The girls who were abducted were targeted simply because they were exercising their right to go to school, out of the ordinary for a girl in Nigeria. Access to basic education for girls has remained low, particularly in the northern region which has the lowest girl child enrollment in Nigeria —in 2008 the net enrollment rate for girls into secondary school was only 22 percent. The girls (who were both Christian and Muslim) at the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok must each have been determined to get an education in spite of tremendous odds. The fact that these girls were also risking violence to be in school illustrates how important the right to education was to each of them.
Boko Haram also has a history of taking hostages as “slaves.” In May 2013, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Sheku released a video saying that Boko Haram had taken women and children, including teenage girls, as hostages as part of its latest campaign. These hostages would be treated as “slaves,” he said. This has raised concern among the family members of those abducted that “Boko Haram is adhering to the ancient Islamic belief that women captured during war are slaves with whom their ‘masters’ can have sex. Regardless of alleged rationale, enslavement, imprisonment, forced labor, rape and sexual slavery are all serious violations of international law. They are defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as crimes against humanity.
The mass kidnapping in April was unprecedented and shocking. Even more shocking – after more than two weeks, the Nigerian government has done very little to find and rescue the girls.
The lack of government response has provoked outrage in Nigeria. On Wednesday, several hundred participated in a “million-woman protest march” in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital to demand that more resources be put toward finding and securing the kidnapped girls. The protesters in Nigeria are joined on Twitter with a growing movement under the hashtags #BringBackOurGirls, #BringBackOurDaughters and #234Girls.
One man, whose daughter was abducted along with his two nieces, said his wife has hardly slept since the attack. She lies awake at night “thinking about our daughter”. As the mother of a young school girl myself, I feel deeply for her. The continuing tragedy of these young Nigerian school girls is every parent’s worst nightmare.
It’s time for world to wake up to the escalating violence in Nigeria, as well as the Nigerian government’s lack of response.
By: Jennifer Prestholdt, deputy director of The Advocates for Human Rights and the organization’s director of the International Justice Program. Ms. Prestholdt has a B.A. in political science from Yale and a M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she studied international human rights law and international refugee policy. She graduated cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School.
Prestholdt has worked on refugee and asylum issues for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland and the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination Against and Protection of Minorities. Prior to becoming deputy director of The Advocates for Human Rights, Prestholdt practiced asylum law for five years as the organization’s director of the Refugee and Immigrant Program. She has also taught International Human Rights Law as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas Law School.
Oklahoma botched last night’s execution of Clayton Lockett by using a new, untested lethal injection protocol. While execution officials had pronounced Lockett unconscious, he was awake minutes later, writhing and breathing heavily. In apparent pain, he fought the restraints that locked him to the gurney. As he continued to twitch and call out “Man” and “Something’s wrong,” officials closed the shutters to block viewers from witnessing an execution gone horribly wrong.
Officials halted the execution. Lockett died of a heart attack within the hour.
The latest bungled execution is a tragic reiteration of Ohio’s execution of Dennis McGuire, who was put to death in January with a new two-drug combination that had never been tested. What McGuire’s attorneys had argued prior to his execution came true: the drug combination caused their client to experience “air hunger” in his struggle to breathe. “Shortly after the warden buttoned his jacket to signal the start of the execution, my dad began gasping and struggling to breathe,” McGuire’s daughter, Amber McGuire, is reported to have said. “I watched his stomach heave. I watched him try to sit up against the straps on the gurney. I watched him repeatedly clench his fist. It appeared to me he was fighting for his life but suffocating.
Oklahoma and Ohio’s experiments with new, untested lethal injection protocols are real-life — or real-death — demonstrations of what can go wrong when states are allowed to execute people using untested and dubious execution methods.
The majority of the 32 death penalty states in the U.S. and the U.S. federal government use lethal injection as the primary means to execute prisoners. Governments have traditionally used a three-drug combination to put people to death. But now, they are resorting to new combinations because the drugs needed for the three-drug injection are difficult to obtain. The drugs’ sources are drying up, caused by foreign government regulations, European Union restrictions placed on the supply, and drug corporations’ positions.
As these drugs have become increasingly harder to obtain, states have begun using other drugs to administer a lethal dose. In turn, pharmaceutical companies have refused to supply these drugs for execution purposes in the U.S.
Now, states like Oklahoma and Ohio are turning to questionable sources—including compounding pharmacies selling drugs that are not FDA-approved—to get the drugs they need to execute people. Obtaining execution drugs that are outside of federal regulation increases the risk of tampering and reduced drug efficacy; this increases the probability of cruel or inhuman treatment or punishment during an execution, a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
Moreover, several states have passed secrecy laws to conceal the identities of their drug suppliers, thus allowing states to withhold critical information from detainees and their families who seek assurances about the drugs’ quality and effectiveness. The attorney for Charles Warner, a second man to be executed by Oklahoma last night, had criticized the suppression of information earlier on Tuesday. “Because the issue of secrecy in lethal injection has not been substantively addressed by the courts, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner will be executed without basic information about the experimental combination of drugs used in their deaths,” attorney Madeline Cohen said in a statement, according to the Washington Post. “Despite repeated requests by counsel, the state has refused, again, and again, to provide information about the source, purity, testing and efficacy of the drugs to be used.”
U.S. states have faced challenges with lethal injection because of the clamp down on the drug supply. Lethal injection in the U.S. has now turned into a cat-and-mouse game, with states attempting to procure execution drugs from an international community determined to keep the drugs out of the states’ possession, leading states to turn to untested and uncharted drug protocols as alternatives.
Regardless of whether a three-drug injection or a two-drug injection is used, there is much concern that these injections cause cruel and inhuman punishment. The gruesome deaths of Lockett and McGuire are visible, horrific testimonials that lethal injection violates the Eighth Amendment. “No one should die the way my dad did, no matter the circumstances,” said McGuire’s daughter, according to reports.
Hours after McGuire’s execution, Terry Collins, who served as the Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections from 2006 to 2010 and oversaw 33 executions, said that the suffocation execution of McGuire shines the spotlight on the unworkable nature of the problems in the death house. “The experiment has failed and that is plainly obvious,” he said.
The Advocates for Human Rights submitted a shadow report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, detailing how the death penalty in the U.S. violates basic human rights, including the right to be free from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. The Advocates was there, at the Committee’s 100th session in Geneva, Switzerland in March, when the Committee took the U.S. to task on the death penalty and other issues. In its concluding observations, the Committee urged that measures be taken to ensure that the death penalty is not carried out in a racially biased or erroneous manner and that lethal injection drugs come from legitimate sources.
By: Attorney Rosalyn Park, The Advocates for Human Rights’ director of research, represents The Advocates on the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty steering committee. She chairs the Working Group for World Day Against the Death Penalty and is active on several other working groups. Before beginning work with The Advocates, Rosalyn interned with Anti-Slavery International in London as an Upper Midwest International Human Rights Fellow.
It’s a bright and shiny day in Minnesota, with the temperature working its way into the 70s for the first time in months. It’s a bright and shiny day, too, because Governor Mark Dayton will sign the Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act at a ceremony on the State Capitol steps at four o’clock this afternoon.
The bullying prevention bill arrived on Governor Dayton’s desk this morning, after vigorous debate in the Minnesota House and Senate and thanks to the more than 100 groups that rallied to support the bill.
“We talk about this [bill] being about anti-bullying, and it is. It’s also about positioning Minnesota as a leader in the next generation of education reform,” said Rep. Jim Davnie, the bill’s chief sponsor in the Minnesota House, as reported this morning by the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
After the Governor signs the bill, its political moment will be over. But, this is when the act’s language will meet its real challenges: daily routines and everyday realities. Boisterous and chaotic hallways, lunchrooms, and playgrounds, where small actions can go undetected; quiet locker rooms after most of the kids have gone home; corners of classrooms as teachers help other students; and the lightening-fast expanse of social media, where dozens of kids in any given school are about to post a comment or photo.
We all know that there is work to be done in order to ensure safety in these commonplace interactions and to help students do what is difficult even for adults— to show others respect and to speak up when someone is the target of injustice.
I have worked with many teachers over the years who wanted to learn more about human rights education in order to provide the knowledge, skills, and values that empower young people to stand up, empathize with others, make good decisions, and ultimately create safe spaces and positive environments. They know that such instruction needs to be explicit.
So, too, do our laws. Administrators, teachers, and students need clear guidance and protection. Fortunately, the Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act will help meet this need.
Every child has the right to security of person and to an education. It will soon be time to dig in and do the work that is called for in this bill. I believe that Minnesotans are up to the challenge, and I hope that soon more students will feel safer and more secure as they go about their day.
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For resources on bullying and other issues affecting students and schools, please see The Advocates’ website dedicated to human rights education, DiscoverHumanRights.org, which includes newsletters on bullying and social emotional learning.
Robin Phillips, executive director of The Advocates for Human Rights, testified today (April 4, 2014) at a hearing before the United States Congress Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about religious minorities in India.
Robin Phillips’ oral testimony, “The Plight of Religious Minorities in India”:
For more than 30 years, The Advocates for Human Rights has worked with diaspora communities—people living outside their country of origin or ancestry who retain ties to and interest in that country. Some come to the United States seeking asylum after facing religious persecution. Others come as professionals or students, or to join family members. And some are second- or third-generation immigrants. They are part of our communities, they are your constituents, and their voices should help inform our policies toward their countries of origin and ancestry.
Indian diaspora sounds alarm about religious freedom in India
The Indian diaspora groups with whom we work have consistently expressed concern about religious freedom in India. We share their concerns, including: communal violence; impunity for the instigators of such violence and those in government who may be complicit; anti-conversion laws; vague anti-terrorism laws that facilitate profiling and persecution of Muslims; police and armed forces practices such as encounter killings and torture targeting Muslims; and a culture of impunity for such practices. These practices violate international human rights standards.
Consistent with the concerns we hear, the Pew Research Center recently ranked India as a country with “very high social hostilities involving religion” and “high” government restrictions on religion.
Indian diasporans around the world have been sounding the alarm as elections approach. In the first eight months of 2013, there were 451 incidents of communal violence, up from 410 in all of 2012. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief cautions that “political exploitation of communal distinctions” presents “a real risk that [large scale] communal violence might happen again.”
Multifaceted impunity fuels communal violence
Impunity fuels communal violence. This impunity is multifaceted: officials do not hold private parties accountable for communal violence; courts do not hold government officials accountable for sanctioning or encouraging that violence; political parties rally behind political leaders who are implicated in communal violence; obstruction of justice and witness intimidation are commonplace in court procedures; immunity laws shield security forces from accountability; and officials accept torture and extrajudicial killings as the norm.
Some examples raised by Indian diasporans highlight these points. Cases brought against officials alleged to be complicit in the 2002 Gujarat violence have been dismissed for lack of evidence after witnesses were intimidated and prosecutors and judges effectively stood in as defense counsel. UN human rights bodies have described the proceedings as “flawed from the outset,” reflecting concerns of religious bias and high levels of corruption. Whistleblowers in Gujarat law enforcement have faced threats and arrests.
Wounds of past communal violence still fresh, especially for women
The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women visited India last May. She observed that communal violence in India “is frequently explained away by implying that equal aggression was noted on both sides.” By characterizing this violence as “riots,” the government “den[ies] the lack of security for religious . . . minorities, . . . disregarding their right to equal citizenship.” “This issue is of particular concern to many,” the Special Rapporteur noted at the end of her visit last May, “as the wounds of the past are still fresh for women who were beaten, stripped naked, burnt, raped [or] killed because of their religious identity, in the Gujarat massacre of 2002.”
In some communal attacks, police reportedly arrest victims and protect the attackers. And the government has been negligent in its duties to victims displaced by communal violence who are afraid to return home. These internally displaced persons continue to languish in subhuman conditions in isolated settlements.
Human rights defenders and Muslims face harassment, threats, arbitrary arrest
Human rights defenders reportserious problems with increased police harassment and arbitrary arrest and detention of Muslims based on false charges of terrorism. Religious minorities have been targeted under an anti-terrorism law that expands the definition of “terrorism”; authorizes warrantless search, seizure, and arrest; and allows detention without charge for up to 180 days.
Indian police confident of impunity for torturing people
While in custody, many suspects are also subject to torture and ill-treatment. The independent Ravi Chander Commission reported that Muslim men were held without charge for several weeks at illegal detention centers and tortured to extract forced confessions of terrorism offenses. In my own personal discussions with Indian police officers, they have been alarmingly candid about their use of torture as a legitimate interrogation technique, signifying a complete disregard for international standards and confidence of impunity for these human rights violations. Not surprisingly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture’s request for permission to visit India has been pending for more than 20 years.
Attorneys for religious minorities face threats, violence
“Encounter killings” have become state policy in India
In addition, “encounter killings,” or killings that occur during staged clashes between security forces and alleged armed suspects are becoming increasingly common. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions reported last year that encounter killings “have become virtually a part of unofficial State policy.”
U.S. must ensure India adequately protects rights of religious minorities
As the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief observed after a 2008 visit to India, “impunity emboldens forces of intolerance.” There is a serious possibility of increased violence against religious minorities in India in connection with the upcoming elections. India cannot abrogate its obligation to protect the human rights of its citizens in the name of national security. The United States and India stand as democratic and pluralistic nations. As such, we must hold each other accountable to the highest standards of human rights protection. We encourage the United States to take strong bilateral and multilateral action to ensure that the rights of religious minorities in India are adequately protected and that India complies with all of its international human rights obligations.
Robin Phillips’ testimony begins at approximately :59:15 in the video of the hearing:
Video excerpting questions about the administration of the death penalty in the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Committee, as well as the responses from the United States delegation.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee took an important step last week in holding the United States accountable for its human rights record, and Friday the ball is in the Supreme Court’s court. In a March 27 press conference, the Committee issued its Concluding Observations, following analysis of the United States’ self-report on its human rights record, shadow reports fromTheAdvocates and other civil societyorganizations, and an interactive dialogue between the Committee and a 32-member government delegation on March 13 and 14 in Geneva, Switzerland.
On Friday, the Supreme Court has a chance to take up one of the Committee’s key issues.
One of our U.S. civil society briefings with the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva (I am seated on the right.)
We were particularly excited when the U.S. State Department announced the delegation, because it included Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. This is the first time a U.S. delegation for a treaty-body review has included representatives from state and local governments. They are an important piece of the accountability puzzle because many of our country’s human rights obligations need to be implemented at the state and local level.
Mississippi retains the death penalty, and Attorney General Hood had just asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to schedule two back-to-back executions for March 26 and 27–for Charles Ray Crawford and Michelle Byrom. We knew that two lives were on the line.
Committee highlights key death penalty issues
The Committee’s examination of the United States on March 13-14 and its Concluding Observations mirror some of the issues we raised in our shadow reports. They devote much attention to the death penalty, including the associated issues of exonoree compensation, racial disparities, and sourcing of drugs used for executions.
While welcoming the overall decline in the number of executions and the increasing number of states that have abolished the death penalty, the Committee shares The Advocates’ concerns about its continued use. The Committee is concerned by the high number of people wrongly sentenced to death, despite existing safeguards, and it is concerned about the racial disparities in the death penalty’s imposition—disparities that disproportionately affect African Americans and that are exacerbated by the rule that discrimination has to be proven case-by-case.
As I discuss below, just this week there have been some developments on the issue of wrongful convictions.
Committee urges federal and state governments to ensure fair compensation for people who are wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death
The Committee also notes, as we observed in our shadow report, that 16 states retaining the death penalty do not provide compensation for people who are wrongfully convicted; other states provide insufficient compensation or impose barriers to obtaining it. Consider Glenn Ford. Wrongfully convicted in Louisiana, Ford spent almost 30 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. As Committee expert Professor Walter Kaelin noted during the review, he was exonerated and released just days before the Committee’s review. He would have been about 34 years old when he entered death row, and was 64 when he was released. Louisiana’s compensation law allows him to collect only a maximum $330,000 for the three decades he spent on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
The Committee also notes with concern reports that states administer untested, unregulated drugs to execute prisoners, and that state authorities withhold information about the drugs from those to be executed. There have been some late-breaking developments around the country on these drug-sourcing issues.
Committee hits hard on Mississippi’s sourcing of lethal drugs
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, March 14, 2014, Geneva, waits to respond to questions from UN Human Rights Committee experts about the sourcing of lethal injection drugs his state plans to use for two upcoming executions. (Photo by the author.)
We were really fortunate that Mississippi Attorney General Hood was part of the U.S. delegation in Geneva. I was there on the ground, so my colleagues at The Advocates and I were able to quickly collect facts about the upcoming executions of Crawford and Byrom that Hood had requested and fed hard-hitting questions about Mississippi’s lethal injection policies directly to the Committee experts.
Mississippi was just one week away from executing Crawford and Byrom with drugs from a compounding pharmacy. As our shadow report explains, compounding pharmacies are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Mississippi’s drugs had likely expired. These kinds of drugs carry a high risk of causing excruciating pain; one of the more recent executions to use compounded drugs resulted in the prisoner crying out during his execution, “I feel my whole body burning.”
Drug-sourcing has become a problem for states seeking to execute inmates, because many European drug manufacturers have stopped selling drugs like pentobarbital to the United States, fearing they will be used in executions. States are therefore scrambling to come up with alternative ways to concoct their execution drugs.
It was instructive that an official from a state government was part of the U.S. delegation—a first—because state governments conduct the overwhelming majority of executions. And the Committee experts repeatedly pressed Attorney General Hood on the sources of Mississippi’s lethal drugs.
You can see the questioning in the 17-minute video at the top of this post, which excerpts the relevant questions on the death penalty from the Committee and responses from the U.S. delegation.
Due Process revived: Michelle Byrom granted new trial; Charles Ray Crawford’s appeal to proceed
Soon after the Committee’s examination, Attorney General Hood’s office asserted that he asks for execution dates only “once due process has occurred.” The Mississippi Supreme Court this week twice disagreed with his characterization of due process. The court reversed Michelle Byrom’s conviction and granted her a new trial with a new judge. In its two-page order, the court emphasized that its action was “extraordinary and extremely rare.”
Seemingly oblivious to his own role in nearly executing someone the court determined was entitled to a new trial, and to the extraordinary nature of the court’s decision, Hood responded, “Our citizens can once again take comfort in the fact that we have a legal system that works for all parties involved.” And rather than accepting the court’s decision, a motion from Hood’s office complained that “[e]ach and every claim that Byrom presented to this Court had been addressed on the merits either by this Court or the federal courts on habeas corpus review,” and asked for the court to explain its decision.
On the same day, the Mississippi Supreme Court denied Attorney General Hood’s request to execute Charles Ray Crawford. The court noted that during the sentencing phase of Crawford’s trial, the prosecution introduced as an aggravating factor evidence that he had previously been convicted of rape. The court noted that Crawford’s appeal of that rape conviction was currently pending, so Hood’s request to execute Crawford was premature.
Challenges to sketchy lethal drug sourcing multiply
But some clever detective work by Byrom and Crawford’s legal team uncovered the source–a compounding pharmacy called Brister Brothers in Grenada, Mississippi. Judging from Brister Brother’s facebook page, the outfit specializes in “herbal dietary supplements,” including a “specially formulated men’s tonic” called “Man Up.”
Brister Brothers co-owner Ward Brister says the company is a “third-party supplier” and did not compound the pentobarbital. According to an NBC report, “Byrom’s legal team presumes Brister purchased the raw ingredients for the drug and that the state intends to have it compounded for the executions.”
The lawsuit alleges that the State of Mississippi will secretly compound the drugs at an unknown time and place, by people with unknown training and credentials. The danger, a lawyer for Byrom and Crawford explains, is that “[i]f the state’s pentobarbital is contaminated or sub-potent, prisoners will be conscious when the second and third drugs are administered, and they will experience a torturous death by suffocation and cardiac arrest.”
U.S. Supreme Court could act soon
Front doors of the U.S. Supreme Court (Photo by the author.)
Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider for the second week in a row whether to review a case raising similar drug-sourcing issues in Louisiana. And it will also consider another Missouri execution case raising a similar challenge. Five Justices must vote to issue a stay of execution, but four votes is all it takes to grant certiorari, so last week’s close vote on the Missouri execution might be a signal of hope for the Louisiana case and others like it.
Committee issues strong recommendations on lethal drug sourcing
In its Concluding Observations released last week, the UN Human Rights Committee urges the United States to
“ensure that lethal drugs for executions originate from legal, regulated sources, and are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and that information on the origin and composition of such drugs is made available to individuals scheduled for execution.”
If the Supreme Court grants cert. in the Louisiana case, it will be the first body of the U.S. government to take action consistent with the UN Human Rights Committee’s recommendations issued last week, upholding our country’s human rights treaty obligations. It would be a great start to the long process of working on implementation of the Committee’s recommendations.
Committee issues further recommendations on the death penalty
The Committee also recommends that the United States consider establishing a moratorium on the death penalty at the federal level, and, on the 25th anniversary of the Second Optional Protocol to the Covenant aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, consider acceding to the Protocol.
In summary, the Committee recommends that in addition to establishing a moratorium, acceding to the Protocol, and ensuring that legal drugs come from transparent, regulated sources, the United States:
1. take measures to effectively ensure that the death penalty is not imposed as a result of racial bias;
2. strengthen safeguards against wrongful sentencing to death and subsequent wrongful execution by ensuring inter alia effective legal representation for defendants in death penalty cases, including at the post-conviction stage;
3. ensure that retentionist states provide adequate compensation for the wrongfully convicted; and
4. engage with retentionist states with a view to achieving a nationwide moratorium.
