'Unseen' News and Views
Principled Diplomacy Critical to Uphold Human Rights Framework
(New York) – Global leaders have failed to take strong stands to protect human rights during 2023, a year of some of the worst crises and challenges in recent memory, with deadly consequences, Human Rights Watch on 11 January 2024 said in its World Report 2024.
| Ed HawkinsJaffna, Sri Lanka,12 January 2024 (IOM)* – It is a sunny day and Selvan is heading out on his motorcycle to buy groceries from a nearby shop. The direct sunlight disturbs him, making it hard to concentrate on the road.
Selvan, 47, was one of the 303 Sri Lankan migrants who smugglers abandoned at sea for 28 days. Photo: IOM 2023/Anushma Shrestha
His vision blurs, the panic grows: he is back on a sinking ship packed with more than 300 other people, pounded by relentless waves, struggling to control his body. Steering his motorcycle through Jaffna, heart pounding, Selvan, 47, struggles for breath, overwhelmed by the primal fear of drowning.
– World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Aiding elite wealth
Aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centres known for banking secrecy and private wealth management.
Using Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data, Jørgen Juel Andersen, Niels Johannesen and Bob Rijkers found trends suggesting wealth accumulation abroad by national elites coinciding with World Bank aid disbursements.
Capital outflows follow aid inflows apparently captured by ruling politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies. In the 22 most World Bank aid-dependent countries, aid disbursements coincide “with increased deposits in foreign bank accounts in tax havens”.
(UN News)* — The imminent execution of an American prisoner by a new and untested method – suffocation by nitrogen gas – could amount to torture, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, warned on Tuesday [16 January 2024].
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© UNICEF/Josh Estey | Photograph of a prison. (file)
Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted of murder in 1988 and is scheduled to be executed on 25 January in the southern state of Alabama.
This will mark the first time in the US that a person will be put to death using nitrogen gas.
+972 Magazine
Palestinians arrested in the northern Gaza Strip describe how Israeli soldiers systematically abused civilians and combatants alike, from severe deprivation to brutal physical violence.
5 Jan 2024 – In early December, images circulated worldwide showing dozens of Palestinian men in the city of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, who were stripped to their underwear, kneeling or sitting hunched over, then blindfolded and put into the back of Israeli military trucks like cattle. The vast majority of these detainees were civilians with no affiliation to Hamas, Israeli security officials later confirmed, and the men were taken away by the army without notifying their families of the detainees’ whereabouts. Some of them never returned.
Members of the UN Security-Council gather for a meeting on the maintenance of international peace and security in the Red Sea. 10 January 2024. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
The headquarters of the International Criminal Court in The Haque, the Netherlands- Credit: Adam Mørk.The continued devastation of Gaza by Israel has triggered widespread charges of war crimes, genocide, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, starvation as a weapon of war and mass killings of civilians – over 22,000 at last count—compared to 1,200 killings by Hamas.
These accusations have prompted growing demands for intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has remained silent while its Prosecutor Karim Khan is accused of double standards and playing politics.
The New York-based Foreign Press Association (FPA), which was scheduled to host a zoom discussion later this week, said “with more than 20,000 Palestinians dead, areas of Gaza turned to rubble, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has yet to investigate either Israel or Hamas for the deaths, on and after 7 October– despite his exemplary hair-trigger speed against (Russian President) Vladimir Putin fo war crimes committed in Ukraine”.
Looking Beyond the Lens of Reason and Political Expediency
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Mahboob A. Khawaja
U.S. military support to Israel’s hegemonic plans to dominate the Arab world is fast assuming the ethos of facts not fiction.
PM Netanyahu wanted to flatten Gaza that his Defense Minister Gallant called them “human animals”, and another War Cabinet Extremist Minster wanted to nuke Gaza and it is obliterated by continuous bombing and destruction for over 84 days.
The unabated bombing and sadistic killings offer statistic of 21,672 people killed, some 8,800 children and 5,670 women crushed and according to the media some 8,000 children buried under rubble for the record human casualties.
A view of the General Assembly Hall as a draft resolution to grant Palestine non-Member Observer State status in the United Nations was introduced. The resolution on the status of Palestine was adopted by a vote of 138 in favour to nine against with 41 abstentions by the 193-member Assembly. 29 November 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 