21st edition – Invisible – Pike & Hurricane

Human Rights Under Fire

Hossein Kazemi — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 11:26:28 +0000

In recent months, the United Nations has come under fire for electing Saudi Arabia’s ambassador Faisal bin Hassan Trad to chair the UN Human Rights Councils panel of experts. The panel selects senior officials who draft international human rights standards and write reports on violations. Nonetheless, the Council has long been the subject of criticism for granting membership to countries with dubious human rights records.

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is supposed to function as a key inter-governmental body with 47 member states for promoting and protecting human rights around the world. The term of each seat is three years, and no member may occupy a seat for more than two consecutive terms. On the list of member countries one can see names such as Netherlands, China, United States, Qatar, Russia, United Kingdom, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia.

The latest criticism stirred up after UN Watch, an independent NGO monitoring UN, has found that the appointment was made in June 2015 but went unreported until September. In the aftermath, diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks exposed that Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia back in November 2013 in New York, to ensure both states are elected to the UN human rights council in 2015. Another cable also revealed that Saudi Arabia transferred $100,000 to Britain for “expenditures resulting from the campaign to nominate Saudi Arabia for membership of the human rights council for the period 2014-2016”. Saudi Arabia had earlier this year sought the leadership slot of the entire Human Rights Council of the U.N., a move that drew criticism given the country’s disastrous human rights record.

UN Watch executive director, Hillel Neuer, commented on the issue in a statement: “This UN appointment is like making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief, and underscores the credibility deficit of a Human Rights Council that already counts Russia, Cuba, China, Qatar and Venezuela among its elected members. . . . Petro-dollars and politics have trumped human rights.”

With a glance at the human right record of a country where women are not allowed to drive yet with the help of Britain was appointed as head of UNHRC, it can be seen that Saudi Arabia continues to be at the bottom of human right reports rankings. In recent instances, three notable cases could draw international attention. In June 2015 Supreme Court of Saudi Arabia upheld a sentence of 10 years prison and 1,000 lashes for blogger Raif Badawi for insulting Islam. Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, Philip Luther, said in a statement: “Blogging is not a crime and Raif Badawi is being punished merely for daring to exercise his right to freedom of expression.”

In another case a teenage boy named Ali al-Nimr was sentenced to beheading and crucifixion for participating in Arab Spring anti-government protests in 2012. He was at age 17 at the time of arrest. The government has said he attacked police and rioted, but the only known evidence is a confession seemingly made under torture that left him in a bloody mess. “When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognise him,” his mother, Nusra al-Ahmed, told The Guardian. “I didn’t know whether this really was my son Ali or not.” Al-Nimr’s trial was called unfair by United Nations expert Christof Heyns and Amnesty International, who called for stoppage of execution.

Following his bad reputation, Saudi Arabian court sentenced Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh to death for apostasy according to trial documents seen by Human Rights Watch. Fayadh was detained by the country’s religious police in 2013 in Abha, in southwest Saudi Arabia, and then rearrested and tried in early 2014. Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system also executes “witches” and gay people.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been supporter of Wahhabi schools in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with starting a brutal war in Yemen. Saudi airstrikes have killed thousands, and the blockading of ports has been even more devastating. Some Yemeni children are starving, and 80 percent of Yemenis now need assistance.
Despite many distressing facts, when it comes to human rights, Western governments tend to turn a blind eye and dear ear about the issue since they see Saudi Arabia as their political ally in the region and a partner who is a major exporter of oil and gas.

Following the Wikileaks disclosure about Britain’s role and Saudi Arabia record in human right some observers have questioned functionality of UNHRC and if member countries such as Saudi Arabia should have a seat there at all. Can human right benefit from such organisations that are overshadowed by political and economical relations?
As one example of the possible damaging effects of Saudi Arabia post appointment, Saudi’s objections halts proposed plans by Netherland in late September for an international inquiry into human rights violations by all parties in the war in Yemen. A war that has killed thousands of civilians in the past six months by the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

Photo credits:

Picture 1: CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Georgina Cope for Number 10, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Picture 3: Pierre Albouy for UN Geneva, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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The Invisible: The Mentally Ill People of China

Martina Frappa — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 11:25:15 +0000

It’s no big news that men cannot easily cope with what is unknown to them. History has repeatedly shown us how diversity is often matched with hostility or worse, indifference. Sadly, this is still the case of mentally ill people in China: “The Invisible”. In the most populous country on earth, with 1.3 billion people inside its borders, more than 100 million cases of mental illness have been diagnosed among the population according to a 2009 report by China’s National Centre for Mental Health. Only 20% out of this number has been given assistance.

When it comes to mental illness, every society has seen its difficulties to deal with it. Often labelled as “dangerous” or “crazy subjects”, these patients have faced long periods of suffering and trouble in the past. It was only when society and medicine made progress, that these people have been finally recognised as victims in need of special assistance rather than criminals that have to be incarcerated. With time, asylums have become mental hospitals, the word “crazy” has been substituted by “mentally unstable” and special care towards these cases has grown parallel with the progress of medicine and psychiatry.

However, in the current People’s Republic of China, improvements are yet far to be made. The extremely inadequate services are not meeting the huge demand for assistance in the country at all. Latest estimates show that there is only one psychiatrist per 100,000 inhabitants available.

Even though the first mental institutions were introduced in the country during the 19th century, mental illness still constitutes a big taboo among the Chinese population. Due to the absence of proper health care centres, most of the mentally ill patients are left on their own and forced to live on the streets in miserable conditions. Completely ignored by the government and considered as monsters that have to be avoided by the population, mentally ill people are left with nothing but bleakness until the day of their death.

Wanted or not everyone during their life has come across someone in need of help and just ignored it.
The image of a man begging at the corner of the street is, and probably will always be, a picture people will be used to, simply assuming the fact that some people in this world are covering that role. That might be the reason why currently, in China, the idea of someone with mental disorder s covered in his own dirt, screaming on the streets and throwing things at kids doesn’t cause surprise or a shock in those walking by every day. The more they scream, the more they are ignored.

However the inevitable fate to which these unfortunates are destined, does not even remotely represent the worst case scenario to which they could be doomed. In China’s rural areas, where 99% of the poor population reside, forms of education and health care are still almost completely absent. In an environment of ignorance and lack of governmental assistance, untrained families are left to deal with the issue of being the only hope for those among their community who suffer of mental illness. It’s in such a precarious situation that the unbelievable has become truth: due to their ignorance about the problem and the consequent incapability to understand it, many families have chosen to cope with their mentally ill relatives by chaining them. Countless are the reported cases of kids, women and men who spent almost their entire life chained as animals either outside or inside their houses.

In what might appear as a medieval, brutal and cruel practice, Chinese rural people actually see in this practice an extremely reasonable solution to the problem. The unpredictability of their behaviour makes any mentally ill a dangerous subject for those around them and therefore, in the eyes of the rural population, they must be controlled and rendered as harmless as possible.

It has been only early this year that the topic has been brought up to the attention of a wider audience by the photographs of a 23 years old Chinese student. Liu Yuyang’s report “At home with mental illness” has shown the world this shocking reality that has been ignored for way too long. By moving around the southern province of Guangdong, Yuyang has been able to capture the unspeakable living conditions of these people with his camera and showed us the kind of “help” that the mentally ill receive by their families. He was able to document the story of Xiao, a father that ties his 5 years old mentally ill daughter with a rope to a wooden stick every morning before going to work, leaving her without pants so that she would not get wet when having to relieve herself. Thanks to Liu’s work, more consciousness about this issue has been brought to the public. New fundraising programs has been created and many have finally received help.

Even though there are several changes that still need to be done, mentally ill people have now been given the chance to hope for a better future. The awareness that has been raised will hopefully provide “The Invisible” with the necessary attention that they deserve and push the rest of the world to do something for them instead of keep looking the other way.

By Martina Frappa

Image Credit:

Picture 1: melenama, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Picture 2: sanna.tugend, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Online Advertisement – an Outdated Business Model?

Michael Schätzlein — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 10:24:08 +0000

Online advertisements are immensely popular with website owners, but are often unwanted by users. Nobody wants to see a 30-second advertisement in order to be able to watch a two-minute video, and nobody likes pop-ups with deliberately hidden “close” buttons. Apart from that, advertisements slow down the sites’ loading process, drain one’s mobile phone’s data limit, and are an additional vulnerability through which malware can enter the device. As a result, a growing number of people resort to installing ad blockers on their devices. This puts the ad industry in a dilemma. New ideas are needed.

The internet is free. A lot of people take this for granted. However, many people forget that hosting a website costs money, and that the hosts need to finance them somehow. Many websites that are not paid for out of the pocket of the person in charge therefore resort to asking for donations, premium memberships, sell their users’ data, or let companies place advertisements on their website.

Advertisements are ubiquitous.

While the global revenue from online advertisement is still experiencing a steep increase, so is the market for ad blockers. In the past year, the ad blockers’ user count has increased by 48%, and for 2016, experts have projected a loss of $21.3 billion in online advertisement revenue through the usage of ad blockers – and these figures only account for the United States. The global user amounts may still be quite low, but the pressure on the online industry is growing.

When the German tabloid BILD, the largest newspaper in Germany, decided a couple of weeks ago to exclude all users running ad blockers from the otherwise free content on their website, and offering a subscription-based service disabling all ads as an alternative, it caused a huge outrage among the German online community. While some showed understanding for the tabloid’s decision, the overall reaction was rather negative. Some people got creative and wrote scripts that circumvent BILDs technical blockades, or plugins that would prevent you from entering the BILD website ever again.

One may feel annoyed by ads.

Not knowing how to deal with the backlash, BILD started to sue against people offering advice on how to circumvent the tabloid’s technical blockade. As a result of the ensuing Streisand Effect, people only became more conscious about the existence of ad blockers and the ways in which one can circumvent BILD’s security.

Even without the ad blockers, a lot of money is being wasted on online advertisement. Internet giant Google, whose revenue stems by 90% from its ad sales, admitted last year that only about 56% of all ads embedded on a website ever get seen for more than one second. Another report by Google-owned Spider.io pointed out that a lot of these ad views were generated by infected computers organised in botnets.

The underlying issue is that everything nowadays is geared towards ad revenue. New solutions must be found. Duolingo, the largest language learning website in the world, is entirely free for its users, without resorting to ad sales or selling user data. Instead, the company lets users practice their newly-acquired language skills through the translation of articles – a service for which the articles’ authors pay a sum to Duolingo. The site has partnered up with CNN and Buzzfeed, for whom Duolingo has users translate articles for their international editions.

A ReCAPTCHA

Duolingo was created by Guatemalan Luis von Ahn, who is also the founder of ReCAPTCHA, an anti-bot tool. Just like Duolingo, ReCAPTCHA uses an alternative business model. Every time users enter a word in order to verify themselves as humans, they help transcribe book and article scans for the website’s clients. The idea behind Duolingo and ReCAPTCHA impressed the internet giants, and Google has since acquired ReCAPTCHA for its own services, and holds a $45 million stake in Duolingo through its investment branch Google Ventures.

Now, Google lets people transcribe books word by word for its Books service, addresses for Google Earth, and articles from the New York Times’ archives, and improves its image recognition algorithms through the displaying of similarly-themed pictures, from which people have to sort the odd man out. However, Google has since drawn criticism for its involvement in ReCAPTCHA. In the beginning of 2015, a woman sued Google in a class-action lawsuit, alleging that Google outsources unpaid labour to its users and thus generating significant revenue and improvement of its services.

In any case, the rise of ad blockers will continue, and website owners will be more and more pressed to seek other business models for their websites. Duolingo and ReCAPTCHA are just two examples of how websites could be financed in the future – one only needs some fantasy.

By Michael Schätzlein

Image credit:

Picture 1: Yuya Sekiguchi, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Hernán Piñera, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Picture 3: Matt Hampel, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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On Bridges and Fences

Carina Vogelsberger — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 10:23:18 +0000

“Building Bridges” – that was the slogan under which Austria proudly presented itself when hosting this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. Only a few months later, however, another event challenged this claim of openness and connecting people: Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’ could no longer be kept within the coastal states and reached the Austrian frontiers. And while the billboards of the song contest disappeared, public discourse shifted from ideas of unity and tolerance to border controls and fence constructions.

Looking back at the course of the crisis, Austria did not get international media coverage before September of this year. At that time, the country experienced an unprecedented influx of refugees due to the spasmodic polices of its neighbour Hungary.
However, Austria’s problems in managing the provision for newcomers started way earlier: the situation in the Erstaufnahmestelle Traiskirchen, Austria’s largest transit camp, is exemplary for the failure to agree on a clear allocation of responsibilities between the national and provincial governments. While the national government claimed that it would be the duty of its local counterparts to provide housing to the new arrivals, the heads of the provincial governments complained about a lack of resources and too little support from the state. In the case of Traiskirchen, the result of these policies was an administrative chaos: supposed to host a maximum of 480 people, at the end of June, the camp accommodated approximately 1.300 refugees, forcing some of its residents to even sleep outside the building. As a consequence, the oppositional parties and the public voiced sever criticism, leading to investigations by Amnesty International in August this year.

Therefore, the new course of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Victor Orban, was an opportunity for the Austrian government to distract from the shortcomings of its own policies. The regained self-confidence may also explain Chancellor Werner Faymann’s comparison of Hungary’s measures with “our continent’s darkest period” in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Backed by the efforts of a strong civil society that emerged out of the demand on volunteers and medical staff at the Hungarian border, Faymann found himself in a save position for such allegations. Conscious that most of the new arrivals, in any case, wanted to continue their journey to Germany, he was more or less freed from any major responsibility.

However, as the influx of people continued, short-term solutions of waving people through became increasingly inadequate and also international critique increased. Bavaria, Germany’s most southern federal state and a direct neighbour of Austria, accused the Austrian government of violating the Dublin regulation and complained about a lack of communication. Meanwhile, further organizational problems at the Austrian-Slovenian frontier became apparent and left the government in need of proving problem-solving competence itself. Yet, first solutions do not seem to be more promising than in other parts of Europe: Recently, Austria’s Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner announced to take “structural measures” that shall grant a secure and ordered crossing at the Slovenian frontier. As turned out later, these measures primarily entail the construction of a fence – formerly the main critique point towards the Hungarian government. According to Mikl-Leitner, this step has become necessary particularly with regard to the criticism from the Austrian population. Despite their tireless efforts, volunteers, NGOs and the police bemoan to be constantly overburdened by the situation which changes almost every day and which is only deteriorating by the ongoing controversy between the state and the provincial governments. The way this dispute is fought out publicly, gives rise to notions of fear and insecurity among the population. Those contribute to xenophobic tensions and fuel the populist discourse of the political right, most prominently the one of the Austrian Freedom Party. Although the latest federal elections left them, again, without major governance competences, the way their claims influence the public debate is astonishingly strong. Moreover, it slowly infiltrates the policies of the social-democratic and conservative circles of the government.

This is particularly true with regard to Austria’s new refugee law, which should come into force, retrospectively, with November 2015 and grants refugees only a temporary right to stay. Furthermore, it tightens the conditions for family reunification. This leads back to the question of who fuels what and whether it isn’t only the political right, but especially policies like these new regulations that strengthen and reaffirm already prevalent prejudices among the local population: by sending people back, as soon as the conditions in their home countries allow it, the law presupposes a lack of interest on the part of the newcomers to fully integrate themselves. This may further serve as an excuse to reduce investments in education and training that would be needed in order to gain access to the labour market. Additionally, limiting the possibilities for family reunification denies refugees the possibility to spare their family members the dangerous, illegal routes to Europe and could be used as an affirmation by the far right, who claim that a large proportion of single men would deliberately leave their wives and children behind. By stating to only react to the anxieties of the people, the government seems to abdicate from its own responsibilities and neglects that the discussed fears may themselves be a result of the policies of the ‘moderate, political middle’.
Overall, it seems as if the allegations amongst the different parties, and especially the dispute between the state and the counties, mainly serve to conceal the inability of either of these actors to handle the current situation effectively. Similar observations can be made for the European Union itself: The insufficient division of competences between the different member states and the commission makes it difficult to agree on a unified response to the current dilemma. This indicates that the ongoing crisis is not so much a refugee or solidarity crisis, as it is often referred to. Rather, the current situation reveals the institutional and structural shortcomings, not only of the European Union, but also of its member states, as the case of Austria shows. This leads to a virtual political standstill, apparent in a culture of doing the least and going a middle way, which brings neither improvement for the people fleeing their homeland, nor does it stop the increasing spread of xenophobic tensions within the continent. However, this must not necessarily mean that we will witness the end of the European project: Isolating oneself from one another by building new fences and walls will not prevent the influx of people as long as war and terror in their own countries do not come to an end.

To conclude, neither for Austria, nor for Europe itself, granting people refuge is a question of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. People will find new ways to enter the European Union – with the only difference that those may be even more dangerous. We are confronted with a structural crisis and whether we are able to overcome it depends on the willingness and capabilities of European and national leaders, and is not so much a question of the population’s solidarity. How we cope with it, nationally and on the European scale, will show whether we can still adorn ourselves with the image of a ‘bridge building’ continent.

By Carina Vogelsberger

Image Credit:

Picture 1: Michael Gubi licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Picture 2: Josh Zakari licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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The Social Cost of Volunteer Work

Céline Sonnenberg — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 10:15:54 +0000

After I graduated from high school I was filled with the wish to see the world, to experience new cultures and to leave the dull day to day live in northern Germany. I was definitely not the only one, who decided to let university wait for another year (or two) and explore the world. In fact so many of my classmates went to New Zealand and Australia that they just accidentally ran into each other from time to time as, all following the holy lines of the Lonely Planet pilgrimage, the hotspots for the backpackers were often the same.

This likeliness of travelers is not a coincidence, it is the result of the huge industry behind it. Backpacking has changed. What was once the search for your own soul and far away cultures, today has become a big business, fulfilling every wish a traveler could have and offering services that range from organized trips and cheap flights for the ones looking for a nice getaway to the new trend voluntourism for the more philanthropic traveler. The sta travel group, a travel agency specializing in making youth oversea journeys as easy as booking an all-inclusive get away to Turkey, sold services for almost a billion US Dollars in 2011.

Next to simply experiencing new cultures and seeing new countries, collecting work experience abroad is the main goals of many young backpackers. A gap year after school is used to learn English, leave the rainy weather of home for a while and ideally make some money while you are at it. In fact the Australian fruit and vegetable industry is so sure that enough northern Europeans are willing to leave their grey day to day life behind to seize the joy of harvesting grapes and take care of kettle in Australian heat, that their sector pretty much relies on this work force.

While Australia keeps advertising their country as a great backpacking location and is happy to welcome the temporary workforce, which is assured to go back to their own countries, they keep intensifying the migration and asylum laws for migrants from troubled regions such as Indonesia. While Australia alone granted their work and travel visas to almost 250 thousand young travelers from all over their world, around 1000 migrants from Africa and the Middle East die each year on their boat trips to Australia, trying to reach a better life in the western country.

Next to the huge work and travel industry baiting thousands of Europeans to New Zealand, Canada and Australia, a new trend has risen, combining the wish to see a different culture, the wish to help and the awareness of the gold star that doing social work will add to your CV: voluntourism. Much like the work and travel industry this sector also focuses on the demands of the paying costumer instead of the people in need.

Voluntourism takes advantage of the young Westerners, trying to help in developing countries and their idea that without work experience abroad getting a job later on will be incredibly hard, by charging up to a thousand dollars for two months full of work, often exceeding the 40 hour week. For many of these so called charity jobs the volunteers also have to find their own accommodation and food- if they are not willing to pay a few dollars extra to the agencies, arranging the stays oversea.

Work placements with children or animals are the most popular ones, as nothing will get you as many facebook-likes as a picture of you holding a brightly smiling orphan or a little baby animal and as we all know: in the end these trips are about making your friends as jealous as possible, while looking extremely selfless. And of course these children should be okay with getting to know new volunteers every three months, as wasting more that two or three months of your precious time on working seems a little exaggerated. After all you still want to see something of the country you are visiting! However labeling these voluntourists as arrogant young westerners or suffering from the pressure of cramming as much extra curricular activities, hobbies and social work in their CVs as humanly possible, ignores that the organizations behind these work placements are anything but social companies. From the thousands of dollars that are paid to work in these project often nothing more than about 20 dollars are given to the actual people in need, running the orphanages or schools in which the voluntourists work.

While we may be sorry for the youngsters just freshly out of high school, spending their hard earned money on these trips and then being gutted about the wrong picture of glorious beaches, happy children and the possibility to be an important partaker in the fight against global inequality, presented to them, the real losers here are the people in the developing world. They are being cheated of money that huge travel companies definitely do not need and it are their children who are suffering from inexperienced kids toying with their education and the emotions, who will have to let go off their so called attachment figures after only a few months and are then expected to welcome the next person with equally open arms. These projects are not made to help the people in the developing world, they are structured to fulfill the expectations of the voluntourist and often at the cost of the people they are supposedly helping.

The real problem is not young westerners wanting to gain experience in other countries or their dreams not being fulfilled, the real problem is the greediness of companies and governments fulfilling these wishes by exploiting people who it will harm a lot deeper than these Western kids looking for an adventure. This ideal of making business of anything once again widens the gap between developed and developing world.

By Céline Sonnenberg

Image Credit:

Picture 1: Michael McDonough, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2

Picture 2: ccbarr, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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