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<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/10/enduring-power-protest" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color:blue">https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/10/enduring-power-protest</span></a></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">THE WEEK IN RIGHTS
</span></b><span style="font-size:10.5pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">| DECEMBER 12, 2019
</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:28.5pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><a href="https://e-activist.com/ea-action/enclick?ea.url.id=4446049&clid=1908&ea.campaigner.email=frpbhvWl%2BcAnmIdPC5YKlA==&ea.campaigner.id=XkcEti%2FQfKOZkArzVWMSmA==&ea_broadcast_target_id=0" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white; border:none windowtext 1.0pt; padding:0in; text-decoration:none">The
Enduring Power of Protest</span></a></span></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; color:white"><a href="https://e-activist.com/ea-action/enclick?ea.url.id=4446050&clid=1908&ea.campaigner.email=frpbhvWl%2BcAnmIdPC5YKlA==&ea.campaigner.id=XkcEti%2FQfKOZkArzVWMSmA==&ea_broadcast_target_id=0" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color:blue; text-decoration:none"><img border="0" id="_x0000_i1025" style="user-select: none;" src="https://aaf1a18515da0e792f78-c27fdabe952dfc357fe25ebf5c8897ee.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/1908/WIR.1212.hk.gif?v=1576184029000"></span></a></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:8.5pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">Photo © 2019 AP Photo/Vincent Yu</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">As we marked Human Rights Day this week, the decade is ending the way it began – in the streets.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">In Hong Kong, Nicaragua, in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran and elsewhere people have been on the march, facing bullets, beatings, and prison to demand an end to repressive
and unaccountable government, to reject corrupt elites, and secure their rights.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif; color:white">They persist because they know the power of protest and resistance, and the efficacy of the human rights ideal, even if the tally of the past decade offers little encouragement.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:13.5pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">© 2019 AP Photo/Vincent Yu</span></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:21.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#7F7F7F">For those who believe the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, the past 10 years have been a reminder that it is also long.</span></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Indeed, as we mark the final Human Rights Day of this decade, we are ending the way we began – in the streets. In Hong Kong, Nicaragua, in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran and
elsewhere people have been on the march, facing bullets, beatings, and prison to demand an end to repressive and unaccountable government, to reject corrupt elites, and secure their rights.</span></p>
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<a href="https://www.hrw.org/view-mode/modal/335273" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444; text-decoration:none"><img 0?="" width="946" height="534" id="Picture_x0020_5" alt="Women shout slogans and wave the Lebanese flag during a demonstration in down town Beirut." style="width: 9.8541in; height: 5.5625in; user-select: none;" src="service.svc/s/GetFileAttachment?id=AAMkADA2ODU2ZDBkLWYzNWItNGFhOC04ZmVmLWE0OTJiMmYzZWM5OABGAAAAAABGBw2b0skdSLjxkXc4kboFBwBNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAAAAAEPAABNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAME6O7BAAABEgAQAA9ABTBC959HrhqR8wkJ8mI%3D&X-OWA-CANARY=QLPH97GO20yOGrCoGTSTWgAhM-dpgtcIdvSNDTFB9lMoJPwWrDWxePSjNX7YJFLxEbZZltNjAFo."></span></a><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444"></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Lebanese women have long been leaders in the country’s protest movements. Here, women shout slogans and wave the Lebanese flag during a demonstration in down town Beirut on October
19, 2019. © Marwan Naamani/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Are they naïve? Or do they know something important and powerful? And what of the lawyers and communities challenging injustice in court, the investigators building meticulous records
of human rights crimes, the journalists dragging into public view the buried facts, the advocates and activists pressuring and cajoling governments, companies, and other powerful actors to defend human dignity?</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">They persist because they know the power of protest and resistance, and the efficacy of the human rights ideal, even if the tally of the past decade offers little encouragement.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">From 2010 through 2012, protest movements swept across Iran and much of the Arab world. But in 2019, Tunisia stands alone among the countries of the Arab Spring in making the transition
to democracy, and among its neighbors renewed repression and brutal wars have followed the uprisings. Hundreds of thousands have died, millions have been injured, and tens-of-millions have been displaced. The cost in lives, resources, and squandered potential
is incalculable.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Ten years ago, the smartphones and social platforms that helped to enable the protests were celebrated as vectors of positive change, opening avenues for speech and organizing beyond
the control of authoritarian governments. They are now more often seen as fueling division, empowering surveillance, invading our privacy, and eviscerating the economic underpinnings of a free press.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Those who have sought refuge from obliterating violence and repression have met a rising tide of xenophobia, as politicians long confined to the margins of power ride a narrative of
cultural, economic, and security threat, often focused on Muslims, refugees, LGBT people – anyone seen as the “other” – to its center. They have sometimes been buoyed by hyper-partisan and often fraudulent media operations.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">In the world’s biggest democracies – India, Brazil, and the United States – the gravest threats to human rights and democracy come from elected presidents who openly praise dictators,
demonize minorities, and undercut the rule of law, putting vulnerable populations at even greater risk.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">It would be easy to make a longer list of reversals: the promise of South Sudan, newly independent in 2011, now mired in war; Myanmar, where the pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi
has emerged as an apologist for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; Tanzania, where the media and civil society face ever tighter controls, arrests, and killing. And in Russia, a protest movement in 2011 held out hope for change, but instead Vladimir
Putin increased his grip domestically and enhanced his influence globally.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Perhaps nowhere exemplifies the retreat more starkly than China, where once some Western analysts breezily promised that rising prosperity would bring progress on human rights and democracy.
Instead, President Xi Jinping has put the fruits of development to work to build an algorithmically enhanced authoritarianism unrivalled in the scope of its ambition for control.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">And yet.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">The protesters taking to the streets in Lebanon and elsewhere are not looking to a global scoresheet and calculating their chances. They are demonstrating that power without legitimacy
can be checked in local struggles rooted in the demand for accountability, and ultimately for human rights. Ethiopia’s initial opening toward greater democratic space under President Abiy Ahmed tells us that some leaders appear to have learned this lesson,
despite the crowing autocrats on the world stage.</span></p>
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<a href="https://www.hrw.org/view-mode/modal/334274" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444; text-decoration:none"><img 0?="" width="946" height="534" id="Picture_x0020_3" alt="Thousands of people take part in the Equality March in Lublin city, Poland, September 28, 2019." style="width: 9.8541in; height: 5.5625in; user-select: none;" src="service.svc/s/GetFileAttachment?id=AAMkADA2ODU2ZDBkLWYzNWItNGFhOC04ZmVmLWE0OTJiMmYzZWM5OABGAAAAAABGBw2b0skdSLjxkXc4kboFBwBNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAAAAAEPAABNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAME6O7BAAABEgAQAHJsOhflQMZMoAtSCYTIHd8%3D&X-OWA-CANARY=QLPH97GO20yOGrCoGTSTWgAhM-dpgtcIdvSNDTFB9lMoJPwWrDWxePSjNX7YJFLxEbZZltNjAFo."></span></a><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444"></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Thousands of people take part in the Equality March in Lublin city, Poland, September 28, 2019.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.15pt; background: white; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444"> © 2019 Attila Husejnow/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">And it isn’t only in street protest or in national struggle that we see the tools and values of human rights successfully at work.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">The millions of women and girls who bravely stepped forward to publicly share their stories in response to Tarana Burke’s #MeToo call built a global movement demanding an end to sexual
violence. Persistent journalists turned accounts of Harvey Weinstein’s predation from Hollywood gossip into international news, and across the world, investigative reporting exposed the misogynistic abuses of other powerful figures. They did so in the face
of a US president whose misogyny is proudly on display. Trade unions and women’s rights groups successfully fought for a new international treaty protecting against violence and harassment at work. Unevenly perhaps, but unstoppably, court cases, new regulations,
a resetting of workplace norms, and sustained activism are creating new protections for women’s basic right to be free of harassment and violence.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Spurred by litigation, culture change, and legislators responding to social movements, the rights of LGBT people are expanding around the world. A rearguard action by opponents including
in Russia and the United States, decrying “gender ideology” and battling the spread of both women’s reproductive rights and LGBT rights is meeting both energized defense, and deep shifts in public opinion.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">In a thousand smaller struggles, the embedding of human rights standards in domestic and international law is helping to bring the perpetrators of war crimes to justice, to secure land
and environmental rights for communities threatened by development, and forcing companies to respect their human rights responsibilities.</span></p>
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<a href="https://www.hrw.org/view-mode/modal/330799" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444; text-decoration:none"><img 0?="" width="946" height="534" id="Picture_x0020_4" alt="201906americas_chile_environment_protest" style="width: 9.8541in; height: 5.5625in; user-select: none;" src="service.svc/s/GetFileAttachment?id=AAMkADA2ODU2ZDBkLWYzNWItNGFhOC04ZmVmLWE0OTJiMmYzZWM5OABGAAAAAABGBw2b0skdSLjxkXc4kboFBwBNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAAAAAEPAABNFUSRsW3TRIo6RTo9vvdQAAME6O7BAAABEgAQAKRh56Z%2Ba3lOi4ZaVYhCrGs%3D&X-OWA-CANARY=QLPH97GO20yOGrCoGTSTWgAhM-dpgtcIdvSNDTFB9lMoJPwWrDWxePSjNX7YJFLxEbZZltNjAFo."></span></a><span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444"></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Students march to demand action on climate change, in Santiago, Chile, Friday, March 15, 2019.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444"> © 2019 AP Photo/Esteban Felix</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.15pt; background: white; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Local human rights defenders around the world don’t rely solely on the courage of their own conviction, or even the force of local law, rooted in their own experience, cultures, and
struggles, they are also part of a global ecosystem of shared norms, institutions, strategic collaboration, and communication that forms a resilient mesh that should be fostered and sustained.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">It will be needed more than ever in the face of this decade’s epochal failure, and the signal challenge of the next: the climate emergency.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Ten years ago, in Copenhagen, governments arrived at the outlines of a consensus on the science of global warming. What they couldn’t agree on was a binding deal to do something meaningful
to stop it. They did better in Paris in 2016, but emissions keep rising regardless, as powerful denialists like Trump push back on the agreement, and even those who admit the urgency of the problem fail to make the required trade-offs needed to slow and halt
the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">Climate change is already driving conflict and extreme weather, threatening health, and constricting access to water. Its effects are set to worsen, and they will affect every dimension
of human rights.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.15pt; background: white; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">But a new global social movement is growing, in schools and on the streets. And existing norms around water, health, humanitarian disasters, and livelihoods offer a rich framework for
building the accountability that is needed to spur action from wanton governments and companies.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.15pt; background: white; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size:16.0pt; font-family:"Garamond",serif; color:#444444">If we are back to where we started the decade, we know the task, we have the tools and, like the protesters, we know the value of sticking to it.</span></p>
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