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Human Rights

Carers Of The World Vs. Covid-19 Criminals

As we enter the third year of the Covid-19 crisis, two battles are underway. One is led by the carers of the world in overcrowded hospitals, fighting to end the pandemic. Another is by corporate executives in closed boardrooms, fighting to prolong it. The question at the very center of both is this — who will control medical recipes worth billions of dollars, and millions of lives? As some countries roll out booster programs, less than 6% of Africa’s more than a billion people have been fully inoculated. Big pharmaceutical companies are letting the pandemic go on — and why not, according to a recent estimate, Pfizer is expected to make astronomical profits —$107bn in cumulative sales by the end of 2022 on its Covid-19 vaccines, now being dubbed a “megablockbuster.”

On Contact: Prison

The poet Dwayne Betts for a long time hid the fact that he had been incarcerated from the ages of 16 to 24 for a carjacking. Betts, a lawyer who was sworn into the Connecticut bar two years ago, is finishing up his PhD at Yale University, where he also earned his law degree. He currently works as a public defender. In his book ‘A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison,’ and in his poems, including his third book of poems ‘Felon,’ he grapples with the degradation, humiliation, and trauma of prison life. Betts, like Virgil in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ leads his readers into the dark and frightening labyrinth of the American prison system, where, as he writes, “Black men go to become Lazarus.” Confronting evil has a cost.

Healing In A Time Of Truth And Justice

National awareness about the role of the federal government and Christian churches in the U.S. Indian boarding school policy is growing rapidly. Ignited by the discoveries of children’s graves at Canada’s Indian residential schools, the U.S. is poised to face its own reckoning for a similar history. The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition seized on the growing awareness during its Healing in a Time of Truth and Justice Summit, held virtually on Nov. 19-20. Presenters at this year’s summit encouraged people to reach out to their congressional representatives in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on U.S. Indian Boarding Schools Act that was reintroduced to Congress on Sept. 30 by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and U.S. Reps. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, Ho-Chunk, and Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, Chickasaw Nation.

My Grandfather Founded The National Day Of Mourning

On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.

Race As A Factor In Human Rights Abuses

This section of our Human Rights in the U.S. 2021 Report will examine key areas of inequality and the ongoing human rights violations that characterize Black life in the U.S. that constitute violations of basic human rights. Because we are addressing human rights and not merely civil rights violations, this oppression is not an internal matter to be addressed only by the governments, processes or people of the United States, but rather a crime against humanity that is properly addressed and adjudicated upon a world stage.

With Attack On Rights Groups, Israel’s Impunity Is On Full Display

Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian writer, and activist, and founder of the rights group Al-Haq, talks about the recent Israeli decision to designate six organizations as terrorists. He explains the context for the Israeli move, the long history of repression of Palestinian activists, and the resistance put up by these groups and the Palestinian people.

Why Seven US Military Officers Just Blasted The CIA

On this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” Khan’s lawyer J. Wells Dixon, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, joins Robert Scheer to discuss the implications of Khan’s testimony, which led the jury to describe his torture–which was unrefuted by the CIA–as “a stain on the moral fiber of America.” “There absolutely needs to be accountability [for CIA torture],” Dixon tells Scheer. “There is no question that [the CIA’s actions] constitute torture and there’s no question that torture is universally prohibited in all circumstances. The only open question is whether anyone will be held to account?”

A Torture Survivor Speaks At The Guantanamo Military Commissions

“I have a story that I have waited almost two decades to tell, so I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to my statement.” For the next two hours, Majid Khan spoke to a panel of military jurors, and to his family—especially his father and sister, who had hugged their son and brother that morning for the first time in nineteen years and sat just feet away in the spectator gallery, visibly suffering through the horror of what they heard. Mr. Khan described brutality and its effects even beyond the heinous acts detailed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 oversight study of the CIA torture program. Torture inflicted by medical personnel stood out. He explained that he was raped by CIA medics – under the guise of both “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” the latter using a “green garden hose,” with one end connected to a faucet and the other forcibly inserted into his rectum.

Why Black Revolutionaries Must Stand With The People Of Nicaragua

On November 7, the people of Nicaragua will go to the polls to reaffirm the commitment to their revolutionary democratic project, a project that began in 1979 when the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) defeated a vicious, neocolonial, gangster regime of Anastasio Somoza that was put in power by the United States. Under the leadership of the FSLN, the people of Nicaragua were able to finally control their own history and destiny. However, U.S. imperialism was not going to respect the wishes of the people. Under the neofascist president Ronald Reagan, the U.S. launched a brutal war of aggression, part of the Reagan administration’s counterrevolutionary strategy to reverse gains of revolutionary movements.

Don’t Ignore The 2021 Tribunal On Genocide

When I walked through the doors of the Shabazz Center for the Spirit of Mandela Tribunal that took place on October 22-25th, I was not greeted by police or any other capitalist/white supremacist security force. Instead, after checking in, I was greeted by brothers that felt like my dad, like my uncles, like my high school track coach or my barber. These men were the Zulu Warriors, brothers who had made the trek from Atlanta to Washington Heights to protect this sacred space for the weekend. Brothers who came to offer protection to the house that Betty Shabazz built, while those who strive to continue her husbands legacy worked upstairs to follow through on the mission of charging the US, once again, with genocide against it’s African and Indigneous captive nations.

US Military Jurors Decry Guantanamo Detainee Torture

Seven United States military officers have written a letter urging clemency for Guantanamo Bay detainee Majid Khan, calling his account of torture at so-called CIA black sites a “stain on the moral fiber of America”. The seven officers were part of an eight-member military jury that on Friday issued a sentence of 26 years in prison to Khan for his support of al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Khan had previously pleaded guilty in 2012 to serving as a courier for the group and helping to plan attacks. The letter from the officers, which was sent to a senior official reviewing the case, was published by the New York Times on Sunday. They were identified only by their juror numbers.

288 Organizations Demand Biden Administration Condemn Israel’s Crackdown On Human Rights Groups

Washington, D.C.  ‒ A broad coalition of more than 288 U.S.-based social justice, civil rights, and human rights organizations is calling on the Biden administration to condemn the Israeli government’s decision last week to designate six Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations.” In a letter issued today, the organizations say the Biden administration has no choice but to condemn and push back against this move if it is to fulfill its avowed commitment to human rights. “These actions by the Israeli government are a clear attack on human rights,” the letter reads. “As such, we expect nothing less than issuing a swift rejection of this unprecedented attack on Palestinian human rights organizations and the attempt by the Israeli government to shut down, delegitimize, isolate, and chill a growing human rights movement.”

WWF Accused Of Deceit, Cover-Ups And Dishonesty

An unprecedented hearing by the US House Natural Resources Committee has seen WWF’s reputation shredded by Representatives from both parties, and independent experts, and a denunciation of the “fortress conservation” model that leads to human rights atrocities. The organization was subjected to unprecedented attack for its involvement in human rights abuses, and refusal to take responsibility for them. Survival International’s Fiore Longo called it “the conservation industry’s equivalent of the Abu Ghraib scandal – a moment from which it will never recover.” The hearing was prompted by exposés by Buzzfeed News and many other investigations, including testimonies from Indigenous people collected by Survival International over many years, that laid bare WWF’s involvement in human rights abuses, particularly in Africa and Asia.

Verdict In The Case Of Black, Brown And Indigenous Peoples

The fact that the United States has committed an array of human rights abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples should be as uncontroversial as it is incontrovertible. There is widespread agreement that settler colonialists committed genocide and other crimes against the Indigenous populations while taking their lands. No one would disagree that enslaved Africans were forced to work the settler colonial lands for hundreds of years in subhuman conditions. The historical record tells the story of additional human rights abuses committed against Mexicans and other groups as the US expanded West and colonized countries like Puerto Rico. No one doubts that Japanese were forced into concentration camps during World War II or that Blacks were lynched and brutalized during Jim Crow.

If All Refugees Lived In One Place, It Would Be The 17th Most Populous Country

On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ‘recognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights’. Such a right should force governments who sit at the table at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow later this month to think about the grievous harm caused by the polluted system that shapes our lives. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) pointed out that 92% of the world’s population breathes toxic air quality; in the developing world, 98% of children under five are inflicted with such bad air. Polluted air, mostly from carbon emissions, results in 13 deaths per minute globally.
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