Monthly Archives: January 2016

How the politics of fear and the crushing of civil society imperil global rights

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Kenneth Roth writes: Fear stood behind many of the big human rights developments of the past year. Fear of being killed or tortured in Syria and other zones of conflict and repression drove millions from their homes. Fear of what an influx of asylum seekers could mean for their societies led many governments in Europe and elsewhere to close the gates. Fear of mounting terrorist attacks moved some political leaders to curtail rights and scapegoat refugees or Muslims. And fear of their people holding them to account led various autocrats to pursue an unprecedented global crackdown on the ability of those people to band together and make their voices heard.

In Europe and the United States, a polarizing us-versus-them rhetoric has moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. Blatant Islamophobia and shameless demonizing of refugees have become the currency of an increasingly assertive politics of intolerance.

These trends threatened human rights in two ways, one well known, the other less visible. The high-profile threat is a rollback of rights by many governments in the face of the refugee flow and the parallel decision by the self-declared Islamic State, or ISIS, to spread its attacks beyond the Middle East. The less visible threat is the effort by a growing number of authoritarian governments to restrict civil society, particularly the civic groups that monitor and speak out about those governments’ conduct. [Continue reading…]

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Desperation on the Greek border as Europe threatens to shut its doors

Vice News reports: “How many countries from here until Germany?” asked Mahfuz Jalili, 16, collecting information to relay to the group of 17 friends and family members who left suburbs of Kabul a month ago only to become temporarily stranded on the Greek-Macedonian border.

“Five?! How much will that cost?!” Mahfuz looks worried. Out of just over $3,000 that his father gave him to make the mammoth voyage from Afghanistan, he has only $50 left, and after more than a day waiting at a gas station on a highway leading to Macedonia, he is getting anxious that Europe may be about to close.

“I don’t really even want to go to Germany, there are too many refugees there,” he told VICE News. “I thought about trying to get to Ireland so I can study engineering. Afghanistan is abnormal, I had to leave.”

As Muhfaz spoke, yet more buses from the Greek capital of Athens swept into the car park and the air become thick with smoke as refugees begun to light bonfires with plastic and kindling foraged from nearby woods. [Continue reading…]

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Finland expects to expel 20,000 failed asylum seekers

AFP reports: Finland expects to expel around 20,000 of the 32,000 asylum seekers it received in 2015, the country’s interior ministry said on Thursday.

“In principle we speak of about two-thirds, meaning approximately 65 percent of the 32,000 will get a negative decision (to their asylum application),” Paivi Nerg, the ministry’s administrative director told AFP.

More than 20,000 of the asylum seekers Finland welcomed in 2015 came from Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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UN launches Syria peace talks despite opposition boycott — updated

Update below — Reuters reports: The first Syria peace talks for two years were a “complete failure” before they started on Friday, a Western diplomat said, after the United Nations announced it would press ahead with them despite an opposition boycott.

Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad said they were far more concerned with fending off a Russian-backed military onslaught, with hundreds of civilians reported to be fleeing as the Syrian army and allied militia tried to capture a suburb of Damascus and finish off rebels defending it.

U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has invited the Syrian government and an opposition umbrella group to Geneva for “proximity talks”, in which they would meet in separate rooms.

But so far the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) has refused to attend, insisting it wanted an end to air strikes and sieges of towns before talks can start. The boycott defies Washington, which has urged the opposition to take up the “historic opportunity” for the talks, without preconditions. [Continue reading…]

UPDATE — Reuters reports: The main Syrian opposition grouping agreed to attend United Nations-sponsored peace talks which began in Geneva on Friday, reversing a boycott that had threatened to wreck the first attempt to find a diplomatic solution to the war in two years. [Continue reading…]

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Joint statement regarding the main principles of any negotiation process in Syria

Over 200 Syrian organisations and more than 790 individuals, including civil society organisations, local councils, NGOs and refugee groups, have laid out their expectations of the Geneva III peace process, and demanded the immediate implementation of confidence building measures, in a new declaration released this week.

The Syrian cause is at a pivotal moment following recent political and field developments coupled with regional and international agreements – including the Vienna Declaration and Security Council Resolution 2254 – that have called for the launch of a negotiated political process between the Syrian opposition and regime.

In preparation for a political process, international envoys and diplomats tasked with the Syrian file have continuously engaged representatives of Syrian civil society on the political process and issued multiple proposals calling for the participation of civil society in any discussions or negotiations between the Syrian regime and opposition.

The signatories of this declaration – both organizations and individuals – hereby affirm that Syrian civil society would not have emerged but for the March 2011 revolution; a revolution that resisted all tyrannical restrictions of a regime that consistently suppressed calls for basic freedom and the formation of civil society since 2000 through the sacrifices of its people, the suffering of its detainees and the souls of its martyrs.

The signatories also affirm that the main conflict in Syria remains with the leadership of the ruling regime based in Damascus and its repressive policies that have led the country down a catastrophic path.
The signatories of this declaration further affirm that in order for Syria to be put on the road to salvation, the Syrian people and what remains of Syrian state institutions must be liberated from this brute force and that civil society, in its many manifestations, must play a key role in furthering the March 2011 revolution and its values. Only then can Syrians realize peace through justice and thereby transition to a democratic pluralistic system where equal rights and responsibilities are granted to all Syrians. And if indeed civil society is to participate in the political process, it must be those members of civil society who emerged from the womb of the struggle for freedom and dignity and sided with the people’s just demands who should participate. [Read the complete declaration with list of signatories.]

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Freed U.S. student: Now is not the time to go to Iran

Reuters reports: An American student detained in Iran who was freed this month under a prisoner swap said on Thursday he was accused of trying to overthrow the Iranian government and held for nearly a month in solitary confinement.

Matthew Trevithick, who had traveled to Iran to study Farsi, told CNN that interrogators at Iran’s Evin Prison also accused him of having access to millions of dollars and knowledge of secret weapons caches.

In his first television interview since his Jan. 16 release, he described his 41-day ordeal, including how he was captured and his treatment and conditions at the prison. [Continue reading…]

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Iran forcing Afghan refugees to fight in Syria

Human Rights Watch: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has recruited thousands of undocumented Afghans living there to fight in Syria since at least November 2013, Human Rights Watch said today, and a few have reported that Iranian authorities coerced them. Iran has urged the Afghans to defend Shia sacred sites and offered financial incentives and legal residence in Iran to encourage them to join pro-Syrian government militias.

Human Rights Watch in late 2015 interviewed more than two dozen Afghans who had lived in Iran about recruitment by Iranian officials of Afghans to fight in Syria. Some said they or their relatives had been coerced to fight in Syria and either had later fled and reached Greece, or had been deported to Afghanistan for refusing. One 17-year-old said he had been forced to fight without being given the opportunity to refuse. Others said they had volunteered to fight in Syria in Iranian-organized militias, either out of religious conviction or to regularize their residence status in Iran.

“Iran has not just offered Afghan refugees and migrants incentives to fight in Syria, but several said they were threatened with deportation back to Afghanistan unless they did,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “Faced with this bleak choice, some of these Afghan men and boys fled Iran for Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqis freed from ISIS’s rule now threatened by ethnic and sectarian ‘cleansing’

Aida al-Khatib reports: Thanks to the security crisis caused by the extremist group known as the Islamic State, the demographics of the province of Diyala are changing. The extremist group has been driven out of certain parts of the province and some of these are now controlled by Iraq’s sometimes-controversial Shiite Muslim volunteer militias while others are run by the Iraqi Kurdish military.

“Demographic changes have become a reality here,” says Raad al-Dahlaki, a Sunni Muslim MP and head of the Iraqi Parliament’s Committee on Immigration and Displacement. “There are many areas where security is extremely lax and there are violations of the law that should not be tolerated. For example certain areas have been shelled deliberately and it’s causing the mass displacement of [mostly Sunni] families.”

Al-Dahlaki believes the perpetrators of these acts are “militant gangs that pretend to be part of the volunteer militias but who are actually carrying out agendas set by foreigners”. And by this he means neighbouring Iran – many of the Shiite militias are funded or otherwise supported by the Iranian military.

“These gangs want to sow discord and change the demography of the province,” al-Dakhali argues.

Al-Dakhali believes the federal government should be doing more to stop the targeting of civilians by military groups, including the Shiite Muslim volunteers and Iraqi Kurdish troops. [Continue reading…]

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France to recognise Palestinian state if deadlock with Israel not broken

Reuters reports: France will recognise a Palestinian state if its efforts in coming weeks to try to break the deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians fail, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday.

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the solution of two states,” he said.

Fabius said that as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, France had a responsibility to try to keep up efforts to find a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

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Keen to be healthier in old age? Tend your inner garden

By Claire Steves, King’s College London and Tim Spector, King’s College London

The world’s oldest man, Yasutaro Koide recently died at the age of 112. Commentators as usual, focused on his reported “secret to longevity”: not smoking, drinking or overdoing it. No surprises there. But speculation on the basis of one individual is not necessarily the most helpful way of addressing this human quest for the Philosopher’s Stone.

The “very old” do spark our interest – but is our search for a secret to longevity actually misguided? Wouldn’t you rather live healthier than live longer in poor health? Surely, what we really want to know is how do we live well in old age.

Clearly as scientists we try to illuminate these questions using populations of people not just odd individuals. Many previous attempts have approached this question by looking for differences between young and old people, but this approach is often biased by the many social and cultural developments that happen between generations, including diet changes. Time itself should not be the focus – at least, in part, because time is one thing we are unlikely to be able to stop.

Yasutaro Koide made 112.
Kyodo/Reuters

The real question behind our interest in people who survive into old age is how some manage to stay robust and fit while others become debilitated and dependent. To this end, recent scientific interest has turned to investigating the predictors of frailty within populations of roughly the same age. Frailty is a measure of how physically and mentally healthy an individual is. Studies show frailer older adults have an increased levels of low grade inflammation – so-called “inflammaging”.

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Almost half a million people at risk of starvation in Syria

The New York Times reports: Two top United Nations relief officials expressed growing frustration on Wednesday over the organization’s inability to deliver aid to destitute Syrians trapped by war, saying that the number of besieged areas has risen to 18 from 15 in the past few weeks and that nearly half a million people may be at risk of starving to death.

The officials, Stephen O’Brien and Ertharin Cousin, delivered their warnings to the United Nations Security Council two days before the scheduled convening of talks in Geneva aimed at halting the war in Syria, which has raged for nearly five years. Whether those talks will proceed as hoped remains unclear.

Mr. O’Brien, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator, told Council members that roughly 4.6 million people lived in besieged or hard-to-reach areas, and that combatants had ignored the Council’s resolutions requiring aid convoys be given safe passage. Ms. Cousin, the executive director of the World Food Program, echoed Mr. O’Brien’s admonitions and said that “close to half a million” Syrians were completely cut off from all assistance. [Continue reading…]

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Syrians fleeing Russian airstrikes and regime forces have nowhere to go

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Syria Direct reports: This past weekend, regime forces backed by “unprecedented Russian airstrikes” captured the last rebel stronghold of Jabel Turkman in northern Latakia, the director of the majority-Turkman, Free Syrian Army affiliated Second Army of the Coast’s media office told Syria Direct earlier this week.

For those fleeing the advance, the Syrian side of the Turkish border is as far as they can go. The border with Turkey in this area is no longer open, and anyone willing to cross must produce valid and current passports and identification.

Nearly six years into this war, documentation has expired, been destroyed or gotten lost. For young children, they were likely born with no birth certificates or any formal recognition that they exist. All of which begs the question posed by Abu Ahmed, who fled to the Turkish border from his home in Jabal al-Akrad after Russian airstrikes intensified and regime forces captured Salma. “Where do we go now?”

“Our children left school, there is no firewood or water, we are dying from the cold, and now we have become a target of the bombing since the regime is approaching,” said Abu Ahmad, who, along with his family slept in sewage pipes for the first two days after fleeing their mountain village.

“From the beginning, the regime has been taking revenge on civilians,” said Umr, the resident from Jabal Turkman now living in a north Latakia camp. [Continue reading…]

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Russian bombs damage British-funded bakery designed to help 18,000 Syrians

The Telegraph reports: Russian warplanes severely damaged a British-funded bakery in northern Syria a few hours before the facility was due to start providing food for 18,000 people.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed by Russian air strikes since the onset of the Kremlin’s intervention on Sept 30. The targets of Russian bombs have included mosques, field hospitals and schools – all of which should enjoy protection under international humanitarian law.

The raid on the rebel-held village of Hazano in Idlib province was the latest occasion when a British-funded humanitarian facility was hit. Eight people were killed – including three children – during this air strike on Jan 20.

The attack took place at around 3pm on the day the bakery was due to open. Russian warplanes fired two rockets into a residential apartment just 30ft from the bakery, killing two families inside and injuring over 100 people. [Continue reading…]

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Sweden prepares to turn thousands of asylum seekers into outcasts

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The Local reports: Sweden plans to charter aircraft to send back as many as 80,000 rejected asylum seekers in what the country’s interior minister is calling “a very big challenge”.

Interior minister Anders Ygeman told Sweden’s Dagens Industri newspaper that he believed that at least 60,000, and possibly as many as 80,000 of the 163,000 who sought asylum in Sweden last year would have their applications rejected, meaning they will be returned either to their home countries or to the European country responsible under EU rules.

“The first step will be to go with voluntary return, and to create the best conditions for that,” Ygeman said. “But if that doesn’t work, we will need to have returns backed up by force.”

“I think we will have to see more chartered planes, particularly in the EU-region.”

He said that the Swedish government hoped to strike deals with other EU countries — in particular Germany — over coordinating flights to return asylum seekers.

It is also seeking return agreements with countries such as Afghanistan and Morocco.

But Victor Harju, Ygeman’s press secretary, on Thursday told The Local that the headlines were “a bit exaggerated”.

“Due to the fact that we received so many people in Sweden last year, we have to face the reality that more people will also not fulfil the needs within the asylum programme and will not get a permit to stay,” he said.

However, immigration lawyer Terfa Nisébini criticised Ygeman’s plan, saying that by giving an estimate that roughly half of applications would be rejected, telling Expressen newspaper that it risked influencing the way the Swedish Migration Agency assesses cases.

Swedish opposition parties also questioned whether the government would be able to successfully carry out Ygeman’s plan. [Continue reading…]

If Ygeman’s press secretary thinks the headlines are a bit exaggerated (BBC News is similar to most others: “EU migrant crisis: Sweden may reject 80,000 asylum claims”) there is nevertheless no reason to doubt that the minister’s statement was designed to generate exactly this kind of reporting. In other words, Sweden wants prospective asylum seekers to assume they will be unwelcome and thus set their sights elsewhere.

As individual European countries each engage in their own poorly conceived forms of crisis management, what is increasingly evident is that this crisis is itself the product of a policy vacuum.

As George Soros said recently:

we don’t have a European asylum policy. The European authorities need to accept responsibility for this. It has transformed this past year’s growing influx of refugees from a manageable problem into an acute political crisis. Each member state has selfishly focused on its own interests, often acting against the interests of others. This has precipitated panic among asylum seekers, the general public, and the authorities responsible for law and order. Asylum seekers have been the main victims.

Al Jazeera reports:

A “race to the bottom” on asylum policy among European Union countries is exposing more than 360,000 child migrants to greater risk of harm as the bloc struggles to cope with a surge of refugees, rights watchdogs said on Monday.

European children’s agencies issued the warning in a report released in Amsterdam, where the EU’s interior ministers were meeting to discuss how to deal with the influx of people fleeing war in Africa and the Middle East.

One of the main concerns is that EU countries, from Sweden to Britain, have implemented measures limiting family reunification rights — which risks separating children from their parents after they survive perilous journeys.

“It seems as if European countries are in a contest to win the title of ‘least willing to accept asylum seekers,'” said the report from the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children, which represents 41 independent children’s rights institutions in 34 European countries.

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The multi-billion-euro price-tag of shutting down the EU’s open borders

La Stampa reports (translation by Worldcrunch): Thirty years ago, the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone came into being. At the time, the International Monetary Fund estimated that the abolition of border controls on the continent would add 1 to 3% to the area’s GDP growth. In the most conservative estimate the pact has brought an additional 28 billion euros in economic growth; the sum could realistically be as high as 50 billion.

This is the scale of the kinds of economic benefits that would be lost if more countries were to re-impose border control, thus ending the three decades of free movement in Europe. And even a partial collapse of the zone could harbor significant costs for all.

In this tense and tumultuous time for the European Union as a whole, Schengen is in real danger of disappearing. Buckling under the pressure of the wave of migrants fleeing war and seeking better lives, six nations have “temporarily” reintroduced border controls with other EU members. While allowed for under exceptional circumstances by the agreement, this is the first time in two decades that such a closure has occurred. In the absence of Europe-wide solutions decided at minister-level meetings, more countries could follow suit to protect their security. [Continue reading…]

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Army chief: ‘Sweden could be at war within a few years’

The Local reports: Sweden could be at war in just a few years, a top military officer has claimed in an internal document sent to soldiers and Swedish Armed Forces staff and seen by Swedish media.

Sweden’s Major General Anders Brännström made the comments in a brochure for representatives attending an annual Armed Forces conference in Boden next week.

“The global situation we are experiencing and which is also made clear by the strategic decision leads to the conclusion that we could be at war within a few years. For us in the army we have to, with all force we can muster, implement the political decisions,” he wrote, reported the Expressen tabloid.

Since the end of the Cold War the Swedish Armed Forces have focused mainly on providing assistance to international missions abroad, but according to Brännström the strategy has now changed to “capability of armed battle against a qualified opponent”. [Continue reading…]

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