The Old Were Sacrificed

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The COVID19 has been devastating for elderly people. 
The numbers are staggering, more than 80 percent of the fatalities due to coronavirus in the US and East Asia occurred among adults aged 65 and over. In Europe and Australia, the figures are even higher, 94 and 97 per cent of the deaths were persons aged 60 and over.

However, when contagions spread, older persons were denied access to beds and ventilators, despite being the most vulnerable group.
Human rights experts were alarmed by the decisions made around the use of scarce medical resources in hospitals and intensive care units, discriminating solely based on age. Despite being helpless and most at risk, older persons were not prioritized; they were de facto sacrificed, denied treatment and emergency support. 
About half of the coronavirus casualties in high income countries were in care homes, though this is an underestimation because originally official death tolls did not include those who had died outside hospitals without a COVID19 test done. 
In Sweden, protocols discouraged care workers from sending older persons to hospitals, letting them die in the care homes. 
Most countries reported insufficient protective equipment and testing in care homes for both residents and care workers. Thousands were infected of coronavirus in nursing homes, and while some staff heroically worked in dangerous conditions, others did not. Staff absenteeism added to the problems. 
In a nursing home in France, 24 old folk passed away in only 5 days; they died alone in their rooms of hypovolemic shock, without food or water, because 40 percent of the staff was absent. 
In Canada, a criminal investigation was launched after 31 residents were found dead, unfed and unchanged at a Seniors’ Residence; after other disturbing cases, the Canadian military had to be deployed to assist and the government is considering to take over all private long-term care institutions. 
In Spain, when the military were deployed to disinfect nursing homes, they were shocked to find people “completely abandoned or even dead in their beds.” Spain has launched criminal investigations into dozens of care homes after grieving relatives of thousands of elderly coronavirus victims claimed ‘our parents were left to die’.
In Italy’s Lombardy region, a resolution offering 150 euros (US$175) to care homes for accepting COVID19 patients to ease the burden on hospital beds, accelerated the spread of the virus among health workers and residents. Coffins piled up in nursing homes. Families are filing lawsuits for mishandling the epidemic.
In the US, more than 38,000 older persons have died in residences because of COVID19 and many families have filed lawsuits against nursing homes for wrongful death and gross negligence. In the US, nursing homes and long-term care operators have been lobbying state and federal legislators across the US to pass laws giving them broad immunity, denying responsibility for conditions inside care homes during COVID19. Nineteen states have recently enacted laws or gubernatorial executive orders granting nursing homes protection from civil liability in connection with COVID19. Nobody is being held responsible for the suffering of thousands of older persons that died alone in care homes.
In the UK, families of care home residents who died from COVID19 are suing the Health and Social Care Secretary; the claims accuse the government of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights, National Health Service Act 2006 and the Equalities Act.
Long-term care is a lucrative and powerful industry. Europe’s care sector is concentrated in the hands of a few large private groups. Also in the US, 70 percent of the 15,000 nursing homes are run by for-profit companies; many have been bought and sold in recent years by private-equity firms.
Health system capacity is strained because austerity cuts in earlier years. It was the shortage of beds, staff and equipment that made doctors discriminate against older persons and prioritize those younger, with more chances of survival to COVID19. Governments and international financial institutions must stop mean budget cuts that have condemned many to die, and instead invest in universal public health and social protection systems, spend more on health and long-term care services for older persons.
Despite a rapidly ageing population, half the world’s elderly lacks access to long-term care. At the moment, governments spend very little on long term care; instead, they have allowed private care services to develop, with minimal regulation. As a result, most older persons have to pay up to 100 percent of long term care out of their own pocket and most cannot afford quality services – a highly unequal system. Societies have failed their senior citizens during the COVID19 pandemic
“Older people have the same rights to life and heath as everyone else. Difficult decisions around life-saving medical care must respect the human rights and dignity of all,” stated the UN Secretary-General.



 http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/07/neglected-sacrificed-older-persons-covid19-pandemic/

Lead Poison in the Blood

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One in three children around the world have concentrations of lead in their blood at levels likely to cause significant long-term health damage, new research has found.
About 800 million children and young people under the age of 19 are likely to have blood levels of lead at or above 5 micrograms per decilitre (5μg/dl), according to the report. There is no safe level for lead exposure, according to the World Health Organization, because even at very low concentrations it operates as a dangerous toxin, but levels above 5μg/dl are regarded by the US Centers for Disease Control as a cause for action. Lead is a potent neurotoxin and high exposure can kill, while lower levels cause symptoms ranging from pain, vomiting and seizures to developmental delay, mental difficulties and mood disorders. The lower levels can also cause children to be born prematurely. Exposure at the levels studied is likely to cause reductions in cognitive ability, higher levels of violence and long term health impacts such as cardiovascular disease, according to the researchers. 
Children are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure because it damages the developing brain and nervous system, building up over time, and the impacts do not show immediately. Lead mimics calcium in the bones, building up in people’s bodies and causing damage to other vital organs, including the kidneys, heart and lungs. Lead at 5μg/dl of blood is likely to wipe about 3-5 points from a child’s IQ score, and at the levels found in the Unicef report could double the level of violence in society. It is also likely to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, as about 900,000 deaths a year are already linked to lead poisoning.  30 academic studies had linked elevated lead levels to people’s propensity for violent behaviour, providing enough corroboration for scientists to make a strong association between continuing lead contamination and its likely impacts on violence.
“This is an absolutely shocking figure,” said Nicholas Rees, policy specialist at Unicef and author of the report. “We have known for so long about the toxic nature of lead, but we have not known how widespread it is, and how many children are affected.”
Richard Fuller of Pure Earth, an NGO that collaborated with Unicef on the report, said people were less aware of the damage caused by lead, after campaigns to remove the toxin from many common uses in developed countries decades ago.
“We did a terrific job of taking lead out of gasoline, but the use of lead has plateaued after falling in the 1970s and 80s,” he said. Fuller said that while the levels of lead might seem small, across populations the damage was significant. “It means double the number of people who are intellectually impaired,” he said. “It is definitely not a trivial issue.”
 In the US, children living in poorer households and dilapidated accommodation have been found to be at higher risk. In the UK, about 200,000 children are likely to be affected, according to Unicef.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/30/one-in-three-children-dangerous-levels-lead-in-blood

Cuba Continues Reforms

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Cuba is loosening restrictions on small businesses as it seeks to stimulate a state-dominated economy effected by events in its ally Venezuela, the United States sanctions and the pandemic. 



 President Miguel Diaz-Canel, however, speaking earlier this month, said the country faced an ongoing international crisis and would implement a series of reforms to increase exports, cut imports and stimulate domestic demand. The economy is forecast to decline this year in tandem with the region, or a bit less than 10 percent. The government admits it has little foreign exchange to buy food, fuel and other supplies from abroad, where the peso is worthless. Cuba faced a liquidity crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered tourism and hit other revenue earners.



 The measures include more autonomy for state companies, farmers and local government, dollarisation of some internal trade and, Diaz-Canel said, “the improvement of the non-state sector, with immediate priority in the expansion of self-employment and removal of obstacles.”



 The non-state sector, excluding agriculture, is composed mainly of small private businesses and cooperatives; their employees, artisans, taxi drivers and tradesmen. All are under the rubric of self-employed, numbering 600,000 before the pandemic left an estimated 40 percent tied to the tourism industry and public transportation without work.



 One obstacle already removed regards the right to import and export, albeit through state companies.



 “We want to put all forms of management on an equal footing,” Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca said.



 COVID-19 pandemic has worsened shortages of food, medicine and other goods and led to long lines at retail outlets.



 https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/isle-revival-communist-run-cuba-loosens-grip-small-businesses-200729190411727.html



Black Motherhood

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n 2018, Serena Williams gave birth to her first child via caesarean section. The day after the birth, the world-number-one tennis player became breathless and told doctors she believed she had developed a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot on her lungs), which she has a history of. She later described how she had to plead with her medical team for a CT scan, which showed she was correct. The blood clots could have been fatal if not treated.
Nine months later, Beyoncé opened up about her experience of pre-eclampsia when she was pregnant with her twins, Rumi and Sir. Her babies were delivered via emergency c-section, and had to stay in intensive care for weeks. Despite being two of the wealthiest women in the world, their stories resonate with black mothers everywhere.
In November 2019, a report into maternal morbidity in the UK from researchers at Oxford University, found black women are five times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth or in the postpartum period, compared to their white counterparts. Asian women were also twice as likely to die compared to white women. This data was up from previous years, which still staggeringly showed black women were three times more likely to die than white women.
Medical professionals have long assumed the death rate can be explained by pre-existing conditions amongst black women such as high blood pressure, or the higher prevalence of complications such as pre-eclampsia. Rather, research from the US points to a more complex picture. The likeliness of an adverse outcome for someone like a black, healthy, middle-class professional increases, rather than decreases. 
In the United States there are similar racial disparities in its maternal deaths with black and indigenous Americans being two to three times as likely to die of pregnancy related causes. 
Black motherhood has been presented in an unfavourable light, both in popular culture and academic circles. Studies have shown the media uses “concern for children as a rhetorical tool to define poor and minority women as bad mothers,” and statistics show black children are overrepresented in the care system, making up 16 per cent of all looked-after children and young people. This is despite society being built on the care services of black women; 20 per cent of black African women work in the health and social care sector often in lower paid jobs that require longer shift patterns.
US academic, Dorthy Roberts in her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty describes how stereotypes of black motherhood persist, from “welfare queens”, who are presented as “immoral, neglectful, and domineering” to “hypersexual” women that are accused of “overbreeding”. In the UK, the media has routinely linked households with single black mothers to increasing youth violence, with little regard for the other structural factors at play.
In March, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (RCOG) hosted an event entitled ‘We need to talk about race’ for International Women’s Day, following an article of the same name written by obstetrician Dr Christine Ekechi. The RCOG event was well attended, yet there was a noticeable absence of white healthcare professionals. Dr Ekechi shared her own powerful experiences of navigating the health system as a black woman whilst sharing those of other women who had felt “dismissed” by healthcare professionals or reduced to “complainers”.
Janet Fyle, a senior midwife and professional policy advisory, is adamant that underlying prejudice among midwives is a crucial factor in the deaths of black mothers: 
“Black women are categorised according to a white perspective; they are not believed, this notion of them having a higher threshold for pain and these biases mean that we miss serious conditions or the opportunity to escalate serious changes in the woman’s condition in a timely way.” Fyle says this goes back as far as when people are studying medicine. “They practice as students on white women and with no opportunity to understand differences,” she says. “People are getting things wrong because they are not culturally competent, for example, doctors, nurses and midwives have the standard patient profile in their heads as being a woman who is blonde, blue eyes and size 12. It’s everything about the concept of medicine.”
The problem isn’t exclusive to women’s experience of childbirth either: the RCOG has highlighted racial disparities within gynaecology services, including the late diagnosis of gynecological cancers and lower uptake of cervical screening amongst black women.
On 15 July the RCOG launched a race equality taskforce to better understand how to tackle racial disparities amongst patients as well as understand the effects on racism on staff working within the sector. The taskforce plans to collaborate with groups across healthcare, government and individuals to ensure new ways are developed to tackle racism and racial disparity.
Dr Ekechi says: “It sends a clear and brave message to our members and the women that we serve, of our strong commitment to equality in outcomes for all obstetricians and gynaecologists in the UK and for the health of each and every woman.” Ekechi says she is “confident” it will “ultimately save lives”.
Rachael Buabeng, founder of Mummy’s Day Out, a community for black women to network and share experiences, had a pregnancy plagued by hyperemesis gravidarum (nausea and vomiting which can lead to reduced fetal growth) and a difficult childbirth. She describes how her husband had to advocate for her when she was not offered alternative pain relief after declining an epidural; she went on to deliver her baby without the midwife in the room, explained:
 “What maternity services need is very, very straightforward. Treat every woman as an individual. Believe women when they say that they will feel pain, believe women when they say that something is not right. Believe women when they say that they are concerned about something and don’t brush it off.”

A Broken Pledge

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The super-rich who pledged to give away most of their money to good causes are instead sitting on rising wealth fueled by the “warehousing” of cash in dedicated family foundations or funds, a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies has found.



 More than three-quarters of a group of US billionaires who signed up to the Giving Pledge to donate most of their money saw a significant rise in wealth over the last decade.



 “The Giving Pledgers set out in 2010 to give away half their wealth and instead their assets have doubled,” said Chuck Collins, co-author of the Gilded Giving report.



  51 out of the 62 American billionaires reviewed in the research saw “significant increases” in their net worth. 



 This is partly because many are making money so fast that it has “outstripped” their capacity to give it away, the IPS said.



 But it also highlighted concerns that many are choosing to put their charitable funds into private foundations and donor-advised funds that often save on tax and may end up “warehousing” money instead of getting it to just causes.



 “They should give it directly to working non-profit charities and not to their own perpetual family foundations or donor-advised funds,” Collins said.



 The top 1 percent may hold 24 percent of global wealth by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report, as global wealth inequality steadily grows.

Vaccine Nationalism Warning

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Global health agencies are planning a scheme to bulk-buy and equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They are watching with dismay as some wealthier countries have decided to go it alone, striking deals with drug-makers to secure millions of doses of promising candidates for their citizens.
The deals – including those agreed by the United States, Britain and the European Union with the likes of Pfizer, BioNtech, AstraZeneca and Moderna  – are undermining the global drive, experts say.
“Everybody doing bilateral deals is not a way to optimize the situation,” said Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI alliance which co-leads the scheme called COVAX designed to secure rapid and fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer said this week it was in concurrent talks with the EU and several of its member states on supplying them with its potential vaccine. Britain announced a deal on Wednesday to secure advanced supplies of potential COVID-19 vaccines from GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi.
This, according to health charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), will further fuel “the global scramble to hoard vaccines by rich countries” and feed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism”.
The concern is that vaccine supply and allocation in this pandemic will echo the last – caused by the H1N1 flu virus in 2009/2010 – when rich nations bought up the available supply of vaccines, initially leaving poor countries with none.
“There is a risk that some countries are doing exactly what we feared – which is every man for himself,” said Gayle Smith, former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and CEO of the One Campaign, a non-profit aimed at ending poverty and preventable disease.
The United States, China and Russia are not among countries expressing interest in COVAX, according to GAVI. And an EU source said last week that the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive arm and leads EU talks with drug-makers, has advised EU countries not to buy COVID-19 vaccines via COVAX.
“I am worried,” said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is happening with the handful of nations that are locking up supply of vaccine competes with the multilateral supply deals. At the end of the day, vaccine manufacturing is a finite resource. You can expand it, but only so much.”
Experts estimate the world can reasonably hope to have around 2 billion doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines by the end of next year. Berkley of GAVI said, however, that if self-interested countries or regions snapped those up to cover their entire populations – instead of sharing them across nations and protecting the most at-risk people first – the pandemic could not be controlled.
“If you were to try to vaccinate the entire U.S., (and) the entire EU, for example, with two doses of vaccine – then you’d get to about 1.7 billion doses. And if that is the number of doses that’s available, there’s not a lot left for others.” If a handful, or even 30 or 40 countries have vaccines, but more than 150 others don’t, “then the epidemic will rage there” Berkley said.
“This virus … moves around like lightning. So you’ll end up in a situation where you will not be able to go back to normal. You won’t be able to have commerce, tourism, travel, trade, unless you can get the whole pandemic to be slowed down.” He and Smith and other health experts said ending the pandemic meant ending it globally.

The fate of land defenders

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A new report reveals a spike in the murder of global land defenders, especially in Latin America. The failure to combat climate change is forcing the most vulnerable to the frontlines, and to pay with their lives. According to NGO, Global Witness, 212 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 alone, a 30% rise from the 164 killed in 2018. Around 40% were indigenous people and traditional land owners.



  Mary Menton, a research fellow in environmental justice at University of Sussex who co-authored the report, told DW that she “would not be surprised” if the real figure were double due to the failure to report and even investigate killings. 



  Menton says only 10% of perpetrators are prosecuted. 



 The overall rise in murders is part of a broader trend. Astudy published in Nature in 2019 showed that in the 15 years between 2002 and 2017, more than 1,558 environment defenders were killed, doubling from two to four per week over that time. 



 Increasing conflict over scarce land resources in a time of rising global consumer demand is forcing indigenous and traditional community leaders to protect their territories, says Rachel Cox,  a campaigner at Global Witness. 

“Indigenous people are disproportionately vulnerable to attack,” she says of minorities resisting mining, logging and the agribusiness projects encroaching on the frontiers they call home. But the killings are only the tip of the iceberg. “Many more defenders were attacked, jailed or faced smear campaigns because of their work,” said Cox

.

1. The Philippines

The deadliest country for environmental activists in 2018, at least 46 environmental defenders were murdered last year in the Philippines, a 53% increase and a return to the high murder rate during the first years of the Duterte regime. Twenty six murders were related to agribusiness, the highest in the world. Leon Dulce, the national coordinator of Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, says “we are bracing for more spates of violence” due to government efforts to expand mining and logging “under the guise of a COVID-19 economic recovery.” President Duterte is also using draconian anti-terror laws to suppress activists by labeling them as criminals.  



 The southern island of Mindanao remains a hotspot with 19 environment-related killings in 2019 due to ongoing opposition to palm oil and agribusiness fruit plantations. In the photo top, a family from the island’s Bukidnon region, are from the KADIMADC community whose ancestral lands have been grabbed and illegally sub-leased.

Attacks are prevalent on the territory of these indigenous or Lumad people, Dulce explained, because it forms “the last forest corridors of the island.” Indigenous communities “continue to stand in the way of mining, dam, and agribusiness tenements,” he said. 

The Philippines’ high vulnerability to climate change, especially typhoons, has further necessitated this resistance, according to the report. 



 2. Brazil

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to expand large-scale mining and agribusiness in the Amazon has forced indigenous peoples further into the frontlines of the climate crisis, especially as deforestation on indigenous land increased by 74% from 2018 to 2019. Of the 24 murders of land defenders in Brazil, 90% occurred in the Amazon. The uptick in violence in the resource rich region that is also the planet’s largest carbon sink, comes as the Bolsonaro government introduced a controversial bill in 2019 that calls for the legalization of commercial mining on indigenous land. In June last year, it was reported that dozens of miners dressed in military uniform invaded the Wajapi community in the Brazilian Amazon, stabbing and killing one of its leaders.



 3. Mexico

Eighteen land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 in Mexico, a rise of four. They included Otilia Martínez Cruz, 60, and her 20-year-old son, Gregorio Chaparro Cruz, who were found dead outside their home in the town of El Chapote in north-west Mexico on May 1, 2019. The indigenous Tarahumara defenders were allegedly killed by assassins in retaliation for their efforts to stop the illegal deforestation of their ancestral land in the Sierra Madre. Two months earlier, Samir Flores Soberanes was shot dead outside his home on February 20, 2019. An Indigenous Nahuatl farmer and environmental activist from Amilcingo, Morelos, Samir publicly spoke out against the Morelos Integral Project (MIP) to develop coal and gas energy infrastructure the day before he was killed.



 4. Romania

Europe has rarely witnessed deaths by environment defenders, but two rangers fighting illegal logging were killed in 2019. Romania has over half of Europe’s remaining old-growth and primeval forests that have been dubbed the “lungs of Europe.” But according to Greenpeace, some 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of this pristine forest is degraded every hour in Romania, much of it by the “wood mafia” that the two forest rangers opposed. The Global Witness report notes that there were hundreds of threats and attacks against the rangers before they were killed. Despite the thousands who marched in Bucharest and across Romania in late 2019 to oppose illegal logging and to demand an investigation into the attacks, no one has been charged.  



 5. Honduras

Killings rose from four in 2018 to 14 last year in Honduras, making it the most dangerous country per capita for land and environmental defenders in 2019. Lethal attacks against activists were especially prevalent against women, continuing the upward trend since Honduran activist and indigenous leader Berta Caceres was brutally murdered in 2016, months after winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, for opposing dam construction in her region. “Women have an important leadership in the fight against extractive companies and criminal groups that want to take away their land,” said Marusia Lopez of the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders, which documented 1,233 attacks against these women defenders between 2017-18.   Afro-indigenous Garifuna people living on the east coast were especially targeted in 2019, with 16 killed for defending their lands, mostly from palm oil and tourism development. Criminal groups have long attacked Garifuna communities with impunity.



 6. Columbia

More than two-thirds of killings took place in Latin America, with Colombia topping the list with 64 murders due to the failure to implement the 2016 peace agreement with FARC and protect farmers transitioning from coca to cocoa and coffee to reduce cocaine production. 



 https://www.dw.com/en/5-deadly-countries-for-environmental-defenders/a-54298499

Philanthropic Foolery

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MacKenzie Scott, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife and the second-richest woman in the world,  says, “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others,”



 Scott  married Bezos a year before he founded Amazon and was one of the firm’s first employees, received a 4% stake from the divorce settlement, shortly after announcing she had signed the Giving Pledge which commits the super wealthy to give away much of their fortunes to charity. Bezos has not joined the Giving Pledge.



 Scott has donated  more than $586 million to racial justice organisations and $399.5 million  to groups aimed at advancing economic mobility. Other causes included gender equality, global development and LGBTQ equality. The list of organisations includes the labour advocacy group One Fair Wage, and other non-profits such as Black Girls Who Code. The $20m gift to Tuskegee University, a historically black college, is the largest in the school’s history. In total, MacKenzie Scott says that she has given $1.7bn (£1.3bn) in philanthropic funding.



 Brian Mittendorf, a professor at Ohio State University, who researches charity finances, explains, Scott’s approach differs from that of many other high-profile billionaires. He said announcements are often built up in advance, with new organisations that can be slow responsible for distributing funds.

“If the goal of doing this was to generate publicity, you wouldn’t have done it the way she did,” he said. “If the goal was to generate impact…this looks like a pretty good way of doing it.”
The list of recipients suggests Scott is trying to address root causes of inequality and racial injustice – priorities that are “more typical” of female than male donors, said Una Osili, a professor of economics and philanthropic studies at Indiana University’s Lily School of Philanthropy. The effort to promote a diverse group of organisations – both big and small, led by people of colour and women, also stands out, she said.
 The Socialist Party is frequently perceived as stingy scrooges for we criticise the idea of giving to charity and we scold philanthropy. We do not doubt the sincerity or compassion of those who donate to charities. But what is fostered is the dangerous illusion that, either through charitable alms-giving, the many problems of capitalism can be solved by good-will and kind gestures. The  Socialist Party is not indifferent to human suffering but it points out that society is well capable of solving the problems of poverty, hunger and homelessness. What does not exist is the social system of production and distribution can be matched to people’s need. Capitalism is a world of deliberate scarcity, in order to pursue the aims of competition and profit.

Myanmar and Women’s Rights

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Myanmar is soon to see the latest version of its Prevention of and Protection from Violence Against Women (PoVAW) introduced in parliament. Legislation that aims to protect women against violence in Myanmar is  long overdue, but it is raising concern among human rights advocates about the inadequate definition of rape, vague definition for “consent”, and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rhetoric.



 The Global Justice Centre (GJC), an international human rights and humanitarian law organisation focusing on advancing gender equality, has pointed out that the legislation falls short of addressing violence against women.

According to GJC, the language used in the law borrows from colonial Myanmar’s 1861 Penal Code and thus perpetuates antiquated understandings of rape, such as; considering rape as violence committed only by men, the definition of “rape” constituting only of vaginal penetration, and no acknowledgement of marital rape.
“The Myanmar government has long shown a lack of commitment to breaking the cycle of impunity for widespread sexual and gender-based violence, a problem that is exacerbated by broader structural barriers with respect to Myanmar’s military justice system, and a lack of robust domestic options for accountability,” the GJC analysis has claimed.
Khin Ohmar, an exiled human rights advocate from Myanmar and founder and chairperson of the advisory board of Progressive Voice — a participatory rights-based policy research and advocacy organisation rooted in civil society, with strong links to grassroots and community-based organisations throughout Myanmar  —  shared how sexual violence in the country is used in a “systematic pattern to target ethnic women and girls”.
Ohmar was speaking at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict, where she further reiterated how the military in Myanmar has carried out “unspeakable crimes” against ethnic minorities in the country.
 Akila Radhakrishnan, president of GJC explains:
“We’re really talking about laws that haven’t been updated so with the political transition there was a moment when women in civil society saw the opportunity to think it’s time we had a comprehensive law on violence against women, updating progressive positions in the penal code and bring in things like protective orders or a more robust categorisations of kinds of sexual and other types of violence. And in some ways, the military continues to perpetrate mass sexual violence. Some of the key things that civil society has been pushing for is bringing the military under a mandate of the law, which is antithetical to the military’s interest as well.”
 Radhakrishnan continued, “Aung San Suu Kyi is no feminist. She has certainly in the past made stronger statements on sexual violence than she currently takes on but she’s very much seen certain types of political reform as her priority. If you look at the trajectory of the laws that were initially passed through the transition, most of the laws were really wound around issues that enabled foreign investment, for example. There were certain laws that were due to be changed around issues such as certain types of press freedoms, many of which have been regressing in recent times in any case. There was never kind of a feminist priority set from the leadership.”

Masked Workers

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 Unite, the GMB and Community trade unions have all said that where masks are believed to be helpful at work, they should be provided employers and workers should not have to foot the bill themselves. Surgical-grade face masks must be provided for all workers who need to wear them including those on the daily commute.



 “The government should provide proper masks and finance it. If this can be done in other countries successfully it should be done here,” said Rob Migeul, Unite’s health and safety adviser. The surgical-grade three-layer mask should have a waterproof outer layer, Unite said, inline with the WHO guidelines. “If you’re going to say use face masks, there must be a standard for them,” he said.



 Head of research, policy and external relations at Community, Kate Dearden, said: “If employers need their workforce to re-enter the workplace then they need to be providing them with the necessary PPE for all activities related to their work.



 A spokesperson for the GMB said: “Most people have no idea about face-mask standards. They should be the WHO backed ones, of three layers. It is the responsibility of the employer to provide the mask. Something that explains what employers are meant to do would be beneficial when it comes to protective equipment.”



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/unions-call-for-face-masks-to-be-provided-for-free-to-all-workers

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