Search Term: "human rights"

The sleeping giant wakes

By David Armstrong
Napoleon’s famous remark about China — “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world” — has achieved a new lease of life in the context of China’s remarkable growth since the death of Mao in 1976. Since then, China has registered a real GDP growth of more than twenty times, it has some $2 trillion in foreign reserves, a million Chinese emigrants now work in Africa on behalf of Chinese economic interests there, China’s military power (land, sea, and air) is growing at around 12% annually, and its non-financial overseas direct investment is currently in excess of $330 billion, to mention just a few of the statistics that usually appear on this topic.

The Arab Spring Needs a Season of Reconciliation

By Daniel Philpott
What is the meaning of justice in the wake of massive injustices? This question confronts the countries of the Arab Spring, just as it confronted tens of countries emerging from war and dictatorship over the past generation. How the Arab Spring countries address the evils of yesterday affects their prospects for peace and democracy tomorrow. Today only Tunisia is reasonably stable.

World Refugee Day: holding up the mirror?

By Alison Kesby
You may be aware that today, 20 June 2012, is World Refugee Day. At one level, World Refugee Day is a time to pause and take stock of the state of international protection – to examine anew the myriad causes of refugee flows and the strengths and weaknesses of the international protection system. It is a time to reaffirm the importance of the 1951 Refugee Convention but also to ask afresh important questions: who today is in need of protection, and why?

Europe in Spite of Itself

By Philip V. Bohlman

By Philip V. Bohlman
For Rambo Amadeus, Montenegro’s entry in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), Europe’s annual spectacle of musical nationalism was over the moment it began. Randomly placed as the opening number in the first semi-final evening on 22 May, Rambo won only disdain from the millions of Eurovision fans who follow the build-up to Eurovision week. For Eurovision’s loyal minions Rambo did everything wrong: A bit portly, with unkempt hair and a poorly-fitting tuxedo, he rapped coarsely, unapologetically attacking the European financial crisis head-on.

Afghanistan’s other regional casualty

By Alexander Cooley
As NATO leaders gather in Chicago to garner international support for an Afghanistan drawdown and stabilization strategy, they should also consider the overlooked toll that the campaign has taken on the adjacent Central Asian states. Western security assistance has made the Central Asian states more authoritarian and more corrupt, while these trends are only likely to deteriorate as the drawdown of US and ISAF forces accelerates.

Declining to investigate atrocities

By William A. Schabas
On 3 April 2012, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued a two-page statement declining to proceed with an investigation into alleged atrocities perpetrated in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. A distinguished commission of inquiry set up in 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council and presided over South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded atrocities had taken place. It recommended that investigations be taken up by the Court. The disappointing statement from the Prosecutor reveals his ideological bias, and confirms the politicization of the International Criminal Court.

What is Shariʿah?

By Tamara Sonn
For many people, the term shariʿah sets off alarm bells. Visions of court-ordered amputations and stoning arise in the popular imagination. Commentators point out that the European Court of Human Rights has pronounced some components of shariʿah, particularly those dealing with pluralism and public freedoms, incompatible with fundamental principles of democracy. And fears of “creeping shariʿah” have inspired hundreds of Web sites warning that Muslim fanatics intend to reestablish the caliphate and bring the entire world under Islam’s harsh legal system.

Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012

By Adam Branch
From Kampala, the Kony 2012 hysteria was easy to miss. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t watch YouTube and the Ugandan papers didn’t pick up the story for several days. But what I could not avoid were the hundreds of emails from friends, colleagues, and students in the US about the video by Invisible Children and the massive online response to it.

The difficulties of shaping a stable world

By Julian Richards
As the world wrings its hands at the slaughter in Syria and ponders what, if anything, it can do, the precedent of intervention in Libya constantly raises its head. Why was it right and proper for us to intervene in Libya to prevent humanitarian catastrophe, but we are choosing not to do so now in Syria?

Homophobic bullying

Recently I learned of yet another suicide of a young gay may which has been attributed to sustained bullying at school. Phillip Parker was 14 years old when he took his own life on Friday January 20th, 2012. Surely it has to be wrong for any young person to feel so helpless that the only way to be freed from the torment of the bullies is to commit suicide.

US law abolishing transatlantic slave trade takes effect

This Day in World History
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was formally, and finally, abolished. The story behind this ban begins at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when slavery lurked beneath several debates and figured in several compromises fashioned to win the support of Southern delegates for the Constitution. One such compromise was a constitutional clause preventing Congress from banning the importation of slaves from Africa for twenty years.

Extractive industries, intellectual property, and the health of indigenous peoples

By William H. Wiist
Because the corporate goal is to obtain the highest profit possible, not social welfare, public health or environmental sustainability, business interests often give little or no consideration to the effects of corporate practices on indigenous peoples. Thus, the estimated 257 to 370 million indigenous peoples in about 5,000 communities in 70 countries, speaking 5,000 of the 6,000 existing languages, often experience severe detrimental consequences from commercial activity.

No fooling with the republic

The “need for public servants who can negotiate . . . moral minefields with wisdom and integrity is more urgent than ever,” says Mary Ann Glendon, author of the new book The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. “It is hard to resist,” she continues, “the conclusion of the classical philosophers that no polity can afford to neglect the nurture and education of future citizens and statespersons.”

Sudan: A personal note

2011 Place of the Year

By Andrew S. Natsios
My first meeting with a Sudanese national was with Dr. John Garang, then commander of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), founded to fight against the Sudanese state—located in the country’s north, with its capital in Khartoum—and to advance the rights of the southern part of the country. It was June 1989. By this point, Garang and the SPLA had been in open war against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, then led by Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, for six years.

17 October 1961: Fifty years on

By Martin Evans
On 17 October 1961 at 5.30 am 30,000 unarmed Algerians converged on the centre of Paris in the light rain, flooding in from the surrounding shanty towns and poor suburbs – Nanterre, Colombe and Gennevilliers. Mostly made up of young men and women, but also a scattering of older people and some mothers with young children, the demonstration was organised by the National Liberation Front (FLN) which had been engaged in war for Algerian national independence against France since November 1954.

Mark Twain’s conflict with America

By Susan K. Harris
My respect for Mark Twain has soared lately. I started looking seriously at his political side in 2003, when I taught his anti-imperialist essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” the week the U.S. invaded Iraq. For the first time, Twain’s anger resonated with me, but I didn’t know what drove it. I’d always accepted the prevailing biographical narrative that personal disasters fueled Twain’s temper tantrums in his last decade. That didn’t really work for “Person,” however; the essay indicts the U.S. for complicity in imperialist aggressions throughout the world. Twain’s anger is political, not personal, and it’s based on a definition