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Ed Webb

'She just vanished': Ethiopian domestic workers abused in Lebanon | Conflict | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...an-domestic-workers-in-lebanon

Lebanon Ethiopia Ghana migrants abuse rights workers labor labour

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • Aster left Ethiopia in search of work. But after a Lebanese family hired her as a live-in housekeeper in 2014, she found herself cut off from the outside world and labouring without pay. Aster’s family, unable to contact her, feared she was dead.
  • Driven by Ethiopia’s rising living costs and unemployment, hundreds of thousands have gone to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Kuwait. But what many find, activists and domestic workers say, is a cycle of exploitation and modern-day slavery that is hard to escape.
  • Rights groups have long documented cases like Aster’s, finding “consistent patterns of abuse” under Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries’ “kafala” or sponsorship system. The system links a migrant domestic worker’s legal status to the contractual relationship with her employer.
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  • The group helped free Filipina domestic worker Halima Ubpah. According to This is Lebanon, Ubpah was confined without pay in the home of a family with close connections to Lebanon’s political elite for 10 years.
  • Local traffickers in Ethiopia work in tandem with recruitment agencies in Beirut. Ethiopian traffickers are known to have charged up to $500 to facilitate the travel of recruits to Lebanon, where domestic workers make on average $150 a month.
  • Some Lebanese employers force their domestic workers to put in extremely long hours, deny them days off, withhold pay, confiscate their passports to prevent them from leaving, and severely restrict their movement and communication
  • Following reports of abuse, Ethiopia, in 2008, banned its citizens from travelling to Lebanon for work. But the ban has never been properly enforced and the numbers of women migrating to Lebanon for work swelled in subsequent years.
  • “I kept asking ‘when are you going to pay my sister?’ She would say that after six months, Meskerem would receive the accumulated pay,” Tsedale told Al Jazeera by phone from Beirut. In March of 2015, with Meskerem yet to see a penny for more than two years of work, an exasperated Tsedale reached an agreement with her sister’s employer: Meskerem would be paid by the end of the month or she’d be permitted to leave. But when Tsedale went to visit her sister towards the end of March, she found an empty apartment.
  • Meseret started working for a Lebanese family as a domestic worker shortly after arriving in the city of Jounieh in February 2011. Things started off well, Emebet said. Her daughter received her salary and sent money home. But a little over a year after departing Ethiopia, she was suddenly unable to reach Meseret by phone and the monthly remittances stopped coming in. “I don’t know why she suddenly stopped calling,” Emebet said. “She just vanished.” Meseret’s parents made the trip to Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, a two-hour bus ride away in Addis Ababa on at least two occasions to plead for help in locating their daughter. “They took our names and opened a file for her. We hoped they might provide answers.” But none came
  • “This is Lebanon”, a Canada-based domestic worker rights organisation that works to locate and free women who have been abused under the kafala system
  • “Since 2017, we’ve looked into over 6,000 complaints of various types of abuse,” Uprety told Al Jazeera. “Many are resolved through negotiations, in particular when it’s cases related to unpaid salaries. We escalate things only when abusers refuse to cooperate.”
  • This is Lebanon caseworkers studied the files of both Meskerem and Meseret for most of 2019. A few weeks after Al Jazeera visited the Emebet’s home, the group called Meseret’s Lebanese employer, Dr May Saadeh, a single mother of three daughters. This is Lebanon activists told Saadeh they would post Meseret’s story to the group’s Facebook page if she did not release the Ethiopian woman. Saadeh gave Meseret some cash and booked her a flight back to Ethiopia. Within days, Meseret was free. By September 2019, Meseret arrived back home.
  • Oula Keyrouz admits Aster is still owed six years of wages, but denies her family mistreated Aster, saying she has pictures she took of Aster enjoying herself in the family home. “I saw her like a daughter to me, like another one of my children.”
  • “Out of nowhere, she suddenly told me that I would be going home. I wasn’t allowed to use a phone for seven years. That day, she handed me the phone and said, ‘call your mother, tell her you will see her soon’.”
  • Meseret boarded a late-night flight back to her homeland, with nothing but the clothes on her back and the cash she was handed. She had no luggage and was still owed seven years worth of pay, more than $12,000.
  • When she was taken by her employer to renew her residency papers, Meseret pleaded with officers at the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut for help. But they turned her away, she said. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, as well as an official Meseret said she spoke to at the consulate did not respond to requests for comment. Saadeh also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s repeated requests for comment.
  • Meskerem boarded a plane and returned to Ethiopia as part of a group of formerly imprisoned domestic workers whose one-way tickets were covered by donations from members of the large Ethiopian community in Lebanon. Meskerem was a free woman again, but returned to Ethiopia last June, terribly scarred by her ordeal. Emaciated, drained, Meskerem had also lost most of her teeth.
  • After months of recuperating, Meskerem gradually opened up about her time in Lebanon, and spoke of the physical and mental abuse endured, the lack of food and how she was locked in at all times and forbidden contact with the outside world
  • “Aster is happy in our home, she is like one of my daughters,” Oula Keyrouz told Al Jazeera by phone. “I don’t understand what the family in Ethiopia wants because we don’t speak their language. But we treat her well.” But Aster told Al Jazeera that she has endured years of abuse, in particular at the hands of Oula’s husband Michel, allegations Oula denied. Aster explained that years ago Michel nearly strangled her with a belt, as punishment for an ill-fated escape attempt.
  • Oula Keyrouz admitted that Aster was owed six years worth of pay, totalling thousands of dollars. “We keep her money for her in a safe. She will take all of it when she returns to her country one day.” When asked when that might be, Oula Keyrouz said that “because of the dollar crisis in Lebanon,” the family couldn’t afford to send Aster home.
  • On June 17, 2020, a taxi pulled up to the Keyrouz family home. Aster, who had made coffee for Oula Keyrouz, walked outside, pretending to be taking out the trash. Instead, she stepped into the waiting vehicle, never to be seen again by the family that had stripped her of her dignity for six years. She was dropped outside the Ethiopian consulate, where members of a community group who had called the taxi, paid the fare and took her in. “It was like being freed from prison,” Aster later said.
  • Aster was part of a group of 90 Ethiopian domestic workers who were repatriated in September, with the help of Egna Legna Besidet, a Beirut-based nonprofit organisation.
  • Aster successfully escaped the Keyrouz home, but like Meseret and Meskerem, she returned from Lebanon empty-handed after years of toiling without pay.
  • In Lebanon, where as many as 400,000 Ethiopians live, migrant workers are also excluded from the protections of the country’s labour laws – putting their lives and livelihood at risk of abuse and exploitation.
  • When asked about the three women’s cases, Lebanese Labour Ministry official Marlene Atallah said her office was aware of such cases and was working on preventive measures. “We have set up a committee at the ministry tasked with dealing with complaints from domestic workers,” Atallah explained. “There is now an emergency hotline number workers can call in case of violations. We have also begun giving orientation sessions for domestic workers to learn how to bring their cases to Lebanese courts.” But Lebanese courts have rarely sentenced abusive employers to jail time, and any kind of justice is often out of reach for migrant workers.
  • authorities estimate that at least two domestic workers die weekly on average. These are mainly deaths by suicide or from botched escape attempts.
  • the deaths of most migrant workers in Lebanon are rarely looked into.
Ed Webb

Terms of Abuse | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...terms-of-abuse

Tunisia politics transition law women violence

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 17 - Cached
  • Even though domestic violence is criminalized, most cases go unreported due to social stigma and a tendency to blame victims rather than perpetrators
  • “Domestic violence laws in Tunisia are not bad,” she said. “The problem isn’t the laws, but rather how to implement them.”
  • there also areas where Tunisian law does fall short — marital rape, which is not illegal, being one of the most prominent
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  • Speaking out against domestic abuse is hard enough; speaking out against forced sex isn’t even an option. A society that thinks it’s okay for a man to hit his wife is likely to condone marital rape. Even though Abbou, the parliamentarian, personally favors criminalizing marital rape, she said it would be a difficult discussion in a patriarchal society like Tunisia, which still expects women to obey their husbands
  • “Maybe it’s better for me to stick around and be hit by my husband,” she said. “I’d rather be abused by one person than be abused by a whole society.”
Ed Webb

Tunisia's Authoritarians Learn to Love Liberalism - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...rians-learn-to-love-liberalism

Tunisia police policing unions truthandreconciliation democratization

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jun 19 - Cached
  • Despite Tunisia’s history of worker militancy under the more than 70-year-old Tunisian General Labor Union, Interior Ministry laws from prerevolution Tunisia read that police and other internal security services—which fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry—are not allowed to form professional unions, nor to strike. So as the post-Ben Ali era witnessed a blossoming of civil society, the creation of countless nongovernmental organizations, and the spread of public debate, internal security employees took advantage of the newfound opening to create unions
  • “The regimes [prior to and after the revolution] used us. They want to put all the blame for abuses on us,” he said. “Before, it was oppression. Anyone of us could be fired for any reason. The station chief could say, ‘Hand me your badge and pistol and get out.’ So we demanded union rights, and we demanded that our colleagues who’d been dismissed for technical reasons—of course not those who stole or kidnapped—are brought back.”
  • Many Tunisians, from ordinary citizens to politicians to human rights workers, say that the security unions often protect the interests of the security state embodied in the Interior Ministry and protect their members from accountability for past and ongoing abuses, including murder. The portrait that emerges is of a security sector that has managed to precisely use Tunisia’s newfound liberal freedoms to entrench its own authoritarian power—to turn the power of the Tunisian revolution against itself.
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  • the unions’ most dangerous intervention has been their advocacy for the “Prosecution of Abuses Against the Armed Forces” draft law. In 2015, after the passage of a counterterrorism law, police unions began pushing for the Ministry of the Interior-drafted bill, which would, according to an Amnesty International report, “authorize security forces to use lethal force to protect property even when it is not strictly necessary to protect life, contrary to international standards.” It would also outlaw the “denigration” of the security forces and criminalize the unauthorized publication of “national security” information—a vague law posing an obvious threat to journalists.
  • Yassine Ayari, a rebellious Tunisian MP, is one of the country’s youngest, at 37. He’s also the only MP to have called for the dissolution of a security union. In a clamorous cafe in the basement of Tunisia’s parliament, he said that at several critical junctures since the revolution, the unions have intervened to protect those in the security apparatuses caught up in cases of torture or murder—citing the unions’ 2011 besieging of a military court that was trying officers accused of killing protesters, their call for members not to attend hearings by Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, and their storming of a courthouse to stop a trial and release five colleagues accused of torture
  • When police units have been accused of torture, they have responded with vicious defensiveness
  • the police unions aren’t just hostile to individuals claiming police abuse. They also oppose post-revolutionary institutions aimed at reckoning with the past and achieving a semblance of accountability. Hammami said, “Police unions have also been very hostile to the IVD (the French acronym used for Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, charged with carrying out investigations of almost 60 years of abuses, whose mandate ended in December of last year). The IVD summons officers that might be involved in cases they’re investigating. [The unions] have encouraged their members not to cooperate. They issue statements publicly on Facebook. They put out the message to their members that they don’t have to cooperate with the IVD. Sometimes it’s even more aggressive, saying, ‘Don’t go.’”
  • Truth and Dignity Commission President Sihem Bensedrine said that she believes the security unions are one of the parties most responsible for the undermining of transitional justice in Tunisia. “One of the strongest anti-justice groups are the police unions,” she said. “We have in our final report published their communiqués where they call for police not to testify before the IVD, and where they say they will not assure the security of the courts judging the police officers.”
  • the old regime elements in government need the security forces if they want to maintain power and return Tunisia to the way it was before the revolution. “The old powers want to come back,” she said. “They’re trying to use the police unions to do this. They’re organizing themselves to repress our free voices and protect themselves from accountability,”
Ed Webb

Bahrain's arrests of opponents show unsettling pattern of abuse | McClatchy - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...ains-arrests-of-opponents.html

Bahrain rights abuses authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 11 - No Cached
  • A detailed examination of Bahrain's arrest and treatment of the dissidents shows widespread and systematic abuse that raises questions about whether the country's Sunni Muslim government has crossed a line beyond which it can't restore social peace in the predominantly Shiite Muslim country.
  • dramatic and humiliating middle-of-the-night raids by 30 to 40 masked gunmen, followed by weeks of beatings and abuse in custody. None of the men has been charged with a crime.
  • anti-Shiite slurs
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  • "Stop screaming or we'll take your kid,"
  • In a videotaped confession that was played during the trial, defendant Ali Isa Saqer said that Mattar had encouraged the protesters to run over police. Saqer's "confession," which later was aired on Bahrain's government-controlled television, was delivered in a flat monotone, and he appeared to be under duress. Saqer died April 9 while in detention, one of four detainees who've died while incarcerated. A video of his corpse at the ritual washing ceremony showed signs of severe beatings. The Bahraini government has acknowledged that he died of torture.
  • It was a full week before he was allowed to contact his wife, and the call was cut seconds after it began. Later the family learned that he'd suffered continuous and severe beatings during the first two weeks he was held, and had lost 45 pounds. On May 2, Sharif's wife issued a cry for help, saying he'd spent 47 days "in a notorious prison, suffering under brutal and continuous torture." She said he'd been taken to the military hospital twice, but that his family hadn't been allowed to see him. "We do not know whether he will be able to further tolerate daily beatings and torture and pray he survives this unspeakable treatment," she said. Between May 8 and May 22, Sharif had four hearings before a military tribunal, but his lawyer was able to attend only one session. He's been charged with conspiring to overthrow the monarchy.
  • Fairooz, Mattar and Sharif are all known as moderate reformers who advocate a constitutional monarchy with an elected government in place of the royal regime.
Ed Webb

Torture in Bahrain Becomes Routine With Help From Nokia Siemens - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-nokia-siemens-networking.html

Bahrain surveillance

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them
  • “The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.
  • Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.
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  • “We are very aware that communications technology can be used for good and ill,” NSN spokesman Roome says. The elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business, and the company has since established a human rights policy and due diligence program, he says. “Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions,” he says.
  • Uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain have drawn strength from technologies such as social-networking sites and mobile-phone videos. Yet, the flip side of the technology that played a part in this year’s “Facebook revolutions” may be far more forceful. Rulers fought back, exploiting their citizens’ digital connections with increasingly intrusive tools. They’ve tapped a market that’s worth more than $3 billion a year, according to Jerry Lucas, president of McLean, Virginia- based TeleStrategies Inc., organizer of the ISS World trade shows for intelligence and lawful interception businesses. He derives that estimate by applying per-employee revenue figures from publicly traded Verint’s lawful intercept business across the mostly privately held industry.
  • Besides Bahrain, several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year -- including Egypt, Syria and Yemen -- also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor. Trovicor equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.
  • The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and other human rights activists have blamed Nokia Siemens for aiding government repression. In 2009, the company disclosed that it sold a monitoring center to Iran, prompting hearings in the European Parliament, proposals for tighter restrictions on U.S. trade with Iran, and an international “No to Nokia” boycott campaign. While there have been credible reports the gear may have been used to crack down on Iranian dissidents, those claims have never been substantiated, NSN spokesman Roome says. In Bahrain, officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.
  • During the Arab spring, it was easy to spot the company’s fingerprints, says Gyamlani. Tuning in to Germany’s N24 news channel at his home in Munich, he immediately suspected that governments were abusing systems he’d installed. Failed uprisings stood out to him because of the way the authorities quashed unrest before it spread
  • Schaake says surveillance systems involving information and communications technology should join military items such as missile parts on lists of restricted exports. Schaake helped to sponsor a parliamentary resolution in February 2010 that called for the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, to ban exports of such technology to regimes that could abuse it. The commission hasn’t implemented the nonbinding resolution. The U.S. Congress passed a law in 2010 barring federal contracts with any businesses that sold monitoring gear to Iran. An investigation ordered by Congress and completed in June by the Government Accountability Office was unable to identify any companies supplying the technology to Iran, partly because the business is so secretive, the agency reported.
Ed Webb

Erasing people through disinformation: Syria and the "anti-imperialism" of fools | AlJu... - 0 views

www.aljumhuriya.net/...nti-imperialism%E2%80%9D-fools

Syria rights imperialism left analysis opinion assad Russia China US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Mar 21 - Cached
  • sought to align themselves with a long and venerable tradition of internal domestic opposition to the abuses of imperial power abroad, not only but quite often issuing from the left. But they do not rightfully belong in that company. No one who explicitly or implicitly aligns themselves with the malignant Assad government does. No one who selectively and opportunistically deploys charges of “imperialism” for reasons of their particular version of “left” politics rather than opposing it consistently in principle across the globe—thereby acknowledging the imperialist interventionism of Russia, Iran, and China—does.
  • The evidence that US power has itself been appallingly destructive, especially during the Cold War, is overwhelming. All across the globe, from Vietnam to Indonesia to Iran to Congo to South and Central America and beyond, the record of massive human rights abuses accumulated in the name of fighting Communism is clear. In the post-Cold War period of the so-called “War on Terror,” American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have done nothing to suggest a fundamental national change of heart. But America is not central to what has happened in Syria, despite what these people claim. The idea that it somehow is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is a by-product of a provincial political culture which insists on both the centrality of US power globally as well as the imperialist right to identify who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are in any given context.
  • erasure of Syrian lives and experiences embodies the very essence of imperialist (and racist) privilege. These writers and bloggers have shown no awareness of the Syrians, including signatories to this letter, who risked their lives opposing the regime, who have been incarcerated in the Assads’ torture prisons (some for many years), lost loved ones, had friends and family forcibly disappeared, fled their country—even though many Syrians have been writing and speaking about these experiences for many years.
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  • Syrians who directly opposed the Assad regime, often at great cost, did not do so because of some Western imperialist plot, but because decades of abuse, brutality, and corruption were and remain intolerable. To insist otherwise, and support Assad, is to attempt to strip Syrians of all political agency and endorse the Assads’ longstanding policy of domestic politicide, which has deprived Syrians of any meaningful say in their government and circumstances.
  • the “anti-imperialism” and “leftism” of the unprincipled, of the lazy, and of fools
  • reinforces the dysfunctional international gridlock exhibited in the UN Security Council
Ed Webb

On the Second Anniversary: Censorship Concerns | Arabic Literature (in English) - 0 views

arablit.wordpress.com/...nniversary-censorship-concerns

Egypt censorship politics #jan25 cartoons art

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • At a recent news conference, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights noted that, two years after January 25, many abuses of state power continue. Censorship is among these abuses
  • censorship, instability, and fear of censorship create a difficult environment for longer-form artistic developments
  • in a recent interview with Mai Elwakil and Andeel at the Egypt Independent, pioneering political cartoonist Amro Selim remained steadfast: We need to constantly push the boundaries whether they are set by society, the political regime or even a newspaper’s editors. If people equate your critique of a bearded political Islamist figure with atheism, then you must do it more, all the time, on purpose. This is ground that we are gaining. It is a battle with possible lawsuits and threats. But we must continue. We went through a lot to be able to draw the president every day. We won ground under Mubarak’s rule. At the beginning of Al-Dostour, I told them that we must shatter the god-like image of the ruler who we cannot draw. We started drawing him from the back, and bit-by-bit we turned him around, until making a cartoon of him became the norm. Then we drew his sons, Gamal and Alaa. We were very happy when these cartoons were published. Before that, if Mubarak were ever represented, it would be with Egypt holding him like her beloved son. We have come a long way in a society that asked us to “respect” the ruler. Now, they want us to go back.
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  • I believe there is a communication channel between cartoonists and readers that even editors might miss. It is amusing to experiment with overcoming censorship.
Ed Webb

Bahraini police taking aim at reporters, teachers | McClatchy - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...aini-police-taking-aim-at.html

teachers journalists Bahrain rights abuses media authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 11 - No Cached
  • After severely curbing news coverage of its crackdown on opposition groups by foreign reporters, Bahraini authorities have begun an assault on local journalists working for international news agencies — with arrests, beatings and, apparently in one instance, electric shock.
  • Besides ousting the editors of the only independent daily newspaper, Al Wasat, the authorities have arrested local reporters and photographers and expelled the only resident foreign reporter, who worked for the Reuters news agency. Most foreign news reporters, including this one, have been prevented from entering Bahrain.
  • The intimidation campaign appears to be focused on teachers, who report that as many as 30 elementary and secondary school teachers are taken from their classrooms at a time and driven to police stations where they are subjected to hours of verbal and physical abuse before being released.
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  • "They called me a donkey, a cow, a liar. They said I am fat. I am an embarrassment, " said one teacher. Most of the teachers were beaten over the head, and had to give up their cell phones and laptop computers, the teacher said. "The whole thing was laughable," the teacher said, "except that I had all my curriculum plans and grades for my pupils on my computer. I need that back."
  • Ed Webb on 26 May 11
     
    with allies like these, who needs enemies?
Ed Webb

BBC News - Bahrain poised for human rights report - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-middle-east-15358707

Bahrain human rights human rights

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • "It's a school night" said the police captain, "they have homework and they'll go home soon, but you should see it at weekends!"
  • When I asked Mansour Al-Jamri, the editor of the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat, if he believed that the human rights situation had now improved he gave me a qualified answer. "It marginally improved in that we don't have people dying in custody any more," he said. "The torture to death has stopped, but not the beatings, not the abuses of people during detention or at the time of protest." "I've personally seen one person a few days ago being beaten up by four security officers and they bled him before arresting him. So this is continuing, people are being intimidated and they are being abused."
Ed Webb

Egypt: Forcibly disappeared transgender woman at risk of sexual violence and torture | ... - 0 views

www.amnesty.org/...of-sexual-violence-and-torture

Egypt LGBT LGBTQ policing police rights abuse abuses authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Fears are growing for the safety and wellbeing of Malak al-Kashef, a transgender woman seized during a police raid from her home in Giza in the early hours of 6 March and who has not been heard from since, Amnesty International said. Malak al-Kashef was taken by police to an undisclosed location. Her lawyers have not been able to locate her and police stations have denied she is in their custody.
  • Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity
  • Amnesty International believes that Malak’s arrest relates to her calls for peaceful protests following a major train crash in Cairo’s central train station on 27 February that killed at least 25 people. “Malak al-Kashef appears to have been detained solely for peacefully exercising her rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly
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  • Due to her gender identity, Malak is at increased risk of torture by the police, including rape and sexual violence, as well as assault by other detainees
  • Malak al-Kashef is a transgender woman who is undergoing gender affirming surgery. However, she has not yet managed to have her gender identity officially recognized and is therefore registered as male in official documents
Ed Webb

Tunisia: Parliament Shouldn't Undercut Transitional Justice | Human Rights Watch - 0 views

www.hrw.org/...-undercut-transitional-justice

Tunisia rights law abuses truthandreconciliation

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “Tunisian authorities have already hampered the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission by refusing to fully cooperate with it and by adopting a controversial law on administrative reconciliation,” said Amna Guellali, Tunisia director at Human Rights Watch. “By voting ‘no’ to extending the commission’s work, parliament would be voting ‘yes’ for impunity.”
  • known by its French initials IVD
  • It said an extension was necessary in light of the numerous hurdles it had encountered, including the government’s lack of cooperation, and difficulties in accessing government archives and military court case files.
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  • mandated to investigate all human rights violations from 1955, shortly before Tunisia’s independence from France, to 2013
  • transferring cases of egregious human rights violations to specialized courts, which the transitional justice law and subsequent implementing legislation established but which have not begun hearing cases
  • a dozen more hearings covering various human rights violations during the presidencies of Habib Bourguiba from 1956 to 1987 and Ben Ali, from 1987 to 2011, such as torture, abuses against union rights, sexual violence against women imprisoned for political reasons, and violations of economic rights
  • 62,000 complaints
  • Tunisian authorities have not investigated or held anyone accountable for the vast majority of torture cases, including notorious cases resulting in death in custody
  • parliament’s approval, on September 13, 2017, of a law on “reconciliation in the administrative field,” which offers blanket impunity for civil servants implicated in corruption and embezzlement who did not benefit personally
Ed Webb

How to survive gaslighting: when manipulation erases your reality | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eality-coping-mechanisms-trump

authoritarianism media psychology abuse Trump politics

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • What’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past. The crazy-making, mind-bending, massive confusion-inducing effects of our current administration’s recklessness with the truth and disregard for verifiable facts is creating an emotional and psychological whiplash. It’s affecting people who have been subjected to abusive relationships; people who feel emotionally vulnerable and it seems to stoke a nearly unprecedented rage in those of us who can see it and feel powerless to do anything to combat it. When people in the mainstream media are being discredited, how exactly are you supposed to call this out?
  • Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.
  • the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.
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  • things will never make sense
  • Detaching from the gaslighting does not mean total detachment. It means distinguishing between the world of the gaslighter and the real world.
  • often people are willing to give up their reality in favor of hanging on to a relationship rather than rupturing it
  • write down what actually happened
  • having to verify reality is in itself destabilizing
Ed Webb

Are the Arab revolutions back? | Algeria | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...volutions-191126074112926.html

opinion analysis ArabWorld uprisings protests revolution revolutions democracy

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - Cached
  • are the revolutions of the Arab world and its neighbourhood back? Or perhaps more accurately - did they go anywhere to begin with? How are we to read these seemingly similar uprisings reminiscent of the glorious days and nights of Tahrir Square writ large?
  • Two counter-revolutionary forces have sought to derail the Arab revolutions: the governments of regional authoritarian powers (with the help of the United States and Israel) on one side and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) - the offspring of their geopolitical machinations - on the other.
  • Since this new wave of protests began, various attempts have been made to explain them in the context of global or local trends.  Similar demonstrations have taken place around the world and been attributed to the austerity measures of incompetent governments. In Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, public anger with economic mismanagement has sent thousands of people on to the streets.
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  • More specific patterns of regional histories need to be taken into account before we turn to more global trends.  
  • Within what historians call the longue duree frame of reference, the success of counter-revolutionary forces in derailing these uprisings is but a temporary bump. The fundamental, structural causes of the Arab (and other world) revolutions remain the same and will outlast the temporary reactionary stratagems designed to disrupt them.
  • postcolonial states across the Arab and Muslim world, all the way to Asia, Africa and Latin America have lost their raisons d'etre and therefore their legitimacy.
  • Defiance of abusive state powers and their foreign backers - think of the junta in Egypt and their US and Israeli supporters, or Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian enablers - cannot be suppressed by yet another abusive total state. The statism at the heart of old-fashioned total revolutions - that one good state will follow one bad state - has long since lost its relevance and legitimacy. What we are witnessing today is the sustained synergy of delayed defiance, open-ended revolutions, and public happiness that in its revolutionary potential is far more enduring than the false promises a total state can deliver.
  • The naked brutality of state powers in suppressing the transnational uprisings were clear indications of their absolute and final loss of legitimacy.
  • In its global configuration, that "democratic" spectacle has resulted in the murderous Hindu fanaticism in India ("the largest democracy in the world") and the corrupt and ludicrous reality show of Donald Trump in the US ("the oldest democracy in the world") or else in the boring banality of Brexit in the United Kingdom. The world has nothing to learn from these failed historical experiments with democracy. The world must - and in the unfolding Arab revolutions - will witness a whole different take on nations exercising their democratic will. Delayed defiance will systematically and consistently strengthen this national will to sovereignty and in equal measures weaken the murderous apparatus of total states which have now degenerated into nothing more than killing machines.
Ed Webb

Black Lives Matter skirts North Africa despite everyday racism - France 24 - 0 views

www.france24.com/...africa-despite-everyday-racism

race racism Africa Maghreb Algeria Tunisia Morocco minorities Libya xenophobia

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, most observers agree, has not triggered a major debate on racism or police violence against black Africans within the Maghreb region itself.Only Tunis saw a small demonstration in early June of around 200 locals and foreigners, at the call of the association Mnemty.The protest was "a message for African Americans from Mother Africa to say 'We are with you'," said its leader, Saadia Mosbah, a dark-skinned Tunisian.
  • a long-standing culture of silence about race.
  • In Morocco, a coalition of associations in 2014 launched an anti-racism campaign in support of sub-Saharan migrants with the message "Massmiytich Azzi!", literally, "Don't call me a black man".After a string of attacks in Tunisia, including a violent assault against an Ivorian woman, Mnemty successfully lobbied parliament into adopting a law against hate speech in October 2018.
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  • "We have to wage a permanent struggle against these verbal abuses," said Algerian sociologist Mohamed Saib Musette."Some Algerians forget that they themselves are Africans." Interracial marriages are rare in North Africa, he said, and "very few TV stars, civil servants or political leaders are dark-skinned".
  • And the Algerian parliament followed suit in April 2020, reflecting, according to Musette, the fact that the reality of racism "is there and must be fought".
  • Slavery was first formally abolished in the region by Tunisia in 1846. French-colonised Algeria partially followed suit two years later, while Morocco under French mandate only did so in 1922.
  • modern-day slave markets have been reported in war-torn Libya, where desperate migrants suffer horrific abuse at the hands of human traffickers
  • In the absence of official data, non-government groups estimate there are more than 200,000 African foreigners in Algeria, and tens of thousands in both Morocco and Tunisia.
  • Algeria and Tunisia bar foreign Africans from obtaining residency papers unless they are students.Only Morocco has exceptionally granted residency rights to some 50,000 people, mostly from West Africa, since 2014.
Ed Webb

Tunisia: LGBT activist's assault seen as a pattern by police | AP News - 0 views

apnews.com/...d0629969ed647f9eab2b4465f14d70

Tunisia LGBT LGBTQ police policing rights violence protests activists

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - Cached
  • A prominent LGBTQ activist in Tunisia has reported that two men, one dressed in police uniform, threw him to the ground, beat and kicked him during an assault they said was punishment for his “insulting” attempts to file complaints against officers for previous mistreatment
  • The Oct. 21 attack in Tunisia’s capital left Baabou with welts and bruises on his face and body. He said that neck trauma caused difficulty breathing, and that his assailants took his laptop, phone and wallet. Police have not publicly commented on Baabou’s account, although his lawyer says an internal police investigation is underway
  • A 2019 study by the Arab Barometer showed that acceptance of homosexuality is low or extremely low across the region. In Algeria, the 26% of respondents who said being gay was acceptable represented the highest share in the region.
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  • Homosexual activity in the North African country remains a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison
  • Although there are signs that attitudes towards Tunisia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are improving, activists say police grew emboldened following antigovernment protests this year as the country’s economy flailed amid the COVID-19 pandemic
  • observers say the October assault in the center of Tunis indicates that members of law enforcement are becoming more explicit in targeting LGBTQ individuals. Baabou’s reported abuse also highlights a pattern of officers independently seeking revenge for efforts by LGBTQ activists to bring misconduct cases against police who harassed or assaulted them, they say
  • “Usually the police are technicians of torture or abuse. They don’t leave fractures or bruises,”
  • After the 2011 revolution that deposed Ben Ali, tens of thousands of officers took advantage of new-found freedoms to unionize. But rights groups say Tunisia’s now-powerful police unions enable misconduct while the government turns a blind eye to brutality.
  • “Officers feel empowered to enact whatever form of violence they want, knowing that they will get away with it because the law is on their side,”
  • Transgender people are not recognized at an administrative or medical level, meaning they are unable to access gender-affirming procedures or to legally change their names, leaving them vulnerable to harassment or violence.
  • Damj has noted an increase in the persecution of LGBT people during the coronavirus pandemic. The organization provided legal assistance to LGBT individuals at police stations in 116 cases and responded to 195 legal consultation requests. The combined number is five times higher than in previous years, according to the group.
  • Observers point to the weeks of antigovernment protests this year as a turning point. Facebook pages linked to police unions began posting photos of LGBTQ activists at the protests, often captured using drones that flew over the crowds, and in some cases forcibly outing individuals to the public.
  • While Baabou thinks that the decriminalization of homosexuality is unlikely any time soon, he is more optimistic about “middle term” prospects. He points to shifting language around LGBT rights in Tunisia and the movement receiving support from other civil rights groups. “Now, we can put pressure and we can free people (from jail). In the past, this wasn’t possible at all,” he said.
Ed Webb

The complicated legacy of Qatar's World Cup - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...icated-legacy-qatars-world-cup

Qatar sport sports sportswashing football soccer FIFA labor workers rights HRW

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • perhaps the biggest test case for what happens when a Middle Eastern nation intent on using oil money to enhance its influence through sports emerges on the global stage.
  • Can sports help bring societal progress to a region that has long resisted change? Or are those countries rewarded with reputational prestige despite human rights abuses that they have little intention to address?
  • “FIFA has a human rights policy that guarantees press freedom, women’s rights and nondiscrimination,” said Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives for Human Rights Watch. “What the Qatar World Cup showed is that, if you have enough money, you can absolutely ignore those requirements.”
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  • Owing to its small population of roughly 300,000 citizens, Qatar relies heavily on migrant workers. When it won the World Cup bid, it employed a labor system called kafala. Under kafala, migrant workers, mostly seeking to leave impoverished conditions elsewhere, have to pay exorbitant recruitment fees and cannot change jobs without the consent of their employer. The system led to rampant abuses that included wage theft and unsafe working conditions, ultimately resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers. Qatar also bans homosexuality, which it defends on religious grounds.
  • In 2016, Qatar said it would abide by the United Nations’ human rights code. In 2019, Qatar announced it would abolish kafala. In 2021, Qatar instituted a minimum wage. The Supreme Committee, Qatar’s World Cup host organization, created a workers’ welfare program for those who built World Cup infrastructure. By the sound of the first whistle last November, the country’s labor market was “radically transformed,” a FIFA spokesman said.“Would any of that have happened if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup?” said Mary Harvey, chief executive at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. “Would kafala still be in place in Qatar if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup? That may not be the question people want to ask, but it’s important. … You don’t just flip the switch with a law change and expect an implementation is going to take hold. It’s going to take a generation probably to get this put in. But it’s still big change, and it’s change that is needed.”
  • Max Tuñón, head of the International Labor Organization’s Qatar office, said he has seen major improvements in working conditions for foreign laborers over the past five years.
  • We work all over the world, and we rarely see change happening at this pace
  • Rothna Begum, a Human Rights Watch researcher, has worked extensively in Qatar and visited with workers. (Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s government allows human rights groups to work in the country.) Begum said it is “not the case” that Qatar dismantled kafala in practice.“They didn’t do it properly, anyway,” Begum said. “They didn’t take away all the elements. They reformed aspects of the kafala system, but they didn’t dismantle the kafala system. The bits that they did reform, they are implementing in such a way that kafala still exists in practice.”
  • While workers can apply to change jobs, Begum said, she has found they must first give notice to their employer. If the employer does not sign a resignation notice, the worker cannot get permission from the government — “employer permission through the back door,”
  • “Qatari authorities — not just Qatari authorities but FIFA — sought to weaponize a narrative of Qatar being an underdog, that they were under attack in this double-standard way that no one else has been under attack before, and it’s because they are a Middle Eastern country,” Begum said. “Rather than dealing with the fact that they just did not come through with reforms and did not protect migrant workers who really contribute to the success of the World Cup and made sure they got their wages and compensated them for it, they instead used this narrative and weaponized it. We’re seeing the Saudis and UAE are moving in that direction.”
  • Qatar’s reforms also did not address the biggest cost of the World Cup: the migrant workers who died — in the thousands according to human rights groups, a number disputed by the Qatari government — while building stadiums and other infrastructure FIFA required after working in extreme heat on strict schedules. Human Rights Watch challenged whether Qatar could move forward with meaningful reform without compensating the families of the workers who died.
  • FIFA instituted its human rights policy in 2017 in response to criticism about Qatar. That policy may receive a more stringent test in coming years. Saudi Arabia, whose government has jailed and executed dissidents, submitted a bid to host the 2034 World Cup and is the favorite to host the tournament. Unlike Qatar, Saudi Arabia has not met with human rights groups.
Ed Webb

Egypt: What doesn't Morsi understand about police reform? - Opinion - Ahram Online - 0 views

english.ahram.org.eg/...nderstand-about-police-re.aspx

Egypt police policing reform history opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • torture was repealed from the Egyptian criminal code in the 19th Century because of a decision from within the state apparatus itself, specifically the police which reached an advanced degree of professionalism. It was also a reflection of a high degree of centralisation, strength and self-confidence of the state’s administrative apparatus, at the heart of which is the police.
  • It is disappointing to watch the serious regression of the Egyptian state over the past 30 years; a regression back to torture practices at police stations and locations of detention in Egypt. Even more upsetting is that those in power today do not recognise the dangers of continuing to ignore this explosive issue, especially after a revolution which – in my opinion – primarily occurred to end torture and other systematic abuses by police against citizens.
  • Egypt’s police today, unlike in the 19th Century, cannot reform itself from within because the state’s administrative apparatus – the judiciary and forensic science – which aided the police in this difficult task in the past, has collapsed. Meanwhile, torture has become systematic and routine which makes it impossible to expect police officers and commanders to accept this mission voluntarily.
Ed Webb

The Real Arab Demand - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-real-arab-demand.html

MENA ArabSpring revolt revolution uprisings opinion analysis authoritarianism legitimation

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Leave aside the simplistic Western narrative about the Arab uprisings representing the final unspooling of a universal urge for “democracy.” Far more threatening to this moment’s legacy is the way in which Arab leaders across the region are seeking to redirect the passion of an engaged public toward canards and chimeras, new and old.
  • The roots of the Arab Awakening are as explosive as they are straightforward: a demand for government that is legitimate in its relationship with the governed and one that is accountable for its actions
  • their quest, finally, to live as citizens, and not merely as subjects
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  • too many Arab leaders are betting on a mix of fear, inertia and confusion to change the subject. Masters of distraction, they are seeking to replace the alibis of old — “resistance” to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and resentment of the power of the United States — by stoking new, and far more dangerous, fears
  • Much as many of the region’s embattled leaders wish to deceive their allies in the West, themselves and their people that this is about perfidious Persia, Shiite sectarianism or political Islam (as threat or savior), the reality is much simpler: The Arab young want competent, responsive and responsible rule
  • in response to an expression of concern about human rights abuses in Egypt, Mubarak abruptly changed demeanor and delivered his standard ultimatum: It’s him or the Muslim Brotherhood. Was Mubarak right? Well, yes, but only up to a point, and only because he made it so by ensuring that the only effective opposition to his rule was channeled through the mosque
  • Power’s purpose has never been so contested, or so contingent, as it is today in the Middle East. Genuine legitimacy must now be earned, and re-earned, through the accountable exercise of power
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