Mission & Justice

Adam Cresswell; 6/8/08

Straight couples are much more likely to transmit HIV during sex than most people realise, with new research showing the true risk may be hundreds of times higher than official guidelines suggest. Doctors and patients are told that on average only one heterosexual transmission of the AIDS virus would be expected for every 1000 sexual contacts, assuming one partner was HIV-positive and the other negative. But US researchers have told a world meeting of HIV experts in Mexico that the true figure could be as high as one transmission for every 10 instances of vaginal sex.

(more…)

5/8/08

The widening gap between rich and poor in Asia’s booming economies is leaving many mothers and children behind and putting children’s lives at risk, according to a new UN report. The UN’s report on the state of Asia’s Pacific’s children, released on Tuesday, highlighted growing concerns that children in India and China continue to suffer despite their countries’ economic gains. “The divide between rich and poor is rising at a troubling rate within sub-regions of Asia Pacific, leaving vast numbers of mothers and children at risk,” the report from Unicef, the UN children’s agency, said.

(more…)

25/7/08

Executions jumped by a third in Iran and quadrupled in Saudi Arabia last year, causing the total number of executions around the world to rise yet again in 2007, a human rights group reported Thursday. It said China remained far in front as the world’s top executioner. The Rome-based Hands Off Cain, which campaigns to stop the death penalty, said that while countries were increasingly renouncing the death penalty, more people were put to death in 2007 than in either of the previous two years. In all, the number of executions increased last year to at least 5,851, compared with 5,635 in 2006 and 5,494 in 2005, the group said in its annual report. The gradual trend of abolishing capital punishment continued, with 49 countries retaining the death penalty, compared with 51 in 2006 and 54 in 2005. Only 26 countries that have capital punishment on their books actually used it in 2007, down from 28 in 2006, the report said. China alone accounted for at least 5,000 executions, the rights group estimated, based on reports by the media and other human rights groups. The exact number of executions in China remains a state secret. This was the same estimate the group gave for China last year.

(more…)

Lindsay Murdoch; 12/7/08

An Australian investigator has named Indonesian military officers responsible for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor in 1999, including acts of torture in which victims were forced to eat their own ears. David Savage delivered a key report to the Indonesia-East Timor Truth and Friendship Commission that was scathing of Indonesian authorities who have for years denied responsibility for violence that left at least 1400 Timorese dead. Mr Savage says in the report, which has been obtained by The Age, that there was “an explicit policy by the Government of Indonesia, at least the military branch”, to use and support militia groups to intimidate, coerce and even kill civilians in favour of rejecting Indonesia’s rule at a UN-supervised referendum.

(more…)

9/7/08

The head of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (RCCI) Recruitment Committee, Waleed Al-Soweidan, has criticized a report by the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the ill treatment of housemaids in the Kingdom, saying the report is based on only “a few cases in which domestic helpers have suffered.” In its 133-page report, entitled “If I Am Not Human: Abuses Against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia,” released yesterday, the HRW called for sweeping labor and justice reforms and for stricter punishment for sponsors who abuse workers. “Saudi families are abusing female migrant workers to the point of slavery and Riyadh needs to respond with sweeping labor and justice reforms,” the report stated. “There are more than a million domestic helpers, including maids, in the Kingdom and it is natural that there will be some problems and disputes here and there,” said Al-Soweidan.

(more…)

Joseph A. Kechichian; 26/6/08

…The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices preceded these publications, going back to the early 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter elevated human rights concerns to the policy level.  In all of these reports, including the ones that displayed blatant misinformation, an effort was made to let facts speak for themselves. Starting in the late 1990s, a slew of new areas of concern emerged, including religion - with the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom -and now human trafficking. The June 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report, a 295 pages document available at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/, is in its eight edition and seeks to address a deadly serious issue. Human trafficking means the actual trade in persons, which is akin to modern-day slavery, as its victims are clearly forced into labour or sexual exploitation. The detailed report estimates that approximately 600,000 to 800,000 individuals are made to involuntarily cross national borders to satisfy criminal gangs each year.To be sure, trafficking in people is wrong, and using physical force is neither pleasant nor victimless. Whenever someone is enslaved - readers are encouraged to consult the original to better understand heart-breaking cases - we all lose part of our humanity.

(more…)

20/6/08

Antarctic whales are threatened by shrinking foraging zones and the need to swim hundreds of kilometres further to find food because of climate change, a WWF report says. Species such as the minke whale, favoured by Japanese hunters, face dramatic changes to their habitat in little over an individual whale’s lifespan, the report says. The report, Ice breaker: Pushing the Boundaries for Whales, has been released just ahead of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Chile next week. It summarises WWF research showing levels of global warming predicted over the next 40 years will lead to winter sea-ice coverage of the Southern Ocean declining by up to 30 per cent in some key areas.

(more…)

8/6/08; http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-leads-the-world-on-prisoner-numbers-20080607-2n96.html

The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch says. This means an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared with 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, the organisation said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures released yesterday. The figures show a sharp racial imbalance in the US prison population, with blacks outnumbering whites by six to one. Nearly 11% of black men aged 30-34 are in prison, according to Justice Department figures. Human Rights Watch said blacks were 12 times more likely to be jailed for drug-related crimes than whites, though drug use was about the same in the two races. “Although whites, being more numerous, constitute the large majority of drug users, blacks constitute 54% of all persons entering prisons with a new drug offence conviction,” it said.

Dewi Cooke; 29/5/08

The Federal Government’s intervention in indigenous communities has earned Australia scorn in this year’s Amnesty International global human rights report. The intervention occurred “without adequate consultation” and resulted in a lack of control by indigenous people over their own lands, the report found. “The fact that the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended with respect to the intervention is of particular concern to us, it’s a breach of international law,” Amnesty campaigns manager Andrew Beswick said. Detailing the human rights performances of 150 countries, the report criticised a Queensland court for “inappropriately” bringing matters of consent into the rape trial of a 10-year-old Aboriginal girl after a prosecutor characterised the incident as “childish experimentation”. Nine males charged with the rape were later given non-custodial sentences.

(more…)

Mike Pflanz; 28/5/08

Sexual abuse of children as young as six by aid workers and United Nations peacekeepers has continued unchecked despite repeated promises to stamp it out, according to a 12-month investigation published yesterday. The study by charity Save the Children UK said there were significant levels of abuse in emergencies, much of it unreported. Unless the silence ended, attempts to stamp out exploitation would “remain fundamentally flawed”. The UN is investigating claims against its soldiers in hotspots such as Haiti, Liberia, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the report said official UN statistics appeared to underestimate the scale of abuse, probably because so much went unreported.

(more…)