Today the 1,179^th American since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, was executed at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. John Allen Muhammad, guilty of a string of Washington DC’s sniper attacks in 2002, was said by his lawyers to be mentally ill, however several pleas for clemency were rejected.I am alone in my apartment in San Diego, waiting for my boyfriend to return from another busy day at work. I’ve been out all day, attending three classes and visiting with people I haven’t seen for a while. But with all of this interaction with friends, classmates and professors, it wasn’t until I turned on the news that I learned of today’s execution. The BBC put the news in the “News in Brief” spent about 10 seconds to mention the event, before it went onto apparently more important stories. So I did a little of my own research.

John Allen Muhammad converted to Islam in 1987, and despite a lack of evidence that his crimes were religiously based, his case is spoken about without his religious beliefs a focal point. After the execution today, there quickly followed a slew of cheap comments and observations about the fact that Muhammad was pronounced dead at 9:11pm EST (‘9/11’ being so crudely linked to the “all Muslims are terrorists” discourse of late). Whether or not the treatment of his case was swayed by this discourse may never be known, but in today’s climate of fear and retribution, I pity any Muslim who finds himself on the wrong side of the law.

Muhammad’s accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the shootings, is serving a life sentence in jail, with no chance for parole. You heard right – he was a minor at the time of his crime, and is now serving a life sentence - no parole. Only yesterday, the U.S supreme court heard both sides of the argument pertaining to this very issue. We will know after many days, weeks, possibly months of deliberations, whether juveniles will be eligible for life imprisonment without parole.

Life without parole may seem like harsh punishment for a 13 year old, even a 17 year old, but what if I told you that until recently, juveniles in the USA were receiving not only life sentences, but death sentences. Scott Allen Hain was the last person executed for crimes committed as a juvenile, his execution was held on 3 April 2003. But in fact, it wasn’t until 2005 that the law was changed in relation to the execution of minors. In 2005, Capital punishment was abolished for crimes committed as a juvenile, in a decision (Roper v. Simmons) by the Supreme Court of the United States which overruled the Court’s prior ruling to uphold the death penalty for offenders above or at the age of 16, in Stanford v. Kentucky, (1989).

So for now, American children are safe from state executions, but their chances of serving life without parole hangs in the balance while we wait for the Supreme Court’s deliberations.

If you would like to contact Amnesty’s Media Blogger or suggest any topics for discussion, contact Helen Milan at mediablog@utsaia.com

As promised, I am going to talk more about prison system in the USA and more on overcrowding, which I touched on in my last post. For this blog though, I want to tell you some important news about this year’s Australian Human Rights Medals and Awards. It’s now the time to start nominating and I can tell you all about how to go about doing just that.

Since 1987, the Australian Human Rights Commission has recognised the often extraordinary contribution to Australian society of a wide variety of men and women committed to issues of human rights, social justice and equality through the annual Human Rights Medals and Awards. Each year the Australian Human Rights Commission receive outstanding nominations for the Human Rights Medals, Young People’s Human Rights Medal and seven award categories: Law, Community (Organisation), Community (Individual), Literature (non-fiction), Print Media, Television and Radio.

This year, they are trying to promote the Young People’s Human Rights Medal, so if you,  your friends or your colleagues know of anyone who might be deserving of recognition in this field, (or from other categories) the Australian Human Rights Commission wants to hear from you!

Go to the awards website:

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/hr_awards/index.html

The media release can be found at:

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/about/media/media_releases/2009/61_09.html

Or you may be interested in a short video about the awards, which you can find on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HNEZpSClp8

If you are interested in human rights, the Australian Human Rights Commission might be an organisation that you find yourself working with or for, so check out the links and get involved!

Keep an eye out this week for my second California prisons blog.

Helen 

 If you would like to contact Amnesty’s Media Blogger or suggest any topics for discussion, contact Helen Milan at mediablog@utsaia.com

A busy street in tourist packed Bangkok. A man throws a sack down onto the sidewalk. In less than a minute the sack is opened out into a blanket and the man has arranged more than a dozen handbags, wallets and carry-alls across it. He starts to shout. Louis Vuitton! Versace! Prada! Hermès! D&G!

 Aaahhhh… music to my ears – all of my favourite men. 

A small length of rope is fastened to the corners of the blanket for quick get-away, and when the cops make an appearance at the end of the busy street, the ropes are pulled and the blanket becomes a sack again.  The man is gone as quickly as he appeared. 

Ever been to Thailand or Bali on your school break and picked up a bargain on a Saks tote or a Gucci watch? Maybe you’ve wandered across the road to Market City on a Friday after class, and stumbled upon a sale table full of your favourite labels at dramatically reduced prices. Maybe you’ve been on eBay and found an unbelievable bargain on a pair of Jimmy Choo kitten heels or Prada sun-glasses.

Yes - we’re talking about fake labels. But by now you may have gathered that the theme of this week’s blog is not how to spot a bargain on eBay or a busy street in Chiang Mai.

I’ve never been a fan of fakes – not just because the quality of a rip-off is always a little suspect, but also because to buy fake and be found out is so conspicuously lacking in style – the very thing we’re going for while dripping in Dolce & Gabbana. But in all my years of dismissive snobbery, there have been far more frightening reasons to avoid fakes. Those reasons are child labour, terrorism and human trafficking. 

 I hope I have your attention fashion victims because what I’m about to tell you is shocking but so important for you to hear. 

Harpers Bazaar published a startling article last month titled “The Fight Against Fakes”. You can read it online by following the link below (and I suggest you do). The idea of child labour is nothing new to me, I am bitterly disappointed every time a friend tells me that she picked up a $10 bargain from a chain clothing store because I can never be certain that it wasn’t made by a child. If it was, chances are, that after the store mark-up and company overheads, sending it to Australia etc, the child that made the t-shirt was probably paid no more than a couple of cents for it…

Child labour and exploitation comes in many different forms. We hear stories of children in brothels in India or mines in Bolivia and we see pictures of children carrying piles of wood or baskets twice their size. We see images of African children with machine guns and machetes and we are shocked and disturbed. But it’s easy to distance ourselves from these problems in foreign lands – after all, our hands are clean. Right? Well, not exactly. Children work in textile factories, and on food processing plants, producing the clothes that we wear and the food we consume – here in Australia.

“The Textile, Clothing & Footwear Union (TCFU) claims up to 200 sweatshops are operating in Brisbane….clothing manufacturers have moved from Melbourne and Sydney to high unemployment areas of Brisbane, where workers, many Asians with poor English, are working up to 100 hours a week for as little as $2.50 an hour, despite the award being from $12 to $15 per hour. Children as young as 10 are also working for very long hours…”  (The Sunday Mail - Queensland Oct 13, 2002)  

The conditions of child labour are seldom snug and comfy. During the years when children should be enjoying their carefree youth, these children struggle just to survive day to day. Some live in abhorrent conditions, some are beaten, some are even raped. The Harper’s Bazaar article tells of children whose legs have been broken to prevent them from wanting to go outside and play. I have read other stories from abroad of children who are locked in factories overnight to prevent them from smuggling products outside to friends and family. We can no longer claim ignorance for the choices we make on the purchase of food and textiles.

Even Australia’s chocolate industry is not as sweet as it seems. Before you sit down to your next chocolatey indulgence, download and listen to Bitter Chocolate, an ABC broadcast that “traces the history of the cocoa bean from its origins in the Mayan and Aztec cultures through to the current-day use of children as slave labour on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast in West Africa”.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2008/2291016.htm

http://www.worldvision.com.au/Act/ShopEthically/DemandEthicalChocolate.aspx

Fakes are everywhere - from the streets of Bangkok to the markets of Sydney. Harper’s Bazaar estimates that counterfeit products worldwide account for $600 Billion in annual sales. In the cyber world, the problem is just as dire. Ninety percent of LV and Dior products on sale on eBay in the first half of 2006 were fakes.

If you are reading this, you’re probably a student. The laws of probability would also have it that you don’t have a great deal of money to spend on seasonal fashion. So chances are your Gucci ‘hobo’ is either a gift from your much older boyfriend, stolen from your mother… or fake.

You and I both know that elite fashion houses aren’t pedalling their wares on dirty street corners (even in this economic climate). We both know that $85 isn’t going to buy you that Hermès Kelly bag and you certainly won’t be picking up a genuine Louis Vuitton luggage set for your weekly wage as a sales assistant at Country Road.

So get real. If you must buy labels - buy labels. Not fakes.

 Step one - Do some reading, do some talking! 

Read the article I just read: http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-look/everyday-style/articleharpers.aspx?cp-documentid=16356770

Go to “Before Their Time: The World of Child Labour”, a photo essay of child labour around the world: www.childlaborphotographs.com/

Step two - Take action!

If you see or hear of someone selling counterfeits or if you see suspicious activity such as a clandestine workshop or smuggling - contact the police.

Harpers Bazaar also suggests you check out the Teacher of Ten Thousand Generations Foundation, which rescues child labourers from counterfeit factories in China and puts them in schools: http://www.confuciusfoundation.org/mission.html

Further reading:

The OneWorld guide to child labour: http://uk.oneworld.net/guides/childlabour

The State of the World’s Children - a UNICEF study: http://www.unicef.org/sowc08/

Until next time,

Helen

If you would like to contact Amnesty’s Media Blogger or suggest any topics for discussion, contact Helen Milan at mediablog@utsaia.com

Hola from San Diego, California! I’m here enjoying my uni vacation with some American friends and I have to say, warm weather, great bars, beautiful people… I could get used to this. It’s true, for most people sunny California is a pretty fabulous place to be. But California is far from fabulous for the 158,000 odd prisoners that fill the prisons in this state.

Last week, my boyfriend and I took a road trip through California and Arizona. Much of the driving was via California’s inhospitable desert and it was out there that we noticed four or five of California’s 33 prisons. Seeing all of those metal structures with their complex security systems and razor wire got me thinking about my recent capital punishment blog, and it seemed fitting that I follow it up with a post about the institutions that house so many of the people that end up on death row in the United States.

We have very limited access to information about prison systems within some countries. There are countries where social liberties are so restricted that public records are destroyed, kept secret or simply not kept at all. We do, however, have pretty extensive access to prison information from the USA. It seems to be fairly widely known and just as accepted that prisons in the USA have some of the worst conditions of anywhere in the free world. One of the reasons for this is that they are literally bursting at the seams.  Some say that the relatively sudden overcrowding has a lot to do with the ‘three-strike law’ that came into effect in 1994. Others think that there is just more crime now.

Whatever your belief, the fact of the matter is that overcrowding of prisons in California is the cause of at least one death per month. The situation has become so dire that in February this year, federal judges ruled that overcrowding of prisons is in violation of prisoners’ constitutional rights and subjects them to “cruel and unusual” punishment. (Go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html for more details)

I’ve been watching the new series from National Geographic called America’s Hardest Prisons, which looks at prison life all over the USA. One of the striking observations that I made was that so many of the prisons pack large numbers of prisoners into areas designed to be used as gymnasiums instead of housing them in cells of two, three or four people. One example is the Salinas Valley State Prison, where 120 men are housed in one room. See: http://ezinearticles.com/?Salinas-Valley-State-Prison-Over-Crowding&id=1681522 )

One of the major problems with this kind of set up lies in the fact that US prisons are notorious for their gang populations. If an inmate is not part of a gang before he/she enters prison, he/she will be within hours of entering the prison. Inmates are forced to join the gang of their race for protection against other races. If they choose to be autonomous, their own race gang will take revenge on them for being disloyal or cowardly. The massive racial armies that are formed within prisons are dependent on the size of their ethnic populations. For example, prisons in California are segregated into groups of Mexicans, Blacks, Whites and ‘Others’ etc. In some prisons, with a high population of Mexicans, the Northern Mexicans and the ‘South Siders’ (Southern Mexicans) will each have a gang; but if the Mexican contingent is very small, they will join together (safety in numbers). Similarly, if the black population is large, they will divide into their street gangs, for instance the Bloods and the Crips. In a complex system like this one, where fighting for your gang will increase your sentence and refusing to fight will get you killed by your own, it’s fairly clear that housing lots of gangs in the same room has deadly consequences.

America is not the only country where prison overcrowding is an issue. Right here in Australia, we struggle with the same problem. Casuarina, Western Australia’s Maximum Security Prison, is one of Australia’s most dangerous prisons and it is gravely overcrowded. Designed for 360 inmates, Casuarina currently houses almost double that number.

Like I said, overcrowding is just one human rights issue in a plethora of issues around the prison system in the USA. I will talk more about some of the other issues in future blogs but for now, why not investigate ways that you can get involved in prison campaigns from your laptop? Here are some starting points:

http://www.adpsr.org/prisons/index.htm
http://www.prop5yes.com/nora-overview
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/98665?recruiter_id=16579505

Wishing everyone good luck getting back into uni mode! See you next week!

Helen

If you would like to contact Amnesty’s Media Blogger or suggest any topics for discussion, contact Helen Milan at mediablog@utsaia.com 

Welcome to the UTS Amnesty International Society Human Rights Blog! As opposed to the more formal “In The Press”, the Human Rights Blog will be more like a ‘pin-board’ of ideas. It will try to be a thought provoking column designed to rouse the activist within… I hope you will check in regularly and be inspired to take action against human rights violations everywhere, whether by penning a letter or joining a campaign.

UTS Amnesty International Society focuses on two campaigns this year: Violence Against Women and the Death Penalty. For my first post, in anticipation of Amnesty Society’s upcoming film screening of The Life of David Gale, I want to talk about Capital Punishment.

Most societies have used capital punishment in some form during the formative stages of their existence. Most societies have stopped the practice all together, but some have retained it, as a method of punishment for those crimes deemed worthy, namely murder, rape, crimes against the State. In some countries it is carried out arbitrarily as a tool of repression or to silence political opposition.

While the barbaric behaviours of past civilizations are looked upon with disgust and smug superiority by later generations, the ‘eye for an eye’ practice of administering violence to punish acts of violence is still alive and well in a number of countries around the world. Some are countries with whom we align ourselves politically and culturally. In America, where human rights are considered central to a fiercely defended code of liberty and justice, 36 of the 50 states still exercise the death penalty. It seems so blatantly contradictory to me that a state that teaches “though shalt not kill” deals with those who do, with more killing.

While burning at the stake, pressing, stoning to death and bludgeoning have been abolished as methods in the USA, the underpinning state violence is just as gruesome when administered by lethal injection or electric chair. When Desmond Tutu said, “I can’t understand why a country that’s so committed to human rights doesn’t find the death penalty an obscenity”, I imagine many Americans had as much difficulty as he, in comprehending the state of affairs in their own home.

So do we wait? Will capital punishment in the countries which still practice it eventually become altogether too barbaric for modern society? Or do we fight for the rights of death row inmates in those countries, now? And while all of you students of politics and sociology scratch your heads and say, “do we have the right to dictate how governments run their own countries?” perhaps we need to make this decision free from the social politics that hinder our ability to distinguish cultural difference from crimes against humanity. I believe we not only have the right, but the responsibility to speak out for people around the globe, who cannot speak for themselves.

And for those who do not see this issue as Amnesty International sees it - consider a major flaw in the rationale of the death penalty that extends well beyond the moral debate. There is a strong case against the death penalty in the fact that it has been mistakenly imposed upon innocent people, and will most definitely continue to be imposed upon innocent people in the future. How many innocent lives do we have to take before we are the ones to be punished? Exoneration after 30 years on death row is an atrocity. Exoneration after death is unspeakable. For the families and friends of those who have fallen through the sometimes gaping cracks in the justice system, the death penalty represents more than a life of worry and anguish for a loved one. It represents the State’s inability to protect, and its fundamental capacity for error; and these errors have a high price.

Case in point: Troy Anthony Davis is an American man from the state of Georgia who has been on death row since being convicted for murder in 1991. Accused of killing off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail on August 19, 1989, his case is now famous for its apparent illegitimacy. The eyewitness testimonies used in the trial have now all but been discredited and there are reports that witnesses were bullied into giving false evidence (Hurricane anyone?) Despite a lack of conclusive evidence against him, Troy remains on death row.

Troy is now 40 years old. He was 23 when he was convicted. His best years have been spent behind bars and now he might be executed for a crime he might never have committed.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooPHNsFqb8M

“Our history shows that the death penalty has been unjustly imposed, innocents have been killed by the state, effective rehabilitation has been impaired, judicial administration has suffered. It is the poor, the sick, the ignorant, the powerless, and the hated who are executed.”
- Ramsey Clark

That’s all for now, I hope to see you all at the AIS film screening of The Life of David Gale (details below)

Helen

(Feel free to join in the discussion using the ‘comment’ section!)

AIS film screening of The Life of David Gale:

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
5:30pm - 9:00pm
UTS Tower Building Theatre Lounge

If you would like to contact Amnesty’s Media Blogger or suggest any topics for discussion, contact Helen Milan at mediablog@utsaia.com