
Labour’s Willie Jackson congratulated Te Pāti Māori for the “greatest exhibition of our culture in the House in my lifetime”.
Jackson said the Treaty bill was a great threat, and was met by a great haka performance. He was glad the ACT Party was intimidated, saying that was the whole point of doing the haka.
He also called for a bit of compromise from Te Pāti Māori — encouraging them to say sorry — but reiterated Labour’s view the sanctions were out of proportion with past indiscretions in the House.
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the prime minister was personally responsible if the proposed sanctions went ahead. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the debate “would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious”.
“Get an absolute grip,” she said to the House, arguing the prime minister “is personally responsible” if the House proceeds with the committee’s proposed sanctions.
Eye of the beholder
She accused National’s James Meager of “pointing a finger gun” at her — the same gesture coalition MPs had criticised Ngarewa-Packer for during her haka. The Speaker accepted he had not intended to; Swarbrick said it was an example where the interpretation could be in the eye of the beholder.
She said if the government could “pick a punishment out of thin air” that was “not a democracy”, putting New Zealand in very dangerous territory.
An emotional Maipi-Clarke said she had been silent on the issue for a long time, the party’s voices in haka having sent shockwaves around the world. She questioned whether that was why the MPs were being punished.
“Since when did being proud of your culture make you racist?”
“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” she said, calling the Treaty Principles bill a “dishonourable vote”.
She had apologised to the Speaker and accepted the consequence laid down on the day, but refused to apologise. She listed other incidents in Parliament that resulted in no punishment.
Maipi-Clarke called for the Treaty of Waitangi to be recognised in the Constitution Act, and for MPs to be required to honour it by law.
‘Clear pathway forward’
“The pathway forward has never been so clear,” she said.
ACT’s Nicole McKee said there were excuses being made for “bad behaviour”, that the House was for making laws and having discussions, and “this is not about the haka, this is about process”.
She told the House she had heard no good ideas from the Te Pāti Māori, who she said resorted to intimidation when they did not get their way, but the MPs needed to “grow up” and learn to debate issues. She hoped 21 days would give them plenty of time to think about their behaviour.
Labour MP and former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe started by saying there were “no winners in this debate”, and it was clear to him it was the government, not the Parliament, handing out the punishments.
He said the proposed sanctions set a precedent for future penalties, and governments might use it as a way to punish opposition, imploring National to think twice.
He also said an apology from Te Pāti Māori would “go a long way”, saying they had a “huge opportunity” to have a legacy in the House, but it was their choice — and while many would agree with the party there were rules and “you can’t have it both ways”.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi speaking to the media after the Privileges Committee debate. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said there had been many instances of misinterpretations of the haka in the House and said it was unclear why they were being punished, “is it about the haka . . . is about the gun gestures?”
“Not one committee member has explained to us where 21 days came from,” he said.
Hat and ‘scribbles’ response
Waititi took aim at Peters over his comments targeting his hat and “scribbles” on his face.
He said the haka was an elevation of indigenous voice and the proposed punishment was a “warning shot from the colonial state that cannot stomach” defiance.
Waititi said that throughout history when Māori did not play ball, the “coloniser government” reached for extreme sanctions, ending with a plea to voters: “Make this a one-term government, enrol, vote”.
He brought out a noose to represent Māori wrongfully put to death in the past, saying “interpretation is a feeling, it is not a fact . . . you’ve traded a noose for legislation”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A Hungarian law banning content about LGBTQ+ people from schools and primetime TV has been found to violate basic human rights and freedom of expression by a senior legal scholar at the European court of justice.
The non-binding opinion from the court’s advocate general, Tamara Ćapeta, issued on Thursday, represents a comprehensive demolition of the arguments made by the Hungarian government defending its so-called childprotection law, passed in 2021.
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, has highlighted the growing isolation of the United States at the United Nations over its defiant stance over Gaza.
He emphasised the contrast between Washington’s support for Israel and mounting global criticism, with 14 members of the UNSC voting for a resolution calling for an immediate permanent and unconditional ceasefire.
Even close allies like the UK voted for the resolution 14-1 and condemned the American position, suggesting that the US has acted as a dam blocking ceasefire resolutions five times since October 23.
But, Bishara said, that barrier was beginning to crack — the US was “utterly isolated”, Al Jazeera reports.
With rising international and domestic pressure, he sees a swelling current of opposition that may soon challenge US policy at the UNSC.
The acting US Ambassador, Dorothy Shea, blamed the crisis on the Palestine resistance movement Hamas and said Israel was “defending Gaza from Iran”, a stance ridiculed by Bishara.
The US vetoed the UNSC resolution calling for a permanent and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, the release of captives and the unhindered entry of aid.
It was the fifth time since October 2023 that the US has blocked a council resolution on the besieged Strip.
‘No surprise’
In remarks before the start of the voting, Acting Ambassador Shea made the US opposition to the resolution, put forward by 10 countries on the 15-member council, painfully clear, which she said “should come as no surprise”.
“The United States has taken the very clear position since this conflict began that Israel has the right to defend itself, which includes defeating Hamas and ensuring they are never again in a position to threaten Israel,” she told the council.
Washington was the only country to vote against the measure, while the 14 other members of the council voted in favour.
A Hamas statement said: “This arrogant stance reflects [the US] disregard for international law and its complete rejection of any international effort to stop the Palestinian bloodshed.”
US isolated in UN Security Council. Video: Al Jazeera
‘Human abattoir’
Meanwhile, former UN Palestine relief agency UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness slammed the Israeli-US aid operation as turning Gaza into a “human abattoir”, or slaughterhouse.
He was condemning the four distribution sites operated by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
“Hundreds of civilians are herded like animals into fenced-off pens and are slaughtered like cattle in the process,” Gunness told Al Jazeera.
The GHF announced two full day’s closure on Wednesday, saying that operations would resume after the completion of maintenance and repair work on its distribution sites.
This come after Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid, killing at least 27 people and injuring about 90, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
The former UN official cast doubt on the reason for the suspension, saying its work had been halted “because it has rightly sparked international outrage and condemnation”.
America’s retreat from foreign aid is being felt deeply in Pacific media, where pivotal outlets are being shuttered and journalists work unpaid.
The result is fewer investigations into dubiously motivated politicians, glimpses into conflicts otherwise unseen and a less diverse media in a region which desperately needs it.
“It is a huge disappointment … a senseless waste,” Benar News’ Australian former head of Pacific news Stefan Armbruster said after seeing his outlet go under.
Benar News, In-depth Solomons and Inside PNG are three digital outlets which enjoyed US support but have been hit by President Donald Trump’s about-face on aid.
Benar closed its doors in April after an executive order disestablishing Voice of America, which the United States created during World War II to combat Nazi propaganda.
An offshoot of Radio Free Asia (RFA) focused on Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Benar kept a close eye on abuses in West Papua, massacres and gender-based violence in Papua New Guinea and more.
The Pacific arm quickly became indispensable to many, with a team of reporters and freelancers working in 15 countries on a budget under A$A million.
Coverage of decolonisation
“Our coverage of decolonisation in the Pacific received huge interest, as did our coverage of the lack of women’s representation in parliaments, human rights, media freedom, deep sea mining and more,” Armbruster said.
In-depth Solomons, a Honiara-based digital outlet, is another facing an existential threat despite a proud record of investigative and award-winning reporting.
Last week, it was honoured with a peer-nominated award from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan for a year-long probe into former prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s property holdings.
“We’re just holding on,” editor and co-founder Ofani Eremae said.
A US-centred think tank continues to pay the wage of one journalist, while others have not drawn a salary since January.
“It has had an impact on our operations. We used to travel out to do stories across the provinces. That has not been done since early this year,” Eremae said.
A private donor came forward after learning of the cuts with a one-off grant that was used for rent to secure the office, he said.
USAID budget axed
Its funding shortfall — like Port Moresby-based outlet Inside PNG — is linked to USAID, the world’s biggest single funder of development assistance, until Trump axed its multi-billion dollar budget.
Much of USAID’s funding was spent on humanitarian causes — such as vaccines, clean water supplies and food security — but some was also earmarked for media in developing nations, with the aim of bolstering fragile democracies.
Inside PNG used its support to build an audience of tens of thousands with incisive reports on PNG politics: not just Port Moresby, but in the regions including independence-seeking province Bougainville that has a long history of conflict.
“The current lack of funding has unfortunately had a dual impact, affecting both our dedicated staff, whom we’re currently unable to pay, and our day-to-day operations,” Inside PNG managing director Kila Wani said.
“We’ve had to let off 80 percent of staff from payroll which is a big hit because we’re not a very big team.
“Logistically, it’s become challenging to carry out our work as we normally would.”
Other media entities in the region have suffered hits, but declined to share their stories.
The latest PFF report listed a string of challenges, notably weak legal protections for free speech, political interference on editorial independence, and a lack of funding underpinning high-quality media, in the region.
The burning question for these outlets — and their audiences — is do other sources of funding exist to fill the gap?
Inside PNG is refocusing energy on attracting new donors, as is In-depth Solomons, which has also turned to crowdfunding.
The Australian and New Zealand governments have also provided targeted support for the media sector across the region, including ABC International Development (ABCID), which has enjoyed a budget increase from Anthony Albanese’s government.
Inside PNG and In-depth Solomons both receive training and content-focused grants from ABCID, which helps, but this does not fund the underpinning costs for a media business or keep on the lights.
Both Eremae, who edited two major newspapers before founding the investigative outlet, and Armbruster, a long-time SBS correspondent, expressed their dismay at the US pivot away from the Pacific.
‘Huge mistake’ by US
“It’s a huge mistake on the part of the US … the world’s leading democracy. The media is one of the pillars of democracy,” Eremae said.
“It is, I believe, in the interests of the US and other democratic countries to give funding to media in countries like the Solomon Islands where we cannot survive due to lack of advertising (budgets).
As a veteran of Pacific reporting, Armbruster said he had witnessed US disinterest in the region contribute to the wider geopolitical struggle for influence.
“The US government was trying to re-establish its presence after vacating the space decades ago. It had promised to re-engage, dedicating funding largely driven by its efforts to counter China, only to now betray those expectations,” he said.
“The US government has senselessly destroyed a highly valued news service in the Pacific. An own goal.”
Ben McKay is an AAP journalist. Republished from National Indigenous Times in Australia.
Laila Soueif is critically ill after nearly 250 days on hunger strike in protest against her son’s imprisonment
The Egyptian president is refusing to take a call from Keir Starmer, knowing it will be a plea to save the life of the mother of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a famous human rights activist and British Egyptian dual national, it has been claimed.
Laila Soueif is in St Thomas’ hospital in London with very low blood sugar levels as she suffers from the effect of nearly 250 days on hunger strike.
The April bombing of a Yemeni oil port by U.S. forces that killed and wounded hundreds of civilians and disrupted the delivery of lifesaving aid to one of the world’s most war-torn nations was “an apparent war crime” that should be investigated, a leading international human rights group said Wednesday. On April 17, a series of U.S. airstrikes destroyed the Ras Isa oil Port on the Red Sea…
On 1 May 2025 the Human Rights Foundation announced the recipients of the 2025 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent: Cuban artist and pro-democracy activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Syrian activist and artist Azza Abo Rebieh, and Russian artist, poet, and musician Sasha Skochilenko.
He gained international attention for his performance art and peaceful protests, including hunger strikes and symbolic acts of resistance. He was arrested during Cuba’s historic 2021 protests and sentenced to five years in prison following a closed trial. In 2022, following a submission by HRF, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his imprisonment to be arbitrary and urged the Cuban regime to release him immediately. He is being held in Guanajay maximum-security prison.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, “Los Heroes no Pesan.” Courtesy of the artist.
AZZA ABO REBIEH
Azza Abo Rebieh is a Syrian artist born in Hama in 1980. During the Syrian revolution, she created graffiti, led workshops with women, and organized puppet theater for children in rural villages. In 2015, she was detained by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Art became her solace during her imprisonment in Adra prison, where she shared a cell with 30 women, many of whom were illiterate. Azza drew her cellmates, dignifying them through reminders and glimpses of themselves through sketches. Following her release, her prison drawings were exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York. Her work explores memory, resistance, and survival and is held in collections including the British Museum and Institut du Monde Arabe.
Azza Abo Rebieh, “Hindmosts.” Courtesy of the artist.
SASHA SKOCHILENKO
Sasha Skochilenko is a Russian artist, musician, poet, and former political prisoner. She was arrested in 2022 for distributing anti-war messages and sentenced in 2023 to seven years in prison under Russia’s so-called “fake news” law.
Skochilenko was released in 2024 as part of the Ankara prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia. She lives in Germany, where she continues her artistic work, participating in exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, and London to showcase the drawings she created in prison. Beyond activism, she’s the author of “Book About Depression,” which played a significant role in destigmatizing mental health issues in Russia.
Sasha Skochilenko replaced pricing labels with anti-war messages (seen here in English translation).
It is entirely unsurprising that Israel has yet again been caught out in a lie – a lie that the BBC once again spread far and wide on its news services.
Israel claimed that it had not fired at starving Palestinians queuing on Sunday morning to get food from one of its highly militarised “aid distribution hubs” – a system Israel imposed on Gaza in place of a long-established and successful aid network run by the United Nations.
More than 30 Palestinians are known to have been killed and dozens more injured in the weekend incident.
Israel blamed Hamas fighters for shooting Palestinian civilians, saying they were trying to stop the crowds from taking food boxes. The Israeli military dished up a video, taken by one of its drones, as supposed proof.
The BBC broadcast that video on its main shows, and then did one of its standard “Israel said, the Palestinians said. Who can really know the truth?” reports of the incident.
The BBC should never have taken Israel’s disinformation seriously, not least because Israeli claims are always shown to be lies when subjected to any serious independent scrutiny. The default position should be that Israel is lying until it can demonstrate convincingly that it is not.
Doctors treating the dead and wounded immediately pointed out that their injuries were consistent with Israeli gunfire. The victims had single shots to the head or chest, in line with targeting by Israeli snipers. Others suffered shrapnel wounds from tank shells. Hamas has no tanks.
Now, expert analysis of the video itself – paradoxically confirmed by BBC Verify – shows that the footage was filmed in Khan Younis, far from Rafah, where the Palestinian aid seekers were killed. It is also apparent from the shadows that the video was taken in the evening, not in the morning when the Palestinians in Rafah were shot.
Despite this, the BBC still writes: “The circumstances of this strike are unclear.”
No, it is entirely clear that the Israeli army disseminated lies, and that the BBC lapped up those lies and spread them to its audiences via its main news shows, before tentatively retracting the lies quietly on a live feed on its website.
The reality is that the video doesn’t show Hamas fighters shooting Palestinians to stop them from getting aid. Rather, it shows a criminal Palestinian gang – of the kind Israel has been cultivating and allying with – looting aid so that it can be sold back to Palestinians on the open market, where Israel’s blockade on food has massively inflated prices.
There are no police in Gaza maintaining law and order because Israel kills any Palestinian seen wearing a police uniform.
It was for these very reasons that international aid organisations refused to take part in Israel’s scheme. They understood that it was never about distributing humanitarian aid, as the UN was best placed to do so.
It was not even chiefly about weaponising aid to lure Palestinians into what are effectively Israeli military bases so that soldiers can use biometric data to snatch any Palestinians they want, disappearing them into Israel’s torture camps, as they have been doing.
Rather, it is about giving the appearance of providing food, most of it useless because it is dried staples that need cooking, when there is almost no water or fuel available, while continuing to starve the vast majority of Palestinians. And it is about using the aid hubs as another front for killing Palestinians.
In other words, after taking the aid system out of the UN’s hands, Israel is successfully enfolding the so-called “humanitarian effort” into its genocide.
If that sounds too cynical, mark this. Israel again shot at crowds gathering on Tuesday morning to get aid from one of its “distribution hubs”, killing at least 27 Palestinians and wounding more than 180.
Several witnesses say there was no aid available when they arrived.
There is no way to be too cynical about what Israel is doing. Israel is utterly committed to its genocide, and a genocidal state has no red lines.
Soueif is willing to do ‘what it takes’ to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah, after a lifetime of speaking up against injustice
Laila Soueif, lying shrunken on a hospital bed at St Thomas’ hospital in London on the 247th day of her hunger strike in pursuit of freedom for her son, imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, is locked in what may prove to be her last of many trials of strength with Egypt’s authoritarian regime.
A remarkable, witty and courageous woman, she has the self-awareness to admit: “I may have made a mistake, God knows,” but she will not back down, and anyone looking back at her rich life has little evidence to doubt her perseverance.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary reflected on her years in Fiji as a television journalist and media educator at a Fiji Centre function in Auckland celebrating Fourth Estate values and independence at the weekend.
It was a reunion with former journalism professor David Robie — they had worked together as a team at the University of the South Pacific amid media and political controversy leading up to the George Speight coup in May 2000.
Leary, a former British Council director and lawyer, was the guest speaker at a gathering of human rights activists, development advocates, academics and journalists hosted at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub, the umbrella base for the Fiji Centre and Asia Pacific Media Network.
She said she was delighted to meet “special people in David’s life” and to be speaking to a diverse group sharing “similar values of courage, freedom of expression, truth and tino rangatiratanga”.
“I want to start this talanoa on Friday, 19 May 2000 — 13 years almost to the day of the first recognised military coup in Fiji in 1987 — when failed businessman George Speight tore off his balaclava to reveal his identity.
She pointed out that there had actually been another “coup” 100 years earlier by Ratu Cakobau.
“Speight had seized Parliament holding the elected government at gunpoint, including the politician mother, Lavinia Padarath, of one of my best friends — Anna Padarath.
Hostage-taking report
“Within minutes, the news of the hostage-taking was flashed on Radio Fiji’s 10 am bulletin by a student journalist on secondment there — Tamani Nair. He was a student of David Robie’s.”
Nair had been dispatched to Parliament to find out what was happening and reported from a cassava patch.
“Fiji TV was trashed . . . and transmission pulled for 48 hours.
“The university shut down — including the student radio facilities, and journalism programme website — to avoid a similar fate, but the journalism school was able to keep broadcasting and publishing via a parallel website set up at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The pictures were harrowing, showing street protests turning violent and the barbaric behaviour of Speight’s henchmen towards dissenters.
“Thus began three months of heroic journalism by David’s student team — including through a period of martial law that began 10 days later and saw some of the most restrictive levels of censorship ever experienced in the South Pacific.”
Leary paid tribute to some some of the “brave satire” produced by senior Fiji Times reporters filling the newspaper with “non-news” (such as about haircuts, drinking kava) as an act of defiance.
“My friend Anna Padarath returned from doing her masters in law in Australia on a scholarship to be closer to her Mum, whose hostage days within Parliament Grounds stretched into weeks and then months.
Whanau Community Centre and Hub co-founder Nik Naidu speaking at the Asia Pacific Media Network event at the weekend. Image: Khairiah A. Rahman/APMN
Invisible consequences
“Anna would never return to her studies — one of the many invisible consequences of this profoundly destructive era in Fiji’s complex history.
“Happily, she did go on to carve an incredible career as a women’s rights advocate.”
“Meanwhile David’s so-called ‘barefoot student journalists’ — who snuck into Parliament the back way by bushtrack — were having their stories read and broadcast globally.
“And those too shaken to even put their hands to keyboards on Day 1 emerged as journalism leaders who would go on to win prizes for their coverage.”
Speight was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned in 2024.
Taeri MP Ingrid Leary speaking at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub. Image: Nik Naidu/APMN
Leary said that was just one chapter in the remarkable career of David Robie who had been an editor, news director, foreign news editor and freelance writer with a number of different agencies and news organisations — including Agence France-Presse, Rand Daily Mail, The Auckland Star, Insight Magazine, and New Outlook Magazine — “a family member to some, friend to many, mentor to most”.
Reflecting on working with Dr Robie at USP, which she joined as television lecturer from Fiji Television, she said:
“At the time, being a younger person, I thought he was a little bit crazy, because he was communicating with people all around the world when digital media was in its infancy in Fiji, always on email, always getting up on online platforms, and I didn’t appreciate the power of online media at the time.
“And it was incredible to watch.”
Ahead of his time
She said he was an innovator and ahead of his time.
Dr Robie viewed journalism as a tool for empowerment, aiming to provide communities with the information they needed to make informed decisions.
“We all know that David has been a champion of social justice and for decolonisation, and for the values of an independent Fourth Estate.”
She said she appreciated the freedom to develop independent media as an educator, adding that one of her highlights was producing the groundbreaking documentary Maire about Maire Bopp Du Pont, who was a student journalist at USP and advocate for the Pacific community living with HIV/AIDs.
She later became a nuclear-free Pacific parliamentarian in Pape’ete.
Leary presented Dr Robie with a “speaking stick” carved from an apricot tree branch by the husband of a Labour stalwart based in Cromwell — the event doubled as his 80th birthday.
In response, Dr Robie said the occasion was a “golden opportunity” to thank many people who had encouraged and supported him over many years.
Massive upheaval
“We must have done something right,” he said about USP, “because in 2000, the year of George Speight’s coup, our students covered the massive upheaval which made headlines around the world when Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour-led coalition government was held at gunpoint for 56 days.
“The students courageously covered the coup with their website Pacific Journalism Online and their newspaper Wansolwara — “One Ocean”. They won six Ossie Awards – unprecedented for a single university — in Australia that year and a standing ovation.”
He said there was a video on YouTube of their exploits called Frontline Reporters and one of the students, Christine Gounder, wrote an article for a Commonwealth Press Union magazine entitled, “From trainees to professionals. And all it took was a coup”.
Dr Robie said this Fiji experience was still one of the most standout experiences he had had as a journalist and educator.
Along with similar coverage of the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis by his students at the University of Papua New Guinea.
He made some comments about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap in the Marshall islands and the subsequent bombing by French secret agents in Auckland.
But he added “you can read all about this adventure in my new book” being published in a few weeks.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary (right) with Dr David Robie and his wife Del Abcede at the Fiji Centre function. Image: Camille Nakhid
Biggest 21st century crisis
Dr Robie said the profession of journalism, truth telling and holding power to account, was vitally important to a healthy democracy.
Although media did not succeed in telling people what to think, it did play a vital role in what to think about. However, the media world was undergoing massive change and fragmentation.
“And public trust is declining in the face of fake news and disinformation,” he said
“I think we are at a crossroads in society, both locally and globally. Both journalism and democracy are under an unprecedented threat in my lifetime.
“When more than 230 journalists can be killed in 19 months in Gaza and there is barely a bleep from the global community, there is something savagely wrong.
“The Gazan journalists won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize collectively last year with the judges saying, “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
“The carnage and genocide in Gaza is deeply disturbing, especially the failure of the world to act decisively to stop it. The fact that Israel can kill with impunity at least 54,000 people, mostly women and children, destroy hospitals and starve people to death and crush a people’s right to live is deeply shocking.
“This is the biggest crisis of the 21st century. We see this relentless slaughter go on livestreamed day after day and yet our media and politicians behave as if this is just ‘normal’. It is shameful, horrendous. Have we lost our humanity?
“Gaza has been our test. And we have failed.”
Other speakers included Whānau Hub co-founder Nik Naidu, one of the anti-coup Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) stalwarts; the Heritage New Zealand’s Antony Phillips; and Multimedia Investments and Evening Report director Selwyn Manning.
Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it
The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,” says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – “or its sequel, Eighteen Inches”, he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.
Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don’t want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it’s a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it’s worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.
In The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times (2/11/25), Wall Street Journal (3/20/25) and Washington Post (10/24/23).
Headlines from the Washington Post (8/27/12, 8/23/12), New York Times (6/2/11) and Wall Street Journal (6/15/12) treated massacres in Assad’s Syria as what Chomsky and Herman called a “nefarious bloodbath.”
The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.
For David Brooks of the Times (6/2/11), the Assad government was “one of the world’s genuinely depraved regimes,” and thus it was necessary for Barack Obama to “embrace the cautious regime-change strategy that is his current doctrine.”
An editorial in the Journal (6/15/12) saw “Mr. Assad’s efficient butchery” as a reason that the US should conduct an “air campaign targeting elite Syrian military units.” This
could prompt the general staff to reconsider its contempt for international opinion, and perhaps its allegiance to the Assad family. Short of that, carving out some kind of safe haven inside Syria would at least save lives.
The Post published an editorial (8/27/12) saying that “according to opposition sources, at least 300 people were slaughtered in the town of Daraya late last week.” The piece added that this
newest war crime, like those before it, reflects a deliberate strategy. As the Post’s Liz Sly has reported [8/23/12], the Assad regime is seeking to regain control over opposition-held areas by teaching their residents that harboring the rebels will be punished with mass murder.
The paper called the Obama administration “morally bankrupt” for not taking more aggressive military action in Syria.
Embracing Damascus
France 24 (5/1/25): “The latest round of violence follows a series of massacres in Syria’s coast in March, where the Observatory said security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites.”
In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance from the US and its partners (New York Times, 8/2/17), his government has opened Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated that it’s open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings and ever-expanding occupation of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.
As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.
Those unaware of the shifts in Syria and US policy toward it might expect the horrors of Syria’s recent massacres to generate a cavalcade of media denunciation. In March, the new Syrian government’s security forces and groups allied to it reportedly killed 1,700 civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority (France 24, 5/1/25), following attacks that Assad loyalists carried out on security and military sites.
Our evidence indicates that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite minority in gruesome . . . attacks—shooting individuals at close range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.
Amnesty called the killings “reprisals,” a reference to the sectarian view that the Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, deserve to be collectively punished for the Assad government’s crimes. The group observed that families of Alawite “victims were forced by the authorities to bury their loved one[s] in mass burial sites without religious rites.”
The Druze, a religious minority with Islamic roots that accounts for approximately 3–4% of Syria’s population, have also been massacred. At the end of April, “auxiliary forces to the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” killed 42 Druze in an ambush on the Damascus/Al-Suwaidaa highway, and another ten civilians from Druze community “were executed by forces affiliated with the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). Some of the victims’ bodies were incinerated (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/1/25).
‘Lack of control’
A New York Times op-ed (4/2/25) treated the killing of “hundreds of Alawite civilians” as a sign of ” the government’s lack of control over its own forces.”
Yet commentary on the grisly mass murders of people from these minority groups has been decidedly muted. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New YorkTimes together have published just one op-ed that focused on the killings. The lone piece (WashingtonPost, 3/10/25) pointed out that Syrian government forces have evidently “embark[ed] on the sort of sectarian slaughter of civilians that many had feared when rebel forces gained power three months ago.” Author Jim Geraghty, however, stopped short of issuing the call for US military intervention that characterizes media responses to nefarious bloodbaths.
Other op-eds treated the al-Sharaa government’s violence as little more than a footnote. A Journal editorial (5/9/25) offering a rundown of recent developments in Syria waited until the last line of the sixth paragraph to mention that “government-aligned forces have slaughtered Alawites and attacked Druze,” as if doing so were a minor detail. A Times essay (4/2/25) took nearly 800 words before referencing the massacres:
And in March, when insurgents loyal to the Assad regime clashed with security groups affiliated with the new government and bands of fighters—including some nominally under the control of the government, according to rights groups—responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians as well as suspected insurgents, it displayed the government’s lack of control over its own forces and ignited fears that the country was descending into sectarian violence.
Painting massacres of hundreds of civilians from minority groups as a “respon[se]” is far from the full-throated denunciations deployed for nefarious bloodbaths: “killing hundreds of Alawite civilians” evidently does not show that the government is “depraved,” but rather demonstrates its “lack of control over its own forces.”
‘Recent surge in sectarian violence’
A New York Times news report (5/14/25) on a meeting between the US and Syrian presidents referred vaguely to “a recent surge in sectarian violence.”
For the New York Times (5/14/25), the massacres of Alawites and Druze weren’t important enough to warrant mentioning in their rundown of Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa. The paper referred instead to “the unstable situation” in the country and “a recent surge in sectarian violence.” That vague language provided no sense of the severity of the violence, or of the al-Sharaa government’s share in the responsibility for it, highly relevant information in an article about the Washington/Damascus embrace.
The phrase “recent surge in sectarian violence” is particularly obfuscatory, as it wrongly suggests that it’s impossible to assign responsibility for that violence, even though it’s well-established that the government and its allies have done most of the killing (Amnesty International, 4/3/25; Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). The wording also inaccurately suggests that this phenomenon is new, an implication debunked by the Carnegie Endowment (5/14/25):
In 2015, fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], which is led by Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, killed at least 20 Druze villagers in Qalb Lozeh in Idlib governorate. Others were coerced into converting to Sunni Islam, while Druze shrines were desecrated and graves defaced.
Similarly, in August 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra was part of a coalition of armed groups that attacked predominantly Alawite villages, killing 190 civilians, including 18 children and 14 elderly men (BBC, 10/11/13). That track record might have been the basis for expressions of moral outrage against the al-Sharaa government’s “butchery,” but, fortunately for HTS and its partners, their massacres are benign.
The relative indifference with which the corporate media has treated sectarian killings carried out by HTS and allies, both before and since they came to power, could also have something to do with the US’s role in helping foment sectarianism in Syria in the run up to the war in the country (Truthout, 10/9/15).
A New York Times (5/16/25) report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying off Syria’s World Bank debt called that move “the latest victory for Syria’s new government as it attempts to stabilize the nation after a long civil war and decades of dictatorship.” Reporter Euan Ward went on to say that “there are still significant challenges ahead for the fractured nation, which has been rocked by repeated waves of sectarian violence in recent months.” At no point did Ward note that the government he said was trying to “stabilize” the nation has been carrying out that “sectarian violence.”
Nor did the Times‘ May 14 or May 16 articles mention, as the Conversation (5/12/25) did, that civil society groups have called for the al-Sharaa government “to issue protective religious rulings for minority communities”—the sort of step a government would take if it were seeking to “stabilize the nation.” “Their appeals have gone unanswered,” the Conversation noted.
The difference in the tenor of coverage of killings by the Assad government and that of the al-Sharaa government’s killings demonstrates the cynicism of corporate media’s humanitarian rhetoric whenever a state in America’s crosshairs is accused of serious crimes. Such preening is not merely hypocritical. It has nothing to do with protecting any population, and everything to do with how the US ruling class generates consent for its blood-drenched empire.
FEATURED IMAGE: Amnesty International’s depiction (4/3/25) of Syrians protesting sectarian killings (photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP).
On Sunday morning at dawn, Palestinians from southern Gaza headed to the aid distribution point in Rafah run by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), the U.S. contractor tasked with delivering aid to Palestinians instead of the UN. Once thousands of aid-seekers arrived at the al-Alam area of Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, the Israeli army opened fire on the crowds, according to eyewitnesses who…
I’ll be interviewing Will this Tuesday, for my radio show, Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge, and it will air in July.
Here’s a blub — a promotional positive statement about the book:
“We are in a fight for our lives against a rising authoritarian tide, and this clear-eyed, compelling, clarion call of a book has a message everyone needs to hear. We will not save ourselves if we do not also fight for the lives of others–including non-human animals. No one is better positioned than Will Potter to connect the dots between fascism and factory farming, and he does so with energy, conviction, and incredible insight.”
— Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
I’m digging the book he sent me. Stay TUNED.
Yes indeed, things have gotten really really worse, and the book thus far is about ag-gag, the history of those laws, and we go back farther than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, way back to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Even farther back to Matthew in that book about bearing witness, or Islam and the concept of being a martyr, witness, whistleblower.
Oh, I recall this bullshit interview/debate on Democracy Now with Will Potter and the schill goofy woman working for the lobby, man, and the manufactured balance, the false balance, the broken equivalency.
My most recent radio interview about to hit the airways June 18, KYAQ.org, but DV and Paulokirk readers get the preview here: The right to community. And that is what the politicians and their thug dictators, the corporations, the polluters and the destroyers, want DESTROYED forever. The-Right-to/for/because of Community
So, moving on before I get back to reading Will’s new book, the infamy of AmeriKKKa and the world, as we slaughter not just the billions of birds and bovine and swine, but our fellow human beings.
Amer had a name. He had a smile. He was loved. He was real. And now, he is gone. We owe him more than silence. We owe Gaza’s starving children more than silence.
*****
I talk about this EVERYDAY — how do we go on without YELLING at the top of our lungs everywhere all the goddamn time?
What glorious days I wake up to!
What mirth and joy the mornings conjure.
After starting my day with coffee and Wagyu steak,
I tap-dance to work and present my deck.
All fun and games with the friends at work,
As we discuss last night’s game we streamed.
“Oh, how he shot — and the one he missed —
They should build him a statue in the city’s midst.”
At noon, I got the letter with the bonus check —
My hard work is really stacking the deck!
That called for a celebration, so we went
To this exquisite bar a colleague had picked.
We did good business this year, my boss said,
As our machines were deployed across the East and the West.
We’re ramping up production — the demand is high.
I already smell the next check — oh, how I fly!
We wrapped up another busy day at work,
As we built more machines to send across the pond.
On the way home, I called my spouse,
And we went to her favourite: Roundhouse.
As we got home, on the TV they showed
One of our products being dropped by the shore.
Our President announced, “No holds will be barred,
In support of our friends who always want more.”
Smacking my lips, I looked up the scrip,
Giddy as a kid, I slept like a pig.
More work tomorrow, as we must ship more
Of our fearsome products to our friends by the shore.
Oh, what great progress! We have come so far.
With my MIT degree, I have become a star.
My machines hum low as they cross the sea,
Carving silence where children used to be.
*****
More of the monsters, the criminals, the continuing criminal enterprises of finance and predatory and disaster and penury and polluting capitalism:
JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon calls on US to stockpile bullets, rare earth instead of bitcoin!
Crime boss in a 5,000 dollar suit:
“We should be stockpiling bullets,” he continued.
“Like, you know, the military guys tell you that, you know, if there’s a war in the South China Sea, we have missiles for seven days. Okay, come on. I mean, we can’t say that with a straight face and think that’s okay. So we know what to do. We just got to now go about doing it. Get the people together, roll up our sleeves, you know, have the debates.”
And so the clown show is so on track to take the USA down the path of intellectual-spiritual-agency starvation. No one in the NBC piece is railing against the military and the fool Trump, no-sir-ee.
Army says Trump’s military parade could cause $16 million in damage to Washington streets
The repair costs are part of the estimated $45 million price tag for the upcoming parade.
Bone spurs Trump, man, what a complete Chief Fraud.
“We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it,” Trump added.
The parade will be part of a massive celebration in downtown Washington that includes a number of events, historical displays and a demonstration by the Army’s famous parachute team, the Golden Knights.
The parade itself will include about 130 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 tanks, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 28 Stryker armored fighting vehicles and a number of vehicles towing artillery launchers. More than 50 helicopters will also participate in an “extensive flyover” in the nation’s capital.
The event will also bring more than 9,000 soldiers from around the country to Washington, about 7,000 of whom will march in the parade itself. The event will also include at least eight Army bands, and some troops will ride on the nearly three dozen horses and two mules expected to march as part of a historical section of the parade.
[Photo: Poison Ivy League school Harvard!]
And you thought colleges were places of sanity and caring? Forget about it.
As colleges halt affinity graduations, students of color plan their own cultural celebrations. Affinity graduations recognize the range “of challenges and obstacles” that students from minority backgrounds face as they work toward their degrees, said one professor.
Death spiral in almost 100 percent of American life:
The Harvard joins many other institutions across the country that have canceled affinity graduations after the federal cracked down on funding for colleges. Notre Dame canceled its Lavender Graduation for 50 LGBTQ students, with members of the university’s Alumni Rainbow Community and the Notre Dame Club of Greater Louisville stepping in to host an independent ceremony this month.
Wichita State University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky also canceled some or all of their affinity ceremonies. The Hispanic Educators Association of Nevada said it canceled its event for Latino students because of a lack of financial support.
This is what education once again means to the perversions called US Secretary of Ed.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her department will give the state ten days to sign an agreement rescinding its Native American mascot ban and apologizing to Native Americans for having discriminated against them and attempted to “erase” their history.
JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York education department, dismissed McMahon’s visit as “political theater” and said the school district was doing a “grave disservice” to its students by refusing to consult with local tribes about their concerns.
“These representatives will tell them, as they have told us, that certain Native American names and images perpetuate negative stereotypes and are demonstrably harmful to children,” he said in a statement.
You feeling the dictator’s blues yet? President Trump has long called for escalating the U.S. drug war against Mexican cartels and wants tougher penalties for dealers selling fentanyl and other street drugs in American communities. “I am ready for it, the death penalty, if you deal drugs,” Trump said during a meeting with state governors in February, where he said dealers are too often treated with a “slap on the wrist.”
But despite his tough rhetoric, Trump has sparked controversy by pardoning a growing number of convicted drug dealers, including this week’s move to grant clemency to Larry Hoover, 74, who was serving multiple life sentences in federal prison for crimes linked to his role leading the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples.
“Larry Hoover was the head of perhaps the most pernicious, efficient drug operation in the United States,” Safer said. “They sold over $100 million of drugs a year in the city of Chicago alone. They were responsible for countless murders. They supported their drug territories with ruthless violence.”
*****
A LITTLE pushback?
What? Everything about Trump, man, is the most perverse, weird and dystopian and of course, Snake Oil Salesmanship and Three Card Monty and Chapter 11-13 full bore.
Not digging the Catholic Church, but can you imagine making rabbis tell the truth, the Fortune 300 or 5,000 go before a board of truth and reconciliation? Imagine if the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Maiming Polluting Poisoning Starving Occupied Palestine had to disclose that client-extortionist privilege? Patient-Doctor confidentiality? Doesn’t exist, and DOGE is coming after the food stampers and the disability pittance recipients while the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires get to keep their dirty felonious secrets, well, secrets.
The sickness throughout the land, as Flag Day and Rapist in CHief’s B-Day and the Military Uniformed Mercenary Hired Guns Army have their anniversary, and we continue writing at Dissident Voice and elsewhere the crimes, man, the inhumanity, the absolute Orwellian and Phillip K. Dick nature of this dystopia.
*****
Some of us are tired of surviving
For many in Gaza, death isn’t always the worst outcome.
What kind of world forces people to beg for death to feel peace?
I’ve survived so many times now I’ve lost count. I was pulled from the rubble with my son after our home was flattened, walked for hours carrying a bag of bread and the bones of what once was a life, fled neighborhoods, towns, and streets we once called home, only to find no home waiting on the other side, and every time I survived, something else died. Sometimes, it was a friend. Sometimes a cousin and sometimes a colleague. Some other times it was the sound of my son’s laughter and my own belief that living means something.
Survival is not a blessing.
I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain. People wake up every day in a different place than where they were yesterday and find it more crowded and more tired and more broken. Stepping over children sleeping on cardboard under trees is now a normal thing, and the days are all the same. So are the struggles of hunger and water and the bitter metallic taste. The same questions about where we should go next, what we will eat today, and who else we’ve lost.
A reporter captured the moment at midnight, as the sky lit up like day from illumination flares.
The caption reads: “We are dying. The Israeli bombing is relentless. Women and children are the victims. No safe places left. No food, no water. Famine is spreading rapidly.”
I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.”
She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.
Another man in Deir Al Balah was standing in the middle of a bombed street and sweeping glass and dirt into a pile. He’d lost two of his daughters, and when I asked him why he didn’t leave earlier, he said, “I didn’t want to spend the last moments of my life running.”
It’s neither courage nor resistance, only exhaustion, the kind that comes with an understanding that in Gaza there is no such thing as a safe place. We just run until our legs and souls give out. And even if we make it out alive, we still carry the weight of every person who didn’t.
In one video, a child sits on top of the rubble sobbing. His father is still trapped beneath the debris.]
People always say survival is the goal and we’re lucky to have made it. But there’s no such thing as luck about people dissolving slowly and dying in slow motion.
During my months reporting from there, I saw children who don’t speak anymore. I once saw a boy in Jabalia who used to love cartoons but now just sits and stares at the wall. When I tried to ask for his name, he covered his ears. His mother said he hasn’t spoken since the missile hit their home and took his sister.
When someone cries out of an injury, we know they’re still holding on. But when they just stare at the ceiling as they bleed, we know they’ve already left, even if their body hasn’t.
There is nothing noble about this kind of survival. There is no aftercare or healing.
A young Palestinian student, Shayma, describes what it’s like to be forcibly displaced amid the devastation and having nowhere to go. The camera pans across the flattened neighborhood where she is sheltering. aljazeeraenglish
We don’t want to die. But when some of us fantasize about death, it’s because we’re full of everything that hurts. Our moms whisper that they envy those who died peacefully and quickly. I myself used to shower in cold water at night just to feel something cold. My neighbor lost her baby to dehydration around the time my son and I were diagnosed with malnutrition in March 2024. She still carries his blanket in her bag.
And here my friends tell me to stay strong and safe. But I don’t want strength anymore. I don’t want to be the one who survived everything. I don’t want my son to grow up believing that pain is something you get used to or that losing everything and still breathing means you’re lucky.
We all have our tricks for trying to suffer a little less. Some stop talking about the people they lost because even saying a name is unbearable. Some lie to themselves and pretend their loved ones are still displaced just somewhere they can’t reach. Some stop eating because food feels like a betrayal when the person you used to share it with is gone.
I once believed that writing would help me make sense of it and that putting these stories down would somehow soften them. But even that doesn’t work anymore. I can’t keep writing about mass graves and call it documenting and narrating pain while still living inside it.
There is nothing poetic about this grief. It is ugly and it is heavy and it is repetitive. Sometimes I walk for hours just not to think and keep my body moving while my mind shuts down, or just to delay the next memory from arriving.
I still wake up sometimes believing we’re back home and feel like I’ll hear my mother’s voice and make coffee in our old kitchen.
The truth is, survival, when it’s endless and hollow and filled with nothing but hunger and mourning and fear… it begins to feel like a punishment.
We are alive in ways no one in this world would envy.
So when the people in Gaza no longer pray for safety, it’s because we’ve seen too much and lost too many.
The UK government should impose sanctions on key figures in the Egyptian government in response to its refusal to release the British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, Labour’s most prominent human rights lawyer has proposed.
Writing in the Guardian, Helena Kennedy called for the UK to take the case to the international court of justice, as France has recently done in the case of a national held by Iran.
Laila Soueif is one of the most determined people I know, and for that reason, she is in grave danger. The grandmother, 69, is lying in a hospital bed in central London, perilously close to death after 245 days on hunger strike. She could still survive, but it will depend on the UK government taking strong action.
Soueif stopped eating to try to save her son, the imprisoned British-Egyptian national Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and winner of the 2024 English PEN writer of courage award. He has spent more than a decade in an Egyptian jail cell because of his writings on democracy. Soueif wants more than anything else to reunite him with his own son, 13, who lives in Brighton and has barely been able to spend time with his father.
Helena Kennedy KC is a Labour peer and was chair of the Power inquiry into the reform of democracy
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An escalation in fighting between Indonesian security forces and Papuan pro-independence fighters in West Papua has seriously threatened the security of the largely indigenous population, says Human Rights Watch in a new report.
The human rights watchdog warned that all parties to the conflict are obligated to abide by international humanitarian law, also called the laws of war.
The security forces’ military operations in the densely forested Central Highlands areas are accused of killing and wounding dozens of civilians with drone strikes and the indiscriminate use of explosive munitions, and displaced thousands of indigenous Papuans, said the report.
The National Liberation Army of West Papua, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement, has claimed responsibility in the killing of 17 alleged miners between April 6 and April 9.
“The Indonesian military has a long history of abuses in West Papua that poses a particular risk to the Indigenous communities,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
“Concerned governments need to press the Prabowo [Subianto] administration and Papuan separatist armed groups to abide by the laws of war.”
Operation Habema
The Indonesian military escalated its ongoing operations, called Operation Habema, in West Papua’s six provinces, especially in the Central Highlands, where Papuan militant groups have been active for more than four decades.
On May 14, the military said that it had killed 18 resistance fighters in Intan Jaya regency, and that it had recovered weapons including rifles, bows and arrows, communications equipment, and Morning Star flags — the symbol of Papuan resistance.
Further military operations have allegedly resulted in burning down villages and attacks on churches. Papuan activists and pastors told Human Rights Watch that government forces treated all Papuan forest dwellers who owned and routinely used bows and arrows for hunting as “combatants”.
Information about abuses has been difficult to corroborate because the hostilities are occurring in remote areas in Intan Jaya, Yahukimo, Nduga, and Pegunungan Bintang regencies.
Pastors, church workers, and local journalists interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that Indonesian forces had been using drones and helicopter gunships to drop bombs.
“Civilians from the Korowai tribe community, known for their tall treehouse dwellings, have been harmed in these attacks, and have desperately fled the fighting,” said the Human Rights Watch report.
“Displaced villagers, mostly from Intan Jaya, have sought shelter and refuge in churches in Sugapa, the capital of the regency.”
Resistance allegations
The armed resistance group has made allegations, which Human Rights Watch could not corroborate, that the Indonesian military attacks harmed civilians.
It reported that a mortar or rocket attack outside a church in Ilaga, Puncak regency, hit two young men on May 6, killing one of them, Deris Kogoya, an 18-year-old student.
The group said that the Indonesian military attack on May 14, in which the military claimed all 18 people killed were pro-independence combatants, mostly killed civilians.
Ronald Rischardt Tapilatu, pastor of the Evangelical Christian Church of the Land of Papua, said that at least 3 civilians were among the 18 bodies. Human Rights Watch has a list of the 18 killed, which includes 1 known child.
The daughter of Hetina Mirip said her mother was found dead on May 17 near her house in Sugapa, while Indonesian soldiers surrounded their village. She wrote that the soldiers tried to cremate and bury her mother’s body.
One evident impact of the renewed fighting is that thousands of indigenous Papuans have been forced to flee their ancestral lands.
Seven villages attacked
The Vanuatu-based United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) reported that the military had attacked seven villages in Ilaga with drones and airstrikes, forcing many women and children to flee their homes. Media reports said that it was in Gome, Puncak regency.
International humanitarian law obligates all warring parties to distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Civilians may never be the target of attack.
Warring parties are required to take all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians and civilian objects, such as homes, shops, and schools. Attacks may target only combatants and military objectives.
Attacks that target civilians or fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or that would cause disproportionate harm to the civilian population compared to the anticipated military gain, are prohibited.
Parties must treat everyone in their custody humanely, not take hostages, and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.
The Free Papua Movement has long sought self-determination and independence in West Papua, on the grounds that the Indonesian government-controlled “Act of Free Choice” in 1969 was illegitimate and did not involve indigenous Papuans.
It advocates holding a new, fair, and transparent referendum, and backs armed resistance.
Vast conflict area
Human Rights Watch reports that the conflict areas, including Intan Jaya, are on the northern side of Mt Grasberg, spanning a vast area from Sugapa to Oksibil in the Pegunungan Bintang regency, approximately 425 km long.
Sugapa is also known as the site of Wabu Block, which holds approximately 2.3 million kilos of gold, making it one of Indonesia’s five largest known gold reserves.
Wabu Block is currently under the licensing process of the Indonesian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.
“Papuans have endured decades of systemic racism, heightening concerns of further atrocities,” HRW’s Asia director Ganguly said.
“Both the Indonesian military and Papuan armed groups need to comply with international standards that protect civilians.”
Above photo: The Attorney General’s Office of El Salvador posted an image of Ruth Eleonora López to its X page. Attorney General of El Salvador. Although the primary victims of El Salvador’s neo-fascist prison system are the Salvadorans themselves. Hundreds of migrants have been illegally deported by the US to these infamous prisons, currently there […]
Using flawed studies and scientific journal publications, abortion opponents are building a body of research meant to question the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone, a key target for the movement. The effort comes as federal officials have expressed a willingness to revisit the drug’s approval — and potentially impose new restrictions on a medication used in the vast majority of…
On the morning of May 6, I walked the dust-choked path to al-Sham Café — a café only in name. It’s just a sagging tent like the one I sleep in. Something no one would ever choose, unless life gave them no choice. The air still stank of fear. Ash floated in the breeze, and the sky hung low, gray and heavy with the ghosts of uncertainty. Then I heard it: “Abood.” Abood. Only my loved ones…
Since the onset of its genocide, Israel has persistently pushed a narrative that the famine devastating Gaza is not of its own making, but the result of “Hamas looting aid”.
This claim, repeated across mainstream media and parroted by officials, has been used to deflect responsibility for what many human rights experts have called a deliberate starvation campaign.
But that narrative has now been discredited by Israel’s internal reporting. Last week, the Israeli military admitted internally that out of 110 looting incidents they documented, none were carried out by Hamas.
Instead, the looting was done by “armed gangs, organised clans” and, to a lesser extent, starved civilians.
Those very gangs and clans are backed by Israel; they enjoy full Israeli army protection and operate in areas Israel deems “extermination zones”, where any Palestinian trying to enter would be killed or kidnapped on the spot.
The gangs had vanished during the two-month ceasefire but conveniently re-emerged as soon as Israel was pressured into allowing a limited trickle of aid to enter. The timing is no coincidence; Israeli policy has deliberately weaponised anarchy to preserve the conditions for starvation.
This pushed even the UAE to strongly condemn Israel after the army forced an Emirati aid convoy to drive through a “red zone” where Israel-backed gangs looted 23 out of 24 trucks.
So why does Israel continue to cling to a demonstrably false narrative while openly engineering a looting crisis through its proxies? Because the myth of “Hamas looting” serves a critical strategic purpose: to whitewash and legitimise a new plan that institutionalises starvation for blackmail, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and mass internment through a shell Israeli organisation.
This is coupled with another alarming tactic of recruiting warlords, drug dealers, and criminals to create a puppet “anti-terror” force.
Israel’s looting myth The “looting” talking point is devoid of any logic, as Hamas would be able to do very little with thousands of tons of looted aid.
Israel and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee both claim Hamas uses the looted aid to buy new weaponry. But where would they buy such weapons from when Gaza is fully sealed off by Israel, and Rafah — the city of smuggling tunnels — is under full Israeli control?
Israel claims Hamas sells looted aid on the black market. But, again, what would they do with the money? Virtually nothing is allowed into Gaza except a trickle of food.
Israel also claims Hamas uses looted aid to recruit new militants, but Hamas doesn’t operate this way. The group depends on utmost secrecy and discipline in its operations.
Each new member passes through a long process of vetting, training, and tests to minimise the risk of infiltration. It would compromise Hamas to recruit people openly, whose only attachment to the group is bread rather than ideological commitment.
Perhaps most damning is that Israel has never captured a single instance of Hamas looting aid, despite subjecting Gaza to the most meticulous surveillance on earth. Israeli predator drones cover every inch of the enclave every minute of the day, yet there is nothing to show for Israel’s claims.
Hamas is also aware that hijacking and looting aid trucks could lead to Israel bombing the vehicles and diverting them from their predetermined route.
The Israeli army has done this on countless occasions when it fired at or bombed humanitarian convoys under the pretext that Hamas policemen came near the trucks. Ironically, those law enforcement officials were actually trying to prevent looting when they were targeted.
Israel’s allies reject the narrative Israel’s strongest supporters have refuted the “Hamas looting” claim. President Joe Biden’s humanitarian envoy, David Satterfield, admitted in February of last year that “no Israeli official has . . . come to the administration with specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance delivered by the UN”.
Satterfield reiterated last Tuesday that Israel has never privately alleged or offered evidence of Hamas stealing aid from the UN and INGO channels. Israel’s ambassador to the EU, Haim Regev, said in mid-October 2023 that “there’s no evidence EU aid went to Hamas”.
Cindy McCain, World Food Programme’s chief and widow of one of the most pro-Israeli GOP senators, forcefully rejected Israel’s narrative on Sunday, saying that looting “doesn’t have anything to do with Hamas . . . it has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death”.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported last week that “Israel has never presented evidence publicly or privately to humanitarian organisations or Western government officials to back up claims that Hamas had systematically stolen aid brought into Gaza”.
An internal memo jointly drafted by UN agencies and 20 INGOs in April, and viewed by The New Arab, stated that “there is no evidence of large-scale aid diversion”.
Gangs and scarcity are responsible for looting While Israel failed to show any evidence of Hamas stealing aid, the only documented organised systematic looting happening in Gaza right now is by Israeli-backed criminal gangs who enjoy full protection from the Israeli army, according to the Washington Post, Financial Times, Ha’aretz, and the UN.
A UN memo said these gangs established a “military complex” in the heart of Rafah after Israel fully depopulated the city. Humanitarian officials say the looting often happens right in front of Israeli troops and tanks, less than 100m away, who take no action until the local police arrive, with Israeli troops then opening fire at them.
Israel not only provides protection and backing to these criminal gangs but has created the perfect conditions for looting to thrive through scarcity and a collapsing state of law and order.
Currently, a single bag of wheat flour sells for about 1,500 NIS ($425), which makes it profitable for gangs to loot and sell on the market. These astronomical prices are driven by scarcity after Israel banned all food from entering Gaza for nearly 80 days, then allowed less than 20 percent of what Gaza needs on a normal day for basic survival after intense international pressure.
During the ceasefire, however, when Israel was allowing 600 trucks to enter per day, prices went back to normal and looting disappeared because it was no longer profitable due to the abundance of food, and because the police were able to resume their work.
Manufactured crisis to advance genocide The engineered looting crisis has long served as a convenient excuse to cover up the deliberate weaponisation of starvation against Gaza’s entire population, allowing Israel to distract from its restrictions on the entry of aid and the spread of famine by saying Hamas is to blame for stealing aid.
But now, this manufactured crisis is serving a second objective: to justify a dystopian ‘aid plan’ Israel is implementing in Gaza that has been condemned and boycotted by every UN agency and humanitarian organisation working in the enclave, as well as donor countries.
A joint UN-INGO memo warned that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would facilitate the use of aid for forcible expulsion, by telling Gazans the only way they can receive food is by moving south to Rafah on Egypt’s border.
GHF, which Israeli opposition leaders said was an Israeli shell funded by Mossad, began its operations last Tuesday after being rocked by two scandals in one day.
GHF’s CEO had resigned on Sunday in protest of the organisation violating the principles of humanitarianism, while the organisation shut down its registered headquarters in Switzerland as soon as Swiss authorities launched an investigation.
Images coming out of the GHF’s militarised aid distribution site were immediately likened to concentration camps, where hundreds of emaciated Gazans were crowded into metal cages like cattle under the boiling sun, surrounded by armed US mercenaries, Israeli troops, and sand dunes.
Alarmingly, people who received aid noted the presence of Arabic speakers in addition to American mercenaries. Last week, the Israel-backed Islamic State-linked gang leader Yasser Abu Shabab emerged in Rafah again after a long disappearance.
Abu Shabab, a drug dealer and wanted criminal previously arrested multiple times by the local police, was the primary suspect in the systematic looting of aid under Israeli protection. This time, however, he emerged in a brand new uniform and military gear and started a Facebook page promoting himself in English and Arabic to mark a new “anti-terror” force operating in Israel-controlled Rafah.
Additional pictures viewed by The New Arab showed multiple armed men dressed in the same uniform as Abu Shabab armed with M-16s standing in front of a humanitarian convoy.
The unravelling of Israel’s “Hamas looting” narrative lays bare a chilling truth: starvation in Gaza is not collateral damage — it is a calculated weapon in a broader campaign of collective punishment and displacement.
By cultivating chaos, empowering criminal gangs, and then manipulating the humanitarian crisis they manufactured, Israel seeks to maintain extreme restrictions on aid, while externalising blame and avoiding accountability.
It is the machinery of genocide disguised in bureaucratic language and carried out under the watchful eyes of the world.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the European Union affairs manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The article was first published by The New Arab. On X at: @muhammadshehad2
Low respect for international law and human rights set worrying precedent, international development minister says
Israel is setting a dangerous precedent for international human rights law violations in Gaza that is making the whole world more dangerous, Norway’s international development minister has warned.
Norway has played a historical role in the region, including by facilitating the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians that led to a celebrated breakthrough deal in 1993. Last year it recognised the Palestinian state, one of a minority of European countries to do so.
What a nasty thing it has turned out to be. It involved subversion – Israel’s desire to ignore international tenets of humanitarian aid in favour of expediency and security – and the naked show of violent desperation. Via the shoddy US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation company, distribution of necessaries in the Gaza Strip through the organisation’s delivery arm, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), has been inadequate and selective.
SRS is a disreputable outfit, one lacking a résumé in humanitarian aid. Its prowess, rather, lies in the realm of military intelligence. A report from Ynet News describes its functions as “operating roadblocks, processing visual data from cameras, drones and satellites and using it to identify Hamas operatives and armed individuals.” In both practice and spirit, this seedy, cynical enterprise violates the four essential principles of humanitarian action: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence.
The four sites of distribution, located in the Tel Sultan area of Rafah and the Netzarim Corridor south of Gaza City, have been picked for reasons of control, surveillance and forced displacement. The official reason is that doing so ensures that no aid ends up in the eager hands of Hamas. “The establishment of the distribution centres,” went the first official comment on the distribution points by the IDF, “took place over the last few months, facilitated by the Israeli political echelon and in coordination with the US government.” Saliently and devastatingly, the system is intended to exclude the role of experienced aid agencies, notably that of the long abominated United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
A vicious example of this new model of aid delivery was given on May 27, with thousands of starving Palestinians descending on a distribution point in Rafah. Herded and harassed, strife duly broke out. The compound was stormed. Those working for GHF retreated after claiming to have distributed 8,000 food boxes.
Israeli troops duly opened fire. According to the enclave’s Government Media Office, the IDF “opened direct fire on hungry Palestinian civilians who had gathered to receive aid”, leaving 10 dead and 62 wounded. Locations for distribution were subsequently “transformed into death traps under the occupation’s gunfire”. While there is some dispute about the figures, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that staff at its Red Cross Field Hospital did receive “a mass casualty influx of 48 patients, including women and children. All were suffering from gunshot wounds.”
This bloody lapse was dismissed by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a minor blemish – there had been a “loss of control momentarily” at the distribution point. An IDF official, however, preferred to see the overall operation as a success. In keeping with standard practice, the IDF had initially denied ever firing at the desperate throng, merely letting off warning shots outside the compound.
In remarks to reporters at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo, the head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, expressed alarm at “the shocking images of hungry people pushing against fences, desperate for food. It was chaotic, undignified and unsafe.” Crucially, this was “a waste of resources and a distraction from atrocities”. The whole affair was particularly galling given the pre-existing networks of humanitarian aid that UNRWA has mastered over the years. The agency, at one point, had as many as 400 distribution centres in Gaza. But Israel has made the removal and elimination of the agency’s influence a vital part of its policy, one that ties in with the agenda of crushing aspirations for Palestinian statehood.
Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, was also in no mood to accept Israel’s novel slant on providing aid. “We continue to witness a brutal humanitarian camouflage, where the red lines have led to massive atrocities.” This was part of “a deliberate strategy – aimed at masking atrocities, displacing the displaced, bombing the bombarded, burning Palestinians alive and maiming survivors.” The “language of aid” had been used to “divert international attention from legal accountability, in Israel’s attempt to dismantle the very principles upon which humanitarian law was built.”
The latest turn of events also prompted the rapporteur to reiterate her view that nothing short of a full arms embargo and the suspension of all trade with Israel would do. “The time for sanctions is now, as Israeli politicians continue to call for the extermination of babies while over 80 percent of the Israeli society, according to Israeli media, ask for the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza.”
The disgraceful deployment of select humanitarian services by GHF has already seen its head resign. In a statement, the now former executive director, Jake Wood, claimed that the Foundation had failed to adhere “to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.” Middle management wonks at the GHF, despite being disappointed at the resignation, expressed readiness with the boisterous assertion that “Our trucks are loaded and ready to go”. The body planned “to scale rapidly to serve the full population in the weeks ahead.” Much more humanitarian camouflage is in the offing.
Examples from six countries include segregated housing for Roma and holding centres for asylum seekers
Hundreds of millions in European Union funds have been used in projects that violate the rights of marginalised communities, a report alleges, citing initiatives such as segregated housing for Roma, residential institutions for children with disabilities and holding centres for asylum seekers.
The report, based on information compiled by eight NGOs from across Europe, looks at 63 projects in six countries. Together these projects are believed to have received more than €1bn in funding from the European Union, laying bare a seemingly “low understanding” of fundamental rights across the bloc, according to one of the authors of the EU-funded report.
On 29 May the Committee to Protect Journalists and fourteen other organisations have urged Pakistan to immediately halt deportation of Afghan journalists and other vulnerable Afghan migrants. The fifteen advocacy groups expressed deep concern over Pakistan’s ongoing deportation plan, first announced on 3 October 2023, which targets undocumented Afghan nationals. The joint statement highlights the heightened risks faced by Afghan journalists, writers, artists, human rights defenders, and others who fled Taliban persecution and are now at risk of being forcibly returned.
Among the signatories are prominent international organisations such as PEN Germany, CPJ, Unlimited Free Press, Front Line Defenders, International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), Nai – Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The organisations also called on the international community to provide safe resettlement opportunities for these individuals, recognising the dangers they face if returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Pakistan’s deportation policy has faced sharp criticism from local and international bodies, including the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). These entities have urged Pakistan to uphold its international obligations and provide protection to those fleeing conflict and persecution.
Despite repeated calls for restraint, the Pakistani government has accelerated forced returns in recent months. In April alone, more than 300,000 Afghans were deported, drawing further condemnation from human rights organisations.
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On 28 May Amnesty International along with four other human rights organizations wrote to the Pakistani prime minister, calling for an end to the “harassment and arbitrary detention” of Baloch human rights defenders (HRDs) exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, particularly in Balochistan province.
The letter comes in the wake of Dr. Mahrang Baloch, one of the leading campaigners for the Baloch minority and the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), and a number of other activists, being arrested in March on charges of terrorism, sedition and murder. ..
The five organizations — Amnesty International, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), Front Line Defenders, International Federation for Human Rights, World Organization Against Torture — appeal to Pakistan’s Prime Minister to release Baloch human rights defenders and end the crackdown on dissent in line with Pakistan’s international human rights obligations;
A dozen UN experts called on Pakistan in March to immediately release Baloch rights defenders, including Dr. Baloch, and to end the repression of their peaceful protests. UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders Mary Lawlor said she was “disturbed by reports of further mistreatment in prison.”
Balochistan is the site of a long-running separatist movement, with insurgent groups accusing the state of unfairly exploiting Balochistan’s rich gas and mineral resources. The federal and provincial governments deny this, saying they are spending billions of rupees on the uplift of the province’s people.
UN Photo/Evan Schneider President Nelson Mandela addresses the 49th session of the General Assembly October 1994.
An Indigenous social worker from Canada and a social entrepreneur from Kenya are the laureates of the 2025 Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Prize, the United Nations announced on28 May 2025.
Secretary-General António Guterres will present the award to Brenda Reynolds and Kennedy Odede on 18 July, Nelson Mandela International Day. “This year’s Mandela prize winners embody the spirit of unity and possibility – reminding us how we all have the power to shape stronger communities and a better world,” said Mr. Guterres.
A Status Treaty member of the Fishing Lake Saulteaux First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, Brenda Reynolds has spent decades advancing Indigenous rights, mental health, and trauma-informed care. In 1988, she supported 17 teenage girls in the first residential school sexual abuse case in Saskatchewan. Later, she became a special adviser to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), helping shape survivor support and trauma responses. She is most recognised for her key role in Canada’s court-ordered Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and her subsequent development of the Indian Residential School Resolution Health Support Program—a national initiative offering culturally grounded mental health care for survivors and families. In 2023, she was invited by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union to share her expertise on trauma and cultural genocide.
Kennedy Odede
Living in Kenya’s Kibera Slum for 23 years, Kennedy Odede went from living on the street at 10 years old to global recognition when he was named one of TIME magazine’s 2024 100 Most Influential People. His journey began with a small act: saving his meagre factory earnings to buy a soccer ball and bring his community together. That spark grew into Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), a grassroots movement he now leads as CEO. SHOFCO operates in 68 locations across Kenya, empowering local groups and delivering vital services to over 2.4 million people every year. Mr. Odede is also a New York Times bestselling co-author and holds roles with USAID, the World Economic Forum, the Obama Foundation, and the Clinton Global Initiative.
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Also interesting to note that according to the Sahara Press Service of29 May 2025 an unexpected and high-profile controversy led to the elimination of Moroccan nominee Amina Bouayach President of CNDH from the shortlist. Bouayach’s candidacy sparked a wave of international protest, with letters, petitions, and statements of condemnation sent to the selection committee from both Sahrawi organizations and Moroccan human rights defenders, who denounced the nomination as a betrayal of Mandela’s legacy.
The opposition was led by victims of human rights abuses—Sahrawis, Rifians, journalists, and former political prisoners—who expressed deep outrage that a figure associated with the whitewashing of Morocco’s ongoing violations could be considered for a prestigious prize meant to honor defenders of dignity and freedom.
In a series of forceful statements, the Sahrawi National Council and the Sahrawi Human Rights Commission described Bouayach’s nomination as “an insult” to Mandela and accused her of legitimizing repression in Western Sahara and within Morocco. Notably, Moroccan activists also voiced rare public criticism, calling the nomination a distortion of both the United Nations’ credibility and Mandela’s ideals…
Her leadership at the Moroccan National Human Rights Council has been, and still is marked not by independent advocacy, but by efforts to legitimize state atrocities even as reports of abuses against Sahrawis, Rifians, journalists, and peaceful dissidents have continued to mount. ..
According to sources close to the selection process, the committee was “taken aback” by the level and breadth of resistance, especially the coordinated objections from across the political and geographic spectrum. This pressure ultimately led to Bouayach’s exclusion from consideration.
Badenoch and Farage seize on Richard Hermer’s ‘clumsy’ remark in speech made in defence of international law
The attorney general has apologised for a “clumsy” remark that compared Conservative and Reform calls to disregard international treaties and quit the European convention of human rights (ECHR) with the early days of Nazi Germany.
Laila Soueif continues protest against detention of Alaa Abd el-Fattah in Cairo
The mother of the imprisoned British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been admitted to hospital after spending more than 240 days on hunger strike.
Laila Soueif’s family said she had been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in London on Thursday night with dangerously low blood sugar levels, but continues to refuse medical intervention that would provide her with calories.
