NYU Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Blog

2015 Fellows

The Changing Face of Tibetan Activism

by

Karanjit Singh
Gu Chu Sum
Dharamsala, India

On the morning of March 10, I woke up feeling uneasy. That day—Tibetan National Uprising Day—commemorates the 1959 uprising by the Tibetan people against Chinese occupation. The reason for my restlessness was probably from learning about the news of yet another self-immolation in Tibet just the day before.

Ever since I began documenting the Tibetan diaspora’s struggle for independence and genuine autonomy, the number of self-immolations has risen steadily, the weight of the situation intensifying itself. My thoughts kept going back to the time I witnessed Jamphel Yeshi self-immolate in protest of Hu Jintao’s visit to New Delhi in March 2012. This event initially motivated me to learn more about the Tibetan issue as well as the agony felt by thousands of Tibetans in exile.

Human rights in Tibet encompass self-determination on one hand, and political repression, cultural assimilation, economic marginalization, and environmental destruction on the other. Moreover, indiscriminate detentions and sentencing, disappearances of religious heads, and forced torture and interrogation of Tibetans who dare to stand up for their rights have left their aspirations crippled. Singing the national anthem or owning the national flag or a photograph of His Holiness the Dalai Lama are reason enough for the Chinese government to sentence one to rigorous imprisonment.

Although the Chinese Constitution provides for freedom of speech, press, assembly, demonstration (Article 35) and religious belief (Article 36), these rights somehow don’t seem to belong to the Tibetans.

Despite the current grim situation in Tibet, remarkable efforts are being made by the Tibetan diaspora all over the world to keep the issue of Tibetan autonomy relevant. The changing face of Tibetan activism, which integrates disciplines like the arts, is charged and ready for the 21st century.

Thus this summer I will be working with Gu Chu Sum in Dharamsala, India. For the past 23 years, this organization has been influential in helping voice the concerns of many suppressed political prisoners in Tibet and has brought international attention to the increasing human rights violations currently taking place in the region. I am seeking to explore how Gu Chu Sum, a grassroots organization and an important part of the Tibetan story, is keeping alive the political aspirations of an exile community.

Since the political prisoners are firsthand witnesses to human rights abuses being carried out by the Chinese Communist Party, their accounts of life in Tibet under the martial-law-like state is an important perspective that needs to be documented. I hope to take portraits and testimonials of the various members of the Gu Chu Sum movement and provide the organization with comprehensive visual documentation of their day-to-day contributions to the Tibetan story, which may be used later by them. I am really excited to have been given this opportunity, and I am confident that my stay with them will be an insightful experience.

Privacy in Modern Times: Challenges to Digital Rights

by

Olivia Martin
Access
Brussels, Belgium

It is the beginning of April. Whew. It still feels surreal that in two short months I will be on my way to Brussels, where I will spend the remainder of my summer break. This monumental change in the course of my life still feels new; every time one of my friends asks, “When are you heading to Brussels again?,” I experience the same joy I felt the moment I heard I had been awarded this fellowship.

Needless to say, I am excited for what is to come: spending 10 weeks in a hub of international politics, working alongside the inspiring European policy team at Access, an NGO focusing on digital rights. Digital rights—a field of much public debate on the part of politicians, activists, and members of civil society—serves to provide language and a framework to address human rights infringements online.

In my roles as a Gallatin student and a digital rights activist, it has become all too clear that many of my peers, as well as me, have become accustomed to life under a constant state of surveillance. Seemingly, our privacy is being infringed upon daily with and without our consent, and images and anecdotes posted online remain there in near-perpetuity, vulnerable to exploitation.

Here, we face a critical analysis of “light of day” human rights infringements, ones that have become so prevalent that their presence and effects have been normalized. Nevertheless, many people cannot afford to sit back and have their data taken from them. Many internet users live under oppressive regimes that will use the information gleaned from unwarranted surveillance to punish those living on the margins of society.

Recent legislation has been enacted to address the issue of privacy infringements, but because it is impossible to pin down a precise definition for the right, these laws can only address the issue in part. The right to privacy is not an absolute one, and the very essence of its temporality and material contingency runs my brain around and around in circles; however, this intellectual and urgent challenge motivates me to continue advocating for a cause that needs youth voices.

I plan to be one of those voices, speaking out in concert for the respect of human rights.

 

Introduction: How Did I Get Here?

by

Benjamin Talarico
Colors Rainbow / Rainbow TV
Yangon, Myanmar

Hello. I am a third-year undergraduate at Gallatin concentrating in the Culture of Neoliberalism. This summer, I will intern at Colors Rainbow, an organization that has been working on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in Yangon, Myanmar, since 2008.  Colors Rainbow focuses mainly on repealing Penal Code 377, an anti-sodomy law instituted by the British. I will work primarily on their publication, Rainbow Magazine, and I will draft and edit reports concerning LGBT rights throughout the country as well.

My desire to understand LGBT rights in Myanmar stems from the extensive time I spent in Southeast Asia during my gap year between high school and college. While there, I became increasingly interested in global economic inequality. While working for an international development NGO in Cambodia, I read a book entitled Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins—a damning account of the World Bank and USAID and their policies towards developing nations. While reading Perkins’s book, I realized that I was embedded in these very systems of inequality at the NGO.

I promptly left.

As I moved about the region, I grew troubled by the tourist gaze—a search for the “authentic” and “traditional”—because I felt that these ways of seeing reproduced colonial tropes of the Other. In response, I became interested in narratives of globalization. What does “globalization” mean to people in the Global South? How do globalizing processes change the way they see themselves? How do workers in the tourist industry perceive themselves in relation to tourists, and how do they perceive the “culture” they are supposedly arbitrating? Because globalization is either demonized (a la Naomi Klein or Vandana Shiva) or valorized (a la Thomas Friedman), I wanted to develop a more nuanced perspective.

After taking Professor Ritty Lukose’s “Globalization: Promises and Discontents,” I refocused my questions. I became interested in global identity-based movements. One question I had was, what political opportunities do globalizing processes present to people involved in these movements?  How do global mechanisms change the way they perceive themselves? Who gets included? Who gets excluded?

These questions led me to Colors Rainbow. I first interned there in the summer of 2013. Myanmar had long interested me; it was a country undergoing a so-called “transition,” and at the time, there was still much optimism about its political trajectory. During the three months I spent in Yangon, I made close friendships with my colleagues and had the privilege of participating in the exciting, dynamic world of LGBT activism.

This summer, I hope to use my strengths as a writer and researcher to contribute to Colors Rainbow and to learn from them what it is to be an activist in today’s Myanmar.

 

The Way Forward for this Human Rights Fellow

by

Edward Shevlin
Pat Finucane Centre
Ireland

This winter was atrocious; the seemingly endless snowstorms filled the life of this graduate student/sanitation worker with stress and caused a veritable backlog of assignments. Just as light began to appear at the end of the tunnel, the painful stabs of sciatica began in my leg as wedding bells tolled for my darling and me.

Some background would be helpful at this point: during the fall semester of 2014 I became aware of a fabulous opportunity offered by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Gallatin was accepting applications for their 2015 Global Human Rights Fellowship from all of the schools under the umbrella of New York University. As I pondered the fellowship criteria, I realized that there was human rights work to be done in the north of Ireland. For too many years, the trampling of human rights has been a matter of policy for the British government in the region. While the McBride Principles and the Good Friday Agreement greatly alleviated the suffering of many victims of human rights abuses, a look back reveals that in many cases the victims were left unacknowledged and uncompensated by the government, which had been at the very least disingenuous about its intentions going forward.

The Human Rights Fellowship required that I find a human rights organization that was willing to take me on. Since I wanted to serve my fellowship in the north of Ireland, I contacted the Pat Finucane Centre with my proposition. After exchanging emails over the next couple of weeks, the staff there agreed to accept me as a human rights research intern.

I am incredibly grateful for the honor to be confirmed as a 2015 Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow. This year finds me receiving many honors, among them being my recent marriage to my darling Mary Ellen on 21 March 2015. This fellowship has also caused me to hasten towards a life in academia and away from my 22-year career as a NYC Sanitation Worker, from which I am filing for retirement by the end of April. As I continue preparations for my work in the north of Ireland this summer, let us hope that I have left all of the obstacles behind me.

 

Protest in Egypt

by

Nadeen Shaker
Egypt

This summer, I will spend time in Egypt studying the legality of protest within a constitutional and legal/administrative framework.

On November 24, 2013, Egyptian interim president Adly Mansour issued anti-protest law 107/13, which restricted gatherings and protests formed without prior police permission. This draconian law has been in place ever since. As a result, hundreds have been arrested and deemed prisoners of conscience.

Data on arrests in Egypt is not readily available or fully confirmable, but activist groups in Egypt have tallied an estimated population of over 40,000 in Egypt’s prisons since the time of former president Mohammed Morsi’s ouster in June 2013 and the current administration. Though protestors have been detained on various counts, including accusations of inciting political, terrorist, and sectarian strife, they have been detained mainly on charges of protesting. The high turnover of trials has seen some prominent activists tried, acquitted, and re-tried. Two major trials have taken place since the issuing of the anti-protest law, each relegating the fates of activists to prison terms of at least two years and to sentences as high as five years.

Anti-protest legislation is not new to Egypt. The first, under which policemen were given the discretion to judge whether a protest or assembly should be dispersed, dates back to 1914, promulgated under British rule four months into World War I. Then followed the Public Assembly Act No. 14 of 1923, which prevented protest without prior notice. And then came the Egyptian Penal Code, which has provisions on unlawful assembly, too. The latest—Law 107/2013—is a well placed reinforcement, coming right after Egypt’s repeated battles with internal conflicts and insurgencies in 2011.

And how does the Egyptian Constitution address the right to protest? It states that it is granted, “as regulated by the law,” which references the anti-protest law and other legislations. Or not. This is one of many such legal doldrums that lawyers currently challenging the constitutionality of the anti-protest law come up against.

If it is interpreted that the right to gather is granted by the constitution, this creates huge tension between constitutional rights and legal and administrative laws such as the anti-protest law. There is even more tension in the case of military tribunals: the military is granted constitutional rights (such as Article 204, which established military tribunals to adjudicate cases in which civilians lead assaults against “military facilities or camps of the Armed Forces” or directly assault “officers or personnel of the Armed Forces”), yet the tribunals involve a battery of administrative policies that are unconstitutional. The coexistence of such tensions speaks to an inherent legal puzzle within which the anti-protest law is buried.

 

Black History in the Atlantic World

by

Ayanna Legros
DRECCA (Fundacíon para el Desarrollo y Reivindicacíon Etno-cultural de las Comunidades Afrodescendientes)
Cali, Colombia

Greetings! I am a master’s candidate in Africana Studies, and this summer I will intern at DRECCA, an organization in Colombia that works to promote the vindication and development of the human rights of Afro-Colombians. I will work in their education department, promoting public policy initiatives against racial discrimination.

My desire to understand black history in the Atlantic World came to fruition during a freshman-year course entitled “Black Politics in Latin America,” but my love for Latin America and the Caribbean started in Harlem, New York. Rarely did a day go by in my home without my Haitian parents giving me a brief history lesson on Haiti.

The “Black Politics in Latin America” course awakened to me the significance of Haiti’s independence in 1804. This event not only caused Haiti to be the birthplace of black citizenship and autonomy, but also represented the struggle to define one’s human right to be free from enslavement, rape, torture, and a plethora of other abuses. It made me yearn to understand the historical significance of independence movements in the Americas at large, and the ways in which Africans and Afro-descended people came to define their space, rights, and citizenship in the New World.

Many Latin American countries attempted to “whiten” their populations by encouraging European migration during the post-independence period. Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia—to name a few—attempted to use “whitening” as a solution to the “problem” of blackness. For example, João Batista de Lacerda, director of Brazil’s National Museum, endorsed “constructive miscegenation” and was one of the first members of the scientific community to do so. In 1912, he calculated that Brazil’s black population would be reduced to zero by 2012 and that mulattoes would make up merely three percent of the total population.[1]

Luckily, Afro-Colombians have been able to survive and prosper despite such efforts, and today they have a strong presence in the Colombian cities of Medellín, Cali, Bogotá, Cartagena, and Barranquilla. However, they have suffered innumerable human rights abuses, starting from their departure from the slave docks in the African continent. Activist groups such as DRECCA are lobbying to demand the recognition of Afro-descended people in Colombia and in the Americas at large on political, social, and economic levels.

As Afro-descended Latin Americans continue to struggle for recognition within their homelands and throughout the diaspora, they need to be recognized during black history month as well. During black history month this year in New York City, I was elated to see a surge in programming surrounding Afro-Latino history. I was also pleasantly surprised to see on Facebook that DRECCA staff members were involved in black history month programs in Colombia.

I look forward to working with DRECCA this summer, as I am confident that it will be a fruitful experience for me personally and professionally.

[1]For more information regarding miscegenation and “whitening” movements in Brazil, refer to Kim D. Butler’s Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won (see in particular Chapter 1: “Order and Progress”).