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Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights Watch’

Report: US Will Provide Ukraine Cluster Bombs as Part of New Weapons Package

Posted by M. C. on July 7, 2023

The news comes after HRW issued a report that said Ukraine killed civilians with cluster bombs used in Izium

antiwar.com

by Dave DeCamp

The Associated Press reported Thursday that the Biden administration has decided to arm Ukraine with cluster bombs and will announce the munitions as part of a new $800 million arms package. The news comes after Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report that said Ukraine has killed its own citizens using the munitions.

US officials told AP that they expect the arms package to be announced Friday. The White House used to be opposed to arming Ukraine with cluster munitions, as they are indiscriminate weapons that cause harm to civilians, but the concerns have waned.

Cluster bombs scatter small submunitions over large areas, making them especially hazardous to civilians who can find unexploded munitions years after they were dropped. Because of their indiscriminate nature, cluster munitions have been banned by more than 100 nations. The US, Ukraine, and Russia are not parties to the treaty, known as the Convention on Cluster Munitions. 

The HRW report said that Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the eastern city of Izium in 2022 killed at least eight civilians and wounded 15 more. HRW also said Russia’s use of cluster bombs in the war has killed many civilians.

See the rest here

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Coming Soon: State-Mandated Abuse of Children – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 9, 2021

According to these “scientists,” this procedure is especially well-suited for young children. But to subject children to this makes no sense from a medical point of view. The travesty of probing children’s rectums for evidence of a respiratory disease could not be more glaring.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/vasko-kohlmayer/coming-soon-state-mandated-abuse-of-children/

By Vasko Kohlmayer

Previously we pointed out  the absurdity of the COVID anal test. The incongruity should be obvious: why would anyone go looking for antigens of a respiratory disease in the rectum rather than in the throat where such antigens reside?

The COVID anal test has been apparently thought up in China, where it is now being rolled out.

The procedure involves inserting a probe some two inches into the rectum and rotating it there repeatedly. In this video you can watch a Chinese “scientist” demonstrating on a dummy how specimen collection is carried out. It is a sickening sight.

A Chinese scientist demonstrates specimen collection in an anal COVID swab

Knowing how our government has behaved in this crisis so far, we can be fairly confident that this test will be soon imported here.

Human Rights Watch categorically condemns the probing of the rectum as part of a forced medical exams for homosexuals. Like COVID anal swabs, these exams involve insertion of foreign objects into the most private and sensitive regions of the human body.

This is how Human Rights Watch views this practice:

“Forced anal examinations are a form of cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment that can rise to the level of torture. They violate the Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Convention on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Forced anal exams are invasive, intrusive, and profoundly humiliating.”

Many of those forced to submit to this procedure have been severely impacted by the experience:

“Some people subjected to these examinations experience lasting psychological trauma. Several victims told Human Rights Watch that they experienced forced anal examinations as a form of sexual violence. Human Rights Watch believes that they are a form of sexual assault. Medical personnel who conduct forced anal exams do so in violation of international principles of medical ethics, including the prohibition on medical personnel participating in any way in acts of torture or degrading treatment.”

Even though we would not argue that the anal COVID swab is the equivalent of an anal exam, the two procedures share a number of disturbing aspects. Some of them include being forced to expose one’s most private parts, bending over and making one’s rectum available for probing by agents of the state. We have yet to hear whether Human Rights Watch will take a position on this.

Especially disconcerting is the fact that children are among the first demographic group being subjected to this ignominious and traumatizing procedure. Per a recent story by Reuters, “[A] Beijing city official said that anal swabs were taken from over 1,000 teachers, staffers and students at a primary school in the city after an infection had been found.”

The Reuters story concludes with something that should make us all shudder:

“Stool tests may be more effective than respiratory tests in identifying COVID-19 infections in children and infants since they carry a higher viral load in their stool than adults, researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) had said in a paper published last year.”

According to these “scientists,” this procedure is especially well-suited for young children. But to subject children to this makes no sense from a medical point of view. The travesty of probing children’s rectums for evidence of a respiratory disease could not be more glaring. If they really wanted to find out whether children had COVID or any other communicable illness of the respiratory tract, they would swab their mouths, not their bottoms. This is how it has always been done.

Normal children are at virtually zero risk from COVID. It is almost unheard of for young people under 18 years of age to die of this disease. Your healthy child is less likely to die of COVID than to be killed by lightning. Furthermore, children are not known to be particularly potent spreaders of the virus. Thus, there is no need to subject them to indiscriminate blanket testing, much less to testing protocols involving such a drastic and unnecessary procedure.

The imposition of the anal test on children has nothing to do with medical concerns and everything to do with governments subjugating their populations through humiliation and medical terror.

Populations that have been terrified and browbeaten into allowing the state to do this will allow government to do anything. What can be worse than forced abuse of children? In a move whose ulterior motive could not be more transparent, governments will now seek to legitimize this outrage under the cover of medical necessity.

If state agents are allowed to insert probes under false pretenses into children’s rectums, there will be no limit to what they can do. Parents who agree to let the state do this to their own children will then agree to anything.

Imagine your child being in the place of the Chinese dummy in the video above. How would a ten-year-old feel after undergoing this? And how would a twelve or fourteen or a sixteen-year-old feel for that matter?

And what about the danger of child abuse? The scope and potential for molestation inherent in this practice is immense. This protocol is an invitation for abuse on a wide scale, making school children easy prey for pedophiles.

There are other dangers as well. Many homosexuals trace the genesis of their tendencies to sexual abuse in childhood, which as is known, often involves anal violation. In other words, there are indications that anal violation in childhood has the potential to give rise to homosexual proclivities.

Do we need to be potentially creating more homosexual people? Given all the negatives and dangers associated with this lifestyle is such a move socially desirable?

Above all, the totalitarians want to teach you and your child this lesson: whatever the state wishes to perpetrate upon your person – no matter how obviously gratuitous or humiliating – you must pull down your pants, bend over and accept it.

The COVID anal probe is part of the strategy by totalitarians to vanquish and gain complete mastery over their populations. They have already demoralized and frightened most of the citizenry and used the pretense of COVID-19 to carry out their unholy project.

The Best of Vasko Kohlmayer Vasko Kohlmayer [email] was born and grew up in former communist Czechoslovakia. He is the author of The West in Crisis: Civilizations and Their Death Drives.

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The Trump Administration Kills Coldly in Yemen, Putting Jobs Before Lives – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2020

It soon became evident that the Saudi military is a vanity force, largely for show. Even with abundant American assistance, providing planes and munitions, training personnel, refueling planes, and giving intelligence to assist in targeting, Riyadh found itself stuck in what became an endless war, a quagmire that revealed the Saudi royals to be incompetent, unimaginative fools.

However, they proved to be efficient killers – of civilians.

Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign.”

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2020/05/17/the-trump-administration-kills-coldly-in-yemen-putting-jobs-before-lives/

by

Many observers have been mystified by the Saudi regime’s hold over President Donald Trump. For years he had criticized the gaggle of corrupt, dissolute royals. He also asked why Americans were paying to defend the wealthy, licentious al-Saud family, as it practiced totalitarianism at home and promoted Islamic fundamentalism abroad, including in America.

Yet Trump made his first trip as president to Saudi Arabia. Some observers wondered if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had salvaged his infamous orb from Mordor’s collapse eons ago and used it to take control of the president’s mind. No other explanation made sense.

Now the New York Times reports that the fault lies with Peter Navarro, the protectionist aide who spends much of his time urging economic and real war with China. He apparently was instrumental in convincing the president to put the profits of munition makers before the lives of Yemenis.

Consider the tragedy that had befallen Yemen, a deeply divided and tragically impoverished nation. During the Arab Spring the Yemeni people ousted the longtime president, leaving a weak and unpopular successor. The former chief executive joined a longtime rebel movement to overthrow the government. All par for the course in a divided land that has never known peace or stability.

But MbS, as the reckless, impulsive, dictatorial crown prince is known, wanted a toady in power next door. He also desired to demonstrate that he was the Big Man in the Middle East. So he and his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, created a faux coalition filled with the bought and conscripted and invaded Yemen. The conquest was supposed to be completed in a few weeks.

It soon became evident that the Saudi military is a vanity force, largely for show. Even with abundant American assistance, providing planes and munitions, training personnel, refueling planes, and giving intelligence to assist in targeting, Riyadh found itself stuck in what became an endless war, a quagmire that revealed the Saudi royals to be incompetent, unimaginative fools.

However, they proved to be efficient killers – of civilians. Reported the Times: “Year after year, the bombs fell – on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign.”

Notably, President Barack Obama and the supposedly liberal interventionists who surrounded him, who insisted that something must be done to stop the killing in Syria, didn’t care and didn’t act. Nothing changed with President Trump; if anything, he seemed bewitched when he returned from his May 2017 trip. The slaughter continued. Read the rest of this entry »

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Credibility of European Court of Human Rights lies in ruins after judges’ links to Soros revealed — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on February 26, 2020

This is the system the one world government people want to use to replace rights and your Constitution.

Imagine enforcement goons from Sierra Leone coming to your house and carting you off for violating a law only they knew existed.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481651-george-soros-european-court-judges/

John Laughland
John Laughland
A study by the European Center for Law and Justice in Strasbourg has revealed several conflicts of interest between judges at the European Court of Human Rights and NGOs funded by George Soros.

The European Center for Law and Justice is an NGO which often appears at the court to campaign on social, family and religion-related issues. I am proud to be listed as a research fellow at the ECLJ but in reality I have written only one article for the center’s website and I receive no salary from it. I had no role in writing the report.

The study has found that, out of the 100 judges who have served on the bench of the European Court of Human Rights in the period 2009-2019, nearly a quarter (22) have strong links to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation or to NGOs like Amnesty International and others which are funded by it. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has received $100 million from the Open Society Foundation since 2010.

Some of the NGOs receive so much of their budget from Soros that they are in effect wholly owned subsidiaries of his foundation.

The links between the judges and the NGOs are substantial. They include working for years as members of the board of directors or executive council of these NGOs; having teaching posts at institutes funded by them; being a salaried director of programs for the Open Society Foundation or associated NGOs; and undertaking other forms of paid work for them. The full list of these links can be found on pages seven and eight of the report.

A good example is that of the Bulgarian Yonko Grozev who, as leader of the Open Society Justice Initiative, defended the Pussy Riot case against Russia in 2018 before being elected as a judge of the court shortly thereafter.

The study does not include less formal forms of collaboration with NGOs, such as occasional work for them (see note 15 of the report). This means that the links are even greater than those specifically addressed in the study.

The report also covers other human rights officers, such as the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe from 2012-2018 (Nils Muiznieks), who does not sit as a judge but who was for years a salaried activist of the Open Society Foundation in Latvia and who has used his official position to campaign against the so-called “anti-Soros” legislation in Hungary.

These NGOs are extremely active at the ECHR. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland filed 16 applications, and defended 32 cases, in 2017 alone. Very often the role played by the NGOs does not appear in the court’s records but has to be discovered from the NGOs’ own reports instead. For instance, a case can be defended by lawyers from one NGO with pleas heard from other NGOs as third parties, even though the other organizations are in fact financed by the same source as the applicant, usually Soros.

There would not be anything wrong with judges having exercised a salaried activity for an NGO prior to becoming a judge if these same organizations were not themselves active as parties who bring cases to the ECHR, either as applicants themselves, as lawyers for applicants, or as third parties giving supposedly expert evidence (but in reality lobbying for a cause), and if those judges did not then hear those cases.

 

Indeed, the report’s worst finding is that in 88 cases judges sat on the bench ruling on cases brought to the court by NGOs they had previously worked for, without declaring a conflict of interest and without withdrawing from hearing the cases (see page 15 of the report and annexes 1 and 2.) In one case, ruled on in 2018, 10 out of the 14 NGOs that had brought the case were funded by the Open Society Foundation, while six out of the 17 judges who heard the case themselves had links to the same Soros-funded group.

The judges’ refusal to withdraw is a disgraceful professional failing which shows that Europe’s supreme human rights body is not, in fact, independent but is instead part of veritable “human rights industry” – a pyramid of money and a tight network of professional relationships, at the top of which sits George Soros with his billions. NGOs are supposed to represent “civil society” independent of states; in reality, a very large number of them are the creation of actors with no democratic legitimacy, like the Open Society Foundation.

The fact that this corrupt system has been able to flourish has several causes. The first is that Soros and the NGOs he finances dominate the human rights industry across the Balkans and in the Baltic states. His millions flood these small, poor countries (he has spent $131 million in Albania since 1992, for instance) and they in turn appoint judges to the ECHR which rules on human rights issues for the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. Indeed, the report finds that the total spending of the Open Society Foundation in Europe, $90 million a year, actually exceeds the annual budget of the European Court of Human Rights ($70 million).

Second, new procedures introduced in 2012 specifically provide for NGOs to take part in the selection procedure for judges at the ECHR. These NGOs can propose candidates and they can lobby for their selection. They have done this on many occasions, as the report shows. In the case of Albania in 2018, for instance, two out of the three candidates were executives of the Open Society Foundation; one of them was elected.

Finally, there is no requirement that people appointed to be judges at the ECHR have any judicial experience at all. Some 51 out of the 100 judges who have sat on the ECHR bench since 2009 had never been judges or magistrates before. Instead, they were very often human rights activists working for Soros or one of his front organisations.

This is a structural weakness which also affects international war crimes tribunals. As I showed in my book, ‘Travesty,’ it means that people can wield judicial power who are not, in fact, trained judges or magistrates or even necessarily lawyers, but instead political activists. In some very egregious cases, people have become judges on the benches of these tribunals without even having a law degree.

The result is that the judges who sit on these bodies do not, in fact, behave as judges should.  The role of the judge is to say what the law is, not to say what he or she thinks the law should be. Unfortunately, this is exactly what judges at the ECHR, and at the new international tribunals, do. In 1978, the ECHR proclaimed that the Convention was “a living instrument which must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions” and that therefore its judges had the right to read new things into the Convention instead of agreeing to be bound by it. Such judicial activism is a travesty of the rule of law.

It is a travesty because the areas in which ECHR judges exercise their judicial activism are precisely the most politically sensitive issues, which should properly be decided by politicians in elected parliaments, or by referenda, and not by an elite caste of unaccountable activists. Those areas include freedom of expression, asylum, LGBT rights, conditions of detention, minority rights, and so on. Using their freedom to make up the law, ECHR judges have over decades applied a new vision of man which is the opposite of the original intention of the Convention, which was to protect human beings and their families from abusive state power. Now the ECHR spends most of its time demanding more state power for this or that fashionable (“woke”) cause.

George Soros has long been attacked for the excessive political power his gigantic fortune has bought, especially in post-communist Eastern Europe. This report by the European Center for Law and Justice is, however, one of the first occasions in which the corrupting effect of that power has been scrupulously identified and documented with respect to the supreme body charged with protecting human rights in Europe. To date, the ECHR has not denied any of the facts outlined in the report and, to the extent that these facts cannot be denied because they come from the ECHR itself, its credibility as an independent judicial body now lies in ruins.

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UN List of Firms Aiding Israel’s Settlements Was Dead on Arrival – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on February 20, 2020

In response to the database, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened
to intensify his country’s interference in US politics. He noted that his
officials had already “promoted laws in most US states…

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2020/02/19/un-list-of-firms-aiding-israels-settlements-was-dead-on-arrival/

by

After lengthy delays, the United Nations finally published a database last week of businesses that have been profiting from Israel’s illegal settlement activity in the West Bank.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, announced that 112 major companies had been identified as operating in Israeli settlements in ways that violate human rights.

Aside from major Israeli banks, transport services, cafes, supermarkets, and energy, building and telecoms firms, prominent international businesses include Airbnb, booking.com, Motorola, Trip Advisor, JCB, Expedia and General Mills.

Human Rights Watch, a global watchdog, noted in response to the list’s publication that the settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. It argued that the firms’ activities mean they have aided “in the commission of war crimes”.

The companies’ presence in the settlements has helped to blur the distinction between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. That in turn has normalized the erosion of international law and subverted a long-held international consensus on establishing a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Work on compiling the database began four years ago. But both Israel and the United States put strong pressure on the UN in the hope of preventing the list from ever seeing the light of day.

The UN body’s belated assertiveness looks suspiciously like a rebuke to the Trump administration for releasing this month its Middle East “peace” plan. It green-lights Israel’s annexation of the settlements and the most fertile and water-rich areas of the West Bank.

In response to the database, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to intensify his country’s interference in US politics. He noted that his officials had already “promoted laws in most US states, which determine that strong action is to be taken against whoever tries to boycott Israel.”

He was backed by all Israel’s main Jewish parties. Amir Peretz, leader of the center-left Labor party, vowed to “work in every forum to repeal this decision”. And Yair Lapid, a leader of Blue and White, the main rival to Netanyahu, called Bachelet the “commissioner for terrorists’ rights”.

Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, accused the UN of “unrelenting anti-Israel bias” and of aiding the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

In fact, the UN is not taking any meaningful action against the 112 companies, nor is it encouraging others to do so. The list is intended as a shaming tool – highlighting that these firms have condoned, through their commercial activities, Israel’s land and resource theft from Palestinians.

The UN has even taken an extremely narrow view of what constitutes involvement with the settlements. For example, it excluded organizations like FIFA, the international football association, whose Israeli subsidiary includes six settlement teams.

This week it also emerged that Amazon was aiding the settlements, though it is not named on the list. The online retail giant delivers for free to addresses in West Bank settlements, while imposing large shipping charges on Palestinians living nearby.

One of the identified companies, Airbnb, announced in late 2018 that it would remove from its accommodation bookings website all settlement properties – presumably to avoid being publicly embarrassed.

But a short time later Airbnb backed down. It is hard to imagine the decision was taken on strictly commercial grounds: the firm has only 200 settlement properties on its site.

A more realistic conclusion is that Airbnb feared the backlash from Washington and was intimated by a barrage of accusations from pro-Israel groups that its new policy was anti-Semitic.

In fact, the UN’s timing could not be more tragic. The list looks more like the last gasp of those who – through their negligence over nearly three decades – have enabled the two-state solution to wither to nothing.

Trump’s so-called peace plan could afford to be so one-sided only because western powers had already allowed Israel to void any hope of Palestinian statehood through decades of unremitting settlement expansion. Today, nearly 700,000 Israeli Jews are housed on occupied Palestinian territory.

On Monday European Union foreign ministers met to respond to the plan, but predictably they agreed to postpone a decision until after Israel’s election on March 2. Tepid opposition is probably the best that can ultimately be expected.

The actions of several European states continue to speak much louder than any words.

Last Friday, Germany followed the Czech Republic in filing a petition to the International Criminal Court at The Hague siding with Israel as the court deliberates whether to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes, including over the establishment of settlements.

Germany does not appear to deny that the settlements are war crimes. Instead, it hopes to block the case on dubious technical grounds: that despite Palestine signing up to the Rome Statute, which established the Hague court, it is not yet a fully fledged state.

So far Austria, Hungary, Australia and Brazil appear to be following suit.

But if Palestine lacks the proper attributes of statehood, it is because the US and Europe, including Germany, have consistently broken promises to the Palestinians.

They not only refused to intervene to save the two-state solution, but rewarded Israel with trade deals and diplomatic and financial incentives, even as Israel eroded the institutional and territorial integrity necessary for Palestinian self-rule.

Germany’s stance, like that of the rest of Europe, is hypocritical. They have claimed opposition to Israel’s endless settlement expansion, and now to Trump’s plan, but their actions have paved the way to the annexation of the West Bank the plan condones.

Back in November the European Court of Justice finally ruled that products made in West Bank settlements – using illegally seized Palestinian resources on illegally seized Palestinian land – should not be labeled deceptively as “Made in Israel”.

And yet European countries are still postponing implementation of the decision. Instead, some of them are legislating against their citizens’ right to express support for a settlement boycott.

Similarly, Europe and North America continue to afford the Jewish National Fund, an entity that finances settlement-building, “charitable status”, giving it tax breaks as it raises funds inside their jurisdictions.

The Israeli media is full of stories of how the JNF actively assists extremist settler groups in evicting Palestinians from homes in East Jerusalem. But Britain and other states are blocking legal efforts to challenge the JNF’s special status.

Soon, it seems, Europe will no longer have to worry about its hypocrisy being so visible. Once the settlements have been annexed, as the Trump administration intends, the EU can set aside its ineffectual agonizing and treat the settlements as irrevocably Israeli – just as it has done in practice with the Israeli “neighborhoods” of occupied East Jerusalem.

Then, the UN’s list of shame can join decades’ worth of condemnatory resolutions that have been quietly gathering dust.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

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’54 Palestinians die’ as Israel refuses medical permits | News | Al Jazeera

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2018

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/palestinians-die-israel-refuses-medical-permits-180213122412689.html

by

Israel was responsible for at least 54 Palestinian deaths last year as it rejected hundreds of medical permit requests it received from Gaza residents seeking treatment outside the besieged strip, rights groups have said.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), highlighted the immediate need for Israel to end its decade-long siege of the Gaza Strip. Read the rest of this entry »

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