The local West Papua action group in Dunedin has met Taieri MP Ingrid Leary and raised human rights and militarisation issues that members believe the New Zealand government should be pursuing with Indonesia.
Leary has a strong track record on Pacific human rights issues having worked in Fiji as a television journalist and educator and as a NZ regional director of the British Council with a mandate for Pacific cultural projects.
She is also sits on the parliamentary select committees for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, and Finance and Expenditure.
She also met Dr David Robie, publisher and editor of Asia Pacific Report that covers West Papuan issues, and Del Abcede of the Auckland-based Asia-Pacific Human Rights Coalition (APHRC).
New Zealand’s defence relationship with Indonesia was critiqued in an article for RNZ National at the weekend by Maire Leadbeater, author of See No Evil: New Zealand’s Betrayal of the People of West Papua.
‘Human rights illusion’ “The recent exposure of New Zealand’s military exports to Saudi Arabia and other countries with terrible human rights records is very important,” Leadbeater wrote.
“The illusion of New Zealand as a human rights upholder has been shattered, and we have work ahead to ensure that we can restore not only our reputation but the reality on which it is based.”
The West Papua action group with Taieri MP Ingrid Leary in Dunedin … retired Methodist pastor Ken Russell (from left), Otago University doctoral candidate Jeremy Simons, group coordinator Barbara Frame, MP Ingrid Leary, Ashley McMillan (Otago PhD candidate), Dr David Robie (APR) and Del Abcede (APHRC).
She cited Official Information Act documentation which demonstrated that since 2008 New Zealand had exported military aircraft parts to the Indonesian Air Force.
“In most years, including 2020, these parts are listed as ‘P3 Orion, C130 Hercules & CASA Military Aircraft:Engines, Propellers & Components including Casa Hubs and Actuators’, she wrote.
The documentation also showed that New Zealand exported other ‘strategic goods’ to Indonesia, including so-called small arms including rifles and pistols.
“New Zealand’s human rights advocacy for West Papua is decidedly low-key, despite claims by some academics that Indonesia is responsible for the alleged crime of genocide against the indigenous people,” Leadbeater wrote.
“Pursuing lucrative arms exports, and training of human rights violators, undermines any message our government sends. As more is known about this complicity the challenge to the government’s Indonesia-first setting must grow.”
Massive militarisation Asia Pacific Report last month published an article by Suara Papua’s Arnold Belau which revealed that the Indonesian state had sent 21,369 troops to the “land of Papua” in the past three years.
This figure demonstrating massive militarisation of Papua did not include Kopassus (special forces), reinforcements and a number of other regional units or the Polri (Indonesian police).
Victor Yeimo, international spokesperson for the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), was cited as saying that Papua was now a “military operation zone”.
“This meant [that] Papua had truly become a protectorate where life and death was controlled by military force,” Belau wrote.
The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.
Origins of War
Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.
From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.
The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.
Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.
American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.
The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.
It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.
The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.
Genocide
Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.
The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.
Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are neverallowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.
Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.
In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.
Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.
The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.
Origins of War
Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.
From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.
The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.
Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.
American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.
The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.
It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.
The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.
Genocide
Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.
The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.
Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are neverallowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.
Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.
In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.
Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.
Every so often, we get a glimpse at who is actually running this joint.
People like President Biden, former President Trump, Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker Pelosi give every appearance of being in charge of their respective spheres, and make no mistake, the power they wield is enormous. Consider those four: Pelosi could halt all legislation, McConnell can come close to doing the same, Trump is running the Republican Party, and Biden can peel the mantle off the Earth with an order to his nuclear command center.
Above and beyond the reach of powerful politicians is the true business of the United States, its most profitable enterprise and its ideologically ingrained mission: war. Practically nothing seems to get in the way of imperialism and war, and specifically the sale of U.S. war weapons abroad. War is not often allowed into the Overton Window of permissible discussion, and when it is, we perceive it through a riot of patriotic noise.
War has the best advertisers the U.S. has to offer; their marketing puts all else to shame. Think about it: A politician proposes a social program designed to help starving children, and the first question, always, is, “How much will it cost?” But when expensive cruise missiles are launched by expensive sailors from an incredibly expensive warship to assassinate a foreign leader or obliterate some buildings, few people ask how much that costs. Hundreds of millions, usually, each time. It takes a fantastic ad campaign to haul down that level of popular buy-in, especially when it cuts deeply against people’s own well-being.
While the actual business of shooting wars is grossly profitable, they tend to draw significant media attention, at least for a while. Wars also historically had a tendency to be short term. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam was the only active war that kept paying out on a daily basis for 20 years. Every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every missile launched, every helicopter shot down, every body bag filled, translates into revenue for someone. For the war profiteers, those three actions made for 60 years of profit combined.
That being said, the long, quiet and reliable money is, and has been for decades, in this nation’s worldwide sale of weapons. Called “Foreign Military Sales” or FMS, it is a business with enormous reach and clout in Washington. At present, the U.S. represents 37 percent of all global arms sales, with half of that going to the Middle East. The U.S. is currently selling weapons to 96 countries around the world, and 169 countries have purchased U.S. weapons since 2001.
“The U.S. sold $175 billion in weapons to foreign partners and allies in fiscal 2020, a 2.8 percent rise from the previous year’s total, according to a Friday announcement from the Defense and State departments,” reportsDefenseNews.
There are a number of laws on the books to try and regulate the practice of FMS. “The 1976 Arms Export Control Act, the 1997 Leahy Law, and the 2008 Foreign Assistance Act all require in various ways that the U.S. government give consideration to risks,” explains the Cato Institute. “Risks,” meaning “how dangerous are the countries we sell the stuff to.” The State Department inspector general also has an alleged say in how this business is run, and who these weapons are sold to. That say has severe limits, however.
In 2020, the Trump administration was bound and determined to sell billions in arms to Saudi Arabia. Inspector General Steve Linick attempted to investigate the sale, based on Saudi Arabia’s documented record of atrocities in the Yemen war. He was fired by the administration for attempting that investigation. In December of 2020, despite enormous pushback from many in Congress, the State Department approved the sale of $290 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. It was finalized an hour before Biden took the oath of office on January 20.
President Biden came into office on a wave of tough talk about Saudi Arabia, specifically regarding their responsibility for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He accused the Saudi hit squad who murdered Khashoggi of acting “on the order of the crown prince” during a Democratic primary debate in November. “They have to be held accountable,” he said. During that same debate, Biden vowed not to sell more weapons to the Saudis if he became president. “We are going to make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are,” he said.
Not only did President Biden fail to punish Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi murder when given a clear opportunity to do so, he is now preparing to break the other promise he made during that debate. Worse, he is doing so by way of an avalanche of weasel words and nodding winks.
“The Biden administration plans to suspend the sale of many offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia approved under the Trump administration,” reportsThe New York Times, “but it will allow the sale of other matériel that can be construed to have a defensive purpose, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The plan, which was briefed to Congress last week, is part of an administration review of billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that the White House announced soon after President Biden’s inauguration.” (Emphasis added.)
The United Arab Emirates also has bloody hands regarding the Yemen conflict. From this deal, the UAE and Saudi Arabia can expect to receive “defensive” weapons like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (if they can keep it in the air) and armed Reaper drones. These items are many things, but to call them “defensive weapons” is an insult to the language, and a further insult to the thousands who have suffered in the Yemen war being waged by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The U.S. sells war globally to the tune of hundreds of billions a year. A portion of those weapons become involved in scenarios that “demand” a U.S. military response. Billions, if not trillions, are spent in those responses (read: wars), with the money going to war-maker corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, and to their pet politicians by way of campaign donations. Some politicians and the people may shout and scream, but as it was said in Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic novel, “The spice must flow.”
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 46th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was held virtually between 22 February and 23 March 2021. Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) welcomed the 46th session as an opportunity to draw attention to the deteriorating human rights condition in Bahrain and the Gulf states, especially amidst the fatal pandemic. During the 46th session, ADHRB submitted four written statements to the Council denouncing humanitarian abuses in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. ADHRB also delivered seven virtual oral interventions condemning the human rights abuses in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and calling on the council to hold their governments accountable for their actions.
Concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen as well as the involvement of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), ADHRB submitted a written statement to the HRC during its 46th session. In the statement, ADHRB expressed its concerns about the “ongoing famine, COVID-19 pandemic, economic crisis, and outbreak of cholera in Yemen”. ADHRB expressed its concern about the violations of international humanitarian law committed by the Saudi-UAE led coalition. ADHRB urged the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to “halt all airstrikes until an international, independent and impartial commission can investigate all the allegations of attacks against civilians” and work to end the conflict through a political settlement. ADHRB also urged the two governments to ensure the provision of clean water, fuel, and other “life-saving imports”. On 16 March, ADHRB delivered a virtual oral intervention under item 4 condemning the Coalition blockade on basic necessities, which caused malnutrition diseases that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Yemen, and calling for a recommendation to the Security Council to transfer these crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court (ICC). On 19 March, ADHRB also delivered another virtual oral intervention under item 9 denouncing the mobility restrictions and discriminatory arbitrary detentions by the coalition.
Additionally, ADHRB submitted a written statement denouncing the ongoing climate violations committed by the government of Bahrain, highlighting their dangerous impact on the local environment and the population. However, despite recognizing the environmental hazards caused by rapid urbanization and climate change, the Bahraini Government continues to persecute environmental human rights defenders. In the statement, ADHRB urged the government of Bahrain to drop all charges against all environmental human rights defenders, and to advance environmental policies like developing an extensive public transportation infrastructure and promoting the use of electric cars to reduce carbon emissions.
Concerned about the condition of political prisoners in Bahrain during the COVID-19 pandemic, ADHRB issued a written statement denouncing the lack of sanitation and medical care, in violation of the Mandela rules (United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners) and international humanitarian law. In the statement, ADHRB provided several recommendations including urging the Government of Bahrain to “drop all charges against human rights defenders” detained for their activism, ensure “the provision of adequate and necessary medical care for all prisoners”, and “end the culture of impunity in Bahrain”. On March 10, ADHRB also delivered a virtual oral intervention under item 3, raising concerns about the repression human rights and civil society activists face in Bahrain under the newly appointed Prime Minister Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa. On 16 March ADHRB delivered two virtual oral interventions at 46th session under item 4, condemning the growing culture of impunity among officials in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and calling on the Council to adapt human rights membership standards to block governments that engage in systematic human rights violations. On 19 March, another virtual oral intervention was delivered by ADHRB under item 8, calling on the Council to hold the government of Bahrain accountable for violating human rights and respect the Bahraini people’s needs to achieve democracy. Accordingly, on 19 March, ADHRB also delivered a virtual oral intervention reiterating the Bahraini people’s right to political self-determination and condemning the dictatorship of Al-Khalifa.
ADHRB also submitted a written statement concerning the detention of Women’s Rights defenders in Saudi Arabia. ADHRB denounced the prison authorities’ failure to provide basic medical care to inmates. ADHRB called upon the Government of Saudi Arabia to release and drop all charges against imprisoned Women’s Rights defenders. ADHRB also urged the Government of Saudi Arabia to “abolish the male guardianship system”.
In line with the 46th session’s activities, on 17 March, ADHRB organized a virtual seminar titled “Patterns of Torture in Bahrain: Perpetrators must Face Justice” in collaboration with the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and International Federation for Human Rights, highlighting the joint report they released about the patterns of torture in Bahrain. In the virtual seminar, the speakers reiterated the importance of accountability in ending the culture of impunity in Bahrain, recommended the establishment of a permanent OHCHR country office in Bahrain, and called for the investigation of the crimes documented in the report, and other crimes against humanity perpetrated in the country.
By participating effectively at the UNHCR 46th session, ADHRB managed to address the most severe human rights violations in the Gulf states and call on their governments to uphold the principles of human rights.
Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)
“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.
Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.
Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.
“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”
Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference, recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.
According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.
“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.
Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.
As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.
Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”
The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.
Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.
Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.
Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:
Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years
In response, Coe wrote:
ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.
Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.
While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015, says that this resolution, passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”
Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.
“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”
Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.
Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.
Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)
“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.
Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.
Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.
“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”
Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference, recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.
According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.
“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.
Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.
As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.
Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”
The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.
Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.
Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.
Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:
Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years
In response, Coe wrote:
ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.
Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.
While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015, says that this resolution, passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”
Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.
“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”
Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.
Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.
Covid failings, crackdown on protest, police discrimination and resumed arms trade with Saudi Arabia all listed in annual report
Amnesty International has published a stark rebuke of the UK government’s stance on human rights, saying that it is “speeding towards the cliff edge” in its policies on housing and immigration, and criticising its seeming determination to end the legal right for the public to challenge government decisions in court.
In its annual report on human rights around the world, Amnesty International says the UK’s increasingly hostile attitude towards upholding and preserving human rights legislation raises “serious concerns”.
Six years ago, on March 26, 2015, the US green-lighted and provided logistical support for the Saudi bombing of Yemen that continues on a daily basis. The US/Saudi war, which includes as allies the several members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, is an undeclared war, illegal under international law, and an endless crime against humanity. The US and the Saudis have dropped cluster bombs on Yemen since 2009. Yemen has no air force and no significant air defenses. Two years ago, even the US Congress voted to end US involvement in the war, but President Trump vetoed the resolution.
In 1937 the Nazis, in support of Franco in Spain, bombed the defenseless northern Spanish town of Guernica, massacring hundreds of civilians gathered in the town on market day. Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, a shriek of protest against the slaughter, is one of the world’s best known anti-war works of art. Yemen has had more than 2000 days of Guernicas at the hands of the US and Saudis, but no Picasso.
On February 4, 2021, President Biden got a whole lot of good press when he announced that the US would be “stepping up our diplomacy to end the war in Yemen.” Biden also promised that the US would be “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.” Biden gave no specific details. The six-year bombing continues. The six-year naval blockade of Yemen continues. The humanitarian crisis continues, with the threat of famine looming. In effect, Biden has participated in war crimes since January 20, with no policy in sight to end the killing.
The humanitarian crisis taking place in Yemen is the largest and most urgent in the world. Twenty million people, including millions of children, desperately need help. The United States is committed to doing our part, both to provide aid and to help address the obstacles standing in the way of humanitarian access.
That sounds a whole lot better than it is. Blinken did not acknowledge the US role in the air war on Yemen. Blinken did not acknowledge the US role in the naval blockade preventing food and fuel from reaching those 20 million Yemenis. Those obstacles to humanitarian access remain unchanged. The US has the power to remove either one unilaterally, just as it unilaterally chose to impose them. Blinken called on “all parties” to allow unhindered import and distribution of food and fuel, as if the US played no role in blocking both.
Blinken wasn’t done inventing a reality to fit US policy. He pledged support for “the well-being of the Yemeni people” but singled out the Houthis for pressure, even though the Houthis represent a large proportion of the Yemeni people. He called on the Houthis “to cease their cross-border attacks,” even though those attacks are a response to the US/Saudi undeclared war. And then he offered an analysis that would be hilarious if it weren’t so grotesque:
… the Saudis and the Republic of Yemen Government are committed and eager to find a solution to the conflict. We call on the Houthis to match this commitment. A necessary first step is to stop their offensive against Marib, a city where a million internally displaced people live, and to join the Saudis and the government in Yemen in making constructive moves toward peace.
The Saudis are so eager to find a solution to the conflict that they maintain their air war and naval blockade, effectively waging war by starvation – a crime against humanity. The “Republic of Yemen Government” is a fiction and a joke. Yemeni president Mansour Hadi, who is 75, was vice president of Yemen from 1994 to 2011, under the late authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh. When Arab Spring protests erupted against Saleh, he stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was “elected” president in 2012 with no opposition – a “democratic” result imposed by an international cabal. When you read media referring to his “internationally recognized government,” that’s the fiction they’re hiding. Hadi’s term as president ended in 2014, the international cabal extended it for a year, and that’s pretty much the extent of his legitimacy. That and US/Saudi firepower. By any rational calculation, Hadi is not a legitimate president. He also has no legitimate alternative. No wonder Hadi doesn’t feel safe in Yemen and remains in exile in Riyadh. The population in southern Yemen under the “government’s” control has recently attacked the government palace in Aden in protest against the government’s failure to provide sustenance and stability. A recent bomb attack aimed at a Hadi government minister reflects the reality that southern Yemen has long had a separatist movement quite independent of the Houthis in the north, in effect a second civil war. The most constructive move the Hadi government could make toward peace is to abdicate.
Marib City, the capital of Marib Governorate, is roughly 100 miles northeast of Yemen’s capital in Sanaa. Marib City was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region. Covering 6,720 square miles in central Yemen, the Marib Governorate is somewhat smaller than New Jersey. Marib contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. Before that, Marib was relatively remote from the fighting in Yemen, providing refuge for a million or more Yemenis fleeing the fighting elsewhere. Marib City had a population of about 40,000 when the civil war broke out in 2014. Now the city has an estimated 1.5 million people.
This was CNN’s headline on March 11, for a story reporting with reasonable accuracy on the very real, years-old humanitarian crisis that the US/Saudi war has brought on the region’s poorest country. CNN quotes a “food insecurity” analysis by the world electronics trade association IPC that predicts that more than 16 million Yemenis (of a total population of about 30 million) are “likely to experience high levels of acute food insecurity” in the first half of 2021. “Out of these, an estimated 11 million people will likely be in Crisis, 5 million in Emergency, and the number of those in Catastrophe will likely increase to 47,000.”
Yemen is an atrocity from almost any perspective. Three US presidents – Obama, Trump, and now Biden – have lied about Yemen while taking the US into an endless nexus of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And for what? To support a Yemeni government that is a fraud? To support a Saudi ally that thought it could win a quick, dirty air war at little or no cost? This abomination, pun intended, never should have happened. So why did it? The formulaic answer in much of the media is usually some variation on this propagandistic patter from Reuters:
A Saudi Arabia-led military coalition intervened in Yemen in 2015 after the Iran-allied Houthi group ousted the country’s government from the capital Sanaa.
This essentially false version of reality in Yemen appears in news media across a wide spectrum, from Al Jazeera to ABC News to this version by CNN:
Saudi Arabia has been targeting Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen since 2015, with the support of the US and other Western allies. It had hoped to stem the Houthis’ spread of power and influence in the country by backing the internationally-recognized government under President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.
The core falsehood in most versions is “the Iran-allied” or “Iran-backed” Houthis. The grain of truth in that characterization is far outweighed by the history on the ground. The Houthis live in Yemen. They are the only combatant force that lives in Yemen, other than elements of the Hadi government and assorted insurrectionists. Yemen is in the midst of a civil war that has flared over decades. The war that is destroying Yemen is waged entirely by outside countries, primarily the US and the Saudi coalition.
The Houthis, who are mostly Shia Muslims, have lived in northwest Yemen for generations and centuries. They fought a civil war against President Saleh and lost. They have long been an oppressed minority in Yemen. When the Hadi government perpetuated the oppression of the Houthis, they rebelled once again. This time, challenging an unpopular and divided government, they were more successful. In 2014 they captured Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, and captured Hadi himself. Then they released him and he fled first to Aden, then to Saudi Arabia, where he is a puppet figurehead.
Before it could become clear what kind of governance the Houthis would provide for their part of Yemen, the US and the Saudi coalition attacked the country. Their publicly stated motivation has always included the imaginary threat from Iran. But the Houthis have a long and independent history that does not rely on Iran for its coherence and force. Iranian support for the Houthis in 2014 was never shown to be significant. The US/Saudi war had had the perverse effect of incentivizing Iranian support for the Houthis, but there’s no evidence that support comes anywhere close to the strength of the US and Saudi coalition forces directed at the Houthis. The US and the Saudi coalition are waging an aggressive war against a country that did none of them any harm. Iran is providing support for an ally unjustly under siege.
The war in Yemen has been brutal on all sides, according to reports by more or less neutral observers. But only the US and the Saudi coalition are invaders, only they are committing international war crimes. The Houthis, as well as all the other sides fighting in Yemen, have also committed war crimes, but on a far lesser scale. Yemeni forces are not the ones waging war by starvation and disease.
Ultimately, the Houthis are the home team, along with other Yemeni factions. The Houthis have nowhere else to go. The only military solution to the Houthis is extermination, genocide, the very course the US and Saudis have been on for years, with the winking hypocrisy of most of the world.
In April 2015, with the Saudis’ saturation bombing already in its third week, the United Nations Security Council unanimously (14-0) passed Resolution 2216, which “Demands End to Yemen Violence.” The Resolution begins with an obscene misrepresentation of reality:
Imposing sanctions on individuals it said were undermining the stability of Yemen, the Security Council today demanded that all parties in the embattled country, in particular the Houthis, immediately and unconditionally end violence and refrain from further unilateral actions that threatened the political transition.
That is the official lie that has publicly defined the war on Yemen since 2015. The UN sees no terror bombing by foreign countries. The UN sees no invasion by foreign troops. The UN sees no terrorist groups in a country that has had little stability for decades. The UN cites only the Houthis for their sins, as if it were somehow the Houthis’ fault that, having no air force and no air defenses, they weren’t getting out of the way of the cluster bombs dropped on their weddings and their funerals.
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) submitted a written statement, to the Human Rights Council during its 46th session concerning The Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen and the Involvement of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Continue reading below for the full text of the statement, or click here for PDF
On 16 March, ADHRB has delivered an oral intervention at the United Nation Human Rights Council session 46 during interactive debate under item 4.
Madam President-
We would like to bring to the council’s attention the growing trend of culture of impunity among government officials in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries.
In Saudi Arabia, the gruesome killing of former Saudi official and journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is a vivid example of culture impunity. While for several years the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was blamed and accused for the brutal killing. After the release of the US intelligence report it should be clear and beyond the reasonable doubt that the actual person responsible behind giving the orders of the killing is no one but Mohammad bin Salman. What made the Saudi Crown Prince engages in such crime is the believe that government officials can get away with any crimes of human rights just because they can and because they are above any accountability.
In Bahrain, the picture is not very much different. Where we have the son of the king Nasser bin Hamad Al-Khalifa engaged in consistent human rights violations where he personally tortured opposition figures, human rights defenders, and athletes. Instead of investigating the crimes he committed, the Bahraini king promoted him to a higher post in his government. This is yet another example of how culture of impunity has spread in Bahrain among highest officials in the country.
The only way this issue could be addressed comprehensively is when officials like MBS and Nasser bin Hamad face international consequences whether from this body or the security council or the new passed Magnitski Act.
On 16 March, ADHRB has delivered an oral intervention at the United Nation Human Rights Council session 46 during interactive debate under item 4.
Madam President-
We would like raise the issue of ongoing systematic human rights violations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Particularly the issue of thousands of political prisoners and human rights defenders.
In Bahrain, Mr. Hasan Mushima the leader of the political opposition in Bahrain and his co-leader Mr. Abdulwahab Husain have been sentenced to life imprisonment because they led the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain in February of 2011. Both of them demanded the right of the people of Bahrain to self-determination and called for the end of dictatorship and human rights violations in the country.
Dr. Abduljalil al-Singace, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, and Naji Fatil are well known human rights defenders not only in Bahrain but in the GCC region. These leading human rights defenders have documented scores of human rights violations committed by the Al-khalifa government in Bahrain. In particular, during the pro-democracy movement which led the Bahraini government to arrest them and punish them by long imprisonment sentences.
In Saudi Arabia, the human rights lawyer Waleed Abo-Alkhair has been targeted by the Saudi authorities for his human rights work. He was arrested and tortured and ill-treated during interrogations and then sentenced for years in prison.
It’s concerning to see such treatment to human rights defenders and prisoners of conscious from the government of Bahrain which is currently a member of the Human Rights Council. We call on the Council to adapt some standards of human rights when it comes to membership criteria so governments like Bahrain will not become a member while it engages in systematic human rights violations against its citizens.
On 16 March, ADHRB has delivered an oral intervention at the United Nation Human Rights Council session 46 during interactive debate under item 4.
Mr President,
We direct the Council’s attention to the ongoing war crimes occurring in Yemen as we welcome the Group of Eminent Experts’ third report which found that “Yemen remains a tortured land, with its people ravaged in ways that should shock the conscience of humanity.”
While we agree, the report itself is not free from major shortcomings as it fails to highlight the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by malnutrition related diseases that could have been prevented if it were not for the Coalition blockade on food, medicine and fuel. While the first two reports referred to these crimes in general, the third report relegated these crimes to a footnote that pointed to a UN Development Program report projecting that over 130,000 people would have died as a result of worsening socio-economic, health and humanitarian condition by the end of 2019.
Mr. President,
This worsening situation is due to the Coalition blockade which has resulted in the death of over 300,000 civilians by use of mass starvation as a weapon of war. Neglecting to mention the number of civilian deaths due to the blockade in the first two reports and then relegating this crime to a footnote in the third report is the basis of our continual concern that the crimes affecting the overwhelming majority of the population are not being given the required attention by the Experts.
Accordingly, we call for a recommendation to the Security Council to transfer the case regarding the blockade to the International Criminal Court as these are crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity.
French Deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau (LREM), president of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group again joins forces with Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB), Women’s March Global, International Service for Human Rights, MENA Rights Group, to reiterate the demand for the definitive release of Loujain al-Hathloul and her right to return to France, on the occasion of her second hearing on March 10th 2021.
Saudi women’s rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, had her sentence suspended on February 10th after 1001 days in prison. However, the fight is not yet over. Her sentence was only temporarily suspended. She has been barred from leaving Saudi Arabia for five years, is not allowed to speak publicly about her time in prison and cannot publicly celebrate her release. Loujain Hathloul’s parents have also been barred from leaving the country, despite the fact that they have not been charged with any crimes. She appeared in court on March 2nd for the first time since her release, to appeal the restrictions put on her and her family.
Before her arrest, Loujain was a peaceful advocate for women’s rights and part of a movement that called for an end to the male guardianship system and the right for women to drive. In 2018, she met with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and shared valuable information of her observations on the situation of women’s rights in the country. She was arrested later that same year with a group of women’s rights activists and was convicted of crimes related to terrorism. In jail, she suffered physical and sexual abuse. The CEDAW, along with UN human rights experts have called for her urgent release since the arrest.
In September 2019, Loujain’s sister Lina urged the UN Human Rights Council to hold those who tortured Loujain accountable, including Saud Alqahtani, the former senior advisor to the Royal Court. Loujain herself – backed up with civil society’s intensive advocacy, her family’s support and the international community including the UN Human Rights Council, UN Special Procedures, and the CEDAW Committee – has bravely spoken out about her torture and ill-treatment. She refused to sign a statement drafted by the Saudi authorities in which she would deny all the torture she has endured, in exchange for her release. Loujain also went on hunger strikes to protest the conditions of her detention after being denied regular access to her family. To date, no one has been held accountable for her torture and ill-treatment.
Before her first hearing, Deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau, President of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group and Najwa El Haïté, lawyer and town elect of Evry-Courcouronnes, published a tribune to demand her definitive release and the lift on her travel ban.
During the hearing on March 2nd, the public prosecution appealed to have her suspension cancelled and to increase her sentence. She was asked if she regretted her actions and asked to submit an apology to the judges. Loujain answered that she had not committed any crimes under local or international law and therefore does not have anything to repent for. She was asked about her communication with foreign countries, to which Loujain replied that all her communications with foreign parties were based on the Saudi international laws that the Kingdom has ratified.
The foreign parties that have been labeled in Loujain’s conviction as terrorist entities include the British embassy, the UN, international human rights organizations and journalists.
The call to rescind her suspension is extremely concerning, as it means that Loujain al-Hathlul is at risk of being incarcerated again and that the mistreatment she has suffered could continue and even intensify. To date, no one has been held accountable for her torture. Her second hearing takes place on 10 March.
ADHRB, Women’s March Global, International Service for Human Rights, MENA Rights Group and deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau, president of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group, reiterate the international community’s call for her permanent, safe and unconditional release. We also demand that the people responsible for her torture and ill treatment is held accountable. Finally, we demand that her travel ban be lifted so that she may, if she wishes, return to France.
United Nations – The United Nations has rightly described the deaths and devastation in war-ravaged Yemen as the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster”— caused mostly by widespread air attacks on civilians by a coalition led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
But rarely, if ever, has the world denounced the primary arms merchants, including the US and UK, for the more than 100,000 killings since 2015– despite accusations of “war crimes” by human rights organizations.
The killings are due mostly to air strikes on weddings, funerals, private homes, villages and schools. Additionally, over 130,000 have died resulting largely from war-related shortages of food and medical care.
Saudi Arabia, which had the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest arms importer during 2015–19, increased its imports by 130 percent, compared with the previous five-year period, and accounting for 12 percent of all global arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Rachel Small, Canada organizer for World BEYOND War, says the use by Saudi troops of Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems in London, Ontario has been well-documented in the war in Yemen where a humanitarian crisis is unfolding.
“It’s despicable,” says Small, who notes that the U.S. has signalled it will be freezing arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its involvement in Yemen. Germany and Italy have also halted arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its involvement in a conflict that has its roots in the Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
“It’s long past time for Canada to do the same,” Small says.
CN is one of 28 Canadian companies involved in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and named in an open letter delivered to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday urging an end to Canada’s weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries taking part in the war in Yemen.
In response to the release of the long-awaited declassification of the U.S. national intelligence report regarding the involvement of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (“MBS”) in the murder of U.S. permanent resident and Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, 42 organizations said:
“President Biden should use his power to impose the full range of sanctions available under the Global Magnitsky Act – including asset freezes and visa bans – on MBS as well as any other Saudi national implicated in the murder. Global Magnitsky Act sanctions should also be imposed on the leadership of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, which owns the airline and airplanes used to transport Jamal Khashoggi’s assassins between Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“The U.S. should also reset its entire relationship with this brutal monarchy, starting with a ban on all arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The president should demand that Saudi Arabia lift the travel ban against women’s rights defender Loujain al-Hathloul and release and drop all charges against all detained women’s rights defenders. President Biden should seek the unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience, including Islamic scholar Salman Alodah, aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, human right advocate Waleed Abu al-Khair, and members of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA). Saudi Arabia has demonstrated a repeated pattern of abuse and harm, from the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to war crimes in Yemen to repression of its own citizens that both violate U.S. export controls and create an untenable situation for any continued security assistance. Finally, we urge the President to instruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation to open a criminal investigation into the murder of a U.S. Resident, as they have for other Americans executed abroad.
“The release of the ODNI report is a much-welcomed act of transparency, but it will ring hollow unless accountability follows. There must be equal application of the law to all people, no matter how high the position in government an individual may hold. It is critical for the U.S. government to send a clear message to MBS and all other world leaders: this heinous crime will not be forgotten, and there will be justice.”
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Background: The declassified ODNI report, released last week, reveals for the first time the evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency relied on to conclude that MBS approved Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Last week, the Department of State announced the “Khashoggi Ban,” a new visa restriction policy pursuant to section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Khashoggi Ban allows the State Department to impose visa restrictions on individuals who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, are believed to have been directly engaged in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities.
The Trump administration had refused to make the ODNI report public despite a statute ordering it to do so. Instead, it only released a classified version of the document to Congress on February 20, 2020. In November 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Saud al-Qahtani, his subordinate Maher Mutreb, Saudi Consul General Mohammed Alotaibi, and 14 other Saudis under the Global Magnitsky Act for the murder of Khashoggi. These designations block any of their property within U.S. jurisdiction and ban U.S. persons from transacting with them or their assets. The State Department also issued travel bans against them based on these sanctions, barring them and their immediate families from U.S. soil. There is no reason why MBS should not be subject to the same, having approved the crime for which these individuals were sanctioned.
Last week, the U.S. military bombed a site near al-Hurri, along the Iraqi border inside Syria, where Iranian-backed Iraqi militias were allegedly stationed. Although the U.S. launched its missiles across an international border (and without the approval of Congress), White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki framed the strike as a “defensive” response to a series of rocket attacks that have killed one and wounded several Americans over the past two weeks. The American bombing left “up to a handful dead,” according to one U.S. official who spoke with CNN, and Tehran condemned the assault as “illegal and a violation of Syria’s sovereignty” — a perception gap certain to complicate President Joe Biden’s pronounced plans to reverse Donald Trump’s antagonistic Iran policies and rejoin the nuclear deal.
The campaign will do little to further the United States’ objectives in the Middle East (in as much as they can even be articulated at this point), but it heralds something more dispiriting still…
An international media rights group has filed a complaint with German prosecutors against Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and four other senior officials accusing them of crimes against humanity over allegations they were involved in the killing of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, authorities said.
Reporters Without Borders
The federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe told the Associated Press it received the complaint from Paris-based Reporters Without Borders on 1 March.
The complaint, relying partially on a newly declassified US intelligence report released on 26 February, identifies five primary suspects: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his close adviser Saud Al-Qahtani, and three other high-ranking Saudi officials, Reporters Without Borders said.
They were identified for their “organisational or executive responsibility in Khashoggi’s killing, as well as their involvement in developing a state policy to attack and silence journalists”, the group said in a statement.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Victoria Jones/PA)
In the US report, intelligence officials stopped short of saying the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s killing in Turkey in October 2018, but described him as having “absolute control” over the kingdom’s intelligence organisations and it would have been highly unlikely for such an operation to have been carried out without his approval.
Denial
Saudia Arabia’s UN ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi disputed the report on 1 March, saying it did not come “anywhere close” to proof of any allegations against the crown prince.
Under the German legal system, anyone can file an allegation with prosecutors and there is an obligation for them to look into the accusations. It’s up to them to determine whether they justify launching a full investigation.
German law allows prosecutors to claim universal jurisdiction in crimes against humanity, and last week they secured the conviction of a former member of Syrian president Bashar Assad’s secret police for his involvement in facilitating the torture of prisoners in his homeland.
In that case the defendant had been living in Germany. The Khashoggi case has no obvious connections to the country.
RSF has filed a complaint with the German Prosecutor targeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for crimes against humanity, revealing the widespread and systematic nature of the persecution of journalists and the assassination of #JamalKhashoggi.https://t.co/ooESEemxs4
Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said in a statement:
Those responsible for the persecution of journalists in Saudi Arabia, including the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, must be held accountable for their crimes.
While these serious crimes against journalists continue unabated, we call on the German prosecutor to take a stand and open an investigation into the crimes we have revealed.
The killing of Jamal Khashoggi
The US document released on 26 February said a 15-member Saudi team, including seven members of the prince’s elite personal protective team, arrived in Istanbul, though it was unclear how far in advance Saudi officials had decided to harm him. Khashoggi had gone to the Saudi consulate to pick up documents needed for his wedding. Once inside, he died at the hands of more than a dozen Saudi security and intelligence officials and others who had assembled ahead of his arrival.
Surveillance cameras tracked his route and those of his alleged killers in Istanbul in the hours before his killing.
A Turkish bug planted at the consulate reportedly captured the sound of a forensic saw, operated by a Saudi colonel who was also a forensics expert, dismembering Khashoggi’s body within an hour of him entering the building. The whereabouts of his remains is unknown.
Besides the crown prince and his adviser, the complaint names Saudi Arabia’s former deputy head of intelligence Ahmad Mohammed Asiri; Mohammad Al-Otaibi, the consul general in Istanbul at the time of the murder; and intelligence officer Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb.
French Deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau (LREM), president of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group joins forces withAmericans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB), Women’s March Global, International Service for Human Rights, MENA Rights Group, CODEPINK, to demand the definitive release of Loujain al-Hathloul and her right to return to France.
On February 10, after 1001 days in detention, Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi activist, emblematic figure of the fight for the empowerment of women in Saudi Arabia and for the right for women to drive who was sentenced to 5 years and 8 months in prison by the Specialized Criminal Court in Saudi Arabia was temporarily released. French Deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau (LREM), president of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group, in association with ADHRB, Women’s March Global, International Service for Human Rights, MENA Rights Group, CODEPINK, recently demanded that her release be definitive and that she gains the right to return to France in a public tribune. Indeed, the sentence imposed on this prominent human rights defender has been suspended, not ended, meaning she is still at imminent risk of being reincarcerated by the Saudi authorities and remains banned from traveling outside the Kingdom.
Loujain al-Hathloul has been judged in front of a Court charged with terrorism-related cases in Saudi Arabia because she “peacefully advocated for years for the right of women in the kingdom to drive, as well as broader reforms related to the repressive male guardianship system.” Those same terrorism laws are regularly used by Saudi officials to silence political opposition and imprison the Kingdom’s dissenting voices on the basis of broad and vague legal grounds. This tribune completes a global effort carried out by international actors to put an end to the culture of impunity that Saudi authorities rest on to pursue their attacks on human rights and their defenders.
“Governments across all states of the Gulf have relied on a perpetuated culture of impunity amongst their officials for decades. International pressure is a most effective way we have found to create change in their behaviour – they depend on those partners” – Husain Abdulla, Executive Director of ADHRB
Loujain was accused of being a traitor to the Kingdom, having transmitted secret information to “hostile states,” the authorities used her advocacy activities as part of the #Women2Drive campaign and her fight against the male guardianship system with international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch as ‘evidence’ against her case. Explicitly qualified as a key partner by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, it is essential that the global call which had pushed for her release insists on the need for her liberation to be unconditional and definitive. At current risk of reincarceration, it is also crucial for Loujain, who has additionally received a number of death threats in prison, that the travel ban imposed on her be lifted so her safety is ensured as she can exit the Kingdom.
ADHRB, Women’s March Global, International Service for Human Rights, MENA Rights Group, CODEPINK therefore add their voices to the urgent call of mister deputy Jean-Baptiste Moreau, president of the France-Saudi Arabia parliamentary friendship group, calling for unconditional release of Loujain al-Hathloul and her right to return to France.
Reporters without Borders accuses Saudi heir of crimes against humanity over persecution of journalists
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and other high-ranking Saudi officials have been accused of committing crimes against humanity in a criminal complaint filed in Germany by Reporters without Borders (RSF), the press freedom group.
The 500-page complaint, filed with the German public prosecutor in general in the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe, centres on the “widespread and systematic” persecution of journalists in Saudi Arabia, including the arbitrary detention of 34 journalists there and the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist.
President Joe Biden came under fire from political leaders and human rights defenders worldwide over the weekend for failing to directly sanction or rebuke Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman over the brutal assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi government hit squad in 2018.
“Mohammed bin Salman is guilty of murder,” wrote the editorial board of the Washington Post, where Khashoggi worked, late Friday night. “Biden should not give him a pass.” The editorial stated:
That heinous crime against a permanent U.S. resident and contributing columnist to The Post should not go unpunished. Under U.S. law, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, as he is widely known, ought to be banned from travel to the United States and subjected to an asset freeze. That President Biden has chosen not to pursue that course suggests that the “fundamental” change he promised in U.S.-Saudi relations will not include holding to account its reckless ruler, who consequently is unlikely to be deterred from further criminal behavior.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the administration’s decision — despite the gruesome murder and the findings of the U.S. intelligence report — to withhold even a wrist-slap from MBS.
“Even in recent history Democratic and Republican administrations, there have not been sanctions put in place for the leaders or foreign governments where we have diplomatic relations — and even where we don’t have diplomatic relations,” Psaki told CNN.
Pasaki said the administration believes there is are “more effective ways to make sure this doesn’t happen again and also to be able to leave room to work with the Saudis on areas where there is mutual agreement where there is national interest for the United States.”
But critics say this is a grave mistake and that some form of accountability or sanction should be aimed directly at MBS.
“With the release of the U.S. report, confirming Saudi officials’ culpability at the highest levels, the United States should now take the lead in ensuring accountability for this crime and for setting in place the international mechanisms to prevent and punish such acts in the future,” Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Saturday.
Specifically, Callamard called on the Biden administration to “impose sanctions against the Crown Prince, as it has done for the other perpetrators — targeting his personal assets but also his international engagements.”
Callamard also offered reaction to the BBC on Saturday:
David Hearst, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Middle East Eye, warned in a column Saturday that Biden is sending a “nothing less than chilling” message to the Saudis — and the world — by taking a hands-off approach to the crown prince.
“This will embolden the murderous prince more than anything his friends in Trump or Pompeo could have done,” wrote Hearst. “It means he can get away with doing the same thing again and again.”
The Saudi prince, he added, “will no doubt vary his means of conducting his terror campaign against anyone who speaks out against him, but, whatever he does, he now knows he cannot be punished because America — even under an administration that is hostile to him — will just not allow it.”
Democrats in Congress also expressed frustration as they called for true accountability.
“What was already apparent is now unmistakable,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). “MBS and the Saudi regime are directly responsible for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and must be held accountable.”
Omar said she intends to introduce a bill in the coming days to place sanctions on MBS — both for the Khashoggi murder as well as other well-documented human rights abuses. “The United States,” said Omar, “should stand consistently for human rights and human dignity around the world — not just when it’s convenient.”
Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J), a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted: “The lack of action against the crown prince sends a clear message across the globe that those at the top can escape consequences.”
I just finished reading the declassified memo on killing of #Khashoggi. I’ve read thousands of intel reports in my career in national security, but this one stands out. Here’s why we need to take this seriously and why we need to do more to hold Crown Prince accountable. THREAD pic.twitter.com/EFQqEuGYKQ
Following release of the U.S. report Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists called for a strong response from the White House and other global leaders.
“The U.S. and its allies,” said CPJ senior Middle East and North Africa researcher Justin Shilad, “should sanction the crown prince and other royal court members to show the world that there are tangible consequences for assassinating journalists, no matter who you are.”
Meanwhile, the Society for Professional Journalist said it was “outraged” that those chiefly responsible for Khashoggi’s murder have been insulated from accountability even as it welcomed promises from the Biden administration that a “range of actions” remain on the table.
“We hope,” said Matthew T. Hall, SPJ national president, “the president chooses one quickly and decisively to send the message to Saudi Arabian leaders and people everywhere that the killing of a journalist is unacceptable anywhere on this planet.”
The White House has said it would make further announcements about possible sanctions and the future Saudi-U.S. relationship on Monday.
President Biden was asked by a reporter directly Saturday whether or not he would “punish” the Crown Prince.
Biden responded: “You’ll see the — there will be an announcement on Monday of what we’re going to be doing with Saudi Arabia, generally.”
Supporters of businessman Osama AlHasani say he is expected to face court on Wednesday, and that they view the case as political
Australian consular officials say they are seeking to help an Australian citizen who has been detained in Morocco, as human rights activists raised fears the man may be extradited to Saudi Arabia.
Supporters of the businessman Dr Osama AlHasani – a dual Australian and Saudi citizen – said he was expected to face court in Morocco on Wednesday, having been detained shortly after he arrived there on 8 February.
We call you to participate in our tweeting campaign with the hashtag #DontDeportOsamaAlHasani and in Arabic with #لاترحلوا_اسامة_الحسني.. The issue is really urgent and there is threat upon his life. We reassert that he has no relation to any political opposition activity. pic.twitter.com/z7FL32nnzT
Exclusive: letters to Dominic Raab and Lady Scotland say Princess Basmah requires urgent medical treatment
Supporters of a prominent Saudi Arabian princess detained with her daughter in Riyadh have appealed to the British government to help secure their release.
In two letters to both foreign secretary Dominic Raab and Commonwealth general secretary Patricia Scotland, the princess’s supporters urged them to intervene on behalf of Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and her daughter Souhoud Al Sharif, arrested in Jeddah two years ago.
At the very least, it seems the Biden administration is sending a signal to other countries that there is a new administration in America, one that will not tolerate foreign intrusions into US affairs the same way its predecessor did. Continue reading
It was a brutal way to go, and it had the paw prints of the highest authorities. On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian insider turned outsider, was murdered by a squad of 15 men from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was dismembered and quite literally cancelled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
This state sanctioned killing was a vile, clumsy effort against a journalist and critic of a person who has come to be affectionately known in brown nosing circles as MBS, the ambitious, bratty Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since then, every effort has been made on his part, and his followers, to repel suggestions of guilt or involvement.
It is worth remembering how the narratives were initially developed. First, the killing was denied as a libel against the kingdom. “Mr Khashoggi,” claimed an official statement from the Saudi authorities, “visited the consulate to request paperwork related to his marital status and exited shortly thereafter.” Then, his death was accepted, but deemed the result of a dreadful accident in which the men in question had overstepped. The death subsequently became the work of a blood thirsty gang of sadists who had acted on their own volition or, as US President Donald Trump called them, “rogue killers”.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir was a model of dissembling grace, telling news networks that it had all been a “tremendous mistake” which the Crown Prince was “not aware” of. “We don’t know, in terms of details, how. We don’t know where the body is.”
Statements of this nature run the risk of being totally implausible while also being revealing. It certainly showed a level of audacity. But in the exposure of the operation, the Saudi intelligence services also risked looking amateurish and startlingly incompetent. As a reward for their activities, 11 of the crew were tried by the Saudi government, eight of whom were convicted of murder. Their names have never been released.
Investigations into the murder are generally of the same view: the operation was authorised by the Crown Prince or certainly someone in the highest reaches of the Saudi government. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnès Callamard, thought as much. In June 2019, the rapporteur published a report finding that the execution “was the result of elaborate planning involving extensive coordination and significant human and financial resources. It was overseen, planned and endorsed by high-level officials. It was premeditated.”
The latest publication to stack the shelves of the Kingdom’s culpability comes in the form of a declassified US intelligence report submitted to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The authors of the short document are clear about the lines of responsibility. “We assess,” goes the Executive Summary, “that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” This conclusion was arrived at given the role of the Crown Prince in “the decision making in the Kingdom”, the participation “of a key adviser” along with members of bin Salman’s protective detail, and his “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”
Sombrely, the compilers of the report can only state the obvious. “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
The details of the report corroborate other findings. The team sent to Istanbul had seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective guard, the Rapid Intervention Force. It would have been hard to envisage the participation of these men in an operation without approval of the Crown Prince. Members of the squad also included those from the Saudi Centre for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) based at the Royal Court.
The only note of slight uncertainty to come in the report is the state of mind Saudi officials were in terms of harming Khashoggi. It was clear that the Crown Prince saw the journalist “as a threat to the Kingdom and more broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.” What was less clear that “how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him.”
The neglected, and no less obscene aspect of the Khashoggi affair apart from his extrajudicial killing, is the business as usual approach taken by various powers towards Saudi Arabia. President Trump was merely the frankest of them all, not wishing to cloud lucrative weapons deals and the ongoing security relationship. “The United States,” he promised in a statement, “intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”
The Biden administration prefers dissimulation and forced sincerity. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saw the need to “recalibrate” rather than “rupture” the relations between the two countries. “The [US] relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual.” It was sufficient for the US to illuminate the issue of Khashoggi’s killing. “I think this report speaks for itself.”
Just to show he has been busy recalibrating away, Blinken announced a visa restriction policy named after the slain Saudi – the Khashoggi Ban. Some 76 Saudi nationals have received bans for having “been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing.”
Ahead of the report’s release, President Joe Biden called his Saudi counterpart, King Salman, making much of human rights and the rule of law. But doing so did not mean holding the Crown Prince to account for his misdeeds. What mattered was “the longstanding partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia”. The Royals, to that end, can rest easy. There will be no substantial change in the arrangements between Washington and Riyadh, merely a heavy layering of cosmetics. That’s recalibration for you.
It was a brutal way to go, and it had the paw prints of the highest authorities. On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian insider turned outsider, was murdered by a squad of 15 men from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was dismembered and quite literally cancelled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
This state sanctioned killing was a vile, clumsy effort against a journalist and critic of a person who has come to be affectionately known in brown nosing circles as MBS, the ambitious, bratty Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since then, every effort has been made on his part, and his followers, to repel suggestions of guilt or involvement.
It is worth remembering how the narratives were initially developed. First, the killing was denied as a libel against the kingdom. “Mr Khashoggi,” claimed an official statement from the Saudi authorities, “visited the consulate to request paperwork related to his marital status and exited shortly thereafter.” Then, his death was accepted, but deemed the result of a dreadful accident in which the men in question had overstepped. The death subsequently became the work of a blood thirsty gang of sadists who had acted on their own volition or, as US President Donald Trump called them, “rogue killers”.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir was a model of dissembling grace, telling news networks that it had all been a “tremendous mistake” which the Crown Prince was “not aware” of. “We don’t know, in terms of details, how. We don’t know where the body is.”
Statements of this nature run the risk of being totally implausible while also being revealing. It certainly showed a level of audacity. But in the exposure of the operation, the Saudi intelligence services also risked looking amateurish and startlingly incompetent. As a reward for their activities, 11 of the crew were tried by the Saudi government, eight of whom were convicted of murder. Their names have never been released.
Investigations into the murder are generally of the same view: the operation was authorised by the Crown Prince or certainly someone in the highest reaches of the Saudi government. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnès Callamard, thought as much. In June 2019, the rapporteur published a report finding that the execution “was the result of elaborate planning involving extensive coordination and significant human and financial resources. It was overseen, planned and endorsed by high-level officials. It was premeditated.”
The latest publication to stack the shelves of the Kingdom’s culpability comes in the form of a declassified US intelligence report submitted to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The authors of the short document are clear about the lines of responsibility. “We assess,” goes the Executive Summary, “that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” This conclusion was arrived at given the role of the Crown Prince in “the decision making in the Kingdom”, the participation “of a key adviser” along with members of bin Salman’s protective detail, and his “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”
Sombrely, the compilers of the report can only state the obvious. “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
The details of the report corroborate other findings. The team sent to Istanbul had seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective guard, the Rapid Intervention Force. It would have been hard to envisage the participation of these men in an operation without approval of the Crown Prince. Members of the squad also included those from the Saudi Centre for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) based at the Royal Court.
The only note of slight uncertainty to come in the report is the state of mind Saudi officials were in terms of harming Khashoggi. It was clear that the Crown Prince saw the journalist “as a threat to the Kingdom and more broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.” What was less clear that “how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him.”
The neglected, and no less obscene aspect of the Khashoggi affair apart from his extrajudicial killing, is the business as usual approach taken by various powers towards Saudi Arabia. President Trump was merely the frankest of them all, not wishing to cloud lucrative weapons deals and the ongoing security relationship. “The United States,” he promised in a statement, “intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”
The Biden administration prefers dissimulation and forced sincerity. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saw the need to “recalibrate” rather than “rupture” the relations between the two countries. “The [US] relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual.” It was sufficient for the US to illuminate the issue of Khashoggi’s killing. “I think this report speaks for itself.”
Just to show he has been busy recalibrating away, Blinken announced a visa restriction policy named after the slain Saudi – the Khashoggi Ban. Some 76 Saudi nationals have received bans for having “been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing.”
Ahead of the report’s release, President Joe Biden called his Saudi counterpart, King Salman, making much of human rights and the rule of law. But doing so did not mean holding the Crown Prince to account for his misdeeds. What mattered was “the longstanding partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia”. The Royals, to that end, can rest easy. There will be no substantial change in the arrangements between Washington and Riyadh, merely a heavy layering of cosmetics. That’s recalibration for you.
We’re also stepping up our diplomacy to end the war in Yemen — a war which has created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe. I’ve asked my Middle East team to ensure our support for the United Nations-led initiative to impose a ceasefire, open humanitarian channels, and restore long-dormant peace talks….
And to underscore our commitment, we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.
This announcement does not augur peace in Yemen any time soon. Rather it looks a bit like political mystification that some have chosen to celebrate now, regardless of what it actually means, apparently in hope of making it a meaningful, self-fulfilling prophecy some time in the future. This does not seem likely, given what Biden actually said, but we shall see.
For the foreseeable future, Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, will remain the victim of a Saudi war of aggression and Saudi war crimes. Since March 2015, with the full support of the Obama administration, Saudi Arabia and its allies have turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, as assessed by the United Nations. Relentless bombing of military and civilian targets alike has led to the deaths of more than 100,000 Yemenis from famine and disease. Millions more need international aid to survive.
One hopeful sign now is the Biden administration’s announcement on February 5 that the US designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization has been rescinded. This was a necessary corrective, not a bold move. The Houthis are ethnic natives in northwest Yemen. Their current territory holds about 70% of Yemen’s 30 million people. They are the victims of Saudi terror bombing.
The Houthis are also the victims of US Iranophobia, the paranoid policy framing that sees Iranian devils behind every difficulty in the Middle East, regardless of any lack of evidence. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is an Iranophobe, as well as a Christo-fascist. In a midnight news dump on January 10, Pompeo announced the terrorist designation to go into effect on January 19. The announcement provided little basis in policy or fact and received bipartisan criticism because its most likely impact would have been to exacerbate human suffering in Yemen.
While the Biden administration’s decision to rescind the terrorist designation eliminates a factor that would have made the Yemen situation worse, there is little in Biden’s speech that promises to make the situation better any time soon.
Supporting United Nations efforts is probably helpful as far as it goes, but it’s a far cry from US engagement on the peace side to match US engagement on the war side. And to suggest that the UN might “impose a ceasefire” implies a military deployment that is pretty much imaginary. The conflict within Yemen is multi-sided, with few if any clearly-defined frontlines.
The Houthis control most of the northwest, but not all, and that may be the most coherent governmental region in the country. In the south, the official Yemen government, unelected but imposed by international fiat and controlled by Saudi Arabia, shares territory with its own rebel faction controlled by the UAE (United Arab Emirates). The eastern two-thirds of the country, mostly desert, contains islands of control under Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other, smaller factions.
The US was misguided, at best, to sanction the Saudi aggression. The US was criminal to support the Saudi aggression for the past six years. Now Biden has said the US is ending “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.” There are NO defensive operations in that war, the war is effectively all in Yemen. And when Biden says the US is ending all American support, does that mean no more military guidance from the US mission in Riyadh? No more logistical support? No more intelligence sharing? No more training Saudi pilots? No more target selection? No more mid-air refueling? No more maintenance for Saudi bombers? No more spare parts? Does it mean an end to the US naval blockade, itself an act of war?
The US has been doing all these things, and probably more, with Obama’s and Trump’s blessings since 2015. Will the US stop doing all of them now, or in the near future? Biden didn’t say (the State Department later hedged). Biden promised to end “relevant arms sales,” whatever “relevant” is supposed to mean, since it means nothing on its face. And in the next line of his speech, Biden revealed the calamitous duplicity of the US position all along:
At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV strikes, and other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries. We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.
This is cover-your-butt spinning to excuse future failures planned to appease the Saudi aggressors. Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks and UAV strikes from the Houthis because the Houthis, in the face of relentless attack, have been fighting back.
Biden’s undefined “other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries” is murky, non-specific, unverifiable. This makes Biden sound like he’s channeling Pompeo in pure Iranophobe-speak. This fearmongering portends nothing good for Yemen.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty is under no discernible threat, except perhaps from within the monarchical police state. So the US is committed to defending an anti-democratic dictatorship that murders its critics in the most brutal fashion? How is that a good thing?
Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity is under no credible threat. Quite literally, Saudi Arabia has NO territorial integrity, since most of its border with eastern Yemen has never been drawn. The Saudis and the Houthis have a territorial dispute in the northwest dating to the 1930s. The Saudis have built more than one wall over the years in an effort to block Yemeni migrants seeking work in Saudi Arabia, which has some ten million migrant workers mostly treated abominably.
Saudi Arabia’s people face a chronic, lethal threat from their own government. There are occasional, minor threats from dissidents. Threats from abroad are likewise all but non-existent. Those missiles and UAV worrying Biden have apparently killed no one; there are no Saudi civilian casualties from the Yemen war, just the 100,000-plus Yemenis.
Biden’s reassurances to Saudi Arabia weren’t just specious, they represent an unchanging rigidity in American thinking that continues as a threat to peace. On Democracy Now, Michigan State University assistant professor Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni scholar and activist, put Biden’s comments in perspective:
So, in his speech, Biden said that he is ending offensive operations in Yemen, but committed — he went on to commit to defending Saudi borders. Now, this is really concerning to me, because I still remember the statement that the White House put out when Obama initially entered the war in March of 2015, and that was the exact same framing, that they were defending Saudi territory from the Houthis. This is what led us here — six years of war, over 100,000 Yemenis killed, 250,000 people starved to death, if not more, the entire country destroyed. And the framing was always to protect Saudi borders.
In reality, in 2015, the Houthis were nowhere near the Saudi border, they were deep in southern Yemen, on the verge of overrunning Aden and driving out the Yemeni puppet government controlled by Saudi Arabia. That was when the Saudis launched their undeclared war; that was when the US supported the unrestricted aerial bombardment of a country with no air defense.
And beneath all the other arguments was the widespread fear of Iran, Iranophobia, based on little to no evidence. Iran is a despised Shia Muslim state in a Sunni Muslim world, and the mutual distrust is deep-seated and irrational, except that the Iranians remember that the western allies of Saudi Arabia imposed one of the world’s bloodier dictatorships on Iran. The Iranians weren’t ever very grateful, so how could the US trust them after that: obviously, if Iran had an interest in supporting the Houthis in resisting a puppet government controlled by the Saudi dictatorship, the US had a reason to intervene against the defenders of freedom. Or as Reuters reported in 2015:
The United States is speeding up arms supplies and bolstering intelligence sharing with a Saudi-led alliance bombing a militia aligned with Iran in neighboring Yemen, a senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday….
“Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force,” he told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
“As part of that effort, we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center….”
That US diplomat in 2015 was US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now President Biden’s new Secretary of State. He was an architect of a criminal war rooted in a largely irrational fear of Iran, along with cynical fealty to Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, US relations with Iran have been poisoned by Iranians taking American diplomats hostage, then manipulating those hostages to push Americans to elect President Reagan. There’s plenty to regret on both sides. But on February 5, Secretary Blinken started a new round of talks with American allies aimed at shaping a new relationship with Iran. The trick will be to treat Iran as a rational adversary, and even more so to persuade Iran that the US can be rational, too. The Yemen initiatives are steps in a positive direction, but only baby steps.
Nearly 40% of families in Yemen are living in debt to buy essentials, according to research by Oxfam, under the shadow of the ongoing civil war.
This comes as millions of Yemenis are reported to be living in food insecurity, a situation that the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said could become famine very soon.
Meanwhile, the UK has come under renewed scrutiny for arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which is leading the coalition blockading Yemen.
Living ‘from one month to the next’
The research by Oxfam found that nearly two in five families in Yemen have to go into debt to buy food and medicine. Pharmacists and grocers estimate the number of people using debt to buy essentials has risen since the beginning of the war in 2015.
Layla Mansoor fled from active conflict three years ago with her family. She says they now usually owe “10,000 to 12,000 YER (USD $11-$15)” every month to the shops where they buy food. Mansoor said:
At the moment we’re living a nightmare. Thankfully, until now, we haven’t needed any kind of medical treatment – but I’m afraid that we won’t afford it, if one day we do.
The research found that many families use aid support to pay off debt and then accumulate more while waiting for aid payments, living permanently in arrears.
This comes directly after a large shortfall in aid payments to Yemen, as well as the UK’s decision to cut foreign aid.
Ibrahim Alwazir, one of the researchers, said:
To struggle this hard to be able to provide food and medicine for one’s family is an avoidable hardship that millions have to overcome on a daily basis. We need peace so no more Yemenis are forced to flee their homes and live in poverty. Peace will allow people to rebuild their lives and businesses, but we need support to help communities to do that. This war has turned my country into the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and it’s only getting worse. We all just want to get back to normal life.
‘Continuing to fuel the war’
More than 8,000 civilians in Yemen have been killed by targeted air strikes, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Acled). These deaths have been caused by the Saudi Arabi-led coalition pursuing an air campaign against Yemen. The coalition’s blockade has also caused an increase in food and fuel prices that is responsible for widespread food insecurity.
Human rights and campaign groups have criticised the UK for its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, particularly after the US decided to review its arms deals.
According to Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the UK has licensed £1.4bn worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia since renewing sales in July.
Sarah Waldron of CAAT said:
These new figures are shocking and once again illustrate the UK government’s determination to keep supplying arms at any cost.
UK-made weapons have played a devastating role in the Saudi-led attacks on Yemen, and the humanitarian crisis they have created, yet the UK government has done everything it can to keep the arms sales flowing.
The arms sales are immoral, and we believe that the decision to renew them was illegal, which is why we have filed a case to challenge it.
Now even the US is curbing its arms sales, while the UK government is continuing to fuel the war. They must change course now and work to support meaningful peace.
Although I have decided to focus this blog mostly on human rights defenders and their awards, I will make an exception for the regular sessions of the UN Human Rights Council of which the46th session has started on 22 February and which will last until to 23 March 2021. This post is based on the as always excellent general overview published by the International Service for Human rights: “HRC46 | Key issues on agenda of March 2021 session”. Here’s an overview of some of the key issues on the agenda which affect HRDs directly:
Modalities for NGOs this year: According to the Bureau minutes of 4 February 2021: “Concerning the participation of NGOs in the 46th session, the President clarified that under the proposed extraordinary modalities, NGOs in consultative status with the ECOSOC would be invited to submit pre-recorded video statements for a maximum of three general debates in addition to the interactive dialogues, panel discussions and UPR adoptions as they had been able to do during the 45th session. In addition, “the Bureau agreed that events organised virtually by NGOs in consultative status with the ECOSOC could be listed on the HRC Extranet for information purposes.”
Human Rights implications of COVID-19
The pandemic – and States’ response to it – has presented various new challenges and threats for those defending human rights. The pandemic has exposed and deepened existing discrimination, violence and other violations. Governments have used COVID as a pretext for further restricting fundamental rights, including through the enactment of legislation, and specific groups of defenders – including WHRDs and LGBTI rights defenders – have lost their livelihoods, access to health services have reduced and they have been excluded from participating in pandemic responses. Action to address the pandemic must be comprehensive and systemic, it must apply a feminist, human rights-based, and intersectional lens, centred on non-discrimination, participation and empowerment of vulnerable communities. Last March ISHR joined a coalition of 187 organisations to draw the Council’s attention to the situation of LGBTI persons and defenders in the context of the pandemic.
Reports of cases of intimidation and reprisals against those cooperating or seeking to cooperate with the UN not only continue, but grow. Intimidation and reprisals violate the rights of the individuals concerned, they constitute violations of international human rights law and undermine the UN human rights system. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/reprisals/
The UN has taken action towards addressing this critical issue including:
Establishing a dedicated dialogue under item 5 to take place every September;
Affirmation by the Council of the particular responsibilities of its Members, President and Vice-Presidents to investigate and promote accountability for reprisals and intimidation; and
Appointment of the UN Assistant Secretary General on Human Rights as the Senior Official on addressing reprisals.
ISHR remains deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who try to engage with UN mechanisms, and consistent in its calls for all States and the Council to do more to address the situation.
During its 42nd session, the Council adopted a resolution which listed key trends such as the patterns of reprisals, increasing self-censorship, the use of national security arguments and counter-terrorism strategies by States as justification for blocking access to the UN. The resolution also acknowledged the specific risks to individuals in vulnerable situations or belonging to marginalised groups, and called on the UN to implement gender-responsive policies to end reprisals. The Council called on States to combat impunity and to report back to it on how they are preventing reprisals, both online and offline.
Item 5 of the Human Rights Council’s agenda provides a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about reprisals, and for governments involved in existing cases to provide an update to the Council on any investigation or action taken toward accountability to be carried out.
During the organisational meeting held on 8 February, the President of the Council stressed the importance of ensuring the safety of those participating in the Council’s work, and the obligation of States to prevent intimidation or reprisals.
In line with previous calls, ISHR expects the President of the Human Rights Council to publicly identify and denounce specific instances of reprisals by issuing formal statements, conducting press-briefings, corresponding directly with the State concerned, publicly releasing such correspondence with States involved, and insist on undertakings from the State concerned to investigate, hold the perpetrators accountable and report back to the Council on action taken.
Other thematic reports
At this 46th session, the Council will discuss a range of economic, social and cultural rights in depth through dedicated debates with mandate holders, and consider the annual report of the Secretary-General on the question of the realization in all countries of economic, social and cultural rights. The debates with mandate holders include:
The Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, annual report on COVID-19, culture and culture rights and country visit to Tuvalu
The Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, annual report on twenty years on the right to adequate housing: taking stock – moving ahead and country visit to New Zealand
The Council will discuss a range of civil and political rights through dedicated debates with the mandate holders, including:
The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, annual report on combating anti-Muslim hatred
The Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy, annual report on artificial intelligence and privacy, and children’s privacy, and country visit reports to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, United States of America, Argentina, and Republic of Korea.
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including:
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on interrelation of human rights and human rights thematic issues including:
The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, annual report on human rights and the global water crisis: water pollution, water scarcity and water-related disasters
The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, annual report on human rights impact of counter-terrorism and countering (violent) extremism policies and practices on the rights of women, girls and the family
Country-specific developments
China
A pile of evidence continues to mount, including the assessment from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, about policies of the Chinese government targeting ethnic and religious minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians. The rule of law is being further eroded in Hong Kong, as deeply-respected principles of due process and pluralistic democracy are disappearing at an alarming rate. Human rights defenders and ordinary citizens confront ongoing crackdowns on civic freedoms, pervasive censorship and lightning-fast recourse to administrative sanction, enforced disappearance and trumped-up national security charges to silence critics. – In the face of this, inaction has become indefensible.
The UN Special Procedures issued a sweeping statement in June 2020, calling for the international community to take ‘decisive action’ on the human rights situation in the country. At the March session, ISHR urges States to convey at the highest level the incompatibility of China’s actions domestically with its obligations as a new Council member, and to continue to press for transparency, actionable reporting and monitoring of the situation. Statements throughout the Council are key moments to show solidarity with individual defenders – by name – , their families, and communities struggling to survive. And finally, States should take every opportunity to support efforts by China that meaningfully seek to advance human rights – while resolutely refuting, at all stages of the process, initiatives that seek to distort principles of human rights and universality; upend the Council’s impressive work to hold States up to scrutiny; and weaken the effectiveness and impact of the Council for victims of violations and human rights defenders. Furthermore, other Council members should step up their commitments to the body’s mandate and purpose, and reject efforts by China and its partners and proxies. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/china/
Egypt
The Egyptian authorities continue to systematically carry out patterns of reprisals against human rights defenders for their legitimate work, including for engagement with UN Special Procedures. These have included arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearance, torture, unlawful surveillance, threats and summons for questioning by security agencies. The government’s refusal to address key concerns raised by States in its response to the UPR in March 2020 demonstrated its lack of political will to address its deep challenges and to engage constructively with the Council. ISHR reiterates its call on the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the human rights situation in Egypt. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/egypt/
Saudi Arabia
In 2020, the Council continued its scrutiny over the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia. Yet, the Saudi government has failed the litmus test to immediately and unconditionally release the women’s rights activists and human rights defenders, instead they continued to prosecute and harshly sentence them for their peaceful activism. On 10 February 2021, it was reported that WHRDs Loujain Al-Hathloul, and Nouf Abdulaziz have been released conditionally from prison after spending over two and a half years in detention solely for advocating for women’s rights, including the right to drive and the dismantling of the male guardianship system. ALQST reported that WHRDs Nassima al-Sadah and Samar Badawi remain in detention and that “in a worrying development, the Public Prosecution has appealed the initial sentence issued on 25 November 2020 by the Criminal Court against al-Sadah of five years and eight months in prison, half of it suspended, seemingly with the aim of securing an even harsher sentence”. See: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/1a6d84c0-b494-11ea-b00d-9db077762c6c
The government’s refusal to address this key concern raised in the three joint statements demonstrates its lack of political will to genuinely improve the human rights situation and to engage constructively with the Council. ISHR reiterates its call on the Council to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.
Nicaragua
On 24 February, the Council will hold an interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Nicaragua. Despite the renewal of Resolution 43/2, the human rights situation in Nicaragua has steadily deteriorated over the last months. Civil society space has sharply shrank, due to new restrictive laws on foreign agents and counter-terrorism, while attacks against journalists and human rights defenders -the last remaining independent human rights observers – continue. The lack of an independent judiciary or NHRI further deprives victims of the possibility to seek justice and redress. Whilst the repression deepens, State inaction in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and the passage of hurricanes have also exacerbated the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the deprivation of economic, social, and cultural rights. In light of upcoming elections in Nicaragua, ISHR urges the Council to renew and strengthen its resolution on the human rights situation in Nicaragua, laying down a clear benchmark of key steps the State should take to demonstrate its willingness to cooperate in good faith, while clearly signaling the intention to move towards international investigation and accountability should such cooperation steps not be met within the year. States should also increase support to targeted defenders and CSOs by raising in their statements the cases of student Kevin Solís, Aníbal Toruño and Radio Darío journalists, trans activist Celia Cruz, as well as the CENIDH and seven other CSOs subject to cancellation of their legal status.
Venezuela
Venezuela will come under the spotlight several times with oral updates from OHCHR on the situation of human rights in the country (25 February, 11 March) and an update from the international fact-finding mission on Venezuela (10 March). OHCHR is mandated to report on the implementation of the recommendations made to Venezuela, including in reports (here and here) presented last June. The fact-finding mission has started work on its renewed and strengthened 2-year mandate, despite delays in the disbursement of funds and is due to outline its plans to the Council. Intensifying threats and attacks on civil society in Venezuela since November 2020, provide a bleak context to these discussions. States should engage actively in dialogue on Venezuela, urging that recommendations be implemented – including facilitating visits from Special Rapporteurs; that the fact-finding mission be granted access to the country and that civil society be promoted and safeguarded in its essential work.
Burundi
On 2 February 2021, the Supreme Court of Burundi announced its decision allegedly adopted on 23 June 2020 to sentence 12 defenders to life in prison. The date of the adoption of this decision was announced after the Court decided to defer it further to 30 June 2020 and again after that. The Court never assigned or informed the 12 concerned of the proceedings. This case was investigated and judged in the absence of all those concerned and the sentence only made public seven months after the alleged proceedings took place. Among the victims of this arbitrary procedure are renown lawyers such as Me Armel Niyongere, Vital Nshimirimana and Dieudonné Bashirahishize, who are being targeted for their engagement in the defense of victims of the 2015 repression in Burundi and for filing complaints for victims to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. A group of civil society organisations denounced the dysfunctioning and lack of independence of judicial proceedings in the country. After confirming the 32 years sentence of defender Germain Rukuki, Burundi continues its crackdown against civil society. In addition to ensuring the continued work of the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi, members of the Council need to call on Burundi to uphold its international obligations and stop reprisals against defenders for engaging with any international mechanisms. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/03/29/ngo-statement-condemns-new-irregularities-in-the-case-of-germain-rukuki-burundi/ The Council will hold an interactive dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi on 10 March.
The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 25 February. The Council will consider updates, reports on and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:
Oral update and interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea
Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Sri Lanka
Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Belarus
Oral update and interactive dialogue with the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen
Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on ensuring accountability and justice in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Interactive Dialogue with the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan
Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar
Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on the situation of human rights in Ukraine
Oral updates and enhanced interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner on the situation of human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the team of international experts on the situation in Kasai
High-level Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in the Central African Republic
Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Mali
Council programme, appointments and resolutions
During the organisational meeting for the 46th session held on 8 February, the President of the Human Rights Council presented the programme of work. It includes seven panel discussions. States also announced at least 28 proposed resolutions. Read here the reports presented this session.
Appointment of mandate holders
The President of the Human Rights Council proposed candidates for the following mandates:
Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (member from Africa)
Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (member from North America)
Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions
Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia
Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (member from African States)
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (member from Asia-Pacific States).
Resolutions to be presented to the Council’s 46th session
At the organisational meeting on 8 February the following resolutions were announced (States leading the resolution in brackets):
Promotion of the enjoyment of the cultural rights of everyone and respect for cultural diversity (Cuba)
Human rights and the environment, mandate renewal (Costa Rica, Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, Switzerland)
Prevention of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Denmark)
Question of the realization in all countries of economic, social and cultural rights (Portugal)
Guarantee of the right to the health through equitable and universal access to vaccines in response to pandemics and other health emergencies (Ecuador)
Negative impacts of unilateral coercive measures (Azerbaijan on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement-NAM)
Human rights, democracy and the rule of law (Morocco, Norway, Peru, Romania, Republic of Korea, Tunisia)
Freedom of religion or belief (EU)
Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, mandate renewal (EU)
Situation of human rights in Myanmar, mandate renewal (EU)
Combating intolerance based on religion or belief (OIC)
Ensuring accountability and justice for all violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (OIC)
Right of the Palestinian people to self-determination (OIC)
Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (OIC)
Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan (OIC)
Technical assistance and capacity-building for Mali in the field of human rights (African Group)
Persons with albinism (African Group)
Impact of non-repatriation of funds of illicit origin to countries of origin (African Group)
The situation of human rights in Iran, mandate renewal (Moldova, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Iceland)
The right to privacy in the digital age, mandate renewal (Austria, Brazil, Germany, Liechtenstein, Mexico)
The human rights situation in the Syrian Arab Republic, mandate renewal (France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, Qatar, Turkey, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka (Canada, Germany, Montenegro, North Macedonia, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
Situation of human rights in South Sudan, mandate renewal (Albania, Norway, UK)
Adoption of Universal Periodic Review (UPR) reports
During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Belarus, Liberia, Malawi, Panama, Mongolia, Maldives, Andorra, Honduras, Bulgaria, the Marshall Islands, the United States of America, Croatia, Libya and Jamaica. ISHR supports human rights defenders in their interaction with the UPR. It publishes and submits briefing papers regarding the situation facing human rights defenders in some States under review and advocate for the UPR to be used as a mechanism to support and protect human rights defenders on the ground.
Panel discussions
During each Council session, panel discussions are held to provide member States and NGOs with opportunities to hear from subject-matter experts and raise questions. Panel discussions scheduled for this upcoming session:
Annual high-level panel discussion on human rights mainstreaming. Theme: The state of play in the fight against racism and discrimination 20 years after the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Plan of Action and the exacerbating effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on these efforts
Biennial high-level panel discussion on the question of the death penalty. Theme: Human rights violations related to the use of the death penalty, in particular with respect to whether the use of the death penalty has a deterrent effect on crime rate
Meeting on the role of poverty alleviation in promoting and protecting human rights
Annual full-day meeting on the rights of the child [two accessible panels]. Theme: Rights of the child and the Sustainable Development Goals
Annual interactive debate on the rights of persons with disabilities [accessible panel]. Theme: Participation in sport under article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Debate on the midterm review of the International Decade for People of African Descent. (Commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination)
To stay up-to-date: Follow @ISHRglobal and #HRC46 on Twitter, and look out for the Human Rights Council Monitor. During the session, follow the live-updated programme of work on Sched.
