The Savage States of America
“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of all murders”
Albert Camus
Tuesday night I, with around 300 others, answered Amnesty International’s call to hold a vigil for Troy Davis, outside the US Embassy in London. It seemed inconceivable that the world’s most powerful democracy could execute a man, especially a man whose conviction had appeared to be highly suspect. Yet the inconceivable had happened. Troy Davis was murdered by the State of Georgia on Wednesday night. US County, State and Federal judicial authorities collectively ruled that evil should prevail resulting in a man being lynched. We must soberly learn from these deeply devastating experiences in order to prevent these crimes from ever being repeated again. Lives like those of Mumia Abu Jamal, depend on it. Though Troy was failed by all, we can’t allow this brutal system to continue, the questions are for us now: what can be learned from this and what can we do next?
Arizona’s SB 1070 law: An affront to US Migrant Rights
Source: Chicago May Day Protests Flickr
SB 1070 enables police officers to lawfully stop, detain or arrest a person whom they have “reasonable suspicion” to be unauthorized, in order to determine the person’s immigration status “when practicable”. It also gives citizens’ the power to sue police officers and departments if they believe that they haven’t investigated a “suspect” undocumented worker thoroughly enough. This law is a charter for racial discrimination.
This law has been met with large protests across the USA and Mexico since May 1st. High profile artists and bands such as Kanye West, Shakira and Rage against the Machine have initiated The Sound Strike, a musician’s boycott of performing in Arizona. President Obama now has the prospect of having to challenge a state law whilst promising to reform immigration law at a federal level.
Senegal sees dramatic escalation in homophobic persecution
International pressure on Uganda as the country attempts to pass an anti-homosexuality bill is important, but other nations remain havens of anti-LGBT oppression. Cary Alan Johnson and Ryan Thoreson call for an end to the criminalisation of same-sex relationships that is fuelling homophobia in Senegal and elsewhere.
BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
Authors: Cary Alan Johnson and Ryan Thoreson
The global outcry against Uganda’s ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ could not be more deafening. Opponents of the legislation have condemned the effort not just to put gays in prison, which is already the law in Uganda, but to further criminalise the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, require that suspected gays and lesbians be turned in to authorities, and to punish some individuals – including those who are HIV positive or those euphemistically called ‘repeat offenders’ – with death.
The governments of Canada, France and Sweden have branded the bill wrongheaded. From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Barack Obama himself, the US, a major foreign donor to Uganda, has made its disapproval of the legislation clear. Usually silent religious leaders, from Anglican and Catholic church leadership to Saddleback church’s Rick Warren and other evangelical Christians, have condemned the bill’s promotion of the death penalty, imprisonment for gays and lesbians, and the threat its provisions pose to pastoral confidentiality.
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Pakistan: After the deluge
Cartoon by Satish Acharya (click image for link)
by Vikram Visana
Every crisis presents an opportunity – this has been the Obama administration’s modus operandi. The floods in South Asia have been a rare opportunity for the USA to win the hearts and minds of disillusioned Muslims in Pakistan. Much more than that, it could have sent a message of solidarity and compassion to the wider Muslim world – vindicating President Obama’s idealistic Cairo speech at the beginning of his tenure as leader of the free world. In the UK, a leaked Whitehall paper has recently revealed that the Coalition wants Britain’s overseas aid budget to make “maximum possible contribution” to the UK’s national security. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan features as a state in which aid should focus on peace and state building in an effort to reduce the spread of radical Islam. You could be forgiven, then, for assuming that both governments would have leapt at the chance to come running to Pakistan’s salvation. Yet the US and UK continue to be tentative in their aid efforts. They increased their aid packages to $150 million and £60 million respectively but only after both had been shamed by the size of public contributions. Even these increases seem rather paltry in the face of the sheer scale of the disaster.
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