Murdoch columnist Piers Akerman can usually be relied upon to defend the most powerful in society and belittle the least able to respond. He’s a corporate commentator, after all. But a piece this week, writing about Gareth Evans, the new chancellor of the Australian National University and former Australian attorney-general and foreign minister, surprisingly reminds…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Australia snubs Tamil refugees
My following article is published in US magazine The Nation: Sri Lanka’s brutal war against the Tamils, a native ethnic group that has suffered legal, economic and political discrimination for more than half a century, has come at a huge domestic and global cost. Human rights in the Sinhalese-dominated nation are consistently violated, with journalists,…
Israeli blogger calls the occupation his country’s defining feature
Israel’s stellar blog Promised Land on the 22nd anniversary of the first Palestinian intifada: Our national project is the occupation. We would like you to think it’s the high-tech industry (the current day’s version of the oranges Israel used to grow) but one can’t compare the investment – both governmental and private – in high-tech…
The Palestinian prisoner’s movement may soon lead the country
Khaled al-Azraq is a refugee who lived in Aida refugee Camp (Bethlehem) before being captured and imprisoned by Israel. He has been a political prisoner for the past 20 years and is currently being held in Nafha (Hadarim) prison in southern Palestine. He writes about the poltical education he has gained during his years incarcerated:…
The threat of Gmail for Islamic leaders
The state of human rights in Iran in 2009 has been grim and worsening. Reporters Without Borders highlights the web apartheid (possibly backed by Western multinationals): The authorities have also targeted the Internet in an attempt to extend their control to the new media. News websites that were likely to criticise Ahmadinejad’s victory, including around…
WMDs didn’t really matter in Iraq after all, says Tony Blair
The Iraq war remains highly controversial and the country itself is mired in turmoil. Not to worry, now argues Tony Blair, Britain simply had to invade the country for purely human rights reasons: Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a…
The shame of those running Iran in 2009
The Islamic Republic lashes out at its own citizens and creates more revolutionaries: Human rights abuses in Iran are now as bad as at any time in the past 20 years, Amnesty International reports tomorrow in a survey marking six months since June’s disputed presidential election. Amnesty documents “patterns of abuse” by the Basij militia…
What it means to advocate the ”˜Sri Lanka model’ for Israel/Palestine
My following article is published on US website Mondoweiss: It is easy to frame the conflict in Israel and Palestine as inherently unique. In many ways it is – decades-old occupation, US-supported racial discrimination and failure of Western journalism to hold the powerful to account – but other struggles have eerie similarities. This year Sri…
The first world needs to hear the voices of the silent
A recipe for global conflict in the 21st century and walls, barriers and missiles won’t keep the demography in check. Action on climate change, anybody? From the slums of Kabul to the shanties of Damascus, more than half of the world’s refugees are now scraping by on tiny strips of land in increasingly overcrowded, overburdened…