Human rights and justice

Why it is essential to travel and see for yourself and then build networks and promote dialogues in the world’s likely most serious conflict. PART II PART I I recommend you read Part I before reading this second part. A dynamic melting pot You may ask where Xinjiang’s immense cultural diversity comes from. While I have not studied its history, I have learned that it has always been one big meeting place, dating back to the first Silk Roads, where people travelled, traded, explored, and migrated. Crisscrossing also borders with eight neighbours so that over time, it became a melting pot. There is a lot of diversity; each national group or ethnicity seems to have preserved vital elements of its own culture, language, aesthetics, way of living, dancing, etc. and also become part of the unity called Xinjiang and China. A woman I met told me that each nationality’s way of dancing could be...

November 16, 2024 I. Introduction The initiative for the “Nordic Delegation to China, September 7-15, 2024” was taken from the Norwegian side. Journalist and former editor Arild Vollan wanted to investigate claims in the media about an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in the autonomous region of Xinjiang in western China. Vollan selected an independent, cross-disciplinary and cross-political delegation group consisting of people who have worked with China and who wanted to get personal impressions of the conditions described in the previous section. The delegation consisted of: • Remi Strand, lawyer. • Thore Vestby, a former member of parliament (H) and former mayor of Frogn. • Arild Vollan (head of delegation), journalist and former editor. • Jan Øberg, PhD sociology, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Lund, Sweden. (1) The delegation itself developed the project’s mandate. Following an excursion to Xinjiang province, the delegation’s...

Citizens dancing on a Friday afternoon at the Grand Bazaar Square in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China – Photo Jan Oberg 2024 This is just a brief reflection on my second visit to China. Still tired from the long journey, I’m slowly adjusting to our time zone and trying to focus on the tasks waiting for me. But a flood of impressions keeps swirling in my mind, making it impossible to rest—especially after realizing how much Western propaganda had shaped my expectations. I thought I was heading to a brutal and backward corner of China, only to find myself utterly enchanted by what I encountered. What intrigued me the most was the fact that I was about to visit what is often portrayed as China’s “most notorious” region. This is the province at the centre of ongoing accusations against China—claims of massive human rights abuses and even genocide, particularly targeting the Uyghur...

Ethnic minorities expert Barry Sautman gives his take on education, the next Dalai Lama, Han chauvinism and Beijing’s treatment of Uygurs September 24, 2024 Barry Sautman is a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Division of Social Science and visiting professor at Tsinghua University. An expert on China’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Tibetan and Uygur communities, his research focuses on minority rights, cultural preservation and social change. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus.For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. This article/interview was first published by the South China Morning Post on September 23, 2024 What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China? I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet,...

  – A communication is submitted today to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), setting forth in detail, through facts and evidence, that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the current president of the European Commission, Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, a national of Germany, is complicit in a number of violations of international humanitarian law, amounting to crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC, committed by the Israeli armed forces (IDF) against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including the Gaza Strip. This communication, endorsed by various human rights groups and prominent academics and experts in international criminal law, calls the Prosecutor to initiate investigations on the basis of the information provided against Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen. The communication documents in detail the fact that Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen personally is criminally responsible and liable for punishment for some...

Liberal democracies remain shamefully complicit with Israel, despite its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people Students of world politics have long understood that when it comes to the strategic interests of leading states, international law is marginalised unless it is useful in waging a propaganda war against adversaries.  Indeed, the United Nations was designed in ways that recognised this feature of international political life. Otherwise, giving the winners of World War II a right of veto would make no sense.  Such an exemption from international law was also evident at the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, at which only the crimes of the losers were scrutinised for legal accountability, and obvious crimes of the victors – such as the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were not prosecuted.  To this day, for understandable reasons, many...

The India that goes to the polls this month is a markedly less democratic one: Narendra Modi has hollowed out institutions and targeted opponents, all the while sowing inter-ethnic tensions. Christophe Jaffrelot April 16, 2024 In 2001, I walked for 7 weeks in the footsteps of Gandhi, his most important places including parts of the Salt March. Already back then, the ruthless emergence of Hindutva and the growing animosity toward Gandhi was easy to sense. One man I struck up a conversation with on a longer bus drive told me that it was high time that Gandhi was murdered. Today, statutes of his murderer are put up, and Gandhi is being marginalised. That is no wonder in Modi’s India – although, of course, Modi has Gandhi in his office and likes to be seen as a Gandhian. Regrettably, TFF seldom published anything about India. But what seems to be a...

Farhang Jahanpour Professor emeritus & TFF Associate* April 10, 2024 The world is in turmoil and perhaps closer to the possibility of a devastating nuclear war than at any time since the Second World War. There are at least three ongoing conflicts that have the potential of expanding into something much more serious that will lead to regional or even global wars. Wars are raging in the heart of Europe, the Middle East and, if some US hawks can get their way, soon there will be another disastrous war between the West and China. Yet, world leaders seem to be asleep and are moving blindly towards the precipice. War in Ukraine On 25 March 2024, in a letter to President Joe Biden, a large number of the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned that in the light of the reports that France was preparing to dispatch a force...

A very important German voice with a particular background expresses his outrage about the hypocrisy of heads of state and foreign ministers flocking to Tel Aviv with one-sided messages, adding the fig leaf not to forget humanitarian aid and completely ignoring the context, the ‘why’ it all happened. Hans von Sponeck TFF Associate March 6, 2024 War – war was part of the first years of my life. I have felt war. My father was executed in 1944, my grandfather died as a prisoner of war, my half-brother lost his life on the eastern front, my mother escaped from an internment camp, and my grandmother and I saw the end of the war in a hide-out at what became the border between two Germanies. As I grew older, I was eager, very eager, to understand what could prevent war. Young as I was, it was not yet clear to me...

Photo: Ash Hayes on Unsplash Tending the fronts of conflict Kristin ChristmanTFF Associate February 15, 2024 On Wednesday, October 25, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “Our war against Hamas is a test for all of humanity. It is a fight between the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis of evil and the forces of freedom and progress. . . We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness. Light will triumph over darkness.”[1] Now where have we heard those lines before? The axis of evil, the forces of light and freedom, the forces of darkness: these prejudiced phrases are so stale they’ve grown moldy. The war in Ukraine, we’re to believe, is against dark, evil Russia. Biden’s National Security Strategy 2022 speaks of the “darker vision” of US adversaries. The Cold War was against the “Evil Empire.” In every single US war for the past two and a half centuries,...

Action Committee For Call to Conscience About Gaza February 5, 2024 To be updated As mentioned earlier here on The Transnational, the “Emergency London Conference of Global Intellectuals of Conscience Concerning the Genocide in Gaza”, arranged by Turkey’s former PM and former foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and TFF Associate since 1986 was held January 27-28, 2024. It was based on this Declaration created prior to the conference. The conclusions and planned actions from the London conference “Supporters of the Declaration of Conscience and Concerns to stop genocide in Gaza met in London on January 27, 2024. Participants came from more than 25 countries. The emergency conference was responding to the genocidal catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, and the recent interim order of the International Court of Justice. The Conference was convened by former Prime Minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu, and Queen Mary...

Photo by Janne Leimola on Unsplash This interview is one of the first outcomes of the January 27-28, 2024 “Emergency London Conference of Global Intellectuals of Conscience, arranged by Turkey’s former PM and former foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and TFF Associate since 1986. The conference was based on the prior statement that TFF participated in and published here. We are grateful for you sharing both the statement and this important interview. The genocide in Gaza requires our utmost attention, and we must build critical human mass to get it stopped. Your help is vital. Please support TFF, which continues to deliver truthful, pro-peace public education based on decades of research by some of the world’s most experienced professionals. Press this read peace button. Thanks!