"Haiti Study Tour 2012” Led by Dr. Marciana Popescu, Graduate School of Social Services (GSSS) and Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York

In Collaboration with NYIHA MEDIA and Social Tap / The Haiti Initiative invite you to:

Film Screening: A Work-In-Process: Human Rights in Haiti

Tuesday January 31, 2012 6:00-8:00

Fordham University, Lincoln Center
South Lounge, 113 West 60th St., New York, NY, 10023

Please Bring Valid I.D. to Sign in at

Security Front Desk

Questions contact Priscilla Dyer via Email: dyer@fordham.edu

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture, called on Bahraini authorities to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and the safety of demonstrators, including that of human rights defenders, following the repression by security forces yesterday of a peaceful demonstration to call for the release of political prisoners.

In the evening of January 6, 2012, Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR, focal point of Social Watch) and Deputy Secretary General of FIDH, was beaten severely by the security forces in Manama while he was participating in a peaceful demonstration to call for the release of political prisoners and human rights activists.

Photo: Prezzensa

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization Against Torture, called on Bahraini authorities to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and the safety of demonstrators, including that of human rights defenders, following the repression by security forces yesterday of a peaceful demonstration to call for the release of political prisoners.

In the evening of January 6, 2012, Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR, focal point of Social Watch) and Deputy Secretary General of FIDH, was beaten severely by the security forces in Manama while he was participating in a peaceful demonstration to call for the release of political prisoners and human rights activists.

According to testimonies, policemen attacked the demonstrators and a group of police officers gathered suddenly around Rajab and started beating him. He was kicked, punched and beaten all over his body and especially on the face and back, while lying on the ground.

Rajab was then taken to Salmaniyya hospital. Several security officers surrounded Rajab’s room until he left the hospital. According to a doctor of Salmaniyya hospital, Nabeel Rajab is suffering from concussion, back pain and bruises to his back and face. At the hospital, Rajab was interrogated by security officers about the attack. His lawyer was prevented from seeing him. Rajab left the hospital in the night of the same day, after receiving treatment.
During the same attack, Sayed Yousif Al-Mahafdha, a member of BCHR, was also injured with a stun grenade in his leg and arm. In addition, demonstrators who had gathered in solidarity outside Rajab’s house were attacked with tear gas.
The Observatory strongly condemns the above-mentioned acts of violence against Messrs. Nabeel Rajab and Sayed Yousif Al-Mahafdha, which appear to have specifically targeted them, sanctioning Messrs. Rajab and Al-Mahafdha for their human rights activities and preventing them from carrying out such activities. The Observatory recalls that Rajab and other human rights defenders are facing an increasingly hostile environment that includes acts of harassment and intimidation.

The Observatory calls upon the authorities of the Kingdom of Bahrain to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, to guarantee in all circumstances the physical and psychological integrity of Messrs. Nabeel Rajab and Yousif Al-Mahafdha and all human rights defenders in Bahrain and to order an immediate, effective, thorough and impartial investigation into the above-mentioned events. Ultimately, the Observatory considers that ensuring that human rights defenders can operate without fear of harassment and attacks and ensuring accountability for any such attacks will be vital in preventing any further escalation of the situation.
Furthermore, the Observatory recalls that several human rights defenders remain in arbitrary detention or subjected to judicial harassment and calls for the release of all human rights defenders arbitrarily detained and the end of judicial harassment, in line with the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights instruments ratified by Bahrain.

OAXACA, MEXICO -- Just before Christmas, the women and children who'd spent 17 months living on the sidewalk outside the governor's palace in Oaxaca announced they were going home. In the spring of 2010, these refugees abandoned their homes in San Juan Copala, the ceremonial center of the Triqui people. Many houses were burned after they left.

Stringing tarps and ropes across the palacio's outdoor colonnade, they set up their planton, an impromptu community of sleeping and cooking areas across the sidewalk from the zocalo, the plaza at Oaxaca's heart. It looked hauntingly similar to the settlements of the Occupy protesters that spread across the United States last fall, but rather than fighting to remain in their tents, the Triqui families in the planton were fighting for the right not to live there, for the right to go home.

Finally, this December, they announced an agreement with representatives of Gabino Cue, elected governor last July, who promised to protect the families if they returned to San Juan Copala. Still, many question whether they can really go back safely.  Even more importantly, they ask what can bring an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of at least 500 people over the last two decades.

This question is not just debated on the sidewalk by the zocalo, or only in Oaxaca.  It is asked, albeit in whispers, by migrant farm workers in Baja California and Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, and in Hollister and Greenfield, in California's Salinas Valley.

Photo: David Bacon

Indigenous Triqui children march through the streets of Oaxaca on December 19, 2011, to protest a wave of killings in their home community of San Juan Copala.

Mixtecos have been leaving Oaxaca for decades, driven mostly by the endemic poverty of the Mexican countryside, says Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a Mixteco professor at UCLA and past coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Yet for many years the Triquis, who were equally poor and live in the same region, stayed put. Their migration only began when the violence in their communities made life unbearable.

Once displaced, they began to migrate within the Mixteca region, then within Oaxaca, and then within Mexico. They traveled north, following other Oaxacans to San Quintin in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, to California.

Triqui migrants might have escaped the violence, but not the political presence of the groups they were fleeing. Wherever they went, the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle (MULT) and the Social Welfare Group of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) sent agents, requiring people to pay monetary quotas and participate in mobilizations.

In the 1980s, Triqui activists organized MULT. "It was a grassroots organization to fight the caciques (rural political bosses) over control of land, forests and other natural resources," says Rivera Salgado. "The caciques were so violent that MULT members had to arm themselves. Eventually, those armed men became a paramilitary group. The caciques were overcome, but what began as a grassroots organization became something different. There was no transition to a civil society form of organization."

Photo: David Bacon