The Scorecard on Children’s Rights in the US, Daily Brief 7 September, 2023
Daily Brief, 7 September 2023
Daily Brief, 7 September 2023
Of the 50 states in the US, how many do you think meet international children’s rights standards?
None.
Not one US state received an “A grade” in our new scorecard, published today. No state even managed to get a “B.” Seven got a “C,” 27 a “D,” and 16 an “F.”
This all may come as a shock to those who consider the US a relatively rich country, where children have it pretty good. It’s possible some are looking no further than their own comfortable neighborhood or mistaking some TV shows for reality.
Or maybe some folks think the standards are too high? So, they approve of child marriage? (still legal in 41 US states). They are for school officials being able to physically assault kids? (called “corporal punishment, it’s legal in 47 states)
They would want to see kids sentenced to life in prison without parole in some circumstances? (legal in 22 states). They’re happy with children doing dangerous work in agriculture? (legal in all 50 states)
I bet not.
I’m sure most readers here – and most Americans, as well – would not approve of these things. I don’t see many folks out there supporting child abuse, do you?
A lot of the topics I discuss in this newsletter are complicated. This one is not.
Beating kids, cutting their childhoods short through early marriage, having them work in hazardous jobs - it’s simply wrong, and no one has to tell you this. You know it. I know it. Most every adult knows it. Children deserve our protection.
The good news is, we are seeing some progress in the US since I wrote in this newsletter about last year’s scorecard. Four states have shed their “F” grade, three moved up to a “C,” and several significantly improved their rankings. Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, and West Virginia showed improvement over the last year.
And while it’s disturbingly true, as I described more recently, that some states have actually moved to roll back child labor protections, we have been pleased to see positive policy changes in several states in other areas: banning life without parole for kids, for example, and prohibiting child marriage.
What’s more, policymakers in several states have introduced new legislation that could lead to further improvements. There are currently bills to ban or restrict child marriage in Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, South Carolina, and Washington. There’s also a promising bill banning corporal punishment in schools in New York.
What we are witnessing here is people’s widely shared morality forcing the law to catch up with us. (Thanks to active public pressure, of course.)
Because we all know that how we treat our kids is a moral imperative. It says everything about how we see ourselves, about the society we want to live in, and – at the risk of getting a bit Whitney Houston about it – what kind of future we want to help create.
Daily Brief, September 6, 2023.
When the two main warring parties in Ethiopia’s Tigray region agreed on a “cessation of hostilities” deal ten months ago, there was hope the brutal two-year conflict was drawing to a close. Some even dared to dream that commanders and officials responsible for war-time atrocities might face justice.
Neither has happened.
Since the signing of the November 2022 agreement, grave abuses, including killings and sexual violence, have continued in Tigray. The human rights and humanitarian situation is still dire.
Eritrean forces remain in parts of the region, have obstructed humanitarian assistance, and are reported to have kidnapped people and pillaged property in areas they control. In Western Tigray Zone, authorities and Amhara regional forces, as well as militias known as Fano, continued an ethnic cleansing campaign and forcibly expelled Tigrayans.
And insecurity and abuses are spreading in Ethiopia.
In April, violence erupted in the Amhara region, south of Tigray, with government military operations against Fano militias. The government blocked mobile internet access and arrested several journalists who had been reporting on developments there.
By early August, clashes intensified, and reports of civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure increased. The government then declared a sweeping state of emergency in the Amhara region that restricts basic human rights, with mass arrests of ethnic Amharas reported in the region and in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
In the Oromia region – a vast area in the center of Ethiopia – an ongoing insurgency and government counterinsurgency campaign against the Oromo Liberation Army have resulted in serious abuses against civilians, such as arbitrary detentions, summary executions, and large-scale massacres including of minority communities there.
Victims and their families have been seeking justice and redress for abuses, but the cessation of hostilities agreement in Tigray lacked details on how to hold perpetrators to account. Instead, it referred to the government’s commitment to implement a “transitional justice policy framework to ensure accountability, truth, reconciliation, and healing.”
You can understand that survivors of abuses and others might not trust such promises nor put their faith in Ethiopia’s domestic legal processes generally. Most importantly, there seems to be little national political will to ensure comprehensive justice and redress for victims of serious abuses.
Clearly, international attention and investigations are still needed.
The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE), established by the UN Human Rights Council in December 2021, is the only existing body with both the expertise and mandate to independently investigate abuses committed in Ethiopia since November 2020. It can also collect and preserve evidence for future prosecutions.
However, the ICHREE’s current mandate expires in September 2023.
Given the gravity of what’s been happening and what continues to unfold in Ethiopia, the UN Human Rights Council at its September session needs to renew its mandate, so it can continue its work.
Lebanon is suffering a devastating economic crisis that’s pushed more than 80 percent of the population into poverty. So, of course, Lebanese authorities are prioritizing… (checks notes, looks up, checks notes again) …attacking LGBTI folks. (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex)
Even for Lebanon’s notoriously responsibility-dodging political “leadership,” this is jaw-dropping.
In August, two officials introduced bills that would explicitly criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults and punish anyone “promoting homosexuality” with up to three years in prison. They don’t even define “promoting homosexuality,” which tells you just how desperate politicians are to create scapegoats to distract from their own long-running incompetence.
These bills are not the start of this witch hunt in Lebanon. It’s been running for some time and kicked into a higher gear in late June with an illegal ministerial ban on LGBTI-related events. And it’s all happening in the context of rising anti-LGBTI violence over the past year – rising because authorities keep giving it a pass.
Just one recent example: on August 23, men from the openly LGBTI-hating “Soldiers of God” group (note: God has never given them permission to use this name) attacked people at drag show in a Beirut bar. They beat up some of the attendees and threatened further violence against LGBTI people.
Agents of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces arrived while the attack was under way, but they did not intervene. Instead, they apparently interrogated the bar owner and guests about the performance. No one has been arrested for the attack.
In the words of my colleague and expert researcher Rasha Younes, the authorities are “allowing unchecked violence against” LGBTI people.
The whole movement – the bills, the ban, the green light to violence – it’s all another clear case of the oft-used politicians’ trick: don’t blame us, the people with power who should be managing the country wisely. No, blame a vulnerable minority with little or no power instead.
You may think our disastrous mismanagement is at the root of your problems, like not having enough money to live. But look, over there, gay people! There’s your real problem!
As elsewhere, for example with Uganda’s new anti-LGBT law, no one should be fooled by this shell-game distraction of unscrupulous politicians.
The question citizens of Lebanon should be asking is clear: Why aren’t our rulers working to make everyone’s life better, rather than spending so much time and effort to make some people’s lives worse?
When asked why he robbed banks, the so-called “gentleman bank robber,” Willie Sutton, replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”
I sometimes get asked why I’m so often writing here about vulnerable people, and why human rights defenders generally are constantly focused on minorities.
Although I’m not keen to compare myself to a bank robber, not even a “gentleman” one, I have to answer in a similar “well, duh” sort of way: because that’s where the human rights abuses are.
It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Powerful people – those with access to money and lawyers and political contacts – are not as likely to be subject to human right abuses. It’s not impossible, but it’s rare, and when it happens, the powerful can defend themselves. By definition.
And I’m not just talking about billionaires here. Even those with more limited means can get satisfaction through legal routes – at least if they live in a country where there are enforceable laws, if the government respects those laws, and the courts basically work. Some big “ifs,” I know, but at least they have a chance.
However, it’s the truly powerless folks who are so often the target of abuses – often by the powerful – precisely because they can’t defend themselves.
Look at one of the most persistently abused groups around the world today: refugees and migrants. These are people who may have lost everything in a war back home: their job, their home, their family. Or maybe they’re escaping extreme poverty.
They set off with little or nothing, searching for sanctuary or a better life, and where they’re living now – or trying to live – they have little power. They can’t vote, and very often, they can’t work legally either. This political and economic powerlessness makes them vulnerable.
Unscrupulous politicians are all too quick to jump on that vulnerability. They tell voters their problems are the fault of those newcomers. And with no refugee votes or campaign donations to worry about, politicians can in some sense target the newcomers “cost free.”
It’s the laziest form of politics, of course: blaming someone else rather taking responsibility and addressing difficult social and economic issues. Bashing the vulnerable is simple; solving problems is hard. But this lazy politics too often works for the politician in terms of media attention and votes.
The same dynamic can happen when it comes to minorities, too, whether ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities. Politicians from majority communities use them as scapegoats to boost their careers in the same way.
And the smaller – and less powerful – the minority, the better for politicians’ purposes. Just take what’s been happening to trans folks, for example.
If a person has a clear head, unbefuddled by the whipped-up fears of shouty TV talking heads, there is no possible way they could objectively say this tiny group of people represents any threat to anyone. And yet, politicians from the US to Hungary to Russia are spending huge amounts of time and effort to bash them in speeches and abuse them with new laws.
Even when it comes to larger minority communities, very often – for reasons of long-term discrimination and unequal opportunities historically – they can find it difficult to fight back. They can be shut out of costly legal pathways to defend their rights, or at least face greater obstacles doing so.
In any case, the message from politicians to the wider public is similar: those people over there, they are the problem. Politicians with power then punish those with less or no power, as if to say: “See, I am doing something about this huge problem I’ve told you you have.” (And please, dear voters, don’t look at anything else, like my corruption or my failure to solve your real problems.)
Sadly, media often play along – in more repressive places because that’s what authorities direct them to do, and in less repressive places because fear and hate are good for business models based on clicks and views. So, too many members of the public accept the sacrifice of the vulnerable – a kind of political sadism – as normal.
It becomes so commonplace, people can even get to the point where they fail to recognize the glaring immorality of things like the EU’s “let them die” policy in the Mediterranean Sea or Texas officials in the US pushing kids into razor wire and deadly river currents.
It’s our role as human rights defenders to remind everyone that this isn’t normal. That it’s completely unacceptable to anyone with any sense at all of human dignity. That politicians are lying to you. And that these vulnerable people they are abusing to boost their political careers are just that: people – with fundamental rights like everyone else.
So, yeah, we work with the vulnerable and minorities a lot, because that’s where the human rights abuses are.
Daily Brief, August 3, 2023.
Who do you believe?
On the one hand, you have the survivors of the greatest tragedy off the Greek coast in recent years.
On the other hand, there’s the Greek coast guard.
The two sides offer very different accounts of what happened on June 14, when the fishing vessel Adriana sank near Pylos, drowning most of the 750 people on board.
One critical issue involves a rope – or “line,” as sailors would say – between the overcrowded boat and the coast guard vessel dispatched to the scene.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch interviewed survivors, who consistently described how the coast guard ship attached a line to the Adriana and started towing it. This, survivors say, caused the Adriana to sway unusually and then capsize.
Greek authorities have strongly denied this. Senior officials of the Hellenic Coast Guard told us their vessel came close to the Adriana and used a line only to approach the boat. They claim they did this to assess whether migrant passengers wanted help, but that passengers threw the line back and the boat continued its journey.
The survivors say people on the Adriana were pleading to be rescued from the rickety fishing vessel – they’d even called for help by satellite phone hours earlier – but the Greek coast guard wouldn’t listen.
When accounts differ as dramatically as this, there clearly needs to be an independent, impartial investigation into what happened. Greek authorities have opened two criminal investigations, one targeted at the alleged smugglers and another into the actions of the coast guard.
Equally clearly, there will be questions about the credibility of Greece’s investigations.
This is especially true given the “Farmakonisi” shipwreck in 2014, in which survivors also argued their boat capsized when the Greek coast guard tried to tow them. The European Court of Human Rights in that case condemned the rescue operations and the subsequent investigation, including how victims’ testimonies were handled.
There are things authorities can do to help make today’s investigations more credible.
One would be to put investigations under the supervision of the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office. Another would be to ensure the Greek Ombudsman’s Office is able to fulfill its oversight role properly, with access to all necessary evidence.
And, of course, investigations should involve taking testimonies from all survivors, under conditions where they feel safe to talk openly.
Investigations seem to be proliferating now, too. In a separate, welcome development, the EU Ombudsman has announced it will open an inquiry into the actions of EU border agency Frontex in the Mediterranean, including in the Adriana shipwreck.
If there’s room for another investigation, I’d like to see one look into the EU’s illegal and morally bankrupt asylum and migration policies generally.
But for now, one final question about Pylos: where are the mobile phones? Survivors say the Greek coast guard took their phones from them (and perhaps from dead bodies, too) after they were pulled out of the water. Survivors told us they contain vital video evidence about the shipwreck and what led to it.
Accounts of what happened that terrible day vary widely, but if the Greek coast guard is so sure of its account, why won’t they give those phones back – or turn them in as evidence?
News this week suggests this is precisely where investigators are now focusing their interest.