Human Rights Video (22): Landmines

WARNING: this video is disturbing, and meant to be.

(imagine if land mines were a part of your everyday)

From an advocacy standpoint, this is probably way over the top. Some would call it badvertising and, indeed, I don’t see the need to shock people in this way in order to raise consciousness. More on landmines here. More human rights videos here.

Related Articles

• Denmark against landmines : Picnic gone wrong [Video] (scaryideas.com)
• Picnic gone wrong (osocio.org)
• U.S. still undecided on joining landmines treaty (reuters.com)

Human Rights Maps (142): Countries That Have Ratified the International Convention Banning Cluster Bombs

(source)

Here’s a version that looks like it’s a bit more up-to-date:

(source, purple = ratifications, blue = signatories)

The convention,

banning the manufacture, use and stockpiling of cluster munitions, … came into force last year [2010], [and] has been signed by 108 countries and ratified by 60 of them [as of today, November 2011]. But 17 of the non-signatories continue to produce the weapons (see map below), and two have used them in conflict this year: Thailand during border clashes with Cambodia in February, and Libya under Muammar Qaddafi during the battle of Misrata in April. (source)

Cluster munition is a particularly horrible type of bomb that spreads large numbers of small bomblets over a wide area. Because of the aimlessness of the device, it poses high risks to civilians both during attacks and afterwards since many bomblets remain unexploded after they land. They kill or maim civilians long after a conflict has ended. Unexploded submunitions are costly to locate and remove. The UN estimates that 98% of victims of cluster munitions are civilians. More here.

More on the law of war, and more human rights maps.

Related Articles

• Cluster Bomb Ban Takes Effect Minus Support of Major Producers (waronterrornews.typepad.com)
• Cluster Bomb Ban Goes International Without U.S. (firedoglake.com)
• UN chief hails treaty banning cluster bombs (independent.co.uk)

Human Rights Maps (117): Gun Rights in the U.S. and the World

(source, click image to enlarge)

The Supreme Court ruled in July 2010 that state and city governments must respect the individual right to bear arms that is guaranteed by Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ruling does not necessarily invalidate all gun control laws, but it will likely mean the demise of outright bans and restrict significantly the ability of states and cities to impose other kinds of controls.

(source, click image to enlarge)

Here’s a map on gun rights in other parts of the world:

(source, click image to enlarge)

More on gun rights here. A related map is here. More human rights maps are here.

Related Articles

• Supreme Court ruling protects gun rights, reasonable restriction (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Supreme Court extends gun rights (news.bbc.co.uk)
• After tragedy, Ariz. lawmakers eye more gun rights (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Children’s Rights (12): Child Soldiers, Why and How?

Why are children recruited for warfare? Why not just use adults who are likely to be more capable and reliable soldiers? There’s an interesting paper here looking at some of the reasons:

• Children are relatively easy to abduct, subjugate, and manipulate. They are more impressionable and vulnerable to indoctrination, and their moral development is incomplete and malleable.
• They are also seen as more loyal and less threatening to adult leadership.
• Children, despite their a priori disadvantages in terms of fighting skills, may have a particular functional value. They may be suitable for menial logistical support of the armed group, or they may even have certain tactical advantages: they can slip through enemy lines unnoticed, making them effective spies and bomb carriers. Also, the proliferation of inexpensive, lightweight weapons has made it easier to use children as soldiers. These small arms are easy to transport and use with little training.
• Rebel groups also make simple cost-benefit analysis: children require less food and no payment. Punishment of children is also less costly. Child soldiers are financially attractive. Rebel groups may be extremely resource-constrained and forced to recruit children.
• The use of child soldiers can present a moral dilemma to enemies: should they kill children?
• Rebel groups may recruit children in order to signal seriousness, commitment and ruthlessness, and thereby instill fear in the enemy.

How are child soldiers recruited? Patterns of recruitment of children vary according to the context. It’s usually a mix of punishment, promises of rewards and indoctrination.

• The recruitment of children is facilitated when they are forced to participate in an assassination (perhaps of one of their relatives, parents or friends). The objective is to break their will. The forced killing of relatives also destroys a child’s outside options: if the child were to flee, it has no place to go to, or the community may reject the child because of what it did.
• Armed forces will also destroy other outside options for children: schools, villages, farms etc.
• Armed forces abuse children’s feelings of desperation and traumas resulting from previous situations of extreme violence.
• Armed forces also abuse certain motivations of children: children may join armed forces because of the desire to take control of events, or because of the protection offered by being at the shooting end of a gun.

More on child soldiers here and here.

Human Rights Maps (79): Numbers of Firearm Deaths in the U.S.

number of firearms deaths in the US

(source)

And this is the map for 2007:

number of deaths due to injury by firearms US

(source, these include accidental shootings, suicides, acts of self-defense, as well as crimes)

Here are some numbers for the rest of the world:

(source)

homicide by firearm, rate per 100000 population

 

percentage of homicides by firearm

(source)

More maps on violence. View all human rights maps. More textual information on violence here and here. Statistics on violence are here. Something on gun control and the arms trade.

Political Graffiti (67): Gun Control

More on gun control. More on the arms industry. More political graffiti.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (57): War

George Carlin

(source)

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done. George Carlin

More on war in general here, and on the arms trade in particular here. More George Carlin.

Human Rights Facts (39): The Arms Industry in 2008

(source)

From SIPRI:

Global military spending reached a record $1,464 billion last year with the United States taking up by far the biggest share of the total. Arms shipments were up 4 percent worldwide from 2007 and 45 percent higher than in 1999. The United States accounted for 58 percent of the worldwide increase between 1999 and 2008. China and Russia both nearly tripled their military spending over the decade. Other countries such as India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Brazil, South Korea, Algeria and Britain also contributed substantially to the total increase. Last year’s military spending comprised about 2.4 percent of global gross domestic product, corresponding to $217 per capita.

From The Economist:

Israel spends most on defence relative to its population, shelling out over $2,300 a person, over $300 more than America. Small and rich countries, and notably Gulf states, feature prominently by this measure. Saudi Arabia ranks ninth in absolute spending, but sixth by population. China has increased spending by 10% to $85 billion to become the world’s second largest spender. But it is still dwarfed by America, whose outlay of $607 billion is higher than that of the next 14 biggest spenders combined.

More on the arms industry.

Cultural Rights (11): Genocide

(photo showing the excavation of mass graves in Srebrenica)

What is genocide?

Genocide is the deliberate, systematic and violent destruction of a group (an ethnic, racial, religious, national or political group). This destruction can take many forms:

• the outright murder of (the majority of) the members of the group
• inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction
• measures intended to prevent births
• systematic rape as a means of terror and a means to “dilute” the identity of the group
• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
• destroying the (cultural) identity of the group (forceful assimilation; imposition of a language, religion etc.)

“Systematic” is important here. Short-term outburst or pogrom type actions will probably not amount to genocide.

The “intent to destroy” is also crucial when labeling actions or campaigns as genocidal. The destruction, however, doesn’t have to be physical (i.e. large-scale murder). As is obvious from the list above, cultural destruction or destruction of the groups’ separate identity is also genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that genocide is

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…”

The “in part” bit has led to some confusion. When is the part of the group that is being destroyed big enough to warrant the label of genocide? There is still some discussion about absolute numbers of victims, percentages of the total population of the group, degree of killing in the territory controlled by the killers etc.

Of all the generally recognized genocides that have taken place throughout human history, the most infamous ones occured in the 20th century (the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, Stalin’s forced famines, Mao’s Great Leap Forward etc.).

Stages of genocide

Before a genocide is actually carried out, the perpetrators usually take a number of “preparatory” steps:

• dehumanization of a group (vermin, insects or diseases…)
• promotion of narratives of “us and them“
• hate propaganda, polarization
• criminalization of a group (group has to be eliminated “in order that we may live”; them or us)
• identification of victims (“yellow star”)
• concentration of victims (ghettos)
• mobilization of large numbers of perpetrators
• state support and logistical organization (arms, transport, training of militias etc.)

Causes of genocide

The causes of genocide are often hard to pin down. They include:

• long-lasting tensions
• imbalances in political power
• imbalances in wealth or economic power
• scarcity
• religious incompatibilities
• indoctrination and propaganda
• civil war
• ideals of cultural purity and autonomy
• ethnological constructs (e.g. the creation of “hutuness” in Rwanda) which get a life of their own
• colonial heritage
• outside indifference
• etc.

Intervention to stop genocide

Here’s a post on humanitarian intervention, and here’s another. Most people around the world agree that the international community should intervene to stop a genocide:

(source)

Human Rights Facts (10): Arms Trade

This post on the international arms trade is a follow-up of a previous post on the evolution of war in the world and of one on the evolution of military budgets and defense spending.

Again, it’s useless to oppose trade in or production of arms in general. People and countries have to be able to defend themselves. However, weapons are mainly used for purposes other than self-defense. You don’t need arms to violate human rights, but it makes it much easier. As most countries don’t produce enough arms for their own needs, they have to import them. It’s difficult to estimate the precise financial value of the international arms trade because statistics are often highly confidential, for obvious reasons. The estimated financial value of the international arms trade varies between $25 and 35 billion, which represents about 0.5 % of world trade. After a downward trend following the end of the Cold War, trade has increased during the last decade:

(source)

The U.S. is the top supplier of weapons to other countries, accounting for around 35% of worldwide weapons sales, followed by Russia, Britain, Germany, France and China. The main buyers of arms are China, India, and the United Arab Emirates.

(source)

(source)

This covers only international transfers. We should also include domestic sales of arms. Many industrialized countries have a domestic arms industry to supply their own military forces, and a domestic trade in weapons for use by their citizens. Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the phrase “military-industrial complex”, where the armed forces, industry and politics become closely linked and encourage each other’s hunger for arms.

We see a similar increase in data on arms production. According to SIPRI,

“arms sales by the 100 largest arms-producing companies in the world (excluding China) – the SIPRI Top 100 – amounted to $315 billion in 2006, an increase of 9 per cent in nominal terms and 5 per cent in real terms.”

(source)

Arms exports are often used, not only for the benefit of the national economy, but also to influence other countries.

Over 600 million items of small arms are in circulation. According to Oxfam, around 500.000 individuals die in small arms-conflicts every year, approximately one death per minute.

Human Rights Facts (9): Military Spending

This is a follow-up of a previous post on the evolution of war in the world. Whereas the number of wars and their intensity seem to decrease over the last decades, the same cannot be said of the arms trade and the defense budgets. This makes it difficult to hope that the statistics on warfare will continue in the same positive trend for the future. The arms industry, the arms trade and defense budgets have traditionally been a strong driving force of violent conflict.

This post focuses on defense budgets and military spending. (The arms trade will be the topic of another post). Although one should not naively condemn all military spending – to use Bush-speak: there are many “evil” people in the world and we should be able to defend ourselves and our values – it is also the case that arms and weapons are a major factor in war dynamics. Their stocks tend to build up as enemies engage in “arms races”. And such races often cause war. War of course is a massive collection of human rights violations. Arms and weapons are also used in non-war situations, such as police brutality, private use, criminal use etc. where they also lead to rights violations. Arms and weapons that are originally part of the military often wind up in other sectors of society.

According to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the governments of the world spent $1.4 billion on arms and the military in 2007, an increase of almost 50% compared to a decade ago. This is 2.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) and $202 for each person in the world. (Compare: only 0.3% of world GDP is spent on development aid).

(source)

The champion of military spending is the U.S., which accounted for 45 % world total in 2007, followed by the U.K., China, France and Japan, with 4–5 % each. The U.S., however, did not substantially increase its spending over the last decades (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have led to an increase but not a lot beyond historic levels). In fact, measured as a share of its GDP, its spending decreased somewhat (it’s now about 5% of its GDP, still double of world average):

(source)

Western Europe has seen the lowest increase in spending, but the levels of spending vary a lot between countries:

China is a particular worry given its substantial increases in spending and the lack of transparency in its budgets:

This is a ranking of the biggest spenders:

(source)

The U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, North-Korea and Israel together have more than 25.000 nuclear arms. Here’s a post on the international arms trade.

Human Rights Facts (8): War

Since the beginning of recorded history, around 3600 BC, over 14.500 major wars have killed close to four billion people, a number that not so long ago equaled the whole of humanity. Since the Second World War, there have been on average about 30 armed conflicts ongoing every year. 90 per cent of casualties in these conflicts have been civilians, compared to 50 per cent in the Second World War and 10 per cent in the First.

Number of armed conflicts

However, recently there has been a drop in the number of wars and in their intensity in terms of their deadliness. This graph gives the number of armed conflicts since the Second World War, including inter-state wars, intra-state wars (civil wars) and colonial wars:

(source)

The exception is, as often, Sub-Saharan Africa, where the trend continues upward.

The following graph splits this out into the three categories of war mentioned before. As one can see, civil wars are by far the most common kind:

The conflicts shown in these figures resulted in at least 25 battle-related deaths a year. In all cases one of the warring parties was a state. The graph does not include ethnic or other conflicts where neither warring party was a state, nor does it include cases of “one-sided” violence such as genocide.

The second figure is a “stacked graph”, meaning that the number of conflicts in each category is indicated by the depth of the band of color. The top line indicates the total of number of conflicts of all types in each year, corresponding to the first figure.

Intensity of war

Also the intensity of wars, measured in terms of their deadliness, has declined, even before the number of conflicts started to fall:

The regional distribution of battle deaths shows a clear concentration in East and South-East Asia, which was the bloodiest region. Recently, however, battle-deaths occur mainly in Africa:

Also when the number of battle-deaths is related to the total of the world’s population do we see a clear improvement over the last decades:

As indicated before, war has many faces:

• traditional inter-state wars
• civil wars within states, between different parts of the population
• war between states on the one hand and insurgents or rebels within their territory fighting with or without external assistance on the other hand
• guerrilla wars
• terrorism
• paramilitary activity
• privatized warfare
• warlordism
• cold war

I’ll come back to some of these issues in future posts, as well as the issue of the arms trade and defense spending. See also previous posts on war, especially posts with regard to ethnic cleansing, refugees, democracy and war, and child soldiers.

Human Rights and International Law (1): Boycotting the China Olympics Because of Human Rights Violations in China and Sudan/Darfur

Some time ago, there was a story in the press about Steven Spielberg canceling his decision to work for the China Olympics. As a consequence, the discussion about a possible boycott (comparable to the boycott of the USSR Olympics after the invasion of Afghanistan) got some more publicity. Here are some general words about sanctions for the sake of human rights.

Boycotts, embargoes and other international sanctions (economic sanctions for example or a ban on foreign direct investments or bank loans) are peaceful means, used by the international community, to convince a country to stop violating human rights or to stop assisting a third country that is violating rights.

A disadvantage of sanctions is that they are most effective against relatively weak states. They can only work when they are directed against countries that are vulnerable to outside pressure (that, for example, depend on imports of products which are not, or not sufficiently, produced at home) and when a critical mass of countries, especially large countries, join in. Moreover, sanctions are not very popular in the countries imposing them. They often hurt that country’s economy. Its businesses can no longer export to or invest in the target countries, and jobs may be lost.

Sanctions are allowed in international law when

“they are taken in consequence of a breach of international rules imposing duties erga omnes, hence conferring on any State a right to claim respect for the rules”. Antonio Cassese

Antonio Cassese

(source)

These rules are, for example, human rights. However, even if every state is allowed to impose sanctions in these cases, it is better that the international community as a whole imposes the sanctions, and not only for efficiency reasons. Collective measures allow us to dismiss the charge of partiality and self-interest. They will also emphasise the symbolic value of the sanctions.

Sanctions have often been successful, for example in the Philippines and in Nicaragua, as well as in Argentina and Uruguay under the Carter administration. Sanctions can be successful when the aim is to weaken the industrial, technological and military powers of a state. Purely symbolic sanctions, such as a boycott of the Olympic Games, are probably less useful. Cultural sanctions are even worse, because they are harmful. They cut off the flow of information. It becomes very difficult to monitor rights violations, the opposition cannot contact the outside world and new ideas cannot take root. Perhaps even the rulers will start to see that other systems can be successful if they are allowed to communicate with the outside world.

It is advisable to impose selective sanctions rather than all-out embargoes that harm the population indiscriminately. Sometimes, it can be enough to stop arms deliveries or oil exports. Not all kinds of sanctions necessarily harm the civilian population.

It can never be the purpose to punish an entire population collectively. All-out embargoes are not only unjust, they are also counterproductive. They do not harm those who are supposed to be harmed, namely the rulers. On the contrary, they reinforce the rulers. The population will identify, not always without reason, the “foreigners” as those responsible for their predicament, a predicament which may be even worse than the one which caused the sanctions. They will rally behind their rulers because the sentiment of “we against the world” will spill over in virulent nationalism. Popular dissatisfaction will be directed to the outside world and away from the rulers. Sanctions are least effective in countries ruled by people who are insensitive to their population’s hardship, or, in other words, in countries where they are most needed.

And even if large-scale hardship caused by sanctions can persuade some rulers to step down or reform, it does not seem right to use or abuse the population in this way. Using people or punishing innocent people is perhaps the most serious violation of human rights.

If sanctions are imposed, then it is important to estimate the possibility of success. One should try to evaluate their efficiency beforehand. The imposition of sanctions and the choice of the kind of sanctions should be decided on the basis of, among other things:

• the fact that less far-reaching measures have been tried and have failed
• an evaluation of the type of adversary and the sorts of pressure he is unable to resist
• the “collateral damage” that is likely to result from the imposition of sanctions
• an evaluation of the stamina of those imposing the sanctions, their willingness to go ahead, and the number of countries that are willing to go ahead
• an evaluation of the possible negative consequences for those imposing the sanctions and of the effect of these consequences on their stamina
• an evaluation of the possibility to evade the sanctions
• the possibility and the willingness to enforce the sanctions by way of a blockade, for example.

More on human rights and foreign policy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Human Rights Quote (17): Water or Guns

Ban Ki Moon

Too often where we need water we find guns instead. Ban Ki Moon

Here are some data on the arms trade. And here is an article on the water problems in the world.