Posts in "Human rights"

By Jayel Aheram at 9:35AM

Oct 24, 2011

Americans Force Innocent Civilians into a Gruesome Death March

NPR is reporting that U.S. and Afghan soldiers have allegedly forced innocent villagers into a gruesome Death March:

Villagers from a violent part of southern Afghanistan say that Afghan troops, along with several American mentors, forced civilians to march ahead of soldiers on roads where the Taliban were believed to have planted bombs and landmines.

John Glaser from Antiwar.com has more:

Last month, scores of villagers came to the district meeting hall along with their village elders, and all told the local authorities similar story. They said American and Afghan soldiers pulled them out of their homes one evening in early September.
According to Faizal Mahmud, the deputy head of Panjwai’s council of elders, the villagers claimed the soldiers arbitrarily detained them, lined them up, and forced them to walk in front of the soldiers for over a mile, through roads believed to be packed with explosives by the Taliban.

Glaser added that if the allegations were true, it would be “a serious violation of domestic and international law. “

The last time American soldiers were involved in a Death March, they were the ones marching. The Bataan Death March was rightfully condemned as a war crime and the people responsible were prosecuted for it, so must this be if it turns out these stories are true. However, if Dick Cheney’s gleeful boast of torture or President Barack Obama’s wanton killing of Americans are of any indication, there will be no justice meted.

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By Shaun Bowen at 9:37AM

Jun 27, 2011

Bad Cases Set Bad Precedents

In my constitutional law class, my professor always had a saying about how the Supreme Court's dicey decisions on issues such as obcsenity, torture, and segregation lead to bad outcomes. That saying was "bad cases lead to bad precedents."

There is no case that represents this saying better than Buck v. Bell. This now infamous case dealt with a Virginia eugenics laws in which the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision upheld that states could forcibly sterilized "feeble minded" people from "polluting" the gene pool. This case in effect allowed for the states, through state-run eugenics laboratories to deem certain people a danger to the genetic purity of society, then have them sterilized as a matter of public health. In the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the decision by stating, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." It was later discovered that Carrie Buck, the defendant, had been raped by her foster' parents nephew. The designation of feeblemindness was given to her to delegitmize her claims.

Fast forward to today and we now have the case of 57-year old Elaine Riddick. At the age of 14, Riddick was raped, which led to her getting pregnant. The state of North Carolina determined that she was "feeble minded," a.k.a. a poor black girl, and on the day of her child's birth forcibly sterilized her.

UCI YAL chapter on fall of the Berlin Wall

President of Young Americans for Liberty chapter at the University of California- Irvine, Anthony Burke, posted his speech he gave at UCI on November 9th to commemorate the fall of the Berlin wall. Anthony eloquently discussed the connection between the politics of liberty and the upholding of human rights:

it should be clear that the ideas of any collectivist philosophy are flawed for the following reasons. First and most importantly are human rights. Human rights are natural rights that include life, liberty, and property and they are rights held by individuals. History has shown us that when entire nations embrace collectivism at the expense of individual rights the people suffer and the rulers gain great powers of influence and control over our lives.

Read the rest here

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By Barry Kuzay at 8:20PM

Oct 14, 2009

Right to Life, Liberty, and 1Mb Broadband Internet

Finland has passed legislation that makes 1Mb (Megabit per second) internet access a legal right starting in July 2010, and Finnish rights will grow to 100Mb in 2015. Huh, and all this time I was thinking that rights never changed!

CNET recalls a similar happening in France:

France, one of a few countries that has made Internet access a human right, did so earlier this year. France's Constitutional Council ruled that Internet access is a basic human right. That said, it stopped short of making "broadband access" a legal right. Finland says that it's the first country to make broadband access a legal right.

It seems the "information superhighway" is the new transcontinental railroad for the government to pour money into, lest us dumb civilians suffer the terrible consequences of our own priorities.

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By Rachel Kania at 11:21PM

Oct 12, 2009

Human rights now, not later.

President Obama made a committment to the Human Rights Campaign to end the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The policy disallows anyone who...

"demonstrates a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from serving in the armed forces of the United States, because "it would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability."

This is a matter of human rights. It seems pretty simple, Mr. President. Just sign an executive order to overturn this policy. It is not a hard decision.

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