The NYTimes online has a series on the “Realm of Senses“: it features the New York impressions and perceptions of people who have lost a sense. Pictures by Béatrice de Géa accompany the description of people like Katherine Vasquez who does not have sense in her legs and feels like “walking on clouds” when exploring the city in her wheelchair and Martin Greenberg, who is deaf-blin and “captures the city through its vibrations.”
The Universal Periodic Review is the United Nations Human Rights Council’s new mechanism to verify the human rights performance of all 192 UN Member States based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and any human rights treaty the Member State has adopted. The review is now in its fourth and final year for the first cycle of reviews.
Austria and Australia are both up for review in the last week of January 2011: Austria on Australia Day, January 26 and Australia the next day, January 27.
The documents on Austria can be found here, for Australia click here.
The Austrian NGO Coalition for the review can be found here.
The Austrian Daily Salzburger Nachrichten published the following cartoon by Thomas Wizany on the occasion of People’s Republic of China President Hu’s State Visit to the United States:
President Obama is holding a board that depicts Mr. Hu with his name – Hu – underneath, the shape of a person with the description “man” underneath and an arrow to the right, the bottom line reading Hu + Man + Rights. President Hu looks at the board quizzically.
An important Op-Ed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus in the NYTimes on sticking to the principles of the brilliant idea to provide microfinance to those in need of (economic) empowerment and criticizing those who loose sight of the intentions and focus on the potential profits.
The Observer profiles the success of the Innocence Project , which so far has exonerated 260 people!
As ASIL notes in its International Law in Brief (ILIB), the 2006 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance entered into force late last month, December 22, 2010. Another core human rights treaty joins the expanding collection!
New Year. Old challenges. The Guardian discusses the perpetually important issue that while private charity and welfare may be a necessary societal cause it does not let the public off the hook of responsibility.
