From the campaign's contextualization website:

The International Campaign on Women Human Rights Defenders is an international initiative for the recognition and protection of women who are activists advocating for the realization of all human rights for all. The campaign asserts that women fighting for human rights and particularly focusing on women's human rights face specific violations in the course of their work because of their sex and gender. In addition, the Campaign focuses on the situation of human rights activists defending women’s rights and in particular calls attention to the violations experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other rights activists on grounds of their sex and gender identities. The identities of these actors as well as the nature of the rights they strive to uphold are both factors that make them the focus of the Campaign.

There are currently 3 videos on The Hub, and they have been chosen as the Editor´s picks: Sunila Abeyesekera of INFORM in Sri Lanka talking about the campaign and how the implementation of gender specific strategies for human rights work is necessary,Lydia Alpizar from AWID who talks about why what she calls “unsexy” topics such as financing are vital for gender equality matters: “without resources there is no implementation of hard-won political commitment to uphold women's human rights” and Aisha Shaheed from the Global Campaign to Stop Killing and Stoning, explaining why crimes against women based on tradition or religion should be stopped.

Following, the 3 videos on strong women who are striving to protect the rights of other women, as uploaded by Violeta Krasnic.

So what is the Hub? It´s a website where anyone can post videos related to human rights, so that they get a wider audience that is interested in the subject, instead of having to dig through regular video uploading websites to find the content they want. It´s a way to get human rights content directly to those who are interested in seeing it.

The next is a 60 promotional video explaining what the Hub does, and how to participate.

A youtube video and background report is posted at interlocals.net

Conferred annually by the One World Broadcasting Trust, the awards “encourage excellence in media coverage that supports a greater understanding of the vital issues of international development. . . [and] recognise the unique role of journalists and film makers in bridging the divide between different societies, and communicating the breadth of social, political and cultural experiences across the globe.”

Global Voices and WITNESS were represented at the ceremony by South Asia editor Neha Viswanathan and former Video Hub editor Sameer Padania (now director of the Video Hub project at WITNESS), respectively. The Human Rights Video Hub beat out BBC's Tribe and the farming charity web site Cowforce for the award.

According to the citation, e-mailed to us this morning by Sameer, the One World jury

decided to award the Human Rights Video Hub Pilot because, although a pilot, it was felt that it enacted and focussed on the potential power of the contemporary participatory web. It has been built around some of the most compelling new media trends we are only starting to witness - the explosion of video sharing online and mobile technology. Making it easy for those without a computer to share human rights violations with global audiences in is potentially transformative. It was agreed that this site sets a benchmark that others must meet in using technology and digital media to bring to light injustices that would not usually be brought to a global public eye, and therefore had the potential to effect real change. It shows how the power of collaboration, distribution and aggregation can amplify the plight of others in an unequal society. It clearly fulfilled the One World Broadcast award judging criteria and it was felt that it provided a much needed portal, space and context, with the support of ethical and thoughtful editorial content, to put the spotlight on global cultures through different lenses.

The WITNESS/Global Voices Human Rights Video Hub pilot, which curates human rights video from around the world, was launched at the Global Voices web site in September 2006. The pilot is the first step in a larger WITNESS project designed to curate video, provide educational tools, and be a resource for activists, journalists and others interested in deterring human rights violations “through community-enabled advocacy, using visual imagery as a catalytic force”.

As Sameer Padania writes in this morning's e-mail: “I know people say this all the time, but the award really does belong to the brave, committed, talented people on the ground - bloggers, human rights advocates, journalists, lawyers, filmmakers, citizens - who fought to bring these stories to light, and without whom we genuinely would have had nothing to say or show.”

The clip shows the Guinean Army firing indiscriminately on a crowd of civilians who were demonstrating their growing discontent with the increasingly autocratic ways of President Lansana Conté. Such eye-witness video footage is especially valuable because voices from the Guinean grassroots are difficult to find in the blogosphere. Most of the online commentary about Guinea in crisis has come from international news agencies and bloggers from elsewhere in Africa.

GV author Jen Brea last month put together an excellent overview of the unrest in Guinea. The crisis reached its climax when President Conté declared martial law and deployed government troops with instructions to use armed force to restore order. The ensuing stand-off led to the deaths of more than 110 people, many of them youths and children killed by gunfire on the streets of Conakry.

Organisations like the International Crisis Group warned that unless real change took place in Guinea, chaos would spread quickly with disastrous consequences. On the ground, civil society refused to back down. Further bold resistance to martial law from the labour unions and the wider populace – backed by the Guinean Parliament – brought about a renewed end to the general strike on 25 February 2007 and the appointment of new Prime Minister Lansana Kouyate, who appears to be a product of consensus.

As GV Francophone editor Alice Backer picked up last week, the Senegalese blogger Alex Seck (Fr) is now talking about Guinea exiting out of its crisis. But the prevailing general tone is still cautious: national union leaders (Fr) and their international counterparts are stressing that it is vital to remain vigilant about this so-called return of peace to Guinea…

There are many warning signs to be drawn from the recent history of conflict in the West African sub-region. For several years attention has been drawn to the risk that Guinea could be the next country to slide into violent unrest.

Wars in the neighbouring countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire had originally positioned Guinea as a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees. However, the enormous numbers of people migrating across Guinea’s volatile borders also included former fighters from neighbouring wars who are vulnerable to being recruited into new hostilities. Some international analysts have spent years contemplating responses to possible conflict in Guinea and the wider humanitarian crisis, while significant concerns have developed around the precarious position of Guinea’s Forest Region as a source of instability in its own right. Yet in essence the central causes of conflict in the sub-region have always been traceable to bad governance and failures of leadership.

So who holds a leader like President Conté to account when his tyrannical tendencies spiral out of control?

Here on the Human Rights Video Hub we’ve been trying to make the point that accountability can stem from ordinary citizens equipped with the technology to capture abuses on film – as the video clip in this piece demonstrates. The problem is that local media in countries like Guinea are still weak, with little access to the tools required to document or disseminate evidence of such abuses of state power. Nor is there much of a Guinean blogosphere to speak of, leaving most people reliant on news websites like AllAfrica.com and Guineenews (Fr), or blogs like Friends of Guinea, to receive reports or analysis about the latest developments.

These sources were supplemented in recent weeks by bloggers from elsewhere who were moved to drive the online debate. For example, Senegal’s Alex Seck (Fr) declared that Guinea was on the brink of imploding (Fr) and that the failure of the international community to condemn or put pressure on President Conte was “shameful”. East African blog Charcoal Ink said the turmoil was a reflection of familiar political trends in Africa: “there is a power struggle going on and power is that delicious elixir that my African leaders can’t get enough of”.

Finally, one of the most interesting responses to the unrest in Guinea was the defiant posturing of the national youth music scene, represented most prominently by the Fonike collective (Fr), which produced a hip-hop video (Fr) in solidarity with the citizens who protested against Conté’s “dictatorial regime”, as well as the following reggae clip:

Unfortunately these voices of the musical youth seem to have little genuine impact, partly due to the fact that much of West African politics is oblivious to grassroots opinion and only really responsive to its “big men”.

So now the most immediate challenge is for one such big man, Prime Minister Kouyate, to seize the momentum (Fr) that the emergence from this violent period has afforded him. To make tangible progress and to prevent Guinea slipping into conflict, Kouyate will need robust assistance from his national and international allies. And most importantly he’ll have to stand strong against the whims and excesses of power-hungry President Conté, in order that the clashes witnessed last month do not become the forebears of yet another devastating West African conflict.

The villagers being forcibly removed here are indigenous Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples, who claim this territory near Lake Izabal as part of their ancestral lands. They want to carry out arable farming, as their forefathers had done peacefully on these plantations until the 1960s. The indigenous perspective on mining is generally negative, fearing harm to the environment and destruction of the local culture and communities.

However, beneath these same lands lie rich seams of nickel, a metal whose scarcity on the world market has this week caused its value to reach a record high…

As reported in earlier dispatches from Rights Action, Canadian nickel-mining firm INCO first purchased the land from Guatemala’s military government of the 1960s, leading to violent evictions of the original Mayan Q’eqchi’ inhabitants. The current proprietor, another Canadian company called Skye Resources, acquired the land from INCO in 2004 and has announced its intention to recommence mining for nickel under the rebranded “Fenix Project”. The Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples feel that their views on use of the land have not been properly taken into account and decided to restate their claims to live and farm there before the “Fenix Project” got underway.

The question at the heart of this story is to what extent the Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples have a right to influence the use of the land they have traditionally lived on. It is a question that has yielded increasingly bitter disputes in Guatemala over several decades and is widely regarded as a legacy of the country's history of conflict and military rule, as well as a facet of the society's broader discrimination against its indigenous communities.

Guatemala has signed up to an important multilateral human rights treaty dealing with the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. Known as Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organisation, the treaty covers a range of contexts, including land rights, respect for indigenous customs and traditions, and eliminating socio-economic gaps between indigenous peoples and the rest of the national population.

Moreover, at the end of a 40-year armed confrontation in which 83% of the victims were Mayans, the Guatemala Peace and Reconstruction Plan, agreed in 1996, places responsibilities on the government to protect its most disadvantaged communities and is supposed to enshrine the right of indigenous peoples to meaningful consultation on land use. The right to consultation is expressly formulated to give indigenous peoples a voice in negotiating fair outcomes to legislative or administrative processes that affect them – including land rights decrees. In this instance, the government’s decision to grant a mining licence to Skye was seemingly taken without “dialogue and negotiation”.

And so it transpired, in a campaign to receive viable farming land from the Guatemalan Government, the indigenous Mayan families reoccupied parts of the intended Skye mining plots in September 2006. After initial clashes with the police in November 2006 had left these families in what Upside Down World described as a “cycle of landlessness, poverty and repression”, they were finally forced off the land unceremoniously when Skye obtained a legal order for their eviction.

The evictions themselves were captured in a compelling photo-journal on the MiMundo blog, depicting the anguish of the residents, the burning of homes by Skye Resources, and the deployment of armed force by the state. As GV Latin America Editor David Sasaki picked up earlier this week there’s a podcast on the Rabble Podcast Network in which the evictions are described by Canadian journalist Dawn Paley, who was at the scene and who had earlier written a provocative article entitled: “this is what development looks like”.

An immediate letter-writing campaign condemning the evictions drew a telling response from the CEO of Skye Resources, in which he spoke of “land invasions” by “squatters” who were removed “in the best possible manner while respecting human rights”. However, Dawn Paley responded with a further open letter to Skye claiming that many of the CEO’s assertions were “simply not true” and seemed to “betray the horrific reality of these evictions”.

In analysing a contentious issue such as land rights, regular, balanced blogging from civil society groups such as the Guatemala Solidarity Network becomes all the more important because of the starkly divergent views that emerge from the actors involved.

By way of example, Skye Resources’ carefully worded press release on the day of the evictions couched the company’s efforts in terms of trying to “help local communities step into a more certain future by helping to define their land rights”, and working to “find a peaceful resolution to the dispute”…

… while in contrast, quoted in an open letter by a researcher who visited the affected communities in September 2006, one Mayan community leader interpreted the relationship somewhat differently: “To them [Skye Resources] we are garbage… they walk all over us.”

Bandh of brothers… [via Neha]

This footage, filmed by Dinesh Wagle, of United We Blog!, shows motorcycle riders being turned backed by members of the National Federation of Nepal Transport Entrepreneurs in Kathmandu. The NFNTE had called a bandh (strike) prohibiting vehicles from running on the streets, after public buses were torched in an earlier protest during the instability in Terai.

I'd love to know what's actually said in the exchange between the two sides - any offers to post a transcript or to subtitle via dotsub or elsewhere?

Wagle offers a worrying perspective on the unpredictability of life in Nepal at the moment:

“[…] it’s indeed hard to predict the political and other developments in today’s Nepal. The trend of creating anarchy and take advantage of such situation has increased over the past several months. There is a kind of planned competition to exploit the situation. You never know what’s going to happen when. Anyone can call a Nepal banda any time. General public has to face the difficulties caused by such prompt and unnecessary decisions. Public have always become the victim of such bandas in the past. What can they do other than quietly suffer?”

FarsiTube, Alexander Litvinenko, strikes in Lebanon, maids protesting at the beach in Peru, vlogging from UAE, and clashes in Bolivia after the jump…

FarsiTube shows a different side to life in Iran [via Hamid]

Iranian YouTube hommage FarsiTube holds reasonable quality footage of the 2006 Women's Day march in Tehran that was broken up violently by police.

The site holds a variety of material, including a documentary about the execution of 16-year-old girl Attafeh Sahaaleh.

It's one of a rash of sites like DocuTube using the “+tube” format - if you've come across another one, share it below, or mail me.

The half-life of Litvinenko [via Veronica]

If this video story from Polish newspaper Dziennik is true, the discovery of Alexander Litvinenko's face on a special forces shooting-range target is pretty embarrassing for the Russian authorities, even if the original video does date from 2002:

[Originally from Dziennik]

Russo-phobic blog The Russophobe takes up the story and AP adds more.

Beirut burns as strike leads to clashes [via Moussa]

In late January the Lebanese opposition called a general strike in protest against the government, and finkployd of Blogging Beirut took several videos of the resulting clashes between “Christians of Hazmieh, Beirut, Lebanon and the Demonstrating (with rock throwing and tire burning) Muslims of West Beirut, on January 23, 2007 […]” - the longest of which is below:

Video by finkployd of Blogging Beirut

After these pictures were taken, Sunni-Shia fighting broke out in Beirut, and a fight in a student cafeteria spilled over into wider violence. A curfew was imposed across Beirut in an attempt to restore order. According to Al-Ahram, tensions remained high over the weekend, and neither the government nor the opposition looks likely to back down. An estimated 300,000 citizens demonstrated in support of the government on Wednesday on the second anniversary of Rafik Hariri's assassination.

Cleaners take protest littorally [via Juan and David]

Hundreds marched onto the beaches of Asia, a Peruvian resort south of Lima, under the banner “Basta de Racismo” (Stop Racism), after domestic workers were banned from swimming at the beaches before sunset - despite a law which prohibits restricting access to the sea.

There are several videos of the protest - a brief taster of Operativo de la Empleada Audaz (Operation Bold Employee), as the action was called, below:

There's a longer version here.

David also sent me a video purporting to show two young men in Lima harassing and abusing their family's domestic worker. In a post at Peruanista, Carlos A Quiroz appealed for any information as to the identity of the domestic worker or the family, and asked readers to visit YouTube, and to flag the video for “graphic and violent content”. The video has now been taken down (”due to terms of use violation”), and Peruanista has posted an update, and a host of videos on the broader issue of violence against women in Peru, at “If you beat your wife, watch these”.

This is the first concrete example I have seen of users being mobilised to flag content of this kind, but I am sure there are others - let me know below, or by email.

UAE students vlog on bloggers [via Amira]

This comes out of, I am guessing, a journalism program in the UAE, as the site is entitled “Broadcasters of Tomorrow”. Please send me more links of this kind, as I'd love to see more examples of local perspectives on human rights stories from around the world.

Cochabamba clashes over coca [via Eduardo]

Finally, Eduardo Avila's superb overview of Bolivia's Black January clashes in Cochabamba, which is required reading and viewing (see videos from YouTubers nenamade and estotaweno), ends with these words:

“A witness in the story stated that the cocaleros (coca growers) had filmed the entire incident [of the death of 17-year-old Cristian Urresti] on a camera. That video could provide clues as to who was ultimately responsible for the brutal death, but it is very unlikely that video will ever find its way to sites like YouTube.”

As this tour of recent videos on GV shows, there's precious little that won't be on YouTube, Ikbis, DailyMotion and MetaCafe before long…

Something for WITNESS's Amazon Wishlist [via Veronica]

First to Pawlina, host of a Ukrainian radio show in Vancouver, Canada, who blogs about human trafficking at The Natashas. After her post in late December commending Ukrainian pop star Ruslana for releasing a video condemning human trafficking, Pawlina praises another musician, Peter Gabriel, for founding WITNESS, but, under the title “Some human rights abuses harder to expose than others”, offers some advice:

It's very commendable of rock stars to help expose human rights abuses around the world.

British rock legend Peter Gabriel has formd an organization called Witness that provides video equipment to human rights activists to record such abuses.

I suspect he may not be aware of the horrific abuses suffered by hundreds of thousands of young women and even children, at the hands of human traffickers pandering to men seeking instant, no-strings-attached sexual gratification.

In which case, someone should send him a copy of The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade.

Then again, no doubt it would be extremely difficult to film what goes on behind the closed doors and barred windows of brothels and “breaking grounds”, much less expose it to public view.

In fact WITNESS did produce a documentary about trafficking in 1997, Bought And Sold, but Pawlina's right - it's proving quite difficult to find footage from behind those “closed doors and barred windows” - so if you have seen, or even filmed footage of that kind, please email me (email address at the end of the article) to let me know.

Knocking on doors and making things happen [via Neha]

Opening doors and unbarring windows, India's Drishti collective have set in motion some pretty impressive video magazines made by their seven Community Video Units. The magazines often make for uncomfortable viewing for local officials, as this post from Reflections in a Window Pane shows. One of the CVUs is hosted by Navsarjan in Gujarat. When one Dalit community in Saurashtra, northern Gujarat, complained that a water-processing plant designed to lower the levels of fluoride in their water had not been used for three years, they met official stonewalling. The Navsarjan CVU's video magazine asked why, and after the magazine was screened to the whole community, including the relevant officials, the water-processing plant was turned back on.

Drishti works with Video Volunteers and you can see a presentation by Gavin White, of Video Volunteers here. I hope to feature some of Drishti's video soon.

Do videos show Nepali police joining in ethnic riots? [also via Neha]

In neighbouring Nepal, youths from the Pahadi community clashed with people from the Madhesi community, and businesses and houses burned in the western Nepali city of Nepalgunj in late December. Paramendra Bhagat at Democracy for Nepal presents three video extracts of the aftermath, claiming that the clashes were in fact a “hate crime” by the Pahadis against the Madhesis. Now the Nepali Times is reporting that the local police were seen attacking Madhesis too. All this is leading some commentators to fear that, with the entry of the Maoists into politics, ethnic rivalries may enter Nepal's politics.

Were the 2006 Fiji elections rigged? [via Preetam]

Fiji's military, which took power in a coup d'etat in 2006, released a video that purports to show senior members of the former ruling party, the SDL, admitting vote-rigging and interfering with ballot boxes. FijiBuzz uploads the video, but meets sceptical responses from commenters on two counts: first, that the man who shot the video, Peter Foster, is said to be a conman who can't be trusted, and second, commenters think that the video fits too neatly with the military's need for some kind of evidence justifying the coup.

Forced evictions ‘rampant' in Cambodia [also via Preetam]

Forced evictions in Cambodia are rampant, said the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions in 2006. In the absence of citizen-filmed footage of evictions, blogger Mongkol linked to a TV documentary showing the extent of forced evictions in Cambodia.

To find out more, visit the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, the Asian Coalition on Housing Rights, and COHRE's Cambodia page.

I'll be featuring more stories on forced evictions soon, so if you have access to relevant footage from anywhere around the world, I'd be very interested to hear from you by email or through the comments box below.

The ethics of filming the poor [back to Veronica]

Finally, Minsztrel at Pestcentric takes issue with a cameraman filming poor Hungarians at a soup kitchen outside the District VII Mayor's office in Budapest. A question for you: how are vloggers dealing with the issue of consent, and what guidelines do they need to follow?

You may be one of the millions who have sought it out online - or you may have decided to avoid it. Someone - a friend, a colleague, a relative - may have emailed it to you, or called you up to tell you about it. You may have seen a clip of it on the TV news. One way or the other, you're likely to have an opinion on it, because it's made for a memorable start to 2007, as political cartoonist blackandblack's cartoon illustrates:

Click here to launch blackandblack's blog in a new window.

If anyone was still in any doubt that sousveillance was one of the ideas of the year, then the Saddam video should put that beyond doubt. What's different about the cellphone footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein, former dictator of Iraq, is that, aside from being probably the most watched web video in history, it has re-ignited a global debate on a perennial human rights issue: capital punishment.

Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar links to both the official and unofficial videos here - on a personal note, I found it one of the most disturbing videos I have yet had to watch, so viewer beware…

Judging by the Iraqi government's indignation at the unofficial footage, and the ambivalent reaction of many major media outlets (as detailed by Armenia-based Onnik Krikorian here), they were the only ones genuinely surprised that a cameraphone was smuggled past the security checks into the death chamber. If whoever filmed it had surrendered his cellphone before the hanging, the world may never have seen beyond the mute, carefully-edited, tastefully-faded-out official video of the proceedings.

The real story emerging from the Saddam video is that, in laying bare the huge gap between the managed official account of his execution and the far messier reality, it has provoked people - and many bloggers - to reflect less on whether Saddam merited his fate, and more on the nature and appropriateness of that fate for the age we live in.

The UN and NGOs criticise Saddam execution…

It's important to remember that the International Community remains opposed to the death penalty, and that the right to life is enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [audio versions of the UDHR in several languages here] - although new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon needed reminding of this on his first day at work. Indeed the UN's Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has called directly on the Iraqi government to delay the executions of Saddam's co-defendants, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, his half brother, and head of the Intelligence Service, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former Chief Judge of the Revolutionary Court, citing questions over the fairness of their trial.

UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, says that Saddam's execution represents a clear violation of human rights law for three reasons: the lack of a fair trial, the Iraqi government's refusal to countenance an appeal, and the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out. In other words, in addition to the UN and human rights law opposition to the death penalty on the basis of right to life, the manner of this execution and the lead-up was a violation of human rights law in and of itself. And now Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy, is pressing the UN to go further by ratifying a Universal Moratorium on the death penalty.

International human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which campaigns against the death penalty, have strongly criticised both the trial and the execution of Saddam Hussein, with Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, saying:

His trial should have been a major contribution towards establishing justice and ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated when he was in power, but his trial was a deeply flawed affair. It will be seen by many as nothing more than ‘victor's justice' and, sadly, will do nothing to stem the unrelenting tide of political killings.

… so Iraq's government pins the blame

Facing a firestorm of international condemnation over Saddam's trial and for the manner of his execution, the Iraqi government has conducted an investigation into the unauthorised video. In an echo of the fallout of Abu Ghraib, the investigation has identified the source of the unofficial videos as two Justice Ministry guards, despite claims from Munkith al-Faroun, prosecutor at Saddam's trial, himself among the 14 witnesses of the execution, that two senior officials were openly filming events in the death chamber on their cellphones. At one point the New York Times even reported that one of the two officials was Iraq's National Security Advisor, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but later corrected this, saying that it had erroneously quoted Mr Faroun.

Bloggers worldwide react to the Saddam execution video

Whoever filmed the cellphone footage, what it reveals has had an enormous impact. There has been plenty of discussion of the geopolitics surrounding the execution of Saddam - take a look at the Iraqi Blogodrome, Lebanon, Iran, North Africa, and elsewhere. The anger about the decision to execute Saddam on the morning of Eid al-Adha is well-documented too - Raed Jarrar is stunned, Abu Aardvark speculates on motivations behind the timing, and Leilouta simply describes a childhood memory of the sacrifice of a lamb. But the cellphone footage has brought a different edge to the discussion - and the irony that debate over capital punishment has been reignited by the execution of a man on trial for genocide is not lost on anyone.

GV's inimitable Salam Adil hits the nail on the head with The Ghost of Saddam Hussein:

Everyone .. and .. their .. auntie seems to have produced their own Iraqi blogger reviews rounding up reactions to the execution of Saddam Hussein.

However, what is needed now is some analysis. So here is my humble attempt to make some sense from the stream of opinions flowing out of the Iraqi blogodrome.

Nearby on GV, Jose Murilo Junior (or perhaps his auntie) provides a fascinating run-through of Portuguese-language bloggers' reactions - ranging from condemnation of the execution to a fearful evocation of “the emergence of a fifth power — decentralized, far-reaching, anarchical” (that's us and our cameraphones, in case you hadn't realised).

Kazakh blogger Adam Kesher invites his readers to vote for or against capital punishment in Kazakhstan, where the government of President Nazarbayev passed a moratorium on the death penalty three years ago. Does he deserve his punishment, or is it a “barbaric sacrifice to political gods?” Of the 27 votes received, 18 are against the death penalty.

From another country with a moratorium, Sean's Russia Blog rounds up Russian media coverage and opinion of the execution, including the news that far-right leader

Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDRP staged a minor protest in front of the Iraqi embassy in Moscow to oppose the execution. Forty four people attended to the demonstration, which wasn’t sanctioned by the police and no one was arrested.

At Two Weeks Notice, Greg Weeks shows how hard other governments are finding it to square the circle. He thinks the Cuban government, which retains the death penalty, might be displaying double standards in denouncing the execution.

Raed Jarrar's description of the execution sums up why the video has stirred up such conflicting emotions:

The execution scene did not at all resemble a State execution; rather, it looked like a chaotic sectarian act of revenge interrupted by shrieking militiamen who received him from the U.S. forces less than 30 minutes before killing him.

Raed, who says he is against the death penalty, makes a stinging attack on the Iraqi government's reaction to the leaked execution video, calling the incident “Execution-Gate”:

As if the problem is about who filmed the shameful scene, not about who designed it and participated in it.

In Malaysia, Ktemoc thinks that the guard held for filming the execution is a “low-level scapegoat”, and sees echoes in the execution fiasco of his country's Squatgate scandal, which I wrote about in September.

In Egypt, Sandmonkey says the video turned his stomach. Adele of Trinidad's The Bookmann goes further:

The use of a phone camera to bring the world more private imagery from the scene also lent an air of the perverse on top of the existing perversity.

Where are the protesters now?

Astrubal, a Tunisian in exile, writes more directly:

Le monde entier va être témoin -à vomir- de cet acte barbare, exécuté non point par un psychopathe sanguinaire et sadique, mais par un Etat sous couvert d’une pseudo justice.

and goes on to lament the absence of Arab protests against the continued use of capital punishment:

J’avais espéré que l’exécution abjecte de Saddam, par sa médiatisation, puisse servir à quelque chose. Quelle soit à l’origine d’un mouvement vers un moyen radical pour empêcher désormais nos tyrans (mais aussi les américains) d’exécuter nos concitoyens –chez nous- en toute impunité.

J’avais espéré observer des manifestations pour clamer “A bas la peine de mort !“, “A bas la sentence destinée à exécuter sous couvert de la loi les adversaires politiques“, “Finissons-en avec ce permis de tuer dont personne ne peut garantir l’impartialité !“, “Abrogeons cette offense à la dignité humaine qu’est la peine de mort !”.

Hélas, au lieu de cela nous assistons aux cris de : “A bas l’Amérique et gloire à Saddam le martyr“.

And on Friday, after prayers, several towns in Jammu and Kashmir witnessed violent protests against the execution, as local Muslim protesters burned effigies of George W Bush and American flags. Also on Friday, three thousand protesters marched in the Jordanian capital Amman against American and Iranian influence in the Middle East. And the NYT reports from Beirut that the cry of “Saddam the martyr” is spreading across the region.

AL Tarrar at Baghdad Connect turns to philosophical anthropologist Rene Girard to make sense of this, arguing that Saddam effectively committed ritual suicide:

The hanging of the Saddam on the first ritual day of religious festivities – when myths, fears, etc are at highest echelon, will produce a ritual ‘sacrificial’ victim for those who deem Saddam is turned into a martyr, and ritual ‘sacrificeacble’ victim for those who deem Saddam is a punishable murderer. […] Becoming more like gods, he refused to acknowledge the new social order and became nihilistic, and as with the ‘Heaven’s Gate’ members he had eventually committed suicide while he was reciting ritual verses during the act.

African bloggers rage against Saddam apologists

In the African blogosphere, Sudanese Thinker, suffering conflicting emotions on seeing the execution video, excoriates Saddam apologist bloggers. Next door, in Kenya, M of Thinker's Room sparks off a debate about capital punishment among his international readership in a post entitled “They Shouldn't Have Hanged Saddam”. UK-based Olawunmi takes a starkly different view, sending Nigeria's leaders a memento mori, that what happened to Saddam can easily happen to other wayward leaders. Another trenchant Nigerian blogger, Akin, advocates turning Saddam's posthumous trial for genocide into a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the most downbeat confession comes from Nkem Ifejika, also based in the UK:

On the night he was executed, a group of us had a debate about capital punishment. I am against it. Not because I believe the worst of humankind should be spared the indignity of state execution, but for our own dignity. We, the judge, jury, and excutioner. We are the ones who need to preserve our own nobility by not killing people. What has killing Saddam gained the world? One less mouth to feed maybe, but other than that - nothing. Is it ever possible for capital punishment to be seen as anything loftier than state sanctioned revenge? I think not. When we were growing up, most of our parents told us not to hit back. Turn the other cheek. Revenge is for the Lord. But even one of the mot theocratic governments in the world, the US government, is in favour of the death penalty.

It's 2007, but it might as well be Middle Ages. Firing Squad, Hanging, Lethal Injection, Electric Chair, Guillotine. What's the difference?

Finally, to the USA, where 60 executions took place during 2005, and 53 in 2006. But the debate made be shifting: in December, the US President's brother, Jeb Bush, suspended executions in Florida, where he is Governor, after an execution by lethal injection was “botched” - now 10 states have taken similar measures. And on January 2nd, the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission issued its report [PDF] recommending to the Governor of that state that the death penalty be abolished. Organisations such as the Death Penalty Information Center and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty are consistently trying to raise informed debate on the issue - and new grassroots discussion fora exist to house these debates. But since Saddam's execution, it seems everyone is talking about it - and it's the cellphone video that sparked it all.

A blog on Catholic legal theory, the Mirror of Justice, questions whether the Iraqi government qualifies as a functioning state, and therefore whether the execution was morally justified. One media columnist warns readers that they shouldn't gloat over Saddam's death, as he was, while he was carrying out the crimes for which he was executed, supported by the USA. Not everyone wants a debate, however, as this strident defence of Saddam's execution testifies at Reject The UN.

As always, feel free to comment, or to add links to coverage from where you are, via the box below.

Resources and further reading

Amnesty International has recently updated its Facts and Figures section on the death penalty. While 128 countries can be considered to have abolished the death penalty wholly, partly or in practice, 69 retain the death penalty, although not all of these will use it in any given year. At least 2,148 people were executed worldwide in 2005 in 22 countries - one country, China, carried out 1,770 of these executions. Six methods of execution have prevailed since the year 2000:

- Beheading (in Saudi Arabia, Iraq)
- Electrocution (in USA)
- Hanging (in Egypt, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Singapore and other countries)
- Lethal injection (in China, Guatemala, Philippines, Thailand, USA)
- Shooting (in Belarus, China, Somalia, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam and other countries)
- Stoning (in Afghanistan, Iran)

Amnesty USA provides a list of relevant international legislation showing the progress towards abolition of the death penalty.

The Project on Extrajudicial Executions, based at New York University School of Law, was established by Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and publishes extracts of his correspondence with governments around the world, and working papers on the right to life.

As for blogs, Abolish The Death Penalty is predominantly US-focused, and has recently been running a series of interviews with the families of executed prisoners. The site has a useful blogroll, with links to many US-based and international blogs on the death penalty, including the excellent Asia Death Penalty.

Beyond the USA, Think Centre is a Singaporean NGO lobbying for an end to the death penalty in Singapore, and Hands Off Cain is an Italian-led campaign for an immediate UN moratorium on the death penalty. Please do add further resources through the comments box below.

[This post benefited from the input of several GV colleagues - Salam Adil, Sami Ben Gharbia, Leila Tanayeva, Ndesanjo Macha, Veronica Khokhlova, Preetam Rai, David Sasaki, Natham Hamm - and Sam Gregory and Hakima Abbas at WITNESS. Thanks to all. Any mistakes are mine alone, likewise any infelicities of translation.]

Now in Egypt, bloggers have struck a blow against police torture, by publicising videos shot by police officers of their colleagues beating suspects, and of police cadets receiving training. Add to this articles in the independent press and protests by civil society organisations, what's fast becoming a national campaign is gathering momentum.

Demagh Mak and Wael Abbas writing in Arabic, and others writing in English, such as Hossam e-Hamalawy, have consistently sought out and brought to light videos of incidents of police brutality on their blogs over the past few months. It's videos like this one - uploaded by Wael Abbas - that appear to be shifting the debate:

As reported by Hossam el-Hamalawy, an investigation has been launched into the conduct of the officer shown slapping the suspect in the above video, although it has now emerged that the officer in question has not yet been suspended from duty.

The brutality of Egypt's police is not a new story - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights have regularly documented and condemned police brutality in briefings and reports.

But sustained pressure from the bloggers, and the publication of an investigative piece into the police torture video in the independent Egyptian weekly newspaper, El-Fagr, have forced the story into the mainstream. On 27th November 2006, El-Fagr published an expose on violence against suspects in the country's police stations, identifying the officers in the video above, and describing a second, much more brutal video.

That second video (which I won't show here) shows a group of officers torturing a suspect - handcuffed, stripped from the waist down, and on the ground - by inserting a stick into his anus. Now Wael Abdel Fattah, the journalist who wrote the 27th November piece in El-Fagr, has published the names of the officers who carried out the torture, and tracked down and interviewed the victim, a bus driver. Sharqawi and Hossam el-Hamalawy cover the story and relay the victim's account of how he came to be arrested, and of the horrific acts of torture perpetrated by the police. Both bloggers publish the victim's name, which, although it's in the public domain in El-Fagr, has caused debate, with one blogger, Elijah Zarwan, wondering at The Skeptic, whether this was the right thing to do.

With Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood) now alleging police torture of one of its activists, and lawyers threatening a national strike in protest against police harassment, the anti-torture campaign in Egypt is growing in confidence and pace.

One YouTube user has now posted a video tribute to the bloggers here (3′42):

If bloggers like Wael Abbas, Demagh Mak, Misr el-Horra can continue to cover and make unignorable the stories that the traditional media find harder to publish, as with the Eid sexual harassment incidents, then it may open the door for the media to enter the debate - which might finally make Egypt's Interior Ministry take the problem seriously.

Backing up to China late last month, students at one technical college in East China's Jiangxi province found out from a television show that they wouldn't be getting the four-year university diplomas they had been promised, and some started rioting. There was bloggage here, here and camera footage posted here, but the story didn't hit YouTube until a few days later. Video clips of the two thousand-strong team of police and soldiers arriving at the school, moving in, inspecting dorms, chasing students and attacking them here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

To give you a taste, here's video number 7, showing the police dispersing protesters:

While we're on the subject of China and video, you might remember this video (shot by a Romanian TV cameraman) of a Tibetan pilgrim being shot dead by a Chinese police unit at Nangpa La Pass on China's border with Nepal:

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Human Rights Watch, which called for an independent investigation into the killing, has now released interviews with two survivors.

In the meantime, the Chinese government has got its own video plans - it's going to install video cameras in every Beijing internet cafe in an effort to “stop spam”.

What shall we do to face challenges of discrimination, extremism and religious fanaticism?

It's a vexing question - and one to which women back home in Egypt would have a very specific answer: stop ignoring violence against women even when it's become an international scandal thanks to citizen video and the internet.

In her speech, Mrs Mubarak failed to make even a passing reference to what had happened to tens of women in her home city of Cairo just a couple of weeks before. A wave of attacks on women in downtown Cairo erupted on the Muslim feast day of Eid Al Fitr, October 24th 2006, when large groups of men attacked several women in the street, as Manal and Alaa's bit bucket relates. But this wasn't a one-off - in January 2006, on Eid al Adha, film-maker Sherif Sadek was back in Cairo, when he heard a commotion on the street outside his downtown apartment. Sherif grabbed his camera and leaned out the window to film the video presented below.

Synopsis

Initially it's a little difficult to tell what is going on in the video - there are crowds in the middle of the street, which looks unusual - but after about 25 seconds, you will see two or three men leading four or five girls down the street past the building from which Sherif is filming. The crowd behind them is extremely large, a couple of hundred strong, and soon surrounds the girls (around 1′20). They then pass down a side-street, partially out of view, which gives Sherif time to spot a man in uniform - a police officer? - looking down the street at the commotion, who then gets back in his vehicle (1′50). Sections of the crowd then come running back round the corner, although it's not clear whether they have the girls with them or not.

The October attacks took a similar form. GV's Amira al Hussaini rounds up the best blog coverage of the October attacks, including Forsoothsayer's translation of blogger Wael Abbas's eye-witness account, and Mechanical Crowds' attempt to pull together the key facts.

Most strikingly, one of the victims of the Eid al Fitr attacks seems to have found a voice through the medium of blogging. Wounded Girl From Cairo appears to be by one of the women attacked on Eid al Fitr, and her description of her ordeal is required reading.

Official media remain silent in “Black Hole of the Internet”

In most countries this would dominate the national media for days, but much of Egypt's official and semi-official media remained conspicuously silent for many days after the events of Eid al Fitr. These stories would probably have died but for Egyptian bloggers such as Wael Abbas, Arabist, 3arabawy and Sandmonkey, who wrote both in Arabic and in English, publicising the video of the incident. Even as international attention grew, Egyptian media maintained their silence, only broken by government-aligned magazine Rose al Yousef, which attacked Wael Abbas for besmirching Egypt's name. The government eventually responded, saying that these events could not have occurred, since there had been no reports of crimes of that kind. In a society where, activists say, women are forced to take the blame for attacks on them, and where police do not take such reports of sexual harassment seriously, is it so surprising that there were no reports of harassment crimes on those nights?

Egypt is listed by Reporters Sans Frontieres as one of the 13 Enemies of the Internet, a Black Hole of information, yet, since the Eid al Fitr attacks, discussion and debate has erupted online about what could have caused this outburst of violence against women. On Al-Ahram Weekly, one commentator see this as part of a larger pattern of frustration at economic and social divisions in Egypt, while another speculates that young men see “women's bodies as the only battleground between Islam and the West.” Bloggers female and male have speculated on whether it's down to sexual frustration among young men. Sandmonkey even points to a TV interview with a man he says is a convicted rapist on Egypt's Death Row, in an attempt to “make some sense of the Eid attacks”.

Women face widespread sexual harassment

Whatever the complex causes of this violence, public sexual harassment is a human rights problem that, according to some female Egyptian bloggers, every woman in Egypt has experienced, but about which there is apparently little public debate.

The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights runs a campaign (Arabic here) to collect and document testimonies about sexual harassment of women and plans to take the evidence of widespread harassment to the government to get them to take the problem seriously. The ECWR campaign aims to raise awareness and debate in the media about harassment, which, if the blogs are anything to go by, affects thousands of women on the streets of Cairo and Egypt's other cities every single day.

How successful the ECWR's campaign has been or could be is unclear, but since the Eid al Fitr attacks, female bloggers such as Mademoiselle HH, Ghawayesh, Zeinobia, and MaryInEgypt, and many commenters on their blogs, have related their own experiences of sexual harassment, and even sexual abuse, to a wider world.

If blogs and citizen video are finally breaking the official and semi-official media's silence on this issue, that is to be welcomed, but the government's attitude may have some distance to travel.

Shutting down women's rights demonstrations at home…

Two demonstrations against sexual harassment in the street have been held in Cairo near the site of the October attacks, on 9th and 14th November. Blogger Mademoiselle HH attended the demonstration on 9th November, and “got home in one piece and did not have to use either my pepper spray or my telescope baton which was a relief”. Her trepidation was understandable, given how women activists and journalists were treated during a protest against a referendum in May 2006 - sexually assaulted by supporters of the ruling party as police looked on, without intervening. Two excellent photo slideshows of the 9th November protest are on Flickr, by Nora Younis and by Nasser Nouri, a Reuters photographer.

On 14th November Magda Ally, Director of the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, led a demonstration, at which speakers called for the government to take action against sexual harassment in public spaces. The 50 protestors from The Street Is Ours were surrounded by hundreds of police and security services personnel, and were pushed away from the Metro Cinema, where the Eid al Fitr attacks began, into the Excelsior Cafe, where they remained for an hour. Foreign journalists complained to Reporters Sans Frontieres that they were being prevented from reporting on the protest, in the course of which eight activists were detained.

Mohamed Gamal, a blogger who witnessed the Eid al Fitr attacks and attended the 14th November protest, sums up in The Daily Star what many Egyptians are thinking:

“It is the duty of our government to provide security to all Egyptian citizens,” he says. “The security forces are only protecting the regime instead of the Egyptian people.”

Attempts to foster the public debate continue in the face of intimidation. There's a meeting planned for 4th December at the American University in Cairo, AUC, at which speakers will debate a range of key issues emerging out of the Eid al Fitr attacks.

… while championing women's rights abroad

Recommendations for protecting and respecting the rights of Egypt's women have come regularly from many quarters - the Egypt Human Development Report (PDF), the National Council of Women, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. President Hosni Mubarak's government was cracking down on protests by its female citizens at the same time as the President's wife, Suzanne Mubarak, leading the Egyptian delegation at the Bahrain meeting of the Arab Women's Organisation, issued a challenge to Arab states and societies:

“The development of women cannot be separated from the development of Arab society as a whole. Development requires social, political and economic reform. The Arab world faces globalisation challenges and must be able to partner with developed countries. In order to meet these challenges, the role of women must be activated.”

But to Egypt's women, appealing in vain to Hosni Mubarak's government to tackle the problem of public sexual harassment and humiliation, his wife's challenge must seem like a distant dream.

For more background and reaction, take a look at Iranian group blog Iranian Truth's coverage of this story. There may be more coverage in the Persian-language blogosphere - Los Angeles has such a significant Iranian population that it's sometime humorously called Tehrangeles…

The UCLA incident is one of three videos of different incidents showing police in Los Angeles appearing to use excessive force when arresting suspects. All three videos were shot by ordinary citizens. The first video of the three emerged on YouTube, and showed an LAPD officer punching a handcuffed suspect repeatedly in the face after a foot chase. The second video, which has not appeared online yet, but was shown as evidence to the L.A. Times by the victim's lawyer on Monday 13th November, involved a homeless, handcuffed suspect being doused in pepper spray by the arresting officer. The officer has since been cleared of wrongdoing, citing the officer's restraint in the face of the victim's “belligerent, threatening and combative behavior”.

Emily at PicturePhoning.com provides links to other incidents involving police captured on video by citizens both in the USA and elsewhere. This seems to testify to a trend that can only grow as more and more people get access to videophones. Some groups are encouraging citizens to use their phones and cameras to record abuses by the police and to upload the clips to video-sharing sites. Sherman Austin, a founder of Cop Watch L.A., a police watchdog website, told a Yahoo! reporter that:

We urge everyone to have a camera on them at all times so if anything happens it can be documented. The concept of patrolling the police is something we are trying to push as a form of direct action.

Do you think this could be an effective form of scrutiny of the police?