Articles, reports and photo essays
Welcome to the 12th issue of Vol. 3 of Human Rights & Culture. In this issue we have an article by Pepe Panglao, a freelance journalist living and working in Hong Kong, on the recent incident in Manila in which nine hostages were killed. We then have, 'Some Theories on the Causes of Poverty, Ctd.' By Filip Spagnoli. Next Human Rights & Culture continues with our series of articles on Female Genital Mutilation. This article, UK--FGM--Reported Cases Rising in London--Female Genital Mutiliation, Illegal in UK but no prosecutions, was presented by the BBC and kindly submitted by WUNRN. And finally we have a photo essay, Stirring the Fire--A Global Movement to Empower Women & Girls--Photography by Phil Borges
As always, Human Rights & Culture is grateful to all of our contributors.
Human Rights & Culture welcomes contributions in the form of poems, articles or book reviews. All work will be acknowledged accordingly. Please forward your contributions to the addresses given below.
Publications--We are pleased to announce the release of the following publications: The latest issue of Ethics in Action is now available. The State of Human Rights in Ten Asian Nations--2009. Sri Lanka Impunity, Criminal Justice & Human Rights by Basil Fernando and the latest edition of Article 2 is now available.
You may view the previous issues and write your comments at: http://hrculture.blog.humanrights.asia/. Your contributions and comments for future issues may be sent to ahrc@ahrc.asia.
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(Following the tragic massacre of the hostages during the recent incident in Manila, Pepe Panglao presented this article which was reproduced as an External Contribution by the Asian Human Rights Commission--Ed).
HONG KONG/PHILIPPINES: Territories and countries--with and without protection
Pepe Panglao
I am a Filipino and I have a Filipina working in my home as a domestic worker. My family, my worker and I are amongst those fortunate enough, to experience the security and protection afforded to the residents of Hong Kong. Having come from various parts of the Philippines, and being aware of the precarious law and order system in that country, we are grateful that we can live in a territory where one can feel safe and protected.
There are over 140,000 Filipino migrants in Hong Kong who are living and working here as domestic workers, professionals and residents. While most of them have lived most of their adult lives in the Philippines, some were born and grew up in Hong Kong and there is no doubt in my mind that they would all share a deep appreciation to the government of Hong Kong who ensures our safety and protection.
Before coming to Hong Kong, I lived most of my adult life in the southern part of the Philippines where conflicts had since been thriving for decades. It is a place where many Filipinos have not lived in, visited or prefer not to go anywhere near. It is very likely to be the last destination foreign tourists would want to visit due to perpetual travel warnings, despite its splendid beauty. Bombings, kidnappings, protracted wars, hostage taking and killing of people in broad daylight was part of my life being a professional journalist there.
However, this is the life that I had lived with and over 90 million Filipinos back home have to live with it every day of their lives. They have no choice but to accept its realities and to struggle in surviving in it daily as they have no other choice. This is the story and experience of many Filipinos here in Hong Kong and my family and I are included in this group. The experience has left deep imprints in our minds; deep trauma; and to some extent has desensitized us. For many Filipinos living and working here, Hong Kong could be their form of healing and a place to escape to given the assurance of protection and security.
Only a handful of Filipinos come to Hong Kong as tourists as the average Filipinos could not afford it. In fact, the vast majority of Filipinos never have the opportunity to travel abroad. Many of them never even get to see other parts of their own country. Some of them grow old and die without ever owning a Philippine passport or knowing what a visa is. In developed countries and societies, parents of new born babies obtain passports for them days after they are born. For them, having their child's birth recorded is a normal process but there are a great many Filipinos who do not even have records of their own existence.
They have no certificates of birth, no travel documents and even in death they could hardly obtain an official record--their existence simply disappears on paper.
And because of the vagaries of the system even if one has a birth certificate some of them had two birthdays--one is the date on which their mothers recall they were actually born and the other is what was written on official documents.
This is the way of life that most of the Filipinos are trying to escape from. However, there are those who resolve to stay behind and speak out against it. This is the meaning that they had found for themselves. But these people--the human rights defenders, political activists, lawyers, journalists, and countless others who had seen the depth of their people's continuing suffering; and are trying to challenge the status quo, have either been extra-judicially killed or forcibly disappeared. A local source has documented 1,205 cases of extrajudicial killings and 206 cases of forcible disappearance since 2001.
Some of the Filipinos who have resolved to speak out against the ugly reality of their country find it too risky for them to remain there. Out of necessity they chose to leave their families and their homes to come to places like Hong Kong where they can campaign openly about the system and injustices in their country. Historically, due to Hong Kong's close proximity to the Philippines; before Hong Kong became widely known as destination for Filipino domestic workers, it used to be also the haven of the Filipino political dissenters from the Spanish colonial period up to the martial law regime of the late President Ferdinand Marcos.
Hong Kong has shown to many of the Filipino people, particularly those who want to speak against the defects of their own country that it is possible to live and work in a secure and protected environment. The territory of Hong Kong and its people had been the benchmark of a rule of law society, a society which remains the dream of the Filipino people. Hong Kong's ugly past before the introduction of the Independent Commission against Corruption is the reality that we Filipinos had to live every day. Hong Kong today is an example for the Filipino people who work here in safety. This place had shown us the meaning that something is possible; it encourages us to work for our country and to hope that the day will come when we can return home and enjoy the same degree of safety.
However, we cannot achieve this by simply dreaming about it, we have to work hard for it. When a Filipino makes the decision to work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong he or she has to endure the difficulties of living in somebody else's home; to mind their children and to do the cleaning--these are things that back home this same worker would have had somebody else doing for her. Many of the domestic helpers in Hong Kong would be professionals back home but have come here to work due to the lack of jobs in the Philippines. They have waived their social rights and swallowed their pride.
When the hostage taking incident in Manila on August 23, which killed eight Hong Kong residents the Filipinos were also grieving; they felt the same anger and sought the same answers to many questions just as the people of Hong Kong are doing now.
The concerns of the local Filipinos that anger and hatred could be vented on them by some people sympathetic to the family of the hostage victims, is not imagined, they are real and are happening. There had also been instances like this in the past, like the discrimination and isolation of Filipinos following a local newspaper report that they were the carriers of a communicable disease. Also, it has also already been confirmed and an established fact that some employers have already sacked their Filipino domestic workers; others have been verbally abused in the streets due to the Manila hostage taking.
A person known to me was told by her employer that if anyone asks what her nationality is, she was instructed: "Tell them you're an Indonesian"; and some employers are restraining the movement of their workers from going out, supposedly for 'precautionary measures'. However, just because these stories are not known to the public it does not mean that there is no such problem. It illustrates rather the extent of restraint that the Filipino workers have to exercise to avoid provoking their employers because at the end of the day, they are all at the mercy of their employers.
Some workers avoid discussing the hostage incident with their employers and believe that this is the safest way to get past it. They just hide in toilets or their own rooms to cry hard due to the humiliation they feel for this shameful incident--and to make sure they do not draw their employer's attention.
This is not to trivialize the feelings of the families of the hostage victims. I completely agree that that the victims' families and the people in Hong Kong have every right to express their anger and that my family and I owe our safety and protection in living here to the Hong Kong government. However, this feeling of safety is what enables me to speak out on behalf of those workers who are not at liberty to do so. To deny the already growing concern and the existing problem of the needless tension; and to calculate one's statement to avoid offending others does not help. It rather prevents the needed precautionary measures and could deprive the possibility of a dialogue.
Thus, when the Filipinos fear to allow their children to go to the playground or send them to school it is not out of paranoia, it is rather their traumatic response due to the insecure life they used to experience and live with back home. It is not an overreaction for them to believe that the people of Hong Kong might resort to violence out of a misguided sense of revenge. It is simply the fact that this was the lifestyle they lived in the Philippines and they are all too familiar with the concept of bloody revenge.
I do understand the concern that tensions could be misinterpreted by others. However, it would be unfortunate if some people might manipulates and exploit the situation. Evidence of needless reactions are already an established fact, not only in HK, but is being widely discussed in the Philippines. The Philippine government has acknowledged that there had been incidents already. These concerns are not imagined but real.
This article is not intended to hurt the feelings of the families of the hostage victims. I do express my deepest condolences to them. Like them, I have also lost many personal friends due to the continuing extrajudicial killings of activists and journalists--most of the killings involved the police, the military and the people who work for them. The latest was the Maguindanao Massacre, where I lost personal friends and colleagues amongst the 57 who were murdered.
However, it is my duty and obligation as a Filipino to speak against anything that could compromise their safety and security in Hong Kong. Here I can say without fear and reservation that if I was attacked or persecuted for my views and opinions I am confident the law in Hong Kong is capable of protecting me. It is this I have deep respect to the Hong Kong people and the Hong Kong government. The example of Hong Kong is what I continue to dream of having for my country--to have security and protection.
Pepe Panglao is a freelance journalist working and living in Hong Kong
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Some Theories on the Causes of Poverty, Ctd.
Filip Spagnoli | August 25, 2010 at 4:40 pm | Tags: causes of poverty, Charles Karelis, disincentives, family structure, poverty trap, psychology, racism, single parents | Categories: economics, poverty | URL: http://wp.me/pd52p-7Jf
(This is a follow-up from two previous posts).
Why are people poor? A cursory investigation almost always blames the poor for their own poverty. Poor people seems to make stupid choices all of the time. They are disproportionately likely to have children while in their teens, to be an unmarried mother, to drop out of school, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes etc. Non-poor people also engage in this kind of irrational behavior but the costs to them are much smaller. So rationality would tell poor people to stay away from such behavior. The fact that they don't leads many to conclude that poor people are especially irrational, perhaps even dumb.
Many conservatives often adopt this causal theory of poverty, although not always in those terms. Perhaps it's a reaction to liberals who tend to situate the cause of poverty far away from the poor themselves, e.g. racism, capitalism etc. Both camps, however, remove responsibility from the discussion. If you're too dumb to escape poverty, you're not likely to magically develop the responsibility to take your life in your hands. And if outside forces as powerful as racism and capitalism make you poor, no matter how strong your sense of responsibility, you're not likely to win.
A multicausal understanding of poverty seems closer to reality: dumb choices, lack of effort and responsibility and outside forces all contribute to create and maintain poverty, in different measures for different people. It's likely that poor people aren't different from anyone else in this respect: everyone makes dumb choices, lacks responsibility in key moments and suffer the brunt of outside forces, the poor just pay a heavier price. They have smaller margins of error, so they suffer disproportionately from the errors they make. And their reserves and defenses are weaker, so the impact of outside forces is stronger. And we shouldn't forget poverty traps as a cause of poverty (see here, here and here): the more you're down, the more difficult it is to get up again. Partly because of material reasons (for example, the trap of the ghetto or the vicious circle of poverty and ill health), but also because of psychological reasons:
A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before. If we have a sink full of dishes, the prospect of washing a few of them is much more daunting than if there are only a few in the sink to begin with.
Being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.
Image (on left) via Wikipedia
This is a classic example of a poverty trap: being poor makes you poorer. People just get overwhelmed by problems and their ability to cope suffers. It's not just that they are dumb or irresponsible; they're simply overwhelmed. All of us would be, even the smartest and most responsible among us.
It also means that, as Charles Karelis has argued, there's something wrong with the disincentive argument about help to the poor (giving them help reduces their incentives to do something about their situation, like giving unemployment benefits reduces the incentive to find a job). Things may actually be the other way around:
Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own.
Related Articles
The Sting of Poverty (gukurup.wordpress.com)
Bee Sting Theory of Poverty (boston.com)
99 problems but the rich 'aint one (mindhacks.com)
This article may be seen at the P.a.p.--Blog, Human Rights Etc
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(Human Rights & Culture has consistently forwarded reports, articles and poetry on the subject of female genital mutilation. We are grateful to WUNRN for forwarding this latest report--Ed)
UK--FGM--REPORTED CASES RISING IN LONDON--FEMALE GENITAL MUTILIATION ILLEGAL IN UK BUT NO PROSECUTIONS
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11053375
Website Link Includes Video Segment.
The number of cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) reported in London has risen and some procedures are taking place in the city, a doctor has said.
Dr Comfort Momah, who runs a clinic in Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, said she sees 350 women and children a year.
The Met said it was aware that FGM was taking place in London and had intervened in 122 cases since 2008, including 25 times this year.
But it said that as it was a "taboo" subject there had been no prosecutions.
FGM is illegal in the UK and anybody convicted for it can be jailed for up to 14 years. The law protects British citizens even if they undergo the procedure abroad.
Dr Momah, who runs one of the 11 African Well Women Clinics in London, said a majority of the cases she saw were from African countries, including Somalia, Eritrea, Gambia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
'Need to prosecute'
She said: "In London FGM is widely spread and in my clinic we see about 350 women and children with FGM related problems every year and do reversal in about 100 cases every year.
"We do have people calling me or calling other clinics saying I know a circumciser in Leytonstone, I know a doctor who is performing it within the community, but they won't give you the information."
She added that more cases are being reported since 2005.
"I see a lot of teenagers now, self-referring to the clinic and getting information from the internet," the doctor said.
Dr Momah said her clinic sees up to 350 women and children with FGM complications
"We need to prosecute somebody if obviously a child is at risk."
The procedure can cause urinary infections, kidney failure, infertility and death.
Salimata Knight, who underwent the procedure in Senegal, said: "I was forced on the floor and I felt something being cut in me and even at that time I did not know what (it) was because at four-and-half years you are not really aware of what it is.
"It makes people suffer, and suffering has no identity, no race and no culture."
The Met said the number of interventions had risen from 38 in 2008 to 59 in 2009.
Its Project Azure, which engages with the community, said London clinics see about 600 women a year.
Det Con (Detective Constable) Jason Morgan, from Project Azure, said: "It affects girls, often as young as seven-days-old, so the girl might be too young to remember exactly what happened, where it happened and who did it to them."
Kindly submitted by WUNRN http://www.wunrn.com
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Stirring the Fire--A Global Movement to Empower Women & Girls
Photography by Phil Borges
http://www.stirringthefire.org/exhibition/leadership
TRANSITO, AGE 91 - Cayambe, Ecuador
So Many Years, So Many Stories - Beauty of Ageing Women
Kindly submitted by WUNRN http://www.wunrn.com
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Publications
Ethics in Action
The latest issue of 'Ethics in Action', published by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), is now available online at: http://www.ethicsinaction.asia
This publication is also available in PDF format: http://www.ethicsinaction.asia/archive/2010-ethics-in-action/vol.-4-no.-4-august-2010/EIAV4N4.pdf.
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C O N T E N T S
Child labour: Hunger and child malnutrition invisible in the Philippines
Jin Ju
UNJUST: The mirror to see Asia
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The WISE women of Pakistan
The Women's International Shared Experience Project
Tribute to murdered environmentalist Charoen Wat-aksorn
Sor Rattanamanee Polka
Request to intervene on complaint of severe torture by Yangon police
Asian Human Rights Commission
Policing in Nepal
Interview with Durga Sob
The Khairlanji massacre is more than another murder story
Avinash Pandey
Disappeared journalist's wife declares loss of faith in Sri Lanka's judicial process and turns to supernatural forces
Asian Human Rights Commission
Recognizing the evils of a 'non-rule of law system': Changing ourselves and our governments
Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena
New webpage on Thailand's state of emergency
Asian Human Rights Commission
The State of Human Rights in Ten Asian Nations--2009
In "The State of Human Rights in Ten Asian Nations—2009" the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) presents analysis concerning the human rights situations, violations and developments its has encountered in its work in 2009.
The AHRC, which is a leading regional human rights non-governmental organisation based in Hong Kong, documents and launches campaigns concerning hundreds of individual cases of grave human rights abuses each year in these countries. This allows it to identify trends in human rights violations and lacuna in the protection of rights that need to be addressed.
Sri Lanka Impunity, Criminal Justice & Human Rights
Basil Fernando
Despite the success achieved by the international community regarding the promotion of international human rights norms and standards in countries other than developed democracies, it would be an illusion to believe that these principles are actually applied in daily life.
In their pursuit of justice, Sri Lankans will learn the difficulties that face come from their dysfunctional criminal justice system. Building a narrative on these difficulties is therefore an essential component of seeking redress for rights violations. These narratives describe not only the difficulties and suffering faced by individuals, but also the nature of various public institutions and the problems within them.
This book makes an attempt to understand the obstacles to the realisation of human rights norms in Sri Lanka, relating to the constitution, criminal justice system or local traditions. The ideas discussed in the book are the result of practical interventions by way of litigation, providing assistance to victims, and through debates conducted on these issues over a considerable time.
Article 2 Vol 09, No. 02 June 2010
The current issue of Article 2 is not available. Among the articles presented in this issue are:
Reflection on article 2 of the ICCPR: The role of human rights activists in diagnosing the lack of effective remedies
Basil Fernando, Director, Asian Human Rights Commission & Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong
A three-part study on the crisis in institutions for administration of justice in Sri Lanka and its consequences for the realisation of human rights in Asia
Basil Fernando, Director, Asian Human Rights Commission & Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong
The role of the UN Human Rights Council on rule-of-law problems in Asia
Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong
Diagnosing the un-rule of law in Burma: A submission to the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review
Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong
Further information on Article 2 may be found at: www.article2.org
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The Asian Human Rights Commission is regularly issuing this article series on Human Rights and Culture in which various cultural expressions, poems, stories, pictures and other forms of cultural expression that are based on the theme of justice, will be published. A pivotal issue in modern literature is justice, particularly the enormous unleashing of injustice under fascist, communist and other authoritarian regime including those that pursue an unbridled market economy have generated responses from created writers. This search for justice is at the very essence of being human. Human beings are part of nature and part of each other. Perhaps the lines of John Donne are most relevant: “... any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;”
Contemporary mass culture promotes violence and destruction. There are those who are opposed to mass culture and want to reclaim the best traditions of human culture within which justice remains a core issue. This column will provide space for those who wish to share their creative initiatives.
About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.