Open Democracy

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pIn February 2009 the Convention of Modern Liberty gathered a distinguished crowd who cared about the issues raised by a growing UK surveillance state. Their words are worth revisiting today.nbsp;/p /div /div /div p'A wake up call', said Anthony Barnett of the Convention on Modern Liberty, a series of meetings of those who felt that there was a growing range of threats to our fundamental rights and freedom in Britain: people, as he said, 'who wanted to test out whether this was the case in public, and debate, if the argument held, why this was so and what could be done'. /p pPlanned in six months by openDemocracy, Liberty, the Rowntree Trusts, thenbsp;emGuardian/ememnbsp;/emand NO2ID, it brought together over 1,500 people in London, hundreds in the parallel conventions across the UK, and many more via the web, leading thenbsp;emObserver/ememnbsp;/emto dub it 'by far the largest civil liberties convention ever held in Britain.'/p pI thought it would be interesting to go back to those discussions onnbsp; 'can privacy have a future?', 'are our civil liberties under a grave threat?', 'judges and politicians' and 'is there a media-political class?', to remind ourselves what a remarkable range of people had to say then about the surveillance state. Since I editednbsp;a href=http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Convention-Modern-Liberty-Fundamental/dp/1845402006the volume of our proceedings,/anbsp;this was a relatively easy exercise. (Speakers’ biographies can be found at the end.)/p pOne keynote speaker from the Convention is sadly no longer with us. This is what he said:/p pstrongemTHOMAS BINGHAM /em/strong/p p“The first catalyst is technological advance: it is now technically possible to observe, to record, to track, to measure, to analyse, to retrieve in a way which could never be done before…. But the possession of great powers by the state, is not a reason for using them. We have, after all, enjoyed for many years, the power to destroy the world, but have wisely refrained from doing so. … The second catalyst of change has been security: security against terrorist attack; security against the commission of crime. These are not considerations which any rational person would dismiss. But nor are they considerations the mere invocation of which trumps any other. Eternal vigilance must again be the watchword: to ensure that intrusive powers are limited to what is demonstrably necessary; to ensure that powers conferred for one purpose are not used for another; to detect and eradicate abuses. It is worth recalling Benjamin Franklin’s observation that ‘he who would put security before liberty deserves neither’. It is also worth recalling John Locke’s even more salutary warning: /p pemAs soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. “/em/p pBut the people who said the following are still with us:/p pstrongemHENRY PORTER/em/strongnbsp;nbsp; “It’s no exaggeration to say that, unless we involve ourselves in the political process, ours will be the first generation in centuries of British history to pass on a less free society than the one we inherited. That is a shocking thought, but we still have time to act.”/p pstrongemPHILIP PULLMAN /em/strong/p pem“You are not to be trusted with laws,br / So we shall put ourselves out of your reach.br / We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition.br / You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them.br / You do not need to hold us to account.br / You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?br / Who do you think you are?br / What sort of fools do you think we are?”/em/p pA nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia, of furtive hatred and low-level panic. Every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour…/p pWe are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation. “em br //em/p pstrongemHELENA KENNEDY QC/em/strongemnbsp;nbsp; “/emSomeone once said that power can turn even the gentlest of souls into a Nero. Well let me tell you, we have managed to see some Neros emerging in contemporary government. I always say there must be something in the drinking water at the Home Office. People who seem perfectly decent, who don’t have staring eyes, who don’t seem mad, go in there and are suddenly overwhelmed with the need to reduce our liberty. “/p pstrongemSIR DAVID VARNEY/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “Now, when I talk about bringing services together, I am saying that the sort of information we as a society need to share is name, national insurance number, date of birth and address. There needs to be a big discussion about whether that’s the right information to share: but I believe that the public have a right to know what information is being held by public services, what use it is being put to, and what the safeguards are for protecting the integrity of that information…./p pstrongemMember of the audience:/em/strongem /emI’d like to ask Sir David Varney why, if he believes that only four items of information are necessary for the database, we are being asked for 53? /p pstrongemDavid Varney:/em/strongem /emI was talking about information which is required for service delivery. If more information than the four items I have identified is required, then I believe we need the service organisation seeking that information to get the consent of the citizen to provide it. I think the 52 comes from security issues and you will have to ask these organisations because I certainly don’t know why they need that amount of information....”/p pstrongemKEN MACDONALD QCnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “/em/strongNow, what the paper completely fails to address is how that precondition, that essential public trust, could possibly survive a system under which the security services were empowered by law to routinely trawl through the private communications data of vast numbers of citizens suspected of no crime, simply in order, as Sir David Omand puts it, ‘to identify patterns of interest for further investigation’. How would the public regard their security services in that world? Of course, such a world would change the relationship between the state and its citizensnbsp; in the most fundamental and, I believe, dangerous ways. In all probability, it would tend to recast all of us as subservient and unworthy of autonomy. It would destroy accountability and it would destroy trust.nbsp;/pp This is for one very simple reason: because to abolish the distinction between suspects and those suspected of nothing, to place them entirely in the same category in the eyes of the state, is a clear hallmark of authoritarianism.”/p pstrongemDOMINIC GRIEVE QC MP/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “The idea that the criminal or the extremist - be it the BNP or mad Islamist - is in some way going to be deterred by these structures, is laughable. But we as politicians seem so often to lack the courage to just come forward and say, ‘none of this will work. You have to accept that society and life carries risk. Death is an inevitability for us all, and whilst it is the duty of the state to do its best to moderate and prevent what is wrong, nevertheless there are finite limits on what we should be doing, because the moment you go beyond it, you start creating that monster…/p pConservatives can get things wrong. We don’t have a monopoly on wisdom. But the one thing that keeps me on the straight and narrow – and I actually think helps us – is that, if we are about to consider something that is authoritarian, somewhere in the back of our consciences as Conservatives, somebody says, ‘your grandfather wouldn’t have approved’. It works quite well. “/p pstrongemCASPAR BOWDEN/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “I am Chief Privacy Adviser for Microsoft in Europe, Middle East and Africa... Advertising is the fundamental business model of the Web… The trouble is that once one has accumulated this kind of profile information with the consent of the user to fulfil this business purpose, it becomes a tempting honey pot for the interests of state surveillance to move in and try and use that data for other purposes. That is precisely what has happened over the years with the situation of mandatory systematic data retention by internet service providers (ISPs).”/p pstrongemIAIN HENDERSON/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “We call our concept, ‘volunteered personal information’. It is literally volunteered by you of your own free will and it will come with a contract that the organisation signs. These will be your terms and conditions rather than the 25-page privacy policy that - at the moment - you can’t do anything about. To design those contracts, we use very high-end lawyers that tell us it’s perfectly feasible. We use very high- end and secure technologies.”/p pstrongemPETER BAZALGETTE/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “My third paradox of the morning would be that Google is allegedly sensitive to data retention. Over the last few years, it has actually reduced considerably the time span for which it is holding personal data. Meanwhile, you’ve got the Home Secretary wanting mobile phone companies to hold personal data for much, much longer. So you have got some commercial organisations trying to be more responsible, while the government is tugging in completely the opposite direction. Between those two points is a complete public policy vacuum. Privacy is only one issue and I’d like to hear people in the debate this morning acknowledge the fact that developing new revenue flows to fund content and services online - that we all enjoy - is also important.“/p pstrongemDOMINIC RAAB/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “What we see time and time again from ministers when they make a call for greater powers, is that it’s said to be based on ‘unprecedented’ threats – 90 days, 42 days, ID cards, and now again with the giant new communications database. Of course, we face new challenges. But that’s no reason to suspend all critical judgement and junk the basic freedoms that we’ve nurtured and defended for centuries, without properly scrutinising the case. “/p pstrongemJERRY HICKS/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “So you might ask, why is it that we can’t just believe them when they say that all this is for our own good and for our national security? The reason is that we have got experience. That’s why we don’t believe them. I am not paranoid – not that that stops them talking about me! But we have got experience. Take the ‘War on Terror’. This was supposed to usher in all these restrictions that would ultimately protect us. My view is that a decent foreign policy would make us all an awful lot safer.”/p pstrongemSAM TALBOT RICE/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “We would argue that an alternative path should take us down the track of data minimalisation. Rather than amassing sensitive personal data and storing it in one place where it’s insecure, the retention and use of data should be strictly limited to the minimum amount required for the minimum time required… /p p… Our fundamental principle is this: that it’s our data and not the Government’s. The policies that we put forward hinge on the idea that we need to give greater power and choice to the individual rather than use technology to empower and extend the arms of the State. What we like to say is that we want to move towards an information society rather than a database state.”/p pstrongemTONY BUNYAN/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “This is not just about the collection of data. It’s not just about privacy. It is also about how that data is going to be used. The people who know this well are migrants who are trying to get into the EU, fleeing from poverty or persecution. They are facing that surveillance system. They’re enduring the tracking, the fingerprinting, the misinformation, the intelligence reports that they can’t see, the police reports that they can’t see. The Muslim communities around Europe, not just in Britain, are facing extraordinary surveillance of their social and political lives. We have cases from all across Europe. Also all across Europe, protests have been policed differently, more aggressively. Now we have a conflation of security in policing. The policing of big international events against terrorist attacks is now equated with protests, cross-border demonstrations. The EU now has one manual to cover both.”/p pstrongemQUENTIN SKINNER/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “There isn’t a dichotomy between liberty and security – secure freedom is the only freedom there is. So to be asked to give up the security of your freedom is to be asked to give up your freedom. And that’s the Leveller case. Thanks very much.”/p pstrongemMICHAEL EDWARDS/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “As I understand it, the current system is based on a philosophy that if we have more information, we can predict and control the world. If we can predict and control the world, then bad things won’t happen. But bad things will always happen, and many more bad things will happen when that desire to avoid bad things happening turns into a desire for domination and persecution, particularly against certain groups of people, and generates widespread mistrust that leads to the breakdown of social solidarity, and the whole cycle starts afresh.”/p pstrongemPETER OBORNE/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “What …we have now is a cartel politics in which the politicians on either side of the House have far more in common with each other than they do with the voters, and that they form a conspiracy against that wider society.” /p pstrongemSIMON JENKINS/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “ My last point. Compare Lord Bingham’s lecture this morning with Jack Straw’s article in the emGuardian/em, yesterday. Jack Straw would have been standing here twenty years ago, with Robin Cook, Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman. All these people would have been standing here castigating the Tory Government for introducing the surveillance society. What happened to them? Are they all actually devious, venal liars? [emAudience cries: Yes!/em] That was meant to be a rhetorical question. Um, no. Something happens to them when they get into power and we don’t yet know what that is. /p pIf I have one plea to all the lobbyists and think tanks who write endless articles and pamphlets on this subject, it would be this: ‘For God’s sake, stop writing about the importance of freedom! Try and find out what it is that works this poison inside Government on otherwise liberal people’. There is a sort of informal conspiracy operating against which even government ministers are not immune. Because unless you tell Jack Straw what he is, I am afraid that particular poison will go on operating and go on infringing upon our liberties. Thank you very much.”/p pstrongemVINCE CABLE/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “If you have to deal, as MPs do, with the Immigration and Nationality Department or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) over tax credits, you see incompetence on a daily basis such as papers getting lost or files getting mixed up. I am reassured by the fact that the system simply cannot manage the data it has got on us. /p pNonetheless, in this economic crisis, there is a risk that the overall environment will deteriorate and the kind of powers that people worry about, could be invoked. “/p pstrongemDAVID DAVIS/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “Earlier this week, Jack Straw said that this is not a police state. And I agree with him: Britain is not a police state. If it were, we wouldn’t be having this meeting. Many of us would be locked up and we wouldn’t have the right to debate. But that does not actually let the Government off the casual, careless corrosion of our freedoms that has been going on for the last decade and more…/p pIn fact, I would like to respond to Jack Straw, not with an answer but with a question. Tell me, Jack, when does it become a police state? When the Government knows everything? When the Government knows - this is a long list I am afraid - everything about every citizen anywhere in the country?.../p pBut I do know this: every erosion of our freedom diminishes us as a people, as a nation, as a civilisation. I also know this: that by the time we know it is a police state, it will be too late. “/p pstrongemDAVID HOWARTHnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; /em/strong“…these oversight arrangements, that look very good on paper, don’t work, because they themselves are subject to the executive branch of government. You can’t trust the Government to control itself. There has got to be external control, and that is what individual rights are about. /p pIt is obvious, I think, from the debate, that part of the problem is that the Government – and perhaps most governments – don’t understand that when you pass general legislation to give someone a power for one purpose, it is inevitable that the state will use those powers for other purposes. And if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand politics, you don’t understand government, you don’t understand human nature.” /p pstrongemPHIL BOOTH/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “If it were another individual obsessively tracking you, monitoring your movements, taking notes on you, snooping and following you wherever you go, we would call them a stalker! There are laws against it.“/p pstrongemSUZANNE MOORE/em/strongnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; “In the name of keeping us safe, they have imprisoned us. Time to break out. “/ppAnd while we are at it – what they said about Britain and torture:/p pstrongemPHILIP PULLMAN /em/strong/p p“emWe know who our friends are,br / And when our friends want to have words with one of you,br / We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need.br / It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law;br / It is for us to know what your offence is.br / Angering our friends is an offence.“/em/p pemnbsp;/emstrongemHELENA KENNEDY QC/em/strongemnbsp; “/emIt is a real fantasy that laws in relation to terrorism can be vacuum sealed, and that somehow they will only relate to terrorism and only for as long as the terrorist threat exists. The reality is, that you can’t vacuum seal law like that… /p pWe also saw standards being lowered on the right to silence and jury trial in the Diplock courts, which in turn have fed into attitudes to those things in the system as a whole. Now the right to silence has been eroded in relation to all crime. That followed within five years of a change taking place, first of all, in Northern Ireland, in response solely to terrorism. /p pSo be very clear that what we are here trying to deal with today is the abuse of power. Of course, perfectly decent people don’t realise that they are doing it. “/p pstrongemKEN MACDONALD QCnbsp;nbsp; “/em/strongWhen your every day begins with security briefings and threat assessments – and believe me, I’ve been there – and when you feel responsible for other people’s safety, it is very easy to fall into a way of thinking that places security above absolutely everything else. It’s a simple psychology to slip into. You start to develop a form of protective zeal.”/p pstrongemDOMINIC GRIEVE QC MP/em/strongnbsp; “I don’t think there is any other European country, even the United States, that has gone completely hell-for-leather in this fashion – and which is transforming us into this rather unpleasant place. The whole episode concerning Binyam Mohamed fills me with utmost shame. Here we are, a country which outlawed torture in the middle of the 17th century, and yet we appear pretty clearly to have colluded with it in the course of the last few years, for issues of state expediency. /p pWe’ve got to change the philosophy, because, unless we change the philosophy, this is going to continue. “/p pstrongemTIMOTHY GARTON ASH/em/strongnbsp; “ What can Britain do? One thing we could do, is to stop colluding in torture.nbsp; That would be a pretty good start.”/p pstrongemPAUL ROGERS/em/strongnbsp; “on the last direct count, 98 thousand people killed in Iraq, (the World Health Organisation surveys show many more than that); 120 thousand people detained without trial, many for years at a time; four and a half million people as refugees and all the problems of prisoner abuse, torture, rendition and the rest. It is so different from what was anticipated… “ /p pstrongemMARY KALDOR/em/strongnbsp; “The reason why we collude in torture is because we are so worried about our arms links with the United States, whether it’s Trident we are talking about or BAE. This is something that nobody is really looking at, but it is incredibly important that we restructure our economy away from this dependence on arms and oil, as this will then give us a real capacity to act in support of human rights.” /p pstrongemTONY BUNYAN /em/strong“The EU is going to put in place a new five-year programme from 2010 onwards called the Stockholm Programme. One of the key themes is the need to harness the ‘digital tsunami’, as they call it, to be used by the state… the EU took a decision, five years ago, to create a ‘security industrial complex’ in the EU to compete with the United States’ (US) military industrial complex.“/p pstrongemSTUART WEIR/em/strongnbsp; “Most obviously, the government uses the fear of terrorism, organised crime, extremism and other forms of anti-social conduct to justify severe measures that remove and restrict traditional civil and political rights.”/p pstrongemVICTORIA BRITTAIN/em/strongnbsp; “Lord Bingham talked about the 1947 committee led by Lord Sankey which took evidence from all the different parts of British society, asking what the Second World War was about, what were we fighting for? Among the things that they came up with was that secret evidence is not ever permissible. And the second thing was that nobody can ever be held for more than three months without trial. Well I’m going to talk today about people who have been held in Britain for seven years without any trial, and who have no prospects of any trial. “/p pstrongemMURRAY HUNT/em/strongnbsp; “In the current controversy about torture, there is an obligation on the state imposed by human rights law to carry out positive, adequate investigations. The Government has to do something. And it is for Parliament to put the pressure on the Government when human rights standards actually require the Government to do something.” /p pstrongemMOAZZAM BEGG/em/strongemnbsp; “/emHabeas corpus is enshrined in the Magna Carta, that great institution of Britishness, one of those British roots which we - Muslims especially - are urged to know all about… So if people are patting themselves on the back because they think Guantanamo is coming to a close, they should take a look at the secret detentions process. “/p pstrongemGEOFFREY ROBERTSON/em/strongnbsp;nbsp; “We should be enormously proud of our abolition of Star Chamber in 1641, which marked the end of torture. “/p pstrongemLORD BINGHAM/em/strongnbsp; “That is why this Convention is so timely and so important: a candle may today be lit, or re-lit, in Britain which, we may hope, shall never be put out. “/p pBefore Lord Bingham’s candle goes out, I'd like to ask them what they would say now… have they changed their minds ? /p blockquotepemLord Bingham (1933-2010) was called to the Bar in 1959 and was made QC in 1972. In 1980, he became Judge of the High Court and subsequently, Lord Justice of Appeal in 1986. From 1992 he was Master of the Rolls until he became Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales in 1996. He was then Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary from 2000-2008. Appointed a Knight of the Garter in 2005. /em/ppembr //em/ppemPeter Bazalgette invests in digital media companies and acts as a consultant to such companies as Sony Music and Sony Pictures. Until 2007, he was Chief Creative Officer of Endemol and is a former Board member of Channel 4. He was a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Bachelorknighted/a in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to broadcasting./em/ppembr //em/ppemMoazzam Begg is one of nine British citizens held in US custody in Bagram and Guantanamo. He was released in 2005 without charge or apology. Since his release he has written an award-winning autobiography, Enemy Combatant, and appears regularly in the international media as a writer and commentator. As director of the human rights organisation, Cageprisoners, he lectures extensively around the country on issues surrounding imprisonment without trial, torture, anti-terror legislation and community relations. /em/ppembr //em/ppemPhil Booth was national coordinator of NO2ID, the UK-wide non- partisan campaign opposing the National Identity Scheme and the database state until 2011. Founded in 2004, in response to the Government’s stated intention to introduce the compulsory registration and lifelong tracking of UK citizens by means of a centralised biometric database, NO2ID seeks to put an informed case against state identity control to the media, to national institutions and to the public at large. /em/ppembr //em/ppemChief Privacy Adviser in the Microsoft Worldwide Technology Office, Caspar Bowden provided expertise on the technology and public policy of privacy to 40 National Technology Officers around the world. He is a specialist in Data Protection and surveillance law, and privacy-enhancing technologies. In 1998, he co-founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research, with the late Professor Roger Needham and Professor Ross Anderson, an independent think-tank that studies the interaction between computers and society. He was appointed expert adviser to the UK House of Lords on three bills concerning privacy and surveillance. Previously he was a quantitative strategist with Goldman Sachs, and a software engineer consulting for clients including Microsoft, Acorn Computers, Research Machines, and IBM. /em/ppembr //em/ppemVictoria Brittain is a journalist and writer. Her most recent book is as co-author of Moazzam Begg’s Enemy Combatant. She is on the board of the Institute of Race Relations. /em/ppembr //em/ppemTony Bunyan is an investigative journalist and writer specialising in justice and home affairs, civil liberties and freedom of information in the European Union. He has been the director of Statewatch since 1990 and edits Statewatch bulletin and Statewatch News online. He has taken ten successful complaints against the Council of the European Union and the European Commission to the European Ombudsman on access to EU documents. /em/ppembr //em/ppemVince Cable (born 9 May 1943) is a British Liberal Democrat politician who has been the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills since 2010 and the Member of Parliament for Twickenham since 1997./em/ppembr //em/ppemDavid Davis was Parliamentary Secretary at the Office of Public Service and Science from May 1993 until July 1994 when he was appointed Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until April of 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he served as Chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. In September 2001, he was appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party, and in July 2002, he was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. From November 2003 to June 2008, David was the Shadow Home Secretary. As a backbench MP, he campaigns for civil liberties. /em/ppembr //em/ppemMichael Edwards is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at New York and Manchester Universities. From 1999 to 2008, he was the Director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Program, and also co-founded the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation. His latest book is Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World (Berrett-Koehler). /em/ppembr //em/ppemProfessor Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of ‘history of the present’. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays nbsp;/ememappear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. /em/ppembr //em/ppemA barrister and QC, Dominic Grieve was elected as a Member of Parliament for Beaconsfield in 1997. He is Queen's Counsel and a member of the Privy Council. He has been the Member of Parliament for Beaconsfleid sicne 1997, and he has been Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland since 2010./em/ppembr //em/ppemIain Henderson works on Mydex, a social enterprise initiative planning to help individuals realise the value of their personal information. He also blogs about buyer-centricity/ VRM issues at Right Side Up and at The Kantara Initiative and carries out customer information strategy work for clients through Information Answers or H2X. /em/ppembr //em/ppemJerry Hicks joined AEU when he started work at Rolls Royce Bristol in 1975 as an apprentice. He was elected as Shop Steward in 1984, as Deputy Convener in 1987 and as Convener for the Test Areas in 1990. In 2003, he was elected to the Amicus National Executive Committee (polling the highest vote in the Aerospace and Shipbuilding sector). Hicks is standing in the current election for General Secretary of Unite taking place during 2013./em/ppembr //em/ppemDavid Howarth is a British academic who was Cambridge’s MP (2005-2010) and Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. He won his seat in Parliament after a 17-year political career with Cambridge City Council. He is an Electoral Commissioner./em/ppembr //em/ppemMurray Hunt has been the Legal Adviser to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights since 2004. Before that he was a practising barrister at Matrix specialising in human rights and public law. He is the author of a number of publications concerning human rights and public law, including Using Human Rights Law in English Courts. /em/ppembr //em/ppemSimon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes columns twice weekly for the Guardian and weekly for the Evening Standard. /em/ppembr //em/ppemMary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Civil/em emSociety and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics.nbsp; She was convenor of the study group on European Security Capabilities established at the request of Javier Solana, which produced the Barcelona report, A Human Security Doctrine for Europe and in 2007 the follow-up report, A European Way of Security: The Madrid Report of the Human Security Study Group. /em/ppembr //em/ppemBaroness Helena Kennedy is a leading barrister and an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues. She is a member of the House of Lords and chair of Justice – the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists. She is a bencher of Gray’s Inn and President of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She was the chair of Charter 88 from 1992 to 1997, the Human Genetics Commission from 1998 to 2007 and the British Council from 1998 to 2004. /em/ppembr //em/ppemSir Ken Macdonald, QC, practises at Matrix Chambers and is a visiting Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He was Director of Public Prosecutions, 2003-2008 where he was the first leading defence lawyer to have been appointed to that post. Since stepping down, he has been an outspoken critic of the communications database proposed by the government to track phone calls, emails, texts and internet use./em/ppembr //em/ppemSuzanne Moore is an award-winning columnist on the Mail on Sunday. She formerly wrote for the Guardian and the Independent. /em/ppembr //em/ppemPeter Oborne is the chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph and reports for Channel 4's Dispatches and Unreported World. He has written a number of books identifying the power structures that lurk behind political discourse, including The Triumph of the Political Class. He is a regular on BBC programmesnbsp;Any Questionsnbsp;andnbsp;Question Timenbsp;and often presents Week in Westminster. He was voted Columnist of the Year at the Press Awards in 2013./em/ppembr //em/ppemHenry Porter is a novelist and political columnist for the Observer newspaper in London. Since 2005, he has been chronicling the attack on liberty and rights in Britain. He has now written over a hundred columns on the subject./em/ppembr //em/ppemPhilip Pullman is a celebrated writer whose Dark Materials trilogy has drawn adult and children readers into a lively dialogue about faith. His interest in Milton illuminates his attitudes to liberty as rooted in an English tradition that he seeks to revive. /em/ppembr //em/ppemDominic Raab was an international lawyer at the Foreign Office, before working as Chief of Staff to respective Shadow Home and Justice Secretaries, David Davis and Dominic Grieve. In January,2010, he published The Assault on Liberty - What Went Wrong With Rights, and was elected Conservative MP for Esher amp; Walton in the 2010 elections. /em/ppembr //em/ppemSam Talbot Rice was head of research at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Before joining the CPS in 2007, he was a Policy Adviser in the Conservative Research Department, a Researcher to two front-bench MPs and head of communications at ARK Schools, a group of academy schools. Since 2012, he is a ‘policy special adviser’ to Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health at the Constitution Unit./em/ppembr //em/ppemGeoffrey Robertson QC is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers, a Recorder, a bencher of the Middle Temple and served as the First President of the United Nations Special Court for Sierra Leone. He is currently a member of the UN Justice Council. His books include The Justice Game – a memoir of some of his notable trials – and The Tyrannicide Brief – an account of how Cromwell’s lawyers brought the King to justice. /em/ppembr //em/ppemPaul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University where he teaches courses on international security, arms control and political violence. He has written or edited nearly 30 books and his work has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Farsi. Paul Rogers is international security consultant for the Oxford Research Group, writes a weekly assessment of international security trends for openDemocracy and was Chair of the British International Studies Association, 2002-2004. /em/ppembr //em/ppemQuentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary. Professor Skinner was previously the Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His work has won him fellowships of several academic Academies, including the British Academy, The American Academy and the Academia Europaea, and he has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including degrees from Chicago, Harvard and Oxford./em/ppembr //em/ppemSir David Varney joined Shell in 1968 after gaining a BSc (Chemistry) from Surrey University. He gained an MBA at Manchester Business School in 1971. Returning to Shell, he worked in Australia, Holland and Sweden before becoming Head of Oil Products Europe. In 1996, he became Chief Executive of BG plc (previously British Gas). In 2002, he became Executive Chairman of Mmo2 plc. In 2004, he was appointed Chairman of HM Revenue amp; Customs./em/ppembr //em/ppemStuart Weir is Associate Director of Democratic Audit, the independent research organisation that audits democracy and human rights in the UK. He formerly founded Charter 88 and was the first director of Democratic Audit in which capacity he wrote and edited numerous books and reports (as he still does). /em/p/blockquote

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pimg style=float: right; src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/rainbow.jpg alt= width=160 /What is life like for gay men and women in Russia? Sergey Khazov looks at the country's gay infrastructure, and discovers a very fragmented picture. /p /div /div /div pUntil a couple of years ago homosexuality was, if not a forbidden topic (it was decriminalised in 1993), certainly a rarely discussed one. Since then twelve regions, including a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/st-petersburg-bans-homosexual-propagandaSt Petersburg/a, have passed laws banning ‘gay propaganda’ aimed at children and young people. The national Parliament has followed with similar legislation, albeit with the word ‘homosexuality’ replaced by the less explicit ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. The wide public discussion around this legislation has led on the one hand to an upsurge in protest activity by the LGBT community, and on the other to an increase in aggression against its activists and gay people in general. /pp class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/rainbow_1.jpg alt= width=460 /'I'm 17. The government says I don't exist. The neo-Nazis say I should be killed. I will survive!' Photo: (cc) Demotix/Roma Yandolin/p pBut what does it mean to be gay in Russia? Where is there support available and who is protecting the rights of the country’s estimated five million gay men and women? This overview will take us to the ‘two capitals‘ — Moscow and St Petersburg — but we begin deep in the Russian regions, in the Volga city of Samara. /p h2strongGays on the Volga/strong/h2 pThirty seven year old Mikhail Tumasov is commercial director of a press distribution company in Samara, a large industrial city on the banks of the Volga and a neighbour of Tolyatti, home of the giant AvtoBaz automobile works. Up to a few years ago Mikhail lived the life of a typical gay Russian: hanging out with friends at their homes, making contacts online, occasional nights out at the ‘Iguana’, the only gay bar in Samara (occasional because he finds it ‘boring’). He didn’t particularly hide his sexuality, but didn’t flaunt it either. He didn’t talk about his private life at work - his close friends knew, nobody else asked. /p pMikhail was lucky with his senior management, and having a senior job himself he was able to avoid colleagues’ curiosity. Gay Russians generally have to hide their orientation and either just keep quiet about their private lives or invent non-existent wives or husbands. But while acceptance levels are still low, the internet has made it much easier to find friends and information. Even if you don’t have your own computer, there’s always an internet café. And in big cities people try to have smartphones so that they can use Grindr or Hornet, apps which allow gay men to track the locations of potential sexual partners. Another popular site in provincial Russia is VKontakte, the Facebook equivalent famous not only for its shameless infringement of copyright (you can download just about any music or film for free) but for its numerous specific interest groups. /p blockquotepem'Even if you don’t have your own computer, there’s always an internet café. And in big cities people try to have smartphones so that they can use Grindr or Hornet, apps which allow gay men to track the locations of potential sexual partners.'/em/p/blockquote pLike many gays (and not just gays) Mikhail was single for a long time before meeting a young man whom he later split up with, and then eight years ago he met Denis, whom he now simply calls his husband. ‘It was all very banal’, he says. ‘We met at a New Year’s party at some friends’ place, and it was love at first sight. We immediately started living together and have been together ever since, except now Denis has a job in Moscow, so I’m thinking about moving there too.’nbsp; Four years ago they bought a flat together and share the mortgage payments, although only Mikhail’s name is on the deeds, and they can’t register as joint owners until the mortgage is paid off. /p pAlthough Mikhail never discusses his sexuality with his parents, on the old ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell’ principle, they know Denis, and Denis’s parents know Mikhail. ‘Nobody asks any questions – it’s simpler like that’, he laughs. ‘But when Denis went to Moscow my mum kept asking about him, as though she wasn’t interested in me, and Denis’s mum knits us socks and sends us salted cucumbers.’/p h2strongHow life changed for Mikhail/strong/h2 pA year and a half ago Mikhail’s quiet life came to an end: he got caught up in activism. At first it was just collecting signatures protesting against the anti ‘gay propaganda’ legislation that had just been passed in St Petersburg, and setting up a VKontakte group called ‘Averse’ to forward this cause. But then: ‘I met this nice couple, Anton and his wife, on a train, we got talking and they invited me round to their flat in Samara. For quite a while now I’ve followed a rule that if I get close to someone, I tell them about myself. And I told them everything. When I was leaving Anton went to show me out, and then beat me up in the lift - because ‘I hadn’t told them straight away; got his trust, didn’t come up to his expectations; there was him thinking I was a normal bloke’. He was at Police College, so it was probably difficult for him’. After this friendly supper Mikhail spent three weeks in hospital with concussion, but first he went to report the incident to the police. /p p‘It was really scary. In the first place, I had to tell some complete stranger about how I was beaten up for being gay, and in the second, there I was basically unintentionally coming out – and I’m pretty well known in Samara. The cop freaked out, of course, but he kind of saw my point, said that you shouldn’t get beaten up for such a thing, although he ended up by saying something about how we need a morals police to stop people being homosexual’. /p pNothing came of Mikhail’s complaint. The magistrate threw it out for being incorrectly formulated and asked for it to be redone, but the deadline passed while Mikhail was in hospital. ‘I had heard about homophobia, of course, but I’d never encountered it before then. I didn’t know what to do, how to react, I was emotionally shaken by it and didn’t know my rights. But the worst thing was that there was no one to ask, and I decided that wasn’t going to sit quietly any longer.’/p blockquotepem'Mikhail went to report the attack to the police. ‘It was really scary. I had to tell some complete stranger about how I was beaten up for being gay, and in fact, there I was basically unintentionally coming out – and I’m pretty well known in Samara. The cop freaked out, of course.'/em/p/blockquote pThe second trigger that turned Mikhail into an leading LGBT organiser was the ‘anti-propaganda’ law passed in a href=http://samaralife.com/anti-gay-legislation-in-samara/Samara/a in 2012. ‘It was being actively discussed then, and there was this awful outbreak of homophobia in the media and the internet’. So first pickets were organised, and then education programmes.nbsp; ‘We have about 30-40 active people, and the rest join in from time to time. We organise discussions and seminars on emotional and legal topics’, Mikhail explains. ‘Things like ‘Love, Family, Relationships’, ‘LGBT and Christianity’ and ‘The gay family: social and legal aspects in Russia’. Over the past year, Mikhail reckons, about 100 people have been to one or more of the seminars. But what’s 100 in a population of over a million? It’s especially difficult to work with young people, says Mikhail. ‘They write to us, but our hands are tied because of the local legislation. While we try to help them on an individual basis, we have to be very careful, and unfortunately we can’t ask them to our seminars.’nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; /p h2strongThe gay northern capital/strong/h2 pSt Petersburg is best avoided in the winter. The cold wind off the Gulf of Finland penetrates your very bones, so you freeze in an instant, no matter how warmly you dress; the sun disappears for months on end and you seem to have landed in an everlasting polar night. The people are equally cold, and even museums are always in semi-darkness, as though they are just about to close. In summer, on the other hand, you can’t fail to fall in love with ‘Piter’, as it is affectionately known to Russians: elegant 18th and 19th century palaces built by European architects; churches more reminiscent of Catholic basilicas than Orthodox temples; wide avenues, canals, little squares in the most unexpected places... You can spend hours wandering along the embankments, you can see the city from a river tram and even sunbathe on a tiny beach next to the Peter and Fortress, where all Russia’s emperors were buried./p pAnd on a Friday or Saturday evening you can, if you like, stroll through the gay district. No, it’s not a joke: it’s simply that two of the three local clubs, ‘The Blue Oyster’ and ‘Central Station’, are very close together and near Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main drag, and the Gostinny Dvor shopping centre, so that on a Friday evening you can imagine you’re in Amsterdam or the Marais in Paris. Just like in other European capitals, the crowd doesn’t hang around in one place and by 2am it’s moved to the third club, ‘Cabaret’, dancing the night away to a drag show that surprisingly enough is better than any in Moscow (perhaps because the backing dancers are professionals).nbsp; The lesbian scene is quite developed here. In addition to social network-organised informal ‘meetings’, the northern capital has two dedicated women-only clubs — ‘3L’ and ‘Infiniti’ — one mixed club called ‘Malevich’ and two parties, ‘Yuppie Ladies’ and ‘Caramel Girls’, that travel from one venue to another. /p blockquotepem'On a Friday or Saturday evening you can stroll through the gay district: two of the three local clubs are close together near Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main drag, and the Gostinny Dvor shopping centre, so that on a Friday evening you can imagine you’re in Amsterdam or the Marais in Paris.'/em/p/blockquote pIt is not only for the nightlife that St Petersburg has acquired the title of the gay capital of Russia. It’s also the centre of the country’s LGBT movement — this despite the fact that the notorious ‘anti-gay propaganda’ law originated here, the brainchild of Vitaly Milonov, a member of the local legislative assembly. Actor, writer and broadcaster Stephen Fry, who is himself gay, a href=http://sptimes.ru/story/37082interviewed/a Milonov in St Petersburg in March 2013, and afterwards tweeted to his five million followers, ‘He looks at life from an Orthodox Christian point of view, as though liberal gay circles are engaging in propaganda and want to invade nurseries and steal children’s souls’.nbsp; /pp class=image-captionimg src=//www.opendemocracy.net/files/fry milonov.jpg alt= width=460 /The meeting of Fry and Milonov turned out to be a major misunderstanding. Photo: RIA Novosti/Igor Russak/p h2strongHelplines, festivals – and friendly straights/strong/h2 pSt Petersburg is home to the headquarters of the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_LGBT_networkRussian LGBT Network/a, founded in 2006 and still the only organisation protecting the rights of the LGBT community at national level. ‘We have offices in sixteen regions,’ its chair Igor Kochetov tells me. ‘We try to work actively in areas where there are no local organisations, and advise them on a wide range of issues as soon as they are set up.’ The Network also runs information campaigns and seminars as well as awareness-raising activities. ‘We are the only organisation in Russia that collects and analyses information about discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity’, he says with pride./p pThe LGBT network set up the first specialised helpline, staffed by trained volunteers. ‘We have 30 ‘helpliners’, some of them professional psychologists and lawyers,’ explains Kochetov, ‘and we take about 1000 calls a year. If someone rings and the person who takes the call can’t solve their problem, their number is taken and a specialist calls them back.nbsp; And if we know there’s a counselling service in their own area, we’ll refer them there.’ The helpline has a freephone number, which is important in a country where intercity calls are not cheap. Most of the calls touch on similar issues: people finding it difficult to accept their own sexuality; lesbians whose ex-husbands want to remove their children from them; transsexuals who need new ID documents; complaints about threats, attacks, blackmail and the behaviour of the police./p blockquotepem'The LGBT network set up the first specialised helpline, staffed by 30 trained volunteers, some of them professional psychologists and lawyers, and it receives about 1000 calls a year. It also has a freephone number, which is important in a country where intercity calls are not cheap.'/em/p/blockquote pThe Network isn’t particularly active in St Petersburg itself, which is understandable given the number of other LGBT activists there. Take for example the ‘Vykhod’ [Coming Out] organisation, founded in 2008, which covers much the same ground, from the organisation of pickets against homophobic laws throughnbsp; psychological and legal advice and support to a ‘Parents’ Club’ whose members support not only one another but young people as well. ‘Vykhod’s’ main activity, though, is putting on its annual ‘Queerfest’, which includes exhibitions, film showings, concerts and discussions.nbsp;nbsp; /p pLast year saw the appearance of the ‘a href=http://www.ilga-europe.org/home/guide_europe/country_by_country/russia/stop_the_anti_lgbt_law_russiaAlliancenbsp; of Straights for LGBT Equality/a’, which also runs pickets, collects signatures on petitions calling for Milonov’s resignation, and generally supports members of the LGBT community. ‘People here aren’t as homophobic as you might think,’ its coordinator Natalya Tsymbalov tells me. ‘When we did one-person pickets on 7th April, people on the street reacted quite positively, and on 1st May, when there was a big democratic demonstration in St Petersburg, we took part in it in our rainbow column, and the only negative reaction came from young nationalists who shouted that we should all be sent off to Auschwitz. /p blockquotepem'In some places it’s merely difficult to organise a march or picket, in others it’s impossible, and unsanctioned actions are broken up by the police and their participants arrested almost before they have had time to unfurl their banners. Both registered NGOs in St Petersburg are being prosecuted under the new NGO laws.'/em/p/blockquote pThe first ‘Side by Side’ LGBT themed film festival in St Petersburg also took place in 2008, and quickly became a major event nationally as well as locally. The festival runs not only in St Petersburg itself, but goes on tour to Moscow, Tomsk and Perm. ‘We’d also like to run it elsewhere’, says festival director Gulya Sultanova, ‘but it hasn’t worked out so far. In 2012, we did hold two festivals in Novosibirsk, but we were literally attacked by local nationalists and church people. We phoned the police and they did turn up, but didn’t do anything. In the end we had to organise taxis for audience members and we ourselves had to more or less run away from the demonstrators, who were on motorbikes. One of the police officers told me that they wouldn’t come out for us at all the next day, because no one wanted to protect us. So we cancelled the final day of the festival.’ In the other cities the ‘Side by Side’ festival ran into problems with venues: as soon as the organisers found a screen and announced their programme, the cinema manager would get a phone call from city hall. /pp class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/gay club.jpg alt= width=460 /Residents of Russia's two capitals can choose between any number of clubs for a good night out. The situation is more variable in the regions. Photo: Moscow's Central Station centralstation.ru/p h2strongMoscow wasn’t built in a day/strong/h2 pLife in Moscow is different from life in the rest of Russia, helped by the fact that 80% of the country’s financial flow and 50% of bank capital is concentrated here. The nightclubs here, ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Central Station’, as well as several bars, are much bigger and can afford DJs and even singers from abroad. Admittedly, on the Moscow gay scene it’s not done to hang out at gay bars – the city is full of ostensibly straight watering places that in fact attract a very wide clientele, from the ‘Denis Simachov’, opened by the fashion designer of the same name, where Moscow’s bohemians gather , to ‘Solyanka’, with its ‘Love Boat’ nights where yesterday’s (or even today’s) schoolkids dance with hipsters from glossy mags and PR agencies. Moscow’s nightlife is in constant flow in all senses – new bars open, old ones close or change their concept, so there’s always something to talk about as you lounge on the latest trendy terrace. /p blockquotepem'Thenbsp; gay clubs in Moscow , ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Central Station’, as well as several bars, are much bigger and can afford DJs and even singers from abroad. But on the Moscow scene it’s not done to hang out at gay bars – the city is full of ostensibly straight watering places with a very wide clientele.'/em/p/blockquote pIt’s easier to be gay in Moscow than in the provinces, though even here a lot depends on your work and your family – not all gays work in advertising or the media. On the other hand, people on the street pay no attention to tight jeans or a screaming scarf (in the regions it’s a good idea to be a bit less camp), cabbies know the addresses of not just gay bars but gay saunas, and women aren’t treated like old maids if at the age of 25 they don’t have a husband and kids. /p pFor whatever reason, the LGBT movement in Moscow is much less active than the St Petersburg one, and generally only follows its lead.nbsp; There is a branch of the a href=http://gaygames.org/wp/about-the-fgg/about-the-federation/LGBT Sports Federation/a (born in 2010 at the Cologne Gay Games), a ‘a href=http://radarus.livejournal.com/Rainbow Association’/a and other support and mutual aid groups. There are the usual pickets and public actions, which usually end in a police station, and a Parents’ Club and Alliance of Straights for LGBT Equality. Activists are not immune to the same pressures as elsewhere in the country: harassment, violence and official indifference. /p pThe new law, too, is having an effect. ‘We have to restrict all our activities to over-18s’, says Igor Yasin, an activist from the Rainbow Association. ‘But we do try to help younger people where we can. Just recently a young activist started having problems at school when people found out about his sexuality. And it wasn’t just his classmates that were giving him a hard time, but teachers as well. It started affecting his schoolwork, so we had to intervene. We asked for help from the ‘Street Children’ organisation, which doesn’t really deal with LGBT issues, and surprisingly there were people there who could help him. But that’s a one-off case, especially since the lad was very active and could stand up for himself.nbsp; /p pOf course Moscow is like all capital cities – it likes people who can stand up for themselves. As for the rest – well, they still have to phone the volunteers in St Petersburg.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pemoDRussia will be publishing an extract from Sergey Khazov's unpublished book, ‘A different childhood’, later in the week. /em/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pa href=http://www.lgbtnet.ru/enRussian LGBT Network/a/p pa href=https://www.facebook.com/groups/378474945543273/%20http:/www.facebook.com/straights.for.equalityAlliance of Straights for LGBT Equality/a/p pa href=http://www.bok-o-bok.ru/default.asp?lan=1‘Side by Side’/a LGBT International Film Festival/p pa href=http://comingoutspb.ru/en/en-home‘Coming Out’/a St Petersburg LGBT organisation/p pa href=http://radarus.livejournal.com/‘Rainbow Association’/a [in Russian]/p pa href=http://gay-sport.ru/Russian LGBT Sport Federation/a/p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/od-russia/alyona-soiko/brokeback-in-belarusBrokeback in Belarus /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/od-russia/kathryn-dovey/russia-enshrining-homophobiaRussia: enshrining homophobia/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/od-russia/igor-kochetkov/pride-prejudice-%E2%80%94-just-%E2%80%98don%E2%80%99t-say-gay%E2%80%99-in-russiaPride, prejudice — just ‘don’t say gay’ in Russia/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Russia /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThe Greek government’s decision to close ERT has been criticised in various activist channels as anti-democratic or even irrational. Yet these activists and opponents of the ERT decision are held together only by thin strands and, in truth, represent heterogenous and conflicting interests and agendas./p /div /div /div pspan class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/2145748(1).jpg alt= width=460 height=345 /Former employees look out from the windows of the ERT building. Panayis Chrysovergis/Demotix. All rights reserved./span/ppThe Greek government’s decision to close down the country’s national broadcaster, ERT, has been criticised in various activist channels as anti-democratic or even irrational. Though currently under negotiation as a response to the general public outcry in Greece and abroad, as a part of the present Greek coalition’s proactive austerity planning the discontinuation of this public service proves a thornier issue than originally anticipated. EBU president Jean-Paul Philippot is to hand over a petition in Athens ‘a href=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22909566signed by 51 European directors general, including the BBC's Tony Hall/a’. Uniform though this condemnation may be, it currently hosts and is preserved by the disparate agendas held by global and national constituencies. A brief outline of the most important ones elucidates current Greek social fragmentation, while also providing a comparative insight into similar instances and events elsewhere in the world./p pFor one, Greek unions and political opposition hubs protested against the sacking of 2,700 ERT employees who, apparently, now that the Government has back-pedaled slightly, can apply for their jobs. This tactic certainly allows Greek power – currently under strict supervision by the EU and its global investors – to put the neoliberal card on the table: temporary contractual work has been the norm over the last decade in Greece. Austerity sacking simply adds new flavour to the recipe. This agenda is primarily economic in its criticisms but it simultaneously demands labour justice and protection./p pBeyond this one may discern the resurrection of Greece’s authoritarian phantom: ERT has been broadcasting almost continuously since 1938 and, despite its intermittent control by dictatorial regimes between 1967 and 1974, it managed to keep apace with the life of the Greek nation. The removal of this social constant from the country’s ailing social landscape almost confirms eschatological scenarios concerning the end of Greek liberties, and, by extension, comes as a sign that the European ‘endgame’ may not be so far away after all. This anti-authoritarian agenda is geopolitical and preserves covert links with particular visions of European postwar histories./p pBut there is also a separate agenda in the protests that exceeds any tacit fears concerning institutional attacks on labour rights or democratic freedom. This is articulated through complaints that the dismantling of ERT will lead to the loss of national memory. The distribution of the broadcaster’s vast archive to potential new shareholders – a rumour not that far from those following BBC’s recent service downsizing – will lead to the erasure of uniform narratives of Greek nationality inculcated in generations of Greek citizens. Implicit in this communitarian agenda is the need to preserve electronic apparatuses that help to calibrate ideal homeland imaginaries and ideal citizenships in an era plagued by individualist greed, corporate calculation, and the loss of solidarity. This is a cultural agenda that communicates with the political and the economic ones./p pThe conflict among such pluralist motivations does not automatically harmonise with the original aim, which is the preservation of a public institution. It certainly highlights the importance of what global austerity measures might eliminate – namely, the presence of an organised Greek polity and a nation addressing its own needs to the world. Each of the aforementioned ‘agendas’ has a vital contribution to make to the preservation of public broadcasting services as part of a broader welfare programme encompassing what social theorists term ‘communicative entitlements’. This refers not only to institutional provision of relevant services (e.g. the ERT) but also public access to them that grants common citizenry with a voice. The fact that a group of ‘rogue journalists’ from the ERT and other services a href=http://www.akous.gr/post.asp?uid=16997‘went online’/anbsp;after the channel’s official closure also attests to the need to open up communicative rights to citizens in cost-effective ways that circumnavigate the excuse of unreasonable public expenditure. Service provision alone does not entail public control or an enlargement of the already damaged public sphere. We ought always to remember that./pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/eleftheria-lekakis/closure-of-ert-public-service-broadcasting-and-austerity-politics-in-greeceThe closure of ERT: public service broadcasting and austerity politics in Greece/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/dawn-foster/from-heart-attacks-to-maternal-care-human-cost-of-austerity-in-greeceFrom heart attacks to maternal care: the human cost of austerity in Greece/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Greece /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThe scale of change in China, and the intriguing perceptions of China's elite, persuade Kerry Brown of the need to think afresh./p /div /div /div pIn the course of over twenty years of engagement with China, most of those positions on the country I once held with great certainty have been eroded, or absolutely evaporated.nbsp; When I lived in the Inner Mongolia region of China in 1994-96, I remember spending most days resisting any sense I was somewhere radically different from where I came from, and trying to pin down similarities. People who talked of guangxi (connections) in Chinese society, of going through the back door to gain favours, or of losing face - all of this was comparable to phenomena in my homeland. /ppBeyond superficial contrasts, I thought, there wasn’t such a massive chasm. I got to know well people who were as transfixed by the great tasks of life - getting on, falling in love, dealing with disappointment and setbacks, and achieving sporadic success and happinessnbsp; - as anywhere else I’d ever been. And when anyone started talking about the subtlety of Chinese communication, and the ways in which saying one thing often mean the precise opposite, I could fall back on the experience of being born and brought up in an England where this sort of practice is almost a national pastime./ppOn a more elevated level, I was strongly alert - having supped for many years at the healthy offerings of scholars like the late a href=http://www.economist.com/node/2099643Edward Said/a, with his study of a href=http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141187426,00.htmlemOrientalism/em/a - to anything that posited China, or for that matter any Asian culture, as somehow encapsulating difference, or of beingnbsp; some sort of construct embodying the other. Nowadays, things are way more complicated. In a speech in Shanghai in 2008, when asked how I had become interested in China, I boldly quoted the great historian a href=http://www.nri.org.uk/joseph.htmlJoseph Needham’s/a statement that it was the final place where one would truly encounter a culture of profound and radical difference. A member of the audience chided me, deploying the a href=http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/clinton.htmdeadly/a term orientalist. I took the rebuke, and grew warier still. /ppOf course, when I am in China I still see, and seek for, commonalities in human behaviour. a href=http://www.chinafile.com/contributor/Simon%20LeysSimon Leys's/a elegant line - we cannot learn any foreign values if we do not accept the risk of being transformed by what we learn - is true as far as it goes, but it raises a question. Why call it a risk? This should be a joy, a happy thing, shouldn’t it? And the joy of engagement with China is increasingly those very moments when expectations are tipped over, and when the idea held to so dearly - and the notion that sameness and easy common ground were everything - is suddenly made complicated and harder to stand by./ppstrongDealing with dissonance/strong/ppTwo recent examples of this experience illustrate the change. The first is an encounter with public attitudes to official malfeasance in China and Britain. In the latter, four politicians were a href=http://gulfnews.com/news/world/uk-house-of-lords-peers-caught-out-in-cash-for-access-scandal-1.1191862accused/a in May-June 2013 of using their role for private gain. They have contested the charges, but the uniform media and public anger suggests there is a complete consensus on the issue: officials just shouldn’t behave like this. In China, the new a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/china-party-states-testleadership/a under Xi Jinping has widely denounced the evils of a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/china-politics-of-corruptioncorruption/a, far more explicitly and forcefully than recent western leaders. Yet, at almost the same time, Chinese people are broadly aware that those around the top political figures - their family members and networks - have accrued huge amounts of wealth. The stories of a href=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-20216501Wen Jiabao/a, the former prime minister, publicised in the a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=allamp;_r=0emNew York Times/em/a in 2012, and those about a href=http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/04/world/asia/xi-jinping-profileXi Jinping’s/a family in a href=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-29/xi-jinping-millionaire-relations-reveal-fortunes-of-elite.htmlBloomberg/a, are two powerful examples. Rumours swirl around almost every other major figure. /ppThere is an odd dissonance here. If leaders in China hate corruption so much, surely they need to begin by stopping the people closest to them from being involved in it? And if they can’t or won't, then surely their loud condemnations of it will be counterproductive - creating cynicism in the public, and accusation that leaders are impotent about affairs in their own backyard? So when leaders use such stern language, are they saying something else? What is really going on, and have we so far misunderstood it? /ppThe second example is Chinese views of their country's role in the world. a href=http://www.brookings.edu/about/centers/china/top-future-leaders/liu_yunshanLiu Yunshan/a was head of propaganda in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politburo before his surprise promotion in 2012. His essays over several years in the party's theoretical magazine, a href=http://www.sinoperi.com/qiushi/About.aspxemQiu Shi/em/a (emSeeking Truth/em), offer insights into a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/chinas-elite-language-deficitelite/a views of Chinese cultural influence and soft power. Liu's argument is simple: the economic prowess that China enjoys these days must translate into influence - and not only must but should. This is a moral right; China has become rich, and therefore powerful, and thus deserves as a matter of justice to be regarded with more respect. This is what makes the series of negative news stories about China after 2009, including claims it is assertive and bullying, very hard to take. Because China is wealthy and strong now, it should be admired, with an extra layer of justification being a href=http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/5541/106/provided/a by the government's promotion of the country’s culture and traditions. End of argument./ppLiu’s tone in his writings and speeches capture well the Chinese elite's sense of exceptionalism, and the way that bewilderment at being misperceived can be shared across cultures. How on earth, he seems to be saying, can people in Europe, America and elsewhere not see that we deserve, we merit, we must have their admiration. Call it hubris or arrogance - but should observers, including myself as someone engaged daily with China and the attempt to understand it, dismiss his view with impatience? How do I engage with this clear exposition of a worldview by someone who is a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/china%E2%80%99s-great-transition-next-partynow/a politically very important? And can I really do anything that would persuade Liu - and perhaps many like him working in the central a href=http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415616737/propaganda/a structures - to change their outlook? Would, for example, being convinced that they have no right to think this have any effect? /ppstrongBeyond sameness/strong/ppWe don't need an era of nostalgic orientalism, for sure. But we probably do need a more sophisticated vocabulary and framework to deal with understanding differences. China is a place of immense diversity, and to get a more profound idea of the sectors, strands and factions bound around common interests there is an important task (see a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/china-what-we-think-we-know-is-wrongChina: what we think we know is wrong/a, 15 May 2013)./ppThe country I went to almost a quarter of a century ago, when it was introspective, constrained and still a little closed in on itself, is now opening out in ways I never expected to see. Maybe we need to track down these moments of intellectual collision, when it becomes clear that alongside much common ground and shared understanding, there are also genuine differences - which, however, we are able comfortably to explore. Trying to think a bit harder and deeper about the Chinese discourses of corruption and the national image is an interesting place to start.nbsp; /pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd div pa href=http://sydney.edu.au/china_studies_centre/spanspanChina Studies Centre, /span/span/aUniversity of Sydney/ppFei Xiaolong, a href=http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520077966emXiangtu Zhongguo/em (emFrom the Soil: Foundations of Chinese Society/em/aem) /em(University of California Press, 1992)/p pa href=http://www.euecran.eu/spanspanEurope China Research and Advice Network/span/span/a/p pKerry Brown, a href=http://www.anthempress.com/friends-and-enemiesspanspanemFriends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China/em /span/span/a(Anthem Press, 2009)/p pKerry Brown, a href=http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814350037_fmatteremspanspanHu Jintao: China's Silent Ruler/span/span/em/a (World Scientific, 2012)/p pKerry Brown, a href=http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4407 target=_blankemspanspanBallot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State/span/span/em/a (Zed Books, 2011)nbsp;/p pSang Ye, ema href=http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10432.php target=_blankspanspanChina Candid: The People on the People's Republic/span/span/a/em (University of California Press, 2006)/p pDavid Goodman amp; Brynanbsp;Goodman, ema href=http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415687997/ target=_blankspanspanTwentieth Century Colonialism and China/span/span/aa title=archive de Twentieth Century Colonialism and China rel=nofollow href=http://archive.wikiwix.com/opendemocracy/?url=http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415687997/amp;title=Twentieth%20Century%20Colonialism%20and%20China target=_blankspanspan↑/span/span/a /em(Routledge, 2012)/p pa href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/kerry-brown/chinadigitaltimes.net/ target=_blankspanspanChina Digital Times/span/span/a/p pa href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/kerry-brown/thechinabeat.blogspot.com/ target=_blankspanspanThe China Beat/span/span/a/p pa href=http://www.eastasiaforum.org/ target=_blankspanspanEast Asia Forum/span/span/a/p pa href=http://www.chinadialogue.net/ target=_blankspanspanchinadialogue/span/span/a/p pa href=http://www.hoover.org/publications/clm/about target=_blankspanspanChina Leadership Monitor/span/span/a/p diva href=http://cmp.hku.hk/ target=_blankspanspanChina Media Project/span/span/anbsp;nbsp;/div pRichard McGregor, a href=http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Party-Richard-Mcgregor/?isbn=9780061998089 target=_blankemspanspanThe Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers/span/span/em/a (Harper Collins, 2010)/p pDavid Shambaugh, a href=http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11044.php target=_blankemspanspanChina's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation/span/span/em/a (University of California Press, 2008)/p/div /div /div /div div class=field field-sidebox div class=field-label Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pKerry Brown is professor of Chinese politics and director of the a href=http://sydney.edu.au/china_studies_centre/China Studies Centre /aat the University of Sydney. He leads the a href=http://www.euecran.eu/Europe China Research and Advice Network/a, and was formerly an associate fellow on the a href=http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/research/asia/Asia programme/a, Chatham House. He is the author of a href=http://www.brill.nl/purge-inner-mongolian-people-s-party-chinese-cultural-revolution-1967-69emThe Purge of the Inner Mongolian People's Party in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1967-69: A Function of Language, Power and Violence/em/a (Brill, 2004); a href=http://www.anthempress.com/index.php/subject-areas/books-0/politics-current-affairs/struggling-giant.html target=_blankemStruggling Giant: China in the 21st Century/em /a(Anthem Press, 2007); a href=http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=1788amp;ChandosTitle=1emThe Rise of the Dragon: Inward and Outward Investment in China in the Reform Period 1978-2007/em /a(Woodhead, 2008); a href=http://www.anthempress.com/index.php/friends-and-enemies-1.htmlemFriends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China/em /a(Anthem Press, 2009); a href=http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4407emBallot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State/em/a (Zed Books, 2011); and a href=http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814350037_fmatteremHu Jintao: China's Silent Ruler/em/a (World Scientific, 2012). His website is a href=http://www.kerry-brown.co.uk/ target=_blankhere/a/p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/china-what-we-think-we-know-is-wrongChina: what we think we know is wrong/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/china-politics-of-corruptionChina, the politics of corruption /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/china-party-states-testChina, the party-state#039;s test/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/bo-xilais-fall-echo-and-portentBo Xilai#039;s fall: echo and portent/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/china-and-japan-conflict-of-logicsChina and Japan: a conflict of logics/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/chongqing-and-bo-xilai-how-china-worksChongqing and Bo Xilai: how China works/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/gan-lulu-and-china-human-touchGan Lulu and China: the human touch/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown-david-goodman/chinas-party-bo-xilais-legacyChina#039;s party, Bo Xilai#039;s legacy/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown-cassidy-hazelbaker/china-and-syria-question-of-responsibilityChina and Syria: a question of responsibility/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/chinas-elite-language-deficitChina#039;s elite: a language deficit/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/three-laws-of-chinese-politicsThe three laws of Chinese politics /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/china%E2%80%99s-great-transition-next-partyChina’s great transition: the next party/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/inner-mongolia-china%E2%80%99s-turbulent-secretInner Mongolia: China’s turbulent secret/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown/chinese-democracy-neglected-storyChinese democracy: the neglected story/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/kerry-brown/china-and-liu-xiaobo-weakness-of-strengthChina and Liu Xiaobo: the weakness of strength/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/kerry-brown-loh-si-hsing/china%E2%80%99s-next-elite-2012-and-beyondChina’s next elite: 2012 and beyond /a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd China /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div div class=field-item even International politics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pGeorge Orwell’s “1984” is alive and well in Spain as the Minister for Justice talks- up plans to deny women the right to an abortion, says Liz Cooper /p /div /div /div pSpain has recently achieved some notoriety as the European country with over 1000 political figures awaiting processing and trial on charges of corruption, according to the a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/world/europe/in-lean-years-after-boom-spains-graft-laid-bare.html?pagewanted=allamp;_r=0New York Times/a, with even members of the Royal Family said to be involved. A more unusual and unexpected scenario is the recent discovery that the Princess Leticia, wife of the heir to the Spanish throne, may be guilty of committing a a href=http://www.casareal.es/ES/Actividades/Paginas/actividades_actividades_detalle.aspx?data=11425“thought-crime/a”.nbsp; On opening an International Conference to debate Language and Journalism, earlier this yearnbsp; the Princess commented on language currently in use to discuss the financial and political crisis in her country and suggested it should be seen as a form of “Newspeak” (“ Neolengua”). She pointed out that “the crisis has its own language and its use may be intentional, because it is not the same to say emassistance/em rather than emrescue/em, emnegative growth/em instead of emrecession,/em or emrestructuring/em in place of emcuts/em” (English translation). She hoped the Conference would create clear guidelines vis-à-vis the language of the crisis “that would be acceptable to the public whether journalists or not”. Leticia Ortiz was a journalist before giving up her profession to join the royal family. She seems to have read George Orwell’s “1984” and understood its concepts of “Doublethink”, for example “War is Peace”; “Newspeak”, a vocabulary under government control; “Thought-crime”, the act of holding unspoken beliefs or doubts that oppose or question the ruling party. /p pThe Spanish “Thought Police”, better known as the extreme right-wing media, have so far shown little interest in her remarks which is surprising as her target might easily have been the current Government campaign to change the 2010 abortion law, brought in by the previous Socialist Government.nbsp; In the run up to the 2011 general election the leader of the “Partido Popular” (PP) Mariano Rajoy committed his party to changing the 2010 law, once in government. One of the last pieces of legislation by the socialist Government of Zapatero was a new a href=http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2010/03/04/pdfs/BOE-A-2010-3514.pdflaw on reproductive rights/a, which states a woman’s right to an abortion on demand up to 14 weeks, and up to 22 weeks if there is serious risk to the life and health of the mother or the foetus, in line with many other European countries. After 22 weeks an abortion can be performed if the foetus is suffering from an extremely serious or incurable condition. nbsp;It was the first time the right of a woman to an abortion on demand was written-in to the law in Spain. The previous law of a href=http://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1985-141381985/a, unchanged until 2010, nbsp;allowed the interruption of a pregnancy up to 12 weeks in the case of rape, up to 22 weeks due to malformation of the foetus, and at any time if it could be shown that to continue would be a danger to the mother’s mental or physical health.nbsp; A woman’s right to choose abortion was excluded. /p pThe Minister of Justice a href=http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/05/16/opinion/1368723975_483486.htmlAlberto Ruiz-Gallardón/a, known to be on the extreme right of the PP, is on the campaign trail and has stated frequently that he intends to change the law, and in particular is a href=http://www.larazon.es/detalle_normal/noticias/1999615/gallardon-asegura-que-la-actual-ley-del-aborto#.Ua3749K8BZgquestioning/a the ethics of aborting a malformed foetus. He has made dozens of statements on television, in interviews and in Parliament, beginning with claims that his politics are based on the protection of the weakest, including the “no nacido”,strong /strong(not born). He claims the new law restricting abortion will be in defence of a woman’s right to give birth. The Minister insists that the law will be based on the right of a woman to be a mother and will ensure that she never has to renounce those rights. He says the new law will increase the protection of reproductive rights, maternity being the most important of these rightsstrong./strong He has confirmed that no longer will women who have abortions be at risk of being sent to prison because the woman is not responsible for the abortion, she is the victim.strong /strongnbsp;The Minister had already announced in March last year that “the freedom to be mothers makes women authentic women”strong. /strongnbsp;During a session in Parliament the Minister said he believed that often women are victims of gender violence for no reason other than that of being pregnant.nbsp; In a question-time in Parliament, when answering a member of the opposition, the Minister for Justice said that many women find their rights to be mothers violatedstrong /strongby pressure from certain organizations (un-named) that in the event of an unwanted pregnancy make the woman uniquely responsible for the decisionstrong /strong(to abort).strong /strongnbsp;It is difficult to make sense of his words. nbsp;If this is not doublethink, talking of the right to give birth rather than the right to choose abortion, it can surely only be described as gobbledegook. /p pThe Minister of Justice claims to have a mandate to change the 2010 law, whereas in fact the latest a href=http://elpais.com/tag/metroscopia/a/polls/a by Metroscopia for El País,nbsp; show that 46% of the Spanish would prefer to leave the current law alone, and 41% are in favour of a return to a law of 1985. The most recent demonstration in favour of keeping the 2010 law drew over 1000 people who surrounded the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia protesting against the influence of “reactionary” elements of the Church against the rights of women. The head of Spain’s Catholic Church, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, has called for an “urgent reform” of the 2010 law, which he said had “led to a rise in the number of abortions to terrifying levels”. The a href=http://www.msc.es/profesionales/saludPublica/prevPromocion/embarazo/tablas_figuras.htm#Tabla%202statistics/a from the Ministry of Health do not support his statement. /p pThe campaign itself is unusual not only in its Orwellian use of language. The Government has an absolute majority and can push through any law, making the campaign unnecessary unless the Minister is trying to increase his right-wing profile with an eye to the future, deflect interest in the current corruption charges largely aimed at his party, or impress the Church. The campaign has however shown that the party itself is not whole heartedly behind the plans to prohibit the abortion of a malformed foetus. Rows have developed between the less extreme members of PP and those who favour the moral a href=http://www.opusdeialdia.org/opus_dei/viewtopic.php?f=20amp;t=879stance/a of the Church and Opus Dei. /p pThe content of the new law is unlikely to entirely satisfy the Church, who presumably will continue their campaign against all abortion. It may go some way to making conservative voters happy as underneath all the doublethink the law is set to demolish the right of a woman to an abortion on demand, and is a severe blow to women’s hard-fought rights that are in real danger under this increasingly authoritarian, backward-looking and misogynist Government. /p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/p pnbsp;/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/liz-cooper/abortion-rights-in-spain-back-to-pastAbortion rights in Spain: back to the past/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/ann-rossiter/abortion-in-ireland-small-step-forwardAbortion in Ireland - a small step forward/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/heather-mcrobie/abortion-access-in-us-military-%E2%80%93-time-for-march-actAbortion access in the US military – time for the MARCH Act/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/liz-cooper/spain-redefining-democracySpain: redefining democracy? /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/nana-darkoa-sekyiamah/kermit-gosnell-vs-joshua-drah-abortion-stigma-and-conservatismKermit Gosnell vs. Joshua Drah: abortion, stigma and conservatism /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/liz-cooper/no-more-%E2%80%98machismo%E2%80%99-domestic-violence-in-political-arenaNo more ‘machismo’: domestic violence in the political arena /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/serta%C3%A7-sehliko%C4%9Flu/vaginal-obsessions-in-turkey-islamic-perspectiveVaginal obsessions in Turkey: an Islamic perspective /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/ali-gokpinar/erdogan-vs-women-abortion-debateErdogan vs women: the abortion debate/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/ourkingdom/ourkingdom/open-letter-of-support-for-doctors-who-provide-abortion-servicesOpen letter of support for doctors who provide abortion services/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/article/the_right_to_abortion_briefing_from_brazilThe right to abortion: briefing from Brazil /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/liz-cooper/politics-of-sexual-harassment-in-spainThe politics of sexual harassment in Spain/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/maria-de-bruyn/hiv-women-and-abortion-rightsHIV, women and abortion rights/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/liz-cooper/ex-president-zapatero-fate-of-new-political-manEx-President Zapatero : the fate of the new political man/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Spain /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pUsing cutting-edge human rights perception polls, the authors explore links between social class and domestic human rights movements in Mexico, Colombia, Morocco, and India. Social elites, they find, are better connected to human rights representatives than the masses. emTranslations:/ememnbsp;a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/james-ron-david-crow-shannon-golden/la-lucha-por-un-movimiento-de-derechos-humanos-Español/a,nbsp;/emema href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/james-ron-david-crow-shannon-golden/la-lutte-pour-un-v%C3%A9ritable-mouvement-populaire-Français/a./emspan style=font-size: small; color: #444444; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;nbsp;/span/p /div /div /div pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/PastedGraphic-1_2.png alt= width=460 /br /emsmallPilot testing the survey in Morocco, September 2012/ Dr. David Crow. All rights reserved./small/em/ppSome say human rights are an a href=http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1525598ideology imposed on the rest by the powerful west/a. Consequently, critics say, human rights ideas don’t resonate as broadly as they should./p pOur a href=http://www.jamesron.com/Human-Rights-Perceptions-Polls.phpHuman Rights Perception Polls/a, however, show that differences emwithin /emcountries, rather than between world regions, pose an equal, or perhaps even greater, challenge. Human rights, we find, are more “toproots” than grassroots, although there are signs of progress./p pWe studied Mexico, Colombia, Morocco, and India, choosing these countries for their multiple religions and world regions, and because they were best-case scenarios for human rights diffusion./p pThe data, however, show that among our survey populations, human rights language, people and activities are better established among elites than among society’s lower echelons./p pUnfortunately, this means that those who stand to benefit most from human rights norms—the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed—have less access to the human rights tools they need./p pTo break through this glass floor, domestic human rights workers will have to redouble their efforts and find new ways of becoming locally relevant./ph2Our evidence/h2 pTo gather this unique information, we polled publics in four countries (in Mexico and Colombia as part of the ema href=http://www.mexicoyelmundo.cide.edu/Mexico, the Americas, and the World/a /emsurvey project, coordinated by top Mexican research institute, a href=http://www.cide.edu/CIDE/a), and will soon extend the research to Brazil./p pSurveys of this sort are rare. Pollsters regularly survey populations on everything from their political views to their toothpaste preferences, and have even begun asking about peoples’ post-war transitional justice preferences. However, they have yet to ask ordinary people about their experience with their own country’s human rights movements./p pIn Mexico, we surveyed the entire public as well as the country’s “a href=http://www.amazon.com/Power-Elite-C-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544power elite/a”: business executives, elected officials, high-ranking bureaucrats, journalists and academics./p pMexico is a best-case scenario for human rights diffusion because its population is wealthier, better educated, and more exposed to global ideas than many. It is also in Latin America, a href=http://books.google.com/books/about/Mobilizing_Human_Rights_in_Latin_America.html?id=xhwBlS5jzggCground zero/a for the global human rights movement, and is wracked by a brutal a href=http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/latin-america-caribbean/mexico/048-pena-nietos-challenge-criminal-cartels-and-rule-of-law-in-mexico.aspxdrug war/a causing extensive human rights damage./p pOur Colombian research also sampled the country’s adult population, many of which are no stranger to human rights talk as a result of their Latin American identity, and their country’s decades-old experience of violence./p pThe Moroccan study sampled the entire adult population of Rabat and Casablanca, the country’s political and financial capitals, as well as rural residents living up to 70 kilometers from either city./p pMorocco’s people are poorer and less educated than Mexico’s or Colombia’s, but its human rights activists are impressively energetic. The Arab Spring, moreover, has boosted local interest in human rights issues, making Morocco another best-case scenario for diffusion./p pIn India, we sampled residents of Mumbai, the country’s business capital, as well as people living in the rural areas of Maharashtra state. India’s population is less educated than either Latin American case, but the country is vigorously democratic, with a deeply committed human rights sector grounded in many decades of rights-based protest./p pSo what did we find?/p h2strongHuman rights exposure/strongspan style=font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.5;nbsp;/span/h2 pAs Figure 1 demonstrates, Mexican elites are far more likely than the general public to encounter the term “human rights,” (emderechos humanos/em in Spanish) in their daily lives. A whopping 90% of Mexican elites reported hearing the term daily or frequently, compared to only close to 40% of the general public./p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 1.jpg alt= width=460 //p pYet even 40% is a big number. With Mexico’s estimated adult population of a href=http://gaia.inegi.org.mx/scince2/viewer.html71.7 million/a, some 28.7 million Mexicans regularly encounter the term emderechos humanos /emin their daily lives. Not bad! The words, human rights, are drenching Mexico’s top-roots, but the grassroots are still getting some moisture./p pNext, consider Colombia. As Figure 2 notes, 49% of Colombian adults also routinely hear emderechos humanos, /emsuggesting that both countries are part of a broader Latin American pattern, due to the region’s long history of human rights activism./p pOur Moroccan survey revealed even higher numbers. In and around Rabat and Casablanca, the country’s top two cities, 54% of adults reported hearing the French, emdroits de l’homme/em, or the Arabic, emhukuk al insaan /em(حقوق الإنسان). A clear victory for the country’s human rights sector, which fought hard to place its concerns on the public agenda./p pOur Indian survey found much less exposure, however. Only 20% of the population in and around Mumbai, the country’s financial center, reported hearing the Hindi term, emmānava adhikāra/em (nbsp;मानव अधिकार ), or the Marathi term, emmānavī adhikāra/em (मानवी अधिकार ), on a regular basis./p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 2_0.jpg alt= //pstrongContact/strong pspan style=line-height: 1.5;Simple exposure to “human rights” is only one indicator of popular engagement, however, and an arguably better measure is /spanemcontact /emspan style=line-height: 1.5;with members of local human rights organizations./spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;nbsp;/span/p pHere, the divide between Mexican elites and the public is even greater. As Figure 3 notes, a stunning 86% of Mexican elites report having met someone working for a human rights organization, but almost 90% of the general public report the opposite./p pThis disparity provides powerful evidence of Mexican human rights workers’ tendency to cluster in the upper realms of socioeconomic space. These advocates may be dissident renegades from their social class—a human rights “vanguard”—but they still populate social spheres inhabited by the powerful./p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 3_0.jpg alt= width=460 //p pYet here, too, the glass is half full, since 11% of Mexico’s general population emhas /emmet a human rights worker at least once in their life. In absolute terms, this is no small figure, translating into some eight million ordinary Mexicans. In one sense, that’s a remarkable achievement./p pOn this count, Colombia’s track record is far better than Mexico’s, since 18% of that country’s adult population report contact (see Figure 4). At 7%, Rabat and Casablanca again came third, while Mumbai was the real laggard, with only 1% of polled residents having met a human rights worker. All human rights sectors have their work cut out for them, but Mumbai’s, Rabat’s, and Casablanca’s needs are particularly acute./p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 4_0.jpg alt= width=460 //p h2strongParticipation/strong/h2 pspan style=line-height: 1.5;Participation in human rights activities is another key indicator of popular engagement, and once again, our data provide evidence of human rights clustering at the upper levels./spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;nbsp;/span/p pIn Mexico, as shown in Figure 5, over 31% of elites report participating in some kind of organized human rights activity, but the same is true for only 4% of Mexico’s general public. As Figure 6 demonstrates, Colombia and Mumbai’s record resembles Mexico’s, while Rabat and Casablanca’s lags. The reasons for these discrepancies are not immediately clear./p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 5.jpg alt= //p pspan style=line-height: 1.5;Importantly, exposure to, contact with, and participation in the human rights movement are not tightly correlated. Each of these areas of human rights work has its own challenges and opportunities, and national human rights communities that perform well on one measure do not necessarily do well on others./spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;nbsp;/span/p pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure 6.jpg alt= width=460 //p h2strongStatistical analysis/strongspan style=font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.5;nbsp;/span/h2 pWe couldn’t reproduce our Mexican elite sample elsewhere, as it drew on a a href=http://mexicoyelmundo.cide.edudecade of prior research/a. Statistical analysis, however, suggests that in all four countries, human rights organizations are better at recruiting elites than at mobilizing the popular classes./p pIn all samples, for example, people with more education hear the words “human rights” more frequently, and in Mexico, Colombia, and Morocco’s Rabat and Casablanca, the better educated are also more likely to have had contact with human rights workers. In Mumbai and the rural areas of Maharashtra state, the better educated are also more likely to participate in human rights activities. Similarly, the wealthier (measured both by income and by the number of light bulbs and rooms in a house) are likelier to hear about human rights in Colombia, Mumbai, and in Rabat/Casablanca; know a human rights worker in Colombia and Rabat/Casablanca; and participate in human rights activities in Rabat/Casablanca./p pThose with greater exposure to diverse social influences are similarly more exposed to human rights. Urban dwellers are far likelier to hear about human rights in Mexico and Mumbai, and Colombian and Mumbai Internet users are more exposed to human rights, and have more contact with human rights workers. In Rabat and Casablanca, they are likelier to participate in human rights activities./p pThe politically active—voters—also have higher rates of exposure to human rights in Colombia, Mumbai, and our Rabat/Casablanca sample, and higher rates of contact in Colombia. Voting in all countries is also concentrated among the economically and educationally better off./p pConversely, marginalized groups, including linguistic and religious minorities, are emless /emlikely to be in the human rights loop. Indigenous groups in Colombia and Mexico (as well as other ethnic minorities in Mexico), and Muslims in Mumbai, hear about human rights less frequently. Mexican indigenous groups, moreover, are less likely to participate in human rights organizations./p pTo be sure, there are some exceptions; in some cases, marginalized groups are gaining more access to human rights./p pIn Mumbai, for example, Buddhists, a religious minority, hear the phrase “human rights” more frequently than the Hindu majority, perhaps due to the mass conversion of emdalits /em(Untouchables) to Buddhism. The Moroccan Amazigh (Berbers) have greater exposure to human rights in Rabat/Casablanca than ethnic Arabs, perhaps due to the Amazigh pride movement./p pAnd the relationship between exposure and income in Mumbai and Colombia is “U-shaped.” The very wealthy have greater exposure to human rights than the middle class, but so do the very poorest./p pOur research also finds evidence that some elites emreject/em human rights norms, even though they may be familiar with them. Colombia’s better educated, for example, along with voters and urban dwellers in Mexico, participate in human rights activities emless /emthan the less well educated, voting abstainers, and rural denizens, even thought they are more exposed to human rights terminology, and have more contact with human rights workers. Exposure and contact, in other words, do not necessarily imply acceptance./p h2strongConclusions/strong/h2 pOur research offers support for the notion that human rights are—for now—an elite-focused activity. In theory, the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed are the human rights movement’s main constituency. In practice, however, these are not the groups with whom domestic human rights workers are making the biggest inroads./p pElite familiarity and contact with human rights, moreover, does not guarantee good deeds or intentions. Elites are often the source of human rights problems, and we have no strong evidence that human rights exposure is revolutionizing their public policy preferences. In fact, our evidence suggests elites may be paying human rights lip service while continuing their business as usual./p pOur findings should not be cause for despair, however. First, there are promising signs of more broad based diffusion; in some places, on some indicators, domestic human rights groups are doing a better job of making contact and spreading their ideas./p pMore importantly, our surveys offer only a single snapshot in time. Human rights mobilization, by contrast, is a long-term process. Over time, domestic human rights workers may exceed their upper strata limits, and make stronger inroads into their countries’ popular classes./p pTo do this, however, human rights organizations will probably have to develop new and better mobilization strategies./p p align=centera href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrightsimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/EPlogo-ogr.png alt= width=300 //a/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pa href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrightsimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/openGlobalRights2.jpg alt= width=140 //a/p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/openglobalrights/james-ron-david-crow-shannon-golden/la-lucha-por-un-movimiento-de-derechos-humanos-La lucha por un movimiento de derechos humanos verdaderamente de sus raíces /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/openglobalrights/james-ron-david-crow-shannon-golden/la-lutte-pour-un-v%C3%A9ritable-mouvement-populaire-La lutte pour un véritable mouvement populaire des droits de l#039;homme/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Democracy and government /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pWhat does the data actually tell us about anti-Islamic violence post-Woolwich, and how do Briton's views of Islam and Muslims compare with the rest of Europe?/p /div /div /div pAccording to one of the ‘Woolwich Angels’, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, the Woolwich murderers reported their aim was ‘to start a war in London tonight’. /p pThey failed. London remained calm on the eve of Drummer Lee Rigby’s murder, despite the best efforts of balaclava-wearing EDL members swarming on Woolwich town centre. But in the weeks since we have seen a range of suspected ‘revenge’ attacks and a growing concern about rising Islamophobia and a spiral of violence.nbsp; /p pStoking intercommunity ‘war’ or tension will increasingly become one of the strategic aims of self-starting Islamist extremists.nbsp; Incapable of organising attacks that will paralyse Britain’s transport network or economy, lone wolfs and small gangs will now turn to fostering a UK that is divided against itself./p pSince the Woolwich murder, 11 mosques have been attacked. These have ranged from bricks thrown through windows and petrol bombs to a man entering a mosque with a knife and verbally abusing and harassing those present. Most recently, a school in southeast London and an Islamic Centre in North London were set on fire, with EDL graffiti found at the scene. While no arrests have been made in connection with the latter, four teenagers have been arrested in Bromley in connection with the school fire. Twitter and social media have been full of vitriolic, racist, ignorant and violent comments directed at Muslims.nbsp; /p pMuslim communities are on edge. Media coverage adds to the fear that they and their children could be targeted next.nbsp; The police and the Government fear that a stream of attacks and counterattacks could tip into full-scale riots, reminiscent of the summer disturbances in the northwest in the early 2000s, or even riots on the scale of those across Britain in August 2011. It only takes one spark to light a powder keg.nbsp; /p pWhether that spark catches light depends on the underlying conditions – in this case, community relations. What is the current state of Islamophobia in the UK, and how was it affected by the Woolwich murder? And what is the public attitude towards EDL marches, and media stories like the recent grooming scandals? /p pAnswers to these questions are not clear-cut. Some – including the current Faith Minister Baroness Warsi – argue that prejudice against Muslims is commonplace and widespread in Britain. Others, such as emThe Daily Telegraph/em’s Andrew Gilligan, think that a href=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10093568/The-truth-about-the-wave-of-attacks-on-Muslims-after-Woolwich-murder.htmlclaims of Islamophobia are often exaggerated/a.nbsp; Hard data does not necessarily settle the issue. Police only began collecting religious hate crime data relatively recently, making it difficult to consider long-term trends. /p pTell Mama, an organisation that tracks anti-Muslim discrimination, reported 212 incidents in the week following the Woolwich attack. Although it’s important to note that a large number of incidents go unreported, this is still relatively low given the size of the Muslim population in Britain as a whole stands at 2.7 million. Plus it was later reported that 120 of these incidents were online and some had not originated in Britain. /p pThe police data that is available suggests that serious incidents are relatively rare, but there are spikes following high profile attacks like 7/7 and Woolwich. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers, there were 71 anti-Muslim reported crimes in the week following Lee Rigby’s death. Their online reporting tool, True Vision, tallied 136 incidents compared to 27 in the week previous to the murder, and 37 in the second week after the attack. Compared to 7/7, these numbers are slightly higher – but the rate of the spike is about the same.nbsp; /p pIn the three weeks following the 7/7 attacks, a href=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4740015.stmthe BBC reported/a that there was a six-fold increase of attacks compared to the previous year, with 269 incidents in London compared to 40 for the comparable period in 2004. However, the increased use of social media websites – Twitter in particular – and the inclusion of online offences by the police and organisations like Tell Mama has inflated the numbers.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; /p pIn both instances, the spike of attacks was momentary and not sustained. Indeed, a href=http://www.report-it.org.uk/hate_crime_data1looking at religiously motivated hate crimes/a (which do not include anti-Semitism) over a three-year period we see substantial declines year on year since 2009, from 2,083 to 2,007 in 2010 and down to 1,773 in 2011.nbsp; /p pPopulation surveys, on the other hand, suggest a more troubling picture of mutually suspicious communities. A a href=http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/fbvrufy6ra/Dr-Matthew-Goodwin-University-of-Nottingham-YouGov-Survey-Results-Extremism-In-Britain-130526.pdfYouGov survey/a in November 2012 found that 59 per cent of respondents agreed that there would be a clash of civilizations between British Muslims and white Britons. A survey conducted by YouGov and Dr Matthew Goodwin after the Woolwich attack found that a substantial percentage of 41per cent of respondents agreed that British Muslims pose a threat to society. 43 per cent also agreed that differences in culture and values between British Muslims and white Britons make further conflicts inevitable. /p pThe British public still remains concerned about the ability of Muslims to integrate into British society. 71 per cent of respondents a href=http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/06/04/beyond-woolwich-british-attitudes-integration/to a YouGov poll/a thought that migrants from Muslim countries were not integrating well, compared to 54 per cent of migrants from Eastern Europe and 46 per cent from African countries. Views were more favourable when considering the children of migrants. But a majority (53 per cent) still felt that children of Muslim migrants were not integrating well. /p pThere is also a general perception among half of Britons that Muslims face discrimination. One YouGov poll found that 50 per cent of British respondents felt that Muslims faced discrimination (ranking only lower than transsexuals, immigrants and traveller communities).nbsp; /p pOther sources, however, tell a more stable and positive story. The European Values Study runs every 8 years and includes a question that assesses attitudes towards minority groups by asking respondents who they would prefer to have as neighbours. Britain was among the top three most tolerant EU countries – and showed remarkable stability between 2000 and 2008, where the percentage that said they did not want Muslims as neighbours actually decreased, despite the 7/7 attacks.nbsp; /p pAnd yet the attacks and plots of Islamist extremists, combined with Government policy and media coverage over the past decade, have taken their toll.nbsp; Across all EU Member States, the average percentage of those who said they did not want Muslims as neighbours increased, from 17.95 per cent saying no to Muslims as neighbours in 2000, to 22.07 per cent in 2008.nbsp; While this represented the biggest increase compared to all other minority groups, Europeans were still twice as likely to say they didn’t want to live next to Roma (39 per cent) and more likely to say that they didn’t want to live next to homosexuals (27 per cent). /p pThe next few months are critical. Recent history teaches that the summer months can often be the most volatile: both instances of rioting and social unrest in the past 15 years occurred in the summer. While the statistics suggest that the spike of attacks following Woolwich were just a momentary blip, population survey data shows that communities remain divided and suspicious – particularly in some parts of the country.nbsp; /p pIf the aim of Islamist extremists – and far right extremists, is to sow discord and strife between communities, then our response to an attack has to be as much about coordinating community relations as emergency response teams. Communities, government and the police need to work together to defuse community tensions./pp There have been some remarkable examples, such as the a href=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-22689552mosque in York serving tea and biscuits/a to EDL demonstrators. Those are precisely the kinds of stories that Britain needs to be hear about. Resilience in the face of terrorism may become less about bollards and more about biscuits.nbsp;/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/paul-rogers/woolwich-and-afghanistan-connectionWoolwich and Afghanistan: the connection/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/ourkingdom/clare-sambrook/woolwich-lord-reid-security-industrys-salesmanWoolwich: Lord Reid, the security industry#039;s salesman/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd UK /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThe death of Savita Halappanavar lifted the lid on the church, the state, and women's reproductive rights in the Republic of Ireland, and has been the catalyst for the new legislation on the rights of pregnant women proposed last week./p /div /div /div pAfter a torturous debate in Dail Eireann (the Irish parliament), beginning in November 2012, the a href=https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=static.rasset.ie%2Fdocuments%2Fnews%2Fprotection-life-pregnancy.pdf+++amp;ie=utf-8amp;oe=utf-8amp;aq=tamp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:officialamp;client=firefox-aDraft Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill /anbsp;was published at midnight on 12 June 2013. The Bill now has to make its way through the parliamentary process and is expected to be passed before the summer recess. Following decades of government inaction and the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A,_B_and_C_v_Irelandcensure/a of the European Court of Human Rights, it looks as if the coalition government of Fine Gael and the Labour Party, together with support from Sinn Fein, will have sufficient voting strength to get the Bill through.nbsp; /p pThe Bill restates the general prohibition on abortion in the Republic of Ireland under the a href=http://www.legislation.gov.ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/contents1861 Act/a imposed under British rule. However, for the first time in the history of the state since it was founded in 1921, an assessment process is set out now to establish the circumstances in which there is a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of a woman where the only treatment that will avert that risk is the termination of pregnancy. The assessment process will require that an obstetrician/gynaecologist and a second relevant specialist must jointly agree and certify that the termination of pregnancy is the only measure which will save the woman’s life. In the case of the risk of loss of life from suicide, the assessment process will involve three specialists; one obstetrician/gynaecologist and two psychiatrists must jointly and unanimously agree and certify that the termination of pregnancy is the only measure that will save the woman’s life.nbsp; Whilst the Bill is welcomed by many pro-choice people as small step in the right direction, the multiple examinations women will be required to go through means that most will opt to take the abortion trail to England, as has been the case since the enactment of the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_Act_1967British 1967 Abortion Act./a /p pThe new Bill does not allow for termination in cases of rape or fatal foetal abnormalities, despite considerable public support for their inclusion in the legislation. It does, however, state that it will be an offence to intentionally destroy unborn human life, with guilty parties liable to a fine or imprisonment for fourteen years. However draconian this sounds, it is an improvement on the penalty of life imprisonment with hard labour meted out under the 1861 Act.nbsp; /p pThe catalyst for the new legislation can be traced to the case of a 17-week pregnant woman with severe back pain admitted to a hospital in the west of Ireland. After examination, she was told that her cervix was fully dilated and her amniotic fluid leaking. Given its immaturity, it was made clear that her foetus would not survive. She was told that once she miscarried her ordeal will be over and she could return home. But it wasn't over. A spontaneous abortion failed to occur in the four or five hours predicted by the consultant gynaecologist. In spite of her repeated requests for an abortion, the woman was informed that since this is a Catholic country no intervention was legally possible while the foetal heartbeat was present. Three days later the foetal heartbeat stopped. Seven days after admission to hospital on 29 October 2012 the woman died of septicaemia. She was just one of an indeterminate number left to die in Irish hospitals when an abortion could have saved their lives. /p pAs the world knows by now, the woman in question was a href=http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/report-identifies-multiple-failures-in-treatment-of-savita-halappanavar-1.1427332Savita Halappanavar/a from the state of Karnataka in south-west India. She was a practising dentist living in Galway city with her husband, Parveen. This was to be their first child. As soon as the case became public knowledge people poured onto the streets to join vigils, rallies and demonstrations. In Galway, Savita's adopted home, those taking part in candlelit vigils carried her portrait bearing the captions: Never again, and, poignantly, She had a heartbeat too. For once, the strident voices of the anti-choice multitude were silent. But not for long. As soon as the Taoiseach (prime minister) announced the government's decision to propose legislation allowing abortion when a woman's life is in danger, the proverbial Pandora's Box was flung open, raising the spectre of other women with a crisis pregnancy being subjected to a repetition of Savita's ordeal. /p pPoliticians, men of the cloth, lawyers and journalists, have pitched headlong into a war of words over how to define abortion in the business of issuing guidelines for medical intervention, as well as life and health in the context of a pregnant woman contemplating or threatening suicide when, say, she is pregnant as a result of rape. Plastic foetuses, religious medals and blood soaked letters containing accusations of mass murder have been directed at the Taoiseach and his colleagues from anti-choice elements. Their fear is that any legal concession would, in the long run, end up introducing a UK-style abortion regime through the back door. /p pThe issue of suicide as grounds for a legal abortion stretches back to 1992 when a 14-year old rape victim was permitted to travel to Britain because of her threat to take her life.nbsp; a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General_v._XX/a, as she is known, was prevented by a High Court injunction from leaving Irish jurisdiction to obtain an abortion in Britain, despite displaying strong suicidal tendencies. As with Savita, people poured onto the streets and public disquiet was such that terms like 'civil war' were being invoked, seeing that the population was split right down the middle on the issue.nbsp; Ultimately, the case went to the Supreme Court where the injunction was overturned. The Supreme Court went much further in the final judgement in the X case, ruling that abortion was lawful in the Republic in the event of there being a real and substantial risk, physical or mental, to the life of the mother.nbsp; /p pThe fallout from the abortion ban in the Republic of Ireland (Northern Ireland, although part of the UK, also has a ban in place under the 1861 Act) is that a recorded a href=http://www.womensgrid.org.uk/?p=155underground abortion trail/a between Ireland and Britain has been in existence since the British 1967 Abortion Act came into being. Like “ships in the night” abortion seekers come and go in secret fearful of being found out by family, friends, work colleagues and the wider society. Figures for 2011 a href=en.wikipedia.org/wikiAbortion_in_the_Republic_of_Irelandshow/a that 4,149 abortion seekers from the Irish Republic (with a total population of 4.65 million) and 1,007 from Northern Ireland (with a total population of 1.78 million) travelled to British clinics at a cost of up to £2,000 each.nbsp;Anecdotal evidence suggests that considerable numbers give false British addresses which result in their being included in the abortion statistics for England and Wales. /p pUnder the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, the mainstream Irish community ignores abortion seekers arriving each day in Britain's largest cities. However, help has been on offer from organisations like the Irish a href=http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ireland’s-Hidden-Diaspora-London-Irish-Underground/dp/095617Women's Abortion Support Group/a (IWASG), part of the 'alternative' Irish community in London.nbsp; An entirely non-funded voluntary Irish feminist group, in existence for twenty years between 1980 and 2000, IWASG provided information, accommodation, finance, and above all, a sympathetic ear.nbsp; Currently, this work is being undertaken by the a href=http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/Abortion Support Network/a (ASN) whose reach stretches beyond London. /p pWhy is Ireland such an anomaly? /p pMany people ask how Ireland as a Western European state could have come to this pass. There is no simple answer, but undoubtedly,nbsp;the disastrous condition of the Southern Irish State (the Republic) in the aftermath of the War of Independence from Britain (1919-21), the partitioning of the island (1920) and the Civil War (1922-23), have had a major bearing on the matter.nbsp; In a new state weakened by war and by partition, economic collapse, and massive levels of emigration, it is hardly surprising that a powerful institution like the Catholic Church moved in to fill the breach.nbsp; In no other European state, with the exception of Poland, was such a close relationship established between the Catholic Church and national identity.nbsp;Persecuted for centuries, especially under the Penal Laws established by British colonial rulers in the late seventeenth century, the Church finally regained its place in Irish society.nbsp;It remained a highly powerful, and highly popular institution, its clergy regarded as folk heroes - until now.nbsp; In recent years, the seemingly endless clerical sexual abuse of boys and girls, as well as revelations of maltreatment of unmarried mothers and wayward women incarcerated in punitive institutions, have finally become public knowledge. In a state that has never had an anti-clerical movement, it is difficult to know whether such knowledge will ultimately destroy clerical power and influence. /p pIn the immediate years after independence the Republic was faced with a choice of pathways in relation to social legislation and social welfare.nbsp;In theory, the new Ireland could have committed itself to building upon the existing British social and welfare infrastructure, much of it provided by the state (under the Poor Law, for example), by the religious orders, especially by nuns and brothers, and by philanthropic individuals.nbsp;However, there was considerable opposition from the powerful Catholic Social Movement in the 1920s and 30s to the idea of state involvement in social policy. In the Vatican world view the state had the function of maintaining public order but should refrain from intervening in social affairs. The result was that although financed from the public purse, the provision and management of the education and health services, the delivery of welfare service, including the distribution of charity to the poor, was led by the Catholic Church. /p pCatholic social teaching stressed the centrality of the family, and this had considerable implications for women who were allocated a 'special place' by both church and state. Taking its cue from the Vatican, the a href=http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/attached-files/htmlfiles/ConstitutionofIreland(Eng)Nov20041937 Constitution of the Republic/a legally established that women's primary role was that of mother and carer sequestered in the home and economically dependent on her husband, the head of household. Marriage bars were introduced in many areas of work, the civil service and nursing being examples, and prohibitions were imposed on women's employment in industrial work.nbsp; Women were denied access to legal aid and they were not allowed to serve on juries. No welfare was available as of right to unmarried mothers, deserted wives or prisoners' wives. A battered wife could not exclude her violent husband from the home. If a wife left home, her husband had the right to claim damages from anyone who enticed her away, or who harboured her, or who committed adultery with her. Furthermore, her husband could legally disinherit her. The Irish Constitution banned divorce and prohibited the importation or sale of contraceptives. Although not explicitly prohibited in the Constitution, abortion remained outlawed under the a href=http://www.legislation.gov.ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/contents1861 Offences Against the Person Act/astrong br //strong/p pIn the 1970s and '80s there were significant changes in the position of women in Irish society.nbsp; A feminist movement emerged which began to a href=http://www.theliffeypress.com/Mondays-at-gaj-s-the-story-of-the-Irish-womenchallenge/a the discriminatory treatment of Irish women. There was also pressure from the European Community, of which Ireland is a member, for the state to conform to Community norms. As a consequence, a series of wide-ranging reforms were implemented.nbsp; Battle royals were a href=http://www.amazon.com/Women-Ireland-Century-Myrtle-Hill/dp/0856407402fought/a to introduce contraception and divorce. Unsurprisingly, powerful conservative Catholic organisations complained vociferously about such radical changes and set about copper fastening the law in one area where they felt confident of success, i.e. abortion. To this end, they proposed an amendment to the constitution to equate the life of the foetus with that of the pregnant woman.nbsp; After a bitterly divisive campaign, the Irish people voted in a a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_of_the_Constitution_of_Irelandreferendum/a in 1983 to place the life of the unborn from the moment of conception on a par with that of the born. The consequences are still being played out as we have seen in the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar, whose death lifted the lid on church, state and the lack of women's reproductive rights for women living in the Republic of Ireland. Whilst the new Bill represents progress, we still have along way to go before the Irish republic affords women the same rights as those living in other Western European countries /pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/liz-cooper/abortion-rights-in-spain-back-to-pastAbortion rights in Spain: back to the past/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/agnieszka-mrozik/polands-politics-of-abortionPoland#039;s politics of abortion/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/heather-mcrobie/abortion-access-in-us-military-%E2%80%93-time-for-march-actAbortion access in the US military – time for the MARCH Act/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/article/the_right_to_abortion_briefing_from_brazilThe right to abortion: briefing from Brazil /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/nana-darkoa-sekyiamah/kermit-gosnell-vs-joshua-drah-abortion-stigma-and-conservatismKermit Gosnell vs. Joshua Drah: abortion, stigma and conservatism /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/serta%C3%A7-sehliko%C4%9Flu/vaginal-obsessions-in-turkey-islamic-perspectiveVaginal obsessions in Turkey: an Islamic perspective /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/ali-gokpinar/erdogan-vs-women-abortion-debateErdogan vs women: the abortion debate/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/ourkingdom/ourkingdom/open-letter-of-support-for-doctors-who-provide-abortion-servicesOpen letter of support for doctors who provide abortion services/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Ireland /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pThis is drawn from the remarks of Dr Dan Plesch at a meeting in the House of Lords chaired by Lord Phillips of Sudbury on Shareholder Accountability and a Fair Society./p /div /div /div pI want to discuss the question of equality before the law and the right to own property freely. These are the basis of a free society and for some conservatives argue that with these provisions in place there is no need for community or state activity outside the realm of security./p pThus - If you get in a car, drive recklessly and kill a group of school children, you will quite rightly be breaking the law. But if you imagine the car a limited liability company where the owners place bets on the fastest, put a driver in the front seat, paid more the faster they go, then if the accident happens you as owner of the car have no liability in law and are not required to take out 3rdnbsp;party insurance. All you have to do is go out and buy a new car and repeat the process. The best those you have damaged can hope for is part of the scrap value of the car that damaged them./p pThus under Limited Liability owners are above the law and the injured have no right to have restoration of their property from you. Nevertheless, this ‘externalisation of risk’ is reputed to be the secret ingredient that makes our economy work.nbsp;For some. It was Adam Smith who first sounded the alarm against the dangers of limited liability, warning in the emWealth of Nations/em that it was not reasonable to protect one group of society from the general laws simply because they could profit from it. So let’s debate this point with the Adam Smith Institute, who strangely have not given much emphasis to this rule of their sage.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/p pThe Adam Smith Institute as with so many of the self-styled ‘Free Marketeers’ present Limited Liability as a natural good, as obviously essential as money itself some might say.nbsp;And yet it was not generally adopted until after 1900, well into the industrial revolution. It was sufficiently controversial to be the topic of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, “Utopia Limited”.nbsp; Perhaps we could ask Stephen Fry,nbsp; producer and star of the film ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’, to reprise his role with a new production of Utopia – though you can find one on YouTube./p pAlthough today’s Economist magazine is a standard bearer for limited liability (LL) and two of its editors wrote a hagiographic work called emThe Company/em, they overlook the fact this elite journal itself opposed LL because of its violation of the property rights of creditors until the 1920s./p pOne may ask, why has LL become an unchallenged and unchallengeable good? After 1945, in the West, Limited Liability was acceptable as part of a broadly social democratic mixed economy with a balance of rights and interests and broad social-state ownership. Since the Reagan-Thatcher era, accelerated by the apparent end of competition from Socialism, the demand has grown ever stronger for total corporatisation of society, prisons, public spaces, the civil service, nationalised industries, and indeed all forms of regulation are seen as obstacles to the market./p pOutside the West, the period of a balance of rights in the social contract barely if ever occurred. Instead, limited liability and especially Transfer Pricing and subsidiary company structures became the means of continuing to extract wealth from territories transformed all too often from political colonies into economic ones./p pThe environment is a key area where the externalisation of risk – especially where it is hard for a polar bear to go to court – produces a legalised recklessness that only strong state action can counter balance/p pNow the continuing financial crisis has begun to make a new debate possible. Wealthy interests, however, are using the present situation to destroy what remains of the post-WW2 social contract and produce a new tyranny of the totalitarian capitalism – dubbed the ‘total market’. it is a literally totalitarian project in that other forms of economic organisation – through the state in particular - are not to be permitted and more and more forms of social life become a corporate feeding ground./p pNow let us be clear, raising the issue of LL is not to be anti-business – but it is to insist on equal rights, not emspecial/em rights for business./p pToday, faced with the crisis and the further assault on society, the response has been faltering. One tremendous advance is the pressure for tax justice, for ‘Accountable Accounting’, led in part by Prof. Sikka at University of Essex./p pAnd yet, one of the key features of the crisis has remained largely unexplored. When the ‘Too big to fail’ banks crashed, limited liability was cast aside, and we all as citizens were forced to take on the liabilities of the banks. But this is ignored./p pInstead we see continued calls for the abolition of state regulation of the market.nbsp;I notice one small indicator - that the British government will no longer regulate what companies will call themselves British, Benevolent or University.nbsp; /p pBut of course not all forms of government regulation are being removed. For limited liability is by far the greatest government regulated distortion of the market in the interest of one special interest – that of shareholders and their managers. Managers have successfully reduced the actual power of shareholders in controlling the company so that they can exist in a uniquely powerful legal no man’s land – under no practical control by shareholders and protected by LL. /p pIf we find a proposal for deregulation of corporate controls of any sort, the first response should be – if deregulation is the agenda, then let us remove the regulation of limited liability. I think we will find that rather like waving garlic at a vampire, corporations would rather shut up about calling for de-regulation if every time they do so they are asked to deregulated their liabilities./p pAs an historian studying this topic it gave me far greater insight into how people in other eras meekly accepted that the aristocracy could literally ride across their fields and property as they chose. It seemed natural at the time, but at least Lords and Ladies were in some way accountable to the Monarch.nbsp;Today we assume we have all sorts of rights and yet are unaware and accepting of the rights of the modern merchant class that go beyond what even the medieval aristocracy enjoyed./p pThe issue of business and human rights is another area of debate that would benefit from introducing LL. So far this approach is tackling the worst excesses of business, predominantly in the third world.nbsp;We need now to engage these communities in debate and ask whether they think that limited liability is consistent with Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that,nbsp;“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law”. And Article 17 –nbsp;‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property’strong.nbsp;/strong/p pThe Farepak scandal is a perfect example of the arbitrary removal of people’s investments in Christmas simply in order to benefit the holding company enabled by Limited Liability./p pReasserting the human right of equality before the law need not mean abolishing LL. What it does mean is starting a new debate about values./p pWealth is increased by the privilege of LL. The rich and the corporations should pay more tax and be regulated to balance that privilege. Otherwise it is simply a tyranny of the wealthy. /p pCorporations enjoy the benefits according to a person under law, they therefore need to be responsible persons; if they will not act like grown ups, but like spoilt teenagers, then we will have to ground them./p pFortunately we have a series of voluntary CSR provisions – at the OECD and in the UN Global Compact. We need these to have the force of law. We need to work globally so that reform proposals begin to be introduced simultaneously in the major legal centres including the EU, the US and China. Thus CSR can become not an optional PR extra but a legal duty to balance LL rights they enjoy./p pIn a fair society where we are all in it together, then we need to be equal before the law. Without checks and balances LL has removed our fundamental rights. /pdiv class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Economics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pIt is activists, not states who will make a difference in future. But western-led rights organizations may have seen their day. emTranslations: ema href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/stephen-hopgood/derechos-humanos-pasados-de-modaEemspañol/em/a.nbsp;/em/em/p /div /div /div pimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Flags.png alt=flags width=460 /br /ema href=http://www.shutterstock.com/Shutterstock/Artistic Photo/a. All rights reserved./em/p pWe live in an era not of triumph, but of the a href=http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100538130amp;fa=authoramp;person_id=3087endtimes for universal human rights/a. In our multipolar world of dispersed state and social power, the inherent limitations of the global human rights model championed by organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is becoming painfully apparent. Both are trying to adjust, Amnesty by relocating to the global south, and Human Rights Watch by turning itself into a genuinely global brand. But if the concept of global human rights is to endure, a new and more political, transnational, agile and adaptable kind of movement must emerge, replacing today’s top-down, western-led model of activism. /p pTo begin with, there is no reason at all to think states in the global South will behave any differently from states in the global North. States are states. The BRICS are not a new beginning, but rather aspirants to global status as members of the a href=http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6744.htmlorganized hypocrisy/a of sovereign states. The question is, can western human rights organizations challenge this by successfully allying with civil society groups in the south? Until now, western NGOs have failed to connect with southern publics beyond the elite level. Can this be changed? After all, many local, southern organizations and movements cherish beliefs that are not prominent in western human rights thinking. These include beliefs about religion, justice, ethnic solidarity, labour rights and the importance of the family. These remain vital aspects of their identity, even as these southern groups are persecuted by their own elites and states. How will universal human rights ideas fare in creating a solidarity movement with this diverse and often conflicting set of actors, many of whom see human rights as either compatible with non-liberal norms, or who are committed to social, economic and cultural rights of the sort a href=http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Defending_Economic_Social_and_Cultural_Rights.pdfHuman Rights Watch/aspan judges inappropriate as a basis for effective campaigning?/spanspannbsp;/span/p h2strongWho defines the concept of human rights? /strong /h2 pspanGlobalization means diversity, but until now, “universal” human rights have been a fairly monotheistic form of secular religion./spanspannbsp;/span/p pMany in the west assume there really is a singular a href=http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9681.htmlglobal human rights movement/a, and that its momentum is unstoppable. But this idea disguises the reality of deep internal inequalities of resources, objectives, priorities and influence. Why, for example, is it criminal justice, rather than social justice, that marks the vanguard of human rights globally? Because Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Commission of Jurists say so./p pThere is a deep divergence between the concept of human rights shared by elites, largely until now located in the west (what we might call Human Rights), and what those rights mean for the vast majority of the world’s population (what we might call human rights). Human Rights are a New York-Geneva-London-centered ideology focused on international law, criminal justice, and institutions of global governance. Human Rights are a product of the 1%./p pThe rest of the world, the 99%, sees human rights activism as one among many mechanisms to bring about meaningful social change. By their nature, lower-case human rights are malleable, adaptable, pragmatic and diverse – they are bottom-up democratic norms, rather than top-down authoritative rules./p pThe zenith for Human Rights came in the years 1977 to 2008, years of growing American unipolarity as the Soviet Union crumbled. Along the way Human Rights achieved the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, but also blunted the radical potential of movements for a href=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674048720national self-determination/a. From the fall of the Berlin Wall for nearly two decades, Human Rights was triumphant: in a href=http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/Vienna.aspx1993’s Vienna Declaration/a, a href=http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/75401994’s Cairo Conference/a, in the ad-hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court (ICC), the intervention in Kosovo, and the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The latter is heralded as the successor to humanitarian intervention and was, its supporters argue, fully vindicated in a href=http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/186279NATO’s action in Libya/a. But these successes disguise the reality that one country and its domestic activists – the US – were calling the global shots. Even during this time, the United States, a href=http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Lawless_World.html?id=RtekoClpu64Ca fair weather friend of human rights/a, has been more culpable than any other state in its refusal to permanently embed multilateral human rights norms when it possessed the power to do so./p h2strongCan western organizations become truly global?/strong/h2 pHow are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other big rights NGOs dealing with the changing world order? They have different strategies. Amnesty is devolving its investigation operations to southern cities. It hopes to ally with local human rights defenders, and increase the small, southern proportion of its global membership. Amnesty terms this a href=http://www.uu.nl/faculty/leg/NL/organisatie/departementen/departementrechtsgeleerdheid/organisatie/onderdelen/studieeninformatiecentrummensenrechten/publicaties/simspecials/Documents/simspecial36.pdf‘moving closer to the ground.’/a Human Rights Watch, with no members to worry about, is creating a global network of research, advocacy and fund raising offices, aided in part by $100 million from a href=http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/09/07/global-challengeGeorge Soros/a. Both strategies contrast with that of the a href=http://www.fordfoundation.org/newsroom/news-from-ford/651Ford Foundation/a, which is giving its money directly to seven human rights organizations in the global South./p pWhy will these strategies not work in the post-western, post-secular, multipolar world? One answer is the relative decline in power of the states, particularly in Europe, who have made human rights norms a foreign policy goal. The United States is unlikely to pick up the slack. Whether its turn to Asia is a a href=http://contextchina.com/2013/03/from-pivot-to-rebalance-the-weight-of-words-in-u-s-asia-policy/‘rebalancing’ or a ‘pivot,’/a human rights are not high on the agenda. And the United States has significant a href=http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-obamas-speech-means-for-guantanamo-20130523human rights problems/a of its own. This shift will weaken the global authority of human rights norms. It is not that the BRICS are anti-human rights, just that they will seek to renegotiate the assumptions and substance of what those rights mean in practice and how, and if, they impinge on state sovereignty. Human Rights Watch’s strategy relies on its ability to ‘name and shame’ these governments, hoping that local offices will increase its credibility and effectiveness (and income and brand profile) in doing so. As of yet, there is no persuasive evidence that this will be successful. Time will tell whether this strategy pays off./p pAmnesty International relies on both research and membership pressure. It is taking a huge gamble by assuming that local activists – under pressure from their own governments and networks – can report abuses without consequences. It also hopes that southern-based research work will be taken seriously by lawyers and policy-makers in Geneva and New York. If it works, the result will be millions of new members standing stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Amnesty in India, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Hong Kong, Senegal and Thailand. Yet despite a href=http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100173990spending hundreds of millions of dollars/a since 1961, Amnesty has yet to build a mass southern membership. And this was during decades when there was no other human rights organization to join. Now there are tens, hundreds, even thousands of human rights NGOs in southern countries. What is Amnesty’s value-added for them? Why would they join an organization synonymous with postwar, Cold War Europe?/p h2strongIs it time for a new kind of activism?/strong/h2 pThe best hope for human rights may lie in the growing professional middle class in the BRICS and other key states like Indonesia. Maybe they will join Amnesty and fund Human Rights Watch? a href=http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Social_Origins_of_Dictatorship_and_Democ.html?id=Ip9W0yWtVO0Camp;redir_esc=yScholars have argued before/a that democracy requires a progressively more active middle-class to underpin it. Human rights might be the same, correlating with wealth, a lifestyle luxury like Louis Vuitton luggage. These are not, of course, ‘the people.’ And even this may be a tough sell in powerful countries like China and Russia. There is no reason why, a href=http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100541080in China for example/a, we might not get capitalism without democracy and human rights. After all, most middle class citizens in western societies neither contribute to, nor protest about, human rights./p pWhat is certain is that in a multipolar world, arriving with Human Rights as a pre-packaged set of laws, norms and advocacy strategies will alienate supporters. Compromise on goals and strategy will be essential, and I am skeptical that Human Rights organizations can do it./p pA whole new kind of activism might be the answer – from a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/30/bangladesh-workers-need-more-than-boycottsconsumer boycotts/a to a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/08/anonymous-hacker-attack-israeli-websiteshacking/a to the a href=http://middleeast.about.com/od/humanrightsdemocracy/tp/The-Reasons-For-The-Arab-Spring.htmArab Spring/a – bringing with it more profound political and social change than Human Rights ever will./ppnbsp;/p pa href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrightsimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/EPlogo-ogr.png alt= width=300 //a/ppnbsp;/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pa href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrightsimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/openGlobalRights2.jpg alt= width=140 //a/p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/openglobalrights/stephen-hopgood/derechos-humanos-pasados-de-modaDerechos humanos: pasados de moda /a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Democracy and government /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pHilary Wainwright reports from Thessaloniki on what happened when the state ordered Greece’s state broadcaster to shut down/p /div /div /div pAt 11.30 on the evening of 12 June, the TV screens in the Thessaloniki office of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) went blank. Black. For a few moments there was the silence of shock and disbelief. /p pA few hours earlier, when prime minister Samaras had announced his unilateral decision, taken at 6pm the same day, he’d said midnight would be the cut off moment. But this lost half-hour was not the main reason for the glum, bewildered look on people’s faces in the newsrooms and studios of the ERT in the capital of Northern Greece. Staring at the black screens where normally there would be regional news programmes, and lively educational and cultural programmes, triggered bad memories: ‘The last time public television was switched off by direct intervention by the government was in 1973 under the dictatorship of the military junta,’ said Panos Karresis, an editor in chief at the Thessaloniki office. ‘When people see the black screens, the crowds outside will grow.’/p h2This is about democracy/h2 pAlready 800 had gathered outside as news broke of the sudden closure of Greece’s only public TV station and with it the immediate loss of 3,000 jobs. Crowds of tens of thousands were gathering outside the ERT offices in Athens. And despite the pouring rain in Thessaloniki, people kept arriving. This combination of protest and solidarity with a determination to take control and thwart the prime minister’s decision is clearly about more than jobs: ‘The presence of the crowds empowers us to find other ways of broadcasting, they are encouraging us,’ said Yannis Angelis, an ERT journalist. The staff and supporters alike are clear: the fight against Samaras is about democracy. /p pSwelling the crowd were 200 or so from an assembly held earlier in the evening of ‘SOSte Nero’, an alliance of unions, co-operatives, municipalities against the privatisation of the regional water company. For them too the struggle was for democracy and for fundamental social rights. ‘We know there is corruption in ERT; what we are concerned to save is public broadcasting,’ insisted George Archontopoulos, president of the water workers union, who had been chairing the earlier assembly against water privatisation. ‘Three channels, local radio across the country, film archives back to the 30s. This is about democracy – all essential for democracy.’/p pBy midnight, Panos, Yannis and their journalist and technical colleagues were back on air. The programme consisted of a panel of well-known cultural figures condemning and discussing the implications of the government’s action, with a stream of contributions from citizens coming in from the protest outside to say what they thought. Again and again the memory of the Junta was evoked in condemnation of the closure. I brought solidarity from Europe: ‘Your struggle for democracy in Greece is a struggle that concerns the whole of Europe. A threat to the freedom of expression is a threat to democracy. We will help you in whatever way we can,’ I said on air. It and all the other expressions of support were received with enthusiasm. (There are links at the end of this article to ways to help.)/p pNews was coming in of opposition to the closure from Bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church – not a usual critic of the government. Elsewhere on the political spectrum, the KKE (the Greek Communist Party) came out in support of the protests, in an unusual show of unity. Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, made a strong speech soon after Samaras’ announcement, calling on Pasok and Dimar (a split from Pasok) to leave the coalition in protest. The leaders of these rump parties spluttered their objections but without any clear threat to leave the coalition. Opinion polls now put support for Pasok down from 13 per cent at the last elections to 7 per cent, Dimar from 7 to as low as 5 per cent compared to Syriza at 29 per cent, New Democracy at 26 per cent and the fascist Golden Dawn at 14 per cent./p h2Clientelism and collapse/h2 pJust a quick aside on Pasok’s decline: talking to the workers inside the ERT office in Thessaloniki, I gained a sense of the collapse of Pasok and New Democracy’s system of patronage as a system of power. ERT had been an example of clientelism at its most extreme. The metaphor which the journalists used to explain how it worked was of electric plugs, ‘visma’ in Greek. Politicians ‘plugged in’ their clients, expecting them to be their voice and do their bidding, at the risk of being ‘unplugged’. The circuits of clientelism sustained the system. Under the pressures of cuts and austerity measures this has been visibly collapsing except at what had been the top – indeed Samaras had reinforced the top with 40 extra ‘plug ins’ at a cost, it is said, of over 1 million euros. /p pThe staff I spoke to had contempt for their plugged-in managers. ‘My supervisor knew nothing; he couldn’t even speak English,’ said Natasha, a news reporter. I asked where they were now. ‘They are here, somewhere in the building, but I can’t see them’, she replied. ‘They are the silent ones’ joked George Archontopoulos, who had come into the office to give solidarity. ‘You see, he knows,’ commented Natasha. /p pYou could see, in these exchanges, the evaporation of fear and the creation of common bonds which were already becoming the basis of workers taking control, knowing that their fellow citizens (often themselves facing similar predicaments) are with them, ‘empowering’ them in Panos’ words./p pThe old clientelist system reproduced itself through fear, obligation and also separation and isolation; each little empire was a world of its own. Only the holders of the plugs knew how the circuit worked. But as the old circuits have crashed under the pressure of the financial crisis and austerity, so new connections are rapidly being improvised outside the clientelist system. These are between the people who actually know how things actually work, whether it be in the media, or water management, health, agriculture or manufacturing. /p h2Broadcasting in defiance/h2 pIt’s an uncertain process and time is short, but as the crowds remained outside the ERT offices into the early morning of 13 June, willing the journalists to remain on air, it was clear that the ability of journalists and technicians to continue to broadcast in spite of the Samaras attempt to pull the plug on public broadcasting was more than symbolic. Indeed it is not only the ERT workers who were strategically vital here but also those who actually handle the real plugs and circuits of electricity. The electrical workers union is one of the most militant (and least corrupt) of the Greek unions. Samaras could have simply ordered the cutting off of electricity to ERT offices. The electricians made that impossible./p pAs I write, events are moving fast. First, Samaras is meeting leaders of Pasok and Dimar. These politicians are finally threatening to leave the government, but the prime minister knows they don’t want elections. He is in an aggressive mood. He went on private television over the weekend to defend the closure of ERT. ‘He spoke not like a politician of 2013 but of the 1960, that is like the military, you know,’ says George from the movement against water privatisation. A sign of his aggression is that he successfully asked the Israeli government, which controls one satellite that ERT journalists are using to continue to broadcast, to cut off the service./p h2A high-risk strategy/h2 pPasok and Dimar are demanding that broadcasting be resumed. Samaras’ compromise – totally unacceptable to the unions and to the majority of Greek people, as opinion polls over the weekend showed, is to re-open on a skeleton staff while proposals are drawn up for a new downsized and, no doubt, part-private broadcasting company to open in the autumn. Second, the Constitutional Court is gathering this evening to consider the legality of the government’s decision to close. A judgement is expected at midnight or tomorrow (Tuesday). /p pMeanwhile the streets will not be empty. The KKE is planning a demonstration outside the ERT offices on Wednesday. Syriza is calling for a massive demonstration in the centre of Athens the following day./p pSamaras’ strategy is high risk. Many believe it is shock tactics, to show the Troika that the government is prepared to be tough (and this makes its attempt to distance itself from the closure farcical). Others suggest wider political goals: ‘Samaras could be just testing what he can get away with,’ says Alex Benos, a professor at the university of Thessalinki university – or, he says, ‘another option is that he is preparing for elections, to get rid of Pasok and Dimar, even to do deals with Golden Dawn.’/p pMuch will be depending on events in the next few days. What is already clear is that the stakes are very high not just for Greece but for the whole of Europe. All those who believe in democracy must do everything they can to protest at the anti-democratic actions of the Greek government. We must mobilise all possible sources of support for the refusal of the majority of Greek people to be led one more step towards a return of dictatorship in a new guise. /ppFurther resources for support:/p pa href=http://www.ifj.org/en/splashhttp://www.ifj.org/en/a/ppa href=http://www.nuj.org.ukwww.nuj.org.uk/a/p pa href=http://www.enetenglish.grhttp://www.enetenglish.gr//a/ppemThis piece was originally published in Red Pepper on June 17/em/pdiv class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Greece /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Culture /div div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div div class=field-item even Ideas /div div class=field-item odd International politics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pTurkey's urban citizens are standing up emagainst /emauthoritarian governance, and emfor/em their right to the city, their right to difference, and their right to resist the top-down imposition of moral and spatial orders./p /div /div /div pemHuzur isyandabr /(One finds peace in revolt)/embr /nbsp;br /- Graffiti in Istanbul /ppDemocracy is a fraudulent contract, José Saramago once remarked; from the moment you cast your vote, you have abandoned power until the next election. This may be the way democratic elections work, but it is not how democracies should. Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan, however, seems all too content with this fraudulent contract. Once an election is over, he will rule over the country, doing whatever he thinks is right, without the slightest opposition, not even criticism—which he, notoriously, cannot stand. He will tell you how many children you should have, that you should not smoke and not eat white bread, and that you should drink the non-alcoholic emayran/emrather than getting drunk with emrakı/em or any other alcoholic beverage (also trying, unsuccessfully, to criminalise adultery and abortion, and toying with the idea of imposing visa restrictions for Turkish citizens to move to Istanbul). Ever the social engineer, the prime minister has an idea on how everything should be, ranging from the private lives of citizens to the planning of cities, all of which he has been trying to regulate the past ten years./p pThe problem is that he has the power to regulate many things. After all, he has won three elections since 2002. His power is legitimate, although it certainly should not extend to some of the areas he has shown a keen interest in. Furthermore, he has to understand that although his power is legitimate, it is not absolute. What is absolute is the legitimacy of revolt, and if Turkey is to become ‘fully democratic’ one day (this is the stated aim of the government’s project for a new constitution), going well beyond a democratic-election regime, then he and his followers will have to come to terms with this. Brutalization, demonization and incarceration of those who disagree and resist will lead elsewhere. We have been there before, and I don’t think anyone remembers it fondly./p pPolitically the most promising aspect of the revolts in Turkey’s cities is that they show people can still revolt against democratically elected governments even in times when economic conditions are not dire—revolt for political ideals, dignity, and aspirations. And revolt with courage, too, despite bones broken, eyes lost, lives terminated. The revolts are the spatialisation of the resentment that has been growing over the years because of authoritarian governance, repression, and erosion of civil liberties, but also a spatial manifestation of these ideals and aspirations, and of the dignity and courage of political subjects constituted in the here and now, demonstrating their political capacity in the city. By standing up against a democratically elected government, the protestors remind us that politics is the business of anyone and no-one in particular, with no privileged subject, specific time or pre-determined space./p pThe triggering event for the revolts was the extreme violence exercised by the police on protestors in a dispute over the redevelopment of Gezi Park in Taksim Square, Istanbul, into a commercial complex.nbsp;Taksim Square is a symbolic place for the secular Republic as well as for Left politics. At the centre of the European section of the city, it is the place for official ceremonies celebrating the Republic (with a monument to its founders) as well as for May Day celebrations (though this is only occasionally allowed). When the first Islamist prime minister of Turkey, Necmettin Erbakan, came to power 1996, he promised to construct a mosque in Taksim Square. He was ousted the following year./p pOn 28 May, the police attacked the peaceful protestors of Taksim Gezi Park with tear gas. Just before dawn on 31 May, a brutal attack was waged by the riot police against protestors who were staging a peaceful sit-in in the park. Then all hell broke loose, police violence continued—as one female protestor put it, “it was as if they [the police] were trying to kill”—in an attempt to disperse thousands of citizens in Istanbul, as well as in other cities, notably Ankara, which did not fail to follow suit (with solidarity protests organised in several cities in the world ranging from Los Angeles to Athens). Many protestors have already died, thousands have been wounded (some seriously) and arrested. Excessive use of tear gas not only made thousands of protestors, including children, sick, but also killed the birds and dogs in Taksim—and we do not yet know the long term effects on humans of tear gas that expired two years ago (but was nevertheless used by the police). The protesters were labelled by Erdoğan variably as “marauders,” “vandals,” “marginals,” and, of course, “terrorists,” denying them all political legitimacy and capacity (they were following, so went his reasoning, orders from “foreign powers”). In the meantime, the prime minister did not fail to emphasise that the government would carry on with the controversial urban redevelopment project, which was at the origin of the revolts. Constructing a third bridge over the Bosporus (to be named after an Ottoman Sultan who had ordered the massacre of thousands of Alevis, who today represent more than 10 percent of Turkey’s population) and a canal to join Marmara and Black seas are also on the agenda.a name=_ednref1/aa href=#_edn1[1]/a/p pBut it would be a mistake to focus merely on Erdoğan’s personality and the Gezi Park controversy. The resentment has been simmering for years over the erosion of civil rights and liberties, suppression of dissent, and authoritarian urban neoliberalism. This is a revolt against state-led neoliberalism, state-led Islamisation, and ever-increasing repression./p pSince coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party—the AKP—has implemented a revanchist politics against the military, journalists and intellectuals, and against what Erdoğan named the “White Turks” (the urban secular elite as distinguished from the “Black Turks,” poor and poorly educated classes and his voting base). Through reforms and practices that established networks of reciprocity or dependence—largely facilitated by religious connections and a clientelistic political culture—or, when those did not suffice, through the mobilisation of the state’s coercive powers, the AKP has tightened its grip on the media as well as on business. As AKP’s power consolidated over years, dissent was suppressed and civil rights and freedoms started to erode. Thousands of activists (mainly Kurdish) are jailed through the use of loosely formulated anti-terror laws that make the flimsiest charges possible. There is ample anecdotal evidence of how the social pressure arising from this revanchist politics is felt at the workplace and universities by secular classes that do not subscribe to AKP’s worldview. Critical journalists are jailed (Turkey is now ahead of China for the number of jailed journalists) or fired, at best—those who are not are intimidated to the point of self-censorship.a name=_ednref2/aa href=#_edn2[2]/a The silence of the Turkish media during the first days of the protests was staggering, which is best exemplified by the difference between CNN-International and the local channel CNN-Turk: while the former was airing live coverage of the revolts, the latter was treating its viewers to a documentary on penguins—which turned these lovely creatures into a symbol of resistance.a name=_ednref3/aa href=#_edn3[3]/a/p pThe judiciary is filled with AKP nominees, army generals are jailed (not that anyone wants another military coup), and the opposition has been so incapable over the years that referring to them as “opposition” seems overly generous. Erdoğan must have felt he could forever exercise his legitimately acquired power with no checks. What he did not see coming was a new generation of urban citizens and new forms of solidarity cutting across social, religious, gender, political divides, and opening up spaces of politics and contestation, willing to risk losing their freedom and lives, rather than further submitting to the closure of all political space for dissent./p pIt is no surprise that these new solidarities and political subjectivities are constituted in and through urban spaces. We must remember that the AKP and its mayors have been zealous city builders, and not just in Istanbul (the citizens of Ankara remember well the provocative urban projects of Melih Gökçek, conceived and implemented undemocratically).a name=_ednref4/aa href=#_edn4[4]/anbsp;This city building, ranging from large-scale urban redevelopment projects to changing street names, not only suited their economic ideology, but also played a symbolic role by leaving its mark on cities. This re-ordering of urban space was supplemented by interventions that were more explicit in their religious motivations, such as rendering public spaces and municipality-owned facilities “family friendly” by establishing separate sections for single men and families, and banning alcohol./p pPrivatisation and selling of public land to developers have been integral parts of AKP’s economic strategy since the early 2000s, and the contracts went to friends and followers (including a company whose CEO is Erdoğan’s son-in-law).a name=_ednref1/aa href=#_edn5[5]/a The AKP has effectively used the state’s legal, financial and coercive powers—as well as its land—to consolidate an economic strategy focused on the development of urban property markets regardless of concerns over its social and environmental consequences. Resistance to top-down urban projects were met by repression; protestors in Turkey’s cities are not unfamiliar with the excessive use of tear gas, water canons, and violence by the police.a name=_ednref6/aa href=#_edn6[6]/a/p pThe AKP has been quite successful in articulating neoliberalism and Islamism, consolidating a regime of governance characterised by market-oriented property development and mediated by Islamic codes of conduct, which became more mainstream.a name=_ednref7/aa href=#_edn7[7]/a While Erdoğan and his followers hoped the people of Turkey would find peace in Islam, thousands now believe they will find it innbsp;emisyan/em—in revolt—as the graffiti that opens this piece suggests (“emHuzur isyanda/em”), which is aemdetournement/emnbsp;of the popular Islamist slogan “emHuzur Islamda/em” that means “one finds peace in Islam.”a name=_ednref8/aa href=#_edn8[8]/a/p pThis is a revolt against state-led property development by those who are enraged by the rebuilding of cities for profit maximization with little or no democratic possibility of contestation, and definitely no consultation.a name=_ednref9/aa href=#_edn9[9]/a This is a revolt against state-led Islamisation by those who are enraged by the increasing social pressure that seeks to impose certain moral codes on what they do, how they dress, how they behave, what they drink. This is a revolt of urban citizens who want to be considered as legitimate partners in the production of their urban spaces and maintain a way of life that is not regulated and restrained by moral codes imposed upon them by an Islamist government. Gezi Park was the last drop in growing resentment and urban resistance, as was the recent passing of a law aimed at restricting alcohol consumption; one clever graffiti in Istanbul suggested that the ban on alcohol had resulted in the sobering up of the people (the Turkish word for sobering up also means “waking up to something”). This is a revolt of citizens with political dignity, ideals, and aspirations. What unites them is their desire to affirm their political capacity, forming solidarities in urban space rather then falling back into tired divides of old. There are women in headscarves, “anti-capitalist Muslims,”a name=_ednref10/aa href=#_edn10[10]/a gays, lesbians, transsexuals, union members, football club fans, Alevis, Sunnis, Jews, Christians, atheists, Armenians, Kurds, as well as Turks. The revolts are not organised or structured around established social, cultural, gender, ethnic, religious, or political identities or affiliations. What brings the protestors together, what brings them to emstasis/em, is their political capacity as equals and political desire to resist repression and authoritarian governance./p pThis is an urban emstasis/em.a name=_ednref11/aa href=#_edn11[11]/a This Greek word rich in meaning seems to me to characterise best the situation in Turkey’s cities.emStasis/em does not merely mean inertia in a negative sense. Even if it suggests stillness, it is a disruptive stillness.emStasis/em means “standing up against” (which might bring something to a stop, hence the more commonly known meaning of emstasis/em; as inertia), “standing for,” and, following perhaps unsurprisingly from these two meanings, “uprising.”a name=_ednref12/aa href=#_edn12[12]/aThe protestors at Gezi Park stood up against what was yet another commercially driven project imposed on their urban spaces for private profit maximization without the slightest procedure of consultation, let alone contestation. The protestors in Turkey’s cities now stand for political ideals that reject social engineering imposing moral and religious orders, authoritarian forms of governance, and repression. The urban citizens of Turkey have stood up against authoritarian governance, standing for their right to the city and right to difference, not understood in a folkloric, exotic, or nostalgic way, but as a right to resist top-down imposition of moral and spatial orders. The urban uprising has begun, we have come to aemstasis/em. But this is not the end, just the beginning./p pstrongAcknowledgements:/strong/p pI am grateful to Bahar Sakızlıoğlu, Ozan Karaman, Walter Nicholls, and the editors ofnbsp;emSociety and Space/emnbsp;for their comments on an earlier version. Many thanks to Peter Gratton for inviting me to contribute to this forum./p hr /pemThis article was originally published on a href=http://societyandspace.com/2013/06/14/commentary-by-mustafa-dikec-fraudulent-democracy-and-urban-stasis-in-turkey/Society and Space - Environment and Planning D/a/ema href=http://societyandspace.com/2013/06/14/commentary-by-mustafa-dikec-fraudulent-democracy-and-urban-stasis-in-turkey/ /aemon the 14th June 2013. Thanks go to the author and publisher for allowing us to republish here/em./phr /pstrongNotes/strong/pp a name=_edn1/aa href=#_ednref1[1]/anbsp;Alevis practice a more liberal form of Islam, which has led to their exclusion by those committed to Sunni Islam, who consider them unbelievers. The AKP is firmly committed to Sunni Islamic principles. /ppa name=_edn2/aa href=#_ednref2[2]/anbsp;According to Reporters Without Borders’s Press Freedom Index 2013, Turkey (‘the world’s biggest prison for journalists’) is ranked 154th among 179 countries./p pa name=_edn3/aa href=#_ednref3[3]/a Some of the most tweeted photos can be seen herea href=http://onedio.com/haber/direnisin-sembolu-penguenler-119343http://onedio.com/haber/direnisin-sembolu-penguenler-119343/a/p pa name=_edn4/aa href=#_ednref4[4]/anbsp;Since 1994 the majority of Turkish cities have been governed by mayors coming from the Islamist movement that eventually led to the creation of the AKP in 2001 by Erdoğan, who was the mayor of Istanbul between 1994-1998./p pa name=_edn5/aa href=#_ednref5[5]/anbsp;See, for example, H Gürek (2008)nbsp;emAKP’nin Müteahhitleri/emnbsp;[emAKP’s Builders/em] (Istanbul: Güncel Yayıncılık)/p pa name=_edn6/aa href=#_ednref6[6]/anbsp;For examples of resistance from Istanbul, see Kuyucu, T. and Ünsal, Ö. (2010) ‘”Urban transformation” as state-led property transfer: an analysis of two cases of urban renewal in Istanbul’nbsp;emUrban Studies/emnbsp;47(7): 1479-1499; also Sakızlıoğlu, B., van Weesep, J, Rittersberger-Tilic, H (2012) ‘Resisting state-led gentrification: the case of Tarlabaşı, Istanbul’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers 2012, New York./p pa name=_edn7/aa href=#_ednref7[7]/anbsp;The articulation of neoliberalism and Islamism is convincingly argued and empirically demonstrated in Karaman, O (2013) ‘Urban neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics’nbsp;emUrban Studies/emnbsp;(published online). For state-led property development and its consequences for the urban poor, see Lovering, J and Türkmen, H (2011) ‘Bulldozer neo-liberalism in Istanbul: the state-led construction of property markets, and the displacement of the urban poor’nbsp;emInternational Planning Studies/emnbsp;16(1): 73-96. This article is part of a special issue on ‘Urban development and planning in Istanbul’, edited by J Lovering and Y Evren./p pa name=_edn8/aa href=#_ednref8[8]/anbsp;A literal translation of “emHuzur Islamda/em” would be “peace is in Islam,” but what this phrase suggests is that one finds peace in Islam. Same also with “emHuzur isyanda/em“: a literal translation would be ‘peace is in revolt’, but what is suggested is that one finds it in revolt (or in revolting)./p pa name=_edn9/aa href=#_ednref9[9]/anbsp;A common practice is to inform the concerned citizens, if they are informed at all, after the decisions have already been made. In the two case studies examined by Kuyucu and Ünsal, the concerned citizens found out about the news only by chance, by which point the allowed time for legal objection had already expired. Here Prime Ministernbsp;Erdoğan’s statement made on 29 May, a day after the first police attack on the protestors, exemplifies well the AKP government’s general approach to democratic consultation and contestation procedures: ‘Taksim Gezi Park is like this, like that, they will go there and protest, whatever. You [the protestors] can do whatever you want. We have made a decision, and that is what we will put to work.”/p pa name=_edn10/aa href=#_ednref10[10]/anbsp;‘Anti-capitalist Muslims’ (emAntikapitalist Müslümanlar/em) is a movement by devoted Muslims who are particularly outraged by the government’s manipulation of Islam for its capitalist agenda./p pa name=_edn11/aa href=#_ednref11[11]/anbsp;This reading of the revolts asnbsp;emstasis/emnbsp;owes greatly to a discussion at a workshop on “commons,” organised by the “Inside/Outside Europe” Research Network, 7-8 June 2013, Winchester University. For their comments and suggestions I am grateful tonbsp;Marissia Fragkou, Philip Hager,nbsp;Evangelos Konstantelos,nbsp;Lizetta Makka, Grant Tyler Peterson, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Ally Walsh and Marilena Zaroulia.nbsp;emEfharisto/em!/p pa name=_edn12/aa href=#_ednref12[12]/anbsp;For those familiar with Turkish,nbsp;emstasis/emnbsp;brings together “emkarşınbsp;durma/em” and “emayaklanma/em.”/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pFor more see Space and Society's a href=http://societyandspace.com/2013/06/05/the-events-in-turkey-a-virtual-theme-issue-for-background/Virtual Theme issue /aon Turkey./p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/gezi-radyo/we-take-back-whats-oursWe take back what#039;s ours!/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/opensecurity/john-mcsweeney/turkish-hopes-for-new-beginningTurkish hopes for a new beginning/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/opensecurity/jon-wiltshire/istanbul-in-lockdownIstanbul in lockdown/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Turkey /div /div /div div class=field field-city div class=field-labelCity:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Istanbul /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Conflict /div div class=field-item even Democracy and government /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pFlawed it may have been, but ERT, Greece's public broadcaster, was one of the few things holding the country together during these difficult times./p /div /div /div p class=image-captionimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/2148919.jpg alt= height=345 width=460 /Employees and members of the public demonstrate outside the offices of ERT3. Demotix/Giorgos Kasapidis. All rights reserved./ppAthens, 1984: In an interview, Manos Hatzidakis, famous music composer, leading figure of the anti-junta movement, and Director of the Public Radio remarked I would advocate for that [closing down ERT], however the people cannot live without ERT. They will die if you do not give them something to protest against. ERT is precious, because it gives the opportunity to the Greek people to protest and say 'ERT is such a disgrace.' /ppFor years, this was what the majority of Greeks believed about the public channel (with the exception of the radio stations that emitted classical music and poetry or literature readings). They were appalled by the quality of the programs and when payrolls became public, they were all shocked by the thick salaries of presenters and management. On the fight between quantity and quality, the former would triumph over the latter./ppAthens, 11 June 2013: Simos Kedikoglou, the spokesman for the government and a former ERT journalist, announced that at midnight ERT would stop broadcasting and all employees would be fired. Imagine David Cameron’s spokesperson making the same announcement for the BBC, or Francois Hollande’s for France Television. Viewers stared at their television screens in disbelief. A wave of either indignation or support washed over the Greek population. As is usual in Greece, people had very strong feelings and found themselves separated into two fronts (as they tend to do for sports, politics, or even pronunciation differences between the north and the south): the pro-ERT and the anti-ERT.br /br /Pulling the plug is indeed jeopardizing the liberty of the press, in a country where images from the military junta from 1967 to 1974 are still very much present in the collective imagery. Despite being a financial disaster, having an over-inflated roster, and being designated as the medium for government propaganda, ERT was a way for Greek diaspora to stay connected to the ‘Metropolis’ and for people to escape from the ridiculous soap operas that private channels seem to broadcast on a seemingly neverending loop./ppBut, if ERT was so problematic, then why are people protesting? The way ERT operated and the way it got shut down are indicative of Greece’s structural problems. The 2 satellite channels, 3 television ones, and 5 radio stations were employing over 2907 employees with permanent status, most of them grossly overpaid. A restructuring plan was expected, but no plan had been presented to the Director or the National Parliament for consideration./ppThe evening the government announced the closure of ERT, no statement was made about the future of public broadcasting and no economically viable alternative was presented to the Greek people. People are not oblivious to the problems, nor fundamentally opposed to reforms, yet they feel incompetence and a lack of accountability from their decision makers. No one would ever object to firing employees that committed fraud, overvalued their programs, or claimed benefits they did not deserve./ppHowever, through Kedikoglou’s very poorly written and articulated speech, the catharsis never came. Instead of making the announcement months in advance and preparing the population while presenting the employees with an exit strategy, he declared that by midnight the stations would stop transmitting. That was it; a modern Cinderella story of yet a little more Greek national capital. For an ex-media person, his strategic communication strategy was remarkably impotent.nbsp;/ppKedikoglou’s speech reflects some of the fundamental problems in Greek politics. Realpolitik dictates that evaluation is risky, as it might harm some of the privileged members of the ruling party’s electoral base. The ‘all or nothing' strategy is convenient because it legitimizes firing your own political supporters. It also enables the government to mitigate the political costs and blame the ‘Troika’ for all reforms; however, in the ERT case Commissioner Olli Rehn claimed that the European Commission never required that the powerful media outlet be shut down, but that an assessment be made and that 1000 poorly-performing employees be dismissed. Unfortunately, that seems like an impossible move for the government as clientelist practices and public sector recruitment are two intertwined activities./ppIf only ERT journalists were always as combative as they were in the last hours of broadcast and made their self-assessment overtime, as every company does, maybe things would be different today and public opinion would not end up polarized once more. Greece has not seen the end of the tunnel, however; conundrums disappear for short periods of time, only to reappear.nbsp; The problems facing Greece today look very much like the ones Greek society was facing in the 1980s. As the famous song by Manos Hatzidakis and Nikos Gatsos goes, Goodnight, Kemal, this world will never change.../pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/eleftheria-lekakis/closure-of-ert-public-service-broadcasting-and-austerity-politics-in-greeceThe closure of ERT: public service broadcasting and austerity politics in Greece/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Greece /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pimg style=float: right; src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/tractor.jpg alt= width=160 /Valery Sidorenko and Sergei Ostapchuk, both tractor drivers, live together happily in a remote village in the Grodinsky region of Belarus. Alyona Soiko travelled there to meet them and hear their story./p /div /div /div pemThis story may seem unlikely (and I initially doubted it myself) but it is completely true. I have used their real names, and only the name of their village is disguised under its first letter. A.S./em/p pstrongValery/Valera (V)/strong strongaged 35/strong. nbsp;I was born in B., the village that I still live in. I didn’t do very well at school and went to work in the local collective farm and went on with my education at evening classes at the technical school. Sergei came to live in the village when I was in the ninth class, I think, and he was two years below me – just a kid. /p pstrongSergei/Seryoga (S)/strong strongaged 33/strong. Before that we lived in the next village, then my parents were given a house here so we moved./p pstrongV/strong Anyway, we met at school, and knew each other of course. But we had different friends. Even when I was in my last year we didn’t have much to do with each other. Everybody went to the disco, of course, but my friends and I didn’t hang out with the younger crowd./p pstrongS/strong We became mates when we started working together at the farm, but we also happened to live opposite one another – those were the houses we were given – so we got friendly as neighbours. He had a wife and kids, so did I. He seemed like a good bloke, our wives were friends as well, our children went to the same nursery. We did birthdays together, all that sort of stuff that neighbours do./ppimg src=//opendemocracy.net/files/red_0.jpg alt= width=460 //pp class=image-captionspanPhoto: Flickr/Kuba Luchtaj. Some rights reserved./span/ppstrongV/strong I started dating Yana after we left school. I wasn’t that keen on her. She was a nice girl but I wasn’t interested in getting married. But then she got pregnant. ‘It’s yours!’ she said. My mum hit the roof: ‘you’ve got to marry her’. So we got married, and two years later another baby came along. We didn’t do a lot of the lovey-dovey stuff – the sex was good at the start, but then we started having problems. Apart from that she was okay – did the cooking and washing, looked after the kids, didn’t nag me too much, let me have a drink as long as I didn’t overdo it. /p blockquotepem'How can I put it? I was just never attracted to girls. I got so scared when I was about thirteen and we were all changing for PE, and I realised that I really liked looking at other boys’ bodies.'/em/p/blockquotepNot like Seryoga’s hell-cat – she’d have hysterics if he had a few too many. She was a real pain in the arse, that one. Sorry, Seryoga, I know you don’t like me saying it, but you picked yourself a really fucked-up bitch. My wife didn’t like me having a night out with the lads, which I liked doing, and, yea, she got cross about that. But she was okay about everything else, understanding. nbsp;/p pstrongS/strong Yea, but what do you want – there she is, getting on with her life, then one day she opens the bathhouse door, and there we are! Your Yana found out about it all later, but she didn’t see that, it’s easier for her. My Katya went ballistic, yea, but you can understand it. Though she was the nervous type, that’s true. But she could have locked us in there and set fire to the place. So don’t you go slagging her off like that. I don’t swear a lot, but I don’t like it when he starts in on Katya.../p pstrongV/strong He’s a big pussy.nbsp; /p pstrongS/strong Fuck off./p pstrongV/strong Anyway, It’s not easy to explain how it all started. You know what it’s like for blokes – you get a boner, that’s it, end of. You can’t say it’s an illness – not very logical, is it? It’s what cocks do. Like I said, sex with Yana was fine at the start, but then I started having problems getting it up. I always had lots of other girlfriends as well, but then that started going wrong too. Also, I had always wanted to try anal sex, but all the girls were, like, ‘that’s disgusting’. Yana as well. Seriously, they all called me a pervert. I often tried to do get my wife to do it, and she’d joke – ‘what are you, some kind of gay?’ But what’s the problem? Sex is sex. If she’d been up for it I might not have left her. But Seryoga muddied the whole situation – one night when we were drinking he pressed himself against me in the yard. At the time I didn’t push him away. Then afterwards I thought, what was that about? I was totally gobsmacked, but then I thought, what the hell, it was ok, I didn’t mind, there were all these feelings and thoughts going through my head and I actually quite enjoyed them. /p pstrongS/strong I always preferred men’s bodies. I think now that if I’d grown up in a city, where there’d be other people like that, it would have come to the surface earlier. But who could I talk to about it here? My mother wouldn’t get it, and even if I’d had a more understanding wife she wouldn’t have either. And my father is a typical rough country bloke. But I’m different. I know I’m an uneducated tractor driver, but I’m not stupid. I was just too lazy to learn. How can I put it? I was just never attracted to girls. I got so scared when I was about thirteen and we were all changing for PE, and I realised that I really liked looking at other boys’ bodies. I didn’t think about sex at all, but when, you know, we were at the disco and all the boys were joking, like, that girl’s got nice tits or a nice bum, I realised that turned them on, but I didn’t get it myself. And that did scare me, but I thought, well, that’s life.nbsp; /p pIt was Katya who came on to me. She came to work at the farm, as a bookkeeper, and we got together. She was nice but I didn’t feel anything in particular. I don’t want to talk about having sex with her – we have kids, that’s all. It’s like, I could get it up okay, but there was something missing. Plus the feeling that I actually preferred men’s bodies just kept getting stronger. But I didn’t fancy anyone here in the village. The boys at school were one thing, but I wasn’t attracted to any of the men. Except maybe Valera – I liked him. But otherwise, well, I’d be watching a film and there’d be lots of good looking men in it, and I liked them better. I could think of a lot I’d like to do with them. And I wasn’t having a lot of sex with my wife, and she didn’t even ask why. She probably thought I was too tired after work, and that suited me fine. The thing was I was always looking at men, although what could I do about it in the village? So I just pretended everything was okay. /p pstrongV/strong Stop wittering on and tell her how you made me gay. /p pstrongS/strong I didn’t do a thing to you. You didn’t beat me up after I hugged you, did you? Anyway, I noticed Valera as soon as we started work, and he was my big fantasy figure all those years. My first and last. Look at him; he’s tall, he had a good body and he was a cheery kind of guy. Every time I saw him I realised what was happening to me. In the summer when he took off his shirt, I could feel myself getting aroused. I really fancied him. I was never really attracted to Katya, but now I knew exactly what I was after. I controlled myself, but it was getting more fucking terrible every day. I don’t swear much, but how else could you say it? I got more and more worked up, couldn’t control myself any longer. That’s basically why I got so drunk that night. But as Valera said, what can you do if you’ve got a stiffy? nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/p pIt was the day of the Nepochilovichs’ daughter’s wedding. The whole village was having a party. I got really hammered and the thought came to me: what the hell – if he beats me up can always hang myself. That’s genuinely what was going through my head. I realised that bloody hell, here I was, I was 31 and there’s finally someone who I want. It was the first time understood what it was to want somebody. I’d listened to blokes talking before and never knew what they were on about. But here was a man. And if something had gone wrong, I really would have topped myself, because how could I go on living after that? So I called him out of their house, there’s a garden behind it and I took him there. He was drunk as well and didn’t seem to care where I was taking him. Then I pulled him towards me, and he didn’t push me away. /p pstrongV/strong Well, we clung to each other, then I broke away, shouted that he was really fucked-up, or something like that, and ran away. Shit, it sounds pretty funny – a grown bloke running away, but that’s what I did. /p pstrongS/strong But at that point I really relaxed. I realised that he had totally tensed up and that he was aroused as well. I thought, I don’t give a damn what happens now. At least I didn’t have to hang myself. /p pstrongV/strong Yea, I was totally gobsmacked by it. Okay, so I was drunk, but I knew exactly whatnbsp; was happening and I was fine with it. Of course after that we stopped talking. We’d say hello, but without even looking at each other. That went on for six weeks or so, but I’d keep remembering it and how good it had been. And the scary thing was that whenever I had sex with Yana it was him I was thinking about. And I kept worrying about why he’d done it then and had been avoiding my eyes since. It was him, after all, that had come on to me. Then I would think, well he was pretty plastered as well, though not enough to go and hit on another bloke. He had to have done it on purpose, the filthy queer. But I was also fantasising about him big time. We didn’t hold back for long. I went and asked him to help me fix the boiler in my bathhouse the next Sunday, when my wife and kids would be away visiting her mother. Okay, I thought, let’s see what happens. And that’s when everything did happen. /p pstrongS/strong Afterwards we were lying there and talked a bit about it all. I told him about my feelings, just like I’ve told you just now, and he told me about his fantasies. You certainly couldn’t call it a case of love at first sight – we didn’t go off and buy rings, at work we carried on as usual – and we met now and then in his bathhouse. It was so good to be together, but we had no ideas about living together. Then Katya caught us in the bathhouse; she was highly strung at the best of times and now she completely lost it. We were totally fucked. She told Valera’s wife and went around telling the whole village about how we were perverts. Then she took the kids and went off to live with her mother, and Valera’s wife followed suit. In fact we don’t even know where his children are now, or where Yana is. My wife won’t let me come near her mother’s house. I’ve tried to visit, but all I get is tears and hysterics. /p blockquotepem'So it turns out we abandoned our kids for a bit of cock. And I suppose we did. But nobody wanted to abandon anybody. There are enough families where the husband has a girlfriend. Only this time it’s a boyfriend. If Katya had found me with some Masha or other, do you think there’d have been a problem?'/em/p/blockquote pstrongV/strong I think Yana had a boyfriend anyway, I’m sure of it. We just don’t know where she went, and even if we did, the situation would be the same as Seryoga’s. Anyway, given that they had fucked off, we thought we may as well live together. Everybody knows about us, we’ve got nothing to hide. And we only have each other now. /p pstrongS/strong So it turns out we abandoned our kids for a bit of cock. I suppose we did. But the point is that nobody wanted to abandon anybody. We could have gone on just as before, if they hadn’t made such a fuss. There are enough families where the husband has a girlfriend. Only this time it’s a boyfriend. If Katya had found me with some Masha or other, do you think there’d have been a problem? But now we have a melodrama. But it’s not for me to judge – I’ve no idea how I would have reacted if I’d seen my wife with another woman. But once it all came out, there was no option but to split up, and we’ve been left all alone together. /p pstrongV/strong We should probably have all lived together, instead of which we’re all living apart. Everything just blew up in our faces. We were too scared – how can you live here with another man, and all that sort of stuff. Are we gay or not – who knows? I used to enjoy sex with a woman, though he says he never did – but I’m different, supposedly straight. Although it’s true I don’t fancy women any more. So if liking sex with another bloke makes you gay, then I’m gay. And we get on well, living together, we were always mates, after all. It’s no big deal: we work, we know how to cook, we’ve just done some decorating. We’ve been together now like this for two years, and everything’s fine./p blockquotepem'Are we gay or not – who knows? I used to enjoy sex with women, though he says he never did – but I’m different, supposedly straight. Although it’s true I don’t fancy women any more. So if liking sex with another bloke makes you gay, then I’m gay.'/em/p/blockquote pIt’s a pity about the children – that’s the only thing. And we don’t know what we can do about it. We never meant to abandon them, it’s just that everything came out and that was it – they were gone. It’s not even as though we’re, like, in love, romantically. Yes, we want to sleep together. But we didn’t want to abandon our kids and break up our families, and that’s what happened. You can see for yourself. I don’t want to even talk about the scenes our wives made, how everyone was crying, and my wife stood there with the children and told them their dad was a pervert and described in detail why that was the case. I was ready to kill the bitch, and not even because she was lying to them, but did she have to traumatise them like that? And Seryoga’s wife kept shouting that he had more or less dreamed all his life about raping his son. So we had that shit to deal with as well. /p pstrongS/strong But now, I’m closer to Valera than to anyone. We’re not all sopspanpy and romantic about each other – we’re too old for that sort of thing. But I love him. What’s not to love? He’s my family. nbsp; nbsp;nbsp;/span/p pstrongimg src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/farm.jpg alt= width=460 //strong/pp class=image-captionPhoto: Flickr / Alexander Kuznetsov/ppstrongV/strong You know, if anyone had told me this would happen, I’d have beaten his fucking face in. But here we are. And the village? The village has accepted it. Well, when I say that... If you mean, does anybody say nasty things about us – there hasn’t been anything like that. But then, this is a dead village, there’s nobody here but pensioners. The old dears found it a bit weird, of course: they huffed and puffed and wagged their fingers at us, ‘What’s going on, Valerka, it seems you’re living together as husband and wife?’ But they soon go used to it – ‘well, what’s the harm, you’ve had your kids, that’s what matters for us women – children, grandchildren and so on.’ In other words, we’d done our duty, so we could be forgiven for our fucking. /p pstrongS/strong At the time, in the heat of the moment, it was hell on wheels, with my wife running round the village in hysterics. But then it all died down. People here have enough problems – a sick cow, kids not coming to visit, pensions not paid, everything’s getting dearer. They can’t spend their lives huffing and puffing at us. /p blockquotepem'The old dears found it a bit weird, of course: they huffed and puffed and wagged their fingers at us. But they soon go used to it...' /em/p/blockquote pstrongV /strongBasically, no one gives a fuck now. We can handle the other blokes at work. They asked, of course, ‘What the fuck have you been up to, lads?’ But we said we weren’t going to discuss it with anybody –it was none of their damned business. And if there’s any trouble, we can give as good as we get. No one’s been hanging around in doorways waiting to beat us up. And if they did – well, look at us, we’re not exactly wimps. /p pstrongS/strong We weren’t even worried about stuff at work. Our boss has his own problems. There’s one tractor for the whole collective farm; it’s autumn, but there’s no digger to dig up the potatoes. And the guys at district headquarters are doing his head in. So he doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. My wife, when she was rushing around, she went to see him as well, asked him to do something – scare us, make us see sense. But what was it to him? It’s not my Katya who’ll get into trouble over the tractor. He’s a practical bloke, in other words. /p pstrongV/strong There was one other crazy old girl – whenever she saw us she’d cross herself and start yelling some prayer or other to the whole street. And it’s like any village here, the old dears all sit on their benches watching the world go by. And there she was screaming at the top of her voice, making an exhibition of herself. She’d always been a bit touched. She’s passed on now. We even dug her grave. No point in getting offended by her – she was a sick woman. But the best bit was that a priest came from town, to bless the house, he said. And you, he said, looking at us, need to go to church. God, he said, had left us, and started going on about Satan. I didn’t want to curse at him, but he was really pissing me off. Seryoga here is more laid back, but he got on my tits and I told him to fuck off. And I said that if he ever came back I would beat his face in. I don’t believe in God, and neither does Seryoga.nbsp; /p pI never had anything against gays – I would never slag them off or anything. Basically I don’t care who sleeps with who. If there’s violence involved, or people try to do it with children who are too young to understand, that’s different - I’d line them up and shoot them. And anyway, I don’t think I ever saw anybody gay. Sometimes kids come here to visit their grannies and you wouldn’t know from the back whether it’s a boy or a girl. They all look the same, all these tight jeans and weird colours. So now gays look more like girls, is that it? I can’t say I like it if a lad looks like a lass – that’s some kind of bollocks. But sex is about two people, right? What we get up to in the bedroom is my own business and nobody else’s.nbsp; /pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-read-on div class=field-label 'Read On' Sidebox:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pa href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/gays-in-belarus-face-repr_0_n_2697873.html'Gays in Belarus Face Reprisals for Activism'/a by Yuras Karmanau, span class=bold color_1A1A1AFebruary 15, 2013, Associated Press. /span/ppa href=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/26/russia_gay_cruising_moscow_fiks'Gay in the USSR'/a by Nora FitzGerald, May 26, 2013, emForeign Policy/em. /ppspan class=bold color_1A1A1Abr //span/ppnbsp;/p /div /div /div div class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/od-russia/elena-fanailova/sexually-liberated-or-just-badly-brought-upSexually liberated, or just badly brought up?/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/od-russia/kathryn-dovey/russia-enshrining-homophobiaRussia: enshrining homophobia/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/od-russia/igor-kochetkov/pride-prejudice-%E2%80%94-just-%E2%80%98don%E2%80%99t-say-gay%E2%80%99-in-russiaPride, prejudice — just ‘don’t say gay’ in Russia/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/valerie-hopkins/lgbt-violence-in-balkansLGBT violence in the Balkans/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Belarus /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pRouhani’s positive reputation among western powers when he led Iran’s nuclear negotiations provides Khamenei, if he wants, with the pretext for greater flexibility at this critical point.strong/strong/p /div /div /div pOn 15 June 2013, a moderate, soft-spoken cleric became Iran’s next president-elect after capturing, in just one round of elections and by a threefold margin over the nearest candidate, an absolute majority of the eligible votes. Although he had campaigned profusely on a platform of greater freedoms, moderation and engagement with the international community, there was little evidence of regime-engineered fraud or violence of the type that bedevilled the 2009 elections. So what exactly was it in the Islamic Republic’s byzantine politics that we just witnessed?nbsp;/p pLast month, when the twelve-man Guardian Council – half elected jurists, half non-elected clerics – announced the final slate of candidates for Iran's 11th presidential elections, the shortlist had been painstakingly pruned down from 686 hopefuls to just six mostly well-known hardliners versus two relatively lesser known moderates. For Iranians desiring real change and notably those who identified with 2009's abortive Green Movement, the flagrant exclusion of the last minute candidacy of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani – a former president, arguably Iran's most powerful individual after Ayatollah Khamenei, but one many perceive capable of redeeming the economy and closing the gaps with the international community – was another slap in the face./p pThe rejection might have been anticipated. Rafsanjani didn’t only fall out with the ruling ultraconservatives (or ‘principlists’) and particularly his one-time buddy Khamenei in recent years - he openly backed the reformists in 2009, an act so anathema it would exact its political pound of flesh from him. Meanwhile, the election campaign revved into full gear with much of the initial focus shifting onto Saeed Jalili, the abstrusely doctrinaire, one-legged chief nuclear negotiator andnbsp;Khamenei’s presumed favourite, who in response to Iran’s thickening crisis grandly offered even more ‘resistance’./p pThen mere days before the elections, two candidates bowed out. Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, a former speaker of parliament and the father-in-law of Khamenei’s son Mojtaba did so without endorsing any other candidate, not that it mattered since five others were still competing for the conservative vote. But it was the withdrawal of Mohammad Reza Aref, the erstwhile reformist vice-president under Mohammad Khatami, upon the latter’s prompting, that would change the entire equation by allowing moderates and potentially reformists to rally behind a single candidate: Hassan Rouhani./p pAnd this, contrary to expectations, was exactly what happened.nbsp;/p pWhile he has received critical public endorsement from Rafsanjani and Khatami, and has held sensitive posts in key security and political institutions (he was a former nuclear envoy under the Khatami government and ex-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and is still a member of the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council), the 64 year-old Rouhani is remarkable in being thenbsp;onlynbsp;cleric, and unlike the runner-up and Tehran’s popular mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, possesses little technocratic experience in economic issues – the key axis of electoral competition. This suggests that many more may have voted for him in protest against the status quo rather than in earnest./p pConsidering the type and state of competition Rouhani faced, this may not come as a surprise. Despite having consolidated their influence as a bloc by the time of the March 2012 parliamentary elections, the regime’s hardliners have increasingly succumbed to infighting of a very public and hence reflexively damaging sort. During Ahmadinejad’s second term, this disunity deepened when the president challenged the Supreme Leader over the firing of the intelligence minister, and further intensified when Ahmadinejad and his chief-of-staff and alter ego, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei entertained talk of direct communication with the Hidden Imam, which attracted inquisitorial denunciations of ‘deviancy’. During these elections, and let alone others, even the carefully strategized trilateral (or ‘2+1’) coalition comprising Ghalibaf, Haddad Adel and Velayati, the latter a longtime Iranian foreign minister and Khamenei’s foreign policy adviser, couldn’t find it in itself to unify behind one figure (whereas Haddad Adel withdrew, Velayati continued to compete with Ghalibaf until the end)./p pOf course, Supreme Leader Khamenei faces something of a dilemma given that he has been associated most closely with the ultraconservative-principlist camp. While he may be the ultimate arbiter in sensitive national security issues, including the nuclear dossier, his authority isn’t absolute despite his epithet, for it reposes on his ability to balance multiple and at times mutually adversarial interests, only one of which (albeit the most powerful) is the Revolutionary Guards. Furthermore, as Iran’s de facto ruler, he has evinced sufficient appreciation for legitimacy so much so that just days back, he even exhorted Iranians who aren’t supporters of the regime to the ballots simply for the sake of the country. The upshot of the painful fallout from the contested 2009 elections, which posed a grave challenge to Khamenei and the regime, was the lesson that became enacted into a merciless and highly exclusionary vetting mechanism by the Guardian Council this time round./p pGiven this fact and his inclusion in the final octet, Rouhani’s victory could even have been anticipated. But the truth is that the new president – and only hindsight will prove his reformist credentials – actually benefits Khamenei more than meets the eye. While not obsequious like Jalili or some of the other principlists might have been, Rouhani is still cut very much from the same establishment cloth and his positive reputation among western powers when he led Iran’s nuclear negotiations provides Khamenei with the pretext for greater flexibility at this critical point – that is, if he wants, for Khamenei’s motives are notoriously hard to decipher. The intervening downtime might also force greater unity among the principlists before the next electoral cycle.nbsp;/p pLet’s be clear. Rouhani’s presidency will in all likelihood not portend a change of direction that reformists and the more liberal moderates demand, so much as a change of tone. Moreover, for his victory to match its newly acquired political symbolism, Rouhani will have to scale a formidable wall of institutional and personal constraints, no cakewalk as every former president since the Islamic Revolution will attest to. But given the infernal desperation of Iranians andnbsp;the simple fact that he is no Ahmadinejad means that he might very well be starting off on the right foot already./pdiv class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Iran /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div div class=field-item even International politics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pDuring those rare moments when western media attention is turned to the country, it is usually with a focus on these security issues rather than on the democratic struggles of Mauritanian citizens.nbsp; /p /div /div /div pAlthough at this time there is no broadbased grass-roots movement in Mauritania campaigning on a national scale for democratic reform, there have been sustained protests and various forms of unrest across the West African country in recent months and years which have received scant international media attention.nbsp; /p pThese demonstrations reflect a range of social problems and discontent in the country at the moment, the results of which may well be determined by how (or whether) they are perceived and depicted by the wider region and world, as much as by how they are acted upon by citizens of that country.nbsp; Let’s briefly trace the trajectory of demonstrations which have taken place in the country since 2011, the main movements behind them and how they have progressed, cooperated and consolidated themselves over the past two years/p pOn January 17, 2011, a 43 year-old named a href=http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http://www.leparisien.fr/flash-actualite-monde/mauritanie-mecontent-du-regime-un-homme-s-immole-par-le-feu-a-nouakchott-17-01-2011-1231257.phpamp;title=%5B2%5DYacoub Ould Dahoud/a in front of the Presidential Palace in protest at the political situation in the country and what he perceived to be a concentration of power in the hands of President, Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz. nbsp;He died in a Moroccan hospital six days later, sparking public outrage and great interest in a href=http://dekhnstan.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/mauritanias-bouazizi-died-today/the manifesto he posted online/a before carrying out this act. nbsp; /p pA a href=https://www.facebook.com/m25fev?fref=tsyouth movement/a was also forming around this time to articulate the grievances of the largely educated but unemployed urban youth.nbsp; Dubbing itself the February 25 Movement, it was modelled loosely upon the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement, in that it made similar use of social media and sought to attract a wide cross-section of society to its cause./p pTheir first mobilisation took place after Friday prayers on February 25 and a href=http://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve468attracted over 3,000 people/a, the vast majority of whom camped out for the night in a square in the capital, Nouakchott.nbsp; Slogans of equality and national unity were common among those in attendance and in follow up demonstrations, as well as the now famous mantra of the Arab uprisings: “the people want the downfall of the regime.” nbsp;As protests continued throughout March and April, the government responded through a combination of concessions to protestors’ demands and heavy-handed tear gas dispersals of any persistent demonstrations.nbsp; These tactics seemed to have some effect, as the youth-led protests demanding political reform dissipated during the months of April and May, although this may also have been due to a a href=http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2011/04/20/97001-20110420FILWWW00652-mauritanieviolences-plusieurs-blesses.phpflaring of ethnic tension/a in the city, brought on by contested student union elections in Nouakchott University, as well as by the February 25 Movement’s tactical decision to a href=http://lissnup.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/mauritania-overview/refine, consolidate and recruit/a to their movement during the latter half of that year./p pOther social movements – which may or may not be tied into the regional ‘Arab Spring’ narrative but which have been equally if not more important in terms of social transformation in Mauritania – have made themselves known over the course of 2011 and into 2012.nbsp; Some of the most prominent and vocal of these have been: ‘Touche pas à ma nationalité,’ nbsp;a black African rights group which campaigns against the perceived racial discrimination embodied in the a href=http://www.fr.alakhbar.info/5609-0-Mauritanie-Tous-les-moyens-sont-bons-pour-ecarter-les-noirs-TPMN.htmlMay 2011 population census/a, and the status accorded to black African Mauritanians in general; a href=http://haratine.blogspot.ie/2013_06_01_archive.html‘l’Initiative pour le Resurgence du Mouvement Abolitionniste en Mauritanie’/a,(IRA-Mauritanie) an abolitionist organisation which campaigns against, and raises awareness about, the enslavement and social exclusion of a large portion ofnbsp; those who belong to the Haratine ethnicity in Mauritania; a href=http://www.fr.alakhbar.info/2462-0-Manifestations-ISERI-Trois-blesses-graves-aux-urgences.htmlTawassoul/a, an Islamist party legalised in 2007, which was vocal in condemning the violent repression and arrest of students of the Islamic Institute of Higher Studies and Research in January 2012.nbsp; These groups often face severe reprisals for their actions, with demonstrations being violently dispersed with tear gas and vocal members being imprisoned.nbsp; To what extent the struggles are linked with each other in the eyes of those waging them is unclear, although there have been signs in 2012 of increased co-operation between civil society groups and opposition parties.nbsp; /p pAt the beginning of March that year, the February 25 Movement, who had recently commemorated their first anniversary with a demonstration in the capital, organised a conference to discuss the political impasse faced by the country from a constitutional and legal perspective. nbsp;A broad range of civil society and trade union groups were represented, as well as a large coalition of opposition parties, named the ‘Coordination de l’opposition démocratique’ (COD).nbsp; The a href=http://lissnup.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/mauritania-mandate-expired/conclusions of the conference/a called into serious question the fundamental legitimacy of the regime.nbsp; An unequivocal call for President Abdel Aziz to step down was made less than two weeks later, with a href=http://lissnup.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/photo-essay-mauritania-mass-rally-12-march-2012/tens of thousands of people turning out/a for a mass demonstration in Nouakchott, organised by the COD and attended by an array of people and groups from different ethnic and societal backgrounds.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;/p pThere have also been signs in 2013 of an increase in solidarity and cooperation between campaign groups, such as a href=http://lissnup.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/m25fev-protest-a-valuable-lesson/a joint protest/a held by the February 25 Movement and black African rights groups, and the recent support offered by the a href=http://lauthentic.info/spip.php?article3917Islamist party Tawassoul/a to the anti-slavery campaign of IRA-M.nbsp; This gesture is of particular significance given that religious pretexts have often been used to justify slavery in Mauritania, and could be indicative of the direction things will take in the near future.nbsp; In turn, IRA-M. expressed its solidarity with the 7,000 dockworkers who went on strike in April in Nouakchott demanding better working conditions and an end to the corrupt relationship between the state and what it termed ‘feudal’ businessmen.nbsp; After a a href=http://www.fr.alakhbar.info/6559-0-Nouakchott---Port-de-lAmitie-Dispersion-violente-dune-manifestation-des-dockers-Photos.htmlviolent crackdown/a on workers by policenbsp;on April 22 failed to quell the movement, government a href=http://fr.alakhbar.info/6575-0-Nouakchott-Un-accord-entre-le-gouvernement-et-les-dockers-grevistes.htmlauthorities and protestors reached an agreement/a two days later, with the government acceding to a number of their demands.nbsp; However it remains to be seen whether this resolution will hold, in light of worker discontent with the recent decision of the executive board of the port to a href=http://www.taqadoumy.com/fr/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=3222:port-de-lamitie-des-millions-douguiyas-pour-les-lgrandsr-amp;catid=77:social-nouvellesamp;Itemid=420significantly increase/a its own members’ salaries.nbsp; More recently still, at the end of May, around 6,000 workers in the northern mining town of Zuouérat a href=http://lissnup.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/mauritania-photo-gallery-zouerate-uprising/took to the streets/a for several days to protest against their working conditions.nbsp; The governor was forced to flee when his office caught fire, and the Interior Minister was eventually flown in to calm the situation./p pThese protests have taken place within the context of a temporary power vacuum, as President Aziz had been in Paris for nearly a month, a href=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19938905allegedly receiving treatment/a for a bullet wound he sustained last Octobernbsp;after ‘accidentally’ coming under fire from members of his own army.nbsp; The concern and confusion which arose from the initial incident has resurfaced during this prolonged period of absence, and a href=http://www.fr.essirage.net/index.php/actualites/1914-coordination-de-lopposition-democratique--communiquewere vocalised/a by the COD in a press release on June 2.nbsp; His return to Mauritania comes at a time when municipal and legislative elections, having been stalled for two years, are being prepared for the month of October.nbsp; Whether or not these elections will go ahead as scheduled remains to be seen, as the a href=http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/security/2013/05/mauritania-suffers-war-mali.htmlspill over effectsnbsp;/aof the ongoing Mali crisis and the a href=http://magharebia.com/en_GB/articles/awi/features/2013/03/19/feature-03activities of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb/a in Mauritanianbsp;may pose significant logistical problems./p pnbsp;The aforementioned geo-political issues mean that social change in Mauritania may carry high stakes, in both national and regional terms.nbsp; And during those rare moments when western media attention is turned to the country, it is usually with a focus on these security issues rather than on the democratic struggles of Mauritanian citizens.nbsp; /p pThe resilience and persistence of those demonstrating is thus quite remarkable, in light of the absence of international scrutiny of government conduct when dealing with protestors.nbsp; Given the limited amount of internet access in the large and predominantly rural country, the potential for local protests about issues such as a href=http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/06/07/mauritanias-unprecedented-killer-heatwave/water shortages/a to be developed and tied into a wider national agenda of democratic reform may be somewhat limited.nbsp; However, there is certainly hope to be found in the burgeoning community of a href=http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/06/09/ahmed-jedou-blogging-for-change-in-mauritania/online blog and social media activists/a that is beginning to project these struggles into the global online sphere, making local grievances more widely known, and linking them to other struggles against oppression in the Maghreb, Middle East and beyond.nbsp;/pdiv class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Mauritania /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Culture /div div class=field-item even Democracy and government /div div class=field-item odd Ideas /div div class=field-item even International politics /div div class=field-item odd Internet /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd img src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Hicham Yezza - Editor-in-Chief - Ceasefire Magazine.jpg border=10 alt= hspace=10 height=80 align=left /While many praise the remarkable determination of Sahrawi activists to maintain the peaceful character of their struggle, others signal this as a key factor behind their failure to secure a just resolution. /div /div /div pIn Oct 2010 - before Tunisia, before Tahrir Square, before Occupy Wall Street and Gezi Park - was the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdeim_Izik_protest_campGdeim Izik/a protest camp in Western Sahara, a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/hicham-yezza/gdeim-izik-first-forgotten-spark-of-arab-uprisingsthe first, now forgotten, spark of the Arab Spring/a. For 28 days, thousands of Sahrawi men, women and children set up camp in the desert, a few miles outside the capital, Layyoune, in protest a href=http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/moroccowestern-sahara/report-2013against Morocco’s three-decades-long occupation/a, only to see their camp obliterated by Moroccan police and many of its a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/hicham-yezza/gdeim-izik-first-forgotten-spark-of-arab-uprisingsorganisers detained, allegedly tortured and sentenced to life in prison after speedy military court trials/a./p pAnd yet, in the three years since, despite hundreds of arrests, incarcerations, injuries, deaths, and countless systemic abuses, the international community’s apparent indifference towards the Sahrawi question has remained largely unperturbed. While media headlines this month have been heavily dominated by the deepening tragedy in Syria and the street clashes in Turkey, there has been a virtual silence regarding the demonstrations - possibly the biggest in Western Saharan history - that have shaken the country these past few weeks./p pHaving been recognised by the UN as under Moroccan occupation since 1975, the Sahrawi people have been, for forty years, waiting for an independence that seems to be forever receding beyond the horizon of possibilities. The international community carries an immense share of the responsibility for this. Even by its notoriously weak-kneed standards, the UN has proved shockingly impotent: having convinced the Polisario Front to lay down arms in 1991 with a promise of holding a self-determination referendum within a year, the UN has since been helplessly overseeing a 20-year long game of delaying tactics and obstructions by Morocco and its western allies. /p pEven worse, during that period Morocco has been busy consolidating “facts on the ground,” transposing as many of its own citizens - at great cost in financial enticements and subsidies - onto the occupied territories as it could get away with, in the hope of tipping the demographic balance the ‘right’ way before the referendum takes place./p pMoreover, despite Western Sahara being on the United Nations’ list of “non-self-governing territories” for decades, the UN’s mission in the country, a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINURSOMINURSO/a, has so far been the only one of its kind in history not to include a human rights monitoring and reporting component, due to staunch Moroccan opposition. Even more absurdly, Morocco has enjoyed a href=http://whatsinblue.org/2012/04/western-sahara-consultations.phpthe right to vet and amend/a the UN mission’s a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/17/western-sahara-forgotten-first-sourcereports before their publication/a. In April this year, the US floated a proposal for the annual UN Resolution renewing MINURSO’s mandate to include a href=http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2013/220an explicit Human Rights remit/a. The Moroccan response was swift and loud, marshalling a href=http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2013/Apr-23/214801-morocco-forces-change-to-un-text-on-w-sahara.ashx#axzz2WPWDFwe3the full extent of its diplomatic and political arsenal/a, including the cancellation of the ‘African Lion’ military training exercises it holds annually with the US. In the end, a href=http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2013/Apr-23/214801-morocco-forces-change-to-un-text-on-w-sahara.ashx#axzz2WPWDFwe3the strategy worked/a and the US relented, dropping its proposal./p pAlthough the resulting resolution, a href=http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2013/sc10986.doc.htmUNSC 2099 – passed by the UN Security Council on April 25/a this year, retained significant references to human rights, less than 24 hours later protesters were brutallynbsp;suppressednbsp;by Moroccan police, which wasnbsp;a href=http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/05/04/301686/rebels-condemn-moroccos-repression/accused of using excessive force/a by the Amnesty International representative. A week later, on May 4, thousands of Sahrawis took to the streets - waving flags and chanting pro-independence slogans - to demonstrate against the occupation as well as the UN’s meek surrender over UNSC 2099. /p pBy most accounts, the protests were peaceful and simply reiterated the call for the right to self-determination, yet they were brutally repressed again. A few days later, on May 9, as another mass protest was being organised on social media, the Moroccan police launched a wave of a href=http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE29/006/2013/enarrests, detentions and torture/a, aimed at nipping the growing movement in the bud. Meanwhile, several journalists who had been reporting on the ground were summarily deported. To the frustration of many, the events produced barely a blip on the international media’s radar. Last week, the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization a href=http://allafrica.com/stories/201306110995.htmlstarted its two week session/a to discuss a href=http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45138amp;Cr=western+saharaamp;Cr1=#.Ub3ZkvnWRqUthe Western Sahara situation/a (among others) with many observers considering the event a largely irrelevant bit of theatre./p pUltimately, as with so much in international politics, the struggle for Sahrawi independence continues to suffer from being on the ‘wrong’ side of the crude calculus of regional and global realpolitik. Indeed, nothing symbolises the cruelty of this predicament more than the irony of Sahrawis having to endure seeing the “Friends of Western Sahara” group at the UN containing one of the chief architects and enablers of their misfortune, France, which has remained a steadfast Moroccan ally on this question for much of the past three decades./p pAs many have noted, the geopolitical deck is too stacked against Western Sahara’s independence: the country’s considerable natural resources - notably its a href=http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/15/western-sahara-why-africa-last-colony-can-break-free/87jACxXfU5bVUtqEe6uyrM/story.htmlphosphate mines and fisheries, but also the potential for oil discoveries/a - ensure that Morocco will simply not relinquish its prized asset unless it comes under extraordinary pressure. /p pMoreover, Morocco’s role as one of the west’s most reliable allies has allowed it to position itself as a dependable centre of “stability” in a region of enormous upheavals and uncertainties. This is a framing that has been disseminated with especially renewed vigour in the aftermath of western interventions in Libya and Mali, often featuring absurd warnings that an independent Western Sahara represents a failed Islamist state in-waiting./p pMeanwhile, in a further irony, while many have praised the remarkable determination of Sahrawi activists to maintain the peaceful character of their struggle, others have signalled it as a key factor behind their failure to secure a just resolution. As Jenn Abelson a href=http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/15/western-sahara-why-africa-last-colony-can-break-free/87jACxXfU5bVUtqEe6uyrM/story.htmlrecently put it in the Boston Globe/a, “Western Sahara is emerging as a case study on the limits of the international community’s power to help a people win self-determination when they choose not to be violent, but to follow the rules.”/p pIndeed, numerous activists, a href=http://www.allvoices.com/news/14688817-africa-aus-unconditional-support-a-great-success-for-saharawi-people-aminatou-haidarnotably Aminatou Haidar/a, have warned that a new generation is fast running out of patience with this debilitating status-quo. Continuing prevarication and complacency on the part of the international community, they warn, could well see a catastrophic, possibly irrevocable, return to the pre-1991 era./p pAs the African Union a href=http://summits.au.int/en/21stsummit/50thcelebrates 50 years since its inception this year/a, it seems rather perverse that the continent is still afflicted with the most literal manifestation of colonialism. Until this stain is excised, Africa’s Last Colony will remain a damning testament to yet another abject failure of the international community to stand up for principles over interests./pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/nikolaj-nielsen/on-frontline-western-saharaOn the frontline - Western Sahara/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/opensecurity/security_briefings/111110Rights groups call for investigation into violence in Western Sahara/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/stephen-zunes/upsurge-in-repression-challenges-nonviolent-resistance-in-western-saharaUpsurge in repression challenges nonviolent resistance in Western Sahara/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/hicham-yezza/gdeim-izik-first-forgotten-spark-of-arab-uprisingsGdeim Izik: the first, forgotten spark of the Arab uprisings/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Morocco /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div div class=field-item even Economics /div div class=field-item odd Equality /div div class=field-item even International politics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd img src=http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/Rhiannon_Smith.jpg border=10 alt= hspace=10 height=80 align=left /Protests were motivated by what has become a two-year-long struggle to force Libya's powerful militias to hand over the reins of military power to the state security forces. Thirty-one people died on June 8. /div /div /div pOn Saturday June 8, 31 people lost their lives and at least 80 were injured when protestors in Benghazi surrounded the headquarters of the government-sanctioned Libya Shield brigade. They were protesting against the continued existence of the militia and demanding that Libya Shield submit to the authority of Libya's official armed forces. Exactly how the protest escalated is not clear, but most reports claim that the militia started firing on protestors as they attempted to overrun their headquarters./p pThe Benghazi deaths prompted the increasingly unpopular Major-General Youssef al-Mangoush to resign as Libya's chief of staff as he was directly responsible for putting the Libya Shield brigades on the government payroll and overseeing their activities. /p pThe scale and senselessness of this tragedy has shaken the country and a three day national mourning period was declared by the General National Congress (GNC) following the deaths. The protests were motivated by what has become a two-year-long struggle to force Libya's powerful militias to hand over the reins of military power to the state security forces, and the tragic demise of these protestors has underlined the corrosive effect that such 'official' armed groups are having on Libya's stability./p pIn the wake of the 2011 Revolution, Libya's transitional government was left with few means by which to impose its authority and maintain security given that its national army and police forces were still very much seen as the enemy. As a result Libya's victorious 'revolutionaries' were co-opted into filling Libya's security vacuum and a system of 'legal' militias evolved whereby armed groups nominally under the control of the government were given the authority to maintain law and order./p pIn the early days after the Revolution this system was widely accepted as a necessary stopgap while new recruits for the armed forces were trained and inducted, and most Libyans who had supported the revolution implicitly trusted these men as they were 'revolutionaries' and the heroes of the hour. However as time wore on, it became ever more apparent that with no revolution to fight, these largely autonomous groups of armed men were eschewing the needs and demands of the state in order to consolidate their own power, pursue their own agendas, and protect their interests. /p pAli Zeidan's government has attempted to bring these militias directly under the control of the state by recruiting former 'revolutionaries' into the fledging police forces and national army. However this process has been slow and in some cases has done little to assuage the influence of powerful individuals as many new recruits are still loyal to their militia commanders. That said in recent weeks newly graduated Libyan forces have been far more visible on the streets, especially in Benghazi, and this has put more pressure on the militias to justify their continued existence when there are legitimate forces which could start to take over their role./p pLibya is currently in a delicate stage of its transition. The state is weak, crippled by a deadlocked decision making process, political immaturity and a lack of institutional capacity, and there are many elements within Libya seeking to exploit this to their own advantage. While the constitution drafting process is finally moving slowly but surely forwards, there are many issues of injustice and inequality which have been swept underneath the rug in Libya's struggle for stability and progress./p pUltimately the Revolution was fought to achieve justice within Libyan society, and it was this noble cause which initially earned revolutionaries the trust and admiration of most Libyans. However, these same revolutionaries are now guilty of perpetuating that same culture of impunity and discrimination which they fought against, either directly through extra-legal interrogation, detention and punishment of suspects, or indirectly by undermining the ability of legitimate security forces to carry out their jobs./p pThere is now a clear and undeniable message from the Libyan people that they do not want these militias anymore. They want national security forces who are directly under the government's control and who can maintain rule and order according to the law, not according to their own interests or beliefs. Although most acknowledge that the Libyan forces are still very weak, the Benghazi tragedy has given added impetus to a desire for legitimacy over brute strength, especially when that strength is wielded against the Libyan people instead of in defence of them as was seen in Benghazi last week./pdiv class=field field-country div class=field-label Country or region:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Libya /div /div /div div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Democracy and government /div div class=field-item even International politics /div /div /div

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd pspanAs the politics of aid to lower income countries comes under greater a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/helen-tilley/politics-of-aid-pie-in-sky-or-feet-on-groundscrutiny/anbsp;/spanspanare the needs of the poor in middle income countries being missed? And as '/spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;big Pharma'nbsp;/spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;a href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/meri-koivusalo/free-trade-trade-creep-and-risks-to-our-public-healthflexes its muscles/anbsp;is enough being done to hold down skyrocketing vaccine prices to benefit those who need them most?nbsp;/spanspan style=line-height: 1.5;The latest controversy is between two organisations that have the same goal - to provide vaccines to citizens of poorer countries./span/p /div /div /div p class=MsoNormalspanThe debate on the skyrocketing price of vaccines is hotting up.emnbsp;/em/spanspana href=http://www.msf.org.uk/Medecins Sans Frontiers/a have recently criticised the a href=http://www.gavialliance.org/library/news/statements/2013/gavi-msf/Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization/a (GAVI) for removing vaccine subsidies from countries that remain in need of aid. GAVI - a public-private partnership between UN organisations, /spanspanthe vaccine industry and the Bill amp; Melinda Gates Foundation amongst others -/spanspan negotiates vaccine price reductions of up to 95% for developing countries. It also contributes to the cost of purchasing the vaccine. GAVI argues that withdrawing support from countries as their economic situation ensures their support is appropriately targeted. However, with a majority of the world’s poor living in middle income countries, does removing support from countries that make marginal economic advances really help those in greatest need?/span/pp class=MsoNormalspanIn 2015 17 countries will ‘graduate’ from GAVI support, due to marginal rises in their per capita income. These countries will see dramatic increases in the amount they need to pay to pharmaceutical companies for their vaccination programmes. MSF highlight the case of Honduras, which will see a 1000% increase in the amount it pays for PCV and rotavirus vaccines (which prevent meningitis, pneumonia, and severe gastrointestinal illness). The country currently pays $1.43 for the vaccines, but this will leap to $15.50 in 2015./span/pp class=MsoNormalspanThe problem with GAVI’s approach is that it ignores emdistribution/em of income. Countries with high levels of economic inequality may see rises in their per capita income, but that revenue remains concentrated within a small section of society. According to the /spanspana href=http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.05TH.20/countries/1W?display=defaultWorld Bank/a, Honduras has a href=http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/news/economy/global_income_inequality/index.htmthe world’s most unequal economy/a. Other countries set to lose GAVI support, such as Bolivia and Angola, are almost as unequal. By removing support from these countries, GAVI are making the poorest members of these countries liable for income enjoyed only by their wealthy elite./span/pp class=MsoNormalspanA /spanspana href=http://www.cgdev.org/doc/full_text/BottomBillion/Glassman_Bottom_Billion.htmlreport/a from the Center for Global Development has pointed out the problems with this approach: “New vaccines that are often available in low income countries, such as those against rotavirus, pneumococcal disease, and Hib, have yet to be introduced in many middle income countries.”/span/pp class=MsoNormalspanOne of the study’s authors, Amanda Glassman, /spanspana href=http://international.cgdev.org/blog/new-bottom-billion-implications-gavicriticised/a the withdrawal of GAVI support from lower middle income countries: “The sheer numbers of unvaccinated children may explain why we see frequent vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks in Lower Middle Income Countries and why it has been difficult to eliminate polio in some of these countries, for example.”/span/pp class=MsoNormalspanGlobally debate between NGOs, governments and pharmaceutical companies on how to make vaccines affordable is intensifying, as the costs charged by pharmaceutical companies skyrocket. The price of some vaccines has risen2700% in a decade. MSF’s vaccine policy adviser Kate Elder told the Global Vaccines Summit in /spanspana href=http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/health/experts-raise-red-flag-about-rising-cost-of-vaccinesApril 2013/a: “Looking at this upward trend we are highly concerned if things continue to go in this direction it will threaten the sustainability of immunization programmes.”/span/pp class=MsoNormalspanThis price rise is not entirely a like-on-like comparison: the number, quality and technology of vaccines have also seen significant improvements over the last decade. NGOs like MSF argue that such developments mean aneven greater need for collaboration between organisations to ensure that the financial and logistical challenges of supplying vaccines are met. The challenges of reaching remote communities, maintaining the ‘cold chain’ to preserve the vaccine, and being able to afford the medication mean that lives are threatened by organisational delays. /span/pp class=MsoNormalspanEven if GAVI will not contribute to the cost of purchasing the discounted vaccine with graduating countries, it has been suggested that they could at least allow certain governments to continue to purchase the vaccine for themselves, using the discounted rate negotiated by GAVI. /span/pp class=MsoNormalspanHowever, GAVI may be reluctant. Their unwillingness to extend the discounts they receive to other organisations has already been criticised by Medecins Sans Frontiers, who are /spanspana href=http://www.msfaccess.org/content/dear-gavi-campaigncampaigning/a for GAVI to allow MSF and other NGOs to have permission to access vaccine discountsnegotiated by GAVI. /span/pp class=MsoNormalspanIn response, GAVI /spanspana href=http://www.gavialliance.org/library/news/statements/2013/gavi-msf/said/a it was ‘addressing the issue’ but that it would be a lengthy process to avoid offending the pharmaceutical companies supplying the discounts. GAVI added“Obtaining such low price agreements with vaccines’ manufacturers for the world’s poorest countries is only possible when there are stable forecasts, long-term commitments to large volumes with secure financing agreements from donors and recipient governments working together. Any adjustment to the current way of working will require careful consideration and the support of key constituencies.” /span/pp class=MsoNormalspanMSF is arguing that GAVI has not been making enough progress, saying “We ask GAVI to fast-track this process so that MSF can vaccinate more kids as soon as possible.” As MSF and other NGOs are in a position to efficiently provide vaccines alongside their other medical services, their argument that allowing them access to GAVI’s discounts would save lives is persuasive./span/pp class=MsoNormalspanThe financial benefits of vaccination programmes are also significant, with a study from the a href=http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/default.htmCenter for Disease Control/a estimating that, for every dollar spent on vaccination programmes, six dollars are saved in direct medical costs. Including indirect costs of failure to vaccinate, such as loss of productivity, a dollar investment can create an eighteen dollar return. Furthermore, the World Health Organisation a href=https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=tamp;rct=jamp;q=amp;esrc=samp;source=webamp;cd=2amp;ved=0CDQQFjABamp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.who.int%2Fimmunization_supply%2Ffinancing%2Fvalue_vaccination_bloom_canning_weston.pdfamp;ei=3fC-UZ1iyabTBfDQgdAIamp;usg=AFQjCNEScPw1TOb9lzG13tmcrE0Spm4PKwamp;sig2=M0BJWwBnhQnAtVZJlusY3Qamp;bvm=bv.47883778,d.d2kestimates/a that 3 million people a year currently die due to vaccine-preventable diseases: decreasing the viability of vaccination programmes will worsen this situation./span/pp class=MsoNormalspanGAVI and many other organisations and governments have had notable successes in the fight to provide vaccination services. But without adequate strategies to ensure that ‘graduating’ countries and established NGOs can access the discounts negotiated by GAVI, the temperature of the debate is set to rise. /span/pp class=MsoNormalspannbsp;/span/ppnbsp;/pp class=MsoNormalspannbsp;/span/p

div class=field field-summary div class=field-items div class=field-item odd p‘How can we get peace and democracy when we still have domestic wars and when everyday people are dying?’ Jessica Nhkum spoke to Jennifer Allsopp at the a href=http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/our-blogs/women-beyond-war/?ref=18Nobel Women's Initiative conference/a in Belfast about the importance of documenting human rights violations, injustices and inequality on the ground in Burma/p /div /div /div pJA: Jessica, could you begin by introducing yourself and by telling us about your work with the Kachin Women’s Association? /ppJN: My name is Jessica Nhkum and I’m from the northern part of Burma. I belong to the Kachin ethnic group. I currently work with the a href=http://www.kachinwomen.com/index.phpKachin Women’s Association/a in Thailand as Joint General Secretary. Our organisation mainly works for the rights of women and children. It was founded in 1999 in Chang Mai, Thailand but 90% of our work is inside Burma. We operate the office outside Burma because it’s more convenient for our communications and advocacy work. If we were based inside Burma we wouldn’t be able to speak out and to publish the reports that we are publishing, such as our recent report, a href=http://www.kachinwomen.com/publications/reports/105-state-terror-in-the-kachin-hills-.htmlemState terror in the Kachin hills/em/a. /p pI joined the organisation in 2006 and straight away I learnt a lot that was new to me about the human rights violations, injustices and inequality that were going on inside Burma, especially in relation to women. I became very interested and started to feel that I also needed to work for women and for my country; to improve the place of women in our community. So I continued working with the organisation and now it’s been almost 8 years./p pJA: Can you tell me a bit more about the kind of human rights violations, injustices and inequality you encounter in your work, in particular in relation to women?/p pJN: In Burma there’s a strong hierarchy system and the government is, well, it’s a military government. The military government has been ruling now for over 60 years. There was a change in 2010 when the current government came to power, but this government is mostly made up of members of the former military government. I was talking at the a href=http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/our-blogs/women-beyond-war/?ref=18conference/a earlier about the high number of rape cases in Burma committed by the Burmese military soldiers. Women in the villages deal with these kind of cases and then, of course, they also face domestic violence. So we still need to empower women a lot in our country. Women are still afraid to speak out for themselves./p pAs well as being oppressed by the government and the military, in Burma women are also oppressed culturally. They are oppressed in their houses, in schools, and in the workplace. To attend a medical school in Burma, for example, a girl has to have higher grades than a boy. If the boy can get into medical school with a score of 500, the girl needs to have score of 520 or something like that. So this is one example of the kind of specific ways in which women are oppressed in Burma. When I was in Burma I didn’t know about these kinds of things. /p pThis kind of gender inequality is very common in our society. Whenever we pick somebody to talk at a public event – or round a family table - it’s almost always a man, and everybody is happy with that. They cheer. If it’s a woman who has been invited to speak then she finds herself in a difficult situation: it’s hard because she lacks the confidence. She’s been oppressed for many years. Often women don’t even dare to speak. /p pIn Burma the educational system and health services are also very bad because our government isn’t taking care of the people, and this also relates to gender inequality. The issue of reproductive health for women is especially difficult. We don’t have local clinics and there is hardly any awareness raising about reproductive health. As a result, at the moment there is a problem with unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and the transmission of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). We come across cases of abortions which have led to the deaths of women, and this is all down to poor access to healthcare. /p pOne area we work on at a href=http://www.kachinwomen.com/index.phpKWAT/a is capacity building so that we can train women and increase their awareness of their rights. We also tell them about opportunities to study, learn and work – we help them to find out who they are, what they’re interested in and what is good in themselves so that they can build their confidence to work. And then we also have a health programme. We have a clinic on the Burma -China border which provides mother and child care for free. What we do is just small, but we do what we can./p pJA: You were talking today on a panel about documentation techniques to increase survivors’ visibility. Could share some of what you were sharing with other participants today in your talk?/p pJH: I was talking about documentation because, as I said, we’re dealing with a lot of rape cases and cases of sexual harassment, also killings. These kinds of abuses are often perpetrated by individuals within the Burmese government military, so we document this data to seek justice. We don’t want to be quiet about these kinds of things. We know that this is happening and that the government has the responsibility to deal with it. We try to inform the international community that this is what is happening in Burma on the ground, in reality, right now. Most of the international community thinks that Burma is really changing now, but we want to show them that it’s not really changing that much in ethnic areas, so be careful in your judgement, please! /p pThe human rights violation documentation work is very important in this sense because if we just talk and talk and don’t have any evidence then how can people believe us?/p pThe truth is that the current government is still the military government and we don’t want to be going backwards. In Kachin state, the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and the Burmese military are still fighting, so how can we get peace and democracy when we still have domestic wars and when everyday people are dying? There are over 100,000 internally displaced people alone in the Kachin and Northern Shan State.nbsp; There’s no plan for these people – to help them to go back to their homes and have a normal life. /p pJA: What are the main challenges, and strategies that you have developed, in terms of getting your evidence recognized and acted upon?/p pWell getting evidence in the first place is very difficult. First we need to empower our community through trainings. We need to say that ‘these things are violations’ and also explain, ‘look, we need to speak up for ourselves!’ So that is why we collect the information and continue doing our work in this way in an effort to change our country./p pThen, the evidence is not always recognized at the local or national level. There was a case in the wartime, I spoke about it earlier. The Burmese military, the soldiers, they took a woman to their barracks and then she disappeared. This was in 2011. The villagers said ‘oh she was dead, we saw she was with no clothes in the barracks. She’d been raped.’ She was dead, just like that. Of course we didn’t see it ourselves, but the girl’s husband and father-in-law appealed a letter to the Kachin State court and also to the Myanmar Supreme Court .They didn’t get a reply. So in Burma it’s still very difficult to work to find justice, even though we’re facing violations every day. One of our colleagues is currently making a documentary film about the case to raise awareness. I think it will come out on a href=http://www.kachinwomen.com/publications/reports/105-state-terror-in-the-kachin-hills-.htmlour website/a soon. /p pJA: The Nobel Women’s Initiative, which is hosting this a href=http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/our-blogs/women-beyond-war/?ref=18conference/a, was set up by a group of female Nobel Peace Prize laureates.nbsp; Does having a female Nobel Peace Laureate from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, impact on your work?/p pJN: Actually, when Aung San Suu Kyi was in jail we hoped that when she was released she’d work for women’s human rights a lot. The problem is that now she is cooperating with the government and she works in the parliament. Her party, the National League for Democracy (a href=http://www.nldburma.org/NLD/a), only holds 6% of the parliament and even the military gets 25% of seats, so I’m not sure how she can convince lots of people in the parliament to change the laws. In our constitution, in order to adopt a law and to change a law you need over 75% of people to agree. If the military permanently has 25% of seats, how can we get over 75% to agree on certain reforms? I’m not sure that of the 25% even 5% will say yes. So this is a big challenge for her. /p pBut actually it’s very good to have Aung San Su Kyi as a Nobel Woman for our country. I was saying to my friends from Burma last night that it’s great that here, at this conference, we can talk freely, discuss, think and ask questions to the Nobel Women from other countries, 6 of them, and they’re so friendly! I learn from them and I get encouragement from them because they are strong and they also give very specific advice. I would really like Aung San Su Kyi to talk like this to the young women human rights workers, so they can learn from her and also so that she can suggest how we can work and talk together./p pBecause, you know, sometimes if we work and work and work we feel tired, and then we want to stop. At this kind of a href=http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/our-blogs/women-beyond-war/?ref=18conference/a we see people who are trying so hard and no matter how hard the situation is they gain successes, and then that makes you think, ‘Ok! We still need to try, we need to mobilise our community even more than we do now’./ppemRead more articles and interviews by Jennifer Allsopp reporting fornbsp;/ema href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050emopenDemocracy 5050/em/aemnbsp;from the Nobel Women's Initiative conferencenbsp;/ema href=http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/2013/05/announcing-moving-beyond-militarism-war-an-international-conference/?ref=18emMoving Beyond Militarism and War: Women-Driven Solutions for a Nonviolent World,/em/aemnbsp;/ememBelfast, Northern Ireland. Read 50.50'snbsp;/ema href=http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/nobel-womens-initiative/nobel-womens-initiative-2013emfull coverage/em/aemnbsp;of the conference../em/pfieldset class=fieldgroup group-sideboxslegendSideboxes/legenddiv class=field field-related-stories div class=field-labelRelated stories:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/jennifer-allsopp/women-human-rights-defenders-activisms-front-lineWomen human rights defenders: activism#039;s front-line/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/amina-mama/challenging-militarized-masculinitiesChallenging militarized masculinities/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/leymah-gbowee/leymah-gbowee-five-words-for-men-of-libyaLeymah Gbowee: five words for the men of Libya/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/heather-mcrobie/patriarchy-and-militarism-in-egypt-from-street-to-governmentPatriarchy and militarism in Egypt: from the street to the government/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/ndeye-marie-thiam/women-of-senegal-agents-of-peaceWomen of Senegal: agents of peace /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/torunn-wimpelmann/problematic-protection-law-on-elimination-of-violence-against-women-in-afghanProblematic protection: the law on Elimination of Violence against Women in Afghanistan /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/nazik-kabalo/call-of-sudanese-women-human-rights-defendersThe call of Sudanese women human rights defenders /a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/jennifer-allsopp/peacebuilding-and-nation-state-towards-nonviolent-worldPeacebuilding and the nation-state: towards a nonviolent world/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/isabel-hilton/peacework-lessons-we-have-failed-to-learn-0Peacework: lessons we have failed to learn/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/jennifer-allsopp/militarism-and-non-state-actors-%E2%80%98-other-invasion%E2%80%99Militarism and non-state actors: ‘the other invasion’ /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/madeleine-rees/sexual-violence-access-to-justice-and-human-rightsSexual violence, access to justice, and human rights/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/heather-mcrobie/from-war-on-terror-to-austerity-lost-decade-for-women-and-human-rightsFrom the war on terror to austerity: a lost decade for women and human rights/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/valerie-hudson/foundation-of-human-security-in-every-societyThe foundation of human security in every society/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/democracy-fifty/meaning_century_4670.jspThe meaning of peace in the 21st century/a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/fear-and-fury-women-and-post-revolutionary-violenceFear and fury: women and post-revolutionary violence/a /div div class=field-item even a href=/5050/naila-kabeer/grief-and-rage-in-india-making-violence-against-women-historyGrief and rage in India: making violence against women history? /a /div div class=field-item odd a href=/5050/jennifer-allsopp/to-culture-of-peace-from-culture-of-warTo a culture of peace from a culture of war/a /div /div /div /fieldset div class=field field-topics div class=field-labelTopics:nbsp;/div div class=field-items div class=field-item odd Civil society /div div class=field-item even Conflict /div div class=field-item odd Equality /div /div /div