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February 26th, 2020

26/2/2020

 
'It began with an interview with a woman called Rashida'.
Through the eyes of a documentary maker and photographer

The Journey Rohingya women by Shafiur Rahman
NB: Shafiur's work will be exhibited in The Glass Tank during the Festival


I had no intention to document the Rohingya crisis. It all happened unexpectedly - without plans and without finance!  I was in Cox’s Bazar in December of 2016 on a project unrelated to the Rohingya. I happened to be there on the 16th of December a national holiday in Bangladesh. The day is a remembrance of when, forty five years earlier, the painful liberation war of 1971 had ended. A genocide had unfolded the previous 9 months and finally the nightmare had come to an end for the Bangladeshis.  Today, that day is known as “Victory Day”. I had nothing to do on that particular day, and so I decided to take a drive to see “what the fuss was about” with the Rohingya pouring in from Myanmar.

​What I saw and what I heard deeply unsettled me.

Though I was born in Bangladesh,  I live in Europe. I am familiar with the haunting  TV news imagery of Syrian and other refugees, walking hundreds of miles, with their children in tow, along bleak roads and across  borders of barbed-wire. I had been to The Jungle in Calais. I had myself filmed desperate refugees in Libyan prisons, and in Italian and Maltese detention camps. And yet in December of 2016, in the cold of Bangladesh’s winter, I was completely unprepared for what I saw and I was overwhelmed.

Naturally, as a documentary maker, I wanted to bear witness. The next month, in January 2017,  I travelled to the camps again. And I have done so over two dozen times in the last 36 months! The January trip was even more shattering and transformative.

It began with an interview with a woman called Rashida. We were outside her hut of plastic sheeting and bamboo poles. It was a painful interview and in it she described the slaughter of her 12 year old daughter.  She recounted how the body of the dead child had to be retrieved secretly at night and then buried quietly. Her eye was still black where one soldier had hit her. She looked distraught. Inside her hut, I met adolescent and young women who had all survived massacres and had been raped. They spoke to me on camera and they insisted they would speak without the veil.

From this group of women, I started to document the lives of  six of them over a period of six months. And indeed I have remained connected with them over the last three years. During this time, all manner of personal disasters unfolded for these young women. One was trafficked. One was raped. One got married to an abusive husband.  What was clear was that Bangladesh was a refuge only in name. For young refugee women, the camps are unsafe. I vividly remember the moment I asked some of them what they would like me to buy for them as a little token of thanks. I couldn’t believe the answer. They wanted a burqa. Without the burqa even going to the toilet was difficult for them.

I was beginning to despair about finding anything redemptive in my entire experience. I was beginning to think that these women will never get over the deaths of their loved ones and/or their own personal trauma. There was no therapy for them. No family support - because they were all dead.  Nothing. Yet over time they showed a resilience and energy that surprised me. For the mothers in the group, I could see that the endurance and the will to survive perhaps came from their love for their children. For the unmarried young women, I can only conjecture that it came from healing together and helped in some small way by a  sewing collective which promoted togetherness and gave them some hope.

Testimony Tailors
When people started to learn about their suffering, they wanted to help. A sewing machine was purchased and delivered to one of the women and then another, and then several more. In time 80 women had sewing machines and they taught each other how to use them and started to make some clothes.
Their sewing provided income which gained them some amount of control over their lives. One young woman who was under pressure to marry someone not of her choosing was able to say no because she had become the breadwinner of the family.

Now something truly inspirational for anyone to witness is how these women are finding hope through creating clothes together. That these women could ever smile again after what they have lived through is difficult to believe but see for yourself.
web site: www.srdocs.net
Instagram: www.instagram.com/shafiur
Twitter: www.twitter.com/shafiur
Testimony Tailors: testimonytailors.com
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February 19th, 2020

19/2/2020

 
In Conversation with a Youth Resilience Builder by Geena Whiteman 

The Oxford Human Rights Festival is about celebrating culture, encouraging debates and discussions and highlighting the work of activists, organisations and individuals across the world in building resilience. The OxHRF has been fortunate enough to conduct interviews with young pioneers across the world, heading up their own organisations and initiatives to make positive change, boost resilience and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Over the next few days we will be posting stories of young activists, the work that they do and what resilience means to them. If you want to check out the work that their organisations do, we have attached their websites for your further information.

Name: Michael Afolami
Age: 27
Location: Nigeria
Organization: Peace Actor Network
www.peaceactornet.org


What challenges is your organization aiming to combat, and is this a local, national or international initiative?

We are working to create an atmosphere of lasting peace in communities, where human potential can flourish. Our work at Peace Actor Network is based on the idea that humans and their actions and activities produce resultant effects in their immediate environments. Our organization is aiming to fix attitudes that fan the embers of conflict. Recently, our organization had gathered that a community that was in a ceasefire with its warring neighboring community might resuscitate the buried disagreement. As our usual practice, we identified the kingpin of the threatening party and interviewed him. Through the interview, we established a relationship with him and built his trust in us, such that he confided in us what their intentions were, and we were able to stop the looming catastrophe. To us, what we do is making communities less fragile and strong enough to prevent the outbreak of conflict. At the national and international levels, the peculiarity and somewhat objective common characteristic of fragile states is that they are prone to conflict. This is exactly the challenge we are aiming to solve: making communities less prone to conflict. At the moment, we only have a local reach with strong vision to enlarge our network of peacebuilders throughout the nation and even beyond in a time not too long.

What does resilience mean to you, and how does your organization build the resilience of those you work with?

At our organization, we perceive conflict as the greatest threat to humanity, and that is what we are fighting against. We do not necessarily need to wait for it before we act. Instead, we take preemptive measures to stop conflict in all dimensions while also building capacity of the people to deal with it – I mean, minimize its scope and impacts – in the event that it occurs. This is what resilience means to us. In light of this, we are leveraging peace education, capacity building and community development to create a community of people that are conscious enough to shun attitudes that lead to conflict.

Which of the 17 SDGs do you think is most important for building resilience around the world, and why?
Peace, justice and strong institution. First thing to note is that a peaceful atmosphere is a prerequisite for building resilience that is sustainable. This implies that you cannot build resilience in conflict, and this is the truth: that resilience is the capacity of a people to avert conflict, violence and disaster, and their ability to manage one in its eventuality. Rather than entirely viewing peace in this regard as the absence of violence, it is important to look at peace in its positive state. Here, peace is assumed to be shaped by attitudes, institutions and structures. These attitudes, institutions and structures are embedded in a number of goals that describe, among others, the level of a community’s resilience. For instance, the political culture of a state; its levels of corruption and human capital; equity in health, education and other infrastructure; flow of information; and the acceptance of the right of others, all determine whether a state is prone to conflict, or whether it can handle one when it occurs. Justice would mean the respect for the rule of law, human rights and dignity, and these are the major drivers of resilience of a people. Judicial independence, balanced democracy, are some institutions and systems that reinforce justice. Effective governance is necessary to increase the levels of human capital, enhance free flow of information and enforce less corrupt systems across governance, media, and lifestyle. In a nutshell, building resilience depends on the people's level of right, positive attitude, and availability of strong institutions in countries and communities. 
www.peaceactornet.org


February 15th, 2020

15/2/2020

 

People & Planet guest blog
'How can you uphold the human rights of others whilst studying?'

This blog has been written by People and Planet based at The Old Music Hall, 106-108 Cowley Rd, Cowley, Oxford OX4 1JE.  The views and suggestions in this blog are the authors.

It’s a big question, one that may not have crossed your mind before – but if you’re a student at a UK university then you are uniquely placed to influence the lives of others around the world. Enter People & Planet, the UK’s largest student network campaigning on world poverty and the environment. Our campaigns are specifically tailored to the university setting, maximising the impact that students can have by encouraging them to leverage their position of privilege within the higher education sector. Our demands are achievable, have a long term impact, are built on the principle of solidarity, and are democratically chosen by our student network.

People & Planet run four campaigns on campuses in the UK, two of which are focussed on climate justice, and the other two focussed on workers rights and migrant rights. Whilst all our campaigns are intrinsically linked, this Blog will focus on the two campaigns most directly working towards protecting Human Rights in the UK and further afield.

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Sweatshop Free
Sweatshop Free is our campaign focused on challenging corporate power: previously this focused on the garment industry but recently moved to incorporate electronics factories into it’s remit, after it became obvious that UK universities were complicit in the use of sweatshops to produce their tech products. The UK Modern Slavery Act (2015) seeks to address slavery, forced labour and human trafficking taking place today. On 29 October 2015, the transparency in supply chains provisions of the Act (section 54) came into force. The provisions require commercial and public interest organisations, including universities, to publish a statement setting out steps the organisation has taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in any of its supply chains and in any part of its own business, often referred to as an “anti-slavery statement”.

According to the International Labour Organization around 25 million men, women and children around the world are in a form of forced labour. Globally, there are 5.4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 people, and 1 in 4 victims of modern slavery are children. In recent years, there have been a number of troubling revelations relating to labour and human rights abuses within electronics factories, such as the Foxconn Suicides and Samsung union-busting. The global electronics industry has been identified as a high-risk industry for modern slavery.

So what are universities and colleges doing to tackle this issue? As huge purchasers of electronics, spending over £10 billion on products every year, the potential for our educational institutions to influence the electronics sector for the better is clear to see. Much of this money goes to companies with long records of human rights abuses. In terms of the electronics industry, each university generally spends between £3 million and £12 million on computers and other hardware every year.

In 2013, a coalition of workers’ rights organisations in countries producing electronics and European purchasers launched Electronics Watch. This became the first worker led organisation supporting demands for democratic unions, better pay and improved factory conditions in the electronics industry. When colleges, universities and other public institutions come together and join Electronics Watch, they can start making important requests from market leaders, including Apple, HP, Dell, Samsung and others.
They can ask where factories in their supply chains are (transparency is a crucial first step to finding out about working conditions!); what policies the companies have to protect workers; what reparations they offer when they find abuses have occurred; and for workers to participate in factory monitoring and problem-solving. Electronics Watch directly supports worker led monitoring and accountability through informal workers groups, civil society organisations and independent trade unions where workers in sweatshops are based, from Mexico to South Korea and from the Philippines to China.
​

The primary goal of the Sweatshop Free campaign is to get our universities and colleges to join Electronics Watch and take their responsibility as major purchasers of electronics seriously!
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Undoing Borders
People & Planets Undoing Borders campaign is part of a student movement fighting the advance of the 'hostile environment' onto university campuses. The climate crisis, alongside decades of military intervention in the Global South, has driven tens of millions from their homes. Meanwhile, the border industry, including immigration detention centres and surveillance companies, swells with the profits of this devastation.
The Home Office co-opts universities into doing their dirty work of surveilling migrants, and undercutting their rights and access to public goods. Young people with temporary immigration status and en-route to citizenship face insurmountable barriers to access higher education. Those with irregular status are denied access entirely. Migrant students and workers in the university are subjected to increasingly invasive forms of policing. While targeting migrants, these processes also erode the rights and freedoms essential to citizenship itself.
Students can reclaim universities as a site of struggle for migrant justice: People, not documents and detention centres, must have power to determine who is free to live with dignity and transform society. We are part of the long fight for these rights to be universal. To this end, we are campaigning for the Vice-Chancellors of UK universities to sign the 'Pledge Against the Hostile Environment'.
The Pledge is a public condemnation of Home Office policies that set up discriminatory barriers to entry for migrant students, turn university staff into border guards and expose students and staff to the abuses of detention and deportation. It is a commitment to prioritising the University's role as a site of critical learning and research, and its orientation to social good, over compliance with Home Office anti-immigrant policy. The Pledge has three main areas:
1. Education for all
​Applicants with ‘discretionary’ or ‘limited’ leave to remain are made to pay international fees and denied access to student finance – effectively excluding them from higher education. Some universities impose more stringent academic requirements and financial proof for students from countries that UK Visas and Immigration designates as 'high-risk'.

We are demanding that universities classify applicants with temporary immigration status as ‘home’ students for fee purposes, and to provide them with bursaries and administrative support. We are demanding that universities remove any additional academic and financial requirements for international applicants put in place to minimise visa rejection figures.
2. Stop surveillance
The Home Office co-opts teaching staff to monitor their own students’ compliance with visa requirements, to ‘catch out’ those whose status becomes irregular or who have to work without permission to support themselves. Universities develop teams of dedicated personnel, as well as training programmes to embed this surveillance across all departments.

We are demanding that universities remove all measures of monitoring that infringe on legislation protecting human rights, civil liberties and equality and to end sub-contracting of data-collection to private companies. We are demanding that training gives priority to these duties over compliance with the Home Office.
3. No detention, no deportation
Universities should offer refuge from the abuses of the detention-deportation system and ensure the freedom of association of its workers. They have previously cut off ties to students who are trapped in detention, even when their cases are ongoing. Sub-contracted corporations that manage their catering, cleaning or security services have invited immigration enforcement raids on university workers in order to crush labour organising.

We are demanding that universities take every precaution in order not to deliver students and staff into immigration detention, to support those who are detained or under threat of detention or deportation, and to intervene to ensure staff’s freedom of association.
Want to get involved with People and Planet? So, if you want to uphold the human rights of others during your time at university, one way of doing so is to launch a Sweatshop Free or Undoing Borders campaign on your campus.

Contact sweatshopfree@peopleandplanet.org and/or undoingborders@peopleandplanet.org to find out more, we have everything needed to get you started and will support you all the way!


Hauwa from the Oxford Human Rights Festival planning committee shares ...

6/2/2020

 
​
What is your name?
My name is Hauwa, I am studying my Masters in Emergency and Development Practice at CENDEP Brookes.  I am part of the Oxford Human Right planning committee for 2020.

Where are you from?
I am from Nigeria.

Why are you interested in this festival?
For the first time in my life I have the opportunity to be involved in a platform that talks about human peace, human rights and draws experiences from all over the world showing how people are coping. It helps bring to light human rights issues, abuses and concerns that we should all be aware of and then think about what we can do.

Why do you think it is important now?
We are currently very aware and in a place in history where people are aware that human rights violations occur.  They are also aware they have rights and others have rights.  Also, the big movement of social media makes it so easy for you to get you voice and pictures out there, reaching across the oceans to get sympathy or solidarity.

What does resilience mean to you?
Resilience to me means not just the ability to bounce back but when I think of resilience I think it’s the ability of people to stretch… to bend and to twist but never beyond their tensile strength in such a case… no matter how hard something is it never really breaks them. They accommodate it and then they go back to where they were before and perhaps in instances they go back better.

What are you most excited about in the festival?
I am excited about the exhibition where we will see stories of resilience from all corners of the world.  I am excited about all the talks and the panel discussion we’ll be having and am excited about the impact and reach we will be able to have from the festival.

Can you tell me a little bit about Nigeria’s involvement?
We are having in the exhibition showcasing Fati Abubakar, a brilliant photographer from Nigeria who documents stories of resilience among internally displaced people in Nigeria.  There has been an ongoing conflict for over 10 years and she goes there… she picks up her camera and she captures the resilience of the people showing that even though they have been displaced from their homes they are still smiling and hoping to go back home.   Their hope keeps them alive. 

Exhibition and events link here
Picture below of Hauwa
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    Throughout the semester members of the student committee will take turns to write a blog. It might be about organising the Festival, it might be about something else they are doing in or away from Brookes, it might be thoughts on our theme of home. Check in regularly to find out!

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