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Category: United Nations

  • Timor-Leste journalist faces probe after exposing child abuse case

    By Sirwan Kajjo in Dili

    In a deeply Catholic country, accusations that an American priest abused dozens of children at an orphanage stunned many in East Timor.

    So when independent journalist Raimundos Oki heard that a group of girls planned to sue authorities, claiming they had been subjected to unnecessary virginity tests as part of the criminal case, he knew he had to hear their story.

    Oki published interviews with the girls on his news website, Oekusi Post, ahead of the trial of Richard Daschbach. The then 84-year-old American priest was jailed in December for 12 years for child abuse.

    But now Oki is under investigation himself, on accusations that he breached judicial secrecy.

    The case is unexpected in East Timor. Also known as Timor-Leste, the country has one of the better records globally for press freedom.

    Groups including Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Human Rights Watch, however, note that the risk of legal proceedings and a media law with vague provisions that journalists “promote public interest and democratic order” could encourage self-censorship on some subjects, including accusations of abuse in the Catholic Church.

    Call from police
    Oki learned that he was under investigation when police called on June 29, ordering the journalist to report to a police station in Dili, the capital, the following day.

    At the station, police informed Oki that the public prosecutor’s office had ordered an investigation into the journalist for allegedly “violating the secrets of the legal system.”

    The investigation is connected to the reports Oki published in 2020 about a planned lawsuit against authorities. In it, the claimants alleged authorities subjected them to virginity tests while investigating claims of abuse against the priest.

    Oekusi Post editor Raimundos Oki
    Oekusi Post editor Raimundos Oki … exposed a controversy over illegal state virginity tests on young girls. Image: VOA

    In their lawsuit and in interviews with Oki, the claimants said they had told authorities they were not among the minors abused by the priest, but that authorities still forced them to undergo the invasive procedure.

    “They wanted to share what they went through with the public,” Oki said. “As a journalist, it is my duty to share their stories with the world.”

    At the time that his articles were published, the priest was still on trial. Oki said a police officer told him the judicial secrecy accusation was linked to Daschbach’s trial.

    Authorities have not responded publicly to the lawsuit, which was filed in July 2021.

    The public prosecutor’s office in Dili didn’t respond to VOA’s request for comment.

    If convicted, Oki could face up to six years in prison.

    ‘Public interest’
    Both the journalist and his lawyer, Miguel Faria — who also defended Daschbach in his trial — deny that Oki breached judicial secrecy, citing public interest as a justification for publishing the interviews.

    “Cases of forced virginity tests are considered public interest, and it is very important for the public to know what happened to these victims,” Faria said.

    The lawyer said that in this case, “the victims speak firsthand about their experiences”.

    Judicial secrecy laws are often enforced to ensure the right to a fair trial or to prevent the risk of a jury being influenced by reporting. UNICEF and others also have guidelines for coverage of child abuse and trials to prevent minors being identified or retraumatised.

    Rick Edmonds, a media analyst at the Florida-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said that in some countries, interviewing witnesses during or even shortly before a trial takes place can jeopardise the trial or provide grounds for appeal if the jury was not entirely sequestered.

    Daniel Bastard, Asia-Pacific director at RSF, said that prosecutors should consider some legal arguments, including that the girls’ testimonies were published during Daschbach’s trial.

    But, he said, “from a press freedom point of view, we need to look at the bigger picture on this issue and think about the public interest.

    “I think the very key in this case is the idea of public interest. In a functional democracy, there can be some debate between the necessity of judicial secrecy and the need for the public to know exactly what is at stake,” Bastard told VOA.

    Showing the suffering
    Oki said his objective was to show the suffering the girls went through. At the time, he said, the media focus was the trial of the priest and not the experiences of minors, who say they went through unnecessary procedures while the case was investigated.

    “Forced virginity test is a violation of basic human rights,” he said. “This practice is against every international norm of human rights.”

    The reporter said authorities didn’t need to carry out such tests to build a case against the former priest.

    The United Nations has called for so-called virginity tests to be banned, saying the procedure is both unscientific and “a violation of human rights.”

    Parker Novak, a Washington-based expert on East Timor, believes Oki’s case is controversial because it touches on the role of the church in the Timorese society.

    “There is a reluctance in the Timorese media, in the Timorese society, to report critically on influential institutions and leaders,” he told VOA.

    The Catholic Church is arguably the most influential institution in the Timorese society, he said.

    “So certainly, any reporting that can be perceived as critical of the church, even if that reporting is wholly justified, whereas this case probably was, it’s still seen as taboo within the Timorese society, and that’s what causes controversy,” Novak added.

    Closed trial
    East Timor is said to contain the highest percentage of Catholics outside Vatican City, and the priest, Daschbach, was a revered figure in the community who had the support of former President Xanana Gusmao, who attended the sentencing.

    The Associated Press reported that Daschbach’s trial was closed to the public and that some witnesses complained of being threatened.

    A US federal grand jury in Washington later indicted the priest for illicit sexual contact in a foreign place and wire fraud.

    Oki has faced legal action previously for his reporting. In 2017, the journalist was accused of criminal defamation over a 2015 article published in the Timor Post about then-Prime Minister Rui Maria de Araujo.

    Charges in that case were later dropped, but Oki believes the case against him this time is more complicated.

    “If they want to politicise it, then I believe they will imprison me,” Oki said.

    “However, if they look at the story, which was published last year along with several videos, they will see that there is no wrongdoing.”

  • Fiji women condemn Bainimarama government’s ‘silence’ on West Papua

    By Rusiate Baleilevuka in Suva

    A Fiji women’s advocacy group has condemned their government for remaining silent over the human rights violations in West Papua amid the Pacific Islands Forum being hosted by Prime Minister Voreqe Bainmarama this week.

    Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) coordinator Shamima Ali with other staff members and activists made the criticisms at a ceremony raising the independence flag Morning Star, banned in Indonesia.

    The women raised the flag of West Papua on Wednesday to show their solidarity.

    West Papua's Morning Star flag-raising in Suva
    West Papua’s Morning Star flag-raising in Suva this week. Image: Fijivillage

    Ali said this ceremony was done every Wednesday to remember the people of West Papua, particularly women and girls who were “suffering twofold” due to the increased militarisation of the two provinces of Papua and West Papuan by the “cruel Indonesian government”.

    She said this was a perfect time since all the Pacific leaders were in Fiji for the forum but the Fiji government stayed silent on the issue.

    Ali added that with Fiji as the chair of the forum, Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama should have negotiated for West Papua to be on the agenda.

    Wenda appeals to Pacific Islands Forum
    Meanwhile, United Liberation Movement of West Papua interim president Benny Wenda has appealed to Pacific leaders to show “timely and effective leadership” on the great issues facing the Pacific — “the human rights crisis in West Papua and the existential threat of climate change”.

    “West Papua is a green land in a blue ocean. Our blue Pacific has always united our peoples, rather than dividing them,” he said in a statement.


    Shamima Ali speaking out on West Papua in Suva. Video: Fijivillage

    “In this spirit of Pacific solidarity, we are grateful for the support our Pacific family showed for our struggle in 2019 by calling for Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to visit West Papua.”

    However, Indonesia continued to undermine the forum by refusing to allow a UN visit to take place.

    “For decades, we have been crying that Indonesia is bombing our villages and killing our people, but we have been ignored,” Wenda said.

    “Now, the world is taking notice of our struggle. The United Nations has shown that up to 100,000 West Papuan civilians have been internally displaced by Indonesian military operations in the past three years alone.

    “They have fled into the bush, where they lack access to shelter, food, water, and proper medical facilities. This is a rapidly worsening human rights disaster, requiring immediate attention and intervention by the United Nations.

    “Indonesia hears the increasing calls for a UN visit, but is employing delaying tactics to avoid exposing their crimes against my people to the world.”

    Rusiate Baleilevuka is a Fijivillage reporter.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Russia Challenges Western Accusations at UN Security Council

    Caleb Maupin reports on the recent allegation of Russian missile targeting an shopping center in Ukraine, dismissed by Russia at the United Nations.

    The post Russia Challenges Western Accusations at UN Security Council first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fiji, Palau and Samoa call for deep-sea mining moratorium at UN conference

    RNZ Pacific

    Palau, Fiji, and Samoa have announced their opposition to deep-sea mining, calling for a moratorium on the emerging industry amid growing fears it will destroy the seafloor and damage biodiversity.

    The alliance was announced just as a United Nations Oceans Conference began in Portugal this week.

    The moratorium comes amid a wave of global interest in deep-sea mining despite environmental groups and governments urging to ban it or ensure it only goes ahead if regulations are in place.

    The alliance between Palau, Fiji, and Samoa was made by Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr at an event co-hosted by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition and the World Wildlife Fund as part of a side event at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon.

    It comes after Vanuatu declared its opposition to deep-sea mining with Chile announcing support for a 15-year moratorium earlier this month, joining the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea who have already taken steps against deep-sea mining.

    The Pacific liaison for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition Aotearoa, Phil McCabe, said a moratorium would prevent or slow the process of mining activity.

    Phil McCabe (Right) and international legal advisor Duncan Currie
    Pacific liaison for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition Aotearoa, Phil McCabe … “The deep-sea mining issue, it seems like it’s the hottest topic here at the Ocean conference.” Image: Phil Smith/VNP/RNZ

    “It’s a pause on no more exploration licences being issued, no exploitation meaning no actual mining licenses being granted and not yet adopting or agreeing to the rules around how this activity might go ahead.”

    Standing ovation
    The Pacific leaders were given a standing ovation for their stance against deep-sea mining.

    McCabe said the issue of mining was the most engaging topic at the event.

    Surangel Whipps asked: “How can we in our right minds say ‘let’s go mining’ without knowing what the risks are?”

    McCabe said Pacific leaders discussed the important role the ocean had in the region.

    “The deep-sea mining issue, it seems like it’s the hottest topic here at the Ocean conference, there was a real heart space discussion around in the Pacific our relationship with the ocean and this activity just really attacking the base of that relationship — just inappropriate.

    “And the leaders were acknowledged and there was a standing ovation,” he said.

    Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner James Hita is calling the new alliance “absolutely monumental” and said now was the time for the New Zealand government to take a strong stand on the issue.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Young people make one vital solution to the ocean crisis crystal clear

    This story was produced as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference Fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).

    One of the first events at the UN Ocean Conference taking place in Lisbon, Portugal was an innovathon for young people. As the UN secretary-general António Guterres said during the occasion, young people are inheriting a deeply troubled planet, thanks to their elders. The innovathon essentially tasked them with cleaning up the adults’ mess.

    If the young people at the conference – including those The Canary spoke to – are any kind of example, it appears they stand ready and willing to rise to the task.

    The Ocean Conference’s primary focus is propelling the innovative solutions needed to improve ocean and environmental health. Young peoples’ contributions at the event show that unleashing their potential is a vital solution in itself.

    Oceans in crisis

    The UN Ocean Conference is running between 27 June and 1 July. It’s the second of its kind, with the first ever UN Ocean Conference taking place in 2017.

    The ocean is in dire straits thanks to human-led actions. Guterres said it is the “reception point” of the three environmental crises we’ve created: climate, biodiversity, and pollution. The ocean, for example, is acidifying due to excessive carbon emissions, which is a threat to a great deal of marine life. Moreover, over 90% of the extra heat from global warming ends up in the ocean. This is leading to persistent and extensive warming waters that increase the severity and regularity of marine heatwaves, according to researchers from Universität Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS). They recently found one such warming pool, measuring some three million square kilometres, in the northeast Pacific. One of the researchers, atmospheric science expert Dr. Armineh Barkhordarian, explained:

    The sharp increase in average water temperature is pushing ecosystems to their limits

    Many ocean-dwelling species, meanwhile, are also diminished and threatened by pollution, overfishing and the activities of the fossil fuel industry.

    Bright young things

    The innovathon was part of a two-day UN Youth and Innovation Forum ahead of the conference’s official opening. During the 24-hour-long event, 130 youth delegates worked on solutions to the pressing issues for the ocean. According to the UN, their ideas ranged from the study of certain species and their food chains in order to decipher the state of biodiversity, to transforming recovered plastic waste into construction materials.

    One of the UK’s youth delegates, Tom Birbeck, participated in the innovathon. Birbeck is a co-founder of an initiative called Arc Marine and told The Canary that the event provided a good opportunity to meet like-minded people who are developing environmentally-sound ideas for tackling key ocean problems.

    Birbeck started Arc Marine with fellow diver James Doddrell to tackle reef degradation in England. The company has designed an artificial reef, among other things, that can be integrated into construction practices. In particular, Arc Marine set out to produce a “nature inclusive design” for the offshore wind-energy sector. Effectively, the company has built a plastic-free and carbon-neutral alternative foundation for offshore wind farm infrastructure. The industry typically uses environmentally problematic materials for these foundations, Birbeck said. Arc Marine’s alternative doubles as living space for species in dire need of habitats due to reef degradation.

    Get out of the way

    During a session on the first day of the official conference, Henk Rogers explained how young people have been instrumental in facilitating the green energy transition elsewhere too. He founded the Blue Planet Alliance in 2020. It aims to get islands and countries around the world to commit legislatively to being reliant on 100% renewable energy by 2045. Hawaii, where Rogers lives, has already made such a commitment. The Pacific island nation of Palau has gone even further, vowing to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2032.

    In the event on the importance of listening to young people from Large Ocean States, otherwise known as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Rogers suggested that Hawaii’s commitment wouldn’t have happened without young people mobilising other citizens and politicians. The Blue Planet Alliance founder argued that the younger generation are more than capable of fighting for their own future. He told The Canary that, in his experience, young people don’t necessarily need their elders’ leadership. Older generations should help young people when they ask for assistance, he argued, but otherwise the former “should get out of the way”.

    Conference outcomes

    Birbeck highlighted the sort of assistance that the UK could provide to ensure that renewable offshore infrastructure helps nature restoration. He pointed to the Netherlands, where the government is making some such developments conditional on their enhancement of the marine environment. Birbeck asserted that the UK government should follow suit for all offshore developments in renewable or fossil energy.

    When asked what outcome he would like to see at the UN Ocean Conference, the Arc Marine co-founder said that nature-inclusive design being used as standard across any offshore or coastal construction project would be welcome. This includes projects like ports and harbours, along with energy infrastructure.

    The Sustainable Ocean Alliance’s (SOA) Caribbean representative Khadija Stewart and Kenley Kenneth, who was Palau’s youth coordinator for the seventh Our Ocean Conference in March, both spoke at the Large Ocean States event. They also shared their hopes about the conference with The Canary. Stewart said she would like to see the scaling up of finance schemes for existing ocean solutions. Essentially, rather than just promoting more and more innovation, Stewart suggested that officials need to get serious about financing and scaling up the solutions we already have. Kenneth, meanwhile, said that he would like to see “concrete outcomes” in terms of how officials are going to invest in young people’s work.

    Ready to do everything

    The Canary asked these young people what different outcomes they’d expect if the UN Ocean Conference were led by them and their peers, rather than older people. Their responses again illustrated what the global community has to gain by letting them lead the way.

    Stewart was confident that a youth-led conference would yield diversity in the range of solutions that would be appropriate to the needs and concerns of people in different parts of the world. She suggested that a Global North perspective tends to dominate in such talks at present. Kenneth argued that, currently, there’s also a tendency to involve young people in the conversation about the problems, but not in the implementation of solutions. With young people at the helm, he said, their many ideas would be funded and put into action. Birbeck, meanwhile, said that a conference led by young people would offer radical and swift decisions. Moreover, he asserted that young people wouldn’t pussyfoot around when it came to calling out and ejecting bad actors, such as extractive industries that engage in greenwashing.

    Diversity, decisiveness, speed, action, and radical thinking. These are essential if we are to meaningfully tackle the triple crises Guterres spoke of. It seems that many young people stand ready to try and – in the UN chief’s words – “do everything to reverse” what older generations have done to the ocean and planet.

    The question is, are those who bear political responsibility for the environmental mess we’re in willing get out of their way?

    Featured image via Sustainable Ocean Alliance / YouTube

    By Tracy Keeling

  • UN Commissioner for Human Rights Comments on US Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health

    In light of the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet made the following comment on June 24, 2022: The US Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s…

    This post was originally published on Human Rights at Home Blog.

  • We Need to Build the Architecture of Our Future

    Diego Rivera (Mexico), Frozen Assets, 1931.

    Diego Rivera (Mexico), Frozen Assets, 1931.

    In April 2022, the United Nations established the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance. This group is tracking the three major crises of food inflation, fuel inflation, and financial distress. Their second briefing, released on 8 June 2022, noted that, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic:

    the world economy has been left in a fragile state. Today, 60 per cent of workers have lower real incomes than before the pandemic; 60 per cent of the poorest countries are in debt distress or at high risk of it; developing countries miss $1.2 trillion per year to fill the social protection gap; and $4.3 trillion is needed per year – more money than ever before – to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

    This is a perfectly reasonable description of the distressing global situation, and things are likely to get worse.

    According to the UN Global Crisis Response Group, most capitalist states have already rolled back the relief funds they provided during the pandemic. ‘If social protection systems and safety nets are not adequately extended’, the report states, ‘poor families in developing countries facing hunger may reduce health-related spending; children who temporarily left school due to COVID-19 may now be permanently out of the education system; or smallholder or micro-entrepreneurs may close shop due to higher energy bills’.

    Renato Guttuso (Italy), La Vucciria, 1974.

    Renato Guttuso (Italy), La Vucciria, 1974.

    The World Bank reports that food and fuel prices will remain at very high levels until at least the end of 2024. As wheat and oilseed prices have escalated, reports are coming in from across the globe – including in wealthy countries – that working-class families have started to skip meals. This tense food situation has led United Nations (UN) Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, to predict that many families will move to one meal a day, which, she says, ‘will be the source of even more instability’ in the world. The World Economic Forum (WEF) adds that we are in the midst of ‘a perfect storm’ if you take into account the impact of increasing interest rates on mortgage payments as well as inadequate salaries. The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva-Kinova, said late last month that the ‘horizon has darkened’.

    Cândido Portinari (Brazil), Coffee Bean Mowers, 1935.

    Cândido Portinari (Brazil), Coffee Bean Mowers, 1935.

    These assessments come from people at the heart of powerful global institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WEF, and the UN (and even from a queen). Although they all recognise the structural nature of the crisis, they are reluctant to be honest about the underlying economic processes, or even about how to adequately name the situation. David M. Rubenstein, the head of global investment firm The Carlyle Group, said that when he was part of US President Jimmy Carter’s administration, their inflation advisor Alfred Kahn warned them not to use the ‘R’ word – recession – which ‘scares people’. Instead, Kahn advised, use the word ‘banana’. Along those lines, Rubenstein said of the current situation, ‘I don’t want to say we’re in a banana, but I would say a banana may not be that far away from where we are today’.

    Marxist economist Michael Roberts does not hide behind words such as banana. Roberts has studied the global average rate of profit on capital, which he shows has been falling, with minor reverses, since 1997. This trend was exacerbated by the global financial crash of 2007–08 which led to the Great Recession in 2008. Since then, he argues, the world economy has been in the grip of a ‘long depression’, with the rate of profit at a historic low in 2019 (just before the pandemic).

    Yildiz Moran (Turkey), Mother, 1956.

    Yildiz Moran (Turkey), Mother, 1956.

    ‘Profit drives investment in capitalism’, writes Roberts, ‘and so falling and low profitability has led to slow growth in productive investment’. Capitalist institutions have shifted from investment in productive activity to, as Roberts puts it, ‘the fantasy world of stock and bond markets and cryptocurrencies’. The cryptocurrency market, by the way, has collapsed by over 60% this year. Dwindling profits in the Global North have led capitalists to seek profits in the Global South and beat back any country (especially China and Russia) that threatens their financial and political hegemony, with military force if necessary.

    Ghastly is the way of inflation, but inflation is merely the symptom of a deeper problem and not its cause. That problem is not merely the war in Ukraine or the pandemic, but something that is confirmed by data but denied in press conferences: the capitalist system, plunged into a long-term depression, cannot heal itself. Later this year, notebook no. 4 on the theory of crisis from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, written by Marxist economists Sungur Savran and E. Ahmet Tonak, will establish these points very clearly.

    Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), Untitled, 2013.

    Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), Untitled, 2013.

    For now, capitalist economic theory starts with the assumption that any attempt to settle an economic crisis, such as an inflationary crisis, must not, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923, ‘disappoint the rentier’. Wealthy bondholders and major capitalist institutions control the policy orientation of the Global North so that the value of their money – trillions of dollars held by a minority – is secure. They cannot, as Keynes wrote nearly a hundred years ago, be disappointed.

    The anti-inflation policies driven by the US and the Eurozone are not going to ease the burdens on the working class in their countries, and certainly not in the debt-ridden Global South. Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Jerome Powell admitted that his monetary policy ‘will cause some pain’, but not across the entire population. More honestly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos tweeted that ‘Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent’. Rising interest rates in the North Atlantic make money far more expensive for ordinary people in that region, but they also make borrowing in dollars to pay off national debts in the Global South virtually impossible. Raising interest rates and tightening the labour market are direct attacks on the working class and developing nations.

    There is nothing inevitable about the class warfare of the governments of the Global North. Other policies are possible; a few of them are listed below:

    1. Tax the global wealthy. There are 2,668 billionaires in the world who are worth $12.7 trillion; the money they hide in illicit tax havens adds up to about $40 trillion. This wealth could be brought into productive social use. As Oxfam notes, the richest ten men have more wealth than 3.1 billion people (40% of the world population).
    2. Tax large corporations, whose profits have escalated beyond imagination. US corporate profits are up by 37%, far ahead of inflation and compensation increases. Ellen Zentner, the chief US economist of the leading financial services company Morgan Stanley, argues that, during the long depression, there has been an ‘unprecedented’ plunge in the share of Gross Domestic Product earned by the working class in the United States. She has called for a return to a more just profit-wages balance.
    3. Use this social wealth to enhance social expenditures, such as funds to end hunger and illiteracy and build health care systems as well as non-carbon forms of public transportation.
    4. Institute price controls for goods that specifically drive-up inflation – such as prices for food, fertilisers, fuel, and medicines.

    The great Bajan writer George Lamming (1927–2022) left us recently. In his 1966 essay, ‘The West Indian People’, Lamming said, ‘The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up’. This was a powerful sentiment from a powerful visionary, who hoped that his home in the Caribbean, the West Indies, would be shaped into a sovereign region that could relieve its people of great problems. This was not to be. Strangely, the IMF’s Georgieva-Kinova quoted this line in a recent article while making the case for the region to collaborate with the IMF. It is likely that Georgieva-Kinova and her staff did not read all of Lamming’s speech, for this paragraph is instructive today as it was in 1966:

    There is, I believe, a formidable regiment of economists in this hall. They teach the statistics of survival. They anticipate and warn about the relative price of freedom… [I] would just like you to bear in mind the story of an ordinary Barbadian working man. When he was asked by another West Indian whom he had not seen for about ten years, ‘and how are things?’, he replied: ‘The pasture green, but they got me tied on a short rope’.

    The post We Need to Build the Architecture of Our Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Latest UN-led talks over Libyan elections fail

    The United Nations Special Advisor on Libya said on Monday, June 20, that the Libyan parties participating in the recent round of talks in Egyptian capital Cairo have failed to reach a consensus over a legal process to hold national elections in the war-torn country. The failed talks have led to fresh apprehensions about the future of the peace process in Libya.

    The third round of talks between the representatives of the Tripoli-based High Council of State (HCS) and the Tobruk-based Libyan parliament were held between June 12 to 20. The first two rounds of talks were held in Cairo last month. The talks to resolve the differences over the overall election process and the governing criteria for candidature in the presidential elections are being hosted by the UN.

    The post Latest UN-led talks over Libyan elections fail appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Whistleblowers: Inside the UN review – a horrific tale of misogyny, rape and 10,000 deaths

    This shocking, methodical documentary uses first-hand testimonies to expose a toxic culture where abusers prey on the vulnerable – while hiding behind a cloak of saintliness

    Not the United Nations as well. We live resigned to the knowledge that our political parties, law enforcers, independent standards agencies and sport governing bodies are functionally corrupt and deeply chauvinistic. Now Whistleblowers: Inside the UN (BBC Two) is here to tell us that the nearest thing we have to an expression of global conscience is a source of shame as much as hope.

    Anyone who has studied the mechanics of the UN security council knows the United Nations is an instrument of iniquitous power, not a check upon it, but Whistleblowers suggests the parts you could still naively have thought of as pure – the collective effort to fight disease, hunger and climate change – ripple with the familiar stench of powerful people who are concerned, it seems, only with how to preserve and abuse their positions. The documentary combines disparate accounts from former senior UN staff, to accumulate a breadth and depth of evidence that becomes crushing.

    We start with Emma Reilly, claiming a boss overruled her when she refused to let China see the names of Uyghur activists who were to attend a human rights council meeting. She feared they would be targeted by state repression. One of those activists says his family was targeted.

    OK, perhaps that’s just one blase manager, and in any case the programme-makers have been sent a UN statement contesting Reilly’s claim. But then we hear from James Wasserstrom, who says he found evidence that the tendering process for the construction of a power station in Kosovo was compromised by kickbacks, and John O’Brien, who raised concerns that an environmental programme in Russia had succumbed to local money-laundering scams.

    Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN went after them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of solicitation and viewing nude photographs on his phone at work (O’Brien sees the allegations as vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, then had his identity leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her flat and refusing to leave: she says the UN had sent them, and had told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Effectively,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me sectioned.” By the time she’d convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting at which she had planned to raise the disclosure of activists’ identities – it so happened that the cops arrived just as the meeting was beginning.

    Still, although the trio’s tears seem real, perhaps all three are lying and the UN’s flat denials are the truth. But we are not even halfway into a 90-minute programme that never feels short of material. Next, the journalist Jeremy Dupin relates how he came to suspect that leaking latrines at a UN base in Haiti caused a catastrophic cholera outbreak that began in 2010 and ended up costing more than 10,000 lives. Attempts to hold anyone accountable were stonewalled.

    Somehow, after this allegation the programme manages to be shocking in a new way. Because, of course, we’re not talking here about powerful people. We are largely talking about powerful men and, in its latter stages, Whistleblowers switches its focus to an organisational culture of misogyny and rape. We hear how peacekeeping troops in Haiti and Central African Republic were implicated in numerous horrific sexual assaults against vulnerable locals, and we meet one of the victims – as well as the former assistant secretary-general Tony Banbury, who resigned in dismay at the UN’s indifferent response to a child in CAR being raped: “I needed the organisation to prioritise that girl. They prioritised the perpetrators.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • Nikole Hannah-Jones Calls for Reparations in Speech to UN General Assembly

    In March, the United Nations marked the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’s groundbreaking 1619 Project, addressed the U.N. General Assembly. As part of our Juneteenth special, we air her full address. “It is time for the nations that engaged in and profited from the transatlantic slave trade to do what is right and what is just. It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas,” Hannah-Jones said. “This is our global truth, a truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there is no repair.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    As we continue our Juneteenth special broadcast, we turn now to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who created The 1619 Project. In March, Nikole Hannah-Jones addressed the United Nations General Assembly as the U.N. marked the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

    NIKOLE HANNAH–JONES: Good morning. It is my deepest honor to speak before you today on this day of international remembrance of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. I have dedicated my life’s work to excavating the modern legacy of transatlantic slavery, and so my thoughts are never far from what has become the defining subject of my journalism, and what I believe continues to be the defining undercurrent of life in the Americas: the legacy of slavery.

    I stand before you, the great-great-grandchild of enslaved men and women born here in the United States of America, part of the millions who lived and died under the brutal, immoral and inhumane system of chattel slavery that existed for the first 250 years of the land that would come to think of itself as the freest nation in the history of the world.

    We gather here to mark the global trade that took some 15 million beloved human beings across the Atlantic in the hulls of barbaric ships, the largest forced migration in the history of the world, one that would reshape the entire Atlantic world and transform the global economy. We must never forget the scale and the depth of the horrors that people of African descent suffered in the name of profit, profit that enriched the European colonial powers and built the nascent economy of the United States. We must never forget how the systems of slavery collapsed, only to be reborn in other models of violent and racist economic exploitation, such as what we benignly call Jim Crow in the United States, but what is more aptly called apartheid.

    But on this solemn day of remembrance, the looking back cannot be and should not be solely defined by African-descended people’s enslavement. Just as defining, just as important to remembering the legacy of the transatlantic slavery are the stories of Black resistance that would, more than any other force, lead to slavery’s collapse in our hemisphere.

    No people voluntarily submit to their enslavement. And by obscuring the role of Black resistance in our collective rememberings of the transatlantic slave trade, we continue to do the work of those who sought to justify slavery by stripping us of our collective humanity.

    People of African descent resisted their enslavement from the moment of their capture. They resisted on the long walk from the interior of Africa to the coast. They resisted in the castles before being dragged out to the waiting ships. They resisted so frequently on the water that slave ships had to be specially designed to try to prevent mutiny. The ocean became the final resting place of thousands of Africans who resisted by choosing a final swim with the ancestors over enslavement in a strange land.

    As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques. We must remember Yanga, who led a community of fugitive Africans and fought the Spaniards so fiercely that they won their status as a free Black settlement.

    We must remember Brazil’s quilombolas, including Palmares, a fugitive Black community that would endure for 90 years in the Portuguese colony, that would import more Africans into slavery than anywhere else in the Atlantic world.

    We must remember the Maroons of British and French Guiana, Cuba and the United States, and the “Bush Negroes” of Suriname, who fought against their oppressors for five decades attempting — as they were attempting to reenslave them.

    We must remember the revolts of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1690, in New York City in 1712, Queen Nanny in 1720, the Stono Rebellion in 1739, and Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760. We must remember the successful uprising of enslaved people — the most successful uprising of enslaved people in the history of the world, the Haitian Revolution, where enslaved people rose up and defeated three mighty colonial empires, becoming the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery and establishing the world’s first free Black republic — an audacity that the Western world has punished Haiti for ever since.

    We must remember revolts in Barbados in 1816, the Baptist War in Jamaica in 1831 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion that same year in the United States, as Black people attempted to make manifest the words of Patrick Henry, the famed American revolutionary, who proclaimed, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” — even as he enslaved African human beings for profit. We must remember freedom fighters such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and Gabriel Prosser.

    We must remember that it was not merely the Enlightenment ideas, some reckoning amongst white abolitionists, that brought the end to the system that had enriched colonial powers, but that abolition was propelled by constant revolt that forced colonial powers to realize, as scholar Mary Reckford wrote, it would remain “more expensive and dangerous to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” Black people were actors in their own freedom.

    Obscuring and marginalizing stories of Black resistance serves to justify the hypocrisy of colonial Europe and the United States by insinuating that had slavery been so bad, surely, African peoples would have fought harder against it. These are lies of omission that in the absence of truth warp our collective memory.

    Resistance, therefore, must be central to any remembrances of the transatlantic slave trade, and must, therefore, be connected to the ongoing resistance movements in the fight for Black liberation across the globe.

    I stand here before you today, a recipient of that tradition of resistance.

    My father was born in a little shack in 1945 on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was born into a family of sharecroppers, the violently enforced system of labor exploitation that emerged at the end of slavery. He was born into a strictly apartheid state, one where Black people could not vote, could not use the public library, could not attend schools with white children, and were lynched for things such as starting a union, walking into a room where a white woman was alone, failing to get off of the sidewalk fast enough in deference to a white person, or — the greatest crime of all in the American South — having the audacity to be a financially prosperous Black person. In Greenwood in the 1940s, life was so devastating that Black children could be put to the fields as early as the age of 3 to start carrying water to workers. So, when my father was 2 years old, my grandmother, Arlena Paul, a Black woman sharecropper, packed a suitcase and loaded her two young children on a northbound train and escaped the apartheid of the American South.

    My grandmother had a fourth-grade education, and she would spend the rest of her life as a domestic and a janitor. But that single act of resistance, leaving the racial caste system of the American South with nothing but the determination that her own children would not pick cotton like she had, like her parents had, like her enslaved grandparents before her had, set in motion the events that would lead me to stand before this distinguished body today, addressing this most esteemed convening, representing all of the nations of the world. Hers was an act of resistance that mirrored those of millions of enslaved Black people who resisted every day in ways big and small. She, like our ancestors, resisted in order to plant the seed for freedoms and opportunities that she would never see for herself.

    And it is this history, this understanding, that leads me to argue that the defining story of the African diaspora in the Americas is not slavery, but our resistance to it, of people determined to be free in societies that did not believe they had a right to freedom.

    We must acknowledge this history as the legacy of slavery can be seen all around us. Today the descendants of slavery fight to resist their conditions in the societies that once enslaved them. They suffer the highest rates of poverty, the highest rates of incarceration, the highest rates of death and the highest rates of violence. And the tradition of resistance continues in protests against police violence and inequality from Brazil to Cuba to the United States.

    But we, the people of the African diaspora, should not have to find ourselves still resisting. It is long past time for the European colonial powers, for the United States of America to live up to their own professed ideas, to become the great and moral nations that they believe themselves to be. It is not enough to simply regret what was done in the past; they are obligated to repair it.

    As I stand before representatives of the countries that once enslaved African peoples and the peoples who were once enslaved, as we collectively remember this day, the way for me to honor those who toiled and died and fought is to say this clearly and without flinching: It is time for the nations that engaged in and profited from the transatlantic slave trade to do what is right and what is just.

    It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas. This is our global truth, the truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there’s no repair. It is time — it is long past time — for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and all the devastation that it has wrought, and all the devastation that it continues to reap.

    I thank you very much for your attention as we all remember this crime against humanity together. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who created The 1619 Project.

    When we come back, we look at how Harvard University has revealed the school’s extensive ties to slavery. We’ll speak to MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UN calls on UAE to release British man imprisoned in Dubai since 2008

    UN working group rules that Ryan Cornelius has been held arbitrarily and subjected to rights violations

    UN officials have called on the United Arab Emirates to immediately release a British businessman who has been detained in the country since 2008.

    The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention has ruled that Ryan Cornelius has been held arbitrarily in the UAE since 2008 when he was arrested at Dubai airport. He has contracted tuberculosis while in detention.

    Continue reading…

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

  • UN human rights chief could not speak to detained Uyghurs or families during Xinjiang visit

    Michelle Bachelet says she was supervised by China officials throughout six-day visit that critics have called a propaganda coup for Beijing

    Michelle Bachelet has said wasn’t able to speak to any detained Uyghurs or their families during her controversial visit to Xinjiang, and was accompanied by government officials while in the region.

    The UN human rights chief, who this week announced she would not be seeking another term, told a session of the 50th Human Rights Council in Geneva that there were limitations on her visit to the region in China, where authorities have been accused of committing crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

    Continue reading…

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

  • UN human rights chief to forgo second term amid China trip criticism

    Michelle Bachelet, strongly criticised over Xinjiang visit, cites personal reasons for decision

    The United Nations’ human rights chief has announced her decision to step down, citing “personal reasons”, amid weeks of speculation following her recent China trip that drew fierce criticism from activists and western politicians.

    Writing on Twitter, Michelle Bachelet, who assumed the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights in 2018, said: “It is time to go back to Chile and be with family.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria!

    So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

    So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

    The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

    We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

    Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

    Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

    Oh, this devil USA:

    Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

    Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

    This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

    Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

    BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

    • The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
    • The demilitarization of the African continent,
    • The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
    • That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

    Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

    So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

    This is his organization:

    Here’s a statement from Madu:

    Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

    ….Smart Madu Ajaja

    This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

    This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

    I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

    So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

    USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

    The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

    –Hugo Chavez

    The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

    –Xoài Pham

    Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

    –Frantz Fanon (source)

    William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

    Here, a bit of an update:

    The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

    A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

    • Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
    • Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
    • Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
    • Cambodia: 2-3 million people
    • Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
    • Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
    • Colombia: 60,000 people
    • Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
    • Croatia: 15,000 people
    • Cuba: 1,800 people
    • Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
    • East Timor: 200,000 people
    • El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
    • Greece: More than 50,000 people
    • Grenada: 277 people
    • Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
    • Haiti: 100,000 people
    • Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
    • Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
    • Iran: 262,000 people
    • Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
    • Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
    • Korea: 5 million people
    • Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
    • Laos: 50,000 people
    • Libya: at least 2500 people
    • Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
    • Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
    • Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
    • Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
    • Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
    • Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
    • Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
    • Somalia: at least 2,000 people
    • Sudan: 2 million people
    • Syria: at least 350,000 people
    • Vietnam: 3 million people
    • Yemen: over 377,000 people
    • Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

    Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

    So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

    So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

    At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

    There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

    It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

    How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

    For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

    • Blockchain
    • Gamification
    • Genomics
    • Impact Finance
    • Smart Cities
    • Biosecurity State

    This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

    The post Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sexual Violence by Russian Troops in Ukraine “Chronically Underreported”

    The United Nations is demanding an independent investigation into charges of rape and sexual assault committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. We speak with Pramila Patten, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who is just back from Ukraine and told the Security Council Monday about multiple shocking reports of rape and assault — all of which Russia has since denied. “We are dealing with a crime which is chronically underreported,” says Patten, who emphasized the need to establish safe spaces for victims to come forward and ensure no perpetrators be granted amnesty through a potential ceasefire or peace agreement. We also speak with Oksana Pokalchuk, executive director of Amnesty International Ukraine, whose organization is investigating the alleged war crimes.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations is demanding an independent investigation into charges of rape and sexual assault committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Pramila Patten, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told the U.N. Security Council Monday about an increasing number of reports of sexual abuse and human trafficking. On Monday, Patten addressed both the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

    PRAMILA PATTEN: We have all heard the accounts of horrific acts of sexual violence, reports of gang rape, rape in front of family members, sexual assault at gunpoint, women who have become pregnant as a result of rape, as well as the reports of refugee women and children being exploited by traffickers and predators who view this turmoil not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to abuse the vulnerable. …

    We have debunked the insidious myth that sexual violence in conflict is inevitable. Now we must demonstrate, through proactive protection and empowerment efforts, that it is indeed preventable.

    It is time to move from best intentions to best practice to catch the women and girls who may otherwise fall through our safety nets. Let us not forget that while the eyes of the world are on the Ukrainian women and girls who are caught in the crossfire, who are living in terror in occupied territories, and who have been deported or forced to flee their homes and homeland, they are looking to us. We must not and cannot fail them.

    AMY GOODMAN: Russia has rejected the accusations that its troops committed sexual violence in Ukraine. This is Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N.

    VASSILY NEBENZIA: [translated] The ratcheting up of accusations of Russian service personnel committing crimes of a sexual nature since the very beginning of our special military operation in Ukraine has become a favorite tactic of the Kyiv regime and our Western colleagues. We all recall how in the Ukrainian and Western media, and also in this room, our soldiers were repeatedly accused of sexual violence with reference to certain reports containing allegedly reliable data. However, no evidence was provided.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. Pramila Patten, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, she recently returned from Ukraine. Also with us, Oksana Pokalchuk, she is executive director of Amnesty International Ukraine. She’s been investigating war crimes by Russian forces since the full-scale invasion began at the end of February.

    Pramila Patten, let’s begin with you. You’re just off your address to the U.N. Security Council. Talk about what you found in Ukraine.

    PRAMILA PATTEN: Well, you will all recall that it was only a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the first reports of sexual violence began to surface. And as the conflict passes the 100-day mark, unfortunately, we continue to receive reports of sexual violence.

    I was in Ukraine from the 1st to the 5th of May, and I also went to Poland and Moldova. I did not meet with victims of sexual violence in Ukraine — I was in Lviv and Kyiv — for obvious reasons: security. But I met with civil society organizations who were frontline service providers who have engaged with victims. I also met with families of victims. And, of course, I met with government officials and signed a cooperation agreement.

    But what I can tell you is that the reports — credible reports — from civil society organizations, but also from government officials, like the Office of the Prosecutor General or the vice prime minister, Olha Stefanishyna, with whom I signed the framework of cooperation, shared a lot of information with me about brutal sexual violence being committed, significantly against women and girls, but also against men and boys.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Pramila, could you talk about the fact that, as many have pointed out, the number of sexual — incidents of sexual violence is likely massively underreported? Because a representative of the Ukrainian Women’s Fund, for example, said that sexual violence, in particular, is a hidden crime, because many women and girls will likely never come forward and report what’s happened.

    PRAMILA PATTEN: You are absolutely right. And that’s why I didn’t wait for accurate bookkeeping, hard data, to react. And that’s why I went to Ukraine, because we are dealing with a crime which is chronically underreported. And that’s my concern. And for me, going to Ukraine was to send a strong message, especially to victims, to urge them to break the silence, because their silence is the perpetrators’ license to rape.

    And as of the 3rd of June, only 124 reports of sexual violence are verifiable, are of a verifiable nature, and are being looked into by the human rights monitoring of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. And that verification process is ongoing. And you can imagine that we — due to security and access constraints, the verification process is taking time. But in 102 cases, perpetrators are reported to be Russian Armed Forces, and two cases from Russian-affiliated groups.

    But, for sure, that we are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. And this is why I signed the framework of cooperation and discussed with the government in Ukraine, but also in Moldova and Poland as refugee-receiving countries, the need to establish safe spaces which will be conducive — to provide a conducive environment for the victims to report, because due to stigma and a host of reasons, this crime is very much invisible.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: I’d like to bring in Oksana Pokalchuk, a representative — you are the executive director of Amnesty international Ukraine. Your organization and you, yourself, have been carrying out an investigation on possible war crimes, including sexual violence, but broader war crimes, in and around the area of the capital Kyiv. Could you tell us what you’ve found?

    OKSANA POKALCHUK: Yeah, sure. So, the pattern of crimes committed by Russian forces in the Kyiv region — but not only, of course — that we have documented includes both unlawful attacks and willful killings of civilians. So, we have to face it that a lot of killings, and most of them, were just apparently extrajudicial executions. So it was a straight will to kill people there.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And explain the areas you were in. Where all did Amnesty conduct investigations of this nature?

    OKSANA POKALCHUK: Sure. Our last report was about the Kyiv region. So, we were in different areas around Kyiv and which were in occupation for more than two months. So it was Borodyanka, Bucha, Hostomel, Stoyanka and many, many other cities and villages around Kyiv. So, for example, in Borodyanka, we found at least 40 civilians were killed in disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks which devastated an entire neighborhood and left thousands — really, thousands — of people homeless. So, in Bucha, for example, we documented 22 cases of unlawful killings by Russian forces. And yeah, as I said before, most of them were apparent extrajudicial executions.

    AMY GOODMAN: And how do you respond, Oksana Pokalchuk, to Russia saying you haven’t provided the evidence?

    OKSANA POKALCHUK: Well, how I would respond? We have evidences. And as far as I know, there are a couple of — there are a couple of cases that are already under the investigation by Ukrainian authorities — if you’re talking about sexual violence, of course, because it’s much more when we talk about other war crimes. But when we come back to the sexual violence, as far as I know, it’s a couple of cases are under the investigation. So I hope that soon we will see open and transparent court proceedings on the matter and it will be [inaudible] bring to justice.

    AMY GOODMAN: Pramila Patten, I wanted to ask you about the whole debate within Ukraine about how explicit to be. And you, I’m sure, have dealt with this around the world. I mean, there’s been the firing of a human rights official in Ukraine for being extremely explicit about the rape of children. And there’s a whole discussion within the human rights and journalistic community in Ukraine. Can you talk about how to talk about this?

    PRAMILA PATTEN: Well, this is one of the areas where my office and the United Nations system will be providing support to the Ukrainian government. And that’s part of the framework of cooperation, which I have signed, that is providing support in the area of justice and accountability.

    We are dealing with a very sensitive issue. And we know why victims do not come forward to report, and one of the reasons being the retraumatization and the revictimization. And there are guiding principles on how to engage with victims, on how to document evidence and how to investigate. And one of the fundamental principles is the “do no harm” principle, which is extremely important.

    And this is precisely why I will be deploying, following the framework of cooperation that I signed on the 3rd of May — will deploy staff with expertise on sexual violence documentation, investigation, prosecution. They will be embedded not only in the Office of the High Commissioner’s human rights monitoring team but also in the Office of the Prosecutor General to support the investigation, to support the documentation, to support the collection of evidence before the evidence trail goes cold. This is crucial. There will be no justice if that stage goes wrong.

    And we have seen a lot in the past, whether it is in Iraq or with the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, who have been interviewed, for example, over 15 times, with all the inconsistency that comes along, then making cases untenable in a court of law. So, we want to reverse that culture of impunity into a culture of justice and accountability. We have to get it right. And I’m very encouraged by the multiplicity of efforts to bolster justice, to bolster accountability.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Pramila, could you say — you’ve said explicitly that any peace agreement, whenever it comes, should state explicitly that there will be no amnesty for perpetrators of sexual violence. Could you explain why you think sexual violence should be treated differently from other war crimes, and in what instances amnesty has been granted in areas of conflict where sexual violence has been prevalent?

    PRAMILA PATTEN: Well, history has taught us that during multiple peace negotiations, the first item that has been on the negotiation table — where, of course, women are conspicuously lacking — the question of amnesty for crimes of sexual violence has always been on the table. And there are contexts where the option was women or peace. And as usual, women get sacrificed.

    So, I am very encouraged by the fact that the Ukrainian government was very receptive to my suggestion of this area of priority, this pillar in the framework of cooperation be included, that in the event of any ceasefire agreement or peace agreement, that there will be specific provisions to ensure that there is no amnesty for sexual violence crimes, because war have limits, and international humanitarian law makes it very clear. And sexual violence can never be excused, can never be amnestied. And we have a solid normative framework with resolutions of the Security Council on the question of amnesty.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Oksana, there have been, of course, as you know, accusations of alleged war crimes — although, of course, much fewer in number — by Ukrainian forces. What do you know about those allegations? And what have you found in your investigations, alleged war crimes by, of course, Russian forces, but also Ukrainian forces?

    OKSANA POKALCHUK: We are now in a situation when a lot of territories where allegedly some war crimes were committed or are now committing, they are under occupation. So, we need to wait for the moment where we, as Amnesty, will be, and, of course, Ukrainian and international investigators will be able to reach this area and to do investigation on the ground, because without being on the ground, without collecting proper evidences, it is impossible to say about war crimes. I mean, we can’t — in my opinion, we can’t presume it.

    Of course, there are no war where there are one party of the war would be — I don’t know — will not violate international humanitarian law, and another part will. Of course, we have to face that, of course, Ukrainian army — I mean, we will find these evidences. But so far, we don’t have enough evidences to talk about it in legal terms. So we have to wait for liberation of occupied territories, come to the territory and just gather information, gather evidences there.

    AMY GOODMAN: Pramila Patten, as we wrap up, Ukraine was already one of the leading countries in Europe when it came to human trafficking. You also have addressed this issue. If you can describe what you saw and how this issue should be addressed?

    PRAMILA PATTEN: Well, with the displacement of close to 14 million people in the past hundred days, mostly women and children, with 6.8 million of women and children, mainly, having fled across borders, what I see is a human trafficking crisis within a humanitarian crisis. And human trafficking is not a separate issue. It is a symptom of a refugee crisis that breeds the exact conditions that human traffickers prey upon: economic impoverishment and a lack of better options. And we know from 2014, even in Ukraine and in the region, how human trafficking thrives. And human trafficking is one of the most serious organized crimes of the day, transcending cultures, geography and time. And we also know that for predators and human traffickers, war is not a tragedy, it is an opportunity.

    What I saw in both Moldova and Poland, where I visited reception centers, is that the majority of the refugees are living with host communities. And there are grave security and protection concerns in both countries. These reception centers are run by volunteers, with only a bare-bone presence of the United Nations agencies. There is a complete lack of oversight in terms of accommodation offers by private citizens, a lack of oversight of transportation arrangements. These are really serious concerns. The reception centers, although the premises have been offered by the local government, they are being run by a multiplicity of actors volunteering to provide services. And from what I saw, they have little or no training or experience in supporting victims, victims of trafficking or persons at risk of trafficking.

    And what is also clear, in all fairness, is that these refugee-receiving countries are overwhelmed. And they urgently need support to be able to allocate sufficient resources to support the responses, given that even service providers and NGOs have limited capacity to sustain an adequate and safe level of response.

    So, I think what is needed, what is critical, is that the international community mobilize to ensure that effective protection systems are in place in all transit and destination countries and at all border crossings. And given the challenges of this transnational organized crime, as well as the very complex nature and multiple dimensions of human trafficking, the response requires an integrated and holistic response, a concerted cross-border response by humanitarian partners, law enforcement agencies, border forces, immigration officials and political leaders. On Monday, when I briefed the Security Council, I urged for a regional European compact to be led by the European Council. And I have the firm conviction that this is what is required at this point in time.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Pramila Patten, we want to thank you for being with us, U.N. special rapporteur on sexual violence in conflict, and Oksana Pokalchuk, executive director of Amnesty International in Ukraine.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fury at UN human rights chief over ‘whitewash’ of Uyghur repression

    Open letter signed by academics in wake of Michelle Bachelet’s China visit demands release of UN report on human rights abuses

    Dozens of scholars have accused the UN human rights chief of having ignored or contradicted academic findings on abuses in Xinjiang with her statements on the region.

    In an open letter published this week, 39 academics from across Europe, the US and Australia called on Michelle Bachelet to release a long-awaited UN report on human rights abuses in China.

    Continue reading…

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

  • UN, Chinese human rights abuses and US interference

    United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s visit to China last month was seized on by the United States to ramp up its anti-Chinese rhetoric, writes William Briggs.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • A new book argues Julian Assange is being tortured. Will Australia’s new PM do anything about it?

    REVIEW: By Matthew Ricketson, Deakin University

    It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever.

    Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges?

    When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene?

    Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t The New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection?

    If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no. At very least, it’s more complicated than that.

    To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place.

    Julian Assange
    Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, Britain, on April 11, 2019. His shaving gear had been confiscated. Image: The Conversation/EPA/Stringer

    That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.

    What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018:

    I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!

    Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”

    The Trial of Julian Assange
    Cover of The Trial of Julian Assange … “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. Image: Verso

    The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council directly appoint
    special rapporteurs on torture. The position is unpaid — Melzer earns his living as a professor of international law — but they have diplomatic immunity and operate largely outside the UN’s hierarchies.

    Among the many pleas for his attention, Melzer’s small office chooses between 100 and 200 each year to officially investigate. His conclusions and recommendations are not binding on states. He bleakly notes that in barely 10 percent of cases does he receive full co-operation from states and an adequate resolution.

    He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests.

    Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”.

    What he finds is stark and disturbing:

    The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.

    It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.

    Collateral murder
    The dirty secrets of the powerful are difficult to face, which is why we — and I don’t exclude myself — swallow neatly packaged slurs and diversions of the kind listed at the beginning of this article.

    Melzer rightly takes us back to April 2010, four years after the Australian-born Assange had founded WikiLeaks, a small organisation set up to publish official documents that it had received, encrypted so as to protect whistle-blowers from official retribution.

    Assange released video footage showing in horrifying detail how US soldiers in a helicopter had shot and killed Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in 2007.

    Apart from how the soldiers spoke — “Hahaha, I hit them”, “Nice”, “Good shot” — it looks like most of the victims were civilians and that the journalists’ cameras were mistaken for rifles. When one of the wounded men tried to crawl to safety, the helicopter crew, instead of allowing their comrades on the ground to take him prisoner, as required by the rules of war, seek permission to shoot him again.

    As Melzer’s detailed description makes clear, the soldiers knew what they were doing:

    “Come on, buddy,” the gunner comments, aiming the crosshairs at his helpless target. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

    The soldiers’ request for authorisation to shoot is given. When the wounded man is carried to a nearby minibus, it is shot to pieces with the helicopter’s 30mm gun. The driver and two other rescuers are killed instantly. The driver’s two young children inside are seriously wounded.

    US army command investigated the matter, concluding that the soldiers acted in accordance with the rules of war, even though they had not. Equally to the point, writes Melzer, the public would never have known a war crime had been committed without the release of what Assange called the “Collateral Murder” video.

    The video footage was just one of hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks released last year in tranches known as the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and cablegate. They revealed numerous alleged war crimes and provided the raw material for a shadow history of the disastrous wars waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, in Aghanistan and Iraq.

    Julian Assange in 2010
    Julian Assange in 2010. Image: The Conversation/ Stefan Wermuth/AP

    Punished forever
    Melzer retraces what has happened to Assange since then, from the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden to Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in an attempt to avoid the possibility of extradition to the US if he returned to Sweden. His refuge led to him being jailed in the United Kingdom for breaching his bail conditions.

    Sweden eventually dropped the sexual assault charges, but the US government ramped up its request to extradite Assange. He faces charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, which, if successful, could lead to a jail term of 175 years.

    Two key points become increasingly clear as Melzer methodically works through the events.

    The first is that there has been a carefully orchestrated plan by four countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and, yes, Australia — to ensure Assange is punished forever for revealing state secrets.

    Assange displaying his ankle security tag in 2011
    Assange displaying his ankle security tag in 2011 at the house where he was required to stay by a British judge. Image: The Conversation/Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

    The second is that the conditions he has been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to if the US’s extradition request is granted, have amounted to torture.

    On the first point, how else are we to interpret the continual twists and turns over nearly a decade in the official positions taken by Sweden and the UK? Contrary to the obfuscating language of official communiques, all of these have closed down Assange’s options and denied him due process.

    Melzer documents the thinness of the Swedish authorities’ case for charging Assange with sexual assault. That did not prevent them from keeping it open for many years. Nor was Assange as uncooperative with police as has been suggested. Swedish police kept changing their minds about where and whether to formally interview Assange because they knew the evidence was weak.

    Melzer also takes pains to show how Swedish police also overrode the interests of the two women who had made the complaints against Assange.

    It is distressing to read the conditions Assange has endured over several years. A change in the political leadership of Ecuador led to a change in his living conditions in the embassy, from cramped but bearable to virtual imprisonment.

    Since being taken from the embassy to Belmarsh prison in 2019, Assange has spent much of his time in solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours a day. He has been denied all but the most limited access to his legal team, let alone family and friends.

    He was kept in a glass cage during his seemingly interminable extradition hearing, appeals over which could continue for several years more years, according to Melzer.

    Julian Assange’s partner, Stella Morris, speaks to the media
    Julian Assange’s partner, Stella Morris, speaks to the media outside the High Court in London in January this year. Image: The Converstion/Alberto Pezzali/AP

    Assange’s physical and mental health have suffered to the point where he has been put on suicide watch. Again, that seems to be the point, as Melzer writes:

    The primary purpose of persecuting Assange is not – and never has been – to punish him personally, but to establish a generic precedent with a global deterrent effect on other journalist, publicists and activists.

    So will the new Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, do any more than his three Coalition and two Labor predecessors to advocate for the interests of an Australian citizen? In December 2021, Guardian Australia reported Albanese saying he did “not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” and that “enough is enough”.

    Since being sworn in as prime minister, he has kept his cards close to his chest.

    The actions of his predecessors suggest he won’t, even though Albanese has already said on several occasions since being elected that he wants to do politics differently.

    Melzer, among others, would remind him of the words of former US president Jimmy Carter, who, contrary to other presidents, said he did not deplore the WikiLeaks revelations.

    They just made public what was the truth. Most often, the revelation of truth, even if it’s unpleasant, is beneficial. […] I think that, almost invariably, the secrecy is designed to conceal improper activities.

    The Conversation

    Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • French court rejects Kanak Senate bid to annul New Caledonia referendum outcome

    RNZ Pacific

    An indigenous legal challenge in a bid to annul the result of last December’s referendum on New Caledonia’s independence from France has failed.

    The highest administrative court in Paris has rejected a claim by the Kanak customary Senate that the impact of the covid-19 pandemic was such that the referendum outcome was illegitimate.

    More than 96 percent voted against independence in the third and last referendum under the Noumea Accord, but more than 56 percent of voters abstained.

    The pro-independence parties had called for a boycott of the referendum after France had rejected pleas for the vote to be postponed until this year.

    When the first community outbreak of the pandemic was recorded in September, a lockdown was imposed, which was extended into October, as thousands contracted the virus and hundreds needed hospital care.

    The court in Paris found that the epidemiological situation had improved in October and November and that by the time of the referendum on December 12, more than 77 percent of the population had been vaccinated.

    It also said the year-long mourning declared by the Kanak customary Senate in September was not such as to affect the sincerity of the vote.

    No minimum turnout
    The court added that neither constitutional provisions nor the organic law make the validity of the vote conditional on a minimum turnout.

    In the week before the referendum, 146 voters and three organisations filed an urgent submission to the same court, seeking to postpone the vote.

    They said given the impact of the pandemic, it was “unthinkable” to proceed with such an important plebiscite.

    They said because of the lockdown, campaigning had been unduly hampered as basic freedoms impinged.

    However, the court rejected the challenge and voting went ahead as intended by the French government.

    Rejecting the referendum outcome, the pro-independence side said apart from court action, it would seek to win the support for its position from the Pacific Islands Forum and the United Nations.

    A pro-independence delegate to last month’s UN decolonisation meeting said French President Emmanuel Macron had declared after the referendum that New Caledonia showed it wanted to stay French although it was known that 90 percent of Kanaks wanted independence.

    French Senate mission planned
    The French Senate is hearing experts this week as its law commission prepares work on a new statute for New Caledonia following last year’s rejection of independence.

    The commission, which is chaired by François-Noel Buffet, has also formed a team that will travel to New Caledonia in two weeks for talks with all stakeholders.

    The team is expected to stay for a week and complete its work by the end of July.

    In December, more than 96 percent voted against independence in the third and last referendum under the Noumea Accord, which had been the decolonisation roadmap since 1998.

    However, the pro-independence parties refuse to recognise the result, saying their abstention had rendered the outcome of the process illegitimate.

    Paris plans to hold a referendum next June on a new statute for a New Caledonia within the French republic.

    Buffet said his mission to Noumea was to consider the institutional situation by consolidating the dialogue initiated by the Matignon and Noumea Accords between France and New Caledonia.

    Electoral rolls issue
    A key issue will be the fate of the electoral rolls.

    The Noumea Accord, whose provisions have been enshrined in the French constitution, restricts voting rights to indigenous people and long-term residents.

    Migration this century has added about 40,000 French citizens who remain excluded from referendums and from provincial elections.

    The anti-independence parties want the rolls to be unfrozen, but the pro-independence side is strongly opposed to this.

    It told the UN Decolonisation Committee that France’s intention to open the electoral rolls to French people who arrived after 1998 was the ultimate weapon to “drown” the Kanak people and “recolonise” New Caledonia.

    It warned the Kanaks would be made to disappear, which would not be accepted but inevitably lead to conflict.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • To meet the Chinese challenge in the Pacific, NZ needs to put its money where its mouth is

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    This week’s White House meeting between NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and US President Joe Biden reflected a world undergoing rapid change. But of all the shared challenges discussed, there was one that kept appearing in the leaders’ joint statement — China in the Pacific.

    Tucked within the statement, with all its promises of increased co-operation and partnership, was this not-so-subtle declaration:

    In particular, the United States and New Zealand share a concern that the establishment of a persistent military presence in the Pacific by a state that does not share our values or security interests would fundamentally alter the strategic balance of the region and pose national-security concerns to both our countries.

    Unsurprisingly, this upset Chinese officials, with a foreign ministry spokesperson accusing Ardern and Biden of trying to “deliberately hype up” the issue.

    But hopefully the statement will also prompt New Zealand to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to increasing assistance in the Pacific region. Expressing “concern” about China’s influence means little otherwise.

    Joe Biden meets Jacinda Ardern
    Shared concerns: Joe Biden meets Jacinda Ardern in the Oval Office on May 31. Image: The Conversation/Getty Images

    Aid and influence

    While New Zealand and Australia are responsible for around 55 percent of all of the aid flowing into the region, that contribution needs to be seen in perspective.

    There are two obvious shortcomings. First, more needs to be done to promote democracy in the Pacific, which means supporting anti-corruption initiatives and a free press. Second, both countries simply need to give more.

    Neither spends anywhere near the 0.7 percent of gross national income on development assistance recommended by the United Nations (UN).

    The high-tide mark for both was long ago: 0.52 percent for New Zealand in 1975 and 0.48 percent for Australia in 1967. Today, New Zealand spends 0.26 percent and Australia 0.21 percent of their incomes on overseas aid.

    It is against this backdrop of under-spending that China has come to be seen as an attractive alternative to the traditional regional powers. It has no colonial baggage in the Pacific and is a developing country itself, having made impressive leaps in development and poverty reduction.

    Debt and distress
    Many of the small developing island states in the Pacific share common challenges and vulnerabilities: negative migration patterns, risk from climate change and fragile economies.

    Three states in the region (Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu) are in the UN’s “least developed countries” category. Two others (Samoa and Vanuatu) are just above the threshold. Most are at high risk of debt distress, increasing the risk of poor policy decisions simply to pay bills.

    The average debt-to-GDP ratio for Pacific states has risen from 32.9 percent in 2019 to 42.2 percent in 2021. Vanuatu, Palau and Fiji have debt-to-GDP ratios greater than 70 percent.

    China currently accounts for only about 6 percent of all aid in the region, but supplements this with grants and loans, some commercial and some interest-free. These overlap with grand infrastructure plans such as the Belt and Road Initiative aimed at connecting many regions of the world.

    While it might not have secured its desired regional multilateral trade and security agreement with Pacific nations, China is clearly in the Pacific for the long haul.

    Working with China
    This presence need not be seen entirely negatively. In the right circumstances, Chinese assistance can have a positive impact on economic and social outcomes in recipient countries, according to the International Monetary Fund. (The same study also found a negative but negligible effect on governance.)

    Overall, Chinese influence in the Pacific is not necessarily something that must be “countered”. For the good of the region, countries should seek ways to work together, especially given that aid to the Pacific is often fragmented, volatile, unpredictable and opaque.

    Co-ordinated, efficient and effective partnerships between donors, recipients and regional institutions will be vital, and co-operation with China could be part of this.

    New Zealand and Australia need to expand their work on the vast infrastructure and development needs of the Pacific. Transparency should be a priority with all projects and spending, and co-operation should be tied to shared benchmarks such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

    For its part, China should give more aid rather than loans (especially to the least developed countries) to avoid the risk of poor countries becoming beholden to lenders or even bankrupted.

    Peace and security
    Above all, peace and security between and within countries should be an agreed fundamental principle. The good news is that South Pacific nations have already taken steps towards this by agreeing to the Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.

    This could be complemented by an agreement banning foreign military bases in the region to maintain its independence. If needed, peacekeeping or outside security assistance should be multilateral through the UN, not bilateral through secret arrangements.

    Co-operation for the good of the Pacific should be the goal, but this is only possible if the region is not militarised.

    Chinese influence and power in the Pacific is a reality that cannot be wished away or easily undermined. With the US similarly determined to assert itself, the stakes are rising.

    All nations should work together to ensure no small, independent Pacific country becomes a pawn in what could be a very dangerous game.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie, professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • West demands publication of UN’s long-awaited Xinjiang report

    Michelle Bachelet’s report on alleged rights abuses in China’s Uyghur region remains under wraps despite recent six-day tour

    Pressure to release a long-awaited Xinjiang report is mounting on the UN’s rights head, as her recent six-day visit to China left activists, western governments and commentators unsatisfied.

    The report, which Michelle Bachelet said was being finalised late last year, is believed to contain evidence of China’s alleged human rights abuses of its Uyghur ethnic minority group in Xinjiang.

    Continue reading…

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

  • The Guardian view on the UN in Xinjiang: a grave error | Editorial

    The UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, failed to adequately address terrible abuses in the region

    “Not only vindicated, but justified,” a Chinese diplomat crowed on Twitter. His remark came only days after an international media consortium revealed new details of the terrible abuses taking place in Xinjiang. Internal Chinese documents – reportedly obtained by a hacker and passed on to the BBC and others – put a human face on some of the perhaps 1 million mostly Uyghur Muslim detainees who have been held in re-education camps without charge or trial, with police photographs of inmates as young as 15.

    The Xinjiang police files also revealed the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy for anyone attempting to flee these centres, and people being jailed for up to 10 years because their phone has run out of credit – apparently regarded as an attempt to avoid digital surveillance. In one county, around one in eight adults were detained in 2017-18. Previously documented abuses include forced sterilisations, children being sent to state boarding schools because their parents are detained, and people being held because they have relatives overseas.

    Continue reading…

  • How the US Government Steals from Other Countries

    The American Government explains its thefts from other countries as being justifiable because the U.S. Government has slapped sanctions upon those countries, and because these sanctions authorize the U.S. Government to steal whatever it wants to steal, from them, that it can grab. Here are just a few such examples:

    On May 26, Reuters headlined “U.S. seizes Iranian oil cargo near Greek island,” and reported:

    The United States has confiscated an Iranian oil cargo held on a Russian-operated ship near Greece and will send the cargo to the United States. …
    “The cargo has been transferred to another ship that was hired by the U.S.,” the source added, without providing further details.
    The development comes after the United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on what it described as a Russian-backed oil smuggling and money laundering network for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. …
    U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), which monitors Iran-related tanker traffic, said the Pegas had loaded around 700,000 barrels of crude oil from Iran’s Sirri Island on Aug. 19, 2021.
    Prior to this load, the Pegas transported over 3 million barrels of Iranian oil in 2021, with over 2.6 million of those barrels ending up in China, according to UANI analysis.
    In 2020, Washington confiscated four cargoes of Iranian fuel that were bound for Venezuela and transferred them with the help of undisclosed foreign partners onto two other ships which then sailed to the United States. …

    On 24 October 2019, USA Today bannered “Pentagon planning to send tanks, armored vehicles to Syrian oil fields” and pretended that if (Syria’s actual invader) America wouldn’t be stealing Syria’s oil, then (Syria’s actual defender, invited into the country in order to help defeat the U.S.-led invasion of it) Russia would be stealing it. Their article closed by saying that: “Nicholas Heras, an expert on Syria with the Center for a New American Security [CNAS], … said, ‘the Pentagon is making contingencies for a big fight with Russia for Syria’s oil.’” Perhaps the intention of that article was to help build Americans’ support for stealing Syria’s oil. (The CNAS is a Democratic Party think tank, and was there endorsing the Republican President Trump’s operation to steal Syria’s oil — it’s a bipartisan goal of the U.S. Government.) By contrast, two days later, Russia’s Sputnik News headlined about America’s thefts of oil from Syria, “The Russian military described the US scheme as nothing less than ‘international state banditism.’” (Russia had no need to deceive anyone about that.)

    On 14 December 2019, Syria Times headlined “A huge convoy for US occupation forces enters Syria’s Qameshli city,” and reported that:

    In a new breach of international laws, the US occupation forces sent today to Qameshli city in Hasaka province a new convoy composed of tanks, ambulances and dozens of vehicles and cars loading military and logistic materials. According to local sources, the convoy illegally entered this morning from Iraq in order to fortify the US occupation forces’ positions in the Syrian Jazeera.
    This convoy is the biggest one that entered the Syrian territories since several months.
    Over the few past months, the US occupation forces sent through illegal crossing points thousands of vehicles loaded with weapons, military equipment and logistic materials to reinforce their existence in the Syrian Jazeera region and to steal Syrian oil and wealth.

    On 2 August 2020, Reuters bannered “Syria says U.S. oil firm signed deal with Kurdish-led rebels” and reported that,

    Damascus “condemns in the strongest terms the agreement signed between al-Qasd militia (SDF) and an American oil company to steal Syria’s oil under the sponsorship and support of the American administration”, the Syrian statement said. “This agreement is null and void and has no legal basis.”

    Furthermore: “There was no immediate response from SDF officials to a Reuters’ request for comment. There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials.”

    The U.S. Government has done this also to Venezuela and other countries that it likewise wants to take over.

    On 13 March 2022, Reuters headlined “Sanctions have frozen around $300 bln of Russian reserves, FinMin says,” and reported that “Foreign sanctions have frozen around $300 billion out of $640 billion that Russia had in its gold and forex reserves, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with state TV.”

    The lawyer and geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris explains how and why America’s blocking Russia’s international payments of Russia’s sovereign debt, and Germany’s seizure of some of Gazprom’s German assets, “violate the [international-law] principle of sovereign immunity; both the central bank and Gazprom are, after all, owned by the Russian Government. … These were the sort of acts that, once upon a time, governments could legally make only in time of war. But of course Germany and the United States are not formally at war with Russia. So we see how another extraordinary step has been taken, towards … ever-greater illegality.” He wonders “what damage” will be done “to the international legal system and to the international financial system.”

    Many of these actions, by America and its allies, are alleged to be done not in order to reinforce existing international laws (which, of course, they instead violate), but the opposite: to advance “the international rules-based order,” which “rules,” that will be made by the U.S. Government, will be introduced as constituting new legal precedents in order to replace the current source of international laws, which is the U.N. and its authorized agencies. The U.S. Government would gradually replace the U.N., except as the U.N.’s being a sump for unprofitable expeditions that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democratic’ U.S. Government can endorse. There would be a further weakening of the U.N., which is already so weak so that, even now, anything which is done by the U.S. and its allies is, practically speaking, not possible to be prosecuted in international courts such as the International Criminal Court, which body is allowed to prosecute alleged crimes only by leaders of “third world” nations. America’s “rules-based international order” would replace that toothless U.N.-based system, and would be backed up by America’s over-800 military bases around the world. Unlike the existing U.N., which has no military, this “rules-based international order” would be enforced at gunpoint, everywhere.

    However, even America’s allied nations are getting fleeced, though in different ways, by the U.S. Government. This is being done via international corruption. For example: America’s F-35 warplanes from Lockheed Martin Corporation and its sub-contractors (Northrop-Grumman, Pratt & Whitney, and BAE Systems), are so bad and so very expensive that the U.S. Government wants to cut its losses on the plane without cutting the profits by Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’-contractors’ on it, and therefore needs to increase its allies’ purchases of these warplanes. NATO is the main marketing organization for U.S. ‘defense’ contractors; and, so, on 15 April 2022, Russia’s RT news headlined “US nuclear bombs ‘shared’ with European allies will be deployed on Lockheed Martin jets, NATO explains,”and reported that,

    Jessica Cox, director of the NATO nuclear policy directorate in Brussels, said … that “By the end of the decade, most if not all of our allies will have transitioned” to the F-35. …
    Germany would replace its aging Tornado jets with F-35s, committing to buy up to three dozen and specifically citing the nuclear sharing mission as factoring in the decision. …
    Finland and Sweden have recently voiced a desire to join NATO, and Helsinki already announced it would buy some 60 F-35s in early February [notably, BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th]. …
    The F-35 was originally proposed as a cost-effective modular design that could replace multiple older models in service with the US Air Force, Navy, and the Marines. In reality, it turned into three distinct designs with a lifetime project cost of over $1.7 trillion, the most expensive weapons program in US [and in all of global] history.
    In addition to the price tag, the fifth-generation stealth fighter has also been plagued with performance issues, to the point where the new USAF chief of staff requested a study into a different aircraft in February 2021.
    General Charles Q. Brown Jr. compared the F-35 to a “high end” sports car, a Ferrari one drives on Sundays only, and sought proposals for a “clean sheet design” of a “5th-gen minus” workhorse jet instead. Multiple US outlets characterized his proposal as a “tacit admission” that the F-35 program had failed.

    That word “characterized” was there linked through to a number of informative articles, such as these, about the F-35:

    Forbes: “The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed”
    Defense News: “The Hidden Troubles of the F-35: The Pentagon will have to live with limits on F-35’s supersonic flights”

    That Defense News report said that the basic design-requirements for the F-35 prohibit any speed higher than the speed of sound (Mach 1), because the air-friction above that speed would instantly melt the stealth coating, and,

    The potential damage from sustained high speeds would influence not only the F-35’s airframe and the low-observable coating that keeps it stealthy, but also the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

    Though that publication — which could not exist apart from the funding that is provided directly or indirectly from America’s ‘defense’ contractors — used euphemisms to describe this problem, such as “potential damage” and that there would need to be imposed “a time limit on high-speed flight” and that “the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability,” the actual facts are: those “short bursts” would, in the practical world, be virtually instantaneous, approximating zero seconds, and the phrase “a risk” would be referring to 100% — a certainty. That’s virtually the opposite of the ‘news’-report’s allegation that the F-35 would need to avoid “sustained high speeds,” because the plane would instead need to avoid ANY supersonic speed. In other words: the plane’s stealth capability would need to be virtually 100% effective and at speeds only below the speed of sound, in order for the plane to be, at all, effective, and deserving to be called a “stealth” warplane. The only exception to that would be the F-35A, for the Air Force (not usable by the Navy — from aircraft carriers — nor by the Army).

    As regards the F-35A (Air Force F-35 version), Wikipedia says about the F-35 that its maximum speed is Mach 1.6 (1.6 times the speed of sound). By contrast, Russia’s Su-57 (which is less expensive), has a maximum speed of Mach 2.0. The reason why Russia’s is both a better plane and far less costly is that Russia’s military-industrial complex is controlled ONLY by the Government, whereas America’s Government is instead controlled mainly by its ‘defense’-contractors, and is, therefore, overwhelmingly corrupt, which is also the reason why America is the permanent and unceasing warfare-state, ever since 25 July 1945, when its “Cold War” started, and has never ceased.

    One of the few honest statements that the world-champion liar and the world’s most respected living person, U.S. President Barack Obama, made about his goals as President, was his 28 May 2014 statement to the graduating class at the West Point Military Academy, that,

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    He was saying there that all other nations — including U.S. ‘allies’ — are “dispensable.” Consequently, of course, in that view: stealing by the U.S. Government, from any other Government, is acceptable. It’s the U.S. Government’s viewpoint, and is politically bipartisan in America. At least until now, it is an acceptable viewpoint, to most people. Perhaps truths have been hidden from them. Who has been doing this, and why, would then be the natural question on any intelligent individuals’ minds. But certainly there can be no reasonable doubt that the U.S. Government does — and rather routinely — steal from other countries. That’s a fact, if anything is.

    The post How the US Government Steals from Other Countries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blinken criticises Chinese ‘manipulation’ of high-profile UN visit to Xinjiang

    US secretary of state says conditions imposed on Michelle Bachelet prevented independent assessment of abuses against Uyghurs, including genocide

    US secretary of state Antony Blinken has expressed concern over China’s “efforts to restrict and manipulate” the visit of the UN’s top human rights official to the Xinjiang region.

    “The United States remains concerned about the UN high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet and her team’s visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and PRC efforts to restrict and manipulate her visit,” Blinken said in a statement on Saturday.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Europe silent on plight of refugees in Libya, says IOM mission chief

    Federico Soda said there needed to be ‘more condemnation’ of the conditions in state-run detention centres in Libya

    Europe has been accused by a senior international official of acquiescence in the plight of thousands of migrants in Libya held in arbitrary detention in “deplorable conditions”.

    Federico Soda, chief of mission at the International Organisation for Migration’s mission in Libya, said not enough was being done by outside actors to try to change the war-torn country’s “environment of arbitrary detention and deplorable conditions” for migrants.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Xi Jinping defends China’s human rights record to visiting UN commissioner

    Leader warns against using issue as ‘excuse to interfere in internal affairs of other countries’ as Michelle Bachelet goes to Xinjiang

    China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has spoken with the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, as she visited the Xinjiang region, warning against the politicisation of human rights as an “excuse to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” and defending his government’s record.

    It comes amid renewed defensiveness in Beijing after the publication of a significant data leak from Xinjiang’s security apparatus, including mugshots of thousands of detained Uyghurs and internal documents outlining shoot-to-kill policies for those who try to escape.

    Continue reading…

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

  • PM Jacinda Ardern launches US tour with NZ ‘open for business’ message

    RNZ News

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has spoken to media to demonstrate to the US market that New Zealand is “open for business”, having arrived in the US yesterday.

    Her trip includes meeting members of Congress and the UN Secretary-General, attending a launch event for sustainable meat exports, delivering the Harvard Commencement speech, meeting with California governor Gavin Newsom, and meeting with executives of tech giants like Twitter and Microsoft.

    With US President Joe Biden in Japan for the launch, and Ardern having only just recovered from covid-19, the hoped-for meeting between the two is still up in the air, but there is optimism from the New Zealand side it will happen.

    Ardern’s first event was a sit down with major American tourism media, as part of the drive to update the US market about New Zealand, and she will later meet meet with representatives of US multinational investment management firm BlackRock.

    Ardern said the message of New Zealand being open for business and open for travel was really important at this time.

    Travelling with a business delegation and doing as much as possible to open doors on their behalf is important, she said.

    “Our high level meeting with BlackRock enabled our business delegation to sit face-to-face with a number of influential individuals in their investor sector from the United States. A really thoughtful, interesting discussion and dialogue which all of our business representatives had the chance to participate in.”

    Ardern said the dominant issue discussed was sustainability.

    Watch the PM speaking


    PM Ardern in the US.      Video: RNZ News

     

    One-on-one with UN chief
    Ardern also had a one-on-one with the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, where Ukraine was top of the agenda.

    Ardern was keen to hear the secretary-general’s perspective on the war in Ukraine and to offer New Zealand’s support in the ongoing diplomatic work.

    She said it was a chance to “discuss everything from the conflict in Ukraine to climate change and more broadly, the role that New Zealand can play in UN reform which we’ve long been an advocate and supporter of”.

    “A really fruitful discussion but really useful to hear the secretary general’s reflections on the current conflict,” she said.

    Ardern said that predominately the focus was on issues of climate sustainability and the war on Ukraine.

    “Any reflection on the relationship between China and the United States whilst ultimately that is a matter for them, what we will continue to advocate is for peace and stability in our region, including any discussions around increasing tensions around Taiwan.”

    Ardern said NZ would continue to be strong advocates of the US using the CPTPP as its port of call for a meaningful trade option.

    ‘An alternate framework’
    “They have proposed an alternate framework, our mission as a country needs to be to keep our aspirations high but also work with what’s on the table,” she said.

    “Ultimately the CPTPP is an existing framework that offers a significant amount from New Zealand’s perspective. However we will also engage with what’s currently on the table.”

    Ardern does not yet have an update on a meeting with Biden.

    Ardern said that having an independent foreign policy meant New Zealand had been very consistent in maintaining its values of peace, stability, the use of dialogue and the importance of multilateral institutions like the UN as an honest broker in difficult situations.

    “There is tension in our region, we have our various periods of time seen escalation in language, we will constantly call, on New Zealand’s behalf and ours, on peace and stability in our region.”

    The Chinese foreign minister is doing a tour of a number of Pacific nations. Ardern is not surprised by this.

    “It’s not necessarily just presence, it’s the nature of that presence and the intention around it,” she said.

    ‘We want collaboration’
    “From our perspective within our region, we’re very firm that yes, of course, we want collaboration in areas where we have shared concern, issues like climate adaptation and mitigation, we want quality investment and infrastructure in our region, we don’t want militarisation, we don’t want an escalation of tension.

    “We want peace and stability so we will remain firm in our values.”

    She said the question would continue to be whether some of those engagements were necessary.

    Ardern’s day will be rounded off with a repeat appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

    Just before departing New Zealand, she virtually attended the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an alliance of 13 countries including New Zealand that proposes joint efforts on climate change and digital issues but is widely considered a US attempt to limit China’s economic influence.

    The IPEF also includes the members of “the Quad” – the US, Australia, India and Japan – who have been meeting in Tokyo, along with Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

    Together, the grouping represents 40 percent of the world’s GDP.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Thousands of detained Uyghurs pictured in leaked Xinjiang police files

    Documents detailing shoot-to-kill policy for people who try to escape published as UN human rights chief visits region

    A new trove of hacked Chinese police photographs and documents shedding light on the human toll of Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang has been published as the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, visits cities in the region.

    The data trove – referred to as the Xinjiang police files and published by a consortium of media including the BBC – dates back to 2018 and was passed on by hackers to Dr Adrian Zenz, a US-based scholar and activist, who shared it with international media earlier this year. It includes thousands of photographs of detained people and details a shoot-to-kill policy for people who try to escape.

    Continue reading…

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

  • UN moves towards crackdown on illegal wildlife trade in historic resolution

    The UN has moved closer towards meaningfully tackling the illegal wildlife trade. The UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) adopted a historic resolution on the issue at a recent session in Vienna.

    There’s no current global agreement on tackling wildlife crime, which is a major threat to species. The move by the UN CCPCJ to adopt the resolution is a step towards filling that void.

    It follows another international body, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), adopting new guidelines to better tackle wildlife trafficking involving the seas.

    Wildlife crime protocol

    Angola, Kenya, and Peru submitted the draft resolution in April. It was titled ‘Strengthening the international legal framework for international cooperation to prevent and combat illicit trafficking in wildlife’. It called on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to consider the benefits of adopting an additional protocol in the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC). This additional protocol would be specifically about preventing and combatting the illegal wildlife trade. Current protocols in UNTOC cover the trafficking and smuggling of people, and the manufacturing and trafficking of arms.

    In May 2021, Gabon and Costa Rica called for a global agreement on tackling wildlife crime. At the time, Gabon’s president Ali Bongo Ondimba explained:

    Wildlife crimes, pose a threat to human and animal health, driving many species towards extinction, degrading entire ecosystems and their ability to sequester carbon, depriving governments of revenue, exacerbating corruption, insecurity, and poverty. If we include the impacts of these crimes on ecosystems, then The World Bank estimates their value at a staggering $1-2 trillion a year.

    Angola announced its support for a global agreement later that year, as did Malawi. The resolution on the matter had numerous co-sponsors, namely Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, the US, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Honduras, Malawi,  Mozambique, Paraguay, and the Philippines.

    A UN first

    The Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime is an alliance that supports legal reforms to tackle illicit trade in wildlife. It pointed out that the resolution is the first to mention a possible new agreement on addressing the illegal trade.

    Animal charity Born Free was a founding member of the global initiative. Responding to the UN’s adoption of the resolution, Born Free’s head of policy Mark Jones said:

    A million or more animal and plant species are staring down the barrel of extinction, with wildlife crime being one of the key drivers. Wildlife crime is also exacerbating climate change, and poses a threat to livelihoods, security and public health. Yet there is currently no international agreement on tackling the problem. Today’s Resolution represents the first step towards securing such an agreement.

    This first step includes UN member states engaging with the UNODC on the prospect of the additional protocol, along with sharing information on their experience of tackling wildlife crime.

    A gamechanger

    The success of the resolution follows the IMO’s adoption of new guidelines for its member states. The IMO is a specialised UN agency responsible for matters pertaining to international shipping.

    The new guidelines relate to the prevention, detection, and reporting of wildlife trafficking in maritime transport, OCCRP reported. They also address due diligence, cooperation, and information-sharing across supply lines.

    The NGO Traffic, which focuses on the illegal wildlife trade, explained that:

    With 90% of the world trade being seaborne and an estimated 72-90% of illicit wildlife volumes being trafficked through maritime transport, the sector holds a responsibility to engage against this transnational organized crime.

    A number of countries, including Kenya, Brazil, and Tanzania, submitted the guidelines to the IMO. WWF’s global wildlife practice leader, Dr. Margaret Kinnaird, has described them as “a gamechanger in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade”.

    Featured image via The wub / Wikimedia, cropped to 770×403, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Dan McGarry: A new day in the Pacific – but will this mean a new Australian trajectory?

    THE VILLAGE EXPLAINER: By Dan McGarry

    With the Australian general election largely done and dusted, and with a clear (if still-to-be-quantified) mandate, Anthony Albanese faces greater and more immediate international challenges than any Australian Prime Minister since the Cold War began.

    Between climate change and an increasingly truculent — not to say belligerent — China, Pacific island countries are searching for reassurance, safety and support. Reassurance that we are valued and respected, and that a rules based order has the same rules for everyone else as it has for us.

    Safety, from the increasingly violent buffeting of climate change, and from the risk of losing our balance in the increasingly straitened geopolitical space we occupy. And support for our own self-determination, territorial integrity and survival.

    Each if these will have significant impacts on the Albanese government’s domestic policies.

    Each will have lasting impact on the Pacific islands region.

    Let’s hope they’ve got a plan in place. They do not have the luxury of time.

    Part of this fight will have to happen while they’re still strapping on the gloves. We’ve already looked at some of the challenges Penny Wong is likely to face when she (almost certainly) becomes Foreign Minister.

    In this issue, we’ll enumerate some of the immediate challenges faced by Wong and her cabinet colleagues.

    PIF Secretariat in shambles
    The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat is in a shambles right now, in no small part because of Australia’s call for a vote during the selection of its most recent Secretary-General, rather than enduring more painstaking but traditional method of consensus-building our leaders learned in the village meeting house.

    The voting split the membership, and the Micronesian contingent still have not reconciled themselves completely.

    There is little Australia can do to fix that. But they can offer unconditional support to the body itself, and for the idea it embodies. They can formally uphold the Boe Declaration, which lists climate change as the single greatest security threat faced by the Pacific islands region, by re-basing (sorry) their security stance on this premise.

    They can fund and support the Blue Pacific strategy. They can fund the Secretariat’s climate indemnity scheme. They can show our reluctant leaders that the PIF is worth being part of.

    More importantly, they can promote our voices in Washington and at the UN. Our plight on the world stage resembles the challenges women have faced since… forever. Ignored, subverted, explained to, denied agency over our own body politic. We don’t need people to speak for us. We need people to listen when we speak for ourselves.

    Endorsement and sponsorship for voices like those of our esteemed Pacific Elders would go a long way to achieving that.

    Even more ambitiously: Is a Pacific COP possible? I’d be pleasantly surprised if this Labor government proved willing to spend the time and effort reaching a landmark such as this.

    Port Vila's Bauerfield airport
    Port Vila’s Bauerfield airport … flooded for the first time in living memory. Image: The Village Explainer

    Immense time, resources needed
    The time and resources required would be immense, and would compete with dozens of looming challenges in the foreign relations/defence space.

    Despite the massive victory it could bring, the opportunity costs are immense. If a COP were achieved, it would build a legacy that could be relied on for years to come, but as we’ve stated before, all this would have to be achieved with a lethargic, hidebound DFAT bureaucracy.

    It’s sadly much easier to imagine Australia lurching from crisis to crisis, as it has for decades.

    In terms of bilateral relations, the stakes are even higher. It is clear now that China intends to build on its perceived momentum in the Pacific, and to test Labor’s mettle from the very start.

    Wang Yi’s tour of four (or five?) Pacific island nations is only days away. His diplomats have been working hard to replicate the success they achieved with Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare, who signed an unprecedented security agreement that would allow personnel to be stationed in-country and ships to visit and re-victual.

    It doesn’t appear that Wang will get what he wants. The pressure is on in Kiribati, but the government there has paid a hefty political price for its whole-throated support of China.

    Since 2020, it’s been feeling much more phlegmatic than it was in the past.

    Chinese base in Kiribati a worry
    Good thing, too. A Chinese base in Kiribati is one that even I worry about. Having AA/AD capabilities just a hop, skip and a jump from Honolulu would force a fundamental re-evaluation of the US Navy’s Pacific stance.

    I’ve pooh-poohed talk of bases in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands in the past. I worry about Kiribati.

    Vanuatu, at least, has managed to keep dancing on the head of an increasingly pointy pin. Resisting pressure at the highest level to include an overt security component in Wang Yi’s gift bag, it has instead signed on to a massive upgrade for its Luganville airport, which will allow wide-body aircraft to fly there directly from Asia.

    The island of Espiritu Santo has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. An upgrade to its international airport is part of Vanuatu’s 2018 tourism development strategy.

    Yes, it’s undeniably true that any airport that can handle an A330 NEO can also handle a C17 or a Xi’an Y-20. But Vanuatu has — for the moment, at least — avoided explicitly allowing any such flights, except possibly for humanitarian reasons.

    Vanuatu’s example is illuminating. They appear to have translated a high-stakes geopolitical gambit into an economic development gain that fits the country’s plans, and which will provide a massive economic boost to its moribund tourist industry.

    But they are faced with increased stridency from all sides, and if they lose the space to manoeuvre, either through rising geopolitical tensions or because climate change pushes us past the point of resilience, then we will be more at risk ourselves, and more of a risk to our neighbours.

    A precarious truth in the Pacific
    This precarious truth applies even more so in Solomon Islands, in PNG, in Fiji … in fact everywhere in the region. Security begins with stability and predictability. We need to know we’ll be around in a generation’s time before we make any other promises.

    And we need to know that Australia’s promises will be kept this time, rather than sacrificed at the altar of domestic politics, as they have under every Liberal and Labor government since the millennium began.

    Can Penny Wong unilaterally undo these all tensions? No. But she can fight for a foreign policy that changes Australia’s trajectory, rather than one that attempts to change ours.

    Rather than trying to align us to Australia, she can fight to align Australia to confront our common existential threats, to listen to how we expect to address them, and then to be a proper friend, and act on our words.

    The Village Explainer by Dan McGarry is a semi-regular newsletter containing analysis and insight focusing on under-reported aspects of Pacific societies, politics and economics. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.