Tag: human rights

RAJARAMAN SUNDARESAN: How Odisha Government Kept The Public Out Of A Public Hearing For A Bauxite Mine

How is this a public hearing? Who are they hearing? The police or the barbed wires they have put to keep us out?   See video “In Mali Parbat we grow ice, mandia, kaangu (millets), harvest roots, tubers. Because of its mountain streams, our paddy ripens, our millets ripen.  We are able to collect firewood and produce to take… Read More RAJARAMAN SUNDARESAN: How Odisha Government Kept The Public Out Of A Public Hearing For A Bauxite Mine

Dilip

Anna Iasmi Vallianatou: The Poland-Belarus border crisis is what happens when humans are treated as weapons

Another humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding on the European Union’s doorstep. Poland has responded by deploying 20,000 border police, firing water cannon and teargas at asylum seekers, reinforcing its border fencing and blocking access for journalists and aid organisations. This need to react is understandable: Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko’s use of refugees and migrants as pawns for… Read More Anna Iasmi Vallianatou: The Poland-Belarus border crisis is what happens when humans are treated as weapons

Dilip

Sanjiv Krishan Sood: It Is the Need of the Hour To Understand Police Brutality in India and Take Action

The police all over the country is increasingly brutal in their approach towards common people. Flouting law rather than protecting the rule of law is becoming the norm. When the chief minister of a state says “thok diya jayega” (will be shot), it is an open call to the police to ignore rule of law in dealing… Read More Sanjiv Krishan Sood: It Is the Need of the Hour To Understand Police Brutality in India and Take Action

Dilip

The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China. By John Gray

NB: I agree with much of Gray’s argument about the fragility of liberal democratic values, but would like to underline one of his sentences, containing the phrase about earlier generations of ‘liberal and socialist thinkers downplaying the colossal human toll of communism in Russia and China‘. There’s no denying this, but let us also remember that… Read More The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China. By John Gray

Dilip

‘The US should be held accountable’: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

“Tyrants in the Middle East, they took it as an example of the bad they can do. Now, in China with the Uyghurs, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Egypt, [they think they can] take people and just indefinitely detain, torture, kill and beat them simply by saying ‘they are extremists’. They say, if our boss [America] can do it,… Read More ‘The US should be held accountable’: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

Dilip

Myanmar’s UN envoy accuses military junta of township massacre

Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations, who has refused to leave his post despite being fired by the junta after the February coup, has alerted the world body to a “reported massacre” by the military. Kyaw Moe Tun sent a letter to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on Tuesday saying 40 bodies had been… Read More Myanmar’s UN envoy accuses military junta of township massacre

Dilip

Chitrangada Choudhury: In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession

Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Fr. Swamy’s death obscures how India’s political economy is linked to deprival. When an officer from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) came to interrogate Father Stan Swamy last monsoon, the Jesuit sociologist, then 83, in turn asked him about police integrity, and why a father-son duo (P. Jayaraj and Bennicks)… Read More Chitrangada Choudhury: In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession

Dilip

Danny Postel – The Other Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East

Saudi Arabia’s role as a counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East is widely understood and thoroughly documented. Historian Rosie Bsheer calls the Saudi kingdom “a counter-revolutionary state par excellence,” indeed one that was “consolidated as such.” The Saudi monarchy has gone into counter-revolutionary overdrive since the onset of the Arab uprisings, scrambling to thwart popular… Read More Danny Postel – The Other Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East

Dilip