NEWSBYKATY GLENN

Beirut is often hailed as the “gay capital of the Arab world.”  Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) folks from all over the Middle East -- and around the world -- flock to the city for its cosmopolitan, liberal vibe and its legendary gay clubs.

Yet this progressive reputation belies the Lebanese government’s official stance on LGBT rights.  Lebanon criminalizes “unnatural sexual intercourse” with penalties ranging from fines to one year in prison, and the police apply this law broadly, using it against not only homosexuals, but also transgender persons and LGBT sex workers.  Beirut may be more tolerant than other areas of the Middle East, but the LGBT community here still faces discrimination, harassment and abuse as part of their daily lives.

Responding to the mistreatment they face, and the general lack of awareness in Lebanon about LGBT issues, Beirut’s LGBT community is getting organized.  Several groups have formed in Beirut in recent years to raise awareness of LGBT issues and to fight for human rights.  Among these are Helem, formed in 2004 to wage “a peaceful struggle for the liberation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender, and other persons with non-conforming sexuality or gender identity,” Meem, a group for lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons, and the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality, which acts as a support network for gender and sexual rights activists.

Governments trying to prevent future charges of corruption have several options.

They can implement measures designed to make government actions as transparent as possible.  They can establish independent bodies charged with monitoring and investigating all allegations of bribery, embezzlement and the like.  Or they can pass a law that lets them designate any and all information as classified, so that no one can ever find out who was corrupt and how much money was skimmed off the top or pocketed as a bribe.

Guess which option South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) wants to pick?

Last week asylum seeker Jimmy Mubenga died while being deported from the United Kingdom and flown back to Angola.

Upon boarding an October 12 British Airways flight in the custody of G4S, a private security group which has a contract with the UK government to escort deportees out of the country, Mubenga's guards restrained him in a manner so brutal that according to several witnesses they appear to have suffocated him.

To make matters worse, the UK Home Office and G4S shamefully tried to obfuscate the cause of Mubenga's death, claiming that he became ill while on the flight.  One witness found this lie so outrageous that he contacted the Guardian, giving the newspaper his account of three physically imposing security guards holding Mubenga down as he called for help and said he could not breath.

If you've been following headlines in recent months, you already know that Zimbabwe has a problem with blood diamonds.  As if the country didn't have enough trouble already, the Marange fields in Chiadzwa, an area in eastern Zimbabwe, were found to be incredibly diamond-rich in 2006.  Marange is one of the biggest finds in recent memory, and possibly the largest source of alluvial diamonds in the world.

The fields were owned first by De Beers and then by another diamond company, but neither began large-scale operations.  It wasn't until desperate Zimbabweans took to the fields in the hopes of finding something that would allow them to feed their families that the scale of Marange's wealth was discovered.  As soon as it was, Mugabe's security forces wasted no time pushing the rural peasants off the land.  Between 2006 and 2008, thousands of people were arrested, beaten, tortured, or killed.  Human Rights Watch puts the number of murders at over 200.  Those responsible for the violence have profited handsomely; Minister of Mines Obert Mpofu recently went on a multi-million-dollar property-buying spree, and top military brass allied with Robert Mugabe are reportedly enjoying paydays in the millions.

Zimbabwe's newfound diamond wealth, and the violence surrounding it, thrust the Kimberley Process back into the spotlight for the first time since the end of the civil wars that led to its creation.  Given the reports of violence at the Marange fields, and the blaring headlines about Zimbabwe's blood diamonds, it's natural to look to the Kimberley Process (KP) -- the idea is to clean up diamond mining, right?  Well, not exactly.  KP was an admirable attempt to stop a specific problem:  conflict diamonds.  In the 1980s and 90s, rebel forces in Sierra Leone and Angola (among other countries) used revenue from diamonds mined in rebel-held territories to finance their activities, and thus to finance bloodshed.  Hence "blood diamond."  KP aimed to fix that issue by establishing a certification scheme that ensured diamonds entering the international market were not funding armed conflicts.  Whether the certification scheme is all that good at tracking blood diamonds is a topic for another day, but the scheme was decidedly not designed for situations like Zimbabwe's.  Nevertheless, many in the international human rights community expected the Kimberley Process to reprimand Zimbabwe by refusing to certify its diamonds.

After months of deliberation, clumsy attempts at reform, and the appointment of an "independent" monitor with disastrous results, the Kimberley Process green-lighted diamond exports from Zimbabwe in July 2010.  A US-based diamond trading group subsequently imposed its own ban, but sales of Zimbabwe's diamonds continue to willing buyers, many in Asia.  Human rights groups roundly criticized KP's approval of diamond sales, and it has taken some serious credibility hits as a result of its actions towards Zimbabwe.

(This is the third post in a series on the business and human rights implications of international adoption.)

Earlier posts discussed corruption in international adoptions, caused primarily by the large sums of money that change hands during many adoptions.  These problems have not gone unnoticed by the international community.  In fact, as early as 1993 an attempt was made to better regulate the international adoption industry by establishing an international treaty, the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.

Unlike many international agreements pertaining to children, which sometimes include a brief mention of adoption within a broad list of children's rights, the Hague Convention addresses the process of international adoption in detail.   The Convention’s most noteworthy contribution is the requirement that each party to the Convention establish a Central Authority to oversee the adoption process (arts. 6-9).  The Central Authority is charged with supervising every international adoption of a child within its borders, including tracking and retaining information on each step of an adoption, and keeping records for the adopted child and the adoptive parents.  The Central Authority also works to prevent corruption in the adoption industry and promotes adoption counseling and post-adoption services.

The Convention is not without its shortcomings.  Its most important section, "Requirements for intercountry adoptions," is vague and weak (arts. 4-5).  After beginning with the unhelpful statement that in order for a child to be adopted, the relevant authorities must determine that the child is "adoptable", it offers hardly any requirements.  It is left to States Parties (countries that have ratified the Convention) to determine whose consent is required for an adoption to take place.  The Convention does not even require that a child's biological parents, if living, consent to the adoption.  Nor does the Convention provide any guidelines for determining how much compensation is reasonable for agencies to request when facilitating an adoption.  Amending the treaty to obligate States Parties to require informed consent from a child's closest surviving biological relatives or guardians, and to place limits on compensation to adoption agencies, would strengthen the treaty considerably and make it easier for all countries to combat corruption within the adoption industry.

(This is the second post in a series on the business and human rights implications of international adoption.)

The first post on the business of international adoption identified a key problem with the current system for locating and adopting children across international borders. Adoption agencies located in the child’s birth country typically receive fees of thousands of dollars — sometimes over $10,000 — for each adoption.  These fees provide an incentive for some unscrupulous agencies to resort to unethical measures, including deceit, coercion, and at times outright kidnapping, to procure healthy young children to offer for adoption.

To illustrate this, look at Liberia, a nation emerging from a long and brutal civil war that destroyed huge swathes of the country and tore apart families. In recent years, Liberia has experienced growing popularity as a location for adoptive parents to seek children. This is due in part to the fact that Liberia does not currently have a strong system in place for regulating adoptions, meaning that the process is faster (and by extension, less expensive) for adoptive parents. Liberia is not a party to the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, an international treaty written in an effort to provide adequate safeguards for international adoptions around the world. (The Hague Convention will be discussed in more detail in the next post.)

The vast majority of Liberians are extremely poor. The country's per capita income was estimated at $500 in 2009. When this widespread poverty is combined with the opportunity to make thousands of dollars for each successful international adoption, and the relative lack of red tape involved in finalizing adoptions and permitting children to leave the country with their adoptive parents, it should not be surprising that reports have emerged of corruption within orphanages and adoption agencies.

A 2008 investigation in Liberia by a BBC reporter posing as a prospective adoptive parent found that agents for some orphanages persuade parents to relinquish their children into the agent’s custody by promising that the child will receive a free education, room and board.  The parents are often unaware that their children are being offered for adoption, and in some cases, discover the truth only after their child has left the country with new parents. Liberia’s Minister of Gender and Development told the BBC that adoption is a lucrative business in the country, and those involved want to make sure they stay in business. A 2007 report on Liberia’s orphanages authored by the United Nations Mission in Liberia confirms the BBC’s findings on how some children end up in orphanages and the financial motivations of some adoption agents.  These reports indicate that at least some of the children offered for adoption in Liberia are actually victims of child trafficking. Concerns about corrupt adoption practices became so acute that the government officially suspended all international adoptions in January 2009, and has yet to lift that suspension.

International adoptions have gotten a lot of press in recent years.  Stories of celebrities adopting children from other countries are so common that such adoptions are hardly even considered trendy anymore.  Celebrity adoptions have fueled the popularity of international adoptions in the U.S., with over 10,000 children arriving from abroad each year.

This is the first in a series of posts on the business of international adoption, highlighting problems in the current system for adopting children across international borders.  These problems largely stem from the fact that international adoption, in addition to being a means for uniting children with adoptive parents, is also a lucrative business.  International adoptions are expensive.  Prospective parents must pay fees associated with their application, homestudy, and post-placement services, as well as travel costs and program fees paid to an adoption agency in the child's home country.

These agency fees pose the biggest problem.  Even when a family is using an adoption agency based in the U.S., that agency typically works with an agency in the adopted child's home country.  Many of the countries from which U.S. families adopt are far less developed and less wealthy than the United States (see here for a list of the 20 most common countries of origin for adopted children).  According to adoption.com, families seeking to adopt should budget for an agency fee of between $7,500 and $30,000.  That's a lot of money anywhere, but particularly in a country like Haiti or Liberia.

Julius Malema has made an appearance on this site before, but the hits keep on coming.  Malema is the president of the African National Congress' (ANC) Youth League. At this point, he has managed to offend almost everyone in South Africa, between suggesting that the woman who accused now-President Jacob Zuma of rape must have had a "nice time," insisting on singing an ANC protest song from the apartheid era that includes the lyrics "Shoot the Boer," and posing as a populist leader while enjoying a champagne lifestyle.

For months, the ANC appeared unbothered by Malema's controversial comments.  His statements were met with no comment from the ANC's top brass, likely because Malema's close relationship with President Jacob Zuma is well-known. Malema's name has been floated repeatedly as a potential presidential candidate when Zuma's term expires.

Recent weeks may have changed all that. The ANC is preparing South Africa for what everyone hopes will be a spectacular 2010 World Cup, but political events have taken a sudden turn for the worse with the murder of Eugene Terre'Blanche, which has sparked tremendous racial tension throughout the country at precisely the moment South Africa is trying to convince tourists to visit.

When Ernest Bai Koroma ran for president in 2007 on an anti-corruption platform, Sierra Leoneans had good reason to be skeptical. Koroma was the All People’s Congress (APC) candidate, the party that had been in power when the Revolutionary United Front began Sierra Leone’s civil war. The APC’s corruption, poor governance, and repression of opposition was in part responsible for the onset of the war. And of course, in too many elections in developing countries, candidates promise to fight corruption, then get into office and promptly begin treating the treasury like their personal bank account.

Koroma was not particularly well-known in Sierra Leone before working his way up through the ranks of the APC. An insurance broker from Makeni, he promised to run the state "like a business concern." Whether because they believed him or simply because they liked him more than the rather uninspiring Solomon Berewa, his main opponent in the race, Sierra Leoneans voted him into office in an election that was largely free, fair, and orderly — no small feat for a country in which every resident has recent, painful memories of violence and anarchy.

Prince Johnson may not be as famous as President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf outside of Liberia, but within the country he could certainly give her a run for her money. The man wears many hats: In the turbulent 1990s, he led the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), a splinter group of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, run by none other than Charles Taylor. He is currently a senator, representing Nimba County. However, Prince Johnson’s notoriety stems not from his senatorial clout, nor even from his warlord days. Mostly people know him as the man who enjoyed a Budweiser while he watched his men cut off former President Samuel Doe’s ears. The moment is memorialized on video, still reportedly available in the markets of Monrovia, though during the three months I lived there, I never felt the need to see it for myself.

Doe’s fate — he was tortured and then killed by Johnson’s men in 1990 — was not uncommon in Liberia, as he had come to power in 1980 by summarily executing the previous president, William Tolbert, along with Tolbert’s entire cabinet. But even in a country that has endured decades of unspeakably brutal violence and a long civil war, Prince Johnson is widely known and feared for his, shall we say, “might makes right” way of doing business. And now? He’s running for president!

Look, he’s not the only person in Liberia with a checkered past. Even Ellen Johnson Sirleaf supported Charles Taylor in the early years of his rule, and Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation made a controversial recommendation that she be barred from seeking office for 30 years as a result of this support. (Johnson Sirleaf announced in January that she will run for re-election, despite this recommendation.) But Prince Johnson is on film torturing a man to death.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s term expires in 2011, and Liberia is preparing for elections. Undoubtedly, the decisions regarding who gets to run, and who wins, are for Liberians alone to make. However, the international community, and in particular the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), can help ensure that Liberia’s elections are truly free and fair by keeping a close watch on the behavior of all candidates. In particular, threats of renewed violence or retribution against those who do not vote for a particular candidate must be monitored and swiftly addressed.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons