'Unseen' News and Views
©MSC shipping | The container ship MSC Daniela at sea.
Raphael (not his real name) has no idea how long he will be stuck on his ship. A 33 year old seafarer from the Philippines, with two children, he was scheduled to fly home in April, but the pandemic put paid to his plans: airports have been closed, and his company decided not to relieve him, and eight other colleagues, some of whom have spent up to 14 months onboard.
Mr. Guterres was delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, held online for the first time, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Nouakchott, 17 July 2020 (IOM)* – The International Organization for Migration (IOM) welcomed this month the efforts of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, whose National Assembly passed on 7 July a new law against trafficking in persons and endorsed the reform of the law against the smuggling of migrants. These instruments contribute to strengthening the existing legal framework to repress and punish the perpetrators of these crimes and provide better protection and assistance to victims.
Sexual violence is used as a war tactic and a political tool to dehumanize, destabilize and forcibly displace populations across the globe, the UN’s expert on the issue told the Security Council on Friday [17 July 2020], pressing countries to adopt a survivor-centred approach that ensures victims will not be forgotten. (*).
“This is a crime that shreds the very fabric that binds communities together, leaving social cohesion and safety nets threadbare,” said Pramila Patten, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
The two Rome-based UN agencies sounded the alarm in a joint report published on 17 July 2020 as the WFP announced that it is scaling up food assistance to an unprecedented 138 million people who face desperate levels of hunger as COVID-19 tightens its grip on some the world’s most fragile countries.
EU Should Press Athens to Halt Abuses
The Greek Coast Guard has been accused of using rescue equipment – namely inflatable, motorless life rafts – to leave asylum seekers and migrants adrift in open water close to the Turkish sea border. May 25, 2020 © 2020 Turkish Coast Guard
Athens, 16 July 2020 (Human Rights Watch)* – Greek law enforcement officers have summarily returned asylum seekers and migrants at the land and sea borders with Turkey during the Covid-19 lockdown, Human Rights Watch said on 16 July 2020.
When President Clinton dropped 23,000 bombs on what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999 and NATO invaded and occupied the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, U.S. officials presented the war to the American public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population from genocide at the hands of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. That narrative has been unraveling piece by piece ever since.
Nicolas J. S. Davies
In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the U.S. bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Del Ponte’s charges seemed almost too ghoulish to be true.
But on June 24th, Thaci, now President of Kosovo, and nine other former leaders of the CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA,) were finally indicted for these 20-year-old crimes by a special war crimes court at The Hague.
(UN News)* — Time is fast running out for getting a UN team of experts aboard the Yemeni oil storage vessel Safer, before it spills its cargo of 1.148 million barrels of light crude oil into the Red Sea, triggering what would likely be a massive environmental and economic catastrophe, the Security Council heard on Wednesday 15 July 2020.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 