Tag Archives: Abuse

Blasphemy laws on the books in one-third of nations: study

Protesters hold placards condemning the killing of university student Mashal Khan, after he was accused of blasphemy, during a protest in Islamabad, Pakistan April 18, 2017

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Laws prohibiting blasphemy are “astonishingly widespread” worldwide, with many laying down disproportionate punishments ranging from prison sentences to lashings or the death penalty, the lead author of a report on blasphemy said.

Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen score worst, topping a list of 71 countries with laws criminalizing views deemed blasphemous, found in all regions, according to a comprehensive report issued this month by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The bipartisan U.S. federal commission called for repeal of blasphemy statutes, saying they invited abuse and failed to protect freedoms of religion and expression.

“We found key patterns. All deviate from freedom of speech principles in some way, all have a vague formulation, with different interpretations,” Joelle Fiss, the Swiss-based lead author of the report told Reuters.

The ranking is based on how a state’s ban on blasphemy or criminalizing of it contravenes international law principles.

Ireland and Spain had the “best scores”, as their laws order a fine, according to the report which said many European states have blasphemy laws that are rarely invoked.

Some 86 percent of states with blasphemy laws prescribe imprisonment for convicted offenders, it said.

Proportionality of punishment was a key criteria for the researchers.

“That is why Iran and Pakistan are the two highest countries because they explicitly have the death penalty in their law,” Fiss said, referring to their laws which enforce the death penalty for insulting the Prophet Mohammad.

Blasphemy laws can be misused by authorities to repress minorities, the report said, citing Pakistan and Egypt, and can serve as a pretext for religious extremists to foment hate.

Recent high-profile blasphemy cases include Jakarta’s former Christian governor being sentenced to two years in jail in May for insulting Islam, a ruling which activists and U.N. experts condemned as unfair and politicized. Critics fear the ruling will embolden hardline Islamist forces to challenge secularism in Indonesia.

A Pakistani court sentenced a man to death last month who allegedly committed blasphemy on Facebook, the first time the penalty was given for that crime on social media in Muslim-majority Pakistan.

“Each of the top five countries with the highest scoring laws has an official state religion,” the report said, referring to Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Somali and Qatar. All have Islam as their state religion.

Saudi Arabia, where flogging and amputations have been reported for alleged blasphemy, is not among the top “highest-risk countries”, but only 12th, as punishment is not defined in the blasphemy law itself.

“They don’t have a written penal law, but rely on judges’ interpretation of the Sharia. The score was disproportionately low,” Fiss said. “If a law is very vague, it means prosecutors and judges have a lot of discretion to interpret.”

 

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Toby Chopra)

 

Turkey’s post-coup emergency rule led to torture, abuse

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during his meeting with mukhtars at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey,

By Humeyra Pamuk

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey has effectively written a “blank check” to security services to torture people detained after a failed military coup attempt, a U.S.-based rights group said on Tuesday, citing accusations of beatings, sleep deprivation and sexual abuse.

A report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) said a “climate of fear” had prevailed since July’s failed coup against President Tayyip Erdogan and the arrest of thousands under a State of Emergency. It identified more than a dozen cases raised in interviews with lawyers, activists, former detainees and others.

A Turkish official said the Justice Ministry would respond to the report later in the day; but Ankara has repeatedly denied accusations of torture and said the post-coup crackdown was needed to stabilize a NATO state facing threats from Kurdish militants as well as wars in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW, said in a statement it “would be tragic if two hastily passed emergency decrees end up undermining the progress Turkey made to combat torture.”

“By removing safeguards against torture, the Turkish government effectively wrote a blank check to law enforcement agencies to torture and mistreat detainees as they like,” he said.

Erdogan reined in police use of torture especially in the largely Kurdish southeast, seat of a militant rebellion, when he first came to power in 2002. But the battle with Kurdish militants has become more fierce since the breakdown of a ceasefire last year and drawn accusations of rights abuses.

HRW said it had uncovered allegations that police had used methods including sleep deprivation, severe beatings, sexual abuse and the threat of rape since the failed coup. Cases were not limited to possible putschists, but also involved detainees suspected of links to Kurdish militant and leftist groups.

Turkey has arrested more than 35,000 people, detained thousands more and sacked over 100,000 people over their suspected links with Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric blamed for orchestrating the coup attempt. Gulen denies the charge.

The government says the widescale crackdown is justified by the gravity of the threat to the state on July 15, when rogue soldiers commandeered tanks and fighters jets, bombing parliament and killing more than 240 people.

Erdogan declared a state of emergency days after the failed putsch, allowing him and the cabinet to bypass parliament in enacting new laws and to limit or suspend rights and freedoms as they deem necessary.

Emergency decrees have since extended the period of police detention without judicial review to 30 days from 4, allowed the authorities to deny detainees access to lawyers for up to five days, and to restrict their choice of lawyer.

HRW said it had found 13 specific cases of alleged abuse in its report, which was based on interviews with more than 40 lawyers, activists, former detainees, medical personnel and forensic specialists conducted in August and September.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall)

Curbs on excessive force proposed for Cleveland police

Police officer at Republican convention

By Kim Palmer

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – Cleveland police would face new limits on the use of force under proposals issued on Thursday by a group charged with monitoring the city’s police department, after a U.S. Justice Department report highlighted abuses by some of its officers.

The report came just weeks after Tamir Rice, aged 12, was shot and killed by a rookie Cleveland police officer in November 2014, triggering national outrage over another case involving a young African-American who died at the hands of police.

Rice was shot after a 911 caller reported someone waving a gun outside a city recreation center. Investigators later determined he had been in possession of a replica-type gun that shot pellets, not bullets.

Changes proposed by the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team – a group of 17 national experts and community activists – include a requirement that officers use de-escalation tactics before resorting to force, such as creating distance from the threat involved.

Officers would also be required to provide medical aid, rather than just request aid, for anyone injured after the use of force. Cleveland officers were roundly criticized for waiting eight minutes before providing first aid to the wounded Rice, who died a day after he was shot.

Cleveland police did not carry first-aid kits at the time of Rice’s death, a policy that has changed since then.

Officers would also be barred from using chokeholds or force against suspects already handcuffed under the monitoring team’s proposals, and prohibited from putting themselves in harm’s way in a manner that might then require the use of deadly force.

A Cleveland police officer who was in the path of an oncoming vehicle, after a high-speed car chase in 2013, shot the first in a barrage of 137 rounds fired by 13 officers that killed the man and woman in the car.

The proposals from the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team are still subject to public comment this month. If approved by a judge and federal officials, they would take effect sometime early next year, according to Matthew Barge, the oversight consent decree monitor.

(Reporting by Kim Palmer; Editing by Ben Klayman and Tom Brown)

Australia prison abuse on aboriginal children investigated

Barbed wire fences surround the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre located near Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia,

By Matt Siegel

SYDNEY (Reuters) – The use of hoods, restraints and teargas on Australian aboriginal children in youth detention centers by police, as shown in footage released this week, could violate the U.N. treaty barring torture, a top U.N. official said on Thursday.

Australia’ Northern Territory on Wednesday suspended the use of hoods and restraints on children after the broadcasting of CCTV footage showing guards at a juvenile detention center teargassing aboriginal inmates and strapping a half-naked, hooded boy to a chair.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ordered a Royal Commission in the treatment of children in the detention center, the most powerful inquiry in the country, rejecting calls for a national inquiry.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, told Australia’s Radio National on Thursday that the video suggested that torture may have taken place and welcomed the inquiry but warned against limiting its scope.

“It’s hard to tell only from the video or the press coverage but I do think that it’s a very worrisome development that can amount to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstance…,” he said.

He said that there was no question that very severe pain and suffering had occurred and that the perpetrators seem to be representatives of the state. If others knew and did nothing, they too could be punished alongside those who actually committed the violence, he said.

The footage, showing six aboriginal boys being stripped naked, strapped to a chair with a hood, thrown by the neck into a cell and held for long periods in solitary confinement, was shot between 2010 and 2014 at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre near Darwin in the Northern Territory.

A report into some of the incidents by the Northern Territory Children’s Commissioner in 2015 found fault with the guards’ behavior, but the findings were disputed by the then head of prisons and not acted upon, said Australian Broadcasting Corp, who aired the footage.

The Northern Territory’s corrections minister was sacked on Tuesday, just hours after the broadcast.

The case highlights concern about the disproportionate numbers of aboriginal youth in custody, with indigenous leaders calling for politicians to deal with the wider issue of the treatment of Aborigines in Australia.

Aborigines comprise just three percent of Australia’s population but make up 27 percent of those in prison and represent 94 percent of the Northern Territory’s juvenile inmates.

Australia’s roughly 700,000 indigenous citizens track near the bottom of almost every economic and social indicator for the country’s 23 million people.

(Editing by Michael Perry)

Mass killings, forced evictions threaten indigenous, minority groups to point of “eradication”: rights group

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Mass killings, forced evictions and conflicts over land put indigenous and minority groups at risk of being eradicated from their ancestral lands, a human rights group said on Tuesday.

From Ethiopia, China and Iraq, the combination of armed conflicts and land dispossession has led to the persecution of minority groups and the erosion of cultural heritage, according to a report by the Minority Rights Group (MRG).

Carl Soderbergh, MRG director of policy and communications, said while discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities is not new, the level of targeted abuse is getting worse.

“The conflict that’s happening in Syria and Iraq right now is leading to the massive displacement of smaller and very ancient religious minorities like the Yazidis and the Sabean Mandeans,” said Soderbergh, lead author of the ‘State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2016’ report.

“They are essentially at risk of being totally eradicated in their traditional areas of origin.”

Civil conflicts and sectarian tensions have engulfed Iraq since 2003 when a U.S.-led coalition toppled Saddam Hussein. In 2014, Islamic State militants declared a caliphate after capturing swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Minorities including the Yazidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Christians and Kaka’i have been disproportionately affected by the recent violence in Iraq.

According to U.N. officials, Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS, has shown particular cruelty to the Yazidis, whom they regard as devil-worshippers, killing, capturing and enslaving thousands.

The persecution of Yazidis was recognized as genocide by the United Nations in June.

“It is getting worse. Whether it’s armed groups like ISIS or (Nigerian Islamist group) Boko Haram or it’s governments, there’s this targeting of heritage that we’re seeing, which is extremely worrisome,” Soderbergh said.

He said many minorities and indigenous peoples also face forced resettlement or evictions from their ancestral lands to make way for large-scale infrastructure or agricultural businesses, which further threatens their cultural heritage and identity.

For example, in parts of East Africa, governments are pushing for pastoralist communities to switch to settled farming with supporters saying such a move will create better food security, curb conflict between herders and farmers and free up land.

But Maasai herdsmen say the privatization and subdivision of their ancestral lands threatens ancient pastoralist practices, endangering livestock on which they depend and eroding communal rights to land and natural resources.

“Once a community is removed from the land, they really struggle to  maintain their cultures and convey their cultures to the next generation,” Soderbergh said.

By 2115, it is estimated that at least half of the approximately 7,000 indigenous languages worldwide will die out, the report said.

Although some governments see these groups as a threat to the state, Soderbergh said minorities and indigenous peoples must be included in decisions that affect their communities.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land and property rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Sex trafficking reaches crisis on Native American Reservations

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report.

On Fort Peck, a reservation of some 10,000 people, six newborn babies tested positive for meth in just two weeks in April and were taken to a hospital 300 miles away, said Howard Bemer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent for Fort Peck.

Meth use and other crime exploded with the tapping of reserves in the Bakken oil fields to the east and south of the reservation in the last decade. The boom brought tens of thousands of workers, flush with cash, to the region.

With the drop in world oil prices, many of those workers are gone but the crime has not, said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

“The boom brought problems that don’t disappear when the boom disappears,” she said.

The drug trade helps incite sex trafficking, as people exchange themselves, family members or friends to get high, she said.

“If someone is addicted to meth, they’re not in their right mind. It is much easier to get them to do things that they never would have done if they weren’t addicted,” she said at a recent anti-trafficking conference in Poplar, the reservation’s tribal headquarters.

Drug debt is a forceful driver of trafficking, and dealers threaten users to pay up by any means, said Sgt. Grant Snyder, a trafficking investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Maybe it’s your 12-year-old daughter, maybe it’s your 5-year-old daughter,” he said.

FAMILY

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

On the bleak, windswept reservation along the Missouri River just 20 miles from the Canadian border, more than half the children live in poverty and jobs are scarce.

Most people work in ranching, mining and farming, but one in three is unemployed. The largest communities are Wolf Point and Poplar, rundown hamlets that are little more than crossroads with a smattering of stores, gas stations, bars and fewer than 4,000 residents between them.

Outside of town, dirt roads link the weathered houses and tumble-down trailers that dot the seemingly boundless grasslands.

Demand for foster care for children removed from homes due to substance abuse is showing a sharp increase, said Courage Crawford, a program director at the Spotted Bull Recovery Resource Center in Poplar which offers rehabilitation programs.

“There aren’t a lot of places in the country that have a perfect storm of both being this rural and this under served of basic services … and also such high rates of poverty and also such rates of abuse,” Healey said.

Last month, the reservation was mourning the death by beating of a 13-month-old girl. A woman responsible for caring for her, while the child’s mother was in jail, has pleaded not guilty to murder.

A memorial service program showed a photograph of the smiling chubby-cheeked girl with shining eyes and a flowered headband.

“With the loss of this child I think we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel,” said Azure, the tribal chief.

Also this year, a Wolf Point man was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl grabbed at a local playground.

Meth is blamed for 40 percent of crime on native land, and most tribal police say domestic violence and assault has increased as a result of addiction, according to the NCAI.

Just thirteen tribal police patrol Fort Peck’s 3,200 square miles, according to the local Journal newspaper.

Across the country, fewer than 3,000 tribal and federal officers patrol more than 56 million acres of Indian country.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Over 200 Rescued Nigerian Women Pregnant From Rape By Terrorists

Officials in Nigeria along with UN officials say that over 200 of the nearly 700 women and girls rescued from the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram have been forcibly impregnated by their captors.

“Already, many of them are undergoing screening for various diseases [and] infections, including HIV/AIDS,” UNFPA Nigeria executive director Babatunde Oshotimehin told reporters, “and about 214 of those already screened were discovered to be at various stages of pregnancies, some visibly pregnant and some just tested pregnant.”

The governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, had been expressing concern over the forced impregnations of the women saying he believes the terrorists are showing one way they hope to spread their extremism across the land.

“Boko Haram insurgents deliberately raped women with the intention of getting them pregnant so they would give birth to future insurgents as successors of their violent struggles, hence the need for a special programm to break the chain anticipated by the insurgents,” spokesperson Isa Gusau said on Monday, according to the Nigerian publication “The Leadership.”

“I [am] very worried about what the future holds for us if what I have gathered about these insurgents works according to their plan,” he continued. “These people (Boko Haram) have a certain spiritual conviction that any child they father will grow to inherit their ideology, whether they live with the children or not.”

The government said they will be providing all the necessary support to the women after their rescue including mental health efforts to reverse any brainwashing by the terrorists.

Officials did say they believe that none of the recovered girls were among the Chibok girls taken in 2013.