share information on human rights defenders, with special focus on human rights awards and laureates
The Ceremony of the Alkarama Award will be held on Friday 7 December 2012 at 18h30 in Geneva at Centre International Conférences, Genève
This year, the laureates are two human rights defenders from the Gulf region:
– Dr Mohamed Abdullah Al Roken, United Arab Emirates
– Dr Saud Mukhtar Al Hashimi, Saudi Arabia.
For more information: http://www.alkarama.org
award@alkarama.org
+41 22 734 10 06
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The United Arab Emirates should swiftly end the arbitrary detention and harassment of its critics in line with its obligations as a recently elected member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, say a number of NGOs In an open letter to UAE President Sheikh Khalifa Al Nahyan, Human Rights Watch, the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and the West African Human Rights Defenders Network urge the UAE to make reforms in the following key areas.
The UAE secured its position on the Human Rights Council on November 12, 2012, after standing unopposed for one of the five vacant seats reserved for Asian states. The UAE’s election to the council coincides with a rapidly deteriorating human rights situation domestically, which led to the European Parliament expressing “great concern” in a resolution adopted on October 26. “Now that the UAE has been elected to the Human Rights Council, it’s high time for real improvements in the human rights situation in the country,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The UAE should mark its election by ending arbitrary detention of 63 political detainees and taking steps to protect the rights of migrant workers.”
Indeed it is good that the NGOs remind the UAE’s rulers that a commitment to human rights entails a commitment to take concrete steps, legislative and otherwise, to uphold the principles and standards of human rights law. These steps should clearly be more than the donations recently made (reported on 16 November) to the United Nations including:
– $10,000 for the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture;
– $30,000 for the United Nations Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of slavery; and….
– $50,000 for the Trust Fund to Support the Activities of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights!
In a letter to the editor of the Guardian of 8 November 2012, Andrew Lovatt puts the question very clearly:
Countries that sell arms to states that have repeatedly violated the human rights of their people should receive universal condemnation from their own citizens for the role they play in furthering the misery and bloodshed around the globe, and Britain’s sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and the UAE should be no exception. Human Rights Watch has reported numerous human rights abuses conducted by both states, which have included the assault and intimidation of nonviolent human rights defenders, political activists and civil society actors in an attempt to suppress freedom of expression and protect the regimes from democratic change.
Britain’s long-standing international support for democracy and human rights has already been undermined by the sale of 72 Typhoons to Saudi Arabia. Should Britain prop up these oppressive states further by putting an extra £6bn worth of military hardware into their hands, its position will rightly be viewed as hypocritical by the rest of the world.
Andrew Lovatt
Market Drayton, Shropshire
The article itself has some strong language:
“For almost two years, the UAE’s political Islamists have been referred to in the West as human rights activists. No doubt, they are indeed activists with an agenda but there is also no doubt that they are not our version of Nelson Mandela, nor is their vision for the country that of the Magna Carta. I have been following their rhetoric — in Arabic — over the past few months on social media with great concern. I have found it to be xenophobic; anti-Semitic; sectarian; exclusionary; racist toward Asians, Africans and other Arabs and overall repugnant.
Nothing exposes the ignorance of non-Arabic-speaking writers than when they comment on the current events in the UAE without taking the time to read what is written. Referring to the political Islamists as “human rights defenders” is an insult to human rights activists all over the world and the equivalent of calling Greece’s Golden Dawn, Holland’s Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders or Hungary’s Jobbik Party as human rights platforms. If outsiders want to champion the UAE’s political Islamists, they should at the very least refer to them as they truly are: right-wing, exclusionary political movements. Vote for Geert Wilders if you like, just don’t call him a human rights defender.“
see full piece: UAE Political Islamists Are Not Human Rights Defenders – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 