Post 3

Human trafficking is an issue on a global, national, and local issue. The article from today was also an issue on all three levels, so it relates to our topic.

Darfur

Finnemore article,

This article made a strong argument for universal human rights. This relates to our group because even if the hate crimes that were being committed in Darfur were not considered genocide they were still a volition of human rights and therefore the UN should have interfered.  

Red Cross Article connections

The Red Cross was based on the actions of one individual. Similarly, if an indigenous group is being victimized by a corporation, the actions of an individual could make a big difference. Also, gaining support for the Red Cross was done first by gaining the support of governments. This  would be a useful strategy for protecting the rights of indigenous groups.

Darfur Progress Report #1

Progress Report #1: Group #2: Jessica Parkman, Maeve Mallozzi-Kelly, Becky Seward, Brooke Johaningmeyer, Jacques Poirier,Colleen Wethern

Darfur/Genocide

Our topic is on Darfur and genocide in general. We plan on developing our action campaign by looking at pre-existing organizations on genocide/Darfur who are actually putting forth effort to help the cause.  Our group will utilize a lot of internet resources such as video clips, electronic databases, other action campaign websites, and other useful websites like “the convention of genocide”.  We established that we are separating our group into two smaller groups. One group will focus on researching and putting together information on the history of Darfur/genocide while the other group will focus on coming up with resolutions to help stop genocide. The history group with include Jessica, Jacques, and Colleen, and the resolution group will include Brooke, Becky, Maeve, and Jennifer.

We will try to answer the following questions: What is the history of Darfur and genocide in general? What are the origins of genocide? How is genocide still effecting people within different areas of the world such as darfur, rwanda, bosnia, etc.? What efforts have been taken to stop genocide thus far? What can we do now to help  stop genocide? 

            During our meeting, we came up with some ideas that will help us develop an effective campaign. We thought about getting the class involved during our presentation by separating them into a few different countries to make them critically think about the issue at hand.  After we have presented them information on how genocide is affecting people to this day. We want to obtain feedback, from the individuals within the different countries, on whether they agree or disagree with their countries views on genocide. Also we had an idea on focusing our action campaign on one issue so we can narrow in on such a broad topic. Finally, the last ideas we established were about how we could get people to take action on genocide. We came up with protesting for  stronger regulations on what the UN considers to be genocide, and we would like people to think about providing funds to private organizations that will go into countries to help stop genocide.  We have yet to determine whether we will use all of these ideas or not. 

Darfur

Fein's article suggested and summarized that in simple terms; The United Nations will not get involved, with countries/ nations and cultural groups that are suppressed physically, emotionally or are victimized with genocide unless funding is available. This funding and collaborative sessions when governments meet together must happen almost instantly or the Declaration of Human Rights will be disregarded and bypassed illegally. Fundraising for private contracting groups is the number one option for helping civilians in these dangerous third world nations.This is why I suggest creating fundraising opportunities generating money for these companies out of our own will.

Progress Report #1

Progress Report #1: Group # 6; Julia Mandehr, Grace Robinson, Kate Kenny, Dominique Bryant, Lilly Judge, Katie Hansen and Mick Pence;

Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror

Our topic focuses specifically on Guantanamo Bay Prison and the events that transpired there with relation to torture and the war on terror. We chose to focus on Guantanamo bay because it is one of the best-known examples of a challenge of human rights. Our plan for developing an action campaign is to spread awareness to the class, and try to gain support to have Guantanamo bay more heavily regulated, and ultimately shut down. We plan on asking the class to get together into discussion groups to go around and share what they really know about Guantanamo bay, and the torture that has gone on within its walls. It is our hope to really engage the class in our presentation and to educate them enough to hopefully have them join our campaign to shut Guantanamo down. We will use examples from the war on terror itself to show how torture has really affected people for the rest of their lives, and how experiencing it within these prison walls is detrimental to ones physical and mental health. There aren’t many specific accounts shared from prisoners within Guantanamo bay because the government has done a lot to keep it quiet. However, there are many stories told from war on terror victims that are similar to those that prisoners exposed to.

The questions we are going to try to answer are:

·      Real examples from prisoners and their stories

·      What are the specific violations of human rights

·      What steps need to be taken to shut it down

·      What is the history of Guantanamo bay

·      Why hasn’t it been shut down yet

·      What are the requirements for being sent to Guantanamo bay

We plan on using our class articles, library books, movie clips and internet sources to find sufficient information to back-up our arguments and build an affective campaign. We are going split up into pairs to research and focus on the different aspects of our presentation, and then combine all of our findings together to form one presentation.  Our topics are the History, the torture techniques and specific accounts of torture, and the steps necessary to close Guantanamo down.

The History: Dominique & Mick

Torture techniques: Grace & Julia

Steps to shut down: Lilly, Kate & Katie

Fein & Franke Article Discussion

Our group found several parts of this week's articles applicable to our action committee subject. In particular, we talked about how the Fein article brought up the issue of when exactly a foreign conflict becomes "our business," when it becomes our place to go in and do something about it and when it's really none of our business. Since our subject is international refugees and displaces persons and our focus is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we felt that this is a particular important question with regards to who we give our help to, and when we give our help, in this conflict.

We also talked about the Franke article and how difficult it is to define universal human rights when you consider every society's own form of cultural exceptionalism: if the believe that what they're doing falls under their own culture's protection of human rights, applying our own definition of human rights to their situation can get complicated. For example, Americans feel very strongly that Afghan women should be properly educated, that education should be a universal right, yet not all Afghanis share that sentiment. Similarly, many of us Americans feel that capital punishment is a fair and justifiable part of our criminal justice system, while many folks in Europe consider this practice barbaric, a violation of universal human rights. As we dig deeper into our Israel-Palestine research, we will have to make sure to continually ask ourselves "does this violate a universal human right or does this violate an American ideal that we feel we ought to impose on everyone else?"