Human rights

The report is more interesting than this abstract sounds:

The present report is submitted to the Human Rights Council pursuant to Council resolutions 32/2 and 41/18. The Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, analyses the current state of international human rights law in relation to the recognition of gender and gender identity and expression, in connection with the struggle against violence and discrimination in its different forms. The present report and the report to the General Assembly at its seventy-sixth session complement each other. Annex 1 contains a description of activities that have taken place since May 2020, and annex 2 provides an outline of the report to the General Assembly.

The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, the terrifying machine of industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous. These assaults will be committed, as they are in Gaza, in the name of progress, Western civilization and our supposed “virtues” to crush the aspirations of those, mostly poor people of color, who have been dehumanized and dismissed as human animals.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.

The message this sends is clear: You, and the rules that you thought might protect you, do not matter. We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Food is no ordinary commodity. It’s both indispensable and a precious, scarce resource. Ultimately, we need to bring food production and distribution under public ownership and control to end this irrationality.

Achieving that end-goal won’t be simple. We can’t simply take over a system as complex as our food system in one fell swoop. Socializing supermarkets, by contrast, would be relatively simple. It’s the obvious place to start.

Most of the popular discourse around food places the burden of change on individual consumers. However lovely local farmers’ markets may be, convincing people to frequent them isn’t going to cut it, especially as wages decline and working hours crawl up. For their part, government regulations can end the worst excesses of the market, but the problems with our food system require more than just regulatory nudges.

Solving these problems will require rational economic planning. In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability.

In the past decade, more than 29,000 people have either died or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean. Each had a name, a face and a story. Each life was a miracle to those that loved and depended on them — and each death a stain on the collective conscience of those who have criminalised human beings just trying to survive. Politicians across Europe know that their hardline immigration policies will not stop people making the treacherous journey across the Channel. That’s not the point. Their intention is to whip up hatred, division and fear.

To many in our political class, mass death at sea is simply the price of grown-up ‘pragmatism’. Conservative and Social Democratic governments alike tell us this the only way to stave off the rise of the far-right: the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, Vox in Spain, the Swedish Democrats, to name a few. However, governments who embrace anti-migrant rhetoric do not neutralise the far-right — they only legitimise them and embolden them.

Why are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?

There’s a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists.’” The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. They’re a response to corporate lobbying.

For months, Israeli soldiers in Gaza have been documenting their own war crimes against Palestinians and sharing them on social media.

The Listening Post collected and reviewed hundreds of items. We asked three experts on human rights and torture to examine the material.

US senators have defeated a measure, introduced by Bernie Sanders, that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords in its devastating war in Gaza.

A majority of senators struck down the proposal on Tuesday evening, with 72 voting to kill the measure, and 11 supporting it. Although Sanders’ effort was easily defeated, it was a notable test that reflected growing unease among Democrats over US support for Israel.

The measure was a first-of-its-kind tapping into a decades-old law that would require the US state department to, within 30 days, produce a report on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords. If the administration failed to do so, US military aid to Israel, long assured without question, could be quickly halted.

On Monday, MPs will mark the UDHR’s anniversary by gathering for a candlelight vigil, under the title ‘Parliamentarians for Peace.’ How ironic that the majority have given the green light to some of the most appalling levels of death and destruction we have witnessed in decades.

[…] 

Across the board, our political representatives are showing monstrous hypocrisy in their commitment to a document they show no signs of respecting. As we speak, our government is attempting to circumvent international law in order to implement its assault on the rights of refugees. And they are emboldened by an opposition front bench that refuses to make the moral case for the right to asylum. The Tories have not ‘failed’ on immigration because they have ‘lost control of the borders’. They have failed because they have proven incapable of protecting the human rights of those seeking a place of safety. Refugees are not political pawns to be debated and disempowered. They are human beings, whose hopes and dreams should not be sacrificed to appease the right-wing press. 

She said: “Previous attempts have failed because they did not address the root cause of the problem: expansive human rights laws flowing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), replicated in Labour’s Human Rights Act, are being interpreted elastically by courts domestic and foreign to literally prevent our Rwanda plan from getting off the ground.

“And this problem relates to so much more than just illegal arrivals. From my time as home secretary, I can say that the same human rights framework is producing insanities that the public would scarcely believe.

“Foreign terrorists we can’t deport – because of their human rights. Terrorists that we have to let back in – because of their human rights. Foreign rapists and paedophiles who should have been removed but are released back into the community only to reoffend – because of their human rights.”

A lot of recent linkage.