Interviewed: Luis Josué Salés, Scripps College; Rachel Mikva, Chicago Theological Seminary; Samira Meht University of Colorado Boulder; Steven K. Green, Willamette University; Susan M. Shaw; Oregon State University.

Since the first indications that the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, following a leaked draft opinion on May 2, 2022, religious leaders from many denominations have been working to preserve access to abortion care, even as others prayed for Roe to indeed be overruled. A minister in Texas was among those working on coordinating abortion care, including flying women to New Mexico to get abortions.

Religious communities in the U.S. have long been divided over the issue of abortion. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that 57% of Americans were supportive of legal abortion. A majority of those who identified as evangelical were opposed to abortion.

Before June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, The Conversation asked several scholars to explain the multiple views across faith groups and also the differences within denominations. Here are five articles from our archives:

1. Abortion rights as religious freedom

Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University, explained why restricting abortion interferes with religious freedom.

The strong opposition of some Christian churches, such as the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, is based on their views about the time of “ensoulment,” the moment at which the soul is believed to enter the fetus. Conservative Christians believe this happens at the moment of conception.

Not all Christian denominations agree. As Green wrote, the United Church of Christ, for example, passed a resolution in 1981 that said “every woman must have the freedom of choice to follow her personal and religious convictions concerning the completion or termination of a pregnancy.”

Additionally, other faith groups such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism have differing beliefs about ensoulment.

2. What Jewish texts say

Judaism allows for abortion and even requires it when a woman’s health is endangered, according to Rachel Mikva, professor of Jewish studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. The majority of foundational Jewish texts assert that a fetus does not attain the status of personhood until birth.

There is some difference of opinion among Orthodox rabbis, but there is room to consider diverse perspectives.

Overall, according to a 2017 Pew survey, 83% of American Jews believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Even ultra-Orthodox leaders, as Mikva found, have resisted anti-abortion measures that do not allow religious exceptions.

3. Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist views

Beliefs from other faith traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam also show that religions place ensoulment at different moments and give it varying degrees of importance, according to Samira Mehta, assistant professor of women and gender studies and Jewish studies at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Muslim scholars and clerics, for example, have a range of positions on abortion. “Some believe abortion is never permitted, and many allow it until ensoulment, which is often placed at 120 days’ gestation, just shy of 18 weeks,” according to Mehta. In general, classical Islamic law sees legal personhood as beginning at birth, and many Muslim religious leaders therefore permit abortion to save the life of the mother.

Views in Hinduism and Buddhism are diverse. “Most Hindus believe in reincarnation, which means that while one may enter bodies with birth and leave with death, life itself does not, precisely, begin or end. Rather, any given moment in a human body is seen as part of an unending cycle of life – making the question of when life begins quite different than in Abrahamic religions,” wrote Mehta. For Buddhists, a decision about abortion is treated with compassion and considered to be a “moral choice,” depending on the circumstances.

4. Shift in views of Southern Baptists

Scholars have also pointed out how in conservative faith groups, beliefs have shifted over time. Scholar Susan M. Shaw, who has long studied the Southern Baptists, explained that they have not always been opposed to abortion.

According to Shaw, the change in Southern Baptist views started in the 1980s, when a more conservative group took charge of the denomination. At that time a “resolution on abortion” was drafted that declared that “abortion ends the life of a developing human being” and called for legal measures “prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.”

Additionally, as Shaw found, another “interesting shift” happened in that resolution – instead of referring to fetal life, as earlier resolutions did, the 1980 resolution called fetuses “unborn” or “pre-born” human life or “persons.” The fetus, as she wrote, “was no longer a developing organism dependent on a woman’s body, but rather it was a full human being with the same status and human rights as the women.”

5. Reproductive options in premodern Christianity

Scholars have pointed out that among premodern Christians, too, views on abortion were more complex. According to religion scholar Luis Josué Salés, pregnancy prevention and termination methods thrived in premodern Christian societies, especially in the medieval Roman Empire.

Indeed, premodern Christians may have actively developed reproductive options for women, Salés found. Sixth-century Christian physician Aetios of Amida and Paulos of Aigina, who came a century later, were said to have provided instructions for performing abortions and making contraceptives.

In the U.S., the first abortion restrictions were enacted only in the 1820s. As Mehta aptly put it, “We tend to think of the religious response to abortion as one of opposition, but the reality is much more complicated.”

Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Global Voices ) – Tech giant Google plans to establish a new Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia.

Access Now, a nongovernmental digital rights organization, has raised alarm and requested the immediate halting of the plan, referring to the country’s “appalling human rights record.”

The organization issued a statement on January 26, with the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), a public interest technology law clinic based at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

The statement warned against the “dangerous” implications of Google’s plans to store Snapchat data on Saudi-based servers, which it said would “place millions of the Snapchat users’ personal information under the jurisdiction of a government with a longstanding record of surveillance.”

“Saudi Arabia and human rights safeguards, historically, do not mix,” said Marwa Fatafta, Middle East and North Africa policy manager at Access Now:

A new Google Cloud region in the kingdom is dangerous, and it is imperative that Google outlines, in no uncertain terms, how they plan to protect data and people’s rights from the prying eyes of the Saudi regime.

The government of Saudi Arabia’s dismal human rights record includes silencing activists, human and women’s rights defenders, and journalists and violating the basic rights of its citizens through extrajudicial killings, detention and torture, and the use of spyware to track and censor.

This troubling history, the statement says, “raises serious concerns about the possibility of facilitating and whitewashing future human rights abuses.”

Notably, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, Inc., has been named as one of the anchor tenants for the new Saudi-based cloud services. Considering the application’s prevalence in the region with over 17 million users, the potential for government demands for content data or metadata — and the increased opportunity to control online discourse — are both of particular concern.

“This directly places millions of people at risk, the consequences of which could be deadly,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, CIPPIC director.

Through open letters addressed to Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, and Snap Inc. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel on Tuesday, January, 26, Access Now and CIPPIC asked both companies to address a a set of questions, including whether a due diligence has been conducted, including on potential human rights impacts, with respect to establishing the cloud region and hosting Snapchat data in Saudi Arabia; what applications or other clients use this centre to store their data, as well as what user data is being held or processed there and from which countries, and what security measures are in place to protect this data.

The letters also inquired about the legal standards which Google Cloud and Snap consider as necessary for secure and sustainable operations and how the kingdom meets those indicators, in addition to any existing understandings between the Saudi government and the companies on government access to data.

According to the statement, the companies have been asked to respond publicly by Tuesday, February 2.

Dahlia Kholaif: I’ve been telling stories of the Middle East for 14 years. I’m a staunch believer in the power of words, and despite all odds, a human-enthusiast. Please don’t hesitate to share your story.
@Dee_Kholaif is my social media handle

Via Global Voices

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Google Cloud Tech: “Google Data Center 360° Tour”

Putting the interests of Internet providers over Internet users, Congress today voted to erase landmark broadband privacy protections. If the bill is signed into law, companies like Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon will have free rein to hijack your searches, sell your data, and hammer you with unwanted advertisements. Worst yet, consumers will now have to pay a privacy tax by relying on VPNs to safeguard their information. That is a poor substitute for legal protections.

Make no mistake, by a vote of 215 to 205 a slim majority of the House of Representatives have decided to give our personal information to an already highly profitable cable and telephone industry so that they can increase their profits with our data. The vote broke along party lines, with Republicans voting yes, although 15 Republicans broke ranks to vote against the repeal with the Democrats.

Should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways. They will watch your every action online and create highly personalized and sensitive profiles for the highest bidder. All without your consent. This breaks with the decades long legal tradition that your communications provider is never allowed to monetize your personal information without asking for your permission first. This will harm our cybersecurity as these companies become giant repositories of personal data. It won’t be long before the government begins demanding access to the treasure trove of private information Internet providers will collect and store.

While today is extremely disappointing, there is still tomorrow. Without a doubt Internet providers (with the exception of the small providers who stood with us) will engage in egregious practices, and we are committed to mobilizing the public to push back. EFF will continue the fight to restore our privacy rights on all fronts. We will fight to restore your privacy rights in the courts, in the states, in Washington, D.C., and with technology. We are prepared for the long haul of pushing a future Congress to reverse course and once again side with the public.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

[Ed. note: Everyone should now be using a Virtual Private Network, which can be installed on your browser very easily. Contrary to what some have alleged, I don’t find that it slows down browsing at all. If you don’t use a VPN now, you may as well publish a public daily list on the web of the sites you visited. Universities often offer VPNs to anyone associated with them, including alumni. Here are PC Mag’s recommendations.

For anything very private or sensitive, or if you live under a brutal dictatorship, you should be using the Tor browser. ]

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Newsy: “Trump to decide future of internet user data”

Via EFF

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit Tech: ” Companies Can Now Buy, Sell Your Internet Browsing History–Without Your Permission”

1. If you appoint yourself to carry out surveillance of a mosque congregation who have never given any evidence of being violent, you might be a white terrorist.

2. If you don’t know the difference between gentle Sufi mysticism and violent extremism, you might be a white terrorist.

3. If you plot to burn down a mosque, you might be a white terrorist.

4. If you also plot to burn a school and a cafeteria, you might be a white terrorism.

5. If you plot to put together a militia to attack the mosque, you might be a white terrorist.

6. If you make phone calls to potential militia members discussing using assault rifles on Muslims at the mosque who put up resistance, you might be a white terrorist.

If companies are allowed to operate in this manner without repercussions, our democracy has no future.’

Telecommunications giant AT&T is spying on Americans for profit and helped law enforcement agencies investigate everything from the so-called war on drugs to Medicaid fraud—all at taxpayers’ expense, according to new reporting by The Daily Beast.

The program, known as Project Hemisphere, allowed state and local agencies to conduct warrantless searches of trillions of call records and other cellular data—such as “where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why”—for a massive range of investigations, the Beast‘s Kenneth Lipp reports. In one case examined by the news outlet, a sheriff’s office in Victorville, California used Hemisphere to track down a homicide suspect.

Hemisphere was first revealed by the New York Times in 2013, but was described at the time as a “partnership” between AT&T and drug enforcement agencies used in counter-narcotics operations.

Neither, it turns out, is entirely true.

Lipp writes:

AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

The details were revealed as AT&T seeks to buy out Time Warner in a mega-merger that media watchdogs are warning would create “dangerous concentrations of political and economic power.”

Evan Greer, campaign director at the digital rights group Fight for the Future, said Tuesday, “The for-profit spying program that these documents detail is more terrifying than the illegal [National Security Agency] surveillance programs that Edward Snowden exposed. Far beyond the NSA and FBI, these tools are accessible to a wide range of law enforcement officers including local police, without a warrant, as long as they pay up.”

“It makes me sick to my stomach thinking about it,” Greer said.

While the government can request that private companies hand over user data, the documents show that AT&T went above and beyond to make the operation profitable, Lipp writes. ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian told the Beast, “Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate.”

And because the contract between the telecom company and the U.S. government stipulates only that agents not speak about Hemisphere if a probe using it becomes public, investigators may be left with no choice but to create a false narrative to explain how they obtained certain evidence, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Adam Schwartz.

“This document here is striking,” Schwartz told Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.”

“At a minimum there is a very serious question whether they should be doing it without a warrant. A benefit to the parallel construction is they never have to face that crucible. Then the judge, the defendant, the general public, the media, and elected officials never know that AT&T and police across America funded by the White House are using the world’s largest metadata database to surveil people,” he said.

Greer added: “Customers trusted AT&T with some of their most private information, and the company turned around and literally built a product to sell that information to as many government agencies and police departments as they could. Not only did they fail to have any safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of the data, they actually required law enforcement to keep the program secret and dig up or fabricate other evidence, to hide the fact that they’d received information from AT&T.”

Fight for the Future called on AT&T to shut down the program and on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Hemisphere and reveal all the cases in which it was used.

“If companies are allowed to operate in this manner without repercussions, our democracy has no future,” Greer said.

Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don’t expect is our own government to hack our email – but it’s happening. Federal court cases going on right now are revealing that federal officials can read all your email without your knowledge.

As a scholar and lawyer who started researching and writing about the history and meaning of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution more than 30 years ago, I immediately saw how the FBI versus Apple controversy earlier this year was bringing the founders’ fight for liberty into the 21st century. My study of that legal battle caused me to dig into the federal government’s actual practices for getting email from cloud accounts and cellphones, causing me to worry that our basic liberties are threatened.

A new type of government search

The federal government is getting access to the contents of entire email accounts by using an ancient procedure – the search warrant – with a new, sinister twist: secret court proceedings.

The earliest search warrants had a very limited purpose – authorizing entry to private premises to find and recover stolen goods. During the era of the American Revolution, British authorities abused this power to conduct dragnet searches of colonial homes and to seize people’s private papers looking for evidence of political resistance.

To prevent the new federal government from engaging in that sort of tyranny, special controls over search warrants were written into the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But these constitutional provisions are failing to protect our personal documents if they are stored in the cloud or on our smartphones.

Fortunately, the government’s efforts are finally being made public, thanks to legal battles taken up by Apple, Microsoft and other major companies. But the feds are fighting back, using even more subversive legal tactics.

Searching in secret

To get these warrants in the first place, the feds are using the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986 – long before widespread use of cloud-based email and smartphones. That law allows the government to use a warrant to get electronic communications from the company providing the service – rather than the true owner of the email account, the person who uses it.

And the government then usually asks that the warrant be “sealed,” which means it won’t appear in public court records and will be hidden from you. Even worse, the law lets the government get what is called a “gag order,” a court ruling preventing the company from telling you it got a warrant for your email.

You might never know that the government has been reading all of your email – or you might find out when you get charged with a crime based on your messages.

Microsoft steps up

Much was written about Apple’s successful fight earlier this year to prevent the FBI from forcing the company to break the iPhone’s security system.

But relatively little notice has come to a similar Microsoft effort on behalf of customers that began in April 2016. The company’s suit argued that search warrants delivered to Microsoft for customers’ emails are violating regular people’s constitutional rights. (It also argued that being gagged violates Microsoft’s own First Amendment rights.)

Microsoft’s suit, filed in Seattle, says that over the course of 20 months in 2015 and 2016, it received more than 3,000 gag orders – and that more than two-thirds of the gag orders were effectively permanent, because they did not include end dates. Court documents supporting Microsoft describe thousands more gag orders issued against Google, Yahoo, Twitter and other companies. Remarkably, three former chief federal prosecutors, who collectively had authority for the Seattle region for every year from 1989 to 2009, and the retired head of the FBI’s Seattle office have also joined forces to support Microsoft’s position.

The feds get everything

It’s very difficult to get a copy of one of these search warrants, thanks to orders sealing files and gagging companies. But in another Microsoft lawsuit against the government a redacted warrant was made part of the court record. It shows how the government asks for – and receives – the power to look at all of a person’s email.

On the first page of the warrant, the cloud-based email account is clearly treated as “premises” controlled by Microsoft, not by the email account’s owner:

“An application by a federal law enforcement officer or an attorney for the government requests the search of the following … property located in the Western District of Washington, the premises known and described as the email account [REDACTED]@MSN.COM, which is controlled by Microsoft Corporation.”

The Fourth Amendment requires that a search warrant must “particularly describe the things to be seized” and there must be “probable cause” based on sworn testimony that those particular things are evidence of a crime. But this warrant orders Microsoft to turn over “the contents of all e-mails stored in the account, including copies of e-mails sent from the account.” From the day the account was opened to the date of the warrant, everything must be handed over to the feds.

Reading all of it

In warrants like this, the government is deliberately not limiting itself to the constitutionally required “particular description” of the messages it’s looking for. To get away with this, it tells judges that incriminating emails can be hard to find – maybe even hidden with misleading names, dates and file attachments – so their computer forensic experts need access to the whole data base to work their magic.

If the government were serious about obeying the Constitution, when it asks for an entire email account, at least it would write into the warrant limits on its forensic analysis so only emails that are evidence of a crime could be viewed. But this Microsoft warrant says an unspecified “variety of techniques may be employed to search the seized emails,“ including “email by email review.”

As I explain in a forthcoming paper, there is good reason to suspect this type of warrant is the government’s usual approach, not an exception.

Former federal computer-crimes prosecutor Paul Ohm says almost every federal computer search warrant lacks the required particularity. Another former prosecutor, Orin Kerr, who wrote the first edition of the federal manual on searching computers, agrees: “Everything can be seized. Everything can be searched.” Even some federal judges are calling attention to the problem, putting into print their objections to signing such warrants – but unfortunately most judges seem all too willing to go along.

What happens next

If Microsoft wins, then citizens will have the chance to see these search warrants and challenge the ways they violate the Constitution. But the government has come up with a clever – and sinister – argument for throwing the case out of court before it even gets started.

The government has asked the judge in the case to rule that Microsoft has no legal right to raise the Constitutional rights of its customers. Anticipating this move, the American Civil Liberties Union asked to join the lawsuit, saying it uses Outlook and wants notice if Microsoft were served with a warrant for its email.

The government’s response? The ACLU has no right to sue because it can’t prove that there has been or will be a search warrant for its email. Of course the point of the lawsuit is to protect citizens who can’t prove they are subject to a search warrant because of the secrecy of the whole process. The government’s position is that no one in America has the legal right to challenge the way prosecutors are using this law.

Far from the only risk

The government is taking a similar approch to smartphone data.

For example, in the case of U.S. v. Ravelo, pending in Newark, New Jersey, the government used a search warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer’s personal cellphone – more than 90,000 items including text messages, emails, contact lists and photos. When the phone’s owner complained to a judge, the government argued it could look at everything (except for privileged lawyer-client communications) before the court even issued a ruling.

The federal prosecutor for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, has gone even farther, telling the judge that once the government has cloned the cellphone it gets to keep the copies it has of all 90,000 items even if the judge rules that the cellphone search violated the Constitution.

Where does this all leave us now? The judge in Ravelo is expected to issue a preliminary ruling on the feds’ arguments sometime in October. The government will be filing a final brief on its motion to dismiss the Microsoft case September 23. All Americans should be watching carefully to what happens next in these cases – the government may be already watching you without your knowledge.

Clark D. Cunningham, W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics; Director, National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

—–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Newsy Tech from last winter: “The Broad, Warrantless Reach Of National Security Letters – Newsy”

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2015 (IPS) – U.S. President Barack Obama spoke in Nairobi at the end of a two-day visit Saturday, focusing on Kenya’s economy and the fight against terrorism, but also briefly touching on gay rights and discrimination.

‘“When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they are doing to anybody, but because they are different, that’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode, and bad things happen,” Obama said at a joint press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
“You can’t encourage change by staying silent.” — Charles Radcliffe”

Presidents Barack Obama and Uhuru Kenyatta wave to delegates at the Opening Plenary at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, in Nairobi, Kenya on July 25, 2015. Credit: U.S. Embassy Nairobi

But LGBTI Kenyans are not in agreement about whether Obama’s presence will help or hurt their struggle, according to the Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Jessica Stern.

“The difference of views is a sign of the strength and diversity of the Kenyan LGBTI movement, but there’s no question that this is a potential minefield, and ultimately, those who stand to get hurt most are regular Kenyans,” she told IPS.

Some have argued that the U.S. president speaking out on LGBTQ human rights in Kenya was counterproductive in the past, and has made the people of Kenya, where same-sex relations are punishable by up to 14 years in prison, more homophobic and unsupportive of the LGBTQ community.

Anti-gay organisations like the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum claim that they gained more support due to President Obama’s comments in 2013, along with some American policies, likely because the protection of LGBTQ communities is widely viewed as an American value being imposed on African society.

After Obama’s comments Saturday, President Kenyatta stated that in Kenya, it is “very difficult to impose” gay rights because the culture is different from the United States, and the societies do not accept it – which makes it a “non-issue” to the government of Kenya.

“There’s been a deliberate attempt to portray homosexuality as a Western import, which it isn’t,” the U.N. adviser on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity, Charles Radcliffe, told IPS. “The only Western imports in this context are the homophobic laws used to punish and silence gay people,” these laws mostly originating from 19th century British colonialism.

By speaking on LGBTQ human rights abuses, Obama is “imposing human values, not Western ones,” says Radcliffe. “It’s possible to respect tradition, while at the same time insisting that everyone — gay people included — deserve to be protected from prejudice, violence, and unfair punishment and discrimination.”

Radcliffe said he believes Obama and other leaders should speak out, as it will “open people’s eyes to the existence of gay Kenyans and the legitimacy of their claim to respect and recognition.”

Radcliffe advises prominent individuals to take their lead from members of the local LGBT community – who are best placed to advise on what interventions are likely to help, and which ones risk making things more difficult.

“LGBT activists are too often isolated in their own countries; they need the support of fellow human rights activists, women’s rights activists and others campaigning for social justice. Public opinion tends to change when individual members of the public get to know LGBT individuals and realise they are people too. The government should hasten that process, not obstruct it. ”

Radcliffe notes that “you can’t encourage change by staying silent.”

According to Stern, “LGBTI Kenyans have been fighting their own heroic struggle for years, but the extremists have seized upon this opportunity to undermine their credibility as Kenyans. All Kenyans, gay and straight, lose when there’s this kind of media spin doctoring.”

Stern urged leaders like Obama and the media not to undermine an opportunity to address a spectrum of human rights abuses Kenyans are living with. Instead, she says there should be a focus on concerns which are being left by the wayside, such as the lack of police accountability, abuse by government security forces, abuse of Somali and Muslim communities, and a crackdown on NGOs, among many others.

“If the mechanisms for government accountability are weak, human rights of all stripes will suffer,” says Stern. “Kenyan activists of all stripes, including those working on LGBTI rights, are protesting corruption in government. They’ve continued calling for accountability for violence in 2007/2008 after elections.

“They’re defending people who’ve been arbitrarily arrested and charged, such as two men in Kwale County being tried under the ‘unnatural offenses law’. They’ve documented hundreds of extrajudicial killings by police in recent years, and they’ve called for police guilty of violence and theft to be disciplined and prosecuted.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Kenya continues to be plagued by corruption at all levels of government with limited accountability.

For example, although both presidents Kenyatta and Ruto campaigned for elected office on pledges to continue their cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has charged both presidents with crimes against humanity in the past, their campaigns later painted the ICC as a tool of Western imperialism, and encouraged other African leaders to undermine the ICC.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Licensed from Inter Press Service
—
Related video added by Juan Cole:

KTN News Kenya: “US President Barack Obama cautions on gay rights in Kenya”