Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 18 November

To the dismay of the rest of the world, US law on surveillance recognizes no privacy rights whatsoever for non-Americans outside the United States, even though many of their communications travel through the United States and the US government has the capacity to collect much of whatever does not. This sweeping disregard for electronic privacy has particularly troubling implications for freedom of expression. In part that is because privacy and free expression are intimately linked. Obama has stopped some of the worst Bush counterterrorism practices. He now needs to go beyond the cheap reassurances he offered us after the first Snowden revelations and rein in the NSA. The main corporate sponsors of the Sochi Olympic Games are: Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, and Visa. The Games will be broadcast in the United States by NBC. None of these corporate sponsors have agreed to urge the International Olympic Committee to press Russia to repeal the anti-gay “propaganda” law. In the past two years, 25 countries improved legal protections for domestic workers, with many of the strongest reforms in Latin America.   However, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – are considering adopting a standard contract for domestic employment that would be made mandatory for all employers, but the measures fall well short of what's required.   Grammy Award-winning musician Esperanza Spalding created this music video as part of a campaign to pressure Congress to close Guantanamo. The initiative is backed by a coalition of human rights and civil liberties groups, including Human Rights Watch. A number of her friends came out in support, including Stevie Wonder, Janelle Monáe, Harry Belafonte and Savion Glover, who all made cameo appearances in the video.  From this morning:  Libya is reeling from Friday's deadly violence, when militias fired on a peaceful public protest against armed groups, killing 43 and wounding hundreds.