I have long argued that we should take another look at the possibility of using the suspension clause when members of the UN Human Rights Council go too far (see e.g. in the case of persistent reprisals https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/zero-tolerance-for-states-that-take-reprisals-against-hrds-lets-up-the-ante/in the reprisals ). On Wednesday 29 June 2016, the two leading human rights NGOs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have urged UN member-states to suspend Saudi Arabia from the UN Human Rights Council over the killing of civilians in Yemen and repression at home. It will be a long shot but worth seeing how it works out: Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged ‘Yemen’
Human Rights Defender Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani Assassinated in Yemen
March 19, 2015
Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani speaking at the Oslo Forum in 2010
Prominent Yemeni journalist, press freedom advocate, and whistleblower Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani was assassinated on 18 March by unknown gunmen outside of his home in Sanaa. Al-Khaiwani was one of Yemen’s most effective journalists. He endured years of harassment, kidnappings, and death threats in retaliation for his outspoken criticism of Yemen’s 30-year dictatorship and his exposés on government corruption. His son, the writer Mohammed al-Khaiwani, witnessed the attack, in which several men on motorcycles opened fire on his father and then fled the scene.
“The murder of Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani is a cowardly and abhorrent display of the evil that so much of the world faces on a daily basis,” said Human Rights Foundation president Thor Halvorssen. “Al-Khaiwani bravely put his life on the line year after year to expose the reality of tyranny and corruption. He will always be remembered for his heroic devotion to use truth and justice.”
Al-Khaiwani is the former editor-in-chief of the pro-democracy online newspaper Al-Shoura. After years of threats and harassment, he was arrested, subjected to a mock trial, and sentenced in 2008 to six years in prison on fabricated charges of conspiring with the leader of an anti-government terrorism cell. and of being a coup-plotter After being tortured during his incarceration, al-Khaiwani received a presidential pardon and was released in 2009.
In June 2008, a week after being sentenced to six years in jail, Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani received the Special Award for Human Rights Journalism under Threat from AI UK.
Human rights defender from York: Ahmed Al-Kolaibi, Yemen
January 23, 2015Ahmed Al-Kolaibi grew up in a mountain village in Dhamar in rural Yemen where the law counts for little, and what matters is tradition and custom. For more than 30 years, there have been ‘revenge’ wars between neighbouring villages. When he was seven, Ahmed lost his own father in one of these revenge killings. An uncle was also badly hurt As he grew older, Ahmed, now 27, began trying to persuade other young men in his village that the killings were senseless. The village elders, incensed that he didn’t want to fight for the ‘honour’ of his village, decided to make an example of him.
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Ahmed Al-Kolaibi
“They punished me. They took my house, they took my land, because they wanted me to be an example,” he says. He went to Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, where he began to work for a peace-keeping organisation, the Dar Al-Salam Organisation. He works as a mediator in the warring villages, trying to arrange truces between rival sheikhs. He has helped train 360 other mediators – and has even secured the release of abducted foreigners. But being a mediator is very dangerous. “We have lost 15 people,” he says quietly.
It can also be deeply frustrating. Once, trying to negotiate a peace between two villages, he was told that 25 people had been killed in one, and ‘only’ 23 people in the other. Before the fighting could be resolved, he was told, ‘we have to kill two people from that village so it is 25/25′.
5 human rights defenders in York tell their incredible stories (From York Press).
Five Women Human Rights Defenders from the Middle East
December 13, 2013On 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.
via Five Women Human Rights Activists who are Changing the Middle East | Informed Comment.
Related articles
Yemeni journalist Shaye receives the 2013 Alkarama Award
October 26, 2013
On 26 October 2013, the Geneva-based Alkarama human rights organisation announced that Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haidar Shaye will receive the 2013 Alkarama Award for human rights defenders. The Director of Alkarama’s Legal Department, Rachid Mesli, said that Shaye was awarded the prize because he personifies the struggle against human rights abuses in Yemen and for his courageous investigative reporting in this regard. Since last year, the Alkarama Award for Human Rights Defenders is presented every year to a human rights defender or organization in recognition of their contribution to the protection and the promotion of human rights in the Arab world.
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies assesses UN Human Rights Council latest session
October 4, 2013Looking back at the 24th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council which came to an end last Friday, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies [CIHRS] is disappointed to see how timid the Council becomes when dealing with human rights in the Arab region. Indeed, the people of Syria, Sudan, Bahrain, Egypt, Palestine, and Yemen need all the support they can get to move their countries towards political stability and the rule of law. The Council should be a driving force in confronting cases of human rights violations and making recommendations to address them.
CIHRS notes with regret Read the rest of this entry »
YEMEN- PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS AND STOP ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS.
June 13, 2013
On 10 June 2013 the Gulf Centre for Human Rights Centre (GCHR) issued a report alleging a widespread pattern of attacks on human rights defenders and journalists in Yemen.
Since Yemen has been engaged in a process of transition to full democracy, the security services have intimidated journalists, allowed the judicial system to be used as a means of attack against them, and failed to investigate violence against human rights defenders. The GCHR has documented multiple cases of attacks, some by the state security forces, but with many being perpetrated by non-state actors. The GCHR calls for an end to the harassment.
Prior to the overwhelmingly peaceful revolution in 2011, attacks were commonplace but easily identified as emanating from the oppressive government of former President Saleh, says the GCHR report. The present pattern of attacks is more unpredictable and their source much harder to identify. “This gives rise to the requirement of even greater vigilance by the authorities to investigate, prevent and punish this wrongdoing, yet the authorities in Yemen have failed to act to investigate the widespread pattern of attacks in the transitional period,” comments GCHR Advisory Board member Melanie Gingell, a British lawyer who carried out a mission to Yemen in April.
– Mohamed Al-Absi is a blogger and journalist who specialises in publishing the documents leaked to him from government departments about corrupt practices. He is now on trial on defamation charges and faces many years in jail if convicted. He has exposed corruption at the highest levels over the years and there are now well-founded concerns for his well-being should he be convicted.
– Judge Ahmed Saif Hashid, currently a member of parliament, has fought for social justice in Yemen but was recently the victim of a brutal beating by security forces when he joined a protest of injured people campaigning for their rights outside parliament. There has been no investigation of this attack.
– A Yemen based organisation, Freedom Foundation, has catalogued 109 attacks on journalists by mid-April 2013, including an attempt to bomb the offices of a newspaper, an attempt to assassinate a local journalist in the south of the country, shots fired at the car of a journalist working for the Times newspaper, and threats to cut out the tongue of a local newspaper editor.
– The journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye remains in prison following his arrest and conviction in relation to an article he wrote exposing the aftermath of an US cluster bomb attack on a suspected Al-Qaeda target, thereby discrediting the previous claim of responsibility for that attack by the government of former President Saleh.
The full report is available online in English and Arabic at: http://www.gc4hr.org/report/view/16
Yemen undertakes campaign of threats and judicial harassment against HRD Samia Al-Agbry
January 15, 2013On 12 January 2013 the Gulf Centre for Human Rights expressed its concern at the campaign of defamation, threats, and harassment against journalist and human rights defender Samia Al-Agbry. In addition complaint was lodged against her at the Department of Public Prosecution in the city of Damt. The complainant accused Samia Al-Agbry of allegedly insulting religion in an apparently orchestrated ‘multi-tools’ smear campaign against her.
On 31 December 2012, Samia Al-Agbry gave a speech at a peaceful gathering in which she said something to the effect that the reason for the elimination of the dreams of people in Yemen to build a civil state is some corrupt individuals who holed up behind religion, military and tribes. The GCHR thinks it is clear that some persons – for political purposes – have twisted her speech in order to target and stop her human rights activities.
It believes that this fierce campaign against Samia Al-Agbry is part of an ongoing trend of harassment of human rights defenders working in Yemen to stop them from continuing their work in defense of human rights.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 