Justice Richard Goldstone, who gained respect internationally for his work in the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and his human rights work in Argentina, South Africa and Kosovo led an investigation into violations of international law committed by all parties involved in the fighting last winter in Gaza and southern Israel. The UN mandated investigation found that both Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups committed grave violations of international law, including war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity, during the conflict. The report supports Amnesty International’s own findings of war crimes committed by both sides.
US made Hellfire missile manufactured in Orlando, FL used in incident where two Palestinian medics and a child were killed.
Remarks from the State Department and specifically Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice do not bode well for the report’s reception in the Human Rights Council and the recommendation that the HR Council take concrete steps to move the process of accountability forward. Ambassador Rice has said she has ’serious concerns’ about the mission’s mandate and that it is imperative to not get distracted and look forward to resolve the conflict.
Amnesty International believes that justice and accountability can never be an impediment to peace, but are the foundation to an enduring peace in the region. And that the recommendations contained in the Goldstone report are the best hope for achieving justice for the victims and to end the atmosphere of impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators from both sides and help end the cycle of violence.
Justice Richard Goldstone is scheduled to present the findings of his team’s investigation Tuesday, September 29th to the Human Rights Council. The HR Council will then discuss the findings and has the ability to refer the report and its recommendations for consideration by the UN Security Council. The United States recently joined the HR Council and has the ability to sway the council one way or the other.
Though Alyce Driver worked three jobs, none of them provided health insurance. Regular teeth cleaning and yearly physicals for her five children were a luxury she could not afford. One day her twelve-year-old son Deamonte complained of a headache. Seven weeks later, Deamonte was dead.
The diagnosis? An abscessed tooth.
While death from tooth decay may have been common in the middle ages, this was 2007.
And while one certainly still hears of such things in some of the more underserved areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, this was in the capital of the richest country on earth.
Deamonte’s story and those of thousands like him who die every year from preventable disease in the United States underscores what’s wrong with the current health care debate. We should be concerned – appalled – that this can happen in our country. But instead of asking ourselves how to right this wrong, we seem to have let the health care debate become about anything but health care.
This country’s founders believed that every human being was endowed with certain inalienable rights – the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the last century, the global community, led by the efforts of the United States and individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, spelled those rights out. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including… medical care….”
Health care is a human right. Like freedom from torture and ill treatment, equality before the law, and education, health care is something that all of us are entitled to by virtue of being human.
But one would never know that by following the headlines in today’s health care debate. We are preoccupied with questions of cost when it comes to universal coverage, but not when it comes to asking critical questions about an industry that maximizes its profits by denying care. Few are asking the most fundamental question: How can our health care system be overhauled so that it fulfills the human right to health care?
Answering this question is a moral imperative, one that requires us to prioritize principles such as universality, equity and accountability. Americans don’t argue that our elections or judicial system are un-American or negotiable because these processes require government involvement and investment to ensure that they function properly and are accessible to all. And while those seeking to undermine reform rally around cries of “government-run medicine,” our nation’s experience shows such slogans to be both inaccurate and misleading. Publicly-financed health care already exists in Medicare; publicly-operated health care is provided through the VA (with some of the highest patient satisfaction ratings among all health care delivered in the United States); and the postal service, schools, police departments, and fire departments are all “government-run” – and we wouldn’t want to do without them.
America needs a health care system that is equitable and fair. Too many of us suffer from disparities in accessibility and quality of care. For example, there is less than one doctor for every one thousand residents in Appalachia, and black women are more than three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as white women. And even for those who have insurance coverage, studies show that we may be just a medical crisis away from financial ruin. These types of imbalances are contrary to the American ideals of equality and fairness, which demand a health care system that does not discriminate against those who need it most.
The human right to health care requires that government be accountable for fulfilling that right. Health care is a public good, not a commodity and a healthy society benefits all of us. The government has a duty to ensure that the right to health care is being met; it does not have an obligation to provide private sector insurers and middlemen with increasing profits, as the current Wall Street driven model dictates. Through public financing and administration of health care we can minimize the profit incentives to deny care and instead guarantee access to quality care for all.
In his latest weekly address, President Obama recognized that health care is a “core ethical and moral obligation” in a move that may signal a shift in the administration’s messaging back to core human rights principles. Unfortunately, even the best of the health care plans on the table in Congress falls short of this lofty rhetoric. Low-income people would still have to pay up to 12% of their income for private insurance premiums, plus deductibles and co-pays. Middle-income families would get no support at all, yet not buying an insurance policy would be against the law. And millions of people would still be uninsured.
We – and our elected leaders – can do better. We live in a broken system, one where a fatal toothache serves as a dire reminder of how too many Americans not only lack insurance, but lack comprehensive coverage that provides easily-accessible and quality health care. Regulation and tinkering would no doubt make some marginal improvements to our failed system, but we don’t need tinkering. We need a game changer. We need a publicly run, publicly accountable, Medicare-like plan that would put the power back in the hands of those whose human rights and very lives are at stake – people like Deamonte Driver.
September 16, 2009 will be the second anniversary of the Nisour Square shootings, in which six Blackwater (now Xe) personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians outside Baghdad’s green zone. The bad media which surrounded the incident galvanized the U.S. Government to take some steps towards ensuring that the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of State (DOS) better regulate PMSC operations in Iraq. But was it enough?
The six Blackwater guards who allegedly indiscriminately opened fire in Nisour Square on September 16, 2007 were finally indicted late last year. The trial hasn’t even started but Blackwater/XE personnel are already implicated in another incident. On May 5, 2009, four Blackwater/Xe personnel reportedly shot and killed two Afghan civilians in Kabul. So much for lessons learned in Iraq; so much for regulation, oversight, and accountability.
However, the U.S. government should not keep pushing aside the questions of how to effectively regulate and where to set the limits on using PMSCs — especially with the increased number of contractors flooding into Afghanistan in the wake of the planned surge in troops. The longer it takes for the U.S. government to finally take a position and answer these questions, the longer PMSCs operate in a legal limbo, in which they may commit human rights abuses with impunity.
The article also mentions that government officials are concerned about serious issues of accountability when contractors are brought into covert and lethal operations. Where there is no transparency, accountability will be near impossible if a crime were committed during those operations. The past administration has been quick to invoke several legal reasons to withhold sensitive information from the public — from the Glomar response to claiming that releasing detainee abuse photos would be against the Geneva Conventions. When the same photos were about to be released in May 2009, the Obama administration sought to block their release arguing that the images could further inflame anti-American opinion. If it is already this difficult to get information out of government agencies, then imagine the difficulty of obtaining information for the purpose of accountability when there’s a private contract involved in a sensitive national operation.
Another area of great concern that the New York Times article briefly touches upon is whether, aside from the concerns about accountability for PMSCs in such a program, PMSCs should be involved in the first place? As Senator Diane Feinstein (CA) aptly states, “It is too easy to contract out work that you don’t want to accept responsibility for”. In the debate about the use of PMSCs in modern warfare, there is the pressing question of what functions a government can and cannot outsource. In U.S. statute and policy, inherently governmental functions are loosely defined as “a function so intimately related to the public interest” that it must be performed by Federal employees. The list of functions that fall under “inherently governmental” is also extremely inconsistent, varying from agency to agency. Because of this lack of a clear and consistent definition, PMSCs are contracted to perform duties in highly sensitive areas such as intelligence and now, even assassinations.
To better regulate the industry, Congress also needs to pass legislation that will close the legal vacuum in which PMSCs are operating and appropriate more resources to regulation and oversight. The U.S. government currently does not adequately regulate the industry and its statutes to hold PMSCs accountable for crimes overseas are few. In its June 2009 Interim Report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting finds that U.S. government oversight of PMSCs is inadequate. Because they mostly operate transnationally, jurisdiction can become a problem. While PMSCs contracted by the DOD can be held accountable under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), contractors hired by other agencies such as the DOS often fall through legal gaps.
The foundation to improve regulation, oversight and accountability of PMSCs has already been set. To close legal gaps such as the one in MEJA, legislation has been proposed in the past and we look forward to similar legislation in the 111th Session of Congress. As for clarifying definitions of “inherently governmental functions”, a bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting was established in Public Law 110-181 to recommend among other things improvements in its Final Report on the “process for determining which functions are inherently governmental and which functions are appropriate for performance by contractors in a contingency operation, especially whether providing security in an area of combat operations is inherently governmental.” On an international level, the UN Working Group on Mercenaries (UNWGM) completed its two-week visit to the U.S. on August 3rd, 2009. During that time, the UNWGM met with the DOJ, members of Congress, governmental officials and public interest groups to discuss how PMSCs can be regulated on international, regional, national and local levels. Such efforts are all a step in the right direction.
Finding fresh ways to talk about socio-economic issues is not new in the health care advocacy community. Even as the Obama administration searches for a new way to pitch their proposed health reform, human rights groups and grassroots social justice networks have already been hard at work trying to shift the language and the thinking surrounding health care in the United States. They are using an oft-overlooked notion in the United States: “human rights.”
Desiree doesn’t explicitly answer the question in the title of her post — in reframing the health care debate, “is it too late for human rights?” The answer to that question is clear: no, it’s not too late.
Whatever happens with the current round of health care legislation — whether or not a bill passes, and if one does, whether it’s weak, strong, or even regressive — this is only the beginning of a long, long process in making the U.S. health care system truly universal, equitable and accountable. A bill would have to be implemented, which would take years. Crucial legislative questions will remain at the national, state and local levels. And there will be much more work to be done on absolutely central issues, like true fulfillment of the right to maternal health care in the United States.
But that’s a quibble. It’s a very informative post, on the imperatives of justice in health care reform, the historical roots of the human right to health care, and more — read the whole thing.
By Anna Phelan, Amnesty International USA’s Business & Economic Relations Group
Among my picks for sleeper hits of the summer, is a powerful documentary film called Crude: The Real Price of Oil. The film is described as a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. For the most part, the main characters aren’t actors… well, I mean Chevron’s invested a lot of money and time in their web of lies, so maybe they’ve been taking acting lessons. And so far, Chevron’s signature method of acting has been to deny responsibility and shift the blame for contaminated soil and groundwater in the communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
On Sunday, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke of how indigenous communities suffer disproportionately from low health standards linked to poverty, malnutrition, environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare marking the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. The hardship and discrimination faced by indigenous peoples has a lot to do with the fact that they are often excluded from decision-making processes – by both governments and corporations. In her Op-Ed piece, Navanethem Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for more than a symbolic celebration saying, after centuries of repression, they need comprehensive tools to defend their human rights, their way of life, and their aspirations.
And that’s what makes the case against Chevron a compelling story for film – not unlike the Doe v. Unocal lawsuit or, more recently, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Shell. Indigenous peoples are gaining access to the legal system to challenge governments and transnational companies and defend their human rights. You might not know their names, but the 30,000 indigenous people who filed suit against Texaco (now Chevron) in 1993 are more than Extras. They are the real-life protagonists.
Sleeper hits are made by word of mouth recommendations. Crude: The Real Price of Oil opens to larger audiences on 09/09/09. Take action now to show your support of human rights for the indigenous communities of Amazon’s Ecuador.
Last week’s revelations about war crimes committed in Afghanistan in 2001 and the US supported cover up have caused quite a stir. Even General Abdul Dostum, the alleged perpetrator of the mass killings of Taliban prisoners of war, made a public comment, stating that “it is impossible prisoners were abused”. Right. My colleague Sam Zarifi wrote up an excellent response. He brings in his first hand experience in Afghanistan. Here are some excerpts:
If, as Dostum asserts, there were investigations by the Afghan and U.S. governments, they should be made public. If their findings were accurate, Dostum should have nothing to fear from a reexamination of the facts. But the facts currently available indicate very strongly that many detainees – possibly hundreds – died while in the custody of Dostum’s forces in November 2001 and their bodies were dumped in the nearby desert of Dasht-e Leili (adding to the numerous bodies unceremoniously deposited there by various warring factions over the past three decades).
(…)
I was a human rights investigator in northwestern Afghanistan in February 2002. At the time, numerous witnesses spoke of seeing several trucks dumping what appeared to be human remains in Dasht-e Leili, while others told of detainees being held for days in overcrowded shipping containers without food, water, or medical care, and, in some instances, being shot while inside the containers.
(…)
Crucially, the International Committee of the Red Cross did not have access to the Taliban detainees at Sheberghan until December 10, 2001 – and thus could not monitor their conditions during the period when the detainees died. This undermines Dostum’s claim that a massacre could not have occurred because the ICRC would have known about it.
(…)
Dostum is correct in one regard: There is a highly politicized atmosphere surrounding the timing of the increased attention to this incident, and that is linked to President Hamid Karzai’s reinstatement of Dostum as the army chief of staff after he had been removed in disgrace last year. Karzai has also nominated as his vice presidential candidate Marshal Fahim, another Northern Alliance commander facing widespread allegations of serious human rights violations and war crimes.
(…)
Many Afghans, who have repeatedly demanded truth and accountability for the three decades of atrocities they have endured, have told Amnesty International they are extremely disappointed by the presence of such figures in Karzai’s administration. The ongoing impunity of senior government officials has done much to erode public confidence in the Afghan government, something now readily acknowledged even by international militaries.
(…)
General Dostum has bemoaned the increasing operations of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda after seven years of international nation building. It is time to ask: After seven years of appeasing warlords and human rights violators, isn’t it time for the Afghan government and its international supporters to try truth and accountability?
Copyright (c) 2009. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
Their operations are vast and war zone contractors are likely here to stay, as Suzanne Simons writes in her CNN International article. Her article is a comprehensive piece that places emphasis on one of the more salient issues regarding private military and security companies (PMSCs) or contractors: lack of regulation, oversight, and accountability. The PMSC industry has grown rapidly since the war on terror and continues to play an integral role in the conflict in Afghanistan under the Obama administration, but the US government, as reported by the CWC in its Interim Report, lacks resources to manage the industry that it has come to depend on like a crutch.
Since 2001, Congress has appropriated about $830 billion to fund U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over that period, America’s reliance on contractors has grown to unprecedented proportions to support logistics, security, and reconstruction efforts related to those operations. More than 240,000 contractor employees—about 80 percent of them foreign nationals—now work in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporting the Department of Defense. Additional contractor employees support the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The result from the combination of a growing military industry and weak government regulation and oversight is a culture of impunity and lack of accountability for the many human rights abuses committed by PMSCs. Yes, five Blackwater guards will be tried in February 2010 for opening fire and killing civilians in Nisour Square and yes, a private civil lawsuit was filed against Blackwater contractor Andrew J. Moonen for killing one of the Iraqi Vice President’s bodyguards in Baghdad’s green zone. However, let us also keep in mind not only how long it took for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to act in the first case, but also the fact that numerous cases of detainee abuse committed by PMSC personnel have gone unprosecuted. In February 2008, Amnesty found out through Senator Durbin’s inquiry to the DOJ that 24 cases of detainee abuse were transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia; 22 of the 24 were dismissed and 2 are pending. Our efforts to find out why these cases were dismissed or unresolved were fruitless.
The industry cannot be expected to regulate itself and a government that is increasingly outsourcing its operations needs to ensure that it has the mechanisms to regulate PMSCs’ activities and hold the companies accountable for their actions (and not reward them with more contracts). Doug Brooks of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) stated that PMSCs are here to stay and that it’s about time we made it work but after the recent completion of a twelfth version of IPOA’s Code of Conduct, the trade association still has not made it work. Essentially, the Code is ineffectual. For starters, there are no guidelines detailing what compliance with its standards entails; companies do not have to show that they are operationalizing the Code to IPOA or any third-party monitor; and there are no requirements for public reporting on company efforts to adhere to the Code.
This is why the U.S. government will have to move beyond the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) to create a new body of legislation that will hold all U.S. government contractors working overseas accountable – irrespective of which government agency employs them – if they commit human rights violations.
Through this image, along with aerial photographs displaying the devastation in the so called “safe zone”, we want to offer the public a rare opportunity to see on the ground details in a country where journalists and international monitors are widely prohibited from documenting the results of the recent military showdown. Graves, shelters and a shipwreck are among the things visible on the aerial photographs. We have combined all this information in a Google Earth Layer (recent version of Google Earth required), in order to give activists around the world access – something the government of Sri Lanka is denying us so far– and to call for accountability for the crimes committed by both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. (Many thanks to AAAS and Ogle Earth for their help in putting this project together).
Satellite image and photograph of Menik Farm. (c) AIUSA, Screenshot taken from Google Earth
U.N. emergency relief coordinator John Holmes recently described IDP camps in Sri Lanka as “internment camps”, stating that people are not allowed to move freely in and out. The people in Menik Farm are being vetted by the government to determine if there are any links to the Tamil Tigers.
We continue to closely to monitor the situation on the ground, so stay tuned for further information.
By Tony Cruz, Amnesty International USA’s Business & Economic Relations Group
Starting July 1, 2009, the Chinese government is mandating all PC makers such as Hewlett Packard and Dell install software that filters Internet content. The government says it is to help give parents control over inappropriate material, such as pornography, but Business Week reports that the software blocks political and religious websites. And after the government of China’s recent internet crackdown on the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square earlier this month, and the widely known controversial self-censorship of companies such as Yahoo and Google, it is clear that the Chinese government continues to use technology to suppress freedom of expression.
For the last three years, I’ve represented Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) at Yahoo! and Google’s shareholder meetings addressing their decisions to self-censor. I’ve asked executives to support freedom of expression on the Internet through such legislation as the Global Online Freedom Act (H.R. 275) which could help IT companies resist information requests by the Chinese government.
Imagine this scenario: if Yahoo! and Google backed this legislation three years ago, the choice facing HP and Dell today would be an easy one — respect human rights or go to jail. But they have not taken concrete steps to rectify their decision to self-censor, a decision that even Google co-founder Sergei Brin calls a “mistake”. In fact, AIUSA recently pulled out of the multi-stakeholder initiative we joined in 2007, with the goal of establishing voluntary principles to promote and respect human rights on the Internet, because we saw no tangible results.
This week we’re able to see in real-time how critical the Internet is for Iranians as a forum for protest and communication. In China, the Internet is equally vital in voicing dissent and discussing justice and rights. If PC companies cave into the Chinese government’s demands to install software that filters internet content, then it could be the next step towards stifling this budding online democratic movement towards accountability, transparency, citizens’ right to participate.
So what’s next for PC companies? Will they be pioneers in socially responsible business practices or will they bend to the Great Firewall of China?
Two significant reports were just issued on human rights in Sri Lanka. The first, AI’s report entitled “Twenty Years of Make-Believe: Sri Lanka’s Commissions of Inquiry,” was released today. The report describes how for the past 20 years, the Sri Lankan government has used ad hoc commissions of inquiry to investigate human rights violations by the security forces. The commissions were established, for the most part, to deflect international pressure on the government to combat the ongoing impunity afforded to the security forces for human rights abuses. The formal justice system in Sri Lanka has failed to provide redress for victims of human rights violations; thus, the violators enjoy impunity for their crimes. The report details how the commissions of inquiry have been equally ineffective in breaking the climate of impunity. Amnesty International is calling on the Sri Lankan government to learn from past failures and take measures to establish a justice system that provides real accountability for past abuses. AI also calls on the international community to help Sri Lanka in this effort.
The second report was issued yesterday by a well-respected Sri Lankan human rights organization, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). The report, entitled “A Marred Victory and a Defeat Pregnant with Foreboding,” describes in vivd detail the last two months of the war between the Sri Lankan military and the opposition Tamil Tigers. The report is equally critical of the Tigers and the government forces: the Tigers shot civilians fleeing the war zone and forcibly conscripted children to fight the advancing Sri Lankan soldiers, while the Sri Lankan government repeatedly shelled the ”no-fire zone” which was crowded with civilians. The report’s authors remark that confirming certain critical details of the last stages of the war will await an independent investigation into the abuses committed by both sides.
If you read both reports, you’ll see why it’s vital that an independent, international investigation must be undertaken into the abuses committed by both sides during the final stages of the war. On a longer-term basis, you’ll also see the challenges facing the Sri Lanka government if they really wish to break the cycle of abuse and impunity that has prevailed for decades in that country. Amnesty International is ready to do our part in helping the Sri Lankan government meet those challenges; I’m sure the rest of the international community would be willing to do so as well. Let’s hope the Sri Lankan government decides to take up this task.
Amnesty International works to protect human rights worldwide. We have more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in over 150 countries, and are completely independent from government, corporate or national interests.
Learn more about us at AmnestyUSA.org »
Jason Opeña Disterhoft is the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Campaigner at Amnesty International USA. His current work focuses on health and housing. See all »
