Marriage equality

On the day that I married P I smiled all day. I smiled so much that my mouth began to ache, but I just couldn't stop. Honestly I felt that happy.

I didn't grow up thinking that getting married was necessarily something that I would do. I never had dreams of a fairy tale wedding or living 'happily ever after'. Not only did my parents get divorced when I was 5, but with the help of my feminist mother I understood from a very young age that the institution of marriage was founded on some fairly problematic patriarchal traditions whereby property in a woman was transferred from her father to her husband. It also had a sad history of trapping people in unhappy or abusive relationships and of reinforcing unequal power relationships in our society.

Despite all this I still chose to get married.

Why?

First and foremost I guess I truly believe that not only is culture something that is constantly evolving, but that it is necessary to make a conscious effort to claim cultural traditions for progressive purposes in order not to cede them entirely to conservative forces.

Second, and this relates to the first point, I believe that cultural traditions have an incredible symbolic power to convey so much more meaning into our lives that we are often willing to acknowledge in the West (or Global North). I don't want to abandon these cultural practices too easily and I felt the tradition of marriage was one that I wanted to take part in, despite its problematic history.

The reason that I wanted to take part in the tradition of marriage specifically was that I felt that it had the power to communicate a whole range of messages that we really significant for me. Due to its history in our culture, marriage had the power to communicate clearly to our family and friends that P and I were now a family and that we hoped that they would adopt our respective partners into our respective family and friendship circles and that they would respect our relationship as being fundamental to our sense of family and belonging in the world. A wedding is certainly not the only way of communicating this message, but it is certainly the most powerful in our culture (particularly if you have family members who are quite religious, etc).

Marriage also had that powerful shorthand in relation to the wider community and to the State and the way that all its various organs treat our relationship. This wasn't a very significant reasons for us to get married, but for some people it would be very important.

Finally, harking back to that symbolic meaning issue, I also felt that marriage was one way that P and I could know that we were both on the same page about where our relationship was going. Of course it is totally possible to commit to someone without marrying them. Of course it is possible to have honest discussions about creating a shared vision for the future, etc. However, some things are difficult to articulate and the less cerebral shared understanding that comes from deciding to marry someone can make that whole process more straightforward for some of us...

So I got married. I didn't change my name. I didn't get 'given away' or promise to obey him. But I got married and it was one of the happiest days of my life. My whole family was there along with many of my friends. We committed our lives to each other in a rotunda by the beach and then I kissed him on the nose. That evening we gathered with our nearest and dearest to celebrate, to eat vegan yum cha and to dance. It was lovely.

My mother and her partner have been together for far longer than P and I. They have loved and supported each other for many many years. They are committed to spending the rest of their lives together. However, despite all this, they are not legally permitted to marry in Australia because they are both female. They are currently denied the right to access the powerful cultural tradition of marriage to communicate to their families and friends that they consider each other family. Of course, their family and friends do understand this by now, but they have also been denied the right to communicate this powerful message to the wider community, to the State and to each other.

Honestly, this makes me so angry. I know that some people consider this to be a minor issue, but it's not. It's a fundamental human rights issue. We might take a fairly casual approach to our cultural traditions here in Australia, but that doesn't mean that they aren't significant or that they don't carry with them enormous power. Denying one group of people access to that power is a human rights abuse.

Today we attended a marriage equality rally in Canberra. This year it was particularly important because there is a federal election next week. Both the ALP and the Coalition have taken positive measures to deny marriage equality to queer people in Australia. Both should be sent a strong message that this is a totally unacceptable breach of human rights.

Meanwhile on planet dark ages, the Families First candidate Wendy Francis has been tweeting about gay marriage being a recipe for child abuse. Having been raised by a gay parent, I found this obnoxious and massively ignorant. However, I do question how fundamentally different it is to the stance adopted by the Coalition and the ALP. Saying that our culture is 'just not ready' for gay marriage is just a more subtle way of perpetuating the exact same prejudices and discriminatory practices. It just means that the bigots in those parties have had better media training.

The ACT Legislative Assembly have tried twice to make civil unions legal for same-sex couples in the ACT. The first time they did this the Howard-Liberal government overrode the legislation. The second time the Rudd-ALP government forced an amendment that prohibited any kind of celebration. They prohibited a celebration! WTF?!

The Australian Greens have tried to introduce a Marriage Equality Act several times and have been blocked by both major parties. If they gain the balance of power in the Senate this election then they may have more leverage to get a conscious vote on this issue. If Lin Hatfield-Dodds gets up in the ACT Senate then the Greens will have the balance of power straight away. This is a significant election for many reasons and marriage equality is one of them.

Marriage equality

The Australian Greens are currently sponsoring the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009. The purpose of this bill is to allow same-sex couples to legally marry in our country. Currently, they are legally denied this basic human right, which is, frankly, despicable.

The Australian Senate is currently having an inquiry into this issue and below is my submission.

Would you like to make one? If so, go here, they make it easy and they have plenty of information for you to read if you want to inform yourself a bit more about the issues. Submissions close on 28 August 2009.

Dear Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee,

This is my submission to your inquiry into marriage equality. I fully endorse the submission made by Australian Marriage Equality in favour of the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009.

I think that is discriminatory and embarrassing that we still deny a significant proportion of our community the equal right to marry in our country. Marriage remains an important cultural symbol of commitment and love in our society. It is the traditional way that we not only celebrate this love and commitment, but also that we symbolise the creation of a family and the adoption of someone's life partner in their extended family. Everyone should have the option of taking part in this ceremony and of having the capacity to make this important statement of their love and commitment to their family and friends.

Additionally, marriage carries with it social and legal privileges that should not be denied to anyone on the basis of their sexuality. While some of these legal privileges, such as the right to access superannuation, have (finally) recently been extended to same-sex defacto couples, many of these privileges are difficult to replicate, and equal access to marriage remains a necessary step to ensure full equality.

Equal access to marriage is a human rights issue and the passing of this Bill is an important step towards Australia becoming a country that respects the human rights of all of its citizens, regardless of their sexuality.

Yours sincerely,

Cristy Clark

Thomas Pogge (on our culpability for poverty)

I find his reasoning so satisfying and so depressingly true:

I argue that current global institutional arrangements as codified in international law constitute a collective human rights violation of enormous proportions to which most of the world’s affluent are making uncompensated contributions.
[...]
Each day, some 50,000 human beings – mostly children, mostly female and mostly people of colour – die from starvation, diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, perinatal conditions and other poverty-related causes.”
[…]
This catastrophe was and is happening, foreseeably, under a global institutional order designed for the benefit of the affluent countries’ governments, corporations and citizens and of the poor countries’ political and military elites. There are feasible alternative designs of the global institutional order, feasible alternatives paths of globalization, under which this catastrophe would have been largely avoided. Even now severe poverty could be rapidly reduced through feasible reforms that would modify the more harmful features of this global order or mitigate their impact.

Full article here [PDF].

Words fail me

This is just so horrific. It makes me want to scream and cry. How could they?

This report (pdf) is pretty awful too. I think that I am going to use it an a case study in my thesis.

To every season

When I was about 6 years old I wanted to grow a flower garden from seeds and I went to the garden shop to buy some with my mother. My mother explained to me that many of the seeds would only last a season and would have to be purchased again the following year. She told me that this was not a natural thing, but rather something that had been purposefully bred into the plants so that a small number of companies could profit from their sale and that now thousands of varieties of flowers no longer existed.

I was shocked. I couldn't believe that such a terrible crime had been committed and that nothing was being done about it. I thought that people should be marching in the street at such a deliberate destruction of flowers.

Well I didn't know the half of it.


Of course this same kind of cynical breeding has been going on with all of our plants - most particularly with our grains, fruits and vegetables - and now it is being done with GM technology. The most insidious example of this is, of course, the Terminator Gene, but essentially the plants that we rely on for food have been deliberately bred for easy transport, appearance and, above all, profit. In the process millions of different varieties of plants that were perfectly adapted to their specific locations and that actually tasted good and were full of nutrients have become extinct and replaced with a monoculture of plants that are poorly adapted to their local environments and require constant inputs of chemicals and pesticides to survive. When I stop and think about it carefully it makes my blood boil.

I have been aware of this issue for a while now. I wrote my Masters thesis on the right to food and water - with a particular focus on the impact of Intellectual Property and GM technology on global food sovereignty - but I haven't been actively thinking about the issue over the past year.

That was until I started reading Barbara Kingsolver's 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'. The book is a documentation of a year in which Barbara and her family decide to live almost exclusively on food that they have grown (or raised) themselves or purchased locally from farmers that they know. Although the family decide to include meat and animal products in their diet and I cannot really relate to that decision, the book makes inspiring reading.

I am currently walking around with a burning desire to grow my own fruits and vegetables and to gain a far deeper understanding of the foods that grow well in my locality and the seasons that determine when they are at their peak, etc.

Our humble little garden is starting to bare some fruits now that Spring is so thoroughly upon us. Our little strawberry bushes are fruiting and yesterday our first tomatoes of the season arrived. We also have tons of herbs (thanks to my mother and her partner's previous gardening efforts) and some sad looking eggplant plants that may or may not come good in the next couple of months.



To be fair, we only moved in in July and small babies are not very easy to garden with, but I wish that our garden was overflowing with food.

Instead, I think that I will embark on a little self-education about fruits and vegetables and try to focus even more on eating seasonally and locally (and organically). And maybe some day in the future we will be lucky enough to be able to step partially off the grid.

How fun would that be?

Lily is on the move, Burma just might be

Lily has taken to waking up rather early of late. This is both good and bad at the same time. Good beacuse she and I get to spend a couple of hours or so together while C catches up on some much needed sleep. Bad because I'm rather buggered.

The early waking thing has happened a few times before, but it has been dramatically altered by the new crawling thing. I used to be able to pop her down in the sunny living room and pop into the kitchen and grab a bowl of cereal and a quick coffee. The last few days, however, have been a different story entirely. She's getting so quick (and quick to get frustrated and need attention). It's like being able to move isn't enought for her - she wants to be able to run!

We're going to spend the day today Lily proofing the house. It's amazing the things she gets herself into - she has a particular, if somewhat strange, fondness for a couple of old speakers I'd stashed under the couch. She also loves this laptop - making typing an intereesting experience...

I actually opened blogger to post about the situation in Burma, but find myself besiged by little hands so will just leave it at this: The writing is on the wall, and it says, Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, you facist arseholes.

Well, that made me feel somewhat better.

Oh, and before I forget (and before I hit post and let Lily have free reign on the keyboard), Burmanet says head fuckwit Than Shwe's family has been whisked off to Laos on a chartered jet. It seems the Burmese first family (first in greed, violence and repression) are safely ensconced inside the stronghold of Burma's closest (if almost entirely impotent) ally. Good to know.

I don't think the keyboard can take anymore drool, so I'll leave it there.

World Press Freedom Day

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. I had meant to post about this and the wonderful (in a bad way) irony that only the day before Rupert Murdoch launched a (thankfully unsuccessful) takeover bid for the Wall Street Journal, in a further bid to consolidate his global media empire and minimise the number of different voices providing news and information around the world.

The bid was defeated, but the irony stands.

I was also going to mention the fact that, so far this year, around the world:

24 Journalists have been killed;

5 Media assistants have been killed;

125 Journalists have been imprisoned;

4 Media assistants have been imprisoned; and

65 Cyberdissidents have been imprisoned.

Possibly the most notorious case is that of Anna Politkovskaya. Russian authorities (almost certainly implicated in her death) launched a half-arsed investigation, which, unsurprisingly, found nothing at all.

C and I saw Anna Politkovskaya speak at the 2006 Sydney Writer's Festival. She was absolutely inspiring and her tragic death brings Russia one step closer to total information blackout.

BBC Palestinian Territories correspondent, Alan Johnston, is still missing (he was abducted in Gaza on 12 March). Cases like his aren't captured in the statistics presented above, and highlight another disturbing trend - the targeting of journalists and media workers by political groups.

Thousands of other journalists everyday around the world self censor and do so increasingly. Not necessarily for fear of their lives (though under many regimes this is certianly the prime motivation to keep things in line), but becuase they know anything they write that doesn't "fit" simply won't get published.

The Lao People's "Democratic" Republic is a classic case in point, but that's for another post.

Overall I'd say things are looking grim. More news sources are controlled by fewer individuals, journalists' lives and liberties are increasingly being put at risk by the actions of state and non-state actors in political battles, and the nature, tone, breadth and depth of information available to us (the peoples of the world) is narrowing, despite the growth of online media content.

I wish I'd written this yesterday.

Careful where you bring up your kids

It seems that it’s a good thing that C and I won’t be bringing 3rd Pea up in the UK or US. UNICEF has just released a report ranking OECD countries on 6 dimensions of child wellbeing.

The UK came in dead last, with the US not far ahead.

Still, at least they ranked.

Initially I was puzzled to note that Australia (and 8 other OECD countries) weren’t in the rankings table. Then I noticed the footnote:

OECD countries with insufficient data to be included in the overview: Australia, Iceland, Japan, luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, Turkey.

Hmmm...

I wonder if we have something to hide.

For those interested, the report is available here. There is also an interesting article in today’s Guardian about the report and the UK’s place in it.

Hicks charged, sort of

The US Government has finally gotten around to charging David Hicks with something, sort of. And while our Dear Leader insists that it wouldn’t be right for Hicks to be charged under retrospective legislation (i.e. with crimes that weren’t crimes at the time they were "committed") in Australia:

"What the Americans do is up to the Americans … We believe the arrangements for the military commission meet the reasonable requirements of Australian law".

"[W]e do not believe the passage of retrospective criminal law in this country is appropriate".

"[O]nce somebody goes overseas they lose the protection of Australian law".

"I don't equate what the US is doing with the passage of a retrospective criminal law in Australia. I don't accept the analogy".

Well, that’s a whole new level of doublespeak.

The whole thing is a farce, and therefore I’m sending you over to a post by AnonymousLefty that would be funny if the situation wasn’t so sad, disgusting and deranged.

Peace or justice?

I have been pondering this article from The Guardian for the last week and I am no closer to resolving exactly what I think about the issues that it raises. However, I thought that it was worth discussing regardless.

Essentially, the Ugandan government has asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to drop its charges against Joseph Kony - the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army - so that they can proceed with a peace deal that may see the end of the civil war in Uganda.

The ICC believe that dropping the charges at this point would be fatally damaging to the credibility of the Court and would be a blow for International Justice. The Ugandan government (and many community members) believe that they should not be made to suffer an ongoing war just so that the ICC can have its historic first case and feel good about itself. I think that they both have a point.


On the one hand, dropping the charges against Joseph Kony would seem to encourage an international culture of impunity; one where people can get away with anything they like so long as they are powerful and violent enough to broker a good settlement at the end of the day. It sends the message that mass murder, mutilation and abducting children in order to force them to become child soldiers and sex slaves is OK - so long as you hold enough power to force the government to grant you amnesty in exchange for a peace deal. What will this mean for future conflict? Will it give confidence to future Joseph Konys that they will never have to deal with the consequences of their actions? Will it mean that they hold out longer and cause more suffering in order to ensure that they too are granted amnesty when it all gets too hard?

On the other hand, why should the people of Uganda continue to suffer for some nebulous idea of justice or even to serve as a warning for future conflicts in other countries? How do they benefit from a standing warrant when they are being terrorised daily and are forced to watch as their children are taken away to face hell on earth?

There is also the question of consequences - how do we know that charging Kony will have any kind of deterrent effect on future tyrants? I doubt any of them start with the idea that they are actually going to lose. It is just 'Western' arrogance to assume that we can solve these issues through the courts rather than allowing them to be solved internally over the negotiating table?

I just don't know. Both dropping the charges and refusing to do so seem completely wrong - how dare the real world be so messy.

Not that I’d ever set foot in a McDonald’s...

...but I was (begrudgingly) happy to see that, in the UK at least, they have announced that all coffee they sell will be sourced from plantations certified by the Rainforest Alliance.

Why is it that the companies that drive small businesses out of business are also the ones that offer (sometimes the only available) humane options for having coffee out of the house? Starbucks is a classic example. They engage in the most insidious business practices (including staking out popular local cafes and offering their lessors higher rent for the premises and placing outlets so closely together that each outlet looses some profits but ensures complete market dominance in any given locale) and yet they offer fair trade coffee.

I get torn between supporting local businesses (the kind without the global megacorps behind them) and buying coffee that actually pays farmers a living wage and supports community development programmes.

What to do other than have fair trade coffee at home and support local cafes by drinking something other than coffee.

More info on the benefits of fair trade coffee and why you should really be drinking it (and encouraging your local cafe to stock it as an option) can be found here and here, and some more general fair trade info here.

Human Rights Day 2006

Today, poverty prevails as the gravest human rights challenge in the world. Combating poverty, deprivation and exclusion is not a matter of charity, and it does not depend on how rich a country is.

By tackling poverty as a matter of human rights obligation, the world will have a better chance of abolishing this scourge in our lifetime... Poverty eradication is an achievable goal.

Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Today is Human Rights Day. This year's theme is "Fighting Poverty: A matter of obligation not charity".

There's not much I can say about this that's new or innovative. It's pretty much all right here, and will only take you a minute to read.

If you have 10 minutes to spare today, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If you have another 15, read the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The Office of the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights also has a handy fact sheet on the International Bill of Rights that these 3 documents make up. It lives here.

Human Rights have also come to play a stronger role in development thinking in recent years. The UK's Overseas Development Institute has a handy briefing paper outlining the thinking. Australia does not officially endorse the approach, and most likely won't, even with a change of government - we don't want to be obliged to actually do anything now do we?

If you still find yourself with some reading time and the inclination to continue perusing what the web has to offer on the topic of human rights and poverty, Amnesty International has a whole site devoted to the topic.

Happy Human Rights Day - and let's hope it can be a happier one for some of the millions of people living in desperate poverty; poverty we could easily end if we so chose.

five days in a sweatshop killed me

NOW, a Nottingham-based art group, has developed an online game that attempts to mimic life for the millions of sweatshop workers struggling to surive all over the global south.

Sim Sweatshop that was aptly described by Mark Oliver, a Guardian journalist, the other day:

Players have to frantically put together trainers as the clock runs down, using a pathetic wage to buy drink and food to stop their energy bar from disappearing... There is a daily quota of shoes to hit, with wages being docked if it is missed... If money runs low, it is a struggle to buy food, and the shoes become blurry as tiredness sets in.

Oliver says he lasted three days before expiring from lack of food and over work. I managed slightly better at five, but never made my full shoe quota (and consequently had my pay docked every day), couldn't afford to buy my child new shoes and my shoes were constantly blurry from lack of energy.

It's hard not to feel the sense of dread and urgency as you attempt to drag the pieces of the sneakers together as quickly as possible, attempting to stay ahead of the clock, while knowing full well that even if you do manage to make your shoe quota for the day, there is a good chance you won't make it tomorrow and, even if you do, you still won't have enough money to feed and your family and pay the rent.

More distressing than the game itself was the statistic quoted by Oliver in his article, citing a report that found more than half of under 25's in the UK have no idea where or how their clothes are produced, nor do they care.

This comment, left on the article the day it was published, just about says it all:

Is it the responsibility of the consumer to know where and how their items are made? Get a bloody grip, do not have a go at under 25s who understandably do not know where their clothes come from it is manafacturers and manafacturers alone who can stop this. Or yes we could boycott all products not made in the West and then watch how the dreadfull wages of sweatshop workers disappears into nothing as they lose their job? The consumer is not at fault here, and it should not be the consumers responsibility to find out.

Notwithstanding the horror inspired by Svenny's ignorance of simple grammatical rules and English spelling, the attitude espoused, seems to me, to neatly sum up the major problem in the world today. Most people in the global north simply do not care about anything beyond their self defined borders. For some that stops with themselves and for many more it expands to encompass family and friends, even as far as most members of their particular nation state (the ones that are of the same colour and religious beliefs at least), but no further.

Thinking about this reminded me of an article written by (one of my favourite philosophers) Peter Singer in 1971. The article Famine, Affluence, and Morality argues compellingly that we not only have the moral obligation to assist others in need, but that this obligation extends to the ends of the earth. The article is definitely worth the read, but, even more deserving is a piece from 1997, The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, in which Singer postulates that few people would hesitate to save a child drowning in a shallow pond, even if doing so inconvenienced them in some small way:

To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

Singer then asks "would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself?" and systematically destroys the various arguments that can be raised in favour of doing nothing in the face of millions of people living precariously, day by day.

Singer's conclusion is worth quoting in full:

In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people going short of food in Rwanda, the desire to sample the wines of Australia’s best vineyards pales into insignificance. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine; but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into fashion, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the added expense that marks out the luxury-car market – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to put themselves in the position of others affected by their actions. If the circle of ethics really does expand, and a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will fundamentally change the society in which we live.

While the crisis of 1997 in Rwanda may have abated to a certain extent, there are plenty of other examples (Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, the Congo and DRC, Afghanistan and Lebanon to name but a few) if you really need persuading, but many others (1.8 billion at last count) around the world are living on the equivalent of US$2 a day or less - the World Bank's poverty line, below which life becomes very percarious indeed. Close to a billion are living on less than US$1 a day, at which point life becomes next to impossible.

As Singer argues, it doesn't cost much to make a difference. There are plenty of organisations who would be grateful to receive some of your spare cash on a regualr basis (Oxfam, Medecins Sans Frontiers, Baptist World Aid, CARE, ActionAid, the ICRC, Save the Children, World Development Movement, UNICEF, again, just to name the first few that spring to mind), there are also ways you can get involved yourself if you have the time and inclination. Volunteer somewhere in your spare time, for example.

But more than this, the single most important contribution you can make is simply to consume less and consume wisely. Know where you clothes are made, buy organic food, recycle and try to live more simply. You'll find you have more time to spare, and more money to spare too (which you really should flick towards an organisation you identify with, if you ask me).

*The anti-Nike ad above is courtesy of AdBusters

Water

I am writing my PhD on the right to water. For some reason, this means that it is topic that I rarely blog about - I guess because it seems that if I were to start, I would have no idea when and how to stop.

However, this is one of the quotes that I am using to start a chapter, and it is really resonating with me today, so I thought that I would share it:

Water consumption has almost doubled in the last fifty years. A child born in the developed world consumes thirty to fifty times the water resources of one in the developing world.* Meanwhile, water quality continues to worsen. The number of people dying from diarrhoeal diseases is equivalent to twenty fully-loaded jumbo jets crashing every day, with no survivors.**

Imagine if twenty fully-loaded jumbo jets were crashing every day, with no survivors. It would definitely make the news. If they were Western people, we would also definitely be doing something about it. We would really really care.

I know that it is not so much that we are devoid of compassion for what is happening in the global south. I know that it is more that the problems seem too huge and our ability to do anything about them seems so intangible (almost like conflict in the Middle East), and so we turn away to avoid feeling permanently depressed about the state of the world.

But the thing that gets me is that this issue really isn't that complicated (or that expensive). We know how to purify water, and we know how to install water pumps and dig decent wells, and it would save so many lives (not to mention the additional health and economic benefits from freeing people - usually women - from the hours of daily labour involved in collecting water from far away impure sources).

OK, minor rant over. I'll go back to my case study on South Africa.

*United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), State of the World's Population 2001, (New York 2002).
**World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), The First UN World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life, (2003), p.5.

The irony of it

After the Indian government hastily blocked access to all blogs and blogging sites after the Mumbai train bombings it seems Indian bloggers have been accessing their blogs through a Pakistani site. It’s always comforting to know that in times of civil strife when democratically elected governments start to act like autocrats citizens can rely on autocratic states to provide them with services.

There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

Even the proposed solution, making individual bloggers liable for their blog’s content, is more than a bit worrying. This would enable the government to more effective go after the authors of sites “which carried material from religious and political extremists” (there are 17 of them targeted at the moment), but would also enable individuals voicing thoughts the government would rather not hear liable under new anti-terror laws.

Still, Indian bloggers are using the Pakistani portal and other methods to continue blogging in the face of government crack downs, just as bloggers in China and other information repressing states do. Prasanto Roy, president of the Dataquest Group, which analyses technological trends in India, is confident that the flexibility of the internet will ultimately prevail:

The internet was built to resist these physical barriers. Information is mirrored and copied quickly. I think what happened here was just some idiot in some ministry decided to block these sites without thinking it through.

Indian government officials were quick to retreat from their actions, saying that blogspot and other sites shouldn’t be blocked:

Gulshan Rai, director of the computer emergency response team, which is responsible for India's cyber-security, said: "Blogspot.com should not be blocked." He added: "What we need to do is work with service providers so that we block individual pages. Just give us some time."

Even blocking individual pages is an infringement of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

That’s pretty clear, I would have thought, and since India is a signatory they are bound to uphold this right (not that being a signatory stops other countries from abusing all manner of rights wholesale).

And, just in case India needs any further prompting to allow people to access the rights they are entitled to, there’s always article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by India on 10 April 1979:

1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

I know that "the protection of national security line" is the one the Indian government is running, but preventing people from speaking their minds in a public forum is actually not a very good way of protecting the national interest. It merely forces people underground where they can plot unimpeded.

Trafficking in (football) dreams

I was saddened to read this article in the International Herald Tribune the other day.

While Kofi Annan might envy the World Cup and wish the UN was run more along its lines (though one would hope the UN’s referees would be a little more together), the world game has its darker side too. And, no, I’m not talking about diving here.

It seems the popularity of the game in Africa is leading to a new form of exploitation (neo-neo-colonialism perhaps) in which young and often times naive boys with some soccer skills are being lured to Europe under false pretences and dumped.

The way it often happens, according to the Tribune, is that an “agent” from a European club will attend a youth tournament in Africa and afterwards approach a skilled player with an offer to play with a major club. The only catch is that the family will have to scrape together several thousand dollars to pay for plane tickets and other expenses. The family is told that the money will be a great investment. The young boy then heads for Europe with the tout, head full of dreams of stardom and money, only to be dumped in a dodgy hotel in Paris and left to fend for him self.

Apparently some of these so-called agents are actually bonafide, but that doesn’t stop them from dumping players that don’t make the cut rather then flying them back to their families.

The article outlines the story of Stéphane K., an 18 year old from Cameroon, who fell victim to soccer trafficking.

In April last year, he had just scored 12 goals in a two-day soccer tournament in western Cameroon when a tall man with a Congolese accent and a winning smile walked up and asked: "Would you like to come to Europe and become a professional soccer player?"

Four weeks later Stéphane was homeless in Paris, his one-month tourist visa expiring and, with it, his hopes of a meteoric career.

"I trained for one week with an Italian team in Genoa," he recalled this week. "Then the agent put me on a plane to Paris, paid two nights in a hotel and I was on my own. He just stopped answering his phone."

You could say that Stéphane was one of the luckier ones, since he actually did get to train with a real club, but in the end his situation is the same – he’s stuck in a foreign country, with no visa and no hope of getting home. The article goes on to show how easily these agents can dupe families:

Stéphane's face hardens when he recalls the agent telling his mother that he would need €3,000 to cover expenses. "She said: 'If what you say is true, then so be it. Sometimes one has to trust people one does not know,'" Stéphane said. "Then she went around to all her friends to borrow the money."

When he has a few coins to call her in Cameroon from time to time, he tells his mother that he is training and that things are going well. "I can't go back before I have got the money to pay back my mother," he said

For kids like Stéphane the world game and the dreams that it engenders have turned to nightmares.

While the game at its highest levels is a thing of beauty (most of the time), it’s worth remembering that there is an ugly underbelly of corruption and greed that elevates some to the level of superstars while destroying the dreams and ruining the lives of thousands of others.

The Karen and Burma

According to the Guardian, the Burmese Junta has launched a new offensive against the Karen people in northeastern Burma. There has been some suggestion that this new escalation of violence against Karen villagers is part of a strategy to cut off the Karen Nation Union (KNU) from civilian support in order to clear the way for a number of dams that they intend to build on the Salween River. Another suggestion (which comes from the Junta themselves) is that the Junta are clearing the areas that surround their new capital in Pyinmana. However, others claim that the offensives against civilians never stopped, despite the ceasefire agreement with the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) in 2004 (the KNLA is the military arm of the KNU), and that the only change has been renewed international attention.


The history of violence against the Karen people (and other ethnic minorities, like the Shan and Karenni) by the Burmese Junta is appalling. During their military rule over Burma, the Junta has consistently attacked, tortured and killed civilians, burnt down villages, employed a strategy of raping women, and driven villagers into forced labour (as porters for the army, and labourers for gas, infrastructure and dam projects).


To make matters worse, Thailand does not recognise the Refugee Convention, so when villagers attempt to flee torture, bloodshed, and systematic rape, they are not granted official protection in Thailand. Instead, they are either granted a place in one of few crowded refugee camps on the border, or they driven back into Burma unless they can escape notice and eek out a precarious living as an 'illegal' resident.


In 2004, I visited one of the biggest Karen refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border. The Mae La refugee camp hosts some 200,000 people, in a tiny space in a valley near Mae Sot. While the people in the camp have been driven from their homes, and forced to subsist on food rations from the World Food Program, what was amazing was the level of organisation and community that existed in the camp. The Karen people have an incredible commitment to education, and every single child in the camp attends schools, which are run by the Karen people themselves (with the assistance of groups like ZOA, who provide teacher training and some resources). The schools go from preschool to the end of high school, and there was some talk of introducing the International Baccalaureate in order to give the children qualifications that they could take anywhere. I was there to talk about teaching some post-secondary courses to the children who had graduated and wanted to do some more academic studies rather than going on to the Tech courses that they had available - in mechanics, cooking, and textiles.

What struck me was that many of these children had never left the tiny area of the Mae La refugee camp, and without a change of government in Burma, might never do so. Here were thousands of children with 12-13 years education, good English, and ambition, and they were stuck in a refugee camp where their only options were to become a teacher, one of a small number of community leaders, or to weave textiles for tourist money. What kind of world allows that to happen? What a ridiculous waste.
[Photos from inside Burma from Earthrights International. Photos from Mae La are mine]

This is outrageous

OK, I would usually be very reluctant to take two things from the one blog in one day, but I felt compelled to mention this issue:

Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, an 18-year old girl, has been sentenced to death by hanging in Iran. Nazanin's "crime" was killing a man who ambushed and tried to rape her and her neice.

According to the Iranian daily Etemaad, then 17-year-old Nazanin and her niece had been spending some time in a park west of Tehran with their boyfriends, when three men started harassing them.

The girls` boyfriends fled from the scene, leaving them helpless behind. The men pushed Nazanin and her niece down on the ground and tried to rape them, and to protect herself, she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand.

The girls tried to escape, but the men overtook them, and at this point, Nazanin stabbed one of the other men in the chest, which eventually killed him. According to the newspaper, she broke down in tears when she told the court: "I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help." Nevertheless, the court sentenced her to death by hanging.

In a western country Nazanin would probably be acquitted or at most receive a short prison sentence, as the murder was obviously committed in self-defense. Furthermore, since she was only 17 years old, she would be treated as a minor. In Iran however, the minimum age for the death penalty is 15 years for males, and 9, yes nine years for females. Although there is no record of girls that young being executed, the fact that the law opens for this speaks clearly about what kind regime Iran is.

Another point worth noticing, is that if Nazanin had let the men rape her, she could in the worst case have been arrested for extra-martial sex, which carries a maximum penalty of 100 lashes.

People are being asked to raise awareness about Nazanin in anyway they can. Suggestions include:

• Write about Nazanin in your own blog.
• Contact newspapers, TV-channels, blogs and other media and ask them to report her story.
• Put a link to this page in your email signature or on your blog.
• Put one of these banners on your website.
• Write the Iranian government or the Iranian embassy of your country , and demand that Nazanin`s death sentence is commuted immediately. Read more
• Contact politicians/representatives and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in your country and ask them to pressure Iran to commute the death sentence and free Nazanin.
• Contact the United Nations Office of Human Rights on this email-address and ask them to protest. [You can also contact them via this page.]
• Sign and spread this petition.

Discrimination and same-sex marriage

I sat down to watch Insight last night out of a keen interest over the issue of same-sex marriage. I was feeling very positive about the introduction of the Civil Unions Act in the ACT, and a perceptible shift in social attitudes towards same-sex couples in Australia (despite the Prime Minister's own revolting attitude on the issue).

As it turned out, I couldn't sit through the whole show uninterrupted. I found myself getting incredibly upset and angry at the bigoted and discriminatory attitudes displayed by members of the audience who were anti-same-sex marriage. I yelled at the television, I switched channels on several occasions in order to calm down, and I generally got quite worked up.

One of the most frustrating features of their arguments, was something that MrLefty has already summed up quite nicely:

Whenever a direct question was put to the conservatives - ie, "this is an example of the way the laws discriminate against gay and lesbian couples - are you in favour of this?" - they refused to answer it, instead immediately diverting off on an irrelevant and stupid "if you look at the tradition of marriage, it's about a man and a woman raising a child" rant.

Then there was the horrible John Heard who yelled over the top of people and made ridiculous sweeping statements to the effect that since he (as a gay man) didn't want to get married, no one else should have the right to do so. He also made the typical mistake of equating gay men with all same-sex attracted people (as though women simply didn't exist), since all his so-called facts related only to gay men.

Of course, the debate focused almost exclusively on the crap argument of "But, what about the children?" As if these hate-filled ranting lunatics really cared about the well being of children. The thing was that no one seemed capable of providing any evidence to support their claims that there was any risk to children from being raised by two people of the same gender.

For goodness sake, in a era when so many heterosexual marriages fail, and children are caught up in messy divorces, domestic violence situations, and shuttled between foster parents, state care and dysfunctional families - who are rarely provided with anywhere near-adequate government support - why are these people focusing on the children of loving couples who happen to be of the same gender? Furthermore, as John Stanhope argued last night - the two issues should not be conflated. People have children out of wedlock all the time (be they heterosexual or otherwise), and there is nothing about marriage per say that automatically generates babies.

The central issue in this debate is discrimination and a fundamental recognition of human rights. Why should a minority group within our society be treated as second-class citizens just because some narrow-minded intolerant people don't like the idea of gay sex? Currently people in same-sex relationships are treated like crap in our country. Regardless of the length of their relationship and the decisions that they make in terms of sharing finances and supporting each other, if one of them dies the other has no rights to their superannuation. Instead it goes into the ether, and the other partner is left with the debts that they have accrued together. That is crap. To add insult to injury, they are not given any legal rights in relation to funeral arrangements, or decisions over their partner's health if they are in a critical state in hospital.

If a same-sex couple raise a child together, only the one that is biologically related to that child is given any legal rights over them. If something happens to the relationship or the biological parent, the other parent has no legal rights to that child even if they have raised them from birth.

The list of discriminatory practices goes on and on, but another significant one is, of course, marriage. When I wanted to formalise my relationship with P, when I wanted my family to take part in a cultural ritual that would help them to understand that he was now part of the family and a permanent part of my life, I was able to get married. It was an incredibly special day for me. We wrote vows to each other and signed a legal marriage certificate, which formalised our relationship before our family and friends, before god, and under the law. We then had a big celebration and people made beautiful speeches about us and our relationship. We shared a meal and cake, and then we all danced. I will never forget the day.

Why on earth should anyone be denied the right to participate in such a ceremony simply because the person that they have fallen head-over-heels for happens to be of the same gender as them? It is so unfair that it makes my blood boil.

Speaking of human rights

The long homophobic arm of Howard's federal government may be reaching out into the ACT to destroy any chance that same sex couples might be granted equal rights under our laws. Apparently, Philip Ruddock is threatening to block John Stanhope's proposed civil union laws for gay and lesbian couples unless changes are made to the bill. You see, Howard is adament that same sex couple not be granted the same rights as heterosexuals and, unfortunately, has the right under the Constitution to dictate his views to the ACT government.

I think that John Stanhope's response is a good one:

Mr Ruddock needs to be asked what is his real concern about the ACT legislation. What is his real concern about my commitment to remove discrimination and to show respect to same-sex relationships and one has to pose the question is whether or not the real reason is that there is no place in John Howard's Australia for homosexuals.

I think that he has basically got it in one.

If it makes him feel any better, there is also no place for:

• single mothers,
• people with disabilities,
• the unemployed,
• indigenous australians,
• asylum seekers,
• unionised workers,
• latte drinkers, or
• university students

(to name just a few).

same sex couples, human rights, Australian politics, ACT politics, John Howard