share information on human rights defenders, with special focus on human rights awards and laureates
A bit of transparency to start the New Year: My blog on Human Rights Defenders was viewed about 19,000 times in 2013. In 2013, I created 644 new posts, bringing the total archive of this blog to 1,056 posts. The busiest day of the year was December 20th with 929 views [most popular post: Mariah Carey needs better-informed staff and donate her 1 million fee to Human Rights Defenders in Angola].
For those interested in more details: Click here to see the complete report.
To mark my post number 1000, I have chosen the subject of human rights awards, timely as today, 27 November, is also the LAUNCH OF THE TRUE HEROES AWARDS DIGEST on www.trueheroesfilms.org. The number of human rights awards has exploded with over 50 new awards created in just the last decade, bringing the total number to well over 100. Most of the research was done when I was writing an article on Human Rights Awards for the Special Issue of the OUP Journal of Human Rights Practice on ‘The Protection of Human Rights Defenders” which comes out on 29 November (for more info go to: http://jhrp.oxfordjournals.org/). Doing the research I found that the information on awards is scattered all over the internet and that human rights defenders would greatly benefit if the dat were put all together in a searchable way in a single Digest.
Things are clearly changing in Iran. It is too early to think that human rights defenders can all safely go back, but the fact that Arseh Sevom – a moderate and informative blog voice on Iran – devotes a part of today’s post by Peyman Majidzadeh to this question is telling. Here are some excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »
A long and very interesting blog post on Al-Jazeera (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013519690697916.html) by Rebecca Vincent goes back to Azerbaijan 2012 and reflects on the pros and cons of boycotts as an action to tool for human rights defenders:
“As an estimated 125 million viewers tuned in to watch the grand final of the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, on May 18, I could not help but think how different this year’s Eurovision experience was from last year’s, when the contest was held in Baku, Azerbaijan. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes my eyes fall on more esoteric contributions to the protection of human rights defenders. Let me share with you Mark Laham’s blog post for the Huffington Times of the 1st of May 2013 which calls for a “borderless” one-hour live online yoga class in honour of Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian lawyer in jail, recipient of the Sakharov Award and Nominee of the MEA 2012. Mark got inspired – through AI – by what he read about Nasrin’s struggle and other brave human rights defenders around the world. “How does Nasrin’s story make you feel?” he asks, ” Me, I…I feel the need to do something that will create positive change for this woman and countless others like her.
Read the rest of this entry »
On 9 April 2013, the Criminal Investigation Department in Kuwait detained human rights defender Mr 
Abdullah Fairouz on charges of insulting the judiciary using social media. The Prosecution Office has ordered ten days of detention pending interrogation on the charges. Abdullah Fairouz is a prominent Kuwaiti human rights defender and writer who has worked for several years on the rights of the Bedoun (citizens without identity cards or any prove of their citizenship). The human rights defender is also a member of the Bedoun Committee at the Kuwait Society for Human Rights. Hours after the disappearance of the human rights defender, it was confirmed that he had been detained at the Criminal Investigation Department after a judge ordered his arrest on accusations of insulting the judiciary by publishing tweets and blog posts. The human rights defender had been criticising the issue of a default judgement against Dr Obaid Al Wasmi and Saud Asfour. The defendants had not been notified of their hearing date and the judgement was issued without their knowledge. A request to visit the human rights defender by Mr Khalid Al-Hamidi, director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights, was rejected by the Criminal Investigation Department without motive.
Front Line Defenders believes that the detention of Abdullah Fairouz is solely motivated by his peaceful and legitimate human rights work, and views this act as part of an ongoing campaign of judicial harassment against human rights defenders in Kuwait.
On 10 January 2013 I posted something on the largest ever trial of internet dissidents in Viet Nam. On 8 March this issue was continued in the UN:
“We call upon the Council to press Vietnam to put an end to this repression,” said Vo Van Ai, speaking on behalf of Vietnamese campaigners and the International Federation of Human Rights. In a speech to the UN body he said a total of 32 bloggers and other cyber-dissidents were behind bars in Vietnam, either sentenced or awaiting trial. They face prison terms of up to 16 years.
“Such repression does not serve to protect national security, as the Vietnamese authorities claim, but to stifle the voices of an emerging civil society speaking out on corruption, power abuse, the plight of dispossessed peasants and farmers, human rights and democratic reforms,” he said. He condemned Vietnam’s use of Ordinance 44, a 2002 ruling which authorises the detention of suspected national security offenders without due process of the law and which is increasingly deployed against bloggers, sometimes in psychiatric hospitals.
Fellow-campaigner Penelope Faulker, with the French-based group Work Together for Human Rights, noted that after a 2009 United Nations review (UPR), Hanoi had pledged to uphold freedom of information. “However, in the past year alone, scores of bloggers, online journalists and human rights defenders in Vietnam have been harassed, intimated, subjected to police abuse, or condemned to extremely harsh prison sentences simply for expressing their peaceful views on the Internet,” she told the Council. The southeast Asian country has been branded an “enemy of the Internet” by freedom of expression watchdog Reporters Without Borders.
I am sharing this with you as a measure of transparency and to promise to do better this year with more pictures – feedback welcome as always, best Hans
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 11 years to get that many views.
Click here to see the complete report.
Admittedly not the best topic to bring up if one wants to increase traffic to one blog, but honesty dictates to shares my thoughts on this with you. It came about by the coincidence of two things: (1) my internet connection is down for technical reasons (I go on-line to do something and then disconnect again), and (2) I read belatedly Schumpeter’s column in the Economist of 2 July 2011 “Too much information”. The latter does not say anything shockingly new but is a good summing up of the problem. Not only the quantity of information is staggering (and continues to ‘stagger’ by doubling the amount of data stored every 18 months) but also the omnipresence and fragmentation due to ease of constant access (broadband, mobile access) is major factor.
The possible solutions include better filtering although I personally have doubt about the real effect of this. If the filters would successfully trim down the overload, it could well risk to make the feeling of stress even worse as the recipients ends up with a larger amount of important and urgent matters that require action or response. The filtering would only be useful if it would reduce the total amount of things to read or see, and one could feel sure that the stuff eliminated is really not important: a substantive SPAM filter that does not need to be checked.
More promising seems to be the ‘solution’ of time off, i.e. disconnecting from the internet and mobile phones completely for at least a few hours a day. This would restore people’s capacity to focus, thus to be more creative and productive as shown by considerable research quoted in the above-mentioned article.
The effect of this on my blog on Human Rights Defenders? Well, one of its purposes has always been to help people to digest the enormous amount of information available even on a relatively narrow topic such as HRDs. The selection may be biased and the way I summarize may be incomplete, but the blogs are usually short and ..- even if due only to my failing internet – there will be less of them for a while.
Johann Hari’s observation comes to mind: there is a good reason that ‘wired’ means both “connected” and “frantic, unable to concentrate”!
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 