human rights – Page 2

President Putin welcomes collective human rights

By Wayne Madsen

Russian President Vladimir Putin has redefined the cause of international human rights to include the concept of «collective human rights». Putin rightly argues that in addition to individual human rights, which are being used by various special interests to advance such «boutique causes» as rights got lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, pedophiles [as seen recently by the German Green Party’s defense of members of Green Party-run pedophile communes], groups of people have the right to protect their social, religious, linguistic, and cultural identities against forces that seek to undermine such distinctions.

In recent years, the interventionists of the U.S. State Department, backed by George Soros and his ilk, have sought to destroy the character of various aspirant nations and ethnically- and linguistically-based regions that have striven for cultural and social independence. Putin has recognized such besieged peoples and that him to recognize the independence of the Republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the CIA- and Soros-infested Republic of Georgia; the autonomy of and referendum in Crimea that saw it reunite with Russia; and the right of Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and Novorossiya to determine their own futures without oppression and violence directed from Azerbaijan, Moldova/Romania; and Ukraine, respectively.

Putin has international law on his side in his argument that collective human rights do, in fact, exist. Such rights were outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1989 Convention of the International Labor Organization, and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In June of this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted in favor of a resolution that recognized group human rights. The global homosexual lobby, as represented by the U.S. State Department, Soros-funded NGOs, and such media outlets as The Daily Beast, cried foul. They claim there are no collective human rights, only individual human rights with an overarching focus on gay rights. The U.S. position that there are no «traditional values» associated with human rights was rejected in a council vote of 26 for, 14 against, with 6 abstentions.

Voting with Russia and against the United States was South Africa, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam, nations with religious majorities and minorities that are constitutionally protected from domestic or foreign dictates that they submit to the whims of the globalized special interests of Soros and his lackeys within the State Department. Other nations that voted with Russia included Algeria, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, China, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Namibia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela. The Soros NGOs and The Daily Beast cried foul and suggested that these nations did not reflect the will of the international community.

Russia stood accused by the Soros types and their State Department facilitators of opposing «diversity». Yet, Russia’s support for the rights of indigenous rights of groups to their own language, religion, and cultural and social values is at the very essence of recognizing diversity, whether it is in Abkhazia, Donetsk, the Serbian districts of the contrivance called the «Republic of Kosovo,» or the Alawite and Kurdish towns of Syria.

All the minions of Soros and the global gay lobby could do was condemn the 26 countries that voted for the collective human rights resolution as nations having «appalling» human rights records. The gay rights lobby would gloss over the dismal records of individual human rights witnessed in such «gay rights» havens as the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand with their panoptic electronic surveillance societies, general acceptance of police brutality, harsh suppression of racial minorities (an issue that is ignored by many gays so long as it is racist and not homophobic-related oppression), and curtailment of free speech.

The Russia-promoted UN human rights resolution also protects children and women from sex slave trafficking. It is no surprise that The Daily Beast would condemn a resolution targeting a revolting global sexual slave trade that is largely centered in Israel. After all, The Daily Beast appears to take all of its editorial directions from the power centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, along with their subservient political and financial cells in New York, London, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

The gay lobby and its supporters are flat out wrong when they reject Putin’s doctrine of collective human rights. Enshrined in international human rights law is the «communal right of privacy,» in addition to general collective human rights, especially as they relate to the rights of indigenous people to be free of wanton exploitation and abuse by neo-colonial or economic interests. In many oppressed regions, dubiously-collected national census information has been used to forcibly assimilate and transfer indigenous populations from their historic lands.

Western corporations and interests, including those of Soros, have eagerly backed Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi because they realize that with her in charge of Myanmar (Burma), western exploiters will be free to displace the ethnic Shan, Kachin, Karen, and other peoples from their resource-rich lands in northern and eastern Myanmar. The Democratic Republic of Congo serves as a case in point where Western corporations have disregarded collective human rights in order to pillage native lands of their precious natural resources. The rise of the «blood diamond» industry in central and western Africa is directly linked to the blatant disregard by the West for «collective» or «group» human rights.

In the early 1990s, before the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), an alternative «United Nations» for indigenous peoples lacking representation at the UN, was taken over by Soros-controlled NGO bureaucrats and «Eurocrats,» the organization based in The Hague conducted a survey of 32 of its then-47 members. The survey discovered that many of the UNPO peoples sat atop highly-coveted natural resources. After UNPO organization was subsumed by the global network of Soros NGOs, which saw to it that Karl von Habsburg of the Austro-Hungarian royal pretenders was appointed UNPO’s director-general, the organization no longer points out the dangers posed to indigenous peoples by unscrupulous corporations and hedge funds like those controlled by Mr. Soros and his Rothschild and Rockefeller colleagues. It was also no coincidence that Von Habsburg served in a senior executive position for the NGO World Vision, an organization with historical ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Hapsburg family are influential promoters of a federalized Europe that stands opposed to the concept of collective human rights as most recently seen in the European Union’s sharp opposition to Scottish and Catalonian independence. The cause of collective human rights received a sharp body blow by the takeover of UNPO by the Soros and Habsburg interests and the collapse of the Scottish and Catalonian independence movements.

The very same promoters of individual human rights, which is nothing more than State Department and Soros code for «gay rights,» would deny collective rights to Kurds, native Americans, and Asian tribal peoples because their cultures and creeds may oppose the promotion of homosexual life styles. Therefore, in the eyes of the gay movement, it is better for such groups to remain suppressed if they refuse to accept the «foreign» life styles imposed from abroad. Putin, by advancing the concept of collective human rights, has seen through the Soros and gay liberation smoke screen as he has called out their main promoters for their abject hypocrisy.

Elderly die of starvation in Ukraine

Sixteen elderly people died from starvation in September in Donetsk. The people could not eat anything as they were afraid to go out of basements, where they were hiding from bombs, the head of Fair Aid Charity Fund, Doctor Elizaveta Glinka said.

“There are many elderly and lonely individuals, who experience terrible problems, living in cold apartments, basements and bomb shelters. The strong shortage of medicines and the lack of medical supervision require the creation of a hospice for those who need assistance. In September, 16 elderly people died from starvation in the center of the city of Donetsk. They were afraid to leave their shelters, so they could not make any food for themsevles,” she said on Tuesday at a meeting of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation.

“We [the Russians] are the nation that survived the war and its terrible consequences. We shared bread even with prisoners of war. I believe that we can not ignore the weak in this situation – the elderly and people with disabilities. We decided to support the creation of the hospice in Donetsk,” she said, RIA Novosti reports.

Elizaveta Glinka, known as Dr. Liza, has repeatedly visited the south-east of Ukraine with humanitarian missions to deliver medicines and medical instruments, as well as to evacuate sick children from the combat zone. In early August, Glinka brought nine seriously ill children from the east of Ukraine to Moscow. Later, she returned from Donetsk with three more children.

Source: Pravda

No law or policy for ‘mastering the Internet’

Britain’s GCHQ is scanning servers in multiple foreign countries for vulnerable ports, according to German newspaper Heise. Using a tool called Hacienda, the intelligence agency seeks to ‘master the internet’ for sources of espionage.

Spanish for estate, Hacienda can port scan all of the servers in a country to provide information on user endpoints and scan for potential vulnerabilities. The ability to port scan is not new, but the scale of its use by government spies, with 27 countries scanned by 2009, has shocked many familiar with the software.

“In 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a ‘standard tool’ to be applied against entire nations,” Heise reports. “Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the Hacienda [program].”

The process of scanning entire countries and looking for vulnerable network infrastructure to exploit is consistent with the meta-goal of “Mastering the Internet”, which is also the name of a GCHQ cable-tapping program. Targeted protocols include SSH, HTTP and FTP, among others.

Systems may be attacked simply because they might eventually create a path towards a valuable espionage target, even without indications this will ever be the case. Based on this logic, every device is a target.

The database resulting from the scans is shared with other spy agencies in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. MAILORDER is described in the documents as a secure transport protocol used between the ‘Five Eyes’ spy agencies to exchange collected data.

System and network administrators face the threat of industrial espionage, sabotage and human rights violations created by nation states indiscriminately attacking network infrastructure and breaking into services.

GCHQ says it will not comment on “intelligence matters” but reiterates that everything that it does is done within a strict legal framework. “It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters,” a GCHQ spokesperson told The Inquirer.

“All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception of Communications and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

“All our operational processes rigorously support this position,” they added.

British intelligence is permitted to go further in surveillance than similar agencies in other Western countries, according to Edward Snowden. The former NSA contractor believes the powers of the British intelligence establishment are not restricted effectively enough by “law or policy”. The lack of legal restrictions allows UK intelligence services to target more people than is necessary.

Source: RT

US, EU kicks treaty binding transnational corporations

The United States and the 28-member European Union (EU) have assiduously promoted – and vigourously preached – one of the basic tenets of Western multi-party democracy: majority rules.

But at the United Nations, the 29 member states have frequently abandoned that principle when it insists on “consensus” on crucial decisions relating to the U.N. budget – or when it is clearly outvoted in the 193-member General Assembly or its committee rooms.

That’s exactly what happened Thursday at the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva which adopted, by majority vote, a proposal to negotiate a legally-binding treaty to prevent human rights abuses by transnational corporations (TNCs) and the world’s business conglomerates.

But following the vote, the United States and the EU, have warned they would not cooperate with an intergovernmental working group (IGWG) which is to be established to lay down ground rules for negotiating the proposed treaty.

Stephen Townley, the U.S. representative in the HRC, told delegates: “The United States will not participate in this IGWG, and we encourage others to do the same.”

There are also a host of practical questions about how an internationally binding instrument would apply to corporations, which are not subjects of international law, and how states would implement such an instrument, said Townley, special assistant to the legal adviser at the U.S. State Department.

The vote was 20 for, 14 against and 13 abstentions in the 47-member HRC. The United States and EU members, including France, Germany, UK, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Estonia and the Czech Republic, along with South Korea and Japan, voted against the resolution.

Spearheaded by Ecuador and South Africa, the resolution received positive votes from China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Philippines and Algeria, amongst others.

The Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, along with Mexico, Peru and the Maldives, abstained.

Anne van Schaik, accountable finance campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, told IPS the voting list “makes clear we are up against powerful forces”.

“Who will not back away from using old bullying techniques?” she asked.

She said the EU has clearly stated it will not cooperate in implementing the proposal.

And after the vote, the United States said this legally binding instrument will not be binding for those who vote against it.

“So we can expect some fierce opposition,” Schaik said, even as the IGWG plans to hold its first meeting sometime next year.

“But we are cheerful because it is not every day public interest wins over corporate interests which are backed by the EU and the U.S.,” she added.

Both United States and the EU have argued that the three-year-old U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is adequate as a yardstick to monitor the business practices – and malpractices – of corporations and big business.

“We have not given states adequate time and space to implement the Guiding Principles,” Townley told delegates.

He said “while we share and appreciate the concerns expressed by some delegations and civil society colleagues that we need to do more to improve access to remedy for victims of business-related human rights abuses, our concern is that this initiative [for a legally binding treaty] will have exactly the opposite effect.”

Philip Lynch, director of International Service for Human Rights, told IPS that in order to be effective, it is crucial that any treaty on business and human rights be negotiated with input from all relevant stakeholders and that it cover all business enterprises, not just transnational corporations.

“We consider it very important that the European Union participates in this negotiation process,” he said, since the EU is both the headquarters for many corporations, and global leaders in the implementation of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

“We also hope that the negotiation of the treaty can complement and build on the consensus underpinning the Guiding Principles, which enjoy strong EU support,” he added.

Speaking of the proposed treaty, Schaik told IPS this is something that Friends of the Earth has campaigned for years, if not decades.

“We have always wanted the U.N. to take responsibility to develop such a mechanism, since they are the only international democratic decision-making body that is able to work on such a proposal.”

So, it is better than, for example, having legislation adopted by some countries, or regional bodies (if this would have been feasible at all), she added.

Secondly, Schaik said, what is very positive as well is that in the resolution, a roadmap is already laid out for the first steps of this working group.

“The division of the votes clearly shows that the countries who are host to a lot of TNCs, such as the EU, as well as Norway and the U.S., are against this proposal,” she noted.

Asked how the Western opposition could be countered, she pointed out the U.S. warned, even before the vote, that countries who voted against it would not be obliged to respect the resolution.

“This is of course total nonsense, but it does mean that both civil society, as well as the countries who voted in favour, will have to do what they can in order for this working group to be successful.”

She said: “We have built at very short time a coalition of more than 610 organisations and 400 individuals.”

She said the treaty alliance is already making plans on how to follow up on this victory, “and I think particularly for groups in Europe, the U.S. and Norway there is an important task to keep pressuring their countries to respect the resolution.

“We will campaign, set up email actions, present research, organise speaker tours and take to the streets, if necessary, to ensure the working group will be successful,” she said.

Source: Common Dreams

Angry China cancels talks with interfering Britain

China on Tuesday condemned Britain for interfering in its domestic affairs, in response to a human rights report, a day after the British government said Beijing had called off human rights talks. Britain listed China as “a country of concern” in its annual human rights report last week, saying it had observed increased curbs on freedom of expression, association and assembly in 2013.

It also cited reports of “the forcible suppression of ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang.”

China reacted by calling off talks with Britain on Beijing’s human rights record. Chinese and British officials had been due to hold a round of the two-way Human Rights Dialogue in London on Wednesday.

The two countries had agreed to resume the regular meetings during a trip to China by British Prime Minister David Cameron in December.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying accused Britain of issuing the report with “irresponsible remarks made about the Chinese political system, rudely slandering and criticizing China’s human rights situation”.

Britain must immediately stop using human rights as a pretext for interfering in China’s internal politics and judicial sovereignty, Hua told a daily news briefing. “Britain’s path on this issue is not helpful to dialogue and discussion on the subject of human rights, and not good for the stable development of the health of China-UK relations,” Hua added.

Cameron’s visit was aimed at spurring closer trade and business links between Britain and the world’s second biggest economy and at drawing a line under a dispute involving Tibet’s spiritual leader that had led to a diplomatic freeze.

But Britain’s Foreign Office said Beijing had pulled out of the first round of the talks, the resumption of which Cameron had hailed at the time as a significant achievement. “We are disappointed that the Chinese government last week unilaterally postponed the dialogue, which was due to take place on 16 April,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said in a statement. “It is not for us to say why it was postponed. We are now in discussion to agree new dates,” she said.

A spokeswoman at the Chinese embassy in London said she was unaware the talks had been cancelled.

Source: Voice of Russia

Zim crimes ruling a ‘landmark decision’

A court ruling that the SA Police Service (SAPS) can investigate alleged Zimbabwean crimes against humanity was described as a landmark decision on Wednesday.

“The court’s decision makes it clear that South Africa has a legal obligation to investigate the perpetrators of international crimes wherever those crimes were committed,” said Priti Patel, deputy director of the SA Litigation Centre (Salc).

Salc said the finding by the Supreme Court of Appeal earlier in the day was a landmark decision for local and international justice.

Salc and the Zimbabwe Exiles’ Forum (ZEF) brought the case to the South African courts.

Patel said the ruling confirmed that the dispensing of international justice was not restricted to international forums.

“It commits the South African authorities to play their part in ensuring that torturers and other international criminals are held accountable for their actions.”

Salc submitted a document to the National Prosecuting Authority in 2008 containing evidence of the alleged involvement of key Zimbabwean officials in perpetrating crimes against humanity in relation to the torture of opposition party members in March 2007.

They wanted the NPA and the SAPS to initiate an investigation into the alleged crimes. The NPA and the SAPS refused to investigate and Salc and the ZEF appealed to the high court. It found in Salc’s favour.

The SAPS and the NPA appealed against the finding to the Supreme Court of Appeal.

The SCA held that the SAPS was empowered to investigate alleged human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

The court dismissed the appeal of the national police commissioner and national director of public prosecutions in the matter.

The SCA rejected the police’s submission that crimes against humanity were deemed to have been committed only once the perpetrators set foot in South Africa.

The court held that the police could investigate, irrespective of whether the alleged perpetrators were in the country.

It further found that, under international law, the SAPS was obliged to initiate an investigation into the alleged offences.

The court found that, on the police’s own version, there was enough evidence to initiate an investigation. This included determining whether the alleged perpetrators were in South Africa.

“No doubt, in conducting that investigation, the police will consider issues such as the gathering of information in a manner that does not impinge on Zimbabwe’s sovereignty,” the judgment read.

The court said it could not tell the police how to investigate such issues. – Sapa

Snowden’s plane will pass through US airspace

Ex-CIA contractor, Edward Snowden’s plane to Cuba will pass through US airspace, an Interfax source reports. Washington has an extradition notice against Snowden on charges of espionage and could intervene if the plane enters US jurisdiction.

Aeroflot flight SU150, leaves Moscow at 14:04 local time (11:04 GMT) and will fly through US airspace a couple of kilometers from the coast of New York on its way to Havana, reported Russian news agency Interfax, citing a source in Sheremetevo airport air traffic control. Snowden is checked into the flight to Havana in seat number 17A, reports the Associated Press, citing Aeroflot.

The source added that US air traffic control can legally ground the plane and take Snowden into custody on charges of espionage, theft and conversion of government property. However, the pilot may change the course of the flight so as not to pass through American airspace.

“The pilot of the plane is within his rights to change the course of the flight and there should be enough fuel to do so,” said the source to Interfax.

The Ecuadorian government has confirmed that Snowden filed for asylum and is processing the request.
WikiLeaks has actively assisted Snowden in eluding the US extradition order, has confirmed the fugitive’s final destination will be Ecuador.

Mr Snowden is “bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from Wikileaks.”

The news that former CIA contractor Edward Snowden had left Hong Kong emerged on Sunday. The city’s authorities published a statement saying that Snowden had legally and voluntarily left Hong Kong on Sunday on a flight to a “third country” with a stopover in Moscow. The statement also said that the documents for Snowden’s extradition submitted to the Hong Kong authorities by Washington were not sufficient to be able to “process the request.”

The White House said it was “disappointed” with Hong Kong’s move to let Snowden go and has urged Russia to consider every option to expel the fugitive.

“The US is advising these governments that Snowden is wanted on felony charges, and as such should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States,” a state department official said.

Washington has stressed they will seek cooperation from whichever country Snowden arrives in.

Snowden initially fled to Hong Kong after leaking troves of classified data to UK newspaper the Guardian, including information of the US spy program Prism.- RT

‘Criminals are being exposed by Snowden’

Information that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is exposing can lead to trials against those involved in war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq or in money laundering and that is why “the West is so afraid,” investigative journalist Tony Gosling told RT.

The 29-year-old whistleblower – who was charged with espionage in the US for revealing secret surveillance programs – arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday. Snowden is on his way to a third country via Russia.

Gosling says Snowden’s got his options rather limited. “The real impact of what he’s done here is only now starting to be realized. Not only is he exposing the criminality of the GCHQ – the signals intelligence part of the British intelligence services – and the NSA, but he is also showing that much of that intelligence contains information which may bring criminal prosecutions. For example, of war crimes, or criminal prosecutions against bankers, people who’ve been doing money laundering, such as Lord Green who was in charge of HSBC. There’s a vast amount of information there.

“There’s one thing I can tell you though, is that he won’t be coming to London. He doesn’t want to end up in the Tower of London like Julian Assange, fugitive, is at the moment.

“Here in Britain, we have a very poor record. Although the government and many of our media talk about protecting whistleblowers, the fact of the matter is if you blow the whistle on anything really big and important, or, in fact, even some trivial things, you’ll be bullied and you’ll be taken out of your job. And there’s total hypocrisy. One of the reasons for this is the way our entire network of government is paid –tax-payers money that is paying for all this intelligence service stuff.

“Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for example, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, is supposed to oversee all this secret stuff. He is actually also employed by financial services firm that works for defense contractors. We are losing any kind of proper democratic oversight of these intelligence services. And that’s one of the things that Snowden has started to expose.

“If I were him, I’d actually be thinking about maybe not going to South America but looking at Iceland. It has got a couple of very useful institutions. IMMI, the Iceland’s Modern Media Institute, which has been set up by the parliament to protect whistleblowers and to make sure that Iceland is seen is a safe heaven. There’s also the AWP, the Associated Whistleblowing Press in Iceland. These are really great institutions which have started to emerge now in Europe as a resistance to the intelligence, really, I suppose the military-industrial complex and the financial cults in the European world, taking over so much of our public life, essentially – leaving our democracies in tatters.”

Gosling thinks Moscow will probably be a transit point, because maybe it would be a little too explosive for him to stay in Moscow for too long.

“I think what’s happening now is that there’s a lack of faith in much of what our intelligence services are up to. When we’ve got no proper democratic oversight of them they are running of on their own.

“The money system as well is involved in it. This is why I point out that much of this intelligence will be to do with economic warfare. We’ve got many new types of warfare in the world – economic is just one of them. Another one is psychological warfare which is using media wars, attacking the reputations of individuals and countries around the world. So, those are the sorts of information that contained in these PRISM leaks that we are now starting to see.

“There have been serious crimes over the last ten years – particularly since 9/11 when the war on terror started – in Afghanistan, Iraq, in places like Yemen, Pakistan where many people were murdered through the use of drones and hellfire missiles completely illegally by mainly three countries – Israel, the US and the UK. But this is what people don’t necessarily understand: there will be information that Edward Snowden has that can actually bring some of these people to trial. That’s why the West is so afraid. If Britain was serious about any kind of real justice, we would be able invite him to London and say, ‘Yes, you can tell all your secrets or stories to people here in Britain, you’ll be safe here.’”

Gosling says Snowden is actually exposing criminals “and the criminals are going for him now”. – RT

UK tapping EU’s data flows a catastrophe – Germany

The German Justice Minister has called the British spy agency’s massive eavesdropping of international fiber-optic cables ‘a catastrophe’. Sabine Leuthesser-Scharrenberger insisted European institutions should seek clarification “straight away”.

The exposure by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of the global eavesdropping capabilities of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have sent European capitals into a stupor.

Having revealed the NSA’s PRISM global surveillance program, Snowden told the UK’s Guardian newspaper information about Britain’s top secret Tempora surveillance project under which the UK’s GCHQ spying agency intercepts and stores for 30 days huge volumes of data, like emails, social network posts, phone calls and much more, culled from international fiber-optic cables.

The most vociferous reaction has come from Berlin where politicians have demanded a thorough investigation of the activities of the British intelligence-gathering community.

“If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe,” German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in an email to the Reuters. She compared the news with a “Hollywood nightmare” and called on to the European institutions “to seek straight away to clarify the situation.”

“The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell’s surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain,” Thomas Oppermann, the leader of the opposition Social Democrats in the Bundestag told Reuters. German politicians called the situation ‘unbearable’ and demanded the government “act against a total surveillance of German citizens”.

A report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper has exposed that UK’s GCHQ has been spying on European capitals for at least 18 months intercepting data from over 200 fiber-optic cables.

Begun in 2008, by 2010 the Tempora project made GCHQ a true intelligence superpower, “’the biggest internet access’ of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,” The Guardian’s report claims.

By the end of 2012 the GCHQ agency reportedly had enough computational capacity to process information from 46 fibre-optic cables at a time, which amounted to 600 million international phone calls and internet messages daily.

While it was reported earlier that NSA shared classified information obtained through its tapping of the world’s largest internet providers with GCHQ, it became known that these were tit for tat relations and GCHQ shared the info it obtained with the NSA, too. The Guardian believes that the 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors, like Edward Snowden, had access to GCHQ databases.

“The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden confirmed to the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US,” he stressed. – RT

Many civilians massacred in Congo, say U.N. officials

Rival armed groups may have killed hundreds of civilians in massacres and other “incomprehensibly vicious” attacks in eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), senior U.N. officials said on Wednesday.

The violence is focused in North Kivu province near the border with Rwanda where warring groups have targeted villages seen as supporting their opponents, while the national army has been diverted to fight a movement of mutineers known as M23.

“The deterioration of the overall security situation in North Kivu following the M23 mutiny and related ruthless attacks against civilians is extremely alarming,” said Roger Meece, special representative of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Meece was cited in a United Nations report issued in Geneva as saying a new round of systematic killings of villagers appeared to have occurred in early August.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said allegations of hundreds of killings were still being verified, but preliminary investigations suggested that a large number of people, mainly women and children, had been slaughtered.

“The sheer viciousness of these murders is beyond comprehension,” she said.

The Congo government in Kinshasa this month rejected calls by other countries in the region for an exclusively African force to tackle the insurgency in the east.

Congo says some of the insurgent groups have support from countries such as Rwanda and Uganda – a charge both those governments deny – and wants an expansion of the 17,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force in the vast, mineral-rich state.

Pillay’s office in Geneva said its mission in Congo had recorded 45 attacks on 30 North Kivu villages since May by a group dubbing itself “Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda” or FDLR, and another called Raia Mutumboki.

The FDLR is largely composed of ethnic Hutus, many of whom fled into the Congo after the defeat of a Hutu government widely viewed as responsible for the massacre of up to a million Tutsis and opponents of its policies in Rwanda in 1994.

The movement sometimes stages attacks in alliance with another armed group, Nyatura, the United Nations says.

Raia Mutumboki is a local militia group that says it is protecting the local population. It targets FDLR members and their families, and has been linked to other attacks against people in Congo perceived to be from Rwanda.

Marie Claire Bangwene Mwavita, administrator of North Kivu’s Masisi territory where much of the fighting has taken place, said that she did not know how many civilians had died so far in the violence, but that there was a risk of growing ethnic conflict.

“I can confirm there are several armed groups operating in Masisi, but I cannot confirm that hundreds have been killed,” she said. “As the armed groups are ethnically motivated, there’s a risk (of growing conflict). But the provincial government is already organizing meetings between different communities to put an end to the problem.”

The U.N. force, known as MONUSCO, focuses on protecting civilians but has been forced to divert resources to tackle the fallout from fighting between the Congolese army and M23.

That conflict has displaced nearly half a million people since the mutiny in April led to the formation of the rebel group that accuses Kinshasa of violating a 2009 peace accord. – Reuters

Mary Robinson has confidence in South Africa’s ‘humanity’

South Africa had to realise its opportunities before its humanity would fully emerge, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said on Sunday.

The country had to work to overcome several problems, including the Protection of State Information Bill, poverty and inequality, and gender-based violence.

Former Irish president Robinson was delivering the 10th annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town.

“My challenge today is to speak to you, South Africans, as your friend,” she said.

“A true friend tells you not only what you want to hear, but also what you need to hear.”

Robinson said she was speaking on the 50th anniversary of former president Mandela’s arrest and the centenary of the ANC’s founding.

“Anniversaries are a good time to take stock,” she said.

Accountability and transparency were required for citizens to remain stewards of democracy.

So, it was with great concern that she had followed the progress of South Africa’s protection of state information legislation.

A law that cloaked the workings of state actors and interfered with the exposure and investigation of corruption would be certain to increase levels of corruption.

“The public interest demands that basic truth, of having both transparency and accountability in government,” she said.

“Secrecy is the enemy of truth in this regard.”

South Africa’s national plan of action for human rights, launched in 1997, stated that democracy was irreconcilable with racial inequality, social injustice, poverty, crime, violence, and disregard for human rights.

She was shocked by the disparity of wealth in South Africa.

“Where you witness extremes of wealth side by side with dire poverty within the same country, it is more divisive than an overall condition of poverty,” she said.

Levels of crime and violence in some areas, such as Lavender Hill or Khayelitsha, meant that people were living in unmanageably traumatic situations.

South Africa was a young democracy, but its citizens had to ask some uncomfortable questions about the underperformance of the education system, high illiteracy, and disparity in resource allocation.

“You have both the positive resource and the acute problem of a young population with high unemployment and a deficit of skills,” she said.

Young people needed support and resources to complete their education and learn skills before accessing a job market where jobs could be found.

Citizenship and common purpose were the essential bedrock to realising freedom, truth and democracy.

In South Africa, as in many countries, there was a lack of trust in traditional institutions of democracy, such as the ability of Parliament and local authorities to tackle corruption and inequality.

However, technology could empower ordinary people and introduce new ways of holding the government accountable.

Ushahidi software had come about in response to a call to repurpose Google Maps for Kenya to identify where violence was occurring, and its extent.

It had since been repurposed to map diseases and many other types of crisis mapping.

One local authority in Ireland was using it to map potholes.

“The potential of this technology to map, and provide data, on incidents of corruption, on non-attendance of teachers at schools, and so on, could make these problems much more visible and increase the possibility of accountability,” she said.

South African women were well represented in government, with 41 percent of Cabinet positions, five out of nine provincial premiers, and 42 percent of Parliamentary seats.

But twice as many women as men had HIV and over 66 000 cases of sexual offences, some against young children, were reported from 2010 to 2011.

A 2009 study by the African Development Bank found that South Africa had focused on representative equality at the expense of policies which would change the lives of the majority of women.

“This is clearly a challenge which women leaders in South Africa must take up — not just political leaders, but women in business, in law, in the unions, and in leadership at local level,” she said.

Men, too, had to see this as a priority.

Sustainable development could not be achieved with zero tolerance of gender-based violence and a full commitment to gender equality.

South Africa had a great opportunity to draw on its strengths, renew its vision, and continue to build its nation.

“I have every confidence in South Africa realising the opportunities for its humanity to fully emerge,” she said. – Sapa

Commonwealth to probe SA human rights violations after complaint by PRAAG

After a complaint by PRAAG, an Afrikaner NGO, the Commonwealth of Nations is to probe human rights violations currently being committed in South Africa against Afrikaners, foreigners and other minorities.

According to a response from the office of Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma, PRAAG’s complaint has been referred to the Human Rights Unit for further investigation.

Dr. Dan Roodt, director of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, has expressed his satisfaction that the Commonwealth responded within two to three weeks from the date of lodging the complaint. “Until now, we have found international organisations such as the UN and the International Criminal Court slow to react to South Africa’s growing human rights crisis. We have high hopes that the Commonwealth and Queen Elizabeth II will address our concerns as quickly as possible.”

South Africa is a founding member of the Commonwealth of Nations, regrouping 54 English-speaking states around the world. As a member of the Commonwealth it is bound by international human rights standards as well as the 2009 Affirmation of Commonwealth Values and Principles.

In its letter to the Commonwealth, PRAAG complained of the persecution, discrimination and extra-judicial killings taking place against Commonwealth subjects in South Africa, such as Malawians, Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. However, regarding Afrikaners, PRAAG averred that there was a “systemic violation of human rights”, including “racial discrimination in jobs, education and access to capital; language and cultural discrimination; murder, extra-judicial killings and ethnic persecution; rape of Afrikaner women and girls; displacement from traditional Afrikaner lands and farms; as well as the forcible transfer of children from the Afrikaner group to the South African group through anglicisation, indoctrination and assimilation”.

PRAAG is also concerned about “interference in traditional Afrikaner schools and educational practices so as to break them down and prevent the transmission of the Afrikaans language, culture and identity to the next generation, vandalism directed against Afrikaner heritage, museums, literature, arts and historic sites through neglect, lack of funding or willful destruction, as well as name changes of towns, streets and places to eradicate Afrikaners’ heritage and historical presence in South Africa”.

The Commonwealth has suggested that PRAAG should also raise these issues with the South African Human Rights Commission. But Dr. Dan Roodt is skeptical about the bona fides of the SAHRC. “In our previous dealings with the SAHRC we have encountered ethnic bias from that organisation. It is not taking Afrikaner complaints seriously. But for the record we will lodge the same complaint with the SAHRC so that there can be no doubt that it was aware of these human rights violations against foreigners, Afrikaners and other minorities,” he said.

The Commonwealth had previously taken steps against South Africa when it imposed sanctions against the country in 1986, upon the recommendation of Bishop Trevor Huddleston of the Anglican Church. Commonwealth sanctions eventually led to regime change in South Africa.

The Commonwealth had also suspended Zimbabwe for its human rights violations in 2002, after which the country withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2003.

UN Human Rights Council to put pressure on Syria

by Marie Sanz, AFP

The UN Human Rights Council’s annual session opens Monday determined to put more pressure on Syria’s hardline regime after publication of a list of officials suspected of crimes against humanity.

“We want Syrian authorities to give up being in denial,” said one diplomat. The Human Rights Council must “continue to put pressure on Syrian authorities”.

The annual meetings which will be opened by UN rights chief Navi Pillay and Nassir Abdulaziz Al Nasser of Qatar, president of the UN General Assembly for 2011-12, will also look into latest developments in Iran, Libya, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and North Korea.

However debates during the first three days were expected to focus on the nearly one-year deadly crackdown by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on dissent in Syria.

More than 7,600 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s rule erupted in March, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

About 90 government ministers and senior officials, including the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Spain, Egypt and Iran, as well as Libyan Prime Minister Abdel Rahim al-Kib, were expected to attend.

Qatar, which has backed calls for an Arab peacekeeping force in Syria, and several other Arab countries, the European Union and the United States have called for an “urgent debate” on the escalating crisis on Tuesday.

“I hope that a strong political message will come from this debate with an appeal for better access to humanitarian aid, and particularly a humanitarian truce for which the ICRC continues to work,” said council president Laura Dupuy Lasserre of Uruguay.

International investigators on Thursday gave Pillay a list of Syrian military and political officials suspected of crimes against humanity that will be discussed on March 12.

The UN-commissioned panel said it documented a widespread and systematic pattern of gross violations by Syrian forces, “in conditions of impunity”, since March 2011.

It said Syria’s government had “manifestly failed” to protect its people, but also said it had found instances of gross abuses committed by rebel fighters, many of them army defectors.

The commission recommended the initiation of an inclusive political dialogue, bringing together the government and opposition groups.

The human rights council was expected to look into a draft resolution that would renew the panel mandate.

The council wants international pressure on the Assad regime to be stepped up, an end to the violence and better access for humanitarian aid, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, US ambassador to the council, told a press briefing.

A European diplomat also confirmed that the annual session which winds up on March 23 aims to agree on a “strong resolution” as the situation on the ground continued to get worse. He called the panel list “shattering”.

The council has so far held three special sessions on the festering Syria crisis and Pillay has asked the UN Security Council and General Assembly in New York to hold Assad to account for crimes against humanity.

Hasni Abidi, director of the Study and Research Centre for the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva, praised the council for its work in the Syria crisis, saying that “for the first time we can see that the human rights council has an edge over traditional UN bodies” in New York.

“It sets the bar very high,” he told AFP, “which means that there is no possible room left for negotiations with the Assad clan when those people are wanted for crimes against humanity.”

Religious intolerance, freedom of expression, human rights violations because of sexual orientation and minority rights are also on the menu of the four-week session.

On March 7 a debate on gay rights has been scheduled but the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has expressed its misgivings.

“We hope that member countries of the OIC will not boycott the debate, which would be a very negative message,” said Dupuy Lasserre.