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	Bahrain/Azerbaijan: Human Rights Defenders Arrested by Human Rights agencies   September 2014   Maryam Al-Khawaja, a leading human rights defender in Bahrain and co-founder of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, is facing imprisonment following her detention at the Manama airport on August 30th.   Based abroad for the last few years, Maryam has been a leading advocate against the regime’s human rights abuses. In the early morning hours of Saturday, August 30, she was arrested on a trip back to Bahrain, where authorities must now decide if it’s best to face the condemnation of locking her up for a long time or better to have her return to the international political circuit where she so brilliantly exposes their false claims of reform.   Maryam told me on Thursday that she wanted to go back to Bahrain and see her dad, who’s on hunger strike in prison. She knew there were risks since she’s been regularly targeted by the Bahraini authorities since she left the kingdom in 2011. She was hopeful though since her visit there in January 2013 didn"t result in her arrest.   When Maryam landed in Bahrain, the police were waiting for her. She’s been detained since, facing charges of assaulting police officers at the airport during the confiscation of her phone (a charge she denies) and possibly other offenses.   For more than three years, Maryam has been one of the most effective international critics of Bahrain"s brutal crackdown on human rights defenders. She"s kept the issue of Bahrain"s human rights abuses on the agenda by criss crossing the globe on behalf of the Gulf Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. She educates government officials, journalists, activists and anyone who’ll listen about the crackdown against pro-democracy protesters since February 2011.   I’ve worked Maryam on various stages of that journey – in Washington and New York, Cairo and Tunis, Dublin and Geneva. I have never seen an activist lobby better than she does. She’s 27, articulate, driven, funny, always prepared and constantly busy. She’s presented Bahrain’s abuses to the U.S. Congress more effectively than anyone else I know.   Maryam"s expertise is not surprising. Her father Abdulhadi is sentenced to life in prison for his part in the peaceful protests and is currently hunger striking to draw attention to the widespread problem of arbitrary arrests. Her older sister Zainab spent most of last year in jail, too, for nonviolent dissent against the regime and faces further charges in the coming weeks.   The Bahrain government, largely controlled by a ruling family, has a decision to make. While there are no doubt those in the regime who would be happy to see Maryam locked away for a long time, unable to advocate in person at the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the European Parliament or anywhere else, there would be a high political price to jailing her. Her arrest is making headlines and Maryam"s impressive range of contacts in dozens of countries have already mobilized to put pressure on the Bahrain authorities to release her. Putting her in prison would make her more famous still, bringing fresh attention to the country’s human rights problems and ongoing political unrest. When her colleague Nabeel Rajab was jailed for two years, his reputation and authority grew. He emerged from jail in May of this year a stronger, more influential figure than ever. The same would likely happen if Maryam were to be jailed.   Some in Bahrain will see jailing or freeing Maryam as a lose-lose proposition for the government and perhaps it is. But what would really shut her up is genuine human rights reform, removing the basis for her complaints. Despite several years of promises, the core problems remain in Bahrain – impunity for torture and other abuses, the jailing of political dissidents and a lack of power sharing by the ruling elite. Until the Bahrain government takes steps toward genuine human rights reform, the regime won’t be able to silence the influence of Maryam, and others like her, inside or out of jail.   * Brian Dooley is director of the Human Rights Defenders program at Human Rights First   http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=48646#.VAug8GP_J30 http://www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/%28httpNewsByYear_en%29/27B1B15729693CD0C1257DBD003BB628?OpenDocument   July 31, 2014   Azerbaijan: Leading Rights Defender Arrested.   (Berlin) – Azerbaijani authorities should immediately secure the release of leading human rights defender Leyla Yunus from pretrial custody, and drop the politically motivated charges against her and her husband Arif Yunus. The authorities should also end their ongoing harassment against the couple.   “The context leading up to these recent charges, including the harassment they have endured over the past four months, make it clear that the charges against Leyla and Arif Yunus are bogus and intended to silence them,” said Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities should immediately end this campaign of intimidation against Azerbaijan’s leading human rights defenders and allow them to work unimpeded.”   Azerbaijan’s international partners, including the Council of Europe leadership and its member countries, should make clear that continued harassment of human rights defenders, and the Yunuses in particular, will have direct effects on their relationships with Azerbaijan’s government.   Leyla Yunus is the director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, a human rights group formed in 1995 that has focused on combating politically motivated prosecutions, corruption, violence against women, and unlawful house evictions. The organization has also been involved in projects aimed at improving people-to-people dialogue between intellectuals and community leaders in Azerbaijan and Armenia, against the background of the unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the autonomous enclave in Azerbaijan primarily populated by ethnic Armenians.   “This arrest and the charges have been in the making for some months now and appear to be in retaliation for the Yunuses human rights work and their outspoken criticism of the authorities,” Denber said. “The authorities should immediately release Leyla Yunus from pretrial detention and drop the charges in the absence of any credible evidence that they are justifiable.”   Azerbaijan has a long history of using bogus charges to imprison its critics, including on treason charges, Human Rights Watch said. In the past two years, Azerbaijani authorities have brought or threatened unfounded criminal charges against over 40 political activists, journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders, most of whom are behind bars.   The crackdown on critical voices continued even as, on May 15, Azerbaijan took over the rotating chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, Europe’s foremost human rights body.   “Azerbaijan takes pride in chairing this important regional institution, yet routinely violates the very values and rights protections on which it is built and for which it exists,” Denber said. “The least Azerbaijan’s partners in the Council of Europe can now do is to urge the government to release Leyla Yunus from pretrial custody and end its escalating persecution of government critics.” For more details visit the link below.   http://iwpr.net/report-news/activists-arrested-azeri-crackdown http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/31/azerbaijan-leading-rights-defender-arrested http://www.ibanet.org/Article/Detail.aspx?ArticleUid=5bb0e289-bf17-4ee6-9381-eea53521ec96   * Access a summary of the UN Human Rights Council panel discussion on the importance of the promotion and protection of civil society space - Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (A/HRC/27/33)   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Pages/ListReports.aspx Visit the related web page
	The Inequality of Life and Death by Göran Therborn Social Europe Journal   There is no more urgent social task in rich countries than to tackle vital inequality, the inequality of life, health, and death. European welfare states have handled many social issues posed by industrial capitalism. They have been most successful in dealing with old age poverty, much less so with child poverty. Inequalities of child development, of educational opportunities, and of adult life-course chances are enduring.   However, there is nothing like the failure even of generous, universalistic welfare states to reduce inequalities of life itself, i.e. of life and death expectancy. The best historical data available, from England and Wales, show that the gap of years on the earth between people of different social classes actually widened from the years starting just before World War I and then again from the mid-1990s.   Currently, the gap continues to widen in a number of countries. In the UK for instance, between Glasgow and the London borough of Chelsea and Kensington by more than a year between 2004-6 and 2009-10, to twelve years, and among the London boroughs by four years from 1999-2001 to 2006-8. In Sweden, the gap between groups of low and high education grew from 2-3 years in 1986 to five years in 2007. Class differences of life expectancy beat or equal national ones.   On an international average level, the global gap in 2010 between the rich country group and the UN set of “least developed countries” was 27 years, between Sierra Leone and Japan. Between two parts of the Glasgow conglomeration it was 28, between Calton in the eastern periphery of the central city and the leafy suburb of Lenzie. Between the most prosperous Swedish municipality of Danderyd, a northern suburb of Stockholm, and the poor one of Pajala, in the far north, the average male life expectancy shortens by 8.6 years, slightly more than the life expectancy gap between Sweden and Egypt.   Most of this widening gap is driven by longer lives among the upper and upper middle classes. However, in the USA and even in a well-organized society like Finland, there is currently an absolute decline of the life expectancy of the most disadvantaged. Death rates at ages 35-64 increased considerably for the poorest fifth of Finnish women between 2004 and 2007, i.e., before the crisis, and from 1988 to 2007 they soared among singles and unemployed men as well as women.   Why are low-status men and women dying early? The first serious answer is: because being put down and controlled from above produce stress hormones which weaken your immunity defence and make you much more vulnerable to a number of diseases. This was discovered already in the 1970s and 1980s by industrial stress researchers, from the long bygone times when there was a public interest in what in Germany was called “Humanisierung der Arbeit“.   It has later been corroborated by large-scale longitudinial studies of employees of the central government bureaucracy in London Whitehall and of the city of Helsinki. Controlling for smoking, alcohol, and obesity, the results are clear: the lower you are in a job hierarchy (of permanent employment in this case), the earlier you tend to die. Both studies have been conducted twice, in the late 20th century and in the early 21st century. Hierarchical vital inequality increased over time among men in both cases and staid stable among women.   There is now a solid body of evidence that unemployment produces premature death. Already by 2010, the financial crisis had caused 8000 more suicides in the EU, compared to what would have happened if the pre-crisis trend had continued. A large longitudinal study of unemployed people in Sweden in late 20th century, with controls for pre-unemployment health, found an increased death rate of 2.47 percentage points over a time span of 10-17 years.   Translated into an estimate of premature deaths in the EU from the 9.5 million increase in unemployment during the crisis would mean about 235,000 premature deaths by 2020-25. This figure is, of course, a “guesstimate”, but a six-digit premature death toll is the best available evaluation of the human costs of the Anglo-Saxon bankers’ crisis.   To tackle this, and the underlying structural inequality of elementary life chances, is this without any doubt the crucial task of 2015-19. The fundamental reason why even generous welfare states have so far failed to narrow the life-expectancy gap is that in contrast to other cases of exploitation, degrading, and disadvantage, the victims do not have the best knowledge and therefore have not been able to develop strong social movements against this literally lethal discrimination. The processes involved are gradual, long-term, and are still not fully understood even by the medical experts who have spotted them and their effects.   What is required, then, is cooperation between, on the one hand, medical and other academic experts, and, on the other, trade unions and civic movements in order to make it a social and political scandal that low-status people shall have much shorter lives than more privileged ones. This is a violation of the most elementary human rights and human dignity.   (Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and Affiliated Professor of Sociology at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Formerly he was co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala, and also Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University Nijmegen, Netherlands.)   http://www.socialeurope.eu/focus/social-europe-2019/ Visit the related web page
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