3 July 2017
openDemocracy: Scrapping human rights is as great a threat to democracy as terrorism
Such arbitrary and authoritarian behaviour would be a clear breach of this country’s obligations as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, but, nothing daunted, Theresa May, no friend of the Convention when she was Home Secretary, added: “And if human rights laws stop us from doing it, we will change those laws so we can do it”. [...]
The policy lasted until December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were interned, of which 1,874 were nationalists and only 107 loyalists, even though loyalist paramilitaries carried out numerous acts of violence against Catholics and Irish nationalists. Indeed, it was not until February 1973 that any loyalists at all were interned. [...]
This ruling was to have truly momentous consequences. When lawyers in the United States Attorney General’s office prepared legal advice to pave the way for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation programme”, they reached straight for the Ireland v UK case, and it came subsequently to be used as justification for the Bush administration’s infamous “torture memos” outlining what interrogation techniques could and could not be used on detainees in Guantanamo and other such centres. [...]
In December 2014 the Irish government announced that it would ask the European Court of Human Rights to revise its judgment in the “Hooded Men” case, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, stated that on the basis of the new material, the government would contend that the ill-treatment should be recognised as torture. Nine of the survivors, backed by the Irish government, are now seeking to take their case back to the European Court. Given that the original judgement has become the benchmark by which countries calculate the legality under international law of their “enhanced interrogation” techniques, the stakes could not be higher. [...]
As Sir Keir Starmer recently put it: “If we start throwing away our adherence to human rights in response to what has happened in the last three months, we are throwing away the values at the heart of the democracy, everything that we say we believe in”.
openDemocracy: Reconstructing the power vertical: the authoritarian threat in Ukraine
The hopes inspired by the first peaceful protests in Kiev were connected with the idea that authoritarian trends in Ukrainian politics could be stopped, that Ukraine could move towards European integration, and that there could be a return to political and economic pluralism in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region. However, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine, combined with the rise in extreme forces on the Maidan and perception of western support in ousting former president Viktor Yanukovych, meant that EuroMaidan’s liberal agenda has faced an uphill battle. [...]
2016 was a critical year for Ukraine’s development. EuroMaidan’s democratic potential was finally exhausted and its civil revolution finally ended. Rather than a flourishing democracy and civil society, 2016 brought the non-democratic and non-legal consolidation of power by and around the president. [...]
By law, the president controls the security services, army, diplomacy and prosecutor's office. Poroshenko has chosen to appoint loyal people to these institutions, regardless of their skill or experience. An extreme example of this is Yuri Lutsenko who was appointed general prosecutor in May 2016 despite having no legal background. The president went to extreme lengths to get a majority of deputies in parliament first to change the legal requirements for the job and then to vote for his ally. [...]
Ukraine’s judiciary cannot be considered an independent branch of government. Little has changed since the mid-1990s: the judiciary remains an integral part to the power base of Ukraine’s leading clans — currently, Poroshenko’s. As a result, public trust in Ukrainian courts is at an all-time low. Shortly after EuroMaidan, the judiciary became one of the first targets of lustration. However, attempts to lustrate corrupt judges have failed miserably, as there are legitimate concerns about the competence and independence of those involved in lustration efforts. Indeed, lustration has had rather unexpected consequences: the judiciary has become even more obedient to the ruling clans who saved them from civil society pressure. [...]
But this assessment seems to have been unrealistically positive. Media independence is actually in decline. In 2016, Ukraine witnessed a number of attacks on major TV channels that constitute the major source of information about politics for Ukrainians. This trend started in May 2016 with the leak of foreign journalists’ personal information by nationalist cyber-activists. Several weeks later, the highly respected journalist Pavel Sheremet was murdered.
Haaretz: A Brief History of 'Lügenpresse,' the Nazi-era Predecessor to Trump's 'Fake News'
Originally coined by the German author Reinhold Anton in 1914, the term Lügenpresse was used during World War I to refer to “enemy propaganda.” Some 30 years later Hitler and the Nazis appropriated the term to weaken opposition to the regime, primarily “accusing” Jewish, communist, and later the foreign press of disseminating fake news.
The phrase made a comeback in Germany in 2014, when the anti-immigrant PEGIDA movement accused the media of “not telling the truth” about crimes committed by refugees and immigrants, primarily those displaced by ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In January 2015, some 25,000 protesters attended a PEGIDA march in Dresden, chanting “Luegenpresse, halt die Fresse" (“shut up, lying press”). [...]
Trump had waged war on the press throughout his presidential campaign, featuring multiple high-profile feuds including with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and CNN, which he dubbed the “Clinton News Network.” But critics and many supporters too were dismayed when he didn’t change tune once in office. In fact, the administration doubled down on much of Trump’s anti-media rhetoric.
Broadly: The Legacy of Robert Spitzer, Psychiatrist Who De-Pathologized Homosexuality
Dr. Robert Spritzer, the physician responsible for the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness, died on Friday, December 25, 2015. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had considered homosexuality pathological. Their Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), originally published in 1952, is the widely respected diagnostic tool for mental health providers in the United States. It was in the DSM that several normal human qualities, including homosexuality, were portrayed as disorders and ailments rather than normal, natural human behavior. [...]
Dr. Ronald Bayer is a professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. "If [you were] homosexual and [felt] deeply distressed about it, that was a psychiatric diagnosis that was treatable by psychiatry," he said in an interview Broadly, adding that this thinking also eventually evolved. "[Spitzer] was deeply involved in [asking], 'What are the criteria used to define a mental illness? Is it simply subjective distress?' If a person felt distressed about being black, we wouldn't say, 'Well, maybe we can turn them into a white person... The African American Civil Rights Movement played a significant role shaping the discourse at that time," Dr. Bayer explained. [...]
Spitzer's advocacy culminated with the release of the new diagnostic manual, DSM III. Not only was homosexuality declassified, but neurosis itself was removed, which challenged the status quo of mid-twentieth century mental health medicine. "[It] was a huge watermark. Finally, in DSM III, they actually eliminated the concept of neurosis as a conceptual framework for psychiatric disorders, which was a central contribution of psychoanalytic thought," said Dr. Bayard, noting that this constituted a remarkable rupture in dominant thinking a the time. "Psychoanalysis was the dominant paradigm in psychiatry through the 1950s and 60s. Every major school that taught psychology was chaired by people with psychoanalytic training."
Financial Times: Why there will never be a Trump in today’s Europe
The cliché is that polarisation, extreme inequality and fake news et cetera are problems plaguing the west. In fact, they are, above all, problems plaguing the US. Whereas western Europe just has a bad cold, the US has caught influenza (with Donald Trump as a symptom, not the cause). The US now probably resembles Brazil or Argentina more than it does Germany or Spain. The one western European country that shares much of the US’s dysfunction is the UK, but even it probably won’t produce a Trump. Here’s why the US is far more unstable than western Europe:
Inequality is much worse in the US. The country’s Gini coefficient after taxes and transfers (a good measure of inequality) is 0.394, higher than anywhere in western Europe, according to the OECD. The only western European country that approaches US inequality is Britain, as witness the disaster at London’s Grenfell tower block in wealthy Kensington. The UK also (unusually for Europe) has less social mobility than the US. [...]
The US is a plutocracy to a degree unimaginable in western Europe. One reason Republicans are trying to strip healthcare from about 22 million people despite a probable electoral backlash is to please Americans for Prosperity, the political vehicle of the billionaire Koch brothers. [...]
Western Europe’s media landscape is also less polarised than America’s, says the Reuters Institute’s recent Digital News Report. Most European countries have major media that are trusted by both rightists and leftists. These can be boring state broadcasters, or the Ansa news agency in Italy, or Germany’s centrist mass media, says the report. Consequently, few western Europeans inhabit ideological “filter bubbles”.
New York Magazine: The Pope’s Pedophile?
But it all feels sickeningly familiar. And this denouement comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has been following the sex-abuse crisis in the church — including Cardinal Pell’s own behavior — for the last few decades. A cloud has hung over Pell since he was an Episcopal vicar in a parish in the 1970s that has been described as a “pedophile’s paradise and a child’s nightmare.” A full 15 years ago, Pell was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy but when the church investigated, a retired Supreme Court justice found that there wasn’t enough evidence, even though the victim appeared to be “speaking honestly from actual recollection.” A year later, Pope John Paul II made Pell a cardinal. Several new alleged victims spoke out in a book published only last month. [...]
It has not been easy being a Catholic in the 21st century. For a gay Catholic, it has been close to agony. It comes as no surprise, for example, that Pell has upheld, like Maciel, a highly conservative theology on sexuality — which was why he was so favored by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He opposed the use of condoms to stop AIDS in Africa, refused to give communion to openly gay people, campaigned strenuously against marriage equality, and described the church sex-abuse scandal as not a function of minor abuse and cover-up but of allowing homosexuals to be priests (a ban on gay seminarians remains formally in place). In his own words: “80 percent of the abuse is with young boys. So I mean it’s obviously connected with the problem of homosexuality … We’ve got to see that [homosexuality] is not tolerated amongst clergy and religious orders.” To which I have to echo David Ridsdale: “Fuck you, George, and everything you stand for.”
The Guardian: Over 60% of voters view Theresa May as PM negatively – poll
Corbyn’s reinvigorated party is now on 45%, six points ahead of the Tories (on 39%), which if replicated in a general election would put Corbyn in a strong position to enter Downing Street as prime minister if one was called in the near future. [...]
On 9 April, May’s approval rating stood at an impressive +21% (where the percentage of those who disapprove of her leadership is subtracted from the number who approve) while that for Corbyn had sunk to -35%.
In an extraordinary turnaround, May’s rating is now at -20% (with 31% approving her leadership and 51% disapproving) while Corbyn’s has risen to +4% with more approving of his stewardship of Labour (42%) than disapproving (38%). [...]
May and Corbyn are now neck and neck when voters are asked who they believe would make the best prime minister, with 35% saying May and 34% Corbyn.
On Brexit, 41% now disapprove of the way May is handling the negotiations on leaving the EU, against 32% who approve. Some 47% of those who backed leaving the EU approve of her handling of Brexit against 27% who disapprove, while 56% of remainers disapprove and only 21% approve.
Business Insider: Here's what it would take for Theresa May's majority to collapse
One Tory MP has become a deputy speaker, alongside two Labour MPs, depriving their respective parties of their votes. The Speaker of the House, John Bercow, also does not vote.
The seven Sinn Fein MPs who were voted in do not take their seats in Westminster by convention, as they refuse to swear an oath to the Queen due to their staunch republican beliefs.
This makes the task for the minority government slightly easier, as Sinn Fein would almost certainly voted against the Tories on a number of issues. [...]
Between 1992 and 1997 the Tory government under John Major suffered a net loss of eight seats through by-elections. This would be enough to give opposition parties a majority if replicated during this parliament.
In four out of the 19 parliaments since the Second World War governing parties have lost seven or more seats. In the period from 1966 to 1970 the Labour government had a net loss of 15 seats due to 20 sitting MPs dying, although this is extremely unlikely to happen this time around.
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