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Last fall, the United States was included for the first time on the annuallist of backsliding democraciespublished by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Broadly defined as those exhibiting gradual but significant weakening of checks on government and civil liberties, backsliding democracies are measured by categories including representativegovernment, impartial administration, and participatory engagement. The European think tank reported that the United States shows significant lapses in effective legislative bodies and freedoms of expression and assembly.

Around the same time, a sweeping abortion ban went into effect in Texas and inquiries about its correlation to our backsliding democracy were raised. TheNew York Timeswas among several news organizations reporting that such a descent is precisely when curbs on womens rights tend to accelerate.

However, there has been notably little discourse about the converse of this proposition: that Americas longstanding and abysmal record on myriad gender equity markershas been the trueharbinger for our downgraded status. According to aUnited Nations report, the trajectory of de-democratization is rarely analyzed initially through the distinct lens of gender equity and there are insufficient efforts to systematically examine the current implications.

To be sure, the United States is in fact experiencing an increase in womens representation.Twenty-seven percentof members of Congress are now women, up50percentfrom a decade ago. On the Supreme Court, women will likely soon account for four out of nine justices, two of whom are women of color. Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman (and person of color) to serve in the role. At thestate level, more than 30percent of elected executives are women, along with 31percent of legislators.

But these raw numbers alone are an insufficient measure. Womens leadership in the United States stilllagsrelative to much of the world. And the figures are a far cry from robust and meaningful representation, especially for women of color. Today there are zero Black women in the Senate, and a Black woman has never served as state governor.

The United States also performs pitifully on essential ingredients for womens participation in the body politic. For example, while maternal mortality has decreasedglobally dropping by43percentover the last three decades rates in the United States remain on the rise. We currentlyrank46th in the world. The crisis isparticularly acutefor Black women, who are three times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth in America than white women. Globally, paidmaternity leave averages 29weeks. We are one of only six countries, and the only wealthy nation, without any form of national paid leave.

Further, the United States is an outlier on constitutional equality, even as the Equal Rights Amendment now navigates final ratification after a century-long fight.Eighty-five percentof United Nations member states have explicit constitutional provisions that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and/or gender. Of those with constitutions adopted since 2000, all do so; France is among those that have amended their older, established constitutions to acknowledge equality.

Across domestic agencies we have too few guardrails against abusive institutional practices and too many reports of barbaric treatment of women and girls, including of those who are incarcerated or detained by the government beingsterilizedwithout their consent, shackledduring childbirth, ordeniedmenstrual products.

And the list goes on. These are not merely the byproducts of a democracy on the decline. Rather they also drive a downward spiral and can inevitably lead to deeper inequality and wider gaps in participation, a truly vicious cycle.

As indicated above, Americas standing in the global reproductive landscape offers a real-time glimpse at what to expect from our backslide. For the past two decades, as much of the world has expanded access to abortion, the United States is one of three countries joined by Nicaragua and Poland actively rolling back rights.Though most Americans support legal abortion, weve now seen overtly unconstitutional laws glide through state legislatures and be met with staggering indifference by the courts. Later this spring, the Supreme Court willlikely uphold the 15-week ban in questioninDobbs vs. Jackson Womens Health Organization, thereby gutting the precedent ofRoe v. Wade. All of which has spurred even more extreme proposals like a billinMissourithat would allow citizens to sue anyone who attempts to help a person seek an abortion out of state.

As theTimesreporter above reflects: For all the complexities around the ebb and flow of abortion rights, a simple formula holds surprisingly widely. Majoritarianism and the rights of women, the only universal majority, are inextricably linked. Where one rises or falls, so does the other.

Except we cannot expect to measure the ebb and flow of a truly inclusive democracy withoutfirstlooking to gender equity. It is not a chicken and egg equation but rather where we must start and end the inquiry. Womens rights have been the canary in the coal mine all along.

Read the rest here:
Women's Rights and Democracy Are Inextricably Linked - brennancenter.org

The 42nd Session of the Congress will take place from 22-24 March. A debate on the situation in Ukraine will take place on Tuesday afternoon, March 22nd. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been invited to address the Congress by video conference and the Congress will adopt an institutional declaration.

Also on the agenda are reports on the application of the European Charter of Local Self-Government in Germany, Luxembourg, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The competent ministers have been invited to participate in the debates: Juliane Seifert, Germany, Taina Bofferding, Luxembourg, Sleyman Soylu, Turkey, and Michael Gove, United Kingdom. Congress members will also consider reports on the observation of the latest local elections in Armenia and Georgia, and local and regional elections in Denmark, and Morocco. They will hold two debates: one on the use of deliberative methods in European municipalities and regions, in which the Mayor of the City of Mostar Mario Kordi will participate, and the other on the situation of independent candidates and opposition in local and regional elections.

Debates are also planned on the participation of children in the sustainable development of their cities, democratic pluralism in regional governance, regions and diaspora, rural youth and the role of local and regional authorities, as well as on "Fake news, threats and violence - pressures on mayors in the current crises in Europe". In addition, as at every session since the launch of the Congress' "Rejuvenating Politics" initiative in 2014, youth delegates will participate in the debates.

Among the invited personalities are also Mariastella Gelmini, Minister of Regional Affairs and Autonomy, on behalf of the Italian Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers, Tiny Kox, President of the Parliamentary Assembly, Marija Pejinovi-Buri, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Roberto Gualtieri, Mayor of Rome, Italy, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, President of the European Committee of the Regions, Jean-Claude Marcourt, President of the Conference of European Regional Legislative Assemblies (CALRE) and President of the Walloon Parliament, Belgium, and Stefano Bonaccini, President of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR)

Agenda and documents: 42nd Session webpage

Aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine | special page

Originally posted here:
Congress 42nd Session: situation in Ukraine; local democracy in Germany, Luxembourg, Turkey and the UK; fake news, threats and violence against mayors...

The New York Times finally admitted Thursday that at least some of the emails found on a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware repair shop are authentic.

Now that President Joe Biden has been in office for more than a year, confirmation that the president's son used his access to his father for financial gain is hardly newsworthy. But when the New York Post first broke the story less than a month before Election Day in 2020, the story was very much newsworthy and also very damaging to the left-liberal media's preferred candidate, then-former Vice President Biden.

But the threat to democracy posed by what happened to the story of Hunter Biden's laptop is not contained in the way the Left's mouthpieces chose to cover it or ignore it. That NPR refused to cover the story at all, instead issuing a tweet calling it a pure distraction, speaks to the organization's credibility, but it is not a threat to democracy. That CNN called the story a manufactured scandal created by the right-wing media machine says much about that network, but it is not a threat to democracy either.

What threatens democracy are Big Tech companies that denied access to their platforms to suppress the story and ban the New York Post entirely. Twitter not only blocked users from sharing the specific story but also locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks.

Facebook suppressed users from sharing the story because, as Facebook Policy Communications Director Andy Stone said at the time, this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebooks third-party fact-checking partners. Stone, who worked for Democrats Barbara Boxer and John Kerry before moving to Facebook, never produced a fact-check that discredited the New York Posts story.

News organizations are free to investigate or not investigate whatever political scandals they want. It is a free county, and there are plenty of other news outlets around. Readers are free to read what they want and abandon outlets that won't cover the news. We encourage people to pick and choose.

But more and more people get their news from Big Tech platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission has determined that Facebook has a monopoly on the personal social networking market. If Democratic operatives such as Stone are making the decisions about which stories are suppressed and which are promoted, that is a big problem for our democracy.

There are no easy answers. The FTC is seeking to force Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, but it is hard to see how that would solve the censorship problem. Other people want to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from lawsuits stemming from content posted by users. But getting rid of Section 230 could prompt Facebook and Twitter to censor more than they do now of what their users say.

We hope Facebook and Twitter will learn from their botched response to the Hunter Biden laptop story, admit they were wrong, and explain how they intend to do better in the future. If they dont, something far more draconian than antitrust suits and the repeal of Section 230 is coming.

Read the rest here:
Hunter Bidens emails expose the Big Tech threat to democracy - Washington Examiner

I saw The Kashmir Files. The incidents that it vividly and truthfully portrayed were not new to me as I had read several books and heard first hand accounts of the victims and have written many articles on this site on Kashmir. But for most Indians and the world the truth has finally been revealed.

This is also about how democracy failed in the state that was captured by the worst elements of radical Islam with the help of Pakistan and worse the politicians who ruled the state happened to be in bed with both Pakistan and the Separatists who hated India.

The end result was that the original inhabitants of Jammu and Kashmirthat contributed most to Indias philosophy and language-Sanskrit- were ethnically cleansed from their land by Islamists. Just like the Jews who constantly got discriminated against time and again, the Kashmiri Hindus had seven Exoduses from the time of the Islamic invasion of India to the 1990s, where the state I was married in was destroyed and turned into a highly radicalised Islamist society. The only state in India where cinema was banned and where the mosques blared messages for Hindus to leave Kashmir but leave their women behind. It was even more direct with the posters and rallies that rang with the slogan Convert, Leave or Die. It was Indias Kristallnatch where Hindu shops and houses were looted and burnt; targeted killings were the order of the day and neighbours turned hostile. It almost seemed that doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, policemen were brainwashed against Hindus overnight. How could this have happened? But it did and for decades.

I am ashamed to say even Hindus and Muslims of India looked the other way. The media, the state and Central government were complicit as were the so called Liberals. The few voices that rose up were instantly quelled. The environment was such that nobody really cared as the Kashmiri Hindu vote bank was minuscule, while the Muslim vote bank in India, even after Partition was sizeable.

Jinnahs two nation theory that insisted that Muslims and Hindus could not live together and that is why India had to be partitioned into West and East Pakistan, did not work out as a change of populations. In spite of the cruel dismemberment of India, more Muslims stayed in India than went to Pakistan.

The frightening fact after viewing Kashmir Files, is that there are still apologists who come on mainstream media and try to sell the dubious legend that Kashmiris were not driven out by genocidal diktats but went off their own free will. They even try to blame the Governor of Kashmir Jagmohan who first under Rajiv Gandhi the PM, warned him in several letters that the separatist forces, radical Islamists and Pakistan were creating havoc in the valley, but according to sources, Rajiv said that Farooq Abdullah was a friend and he did not want to hear anything against him.

This at a time when Kashmiri Hindus were being discriminated at work places, made to give up their land and homes under the Draconian Roshini Act that was clearly for the Muslims of the state and against the Hindus.

This was the not the first time it had happened. Farooq Abdullahs father Sheik Abdullah, who Nehru made the virtual PM of Kashmir also had a land reform act where several thousand Hindus lost their land and livelihoods to Muslims.

It was politics, Pakistan and and the personal agenda of Muslim leaders that brought about the horrifying genocide of Kashmiri Hindus. But it is still possible to have a Reconciliation pact between the original inhabitants of Kashmir and the Muslims, as long as we dont allow the old political games and Pakistan to create an Islamist narrative.

Vivek Agnihotris film is a warning of what can happen when the state absolves its responsibility along with the Centre to protect its citizens. The Kashmir Files is now in theatres all over the world. I pray that policy makers, people of all faiths and the media see it, not with any biases but as justice and recognition to a people wronged. Just as the Holocaust is seen today.

Unless every citizen of India recognises this film for the truths it tells and reaches out to those who have been deprived of their homeland for 32 years, there can be no justice or reconciliation.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

Read more:
The Kashmir Files Where democracy failed - Times of India

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

I think he is a war criminal, President Joe Biden said Wednesday of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden was responding to a reporters question following a White House event. Earlier, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, ruling on a complaint filed by Ukraine, directed Russia to immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine. The vote on the court was thirteen in favor, with Russia and China against. On the same day, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Poland and Ukraine as part of his investigation into possible war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine. His investigation bypassed the usual months-long authorization process at The Hague after 39 member nations of the ICC requested expedited action.

The Rome Statute, the UN treaty that governs the ICC, has 123 signatory nations, but neither Russia nor the United States is among them, rejecting the courts jurisdiction. Ukraine is also not a party to the ICC, but has allowed it to investigate events within its territory from November, 2013 onward, encompassing the violent Euromaidan protests and the ensuing armed conflict in the Donbas region.

I wish to send a clear message, ICC Prosecutor Khan said in a statement. If attacks are intentionally directed against the civilian population: that is a crime that my Office may investigate and prosecute. If attacks are intentionally directed against civilian objects, including hospitals: that is [also] a crime.

Accounts of the staggering brutality of the invasion increase daily. In Mariupol, a maternity and childrens hospital was bombed last week. This week, also in Mariupol, the Donetsk Regional Theater of Drama was hit. Hundreds of civilians, including children, were sheltering there. The Russian bombardment of Ukrainian civilians has been wanton and relentless, and has included the use of cluster bombs. Overall deaths among the civilian population are estimated well into the thousands. More than 3 million people have fled the country, with UNICEF estimating that the war has created one child refugee per second.

Shortly after Biden called Putin a war criminal, his administration walked back the statement. State Dept. spokesperson Ned Price and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden was speaking from the heart, while the official U.S. government process to assess war criminality was ongoing.

There is good reason for Washington officialdom to be circumspect with accusations of war crimes. If a man in the Kremlin can be charged with war crimes for ordering an illegal invasion, what is to stop the same charges from being levied against a man in the White House for doing the same thing? Former President George W. Bush did just that in 2003. Bush said in a statement on February 24th, I join the international community in condemning Vladimir Putins unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine.

Historian Andrew Bacevich knows a thing or two about war. He was a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam. His son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007.

Not for an instant would I want to minimize the horrors that are unfolding in Ukraine today and the deaths and the injuries inflicted on noncombatants, Bacevich said recently on the Democracy Now! news hour. But lets face it, the numbers are minuscule compared to the number of people that died, were displaced, were injured as a consequence of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistanin the vicinity of 900,000 deaths resulted from our invasion[s]. I understand that Americans dont want to talk about that, dont want to remember that, the political establishment wants to move on from that. But there is a moral dimension to the Ukraine war that should cause us to be a little bit humble about pointing fingers at other people.

Indeed, Bidens own Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, had to edit her March 2nd remarks to the General Assembly. She said, We have seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.

The phrase, which has no place on the battlefield was struck from the transcript, reflecting the U.S. refusal to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The U.S. used cluster bombs in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and as recently as 2009 in Yemen in an attack that killed 55 people.

If international law is to count for anything, it must be enforced equally. No one, in Russia, the United States or elsewhere, is above the law. The United States should join the civilized world and sign the international treaties on the ICC, cluster munitions, and landmines.

Read this article:
War Criminals Must Be Held Accountable, Whether in Russia, the U.S. or Elsewhere - Democracy Now!