minorities

MYANMAR: ‘The government needs to open the doors’
CIVICUS speaks with Nay Lin Tun, a doctor and civil society humanitarian worker in Myanmar, about conflict in Rakhine State, the difficulties faced by minorities in the region, and civil society’s work to provide help.

Can you tell us about your background and the work you’re doing in Rakhine State?

I’m a doctor working in public health, particularly focusing on primary healthcare, reproductive and women’s health, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. I was part of a group who founded a civil society organisation, the Center for Social Integrity, which supports communities in conflict-affected areas, including Rakhine State. We’re trying to support people based on their needs, including their needs to food, shelter and livelihoods. Right now in Rakhine State we are providing basic humanitarian support, education, healthcare, livelihoods and water and sanitation services for people in the conflict areas. Because of my experience I focus on providing healthcare and humanitarian support.

At the moment there is fighting in the north and east of Rakhine State between the Myanmar Army and the insurgent Arakan Army. According to the United Nations there are around 35,000 newly displaced people because of the fighting in 2019, living in camps in Rakhine State. We are supporting these communities and other conflict-affected communities in the area.

What are some of the challenges minority groups face in Rakhine State?

In my country there are 135 recognised ethnic groups. The majority ethnic group are the Bamar, who are the main group across most of Myanmar. At the other end of the spectrum are lots of small groups, often in the regions close to borders, who are becoming less and less recognised by the government. Different groups face different challenges. In Rakhine State there are religious, ethnic and social minorities, and they all face human rights challenges.

The Rohingya community, who are Muslims, have been subjected to a lot of abuses. They are denied citizenship and treated as stateless persons. They are not recognised as an ethnic group by the 1982 Citizenship Law. They are called Bengalis by many in the dominant population groups, because they see them as belonging to Bangladesh. They have their movement restricted and struggle to access education and healthcare.

Local hospitals are inadequate, so if there is a medical emergency people have to travel to a major city. Before 2017 they could go to the Bangladesh side of the border on a short-term pass and get hospital treatment, but now the border area is closed and they cannot do this. But because they don’t have citizenship and their movement is restricted, it is also hard to go to the big hospitals in Sitwe, the main city in Rakhine State. People can pay for this with their lives. If there is an emergency, the only way people can negotiate to get treatment is to pay a bribe. This happened to someone I was trying to treat for a tumour.

In another case, a pregnant woman had severe labour pains in the middle of the night. They tried to take her to hospital, but there is a curfew, introduced in 2017 and in force ever since. No one can go out between 11pm and 5am. There are many police checkpoints in the area, and while other villages were okay, in this case they would not allow this pregnant woman to pass. She had to go home. By the time she could go to hospital the next day, the child was already dead. Luckily, the mother survived.

Rohingya people are also denied education. The highest education most people can get is at high school. They cannot join a university as a full-time student. They can only do distance learning for a few subjects. They also struggle to find work. Most Rohingya people work in farming, fishing and cutting timber, but right now they are not allowed to fish or go into forests to chop wood. Most of the farming lands are occupied by the military. Most people are now involved in daily casual work. So everyday life is very challenging.

The Rohingya are not the only minority in the region who face difficulties. Local ethnic groups such as the Chakma, Dynat and Mu, who live on the mountains, face challenges, even though their religion is Buddhist. Because they live in remote locations, they cannot access healthcare and education. They have no life opportunities.

What was your experience of the violence that occurred in 2017?

What I saw was people living in fear. I saw communities that were afraid of each other: Rohingya people and Rakhine people, the majority group within the state, were afraid of each other. I worked on medical clinics in northern Rakhine State and hired a taxi to transport medicines. My driver, who was from the Rakhine group, did not want to take me to the area. You had people unable to go to the other communities because they did not think they would come back.

What role do you think hate speech and extremist views played in stoking conflict?

Most of the hate speech and extremist protest and provocations came from extreme groups in the big cities, and was spread by social media, whereas in rural communities it was more that you had villages of different ethnic groups that were afraid of each other. There was a lot of misinformation spread through social media, and this was viral. No one could know what was true or not. Positive stories and true information were far less viral than hate speech and misinformation.

In the major cities, hate speech and misinformation turned a social conflict into a religious conflict between Buddhism and Islam. Extremist Buddhist monks turned this into a bigger conflict. Extremist groups spread disinformation and encouraged extremism, with the unofficial support of the military and political parties, in their own interests. People played political games in the big cities, but they had no connection to the villages in the conflict area. Those people were the most affected and they were living in fear, and live in fear now. There is a big challenge in controlling hate speech and misinformation on social media.

It is much harder for civil society voices promoting social cohesion and religious harmony to be heard compared to hate speech, but civil society is trying to do this. These are messages my organisation is trying to promote very strongly in the conflict areas. But there is a need for more impact, and more efforts, not just from civil society but from the government. There is a need for much more activity that strengthens communities.

What support is needed, including from the international community, to improve the lives of minorities and people affected by conflict?

There is a lot of willingness from the international community to support people in Rakhine State, and not only Rohingya people but also other minorities. But the most challenging thing at the moment is that national government and local authorities are limiting them from doing so, and have been doing since 2017. So there is a lack of ability to really go into the villages and directly help people.

The international community needs to engage with the national government and local authorities so that they are willing to work with them and listen to the voices of local communities and support them in the areas affected by conflict. They need to build relationships with the government, and the government needs to work with the international community. The government needs to open the doors.

It is all about access – access to healthcare, access to education, access to livelihoods. Right now access is blocked. Even access to the internet was blocked by the government, between June and September. People don’t have access to the means to share their voices. People are also scared of speaking out because of restrictive media laws. They fear they will get into trouble. This is why I try to share their stories. So, access is the big challenge. We need more access by the community for the community. This is why the government needs to open the doors for international and local civil society.

Civic space in Myanmar is rated as ‘repressed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch withCenter for Social Integrity through its website andFacebook pages, and on Twitter@cfor_integrity.
Bolder measures must be taken to force the junta out of power
Statement at the 51st Session of the UN Human Rights Council

Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar

Delivered by Kyaw Win

The Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) and CIVICUS welcome the findings of the High Commissioner’s report on the progress made and remaining challenges regarding the recommendations of the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar. While cutting the junta’s access to revenue and arms supplies are urgent and essential measures that must be taken by all State Parties, we urge the international community to pursue bolder measures to force the military junta out of power.

The international response to the attempted coup has so far proceeded in a slow and fragmented manner with junta-perpetrated violence including against peaceful protestors and humanitarian needs in Burma continuing to escalate. During the first half of 2022, the junta was reported to commit more incidents of violence against civilians than any other ‘state’ armed force globally.1 The human rights situation of the Rohingya and Muslim minorities has continued to deteriorate, with these groups facing tightened restrictions on their fundamental freedoms and increasingly at risk of being subjected to further atrocity crimes.

The longer the international community waits to act, the more emboldened the junta will become as it escalates its crimes against humanity and war crimes. In addition to the High Commissioner’s recommendations, BHRN and CIVICUS call on governments worldwide to:
- Sharply increase engagement with the National Unity Government (NUG) and other key actors who are active against the junta, including ethnic resistance actors and leaders of the civil disobedience movement.
- Redouble efforts to pursue international legal action against the junta, including by joining the Gambia’s case at the International Court of Justice and by actively pursuing investigations and prosecutions under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Additionally, BHRN calls on:
- ASEAN to coordinate with the UN to ensure strong action against the junta’s abuses.
- The UN General Assembly to adopt a resolution making clear that the NUG is the only government that member states and the UN should engage with.
- The UN Security Council to end its inaction and refer the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court or establish a separate criminal tribunal to investigate and prosecute the full spectrum of atrocity crimes in Myanmar.
Civic space in Myanmar is rated as "Repressed" by the CIVICUS Monitor
CIVICUS: #WhyWeMarch
On Saturday, 21 January 2017, millions will gather in Washington D.C. and in hundreds of other cities around the world to take part in the Women’s March. CIVICUS stands in solidarity with the demonstrators who in the spirit of democracy, seek to honour the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice, and reject the sexist and bigoted rhetoric used during the US election against minorities and excluded groups.

Globally, the sister marches carry a message of solidarity in celebration of our multiple, diverse and intersecting identities and reject all forms of patriarchy and the discriminatory systems that support them worldwide. We will not rest until women have parity and equity at all levels of leadership in society.
HUMAN RIGHTS: ‘People have a great desire for positive stories’
CIVICUS speaks with Saleem Vaillancourt, a journalist and media producer who works to promote the rights of Iran’s Bahá’í community and to encourage positive action to realise human rights. Saleem works with the street art for social justice project,Paint the Change.

Can you tell us how your work began?

I work closely with the Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker, Maziar Bahari. Maziar’s story is well known. He was jailed in Iran and held in solitary confinement in 2009 after covering the Iran election crisis. He was released after an international campaign and the book he wrote about his ordeal, ‘Then They Came for Me’, was made into a film, ‘Rosewater’, by Jon Stewart. Maziar was no longer simply a journalist; he was also a human rights advocate. Once released, he could talk about all the things going on in Iran that he couldn’t when he was working in Iran.

Chief among these is the situation of the Bahá’í community, which is the largest religious minority in Iran. They are persecuted by the Iranian government because their beliefs come up against the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam practised by the government. Bahá’ís are routinely arbitrarily detained, held either without charge or under false charges and jailed. They are denied the right to go to university. There is a lot of misinformation and propaganda against them from the state media.

I’m a Bahá’í and I worked with the Bahá’í community, and also as a journalist and in public communications, and that’s how my path crossed with Maziar. In 2014 he made a documentary, ‘To Light a Candle’, about the story of the Bahá’ís and particularly about the denial of their right to education, and their response, which was to create an informal educational project – an underground university – in which they created opportunities to educate themselves. This is a programme that for 30 years has given thousands of people an education, many of whom have gone on to pursue graduate studies in western universities. It’s a huge success and a major example of constructive resilience, or what Maziar calls peaceful resistance: meeting injustice not with conflict but by building a positive alternative to overcome the situation.

I joined him for what was meant to be a short time to help promote his film and things grew from there. We created a campaign, ‘Education is not a Crime’, which is a street art and human rights campaign in which we use murals to talk about the story of the Bahá’í in Iran and more broadly to try to address education inequity and uneven access to education in other contexts as well.

What are the key methods by which you work?

We create murals, and then the murals have a social media dimension, because we share them online as videos and create local conversations, explaining why we are doing these, and especially relating what we are doing to local stories. For example we painted 20 murals in Harlem in New York, and people in this neighbourhood really saw a parallel in our work between Bahá’ís in Iran and the African-American experience of discrimination and the attempt to overcome discrimination, including in the area of education. We made a documentary about that in 2017, ‘Changing the World One Wall at a Time,’ which has been screened around the world.

This led to an initiative in Detroit, where we’ve partnered with the City of Detroit and local schools. The city government was already working to encourage school attendance, which is something we care about in terms of access to education. They created a bus route called the ‘GOAL Line’ – GOAL stands for ‘get on and learn’ – but we observed that the bus route had no shelters, so we offered to build some shelters and put artwork on them. The artwork was created in art workshops through a partnership with local students and local artists. The works represent the community in a direct way and create a visual cue in the community around the issue of education. In this activity, we moved from the area of pure awareness-raising to a kind of indirect social action.

We’re also starting to do a locally orientated street art project in London, producing work with local communities that celebrates local heroes, people who contribute to their community, whether they are known by their community or not. We put them on the side of buildings so they become positive stories that can encourage local young people.

Another thing we have been doing is producing an oral history video series in the USA, about the Bahá’í community, not only about Iran but also about the work of the community to promote race unity over the past several generations. Again, this is about telling a positive story and something that perhaps helps others in US society to look again at the issue of race – something that is obviously very charged and challenging – and find other ways of addressing it.

So that’s what I do. It’s a chance for both Maziar and I to talk about issues we think are important, but that are not limited to a focus on the Bahá’í community. Our work is at the intersection of human rights, social action and media. Sometimes it is about raising awareness or fighting instances of violations of human rights, as with the rights of the Bahá’í in Iran, but more and more now it is about finding positive stories and celebrating them through street art or a film or through other media. We want to do this in a way that can help a community see a positive version of themselves and put that at the centre of their own narrative.

What would you say you do that is different from the conventional work of a human rights organisation?

Because we are principally a media-driven group, we try to apply our media work to human rights issues and social issues, and we are looking to go beyond human rights awareness-raising to try to contribute to social processes in local communities. The Detroit project is an example of that. So that’s a kind of social action that’s distinct from awareness-raising as a conventional discipline.

We are trying to do human rights work and social action work together. We see them as different sides of basically the same work. We want to reach audiences that perhaps haven’t been engaged in human rights discussions or social action before, through media and through education workshops. So our focus is not so much on informing policy-makers, but on trying to reach local communities through accessible media and artforms.

What are the challenges faced when defending the rights of Bahá’í people in Iran?

I am also involved in IranWire, an independent news website. I know through this that Iranian journalists are targeted. Our site was recently down for a few hours over the course of several days because of a sustained denial of service attack originating from Iran.

Maziar is continually attacked on Twitter and by Iranian state media, as are other people we work with. Many people who have worked in the public space on the issue of the Bahá’ís are vilified by the Iranian media. When Maziar and others talk to United Nations institutions, they get criticised and there is a lot of disinformation spread about them. It’s clear that the Iranian authorities seek to discredit people through disinformation to try to limit their legitimacy in the international space when they talk about human rights issues happening inside Iran. The Iranian government attempts to control the narrative.

Turning to your work outside Iran, what would you say the major successes and challenges have been?

I think the big success we’ve had so far is the initiative to create the murals, especially in Harlem but also around the world: to create a story out of them, and for that story to be something that people respond to, and for us to find a way to relate that story to other situations around the world.

In the early stage of developing these murals in New York, after we had produced one or two in Harlem, the questions of these parallels between the Bahá’ís and the African-American community started to sit up. It’s not a parallel in terms of scale or severity or even of type, but it’s a parallel in terms of individual experiences and the ideology that has created a situation. African-American people who learned about the project brought that parallel to the fore in our discussions. Here was one community that is struggling identifying with the struggle of another community, that was undergoing the kind of suffering that makes the community more empathetic and more aware of the struggles of another.

We decided to tell that story as much as we could and in our work in Harlem to work with local artists and local community leaders as much as possible, and to hold educational workshops for young people around the creation of the murals. I think the fact that those murals became possible and were welcomed into the community, that there was the opportunity to see these parallels and to tell that story around the world, and that the story was broadcast inside Iran in Persian on satellite TV and seen by millions of people there, was probably the biggest success.

I think there’s not so much one major challenge we have been unable to overcome, although there are things that are harder to do than others, but it’s more that nobody is particularly out there asking for anybody to do something positive. I think a lot of people have a great desire, appetite and thirst for encountering positive stories even if they address challenging issues, but it’s not something you see being asked for in market terms, and in terms of what audience there is, and what funding you can get to do projects.

So it is a challenge to create the audience and explain our reasons for approaching our work as we do, and maintain these projects, because it’s not something that is being asked for in a commercial sense. I don’t necessarily mean commercial in terms of being driven by profit, but even non-profitable works need grants, and while there are grants that are tailored around work that tries to introduce positive narratives, it takes a lot of effort to identify them and to massage an idea into a format that would meet the requirements of a particular grant.

What more needs to change, and what further support is needed, to enable your work to achieve even more?

I think there are two levels. At the level of human attitudes, in general the world is in a very difficult place and much of what’s happening is turning people towards conflict. I think what needs to change – in order for the kind of stories we want to produce and tell to be more easily relatable and for people to be able to understand what we are getting at – is that people need to be orientated towards positive stories, towards sharing and finding them, and to seeing the world through the lens of positivity. This is not to deny there are negative things or pretend that everything is fine, but to say that we address a challenge or a difficulty not by more contention but by means of conciliation and friendliness. I think if people’s minds are orientated more that way they would be likelier to seek out or ask for the positive stories we try to tell. I’m not saying we’ve nailed that formula, but that’s our motivation and we’re trying to work in that direction.

At the structural level I think the kinds of grants, and often the kinds of initiatives that organisations want to support or are asking for, need to change. Again, it is possible to do that in terms of some grants that exist, but there is a lack of a structure and approach that says: this organisation really wants to find positive stories because positive stories change the nature of a society’s view of how to deal with challenging issues.

So much of what civil society does is about countering things that are negative. This is important work, but I also think that civil society should be going towards what it wants to see in the future. If there could be a harmonious sense across civil society about what the future ought to be, how human rights ought to be respected and what the nature of society should be in order to realise those ideals, then I think we could move towards shared civil society agendas that make it possible to work for these goals more easily.

In the civil society space, the media space and the human rights space – and partly because we are all too busy but also because there is no clearing house or central organising system – I don’t know who in civil society would want to work in the same way. But I’d love to know more about who’s out there and what they’re doing, in order to more easily find the appropriate partners.

Civic space in Iran is rated as ‘closed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch with Paint the Change through itswebsite.
Myanmar remains at crisis point and impunity still persists
Statement at the 51st Session of the UN Human Rights Council

Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar

Delivered by Kyaw Win

Thank you, Mr President, and thank you Special Rapporteur for the update.

Myanmar remains at crisis point in terms of human rights, especially the assault on civic freedoms. Both the UN and human rights groups have documented allegations of crime against humanity and war crimes perpetrated by the junta, with more than two thousand individuals unlawfully killed since the attempted coup in 2021.

Peaceful expression of dissent have been met with arbitrary arrest and detention by the junta. Criminalisation of activists, journalists and lawyers on fabricated charges ranging from ‘incitement’, sedition and terrorism has persisted. Political detainees have reported the frequent use of torture and extra-judicial executions in military bases, police stations and other places of detention. Burmese Muslims on the Thai-Burma border have been rendered stateless. The junta are consistently breaching ICJ provision measures.

Despite these documented crimes, impunity still persists and we call on the Council to ensure advancement of accountability.

Despite the appalling executions of four pro-democracy activists by the junta in August this year and the global outrage, more political prisoners are at risk of facing the death penalty and human rights violations have continued unabated. In this environment, civil society requires even more support and protection from the international community.

We ask the Special Rapporteur of strategies he has identified to enhance civic space protection inside the country, and particularly the role of UN agencies and UN member states in supporting both your mandate and supporting local civil society and human rights defenders.

Civic space in Myanmar is rated as "Repressed" by the CIVICUS Monitor
MYANMAR: ‘Opposition parties complain that the election body censors their messaging'
CIVICUS speaks to award-winning journalist Cape Diamond (Pyae Sone Win) about the upcoming elections in Myanmar. Cape is a multimedia journalist based in Myanmar, covering issues of human rights, crisis and conflict. Currently freelancing for the Associated Press (AP), he has provided critical coverage during the Rohingya crisis and contributed to numerous international outlets, including Al Jazeera, ABC News and CBS. He also contributed to the BAFTA Award-winning documentaryMyanmar’s Killing Fields and New York Film Festival gold medal award-winner The Rohingya Exodus.

Scheduled on 8 November 2020, the election will be Myanmar’s first since 2015, which resulted in a landslide victory for the National League for Democracy (NLD), and only the second competitive election since 1990, when the military annulled the NLD’s overwhelming victory.

What is the situation for civic freedoms and civil society ahead of the elections?

The situation for the freedom of speech is very concerning. Over the years, journalists and rights activists in Myanmar have been criminally charged for their work. Restrictive laws, including the Telecommunications Law, the Unlawful Associations Act, the Official Secrets Act and defamation provisions in the Penal Code, continue to be used to prosecute activists and journalists. The Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law has been used against those protesting.

Many political parties have raised complaints that the Union Election Commission (UEC), the electoral body, has censored the messages that are set for broadcast on national TV ahead of the elections. For example, Ko Ko Gyi, chairman of the People's Party, said that the edits that the UEC made to his election campaign speech prevent him from airing the party's full political stance ahead of the elections. Two parties – the Democratic Party for a New Society and the National Democratic Force – cancelled their election broadcasts in protest against censorship.

At the same time, critics say that the electoral body is biased in favour of the ruling party, the NLD led by Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s something that we should keep our eyes on and speak out about to ensure credible elections.

Has the electoral body engaged with civil society?

I’ve been hearing that the current UEC is not that actively engaging with civil society. They initially barred the People’s Alliance for Credible Elections (PACE), one of the largest election monitoring groups in the country, from monitoring the election. The UEC accused PACE of not being registered under the law that applies to civil society organisations and of receiving funding from international sources. Even though the UEC subsequently allowed PACE to operate, the organisation is struggling to proceed due to the newly imposed COVID-19 restrictions.

What are the main issues the campaign will revolve around?

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing civil war across the country are the main issues for us at the moment. It’s very clear that the ruling party and the government are not paying enough attention to the situation of minorities in regions experiencing civil war.

It’s worrying that the country is undergoing a pandemic, which I believe it does not have enough capacity to handle. As of 29 September 2020, we have had a total of 11,000 reported cases and 284 deaths due to COVID-19. A surge of infections over the last few weeks has been worrying, as we only had around 400 confirmed cases in August. I am concerned about whether the environment will be safe for people to go out and vote on the election days.

More than 20 political parties have sent requests to the electoral body to postpone the elections due to the pandemic, but they were rejected. The ruling party is not willing to have the elections postponed.

Will it be possible to have a ‘normal’ campaign in this context?

I don’t think it’s possible to have normal campaign rallies such as those of the previous election in 2015, because we are in a pandemic. The government has taken several measures to combat the spread of the disease, including orders against gatherings of people. Political parties are not allowed to organise their campaigns in semi-lockdown areas.

Major cities like Yangon and the Yangon Region, as well as some townships in Mandalay, are under semi-lockdown, which the government calls the Stay-At-Home programme. At the same time, the whole of Rakhine State, which is experiencing civil war, is also on semi-lockdown. I am afraid people in the civil war zone will not be able to go out and vote.

Candidates are using both mainstream and social media to reach their audiences. However, as noted earlier, some opposition parties have been censored by the UEC. Some opposition members have denounced unfair treatment by the UEC and the government, while the ruling party is using its power to expand its popularity. This will clearly harm the electoral chances of the opposition.

What specific challenges do candidates face in Rakhine State?

As the whole of Rakhine State is under COVID-19 restrictions, candidates are not able to campaign in person. Therefore, they are mostly campaigning on social media. At the same time, a long internet shutdown has been in place in many townships in Rakhine State, imposed due to ongoing fighting between the Arakan Army and the military. I am concerned about whether people will be able to get enough information around the elections.

The Myanmar government is also using the discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law and the Election Law to disenfranchise Rohingya people and block them from running for political office. Election officials barred Kyaw Min, head of the Rohingya-led Democracy and Human Rights Party (DHRP), from running. He was disqualified along with two other DHRP candidates because their parents were allegedly not citizens, as required by election law. This is one of the various tools used to oppress the Rohingya population.

In October, the UEC released a smartphone app that was criticised over its use of a derogatory label for Rohingya Muslims. The mVoter2020 app, aimed at improving voter awareness, labels at least two candidates from the Rohingya ethnic group as ‘Bengali’, a term that implies they are immigrants from Bangladesh, although most have lived in Myanmar for generations. This label is rejected by many Rohingya people. Additionally, none of the one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and another several hundred thousand dispersed in other countries will be allowed to vote.

Civic space in Myanmar is rated as ‘repressed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Follow@cape_diamond on Twitter.
UK: ‘The government continues to scapegoat migrants and fuel racist rhetoric to cover its policy failures’
CIVICUS speaks with Aria Danaparamita, Advocacy Director of theJoint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI),about the UK’s new migration treaty with Rwanda, aimed at sending asylum seekers arriving unlawfully in the UK to Rwanda for processing.

The JCWI has been challenging policies that lead to discrimination, destitution and the denial of rights in the UK for more than 50 years. It provides legal and advice services to immigrants and asylum-seekers.

How different is the new treaty that the UK signed with Rwanda from its predecessor?

The new agreement is different from the previous one because it’s a treaty between the governments of the UK and Rwanda, while the previous one was only a memorandum of understanding. A treaty is legally binding under international law and requires scrutiny by the UK parliament, while the previous agreement was simply signed by the UK Home Secretary.

The new treaty is accompanied by draft ‘emergency legislation’ seeking to provide the legal basis for maintaining that Rwanda is a safe country, which is a prerequisite for the treaty to be implemented without the UK breaching its international obligations towards asylum seekers.

The treaty includes provisions aimed at addressing the concerns raised by the UK Supreme Court about the systemic risks of human rights violations if people were to be sent to Rwanda. However, these provisions – which are at this point just words on paper – will be wholly inadequate. The Supreme Court was unanimous and unequivocal in its evidence-based finding that Rwanda is not a safe country, and the risks are systemic and cannot be improved in a matter of months, despite the government’s wishes. Because of this, the treaty and the provisions in the Rwanda Bill are nothing more than an attempt to legislate the fiction that Rwanda is safe, despite overwhelming evidence on the contrary.

Many people across the UK and across civil society are united in their strong rejection of the Rwanda plan. We have told the government ever since the first Rwanda flight was planned that this is a cruel and inhumane plan, and that it risks breaching the UK’s obligations under international law as well as our moral duty to protect people in search of safety. We continue to resist the government’s failed and inhumane Rwanda plan because we should not be sending people to places where their lives are at risk – whether Rwanda or anywhere else.

Do you view this as part of a wider trend?

We are seeing more and more policies that are hostile towards people on the move, particularly in western, former colonial countries. It is both ironic and unjust that the countries that have historically benefited, and continue to benefit, most from migration are now turning people away at their borders, often with high levels of violence. Across European lands and seas, we have seen lives taken away by cruel border regimes that do not value migrants as people. We urge the UK government to stop making policies driven by hate and hostility, and instead protect the rights of everyone to move, work and live freely.

Migration is a fact of life. We as humans have always moved, whether to the next town or to another country across the world. In fact, the most recent immigration statistics show that the UK urgently needs migrant workers to increase its labour force.

But instead of recognising the genuine need to welcome migrants in this country, or acknowledging the ways people contribute to our communities, the government continues to scapegoat migrants and fuel racist rhetoric to cover its policy failures – to address the deepening cost-of-living crisis, to reform our crippled healthcare sector, or to provide adequate public services after years of austerity.

What would the impact if the Rwanda plan were to be implemented?

The Rwanda plan has always been cruel, inhumane and, as the Supreme Court’s judgement unequivocally shows, unlawful. We cannot send people away to places where their lives might be at risk. It is against international law, our domestic law and our moral compass as a society.

If the Rwanda Bill is passed, it will almost certainly breach international law. The Home Secretary himself has acknowledged that he cannot guarantee it will comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. It will also stand to breach numerous conventions, from the Refugee Convention to the Convention against Torture.

The human cost of this bill will be catastrophic. Even before it has passed, we have seen the prospect of being sent to Rwanda drive the people we support into extreme anxiety and mental distress, and we continue to see alarming rates of self-harm and suicides. We cannot let this bill pass or be implemented. By implementing it, the government will be forcing people to face certain and irreversible harm.

How is UK civil society, and your organisation in particular, working to help migrants?

JCWI support migrants in various ways, including by providing legal representation and high-quality legal advice. We also campaign alongside migrants and grassroots communities for migrant justice.

For doing this work, in recent years we have faced increasingly hostile and racist rhetoric led by those in power and enabled by the media. However, we will not let this stop us. We know that most people are kind and compassionate and believe that we all have the right to live safe, thriving lives regardless of where we are from. Together we can build the world we want to live in, free from harm and border violence.

Civic space in the UK is rated ‘obstructed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch with the JCWI through itswebpage orFacebook page, and follow @JCWI_UK onTwitter andInstagram.
UK: ‘The Rwanda plan sets a worrying precedent for the future of migration and human rights’

CIVICUS speaks with Julia Tinsley-Kent, Policy and Strategic Communications Manager of the Migrants’ Rights Network, about the UK’s new migration treaty with Rwanda, aimed at sending asylum seekers arriving unlawfully in the UK to Rwanda for processing.

The Migrants’ Rights Network is a UK charity that stands in solidarity with migrants in their fight for rights and justice.

How different is the new treaty that the UK signed with Rwanda from its predecessor? Do you think it will be implemented?

The Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling that the UK government’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda was unlawful on the basis that the country is unsafe and that there was a risk of refoulement – the forcible return of migrants to a country where they are likely to face persecution.

However, the UK government has not been deterred and has pressed ahead with new legislation that would declare Rwanda a safe country. The new Bill would give the government the power to disapply elements of the Human Rights Act 1998 and ignore European Court of Human Rights injunctions against deportation flights. It also puts a legal obligation on the courts to consider Rwanda a safe country when considering removal decisions, and to not entertain any claim based on the UK’s Human Rights Act or international law obligations.

The UK government has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to outsourcing its protection obligations to other countries like Rwanda. Regardless of whether this policy is eventually implemented, it has already caused harm to migrant communities in Britain and demonstrated what lengths the government is prepared to go in deterring people from seeking safety and a new life in the UK.

What is concerning about the plan is the worrying precedent it sets for the future of migration and human rights. It shows the UK government is prepared to overhaul the judicial system to push through regressive and cruel policies.

Do you view this as part of a wider regional or global restrictive trend?

The Rwanda plan is one component of the UK’s increasingly hostile environment for migrants. This is reflective of a wider global trend. Across the world, but particularly in Europe and the USA, governments are pouring money into tightening already highly militarised borders.

In times of crisis or economic instability, governments will scapegoat excluded groups and migrants to distract from their own failings. It is the oldest trick in the book. At a time where the UK is in the midst of a chronic cost of living crisis where growing numbers of people are struggling to feed their families or pay their bills, the government is shifting the blame and attention on to migrants.

Contemporary attitudes and policies on migration draw on decades of restrictive racist immigration policies, aimed at keeping out particular groups of migrants. We must acknowledge the disparities between who is constructed as welcome in the west and who is not. For example, hostile borders and immigration policies have not been imposed on white people from Ukraine nor wealthy, western expats. Instead, it is people of colour and those from majority-Muslim countries who withstand the worst of them.

How does UK civil society and your organisation in particular work to help migrants?

At the Migrants’ Rights Network, we stand in solidarity with migrants in their fights for rights and justice. We are a charity mostly led by migrants and migratised people – people assumed to be migrants – that campaigns for transformational change to tackle oppression at its source. We are not a formal network but we work to establish and strengthen connections because we believe it is through building bonds between people that we have the greatest opportunity to achieve transformational change. We are led by the opinions, views and experiences of migrants and grassroots organisations and are willing to be challenged. In particular, we look at how racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and other systems of oppression shape immigration systems and how migrants are constructed in prevalent narratives.

Our work takes many forms. Among these, we use our platform to raise awareness of pressing issues amongst politicians and policy makers, and in the media; work with people and organisations to build campaigns and links with legal experts to pursue strategic litigation; build an evidence base for change by co-curating with affected migrants to better understand the issues and inform our work and the work of others; promote partnership and collaboration between different causes and campaigns, to enable information and resource sharing; inform migrant communities on their rights through our tailored resources and training; and develop alternative narratives to counter harmful rhetoric and narratives around migration through informative and creative campaigns.

British migration charities should focus on delivering much-needed support and campaigning for liberation, but must also ensure that they are held to account by migrants. Recommendations are often based on assumptions rather than experience, so we must ensure we remain accountable to those who have moved across borders.

Civic space in the UK is rated ‘obstructed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch with Migrants’ Rights Network through itswebpage orFacebook page and follow @migrants_rights_network onTwitter andInstagram.

The opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIVICUS.
VIETNAM: ‘The government is using non-state actors against minority religions’
CIVICUS speaks with Thang Nguyen of Boat People SOS (BPSOS), a civil society organisation based in the USA and Thailand, about the challenges for civil society and religious minorities in Vietnam, and about their work to enable civil society responses.

Can you tell us about BPSOS and the work it does?

I’m currently the CEO and President of BPSOS, having joined initially as a volunteer. BPSOS was founded in 1980. We have two major divisions. The first, our domestic programme, is about serving refugees and migrants in the USA, across six locations. Second, we have our international initiatives, run from our regional headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand.

In Bangkok, we provide a legal clinic to help refugees and asylum seekers with their asylum claims and with protection – not only those coming from Vietnam but also from other countries, including Cambodia, China, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. We have a programme to help Vietnamese human rights defenders at risk, whether they be in prison or in hiding in Vietnam or seeking refuge in Thailand or elsewhere. A major component is to build capacity for civil society in Vietnam at the community level. Finally, we have a religious freedom project, working with local, regional and global partners, to build up a network for advocates for freedom of religion or belief in South East Asia. We hold an annual conference, the Southeast Asia Freedom of Religion or Belief Conference (SEAFORB).

What are the key current challenges experienced by civil society in Vietnam?

The regime is still very oppressive. The government has heavy-handed policies against people coming together to form their own associations, which make it hard for organised civil society to develop. The government is now somewhat more tolerant with individuals speaking out, or perhaps it is that the government struggles to control expression on social media to the same extent.

Another challenge comes with the people themselves. Living in a closed society, they don’t have many opportunities to develop the necessary skills or experience to come together and form associations.

Further, there’s very little commitment or investment from the international community to develop civil society in Vietnam, compared for example to Cambodia or Myanmar. There are very few organisations from outside Vietnam that work hand in hand with groups in Vietnam to help them develop capacity to implement programmes.

Because of this, there are very few truly functional independent civil society organisations in Vietnam and the number of these has decreased over the last five years because they cannot sustain themselves in the face of interference from the government. There are only individual human rights defenders, some of them well-known, but not organised civil society.

In contrast, there are tens of thousands of government-owned ‘non-governmental’ organisations (GONGOs) that are controlled by the Communist Party. They present themselves as the civil society of Vietnam.

What are the challenges minority groups face in Vietnam, particularly religious minorities?

Many of the minority groups are indigenous peoples, but the government of Vietnam does not recognise them as such; it only classes them as ethnic minorities. They therefore face a fight for the right to be recognised as indigenous people. They are often separated from their ancestral land.

For many groups, a religion that is a minority belief in Vietnam is part of their social and cultural makeup. For example, the Cham are Muslim and the Khmer Krom are Theravada Buddhists, which is very different from the Mahayana Buddhism practised by the majority of Vietnamese Buddhists. Then there are the Hmong and the Montagnards: Christianity has spread among the Montagnards for decades, and the government wants to control and stop this. Since the early 1980s, Christianity also started to develop in the Northwest Region among the Hmong population. The government of Vietnam viewed this as an undesirable influence from the west, and therefore it has taken drastic messages to stop its further spreading in the Northwest and Central Highlands regions.

Most of these groups of people are located remotely and so don’t have access to the internet, and don’t know how to attract resources, even from within Vietnam. Other people in Vietnam aren’t aware of the situation, let alone the international community. Little information is available about these groups.

The government authorities are directly suppressing independent house churches. In the Central Highlands, thousands of house churches have been closed, set on fire and destroyed. In 2004 the government issued an ordinance on belief and religion, meaning that house churches have to be registered. There are credible reports that the government trained a lot of its own people to become pastors, and they have set up new churches allowed by the government. These are run and controlled by the government.

A major challenge is the forced renunciation of faith. Christians have been ordered to leave their parish churches and told not to follow any religion, or to join a government-controlled church. People who have resisted joining government-controlled churches have been harassed, persecuted and tortured. Several deaths in police custody have been documented. There are quite a lot of religious prisoners of conscience, many of them Montagnard Christians.

The repression of the Hmong is even more drastic. In many parts of Northwest Region, Hmong Christians who have refused to renounce their faith have been evicted from their villages by the local authorities. Their villages have been declared as Christian-free zones. Tens of thousands of Hmong have been affected, something that continues to this day. They became itinerant, and it has taken them many years to coalesce into new communities, usually in previously uninhabited areas unknown to local government. Many moved to the Central Highlands. They are completely undocumented and so have become functionally stateless. They live outside society. Married people are not issued with marriage certificates, babies do not get birth certificates, children can’t formally receive education – although some slip into school unofficially – and people can’t get legal employment, set up a business, or open a bank account. They are restricted in their travel: pastors can’t travel into these communities, while they cannot travel to worship elsewhere.

In many provinces Catholics, even when they are part of the major ethnic groups, have been persecuted by the government. And then there is the Cao Dai religion, a minority religion with about five million reported followers, although the government only recognises around 1.2 million Cao Daiists. Its church structures were disbanded in 1978. In 1997 the government created a new Cao Dai sect, and then 10 years later turned this into a new religion with a similar name and transferred all the property of the Cao Dai religion to it. To the world the government presents this sect as the representative of the Cao Dai religion.

The government is also using non-state actors against minority religions. In Nghe An Province, the authorities use organised mobs known as Red Flag Associations, which are supported and encouraged by local authorities to attack churches and beat up parishioners. We have had several reports of this.

What steps are needed to help civil society respond to these rights violations?

Because of the restriction of organised civil society there’s very little response to the suppression of religious minorities. This lack of organised civil society also makes it difficult to foster partnerships between civil society groups in Vietnam and international human rights organisations. In response, we are trying to build community capacity to develop organisations in Vietnam to protect rights.

We train a lot of people in Vietnam to know how to report human rights violations. So far we’ve trained about a thousand local rapporteurs and they have generated about 200 different reports that have been submitted to various United Nations (UN) special procedures and UN bodies, and shared with other governments and international human rights organisations to raise awareness of the situation in Vietnam.

We are helping to form community-based CSOs in each minority community. So far there are about 20 of these, and we aim to have 100 by the end of 2020. We have incubated a number of CSOs specialising in different aspects of human rights, based on the international commitments Vietnam has made as a result of signing various conventions. For example, we have supported the creation and development of Vietnamese Women for Human Rights, the Vietnam Coalition Against Torture and the Vietnam Freedom of Religion or Belief Roundtable. We have worked with Montagnard people to form a CSO specialising in Montagnard minorities. Now we are connecting these specialist CSOs with their peers outside Vietnam. For instance Vietnamese Women for Human Rights is now a member of FORUM-ASIA, a network of human rights organisations throughout Asia and the Pacific. We are cultivating these kinds of partnerships.

What more support is needed?

Once CSOs in Vietnam have developed some capacity, there is a need to connect them with civil society outside Vietnam. We are advocating for organisations to offer internship and fellowship schemes to enable staff to develop skills, experience, connections and exposure outside Vietnam.

We hope to see more projects geared at further developing civil society in Vietnam, through training, coaching and technical assistance as well as advocacy. There has been an almost complete lack of this kind of investment from civil society worldwide. Organisations are issuing statements about Vietnam and that is appreciated, but this is the next step needed. Amnesty International now has a Vietnamese national working on Vietnam, who was with BPSOS before, so this is a positive step and a model to replicate.

It would be much more effective if international human rights organisations working on Vietnam could coordinate among themselves, and with groups within Vietnam. For instance, a joint advocacy project on the functionally stateless Montagnard Christians, with pressure coming from multiple directions, would help.

Civic space in Vietnam is rated as ‘closed’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

Get in touch with BSPOS through itswebsite orFacebook page and follow@BoatPeopleSOS on Twitter.