Daily Brief Audio Series
“The country is falling apart. There is no state authority left. The authorities now are the criminals.”
The words[SN1] of a senior police official sum up the situation in Haiti today.
What this means for ordinary Haitians, however, was perhaps better expressed by a 23-year-old mechanic in the capital, Port-au-Prince: “There is no state, the police are scared, and they have no way to defend us from the gangs that shoot, kill, kidnap, rape women, and take away everything from us on a daily basis.”
Haiti is on the brink of a total collapse. In fact, it’s probably already past that point, as violent criminal groups seek to overthrow the government.
The groups’ actions have practically shut down the economy and the delivery of humanitarian aid. Their assaults on two prisons have set loose almost 4,700 prisoners. Nearly all transportation, including the country’s main port and international airport, is at a standstill.
The prime minister, Ariel Henry, failed to organize elections and step down by February 7 as promised, leading to protests and deeper chaos. Now, he’s outside the country, unable to return since he traveled to Kenya to finalize arrangements for the Kenyan-led international security support mission, which has been beset by legal, funding, and operational problems.
Right now, the most powerful person in the country may be Jimmy Chérizier aka “Barbecue,” the leader of Haiti’s main criminal coalition, known as G9. He’s working with a rival criminal gang to remove Henry from power and confront the international support mission when it arrives.
Criminal gangs already control much of the country. They have killed more than 1,100 people and injured nearly 700 others in 2024 alone. Some 13,000 people have been killed, injured, and kidnapped by criminal groups since January 2022. Thousands of women and children have been victims of sexual violence.
More than 362,000 people have been internally displaced. Food insecurity in Haiti is among the worst in the world. Many children are out of school, and often fall prey to recruitment by criminal gangs.
The people of Haiti desperately need international support, and the Kenyan-led mission will certainly be entering an extremely hostile environment. Pledges of support have come from the US, Canada, and France. Benin, Chad, Bangladesh, Barbados, and The Bahamas have committed to deploying forces alongside Kenyan police officers.
The history of international interventions in Haiti is littered with serious errors, even horrors. Governments need to avoid past failures, which means putting the protection of human rights at the core of the mission.
Haitian civil society could help show the way. Independent charities and activist groups have developed proposals to restore the rule of law, security, and access to basic necessities. International actors should work with these folks on the ground who understand the situation best.
Only by working together locally and internationally is there a chance to help bring about true democratic governance as the ultimate basis of long-term security in Haiti.
[SN1]Should we not link to presser?
France made history on Monday. It became the first country to add to its national constitution an explicit recognition of the freedom to have an abortion.
On the one hand, obviously, it was a tremendous victory for human rights. Even though abortion has been legal in France since 1975, the positive vote by an overwhelming majority of France’s parliament confirmed it as a right at a more fundamental level.
On the other hand, equally obviously, it begs the question: how is it that, in the year 2024, there’s even a debate about whether a person has the right to control their own body? It’s self-evident that an individual should be free to decide questions about their own health.
So, while France’s move is of course welcome, it’s also a reminder of just how pathetically behind so many places are when it comes to human rights, even one as clear as the right to keep the government out of your body.
In some countries, things are going backwards. The 2022 US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which constitutionally protected the right to abortion on privacy grounds, opened the floodgates. Abortion is now restricted in 21 US states, and 14 US states have taken measures to criminalize healthcare providers who perform abortions.
As with so many political movements that aim to increase government power at the expense of individual rights, the abuses build and build beyond even the point of absurdity.
In the US state of Alabama, for example, the state supreme court ruled frozen embryos have the legal status of “children.” Meanwhile, Alabama law allows children – real children – to be beaten in schools.
But don’t think France is somehow now perfect either.
The new protection of abortion is a victory, but even in other areas of women’s rights, France’s government is not setting a shining example. As my expert colleague Hillary Margolis notes, the country still fails to sufficiently prevent violence against women, protect victims, and hold perpetrators accountable. France has had 31 reported femicides in 2024 so far.
France has also actively restricted women’s and girls’ dress, banning full-face veils in public places, head scarves in schools, and head coverings for athletes, including in national and international competitions. So, you have a right to decide what to do with your body, but not what you wear? It all disproportionately impacts Muslim women and girls, of course.
Of course, the confirmation of the right to abortion in France is good news. Not only does is bolster the rights of people in France, it also sends an important message internationally after attacks on abortion access and sexual and reproductive health rights elsewhere.
But it also reminds us there is so much more to be done everywhere, including in France.
Leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Australia are meeting at a summit in Melbourne, this week, offering an opportunity to reflect on where the region is heading.
The situation is not good.
If we look at the state of democracy and human rights in south-east Asia in recent years, we see serious backsliding and growing repression. And ASEAN’s role has been pathetic.
Perhaps the most dramatic disintegration of democracy has been seen in Myanmar. In 2015, the party of Nobel Prize winner and long-detained dissident Aung San Suu Kyi won a sweeping victory in national elections. The military still maintained a lot of power in the country, but it offered a moment of hope.
In 2017, however, the military conducted a brutal counter-insurgency campaign that included crimes against humanity and acts of genocide against the Rohingya minority, with systematic massacres, rape, and arson. Rather than side with the victims, Aung San Suu Kyi stood by the military, and in 2019 she even defended the military’s campaign at the World Court in The Hague.
It did her little good. Two years later, in 2021, the military ousted her civilian-led government in a coup, and she was again imprisoned on bogus charges, along with tens of thousands of others. Under the junta since then, the people of Myanmar have been suffering an ever-downward spiral of atrocities.
Elsewhere in the region, the repression and reversals may not be as dramatic, but they are still deeply worrying.
Cambodia has a “new” leader after Hun Sen handed power to his son Hun Manet, but the younger generation of ruler is just as authoritarian. Physical assaults of opposition members have continued, opposition leaders are in prison, and the main opposition party was banned from contesting the sham 2023 elections.
In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr – son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos – is in power. There was once a hope he might end the horrific abuses that took place under his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, but no. Security forces still commit point-blank killings of drug suspects, and the government refuses to co-operate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation.
In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo’s term is coming to an end, and his likely successor is current defense minister Prabowo Subianto, a man implicated in massacres in East Timor in 1983, and in the 1997-98 kidnappings of activists in Java, which led to his dismissal from the army.
If there’s a common thread running through all these countries and the region generally, it’s the absence of accountability. Perpetrators of serious crimes never face justice, and so they keep committing those crimes. Others also see that they get away with it, and so, are not afraid to join in the abuses.
This is hardly unique to south-east Asia, of course, but what is region-specific is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN has been useless in addressing these problems plaguing the region, “woefully inadequate and impotent” in the words of my expert colleague, Elaine Pearson.
Even governments like Australia (which is not a member of ASEAN) have failed to effectively defend democracy and human rights in the region – usually for fear of damaging trade relations with strategic allies or of sending them deeper into the embrace of China than they already are. If they say anything, Australia and others usually prefer to say it privately. This is considered a “pragmatic” approach.
It doesn’t seem very “pragmatic” to me. When addressing human rights abuses, so-called “private diplomacy” is pointless diplomacy. Words whispered off-stage have no impact on the players. And how exactly is passively watching the decline of human rights and democracy in your neighborhood “pragmatic” for a democratic country in the longer term?
The Australian government may not answer these questions or make any course corrections as it hosts this week’s summit in Melbourne. But it should.
In the devastating conflict that’s been raging in Yemen for years, the warring parties sadly seem to agree on one thing: treating women as second-class citizens.
All authorities across the fractured political landscape that is Yemen today are increasingly restricting women’s freedoms. Primarily, they deny women’s freedom of movement, and this in turn undermines so many other fundamental rights. Movement restrictions harm women’s ability to access work, education, and health care.
It doesn’t matter which side of the conflict you look at, all sides are violating women’s rights. The Houthis, the Yemeni government, and the Southern Transitional Council, are all systematically violating women’s right to freedom of movement.
Authorities throughout the country are barring women from traveling between governorates without a male guardian’s permission or being accompanied by an immediate male relative. In some cases, women are also prevented from traveling abroad without a male guardian’s permission.
The proliferation of roadside checkpoints has allowed for these unjust restrictions to be enforced more frequently. Women interviewed for a new report said they had often been forced to turn around at checkpoints or stopped there and harassed for hours when in a car without an immediate male relative.
The very concept of a woman needing a “male guardian” to move from point A to point B is bad enough, but it gets even worse. How “male guardian” is defined adds further humiliation on top of the discrimination. The new report
details the indignities. For example, a woman in her 50s was forced to get her son’s approval before she could travel. Her son was 14 years old.
What’s more, if a male guardian reports a woman to the police for traveling against his wishes, the Interior Ministry and security offices can arrest her.
The restrictions have made it more difficult for women to access higher education. In some cases, drivers have refused to take women to college campuses because they know the problems they will face at checkpoints.
Some checkpoint officials have specifically targeted women working with nongovernmental groups and humanitarian workers. The movement restrictions have in fact forced many Yemeni women to leave their jobs at aid organizations and UN agencies.
The result is doubly grim. The women lose much-needed income for their families, and a country full of people dependent on international assistance is deprived of these women’s knowledge and experience in the aid sector.
As my expert colleague Niku Jafarnia says, “Instead of focusing their efforts on ensuring that people in Yemen have access to clean water and adequate food and aid, warring parties are spending their energy raising barriers to women’s freedom of movement.”
Carbon Credit Casualties in Cambodia, Daily Brief February 29, 2024
Daily Brief, February 29, 2024
The idea of carbon offsetting originally sounded pretty good to many people concerned with climate change.
With Earth’s temperature rising quickly because of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, carbon credits were proposed as a way to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Given the critical changes we’re seeing in our environment – like increasingly devastating heat waves and hurricanes – many still support offsetting and credits as part of the solution.
How it’s supposed to work is straightforward enough. A carbon credit is a unit of measurement equal to 1000 kilograms of carbon dioxide theoretically removed from the atmosphere or prevented from reaching it. Companies can buy – or be compelled through regulations to buy – these credits to offset the emissions they create in their business activities.
For example, an airline may purchase carbon credits to claim it offsets the harmful emissions from its planes.
The carbon offsets are supposed to be generated by forest, conservation, or clean energy projects. Trees grow by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so, plant some trees, and we’re golden, right?
The problem is, too many carbon offsetting projects are ineffective globally and abusive locally.
First, many carbon credits currently available for purchase stem from offsetting projects that cannot show they generate any savings at all in carbon dioxide emissions. They fail this most basic test.
Second, some carbon offset projects have been linked to serious human rights violations. Indigenous peoples have been displaced from their land, and violent repression has been used against those opposing these projects.
A new report describes some of the human rights harms such efforts can lead to, looking in detail at a major carbon offsetting project in Cambodia.
Carried out by the Cambodian Ministry of Environment and the conservation group Wildlife Alliance, the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project encompasses half a million hectares in the Cardamom mountains. (That’s about the size of the US state of Delaware or twice the size of Luxembourg.) It’s an area of rainforest that’s been home to the indigenous Chong people for centuries.
Yet, somehow, the nature conservation project operated for more than two years without consulting the local Chong people on whether they agreed to its design or implementation. It is no surprise that when such a massive undertaking is decided without meaningful input from those impacted, it leads to harms. Chong people have faced forced evictions and criminal charges for farming and foraging in their traditional territories.
The situation has evolved over the years, and the good news is, there have been some encouraging – if limited – developments.
Wildlife Alliance has committed to taking positive steps such as giving their rangers human rights training, but it does not recognize that abuses have taken place nor that they’re responsible for remedying them.
Our report triggered an ongoing investigation into alleged abuses by the company that certified the project, Verra, during which no new carbon credits from the project will be issued. However, despite Verra certifying the project met many stringent social and environmental standards, the reality on the ground was quite different. Why did Verra not catch this sooner?
This Cambodian example demonstrates the wider issue and the serious problems seen in numerous carbon offsetting projects around the world. Faced with a worsening climate crisis due to our own actions, humanity desperately needs to lower our carbon dioxide emissions. But not like this.