More Case Studies Flashcards
Gangs in El Salvador
El Salvador has long suffered from cycles of extreme violence linked to powerful criminal gangs. National authorities have responded with both severe repression and secret appeasement. In public, governments may enact “mano dura” or “iron-fist” policies, which include mass arrests of suspected gang members. But in secret, Salvadoran leaders have negotiated with imprisoned gang leaders, providing them with benefits in return for ordering their members to dial back the bloodshed.
Under President Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran government has initiated an unprecedented anti-gang crackdown in response to a weekend surge of killings in March that many suspect signaled the breakdown of a secret gang truce. Since declaring a “state of exception” in March 2022 that suspends certain constitutional rights, the government has arrested more than 53,000 suspected gang members, doubling the number of people held in the country’s prisons. Almost two out of every 100 Salvadorans is now in jail, the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his iron-fisted policies, the Salvadoran president remains popular, with approval ratings that have hovered between 80 and 90 percent. However there have been alleged human rights abuses that the government as committed in it’s crackdown. Salvadorians are held captive without charge at times.
However the crackdown may have negative effects as it encourages gangs to better organize. Since a lot of people from all over the country, there are networking opportunities and chances for gang violence increase. Additionally, children are usually then taken in to fill up the gaps that the member arrests leave.
Guantanamo Bay
In 1898, Guantanamo Bay was taken by U.S forces and their Cuban allies (at the time) used it as a forward-operating base in their effort to grow Spanish control over the Island. In 1903, the US leased 45 square miles of land and water at Guantanamo Bay from the independent Cuban government (since 1902) to be used as a base for the US Navy
In 1934, the lease was reaffirmed: Cuba and the United States sign a perpetual lease that rents the 45 square miles of Cuba to the United States for $4,085 a year. The area was then used for Haitian refugees fleeing a coup d’état as well as Cuban refugees. The camp held around twelve thousand refugees.
When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba the 1950s, there was briefly a period during which the fate of Guantanamo seemed in question. As TIME reported in the Sept. 12, 1960, issue, Castro threatened to kick the Navy out if the U.S. continued to interfere with the Cuban economy; however, he also said that he knew that, if he did so, the U.S. could take it as a pretext to attack and get rid of him. Castro would continue to bring up his displeasure at the U.S. presence in Cuba — in 1964, he cut off the water supply, to which the Navy responded by building its own water and power plants — but the lease stayed, as did the military families based there.
The Cuban government continues to demand the return of the area occupied by the Naval base and says it does not cash the checks the US sends every year to pay for the base. Many Cuban historians argue the US, an occupying force at the time, strong-armed Cuba to hand over the land for the base which was originally a coaling station for ships.
Now, US military members meet with Cuban military officers once a month in what is known as “fence line” meetings to discuss upcoming maneuvers and other issues. They switch off who hosts the meeting each month.
On 2002, the Guantanamo Bay naval based was opened as a place for the US to detain suspected terrorists. The prison is made of several camps including 12 publicly known sites. Over the years, 800 men have been sent to the prison without trial.
However, the prison has had many human rights allegations placed upon it. One such person was Mohamedou Ould Slahi. One of his associates, his cousin, Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, was a spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden and al-Walid was vocal in his advice to bin Laden that the September 11 attacks on America should not be carried out. When al-Walid left al-Qaeda, he twice arranged for Slahi to send money through to his family, at a total of $8,000. This later was used as “evidence” that Slahi was funding al-Qaeda activity, and US intelligence claimed to have heard him talking to al-Walid on a phone owned by bin Laden.
The torture that he went through was inhuman. In Guantanamo, Slahi described in his diary: “The cell – better, the box – was cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day… I was living literally in terror.” He was subjected to 24-hour interrogations, force feeding during Ramadan, and no access to medication for his sciatic-nerve injury. He was head-butted, groped, threatened with rape, waterboarded, starved of food, subjected to strobe lights and taken out to sea blindfolded in a mock execution. Then, because the FBI weren’t getting the intel they wanted, they upped the torture on him again.
Eventually, Slahi cracked. He wrote in his diary: “Had I done what they accused me of, I would have relieved myself on day one. But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you haven’t done; you need to deliver the details, which you can’t when you haven’t done anything. It’s not just, ‘Yes, I did!’ No, it doesn’t work that way: you have to make up a complete story that makes sense to the dumbest dummies. One of the hardest things to do is to tell an untruthful story and maintain it, and that is exactly where I was stuck.”
Slahi was left to languish in Guantanamo, never charged with any crime, never given a day in court. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees in the prison could file habeas corpus proceedings to challenge their detention. Slahi did so, and quietly, in 2010, the US government dropped its previous allegations that Slahi had participated in the Millennium Plot and that he knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened. However, he was still not released.
It wasn’t until Barack Obama became president in 2009 that he committed to shutting down the prison. He didn’t succeed, but in 2013 he did manage to put forward a list of detainees who could be eligible for review to release, which included Slahi. In June 2016, he had his first periodic review and four months later, he was finally freed, after being detained for 14 years without ever being charged with a crime.
1) Is International Law enough to enforce human rights
2) Hypocrisy of superpowers
3) Concepts of Equality, Justice and Legitmacy
Hong Kong Pro-Protests
Hong Kong was originally a British Colony for more than 150 years. For the first part of the 150 years, the island was ceded to the British after the war of 1842 (War between Britain and the Qing dynasty). For the latter part, Britain leased the land from China for 99 years. Then as the deadline approached for the end of the 99-year lease, there were talks about the future of Hong Kong. Eventually, the two sides agreed that Hong Kong should be returned to China in 1997, under the “one country, two systems” agreement. As a result, Hong Kong has it’s own legal system and borders, rights and freedoms, and assembly. However it seems that the China is interfering with Hong Kong’s elections which is bringing question the autonomy that was declared in the bill. In fact, Hong Kong is starting to see a steady decline in freedoms.
Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, says that ultimately both the leader, and the Legislative Council, should be elected in a more democratic way - but there’s been disagreement over what this should look like. The Chinese government said in 2014 it would allow voters to choose their leaders from a list approved by a pro-Beijing committee, but critics called this a “sham democracy” and it was voted down in Hong Kong’s legislature. In 28 years’ time in 2047, the Basic Law expires - and what happens to Hong Kong’s autonomy after that is unclear.
The extradition bill which triggered the first protest was introduced in April 2019. It would have allowed for criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China under certain circumstances. Opponents said this risked exposing Hongkongers to unfair trials and violent treatment. They also argued the bill would give China greater influence over Hong Kong and could be used to target activists and journalists. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. After weeks of protests, leader Carrie Lam eventually said the bill would be suspended indefinitely. In the months that followed, protesters filled the city’s streets, broke into the local legislature and vandalized it, staged sit-ins at the airport, and turned a university campus into a fiery battleground. Earlier this year, the demonstrations quieted amid the coronavirus pandemic. But Beijing’s push to impose national security laws over the territory has prompted some protesters to return to the streets. Their presence is a reminder that many thorny issues — including the demonstrators’ demands for greater official accountability — remain unresolved.
Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 that gave it broad new powers to punish critics and silence dissenters, which has fundamentally altered life for Hong Kongers. It extended the definition of offensive, making it easier for citizens to be sentenced by behaviors that my potentially challenge the Chinese government’s rule.
→ Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces are punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison
→ Damaging public transport facilities can be considered terrorism
→ Those found guilty will not be allowed to stand for public office
→ Companies can be fined if convicted under the law
→ This office can send some cases to be tried in mainland China - but Beijing has said it will only have that power over a “tiny number” of cases
→ In addition, Hong Kong will have to establish its own national security commission to enforce the laws, with a Beijing-appointed adviser
→ Importantly, Beijing will have power over how the law should be interpreted, not any Hong Kong judicial or policy body. If the law conflicts with any Hong Kong law, the Beijing law takes priority
→ Some trials will be heard behind closed doors.
→People suspected of breaking the law can be wire-tapped and put under surveillance
→ Management of foreign non-governmental organisations and news agencies will be strengthened
→ The law will also apply to non-permanent residents and people “from outside [Hong Kong]… who are not permanent residents of Hong Kong”.
Greece’s neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists (The Golden Dawn)
After the truck driver walks up to a pedestrian and stabs him, he confronts the police by saying “I am one of you”. Reasonably, the police officer was confused and the driver then proceeds to say “I am the golden dawn”. The truck driver would later claim that the murder was an act of self-defense. He said he had simply got caught up in a random street brawl in the Greek port city of Piraeus, shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013. What he told the police officer, overheard by several witnesses, suggested something quite different.
Golden Dawn was a neo-Nazi party that had risen into the spotlight the previous year while Greece was suffering from an economic crisis. The party had gone from winning fewer than 20,000 votes in the country’s 2009 general election to winning more than 7% of the vote, and 18 parliamentary seats, in 2012. No outright fascist party in Europe had made such gains in a general election for years. Although they played by the political rule book with respectable politics, they were the kind of Nazis you are more likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and antisemitic (anti-jewish) conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme rhetoric. They had made reference to the holocaust with intention of repeating the horrific events of the past.
Events were brought to light when 3 Golden dawn supporters sent a message to trail Fyssas (a popular jewish rapper amongst the working class Greece youth). He was then stabbed. Earlier tow men linked to the Golden Dawn has stabbed a Pakistani man, Shehzad Luqman. Fyssas’ mother then went on news demanding for justice, making it a case for every Greek. Trails were then held and an investigation into the Golden Dawn was done. Over the span of 6 years, the trial continued and revealed that this was the closest extreme facism had gotten to gaining a foothold in European Politics.
Golden Dawn started out as a Masonic Society (Men-Only). For many years it was small and remained hidden, recruiting its members from the hooligan football scene in Greece. However, they then switched strategy in the 2000s by linking the increasing crime rate to the immigrants. During the time of economic turmoil in Greece, Athens became visibly poor; some blamed this on the influx of immigrants. Attacks started when people who were wearing the golden dawn logo attacked immigrants by beating them up with sticks and knuckleheads.
Every country in Europe has groups like Golden Dawn: small, often clandestine networks of rightwing extremists whose ideology blurs the line between politics and a cult. Their hopes of breaking into the mainstream lie in economic collapse, intense social conflict or a state that doesn’t enforce the law. In the wake of the global financial crisis, Greece offered Golden Dawn a combination of all three.
In 2009, the new elected centre-left party Pasok discovered a hole in public funding. As a result, the government was forced to get bailout. In a spiral of increased spending, the government was forced to raise taxes to the point where there was a tax on heating fuel (many people started to use wood-burning stoves). Then overtime, a corrupt sentiment was adopted by the public towards the government and riots start to break out.
In this fraught atmosphere, Golden Dawn worked hard to attract the support of the disaffected, vehemently opposing the disorder of the protests, but positioning itself against austerity. It expanded across the country, building several well-organised branches around Piraeus, a port city dominated by Greece’s powerful shipping industry and beset by unemployment. “Call us if you want to get rid of the commies,” its members told people in the shipyards, traditionally the stronghold of a trade union affiliated with Greece’s Communist party.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that in 2012 election, a new rightwing party was established to lead the country, New Democracy. New democracy positioned itself as centrists though many argue that they were a rightwing nationalist party. They started to round up illegal immigrants with scores of people getting arrested. At on point the situation came down to creating a coalition with the Golden Dawn. People started to turn to the radical left party, Syriza while others felt like the whole system is a lie and turned to Golden Dawn. In this atmosphere, Golden Dawn campaigned hard to position itself as the defender of the nation. Its activists staged “Greeks-only” food banks and blood-donation drives, and forced their way into hospitals to check the residence permits of immigrant nurses. It staged spectacular rallies, with hundreds of members marching with torches and Greek flags at night, to boost its prominence in the media, with some outlets giving the party an easy ride.
Fysaas’ murder brought down the support for the Nazi party but greece’s crisis was far from abated. The court had made it clear that the party was on trial for the murders and not their ideology. Since it’s in Greece’s constitution to not ban parties, they couldn’t simply get rid of Golden Dawn.
Throughout the trial, it was brought to light how the party trained it’s members to follow in the exact footsteps of Nazi Germany. The party followed a military style structure as no order was allowed to be carried out without approval from higher officials. It was also found that the party did recieve some help from the police.
However over the years their support did come to a close, even with support from the radical left party Syrzia.
As the Guardian States: Fascism, more than any other political current, is a battle over memory as much as it is about the present. The extreme nationalists who populate the far right know this, and they know that in order to succeed they must make us forget what their ideas have led us to in the past. Fascism seeks to colonise our myths of identity and belonging, to turn them to its own destructive ends. It starts by promising to clean up your neighbourhood, your city or your country. It says the nation is for you, and people like you alone – and that its violence will only ever be directed against those who don’t matter: the misfits, outsiders, inferiors. It never stops there.
US Insurrection - The January 6th Capitol Riots
How the 2020 presidential election was conducted was severely affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic. Due to the risk that the pandemic imposed, there were measures put in place. These measures included the extending the early-voting periods and eliminating requirements for obtaining or casting absentee ballots (ballots that allow voters to vote from another location). Millions of people were expected to use this as a safer alternative to in-person voting however, it was correctly anticipated that democratic voters would be more likely to use absentee voting rather than republic voters (Trump did downplay the pandemic a lot).
Republican leaders in several states filed scores of lawsuits alleging that the changes undermined the constitutional authority of state legislatures to make election law or that they invited individual voter fraud. Amid those failed challenges, Trump continued to falsely claim that Democrats were plotting to “rig” the election through voter fraud and by systematically forging, altering, or discarding absentee ballots, among other illegal means.
In a press encounter in the early morning of November 4, the day after the election, Trump maintained his false narrative of Democratic cheating by declaring himself the winner and denouncing the ongoing counting of absentee ballots as a “fraud on the American people.” During the next several weeks he continually accused Biden and the Democrats of having stolen the presidential election and repeated conspiracy theories involving ballot stuffing, dead voters, and malicious voting-machine software that deleted or changed millions of votes for Trump. His false accusations were indirectly endorsed by several Republican members of Congress who expressed uncertainty about the election’s outcome or who simply refused to publicly acknowledge Biden’s victory. Their calculated reticence helped to spread false doubts about the integrity of the election among rank-and-file Republicans.
As vote counting continued, various groups of radicalized Trump supporters quickly coalesced around the idea that forceful protests and even violent direct action were necessary to stop the counting of fraudulent ballots and thereby to prevent Biden from taking office. A short-lived Facebook group calling itself “Stop the Steal” was created on November 4 and grew to some 320,000 members in less than 24 hours before the social media company shut it down because of posts containing disinformation and calls for violence (see also collective violence).
After the electors from each state cast their votes for president and vice president on December 14, giving Biden a victory of 306 electoral votes to 232, Trump and his allies, as well as leaders of Stop the Steal and other pro-Trump groups across the country, turned their attention to the last, formal step in the election of a U.S. president, the ceremonial opening and counting of the electoral votes of each state in a joint session of Congress, presided over by the vice president and commencing on January 6, a date fixed in federal law.
Trump encouraged his supporters to attend a rally and march on January 6 to protest the vote-counting ceremony. In one of the tweets, Trump stated, “Be there, will be wild!” Although Trump did not explicitly direct those in attendance to commit illegal acts, his generally incendiary language plainly suggested to many in the crowd that they would be justified in violently attacking the Capitol and members of Congress to prevent Biden from becoming president. He encouraged the crowd to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to the Capitol building; and urged his audience to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.
And of course, they did by completely overrunning the police forces at the capitol building. Teams were dispatched to contain the violence but by then many were injured. At about 4:20 PM on the day of, Trump tweeted a brief video in which he once again asserted that the election had been stolen. Expressing his “love” for the rioters, he urged them to “go home,” stating that “we have to have peace.” According to a Justice Department report released in July 2021, approximately 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers were criminally assaulted by the rioters in the January 6 attack. Among those victims, one died of a series of strokes after being hospitalized for injuries sustained in the attack, and two others committed suicide.
On January 13, 2021, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 232 to 197, adopted a single article of impeachment against Trump for incitement of insurrection. At his Senate trial in February, which began three weeks after he left office on January 20, Trump was acquitted after only 57 senators, 10 short of the required two-thirds majority, voted to find him guilty. During the first year after the attack, the FBI and the Justice Department arrested more than 725 of the rioters, charging them with a variety of federal crimes, including injuring law-enforcement officers, destruction and theft of government property, and conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding. As of early January 2022, the FBI had yet to identify and apprehend more than 350 additional persons believed to have committed violent crimes on the Capitol grounds.
In October 2021 Trump filed suit against the committee in federal district court, seeking to block the release of several hundred pages of records relating to his activities and communications before and during the attack, which the committee had originally requested in August. In December, after the district court rejected Trump’s request and an appellate court upheld that decision, Trump filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court, asking that it review the district court’s ruling and that it block release of the documents pending its final decision in the case. The Supreme Court denied Trump’s request in January 2022, allowing the committee to begin receiving the documents from the National Archives.
South China Sea Conflict 2021
China’s lays claim on sovereignty over the sea and it’s estimated 11 billion barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Additionally it holds immense importance as an international waterway. China has antagonized the competing claim from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. It was as early as the 1970s that different countries began to claim the islands and various zones in the South China Sea, such as the Sparty Islands, which possess rich natural resources and fishing areas.
The South China Sea itself if made up of many different islands whose claims are heavily contested. By claiming these Islands countries can claim a exclusive economic zone as put forth by UNCLOS. Under an EEZ, only the country can exploit the region for economic resources. There are external actors as well, notably, Japan, India and the United States who regularly contest China’s Claims by conducting naval exercises in the waters. These actors also need the south China to be of free access so that their shipping routes are not blocked.
China maintains that under international law, foreign militaries are not allowed to conduct intelligence-gathering activities, such as reconnaissance flights, in it’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). However, according to the UN, United states and the claimant, under the UN Convention of the Law of Sea, these countries should have the freedom of navigation to EEZs and are not required to inform the claimants of military activities.
In July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued its ruling on a claim brought against China by the Philippines under UNCLOS, ruling in favor of the Philippines on almost every count. While China is a signatory to the treaty, which established the tribunal, it refuses to accept the court’s authority.
In recent years, satellite imagery has shown China’s increased efforts to reclaim land in the South China Sea by physically increasing the size of islands or creating new islands altogether. In addition to piling sand onto existing reefs, China has constructed ports, military installations, and airstrips—particularly in the Paracel and Spratly Islands, where it has twenty and seven outposts, respectively. China has militarized Woody Island by deploying fighter jets, cruise missiles, and a radar system.
The United States has a role in preventing military escalation resulting from the territorial dispute. Washington’s defense treaty with Manila could draw the United States into a potential China-Philippines conflict over the substantial natural gas deposits or lucrative fishing grounds in disputed territory. The failure of Chinese and Southeast Asian leaders to resolve the disputes by diplomatic means could also undermine international laws governing maritime disputes and encourage destabilizing arms buildups.
Tensions between China and both the Philippines and Vietnam have recently cooled, even as China increased its military activity in the South China Sea by conducting a series of naval maneuvers and exercises in March and April 2018. Meanwhile, China continues to construct military and industrial outposts on artificial islands it has built in disputed waters.
The United States has also stepped up its military activity and naval presence in the region in recent years, including freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in January and March 2018. In a speech during his November 2017 visit to Southeast Asia, President Donald J. Trump emphasized the importance of such operations, and of ensuring free and open access to the South China Sea. Since May 2017, the United States has conducted six FONOPs in the region.
Exploitation of Latinos migrants in the UK
Latin Americans arrived in the UK in relatively large numbers from the 1970s onwards. Colombians and Ecuadorians were the most likely to arrive in the 1980s and 1990s. While many claimed asylum, this has declined over the last decade. Economic migration is now the main source of Latin Americans arriving to the UK, with large flows of Brazilians arriving since 2000 and it now forms the largest nationality group. Latin Americans have established a range of community organisations since the 1980s.
→Latin Americans have very high employment rates, with 85% in work.
→ More than half of all working Latin Americans are employed in low-skilled jobs, rising to two-thirds if sales occupations are included.
→ One-fifth is employed in professional and managerial jobs.
→ 22% of employees have no written contract, which implies that basic rights and benefits such as sick pay and annual leave are being denied to many workers.
→ Many Latin Americans work fragmented and unsociable hours. One-third work part-time and another third combine more than one job to make ends meet.
→ 11% of Latin American workers earn below the statutory National Minimum Wage –10 times the UK rate.
→ They earn a median hourly rate of pay of £7.07 per hour, higher than the National Minimum Wage but lower than the London Living Wage.
→ They have substantially lower household incomes than the UK average.
→ Almost 40% of working Latin Americans experience workplace abuses, including
having payments withheld (22% of those working) and verbal abuse (14%).
→ They cope with economic vulnerability in a range of ways, including borrowing and
saving. The global financial crisis has exacerbated economic hardships
→ They have very poor housing with overcrowding, living in temporary or accommodations.
→ They stay in contact with their families and almost two-thirds send money or gifts back home with few variations according to year of arrival, gender, income or occupation.
→ They send a median of £2000 per year to Latin America. They send 12% of personal weekly income back home. They save 23% of their income some of which is also sent back home.
→ Most remittances are used for family maintenance. Remittance sending and maintaining relationships across borders provides a lifeline for many families back home, although it can be very challenging.
One of the reasons why there are many Latin American immigrants within the UK is due to state persecution. This could be due to fear of expressing their own political opinion as many get tortured or harassed by doing so, or for being part of a minority.
China-India Border Dispute
After India had gained independence and the people’s republic of China was formed, India and China were on relatively good terms. However that did not long when China sent troops into Tibet to control the region, keeping in mind that Tibet was a semi-autonomous nation. Of course, China became convinced that India was responsible for Dalai Lama’s escape as well as conspiring with the US and UK to plan such an event. By the early 60s, there was very little trust between the two nations.
The first confrontation occurred when India discovered that China were building roads on territory that they deemed as rightfully theirs. Then in 1962, a border war happened and since then the conflict has not been resolved. In fact, this is the longest disputed border on the planet. There are three areas on contention, Ladakh, Doklam Plateau and Arunachal Pradesh (China claims that this apart of south tibet). All this confusion is due to multiple maps drawn by the British which lays out the border differently in each interpretation for both sides.
However there was cooperation amongst the both sides after 1962 in which both agreed that the contested land is both man’s land. Neither side would disturb the status quo, both sides could petrol the region and no side would establish a permanent presence. This solution is known as the line of actual control and it is a temporary border. However, there were disputes in Ladakh for where this LAC actually is.
Things then started to heat up in Doklam Plateau in 2017, where there was a conflict between Butan and China; India stepped in to help Butan and push China back. China then started to construct a road that would give them direct access to the Siliguri Corridor, which is a choke point between the east and the west of India. Butan allowed India to enter the country and stop the expansion. For months the troops faced off but no casualties were reported.
In 2019, there were summits and China started to invest heavily in India, especially telecommunications. When the pandemic hit, India became concerned about it’s overdependence on China due to the way that China treated the Pandemic.
In 2020, China surprised India in the disputed region of Ladakh where the Chinese argued that India’s efforts to build new roads in the region and improved infrastructure had changed the status quo and forced a response out of China. This all came at a time where India and China were at their peek of economic relationships.
China then proceeded to develop villages near the border to fortify their presence, while also putting villages inside of Territory contested by Butan.
Of course, they also have their disputes in the South China Sea.
