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Even as an Indian youth battles for life after a brutal attack on a group of four Indian students in Australia, Amnesty International says that the global economic downturn has aggravated human rights violations, and xenophobia is on the rise
Xenophobia was on the rise, Amnesty International warned on May 28, 2009, citing attacks on African immigrants in South Africa a year ago that killed at least 56 people. This was even as Shravan Kumar, a 25-year-old Indian student who was attacked with a screwdriver recently, along with three friends, lies unconscious in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Australia. Amnesty is concerned with the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who have been laid off as export-driven economies slow down, leaving more “disillusioned angry young men idle in their home villages and easy prey to extremist politics and violence”. Wealthy countries were resorting to ever harsher methods to keep out migrants, Amnesty said. Some European Union states such as Spain have signed agreements with African countries to return migrants, or stop them leaving in the first place. “Countries such as Mauritania see these agreements as license to arbitrarily arrest, detain in sub-standard conditions, and deport without any legal remedy large numbers of foreigners on its territory,” said Amnesty. The world faces a grave danger that “rising poverty and desperate economic and social conditions could lead to political instability and mass violence,” the rights group’s secretary general, Irene Khan, wrote in its annual report for 2009 titled ‘State of the World’s Human Rights’. Migrant workers in China, indigenous peoples in Latin America, and millions across the African continent are already bearing the burden of official repression as they try to protest their growing deprivation, she said. As governments struggle to resuscitate their economies, human rights are being “relegated to the back seat,” Khan added, calling for a “new global deal on human rights… to defuse the human rights time bomb”. “We are sitting on a powder keg of inequality, injustice and insecurity, and it is about to explode,” Khan wrote in the report. One bright spot in the human rights picture has been a change in the US’s position on the war on terror, she said. Noting that nearly 1 billion people suffer from hunger or malnutrition, Khan said food shortages have been aggravated by discrimination and political manipulation of food distribution. In Zimbabwe, where 5 million people needed food aid by the end of 2008, the government used food as a weapon against its political opponents, while in North Korea the authorities deliberately restricted food aid to oppress people. World leaders are concentrating on attempts to revive the global economy but neglecting conflicts that spawn widespread human rights abuses, the report says, citing Gaza, Sudan’s Darfur region, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. The report was compiled in 157 countries and highlights human rights abuses that have taken place over the past year within the context of the global economic crisis: - Marginalised and indigenous communities have been denied basic rights for a decent life, despite economic growth in countries like Brazil, Mexico and India.
- Hundreds of thousands of people in slums and rural communities have been forcibly uprooted in the name of economic development.
- Skyrocketing food prices have led to more hunger and disease in many countries, and in some countries -- notably Burma (Myanmar), North Korea and Zimbabwe -- governments used food as a political weapon.
- Discrimination and violence against women persists.
- In response to migratory pressures, receiving and transit countries have adopted even more restrictive measures to keep people out, with the EU leading the way in collusion with the governments of Mauritania, Morocco and Libya.
There is a stark warning in the 400-page report: that rising poverty could lead to instability and mass violence. It concludes that sustained economic recovery will not happen unless governments tackle human rights and bring an end to armed conflict. Amnesty argues that structural policies based on market economics have widened the gap between the rich and the poor, and left hundreds of millions of people vulnerable to poverty, with no safety net. It says multiple factors are increasing levels of hunger and malnutrition, and too little is being done to provide people with their basic needs. Amnesty is launching a new campaign called ‘Demand Dignity’. It is calling on the world’s strongest economic powers to set an example and defuse the current crisis. “Crises create opportunity,” Khan said, arguing that forgetting human rights in the scramble to reverse the downturn would leave any future economic recovery incomplete. “Ignoring one crisis for the sake of the other will solve neither,” she concluded. Source: The Associated Press, May 28, 2009
PTI, May 28, 2009
http://www.reuters.com, May 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk, May 2009
http://www.amnesty.org.uk, May 2009
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