JBI Human Rights

Syria and the Arab Spring: Defending Human Rights

(L-R) David Keyes, Robert Rifkind, Radwan Ziadeh, Robert Goodkind

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) held a panel discussion  on Syria on June 21, featuring speakers Radwan Ziadeh, a visiting scholar at George Washington University and founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria and David Keyes, director and co-founder of CyberDissidents.org and executive director of Advancing Human Rights.

 

E. Robert Goodkind, chairman of the JBI Administrative Council, opened  the meeting, recalling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech in April: “the long Arab winter has begun to thaw. For the first time in decades, there is a real opportunity for lasting change, a real opportunity for people to have their voices heard and their priorities addressed.” 

 

In the past six months, popular protest movements seeking an end to oppression have broken out in countries across the Middle East and North Africa.  So far opposition movements against oppressive governments in Tunisia and Egypt have remained largely non-violent, but it remains to be seen whether transitional regimes will fulfill their promises to ensure greater human rights protection for all citizens. Some regimes have violently cracked down against protesters but have faced little in the way of international condemnation. 

 

Since mid-March, Syrians have turned out in increasing numbers – first to call for the right to freedom of expression and an end to corruption and abuse by security forces, but ultimately for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.  The Syrian security forces have been accused of committing horrible atrocities against mainly peaceful protesters, including widespread arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial executions, and wide-scale torture.

 

While the US government and UN Human Rights Council have condemned the violence in Syria, the international community has been muted in response to the Assad regime, and few have called for the Syrian dictator to give up power.  The UN Council remains deadlocked over a weak draft resolution that does not even begin to approach the scope of the resolution imposing a no-fly zone and other protective steps in Libya.

 

Robert S. Rifkind, JBI Administrative Council member, moderated the panel discussion. He began by asking whether the series of demonstrations for democracy and the toppling of long-time autocratic leaders in the Middle East, dubbed the “Arab Spring,” were now reaching a dry summer spell where they faced serious obstacles in some place as some of the dictators refused to step down. Rifkind noted that one good thing to come out of the tumultuous events was an improvement in the UN Human Rights Council, whose members were forced to get in step with the dramatic events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The Human Rights Council acted to suspend Libya’s membership, and backed the appointment of a special rapporteur on Iran to investigate the crackdown on dissent there.

Radwan Ziadeh

Radwan Ziadeh, a leader of the Syrian human rights movement, said that at least 1,500 people have been killed by government troops firing on demonstrators. He cautioned that this figure was incomplete, as no independent investigators or domestic or foreign news crews have been able to function for long in Syria. The world was shocked by the brutal murder by government troops of Hamza Al-Khatib, the 13-year-old Syrian boy who had demonstrated in the square. Last week, four women were raped; at least 17 people have disappeared.  Ziadeh contrasted these appalling statistics with the more successful revolution in Egypt, where in 17 days, from January 25 to February 13, at least 250-300 people were known to be killed. He said that the relatively lower death toll and success in toppling President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power 22 years, was due to CNN and other foreign media providing 24/7 coverage. “This is something that is missing in Syria,” he explained.

 

Ziadeh recalled Hannah Arendt’s designation of the two pillars of totalitarian society -- terror and the police -- as an apt description of the Syrian situation. The government used arbitrary arrests and murder to keep people terrorized and undermined the one feature of Syrian society that manages to survive, human solidarity. Numerous people have been arrested; there have been 2,200 detained in Dara alone, including many members of an extended family, kept in a cinema converted to a detention center.

JBI and Africa Institute Condemn Murder of Ugandan LGBT Activist

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) and the American Jewish Committe's Africa Institute condemn the murder of David Kato, a prominent Ugandan human rights defender. 

Kato faced threats and harassment in the months preceding his death, fueled in part by a local newspaper’s publication in late 2010 of the names, images, and addresses of a number of LGBT activists, including Kato, alongside statements explicitly calling for them to be hanged.  Despite this, pending completion of the police investigation, Ugandan authorities have not yet attributed the motive of the killing to discrimination. 
 
“President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda should respond to this horrible event by ordering a thorough, impartial investigation and ensuring that those who murdered David Kato are apprehended and punished,” said Felice Gaer, Director of JBI.  “Only by countering hate-filled rhetoric against and harassment of LGBT individuals, and publicly reaffirming that all Ugandans are entitled to equal enjoyment of their rights, can Museveni hope to ensure that others do not share Kato’s tragic fate.”

JBI on Belarus: Letter to President Lukashenka

On December 23, JBI sent an open letter to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka urging him to take urgent action to safeguard the rights and physical integrity of Belarusian journalists, human rights defenders, and former presidential candidates, particularly Andrei Sannikov and Vladimir Neklayev, who were detained along with more than 600 others by Belarusian security forces on December 19 and 20, 2010.  JBI expressed particular concern that both Sannikov and Neklayev appear to be in urgent need of medical attention, which they have not received. 

The letter can be downloaded at: Download JBI_Letter_Belarus

The text of the letter follows:

The Role of Human Rights in US Foreign Policy: Setting Examples or Exercising Leadership

On June 14, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) held a public panel discussion titled, “The Role of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy:  Setting Examples or Exercising Leadership?”  E. Robert Goodkind, Chair of JBI’s Administrative Council, moderated the program which featured the following panelists:
George Packer, writer for The New Yorker magazine; Suzanne Nossel , U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations; Sharon Hom, Executive Director, Human Rights in China, and Andrew Apostolou, Senior Program Manager, Freedom House. A summary is presented below. 

George Packer: Rights and Wrongs

George Packer’s essay titled "Right and Wrongs," published in The New Yorker on May 17, 2010 critiqued President Barack Obama's human rights policy. Beginning from the premise that following the Bush administration there was “a need to cleanse the air,” Obama’s speeches did not moralize about good and evil, nor did he emphasize freedom.   Rather than prodding other countries to focus on human rights or democracy, however, Obama embarked on a policy that featured other issues: renewing American partnerships with countries like Russia, rebuilding multilateral institutions on issues like nuclear non-proliferation, and trying to engage with hostile regimes like Iran.

In China, early in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly assured her hosts that human rights would not interfere with improved relations. General Scott Gration, the President's Special Envoy to Sudan, suggested that the U.S. would deal with President Omar al-Bashir who was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). These developments were met with dismay by human rights activists, according to Packer. In time, the administration found "a better balance between engagement and criticism" but it continues to face serious questions and is "coming up against the limitations of engagement."

Packer talked with experts close to the Administration and found that while some of Obama's speeches, such as the speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, were quite weighty and even stirring on rights issues, there was a widely recognized gap between the policy stated in the speech and any action thereafter. It is not just the disjunction between words and action, it is actually worse than that. The pattern has been to “say one thing and then imagine that saying it has created a policy and that that policy is going to be implemented.” Packer emphasized that “Implementation is 90% of the battle, and it's taken a long time for implementation to begin to catch up with the speeches." Complicating things further, according to Packer, this is the “most White-House-centric foreign policy since [Richard] Nixon.” The State Department is cut out of foreign policy-making issues, or left to wait for various policy matters to be resolved elsewhere before they can take action -- such as with Afghanistan. While Secretary Clinton has become "more of a dominant force," there is still a lot of frustration in the State Department about White House control.

The critique of Obama from his supporters is a kind of "lover's complaint." They harbor an expectation that Obama, in trying to restore or repair relations with Russia, Iran, China or Burma, and in making an outreach to the Islamic world, will still find a way to raise human rights. To be sure, after the failed policies of the Bush administration, Obama had to "disinfect the room" and make sure the U.S. would "speak with credibility and authority” on rights issues. And yet Obama did not use the terms "human rights" or “democracy” in his Cairo speech until paragraph 44 –“pretty far down” as any journalist could see.  When non-violent Iranian demonstrators were demanding their human rights and being shot or hauled off to jail, the Obama Administration’s initial response was “pathetically muted.”

"I don’t think it’s because they didn’t care.  I think it’s because they didn’t know how to jump from engagement to criticism," remarked Packer, and they hadn't yet figured out how to "engage and, at the same time, use public as well as private channels to criticize human rights violators and violations".  As a result, there has been a lot of disappointment. A key problem with the engagement strategy, he stated, has been too much engagement with governments and too little with the publics, whether in Iran, Burma or elsewhere. “Why is it that over and over we are hearing from Egyptian democracy and civil society activists that they feel they’ve been abandoned?”  There is real opportunity there now.

JBI Urges UN Secretary-General to Seek Iranian Human Rights Activist's Release

New York – AJC’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) is calling on the UN Secretary General to secure the release of Shiva Nazar Ahari, a prominent Iranian women’s rights activist who faces trial Saturday on trumped-up charges, with a possible death sentence if convicted.

“The case of Shiva Nazar Ahari exemplifies the sorry state of human rights in Iran ,” said JBI Chair E. Robert Goodkind.

Charges against Nazar Ahari include “actions against national security” and “propaganda against the regime” for her participation in demonstrations and human rights activism. An additional charge, muharib, or “waging war against God,” for her alleged membership in the Mujahedin-e Khalq, carries the death penalty. Aharii has denied any connection to the organization.

“UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon can help protect this remarkable advocate of justice, whose life is in danger,” said Goodkind. “He should insist that Iran respect the concerns of UN human rights bodies by promptly releasing Nazar Ahari from prison.”

A UN General Assembly resolution adopted last December expressed concern over “increasing harassment, intimidation and persecution of political opponents and human rights defenders from all sectors of Iranian society, including arrests and violent repression.”

The resolution also called on Iran to allow UN human rights rapporteurs and experts to visit. Regrettably, not one UN expert has been permitted to visit the country in the past four years.

Nazar Ahari, founder of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), was arrested on December 20, 2009. She has since been detained at the infamous Evin prison with little access to her lawyer and family members, and long periods of solitary confinement.

AJC’s Jacob Blaustein Institute, founded in 1971, works to narrow the gap between the promises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reality in compliance with those norms.

JBI Statement on Democracy and Human Rights Monitoring

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights released a statement on Democracy and Human Rights Monitoring today affirming its support of such  monitoring as a hallmark of democracies, and while noting that scrutiny of the work and methodology of such rights groups can be a legitimate concern, pointed out that no country should be exempt from such examination/criticism.

Nonetheless, JBI pointed out that legitimate scrutiny of NGO methods “should not spill over into undue accusations of disloyalty or ad hominem attacks, such as were recently aimed at the distinguished former MK Naomi Chazan, nor deteriorate to permit the use of anti-Semitic imagery, as took place recently in Israel in an advertisement and cartoon criticizing the New Israel Fund, of which Ms Chazan is President.”

The statement was signed by E. Robert Goodkind, JBI Chair, and Felice Gaer, Director.

JBI Protests Death of Libyan Human Rights Defender and Democracy Advocate

On June 2, the JBI addressed a letter to the Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions of both the UN and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights regarding the death of Libyan human rights defender and democracy advocate Fati al-Jahmi on May 20. The JBI urged a prompt and thorough investigation by the government of Libya of the death in detention of Al-Jahmi, declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International for his interviews publicly calling for Libya’s democratization, including free elections, freedom of expression and of the media, and release of political prisoners. 

On May 3, Al-Jahmi, imprisoned in 2002, experienced a sudden deterioration of his health, fell into a coma, and was transferred to Jordan on May 5 for treatment, where he died. In March 2008, Al-Jahmi had told representatives from prominent human rights groups with whom he was allowed to meet that he was denied access to medical care for serious illnesses, including diabetes and coronary heart disease. At the time of the meeting, the visitors said he appeared frail and emaciated and could hardly speak or life his arm; his brother, Mohamed al-Jahmi who resides near Boston, reported the same.

The JBI called on the Libyan and Jordanian authorities to make public Al-Jahmi’s medical records from the Tripoli Medical Center where he was detained in the years prior to his death as well as the Medical Center in Amman. As Al-Jahmi had made repeated requests to the organization Physicians for Human Rights  to release the findings of an independent medical exam conducted by a PHR doctor in March 2008, and it is believed he would have wanted his medical records made public. Al-Jahmi’s immediate family members have faced intimidation from Libyan authorities and are not in a position to call for an investigation or a release of his medical records. Al-Jahmi’s case received widespread international attention, with some 17,000 people signing appeals on his behalf.

JBI Joins Six Human Rights Groups in Defense of Russian Lawyer

JBI joined 6 other human rights organizations in an appeal to President Barack Obama as well as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the eve of the G20 summit to address grave concerns about the deterioration of the rule of law and human rights in Russia.

Among concerns were the number of well-publicized murders of journalists and others critical of the government, the tightening of restrictions on independent civil society, the alleged practice of politically motivated prosecutions, and serious flaws within the criminal justice system that undermine due process, the right to a fair trial, and freedom from torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Emblematic of the unfair criminal justice system was the new trial of the high profile case of two businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, are each serving eight-year sentences on charges of fraud and tax evasion, said to be politically motivated. The two are now facing new charges and a second trial. Lawyers for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev and several courts outside Russia have made well-founded allegations that their first trial was unfair, marred by procedural irregularities and failure to respect the basic rights of the defense.  Moreover there is a broad consensus that the prosecution of the men in the first instance was politically motivated. A British court has refused a series of extradition requests made by Russian authorities in cases related to the so-called Yukos Affair in which Khodorkovsky was also charged. The European Court of Human Rights as ruled that Russia has violated Lebedev's rights to liberty and security on five counts.

The groups also express deep concern about efforts by some authorities to disbar prominent human rights lawyers Karinna Moskalenko, Yuri Schmidt, and other members of the two businessmen's defense team.  They called on the Russian government to ensure that the defense lawyers representing are protected against any attempts to intimidate or harm them and that any further unwarranted attempts to disbar them are halted immediately.

Last year, JBI hosted Karinna Moskalenko, who lectured about challenges facing the legal profession in Russia and her work with the European Court of Human Rights, and has since met with her on follow-up trips to the U.S. to support her efforts for the independent bar in Russia.

The text of the letter follows.