Human Rights

In the heart of Athens Exarchia Square, a Palestinian refugee youth from Ein El-Hilwa refugee camp in Lebanon sits to tell me of the sobering reality offering refugee support services in Greek camps has taught him. By now, Exarchia has cleared of the international volunteers who come for the summer to offer “help” and of […]

censorship

University of Michigan Professor Disciplined for Refusing to Write Student Recommendation Letter

contributors

October 16, 2018 Committee on Academic Freedom Middle East Studies Association of North America Elizabeth R. Cole Interim Dean College of Literature, Science and the Arts University of Michigan ecole@umich.edu Dear Dean Cole: We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express […]

Human Rights

Cologne: 10,000 to Protest Turkey’s Erdogan on Human Rights

AFP

by Michelle FITZPATRICK | – Cologne (Germany) (AFP) – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to open one of Europe’s largest mosques in Cologne on Saturday as he wraps up a controversial visit to Germany, with police deploying in force amid planned protests. The inauguration will be the closing event of Erdogan’s three-day state […]

censorship

Today, Europe Lost the Internet. Now, We Fight Back

Cory Doctorow

( Electronic Frontier Foundation) – Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like tweets and Facebook updates; […]

Torturers

No one, not Psychologists or Supreme Court Justices, should be Helping with Gov’t Torture

Rebecca Gordon

San Francisco ( Tomdispatch.com) – Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The APA’s decision is important — […]

Colonialism

Human Zoos in the Age of Trump

Ariel Dorfman

Durham, NC (Tomdispatch.com) – When Donald Trump recently accused “illegal immigrants” of wanting to “pour into and infest our country,” there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated. Nobody, […]

Displaced and Refugees

World to 22 mn Refugees: Only 200K of You can be Helped

John Feffer

New York (Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Over 22.5 million people have been forced to flee their countries. Last year, less than 200,000 were resettled. It’s a famous story, though perhaps not famous enough. The 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, was recounted in a 1974 book and a […]

Displaced and Refugees

“Death Sentence:” Dems Slam Sessions’ Denial of Asylum to Gang, Abuse Victims

Paul Handley

Washington (AFP) – US Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared Monday that victims of domestic and gang violence will no longer qualify for asylum, in an effort to stem a flow of illegal immigrant families from Central America. In a deciding opinion on a case of an unidentified woman from El Salvador who was raped and […]

Children

UN: ‘Nothing Normal’ about U.S. Detaining Immigrant Children

TeleSur

“Detention is never in the best interests of the child and always constitutes a child rights violation,” officials said. The United Nations has called on the United States to stop detaining irregular migrant families and separating children from their parents on its border with Mexico, saying that the acts broke the law. Several hundred children […]