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A Dangerous Time to Be a UN Staff Member

In Somalia, four UN staffers were abducted by armed gunmen. In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tiger rebels have pressed UN workers and their family members (including a 16-year-old girl) into forced military service. The former is unfortunately still run-of-the-mill for lawless Somalia, despite the hopeful prospects of the country's new government. The latter is another sign of disrespect for UN blue in Sri Lanka, as well as of the Tigers' increasing desperation, as they are forced into an ever dwindling territory by the Sri Lankan military (itself also a culprit of unconscionable human rights violations). These incidents are particularly salient reminders, but the danger of working as a UN staff member in unstable parts of the world -- that is to say, most of the places where the UN works -- is a constant fact of life for these brave individuals. From doing nothing other than helping their host country's nationals, UN staffers (the vast majority of whom, it bears reminding, are themselves citizens of the country in which they work) can be targeted by disruptive elements simply for what they represent (the "international community") and for the attention that attacking them will almost certainly raise. What such spoilers don't seem to realize is that this attention will inevitably backfire on their cause, exposing them as truly uninterested in the fate of their country, which they purport to be fighting for, but which UN workers are only working to improve. UPDATE: Hostages in Somalia released. (image of UN World Food Program workers in Somalia)

75-Year-Old Woman in Saudi Arabia Sentenced to 40 Lashes

This comes from Amira Al Hussaini of Global Voices Online.
A 75-year-old Syrian woman was sentenced to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from Saudi Arabia, for having two unrelated men in her house.
The men were reportedly taking bread to the widow Khamisa Sawadi, who was married to a Saudi, and one of them was her late husband's nephew. The two men were also charged with ‘mingling' with an unrelated woman and sentenced to prison and lashes, sparking criticism for the country's judiciary and the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Via Amira, a female Saudi blogger named Sabria Jawhar offers her take on the Sawadi case.
Saudi Arabia has made significant strides in the advancement of women in key government positions. The appointments of Noral Al-Faiz as deputy minister for Girls' Education and Dr. Fatimah Abdullah Al-Saleem as cultural attaché at the Saudi Embassy in Canada by the Ministry of Higher Education, inspires Saudi women. Saudi women view Al-Faiz and Al-Saleem as role models, recognizing that they, too, can achieve success on their own terms.
Yet the social realities are that Al-Faiz and Al-Saleem are the exceptions, not the rule, of what Saudi women face in the future. For every Al-Faiz and Al-Saleem there are 100 Khamisa Sawadis. For every female Saudi graduate student studying abroad, there are 100 other Saudi women denied their right to divorce abusive husbands or to gain custody of their children.
Saudi Jeans has more.

On Gang-Raping and Killing Babies and Lesbians

The World Health Organization's World Report on Violence and Health estimates that over a million people lose their lives to violence and millions more are injured and maimed every year. The report states that violence is "among the leading causes of death among people aged 15-44 years worldwide, accounting for 14% of deaths among males and 7% of deaths among females." What's so disturbing is the myriad forms this violence takes and how deeply pervasive and borderless it is. Across the globe and across the centuries, humans have committed the most barbaric acts, limited only by their imaginations, and the march of civilization has done little to change the grim reality that on any given day, in every corner of our planet, gruesome and ungodly things are done to women, children and men. In Beirut during the 70s and early 80s, I witnessed terrible acts of violence, car bombs at supermarkets and missile strikes on residential neighborhoods, bloody bodies and corpses in the street, the carnage of urban warfare. It has made me keenly attuned to the darker aspects of human nature, the willingness to brutalize one another. Four decades on this planet and I still cannot fathom how a man can rape a baby, how people can gas, hack, strangle, shoot, smother, burn, and torture their fellow humans. Rather than become dulled and inured from violence overload, I am ever more appalled and horrified by it. Take this CNN report on gang-raping little girls in Darfur:

Can we even imagine the anguish felt by these young victims and their families? Can words and images conjure their REAL suffering and fear?

12 Year Old Somali Girl Washing Cars on the Street

From IRIN:
At only 12 years old, Fathiya Hassan has distinguished herself in Hargeisa, capital of Somalia's self-declared republic of Somaliland, by being the first girl to join the thriving car-wash business. A local human rights NGO says 30 percent of children in Somaliland engage in some form of work, making Hassan one of hundreds of children working to feed themselves and their families, despite the fact that child labour is outlawed. She spoke to IRIN on 24 February. "I usually operate along Togdheer Street and I earn 10,000 Somaliland shillings [US$1.60] daily, but there are some days when I don't make anything. "Although I have been a car-washer for the past two years, I would give it up in an instant if I got some support to go to school. I have also worked as a cleaner in one of the restaurants here in Hargeisa. "Sometimes I don't get paid the same amount that a male car-washer would receive; some even tell me they have nothing to pay me; if I insist on being paid, they threaten [to beat] me. "Moreover, the male children who also wash cars look down on me, telling me: 'You are a girl, you don't deserve to wash cars'."
Here's a 2008 UNICEF video on child labor (UNICEF estimates that there are "158 million children under the age of 15 who are trapped in child labor around the world.")

VIDEO: Congo rape victims speak out

This was posted on the NYT's YouTube channel a couple of months ago. It is a disturbing depiction of the sexual violence inflicted on women around the world (in this case DR Congo):

Would You Defend Hitler?

In this edition of UN Plaza I interview Kevin Jon Heller of Opinio Juris. In addition to being an excellent blogger and a professor of international law Kevin serves as a defense adviser to Radovan Karadzic. In the segment below Kevin talks about some of the ethical considerations at stake in defending someone accused of the worst of times.

Obama Reverses U.S. Position on LGBT Issues at the UN

In late December the United Nations General Assembly held a symbolic vote on a statement calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. France spearheaded the resolution, which was a 13 point declaration "to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention." The statement received 60 votes in support, mostly from Europe and South America. Opposing the resolution, were the United States, the Holy See, and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. At the time, the Bush administration couched its objection to the measure in legal technicalities. Well, that was then. This is now: At the so-called "Durban Review Conference" on racism and xenophonia underway in Geneva, Europe again put forward language condemning “all forms of discrimination and all other human rights violations based on sexual orientation.” According to UN Watch, "The Czech Republic on behalf of the E.U., with the support of New Zealand, the United States, Colombia, Chile on behalf of the South American states, the Netherlands, Argentina and a few others, took the floor in support." (emphasis mine). The efforts to include language on discrimination based on sexual orientation ended up failing for lack of support from non-western countries. Still, it's relieving to see that the United States is now back on the side of the enlightened on this issue of basic human rights.

The Durban Paranoia

Anne Bayefsky is still sputtering about the United States' cowardly decision not to pack its bags and fling them in the face of every other country interested in holding a meaningful conference on racism. Holding her nose, Bayefsky dives into the bureaucratic minutiae of the preparatory meetings to which -- gasp -- the United States decided to send a delegation and, unsurprisingly, is appalled by what she sees. The very Constitution is in jeopardy, in her frantic outlook, because the U.S. delegates did not reject out of hand the idea that countries should...wait for it...oppose hate speech. The provision in question:
States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of persons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination...
To assuage free speech concerns, the U.S. delegation made sure to cite a later provision reassuring "the right to freedom of opinion and expression." But far from calming Bayefsky, this only stokes her rage; by even referencing the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, rather than tearing it to pieces, the United States is, in her twisted paranoia, sacrificing its very sovereignty, and binding itself to the sordid agenda of the Durban Review Conference's more unsavory participants (the Irans and Cubas and North Koreas of the world that the Right will stare down so readily when it comes to military bluster, but to which they ascribe a bizarrely aggrandized influence when it comes to diplomacy). In a remarkable reverse-Orwellian feat, Bayefsky unconcernedly relies on assumptions that, when it comes to Durban, everything means exactly the opposite of what it appears to mean. Thus, the anti-racism conference is invariably a "racist confab," and any motion to curb hate speech is certainly an insidious attempt to eat away at our treasured principle of free speech. By ceding the territory of meaning to the conference's nefarious actors -- that Iran has an anti-Semitic agenda should come as no surprise to anyone -- Bayefsky is essentially stooping to their level. Human rights have meaning and value, and it would be encouraging to see skeptics like Bayefsky express some interest in strengthening the concept worldwide, instead of simply retreating and retrenching in America's own fortress of freedom.