FAIR – Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting – takes a critical look at the discussion of “poverty” as the economic crisis widens and deepens. Not entirely surprisingly there are some traps the mass-media are falling into. The stereotypes of the “good times” are maintained as the focus is not on low-income poor who have been stuck on the margines of society for years and are hit hardest by the economic down-turn but rather on the newly poor who by and large have a middle-class background. 

Speaking of poverty, Peter Singer observes “There is a psychological difficulty in really thinking seriously about large-scale poverty when it happens far away from you and you don’t know the people involved,” in a discussion of his new book – The Life You can Save: Ending World Poverty Now.

The Guardian reports on an independent study by Johns Hopkins University that interviewed victims and helpers in the aftermath of cyclon Nargis in May last year in Myanmar/Burma. The military junta appears to have blocked relief efforts, seizing food stuffs for sale on markets, arresting some of the people trying to offer help and using forced labour in some reconstruction efforts.

The director of the centre for public health and human rights at Johns Hopkins University, Chris Beyrer assumes that the regime’s response is a violation of humanitarian relief norms and that the systemacy of abuse could amount to crimes against humanity by “intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health”.

The US Department of State released its annual human rights report. Austria’s write up discusses various areas of human rights and raises a string of concerns. It also observes that “There appeared to be relatively little representation of ethnic minorities at the national level.”

Ahead of the elections in Carynthia – on Sunday, March 1 2009 – a piece for derstandard.at by Tanja Malle – “Verflixt und Zugetafelt” – discussed the underlying issues in the ongoing debate over topographical town signs for the Slovene minority in the province. As Malle rightly states, the ongoing debate over the number of town signs is barring a much needed discussion over the fostering of minority culture, particularly language education. The political climate created by the town sign debate has paved the way for minimalist – or as Malle describes it – “alibi” provision of language initiatives in kindergartens and other educational fora.

The Guardian published the statement by Binyam Mohamed, the recently released British Guantanamo Detainee: 

I hope you will understand that after everything I have been through I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment of my arrival back to Britain. Please forgive me if I make a simple statement through my lawyer. I hope to be able to do better in days to come, when I am on the road to recovery.

–Binyam Mohamed

Recently retired Australian High Court Judge Michael Kirby had the following to say about human rights in an Op-Ed published the other day: 
The essential underpinning of fundamental human rights is love. Love for one another. Empathy for fellow human beings. Feeling pain for the refugee; for the victim of war; for the prisoner deprived of the vote; for the child dying of cholera in Zimbabwe. We can imagine what it must be like to be a victim because, as human beings, we too feel, and yearn for, life, freedom and justice.

The NYTimes reports on the efforts of human rights defenders in China to shed some light on the construction of buildings that collapsed in the quake in May 2008. Discussing the fate of advocate Huang Qi, the Times states: “People charged with “illegal possession of state secrets” have little hope of defending themselves in the court system, which operates under Communist Party control. The official definition of secrets is broad and flexible, and can be applied to widely available government documents or even reports published by state-run media. The exact secret involved is rarely revealed.”

The shiniest kid on the block of fundamentalisms is “market fundamentalism”. The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd is sparring with his conservative counter parts over the role of capitalism as a cause for the current financial crisis: “Free market fundamentalism, underpinning greed, caused the global financial crisis which has now caused a global economic recession affecting every country in the world,” he observed.

Eighty percent of the world’s governments fail to provide adequate information for the public to hold them accountable as reported by the International Budget Partnership (IBP). Almost half of 85 countries whose budget accessibility was reviewed by the IBP are able to hide unpopular, wasteful, and corrupt spending.

One of Australia’s most prominent lawyers – and “most colourful judges” –  High Court Justice Michael Kirby retired today. As the Age’s Leonie Wood summarizes Kirby’s approach to law: “Justice  can only be done by following the law as it has been applied and adapted over time, and then bringing to that vast canon a “sense of justice for the individual as the abiding moral force of the judicial vocation”. Kirby was one of the driving forces of Australia’s increased commitment to implement international human rights.