Daily Brief Audio Series
“There is no exit policy.”
In one short sentence, a staff member thus summed up the core problem at Asha Kiran, a government-run shelter for people with disabilities in Delhi, India. Most people languishing there have been abandoned by their families and have no choice but to remain institutionalized.
Conditions are grim for those trapped in Asha Kiran. Nearly 1000 men, women, and children are held in a facility meant to house 570. Overcrowding, poor hygiene, and a lack of adequately trained staff compound the problems.
Some are confined to a bed with limited to no activity, at risk of irreversibly stunted physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development. And most of them will live their entire lives there, in Asha Kiran.
A devastating twist is that Asha Kiran literally means “ray of hope.”
Institutionalizing a person with a disability without their consent is a form of arbitrary detention – essentially being jailed for no crime. Asha Kiran residents are detained behind locked gates, with little if any opportunity to go outside or even move around the facility. When my HRW colleagues visit, staff tell them very plainly: it’s like a prison.
And, of course, Asha Kiran is hardly an isolated case in India. There are hundreds of custodial institutions like this for people with disabilities across the country. Worse still, authorities are putting money into building new institutions and refurbishing existing ones to hold ever more people.
This approach runs contrary to India’s obligations under international law, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
What authorities should be doing instead is getting people out of these prison-like facilities by funding community-based services to support these people’s right to independent living.
But there is a “ray of hope” in this story, after all. The governing council of Asha Kiran, in its final meetings in 2023, formally recognized their obligations and resolved to make a change. They adopted landmark recommendations to create and implement an action plan to end this lifelong warehousing of people with disabilities.
The plan would involve developing voluntary, community-based assisted living services and other forms of support to enable people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities to live independently in their communities.
The Delhi government now needs to act swiftly on these critical recommendations of the governing board.
Ultimately, the “ray of hope” here is that human rights principles might be upheld, and the dignity of these people will finally be recognized and respected.
Let’s throw children suffering from infectious diseases out into the city streets – does that sound like a good idea to you?
That’s what authorities are doing to kids in Marseille, France’s second largest city, apparently unconcerned by the brutal immorality of what they’re doing, let alone the public health issues.
To understand this breakdown in human decency, let’s focus on one case, that of a teenage boy we’ll call “R.”
Born in West Africa, R. ended up in Marseille, where initially he was able to stay in emergency accommodation in February 2021. There, he waited for an all-important age assessment, that is, whether the regional authorities in the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône considered him a child or an adult.
While housed there, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis by the national tuberculosis control center. Now, tuberculosis is preventable and curable, but it can be fatal without treatment. In fact, after COVID-19, tuberculosis is the second leading infectious killer globally today.
Naturally, then, the national tuberculosis control center told the departmental authorities about R.’s diagnosis and requested he be sent to their facilities for treatment. However, despite numerous reminders to the department over several months, R. was never redirected to receive that treatment.
Instead, in April 2021, his age assessment declared him not a child, and he was turned out on the streets with no anti-tuberculosis treatment nor follow-up care.
These age assessments in France are often pivotal like this, but the decisions are super dodgy. In nearly 75 percent of cases, the assessments are overturned on appeal. Unfortunately, this review by the courts can take months, even years. In the meantime, children are ineligible for emergency accommodation – that is, they’re often forced to live homeless, on the streets.
They also can’t access services, such as education, legal assistance, the appointment of a guardian, and universal health protection.
Which brings us back to the teenage boy, R. Untreated, his tuberculosis spread to his bones and spinal cord. In November 2021, R. abruptly lost sensation in both his legs. Doctors performed an emergency arthrodesis – a joint fusion – and inserted metal plates in his vertebrae.
To this day, R. continues to experience severe physical pain, he’s lost 60 percent of his mobility, and there are movements he will never simply be able to do again. His nightmare could have been avoided had the authorities acted ten months earlier, when R. had his initial diagnosis.
The mean-spiritedness, the shamefulness, the shortsightedness of the authorities’ actions are appalling, but what’s even worse is that R.’s case is not unusual.
A new report documents how the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône, which includes Marseille, is failing to provide unaccompanied migrant children the protections they need and to which they are entitled.
They force children to sleep in the streets for days or weeks with tuberculosis, HIV, post-traumatic stress, or undetected pregnancies while they wait for their age assessment appeals – which, again, are successful in three out of four cases.
Officials should stop trying to hide behind the too-often bogus bureaucracy of age assessments. They should assume these folks are kids – because most of them are – and treat them humanely, not throw them out on the streets.
When this newsletter looked at Haiti’s living nightmare in September, we noted international security support may be necessary to help stem the horrific breakdown of public order. We did not say this lightly – past interventions left a trail of abuses – but the situation was so bad, the world needed to re-examine its well-warranted reluctance to get involved.
The situation in Haiti has only deteriorated since.
For years, the people of Haiti have suffered a severe political, humanitarian, and security crisis, and things got even worse with the assassination of the country’s president in 2021.
There’s been a surge in killings and kidnappings, rampant sexual violence, and a severe food crisis. Criminal groups prevent the delivery of humanitarian assistance to people in dire need of food, medicine, and other aid.
In October 2023, the UN Security Council authorized the deployment to Haiti of a Multinational Security Support mission, to be led by Kenya. However, the mission’s deployment has been stalled.
Another complication has now arisen with a ruling by Kenya’s High Court on Friday that blocks the government from deploying police officers to Haiti. The government is appealing.
With extreme violence and the collapse of public order engulfing them, Haitians are wondering how long they’ll have to wait.
The UN Security Council discussed Haiti again last week, and HRW’s executive director Tirana Hassan addressed the body. After reminding Council members of the desperate plight people are facing in Haiti, she explained the need for the international mission to be driven by a human-rights-based approach – and she detailed what that would look like.
Of course, given the deadly mistakes of past interventions in Haiti, the deployment will need diligent oversight. The Council should also support investigations into any allegations of abuse and ensure accountability of anyone found guilty.
And although ending the country’s violent chaos may be the most immediate concern, any lasting peace and security will need to do more than that. People need well-coordinated humanitarian and development assistance and a transitional government that can credibly work with international partners to ensure the rule of law until free and fair elections can be organized.
For too long the victims of criminal groups and their backers, the people of Haiti deserve to see strong measures put in place to ensure justice and accountability for past crimes.
And, of course, the international intervention needs to curb the illicit flow of arms and ammunition to criminal groups in Haiti.
Haitians are facing terrifying levels of violence – unprecedented even for a country with as troubled a recent history as Haiti.
As Tirana says: “Each day that passes without a meaningful increase in international support that addresses all aspects of the crisis puts more lives at risk.”
A Human Sacrifice to Fossil Fuels, Daily Brief January 25, 2024
Daily Brief, January 25, 2024
It’s not called “Cancer Alley” for nothing.
The 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, in the US state of Louisiana, got that name for a reason. Some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations dominate the area, and they’ve wrecked the health of local residents.
The science of what’s happening here is clear. “The places where you have more industrial pollution, you have higher cancer rates,” says Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist from Tulane University who has investigated the area.
In fact, parts of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley have the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the United States.
And cancer is hardly the sole health problem linked to the area’s fossil fuel industries.
In a new HRW report, Cancer Alley residents describe not only cancer and its devastating impacts, but also elevated rates of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health, as well as respiratory ailments.
Entire communities have been devastated by cancer, the deaths of family and friends, missed days of work and school due to illness, and children rushed to emergency rooms suffering from asthma attacks. These harms are disproportionately borne by the area’s Black residents – many of whom have been organizing to fight back through public activism and legal action.
Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James, a faith-based environmental justice organization in Welcome, St. James Parish, in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, explains in a new video that what industry is doing feels like a death sentence. “Like we are being cremated, but not getting burnt, but being polluted, dying from inhaling the industries going into our bodies, going through our nostrils.”
But she and many others in the area are unbowed: “There’s no place like home. I was born and raised here, and this is where I want to stay. The industry will have to go, not us. And we will not be a sacrifice for the industry.”
She’s right, of course. No one should have to die, no mother have to suffer, no child have to get sick, because of humanity’s need for energy. We know what’s causing the problem, and we know it’s fixable.
For decades, however, government agencies responsible for the protection of the environment and the wellbeing of citizens, haven’t been doing their job.
Louisiana’s regulatory authorities, particularly the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, have failed to address the severity of harm from fossil fuel and petrochemical industries and failed to enforce minimum standards set by the federal government. In short, they failed to protect people’s health.
The US Environmental Protection Agency shares the blame by not ensuring federal laws and mandates are enforced in the state of Louisiana.
People around the world often talk about the future dangers of climate change in general, global ways. That’s important, of course – essential, in fact. But we also need to understand how humanity’s addiction to burning fossil fuels, the largest driver of the climate crisis, impacts people in deadly ways in their local communities, on the ground and in the air, right now.
What's happening in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley is indeed like a sacrifice, a daily human sacrifice on the altar of our global fossil fuel cult.
The regulatory agencies need to do their job, governments need to uphold their obligations, and these human sacrifices must end.
State Murder in Iran and the US, Daily Brief January 24, 2024
Daily Brief, January 24, 2024.
For two countries practically at war with each other for decades, authorities in Iran and the US agree strongly on at least one thing. Both support the abhorrent idea that the government is allowed to commit pre-meditated murder against its citizens.
Grim new capital punishment cases in both countries prove the point.
In Iran yesterday, the state murdered two people, Mohammed Ghobadlou and Farhad Salimi.
The former, Amnesty International details, was killed because he took part in peaceful protests. The latter, another political prisoner, faced multiple charges during his more than 13 years of imprisonment, including the ludicrous “enmity against God.” (See also: “Blasphemy Is Bogus,” Daily Brief, January 9)
Iranian authorities have been ramping up executions at an alarming rate, murdering at least 746 people in 2023. Many death sentences are related to charges involving drug offenses or “intentional murder.”
It’s strange authorities should claim to disapprove so strongly of “intentional murder,” when they are doing it themselves so frequently.
In any case, they are also targeting ethnic minorities in their killing spree. At this moment, eleven people await imminent execution, and eight of those on death row are Kurdish.
Now, let’s talk about Alabama.
Tomorrow, the US state plans to tie down Kenneth Eugene Smith, strap a respirator mask to his face, and force him to inhale pure nitrogen gas until he suffocates to death. Apart from being horrific generally, this is a completely untested method of execution – no one in the US has ever been put to death like this before. This cruel experimentation sounds a lot like torture.
Thursday’s scheduled murder is not the first time the state of Alabama has attempted to kill Smith. In November 2022, Smith survived a botched execution by lethal injection, a horrifying event and Alabama’s second failed execution in less than two months.
Smith was found guilty of murder (in a case blighted by serious rights violations), so as in the Iranian murder cases, the moral absurdity is clear: the authorities claim to be opposed to murder but commit murder themselves.
The death penalty is not as frequently used in the US as in Iran. Twenty-seven of the 50 US states (as well as the federal government) have it on the books, though several have not had an execution for some time. Still, some 24 people were executed in the US last year, and while that’s far less than the hundreds in Iran, the principle is the same.
The death penalty is an attack on human dignity, is uniquely cruel in its finality, and is inevitably marked by discrimination, arbitrariness, and error. This is true whether we’re talking about Iran, the US, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Belarus, or any other place with the death penalty.
No government should be committing pre-meditated murder against its citizens. No government should have that power.