07/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
‘In too many societies girls still face the double discrimination of being young and being female. They are pulled out of school, married early, and are more likely to be subject to violence.’
Teenage girl from Mauritania. Image: Ferdinand Reus | Wikimedia Commons
“This is not only unjust; it is also short-sighted.The 500 million adolescent girls and young women in developing countries are potentially a major force in driving economic progress,” says this year’s report ‘Because I am Girl’ published by Plan, which assesses the state of the world’s girls.
While women and children are recognised in policy and planning, girls’ particular needs and rights are often ignored, says Plan, an international NGO founded 70 years ago working in 50 developing countries to promote child rights.
“But the challenge of gender equality cannot be tackled by girls and women alone – which brings us back to boys and men. Fathers, husbands, brothers and boyfriends all have their part to play, and this year’s report will demonstrate how and why men and boys can, and should, contribute to creating a more equal society.”
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07/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
Beirut, 6 Oct., 2011 – Six months into pro-democracy protests in Syria, allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated by supporters of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime proliferate.The latest UN figures talk about 2.900 deaths.
Image: Syriana2011 | Wikimedia Commons
Human rights organizations documented numerous cases of torture in the six months since the start of the uprising. Amnesty International has documented 10 cases of children dying in custody, some of them mutilated either before or after death; while another global campaigning organization, Avaaz, reports that 16 children died in detention after they suffered severe torture.
A UN-backed rights commission has urged Syria to let it into the country to investigate reports of killings and torture, including of children, according to IRIN, humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs*. “We have received many scary reports about the situation of children during the conflict,” said Paulo Pinheiro, a Brazilian human rights expert heading the commission of inquiry.
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06/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Eric Stoner* – Waging Nonviolence
Schizophrenic is one way to describe the position of the US on the Arab Spring. Another perhaps more accurate word would be hypocritical.
Image: Mohamed CJ | Wikimedia Commons
The disconnect between the rhetoric and actions of the US government regarding the uprising throughout the Middle East and North Africa this year can be no more clearly seen than in its position towards the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain.
The nonviolent protests continue every day in Bahrain, as Bahraini journalist Nada Alwadi reported for WNV last month, as does the bloody crackdown. In response, the US has taken a stand—once again, on the wrong side.
When President Obama said in his speech at the UN last month that the US is a “close friend of Bahrain,” he wasn’t referring to the people of Bahrain but the dictatorial regime of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
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05/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Meredith Alexander* – Think Africa Press
925 million people go to bed hungry every night. At the same time, 1.5 billion people are obese. These attention grabbing figures are just the latest in a long line of counterintuitive hunger statistics. In Africa, women produce 80% of the food, but own only 1% of the land.
Image: lyzadanger | Wikimedia Commons
According to the World Bank, a 1% increase in agricultural GDP reduces poverty by four times as much as 1% increase in non-agricultural GDP. Despite this impressive return on investment, less than 5% of aid is spent on agriculture.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the majority of hungry people are farmers: half of the people without enough to eat, including three-quarters of Africa’s malnourished children, live and work on small farms.
This last statistic can lead people to simplistic conclusions. Perhaps the answer is to consolidate landholdings, mechanise farming and send the extra people to the cities? This seemingly easy answer is mistaken on every level.
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04/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Shahira Amin* – Index on Censorship
Cairo, October 3, 2011 – It’s Maikel Nabil Sanad’s 26th birthday but he is in no celebratory mood. When I arrive at El Marg prison north of Cairo during visiting hours on Saturday 1 October, I can barely hide my shock at seeing his bony physique.
Image: Lilian Wagdy | Wikimedia Commons
Maikel is wearing a wrinkled blue track suit and on his head is a baseball cap worn backwards in a sign of rebellion. It is clear that Maikel is in extremely frail health. He attempts to stand up to greet me but almost immediately falls back into his chair in sheer exhaustion.
That’s because today, Maikel tells me, is also the 40 day of his hunger strike — one that he had hoped would draw public attention to his plight and force the ruling military council to reconsider what he describes as the military’s “discriminatory “policies.
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04/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says Syrian military and security forces have killed at least 2,700 people; but activists and human rights groups put that number as high as 5,300.
Credit: UN
Swept up in a wave of protests demanding political freedoms and human and civil rights across the Arab region, Syrian protesters have seen a violent crackdown by the Syrian military and security services.
“We are in a stalemate,” said Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria.
“We are in a very difficult situation, where if things [continue] like this, we don’t have any light at the end of the tunnel,” he added, citing an “excessive use of force” by the government; the refusal by some parts of the opposition to negotiate; and increased violence in places like Homs.
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04/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
The United Nations urged the international community to take action against mounting threats posed by climate change on the world’s urban areas, warning that climate-related events could force up to 200 million people worldwide to flee their homes by 2050.
Credit: UN
Marking World Habitat Day on Oct. 3, whose theme this year is “Cities and Climate Change,” UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon cautioned that the link between urbanization and climate change was “real and potentially deadly.”
“Rising sea levels are a major impact of climate change and an urgent concern,” he said in a message delivered by deputy secretary-general Asha-Rose Migiro to a high-level meeting in New York. Ban added that with 60 million people now living within one metre of sea level, the world’s major coastal cities were at risk of being inundated by rising waters.
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03/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Danny Lucia*
New York, October 3, 2011– The stakes went up for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement this weekend after police escalated their repression with the arrest of over 700 peaceful protesters during a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1.
Crowd in Wall Street after the 1929 stock market crash | Wikimedia Commons
But the arrests couldn’t stop the growing enthusiasm for the movement. On the contrary, similar occupations continued to spread to other cities around the U.S., and the movement in New York City received more endorsements and pledges of support from labor and community organizations, ahead of a major union rally planned for this Wednesday.
Occupy Wall Street and its sister actions around the country have become lightning rods, drawing people fed up with every aspect of a world dominated by the greed and power of the “1 percent” on Wall Street and at the top of U.S. society.
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02/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
They now total 700 million people. By 2050 they will be about two billion or over 20 per cent of the world’s population. Many of them are still vibrant and essential contributors to the development and stability. Yet, they are largely excluded from the wider global and national development agendas.They are the elderly–our parents and grandparents.
Credit: UN
Credit: UN
Ahead of this year’s International Day of Older Persons on October 1, the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights Navi Pillay, reported that two-thirds of the world’s older people live in low- and middle-income countries.
She called on Governments “to introduce social pension schemes for older people and to adopt adequate measures in areas such as housing, health, transport, access to water and personal security to ensure that they are not discriminated against or left unprotected.”
For his part, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said that in sub-Saharan Africa, 20 per cent of rural women aged 60 and older are the sole supporters for their grandchildren. “They take on added and often unexpected responsibilities, typically with little or none of the necessary resources and desperately need social services, especially social pensions.”
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01/10/2011
Human Wrongs Watch
By Doug Singsen and Will Russell*
New York–Daily protests and an ongoing park occupation in the financial district of New York City are gaining growing national attention as an expression of anger against Wall Street greed–and now the brutality of police against demonstrators, after the NYPD savagely attacked a march rom the encampment to Union Square on September 24.
Wall Street Area. Image: Ibagli | Wikimedia Commons
The hundreds of people who have participated in Occupy Wall Street since it began September 17 are protesting economic inequality and the power wielded by banks and big corporations in U.S. society. The occupiers say they represent the 99 percent of society that is fed up with the massive wealth and corruption of the top 1 percent.
The initial demonstration drew some 500 people to Bowling Green Park, site of the famous Charging Bull sculpture that is a famous symbol of Wall Street. Organizers had hoped for thousands to turn out, but activists continued with their aim of establishing an encampment–it was set up in nearby Zuccotti Park.
The protesters renamed the park Liberty Plaza in homage to Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo–the symbol of this year’s Egyptian revolution. In a stroke of happenstance, it turned out Liberty Plaza was actually the original name of Zuccotti Park.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 