JONAS ALASKA// With his down-to-earth, personal and honest portrayals, it’s no wonder Jonas Alaska is a critic’s favourite. Already with his debut album, he was triple-nominated for the Norwegian Grammy.
NORA GUNDERSEN & ODA VOLTERSVIK // Nora Gundersen and concert pianist Oda Voltersvik will perform at Den Nationale Scene in November! They have both played as solo artists and chamber musicians both in Norway and abroad.
DØSSI // Ingrid Døssland, known as DØSSI, is a producer and singer/songwriter. With her dreamy voice, DØSSI draws you in to her own world of feelings and melancholy.
FRODE GRYTTEN // Frode Grytten has, throughout an extensive and critically acclaimed career, distinguished himself as one of Norway’s foremost writers.
SHARQANT // Sharquant is a band consisting of three musicians with backgrounds from Syria and Iraq. The band was established in 2018, in Bergen. Their music consists of a blend of different parts of the Arab culture, and their music transports the audience to the Mediterranean region.
Guri Solberg is the host of the Rafto Prize Award Ceremony!
The Council has approved conclusions on the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy 2020-2024. The Action Plan sets out the EU’s level of ambition and priorities in this field in its relations with all third countries.
The conclusions acknowledge that while there have been leaps forward, there has also been a pushback against the universality and indivisibility of human rights. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences have had an increasingly negative impact on all human rights, democracy and rule of law, deepening pre-existing inequalities and increasing pressure on persons in vulnerable situations.
In 2012, the EU adopted the Strategic Framework on Human Rights and Democracy which set out the principles, objectives and priorities designed to improve the effectiveness and consistency of EU policy in these areas. To implement the EU Strategic Framework of 2012, the EU has adopted two EU Action Plans (2012-2014 and 2015-2019).
The new Action Plan for 2020-2024 builds on the previous action plans and continues to focus on long-standing priorities such as supporting human rights defenders and the fight against the death penalty.
By identifying five overarching priorities: (1) protecting and empowering individuals; (2) building resilient, inclusive and democratic societies; (3) promoting a global system for human rights and democracy; (4) new technologies: harnessing opportunities and addressing challenges; and (5) delivering by working together, the Action Plan also reflects the changing context with attention to new technologies and to the link between global environmental challenges and human rights.
Kyra Dupont for Geneva Solutions News of 20 November 2020 interviewed two environmental defenders: Vanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old Ugandan and and Solar Impulse founder Piccard to see how their actions resonated.
The Young Activists Summit (YAS) taking place online today aims to shine a spotlight on young activists who are advancing climate action – but also foster greater dialogue between generations. Young activists have become the face of today’s climate crisis. But the fight did not start with Generation Z – nor are they the only ones affected by the realities of global warming. The Young Activists Summit, hosted in Geneva, will give young people a platform to speak up on climate issues, while at the same time encouraging dialogue with an older generation of climate influencers, including Solar Impulse founder Bertrand Piccard.
Roots of a fight. Vanessa Nakate grew up in Kampala in a middle-class family inspired by a father trader in solar batteries and involved in community work as a member of the Rotary Club. “Like my father, I wanted to help out those in my community, find a way to change their lives.” As she was looking for a meaningful cause to dedicate herself, the student in business administration discovered climate change.
“I had already seen floods, landslides, droughts but I had never connected them to climate change because in schools in Uganda this is something we do not worry about: it either belongs to the past, or to the future. When I started reading about it, I grew to understand that this is the current threat humanity faces right now. I decided that I had to take action and be part of the climate movement.”
Like Nakate, Piccard – the son of oceanographer Jacques Piccard – was also inspired by family members. While studying at medical school (he became psychiatrist) he started fighting for cleaner aviation and ultralight airplanes.
“I was horrified by how human beings could pollute and all the disrespectful way of treating the environment.”
The power of youth. Worried by the unusually high temperatures hitting Uganda, Nakate began protesting against climate inaction in front of Ugandan parliament in 2019. She also staged hunger strikes every Friday for three months. It did not have much impact nor did it attract much attention being the sole protester outside the government gates. But an activist was born. Eventually, other young Ugandans started responding to her calls on social media.
For Piccard too, beginnings were hard. To his great surprise, his fiercest opponents were the ecologists who did not want cleaner aviation, only fewer planes. It took a good 35 years to win his case. Today, he is respected for realising the impossible: he is the visionary initiator of Solar Impulse, the first zero-fuel aircraft with perpetual autonomy. Thanks to his round-the-world flight, the “explorer for sustainability” was able to launch the Solar Impulse Foundation and its 1,000 solutions to protect the environment in a profitable way. He is now listened to by chiefs of state and respected institutions like the European Commission or the United Nations.
Swiss psychiatrist and pilot Bertrand Piccard receives the Knight of the Legion d’Honneur insignia from French President François Hollande. (Credit: Keystone / Etienne Laurent)
Injustice as a driving force. Nakate’s energy comes from her desire to end the injustice afflicting her country and the African continent in general. In Uganda, 90 per cent of the population depends on agriculture for their survival, “a matter of life and death”.
This is why she is not afraid to tell the truth and speak up in front of decision-makers. Convinced young people can make a difference, she founded Youth for Future Africa and the Rise Up Movement Africa before joining the ranks of a handful of activists at the UN climate summit, COP25, in Madrid in December 2019 where she met Greta Thunberg. She was also invited by Arctic Basecamp in Davos where she co-wrote a letter to the participants of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Climate activists Isabelle Axelsson, Loukina Tille, Vanessa Nakate, Greta Thunberg, and Luisa Neubaue, from left, arrive for a news conference in Davos on 24 January 2020. (Credit: Keystone / Markus Schreiber)
Thousands of young people mobilised for climate change, a powerful grassroots movement that did not exist in the same way when Piccard started to voice his concerns.
“They are very fortunate to be such a big group with such a loud voice. When I was their age, I was very lonely and not a lot of people were speaking about these climate issues. It gives us strength. It gives power. People listen to them. But it also gives them responsibility.”
The keys to sucess. In order for youth aspirations to bear fruit, their message must be practical and concrete with very targeted requests, says Piccard. Development aid should help incentivise developing countries to be cleaner, more efficient and sustainable so donors and investors know that they are not losing their money.
“To say they want to fight climate change is too vague (…) By being practical and voicing specific and understandable claims, they will have a much more positive outcome than if they just protest and say “we are paying the cost of rich countries”.”
Refusing economic growth is purely idealistic, according to Piccard. Its reduction would lead to social chaos, the bankruptcy of thousands of companies and the unemployment of millions of people. The decision-makers must find an advantage in investing in developing countries. Solidarity, yes, but with good leverage.
“To fight poverty in developing countries, you need to localize the production of energy and give energy access to everybody. And you can only do that with renewable energies. If you put solar energy in a village in Uganda, it will create a local economy. People who have solar energy will sell the electricity to people charging their phones, doing business, pumps for irrigation. They will store it in batteries and sell the electricity further…”
Nakate says she is fighting for the fact that the impacts of climate change are not borne equally or fairly between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations. Many victims of climate change have disproportionately low responsibility for causing the emissions responsible for global warming. Meanwhile the $1bn promised by the Green Climate Fund is still underfunded. A balance still needs to be found between the young activist’s call for climate justice and proper use of funds seniors like Piccard insist on.
The power of education. Well aware of the interactions between climate and social justice, Nakate started to work on the Green Schools Project, a renewable energy initiative which aims to transition schools to solar energy and install eco-friendly stoves. This way, she hopes to bring transition to renewable energy in rural schools and give them access to electricity and a better education.
“I never had the opportunity to learn about it, to understand the danger that our planet is facing. If you know that you are in a burning house, you will do everything you can to stop the fire. So, I believe in creating awareness, and this awareness only comes through education.”
Nakate especially believes in educating girls, the number six tool to fight the climate crisis on the list of the DrawDown project.
“There are a lot of different technologies to move towards sustainability but most of them need so much funding. Educating girls is something we can do right now. When you educate these girls from the most affected communities, it also benefits their families and cascades into their communities. They will make better decisions in their lives, have fewer children, survive the risk of hunger, resist school drop-outs, know how to build resilience. They are tomorrow’s leaders, tomorrow’s campaigners, tomorrow’s scientists who will make the best decisions for their countries.”
“Women leaders make the best decisions for their countries. We need more girls in decision-making positions,” says Nakate (Credit: Ronald Meyna)
Africa’s contribution to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions is less than four per cent of the total. But despite being one of the lowest emitters, it is the continent most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Yes, those who are the least responsible are suffering the most and yes, it comes as an injustice, says Nakate. But like Piccard in his own time, she resorted to take control of her own destiny.
“We cannot lay back and feel comfortable because our emissions are limited. If we do not speak up for ourselves, we will continue experiencing direct impacts of climate change.”
European Parliament is deciding its position on what an EU law on corporate due diligenceshould look like. Richard Gardiner (a Senior Campaigner for Corporate Accountability at Global Witness) on 2 September 2020 explains more and more recently (11 November 2020) a group of 87 organisations and media freedom groups call on the EU to to protect journalists against gag lawsuits (SLAPPs)
As the European Parliament begins developing proposals for a new – and momentous – law to hold business to account for its impact on people and planet, Richard Gardiner sets out how this process came about and what needs to happen now to ensure this really delivers results.
Where are we now?
Following the publication of the European Commission study on due diligence requirements through the supply chain earlier this year, in April, European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders announced to the European Parliament Responsible Business Conduct Working Group that he will introduce EU rules on corporate accountability and corporate due diligence in early 2021.
In response to this announcement, Members of the European Parliament are now starting work to develop a European Parliament position on what an EU law on corporate due diligence could look like. This work will take place within the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee and will be led by MEP Lara Wolters.
The goal of this work is to influence the final Commission legislative proposal and ensure that the Commissioner follows through on his commitment to present an ambitious framework for this law.
Potential to be a real game changer?
Global Witness has long advocated for mandatory corporate accountability rules to tackle corporate abuse against people and planet.
Our recently published report ‘Defending Tomorrow’ shows that while land and environmental defenders continue to act as the first line of defence against climate breakdown, far too many businesses, financiers and governments either fail to protect them or – in the worst examples – can be complicit in the violence they face.
These brave people play a vital role challenging companies operating recklessly, rampaging unhampered through virgin forests, protected wetlands, indigenous territories and biodiversity hotspots. They are on the frontline of our global, collective fight against climate change. However, despite their importance to the preservation of our planet, our report shows that 212 land and environmental defenders were murdered in 2019 – the bloodiest on record, with the deadliest sectors for this violence being mining, agribusiness and logging.
There is clearly a legislative gap when governments and citizens have no legal means to hold corporations accountable for their human rights and environmental abuses. As the world’s largest trading bloc, the EU is now looking to lead the global debate on corporate accountability and this new law will shape not only corporate behaviour within the EU but also globally.
What needs to be in this new law?
Civil society united in their calls for the EU to introduce legislation on corporate due diligence. We have consistently pointed to the fact that voluntary measures have proved to be vastly insufficient and new legislation is urgently needed to establish clear, robust and enforceable cross-sectoral requirements on all business enterprises, including financial institutions, to respect human rights and the environment.
As the European Parliament begins to discuss the details of corporate accountability legislation, Global Witness is part of a coalition of NGOs that has published its call to action for the key elements needed to hold businesses to account:
The new law must apply to all businesses, including finance, of all sizes and sectors acting in the EU.
Business must have a duty to address all the adverse human rights, environmental and governance impacts in their global supply chains.
Businesses must conduct Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) Due Diligence to identify, cease, prevent, mitigate, monitor and account for their adverse risks.
Businesses must engage and consult with all relevant stakeholders, including human rights defenders and indigenous peoples, as part of their RBC due diligence.
Businesses must be made liable for the human rights, environmental and governance adverse impacts in their global value chains.
The months between now and the end of the year promise to be extremely interesting on the topic of corporate accountability across all the EU institutions. Firstly, the European Parliament will aim to finalise its advice to the Commission by end 2020 in order to ensure that it can be taken into account in the Commission proposal. Secondly, the Commission has draft plans to release a public consultation on the new due diligence legislation in Autumn 2020 to get public input on how to draft their proposal.
And finally, the German Presidency of the European Council have indicated that due diligence is a key political priority for their Presidency and they will aim to have Council conclusions on this topic by the end of the year. At Global Witness, we will continue to engage with all the European institutions to ensure that EU policy makers live up to their commitments to introduce a meaningful and impactful new law.
SLAPPs: More and more journalists and civil society organisations are being sued by powerful businessmen and politicians. The International Press Institute (IPI) has joined a group of 87 organisations and media freedom groups calling on the EU to ensure those with a watchdog role are protected from gag lawsuits.
This scrutiny is the lifeblood of healthy democratic societies. The European Court of Human Rights and other national and regional courts have consistently and explicitly recognised in their judgments the important role a free press, and more broadly civil society, plays in holding the powerful to account. Their judgments reaffirm the obligation states have to create an environment that is conducive to free speech. Because without this, democracy weakens and dies.
The holes in our laws that allow powerful people to hammer their critics into submission are a hole in European democracy. Cases of abuse pepper the continent. Poland’s second-biggest daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, has received over 55 legal threats and lawsuits by a number of actors, including from Poland’s ruling party, since 2015.
French businessman Vincent Bolloré and companies affiliated with the Bollore Group have blanketed journalists and NGOs in libel suits to stop them covering his business interests in Africa. In Spain, meat producer Coren is demanding €1 million in damages from an environmental activist for criticising its waste management practices, having previously threatened activists and scientists who were researching nitrate levels in its local waters.
The people we depend on for information about what is happening around us are being distracted, impeded, or entirely blocked from pursuing their work by these costly and resource-intensive legal attacks. The situation is becoming skewed beyond recognition. When it comes to certain people, governments, companies and topics, it’s not writers, film makers or journalists who decide what we read, watch and talk about.
It’s not even the courts, for SLAPPs rarely make it to a hearing, let alone a court judgment. Rather, it’s the oligarchs and their associates in politics, through the lawyers they pay, who are shaping the narrative and preventing the truth from emerging.
We’ve seen a worrying pattern emerge in Europe of government officials or beneficiaries of large public contracts adopting the tactics of celebrities and oligarchs to shield themselves from the heightened level of scrutiny that their positions or financial links to government warrant. The fact that the threats are often cross-border ratchets up the costs for journalists and activists, who find themselves summoned to court far from home in Europe’s most expensive legal jurisdictions.
Awareness of this problem is growing. European Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová has promised to ‘look into all possible options’ to counter the threat SLAPPs pose to European democracy. One promising solution lies in the institutions of the European Union, and it could help realter the balance between pursuers of SLAPPs and the public’s right to be informed of matters in the public interest.
EU-wide legislation should be adopted to protect people across the European Union from SLAPPs. This has to be a priority. As in other parts of the world, rules should be in place across the EU to allow SLAPP suits to be dismissed at an early stage of proceedings, to sanction SLAPP litigants for abusing the law and the courts, and to provide measures to allow victims to defend themselves.
When we consider the importance of public watchdogs such as investigative journalists, activists, and whistleblowers to the rule of law and the fight against corruption, the absence of safeguards is a threat not only to press freedom but to the proper functioning of Europe’s internal market and, increasingly, to Europe’s democratic life.
The reality is that for every journalist or activist threatened with violence in Europe, a hundred more are silenced discreetly by letters sent by law firms, perverting laws meant to protect the reputations of the innocent from attacks by the powerful.
SLAPPs are a far less barbaric means of silencing someone than a car bomb or a bullet to the head, but their silencing effect is often just as destructive.
On 16 November 2020, Amnesty International denounces the arbitrary arrest of Mohamed Basheer, the Administrative Manager at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), over bogus charges.
“By arresting Mohamed Basheer, a member of staff at one of Egypt’s most prominent independent human rights organizations, the Egyptian authorities have yet again shown their intolerance of any scrutiny of their abysmal human rights record, sending a chilling message to the embattled human rights community in Egypt that they remain at risk.” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director.
“Amnesty International strongly condemns Basheer’s arrest and detention and believes he is being targeted solely for his organization’s legitimate human rights work, including for meeting with Western diplomats. Members of the international community, and especially the states whose representatives were part of that visit, must now show that they won’t accept this reprisal and urge the Egyptian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Basheer, drop all charges against him, and end the persecution of Egyptian civil society and human rights defenders. ”
EIPR is an independent human rights organization whose work covers a variety of political, civil, economic and social rights in Egypt. According to Gasser Abdel-Razek, the Executive Director of EIPR, plainclothes security forces raided Basheer’s home in the early hours of 15 November. They took him to a National Security Agency building, where they detained him for more than 12 hours and questioned him without a lawyer present about the visit on 3 November by Western ambassadors and diplomats to the EIPR’s office. He was then taken to the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP), where a lawyer who attended his questioning by prosecutors there, said the questions had focused on EIPR’s publications and legal assistance to victims of human rights violations.
EIPR researcher Patrick George Zaki remains detained pending investigations by the SSSP over unfounded “terrorism”-related charges since his arrest in February 2020.
Migrant Workers Rights Network is a grassroots member-based association that works to protect the rights of migrant workers who live and work in Thailand, the majority being from Myanmar. The organization was founded in 2009 by nine Myanmar migrant leaders after seeing extensive exploitation and abuse of migrant workers in Thai factories, the seafood industry, agriculture, and construction. They decided that empowerment of migrants is the best way for migrant workers to protect themselves.
Voicing concerns over increasing restrictions on civil society in Cambodia, a group of independent UN human rights experts have called for an immediate end to the systematic detention and criminalization of human rights defenders.
In a statement on 16 November 2020 Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, said she was “alarmed” by credible reports that at least 21 human rights defenders have been subjected to threats, arbitrary arrests and detentions in the past three months.
“I have reviewed publicly available footage where excessive force has been used by the security forces to prohibit human rights defenders, many of them women, from exercising their rights to peaceful assembly. Promotion and protection of human rights through peaceful means is not a crime,” she said.
Ms. Lawlor referred to several cases in which detention has reportedly been used to punish human rights defenders for carrying out their work.
Rights defender Rong Chhun was arrested on 31 July after taking up the case of farmers in Tbong Khmom province who had their land taken in connection with a border demarcation between Cambodia and Viet Nam.
Subsequently, several other human rights defenders who protested his detention were also arrested. Twelve remain in pre-trial detention, have been denied bail, and are facing charges punishable by up to two years in prison.
“Human rights defenders should never be criminalized for their courageous efforts to protect the rights of others … I am increasingly concerned by the circular pattern of detaining them for advocating against the detention of or violations against fellow defenders,” said Ms. Lawlor.
“There seems to be no limit to who the authorities will target, making their actions in recent months appear as a concerted attempt to erode civic space and stifle the work of human rights defenders,” she added.
Dana Walters, in Harvard Law Today of 16 November 2020 describes how Salma Waheedi partners with gender justice coalitions to advance legal equality in Muslim communities. I repeat the article in full as it contains lots of interesting details:
Since joining Harvard Law School, Salma Waheedi, a clinical instructor and lecturer on law in the International Human Rights Clinic, has devoted a major part of her teaching and clinical legal practice to training students to become effective international women’s rights advocates. A native of Bahrain and a U.S.-trained attorney with a background in constitutional and Islamic Law, Waheedi has led advocacy and social justice-oriented legal projects in partnership with women’s rights activists in Muslim communities. To change the lived experiences of women most acutely, Waheedi and her partners have focused on family law reform.
Salma Waheedi joined Harvard Law School in 2016 as a joint fellow in Islamic Legal Studies and the International Human Rights Clinic. Today, she is a clinical instructor and lecturer in law in the International Human Rights Clinic and associate director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World.
“Despite its huge impact on women’s lives, it’s an area that receives relatively little attention in human rights circles,” Waheedi said. “We are talking about a system of laws that govern all aspects of women’s private lives, including marriage, divorce, child custody, matrimonial property, inheritance, as well as freedom of movement and work and protection from violence.”
..Waheedi’s practice focuses on lending legal support to women’s rights advocates working with their local communities, as well as international coalitions working to foster cross-regional collaborations. One key example is Musawah, a global movement advocating for justice and equality in the Muslim family. Musawah takes strong positions against child marriage, forced marriage, and polygamy and calls for equality in spousal rights, custody rights, access to divorce, and inheritance rights. It advocates for these changes through a holistic framework that integrates progressive Islamic legal interpretations, human rights principles, local constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination, and the lived experiences of Muslim women.
“Many current legal provisions are no longer tenable given the lived realities of Muslim women today,” Waheedi said. “Muslim feminist scholarship aims to create a paradigm shift by emphasizing the need to return to the core principles of the Quran, such as justice, equality, and dignity for all, as a basis for an alternative rights-based reading of Islamic legal sources that responds to the contemporary needs of the Muslim family.”
To help conceptualize current reforms and outdated laws, Musawah and Waheedi’s student teams have put together a comprehensive Muslim family law mapping project. The project is a resource for researchers and academics to look comparatively across 31 countries with Muslim majorities or minorities. Importantly, the initiative also outlines positive developments for women’s rights in the Muslim world, celebrating successes, as well as marking lessons for how to continue to advocate for change.
In Fall 2018, Samantha Lint ’20 (middle) traveled to Geneva with Waheedi to work with women’s rights advocates to present a report on Mauritius to UN committees. Lint is seated between advocates Narghis Bundhun (left) and Anushka Virahsawmy (right).
Over the years, Waheedi’s student teams have also collaborated with international coalitions, local organizations, and grassroots activists to develop legal reform proposals and strategic advocacy reports to address gender discrimination in countries including Jordan, Nigeria, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Kenya, Mauritius. Salomé Gómez Upegui LL.M. ’18, who worked with Waheedi in 2017-2018, said working on such advocacy reports required “creative thinking,” asking students to learn and rely on comparative law, alternative interpretations of Islamic law, and human rights standards. After working on the reports, students often worked closely with activists to develop engagement strategies with their local legislatures or at the international level with United Nations mechanisms.
In fall 2018, International Human Rights Clinic alumna Samantha Lint ’20 worked with Waheedi, Musawah, and Mauritian family law expert, Narghis Bundhun, to document gaps in legal protection for married Muslim women. After working on the report, Lint traveled with Waheedi to present the findings to the U.N. Committee on the Convention on the Eliminations of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Lint, who had come to law school after working in women’s empowerment and global reproductive health, learned a tremendous amount about how to “support NGO advocacy in a U.N. treaty review process.” Importantly, she noted, working on the project demonstrated how change is possible within a large and bureaucratic organization like the U.N.
“After presenting our report to the CEDAW Committee, several members focused on the issues we raised when questioning the government of Mauritius. The government seemed a bit taken aback, and the committee really emphasized the problems with the lack of clear codified rights for Muslim religious marriages,” Lint said. “I saw that civil society advocates are a huge resource to the Committee, and are key in elevating issues that may otherwise go overlooked.”
Moreover, after presenting the report to the U.N., Lint and her team learned that the “the review process served as a catalyst for on-the-ground discussions and change [in Mauritius].”
Waheedi emphasized that she teaches her students that, as international lawyers, their role is to amplify the voices of local communities and grassroots activists.
She added, “local activists know the situation on the ground best. They are very clear about their priorities and needs. But many of these activists don’t always have the capacity or the resources to manage a full advocacy campaign at the international level. That’s where we come in,” she said. “In those cases, we have been able to work with the advocates to distill issues of concern, articulate proposals for legal reform, formulate advocacy strategies, and help them figure out where to put pressure on certain priority points to make change happen. But at the end, their voices are the ones that must be heard.”
Tarek Zeidan, executive director of the LGBT rights organization, Helem, was a cross-registered Harvard Kennedy School student in the International Human Rights Clinic. Zeidan worked with Waheedi on a project advocating for legal equality and protection of women from violence in Kuwait and Oman, gathering testimonies from local women and learning how to weave such first-hand evidence into documentation for advocacy purposes.
Working on the project gave Zeidan professional insight into how to structure human rights documentation and link it to “existing international legislatures to make the strongest case for equality-oriented legal reforms.”
Zeidan still draws on the lessons he learned with Waheedi as he now leads Helem in Lebanon: “I based a lot of our engagement plans with international organizations like the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights or the United Nations Development Programme on what I learned about appealing to international organizations in the clinic.”
“One of my main objectives is to train lawyers and advocates who would listen mindfully, set aside their assumptions and preconceptions, and work in collaboration with local activists and communities to develop solutions that correspond to their needs and priorities. Strengthening students’ cross-cultural sensitivity and the competency to translate between contexts are key learning goals in all these projects,” Waheedi said.
In 2018, Waheedi was named associate director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, a research program at Harvard Law School, which has enabled her to foster stronger engagement with scholars and policy experts and to bring contemporary debates on gender, feminism, and legal advocacy in Muslim contexts to HLS.
In late November, Waheedi will participate in Musawah’s global convening on Muslim family law reform, which will bring together activists, scholars, and policy makers from over thirty different countries to strengthen networks of mutual learning and support. Advocates will hold consultations over the course of five days to identify key barriers and challenges to reform in national contexts, share good practices, and work to develop key messaging to build public support for advancing equality and justice and to challenge Islamist and Islamophobic narratives.
The meeting will also celebrate and build upon the recently launched Musawah initiative, the Global Campaign for Justice in Muslim Family Laws. In early October, Waheedi curated a webinar for the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World to highlight the campaign and the voices of Muslim women activists campaigning for egalitarian reform. The webinar, titled, “Muslim Women Creating New Futures,” featured Zainah Anwar, executive eirector of Musawah; Marwa Sharafelden, Musawah’s MENA region senior expert; and Hala Al-Karib, regional director of the strategic initiative for women in the Horn of Africa, and was moderated by International Human Rights Clinic alum Upegui.
Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has made “the work more relevant and urgent,” says Waheedi. As the UN has observed, the virus has been associated with a “a shadow pandemic,” a rise in violence against women and girls, and has exacerbated inequalities faced by women in the realm of marriage and the family. Musawah’s campaign and Waheedi’s advocacy for women’s rights operate within this context.
“It is important to recognize that there are no quick wins in this line of work, yet my students and I are always motivated and inspired by the dedication and perseverance of our partners in the most challenging of circumstances. We are energized by positive changes that are achieved through the relentless work of grassroots activists and organizers—from family law reforms in Jordan and Morocco to passing a law against domestic violence in Kuwait this year to banning triple talaq in India in a 2017 Constitutional Court victory. Change is not only possible; it is inevitable.”
The opening of the Forum gave a sobering assessment of how the COVID crisis has reversed business and human rights gains. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that COVID restrictions were being exploited to suppress rights and to silence dissent. She pointed out that supply chains had suffered most, with female workers disproportionately affected.
UNICEF’s Sanjay Wijesekerg said decades of progress on child labour and child marriage were being lost. He was one of a number of speakers throughout the day calling on governments to use their financial leverage during the crisis to enforce respect for business and human rights.
In a special session on lessons from the pandemic, Tony Khaw — Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for semi-conductor producer NXP — explained how they had been able to help foreign migrant workers, always the most vulnerable in the company’s workforce across 26 countries, who were unable to return home because of travel restrictions; and Shubha Sekhar, Director of Human Rights: Eurasia & North Africa for The Coca-Cola Company, described how human rights specialists had been embedded in the company’s crisis-management teams.
Both companies found the advantage that comes from the fact that “due diligence” meant they had already established highly developed relations with suppliers, which had enormous benefits to both companies and to the supply chain when the crisis hit. Small businesses and jobs were saved, but security of supply remained protected.
Corey Klemmer, Director of Engagement at impact investor Domini, said investors also saw how companies with strong human rights records had been shown to be more resilient. The business case for human rights respect clearly exists in bad times, as well as good.
However, a second theme running throughout the day was what UN Global Compact Executive Director Sanda Ojiambo called a “growing disconnect” between companies adopting human rights policies and taking action to implement them.
The fourth Corporate Human Rights Benchmarkannual report — launched today at the Forum — finds the most improvement this year has been in public commitments to respect human rights by business, but that a large number of companies had failed to record improvement during the year; and still, 79 of the 230 companies assessed scored zero for human rights due diligence.
The day’s closing CEO panel put this down to an issue of leadership.
UN Working Group Chair Anita Ramasastry said the leading companies were the ones “where the CEO can speak easily about the Guiding Principles and not just having a company human rights statement. It means employees, investors, stakeholders and consumers really notice.”
Meanwhile, for anyone afraid that cross-industry collaboration between companies on broader societal issues might impinge on their competitiveness, the best answer came from Michele Thatcher, SVP and Chief Counsel at PepsiCo, who said: “We even found ourselves at Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta, talking human rights.”
Another key finding in the Human Rights Benchmark report was in a study of automotive companies, which finds almost no correlation between companies who rate well on climate action and those who do so on human rights. The two appear to be treated entirely separately by the industry — it’s as if the term “climate justice” had never been invented.
The case to link the two was made by former Irish President Mary Robinson, who used the Forum to appeal to companies to work directly with human rights defenders at the local level — “as they understand the link between the environment, development and rights.”
A positive sign that the linkage is being better understood came from the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Filipo Veglio, who explained how the organisation has now changed its membership criteria to require a commitment to human rights, too.
What links the two major themes to emerge from the day — whether COVID or climate — is the need for companies to take steps to assist vulnerable people in supply chains, and to ensure their needs are taken into account in the change processes in which business is engaged.
Richard Howitt will be providing daily updates on the UN Human Rights Forum 2020.
In the meantime on 11 November 2020 the Business ad Human Rights Resource Centre published:”The dirty side of development finance‘
…Human rights abuses and lack of meaningful consultation are a common feature of many of the so-called “development projects”. Human rights defenders, civil society and local communities all over the world have been denouncing the inherent, structural problems of the current development model for years. Yet, banks keep burying their head under the sand, failing to recognise these problems and to address them…
When the Inter-American Development bank and other financiers began talking about building three hydroelectric dams along the Pojom and Negro rivers, the word ‘development’ became the smokescreen for giving freeway to corporations. The pristine hills of Ixquisis, where local indigenous communities of Mayan descent had been living for centuries, were plundered, polluted and militarized…
In Armenia, for the past two years, local residents have been protesting against the development of the Amulsar gold mine. Built near the touristic spa town of Jermuk by the international mining company Lidyan, the mine would pose a threat to the environment and livelihoods of the local people. As the company plans to use cyanide to leach gold concentrate, the precious water sources in the area are in danger…
In Kenya, the Sengwer indigenous communities in the Embobut forest have been facing forced evictions, loss of livelihood and violent attacks because of a conservation project approved in the name of “sustainable development”…
In Nepal, the European Investment Bank (EIB) is funding a 220 kV transmission line project in the Lamjung district, failing to respect the right of the local indigenous communities to free, prior and informed consent. Project documents were primarily provided in English and, even in those rare cases where consultations took place, communities could not participate meaningfully and negotiate compensation rates…
Hussein al-Qaidi, director of the Office of Rescuing Kidnapped Yezidis for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), has been named the recipient of the Sergio Vieira De Mello Prize, which is awarded yearly in Poland (!) to individuals and organizations which promote human rights and dialogue.
Qaidi is a Yezidi, born in the Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2014, after ISIS overran the Yezidis’ homeland, he organized campaigns to find missing people, free them, and help then return to a normal life.
The KRG supported Qaida’s efforts and already in August 2014, he was named to lead a new unit: the Office of Rescuing Kidnapped Yezidis. It is based in Duhok, and Qaida remains its head.
Last November, Qaida received the prestigious Mother Teresa Memorial Award for rescuing thousands of Yezidi women from the clutches of the ISIS terrorists.
Raoof hopes that the award will put Yezidis in the spotlight again in Poland, since previous awards were widely reported in the Polish media.
“I believe that it will once again make Polish people aware of the difficult fate of Yezidis and also show that there are still many people and organizations helping Yezidi people with great courage and commitment, ”he continued.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 