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	As rich nations close the door on refugees, Uganda welcomes them by Joseph Goldstein New York Times, agencies   In a rising era of xenophobia, Uganda has made hosting refugees a core national policy, by Joseph Goldstein. (New York Times, agencies)   President Donald Trump is vowing to send the military to stop migrants trudging from Central America. Europe’s leaders are paying African nations to block migrants from crossing the Mediterranean — and detaining the ones who make it in filthy, overcrowded camps.   But Solomon Osakan has a very different approach in this era of rising xenophobia. From his uncluttered desk in northwest Uganda, he manages one of the largest concentrations of refugees anywhere in the world: more than 400,000 people scattered across his rural district.   He explained what he does with them: Refugees are allotted some land — enough to build a little house, do a little farming and “be self-sufficient,” said Osakan, a Ugandan civil servant. Here, he added, the refugees live in settlements, not camps — with no barbed wire, and no guards in sight.   “You are free, and you can come and go as you want,” Osakan added.   As many nations are securing their borders and turning refugees away, Uganda keeps welcoming them. And they keep coming, fleeing catastrophes from across this part of Africa.   In all, Uganda has as many as 1.25 million refugees on its soil, perhaps more, making it one of the most welcoming countries in the world, according to the United Nations.   And while Uganda’s government has made hosting refugees a core national policy, it works only because of the willingness of rural Ugandans to accept an influx of foreigners on their land and shoulder a big part of the burden.   Uganda is not doing this without help. About $200 million in humanitarian aid to the country this year will largely pay to feed and care for the refugees. But they need places to live and small plots to farm, so villages across the nation’s north have agreed to carve up their communally owned land and share it with the refugees, often for many years at a time.   “Our population was very few and our community agreed to loan the land,” said Charles Azamuke, 27, of his village’s decision in 2016 to accept refugees from South Sudan, which has been torn apart by civil war. “We are happy to have these people. We call them our brothers.”   UN officials have pointed to Uganda for its “open border” policy. While the United States, a much more populous nation, has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1975, the US government settles them in the country after they have first been thoroughly screened overseas.   By contrast, Uganda has essentially opened its borders to refugees, rarely turning anyone away.   Some older Ugandans explain that they, too, had been refugees once, forced from their homes during dictatorship and war. And because the government ensures that spending on refugees benefits Ugandans as well, younger residents spoke of how refugees offered them some unexpected opportunities.   “I was a farmer. I used to dig,” Azamuke said. But after learning Arabic from refugees from South Sudan, he got a better job — as a translator at a new health clinic that serves the newcomers.   His town, Ofua, is bisected by a dirt road, with the Ugandans living on the uphill side and the South Sudanese on the downhill side. The grass-thatched homes of the Ugandans look a bit larger and sturdier, but not much.   As the sun began to set one recent afternoon, a group of men on the Ugandan side began to pass around a large plastic bottle of waragi, a home brew. On the South Sudanese side, the men were sober, gathered around a card game.   On both sides, the men had nothing but tolerant words for one another. “Actually, we don’t have any problems with these people,” said Martin Okuonzi, a Ugandan farmer cleaning his fingernails with a razor blade.   As the men lounged, the women and girls were still at work, preparing dinner, tending children, fetching water and gathering firewood. They explained that disputes did arise, especially as the two groups competed for limited resources like firewood.   “We’ve been chased away,” said Agnes Ajonye, a 27-year-old refugee from South Sudan. “They say we are destroying their forests.”   And disputes broke out at the well, where Ugandan women insist they should be allowed to skip ahead of refugees.   “If we hadn’t given you the land you live on, wouldn’t you be dying in Sudan?” said Adili Chandia, a 62-year-old refugee, recounting the lecture she and others got from a frustrated Ugandan woman waiting in line.   Ugandan officials often talk about the spirit of Pan-Africanism that motivates their approach to refugees. President Yoweri Museveni, an autocratic leader who has been in power for 32 years, says Uganda’s generosity can be traced to the precolonial days of warring kingdoms and succession disputes, when losing factions often fled to a new land.   This history of flight and resettlement is embedded in some of the names of local groups around western Uganda, like Batagwenda, which means “the ones that could not continue travelling.”   The government encourages the nation to go along with its policy by directing that 30 per cent of foreign aid destined for refugees be spent in ways that benefit Ugandans nearby. So when money for refugees results in new schools, clinics and wells, Ugandans are more likely to welcome than resent them.   For Museveni, hosting refugees has given him relevance and political capital abroad at a time when he would otherwise have little.   A former guerrilla fighter who quickly stabilized much of his country, Museveni was once hailed as an example of new African leadership. He was relatively quick to confront the AIDS epidemic, and he invited back Ugandans of Indian and Pakistani descent who had been expelled during the brutal reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s.   But his star has fallen considerably. He has clung to power for decades. His security forces have beaten political opponents. Freedom of assembly and expression are severely curtailed.   Even so, Uganda’s openness toward refugees makes Museveni important to European nations, which are uneasy at the prospect of more than 1 million refugees heading for Europe.   Other African nations also host a significant number of refugees, but recent polls show that Ugandans are more likely than their neighbours in Kenya or Tanzania to support land assistance or the right to work for refugees.   Part of the reason is that Ugandans have fled their homes as well, first during the murderous reign of Amin, then during the period of retribution after his overthrow, and again during the 1990s and 2000s, when Joseph Kony, the guerrilla leader who terrorized northern Uganda, left a trail of kidnapped children and mutilated victims.   Many Ugandans found refuge in what is today South Sudan. Mark Idraku, 57, was a teenager when he fled with his mother to the area. They received 2 acres of farmland, which helped support them until they returned home six years later.   “When we were in exile in Sudan, they also helped us,” Idraku said. “Nobody ever asked for a single coin.”   Idraku has since returned the favor, loaning 3 acres to a South Sudanese refugee named Queen Chandia, 37. Chandia said the land — along with additional plots other Ugandans allow her to farm — has made all the difference.   Her homestead of thatched-roof huts teemed with children tending their chores, grinding nuts into paste and maize into meal. Chandia is the mother of a girl and two boys. But over the years, as violence hollowed out her home country, Chandia started taking in the orphaned children of relatives and friends. Now 22 children call her “mom.”   A refugee for nearly her entire life, Chandia arrived in Uganda as a young girl nearly 30 years ago. For years, she worried about being expelled.   “Maybe these Ugandans will change their minds on us,” she said, describing the thought that plagued her. Then one day the worry stopped.   But Osakan, the administrator who oversees refugee affairs in the country’s extreme northwest, is anxious. There is an Ebola outbreak over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Osakan fears what might happen if — or when — a refugee turns up in Uganda with the dreaded illness.   “It would destroy all the harmony between refugees and host communities,” he said, explaining that it would probably lead to calls to seal the border.   For now, the border is very much open, although the number of refugees arriving has fallen significantly. In one of the newer settlements, many of the refugees came last year, fleeing an attack in a South Sudanese city. But some complained about receiving too little land, about a quarter acre per family, which is less than previous refugees had received.   “Even if you have skills — in carpentry — you are not given a chance,” said one refugee, Simon Ludoru. He looked over his shoulder, to where a construction crew was building a nursery school. The schoolhouse would teach both local Ugandan and South Sudanese children together, but the workers were almost entirely Ugandan, he said.   At the construction site, the general contractor, Sam Omongo, 50, said he had hired refugees for the job. “Oh, yes,” he exclaimed.   How many? “Not a lot, actually,” he acknowledged. “I have about three.” Omongo called one over.   “Are you a refugee?” Omongo asked the slight man. “No, I’m from Uganda,” he said softly. His name was Amos Chandiga, 28. He lived nearby and owned 6 acres of land, though he worked only 4 of them. He had lent the other two to a pair of refugees.   “They asked me, and I gave it to them,” Chandiga explained. He patted his chest. “It comes from here, in my heart.” http://bit.ly/2Oc851D   http://www.nrc.no/ http://www.unhcr.org/emergencies.html http://www.unhcr.org/news.html http://www.hrw.org/news/2019/02/21/african-union-needs-protect-continents-displaced http://www.nrc.no/news/2019/february/african-countries-must-step-up-their-support-for-displaced-people/ Visit the related web page
	At UN Trump declares America stands Alone by Barbara Crossette, James Goldston Open Society, Pass Blue, agencies   Oct. 2018   At UN Trump declares America stands Alone, by Barbara Crossette. (Pass Blue)   The UN audience could only gasp when Donald Trump made his stormy debut in the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 as president of the United States. This year they laughed in his face.   The gap between the US and the rest of the world has demonstrably widened under the Trump administration, and this phenomenon has consequences. Trump’s rhetoric may have been toned down by his advisers, but his belligerence has deepened and broadened. In the week after his dismissive remarks and display of raw ego — provoking laughter in the General Assembly — talk among government leaders and commentators worldwide has turned to the reality that the US has opted out of constructive leadership.   Now, the question is what the rest of the world will do about it.   Alternating between bragging about his self-proclaimed achievements and lambasting the role of the institution in which he was speaking, Trump went after his usual targets — the Iran nuclear deal, the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, even OPEC, among others. He lavished praise on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, last year’s villain. (He said later that he and Kim “fell in love” in an exchange of letters.)   Then, for good measure, Trump added a dose of boorish bad manners. He arrived late for every important scheduled appearance — so late for his speech in the General Assembly on Sept. 25 that the staff had to fill his spot with Lenín Moreno Garcés, the president of Ecuador. Moreno spoke from a wheelchair, and this abrupt change of precedence required that the podium be hastily reconfigured.   In the Security Council, Trump appeared more than 20 minutes late for a Sept. 26 meeting he was scheduled to chair. Noticeably, some diplomats turned their backs to him as he and his entourage strolled into the chamber. He was also late for a lunch on Sept. 25, for government leaders hosted by Secretary-General António Guterres, where Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada avoided each other for most of the lunch, although their tables were side by side.   By then, Trump had made it abundantly clear where he stood on the vision and values of the UN. In addressing the nations of the world, he declared that America chose to stand alone.   “America is governed by Americans,” he said. “We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” On the International Criminal Court — a target of John Bolton, the US national security adviser, since its creation in 1998 by an international statute that the US signed but never ratified — Trump called the independent court “an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”   This farewell to globalism, whose practical value to humanity’s future was eloquently defended by Guterres in his opening General Assembly speech last week, disregarded generations of growing American involvement with the rest of the world — more young people studying and living abroad, more US government exchange programs in many fields and that symbolic photograph of John Kerry at the UN in 2016, signing on to the Paris climate agreement with his eye on the future and holding a granddaughter of his in his arm.   Jeffrey Laurenti, who has been analyzing US-UN relations for many years for the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA) and the Century Foundation, is watching a new era in the making. After listening to world leaders speaking at the UN and in off-the-record sessions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York the past week, he wrote a memo about the US in the new world under Trump for PassBlue:   “There was, I thought, a palpable change in atmosphere from last year to this. Last year there was an air of apprehension about the new US president, a sense of both threat and possibility. Nations’ leaders were hoping still to find the sweet spot behind the bluster where they could reach understandings with the new regime.   “A year later, the illusions are gone, thanks to Washington’s steady stream of disruptive actions and withdrawals, from Iran and Jerusalem to trade wars and refugees, with various U.N. agencies and funds left as collateral roadkill,” he wrote. [On Oct. 1, the Pew Research Center published the results of an international poll taken in August that showed Trump’s ratings across 25 countries remains poor, dragging down the US image to levels that are “much lower than during Barack Obama’s presidency.”]   “For America’s traditional democratic allies, the president’s replacing the realist H.R. McMaster with the detested ideologue John Bolton signaled there will be no reasoning and no shared values,” Laurenti continued. “Trump’s America has gone rogue from the law-based ‘international community’ the democracies have invested so many years and so much political effort in creating. When moderate leaders of five Latin American countries joined Canada’s Justin Trudeau in referring Venezuelan crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court, they were sending a message to Trump as much as to Nicolas Maduro, maybe even more so.   “At one level, presidential bombast is greeted with derision — and perhaps the U.N. needs more laughter. But at the same time the president chooses a Security Council meeting to accuse the Chinese — the Chinese! — of meddling in U.S. elections, as the Europeans are hammering out guarantees with them and the Russians for Iran in the wake of an American withdrawal from the nuclear agreement. Washington decides to try starving Palestinians into submission by halting its funds for the U.N. refugee program, and Arabs and Europeans work feverishly to line up alternative funding for UNRWA.   “At this General Assembly the outlines of a new policy of containment became visible — this time not containment of Stalin’s USSR, but of Trump’s USA,” Laurenti concluded.   Many speakers in this year’s General Assembly opening debate have been critical, directly or obliquely, of this extraordinary US policy of disengagement. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke of a world in a deep crisis that was not an “interlude” in contemporary history that can safely be ignored. He sees the emergence and spread of a “survival of the fittest” approach, when every country makes and follows its own laws.   “What I am saying is that this path of unilateralism leads us directly to withdrawal and conflict, to widespread confrontation between everyone, to the detriment of all — even, eventually, of those who believe they are the strongest,” Macron said in a passionate speech. He later apologized for pounding the lectern.   Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, who is on the receiving end of very harsh charges by Trump, said at a news conference in Tehran after returning from the UN: “What’s important is that today, other than one or two countries, no one is supporting America. It is a historic political isolation that is rare for America.” In his General Assembly speech, Rouhani remarked that Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal stemmed from “a weakness of intellect.”   Trump in his UN speech had blasted Iran as the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, whose leaders “sow chaos, death, and destruction.”   All five other parties to the Iran agreement designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union — have vowed to stay the course, despite threats from Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, against those who do not follow American-imposed sanctions against the Iranians.   The threats were meant to sound alarming, just as the Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans are now beginning to exert independence and maintain distance from the US — if that is even possible.   For those in the US who have said Trump’s international tirades should be considered mainly intended for the consumption of American voters, that is no excuse — or not a good-enough reason — for ignoring how the just-ended, mean-spirited performance by Trump and his hard-liners at the UN is playing out around the world, where the US may no longer be trusted and allies may soon be harder to find. http://bit.ly/2PlPFga   Statement by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council - June 2018   I am presenting three reports today, one on the USA, one on Ghana, and one on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and social protection.   I note with regret that United States Ambassador Nikki Haley has characterized this Council as a cesspool and chosen to withdraw from it just days before my presentation. Speaking of cesspools, my report draws attention to those that I witnessed in Alabama as raw sewage poured into the gardens of people who could never afford to pay $30,000 for their own septic systems in an area remarkably close to the State capital. I concluded that cesspools need to be cleaned up and governments need to act. Walking away from them in despair, as in Alabama, only compounds the problems.   The suggestion that this Council should only consist of rights-respecting States was made long ago by the US and others, but abandoned because there are no workable criteria to determine who should qualify under such a test, and because a body composed only of self-appointed good guys would not only be tiny but would be talking unproductively among themselves. Human rights promotion requires robust engagement, not behaving like the kid who takes his football and goes home.   Ambassador Haley complained that the Council has done nothing about countries like Venezuela. In fact I and several other special rapporteurs reported earlier this year that “vast numbers of Venezuelans are starving, deprived of essential medicines, and trying to survive in a situation that is spiralling downwards with no end in sight”. We warned of “an unfolding tragedy of immense proportions.”   I turn now to my report on the United States. My starting point is that the combination of extreme inequality and extreme poverty generally create ideal conditions for small elites to trample on the human rights of minorities, and sometimes even of majorities. The United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world, and this can only be made worse by the massive new tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy.   At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million of those live in extreme poverty. In addition, vast numbers of middle class Americans are perched on the edge, with 40% of the adult population saying they would be unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense.   In response, the Trump administration has pursued a welfare policy that consists primarily of (i) steadily diminishing the number of Americans with health insurance (‘Obamacare’); (ii) stigmatizing those receiving government benefits by arguing that most of them could and should work, despite evidence to the contrary; and (iii) adding ever more restrictive conditions to social safety net protections such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and cash transfers, each of which will push millions off existing benefits.   For example, a Farm Bill approved yesterday by Republicans in the House of Representatives would impose stricter work requirements on up to 7 million food stamp recipients. Presumably this would also affect the tens of thousands of serving military personnel whose families need to depend on food stamps, and the 1.5 million low-income veterans who receive them.   The US health care system already spends eight times as much to achieve the same life expectancy as in Chile and Costa Rica, and African-American maternal mortality rates are almost double those in Thailand. The World Economic Forum recently ranked the US 26th out of 29 advanced economies for promoting intergenerational equity and sustainability, and 28th for promoting inclusion. WHO data released recently shows that babies born in China today will live longer healthy lives than babies born in America. In global healthy life expectancy rankings, the US came 40th.   In an exclusive Fox News story yesterday Ambassador Haley called my report “misleading and politically motivated.” She didn’t spell out what was misleading but other stories from the same media outlet emphasized two issues. The first is that my report uses official data from 2016, before President Trump came to office. That is true, for the simple reason that there will be no Census Bureau data on the Trump era until September this year. But these data provide the best available official baseline, and my report then factors in the effects of the combination of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and systematic slashing of benefits for the less well-off.   The second criticism, as noted by Sean Hannity, is that the US “economy continues to roar to life under President Trump.” Indeed, the US economy is currently booming, but the question is who is benefiting. Last week’s official statistics show that hourly wages for workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, who make up 80% of the private workforce, actually fell in 2017. Expanding employment has created many jobs with no security, no health care, and often with below-subsistence wages. The benefits of economic growth are going overwhelmingly to the wealthy. Average pre-tax national income per adult in the US has stagnated at $16,000 since 1980 for the bottom 50% of the income distribution, while it has really boomed for the top 1%, a trajectory that has been quite different from that in most European countries.   Even the IMF has warned that in the US “prospects for upward mobility are waning, and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy”. In other words, the American dream of mobility, is turning into the American illusion, in which the rich get ever richer, and the middle classes don’t move.   My report demonstrates that growing inequality, and widespread poverty which afflicts almost one child out of every five, has deeply negative implications for the enjoyment of civil and political rights by many millions of Americans. I document the ways in which democracy is being undermined, the poor and homeless are being criminalized for being poor, and the criminal justice system is being privatized in ways that work well for the rich but that seriously disadvantage the poor.   Underlying all of these developments is persistent and chronic racial bias. That bias also helps to explain the abysmal situation in which the people of Puerto Rico find themselves. It is the poorest non-state in the Union, without a vote in Congress, at the mercy of an unelected and omnipotent oversight board, and suffering from record poverty levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.   Perhaps the best illustration of the cause and effect of these trends is what might be termed the Ferguson syndrome, recalling the city in which an unarmed African-American was shot dead by a white Police Officer in 2014. What happened in Ferguson, according to the US Justice Department, and what is happening in many other cities and counties can be summed up in the following composite picture.   In a nutshell: state and county taxes are capped; public budgets are slashed; governments are left without essential resources; they instruct their police departments to impose and collect more fines to fund the general budget; these fines fall overwhelmingly upon the poor; the victims cannot pay the fines and so additional penalties and fees accumulate; most scrimp and pay but some default and are imprisoned; when they are in prison their economic and family situations collapse; and when they emerge from prison they are even less unemployable because they have a conviction.   In her statement on my report, Ambassador Haley says that “it is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” and claims that I should instead be looking at the human rights situations in two war-torn African countries (Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo).   “Rather than using his voice to shine a light on those vulnerable populations, and so many others, the Special Rapporteur wasted the UN''s time and resources, deflecting attention from the world’ s worst human rights abusers and focusing instead on the wealthiest and freest country in the world.”   Leaving aside the fact that this Council has published many report detailing the situations in those two countries, my view is that when one of the world’s wealthiest countries does very little about the fact that 40 million of its citizens live in poverty, it is entirely appropriate for the reasons to be scrutinized.   If this Council stands for anything, it is the principle of accountability – the preparedness of States to respond in constructive and meaningful ways to allegations that they have not honoured their human rights commitments.   The United States position, expressed by Ambassador Haley seems to be that this Council should do far more to hold certain states to account, but that it should exempt the United States and its key allies from such accountability.   In terms of recommendations, I would single out three in particular. A first step would be to acknowledge that America’s proudest achievement –a vibrant democracy – is in peril unless steps are taken to restore the fabric from which it was crafted, including the adage that ‘all are created equal’.   A second step would be to stop irrationally demonizing taxation and begin exploring how reasonable taxes can dramatically increase the social well-being of Americans and the country''s economic competitiveness.   And a third step would be to provide universal healthcare, as every other developed and many developing countries already do. This would rescue millions from misery, save money on emergency care, increase employment, and generate a healthier and more productive workforce. http://bit.ly/2MfEd5k http://bit.ly/2Iyc9LZ http://srpoverty.org/country-visits/   Sep. 2018   Why John Bolton’s diatribe against the International Criminal Court is misleading, misguided, and wrong, writes James Goldston the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.   John Bolton, the U.S. president’s national security adviser, launched an assault on the International Criminal Court (ICC) this week that was all Trump: untethered to facts, myopic in its view of U.S. national interest, and aimed at dismantling the international order.   Modeling his boss’s tweetstorms, Bolton has sown confusion and furor among ICC defenders through equal parts deception, exaggeration, and intimidation.   It’s important to separate fact from fiction in Bolton’s diatribe. Among the many misrepresentations, here are three of the biggest:   First, Bolton wrongly portrays the ICC as a “free-wheeling global organization claiming jurisdiction over individuals without their consent.” This is plain nonsense. People rarely “consent” to being prosecuted for crimes they commit. But if you travel to another country and kill someone, guess what? You will be held to account even though you had no say in making the law or selecting the judge.   Second, Bolton’s complaint that the ICC is “unaccountable” similarly flies in the face of reality. The ICC operates under the terms of a painstakingly negotiated instrument which sets forth meticulous definitions of criminal conduct as well as numerous stages of legal processes. The entire enterprise has been ratified by more than 120 governments—every one of them determined to yield no more power to an international tribunal than necessary. If anything, the ICC is accountable to too many actors—which is one of the factors limiting its global impact (of which Bolton is so scornful).   Third, Bolton egregiously asserts that the ICC is “superfluous,” because the U.S. judicial system already holds American citizens to the highest legal and ethical standards and “takes appropriate and swift action to hold perpetrators accountable.” If only that were so. My organization represents two individuals whom, according to the European Court of Human Rights, were tortured, forcibly disappeared, and kept hidden by the CIA from the outside world for months at a time. To this date, no U.S. official has been prosecuted for these or the many other abuses perpetrated as part of the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror. U.S. courts have repeatedly declined to entertain these cases on the merits.   In short, Bolton’s crude declaration of war on the ICC is founded on falsehoods. Even more worrisome, it embodies the worst of the Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law.   For the ICC is not just a court. It’s also the cornerstone of a worldwide movement—animated by a fundamental principle that undergirds the U.S. Constitution—that no one is above the law. It’s a product of history; of the memory of how wrong things can go when national sovereignty is taken to an extreme and demagogic leaders pit one group against another.   And despite its imperfections, the ICC is the institutional expression of a decadeslong ambition to ensure that when powerful leaders cross the line from politics to grave criminality, they will be tried and punished—fairly, and in a manner that reaffirms the global community’s collective will to do better.   So when the ICC’s watchful eye prompts Colombia’s drug lords to end a half-century-long civil war in America’s backyard, as they did in 2016, for example, that’s a win not only for Colombia’s people but also for the United States.   And when the ICC’s example sparks national prosecutors in Germany, Sweden, and other countries to bring war crimes charges against terrorist fighters and officials from Syria’s murderous regime, that’s a win not only for the hundreds of thousands killed since 2011 but also for the United States.   And when, notwithstanding similar UN blockage, a chamber of ICC judges asserts legal jurisdiction over the forced deportation of Rohingya, as was recently done, that’s a win not only for the long-suffering victims but also for the United States, which has both strategic and moral reasons to defend Muslims from persecution.   Simply put, while the ICC may be “dead” to John Bolton, the human aspiration for basic justice is alive and kicking in the United States and around the world. Blind opposition to a foreign court may excite President Trump’s political base, but it undercuts U.S. interests and ignores some of the United States’ most cherished principles. http://osf.to/2PlFQz9   http://www.passblue.com/2019/06/04/pompeo-retreats-on-universal-human-rights-as-us-looks-more-inward/ http://bit.ly/2XN4Xmv http://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/10/atrocities-new-normal http://bit.ly/2HYIXsb http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-insights/policy-topics/human-rights-justice/universal-declaration-human-rights-70 http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-insights/policy-topics/human-rights-justice/samantha-power-and-salil-shetty-why-human http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2018/12/michelle-bachelet-multilateralism-attack-181201061606258.html http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/12/will-member-states-help-offset-us-funding-cuts-un/ http://www.passblue.com/2018/12/06/trump-wants-a-new-liberal-world-order-pompeo-tells-europe/ http://www.cfr.org/article/year-extreme-weather-climate-2018 http://www.thenation.com/article/journalism-asymmetric-politics-eric-alterman/ http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/416887-food-insecurity-a-denial-of-human-rights Visit the related web page
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