China’s vast security apparatus has moved swiftly to smother mass protests that swept the country, with police patrolling streets, checking cell phones and even calling some demonstrators to warn them against a repeat.
In major cities on Monday and Tuesday, police flooded the sites of protests that took place over the weekend, when thousands gathered to vent their anger over the country’s tough zero-Covid policy – some calling for greater democracy and freedom in an extraordinary show of dissent against Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The heavy police presence has discouraged protesters from gathering since, while authorities in some cities have adopted surveillance tactics used in the far western region of Xinjiang to intimidate those who demonstrated at the weekend.
In what appears to be the first official response – albeit veiled – to the protests, China’s domestic security chief vowed at a meeting Tuesday to “effectively maintain overall social stability.”
Without mentioning the demonstrations, Chen Wenqing urged law enforcement officials to “resolutely strike hard against infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces, as well as illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order,” the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
The tough language may signal a heavy-handed crackdown ahead. While protests over local grievances do occur in China, the current wave of demonstrations is the most widespread since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement of 1989. The political defiance is also unprecedented, with some protesters openly calling for Xi, the country’s most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades, to step down.
Some of the boldest protests took place in Shanghai, where crowds called for Xi’s removal two nights in a row. The sidewalks of Urumqi Road – the main protest site – have been completely blocked by tall barricades, making it virtually impossible for crowds to congregate.
Ten minutes’ drive away, dozens of police officers patrolled the People’s Square – a large plaza at the heart of the city where some residents had planned to gather with white paper and candles on Monday evening. Police also waited inside a subway station there, closing off all but one exit, according to a protester at the scene.
CNN is not naming any of the protesters in this story to protect them from reprisals.
The protester said he saw police checking the cell phones of passersby, and asking them if they had installed virtual private networks (VPNs) that can be used to circumvent China’s internet firewall, or apps such as Twitter and Telegram, which though banned in the country have been used by protesters.
“There were also police dogs. The whole atmosphere was chilling,” the protester said.
Protesters later decided to move their planned demonstration to another location, but by the time they arrived, the security presence had already been stepped up there, the protester said.
“There were too many police and we had to cancel,” he said.
On Tuesday, a widely circulated video appears to show police officers checking passengers’ mobile phones on a Shanghai subway train.
Another Shanghai protester told CNN they were among “around 80 to 110” people detained by police on Saturday night, adding they were released 24 hours later.
CNN cannot independently verify the number of protesters detained and it is unclear how many people, if any, remain in custody.
The protester said the detainees had their phones confiscated on board a bus that took them to a police station, where officers collected their fingerprints and retina patterns.
According to the protester, police told those detained they had been used by “ill-intentioned people who want to start a color revolution,” pointing to nationwide protests breaking out on the same day as evidence of that.
The protester said police returned their phone and camera upon their release, but officers had deleted the photo album and removed the WeChat social media app.
In Beijing, police vehicles, many parked with their lights flashing, lined eerily quiet streets on Monday morning throughout parts of the capital, including near Liangmaqiao in the city’s central Chaoyang district, where a large crowd of protesters had gathered Sunday night.
The demonstration, which saw hundreds marching down the city’s Third Ring Road, ended peacefully in the early hours of Monday under the close watch of lines of police officers.
But some protesters have since received phone calls from the police inquiring about their participation.
One demonstrator said she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as a local police officer, asking her whether she was at the protest and what she saw there. She was also told that if she had any discontent with authorities, she should complain to the police, instead of taking part in “illegal activities” such as the protest.
“That night, the police mostly adopted a calm approach when dealing with us. But the Communist Party is very good at meting out punishment afterward,” the demonstrator told CNN.
She said she did not wear a face mask during the demonstration. “I don’t think Omicron is that scary,” she said. But her friends who wore masks to the protest also received calls from the police – some as late as 1 a.m., she added.
Still, the protester remained defiant. “It is our legitimate right (to protest), because the constitution stipulates that we have freedom of speech and freedom of congregation,” she said.
Another protester, who has not heard from the police, told CNN that concern she could be the next to be called upon weighs heavily on her mind.
“I can only seek consolation by telling myself that there were so many of us who took part in the protest, they can’t put a thousand people in jail,” she said.
Meanwhile, some universities in Beijing have arranged transportation for students to return home early for winter break and take classes online, citing an effort to reduce Covid risks for students taking public transportation.
But the arrangement also conveniently discourages students from gathering, following demonstrations on a series of campuses over the weekend, including the prestigious Tsinghua University where hundreds of students shouted for “Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!”
Given the long history of student-led movements in modern China, authorities are particularly concerned about political rallies on university campuses.
Beijing’s universities have been the source of demonstrations which kicked off the May Fourth Movement in 1919, to which the Chinese Communist Party traces its roots, as well as the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which were brutally crushed by the Chinese military.
WASHINGTON — The Senate passed bipartisan legislation Tuesday to protect same-sex marriages, an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.
The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 on Tuesday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.”
Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress, to send the bill to the House and then — they hope — to President Joe Biden’s desk. The bill has gained steady momentum since the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion, a ruling that included a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas that suggested same-sex marriage could also come under threat. Bipartisan Senate negotiations got a kick-start this summer when 47 Republicans unexpectedly voted for a House bill and gave supporters new optimism.
The legislation would not force any state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But it would require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed, and protect current same-sex unions, if the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision were to be overturned.
That’s a stunning bipartisan endorsement, and evidence of societal change, after years of bitter divisiveness on the issue.
The bill would also protect interracial marriages by requiring states to recognize legal marriages regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity or national origin.”
A new law protecting same-sex marriages would be a major victory for Democrats as they relinquish their two years of consolidated power in Washington, and a massive win for advocates who have been pushing for decades for federal legislation. It comes as the LGBTQ community has faced violent attacks, such as the shooting last weekend at a gay nightclub in Colorado that killed five people and injured at least 17.
“Our community really needs a win, we have been through a lot,” said Kelley Robinson, the incoming president of Human Rights Campaign, which advocates on LGBTQ issues. “As a queer person who is married, I feel a sense of relief right now. I know my family is safe.”
The vote was personal for many senators, too. Schumer said on Tuesday that he was wearing the tie he wore at his daughter’s wedding, “one of the happiest moments of my life.” He also recalled the “harrowing conversation” he had with his daughter and her wife in September 2020 when they heard that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. “Could our right to marry be undone?” they asked at the time.
With conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ginsburg, the court has now overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to an abortion, stoking fears about Obergefell and other rights protected by the court. But sentiment has shifted on same-sex marriage, with more than two-thirds of the public now in support.
Still, Schumer said it was notable that the Senate was even having the debate after years of Republican opposition. “A decade ago, it would have strained all of our imaginations to envision both sides talking about protecting the rights of same-sex married couples,” he said.
Passage came after the Senate rejected three Republican amendments to protect the rights of religious institutions and others to still oppose such marriages. Supporters of the legislation argued those amendments were unnecessary because the bill had already been amended to clarify that it does not affect rights of private individuals or businesses that are currently enshrined in law. The bill would also make clear that a marriage is between two people, an effort to ward off some far-right criticism that the legislation could endorse polygamy.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been lobbying his fellow GOP senators to support the legislation for months, pointed to the number of religious groups supporting the bill, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of those groups were part of negotiations on the bipartisan amendment.
“They see this as a step forward for religious freedom,” Tillis says.
The nearly 17-million member, Utah-based faith said in a statement this month that church doctrine would continue to consider same-sex relationships to be against God’s commandments. Yet it said it would support rights for same-sex couples as long as they didn’t infringe upon religious groups’ right to believe as they choose.
Most Republicans still oppose the legislation, saying it is unnecessary and citing concerns about religious liberty. And some conservative groups stepped up opposition in recent weeks, lobbying Republican supporters to switch their votes.
“As I and others have argued for years, marriage is the exclusive, lifelong, conjugal union between one man and one woman, and any departure from that design hurts the indispensable goal of having every child raised in a stable home by the mom and dad who conceived him,” the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy, wrote in a recent blog post arguing against the bill.
In an effort to win the 10 Republican votes necessary to overcome a filibuster in the 50-50 Senate, Democrats delayed consideration until after the midterm elections, hoping that would relieve political pressure on GOP senators who might be wavering.
Eventual support from 12 Republicans gave Democrats the votes they needed.
Along with Tillis, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman supported the bill early on and have lobbied their GOP colleagues to support it. Also voting for the legislation in two test votes ahead of passage were Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Todd Young of Indiana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Mitt Romney of Utah, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.
Lummis, one of the more conservative members of the Senate, spoke ahead of the final vote about her “fairly brutal self soul searching” before supporting the bill. She said that she accepts her church’s beliefs that a marriage is between a man and a woman, but noted that the country was founded on the separation of church and state.
“We do well by taking this step, not embracing or validating each other’s devoutly held views, but by the simple act of tolerating them,” Lummis said.
The growing GOP support for the issue is a sharp contrast from even a decade ago, when many Republicans vocally opposed same-sex marriages.
Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who is the first openly gay senator and has been working on gay rights issues for almost four decades, said this month that the newfound openness from many Republicans on the subject reminds her “of the arc of the LBGTQ movement to begin with, in the early days when people weren’t out and people knew gay people by myths and stereotypes.”
Baldwin, the lead Senate negotiator on the legislation, said that as more individuals and families have become visible, hearts and minds have changed.
“And slowly laws have followed,” she said. “It is history.”
A young child receives vaccine drops in Pakistan, but the region has experienced an upsurgence of cases because of vaccine refusal. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
by Ashfaq Yusufzai (peshawar)
Inter Press Service
PESHAWAR, Nov 29 (IPS) – Vaccine refusal is impacting the eradication of polio in Pakistan.
Pakistan has vaccinated about 35 million children during its door-to-door campaign, but about 500,000 remained unvaccinated due to refusal by their parents, Jawad Khan Polio officer in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, recorded in 2022 so far.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, has reported all 20 polio cases. North Waziristan has detected 17 infections, Lakki Marwat 2 and South Waziristan 1.
Khan says that hesitancy against vaccination is not a new trend, as Pakistan has been facing this problem since the start of the polio-eradication campaign in the 90s.
Of the 17 cases reported in militancy-riddled North Waziristan, 12 were not vaccinated, while five were partially immunized.
Muhammad Shah, whose son was diagnosed with the polio virus in August, told IPS that he had been opposing vaccination because this wasn’t allowed in Islam.
“Our religion Islam says that no medication is permissible before the occurrence of any ailment; therefore, our people defy vaccination to fulfill their religious obligations,” he said. Shah, a religious preacher, says his son will soon recover from the paralysis.
He says he was unrepentant in refusing vaccination of his child and would continue to thwart efforts by vaccinators to inoculate the toddler.
North Waziristan district, located near Afghanistan’s border, has many militants who staunchly oppose vaccination.
“It was the hub of the polio virus till 2014 when militants ruled the area illegitimately as there was a complete ban on all sorts of immunization. The Taliban militants were evicted through a military operation in 2014, and parents started vaccinating their kids,” Sajjad Ahmed, a senior health worker, said.
According to him, polio vaccinations have decreased with the emergence of militancy in the area.
“In the last three months, three persons, including two policemen and one health worker, have been killed by unknown assailants during a polio drive in North Waziristan,” he said.
People are afraid to take part in the campaign due to fear of reprisals by Taliban militants, he said.
Dr Rafiq Khan, associated with polio immunization in the region, told IPS that parents refuse vaccination, arguing that it was a US and Western plot to render recipients impotent and cut the population of Muslims – a baseless argument.
“Alleged Taliban have killed about 70 vaccinators and policemen since 2012. Government deploys 25,000 policemen in each three-day campaign to ensure the safety of workers,” he said.
Khan said that militants are pressuring the people against vaccination, due to which parents weren’t willing to administer jabs to their kids below five years.
“We are also facing fake finger marking of kids. As a standard procedure, our vaccinators mark the thumb of the vaccine recipients with indelible ink so that we know how many children have been immunized,” he said.
However, the parents ask the vaccinators to mark their kids’ fingers without vaccination, he said. In this way, parents deceive the government.
“Now, we have started convincing the parents through community elders and religious scholars to create demand for vaccination,” he said.
The government has enlisted the services of religious scholars to do away with refusals against poliomyelitis.
Maulana Amir Haq, a pro-vaccination cleric, told IPS that they had been holding awareness sessions with people telling them vaccination is allowed in Islam.
“It is the responsibility of the parents to safeguard their kids against diseases and vaccination aimed to prevent the crippling ailments. There, parents should fulfill their religious duty and inoculate their sons and daughters,” he said.
He said that laboratory reports confirm vaccines given to Pakistan’s children are safe and don’t contain any ingredient to sterilise the recipients. The situation is changing because we now reach hardcore refusal cases and vaccinate them.
Federal Health Minister Abdul Qadir Patel said that it is crucial to understand that the only protection from polio is vaccination, and parents should protect their children against disability through free immunization.
“We want to wipe out the virus and safeguard not only our own kids but all around the world,” he told IPS.
Polio will keep haunting us until we interrupt transmission, Federal Health Secretary Dr. Muhammad Fakhre Alam said.
On August 31, a 16-year-old boy was diagnosed positive for polio in Waziristan, which shows how robust Pakistan’s virus detection network is because it highlights that we can identify polio cases in children outside the usually expected age, he said.
National Emergency Operations Centre Coordinator for polio, Dr Shahzad Baig, expressed concerns about the spread of wild poliovirus as millions of people in the country are displaced by recent floods.
“The scale of the current calamity is absolutely devastating. As part of the polio programme, our network of health workers is here to support in every way we can, but I am deeply concerned about the virus gaining a foothold as millions of people leave their homes and look for refuge elsewhere,” he said.
The province of Balochistan and parts of southern Punjab, and 23 districts of Sindh were unable to hold a vaccination drive as floods swept away homes and villages around the country. Despite the extreme climatic conditions, polio teams reached children in all accessible areas, he said.
Neighbouring Afghanistan is facing the same problems; however, it has detected only two cases this year.
After days of intense negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, countries at the latest UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, reached agreement on an outcome that established a funding mechanism to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced disasters. 20 November 2022 Credit: United Nations
Opinion by Inge Kaul (berlin)
Inter Press Service
BERLIN, Nov 29 (IPS) – For decades, there have been non-conclusive deliberations regarding how the international community could support poor and vulnerable countries in their efforts to cope with and recover from the havoc wreaked on their territory by the ill-effects of global warming such as severe droughts, floods, storms, or rising sea levels.
At the COP27 climate summit, this issue figured for the first time as a separate item on the agenda; and, as one of their very last-minute decisions, delegations even agreed to establish a dedicated loss and damage fund (LDF). However, the question of how to operationalize, notably resource the fund was left open.
A “transitional committee” is to be created to examine possible funding options and report to COP28, which could then, eventually, decide on the LDF’s operationalization.
Remembering the many press photos showing the despair written into the faces of people, whose houses and fields were destroyed by floods, or the blank stares of those sitting next to the cadavers of their cattle killed by severe drought conditions,
I feel that business as usual—namely, taking it easy in delivering on funding promises (as we have seen it in the case of the $ 100 billion annual climate-finance promise) — would be an extremely immoral and unethical behavior in the present case.
Therefore, let’s waste no time and start to explore where one could find money fit for the purpose of loss and damage support.
In the following, I argue that only one – still to be established – source will generate on a relatively reliable and predictable manner the longer-term stream of public finance required, as a minimum, for creating a solid basis of LDF core funding.
The funding source to be agreed and established as a matter of highest urgency are UN assessed contributions for climate security.
Money fit for the purpose of loss and damage support
However, at the outset, it is perhaps important to clarify that support for loss and damage should not be confounded with humanitarian assistance delivered as a prompt crisis-response measure.
Disaster may strike countries haphazardly, irrespective of whether they are poor or rich, vulnerable or not. All countries may need or, at least, somehow benefit from immediate and fast-disbursing, short-term humanitarian assistance in cash or kind.
How best to organize such short-term humanitarian assistance is also an important issue that deserves more attention. However, it is an issue beyond the scope of this article.
Therefore, let’s now turn to the specific issue of what type of external support could be most useful for “climate victims”, notably poor and vulnerable countries struggling to rebuild their communities and economies.
An entity such as the newly established LDF and the money that, one day, it might have at its disposal, are governance tools. Like any other tools they should be fit for the purpose at hand.
Considering for now mainly the core funding that the LDF needs to have, it should perhaps have three key characteristics, namely be: (1) public finance; (2) patient, that is, designed for the longer-term; and (3) relatively predictable in its availability.
The reasons are that, typically, a country’s vulnerability to severe climate events is a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon to which both structural factors (e.g., the countries geographic position and size) and non-structural factors (such as its development level) contribute.
Thus, by implication, meaningful loss-and-damage support is likely to be required for several years, maybe, even for a decade or more. This should not come as a surprise, because even in developed countries rebuilding efforts have often been a lengthy process.
Moreover, in the case of small-island developing countries, it could even be that parts of the population need to be resettled to start their life anew.
Initially, patient, predictable public finance may constitute the most important source of funding. As the rebuilding process advances, the public funds could also play an important role in helping to mobilize other resource inflows, including private investments.
Or, they could be twinned with adaptation finance and other types of climate finance, as well as official development assistance.
Making the case for UN assessed contributions for climate-security, including loss and damage support
By now, there exists broad-based agreement that our security today depends on more than the security of our countries’ external borders and on more than the control of within-country conflicts and violence.
As US President Joe Biden, noted in his statement to COP27, military security today is only one dimension of our security, next to climate and food security; and, as COVID-19 taught us, next to global health security.
The security threats we are facing are global in their reach; they tie us together in a web of manifold interdependencies. They require all hands-on deck, or no one will be secure. The United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) is, therefore, correct in pushing for a “Climate Solidarity Pact.”
Thus, it is timely to ask: Why do we have, within the UN, only an established system of assessed contributions to support efforts aimed at keeping and restoring military security? Why not also assessed contributions – a solidarity-based pact – to climate security?
Among the reasons that strongly speak for this financing option are several. First, such contributions could be introduced for, say, an initial period of 20 years, subject, of course, to regular monitoring of their functioning and impact.
Evidently, they would provide the type of reliable and predictable long-term public finance that the LDF needs.
Second, agreement on a UN funding scale for climate security would help end the present continuous tussle among countries over who should contribute how much. The UN assessment scale for determining individual countries’ contributions to climate security would be based on a joint decision by member states.
Besides income (capacity to pay) one would, in the present case, certainly also consider past and current per-capita emission levels and other relevant factors.
Many aspects of the proposed funding source still need further élaboration and consultations. However, let’s start at the beginning and encourage a world-wide dialogue on the pros and cons of the following issues.
Should we: (1) consider climate security, notably that of vulnerable countries, as a global security issue; and (2) grant climate security the same financing privilege that military security enjoys, namely, to benefit from assessed contributions paid by all UN member states according to a formula that aims at promoting climate security and justice?
Why not ?
Inge Kaul is a fellow at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany.
Elon Musk on Monday claimed that Apple has “threatened” to pull Twitter from its iOS app store, a move that could be devastating to the company Musk just acquired for $44 billion.
“Apple
(AAPL) has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk said in one of several tweets Monday taking aim at Apple
(AAPL) and its CEO for alleged moves that could undermine Twitter’s business.
In another tweet, Musk claimed that Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. “Do they hate free speech in America,” he said, in an apparent reference to his oft-stated desire to bolster his idea of free speech on the platform. “What’s going on here [Apple CEO Tim Cook]?” Musk added in a follow-up tweet. He also criticized Apple’s size, claimed it engages in “censorship,” and called out the 30% transaction fee Apple charges large app developers to be listed in its app store.
The tweetstorm highlights the tenuous relationship between Musk and Apple, which along with Google serves as the major gatekeepers for mobile applications. Long before taking over Twitter, the Tesla CEO said that when the car company was struggling, he considered selling the company to Apple, but that Cook refused to take a meeting with him.
Removal from Apple’s app store, or that of Google, would be detrimental to Twitter’s business, which is already struggling with a loss of advertisers following Musk’s takeover and a rocky initial attempt at expanding its subscription business.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweets. The company has previously shown it’s willing to remove apps from its app store over concerns about their ability to moderate harmful content or if they attempt to circumvent the cut Apple takes from in-app purchases and subscriptions.
In January 2021, Apple removed Parler, an app popular with conservatives, including some members of the far right, from its app store following the US Capitol attack over concerns about the platform’s ability to detect and moderate hate speech and incitement. Parler was returned to Apple’s app store three months later after updating its content moderation practices.
In its official app store review guidelines, Apple lists various safety parameters that apps must adhere to in order to be included in the store, including an ability to prevent “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy” such as hate speech, pornography and terrorism. “If you’re looking to shock and offend people, the App Store isn’t the right place for your app,” the guidelines state.
Various civil society groups, researchers and other industry watchers have raised concerns about Twitter’s ability to effectively moderate harmful content and maintain the platform’s safety following widespread layoffs and mass employee exits at the company. Musk has also claimed he wants to amplify “free speech” on the platform and has begun to restore some accounts that were previously banned or suspended for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules. Musk himself has shared a conspiracy theory and several other controversial tweets since taking over as Twitter’s owner.
Musk, long a prolific and antagonistic tweeter, has not let up at all since taking over the company. And what it may have lost in revenue, he has claimed it has made up for in engagement. Part of the strategy appears to be relentlessly taking aim at enemies, either of him personally or of “free speech.”
In an interview with CBS earlier this month, Cook was asked whether there are any ways in which Twitter could change that would cause Apple to remove it from the app store. “They say that they’re going to continue to moderate and so … I count on them to do that,” Cook responded. “Because I don’t think that anybody really wants hate speech on their platform. So I’m counting on them to continue to do that.”
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Roth said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.”
And last weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
While the state of Apple and Twitter’s relationship is unclear, the iPhone maker was running Black Friday ads on the platform as recently as last Thursday, according to posts viewed by CNN.
Many companies have pulled back on digital ad spending in recent months as the economy declined, and Twitter has likely always only been a small portion of Apple’s ad budget. Apple’s impact on Twitter, however, could be much more significant, including if Musk succeeds in shifting its core business to being more reliant on subscription revenue, and potentially has to pay a 30% cut to Apple.
In one tweet Monday, Musk asked his nearly 120 million followers if they know “Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?” In another tweet, he posted a picture of a highway exit: one lane headed toward “pay 30%,” the other pointed toward “go to war.” An old car labeled “Elon” skidded toward the latter.
The 17th Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to be hosted by the Government of Ethiopia with the support of UN ECA and UN DESA, will take place from 28 November to 2 December 2022 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, under the overarching theme “Resilient Internet for a Shared Sustainable and Common Future”. There are five themes that guide the agenda of the meeting, drawn from the Global Digital Compact found in the UN Secretary-General’s report on “Our Common Agenda”. Credit: United Nations
Opinion by Emma Gibson (addis ababa, ethiopia)
Inter Press Service
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Nov 28 (IPS) – The upcoming consultation on the Global Digital Compact presents a unique opportunity to ensure that human rights in the digital world are protected in international common standards.
The United Nations has proposed a Global Digital Compact, a set of shared principles for our digital future, which is scheduled to be agreed upon by Member States in September 2024. The Compact is expected to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all”, and the consultation being conducted by the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology presents a unique opportunity to ensure that these principles are rooted in human rights law and underpinned by an intersectional feminist, anti-discrimination analysis.
This is not the first time a range of countries have contributed to a document articulating a better way forward in the digital world. The Declaration for the Future of the Internet lays out priorities for an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure” Internet, and establishes a code of practice for how nation-states should act in the digital sphere. Sixty-one countries have signed on, and while this is a welcome step, it underscores how the world’s current patchwork of laws and policies are failing to adequately protect and promote human rights online.
The Declaration envisions a well-governed digital domain in which human rights and democracy are defended, privacy is protected, freedom of expression is upheld, and censorship condemned.
But all this cannot be achieved simply by making a statement of intent. Our human rights apply in the digital world too and our digital rights have to be protected in law.
Securing our human rights in the digital world. Credit: Millicent Kwambai / Equality Now
The Internet – a tool for great good and huge harm
Early predictions on how the Internet would remove barriers and usher in freedoms, connect people globally, and help achieve liberty, democracy, and equality, have only partially been realized.
While the Internet has been a conduit for much good, it has also become a powerful tool to commit harm, including facilitating the proliferation of disinformation, surveillance, and polarization, alongside an explosion in online crime, harassment, and abuse.
Digital dividends do not benefit people in the way they should, and the facade of the digital world that most people see conceals the rife existence of exploitative and often low-paid work.
The application of uneven regulations across jurisdictions, and the continuing use of standards and principles that are voluntary for the private sector, has resulted in multinational tech companies largely regulating themselves. But they have failed to stem the rising tide of harmful narratives, hate speech, and disinformation that is poisoning our digital ecosystem.
We need to rethink how we ensure that the Internet and digital technologies are available, safe and accessible to all.
The call for universal digital rights
To achieve a well-governed digital realm, international women’s rights organizations Equality Now and Women Leading in AI are calling for universal digital rights, rooted in human rights law and underpinned by an intersectional, feminist informed and anti-discrimination analysis. Clearly articulating how human rights apply in cyberspace would ensure accountability on the part of governments and companies.
Some laws and regulations exist, particularly around data privacy and freedom of expression. However, what is needed is an agreed understanding of fundamental digital rights.
Providing clarity on what constitutes universal digital rights would address the current critical failings arising from the misuse of the Internet and digital technology. It would protect people from human rights violations that are outside the framing of current laws, such as how the law applies in the virtual world of the Metaverse. And it would foster an inclusive digital landscape, including by promoting equitable and affordable access to the Internet and digital technology.
Clarity on universal digital rights would respond to existing challenges around protection of a person’s “digital twin” — their digital representation. It would ensure trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, and address the current uneven and ineffective regulation of the Internet.
Human rights apply in the digital world too and our digital rights must be protected in law
Achieving universal digital rights is ambitious in scope but the only way to truly guarantee an equitable Internet and use of digital technologies is through international, multi-sectoral cooperation. Just as the efforts of individual nations alone can never solve a worldwide environmental crisis, nor can we rely on separate national laws and policies to guide, regulate, and care for our global digital ecosystem.
The fact that over five dozen countries have signed up to the Declaration for the Future of the Internet is a sign that, even in these times of geopolitical instabililty, there is still an appetite to rally behind an ideal of how the digital world should function. The Digital Global Compact provides an opportunity for realization of this ideal at the global level.
Diverse voices need to be heard and contribute to global and multi-stakeholder discussions on how we will achieve universal digital rights This is why Equality Now and Women Leading in AI are taking part in the 2022 Internet Governance Forum in Addis Ababa and are excited to connect with others who want to co-create legal, ethical, and technical solutions to address current and future harms in the digital realm.
We want to make sure that the perspectives of women, girls, and other discriminated-against groups from every part of the world are fed into the consultation on the Global Digital Compact so that the Internet and digital technology works in everyone’s interests, not against them.
Emma Gibson is the Campaign Lead, Universal Digital Rights, for Equality Now.
For media inquiries please contact: Tara Carey, Equality Now Global Head of Media, E: [email protected]; M: +447971556340 (WhatsApp)
Equality Now is a feminist organization using the law to protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls. Since 1992, an international network of lawyers, activists, and supporters have held governments responsible for ending legal inequality, sexual exploitation, sexual violence, and harmful practices.
This is an opinion editorial by Anita Posch, the founder of Bitcoin For Fairness who has traveled extensively around the world to learn how the globally unbanked can benefit from sovereign money.
In 2022, European politicians formed an initiative with the goal of banning proof-of-work mining because of its high electricity consumption. The underlying goal is to blame Bitcoin for damaging the environment, when it’s — as they claim — just a tool for useless speculation.
In 2021, the co-founder of Ripple, which advertises itself as having better qualities than bitcoin, donated $5 million to support Greenpeace USA with a campaign called “Clean Up the Code.” It attempts to lobby Bitcoin developers to change the mining mechanism from proof of work to proof of stake, which would supposedly reduce its power consumption by 99%. With Ethereum moving from proof of work to proof of stake recently, these actors feel they have seen their theory confirmed and are trying to lobby against Bitcoin even more.
What they don’t mention is that the differences between proof of work to proof of stake are huge. These mechanisms have different goals and very different outcomes, which result in different properties of the cryptocurrencies they secure. In short: the immutability of proof of work is stronger than that of proof of stake.
Proof of work is better at producing a robust, immutable blockchain that has a fair degree of decentralization and cannot be easily tampered with, even by very rich, very influential, very powerful organizations and entities. Proof of stake doesn’t have any of these goals. It has the goal of governance in an environmentally-friendly way that still maintains decentralization but allows some flexibility of a blockchain. In the short weeks after Ethereum’s switch, the overwhelming proportion of validators started to censor transactions following the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list.
Proof of work makes Bitcoin uncensorable, immutable and permissionless. These are the properties for resistance. It’s a tool for financial self defense and a Trojan horse for freedom. Bitcoin is a silent revolution. It empowers civil resistance. It’s our only shot at finding a better money that actively enforces human rights and supports activists in their resistance against dictators and authoritarians.
In this article, I won’t discuss energy use, because as soon as you understand the importance of Bitcoin to make the world more fair, you’ll get that the amount of energy used is off topic. You’ll understand that even better when you understand that Bitcoin mining is securing the total value stored on the blockchain and renders it the most secure network that we know of. And, on top of that, Bitcoin mining is already one of the greenest industries globally.
In the following, I lay out how Bitcoin enforces seven of the 30 articles mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It should become clear that Bitcoin is neither useless nor just a tool for speculation.
The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights
Let’s turn back time to December 1948. Three years after the end of World War II, the world was still in horror over what had happened since Germany attacked Poland in September 1939. It started a war that lasted six years, killed approximately 80 million people, including six million Jews and many other members of minorities like Roma, Sinti, Black Germans, the differently abled, socialists, communists and homosexuals.
As a consequence, the United Nations was founded in 1945 by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights.
One of the outcomes was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was proclaimed on December 10, 1948. In succeeding decades it has been integrated into many countries’ laws and can be seen as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time in human history, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages.
An UN committee chaired by Eleanor Rooseveltdrafted 30 articles. Hansa Jivraj Mehta, an Indian educator, independence activist, feminist and writer, was responsible for changing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from “all men are born free and equal” to “all human beings are born free and equal,” highlighting the need for gender equality.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights served as a recommendation for a number of laws. Laws can be enforced or not. Laws in themselves are no guarantee that anyone is treated equally or is not being discriminated against or free from suffering under financial oppression. Contrary to human-enforced laws, a protocol that is enforced by mathematical rules built in consensus with all its users will always be non-discriminatory and provide an inclusive financial system. “Rules without rulers,” as Andreas M. Antonopoulus says.
The questions remain: How much electricity is the life and freedom of billions of people worth? How do people in the developed North come to decide what a good use of energy is for the South? Beyond a tool for “speculation,” isn’t Bitcoin also a great tool for privacy and financial self-sovereignty globally?
Let’s take a look at the state of the world today and how this global regulatory regime came into place that is defining who has possibilities and who hasn’t.
Fifty-four percent of the global population lives in authoritarian or hybrid regimes. They don’t enjoy the privilege of living in full democracies. Only 6.4% of all people live in countries of “full democracy” like Germany, France, Austria and so on, or in the U.S. All of the others around the world are living in either flawed democracies or they are in full dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. The place where you were born largely defines the chances you’ll have in life (exceptions are rare).
A look at the map of the democracy index shows a pattern to remember. The dark red areas are the countries where life is the worst, their peoples have the least freedom. The worst country per this metric is Afghanistan, followed by Myanmar, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and the Central African Republic.
A look on the map of political corruption shows a similar pattern. The dark red areas are stretched from the Northeast, starting in Russia and China, going over Africa and into South America. There seems to be some sort of correlation between corruption and failing democracies. That is corruption enables both human rights abuses and democratic decline. In turn, these factors lead to higher levels of corruption, setting off a vicious cycle.
Finally, let’s look at the world wealth map. The same pattern is visible. In countries with dictators and authoritarian leaders, people are on average poorer, with the poorest countries being in Africa and the Middle East.
The average net worth across the entire world indicates the enormous disparity between the developed world and everyone else. At one extreme, there are countries with net worth (with “net worth” being measured as the market value of all assets minus any outstanding debts) numbers over $500,000, and at the other extreme, there are places where people have less than $500 to their names. There is a smattering of light orange countries in between, but the worldwide map demonstrates an astonishing level of inequality between the haves and the have nots.
A History Of Monetary Power
The British Empire
The reasons for the huge inequality are manifold. Colonialism has definitely been one of them. This map below shows the British Empire in 1910. This political and economical control enabled the United Kingdom to become the first monetary hegemon (“hegemony” refers to a single state that has decisive influence over the functions of the international monetary system). In 1910, the British pound was still backed by gold (the gold standard meant that all circulating money was backed one to one by gold in the treasuries of banks) and everyone used it for trade.
“With the Bretton Woods system and the following petrodollar system, the United States obtained a near-global lock on the international money system. Previous empire currencies never obtained that complete of a financial lock on the world, and thus were never true ‘global reserve’ currencies but instead were just ‘widely recognized and dominant’ currencies…
“However, after only a decade, the Bretton Woods system began to fray. The United States began running large fiscal deficits and experiencing mildly rising inflation levels, first for the late 1960s domestic programs, and then for the Vietnam War. The United States began to see its gold reserves shrink, as other countries began to doubt the backing of the dollar and therefore redeemed dollars for gold instead of comfortably holding dollars…
“The system had an underlying flaw that when left unaddressed brought the system down. It was never truly sustainable as designed. There was no way that the U.S. could maintain enough gold to back all of its currency for domestic use, and simultaneously back enough currency for expanding global use as well (which was the part that was redeemable).”
“Eventually in 1971, math came back with a vengeance on the Bretton Woods system, and Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of dollars to gold, and thus ended the Bretton Woods system. The closing of gold convertibility was proposed to be temporary at the time, but it ultimately became permanent. Rather than shifting to another country, though, the United States was able to re-order the global monetary system with itself still in the center, in the next system.”
When Richard Nixon abolished the gold standard in 1971, he basically rendered all currencies in the world as fiat money. “Fiat” is a Latin word that means “let it be done.” Since 1971, our currencies aren’t backed by gold anymore and only have value because they are legal tender. The economical consequences have been immense.
It was the first time in history that only fiat currencies existed. This can lead to serious problems, for instance when one tries to use printed paper in another country. Why should businesses and governments in other countries accept pieces of paper, which can be printed endlessly by a foreign government and have no firm backing, as a form of payment for their valuable goods and services? The fiat system had a problem.
The Petrodollar
In 1974, following a variety of geopolitical conflicts including, the Yom Kippur War and the OPEC oil embargo, the United States and Saudi Arabia reached an agreement to sell their oil exclusively in U.S. dollars in exchange for U.S. protection and cooperation. From there, the world was set on the petrodollar system; a clever way to make a global fiat currency system work decently enough.
But the system is cracking here and there. In August 2017, for instance, Venezuela declared that it would cease pricing its oil in U.S. dollars and instead use euros, yuan and other currencies. In March 2022, media reports suggested that Saudi Arabia was considering pricing some of its oil sales to China in the Chinese yuan rather than the U.S. dollar. On March 23, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced an order forbidding “non-friendly” countries (including EU countries, the U.S. and Japan) from buying Russian gas in any other currency besides Russian ruble (although the Russian Finance Ministry reportedly said it would also accept gold or bitcoin).
“…over the next several years, the global economy will, more likely than not, encounter a bear cycle of the current petrodollar system. If so, assets such as global equities, quality residential real estate, precious metals, industrial commodities, and alternatives such as Bitcoin, are likely to do well.
From there, the global monetary system will gradually become more decentralized, in the sense that alternate payment systems and alternate currency settlements among trading partners are growing in use. This will indeed be a more structural shift towards a new system. It could happen slowly, as it already is, or it could accelerate if the US itself also shifts out of the fraying system.”
Consequences Of Monetary Hegemony
For at least the past 78 years, marked by the end of World War II, the global economy has more or less revolved around the U.S. dollar. The Bretton Woods system was also the start of global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Since then, a lot of additional organizations like the Bank For International Settlements (BIS), the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and OFAC were launched. Unelected representatives are inventing rules to fight money laundering, tax evasion and, in recent decades, terrorism.
I haven’t heard of any financial regulation that was voted on by the population. But every country in the world has to regulate its banks. In parts for good reason, but despite the overarching regulations, the world is still riddled with fraud, banking failures (and now, also cryptocurrency fraud in cases such as FTX, Luna, etc.) and money laundering. It’s just that the small fish get caught, while the big fish in most cases simply pay a fine which is less than their profits and move on.
There is already enough regulation and laws around traditional finance and the cryptocurrency industry. The fall of FTX was caused by fraud, not because Bitcoin is a tool to rip off people. The opposite is true. If all actors in the industry were to stay true to the Bitcoin principles of transparency and not building on debt, then these things wouldn’t have happened. It’s centralized actors and their secrecy that allow fraud like that to happen. Fraud has always been a crime, there are laws to deal with it. It’s not lack of regulation, it’s lack of oversight.
Organized And Willful Financial Exclusion
How did the above institutions come into being? It’s interesting to see the background of organizations which make decisions determining the difference between the have and have nots.
The BIS: The Central Bank Of Central Banks
The BIS is an international financial institution owned by central banks that “fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks.” Interesting sidenote: the BIS shouldn’t exist anymore if it was for members of the Bretton Woods conference.
The BIS was founded in Europe in 1930. During the second world war, the BIS helped the Germans transfer assets from occupied countries. The fact that top-level German industrialists and advisors sat on the BIS board seemed to provide ample evidence of how the BIS might be used by Adolf Hitler throughout the war, with the help of American, British and French banks. Between 1933 and 1945, the BIS board of directors included several Nazis, for instance, a prominent Nazi official, Emil Puhl responsible for processing dental gold looted from concentration camp victims. All of these directors were later convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
For this reason, the Bretton Woods Conference was meant to be Norway’s proposal for “liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at the earliest possible moment.” Moreover, now that the IMF has been established, the BIS seems even more superfluous.
But the momentum for dissolving the BIS faded after U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945. Under his successor, Harry S. Truman, the top U.S. officials most critical of the BIS, left office by 1948, the liquidation had been put aside.
The FATF: The Financial Action Task Force
The FATF is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001, its mandate was expanded to include terrorism financing.
Since 2000, the FATF has maintained the FATF blacklist and the FATF greylist. These are lists of countries that the FATF considers non-cooperative and deficient in the global effort to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. While, under international law, the FATF blacklist carries with it no formal sanctions, in reality, FATF blacklist members often fall under intense financial pressure.
Accepting Two Billion Excluded People As Collateral Damage
The effects on people in these countries are huge. Sanctions always hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. The powerful find their ways out. For instance, FATF has made it difficult for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in these countries to access funds to aid in relief situations due to strict FATF criteria. The FATF recommendations do not specifically set out restrictions for NGOs.
“In a 2020 paper, Ronald Pol states that while the FATF has been very successful in getting its policies adopted worldwide, the actual impact of those policies is rather small: according to Pol’s estimates, less than 1% of illegal profits are seized, with the costs of implementing the policies being at least one hundred times larger. Pol contends that industry and policymakers consistently ignore this, instead evaluating the policies based on success metrics that are largely irrelevant.”
The U.S. was attacked in 2001 and in the following years, it strengthened regulations to combat terrorism which trickled down to almost all jurisdictions in the world, consequently excluding billions of unregistered and stateless people from establishing bank accounts, get jobs, purchase homes or start businesses. In addition, these people are impoverished, marginalized, discriminated against, disenfranchised and politically excluded.
For instance, there is Winnet Zhamini, aged 33 and grandmother. She is one of 300,000 Zimbabweans who will never have access to a bank account because of her lack of identification papers. As she told The Guardian:
“I have never had a birth certificate or an ID. My father was Malawian and settled here in the 70s. When we were born, we never had an opportunity to get birth certificates. My mother, who was Zimbabwean, died, my father just disappeared. My husband left me because I do not own any particulars. My sister got married and bore four children, but the husband chased her away because she has no ID. I cannot even buy a sim card. I cannot get a job, I survive on doing laundry. But we get exploited because there is no choice.”
These organizations are forcing everyone into overarching regulations and bureaucracy, which enable control on the level of the individual leading to financial exclusion and oppression of billions of people.
The data collected by authorities is a honeypot for hackers, online crimes and extortion. And this all to find the few who are really money laundering or financing terrorism. Instead of general surveillance, why not focus and target the few? It’s a vicious circle. Sanctions, overarching regulations and financial control are the reasons why people need Bitcoin.
How Bitcoin Enforces The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights
A global regulatory regime is excluding an estimated 1.7 billion (perhaps 3 billion if you include an estimated two children per adult) people from having a bank account. Which leads us to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its 30 articles. I’ll refer to seven of these articles to demonstrate how Bitcoin is supporting Human Rights.
This human right would suggest we all are born free to enjoy dignity and rights. But this is definitely not the case financially. Billions of people being too poor or without IDs are excluded from financial services. Of the 1.7 billion unbanked (these are just the household heads, including families, it’s more), 980 million are women.
Unbanked people can’t store their cash safely because of potential damage from animals like rats or because it makes them a target for robbery, and they can’t borrow money or else they fall prey to loan sharks.
“Towards the last days of February (2022), I borrowed N18,000 ($43) from the Soko-loan app which I saw on Facebook. During the application, the app displayed 92 days as the minimum loan tenure but after I had submitted my data, I saw an interest rate of (about) 45% for 14 days!”
The solution is not more regulation, but open access to secure, decentralized money.
Financial Illiteracy And Lack Of Wealth Cause Exclusion
If you do manage to have an ID and access to a bank account or mobile money service in Africa, it still doesn’t mean that you can access it easily or send money to someone in your own country or abroad. Red tape, unfunctional or non-existent IT infrastructure and high fees make this so hard that many people, even though they own bank accounts, just stop using them.
The fee structure of South African banks, for instance, is up to four times higher than in countries such as Germany, Australia and even India. Many people are willing to run the risk of loss and theft associated with cash to avoid the fees and the red tape.
People on low incomes have a deep mistrust of the formal financial sector, which is rooted in fears of exploitation. Past abuses, such as the inappropriate marketing and selling of financial products, have shown that poor people are highly susceptible to rapacious commercial interests.
Africa’s poor are particularly vulnerable due to widespread financial illiteracy, exacerbating the sense of mistrust and levels of exploitation fostered by these practices. Unfortunately, this is a systemic education problem within Africa that cannot be addressed in the short term.
This is also a problem with all crypto tokens and outright scams as well. Bitcoin educators must make the difference between centralized institutions and the internet protocol of money clear to the people. Education is key, especially when the existing system must not be copied into the future, which was the goal of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto in the first place.
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.”
Fourteen African countries which were colonized by France with about 200 million inhabitants are still obliged to use the Central African franc and the West African franc, collectively known as the CFA franc. The CFA franc is legal tender and is pegged to the euro. The countries must deposit half of their foreign exchange with the French Treasury. Although these countries have been independent for decades, they don’t have financial sovereignty. That’s not independence, that’s monetary colonialism.
Inflation Is Hidden Tax
For the first time since the 1920s, Austrians and Germans are feeling the impact of inflation. Ten percent was the peak in November 2022. Energy prices in Europe are skyrocketing. Friends in Austria are telling me that they won’t heat their flats this winter and are buying cheap food. They have “middle-class” jobs, they are well educated. Ten to 20 years ago, the jobs they are doing were paying enough to buy an apartment on credit, own a car and go on a holiday trip with the family. Those days are over.
Just imagine that the value of your money is decreasing by 500% per month. The salaries of civil servants, doctors and teachers in Zimbabwe are around $300 per month, and they are paid in the Zimbabwe dollar. Saving money is completely impossible. Either you spend it immediately or you try to find someone who wants to exchange it to the U.S. dollar. Every day is centered around money management. “What is the rate today?” might be the most used question after “Hello, how are you?” in Zimbabwe, followed by the decision of “in which currency am I going to pay?”
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. When I mention that in my talks in Zimbabwe, people immediately understand the use case. There will be no monetary inflation, which would render bitcoin to have less value. Yes, bitcoin’s value is volatile, that’s because its price is determined by supply and demand and there is simply not enough demand yet to stabilize the value. But nobody can inflate the maximum amount of bitcoin that will be available. Bitcoin can also not be forged like cash or gold.
Corruption
Speaking of corruption and gold. Corruption is abuse of entrusted power for private gain. In Zimbabwe, the ruling elites are behind its disappearing gold. Every year, gold worth $1.5 billion is being looted.
At the same time, Zimbabwe’s once enviable healthcare sector is collapsing under the weight of dilapidated infrastructure, a lack of drugs and poorly-paid staff going on frequent strike. Pregnant women are being forced to pay bribes to get help with giving birth, with reports of babies being born in queues outside maternity clinics. People are dying in traffic every day due to the poor condition of streets, while the government and ministers are rewarding themselves with new luxury cars.
The Bitcoin blockchain is a transparent ledger of all transactions that took place since Bitcoin started publicly on January 3, 2009. That means that budgets for ministries or projects can be audited. With multisignature wallets, the possibility to steal funds shrinks. This would only be possible if all signers were to collude.
But this doesn’t contradict the privacy-preserving properties of Bitcoin. If you choose to make a budget auditable, you can. The private keys give you the possibility to stay private or to reveal data. If you self custody your bitcoin, you decide. This is how Bitcoin empowers individuals and keeps authorities in check.
How Bitcoin Fixes the Right to Equality
Bitcoin is a neutral, global, borderless money. As an open protocol, it can be used by anyone. No one can be excluded and everyone is treated the same. Bitcoin gives self sovereignty on a personal and national level. Bitcoin doesn’t care where you were born. Suffering a high amount of inflation and corruption is a result of the misfortune of your birth location.
Article 12: The Right To Privacy
You read that correctly: privacy is one of the human rights mentioned in the declaration. How can it be that our privacy is highly infringed not only by companies like Facebook, but also by the regulatory authorities? In the name of preventing money laundering and child abuse, we’re all under constant surveillance.
“We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is, the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”
Yet people argue with me, saying things like, “But I’ve got nothing to hide, it’s OK, we need this control to fight criminals.”
My answer: it’s not about having nothing to hide! Alone, this idea is pushing human rights activists, lesbians and gays, opposition members and so on under the suspicion that they have something to hide. No, they do not have anything to hide. Nonetheless, they are targets of violence, intimidation and prison and are facing death in many countries. That’s the reason why privacy is important.
Even more so, it’s important that everyone is using privacy protection. The more people who care about privacy, the better protected freedom fighters and vulnerable groups are. This means that more privacy protection needs to be included in Bitcoin at the blockchain level. Less-wealthy people can’t afford a VPN service that costs $10 per month. They use what they get for free.
Many millions are on Facebook and WhatsApp in Africa. Why? Because it’s the only option they have. The cheapest option that telecom providers there offer are “social media” bundles. That’s why thousands of people believe that Facebook is the internet. We shouldn’t repeat that mistake. But we’re on the brink. Luno, Binance and Coinbase are well-known brands in Africa. Most people believe that one needs to use an exchange or a bank to be able to use Bitcoin, and not only in Africa. I’ve heard that several times from people.
Privacy is a luxury for most Africans. They are even more prone to data collection and abuse.
How Bitcoin Fixes The Right To Privacy
Bitcoin’s privacy isn’t perfect, yet. New technologies like PayJoins or Confidential Transactions will hopefully be implemented in the coming years. Payments on the Lightning Network are more private already. Wrapped Lightning invoices protect the recipient from being identified by custodians. With CoinJoins, you can already achieve a high level of privacy. In the future, this kind of protection needs to be the standard.
Still, since Bitcoin is pseudonymous and many people in African countries use it peer to peer without know-your-customer (KYC) identification, it gives them more privacy than their bank or mobile money provider. In Zimbabwe, all digital transactions are automatically taxed at 4%. Every payment is traceable by the government since mobile money transactions are moving from one SIM card to the other and SIM users are registered.
Privacy is never zero or one. It’s on a scale. The privacy possible while using Bitcoin is higher than that of your credit card, but lower than that of using cash. There is definitely a lot of work to be done and it’s important to make Bitcoin on the base chain more private. But Bitcoin gives you plausible deniability already now. It protects one from being an easy target.
Article 19: Freedom Of Speech
Funding the opposition in Zimbabwe? Supporting a gay rights group in Saudi Arabia? Protesting against China in Hong Kong? Donating toward Ukrainian refugees? Then you’re sharing your opinion with the world through your financial transactions. If you can’t send money to an abortion clinic in the U.S. for fear of being prosecuted, then your freedom of speech has been taken away.
Similar cases to the below are not unique to Zimbabwe, but that is just the country I visited for the longest period. The young man pictured on the left was brutally murdered because he was an activist. The man pictured on the right was arrested because he was wearing a yellow t-shirt. Yellow is the color of the opposition, and wearing yellow was forbidden by the government.
“Even schoolchildren have not been spared with reports suggesting that schools with yellow uniforms have been directed to abandon them and pick different colours,” ZimEye reported.
Bitcoin transactions are uncensorable. Used the right way, Bitcoin gives you enough privacy to express your opinion (I’m not talking about any privacy it may grant for committing crimes).
Freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of association. If you can’t express your political opinion, if you can’t meet with your fellow demonstrators or freedom fighters because of financial surveillance, then you’re stripped from political power. If your activism endangers the authoritarian powers, then they cut you off from your bank account.
This happened in Nigeria during the EndSARS movement which started in October 2020. The demonstrations against police brutality were supported by the Nigerian Feminist Coalition. They collected donations via their bank account and gave food, drinks and other needed support to the demonstrators, but not for long. The country’s central bank cut off their bank account. But the women remembered Bitcoin, the technology that works without banks. Tech savvy as they were, they set up a BTCPay Server instance and started collecting donations in bitcoin from all over the world.
Bitcoin’s privacy and uncensorability enables people to cooperate against dictatorships. You simply can’t freeze a Bitcoin account, because there are no accounts. As long as you self custody your keys, no one can take your money away from you.
“Foreign exchange controls are imposed by a government on the purchase/sale of foreign currencies by residents, on the purchase/sale of local currency by nonresidents, or the transfers of any currency across national borders. Countries with weak and/or developing economies generally use foreign exchange controls to limit speculation against their currencies. They may also introduce capital controls, which limit foreign investment in the country.”
Thirty-one countries globally are imposing foreign exchange controls, such as Argentina, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, just to name a few. These discriminatory restrictions are financial oppression.
In Zimbabwe, for instance, online banking transactions are limited to $600 dollars per month. Per transaction you can only transfer $37. It’s basically impossible to run a business like that.
Another form of financial discrimination is the war on cash. In 2016, the Indian government and central bank withdrew the highest-denominated banknotes from one day to the other to fight money laundering and the black market. Hundreds of thousands of cash dependent people stormed banks and ATMs to exchange their banknotes. But, of course, ATMs were empty and it was a weekend.
The result was that 82 people died and millions lost their money. And this overreach had seemingly zero positive effect, because two years later, the black market money problem still existed.
How Bitcoin Fixes Freedom From Discrimination
Bitcoin is permissionless. Anyone can use it, regardless of race, gender, status or wealth. Nobody can take it away from you. Since it’s a protocol controlled by code and machines, there can be no discrimination based on human prejudices.
Most people don’t have the right to free movement — at least they aren’t welcome to arrive in many countries. Even if one is allowed to move freely, one can’t take all of their wealth with themselves.
Imagine you need to flee your home because of war or discrimination and persecution. You can’t just go to the bank and ask for all of your money and transfer it abroad. Foreign exchange controls and regulations ban the import of a stash of money higher than a few thousand U.S. dollars. If you own a house or land, you need to sell it and see how you can transfer it from one jurisdiction to the other.
How Bitcoin Fixes Freedom of Movement
Bitcoin is borderless. It enables free movement without losing all your wealth.
The Ukrainian referred to in the above headline was able to flee the war zone because they could take their bitcoin with them. In fact, you don’t even need a device to take all of your wealth with you. Memorize the 12 seed words to your Bitcoin wallet, throw away your smartphone or computer and move over borders. On the other side, get yourself a phone, install a wallet and import the seed words. You’ll have access to your money.
Seventy-five economies globally still limit women’s rights to manage assets. There are countries in which women are not allowed to own property or inherit it — they never will be owners of land that could be used as a security to apply for a loan or support their informal businesses. This is occurring mostly in countries in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific.
“Data shows that giving women greater access to assets through inheritance can change outcomes for children, particularly girls. In 1994, two states in India reformed the Hindu Succession Act to allow women and men the same ability to inherit joint family property. This altered control over assets within families and increased parental investments in daughters. Mothers who benefited from the reform spent twice as much on their daughters’ education, and women were more likely to have bank accounts and sanitary latrines where the reform occurred.”
Women are the majority of Kenya’s population; they perform 70% of the agricultural labor, but they own less than 2% of the land and control very little of the income produced by their labor. According to a Savings Learning Lab report, after being provided with savings accounts, market vendors in Kenya, primarily women, saved at a higher rate and invested 60% more in their businesses. Women-headed households in Nepal spent 15% more on nutritious foods (meat and fish) and 20% more on education after receiving free savings accounts. Moreover, farmers in Malawi who had their earnings deposited into savings accounts spent 13% more on farming equipment and increased their crop values by 15%.
Bitcoin empowers women and vulnerable groups, because one can own it secretly. No one needs to know. This lowers the danger of money being taken away by partners and family members.
In the near future, people will be able to use bitcoin as a collateral for micro loans. One can save as little as one cent or $1 in bitcoin a day on the Lightning Network. After saving a certain value, like $50, they can receive a micro loan. After paying back, they’ll get back the collateral.
How Bitcoin Fixes the Right to Property
Bitcoin is not only digital money, it’s digital property. Therefore, self custodying your bitcoin makes you an owner of property. Since Bitcoin is permissionless, the right to own property is granted to anyone.
Bitcoin is carried by a social movement. It’s a silent revolution. By being in charge of our private keys, each one of us is part of a collective with the power to force governments to be held accountable. With the help of Bitcoin, dictators can be toppled. Self custody your bitcoin, incapacitate them from the power to create and seize money and their funds will dry out. Hold them accountable by pressuring them to audit public funds.
It may sound illogical, but by using Bitcoin, you’re supporting freedom fighters globally and helping make the world more inclusive. This is why my non-profit initiative is called “Bitcoin For Fairness.” Ultimately Bitcoin doesn’t fix everything. There will always be rich and poor people. But Bitcoin definitely fixes one huge thing: It enables fair access to a borderless, neutral money that can’t be altered to the advantage of any single entity.
Bitcoin delivers the opportunity for historical reparation from the effects of colonialism. It can make the gap between rich and poor smaller. That’s why I put so much effort into sharing Bitcoin self-custody knowledge in African countries and the Global South. The peer-to-peer, non-KYC revolution will take place here, where people are used not to using banks. My motto is: “Keep the unbanked unbanked” and support them in their fight for financial freedom. I’m just an ally visiting and sharing knowledge. The local people are key. The opportunity is there, I trust they’ll take it and run.
Bitcoin isn’t useless, it’s priceless. Anyone who is lobbying for a Bitcoin ban or attempts to control it is an enemy of freedom and of humankind. It’s a voluntary network, if you don’t like it, don’t use it.
This is a guest post by Anita Posch. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Edward Lawrence, a journalist at the BBC, was arrested by police in Shanghai at the scene of protests on Sunday night, according to the BBC and as captured on what appears to be mobile phone footage of the arrest.
While he has since been released, a BBC spokesperson has expressed extreme concern about his treatment, saying he was “beaten and kicked by the police.”
Protests have erupted across China in a rare show of dissent against the ruling Communist Party, sparked by anger over the country’s increasingly costly zero-Covid policy.
Among the thousands of protesters, hundreds have even called for the removal of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who for nearly three years has overseen a strategy of mass-testing, brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantine and digital tracking that has come at a devastating human and economic cost.
The BBC statement reads in full: “The BBC is extremely concerned about the treatment of our journalist Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering the protests in Shanghai. He was held for several hours before being released. During his arrest, he was beaten and kicked by the police. This happened while he was working as an accredited journalist.”
The statement continues, “It is very worrying that one of our journalists was attacked in this way whilst carrying out his duties. We have had no official explanation or apology from the Chinese authorities, beyond a claim by the officials who later released him that they had arrested him for his own good in case he caught Covid from the crowd. We do not consider this a credible explanation.”
Public protest is exceedingly rare in China, where the Communist Party has tightened its grip on all aspects of life, launched a sweeping crackdown on dissent, wiped out much of civil society and built a high-tech surveillance state.
At least two clips of the arrest were posted online by a Twitter user who says they witnessed the scene. One clip, filmed from above, shows at least four police officers standing over a handcuffed man whose face is obscured.
In a second clip of a man wearing the same clothing, Lawrence’s face is clearly identifiable, as police quickly led him away, and then shouts, “Call the consulate now.”
The witness who shared the videos said they saw the journalist get “sieged and dragged to the ground by several cops.”
It is unclear what happened in the lead-up to Lawrence’s arrest. The video available online begins with his arrest and does not show what happened prior.
CNN reached out to China’s Foreign Ministry for comment on the incident. Chinese authorities have not yet made any public statements on the matter.
A meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Credit: UN / Jean-Marc Ferré
by Marty Logan (kathmandu)
Inter Press Service
KATHMANDU, Nov 25 (IPS) – Human rights defenders are alarmed at what appears to be a new process permitting countries to keep confidential their responses to UN experts about allegations of human rights abuses.
A page on the website of the UN human rights office hosts letters (known as “communications”) from human rights experts, or “special rapporteurs”, to those alleged to have committed the abuse — usually a government. In most cases the page also hosts the response, but in some recent instances a placeholder document has appeared that says, “The government’s reply is not made public due to its confidential nature.”
Replies from at least four governments — Ecuador, Guatemala, India and Nepal — and one non-government entity, UK-based tobacco company Imperial Brands PLC, show this form letter.
That withholding of information, say the defenders, is unacceptable because the person who sent the allegation of a human rights violation, sometimes at the risk of personal harm, deserves to know how the government is responding.
“There is a lot of effort from the side of those sending information about incidents of human rights violations happening to them, and they send these to the rapporteurs even knowing that there can be risk to their lives,” says Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, executive director of the Philippine human rights organization Tebtebba, which works for the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“Part of the process of resolving issues brought before the special rapporteurs is for the victims to read the response of the state, which will be the basis for the next steps they can take. Withholding publication of responses is a dead end for potential resolution of issues,” added Tauli-Corpuz in an email interview. She was the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of Indigenous peoples from 2014 to 2020.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which hosts the webpage, did not respond to requests for comment about the apparent change in process.
Communications can also include objections to laws or practices that contravene human rights standards. In 2021, a total of 1,002 communications were sent from experts to 149 countries and 257 “non-state actors”, which include businesses and international bodies and agencies, says an OHCHR report. Of those communications, 651 received replies.
The 1,002 communications concerned 2,256 alleged victims. No statistics are available on how many requests were made for communications to be kept confidential, adds the report.
One Nepal-based defender says she’s not surprised that states have asked for confidentiality, but was startled to hear that it was granted. “Individuals and organizations seek help from the UN because their government does not respond to these issues… they should be receiving updates,” says Mandira Sharma, a human rights lawyer who has experience with UN human rights bodies. “Otherwise why would anyone engage?”
“Unless there is very critical information that would put someone’s life at risk they should be able to make the information public,” added Sharma.
It is not unusual for a reply from a government to include information that is redacted.
There should be a space for human rights experts and countries to have private conversations about allegations, says Sarah M. Brooks, Programme Director for the organization International Service for Human Rights.
“But the communications process is premised on information coming from the ground, from victims and advocates, who often take great risks to share it with the UN. To then hold state responses confidential aligns neither with the purpose of the communication procedure, nor the principle of actually respecting and empowering victims in its conduct,” she said in an online conversation.
“To bend to states’ requests to hold certain information confidential — in other words, to not share possibly life-saving information with victims, family members and lawyers — would be a grave error on the part of any UN actor,” added Brooks.
23-year-old Varin poses next to a mural for queer rights in Sulaymaniyah. It was not long before it was vandalized. Credit Andoni Lubaki/IPS
by Karlos Zurutuza (sulaymaniyah, iraq)
Inter Press Service
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq, Nov 25 (IPS) – It’s mostly people in their twenties sitting on a terrace in the shade of a beautiful grove of trees: black clothes, piercings, tattoos and some purple streaks in their hair.
It could be a trendy cafe in Berlin, Paris or any other European capital, but the sunset call to prayer reminds us that we are in Sulaymaniyah. After Erbil, it’s the second city in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq.
We cannot disclose the cafe’s exact coordinates, nor the full name of the person who has brought us here. She is dressed in white -shorts and a T-shirt- and boasts a rainbow bracelet on her left wrist. She asks to be quoted as Kween. “It’s just queen with a k for Kurdish,” she explains. Kween is a trans woman.
The youngest of five children from a Kurdish family in Diyala, a district in the east of the country, this 33-year-old Kurd admits to IPS that she was “a boring man” for the first 25 years of her life.
“I learned to block my needs. However, I first dressed as a woman in my mother’s clothes and also put on makeup when I was only five,“ she recalls. In a dress, she adds, “I feel the person I am and the person I have always been.”
But that freedom mostly enjoyed in solitude has its price. How to forget the beating her older brother gave her when she was first caught, at six; the humiliation and bullying she suffered at school…
She was almost killed when she was 24. Someone contacted her on the Internet and asked to meet on the outskirts of the city. But they were five individuals, waiting to give her a thrashing. Completely numb from the beatings and covered in mud and blood, Kween still mustered the strength to walk to a local judge’s office.
“You have two options: either file a complaint and stain your family’s name forever, or simply stop doing what you do,” the magistrate blurted at her. Back home, she could not say what she had gone through or, above all, why. Even today, no one in Diyala knows that Kween is a woman.
Against all odds, she’s been working for several years with a foreign NGO focusing on the protection of vulnerable groups. Among other projects, she´s working on a list of Kurdish words to talk about the rights of the LGBTI collective that are not offensive.
An example: Hawragazkhwaz (literally, “someone attracted by members of their own sex”), is, so far, the only inclusive form for “homosexual;” miles away from commonly-used terms that include ideas such as “paedophilia” or “rape”.
Kween has not yet decided to have surgery or take hormones, but she hasn’t had much time for it either. The work at the NGO and the search for a place in society for the members of the LGBTI community, she says, absorb most of her time.
“If I have a mission in life, this is it.”
Kween, a 33-year-old Kurdish trans woman, says she only dresses as a woman in “safe places”.. Credit: Andoni Lubaki/IPS
“Immoral conduct”
A transgender woman is beaten, burned alive and thrown in a dumpster; assailants torture, then murder a gay man while his partner is forced to watch; a lesbian is stabbed to death while being told to stop her “immoral conduct”.
These are just three cases among the many included in a Human Rights Watch report on the LGBTI collective in Iraq released in march 2022. Kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of queer people at the hands of armed groups, “often by the state’s security forces,” are also reported.
“The members of this community live under the constant threat of being captured and killed by the Iraqi police, and under total impunity,” Rasha Younes, an HRW researcher, denounced in the report.
The images of gay people the Islamic State pushed from rooftops are still fresh in everyone’s minds. Also the ones Doski Azad, a Kurdish trans woman, posted on Instagram before her body was found in a ditch last February. She was murdered by her own brother.
During the rule of the Islamic State, many members of the LGBTI community were executed from rooftops or other high points in cities such as Mosul (Iraq) or Raqqa (Syria). Credit: Andoni Lubaki/IPS
“I know a lot of people who never go out on the streets,” Varin, a 23-year-old queer activist tells IPS from the same terrace. It was thanks to the Internet that she discovered that, like her, there were people who did not feel identified with any single gender expression.
The activist works in a swimming pool, but her chemistry studies have opened up a job opportunity for her in Qatar that she does not want to miss.
“I showed up for the job interview dressed as a demure woman and, of course, with long sleeves so the tattoos wouldn’t show,” she bursts out with a loud laugh.
Varin points to “around 30 members” within Sulaimaniyah LGBTI community. They meet in cafes like this one. Social networks also make it easier to get to know each other.
Do they organize protests? No, too dangerous. Actually, the mural that she will choose to pose for our photograph has already been vandalized (it would be completely destroyed a few days later).
Despite the threats, this Kurdish city has become the safest space in the country for members of the LGBTI community. Many queer people from the south of the country seek refuge in cities like Erbil, the Kurdish capital of Iraq.
The situation is by no means comparable, but Varin underlines that Erbil is still a very conservative city, “one of those in which time stands still during the month of Ramadan and where you can never let your guard down.”
Suicidal tendencies
In April 2021, several young men from Sulaimaniyah were arrested “for being homosexual and for their immoral conduct.” That´s how the leader of the operation labelled it before the press. The Sulaimaniyah Police refused to answer questions from IPS. Nonetheless, harassment seemingly extends to anyone who may dare to show any kind of support.
Such is the case of Rasan, a local NGO constantly forced to answer to justice for “promoting the LGBTI community.” They are still awaiting trial after the most recent lawsuit, filed by a member of the Kurdish parliament.
The campaign of harassment of members of the LGTBI community in Iraq condemns the majority to a life of isolation to avoid arrest, torture, and murder. Credit: Andoni Lubaki/IPS
From their office in Sulaimaniyah, Tanya Kamal Darwesh, director of Rasan, assures IPS that their mission is not to promote the LGTBI community but “to raise awareness in society about it.” But even more worrisome, she adds, is that the arrests of members of the collective are still common currency in Iraq´s Kurdish region.
“Instead of accepting the existence of these people, they insist on criminalizing them: they are accused of prostitution, drug trafficking or whatever else to kick them off the streets,” denounces the human rights activist.
“All the clans, the parties, the leaders, both religious and political, coincide in their animosity towards the queer collective. They often stick to religious issues to justify violence, or simply they make politics out of it,” rounds up Darwesh.
Their defenselessness is overwhelming, and the psychological impact of intolerance towards this group translates into cases of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and even suicidal tendencies.
That’s the diagnosis conveyed to IPS via videoconference by a trauma psychologist who prefers not to give her real name for the interview. She has been working with victims of sexual violence and torture in the Middle East for over a decade and she wants to avoid a veto at all costs.
Other than attacks at almost every level, she also highlights the risk of being “excluded from the labour market, or even from their own families in a region where they play such a key role.”
After several trips to the region, the specialist has had the chance to meet Varin and Kween in person. “Other than hope to the community, they also offer a space in which to ask questions,” she stresses. “Just by being visibly queer, they’re already showing great courage.”
“Millions are being plunged into extreme hardship and appalling conditions of life by these strikes”, he said.
“Taken as a whole, this raises serious problems under international humanitarian law, which requires a concrete and direct military advantage for each object attacked”.
Racking up casualties
According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), on Wednesday further missile strikes in the city and region of Kyiv killed at least eight civilians, counting one girl, and injured some 45 others, including seven children.
A two-day old baby boy was killed, and two doctors injured by a rocket strike on a hospital in Vilniansk, in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Since Russia began its ongoing barrage of missile strikes and loitering munition attacks across the country on 10 October, HRMMU has verified at least 77 civilian deaths and 272 injured.
Allegations on both sides
In addition to documenting civilian casualties, the Monitoring Mission has been examining videos and other information surrounding alleged summary executions.
“Since Russia began its armed attack on Ukraine in February, there have been numerous allegations of summary executions by both parties of prisoners of war and others no longer participating in the fighting”, Mr. Türk said.
“Persons hors de combat, including soldiers who have surrendered, are protected under international humanitarian law and their summary execution constitutes a war crime”, he reminded.
‘Forensic investigations’ needed
Among some of the videos that have surfaced over the last two weeks on social media are video clips from the village of Makiivka, which show the apparent surrender of Russian forces or Russian-affiliated armed groups; a man opening fire at Ukrainian soldiers; and subsequently the dead bodies of some 12 Russian soldiers.
“Our Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has conducted a preliminary analysis indicating that these disturbing videos are highly likely to be authentic in what they show. The actual circumstances of the full sequence of events must be investigated to the fullest extent possible, and those found responsible, appropriately held to account”, said the senior UN official.
“The analysis the Mission has done to date underlines the need for independent and detailed forensic investigations to help establish exactly what happened”.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the events.
“It is essential that all allegations of summary executions are investigated fully in a manner that is – and is seen to be – independent, impartial, thorough, transparent, prompt and effective”, said Mr. Türk.
Cost of war
The UN Human Rights Chief also called on the parties to “issue clear instructions” to refrain from retaliation and reprisals against any prisoners of war and to ensure that these instructions are fully complied with.
“The rules governing armed conflict set out in the Geneva Conventions demand this. Order your troops to treat those who surrender and those they detain humanely”.
He flagged the devastating impacts of missile strikes by Russian forces and allegations of summary executions of prisoners of war as showing “all too plainly the intolerable human cost of this, and any other, armed conflict”.
“They are a stark reminder of why international law exists and why it must be fully complied with to prevent a descent into utter inhumanity and negation of the very idea of our human rights”, the High Commissioner stressed.
DOHA, Qatar, Nov 25 (IPS) – The sun is shining, and the temperature sits at an idyllic 28 degrees Celsius. The Uber driver taking me to work is from Pakistan and devastated about the recent loss to England in the T20 Cricket World Cup final in Australia.
On route to the office, I stop to get a coffee and the barista is from Gambia, the server from Uganda and the cashier from Nigeria. They all smile and greet me as I travel through the line. As I enter the office, I am greeted by the Indian and Bangladeshi security guards and then pass the Filipino, Togolese and Algerian cleaning staff who are preparing for the rush of staff on what will undoubtedly be a busy morning.
The world’s real melting pot is not London, Melbourne or Los Angeles. It’s here in the Middle East. The representation of cultures here in Doha dwarfs anything outside of the Arab Gulf and many are here for the prospect of work and the opportunity brought about by the ongoing FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
Qatar’s open door
As an underlying groundswell of xenophobia has permeated through much of the world – the Global West has shut its borders, limited migration and made the process of entering, let alone working, more difficult – Qatar has opened its doors. The people working here are searching for a way to improve the situation for their families.
Many are from some of the poorest places on the planet where the people are most in need. The media have filled newspapers and TV screens with negative stories about Qatar, a country they have never visited and a culture they have never experienced.
When the majority have turned their backs on these poorer countries, could the conversation surrounding workers for this World Cup not have been about opportunity? About the incredible impact and lasting legacy, the jobs generated here will have on families and communities across the globe? About the dissemination of wealth back to the areas and communities who really need it?
For decades the world has shifted industry towards regions that can provide cheaper labour. The movement of whole sectors to Asia and the sub-continent have kept many organizations afloat. This was seen as a creative way to save money, drive higher dividends for shareholders and keep prices low for consumers despite the effect it would have on local jobs.
This paradigm is alive and well. Salaries and wages are much lower in Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary or Bulgaria than in countries like Germany, Austria or France. In many cases, this has led companies based in Western Europe to build subsidiaries in Eastern Europe to take advantage of lower labour costs. Western European economies heavily depend on working migrants from the East earning low wages and working in poor, unregulated conditions. That isn’t particularly controversial in Europe.
The same can be said for Eastern European countries who replace the workforce that has departed with workers from Central Asian countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So, for all the outrage and condemnation that has been aimed at Qatar, a quick google search would show the very thing they are advocating against is happening under their own nose.
Uniting instead of dividing
However, hypocrisy is not limited to Europe. Australia, for example, became the first 2022 World Cup team to release a collective statement against Qatar’s human rights record, compiling a video message critiquing the World Cup host’s treatment of migrant workers. It may surprise those individuals to learn that Australia’s track record on human rights is not exactly squeaky clean.
More than 40 nations at the UN Human Right Council, including Germany, South Korea and the USA, have questioned Australia’s policies toward asylum seekers and refugees. Among the issues raised are Australia’s continued use of offshore processing and prolonged detention for asylum seekers.
The council accuses the Australian government of not following through on some of its key past pledges and of still subjecting refugees to immense harm.
The World Cup in Qatar is the 22nd iteration of the international tournament which was first held in Uruguay in 1930. In the 92 years since, the ‘world game’ – despite its interest across the globe – has held 15 out of 20 World Cups in Europe and South America.
Five nations have already hosted the event on more than one occasion. An incredible concentration given the participation and interest. This time things are different. The world game is branching out and reaching a new audience.
The World Cup in Qatar represents the first major sporting event in the Arab and Muslim world. The impact will not just be felt amongst the 2.7 million population of Qatar, or even across the 475 million people who call the Middle East home. This event will resonate with the 1.9 billion Muslims across the globe.
From Indonesia to Morocco, the Maldives to Egypt, roughly one quarter of the world’s population, who in almost 100 years of World Cup football have been in the background, will be front and centre.
If the focus of the next four weeks can be the incredible football played on the pitch, the generosity and kind-hearted nature of the hosts and the collective joy that bringing cultures, religions and people together – not just those from Europe and South America – this World Cup may end up being a turning point for a truly world game.
They say that World Cups are a life-changing experience for the players and teams that compete in them, and even more so for the winner. However, for this World Cup, for the first time in history, the real winners won’t be on the pitch at Lusail Stadium on December 18.
They’ll be behind the scenes, in the Ubers, coffee shops and security points across the country, taking the opportunity, the generational-altering opportunity, only the World Cup in Qatar was offering them.
Myles Benham is a Freelance Event Manager with 15 years’ experience working in Global Mega Events and is currently in Doha for the World Cup.
Iran arrested a prominent former member of its national soccer team on Thursday over his criticism of the government as authorities grapple with nationwide protests that have cast a shadow over its competition at the World Cup.
The semiofficial Fars and Tasnim news agencies reported that Voria Ghafouri was arrested for “insulting the national soccer team and propagandizing against the government.”
Ghafouri, who was not chosen to go to the World Cup, has been an outspoken critic of Iranian authorities throughout his career. He objected to a longstanding ban on women spectators at men’s soccer matches as well as Iran’s confrontational foreign policy, which has led to crippling Western sanctions.
Voria Ghafouri of Esteghlal looks on during a Persian Gulf Pro League match between Esteghlal and Padideh FC at Azadi Stadium on June 21, 2021 in Tehran, Iran.
Mohammad Karamali/DeFodi Images/Getty Images
More recently, he expressed sympathy for the family of a 22-year-old woman whose death while in the custody of Iran’s morality police ignited the latest protests. In recent days he also called for an end to a violent crackdown on protests in Iran’s western Kurdistan region.
The reports of his arrest came ahead of Friday’s World Cup match between Iran and Wales. At Iran’s opening match, a 6-2 loss to England, the members of the Iranian national team declined to sing along to their national anthem and some fans expressed support for the protests.
Prior to that gesture, the team had lost support from fellow Iranians for its meeting with hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told CBS News this week.
Dagres said that while the team remaining silent during the anthem “may seem very significant, many Iranians were already disappointed in the team’s behavior during the past week.”
In addition to the meeting with Raisi, Dagres said photos showing the players celebrating their World Cup entry, as “protesters were being slain in the streets by security forces,” left many Iranians to view their team “as not representative of them, but of the clerical establishment.”
The protests were ignited by the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police in the capital, Tehran. They rapidly escalated into nationwide demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The western Kurdish region of the country, where both Amini and Ghafouri are from, has been the epicenter of the protests. Shops were closed in the region on Thursday following calls for a general strike.
Iranian officials have not said whether Ghafouri’s activism was a factor in not choosing him for the national team. He plays for the Khuzestan Foolad team in the southwestern city of Ahvaz. The club’s chairman, Hamidreza Garshasbi, resigned later on Thursday, the semiofficial ILNA news agency reported, without elaborating.
The protests show no sign of waning, and mark one of the biggest challenges to Iran’s ruling clerics since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought them to power. Rights groups say security forces have used unleashed live ammunition and bird shot on the protesters, as well as beating and arresting them, with much of the violence captured on video. Last week, Iran sentenced a person to death for taking part in the protests.
At least 442 protesters have been killed and more than 18,000 detained since the start of the unrest, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been monitoring the protests.
The U.N. Human Rights Council voted Thursday to condemn the crackdown and to create an independent fact-finding mission to investigate alleged abuses, particularly those committed against women and children.
Authorities have blamed the unrest on hostile foreign powers, without providing evidence, and say separatists and other armed groups have attacked security forces. Human Rights Activists in Iran says at least 57 security personnel have been killed, while state media have reported a higher toll.
The protesters say they are fed up after decades of social and political repression, including a strict dress code imposed on women. Young women have played a leading role in the protests, stripping off the mandatory Islamic headscarf to express their rejection of clerical rule.
Some Iranians are actively rooting against their own team at the World Cup, associating it with rulers they view as violent and corrupt. Others insist the national team, which includes players who have spoken out on social media in solidarity with the protests, represents the country’s people.
The team’s star forward, Sardar Azmoun, who has been vocal about the protests online, was on the bench during the opening match. In addition to Ghafouri, two other former soccer stars have been arrested for expressing support for the protests.
Other Iranian athletes have also been drawn into the struggle.
Iranian rock climber Elnaz Rekabi competed without wearing the mandatory headscarf at an international competition in South Korea in October, a move widely seen as expressing support for the protests. She received a hero’s welcome from protesters upon returning to Iran, even as she told state media the move was “unintentional” in an interview that may have been given under duress.
Earlier this month, Iran’s football federation threatened to punish players on its beach soccer team after it defeated Brazil at an international competition in Dubai. One of the players had celebrated after scoring a goal by mimicking a female protester cutting off her hair.
Norwegian Refugee Council calls for ‘lasting peace’ to end restrictions on freedom of movement across Colombia.
Armed groups in Colombia are confining people to their homes and communities in a bid to exert control over territory, said the Norwegian Refugee Council, which called on the authorities to do more to ensure citizens can move freely.
The NRC said on Thursday that millions of people are affected by six “ongoing non-international armed conflicts” in which armed groups use confinement “to exert control over isolated communities and territories that are often used for illicit activities”.
“Imagine being forced to stay in your home by men with guns – day after day. The confinements in Colombia mean you can’t work, visit your family or send your children to school,” Juan Gabriel Wells, interim country director for NRC in Colombia, said in a statement.
“We call on the Colombian government and non-state armed actors to agree on a lasting peace that benefits the vulnerable populations affected by these inhumane restrictions of movement.”
Thursday marks the six-year anniversary of a peace deal between Bogota and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that saw members of the left-wing rebel group lay down their weapons. But some FARC dissidents rejected the agreement and have picked up arms again.
Violence has surged in Colombia since the signing of the accord, especially in parts of the country that lay outside government control and where armed groups are involved in drug trafficking and other illicit activities.
Last weekend, at least 18 people died in fighting involving FARC dissidents and a criminal band that calls itself “Comandos de la Frontera” or “Border Commandos” in southwest Colombia, near the border with Ecuador. The two groups were battling for control of drug trafficking routes.
The incident marked the deadliest fight between illegal armed groups since left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro took office in August.
Petro has promised to bring “total peace” to the country after nearly six decades of armed conflict that left at least 450,000 dead between 1985 and 2018 alone.
And earlier this week, Petro’s government began peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country’s largest remaining rebel group, in neighbouring Venezuela.
The delegates said in a joint declaration that they had gathered to restart a dialogue “with full political and ethical will, as demanded by the people of rural and urban territories that suffer from violence and exclusion, and other sectors of society”.
The first round of negotiations will last 20 days, with diplomats from Venezuela, Cuba and Norway helping in the negotiations, while representatives from Chile and Spain will observe the process.
Citing figures from the United Nations humanitarian affairs office (UN-OCHA), the NRC said on Thursday that more than 2.6 million people had their movements restricted so far this year due to continuing violence, with “Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities being some of the worst affected”.
“The rules imposed by the armed groups are: ‘you can’t go out;’ ‘you can’t use that road;’ ‘we don’t want to see any people passing through here.’ We are trapped,” Cecil, an Indigenous teacher from the Pacific coast region, said in the NRC statement.
“Where I live, we are afraid to walk [outside] – we can’t do it freely,” a resident of southwest Colombia, Nelsa, also said.
President Gustavo Petro has promised to bring ‘total peace’ to Colombia [File: Nathalia Angarita/Reuters]
In a significant escalation of political unrest, protests against China’s strict zero-COVID policy spread to several cities and university campuses across the country, with demonstrators in Shanghai calling for President Xi Jinping to step down.
After erupting in the Xinjiang region, social media footage indicates that demonstrations have now broken out in Nanjing, Urumqi, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Beijing, where street protesters tore down a physical COVID barrier.
The Chinese Communist Party has pursued a zero-COVID policy, cracking down on any virus transmission by implementing stringent lockdown measures that confine millions of people to their homes for months on end. But case numbers have begun to surge recently.
In Shanghai, police pepper-sprayed around 300 protesters on Saturday night, the Associated Press reported. The demonstrators demanded that President Xi Jinping resign and called for the end of his Communist Party’s rule. Hours later, people demonstrated again in the same spot; police again broke up the protest, the AP said.
According to AFP, students also protested at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Xi himself studied.
In an unprecedented wave of public dissent, protesters have jostled with lab-coat-wearing officials and held up blank pieces of paper in defiance of the authoritarian regime.
The protests began in the wake of a fire on Thursday night that killed 10 people in an apartment in Urumqi, the Xinjiang regional capital, and that some protesters allege was worsened by the strict enforcement of the lockdown policy. Beijing stands accused of human rights violations against Uyghurs, a Muslim minority, in Xinjiang, a region in the far west of the country.
Amnesty International appealed to the Chinese government to allow peaceful protest. “The tragedy of the Urumqi fire has inspired remarkable bravery across China,” said the group’s regional director, Hanna Young, according to the AP. “These unprecedented protests show that people are at the end of their tolerance for excessive COVID-19 restrictions.”
Some commentators have described the wave of protests as the biggest threat yet to President Xi’s rule, which he consolidated last month by securing an unprecedented third five-year term in office.
European Council President Charles Michel is traveling to China to meet Xi on December 1, as the EU reassesses its economic dependence on China against the backdrop of Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine, which China has not publicly condemned.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledged earlier this month that Beijing’s methods for fighting the coronavirus “differ greatly” from those of Berlin, but that the two governments are aligned in the battle against the pandemic. Scholz announced during a visit to China in early November that the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine would be offered to expats in China.
Europe, the world’s biggest consumer of chocolate, and West Africa, the leading grower of the cocoa beans used to make it, share a common goal to make the sector sustainable.
But they have opposing views on how to put an end to the social, economic and environmental harms caused by satisfying Europe’s sweet tooth, heralding a showdown over who will bear the costs of complying: Big Chocolate or cocoa farmers.
The EU is finalizing regulations that seek to ensure that chocolate entering the market is free from deforestation and child labor. At the same time, Ghana and Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producers, are demanding higher prices. That’s vital, they say, to make sustainable chocolate a possibility — and not a pipe dream.
The stakes are high: For the EU, cocoa is a test case for how companies and producers react when the bloc tries to impose higher standards. For producers, the push to set up a cartel could drive up prices in the short term — but also risks stimulating oversupply and ultimately causing a price crash that would deepen the poverty already suffered by most cocoa farmers. Chocolate makers, facing rising costs and greater scrutiny, may reroute supply chains to other cocoa-producing countries seen as less risky.
Doing nothing is not an option, said Alex Assanvo, who heads the joint West African initiative to support cocoa prices.
“We are not asking to pay them more, we are asking to pay them a fair price,” Assanvo told POLITICO in an interview. “If we believe that this is going to create oversupply, well then I don’t know, maybe we should stop eating chocolate.”
Bittersweet taste
Chocolate may be sweet but the industry that makes it is not. Most of the beans used to produce the world’s supply are grown by impoverished West African farmers; all too often from trees planted on deforested land and harvested by children. One problem drives the others. Poverty pushes farmers to chop down forests to produce more beans and profits and to put children to work as they cannot afford to pay wages to adult laborers.
To address this, Ghana and Ivory Coast, which produce 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, formed an export cartel in 2019 modeled on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). They introduced a $400 per ton Living Income Differential, which aims to bring the floor price up enough to cover the cost of production.
In public, big chocolate manufacturers and traders, including Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Ferrero, Hersey, Lindt, Mars, Mondelez and Nestlé, welcomed the initiative.
Yet behind the scenes many of the firms — which between them account for about 90 percent of the industry’s $130 billion in annual profits — have done everything possible to avoid paying the premium and to drive prices back down, according to the Ivorian Coffee-Cocoa Council (CCC), the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) and their joint Initiative Cacao Ivory Coast-Ghana (ICCIG).
The companies that responded to requests for comment from POLITICO said that they have paid the Living Income Differential (LID) since its introduction. The Ghanian and Ivorian trade boards and the ICCIG claim, however, that they have negated the LID’s value by forcing down a different premium, the origin differential.
Fed up, these countries boycotted the World Cocoa Foundation Partnership Meeting at the end of October in Brussels. They then gave the companies a deadline: commit to the premiums by November 20 or the countries would ban their buyers from visiting fields to carry out harvest forecasts and suspend their Corporate Social Responsibility programs – which sell well with ethically-minded consumers.
More harm than good?
Another proposed remedy comes from Brussels. Cocoa is one of the products to which the new EU legislation on due diligence — Brussels speak for supply-chain oversight and compliance — would apply.
Under this, large firms operating in the bloc will be forced to evaluate their global supply chains for human rights and environmental abuses, and compensate injured parties. In theory, this should reduce deforestation and child labor and improve the lot of farmers.
Yet, as European ambassadors thrash out the terms — and big players like France push for them to be watered down — concerns are growing that the legislation could turn out at best to be ineffective in practice, and at worst do more harm than good.
Cocoa farmers, and the NGOs that support them, have reason to be skeptical: Back in 2000, a BBC documentary exposed the widespread use of child labor on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and Ghana. The resulting media pressure led to a proposal for legislation in the United States forcing companies to certify chocolate bars free of child labor.
Companies pushed back hard, Antonie Fountain, managing director of cocoa NGO coalition The Voice Network, told POLITICO. The proposal was dropped and companies committed instead to a voluntary plan to solve child labor, he explained: “And that turned into a two-decade failure of policy.”
The resulting patchwork of pilot projects failed to transform the sector. Despite an initial decline, nearly 20 years after the framework was introduced 790,000 children in Ivory Coast and 770,000 in Ghana are still working in cocoa, with 95 percent of them exposed to the worst forms of child labor, according to a 2020 report.
Deforestation has meanwhile accelerated.
Ivory Coast has lost up to 90 percent of its forest in the last half century. Between 2000 and 2019 alone 2.4 million hectares of forest was cleared for cocoa farms, representing 45 percent of the total deforestation and forest degradation in the country, according to Trase, a data-driven transparency initiative.
The government’s attempts to safeguard what remains are half-hearted and often undermined by corruption: In 2019 a quarter of Ivory Coast’s cocoa production was in protected areas and forest reserves, the Trase study found. This left the EU exposed to 838,000 hectares of deforestation from Ivorian cocoa. Commodity trader Cargill leads the pack, according to Trase, with its 2019 exports exposed to 183,000 hectares of deforestation.
Over the last decade companies have proposed corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that aim to tackle both ills. For instance, Mondelez, the maker of Cadbury and Toblerone, recently committed $600 million to tackle deforestation and forced labor in cocoa-producing countries, bringing its total funding for environmental and social issues to $1 billion since 2010.
These sums are, however, puny by comparison with the profits earned by those firms, said Fountain. Mondelez returned $2.5 billion to investors in the first half of 2022.
Mondelez is “excited” about its investments, the firm said in a statement. But it is calling for more sector-wide actions and rethinking its incentive model. Cargill did not respond to a request for comment.
Social responsibility
The big numbers that companies cite about their CSR programs’ reach often boil down to one-off training sessions on productivity for farmers, Uwe Gneiting, senior researcher at Oxfam, told POLITICO. This was the case for 98 percent of the 400 farmers interviewed for research recently carried out by Gneiting and others from the charity into the impact of sustainability programs over the last decade in Ghana on farmers’ incomes.
The research finds that CSR initiatives, which companies use to tout their sustainability credentials to European consumers, have not meaningfully increased farmers’ productivity or profits, pointed out Gneiting. In fact, farmers end up shouldering the associated costs, because companies offer the training but do not pay for extra labor or the fertilizer that farmers need to put it into action.
Instead, Ghanian and Ivorian farmers have been hammered by the soaring cost of production and of living over the last three years, finds the new Oxfam research. Fertilizer costs have increased by more than 200 percent, said Gneiting, along with labor and transportation costs. That in turn has contributed to a decline in yields that have also been hurt by climate change, with weather patterns becoming increasingly unpredictable.
All of this has meant incomes have declined close to 20 percent since 2019, said Gneiting, which for farmers already living on the poverty line is “existential.” The decline would have been much worse, he added, if it hadn’t been for the Living Income Differential. Nonetheless, 90 percent of the farmers interviewed say they are worse off than three years ago.
Over the same period, as cocoa prices have fallen, companies have made “windfall gains,” said Isaac Gyamfi, director of Solidaridad West Africa. “The raw material became cheaper for them. But the price of chocolate didn’t change.”
Can Brussels sort it out?
To what extent the new due diligence directive will make a difference depends on the final text that was put to a meeting of EU trade ministers on Friday.
When the European Commission first came up with the draft it was seen as a game changer, but subsequent wrangling over the regulation’s scope has raised doubts. Last week, ambassadors from France, Spain, Italy and some smaller countries voted down the text in the European Council, seeing the value chain and civil liability provisions as too wide and too ambitious.
Two-thirds of Ivorian cocoa is exported to the EU and the U.K. | Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images
A European diplomat told POLITICO that France supported the proposed directive “very strongly,” and its view that it was important to concentrate on the “upstream” part of the supply chain was shared by a majority of EU member countries.
NGOs take the view that, while it’s positive that the EU is proposing broad legislation, there is a risk that it ends up replicating the mistakes that undermined the voluntary initiatives. One of these is the potential limitation of the companies’ due diligence obligations to “established business relations.”
“What you’re going to get is a whole bunch of companies that are going to try to have as few established business relations as possible, which just makes supplying commodities more precarious, rather than less,” said Fountain.
Analysis from Trase finds that 55 percent of Ivorian cocoa, two-thirds of which is exported to the EU and the U.K., comes from untraceable sources. NGOs working on cocoa and on other sectors due to be impacted by the new directive are calling for it to be applied to business relationships based on their risk rather than their duration.
The civil liability mechanism, which should guarantee compensation for people whose rights have been violated, has also come under scrutiny. The latest compromise proposal debated in the Council, seen by POLITICO, reduces the risk of companies getting sued by stipulating that a company can only be held liable if it “intentionally or negligently” failed to comply with a due diligence obligation aimed to protect a “natural or legal person” — not a forest, for instance — and subsequently caused damage to that person’s “legal interest protected under national law.” But, it states, a company cannot be held liable “if the damage was caused only by its business partners in its chain of activities.”
Earlier this year, the EU, Ivory Coast and Ghana and the cocoa sector all committed to a roadmap to make cocoa more sustainable, which, they agreed, includes improving farmers’ incomes. Yet it remains unclear whether this will be mentioned in the final draft of the due diligence directive.
“Sustainability cannot exist without a living income,” said Heidi Hautala, Green MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s Responsible Business Conduct Working Group. Hautala, who is among those pushing for the reference to a living income to be included in the final text, added that responsible purchasing practices are “a prerequisite for respect of human rights, environment and climate.”
Living income “needs to be a part of it because otherwise you’re in trouble,” agreed Fountain.
“If you don’t look at what does a farmer need in order to comply, if you don’t make sure that a farmer actually has the right set of income, then all you’re doing is pushing the responsibility for being sustainable back to the farmer. And this is what we’ve done for the last two decades.”
A lobby group backed by Elon Musk and associated with a controversial ideology popular among tech billionaires is fighting to prevent killer robots from terminating humanity, and it’s taken hold of Europe’s Artificial Intelligence Act to do so.
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) has over the past year made itself a force of influence on some of the AI Act’s most contentious elements. Despite the group’s links to Silicon Valley, Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have found themselves on the losing side of FLI’s arguments.
In the EU bubble, the arrival of a group whose actions are colored by fear of AI-triggered catastrophe rather than run-of-the-mill consumer protection concerns was received like a spaceship alighting in the Schuman roundabout. Some worry that the institute embodies a techbro-ish anxiety about low-probability threats that could divert attention from more immediate problems. But most agree that during its time in Brussels, the FLI has been effective.
“They’re rather pragmatic and they have legal and technical expertise,” said Kai Zenner, a digital policy adviser to center-right MEP Axel Voss, who works on the AI Act. “They’re sometimes a bit too worried about technology, but they raise a lot of good points.”
Launched in 2014 by MIT academic Max Tegmark and backed by tech grandees including Musk, Skype’s Jaan Tallinn, and crypto wunderkind Vitalik Buterin, FLI is a nonprofit devoted to grappling with “existential risks” — events able to wipe out or doom humankind. It counts other hot shots like actors Morgan Freeman and Alan Alda and renowned scientists Martin (Lord) Rees and Nick Bostrom among its external advisers.
Chief among those menaces — and FLI’s priorities — is artificial intelligence running amok.
“We’ve seen plane crashes because an autopilot couldn’t be overruled. We’ve seen a storming of the U.S. Capitol because an algorithm was trained to maximize engagement. These are AI safety failures today — as these systems become more powerful, harms might become worse,” Mark Brakel, FLI director of European policy, said in an interview.
But the lobby group faces two PR problems. First, Musk, its most famous backer, is at the center of a storm since he started mass firings at Twitter as its new owner, catching the eye of regulators, too. Musk’s controversies could cause lawmakers to get skittish about talking to FLI. Second, the group’s connections to a set of beliefs known as effective altruism are raising eyebrows: The ideology faces a reckoning and is most recently being blamed as a driving force behind the scandal around cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has unleashed financial carnage.
How FLI pierced the bubble
The arrival of a lobby group fighting off extinction, misaligned artificial intelligence and killer robots was bound to be refreshing to otherwise snoozy Brussels policymaking.
FLI’s Brussels office opened in mid-2021, as discussions about the European Commission’s AI Act proposal were kicking off.
“We would prefer AI to be developed in Europe, where there will be regulations in place,” Brakel said. “The hope is that people take inspiration from the EU.”
A former diplomat, the Dutch-born Brakel joined the institute in May 2021. He chose to work in AI policy as a field that was both impactful and underserved. Policy researcher Risto Uuk joined him two months later. A skilled digital operator — he publishes his analyses and newsletter from the domain artificialintelligenceact.eu — Uuk had previously done AI research for the Commission and the World Economic Forum. He joined FLI out of philosophical affinity: like Tegmark, Uuk subscribes to the tenets of effective altruism, a value system prescribing the use of hard evidence to decide how to benefit the largest number of people.
Since starting in Brussels, the institute’s three-person team (with help from Tegmark and others, including law firm Dentons) has deftly spearheaded lobbying efforts on little-known AI issues.
Elon Musk is one of the Future of Life Institute’s most prominent backers | Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images
Exhibit A: general-purpose AI — software like speech-recognition or image-generating tools used in a vast array of contexts and sometimes affected by biases and dangerous inaccuracies (for instance, in medical settings). General-purpose AI was not mentioned in the Commission’s proposal, but wended its way into the EU Council’s final text and is guaranteed to feature in Parliament’s position.
“We came out and said, ‘There’s this new class of AI — general-purpose AI systems — and the AI Act doesn’t consider them whatsoever. You should worry about this,'” Brakel said. “This was not on anyone’s radar. Now it is.”
The group is also playing on European fears of technological domination by the U.S. and China. “General-purpose AI systems are built mainly in the U.S. and China, and that could harm innovation in Europe, if you don’t ensure they abide by some requirements,” Brakel said, adding this argument resonated with center-right lawmakers with whom he recently met.
Another of FLI’s hobbyhorses is outlawing AI able to manipulate people’s behavior. The original proposal bans manipulative AI, but that is limited to “subliminal” techniques — which Brakel thinks would create loopholes.
But the AI Act’s co-rapporteur, Romanian Renew lawmaker Dragoș Tudorache, is now pushing to make the ban more comprehensive. “If that amendment goes through, we would be a lot happier than we are with the current text,” Brakel said.
So smart it made crypto crash
While the group’s input on key provisions in the AI bill was welcomed, many in Brussels’ establishment look askance at its worldview.
Tegmark and other FLI backers adhere to what’s referred to as effective altruism (or EA). A strand of utilitarianism codified by philosopher William MacAskill — whose work Musk called “a close match for my philosophy” — EA dictates that one should better the lives of as many people as possible, using a rationalist fact-based approach. At a basic level, that means donating big chunks of one’s income to competent charities. A more radical, long-termist strand of effective altruism demands that one strive to minimize risks able to kill off a lot of people — and especially future people, who will greatly outnumber existing ones. That means that preventing the potential rise of an AI whose values clash with humankind’s well-being should be at the top of one’s list of concerns.
A critical take on FLI is that it is furthering thisinterpretation of the so-called effective altruism agenda, one supposedly uninterested in the world’s current ills — such as racism, sexism and hunger — and focused on sci-fi threats to yet-to-be-born folks. Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher whose acrimonious exit from Google made headlines in 2020, has lambasted FLI on Twitter, voicing “huge concerns” about it.
“They are backed by billionaires including Elon Musk — that already should make people suspicious,” Gebru said in an interview. “The entire field around AI safety is made up of so many ‘institutes’ and companies billionaires pump money into. But their concept of AI safety has nothing to do with current harms towards marginalized groups — they want to reorient the entire conversation into preventing this AI apocalypse.”
Effective altruism’s reputation has taken a hit in recent weeks after the fall of FTX, a bankrupt exchange that lost at least $1 billion in customers’ cryptocurrency assets. Its disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried used to be one of EA’s darlings, talking in interviews about his plan to make bazillions and give them to charity. As FTX crumbled, commentators argued that Effective Altruism ideology led Bankman-Fried to cut corners and rationalize his recklessness.
Both MacAskill and FLI donor Buterin defended EA on Twitter, saying that Bankman-Fried’s actions contrasted with the philosophy’s tenets. “Automatically downgrading every single thing SBF believed in is an error,” wrote Buterin, who invented the Ethereum blockchain, and bankrolls FLI’s scholarship for AI existential risk research.
Brakel said that the FLI and EA were two distinct things, and FLI’s advocacy was focused on present problems, from biased software to autonomous weapons, e.g. at the United Nations level. “Do we spend a lot of time thinking about what the world would look like in 400 years? No,” he said. (Neither Brakel nor the FLI’s EU representative, Claudia Prettner, call themselves effective altruists.)
Californian ideology
Another critique of FLI’s efforts to stave off evil AI argues that they obscure a techno-utopian drive to develop benevolent human-level AI. At a 2017 conference, FLI advisers — including Musk, Tegmark and Skype’s Tallinn — debated the likelihood and the desirability of smarter-than-human AI. Most panelists deemed “superintelligence” bound to happen; half of them deemed it desirable. The conference’s output was a series of (fairly moderate) guidelines on developing beneficial AI, which Brakel cited as one of FLI’s foundational documents.
That techno-optimism led Emile P. Torres, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy who used to collaborate with FLI, to ultimately turn against the organization. “None of them seem to consider that maybe we should explore some kind of moratorium,” Torres said. Raising such points with an FLI staffer, Torres said, led to a sort of excommunication. (Torres’s articles have been taken down from FLI’s website.)
Within Brussels, the worry is that going ahead, FLI might change course from its current down-to-earth incarnation and steer the AI debate toward far-flung scenarios. “When discussing AI at the EU level, we wanted to draw a clear distinction between boring and concrete AI systems and sci-fi questions,” said Daniel Leufer, a lobbyist with digital rights NGO Access Now. “When earlier EU discussions on AI regulation happened, there were no organizations in Brussels placing focus on topics like superintelligence — it’s good that the debate didn’t go in that direction.”
Those who regard the FLI as the spawn of Californian futurism point to its board and its wallet. Besides Musk, Tallinn and Tegmark, donors and advisers include researchers from Google and OpenAI, Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (which in turn has received funding from FTX) and actor Morgan Freeman.
In 2020 most of FLI’s global funding ($276,000 out of $482,479) came from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charity favored by tech bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg; 2021 accounts haven’t been released yet.
Brakel denied that the FLI is cozy with Silicon Valley, saying that the organization’s work on general-purpose AI made life harder for tech companies. Brakel said he had never spoken to Musk. Tegmark, meanwhile, is in regular touch with the members of the scientific advisory board, which includes Musk.
In Brakel’s opinion, what the FLI is doing is akin to early-day climate activism. “We currently see the warmest October ever. We worry about it today, but we also worry about the impact in 80 years’ time,” he said last month. “[There] are AI safety failures today — and as these systems become more powerful, the harms might become worse.”
Both players and fans are using the World Cup stage as an opportunity to highlight issues of inclusion and human rights, including LGBTQ+ rights in host nation Qatar and the ongoing anti-regime protests in Iran.
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After days of intense negotiations that stretched into early Sunday morning in Sharm el-Sheikh, countries at the latest UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, reached agreement on an outcome that established a funding mechanism to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced disasters.
Opinion by Meena Raman (sharm el-sheikh, egypt)
Inter Press Service
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 22 (IPS) – COP 27 delivered on what was the ‘litmus test’ for its success – consensus on the establishment of a fund on loss and damage. What seemed impossible was made possible, largely due to the unity of the G77 and China and the role of the Egyptian Presidency. Also important were efforts by civil society groups who put pressure on the United States, the main blocker to having the fund.
Until the final hours of the climate talks, it was uncertain whether the deal would be sealed, given behind the scenes diplomacy by the COP Presidency team. The G77/China was led by Pakistan, that wielded a strong moral voice at the conference, following the catastrophic and devastating floods which was attributed to climate change.
It was a big win for loss and damage issues at Sharm el-Sheikh, to spotlight what was once seen as an ‘orphan child’ of the process, with usual priority given to mitigation (emissions reductions), while adaptation to climate impacts is treated as the ‘step child’.
However, there is nothing significantly meaningful on finance, given the overall stance of developed countries in the process, with the loss and damage fund remaining empty for now, with the hope that it will deliver more in the coming years when the fund is set up and is resourced.
The Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which is to be a technical assistance facility for developing countries also was devoid of any financial commitments. The finance decisions adopted only exhorted developed countries to deliver on the USD 100 billion per year by 2020 pledges and to double adaptation funding.
New pledges, totalling more than USD 230 million, were made to the Adaptation Fund at COP27, a small sum given the scale of the needs in developing countries.
An overarching alarm and agony of many developing countries at the Sharm el-Sheikh talks were the persistent efforts by developed countries to not own up to their historical responsibilities for past emissions, and to delete or dilute the foundational principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDRRC) between developed and developing countries under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.
This attempt was repeatedly called out by developing countries, especially from the Like-minded developing countries (LMDC), the African Group, the Arab Group and ABU (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay). The effort to remove this differentiation was at the heart of the fight on many fronts, especially on the issue of mitigation and finance, which seemed like a repeat of negotiations in Paris.
Developed countries continued their efforts at using terms such as ‘major emitters’, ‘major economies’, and the ‘G20’ in relation to who should show more ambition on mitigation, while in the discussion on finance, it was about “broadening the donor base”.
The retort from developing countries was that these issues were already settled under the Paris Agreement and that the principles and provisions of the Agreement should be respected and implemented.
The climate talks which began on Sunday, 6 Nov, were supposed to end Friday, 18 Nov, but decisions were only gavelled early morning of Sunday, 20 Nov, when the official plenary began at 4 am. Delegates were visibly exhausted and bleary-eyed following long days and nights of negotiations which were particularly intense since Wed, 16 Nov.
Apart from the loss and damage fund, other issues that were deadlocked during the week were the cover decisions (as to what they should contain), the mitigation work programme, the global goal on adaptation and matters related to finance.
Among the sticky issues in relation to mitigation were on how the temperature goal of 1.5°C should be reflected, how to advance efforts following the controversial paragraph adopted on the phase down of unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies from COP 26 decision in Glasgow, and the peaking of emissions by 2025.
In order to avoid spats in public given the wide divergence between Parties in the full glare of the public and world media, the COP 27 Presidency team resorted to informal consultations and diplomatic efforts behind the scenes to find compromises on the difficult issues with draft texts which were reviewed by Parties.
This was the reason for the delay in convening the final plenary, as Parties also wanted to gauge if they could live with the draft decisions, as they assessed the overall balance of the package of decisions among the key issues of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and finance.
COP 27 President Sameh Shoukry convened plenary and gavelled the adoption of the various decisions. Following the adoption of the decisions, he said that “despite the difficulties and challenges of our times, the divergence of views, level of ambition or apprehension, we remain committed to the fight against climate change…. and that as much as sceptics and pessimists thought that climate action will be taking a back seat on the global agenda, we rose to the occasion, upheld our responsibilities and undertook the important decisive political decisions that millions around the world expect from us.”
Minister Shoukry added that “We listened to the calls of anguish and despair resonating from one end of Pakistan to the other, a country with literally more than a third of its area flooded, a resounding alarm of the future that awaits us beyond 1.5 degrees. A bleak future…, a future that I do not wish for my grandchildren nor for any child on this planet.”
“Today, here in Sharm el-Sheikh, we establish the first ever dedicated fund for loss and damage, a fund that has been so long in the making. It was only appropriate that this COP, the implementation COP in Africa, is where the fund is finally established.”
“Millions around the globe can now sense a glimmer of hope that their suffering will finally be addressed, swiftly and appropriately,” he said further, adding that “We leave Sharm el-Sheikh with renewed hope in the future of our planet, with an even stronger collective will and more determination to achieve the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.”
Among the significant decisions adopted are highlighted below.
The cover decisions – Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan
The cover decisions adopted under the COP (Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC) and CMA (Conference of Parties to the Paris Agreement) are referred to as the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. The COP and CMA decisions are similar in many respects. Highlights of some of the main aspects of the decisions adopted under the CMA are as follows:
The decision “Stresses that the increasingly complex and challenging global geopolitical situation and its impact on the energy, food and economic situations, as well as the additional challenges associated with the socioeconomic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, should not be used as a pretext for backtracking, backsliding or de-prioritizing climate action.”
It “Reaffirms the Paris Agreement temperature goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;” and “Reiterates that the impacts of climate change will be much lower at the temperature increase of 1.5 °C compared with 2 °C7 and resolves to pursue further efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C”.
On enhancing ambition and implementation, the decision “Resolves to implement ambitious, just, equitable and inclusive transitions to low-emission and climate-resilient development in line with the principles and objectives of the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, taking into account this decision, the Glasgow Climate Pact (GCP) and other relevant decisions of the COP and the CMA.”
(The developed countries of late, have been mainly focussing on the GCP, and much less on the Paris Agreement and even less of the Convention. Some major developing countries have raised concerns that the GCP is being put at the same level as the Convention and the Paris Agreement.)
On mitigation, the decision “Notes with serious concern the finding in the latest synthesis report on nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that the total global greenhouse gas emission (GHG) level in 2030, taking into account implementation of all latest NDCs, is estimated to be 0.3 per cent below the 2019 level, which is not in line with least-cost scenarios for keeping global temperature rise to 2 or 1.5 °C” and “Emphasizes the urgent need for Parties to increase their efforts to collectively reduce emissions through accelerated action and implementation of domestic mitigation measures in accordance with Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement.” (Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement states: “Each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive NDCs that it intends to achieve. Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.”)
The decision also “Calls upon Parties to accelerate the development, deployment and dissemination of technologies, and the adoption of policies, to transition towards low-emission energy systems, including by rapidly scaling up the deployment of clean power generation and energy efficiency measures, including accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, while providing targeted support to the poorest and most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support towards a just transition.” (This is a repeat of the decision from the GCP).
A new and significant outcome on “pathways to just transition”, where there is a decision to “establish a work programme on just transition for discussion of pathways to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement”. It also decided “to convene, as part of the work programme on just transition, an annual high-level ministerial round table on just transition, beginning at its fifth session”.
On finance, the decision “Notes with concern the growing gap between the needs of developing country Parties, in particular those due to the increasing impacts of climate change and their increased indebtedness, and the support provided and mobilized for their efforts to implement their NDCs, highlighting that such needs are currently estimated at USD 5.8–5.9 trillion26 for the pre-2030 period.”
It also “Expresses serious concern that the goal of developed country Parties to mobilize jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020…has not yet been met.
The decision also “Calls on the shareholders of multilateral development banks (MDBs) and international financial institutions (IFIs) to reform MDB practices and priorities, align and scale up funding, ensure simplified access and mobilize climate finance from various sources and encourages MDBs to define a new vision and commensurate operational model, channels and instruments that are fit for the purpose of adequately addressing the global climate emergency…”.
Loss and damage fund
In a separate decision, Parties agreed to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, in responding to loss and damage, including with a focus on addressing loss and damage by providing and assisting in mobilizing new and additional resources, and that these new arrangements complement and include sources, funds, processes and initiatives under and outside the Convention and the Paris Agreement.”
It was also decided “to establish a fund for responding to loss and damage whose mandate includes a focus on addressing loss and damage.” Parties also agreed to “Establish a transitional committee on the operationalization of the new funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage.
Mitigation work programme
Parties decided “that the work programme shall be operationalized through focused exchanges of views, information and ideas, noting that the outcomes of the work programme will be non-prescriptive, non-punitive, facilitative, respectful of national sovereignty and national circumstances, take into account the nationally determined nature of NDCs and will not impose new targets or goals.” (This was a grave concern to many developing countries).
It was also decided “that the work programme shall function in a manner that is consistent with the procedures and timelines for communication of successive NDCs established in the Paris Agreement,” and “that the scope of the work programme should be based on broad thematic areas relevant to urgently scaling up mitigation ambition and implementation in this critical decade…”
Meena Raman is Head of Programmes at Third World Network – headquartered in Penang, Malaysia.
Children from marginalised ethnic, language and religious groups, from 22 low and middle-income countries which were analysed, lag far behind their peers in reading skills. Credit: Brian Moonga/IPS
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Nov 21 (IPS) – An indisputable truth is that no child has ever chosen where to be born, which colour of skin to have, which ethnic community to belong to, what religion to practice and language to speak, or how safe or dangerous the context to grow up in. A child is the most innocent and defenceless human being.
Nevertheless, children fall easy prey to all kinds of brutalities, everywhere and every single day. See how.
Racism and discrimination against children based on their ethnicity, language and religion, are rife in countries across the world, stated the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ahead of this year’s World Children’s Day on 20 November.
In its report: Rights denied: The impact of discrimination on children, the world’s largest body defending the rights of children, reveals the staggering impact of discrimination on children and the extent to which racism and discrimination affect their education, health, access to a registered birth, and to a fair and equal justice system.
It also highlights widespread disparities among minority and ethnic groups.
A lifetime of pain: “Systemic racism and discrimination put children at risk of deprivation and exclusion that can last a lifetime,” said UNICEF Executive Director, Catherine Russell. “This hurts us all.”
Ethnicity, language, religion: The report shows that children from marginalised ethnic, language and religious groups, from 22 low and middle-income countries which were analysed, lag far behind their peers in reading skills.
Lagging behind: On average, students aged seven to 14 from the most advantaged group are more than twice as likely to have foundational reading skills than those from the least advantaged group.
A UNICEF analysis of data on the level of children registered at birth – a prerequisite for access to basic rights – found significant disparities among children of different religious and ethnic groups.
“The unresolved legacies of trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans, as well as colonialism, post-colonial apartheid and segregation, continue to harm these children today.”
Deprivation: Discrimination and exclusion deepen inter-generational deprivation and poverty, and result in poorer health, nutrition and learning outcomes for children, a higher likelihood of incarceration, higher rates of pregnancy among adolescent girls, and lower employment rates and earnings in adulthood.
“People are stereotyped and discriminated against purely because they are poor. This is frankly sickening and a stain on our society.”
No Need to add that children are among the most hurt by impoverishment, humiliation and stigmatisation.
No immunisation: While COVID-19 exposed deep injustices and discrimination across the world, and the impacts of climate change and conflict continue to reveal inequities in many countries, UNICEF highlights how discrimination and exclusion have long persisted for millions of children from ethnic and minority groups, including access to immunisation, water and sanitation services,
In addition to all the already reported brutalities committed against the most innocent and defenceless humans–the children, many more crimes continue to be perpetrated amidst worldwide impunity.
The following are just some tragic examples.
One billion children experience some form of emotional, physical or sexual violence every single year.
One child dies from violence… every seven minutes.
Millions of children are displaced by armed conflict. These children are at a high risk of grave violations in and around camps, and other areas of refuge.
Drowned, abandoned, stranded: Children are often forced to migrate with their parents to flee armed conflicts, severe droughts, floods and landslides they have not caused. In their voyage to hell, children are drowned, and those who survive are often separated from their families and abandoned at borders.
Violence without frontiers: violence against children knows no boundaries of culture, class or education. It takes place against children in institutions, in schools, and at home. Peer violence is also a concern, as is the growth in cyberbullying.
Isolation, loneliness, fear: Children exposed to violence live in isolation, loneliness and fear, not knowing where to turn for help, especially when the perpetrator is someone close.
Hunted in refugee camps: Criminal groups trading with the lives of the weakest humans go to refugee camps to hunt defenceless children and youth for trafficking, smuggling, enslavement, and making money from selling their organs.
Slavery: Millions of children are pushed into forced labour, carrying out extremely hazardous work. And 70% of boys and girls living in rural areas are workers.
Impunity
All these crimes against innocent children are being committed. And go unpunished.
No wonder, the world is so busy talking about weapons, wars, oil, gas, carbon, the concentration of food markets, more technology, and how to further expand the digitalisation of all aspects of life.
