The truth, and nothing but the truth…says who?

GHRD ended up in the middle of the Swedish media battle last week when investigating a murder in Bangladesh. Ashit Biswas, 32, disappeared in 2005 and the remains of his body were found last week – elucidating another uninvestigated crime in Bangladesh. Usually, the ‘West’ show little interest in what’s going on in Bangladesh.

But this case is different. The suspect, Joy Rahman, is something of a media celebrity in Sweden, where he spent eight years in prison for murder, before being found innocent by the Supreme Court. It was the scandal of that time. Rahman cried out in media, a victim of a racist prejudiced justice system. He moved back to Bangladesh and started a foundation for the money he was given as compensation. Not that money could ever compensate eight years of declined freedom! But it helps. Especially in Bangladesh, where money is the answer to all problems, including legal ones.

Now, everyone wanted their share of this story. The question of guilt – and victimization is central and divided the Swedish and Bangladeshi press. In Sweden, they are eager to portray Joy Rahman as another victim of corruption and illegality in a non-existent Bangladeshi justice system. In Bangladesh, some media want to see Joy Rahman hanged by tomorrow, whether there is evidence or not.

As for me, I am referring to the rule of law, to objective reporting and to respect Rahman’s right to presumption of innocence whilst searching the truth about Ashit’s death. Media cannot, and should not, determine guilt. In Western Europe, most of us are skeptical to the ‘facts’ produced by media, but rely on a court verdict.

But when working in Bangladesh, this perception of ‘truth’ is challenged. Here, police investigations and verdicts are for sale. The police fabricate charges, plant evidence and force through confessions under torture on routine. Meanwhile, many media in Bangladesh are opposing this corrupt system, struggling to work independently to expose the truth.

So what do we know? Well, whereas many criminals escape trials; innocents are also convicted, imprisoned and executed. The question now is; to which category does Rahman belong? And says who?

The power and downfall of the masses

GHRD participated in another FLARE meeting last week, this time in Bari, southern Italy. I had the privilege to meet and listen to Mr Luigi Ciotti, president of Libera, the largest network against the mafia in Italy. For obvious reasons, this man is most wanted and he has miraculously survived years of assassination attempts. When this honorable man sat down in front of me, turned around and shook my hand, for a moment, I felt afraid. A pathetic thought crossed my mind; what if someone will attack him now, when I am behind him? In the next second, I felt a strong wave of guilt. What a coward! There are people willing to sacrifice their lives for something they believe in, and then you are afraid to even sit behind one of them? What kind of human rights defender are you? Well obviously, a human rights officer, with emphasis on office. I felt pathetic.

Then, luckily, I gained some strength again when taking part in a huge demonstration against the mafia. It felt powerful and important to walk there in the burning sun, shouting “FREEDOM LEGALITY AND RIGHTS IN EUROPE” amongst 100,000 people, all brought together around one common goal; to speak out against corruption and organized crime. There is something extraordinary about public manifestations where thousands of strangers with different background, age, gender, nationality and religion have taken a standpoint about something that matters to them, and then unite to express this position.

Tragically, another protest was brutally smashed down at almost the same moment. Dozens of innocent Tibetians are feared dead, many are arrested and likely to be tortured or ‘disappear’ - simply because they claimed their right to peaceful demonstration. My thoughts are in Tibet today.

It’s safe being a ‘human rights officer’ in The Hague.

India untouchable

I went to Nijmegen last Sunday to take part in a cultural event focusing on development and human rights in India. Unsurprisingly, one of the main topics was the Dalits (Harijans) or the untouchables. Despite its constitutional abolition in 1950, the caste system is a cruel reality in a large part of rural India. Dalits are considered less human then other castes, they are thought to be ‘polluted’ and should thus never be touched by anyone from a higher caste. For this reason they are discriminated against in all spheres, an exclusion that applies to adults and children alike. The story of the little boy that fell into the water and drowned because no-one wanted to touch him is hard to forget. It is one of the most severe human rights catastrophes in the world today.

But it is disturbing to see how this complex issue continues to be analysed and discussed in the simplest manner. The movies show fat and inherently evil Brahmins that shout that Dalits are inferior by nature and thus destined to clean their toilets. And this is described as the very essence of Hinduism. Religion is immediately given the blame. It is equally disturbing whenever ‘ Islam’ is equalised with terrorism. Even though religion plays an undeniable role in both of the above mentioned examples, it is hardly the one and only factor. It is not religion by itself that generates conflict, violence or human rights abuse. Religion, is a social construction such as ethnicity, or nationality, that is used as a tool to manifest other interests. It is the interpretation and violent enforcement of religion/ethnicity or nationality that is dangerous.

This clearly requires a higher level of analysis, which is more demanding than finding some Brahmins that are willing to misbehave in tv for their five minutes of fame (or bearded Muslims for that matter).

It is natural and inevitable in popular science and media to simplify complex social and political phenomenon in order to make them easy to comprehend. But this simplification also undermines the opportunities for accurate analysis and ultimately, a change.

The social order is based on our need to distinguish between good and evil and us and them; and evil is inherent in‘them’. Religion is an easy target because it allows us to project evil acts on ‘the others’.

In some instances, the solution to the ‘problem’ then simply is conversion to the ‘good’ religion. Unsurprisingly, yet shocking, conversion to Christianity is often proposed as a solution to the Dalits by Christian charity organisations.

And then we are surprised when the western human rights regime is being accused of pursuing a post colonial agenda?

Religion alone does not constitute the root cause of human misery. And it certainly does not hold the key to its solution.

Never again?

GHRD attended an international conference in Krakow, Poland last week; FLARE – Freedom Legality and Rights in Europe. FLARE is a European network of more than 40 civil society organisations with the aim to promote legality and human rights in Europe. It was an interesting (and hectic) week and I enjoyed the workshops and in particular to discuss human rights with representatives from Italy, Romania, Serbia, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, …

But it is the visit to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau that I remember the most. It was a horrific day in every sense. I thought I was prepared. After all, I deal with cases of gang rape, torture and murder on a daily basis at work. And I specialised in genocide at university. I have studied the holocaust in every detail; seen the photos, films, read the books of survivors, and experts; I even analysed the toilet system in the camps (!). But to walk for hours through this death camp, created by humans with the sole intention of exterminating others, where over one million human beings lost their lives in the most dehumanising way, gave rise to feelings that no books could ever convey. I felt sad, helpless, empty, angry, disillusioned; the importance of keeping Auschwitz as a painful memory felt stronger than ever. Indeed we must remember, and the words never again must never silence.

But it did happen again. And it happened before. Again and again and right now.

The Holocaust was unfortunately neither the first nor the last moment in history where one group organised, planned and executed the killings of another group, with intent to destroy, in whole or in part. Indigenous peoples were extincted with genocidal intent as soon as Europeans ‘discovered’ their continents over 600 years ago. Genocides took place in Bangladesh, Ottoman Empire (Armenian genocide), East Timor, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia- Herzegovina, and Sudan, to name a few.

A genocide does not take place overnight – it requires structure and planning. Major genocide characteristics are: the division of people between ‘us and them’, hate speeches, dehumanisation, propaganda, targeting of a specific group because of their ethnic/religious identity, which finally leads to the extermination of this group.

The development in some South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Jammu/Kashmir, Malaysia, and Pakistan is not too far away from this description. Now it is up to us to decide if again will ever turn into never.

The slave trade of our time

Welcome back to the first blog of the year 2008!

I have been preparing a lecture for The Hague University and the cultural week this upcoming Tuesday. I am aware that it’s a privilege to be able to stand in front of 200 students, that (whether they like it or not) will have to listen to what I have to say about such an important subject as human rights. It’s also a challenge to compose a comprehendible introduction to the entire international human rights system – in only 45 minutes. I have been thinking a lot about how I can make maximal use of this time; what aspect of human rights is the most crucial to emphasise, what is it that I want people to know about human rights?

One crucial and always relevant point I will emphasize on Tuesday is that the international human rights system as we know it today is the result of historical processes and it is thus changing over time. The norms and values underlying it, including the concepts of rights and which groups we consider human enough to be granted these rights, are dynamic. It is therefore crucial that we always continue to evaluate and criticize this system and the groups that we consider ‘humans’ and thus should be granted rights.

Throughout history, human rights have been violated in the most atrocious manners; we have raped and murdered and enslaved people; but at the time it was often not considered a human rights violation. We have justified the enslavement of native Africans, the wiping out of entire indigenous populations, the repression of homosexuals, women, disabled, political opponents, the persecution of the Jews, just to name a few, legally, morally and scientifically.

Women are too stupid to vote or attend university, homosexuality is a disease that can be cured, Africans and Native Americans needed to be saved by the ‘civilized’ Europeans, and the Jewish conspiracy was reaching such dangerous levels that the holocaust almost should be considered collective self defence. These have all been arguments that have justified the infringement of rights for certain groups, and they were more or less accepted by the public at their time. Today, it sounds horrific. Today, we think we know better. But do we?

We have seen a scary development, in particularly after 9/11, moving towards a system where human rights become relative and depends on your belonging to religious/ethnic groups, where torture and arbitrary arrests are being justified in the name of ‘war on terror’.

So, two questions I am looking forward to discuss on Tuesday are:

What is the slave trade of our time? And who are the 'Jews' in 2008?

Banished within and without

I was deeply touched and inspired this week by two women, and although the stories and background of these women are completely different, the essence is the same: imprisonment.

One is Taslima Nasrin - a world famous and outspoken women’s rights activist, forced into exile and a life under constant threat. Ms Nasrin wrote a letter entitled ‘Banished within and without” about how she lives her life: “my world is gradually shrinking. I, who once roamed the streets without a care in the world, am now shackled. Always outspoken, I am now silenced, unable to demonstrate, left without the means of protesting for what I hold dear. […] I spend my existence surrounded by walls: a prisoner.”

The other story concerns a woman who has spent time in an Asian prison and now she is trying to help her friends that are left ‘in hell’ without any contact with the outside world.

Whether physical or mental, and regardless of reason, I can’t think of anything worse than being denied your personal freedom. I can’t imagine how it would feel to be expelled and forced into exile in a foreign country; to be sentenced to life in a remote and primitive prison, tortured in a secret detention center, or how and if I would survive if I was sold into sexual slavery or forced labour.

What I do know is that these are some of the major human rights catastrophes of our time. In Christmas times like this, and whilst being all excited about going back home to friends and family, my thoughts are with all those women, men and children who are unable to do so.

When rights become privileges

We are currently preparing for human rights day that is celebrated worldwide on 10 December. I will proudly spend this day gagged and tied up walking through the rainy streets of The Hague in a silent protest for those who are suffering in silence and silenced after being abused.

Freedom of speech and association is a basic human right and all we had to do was to send a fax to the police and voila’ - we can hit the busy shopping streets with our placards and banners. We are even allowed to enter the parliament to talk to those in power!

It strikes me how privileged we are, and how ironic it is that those that suffer the most, living in countries where there is a true and pressing need to speak out, also are those unable to do so. Freedom of speech is a human right governments easily grant - in countries where it won’t constitute a threat to the said regime.

Indeed this applies not only to civil and political rights but to the general adaptation of international human rights standards as well. Since the creation of the United Nations and the promotion of universal human rights for all, it has been the most repressing regimes that have been objecting the most. The international human rights regime has been rejected as ‘post imperialism’ or ‘western, neo-liberal propaganda’ by governments in attempts to justify practices such as genital mutilation, torture, persecution of minorities and/or homosexuals and gender discrimination.

It is true that the contemporary human rights doctrine was based on a ‘western’ liberal philosophy, and some of the critique may be justified.

Nonetheless, it also appears that the people it is set out to protect - those who are tortured in prisons or forced into exile because of their identity - rarely object to the idea of universal human rights. What they want is the right to live a life in peace, free and equal, regardless of ethnicity, sex, religion or political/sexual orientation.

You can use your democratic freedom and give others a voice by joining us in our protest this Monday, 10 December on Human Rights Day in The Hague.

I am looking forward to meet you there!

For more details about our demonstration see www.ghrd.org