Outreach workers with Operation SNUG in New York City's Central Harlem talk to a young man in their programme. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, May 1 2014 (IPS)

It’s four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in Harlem and 19-year-old Solideen Rann is spread out on a plush hand-me-down couch inside an old glass-and-aluminum storefront on Malcolm X Boulevard.

His body language is making no effort to conceal he’s only reluctantly participating in a conversation with Dedric Hammond, 36, who’s taking up the other corner of a dream in bright orange velour. “If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.” -- Dedric Hammond

“You do this one thing for me and I’ll leave you alone,” Hammond says, leaning into him.

“I’m not about that sh*t no more,” Rann pleads uncomfortably, trying to get the six-foot-four-inch man to leave him alone, which is proving futile.

“Just this one time. That’s it,” the elder continues his persuasion.

In a not-so-distant universe, this script of a conversation between two men intimately familiar with the darker side of Harlem’s bustling streets could spell a shady affair with a dangerous outcome.

Today, however, the conversation is about an upcoming panel discussion and Hammond, who’s known in the neighbourhood simply as “Beloved”, is pushing Rann to step up as a role model to other teens.

The office they sit in is that of Operation SNUG (“guns” spelled backwards), a team of “interrupters” charged with breaking the cycle of youth violence in this stretch of Central Harlem between 125th and 137th street.

Here, roughly one in three families live below the poverty line.

“That sh*t” Rann referred to is getting into street fights – fights that once landed him in jail and killed his best friend.

These streets and others like them funnel some 24,000 young people each year into New York State’s juvenile justice system – one of the harshest in the United States, where teens as young as 16 can serve time in adult prisons.

Half of those arrests are in New York City, where 52 percent of juvenile delinquent cases involve crimes against another person.

At all hours of the day, cell phones are buzzing in the SNUG office. They’re brimming with messages from community leaders, concerned parents and local youth providing tip-offs that a conflict between rival groups has reached boiling point. Within minutes, SNUG staff hit the streets to step in and mediate between the different sides.

They mediate on street corners and in public parks, in hospital waiting rooms and public housing hallways.

When a shooting or stabbing victim is submitted to Harlem Hospital, SNUG staff are the first to be called –ahead of the local police — to talk the victim, family and friends out of retaliating.

“I’d be over there talking to the whole hood,” Hammond tells IPS about the containment they do right after a violent event. “I’m talking to their people, I’m talking to their mother – whoever will make a tear come to their eyes, I’m talking to them too.

“Because the moment we know… what they have feelings for, that’s when we can start this conversation and begin the process of healing.”

It’s a process that Hammond and his team of 10 interrupters know first-hand. Each one of them is a former member of one of Harlem’s 60 some crews, each one with criminal convictions of their own.

“I’ve got people on my team who killed people,” says Hammond, surrounded by plastic flowers and props the team uses to stage “mock funerals” – one of many tactics to get “their kids” to see the devastation their actions can cause.

Hammond, who picked up his first gun to protect his little brother at age 13, spent eight years in jail and was shot twice after leaving gang life behind.

These experiences of having been on both sides of a gun are key to SNUG’s ability to connect with high-risk youth, says Beloved, whose reputation as a shooter once earned him the street name Bad News.

“Back when I would recruit a dude, I’m going to his church, I’m at his school, I’m at his mother’s house, I’m where he’s at on the basketball court.

“So the same strategies we used to do robberies and stick-ups and all that other stuff, are the strategies we use today to stay in these kids’ ears – we got to pacify them.”

Understanding the streets

“They innately understand the rhythm of the street, the rhythm of what happens when…” says Aarian Punter, project manager for Restorative Justice Services at the Harlem unit of the New York City Mission Society, a community cornerstone that provides educational services and after school programmes for youth.

“They know when to hit the streets, hit the blocks, call their caseload.”

Eighty-hour workweeks are not uncommon for SNUG’s outreach workers.

Apart from the 24-hour crisis interventions, there’s the regular heart-to-hearts on the bright-orange couch. There’s the monitoring of social media for signs of brewing disputes and there are the spontaneous field trip to the ice cream shop as a way to keep two rivaling groups out of each other’s hair.

It’s all part of the puzzle to stop the viral transmission of violence.

Containing the virus

Operation SNUG is an offshoot of the Cure Violence model created by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who found that major outbreaks of violence like the Rwanda genocide followed the patterns of outbreaks of infectious diseases and who holds that violence can be contained and even eradicated when approached like a virus.

Key, according to Slutkin, is a shift from public shaming of “bad” people to identifying the transmitters of violence and changing personal behaviors and community norms.

In New York state the vast majority of juveniles in youth facilities – 83 percent in 2010 – are black and Latino. Eighty-nine percent of boys and 81 percent of girls relapse into crime by the age of 28.

Statistics like these hint at the devastation done to communities of colour by violence, drugs and chronic poverty.

Devastation reached a peak in the crack era of the 1980s and 90s when New York’s overly punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws sent a generation of men to prison, initiating a ripple effect that can be felt today, says Punter.

“You have no idea what these kids have seen. These kids have seen their fathers go to jail for 20 years, they’ve seen their mothers destroyed by the crack era… So you have a whole generation of kids whose issues were never really dealt with.”

In recent years, New York City police responded by overpolicing black and Latino youth through its controversial Stop and Frisk policy, which further criminalised low-income communities of colour.

Working with referrals from SNUG and others, Punter and her colleagues aim to change young people’s relationship with the criminal justice system, away from one that’s “normal”, and provide educational opportunities that allow them to envision a life beyond the streets.

Operation SNUG found a home under the umbrella of the Mission Society after many other organisations found the programme too risky to take on. But without violence interruption, few other services have a chance to flourish, says Hammond.

“If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.”

According to a 2013 study by the NYC Department of Health, gunshot wounds decreased from 52 to 26 in a one-year period in SNUG’s target demographic. While it’s hard to attribute decreases in crime to one factor only, Rann has no doubt that “Without SNUG, a lot of [guys] would have died.”

Today, Rann works two jobs to support his baby son and is considering college.

After a solid hour of persuasion by his mentor of three years, he never did step up to speak on the public panel. But Hammond doesn’t see it as a defeat.

“It’s like working with clay,” he says. “You push and mold and when you get it to where you want it then you continue to work on it like that.”

A mural in Bushwick aims to raise awareness about residents' rights in dealing with the police. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A colourful mural occupies the full left side facade of a three-storey house on the corner of Irving and Gates Avenue in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick. It depicts a group of youths taking cellphone footage of an arrest scene. Above it, a message reads, “You have the right to watch and film police activities.”

“We painted this mural to make people aware of their rights,” says 19-year-old Justin Serrano, who grew up in this predominantly Hispanic community, where about a third of households live below the poverty line.

The mural, painted by youths at Make the Road New York, a non-governmental organisation that offers community and youth-empowerment programmes in working-class communities across the city, reflects the prevalence of police in the lives of young people in Bushwick. It also provides insight into their relationship with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in their community."It makes me feel like I'm non-human."
-- Justin Serrano, on stop and frisk tactics

For youths growing up in communities of colour, such as Bushwick, that relationship over the last decade has been marked by one policing tactic in particular: Stop, Question and Frisk.

Stop and frisk, as it’s popularly known, allows police officers to stop and search persons under reasonable suspicion they are involved in criminal activity. It’s a staple tactic in New York’s zero-tolerance approach to policing and has become the modus operandi under the city’s last two mayors.

A high return rate?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s police commissioner Ray Kelly have credited the policy with a citywide decline in violent crime and 8,000 guns being taken off the streets.

Criminal justice scholars and civil liberties advocates, meanwhile, have long questioned the policy’s effectiveness and the police department’s predominant focus on poor communities of colour.

Available NYPD data shows that between 2003 and 2012, New York police performed close to five million stops. In roughly 88 percent of these stops, the subject was black or Hispanic.

In 90 percent of stops, police were unable to prove any wrongdoing. Last year alone, blacks and Hispanics were subject to nearly 400,000 innocent stops.

While the number of stops skyrocketed in recent years, gun recovery has been persistently low throughout the decade, at less than one percent of stops.

Collateral damage

Change seems to be on the horizon after two historic wins for police-reform advocates in New York this month, but community advocates and criminal justice scholars emphasise the collateral damage created by millions of innocent stops.

The explosive rise in the number of stops involving young men of colour has raised particular concern about the adverse impact on generations of youths growing up “overpoliced“, according to researcher Brett Stoudt, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Centre.

From 2008 to 2009, youths between the ages of 14 and 21 made up one-third of all stops while accounting for only one-tenth of the city’s population, one of his studies revealed.

Stoudt says that repeatedly being stopped under suspicion of criminal activity without having done anything wrong has a demoralising and disempowering effect on young people.

The high number of stops in select neighbourhoods also creates a “cyclical environment” by increasing the chances that youth in these communities “for one reason or another” are caught up in the criminal justice system, according to Stoudt, co-author of the recently report “Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City“.

For example, “during a stop, an officer may find a small amount of marijuana. Or [the young person] can get scared and they run,” he tells IPS.

Changing behaviour

“It makes me feel like I’m non-human,” says Serrano of the more than twenty times he’s been stopped. On one occasion, he was rushing home to bring medicine to his mom and ended up at the local precinct instead.

In New York, young people’s experiences with police don’t stop in the streets – they also extend into schools and residential buildings, where NYPD can legally be present.

This surveillance of all aspects of daily life can lead youth to significantly change their personal behaviour, says Stoudt, including not seeking help from police when they need it.

Sitting on a bench at a local playground, Serrano takes a minute from eating ice cream to offer advice to two younger friends pulling up on BMX bicycles.

“You gotta stop riding your bike, man,” he says. “Since I started riding my skateboard, I’ve been stopped way less.”

Serrano also stopped “hanging out” inside his community, he says. Instead, he meets his friends in a gentrified section of a nearby neighbourhood, where they are not bothered.

In the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Flatbush, a few miles south of Bushwick, Keron Gray says he avoids being outside with his “louder friends” and stays clear of routes where he is more likely to be stopped.

“It’s annoying,” says Gray. “When you’re shopping on Fifth Avenue [in Manhattan], that doesn’t happen.”

Is reform inevitable?

City officials have long defended the tactic of stop and frisk by pointing to a higher prevalence of violent crimes in target communities.

In a landmark decision on Aug. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected that argument, ruling that the NYPD’s application of stop and frisk created “a policy of indirect racial profiling” that had violated the constitutional rights of non-whites.

Scheindlin, who found that “the racial composition of a precinct or census tract predicts the stop rate above and beyond the crime rate,” ordered a sweeping reform process.

Last week,  New York’s City Council overrode a mayoral veto and passed two bills that establish independent oversight over NYPD policies and expand legal recourse against bias-based profiling.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg, who has moved to appeal the federal ruling, has warned that both decisions will stifle police work and cause a surge in violent crime.

But between this month’s events and a new mayor taking office in 2014, reform seems inevitable for the nation’s largest police force.

For Serrano, however, some damage is irreparable. “The first time I was stopped, I was with my little brother… To this day, [he] sees me different[ly] – he sees me as a criminal.”

One of the organic waste collection bins distributed to New York households. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 6 2013 (IPS)

Ask a random New Yorker what their city is famous for and “composting” is about as likely to make the list as “cheap housing” and “warm winters”. But if it is up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this will soon change.

Bloomberg, who will leave office at the end of this year, announced in June that the city’s Department of Sanitation has begun collecting organic waste in pilot communities across New York and plans to drastically expand the number of participating households in the coming two years.

The ultimate goal will be mandatory organic waste recycling for all city households by 2016. The waste will be turned into compost, a fertiliser obtained from decomposed organic matter, or converted into a source of clean energy.

The initiative is part of Bloomberg’s plan to divert 75 percent of city trash from landfills by 2030 and cut down on the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, to which trash contributes about three percent.

Currently, New York City is hauling a large part of its solid waste, more than 14 million tons annually, to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Ohio, where it is paying 86 dollars a ton to dump the trash – transportation costs not included.

If the residents of the city’s nearly three million residential units separate organic matter from regular trash, the city hopes to divert 1.2 million tons of garbage from landfills. This move could save up to 100 million dollars per year, or just under a third of the total money spent annually to dispose of residential trash, according to the Department of Sanitation.

The initiative’s test phase currently involves two high-rises in Manhattan, the neighborhood of Westerleigh in Staten Island, as well as around 100 restaurants and public schools across the city.

But the Department of Sanitation is preparing to expand the scope to 150,000 single-family homes, 70 high-rises across all five of New York’s boroughs as early as 2014.

About a quarter of New York City trash is made up by residential garbage. Roughly another quarter is produced by businesses, and with 70 percent of that trash coming from restaurants, getting the hospitality sector involved in the initiative is an important part of the composting pie.

For eco-conscious restaurants that are already paying for special food waste pick-up, a citywide scheme for restaurants would likely be welcome. For others, with small kitchens, adding an extra bin may not be feasible, as a report on restaurants published Jun. 20 by the New York Times shows.

In addition to easing the burden on the environment and the city’s chequebook, there are various other ways in which New York can benefit from collecting organics, according to Ron Gonen, deputy commissioner of sanitation for the City of New York.

“There are two main things that can happen with your organic waste currently,” Gonen told Tierramérica*. “It can be turned into compost, which is an organic fertiliser – and we have a composting facility here in New York City – and that compost is donated to local parks and gardens or sold to landscapers.”

“You can also convert organic waste to renewable energy via a process called anaerobic digestion (in the absence of oxygen),” he added. The result is a methane-rich biogas.

New York already has one anaerobic digestor in one of its waste water treatment facilities, and the city is considering issuing a call for proposals for a large anaerobic digesting facility that could convert most of New York City’s food waste either into natural gas or clean electricity.

“But there are also some interesting emerging technologies,” said Gonen.

“One, for example, can turn food waste into a clean-burning fuel called DME (dimethyl ether, a substitute for gas oil), so it’s not unforeseeable that sometime in the near future we’d be running our sanitation vehicles off of the food waste we collect,” he added.

Changing attitudes

Westerleigh, a neighbourhood of 3,500 residents in the New York borough of Staten Island, is one of the test communities for the new composting initiative. While the participation rate stands at around 50 percent, responses of participants are mixed.

Rosemary Caccese, who was already composting in her own backyard before Bloomberg’s plan, welcomes the new city programme. “I put mine out every week,” she told Tierramérica, referring to her new brown trash can that gets picked up once a week.

“It’s work, it’s not easy to do,” she added, but as someone who cares about the environment, it is a small price to pay for her.

When it comes to citywide implementation, she expects it may be difficult for the elderly to keep up.

Across the street, Donald Carullo says the fact that he and his wife are older is precisely what allows them to participate in the initiative. For his son, who has three children, on the other hand, it is too time consuming, he told Tierramérica.

Over on Burnside Avenue, Lois Conti, who describes herself as “green” and proudly runs down a laundry list of environmentally friendly features she has added to her house, is nevertheless sceptical about the new plan, mainly for practical and design reasons.

“My girlfriend has five children; you’re going to need more than this,” she told Tierramérica, while pointing at the new oval-shaped one-gallon (4.4 litres) container in her kitchen, one of the two models that the city is distributing to households.

For a small household like hers, it is hardly worth the effort, she said. And in a hot New York summer, “It starts to smell.”

Changing attitudes is a large part of the challenge for the city in the coming months. Emphasising the financial savings to the city, and ultimately to the taxpayer, is essential to selling the programme, says Gonen.

While the current phase is voluntary, the programme would eventually become mandatory and include fines for trash offenders.

Alexander Allen, who talked to Tierramérica at one of a few dozen compost drop-off locations in the city, thinks the initiative makes a lot of sense environmentally.

He is less sure whether making it mandatory is going to work, however, and thinks that fines alone will not be enough to change attitudes. “In the end, it’s up to people,” he said.

New York City is following in the footsteps of other U.S. cities like San Francisco and Seattle that have implemented similar initiatives. But it is also charting new ground.

“There is no city in North America, and perhaps Europe, where waste management is as complicated as in New York City,” said Gonen.

“We have an old built environment, we have a diverse built environment, and we’re multicultural,” he noted.

But this also means an opportunity for the Big Apple to serve as an example for other cities around the world.

“There is no other major city,” he said, “that can look at what New York City accomplishes and say ‘Oh, we couldn’t do that, we have a more complex system.’”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

 VIDEO: Compost Collection Challenges New Yorkers’ Fast Lifestyles

Excerpt:

A fact-finding team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visits Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in May 2011. Credit: IAEA Imagebank/ CC by 2.0

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

For the former industrial engineer Yastel Yamada, retirement does not mean he intends to sit back. Instead, the 73-year-old and about 700 other skilled seniors across Japan are eager to volunteer to tackle the most dangerous part of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant cleanup and spare a younger generation from the effects of extreme radiation.

Yamada and his army of radiation Samaritans are among a growing number of civil society groups across Japan that are taking measures to inform the public about the lingering dangers of radiation and advocate for a stronger government response to the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

“By the time we develop cancer, we will be dead anyways,” Yamada told IPS, following a recent tour through the United States to promote the efforts of his organisation, the Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima (SVCF), to gain access to the site.

One of SVCF’s goals has been to build international political pressure to force the Japanese government to take charge of the disaster and bring global experts into the plant recovery process, which will take an estimated 20 years of ongoing cleanup and monitoring for up to 40.

“Chernobyl was bigger, but much less complicated,” Yamada noted.

So far, however, responsibility for the plant remains in the hands of the privately owned Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) – a management company with little expertise in cleanup, Yamada worried.

About 400 companies currently perform various cleanup tasks at Fukushima Dai-ichi, according to the engineer, who explained that the elaborate, multi-layered subcontracting structure remains in the way of the veterans’ efforts to work on the site.

Yamada blames the cosy relationship between the Japanese government and the business sector for the government’s refusal to remove the cleanup process from TEPCO’s control – cleanup whose success or failure will affect future generations around the globe.

Mistrust abounds

Close ties with the industry, changing, safety information, dubious radiation counting and conflicting updates about the status of Fukushima Dai-ichi are contributing to growing mistrust in the Japanese government’s willingness to protect its own citizens.

As doctors continue to dismiss emerging health issues and top researchers refuse to attribute abnormalities to radiation, the Japanese medical establishment, too, has lost the trust of an increasingly savvy sector of the Japanese population.

In a recent example, this month the Fukushima prefecture presented the findings of its latest Health Survey, which showed that over 42 percent of the 47,000 children examined have thyroid nodules or cysts –  far above the 1.6 percent measured in the only other study of its kind conducted in Nagasaki in 2001.

Yet when asked about a link to radiation exposure, Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, a researcher at Fukushima Medical University who headed the survey, suggested to German TV channel ZDF that the findings may instead reflect Japanese children’s seafood-rich diet.

“Suzuki is lying to the Japanese people,” Dr. Yurika Hashimoto, a pediatrician with 15 years of experience, told IPS. “People are not believing them anymore.”

Hashimoto made no secret of her distrust in much of the information issued by government and the highest ranks of the medical establishment. Recently, to limit her own exposure to radiation, she relocated to Osaka from Tokyo, where she was trained and used to run her clinic.

Diarrhea, nose bleeds, skin infections and conjunctivitis are among a plethora of symptoms she has increasingly seen in her patients, both in and outside of the Fukushima prefecture, since the March 2011 disaster.

When they bring these symptoms to other doctors, however, patients are frequently ridiculed or ignored, according to Hashimoto.

Citizens become activists

Shizuoka resident Kazko Kawai, who lives about five hours from Fukushima, felt removed from the nuclear crisis until local government officials near her hometown decided to start burning contaminated debris that had washed up in her region, she told IPS during a recent visit to New York. She has been part of the advocacy group Voices for Lively Spring ever since.

Kawai reached out to a handful of international physicians to invite them on a five-city tour that would serve as a travelling clinic and information centre for concerned citizens.

“It [was] the same symptoms everywhere we went,” said Dr. Doerte Siendetopf, a retired German physician who has worked with children of the Chernobyl disaster for 20 years, in a videotaped interview with Kawai.

In the interview, Siedentopf, speaking alongside American colleague Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, run down a list of findings that widely overlaps with Hashimoto’s.

While it’s too early to tell which of these symptoms are caused by the nuclear fallout, they demonstrate a need for broader epidemiological research, as well as compassion from primary care physicians, said Patterson.

“It’s not doing any good telling people they shouldn’t worry – these anxieties and concerns are very real.” Instead, doctors in Japan have a unique opportunity to truly establish the effects of radiation, Peterson stressed, in ways that were not possible after Chernobyl 26 years ago.

In a statement issued Monday, Anand Grover, the United Nations (U.N) Special Rapporteur on the right to health who recently returned from an 11-day mission to Japan, urged the Japanese government to monitor a larger section of the population.

Grover, whose full, independent report to the U.N. Human Rights Council is expected next June, met with stakeholders, including government, medical practitioners, civil society and affected residents.

He expressed concern that affected residents “have had no say in decisions that affect them” and emphasised that affected people ought to be included in decision-making processes, including “implementation, monitoring and accountability procedures”.

Meanwhile, sceptical citizens continue to protect themselves as best they can in what has become the new normal since 3/11.

Asked how her daily life has changed since the disaster, Kawai reached into her handbag to pull out a stick-shaped device with a digital display. “It measures gamma rays,” she said with the unfazed demeanour of a TV chef showing a stick of butter to her audience. “Everybody has one now – they go for about 60 bucks.”

A Karachi street during the rioting on Sep. 21. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Oct 3 2012 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s unequivocal defence of First Amendment protections of blasphemy and hateful speech during last week’s address to the 67th United Nations General Assembly defied calls from Muslim protesters and some foreign government leaders to ban a controversial YouTube video and support stronger restrictions to religious criticism.

Obama’s remarks followed two weeks of riots in countries including Libya, Egypt and Pakistan that resulted in an estimated 50 deaths, and courts in Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Kyrgyzstan banning online access to a video depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud and a philanderer.

The extreme response to the video overseas has overshadowed what the film itself is a symptom of – an unprecedented rise in domestic hate groups across the United States since 2000.

Between 2000 and 2011, the number of hate groups in the U.S. rose from 602 to 1,018, according to Mark Potok, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which collects data on hate groups nationally.

The number of right wing “patriot” groups – which blend fears over the loss of white power with fears of impeding civil war between rich and poor – grew from 148 in 2008 – the year Obama was elected and the economy crashed – to 1,274 in 2011.

While much of the rest of the world continues to be baffled by U.S.-style protection of expression, Obama – himself a frequent target of racist speech – reaffirmed the First Amendment’s adage that “the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression – it is more speech.”

“The U.S. is very protective of speech vis-à-vis the rest of the world,” David Hudson, a first Amendment Scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, told IPS. “Free speech is a sacred right here – our blueprint for personal freedom.”

While the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledges restrictions when it comes to direct threats, incitement of imminent lawless acts, or “fighting words”, these three categories are narrowly defined and much hateful or repugnant speech doesn’t fall into any of them, according to Hudson.

“Truth Will Prevail”

“On hate speech, the United States Supreme Court has generally held that speech that disparages a group on the basis of racial, religious, ethnic, sexuality, or gender identity cannot be criminalised,” Ruthann Robson, a professor of law and university distinguished professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, told IPS.

“The underlying idea is that ‘truth will prevail’ and that ‘bad ideas’ will suffer in a ‘marketplace of ideas.’ Of course, not everybody agrees with this.”

In Canada, for example, courts apply a balancing test that weighs equality concerns against free speech concerns, Robson explained. “In the U.S.,” on the other hand, “free speech is generally considered more central.”

In addition to the blasphemous nature of the Muhammad video, public discussions on possible restrictions to its content have focused on whether the video’s incitement of riots across the world could trigger First Amendment exceptions.

“The incitement standard really was made for people on a soap box,” Robson explained, adding that actions involving books or the internet are likely “too attenuated” for the restriction to apply.

“The notion behind it is that if you’re watching something or you’re reading something, you are alone – you are not being whipped up by a crowd.”

The person who is speaking also has to be intent on inciting the violence that ensues and it has to be objectively likely that the intended result will happen immediately, according to the scholar.

The Mohammad video – which Obama called “crude and disgusting” – in fact led a quiet existence on YouTube for two months before an Egyptian TV station aired part of it last month.

Extremist leaders, who have lost footing since the Arab spring brought moderates into power in countries like Egypt, were eager to capitalise on the video by amplifying the outrage and creating new platforms for themselves.

With the actual rabble-rousing happening halfway across the world, the reactions to the video were hardly immediate nor unmediated to pass the incitement test.

Robson concedes that the legal field has been somewhat in “disarray” when it comes to the doctrine of incitement in the new media age, struggling with situations that the doctrine really wasn’t anticipated to take into account.

So far, “the default has been that it’s not imminent action.”

A true marketplace of ideas

Chad Johnston is the executive director of two public access television channels in North Carolina, which by their mission are uncensored, uneditorialised community platforms that aim to facilitate the open market place of ideas that the First Amendment envisions.

This also means that a local hate group has the same opportunity to use the station’s facilities and airtime as the local knitting club does.

Classifying when speech crosses boundaries into unprotected expression has occasionally required the staff to do some “long and hard thinking”, Johnston said.

“The First Amendment is so great and so tricky at the same time. In the end, I think it is much more dangerous to a healthy democracy and – on a micro scale – a healthy community to tell people that they can’t speak their mind.”

What public access does best, according to Johnston, is create feedback loops in communities by inviting viewers to produce content in response to views they find offensive.

That kind of dialogue is essential to understanding how complex and diverse communities are, Johston said, while bringing views out of the “dark shadows” of society.

As repulsive as those views may be, expressions made on public access TV would be hard to criminalise on the basis on the First Amendment alone, according to Robson, and are much more likely to be in violation of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules.

The internet, however, is not yet subject to such regulations, and government is facing public pushback over attempts to regulate internet content.

Working harder

As the marketplace of ideas goes global, we are challenged with the fact that misinformation invariably spreads faster than valuable information, Arjun Appadurai, a well-known social-cultural anthropologist, recently said at the U.N.

The reason hate-oriented propaganda is successful, according to Appadurai, is that true information requires education and debate, while misinformation is bred in conditions of misery and anxiety, “which are widely available in a world of competition, misery and unequal opportunity.”

Like SPLC – which has taken the recent surge in hate propaganda as an opportunity to build stronger alliances to counter misinformation and blatant lies about minorities – Johnston, too, sees hate speech as an invitation to work harder on building understanding.

“I want to know if the (white supremacy group) KKK is active in my community – that gives me motivation to go out and fix that,” he said.

So while the “more speech” adage may be a testament to the United States’ deep-rooted mistrust of government – it also puts faith in another great value: rolling up your sleeves to make things better.

Following a lukewarm outcome of the Rio+20 sustainable development negotiations in June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is moving full-steam ahead on a new initiative aimed at leveraging public-private partnerships to bring modern energy to over one billion people by 2030.

Newly-appointed Special Representative for Sustainable Energy for All, Kandeh Yumkella (right), addresses assembled dignitaries at the United Nations. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (centre) and World bank President Jim Yong Kim will provide additional leadership to the energy initiative. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Under the moniker Sustainable Energy for All, the new initiative aims to establish universal access to modern energy, double the share of renewable energy worldwide and double the rate of improving energy efficiency over the next two decades.

“Our goals are ambitious,” Ban told country leaders during a high-level discussion on the initiative taking place on the sidelines of the 67th General Assembly in New York on Monday.

In all, the effort will target the approximately 1.3 billion people currently living without access to electricity, 95 percent of whom reside in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia.

“We have come a long way, but we have a long road ahead,” the U.N. chief said, referring to gains made since the launch of the initiative last year, which have surpassed expectations for 2012, according to Ban.

So far, over 60 developing countries have signed on to the initiative and upward of 50 billion dollars have been committed by businesses and investors for the global effort that aims to entice the private sector to invest heavily in energy solutions by partnering with public and philanthropic institutions to mitigate investment risks.

In order to provide universal energy access by 2030, investment of 48 billion dollars per year will be needed, according to a vision statement by the secretary-general released at the launch of the initiative.

While that number sounds large – it is five times the investment brought together for expanding energy access in 2009 – it’s only three percent of total global energy investment, according to the statement.

New leadership

To give permanent leadership to the initiative, Ban on Monday appointed Kandeh Yumkella, current director-general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), as new special representative and CEO of the effort.

In addition, the Secretary-General himself and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim will co-chair a new board to provide strategic guidance, Ban told assembled dignitaries.

Kim called access to energy crucial for economic growth and poverty eradication, referring to both as “the problems of our time”.

Yumkella’s first goal as full-time captain of the initiative is to utilise its 30-member board to grow the existing coalition of partners, including governments, private sector and civil society, the special representative told IPS.

The initiative will have a “solid private sector approach … with clear milestones and meetings every six months,” according to Yumkella, who says the board is particularly zeroing in on current barriers to private investment.

At the same time, he aims to build “a network of networks” for sustainable energy finance that builds on proven strategies.

Need for funding

Developing countries came out in strong support of the initiative on Monday, but also reminded assembled leaders of the unequal burden falling on them to deal with the effects of climate change.

“We are the countries who contribute least to greenhouse emission and are yet hit by it hardest,” the permanent representative of Swaziland said on Monday. “We therefor appeal to our developed partners for support.”

Affected by the global economic crisis, Swaziland is struggling to meet food needs while also trying to grow a green economy.

While the initiative will provide both financial and technical support to countries developing their energy sector, Yumkulla underlined that “this is not an aid model” but one in which donors commit their money to leverage private capital for energy projects.

Commitments

As partner institution, the World Bank, in June, committed to doubling its energy investment to 18 billion a year, with an emphasis on low-carbon energy.

The African Development Bank aims to invest 20 billion in energy by 2020, which it thinks will leverage 80 billion dollars in partnerships.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, meanwhile, is throwing eight billion dollars at the issue over the next three years.

On the private side, Bank of America has will invest approximately 35 billion dollars into renewable energy, efficiency and access over the next 10 years.

Chairman of Bank of America Corp. Charles Holliday – who saw the initiative through its first year – will continue as chairman of its new executive committee.

Women to benefit most

As women make up two-thirds of the world’s poor, lack of energy access causes an unequal drain on women’s time and opportunities, according to Sheila Oparaocha, coordinator of Energia International, a network on gender and sustainable energy that’s a partner to the initiative.

Yet, “across the board, we find that existing energy policies don’t address women and the poor,” Oparaocha told IPS.

Energy solutions ought to target cooking needs and small-scale businesses, she said, adding that real participation of women in energy decision-making is crucial for better governance of the energy sector as a whole.

Rio+ 20

Hopes for increased government investments in a comprehensive sustainable development agenda were shattered in June when Northern governments – mired in a global financial crisis – barely agreed to reaffirm their commitments made 20 years ago.

The secretary-general’s sustainable energy initiative is now focusing on what many post-Rio perceive as the only viable alternative to bridging the finance gap for sustainable development initiatives: leveraging private investment for social good.

About 100 companies and institutions have so far signed onto the initiative – one of the initiative’s biggest achievements to date, Yumkella says.

The other is Monday’s high-level discussions itself – “getting diplomats and world leaders together in New York, and there is no talk about oil and gas but energy for development.”

As a cross-cutting issue, energy solutions influence all of the Millennium Development Goals world leaders are struggling to accomplish by 2015.

A malnourished and dehydrated baby cries as a doctor applies an intravenous drip to increase fluid intake at Banadir Hospital in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Credit: UN Photo/Stuart Price

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2012 (IPS)

While the global community made progress in reducing under-five child mortality to below seven million per year, it risks failing to reach the global targets set for 2015 if action is not scaled up, according to a new report released by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF Thursday.

“The story of child survival over the past two decades is one of significant progress and unfinished business,” UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake stressed in the introduction of the 2012 progress report Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed.

In moving forward, programming must continue to involve communities and local women’s groups in mortality-prevention efforts, UNICEF chief of health Mickey Chopra told IPS, as these have been crucial to achieving the successes booked so far.

A mixed bag of progress

Out of the 66 countries with high under-five mortality rates, only 15 are currently on track to meet the deadline for achieving Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4) on reducing child mortality by two-thirds in 2015.

Pneumonia, pre-term birth complications and diarrhoea are the leading causes of death in children under five, according to the report, which also states that one-third of all under-five deaths are attributable to undernutrition.

Worldwide, under-five child mortality went down by 41 percent between 1990 and 2011, from 12 million to 6.9 million.

This means that 14,000 fewer children died per day in 2011 than two decades ago.

While this progress is significant, a number of regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, continue to show alarming rates of deaths in children under five.

Out of the 24 countries that continue to struggle with the severest rates of child mortality, 23 are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where one in nine children dies before the age of five, according to the report.

With an under-five mortality rate of 1.7 million, the country with the highest child mortality worldwide is India. Together with sub-Saharan Africa, it accounts for 80 percent of all children dying under the age of five.

But poor results in these regions overshadow the fact that two others, East Asia and North Africa, have achieved MDG4 ahead of the 2015 deadline, while Latin America and the Caribbean – with a 64 percent reduction – is well within reach.

Involving women’s groups crucial to success

“Women’s groups are the reasons for the successes we’re seeing across the world,” said Chopra, who highlighted the role of organised women in preventing HIV and mother-to-child transmission.

“We also have evidence, particularly from Asia, where women’s groups have led to significant reductions in newborn death as mothers teach each other and model behaviour for each other of how to take care of their newborn.”

Solome Mukisa is the executive director of the Uganda Community-Based Association for Child Welfare (UCOBAC), a local women’s organisation in Kampala, Uganda, which provides free immunisations for infectious diseases like whooping cough and tuberculosis and educates communities about disease prevention in children under five.

“In all the work we do to support child health, we prefer to work with women and women’s groups because women tend to spend more time with the children and are more likely to spend their income on the children than men,” she said.

In addition to making home visits and connecting mothers with government health centres, UCOBAC empowers women with knowledge, skill and finances to start and manage kitchen gardens with nutritious vegetables and fruits on which to feed their children.

Rate of decline

Community-based efforts like these have contributed to an increase in the annual rate of decline in under-five mortality over the last decade – the decade of the MDGs – from a 1.8-percent decline in the 1990s to a 2.3-percent decline between 2000 and 2011.

This success has been even higher in sub-Saharan Africa, which doubled its annual rate of reducing child mortality from 1.5 percent to 3.1 percent over the same period.

Still, with a comparatively low decline of 39 percent since 1990, Sub-Saharan Africa has a much further way to go than others, joined by Oceania with only 33 percent.

New technologies for accelerated progress

In an effort to be more effective in its mission, UNICEF has been advocating at the global level to make new technologies available to developing countries, including bringing new vaccines to the market more quickly and at cheaper prices, Chopra said.

“Previously, it took a new vaccine 20 years from its introduction in the North to make it to countries in Africa or Asia. But in the last five years, with new pneumonia and diarrhoea vaccines, it’s taken us less than two to three years for new vaccines to be introduced in the South.”

Renewing the promise

To accelerate progress in the home-stretch of the MDGs, UNICEF and its partners are scaling up action through A Promise Renewed, which among other measures, calls on governments to sharpen evidence-based country plans to prevent children dying from preventable causes.

International partners ought to make a significant jump of 25 percent in the next three years to reach MDG 4 by 2015, it says.

“As the message of report … makes clear, countries can achieve rapid declines in child mortality with determined action of governments and supportive partners,” according to Lake.

“The time has come to re-commit to child survival and renew the promise,” UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Geeta Rao Gupta said on Wednesday.

In 2011, 19,000 children per day died before reaching their fifth birthday, according to UNICEF.

A young girl proudly shows her drawing of Boudha Stupa - a symbol of peace - during the 2012 Nepal Peace Exchange organised by Creating Peace Project. Credit: Creating Peace.

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 10 2012 (IPS)

When Ross Holzman packs for a work trip, he brings three bags with him: One with blank postcards, one with crayons, and one with thousands of artworks created by children around the world.

The artworks, called “peace cards”, are canvasses on which children express their visions for peace in drawings and text.

During Peace Exchange workshop, children, ages eight to 18, are encouraged to discuss what peace means to them and what they can do to build it. Every child who completes an artwork, in turn, receives a card from another child across the globe.

“The inspiration for what I do is really based on looking around in our society in America having travelled abroad,” Holzman, 37, told IPS. “We don’t discuss peace. We take for granted that we essentially live in a peaceful environment, but there is violence in our schools, our media, our communities.”

Post-graduate stints in the corporate marketing world led him to India in 2002 from where, he said, he returned transformed, taken aback by the negativity and fear that permeates U.S. media.

A former-business-consultant-turned-peace-educator, Holzman started making political art following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but soon realised that fighting aggression with angry art was not creating the positive change he really sought.

At the same time that the U.S. was spending billions on two wars abroad, Holzman saw art education programmes going on the chopping block in schools across the country, limiting possibilities for youth to process their experiences in the world artistically.

He started working on collaborative art projects, including large-scale peace banners with youth and “grown ups” to foster cooperation and self-expression in the Bay Area.

With Banners for Peace he subverted a classic U.S. American advertising technique – the omnipresent billboard– and used it to draw attention to peace education.

But setting ego and personal vision aside to build a shared vision was a learning experience for Holzman as well.

“I had to get over my own resistance to working with others,” he said. “Collaborating with art can be a really difficult thing – it can push people’s buttons. But in order to harmoniously coexist, we have to experiment in new ways of being and working together.”

He founded the Creating Peace Project, a San Francisco-based NGO, in 2008, to give a home to his existing peace education projects and embark on an international Peace Exchange between children from different cultures.

He has since facilitated peace-card workshops in India, Nepal and Uganda, where he’s worked with thousands of children, including refugees and children affected by civil war.

For him, the key to peace is self-awareness. “The thing that I’ve learned is that self expression, being creative is one of the premier tools for learning about ourselves – the more we learn about ourselves, the more we are at peace with ourselves.”

Shifting one’s perspective inward to connect with feeling and emotions allows for a change in our relationship to those feelings, Holzman said, “even if they are dark and negative and potentially violent.”

A typical workshop takes two to three hours, involves discussion, a short meditation and a free-form hour in which children paint their own peace cards that will travel in Holzman’s bag to another school across the world.

The young artists share their work and vision with the group before handing their artwork to the instructor, who, in turn, sets off a frenzy of excitement by handing out cards created by children across the world.

The act of sharing and letting go is another essential part to peace building, according to Holzman. “You’re translating emotions into something real and then you give it away. You create something you are attached to and then you let it go.”

Creating Peace Project falls into a line of civil society organisations working toward creating a Culture of Peace as articulated by the 1999 Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace adopted by the U.N. General Assembly.

Spearheaded by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the declaration acknowledges the need for creating peace culture through means other than political cooperation and economic development.

Education for peace, disarmament and building cooperation and solidarity are among the defined elements of moving from a culture of war to a Culture of Peace at a family, community and global level, according to the declaration.

On Sep. 14, the 193-member General Assembly will once again take on the issue of building a Culture of Peace during a High-Level Forum , a week before World Peace Day on Sep. 21.

Holzman , meanwhile, is happy to continue to learn from and be surprised by the children he works with.

Bringing a bag of cards from Colombia into a privileged San Francisco school recently, he got a bit nervous.

“I was sure these hipster San Francisco kids are just going to be like ‘whatever.’ That was my own negative premonition, and I was totally wrong,” he recalled about the class’s heartfelt responses that day.

“It’s not about the calibre of creativity, but that something is given and received and it teaches them that we are part of a global culture and that we all want the same things.”

Various initiatives are underway to regulate Private Military Security Contractors, whose services, including aviation and armed guarding, have raised concerns about alleged human rights violations. Credit: Tim Beach/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 2012 (IPS)

Alleged human rights violations and other challenges involving the use of Private Military Security Contractors (PMSCs) have sparked a series of international efforts to create systems of accountability for an increasingly complex transnational industry.

In one such effort, the second session of a special open-ended intergovernmental working group of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva this week will consider various possibilities for expanding the existing regulatory framework for PMSCs, including a draft convention that would limit the functions states could outsource to private companies.

The draft convention is one in a series of efforts introduced in the last five years to create systems of accountability for an industry that by its nature poses a complex regulatory challenge.

A second initiative, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers (ICoC), is currently undergoing review.

Challenges

“Any industry that has such transnational operations has jurisdiction issues,” according to James Cockayne, an expert on international criminal justice and co-director of the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation in New York.

“That is compounded, however, by a second factor, which is that the industry involves the use of force. So there are strong incentives – particularly when things go wrong – for people to be less than forthcoming with information,”  Cockayne told IPS.

He added that the fact that the industry operates in weak and conflict-affected states means that even the best-intentioned companies and regulators may face extreme difficulty in accessing information needed for effective regulation.

Cockayne, who addressed gathered state parties in Geneva Tuesday, was previously involved in the creation of the 2008 Montreux Document in which 17 states affirmed their existing international legal obligations and good practices related to operations of PMSCs.

Shortcomings

Montreux, however, did not create a binding international system for accountability for PMSCs that would tackle existing jurisdiction issues.

National regulations and standards regarding PMSCs vary per state.

The existing Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, in turn, does not actually apply to the new PMSC industry.

It’s also unclear how international humanitarian and human rights laws that apply to PMSCs translate into concrete obligations of states, according to the Mercenaries Working Group in a recent submission to the HRC.

Among a number of failed attempts to bring alleged human rights violations to trial, it cited Ecuador’s inability to obtain remedy for its citizens affected by U.S. counter-narcotics operations involving the use of aerial fumigation outsourced to DynCorp.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in June, opened the way to try four former employees of security outfit Blackwater (now Academi), after earlier attempts at prosecuting the quartet that’s accused of killing 17 Iraqis in a street shooting in 2007 had failed.

The industry is not against better regulation, according to Doug Brooks, president of the Washington D.C.-based trade association International Security Operations Association (ISOA), whose members have included both DynCorp and Blackwater (the latter has since left).

For one, regulation can create more clarity in the field and limit a drive toward ever-cheaper contracts, Brooks told IPS.

The U.N. and private security

In addition to governments using contractors, the U.N. has become a frequent client, according to a report published last month by the New York- based Global Policy Forum.

The report written by Lou Pingeot criticises the U.N.’s use of PMSCs, which it says challenges the U.N.’s legitimacy as an organisation championing human rights.

“The U.N. needs this industry to do what it does,” Brooks told IPS, adding that the Western world has “largely abdicated responsibility” for peacekeeping operations to the poorest militaries in the world which lack the ability to provide certain essential services.

According to Pingeot, the issue is not merely states losing control over the use of force, “The problem is rather that they lose democratic control over the use of force.”

Simultaneous efforts underway

The draft Convention on PMSCs identifies a set of inherent state functions, including detention, interrogation and intelligence that private companies could not perform.

The fact that major clients of PMSCs – most notably the U.S. and the U.K. – have employed contractors for a number of these functions poses questions about whether these states would back regulation that curtails their ability to outsource the use of force.

“It’s a pie in the sky,” according to Brooks.

Instead, he is rallying his troops around the International Code of Conduct, which brings together stakeholders from industry, government and civil society in an effort to create a gold standard for industry providers who voluntarily commit themselves to abiding by the Code.

Governments, in turn, would have to commit to using only companies who are signatories to the Code.

The fact that the Code is popular with the industry and that the U.S. as a major client has been involved in the discussions is a “big deal”, according to Brooks.

The Code listed 404 companies as signatories as of June.

But key pieces, including a governance and oversight mechanism and a third-party complaints process, remain to be worked out by all parties.

Without a third party complaint process, there is no accountability system, according to Cockayne, who admits to having little faith that significant progress will be made on either of the two initiatives soon.

“We don’t see the ICoC as a silver bullet solution, but rather as part of the larger ‘accountability toolbelt’,” Amol Mehra, of the civil society organisation International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), told IPS.

ICAR supports the ICoC initiative, while at the same time working to build stronger domestic legal frameworks.

Voluntary commitments and standards like the ICoC are not enough to protect human rights, but it’s a step toward changing corporate behaviour, Mehra said.

Hiding in plain sight

There may be a middle-ground solution between “the rock of the draft Convention” and “the hard place offered by the Code”, according to Cockayne in his remarks to the open-ended working group Tuesday.

And it’s “hiding in plain sight” in the guise of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, unanimously adopted by the Human Rights Council last year and embraced by ICoC signatories.

This common ground could provide a new point of departure for intergovernmental discussions of how to implement those commitments.

“I do believe there is goodwill on both sides,” Cockayne told IPS.

“With a little bit of leadership and creativity I think you could see some quite dramatic forward progress fairly quickly.”

Young girls eat a midday meal at the World Food Programme (WFP) school feeding centre in Guidam Makadam, Niger. The UN estimates 8.8 billion dollars is needed to respond to rising global humanitarian needs in for 2012. Credit: UN Photo/WFP/Phil Behan

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

Global funding for humanitarian aid interventions saw the biggest shortfalls in 10 years in 2011, according to a new report, raising questions about the international community’s ability to meet a 20-percent greater need for 2012 driven by drought and conflict.

The launch of the 2012 Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report last week coincided with the release of new mid-year data by the U.N. that scaled up earlier projections of humanitarian needs from 7.9 billion to 8.8 billion dollars for 2012.

The GHA report by British aid monitor Development Initiatives (DI) highlights a changing humanitarian aid landscape in the wake of 2010’s earthquake in Haiti and massive floods in Pakistan.

It also shows an international community failing to meet increasing crisis needs worldwide.

While needs for humanitarian aid dropped in 2011 – from 74 million people requiring assistance in 2010 to 62 million in 2011— the international community was still less able to meet global needs.

Total financing contributions for humanitarian assistance from government and private donors dropped by nine percent.

Consequently, nearly 38 percent of humanitarian needs went unmet last year, in comparison to a 28 percent shortfall in 2007, available data revealed.

Overall funding for GHA over the same period increased from 12.4 billion dollars to 17.1 billion dollars.

Big shifts in 2010

The year 2010, in particular, was a watershed year for humanitarian aid, with the Haiti earthquake and the mega-floods in Pakistan driving a record annual total of 18.8 billion dollars in contributions from the international community, compared to 15.3 billion the year before.

While the gap between needs and funding is widening, the sector overall has shown remarkable resilience compared to the total decline in Official Development Assistance (ODA), according to Lydia Poole, author of the report and leader of DI’s Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme.

“The positive aspect of the report is certainly the increase in private funding,” Poole told IPS, “and the fact that private funding does seem to be very responsive to peaks in need.

“Private funding also didn’t drop as much in 2011 as we might have expected.”

Private funding increased 70 percent in 2010, and, like humanitarian funding overall, stayed above 2009 levels in 2011.

Invisible losers

While the widespread international attention to the 2010 natural disasters in Haiti and Pakistan set new humanitarian aid records, it also caused a significant shift in the allocation of funds that left other countries proverbially dry.

Chad and Nepal, most significantly, each saw aid cuts of at least 30 percent in 2010 — examples of the invisible losers in the shift of aid that assigned 50 percent of funding to the top three recipients only, data reveals.

In the 10 years prior, only about one-third of all humanitarian aid went to the top three crisis countries, with the rest being distributed among a large number of other countries.

More starkly, front-runner Haiti in 2010 received more than double the assistance of any top-ranking recipient in any previous year.

“It certainly doesn’t correspond with the good humanitarian donorship principles of not funding one humanitarian crisis at the expense of another,” according to Poole.

She specifically pointed to the effects on the Horn of Africa crisis, which took on devastating dimensions in 2011.

Regardless of early warnings about the impeding drought in the region, “the net effect was that there wasn’t enough donor funding for organisations (in the Horn of Africa) who were ready and could have prevented suffering and saved many lives had they received the funding to do so,” Poole said.

Resilience continues to take a backseat

Natural disaster and conflict continue to be main drivers of humanitarian crises, the report affirmed.

Yet only four percent of humanitarian aid funds was spent on disaster prevention and preparedness between 2006 and 2010, the report shows – well under the 10 percent targeted.

“There is a lot of rhetoric and debate about investing in resilience at the moment, and I think donors are really still figuring out what that means,” said Poole.

“In many of the humanitarian crises, the causes of the crises are related to insecurity. So there really isn’t a lot that humanitarian aid alone can do.”

To properly address the issue of prevention, the current debate ought to involve a wider group of actors, according to Poole, including national governments, the development sector and peacekeeping.

Limited access for civil society organisations

The report also mentions the difficulties of local NGOs and civil society organisations – which tend to be the first-responders in times of crisis – to access international and government funds once disaster strikes.

This finding was echoed by NGO Humanitarian Response Advisor Manisha Thomas, during a side event of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on Jul. 20, sponsored by the government of Haiti and the International Organisation for Migration.

For one, many international NGOs are hesitant to partner with local organisations due to a fear of losing visibility and thus donors, Thomas said.

“Unfortunately, unless you fly your NGO flag, a lot of donors are not going to fund you,” she said.

There needs to be a discussion on the donor side about funding international organisations to partner with local actors, she stressed, as well as ways to get money to local and national NGOs directly.

“In an era of financial austerity… there is a financial argument to be made that national and local NGOs are much more efficient in terms of cost at delivering humanitarian response,” said Thomas.

While the GHA report currently does not capture much of the qualitative side of aid funding, Poole hopes that the International Aid Transparency Initiative will enable better data and monitoring in the future of how funds are making it to the ground.

“Because it’s a largely supply-driven system, we currently know what money donors are pushing out the door, but we don’t necessarily know how it flows through the system,” she said.

Rising needs for 2012

Unfolding major crises in the Sahel and conflict in the north of Mali have driven the total number of people needing assistance up from 51 million to 62 million worldwide in 2012.

A recent mid-year review of the U.N.’s Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) shows 45 percent of the required funding has so far been received.

The United Nations is increasingly hiring Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) for its missions across the world, raising concerns over the use of firms known for participation in human rights abuses, as well as an overall lack of accountability structures governing these contractors within the U.N. system.

Between 2009 and 2010 alone, the U.N. increased its use of private security services by 73 percent (from 44 million to 76 million dollars), according to a new report by the independent policy watchdog Global Policy Forum (GPF).

Among other services, these firms provided armed and unarmed guards, convoy security, risk assessment and security training to the U.N.

In specific field missions, for which there is more data than the U.N. as a whole, increases in outsourcing become even more stark, says the author of the report, Lou Pingeot, programme coordinator at GPF.

“When you look at 2006 to 2011, use of PMSCs in field missions have increased by 250 percent,” Pingeot told IPS.

The report, titled “Dangerous Partnership” and launched in New York on Tuesday, is based on Pingeot’s extensive research into available records of annual procurement by U.N. agencies, as well as on- and off-the-record interviews with U.N. staff across various agencies and departments.

It chronicles a build-up in the use of PMSCs within the U.N. starting in the 1990s with the peacekeeping missions in Somalia, the Balkans and Sierra Leone.

The focus on security and protection of U.N. premises increased in the wake of 9/11 and the 2004 bombing of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq, the report argues, followed by the creation of the U.N. Department of Safety and Security (DSS) in 2005. The latter aims to institutionalise security coordination among U.N. agencies through the establishment of an Inter-Agency Security Management Network.

While Pingeot is eager to stress that the numbers used in her research on PMSCs show trends based on imperfect data, they nevertheless illustrate a direction the U.N. is heading in that also worries many of her interviewees, she said, though most are uncomfortable voicing their concerns publicly.

One reason for concern over increased use of PMSCs is the absence of guidelines and frameworks to govern the outsourcing of U.N. tasks to private firms, especially those working in conflict zones.

Another concern is the possible clash between U.N. values and those of employees in private security firms, who display a “culture of superiority” and “propensity for the use of violence”, according to the report, which also examined WikiLeaks cables and media coverage of these firms.

While discussion on the subject within the U.N has been minimal at best, a 2002 report by the secretary-general on U.N. outsourcing practices, cited in “Dangerous Partnership”, acknowledged that outsourced activities “may compromise the safety and security of UN staff ,” and called on offices which outsourced security services to replace contractors with U.N. personnel.

Among the companies the U.N. has recently hired are DynCorp, a U.S. firm that became widely known for its involvement in a sex trafficking scandal during the U.N. mission in Bosnia in the 1990s – a story that’s since made its way back into the media through the 2010 film “The Whistleblower.”

The company also operated covert U.S. “rendition” flights to secret prisons across the world, as revealed in a 2011 court case between DynCorp and another private contractor first reported on by the Associated Press.

Another stand-out on the list of U.N. contractors is British security giant G4S, which received a 14-million-dollar U.N. contract for mine clearing and provides security services to the U.S. military in Iraq. In Britain, the company has been scrutinised for its questionable treatment of migrants while operating a number of migrant detention centres and is currently in the running for a 1.5-billion-pound contract to operate police services in two counties in the U.K.

The main argument for using private contractors is cost-saving, with major players like the U.S. and the U.K. pushing the U.N. to streamline its operations by outsourcing more tasks to PMSCs.

It’s a muddy argument at best, says Pingeot, who in her roughly two years of research was not able to find a serious comparative study on the financial benefits of outsourcing U.N. security services. In addition, the practice of issuing no-bid contracts cuts out any financial benefit that price competition may have had.

“You also don’t count externalities, including the cost to put a proper review mechanism into place for an industry that’s currently self-regulating and thus unaccountable,” she said.

“For me, the most astounding aspect of the report is how the U.N. has over 20 years avoided discussion on the topic,” James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, told IPS.

“How can you year after year bring out reports and talk about the security of U.N. staff and not mention this? The emperor has no clothes.”

One aspect that has stifled real discussion is the influence two of the biggest players within the U.N., the U.K and the U.S. governments, he said, both of whom are major clients of these firms, rendering any discussion dead on arrival.

The industry, in turn, makes use of this access to their governments to secure support on bids within the U.N., which are not the most lucrative financially but lend prestige and increase the companies’ image, according to Pingeot’s research.

The cozy relationship between member states and private contractors also fuels “bunkerizations”, the report finds, as the increased use of PMSCs and their involvement in determining U.N. and national policy means that countries end up with an increasing “need” for security.

“It’s self-perpetuation of the industry,” Pingeot said.

Responding to requests for comment on the report, the spokesperson for U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement Tuesday that the U.N. system has been working on a draft decision-making and accountability framework for the use of armed private security companies, and that such a draft was approved by the Inter Agency Security Management Network in June 2012.

The draft’s approval was news to Pingeot, who says it’s been on the table for two years with little moving on the matter. “We obviously forced their hand,” she said in response to the statement following her presentation of the report at the U.N. Church Centre.

“But it could still take years for such guidelines to be approved,” she adds. More importantly, it misses the point of the report, “Which is that what’s needed is a broad reassessment of the U.N.’s relationship and contracts with all of these organisations, not just those providing security.

“We’re way past the time for small reforms and guidelines like this. We’re past fig leaves.”

New York State legislators up in Albany are likely to be seeing a lot of Librada Paz in the near future.

Librada Paz in the winter of 1990, when she worked trimming apple trees about two years after arriving in the United States. Credit: Courtesy of Librada Paz

The farmworkers’ rights activist was recently chosen as the 29th recipient of the annual RFK Human Rights Award, marking the beginning of a six-year partnership between Paz and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to further her advocacy for just working conditions for farmworkers and the recognition of additional exploitation women face in the fields daily.

“The judges were extremely impressed with her, and excited about the possibility of making a difference with our support,” Santiago Canton, director for the Human Rights Program of the Washington D.C.-based RFK Center, told IPS.

The future partnership with Paz and her organisation, Rural Migrant Ministry (RMM), will include financial support and human resources for advocacy campaigns to get farm workers equal protection under New York State’s Labor Relations Act.

Currently, farm labour is excluded from this law – which grants other New York State workers such rights as a day of rest, sick leave, paid overtime and collective bargaining – leaving it up to farmers to decide whether or not to extend such rights.

“I’m very excited about this partnership,” Librada Paz told IPS. “RMM needs a strong partnership like this in order for us to really help out. I think it’s going to be really powerful.”

Paz migrated from Mexico to the U.S. at age 15, along with her sister, where she joined her two brothers working 14-hour days on farms in Florida, California and New York. For the next 15 years, she experienced first hand many of the conditions she today addresses in her work for RMM, a non-secterian organisation educating and advocating for farmworkers across New York state.

Having obtained a college degree and her citizenship, Paz quit the fields in 1998 and has since poured her energy into lobbying for such initiatives as the Farm Workers Fair Labor Practices Act – a bill that has won the backing of other civil society organisations, like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

She’s eager to stress that “not all farmers are bad”, but that protections ought to be in place for those workers who are currently being exploited by the rotten apples in the industry.

“People are being fired because they get sick. And people get sick because they don’t get a day of rest,” she said.

Her organisation further seeks overtime pay for work “above 50 or 60 hours a week”, which is a standard workweek for farmworkers, according to Paz.

One of the biggest obstacles her organisation faces in its lobbying efforts at the state level, she said, is politicians’ disbelief that workers’ rights are violated to the extent they are. When it comes down to it, “It’s always their word against the farmers’.”

In addition to across-the-board farm labour conditions, which Canton calls “horrendous” and “anachronistic” in most of the U.S., women face additional discrimination, ranging from difficulties securing farm work to endemic sexual abuse.

“When I first came here, we would go to farmers and they would say ‘we’re not hiring women, we’d never ever hire women’,” the now 39-year old remembers of her early experiences finding work. “Now it’s more open, but it’s still not as easy as for men.”

Once she did find employment, the living conditions were tough for women. “People want to take advantage of you. We sleep with men and women in one room. And you know what men do when there aren’t many women around.”

Paz, who has been active in the farmworkers movement since high school but who didn’t become politicised as a woman activist farmworker until about 10 years ago, sees a similar trajectory reflected in other women. “Maybe it’s me paying more attention now, but even just 10 years ago, women were much less visible in the movement that they are now.”

She remembers attending a conference on sexual violence against women farmworkers around that time as one of the first instances that women around her banded together for their rights. “Women have become more active and are participating in events, and working to empower other women.”

Paz’s award closely follows the recognition of another farmworker rights activist, Dolores Huerta – cofounder of the United Farmworkers with Cezar Chavez – who received the Medal of Honor from U.S. President Barack Obama in May.

Both choices mark a strong recognition of women’s involvement in the fight for equal labour rights of farmworkers and the additional discrimination they encounter.

The RFK Center, which announced the decision last week, chose Paz out of 34 nominees to enter into a partnership. The centre will provide up to 30,000 dollars in financial assistance and one staff person at the centre who will fully dedicate their time to working with the award winner on a strategy they design and execute over the next six years, according to Canton.

“This doesn’t mean after six years we’re gone,” he stressed. “The idea of the award is to help those individuals and those organisations that are working towards social justice to make a difference in the world of millions of people. If after six years we still consider this work relevant enough to continue, we will continue to support her.”

In recent years, the Robert F. Kennedy Center has recognised and supported the work of Ugandan LGBTQI-activist Frank Mugisha and Mexican advocate for indigenous rights Abel Barrera Hernández, among others.

Paz admits she wasn’t aware quite how big of a deal the award was until she won it and did some research.

“I did not know how powerful they (the RFK Center) are. When I realised it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really incredible.’”

With the help of the RFK Center, she’ll be knocking on some more doors in the state capitol, Albany, soon, she assured IPS. After all, she knows her way well there. “I’ve been around and around to Albany,” she says, laughing, “And I never give up.”

The award will officially be handed to Librada Paz during a ceremony in Washington D.C. in November.