Human Rights and the "Other"

Credit: International Network of Liberal Women

In recent weeks, Human Rights Watch and Bill Gates released two reports on global poverty and the most pressing rights struggles of 2013. In Davos, some of the highest-earning and most powerful leaders of the world convened for the World Economic Forum.

Yet, as I live my life here in Paris, having completed a Master's degree focusing on human rights at the end of last year while at the same time undergoing a heart surgery, I contemplate what human rights means to me personally versus others. How much overlap is there between developing versus developed nations? How can I fully live within and access my own rights in a country that is not even my own? What I have come up with as I train in the park near my pink cottage, sending resume after resume, networking, flying to Rome to be with my French boyfriend who works for the United Nations and is also seeking long-term employment in his own country, trying to build the rest of a dream after significant resiliency most of my life, is how blurred the line is between those in need of accessing and fully realizing human rights standards. These are the people I love, live near, and work alongside.

The past few days the American news has been shaped by an announcement that AOL had reversed a decision regarding 401ks to its employees after a media frenzy regarding CEO Tim Armstrong's comment that,

Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.

The mother of the "distressed baby," Novelist Deanna Fei, published an eloquent and very brave response to her husband's employer in Slate magazine. Her husband, Peter S. Goodman, is the Executive Business and and Global News Editor of AOL's Huffington Post. The Goodmans are known to me because Arnold and Elise Goodman, the grandparents of the "distressed baby" girl, were the couple who gave me very my first job in publishing when I was nineteen years old. I worked from their home as their Literary Agency Assistant, and the position was a lifelong dream for this rural girl from a chaotic childhood with little resources earning and financing my undergraduate degree in Manhattan. I filed their contracts, letters to their children, answered their phone calls from the authors of the What to Expect When You're Expecting series, sent out rejection letters, and learned about publishing from two people who had made a wonderful life from it. They had a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two wonderful children, and to my young eyes they were living the good life.

Enter the life of their own grandchild. As an advocate for children's health, I was aghast reading the AOL CEO's comment but was not surprised. The state of healthcare in my own country is one of the most brutal abuses of rights in a wealthy and developed nation that exists. So is the cost of education. Enter where I live currently so as to actually complete a Master's degree before I turned 35. When I had my heart surgery last year, I was also a student who paid nothing to have that surgery. I had suffered from supraventricular tachycardia since I was seventeen years old but still went on to race ultramarathons and build running teams in support of women and children's health. But around the end of 2012, as my hormones shifted and I worked freelance while earning my degree and trained teams of ex-pat runners, I began to have heart episodes much more frequently. When my sisters' were visiting me last March and I looked up at my baby sister's worried face sprawled on a Parisian sidewalk in full-on tachycardia, I began to think the time had come to fix my heart. Then I read online that when I am pregnant someday my baby would also go without oxygen and experience the same horrendous effects I did when the tachycardia occurred plus it could affect the child's development; I knew it was time to have heart surgery.

For a Syrian Refugee in Palestine: A Lifelong Plight of Unanswered Rights

[Editor's Note: This blog post by IMOW contributor  Simba Russeau was originally published on Debating Human Rights for Blog Action Day 2013.]

On December 10, 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) -- which consists of thirty articles -- was adopted by the United Nations (UN) in response to a global need for the observance and respect of human rights regardless of religion, gender, or race.

 “The first Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn’t the first but it’s the greatest and most important. It was drafted in 1948 by the fifty-six member states of the United Nations. Our goal was to draft text that would be universally accepted as rights and freedom that applied to everyone,” Stéphane Hessel, former Ambassador to the UN and a co-drafter of the UDHR in 1948 said.

“However, people continue to contest the first human rights declaration by stating that westerners drafted it. This isn’t true. People from all areas of the world drafted it. People have said that it was drafted by the colonial powers and not by the de-colonialised people of the world. This is also false because we did take into account that some people were already independent and others not yet and that this declaration needed to apply to them also.”

At the time of it’s drafting, a mass exodus was taking place. According to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, the 1948 Nakba forced an estimated 711,000 to 725,000 from their homelands.

Calling into question the lack of energy put into securing the homeland of Palestinians at the time of the drafting of the UDHR. “There terrible crisis in the Middle East is still not solved but the declaration on human rights lays out all the things that should be applied by Israel,” adds Hessel.

“Please don’t mix the question of implementation and the question of declaring values. The declaration declares values but it’s the responsibility of the countries, non-governmental organisations and the people to implement those values and that has not happened when it comes to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Forty-six year old Omar, who requested anonymity due to security concerns, was born in Syria. In 1948, his parents fled the city of Haifa, which is the largest city in northern Israel. More than 470,000 Palestinians were residing in Syria’s before the war. Many, like Omar, hail the hospitality offered to their ancestors during their desperate search for safe haven.

“Before the war, life in Syria was good. The Syrian government and the people treated us very well. Our families, who fled in 1948, were accepted without conditions and given full rights in the country,” Omar said. “I worked for a good company as a civil engineer. Basically, we lived as if we were Syrians. I earned a good salary, we had a home and I was able to provide for my family. Our children were getting a good education.”

Omar’s life changed when fierce clashes between fighters loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition engulfed the Palestinian camps of al-Yarmouk, which is nestled on the southwest outskirts of Damascus.

Gender-Based Violence Plays Role in Arms Treaty Conference

"A guy with a machete in a village can rape one woman. Two guys with a machine gun can rape the whole village." --Annie Matundu Mbambi, Democratic Republic of Congo


For the past three weeks, the United Nations has been the epicenter for all countries of the world to meet for the first-ever Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). This week, negotiations to limit the presently unregulated international arms trade are entering their final phase.


According to the United Nations News Centre, "Currently, 80 percent of the global trade in conventional weapons is dominated by a handful of countries, but with globalization, new producers are entering the market." 


What does this mean? Arms proliferation is a changing and world-threatening issue with increasing magnitude, new players, and a greater thrust because of globalization. Yet, unregulated arms control has also changed modern warfare. In April, Elle Magazine quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying, "In World War I, 90 percent of the casualties were soldiers, but in Africa's recent conflicts, 90 percent of casualties are civilians. So peacemaking and peacekeeping must change too."

Whether child soldiers or sustained gender-based violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, women and children are specific targets of war. In fact, a former UN Peacekeeping Commander Major General Patrick Cammaret once said, "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict." 


As such, the report Putting Women's Rights Into the Arms Treaty, cites one of the greatest reasons for the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is "that war is affecting civilians, particularly women and children, at much higher percentages." 

Enter discussions of gender-based violence and sexual violence. Kate Hughes, a British representative of Oxfam, has spent the past few weeks in New York City raising even greater awareness as to why gender-based violence (GBV) must be included within the treaty terms. In the early days of the conference, Kate helped orchestrate a media stunt picked up by CNN to highlight the current "body bag" approach to arms control, which she says, is that "we wait till body bags pile up before there is an arms embargo."

Think back to the quote beginning this article from a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) comparing the damage done with a machete versus an AK47. In the DRC, rape statistics are beyond horrifying, with estimates of nearly two million women raped and a new rape every minute. 

Hughes says, "The opening quote really sums up why the ATT has so much relevance to the issue of gender-based violence. GBV is instantly exacerbated when you add a gun to the equation. Countries with the highest instan[ces] of gender based violence, are by and large conflict countries; countries that are awash with weapons. The Arms Trade Treaty presents an opportunity, but it is an opportunity that could be missed. Some states are resistant to the explicit reference of gender based armed violence; there are also states that are resistant to the treaty covering weapons like the AK47 for example. (It is the AK47 that is one the most prevalent weapons in DRC.)"

Yet, how vast are the effects of gender-based violence in conflict zones? The Women's Media Center's Women Under Siege has been working hard to document the new cases of GBV and sexual violence happening in Syria. If you look at their live crowd map, one gets the sense of sexual violence permeating war zones.

Hughes shares other conflict zones where that the case. "Gender-based violence has been reported to have been committed by armed groups including state security forces recently in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Mali. It's been committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with reports of women - from young girls to elderly women - being tortured and violently raped as a tactic of armed groups to assert power and domination. Communities also increasingly report sexual violence against men and boys. During Colombia's 50-year armed conflict, sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, routinely practiced by all of the armed groups: state military forces, paramilitaries and guerrillas. Last week, Norway pointed to the prevalence of systematic rape in the recent war in the Balkans."  

Just like every facet of war, profit often dictates rather than diplomatic intervention. A recent  allafrica.com article cites how tense conversations have become in the ATT conference's final days. 

The talks, which carried on throughout the weekend in New York, are now being dominated by sceptical governments including Iran, Syria and Cuba, intent on having a weak treaty - or no treaty at all. China and Russia are opposed to effective human rights and humanitarian rules in any deal whilst the US wants exclusions that could undermine the effectiveness of any treaty. 

London and Paris, which until now have been key champions of a strong treaty, are now coming under intense pressure from Washington. There are concerns that they may trade-off strong international humanitarian and human rights protections to get China, Russia and the US to sign up to any final deal.  

What are the desired outcomes of getting gender-based violence into the Arms Trade Treaty? The report Putting Women's Rights Into the Arms Treaty shares, "To have real impact, a prospective Arms Trade Treaty must include legally binding criteria that prevent arms transfers to abusers of human rights or into situation where there is a substantial risk that they will undermine development or exacerbate armed violence. The Arms Trade Treaty also needs to refer to gender-based armed violence in both the treaty text and criteria." 


Kate Hughes agrees, then adds:

The treaty must recognize that there is a gendered impact to armed violence and makes it a specific goal / objective of the treaty to address this. We are pushing to have a specific criteria that says that states "shall not" transfer weapons where there is a substantial risk of that these weapons will be used to commit GBV. It is not the case that the arms trade treaty will suddenly eliminate GBV, but it is a really important opportunity make sure that the international community upholds its commitments to women, peace, and security issues. 

This world map shows which countries are in support of including GBV in the treaty. The United Nations Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty ends July 27. 

Photo credit: Control Arms

What Razan Ghazzawi Can Teach Us about Taking Action

Razan during The 3rd Arab Bloggers Meeting Oct. 2011, in Tunis. (Photo: Flickr - Ibtihel Zaatouri)

If you haven't heard the story yet, Razan Ghazzawi is the latest among a dozen bloggers, activists, and journalists who have been detained since the nine month uprising calling for the ousting of President Bashar Assad erupted in March.

Ghazzawi was detained on Dec. 4 at the Jordanian border by Syrian immigration as she tried to cross into Jordan to attend a conference on press freedom in the Arab world. Currently, she is being held in Adra prison and faces a potential 3- to -15-year prison sentence.

On Monday, Syrian authorities charged Ghazzawi with membership to a secret organisation, which aims to change the economic and social status of the state, conveying within Syria false news that could debilitate the morale of the nation and weakening national sentiment, violating Article 335 of the Syrian penal code -- banning participation in a riotous demonstration -- and inciting sectarian strife.


Who is Razan?
Razan, 31, is a blogger, feminist and human rights activist who has campaigned for the release of political prisoners and documented human rights abuses.

Prominent Egyptian blogger Zeinobia praises Razan's revolutionary spirit:

Razan has been active and outspoken when it comes to injustice. She is among a few Syrian bloggers that blog with her real name. She is U.S. born yet she is an Arab leftist nationalist. I think Razan Ghazzawi is the second female Syrian blogger to be arrested after Tal Malhoi.

I remember once, during the revolution in Egypt, Razan tweeted about how she and her family were glued in front of the TV every afternoon till late night watching Tahrir square in those 18 days and how she cried when Mubarak was ousted. Razan is another Syrian, among thousands of Syrians, detained for no reason except they want freedom and democracy.

Since 2009, Razan has been maintaining Razaniyyat where she blogs, mainly in English, about human rights, women's and gay rights, as well as Arab and Syrian affairs. She is also the media coordinator for the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.

Syrian Uprising
On Wednesday, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, urged the United Nations (UN) Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. The call comes as the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) prepares to release a report also calling for Syria's referral to the ICC.

According to recent UN statistics, the brutal crackdown has left more than five thousand dead while thousands more continue to languish in prison. Today alone, violence across Syria has killed at least twenty-five people and the death toll is rising by the minute.


Time to Take Action
Since Razan's arrest, more than four thousand people have joined the Facebook campaign Free Syrian Blogger & Activist Razan Ghazzawi and started an online petition to demand intervention by the Arab League and the US government.

Twitter users have also launched the hashtag #FreeRazan to show solidarity.

As you can see, Razan was a person of action. So here's a list of ways that you can also take action:

• Write an email or send a fax to your local politician, Foreign Minister, members of parliament of congress. Use the internet to find their contact details or see this list of emails. Razan is an American Citizen – here is a list of US Embassies to contact demanding they take urgent action.
• Use your profile photo to draw attention to Razan’s arrest and the plight of all prisoners in Syria via Twibbon or you can use this image, or make your own.
• Use the tag #FreeRazan to share links, videos, news from #Syria – keep attention levels UP, don’t let this important news be overpowered by other stories and fade from view.
• Post news and links to FaceBook, blog, forums, and in comments on videos and news posts about Syria. If you write, please write about this issue.
• Schedule tweets for when you can’t be online – use Dlvr IT for feeds or Buffer for individual tweets. Also, Razan’s twitter account is currently being managed by her friends and supporters. Follow her if you’re not already @RedRazan for important updates.
• Join the Free Razan FaceBook page and share the page with all your friends.

If you have more ideas, please share them here.