Is a gene more like a tree trunk or more like a baseball bat? A federal court Thursday took a stand on the question, ruling that isolated DNA molecules are “not found in nature”, and are therefore more like inventions, such as baseball bats, than natural phenomenon, such as tree trunks.

Structure of the BRCA1 protein. Credit: emw/creative commons

Using language steeped in metaphor in a packed U.S. federal courtroom, attorneys in July debated the question in a closely-watched case on the right to patent genes that has been working its way through the courts.

At stake: the right of one company – Myriad Genetics – to patent a gene as a human invention under U.S. patent law, which allows patents on inventions but not on products of nature.

In a ruling that largely upheld the status quo in a biotech industry that has been patenting genes for decades, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Thursday that “isolated” human genes are patentable. Methods of “comparing” or “analysing” DNA sequences are, however, not patent eligible, it ruled.

In a two-to-one decision, the court affirmed Myriad’s right to claim intellectual property rights on the BRCA-1 BRCA-2 genes, genes where mutations indicate a woman has an 82 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer.

The company’s patents on the genes are the basis of a breast cancer indicator test that has been a profitable asset in the company’s portfolio of intellectual property.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing a group of about 20 plaintiffs, including the breast cancer patient advocates and geneticists, several years ago launched a legal challenge to Myriad’s right to patent the genes.

The plaintiffs, including patient advocacy group Breast Cancer Action, have argued that Myriad’s IP rights to the genes allow it to block others from testing for – or even looking at – the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, a right they say Myriad has exercised in the past with legal threats.

Plaintiffs have also argued the patents raise prices for testing and essentially create a market monopoly which blocks the poorest from getting tested and stifles scientists who want to look at the genes. Yale geneticist Ellen Matloff, a plaintiff in the case, told IPS last year the situation was “horrifying.”

Matloff told IPS that 95 percent of patients she recommended for Myriad’s 700-dollar supplementary BART test, which looks for mutations on the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, opted not to get it because of its high cost.

Furthermore, those who question gene patents have pointed out that patenting individual genes might even be myopic, especially in a world of whole genome sequencing where the scientific community is increasingly interested in gene interactions, the influence of the environment on genetics (called epigenetics), and other big-picture indicators to understand patient health.

The case has been working its way through the courts. A New York district court judge sided with the ACLU in 2010, but the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling in July 2011.

The ACLU appealed to the Supreme Court last year, but the Court declined to issue a ruling in the case. Instead, it sent the case back to the Federal Circuit to re-examine in light of its unanimous spring decision that Prometheus Laboratories Inc. did not have a right to patent a certain blood test because the patent was based on observations about natural phenomena.

But Thursday, the Federal Circuit again ruled that genes are patentable. The court wrote, “The isolated DNA molecules before us are not found in nature. They are obtained in the laboratory and are man-made, the product of human ingenuity.”

In its majority opinion the court also highlighted that gene patenting had been standard practice for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for years.

“Why hasn’t this come up in 30 years,” Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore, who sided with the majority, asked during oral arguments in the courtroom July.

Moore hinted at the biotech sector’s financial stake in gene patents, often key components of diagnostic test IP at the centre of a much-hyped personalised medicine industry. “What about the biotech sector and all the money?” Moore asked.

In his dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge William Bryson wrote, “my colleagues assign significant weight to the fact that since 2001 the PTO has had guidelines in place that have allowed patents on entire human genes… I think the PTO’s practice and guidelines are not entitled to significant weight…”

Sandra Park, an attorney with the ACLU, told IPS her team was disappointed in the Federal Circuit court’s decision, which she said she believed did not take the Supreme Court’s ruling in Prometheus adequately into consideration.

“We think that the Supreme Court’s recent decision is very clear that the Court is very concerned about how patents interfere with scientific work,” Park told IPS. “The Supreme Court has said that the interests of industry in relying on patent protection is not a factor in determining that something is patentable.”

Park said the mere fact that Prometheus argued that it needed its patents to advance its interests, in the Supreme Court’s ruling, was insufficient reason to justify patents.

If the ACLU decides, with the other plaintiffs, to appeal the Federal Circuit court’s decision, it is possible the Supreme Court might decide to hear the case. Such a scenario is not unheard of. In fact, Park said, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Prometheus’s right to its diagnostic patent came after the Federal Circuit twice upheld it.

Park said the ACLU was still deciding its next step. “We are reviewing our options, but we haven’t made any decisions yet.”

As the International AIDS Conference ended in Washington on Friday, organisers unveiled groundbreaking new research on the promise of early anti-retroviral (ARV) drug therapy.

The announcement came amid urgent calls from advocates and activists for governments and agencies to do much more to make those drugs available to everyone who needs them.

The biannual conference drew 24,000 delegates from 83 countries and marked the first time the conference has been held in the United States in more than two decades. In 2009, President Barack Obama ended a ban that prevented HIV-positive travelers from coming into the U.S. that had been in place for 22 years.

In a study that was released on Thursday at the conference, a group of patients in France called the Visconti Cohort started taking ARVs shortly after their infection with the HIV virus. After six years, patients stopped taking their drugs but did not experience resurgence in the virus. Even after stopping therapy, patients in the Visconti group had similar levels of HIV in their cells as a control group.

The study was conducted by the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS) under the direction of lead research Charline Bacchus, who presented the findings.

“These results suggest that the antiretroviral treatment should be started very early after infection,” Bacchus said Thursday at the conference.

Tapping a deep wellspring of hope for an end to AIDS – an end researchers say could be near – a Friday press release hinted at a “cure”. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the goal of a “generation that is free of AIDS”.

But excitement surrounding the promise of ARVs and the announcement of breakthrough research contrasted with the realities of a disease that continues to kill, realities activists and advocates from the international HIV / AIDS community urged policy-makers to address.

While ARV drugs are known to prevent transmission in 96 percent of cases if started early and taken regularly, not everyone has access to those drugs. Worldwide, only one out of two people has access to ARVs, and in the U.S., 750,000 HIV-positive individuals remain untreated.

Proposed government cuts would slash 214 million dollars in funding to the U.S.’s signature bilateral anti-AIDS programme, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The programme has been credited with reducing the death rate in certain countries by 10 percent.

Activists and advocates this week urged leaders to continue funding for such programmes and keep HIV/AIDS in focus. Thousands of people from more than 47 member organisations rallied under the banner of the “We Can End AIDS” coalition this week in Washington.

They marched to the White House and called on world leaders to commit resources not only to increasing accessibility to life-saving drugs, but to stabilising community services that support treatment and adherence to drug regimens, such as housing.

“Housing has proven over and over again to increase stability for people who are marginalised,” said Chuck Christen, a conference delegate and public health doctor with Prevention Point in Pittsburgh, an organisation dedicated to providing health support services to injection drug users.

“Through housing programmes they (HIV-positive individuals) are linked to so many services,” Christen told IPS.

Christen also said he supported changes in U.S. policy that would lift a ban on syringe exchanges, or the public provision of clean syringes, which he said was proven to reduce transmission of HIV among injection drug users. In a larger but related demand, marchers called for an end to policies that punitively criminalised drug users and called for support services for those individuals instead.

Among other demands, activists asked policy-makers end free trade policies they said drove up prices for HIV/ AIDS drugs, and scale up tuberculosis screening and treatment programmes. Tuberculosis is a major cause of death among AIDS patients globally, and the theme of this year’s AIDS convention was “Turning the Tide on TB/HIV”.

These programmes, experts in the field say, are not just supplemental: they are necessary. Yogan Pillay, deputy director general of Strategic Health Programmes at the National Department of Health, South Africa, spoke at a plenary session of the conference on Friday. He said drugs would only be effective in the context of other programmes.

“If we don’t work closely with civil society, we won’t get good adherence (to drug regimens), which is a prerequisite for” reducing transmission, Pillay said Friday.

Nadine Bloch is coordinator of “We Can End AIDS National Coalition.” Bloch said science no longer stood in the way of ending the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“We have the science,” she told IPS. “We know how to do it, and we need for all governments and all agencies to put the resources in place to end the epidemic.”

Protesters at the "We Can End AIDS Rally" Hold Up Pill Bottles. Credit: Amanda Wilson/IPS

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Jul 26 2012 (IPS)

As the nineteenth International AIDS Conference continued in Washington Tuesday, thousands of protesters marched on the White House with a set of demands to end the epidemic.

At the forefront were calls for an end to free trade deals that protesters argue make vital AIDS medicines unaffordable.

The march comprised a coalition of AIDS advocacy and activist groups organised under the mantra “We Can End AIDS”, and ended with a dramatic display when activists gathered symbols of the fight against AIDS – pill bottles and money – tied them with red ribbons, and threw them in front of the White House.

A growing movement within the international advocacy community and those living with HIV/AIDS argue that free trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a deal the Barack Obama administration has been negotiating with 10 Pacific nations over the past three years –contain excessively stringent protections for pharmaceutical patents on AIDS drugs.

Lorena Di Giano of the Argentinian Network of Women living with HIV spoke at the rally, saying such free trade agreements “would make access to affordable drugs even more difficult”.

Medicine works, but who owns it?

Anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines are known to reduce the transmission of HIV, yet only one out of every two HIV-positive people are on ARVs worldwide. The number is lower for children, and still lower for people in the developing world. But, protesters say, patent protections do not help get more drugs to more patients, a step they say could dramatically halt the epidemic.

They say patents on drugs imported to developing or middle-income countries could block generic manufacturing, resulting in monopolies and higher prices for vital medications.

This trend, advocates say, will exclude and marginalise HIV-positive patients who do not fit within a narrow market of elite or middle-class consumers in middle-income countries who are increasingly targeted for drug sales.

That could mean bad news for patients in fast-growing, middle-income countries such as India and Brazil, where pharmaceutical companies have launched lawsuits against governments in order to enforce patents and block other manufacturers from producing their drugs.

Protesters say the situation is clear: pharmaceutical companies are suing governments for rights to exercise exclusive IP rights on effective new AIDS drugs, making clinical trials data secret, even as they target expensive new drugs to elites and a growing middle class while leaving the marginalised to fend for themselves, or even die.

Currently, certain free trade deals have some flexibility for countries that prefer not to enforce patents on pharmaceuticals. Under the World Bank’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), those exceptions expire in 2016. Protesters are arguing for their extension.

Brook Baker, a policy analyst and advocate on IP and access to medications with the U.S.-based AIDS advocacy organisation Health GAP, spoke at a panel session of the International AIDS Conference on Tuesday. He said a dramatic fall in prices for some drugs had lulled people into a false sense of security.

“We face a future in which IP protection in the form of data monopolies and patent monopolies stand in our way,” Baker said. “All new drugs are being created under much stricter IP regimes, and they can be two to three or even 10 times more expensive (than generics).”

Baker urged governments to accept recommendations related to IP in a July report issued by the Global Commission on HIV and The Law, an independent high-level legal commission made up of former heads of state and leading legal, human rights and HIV experts.

In its annual report, the commission this year recommended a moratorium on TRIPS patent enforcement on pharmaceutical products. “The HIV epidemic has exposed the serious problems of applying TRIPS to medicines and other pharmaceutical products,” the report notes. “This has implications well beyond HIV, for example, for non-communicable diseases which affect millions in high-, middle- and low-income countries.”

Baker said the need to address the link between patent law, pricing, and access was especially urgent in middle-income countries such as China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which have 25 percent, or eight million, of all HIV-positive people.

“They (pharmaceutical companies) are interested in selling to the elites and a growing middle class,” Baker said. “If you get a right to exclude competition and you price your medications for the elite,” people are going to be marginalised, he said.

Tahir Amin, an international IP scholar, emphasised that, through a process called “evergreening”, many new patents on drugs are simply patents on slight changes in compounds being passed off as brand new drugs. “It shocks me to think that this is innovation,” he said.

Sarah Zaidi of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), based in Thailand, pointed out that the number of free trade agreements had increased from eight in 2001 to 72 in 2012. She said strong IP clauses show the strength of the pharmaceutical patent holders.

“It’s really criminal when you know the evidence around treatment and prevention and the one thing that is keeping you from accessing these drugs are patents,” Zaidi told IPS. “It’s a tragedy.”

Electronics are at the top of many holiday gift lists in the U.S. this season, but some of those products could be made using minerals from areas of the world where conflicts have led to widespread human rights abuses.

A sack of cassiterite (tin ore) at a trader

Much like “blood diamonds”, observers say the sale of the so-called “conflict minerals” by armed militias to corporations making consumer goods for U.S markets is fueling – and funding – atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where an ongoing war has killed over five million people in the most bloody conflict in Africa since the Rwandan genocide.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is legislation best known for regulating the U.S. financial market, but part of the act would also address corporate accountability outside the U.S. when it comes to conflict minerals.

Part of the law would require all companies listed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to report whether they are sourcing tungsten, tin, tantalum and gold from areas of the DRC linked to militia human rights abuses.

The rule would force companies to investigate whether their products contain conflict minerals and then report that information to the SEC as part of the public record. In legal terms, the process is called “supply chain due diligence”.

But the provision is hung up in a rule-making process at the SEC – the body charged with outlining how that particular provision of Dodd-Frank will be spelled out. The SEC has missed its own deadline to outline rules by eight months. The SEC’s website has the task on a to-do list for 2011.

Supporters of the law, including international human rights groups and civil society groups in the United States and DRC, are asking what the hold-up is, and Global Witness, a natural resource conflict watch group, says lives are on the line.

According to Global Witness, the delay “in effect buys extra time for those armed groups responsible for horrendous attacks against civilians in Congo to further benefit from the minerals trade.”

An investigation carried out by the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office in the DRC reported that 300 civilians in three villages located close to mining sites in North Kivu province were raped in August 2010. The U.N. has linked that incident directly to competition over access to minerals.

Global Witness has carried out its own investigations, including supply chain mapping, and reports that the trade in conflict minerals is fueling land-grabs and displacements in eastern Kivu Province of DRC, where “human rights abuses, including gender-based violence such as rape and sexual slavery have reached catastrophic proportions.”

Opponents of the provision – many of them corporate interest groups – argue that the rules could cut off trade with DRC or cost too much to enforce, and that tracking the origin of their minerals would be extremely difficult.

Supporters of the rules say the minerals covered – tungsten, tin, tantalum – can be traced to just a few smelters globally. They also counter that the provisions won’t block trade, and that the rules will simply require that corporations find out whether they are buying minerals supplied by armed groups in the DRC, disclose that information, and then take “due diligence” measures to source from other mines.

The governor of North Kivu province told Global Witness researchers in April the war had been going on since 1996, and wondered “why didn’t the U.S. government pass this law 10 years ago?”

Representative Jim McDermott, a supporter of the legislation, said the bill was a modern-day measure that would allow consumers and corporate investors to decide for themselves whether to do business with companies that source conflict minerals.

“It is important if we believe in social justice that we cut off the money to those who are killing and raping all over Africa,” McDermott told IPS.

The U.S. state of California – the eighth largest economy in the world – used the provision as a model for its own bill, passed in September, which prohibits the state from doing business with companies that use conflict minerals.

“I think there has been a lot of political pressure by different groups – some of the industry groups – (not to issue the rules),” Corinna Gilfillan, head of the U.S. office for Global Witness, told IPS. “We are talking about two really critical provisions that are important for human rights and we are now eight months delayed. What are the impacts?”

Another, geographically broader provision of Dodd-Frank, also related to transparency, is held up in the rule-making process at the SEC.

That provision would require oil, gas, and mining companies to report to the SEC what they pay in taxes, royalties, fees, production entitlements, and bonuses to governments around the world. Publish What You Pay, an anti-corruption coalition of 600 religious, environmental, and civil society organisations, has been working to implement the measure since 2004.

“In a lot of resource-rich countries, people are living on less than two dollars per day,” said Isabel Munilla, director of Publish What You Pay, at a forum hosted by the Brookings Institution last week in Washington. She said payment reporting initiatives lessened corruption and increased the power of citizens of resource-rich countries to demand their fair share of benefits.

McDermott urged U.S. citizens to throw their support behind full implementation of Dodd-Frank.

“My belief is that honest profit can live beside social justice, and that is what these bills are all about,” he said.

The SEC declined to comment on the delay for this article.

Ethical reviews are often inadequate in low and middle-income countries. Credit: Ayena/Public Domain

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 2011 (IPS)

The current U.S. system for protecting the subjects of federally-funded medical research, both in the U.S. and around the world, has room for significant improvements, a presidential bioethics panel concluded late last week.

Meanwhile, clinical trials watchdogs continue to call for stricter oversight of private pharmaceutical company research on populations in the developing world as the off-shoring of clinical trials globally continues to grow.

President Barack Obama tasked the Presidential Commission on Bioethics with reviewing U.S. regulations for protecting medical research subjects after revelations last year that U.S. government researchers in Guatemala in the 1940s deliberately infected prisoners, prostitutes, soldiers, and mental health patients, most of whom were never told what was being done to them, with syphilis, chancroid and gonorrhea.

Nearly 2,100 people were deliberately infected as part of the experiments, according to a report the Guatemalan government released earlier this month.

The U.S. government apologised for the experiments last year, and Obama asked the bioethics panel to investigate what happened in Guatemala and look into current frameworks for protecting human subjects of scientific research – especially federally-funded research – around the world today.

Commission chairperson Amy Gutmann said the panel concluded that protections for human subjects are “robust” and that “nothing like what happened in Guatemala could happen today” when it comes to federally-funded experiments. However, she said there was a need for more information about what research the government is supporting.

Among the 14 recommendations detailed in the report, the commission urged that the U.S. government keep better track of the medical research it funds. The commission found the U.S. government funded 50,000 studies worldwide in 2010 but had no centralised way of keeping track of them.

Of the 18 federal departments and agencies funding medical research in the U.S. and abroad, the panel found that few of them could easily provide basic information about the number of human subjects involved, levels of funding, or the geographic locations of studies.

Government’s tracking of trials limited

While federal law requires that “interventional” experiments – trials of drugs or devices – be registered on a central database, ClinicalTrials.gov, the report points out that other observational, epidemiological, public health, and biomedical studies involving human subjects are not subject to the same requirement.

A central web-based portal where each agency or department could register all its studies involving human subjects should be created, the panel said, enhancing transparency and access to information about human subjects research for the public.

Compensation policy for injuries

The U.S. government should also adopt a requirement that researchers or sponsors compensate people injured as a result of their participation in medical research, the panel said. A succession of federal commissions have recommended such a policy, but no such law has ever been adopted.

In the U.S., those injured in medical research rely on civil lawsuits or researcher-sponsored insurance, but lawsuits can take years to resolve, and not all trials insure participants against injury. Most other developed nations have laws that require researchers to compensate victims injured during medical research, the panel noted.

Annelies den Boer, senior health advocate with the Wemos Foundation, a clinical trials watchdog group based in the Netherlands, praised the U.S. commission for recommending a mandatory policy of compensation for injuries. However, she said the burden of proof still lies with test subjects in many places, a problem in communities with high levels of illiteracy and poverty.

“This is a problem particularly in low-income settings, when vulnerable trial subjects are involved,” Den Boer told IPS.

Wemos published a report last year highlighting the personal stories of human subjects of clinical trials around the world and the difficulties many research participants face when making injury claims.

Status quo in EU and U.S failing subjects in developing world

Another problem, Den Boer said, is that many regulatory bodies, including the European Medical Association (EMA), rely heavily on ethical reviews where trials are taking place.

Among the U.S. commission’s recommendations is developing a process for evaluating foreign government’s requests to be recognised as having “equivalent protections” as long as they are “at least equivalent” to protections in the U.S.

But Den Boer said reviews are often inadequate in low and middle- income countries such as India where ethics committees are understaffed and may have conflicts of interest.

A report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) this year detailed “concerns” over clinical trials in India and, according to WEMOS, doctors in India have earned up to 1,500 dollars per patient for enrolling subjects in clinical trials.

“On top of that, pharmaceutical companies outsource their research to CROs, and a recent study by SOMO (Center for Research on Multinational Corporations) raises concerns whether monitoring by pharmaceutical companies of ethical compliance by CROs is adequate,” Den Boer said.

In October, IPS reported that British drug company AstraZeneca tested its drugs on victims of the Bhopal chemical disaster without their consent at a hospital in Bhopal, India that had been designated for the victims’ care.

British newspaper The Independent reported in November that French and U.S. pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Quintiles, were also involved, and that they made pay-offs to the hospital to be able to test their drugs on patients without the patients’ informed consent.

Fourteen patients died during the trials, which were conducted between 2007 and 2010. Drugs and treatments resulting from those trials have since been approved for sale in Europe and the U.S., according to the Independent.

Addressing just such a scenario, the U.S. bioethics commission said last week that researchers should be aware of selecting research sites to ensure that experiments do not take advantage of vulnerable populations. The report also implores that its recommendations should also apply to private companies, not only federally-funded research.

European law states that drugs tested in violations of protections guidelines such as the Declaration of Helsinki should not be granted market authorisation in Europe. Den Boer said Wemos, with support of members of the European parliament, hopes to push the EMA to block unethically tested drugs from the European market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abandoned the Declaration of Helsinki in 2008.

Speaking to the bioethics commission in November, a representative of the biotechnology industry lobby group PhRMA defended private companies’ testing of drugs abroad, arguing that members of its organisation respect the human subjects enrolled in their trials.

Pfizer and AstraZeneca are members of PhRMA, according to a members list posted on its web site.

According to an article posted on the commission’s blog, the representative “pointed out that pharmaceutical companies make medicines that are used globally”.

“Is it ethical to test them only in the United States?” he asked.

Excerpt:

Davidica Ikai Grasiano Ayahu of the ITWAK Organisation addresses a working group on the specific medical needs of women in South Sudan. Credit: Shereen Hall, courtesy of the Institute for Inclusive Security

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Dec 15 2011 (IPS)

As South Sudan maps out its economic future at the South Sudan International Engagement Conference (IEC) this week in Washington, women from the new country called on donors to invest in projects that ensure women benefit equally from development plans.

Pointing out that women played a critical role in the referendum that made South Sudan an independent country in July – 52 percent of voters in that referendum were female – South Sudanese women pushed for measures that would help secure a strong female presence in sectors including government, agriculture and the economy.

The IEC, organised by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), brought together government leaders from South Sudan with a group of rich states, foreign aid groups and private investors to develop a South Sudan Development Plan, a blueprint for the young state’s social, economic and political policies.

Groups included the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union, the Corporate Council on Africa and InterAction. Officials from the United Kingdom, Norway and Turkey were also present.

The conference, which concludes today, is taking place amid continuing violence in the still-contested border states of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile.

North Sudan charges that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army is supplying rebels in the two states with weapons while international human rights groups claim that the North is indiscriminately bombing civilian populations in the two states and denying humanitarian relief agencies access to the region.

As the IEC continued in Washington, South Sudanese women delegates urged those present to acknowledge the role women play in peace building and their right to a seat at the table in planning the country’s future.

The women recommended ensuring that 25 percent of all investments in agriculture and commercial livestock go to women, thereby “increasing their food productivity, their entrepreneurship, and access to markets.” The large majority of farmers in South Sudan are small women farmers, and war has left South Sudan with a large number of female-headed households.

“We want aid to target women specifically,” said Sarah James, a women’s rights activist and chairperson for the South Sudan Women General Association. “We can’t assume that it will reach them.”

James, speaking to a large crowd of investors and foreign development aid donors gathered on the first day of the conference, urged them to consider women as equal partners in sustainable peace and development in the country.

The Institute for Inclusive Security, together with U.N. Women, hosted a gender symposium preceding the IEC where the women sketched out their recommendations. The symposium marked an effort to facilitate South Sudanese women’s access to decision-making about the future of the new country.

The effort is significant because according to the Institute, post conflict recovery and private sector development in other countries where wars have ended have “most often returned power and economic opportunities to male elites”.

The women’s recommendations include a plan to double women’s literacy from 12 percent to 25 percent as well as earmarks to ensure half of the oil revenues allocated to communities through community development funds go to women’s health, economic and physical security.

Also proposed was a plan for a women’s bank with start-up capital of 10 million dollars to provide women with accessible, low interest loans for their own business ventures.

“People are bringing home the experiences they got in other countries during their displacement,” said Mary Kojo, who herself was displaced for a time in Khartoum. She currently works with the Ministry of Gender, Child and Social Welfare and has worked to build women’s small-scale businesses.

Women are well-qualified to work in every sector of South Sudan’s development, she pointed out. “We have the capacity. It’s only that we are not being given the opportunity,” Kojo told IPS. “That’s why we are here – we want our voice wherever men have a voice.”

The list of South Sudanese women’s priorities includes basic services, better schools and better hospitals. With one out of seven pregnant women dying due to pregnancy-related causes in South Sudan, according to the U.N., the room for improvement is significant.

Women delegates also said small loans for South Sudanese women could help increase female farmers’ participation at food and vegetable markets, a sector where women from the neighbouring countries of Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda currently dominate because of their access to start-up capital, the women told IPS.

The women also urged the government to continue to implement the 25 percent quota currently in place for women at all levels of government.

This conference is the first of its kind, known in the aid world as a “donor conference”, to include women from civil society in all sessions, including planning sessions for the management of oil revenues, social service delivery, governance and environment.

Anne Marie Goetz, chief of the peace and security program at U.N. Women, said including women in development planning makes sense, not only from a rights standpoint, but also economically. The agricultural sector is just one example.

“Investing in women’s agricultural production is a way of ensuring rural market development and community stability because women invest in their communities,” Goetz said. She said statistics show that women invest 90 percent of their income on family well-being compared to the 40 percent that men invest.

“If women aren’t at conferences, then there’s no pressure for quotas, there is no pressure for women’s land rights… there is no pressure for justice for war crimes,” Goetz said.

But why did it take so long to include women? Goetz said it is because the international community has itself been slow to acknowledge that women have specific priorities and perspectives that are inadequately reflected by governments.

Goetz told IPS, “There is now a growing recognition that you cannot build good governance and sound economic foundations without involving half the population.”

Excerpt:

While most of the one million women in prison in the U.S. are incarcerated for non-violent offences, many experience harsh treatment that advocates say violates their human rights.

Artistic recreation of a woman's prison cell, part of the multimedia installation "Voices in Time: Lives in Limbo". Credit: Courtesy of BeyondMedia

For example, the shackling of women prisoners’ arms and legs during labour and childbirth remains a common practice in many states, according to human rights organisations. Only 14 states prohibit the shackling of women when they’re giving birth.

But shackling is not the only treatment that defines many women’s experiences in prison in the U.S. One study found that 2.1 percent of female inmates experienced sexual misconduct by a staff member during a 10-month period, and advocates believe the real number could be much greater.

Tuesday is the twelfth day of the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence“, a campaign organised by Rutgers University, and one of the themes of this year’s campaign is “sexual and gender-based violence committed by state agents”.

In the U.S., organisations looking at the issue maintain that violence against women in prison is so endemic that women, who many times suffer sexual abuse and battery in their own lives before entering prison, are being revictimised en masse through systemic violence.

In a report released in June, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women highlighted “high incidents of verbal abuse and general mistreatment by both male and female guards, particularly by younger staff who are new”.

The U.N. report also highlights inadequate health care for female inmates and mental distress caused by “the continued parctice of cross-gender supervision and searches, the frequent lockdowns, the isolation of inmates, and the general agressive climate and verbal abuse prevalent within the facilities.”

Joanne Archibald is the associate director of the BeyondMedia Project, a Chicago-based media activism organisation behind the Womenandprison.org blog featuring the personal stories of women in prison.

She pointed out that while strip searches are carried out by same- gendered guards, male prison guards in the U.S. typically do have access to women prisoners’ living quarters, can do searches at any time, and carry out pat-downs.

Archibald believes the statistics on staff sexual victimisation in prison could be higher than official statistics reflect, as many women don’t speak up out of fear of reciprocity. If they report abuse, women also could also face the prospect of solitary confinement while investigations are carried out.

“Most people just suck it up and think ‘okay, I am going to get out of here some day’,” Archibald told IPS.

A cycle of abuse

From sexual violence to strip searches, such experiences can be devastating, especially for women in prison who have a history as victims of abuse in the past. Government reports say around 40 percent of women prisoners have a history of physical or sexual abuse, but other researchers report much higher numbers.

The blog features the story of Lydia, a 56-year-old Florida woman who was sentenced to life without parole in prison for the murder of her abusive ex-husband. The then-governor granted her clemency in 1998, but he died just a few days later and his successor didn’t honour the executive order that would have set Lydia free. She is still behind bars.

And there are other stories, such as those of women who are incarcerated for non-violent offences, such as drug-related offences, often without adequate drug treatment programmes or health care.

“If you were molested at age five, you learn to take care of yourself by getting high,” Archibald told IPS. “That starts the cycle. And prison is not really the way to end that cycle for most people.”

For women who have experienced abuse, even pat-downs can trigger flashbacks, Archibald said. She said the often punishing atmosphere of prison life resembles, in many ways, the abuse that many women in prison experienced in their own lives before being incarcerated.

“Part of being abused is learning helplessness, that you don’t have right to speak out about it, and that this is what you deserve – that is reinforced in what they experience every day” in prison, Archibald told IPS. “When they talk about signs of an abusive relationship – ignoring what you think, blaming you for your own problems – it is very similar to what you experience in prison.”

Overflowing jails

Robin Levi is co-editor of the book “Inside This Place, Not of It”, a collection of oral narratives from 13 women in prison throughout the country. She works with Justice Now, a legal advocacy group for women prisoners based in California.

Levi said there have been some improvements in the area of sexual abuse against women in prisons, as well as efforts to decrease forced sexual attacks, but evidence shows abuse is still widespread.

“In our research, there are still some states where it was basically a free-for-all in terms of the guards being able to abuse the women,” Levi told IPS. She said Virginia and Colorado were currently facing lawsuits over incidents of sexual assaults on women in prison.

At the heart of the problem, Levi said, is the over-incarceration of women.

The U.N. report of the rapporteur on violence against women notes a 400-percent increase in the number of women in prison since the 1980s, mostly non-violent, first-time offenders, “following the introduction of mandatory sentencing in federal drug laws”.

“All of these things are making our prison population to skyrocket and putting many, many people who are already broken and have already been abused in the line for more violence,” Levi told IPS.

She said that the women’s narratives featured in her book highlight the full life stories of women who could offer so much more to society.

“I hope that people would ask what is being served by keeping them in prison,” Levi said. “Are we safer because these women are in prison? Is our community safer? Is our society better?”

An Indian migrant worker. The World Bank says money sent home by migrant workers has increased for the first time since the economic crisis. Credit: Sumeet Malhotra/ CC by 2.0

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Dec 1 2011 (IPS)

Despite a global economic crisis, worsening employment prospects for immigrants and hardening views on immigration in the U.S. and Europe, migrant workers are sending more money home, according to a World Bank report on global remittances released Wednesday.

An Indian migrant worker. The World Bank says money sent home by migrant workers has increased for the first time since the economic crisis. Credit: Sumeet Malhotra/ CC by 2.0

Countries receiving top remittances this year are India, China, Mexico and the Philippines. Other top recipients include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Vietnam, Egypt and Lebanon.

“Remittance flows to developing countries have remained resilient,” said Hans Timmer, director of the Bank’s Development Prospects Group. “Remittance flows to all developing regions have grown this year, for the first time since the financial crisis.”

The World Bank also cited “higher-than-expected” growth in remittances to four out of six World Bank-designated developing regions. Part of that growth can be attributed to exchange rates, it said.

When foreign currencies weaken against the currency in worker destination countries – against U.S. dollars, for example – workers such as those working in the U.S. can send more money home, Merrell Tuck-Primdahl, a communications officer with the World Bank, told IPS. “That is certainly one of the factors behind the flows and why they picked up.”

The report also noted that remittance flows to Latin America and the Caribbean grew this year for the first time since the financial crisis began, although that growth was lower than the World Bank expected because of “continuing weaknesses in the U.S. economy”.

The report underscored that “persistent unemployment in Europe and the U.S. is affecting employment prospects of existing migrants and hardening political attitudes toward new immigration”.

Destination countries: Sources of remittances

According to the report, the growth in remittances can also be attributed to the fact that some countries are sending migrant workers to a diversifying group of destinations to work.

For example, while the U.S. and Europe saw a decline in Filipino workers, more Filipino workers went to the Middle East, mainly to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to Asian countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, and to Africa.

In the U.S., a steep fall in new housing construction, a sector that has traditionally employed Latin American migrants, in 2006 “appears to have stabilised”, but migrant employment in construction “remains well below pre-financial crisis levels”, according to the report.

The U.S. and Spain are the main sources of remittances for developing countries in Latin America, while six Gulf countries account for a significant portion of remittances to South Asia and one third of remittances for Europe and Central Asia originate in developing countries such as Russia.

The report also noted that the so-called Arab Spring has had an effect on migrant workers and remittances – migrant workers in Libya have returned home, but “migrants from many other Sub-Saharan African countries, often unskilled and illegal, have been stuck and vulnerable to abuse in Libya”.

Development aid uncertain

Remittances have a variety of positive effects, the report said. They can reduce poverty, help people accumulate wealth, lead to more spending on health and education and reduce child labour, to name a few.

But Elaine Zuckerman, executive director of Gender Action, an organisation that promotes women’s rights and gender equality, pointed out that while remittances do often go to support individual families, there is no guarantee that remittances will be channeled to projects that have broader public benefit.

She said that while it is possible for remittances to be allocated to building schools or clinics, most remittances directly support migrants’ family members, who then might use that money to improve their own housing or buy consumer products such as electronics.

“Remittances lack social and economic development goals, and they certainly lack a focus on women’s rights and promoting sustainable, equitable development of countries and their populations,” Zuckerman told IPS.

She said that while remittances reached 351 billion dollars this year, total development aid dispersed by the major multilateral development banks, excluding the International Monetary Fund, totalled slightly over 100 billion dollars.

Zuckerman believes the gap between remittances and aid will only increase in the future. The World Bank’s budget had been bumped up by richer countries on a temporary basis over the last several years but will eventually decrease.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is supported mostly by the U.S. and European countries, is also facing a major economic crisis, Zuckerman said. Contributions from rich donor countries to the Fund, which pays for over 70 percent of antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS in the developing world, are down.

“Remittances are great in that they help individual families, but they don’t have larger social goals like combating HIV in a country, or improving social services, or giving women gender equality,” Zuckerman concluded.

By Amanda Wilson and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

For the fifth consecutive year, the number of international students studying in the U.S. increased, hitting an all-time record high, according to a report released Monday by the Institute of International Education (IIE) at the start of International Education Week.

The number of international students studying in the U.S. has been steadily climbing since experiencing a decline in the years after Sep. 11, 2001. With total U.S. enrollment estimated to be about two million, international students comprise less than four percent of total enrollment, according to the report.

But while more international students studied in the U.S. last year than during any time in the nation’s history – a total of 723,277 foreign students in the 2010-2011 school year – less than two percent of U.S. college and university students studied abroad during the same period, according to the IIE report.

Speaking in a videotaped message on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged U.S. students to apply for passports and “not just think globally but get out there and study globally as well”.

The IIE report, called the “Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange”, is based on a survey of 3,000 U.S. institutes of higher education and published annually with support from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

China, India top the list

China was the top sending country for the second year in a row, with 157,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. last school year. China surpassed India as the top sending country in 2008-2009. India maintained 14 percent of “all international students in U.S. higher education, with tens of thousands more students from India in U.S. higher education than in any other host country.”

India and South Korea were the second and third top sending countries, together with China comprising “nearly half (46 percent) of the total international enrollments in U.S. higher education,” according to the report.

Canada, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Japan were respectively the next top sending countries, with enrolling students from Saudi Arabia increasing by 44 percent. The report attributes this to a “large Saudi government scholarship program that has been ramping up over the past few years”.

Japan and Kenya saw double-digit percentage declines in the number of students from those countries enrolling in U.S. higher educational institutes.

The report also highlighted U.S. Department of Commerce statistics showing international students contribute more than 21 billion dollars to local economies. Sixty-three percent of international students “receive the majority of their funds from personal and family sources”, according to the report.

California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts and Illinois held their places as the top five destination states for international students, although the report shows that Ohio and Pennsylvania moved up on the list of top destinations.

The University of Southern California was the leading host institution for the tenth year in a row, hosting more than 8,000 international students last academic year, followed closely behind by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, New York University and Purdue, respectively.

The top fields of study for international students in the U.S. last year were business and management and engineering, which together attracted 40 percent of all international students.

U.S. students abroad

While the total number of U.S. students studying abroad has increased by 88 percent in the last 10 years, they still comprise just two percent of U.S. college students, a statistic Assistant Secretary of State Ann Stock said should be higher.

“We can and must do better in today’s global economy,” Stock said. She said students who study abroad come back more “globally aware and globally competent”.

Stock pointed to some of the federal programmes set up to facilitate U.S. citizens study abroad, including The Fulbright Scholar Program, the Humphry Fellowship Program, The Gilman International Scholarship, and Critical Language Scholarships.

The top four destinations for U.S. students studying abroad were the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and France. While China replaced Mexico as the fifth most popular destination for U.S. students studying abroad, the report points to a continuing exchange imbalance in the relatively small number of U.S. students studying in Asia compared to the number of Asian students studying in the U.S.

Still, the report points to “a surge in interest in study in China in the past decade, with nearly 14,000 students studying in China in 2009-2010 compared to fewer than 3,000” 10 years ago. The report also points to double-digit increases in the number of U.S. students studying abroad in India, Israel, Brazil and New Zealand.

About 42,000 students pursued their entire degrees abroad, about 16,000 of those in the United Kingdom.

Some imbalances characterise the demographics of U.S. students studying abroad. Two-thirds of those students were women, although the number of males studying abroad is growing. The report also shows that while racial and ethnic minorities comprise one-third of college and university students in the U.S., only one-fifth of those who study abroad from the U.S. come from minority groups.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

Frank Mugisha was just a young teenager in Uganda when he came out as gay. He faced bullying and threats, but he says the stories of lesbian, gay, and transgender friends he later met were much worse – some were kicked out of their homes by their families, subjected to sexual violence to “make them straight”, or arrested.

Frank Mugisha Credit: Photo courtesy of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

The activists provided their names and phone numbers for interviews and spoke out, sharing their personal stories. That campaign brought visibility to sexual minorities in a country where the government had, until then, denied their very existence.

On Thursday in Washington, Mugisha, director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), an LGBTI organisation in the East African country, will receive the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights Award. The award recognises “an individual who stands up to oppression at grave personal risk in the nonviolent pursuit of human rights”, according to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

The award marks the beginning of a six-year partnership in which the RFK Center will support Mugisha’s work and that of SMUG, a membership organisation working with 40 civil society partners in Uganda. This week, Mugisha and members of the RFK Center will travel to meet with prominent human rights groups, organisations, and members of the U.S. Congress to raise awareness about the situation of the LGBTI community in Uganda.

In a country where the government had maintained that sexual minorities did not even exist, the 2007 media campaign Mugisha organised with other members of the LGBTI community and their allies achieved an incredible first step for the country’s sexual minorities movement.

“It ended the myth that there are no homosexuals in Uganda,” Mugisha told IPS. “At least there is that acknowledgment that we exist.”

Activists in Uganda have also gone beyond visibility-building for sexual minorities to direct advocacy and political lobbying for rights for members of Uganda’s LGBT community. SMUG’s education initiatives promote understanding and acceptance of Uganda’s sexual minorities, who face discrimination in areas of life from education to health care.

The group also provides emergency response support for members of the community who have been arrested and seeks legal representation for them. It also educates on HIV/AIDS.

But an anti-gay law currently being reconsidered by Parliament would criminalise those health and education efforts as “promotion of homosexuality”. And although Uganda’s laws already criminalise homosexual acts – it is one of 70 countries worldwide where consensual homosexual conduct is punishable as a crime – the new law would make homosexual activities punishable by death in certain cases.

According to the RFK Center, 80 percent of Ugandans support the bill. The bill had earlier been shelved under international scrutiny, but on Oct. 25, it was reintroduced. Human rights organisations and governments around the world have vocally condemned the bill and voiced concerns that it could lead to more violence against Uganda’s LGBT community.

Gay rights activist David Kato, former advocacy and litigation officer for SMUG, was murdered in January of this year. He had received death threats after his name and photo were published by a Ugandan newspaper in 2010.

An ‘international struggle’

The timing of the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009 has been linked in news stories to visits to Uganda by U.S. ministers that same year.

“Then we had religious leaders coming from the U.S. in 2009 bringing words that we don’t understand,” Mugisha said, referring to concepts such as “ex-gay” and the idea that activists were “recruiting” others to be gay. “We are just gay people who want to be accepted and live in peace.”

Mugisha spoke Tuesday in Washington at a panel on sexuality and intolerance in East Africa hosted by TransAfrica, the Center for Constitutional Rights, SMUG, and the University at Buffalo Law School.

Makau Mutua, dean of Buffalo Law School and prominent human rights law scholar, also spoke at the conference Tuesday. He challenged the idea that homophobia had roots in Ugandan or African culture in general.

“When I was growing up there was no word for homosexuality,” Mutua said. “There is nothing that is inherently homophobic in African societies.”

Sylvia Tamale, a professor and legal scholar based in Kampala, Uganda, said the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was being used by both political and religious leaders for their own interests and that it was “being dangled like Damocles sword over the heads of LGBT citizens and activists in Uganda”.

She said the bill was being used to divert public attention from other issues in Ugandan society such as “skyrocketing unemployment, inflation, our health facilities”, Tamale said. “For weeks it becomes the issue on all the FM stations.”

But she asked members of the international community not to think of homophobia in Uganda and the struggle of the LGBTI community there as a problem exclusive to East Africa.

“I want us to look at this resurgence of homophobia on the whole continent, I want us to look at it as an international struggle – it is not as if the West is homophobia-free,” Tamale said.

She added that she did not support aid sanctions against countries with anti-gay bills, such as those proposed by United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron in October, as she said it could “unleash a terrible backlash”.

Mugisha said Tuesday that the positive achievements of the LGBTI movement in Uganda gave him hope, but that much work remained.

“I tell people I am not so afraid of my government,” Mugisha said, adding that if he were arrested, people would likely protest. “But what about my neighbour? If we don’t change people’s minds, if we don’t end the ignorance about homosexuality in Uganda, the challenges will continue.”

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 2011 (IPS)

The U.S. State Department Wednesday released a statement criticising what it said was a “deteriorating” human rights situation in Uganda and the government’s increasingly heavy- handed tactics to repress political opposition and silence dissent.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni has been in power for 25 years. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Castro

Release of the statement was an unusual move, as State Department criticism of allies is usually issued in response to questions from reporters. This statement, however, was volunteered.

Also on Wednesday, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported that in Uganda a mob of 20 people, believed to be linked to the government, stormed Besigye’s house in the village of Kasangati. Skirmishes between the “alleged state agents”, supporters of Besigye’s FDC party, and villagers left 12 people injured.

Besigye is a well-known figure in Uganda. The politician, who has lost to Museveni three times, started a “walk to work” protest campaign in the spring in which he walked down the street with several dozen supporters to bring attention to soaring food and fuel prices.

The symbolic “walk to work” campaign gave momentum to other anti- government protests that broke out in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, in April and May. It was during those protests, according to the State Department’s statement, that “Ugandan security forces killed at least ten civilians, including a two-year old girl, while attempting to disrupt peaceful protests against rising prices.”

Bisigye was arrested this spring in what many said was an attempt by the government to silence criticism of President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power in Uganda for 25 years.

“On October 31, police again arrested Besigye for attempting to walk to work,” the statement reads. Also in October, the Ugandan government “urged Parliament to adopt draft legislation severely limiting public meetings of three persons or more”.

According to the statement, the Ugandan government’s proposed legislation “specifically references meetings where participants discuss government principles, policies, and actions, and appears to target opposition and civil society organizations critical of the government”.

The U.S. State Department’s urging of Uganda to protect its citizens’ human rights comes less than a month after the Barack Obama administration sent in about 100 “advisory” U.S troops to help the Ugandan government track down the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The move was approved this spring by Congressional legislation backed by both Republicans and Democrats, as well as many humanitarian and human rights groups, that had expressed outrage at reports of recent massacres and other depredations carried out by the LRA in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR).

Restrictions in Uganda already in force

Scott Edwards, advocacy director for Africa with the London-based Amnesty International (AI) U.S. section in Washington, told IPS that a de facto ban on public assembly has been in force for months, with arrests continuing throughout the summer and fall.

“We are very concerned about the blanket ban on public assembly that we have seen from the government,” Edwards told IPS. He said AI was concerned about “a steady increase” in repression of peaceful assembly and expression. “In terms of realities on the ground, the legislation would just be cover for what is already occurring.”

The State Department’s statement comes just one day after AI on Tuesday released a lengthy report on human rights violations Uganda citing widespread repression of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in the country.

“The official response to public protests over rising costs of living involved the widespread use of excessive force… the imposition of restrictions on the media and attempts to block public use of social networking internet sites,” the report says.

Death penalty bill for LGBTs reintroduced

Edwards also told IPS that reports out of Uganda indicate that a draft law that would legislate criminal penalties as severe as the death penalty for members of Uganda’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gender (LGBT) community – a law that had been tabled under international scrutiny – would be reintroduced.

He said the bill, which would ramp up penalties for being gay, which is already illegal in Uganda, could be re-introduced as early as next week.

Human rights organisations and governments around the world have vocally condemned the bill and voiced concerns that it could lead to more violence against Uganda’s LGBT community.

In a tragic case of anti-gay violence in Uganda that received attention around the world, gay rights activist David Kato was violently murdered in January. He had received death threats since being outed by a Ugandan newspaper in 2010.

Edwards said government actions repressing peaceful assembly and journalists, combined with the judicial assault on a particular group “creates a very dangerous atmosphere, not just in terms of proposed legislation, but in the day to day lives of people on the street who may be targeted because of their identity.”

Frank Mugisha, a 29-year-old LGBT activist who has been a vocal advocate for the rights of Uganda’s sexual minorities, is set to receive the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in Washington in November.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 2011 (IPS)

When Mona Kareem, a member of the Bidoun population of Kuwait, was 11 years old, a neighbour Kuwaiti woman asked her where she was from. When Kareem answered, “I am from Bidoun,” the woman laughed at her. “There is no country called Bidoun. There is no Bidoun.”

Bidoun women of Kuwait. Credit: Courtesy of Refugees International

Kareem shared her story Tuesday at a conference on statelessness and gender discrimination organised by Refugees International (RI) at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). It was, she said, the first time anyone from Kuwait’s Bidoun community had ever shared their story in the U.S.

Estimated to be about 100,000, the Bidoun, which means “without” in Arabic, live their lives without any nationality in Kuwait and other states. Although they are culturally and linguistically no different from Kuwaiti citizens, Bidoun are treated as “illegal residents” there, RI reports.

Their stateless status blocks them from access to the privileges and rights Kuwaiti citizens enjoy such as drivers’ licenses and birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates.

At the conference, international human rights advocates urged countries around the world to take action on issues of statelessness, a legally invisible status that United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonia Guterres, said Tuesday is “probably the most forgotten global human rights problem in today’s international agenda”.

According to RI, about 12 million people worldwide lack effective citizenship, a status that deprives them of rights such as legal representation, identity documents, and access to public schools. And in many countries, discrimination against women in nationality laws aggravate or actively create statelessness.

For example, Kuwaiti women, unless they are divorced or widowed, cannot pass on their citizenship to their children, according to RI. In this way, many children of Bidoun fathers inherit their fathers’ statelessness.

Forty nations in the world have explicit gender discrimination in their laws, and 30 nations have nationality laws in which mothers are not able to convey their nationality to children when they are married to someone stateless or of a different nationality.

These laws create situations in which “statelessness is actively being created because mothers cannot pass their nationality,” Guterres said. He urged the 30 countries to amend their nationality laws to allow “all of the world’s mothers to convey their nationality to their children in the same way as fathers”.

Michel Gabaudan, president of RI, emphasised the global nature of statelessness and pointed to the Roma people of Europe and Southern Sudanese currently living in Khartoum. Southern Sudanese in Khartoum are “at risk of becoming stateless if the state does not adopt a measure to establish citizenship”, Gabaudan said.

Sonia Pierre, a Dominican activist of Haitian decent, also shared her story Tuesday. Speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, she told stories of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic who have, since 2010, been retroactively stripped of their Dominican citizenship. RI is urging the Dominican Republic to stop denationalising Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Mona Kareem’s story

Kareem, an activist who tweets avidly under the Twitter username @monakareem, was born in Kuwait in 1987 and began publishing poetry at the age of 14. Although most Bidoun cannot attend university, she eventually won a scholarship to a private university in Kuwait and is now a student of comparative literature at State University of New York, Binghamton. She is a contributor to Global Voices, GV Advocacy, Jadaliyya.com and Migrant-rights.org.

But Kareem said most of her female peers met a different fate. She said many young women like her try to avoid giving their children the destiny of statelessness by marrying Kuwaiti men or choose never to marry. Others commit suicide. Still others are “fighting for documents and bringing more kids into the same tragedy”.

Bidoun youth, who have few employment prospects and little hope of university education, drop out of school and suffer from major depression, according to Kareem. “None of them have hope,” Kareem said. “None of them even use the word hope.”

Progress is Possible

Despite the harrowing accounts of stateless peoples throughout the world, Guterres said there is reason for hope. He said 10 countries have recently made progress or changed their constitutions to reduce or eliminate gender discrimination in their laws, and he pointed to Tunisia as an example.

Since former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster in January 2011, government officials Tunisia have voted to more stringently adhere to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international gender non- discrimination treaty, giving Tunisian women equal rights to nationality and to equality within the family in matters of marriage, divorce, and custody.

He said the UNHCR was currently working with South Sudan, Nepal and Vietnam as they draft new constitutions and nationality laws to help eliminate problems that still exist.

Sarnata Reynolds, RI project manager for statelessness, said Libya also amended its nationality law in May, 2011. She said the UNHCR launched a major campaign on statelessness at the end of August.

“We’re thrilled,” Reynolds told IPS.

In a success story from Algeria, Algerian activist Lalia Ducos described how women’s rights activists and artists in that country in 2003 formed the “20 Years is Enough” movement to mark the 20th anniversary in 2004 of the country’s gender discriminatory family code legislating marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship.

As part of the campaign, women musicians from Algeria, France and Argentina created a widely-circulated video to promote reform of the Algeria’s family code, and in 2005, the code was reformed. The real breakthrough, Ducos said, was that the new code lets women pass on their citizenship to their children. Previously, only a man could pass on citizenship.

“It ensures a woman that her children will always have a nationality, no matter her choices in love and marriage,” Ducos, speaking in French, said through an interpreter. Ducos has hope for women suffering from gender discrimination everywhere.

She said, “Our liberation should blossom at the same time as the Arab Spring.”

Excerpt:

If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear a case on gene patents, observers say the resulting face-off – between a large genetics testing company and a vocal coalition of breast cancer patient advocates – will have a massive impact because of what is at stake: valuable information about the human genome.

Structure of the BRCA1 protein. Credit: emw/creative commons

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced they will ask the Supreme Court to rule on the gene diagnostics company Myriad Genetics’ patents on “isolated” BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, two genes that can have mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer, as well as prostate cancer for some populations.

Myriad’s gene patents allow it to hold exclusive rights in the U.S. to test the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes for the mutations that indicate a particular patient has a higher risk of developing cancer. The mutations, which occur in five to 10 percent of breast cancer cases, give women an 85-percent risk of developing cancer compared to a 10- percent risk in the general population.

The group of 20 plaintiffs in the case, including geneticists, pathologists, and breast cancer survivor advocates such as Breast Cancer Action (BCA), represented by the ACLU, maintain that the patents block patient care because patients can’t get second opinions and that access to the expensive tests is stacked against the poor.

In September, Myriad sent the following statement to IPS: “Myriad offers a number of financial assistance programs to help uninsured and underinsured patients, including interest-free payment programs that require less than 30 dollars per month for BART testing.”

Myriad had no comment on the Supreme Court case.

But more than just a footnote in the annals of business or intellectual property (IP) law, stakeholders say the case, if the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, would have a ripple effect on biology, patient groups, and an industry betting billions on growth in “personalised” medicine and individual genetic diagnoses.

A leading industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO), threw its full support behind Myriad Genetics, and supporters of gene patents say they help research and development (R&D) in the sector.

Discussions of R&D in the biotech sector – and its promise of jobs and economic growth – are also increasingly tied to broader national economic policy. Last month, the administration of President Barack Obama announced development of a “Bioeconomy Blueprint” for “building the U.S. bioeconomy.”

One of the main pillars of the ACLU’s argument is that patents block other researchers and gene sequencers, in an era of decreasing cost and increasing ease of full-genome sequencing, from looking at the genes to see how they relate to the full genome or to other breast cancer mutations.

“When Myriad started enforcing their patents, they shut down all other labs, including our lab at Yale,” (from doing BRCA sequencing), Ellen Matloff, a plaintiff in the case and head of genetic counseling at Yale Cancer Center, told IPS.

Do patents block research?

Misha Angrist is a professor at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University and author of the book “Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics”. He has studied how gene patents played out in a disease called Long QT Syndrome (LQTS), which has a genetic link that causes an irregular heartbeat and can cause sudden death.

The genes linked to susceptibility for the disease were discovered by the University of Utah in the 1990s, according to Angrist. The university eventually licensed patents on those genes to a private company, DNA Sciences, which then sold its assets to Genaissance Pharmaceuticals. That company and its patents were eventually were “swallowed” by another company called Clinical Data.

However, “there was a period when DNA Sciences and Genaissance controlled the IP related to the Long QT susceptibility genes and enforced their IP rights against other labs that were doing homemade Long QT tests,” Angrist told IPS.

That period began in 2002 and lasted for less than two years. Angrist and a group of colleagues continued to urge Clinical Data to make its mutation data public, and in 2008 the company complied.

Angrist said that while reports show 20 percent of the human genome has been patented, most of those patents have never been enforced or used to block research. He said patent-holding companies usually do not have a big enough incentive to enforce their patents.

A particular set of circumstances has to coalesce to make a patent worth enforcing, according to Angrist: the gene should have a mutation that substantially raises a patient’s risk, it should be prevalent, and there should be interventions available that directly treat or cure a patient.

“Strong genes that are predictive, a big enough market to make money, and interventions that actually help – it’s a pretty small number,” Angrist told IPS.

For Myriad Genetics, the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 fit that bill.

“Hereditary breast cancer and Long QT Syndrome are exceptional as cases where patents are relevant,” Angrist said. “They are common enough that companies like Myriad see a very profitable product and lots of money to be made.”

Gene patent supporters argue gene patents don’t block research, but rather give researchers incentives to “undertake the research investment necessary to create and market these products and services,” according to a brief written in support of Myriad genetics by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PHRMA), and provided to IPS.

But others point out that research behind gene patents is often undertaken with public money, such as in the Long QT case, by The University of Utah.

Gene patent supporters also argue that patents give other researchers an incentive to improve their own research by forcing a “would-be copyist to ‘design around’ the claimed invention,” according to the PHRMA brief.

But Angrist quotes an old adage that “you can’t invent around a gene”. He said he thinks the end of gene patents is on the horizon, possibly within this decade. He pointed out that sequencing is getting cheaper and said patents expire on their own anyway, ultimately dying of “natural causes”.

“There will come a day when people will be able to do this (gene sequencing) in their garage and, in that case, how does any company enforce its patents?” Angrist told IPS. “This is like trying to keep water in a sieve.”

*This story is the second of a three-part series on gene patenting.

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 19 2011 (IPS)

High-level United Nations officials and advocates of U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping initiatives in Washington this week urged lawmakers to continue and even ramp up support for the operations, which they say benefit U.S. security interests, protect civilians, and prevent failed states.

Female member of the Nigerian battalion of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) stands in the rain. Credit: UN Photo/Christopher Herwig

The rallying cries came as Republican presidential candidates, as recently as a debate televised Tuesday night, launched repeated criticisms of U.S. funding for the U.N. and its operations ahead of the 2012 presidential election. The U.N.’s blue-helmeted peacekeeping troops have also faced criticism of misconduct in the past.

But defenders of U.N. peacekeeping operations, including advocates at two separate forums hosted by the Brookings Institute and The Partnership for Effective Peacekeeping (PEP), said this week that the U.N. has instituted reforms to make its missions more effective, transparent, and cost-conscious.

Victoria Holt, deputy assistant secretary of state for international relations in the Barack Obama administration, speaking at a panel hosted by PEP and the Better World Campaign, emphasised the administration’s support for the U.N.

“This is a commitment of this administration to get the funding to fully fund those” obligations, Holt said. She said support for U.N. peacekeeping operations was a policy the previous administration also shared.

Anthony Banbury, assistant-secretary general for field support for the U.N., said economic crises in U.N. member countries were forcing states to scrutinise spending on U.N. peacekeeping missions, but that member countries still benefited from U.N. peacekeepers’ work, including their work supporting rule of law development, police training, disarmament, and protection of civilians.

Banbury said Tuesday that with reforms, the U.N. “will increasingly achieve what we all want: a peacekeeping capability in the U.N. that is able to deliver these not just complex but important mandates – including the protection of civilians – but at a cost that is affordable.”

Noam Unger, policy director of the Foreign Aid Reform Project at the Brookings Institution said Tuesday U.N. efforts were “under assault” and that anti-U.N. rhetoric sent a negative sign about U.S. commitment to international projects like the U.N., an institution he said was a means of promoting U.S. foreign policy and security interests in collaboration with other nations.

“It is a bad sign politically for where the U.S. is in terms of thinking about what the U.N. means around the world,” Unger said. “I think that we will get past it, but I am very concerned about that nowadays.”

A foreign policy committee in the Republican-led House of Representatives voted last week to approve a bill that would slash funding to the U.N. and its agencies. Observers say the bill has no chance of passing this year, especially in the Senate where Democrats have a majority. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would press Obama to veto it, should the bill make it to his desk.

“I think this is a bad direction to go – I don’t think the bill has a prayer of passing,” Unger said. “There is some strong language from the administration about vetoing it.”

Unger said that U.N. peacekeeping efforts bolstered U.S. security by preventing failed states, a tenet that has become increasingly central to U.S. security policy, especially in building the cases for continued engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.N. spends about eight billion dollars on peacekeeping worldwide each year, with the U.S. funding about two billion, or a quarter of that. While that spending has been criticised, advocates for U.N peacekeeping operations say critics have very little understanding of the breadth and scope of peacekeeping activities that are carried out with that funding and how they directly benefit the U.S.

Peter Yeo, director of the Better World Campaign, said Wednesday at a forum hosted by PEP that the U.S. should continue paying its dues “on time and in full”, and even bolster its support.

U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping operations “allows us to work with other countries and share the cost while directly promoting U.S. interests,” Yeo said. “The rest of the world pays the bulk. That is a good deal for American taxpayers.”

He also said the U.S. had a key role to play in not only in supporting U.N. peacekeeping operations financially, but in making them more efficient. A report released by PEP, “U.S. Engagement in International Peacekeeping: From Aspiration to Implementation”, laid out 26 recommendations to “enhance and increase U.S. involvement in international peacekeeping”.

Those recommendations include full funding of U.S. contributions to U.N. peacekeeping missions, more “timely and cost-effective delivery of human and material resources to peacekeeping operations”, and support for the Presidential Peacekeeping Initiative which lays out a possible plan for increasing the number of U.S. personnel sent to peacekeeping operations.

The report also recommends increased support from the department of defence to provide more women to peacekeeping missions to increase transparency and reduce sexual and gender-based violence – a step Kristen Cordell, a co-author of the report and advocate with Refugees International, said is proven to work. She said other countries were sending women to peacekeeping missions, and that the U.S. could do the same.

“We have an incredibly rich talent pool,” she told IPS.

Excerpt:

When Jaydee Hanson, then-bioethics director for the United Methodist Church, spoke out publicly against gene patents over 15 years ago, some in the biotech industry compared his stance to the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo, the 15th century astronomer who discovered the moons of Jupiter.

Hanson and 200 other religious leaders had released a statement that DNA in the human body and animals are natural objects and should not be subject to patenting.

Patent supporters in the biotech industry disagree, arguing that “isolated copies” of genes outside the human body should be patentable and that the prospect of intellectual property rights on genes serves as incentive for further research.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced it would ask the Supreme Court to rule on a patent by Myriad Genetics, a genetic diagnostics company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, on “isolated” BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, two genes that can have mutations linked to breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.

Those with a stake in the case say any ruling from the court would have a major impact on patient care, scientific research, and rights to access human genetic information, as well on legal doctrine.

District judge Robert Sweet agreed with the ACLU in 2010, but Myriad appealed, and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Sweet’s ruling in July, with two out of three judges siding with Myriad, affirming the company’s right to patents on the two “isolated” BRCA genes linked to breast cancer.

Facing a mid-December deadline to appeal the lower court’s ruling to uphold gene patents, the ACLU decided to move forward with the appeal in time for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, said Sandra Park, an ACLU attorney working on the case.

“We consulted with our clients and made the decision to move forward, given the importance of the issues to patients and scientists,” Park told IPS, adding that the Supreme Court would likely make a decision in the spring of 2012 about whether it will hear the case.

More than 4,000 genes have been patented, including copies of genes that make up 20 percent of the human genome, according to Hanson, who now works as a policy director for the International Centre for Technology Assessment (ICTA). In the past, Hanson and ICTA have successfully challenged patents on a beagle and other animals.

In September, Myriad sent the following comment to IPS: “Myriad defended its position in the courts and recently had a favourable outcome. We believe that isolated DNA and cDNA are patent-eligible material, as both are new chemical matter with important utilities which can only exist as a product of human ingenuity.”

With its patents, Myriad holds exclusive rights in the U.S. to test the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes for mutations and provide that information to doctors and patients. Those mutations place women at a much greater risk of developing breast cancer and some men at greater risk of developing prostate cancer.

ACLU: Patents make tests cost-prohibitive and block research

The ACLU represents a group of 20 other plaintiffs, including geneticists, pathologists and breast cancer survivor advocates, who maintain that the patents block patient care.

They argue that patients shouldn’t have to pay for genetic information they could use to make life-or- death decisions, such as whether to get a mastectomy, especially when other genetic testing providers could offer that information if Myriad didn’t have exclusive rights to sequence the genes.

Five to 10 percent of breast cancer cases are linked to mutations on the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes, and those with the mutations have an 85 percent risk of developing cancer. Some insurance policies cover the tests, but other plans, especially those providing insurance for the poor, don’t.

According to Park, Myriad chose not to enter into contracts with about half of all insurance programs in states that cover low-income people.

Ellen Matloff, a genetic counselor at Yale for over 15 years and a plaintiff in the ACLU case, said the cost of the test was a real issue for many of her patients.

According to her, “comprehensive” breast cancer test from Myriad for other breast cancer mutations costs 3,400 dollars and a supplementary test for the BRCA-1 and BRCA- 2 genes, called the BART test, costs 700 dollars. Matloff said that 95 percent of patients she recommends for supplementary testing don’t end up being tested because of its high cost.

“I know that we are missing mutations,” Matloff told IPS, adding that the BRCA gene mutations are passed down maternally and paternally. “It is going to impact them, their children, their siblings their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, and from a clinician’s standpoint it is horrifying.”

Gene patenting opponents also argue that in a new era in which full- genome sequencing is getting faster and cheaper, patents stand in the way of access to new knowledge about how certain genes are related to disease.

“The whole next phase of [research in] genetics and disease is to understand how genes work together,” Hanson told IPS. “It is a huge task, and the patents just interfere with it.”

Matloff expressed a similar concern that advanced knowledge about genes without access to that knowledge could create problems for patients and care providers.

“It is almost like saying, ‘we have your genes right in front of us, it came out of your body, but we are not allowed to look at it, we’re not allowed to interpret it, and we are not allowed to give the information back to you,'” Matloff said.

“It’s kind of like saying two of your genes are in jail, but we are not allowed to report this information to you, even though it would save your life.”

*This is the first in a series of articles on gene patenting.

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 11 2011 (IPS)

A new report on global hunger pinpoints factors at the heart of spikes in food prices it says are exacerbating the unfolding food crisis in the Horn of Africa.

Released ahead of World Food Day on Oct. 16, the report calls for action to control price volatility in the global food market and protect the world’s poorest from the scourge of famine.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI), released Tuesday by The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide, points to climate change, growing demand for biofuels, and increasing commodities futures trading in global food markets as the causes of price increases in food, which it says were also at the root of the food crisis of 2007-2008.

Price volatility refers to the relative rate at which the price for a commodity changes over time, according to the GHI. The report points to an enduring period of high and increasingly volatile prices for food, which it says has economic, social and political impacts.

The GHI report places countries on an index of hunger based on three indicators: the proportion of undernourished people, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the child mortality rate. According to the report, 26 countries face hunger crises. Burundi, Eritrea, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had a GHI score that increased 63 percent due to ongoing conflict, top the index with the most extreme levels.

Another major food security report released by the United Nations this week, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011”, also highlights data showing that volatile food prices are increasing hunger in the world’s poorest countries and forecasts that high prices will continue into 2012.

“Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Kenya are severely suffering from a number of factors that contribute to food insecurity,” said Wolfgang Jamann, secretary general of Welthungerhilfe, during the Tuesday press conference. “This is just one side of the coin – the other side of the coin is the so-called ‘silent hunger’ of over one billion people in the world who are suffering from acute or chronic hunger.”

Increasing food commodities futures trading, when investors bet on future prices for food commodities, in maize, soybeans, and wheat, have increased prices for those foods, according to the GHI. The report points out that money invested in food commodities futures trading went from 13 billion to 260 billion dollars between 2003 and 2008.

Maximo Torero, director of the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division at IFPRI and co-author of the GHI report, said speculation in the food commodities market is excessive.

“In the case of wheat you have people trading for three times the production of wheat,” Torero told IPS.

He said the problem arises when investors enter and exit the market for short-term profit without ever making a real transaction. According to Torero, only two percent of transactions are ever realised in the food futures market. The situation is one that needs more regulatory measures, he said.

Increasing and excessive food commodities speculation coincides with an ongoing boom in biofuels. As the WHI report points out, the United States and European Union are subsidising biofuel production as an alternative to crude oil. This is encouraging farmers to shift their production to biofuel crops, such as maize, that never make it to the dinner table. Global biofuel subsidies reached 20 billion dollars in 2009, according to the GHI.

Torero said that when more food crops go to biofuel production in the United States, it affects the amount of crops that can be exported to other countries. This has an impact because the United States accounts for about 50 percent of all global corn exports. As the GHI points out, an increasing link between the energy market, which is highly volatile, and the food market, is also making prices more volatile.

Furthermore, extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, which may increase due to even very small changes in the global climate, have the potential to decimate crop yields, further raising food prices. The poor are hard-hit by food price spikes and volatility, especially in low-income countries where families spend a majority of their income on food, the report stresses.

The GHI presents several policy recommendations to address food price volatility and increases by “revising biofuel policies, regulating financial activity on food markets, and adapting to and mitigating climate change”. It also urges countries to improve social services and invest in “sustainable, small-scale agriculture”.

Other voices are calling for a dramatic re-examination of global food supply chains to make them shorter and more geared toward local needs. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has advocated for sustainable, small-scale agriculture under the banner of “Agroecology”.

“International trade only concerns nine to 10 percent of the food that is produced globally, yet it has had decisive influence on the way decisions are made on the way infrastructure develops and on how farmers are being supported,” DeSchutter told IPS earlier this year. “Governments have generally supported export-led agriculture, supported global supply chains, and under-invested in local and regional markets.”

He said he encouraged governments to reinvest in agriculture that feeds local populations. Instead, he said small farmers around the world were being ignored by public policies, migrating to cities, and eventually ending up in poverty and eating heavily-subsidised, cheap, imported food.

DeSchutter told IPS, “It’s a vicious cycle in which small farmers are further impoverished because they can’t compete – that’s why we have one billion hungry.”

*With additional reporting by Kanya D’Almeida.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 5 2011 (IPS)

Foreign aid could be one of the first items on the chopping block as the United States struggles to address trillion- dollar deficits in the coming fiscal years, a fate U.S. international development agency officials are trying hard to avoid.

Top-level officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) teamed up with a Hollywood celebrity in Washington on Monday to urge the public and lawmakers not to cut spending on foreign aid, which they say saves lives, strengthens security, and builds economies around the world, ultimately helping the U.S. most of all.

USAID deputy administrator Donald Steinberg and the organisation’s chief economist, Steve Radelet, joined with Barbara P. Bush and actress/singer Mandy Moore this week to argue for the foreign aid agenda, which faces criticism from both policymakers and voters who often question the effectiveness of aid projects in general.

Officials say that they’re fighting not just a budgetary battle, but one of perceptions: most U.S. citizens believe that foreign aid spending is already in excess, when in reality it accounts for only one percent of the U.S. federal budget, according to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Aid projects in the spotlight, at home and abroad

The forthcoming conference of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in Busan, Korea this November will put foreign aid effectiveness at the forefront of the debate.

With U.S. international development projects under scrutiny in the U.S. at home, and abroad, continued federal spending at current levels on organisations like USAID could depend on officials’ ability to make a convincing argument about the value of foreign aid.

Aid effectiveness is a major factor in the decision-making process for officials, and has been a dominant theme in discussions of international development this year, including a meeting of civil society organisations during the World Bank annual fall meetings in September as a prelude to the Busan conference.

The U.S. has already made strides towards meeting the goals set forth in the Paris Declaration by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2005, which focused heavily on results- oriented development that includes the voices of those who are affected by aid projects.

USAID officials said Monday that the organisation was running more efficiently, transparently, and with more self-evaluation than ever before and that cutting funding for the agency would mean a major backslide for international development.

“We are involved in 1,200 separate partnerships with the American people, NGOs, private companies, local governments and local NGOs,” Steinberg said. “These are ways of taking very scarce American taxpayer dollars and multiplying them.”

Steinberg said the organisation was holding itself accountable “like never before”, publishing everything that it is doing online.

In fight for aid money, an economic argument

A letter of support for foreign aid, signed by more than 100 international aid organisations in early September, urged lawmakers to avoid “deep and disproportionate” cuts to the foreign aid budget.

If a congressional super committee tasked with making at least 1.2 trillion dollars in cuts to the federal budget does not reach an agreement on where to make them, cuts will be made automatically. Fifty percent of cuts would come from security-related programmes. While the Pentagon would be the biggest target for cuts, the security budget also includes funding for USAID.

The Center for Global Development (CGD), an international development policy institute, has been a leading proponent of the idea that development promotes global stability.

Casey Dunning, a policy analyst with CGD’s Rethinking US Foreign Assistance programme, said that budget concerns may require the U.S. to focus its efforts on a smaller number of countries. Last year, USAID gave aid to over 150 countries, according to CGD. But, Dunning said, spending cuts should avoid some programmes in particular.

“I think that there is definitely a strong indication of where the cuts shouldn’t be happening,” Dunning told IPS. “If we look at the initiatives that have gotten a lot of attention in the budget and on the Hill, like the Feed the Future Initiative, these are places where we should be investing our resources.”

USAID officials Monday in Washington urged lawmakers not to put foreign aid on the chopping block, arguing instead that development money ultimately helps the U.S. economy by creating security and building healthy societies and consumers abroad.

“(Foreign aid) is giving incredible dividends in terms of making people healthier, and making markets stronger for American companies which is also helping people at home,” Scott Thompson, a spokesperson for Population Services International (PSI), a global public-private health contractor and sponsor of the event on Monday, told IPS. “It would be foolish to throw away.”

Pushing a strong economic argument that seemed targeted to win the support of even fiscal conservatives, USAID officials said one in five jobs in the U.S. is supported by exports to the developing world.

“By establishing links to these consumers today, we can effectively position American companies to sell them good tomorrow,” read a statement issued by USAID on Monday.

USAID is sponsoring the campaign to save foreign aid budget in partnership with other major foreign aid actors such as PSI, WorldVision, a Christian humanitarian organisation, and PATH, an international nonprofit.

“Up-front investment in stabilising countries saves us costs up-front in security later on,” Radelet said. “These relatively modest investments have big payoffs later on, that’s why we think it’s the most important investment we can make.”

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2011 (IPS)

As a light drizzle fell Saturday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu pointed to solar houses constructed by students on the National Mall park in Washington as evidence that the U.S can compete internationally in the renewable energy market to create jobs and win “the war against climate change”.

Three-year-old Henry Shales, visiting from New York, takes a close look at a solar panel on display at the DOE Solar Decathlon 2011. Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

The homes were on display for about one week from the end of September through Sunday, Oct. 3.

Four thousand students working on 20 teams from around the world designed the homes, and the DOE, which has sponsored the event since 2002, estimated that by Saturday more than 200,000 people had visited them.

Energy efficiency with market appeal

On Saturday, gray light filtered into the kitchen through a “living wall” of plants and herbs on shelving as crowds shuffled through a house designed and constructed by a team from Middlebury College in Vermont.

The home, inspired by New England farmhouses, featured south-facing windows, skylights, front-loading washer and dryer, Vermont White Oak decking, and student-designed furniture. In the hours before the much-anticipated award ceremony, Middlebury students were busy guiding visitors through the home they had worked on for two years.

Alison Thompson, an environmental studies major with a focus on geology, said she was proud the team from her small liberal arts school – without any engineering team members – had made it to the competition.

“This embodies the spirit of what we are trying to do (at Middlebury)”, Thompson told IPS. “The fact that we showed up here and we are a serious contender, we are thrilled,” she said.

The team, a diverse mix of students including English and political science majors, met once per week in their spare time over a period of two years to fundraise, design, and plan the house after a student’s mother suggested entering the competition.

Later at the awards ceremony, the Middlebury College team erupted in raucous shouts of joy when organisers announced Middlebury had won first place in the market appeal contest. The University of Maryland house took first place overall, while Purdue and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand came in second and third, respectively.

Appalachian State University, located in the mountains of North Carolina, won the “people’s choice award”, gaining the most visitor votes for its “solar homestead“, a structure with a long, covered porch and a design inspired by the dwellings of rugged Appalachia.

At the Solar Decathlon awards ceremony, Chu said critics of the U.S. solar power and green energy initiatives need only to look at student-built model homes to see that U.S. innovation “is alive and well”.

“Just as there is a fierce competition here (at the Solar Decathlon), there is competition across the world,” Chu said. He said that by 2050, solar power could generate 20 percent of the world’s energy and that countries like China were investing heavily in the sector.

“Some say this is a race America can’t win,” Chu said. “They say we can’t afford to invest in clean energy. I say we can’t afford not to.”

Facts ignored in Solyndra crash

In September, the crash of Solyndra, a California-based solar cell manufacturer with 535 million dollars in federal loan guarantees, provoked widespread speculation about the future of green tech initiatives in the U.S. Critics pointed to the crash to argue that the U.S. renewable energy sector has had its day in the sun and does not merit government support.

Since the crash, reports such as this analysis from the Washington Post have highlighted how a variety of circumstances contributed to the company’s failure. And while critics argue the U.S. can’t compete with China, according to a report from ThinkProgress, the U.S actually exported more than 1.7 billion dollars worth of solar products to China in 2010 and had a net trade surplus of 247 million dollars.

Alexander Ochs, director of the energy and climate programme at the WorldWatch Institute, said the solar industry was actually one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S., with 5,000 companies employing more than 100,000 people. He said Solyndra failed because it made poor investment decisions and was buffeted by price fluctuations in the raw materials market – not because solar power industry is in trouble.

“Solyndra is now used as a scandal to set an example that solar is not working in the U.S. or that it cannot compete on the international market. It is basically used as an attempt to kill the industry as a whole,” Ochs told IPS.

In fact, Ochs said the solar industry grew at a rate of 69 percent in the last year alone, more than doubling in size, and at a rate much higher than the fossil fuel industry, which grows only in the low single digits, or nuclear, the only energy sector with a negative growth rate.

Notwithstanding those facts, Ochs said criticisms of government support for renewable energy did not take into account the comparatively large cost of fossil fuel subsidies.

A study by the Environmental Law Institute estimates that between 2002 and 2008 in the U.S., the fossil fuel energy-producing sector received 72.5 billion dollars in subsidies while, in the same six- year period, renewable energy received 29 billion, a large proportion of that going to biofuels.

According to the World Bank, globally the fossil fuel industry received 557 billion dollars in government subsidies in 2009, while the renewable and biofuel industries combined received 46 billion – just one-twelfth of what fossil fuel industry received.

Arguing that the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies that are direct, indirect, infrastructural – even subsidies in the form of externalised health and environmental costs – Ochs questioned how critics could argue that the renewable energy industry could compete without getting subsidies itself.

Ochs told IPS, “Twenty years after we started taking climate change seriously and in light of all the economic problems and health problems that result from our use of fossil fuels, we are still putting 12 times the amount of money into fossil fuels.”

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 30 2011 (IPS)

Imagine a class of 24 children, three of whom take performance enhancing medicines that increase their chances of scoring high on standardized tests. Now quadruple that number, with one half of the pupils popping pills and the other pushing their pencils med free.

Arizona State University (ASU) professors Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, co-authors of the book “The Techno-Human Condition”, use this hypothetical scenario to illustrate the implications of enhancing, or the practice of interfacing humans and technologies to augment human capacities. Though the classroom example is just one hypothetical scenario, enhancement technologies are already very real, the authors said, arguing that the human body is a “design space for bioscience” in a society already engaging technology on a highly personal level.

“How many of you outsource your memory to Google?” they posed, referring to relying on a search engine to retrieve forgotten information.

New technologies, they said, are “changing the ethical space” of society and presenting new questions about right and wrong, ethical and unethical, and natural and unnatural. Furthermore, the choice to enhance matters on a social scale much broader than individual choice

“These technologies all have ripple effects… If one person in my SAT class enhances, that’s one thing, but if it is 25 percent, it begins to skew the curve,” Allenby said at the forum, “Is Our Techo-Human Marriage in Need of Counselling”, held in September at the New America Foundation and co-sponsored by Slate Magazine and ASU.

“Enhancements are not free of implications for everybody else in the society that is playing with enhancements.”

The authors pointed to new computer-human relationships, such as the use of Facebook and more extreme phenomena, such as ‘deaths by gaming’ caused by video-gaming so intense that gamers neglect to eat or drink and finally die. Other examples come from the field of biotechnology, such as life-extending treatments.

“Everyone wants to live to be 150, but what (would) a world where everyone can live to 150 be like?” Sarewitz asked. “We need to talk about what that would be like.”

The technologies the authors highlight hold overwhelming potential to improve human physical or mental capacities in the near future and promise breakthroughs that challenge long-held ideas of what is humanly possible.

Two main arguments currently dominate the discourse about enhancements, Allenby and Sarewitz said. The conservative approach to technology promotes state regulatory intervention, whereas the libertarian approach sees individuals as having free rein on how, when and if they choose to enhance.

After all, the authors argued, people like to enhance, especially if they believe they might give their children a “competitive advantage in life”.

On the other hand, “sometimes people rise up and reject certain technologies for certain reasons,” Sarewitz said, pointing out broad rejections of genetically modified foods in Europe and a push away from nuclear energy in the United States.

Either way, the authors suggested that technology is evolving faster than society’s ability to grapple with it. They say discussion should focus on which technologies society will have to deal with and which ones should be challenged.

Others disagreed. A broader discussion on technology and society should not only confront the “accept” or “reject” dilemma, according to Bill Freese, a science policy analyst with the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA, a non-profit that analyses technology’s impacts on society.

He said it should also examine the promises, hype, and sensationalism that accompany breakthroughs and advances. “What we are finding that with biotechnology is that there has been very little accomplished compared to the promises,” Freese told IPS.

While Freese said the biotech sector has successfully been able to engineer bacteria and cell cultures to produce drugs, other decades- long biotech research on gene therapy, which promises to cure rare diseases using genes inserted into the human body, has yet to produce a successful breakthrough.

“It is really important to understand that a lot of this is hype, and very carefully calibrated hype,” Freese said, pointing out that much of the publicity surrounding biotechnology in particular is strategically created to attract funding, with many start-ups ultimately going bankrupt without ever fulfilling their promises.

Freese suggested that a broader discussion on technology and society could start with greater transparency surrounding government institutions and their funding of private companies conducting medical research, such as in genetic engineering.

He questioned whether government institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should give funding to biotech companies working on research in human genetic engineering.

“The NIH could throw open this whole issue to debate,” Freese said.

In addition to ICTA, which was formed after the U.S. Congress shut down the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1995, another non-governmental organisation working in society and technology is the ETC Group, a group researching broader socio- economic issues related to new technologies.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2011 (IPS)

In the seemingly lawless global free-for-all to lay claim to reserves of the world’s most precious remaining natural resources, experts warn that “cowboy mining companies” are plundering the earth’s riches and leaving little left for the rest.

But laws do exist, and better governance of what is known in technical terms as “resource extraction” can help prevent such abuses, according to University of Oxford economics professor Paul Collier.

Collier, who spoke at World Bank meetings here last week at a panel session hosted by the Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), said civil society has a key role to play.

RWI is a policy organisation that advises governments and citizen groups on “effective and sustainable” resource use.

In a new book edited together with Anthony Venables, “Plundered Nations? Successes and Failures in Natural Resource Extraction”, Colliers argues three factors are necessary to make sure everyone gets a fair share of the resource pie.

The book features case studies of eight resource-rich countries and presents analyses of the countries’ use of their resources according to certain indicators. The countries include Cameroon, Chile, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia and Zambia.

According to the authors, two of the countries, Chile and Malaysia, have a successful history of natural resource use, while the other countries largely fell victim to the so-called “resource curse”.

“Actually the reason why success is so rare is that actually there is a whole chain of decisions, all of which have to go right in order to harvest the enormous opportunity of natural assets,” they say.

Malaysia, for example, reduced poverty from 50 percent of the population in 1970 to less than four percent by 2007 because of successful natural resource extraction governance.

“That could have been resource-rich Africa,” Collier said.

According to Collier, that chain includes three important steps necessary for avoid plunder. According to a “first discover, then capture” mantra, Collier said governments should first obtain geological information in order to know the extent and value of their countries’ natural resources before ever letting companies break ground to dig.

Then, governments should retain a “substantial” portion of companies’ profits from resources through taxes and, lastly, should use that money for public projects that support livelihoods and diversify economies.

“The few can steal from the many or the present can expropriate what should belong to the future, but both plunder,” Collier said. “Natural assets should benefit all future generations.”

Karin Lissakers, executive director of RWI, said weak legal codes in the area of resource extraction often prevent countries from benefiting from their natural resources.

“Public audits, conflict of interest laws, companies being required to sign a pledge to meet standards…these are the kinds of things you can do to increase the revenue stream,” Lissakers said, adding that contracts should be made public.

She said that Guinea, an African country rich in copper, approved a new mining code in early September, with policy help from RWI. The new mining code in Guinea doubled taxation on iron ore extraction, which will mean an addition three billion dollars per year in tax revenue for a country where, according to Think Africa Press, 47 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar per day.

According to Collier, for a resource extraction law to be effective, government approval is just the first step. He said the law also needs a “critical mass of citizens who know what that rule is for and scrutinise it to make sure what is needed is being done”.

One tool meant to enhance the ease of public oversight, supporters say, is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). EITI is a set of principles under which extraction companies disclose how much they pay governments in taxes and other payments, and governments publish what they receive from companies.

EITI is funded in part by the United Nations and the World Bank and supported by non-governmental, civil society organisations such as the Open Society Foundation, Publish What You Pay International, and Oxfam.

Last week in New York at the launch of a major global government transparency initiative, the Open Government Partnership (OGP), U.S. President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. would implement EITI, which was first put forward in 2002. Thirty five-countries are now implementing EITI and 12 countries have achieved EITI Compliant status.

Another such initiative is the Natural Resource Charter, a proposed blueprint for better managing how profits from the world’s resources are divvied up. The charter offers concrete guidelines for how revenues from resources should be invested, with an aim toward more widespread social and economic benefit.

“For a government that wants to get it right, this is a how-to guide,” Collier said. “For the citizens who are afraid their nation is going to be plundered, this is what you need to look at.”

Not all efforts to rein in rogue mining companies have met with success. A bill that would have held Canadian mining companies, many of which are based in Toronto, accountable to foreign practices guidelines, failed to pass in the Canadian parliament last year. Bill C-300 lost by a narrow, six vote margin of 140 to 134.

Collier said the scenario could have turned out differently if there had been more pressure from Canadian citizens for parliamentarians to pass the law. Lissakers said company opposition to the law was probably a factor in its failure.

“There are some real cowboy mining companies in Canada,” Lissakers said, adding that Canada was objecting to including some resource extraction governance provisions in a major report from the Group of Twenty (G20), a group of the world’s most influential economies. “There is quite a lot of work to be done.”

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 20 2011 (IPS)

As leaders from two of the world’s largest financial institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, met for annual meetings here Tuesday, a delegation of activists from India called on the World Bank to follow through with its proposal to dramatically cut funding for coal-burning power stations.

Schoolchildren in Vilandai, India attend a climate change workshop. Credit: Courtesy of 350.org

As part of its journey, the delegation will visit Kayford Mountain, Blair, Fayette County, and Charleston, West Virginia.

In a ray of hope for activists, the World Bank issued a new draft energy policy earlier this year that would, if approved, dramatically cut funding for coal projects. If the World Bank, which has given billions of dollars in funding to coal development projects in the past, pulls funding for coal, the move could have a ripple effect.

Growth in India, much like China, is fueling an “insatiable” demand for energy, said Shikha Bhatnagar, associate director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council.

The Atlantic Council sponsored a panel session Tuesday, along with the Sierra Club and the Bank Information Center (BIC), a World Bank monitoring group, to discuss India’s energy future and the challenges posed by what coal critics describe as the country’s intensifying coal bender.

According to the Sierra Club, India approved 150 new coal-fired power plants last year alone and has plans to increase its countrywide coal-fired power 600 percent over the next two decades.

But Ron Somers, president of the U.S.-India Business Council, said India was inefficiently mining coal, forcing it to import from Indonesia, Australia, and South Africa. Meanwhile, he said, India is experiencing a growing demand for energy from a population of 1.2 billion, 54 percent under the age of 25.

He said that while Indians consume 700 kilowatt hours per person per year compared to the average U.S. resident’s 14,000, there is nevertheless a growing demand for energy, as well as for new technologies such as cellular phones, 10 million of which are sold every month in India.

“If you can jump that far in telecommunications, can we not leapfrog out of coal power?” Somers said. “At some point to the government is going to say ‘this is not sustainable’.”

Coal critics also say coal mining and burning projects have immeasurable costs for the communities and ecosystems that bear the brunt of the environmental impact, from India to the U.S.

“There is not a single country that has not increased its GDP quite a lot without increasing pollution quite a lot,” said Soumya Dutta, a member of the India People’s Science Forum, based in New Delhi.

In 2009, mountaintop removal coal mining had destroyed 352,000 acres and 135 mountains in West Virgina alone, according to study commissioned by Appalachian Voices. Civil society activists from communities facing environmental effects of coal mining, both in West Virginia and India, have called for halts to projects they say destroy quality of life, damage water sources, and irreparably alter landscapes.

Vaishali Patil, a delegation member and activist from the Konkan Coast region of Maharashtra, Gujarat, India, has organised local youth and community groups in her region to oppose new coal development projects. Her organisation is called “Ankur”, which in Hindi means “seedling”.

“There is tremendous unrest,” Patil said, referring to the impact of the projects on her community.

The projects in Gujarat, according to a new report “Coal Narratives: Voices from the Front Lines of the Global Struggle”, published by the Sierra Club, have been accompanied by a “violent onslaught of land acquisition, displacement, corruption, and intimidation”.

Patil said that the biodiversity hotspot where she lives is facing the prospect of many more environmentally high-impact energy projects, including 56 sanctioned iron-ore mining operations, slated for the Western Ghatt Mountains, and 19 proposed coal thermal and nuclear power stations.

Patil said she was looking forward to her trip to West Virginia to meet with U.S activists.

“I am looking forward to seeing what the civil society advocacy strategies are here,” Patil told IPS. “I want to learn from them, to share our struggle for community rights, for the right to natural resources, to save the land and sea – we feel this struggle is for our survival.”

On Sep. 24, the Indian delegation and U.S mountaintop removal activists will take part in “Moving Planet” day, a global day of action organised by civil society groups and supporters of fossil fuel-alternative energy, together in West Virginia. Events are also planned in India.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 16 2011 (IPS)

Changes to a key anti-bribery law that applies to international commerce, proposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, could have disastrous consequences, hurting multinational firms, human rights, and the U.S.’s place of respect as an early adopter of the legislation, opponents to the changes argued here Friday.

According to a report published by the Open Society Foundation’s (OSF) Open Society Policy Center, proposed changes to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), corporate anti-bribery legislation passed in 1977, could create loopholes in the legislation so large as to make the FCPA largely useless.

Anti-corruption advocacy organisations including Global Financial Integrity, Transparency International, and the Project on Government Oversight have written letters in support of keeping the FCPA, which applies to U.S. businesses and any businesses trading on the U.S. Stock Exchange and makes it a crime to trade favours for business advantages in countries where multinational companies do business, in its current form.

They say changing the FCPA now could also reduce the strength of a law, in force for more than 30 years, which OSF says is good for governance, good for human rights, and good for democracy. OSF pointed out that corruption has been linked to higher infant and maternal mortality rates in the countries that rank high on corruption indexes.

In several high-profile FCPA cases in 2009, the multinationals Siemens, a German company, and Halliburton, a U.S. company, paid settlements of 800 million and 559 million dollars, respectively. Chevron, IBM, and Johnson and Johnson have also been charged under the FCPA.

In 2010, under the FCPA, the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigated whether Johnson and Johnson and a dozen other drug companies bribed doctors and other health officials in foreign countries to prescribe their drugs. Johnson and Johnson reached a settlement in the case for 70 million dollars.

Supporters of the changes argue that an increase in prosecutions on the part of the DOJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the enforcement bodies behind the law, prove that the government is using its authority to over-prosecute, stifling U.S. corporate competitiveness abroad. To argue the case for FCPA revisions in front of Congress, the Chamber of Commerce has hired Michael Mukasey, former attorney general under President George Bush.

Proposed changes, outlined by the Chamber in 2010, include making provisions for companies with “compliance programmes”, a requirement that intentions to bribe be “willful”, further specifications about the definition of “foreign official”, and elimination of civil liability for corporate subsidiary companies.

But Dan Danielsen, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law and co-author of the OSF report along with David Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, said the FCPA has mainly only been applied to egregious cases and that it often gave corporations the chance to settle or reform their practices.

“If you read the cases and looked at the details…you begin to see that what is going on through the DOJ and SEC is really working with business through deferred and non-prosecution agreements to evolve best practices,” Danielsen said.

Lester Myers, a business consultant and Georgetown University professor present at the meeting, said measures such as the FCPA that supported transparency actually worked in the favour of businesses.

“Bribery is damaging to capitalism,” Myers told IPS.

Bennett Freeman, senior vice president of sustainability research and policy at Calvert Asset Management, said the FCPA helped businesses by ensuring an equal playing field and said his company had implemented standards to ensure the companies it invests in uphold certain standards in the areas of social governance criteria.

“For us, living by the FCPA is an absolute touchstone,” Freeman said. “We want transparency, stability and rule of law in the diverse markets were companies work around the world – transparency is really the investor’s best friend.”

He said he believed the current attack on the FCPA was ill-judged and ill-timed at a moment when the U.S. should be raising its standards for transparency rather than lowering them.

“We have got to keep the USA on the side of governance, rule of law, and fair playing fields bound by that rule of law around the world,” Freeman said.

OSF said the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) has publicly supported keeping FCPA in its current form.

Changing the FCPA now, opponents to changes argue, could make the U.S. look soft on corporate crime, out of step with global trends toward stronger corporate oversight, and out of touch with an emerging global reality in which revolutions across the Arab world were in part fueled by popular anger at corporate and government corruption.

“What is underlying this is the desire to radically alter corporate criminal liability,” Sarah Pray, policy analyst with the Open Society Foundation (OSF), the international human rights, democracy and anti- corruption advocacy organization that published the report, told IPS.

“Nuancing who you can and cannot bribe, what part of the corporate structure can do the bribery – it is inappropriate, and it is wrong,” Pray said.

Danielsen said the proposed changes significantly limited the scope of the FCPA by making the language of the provisions of the act more specific. While at first glance, the move might give the impression of making the law stricter, it actually essentially created a “line in the sand to cross,” he said.

On closer inspection, Danielsen said, the proposed amended FCPA “looks more like a license to commit intentional acts of bribery”.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2011 (IPS)

According to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.6 million more people slipped into poverty in 2010, placing the number of U.S. residents living below the poverty line at 15.1 percent.

The data show how recession in the U.S. continued to cause “incomes to drop, poverty to rise, and people to lose their health insurance”, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit research institute in Washington focusing on the impact of economic trends and policy.

“We do have an increase in the number of people who did not work at all,” Trudi Renwick, of the poverty statistics branch of the Census Bureau, said in a press conference Tuesday. “That might be the single most important factor increase in the poverty rate.”

Census data shows one million households went from having at least one household member working in 2009 to having nobody working at all in 2010. The number of people who did not work even one week in 2010 also increased to 86,776, up from 83,323 in 2009.

Official numbers show that last year the total number of U.S. residents living in poverty increased to 46.2 million people, up from 43.6 million in 2009, or 14.3 percent. The official poverty line is set at 22,314 dollars for a household of four and counts cash income before taxes. It does not include non-cash income such as food stamps.

In what Elise Gould, director of health policy research at EPI, Tuesday called “a very devastating number”, the percentage of people living in what the government labels “deep poverty”, or on an income at least half the official poverty line, was 6.7 percent in 2010, the highest rate since the last record high in 1993 when it hit 6.2 percent.

According to the Census report, “the poverty rate and the number of people in poverty increased in the first calendar year following the end of the last three recessions,” including recessions that ended in 1961 and 1975.

While the Great Recession officially ended last year and government stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 spurred some growth in 2010, Census Bureau data released Tuesday shows a continued downward trend in household incomes. With those in the midwest, south and west being hit hardest, real median household income in the United States was 49,445 dollars in 2010, 2.3 percent less than in 2009.

According to EPI, a reflection on Census data from the last 10 years shows that working-age households now earn on average 6,300 dollars, or 10 percent, less than a decade ago, with an increase in disparities between racial and ethnic communities.

“The last 10 years wiped out all improvements in earnings for blacks since 1996,” said Shierholz.

Assistance programmes, doubling up eased impact

The numbers could have been even more dramatic. Census data shows that without the government’s unemployment insurance programme, 3.2 million people would have fallen below the poverty line.

While the number of uninsured people rose slightly in other age groups under 65, the number of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 who had health insurance increased by two percent, or half a million people.

Elise Gould, director of health policy research at EPI, said that change could be attributable to health care reform which allows young adults to stay on their parents’ work-sponsored health insurance plans until the age of 26.

The Census Bureau also said 45.3 percent of all adults age 25 to 34 who were living with their parents would have fallen below the poverty line had they lived alone. A total of 5.9 million people aged 25 to 34 lived in their parents’ homes in 2010, an increase of 25 percent since 2007, according to Renwick.

Increased unemployment rates have also seen an increase in the number of people who rely on government assistance programmes such as food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), up 74 percent since 2007. But the high cost of the programme, 68 billion dollars in 2010, means it might be targeted by lawmakers looking for budget expenses to cut, along with other government assistance programmes.

Liz Accles, an analyst with the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, a membership agency of human service providers in New York City providing assistance mostly to people living in deep poverty, said her organisation was witnessing a massive increase in the need for government-funded assistance programmes, but said she feared they could be targeted for spending cuts.

Accles said assistance programmes such as welfare, food stamps, Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid not only help individuals facing poverty – giving them the support they need to feed their children and get to work – but also the larger economy by helping indirectly to stimulate economic activity and job creation.

“There are arguments to be made that the well-being of the lowest income members of society has an impact on everybody,” Accles said, arguing that poverty was an issue for a whole society, not just the poor.

“Unless you can exist in a tightly enclosed bubble, the way people fare and people’s ability to work, it does have a direct impact,” she said.

“We are all interconnected,” she told IPS. “At a certain point the richest people feel the impact of the neglect of the poorest people.”

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson and Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY/WASHINGTON DC, Sep 9 2011 (IPS)

The appalling experiments carried out by U.S. doctors in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 using 1,300 human subjects who were infected with sexually transmitted diseases highlighted the inadequacy of controls and safeguards in clinical testing in this Central American country – still a major problem today, according to experts.

“The trained human resources are not in place for oversight of research, and the standards and regulations are either flawed or are not met,” Dr. Luis López, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues , which was tasked by President Barack Obama to investigate the case, told IPS.

In Guatemala, medical research is regulated by a 2007 Health Ministry agreement on “standards for the regulation of clinical trials”, which is “very weak because it does not have the strength of legislation and fails to outline the intersectoral aspects that could be in play when it comes to experimentation with human subjects,” the expert added.

No such regulations existed in this country in the 1940s, when prisoners, military conscripts, sex workers, mental patients and orphans were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid purportedly to test penicillin in the shocking U.S.-run experiments.

But more than six decades later, controls “are still so weak that not all studies using human subjects in Guatemala reach the hands of the Health Ministry,” López said.

Various clinical ethics committees operate in universities, hospitals and other institutions in Guatemala. But it is the Health Ministry, through the Commission for the Evaluation of Clinical Trials, that ultimately grants permission for such testing.

The experiments in Guatemala came to light in October 2010, when Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, revealed the research carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by U.S. Dr. John Cutler in complicity with Guatemalan doctors.

In late August, the U.S. presidential bioethics commission revealed new details and reported its finding that the experiments in Guatemala were bad even by the standards of the time. The panel’s full investigation will be released Tuesday, Sept. 13.

The panel said a total of 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in the research, 1,300 of whom were unknowingly infected with STDs, and only 700 of whom received treatment of any kind.

At least 83 of the 5,500 subjects died by late 1953, although the bioethics commission said it was not clear whether they died as a direct result of the experiments.

Obama apologised to Guatemala in October 2010 and gave the panel the task of investigating what happened, and reviewing standards for protecting human subjects in on-going U.S.-funded medical trials, both domestically and internationally. The Guatemalan government also established a commission of enquiry, which has not yet released its report.

Authorities in Guatemala have located five survivors of the experiments, who are to receive compensation from the government.

The public health system is precarious in this country, where half of the population of 14 million lives in poverty and 17 percent in extreme poverty.

With respect to the weak controls in such cases in Guatemala, López said training was needed in oversight of research, and that the Health Ministry standards on the regulation of clinical trials should be made into law, following the example of other Latin American countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

The expert also said clinical trials should focus on illnesses like Chagas disease, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis and malaria, which are common in poor countries like Guatemala, “but are ignored by the pharmaceutical industry, whose interests have never revolved around solving the problems of local populations.”

Dr. Carlos Mejía, the president of the Guatemalan medical association and a member of the Guatemala commission charged with investigating the experiments led by Cutler, told IPS that in Guatemala, “all kinds of medical research is carried out, but oversight must be strengthened.”

The physician acknowledged that there is insufficient staff monitoring medical trials, especially in remote regions in the country. He also concurred with López that the Health Ministry standards and regulations should be given the force of law.

He said that above and beyond the question of research, the public health system “has not been a priority” in this country, “as demonstrated by the total neglect of the system resulting from a lack of budget funds.”

Mejía said it is “very unlikely, but not impossible” for a repeat of the deplorable 1940s experiments to happen in Guatemala today.

He added, however, that “there are rumours that people were sterilised, but we have to investigate that.”

Continued shock waves in U.S.

Reverby told IPS that the scenario necessitated a deeper analysis than the standard ‘good guys versus bad guys’ approach, which has hitherto been the predominant media angle.

“The story gets covered as if this was Saturday afternoon at the movies – innocent victims, bad doctors. That makes it too easy to think that because we have regulations in place this can’t happen. It’s not a melodrama. What is important to take away here is that they thought what they were doing was right, not that they were monsters.”

The U.S. presidential bioethics commission, made up of 14 members from 10 countries, made five clear recommendations for how to better protect human subjects involved in international research, including: better community involvement and representation, ethics training for researchers, a more comprehensive trials registry, compensation for research-related injuries, and rule harmonisation across borders.

The panel also recommended that the United States adopt a system to compensate research participants who are injured as a result of their participation.

Amy Gutmann, the commission chair, pointed out that while many European countries, as well as India and Brazil, have such a system, the United States does not. “The U.S. is an outlier here and the panel felt very strongly it was an outlier on the wrong side,” she said.

In addition, the commission recommended expanding an official U.S. registry for research on human subjects to include studies not specifically involving clinical medical intervention. Panelists noted that currently, U.S. law requires only clinical experiments involving “intervention” to be registered, but there is no similar requirement for non-clinical public health or epidemiological studies.

The debate has just begun

Carla Saenz, regional bioethics advisor for the Pan American Health Organisation, attended the Aug. 29 meeting in Washington where bioethics commission members discussed some of the findings. She told IPS that while she agreed with more wide-reaching registries for public health and epidemiological studies, she questioned how standards for “community representation” would be implemented.

“The majority of research takes place in cities of eight million people in huge hospitals,” Saenz told IPS. “So who is a ‘community’? We have to specify what the recommendations need to do.”

With discussions touching on such weighty subjects as the meaning of community and disparities in power and interests, the commission appeared poised to confront at least some of the major bioethics issues today. But there was clear tension in the room when guest speakers discussed one of those questions: the nature of consent.

While Gutmann emphasised the importance of the first principle of the Nuremberg Code for experiments on humans which lists “voluntary consent” as a primary standard for any research involving human subjects, guest speakers disagreed about what, exactly, consent means.

Ezekiel Emanuel, former chief of NIH’s Clinical Centre Department of Bioethics, said he supported allowing research participants to give their “blanket consent,” essentially, one signature that would allow their information or biological materials to be used in any subsequent studies without further permission from participants.

Emanuel said researchers had a market-based incentive to make sure that studies went well and that this would serve as a natural form of checks and balances ensuring participants would be protected. He said surveys show most people in the U.S. don’t care what their data and materials are being used for, as long as they know they are being used.

“If they don’t want that research done, they don’t sign the consent form,” he told the commission.

But another guest speaker, Carletta Tilousi of the Havasupai American Indian Tribe, said she disagreed with blanket consent. She, along with other tribe members, gave her blood to a 1990s study, which Arizona State University said would be dedicated to Alzheimer’s research.

However, tribe members, who live on a territory to the southeast of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, say their blood was used for other research not related to diabetes, including research offensive to the tribe. The university agreed on a settlement with the tribe for 700,000 dollars in 2010.

“I still wonder where it went,” Tilousi said, adding that she wanted to know whether her blood was being used for something good, where and how it was used, and who used it. “That is a question I am going to have to live with.”

*Danilo Valladares reported from Guatemala City and Amanda Wilson from Washington DC.

Excerpt:

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2011 (IPS)

The 10 years since Sep. 11, 2001 have offered scholars, politicians and the Millennial Generation, a group who was entering adolescence at the turn of the century, fodder for contention about just what the changes of the last decade mean for the younger generation.

Some of these Millennials were on hand at a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress this week and weighed in on the shift in the U.S. social and legal framework that has defined the world – and the adulthood – they entered into.

“9/11 happened at such a formative stage in our lives that it’s hard to imagine what the world was like before it,” said Adam Serwer, a reporter for the nonprofit news organisation Mother Jones.

Some broad doctrinal shifts in both legal and social policy are worrisome to the emerging generation, said Alyssa Rosenberg, a blogger at ThinkProgress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, who witnessed the Sep. 11 attacks on cable television at her high school in Boston, Massachusetts.

Referring to post-9/11 moves in the United States in defence and social policy, she said, “I think America’s made its worst mistakes when it has assumed that we need to be a fundamentally different society to survive and to thrive.”

Legal scholars argue that a number of broad shifts, both social and legal, have characterised the 10 years in the U.S. since the attacks of Sep. 11 – the same decade the so-called Millennial Generation came of age.

Millennial Generation often refers to those with a birth date between 1982 and the mid-1990s, whose passage into young adulthood coincides with a massive leap in accessibility to new technologies.

Looking back at the last decade, scholars point to definitive changes in U.S. citizens’ relationship to their personal information – and how protected it is – and, whether they realise it or not, their relationship to the larger world from the perspective of international law.

The observations paint a picture of a world in which Millennials in the U.S. are sharing more information through networks that connect them to the entire world, yet in some ways are less protected and more isolated than they were 10 years ago.

Some scholars say that while U.S. citizens’ personal information may be less protected, they are also more isolated because of a broad shift away from integration into the framework of international law.

Legal scholars and civil society activists discussed doctrinal shifts in the 10 years since Sep. 11, 2001 at a meeting of the American Constitution Society (ACS) held early this month.

“9/11 happened right when technology was taking a big leap,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Nojeim said that with the rise in the use of new technologies, the amount of record-keeping and storage of personal data by third parties – often private companies – managing cloud computing, social networking, and mobile location storage related to cellular telephone use, also rose.

The shift of personal communication toward technologies that enjoy less protection coincided with another shift, according to a lawyer who also spoke at the ACS forum: a U.S. shift away from integration into international legal frameworks.

Richard Klingler, an attorney and former general counsel on the National Security Council, said U.S. policy is now less open to international law than it was 10 years ago.

The power to pursue an international course, he said, has rested with Congress, which he said has so far “not pursued an internationalist path” but instead tended to favour state law over international law unless the president explicitly stated otherwise.

Klingler pointed to U.S. opposition to the Kyoto Protocol to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and said the U.S. had not embraced the International Criminal Court (ICC) or engaged the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Neither had the Law of the Sea Treaty, Klingler pointed out, moved forward in the last 10 years.

“This decade’s retreat from international law and processes,” Klinger said, has created a new norm where U.S. policy toward international legal projects has become “a highly contested partisan issue”.

“The momentum of engagement in a transnational project has ceased or even moved backward,” he said.

Although this period may have been marked by a lack of U.S. participation in international law and cooperation, after the attacks, the U.S. ramped up its military engagement in the Middle East through wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The controversy surrounding not only the evidence but motivations for entering into conflicts throughout the world is perhaps indicative of a shift in the U.S. psyche following Sep. 11, Serwer said this week.

“We felt like something needed to be done,” Serwer said, referring to the war in Iraq.

But, while public support for the war was strong at the time, he said, he questioned whether it might have been reactionary. “It’s extremely difficult to make a good and informed decision when you’re scared out of your mind.”

The Millennial Generation’s attempts to reconcile the decisions of their elders with their own experiences of the world weigh heavily on their actions, panelists at the Center for American Progress said.

Serwer said, “It’s really important on some level to reduce that footprint, and make sure that the West’s relationship with the Muslim world is not defined at the point of a gun.”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2011 (IPS)

As a high-ranking Uzbek delegation wound up talks with senior U.S. officials here Wednesday, human rights groups urged the administration of President Barack Obama not to lift seven- year-old restrictions on Washington’s aid to Tashkent in exchange for a new agreement on using Uzbek territory to transport “non-lethal” supplies to and from Afghanistan.

“For the U.S. to lift its restrictions now would be an enormous gift to one of the most repressive governments in Central Asia,” said Hugh Williamson, head of Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Europe and Central Asia division.

“In the midst of the Arab Spring, the administration should have learned that downplaying human rights with abusive allies is not only harmful for the population affected, but damages the United States’ interests and reputation over the long term,” he added.

This week’s meetings, the latest in a series of semi-annual bilateral consultations, came as the administration is pressing Congress to lift human rights restrictions on U.S. aid to the government of President Islam Karimov in order to secure an expansion of an accord that permits Washington and its NATO allies to ship supplies and equipment to their forces fighting in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan.

With Obama committed to withdrawing 30,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer and NATO planning to withdraw all its forces by 2014, the Pentagon wants to ensure that Uzbekistan will permit supply lines to run through its territory in both directions.

“The two-way transit (accord) is under discussion, but there’s not yet agreement on it,” a senior administration official told IPS after Wednesday’s talks, which, according to the official, addressed a variety of other issues, including Uzbekistan’s human rights performance.

Uzbekistan is a key hub in the so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a set of commercial agreements between the NATO members and countries of the former Soviet Union to ship supplies overland to Afghanistan. As with all host governments, Uzbekistan is paid transit fees, while local contractors – some of which are reportedly linked to senior government officials or their families – are paid to provide logistical and other services.

Both Uzbekistan and the NDN have become increasingly important to Washington and its NATO allies as an alternative supply route to Pakistan. About 40 percent of all external supplies for NATO troops are now shipped via the NDN.

Growing tension between Washington and Islamabad over U.S. covert activities in Pakistan – especially since the May assassination of Al- Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad – has raised new questions about the stability of the Pakistan route, making the NDN potentially more important than ever in sustaining NATO operations in Afghanistan.

Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan with an iron hand since even before the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, has reportedly been pressing hard for the lifting of sanctions, notably strict limits on training of Uzbek military officers and an outright ban on funding for arms transfers. They were imposed by Congress in 2004 in reaction to his failure to comply with commitments he made in a bilateral “Strategic Partnership” agreement he signed with President George W. Bush at the White House in March 2002.

Under that agreement, which came several months after Tashkent granted the U.S. access to its Karshi-Khanabad (K2) air base for use in the war in Afghanistan, Karimov pledged, among other things, to promote a strong and open civil society, ensure respect for human rights, guarantee the independence of the media and the courts, and establish a multi-party system with free and fair elections.

The 2004 legislation provided that the secretary of state must certify that the Uzbek government was making “substantial and continuing progress” in meeting those commitments before the aid restrictions could be lifted.

But given Karimov’s record of repression – which includes the systematic use of torture and ill-treatment of political prisoners, the harassment of civil society groups, and the persecution of thousands of Muslims who practice their faith outside state controls, as well as the massacre of hundreds of unarmed protestors in Andijan in 2005 for which no one has yet been made accountable – no secretary of state, including Hillary Clinton, who met with Karimov in Tashkent last December, has made such a certification.

Nor do U.S. officials appear prepared to make that case now. “I think there has been some improvement,” Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake, who led the U.S. side in this week’s talks, told IPS, noting, among other things, the release over the past year of “some very high-profile dissidents”.

“We’ve been very clear with the government of Uzbekistan that there is great room for improvement on their human rights issues,” he said. “We’re not making the case (to Congress) on the basis that improvements have been so great that restrictions should be lifted. We’re saying they should be lifted because this is an important way to support our troops.”

Whether that argument will win the day on Capitol Hill remains to be seen.

“The law seeks to hold the Uzbeks to commitments they already made, and then reneged on. So the administration is in a bind,” noted one key Senate staffer. “I don’t know how this is going to get resolved. It’s not black and white. There are competing equities.”

But HRW thinks that’s a bad bargain. “Providing aid concessions in the absence of measurable progress on human rights would send a troubling message to the people of Uzbekistan that Washington values short-term gains above the long-term promotion of fundamental rights,” according to Williamson.

Some Central Asia specialists agree, arguing in any event that the Washington’s hand in dealing with Karimov is much stronger than the administration is letting on.

“The Uzbeks need the U.S. militarily,” said Steve Swerdlow, who headed HRW’s office in Tashkent until the government ordered it closed earlier this year. “Karimov is very worried that once the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, his regime will be more vulnerable to the Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). So we have leverage.”

The notion that Karimov needs Washington more than the other way around is shared by other Central Asia experts.

“You have to wonder whether there really is a serious risk that Karimov would in fact reduce his cooperation on the NDN and whether that risk would justify the risk faced by the U.S. in being perceived by the Uzbek population as doing whatever it took to get back in Karimov’s good graces,” said Jeff Goldstein, a Central Asia expert at the Open Society Institute (OSI), which was expelled from Uzbekistan in 2004.

“The Uzbek government already makes a lot money off the NDN,” added Alexander Cooley, a Central Asia expert at Barnard College. “I simply don’t buy this threat that it’s somehow going to shut down the entire NDN because of (these aid restrictions). If the U.S. does give in, it sends a terrible message that it can essentially be blackmailed into providing military aid.”

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By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 2011 (IPS)

Fisheries representatives from two of the world’s four largest fish consumer markets, Europe and the U.S., signed an agreement here Wednesday pledging to combat illegal fishing on the high seas.

U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Jane Lubchenco and European Union Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki signed the agreement, which they said represented a shared commitment to strengthen monitoring of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing with an aim to protect fishing livelihoods and fish stocks for future generations.

International oceans and environmental activists praised the multilateral pledge as a major step forward in the struggle to protect the ocean’s fish from practices they say amount to aggressive, destructive, and unquantifiable pillaging.

The amount of IUU fishing, also called “pirate fishing” when it flouts quotas set by 20 worldwide regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) to manage fish populations, is estimated at anywhere between 20 to 40 percent of all catches worldwide with a market value of 23 billion dollars.

Pointing to the risks of dwindling fish stocks and aggressive overfishing worldwide, U.S. and EU officials said their common vision entailed better fishing vessel monitoring, enforcement, and information-sharing, as well as a possible global seafood catch certification scheme that would include electronic remote verifying systems in which fishing vessels, while at sea, could log their catches into a central database.

Officials said such a global certification scheme, similar to one Damanaki said the EU implemented in 2010, would allow control of the fish supply chain “from the net to the table”. Damanaki said it would empower consumer countries to turn away pirate fishing vessels at port and to identify and reject illegally-caught fish.

U.S. and EU officials said the move would also improve science-based fisheries management by giving scientists better information about the status of fish populations.

Such an ambitious measure, the fisheries officials argued, could be managed by an international governing body such as the United Nations and would give participating consumer regions more power to crack down on the massive global economy in unregulated and unreported fish catches and sales, thus protecting the world’s fish populations.

Bigeye and bluefin tuna are both regulated under various treaty management organisations, but in part due to massive illegal fishing and a high market demand for tuna, their populations have seen a dramatic decline in recent years.

The EU and U.S. have so far taken up efforts which Damanaki said were “different paths to the same end goal.” The EU commissioner said she supported efforts to cut EU funding to large, destructive fishing vessels and re-channel that money into monitoring and tracking technology, incentives to fish less, and grants for small, aquaculture projects in landlocked countries.

U.S. fisheries officials said they hoped to achieve congressional support for Senate Bill 52, the International Fisheries Stewardship and Enforcement Act, which they said would give NOAA greater authority to combat illegal fishing by international fleets.

The U.S. has also signed but not ratified a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) measure through which signatory countries take steps to keep IUU vessels out of their ports. Ratification of the measure will require congressional approval.

Activists see move as sign of hope

Lee Crockett, director of federal fishery policy at the Pew Environment Group, told IPS the U.S.-EU effort was connected to a broader push toward better monitoring and tracking initiatives in fish management organisations, such as a catch documentation scheme (CDS) for bluefin tuna implemented by the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

But RFMOs set quotas for fishing based on data from documentation schemes – with electronic, real-time documentation being the most advanced – so any fishing activity that takes place outside of those frameworks impedes scientists’ ability to count fish and set quotas.

“Not only is IUU fishing an economic loss to all the countries that depend on fisheries resources, it does not enter into any data stream,” Phil Kline, senior oceans campaigner with Greenpeace, told IPS. “It deprives the managers and the scientists from the actual data of what is being taken out of the ocean so it actually feeds into the cycle of overfishing.”

Kline, who worked for decades as a commercial fisherman, said he supported any effort between the EU and U.S. to combat illegal fishing, even though myriad RFMOs – for different species, regions and fish and depending on whether they swim on the top of the ocean or the bottom – had a poor track record of success.

“None of them so far have successful management history. They have allowed depletion under their management regimes,” Kline told IPS.

Gerry Leape, senior officer for international policy at the Pew Environment Group, told IPS he believed a global electronic tracking and monitoring initiative, managed through a central database, could help identify those fishing vessels “playing by the rules” and help scientists set better catch limits.

“It will strengthen these international fishing bodies and the scientists who are trying to set catch limits won’t have this unknown number [of illegally caught fish] that is in addition to that limit they are setting,” Leape said.

He said that although the U.S. and EU were in a position of strategic power in comparison to pirates because of their market positions, there had so far not been enough political will to implement such broad measures.

Leape told IPS the collaboration between U.S. and EU fisheries officials could increase the chances of success for the fight against IUU fishing. He said, “We need action urgently if we want fish around for future generations.”

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By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Aug 25 2011 (IPS)

When an expensive unmanned aircraft built by Lockheed Martin Corporation, a U.S. defence contractor, disappeared during a U.S. military test flight off the Pacific coast earlier this month, the debacle raised eyebrows.

The incident also raised criticism that the U.S. government is spending millions on hefty defence contracts to pay for technology that does not work.

The experimental craft was designed to travel at 20 times the speed of sound and be able to attack targets anywhere on earth within 60 minutes. Part of a defence department programme named “Prompt Global Strike” that has cost about 320 million dollars – this was only the aircraft’s second flight.

But Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, held a press briefing here Wednesday to defend its technology and responded to speculation that a congressional super-committee, appointed in August to identify areas for federal budget cuts, might take a red pen to defence spending.

While company executives did not address the test flight incident, they did reassure reporters that the company’s missile defence programmes are cutting-edge and that they are “affordable” – a word executives used several times during the briefing.

According to the Arms Control Association, the U.S. spends about 10 billion dollars on missiles systems annually, which includes spending on missiles as well as satellites, communication, research, and anti- missile technology.

Company executives told reporters that Lockheed Martin has actually saved the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars since 2006 by selling its PAC-3 missile defence technology – an interceptor missile the U.S. also buys – to Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates, a move Lockheed said reduced its production costs.

Designed to intercept targets in mid-air, the technology is also slated for use in the Medium Extended Air Defence System (MEADS) programme, a design-stage missile defence programme paid for by Germany, Italy, and the United States, managed by the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation and developed by an industry group led by Lockheed Martin.

In March, the U.S. defence department said it will continue to foot its 58 percent share of the bill to develop the MEADS programme, at a cost of over 800 million dollars until 2013, even though it plans to exit the tri-national deal before the technology is up and running.

The Pentagon has already spent 1.5 billion dollars on MEADS. Through the arrangement, Lockheed Martin executives said Wednesday that the U.S. would retain intellectual property (IP) rights to the technology that it will be able to “harvest” in the future.

But critics have questioned not only whether spending so much money on technology developed by private defence contractors is worth the money, but whether the science behind the technology is sound.

Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Washington-based government watchdog group Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said defence contractors often provide the scientific information governments use to evaluate such technologies.

“These contractors are seen by the government as having scientific and technical expertise, especially since the government has largely gutted itself of its own scientific and technical expertise,” Schwellenbach told IPS.

“The government is especially reliant on contractors to tell it what works and what doesn’t, to provide data and then do analysis of the data,” Schwellenbach said. “Basically contractors have a lot of power to help steer government decision-making regarding major weapons programmes.”

Schwellenbach said that the positive outlooks presented by contractors could influence government missile defence policy and spending.

“Year after year we have dismal performance by Lockheed Martin,” Schwellenbach told IPS. He said issues with the company included cost and schedule overruns on multiple contracts. Lockheed Martin holds the number one ranking at the top of POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. “If the cost overruns and schedule delays were minor they could be overlooked – sometimes these contracts double in expense. Sometimes these weapons don’t even work.”

Schwellenbach said there are independent groups, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which can offer contrary opinions on such missile defence systems. The group, an independent, non-profit composed of citizens and scientists, has been critical of missile defence technology.

“Tax payers have ponied up tens of billions of dollars and we still don’t have a system that works,” Schwellenbach told IPS. He said there has never been a realistic test of the missile defence system. “Essentially, you are trying to get a bullet to hit a bullet.”

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and author of ‘Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex’, said talks of defence budget cuts have private defence contractors like Lockheed Martin alarmed.

“In contrast to the last decade or more… the days when the money was flowing easily and they could get everything they wanted are definitely coming to a close,” Hartung told IPS.

However, Hartung said Lockheed Martin had plans to bid on a contract worth billions of dollars to build ground-based missile defence silos in Alaska and at the Vandenberg Airforce Base in California – a project that could continue for many more years.

The U.S. Department of Defence frames the need for the project around the idea of a threat from North Korea, but Hartung said North Korea didn’t have missiles strong enough to reach the U.S.

“If (North Korea) attacked the United States it would be terrible but it would not undermine the U.S. ability to retaliate and destroy North Korea,” Hartung told IPS. “It would be suicidal for North Korea to do that.”

Referring to the fact that the U.S. has justified its defence programmes through fear mongering he added, “There is a lot riding on the notion that North Korea is an emerging threat.”

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By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Aug 19 2011 (IPS)

In a groundbreaking decision that affirms domestic violence as an international human rights issue, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has ruled that the U.S. should do more to protect victims of domestic violence.

The ruling, officially made in July, was detailed in a report officially released to the public here on Wednesday.

The decision marks the first time that an international tribunal has found that the U.S. violated the rights of a domestic violence survivor. It also specifically articulates that failure to respond to domestic violence can constitute a human rights violation by the U.S. government.

When Jessica Gonzales called police in Castle Rock Colorado on Jun. 22, 1999 begging them to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband and reporting he had abducted her three daughters, the police told her there was nothing they could do.

Even as Gonzales called in repeated pleas for help from local police, those calls went unanswered. Hours later, her estranged husband was killed in a shootout with police and the three girls were found dead in the back of his pickup truck.

In the years that followed, Gonzales, who now goes by Lenahan, took her complaint against local police all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2005 ruled that, contrary to what Lenahan had been told by local authorities, Colorado state law did not actually require state police to enforce restraining orders.

Jessica Lenahan did not give up but instead took her case, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to the IACHR, the international human rights tribunal of the Washington-based Organisation of American States (OAS), a 35-member international body.

The IACHR, in its ruling on Lenahan’s case, found that the U.S failed to meet “international obligations” outlined in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, a human rights declaration signed by the U.S.

Human Rights Watch, a prominent human rights organisation, applauded the decision and issued a hope that the ruling would “spur domestic violence reform”.

“When the Supreme Court took [the case] up and decided that, as an individual woman, you don’t have a constitutional right to have a restraining order, I think that sent a powerful message about how much women can count on these pieces of paper that are supposed to be providing them with protection,” Meghan Rhoad, a researcher in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

Rhoad said the IACHR case was critical because “it is about taking the next step in the struggle against domestic violence and moving from having those laws and procedures on the books and seeing them translated into effective protection in women’s lives.”

Legal Momentum, a defence fund dedicated to protecting the rights of women and girls, urged “the U.S. Government to adopt the IACHR’s recommendations to ensure that local authorities protect victims of intimate partner violence and their children.”

The IACHR decision underlines a “historical problem” in the U.S. with enforcing protection orders – a problem the tribunal says “has disproportionately affected women since they constitute the majority of the restraining order holders”.

In its report, the IACHR also underlined what it called numerous failures on the part of the state of Colorado, which it said was not “duly organized, coordinated, and ready to protect these victims from domestic violence” through effective and real implementation of the restraining order.

The commission also recommended that the U.S. take legislative measures to enforce the “mandatory character” of restraining orders to better protect women and create more “effective implementation mechanisms”.

“I think the main thing that is needed is actual enforcement of the laws that are on the book,” said Sandra Park, an ACLU attorney who worked on the Lenahan case, told IPS. “We have some very strong laws that have been enacted by the states, but the key is making sure that they are actually enforced.”

Park said IACHR decisions have led countries to reform their laws on domestic violence in the past. A similar decision in 2000 on the Maria da Penha case in Brazil led that country to eventually completely reform its domestic violence policies. In 2006, Park said, Brazil “put into place a lot of protection and procedures regarding how the government responds to domestic violence” as a result of IACHR recommendations.

Park told IPS she believes the U.S could take similar steps, and that the key lies in creating stronger mechanisms of federal oversight for how police respond to domestic violence complaints. Although the issue of restraining orders falls under jurisdiction of individual U.S. states, Park said there is a precedent for federal oversight of some police actions, such as cases that involve police brutality or racial profiling.

There are also cases in which the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) has investigated local communities’ police responses to gender-based violence and sexual assault.

In March, the Department of Justice released its investigation into police action in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which also looked at police response to domestic violence and sexual assault. The report included recommendations for how New Orleans police could respond to domestic assault and gender-based violence.

Park praised the work of the U.S in its investigation of New Orleans police and said she believed it was evidence that IACHR recommendations could be implemented.

“We hope this is a sign that they will continue to work with advocates and victims across the country to strengthen police response to domestic violence,” she said.

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