[reposted as it seems that the link no longer worked – why? – Syrian secret service THAT sophisticated??]
After more than a month the abduction of 36-year-old human rights defender Ms. Razan Zaitouneh in Syria continues to go unsolved. She became part of the statistics herself that she was gathering inside Syria. Now part of ‘the missing’ inside her country Zaitouneh was joined in her abduction by her husband Nazem al-Hamadi, along with reform activist Ms. Sameera Alkhalil along with lawyer and poet Wael Hamada on December 9, 2013 in the Damascus suburb of Douma city. Just before she recorded this video message for the FIDH:
Human Rights Watch World Report 2014 (covering 2013) was released on 21 January 2014 with press releases and – to illustrate the growing importance of images – with a press conference streamed live from Berlin. Speakers are Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, and Wenzel Michalski, Germany Director of Human Rights Watch.
In relation to the other post of today about Witness’ new application, I want to draw your attention to the video posted on 23 December giving excerpts from the human rights channel covering police brutality, torture, chemical weapons attacks, etc. Through the lenses of bystanders, witnesses, and sometimes even perpetrators, you see the darkest episodes of humanity, all with the ease of a click, and the speed of an upload. They come from Daveyton, South Africa in late February, watching with other shocked bystanders as officers handcuffed Mido Macia to their van and drove away, dragging the taxi driver down the gravel road behind them; from Haiti were you can listen to Haitian earthquake survivors, who testified that officials, landowners, and thugs were attempting to force them out of tent camps and into the streets. And in the pre-dawn hours of mid-August, in a suburban Damascus hospital, witnessing in horror victims as young as babies suffering from what would later be confirmed to be a chemical weapons attack. [In 2013, the Human Rights Channel curated nearly 2300 videos from 100 countries, but as the importance of citizen video becomes clear, so too do the challenges it involves, including the need for verification and the potential of misuse.]
(Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson. UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras)
Still haunted by its failure to forestall genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica nearly 20 years ago and confronted by ongoing bloodshed in Syria and the Central African Republic (CAR), the United Nations is revamping its preventive strategies under a new initiative called ‘Rights up Front.’ “The need for early action, and the crucial role of responding early to human rights violations, is at the heart of the ‘Rights up Front’ initiative,” Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told an informal session of the General Assembly on 17 December 2013 – as he presented a six-point action plan.
It includes training UN staff on the world body’s core purpose of promoting respect for human rights; providing Member States with the information needed to respond to human rights violations; and ensuring that UN personnel around the world are more attuned to situations where there is a risk of serious human rights abuses and are equipped for the responsibilities that such potential crises entail.
The strategy, initiated by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, also includes achieving a more coherence by strengthening engagement with the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council and providing earlier and more coherent support to teams on the ground before a crisis emerges; and better organization of human rights staff so that they can identify risks of serious violations of human rights that could lead to atrocities.
Finally, underpinning all these activities will be better information management on threats and risks to populations for planning operational activities and for sharing with Member States.
“. ..It is irrefutable, and needs repeating, that serious human rights violations are the best early warning of impending atrocities.” Eliasson said. “If we fail to act early, the human, political and economic costs can be devastating as we know far too well. This calls for a more alert, flexible and coordinated UN System, both on the ground and at headquarters.”
Horrendous events led us all to say ‘never again’, Mr. Eliasson said. “We said we would have to do more to prevent serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Despite much effort, since 1995 hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of mass atrocities and tens of millions have been displaced.” But steps forward have been taken. “World leaders endorsed the ‘responsibility to protect in 2005. And Member States have over the years articulated an increasingly detailed agenda for the protection of civilians,” he said. Yet, the crises in Syria, where over 100,000 people have now been killed and 8 million driven from their homes in the nearly three-year civil war, and in CAR, where thousands have been killed and over 600,000 displaced in a conflict increasingly marked by inter-communal clashes between Christians and Muslims, are reminders that serious human rights abuses are often the clearest early warning of emerging conflict, he added.
“When people in today’s world are at risk or subject to serious violations, they expect and request the United Nations to act – and we do,” Mr. Eliasson declared. “However, in practice, our response to crisis often comes when a situation has deteriorated to the point where only a substantial political or peacekeeping mission can deal with the problems.”
On 9 December 2013, 4 human rights defenders [Ms Razan Zaitouna, Mr Wael Hamada, Mr Nazem Hamaadi and Ms Samira Khalil] were abducted by masked armed men and taken to unknown whereabouts in Syria. They were kidnapped from the offices of the Center for Documenting Human Rights Violations in Syria, located in Douma. Razan Zaitouna is an award-winning human rights defender who worked on the rights of political prisoners in Syria before the revolution, and continued her activities throughout the peaceful uprising in 2011, founding the ‘local coordination committees’. In 2011, she received the Anna Politkovskaya award “RAW (Reach All Women) in WAR” and in 2013 the International Women of Courage Award. Wael Hamada is an active human rights defender who had been kidnapped by the authorities in 2011 for his legitimate work in the defence of human rights in Syria, and Nazem Hamaadi is a well-known lawyer and poet, respected for his defence of detainees who were arrested in Damascus during the revolution. Samira Khalil is a human rights activist and a member of a peaceful political opposition party in Syria.
On 12 December 2013 Tasnim Nazeer published a list of 5 women human rights defenders who in spite of setbacks in the “Arab Spring” have no plans to stop fighting:
Tawakkol Karman. The first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. A Yemeni journalist, human rights activist and politician member of the Al-Islah political party, Karman is the leader of the renowned group “Women Journalists Without Chains,” which she co-founded in 2005. She became the international public face of the Yemeni “Arab Spring” uprising in 2011. The people of Yemen know her as the “Iron Woman” and “Mother of the Revolution” due to her courage in sticking up for human rights injustices in Yemen.
Razan Ghazzawi Razan, an award-winning Syrian blogger, campaigner and human rights activist. She has been actively involved in the events during the Syrian Civil War, and has been particularly outspoken on activists’ arrests and the violations of human rights committed by the Bashar al Assad regime.Razan, who has been arrested by the Syrian regime several times and is forbidden to leave Syria, was named as an “iconic blogger and leading activist” by The Telegraph as well as awarded the 2012’s Human Rights Defenders at Risk award by the Dublin-based Front Line Defenders foundation.
Moushira Mahmoud Khattab, an Egyptian human rights activist, former politician and diplomat. She has previously held the positions as Minister of Family & Population as well as ambassador to South Africa, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Khattab is a renowned human rights activist who speaks up for the rights of children and women in Egypt and the MENA region. Her efforts to advocate human rights have been recognized internationally through numerous awards, including the two highest honors that can be bestowed on any foreign national in South Africa and Italy.
Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer, human rights activist, physician and psychiatrist. Saadawi has authored many books on the subject of women and Islam and advocates human rights issues involving women. The founder and president of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights, she has been awarded numerous honorary degrees on three continents.
Manal al-Sharif. Women’s rights activist from Saudi Arabia who helped start a groundbreaking women’s right to drive campaign in 2011. An outspoken voice on the rights of women in the Kingdom, she was detained and released on 21 May and rearrested the following day on the conditions of returning for questioning if she were to continue talking to the media about rights for women to drive in Saudi Arabia.
On 2 December 2013 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights delivered a “mixed report” on human rights progress around the world, with slow and steady advances in some areas alongside causes for alarm in others. “As we look around the world at the end of 2013, we see examples of situations where that readiness of the international community to act in time is already being sorely tested,” Navi Pillay said during a press conference in Geneva. In addition to Syria, where the scale and viciousness of the abuses being perpetuated by elements on both sides almost defies belief, the situation in the Central African Republic is deteriorating rapidly, and the alarm bells are ringing loud and clear. “Elsewhere, there is much turbulence,” Ms. Pillay said, highlighting the “serious politically-driven instability” in Bangladesh which is claiming a lot of lives in the run up to the election, the “heavy-handed attempts” by successive administrations in Egypt to quell people’s right to peaceful protests. Meanwhile, reprisals against civil society organizations, individual human rights defenders and journalists working on rights issues are “extremely worrying” in a number of countries, she said. The High Commissioner also drew attention to the situation of migrants, who continue to be treated as second-class citizens in many countries, as well as the continuing political exploitation of xenophobia and racism in Europe and other industrialized areas. “Amidst all this, there is nevertheless progress, sometimes taking place slowly and steadily out of the limelight, sometimes the subject of major policy shifts – including a number of reforms announced over the past two weeks by the Government of China,” Ms. Pillay stated. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and she noted that overall, the UN human rights system is a great deal stronger than it was two decades ago. “The UN human rights institutions, however well they function, are not enough by themselves,” she added.“The rest of the United Nations – individual Member States, powerful bodies such as the Security Council and the General Assembly, and all the UN’s myriad agencies, funds and programme – need to pull their weight in the common cause of improving human rights for everyone everywhere, in accordance with the UN Charter.”
(Nasrin Sotoudeh was recently released from prison in Iran – EPA)
On 1 December Mary Lawlor, Executive Director of Ireland-based Front Line Defenders, published an opinion piece in Al-Jazeera on the place of human rights defenders in the recent developments concerning Iran and Syria. In order not to lose the coherence of the argument I give it here in full:Read the rest of this entry »
On 15 November 2013 William J. Burns, Deputy Secretary of State of the USA, spoke at a ceremony honoring Syrian human rights defender Ms. Hanadi Zahlout, who was accorded the 2013 Human Rights Defender Award of the US Government. He said inter alia: Read the rest of this entry »
Sinterklaas en zwarte piet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It seems that some politicians expressed as their view that the UN should act on Syria as quickly as on the Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) issue! A bit unfair given that smaller problems (and Black Pete is a comparatively small one) are easier to tackle and allow show some quick progress. While the popular feelings in my country of origin (the Netherlands) run high and are overwhelmingly against any changes in the Sinterklaascelebration, I personally feel that some chances would not do great harm. In fact, I think both parties are exaggerating. Those who think it is institutionalized racism have not experienced the celebration and seen the happy faces of small children, including black kids. Those who think this is purely hypersensitivity or political correctness gone overboard have never been discriminated on the basis of the color of their skin.
The Sinterklaas celebration is a marvelous and unique event that enthralls kids enormously. It is very old (17th century, I believe) but the ‘black Pete’ helper was added only around 1850. In view of the sensitivity of a minority of Dutch citizens and that of a majority of world citizens (however much they misunderstand the issue) it would not be great disaster if there were some more changes to accommodate ill-feelings. After all, few years ago the Dutch introduced women ‘black Petes’ – so why not another novelty: e.g. color them in a few different colors. In a decade from now nobody (especially small kids under 10 who are the only ones who believe in the good man!) will remember anything about all this history, the black color, the controversy.
What should not be done is to abolish or condemn the whole Sinterklaas tradition on 5 December which is much bigger and richer than the relative minor issue of the color of the helper.
PS In the informative piece of ABC News (see link below) there is an indication of the strong popular feeling in the Netherlands: a Facebook page seeking to preserve the clowns in blackface makeup known as “Black Petes” as part of the “Sinterklaas” childrens’ festival has become the fastest-growing Dutch language page ever, receiving a million ‘likes’ in a single day.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 