Dilip Simeon's blog

To German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the UN Secretary-General and all global leaders attending COP27 in Egypt: As citizens from across the world horrified by Egypt's human rights violations, including the unlawful imprisonment of Alaa Abd el-Fattah and thousands of other political prisoners, we call on you to use all your diplomatic and financial means to bring about the immediate and unequivocal release of Alaa, to ensure Egypt releases its political prisoners ahead of the UN Climate Summit COP27 and reopens its civic space in a meaningful way. You have the power to push for human rights in Egypt – we count on you to use it. https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/free_alaa_global_2/?kiQPaab Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a vital voice of the Arab spring, is one of  at least 60,000 people jailed by Egypt’s regime on political grounds . For over 100 days, he has been on hunger strike, surviving on a daily spoon of hon...

Turkey should face charges in front of the international court of justice for being complicit in acts of genocide against the Yazidi people, while Syria and Iraq failed in their duty to prevent the killings, an investigation endorsed by British human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy has said. The groundbreaking report, compiled by a group of prominent human rights lawyers , is seeking to highlight the binding responsibility states have to prevent genocide on their territories, even if they are carried out by a third party such as Islamic State (IS). The lawyers, grouped under the title of the Yazidi Justice Committee (YJC), said there was accountability under international law for states to prevent the crime of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, chair of the YJC, described the genocide of the Yazidi people as “madness heaped on evil”. “Mechanisms in place could have saved the Yazidis from what is now part of their past, and part of their past partial d...

Calling the Supreme Court order on Zakia Jafri's petition a "wonderful piece of literature", senior SC lawyer Kamini Jaiswal on Tuesday said the judgment is "completely illegal, unconstitutional and violates every tenet of law and fundamental rights"... https://www.deccanherald.com/national/sc-order-on-zakia-jafris-appeal-illegal-unconstitutional-and-violates-every-tenet-of-law-1122315.html 'Heaven Help Us if SC Judges Intended Setalvad's Arrest': Justice Lokur Eminent Citizens Write To CJI To Suo Moto Clarify That Zakia Jafri judgment was not Intended to have adverse consequences Written by various lawyers and other individuals (304 in total), the letter expresses concern over the imprisonment of activist Teesta Setalvad,; former  ADGP RB Sreekumar and others, stating that they were being hounded "because they chose to pursue justice for the over 2000 people who were killed in Gujrat in February 2002... https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/lette...

In 2001, the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah published By the Sea, the story of Saleh Omar, a man who arrives at Gatwick airport as a refugee. The border official he speaks to says his parents also came to Britain as refugees, “But my parents are European, they have a right, they’re part of the family.” He goes on to say, “You don’t belong here … and we don’t want you here. We’ll make life hard on you, make you suffer indignities, perhaps even commit violence on you.” Omar is far from unaffected, but he carries within him an important piece of knowledge: he knows that by the British government’s own rules he is entitled to asylum, and though the official might spew racist language he will have no option in the end but to stamp Omar’s passport and allow him through. As indeed he does. I have read the novel twice, 20 years apart. The behaviour of the official becomes no less appalling but, even so, I read the Gatwick scene very differently the second time around. In Priti Patel’s B...

A Delhi University professor has been booked for an allegedly objectionable social media post on the claims of a ‘Shivling’ being found at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. Ratan Lal, an associate professor of history at the Hindu College, has been booked under IPC sections 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race) and 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings). In a statement Wednesday, DCP (North) Sagar Singh Kalsi said, “A complaint was received Tuesday night against Ratan Lal, professor of history at Hindu College, DU, regarding a deliberate and malicious post on Facebook that was intended to outrage reli­gious feelings by insulting a religion/reli­gious beliefs. A case under IPC sections 153-A/295-A has been registered at the Cyber Police Station, north district.” Speaking to ThePrint, Lal, who belongs to the Dalit community, said, “Critique of religion has been a part of discourse since the time of Gautam Buddh...

There was unrest in Jerusalem Friday as thousands attended the burial of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was  shot dead  two days earlier while reporting on a military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin.  Mourners had marched from Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate to Mount Zion cemetery. They were met with violence at the St. Joseph hospital complex by Israeli police when they tried to carry Abu Akleh's coffin, which Al Jazeera footage showed being rocked and then falling out of the hands of some of the pallbearers, as Israeli police beat them with batons. Shireen Abu Aqleh: press freedom under attack Crowds walked behind as Abu Akleh's rose-covered coffin was carried by pallbearers and lain down to rest next to her parents' grave. Church bells echoed through the cemetery.  The burial was taking place a day after a memorial procession that brought thousands to the West Bank city of Ramallah. Mourners flocked to the city's streets on Friday and huddled...

  Anyone who has ever genuinely immersed themselves in Ramcharitmanas will recognise the singular poignancy of one moment in the Sundarkand where Hanuman meets Sita. Until that point the story is hurtling towards disaster. Sita has been abducted. Ram is distraught and unsure of himself. But the moment Hanuman meets Sita is the point at which the epic turns; the confidence that order will be restored reappears. Hanuman drops Ram’s ring from the tree. Sita experiences contradictory emotions: Joy at recognition of the ring; fear about what its presence might mean.  (In Tulsidas’s rendition: Harsha vishaad hridya akulani). Sita is thinking many things. Suddenly Hanuman’s words of reassurance break out as he identifies himself. In all musical renditions, whether by Channulal Mishra or the underrated version by Mukesh, the gentle line “madhur vachana bole Hanumana (Hanuman spoke, his words like honey)”, always stops you in your tracks. Its power is not just the simple poetry but the...

A bold new exhibition by a young Myanmar artist challenges people not to turn away from dead babies and brutalised women in conflict zones overlooked by the world’s media. The  London show , ‘Please Enjoy Our Tragedies’, is by Sai, a multimedia artist who blocks out his last name for security reasons. Some of Sai’s work will be shown at the Venice Biennale  from 23 April , as part of the European Cultural Centre’s  Personal Structures exhibition . While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine currently dominates global attention, Sai draws links between that conflict and domestic repression in Myanmar. “The same stakeholders are involved in Myanmar as in Ukraine,” he told openDemocracy. “Russia arms Myanmar’s generals and China supports them. It’s not a Ukraine problem; it’s a global problem.”… https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/myanmar-sai-artist-junta/ Silent strike empties streets in Myanmar on anniversary of coup More  posts on Myanmar

UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk has issued one of his strongest condemnations yet of Israeli apartheid in a  report  to the 49th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council for Agenda Item 7; the session which, claims Israel, singles it out unfairly. Referring to various statements, including those of former Israeli ministers and officials in state institutions who called out the colonial state’s apartheid, Lynk declared, “If these responsible figures have determined that this reality is apartheid, then it is incumbent on the rest of us to test, through the tools of international law and human rights, whether these observations accurately reflect what is happening in the Palestinian territory.” Lynk’s report notes that the Rome Statute’s legal definition of apartheid provides “a forward looking definition with a universal application”, with no reference to South Africa, the country which remains the state primarily associated with the racist system of government and th...

A Colombian conservationist who saved a rare species of parrot from extinction, a young feminist activist in  Afghanistan , and two poets in Myanmar who used words to protest against the military coup were among 358 human rights defenders murdered in 35 countries last year, analysis has found.  The environmentalist  Gonzalo Cardona Molina ,  55;  Frozan Safi , a 29-year-old Afghan economics lecturer; and  K Za Win and Khet Thi , two of several poets to be killed, were among those targeted because of their 'peaceful and powerful' work, according to a  global analysis  of threats and attacks faced by human rights activists compiled by Front Line Defenders (FLD) and the Human Rights Defenders Memorial.  Many of the killings could have been prevented, as they were preceded by threats and calls for protection, according to  FLD , which tries to protect activists at risk…. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/02/more-human-r...

A chill is blowing through Chinese civil society as activists, journalists and academics report receiving police warnings and censorship of their social media platforms in recent weeks as Beijing prepares to host the Winter Olympics beginning on Friday. In mid-January, the Beijing-based human rights activist Hu Jia said in a tweet that China’s state security apparatus was summoning activists around the country to question them and warn them to stay silent. The author Zhang Yihe and prominent journalist Gao Yu said they had lost some or all of their access to WeChat, China’s dominant social media platform. Academics including Guo Yuhua, the outspoken Tsinghua University sociologist, and He Weifang, the Peking University law professor, reported similar issues. Ahead of the Games, authorities also detained two prominent human rights activists: the lawyer Xie Yang and writer Yang Maodong. They are held on suspicion of “inciting state subversion”. A third rights lawyer, Tang Jitian, went mi...

Prison was a central pillar of communism and an experience shared by generations of eastern Europeans. The USA today can also be described as a carceral society, its prison system the expression of a ‘new Jim Crow’. What does the comparison mean for the definition of the ‘political prisoner’? A conversation. I’m American, but I’m a historian of eastern Europe. Since Donald Trump, however, one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the centrality of mass incarceration in the context both of American racism in particular and of our political system more broadly. Many of the people I’ve known in eastern Europe, especially among the generation born just after the war, have also had the experience of being in prison – in their cases, as political prisoners. For a still earlier generation – the avant-garde poets, for example, who got themselves involved in communism – there was an assumption that sooner or later you would sit in prison. In an interview with Antonín Liehm in the late 19...