Big report in the NYTimes on universal coverage of health care “in dirt-poor country,” Rwanda.

Jennifer Bartlett in a NYTimes Online column, “Assumptions” for city room blog describes her experience venturing through New York with cerebral palsy.

Micah Kellner, a NY assembly man, responded with the following letter:

Ordinary New Yorkers expect to be treated according to a simple standard of common courtesy and respect, and those of us with disabilities are no different. Yet too often we are confronted by strangers who make bizarrely inappropriate comments or offer unnecessary and unasked-for expressions of sympathy. There is a double standard here — as if we are not entitled to the same basic consideration taken for granted by others in their daily interactions.

Kellner stresses the importance of overcoming social barriers: “equality begins with respect for people’s differences, and with overcoming deep-seated preconceptions about people with disabilities.”

As part of its Demand Dignity Campaign, amnesty international, in its Report From Promises to Delivery demands that the fight against poverty – the spear head of the Millennium Development Campaign – be based on human rights.

The Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, Magdalena Sepulveda in her Report to the Human Rights Council warns that the changing of societal patterns and family living arrangements means that older persons are at an increased risk of extreme poverty.

“Societies are abandoning traditional care practices,” the Special Rapporteur warns and calls on systemic measures such as realization of the right to social protection through universal pensions.

There are apparently 105.000 homeless people in Australia, half of them are estimated to be below 25 years of age. Sarah Davies of the Melbourne Community Foundation discusses in The Age how, despite being a complex issue, the right to housing can be realized.

The United Nations have set eight goals to be reached by 2015: halving poverty, ensuring universal primary education for all among others. Persons with disabilities are largely being left out of the policies and programs put in place to reach the so called Millennium Development  Goals (MDGs).

The General Assembly of the United Nations has adopted a resolution calling for the realization of the MDGs also for persons with disabilities. The world’s parliament among others calls for ‘explicit’ mention of persons with disabilities in the upcoming review of the goals. The Journal for Disability & Development has published an analysis of the resolution. More information on the issue can also be found at www.IncludeEverybody.org

After a while – two years to be exact – returning to the issue of soccer & human rights ahead of the World Cup in South Africa. The NYTimes has a piece on the history of soccer in the host country. As one interviewee describes it, soccer “was a way to keep us out of trouble, a form of freedom, a chance to meet people from different areas.” The piece highlights the repercussions of Apartheid one-and-a-half decades after its end as “complicated.”  Tellingly, South Africa had four different federations: for blacks, whites, Indians and the so-called coloreds.

The Boston Globe reports – ht: UN Wire – about the work of MIT doctoral candidate Amos Winter on a “leveraged freedom chair“, designed to be produced with low cost material for the otherwise hardly accessible to inaccessible surfaces in developing countries. Reminds me a little of “design for the other 90%“.

(c) Massachusetts Institute of Technology/M-Lab

(c) Massachusetts Institute of Technology/M-Lab

ECRI – the Council of Europe’s Commission Against Racism and Intolerance – has released its latest Report on Austria. The Commission states among others:

Racism in public discourse remains a worrying issue, in the absence of an adequate response by the authorities. Far-right political parties have openly exploited prejudice against minorities, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, Jews and Muslims and their statements have not been always condemned by mainstream political parties in a sufficiently strong manner. In addition, some media have contributed to creating an atmosphere of hostility against members of minority groups and asylum seekers.

In its previous Report on Austria, the Commission had voiced concern “that the press has contributed to a certain “ethnicisation” of crimes, particularly as regards Black Africans and drug dealing or Eastern Europeans and certain types of organised crime.”

As the red carpet rolls out ahead of women’s day and briefly also for the Academy Awards, Kim Elsesser – a research scholar at the Center for Study of Women at the University of California – highlights the separation of the best actor and best actress in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes.

Picture credit Kelly Blair/NYTimes

The Economist is focusing on the disappearance of women, in particular girls, in its latest issue, asking: “what happened to the 100 million baby girls?” The article explains how declining fertility and prejudices are major factors in a radical shift of gender balance in many societies.

“Criminalising migration is the wrong answer to a complex social phenomenon,” the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg states in a new Issue Paper.

In dissecting the complexity of migration, the Commissioner rightly warns of the implications of language in public debates:

The choice of language is very important to the image which the authorities project to their population and the world. Being an immigrant becomes associated, through the use of language, with illegal acts under the criminal law. All immigrants become tainted by suspicion. Illegal immigration as a concept has the effect of rendering suspicious in the eyes of the population (including public officials) the movement of persons across international borders.

The Guardian reports about a Report by the National Equality Panel. It highlights income disparities: “richest 10% is more than 100 times better off than the poorest 10%”. An unemployed father of three observes:

“If you don’t feel secure, you are always on tenterhooks, you snap at the children. It is a mental strain. Sometimes you feel you just want to roll over and give up. Your resilience is worn away, there is nothing left to rely on.”

Data of the report can be found here.

“Thinking beyond the label” is an advocacy campaign aimed at debunking myths about inclusion of persons with disabilities in the work place. Highlighting the ease with which one tends to “label” people using the classic self-make labels, the campaign plays with stereotypes and “labels” respectively.

An example is the following add in which a woman clothed in an eclectic mix of patterns as “pattern deficient”:

As the tragedy in Haiti unfolds, the Wall Street Journal observes: “while natural calamities do not discriminate between rich countries and poor ones, their effects almost invariably do (…) The difference is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes.”

In an Op-Ed in the Observer, singer Régine Chassagne states:

“Many Haitians expect to be let down. History shows they are right to feel that way. Haitians know that they have been wronged many, many times. What we are seeing on the news right now is more than a natural disaster. This earthquake has torn away the veil and revealed the crushing poverty that has been allowed by the west’s centuries of disregard.”

The infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, Camp Delta has produced much dispute, rightly so. Its effect on the rule of law in the United States of America remains to be seen. One of the many side aspects are the torment this – and similar – facilities leave on all involved.

The BBC has an interesting story on the reconciliation between a former prison guard and two inmates. They were reconnected using the online social tool “facebook.”

NYTimes columnist Judith Warner discusses the situation of persons with varying forms of depression in the United States of America. As a new  study finds that those who do get treaty do not get treated properly and many others receive no treatment at all, Warner holds: “This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or finding care that is ineffective.”

The effect of social barriers, such as stigma and ignorance cannot be overestimated. Equally, access to affordable quality health care – a human right – is fraught for many around the globe.

In early December the United States of America reached an agreement with a string of American Indian tribes who had been battling the government’s faulty practices towards them by way of a class action since 1996. The statement by President Obama did not focus on offering an apology but did venture to state that it was “an important step towards a sincere reconciliation.”

Happy New Year! The European Union is dedicating 2010 to the fight against poverty and social exclusion, see EU framework on poverty + social exclusion.

The Celebration of the Fall of the Wall on 9 November 2009:

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Britain

This wall was torn down not by the demands of political leaders, not by dictat from on high, not by the force of military might but by the greatest force of all – the unbreakable spirit of the men and women of Berlin. You dared to dream in the darkness. You know that while force has temporary power to dominate, it can never ultimately decide. You proved that there is nothing that cannot be achieved by people inspired by the power of common purpose, and let me thank you, the people of Berlin, for sending a message to every continent that no abuse, no crime, no injury need endure forever.

(…) injustice is not the final word on the human condition (…) in a troubled world, with an Africa in poverty, Darfur in agony, Zimbabwe in tears, Burma in chains, individuals, even when in pain, need not suffer forever without hope (…)we can advance prosperity not just for some but for all.

The tides of history may ebb and flow, but across the ages, history is moving towards our best hopes, not our worst fears, towards light and not darkness, towards the fulfilment of our humanity, not its denial, so as we stand here, as free people, gathered today in the shadow of history, let us pledge that we will work together to write the next chapter of the human story. Let us write a chapter of liberty, and of prosperity, and of peace.

Barack Obama, President of the United States of America

There could be no clearer rebuke of tyranny. There could be no stronger affirmation of freedom. This anniversary is a reminder that human destiny will be what we make of it.

Even as we celebrate these values, even as we mark this day, we know that the work of freedom is never finished.

Today, there are still those who live within wall of tyranny. Human beings were denied the very human rights that we celebrate today. And that is why this day is for them as it is for us. It is for those who believe even in the face of cynicism and doubt and oppression that walls can truly come down.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

For us Germans November 9 is also a day of remembrance. 71 years ago today the Reichsprogromnacht opened the darkest chapter of our history: the systematic persecution and murder of European Jews and many other human beings. We do not forget this on a day like today.

Both facts show us: freedom does not develop by itself. One has to fight for freedom and liberty. Freedom has to be defended regularly. Then freedom remains what it is: the most valuable good of our political and societal order. Without freedom no democracy, without freedom no diversity, no tolerance and therewith also no common Europe.

(The image states:  I (HEART) RAEDNIG – 42 million Americans are functionally illiterate. Join Jumpstart in the fight against illiteracy.)

There are many initiatives to boost people’s ability to read and write, as the right to education and attain the skills to read and write are still not being fulfilled for many people. A particularly striking campaign is underway in the United States, where jumpstart is using the famous “I love New York” icon to highlight the need to ensure that everyone has a chance to learn to read and write:

(The image states: I (HEART) NWE YROK – 22% of New Yorkers can’t read. Join Jumpstart in the fight against illiteracy.)

It seems like yesterday that the then-Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, raged against the latest increase of the world’s people who go hungry jumping to 820 million. With the crisis deepening daily, the FAO’s announcement of one billion people in the world going hungry is sidelined as a statistical fact in an environment that fails to acknowledge the hardest hit on its door step: compare Barbara Ehrenreich’s coverage of those “too poor to make the news.”

“The fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” Article 11 of the Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights has been endorsed by no less than 160 countries world wide.

The preference for male babies – female infanticide – has now officially reached the United States of America. As the New York Times reports that the census data reveals a preference for males in minority groups such as Chinese, Koreans and Indians.

The lack of gender-perspective punctuates all areas of society, some revelations are more brutal than others. As Frances Crook highlights in the Guardian the failure to acknowledge gender in the British justice and prison system leads to the violation of women’s rights as many women prisoners get engulfed in a vicious cycle of male violence, crime and imprisonment.

Sad – but not surprising – the poverty numbers in Austria, as in many other countries, are climbing. The already staggering numbers of one million – out of eight – in or on the margins of poverty have been increased significantly: according to Martin Schenk of the Armutskonferenz, the amount of people living in poverty will rise by at least 100.000 by the end of the year.

The Child Rights Convention is the only UN human rights treaty with almost universal ratification – save the USA and Somalia. As the AP reports, representatives in the US House are staging opposition to the possibility of ratification, citing the potential “erosion” of parental rights.

“A child’s ‘right to be heard’ would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed”; and “Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion,” Representative Hoekstra is said to fear.

The government of the People’s Republic of China has released its National Human Rights Action Plan for 2009-2010. The comprehensive document can be found here, it includes, among others, a chapter on the rights of persons with disabilities as was duly noted by BIZEPS.

Time and again the consequences of female infanticide – the preference for boys leading to sex-selective abortions – are discussed in the media. The latest report comes from China where the combination of the one-child policy mixed with a preference for males has created a gap of 32 million in the generation of under 20-year-olds.

In its latest Report amnesty international Austria discusses the question of structural racism in the Austrian police force and asks: “victim or suspect?” as it documents the frequent correlation of “race” and “police violence.” “Migrants or persons of an ethnic minority are far more easily suspected to have committed a crime than “white” Austrians,” concludes amnesty.

Migranten oder Angehörige ethnischer Minderheiten geraten viel leichter als weiße Österreicher unter Verdacht, Straftaten begangen zu haben. 

The police denies any pattern or other wrongdoing.

The grey-areas of any profession are thorny territory. Some of the greyer questions loom around medical professionals working for police, prisons and the likes. The fact that they are being paid by one side but should be looking after the people on the “other” side regularly raises tricky questions.

 As the NYTimes reports a report by the International Red Cross, which had been kept confidential for quite some time, recounts the experience of several prisoners at ‘Camp Justice’, the Guantánamo Bay prison; concluding that the role of the medical professionals was to “support the interrogators, not protect the prisoners.” 

The bid of Signmark, the deaf Finnish sign rapper to represent his native Finland in the upcoming Eurovision Song-Contest was slimly defeated by another group. Here is the video:

Construction work and the right to housing collide frequently. A particular concern are building projects, which destroy the already appalling “living” conditions of homeless people who try to get by in make-shift “homes”. Often migrants from rural areas, they get by in little “huts”. One such example was featured in the IHT, which reported on a Chinese blogger, Zhang Shihe, who covers the plight of the homeless South of Tiananmen Square.

Students at Harvard’s Medical School are challenging the ties between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, or more specifically the influence that such ties have on the teaching of some professors at HMS, reports the IHT.

Seems like a good poignant time to revisit the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines as spelled out by outgoing Special Rapporteur on the (human) right to health, Paul Hunt.

The Preamble highlights that “Almost 2 billion people lack access to essential medicines; improving access to existing medicines could save 10 million lives each year, 4 million of them in Africa and South-East Asia.” Acknowledging that it is the States who bear the primary responsibility to ensure access to the highest attainable standard of health – and therewith medicines – the Guidelines stress that “Pharmaceutical companies, including innovator, generic and biotechnology companies, have human rights responsibilities in relation to access to medicines.”

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.