Young Bangladeshi women raise their fists at a protest in Shahbagh. Credit: Kajal Hazra/IPS

By Clara Fok and Sara Vida Coumans
NEW YORK, Aug 11 2015 (IPS)

There’s a deep irony that as people around the world mark International Youth Day on Aug. 12, hardly any attention will be paid to the shrinking space for young human rights defenders who increasingly find themselves on the receiving end of government repression. 
In recent years, helped by the connective power of social media, the world has witnessed the growing force of young people fighting for and defending their rights and shaping their communities. Young people are mobilising the masses to hold governments accountable by calling on them to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. Young people are not just taking a back seat and swiping away on their gadgets, but are organising sit-ins, protests, occupying public space, and directly holding talks with governments.

Of course, young people have always played a key role in social movements where they have a huge stake. But now they are increasingly taking on leadership roles in peaceful protest movements and driving change.

Young people are not just taking a back seat and swiping away on their gadgets, but are organising sit-ins, protests, occupying public space, and directly holding talks with governments. They are not waiting to be told what to do.

This has come at a price. Unfortunately – and too frequently – states respond to young people’s peaceful civic engagement by beating and locking up youth activists.

Take Myanmar, for example. More than 100 student leaders, including human rights defenders and activists, are facing jail time for protesting against the new National Education Law. Among them is Phyoe Phyoe Aung, the 26-year-old leader of one of Myanmar’s largest student movements.

On Aug. 25, she’ll turn 27, but it looks likely she will spend her birthday behind bars as part of an unjust and lengthy prison sentence after she was arrested in March following a violent police crackdown on largely peaceful protests.

Many more across the country continue to be harassed and intimidated in what appears to be a systematic clampdown on the student movement.

This should come as no surprise – the Myanmar authorities have a long history of repressing student-led movements, which they fear will trigger wider calls for political change and threaten their grip on power.

On the other side of the world, things are no different. In June, the security forces in Angola arbitrarily arrested 15 youth activists for participating in a meeting where they peacefully discussed politics and some of the concerns they have regarding the government of President José Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in power for the past 36 years.

They have been accused of planning to disrupt public order and posing a threat to national security. Even young activists who were not in the meeting were accused of being part of it. They are all being held in solitary confinement far away from their homes, making it very hard for their loved ones to visit. 

Efforts to secure the release of the activists were severely punished. On July 22, five people who tried to visit them were detained for nine hours and a few days later a peaceful protest calling for the release of the 15 was violently repressed.

Such heavy-handed responses are not unique to Myanmar and Angola. Everywhere – from Turkey to Venezuela, the United States to Egypt – young human rights defenders have been thrown behind bars for fighting for their rights.

Society does not always welcome the acts of resistance by young human rights defenders. As noted by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, “general perception of youth in society, also conveyed by established media outlets, often point to their young age and lack of maturity as grounds for not giving them a say in public affairs. Youth and student movements are seen as troublemakers rather than serious actors that can fruitfully contribute to public debate”.

But denying young people a seat at the table limits opportunities to engage in debates about the progressive realisation of human rights. Even when young people are allowed to participate, it is often meaningless or tokenistic, because it is widely assumed that they are there to learn and develop, rather than to equally contribute to solutions.

This age-centric approach becomes a vicious cycle – very little room is given for young people to actively participate and shape the agenda, while policy makers fail to effectively address the barriers young people face to accessing basic human rights.

We need to take a step back and reflect on what this means for how states react to young people when they are peacefully engaging with society in a bid to create a space for them to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

If governments are serious about the lives of young people, they must ensure that young human rights defenders can claim and exercise their rights freely and without fear.

It is true that meaningful youth civic engagement will not happen overnight and it takes time to create productive inter-generational partnerships that are based on trust. But governments can take the first step by immediately and unconditionally releasing all the human rights defenders detained for peacefully exercising their rights.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Presidential elections in Iran have historically been used by reformists to push for a more open political environment. Credit: Garry Knight/cc by 2.0

By Yasaman Baji
TEHRAN, Jan 30 2013 (IPS)

With the June 2013 presidential election drawing closer, Iran’s reformists are debating what they should do in the face of the severe restrictions to which their leaders and political parties have been subject since the popular protests that roiled the country after the last election four years ago.

While some reformists have insisted they will boycott the election, others are arguing that it could offer a new opportunity for political organising regardless of whether the Guardian Council, the body that vets potential candidates, will permit their well-known political leaders to run.

Still others say much depends on how the competition among their conservative rivals shakes out in the coming months. Since no conservative or hard-line candidate has yet stepped forward to announce his official candidacy, they argue it is too soon to decide what position to take and that the political environment could yet change in unexpected ways before the election.

Presidential elections in Iran have historically been used by reformists both to push for a more open political environment and to demonstrate their ability to mobilise popular support, particularly among the urban middle classes.

This year, however, reformists appear more ambivalent, especially given the continuing house arrests of their 2009 presidential candidates, Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, and the imprisonment of other key reformist leaders, including former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh and the former chair of the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Relations Committee, Mohsen Mirdamadi.

Their release – as well as those of other political prisoners – has been a top priority for many reformists, even as a condition for their participation in the June election.

But some reformist leaders disagree. Former interior minister Abdullah Nuri believes that addressing the deteriorating economic situation and the continuing external threat against Iran posed by the U.S.-led sanctions regime is more urgent than the release of their political comrades from detention.

In addition, Nuri worries that the insistence on the release of political prisoners before the reformists agree to participate in the election will force them to play a game under rules set by their foes. “We should take the first step and show our opponents that we are determined and serious,” Nuri told the monthly Aseman in October.

Former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi, who supported Karrubi in the 2009 election, has taken a similar position.

Also writing in Aseman, he recently asked: “Is it logical to ask our rivals to fulfill our ultimate demands so that we can win the competition with them? If political prisoners were to be released (and)… economic, cultural, and political situation and domestic and foreign policy be improved (before the election), then why should the reformists win power?

“These are in effect the reformists’ future programmes, and they must make an effort to fulfill them when they reach power and not make them conditions for participation in elections.”

Such words, along with rumours regarding the possible candidacy of former first vice president Mohammadreza Aref and former minister of education Mohammad Ali Najafi, have given the impression that at least some reformists are seriously considering participating in the election.

Some reformist groups have even declared that former president Mohammad Khatami will be their candidate despite the latter’s declaration last summer that he will not run.

Even the mention of Khatami’s name as a possible candidate, however, has unsettled the hard-line establishment. Iranian state television has gone so far as showing Khatami – something it had not done for years – and calling him a “companion of sedition”. Sedition is a term routinely used to refer to the protests that followed the contested results of the 2009 presidential election.

“Companions of sedition” could participate in the election, the television programme said, only if they renounced or recanted their support of sedition.

In December, the spokesman for the Guardian Council, the body that determines who is eligible to run for office, appeared to echo that view, insisting that the disavowal of sedition will make it more likely that candidates will receive favourable consideration.

The call for renunciation by institutions close to the Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, however, was immediately rejected by key reformists. Cleric Mussavi Khoeiniha, the publisher of the now-banned daily Salaam, pointed out that the reformists had made former Prime Minister Mussavi their candidate in 2009.

“Now we should renounce our support in order to participate in the election so that they can repeat the same story? What kind of political logic would allow us to do this?” he asked, adding that that he is opposed to the view that reformists should participate in the election at any cost.

One well-known reformist who did not want to be identified told IPS that the Leader and his close advisors don’t believe the country is facing such a serious crisis that they need reformists’ participation in the election as a means to enhance the legitimacy of the regime and promote national unity in the face of external pressures.

“They only need the people we can bring to the polls and not us. Why should we then place our votes in their pockets?” he said.

Khatami himself has ignored demands on him to renounce his support for the 2009 protests and has instead, along with former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, called repeatedly for a free and fair election.

In doing so, he has chosen to ignore Leader Khamenei’s criticism of “those who keep saying” that elections must be free. “In which country elections are freer than Iran? Be careful your words do not discourage people from participating in elections,” Khameni has warned.

Khatami reacted to the Leader’s criticism by saying that a free election simply means an election which is not engineered in advance for the purpose of achieving specific results.

“They say we will not give permission; you should participate in the election but only the way we want you to,” Khatami scoffed in a recent meeting with a reformist party.

Still, Khatami has remained vocal and has used the pre-election political environment to repeatedly sound the message that the reformists have not gone away and remain an important voice for articulating unmet needs and demands for political and social reform in the country.

These demands for a more open political and cultural environment tells Abbas Abdi, a well-known reformist journalist, that reformists should do as they did in the 1997 presidential election when Khatami’s surprise victory shocked the conservative establishment.

“Our understanding should be that there is an election, and we should participate in it. In all likelihood, we will not receive a lot of votes but maybe we will,” Abdi stated in an interview with the daily Etemaad.

A university professor who asked not to be identified was even more sanguine. “Even if there is no hope in the benevolence of the Leader, there must be hope in his limitations,” he told IPS.

Pointing to Khamenei’s aversion to being seen as interfering in the political process, the professor believes that, “Between Khamenei’s pretense of impartiality and hidden interventions, a space is created for the activities of political groups, including the reformists.”

As of now, however, it is not clear whether the reformists believe such a space exists and, if it does, whether they will even be allowed to try to seize it.

This week’s arrests of more than a dozen of young journalists who mostly work for reformist dailies and weeklies may be an omen that the traditionally more open pre-election environment may not be repeated this time.

While the charges against these journalists have not yet been announced, indications are that their arrests are not for their writings and relate to their alleged illegal contacts with “anti-revolutionary” Persian-language media outside of Iran.

The move suggests that the current political establishment in Iran remains highly sensitive and continues to treat the reformists not as competitors with different domestic and foreign policy outlooks but as a security challenge to the survival of the Islamic regime.

A Santiago demonstration calling for decent minimum wages is violently repressed in July 2012. Credit: Fernando Fiedler /IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jan 18 2013 (IPS)

Chile’s positive economic performance in 2012 is not enough to boost President Sebastián Piñera’s waning popularity, as many Chileans believe the country’s much-touted growth does nothing to compensate or solve decades of accumulated injustices, several analysts told IPS.

Chile has successfully sidestepped the European economic crisis, closing the last fiscal year with a 5.5 percent growth in its gross domestic product (GDP) and an inflation rate of 1.5 percent.

At the end of 2012, unemployment affected only 6.2 percent of the economically active population, with salaries growing at a rate of six percent, according to official figures.ries

The government hailed each of these positive indicators as proof of the strength of Chile’s economy. In an effort to showcase these achievements, a dedicated web portal was launched to highlight the progress made by the country’s right-wing administration headed by Piñera who, before running for president, was a successful businessman.

Nonetheless, the president’s popularity remains low at around 30 percent, with a significant percentage of people disapproving of his administration and only 28 percent in favour of his economic and employment policies.

Mauricio Morales, a political scientist at the Diego Portales University, explained, “The percentage of approval is determined not only by economic indicators but also by a president’s personal traits.”

“Piñera is not perceived as an honest or approachable president,” in contrast to his predecessor, the socialist Michelle Bachelet, who governed from 2006 to 2010 with an approval rate of over 50 percent.

This makes Bachelet — the current executive director of UN Women – the candidate most likely to win the October presidential elections, although she has yet to announce her decision to run.

Morales went on to say that polls usually reveal a difference between the level of approval for the economic policies implemented by a government and the popularity of its president.

However, “in Piñera’s case, both indicators are practically identical, and this shows just how relevant personal traits are” in determining popularity.

Manuel Riesco, an economist with the Centre for National Studies on Alternative Development, observed that the fact that Piñera’s low popularity has sunk so low and that Chileans are not very impressed by these economic indicators are a reflection of the “accumulated injustices” suffered by the population, which are ignored by the government.

“The discontent among Chileans has nothing to do with economic performance, but rather with the widespread abuse they have suffered over the past two decades, both in boom cycles — like today’s — and stagnation periods alike,” he said.

According to Riesco, “People mistakenly believed that the end of the dictatorship, which stretched from 1973 to 1990, would put a stop to the abuses they suffered. But unfortunately that did not happen, because while the political system was democratised, the model in place remained basically the same, with no substantial changes.”

The economist observed that “Chileans are well-informed citizens and they’re also very patient. But after 10 years their patience starts to wear thin, and it’s been 20 years now.”

In his opinion, that explains the current “new spur in mass participation in public matters. And this participation won’t subside until solutions to the most critical issues are found.”

Social protests continued in Chile throughout 2012, when a call for structural change in politics and government took centre stage, overshadowing the previous year’s struggle for democratisation of education.

While the undisputed champions of change in 2011 were students, in 2012 activism spread across society and the focus of demands shifted to environmental, economic and social issues, converging in a call for constitutional reform through the convening of a constituent assembly.

The current constitution, in force since 1980, was drafted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and is one of the regime’s legacies. Social activists say its provisions hinder the institutional development necessary for the expansion of democracy and the establishment of a more just and progressive society.

Ordinary Chileans join academic, political and social experts in criticising the government’s failure to translate economic growth into a reduction of social injustice, poverty or environmental degradation.

Mercedes Muñoz, who has been a teacher for almost 40 years and is now close to retirement, told IPS that the figures announced by the government are not “at all” reflected in the day-to-day lives of most Chileans.

“The government does not seem to be investing in education or health, or in anything that will make our lives better and give us a sense of security, or that will guarantee that a life’s work will provide a decent retirement, or that putting your kids through school won’t mean getting into debt for life,” she said.

Muñoz added that these positive economic indicators “are enjoyed only by the country’s wealthiest” and stressed that if Chile’s macro-economy comes out unscathed from the global crisis “it will be at the expense of the people and because of their sacrifice”.

Long held up as the “Latin American miracle” because of its dynamic economic growth and poverty abatement, Chile is also known for having one of the widest gaps between rich and poor of all of Latin America.

According to the 2012 National Socioeconomic Characterisation Survey (Casen), in 2011 the income of the richest sectors of Chilean society was 35 times more than that of the poorest sectors, down from 46 in 2009.

Riesco explained that, despite the negative perception of the population, “we should certainly be celebrating the country’s success in weathering the global financial crisis” that broke out in 2008 in the United States and which shifted its epicentre to Europe in 2010.

But he expressed concern over the fact that that success is due to an external factor: “the unusually high price of copper, the country’s main resource.”

The income from copper “is practically all rent, that is, the excess above the cost of copper production. Therefore it’s not value added by Chilean labour but a rent transferred from abroad and for the most part appropriated by the large mining companies,” he said.

Mining accounts for at least one fifth of Chile’s GDP, and as mining resources “are by definition limited, they can disappear, as occurred with nitrate deposits in the past”.

Moreover, “the price of copper will inevitably drop, bringing Chile’s economy down to its true dimensions, which is the added value generated internally, or, if you prefer, the sum of its costs of production; everything above that is rent, which is fleeting,” he said.

Less than a month into what will be a year marked by presidential and legislative elections, the government has been quick to project that by the end of 2013 the economy will have grown by five percent, inflation will have dropped at an annual rate of three percent and fiscal spending will have increased by five percent.

Despite this optimistic outlook, according to Morales if “Piñera has not yet garnered much popularity” it’s doubtful that he will do so in 2013, his last year in office, and he will “face, like never before, the loneliness of power.”