NEWSCIVIL RIGHTS

In just a few days, more than 65,000 people have joined the campaign led by UC Davis student David Buscho, calling for the immediate resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi after student demonstrators were brutally pepper-sprayed while peacefully sitting on the ground.

David was one of the students who was pepper-sprayed. In an interview about the incident, he recaps what it was like for he and his girlfriend to be pepper-sprayed:

"I had my arms around my girlfriend. I just kissed her on the forehead and then he sprayed us. Immediately we were blinded," Buscho told The AP. "So I was sitting their blind, suffocating. My girlfriend was writhing in pain. I wanted to touch her but my hands were covered in pepper spray."

Malawi is often referred to as "the warm heart of Africa," but concerned citizens who are calling for changes to the country's economic conditions have been met with violent cruelty by the country's security forces. At the end of July, 19 people were killed in protests across the country.

Facing a deteriorating economy, trade unions and civil society organizations presented Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika with proposals for addressing the country's rising fuel costs, electricity shortages, foreign exchange shortages, corruption, financial mismanagement, problems with higher education, attacks on freedom of the press and other issues. Joining together under the theme "Uniting for Peaceful Resistance Against Poor Economic and Democratic Governance: A Better Malawi is Possible," citizens rallied across the country on July 20th. While the demonstrations were peaceful, security forces violently repressed demonstrations, killed 19 people, arrested around 500 individuals and assaulted and arrested several members of the press.

In response to growing repression on behalf of Mutharika's government, the US has frozen $350 million in aid to the country. Britain froze aid earlier in the year due to a diplomatic dispute. Civil society organizations had originally planned to hold vigils across the country this week in order to honor those who were killed during the demonstrations and to continue to put pressure on the government to address their concerns. However, government officials obtained a court injunction to prevent these events and organizations leading the movement decided to postpone the vigils.

The vigils were postponed amid growing tension in the country as the President continued to publicly demonize human rights organizations. According to Amnesty International, Mutharika called the July demonstrations "the work of Satan" and he threatened to "smoke out the organizers" while some prominent advocates received death threats. Currently, civil society organizations are working to establish a dialogue with the government that is being mediated by the United Nations. However, even though demonstrations have been postponed, a heightened police presence on the day when protests were previously scheduled to occur was evident across the country.

The Malawi Congress of Trade Unions has started a petition on Change.org calling on President Mutharika to cease attacks on civil society organizations, begin a genuine dialogue around citizens' concerns and to respect freedom of association and expression. You can show your solidarity with these brave human rights advocates facing extraordinary risks for their efforts to exercise their rights by signing the petition here.

Photo credit: tlupic

After six Fullerton Police officers beat a mentally ill, homeless man so severely on July 5 that he died from his injuries five days later, outraged residents of the Orange County, Calif., city demanded action—namely that the police chief and officers in question be held responsible. Now, Chief Michael Sellers and the six officers are on leave. But key footage that captured the beating of 37-year-old Kelly Thomas remains under wraps because Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas refuses to release it until an investigation of the beating, likely to take months, is complete.

It’s a move that Fullerton Councilman Bruce Whitaker finds objectionable. “I fully support and urge any efforts which will result in a clear and complete explanation of events which led to the death of Kelly J. Thomas and insist that related evidence, including video and audio recordings be made public,” Whitaker stated.

Whitaker’s far from alone. A Change.org petition demanding that the footage be made public has garnered more than 2,400 signatures. Edward Singh—a resident of La Mirada, Calif., which is near Fullerton—said he launched the petition because the audio he heard of Thomas’ beating left him heartbroken. “I can still to this day hear his voice screaming for his dad while he’s being beaten to death,” Singh said.

The public has rallied around Thomas in death because the homeless man was a familiar face on Fullerton’s streets and a known schizophrenic. Thomas’ mental illness may have led him to allegedly flee from officers when they tried to search his backpack during an investigation of attempted car burglaries at a transit center. The fatal beating ensued. In addition, Thomas was reportedly stunned with an electroshock gun several times.

While the public has organized protests to speak out against the Thomas beating and demand justice, the call to release the video footage has fallen on deaf ears. District Attorney Rackauckas has only stated that the footage he’s seen doesn’t indicate that the officers intentionally tried to kill Thomas. Moreover, when Councilman Whitaker urged for release of the footage, Fullerton Mayor Richard M. Jones stressed that the councilman was only speaking for himself and told a news blog called Fullerton Stories, “It’s just not good to speculate on things until we know all the facts.”

The irony of this, of course, is that withholding the video footage prevents the public from knowing all of the facts.

“By releasing the video people could be made more aware,” Singh said. “The reality is that this (police brutality) happens all too often, and cops get away with a slap on the wrist.”

Don’t let that happen. Demand that the footage of Thomas’ beating be released at once!

Photo Credit: Dave Conner

After 18 months of strategizing, inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California launched a headline-grabbing hunger strike on July 1 that put the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation under intense media scrutiny. Not only did California papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times weigh in on the strike, the New York Times and the Guardian of London featured opinion pieces in support of the strikers. To boot, prisoners at 13 other California prisons joined the strike as well, and a Change.org petition urging CDCR to meet the prisoners’ demands has netted more than 9,500 signatures.

A major reason the strikers have garnered so much support is because their demands are far from exorbitant. The prisoners demanded an end to long-term solitary confinement, group punishments by race and too small portions of food, to name a few. According to Marilyn McMahon, the California Prison Focus attorney who started the Change.org petition:

“California keeps prisoners basically in solitary confinement for decades, more than 20 years, and I believe that’s torture under international law…The demands they (the strikers) put forward were really modest and so reasonable, most people could look at them and sign (the petition) to say yes.”

High Representative and European Commission Vice President Catherine Ashton formally responds to Saudi women’s Change.org campaigns asking her to support for Saudi women’s right to drive; calls on Saudi Arabia to implement UN anti-discrimination convention.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has called on Saudi Arabia to implement an international women’s rights convention in a letter to Saudi women fighting for the right to drive.

The letter, signed July 6 and received by Saudi Women for Driving on Wednesday, directly calls on Saudi Arabia to implement the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a rare statement of criticism for such a senior diplomat.

More than two-and-a-half years have passed since Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a police officer as he lay face down on a train platform in Oakland, California.

Now his family and friends are bracing for the release of his killer from jail.

As soon as June 13, ex-Bay Area Rapid Transit cop Johannes Mehserle may be released from the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles. That’s less than a year after he entered the facility in July following a conviction of involuntary manslaughter for killing the 22-year-old Grant early on New Year’s Day 2009 while detaining him and his friends for allegedly fighting on a train.

Why so little time for taking a life?

Despite going through multiple security screenings and being cleared to fly, two Imams were kicked off a Delta flight last week because the pilot said he was not comfortable flying with them aboard.

These Muslim religious leaders, ironically on their way to a conference on fear of Islam, were two of seven Imams who were denied boarding on their way to the conference.

Over 1,200 activists on Change.org have already stood with the Imams, demanding that Delta publicly apologize, institute new non-discrimination and sensitivity training for all pilots and flight crew about religious tolerance, and create a set of public guidelines and consequences for any employee who violates the code of conduct. You can join the campaign and sign the petition here, calling on Delta to do the right thing.

When a few passengers on an Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight, a carrier run by Delta, noticed two imams dressed in Islamic garb on their flight on Friday, they asked that the passengers be removed.

So what did the pilot do? He went right ahead and kicked the Muslim passengers off the flight!

Masudur Rahman and Mohamed Zaghloul, who hold high religious positions in the Muslim community, were heading from Tennessee to North Carolina when the incident occurred. According to Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations, the men "went through security, even went through secondary security, and got on the plane."

The plane was taxiing out when the passengers complained that they were uncomfortable with the men being on their flight.

In an ironic twist of fate, the men were headed to North Carolina for a conference on prejudice against Muslims, or Islamaphobia.

Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky served time in prison even before murdering Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters four years ago during a home invasion in Cheshire, Conn.

During the criminal proceedings for the murders, it surfaced that Hayes had read a book called In the Middle of the Night: the Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood and other violent materials while locked up for previous crimes.

That discovery prompted Connecticut state Sen. John Kissel to ask state Corrections Commissioner Leo Arnone to crack down on the reading materials available to prisoners. In July, Arnone said that a new policy would be instituted that would impose additional restrictions on the literature in prison libraries.

With only 150 signatures sent to Georgia legislatures, a local Native American tribe has successfully used Change.org to get a discriminatory bill dropped!

One of the Creek Tribes, the Kialegee Tribal Town, wanted to come home. Then the Georgia State Legislators tried to prevent Indian Tribes that are recognized by the state from acquiring land for purposes other than casinos.

After the legislators got over 100 e-mails through this Change.org campaign, the House Judiciary Committee signed off the bill as "died in committee."

"We’ve drawn a line in the dirt, and it happens to be our dirt," said Wallace Seabolt of The Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee, who started the petition. "We don’t ask anything except to be allowed to practice out culture, our traditions, and to share that... I think Change.org is really great. I’ll be in touch if there are any more things we need to work on.”

These tribes are recognized by Georgia and the bill (SB 62) would have unconstitutionally placed a severe hardship to require them to wait until the General Assembly is in session to get approval for a purchase or transfer of land. Local Native American activists argued, successfully, that such a policy would constitute illegal interference over American Indian tribes and violate the American Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, Subsection 1302(8).

A big congrats to everyone involved, and thanks for taking action!