Human-rights Activists Research Articles

Why I Write?

Why write? The spaces of intellectual dissidence once provided by universities—promoting disinterested inquiry, encouraging critical analysis, challenging conventional wisdoms—are increasingly controlled, if not squeezed out. A lethal mix of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism is unfolding in different combinations around the world, and one of its key targets of attack is intellectual freedom. It is pressing for academics as writers to ask, What is our purpose? Who is our reader? How do we navigate the tensions between the constraints of academic evaluation criteria and the compulsions of writing for wider publics, scholarly fidelity and activist commitments, writing as scholars and producing journalism or fiction? This article reflects on these questions through the writing of the book Nightmarch, an anthropologist’s account of the spread of the Naxalites, a Marx-, Lenin-, and Mao-inspired guerrilla struggle among Indigenous people in the heart of India. The backdrop is the rise of neoliberal audit cultures in UK universities sapping writing of its vitality and Hindu nationalism in India clamping down fiercely on debate, deliberation, and critique, with human rights activists and intellectuals imprisoned as alleged Maoists or “urban Naxals.” The overall aim of this essay is to contribute to opening the space for intellectual dissidence and ignite scholarly relevance beyond academia.

The Limits of Vietnam's Incrementalism towards the Abolition of Capital Punishment for Drug Offenses

AbstractInternational law has ruled out the application of the death penalty on drug offenses. Despite failure to meet the threshold to be categorised as one of the ‘most serious crimes’, the practice of capital punishment for drug offences in many parts of the world continues to dismay human rights activists and practitioners. This article aims to exhibit a dynamic view on drug offences under Vietnamese law. It contends that the nation's understanding of the severity of drug offences has witnessed incremental changes corresponding with international standards, although not completely compatible. Drawing on comparative scholarship, the article then moves on to ask whether there is any room left for the total abolition of capital punishment for drug offences. It suggests that Vietnam's incrementalism towards abolition has reached its bounds. Renovation in the understanding on the severity of drug crimes is very much needed to re-fuel the abolitionist movement in the country.

Launch of the revised version on the Istanbul Protocol.

On the 29th of June 2022, an updated version of the Istanbul Protocol was launched in Geneva, Switzerland; twenty three years after its first official endorsement by the OHCHR (Office of the Human Rights Commisioner, UN) in 1999. The Istanbul Protocol, or the Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; guides human rights activists, experts, and organizations around the world. The launch of this revised version was enabled by the contributions from more than 180 experts of the anti-torture field. It was hosted by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and led by the Istanbul Protocol Editorial Committee. The Istanbul Protocol lays out the international legal norms and standards for dealing with torture and ill-treatment. It sets the relevant ethical codes, and provides guidelines for the legal investigation of torture. The Protocol also details general considerations for interviews and the guidelines for documenting physical and psychological evidence. The revision adds in two sections which respectively underlines the role of health professionals in documenting torture through various contexts and provides recommendations on the implementation of the Protocol. Informed by six years of preparation and consultation, this revised version was spearheaded by four civil society organizations (the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, REDRESS Trust, Physicians for Human Rights, and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims) and four UN bodies, (Committee against Torture, the Subcomittee on the Prevention of Torture, Special Rapperteur on Torture; as well as the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture). This is the second update to the Protocol, the first being 18 years earlier in 2004. The revision of the Istanbul Protocol is not a replacement but rather an expansion. The document attempts to fill in the gaps created by almost two decades of global change. In the foreword of the updated document, Michelle Bachalet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, calls for states to make the Istanbul Protocol an 'essential part of training for all relevant public officials and medical professionals engaged in the custody, interrogation and treatment of persons subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment' (OHCHR, 2022).

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AHRD IN INDONESIA

Cases of human rights violations continue to occur in the Asian region, including the ASEAN region, even though ASEAN countries have agreed to adopt the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. In fact, the practice of AHRD is still minimally considered by ASEAN and ASEAN members themselves. Indonesia as an ASEAN member is also still taking action against human rights such as the case in Papua, not only local residents who get human rights violations from the government, but also from some data it is found that Papuan human rights activists are also intimidated. In this case, it can be seen that the implementation of the AHRD has not been fully maximized in Indonesia in handling cases of human rights violations contained in the points in the AHRD.

The Nature of Gender Portrayal in Editorial Cartoons: Analysis of Kenya’s Daily Nation and Standard Newspapers

Visual images often have lasting memory with the capacity to reveal the anguish of a tormented soul. It can stimulate sexual passion as well as generate intense feelings and excitement to the level of driving people to the bravery and barbaric acts. These images evoke responses in people based on their interpretation of meanings informed by common beliefs and values. In most cases, the victims are subjected to gender-based humiliation in the public eye. This paper investigates the nature of gender portrayal through selected editorial cartoons. This study is anchored on the relativist/interpretivist philosophical paradigm in which a qualitative case study design is adopted. The case in reference is the Daily Nation and the Standard newspapers of Kenya’s Nation Media Group and Standard Group, respectively. Data was generated from sampled cartoons published by the two dailies. The data was complemented by semi-structured in-depth interviews targeting the cartoonists, human rights activists, and gender specialists from selected organizations in Kenya. In total, 252 cartoons out of 2184 which is 11.5 percent, were sampled systematically through a six-week purposive sampling mechanism. Each week represented a month amounting to three years in a row. The findings of the study revealed that men were negatively represented in most of the cartoons. Specifically, men were linked to greed, corruption, political violence, and land grabbing among other issues. On the other hand, women were mostly portrayed as weak, helpless, vulnerable, and most afflicted. In over 30 of the sampled cartoons, women were projected as sexual objects and agents of beauty. And yet in some though only a few, the very women were projected as the voice of reason and one that could be entrusted with leadership and integrity. This study reveals the bias and increased stereotypical overtones and the inability of the two newspapers to adequately embrace gender sensitivity in the way cartoons portray both men and women to their readers. Editors, reporters, and cartoonists should remove bias and stereotypes in their portrayal of both men and women. To this end, urgent retraining and sensitization on gender sensitivity cartooning are highly recommended for media practitioners. Specific editorial guidelines for cartoonists and mentoring of female journalists to become cartoonists are equally required to mitigate biased cartooning.

Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Chris White.

<i>Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies</i>, edited by Fenggang Yang and Chris White.

Human rights activism after the movement ends: Global lessons from Kenya’s unfinished “revolution”

Some 30 years after their dangerous human rights activism in Kenya that challenged an authoritarian regime and won multiparty democracy, more than half the leading survivors were still politically active. Three were governors, one was the Supreme Court Chief Justice, five were human rights activists; others were attorneys or otherwise politically engaged. This study provides fresh insights on the theory of cycles of social movements and offers global implications for movements in other countries. The decline of social movements “remains relatively understudied from an empirical standpoint.” The study builds on the cycle theories of Tarrow, considered the “leading theoretician of protest cycles.” It finds that (1) long after a protest movement has ended, some activists may continue individual activism in line with the goals of the movement or a subset of goals; (2) partial victories or regime concessions tend to weaken cohesiveness of a movement and make subsequent victories harder; (3) regime change, although more dangerous, in some ways is easier than regime reform. The findings are based on interviews conducted by the author, mostly in Nairobi, with the leading veteran activists and others between 2019 and 2021, plus archival reviews.

The Nexus between Information Communication Technology and Human Rights in Southern Africa

The study sought to empirically test the contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to the advancement of human rights, drawing on the fact that safeguarding human rights through the use of ICT is a field of increasing interest to academics and those working towards the advancement of human rights and development practitioners. The literature on ICT and human rights holds the view that ICT can play a significant role in the advancement of human rights. ICT has become an essential instrument for realising human rights, and ensuring its accessibility must be a primary concern for all governments. However, despite the increase in ICT usage, the southern African region has been marred by atrocities and human rights violations. Many southern African governments regularly impose restrictions on human rights defenders, journalists, and rights activists, often to suit political goals. The use of ICT has extensive effects on the human rights agenda and forms an important tool in its endeavours to gather, analyse, and spread information and advocate for fitting remedies in response to human rights infringements. It is against this background that this study sought to examine the contribution of ICT to the advancement of human rights. The study was quantitative in nature, using panel data to estimate its model. The findings reveal a weak positive relationship between ICT and the advancement of human rights. The study recommends that governments and civil society encourage the use of ICT functionality in ways that advance human rights.

Bridging the Gap between Foreign Investor Rights and Obligations: Towards Reimagining the International Law on Foreign Investment

AbstractThis article proposes to see the history of the international law on foreign investment as about the promotion of investor rights as much as the resistance to investor obligations. The argument is that the divide between investment protection and the responsibility of foreign investors is one of the most significant features of international investment law. The article shows that the different treatment of rights and obligations is grounded in the same business project and legal imagination. Maintaining this divide has never been easy, as this model faced resistance, particularly from Latin America, trade unions and human rights activists. The analysis concludes by noting that academics can contribute to reimagining the international law on foreign investment by bringing investment treaty law and business and human rights closer. This shift is already happening.

The experiences of older formerly incarcerated adults in a specialized reentry program during the COVID-19 pandemic

A growing area of concern among prison reform advocates and human rights activists is the “greying prison population” or the continuous, unified growth in the number of older incarcerated individuals. Older individuals experience an accelerated aging process while incarcerated, but are less likely to reoffend upon release. While the aging prison population has in recent years become a focus of criminological and gerontological scholars, the lived experience of older formerly incarcerated individuals during the reentry process remains understudied. Using a qualitative approach, this cohort study seeks to further elucidate the unique needs, beliefs, and perceptions of this population within the context of an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of interviews was conducted with participants in a comprehensive reentry program for formerly incarcerated older adults in New York City who had been released between 2019 and 2020. Participants (n = 9) reported that their greatest challenges during the reentry process were securing safe and stable housing, managing physical and mental health issues, and coping with trauma, social isolation, and interpersonal conflicts. Other criminogenic factors which are typically associated with recidivism were less frequently reported among the cohort, including challenges securing employment and substance abuse issues.

“Whose Human Rights Anyway?” Post-colonial Perspectives of Being Intombi (Virgin) in Contemporary South Africa

ABSTRACT This article explores how izintombi (virgins) in the Zulu culture make sense of being young, Zulu and woman in contemporary South Africa; a country where human rights are protected through the Bill of rights within the Constitution, and watched by human rights activists. The resurgence of ubuntombi (virginity) in-between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s was accompanied by the revival of virginity testing. This aroused discontentment from some scholars, human rights advocates and gender activists who regard it as a violation of girls’ human rights. Representations from practitioners of ubuntombi (virginity), however, were not among the critics, yet they consider this cultural practice their cultural heritage and identity. The article is based on empirical research conducted on ubuntombi (virginity) through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) in KwaZulu-Natal province. Through a postcolonial feminist theoretical lens, the article demonstrates that the tested young Zulu women, included in the research, re-narrate and re-claim ubuntombi and virginity testing as cultural practices that inform their young womanhood in the Zulu context. Even though some izintombi object to virginity testing, they similarly enjoy their status of being izintombi since they regard it as their indigenous practice.

Duterte's “War on Drugs” Rhetoric

Duterte's “War on Drugs” Rhetoric

On Social Networks, Anonymous Testimonies, and Other Tools of Feminist Activism against Sexual Violence in Egypt

On Social Networks, Anonymous Testimonies, and Other Tools of Feminist Activism against Sexual Violence in Egypt

School Social Workers in Human Rights Education Against Hate Speech in Poland

Our aim is to show how digital skills training for school social workers in Poland became possible with the involvement of human rights activists, media, intellectuals and human rights trainers. School social work in Poland has become the focus of activity for trainers focused on human rights. The huge training process began in response to the need for hate speech prevention which was first expressed in Polish intellectual circles and mainstream media. It led to the school social work development programme, based on the metaphor of garden and gardening within the hate speech prevention discourse. We describe action research focused on our way of teaching school social workers to be the gardeners of the internet space.

Sustainable Global Supply Chains: The Human Rights Aspect

The objective of this paper is to examine Global Supply Chains (GSC) from the perspective of human rights. Economists and international business scholars focus on the economic nature of this phenomenon and its complex international structure. International institutions (such as the WTO, OECD and others) direct their efforts to the regulation of the relations within the structure and to the measurement of the contribution of GSC to national economies and global trade. Human Rights activists, on the other hand, are tackling violations of human rights at the various stages of the supply chains. At present, politicians, regulators and a limited number of scholars are also trying to deal with the issue of human rights within GSC from a different angle – namely, the behaviour of business with regard to human rights issues in international business activities. The paper builds on the author’s previous research on global supply chains in their role as stakeholders within the corporate governance system. The author adheres to the view that the study of human rights issues in the context of GSCs demands an interdisciplinary research approach and utilizes an adequate conceptual framework that should be further developed. Theoretical observations are combined with a survey on the business attitude towards human rights. Venue for following studies is drafted. Keywords: words: global supply chains, human rights; international business; stakeholders; corporate governance, adverse impact, modern slavery JEL: M54, M55, K3, J28, F2

A public policy analysis with key stakeholders' insights to understand India's compliance with the WHO framework convention on tobacco control.

BackgroundTobacco-related morbidity and mortality is a global public health challenge. India is the second largest consumer of tobacco in the world. The present paper synthesises the data from qualitative interviews of experts working in the field of tobacco control alongside a critical analysis of the national tobacco control policy of India.MethodsThe research methods adopted for the present work included the following: 1) qualitative in-depth interview of experts and analysis of the qualitative data using thematic analysis; 2) searching existing literature and secondary data on the national tobacco policy and analysing the same using the methodological orientation of qualitative content analysis; and 3) health policy analysis of the national tobacco policy. Themes and sub-themes obtained from the two approaches were compared to generate meaning.ResultsNine experts (three women and six men) participated in the in-depth qualitative interviews from a variety of professional backgrounds (preventive oncology researcher, tobacco cessation specialist, public health expert, clinicians and human rights activists). The systematic and comprehensive literature search resulted in finding 14 research papers, reviews, policy documents and commentaries on the tobacco epidemic in India. The various themes that emerged from the qualitative interviews that found support from secondary data as well were: ‘Conflicting policies of Government: Promoting tobacco production and at the same time restricting its use’, ‘Failure to shield from influence of tobacco industry’, ‘Demand reduction proposals through taxation and pricing’, ‘Legislation to protect from and reduce the harm of second-hand smoking’, ‘Health warning on packaging and labelling of tobacco products’, ‘Promotion and advertisement of tobacco products’, ‘Prohibiting production by and sale to minors’.DiscussionThe control of a tobacco epidemic has multiple structural and functional challenges embedded in the complexity of the public–private interfaces, socio-economic forces, conflicting interests of the stakeholders and diverse nature of the problem. Any intervention planned to reduce the tobacco usage at a population level needs to take these factors into consideration.

The Impact of Covid-19 On Migrants and Trafficked Persons in Malaysia

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted people’s lives, economic status, and daily routine. The extensive scale of the virus has caused fear, confusion and panic throughout the globe spurring states to devise stringent procedures to manage the crisis. In Malaysia, A Movement Control Order (MCO) was implemented on 18 March 2020 as a preventive measure to control the spread of the virus. To enforce such restrictions, the government relies heavily on law enforcers, and the criminal justice system to ensure public safety and security. In light of such restrictive measures, those who are severely impacted by such repressive rules are the marginalized communities. This includes trafficked persons, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as law enforcers seek to use the pandemic to further control their movements and restrict their rights wherever possible. In this instance, xenophobia, anti-immigrant prejudice, intolerance, social exclusion, and discrimination exacerbates the vulnerability of migrants particularly undocumented migrants and trafficked victims. According to human rights activists, these groups are exposed to regular insults, verbal abuse, threat, public shaming and blame by citizens, employers, politicians, and enforcement agencies. Therefore, this article highlights two main points. They are: xenophobia between the dominant populations and the migrant community in Malaysia; state’s policing of migrants and the conditions of the detention centres and shelters in Malaysia. The article concludes by arguing that the policing and ‘protection’ of migrants during the pandemic have resulted in irreparable harm, mistrust, and stress among the migrants which undermines the positive development outcomes of migration.

Social mining for sustainable cities: thematic study of gender-based violence coverage in news articles and domestic violence in relation to COVID-19

We argue that social computing and its diverse applications can contribute to the attainment of sustainable development goals (SDGs)—specifically to the SDGs concerning gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls, and to make cities and human settlements inclusive. To achieve the above goals for the sustainable growth of societies, it is crucial to study gender-based violence (GBV) in a smart city context, which is a common component of violence across socio-economic groups globally. This paper analyzes the nature of news articles reported in English newspapers of Pakistan, India, and the UK—accumulating 12,693 gender-based violence-related news articles. For the qualitative textual analysis, we employ Latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling and propose a Doc2Vec based word-embeddings model to classify gender-based violence-related content, called GBV2Vec. Further, by leveraging GBV2Vec, we also build an online tool that analyzes the sensitivity of Gender-based violence-related content from the textual data. We run a case study on GBV concerning COVID-19 by feeding the data collected through Google News API. Finally, we show different news reporting trends and the nature of the gender-based violence committed during the testing times of COVID-19. The approach and the toolkit that this paper proposes will be of great value to decision-makers and human rights activists, given the prompt and coordinated performance against gender-based violence in smart city context—and can contribute to the achievement of SDGs for sustainable growth of human societies.

‘I was celebrating the justice that the victims got’: exploring irreconciliation among Bangladeshi human rights activists in London

AbstractThis essay investigates transnational human rights activist networks seeking justice for war crimes committed during the Bangladesh War of 1971, especially in light of the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on activists in London, it demonstrates the need to engage with transitional justice initiatives discursively and ethnographically in order to avoid losing sight of the ways in which uses of human rights concepts can veil power dimensions through universalist legalistic abstractions. The essay explores engagements with atrocities of the war by mapping the travel and uses of human rights tropes to articulate claims of justice. It showcases how in addressing the violence of the Bangladesh War, victor justice and punishment are emphasized while futures are imagined in which enemies no longer exist. In the examples, a language of justice is employed to call for prosecution, but justice is reframed so that it is equated with the impossibility of reconciling people on opposing sides during the war.

Freedom of speech in contemporary Arab societies from a gender perspective

Women and girls in contemporary Arab societies suffer from various and intersecting forms of discrimination that deny them their enjoyment of fundamental human rights. The right to freedom of expression is one of the essential areas that may expose this gender-based discrimination and patriarchal attitudes. In many contexts, freedom of expression has enabled women to speak out and organize in civil, political, social, economic and cultural spheres and contexts; participate in their own emancipation and improve their status. Women’s exercise of freedom of expression has also provided them with new rights such as the right to vote, the right to control their own bodies, the right to join unions and the right to equality before the law and to participate in decision-making and hold governments to account. In the last decade, we have witnessed different attacks on women’s rights particularly their right to the freedom of expression, as scholars, journalists, social media users, human rights defenders, politicians and activists. The aim of this article is to explore emerging challenges and to highlight the struggle of Arab women for freedom of expression.