HUMAN RIGHTS 2

see DN coverage

see war crimes

SEE ISRAEL PALESTINE gaza

see death squads

see climate lawsuits

see baby jail mass deport

see jrnl activ killed

see ICE 3 BOVINO

see student suppress, mass deport trump cecot el salv

see coup assassination

SEE FACEBOOK MYANMAR INDIA

see violations

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an 3 26

By late 2025, former Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino had become well known for his unapologetic embrace of aggressive and at times even deadly approaches to mass deportation. Now new reporting based on leaked documents indicates that his “smash-and-grab tactics” have been implemented as the norm throughout the Department of Homeland Security.

After the fallout from Trump’s disastrous surge of DHS agents in Minnesota, which left two dead and resulted in scores of civil suits, many celebrated the replacement of Greg Bovino with border czar Tom Homan, but it is now becoming clear that the former’s violent mark has been left on the agency, with the changes implemented by Bovino and his allies now ingrained into the departmental culture.

As an example of this, a leaked internal memo issued two months before Border Patrol’s Minnesota blitz detailed how to get away with smashing a car window then dragging the occupant out with minimal legal liability. This has since become a common practice in cities across the country.

Another leaked memo rescinds borderland migrant entry safety guidelines implemented in 2022 that limited certain interdiction tactics in dangerous environments. As a result, Border Patrol agents are now allowed to arrest migrants in waterways and on the border fence, force them back into waterways or onto the wall, and forcibly remove them to the Mexican side of the border.

Bovino’s role in creating this aggressive enforcement culture is hard to deny. For example, a recent investigation determined that the border region overseen specifically by Bovino — who once praised an agent who had shot a US citizen five times as “excellent” — had the highest ratio of use-of-force incidents to assaults on agents of any sector in the nation, rating well above the average.

To counter Bovino’s impact on the agency, Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois has introduced the DHS Use of Force Oversight Act, which would implement a DHS policy addressing use of force and de-escalation.

“A Use of Force Policy should NOT be a suggestion — it should be mandated by law,” said Ramirez. “Let me be very clear: reforms are NOT enough. Americans are past reform of a department that has used taxpayer dollars to execute people in broad daylight. ICE must be abolished, and DHS dismantled.”

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simon clark

mogera ACCESS TO GOOD INFO IS HU RIGHT

Prof Morgera's report: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/ge...

28:15

argument for this has been made clear by now. Climate misinformation produces clear and demonstrable harms both to the

28:22

environment and to us and our human rights. But the obvious counterargument is, what about my freedom of speech? Why

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can't I say what I want even though I know that something is inaccurate? I mean it is essential to protect

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freedom of speech and in all my work I've always mention how important it is to have as open conversations as

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possible. Now the question here is different if this is a conduct that's been repeated and that over time has led

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to the protection of a vested interest which is uh intrinsically uh opposite to

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the protection of a public good. I mean climate change has been recognized as

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structural violence against children for instance by the UN committee on children's rights and incitation to

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violence um is for instance one of the very few exceptions that has been recognized to freedom of expression. I

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think there's two things to highlight here that Professor MorgeRa said. Firstly, this is not a law that is

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criminalizing ignorance about climate change. Like just saying something wrong wouldn't break this hypothetical law.

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We're talking about a law that's quite explicitly targeting the fossil fuel industry that has a long history of

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acting against the public good. And secondly, by basing the argument for this law on human rights...

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AN 9 25

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.

"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

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gaza

pvt contractors IDF shoot 600 in food lines 7 25 msnbc hayes

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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.

"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

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mma 7 25

Fox News scoffed that Andry Hernandez was “just a gay barber” when Trump sent him to a torture prison. Now, Fox ignores reporting that he was sexually assaulted there.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/04/25

Fox News regularly downplayed concerns that the Trump administration’s denial of due process had resulted in immigrants sent in error to a notorious foreign prison, with one host mocking interest in the plight of a man he described as “just a gay barber.” That man, Andry Hernández Romero, said last week that he was beaten by guards, one of whom forced him to perform oral sex, during his 125 days in captivity.

Fox personalities were elated in March when the Trump administration dubiously invoked a rarely utilized wartime authority to deport over 250 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a megaprison known for its brutal conditions. The network had spent 2024 concocting a bogus narrative about a “migrant crime wave,” and they quickly and uncritically adopted the administration’s justification that it had targeted violent Tren de Aragua gang members for this treatment.

While Fox’s stable of propagandists bleated that the deportees were “the worst of the worst,” CBS News reviewed the names and found that three-quarters had no criminal record in the United States. Indeed, the group included people like Hernández, a gay 32-year-old makeup artist who entered the U.S. legally and passed a preliminary asylum screening. He had no criminal record or removal order but was detained and ultimately shipped to El Salvador over concerns about his wrist tattoos — crowns with the words “Mom” and “Dad” next to them.

Rather than express concerns over the U.S. government using such slight evidence to send people to a foreign prison known for its brutal conditions, Fox hosts ran cover for the administration. They accused critics of sympathizing with “illegal alien gangbangers,” accused them of pushing “false sob stories,” denounced news outlets that “only focused on” the innocent people sent to the torture prison rather than the supposedly guilty ones, and denied the importance of providing due process to determine which group is which.

Fox’s Jesse Watters on Andry Hernández: “It’s just a gay barber”

Perhaps the most disturbing discussion came during the March 31 edition of The Five, when Jessica Tarlov, the panel show’s lone Democrat, drew derision from right-wing co-hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld for repeatedly directing the show’s attention to Hernández’s plight.

Video

Citation

From the March 31, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

“Time magazine was there when the gay barber from Venezuela who had a crown tattoo that said ‘mom’ was being processed coming into the El Salvadoran — oh, am I boring you again?” Tarlov said at one point. “I'm sorry.”

“No,” Watters replied. “But you've been talking about this gay barber from El Salvador with some stupid tattoo for weeks. Weeks, Jessica.”

“It's just a gay barber,” Watters added.

“He’s not into you,” Gutfeld interjected.

“He's an innocent guy who got swept up in a deportation, and hopefully we get it figured out and straightened out,” Watters continued. “But a lot of people in this country, Jessica, get arrested for things that they didn't do, get falsely accused, falsely convicted.”

“That doesn't mean you stop arresting criminals because one guy was arrested who was innocent,” Watters concluded. “It just means you just try to do it better the next time.”

What we did to Andry Hernández

Four months after that segment, the Trump administration managed to have Hernández returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange. Unfortunately, the administration didn’t “get it figured out and straightened out” before he was brutalized by guards, one of whom forced his penis into Hernández’s mouth and made him perform oral sex, Hernández subsequently told interviewers.

“Hernandez says the prison was hot and quiet. Guards would drag inmates out of their cells and beat them if they made too much noise,” NPR’s Manuel Rueda reported on July 27. “He slept on a metal plank without a mattress and shared his cell with up to 19 people. There was a toilet in each cell but no walls to separate it from the rest of the room.”

Rueda further reported that, according to Hernández, he was punished with confinement in a smaller cell “after guards caught him bathing outside regulatory hours. He says he was beaten with batons by three wardens in the small room and forced to perform oral sex on one of the guards.”

“In that prison, human rights don't exist, and the guards take pleasure out of seeing others suffer.” Rueda translated Hernández saying.

NBC News likewise reported on July 28 that Hernández said that “one day during his imprisonment he was taken to solitary confinement, where prison staff ‘made me kneel, perform oral sex on one person, while the others groped me and touched my private parts’ and ‘stroked me with their batons.’”

Fox has not reported on Hernández’s account, according to a Media Matters review.

And while Watters had expressed his vague hope for Hernández that “we get it figured out,” The Five is instead focused on issues he apparently finds more important.

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Facebook Used the Philippines to Test Free Internet. Then a Dictator Was Elected

NO LNX

Facebook Used the Philippines to Test Free Internet. Then a Dictator Was Elected.

By Jake Swearingen

Sept. 4, 2018

A pool of blood remains at the gutter where an alleged drug user was killed by unidentified assailants in Manila, Philippines. Photo: Ezra Acayan/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In 2013, Facebook hit upon an idea to grow its user base: It would subsidize internet access to Facebook on mobile devices in countries where cellular data was pricey, physical internet infrastructure was poor, and the smartphone revolution meant many leapfrogged from having no internet access at all to using their smartphone as their only source to the web. It found the perfect country to test this out on, in the 100 million citizens of the Philippines, calling it “Free Facebook.”

If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because Facebook attempted to do a version of this in many more countries with its “Internet.org” plan, hoping to get basic internet access to billions of people living without it — access that would come thanks to subsidies from Facebook. Internet.org was largely a failure, thanks to pushback by local governments, telecom companies, and human-rights organizations. Meanwhile, Free Facebook remains wildly successful in the Philippines. As outlined by BuzzFeed News reporter Davey Alba, the company serves as the de facto ISP for many Filipinos:

Thanks to a social media–hungry populace and heavy subsidies that keep Facebook free to use on mobile phones, Facebook has completely saturated the country. And because using other data, like accessing a news website via a mobile web browser, is precious and expensive, for most Filipinos the only way online is through Facebook.

Roughly 69 million Filipinos have access to the internet today, of those nearly 100 percent have a Facebook account. In the U.S. and Canada, for comparison, 87 percent of people with internet access use Facebook. (Zuckerberg, when told by the CEO of Filipino website Rappler in April of 2017 that 97 of the population with internet access was on Facebook, reportedly asked, “What about the other 3 percent?”)

Two years after the launch of Free Facebook, Rodrigo Duterte mounted a presidential bid, casting himself as the tough-on-crime, anti-elite Everyman ready to bring back jobs and order. Posts about Duterte, full of memes, propaganda, and outright libel (one opponent, now in prison on a dubious drug charge, saw a fake sex tape circulate on Facebook with her in it) did extremely well on Facebook, as nearly any inflammatory content does. When Duterte said he would dump the bodies of executed drug dealers “into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there,” the post immediately went “viral, viral, viral,” bragged one of his two social-media directors.

:{:{He won handily, and his rule has been brutal. At least 12,000 people have been killed during Duterte’s crackdown on drugs, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have been jailed, many of them opponents of Duterte himself.}:

Meanwhile, his social-media team has actively worked to bring in social-media influencers to prop up Duterte’s regime (think Filipino versions of social-media creatures like Mike Cernovich, Laura Loomer, or Jack Posobiec) working closely with the Duterte administration — sometimes directly on the government payroll — to spread fake stories such as a deposed Supreme Court justice was caught attempting to flee the country. Meanwhile, news sources seen as unfriendly to the Duterte campaign have increasingly come under fire, including banning all reporters from an outlet from the presidential palace.}:

Look: Absent Facebook, Duterte almost assuredly would have assumed power and began his dictatorial rule over the Philippines. But Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, attenuated to surface anything that attracts attention, amplifies dictators and demagogues like Duterte. In one egregious example, a fake sex tape spread quickly through Facebook of one of Duterte’s opponents having sex with her chauffeur. “De Lima is not only screwing her driver, she is also screwing the nation,” quipped Duterte.

Facebook says it’s working to police the content in the Philippines better. “We know we were too idealistic about the nature of these connections and didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse or thinking through all the ways people could use the tools on the platform to do harm,” said a Facebook spokesperson to BuzzFeed News. “In the Philippines, this includes the roll-out of third-party fact-checking, better detection of bad content, improved enforcement of our policies, and deeper support for the country’s digital literacy efforts.” (Ironically, many of Facebook’s content moderators who would end up doing this work live in the Philippines.)

:{:{There’s a peculiar callousness in Facebook using entire countries as testing environments. Last year, the company wanted to know what happen if it split the News Feed into two separate streams: one only populated by posts created by friends, and one only for posts created by media publishers. Instead of testing this on a small percentage of American users, it simply flipped the switch in six countries: Bolivia, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. Media organizations suddenly saw their websites’ traffic plummet, fake news stories flourished, and Facebook shut down the experiment within weeks , apologizing in a post that the company “received feedback that we made it harder for people in the test countries to access important information.”}:

About 66 million people — roughly the population of Texas, Florida, and New York combined — live in those six countries. Each country has its own particular news ecosystems, cultural norms, and political challenges. For Facebook, the countries represented a handy way to try out some A/B testing. To be very cynical about it, it also probably affected Facebook’s decision that those six countries bring in significantly less advertising dollars than Texas, Florida, and New York.}:

In the Philippines, its Free Facebook program has become so successful that it’s hard to imagine how Facebook and the Philippines could ever untwine themselves from each other. (Indeed, the company partnered with Duterte’s government to build an undersea cable connecting the Philippines to the U.S. and Asian countries.) And even after Duterte leaves office, whenever that may be, the Philippines will still be a country where one website’s algorithm determines what 97 percent of internet users look at.

There are, of course, no parallels to be drawn between the Philippines and the United States.

Correction: An earlier version of this story cited that 97 percent of Filipinos with Internet access have a Facebook account. According to the data from WeAreSocial, that number is actually 100 percent; 97 percent of Filipinos with internet access were on Facebook in April 2017. The post has been updated to reflect that.

SourcesHow Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War [Buzzfeed]

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Amnesty report finds Facebook amplified hate ahead of Rohingya massacre in Myanmar

World Sep 29, 2022

With roosters crowing in the background as he speaks from the crowded refugee camp in Bangladesh that’s been his home since 2017, Maung Sawyeddollah, 21, describes what happened when violent hate speech and disinformation targeting the Rohingya minority in Myanmar began to spread on Facebook.

“We were good with most of the people there. But some very narrow minded and very nationalist types escalated hate against Rohingya on Facebook,” he said. “And the people who were good, in close communication with Rohingya. changed their mind against Rohingya and it turned to hate.”

READ MORE:** Facebook’s system approved dehumanizing hate speech

For years, Facebook, now called Meta Platforms Inc., pushed the narrative that it was a neutral platform in Myanmar that was misused by malicious people, and that despite its efforts to remove violent and hateful material, it unfortunately fell short. That narrative echoes its response to the role it has played in other conflicts around the world, whether the 2020 election in the U.S. or hate speech in India.

But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.

Despite years of warnings, Amnesty found, the company not only failed to remove violent hate speech and disinformation against the Rohingya, it actively spread and amplified it until it culminated in the 2017 massacre. The timing coincided with the rising popularity of Facebook in Myanmar, where for many people it served as their only connection to the online world. That effectively made Facebook the internet for a vast number of Myanmar’s population.

More than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh that year. Myanmar security forces were accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes owned by Rohingya.

“Meta — through its dangerous algorithms and its relentless pursuit of profit — substantially contributed to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya,” the report says.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to answer questions about the Amnesty report. In a statement, the company said it “stands in solidarity with the international community and supports efforts to hold the Tatmadaw accountable for its crimes against the Rohingya people.”

“Our safety and integrity work in Myanmar remains guided by feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions, including the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar; the Human Rights Impact Assessment we commissioned in 2018; as well as our ongoing human rights risk management,” Rafael Frankel, director of public policy for emerging markets, Meta Asia-Pacific, said in a statement.

Like Sawyeddollah, who is quoted in the Amnesty report and spoke with the AP on Tuesday, most of the people who fled Myanmar — about 80% of the Rohingya living in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine at the time — are still staying in refugee camps. And they are asking Meta to pay reparations for its role in the violent repression of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which the U.S. declared a genocide earlier this year.

Amnesty’s report, out Wednesday, is based on interviews with Rohingya refugees, former Meta staff, academics, activists and others. It also relied on documents disclosed to Congress last year by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist. It notes that digital rights activists say Meta has improved its civil society engagement and some aspects of its content moderation practices in Myanmar in recent years. In January 2021, after a violent coup overthrew the government, it banned the country’s military from its platform.

READ MORE:** Facebook misses misinformation in Brazilian election ads

But critics, including some of Facebook’s own employees, have long maintained such an approach will never truly work. It means Meta is playing whack-a-mole trying to remove harmful material while its algorithms designed to push “engaging” content that’s more likely to get people riled up essentially work against it.

“These algorithms are really dangerous to our human rights. And what happened to the Rohingya and Facebook’s role in that specific conflict risks happening again, in many different contexts across the world,” said Pat de Brún, researcher and adviser on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty.

“The company has shown itself completely unwilling or incapable of resolving the root causes of its human rights impact.”

After the U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar highlighted the “significant” role Facebook played in the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya, Meta admitted in 2018 that “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”

In the following years, the company “touted certain improvements in its community engagement and content moderation practices in Myanmar,” Amnesty said, adding that its report “finds that these measures have proven wholly inadequate.”

In 2020, for instance, three years after the violence in Myanmar killed thousands of Rohingya Muslims and displaced 700,000 more, Facebook investigated how a video by a leading anti-Rohingya hate figure, U Wirathu, was circulating on its site.

The probe revealed that over 70% of the video’s views came from “chaining” — that is, it was suggested to people who played a different video, showing what’s “up next.” Facebook users were not seeking out or searching for the video, but had it fed to them by the platform’s algorithms.

Wirathu had been banned from Facebook since 2018.

“Even a well-resourced approach to content moderation, in isolation, would likely not have sufficed to prevent and mitigate these algorithmic harms. This is because content moderation fails to address the root cause of Meta’s algorithmic amplification of harmful content,” Amnesty’s report says.

The Rohingya refugees are seeking unspecified reparations from the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant for its role in perpetuating genocide. Meta, which is the subject of twin lawsuits in the U.S. and the U.K. seeking $150 billion for Rohingya refugees, has so far refused.

“We believe that the genocide against Rohingya was possible only because of Facebook,” Sawyeddollah said. “They communicated with each other to spread hate, they organized campaigns through Facebook. But Facebook was silent.”

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6 25

facebook meta genocide myanmarr india modi

[### Myanmar: Facebook's systems promoted violence against ...

Amnesty International

https://www.amnesty.org › Latest › News › 2022 › 09](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/)

Sep 29, 2022 — Myanmar: Facebook's systems promoted violence against Rohingya; Meta owes reparations ... Genocide Convention based on Myanmar's treatment ...

see baby jail

an 3 25

Private prison companies in the United States can hardly contain their excitement as the Trump administration moves to revive the practice of detaining migrant families at facilities with records of horrifying abuses, a decision that advocacy groups say highlights the White House's disdain for human rights as it carries out its large-scale assault on immigrants.

"Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies," Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Thursday after CBS Newsreported the administration's moves.

According to CBS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—newly empowered by President Donald Trump—"was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children" on Thursday "in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors."

"The group includes three children," the outlet added, citing an internal government report.

Separately, NBC Newsreported Thursday that "U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown."

"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes," NBC observed. "The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories."

As part of the revival of family detention—which was used by the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, and largely ended by the Biden administration—immigration officials are "refitting" two Texas facilities, including the notorious detention center in Dilley, Texas.

CoreCivic, a private prison company, has been newly contracted by ICE to reopen the facility for family detention.

"I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career," Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's CEO, told investors last month.

George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, said last week that "we've never seen anything like this before," referring to the speed with which the Trump administration is moving to procure contracts for migrant detention.

The New York Timesreported Friday that "a GEO Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million to Republican PACs that accept unlimited donations, with the bulk going to groups that supported House Republicans and Mr. Trump."

"It is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."

The Detention Watch Network noted that while the Dilley center was "in operation for family detention, there were reports of foul water and negligent medical treatment, with hospitals confirming that children are consistently released with health issues they dubbed 'Dilley-ish.'"

"In 2018, a 19-month-old girl, Mariee, tragically died after leaving the facility, and in 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a 5-year-old," the organization said.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote earlier this week that he visited the center in December 2018 and "it was horrifying."

"The cruelty and abuse of Trump's family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation," Merkley wrote on social media. "I'm calling on the admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen."

Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said Thursday that "it is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."

"Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children," said Ghandehari. "Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community-based groups—never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence."

"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment," Ghandehari added. "Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability."

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an 4 25

The global human rights group Amnesty International on Tuesday called on supporters of the United States' core constitutional rights to write to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding that the Trump administration stop its campaign to strip foreign students of their right to be in the country for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.

As Common Dreamsreported Tuesday, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accosted former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil, forced him into an unmarked vehicle, and took him to a detention center in Louisiana thousands of miles from his pregnant wife in March, the administration's attacks on international students have only intensified.

Seven identified students have had their visas revoked, while the administration is pushing to revoke the residency status of at least two students who protested the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on Gaza.

The White House is using a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act to claim that certain students including Khalil pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy and should be deported.

"At least 1,300 additional students are known to have had their visas revoked," reads a letter template provided to supporters by Amnesty. "However, many of these students never received notice of the revocation, nor did they participate in any protest or expressive activity on campus. Some students may have been targeted due to having committed minor crimes such as traffic violations. According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of students, many were targeted because of their country of origin, particularly those from African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian backgrounds."

Supporters who send the letter can urge Noem to "restore the visas and immigration status of these students and visitors, release all students from immigration detention, refrain from deporting any of them, and end the targeting of students based on their immigration statuses and for exercising their human rights."

"According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of students, many were targeted because of their country of origin, particularly those from African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian backgrounds."

As Common Dreamsreported, President Donald Trump's attacks on foreign students' First Amendment rights and his threats to universities' funding if they don't comply with his policies aimed at rooting out criticism of U.S. policy in Israel and Palestine, which both Republican and Democratic politicians have claimed is synonymous with antisemitism, have pushed schools to notify hundreds of students that their visas were revoked.

Trump's attacks on international students have shocked several federal judges, and one judge in Georgia on Friday ordered ICE to restore the legal status of students whose visas were revoked due to DHS' termination of their records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

DHS admitted in a court filing last week that it does not have the authority to change students' visa status via SEVIS.

"These repressive tactics and the summary revocation of people's immigration status," said Amnesty, "whether due to their speech and protest activities or their country of origin, demonstrate an utter lack of respect for their human rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, due process, and to be free from discrimination."

NOTE ERIK PRINCE TRYING TO GET INTO BIZ W/ BUKELE

Effects and Results

At the end of March 2022, Salvadoran security forces announced that they had arrested 576 gang members; since the declaration of the state of exception, more than 83,000 individuals linked to gang structures have been arrested, including gang leaders.^[10]

As of December 9, 2024, the Bukele government has totaled 776 non-consecutive days without homicides.^[11][12]

10 11 12

Arias, Diana (6 December 2024). "Régimen de excepción seguirá garantizando la seguridad pública". El Salvador. Diario El Salvador.
Infobae, Por Newsroom (2024-09-13). "El Gobierno de El Salvador anuncia que el país suma 700 días no consecutivos sin homicidios". infobae (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2024-12-09. {{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help)
"Diciembre sigue sin registrar homicidios en todo el país". Diario La Página (in Spanish). 2024-12-09. Retrieved 2024-12-09.

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › State_of_Exception_in_El_Salvador

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10 24 trying to remember soc term for zone ppl it’s OK to kill sacrifice

see state of exception margin

1/20:(

anti-terrorism?:(

aha-ish: 1st they came for...:

at the border, inner city, prisons, on the margins authoritarian power, violence, violation of civil/human rights can be test, done w/o much scrutiny

BLM trump wanted to shoot in legs by military // unmarked van border guards in Portland

see dapl water protectors, indigenous green, baby jail trump border?

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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

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4 24 7 WORLD CENTRAL FOOD KITCHEN CHEF ANDRES KIA

4 24 kpfa

israel target low level hamas kill at home ok to kill 15-20, higer value kill 300 with smart munitions 4/5/24 7 am lavendar, where’s daddy

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massacre MBS

https://www.alternet.org/like-fields-report-says-saudi-border-guards-killed-hundreds-of-migrants/

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights-activists-sound-the-alarm-as-el-salvador-battles-its-gang-crisis/

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15052022/philippines-fossil-fuels-climate-liability

icn 5 22 nick k

when Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in 2013, it made a direct hit on the hometown of Yeb Saño’s family. Saño,the country’s chief climate negotiator at the time, had to attend the United Nations climate change conference in Poland only days after the storm passed. As he addressed the other delegates, his brother was helping collect the dead.

“My brother remembered exactly how many bodies he picked up with his own hands,” Saño said. “Seventy-three dead bodies exactly.”

Haiyan ultimately killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines and damaged more than 1 million homes, uprooting lives with devastation from which the country still hasn’t recovered. While the storm may have been an act of nature, Saño and others were convinced that humans, ultimately, were responsible.

In 2015, working with Greenpeace Southeast Asia, Saño sought to hold those people accountable, petitioning the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights to declare the world’s largest fossil fuel companies “accountable for either impairing, infringing, abusing or violating human rights” because of their contribution to climate change.

earlier this month, the commission issued its conclusions. Saño felt vindicated. In a damning and lucidly-written report, the commission found that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies had “engaged in willful obfuscation and obstruction to prevent meaningful climate action.” The companies continue to deny climate science and try to slow a transition away from fossil fuels, the report said, driven “not by ignorance, but by greed.”

As the first national human rights body to weigh in on fossil fuel companies’ role in driving climate change, the commission determined that corporations have obligations under human rights law and can be held liable if they neglect them. While the commission has no power to compel companies or governments to act on its findings, legal experts said its report carries broad implications for other cases.

“This is a milestone for the narrative that climate impacts result in the infringement of human rights,” said Saño, now the executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. “So this report means a lot to Filipinos who confront the adverse effects of the climate crisis. This means a lot for the pursuit of climate justice.”

Some of the companies named in the petition, which included Chevron, ExxonMobil and other major producers, sought to have it dismissed, the report said, arguing that the commission had no jurisdiction beyond its borders and that the topic reached outside its traditional realm of political and civil rights. But the commission rejected these appeals, determining that it had a mandate “to test boundaries and create new paths; to be bold and creative, instead of timid and docile.”

Some experts said the report’s impacts extend beyond the Philippines, increasing the legal risks that fossil fuel companies are facing from a raft of lawsuits around the world. Despite the commission’s lack of enforcement powers, legal experts said its findings provide new strength and evidence for cases that have already been filed and will help people file new challenges in courts and human rights commissions elsewhere.

“I think corporations, their boards, their leaders should really start taking this potential liability seriously,” said John Knox, an expert in international and human rights law at Wake Forest Law who testified to the Philippines commission. “This is the harbinger of much more to come.”

The commission’s multi-year inquiry and its final report are part of a growing effort globally to reframe climate change as a threat to human rights. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council created a new special rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change. Aside from better recognizing the impacts of warming on people’s health and well-being—now evident around the world in the form of more extreme weather—advocates of this framing say it provides a solid base for holding governments and corporations accountable if they fail to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Saño said he has been in touch with colleagues in other parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe about the report’s findings.

“Many of them were just waiting for this to be completed,” he said, “and now that we have seen the culmination of the Philippines case it provides a lot of energy into those other possibilities.”

A Roadmap to Document Harm

The Philippines is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, an archipelago south of Taiwan that is hit by an average of 20 cyclones each year, according to the commission’s report. The country has also contributed only a tiny portion of the greenhouse gases that humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the last century-and-a-half. The pairing of the Philippines’ vulnerability with its relative lack of culpability makes it a powerful venue for an inquiry into climate change and human rights.

In 12 public hearings and many hours of testimony, the commission gathered an exhaustive catalog of evidence about the science of climate change and its impacts, and fossil fuel companies’ efforts to sow doubt about that science as they lobbied against government attempts in the United States and other countries to reduce dependence on coal, oil and gas.

The petition by Greenpeace drew on the research of Richard Heede, who leads the Climate Accountability Institute and has published studies linking specific levels of greenhouse gas emissions to specific companies, the so-called “carbon majors.” According to Heede’s research, Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, is responsible for more emissions than any other company, with Chevron and Exxon close behind.

Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners, said the new report was perhaps the most comprehensive compendium of all the research that has been published on fossil fuel companies’ role in driving emissions.

But what stood out, Muffett said, is that the report tied those greenhouse gas emissions to immediate threats to specific human rights of Filipinos, including their rights to life, health, food security and sanitation.

“Through every one of those rights, the commission pulls out witness testimony that says this was the lived experience of this,” Muffett said. “It is very much a roadmap to show how you document human rights impacts of climate change not only on entire nations, but on individuals and the communities who are being harmed, and that is, I think, extremely important.”

One chieftain from the southern Philippines testified that her people have been unable to practice traditional rituals based on seasonal rhythms because erratic weather has disrupted the once-predictable patterns. A rice farmer reported decreased harvests as a result of extreme heat.

One storm survivor told of losing three children, a son-in-law and four grandchildren to Typhoon Sendong in 2011. Veronica Cabe, one of the petitioners, spoke about the destabilizing effects of having her home destroyed by a storm.

“We felt displaced, we didn’t have our own space,” she told the commission. “We were forced to live with friends who were willing to share their homes with us. We were separated from each other.”

The commission held several hearings in New York and London, and traveled to the Netherlands, too, in a mostly-failed attempt to have some of the 47 fossil fuel companies named in the petition testify or meet with the commissioners.

The report focuses in particular on arguments made by theAmerican Petroleum Institute, the American coal industry and others, beginning in the 1990s, against efforts to limit emissions from fossil fuels, despite those organizations’ knowledge of the dangers of failing to do so.

In the report, the commission cites international human rights laws and standards to say that corporations, in addition to states, have obligations to protect human rights. It points to the continued financing of politicians who oppose climate action as evidence that fossil fuel companies are still working to deflect needed action. And it adds that financial institutions that fund fossil fuel production share in the responsibility and, potentially, liability for continuing to drive emissions higher.

Scott Lauermann, a petroleum institute spokesman, said, “At a time of rising energy costs and geopolitical volatility around the world, it’s more apparent than ever that we must both reduce emissions and ensure access to affordable, reliable energy for U.S. consumers, and that’s exactly what our industry has been focused on for decades” He added, “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

Creighton Welch, a spokesman for Chevron, said, “Chevron intends to be a leader in efficient and lower-carbon production of traditional energy—in high demand today and for years to come—while growing the lower-carbon businesses that will be a bigger part of the future.”

Todd Spitler, an Exxon spokesman, said the company was “developing comprehensive roadmaps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operated assets around the world and in support of society’s net-zero ambitions,” including investments in low-carbon technologies such ascarbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels. He added, “Our commitment to emissions reduction isn’t new; we have supported the Paris Agreement from its inception and made consistent progress on short- and medium-term emissions-reduction plans.”

A spokesperson for Saudi Aramco declined to comment.

The report was the first to be issued by a national human rights commission, and experts said it was only the second official finding to tie fossil fuel companies’ actions and responsibilities directly to the human rights impacts of climate change. Last year, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions in a ruling that drew in part on human rights laws.

Muffett and others said the report will add to a growing list of rulings and evidence laying the groundwork for holding specific companies liable for their role in fueling warming.

“What the commission is saying is there are adequate bases here for seeking to hold these companies liable,” Muffett said. “And I think that’s really significant because this report provides a pretty clear roadmap to human rights bodies and courts around the world, to then take up cases to do precisely that.”

In the report, the commission acknowledged that it had no enforcement powers, and instead was providing recommendations to companies and governments for how they could meet their obligations to protect human rights with respect to climate change. For companies, chief among those was halting the exploration of new oil and gas fields and contributing to a climate fund for mitigation and adaptation. The report said states must enact policies to make sure companies take these steps, and to penalize those that don’t.

Saño said he hopes the report would have immediate impacts in the Philippines, where the son of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was just elected president on Monday. He said successive governments have failed to address injustices in the country, including the concentration of power in a small elite, that exacerbate the impacts of climate change. The new government has an obligation to better protect its citizens from the storms that hit its coastlines every year, Saño said, and “this really paves the way for a lot of change, we hope.”

tv pix of woman bleeding on stretcher ukraine

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/russia-bombs-ukraine-maternity-hospital/

chevron and total pull out of burma myanmar hu rights and lack of rule of law?

1/22 kpfa

aha land is wealth, mine me vs we and it is class/status; pharma keeps vax from world/ poor ppl b/c proprietary IP

xian nat'l prop over HUMAN rights:

==

omg npi

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/extremist-christians/

paul r salon

progressive policies and positions are supposed to be rooted in reality and hard evidence. But that's not always the case when it comes to the culture wars that have such an enormous impact on our politics — especially not since the unexpected evangelical embrace of Donald Trump in 2016, culminating in the "pro-life" death cult of anti-vaccine, COVID-denying religious leaders. If this development perplexed many on the left, it was less surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.

One leading figure within that small group, Rachel Tabachnick, was featured in a recent webinar hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (archived on YouTube here /maxresdefault.jpg)), as part of its Religion and Repro Learning Series program, overseen by the Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson. Tabachnick's writing on dominionism can be found at Talk2Action and Political Research Associates, and she's been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Her presentation sheds important light on at least three things: First of all, the vigilante element of the Texas anti-abortion law SB 8. Second, the largerpattern of disrupting or undermining governance, including the "constitutional sheriffs" movement, the installation of overtly partisan election officials and the red-state revolt against national COVID public health policies. While Donald Trump has exploited that pattern ruthlessly, he did not create it. And third, the seemingly baffling fact that an anti-democratic minority feels entitled to accuse its opponents — including democratically elected officials — of "tyranny."

Some dominionist ideas — such as the biblical penalty of death by stoning — are so extreme they can easily be dismissed as fringe, others have been foundational to the modern religious right, and still more have become increasingly influential in recent years. Those latter two categories are what we need to understand most, say both Tabachnick and Jackson.

"One of the things that struck me, as a relative newcomer," said Jackson, a former Congregationalist minister, "was that there was not sufficient understanding about the theological frames used by many individuals who are opposed to abortion." She continued, "I'm a strategist in a lot of ways, and one important strategy, I believe, must be to understand what the teachings and the theological frames are" on the other side. Which links directly to the question of what progressive activists need to do differently in this changed environment.

This failure to understand the nature of dominionism has hampered activists, not just in the realm of reproductive justice, but across an entire spectrum of political issues, both cultural and economic.Jackson discussed her own background, raised within a conservative Christian worldview.

"I was taught a very individualistic approach," she said, "taught that we shouldn't pay taxes, because doing so enabled people who were not working, and enables people whose lifestyle we don't agree with." There's nothing new about such views, but dominionism provides believers with an even stronger foundation for them.

Jackson describes her current understanding of religious faith as highly intersectional: "We believe that to understand the attacks on abortion also invites us — or even requires us — to look at attacks on voting, to look at attacks on immigrants, attacks on prison reform, attacks on equal pay and on and on," she said. "It's all of the same cloth: They are all attacks on humans flourishing. That's my language. The God of my understanding wants all of us to flourish in who we are."

the language of dominionism is strikingly different, to put it mildly. In her webinar, Tabachnick played a clip of one of the movement's leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:

Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society — in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that "he has made us kings and priests," and check the rest of that verse, it says "for dominion." So we are kings for dominion.

Later she provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy":

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as "Christian reconstructionism," come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word "theocracy" in favor of "theonomy," for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, "Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth." The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the "seven mountains" of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.

But it's the other branch, the Christian reconstructionists, who have excelled at strategic organizing and providing blueprints across different right-wing constituencies for almost 50 years. They are the ones Tabachnick focused most of her presentation on, specifically two key figures: Rousas John Rushdoony, the movement's master theologian, and his son-in-law Gary North, a prolific strategist, propagandist and networker who was once a staffer for Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian hero.[ayn radical indiv ~ jesus charity]

Christian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is "about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions." This dispensation would include, "according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion."

In a recent private presentation, Frederick Clarkson asked a rhetorical question: "People have long said that there should be Christian government, but if you had one, what would it look like? What would it do? Rushdoony was the first to create a systematic theology of what Christian governance should be like, based on the Ten Commandments, and all of the judicial applications he could find in the Old Testament — including about 35 capital offenses."

But the "Handmaid's Tale"-style extremism of dominionists' ultimate vision shouldn't really be our focus, Tabachnick told Salon. "Nobody cares about the theocratic, draconian future envisioned by reconstructionists because they don't believe it will happen," she said.

What's happening right now, however, is that this ideology has had tremendous impact on more immediate politics. "Christian reconstructionism is the merger of a distinct brand of Calvinism with Austrian School economics," Tabachnick said. "In other words, it's an interpretation of the Bible grounded in property rights." The results have been far-reaching:

For more than 40 years, its prolific writers have provided the foundations and strategic blueprints for the attacks on liberation theology and the social gospel, as well as many other streams of Christianity which do not share the Reconstructionists' belief in unfettered capitalism as ordained by God and its fierce anti-statism.

The larger religious right's attack on public education, thesocial safety netand most government functions are largely grounded in the writings, strategies and tactics formulated by reconstructionist writers. Reconstructionism is not the only (and certainly not the first) source of interposition and nullification in this country. However, much of what is currently being taught today about using interposition to undermine the legitimacy of government is sourced in reconstructionism.

This idea of "interposition" comes through what's known as the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," which we'll return to below. But its significance — especially in the post-2020 Republican Party — has only recently become apparent. Reconstructionism's initial appeal was more immediately, as Tabachnick explained in the seminar:

What Rushdoony provided is a package that included attacking what these fundamentalists hated and feared most in society, often expressed in terms of "This is communist. This is socialist." But Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas, and at the same time not just tear down the old order, but provide a blueprint for the new order.

Everyone didn't have to agree on the blueprint, she said: "Rushdoony's ideas went out in bits and pieces. The Christian right leaders took what they wanted and discarded what they didn't."

"Christian reconstructionism, as articulated by Rushdoony, provided a standard by which everyone else had to measure themselves," Clarkson told Salon. "Not everyone on the Christian right agreed with Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionist thinkers on, for example, the contemporary application of capital crimes listed in the Old Testament. And followers were often at pains to distinguish themselves."

Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."

The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.

There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slavery and continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."

As detailed by Randall Balmer in "Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions,most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.

Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.

"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."

As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" — defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.

"Many violent anti-abortionists have justified their actions in reconstructionist teachings," she said. "One of these was Paul Hill, who studied under one of the major reconstructionist leaders and corresponded with others." Hill went on to murder Dr. John Britton, a physician who performed abortions, as well as Britton's personal bodyguard, in 1994. Hill was executed in 2003, but the reconstructionist movement sought to cast him out well before that.

"Gary North responded, after the murders had taken place, in a book called 'Lone Gunners for Jesus,'" Tabachnick said. His message to Hill was, "You're going to burn in hell, you've been excommunicated. This was because Paul Hill stepped outside the bounds of the guidelines set by the movement."

To explain this, she quoted a passage from another book by North that offered qualified support for Operation Rescue: "We need a statement that under no circumstances will Operation Rescue or any of its official representatives call for armed resistance to civil authority without public support from a lesser magistrate."

"On the basis of their belief of what the law or the word of God is, they are allowed — on the advice, on the interposition, of a lesser magistrate — to commit acts of violence," Tabachnick continued. North was seeking to control or curb anti-abortion terrorism, but without rejecting it in principle. Murdering abortion providers — or even murdering women seeking abortions — could be morally justified, with the blessing of a lesser magistrate.

This is relevant to SB 8 in Texas in at least two ways. That bill bans abortions after six weeks and is enforced not by state officials, but by deputizing private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or "aids and abets" it. First of all, giving private individuals these vigilante-style rights seems a lot like making them into "lesser magistrates," however narrowly constrained.

Second, the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the law — which clearly violates the Constitution and existing precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in her dissent — can be seen as an example of the doctrine in action. In more normal circumstances, the court would have stayed the law pending consideration on the merits, even if a majority of justices intended to overturn precedent. That's how common law has worked for centuries.

But biblical law isn't common law, especially as reconstructionists understand it. Under the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," Roe is not precedent but an instance of tyranny — and the justices have aduty to Godto resist it. Of course, not even Amy Coney Barrett or Clarence Thomas has said anything like that, but it's entirely consistent with their behavior — as well as with their silence, since openly making such an argument would clarify just how radicalized they have become.But adherents of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate must surely appreciate the drift in direction.

Nor is the doctrine limited to abortion cases, as already noted. Matthew Trewhella is a pastor who was a prominent leader of violence-prone wing of the anti-abortion movement in 1990s, and author of the 2013 book, "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates," which greatly heightened its visibility.

"Trewhella is now all over radio and the internet," Tabachnick said in her webinar, "claiming to meet with state legislators and attorney generals at the moment, with the cause of fighting the 'tyranny of mask mandates' and vaccination for COVID. So you can see how this is a concept that is not just limited to abortion. It is a concept that can be used in resistance of government authority all over the country in all different kinds of ways — FEMA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management and so forth."

Trewhella isn't breaking new ground here. Clarkson's 1997 book "Eternal Hostility" describes him making similar arguments in a speech to an anti-tax group in Wisconsin. He was just one figure among many spreading the seeds of reconstructionist resistance to federal authority among militia members, "freemen" and anti-abortion activists at the time.

"This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government," Tabachnick told Salon. "Therefore, any 'rights' that conflict with their interpretation of God's law are not actually rights. They are 'humanist' or a product of man's laws and not God's laws. This theme of 'human rights' versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings."

She pointed to "What's Wrong With Human Rights," an excerpt from a book of the same name by theRev. T. Robert Ingram published in "The Theology of Christian Resistance," a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as "a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union," and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Masonin 1776.

The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning "That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights," is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an "error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life." The second, beginning "That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them," he dismisses as well: "The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that 'power belongeth unto God.'"In short, there are no human rights.

The connection to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is clear: Power comes from God, not the people. Whatever the people want is irrelevant. Whatever laws they may pass are irrelevant, too, if they go against God. "Tyranny" is whatever the Christian reconstructionist decides he doesn't like.

Elsewhere, Ingram denigrates freedom of speech and the press:

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are, in fact, applied seriously only to giving government protection to instigators of riot and rebellion, as well as those who would undermine human order by more subtle attacks on morals and customs.

As for the right to dissent, he calls it "not a lawful claim to own or to do something, which is the true right," but "a turning upside down of right and wrong, calling good evil and evil good." Similarly, there is no scriptural right to "resist authority," only that granted by the false doctrine of "human rights."

Ingram's interpretation of the Civil War is that "Yankee radicals inflamed the Northern peoples to mount the Civil War in the name of a 'human right'to be free ... if they did not destroy the whole Southern Order, they did at least dismantle its vast and efficient plantation economy." The civil rights movement, unsurprisingly, is understood as a defiance of "Tradition, law, and custom, which preserved public peace and order in the bi-racial state of the union, both North and South," and became "the target of the right to resist in the 60's, the supposedhuman rights justifying the violent means."

Tabachnick didn't dig into this text in her webinar, but it serves to illustrate her central principle: "This attack on the very concept of 'human rights' can be found throughout today's religious right."

Jackson told Salon that the most important part of Tabachnick's presentation came "when she talked about humanism and the humanistic frame, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those who are within the dominionist camp see that as contrary to God. I read those same documents and I say, this is pointing us toward the direction that God wants for us. They look at it and see that as counter to God, because humanism from their perspective is something very contrary to God."

If we take such arguments seriously, then we understand why for dominionists there is nothing wrong with breaking any law at all, so long as "God wills it" and you have the blessing of a so-called lesser magistrate. This is the reconstructionist argument supporting a whole range of chaotic right-wing activity today, including baseless claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. After all, the fundamental reconstructionist argument is that all such democratic government is illegitimate.

"The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law," Tabachnick said. "Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it's important to recognize the movement's impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.

"As I wrote almost a decade ago, the theocratic libertarianism of Christian reconstructionism has been surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young libertarians— many of whom may not realize what is supposed to happen after the government is stripped of its regulatory powers."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/27/headlines/vanuatu_to_ask_for_icj_opinion_on_climate_crisis

Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu is asking the International Court of Justice to weigh in on the rights of its people to be protected from the climate catastrophe. Prime Minister Bob Loughman addressed the U.N. General Assembly Saturday.

Prime Minister Bob Loughman Weibur: “Limiting warming to near 1.5 degrees will be beyond reach. The issues are increasingly eluding the control of individual national governments.”

How China spreads its propaganda version of life for Uyghurs

by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative...

air strikes, missles

Human rights experts denounce Israeli attacks and confiscation of homes in East Jerusalem

Andrea Germanos Common Dreams

Israeli forces are facing fresh condemnation from international human rights experts for their "excessive force" against Palestinian protesters in occupied East Jerusalem that left...

amnesty int'l

retaliation by Modi, had to pull staff out of india 9/20 delhi riots

hudbay skye ixil pvt sec

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/26/hudbay-skye-canada-mining-guatemala/

...“We’ll need pressure on the Puerto Barrios Judge,” he wrote. “We have this arranged.”

One week later, the judge granted the eviction order, according to the affidavit filed by the women’s lawyers.

But CGN soon had to clear another legal hurdle: The villagers and an Indigenous rights group, CONIC, had gone to court and requested an amparo — similar to an injunction — to temporarily prevent the impending evictions because they had not been notified of them. In late December, it seemed likely that they would be granted their request, which would have postponed the evictions for at least six months.

According to emails filed in court, CGN managers called their “contacts” at the Policía Nacional Civil, Guatemala’s national police, to see if the PNC could conduct the evictions ahead of schedule, before the amparo could be granted. However, the police replied that too many officers were on holiday. Additionally, “they said the order to speed up the execution of the orders will have to come from a very high level either the President or the Minister of the Interior,” Monzón wrote.

Monzón called Rodolfo Sosa, a CGN lawyer, who said he would try to speak to the Guatemalan president, Óscar Berger. Sosa and Berger were once partners in the same prestigious firm, and Sosa’s daughter is married to one of the president’s sons. Sosa could not reach Berger, however. So Monzón contacted his “friend,” the minister of defense, who also couldn’t help because of the vacationing officers.

Since those avenues were dead ends, CGN requested that the court let it weigh in during the legal proceedings that CONIC had initiated....

Skye and CGN management also participated in coordinating the on-the-ground activities of the rank-and-file police officers and soldiers who effectively worked as partners of CGN’s security. Photos show that shortly before the eviction on January 9, dozens of PNC trucks and vans stretched in a long row along the road outside of CGN’s compound, inside of which a white pickup truck carried men “in what appear to be army uniforms,” according to the affidavit filed by the 11 women’s lawyers. The public and private security forces gathered at CGN’s facilities “on the morning of each eviction, including the eviction on January 17,” the affadavit alleges. Photos also show CGN managers, their middlemen, and PNC officers having a meeting after the eviction of January 8, 2007. This was just one of the “pre-eviction planning sessions and post-eviction debriefs [that] were held in CGN’s offices,” the affidavit claims.

The armed, masked men who stormed into Lote Ocho as the rain poured and the wind gusted at 5 o’clock in the evening on January 17, 2007, only seemed to be distinguished by their uniforms. The uniforms were black, “the colour of the sky,” and “the colour of the trees,” the women say.Black, blue, and green: the outfits of the PNC, CGN security, and the army. Something else helped tell them apart: Two of the women who are literate say they saw CGN’s logo on the blue uniforms.

This distinction mattered little, however, since the three groups of men had allegedly already broken into smaller groups and teamed up when they attacked, according to the women’s depositions. Men from each force seized one pregnant woman who was making tortillas and dragged her into the bushes as her children cried and screamed, she testified. She described the men as a “dog when he comes and he finds some food and he’s growling.” It was all together that they gagged her, wrapped cloth around her eyes and ears, cut her clothes off with a machete, and raped her one after another in what was perhaps an intentional reenactment of the rapes that the military used as a tactic of terror against Maya women during the civil war. “They took off my clothing and they played with my life,” another woman said during her deposition. Men from all three groups splashed gasoline over the makeshift huts and the women’s tattered clothing and set them ablaze.

Irma Cac, one of the woman who was allegedly gang-raped, cried while speaking in Toronto in September 2019 after attending a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit. “I will never forget,” she said, “it will never escape from my eyes — the color of

dn 920 https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/24/headlines/china_accused_of_forcing_thousands_of_tibetans_into_mass_labor_camps

still building hiugur camps? still using anyway, expand technique to tibet

China Accused of Forcing Thousands of Tibetans into Mass Labor Camps

920 an

omg

Full frontal attack on rule of law’: Trump sanctions top ICC officials probing US war crimes in Afghanistan

us mil in afgan, but also israeli palestine

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dn 880

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https://theconversation.com/pompeos-plan-for-a-hierarchy-of-human-rights-could-serve-to-undermine-them-all-including-religious-freedom-143385

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https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/10/falcon-humanrights.html

New Human Rights Lab trains students to investigate wrongdoing

Students use high-tech sleuthing tools to help hold perpetrators accountable

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human rights

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/nestle-u-s-a-inc-v-doe/

Nestlé U.S.A., Inc. v. Doe

Petition for certiorari denied on January 11, 2016

Docket No.	Op. Below	Argument	Opinion	Vote	Author	Term
15-349	9th Cir.	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	OT 2015

Issue: (1) Whether a defendant is subject to suit under the Alien Tort Statute for aiding and abetting another person's alleged violation of the law of nations based on allegations that the defendant intended to pursue a legitimate business objective while knowing (but not intending) that the objective could be advanced by the other person's violation of international law; (2) whether the “focus” test of Morrison v. National Australian Bank, Ltd. governs whether a proposed application of the Alien Tort Statute would be impermissibly extraterritorial under Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.; and (3) whether there is a well-defined international-law consensus that corporations are subject to liability for violations of the law of nations.

same case?

https://ballotpedia.org/Nestle_USA_v._Doe_I

Nestlé USA v. Doe I is a case scheduled for argument before the Supreme Court of the United States during the court's October 2020-2021 term. The case came on a writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. It was consolidated with Cargill v. Doe I.[[2]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-2)

The case concerns the Alien Tort Statute.

HIGHLIGHTS

The case:A group of Malian citizens ("claimants") filed a lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against corporations including Nestlé USA and Cargill, Inc. In the lawsuit, the claimants alleged they were subjected to child slavery on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the case on the grounds that corporations could not be held liable under the ATS. On appeal, the 9th Circuit vacated the lower court's ruling.

The issue:"1. Whether an aiding and abetting claim against a domestic corporation brought under the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1350, may overcome the extraterritoriality bar where the claim is based on allegations of general corporate activity in the United States and where plaintiffs cannot trace the alleged harms, which occurred abroad at the hands of unidentified foreign actors, to that activity.

Whether the Judiciary has the authority under the Alien Tort Statute to impose liability on domestic corporations."[[3]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-questions-3)

The outcome: The appeal is pending adjudication before the U.S. Supreme Court.

You can review the lower court's opinion here.

Timeline

The following timeline details key events in this case:

July 2, 2020: The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the consolidated cases.
October 2, 2019: Cargill, Inc., the petitioner, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
September 25, 2019: Nestlé USA, the petitioner, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
July 5, 2019: The 9th Circuit reversed the district court's ruling in an amended opinion and denied the petition for rehearing.

Background

Initial complaint and appeal

A group of anonymous Malian citizens ("claimants") filed a class-action lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against multinational cocoa suppliers, including Cargill, Inc., and food and beverage companies, including Nestlé USA. The claimants alleged that as children they were forced to work on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire.[[4]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-Cargill-4)[[5]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-petition-5)

In 2010, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the lawsuit, holding the claimants (1) did not and could not allege the defendants "acted with the purpose and intent that their conduct would perpetuate child slavery in Ivorian farms" and (2) failed to show anything more than "ordinary commercial transactions." The district court also held that international law prevented ATS claims against corporate defendants.[[5]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-petition-5)

On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit vacated the district court's ruling in an amended opinion and remanded the case. The 9th Circuit held ATS claims could be brought against corporate defendants.[[5]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-petition-5)

Second appeal

In 2016, the Malian citizens filed an amended complaint. The Central District of California dismissed the complaint, holding the claimants' focus was outside the United States, or extraterritorial. On appeal, the 9th Circuit reversed the district court's judgment, holding that (1) corporations can be sued under the ATS and (2) the claimants' complaints had a sufficient U.S. focus. The 9th Circuit also issued an amended order holding the claimants had standing.[[5]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-petition-5)

Alien Tort Statute

The Alien Tort Statute (28 U.S. Code § 1350) provides:

“

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.[[6]](https://ballotpedia.org/Nestl%C3%A9_USA_v._Doe_I#cite_note-quotedisclaimer-6)

”

Questions presented

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dn 120

Chinese Artist & Filmmaker Ai Weiwei on State Violence from Mexico to Hong Kong to Xinjiang

2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared after they were abducted in Iguala, Mexico. More than five years after their disappearance, the families of the students are still fighting for justice. The story is the subject of a stunning new documentary by the world-renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. The film, “Vivos,” follows the families of the disappeared students in their daily lives as they grapple with the absence of their loved ones and attempt to hold the Mexican government accountable for their disappearance. We sat down with Ai Weiwei earlier this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to speak with him about “Vivos,” why his next project will focus on Hong Kong, and more.

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AN 28, 2020

Murder of Mexican Artist Isabel Cabanillas Highlights Endemic Issue of Femicide in Ciudad Juárez

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An act of mass surveillance’: India’s use of facial recognition tech against protesters angers privacy advocates Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

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UN researcher hails ICC’s pursuit of war crimes probe in Palestine as ‘momentous step’

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

A United Nations human rights researcher on Tuesday hailed the International Criminal Court’s recent decision to pursue a formal investigation of alleged war crimes in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel…

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/12/09/carbon-majors-climate-liable-human-rights-violations-philippines-commission

isab ws. Originally published on Climate Liability News.

The world’s biggest polluters could be held legally liable for their contributions to climate change, a major national inquiry into the links between climate and human rights has concluded.

The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights announced its conclusion on Monday following a nearly ...

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:{IACHR:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Says Commission Should Investigate Human Rights Abuse in Bolivia

'Asked to violate human rights’: Report shows the Trump admin. knows its new asylum policy could be deadly

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

the Trump administration knows that its new rule sending asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala is deadly. It has stated as much in guidance reportedly distributed to asylum officers tasked…

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https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/10/falcon-humanrights.html

New Human Rights Lab trains students to investigate wrongdoing

Students use high-tech sleuthing tools to help hold perpetrators accountable

==

Bertal Cáceres(Lenca) was a Honduran environmental activist, indigenous leader, and co-founder and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, for "a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam" at the Río Gualcarque. She was assassinated in her home by armed intruders, after years of threats against her life. A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that Caceres' name was on their hitlist months before her assassination. As of February 2017, three of the eight arrested people were linked to the US-trained elite military troops of which two had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, the former School of the Americas (SOA).

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Rights groups urge Senate to reject nomination of torture advocate to top human rights post

Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams

Billingslea’s nomination has alarmed human rights advocates due to his unapologetic embrace of torturing suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush administration.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/brazil-criminal-networks-target-rainforest-defenders

SSão Paulo) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by criminal networks that use violence and intimidation against those who try to stop them, and the government is failing to protect both the defenders and the rainforest itself, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 165-page report, “Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon,” documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes.

“Brazilians who defend the Amazon are facing threats and attacks from criminal networks engaged in illegal logging,” said Daniel Wilkinson, acting environment and human rights director at Human Right Watch. “The situation is only getting worse under President Bolsonaro, whose assault on the country’s environmental agencies is putting the rainforest and the people who live there at much greater risk.”

The criminal networks have the logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to intimidate and, in some cases, kill those who seek to defend the forest, Human Rights Watch found.

On September 23, 2019 the United Nations will hold a summit meeting to discuss global efforts to mitigate climate change. As its contribution to those efforts, Brazil committed in 2016 to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.

Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 170 people, including 60 members of Indigenous communities, and other local residents in the states of Maranhão, Pará, and Rondônia. Researchers also interviewed dozens of government officials in Brasília and throughout the Amazon region, including many who provided inside accounts of how President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies are undermining enforcement efforts.

...

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.”

nb bizarre that rump imposes sanc on chavistas that helped poor ppl, but want to relax on putin murderous dictator who attacked our elections

AN 819

no lnx

‘Economic terrorism’: Trump imposes total embargo against Venezuela after failed military coup

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 6, 2019

After the U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by force fizzled out, the Trump administration on Monday moved to further strangle the Latin American nation’s economy by imposing a full economic embargo.

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President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Venezuela, according to the Washington Post, “blocks all property and assets of the government and its officials, and prohibits any transactions with them, including the Venezuelan Central Bank and the state oil company.”

“The action puts Venezuela on par with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, the only other countries under a similar full embargo,” the Post reported.

Journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen described the embargo as “economic terrorism”:

US ramps up economic terrorism campaign against Venezuela with total economic embargo and sanctions on any third party company who it does business with. https://t.co/3jRymjniCK

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) August 6, 2019

The Venezuelan economy has already been crippled by sweeping U.S. sanctions, which the Trump administration has expanded over the past several months in an attempt to overthrow Maduro and install opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

As Common Dreams reported in April, a study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that Trump’s sanctions against Venezuela killed more than 40,000 people between 2017 and 2018.

“The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports,” wrote CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot, a co-author of the study. “This is illegal under U.S. and international law, and treaties that the U.S. has signed. Congress should move to stop it.”

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The Trump administration’s decision to impose a full embargo on Venezuela was viewed as yet another attempt to oust Maduro—an effort that could do severe harm to the civilian population.

“Trump’s action, the toughest yet against Maduro, not only bans U.S. companies from dealings with the Venezuela government but also appears to open the door to possible sanctions against foreign firms or individuals that assist it,” HuffPost reported.

Responding to recent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton wrote, “The U.S. gov is telling the Venezuelan people that if they want to eat, they have to change their politics.”

The embargo comes as Trump national security adviser John Bolton is in Peru to deliver an address Tuesday to the so-called International Conference on Democracy in Venezuela.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a copy of Bolton’s prepared remarks, the national security adviser plans to claim that previous embargoes imposed by the U.S. were successful.

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“It worked in Panama, it worked in Nicaragua once, and it will work there again, and it will work in Venezuela and Cuba!” Bolton will say, the Journal reported.

Though the Trump administration insisted the embargo will allow exceptions for humanitarian assistance such as food and medicine, experts said such exceptions will likely not have an effect in practice.

“The administration hasn’t been very good at dedicating financial lines that would allow the purchase of food and medicine in sanctioned countries,” sanctions expert Jeffrey Schott told the Journal. “In practice, we still block food and medicine because the parties in the targeted regime that want to import it can’t get financing.”

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humanrights719

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-cabinet-bible-study-leader-sets-up-ministry-for-nicaraguan-strongman-sanctioned-by-u-s

Ralph Drollinger, whose ministry runs Bible studies for members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet and the U.S. Congress that are meant to “disciple” public officials to his particular “very conservative” interpretation of Christianity, traveled to Nicaragua this month at the invitation of President Daniel Ortega to discuss setting up similar Bible studies for Nicaraguan officials.

Drollinger spoke at a massive public gathering celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. Drollinger’s visit, and his for Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, are striking in light of the intense criticism of the Ortega-Murillo regime by the U.S. government, which as recently as April expanded sanctions against individuals and institutions associated with the government–not to mention the disconnect between Ortega and Drollinger’s political backgrounds.

In an announcement of the most recent sanctions–against a bank and the son of the president and vice president—the U.S. undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said, “President Ortega, Vice President Murillo, and members of their inner circle continue to engage in blatant corruption, violence, and violations of basic human rights.” The government has also been criticized by international human rights advocates.

The latest U.S. sanctions came about one year after Nicaraguan officials and their allies killed hundreds of people and jailed or drove into exile thousands more in a violent crackdown on political protesters. Ortega, who has faced “persistent accusations” of election fraud, has consolidated his power, changed the constitution to eliminate term limits, and blocked opposition candidates from running for office. In August 2018, the Washington Post reported that “police and masked gunmen working with them have hunted down opposition leaders and protesters by the hundreds” and that many “have been killed, arrested, or disappeared.” In September, the BBC reported that the government had ordered the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to leave the country after it criticized the government’s use of excessive force against protesters and torture of detainees.

This April, the newspaper El País reported that repression under Ortega “has worsened during this year.” It cited a move by police to prevent regime opponents “from mobilizing in the streets of Managua.”

:{But there was no mention of any of that unpleasantness in Drollinger’s }:{ at the July 19 celebration. He began his remarks by bringing greetings from the U.S. }::{House of Representatives Bible study, the Senate Bible study, and “the U.S. White House cabinet member Bible study.”}:

Drollinger pronounced himself “blessed” and “honored” by the invitation to come to Nicaragua for the celebration and to talk about creating Bible studies for government officials. “In the United States of America, we have found amongst our political leaders, that it is essential they have a Bible teacher in their midst,” Drollinger said. He reiterated that point, saying “we have found in our nation, that it’s an important aspect of our government to have a Bible teacher in the midst of our political leaders.”

“Mrs. Vice President has said you are a Christian nation,” he told the crowd. “In America, we view ourselves as a Christian nation. But what is a Christian nation? A Christian nation is a Christian nation to the degree that the people in the nation reflect the attributes of God.”

Drollinger went on to say that it falls to the institution of the church to reflect the mercy, grace, love, patience and kindness of God, adding that other attributes include justice and righteousness, which God has “asked the state to manifest.”

We are personally to manifest the attributes of God’s justice and righteousness in our personal and our national life. And so to the degree that we reflect the love of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the mercy of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the grace of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the patience of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the justice of Christ, to the degree that our nation and our personal lives reflect the righteousness of Christ, is the degree to which we are or are not a Christian nation.

Let’s pause for a moment to remind ourselves what Drollinger and his Capitol Ministries teach about what God wants from public officials. Drollinger believes he has been called by God with a very specific purpose—to convert and “disciple” public officials at every level of government to his biblical worldview. Drollinger teaches public officials that the Bible endorses or mandates right-wing policy positions on economics, immigration, environmental regulation, abortion, LGBTQ equality, and the death penalty. Drollinger teaches that the government’s job is to “quell evil” and that governments and public officials “must send a constant message that sin will be punished.” He also teaches that the Bible promotes distinct gender roles, and he will not allow women to be Bible study leaders.

Drollinger’s teachings are reflected in his handbook for Christian public officials: Oaks in Office: Biblical Essays for Political Leaders. Capitol Ministries says that the Spanish-language edition is soon to be released and “will be used in the discipleship of the nation’s leaders.” Another Drollinger book, “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint,” has also been translated into Spanish and Portuguese with a new title, “Rebuilding a Nation.”

What might motivate Ortega and Murillo to invite Drollinger to Nicaragua and give him a speaking platform at a major national celebration? It’s a way to publicly wrap themselves in the mantle of Christianity, and perhaps poke a finger in the eye of the U.S. Treasury and State Departments by going over officials’ heads, so to speak, to an American who brags of his access at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Ortega and his wife have used religion for political purposes. A 2018 Washington Post article entitled “From Rebel to Strongman,” noted that when Ortega returned to office in 2006 a decade and a half after he was ousted by voters, he had “amped up his talk of peace and Christian values.” The BBC quoted Ortega saying in 2006, “Jesus Christ is my hero now.” According to Capitol Ministries, Ortega’s invitation said, “We know if the people that God has trusted with the destiny of a nation are born again, our legislators will legislate according to the Bible.”

By one estimate, Nicaragua is about one-half Catholic and one-third evangelical. While Ortega’s opposition to abortion has undoubtedly pleased church leaders from both groups, the government became increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church during the past year over some church leaders’ criticism of his abuses of power.

Foreign Policy reported last August, “In recent weeks, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and forces loyal to him have targeted clergy, profaning and destroying Catholic churches, even killing those who seek refuge within them.” Foreign Policy noted that Vice President Mike Pence had slammed the Nicaraguan government for “virtually waging war on the Catholic Church and those calling for democracy and national dialogue.”

It’s worth noting that Drollinger has seemingly little tolerance for those whose take on Christianity or biblical interpretation differs from his own. He has called the Catholic Church “the world’s largest false religion.”

Given the hostility between the Nicaraguan government and the Catholic Church, the public embrace of Drollinger could be seen as a way for Ortega and Murillo to portray their government as publicly aligned with Christianity in spite of their feud with Catholic leaders.

Indeed, in April, shortly after presidential son Laureano Ortega Murillo was hit with sanctions by the U.S. government, he took part in an evangelical gathering where Managua Mayor Reyna Rueda was given the microphone to thank God for “the peace that reigns in our country.”

The appearance generated some side-eye reporting on the leaders’ newfound enthusiasms. “Until recently, it was normal to see the Ortega Murillo family attending mass,” noted La Presna. “But since the dictatorship declared the Catholic Church as an enemy, they have moved closer to certain evangelical leaders, whose position during the crisis that Nicaragua is going through has been silence.”

La Prensa quoted Eliseo Nunez, a former deputy and member of the Broad Front for Democracy (FAD) portraying the ruling family as unprincipled and willing to do anything to maintain their hold on power. He accused Ortega of “taking advantage of the opportunism of a few pastors” in order to falsely portray all evangelicals as his supporters. There were also some Catholic leaders present at the July 19 celebration, La Presna reported, including a priest who asked Drollinger to intercede with the U.S. government to lift its sanctions.

Capitol Ministries’ own reporting about Drollinger’s public appearance in Nicaragua, which includes a link to the video of his “sermon,” states, “Drollinger explained that in the Bible, God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations,’ that only individuals can become Christians by being forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” But that’s not accurate, according to the video of Drollinger’s remarks at the political rally. At no point does he “explain” that “God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations’”—nor does he talk on that video about “individuals becoming forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” [See update below for Capitol Ministries’ explanation.]

“A ‘Christian nation’ per se, doesn’t exist,” continues the Capitol Ministries blog post, “Nations can only be so-called ‘Christian’ to the extent that their laws and people are guided by Christian principles, two of which are righteousness and justice, Drollinger said.

Drollinger did not tell the crowd in Managua that a “Christian nation” doesn’t exist. As noted above, he did say that what makes a nation a Christian nation is that its people and leaders reflect what he calls the attributes of God. He prayed that the people, government officials and country of Nicaragua would reflect the attributes of God, and added, “May God cement these ideas as to what is a Christian nation.”

This apparent misrepresentation* of his public remarks, at least those captured on the video shared by Capitol Ministries itself, may reflect the group’s sensitivity to how researchers and reporters have characterized Drollinger’s positions on church-state separation—he says he supports institutional separation, but not influential separation—and on Christian nationalism, which he has denounced.

Drollinger’s public remarks were translated into Spanish by Oscar Zamora, Capitol Ministries’ Peru-based director for Latin America. Zamora reported that he recently met with Nicaraguan congressional leaders and with General Inspector Jaime Vanegas “who asked me to give a word to almost 200 police officers who were waiting for me at an auditorium next door.” He also said he had met with Managua Mayor Rueda.

After the trip, Capitol Ministries announced that Bible studies for Nicaragua’s cabinet and National Assembly deputies will be led by Arsenio Herrera, who reportedly pastors the largest evangelical church in Managua. Herrera, described as the “spiritual son” of the late American missionary David Spencer, has his own ambitious plans to have a church in every city in the country to go along with his TV ministries. “We are a national church,” he said in 2015. A few years ago he told the Daystar network that he is “believing for the transformation of the nation.” Daystar described him as “working to establish the Kingdom of God in Nicaragua.”

Capitol Ministries says it “has planted ministries in 24 foreign federal capitals and has an objective of establishing 200 ministries in 200 foreign nations in the years to come.” It says that since Zamora’s appointment as Latin America director, “ministries have been birthed in Honduras, Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico, and Costa Rica.” And it has asked its supporters to pray “for upcoming launches in the federal capitals of Brasilia, Brazil on August 29, and Panama City, Panama on October 22.”

*Update: After this blog post was published, Capitol Ministries contacted Right Wing Watch to let us know that its story about Drollinger’s Nicaragua trip has been edited to clarify that the comments attributed to him that do not appear in the video were meant to be described as things he said later to “explain” the “intent” of his talk in Nicaragua. With this clarification, the CM post no longer appears to report inaccurately what he told the crowd; readers can judge for themselves how closely his actual remarks, which described what makes a nation a Christian nation, matched what Capitol Ministries says was his intent.

pompeo hu rights

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/not-a-straight-white-male-us-religious-conservatives-are-coming-for-you/

no lnx

Not a straight white male? US religious conservatives are coming for you

CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union. Image via Wikimedia Commons / Michael Vadon.

Written by OpenDemocracy.Net August 4, 2019

by Jessica Stern, Yifat Susskind

Any schoolchild in the United States knows that the US Declaration of Independenceguarantees individuals’ rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Now, imagine what these principles mean for right-wingers and religious fundamentalists: where “life” refers to fetuses; “liberty” includes the prerogative to discriminate against LGBTIQ people; and “the pursuit of happiness” is reserved for straight, white patriarchs.

For more nightmare fuel, look no further than the new government body that Secretary of StateMike Pompeo announced earlier this month: The Commission on Unalienable Rights. For the uninitiated: this project’s name might sound progressive, but it’s most definitely not.

Everything we’ve heard about this Commission is full of coded language that’s about as subtle as a brick through a window. This isn’t business as usual – even for the Trump administration. It represents an acceleration of a longstanding fundamentalist agenda.

According to its statement of intent, the Commission is needed as human rights “discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights”.

In case you’re wondering how to distinguish “natural” rights, they’re the ones bestowed by God (at least according to Pompeo’s commissioners). One of them, Peter Berkowitz, argues that Christianity is the source of all human rights. Another, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, sees marriage equality for LGBTIQ people as a sign of the “End Times”.

In typical fundamentalist fashion, this project seeks to impose the same interpretation of law and rights used for generations to uphold slavery, genocide, categorical disenfranchisement, marital rape, domestic violence, and the criminalisation of LGBTIQ lives. Turning the clock back 200 years: this is how Pompeo proposes to make America great again.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, theSecretary of State attacks “politicians and bureaucrats [who have created] new rights”, and thus “blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments”. He also asserts that “rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups”.

But people whose rights are in danger because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other real or perceived identity are not “interest groups”. We are the majority of the world. And we’ve fought for generations to ensure that human rights frameworks are truly inclusive of all people. Now, this Commission wants to undo our gains.

The Commission chair, former US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon, says it will “work at the level of principle, not policy”. This should set off alarm bells. Policies, after all, can be reversed. But principles set the parameters of what kinds of policies are even possible. That’s their real aim: to circumscribe the range of acceptable ideas, scale back hard-won universal rights, and thus limit our possibilities.

We expect they’ll start with foreign policy, taking a page from a tried-and-true playbook. For decades, what American ultra-conservatives couldn’t get away with at home, they’ve exported abroad – through such heinous policies as the so-called Global Gag Rule, and the Helms Amendment, for instance, which have limited women’s access to safe abortion services around the world.

And once these right-wing policies are established – and legitimated – in foreign policy, they’re brought home to roost. Recently, a US court of appeals ruled that Trump’s Domestic Gag Rule can go into effect (further limiting abortion access here as well).

As the directors of international organisations for women and LGBTIQ people, OutRight Action International, and MADRE, we’re working to create a world of human rights and gender justice, where all people live free from violence and discrimination.

This work threatens the aims of ultra-conservatives, whose worldview depends on women being subservient within societies and LGBTIQ people disappearing altogether.

Their frontal assault is against abortion and the rights of LGBTIQ people, but that’s only their opening salvo. Unless you are part of the narrow demographic of rich, white men deemed to have rights in 1776, they’re coming for you too. In fact, their ideology threatens the vast majority of people – which is one reason it must be justified as “natural” and God-given.

The right’s concerted attack on reproductive rights and LGBTIQ people reflects the centrality of gender as a system for asserting the control and domination they seek. They target us because we’re upending that system. But allying feminist and LGBTIQ rights movements is more than a mutual defense pact: it’s a strategy to defeat the right.

Just last month, our organisations won a major victory after a year-long campaign around a pending international treaty on crimes against humanity. We ensured that this draft treaty dropped an outdated definition of gender, affirming the rights of all people.

In that campaign, we saw many of the same attacks that are now embedded in Pompeo’s new Commission – including claims that we were assaulting the ‘natural order’ and that our advocacy threatened traditional conceptions of rights.

One right-wing organisation C-FAM even claimed that our victory represented an attack by homosexual men on “our mothers and our sisters and our daughters”. That might seem a strange charge against an effort led jointly by LGBTIQ and women’s organisations, but they see the threat represented by our unified efforts and seek to drive a wedge between us.

One of the greatest successes of human rights advocates over generations is this: When our own governments and constitutions fail us, we can turn to international human rights to seek justice and reparation. We can share our testimonies about the abuses we’ve endured and, perhaps most importantly, change the global conversation. In doing so, we’ve influenced policies and practices at home and around the world.

Attacks on human rights, gender protections, and the multilateral system are a transparent attempt to close down that channel of progressive change-making. But by aligning our efforts as women’s and LGBTIQ rights organisations, and making common cause with other progressive movements, we can face down this latest assault.

Right-wingers are not coming after us because we’re weak. They’re coming after us because they’re afraid, we’re strong, and we know how to take them on.

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/gold-miners-murder-indigenous-leader-amazon-2639458840.html

Gold Miners Murder Indigenous Leader, Force Villagers in Brazil’s Amazon to Flee

Olivia Rosane Jul. 29, 2019 01:57PM EST POLITICS

[A Waiapi man looks at a boy picking fruits from a Geninapo tree at the Waiapi indigenous reserve in Amapa state in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2017. APU GOMES / AFP / Getty Images]

Gold miners invaded indigenous territory in Brazil's Amazon, killing one leader and prompting villagers to flee for safety, The New York Times reported Saturday.

The violence confirms fears that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro's promises to open protected lands to mining and other extractive industries will have devastating consequences for indigenous communities.

"The president is responsible for this death," opposition Sen. Rodolfe Rodrigues told The New York Times.

Rodrigues received an urgent voice message from leaders of the Wajãpi tribe, who live in the state of Amapá in Northern Brazil.

"They are armed with rifles and other weapons," community leader Jawaruwa Waiãpi said in the message. "We are in danger. You need to send the army to stop them."

Federal police arrived in the area Sunday, and both police and the federal prosecutors' office said they would investigate the incident, BBC News reported.

The murdered leader was identified as 68-year-old Emyra Wajãpi. His body was found with stab wounds in a river Wednesday, according to Brazil's indigenous rights agency Funai.

Reports of what happened next are mixed. Armed miners entered the village of Yvytotõ Friday, occupying a home and prompting the villagers to flee 40 minutes on foot to Mariry village, according to accounts from BBC News and Survival International. The Guardian reported that villagers fled Mariry to the larger village of Aramirã, where shots were fired on Saturday. BBC News reported that 10 to 15 miners invaded, while The Guardian and The New York Times put the number at dozens.

"The garimpeiros [miners] invaded the indigenous village and are there until today. They are heavily armed, they have machine guns. That is why we asking for help from the federal police," 26-year-old tribe member Kureni Waiãpi, who lives in Pedra Branca do Amapari, said, as The Guardian reported. "If nothing is done they will start to fight."

As the villagers sent their message pleading for help Saturday, Bolsonaro once again expressed his desire to open indigenous reserves to mining, speaking of the resources located in the Raposa Serra do Sol and Yanomami reserves, where mining invasions are common.

"I'm looking for the 'first world' to explore these areas in partnership and add value. That's the reason for my approximation with the United States. That's why I want a person of trust in the embassy in the USA," Bolsonaro said, according to the O Globo newspaper, as The Guardian reported. Bolsonaro has come under fire for his plan to appoint his son Eduardo as the U.S. ambassador.

Rodrigues said the weekend's incident was the first invasion of Waiãpi land in 30 years, according to BBC News.

Invasions like this one are "encouraged by the irresponsible, authoritarian and prejudiced stance of the current government — especially President Bolsonaro — and its attack on the rights of this country's first peoples," the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon said in a statement reported by Survival International.

The Waiãpi were first contacted in 1973 when Brazil's military dictatorship built a highway through part of their land, bringing miners and deadly diseases. Their territory was officially recognized in 1996. Today, around 1,500 Waiãpi live in the protected area, according to Survival International.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Amazon gold miners invade indigenous village in Brazil after its ...

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/29/colombia_protests_against_social_leader_assassinations

Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets on Friday in more than 50 cities and towns across Colombia to protest a surge of lethal attacks on indigenous, Afro-Colombian and environmental leaders in recent years. Solidarity marches were held in dozens of cities around the world, from Mexico City to Athens. In 2016, the Colombian government and FARC rebels signed a historic peace accord to move the country forward after a half-century of armed conflict. But since then, nearly 500 human rights activists, many from the Afro-Colombian community, have been killed, targeted for their work combating illegal mining, drug trafficking, and land restitution and environmental causes. Friday’s protests came after a heartbreaking video went viral showing the child of renowned community activist, María del Pilar Hurtado, screaming and crying after witnessing a gunman shoot down his mother. We speak with Luis Gilberto Murillo, former governor of the Colombian department of Chocó and former Colombian minister of environment and sustainable development.

==

trump faLLOUT: fail doom tip pt

https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html

The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being clear cut so rapidly — a rate of three football fields per minute — that it is approaching a "tipping point" from which it will not recover,according to the Guardian.lnx]

As trees are lost, researchers said there is a risk that large areas could transition from rainforest to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall from evaporation and from plants giving off watervapor, according to Newsweek.

A transition on that scale could have significant implications for global warming since the rainforest absorbs vast amounts of atmospheric carbon. Recent research has shown the potential for massive tree plantings to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.

"It's very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away," said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, as the Guardian reported. "We can't see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem."

The alarming rate of deforestation and its acceleration confirms suspicions that new president Jair Bolsonaro has allowed illegal land invasion, logging and burning. Bolsonaro has called his own government's satellite data lies.The president's comments followed preliminary satellite data that showed more than 400 square miles of the rainforest had been cleared in the first half of July — an increase of 68 percent from the entire month of July last year, according to the BBC.

Bolsonaro, the far right politician who has said he is fulfilling a mission from God, dismissed concerns expressed by European Union members and called it hypocritical since so many European forests have been wiped out.

"You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours," Bolsonaro said, as the Guardianreported. "If all this devastation you accuse us of doing was done in the past the Amazon would have stopped existing, it would be a big desert."

The DETER-B satellite system that the Brazilian government started to use in 2015 to track deforestation has shown that the record setting July deforestation is on pace to clear enough forest to fit New York City twice by the end of the month.

The DETER satellite data is considered preliminary. Detailed figures are released at the end of the year when data from other satellites and observatories is also collected, according to Newsweek.

"Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies," said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups, as the Guardian reported.

After years of conservation, Brazil's environmental track record has nose-dived in the first seven months of Bolsonaro's administration. He has given environmental oversight to the agriculture minister, who is the leader of a farming lobby. His foreign minister called climate science a part of a global Marxist plot. The government has invited businesses to register land counter-claims in areas that are protected nature reserves, indigenous territories and areas dedicated to sustainable production by native forest people, according to the Guardian.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping ... ›

==

aha: dereg (damages protection of forest, thus buffer and resilience) and corruption is lack of info on effects so we can avert disaster --> AGW:

ref

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point

guk no lnx

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'

Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil

Jonathan Watts in Altamira

@jonathanwatts

Thu 25 Jul 2019 17.40 BST Last modified on Thu 25 Jul 2019 21.37 BST

Amazon rainforest turned into farmland. An area the size of Greater London has been lost this month. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.

Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.

With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.

The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.

“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”

It may also complicate ratification of Brazil’s biggest ever trade deal with the European Union if EU legislators decide the South American nation is not keeping its side of the bargain, which includes a commitment to slow deforestation in line with the Paris climate agreement.

The official numbers from the National Institute for Space Research are a growing embarrassment to Bolsonaro, who has tried to fob them off as lies and criticised the head of the institute.Earlier this week, the president insisted the numbers should be screened by the ministry of science and technology and shown to him before being made public so that he did not get “caught with his pants down”.

This has raised fears that the data could be vetted in future rather than automatically updated online each day as is currently the case.

In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection.

He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby. His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.

This has emboldened those who want to invade the forest, clear it and claim it for commercial purposes, mostly in the speculative expectation it will rise in value, but also partly for cattle pastures, soya fields and mines.

Earlier this month, it was reported that thousands of gold miners illegally invaded Yanomami indigenous territory near the border with Venezuela. Elsewhere, illegal loggers have mounted at least two attacks in response to Ibama enforcement operations,according to the Folha newspaper. On 4 July, they reportedly burned an Ibama truck in Espigão d’Oeste, Rondônia state and last week they were said to have burned bridges in Placas, Pará state.

Rather than defend his officials, the environment minister Ricardo Salles appeared to side with the loggers when he gave a speech to a group of them in Rondônia soon afterwards, in which he reportedly told them: “The timber industry deserves to be respected… What happens today in Brazil, unfortunately, is the result of years and years and years of a public policy of producing laws, rules, regulations that are not always related to the real world. What we are doing now is precisely bringing the legal part of the real world that happens in every country from north to south.”

During a recent G20 meeting, Bolsonaro told the German chancellor Angela Merkel that she had no right to criticise because Brazil’s conservation record was superior to that of Europe’s. This is a dubious claim, according to Climate Observatory, which cites World Bank data that shows Germany has given protected status to a bigger share of its land than Brazil.

Brazil is also going backwards fast. After an 80% reduction in the rate of deforestation between 2006 and 2012, successive governments have relaxed protections. Clearance has been creeping up. Last year, deforestation rose 13% to the highest level in a decade. This year is on course to be far worse and the trend is back towards the dark days of the early 2000s.

“Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies,” said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups.

He said Salles had eradicated the department responsible for policies to combat deforestation, that no leaders have been appointed in eight of the nine Ibama regional offices, and that operations to combat environmental crimes declined 70% between January and April 2019 compared with the same period last year.

The Deter satellite data is considered preliminary, but it is usually a guide to the longer-term trends. More detailed annual figures are usually released towards the end of the year, after the National Institute for Space Research has calculated data from the more powerful Prodes satellite system.

Trees are considered essential to climate stability. Earlier this month, a study indicated that planting a trillion trees could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. But scientists say maintaining existing forests, particularly in the tropics, is far more important.

==

==

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

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

no lnx

The Trump administration is abolishing the very idea of human rights as a part of the American identity

Written by Karen J. Greenberg / Tom Dispatch July 25, 2019

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.

This article originally appeared on Tom Dispatch.

Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.

Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.

This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an overwhelmed border police force.

Children in Detention Camps

The story of the children at the border is indeed gruesome. The United States has long had migrants pushing at its southern border, often in larger numbers than at present. In fact, since the 1980s, the numbers crossing that border exceeded one million in 19 different years. While the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to estimate that current immigration rates are on track to exceed one million by September, many other experts don’t think it will even happen this year.

What’s genuinely new with the current border crossings is the number of children among the migrants. According to Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s sobering recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the presence of such children has risen 72% in recent years. Some even come “unaccompanied.” Others belong to migrant families. And while last month the government officially stopped its cruel policy of separating families, leaving many of those children (even toddlers and babies) alone in custody, Vox reports that “at any given time, for the past several weeks, more than 2,000 children have been held in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol without their parents.”

The conditions in the camps, strewn along the U.S. borderlands from Arizona to Texas, are shameful and fall most harshly on those very children. A recent Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, issued in redacted form just days before the July 4th holiday celebrating the birth of this country as a beacon of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” described the staggering squalor and danger at such confinement facilities. There, children were often deprived of changes of clothes, beds, hot meals, toothbrushes, soap, showers, even adequate medical attention. Other eyewitness accounts have provided graphic details on the nature and scale of the deprivation, showing us children in soiled diapers, living with the stench of urine, sleeping on concrete floors, many weeping. On the somewhat more civilized floor of the Senate, members were told of children sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, and of the spoiled food at the camps.

Add to this the emotional toll that family separations have wrought on thousands of young people, as a new report issued by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee reveals and as others have documented. An El Paso immigration lawyer visiting one facility, for instance, described seeing a young boy who had scratched his own face until it bled. There are first-hand accounts by visitors to the camps of children trying to choke themselves with the lanyards from their own identification cards and others who dreamed about escaping by jumping out of windows high above the ground.

No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a pediatrician, has labeled the situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that “several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the treatment of the children to torture.

It’s hard not to assume that, however overwhelmed CBP may be, at least some of this treatment is intentional. Why else turn away doctors offering help or refuse supplies of donated aid sent by worried citizens? Why arrest a humanitarian aid volunteer who gave food and water to two ill and desperate undocumented Central American migrants and tried to get them medical help? The administration acknowledges that the overall situation is dire, but its officials on the spot have basically thrown up their hands, complaining that they have been “overwhelmed” by the situation they created, are “not trained to separate children,” and are powerless to address the problem of scarce resources.

While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the Democrats for any problems there.) Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.”

In court, Department of Justice lawyer Sarah Fabian refused to admit that the absence of soap, a toothbrush, a bed, and sleep constituted unsafe and unsanitary conditions, the legal standards applying to the detention of migrant children. The U.S. Border Patrol chief for the El Paso region callously remarked, “Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody. Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts, with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks.” Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the refusal to acknowledge reality recently by calling the two camps he visited, neither solely for children, but one housing families, examples of “compassionate care… care that every American would be proud of.”

Really? In whose world are filth, disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem? The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended consequences. It’s not.

A Declaration of Inhuman Rights

Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered some insights into the mindset of such an administration when it comes to the country’s longstanding embrace of the very idea of human rights. Soon after July 4th, he announced the creation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department. Its purpose, he claimed, was to rethink the spread of human rights protections as a part of American foreign policy. The very idea of rights, Pompeo insisted, had spun out of control. “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass,” he said, wagging his finger at 70 years of history. “‘Rights talk’ has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.”

Rather than expand rights further, he explained, the country would do well to return to (his idea of) the context of the founding fathers and explore just what they really meant in their classic writings. Essential to his goal, experts suggested, was rolling back abortion rights. A remarkable number of the commission members were, in fact, known for their anti-abortion positions and this should have surprised no one, since the State Department had already withdrawn all health assistance from international organizations that offer abortion counseling and care. In doing so, it expanded what, in prior Republican administrations, were more modest restrictions on abortion-related care. Striking as such a global anti-abortion-rights position might be, however, Pompeo’s urge seems far grander. His goal is evidently to unilaterally reject the evolution of human rights that has prominently defined the country since the post-World War Two era, and that has been an essential piece of American democratic rhetoric since its founding.

To begin the process, Pompeo promptly misappropriated the very language of the Declaration of Independence to promote an agenda explicitly calling for the removal of rights. “My hope,” he announced, “is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better protect essential freedoms — and underscore how central these ideas are not only to Americans, but to all of humanity.” As the rest of his comments showed, he was invoking the freedom to deprive others, exclude others, and cause hardship for others. Placed alongside the border realities, it was a testament to the administration’s determination to erase rights from the nation’s identity. Putting a fine point on his goals, Pompeo added that, in his view, human rights and democracy were distinctly in opposition to each other. As he pungently put it, “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”

Pompeo’s attempt to recast the founders’ intent in the context of today’s cruelty may be the most full-throated articulation to date of what this administration has been up to. The ongoing mistreatment of children at the border, a story that has lasted for well over a year, suggests that the spirit of Pompeo’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights has long been on the agenda. He had one thing right, however: those border camps do seem to belong to another place and time, one that preceded the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another document he invoked, intending to reshape American adherence to it.

The New Status Quo

This is hardly the first time the Trump administration has revealed its cynicism over democracy. Redefining the very purpose of “liberal democracy,” as I wrote more than a year ago, had been part of its mission since the beginning. In its first 18 months, the administration removed the language of democracy from the mission statements of many of its departments, including the phrase “nation of immigrants” from that of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still, after two and a half years of reorienting the executive branch of government away from equal protection under the law, the equal right to vote, and a respect for the very idea of welcoming immigrants, Pompeo’s “commission” may be the most brazen conceptual act yet when it comes to erasing the language of human rights from the country’s identity.

It’s in this still-developing context that the migrant children crisis should be understood. It should be seen as a graphic version of the insistence of this administration on changing the very meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the modern age. For Pompeo (as for his president), the evolution of the country towards more rights for more people is nothing but a mark of shame. How far back would he take us? To before the Civil War?

No wonder, on learning each day’s news from the border, it’s easy to feel we’ve entered a dismal fairy tale from an age of ogres and witches, where the forces of evil and ill will have taken charge and the prospect of saving helpless children seems as irretrievably long gone as those crumbs eaten by the birds following Hansel and Gretel on their grim journey into the witch’s lair. Attacking the most vulnerable among us — infants, toddlers, young children, teens — leaves little room for doubt. This administration is determined to undo the country’s commitment to human rights and so change its identity in a way that should concern us all.

==

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 Times report 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 Times report—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 were accused 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.

A

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 firing on unarmed protesters. 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

Energy & Infrastructure - RECO

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

Congreso investigara venta de islas a extranjeros, Laprensa

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

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 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 that it is “the only company that can distribute and generate electricity on the island of Roatan,” though Mayor Ebanks stated that RECO 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.”

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

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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.

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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

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4x/week kia

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

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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.

READ MORE

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.

...

The Philippines 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.

READ MORE

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

Frank Barat

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

46

Killings linked to agribusiness

57

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

92%

Of killings went unpunished

Source: Global Witness

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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.

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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 for Somalia’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.

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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.

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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."

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

ogoni

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

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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 the Philippines, 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,” said 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

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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".

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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, Erdogan 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.

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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 Shell Plc 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)

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

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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."

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DN

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."

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.”

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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, the World 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 Journal found 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 Post that 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 AFP suggests 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, and author of This Blog Harms.

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

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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)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

*Myo Zaw Do is a pseudonym.

(1) Felicity Lawrence, Thai seafood industry censored over Burmese migrant’s trafficking ordeal, The Guardian, March 4, 2014.

(2) Felicity Lawrence, Thai seafood industry censored over Burmese migrant’s trafficking ordeal, The Guardian, March 4, 2014.

(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.

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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...