Category Archives: Society

Climate Change, Government, National Security, Politics, Society

The societal, cultural and geopolitical impacts of climate change…

CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE has been synonymous with polar bears and deforestation, but these days climatologists are paying more attention to people.

For many years now, climate change studies have tended to focus and rely on numbers-heavy charts and complex models to report on phenomena such as shrinking polar caps, melting glaciers and permafrost, caribou, the declining populations of reindeer and seal, as well as rising sea levels from Nigeria to the Maldives to the South Pacific.

In recent times, however, ethnographers, think tanks and sociologists have begun looking more closely at the social and cultural impacts of climate change on indigenous communities. Studies have been published on subjects including the Wauja people in Brazil (who have been impacted by the shrinking Amazon rain forest and industrialisation), Sami reindeer-herding communities across a warmer northern Scandinavia, as well as how the Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking tribes in the Kalahari Basin of sub-Saharan Africa have been affected. Of particular interest are the subsistence communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia whose coastal settlements are at continued risk of flooding from typhoons, monsoons and higher sea levels. Such research reflects a growing realisation in academic and policy circles that cultures and societies tied to nature have multigenerational knowledge that gives them special insight into changes in nature and the environment.

In the last decade or so, it has suddenly become apparent that the impact on people is really important and should be more than just an afterthought. There is undoubtedly an increasing realisation that climate change is more than a scientific artefact.

In 2014, Earth had its hottest year since weather record-keeping began 135 years ago. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with nine of the total in the 21st century, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recent studies show changes happening more quickly than predicted. The highly credible journal Science reported in March that the southern Antarctic ice sheet suddenly began losing its mass in 2009 at a steady and fast rate.

There is also growing interest in the geopolitical effects of climate change. The Brookings Institute, for example, estimates that for every percentage point rise in average temperature and drop in average rainfall, violent conflict between neighbouring states rises 4 percent, while violent conflict between groups within states climbs 14 percent. Scholars foresee, too, new shipping routes opening up as the Arctic ice cap shrinks still further, potentially leading to military conflicts. Russia, for instance, planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole in 2007 and has some 4,300 miles of Arctic coastline.

In violence-plagued northern Mali, a desiccated landscape of dust and mud huts where the average rainfall is a third less than it was nearly two decades ago, scholars recently blamed a climate-change induced drought for fuelling conflict between Tuareg separatist rebels (who need water and grass for their cattle herds), as well as government-backed forces. In March, the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed study stating that ‘there is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria.’ This was a devastating drought that led to widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families towards urban centres. Some studies suggest climate change will produce permanent refugees.

Last October the Pentagon published a report which said: ‘Climate change poses immediate risks to national security.’ Chuck Hagel, then defence secretary, referred to climate change as being a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases and armed insurgencies. And President Barack Obama picked up that thread in May, telling graduating cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that climate change ‘constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security’ as well as invoking how those threats will impact on how the U.S. military defends its country.

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Britain, European Court, Government, History, Human Rights, Politics, Society, United Nations

Celebrating 800 years of the Magna Carta: why would Britain contemplate leaving the ECHR?

MAGNA CARTA & ECHR

The 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta will be celebrated in Britain this year. This was the treaty signed between King John and a group of rebellious barons in 1215 that guaranteed British citizens a range of freedoms and civil rights. One of the 25 guarantors of the Magna Carta was the Earl of Winchester, Saer de Quincy, whose ancestors were from France. De Quincy fought King John when he failed to respect the Magna Carta and it all contained, and asked the French prince Louis to lay claim to the English throne. Whilst on a crusade, and far away from home, De Quincy died in 1219.

As a crusader today, De Quincy would probably have been labelled a foreign fighter by the intelligence services and would never have made it to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, having been stopped by border control as he attempted to leave the UK. His attempts to have King John of Runnymede replaced by a French king would have landed him in jail under anti-terrorism laws. And no doubt GCHQ, the intelligence services listening outpost in Cheltenham, would have kept him and his fellow barons under 24/7 surveillance as a threat to national security.

Today Magna Carta (and the accompanying legal presumption of habeas corpus) is celebrated as one of the most important documents in the history of civil rights. It is widely seen and accepted as being the precursor to later conventions that protect human rights and the rule of law, including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and, more recently, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Magna Carta, though, was never meant to protect all the people, whereas the UN and European documents gives equal protection to all citizens, regardless of their status in society.

Today, too, we don’t need charters to protect Barons against the abuse of power by Kings. But we do need laws that protect citizens against abuse of power by governments, and we need not only national laws, but European and international ones.

David Cameron symbolises Magna Carta as the ultimate expression and mantra of British values. While some Tories are now promulgating the argument that the UK should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and return to those traditional values, against the backdrop of the Magna Carta anniversary celebrations their arguments are especially ironic. For example, they strongly accuse the ECHR of limiting the freedom of governments, but King John probably complained too about the Magna Carta unduly restricting his absolute freedom to rule as he wanted. But crucially those in power must be bound by law in order to protect citizens from arbitrary rule.

800 years on, the values and principles laid down in Magna Carta have been embraced by large parts of the world. They have become universal and their shared values are at the core of the European Union as a community of citizens. We should be glad that European courts in Luxembourg and Strasbourg protect us against governments exceeding and abusing their powers, undermining civil liberties and the rule of law.

Fundamental rights, the rule of law and democratic principles enshrined into nationhood are frequently violated in nearly all EU member states. In some cases, the violations are serious and systematic. The current Hungarian government is one of the most egregious offenders. In recent years, the media has been critically gagged, electoral law changed to secure an absolute majority for the governing party, political opponents weakened and the independence and impartiality of the judiciary undermined. But there are also many other examples across Europe: the ant-gay laws in Lithuania, the deportation of Roma people from France, the cruel and inhumane treatment of underage asylum seekers in the Netherlands, and the collective disregard shown for the law and civil liberties in many countries’ counter-terrorism policies.

If we become accepting of tolerating torture, secret prisons, rendition, abduction, and indefinite detention without fair trials and representation then we will lose our moral authority. Such blots tarnish Europe’s status as a shining beacon of freedom and human rights in the world. EU governments must be held accountable for such crimes, especially those that are committed in the name of defending democracy.

That is why we need legal instruments to uphold our common values, even if this means that sometimes national authorities are overruled. EU member states voluntarily signed up to these supranational laws and conventions for good reason, namely because it is the essence of democracy that those in power are bound by laws and that their powers are limited. Whilst that may sometimes be awkward, such checks and balances are the vital safeguards which protect us against abuse of power by the state.

As it happens, these principles are not politically left or right-wing, nor are they alien to modern British culture. Quite the opposite: safeguarding citizens’ rights and the rule of law have their roots firmly established in that ancient, famous document that will be celebrated this year. Magna Carta does not set Britain apart from the rest of Europe. It is the expression and very epitome of the common European values that we have all come to embrace.

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European Parliament, Government, History, Society, Turkey, United Nations

Genocide. An emotive word that must be used correctly…

GENOCIDE

Intro: Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings

A century ago, in 1915, Ottoman officials seized upon and rounded up Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were later murdered. Events which followed are still bitterly contested. The official Turkish version says that some 500,000 Armenians died, which included those fighting alongside the invading Russians against Ottoman forces. Others were also slayed as a regrettable side-effect of deportations that were perhaps understandable in the context of the times. However, many scholars say that up to 1.5m Armenians died, and imply that their deaths were a result of a deliberate and orchestrated campaign to eliminate the Ottoman empire’s only sizeable Christian population. Pressingly, given this account of events, members of the Armenian diaspora want events recognised as genocide.

Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings; use of terminology and language matters as to which word should be used.

In 1948 the United Nations adopted a convention aimed at preventing and punishing acts of genocide, which it defined as the ‘deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnical, racial, religious or national group’. Agreement on the text involved a number of compromises. For example, targeting victims because of their class was not classed as genocide: Stalin would hardly have signed it if it meant being held to account for his mass slaughter of ‘middle peasants’. In the past century, the world has witnessed many mass slaughters, including some which have been acknowledged as genocide and some that do not fit within the UN’s definition. The genocidal nature of the slaughter of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis by majority Hutus militias, for instance, is not in question. Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, however, does not strictly qualify, since the Khmers Rouges targeted no particular group.

Genocide as a word has considerable power. If mass slaughter is recognised as genocide when it is happening, it will be much harder for outside forces to sit idly by. When capitulation is over, an official declaration that it was genocide can give any survivors some grim satisfaction. But when that recognition is withheld, because of a technicality or due to political expediency, it will feel like the final insult. And the ‘crime of crimes’ tag that genocide has been given has led to some human rights activists and legal scholars expressing concern that this status sometimes overshadows the horror of other crimes against humanity.

Pope Francis and the European Parliament have very publicly described the Armenian massacres as genocide: the pontiff at a mass on April 12th attended by Armenia’s president, and the European Parliament in a plebiscite three days later commending the pope’s words and calling on Turkey, too, to recognise the killings as genocide. The Turkish government reacted with outrage and fury, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying: ‘It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin.’ Mr Erdogan’s foreign minister claimed Pope Francis had fallen for propaganda disseminated by the Armenians who ostensibly control the press in his homeland of Argentina. The irony, though, is that Mr Erdogan has done more than any previous Turkish leader to acknowledge the suffering and pain of Armenians under the Ottoman empire, such as when he offered his condolences last year on April 24th. But unquestionably, there are limits to the willingness of the Turkish government in facing up to, and naming, the crimes of his country’s past.

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