Human Rights Violations

===

see

HUMAN RIGHTS 2 719

CAPT 719

neglected?

primary 818, as includes death and torture

broad category: see also death squads and sweat shops

see int'l agribiz, brazil

see indig activ suppress 4

see int'l corruption, authoritarian, degradation of judic/ rule of law

see global witness

===

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.

News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."

In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.

Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.

IFrame Content

"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."

Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."

She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."

An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."

"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."

NOW READ:DOJ memo reveals Trump’s dark plan for a new Red Scare — and it may be perfectly legal

---

===

chiquita Brands International Inc. bananas are arranged at Union Street Produce Co. in San Francisco, California.

Banana giant Chiquita Brands will need to pay $38.3 million to family members of those killed during Colombia’s bloody Civil War after the company was found liable for funding a right-wing paramilitary group.

The verdict was handed down on Monday by a jury in West Palm Beach, Florida. The landmark ruling is the first time a major U.S. company has been found guilty of human rights abuses in another country.

“The verdict sends a powerful message to corporations everywhere: profiting from human rights abuses will not go unpunished. These families, victimized by armed groups and corporations, asserted their power and prevailed in the judicial process,” said Marco Simons, general counsel at EarthRights International, a nonprofit representing victims in the case, in a statement.

The trial included testimony from families of the nine victims, including expert reports, and key documentary evidence.

Chiquita, which is headquartered in Florida, said in statement following the verdict that “the situation in Colombia was tragic for so many,” adding, “however, it does not change our belief that there is no legal basis for these claims.”

According to court documents, Chiquita agreed to pay a $25 million fine to the the U.S. government in 2007 after it admitted that it had paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia (AUC). The AUC was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2001.

Chiquita has faced similar suits filed in U.S. courts from families of other victims that were killed by the paramilitary group, which the company also paid.

The court’s latest verdict follows a weeks-long trial, including a jury selection period that began in April, EarthRights said, adding that its case was originally filed in July 2007 and was later combined with several other cases.

“It’s a triumph of a process that has been going on for almost 17 years, for all of us who have suffered so much during these years,” one of the victims said in EarthRights’ press release. “We’re not in this process because we want to be; it was Chiquita, with its actions, that dragged us into it. We have a responsibility to our families, and we must fight for them.”

Chiquita jury verdict in Colombia paramilitary killings case awards millions : NPR

===

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58508001

no lnx pix

Record number of environmental activists murdered

By Claire Marshall

BBC Environment & Rural Affairs Correspondent

Published 13 September

image captionSouth African environmental activist Fikile Ntshangase was shot dead in her own home

A record number of activists working to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year, according to a report by a campaign group.

227 people were killed around the world in 2020, the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year, the report from Global Witness said.

Almost a third of the murders were reportedly linked to resource exploitation - logging, mining, large-scale agribusiness, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure.

The report called the victims "environmental defenders" killed for protecting natural resources that need to be preserved, including forests, water supplies and oceans.

Since the Paris Agreement on climate change was signed in 2015, the organisation says on average four activists have been killed each week.

It said this "shocking figure" was likely to be an underestimate because of growing restrictions on journalists and other civic freedoms.

Logging was the industry linked to the most murders with 23 cases - with attacks in Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru and the Philippines.

Indigenous peoples, most often on the frontline of climate change, accounted for a further one third of cases. Colombia had the highest recorded attacks, with 65 people killed last year.

'Unbearably heavy burden'

A senior campaigner for Global Witness, Chris Madden, called on governments to "get serious about protecting defenders." He said companies must start "putting people and planet before profit' or he warned that "both climate breakdown and the killings" would continue.

"This dataset is another stark reminder that fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers and biospheres that are essential to counteract unsustainable global warming. This must stop''.

The organisation called on governments to formally recognise the human right to a safe, healthy and sustainable environment, and ensure commitments made at November's UN climate change conference, COP26, integrate human rights protections.

In response, COP26 president Alok Sharma told the BBC he had "prioritised meeting people on the front line of climate change," to ensure the voices of all are heard."

'Shot dead in her living room'

Those murdered includedSouth African Fikile Ntshangase, 65, who was involved in a legal dispute over the extension of an opencast mine operated by Tendele Coal near Somkhele in KwaZulu-Natal province. She was shot dead in her own living room.

Her daughter, Malungelo Xhakaza, 31, said her "mother's struggle lives on." She said: "To this day no arrests have been made in the investigation into my mother's murder. There has been no accountability. It seems to me that someone wants this mine expansion and the extraction to go ahead, no matter the cost."

Petmin Limited, which owns the Somkhele mine through its subsidiary Tendele Coal Mining, told Global Witness that it "acknowledges community tensions may have been a factor in Fikile's death." The company said it "strongly condemns any form of violence or intimidation" and has offered full co-operation with the police.

Óscar Eyraud Adams

image captionÓscar Eyraud was killed in his home in Mexico in 2020

The killings also included Óscar Eyraud Adams, who was murdered in Mexico in September 2020. He was working to help the indigenous Kumiai community in Baja California have better access to water.

Global Witness said activists still under threat included communities in Guapinol in Honduras, where dozens of people have been protesting against an iron oxide mining concession that was granted by the central government in a protected area. Campaigners believe the Guapinol river, a vital water source, is threatened. The organisation says "many community members remain incarcerated."

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/dianna-ortiz

no lnx twt vid

Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62

Common Dreams February 22, 2021

Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.

Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."

It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.

The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.

"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."

By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.

"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.

"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"

—Ortiz

Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.

On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:

I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.

We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.

Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.

"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:

I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.

Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.

Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.

"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."

Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."

Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."

"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."

Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."

—Ortiz

In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.

Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.

Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.

In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.

Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.

The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.

The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."

Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.

Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.

Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."

Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.

"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."

—Ortiz

"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."

"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."

Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."

"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Why Democrats must make a firm break from the CIA's horrifying ... ›

Who’s next?’ Israel expels Human Rights Watch director for opposition to illegal Israeli settlements

Julia Conley / Common Dreams

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/heres-what-key-details-in-leaked-documents-reveal-about-chinas-detention-camps/

Humanitarian catastrophe’: Civilians flee as Turkey launches military assault on Kurds in Syria

Jake Johnson / Common DreamsOctober 9, 2019

A spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) accused Turkish forces of deliberately targeting “civilian areas.”

===

hrw

Saudi-led coalition naval forces have carried out at least five deadly attacks on Yemeni fishing boats since 2018, killing at least 47 Yemeni fishermen, including 7 children, in apparent war crimes.

Fishermen waved white cloths, raised their hands, or otherwise showed they posed no threat. In three attacks, coalition forces did not attempt to rescue survivors adrift at sea, and many drowned.

“Before the war, fishing was good,” said the wife of a fisherman. “But we heard that eight men from the neighborhood next to us were killed … so [my husband] stopped going.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-trump-administration-is-abolishing-the-very-idea-of-human-rights-as-a-part-of-american-identity/

see uigurs

MIT is collaborating with a Chinese company called iFlytek, which supplied voice recognition technology to Xinjiang. By the way, this is why we're using a voice actor for Alim. China has his voice now. And engineers at NPR told us, even if we tried distorting Alim's voice to protect his identity, it could be reverse-engineered.

===

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/06/history-shows-why-police-use-facial-recognition-tech-can-threaten-rights

Debates in the US about whether police should use facial recognition technology are intensifying. Amazon shareholders recently rejected a proposal to stop, at least temporarily, sales of the company’s Rekognition software to government entities. Washington state, home to Amazon and Microsoft, has seen a push for regulation. And last month, San Francisco banned the technology’s use by local agencies.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have called on US companies not to sell the technology to governments due to rights concerns. Research suggests facial recognition may be inaccurate, especially for people of color and women. Inaccuracy is not the only potential rights problem, however. Since the technology can track where we go and with whom, its use could discourage people from freely expressing themselves and associating with others. It also creates a pool of information that could be misused in a discriminatory manner.

These last two concerns are highly significant for some Seattle activists who pointed to lessons of the past in interviews with Human Rights Watch. During World War II, the US government applied then-advanced punch-card reading (or “Hollerith”) machines to non-public census data to target west coast Japanese American communities for incarceration.

“We are a community that has been surveilled in the past, and we’re also a community where the latest technological advancements [were] used in our oppression,” said Geoff Froh, deputy director of Densho, which documents the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. “Instead of Hollerith machines, we now have facial recognition technology.”

In 2000, the Census Bureau acknowledged that its use of census data facilitated the World War II-era abuses.

Facial recognition software can scan photographs or videos to identify people and record their locations – not unlike the earlier census data that was mined and misused.

Stanley Shikuma of Seattle’s Japanese American Citizens League noted that today’s monitoring technology is even easier to deploy, and highlighted the rights threats to anyone who might face bias or police harassment.

“If you think that the police are watching you … when you go to the bank, or you go to the doctor’s office, or you go to the church or the synagogue or the mosque,” you’ll be less likely to exercise those freedoms,” Shikuma said. “I don’t think that’s the kind of society you want, where people are looking over their shoulder because they don’t know which government agency might be watching them.”

Human Rights Watch agrees. Congress should impose strong, enforceable limits on this new technology – and in the meantime, companies shouldn’t put it in government hands.

===

‘Inside Syria’s Secret Prisons’: A harrowing account of how Assad’s torture machine crushed dissent

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/unfathomable-evil-recognizing-unfathomable-evil-trumps-possible-pardons-of-war-criminals-provoke-outrage/

Progressives, human rights advocates, and journalists responded with outrage on Saturday to a New York Timesreport that President Donald Trump “has requested the immediate preparation of paperwork needed to pardon several American military members accused or convicted of war crimes.”

Unnamed U.S. government officials told the Times that on or around Memorial Day, Trump may pardon multiple servicemembers involved with “high-profile cases of murder, attempted murder, and desecration of a corpse.”

As the newspaper reported:

The requests are for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, who is scheduled to stand trial in the coming weeks on charges of shooting unarmed civilians and killing an enemy captive with a knife while deployed in Iraq.

They are also believed to include the case of a former Blackwater security contractor recently found guilty in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis; the case of Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, the Army Green Beret accused of killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and the case of a group of Marine Corps snipers charged with urinating on the corpse of a dead Taliban fighter.

“These are all extremely complicated cases that have gone through a careful system of consideration,” Gary Solis, a retired military judge and armor officer who served in Vietnam, told the Times. “A freewheeling pardon undermines that whole system."

Solis warned that pardoning servicemembers accused or convicted of war crimes “raises the prospect in the minds of the troops that says, ‘Whatever we do, if we can get the folks back home behind us, maybe we can get let off.'”

The news on Saturday came after Trump, earlier this month, pardoned former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, who was convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner in 2008. As Common Dreams reported at the time, human rights advocates decried that decision as “a presidential endorsement of a murder that violated the military’s own code of justice.”

The Timesreport—on which the White House and Justice Department declined to comment—was met with similar condemnation.

The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, who spoke out against Trump’s pardon of Behenna, tweeted, “This incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our opponents and allies, and in doing so puts U.S. servicemembers at greater risk.”

Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth said, “Think of the horrible message that sends to would-be war criminals around the world.”

Murtaza Mohammad Hussain, a reporter at The Intercept, denounced Trump’s expected move as “a huge injustice to those whose lives they destroyed and a message that America will tolerate war crimes.”

Their criticism was echoed by others, including journalist Ryan Devereaux, who suggested that “if you were to make a list of ‘top notorious U.S. war crimes of the post-9/11 era’ it would look a lot like the president’s pardoning plans.”

===

new

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/saudi-arabia-beheaded-37-dissidents-last-month-and-u-s-media-called-them-terrorists/

Saudi Arabia executed 37 men on April 23, as it announced in a press release in its official gazette. The first line of the release read, “Saudi Arabia said it executed 37 citizens last Tuesday after they were convicted of terrorism.”

A cursory Google search would have shown that this assertion was completely false. But many in the U.S. press dutifully stenographed this claim into a headline:

“37 Saudis Executed for Terrorism-Related Crimes”: Time (4/23/19)
“Saudi Arabia Executes 37 in One Day for Terrorism”: New York Times (4/23/19)
“Saudi Arabia Beheads 37 Prisoners for Terrorism Crimes”: PBS NewsHour (4/23/19)

In fact, by looking at court documents from the Saudi government, we know that of these 37 men, 11 of them wereaccused of being “Iranian spies,” and 22 were accused of participating in a demonstration during the Arab Spring. (These 33 belonged to the Shia minority; the others practiced Sunni Islam or could not be identified.)

Of the 22 men accused of protesting, six were juveniles at the time. Mujtaba Al Suweikat was on his way to study at Western Michigan University when the Saudi authorities arrested him and charged him with “inciting disloyalty to the king.”

Saeed Mohammed Al Skafi was 17 during the protests. One of the charges against him was “posting pictures of other detainees.” Most of the others were convicted of offenses like “chanting disloyal slogans about the king” and “using social media to incite demonstrations.”

Of the 11 convicted of being Iranian spies, they were also found guilty of farcical offenses such as “condemning the bloodshed” (in February 2012, Saudi forces in the Shia-majority Saudi governorate of Qatif had sprayed protesters with bullets) and saving images and documents of the protests (which are also available on YouTube) on their hard drives.

mong the other four people executed, Khaled Al Tuwairji, a Sunni, was accused of killing Maj. Gen. Nasser Othman. However, all three outlets repeated that he was a “Sunni extremist,” for which we have no other evidence. Al Tuwairji was tortured into a confession (Erem News, 4/23/19). But all three outlets justified his execution and subsequent crucifixion by insisting that he was a convicted Sunni militant.

Another of the Sunnis executed, Khaled Al Farraj, was convicted on the vague charge of being affiliated with an outlawed terrorist organization. But even according to Saudi state media, he didn’t engage in any acts of terrorism. He is the only one of the 37 people executed who seems to have been charged with a terrorism-related offense.

PBS NewsHour (4/23/19)

Having false information in the headlines is extremely prejudicial. Studies have repeatedly shown that a large portion of readers do not read past the headlines — and those that do end up remembering the headline the most.

In its first version of the article, which has changed since then, the New York Times wrote of Saudi Arabia, “It listed the 37 men by name but provided little information about what specific crimes had been committed by whom or when.” Instead of relying on a Saudi press release, the Times could have tried a cursory web search — or even searched its own archives. In an article by the Times editorial board (8/3/17) nearly two years ago, it had a short biography of Mujtaba Al Suweikat, the “disloyal” Western Michigan student, and the specific crimes he had been charged with.

Though the Times article was edited after publication to include some information that didn’t come from the Saudi press release — citing a Human Rights Watch official’s concern that many of the cases “raised serious rights concerns,” for example — the revised article was still misleading. For example, in paragraph three, it stated, “Some men had been involved in bomb attacks on security headquarters that had killed officers, the [state news] agency said.” As far as we know, none of the 37 executed men had been involved in any bomb attacks, but the Times never challenged this Saudi government assertion.

Furthermore, the Times said that 14 of those killed had been arrested in relation to “sometimes violent protests.” It failed to mention that that violence came from the Saudi government.This video, from July 2012, clearly shows Saudi police. In searching through the news archives, articles have repeatedly mentioned protesters being shot by the Saudi police. There appear to be no reports (outside Saudi propaganda statements) of violence emanating from the protesters.

The articles in the Times, Time magazine and the NewsHour all mentioned Saudi-Iranian relations, thereby amplifying longstanding Saudi propaganda that accuses Shia of being naturally loyal to Iran, which is blamed for “stoking unrest” to justify brutal crackdowns of the religious minority.

All three outlets also added gratuitous details about the attack in Sri Lanka and/or other ISIS-related attacks — attacks that there’s no suggestion any of the defendants were connected to. In fact, most of these defendants were arrested before ISIS existed. And a majority of those killed, being Shiites, would be viewed by ISIS as heretics. To bring up these attacks seems like a distraction from the topic of the stories, which is the Saudi government beheading people who have for the most part been accused mainly of being dissidents.

RECO Company Website:{:(style="background:url("):}:

Energy & Infrastructure - RECO:{:(style="background:url("):}:

WARREN’S PRIVATE SECURITY TEAM KILLS 3 LOCAL TEENS ON HIS PRIVATE ISLAND, INJURE 11 MORE

As of 2005, Kelcy Warren owns the majority of Barbareta, which has essentially become his private island east of Roatan. Residents have expressed concern about changes in ownership of the island leading to suppression of the cultural enjoyment of the environment.

Oscar Mejia, congressman with the left-leaning Democratic Unification Party expressed deep concern over the practice of selling islands to foreigners. Mejia used Kelcy Warren’s purchase of Barbareta as an example of how such sales not only compromised the Honduran constitution, but also posed potentially deadly consequences for locals.

Boat Rams Another, Killing Three, Bay Island Voice:{:(style="background:url("):}:

Congreso investigara venta de islas a extranjeros, Laprensa:{:(style="background:url("):}:

According to the Bay Islands Voice, Warren’s private security guards killed and critically injured 14 young islanders of ladino ethnicity who were fishing near his estate on the island of Barbaret in 2007. Relatives of the deceased publicly considered charging Warren with the deaths, and apparently had garnered enough public support for this campaign that elected officials began openly espousing discomfort of the implications on foreign relations that would come with charging a wealthy American businessman with such a crime.

Barbaret’s falling out, Bay Island Voice:{:(style="background:url("):}:

The liability was ultimately pinned solely on the security employees, and not the man paying them to “guard” the island. Media reports offer absolutely no indication of any threat of violence from the fishermen which could have inspired the attack. Warren’s private security:{:(style="background-image:url("):}: killed 3 teen boys, putting one in a coma, causing another to lose an eye, and injuring 9 others--all for fishing. Police statements to the press indicate that, by their analysis at that time, the act was premeditated.

Prior to becoming a private island, locals had regularly enjoyed the coral reefs and lush fishing areas of Barbaret.

Waren’s RECO holds an effective monopoly over Roatan’s energy supply, a claim which by itself has raised concerns from local government. First, RECO insists :{:(style="background:url("):}:that it is “the only company that can distribute and generate electricity on the island of Roatan,” though Mayor Ebanks stated thatRECO must abandon:{}: its scheme to monopolize Roatan’s energy grid and prepare to compete with other providers. Secondly, the diesel powered energy supplied by RECO is dirty.

Residents have long been protesting against outmoded diesel fuel storage tanks kept in their residential areas. The local government has asked RECO to move the tanks.

===

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/secret-archives-reveal-a-dirty-war-how-the-us-backed-a-foreign-militarys-conflict-that-kill-30000/

Rut Diamint, Torcuato di Tella University

History books may never tell the full story of the dictatorship that terrorized Argentina from 1976 to 1984.

But newly declassified United States military and intelligence documents recently delivered to Argentina offer new details about the country’s brutal military junta.

The archival documents were the fourth and final batch of 43,000 declassified U.S. telegrams, military records, intelligence and confidential memos given to Argentina following an extraordinary 2016 agreement between Argentine President Mauricio Macri and former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Argentines now have more information about a dark period of our history that will allow us to continue strengthening justice, seeking and finding the truth,” Macri said on Twitterafter receiving the 7,500-document report on April 12.

The archives narrate the human rights abuses committed by Argentina’s military government, often with the assistance of the United States. They include the forced disappearances of 30,000 people, international assassination squads that stalked their victims abroad and the kidnapping of hundreds of babies born in detention.

Bloody history of US intervention

The U.S. declassification effort began under persistent pressure from Argentine human rights groups founded to uncover the atrocities of the dictatorship – a period I have spent my academic career studying.

Argentine democracy was interrupted by military coups six times in the 20th century.

The declassified documents outline what happened after the last coup, staged in 1976 by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla. It gave way to the cruelest, most repressive and violent eight years of Argentina’s history.

In August 2000 representatives from Argentina’s Center for Legal and Social Studies and the original Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – a human rights group that locates the lost children of the dictatorship, which has since splintered into several factions – met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

That encounter led to the declassification of 4,700 State Department documents in 2002. Those documents included U.S. diplomatic cables, memoranda, reports and meeting notes related to the Argentine dictatorship, and revealed clear U.S. involvement in the junta’s “dirty war.”

Now, Argentina has the military and intelligence archives behind these operations, too.

The declassified documents show that U.S. intervention in Latin America went well beyond giving “a little encouragement” to Latin American military regimes, as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1976.

Argentina was the operations center for Plan Condor, a U.S-organized alliance between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, created in 1975 and operational until around 1980.

Fearing the spread of communism across the Americas, the Ford administration offered these rightist military regimes everything from counterinsurgency training and financial assistance to intelligence briefings.

With U.S. support, Argentina’s junta kidnapped leftists, dissidents, union leaders and anyone who looked remotely like a threat. They tortured detainees, and then threw them alive and conscious out of airplanes into the River Plate, near Buenos Aires, or dumped their bodies in mass graves.

Pregnant women were killed after giving birth, their babies adopted by the families of childless generals. Neighbors under police surveillance informed on other neighbors to appease the junta, then were abducted and tortured anyway.

The U.S. eventually grew uncomfortable with the activities of its Argentine allies.

In 1976 Robert C. Hill, U.S. ambassador to Argentina, reported to Washington that the number of people detained by the junta must “run into the thousands” and, with Kissinger’s knowledge, confronted the Argentine government about its human rights abuses.

“[Argentina’s] security forces are totally out of control,” Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman told Kissinger in 1976.

The U.S. withdrew its support from Plan Condor after Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977. Carter, a Democrat, hoped to see democracy restored in Argentina.

That would take another six years.

A bloody history learned little by little

Argentines have learned the details of this sadistic regime little by little.

Even in the waning days of the dictatorship, human rights groups began filing freedom of information requests and writs of habeas corpus with the dictatorship, to little effect.

The law began to work in democracy’s favor again after Argentina’s first post-dictatorship leader, the late President Raúl Alfonsín, was elected in 1983. He created a truth commission that uncovered 340 secret detention centers across Argentina and identified 8,690 “disappeared” people.

Once some perpetrators and victims were known, the victims’ families could file suits to hold the people who oversaw torture centers criminally responsible for their loved ones’ disappearance.

Painstaking archival research, interviews, investigations, lawsuits and prosecutions have followed under every administration since, albeit with differing levels of priority.

Much of what is known about the fates of those abducted by the military regime was discovered in the basement of the Argentine Air Force in 2013, where “black lists” of identified leftists were archived.

The newly declassified U.S. archives offer little new information that might bring closure to thousands of Argentine families whose loved ones remain, officially, “disappeared.”

As of 2017, 2,979 people had been tried for their role in the dictatorship. The charges include crimes against humanity, arbitrary detention and kidnapping. Another 593 cases remained in process.

‘Never again’

The newly declassified U.S. telegrams and confidential communications may spur new prosecutions.

They include the names of government officials and informants complicit in Plan Condor, as well as details on the torture techniques used to extract information from detainees.

“The release of these documents stands as a uniquely valuable contribution to the cause of human rights, the cause of justice and the cause of our fundamental right-to-know,” said Carlos Osorio, a Latin America analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

In 2014, under President Cristina Fernández, Argentina began its own declassification program, alongside that of the United States. Among other disclosures, it published thousands of dictatorship-era archives, including 648 pages documenting the staffing and day-to-day operations of the military junta’s foreign ministry, including its relations with the United States.

Argentina’s commitment to uncovering every dark detail of the dictatorship derives from a national sentiment that its democracy depends on understanding the past.

“Nunca mas” – “never again” – has become the rallying cry of a population that insists that history should not repeat itself.

Rut Diamint, Political Science Profesor, Torcuato di Tella University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

===

omfg

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/china-created-a-racist-artificial-intelligence-to-track-muslims

The Chinese government is using facial-recognition software to “track and control” a predominantly Muslim minority group, according to a disturbing new report from The New York Times. The Chinese government has reportedly integrated artificial intelligence into its security cameras to identify the Uighurs and appears to be using the information to monitor the persecuted group. The report, based on the accounts of whistleblowers familiar with the systems and a review of databases used by the government and law enforcement, suggests the authoritarian country has opened up a new frontier in the use of A.I. for racist social control—and raises the discomfiting possibility that other governments could adopt similar practices.

Two people familiar with the matter told the Times that police in the Chinese city of Sanmenxia screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times in a single month. Documents provided to the paper reportedly show demand for the technology is ballooning: more than 20 departments in 16 provinces sought access to the camera system, in one case writing that it “should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.” This, experts say, is more than enough to raise red flags. “I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.“Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

Racial profiling has long been a concern in the use of artificial intelligence. But in the United States and other Western countries, much of that scrutiny has centered on biases built into A.I. systems. Computer scientist Aylin Caliskan put the matter succinctly in a 2017 interview with Vox: “Many people think machines are not biased. But machines are trained on human data. And humans are biased.” Already, studies have shown this to be the case. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that machine-learning software rated black people at higher risk of committing another crime after an initial arrest. (The software’s conclusions were based on current incarceration rates.) American lawmakers have highlighted these concerns as the A.I. race heats up. “Algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to basic human assumptions,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at an event in January. “They’re just automated assumptions. And if you don’t fix the bias, then you are just automating the bias.”

In China, however, the government appears to be exploiting that bias, purposely using the technology to keep tabs on a subset of its population. China has faced increasing criticism from human-rights groups for its treatment of the country’s 11 million Uighurs, about a million of whom are believed to be detained in Chinese indoctrination camps, which the government characterized to the Times as “vocational training centers that curb extremism.” But the secret use of artificial intelligence as part of its crackdown on the Muslim minority is likely to exacerbate fears about the government’s increasingly aggressive approach to the group, and about the abilities of governments worldwide to use technology for nefarious purposes. China appears to be the first country to use the systems explicitly for racial profiling, but experts are concerned that others will follow. “Take the most risky application of this technology, and chances are good someone is going to try it,” Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told the Times. “If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”

===

https://twitter.com/hashtag/humanrights?src=hash

===

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/15/saudi-weapons-yemen-us-france/

mint

Despite Human Rights Abuses in Yemen, Saudi Soldiers Receive UK Military Training

The British state has been under criticism for not halting arms sales to Saudi Arabia following multiple reports of human rights abuses and one of the worst human tragedies involving civilian deaths due to hunger in Yemen.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/16/wwmd.html

China's increasing inequality and rocky transition to market capitalism has created a rising tide of wildcat strikes from independent trade unions, who have found powerful allies in national student communist movementswhose members were made to study Marxism in an effort to purge the country's intelligentsia of "bourgeois" ideologies of liberalism and democracy.

The students -- who call themselves "Marxists" and "Maoists" -- took the message to heart and mobilized in solidarity with the striking workers, in defiance of the Chinese state.

Now the state has struck back: Chinese communist student activists and leaders have gone missing, often after public kidnappings at the hands of presumed state enforcers who drive up in black, unmarked cars and force the students inside. Some of these students have not been heard from since.

The disappearances have created a wave of terror among the activists and their friends, who say that the retaliation is arbitrary and untargeted, sometimes aimed at prominent leaders and sometimes at young people who were essentially just bystanders during meetings and strikes.

But as public attention grew, the government quickly tightened the net around the young protesters. On August 11, one of the main organizers, Shen Mengyu, a graduate of Sun Yat-sen University, another elite school in southern China, was detained by a group of unidentified men.

Yue disappeared on August 24, along with a number of her fellow students. No official arrest reports have been announced yet by police and neither Shen or Yue have been seen since.

Following their disappearance, a group of alumni and students at Peking University set up the "Finding Yue Movement" to lobby for the graduates' release. One of the organizers, Zhang, was among those who disappeared in the past week.

"There is a pervasive sense of fear particularly after what happened in Peking University a few nights ago ... (Zhang's) crime was essentially to draw attention to the fact that another student had disappeared," Friedman, the American professor, told CNN.

Young Marxists are going missing in China after protesting for workers[Ben Westcott and Yong Xiong/CNN]

===

Philippines: Lawyer Fighting Duterte’s Drug War Shot Dead

===

4x/week kia

https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/photo-series-highlights-plight-environmental-rights-defenders

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/2017-deadliest-year-environmental-activism-report-180722174539780.html

2017 was deadliest year for environmental activism: report

At least 207 activists were killed, with Brazil, the Philippines and Colombia named as the most dangerous countries.

arly four land and environmental activists were killed each week in 2017, making it the deadliest year on record, according to a new report by Global Witness.

In the report, published on Tuesday, the UK-based watchdog said 207 people lost their lives last year in their fight against companies and governments that seize land and harm the environment.

Latin America was once again the most dangerous region for environmental activism, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the total killings.

Brazil remained the country with most registered deaths, the report said.

At least 57 people were killed in 2017, marking the most deaths of land and environmental defenders ever registered in one year in any country.

Colombia's social leaders 'very scared' amid surge in murders

President Michel Temer and his predecessor Dilma Rousseff weakened laws and institutions designed to protect environmental defenders and made it easier for industries to proceed with projects without consent from affected communities.

Despite the country's constitution recognising the rights of indigenous people to their ancestral land, there has been a drastic decrease in demarcations. Under Rousseff, the average number shrank from 13 to three per year. There have been none since she was removed from office in August 2016, the report found.

John Knox, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said Latin America's population and endemic corruption make it a particularly dangerous area for environmental activists.

"You see indigenous peoples who are still directly dependent on natural resources in forests or sometimes fisheries who are already discriminated against or marginalised," he said.

"When conflicts between the companies and governments that want to profit from natural resources and the people who depend upon them occur in countries or regions that have a weak rule of law, then they are much more likely to result in violence and killing," he told Al Jazeera.

Of the 10 most dangerous countries, seven are in Latin America [Thom Pierce/Guardian/Global Witness/UN Environment]

In Colombia, at least 24 environmental activists were killed in 2017, according to the report.

The 2016 peace agreement between the government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has led to a worsening situation for environmental activists as rival actors vie to fill the power vacuum in the countryside, competing for land and natural resources once controlled by the FARC, the report said.

According to the country's ombudsman's office, more than 300 rights defenders - including environmental, land and human rights activists - have been killed since the beginning of 2016.

Mexico saw the largest year on year increase in deaths, surging from three in 2016 to 15 in 2017. The attacks took place in a context of impunity, with increased violence against activists in areas where drug cartels operate, according to the report.

...

ThePhilippines recorded the highest number of killings ever seen in an Asian country, Global Witness said.

The combination of bountiful natural resources, a large indigenous population and high levels of corruption, as well as the residue of colonial-era land disputes, provide fertile ground for violence against activists in the island nation, the report said.

"The Philippines has traditionally been the worst-hit country in Asia but there's a clear worsening of the situation under President [Rodrigo] Duterte," said Ben Leather, a senior campaigner at Global Witness and the author of the report.

"His aggressively anti-human rights discourse and his use of martial law, which has put the army into areas which are resource-rich, have meant that a bad situation in the Philippines has got drastically worse under his rule," Leather told Al Jazeera.

In December 2017, more than 200 people were forced to flee a village near the southern town of Lake Sebu, after the military killed eight people and wounded five others in a dispute over the expansion of a coffee plantation, according to an investigation by human rights groups.

In his annual State of the Nation address on Monday, Rodrigo Duterte, who has come under heavy criticism over his human rights record and deadly anti-drug crackdown, hit back at critics, claiming his tactics were justified as they were saving lives.

Intimidation and murder: Brazilians fight unequal land ownership

"Your concern is human rights, mine is human lives," he said.

Culture of impunity

According to Global Witness, violence against activists is made possible due to impunity and corruption.

The report states that 92 percent of those responsible for these killings are never brought to justice.

Global Witness also found that that seven "massacres" - which it defines as any incident in which more than four people were killed at the same time - took place in 2017, more than ever before.

OPINION

Criminalising Standing Rock

by Frank Barat

"The fact that very few of the cases of past killings of defenders have ever been prosecuted gives would-be perpetrators the green light to attack without consequence, leading to increasingly flagrant attacks and massacres," Leather said.

"In many cases, governments and corrupt officials within them are colluding with big business to impose development projects and other business ventures onto communities without their consent.

"So, when those communities take a stand, both the interests of the business and the corrupt officials are threatened, which means there's less of an incentive for those governments to bring the killers to justice," he told Al Jazeera.

...

207

Environmental and land activists killed in 2017

60%

Of those killed were in Latin America

115

Killings linked to government security forces

25%

Of those killed were from indigenous groups

Killings linked to agribusiness

Activists killed in Brazil, the worst year on record for any country

92%

Of killings went unpunished

Source: Global Witness

https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/human-rights-center/programs/technology/human-rights-investigations-lab-internships/

===

1/18 green activists ngo arrested, killed alleged suicide; kpfa 11/2/18

===

...ut as multiple outlets reported Friday, other countries were listening. The Nigerian Army, in response, tweeted out the clip of Trump encouraging violence with the comment: "Please Watch and Make your Deductions."

In light of a recent massacre — in which human rights activists say the Nigerian Army killed 45 peaceful protesters from the group Islamic Movement in Nigeria — this tweet was taken as a justification for state-based suppression of free speech. The Nigerian officials have denied the higher numbers of fatalities, placing the death count at six, but a Reuters reporter counted at least 20 bodies on the scene.

The use of Trump's words to justify this kind of atrocity is the continuation of a troubling trend during his time in office. His embrace of authoritarian tactics and political violence appears to have emboldened strongmen leaders around the world. Previous reporting has shown how foreign authoritarians have cited Trump's own language and behavior, including most prominently his attacks on the press, to quash dissent from their own brutal regimes.

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/oxfam-state-department-women-lgbtq-rights-reporting

Thursday, Oxfam America released a damning report on the State Department's coverage of human rights abuses under President Donald Trump.

Historically, the State Department's human rights reports are an essential tool to monitor what is going on in authoritarian and theocratic nations around the globe. But according to the new report, two areas of human rights are receiving significantly less focus under the Trump administration: women's rights and LGBTQ rights.

Specifically, the report found that women's rights abuse reporting is down 31 percent under the Trump administration, while LGBTQ rights abuse reporting is down 21 percent.

"We also found that reporting on womens rights was reduced more in countries where gender inequality is higher — in other words, where the problem of violations of women’s rights is worse, the State Department cut back on reporting," said Oxfam America. "Reporting on women's rights was also reduced more in countries that send more asylum applicants. In other words, where desperate people try to flee, the State Department cut back on reporting." These results are not surprising. Trump is infamous for his abuse of women, and his administration has been making crackdowns of its own on LGBTQ rights, from transgender military service to the end of visas for LGBTQ partners of foreign diplomats. Moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has extensive ties to the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates an antigay hate group.

But the news that women and LGBTQ persons are being overlooked in U.S. human rights reports is particularly dismaying in a time when they could be facing new threats around the globe. For example, Jair Bolsonaro, an anti-LGBTQ extremist who has reflected fondly on military dictatorship, just won the presidency in Brazil, the world's fifth-largest country.

It is clear that the Trump administration is uninterested in policing human rights in general, given that they withdrew the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council in June.

In the modern world, careful monitoring of threats to human rights is an essential pillar of international accountability. And if the United States is abandoning its role in doing so, it will be more important than ever for other nations, and NGOs, to step up and continue the fight.

===

https://www.newsweek.com/heres-where-paul-manafort-did-business-corrupt-dictators-1061470

no lnx pix

WORLD

HERE’S WHERE PAUL MANAFORT DID BUSINESS WITH CORRUPT DICTATORS

BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 8/7/18 AT 3:11 PM

Manafort Trial: Rick Gates Testifies He Committed Crimes With Former Trump Campaign Aide

As the trial against Paul Manafort enters its sixth day, many observers are focusing on his work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians. However, he has had a long history of dealing with unsavory foreign leaders during his decades-long career as a political lobbyist.

Prosecutors in Virginia’s federal court claim that President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager avoided paying taxes on millions of dollars he made working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine—the Party of Regions of former President Viktor Yanukovych.

Much has been made of Manafort’s connections to figures like Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine for Russia after being ousted from power by a pro-Western uprising in 2014, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whom Manafort offered to brief on the Trump campaign. After all, Manafort’s allegedly illegal activities were revealed after special counsel Robert Mueller began investigating potential links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Manafort has previously worked in other continents. His first lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which he ran with fellow Trump aid and political consultant Roger Stone, has been nicknamed the"torturers’ lobby" for having represented so many political leaders involved in human rights abuses.

“Last year, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Co., which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991,” details a report from the Center for Public Integrity published in the early 1990s.

166202411-594x594

Former Nigerian President General Sani Abacha (right) and his Gambian counterpart attend a summit. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Abacha.

“Former Reagan political operative Paul Manafort oversees foreign accounts; his partner, Charles R. Black, was a senior political strategist in the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Their firm's fees to represent Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Angola's UNITA rebel group in 1991 totaled more than $3 million. All four receive U.S. aid and abuse human rights,” the report continued.

The lobbying firm’s work with dictators predates the 1990s, however. Established in 1980, Manafort’s lobbying firm began working for the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, a kleptocratic dictator from the Philippines, in 1985. During the two decades Marcos was in power, around 34,000 people were tortured while he amassed a fortune of at least $10 billion, worth around $22 billion in today's money. His regime paid Manafort’s company almost $1 million a year, or around $2.2 million today.

Later, in 1998, Nigeria’s former president, the Army Officer Sani Abacha, turned to Manafort’s team to help clean up his public image. Manafort personally handled his account, according to reports. The U.N. noted that Abacha’s regime “carried out widespread repression of human rights advocates, pro-democracy activists, journalists and critics of his government,” and that “extrajudicial killings, torture, assassinations, imprisonment and general harassment of critics and opponents were the hallmark of his administration.”

Meanwhile, former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, accused Manafort’s lobbying firm of having lengthened the civil war in Angola by supporting Jonas Savimbi. The firm helped secure support in Washington for Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which was trying to oust a Marxist government from power in the 1980s. According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA “used terror as a policy, to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”

57643400-594x594

Indonesian students hold a rally as they protest against the decision to drop the graft case against former dictator Suharto (right), in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, on May 18, 2006. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Suharto.

BAY ISMOYO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Manafort has also worked for Indonesian military leader and former president Suharto—who has been described as one of the most brutal and corrupt leaders of the 20th century—and forSomalia’s dictatorial leader Siad Barre, whose regime committed widespread atrocities in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Generally, these brutal leaders shared one thing in common: a fierce opposition to communism. Support for figures fighting communist movements was generally in line with the foreign policy goals of the Republican Party at the time. Nevertheless, Manafort’s decision to work with Russians and pro-Russian politicians in the former Soviet Union was a notable departure from his party’s priorities.

According to one of his former employees, Manafort’s work has been characterized by his lack of moral compass and motivation for money and influence.

“I told Manafort it didn’t seem like a promising strategy to march into a murderous dictator’s office and point out to him and his lieutenants that he had a public relations problem. ‘Are we sure we want this guy as a client?’ I asked, in a garish display of naïveté,” K. Riva Levinson, who worked for Manafort early in her career, wrote in an op-ed last year.

“Manafort sounded annoyed, as if I had asked the right question at the wrong time. He waved off my concerns as he settled into his large leather armchair in his spacious corner office overlooking the Potomac River, the walls adorned with photos of past presidents, senators, congressmen and other notables,” Levinson described.

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/environmental-activists-amnesty-international-2563882266.html

Environmental Leaders Under Threat in Paraguay and Peru, Amnesty Reports

Authorities in Paraguay and Peru are unjustly criminalizing activists who speak out to protect their environment and land, an Amnesty International report released Thursday revealed.

The report, *A Recipe for Criminalization: Defenders of the Environment, Territory and Land in Peru and Paraguay*, outlined the three "ingredients" both countries use to undermine the efforts of activists. First, they delegitimize activists through smear campaigns. Second, they apply laws and regulations that allow for forced evictions. And, third, they misuse the criminal justice system to prosecute activists for unfounded reasons.

"Those who bravely stand up to defend their land and the environment are frequently targeted because of their work. These attacks have a devastating impact on their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, as well as that of their families and communities," Amnesty International Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas said in a press release.

The report included examples of how these ingredients combine on the ground.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/just-as-u-s-media-does-with-mlk-brazils-media-now-trying-to-whitewash-and-exploit-marielle-francos-political-radicalism/

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022018/marathon-oil-shareholder-resolution-human-rights-dakota-access-environment-social-risk-disclosure

The clash between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and backers of the Dakota Access pipeline unfolded in news clips of violence, intolerance and humiliation. Demonstrators against the pipeline were met with snarling guard dogs, armed security officers and fire hoses that drenched them during freezing weather.

For a block of shareholders in Marathon Petroleum Corp., an Ohio-based company that bought a minority interest in the Dakota Access pipeline just as tensions hit a flashpoint in 2016, it was an unsettling scene that played out on social media and network news.

What happened in full view of the world on the remote plains of North Dakota has prompted a shareholder resolution calling on Marathon to explain how it identifies and addresses environmental and social risks—including potential violations of the rights of indigenous peoples—when making business decisions related to acquisitions.

"The construction and operation of energy infrastructure in North America requires respect for rigorous standards of environmental review and the human rights of Indigenous Peoples," the resolution says.

The shareholders argue that Marathon, which contributed $500 million in partnership with Enbridge to buy a $2 billion stake in the Bakken pipeline system that included Dakota Access, must consider environmental and human rights issues when assessing risks associated with purchases. They cite the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a measure of the expectations for considering the rights of indigenous people to "free, prior and informed consent prior to the approval of any projects affecting their traditional territory."

"When such risks are not adequately considered, decisions can be made that lead to reputational, regulatory and financial loss," says the resolution, which will be considered during the company's annual meeting in Findlay, Ohio, on April 25.

The shareholders say the value of their investments could be jeopardized by the negative image created by future confrontations that could result in damage to the company's reputation.

So, they are asking Marathon to prepare a report that describes the review process used to identify and address environmental and social risks in reviewing potential acquisitions. They want the company to consider a number of points, including how environmental and social risks are identified and assessed; which international standards are used to define the company's human rights; and how this information is calculated into business decisions.

Jamal Kheiry, communications manager for Marathon, said the company had no comment. The company's position will be spelled out later in its proxy statement that addresses business to be conducted at the meeting.

Human Rights Risks Are Investment Risks

The resolution by Marathon shareholders is one of more than two dozen resolutions on environmental matters filed with oil and gas companies. Those resolutions, which address concerns such as reducing methane emissions and curbing global warming, could be considered during annual meetings usually scheduled throughout the spring.

Marathon shareholders filed a similar resolution last year that met resistance from the company but still earned approval by 35 percent of the company's stockholders who voted.

The New York State Comptroller's Office, which manages public employee pension funds that are major shareholders, was the lead sponsor of both resolutions.

Although the office declined to discuss the resolution in detail, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said a year ago that investors had a right to know how Marathon considered the rights of indigenous peoples.

"Given the nationwide protests and controversy that surrounded the Dakota Access Pipeline, we assume Marathon would have undertaken robust due diligence before getting involved with that project," DiNapoli said in a 2017 statement. "Risks to the environment and to human rights create risks for our pension fund's investments and should be addressed as part of a sustainable business plan."

Why Marathon Says It Opposed the Resolution

The company, in its proxy statement last year, said it "respects the human, cultural and legal rights of individuals and communities" but still urged shareholders to reject the resolution.

Preparing the kind of reports sought through the resolution would require a highly customized study of projects under consideration, the company's 2017 proxy statement said."Providing a report of the nature the proponent seeks would require (Marathon) to present an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of prospective strategic transactions," it said.

Marathon's Board of Directors argued that the company's community engagement program provided a forum and allowed adequate opportunity for any group to make its positions known.

The resolution resonated with shareholders, though, said Jonas Kron, a senior vice president for Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based company that focuses on socially responsible investing and that filed the resolution.

Similar resolutions addressing environmental and social justice issues with oil and gas companies typically generate around 20 percent approval, he said. "This vote shows the intensity of the issue with shareholders," he said. "I would hope they would be more responsive to such a significant plurality, and take steps to reexamine the way they consider indigenous people issues and maybe don't get involved with these types of projects."

A year ago, Marathon sought permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to suppress the resolution. The commission, which regulates publicly traded companies like Marathon, rejected the company's request.

This year, Marathon has not tried to block the resolution and is in discussions with DiNapoli's office. "Should Marathon decide to endorse its provisions as company policy, the comptroller will ask that the proposal be withdrawn from consideration at the annual meeting," Patrick Doherty, the comptroller's director of corporate governance, wrote to Marathon.

'People Are at Stake'

Shareholders in Marathon's partner, Enbridge Inc., a Canadian pipeline company that owns more than 10,000 miles of pipelines in Canada and the United States, filed a similar resolution last year that was also sparked by the faceoff at Standing Rock.

"To put it very bluntly, the protest, the movement, if you will, could most likely have been prevented," Chad Harrison, a Standing Rock councilman, said during the Enbridge shareholders meeting last year.

The solution would have been for the company to engage the people affected by the pipeline, he said. "People are at stake," Harrison said, according to a transcript. "People on the ground, people where pipelines are built."

Although Enbridge opposed the resolution and it was defeated, the company nevertheless vowed to update its policy on indigenous peoples and expand its disclosures about how it addresses human rights.

"One thing that shouldn't be in doubt is the fact that we recognize and respect the legal and constitutional rights of indigenous peoples, and the vital relationship they have with traditional lands and resources," Enbridge President and CEO Al Monaco said in a statement following the shareholders meeting.

The Dakota Access pipeline is part of Marathon's 8,300 mile pipeline system. It begins in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and runs nearly 1,200 miles to Illinois, where it connects to other pipelines that carry oil to refineries as far south as Texas. Along the way, it crosses hundreds of streams, rivers and other waterways, including the Missouri River a half-mile upstream from the Standing Rock reservation.

The people of Standing Rock rely on the river for drinking water, irrigation and fishing.

A prolonged protest involving people from more than 100 tribal nations, along with veterans and supporters from across the country, began in 2016 during construction of the pipeline. Along with their fear of polluted water, the tribe decried the desecration of sacred sites and the loss of tribal sovereignty; issues that highlighted the tribe long-standing struggle for social justice.

Oil began flowing through the $3.78 billion pipeline last year. It was designed to carry 470,000 barrels of oil a day.

Jodi Gillette of Standing Rock, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on Native American affairs, reminded Marathon shareholders last year of the tribe's rich heritage. While she said she believes the company can change, she said this of Marathon executives: "They are the ones who will have to look their grandchildren in the eye and say they are the ones who continue the abuse of the indigenous people of America even when they had the chance to change."

https://www.ecowatch.com/shell-nigeria-amnesty-2513278575.html

ogoni

https://www.alternet.org/environment/global-firms-accused-importing-timber-linked-amazon-massacre

brazil

http://www.alternet.org/environment/environmental-and-land-activist-killings-hit-all-time-high

Last year was the deadliest on record for environmental activists, according to new figures released by the UK NGO Global Witness.

The organization’s latest report documents a “crisis” spreading globally as the number of countries in which killings were recorded countries shot up from 16 to 24. 60% of deaths occurred in Latin America, which means that the region remains the most dangerous one in the world in which to oppose environmental degradation.

Yet again, Brazil, which has witnessed particularly bloody land conflicts in recent months, ranks first with 49 murders. Nicaragua has the highest rate of killings per capita: 11. And in Colombia, figures hit an all-time high: 37.

“This report tells a very grim story. The battle to protect the planet is rapidly intensifying and the cost can be counted in human lives”, says Ben Leather, a campaigner at Global Witness.

In Asia, resistance to big mining projects in such countries as India and the Philippines has been met with state-sanctioned repression and violence. India has witnessed a three-fold increase in killings and thePhilippines,where 28 activists were killed last year, stands out as the most lethal country in the region.

Logging and agriculture, including extensive cattle ranching, are two other main drivers of conflict, the report says.

Peace is dangerous for Colombia

Last year, as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) gave up control of swathes of rural territory as part of a historic peace process, deforestation and environmental degradation increased.

Deforestation rose 44 percent in 2016, encompassing an area of 690 square miles, as criminal groups moved into areas vacated by the FARC and engaged in illegal logging and mining, according to figures released by the Colombian government’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM). The Amazonian regions of Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare, in the south, were the worst affected.

“They [the FARC] weren’t environmentalists, but they did regulate activity, and—since they had the guns—people complied”, activist Susana Muhamad recently told *The Guardian*.Under their watch, they limited deforestation by civilians to 2 hectares per year, so as to maintain forest cover which helped their protection from government forces.

Along with rising deforestation, killings of those defending land and the environment have also increased. “The peace process in Colombia has paradoxically fueled more violence against those who defend their land and the environment against destructive industries”, says Billy Kyte, leader of Global Witness’ land and environmental defenders campaign.

Kyte explains that communities returning to reclaim lands lost during the armed conflict are now facing paramilitary groups, large landowners and criminal gangs eager to profit from Colombia’s rich natural resources.

It is the Colombian government’s responsibility to promote the rule of law in rural Colombia and make areas safe for communities, Kyte adds, before promoting environmentally degrading development projects.

Earlier this year, at least one expert questioned Global Witness’ methodology in a special report profiling the situation in Honduras. He argued that it conflated killings of environmentalists and victims of agrarian conflict.

Methodology questioned

“Global Witness’ report doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny,” José Herrero, vice-president of the conservation foundation FUCSA, arguing that the “confusion” of the categories of victims in the report inflated the figures.

Kyte, who was intimidated and threatened with arrest for promoting the report in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, defends Global Witness’ data collection methods: “We compile data on land and environmental defenders – people who defend land or environmental rights. Our definition and criteria for inclusion is and always has been very clear – we don’t just record killings on environmentalists,” he says.

===

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-its-getting-harder-and-more-dangerous-hold-companies-accountable

There is a crisis of impunity for corporate human rights abuses and it is getting worse.In our work with the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, we track the latest legal developments in holding companies accountable for human rights abuses, to share knowledge among lawyers and ultimately strengthen accountability. For years, we have highlighted increasing barriers for victims to obtain justice. As companies are rarely brought to account, there have been few reasons for optimism.

So bad is the crisis of impunity that we have had to dedicate a significant portion of space in our latest Annual Briefing to the threats directed at advocates and lawyers working on corporate accountability. In 2016, we even saw Pavel Sulyandziga, a well-known indigenous leader in Russia and member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, speak out about the harassment he and his family are facing because of his work supporting local communities to retain control of their land from extractives companies.

The Law as a Weapon

Human rights defenders working on corporate accountability have faced killings, beatings and threats and are rarely, if ever, able to obtain justice. Moreover, the law is often used as a weapon. In the last two years, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has tracked over 450 cases of attacks against human rights defenders working on corporate accountability. The most common is judicial harassment (40% of cases).

In February 2016, six activists opposing the use of villagers' land for Socfin plantations were jailed after a Sierra Leone court found them guilty of destroying 40 palm oil plants. The activists say they are innocent and see the trial as a "tactic to get us into prison so that we cannot raise our voice on the unacceptable land deals in Malen Chiefdom."

These types of legal harassment are often not intended to be successful claims, but rather are designed to silence human rights defenders by tying them up in costly litigation processes. In France, the NGO Sherpa has been sued by the company Vinci for defamation, after the NGO filed a criminal complaint in March 2015 against the company and its Qatari subsidiary over alleged forced labour on their construction sites in Qatar. Sherpa said of the lawsuits: "[b]y involving us in these costly proceedings, Vinci is plainly seeking to pressure us into withdrawing our action for lack of resources."

These lawsuits are often a disproportionate response to statements as small as social media posts. During a mission to Indonesia in September 2016, we met with the NGO KontraS, which is currently campaigning against criminalisation of human rights defenders. They told us of an activist from the NGO WALHI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia) who faced a criminal defamation complaint by supporters of a land reclamation project in Bali, over a Twitter post that mocked them. In the US, community activists were sued for USD 30 million by Green Group Holdings after they complained on social media about the company's landfill and its impact on the local resident's health. Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who worked on the case, said: "No one should have to fear a multi-million dollar lawsuit just for speaking up about their community -- but our clients did."

Lawsuits like these have a chilling effect on human rights activism and advocacy. The inequality of power and resources between large corporations with teams of lawyers and grassroots human rights defenders means that many activists may give into the demands of corporations rather than enter a costly legal battle. This chilling effect is immeasurably worse when defenders are threatened with physical assaults and death.

From Impunity to Accountability

Companies benefit from an environment where there is freedom of speech, satisfied workers, and an increased consumer base, and governments attract investment when there is a strong rule of law. Governments should decriminalise defamation as advocated by international and regional organizations and leading NGOs, enact laws to protect human rights defenders and their lawyers from harassment, and provide an enabling environment and open civic space for those working on corporate legal accountability. (Of course, detractors would argue that criminal defamation laws are needed to protect their reputation, but there are still civil liabilities.) Governments should pass legislation to address strategic lawsuits against public participation, like those passed in several US states and Canadian provinces.

Corporations can influence governments to improve by voicing opposition to governmental action or legislation that threatens to close the civic space. Natural Fruit filed a defamation lawsuit in Thailand against Andy Hall, a British labour rights activists and researcher, over a report that alleged labour abuse against migrant workers in the company's factories. The Senior Vice President of S Group, a Finnish retailer that sourced from Natural Fruit, testified in support of Andy Hall in the Thai criminal defamation lawsuit against him in July 2016. S Group's action in this case demonstrates the steps companies can take to support human rights defenders under legal attack. Companies can also draft a dedicated policy on human rights defenders, like adidas has done, explaining why human rights defenders are important to their work and setting out expectations towards the company's suppliers.

Everyone benefits from the work of human rights defenders and the promotion of the rule of law, so businesses and governments should work to support and protect them. The legal system should only be used to bolster the rule of law, not burden its defenders.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout

https://www.hrw.org/the-day-in-human-rights/2017/02/24

"I was a Muslim in Trump's White House". Rumana Ahmed lasted 8 day before resigning from her job on the National Security Council under United States president Donald Trump, because she "could no longer stay and work for an administration that saw me and people like me not as fellow citizens, but as a threat".

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/world/amnesty-human-rights-report/

rise in divisive rhetoric in mainstream global politics is threatening to roll back human rights around the world, Amnesty International says in its annual report for 2016, published on Tuesday.

Announcing the human rights report, Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty listed US President Donald Trump alongside world leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and claimed that their "divisive fear-mongering has become a dangerous force in world affairs."

"Whether it is Trump, Orban, Erdoğan or Duterte, more and more politicians calling themselves anti-establishment are wielding a toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanizes entire groups of people," Shetty said in a statement accompanying the report.

// https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/25/us-trumps-immigration-actions-harm-millions

...Trump’s order also directs the government to use its authority to return to Mexico people entering from there without visas. Placing asylum seekers outside the United States could compromise their ability to have their claims for protection fully and fairly considered.

Trump also announced that his administration would pursue agreements with local police forces that would deputize them to enforce immigration law. His policy would seek to withhold federal funds from cities and states designated by the administration as having “sanctuary” policies intended to limit local law enforcement involvement with federal immigration enforcement.

Trump’s claims that such actions would make communities safer conflate immigration with crime, which is both false and dangerous, Human Rights Watch said. Numerous studies have debunked the myth that increased immigration leads to increased crime.

Human Rights Watch research shows that in some communities, the involvement of local police in immigration enforcement has caused immigrant victims of crime, including violent crime such as rape, to fear reporting those crimes to police. Many local law enforcement agencies have supported the policies Trump criticizes to encourage community members – regardless of immigration status – to report crime, believing it is the best way to protect everyone’s safety. Policies and political rhetoric that conflate immigration with crime also risk fueling xenophobic violence and other crimes.

“President Trump claims these actions are needed to put Americans first, but instead, they will harm US citizens’ interests in keeping families together and maintaining public safety,” Parker said. “Congress and the courts, as well as the public, should check these actions and stand up for the rights of all.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-indonesia-idUSTRE7676I120110708

WORLD NEWS | Fri Jul 8, 2011 | 5:01pm EDT

Indonesia torture case vs Exxon Mobil revived

By Jonathan Stempel | NEW YORK

Indonesian villagers who accused Exxon Mobil Corp's security forces of murder, torture and other atrocities have regained their right to sue the giant oil company in the United States.

A federal appeals court said on Friday that companies are not immune from liability under a 1789 U.S. law known as the Alien Tort Statute for "heinous conduct" allegedly committed by its agents in violation of human rights norms.

The 15 villagers contended in their lawsuit that family members were killed and that others were "beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked, and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty" amounting to torture in Indonesia's Aceh province between 1999 and 2001, a period of civil unrest.

A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said Exxon Mobil should be forced to defend against such charges.

Given that laws in civilized nations hold corporations responsible for lesser wrongs, "it would create a bizarre anomaly to immunize corporations from liability for the conduct of their agents in lawsuits brought for shockingly egregious violations of universally recognized principles of international law," Judge Judith Rogers wrote for a 2-1 majority.

Friday's decision reversed part of a ruling by the federal district court in Washington, D.C.

It is also at odds with a landmark ruling last September by the federal appeals court in New York, raising the prospect that the U.S. Supreme Court could try to resolve the dispute.

"The ruling basically says that corporations are not above the law," said Jennifer Green, a University of Minnesota law professor and director of that school's human rights litigation clinic, who submitted a brief on the plaintiffs' behalf. "When corporations have knowledge that they are aiding and abetting human rights abuses, they can be held liable in a U.S. court."

Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, said it is reviewing Friday's decision, calling the plaintiffs' claims "baseless." Indonesia's government has also opposed the lawsuit.

"NOT ABOVE THE LAW"

The villagers sought to hold Exxon Mobil responsible for having retained soldiers from Indonesia's military as guards for a natural gas facility in Aceh, despite knowing of past human rights abuses by Indonesia's army and that the contract would lead to human rights violations against Aceh villagers.

In its ruling, the D.C. Circuit also upheld the district court dismissal of claims under a different law, the Torture Victim Protection Act.

It returned the case to that court, where a jury could decide liability and any compensatory or punitive damages.

"We have fought these baseless claims for many years," Exxon Mobil spokesman Patrick McGinn said in a statement.

"While conducting its business in Indonesia, ExxonMobil has worked for generations to improve the quality of life in Aceh through employment of local workers, provision of health services and extensive community investment. The company strongly condemns human rights violations in any form."

Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the decision makes clear that corporations would be "as liable as anyone else" for violating international human rights norms.

DISSENT

Friday's decision puts the D.C. Circuit in agreement with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

It also put both courts at odds with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said companies are not liable in U.S. courts for violating international human rights law.

That case was brought against Royal Dutch ShellPlc by the families of seven Nigerians executed by a former military government. They accused Shell of helping Nigerian authorities violently suppress protests against its oil exploration and development in the 1990s. [ID:nN04244684]

The 2nd Circuit decision applies in New York, Connecticut and Vermont.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh dissented from Friday's decision, saying it would be "quite odd" for a U.S. court to allow Alien Tort Statute claims against a corporation based on customary international law, when no international tribunals would.

He also said the ruling could harm U.S.-Indonesian relations, and perhaps damage the war on terrorism.

Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush. Rogers and Judge David Tatel, who comprised the majority, were appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Exxon shares closed up 6 cents at $82.42 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The case is John Doe VIII et al v. Exxon Mobil Corp et al, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 09-7125.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston and James Vicini in Washington, D.C.; editing by Tim Dobbyn, Andre Grenon and Matthew Lewis)

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/trumps-pick-secretary-state-rex-tillerson-linked-human-rights-abuses-indonesia

This week, Congress will consider whether to confirm President-elect Donald Trump's appointment for secretary of state. Trump's choice, former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson,has come under fire for his close relationship with Russia's Vladimir Putin and his lack of government experience. As Tillerson seeks to become America's top diplomat, another aspect of his past should come under scrutiny: his former company's troubling ties to allegations of torture and other grave human rights abuses in Indonesia.

Until recently, Exxon Mobil worked extensively in Indonesia's Aceh Province, home to one of the globe's largest natural gas fields. A company executive once said that for a time, Exxon Mobil's operations in the region were "the jewel in the company's crown." Back in the 1970s, Mobil Corp.—which in 1999 merged with Exxon Corp.—obtained exclusive rights to extract gas from the area and began a joint venture with the Indonesian government to process it. The company soon started employing Indonesian soldiers to protect its operations there. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, amid a war between the Indonesian military and armed separatists in the region, some of the soldiers working for the company allegedly detained, tortured, and even killed local Indonesian people who lived and worked nearby, according to a lawsuit first filed in the United States in 2001. Another lawsuit was filed on behalf of more Indonesians in 2007 and consolidated with the first.

According to the lawsuits, one plaintiff was allegedly shot in the knee by an Exxon Mobil security official while riding his bike home from a local plantation, where he worked as a laborer. When another plaintiff tried to intervene, a security official stomped on his head. A third plaintiff said security officials shocked him in the genitals with electricity and brought him to a pit filled with human heads. Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth of International Rights Advocates, says he's met dozens of people in Aceh with similar complaints. In response to my questions about the case, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil told me the company "categorically denies any complicity in any human rights abuses committed by Indonesian soldiers during an Indonesian civil war."

The Indonesian plaintiffs say top Exxon Mobil executives in Texas knew or should have known about the alleged abuse but kept the soldiers on board for security anyway. During the first few years of abuse outlined in the complaints, Rex Tillerson was executive vice president of Exxon Mobil Development Company, a subsidiary that develops Exxon Mobil's exploration and production projects around the world. He became senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp. in 2001 and its president a few years later. Exxon Mobil says Tillerson had no responsibility for operations in Aceh "during the relevant time period." Collingsworth says there's no evidence to suggest he was making decisions related to the retention of Indonesian soldiers as security.

But it's hard to believe Tillerson wouldn't have had some idea of what was happening in Aceh. The abuse was covered by news organizations—including the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal—as early as the 1990s. "There wasn't a single person in Aceh who didn't know that massacres were taking place," a former top government official in Aceh told BusinessWeek in a 1998 investigation. In 2001, Time magazine wrote that in Aceh, "people literally line up to tell stories of abuse and murders committed by troops they call Exxon's army." Marco Simons, a legal director for the advocacy group EarthRights International who filed a brief in support of the Indonesians in 2010, says it's troubling that some of the problems in Aceh happened while Tillerson was among the company's top executives: "Either he knew about it and condoned it or he didn't have sufficient control over his operations to know about what was going on."

After the first lawsuit was filed in 2001, the abuse allegedly continued for a few years, until a brutal tsunami devastated Aceh and essentially ended the ongoing war between the separatists and Indonesia's military. Exxon Mobil continued to employ the soldiers after that. In 2005, Exxon Mobil's shareholders asked the company to report back to them about security arrangements with Indonesia's military, but the company's directors objected.

In 2006, Tillerson took the reins as Exxon Mobil's CEO. The company continued employing Indonesian soldiers in Aceh, according to the 2007 complaint. "Defendants have refused demands to investigate, improve, or cease its security forces' abusive actions," the plaintiffs charged. Years earlier, Tillerson and other Exxon Mobil executives had met with officials in Indonesia; some, like former CEO Lucio Noto and former executive vice president Harry Longwell, had discussed the security problems in Aceh, but it's not clear whether Tillerson broached this subject during his meetings. In 2015, Exxon Mobil sold its Aceh assets to Indonesia's state oil company.

The litigation between Exxon Mobil and the Indonesian plaintiffs has now dragged on for about 16 years. A judge ruled in 2015 that the case could continue to move forward, stating that "the Court accepts as true for purposes of this motion" the assertion that "Exxon exercised substantial control over the activities of these soldiers." Collingsworth says his clients are still waiting for justice. "Some part of that is Rex Tillerson," he says. "He [was] the CEO. He could say, 'These people got hurt, the war's over, why don't we help them?'"

Collingsworth worries a State Department under Tillerson could intervene to side with big companies like Exxon Mobil in future human rights abuse cases. There's some precedent for this: In 2002, the State Department under President George W. Bush warned a court in the United States that allowing the Indonesians to pursue their lawsuit against Exxon Mobil could have a "potentially serious adverse impact" on US government interests. Now, Collingsworth said, the State Department has the power to determine whether his plaintiffs and witnesses can get visas to travel to the United States for trial—he adds that a trial date is imminent. More generally, he adds, the State Department can play a role in promoting rule of law in countries abroad. But if Tillerson, "the most prominent of all CEOs of the biggest oil company," is appointed, he says, it'll send a message to people around the globe: "The world is open for business—environment and human rights be damned."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Tillerson talking about the so-called war on drugs, in which thousands have been killed. Now, in your piece, Antonia, you talk about Exxon’s role in Aceh, Indonesia. Could you explain what Exxon is being accused of there?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. Human rights was a big theme throughout the hearing, brought up by many, many senators. And, you know, as someone who’s spent a—you know, I’ve written three books about the oil industry. I’ve spent a lot of time studying ExxonMobil. To hear Rex Tillerson continually talk—and in that clip he didn’t, but he did mention, you know, the way that he—the ways that he would uphold human rights—was deeply disturbing, for one reason being this case that I highlight in my report, which is one of the more renowned because of the level of abuse, international human rights cases involving an oil company. And this is a case in which the complaint is actually now just getting ready to go before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. They’re awaiting a trial date any day now. And this involves severe human rights abuses in Indonesia by security forces employed by ExxonMobil. And the complaint specifically names Rex Tillerson.

And what the charges are, they involve charges from 2000 to 2004 that ExxonMobil essentially, in the words of the complaint, privatized the Indonesian military to act as its own security force for its natural gas operations there. Aceh was in the midst of an independence movement. It was a violent and hectic independence movement. And ExxonMobil used a renowned-for-its-human-rights-abuse-record military to be its private security force. And in one of the cases, for example, John Doe number two—and they’re all John Does, because they’re all afraid for their lives—the person alleges that he was kidnapped by ExxonMobil’s private security forces. He was held for three months. He was severely tortured. He was shown a pile of human heads and warned that this is what was going to happen to him. He was eventually released, and then his home was burned down. But this is a case that involves charges of murder, sexual assault, you know, sort of the most horrific things you can imagine. And the case alleges that the decisions were being made to use this military force at the highest levels of ExxonMobil, in the executive level, at the—you know, not just in the subsidiary in Indonesia, but in corporate headquarters in the United States, and that the decision—even when it was known by executives that the Indonesian force was using these extreme human rights abuses, the decision was made to continue using that force and actually to intensify the use of that force.

And named in the complaint is Rex Tillerson in his role then as president of ExxonMobil, as someone who had met with Indonesian authorities.So this is a case that he, you know, I would imagine, at a minimum, is certainly aware of, and very important. You know, what ExxonMobil argues is not that the human rights abuses did not occur, but rather that it is not liable for them. And ExxonMobil stayed in Indonesia. You know, the only—the only thing that ended this conflict was the tsunami at the end of—in December 2004 that essentially wiped out Aceh. The ExxonMobil facility survived the tsunami. And so, ExxonMobil never chose to stop operating because of everything that was going on around it. It stayed. It stayed. It stayed. It stayed. And that is an example of choices made all around the world, where ExxonMobil has partnered with and propped up—right now in Angola, in Equatorial Guinea—worked with, propped up dictators, governments that are incredibly abusive to their people, so that they could get their oil. And that has been and continues to be the model that ExxonMobil follows.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, we want to thank you for being with us. Antonia Juhasz, oil and energy journalist, author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill as well as The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It. We’ll link to your piece, "Rex Tillerson Could Be America’s Most Dangerous Secretary of State."

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/landmark-human-rights-case-against-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-firms-pushes-on/

Landmark Human Rights Case Against World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Pushes On

Dec 29, 2016 by Casey Coates Danson

[Translate]

Environment

This is the first-ever human rights violations case due to climate injustice alleged against carbon majors.

By Ping Manongdo / Eco-Business

December 24, 2016

Image of oil platform during sunset.

Photo Credit: Dabarti CGI/Shutterstock

The Philippines Commission on Human Rights has announced that it is moving forward with the next steps in the world’s first-ever case against major fossil fuel companies for alleged human rights abuses.

The commission is to take to task oil giants such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, BHP Billiton, Suncor and ConocoPhillips for their alleged role in causing death and financial loss on a massive scale as a result of climate-induced disasters in the archipelago.

A month after concluding the first phase of their investigation, which looked at scientific evidence linking climate change and fossil fuel operations, CHR commissioner Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz, who leads the national investigative body for the case, said they are now ready to push forward with public hearings, beginning in April 2017.

Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastation. Many houses were wiped out by container vans that were pushed by the typhoon from a nearby port in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines. Image: Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Cadiz said they have secured responses from 20 out of the 47 fossil fuel companies involved in the case as of December 8.

The responses were either sent to CHR directly or to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC), a New York-based advocacy group that tracks the human rights policies and performance of businesses.

In a letter addressed to BHRRC, American company ConocoPhillips, which claims to be the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company, said they challenged the jurisdiction of the legal proceedings arguing that their company does not have operations in the Philippines.

“We operate responsibly and take climate change issues seriously; managing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations and integrating climate-change related activities and goals into our business planning,” Sabrina Watkins, ConocoPhillips’ head of sustainable development, said in the statement.

Repsol, a global energy producer based in Madrid, confirmed in a letter sent to BHRRC on November 8, that they sent a reply to the CHR but are unable to disclose details due to the confidentiality rules of the government body.

Russian company Lukoil for their part said that they have now developed and are implementing what they call a Biodiversity Protection Program focused on “undoing harm” to marine resources and “reclaiming oil contaminated land.”

The company further said that it has been aiming to prevent water pollution by using “zero pollution” technology in its off-shore operations since 1997. With this technology, not a single item of waste will pass into the water, the company said in a statement.

The CHR said the petitioners would be ready with a consolidated response by February 14, 2017.

“As petitioners, we will continue to advocate for our demands, including an authoritative finding by the CHR that fossil fuel companies must respect human rights and outline steps that would shift their existing business practices away from further contributions to climate change and prevent human rights impacts,” said Rose Trajano, secretary general of the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates, one of the petitioning organisations.

“As long as companies and governments fail to act on climate change, every day is human rights day. Today, we got much closer to our aspiration of holding those most responsible for the climate crisis accountable, in order to prevent further harm,” said Yeb Sano, executive director, Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

The petition was filed by typhoon victims, backed by 14 civil society and non-government organisations including Greenpeace Southeast Asia, on September 15 last year.

They demand that the 47 fossil fuel companies explain how the human rights violations resulting from climate change will be “eliminated, remedied, and prevented.”

An archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, the Philippines is one of the countries in the world that is most vulnerable to climate impacts. In 2013, it was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, locally known as Yolanda, one of the most powerful storms that has ever made landfall, which killed more than 6,000 people and displaced more than half a million.

In October this year, the country’s northern region was hit by Typhoon Haima, locally known as Lawin, a Category 5 typhoon.

The petitioners argue that climate injustice is a violation of human rights.

“The reality of climate change and how it affects human rights has been put in the spotlight, and ultimately, when people stand together and rise above adversity, justice will prevail,” Sano said.

Ping Manongdo is a correspondent based in Baguio City, Philippines. She has supported publicly listed companies as well as SMEs based in Singapore with their digital media content strategies for six years. Before that, she was a news reporter for one of the biggest media organizations in the Philippines, and wrote stories on military conflict, environmental disasters, and the plight of marginalized communities in her country.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/us-mining-company-defends-deploying-hired-thugs-against-indigenous-farmers-peru

The Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation was hit with negative press last week following reports that its Peruvian subsidiary sent security forces to attack the prominent indigenous environmental defender Máxima Acuña de Chaupe at her remote farm in the northern Andean highlands. Now, the mining giant's latest public relations campaign to defend its use of force against the Chaupe family, including the destruction of their crops, is provoking fresh outcry from human rights and environmental organizations.

Máxima attracted international acclaim—and a Goldman Environmental Prize—for her years-long resistance against the Yanacocha mining company, which is 51.35 percent owned by Newmont and has waged a relentless campaign to transform her plot into the open-pit Conga gold and copper mine. In retaliation for her refusal to sell her land to Yanacocha in 2011, Máxima says she has endured a steady stream of intimidation, harassment and surveillance, alongside an ongoing legal campaign to drive her family from their home of more than 20 years. The mine is widely opposed by peasants and workers in the region, who have staged mass protests and general strikes to resist the project.

The dispute came...

Australia has been forcibly transferring refugee and asylum-seeking men, women, and children to the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru since September 2012. About 1,200 people who sought refuge in Australia now languish on Nauru, facing severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and neglect.

Those transferred to Nauru initially spent a year or more housed in cramped vinyl tents in a nearly unlivable detention facility that many described as “prison-like.”

:{:{They routinely face neglect by health workers and other service providers hired by the Australian government – even for life-threatening conditions. They are frequently assaulted by local Nauruans, who go unpunished.

Many have dire mental health problems and suffer overwhelming despair – self-harm and suicide attempts are frequent.

Australia and Nauru impose strict secrecy on the processing of asylum seekers on Nauru and refuse most requests to visit from journalists or researchers. Nevertheless, an Amnesty International researcher and a Human Rights Watch researcher were able to enter Nauru legally and remain for a total of 12 days in July 2016.}:}:

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/honduran_indigenous_leader_berta_caceres_assassinated

Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres has been assassinated in her home. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras.

In 1993 she co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). For years the group faced a series of threats and repression.

According to Global Witness, Honduras has become the deadliest country in the world for environmentalists. Between 2010 and 2014, 101 environmental campaigners were killed in the country.

In 2015 Berta Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading environmental award. In awarding the prize, the Goldman Prize committee said, “In a country with growing socioeconomic inequality and human rights violations, Berta Cáceres rallied the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras and waged a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam.”

freeport papua:

The ramifications are both environmental and social.

'Slow-motion genocide'

The social and economic condition of the indigenous Amungme and Kamoro poses fundamental human rights concerns. Although Freeport-Indonesia directly or indirectly employs a large number of West Papuans and is regularly Indonesia's biggest taxpayer, in 2005, theWorld Bank found that Papua remained the poorest province in Indonesia.With a marked rise in military personnel and foreign staff has come a number of social issues, including alcohol abuse and prostitution such that Papua now has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in Indonesia.

Indonesian control of West Papua has been characterised by the ongoing and disproportionate repression of largely peaceful opposition. Few sustained violent interactions have occurred; however, in one major conflict in 1977, more than 1,000 civilian men, women, and children were killed by the Indonesian military in Operasi Tumpas("Operation Annihilation") after a slurry pipe was severed and partially closed the Ertsberg mine. cfe bruce harrison

---

e third chapter of a four-part essay that examines how the Norwegian Pension Fund came to blacklist the mining giant Rio Tinto. If you missed them, catch up with the earlier chapters: 1. The blacklisting of Rio Tinto, and be 2. West Papua: A history of exploitation.

Part 3: Mining companies funded abuses

In February 1995, Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced three deals that secured access into Grasberg, a massive gold and copper mine in the Indonesian province of West Papua.

First, Rio Tinto agreed to invest $500m of new capital in Arizona-based mining corporation Freeport for a 12 per cent stake in the US business. Second, Rio Tinto agreed to finance a $184m expansion of the Grasberg mine. In return, it received 40 per cent of post-1995 production revenue that exceeded certain output targets and, from 2021, a 40 per cent stake in all production. Finally, Rio Tinto would receive 40 per cent of all production from new excavations elsewhere within West Papua.

Rio Tinto was effectively doing business with Indonesian dictator Suharto, too.

In response, Freeport told shareholders that Rio Tinto would "contribute substantial operating and management expertise" through proportional representation on the board - as well as on various Grasberg operating and technical committees, from which the "policies established by the [board] will be implemented and operation will be conducted".

Speaking of the "exceptional potential" of the deal, Rio Tinto's then chief executive, Robert Wilson, agreed that "given [Rio Tinto's] experience in other major open-pit copper ore bodies such as Bingham Canyon, Palabora and Escondida, we anticipate considerable mutual benefit".

Rio Tinto obviously liked how Freeport-Indonesia did business, especially at Grasberg.

:{US government: Grasberg contravenes the Foreign Assistance Act

By October 1995, an independent US government agency had cancelled Freeport's international political risk insurance. The insurer, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), specifically cited the Grasberg mine operation as contravening the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which required that "overseas investment projects do not pose unreasonable or major environmental hazards or cause the degradation of tropical forests". Freeport was the first policyholder to be terminated by the OPIC for ethical violations, despite President Suharto and Freeport director Henry Kissinger heavily lobbying the US government to reinstate the policy. Following OPIC's decision, the company did not disclose the environmental performance of the mine again until 2003 - it no longer had to.

For a brief time in 2000 and 2001, a particularly sympathetic Indonesian environment minister, Sonny Keraf, pursued numerous avenues to impose penalties and fines on Grasberg, including an unsuccessful attempt to invoke the criminal section of the 1997 Environmental Law to cease Freeport-Indonesia's riverine method of tailingsdisposal, by which the corporation fed the mine's waste product into nearby rivers. Under pressure for his pursuit of the part-Indonesian-owned Freeport, Keraf was replaced following the 2001 election.

As Suharto's reign came to an end, an increasing number of West Papuans also began to campaign against the environmental and social impact of Grasberg. Papuan leaders brought the matter before the US Federal District Court in April 1996 and before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the US House of Representatives in May 1999. Many more attempts, including one to address shareholders at Rio Tinto's 1998 annual general meeting in London, were foiled by Indonesian authorities.

Building on restrictions introduced in 1991, the US government banned arms transfers to Indonesia for widespread human rights violations in East Timor in 1999. Consequently, Freeport's payments to the Indonesian military and security forces were more closely scrutinised. The Wall Street Journalfound that, between 1991 and 1997, Freeport guaranteed more than $500m in loans so that Suharto's family and allies could purchase a stake in the mine - a great portion of which was written off by Freeport in 2003.

An outspoken Australian academic, Lesley McCulloch, also found that the 1996 Timika riots adjacent to the Grasberg mine led to a spike in monetary demands by the Indonesian military, resulting in the funding of a $35m army base. Freeport and Rio Tinto refused to disclose details of the payments.

A history of violence

Then in August 2002, two US teachers and an Indonesian employee of Freeport-Indonesia were murdered at the Grasberg mine complex. Following one rebel's admission that he was a business partner of the Indonesian military, several New York City pension (superannuation) funds formally requested that Freeport disclose the nature of its Indonesian "security" payments. The shareholders were concerned that such payments violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Although Freeport was not required to put the proposal to shareholders, the company did begin to disclose its security-related payments. Filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission since 2001 have confirmed annual payments reaching an average $5m each year for government-provided security of the Grasberg complex and its staff - and fluctuating annual costs reaching $12m for unarmed, in-house security costs. A spokesman for the company later told the Jakarta Postthat these payments had been taking place since the 1970s.

Sporadic accounts began to surface - in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jakarta Post, and New York Times - quoting internal sources that confirmed that the Indonesian had masterminded the killings to extort monies from the Grasberg operators. "Not surprisingly, the Indonesian military has exonerated itself," US Congressmen Joel Hefley and Tom Tancredo said in June 2003. "American investigative teams, including the FBI, have not been able to complete their investigations mainly due to the Indonesian military's refusal to co-operate and tampering of evidence."

Freeport remained steadfastly opposed to later demands by New York City pension fund investors to cease all payments to the Indonesians until they complied with official US investigations into the August 2002 murders. At the 2004 annual general meeting, president and chief executive Richard Adkerson advised shareholders: "The management and Board believe that the stockholder proposal mischaracterises the company's relationships with Indonesian security institutions and suggests actions that would undermine the company's relationship with the Indonesian government and the security of the company's operations."

Despite the ongoing human rights and corruption concerns in West Papua - including a report by the World Bank and a letter by US senators to then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calling for the appointment of a special representative to Indonesia - after a vote by shareholders, the resolution was not passed.

On March 23, 2004, Rio Tinto announced it had sold its 11.9 per cent shareholding in Freeport. Rio Tinto made a $518m profit. Citing no environmental or social reasons, Rio Tinto's then-chief executive Leigh Clifford reassured shareholders that "the sale of [Freeport] does not affect the terms of the joint venture nor the management of the Grasberg mine" and that through "our significant direct interest in Grasberg, we will continue to benefit from our relationship with Freeport".

Rio Tinto remained committed to the mining of Grasberg and would continue overseeing its management through various operating and technical committees.

Sensational claims that illegal payments to individual soldiers, units, and policemen had been routinely made to secure the Grasberg complex and its staff came to light in 2005. A report by Global Witness revealed that an additional $10m had been paid directly to individual military and police commanders between 1998 and 2004. This included $247,000 between May 2001 and March 2003 to General Mahidin Simbolon, former head of the 1999 East Timor massacre, and monthly payments throughout 2003 to the police Mobile Brigade - a group cited by the US State Department as having "continued to commit numerous serious human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, and arbitrary detention".

With the US arms trade embargo still in place, Rio Tinto had reassured the market that payments to the Indonesian military were "legally required and legitimate" only months before the news broke. Now Rio Tinto and Freeport-Indonesia came under even greater public pressure. At Rio Tinto's next shareholder meeting, after several West Papuans refugees made statements to the board on Grasberg, shareholder activist Stephen Mayne suggested that "the most appropriate thing for Rio Tinto to do would be to exit". After confirming that Rio Tinto's contractual obligations would permit such a move, then-chairman Sir Rod Eddington informed shareholders that they "make a considerable effort to ensure that the best that Rio Tinto can offer to Freeport in the management of that venture is available to them".

An Indonesian ministerial decree in 2007 demanded that the security of "vital national objects" - such as Grasberg - be handed over to the police within six months. Evidence obtained by world news service AFPsuggests this is not happening. In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Freeport disclosed additional direct payments of "less than" $1.6m in 2008 to 1,850 soldiers, despite the fact that 447 policemen make up the official number of personnel responsible for security at the Grasberg complex.

:{Unrepentant

The company's 2008 Sustainable Development report confirms that Freeport-Indonesia makes contributions to "security institutions (including both police and military)". Alarmingly, according to Amnesty International, as recently as 2008 there have been fundamental human rights violations such as the "torture, excessive use of force and unlawful killings by police and security forces" - reports that have subsequently been confirmed by the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders and the United Nations Committee against Torture.

"There is no alternative to our reliance on the Indonesian military and police," Freeport chairman James Moffett said to the *New York Times* in 2005. "The need for this security, the support provided for such security, and the procedures governing such support, as well as decisions regarding our relationships with the Indonesian government and its security institutions, are ordinary business activities."

:{Read the concluding chapter: Norway's 'ethical divestment' from Rio Tinto.

This is an extract of a chapter from the book, Evolutions in Sustainable Investing: Strategies, Funds and Thought Leadership, to bepublished by Wiley in December 2011.

NAJ Taylor is a PhD candidate in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, andauthor of This Blog Harms.

===

turkey ct win goons http://ecowatch.com/2014/11/13/court-ruling-coal-power-plant/

House Committee on Financial Services, hold a congressional hearing and help businesses eradicate human trafficking and modern slavery in supply chains.

Why Important

"We were sold for $430 per person. I felt very depressed when I ended up on the boat. I felt I was in hell." - Myo Zaw Do*, a migrant from Burma who was sold on Thai fishing ships.(1):(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
Myo Zaw Do, a migrant from Burma, describes how he was sold into slavery on Thai fishing boats for only $430. He was forced to work without pay and suffered brutal beatings by the captain, including one in which his head was slammed so violently into the ice on the deck that he is now partially deaf.  Trafficked workers endure regular beatings, torture, and execution-style killings. Some are even driven to suicide, all to support the flow of cheap, farmed shrimp distributed throughout the world.(2):(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
Two big global retailers -- Walmart and Costco -- are named as customers of a seafood supplier in Thailand with proven links to slavery.(3) Which means that shrimp farmed with slave labor is ending up on your plate.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
You can help change this! Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are considering the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2014 that encourages businesses to disclose what efforts they take to identify human trafficking in supply chains. You can tell the House of Representatives to hold companies accountable for the millions of children, men, and women trapped in the everyday nightmare of forced labor.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
The business supply chain transparency bill would require large companies to say if they are taking any steps to address slavery in supply chains and what those steps are. These disclosures allow consumers to make informed decisions about what products they buy and which companies they invest in. Myo Zaw Do is just one of the millions of trafficked workers who are held in slavery in order to produce goods we purchase everyday. :(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
Tell the House of Representatives to take the first step to passing the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2014 (H.R. 4842) by holding a hearing. Together we can shine a light on this hidden crime.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
*Myo Zaw Do is a pseudonym.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
(1) Felicity Lawrence, Thai seafood industry censored over Burmese migrant’s trafficking ordeal, The Guardian, March 4, 2014.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
(2) Felicity Lawrence, Thai seafood industry censored over Burmese migrant’s trafficking ordeal, The Guardian, March 4, 2014.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):
(3) Kate Hodal, Chris Kelly in Songkhla and Felicity Lawrence, Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK, The Guardian, June 10, 2014.:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):

snowden says US human rights spied on incl Am Int'l

===

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/7/exxonmobils_dirty_secrets_from_indonesia_to includes key legal suit

Steve Coll, President of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is called, “Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power.” Previously, he was managing editor of the Washington Post and has also been a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at the paper. He was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for the book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.” He is also author of “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.”

===

The Power of the Tort

If POCLAD’s project of reviving the dormant practice of charter

revocation seems quixotic, consider the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA),

one of the first laws that followed the ratification of the Constitution in

At first glance, it would seem even more quixotic to attempt to

revive a dusty law that had lain in hiberation for two centuries and that

had been written originally for suing with pirates and protecting diplomats.

Nevertheless, in 1979, lawyers for a Paraguayan couple rediscovered

the law and used it successfully in a lawsuit against a Paraguayan

police officer accused of murdering the couple’s son.

The ACTA applies to violations “against the law of nations,” i.e.

laws committed outside the context of the United States legal system.

With its revival, a mechanism now exists for addressing horrific crimes

whose victims would otherwise have never found justice. The ATCA

has led to a number of suits against corporations. In 1996, the International

Labor Rights Fund assisted Burmese villagers in filing a suit

against Unocal, charging that the oil and gas company had used forced

labor in building a pipeline in Burma. Other suits have targeted Shell

(for alleged human rights abuses in Nigeria), Texaco (for allegedly

dumping toxic waste in Ecuador), Coca-Cola (for allegedly using paramilitary

forces to suppress union activity in Colombia), Del Monte (for

allegedly hiring thugs who tortured union leaders in Guatemala), Dyn-

Corp (for allegedly spraying Ecuadorian villagers with toxic chemicals),

and the Drummond Company (for allegedly hiring gunmen to assassinate

union leaders in Colombia).

...

For example, the concept of “human rights” can be seen as a safety

feature—an organizational airbag that helps prevent large, powerful

institutions from crushing vulnerable human beings. To make any such

design feature workable, it must be accompanied by legal systems to

interpret it and police power to enforce it. When it works, it is a powerful

and deep innovation.

As new design ideas for the state were implemented in America

and elsewhere, it became apparent that some worked better than others.

For example, compare the American experience with the French in

crafting a working system of human rights. Although France’s Declaration

of the Rights of Man and the Citizen is more extensive than America’s

Bill of Rights, the two countries diverged in mechanisms for

enforcement. In France, enforcement was placed in the hands of the National

Assembly and its representatives on the Committee for Public

Safety. In America, Chief Justice Marshall’s assertion of Supreme Court

authority in Marbury v. Madison (1803) established judicial review in a

separate branch of government. In France, the human rights system

quickly broke down; in the United States it worked, however imperfectly.

International human rights expert Geoffrey Robertson attributes

the difference to the fact that Marbury v. Madison “provided human

rights in the U.S. with a set of teeth, by endorsing courts rather than

legislatures as their enforcement mechanism.”

Just as it was necessary to innovate and implement specific new

features in order to democratize and constrain state power, the same

applies to corporate power. A short list of changes might include the

following: (1) revoke the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights; (2)

curb corporate “quasi-rights” as appropriate, e.g. requiring corporations

to renew their charters every five years; (3) ban corporations from political

activity; (4) shore up the boundaries of “non-corporate” spaces in

society, e.g. prohibiting advertising aimed at children; (5) expand the

scope of worker and customer rights vis-à-vis corporations; (6)

strengthen countervailing institutions, especially unions; (7) promote

non-corporate institutions like public schools and economic forms like...