Countries and int’l experts condemn biased “summit for democracy” in US - Research

POLITICS

13 December 2021 




BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 13

Trend:

The so-called "Summit for Democracy" was held at the initiative of US President Joe Biden on December 9-10. From the very beginning, its holding was perceived with a grin as such countries as Azerbaijan, Turkey, Hungary and China were not invited to it. The process of organizing of the US-initiated so-called "Summit for Democracy" is absurd. The US wants to present itself to the world as patron of democracy. Allegedly, the US, rather than all countries, is on the guard of democracy in the world.

The states, deliberately not invited to the so-called "summit", expressed their opinion on this issue at various official levels.

The US is destroying the system of international relations based on international law and the central role of the UN, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova said, Trend reports.



"The facts show that the US and its allies cannot and must not claim to be a "beacon" of democracy as the US hase chronic problems in the field of freedom of speech, electoral system, corruption and human rights," the official website of the Russian Foreign Ministry says.

China has also expressed an official position on this issue. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the US goal is hegemony, rather than democracy.

In turn, Thailand officially expressed condemnation and regret. It was not invited to the summit either.

The international experts and the media outlets expressed ambiguous attitude towards the ambivalent approach of the organizer of the so-called "summit".

Expert in foreign policy and security Ted Piccone stressed that the participation of some invitees was obvious to counter the Chinese influence. For example, the US ally - the Philippines has one of the lowest democracy index among 15 countries in East Asia and the Pacific.

As for Poland, its overall index has decreased by about 10 percent since 2015. Despite this, the White House invited Warsaw to the so-called "summit". The author of the article said that as a reason, it is possible to assume that Poland plays an important role as a support against Russia in NATO.



The author of the article stressed that the invitation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the event is also surprising. It ranks 137th out of 139 countries in terms of overall rule of law and has the worst ranking among African countries.

In an article posted by the Washington Examiner news agency, correspondent Katherine Doyle stressed that the inclusion of the issue of combating corruption on the agenda of the so-called "summit" raised many questions amid major corruption scandals around Biden’s family.

For example, Biden's son's firm invested in the Chinese companies that fell under the US sanctions, so ethics experts repeatedly demanded transparency from the White House on Hunter Biden's transactions.

An ambiguous attitude towards the so-called ‘summit’ was expressed in the US as well. New York Times correspondents Michael Crawley and Zolan Kanno-Youngs stressed in their articles that Biden plans to cooperate with Congress to spend about $424 million to support foreign independent media, fight against corruption, help activists, develop technologies and protect fair election.

Even the US officials admit that among other problems, political polarization, racial injustice, restrictions on voting rights and internal extremism are being aggravated in the US. Some activists called on Biden to pay more attention to the internal problems than external ones.

Bekir Ilhan, expert on international security and military innovation at the Turkish Anadolu news agency, stressed that a third of 110 countries invited by Biden’s administration to the so-called "Summit for Democracy" in December had low figures on the democratic criteria set by Freedom House. The real goal of the organizers of this event is to create a common vision of "democracy" in Washington’s interests.

Time magazine correspondent Debasish Roy Chowdhury wrote in an article that the President of the United States, the forces of which have recently left Afghanistan and which concluded a $650 million arms deal with Saudi Arabia, thought it a good idea to hold a two-day virtual meeting on democracy.

However, the invitation of the worst countries for democracy can not be explained. More than 30 percent of 110 invited countries were classified as "partially free" by the US-based Freedom House non-profit organization.

According to an article published by TASS news agency, the so-called "Summit for Democracy" is more like a piece of US foreign policy PR.

Some human rights activists were dissatisfied that democracy issues would be discussed at a political level, rather than at a public one.

Taking into account that a big part of the summit would account for three-minute speeches of invited leaders of the countries, there would be little time for activists.

A number of critical remarks about the summit were spread on social media. US economist Janet Yellen announced about the creation of the Anti-Kleptocracy Fund to "reward people who can report where corrupt foreign leaders are hiding their money in the US".

The so-called "summit for democracy" organized by Biden does not have any credibility, given Washington's experience of violation of democracy and human rights around the world. This so-called "summit" has been named "the latest provocation of the new Cold War."

Such a statement was made that such a selective invitation of countries to this event testifies to the US weakness and its inability to resist the undermining of the authority of its foreign policy at the UN.

WATCH: CN Live! — ‘The Survival of Julian Assange’

December 13, 2021


Jill Stein and Doctors4Assange Lissa Johnson and Bill Hogan join CN legal analyst Alexander Mercouris to discuss the latest developments in the Julian Assange case.

Two days after the High Court of England and Wales allowed the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, came news that the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher had suffered a stroke on Oct. 27.

Not only is his freedom at stake, but his very life. Joining us to discuss these dramatic developments are CN legal analyst Alexander Mercouris and Doctors4Assange members Jill Stein, Bill Hogan and Lissa Johnson. Watch it live at 7 a.m. EST, noon GMT and 11 p.m. AEDT or later on replay with your hosts Elizabeth Vos and Joe Lauria. Produced by Cathy Vogan.

On Sunday, Doctors4Assange released the following statement:

DOCTORS FOR ASSANGE STATEMENT (12/12/2021)

Julian Assange’s fiancé, Stella Moris, announced yesterday that Mr. Assange had a “mini-stroke” on October 27, the first day of his latest extradition hearing, according to the Daily Mail. He was reportedly ‘left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage.’

This dangerous deterioration of Mr. Assange’s health underscores urgent concerns raised by Doctors for Assange over the past two years. Therefore, once again, Doctors for Assange calls for Mr. Assange to be released from prison so he can access consistent, high quality, independent medical care – something which is impossible for him to obtain in Belmarsh prison. We reiterate that Mr. Assange is in no condition to undergo an extradition trial. Further, extraditing him to the harsh conditions of the inhumane US prison system should be out of the question. He should therefore be immediately and permanently released from prison.

This latest medical emergency adds to the already dire state of Mr. Assange’s health owing to his prolonged psychological torture. This includes eleven years of arbitrary detention, medical neglect, solitary confinement, obstruction of access to his lawyers, and an Orwellian legal prosecution that has violated the rule of law and due process:
key accusations in the US indictment against Mr. Assange are marred by outright lies and a paucity of fact;

he and his legal team have been surveilled by the CIA; and

Mr. Assange has been targeted by the agency in a plan to kidnap and assassinate him.

Throughout, Mr. Assange has been subjected to concerted character assassination through propaganda campaigns in mainstream media across the globe.

Assurances that Mr. Assange will not be subjected to harsh prison conditions by the very agency that has been plotting to kidnap and assassinate him are farcical. For the High Court to accept such a ludicrous proposition, describing the assurances as “solemn undertakings offered by one government to another”, calls into serious question the independence, impartiality and integrity of the UK judiciary.

The health of Mr. Assange and the health of our democracy, which depends on a free press and judicial integrity, are both in serious jeopardy. This shameful and deeply damaging case should be dropped now, and Julian Assange granted his long overdue freedom.

WATCH: Hedges on Assange Ruling With the Editor-in-Chief
December 12, 2021


Chris Hedges interviewed Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria on his program On Contact about the High Court ruling allowing Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States. Broadcast before news of Assange’s stroke.




Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

A demoralising decision

Editorial

DAWN.COM

PAKISTAN

Published December 13, 2021 - 

A UK High Court decision allowing the extradition of Julian Assange to the US comes as a blow not just to the WikiLeaks founder but also to democracy and media everywhere. The US wants Mr Assange for the publication of thousands of classified documents between 2010 and 2011. In January this year, a UK court said he could not be extradited due to concerns for his mental health. Last week, however, the US won an appeal after the court accepted assurances that Mr Assange would not face strict prison conditions, which was the basis for the earlier ruling. The decision is devastating for Mr Assange’s family and friends who are concerned about whether he can survive prison. But it is also a message from the US that whistle-blowers and those that expose uncomfortable realities will be pursued and punished.

Mr Assange’s revelations were very much in the public interest. Instead of seeing them as such, and as falling in the realm of free speech, American authorities went after him with desperation, and gave assurances to the court regarding better prison conditions. US prison conditions are often seen as a grave issue by UK courts during extradition trials, and in its efforts to successfully extradite individuals, the US has gone to great lengths to persuade judges that detention conditions will not be inhumane. America’s actions paint a sorry picture of a country that prides itself as a champion of rights and democracy. Punishing Mr Assange for lifting the lid on grave abuses committed by the US administration in Iraq — documents that were published by media outlets — flies in the face of democratic ideals. An appeal to the high court may buy Mr Assange a few more years. But the fact remains that he has been detained in some way or the other for 11 years. The US should not pursue this extradition case, and the UK must not allow it, because revelations like Mr Assange’s allow the media to hold the powerful accountable and demand a more just world.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2021

Journalism, Assange and Reversal in the High Court

Photograph Source: Anthony Crider – CC BY 2.0

BY BINOY KAMPMARK
DECEMBER 13, 2021

British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair. Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes.

In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex Assange did so much to expose. The decision of the UK High Court, handed down on December 10, will go down in the annals of law as a particularly disgraceful instance of this.

From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm. 17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it. It criminalises the receipt, dissemination and publication of national security information. It attacks the very foundations of the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of accountability and subverts the protections of the First Amendment in the US constitution. It invalidates motive and purpose. And, were this to be successful – and here, the British justices seem willing to ensure that it is – the United States will be able to globally target any publisher of its dirty trove of classified material using an archaic, barbaric law.

It should also have occurred to the good members of the English legal profession that these lamentable proceedings have always been political. Extraditions are generally not awarded on such grounds. But this entire affair reeks of it. The US security establishment wants their man, desperately. With the coming to power of President Donald Trump, one counterintelligence officer, reflecting on Assange’s plight, made the pertinent observation that, “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”

The original decision by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser was hardly grand. It was chastising and vicious to journalism, cruel to those revealing information that might expose state abuses and an offense to the sensibility of democratic minded persons. The point was made that security and intelligence experts, however morally inclined or principled, were best suited to assessing the merits of releasing classified information. Journalists should never be involved in publishing such material. Besides, thought the Judge, Assange was not a true journalist. Such people did not purposely go out to disclose the identities of informants or propagandise their cause.

The only thing going for that otherwise woeful judgment was its acceptance that Assange would well perish in the US legal system. Noting such cases as Laurie Love, Baraitser accepted that the prosecution had failed to show that Assange would not be placed in a position where he could be prevented from taking his own life. Should he be sent across the Atlantic, he would face Special Administrative Measures and conclude his life in the wretched cul-de-sac of the ADX Florence supermax. Any extradition to such conditions of sheer baroque cruelty would be “oppressive” given “his mental condition”.

The prosecution had no qualms trying to appeal and broaden the arguments, citing several propositions. Contemptibly, these focused on Assange the pretender (suicidal autistics cannot give conference plenaries or host television programs), expert witnesses as deceivers (neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, for initially “concealing” evidence from the court of Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and their children), and the merits of the US prison system: matronly, saintly, and filled with soft beds and tender shrinks. Why, scolded the prosecutor James Lewis QC in October, had the good judge not asked the US Department of Justice for reassurances? Assange would not face the brutal end of special administrative measures. He would not be sent to decline and moulder in ADX Florence. He could also serve his sentence in Australia, provided, of course, the Department of Justice approved.

In reversing the decision to discharge Assange, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde were persuaded by two of the five grounds submitted by the prosecutors. Sounding astonishingly naïve (or possibly disingenuous) at points, the justices accepted the prosecution’s argument that undertakings or assurances could be made at a later stage, even during an appeal. Delays by a requesting state to make such assurances might be tactical and stem from bad faith, but not entertaining such assurances, even if made later, might also result in “a windfall to an alleged or convicted criminal, which would defeat the public interest in extradition.”

Judge Baraitser should have also been mindful of seeking the assurances in the first place, given how vital the issue of Assange’s suicide risk and future treatment in US prisons was in making her decision against extradition.

It followed that the justices did “not accept that the USA refrained for tactical reasons from offering assurances at an earlier stage, or acted in bad faith in choosing only to offer them at the appeal stage.” Diplomatic Note no. 74 contained “solemn undertakings, offered by one government to another, which will bind all officials and prosecutors who will deal with the relevant aspects of Mr Assange’s case now and in the future.”

This meant that Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or sent to ADX Florence, and that he would receive appropriate medical treatment to mitigate the risk of suicide. (The justices erred in not understanding that the assurance to not detain Assange ADX “pre-trial” was irrelevant as ADX is a post-conviction establishment.) He could also serve his post-trial and post-appeal sentence in Australia, though that would be at the mercy of DOJ approval. All undertakings were naturally provisional on the conduct of the accused.

As the original judgement was premised upon Assange being subjected to the “harshest SAMs regime”, and given the significance of the evidence submitted by Kopelman and Dr Quinton Deeley on Assange’s suicide risk in “being held under such harsh conditions of isolation”, the justices were “unable to accept the submission that the judge’s conclusion would have been the same if she had not found a real risk of detention in those conditions.”

Such narrow reasoning served to ignore the ample evidence that such diplomatic assurances are unreliable, mutable and without legal standing. In terms of solitary confinement, the US legal system is filled with euphemistic designationsthat all amount to aspects of the same thing. If it is not SAMs, it is certainly something amounting to it, such as Administrative Segregation.

Previous diplomatic assurances given by US authorities have also been found wanting. The fate of Spanish drug trafficker David Mendoza Herrarte stands out. In that case, a Spanish court was given an assurance that Mendoza, if extradited to the US to face trial, could serve any subsequent prison sentence in Spain. When the application to the US Department of Justice was made to make good that undertaking, the transfer application was refused. The pledge only applied, it was claimed, to allow Mendoza to apply for a transfer; it never meant that the DOJ had to agree to it. A diplomatic wrangle between Madrid and Washington ensued for six years before the decision was altered.

And just to make such undertakings all the more implausible, the “solemn assurances” were coming from, as Craig Murray pointedly remarked, “a state whose war crimes and murder of civilians were exposed by Julian Assange.”

The justices also failed to consider the murderous elephant in the room, one that had been submitted by the defence at both the extradition hearing and the appeal: that US government officials had contemplated abducting and assassinatingthe very individual whose extradition they were seeking. This was a view that held sway with former US Secretary of State and CIA chief Mike Pompeo.

In the United States, talking heads expressed their satisfaction about the glories of the US justice and prison system. Former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC that, “This was really a guy who just violated the law”. Concerns by Assange’s defence team that his “safety in [US] prison” would be compromised showed that “they really don’t have perspective on this”.

It is fittingly monstrous that this decision should be handed down the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov. Or that it should happen on Human Rights Day, which saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s boast that “we will continue to promote accountability for human rights violators.” Except one’s own.

Inevitably, these cruel, gradually lethal proceedings move to the next stage: an appeal to the Supreme Court. As the paperwork is gathered, Assange will muse, grimly, that the entire period of his discharge never saw him leave Belmarsh Prison.


Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

PRISON NATION USA

Can Architects Help End Solitary Confinement?

Creating a New Architecture of Justice and Healing

By NICOLE CAPOZZIELLO | 

November 29, 2021


The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola holds more than 6,000 men, three-quarters of whom are Black, in an area larger than Manhattan. Angola, which takes its name from the slave plantation that once occupied the site, is a place synonymous with draconian sentences and nightmarish conditions. But even here, a special level of dread has been reserved for a nondescript cement complex called Camp J. From its opening in 1976 until its closure in 2017, Camp J housed thousands of people in solitary confinement, mostly as punishment for breaking prison rules. At any given time, up to 400 men were held there in intense isolation known as extended lockdown.

The nondescript exterior of Camp J at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, where men spent months in solitary confinement in windowless cells. Photo: Michael Hallett

Men in Camp J lived in four cell blocks, in cells measuring 6×9 feet with no windows and no direct access to natural light or ventilation. A long, dark corridor ran along each block, with louvered windows that let in only a modicum of light and air, and a few industrial fans as the only relief from the Louisiana heat. Self-harm was commonplace, and suicides were far from rare. More than once, corrections officers assigned to the unit walked off the job. The cells were compared to dungeons, by people imprisoned there and outsiders alike.

Solitary confinement cells like the ones in Camp J don’t materialize out of nowhere. Long before they are erected, before they bear witness to countless hours of human misery, these cells exist as mere lines on a blueprint, the result of an architect’s pen put to paper.

Architects invested in human rights have long been concerned with the ethos and effects of the American criminal justice system—and with their profession’s role in designing torture sites. In 2013, Raphael Sperry, an architect and the president of the nonprofit Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), began a campaign to pressure the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to alter its Code of Ethics. His goal was to bar AIA members from designing execution chambers and solitary confinement cells. Last December, the campaign finally succeeded, placing one more roadblock in the way of jurisdictions intent on locking people up in conditions that amount to torture.

“When I talk to people about the practice of solitary confinement, the most common question I get is ‘but what are you going to do about the worst of the worst people?’” Sperry said in an interview. “And I say, ‘if you want to talk about the worst of the worst, let’s talk about the worst of the worst buildings.’”

Designing Torture

The U.S. criminal justice system’s values of punishment and retribution are never more apparent in the built environment than in solitary confinement cells, where they are cast in reinforced concrete and steel.

Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which opened in 1829, was the first prison designed specifically for solitary confinement.

 Photo: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site

Long-term solitary confinement in the United States took root in 1829, as an experiment at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which was designed and built to enable its residents to be held in total isolation. Intended to encourage self-reflection and remorse, the isolation was instead profoundly harmful, and by the early twentieth century, the practice had been largely abandoned. Today, the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site serves as a monument to the failure of solitary confinement.

But the use of solitary did not remain in the past. It resurfaced in the 1980s, as the U.S. prison population exploded and policymakers turned away from any notion of prisons as places of rehabilitation. Since then, units and entire institutions created to achieve “total control” have proliferated: California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in 1989, and ADX Florence in Colorado, the first federal supermax, followed in 1994. Today, more than 40 states have supermax prisons built for extreme isolation, and a variety of solitary confinement units can be found in correctional institutions across the country.

“I’ve been in prisons and jails all over the country, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oregon, North Dakota, Georgia, Louisiana, among others, and their solitary units all look rather different. There are some architectural commonalities, but the level of noise, how deep it is in the prison, the temperature, the cleanliness, the technology, all greatly varies,” said David Cloud. He is research director at Amend, an organization based out of the University of California San Francisco that works to abolish systems designed to inflict harm as well as to immediately reduce the harm caused by these systems. “But the thing they share, whether it’s a newer supermax or a more cheaply built solitary unit, is that it’s a place that’s meant to isolate, deprive, and dehumanize people.”

These places have done so successfully and with great consequence; about 5 percent of all incarcerated people in the U.S. are held in solitary, but as many as half of prison suicides occur there. Most of those who survive their time in solitary experience permanent damage to their psychological and physical health.

“In society… they have learned that animals being in a closed area is inhumane. But they treat human beings here in a worse way,” wrote Herman Wallace, a member of the “Angola 3” who endured 41 years in solitary. “They put people here in a six by nine cell; they are not going to put animals in a cage like that unless they are doing some experiment with the animals and trying to kill them. That is what they are doing to these men; they are killing them slowly and surely.”

Public debates about solitary confinement often look at how this practice of torture metastasized within the now decades-long failed experiment of mass incarceration. People consider the values that underpinned it, the policies that calcified it, the harms to and unmet needs of those subjected to it. While the onus has been rightfully placed on the enormous machine of corrections, it’s easy to forget that other professions and individuals have played an essential role as well.

Prison design is highly specialized and often not particularly competitive, due to both the ethical dilemmas it presents and the challenges inherent to working with the client—which may be a local, state, or federal correctional system or a private prison contractor. “Justice architecture” can also be highly profitable; governments are typically willing to write a blank check for the promise of public safety, making construction budgets, like the budgets of departments of corrections themselves, huge. But these funds are used to build out the security and technology of a space, not to improve the lives and opportunities of those living and working inside of it.

“Public safety is not achieved by bars and barbed wire and pepper spray—it just bottles up the problems you’re hoping and claiming to address,” said Cloud.

Evolving Standards

When Sperry and ADPSR began their campaign in 2013, the AIA resisted taking a stance on capital punishment and solitary confinement, citing the legality of both in the United States. Sperry countered with the argument that solitary confinement in excess of 15 days has been deemed torture by the United Nations. Therefore, he argued, complicity in the practice is in violation of the AIA’s own Code of Ethics, which instructs members to “uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.”

A cell at Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax facility in northern California, where individuals have spent decades in solitary confinement.

After years of education and advocacy, the AIA finally agreed. In December 2020, the organization changed its ethics rules to prohibit its 95,000 members from designing spaces intended for execution or torture, including solitary confinement. “With the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there was a need for white institutions, including architecture, to figure out what they could do for people of color,” said Sperry, who credits the adoption to a confluence of receptive leadership at the AIA and this political energy. (While racial and gender diversity in the profession has been growing, only 2.5 percent of architects are Black and 11 percent are Hispanic or Latino. Over 70 percent of American architects are men;).

Sperry is hopeful that the change will have concrete impacts. Under the new ethics rules, AIA members working on prison-building contracts will be unable to design a solitary wing or building. While the construction of new prisons is less commonplace today than during the prison boom of the 1990s, solitary confinement units remain a standard feature.

“If you think that your client is intending to keep people in these spaces for more than 15 days, you, as an AIA member, wouldn’t be able to design that,” said Sperry. who believes that at minimum this creates an obstacle for the client. Rules of Conduct are mandatory, and according to the Code of Ethics, violation by a member architect “is grounds for disciplinary action by the Institute.”

“Members will have to talk to their clients about protecting individuals’ human rights,” he said. “And I hope that the bigger outcome will be in just reconsidering jail projects entirely.”

The ethics code change may also help by giving advocates and lawyers ammunition when bringing forth court cases on solitary confinement. “When you try to bring a case that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual, you have to show ‘an evolving standard of decency,’ and I sure think this is one,” said Sperry. “Architects used to design solitary confinement cells and now they won’t? That’s a great case, and I’m hoping lawyers will make use of this.” The idea of meeting society’s “evolving standards of decency” is one the U.S. Supreme Court first articulated in 1952 as a test of whether the state violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“We have to start thinking more creatively about solutions to big issues, including the structural problems that drive mass incarceration,” said Cloud. New approaches will only become more needed and unavoidable, as climate change and public health crises—not the least of which has been the COVID19 pandemic—are increasingly felt in our built environment, including prisons.

Transforming and Memorializing Carceral Spaces

For proponents of change both outside and inside the criminal justice system, a big question remains: if we succeed in ending the inhumane practices for which these spaces were built, what do we do with the spaces that already exist? Solving this problem again depends upon the participation of architects and designers.

“One of the biggest challenges of addressing solitary is the physical space,” said Cloud. “You can change the name of the unit, you can let people out of their cells more often, but at the end of the day, it’s still a bleak environment within a system meant to disappear and dehumanize people.” In many cases, no amount of ingenuity or goodwill can transform small, dingy cells, expressly designed to cause harm, into livable units. The only answer is to stop housing people in the units altogether.

Take Angola’s Camp J, which was closed in 2017 due to external pressure from advocates and internal pressure from staff.

From 2017 to 2019, the Vera Institute’s Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative partnered with state corrections departments to look at and address their use of solitary; in Louisiana, this work was led by David Cloud. As a part of their research, Cloud and others, including a team from Boston-based architecture firm MASS Design Group and Loyola University law professor Andrea Armstrong, held a series of focus groups with incarcerated people and staff. In this participatory research, they asked people who had endured solitary confinement at Camp J: Could a dilapidated and deserted space, associated with trauma and agony, be reconfigured to help improve the lives of incarcerated people?

MASS Design Group, working with the Vera Institute of Justice, envisioned new possibilities for Angola’s Camp J, including using the site to create a sanctuary space. Image: MASS Design Group/Vera Institute of Justice

The first proposal was to house a residential, multi-generational living and mentoring program, grounded in tenets of racial and restorative justice, a model that Vera had pioneered elsewhere with its Restoring Promise initiative. The second idea was to repurpose the building as an Educational Center focused on reentry, in response to residents’ and staff’s desire for more opportunities for vocational skills and education.

However, others thought that Camp J was simply irredeemable. Cloud recalled, “Some people said, ‘That place has so much baggage, so much trauma. It’s haunted.’” This led to a final suggestion: to ceremoniously raze the building and replace it with a space of remembrance, moral reckoning, reflection, and healing, which the proposal called an “Interpretive Ruin.”

As of yet, none of these ideas has been realized. According to Cloud, while there was support from Louisiana State Department of Public Safety and Corrections leadership to pursue these ideas, resources and local politics seemed to stand in the way. Then, in March of 2020, Camp J was reopened as a quarantine facility to house incarcerated people who tested positive for COVID19. When cases fell, it was closed, but as they have risen within state prisons it was reopened once again.

Though still unfinished, this initiative fits into a broader movement to create spaces that memorialize people’s lived experiences, facilitate healing, and embody a different vision of justice.

Two nonprofit architecture firms, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) and MASS Design Group, are at the forefront of this work. MASS’s creations have included the Soil Collection for the Memorial to Peace and Justice, a collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative featuring soil from lynching sites throughout the south, and the Writing on the Wall, a traveling exhibition and installation composed of over 2,500 essays, poems, letters, stories, drawings and notes written by people in prison around the world.

DJDS’s projects have also included ongoing work to transform the Atlanta City Detention Center into a Center for Equity; peacemaking centers; and resource hubs like Restore Oakland, a “center for restorative justice and restorative economics.”

“In order to heal, you need to be connected, and shown support, shown love, shown that people believe in you. And that’s the opposite of solitary confinement, and prison in general,” said Garrett Jacobs, DJDS’s Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships. “We’re about building up what prison has often broken down. We believe in abundance—there is enough love, there are enough resources, there is enough space for people. And with this, we believe that people can transform.”

Deanna Van Buren of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces takes part in the community engagement process for a Women’s Mobile Refuge Trailer at San Francisco County Jail. Photo: DJDS

DJDS is committed to working with people who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system, and applying trauma-informed principles throughout the process. Jacobs said it is important to them to adhere to a universal approach to design, one that asks: “How can we design to counteract the worst-case scenario someone may have been exposed to?” Arguably, this scenario is solitary confinement, a setting of torture and deprivation, lacking any pretense of nature, connection, or life.

At design workshops, DJDS asks participants to explore the question of what justice buildings would look like if accountability, healing, and transformation were the goal. “When you go into a creative process with someone who has experienced something as difficult as incarceration, you have to think about the many things that could shape their mindset, so they can unlock all of their gifts,” said Jacobs.

As members of underserved communities and survivors of a total institution such as prison, participants often have had little control of their environment and little reason to hope. A setting in which they are treated with respect and asked to imagine a different reality can be foreign or even stressful. Jacobs said that participants soon warm up, imagining and creating prototypes using prison-approved materials like construction paper, glue sticks, and acrylic paint. And while each design looks different, there are elements that they strikingly share: light, openness, the color green.

“But visualizing these spaces is not enough,” DJDS Founder and Executive Director Deanna Van Buren put forward in a TED Talk. “We have to build them.” And that is what some architects are doing. While they recognize that many of these undertakings are immense, so are the possibilities. In their work, informed by the experiences of impacted communities, they are inventing and propagating new types of buildings, centering on restorative justice and offering alternatives to the courthouses, holding centers, and prisons of our current punitive system.

One by one, these structures are migrating off of paper, manifesting a new era founded on intentionality rather than complicity. In this future, human beings are no longer warehoused in spaces of poured, reinforced concrete, and justice architecture lives up to ideals beyond retribution, control, and disconnection. It is an era designed for a new experiment: healing.

Help Solitary Watch Expose the Torture of Solitary Confinement

By EVENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS | December 3, 2021


Earlier this week, on #GivingTuesday, we emailed this message to our supporters, asking you to think about the tens of thousands of individuals living in solitary confinement in the United States. These people woke up locked alone in small cells. They ate their meals alone, spent hour after hour entirely alone, and then fell asleep alone. Doubly isolated—first from their families and communities beyond the prison walls, and then from any human contact within them—many will continue to live this way for weeks, months, years, or even decades. Some will not survive; others will never fully recover.

When Solitary Watch began its work in 2009, our slogan was “News from a Nation on Lockdown.” We were a small outfit with a large mission: to make sure the world knew that at least 100,000 people—the majority of them Black and brown, and many with mental illness and other vulnerabilities—were being tortured daily in U.S. prisons and jails. Over the next twelve years, we reported exclusively on the use of solitary confinement across the country and published hundreds of first-hand accounts of life in state-imposed isolation. Our work has been instrumental in exposing the prison within a prison that is solitary and fueling movements nationwide.

SUPPORT OUR CRITICAL WORK TODAY AND YOUR DONATION WILL BE DOUBLED.

Real change on this issue had just begun when the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic made a different version of “lockdowns” part of the world’s collective experience. While people around the world struggled with restrictions and isolation, the trauma of the pandemic was magnified behind bars. Rather than releasing people to save lives, authorities turned to prison lockdowns that lasted months and longer. Inside prisons and jails, the primary response to the pandemic was mass solitary confinement.

Solitary Watch’s research and analysis of this crisis formed the basis of a report that received widespread media attention and changed the terms of debate about Covid in prisons. We found that the use of solitary confinement increased by 500 percent in the early months of the pandemic, when lockdowns placed more than 300,000 people in prolonged isolation, despite far more humane and effective alternatives.

At the same time, we worked closely with incarcerated journalists to publish inside accounts of the contagion’s spread through prisons. Solitary Watch Contributing Writer Juan Moreno Haines wrote of the ineptitude and callousness that characterized the response at California’s San Quentin, where authorities essentially introduced the virus into the prison through transfers, and then when people fell ill, placed them into appalling conditions in solitary confinement units. Juan continued to send dispatches from his isolation cell after he himself contracted the virus.

Solitary Watch also reported on how solitary confinement was used to punish whistleblowers and suppress protests during the pandemic as people behind bars—who in 2020 contracted Covid at a rate as high as five times that of the general public—desperately tried to keep their time in prison from becoming a death sentence. When few were listening, Solitary Watch helped ensure their voices were heard.

As the Covid-19 pandemic lingers on, its lessons are already being lost: Mass incarceration is deadly, and the lives of those inside are too often treated as expendable. And solitary confinement isn’t a public health strategy; it’s torture

These are the truths that we need to carry forward in this critical time. But to do so, we must ask for your support. If you missed making a donation to Solitary Watch on #GivingTuesday, please donate today to help expose the torture and end the silence of solitary confinement.

YOUR GIFT TO SOLITARY WATCH TODAY WILL HAVE TWICE THE IMPACT.

Now is an especially good time to give. If you make a recurring donation today, NewsMatch will match the amount 12 times over. Every one-time donation will also be matched up to $1,000. Please give now so your generosity can be doubled. Every contribution makes a difference.

Thank you.

 PRISON NATION USA

#PregnantBehindBars

As SCOTUS Contemplates Shooting Down Roe, 

A New Report Shines A Light On What 

Reproductive “Choice”

 Looks Like In The 

Nation’s Prisons And Jails

December 13, 2021

 

Written by Celeste Fremon

During the nearly five decades that Roe v. Wade has been considered to be settled law, the courts have repeatedly confirmed that incarcerated people retain this constitutional right.

Now, of course, for the first time in nearly half a century, abortion rights are under attack, as demonstrated on December 10, when the newly-constituted highest U.S. Supreme Court only barely disrupted SB 8, the Texas law that allows what amounts to legal vigilantism.

(For those unfamiliar, SB 8, outlaws abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, then enforces the new law by essentially deputizing anyone who wishes to do so to sue any person who “aids or abets” a non-permitted abortion in any way, and thus collect a $10,000 bounty.)

Next, SCOTUS will rule on the 2018 Mississippi law, which bans abortions outright after 15 weeks.

With the above new legal landscape in mind, Prison Policy Initiative researchers Katie Rose Quandt and Leah Wang, have released a brand new report about what kind of choices are available to women inside U.S. jails and prisons, if they find themselves pregnant in lock-up, and how those policies might change should Roe be overturned.

Here’s what they found.

In the nearly 50 years since Roe v Wade established the right to an abortion without excessive governmental restriction, the courts have repeatedly confirmed that incarcerated people retain this constitutional right. 

So, now that abortion rights are under attack throughout the nation, and state legislatures enacted 90 abortion restrictions in the first half of 2021, the most of any year in U.S. history, what is the situation for those who find themselves living behind bars when or shortly after they learn they are pregnant?

To answer that question, Quandt and Wang analyzed two studies recently published in different medical journals, each of which analyzed incarcerated people’s access to abortion across 22 state prison systems and six county jail systems.

“Life behind bars does not occur in a bubble,” write the Prison Policy Initiatives authors in their new report, “and these state policies have implications for the estimated 58,000 pregnant people who enter jail or prison each year.”

 The two main studies that Quandt and Wang examined reveal that abortion and contraception access varies greatly between states — and that, unsurprisingly, that there are correlations between the state’s abortion policies and access to abortion behind bars.

For example, only three of the 22 state prison systems studied banned abortion entirely. And all three of those states, which banned abortion in prison, were states that had policies that were considered “hostile” to abortion rights.

In all, 77% of state prison systems in states “hostile” to abortion rights, allowed abortion for incarcerated people, compared to 100% of prison systems in “nonhostile” states. 

Second trimester abortions were allowed for incarcerated people in 38% of hostile states and 67% of nonhostile states.

When looking at the policies for jails, the PPI report found a similar pattern. Both of the jails examined, which were located in a hostile state (Texas), banned any and all abortions for incarcerated people, while all four jails studied that were in non-hostile states allowed abortions in both the first and second trimesters.

Still, even in states that officially allow abortion, the PPI report found that many incarcerated people were still effectively blocked from obtaining the care they needed due to barriers such as the obligation for the pregnant person to pay for their abortion, a requirement that for many women prooved simply insurmountable. In other cases, the physical distance between the prison or jail, and the abortion caregivers, became the deal breaker. 

All in all, wrote the PPI report’s authors, the “studies make clear that people behind bars often have very few — if any — choices and autonomy when it comes to their reproductive health and decisions.”

In short, here are the report’s main findings.

• Most state prison systems (19 of the 22 studied, or 86%) allowed abortion, whether it was written policy or not. Of these, eight allowed it during the first trimester only.
• Seven state prison systems (32%) did not have an official written policy regarding abortion. While four of these states did allow abortions in practice, “the lack of policy is concerning,” wrote the report’s authors, “and may leave individuals’ access to the discretion of prison staff.”
• Three prison systems did not allow abortions at all. None of these three had an official written policy on abortion access, “but in practice they did not allow any access, and did not indicate exceptions for rape or incest, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.” 
• Most jails (4 of the 6 studied) allowed abortion. The two that banned abortion were both in Texas. Namely the Harris County jail in Houston, and Dallas County jail system.
• The four other jails studied allowed abortion during both the first and second trimesters.
• The researched studied by the PPI report indicated abortions are “relatively uncommon behind bars.” Over the one-year course of the main study the PPI authors looked at, there were 33 abortions reported in the jails the study followed, and 11 in the study’s prisons, out of the 1,040 total reported pregnancies in all of the facilities studied.

The Prison Policy Initiative report also looked at the related issue of contraception, which is a critical issue to many women in prison who are pre-menopausal. When it came to contraception, the PPI researchers discovered that in six of the prison systems studied that allowed access to permanent contraception, those same prison systems did not allow accesses to reversible contraception. 

This means that, in those six state systems, incarcerated people who want contraception may be forced to choose between permanent sterilization or no contraception at all. 

California is, of course, one of the more liberal states on the topic of abortion, both in state prisons and county jails.

Yet, in a 2014 audit of California prisons performed by the state auditor, the auditor’s office found that 144 women — particularly women of color — were subjected to illegal sterilization procedures between 2006 to 2010, in which all but one the 144 bilateral tubal ligation procedures that occurred, were performed without the necessary approvals.

In some of those cases, according to the auditor, the women who were sterilized had no idea that their surgeries would prevent them from ever getting pregnant.

In many of the cases, wrote the auditor, prison medical staff simply requested approval for some other medical procedure—such as a cesarean section— and “did not indicate that the inmate was also to be sterilized.”

In another devastating case, in 2020, a whistleblower alleged that an immigration detention center was conducting mass hysterectomies that one detained woman compared to an “experimental concentration camp.”

Historically, the report’s authors noted, forced sterilization has disproportionately devastated the lives of Black, Indigenous and other women of color.

Furthermore, as with abortion, wrote the report’s two authors, “many facilities did not have a written policy regarding contraception,” meaning actual access in those states might fall to the discretion of staff members.

“Pregnancy overlaps with incarceration often enough that prisons and jails should have clear policies and procedures to screen for pregnancy, provide quality prenatal and postnatal care, and ensure that incarcerated people have access to safe abortions, deliveries, and contraception, as they are entitled to by law,” the authors wrote.

“People do not lose their constitutional right to reproductive autonomy when they are incarcerated.”

Yet, the two recent studies that PPI examined reveal abortion and contraception policies—in the way they are actually practiced—are often unconstitutional, and “frequently undermine individuals’ autonomy.”

Avi Benlolo: China is not the only nation flouting basic human rights

All modern human rights framework is grounded in the travesty of the Holocaust. Soon after the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their accomplices, the United Nations was founded in 1945 with the objective of maintaining international peace and security. What followed next was the publication of and supposed international agreement on perhaps the most significant document to safeguard humanity — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

© Provided by National Post Tacinisahan Mahmut holds photographs of family members who have been jailed or who have disappeared in her native East Turkistan, in the northwestern part of China, during a Nov. 23, 2021, rally on Parliament Hill organized by the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and East Turkistan Association of Canada.

Adopted by the UN General Assembly 73 years ago on this day — Dec. 10, 1948 — it would become the moral and ethical compass for the advocacy for peace and security. Our celebration of Human Rights Day annually on this date should come with a profound recognition that it arose from the ashes of children, women and men who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and dozens more death camps.

Without universal guidelines, humanity’s primal tribal traits give way to chaos and violence. Humanity requires governance, codes of conduct and rules to build a productive civilization. For centuries, our moral compass was governed by religion. Much of what we see in today’s UDHR was not invented by its Canadian architect, John Peters Humphrey, or by Eleanor Roosevelt, who pressed the document forward at the UN.

The UDHR is a secularization of basic religious precepts. Its premise is firmly grounded in the original rules handed to the Jewish people in the Torah at Mount Sinai. Eventually these ideas were transmitted to other religions that sprouted from Judaism — particularly Christianity. We all know the basic principles found in most religions today: Honour thy mother and father; do not commit murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not tell lies; do not be envious of others.

Human rights start with the simple, religion-based Golden Rule that should govern our conduct every day — “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s a basic principle that every child on the planet should be taught to observe. On this day for human rights, let’s reinforce the UDHR’s basic foundational parameters including that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security,” and that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

In a world that is tearing itself apart at the seams, getting back to these basic human codes of conduct is more essential than ever. In the past number of days, Canada has joined the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in a diplomatic boycott of China’s Winter Olympics in protest over its human rights abuses. Indeed, democracies — as few as they are today — are the only governing bodies standing against such darkness today.

In Vienna, intensive discussions are underway again with Iran as Western allies try to avert a possible nuclear catastrophe with a radical Islamic regime clearly hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. In many cases, defending human rights and averting a potential genocide involves more than negotiation and sanctions. In cases such as the Second World War and even recently in Rwanda and Bosnia, stopping an evil regime has required a military solution as a last resort.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) convention, adopted by the UN in 2005, requires member states to protect populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. But tragically, we are failing, particularly in the case of Syria, where more than 350,000 civilians have been killed in its civil war — without as much as a peep from Arab neighbours and Western allies. Yemen and Africa, too, are on the cusp of famine due to continued war and ethnic conflict.

As democracies decline in number and strength and as the United Nations community of assembled states continues to overlook its foundational principles of preserving human and civil rights, the future of humanity is in jeopardy. Many in Western society focus on scientific innovations, on the next start-up, on the next electric car or their next vacation. We forget how fragile and insecure we really are. All this around us is a social construct, and material things become irrelevant when chaos and violence engulfs humanity. We need to protect our rights, our freedom and democracy first if we are going to protect our children and grandchildren from the coming storm. Think about it.

National Post

Avi Abraham Benlolo is the Founder and Chairman of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative.

Biden says he's 'deeply troubled' by Kellogg's move to permanently replace striking union workers
insider@insider.com (Juliana Kaplan,Charles Davis) 

 Kellogg's Cereal plant workers demonstrate in front of the plant on October 7, 2021 in Battle Creek, Michigan. Workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants are striking over the loss of premium health care, holiday and vacation pay, and reduced retirement benefits.

 Rey Del Rio/Getty Images

President Joe Biden released a statement saying he was "deeply troubled" by Kellogg's plan to replace striking workers.

Workers across four plants have been on strike since early October, and voted down a tentative agreement this week.

One striking Kellogg's worker said that Biden's statement is "exactly what we needed at this time."

President Joe Biden has chimed in on the ongoing strike by Kellogg's workers, reiterating his "unyielding support" for unions and slamming the company for moving to replace workers on strike.

In a statement, Biden said that he was "deeply troubled by reports of Kellogg's plans to permanently replace striking workers."

Kellogg's workers at four plants have been on strike since October 5, pushing back against a two-tier wage system that they say is unfair. Unit members "overwhelmingly" voted down a tentative agreement on Tuesday, according to the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International union, and have remained out on the picket line. A Kellogg's presentation said that tentative agreement included 3% wage increases, and enhanced benefits, alongside an "accelerated" path to move workers out of the lower-tier wage system.

In response to members voting down the agreement, Kellogg said that "the prolonged work stoppage has left us no choice but to hire permanent replacement employees in positions vacated by striking workers," with about 1,400 workers set to be replaced.

Biden is crying foul on that, saying that permanently replacing workers on strike "is an existential attack on the union and its members' jobs and livelihoods."

"I have long opposed permanent striker replacements and I strongly support legislation that would ban that practice," Biden said, adding that it "undermines the critical role collective bargaining plays in providing workers a voice and the opportunity to improve their lives while contributing fully to their employer's success."



In a statement to Insider, Kellogg spokesperson Kris Bahner that the "the tentative agreement was a fully negotiated deal between Kellogg and the union," saying that it "contained no concessions or takeaways."

"We are very disappointed that it was ultimately rejected," Bahner said. "We have an obligation to our customers and consumers to continue to provide the cereals that they know and love – as well as to the thousands of people we employ."

Dan Osborn, president of the local union branch in Omaha, Nebraska, told Insider that Biden's statement is "exactly what we needed at this time." BCTGM told Insider that it "whole-heartedly" agrees with the president.

Osborn said that, even as members out on strike start defaulting on their mortgages, and facing down winter conditions, "we're still out there."

"We have people battling cancer. It's going to really affect negatively our relationships with our spouses," Osborn said. "That's the reality and that's the gravity of the situation we're finding ourselves in, but, at the end of it, we still believe in what we're fighting for."

"They can permanently replace us and they could try to start our factories up without us. They can make as much as they want. If they're not selling it, then they're gonna be in trouble."

Biden's support marks another prominent voice coming out in support of the strikers, and is consistent with his positions on labor. He has said that he means to be "the most pro-union president, leading the most pro-union administration in American history." He's thrown his support behind the PRO Act, a labor-rights bill, with some of its provisions appearing in the Build Back Better Act.

"Unions built the middle class of this country," Biden said. "My unyielding support for unions includes support for collective bargaining, and I will aggressively defend both."

U.S., Australia, Denmark, Norway to curb tech exports to human rights abusers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House announced on Friday that Australia, Denmark and Norway would join it in an effort to curb technology exports to governments that use the products for repression

.

© Reuters/JONATHAN ERNST A general view of the sun rising behind the White House in Washington

The White House said last week it was forming the group to address "the misuse of certain dual-use technologies that can lead to human rights abuses" and ensure that "critical and emerging technologies work for and not against democratic societies."

On Friday, it revealed the names of countries pledging to work with it on the endeavor, adding that Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom supported the move.

"Over the coming year of action, we commit to working to establish a voluntary, nonbinding written code of conduct around which like-minded states could politically pledge, to use export control tools to prevent the proliferation of software and other technologies used to enable serious human rights abuses," the member countries said in a statement.

The announcement was made as part of U.S. President Joe Biden's Dec. 9-10 Summit for Democracy, with the goal of helping stop democratic backsliding and the erosion of rights and freedoms worldwide. The summit invitation list did not include China or Russia.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Paul Simao)

In pictures: Milky Way shines above ruins of Syria's war

Syrians can observe the galaxy from ruins and camps in northwestern Syria, now home to those displaced by the country's nine-year-long war

Asaad al-Asaad
27 September 2020 

SEE THE REST HERE

In pictures: Milky Way shines above ruins of Syria's war | Middle East Eye