By Brittney Hodnik Impunity Watch Reporter, North America
OTTAWA, Canada – According to a report released by the YWCA, women in Canada are facing an increased risk of homelessness due to many factors. Teenage girls are quickly becoming the largest demographic for the face of homelessness. Without the government’s help, the problem will only worsen.
Women are now a very significant part of the homeless population in Canada. (Image courtesy of The Montreal Gazette / Reuters)
According to The Montreal Gazette, homeless women are now resorting to “survival sex” just to find a place to sleep at night. This is a form of prostitution and ‘hidden homelessness’ where women trade sexual favors for a place to spend the night. Additionally, some women spend the night at houses of friends and family members, but often those people exploit and abuse them, reports The Montreal Gazette.
Teenage girls make up one-third to half of homeless youths in urban areas, according to The Wall Street Journal. While many women flee to escape abuse, they find it waiting for them in the street, forcing them into a long cycle of homelessness. According to Ann Decter, Director of Advocacy at YWCA Canada, “as many as 60% of homeless girls have been sexually abused,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
The YWCA’s report shows that homelessness is on the rise with women for many reasons. Donna Brooks, the executive director at Prince Albert’s YWCA said many women become homeless because of the lack of affordable housing, domestic abuse, addictions, or mental health issues, according to News Talk 650.
Although the government programs give some money to women to support themselves, reports The Montreal Gazette, it is not nearly enough to cover rent and other necessities. Women are forced back to the streets because they cannot afford everything they need.
Another problem is the lack of beds in shelters across Canada. The YWCA’s report says more beds, and more women only shelters would help alleviate the problem a little bit. Eric Desjardins, a front-line worker at Ottawa shelters said that not only do shelters need more beds, but also they need more people to work with the homeless women and get them on the right track, according to The Montreal Gazette.
Desjardins said, “There is need for more beds but therapies and programs should take priority. There is a need for more caseworkers. They are the ones who refer people to appropriate services and programs,” as reported by The Montreal Gazette.
The YWCA Canada is the country’s oldest and largest women’s multi-service organization, according to The Wall Street Journal. Although it reaches out to nearly 1 million women, girls, and families in Canada, there is still a shortage of beds and workers across the country.
BEIJING, China– Three Tibetan activists marked the twenty-first day of what they have announced to be an “indefinite hunger strike” in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York City today.
Three Tibetan activists have refused food for 21 days in front of the United Nations in order to draw attention to the continuing crackdown by Chinese authorities in Tibet. (Photo courtesy of Voice of America).
The three say that they are fasting in protest of the continuing crackdown by Chinese authorities in Tibet.
No action by the United Nations or the Chinese Government to ease the situation in Tibet yet appears to be forthcoming.
However, the three human rights activists, who are confined to wheelchairs due to famine-induced weakness, cannot help but attract headlines and have succeeded in garnering a significant amount of attention.
The three activists claim to have been visited on Monday by top United Nations human rights official Ivan Simonovich, whom they purport to have told that they wish to see “concrete action” by the Chinese Government to ease the crackdown on dissent in their distant homeland. The strikers say that they shall continue their fast “indfinitely” until the Chinese Government takes such action.
Mr. Simonovich’s visit was apparently followed up today by an expression of concern for the health of the strikers from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Nonetheless, the Secretary General stated that he “affirms the right of all people to peaceful protest.”
The strikers hope to bring pressure to bear upon the United Nations to take action and have delivered a petition with five demands to that effect. The core demands included a request for a fact-finding mission into the situation in Tibet. The strikers also called upon China to open up the region to journalists, to end martial law in areas with large Tibetan populations and to release all political prisoners.
One of the activists, 69-year old Dorjee Gyalpo, informed journalists that he is prepared to give his life to achieve the goals of the group’s petition. The other two strikers explained that their goal is not merely to bring awareness to the Tibetan cause, but to resolve the situation.
The United Nations has informed the media that it has received the petition and is investigating the matter.
Elsewhere in New York City, on Saturday an estimated 2,000-4,000 local Tibetans marched in solidarity with protestors in Tibet and to mark the 53rd anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. Similar marches by hundreds of Tibetan exiles also occured in cities and towns in India, which houses the Tibetan Government in exile.
The protests have taken place against the backdrop of ongoing, muffled protests in Tibet itself. Human rights organizations estimate that some two dozen Tibetans, mostly Budhist monks, have set themselves on fire in China in recent months in protest of Chinese rule. Tibetan protestors also seek the safe return of their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
Chinese authorities have responded to the protests by branding the self-immolators as terrorists and vastly increasing the number of police and security personnel in the region. Additionally, the authorities have clamped down tightly on the internet and mobile phones in the region, in some areas reportedly blocking these forms of communication entirely.
Tibetan activists and human rights groups say that the Chinese authorities in parts of China with a sizeable Tibetan population suppress Tibet’s culture and religion and crush all public displays of dissent.
Tibet has been under varying degrees of Chinese rule ever since Chinese troops occupied the region in 1950.
BEIJING, China – Human rights lawyers and activists hailed proposed revisions to China’s Criminal Procedure Law, which were unveiled on the fourth day of the National People’s Congress in Beijing last Thursday, with cautious optimism.
Chinese police already possess sweeping powers in practice (Photo courtesy of the Washington Post).
The revisions passed today with overwhelming support from what many analysts believe to be a “rubber stamp” congress, which has never rejected a proposed draft law.
However, the revisions are seen as controversial and have been the subject of unusually fierce public debate inside China since they were first publicly announced last August. The crux of the controversy surrounded the issue of secret detentions by China’s police forces.
Proponents of China’s increasingly powerful, hard-line, state security apparatus took a position favoring an amendment that critics claimed would simply legalize existing police practices of “disappearances” and secret detention without implementing oversight or guidelines. Supporters of the amendment are believed to be concerned with the growing number of strikes, protests and public dissent across China. Many in China’s government fear the emergence of a widespread Chinese version of the “Arab Spring.” They believe that increased police powers are necessary in order for the Communist Party to maintain order and control.
On the other side of the controversy, human rights activists, political reformers and a sizeable portion of China’s legal community decried the proposed amendment, known as Article 73. Reformists have been able to harness an unusually large and vocal showing of public support, including tens of thousands of online complaints about the proposed amendment.
Support for the reformist stance is thought to partially be a backlash against what a report by Hong Kong-based human rights organization Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) recently labeled in its annual report as “…a year of harsh crackdowns for human rights defenders, characterized by lengthy prison sentences, extensive use of extralegal detention, and enforced disappearance and torture.”
According to CHRD’s report, almost 4,000 political campaigners were detained in China last year. The report indicated that at least 150 of the detainees had been tortured and at least 20 had been “dissapeared” for weeks or months without their families being informed by the authorities.
Additionally, the Chinese Government has increased it’s security and police presence in its restive province of Xinjiang and areas with large Tibetan populations. Human rights groups say that the Chinese Government suppresses traditional religion and culture in these regions and that it regularly carries out secret detentions and disappearances in order to maintain control there.
However, China maintains a virtual stranglehold on the flow of information out of Xinjiang and Tibet, making it difficult to determine whether repression in those regions had a significant impact on the debate over revisions to China’s detention laws.
An earlier draft of Article 73 would have allowed for China’s police forces to affect secret detentions without informing detainees’ families. Though the legality of secret detentions and “disappearances” under Chinese law was questionable prior to today’s passage of the revisions, it is widely believed that these practices were already commonplace in China.
However, haggling over the proposed amendments has yielded a compromise, which many view as a small victory for reformers. Last week the proposed amendment was modified in a highly unusual attempt to ease concerns over human rights. The amendment provides police with the power to detain dissidents for up to 6 months in “residential surveillance” at their homes or at other locations such as hotels. It also gives police the power to hold people in “secret detention centers,” often referred to as “black jails.” However, the amendment now comes with a caveat requiring the authorities to inform detainees’ families within 24 hours after the start of detention.
Human rights groups have been quick to point out that the law provides exceptions to the “24 hour rule” in situations when informing the family would be impossible or in situations involving “state security” or “terrorism.” State security is widely viewed as a catch-all phrase that covers vaguely defined crimes such as “subversion” in order to provide a mechanism for detaining dissidents critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Rights groups have further asserted that the amendment gives a legal justification for existing police practices that violate human rights, which they argue will likely increase now that the amendment has passed. Activists have often brought allegations of torture and other abuses committed by police during “residential surveillance” or secret detention.
Aside from the secret detention issue, the revisions have been praised for taking a surprisingly humanitarian tone.
According to China’s official Xinhua news agency, the amendment explicitly states for the first time that trials are to exclude “confessions extorted through illegal means such as torture.” Furthermore, Chinese defense attorneys have praised provisions of the amendment that they say will likely allow them more access to suspects and defendants. Additionally, in a statement on its website, human rights group Amnesty International praised the amendment’s “…improved legal protections for minors and the mentally ill…”
However, Amnesty and other rights groups have indicated that they do not believe that the reforms go far enough and fear that legal protections may not be effective in practice. Amnesty has urged the adoption of a “right to silence,” a presumption of innocence and protection from arbitrary “technical surveillance” such as wiretaps.
China is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which it has yet to ratify. The ICCPR provides that “anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful.”
According to Human Rights Watch, even though China has not yet ratified the ICCPR, China is obligated under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties “to refrain from acts which would undermine the object and purpose” of a treaty to which it is a signatory.
Overall, activists have applauded the reforms as a positive first step in human rights reform and have noted the importance of increasing public input in the Chinese political process.
As the National People’s Congress’s annual session drew to a close today, out-going President Wen Jiabao called for further political reform and increased openness inside China. Without reform, Wen said that “such historic tragedies like the Cultural Revolution [which was characterized by human rights abuses on a massive scale] may happen again.”
By Brittney Hodnik Impunity Watch Reporter, North America
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – As previously reported, Guatemala began trying former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt for genocide and other crimes against humanity. Other high-ranking soldiers and officials are now facing the same fate. The 17-month period between 1982 and 1983 claimed the lives of nearly 250,000 people. Now, nearly 30 years later, the people responsible for these killings are being brought to justice.
Pedro Pimentel Rios at his trial on Monday. (Image courtesy of The Guardian)
According to The Associated Press, Pedro Pimentel Rios is the fifth former special forces soldier to be sentenced for his participation in the “Dos Erres” massacre in 1982. Rios was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison – 30 years for each of the 201 people slaughtered in the massacre, plus 30 years for crimes against humanity. All five of the former soldiers were sentenced to 6,060 years or more.
Rios is a 54 year old former instructor at a Guatemalan training school for elite military forces. He moved from Guatemala to Santa Ana, California where he worked in a sweater factory until finally being detained by immigration authorities in May 2010, according to The Associated Press. The United States extradited him to Guatemala the following year.
According to CNN, Judge Irma Valdez said Monday that the evidence presented by the prosecution along with testimonies from witnesses proved Pimentel was involved in the killings.
Maria Tulia Lopez Perez is just one of the many survivors of the three-decade long civil war. She still suffers back pain from the torture she endured in 1985, according to BBC News. She currently works with other survivors who come to her suffering from depression, insomnia, and post-traumatic stress; she helps them remember that they are not alone, reports BBC News.
The ruling is highly symbolic, according to The Guardian, because under Guatemalan law, criminals may only serve 50 years. This ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the civil war.
As for Efrain Rios Montt, his defense lawyers say that he did not control battlefield operations while he was dictator, according to The Guardian. He faces charges of genocide and he is accused of ordering the killings of at least 1,700 innocent Mayan people during his reign.
Overall, more than 200,000 people were killed or “disappeared” during the 36-year civil war, where there were 669 documented massacres, as reported by CNN. Other officials will likely face the same consequences as Rios, receiving more than 6,000 years in prison, as Guatemala tries to bring some closure and justice to the victims of the civil war.
Press Release Originally sent by Hermitage Capital 3/12/12
59 Swedish members of the Parliament from seven of the eight political parties signed a parliamentary petition to Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, calling on him to impose EU-wide visa sanctions on Russian officials in the Magnitsky case. The parliamentarians stress it is a matter of international importance given Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe and WTO.
In the parliamentary petition, Swedish MPs said:
“Law and justice in Russia – and lastly justice for Sergei Magnitsky – is a question that concerns the entire circle of member states in the Council of Europe and the WTO, of which Russia is a member. The outcome of this case will establish the country’s standing as a state governed by law.”
Swedish lawmakers urged the Swedish government to work at the EU level “for the purpose of coming to an agreement among the EU’s member states on the subject of sanctions against the offenders.”
The petition was initiated by Mats Johansson, from the ruling Moderates party, along with Olle Thorell, a foreign affairs spokesperson from Social Democrats party, and Kerstin Lundgren, from the Centre Party.
“As members of the Human Rights Group of the Swedish Parliament we often deal with cases like this. But if Russia wants to be a member of the Council of Europe, it cannot act like any other totalitarian state but must respect the rules of the club. Impunity for the perpetrators in the Magnitsky case is not in line with these rules,” says Mats Johansson, who is also a standing Rapporteur on media freedom of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
The Swedish parliamentary action is a result of the impunity of Russian officials who falsely arrested, tortured and killed 37-year old Sergei Magnitsky. These officials have since opened a posthumous proceeding against him, an unprecedented act in Russian legal history.
The petition to the Swedish Prime Minister pointed out the absurdity of the posthumous prosecution by saying:
“He (Sergey Magnitsky) was murdered in prison because of his defense of the law and justice in the proceeding against officials who had stolen companies owned by the foreign investment company Hermitage. No one responsible has been punished so far. Quite the opposite – the Russian government has recently taken the unusual step of prosecuting Magnitsky posthumously, a practice that hasn’t been followed in 500 years.”
The Swedish initiative follows a number of actions by parliamentarians in Europe.
Coskun Coruz, Human Rights Rapporteur for the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly, said last week that “Russia’s lawlessness in this case is absolutely not fitting into OSCE’s values” and vowed to do everything in his power so that Russian authorities prosecute Magnitsky’s killers.
On October 4, 2011, Parliamentary Assembly delegates from 29 countries of the Council of Europe signed the Magnitsky Declaration (http://assembly.coe.int/Mainf.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc11/EDOC12744.htm), calling upon the Russian government to cease the posthumous prosecution of Mr Magnitsky and the intimidation of his family and to allow the family to carry out an independent medical evaluation, which Russian authorities continue to refuse.
On 28 February 2012, the European Parliament’s Delegation to EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee urged EU member countries “to start immediately procedures to enact measures such as an EU-wide travel ban and a freeze on the financial assets of those believed to be guilty of the torture and death of Sergei Magnitsky as well as of those covering up the case.”
On 7 March 2012, a motion was unanimously passed in the British House of Commons calling for visa and economic sanctions on Russian officials involved in the original crimes uncovered by Mr Magnitsky and the cover-up since his death.
