Daily Brief Audio Series
Today will see a key step in a long-running effort by the UK government to be cruel. The appalling Rwanda deportation bill finally passed through Parliament last night and will soon be given the royal nod to become law.
The government has wasted no time in promising that the first flights of UK asylum seekers to Rwanda would happen soon. Expect a lot of legal challenges along the way, as well as more hate-mongering headlines against foreigners and demonization of human rights defenders in the coming months.
Over the past few years, the government has been pushing this Rwanda deportation idea hard. It’s been a kind of obsession for them. One former UK Home Secretary in the Conservative government even called it that: sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, she said was her “dream” and her “obsession.”
Never mind Rwanda is not a safe place to send people to – it’s well-known for things like extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances, and torture. Never mind the UK’s highest court confirmed Rwanda is not safe to send asylum seekers to.
Nope, the UK government has been plowing ahead regardless, trying to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling with this new bill. It’s a move that undermines rule of law and sets a dangerous, undemocratic precedent.
It also adds to their years of undermining evidence, ignoring human rights organizations’ reports, and even ignoring the government’s own assessments of the situation in Rwanda.
Just how far the UK government is willing to go in its obsession can also be put in numbers. According to the National Audit Office – that’s the official spending watchdog in the UK – the plan will cost taxpayers £1.8 million per expelled asylum seeker. That’s US$ 2.2 million each.
Cruelty doesn’t come cheap, apparently.
Has the UK government really not stopped for a second to consider the costs here? Have they not realized they could treat these people humanely in the UK for a fraction of that price?
But the government clearly doesn’t care about the cost of the scheme to taxpayers any more than it cares about the cruelty it will inflict on asylum seekers. What matters to them appears to be signaling that they’re “tough” on asylum seekers, no matter who pays in blood or money.
This obscene obsession has motivated them for so long, they can’t seem to think rationally about the consequences at all. And as with many unchecked obsessions, it has led to madness – financial and moral madness.
Today is Earth Day, and in the run up to the annual commemoration of our planet, media headlines have been typically grim. We’ve seen news stories on extreme weather warnings related to the climate crisis, species being driven toward extinction, and air pollution causing insects to mate with the wrong species. There’s also the evergreen story of politicians failing to fulfil their promises on the environment, and painful headlines like: “Should we reconsider having children due to fears about the climate crisis?”
Cheery.
Now, fine, the reality is, news about the environment isn’t great generally, and the impacts of human-generated climate change in particular are often grim.
However, if we’re only fed a diet of disaster, our sense of hope will be malnourished. On Earth Day, we should not succumb to despair nor miserablism. We should realize there have also been some positive environment stories lately. Here are four.
First, government representatives from around the world are meeting in Ottawa, Canada, this week to continue negotiations on a legally binding international agreement on plastic pollution. The latest draft isn’t everything that’s needed, but it does contain some positive measures.
Second, at the European Court of Human Rights recently, a group of women from Switzerland won a landmark case against their government. They successfully argued Switzerland’s failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a violation of human rights.
Third, the US Environmental Protection Agency – under pressure from concerned activists, of course – has introduced new regulations requiring more than 200 petrochemical plants to curb toxic pollutants. It’s good news for people living in places like “Cancer Alley.”
The fourth example comes from Peru. Last month, residents from the town of La Oroya, who’d been exposed to extreme levels of toxic lead and other metals from a mine and smelter complex, won a landmark case at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Court found the government responsible for violating the right to a healthy environment, among other rights.
So much environmental news around the world is depressing, and it can give a sense that we’re all doomed to unstoppable pollution and a climate catastrophe. But there are some bright spots out there. People are fighting back and winning – often when they use human rights as the framework of their arguments.
On Earth Day, let’s remember: we have a right to a healthy environment, and pushing governments to uphold this right is one key way to make environmental progress.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my thousands of hours on social media over the years, it’s this: block early, block often.
I have a personal set of “blocking rules” I post frequently – on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Twitter/X – explaining who gets blocked. For example, when I see someone in my replies supporting war crimes - boom, instant block. Pushing the propaganda lines of abusive governments? Block. Flinging hate? Block.
But wait, some say, aren’t you a human rights guy? Don’t you believe in freedom of speech?
Of course, I believe in freedom of speech. But just because someone is free to speak, does not mean I am obligated to listen to them – nor share their ideas.
There’s a responsibility I feel I have – that we all have – when using social media. We can control parts of these online spaces, and like a micro-editor of a micro-publication, we get to decide what we want our readers to see, and not to see.
Not only do we have control over our own posts and replies, we have some control over the replies of others. And for both: control implies responsibility. Blocking accounts that are spreading poisonous ideas in the replies to your social media posts is simply responsible behavior.
This always becomes an issue for me when I post about ongoing conflicts. Yesterday, I saw it in replies to social media posts linking to my latest Daily Brief article on Israel/Palestine, but it happens with every conflict. I block people who still seem to think the laws of war and other standards should only apply to the “other side” and not to “their side.”
Defending atrocities is appalling. Those who do so are denying the suffering of innocent individuals, and in doing so, they are denying the fundamental humanity of everyone, including themselves, actually.
In a way, it’s not their fault, of course. Conflicts can negatively impact people’s brains, push their minds into vicious desires for, or at least acceptance of, revenge and punishment, even of the innocent.
But that doesn’t mean I want to see their verbal violence and incitement to hatred in social media replies. And I don’t want my inaction to help such ugliness spread.
So, yes, I block people on social media. Often. I encourage you to do the same.
There were ten or twelve of them, all in civilian clothes. They were armed with knives, handguns, and assault rifles. They came to the small, rural community of about 40 people and started piling up stones in the road, blocking the only way out.
On the third day, dozens more arrived, all armed. Some went into the fields with dogs to steal hundreds of sheep. Some went door to door, telling people to leave their homes within the hour, or else…
They threatened to “cut our throats, and pointed at us, including our kids,” one victim later described. “I told my wife to take the kids and run.”
Residents fled for their lives. None of them have been able to return to their homes in al-Qanub, near Hebron in the southern West Bank. These kinds of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have been increasing since October.
Over the past six months, most international eyes have been focused on the horrific events in and around Gaza. That’s understandable, given the unprecedentedly gruesome Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and the Israeli military’s half year of massive collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza in response.
But the worsening situation in the West Bank is worthy of the world’s attention, too. Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians. They’ve stolen their phones, cars, and livestock; threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently; and destroyed their homes and schools.
Israeli security forces should be stopping this violence and reining in the settlers. They are not.
Israeli police, which have law-enforcement jurisdiction over settlers, have reportedly been instructed not to enforce the law against violent settlers. The military, which has jurisdiction over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, are either standing by or actively taking part in the attacks. Of the more than 700 settler attacks the UN has recorded between October 7 and April 3, soldiers in uniform have been present in nearly half of them.
Authorities in Israel are ultimately responsible for this rising settler violence against Palestinian communities. It’s on them to maintain security, to protect human life and property, and they are clearly failing to do so. What’s more, authorities have done nothing to help people return safely to their homes.
The international community – especially Israel’s friends – has tools available to try to rein in this campaign of violence.
The UK, US, and France have announced visa policies that bar entry to some violent settlers. The US and UK have also imposed financial sanctions on eight settlers and two settlement outposts. The EU has yet to impose sanctions, due to staunch reluctance by EU members Hungary and the Czech Republic.
But what about outside pressure on the Israeli government itself, given its ultimate responsibility here? Governments could suspend military support to Israel. They could review or suspend bilateral agreements. They could boost efforts to hold war crimes suspects to account.
That’s the kind of outside pressure that would probably be more likely to stem settler attacks.
There’s an old slogan from rights activists that says: “Some people are gay. Get over it.”
It’s pithy, memorable, easily repeatable – as with all good slogans. It’s also easily repurposed for other uses, like, “Some people are trans. Get over it.”
Most importantly, it puts responsibility on the receiver of the message. It says, it’s not the scapegoated groups that’s the issue here. The issue is you, the individual reader or listener. You are called on to reassess your thinking. Its bluntness is a challenge: this is how reality is, and if what’s in your head can’t accept reality, the problem is what’s in your head.
Authorities in Belarus should maybe meditate on this. The other day, they again attacked lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Specifically, they changed the definition of pornography under Belarusian law so it now categorizes depictions of LGBT folks as it does depictions of necrophilia and pedophilia. In short, they’re labelling LGBT lives as “pornography.”
Of course, it’s nothing new exactly in Belarus, which under the dictatorship of Aliaksandr Lukashenka is a human rights hell hole generally. Authorities have attacked LGBT folks there before, too, and public officials are pushing to introduce even criminal penalties for “non-traditional sexual relationships and gender change propaganda.” Belarus is marching in lock-step with its ally, Russia, which has expanded its anti-gay propaganda law and banned the “international LGBT movement” – an organization which, as you know, doesn’t exist.
Putin has been attacking LGBT folks in part to try to boost his support among conservatives abroad, especially in the West over the war in Ukraine. Putin often ludicrously presents his atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine as a battle for “traditional values.”
A few months ago, my former colleague Graeme Reid (now with the the UN as an Independent Expert) wrote an article on “Russia, Homophobia and the Battle for ‘Traditional Values.’” In it, he described a competition between two visions of the world:
On one side is the vision of a social order in which the individual is subordinated to [the state’s] notion of ‘culture’ and tradition, brooking no dissent. The competing vision is rights-based and accommodating of diversity.
What anti-LGBT dictators, like Lukashenka and Putin, and their admiring Western demagogues are calling for when they talk about “traditional values” is obvious. They want a world where the state, the government, can deny you your individual freedoms – even your own bodily autonomy – based on “tradition,” which conveniently for them, they get to define. No thanks.
In their authoritarian efforts, they even take steps that deny the very existence of LGBT people.
Those of us who believe in freedom and accept the reality of human diversity have the opposite view. And we say, “Some people are gay. Get over it.”