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	Information Inequality is a Global Issue by Daniel Bruce Internews Chief Executive in Europe   May 2016   Access to information is a fundamental freedom. That’s the central theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day, on May 3. The aim is certainly laudable, but is information access alone really enough? In a world where inequality in all forms is rampant, are we doing enough to ensure socially inclusive access to information? As it stands, access to information remains unequally distributed, particularly for already vulnerable populations.   This stark information inequality manifests itself in many different ways. Take gender: Women around the world are excluded in both subtle and overt ways from participating equally in the creation and dissemination of information. Globally, women occupy less than one third of full-time media and ICT positions, and even fewer work in senior leadership roles. Only 10% of news stories worldwide focus on women, and roughly 80% of “experts” interviewed are men. Beyond that, only 21% of women in developing countries have access to the Internet, which limits equitable educational and employment opportunities.   Worse still, when women take a role online, particularly as journalists, two out of three experience harassment. In many cases, this becomes so significant that they remove themselves from the conversation and self-censorship defeats information equality.   We hear of this happening repeatedly from Colombia to Pakistan to Sri Lanka and beyond. As Colombian activist and lawyer Carolina Botero Cabrera recently told us, “We found that many [journalists] decided to leave online media altogether, especially those who were engaged in really sensitive issues, such as mining, bribes and corruption. They simply decided to erase their online profiles because the harassment they were being subjected to was so nasty.”   Another problem is language; access to information is obviously only meaningful if it’s linguistically appropriate. More than 55% of all websites are in English, yet only 24% of the global population speaks English as a first or a second language. Hundreds of ethnic minority communities risk being left behind because of insufficient information access in their own languages. The issue becomes more pronounced when languages are new to the online environment, such as Burmese with its non-standard alphabet.   Language can also be a complex barrier at local level, where countries are increasingly relying on online media and communications. Sri Lanka, for example, emerged from a brutal 27-year civil war in 2009 and has since been taking tentative steps towards a fragile democracy. It has two primary language groups, Sinhalese and Tamil. Very few people are bi-lingual and the media and information environment is deeply divided along linguistic lines; Sinhalese media for the Sinhalese population and Tamil media for the Tamils. In this island state the lack of access to a shared media keeps people locked into their own echo chambers, creating barriers to the much-needed dialogue and healing that must follow the end of the civil war.   A third factor that locks people into information inequality is censorship and surveillance. All too often, activists and journalists working in conflict zones or closed environments are compromised by state surveillance and censorship. While there are many very good tools that have been developed by the global open source technology community to provide excellent, secure communications, they remain difficult to use. In the heat of the moment, they are abandoned.   Last year, when President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced that he would amend electoral law to extend his term, people took to the streets in protest. Kabila immediately responded with a brief shutdown of the Internet and a suspension of SMS services. 72 attacks against journalists were documented in 2015, with security forces responsible for more than half of these attacks, according to a report by Journaliste en Danger, a Congolese press freedom organization. Many journalists responded with self-censorship to remain safe. So whilst on paper DRC is committed to key principles of press freedom and information access, the living reality is often very different.   Beyond simply growing access to information, we are calling for a reduction in global information poverty for the world’s most vulnerable and underserved populations. This means building equitable access to meaningful information that is robust and hard to unravel. This means ensuring market incentives and good policy are in place to ensure a diversity of voices in any given community.   This means promoting information inclusion for historically excluded groups such as women, ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTI populations. This means ensuring access is as safe and secure, and that governments are held to account on their commitments.   If we neglect to pay attention to the growing gap between those who have access to trusted information that enables them to advance in their lives and those who do not, the broader global inequalities that we care about will only deepen. Visit the related web page
	Partnering for human rights and rule of law by Friends of Europe, agencies   April 2016   Partnering for human rights and rule of law, by Irene Khan.   Preventing conflicts is clearly a better and less costly than intervening after conflict erupts. Yet there is too little attention paid to it, and what little there is turns out often to be inadequate. Part of the problem is that twenty first century patterns of violence – complex, recurring, mulit-layered, trans-national, linking political conflicts with organized crime and religious – seem ill-suited to twentieth century styles of prevention, based on mediation, military assistance and development aid.   Indeed, developing countries need more aid to fight poverty. But they also need the capacity to counter military and security threats. But equally – and possibly at times even more importantly – they need to focus on justice – or rather injustice: inequalities, exclusion, exploitation, discrimination, corruption that benefits a few and deprives the rest. When states, markets and social institutions fail to provide justice and opportunities for all citizens, that’s when grievances accumulate.   When the EU emphasizes human rights in its foreign and security policy, it creates incentives for those countries to pursue inclusive social and economic policies. But too often these days, aid is giving way not only to trade but to the trading away of human rights standards in the name of international cooperation. That is extremely short-sighted.   Just as corruption and exclusion increase the risks of violence, legitimate institutions and good governance bring greater accountability and integrity, and give everyone a stake in peace and security.   The rule of law is a fundamental pillar of peaceful societies – both because it can protect rights of citizens and also promote an environment for trade and investment. That in turn can generate jobs for unemployed youth, reducing a factor of social unrest and violence.   Justice sector reform does not get as much attention or resources as it deserves. The other problem is that it is not matched and coordinated adequately with international assistance on the security sector. When courts and the legal community are lagging behind robust security measures are launched, it increases the risks of human rights violations with impunity.   There is also a tendency to take a cookie-cutter approach to technical legal assistance, transferring standard responses from one country to another. As the world’s only multilateral organization devoted exclusively to advancing the rule of law and development, International Development Law Organization IDLO that I currently lead takes pride in legal pluralism and tailor-made approaches. Each country has a distinct legal system and understanding the local context and actively promoting ownership are important if the reforms are to take root.   By incorporating access to justice and the rule of law into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development an enormous window of opportunity has opened up for both promoting and measuring the reduction of violence and prevention of conflict.   As Europe’s own experience shows, legitimate, effective institutions are key to building conflict-resilient societies. That’s where the rule of law comes in. People must have confidence in institutions. But states alone cannot build that confidence.   That is why institution-building is both a top down and a bottom up simultaneous exercise. The demand for justice improves the supply of justice.   Encouraging civil society participation is crucial. By civil society I mean more than “NGOS” – I mean professional bodies, bar associations, trade unions, women’s groups.   Too often women are left out of the equation of conflict prevention, notwithstanding UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1960. Women bring a different perspective on how to share power, promote human rights or address security. A world that is safe and fair for women is a better world for all.   Climate Change and Security in Fragile States, by Stéphane Dion.   As Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, I understand how important the issue of climate change and security is for humankind. It can be neither downplayed nor ignored: climate change is the biggest challenge we are facing this century.   Many think of climate change in terms of awful weather. When worse than normal storms produce perilous consequences, people are right to assume that these extreme weather events threaten lives, livelihoods and assets. But climate-related peril also includes the plight of drought. In fact, the real threat that brings drought and rainfall together is water. The threat that climate change can bring either too much or too little water at the wrong time and in the wrong place sets the stage for a multiplicity of security challenges.   Food security is a case in point. In an essay written for The Washington Quarterly in 2010, then-director of the United Nations World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, wrote that: “Without food, people do one of three things: revolt, migrate, or starve. When governments can no longer provide food security, states fail.”   Look at Syria. The 2007-2010 drought was the worst on record. A United Nations Development Programme report found that nearly 75 percent of farmers in northeastern Syria experienced total crop failure and herders lost 85 percent of their livestock. The environmental disaster and resultant mass migration put significant strain on Syria’s economically and water-stressed cities, just as political unrest was intensifying.   Climate change was not the direct cause of the civil war that eventually followed, but it did amplify the risks.   Migration is just one of the many ways in which climate change can multiply risk in fragile states. According to a recent G7 report called A New Climate For Peace, climate change can also contribute to instability and conflict related to how natural resources are managed; hamper food security; increase natural disasters; complicate trans-boundary water management disputes; lead to a rise in sea levels; and, through ill-conceived or poorly planned climate programs and policies, create unintended negative consequences for people and communities.   "It is so easy to deceive me for I am glad to be deceived", by Anna Neistat. (Amnesty International)   Russian poet Alexander Pushkin said in a 19th century love poem: “It is so easy to deceive me for I am glad to be deceived”   Ironically, this quote sums up for me the biggest problem with the early warning systems. Having covered most of the major conflicts over the last 15 years, I am beginning to believe that the challenge is not so much our inability to detect and analyse the signs, but the unwillingness of the key international players to even accept the possibility or reality of looming disasters, let alone act to prevent or mitigate them.   It is true that human rights groups themselves still have some way to go to respond proactively rather than post-factum, to human rights violations, and to focus on prevention in addition to documentation and accountability.   But even in situations where we are able, at least to a certain extent, to sound an alarm before a deteriorating human rights situation turns into a major crisis, we rely on the governmental and intergovernmental bodies to make concrete actions to stop the downward spiral.   Yet convincing them that action needs to be taken before the bodies start piling up and refugees flee in thousands, is always an uphill battle. Partially, because they are “glad to be deceived” and refuse to change their attitudes, especially toward those whom they consider to be key partners in political, military, economic and other cooperation.   I remember my desperate trips to Brussels and Washington trying to convince our western interlocutors that the war in Chechnya is not a minor conflict somewhere on the outskirts of Russia but a major factor that would have dramatic impact on Russian domestic and foreign policy; or that ignoring Uzbekistan’s crackdown on freedoms for the sake of military cooperation is short-sighted at best; or that Sri Lanka’s government final assault on Tamil Tigers would result in thousands of civilian casualties which were at that time preventable; or that the situations on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq have little to do with how they were conceptualised. The list is endless.   In all of these situations, the warning (a relatively early one) was there. What was missing is flexibility and readiness to change, especially to change quickly enough, the existing preconceptions and operationalise a paradigm shift.   Additionally, it would be important to reconsider the value of different sources of information in Early Warning Systems (EWS). On one hand, currently, there seems to be an increased reliance on automated computations and sophisticated data collection and analysis system, with less weight given to more “traditional” ways of information-gathering. On the other, governmental or, for example, UN channels or information gathering and dissemination are given significantly higher importance, while in reality, it is local actors who possess the most valuable and up-to-date information.   In many situations, compared to government actors, and even the UN agencies, local and international human rights organisations have fewer mandate limitations, extensive network of contacts, are less restricted in movements and communication, and have less bureaucracy to deal with– all of which makes them efficient in collecting and sharing the information. Yet, ironically, while such organisations are often accused of gathering “intelligence,” their findings and analysis are not always given sufficient attention.   Extreme violence and its impact on children, by Leila Zerrougui.   Children have been significantly affected by extreme violence in recent years and were often the direct targets of acts intended to cause maximum civilian casualties and terrorize communities, including through depicting children as ‘executioners’ or forcing them to be suicide bombers. The distribution of violent images and videos on social media placed the plight of children caught in the midst of these conflicts at the forefront of the world’s collective consciousness.   Acts of extreme violence are abhorrent and States have obligations to take measures that are in accordance with international law to ensure that civilians are protected from these groups. Efforts to counter extreme violence and armed groups engaged in such violence must be carried out in full compliance with international humanitarian, human rights and refugee law. Children caught in the middle of operations by armed forces have been killed and maimed and their homes and schools destroyed. In some cases, State-allied militias and vigilante groups have been mobilized, and children have been used in support roles and even as combatants.   Failure to abide by international law only worsens the suffering of the civilian population and can have the unintended consequence of creating or adding to real or perceived grievances in the affected population.   When responding to extreme violence, armed forces should ensure that their rules of engagement take into account the fact that a large number of children can be associated with these armed groups and may have been placed on the front line, either to engage in combat roles or as human shields.   Purely military and security approaches have not proved effective in addressing extreme violence; prevention must be a key component of response strategies. Extreme violence does not occur in a vacuum, which is why it is necessary, as a first step to finding a lasting solution, to identify and address its root causes and catalysts, such as poverty, protracted conflict without hope of resolution, lack of good governance, political grievances, the alienation of communities and lack of opportunities for youth.   Action is required by the international community, regional organizations and individual Member States to mobilize resources to build resilience and strengthen protective environments for children. In countries affected by conflict, education is one tool that can help to prevent social exclusion and promote respect for human rights, peace and diversity, and reduce the vulnerability of children.   The effective reintegration of children associated with armed groups is crucial. Indoctrination and trauma from exposure to extreme violence can increase the complexity of reintegrating children into their former communities. A new and compounding challenge is the regular use, by groups perpetrating extreme violence, of propaganda on the Internet and social media to recruit youth and children.   * Leila Zerrougui is the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.   National security choices and the threat to healthcare, by Joanne Liu. (MSF)   In the current global dynamic where everything is seen through the lens of national security interests it is tragically and increasingly difficult for humanitarian organisations to respond either in a timely or meaningful fashion to the needs of populations caught at the nexus of wars/bio-threats and security.   Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) witnessed this during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when the world only paid attention and mobilised resources after a small number of Ebola cases emerged in Europe and North America. And, rather than focusing on the source of the epidemic and attending to the core medical needs of those most affected, initially measures were only enacted to protect borders and trade. The international epidemic response system, as it is at the moment, is simply not working.   The global ‘refugee crisis’ is evoking the same reactions. The EU is obsessed with protecting its borders rather than with the protection of people. EU countries are denying one of the most basic human rights – the right to flee when your life is in danger. Desperate people are being pushed underground, into the hands of smugglers and labour exploiters. There is no end in sight at the moment for the problems pushing people to leave their countries – brutality of war, hardship, famine – and rich countries will remain rich so it is very unlikely that the flow of arrivals will diminish. The over-the-top protective attitude supported and implemented in the name of national security interests by EU Member States has deadly consequences.   The way wars are waged today, it is becoming almost suicidal for health workers to care for patients at the frontline. With the War on Terror as a backdrop, what was considered a given under International Humanitarian Law – the inviolability of medical facilities – is being flouted. In 2015, 106 aerial bombings and shelling attacks hit 75 MSF hospitals and MSF-supported hospitals, 63 of these were in Syria.   MSF medical facilities were also attacked in Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Regardless of the country where the medical facility is attacked, the end result is the same – civilians are denied access to healthcare at a time when they need it the most.   National security interests of States are often used to justify wars without limits, particularly in contexts where the enemy is defined as a terrorist. Patients are being crushed in the anti-terror narrative’s wake.   As a doctor, war stops at the door of my hospital. I treat everybody, regardless of affiliation, religion or creed. This includes injured combatants. I cannot accept that patients will be killed or wounded if they are perceived as posing a security threat to the most powerful. The doctor of your enemy is not your enemy.   The ‘security at all costs’ logic means that humanitarian aid is welcomed when it serves certain national security interests but it is restricted, even attacked, when it does not. If national security imperatives are the main driver of humanitarian response we will continue to see delayed or inefficient epidemic response dead bodies washing up on the shores of Europe hospitals being bombed in war zones.   Don’t make healthcare workers, patients or civilian populations the collateral damage of your national security choices.   * Dr. Joanne Liu is President of Médecins Sans Frontières   * Extracts from Friends of Europe - Security Jam. Visit the related web page
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