thenatureofmind

The Human Rights Implications of Solitary Confinement, Extreme Sentencing, and the Death Penalty

In the past two years, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, has condemned the death penalty and solitary confinement, finding that the imposition of these punishments can constitute torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Mendez called for the absolute prohibition of the death penalty and solitary confinement on juveniles and persons with mental disabilities. He additionally recommended the implementation of alternative disciplinary sanctions, and called for the universal prohibition of solitary confinement exceeding 15 days.

The Human Rights Implications of Solitary Confinement, Extreme Sentencing, and the Death Penalty

Oscar Nominee Detained by DHS

Why Is Guantanamo Still Open?

The Congress of the United States appropriates, and the president of the United States spends, more than $400,000 per day, seven days a week, to imprison people whom the government itself has deemed innocent. The US Court of Appeals has upheld the legality of this indefinite detention of the innocent, and the US Supreme Court has refused to review it.

The chance of ending this absurdity is just about zero.

That's not just because the $400,000-a-day facility is the Guantanamo prison camp, and it's not just because Congress would try to keep the president from closing the prison even if he wanted to, and it's not just because the president signed into law the NDAA that pretty much requires him to keep Guantanamo open - it's also because official US policy pretty much still supports everything that was done and continues to be done at Guantanamo.

Why Is Guantanamo Still Open?.

Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control

Remember that "imposing measures intended to prevent births" is an officially recognized method of genocide:

This weekend, a report revealing that African women immigrating to Israel were subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization made global headlines.

Some 130,000 Ethiopians, most of them Jewish, live in Israel. The community experiences higher poverty and unemployment rates than the rest of the country’s Jewish population. In the past decade, the birth rate among Ethiopian-Israelis has declined by at least 20 percent. Advocacy groups now claim this decline is the result of a birth control regimen forced upon Ethiopian immigrant women.

Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control

NDAA 2013 Propaganda

In Chile, Plunder and Perverse Laws against the Indigenous Population

While the nation and its governments do not have the political will to resolve our historic demands, which are based in territory and autonomy, it will be difficult to have peace. If the government continues to obstinately militarize certain territorial spaces, there will be no real possibilities to seek some kind of understanding,” declares Ramón Llanquileo Pilquimán from the southern Chilean prison in Angol. He is one of the two Mapuche political prisoners on hunger strike since November 14.

In Chile, Plunder and Perverse Laws against the Indigenous Population

White Power to the Rescue

On a windy afternoon a few days ago I went to a depressed section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all anyone has in this case since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle used his house as a stop on the underground railroad for escaped slaves in the decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called Slave Haven. It has artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars and broadsheets advertising the sale of men, women and children. In the gray floor of the porch there is a trapdoor that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement. Escaped slaves were purportedly guided by Burkle at night down a tunnel or trench toward the nearby Mississippi River and turned over to sympathetic river traders who took them north to Cairo, Ill., and on to freedom in Canada.

White Power to the Rescue.

Cornel West | Occupy Wall Street Debate | Oxford Union

Dr. Cornel West: "MLK Today Could Be Taken to Jail Without Due Process

Idle No More: Indigenous Uprising Sweeps North America

It took weeks of protests, flash mobs, letters, rallies, and thousands of righteous tweets, but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally caved. He agreed to a meeting with the woman who had been petitioning him for twenty-four days, subsisting on fish broth, camped in a tepee in the frozen midwinter, the hunger striker and Chief of the Attawapiskat Theresa Spence.

Idle No More: Indigenous Uprising Sweeps North America.