Daily Brief Audio Series
If you have a criminal conviction, should you lose your right to vote?
Public debate on this has blossomed in the United States in recent weeks, for obvious reasons. But, despite the media’s tendency to focus on individual personalities, all the buzz has also exposed a fundamental issue.
The US is out of step with the rest of the world in denying the right to vote to large numbers of citizens based on criminal convictions – what’s known as “felony disenfranchisement.”
A new report examines laws in 136 countries around the world and finds most never, or rarely, use convictions to reject a person’s voting rights. And even among those countries that do, the US is one of the most restrictive, disenfranchising a larger proportion of people.
The US currently bans more than 4.4 million citizens from voting due to felony convictions. That’s equivalent to the entire population of the US state of Kentucky or Oregon.
And, of course, some groups get hit more than others.Racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Black Americans, “continue to be disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and subjected to harsher sentences, including life imprisonment without parole…” So, they are disproportionally prohibited from voting, as well.
One in 19 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised. That’s three and a half times as many as non-Black Americans.
Yet again, we see the pervasive poison of white supremacy in US history at the origin of a US failure on fundamental rights.
US laws mandating felony disenfranchisement date back to the end of the Civil War. After formerly enslaved Black men gained the right to vote through the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, state lawmakers began expanding the list of crimes defined as felonies to target Black people. At the same time, states began revoking voting rights for any felony conviction.
The federal government officially barred some of these policies, known as “Jim Crow laws,” in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but felony disenfranchisement laws remain in 48 US states.
The current media buzz may all be about one man, but this is not an issue about any single individual. It’s about 4.4 million people being prevented from exercising a fundamental right.
The US is out of step with much of the rest of the world on this – strange for a country that likes to think of itself as a leading democracy.
As the impacts of global warming become ever more apparent, heat has hit the headlines around the world these days like never before.
In Saudi Arabia this month, more than 1,300 people have died during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Heat stress has been a major contributing factor to the death toll, with temperatures soaring beyond 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
Across the US, some 65 million people are facing heat alerts as another “heat dome” has pushed temperatures in some places over 50C (122F), as well. Heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes, floods, and tornados combined in the US, and heat-related deaths have been increasing, with more than 2,300 in 2023.
In both places – Saudi Arabia and the US – human harms have been exacerbated by authorities failing to make appropriate preparations or refusing to address longstanding social issues, ignoring that some people are more vulnerable to heat-related health problems than others.
In other words, the deadly dangers were predictable and avoidable, if only governments acted in time and made saving lives their priority.
In many ways, it’s the same with global warming as a whole. The problem is known, as is what’s needed to save lives – but governments are failing to act nonetheless.
Let’s review the science. Global temperatures have been rising because humans have been pumping too many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in particular carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
Oil, gas, and coal had been just sitting there, holding carbon in the ground for millions of years. Then, we came along and extracted and burned them, releasing that carbon as carbon dioxide into the air.
The result is, over the past ten years, the planet has been about 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the pre-industrial 1800s. That’s the hottest decade on record. And 2023 was the worst year ever, with global average near-surface temperature reaching 1.45 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments aimed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. The vast majority of climate scientists now say this target will not be met, and a rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius, or worse, is more likely.
In short, humanity has been heating up the planet, and we are missing international targets to try to get things under control, or at least make the impacts more manageable – or at the very least, a bit less dystopian.
Governments need to commit to rapidly phasing out all fossil fuel extraction and use. Specifically, this means stopping authorization for all new fossil fuel projects, and ending government subsidies and international finance, for oil, gas, and coal development.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about “saving the planet”; it’s about saving people. We need to have a planet that’s habitable for humans. This means our authorities taking decisions, locally and globally, that prioritize human lives: in Saudi Arabia, in the US, and around the world.
Attacks by armed militants in Dagestan on Sunday killed at least 19 people and left many wondering both why and what’s next.
The gunmen – apparently supporters of Islamic State (ISIS) – hit the two largest cities in this region of Russia’s North Caucasus. In Derbent, they slit the throat of a 66-year-old Russian Orthodox priest and set fire to a church. They also torched a synagogue. In Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, they attacked a church and a police checkpoint near a synagogue.
When the smoked cleared, at least 15 law enforcement personnel and four local residents lay dead, dozens were wounded, and at least two questions immediately sprung to people’s minds.
First, how could this have happened yet again? How could the authorities have apparently been caught by surprise and fail to prevent this coordinated attack, despite other recent incidents of mass violence?
November witnessed antisemitic mob attacks in Dagestan and other regions of the North Caucasus. These included the takeover of the Makhachkala airport by a mob hunting for Israeli passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv; an attack on a hotel after false rumors it was housing “Israeli refugees”; and an arson attack on a Jewish community center under construction.
Then, in March, there was the horrific attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, claimed by ISIS, in which militants killed at least 140 people.
Attacks keep happening, and people keep getting killed. Russia’s security apparatus seems to have taken its eye off the ball at the very least. Many experts suggest the ongoing failure to address domestic threats is linked to security services spending too much of their time and resources on Russia’s atrocity-filled invasion of Ukraine.
The second question is, what are the authorities going to do now? If history is any guide, things don’t look good.
Russia has been facing militant Islamist insurgencies in Dagestan on and off for more than two decades. Security services have responded with abuses of their own: abductions, forced displacement of local residents, and torture.
After the concert hall massacre in March, Russian authorities not only tortured at least two suspects, they shared recordings of it. It was as if they were taking pride in torture.
As my expert colleague Tanya Lokshina has detailed, security services also followed up with abusive raids against Central Asian migrants, who have furthermore been targets of xenophobic violence in public.
In the wake of the latest militant attacks in Dagestan on Sunday, we can hope Russia’s authorities will have learned by now that illegal abuses haven’t worked to stem militancy – that preventing attacks beforehand would be more effective than torturing people afterwards.
Hope dies last.
Twenty-something years ago, I took my first trip to the Xinjiang region of China.
One day, I wandered up a dry gorge in the Flaming Mountains outside the city of Turpan to visit a set of caves carved into a cliff face centuries ago and decorated inside with colorful Buddhist murals. I was the only tourist there, and as I walked alone along the pathway from cave to cave, everything was perfectly silent – apart from one thing.
An old Uyghur man was playing a dutar, a traditional two-stringed instrument with a long neck, a kind of lute that’s at the heart of Uyghur musical culture. He sat on a stool, plucking away, sending notes ricocheting against the rock and out into the narrow valley below. It was haunting and timeless, connected to a tradition that stretched back ages.
It was made poignant by everything else I’d seen in Xinjiang on that trip and a subsequent one a couple years later: the local culture was fast disappearing.
The cities of Urumqi and Kashgar, for example, were being rapidly reshaped. Block-by-city-block, traditional buildings in their mud-brick tans, so indicative of central Asian architecture, were being torn down and replaced by modern low-rises of metal and glass.
A very few traditional buildings would be allowed to remain, it seemed back then – a madrassa and a mosque, perhaps – just enough to have an iconic local image for postcards, but nothing else.
The trend of cultural erasure intensified years later with the Chinese government’s “Strike Hard” campaign that aimed to “break their lineage, break their roots.” The result has been crimes against humanity, including mass detention, forced labor, and cultural persecution against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
In some parts of the province, entire Turkic families have been forcibly disappeared or torn apart, with the adults detained and the children held in state-run “orphanages” that aim to stamp out their culture and identity.
Another part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Uyghur culture in Xinjiang has been the changing of hundreds of village names that have religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uyghurs. Authorities impose new village names reflecting crude, even offensive, propaganda – “Happiness” or “Harmony,” for example – or straight-up Communist Party ideology.
One place in the long list of village name changes stands out for me. There’s a village that was relabeled “Red Flag” in 2022. It used to be called “Dutar” – after the musical instrument.
You’re told your country doesn’t exist. You’re told your language doesn’t exist. Your teacher has been taken away and tortured.
The classroom where you’re sitting is in the same school building, in the same village, in the same region – but your world has been turned upside-down since Russia’s military occupation began.
Children have been prominent victims of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine. This includes being subjected to mass child abductions by Russia, which made Vladimir Putin himself the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.
Russian treatment of Ukrainian children in schools under occupation adds to the ever-growing list of Russian abuses, as a new report focusing on the occupied-then-liberated Kharkivska region of Ukraine details.
Russian authorities are suppressing the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian educational curriculum. They are using Russian as the language of instruction and imposing the Russian curriculum, filled with anti-Ukrainian propaganda denying the very existence of the people to whom pupils and students belong.
In short, Russia is using the education system to carry out Russification and political indoctrination in its occupied territories.
Such measures violate the laws of war. These require an occupying power to restore public order and services in an occupied territory, including to facilitate the proper education of children. However, it must respect the laws in force in the territory before the occupation. Occupiers are prohibited from imposing their own laws, including laws on education.
It also flies in the face of other international human rights standards, including the prohibition against propaganda for war, a child’s right to mother-tongue education, and parents’ right of choice regarding their children’s schooling.
Furthermore, Ukrainian children under Russian occupation have to undergo military training as part of the imposed school curriculum.
Occupying authorities also demand secondary schools in occupied Ukrainian territory to share the names of students ages 18 and older. Russian authorities deem them eligible to be drafted into the armed forces – where they might then even be forced to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
Teachers and other school staff who try to resist these imposed changes have faced vicious retaliation. Russian authorities have used threats, coercion, detention, and torture against them, including brutal beatings and electric shocks. Russian authorities have also threatened parents whose children were learning the Ukrainian curriculum online.
There are an estimated one million school-age children in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The occupiers deny them their right to education, as guaranteed under international law.