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Rejecting TPP a Matter of Human Rights
Rejecting TPP a Matter of Human Rights
Trade deal would put Canada in consort with nation plagued by trafficking, aggressive corps
Forget about the dairy farms and supply management. The real reasons Canada should withdraw from its unseemly flirtation with the Pacific Rim trade deal are that it would formalize a trade relationship with a country plagued by human rights abuses, and make local laws and regulations designed to protect health and the environment more easily struck down by multinational companies out to fatten their bottom lines.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a proposed deal between 12 nations. I believe Canada should withdraw from negotiations, but that is unlikely to happen given the three largest parties contesting this fall’s federal election haveexpressed some level of support for it, with NDP support the most ambiguous and Conservative the most enthusiastic. The Green party has joined the NDP in calling for public release of the draft deal before it is signed by Canada, and is the only significant Canadian party to explicitly oppose the deal.
We’ve been hearing a lot over the past few weeks about the TPP. Most of the mainstream media coverage has been obsessively focused on whether delegates from the 12 countries involved would be able to cut a deal at last minute negotiations in Hawaii. The big issues, we were told, were whether the Harper Conservatives would give away Canada’s traditional supply management arrangements for dairy products, and whether the other countries involved would yield to American pressure to re-write intellectual property laws to further enrich big U.S. based multinationals.
While these are both important issues, and arguably enough to suggest Canada should opt out, the combination of secrecy and distraction has meant that some other crucial matters have been ignored.
It is hard for anyone outside the secretive negotiations to assess these matters with any certainty, as details of the deal have yet to be made public.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canada Without Poverty charity challenges Harper govt. audits at UN in Geneva
Ottawa anti-poverty charity in Geneva this week arguing before UN that political-activity audits are an abuse
The head of a small Ottawa-based charity is in Geneva this week to complain to a United Nations committee about the Canada Revenue Agency’s program of political-activity audits.
Harriett McLachlan, president of Canada Without Poverty, is pleading her case before the UN Human Rights Committee, arguing that a special audit program launched by the tax agency in 2012 violates Canada’s international commitments on human rights.
The UN Human Rights Committee will hear complaints this week from a small Ottawa charity that the Harper government is violating its rights.
McLachlan says a rule limiting to 10 per cent the resources a charity can devote to political activities effectively silences groups like hers that want to hold the Canadian government accountable.
“If we want to write a petition, or be part of some kind of gathering, a protest, there’s a fear there that we are stepping over the bounds,” she said in an interview with CBC News.
“There’s a potential of a gag being put over my mouth.”
Canada under scrutiny
Canada Without Poverty is among 60 charities being hit with political-activity investigations under a $13.4-million special program by the Canada Revenue Agency. The group has been under continuous audit for three years.
The UN Human Rights Committee each year reviews the human-rights records of a handful of the 168 countries that have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights. Canada’s turn comes up this week.
A panel of 18 independent experts will listen to Canadian groups, such as Kairos and Amnesty International Canada, raising issues of human-rights abuses in Canada, including murdered and missing indigenous women, and the residential school abuse of indigenous children.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canadian Miners on the Road to Accountability
Canadian Miners on the Road to Accountability
There was a time not that long ago when Canadian mining companies could feasibly commit all sorts of human rights abuses abroad, trampling the rights of local impoverished communities and overstepping their remit as a foreign firm extracting natural resources.
Numerous allegations against these mining firms have cropped up all over the world, but there are a few cases which have continually drawn the attention of activists and law enforcement bodies alike.
Hudbay Minerals previously ran the Fenix ferro-nickel project in Guatemala until September 2011. But locals allege – and have brought forward multiple lawsuits – that Hudbay security guards gang-raped several local indigenous women and shot and killed indigenous leader Adolfo Ich Chaman in 2009 after he tried to calm a protest at the mining site.
Hudbay has refuted these claims for years, but in July 2013, the Superior Court of Ontario ruled that these suits – the three lawsuits in total which have been filed – can be heard in an Ontario court.
Though Hudbay dropped its opposition to having the case heard in Ontario in February 2013, the trial has yet to be held.
Another Canadian miner, Centerra Gold, is accused of dubious activities in Kyrgyzstan, where its main Kumtor gold mine is located. The local population in the Kyrgyz mountains has been against the development of the mine for years, protesting against everything from the sullying of the water from the mine’s tailing ponds to the lack of available jobs for local inhabitants.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Arguing That You Don’t Care About The Right To Privacy Because You Have Nothing To Hide Is No Different Than Saying You Don’t Care About Free Speech Because You Have Nothing To Say
Arguing That You Don’t Care About The Right To Privacy Because You Have Nothing To Hide Is No Different Than Saying You Don’t Care About Free Speech Because You Have Nothing To Say
Most Americans value privacy and oppose mass surveillance.
The minority who don’t – and who think spying is okay because they have “nothing to hide” – aregrossly misinformed (and don’t know that spying is meant to crush dissent and consolidate power …not stop terrorism).
Edward Snowden noted today in a Q&A on Reddit:
Some might say “I don’t care if they violate my privacy; I’ve got nothing to hide.” Help them understand that they are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can’t give away the rights of others because they’re not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority.
But even if they could, help them think for a moment about what they’re saying.Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Amen.
Resentful Rage: Stage-4 of Cancerous Inequality
Resentful Rage: Stage-4 of Cancerous Inequality
White America’s ugliest, uncompassionate, punitive face came to life in 1994 politics as Bill Clinton signed the incommensurable largest crime bill Congress had ever legislated: the Violent Crime Control Act; now, in retrospect, perhaps the most anti human rights legislation in modern times, not just in the US but throughout the civilized world.
Clinton reasoned signing this bill as remedy to his view that gangs and drugs had taken over the streets of America and undermined its schools. But more than Clinton’s flawed reasoning; it has been rationalized politics which has cost the nation, and continues to cost, hundreds of billions of dollars by incarcerating a third of the male black population in their prime, productive years; that, while giving police a stronger arm, inviting all too often an aggressive conduct from people in uniform already predisposed to exceed of their own accord the force required in exercising their honorable mission to protect and serve us all.
America’s uniquely irrational behavior among civilized nations, whether or not a product of our diverse multi-racial society, has not served the country well during the past two decades adding the social problems created by racial inequality to an ever-widening economic inequality among Americans that Ronald Reagan legated to us.
And as social inequality merges with economic inequality, a synergy of resentful rage is being created in cities and communities largely populated by people of color. Enter the city of Baltimore with a two-thirds black population, America’s problem-du-jour.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Cool Interval-James Howard Kunstler
A Cool Interval
For the moment, while the racial grievances of 2014 have chilled on the polar vortex, and no unarmed black teens have been shot by cops for a couple of weeks, it might be a good time to continue that honest discussion about race that the media nabobs — such as Charles Blow and Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and Don Lemon of CNN — demand when some incendiary event goes down and tensions across the country become unbearable. That demand, of course, is a political booby-trap because any discussion not founded on the presumption of white malice is instantly deemed inadmissible and “racist” — which is just cheap demagogic despotism designed to shut down the very discussion they asked for. So that is exactly what I expect in response to this essay.
I bring these matters up because it seems to me that the long, arduous, costly battle for “civil rights” which began in my childhood a half century ago is beginning to look like a lost cause. The movies and TV are full of black / white buddy stories, and commercial images of a shared American experience as if there really was a common culture that blacks and whites felt an equal investment in. These stories and images are largely wishful, though I believe the dream of a common culture that would nurture all types of people in America stood at the heart of civil rights idealism of the sort represented by Martin Luther King and the white public figures who marched in solidarity with him.
Something went terribly wrong in the early going, and I don’t think there has ever been an honest discussion about it by American social thought leaders of any race, though I have raised the point more than once in passing. It was the paradoxical rise of black separatist politics at the exact historical moment of civil rights triumph when the two landmark civil rights bills were passed: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Saudi blogger receives first 50 lashes of sentence for ‘insulting Islam’
Saudi blogger receives first 50 lashes of sentence for ‘insulting Islam’
A Saudi blogger convicted of insulting Islam was brought after Friday prayers to a public square in the port city of Jeddah and flogged 50 times before hundreds of spectators, a witness to the lashing said.
The witness said Raif Badawi’s feet and hands were shackled during the flogging but his face was visible. He remained silent and did not cry out, said the witness, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity fearing government reprisal.
Badawi was sentenced last May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes. He had criticized Saudi Arabia’s powerful clerics on a liberal blog he founded. The blog has since been shut down. He was also ordered to pay a fine of 1m riyals or about $266,600.
Rights activists say Saudi authorities are using Badawi’s case as a warning to others who think to criticise the kingdom’s powerful religious establishment from which the ruling family partly derives its authority.
London-based Amnesty International said he would receive 50 lashes once a week for 20 weeks. The US, a close ally of Saudi Arabia, has called on authorities to cancel the punishment.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
U.S. torture debate underscores shifting view on personal liberties – World – CBC News
U.S. torture debate underscores shifting view on personal liberties – World – CBC News.
In America, you get a fair shake, or you’re supposed to. Here, you’re governed by law, not the whim of some swinish satrap.
America is not a place where peaceful dissent should cost you your freedom, or even your life. Americans don’t live in terror of their security police.
All of this is arguably less true today than it was 20 years ago; it’s certainly less true since Sept. 11, 2001.
Strangely, it is America’s conservatives, the people to whom personal liberty is a supreme value, who seem most willing to give it away.
“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you don’t have anything to worry about,” they say, while pushing new powers for law enforcement and the growing surveillance-industrial establishment.
That, of course, is the cheapjack police-state justification; the sort you hear in countries that are said to be “not ready for democracy.” It is most un-American in spirit, but the law-and-order bunch doesn’t see it that way.
Amnesty International: Tories’ Resources-Over-Human-Rights Approach Mistaken
Amnesty International: Tories’ Resources-Over-Human-Rights Approach Mistaken.
OTTAWA – Amnesty International’s Canada branch has issued a wide-ranging attack on the Harper government for making economic development a higher priority than human rights — especially in resource development.
Alex Neve, Amnesty’s director general, said the organization wants human rights issues to be on the agenda for the expected federal election in 2015.
Canadians will be talking about jobs and economic prosperity during next year’s election, and those issues are inextricably linked to questions of human rights, said Neve.
Amnesty is accusing the government of doing too little to ensure that the rights of aboriginal people are adequately protected in the hundreds of major resource projects that are planned for the next decade.
“With all the attention that will be on jobs and the economy, we have to recognize how important it is to deal with indigenous people’s land rights, corporate accountability and a trade policy that is grounded in human rights,” said Neve.
UN rights watchdog accuses Kiev forces of torture, inhumane treatment of civilians — RT News
UN rights watchdog accuses Kiev forces of torture, inhumane treatment of civilians — RT News.
Kiev-controlled volunteer battalions and the Ukrainian Security Service are involved in an increasing number of human rights violations including torture and forced disappearances of those suspected of “separatism,” according to a UN OHCHR report.
The report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says that Kiev’s actions in eastern Ukraine to “restore order” have led to “arbitrary detentions, torture, and enforced disappearances of people suspected of ‘separatism and terrorism’. Most of such human rights violations appear to have been perpetrated by certain voluntary battalions or by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).”
The eighth OHCHR report on the human rights situation in Ukraine released on Monday added that the procedural rights of people have not always been observed, with reports of ill-treatment and reprisals upon release.
China says U.S. can’t slam others on rights when it has racism problems at home | Reuters
China says U.S. can’t slam others on rights when it has racism problems at home | Reuters.
China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that the United States has no right to confront other countries on their human rights records when it faces problems with racism and mistreatment of prisoners at home.
Both U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. ambassador toChina Max Baucus issued statements on Wednesday to mark International Human Rights Day in which they mentioned cases such as the imprisoned Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said it was hypocritical of the United States to do this considering its own poor record, in apparent reference to recent protests over the killings of unarmed black men and a U.S. Senate report on the torture of detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The United States has no right to pose as arbiters and at every turn point their fingers at other countries’ human rights as racism and mistreatment of prisoners and other serious problems in the United States are facts now known to all,” Hong told a daily news briefing.
China and the United States often spar about each other’s human rights records, and on Wednesday, Beijing urged Washington to “correct its ways” following the torture report.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
CIA report: ‘Torture is a crime and those responsible must be brought to justice’ | US news | theguardian.com
The UN, human rights activists and legal experts have renewed calls for the Obama administration to prosecute US officials responsible for the CIA torture programme revealed in extensive detail following the release of a damning report by the Senate intelligence committee.
The report, released on Tuesday, found the CIA misled the White House, the Justice Department, Congress and the public over a torture programme that was both ineffective and more brutal than the agency disclosed.
“Today’s release once again makes crystal clear that the US government used torture. Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice,” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven W Hawkins, said in a statement.
“Under the UN convention against torture, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever can be invoked to justify torture, and all those responsible for authorising or carrying out torture or other ill-treatment must be fully investigated.”
In Geneva, the United Nations’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said CIA officers and other US government officials should be prosecuted.
“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US government provides no excuse whatsoever,” Emmerson said in a statement.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
