Last Friday, Amnesty International launched Deadly Delivery, the new report highlighting the shocking rates of preventable maternal deaths in the United States. The media has been paying attention.
On Wednesday, viewers of Good Morning America saw our researcher Nan Strauss talk about Caesarian sections in the United States. Jennifer Block wrote an article about the report at Time.com, and Colum Lynch at the Washington Post cited our report and quoted Amnesty Executive Director Larry Cox in an article on maternal mortality worldwide. CNN picked up the story as well, with an article that detailed Amnesty’s call to action, and included comments from supportive health care professionals around the country. The Guardian, one of the UK’s leading dailies, ran an article on Friday highlighting Amnesty’s role in calling out the violations of women’s human rights in the United States. State media outlets are running the story too, particularly in states that are hard-hit by the maternal health care crisis (like Louisiana) . Here at Human Rights Now, we kicked off coverage with a post from Alicia Yamin, a world expert on maternal mortality and human rights and a special adviser to our Demand Dignity Campaign.
If you haven’t already, make sure to take action and call on Secretary Sebelius to create an Office of Maternal Health to safeguard women’s right to safe childbirth in the United States!
While the Republicans cynically stall efforts on health reform to gain political advantage and the Democrats wrangle over special deals, too many people continue to die in this country because they lack access to care. A report released today from Amnesty International highlights the scandalous fact that every day in the richest country in the world 2 to 3 women die in pregnancy and childbirth.
As Deadly Delivery: THE MATERNAL HEALTH CARE CRISIS IN THE USA notes, the U.S. “spends more than any other country on health care, and more on maternal health than any other type of hospital care. Despite this, women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 40 other countries. “ For example, the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the U.S. is five times greater than in Greece.
Perhaps even more scandalous, “African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. These rates and disparities have not improved in more than 20 years.”
Amnesty’s report rightly asserts that this is not just a public health scandal; it reflects widespread violations of women’s human rights, including the right to life, the right to freedom from discrimination, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Patterns of marginalization and exclusion in this society are exacerbated by a discriminatory and dysfunctional health system.
Throughout the health care reform debates, there has been scarcely a mention of health care being a fundamental human right. But the fact is that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not recognize a legal entitlement to health care.
The purpose of these visits is to educate members of Congress about the shocking rates of pregnancy-related deaths among women in the United States. The awful truth behind these appalling numbers is that half of these deaths can be prevented. Women are dying because they simplycan’t afford to access proper maternal care.
These groups, or delegations, that will help raise awareness about this tragedy, play an essential role in keeping human rights central to the health care debate. Right now we are looking for people who can help us coordinate these meetings locally. There are a few things you should know first before you consider going head-to-head with your Senator or Representative:
1) Senators and Representatives aren’t as mean as they look on TV. Now don’t get us wrong, they aren’t angels either, but for the most part, we find that elected officials enjoy sitting down face-to-face with their constituents. They are public servants and can only represent you if they know where you stand on the issues. After meeting with our delegations, we’ve seen members of Congress change their tune on our issues – signing on to letters of support or even voting in favor of human rights!
2) There is power in numbers. Even though your delegations are made up of a few people, you’re not just at the Congressional office as a small group; you’re representing a movement of millions. As a representative of Amnesty International, your reputation precedes you. When you stand up for human rights, you never stand alone.
3) Preparation is key. We won’t let you go in there unprepared. In fact, our government relations experts are on-hand to answer all your questions about how to organize an effective meeting and present the issue clearly. We’ve put together step-by-step guides and other instructional materials to ensure that you feel prepared before you meet with your elected officials.
I hope you’ll consider joining our fight to prevent pregnancy-related deaths. We will not back down until a woman’s right to a safe childbirth is fully protected!
By Laura Moye, Amnesty International USA Death Penalty Abolition Campaign Director
Imagine President Obama competing with other nations for world leadership on human rights by putting forward a goal to end the death penalty globally in just five years. Well, that’s exactly what Spain’s Prime Minister Zapatero did last Wednesday. He addressed the Fourth World Congress against the Death Penalty in Geneva saying that his country, which now holds the European Union presidency, was very committed to seeing a world without the death penalty by 2015.
Leaders meet in Geneva at the World Congress Against the Death Penalty
The World Congress against the Death Penalty was kicked off at the United Nations’ historic Palais des Nations. Preceding Mr. Zapatero’s remarks was a string of high level government and UN officials who put forward their commitment to global abolition. Robert Badinter also spoke. Badinter was the French justice minister responsible for the abolition of France’s death penalty at a time when French public opinion was more in favor of the death penalty than not. Today, the European Union is unified on the issue of the death penalty. Abolition has become a major plank in their human rights platform.
In 1977, 16 nations were abolitionist. Today, 139 are. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US are noted outliers in this global trend. And there is a growing global movement working hard to continue the trend toward global abolition.
Abolition of the death penalty everywhere is possible. Abolition of the death penalty in the United States will happen in my lifetime!
There is a global community of human rights activists and governments that stand with us in our struggle to end the death penalty.
Cartridge casing from a bullet, for a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle, found at Conakry stadium. Copyright Amnesty International
There is no question that the September 28th, 2009, Bloody Monday massacre in Guinea was an unprecedented episode of violence and brutality by Guinea’s security forces. But let’s not forget that this was not the first time that Guinea’s military and security forces have used excessive force and acted with impunity in the past decade. In fact, the behavior of the security forces has been defined by a clear pattern of unlawful killings, extrajudicial executions, rape, arbitrary detentions, torture and grossly excessive use of force.
You did not want the military, so now we are going to teach you a lesson – member of the security forces present during the 28 September 2009 violence
Yet, as Amnesty’s new report demonstrates, a number of governments and companies have continued to finance, train and supply Guinea’s security forces, ignoring the numerous human rights violations they have committed over the years. In fact, several of the military and security units whose members were directly involved in the commission of human rights violations during Bloody Monday and in previous years had received training from states including France, China and the US. Weapons and security equipment supplied from South Africa, France and elsewhere provided the tools for the crimes perpetrated on Bloody Monday.
The decision by several states to suspend military cooperation with Guinea, including the US after the December 2008 coup and France after the September 2009 massacre, was too late. While such suspensions will certainly help minimize the capacity of the security forces to commit human rights abuses in the future, the signs were there long before December 2008 and military cooperation should have been suspended much earlier.
What the case of Guinea shows is the need for all states to adopt international standards to assess arms transfers on a case-by-case basis. This would ensure that states adequately assess the risk of exporting arms and training to countries such as Guinea and that such transfers do not facilitate serious human rights violations.
With a tie vote, the Kansas Senate today failed to pass SB 375, a bill which would have abolished that state’s death penalty. The Kansas Senate consists of 31 Republicans and 9 Democrats, and the vote was 20-20.
Extensive debates like the one today have been taking place in state legislatures across the country, reflecting a growing national concern that the death penalty is ineffective and unnecessary, and that there are better ways to tackle the problem of violent crime. Kansas has not had an execution since 1965, and has less than a dozen people on death row. On Thursday, Governor Mark Parkinson had said:
“I haven’t said I would never sign a repeal. I said it’s unlikely. If that bill hit my desk, I assure you I would spend a significant amount of time really researching whether the death penalty made sense.”
Now it appears he will not have to do that research, at least not this year. But the result of today’s debate underscored that support for capital punishment is increasingly precarious, with a growing number of conservatives voting to abandon the death penalty alongside their more liberal colleagues.
More disappointing news emerged on Monday for those who believe that US law and professional ethics should actually mean something.
The long awaited Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report into the quality and probity of the work produced on coercive interrogation by John Yoo and Jay Bybee while working in the Office of General Counsel has reportedly undergone internal revisions neutering its findings.
David Margolis, a career civil servant who served in the Justice Department throughout the Bush administration, has reportedly downgraded criticism that Yoo and Bybee violated their professional obligations concluding rather that they merely exercised poor judgment.
This is no semantic distinction – it means the difference between potential disciplinary action before state bar associations, and in Bybee’s case potential impeachment as federal judge, and little more than a minor flurry of professional embarrassment.
Once again, we see key players in one of the darker chapters in America’s recent history squirm their way out of trouble scot-free, not a stain in their character. What a contrast to a spectacle unfolding across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom.
On January 29th the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was summoned to appear before the Chilcot commission established to investigate Britain’s decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq.
The committee conducting this inquiry consists of two of Britain’s most prominent academics, Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert and military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman, two former career civil servants, Sir John Chilcot and former Ambassador to Russia Sir Roderic Lyne, and Baroness Prashar, a prominent humanitarian.
The United Nation’s first report on The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, released on January 14, 2010, contains figures and an assessment that are both shocking and illuminating, even to those who are familiar with indigenous rights issues. The report evaluates the state of indigenous populations in specific countries and situations, in both the developed and developing world.
The report states that,
“Indigenous peoples suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, oppression and discrimination, as well as lack of control over their own ways of life. Their right to development has been largely denied by colonial and modern States in the pursuit of economic growth”
The United States is by no means exempt from the report’s critique. Despite increased state and federal acknowledgment of the challenges that Native Americans and Alaska Natives face in the U.S., the U.S. has made only incremental change and continues to generate appalling statistics and significant disparities. A recent study that applied the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index (HDI) – which measures health, education and standard of living — to indigenous populations in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand found that while the U.S. ranked seventh overall (globally), U.S. American Indians and Alaska Natives ranked thirtieth.
The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples notes that nearly a quarter of Native Americans and Alaska Natives live below the poverty line in the U.S., compared to about 12.5 percent of the total population, and pinpoints the direct relationship that the educational deficit has upon economic opportunities and employment rates.
Children living in the ruins of destroyed houses in Luanda, Angola.
Angola is experiencing a major revitalization as it slowly recovers from a devastating 27 year civil war that finally ended in 2002. The Africa Cup of Nationskicked off (sorry for the soccer pun) this week: a biennial continent-wide tournament, and this year a rousing prelude to the World Cup occurring in June in South Africa. Angola is also one of the world’s top twenty crude oil exporters and a member of OPEC. This revenue stream elevates Angola’s stature as a major economic player both globally and in the region, as nations compete for Angolan oil exports.
These resulting economic ties also create political relationships. Stay with me, I am getting to my point, I promise. Angola ranks sixth in the list of countriesimporting oil into the United States. This means the US relies on Angola and Angola relies on the US. Thus each is in the position to influence the other on a whole host of issues. And so we have arrived: Angola is up in February for its turn under the United Nation’s Universal Periodic Review (UN-UPR).
The UN-UPR is a process by which each member state’s human rights record is scrutinized by it’s peers. All member nations are subject to this review every four years, during which time other nations and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) can raise concerns, ask questions and make recommendations on how to improve human rights conditions. One of the concerns about the process, which has already played out during other state’s reviews, is peer nations won’t really raise the tough issues. Rather they lob soft balls (or maybe soccer balls?) for fear of damaging economic relationships or labeling as a hypocrit because of the peer nation’s own human rights record.
But it is the duty and responsibility of UN member states to hold each other accountable, and it is our onus as global citizens to make sure our governments step up to the plate. So we are calling on the US State Department to not go easy on Angola because we want it’s oil exports. Instead, we are demanding the US help ensure human rights are imported into Angola via the UPR process.
There are three major areas we call on Secretary Clinton to raise during the UPR process: forced evictions, the safety of human rights defenders and protections of freedom of expression and association. These are all areas of serious concern in Angola; people are rendered homeless for political and/or economic gain, human rights defenders experience repression and beatings as they work to hold the government accountable and journalists and citizens are imprisoned for speaking out and demanding positive change.
So stand up as a global citizen and encourage all UN member nations to not give Angola an easy pass under the UN-UPR next month and tell Secretary Clinton that the US must do it’s part! Economics is supply and demand. Instead of only demanding oil come out of Angola, let’s supply the tools to encourage human rights to come in!
Tens of thousands of protesters came together at a rally Sunday afternoon following a march through the streets of Washington DC. The event, known as the National Equality March, was an enormous gathering of support for equal rights for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) citizens in the country. While the demand for “equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states,” seems reasonable enough, the matter of whether LGBT citizens should be granted equal rights under the law has been a huge debate in recent years. Two major points of protest are, first, for the government to put an end to the don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) policy, which has resulted in hundreds of soldiers being discharged from the military, and, second, to put an end to The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which gives states the right to not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and forbids federal marriage rights from being granted to any same-sex couples, regardless of their state laws. Other issues such as legal discrimination, legal physical protection, equitable healthcare, and immigration policies were also discussed at the rally. (more…)
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.
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Elise Auerbach is the Iran and Jordan country specialist for Amnesty International USA. See all »
Last Friday, Amnesty International launched Deadly Delivery, the new report highlighting the shocking rates of preventable maternal deaths in the United States. The media has been paying attention.
While the Republicans cynically stall efforts on health reform to gain political advantage and the Democrats wrangle over special deals, too many people continue to die in this country because they lack access to care. A report released today from Amnesty International highlights the scandalous fact that every day in the richest country in the world 2 to 3 women die in pregnancy and childbirth.
From March 29-April 9th, 
