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 Launches Publication on Preventing Genocide

Today, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) published a major compendium of legal norms for genocide prevention, setting forth a set of risk factors for genocide and the normative basis in international law for those risk factors. 

JBI’s Compilation of Risk Factors and Legal Norms for the Prevention of Genocide was created at the request of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, Dr. Francis M. Deng.  The document sets out the legal framework for and gives substance to the concept of “genocide prevention,” the cornerstone of the Special Adviser’s mandate and a core obligation of the 140 States that have ratified the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

JBI released the Compilation at the United Nations at a launch event featuring a discussion on genocide prevention with expert panelists Dr. Deng, Edward Luck, the Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Responsibility to Protect, and Felice Gaer, Director of JBI.

Download JBI Compilation Updated

JBI on US Participation at UN Human Rights Council

On April 5, following the March 30 announcement by the United States that it would seek reelection to the UN Human Rights Council when its first term expires in 2012, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Human Rights (JBI) joined ten prominent NGOs in urging the US to continue to seek improvement in the Council's performance.  In their letter, the groups stressed several important accomplishments at the Council's recent session, along with the importance of eliminating the Council’s disproportionate focus on Israel, increasing attention on other ongoing and emerging human rights priorities, and improving the Council's membership.

To read the letter on US participation at the Human Rights Council, see: Download Joint Statement on US at HRC.

 

JBI Remembers Beijing: The Ferraro Factor

Geraldine A. Ferraro, who passed away this weekend, is a symbol of women’s rights advocacy.

As America’s first female candidate of a major party for vice-president, she broke barriers. But readers of IntLawGrrls may not know how actively and directly she influenced women’s rights issues in the international legal context as well.

Appalled by televised reports about the use of rape as a weapon of war by Serbs in the Bosnian conflict, Gerry contacted Madeleine Albright to ask what the new Clinton Administration was doing about it. She was immediately asked to join the Administration’s first delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, in February 1993, where she helped convince Member States to adopt a separate resolution addressing rape in war.

As Gerry told it, accomplishing this task required her to conduct gender-sensitivity training, too. For example, she found herself telling the male diplomats from the Islamic Conference that they needed to recognize that such sexual violence was not so much an insult to THEIR "honor" (which was all they were prepared to declare) but rather a very real lasting physical and psychological abuse of the women who were victimized. Gerry emphasized that something serious had to be done by the Commission to name it, stop it, punish the perpetrators and aid the survivors. As a result, the Commission adopted a resolution that called for "joint and separate action to end this despicable practice," as well as for investigations, accountability and assistance to the victims.

Later that year, the protection of women’s rights was affirmed as a major focus of the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna – only a few hundred miles from Bosnia itself.

JBI Welcomes Progress on Monitoring Iran, ‘Defamation of Religions’ at UN Human Rights Council

JBI congratulates US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US delegation to the UN Human Rights Council for successfully pressing for the adoption of several positive measures by the Council at its recent session, which concluded Friday, March 25.  In a speech at the Council’s opening on February 28, Secretary Clinton pressed the Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran and to move beyond its focus on “defamation of religions.” This week, following further active diplomacy by the US, the Council created the special post on Iran and, for the first time, refrained from adopting a “defamation of religions” resolution.  These changes follow the Council’s historic decision at a special session on February 25 to recommend that that the General Assembly suspend Libya’s membership on the Council in response to the Libyan authorities’ commission of gross and systematic violations of human rights. 

 

JBI Applauds Historic UN General Assembly Action Suspending Libya’s Membership in Human Rights Council

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) welcomes today’s historic consensus decision by the UN General Assembly to suspend Libya’s membership in the Human Rights Council.  Today’s vote is unprecedented; never before has a state’s membership in any UN human rights body been suspended. 

The resolution calling for Libya’s suspension was co-sponsored by more than 60 states that supplemented the original sponsors Botswana, Jordan, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Qatar.  In introducing the resolution, Lebanon emphasized that the General Assembly’s action is procedural, exceptional and temporary, and that the General Assembly may review and change its decision to suspend Libya’s membership in the Council at a later date, perhaps following a change in government.  Link to UNGA Resolution

“Defamation of Religions” resolution adopted at UN General Assembly by smallest margin to date

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) expressed regret that on December 21, the 65^th United Nations General Assembly once again adopted a resolution on “combating defamation of religions.”  JBI has expressed serious concern about efforts to enshrine “defamation of religions” in human rights law as a form of incitement.  The draft resolution on “combating defamation of religions” endorsed by the General Assembly on December 21, in which the phrase “vilification of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general,” appears six times, reflects these concerns. 

JBI has noted that  the resolution’s effort to expand the definition of “incitement to religious hatred” to include “defamation of religions” threatens to render laws prohibiting blasphemy and other forms of religious insult defensible, or even commendable, under human rights law.  These laws are highly susceptible to abuse by governments, particularly against members of religious minority communities. 

However, JBI is encouraged that the “combating defamation of religions” resolution adopted on December 21 was adopted by the smallest margin – 79 states in favor and 67 opposed – of any of the series of “defamation of religions” resolutions that the UN has considered since states began introducing resolutions on the issue in 1999.  JBI encouraged states that oppose the “defamation of religions” initiative at the UN to increase their diplomatic efforts vis-à-vis the 40 states that abstained from the vote so that the next such resolution proposed before a UN body – which likely will be considered by the Human Rights Council in March – will be rejected.

JBI: Draft “Vilification of Religions” Proposal at UN Threatens Freedom of Expression, Religion

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) expressed concern today that the most recent draft of a proposed resolution on “Combating Religious Hatred and Vilification of Religions” under consideration at the UN General Assembly, if adopted, would serve as a justification for and even endorse harmful “anti-blasphemy” laws already in force in many States.  JBI called on UN Member States to oppose any draft resolution that similarly threatens the rights to freedom of expression and religion.

The unofficial draft resolution, submitted on November 12 by Morocco on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), an inter-governmental organization consisting of 57 Member States, contains a number of textual changes that differentiate it from the resolutions on “Combating Defamation of Religions,” adopted in past years by the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council.  The most significant of these changes is the substitution of the concept of “vilification of religions” in place of the concept of “defamation of religions.”

As JBI has noted in the past, including at an expert discussion convened on October 6, 2010, past resolutions that have been adopted by UN bodies on “defamation of religions” threaten to give rise to very serious negative consequences for human rights.  The proposed draft resolution on “vilification of religions” suffers from nearly all of the same shortcomings, and proposes similarly unacceptable restrictions on the fundamental human rights, particularly the right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief.

To see the proposed draft resolution, see here: Download OIC proposal

To see JBI’s analysis of the proposed draft resolution, see here: Download Memo_on_Vilification_of_Religions_Proposal

Engaging China on Human Rights at the UN

JBI Director Felice Gaer recently gave an extensive interview on engaging China on human rights at the UN to Human Rights in China.  In the interview, Gaer shares her personal views, derived from her years of practice in the human rights field, on issues including China’s tactics and use of “smart” power at the UN, the UN Human Rights Council and its Universal Periodic Review process, and strategies for future engagement with China.

The full text of the interview is available here: China Rights Forum interview with Felice Gaer

JBI Calls for US Ratification of Women's Rights Treaty

On November 18, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law will hold a hearing on the importance of US ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).  It will be the first time in eight years that the Senate has held such a hearing on the women's rights treaty, which the US signed in 1980 but has never ratified, and on which the Senate has never held a full floor vote.

Today, JBI Director Felice Gaer submitted a statement in support of US ratification of the CEDAW for inclusion in the congressional record.  Drawing upon JBI's long history of support for US ratification of the CEDAW and on her perspective as the first American member of the Committee against Torture, the monitoring committee for a parallel UN treaty, Gaer urged all US senators to vote in favor of US ratification of the CEDAW, stating, "The United States has long accepted the principle that women's rights are human rights; it is time for the Senate to act on that principle and to approve US ratification of the international treaty that does the most to make this principle a reality." 

The letter argued that the CEDAW has been uniquely important to women worldwide struggling for non-discrimination and to exercise basic human rights, particularly because those States that ratify the CEDAW are required to report regularly to a monitoring committee composed of independent experts from 24 countries.  Those experts then examine the reports submitted by State parties and offer comments and suggestions concerning compliance in an inter-active dialogue. 

Gaer stated that the CEDAW Committee, like the Committee against Torture, on which she has served since 2000, offers the US an opportunity to engage directly with rogue regimes and violator countries on the advancement of women's rights.  CEDAW ratification would allow the United States not only to vote for the members of the CEDAW Committee but  to itself seek election to the Committee.  The letter noted that many of the members of the CEDAW Committee have called for US ratification of CEDAW, arguing that if it were to become a member of the Committee, it would strengthen the Committee's scrutiny of violator countries.

The letter noted that CEDAW ratification is consistent with the "principled engagement" strategy that the US government presently pursues in its relations with other UN bodies.  Conversely, the US's current status as one of only seven countries worldwide that have failed to ratify the CEDAW--a distinction it shares with Iran, Sudan, and Somalia--is an embarrassment, given the leadership that the US has shown in advancing women's rights and equality at home and abroad.  It also stated that US ratification of the CEDAW would result in few costs to the Unites States, because as a result of its longtime commitment to women's rights and equality, the US is already substantially in compliance with the treaty. 

The full statement is available here: Download JBI CEDAW statement

More information about the Senate's Nov. 18 hearing on CEDAW ratification and a link to the webcast is available here: Senate CEDAW hearing.