Tag: Pakistan

The Worldwide Traffic in Human Beings

The U.S. State Department recently released the first of a series of annual reports on the worldwide trafficking of human beings. According to the “Trafficking in Persons Report,” about 700,000 people — mostly women and children — are pressed into this modern form of slavery every year.

The report grades countries around the world based on their compliance with international treaties designed to prevent such trafficking. The report divides countries into three tiers, with Tier 3 being countries whose legal systems do not comply and are not making significant progress to achieving compliance. The list of Tier 3 countries includes Albania, Bahrain, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Greece, Indonesia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sudan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Several of the countries on that list, of course, are close allies of the United States.

The victims of such trafficking end up working as cheap labor in construction sites or clothing factories, while many of the women involved in the trade are forced into prostitution. At a press conference announcing the release of the report, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the ongoing trafficking in human beings an “abomination against humanity.”

Source:

US decries ‘modern-day slavery’. The BBC, July 12, 2001.

Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report. The United States Department of State, 2001.

China Leads World in Imprisoning Journalists

A new report by the Committe to Protect Journalists says that China leads the world in imprisoning journalists. China accounted for 22 of the 87 journalists imprisoned worldwide.

The CPJ report noted that China seems to have hardened its stance against journalists over the past couple years, likely in response to the chaos created by rapid Internet adoption.

In previous years, the Chinese government made concessions to international public opinion by carefully stage-managing the release of prominent dissidents, including journalists, at critical moments. Authorities took a harder line in 2000, when not a single journalist was released.

Other countries which had jailed journalists as of December 2000 were,

Country

Imprisoned
Journalists
Algeria
2
Burma
8
Central African Republic
1
China
22
Comoros
1
Cuba
3
Democratic Republic of Congo
4
Egypt
1
Ethiopia
7
Iran
6
Kuwait
2
Nepal
1
Niger
1
Syria
1
Tunisia
2
Turkey
14
Uzbekistan
3
Vietnam
2

The number of imprisoned journalists has fallen dramatically since 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned, but these numbers do underestimate the problem since they only count journalists who were still in prison at the end of 2000. A much larger number of journalists were imprisoned for at least part of 2000 but released before the end of the year.

Of course arrest isn’t the only way of intimidating journalists. Last year 24 journalists were killed around the world either in the act of reporting on a story or in retaliation because of their reporting or affiliation with a news organization. The murder of journalists breaks down like this,

Country

Journalists
Killed

Bangladesh
 2
Brazil
 1
Colombia
 3
Guatemala
 1
Haiti
 1
India
 1
Mozambique
 1
Pakistan
 1
Philippines
 2
Russia
 3
Sierra Leone
 3
Somalia
 1
Spain
 1
Sri Lanka
 1
Ukraine
 1
Uruguay
 1

Additionally another 20 journalists were murdered worldwide, but the motive for those murders remains unclear.

Source:

Attack on the Press in 2000. Committee to Protect Journalists, 2000.

China: ‘Leading jailer’ of journalists. The BBC, March 19, 2001.

Stop Honor Killings

The other day I was reading a book by an academic feminist who argued, among other things, that the idea that there is a universal code of morality (i.e. there are just things that are plain wrong) is a white imperialist idea. Maybe, but I still have to say that honor killings are wrong and the relativists be damned.

What’s an honor killing? An honor killing is where a man kills a female relative if he suspects she’s committed a sexual transgression, and in some cultures such violence is not only ignored but actually sanctioned by the legal code.

In Jordan, for example, two women were recently murdered in honor killings. In one case a father killed his adult daughter after she was released from jail after serving time for a sexual relationship her step brother. In the second case, a woman accused of having extramarital sex was murdered by her brothers. Of course both men and women kill each other in the United States and other parts of the world over sexual infidelity, but here’s the kicker — in Jordan the penal code specifically exempts a man from punishment if he kills a female relative to atone for her sexual transgressions.

According to the BBC (Jordanian women killed ‘for honour’), in Jordan about 25 women a year are murdered this way, and their murderers are protected by law from prosecution. That’s a rather large figure in a country of less than 5 million people.

A small group of reformers tried to get the Jordanian parliament to overturn the law protecting honor killings but failed. A protest against the law drew only a few thousand people.

And Jordan isn’t alone in having a problem with honor killings. A report released by Amnesty International last September claimed that hundreds of honor killings take place in Pakistan every year. Although honor killing is murder under Pakistan’s penal code, juries tend to acquit men who kill their female relatives for reasons of honor and judges tend to give light sentences for those men who say they killed to preserve their family’s honor.

Maybe it’s just the Western imperialist in me, but honor killing is downright barbaric and should be outlawed everywhere in the world.