NEWSHUMANITARIAN LAW

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.”

International campaign successfully encourages German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) to withdraw from supportive role in the construction of an Israeli train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that crosses Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories.

German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) has announced that it will no longer participate in the construction of a high-speed Israeli train line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the route passes through occupied Palestinian territory yet is intended for the exclusive use of Israeli citizens.

The news comes after an international campaign let by German, Palestinian, and Israeli activists calling on the Deutsche Bahn Group to withdraw from the project, which activists claim violates international law.

The line is set to cut travel time between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to 28 minutes and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Deutsche Bahn was consulting with Israel Railways on the electrification of the route. According to a report in Der Spiegel, Germany’s Federal Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer told Deutsche Bahn CEO that the project was politically “problematic” and violated the “terms of international law.”

Update: BP has now stopped all business with Libya, and growing sanctions may soon stop others as well.

As unrest in Libya grew into full fledged violent clashes, Change.org member Alyssa Kwan saw a crucial chance to make a difference: calling on BP, one of the largest companies doing business with the Gaddafi regime, to suspend operations in Libya.

She launched a concise and effective petition, which quickly gathered more than 2,500 signatures. The UN seemed to agree with the sentiment, imposing sanctions on the current Libyan government and referring several members of the regime to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Earlier this week a group of Libyan activists launched a petiton calling for Malta to grant asylum to two Libyan pilots who defected to the small island nation last Monday. Within 24 hours they had tens of thousands of signatures, more than 1,000 signatures an hour!

Who are these folks?

ENOUGH! Gaddafi is a group of grassroots Libyan activists both inside and outside the country, working together to bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the long time dictator of Libya. Calling themselves a new voice of dissent against the Gaddafi regime, ENOUGH! Gaddafi seeks to utilize grassroots Libyan activism to "promote the ability of the Libyan people to overcome the limitations imposed upon them by an illegitimate and unjust government."

Last week, two Libyan pilots were ordered to bomb civilian protesters by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. They faced an unimaginable choice: bomb their countrymen or face likely execution if they returned without carrying out the attacks. Instead, they found a third option - flying their planes out of Libya and defecting to the nearby island nation of Malta. In doing so, they saved the lives of untold numbers of their fellow Libyans.

But ever since Malta's Refugee Commissioner Mario Guido Friggieri and other government officials have refused to say whether they will give these pilots asylum.

A group of Libyan activists have gathered tens of thousands of signatures in under 24 hours on a petition calling for Malta to grant asylum to two Libyan pilots who defected to the small island nation last Monday.

That's more than 1,000 signatures an hour!

These pilots faced an unimaginable choice: bomb their countrymen or face likely execution if they returned without carrying out the attacks. Instead, they found a third option - flying their Mirage jets out of Libya and defecting to the nearby island nation of Malta.

In doing so, they saved the lives of untold numbers of their fellow Libyans.

But to date the Maltese government has been silent as to the fate of the two pilots, and the decision rests with Malta's Refugee Commissioner Mario Guido Friggieri.

You live in one of the poorest countries on earth, with one of the worst quality-of-life indexes in the world, among the top five worst inflation rates on earth, at the bottom of the global list of a per capita GDP.

Living in Ghana could be easier. But for the country's urban poor, it's about to get even worse.

The Ghanaian government has imminent plans to evict thousands of destitute city dwellers from the Agbogbloshie area around the railways lines in the country's capital Accra.

Known as the "Railway Dwellers," the families living in makeshift homes within 50 feet of the train lines were given until mid-December to vacate the area or face homelessness.

The government decided to forcibly move the "Railway Dwellers" after signing a $6 billion contract with a Chinese company to completely overhaul the country's railways last month.

While that might sound just dandy, the problem is that local authorities have not given the "Railway Dwellers" any alternative housing. On the contrary, municipal officials simply rolled into the informal railway settlement with megaphones a couple weeks ago ordering residents to get out within two weeks - not the most sensitive of national development strategies.

As the "Railway Dwellers" organize against the forced evictions, Amnesty International has taken the lead in urging the Ghanaian authorities to abide by international law, which clearly forbids such forced evictions, even if those living on the land have no legal rights to it.

While the international community focuses on the ongoing tension between the two Koreas, for many on this small peninsula, border tensions are the least of their worries - what truly concerns them is their next required health check and the HIV test that comes with it.

What happens to someone who tests positive? Does such a result lead to counseling and medication? Nope, it leads to immediate deportation to your native country.

Suffice it to say, South Korea is not the place to test positive.

Israel inflicted incredible damage to local civilian infrastructure in the 2006 Lebanon war.

In the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary force that controls most of southern Lebanon, Israel bombed bridges, roads, schools, medical clinics, power stations, even the Beirut international airport. Vast swaths of southern Lebanon were left uninhabitable due to unexploded Israeli cluster bombs, and the Israeli bombing of the Jiyeh power station caused the largest ever oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea and created a 'toxic cloud' which rained oil all over Lebanon. The country still has not recovered from the war, with the Lebanese government saying it would take at least 10 years to rebuild the damage done to civilian infrastructure.

What is the Lebanese Defense Minister doing to protect his country's civilians and national infrastructure?

Giving advice to Israel.

In yet another diplomatic bombshell revealed by Wikileak's publication earlier this week of over a quarter million US diplomatic wires, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr is revealed to have offered advice on how Israel could defeat Hezbollah in what many see as an inevitable repeat of the 2006 war.

"Israel cannot bomb bridges and infrastructure in the Christian areas," Murr was quoted as telling diplomats at the US in the Lebanese capital of Beirut on March 10, 2008. "The Christians were supporting Israel in 2006 until they started bombing their bridges."