Category: United Nations

  • The following calls for inputs have been issued by the UN Human Rights Mechanisms with deadlines in November 2021 and law professors whose practice, research, and/or scholarship touches on these topics may be interested in submission: Special Rapporteur on the…

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

  • RNZ News

    In just a few weeks the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply as millions cope without desperately needed international aid, New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis says.

    Bellis is Al Jazeera’s senior producer in Afghanistan and reported on the turmoil in August as the Taliban took over the government and thousands of people tried to flee.

    She has dealt with Taliban leaders for a long time, and has sensed a change in their attitudes since they first ruled the country before being toppled 20 years ago.

    She had to leave the country in mid-September because the network feared for her safety and Bellis noted on Twitter that the Taliban were detaining and beating journalists trying to cover protests.

    Now she has returned and told RNZ Sunday Morning that she was not worried about her safety.

    “The situation here is pretty dire and there are a lot of stories still to be told and I feel invested in what’s happening here and I also just love the country. It’s a beautiful place to be with amazing people and I genuinely like being here.”

    However, the country is facing an uncertain future with its population suffering more than ever now that international aid has been cut off.

    UN warns of humanitarian crisis
    This week the United Nations warned that Afghanistan is becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and Bellis agrees.

    “The Taliban took over about two months ago and I just can’t believe how quickly everything has deteriorated.

    “People cannot find food, there’s no money, they can’t pay for things, employers can’t pay their workers because there’s no cash, they can’t get money out even from the ATMs.”

    Millions of jobs have disappeared, half of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from and already children are dying from malnutrition, Bellis said.

    All the aid agencies are appealing to the world to listen.

    23 million need urgent help
    She is about to go out with the UN Refugee Agency whose teams are organising some aid distribution as the temperatures drop to 2 degC overnight as winter approaches. They are handing out blankets, food and some cash to thousands of the needy in camps in Kabul.

    “But it’s such a Band-Aid. There is no way they can reach the number of people they need to reach — it’s  like 23 million people who need that kind of assistance,” she said.

    Neighbouring countries such as Pakistan and Iran were very concerned, in part because they fear a huge influx of refugees. They have closed the borders to try and keep them away.

    The process of getting money and food into people’s hands had broken down, she said, with a lot of it due to United States sanctions.

    Three quarters of the country ran on foreign donations before the Taliban took over and that has dried up because no countries are recognising the Taliban’s legitimacy to govern.

    Bellis has spoken to one senior Taliban official who said that at recent meetings between the Taliban and the US in Doha the Americans would not tell the Taliban what policies they needed to enact to unfreeze billions of dollars in funding.

    “They [the Americans] are playing with millions of people’s lives.”

    School problem for girls
    She believes some Taliban leaders are pragmatic and would be willing to agree to high school girls being educated but are worried they will alienate their conservative base.

    In the main, primary school age girls are able to attend their lessons but the problem is at secondary school level.

    “If you’re a high school girl in Kabul it’s awful – sitting around thinking how did this happen. It’s really frustrating and really frustrating for everyone to watch and say this doesn’t make sense.”

    Taliban Badri 313 fighter
    An elite Taliban Badri 313 fighter guarding Kabul airport … facing threats from ISIS-K. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR

    Bellis said while she feels safe at the moment, the main problem is the terrorist group, ISIS-K, who have made threats against the hotel where she is staying.

    The Taliban have said they will protect guests and have placed dozens of extra guards outside.

    ISIS-K is believed to only number between 1200 and 1500 yet they are a potent force with their random attacks, such as beheading members of the Taliban, whom they hate.

    She believes the Taliban’s biggest worry is that ISIS will appeal to its most fundamentalist members.

    ISIS attracting recruits
    ISIS is also believed to be trying to attract recruits who would be trained as fighters and be paid $400 a month which is a substantial amount of money in Afghanistan.

    Bellis said she feels guilty staying at a hotel with the scale of poverty and deprivation she is witnessing.

    “Right outside the door people are desperate,” she said.

    She visited a major maternity hospital in Kabul yesterday and the only medication available for women giving birth was paracetamol.

    “Imagine going into labour and thinking, OK if anything goes wrong I’ve got paracetamol. It’s just life and death on so many levels.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ANALYSIS: By Nathan Cooper, University of Waikato

    As the UN climate summit in Glasgow kicks off tomorrow, it marks the deadline for countries to make more ambitious pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    The meeting is the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and is being heralded as the last best chance to avoid devastating temperature rise that would endanger billions of people and disrupt the planet’s life-support systems.

    New Zealand will be represented by the Climate Minister and Green Party co-leader, James Shaw, along with a slimmed-down team of diplomats.

    COP26 GLASGOW 2021

    Shaw, who described climate change as the “most significant threat that we face for decades to come”, will take part in negotiations aimed at achieving global net zero, protecting communities and natural habitats and mobilising finance to adequately respond to the climate crisis.

    This is the time for New Zealand to commit to delivering on its fair share of what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming.

    To understand why COP26 is so important we need to look back to a previous summit, COP21 in 2015, which resulted in the Paris Agreement. Countries agreed to work together to keep global warming well below 2℃ and to aim for no more than 1.5℃.

    They also agreed to publish plans to show how much they would reduce emissions and to update these pledges every five years — which is what should be happening at the Glasgow summit. Collectively, current climate pledges (known as Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) continue to fall a long way short of limiting global warming to 1.5℃.

    Many countries have failed to keep pace with what their climate pledges promised. The window to limit temperature rise to 1.5℃ is closing fast.

    Time to raise climate ambition
    On our current trajectory, global temperature is likely to increase well above the 2℃ upper limit of the Paris Agreement, according to a UN report released last week.

    New Zealand has agreed to take ambitious action to meet the 1.5℃ target. But its current pledge (to bring emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030) will not achieve this.

    If all countries followed New Zealand’s present commitments, global warming would reach up to 3℃. The government has committed to increase New Zealand’s NDC — after receiving advice from the Climate Change Commission that its current pledge is not consistent with the 1.5℃ goal — but has not yet outlined a figure.

    The effects of the growing climate crisis are already present in our corner of the world. Aotearoa is becoming more familiar with weather extremes, flooding and prolonged drought.

    Many of our low-lying Pacific island neighbours are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Some are already looking to New Zealand to take stronger regional leadership on climate change.

    A perception of New Zealand as a potential safe haven and “Pacific lifeboat” reminds us of the coming challenge of climate refugees, should global warming exceed a safe upper limit.

    More work to do
    New Zealand’s emissions have continued to rise since the Paris summit but our record on climate action has some positives. The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act, enacted in 2019, requires greenhouse gas emissions (other than biogenic methane) to reach net zero by 2050.

    Only a handful of other countries have enshrined such a goal in law.

    The act also established the Climate Change Commission, which has already provided independent advice to the government on emissions budgets and an emissions reduction plan for 2022-2025. But much more needs to be done, and quickly, if we are to meet our international commitments and fulfil our domestic targets.

    Climate Change Commission recommendations around the rapid adoption of electric vehicles, reduction in animal stocking rates and changing land use towards forestry and horticulture provide some key places to focus on.

    As COP26 begins, New Zealand should announce a more ambitious climate pledge, one stringent enough to meet the 1.5℃ target. Announcing a sufficiently bold NDC at COP26 will provide much-needed leadership and encouragement for other countries to follow suit.

    It will also act as a clear signpost for what our domestic emissions policies are aiming for, by when and why. But, no matter what New Zealand’s revised NDC says, much work will remain to ensure we make good on our commitments and give the climate crisis the attention it demands.The Conversation

    Dr Nathan Cooper is associate 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.

  • China breaks the US-led blockade to assume its UN seat 50 years ago. A 10% drop in magnesium production has occurred. China accounts for 85% of global magnesium production.

    Pang Jianwei and collaborating scientists have established the first integrated quantum communication network, an “unhackable” network.

    The post News on China | No. 73 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Abdulla AbdulKarim AlAnjawi is a 23-year-old Bahraini national who was arrested without a warrant from his home by Bahraini authorities in the beginning of 2021. He has been subjected to torture and ill-treatment both during interrogations and while in detention at Jau prison, where he is serving his sentence.

    At dawn on the 4th of January 2021, officers in civilian clothing knocked on Abdulla’s house door, waking his father and interrogating him about his son’s whereabouts. They then proceeded to wake Abdulla up, handcuff him, and drag him into their car. They also searched the entire house and took some of Abdulla’s belongings, including all of his phones. Authorities did not present a warrant or give a reason for the arrest.

    The day after his arrest, Abdulla called his family to inform them that he was at the CID. He remained in detention for 11 days without any contact, after which he was taken to the Office of the Public Prosecution, with his lawyer present. He was only allowed to call his family again after being transferred to Dry Dock Detention Center. During interrogations, Abdulla was threatened, so he did not mention the details of his torture out of fear. He only mentioned to his family that the torture he had undergone was so severe that he was forced to give false confessions to the charges that were raised against him. The torture resulted in various injuries, including back and feet pain, which he did not receive treatment for, despite requesting to see a doctor.

    Abdulla had been previously sentenced to two years in prison on two charges of unlawful assembly. He served these two years and was later released in 2017. On the 14th of September 2021, Abdulla was sentenced to 10 years in prison with a fine of 100 thousand Bahraini dinars. He was charged with: 1- joining a terrorist cell, 2- financing terrorism, and 3- transferring money, explosive canisters, and transmitters inside Bahrain. At no point during the trial was a timeframe given as to when Abdulla would have allegedly committed these crimes, and the prosecution has failed to give specific dates or locations in relation to these charges. Abdulla was unable to freely communicate with his lawyer or prepare for the trial, and his forced confession was used to convict him.

    While in prison, Abdulla has also suffered from ill-treatment and discrimination. He developed a fever and congestion due to the small and overcrowded surroundings in which he was placed, where infections are easily transmissible among inmates. Abdulla’s family filed a complaint to the Ombudsman, who visited and questioned Abdulla, although he did not mention whom exactly it was that had visited him.

    The treatment of Abdulla at the hands of Bahraini authorities, from his arbitrary arrest without a warrant, his denial of a fair trial and due process rights, the multiple threats, ill-treatment, and religious discrimination suffered, all constitute violations of Bahrain’s obligations under the Constitution as well as various under international treaties, including the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

    Therefore, ADHRB urges authorities to grant Abdulla a retrial that respects international evidentiary standards and is not based on false confessions extracted under duress. Finally, ADHRB calls upon authorities to urgently investigate allegations of ill-treatment and torture with a view to holding the responsible officers accountable.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Abdulla AbdulKarim AlAnjawi appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • SPECIAL REPORT: By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Armed conflict in West Papua has caused an exodus of displaced people into one of the most remote parts of neighbouring Papua New Guinea.

    The latest flashpoint in the conflict is in the Indonesian-administered Bintang Mountains regency, where state forces are pursuing West Papua Liberation Army fighters who they blame for recent attacks on health workers in Kiwirok district.

    Since violence surged in Kiriwok last month, Indonesian security forces have targetted suspected village strongholds of the OPM-Free Papua Movement’s military wing.

    At least 2000 people are recorded by local groups to have fled from the conflict either to other parts of Bintang Mountains (Pegunungan Bintang) or crossed illegally into the adjacent region over the international border.

    Hundreds of people have fled across to Tumolbil, in Yapsie sub-district of the PNG province of West Sepik, situated right on the border.

    A spokesman for the OPM, Jeffrey Bomanak, said that those fleeing were running from Indonesian military operations, including helicopter assaults, which he claimed had caused significant destruction in around 14 villages.

    “Our people, they cannot stay with that situation, so they are crossing to the Papua New Guinea side.

    “I already contacted my network, our soldiers from OPM, TPN (Liberation Army). They already confirmed 47 families in Tumolbil.”

    Evidence of the influx
    A teacher in Yapsie, Paul Alp, said he saw evidence of the influx in Tumolbil last week.

    “It is easy to get into Papua New Guinea from Indonesia. There are mountains but they know how to get around to climb those mountains into Papua New Guinea.

    “There are foot tracks,” he explained, adding that Papua New Guineans sometimes went across to the Indonesian side, usually to access a better level of basic services.

    A village destroyed in Pengunungan Bintang regency, Papua province.
    A village destroyed in Pengunungan Bintang regency, Papua province. Image: ULMWP/RNZ

    Alp said West Papuans who had come to Tumolbil were not necessarily staying for more than a week or so before returning to the other side.

    He and others in the remote district confirmed that illegal border crossings have occurred for years, but that it had increased sharply since last month.

    For decades, the PNG government’s policy on refugees from West Papua has been to place them in border camps, the main one being at East Awin in Western Province, with support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

    Thousands of displaced Papuan have ended up at East Awin, but many others who come across simply melt into the general populace among various remote villages along the porous border region.

    Threadbare security
    Sergeant Terry Dap is one of a handful of policemen in the entire Telefomin district covering 16,333 sq km and with a population of around 50,000.

    He said a lot of people had come across to Tumolbil in recent weeks, including OPM fighters.

    “There’s a fight going on, on the other side, between the Indonesians and the West Papuan freedom fighters.

    “So there’s a lot of disruption there [in Tumolbil]. So I went there, and I talked to the ward development officer of Yapsie LLG [Local Level Government area], and he said he needed immediate assistance from the authorities in Vanimo [capital of West Sepik].”

    “They want military and police, to protect the sovereignty of Papua New Guinea, and to protect properties to make sure the fight doesn’t come into PNG.”

    Sergeant Dap said he had emailed the provincial authorities with this request, and was awaiting feedback.

    Papua New Guinea police
    Papua New Guinea police … “There’s a fight going on, on the other side, between the Indonesians and the West Papuan freedom fighters.” Image: Johnny Blades/RNZ

    More civilians crossing over
    According to Bomanak, the impacts of displacement from recent attacks in Kiwirok district are ongoing.

    “This problem now is as we have damage in village, more civilians will cross over in Papua New Guinea side.

    “Five to six hundred villagers, civillians, mothers and children, they’re still in three locations, out in jungle in Kiwirok, and they’re still on their way to Papua New Guinea,” he warned.

    On the PNG side, Sergeant Dap said some of the people coming across from West Papua have traditional or family links to the community of Tulmolbil

    But their presence on PNG soil creates risk for locals who are fearful their communities could get caught in the crossfire of Indonesian military pursuing the Papuan fighters.

    Dap said he spoke with the OPM fighters who had come to Tumolbil, and encouraged them not to stay long.

    “I’ve talked to their commander. They said there’s another group of people coming – about one thousand-plus coming in,” he said.

    “I told them, just stay for some days and then you go back, because this is another country, so you don’t need to come in. You go back to your own country and then stay there.”

    Violence in mountainous Pengunungan Bintang regency, near the border with PNG, October 2021.
    Clashes in the mountainous Pengunungan Bintang regency, near the border with PNG, in October 2021. Image: RNZ

    The policeman has also been involved in efforts by PNG authorities to encourage vaccination against covid-19.

    Mistrust of covid vaccines is deep in PNG, where only around 2 or 3 percent of the population has been inoculated, while a delta-fuelled third wave of the pandemic is causing daily casualties.

    Sergeant Dap said convincing people to get vaccinated was difficult enough without illegal border crossings adding to the spread of the virus and the sense of fear.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Kaeleigh Williams, 2L at St. Louis University School of Law On Thursday October 14, 2021, the U.N. General Assembly elected the United States to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. The Trump administration quit the 47-member body more than three…

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

  • ANALYSIS: By Wesley Morgan, Griffith University

    The Pacific Islands are at the frontline of climate change. But as rising seas threaten their very existence, these tiny nation states will not be submerged without a fight.

    For decades this group has been the world’s moral conscience on climate change. Pacific leaders are not afraid to call out the climate policy failures of far bigger nations, including regional neighbour Australia.

    And they have a strong history of punching above their weight at United Nations climate talks — including at Paris, where they were credited with helping secure the first truly global climate agreement.

    COP26 GLASGOW 2021

    The momentum is with Pacific island countries at next month’s summit in Glasgow, and they have powerful friends. The United Kingdom, European Union and United States all want to see warming limited to 1.5℃.

    This powerful alliance will turn the screws on countries dragging down the global effort to avert catastrophic climate change. And if history is a guide, the Pacific won’t let the actions of laggard nations go unnoticed.

    A long fight for survival
    Pacific leaders’ agitation for climate action dates back to the late 1980s, when scientific consensus on the problem emerged. The leaders quickly realised the serious implications global warming and sea-level rise posed for island countries.

    Some Pacific nations — such as Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu — are predominantly low-lying atolls, rising just metres above the waves. In 1991, Pacific leaders declared “the cultural, economic and physical survival of Pacific nations is at great risk”.

    Successive scientific assessments clarified the devastating threat climate change posed for Pacific nations: more intense cyclones, changing rainfall patterns, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, coastal inundation and sea-level rise.

    Pacific states developed collective strategies to press the international community to take action. At past UN climate talks, they formed a diplomatic alliance with island nations in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, which swelled to more than 40 countries.

    People stand in water with spears
    Climate change is a threat to the survival of Pacific Islanders. Image: Mick Tsikas/AAP/The Conversation

    The first draft of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – which required wealthy nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – was put forward by Nauru on behalf of this Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

    Securing a global agreement in Paris
    Pacific states were also crucial in negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in Paris in 2015.

    By this time, UN climate talks were stalled by arguments between wealthy nations and developing countries about who was responsible for addressing climate change, and how much support should be provided to help poorer nations to deal with its impacts.

    In the months before the Paris climate summit, then Marshall Islands Foreign Minister, the late Tony De Brum, quietly coordinated a coalition of countries from across traditional negotiating divides at the UN.

    This was genius strategy. During talks in Paris, membership of this “High Ambition Coalition” swelled to more than 100 countries, including the European Union and the United States, which proved vital for securing the first truly global climate agreement.

    When then US President Barack Obama met with island leaders in 2016, he noted “we could not have gotten a Paris Agreement without the incredible efforts and hard work of island nations”.

    The High Ambition Coalition secured a shared temperature goal in the Paris Agreement, for countries to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above the long-term average. This was no arbitrary figure.

    Scientific assessments have clarified 1.5℃ warming is a key threshold for the survival of vulnerable Pacific Island states and the ecosystems they depend on, such as coral reefs.

    Coral reef with island in background
    Warming above 1.5℃ threatens Pacific Island states and their coral reefs. Image: Shutterstock/The Conversation

    De Brum took a powerful slogan to Paris: “1.5 to stay alive”.

    The Glasgow summit is the last chance to keep 1.5℃ of warming within reach. But Australia – almost alone among advanced economies – is taking to Glasgow the same 2030 target it took to Paris six years ago.

    This is despite the Paris Agreement requirement that nations ratchet up their emissions-reduction ambition every five years.

    Australia is the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum (an intergovernmental group that aims to promote the interests of countries and territories in the Pacific). But it is also a major fossil fuel producer, putting it at odds with other Pacific countries on climate.

    When Australia announced its 2030 target, De Brum said if the rest of the world followed suit:

    the Great Barrier Reef would disappear […] so would the Marshall Islands and other vulnerable nations.

    Influence at Glasgow
    So what can we expect from Pacific leaders at the Glasgow summit? The signs so far suggest they will demand COP26 deliver an outcome to once and for all limit global warming to 1.5℃.

    At pre-COP discussions in Milan earlier this month, vulnerable nations proposed countries be required to set new 2030 targets each year until 2025 — a move intended to bring global ambition into alignment with a 1.5℃ pathway.

    COP26 president Alok Sharma says he wants the decision text from the summit to include a new agreement to keep 1.5℃ within reach.

    This sets the stage for a showdown. Major powers like the US and the EU are set to work with large negotiating blocs, like the High Ambition Coalition, to heap pressure on major emitters that have yet to commit to serious 2030 ambition – including China, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.

    The chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Fiji’s Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama, has warned Pacific island countries “refuse to be the canary in the world’s coal mine”.

    According to Bainimarama:

    by the time leaders come to Glasgow, it has to be with immediate and transformative action […] come with commitments for serious cuts in emissions by 2030 – 50 percent or more. Come with commitments to become net-zero before 2050. Do not come with excuses. That time is past.The Conversation

    Dr Wesley Morgan, researcher, Climate Council, and research fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith 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.

  • Kaniva Tonga

    Cardinal Soane Patita Mafi has a message for the politicians who will soon gather for next month’s COP 26 conference, regarded by many as the last chance to avoid the worst that climate change has to offer.

    The Tongan-based prelate’s message is simple: Listen.

    “We want those big nations to really see and to really hear,” he said in an interview with the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet.

    “Not to pretend. Not to turn away. We want them not to be deafened to the cry of reality by other agendas. Can they turn an ear of love, not of political expediency? Are they prepared to hear the voice of the voiceless?”

    For the senior Catholic church leader in the Pacific, it is important that peoples of the Pacific are not overlooked in Glasgow.

    The islands are among the most vulnerable in the world and Cardinal Mafi has emerged as one of their most eloquent advocates

    Mafi told The Tablet that when young Tongans question their role in the church and ask “Who are we?” their question is bound up with questions about the fragility of the environment.

    Rebirth of spirituality
    Cardinal Mafi was consecrated just three months before the publication of Pope Francis’ widely influential encyclical, Laudato Si, which calls for a widespread rebirth of spirituality and social and environmental awareness to combat climate change and redress the horrendous imbalance of power and wealth in society.

    The cardinal is a member of the executive of Caritas Internationalis and, since March 2021, the president of Caritas Oceania, which has seven member organisations: Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tonga.

    Across the Pacific he sees climate change-induced problems in many Island states, including deforestation in Solomon Islands, people in Kiribati losing their homes, villages in Fiji forced to relocate owing to rising sea waters, vanishing foreshores and erosion.

    He is worried about the effects of climate change, which have brought severe cyclones more often. His own house floods on a regular basis.

    However, he believes it is important that the huge challenges facing the Pacific do not reduce people to fear and passivity.

    He told The Tablet that he visited people after storms and was always lifted by their resolve to help each other.

    “They are always smiling. But when you visit them privately in their homes, they will share their real emotions. There is a lot of pain and many tears,” he said.

    He fears that the loss of a traditional communal lifestyle would deprive people of the one resource they had to cope and prosper.

    “This is worth more than so-called economic development and foreign-owned infrastructure.”

    This is an abridged and edited version of an article by Michael Girr, which appeared in The Tablet on October 21, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • In the early 2000s, activists began to campaign against the extraction of “conflict minerals.” Today, violence continues unabated in eastern Congo, underscoring the misguided frameworks governing transnational intervention.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Government pocketed half of donations in 2020 as central bank forced UN agencies to use lower exchange rate


    The Syrian government is siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid by forcing UN agencies to use a lower exchange rate, according to new research.

    The Central Bank of Syria, which is sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, in effect made $60m (£44m) in 2020 by pocketing $0.51 of every aid dollar sent to Syria, making UN contracts one of the biggest money-making avenues for President Bashar al-Assad and his government, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Operations & Policy Center thinktank and the Center for Operational Analysis and Research found.

    Continue reading…

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

  • By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific journalist

    The head of the Pacific Islands Forum says New Zealand’s climate aid boost augurs well heading into COP26, and is pushing all developed countries to meet climate funding commitments made in Paris in 2015.

    New Zealand announced yesterday that it was committing NZ$1.3 billion over four years to support countries most vulnerable to climate change.

    Over half of the money is to go to the Pacific.

    New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister James Shaw described it as finance that is necessary to support some of the most vulnerable countries in the world to adapt to the effects of climate change.

    After all, New Zealand committed to making such finance available as part of it signing up to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

    With the aid announcement coming ahead of the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, at the end of this month, Shaw hopes it can help repair some of the frayed consensus around the Paris Agreement.

    “Because the fact is that the developed world has not delivered on that commitment to collectively mobilise US$100 billion a year [in annual climate finance].”

    ‘Suspicion and breakdown’
    “That has led to a suspicion and a breakdown in relationships between the wealthier countries of the world, of which New Zealand is one, and the other countries.”

    The Pacific Forum’s Secretary-General, Henry Puna, is heartened by the level of support.

    “I’m totally ecstatic on behalf of the region at the New Zealand announcement,” he told RNZ Pacific.

    “Yet at the same time, urgent ambitious climate action and finance are the two hinges open on a net zero, 1.5 degree future. But time is running out.”

    Tuvalu is highly susceptible to rises in sea level brought about by climate change.
    Tuvalu is highly susceptible to rises in sea level brought about by climate change. Image: Luke McPake/UNDP

    Puna said he was hopeful that all developed countries would finally fulfill the funding commitments that they had made in Paris but had largely failed to meet.

    “And I think the US has already set the tone; and the announcement — although not on the same issue — by China that they’re also coming to the party, augurs well for COP26.

    He said the Pacific Islands region’s representatives would be heading to Glasgow in hopeful but resolute mode.

    “But we’re certainly going there with full determination to try and talk to developed countries to support the commitments that we already made in 2015 in Paris.”

    According to Shaw, the climate funding will be directed in three areas:

    • to support adaptation efforts;
    • to support Pacific countries to reduce carbon emissions themselves;
    • and to support climate change capacity and capabilities — this could include investment in ocean science, and preparing for climate-related migration.

    Finance allocation to be Pacific-led, needs-based
    Shaw said the funding will be on top of New Zealand’s existing aid programme.

    The government is not yet being too prescriptive on categorisation of the adaptation efforts it will finance, with Shaw saying they would prioritise on the basis of need.

    He said New Zealand would be guided by Pacific Islands governments on where the climate aid is best directed.

    “Last year the Fijian prime minister asked our government for help, as it undertakes the massive task of moving 42 villages further inland, away from rising waves,” Shaw explained.

    Minister for Climate Change James Shaw launches a discussion document on the emissions reduction plan.
    Minister for Climate Change James Shaw … “Many villages in low-lying countries like Tuvalu, Tokelau and Kiribati have no further inland that they can go. They must adapt to the massive changes that are upon them.” Image: RNZ/Poo/Stuf/Robert Kitchin

    “Many villages in low-lying countries like Tuvalu, Tokelau and Kiribati have no further inland that they can go. They must adapt to the massive changes that are upon them.”

    But Dr Luke Harrington, a senior research fellow at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, says in terms of the country’s overseas aid contributions the aid boost is not enough

    “All OECD countries have a target of about 0.7 percent of our gross national income. New Zealand sort of sits at the moments at about 0.27 percent. So that’s about an annual shortfall of $1.2 billion.”

    However, Shaw said the funding boost could make a real difference.

    “The Cook Islands estimate that about 25 percent of their annual budget is spent on climate-related costs — whether that’s cleaning up after the last cyclone or trying to build stronger and better infrastructure and housing to resist the next cyclone.”

    Still, the minister conceded that the new climate aid package was no substitute for significant reductions to carbon emissions, and on this front as well, few countries have done what is required.

    King tide in Tarawa, Kiribati, Friday 30 August 2019.
    A king tide in Tarawa, Kiribati, on 30 August 2019. Image: RNZ/Pelenise Alofa/KiriCAN

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The United States was elected to the UN Human Rights Council on October 14, 2021, more than three years after the Trump administration withdrew from the Council. On the campaign trail President Biden had promised that the United States would…

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

  • Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group examined alleged human rights abuses suffered by Yemenis whose basic rights to food, shelter, safety, health care and education were horribly violated, all while they were bludgeoned by Saudi and U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, and constant warfare since 2014.

    “This is a major setback for all victims who have suffered serious violations during the armed conflict,” the GEE wrote in a statement the day after the U.N. Human Rights Council refused to extend a mandate for continuation of the group’s work.  “The Council appears to be abandoning the people of Yemen,” the statement says, adding that “Victims of this tragic armed conflict should not be silenced by the decision of a few States.”

    Prior to the vote, there were indications that Saudi Arabia and its allies, such as Bahrain (which sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council), had increased lobbying efforts worldwide in a bid to do away with the Group of Experts. Actions of the Saudi-led coalition waging war against Yemen had been examined and reported on by the Group of Experts. Last year, the Saudi bid for a seat on the Human Rights Council was rejected, but Bahrain serves as its proxy.

    Bahrain is a notorious human rights violator and a staunch member of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-led coalition which buys billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States and other countries to bomb Yemen’s infrastructure, kill civilians, and displace millions of people.

    The Group of Experts was mandated to investigate violations committed by all warring parties. So it’s possible that the Ansar Allah leadership, often known as the Houthis, also wished to avoid the group’s scrutiny. The Group of Experts’ mission has come to an end, but the fear and intimidation faced by Yemeni victims and witnesses continues.

    Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization established in 2007, advocates for human rights by reporting on issues such as the torture of detainees, grossly unfair trials, patterns of injustice, and starvation by warfare through the destruction of farms and water sources. Mwatana had hoped the U.N. Human Rights Council would grant the Group of Experts a multi-year extension. Members of Mwatana fear their voice will be silenced within the United Nations if the Human Rights Council’s decision is an indicator of how much the council cares about Yemenis.

    “The GEE is the only independent and impartial mechanism working to deter war crimes and other violations by all parties to the conflict,” said Radhya Almutawakel, Chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. She believes that doing away with this body will give a green light to continue violations that condemn millions in Yemen to “‘unremitting violence, death and constant fear.’”

    The Yemen Data Project, founded in 2016, is an independent entity aiming to collect data on the conduct of the war in Yemen. Their most recent monthly report tallied the number of air raids in September, which had risen to the highest monthly rate since March.

    Sirwah, a district in the Marib province, was—for the ninth consecutive month—the most heavily targeted district in Yemen, with twenty-nine air raids recorded throughout September. To get a sense of scale, imagine a district the size of three city neighborhoods being bombed twenty-nine times in one month.

    Intensified fighting has led to large waves of displacement within the governorate, and sites populated by soaring numbers of refugees are routinely impacted by shelling and airstrikes. Pressing humanitarian needs include shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene, and medical care. Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy. This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.

    In early 1995, I was among a group of activists who formed a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness to publicly defy economic sanctions against Iraq. Some of us had been in Iraq during the 1991 U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm invasion. The United Nations reported that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had already died and that the economic sanctions contributed to these deaths. We felt compelled to at least try to break the economic sanctions against Iraq by declaring our intent to bring medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals and families.

    But to whom would we deliver these supplies?

    Voices in the Wilderness founders agreed that we would start by contacting Iraqis in our neighborhoods and also try to connect with groups concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East. So I began asking Iraqi shopkeepers in my Chicago neighborhood for advice; they were understandably quite wary.

    One day, as I walked away from a shopkeeper who had actually given me an extremely helpful phone number for a parish priest in Baghdad, I overheard another customer ask what that was all about. The shopkeeper replied: “Oh, they’re just a group of people trying to make a name for themselves.”

    I felt crestfallen. Now, twenty-six years later, it’s easy for me to understand his reaction. Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?

    No wonder I’ve felt high regard for the U.N. Group of Experts who went to bat for human rights groups struggling for “street cred” regarding Yemen.

    When Yemeni human rights advocates try to sound the alarm about terrible abuses, they don’t just face hurt feelings when met with antagonism. Yemeni human rights activists have been jailed, tortured, and disappeared. Yemen’s civil society activists do need to make a name for themselves.

    On October 7, the day the U.N. Human Rights Council voted not to continue the role of the Group of Experts with regard to Yemen, the United Nations agreed to set up an investigative group to monitor the Taliban. However, the agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.

    Politicizing U.N. agencies and procedures makes it all the more difficult for people making inquiries to establish trusting relationships with people whose rights should be upheld by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

    When I was approaching shopkeepers for ideas about people we might contact in Iraq, I was just beginning to grapple with Professor Noam Chomsky’s essays about “worthy victims” and “unworthy victims.”

    That second phrase seemed to me a terrible oxymoron. How could a victim of torture, bereavement, hunger, displacement, or disappearance be an “unworthy victim?” Over the next thirty years, I grew to understand the cruel distinction between worthy and unworthy victims.

    A powerful country or group can use the plight of “worthy victims” to build support for war or military intervention. The “unworthy victims” also suffer, but because their stories could lead people to question the wisdom of a powerful country’s attacks on civilians, stories about those victims are likely to fade away.

    Consider, in Afghanistan, the plight of those who survived an August 29 U.S. drone attack against the family of Zamari Ahmadi.  Ten members of the family were killed. Seven were children. As of October 13, the family had not yet heard anything from the United States.

    I greatly hope Mwatana, The Yemen Data Project, The Yemen Foundation, and all of the journalists and human rights activists passionately involved in opposing the war that rages in Yemen are recognized and become names that occasion respect, gratitude, and support. I hope they’ll continue documenting violations and abuse. But I know their work on the ground in Yemen will now be even more dangerous.

    Meanwhile, the lobbyists who’ve served the Saudi government so well have certainly made a name for themselves in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

    Grassroots activists committed to ending human rights abuses must uphold solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Yemen and Afghanistan. Governments waging war and protecting human rights abusers must immediately end their pernicious practices.

    In the United States, peace activists must tell the military contractors, lobbyists, and elected representatives: “Not in our name!” With no strings attached, the U.S. government should be proactive and end war forever.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    Tower houses in Sanaa, August 15, 2013 (Rod Waddington)

    The post Abandoning Yemen? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Human rights council also appoints special rapporteur to monitor impact of climate crisis on rights

    The UN’s main human rights body has overwhelmingly voted to recognise the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right, and to appoint an expert to monitor human rights in the context of the climate emergency.

    The human rights council passed the clean-environment resolution, which also calls on countries to boost their abilities to improve the environment, by 43-0 while four member states – China, India, Japan and Russia – abstained.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Saudi ally Bahrain and 20 other countries reject extension of independent monitors’ mandate

    Bahrain, Russia and other members of the UN human rights council have pushed through a vote to shut down the body’s war crimes investigations in Yemen, in a stinging defeat for western states who sought to keep the mission going.

    Members narrowly voted to reject a resolution led by the Netherlands to give the independent investigators another two years to monitor atrocities in Yemen’s conflict.

    Continue reading…

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

  • More Than 5 Million People in Ethiopia Are in Need of Humanitarian Assistance

    Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New York, October 6, 2021 – The United Nations Human Rights Council should renew the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen and support the group’s work investigating human rights abuses in the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    “The U.N.’s Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen has played a critical role in highlighting press freedom and other human rights violations in the country, and has provided one of the few roadmaps to accountability in a conflict where impunity has ruled the day,” said CPJ Senior Middle East and North Africa Researcher Justin Shilad. “U.N. Human Rights Council member states must renew the group’s mandate and support its work by condemning attacks against journalists in Yemen by all sides.”

    The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights established the body in September 2017 to investigate and document human rights violations in Yemen, and its mandate has been renewed each year; its next renewal vote is scheduled for tomorrow, according to Reuters. That Reuters report, along with local human rights organizations, have noted that groups affiliated with the Saudi Arabian government have lobbied against the group’s renewal.

    In its most recent report, the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen documented ongoing violations of press freedom and attacks and arbitrary detentions of journalists, calling for all sides to end such attacks. That report also recommended that the U.N. Security Council refer violations in Yemen to the International Criminal Court and expand sanctions against offenders.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The UK is part of an unholy alliance that is opposing a breakthrough proposal at the United Nations. The proposition aims to recognise access to a healthy environment as a human right. But the UK, US, Russia, and Brazil are refusing to support it.

    In the case of all these countries, the opposition to the plan is unsurprising. But the UK and the US consistently, and vehemently, proclaim themselves to be dedicated to tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. So their opposition in particular reeks of hypocrisy.

    Right to a healthy environment

    According to Reuters, the UN’s Human Rights Council is considering the proposal, which is supported by numerous nations.

    As the UN Environment Programme has pointed out, over 100 states already recognise a healthy environment as a right, or provide “provisions for a healthy environment”, in their constitutional and national rules. This includes Russia and Brazil, but the UK and US do not offer such protections on a national basis.

    If the UN adopts the resolution, its recognition of the right to a healthy environment would be non-binding. But the thinktank Universal Rights Group’s Marc Limon explained that:

    At national level, this right has been shown to empower people, particularly those most vulnerable to environmental damage or climate change, to drive change and hold governments to account

    So although the resolution wouldn’t be enforceable, it would likely strengthen citizens’ demands for action on environmental issues. Already millions of people die and suffer around the world every year due to poor environmental conditions. As the climate and biodiversity crises intensify, this is only going to get worse.

    Reuters reported that the resolution is likely to pass despite opposition due to the significant support it has from the majority of nations.

    Legal concerns

    Both the UK and the US reportedly cited legal concerns as a factor in their opposition to the resolution. The US has also apparently questioned whether recognition of such a right could weaken peoples’ civil and political rights. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the UK mission in Geneva insisted that the country’s “leadership on climate action is well documented”. They also said the UK would “engage constructively” with the resolution’s authors, despite opposing the proposal itself.

    Executive director of Stop Ecocide International Jojo Mehta told The Canary that “Governments should be stepping up, not stepping aside” when it comes to cementing the right to a healthy environment in law. She said:

    The human right to a healthy environment and a criminal law of ecocide as a protection for that environment are complementary legal initiatives and we need to establish all the legal tools we can to protect future generations and life on Earth.

    Stop Ecocide International is campaigning to make ecocide an international crime. At the recent International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress, it attempted to secure a vote on a motion of support for making ecocide a crime. The IUCN Resolutions Committee apparently rejected the motion. Astonishingly, in light of the institution’s remit and the current severity of the environmental crises, the committee argued that “consideration of this matter can wait until a later date”.

    Sorely needed protection

    As recent events show, a strengthening of the right to a healthy environment is sorely needed in both the UK and US. Heated reported, for example, that US president Joe Biden allowed a new tar sands pipeline to begin operation on 1 October. Public opposition has been immense, particularly from indigenous peoples, who officials have met with arrests and silence. The pipeline will increase annual carbon pollution levels significantly, equivalent to the amount 50 coal-fired power plants would produce, according to Oil Change International.

    In the UK, officials have adopted a similarly heavy-handed approach to deterring citizens from fighting for a healthy environment. On 6 October, six activists who tunnelled under Euston station in opposition to the highly environmentally-destructive HS2 rail project faced trial. Protestors from Africans Rising who scaled Westminster and dropped a banner calling for debt cancellation and reparations for Africa in 2020 are also in court on the same day. The demand from Africans Rising cited the “past and ongoing social and environmental cost” to Africa of the global North’s “appetites that are inextricable from their colonial foundations”.

    Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion activist James Brown was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment in September after he glued himself to a plane at London’s City Airport. And this is against the backdrop of Priti Patel promising more and more draconian police powers to arrest and lock up environmental protesters.

    Climate justice

    In short, both countries are continuing with environmentally damaging policies amid the climate and biodiversity crises. Rather than listening to and obeying their citizens’ demands for change, they’re often responding with oppression instead.

    The global recognition of a healthy environment as a human right would undoubtedly empower citizens to hold their representatives to account. It could also help to achieve climate justice, which is vital in a just transition to a sustainable global civilisation.

    These countries’ opposition to the UN proposal calls their commitment to climate justice into question.

    Featured image via Reuters /YouTube

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The world’s top human rights legal body just offered a crucial show of support for Steven Donziger, the attorney who won a landmark multibillion-dollar case against an oil giant over pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. The ruling came on the eve of his sentencing in a criminal trial.

    On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights ruled that Donziger’s home detention is illegal under international law and called on the U.S. to release him. Donziger will have spent an unprecedented 787 days on house arrest as of Friday in what is one of the most winding and wild court cases that spans multiple countries and involves Chevron and thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon.

    The post UN Finds Steven Donziger’s House Arrest Violates International Law appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Rafael Tufiño Figueroa (Puerto Rico), La plena, 1952-54.

    Each year in September, the heads of governments come to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City to inaugurate a new session of the General Assembly. The area surrounding the headquarters becomes colourful, delegates from each of the 193 member states milling about the UN building and then going out to lunch in the array of restaurants in its vicinity that scraped through the pandemic. Depending on the conflicts that abound, certain speeches are taken seriously; conflicts in this or that part of the world demand attention to the statements made by their leaders, but otherwise there is a queue of speeches that are made and then forgotten.

    On 25 September, the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, took the stage in an almost empty UN General Assembly chamber. ‘How many more leaders must come to this podium and not be heard before they stop coming?’, she asked emphatically. ‘How many times must we address an empty hall of officials and an institution that was intended to be made for leaders to discuss with leaders the advancement necessary to prevent another great war or any of the other great challenges of our humanity?’. Prime Minister Mottley set aside her prepared remarks, since, she said, they would be ‘a repetition of what you have heard from others’. Instead, she offered a biting statement: ‘We have the means to give every child on this planet a tablet. And we have the means to give every adult a vaccine. And we have the means to invest in protecting the most vulnerable on our planet from a change in climate. But we choose not to. It is not because we do not have enough. It is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have… If we can find the will to send people to the moon and solve male baldness … we can solve simple problems like letting our people eat at affordable prices’.

    Albin Egger-Lienz (Austria), Nordfrankreich (‘Northern France’), 1917.

    The United Nations was formed in October 1945 when 50 countries met in San Francisco to ratify the UN Charter. ‘This is 2021’, Prime Minister Mottley said, when there are ‘many countries that did not exist in 1945 who must face their people and answer the needs of their people’. Many of these countries were once colonies, the well-being of their people set aside by their colonial leaders at the UN. Now, 76 years later, the people of these countries – including Barbados – ‘want to know what is the relevance of an international community that only comes and does not listen to each other, that only talks and will not talk with each other’, Prime Minister Mottley said.

    While the world leaders followed each other to the podium, Sacha Llorenti, secretary-general of ALBA-TCP – an organisation of nine member states in Latin America and the Caribbean set up to further regional cooperation and development – asked a fundamental question during a No Cold War webinar on multipolarity: ‘If the UN Charter was put to a vote today, would it pass?’

    The Charter is ratified by every member state of the United Nations, and yet, clause after clause, it remains disrespected by some of its most powerful members, with the United States of America in the lead. If I were to catalogue the incidents of disregard shown by the United States government to the United Nations institutions and to the UN Charter, that text would be endless. This list would need to include the US refusal to:

    • Sign the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
    • Ratify the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
    • Join the 2002 Treaty of Rome (which set up the International Criminal Court).
    • Participate in the 2016 Global Compact on Migration.

    This inventory would also need to include the usage of unilateral, illegal, coercive sanctions against two dozen member states of the United Nations as well as the illegal prosecution of wars of aggression against several countries (including Iraq).

    Would the United States government exercise its veto in the UN Security Council if the UN Charter came up for a vote? Based on the historical actions of the US government, the answer is simple: certainly.

    Käthe Kollwitz (Germany), Die Gefangenen (‘The Prisoners’), 1908.

    During the UN session, 18 countries – led by Venezuela – held a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter. One in four people who live in the world reside in these 18 countries, which include Algeria, China, Cuba, Palestine, and Russia. The Group, led by Venezuela’s new Foreign Affairs Minister Felix Plasencia, called for ‘reinvigorated multilateralism’. This merely means to uphold the UN Charter: to say no to illegal wars and unilateral sanctions and to say yes to collaboration to control the COVID-19 pandemic, yes to collaboration on the climate catastrophe, yes to collaboration against hunger, illiteracy, and despair.

    These countries never get to define what the ‘international community’ thinks because that phrase is used only in reference to the United States and its Western allies, who decide what must be done and how it must be done for the rest of the world. Only then, in the solemnest of voices, do we speak of the ‘international community’; not when the Group of Friends – which represents 25% of the world’s people – nor when the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – which represents 40% of the world’s people – speak, nor even when the Non-Aligned Movement with its 120 members speaks.

    Mahmoud Sabri (Iraq), The Hero, 1963.

    At the UN, US President Joe Biden said, ‘We are not seeking a new cold war’. This is welcome news. But it is also discordant. Prime Minister Mottley asked for clarity and honesty. Biden’s comment seemed neither clear nor honest, since around the time of the UN meeting, the US entered a new arms agreement that masqueraded as a military pact with Australia and the United Kingdom (AUKUS) and held a meeting of the Quad (Australia, India, and Japan). Both have military implications that intend to pressure China.

    Beyond this, US government documents refer over and over again to the desire for the US military to be expanded to ‘fight and prevail in a future conflict with China’; this includes a reconfiguration of military activities on the African continent directed at pushing back Chinese commercial and political interests. Biden’s additional budget request for the US military says that this is needed ‘to counter the pacing threat from China’.

    This threat is not from China, but to China. If the US continues to expand its military, deepen its alliances in the Pacific region, and ramp up its rhetoric, then it is nothing other than a New Cold War – another dangerous action that makes a mockery of the UN Charter.

    At the No Cold War webinar on multipolarity, ‘Towards a Multipolar World: An International Peace Forum’, Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party of Zambia said that, while he grew up in a world where the bipolar Cold War seemed to pose an existential threat, ‘the unipolar world is more dangerous than the bipolar world’. The system we live in now, dominated by the Western powers, ‘undermines global solidarity at a time when human solidarity is needed’, he said.

    Roberto Matta (Chile), El primer gol del pueblo chileno (‘The First Goal of the Chilean People’), 1971.

    You cannot eat the UN Charter. But if you learn to read, and if you read the Charter, you can use it to fight for your right to human decency. If we 7.9 billion people came together and decided to form a human chain to advance our human rights – each of us standing three feet apart – we would form a wall that would run for 6.5 million kilometres. That wall would run around the equator 261 times. We would build this wall to defend our right to become human, to defend our humanity, and to defend nature.

    The post If the United Nations Charter Was Put To a Vote Today, Would It Pass? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The UN must urgently appoint a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights to galvanise action on the biggest threat to fundamental freedoms

    Climate breakdown is making a mockery of human rights.

    Start with the most fundamental right of all: the right to life, liberty and security. Two million people have died as a result of a five-fold increase in weather-related disasters in our lifetimes. And given that 90% of these deaths have occurred in developing countries, which have contributed the least to global heating, the climate crisis is also making a mockery of the notion that we are all born equal – as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and numerous national constitutions assert.

    Continue reading…

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

  • On October 4-5, 2021, the United Nations Office at Geneva and the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will be holding a webcast on “Peace, Diversity and our Common Humanity”. From the event organizers: UN Secretary-General António Guterres has just published his…

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

  • COMMENTARY: By Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama in Suva

    Fiji Islands Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama is the current Chair of the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum. Addressing the UN General Assembly virtually on September 25, he called on the global community to embrace Fiji’s vision of a “better, greener, bluer and safer future for humanity”.

    The United Nations report to the UN General Assembly this year is titled “Our multilateral challenges: UN 2:0”, a Common Agenda the blueprint for a future that is better, greener, and safer—and I would humbly add, “bluer”.

    We want that future for Fiji. We want islands inhabited by citizens who stand with nature and not against it. We want sustainable economic growth that is powered by clean energy and protected from the impacts of climate change.

    We want robust and resilient health systems, and we want good jobs and income supported by a green and blue economy. To succeed, our vision must become the vision of humanity, because our fate is the world’s fate.

    The world’s present course leads nowhere near the future we want for ourselves. A deadly pathogen is burning through humanity like a bushfire—and inequity is fanning the flames. This year alone, climate-driven floods, heatwaves, fires, and cyclones have killed hundreds and inflicted unsustainable economic damage.

    We humans are the cause, but we are refusing to become the solution.

    The UN Secretary General’s recommendations in “Our Common Agenda” are spot on. We must meet this moment with a new UN—a new energy, new resources, and new bonds of trust with the people this institution serves.

    A new UN that empowers those on the margins of society—particularly women and girls—and brings them into the centre of global decision-making.

    Two pandemics
    In the past year, it has become clearer that we face two pandemics—one that is ending for the wealthy nations and one that is worsening across much of the developing world. That widening chasm can be measured in lives lost and in years of economic progress undone.

    Across the Global South, what the world once branded as “sustainable development” is unravelling before our eyes. Hundreds of millions of jobs have been lost, hundreds of millions of people cannot access adequate food, and an entire generation has had their education disrupted.

    The wounds of this crisis will cripple us for years if left untreated.

    Leaders who cannot summon the courage to unveil these commitments and policy packages at COP26 should not bother booking a flight to Glasgow. Instead, they—and the selfish interests they stand for—should face consequences that match the severity of what they are unleashing on our planet.

    — Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama

    Fiji’s experience shows how an equitable recovery can begin. It starts by getting jabs in arms, fast. After one full year with zero local covid cases, the insidious delta variant crept into our country and sparked a deadly second outbreak.

    After a slow start while we scrambled to acquire enough vaccines, we are winning the battle.

    Over 98 percent of adults across our 110 populated islands have [had] one jab of the vaccine, and more than 67 percent are fully vaccinated. We thank India, Australia, New Zealand and the United States for helping us secure the doses we needed.

    Our mission now is to recover the more than 100,000 jobs lost to the pandemic and to recoup a 50 percent loss in government revenues. Soon, Fiji will reopen to tourism and to regional and international business.

    Victory over the virus
    We will look to accelerate investment trends, like increased digitisation, that will modernise our economy and help it recover.

    But Fiji’s victory over the virus will be short-lived unless the global community can accelerate vaccinations everywhere. It is appalling that wealthier countries are already considering third doses or boosters for their citizens while millions of people—including frontline healthcare workers—in the developing world cannot access a single dose.

    Globally, thousands of lives are still being lost every day to the virus. The majority represent our collective failure to make vaccines available to developing countries.

    Vaccine nationalism must end. The G7, G20, and multilateral financial institutions have failed to stop it. Only the UN can fill this void of leadership.

    I join other leaders in calling on the UN to convene an urgent special meeting of leaders to agree to a time bound, costed, and detailed plan for the full vaccination of developing countries.

    Vaccine inequity is a symptom of a much larger injustice, one that is inherent to the international economic system. This injustice is the unequal distribution of finance, or access to finance, that can fuel a recovery.

    While wealthy nations have propped up their economies by printing and investing trillions at near zero interest rates, developing nations—particularly small states—have had to borrow at punitive rates to simply keep our people alive, fed, and healthy.

    Cash transfer programme
    Through the pandemic, my government rolled out the largest cash transfer programme in our history—providing hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment benefits to nearly one-third of Fiji’s adult population.

    We even expanded some of our social protection programmes, including pensions for the elderly, and financial support for the differently abled and other vulnerable communities.

    The alternative was mass destitution, which we would not accept. But to pay for it, we had to take on debt, precipitated by massive reduction in government revenue.

    We need a more innovative framework for development finance that recognises the unique needs of SIDS (Small Island Developing States). And we must adopt a more sophisticated framework of assessing debt sustainability that incorporates the urgency of building resilience and breaks free of the norms of the 20th century.

    This pandemic has been a painful lesson about where unilateral action can lead and where our multilateral institutions are unwilling to go. We must find new frontiers of co-operation if we stand any chance of averting future pandemics—or staving off the worst of climate change.

    If small states are to build back greener, bluer, and better, we will need an equal voice about and vote on decisions that determine our future. Small states need our interests heard, understood, and acted upon.

    Despite all the talk we hear of saving the planet, the world’s collective commitments are paltry. Akin to spitting into the strengthening winds of climate-fuelled super-storms.

    Frequent devastation
    The climate is on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of global warming, which would ensure the loss of entire low-lying nations in the Pacific and huge chunks of global coastlines. It guarantees frequent devastation from floods, cyclones, coastal inundations, and wildfires.

    It spells climate-driven conflict, mass migration, and the collapse of food systems and ecosystems. It is appalling. It is unimaginable. But it is where we are headed.

    Since March 2020, Fiji has experienced three cyclones—two of which approached category five intensity. Fijians are strong people. We endured much, and we will endure more still. But I am tired of applauding my people’s resilience. True resilience is not just defined by a nation’s grit but by our access to financial resources.

    Today, SIDS are able to access less than 2 per cent of the available climate finance. To build a truly resilient Fiji, we need access to fast-deploying targeted grants, long-term concessionary financing and financial tools and instruments established through public-private collaboration and partnership.

    The Fijian economy depends on a healthy ocean and so we are taking bold strides to reverse its current decline. We have committed to 100 percent sustainable management of EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) and 30 per cent declared as marine protected areas by 2030.

    We are expanding investments in sustainable aquaculture, seaweed farming, and high-value processed fish.

    But we cannot do this alone. We look to the global system to stop illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We look to UN member states to agree to a new treaty to preserve marine in waters beyond national jurisdictions.

    Pacific mission in Glasgow
    In one month, we meet in Scotland for a hugely consequential COP. The Pacific’s mission in Glasgow is clear: we must keep the 1.5 target alive.

    This demands drastic emissions cuts by 2030 that put large nations on a path towards net-zero emissions before 2050.

    Leaders who cannot summon the courage to unveil these commitments and policy packages at COP26 should not bother booking a flight to Glasgow. Instead, they—and the selfish interests they stand for—should face consequences that match the severity of what they are unleashing on our planet.

    We do not tolerate war between states. So, how can we tolerate war waged against the planet, on the life it sustains, and on future generations? That is the firm red line Pacific nations will draw in Glasgow. We are demanding net-zero emissions and accepting zero excuses.

    At COP26, the global north must finally deliver on US$100 billion a year in climate finance and agree to a pathway to increase financing commitments to at least $750 billion a year from 2025 forward.

    If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and submarines, we can fund climate action. It is criminal that vulnerable Pacific Small Island Developing States can access a mere 0.05 percent of the climate finance currently available to protect ourselves from an existential crisis we did not cause.

    These are the challenges we face, and we must find the courage to face them squarely. The consequences of not doing so are simply unthinkable.

    Published in partnership with IDN-InDepthNews.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • This month, the Sanctions Kill coalition (Popular Resistance is a member) released its report: “The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions.” The 35-page report was written in response to the Biden administration’s January call for a review of the US sanctions to determine if they ‘unduly hinder’ the ability of targeted nations to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

    To date, there is no word on whether that review has been conducted, but given that the State Department and Treasury are tasked with conducting it, the same institutions that impose sanctions, the Sanctions Kill coalition had no confidence their report would challenge the US’ current foreign policy path of escalating economic war on 39 countries, or a third of the world population.

    The post Stop US Sanctions: ‘You Don’t Feel Them, But They Are Killing Our People’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley addresses the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters on September 24, 2021, in New York.

    Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley delivered a scathing indictment of the rich and powerful during her address at the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, condemning the leaders of wealthy countries for refusing to take basic steps to end the coronavirus pandemic, tackle the climate emergency, and usher in a more just society.

    “If I used the speech prepared for me to deliver today, it would be a repetition, a repetition of what you have heard from others and also from me,” Mottley said at the outset of her remarks, which came after the leaders of African and Latin American nations decried the massive, persistent inequities in coronavirus vaccine distribution that have left billions of people without access to lifesaving shots.

    “How many more times will we then have a situation where we say the same thing over and over and over, to come to naught?” she asked. “My friends, we cannot do that anymore.”

    In the roughly 15 minutes that followed, Mottley — the leader of Barbados’ Labour Party and the first woman to serve as the small island nation’s prime minister — decried the international community’s continued inaction in the face of intensifying global crises.

    “How many more variants of Covid-19 must arrive, how many more, before a worldwide action plan for vaccinations will be implemented?” Mottley said. “How many more deaths must it take before 1.7 billion excess vaccines in the possession of the advanced countries of the world will be shared with those who have simply no access?”

    Watch the full speech:

    “None are safe until all are safe. How many more times will we hear that?” she continued. “How much more global temperature rise must there be before we end the burning of fossil fuels? And how much more must sea levels climb in small-island developing states before those who profited from the stockpiling of greenhouse gases contribute to the loss and damage that they occasioned, rather than asking us to crowd out the fiscal space that we have for development to cure the damage caused by the greed of others?”

    Mottley went on to dismiss the notion that the international community lacks adequate resources to make transformative progress in the fight against Covid-19, the climate crisis, and global inequality.

    “We have the means to give every child on this planet a tablet, and we have the means to give every adult a vaccine, and we have the means to invest in protecting the most vulnerable on our planet from a changing climate — but we choose not to,” she said. “It is not because we do not have enough, it is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have. And it is also because, regrettably, the faceless few do not fear the consequences sufficiently.”

    “The nation states of this assembly and the people of this world must indicate what direction we want our world to go in,” Mottley added, “and not leave it to the faceless few who have worked so hard to prevent the prosperity from being shared.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany

    Continue reading…

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

  • The Group of Friends in Defense of the United Nations Charter held its first ministerial meeting at Venezuela’s UN Mission in New York City on Thursday, September 23 on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting. The 18-country group adopted a declaration which outlines a policy in favor of respecting the UN charter.

    The post 18 Countries Issue Call For Defense Of UN Charter appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Large corporations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took over the United Nations Food Systems Summit, abandoning small farmers on behalf of Big Ag companies, endangering food sovereignty.

    The post How Big Corporations And Bill Gates Took Over The UN Food Summit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • New York, September 24, 2021 — Congolese authorities should immediately release journalist Pierre Sosthène Kambidi and ensure the press across the country can work without fear or intimidation, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    On September 20, plainclothes military officers arrested Kambidi, a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and the local news website Actualite.cd, at the Sultani Hotel in the capital, Kinshasa, according to one of Kambidi’s lawyers, Gode Kabongo, who spoke to CPJ by phone; Actualite.cd publication director Patient Ligodi, who visited the journalist in detention on September 22 and spoke to CPJ by phone; and reports by Actualite.cd and Radio France Internationale (RFI), the French public broadcaster, where Kambidi occasionally contributes coverage.

    The journalist was taken into custody and initially questioned as a witness in the case of the 2017 killing of U.N. experts Michael Sharp and Zaida Catalan in the country’s Kasai Central region, and was subsequently accused of the alleged crimes of terrorism, criminal association, and insurrection, according to the reports by Actualite and RFI. Kambidi has not been formally charged and is being held at the office of the auditor-general, an authority responsible for military justice in the country, according to Ligodi and those reports.

    According to Ligodi and another report by RFI, Kambidi’s arrest was connected with the prosecutor’s desire to know how Kambidi came to possess footage of the killings of Sharp and Catalan, as well as how he knew details surrounding their deaths. Kambidi had participated extensively in reporting about the killings and other violence in the area, according to posts on Twitter by Sonia Rolley, an RFI reporter who covers the region, and Axel Gordh Humlesjö, an investigative journalist working for Sveriges Television, Sweden’s public broadcaster.

    “Journalist Pierre Sosthène Kambidi should never have been arrested, and his detention without charge by military authorities sends a chilling message to the press in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Durban, South Africa. “Congolese authorities must respect Kambidi’s right to keep his sources confidential, and should immediately release him and drop any investigation into his work.”

    Military prosecutors questioned Kambidi about the case without a lawyer present on September 21, and U.N. experts appointed by the U.N. secretary general to assist in the investigation of Sharp and Catalan’s deaths participated via videoconference, RFI reported.

    The following day, after Kambidi was granted access to a lawyer, authorities from the military further questioned him for about eight hours, according to Bienvenu-Marie Bakumanya, deputy director of the AFP bureau in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who spoke to CPJ by phone after visiting Kambidi today to deliver him food. U.N. experts participated in this session as well, Bakumanya said.

    Auditor-General Lucien-Rene Likulia Bakumi responded to CPJ’s phone call for comment by referring questions to Cyprien Muwawu, the magistrate responsible for Kambidi’s case. CPJ called Muwawu for comment, but no one answered.

    Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, responded to CPJ’s emailed questions, including about the U.N. experts’ involvement in the questioning of Kambidi when his lawyer was not present. In his emailed reply, Dujarric reiterated points made in today’s midday briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York, a video of which was posted on the U.N. website. The experts assisting the investigation into Sharp and Catalan’s killings do not “interrogate witnesses or suspects directly,” he said, adding that “support provided by the U.N. includes guidance to ensure that the investigation is conducted in a manner consistent with international law.” He further added that at no point during the two days of questioning that the experts attended was Kambidi “asked or pressured” to “reveal his sources.”


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.