To Save the Forests, Protect the People: Daily Brief

A landmark European Union anti-deforestation draft law will be working its way through the European Parliament and EU member states in the coming months. The law aims to restrict imports of key agricultural commodities – cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, soy and wood – grown on land that was deforested after 2020.  The proposal does, however, have a crucial flaw: it doesn’t compel businesses to uphold international standards with regard to land rights. Globally, industrial agriculture is the chief driver of forest loss, and environmental destruction is often entangled with rights abuses against forest-dependent communities. Many of the most influential companies driving deforestation have yet to adopt policies to root out deforestation from their supply chains, and those that have, have not enforced them. This lack of protection has been a disaster for Indigenous people and local communities who manage half of the world’s great forests. Many have been dispossessed or denied rights to their land, attacked, threatened, or killed for defending these rights. In an open letter to EU policymakers, 191 organisations from 62 countries have today called for the law to require companies to respect traditional communities’ rights over their territories. Because, as numerous studies show, to protect the forests, you have to protect the people who live in and around them.

The upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, which are scheduled to begin on February 4, will take place against a backdrop of severe Chinese government rights abuses, as well as risks to athletes that are unprecedented in the modern Olympic era. Designed to “sportswash” the Chinese government’s abysmal human rights record, these Winter Games are a centerpiece of President Xi Jinping’s effort to burnish China’s image on the world stage. Athletes participating in the games will be surveilled, and their rights to free speech and protest severely curtailed. Even reporting journalists might not be safe from surveillance, albeit perhaps better protected from arbitrary detention than their Chinese colleagues. As the Committee to Protect Journalists has recently reported, China, for the third straight year, remains the worst jailer of journalists in the world. In view of all this and Beijing’s crimes against humanity targeting ethnic Uyghurs, repression in Hong Kong and Tibet, Human Rights Watch has joined a global call by nongovernmental organizations for governments to join a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, Germany’s Parliament, in a statement published today, has severely criticized the human rights situation in China ahead of the Beijing Olympics. For a discussion of the Beijing Games and the evisceration of civil society in China join Human Rights Watch and its partners at 7p.m. EST today. 

Egyptian authorities have been deporting Eritreans seeking asylum, among them children, despite remonstrations by UN human rights experts, including the special rapporteurs on Eritrea and on torture, that others previously returned had been, “tortured, held in extremely punitive conditions and disappeared.” Eritrea’s repressive government requires all citizens under 50 to serve in national or military service indefinitely, often years longer than the 18 months authorized by law. Conscription into the country’s abusive indefinite national service begins at high school, where thousands of Eritrean secondary school students, including both girls and boys under 18, are conscripted each year. Anyone of draft age leaving the country without an exit permit is perceived to be a deserter, risking imprisonment in often inhumane conditions, as well as forced labor and torture. By arbitrarily detaining people in need of protection, preventing them from seeking asylum and forcibly deporting them, the Egyptian government is committing refoulement. 

A lack of sufficient safeguards in procurement practices by UN agencies providing aid in Syria has resulted in a serious risk of financing abusive entities, Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Legal Development Programme (SLDP) have found. Tender and procurement documents researchers of the two organizations reviewed did not include human rights standards that vendors are expected to abide by. Procurement officers appear to rarely actively look for human rights-related disqualifying criteria, instead relying heavily on self-reporting by the prospective suppliers themselves or on UN sanctions lists which do not include human rights abusers within the Syrian government and affiliated militias. Thus, UN agencies have awarded Security Services contracts worth over $4 million to a private security firm with links to a division of the Syrian military which participated in the extrajudicial killing of thousands of protesters, while contracts to support the repair of water supply pipes and removal of rubble in a district of Aleppo city went to a militia-turned-service provider formed from militia groups that participated in the forcible displacement of people in Aleppo. 

Today marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. The day, January 27, is commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. The guiding theme this year is “Memory, Dignity and Justice”, with the United Nations declaring Holocaust commemoration and education a global imperative in view of growing Holocaust denial and distortion. Ironically, on this very day, a school board in Tennessee, in the US, is making headlines for banning a Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the Holocaust from its classrooms over eight curse words and an illustration of a naked cartoon mouse. The graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by New Yorker Art Spiegelman, uses hand-drawn illustrations of mice and cats to depict how the author’s parents survived Auschwitz. Spiegelman’s Jewish parents were both sent to the Nazi concentration camps. His mother took her own life when he was just 20. The decision comes as conservative groups across the US are stepping up campaigns to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities, and as anti-Semitism continues to surge globally.