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	Hungarians march against anti-Semitism after far-right poll gains by ICARE, Open Society & agencies   10/6/2014   UN rights chief: Xenophobia in EU paves way to violence. (DPA)   The recent rise in xenophobic rhetoric from EU politicians could pave the way for violence and human rights violations, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay warned Tuesday in Geneva. At the opening of the U.N. Human Rights Council''s summer session, Pillay said the xenophobic, racist and religiously intolerant discourse could undermine the fight against discrimination in Europe. "There is a road to perpetration of human rights violations. And hate speech - particularly by political leaders - is on that road," she said. Pillay added that the recent deadly attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels was connected to this climate of extremism. The suspect in the shooting is 29-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, who is believed to have trained with jihadists in Syria.   The U.N. rights chief pointed out that the newly elected European Parliament will include several extremists, including the former chief of the German National Democratic Party, Udo Voigt, who has said that "Europe is the continent of white people and it should remain that way." She also mentioned French Front National chief Marine Le Pen, who was re-elected in last months EU polls and who has compared Muslims praying in public with France''s occupation by Nazi Germany. Another EU parliamentarian who secured another term was Mario Borghezio of Italy''s Northern League, who has been convicted of setting fire to migrants makeshift beds.   The EU elections resulted in wins by rightist parties in France, Britain and Denmark, as well as in gains among such parties in Austria, Finland and Sweden. Top EU officials on Tuesday also discussed the threat of extremism during talks with religious leaders in Brussels. "We have highlighted the importance to be vigilant (on) all attempts to come to extremist positions against each other and namely against the values that are so important in the EU," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. He spoke of the dangers of fundamentalism, racism and discrimination, highlighting the "tendencies that we''re seeing in some parts of our society ... putting into question relations between people, where the other is perceived as the enemy." "We need a prosperous, efficient, generous and protective Europe to avoid a Europe dominated by the fear of the other and the hate of the other," EU President Herman Van Rompuy added.   The participants in the Brussels talks held a minute of silence in honor of the Jewish Museum victims. "I don''t think there are religions worthy of the name that preach the death of innocent people," said the chief rabbi of Brussels, Albert Guigui. "Fanatics who use religion as a lever for their own interests, they take advantage of religion to kill."   In Geneva, meanwhile, Pillay said some progress has been made in the human rights field in the six years since she became high commissioner, including efforts to abolish capital punishment and the creation of the UN Human Rights Council. Her term ends in September. At the same time, she deplored the situation in Syria. "It is shocking beyond words that war crimes and crimes against humanity have become commonplace and occur with complete impunity," she said, pointing to last month''s vetoing of a U.N. Security Council resolution by Russia and China, who blocked Syria''s referral to the International Criminal Court.   27/4/2014   Hungarians march against anti-Semitism after far-right poll gains. (Reuters)   Tens of thousands of Hungarians joined a protest march on Sunday against anti-Semitism, three weeks after the far-right Jobbik party won nearly a quarter of votes cast in a national election.   Budapest"s annual "March of the Living" has drawn an increasing number of participants in recent years to commemorate the deaths of around half a million Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust in World War Two.   The marchers, many holding European Union and Israeli flags, attended the inauguration of a Holocaust monument on a bank of the Danube where Jews were executed during the war. They then marched in silence through the city to an old railway station from which trains departed 70 years ago for Nazi death camps. More people are taking part because they fear anti-Semitism is again on the rise, said Miklos Deutsch, 64, a restaurant manager, after a shofar, a traditional Jewish instrument made from a ram"s horn, gave the signal for the march to start.   "The cause, indeed, is poverty. When the economy does not really work and people are poor, somebody has to be blamed, and the Jews and the gypsies are blamed," he said. "The strengthening of Jobbik is dangerous," added Deutsch, whose parents lost most of their relatives in the Holocaust.   Unemployment has fallen under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban"s conservative Fidesz party, which again secured a two-thirds parliamentary majority in this month"s election. But many Hungarians still struggle to make ends meet and this discontent has helped Jobbik increase its support to 21 percent of the national vote from 16 percent four years ago. Jobbik denies being anti-Semitic but does little to dispel its reputation for intolerance.   Its followers are often openly hostile to Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities. "Anti-Semitism has risen. You can feel that in all segments of society: in politics, in media, in schools and in social intercourse," said another marcher, Gyorgy Burjan, a retired engineer, adding that Jobbik had capitalized on that.   Jewish groups have also protested against a plan to build a memorial to Hungary"s 1944 German occupation, saying it would conceal the responsibility of local authorities who collaborated with the Germans to ship hundreds of thousands to the camps.   Rising Anti-Semitism in Europe, While violent attacks are decreasing, their intensity grows, Kantor Center report reveals.   President of the European Jewish Congress Dr. Moshe Kantor says Jews feel less welcome and more insecure in large parts of Europe during the release of the findings regarding the situation of anti-Semitism worldwide in 2013.   Kantor was speaking at a press conference where the annual findings for 2013 were released by The Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Moshe Kantor database for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the European Jewish Congress. Results from the 2013 survey show that anti-Semitic attacks are growing in their intensity and cruelty. The number and type of violent attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions is worsening.   During 2013, there were 554 registered violent anti-Semitic acts, perpetrated with weapons or without, by arson, vandalism and direct threats, against persons, synagogues, community centers and schools, cemeteries, monuments and private property. The highest number of recorded incidents comes from France: 116, a rise in violent cases has also been noted in the UK, with 95 cases compared to 84 in 2012, and in Canada, 83 compared to 74; in Germany: 36 compared to 23; 23 in the Ukraine, compared to 15; 15 cases in Russia (11 in 2012), and 14 in Hungary (12 in 2012).   We also learn that Jews remain, in parts of Europe, a targeted minority, especially relative to its numbers. In France, for example, Jews are around 1% of the population, while 40% of the racist violent attacks in 2013 were against Jews. “As we see in these findings in addition to results from the EU Fundamental Rights Agency survey released in November, Jews do not feel safe or secure in certain communities in Europe,” Kantor said.   “According to that survey, almost half of the Jewish population is afraid of being verbally or physically attacked in a public place because they are Jewish and 25% of Jews will not wear anything that identifies them as Jewish or go near a Jewish institution for fear of an attack.”   “Normative Jewish life in Europe is becoming increasingly unsustainable if such large numbers of European Jews are forced to live in fear and insecurity," Kantor continued. "European governments must be pressed to address this issue with utmost urgency.”   Dr. Kantor also spoke about how hate and incitement can easily translate into violence. “It is often easy to ignore such types of anti-Semitism - because there are usually no direct victims, no physical harm, but the influence of such simple acts of hate on masses of young people is a dangerous source of anti-Semitism for the future,” Kantor said.   “However, we received a stark lesson two weeks ago in Kansas City that there are many dangerous anti-Semites out there who just need the trigger and the opportunity to transfer their hate speech into violent action.”   “This is why we must always continue to monitor the sources of hate in order that our communities can live in security," he continued. "We often face the dilemma of whether to ignore such so-called "harmless" acts of hate, usually spread verbally, through hate-speech or through literature. But by truly understanding the dangerous potential of this behavior we dare not ignore it.”   Romani Nazi death camps barely merit signposts, by John Lennon, Vice Dean for Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University.   Gypsies, tinkers, pikeys, travellers – everyone knows the terms, not to mention the even more derogatory ones. The Roma and Sinti people have been the subject of prejudice and discrimination in Europe for centuries. This has ranged from gypsy hunts in 16th century Bohemia, to incarceration and extermination under the Nazi regime, to present day discrimination against a population of more than 12 million people across Europe. In the UK, a third of residents said in a survey a few years ago that they were prejudiced against gypsies, travellers and Eastern European Romani.   This scale of bigotry pervades much of Europe. Somewhere between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti people are estimated to have lost their lives during the World War II. This imprecise statistic is a deliberate result of the disregard given to the process of forced labour and extermination that they went through.   In Nazi racist ideology such people were beneath contempt and considered to be worth less than Jews, so they did not see a need to record their incarceration or death. The lack of detailed record by an otherwise fastidious and technically obsessed regime is one of the reasons for the absence in history and concentration camp museums of the gypsy holocaust, or porrajmos, as the Romani call it. Of the concentration camp sites across many of the countries that the Third Reich successfully invaded and annexed during World War II, there are few signs of the places where the Roma and Sinti were incarcerated and the vast majority lost their lives. It would seem that even remembrance is denied to a culture where the oral rather than written tradition is more common in recounting history.   My own research into the field known as dark tourism – the attraction by visitors to sites of death, destruction and mass killing – has recognised the enduring attraction of concentration camps and sites associated with the Nazi holocaust. These sites exist to preserve a memorial and educate future generations about the mistakes of the past. Their preservation is normally linked to education, promoting future tolerance and understanding. Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland records more than one million visitors per year; and Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin achieves close to 400,000 visitors every year.   The limited number of sites associated with the gypsy holocaust has also been the subject of exploratory work. For example the remains of so-called gypsy camps in many parts of the Czech Republic – where there was a significant Roma and Sinti population prior to the war – have been lost and their locations are rarely commemorated.   Indeed, Lety Concentration Camp, one of the largest Roma and Sinti camps is commemorated by a single sign (in Czech) and just one interpretive board. The site of this former camp is now covered by a sprawling industrial pig farm and pork processing plant established after the war and of such a scale that there is no vestige of the former buildings. Czech nationals collaborated and participated in identifying and incarcerating Roma and Sinti, but this dark period of the country’s history is a narrative that is yet to find a proper voice.   This lack of commemoration and concern is not limited to the past. In contemporary Europe, Roma and Sinti still suffer discrimination and prejudice. It is notable that the European Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg declared in 2008, “today’s rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazis and fascists …” Roma and Sinti often live in ghetto-like conditions around Europe. Their settlements are characterised by crumbling infrastructure, high rates of unemployment, low educational participation and poor levels of educational attainment. In the UK between 75,000 and 300,000 gypsies and travellers are functionally illiterate. The average school leaving age is under 13 years and the propensity for depression and other mental health problems is 20 times higher than the norm. Domestic abuse is common and infant mortality rates are among the nation’s highest.   This depressing and tragic evidence of discrimination has set these peoples apart from much of Europe for centuries. Their problems and issues go largely unreported and even their tragic past is either partially ignored or deliberately overlooked. It has been said that until a nation can confront the very worst of its past, it cannot progress and grow. Here we have a tragedy that is both part of our shared past and a real element of our present. This excluded and oppressed minority require both a voice and our urgent attention.   http://counterpoint.uk.com/projects/reluctant-radicals-2/ http://www.icare.to/news.php?en Visit the related web page
	Social audits - Data to the people! by Philippa Garson IRIN Global   Protests against poor delivery of services such as water, toilets, health and education, have become such a ubiquitous part of the South African landscape they barely make the news: as the delivery problems continue, so do the protests, and the vicious cycle of creeping poverty and mounting frustration continues.   But “social auditing” - a new kind of civil society activism that helps empower communities to gather the financial information they need to pressure for real change - may turn these protests into more than hot air, and ultimately help bring about tangible lifestyle improvements for the communities themselves. Around the world social auditing is being seen as a way to empower people to monitor the delivery of programmes aimed at them and to help ensure that these programmes are not corrupted, stalled or mismanaged, and that they deliver what is actually required.   In Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, for example, a social audit of portable toilets conducted by a triumvirate of NGOs and affected communities, has found the toilet contractors wanting in a myriad of ways and the group has the detailed, documented evidence to prove it.   Pioneered by the Social Justice Coalition working alongside Ndifuna Ukwazi (Dare to Know) and assisted by the Washington-based International Budget Partnership (IBP), the group conducted several auditing campaigns to show how the community was not getting access to proper sanitation. Although the city signed strict contracts with tenders to supply portable toilet solutions, the community’s own research showed that: there were not enough toilets, they were broken, not cleaned adequately, and posed “life threatening risks to the poorest and most vulnerable communities in the city”.   They also revealed that the city had no viable long-term plan to provide sanitation - a basic human right - to all its residents. Involving court actions and demonstrations, the campaign is ongoing, but the city of Cape Town has acknowledged that its sanitation plans needs to be improved and monitored better.   Holding government accountable   Ndifuna Ukwazi deputy director Jared Rossouw told IRIN that ultimately the goal is to “build a social audit movement in South Africa. We want to be able to engage with local governments around service delivery. We want them to provide us with data, to see this as a legitimate form of community oversight. It’s about educating communities to understand the data so that they know what’s being paid for, so they can use that information to conduct audits and hold government accountable.” Rossouw says there is interest from some quarters in national government to promote this form of “citizen-based monitoring of service delivery”.   In India, the government is more involved in social auditing, with mixed results. An NGO called Samarthan has pioneered social auditing in that country, with its attempts to make the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (legislation passed in 2005 by the government to grant families the right to 100 days of paid labour per year) a reality. The right-to-work programme, the biggest in the world, was from the outset beset with bureaucratic problems and large-scale corruption. This led to Samarthan, which operates in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, to conduct social audits at the village level, “to follow the paperwork up and the money down”.   The social audits bought to light mismanagement and corruption at every turn: local elites were embezzling money and people were being denied jobs. The problems were exacerbated by a culture of corruption among officials and a culture of subservience among poor and illiterate farmworkers, who feared asking questions or challenging local authorities, says Samarthan executive director Yogesh Kumar.   Despite a backlash by local officials who tried to subvert Samarthan’s work, media attention eventually made the government more open to trying to sort out the problems and these audits are now conducted in partnership with it. However, Kumar says many audits are simply “happening on paper”, are not widespread enough and are of uneven quality. But gradually, he says, a “social auditing culture of transparency and accountability is building”. “Once we do a good social audit, the villagers realize the value of it. The larger push will come when there is a strong political will for this, when the senior politicians take it up.”   Fraud risk   Similar programmes in Ghana and Mexico have exposed the weaknesses of government programmes to help the poor by means of civil society audits and involvement in the budgeting process.   In Mexico, Fundar’s Subsidios al Campo campaign showed how the government programme to give cash payments to farmers in need ultimately only benefited the wealthiest of them. This led to the government setting down new rules to make the process more transparent and reduce the risk of fraud.   In Ghana, advocacy organization Social Enterprise Development Foundation (SEND-Ghana) found that a school feeding programme was not being implemented properly. Partly through their efforts, local communities got involved in monitoring the programme. Also, basic services such as water supplies, toilet facilities, health and education services, were improved as a result.   South Africa’s other notable example of social auditing involves the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), founded in 1998. It was partly the TAC’s budget analysis that led to the government being compelled to provide ARV drugs to pregnant women to prevent them passing on the HIV virus to their unborn babies. TAC was able to show that the health department could in fact afford to pay for the drugs. As a result, hundreds of thousands of deaths were prevented and the country now has a massive antiretroviral treatment programme that targets more than 1.2 million people.   Towards more transparent budgets   While civil society can play a key role in monitoring how budgets are spent, governments have to play their part by opening their books, involving citizens in spending decisions and doing their own audits on how effectively the money is being spent. IBP publishes a bi-annual index, ranking 100 countries it surveys, according to how open their budgets are.   One of the reasons why governments have not achieved the Millennium Development Goals is because they are not spending public money properly, says Vivek Ramkumar, IBP’s director of International Advocacy and Open Budget Initiative. Part of the problem, he says, is that in many countries, the allocation and spending of budgets is still shrouded in mystery. With the global recession putting the squeeze on aid from donor countries, governments in developing countries are under growing pressure to meet the demands of service delivery themselves. “What we are seeing is that if this is done in an open way and if information is shared with the public, the priorities are set in a way that truly reflects national needs.”   The budgetary process involves many macro and micro decisions that take place throughout the year. “While some of these decisions require a sophisticated understanding of global financing… this is not all that budgeting is about,” says Ramkumar. There are many political decisions that require citizen buy-in. He points out that sales tax, for example, is being paid by poor and marginalized populations themselves. “They bear the brunt of decisions that are being discussed and implemented at a higher level”. There will be more buy-in, along with a “culture of trust”, when citizens are consulted along the way, he says. “At the micro level, citizens do not need to be highly educated to know whether resources are being used properly in their areas,” he adds.   * Access the complete story via the link below. Visit the related web page
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