By: Gracyn Elizabeth McGathy
Every evening at 6:35 p.m., the iron bars of Diavata Refugee Camp glow orange. The sun sets fiercely over its weed-covered fields, illuminating a collection of discarded goods: a worn shoe, crushed soda cans, and ripped plastic. The bus to the nearest city, Thessaloniki, will have come and gone by now, completing its second of only two stops it does each day in Diavata.
The only piece of evidence left to prove that help was once there lies rotting by the side of the road. With faded letters barely legible now, a scrap of once-white tarp labeled “United Nations.” The 2015 refugee crisis, a consequence of the Syrian Civil War, drew many major humanitarian organizations to the desolate expanse of Diavata. Casa Base, a small local NGO, housed in a rusting warehouse adjacent to the camp. The only organization left of its kind, forced to be the main organization responsible for providing critical humanitarian aid to the refugees...
By Mara Bulzan
It’s 2024 and I could not stop staring in disbelief at the costumes worn by Columbia students at Halloween parties. Ostentatious reproductions of stereotypical Roma clothing (derogatorily referred to as “gypsies”) worn to frat parties by young, white, and highly educated women. And no one called them out for it. They were not Roma, so their smiles and dancing could not have been weighed down by a history of over 800 years of enslavement, genocide, forced displacement and eugenic policies. They were not stigmatized for “looking Roma,” so they could use it as a costume. When they looked in the mirror that night, the face of someone deemed a perpetual outsider did not glare back at them.
Contemporary popular culture has normalized the stereotypical depiction of Roma women to the point in which it has become an aesthetic with fetishistic tendencies. She is only allowed to be a free-spirited, sly seductress with fortune-telling abilities. It is preferable that she...
By Gracyn McGathy
Ukraine’s recent decision to announce formal withdrawal from the Mine Ban Treaty should be a source of grave concern for the international human rights community. Their choice follows the scheduled exit of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Poland from the agreement later this year, all of which cited concerns over the Russio-Ukrainian war. Following two lengthy Russian invasions, Ukraine is now considered to be the most “mined country” in the world, with much of the forest terrain around the Kharkiv Oblast littered with trip-wire explosives, booby-trapped munition, and anti-personnel mines.
The purpose of many anti-personnel mines is to “injure, rather than kill,” maximizing human suffering while attempting to create medical and evacuation burdens upon the enemy force.
One of the defining characteristics of these mines is the little pressure required to explode, with some detonating at a mere 11 pounds of weight. Because of this, children around the globe are disproportionately at risk of threats posed by active minefields, and...
By Guest Writer Nevin Kamath
Photo Attribution: James LeeFormerIP at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps an underreported tragedy of Russia’s war in Ukraine is the ongoing evaporation of freedoms within Russia itself. I recently moderated the American Bar Association’s (ABA) “Challenges Facing Judges, Lawyers, and other Human Rights Defenders in Russia - Where are we now?” presented to the ABA and the general public by the ABA’s International Law Section, International Human Rights Committee in June 2023. What we heard from three experts was a grim reminder of why Russia scores at a 16/100 (Not Free) and dropping in Freedom House’s 2023 research.
What does the current situation in Russia look like for judges, lawyers, and human rights defenders?
We first heard from Daria Korolenko, a lawyer and researcher with OVD-info, which is an NGO that defends the freedom of peaceful assembly and the freedom of speech by “monitoring the detention of activists at rallies and providing politically persecuted citizens with...
By Guest Writer Harsh Bansal
INTRODUCTION
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, fueled by advancements in military technology and modern warfare systems. As the possibility of the conflict being brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) looms – which is likely in the backdrop of the issuance of Arrest Warrants by the Pre-Trial Chamber II – questions regarding assigning responsibility and accountability for the use of Autonomous Drones such as the USA's Switchblade, Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, Iran's Shahed-136, and most recently Ukraine's UJ-22 on the Kremlin Senate will arise.
AWS
These drones possess the remarkable capability of autonomous functioning, allowing them to operate independently without direct human control, hence dubbed Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS). USA’s Defense Directive No. 3000.09 defines AWS as a system that "once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator.”
All drones have different degrees of autonomy, hence making it more difficult to identify the perpetrator. Degrees of autonomy can be divided...
By Guest Writer Tatiana Gnuva
Excessive Use of Police Force to Shut Down Protests
France, a country that prides itself on being the home of “human rights” and whose very motto is “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” (“Freedom, equality, fraternity”) is responsible for a number of human rights violations related to police brutality and overreach. In fact, the UN Human Rights Council condemned France on May 1st for police brutality, ethnic profiling, and excessive use of force in large-scale police operations to regulate protests. The Council strongly recommended that the state intensify its efforts to combat anti-Muslim hate and reduce the systematic racism that pervades French police activities.
Several NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have identified countless instances of police brutality that have only increased in frequency. During the “Gilets Jaunes” demonstrations of 2019, the police used excessive force to harm peaceful protestors and bystanders—including journalists—by violently shutting down protests with tear gas and disproportional physical force. These actions are problematic and...
By Guest Writer Mohammad Zayaan
On September 15, 2021, after a hostile takeover, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, leading to one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has witnessed. Thousands of Afghans were displaced from the country and forced to move to different parts of the world to avoid persecution. As a result, some countries developed specific policies, after this unprecedented increase in the refugee influx, some guaranteeing safe haven while others are refusing to accept them.
This article discusses a specific policy change that the UNHCR could bring to help people from Afghanistan who had migrated before September and whose application for refugee status had been rejected by the UNHCR. Apart from a country’s own refugee policy, the UNHCR has a separate mechanism called Refugee Status Determination (RSD) to identify and recognize refugees. This mechanism is based on the Refugee Convention, 1951, the Protocol Related To The Status Of Refugees(1967), and the principle of non-refoulement. It is also used...
By Guest Contributor Farid Noori.
On September 30, 2022, 18-year-old Marzia Mohammadi started somewhat of a different day. A special day, some might say. She was going to take the practice version of Afghanistan’s national university entrance exam in a country where schools are closed for girls past sixth grade. Smart, beautiful, and ambitious, Marzia kept a diary in which she wrote lofty dreams like one day meeting in Paris her favorite author, Elif Shafak, and going for a bike ride. Her entry on September 22 reads:
“When national results are out, Marzia, daughter of Bostan Ali, will score in the top 10.”
Eight days later, while preparing for that same exam, instead of showing the world her talent and grit, Marzia was torn to pieces. A suicide bomber entered the classroom and detonated himself among the students killing Marzia, her cousin Hajar, and 55 other students. Besides being mostly girls, the victims shared another identity: all were Hazara, an ethnicity heir...
By Staff Writer Sydney Smith
Content Warning: sexual violence
On March 9, 2022, Russian soldier Mikhail Romanov barged into the home of a mother in the Kyiv region of Ukraine where brutally he took the life of her husband, forcibly undressed her, and gang raped her with a pistol to her head. The raping took place over three separate occasions while her child bore witness. This horrific story is just one account of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) that has been documented thus far in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A report from the OHCHR identifies 108 allegations of CRSV against women, girls, men and boys from February 24 to May 15, 2022 in eleven Ukrainian cities and in a detention facility in the Russian Federation. Although rape and gang rape are the highest reported allegations, at seventy-eight, CRSV takes on many forms and this report alone includes seven attempted rapes, fifteen forced public strippings, and eight other accounts of sexual torture, sexual...
By Dallin Durtschi, staff writer
Sports teams are sometimes owned by well-known public figures. The Dallas Mavericks are owned by Mark Cuban, Will Ferrell owns part of Los Angeles FC, and last month, the man responsible for ordering the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi also purchased the majority share of Newcastle United, an English Premier League football club. This new owner is none other than Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
In October, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), whose chairman is the Saudi Crown Prince, was granted permission by the English Premier League to purchase Newcastle United. Amnesty International has outcried and rejected the Saudi purchase pointing towards the massive human rights implications.
Saudi Human Rights Abuses
Lack of Freedom of Speech
The Saudi State carried out the infamous murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi which is a demonstration of their commitment to rejecting freedom of speech and crushing criticism of the state.
Women’s Rights Abuses
Their women's rights abuses are systematic and heinous. Women are not...
