Rock Hill Herald Online, 12 OCTober 2012, reports on the 20 years anniversary of Witness.
Hosted by award winning actor and long-time supporter of LGBT rights Alan Cumming, the evening kicked off with a journey – taking guests back in time 20 years to look at how WITNESS and its partners have used video in human rights campaigns over the years. Music legend and WITNESS co-founder Peter Gabriel performed.
“WITNESS became a vision for me after the Human Rights Now! Tour back in 1988. I traveled with Amnesty International and met brave human rights defenders who suffered grave abuses. I documented their testimonies with my own handheld video camera in the hopes that their stories would not be buried or forgotten,” said Peter Gabriel. “20 years later, WITNESS is now as important as ever, helping people use video to tell their stories and giving them access to strategies and tools to create meaningful change.”
Since 1992, WITNESS has trained more than 4,500 human rights defenders and partnered with over 300 groups in 86 countries to produce campaign videos that have reached more than 260 million people worldwide.
“Tonight we celebrate how much WITNESS has accomplished over the last 20 years, but also look forward to how much more we can continue to accomplish,” said Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, Executive Director of WITNESS. “We are at a critical point in the history of human rights, where anyone with a camera can be not only a witness but also a catalyst for change. In this ‘cameras everywhere’ world, WITNESS is committed to helping grow the ranks of human rights defenders and citizen activists.”
Video clips of interviews and musical performances, plus images from the event can be accessed at witness.org/gala.
This dates back to March 2012. I missed it and so may have you. It is a excellent interview by Iran specialist Drewery Dyke of of AI with the author Amir. He is an Iranian-American human rights activist, journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared in the Islamic Republic’s gulags. Mehdi has vanished in an extrajudicial twilight zone where habeas corpus is suspended. What stops his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of a mother who refuses to surrender her son to fate and the tenacity of a brother—a blogger—who fuses culture and technology to explore and explode absence: the void in which Mehdi has vanished.
While there have been some notable improvements in Colombia with regard to the situation of Human Rights Defenders over the last years, there are still terrible lapses as shown by the case of the trade unionists Oscar Arturo Orozco and Wilson Jaramillo’s who were shot at when traveling by car on 4 August in the Caldas Department. The president of the Caldas branch of the Trade Union Congress (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, CUT), Oscar Arturo Orozco and the secretary-general Wilson Jaramillo were travelling by car between Manizales and the municipality of Palestina in Caldas Department when shots were fired by two men on a motorbike and several others standing at the side of the road. Several shots hit the car, but neither man was injured. Both men are also members of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movimiento Nacional de Víctimas de Crímenes de Estado, MOVICE) and the Colombian Electricity Workers’ Union (Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Electricidad de Colombia, SINTRAELECOL).
Over recent years flyers containing death threats have been repeatedly left at the office of SINTRAELECOL, most recently in mid-July when the death threat contained a picture of bullet cartridges. According to the CUT, 12 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia in this year alone. This attack comes at a time when there had been an order to remove the protection Oscar Arturo Orozco was receiving and when parts of the budget of the Ministry of Interior Protection Programme have been reduced.
Amnesty International, Protection International and other NGOs call for expressions of support: Go to original article
Several human rights organizations, including AI, called on Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Abdolfattaf Soltani, a prominent lawyer and founding member of the Center for Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), an organization co-founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi
Abdolfattah Soltani was originally sentenced by Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court to 18 years’ imprisonment to be served in the remote city of Borazjan, some 620 miles south-west of Tehran, which will make it hard for his family to visit him. Soltani was also banned from practicing law for 20 years.
His lawyer and family were informed of the initial sentence March 4. On June 4, his family was informed that Branch 54 of the Appeal Court of Tehran had reduced his sentence to 13 years’ imprisonment and overturned the ban on practicing law for 20 years; the court confirmed that his imprisonment sentence is to be served in the city of Borazjan.
Arrested on September 10, 2011 on charges including “spreading propaganda against the system,” “setting up an illegal opposition group [the CHRD],” and “gathering and colluding with intent to harm national security,” Soltani also faced charges of “accepting an illegal prize and illegal earnings” relating to his acceptance of the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award in 2009.
On at least two occasions since his imprisonment, Soltani was pressured to “confess” on camera, including “confessing” that the center had received funding from foreign sources to encourage a “soft revolution” in Iran – which Soltani denies.
Since the CHRD was forcibly closed in December 2008, Iranian authorities carried out a campaign of prosecution and harsh sentencing against anyone with actual or perceived links to the center. Its members have continued to carry out their work in support of human rights but have faced repeated harassment, intimidation, arrest and imprisonment. Several are currently serving prison sentences in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including Narges Mohammadi (six-year sentence), Mohammad Seyfzadeh (a two-year prison sentence), Mohammad Ali Dadkhah (nine years’ imprisonment – currently at liberty, though he may be called to serve his sentence at any time) and MEA 2012 nominee Nasrin Sotoudeh (6-year jail term).
Amnesty International shows its ‘new’ broadened mandate with this short video on forced evictions in Africa. In 4 languages on YouTube: video by AI on forced evictions in Africa. It highlights the kind of human rights violations that the 2012 nominee of the MEA in Cambodia is dealing with: see short film on the multimedia monk on http://www.martinennalsaward.org
In my post of 1 April I wondered whether the would be justice for the Bahraini HRD on hunger strike, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja. Now we know that the Court of Cassation on Monday did not order the requested release but announced that the decision will be read on April 23. His deteriorating health condition simply cannot wait until that date. The Government remains responsible for the consequences.
A leading Bahraini human rights defender, Al-Khawaja’s appeal is set to be heard in Bahrain’s Court of Cassation on 2 April. He is currently serving a life sentence for his role in anti-government protests last year. The activist is at risk of death after 50 days on hunger strike (according to his lawyer, he has lost 16 kg since his hunger strike began on 8 February). Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, 52, is a former protection co-ordinator with Frontline, an NGO on the Jury of the MEA. He was arrested in April last year for being one of the leaders of anti-government protests and was sentenced to life imprisonment in a grossly unfair trial by a military court last June. “Bahrain must ensure that Al-Khawaja is released immediately and unconditionally,” said Philip Luther of Amnesty International, another member of the MEA Jury. He added: “The continued imprisonment of Al-Khawaja demonstrates that the Bahraini authorities are not serious about fulfilling their promises to release people imprisoned for exercising their right to free spHe has not used or advocated violence in his participation in the anti-government protests, and no such evidence was shown by the authorities during the trial.
Activists in Bahrain have repeatedly called for ’s release. Demonstrators in Manama attempted to stage a sit-in at a main highway on Monday, but were quickly dispersed by riot police. Al-Khawaja, who is married with four daughters, is also a citizen of Denmark, where he lived in exile for decades. He returned to Bahrain after the government announced a general amnesty in 2001. Danish diplomats have visited him in prison several times and confirmed his deteriorating health.
Under the title “A Diminished Force for Good” Tom Parker of USA AI posted on 21 March 2012 a piece that – in a frank way – argues that the US should act with regard to its own human rights problems in order to regain international influence. It takes the lead role of the US in getting a resolution on Sri Lanka (successfully) passed in the Human Rights Council in Geneva this week and contrasts it with how the US has dealt with human rights abuses in its own ambit.
As Amnesty’s recent report Locked Away: Sri Lanka’s security detaineesmakes clear, human rights abuses still continue to this day in Sri Lanka. Instances of arbitrary and illegal detention have been widely reported, as have acts of torture and extrajudicial execution. Tom Parker says “I know from my own personal experience of working with Sri Lankan human rights defenders that the climate of fear in which opponents of the Rajapaksa regime operate is all-pervasive. The situation in Sri Lanka is grave and the intervention of the United Nations is much needed. .However, welcome though the US-sponsored resolution is, it is greatly undermined by the embarrassing gap that exists between US rhetoric and US behavior. Critics have not been slow in pointing this out.”…”The complete failure of the United States to address the deliberate use of torture as an integral part of the War on Terror hugely diminishes its ability to put pressure on other states to adhere to human rights standards that it itself has ignored. And we are all the poorer for it.”
“The alacrity with which the US Army has responded to the tragic deaths of sixteen Afghan villagers in Zangabad, Afghanistan, earlier this month demonstrates that accountability is nothing to be afraid of. Indeed it can be a powerful force for good….. The US is one of the [governments that actively promote human rights] but its influence has been greatly diminished over the past decade because of its reluctance to meaningfully address its own, very public, failings in this regard….We need a strong US voice speaking out for human rights in the world, but that can’t happen without real accountability at home.”
Governments are becoming increasingly ‘sophisticated’ in their repression of human rights defenders. Probably as a result of the remarkable worldwide acceptance of human rights as a universal set of standards, Governments that want to continue to suppress criticism are resorting to more and more indirect methods of repression.
The basic universality of human rights is nowadays accepted by the quasi-totality of mankind. In the words of Normand and Zaidi, ‘the speed by which human rights has penetrated every corner of the globe is astounding. Compared to human rights, no other system of universal values spread so fast’. This has not stopped a small number of governments (e.g. Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea) to continue to oppose the idea and depict human rights as a ‘western’ or ‘foreign’ product, alien to their culture. But the big majority seems to have accepted that there is a crucial distinction between the universality of human rights and its universalisation (or universal application). The first is the moral and legal principle that a core of human rights exists and applies to every person in the world irrespective of his or her culture, country, etc. The second is the process by which these universal standards become a reality. Here one cannot make the same optimistic observation about the speed by which human rights are spreading, but this is not only due to the ever-present gap between rhetoric and reality. The international system itself allows for differing interpretations by giving a margin of appreciation at the regional and national level and by permitting States to make reservations to international agreements. The big question is then, to what extent local cultural, legal and religious practices can be accommodated by the international system without losing its coherence.
In this context one sees increasingly that Governments use ‘tricks’ or at least more roundabout ways to tackle those they want to silence. Recent examples are the disbarment of lawyer Intigam Aliyev in Azerbijan (continuing legal work without license), financial fraud charges against Ales Bialiatski in Belarus (NGO refused recognition, therefore no bank account in Belarus, thus acceptance of grants in neighboring countries illegal), withdrawal of recognition of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. Now Amnesty International has come with a report on Ethiopia‘Stifling human rights work: The impact of civil society legislation in Ethiopia’ (PDF). It describes in detail how the 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation imposes heavy restrictions on human rights groups operating in the east African country, and allows for excessive government interference. The result is that Ethiopians have less access to independent human rights assistance. Amnesty International’s Deputy Africa Director Michelle Kagari said: ‘Rather than creating an enabling environment for human rights defenders to work in, the government has implemented a law which has crippled human rights work in Ethiopia. The space to make legitimate criticism is more restricted than ever.’ Human rights defenders risk imprisonment if they violate vaguely defined provisions within the 2009 law, making them afraid to speak out, and often resort to self-censorship, in order to avoid repercussions.
There are surely many other examples and it goes to show that those of us who want to assist HRDs in their work have to become also more sophisticated and cut through the maze of legalistic and bureaucratic measures to unearth the truth about the situation of HRDs. We have our work cut out!
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 