Tag Archives: human-rights

Here’s Why Los Angeles Parents Are Standing with Striking Teachers against Billionaire-Backed Charters

Yesterday for the second day in a row, 50,000 people rallied in support of the striking teachers of Los Angeles.

This time our target was the California Charter School Association, the lobbying arm behind the rapid expansion of unregulated charter schools in Los Angeles. It’s funded by billionaires like Eli Broad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

The CCSA has pursued a plan to move one million students from public schools into charter schools by 2022.

Los Angeles Teachers Strike to Defend Public Schools from the Privatizers


January 14, 2019 / Barbara Madeloni
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Last spring a teacher uprising swept the red states. Today it reached the West Coast, as the 34,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles began a long-anticipated strike in the nation’s second-largest school district.

Teachers, parents, students, and community supporters hit the picket lines in their fight against the budget cuts and privatization being pushed by the school board and Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker.

Ahmed Mansoor’s jailing is an attack on human rights. He must be freed now | Letters

Politicians, campaigners and other prominent figures, among them Stephen Fry and Noam Chomsky, call on the United Arab Emirates to free a leading human rights campaigner

We, the undersigned, call on the government of the United Arab Emirates to immediately and unconditionally release prisoner of conscience Ahmed Mansoor.

Mr Mansoor is an internationally acclaimed human rights campaigner, the 2015 winner of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders and a member of both the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch and the Gulf Centre for Human Rights. In May 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “defaming” the UAE on social media. An appeal to overturn this sentence was rejected on 31 December 2018. Mr Mansoor’s arrest and the charges against him relate solely to the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression.

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How should companies like Netflix respond when repressive governments order the removal of critical content?

The answer is easy but companies will not take it – do not do business in nations that want to censor what you can offer your potential customers. Netflix’s decision to comply to Saudi Arabia’s request has renewed an ongoing debate about how international companies should respond to politically motivated censorship demands when operating in repressive countries.

Think Riyadh’s Netflix ban was bad? Imagine if Hasan Minhaj was a Saudi citizen | Safa Al Ahmad

If the US comic lived in the kingdom, he would have been spied on, arrested, tortured and possibly worse

The government of Saudi Arabia makes it very clear that resistance to its regime is futile. It will not tolerate dissent; it is untouchable.

Related: Outrage after Netflix pulls comedy show criticising Saudi Arabia

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US halts cooperation with UN on potential human rights violations

Lady Liberty walks off job!

Exclusive: State department has ceased to respond to complaints from special rapporteurs in move that sends ‘dangerous message’ to other countries

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The Trump administration has stopped cooperating with UN investigators over potential human rights violations occurring inside America, in a move that delivers a major blow to vulnerable US communities and sends a dangerous signal to authoritarian regimes around the world.

Related: UN special rapporteur demands inquiry into death of Guatemalan girl held in US

Related: UN condemns Trump administration for exacerbating US poverty levels

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China thinks it can arbitrarily detain anyone. It is time for change | Michael Caster

True… and so does the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, it is a long list. I think perhaps Costa Rica and Canada may be the only ones not on this list.

The lack of global outcry over the detention of two Canadians virtually guarantees the next such case

Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, has called China’s detention of Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor a “worrying precedent” but for many China watchers it is all too familiar.

It reminds us of the detentions of other foreign citizens, such as Canadian Kevin Garratt, Briton Peter Humphrey, Sweden’s Gui Minhai, or Taiwanese Lee Ming-che, and that over the years China has institutionalised arbitrary and secret detention affecting innumerable Chinese citizens, and with little international consequence.

Related: China detains second Canadian citizen as Huawei row intensifies

Michael Caster is a human rights advocate and researcher, author of The People’s Republic of the Disappeared, and co-founder of the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders.

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Lyudmila Alexeyeva obituary

Veteran campaigner against repression who returned to Russia after a period of exile

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who has died aged 91, was a veteran of Russia’s human rights community who began working for change during the Soviet period, went into exile and then, unlike most other dissident émigrés, returned to Moscow after the Soviet Union collapsed to resume the struggle under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency.

Small of stature but filled with determination, she risked arrest by taking part in street demonstrations until eight years ago. She remained active even after that, writing a text for last week’s annual conference of the human rights monitoring organisation known as the Moscow Helsinki Group, which she had helped to found in 1976.

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