Tag: police state

Iran
Sharifeh Mohammadi

Iran: retrial for labor activist sentenced to death

Iran’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial of labor rights activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, who had been sentenced to death for treason. The order lifts her death sentence while she awaits a retrial. In the conviction handed down by the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Rasht, Mohammadi’s alleged membership in the National Labor Unions Assistance Coordination Committee (LUACC) was included as evidence—despite the fact that LUACC is a legally established independent labor organization in Iran. As a member of the International Labor Organization and a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, Iran is obliged to guarantee the right to form trade unions and to strike. Prominent human rights defenders, including former political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh, have announced their intention to begin a hunger strike if Mohammadi’s death sentence is not overturned. (Image: Center for Human Rights in Iran)

Europe
tolstoy

Podcast: Tolstoy would shit II

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state’s propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual “deviance.” Following alarming reports of “concentration camps” for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined “traditional marriage,” while a “gay propaganda law” imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The “LGBT movement” has been designated a “terrorist organization”; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as “deviant content.” Yet the venerable littérateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 247 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).

Iraq
Tishreen

Iraq: no justice five years after Tishreen protests

Amnesty International highlighted the failure of successive Iraqi governments to ensure justice, truth and reparation for the lethal crackdown on the 2019 Tishreen (October) protests. A new report reveals ongoing impunity five years after nationwide demonstrations that led to hundreds of deaths and disappearances, and thousands of injuries among the protesters. The Tishreen demonstrations, which began Oct. 1, 2019, saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis taking to the streets to demand jobs, improved public services, and an end to government corruption. Amnesty found that they were met with “serious human rights violations and crimes under international law…including the excessive and unlawful use of lethal force by anti-riot police, counterterrorism forces and members of Popular Mobilization Units.” According to Amnesty’s analysis of information from Iraqi courts, out of 2,700 criminal investigations opened, only 10 arrest warrants have been issued against suspected perpetrators, and a mere seven convictions have been handed down. (Photo: JURIST)

Afghanistan
Afghanistan women

ICJ case against Taliban over ‘gender apartheid’

Twenty-six countries expressed their support for a legal initiative to hold the Taliban accountable at the International Court of Justice for systematic human rights violations against women and girls in Afghanistan. In a joint statement, the countries emphasized Afghanistan’s obligations under international law, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international bill of rights for women. Since the Taliban’s seizure of de facto power in 2021, Afghan women and girls have faced severe violations of their rights. The Taliban government has taken various measures to limit their participation in public life and has engaged in systematic discrimination, which has been called “gender apartheid.” (Photo: 12019/Pixabay via Jurist)

The Caribbean
Martinique

France deploys anti-riot police to Martinique

The French government deployed the special anti-riot police, the Republican Security Companies (CRS), to Martinique in response to ongoing protests over the rising cost of living on the French-ruled Caribbean island. The deployment marks the first time CRS units have been sent to Martinique since they were banned from the territory in December 1959, following violent protests in departmental capital Fort-de-France that drew widespread criticism over heavy-handed police intervention. (Map: PCL)

Iran
Pakhshan Azizi

Iran: revoke death sentence of Kurdish activist

Over 26 rights organizations, including the Kurdistan Human Rights Network and Center for Human Rights in Iran, issued a joint statement calling for the immediate revocation of the death sentence imposed on Kurdish women’s rights activist Pakhshan Azizi. This sentence, handed down by the Iranian judiciary, has sparked international outrage, with the organizations calling it “a blatant violation of human rights principles and standards as well as international conventions and treaties.” Held in solitary confinement for months, during which time she was subjected to torture to coerce confessions, Azizi was sentenced to death by the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran on charges of “armed insurrection” and “membership in opposition groups.” Her lawyers maintain that Azizi has no involvement in any armed groups, but that she spent years working in displaced persons’ camps in Syria’s Rojava region, providing humanitarian aid to those displaced by ISIS violence. (Image: ANF)

Africa
#EndBadGovernance

Nigeria: drop treason charges against protestors

Human Rights Watch released a statement condemning the treason charges leveled against protestors in Nigeria last month. A total of 124 people were arrested during the #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria campaign in August, and 10 of those individuals have been charged with treason. The crime of treason can be punishable by death in the West African country. The protest campaign, initially planned to last 10 days, was cut short by violent repression that left at least 20 dead. Activists are now planning a new campaign under the hashtag #FearlessInOctober. (Image via Twitter)

Greater Middle East
Riyadh

Demand Saudi Arabia release detained cyber-dissidents

A group of 40 rights organizations issued a joint statement calling on authorities in Saudi Arabia to release all those unfairly jailed for their online activities before Riyadh hosts the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in December. The organizations stated that the detentions contradict the IGF’s stated values of advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age. They charged that Saudi authorities are subjecting citizens to unprecedented repression, including decades-long prison sentences for expressing critical views online. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Watching the Shadows
Twitter

Is Elon Musk unstoppable?

If elected president in November, Donald Trump says he will create a government efficiency commission led by tech billionaire Elon Musk as part of his economic plan. Musk suggested the idea to Trump in a conversation on X, which he bought in 2022 when it was called Twitter. The announcement is the latest display of Musk’s growing influence in politics. The self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” is accused of censoring progressive opinions while amplifying the voices of far-right networks. So far, no one seems to be able to check his growing power, as his recent legal battles with Australia and Brazil have demonstrated. Both countries tried to curtail content deemed harmful, but Musk ignored their requests. After Musk disregarded a judicial order to suspend dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation in Brazil, the country’s Supreme Court ruled to ban it nationwide. Journalists, who have relied heavily on it, have expressed a mixture of relief and regret at the ban. (Photo: Filip Troníček via Wikipedia)

Watching the Shadows
computer smash

Podcast: rage against the technocracy II

Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence continue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being used as conduits for propaganda and disinformation lubricating the reconsolidation of dictatorships. This is all about to get much worse—with propaganda especially getting exponentially more sophisticated—through the advent of artificial intelligence. What is urgently mandated—ultimately, even to be able to effectively oppose genocides and dictatorships—is a revolution of everyday life, reclaiming human reality from digital totalitarianism. The uprising in El Salvador against the mandatory imposition of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 still stands as a glimmer of hope, pointing the potentiality of this kind of revolution—even if the aspiring autocrat Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin a national currency, put down the uprising and is now consolidating an authoritarian regime. Bill Weinberg rants against the digital Borg in Episode 242 of the CounterVortex podcast. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: Earth First! Newswire)

Southeast Asia
Cambodia

Cambodia: citizens detained for protesting mega-project

At least 94 people have been arbitrarily arrested in Cambodia since late July for expressing public criticism of the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle Area (CLV-DTA), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. The human rights organizations believe at least 59 of those arrested have been unlawfully detained by Cambodian authorities, and called for all charges in these cases to be immediately dropped. The Khmer Movement for Democracy states that the CLV-DTA would serve “as cover for further illegal deforestation, land evictions, and exploitation of resources for foreign gain.” (Map: PCL)