UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Condemns migrant detention in Europe

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein

GENEVA- The UN's human rights chief voiced alarm Monday at the increasing detention of migrants in Europe, including unaccompanied children, amid widespread anti-migrant rhetoric across the continent.
As Europe faces its biggest migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II, UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said he had sent staff members to assess areas along the main migration routes in the central Mediterranean and Balkans.
'They have observed a worrying increase in detention of migrants in Europe, including in the hotspots, (which are) essentially vast mandatory confinement areas which have been set up in Greece and Italy,' he told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council's second annual session.
'Even unaccompanied children are frequently placed in prison cells or centers ringed with barbed-wire,' he said, insisting 'detention is never in the best interests of the child.'
Zeid urged the EU to collect data on migrant detentions by member states, warning that 'the figures would, I fear, be very shocking.'
More than one million people made the journey to Europe in 2015, the majority fleeing war in Syria and the Middle East, and a further 208,000 have come since January, according to UN figures.
More than 2,850 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean so far this year.
Faced with the influx, the UN rights chief warned that many countries were showing 'a strong trend that overturns international commitments, refuses basic humanity, and slams doors in the face of human beings in need.'
He pointed out that EU countries so far have managed to relocate fewer than one percent of the 160,000 people they have committed to taking from overwhelmed Greece and Italy.
He urged European countries to 'find a way to address the current migration crisis consistently and in a manner that respects the rights of the people concerned,' and to 'remove hysteria and panic from the equation.'
This, he said, was particularly important in the context of a deal between the European Union (EU) and Turkey in March, under which migrants not entitled to asylum are to be deported from Greece back across the Aegean.
Zeid also decried 'the widespread anti-migrant rhetoric that we have heard, spanning the length and breadth of the European continent.'
'This fosters a climate of divisiveness, xenophobia and even, as in Bulgaria, vigilante violence,' he said.
Before they reach Europe, many migrants are meanwhile suffering horrible human rights abuses in chaos-wracked Libya, the UN rights warned.
He decried 'disturbing reports of many migrants in Libya being subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention, attacks and unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, sexual violence and abduction for ransom.'
UN staff visiting a migrant detention center in the country found 'dozens of people crammed into storage rooms without space to lie down.'
He urged EU countries attempting to cooperate with Libya on migration and border management to only do so 'in full respect for the human rights of the people involved.'

Iranian mullahs’ Fear of General Uprising

Source: American Thinker, May 18, 2016

Reports from inside Iran indicate a mounting economic crisis, despite a windfall of billions pouring into Iran following the nuclear deal sealed with the P5+1 following negotiations in which the international community bent over backwards in the mullahs’ favor.
After waves of spurious promises, which ultimately failed to provide or allow the people to reap any form of benefit from this deal, the government of Hassan Rouhani -- with a faux pas catchphrase of “moderation” -- is engulfed in a series of major calamities, with fears simmering among the leadership of growing dissent that can only possibly be construed as the roots of general uprisings in the making across the country.

Dismal Report Card for Rouhani

During the past few years, Iran’s economy has experienced skyrocketing inflation rates, which according to a parliamentary report is running alongside an unemployment tsunami. Politicians are pressuring the banks to decrease profit rates (to numbers lower than inflation rates). Moreover, the banks have taken their own action to safeguard resources, by investing in financial markets of real estate and production lines.
Various governments in Iran, especially that of Rouhani, have throughout the years issued specific instructions to the country’s banks, aimed at decreasing their profits. As this trend continued, the banks gradually failed to live up to their duties as financial mediators and liquidity directors.

The Liquidity Plight

The main problem – as was the case internationally in the 2008 slump -- in this regard is lack of liquidity. Liquidity is running at 20% in Iran, and has plagued the economy for many years now. On the other hand, the true portion of Iran’s economy is suffering from liquidity shortage. Despite the fact that Iran’s economy is based on banks, it appears the issue of diverting liquidity and its quantity have raised startling concerns.
“The main reason behind liquidity shortage lies in unpaid bank loans, and the government -- as the main party in debt to banks -- must take action on this matter,” said Mohammad Mehdi Reiszadeh, an advisor in Iran’s Chamber of Commerce.

The Banking Scapegoat

Whenever governments face any type of shortages, they focus pressure on the banking system and the country’s central bank. The remaining unpaid bank loans belong largely to the regime’s senior elite, with a list of 30 individuals said to be controlling a large portion of such unpaid bank loans. If this money was actually recoverable, the banking system would have been able to provide investment for production units. There is no such thing occurring in Iran today.

Doomed Policies

Media outlets associated with the camp of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and Rouhani, are pointing fingers at the government of firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for squandering oil revenues -- made available to him through years of oil prices in the range of $100+ a barrel -- in the housing and construction industry.
With this industry facing major problems, it had its toll on Iran’s now parched economy, as more than 200 to 300 industries linked to road and construction now face major rollbacks, with the entire economy threatened by recession. A collapse of the real estate industry that provided profits for the banks resulted in an effective lockup of bank funds.
Such counterproductive plundering adopted by the mullahs’ regime have spiked anger amongst the people, surfacing especially among the youth. Mardom-Salari, a newspaper affiliated to the Rafsanjani-Rouhani camp, has conveyed a similar message over the breadth of escalating public unrest.
“… two issues that can enormously destroy the Rouhani government, and may even deliver a significant defeat in the 2017 presidential elections, is the continuing state of economic recession, and no improvements in the lower class’ daily living conditions… the economic recession, developing from 2014 onward to this day, has yet to provide room for any positive signs.”
In fact, indications show that in the present fiscal climate, an effective recession will continue into 2016 and early 2017.
Another challenge for Rouhani’s government will is the lower class’ lack of participation in politics and support for government policies, especially in Tehran and other large cities. This should ring alarm bells for Rouhani’s government.
Iran is a country where a significant percentage of the economy is all but monopolized by the Revolutionary Guards, a military force running parallel to the regular army, while in other sectors of the country, desperate people are resorting to “street-vendoring” to make ends meet, and families have become so poor they are literally renting out their children for $5 a day, or even selling them for less than $700.
As long as the regime in Iran is established on the central tenets of domestic crackdown, plundering the people’s wealth, and exporting terrorism and fundamentalism across the globe, the ruling mullahs in Tehran and their military/security top brass will continue to rule in a state of paranoia, forever terrified at the possibility of nationwide uprisings brewing under the ashes of a failing economy in a nation where the seeds of revolt are fast beginning to materialize after years of violent repression. With the mullah’s grip beginning to loosen, galvanized dissent within Iran is becoming a force to be reckoned with.

How the world must respond to Syria crisis

                              Shame to The calamity of  The entire world

This is an article by Frida Ghitis, a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, and a former CNN producer and correspondent. 

The image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying facedown on a beach, dead, after his family sought to escape the horrors of their country’s civil war, has touched the world. But compassion without action is pointless.
Thousands of refugees are battling European governments. Today, it’s Hungary. Last month, it was Macedonia. Desperate people are paying thousands of dollars to traffickers to take them to safety; scores have died of asphyxia after being locked in trucks that failed to reach their destination; thousands have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
We are living in the worst refugee crisis since World War II, and yet the truth is that world leaders have failed to manage the crisis. They will, of course, answer to history. But in the meantime, the situation will only become worse without drastic action: More will die, more refugees will arrive unwanted, more countries will become destabilized and, if this goes on much longer, we will have a generation of Syrians who have grown up in the kind of conditions that perpetuate conflict.
It is too late to prevent the current crisis, but there is plenty we can try to do moving forward to try to ease it.
What exactly?
For a start, world leaders should convene a top-level emergency gathering to focus on the key aspects of this crisis. The conference should be called by a group of countries, including Germany with strong backing from the United States, and should include the European Union , the United Nations and other world powers, Syria’s neighbors, and also Russia and China. The objective should be threefold: to stop the killing, to help the refugees and to bring an end to the war.
Arab nations must play a major role in addressing the Syrian crisis. We are all responsible. But the people of Syria are their neighbors, their brethren. The conflict is in their midst, its impact close to home. To be sure, the neighborhood has not completely failed Syrian refugees. The overwhelming majority of those who have fled Syria -- millions of them -- are now living in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and Arab states have helped finance those costs. But more is needed.
Once convened, this international conference should work to develop a comprehensive international plan to help refugees, one that involves a much greater role for Arab and other Muslim states. Indeed, wealthy Gulf states should be encouraged to not just make an outsize financial contribution, but countries like the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia should be pressed to welcome refugees.
Of course, Europe and the United States should also receive more from among the millions of desperate Syrian refugees fleeing conflict. But so should thriving Muslim states such as Malaysia, Indonesia and of course Iran, whose support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad means it has additional moral responsibility for what is happening. (And speaking of Asia, this could be an opportunity for a country like Japan, with its demographic crisis, to boost its population, or at least do its part to share the burden of this major humanitarian emergency.)
But giving refuge to those who are fleeing the horrors of conflict is not enough -- the crisis also needs to be tackled at its source. So, to at least try to slow the killing, it is time to give serious consideration to the establishment of safe zones inside Syria, a proposal that is actually more complicated than it might sound.
For example, when Turkey proposed such an approach, some feared that it secretly planned to expel Syrian refugees from Turkish territory and send them back inside Syria to any safe zones. If the system is to work, these zones must come with an ironclad vow from countries hosting refugees not to force anyone to return to Syria before the war is over.
Safe zones will, of course, require a military commitment to be effective, perhaps from the United States, NATO and other allies, to guarantee the 'safe' in 'safe zones.' They will therefore need to become no-fly zones, with air patrols and anti-aircraft support on the ground. The betrayal of so-called safe areas in Bosnia’s Srebrenica must never be allowed to happen again.
Above all, though, it is imperative to bring an end to the war, to defeat ISIS and -- just as crucially, although this point now often gets overlooked -- to bring an end to the regime of al-Assad, whose rejection of peaceful demands for democratic reform laid the groundwork for this epic human displacement and for the upsurge in extremism.
And epic this displacement has truly been -- more than 320,000 people have been killed in the war, according to one monitoring group, and there is no end in sight. Before the war started in 2011, about 23 million people lived in Syria. Fully half of them have been displaced. Some 7.5 million are internally displaced. More than 4 million are registered with the United Nations, and many of those fleeing have not been. It is estimated that there are almost 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, at least 600,000 in Jordan and perhaps 1.1 million in Lebanon, where they now make up nearly a quarter of the total population.
Such an enormous movement of people is further destabilizing an already unsettled region, and bringing with it a level of disruption that could very well sow the seeds for another generation of conflict and extremism.
The West’s initial approach, which effectively viewed the Syrian civil war as 'their problem,' has merely underscored how in reality there is no way to contain such conflicts within national boundaries -- this war has spawned ISIS, its videotaped beheadings and sanctioned sexual slavery, scattering its poisonous extremist ideology far and wide. And while an international gathering cannot undo the devastation that has been wrought, it can still be a positive first step toward winding down this conflict.
This is the moral and strategic challenge of our time. So far, the world has failed. But if its leaders can begin to publicly and materially empower those who stand for a pluralistic, tolerant and democratic Syria -- one that will eventually welcome back the millions of citizens who have fled -- then we might be able to turn the compassion we have seen in recent days into a more hopeful legacy for the country and its people.

Planting the seeds of hope

By   Iran reporter

June 1sth 2015

As Mullahs’ regime in utter 

weakness is driving the region towards unprecedented crisis.

As the oppression, torture, hanging, medieval dooms are implemented across the country, despite the claims of moderation by Rohani cabinet,

As the officials of this regime plunder all Iranian assets, and the situation of the people life has deteriorated,

A huge gathering of Iranians in resistance meeting in Paris gives a response and plants the seeds of hope in Iran and entire region. A response to all cries that seeks freedom and rescue,

• a great gathering in Paris, thousands of Iranians, while being supported by a number of prominent European and American dignitaries, reminded that a major development is on the way in Iran and a democratic change, as a solution to avoid an unprecedented regional and international crisis, is at hand.

the President of the Maryam Rajavi , President-elect of the Iranian Resistance will symbolize millions of oppressed Iranians who seek for liberty and democracy in Iran more than Four decades but the International community has ignored them unfortunately!.

In this assembling Iran rises with all his great stature to say: I resist against tyrannical fundamental regime of fascist mullahs.

So, it is a national and international obligation for all compatriots and all who respect human values  to participate in this action and announce his presence!