By Elaine Pearson
SYDNEY, Mar 23 2023 – “The physical torture was merciless,” said one man, “so we had no option but to present ourselves to the court based on [the security forces’] demands and their statements.”

“They would beat me up, so I confessed, although it wasn’t true,” said another.

Such allegations have appeared over and over  again in the work of Human Rights Watch around the world. But most people don’t expect to hear them from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, whose rulers famously claim to maximize “gross national happiness” instead of mere GDP. This idea, enshrined in the kingdom’s 2008 constitution, has been taken up by economists and the United Nations, and inspired an annual World Happiness Report.

But Human Rights Watch has documented the presence of  at least 37 inmates in the country’s prisons who are described under Bhutanese law as “political prisoners” because of alleged political crimes against the state.

The origin of most of these cases goes back to the period around 1990, when the Bhutanese state drove around 90,000 Bhutanese who speak Nepali as a first language into exile. In a country that had around 550,000 people, that was a large share of the population

The origin of most of these cases goes back to the period around 1990, when the Bhutanese state drove around 90,000 Bhutanese who speak Nepali as a first language into exile. In a country that had around 550,000 people, that was a large share of the population.

The ruling elite, from the Ngalop community, had come to see the Nepali-speaking community as a threat to Bhutan’s cultural identity and their own dominant position. New, discriminatory citizenship laws stripped many of their citizenship, while “Bhutanization” laws aimed at enforcing a version of national identity based on Ngalop culture and language.

Amid widespread security force abuses, many Nepali-speakers were forced to flee and became refugees in nearby Nepal, although a sizable Nepali-speaking community remained in Bhutan.

Thousands were arrested for peacefully protesting these policies. Many were released on the condition that they leave the country, or after serving their terms. Bur the longest serving political prisoners have been in prison, serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole, since 1990.

They include eight  former Nepali-speaking soldiers of the Royal Bhutan Army who allegedly attended protest  at a secretive and remote jail used to imprison former officials accused of treachery.

Another 15 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese have been imprisoned since 2008 – 12 of them serving sentences of life without parole. These were young men who had fled Bhutan as children with their families, and came back to Bhutan as part of a campaign for the right to return by a banned group called the Bhutan Communist Party.

Most were captured shortly after their arrival, some with small arms and others with political pamphlets. At their trials for treason, the prosecution contended that because their families fled when they were infants, these young men had “abandoned the country and decided to be enem[ies] of Bhutan.”

Five of the political prisoners belong to a different community known as Sharchops (“Easterners”). Four men and a woman are imprisoned for alleged connections to another banned political party, the Druk National Congress, which campaigned for parliamentary democracy and human rights in the 1990s – before Bhutan adopted a democratic constitution.

In every case for which  Human Rights Watch obtained testimony, it was alleged that the prisoners were severely tortured at the time of their arrest and trial. “He was tortured by the army,” said the sister of a prisoner who was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to life. “They [the prisoners] were beaten and burned. When I met him, he was very sad, his eyes were full of tears.”

Under the Bhutanese legal system at the time, none of the accused had defense lawyers at their trials. In 2019 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention interviewed some of these prisoners, noted that under Bhutanese law they have “no prospect” of being released alive unless they are granted an amnesty, and recommended that their convictions be reviewed.

A prisoner who met the Working Group told Human Rights Watch that guards had warned inmates not to tell the UN experts the truth about their treatment: “You have to live with us. They will leave tomorrow, so think wisely before speaking.”

The prisoners are prevented from making or receiving telephone calls to their families in Nepal, or other countries — such as the United States, Canada, or Australia — where refugees have resettled. They are also prevented from sending letters, and their families do not know whether the letters they send are delivered. This causes great distress to the prisoners themselves, and their loved ones, who don’t know what condition they are in.

Bhutan’s legal philosophy is guided by Buddhist principles emphasizing concepts such as “compassion.” The country is now a parliamentary democracy, but King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is still uniquely empowered to release these prisoners. It can be done. In 1999, his father King Jigme Singye Wangchuck granted amnesty to 40 political prisoners. Only last year, the king granted amnesty to a political prisoner serving a life term.

These cases belong to a different time, before Bhutan’s 2008 democratic reforms. Bhutan should  let all the political prisoners return to their families.

Excerpt:

Elaine Pearson is Asia director at Human Rights Watch

By Francis Kokutse
ACCRA, Mar 23 2023 – Poverty alleviation policies, especially cash transfers, will not only improve the poor condition of the beneficiaries but can also play a role in strengthening the psychological health of people as well as improve the mental health of those living in poverty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICS), including Africa, a new study has said.

An example of these poverty alleviation programmes is the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), under Ghana’s ministry of gender, children and social protection for extremely poor and vulnerable households. This is made up of orphaned children, persons with severe disabilities without productive capacity as well as elderly persons who are 65 and above.

The aim is to improve, among other things, basic household consumption, and nutrition among children below two years of age and the aged. It is also intended to increase access to health care services among children below five years of age.

The study found more than 20,000 Africans, out of 26,794 people receiving these cash transfers under poverty alleviation programmes in six countries across Africa, admitted that this financial assistance does have some effect on their mental health.

A co-author of the study, Clara Wollburg, affiliated with the department of social policy and intervention, University of Oxford, Oxford, told IPS, “13 out of the 17 studies were conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of those studies, four were located in Malawi, four in Kenya, two in South Africa, and one each in Zambia, Mali, and Uganda.”

The World Health Organization defines mental health as “a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” And in Africa, StrongMinds Uganda says “despite the high prevalence of mental illnesses across the continent, mental health remains under prioritized in many African countries.”

The study, “Do cash transfers alleviate common mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries? A systematic review and meta-analysis,” published in PLOS One journal on February 22, 2023, said their “findings lend weight to the hypothesis that poverty alleviation can play a role in strengthening psychological health of people living in poverty in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs.)”

It said their “analysis shows that providing populations living in poverty with cash transfers leads to improvements of depression and anxiety disorders. However, these benefits may not be sustained once the financial support ends,” the authors said.

Nigerian-born associate professor in psychiatry living in the US, Andrews O Newton, said the recent Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) decision that has denied a lot of people access to cash could lead to depression. “Depression is the commonest form of mental illness. However, most people do not know because sufferers are not seen outside. The chronic stress caused by governmental policies makes it more severe, and one terrible consequence is suicide,” Newton said. The CBN has since been legally obliged to delay its deadlines to redesign the currency.

He said, “extreme poverty dehumanizes,” adding that such a situation is likely to lead to “feeling sad and empty, poor concentration, lack of drive and motivation, poor sleep as well as lack of energy.

The study focused on people living in poverty, who are recipients of cash transfers, and participants in inactive control groups, who received no transfers or were enrolled at a later stage, served as a comparison group. Active control groups receiving alternative interventions were not included, as this makes a causal inference about the effects of the transfers difficult.

They included conditional and unconditional cash transfer programmes (CTPs) targeted at households living in poverty in LMICs but did not apply an absolute low-income/poverty threshold, relying only on the relative threshold for grant eligibility applied by the organizations administering the transfers.

“Our findings have important implications for policymakers in Africa as they show that providing cash transfers to people living in poverty not only improves poverty indicators and school attendance, for example, but also meaningfully impacts depression and anxiety outcomes of beneficiaries. This is especially true for unconditional cash transfers,” Wollburg said.

She said they analyzed cash transfer programs that were specifically targeted to low-income and/or deprived households as indicated by, e.g., low monthly household expenditure and consumption, inability to meet basic needs, food insecurity, low educational attainment and high HIV risk.

Esenam Abra Drah, a mental health advocate in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, said, “from personal experience if you don’t have money, it can be frustrating.” Esenam understands this because she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in August 2015 at the time she was studying Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Linguistics at the University of Ghana.

Currently serving as an executive member of Psychosocial Africa, a grassroots mental health support group set up by, and for people with lived experience of mental illness, Drah admitted as the study showed that her situation affected her schoolwork though she was able to graduate.

The study cautioned that policies aiming to address the poverty-mental health cycle should consider unconditional, longer-term support to populations living in poverty.

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By Karlos Zurutuza
BIARRITZ, France, Mar 23 2023 – The woman we’re meeting in a house on the outskirts of Biarritz -800 kilometres southwest of Paris- is a university professor, the author of several books and hundreds of articles, and a well-known human rights activist.

Several human rights watchdogs have consistently denounced Selek’s case. Human Rights Watch describes it as “the perversion of a criminal justice system”; the International PEN Club – a world association of writers with consultative status at the UN- includes Selek in its list of 115 authors who suffer harassment, arrest or violence around the world

According to Turkish courts, she also planted a bomb that killed seven people and injured more than 120 in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar 25 years ago.

“Up to four scientific reports, including the one from the Turkish police themselves, pointed to a gas explosion, but later they said that it had been a bomb, and that I had planted it,” Pinar Selek tells IPS. This 51-year-old Turkish woman is embroiled in one of the strangest trials in the history of the Turkish judiciary.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” she blurts. “The case is based on the testimony of a Kurdish man who said that we had planted the bomb together. Later, he claimed to have confessed under torture, and that he didn’t even know me. He is free in Turkey, and I am in exile.”

On June 21, 2022, the Turkish public news agency Anadolu announced the annulment by the Supreme Court of Turkey of Pinar Selek’s fourth acquittal. Previously, she had been found innocent in three criminal proceedings.

But the sentence to life imprisonment is already firm and unappealable. On January 6, 2023, the Istanbul Court of First Instance issued an international arrest warrant for her.

Martin Pradel, Selek’s lawyer, talks about a “purely political case”.

“I have never heard of any other case that has gone on for 25 years without legal evidence of any kind. And this is without mentioning that Pinar has been acquitted up to four times,” Pradel told IPS over the phone from Paris.

The lawyer urged the French state to give Selek protection as a French citizen. If not, he added, the next step would be to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Several French town halls such as the one in Marseille have also turned to her case. On March 29 she will receive the Medaille de la Ville de Paris, a recognition awarded by France´s capital city (Courtesy Pinar Selek)

“Where are they?”

Born into an Istanbul family of left militants, Pinar Selek has devoted her life to making visible those “invisible” in her country of origin: women and Kurds, prostitutes, Roma, homosexuals, Armenians…

“Where are they?” has always been her question as a researcher, and also as an activist. It was this vital commitment that brought her to prison in 1998, after refusing to hand the police a list of Kurdish contacts for one of her sociological studies.

“When they started building new prisons, we resisted being transferred. More than 300 died under attacks in which prisons were even bombed,” remembers Selek.

She was released after more than two years of captivity, torture, and a hunger strike in which, she says, dozens died. Back on the street, she was one of the founders of Amargi, a groundbreaking feminist organization in Turkey, and also the first feminist bookstore in the history of her country.

She has added a set of tales and a few books of her own to its shelves, but she has not been back in a long time. She had to leave the country in 2009 and, after getting her French citizenship in 2017, she settled down in Nice, where she teaches at the University Côte d’Azur, a public institution.

Ilya Topper, a Spanish journalist and analyst based in Istanbul for more than ten years, sees the trial opened against Selek in 1998 as “part of that brutal campaign against everything that seemed to treat Kurdish demands as a topic that could be discussed.“

“Until around 2005, anyone within a hundred meters of a protest which held a banner with a slogan that had any remote resemblance to a phrase once said by someone from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) would be put in jail for many years,” the expert told IPS over the phone from Istanbul.

Until just over a decade ago, he adds, mayors were still sentenced for saying something in Kurdish on charges of “speaking a non-existent language.” He illustrates it with a concrete case:

“In 2011, a Kurdish mayor was sentenced to half a year in prison and a fine of 1,500 euros for naming a public park after Ehmedi Xani, an 18th-century Kurdish poet. The controversial issue was not the writer, but the initial letter of his last name: it is written with X, which exists in Kurdish, but not in Turkish.”

The trial against Selek, underlines the analyst, “highlights the deterioration of the Turkish Judiciary in a country where you can go to prison for any reason.”

Pinar Selek fears that her international arrest warrant will affect her family in Turkey and restrict her movement even within France. Credit: Juantxo Egaña/IPS

Solidarity

Several human rights watchdogs have consistently denounced Selek’s case. Human Rights Watch describes it as “the perversion of a criminal justice system”; the International PEN Club – a world association of writers with consultative status at the UN- includes Selek in its list of 115 authors who suffer harassment, arrest or violence around the world.

In a telephone conversation with IPS, its president, Burhan Sönmez, mentioned other notorious cases in Turkey, such as that of the publisher and human rights defender Osman Kavala, or the opposition politician Selahattin Demirtaş

“Both remain behind bars despite the European Court of Human Rights ruling for their immediate release,” Sönmez stressed from London.

Solidarity goes hand in hand with denunciation. More than a hundred personalities including intellectuals, political leaders and social agents will attend the hearing to be held in Istanbul on March 31. It’s a legal formality to notify Selek of her firm life sentence.

Michele Rubirola, former mayoress of Marseille and today the first deputy of the consistory, is the one chosen to represent the city. In a telephone conversation with IPS, Rubirola spoke of “someone who is a victim of injustice and oppression.”

“Selek ‘s academic struggles have turned into political struggles, and the relentlessness of the political and judicial power she is facing consolidates her as a true human rights activist,” added the delegate.

A judicial process that has lasted a quarter of a century is reaching a key moment just a few weeks before decisive elections in Turkey, a referendum on the more than two decades in the power for Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“My trial is one of the indicators of the evil rooted in Turkey: it reflects both the continuity of the authoritarian regime and the configurations of the repressive devices,” laments Selek.

She also confesses concern about how it may affect her family in Turkey, and herself in her host country.

“I am convicted of a massacre and my movement may be restricted internationally, and even within France. Moreover, Turkey is asking me for millions in compensation for the deaths and the destruction and there´s an international financial convention that could be executed in France,” she recalls.

Today, her only certainty is that she will try to move on with her life. Other than her work at the university, she also gives talks and organizes events and protests. Exile, she says, “may have uprooted me from my country, but not from the street.”

By Jotham Napat and Patricia Scotland
LONDON, Mar 23 2023 – Human life is sacred and every individual deserves an equal chance in life. We have a common desire, we all want to lead a free, fulfilling existence, with dignity, where our basic needs are met, with opportunities to advance and equal treatment under the law. These are fundamental human rights, protected by international law, which we all have a shared responsibility to protect.

Out of the horrors and bloodshed of war, we created an international system for cooperation between nations under the United Nations, with our rights enshrined by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Today, our rights are threatened not only by weapons, but by the destruction of our environment, our earth, our only home.

Climate change is wreaking havoc on people’s basic human rights to life, food, water, housing, health and a decent standard of living. And as the IPCC stated just this week, we have a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to prevent this destruction.

Hon Jotham Napat

We cannot let these rights be taken away from us – particularly from vulnerable communities. We must act.

This month, when formidable twin cyclones Judy and Kevin slammed into the small island nation of Vanuatu within days of each other, they laid waste to homes, infrastructure and crops, severely impacting more than 80% of the population.

And like many other climate-vulnerable Pacific Island countries, whose territories are 99 per cent ocean, Vanuatu could see more than a metre rise in sea levels by the end of the century, placing entire coastal communities further in jeopardy.

Elsewhere in the world, drawn-out droughts in East Africa – the worst seen in 40 years – are killing millions of livestock and placing 17 million people at risk of starvation.

In South Asia, tropical cyclones are becoming ever more destructive, with the likes of Cyclone Amphan (2020) displacing nearly five million people across India and Bangladesh.

These worsening conditions are not freaks of nature, they are a predictable – and predicted – process of intensifying environmental damage caused by human activity. The world’s scientific community is unanimous and unequivocal that human influence has driven up average global temperature, causing unprecedented changes across the entire climate system.

Rt Hon Patricia Scotland

The burning of fossil fuels to supply skyrocketing energy needs and the release of harmful greenhouse gases continue to trigger harmful, irreversible consequences for the environment – and it is the most vulnerable which suffer the most.

It is one of the world’s deepest injustices and the root of growing inequality. While the most climate vulnerable countries have contributed the least greenhouse emissions that cause climate change, they are forced to endure the very worst of its impacts.

Small island developing states – two thirds of which are in the Commonwealth – contribute less than 1 percent of global emissions, while the world’s poorest nations contribute less than 4 percent. Yet it is their people who are frequently and directly in jeopardy, including their rights to development, self-determination and a healthy environment.

Addressing these injustices provides the foundation for an initiative led by Vanuatu, a Commonwealth member country, to obtain official advice from the world’s highest court.

On 29 March 2023, Vanuatu, along with more than 115 other co-sponsoring countries including a host of Commonwealth nations, will table a proposed resolution at the United Nations General Assembly requesting an advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice.

Such an opinion, though non-binding, would outline the obligations of states under international law to protect the environment and future generations from climate change. It would also clarify the legal consequences of harming the environment, taking into account the impacts on vulnerable communities and future generations.

This is not an attempt to blame or shame countries for the policies of the past, it is an attempt to clarify international climate obligations which can help all nations be more ambitious and effective. It has the potential to focus climate action not only on degrees of Celsius and tons of carbon, but on to preventing the most serious climate impacts on our people and our planet.

Disaster response efforts led by the National Disaster Management Office of Vanuatu to support affected communities after dual Cyclones Judy and Kevin. Credit: NDMO Vanuatu

This moment deserves our attention. All Commonwealth countries adhere to the Commonwealth Charter, which places the utmost importance on protecting the environment, and centralises the need for multilateral cooperation, sustained commitment and collective action on climate change. The International Court of Justice plays a vital role in multilateral cooperation as the main judicial organ of the United Nations – and the Commonwealth Charter emphasises the value of the rule of law at every turn.

There is no question that international law can be a vital tool in establishing and delivering climate justice. In the most vulnerable parts of the world, it is often all that stands between climate resilience and catastrophe, between prosperity and destitution.

When the resolution is tabled at the General Assembly, it will be worthy of careful consideration and support by all UN Member States. The breadth and diversity of countries at the heart of this effort underscores the grim reality that climate change does not, and will not, spare any of us. In this, we do not have a choice, only a responsibility, because it is a matter of life or death. We must therefore use every mechanism at our disposal to rise to the challenge of climate justice in a fair and effective way.

Hon Jotham Napat is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and External Trade of Vanuatu, a Pacific Island nation on the frontlines of climate change.

Rt Hon Patricia Scotland, KC is the sixth Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and the first woman to hold the post. She leads an organisation of 56 countries working together to promote democracy, peace and sustainable development.

IPS UN Bureau

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