Posts tagged ‘human rights’
BY Miatta Gorvie
FILED UNDER
Human Rights
Humanitarian
Immigration and Refugee Law
Uncategorized
Israel’s other refugee question
This past August, visiting Israel for the first time and staying with a friend in south Tel Aviv, I was immediately struck by the number of African faces I saw in her neighbourhood. These Africans, I was informed, were migrants mostly from Eritrea, Darfur, and Southern Sudan (now the Republic of South Sudan) who were seeking protection in Israel under the 1951 Refugee Convention. You see, until that point, my knowledge of Israel’s refugee issues extended only to the question of the right of return of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 and their descendants. As a “final status” issue in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and one that cuts to the core of the national identities of both factions, it is easy to understand how this new class of African refugees can escape the attention of human rights lawyers and advocates abroad.
I was in Israel taking part in a program on law and internal diversity, a partnership of McGill and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, so thankfully I was able to explore Israel’s refugee policies in greater detail in a course on migration and diversity. For conceptual clarity, an asylum seekers is a person who is making a claim under the Refugee Convention and and a refugee is one whose claim has been accepted by the receiving country. It is notoriously difficult to collect statistics on migration flows,…
Bush, torture, and politics trumping law
Human rights and anti-war activists greeted former U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to British Columbia last month with calls for his arrest. The demonstrators correctly asserted that Canada has a responsibility to investigate Bush for his role in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody.
A visit by former Vice President Dick Cheney in September received a similar welcome, as have other visits by Bush administration officials. Already in 2004, a group called Lawyers Against the War tried to bring torture charges against Bush by filing criminal charges.
The number of voices calling for investigation and prosecution is growing and now includes several mainstream human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. On the political stage, federal NDP Immigration critic Don Davis urged the government to deny Cheney entry into Canada.
The evidence against Bush and Cheney also continues to mount. The Canadian Centre for International Justice teamed up with the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights to file a 70-page draft indictment against Bush ahead of his visit to Canada. The indictment was accompanied by 4000 pages of evidence that described the U.S. program of extraordinary rendition, the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and secret CIA detention sites.
Bush himself has on various occasions admitted to authorizing torture techniques, such as waterboarding. In an interview with American journalist Matt Lauer, Bush claimed…
BY Edward Bechard-Torres
FILED UNDER
Human Rights
Humanitarian
Public International Law
Fragmented Laws, but Estranged? Belligerent Occupation, International Human Rights Law and Legislative Reform
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Domestic Implementations of the UN’s Financial Sanctions against the Libyan Regime
On February 26, 2011, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1970, which authorized, among other measures, an asset freeze against Muammar Gaddafi, his family, and certain members of the Libyan regime.
The Security Council passed the Resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows the Security Council to issue binding decisions to maintain or restore international peace and security. Thus, member states are obliged to take domestic measures to implement the Resolution’s sanctions against the Libyan regime. This post provides a brief overview and comparison of the specific domestic initiatives that Canada, the UK, and the US have taken to implement UNSCR 1970 at a domestic level.
Canada
On February 27, one day after the passage of UNSCR 1970, Canada adopted Regulations Implementing the United Nations Resolution on Libya and Taking Special Economic Measures. The Governor General made these regulations under the authority granted by the Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA). The Special Economic Measures Act grants the Governor General the authority to make regulations to impose sanctions against a foreign state when Canada is obliged to through its membership in an international organization or when there is a threat to international peace and security.
United States
On February 25, one day prior to the passage of UNSCR 1970, Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13556 Blocking Property and Prohibiting Certain Transactions Related to Libya. Although the sanctions…
BY Noah Fangzhou Bian
FILED UNDER
Constitutional Law
General
Human Rights
Public International Law
Egypt’s Dilemma: The Price to Pay for The Rule of Law
No other current event has garnered as much press and concern from the international community as the mass popular protests against the Mubarak regime in Egypt. The string of recent uprisings in the Middle East reminds us of the wildfire spread of revolutions across the nations of the Eastern European bloc in 1989. Egyptian protesters, emboldened by the successful overthrow of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, have organized massive demonstrations in several key cities in Egypt, demanding reform and President Hosni Mubarak’s immediate and unconditional surrender of power. Many factors have contributed to the recent uprising in Egypt, including the country’s many economic and social ills, yet one of the root causes for public grievance lies with the major shortcomings of Egypt’s legal system itself.
Following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been under permanent state Emergency Law that has limited political expression and dissent. [1] On May 11, 2011, Egypt’s parliament, dominated by President Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, voted to extend the Emergency Law active since 1981 for two more years. Although the official reason for the extension was to curtail terrorism and drug trafficking, the Emergency Law effectively gives the government the right to arrest “people without charge, detain prisoners indefinitely, limit freedom of expression and assembly, and maintain a special security court .” [2] Michael Scheinin – the UN’s…
Is Sorry Enough?
Saying sorry isn’t always easy to do. It often takes a mature person to demonstrate to others that not only does one recognize wrongs done, but that one also feels remorse for that.
However, when an apology comes from the government for a wrong committed to individuals, the reaction tends to be much less gracious and questions of legality quickly arise. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently apologized to the government of Guatemala for the intentional infection of Guatemalan prisoners and handicapped residents with syphilis and gonorrhea as part of a medical research program conducted from 1946 – 1948, where at least hundreds of people were directly infected. According to the New York Times, the researcher who discovered the report claims that the Guatemalan project was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. Questions of state legality includes a new twist under international law: how should the U.S apology be handled and is there an obligation for further reparations?
While a trend has developed for an international legal system which imposes positive obligations on states, the first draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts were only recently passed by the UN General Assembly in 2001. Still, the General Assembly had recommended that the International Law Commission review State Accountability…
Toward a Right to Development? : Reflecting on the Endorois Decision
Last month, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“ACHPR”) handed down a decision on the Endorois peoples’ situation in Kenya. The decision not only marks the end of a nearly 40 year struggle by the Endorois people against the Kenyan government but it also heralds the increasing importance of the third generation human right to development.
The Endorois people are a sub-tribe from central Kenya that were evicted from their lands near Lake Bogoria in the 1970s. The government relocated them to an area that limited their access to a clean water source, central sites of worship and other daily requirements for their pastoral way of life. The Kenyan government failed to provide compensation for this eviction but still proceeded to develop a Game Reserve on the Endorois former lands.
After exhausting all domestic avenues for remedy, the Endorois – with the help of Minority Rights Group International – brought their case before the ACHPR. The ACHPR is a quasi-judicial regional body that renders non-binding decisions aimed at protecting human and collective rights in Africa as envisaged by the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“African Charter”). Although non-binding, I believe that the decisions from the ACHPR can be viewed as a snapshot of general zeitgeist. Indeed, until the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights starts delivering decisions regularly, the Commission’s decisions will remain…
More Atrocities in the Congo
Drifting from my previous posts on international family law, I will focus today on the recent Human Rights Watch report on the Lord’s Resistance Army atrocities in the Congo. I have chosen to highlight this report for two reaons. First and foremost, I believe that the direct and indirect victims of the situation in the Congo deserve—at the very least—the world’s attention. Secondarily, I believe the report points out the nuanced and interdependent relationship between human rights and humanitarian law.
The 73-page report is heartbreaking. It contains information from 128 interviewees interviewed by three Human Rights Watch staffers. The accounts of murder, violence against children through child soldiers, rape, torture, abduction, and unimaginable brutality are not easy to read. I did, however, feel a duty to pay attention to these accounts.
Astonishingly (at least to this Western writer), the 312 murders and 250 abductions went relatively unnoticed for months. The area’s remoteness slowed communication, assistance, and investigation. This persistent isolation surely devastates the local population, who were unimaginably terrorized by these atrocities. Thanks to the courageous interviewees and interviewers, the world can take notice and seek some measure of justice.
The Human Rights Watch report calls for justice by addressing several stakeholders. It first demands that the LRA cease its attacks and release its prisoners.
The report then addresses the governments of the Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic,…
International Consequence to Prorogation
In discussing the principle of democracy in international law in my previous blog entry, I used the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall as a starting point. I wondered whether the blueprint for German reunification at the turn of the decade of the 80s could be used eventually for Korean reunification. As the 00s give way to the 10s, I find myself more compelled now than before to write about another “threat to democracy.” While such a phrase may conjure up a slew of George W. Bush speeches discussing his “crusades” to the Middle East, the threat of which I speak is not overseas, not even in a different continent, but here in North America. It is in Canada. While saying that Prime Minister Harper’s move to prorogue parliament on December 30th, 2009 is a threat to democracy and an affront to international law may seem like a slight exaggeration, the background of the prorogation makes it internationally relevant.
Authoritarian Leadership
This blog is certainly not the forum to engage in an ideological debate. Moreover, prorogation of Parliament is not unusual. Since Canadian Confederation, the Parliament has been put on hold 105 times. However, it is the timing and circumstances of this prorogation which has drawn nationwide criticism. While this is not a problem under Canadian domestic law, it is arguably contrary to “soft”…
A Trend Toward the ‘Humanization’ of Conflict Law?
Israeli Targeted Killing and the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights
The modern laws of warfare were born in the nineteenth century from Europe’s fears “about the escalating severity of war”[1]. As the decades passed, war’s means, methods, aims and tactics have changed. Suicide bombers that melt into the civilian population have replaced ordered battalions of uniformed soldiers. Strikes from unmanned Predator drones have supplanted direct confrontations on the battlefield. Wars are fought not only against states, but also against colonial domination, racist regimes and abstract social phenomena, most notably the “war on terror”.
