industryterm:rights law

WHO EMRO | UN agencies deeply concerned over killing of health volunteer in #Gaza | Palestine-news | Palestine
▻http://www.emro.who.int/pse/palestine-news/un-agencies-deeply-concerned-over-killing-of-health-volunteer-in-gaza.html

“Reports indicate that Razan was assisting injured demonstrators and wearing her first responder clothing, clearly distinguishing her as a healthcare worker even from a distance,” said James Heenan, Head of Office, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). “Reports suggest that she was shot in the back about 100 metres from the fence .

Under international human rights law, which applies in this context along with international humanitarian law, lethal force may only be used as a last resort and when there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury. It is very difficult to see how Razan posed such a threat to heavily-armed, well-protected Israeli forces in defensive positions on the other side of the fence.”

#crimes #Israel

Chase Madar · Short Cuts · LRB 2 July 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/chase-madar/short-cuts

Représentants (personnes et institutions) théoriques des droits humains agissant ou prenant position en faveur de la violence létale,

Harold Koh is the former dean of Yale Law School and an expert in human rights law. As the State Department’s senior lawyer between 2009 and 2013, he provided the Obama administration with the legal basis for assassination carried out by drones. And despite having written academic papers backing a powerful and restrictive War Powers Act, he made the legal case for the Obama administration’s right to make war on Libya without bothering to get congressional approval. Koh, who has now returned to teaching human rights law, is not the only human rights advocate to call for the use of lethal violence. Indeed, the weaponisation of human rights – its doctrines, its institutions and, above all, its grandees – has been going on in the US for more than a decade.

Take Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US allies into providing more troops for Obama’s escalated but unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. This last argument wasn’t successful in 2012, though she was at it again recently when interviewed on Charlie Rose. Or there’s Sarah Sewall, another former director of the Carr Centre, who was responsible for the material on human rights in the reworked US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Or Michael Posner, the founder of Human Rights First, now a business professor at NYU, who, as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour in Obama’s first term, helped bury the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations to investigate atrocities committed during Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. Or John Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe.

[...]

Human rights organisations have also been at it. Although it’s the policy of Human Rights Watch not to comment on matters of jus ad bellum – whether or not a war should be waged – in 2011 the UN resolution authorising military force in Libya was warmly endorsed by the outfit’s executive director and top Washington lobbyist. Just days after airstrikes began against the Qaddafi government, a Human Rights Watch researcher called Corinne Dufka called for ‘nothing less than the type of unified and decisive action the UN Security Council has brought to bear in Libya’ to be employed in Côte d’Ivoire in an article published in Foreign Policy. Amnesty International consistently backed US military operations in Afghanistan, which it seemed to view as a Peace Corps programme with soldiers attached.

#droits_humains #états-unis

Muiznieks urges Spain to withdraw amendment giving legal cover to #push-backs in #Ceuta and #Melilla

Concluding a visit to Melilla and Madrid, Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, has called on the Spanish authorities to stop the pushbacks to Morocco of migrants entering the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and to reconsider the amendments legalising this practice. According to the Commissioner, these modifications are in clear breach of human rights law.

“The Spanish authorities should reconsider [the amendments] and ensure that any future legislation fully abides by Spain’s international obligations, which include ensuring full access to an effective asylum procedure, providing protection against refoulement and refraining from collective expulsions", Commissioner Muižniekssaid.

“Push-backs must stop and should be replaced by a practice which reconciles border control and human rights. This is not mission impossible, considering that the migration flows in Melilla currently remain at a manageable level”, he added. According to the Commissioner, Spain received 5,200 asylum applications in 2014, i.e. 1% of the applications lodged in Europe.

Furthermore, the Commissioner asked for any excessive use of force by law enforcement officials to be fully and effectively investigated and for those found responsible to be adequately sanctioned.

Commissioner Muižnieks welcomed the establishment in November 2014 of an asylum office at one of Melilla’s entry points from Morocco. According to the Commissioner, people fleeing Syria are increasingly using this office but regretted that “for other people, particularly Sub-Saharan Africans, who may also have valid protection claims, this possibility is still out of reach and they have to take serious risks, including jumping over the fence that surrounds the city, to get in”.

Citing the overcrowded conditions in the Centre for Temporary Stay of Migrants (CETI), which is hosting 2,000 migrants, four times its capacity, the Commissioner also recommended improving reception conditions in Melilla.

The conservative-led lower house of the Spanish parliament approved legislation on Thursday 11 December allowing for the summary expulsion to Morocco of migrants entering the country’s cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. The bill still has to be passed by the upper house of the Parliament.

#refoulement #Espagne #Maroc #migration #asile #Forteresse_Europe