Open Democracy & 50.50 Inclusive Democracy ,  also carried by the International Centre for Transitional Justice website, and Salem News, 24 Nov 2011 If and when Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) releases its report later this month, as scheduled, it will do so amid wide scepticism on many critical fronts – except, it seems, for one. The credibility, independence and the ethnic balance of the post-war commission have been well-challenged internationally, since it was established by the President last year to ostensibly help reconcile the nation.  But for the war’s tens of thousands of female survivors there has been little space and little said, by either the commission or its critics. The LLRC’s weaknesses in this area deserve greater attention. They also add significantly to the impression of an instrument trailing far behind modern truth and ... Read the full article

11 November 2011. Long Reads brings to Groundviews long-form journalism found in publications such as Foreign Policy, The New Yorker and the New York Times . This article was cited and quoted by the Tamil National Alliance, in its critique of the LLRC report, in Jan 2012. The power and promise of national exercises like the LLRC lies in the way that they can access the voices of those who have not traditionally been heard, and use them to build a more  inclusive collective memory. Yet for Sri Lanka’s Tamil women, the LLRC simply reaffirms bad old habits, writes Jo Baker In the lead up to the release of the report by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), strong concerns have been publicly raised about the value of a process that aims to build a clear picture of the conflict, without fully including ... Read the full article

Study on Gender and Sri Lanka's Commissions of Inquiry to be published by the LST Review. Abstract: Truth-telling mechanisms have consistently been shown to take on and perpetuate the gender-biases of their contexts. By exploring the scope of State-led and condoned discrimination towards Sri Lanka’s largest group of war-affected survivors, Tamil women in the North and East of the country, this paper aims to highlight the need for gender-sensitive truth commissioning following the conflict, and to assess key legal and practical obstacles to achieving this according to the international legal framework on non-discrimination. Drawing on critiques of Sri Lanka’s past and current Commissions of Inquiry, and on best practice, it then briefly proposes ways to place Tamil women more centrally, and therefore legally, within the transitional narrative. This paper was prepared as part of an MA degree in Human Rights Law at ... Read the full article

Respect and Protect? Exploring the need for the United Nations Human Rights Council to strengthen its response to reprisals This study will be joint-published as a policy paper later this year with the International Service for Human Rights, and was written thanks to input from a wide range of human rights practitioners working with and at the UN Human Rights Council. It falls among an expanding body of concern on the subject of reprisals against human rights defenders who cooperate with its key mechanisms. In addressing the reliance of Council mechanisms – and indeed the UN’s overarching objectives – on private actors and intermediaries, I contend that it cannot effectively fulfill its mandate without better protecting such persons – and being seen to be doing so. I first look at the nature of the relationship between Council and cooperator, ... Read the full article

Jo presented research at the 16th UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva at the side event, ‘Evolution of the recent debate on defamation of religions‘, on behalf of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and the SOAS Human Rights Law Clinic.  The study charts the development of discourse on religious defamation at the United Nations, and analyses blasphemy cases in Pakistan, Syria and Algeria using the international human rights legal framework.  It has been published by the Social Science Research Network (available to download here in full), and was well used by NGOs and delegates at the Session in the lead up to a groundbreaking draft resolution that better preserved the right to free expression. Also on the panel were the Director of the Human Rights Treaties Division at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ibrahim Salama ; Pakistan MP, ... Read the full article

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 22 April 2011 A humanitarian design group is redefining crisis response across the globe, writes Jo Baker. Twelve years ago a designer caught in a disaster zone might have been at rather a loss at how to pitch in; but when the quakes hit Japan last month it took very little time for the architects to rally. There were readymade chapters in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto with access to a global network of nearly 5,000 volunteer design professionals, a template for crisis response, and an online bank of designs, all relevant to post-crisis reconstruction and free for the download. And joining all these dots was the only international humanitarian-oriented organization to have pioneered design as a tool to fight disaster: Architecture for Humanity (AFH). Throughout the last month AFH has been working to link ... Read the full article

Extended interview, March 2011 Architect, eternal optimist and founder of a now-formidable humanitarian relief organization, Cameron Sinclair chats about the transition from design to development guru, the politics of humanitarian intervention, and sending architects into many of the decade’s biggest disaster zones. “The idea of designing without ego …” When we won (the grant) from TED we were a 60, 000 dollar organisation, now we’re closer to 6 million; that’s in four or five years. It wasn’t TED that made us explode, though it really gave us awareness and projected our methodology to other people; the idea of designing without ego, sharing openly, using adaptation as opposed to repetition, which was a really big shift: saying, different neighbourhoods have different issues, adapt the building to that. The thing that really made us explode was just prior to TED, when ... Read the full article

In part one of a two-part interview Colombo based Attorney-at-law Ranjan Mendis explains how the Sri Lankan police continue to influence the outcome of torture trials taken against them, resulting in a mere handful of convictions since the domestic anti-torture law was passed sixteen years ago. "Torture by police is the order of the day" "As a regular practitioner in criminal courts I know the day-to-day. We meet a large number of people belonging to various walks of life; torture by the police is the order of the day – the order of the day. I want to emphasize that. In India torture is very common by the police as well as by the army, but in Sri Lanka torture by the army and other armed ... Read the full article

‘The World's Forgotten', Asia Sentinel Hong Kong, 19 April 2010, reprinted as an Op-ed in the Jakarta Globe, Indonesia Millions of detainees across the globe remain in filthy, crowded and unsanitary prisons (See online version here) As the UN's top investigator into torture and punishment prepares to end his term later this year, he has focused on a group people whom he has long called the globe's "most vulnerable" to discrimination and to neglect. Detainees, says Dr Manfred Nowak, have become the world's forgotten. The theme has become central to the Austrian professor's six-year tenure, and in the most recent session of the Human Rights Council this March he strongly reiterated his call for a new convention to protect them. Where other forms of discrimination are strongly represented in global social movements, the plight of those considered "criminal" tends ... Read the full article

 March 8, 2009, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong   Nasir Aslam Zahid has led the struggle for equal rights in Pakistan, where women remain in chains. But the former judge vows to fight on. For a free man, Nasir Aslam Zahid spends a lot of time in jail. “It does sometimes baffle callers,” says the Pakistani in clipped, wry tones, at the Asian Legal Resources Centre in Hong Kong. “Most of my phone calls these days are taken from prison.” The former chief justice runs LAO, a legal aid organization based out of Central Prison Karachi, which helps women and children incarcerated across his home province, Sindh. These days he is more worried about the renovation of toilets, administering of medicine and arranging of bail than passing judgments, but both roles  have exposed him to the glut of problems facing women in his ... Read the full article

Asian Human Rights Commission , 20 November 2009. It may have a recently-restored judiciary and an elected government that claims a strong interest in the rule of law, but Pakistan is seeing little progress in the hundreds of missing person’s cases still pending. Pakistanis continue to be regularly 'disappeared' after arrest. With the police force exposed as increasingly negligent and corrupt, the responsibility of identifying such cases and intervening has long fallen to the judiciary. Judges taking suo moto action have secured the rescue of numerous persons from illegal military detention in the recent past, and this is widely believed to have been a major motive behind the sacking of the Supreme Court judges in 2007 by then-President and Army Chief, Pervez Musharraf. Yet despite the restoration of the ... Read the full article

The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 7 October 2008: SCMP land grab (PDF) 15,000 Cambodians are at risk of eviction from their homes as developers exploit a corrupt system which fails to protect property rights. In June 1975 waves of black-clad guerilla fighters entered Phnom Penh and emptied it – by persuasion, coercion and violence – in just a few days. The Khmer Rouge north had beaten the south, and as a first step, more than two million bewildered people were banished from the city and sent to live in the countryside. Today, facing the prospect of its first skyscraper, a rash of Special Economic Zones and numerous foreign-backed developments, Cambodia is boasting of a new era. Yet some things haven’t changed. “See that tree?” asks Son Chhay, a bespectacled Cambodian minister, as we stand on the steps of the new ... Read the full article