Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

This pandemic-ridden year is about to end, but the changes and new practices that it brought to almost every possible sphere of human existence is not ending anytime soon. While Covid-19 brought with it a set of changes in the overall work culture and business thinking around the world, some of it proved to be effective, while others failed to make the expected impacts. As we are about to enter a new decade, we try to discover some of the work trends introduced in 2020 that are here to stay and some that aren't.

Remote working: Yayy or nayy?

While some industries or companies found it absolutely impossible to continue the "Work from home" routine, for the others it worked quite well. Case in the study: The Toggle team. While in the beginning, we found it a bit hard to adjust with the routine, that involved being available past working hours to get things done that wouldn't take much time if we were in the office, we eventually found a way out of the mess and thanks to the boss, found a work schedule that suited everyone. (Despite our somewhat unhealthy lifestyles and crazy sleep schedules, it all worked out well in the end.) The entire WFH thing turned out to be a big "nayy" for a lot of offices, but simultaneously was a huge "yayy" for individuals or groups like the Toggle team.

Open desks have to go, time to bring back the cubicles

Those companies that went back to physical offices after the initial months are switching from open floor plans to the old cubicle style office spaces. While remote working might not be feasible for them, ensuring social distancing in office spaces has become a must. And open floor plans definitely don't serve that purpose. As the risks of transmission are not going to be reduced any time soon, looks like the cubicle trend is here to stay.

Unnecessary meetings: Big no-no

Meetings that practically don't add any value to the work at hand have gone out of practice in the last few months to a great extent. While the abolition of this culture ensures increased social distancing, over the months almost everyone realised how it also increases efficiency, ensuring better communication among teams. Hopefully, this culture will not be making a comeback any time soon.

Remote hiring and assessments

The hiring process has also gone online for quite a lot of organisations. Several corporate and other organisations have had online assessments for their recruitment processes for the last few months. Interviews, too, are being taken online. More opportunities have been created for freelancers, both beginners and skilled. Hopefully, this trend will be staying for a long long time.

Exploring the scopes of technology: Increasing dependence

The WFH culture has increased the workforce's dependence on technology more than ever. Even after most organisations have gone back to physical offices, the dependence on technology hasn't decreased. For most people, it has made work-life easier. Intensive investment in tech is gradually making its way. Having a functional website and a shared digital platform to work and communicate better is becoming a top priority for most companies. Technology definitely increases efficiency, which makes the increased dependence on technology a trend that is here to stay.

Maximizing profits or being resilient?

While many businesses, mostly startups had to shut their operation in the pandemic, others rose to the occasion by focusing on being more resilient to the face of adversity. While the uncertainty grappled, these businesses diverted their focus from maximizing the profit to ensuring community services and protecting their existing workforces. Rethinking the entire business model to make it survive has been a pretty daunting job for most businesses, but it has also been a learning experience. Resilience is a trend that is here to stay. Nothing is certain, preparing for the worst is always a good idea and ensuring resilience is always the right way to go about it; these are the definitely the pickings from 2020 for most small and medium businesses, including urban startups.

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Business lessons 2020: What worked and what burned out - The Daily Star

Written by Hena Sharma, CNN

On the fronts of 19th-century postcards displayed in Caribbean shops, women in traditional Indian styles portrayed the islands as lush and exotic tourist destinations. The models posed coyly, dressed in traditional lehenga cholis garments and ornamented in elaborate gold and silver jewelry -- bell-shaped jhumkas (a classic style of earring) and all.

Simply referred to as "coolie belles" on the cards, the women wcere nameless and mysterious protagonists. They were often pictured in photography studios, leaning against European-esque pillars; sometimes they posed in front of cane fields.

Rare postcards give a glimpse at the 19th-century Indo-Caribbean women who signed contracts as indentured laborers. Tourists collected these images as evidence of their worldliness. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

Thousands of miles away from their homeland, these Indo-Caribbean women were some of the 2 million indentured laborers the British transported to their colonies between 1834 and 1917. In the Caribbean, they signed contracts for five years or longer and worked on sugarcane fields on islands like Guyana, Trinidad, Surinam and Jamaica after slavery had officially ended. Yet they toiled away on the same plantations, lived in the same quarters and were transported on boats of similar conditions to slave ships, according to Rupa Pillai, a senior lecturer of Asian-American studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

They were also referred to as "coolies" by British authority -- a highly charged slur used to represent Asian manual workers -- and were often physically abused.

An understudied history

This past year marks a century since the final abolition of indenture contracts in the Caribbean, yet there often little attention given to the history of the exploitative practice, which had a seismic impact on the world.

"It was the largest mass migration of people in the 19th century, (but it was) completely ignored when the system ended," said Indo-Caribbean scholar David Dabydeen over the phone. Dabydeen is the director of the Ameena Gafoor Institute, which studies indentureship and its legacies.

Pillai shares this frustration. "So much is tied with indenture but it's largely invisible which is so aggravating," she said in a phone interview.

It's been a century since indenture contracts were abolished in the Caribbean, yet the experiences of the women and men who were exploited through the practice are still seldom told. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

As Indians faced tumultuous political upheaval and famines in the 19th century, the country was ripe for Britain to exploit, according to Pillai. Indentureship was falsely advertised as a way for Indians to see a better life. Contracts were written in English, yet the people signing them had high levels of illiteracy. Women who had been disowned by their families and widows were particularly vulnerable. If your husband had died "your life was basically over, even if you were young," said Pillai.

Women were also actively recruited by the British to satisfy and carry out domestic work for the male-majority population of indentured workers. With approximately 30% of the entire indentured population being women, according to Pillai, men were often in competition for partners, while violence and sexual abuse against Indian women was not uncommon.

Despite such a low percentage of women present as laborers, they feature predominately on postcards from the time.

Exploitative photography

The scenes were entirely controlled by White European photographers -- one of whom was Felix Morin, a French commercial photographer who owned a studio in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain, from 1869 through to late 1890.

White European photographers were hired to photograph the Indo-Caribbean laborers,exoticizing them and promoting an idealized view of indentureship. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

With the models dressed in their best jewelry -- symbolizing wealth -- and traditional clothing, the photographs exocitized and sexualized them, hiding the "background of labor and violence" they experienced, according to Bahadur. The images seemed to say, as Pillai described, "We've colonized them. They're lovely docile, civilized individuals that you can come and look at -- come to the Caribbean!"

The postcards of Indo-Caribbean women were far from the only early exploitative uses of photography. As the medium was popularized, its use within anthropology was often fraught, presented as evidence for racist claims. In 1868, British colonial administrators commissioned the eight-volume visual encyclopedia "People of India," characterizing different types of Indians by caste, religion and tribe.

Pillai sees a link between the postcards and photographic projects like "People of India."

"It's that kind of visual language you can see present in these postcards and other postcards that were happening at the time," she said. The images showed the women as "other," an idea further enforced by their arms and legs being on display. With the postcards published at the height of the Victorian era, the exposure of hands and feet would have been shocking. "(Their) White women counterparts would have been completely covered," she said.

Personal connections

Well over a century later, visual artist Andil Gosine reimagined the postcards in his photo series "Cane Portraiture." Gosine lived in Trinidad until he was 14 and is a descendent of Indo-Trinidadian indentured workers. For the series, Gosine invited Caribbeans who had migrated to New York to pose against a backdrop of sugarcane fields. There was a performative aspect to the work, which was eventually printed as a set of postcards.

"('Cane Portraiture') was primarily about the interaction with myself and the subjects as a way of imagining what was going on between Felix Morin and the Indian indentures," Gosine said in a phone interview.

Andil Gosine's series "Cane Portraiture" is a modern interpretation of the colonial-era postcards. Credit: Andil Gosine

In contrast to Bahadur and Pillai, who believe the woman had little power over their images in the postcards, Gosine thinks the reality may have been a bit more complex. "Sometimes I think the stories are too simple, like: 'Oh, here's the colonizer with all the power...controlling the form of representation.' I believe there's a negotiation (in photography)," he said. "I don't think we should strip the subjects of all their agency. When I look at his images, I see possibilities that perhaps they were choosing how they were wanting to be represented as well."

The work helped him understand more about his longing for the Caribbean, even if his idea of "home" conjured up painful images of cane fields. "When I did the project...I realized it was kind of a plea for connection and home." Having grown up in a village that was once a sugar cane field, Gosine explains that his desire for home was "a complicated longing because it still represents the plantation."

"When I did the project...I realized it was kind of a plea for connection and home," said Gosine. Credit: Andil Gosine

"On the one hand you have the postcards functioning as an accessory of the Empire," Bahadur said. "On the other hand, I was really excited when I first saw (them)." She had struggled looking through written archives of the era because of the absence of personal accounts from the women. But the pictures were different.

"They weren't telling their stories in their own words," she explained. "So when I saw the postcard images...I was looking at them, and they were looking at me."

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Felix Morin's name, as well as clarify that it was Gaiutra Bahadur's great-grandmother, not grandmother, who arrived in Guyana.

Link:

Why Indian women became the faces of these Victorian-era postcards - CNN

Oregons U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced theAbolition Amendment, which would strike the punishment clause of the 13th Amendment and abolish forced prison labor.

That amendment is known, when we are in high school, as the amendment that ended slavery in America, Merkley said during a press conference Monday. The problem with that story is that slavery continued under the (punishment) clause of the 13th Amendment. That clause specifically says that slavery cant continue except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Merkley argued that the 14-word exception has allowed the U.S. to replace legal slavery with coerced labor in the prison system, and allowed the government to essentially outlaw being Black in America by disproportionately arresting citizens of color and renting them out as a workforce.

We think about the impact of slavery on the financial foundation for families, Merkley said during a virtual press conference on Monday.

Obviously a family under slavery built no financial foundation.

Well, when you broke apart a family and arrested the adults and rented them into slavery, there was no financial foundation there. People lost what they had.

In Oregon, inmates are paid far below the minimum wage to do work that often puts them at risk, like performing laundry services for hospitals at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September, 150 prisoners fought wildfires alongside professionals. In Texas, inmates have been drafted to work in morgues overwhelmed by victims of COVID-19.

These laws started to have the state profit directly off slavery because the state governments who rented people back into slavery helped finance their state governments with the money, Merkley said. This whole process led to a theme that Black Americans are criminals. It led to dehumanization, it led to unequal treatment under the law. It was the first wave of mass incarceration, which continues to this day.

This is the first effort of its kind to be made at the federal level, although Merkley pointed out three other states have already passed laws striking such exceptional language from their state constitutions: Colorado, Nebraska and Utah.

Im encouraging the Oregon Legislature to send a constitutional referral out to the people during this coming session, so the people of Oregon can vote to take this out of our Oregon Constitution, Merkley said.

During the press conference, Sen. James Manning (D-Eugene) said the late Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem) had introduced such a bill in 2019, but that it was a casualty of the Republican congressional walk-out.

I have redrafted that resolution and plan to bring it back, Manning told Merkley. I am so happy to hear that youre doing this, but I want to make sure I mirror the work that youre doing. Maybe we can tag-team and call it the Merkley-Winters resolution.

Merkley admitted that he was first made aware of this form of legalized slavery, and its continuation of systemic racism, by the 2016 Ava DuVernay documentaryThe 13th, which served as a crash-course of sorts about systems of racial control and ways governments and private prison companies are financially incentivized to create targeted legislation to increase the carceral population, specifically among people of color.

Following the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, southern jurisdictions arrested Black Americans in large numbers for minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy, codified in new Black Codes which were only applied to Black Americans. The punishment clause was then used by sheriffs to lease out imprisoned individuals to work landowners fields, which in some cases included the very same plantations where they had been enslaved. The practice grew in prevalence and scope to the point that, by 1898, 73% of Alabamas state revenue came from renting out the forced labor of Black Americans.

The Punishment Clauses facilitating and incentivizing of minor crime convictions continued to drive the over-incarceration of Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era. Ultimately, by creating a financial incentive for mass incarceration, it also continued to fan the flames of the War on Drugs and the proliferation of three-strike laws, severe plea deals, and harsh mandatory minimum policies, which have had a disproportionate impact on communities of color in America for generations.

Those policies have driven an $80 billion detention industry. More than two million prisoners reside in the U.S., comprising 20% of the worlds incarcerated population.

By making it a choice, it means that there could be more accountability for work programs because a lot of them absolutely dodge the health and safety provisions, Merkley said.

Our Abolition Amendment seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit and that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War, Rep. Clay said in announcing the resolution.

No American should ever be subject to involuntary servitude, even if they are incarcerated.

We want to thank Sen. Merkley and Rep. Clay for their leadership on this important racial justice issue, and for shining a light on something that is not just about a symbol or a vestige of the past, but something that reverberates and has consequences today, Clint Odom, senior vice president for policy and advocacy at the National Urban League, said.

The Abolition Amendment is supported by The Sentencing Project, Polaris, the Abolish Slavery National Network, the Constitutional Accountability Center, Amnesty International, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Human Rights Watch, Color of Change, the Justice Round Table Coalition, Indivisible, Democracy For America, International CURE, Dream Corps, and Alliance of Families for Justice.

Merkley and Clay were joined in the introduction by U.S. Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), and by U.S. Representatives Cedric Richmond (D-LA-2), Katherine Clark (D-MA-5), Andr Carson (D-IN-7), Danny K. Davis (D-IL-7), Marc Veasey (D-TX-33), Alcee Hastings (D-FL-20), Ral Grijalva (D-AZ-3), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX-29), Frederica Wilson (D-FL-24), Nanette Diaz Barragn (D-CA-44), David Trone (D-MD-6), Abigail Spanberger (D-VA-7), Deb Haaland (D-NM-1), and Gwen Moore (D-WI-4).

The full text of the legislation is availablehere. A summary can be foundhere

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Sen. Merkley Co-Sponsors Bill to Close 'Slavery Loophole' in 13th Amendment - tntribune.com

If you look into the religious demographics of who voted for Trump in 2020, youll find that 75% to 80% of white Christian Protestant evangelicals voted for Trump and, something we hear less about, almost 50% of Catholics voted for Trump. As per the most recent figures, about 25% of adult Americans are evangelicals and about 25% are Catholic.

The above figures mean that a full 50% of the American electorate are either evangelical or Catholic. Another 15% of the electorate are members of the so-called main line Christian denominations Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, etc. Another 15% are other Christian denominations. This means that 80% of the American electorate is Christian. Only 4% are agnostic or atheist. (Pew Research Center figures and graphs are available online.)

So Democrat leaders, you have a serious problem. The fact is that 80% of American voters profess themselves Christian and yet, for the last good number of years, Democrat politicians are so mum about anything religious that the public receives the impression the Democratic Party is downright anti-religious. But that is not the reality.

Back in June 30, 2019, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, of Delaware, wrote an important piece in The Atlantic, Democrats Need to Talk About Their Faith. His main point is that he himself and many other Democrats have been too silent about their faith for too long. He points out choosing not to talk about our faith as Democrats ignores the clear fact that America is still an overwhelmingly religious country, and that the Democratic Party, too, remains a coalition largely made up of people of faith.

Coons quickly points out there is a right and a wrong way to proceed; We must be careful to never weaponize or politicize faith, religion or scripture, nor should we claim some sort of divine endorsement for our policies. And he adds, Americans of all faiths or no faith at all should feel equally welcomed in our coalition.

The above paragraph is almost exactly the opposite from how the Christian Right has exploited religion politically for the past 30 years. And, just as bad, the Democratic Party has let the Right get away with it to the extreme detriment of our country and of democracy itself.

In these United States, a valid response to Republicans using religion as a weapon cannot be simply for Democrats to politely look the other way and not call it out. That is to say, to use a response that simply excludes anything religious from public and political discourse. Such response is no response at all literally. It doesnt work. What has happened, with a vengeance, is that only one form of religion (the extreme Christian Right) has been allowed to occupy center stage and have a massive influence over voters. The other half of religion in America, through inaction, has let itself have no voice.

This has resulted in the tragically absurd situation we are experiencing right now: A widely held perception in this election has been that if you wanted to be a good Christian voter, you had to vote for Trump even if you held your nose while doing so.

It is a sad commentary on the state of religion in America that a man as immoral, unethical and irreligious as Trump has shown himself to be, has been able to obtain close to a majority of the popular vote and almost three-quarters of the religious vote. Furthermore, we now know, as he admitted to his inner staff, he was playing his evangelical supporters for suckers, saying: Can you believe that people believe that bullshit, as reported in various sources in September of this year.

How has this happened? It has been allowed to happen by the shameful and deafening silence of Democrats on the subject of faith and Christianity. Separation of church and state does not mean one should never talk publicly about faith or religion. It means, precisely and concisely, as per the First Amendment of the Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. In fact, the very next phrase in this amendment begins with, or abridging the freedom of speech. Speaking about faith and professing a religion are protected rights rights we should use, not push back into a corner.

Somehow, during the past generation, Democrats seem to have taken the First Amendment to be an ironclad demand for fostering secularism above almost all else. For anyone who might not be completely familiar with this term, secularism is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as indifference to or rejection, or exclusion of religion and religious considerations. The Democrats interpretation of the First Amendment in this way is highly questionable. And it is an interpretation that is unhealthy for a political party in the United States.

How has Trump gotten away with so much and retained so much of the religious vote? The most important part of the answer is: A vote for Trump was a vote against secularism even though most Trump voters themselves might not phrase it exactly that way. Very simply, a huge percentage of Americans do not want a country that is committed to the philosophy (or should I say denomination) of secularism. In this country, that wont fly. The Democratic Party will crash and burn if it doesnt realize this mistake. America is not like Europe in this regard.

I am a solid Democrat, but I am very displeased with the cowardly retreat of Democratic politicians from stating: 1) how their faith inspires them personally and 2) how our faith (Christianity, as well as other faiths) urges us toward a government that places the common good and attention to the less fortunate front and center. This means, among other things, unfailingly to place human persons above corporate persons, people over corporations we have to start right there.

This means that we remember it was religious leaders who first pushed for the abolition of slavery and then pushed for civil rights in America. It was religious leaders like Dorothy Day who pushed hard for a living wage for American workers. It was the church that gave birth to hospitals and universities, and the Catholic Church is still the largest operator of hospitals in the world. It was religious leaders in Europe (Christian and Jewish) who first stood up against Hitler. It was religious leaders in South America who pushed for a movement called liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor. The list goes on and on. As the saying goes, faith moves mountains.

If nothing else happens in the next four years because of gridlock in Congress, the Democratic Party still has the opportunity to convince the American electorate that its not the Party of secularism and atheism. If it doesnt do that, it might well not hold onto the White House or the House of Representatives.

President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris, you are practicing Christians, and you have mentioned this to some degree during your campaign, but please remember you dont have to lock your faith away in a closet as a forbidden topic when you step into office. Thats not how you live your lives and it shouldnt be how you run your political lives. Further, use your bully pulpit to encourage fellow Democrats to do the same: open up and proclaim, regularly, how your faith inspires you and should inspire all of us to make America into a kinder, gentler nation.

We Democrats cannot allow the Republican Party to be perceived any longer as the only party in America that is friendly to religion. If we let that go on, we are letting down our faith, letting down our party and letting down our country. As Biden has said, the soul of the nation is at stake. Indeed, that is the truth.

John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia Universitys Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part time in Mexico.

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On Faith: Democrats and secularism | Perspective | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

Professor Roger Hood, who has died aged 84, was an eminent criminologist known for his work on parole, ethnicity, and the death penalty. He believed the study of criminology should not remain isolated within the domain of academia but should be deployed to bring real change in the wider world.

Hood was born in Bristol in 1936, the son of Phyllis and Ronald, a stockbrokers dealer. He was educated at King Edward VI Five Ways School, Birmingham, where he captained the rugby first team. After winning a scholarship to read sociology at the London School of Economics, he completed a PhD on homeless borstal boys at the University of Cambridge. In 1963, the year he finished his studies, Hood became a lecturer at the University of Durham.

He went on to join the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, where he worked with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in 1967. Inspired by that experience, he moved to Oxford in 1973. Building on Professor Nigel Walkers Oxford Penal Research Unit, Hood became founding director of the Oxford Centre for Criminology, which he led for the next 30 years.

In his teaching on sentencing, Hood favoured a direct approach, whereby students could learn about jail from prisoners themselves at the nearby Oxford Prison. Faculty at Oxford spoke of how his fatherly warmth, limitless attention to detail, and constant care for his students welfare made the difficult path towards academic maturity much easier to climb.

Hoods criminological research had three main strands: parole, with Professor Stephen Shute; race and sentencing; and the death penalty, which although abolished in Britain in the mid-1960s is still in force in many countries.

Hoods interest in parole began in the early 1970s when he served for two years as a member of the Parole Board for England and Wales under its first chair, Lord Hunt. In the late 1980s he became a member of Lord Carlisle of Bucklows review of parole and in the early 1990s teamed up with Shute for three influential research studies of parole decision-making. Among their recommendations, Hood and Shute argued that parole assessments would be improved if actuarial risk prediction scores played a greater part.

Hood and Shutes third report, The Parole System at Work: A Study of Risk Based Decision-making, published in 2000, formed the basis of the governments 2001 Comprehensive Review of Parole. It also prompted a similar review to be commissioned in Scotland. The research was later cited by the Court of Appeal in litigation involving the Parole Board in 2008.

Hoods landmark research on ethnicity and the criminal courts began with his 1992 study, Race and Sentencing. He analysed more than 3,000 sentencing decisions at five crown court centres across the West Midlands and found evidence of possible racial discrimination.

A decade later he again teamed up with Shute to complete another substantial study of ethnicity, this time focusing on perceptions of fairness and equality of treatment. The research involved both court observations and 1,500 interviews with minority ethnic and white defendants and witnesses, judges, magistrates, court staff, and lawyers. Published in 2005 in a book entitled A Fair Hearing? Ethnic Minorities in the Criminal Courts, one of Hood and Shutes central recommendations was that written transcripts of judges sentencing remarks should be made available to all sentenced offenders, a proposal which was taken up by David Lammys review in 2017.

Following retirement from the University of Oxford in 2003, Hood worked extensively with Parvais Jabbar, Saul Lehrfreund and Florence Seemungal of the Death Penalty Project. He travelled widely, lecturing on the case for abolition.

Hood was a founding member of the Judicial Studies Board (1979-1985) and served as president of the British Society of Criminology (1986-1989). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and awarded a CBE in 1995 for services to the study of criminology. He received honorary degrees from the University of Birmingham (2008) and Edinburgh Napier University (2011) and was made an honorary Queens counsel in 2000. In 2012, the European Society of Criminology recognised his lifetime contribution as a European criminologist.

Hood remained active in his research and writing until the end of his life. He had recently completed a report on the death penalty in the Caribbean, Sentenced to Death Without Execution. Interviews with 100 opinion formers amongst the judiciary and lawyers to determine if and why they still supported capital punishment revealed a 52:48 ratio in favour of abolition.

Professor Carolyn Hoyle and Professor Lucia Zedner at the University of Oxford paid tribute to Hood, saying: Many of the current members of the Centre for Criminology owe Roger an immense personal and professional debt. He taught us, advised us and inspired us. He was held in the same high regard at his college, All Souls, where he never tired of encouraging younger scholars, while developing, over his many decades there, friends for life.

His wife Nancy Stebbing, whom he married in 1985, died last year. He is survived by his daughter Cathy from his first marriage to Barbara Young, and by three stepchildren, Zoe, Clare and David.

Professor Roger Hood, academic and campaigner, born 12 June 1936, died 17 November 2020

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Roger Hood: Professor who believed criminology could make an impact beyond the walls of academia - The Independent

In October, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, an international ban on nuclear weapons with 86 state signatories, received its 50th ratification by a state signatory. As a result, and despite U.S. attempts to scuttle the treaty, it will enter into force as legally binding international law in January 2021. It is unlikely that U.S. President-elect Joe Biden will sign the treaty or reduce his countrys nuclear arsenal substantially during his presidency. Still, his administration is likely to reverse some of President Donald Trumps nuclear weapons policies and could promote significant nuclear nonproliferation measures. Like the leadership of all nuclear-armed states, Bidens administration will face continued pressure to sign the treaty and deeply engage in nuclear disarmament.

The 2017 international agreement bans the development, testing, use, or threat of use of nuclear weapons. It also prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons. The treaty was spearheaded by non-nuclear-armed states, survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear weapons testing, and nongovernmental organizations, including the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. The nine nuclear-armed statesChina, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United Statesboycotted the 2017 treaty negotiations, oppose the treaty, and have not signed it.

Earlier this year, as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons edged closer to entering into force, the Trump administration urged states that had ratified the treaty to withdraw their ratificationsan effort that did not work but was in keeping with long-standing U.S. views that nuclear weapons enhance U.S. security and that of its key allies.

Had Biden been president at the time, he might well have done the same. Like his predecessors, Biden is a proponent of nuclear deterrence. As vice president in 2017, he referred to it as the bedrock of [U.S.] national defense, and a statement on his campaign website affirmed that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterringand if necessary, retaliating againsta nuclear attack. Once in office, it is likely that Biden will continue Trumps policy of opposing the new treaty.

Yet, the arguments mounted in favor of nuclear deterrence are deeply flawed. As the nuclear weapons specialist Benot Pelopidas has highlighted, nuclear weapons have not deterred war between nuclear-armed states or maintained international peace. China and Russia engaged in a border clash in the late 1960s, and India and Pakistan were engaged in direct conflict over disputed territory in the 1990s. Nuclear weapons did not keep the Cold War cold; tensions played out via proxy wars in the global south resulting in the deaths of millions of civilians, and nuclear war almost broke out between the United States and Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Furthermore, historians of nuclear weapons have argued that during the early Cold War, nuclear weapons contributed to an escalation in tensions between nuclear-armed states.

Not only are nuclear weapons of dubious value for deterrence, they also present immense threats to human health and the environment. The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 resulted in the deaths of an estimated 230,000 people from radiation sickness, burns, and injuries. The radiation also increased risk of illnesses over the long term, created ongoing psychological trauma, and led to discrimination against survivors. Since 1945, nuclear tests conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands and in Nevada in areas with large Native American populations, by France in Algeria and French Polynesia, by the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan, by the United Kingdom in Australia in areas with sizable Indigenous populations, and by China in Xinjiang have also resulted in marginalized populations facing high rates of cancer and birth defects, and the contamination of their environments. Overall, since 1945, atmospheric nuclear testing has resulted in at least 2 million global cancer deaths.

That is why the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is necessary on top of other measures like the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, a key piece of international nuclear law, which many states have largely failed to adhere to. The treaty allowed the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and the Soviet Union, then the only nuclear-armed powers, to maintain their existing arsenals and banned all other states from acquiring them. Despite this, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel developed and maintain nuclear weapons. The treaty also required nuclear-armed states that are signatories to work toward nuclear disarmament, which the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France have largely not done, as they all continue to retain and modernize their nuclear arsenals, notably by developing nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed drones, and increasing the lethality of existing nuclear weapons. The new treaty would address the limitations of the earlier one by banning nuclear weapons outright, and for all states.

Regardless of nuclear-armed states policies regarding the new treaty, the agreement is significant, as it considerably strengthens the body of international nuclear law, the norm of nuclear nonproliferation, and, crucially, as disarmament law specialist Anna Hood has argued, contributes to the delegitimization and stigmatization of all nuclear weapons regardless of which states possess them. Importantly, increasing support for the treaty and the abolition of nuclear weapons also increases pressure on nuclear-armed states to substantially and meaningfully engage in nuclear disarmament.

Although Biden is likely to continue to snub the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, it does not mean that U.S. nuclear weapons policy will adhere entirely to the Trumpian status quo. Like former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden has been a long-standing advocate for arms control, including the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The agreement bans all nuclear testing and was signed by Clinton, but it has still not been ratified by the Senate, a process that would require a two-thirds majority. Facing a similar blockage, it is highly likely that Biden would continue Americas bipartisan moratorium on nuclear testing, which began during George H.W. Bushs presidency and was almost interrupted by the Trump administration contemplating resuming nuclear testing.

Biden has pledged a five-year extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia, which caps the number of deployed nuclear weapons by both states to 1,550. New START is the only remaining arms control treaty between the two states. In 2019, Trump withdrew the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an arms control agreement signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan that banned U.S. and Russian possession of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles. The Trump administration and Russias President Vladimir Putin have not yet agreed to extend New START, which will otherwise expire in February 2021the Trump administration has proposed only extending the treaty for one year.

During his presidential campaign, Biden did embrace a no first use policy, which renounces a first use of nuclear weapons and advocates for using such weapons only in response to a nuclear attack. If Biden did officially adopt no first use, it would be significant, as the U.S. president has sole authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. No previous U.S. administration has renounced first use. Meanwhile, globally, only India and China have.

Biden is not the first Democratic leader to contemplate adopting a no first use policy for the United States. Obama contemplated the policy but ultimately rejected it following opposition from hawkish Democrats in his administration. Although Biden will also face opposition from some Democrats, he will also likely be under pressure from progressive members of his party. For example, in 2019, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced the No First Use Act in the U.S. Senate, seeking to bar the United States from conducting a first strike.

Furthermore, later that year, Democratic congressional advocates for the abolition of nuclear weaponsReps. James McGovern and Earl Blumenauerintroduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives calling for the United States to adopt a no first use policy, embrace the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons, and cease modernizing its nuclear arsenal. As a result, Biden will likely also face pressure from some progressive Democrats to sign the new treaty and deeply engage in nuclear disarmament.

In his famous 2009 Prague speech, Obama asserted that the United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons. These stepswhich were important, but small, under the Obama administration and virtually nonexistent during Trumps presidencywill likely remain only incremental during Bidens presidency.

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What Does the Future of America's Nuclear Briefcase Look Like? - Foreign Policy

NOVEMBER 24, 2020

FRANCISCO DUPUIS, an African American man, fled the United States for Mexico and petitioned the federal government there for citizenship in 1850, arguing that his many years of service and loyalty made him worthy. Witness accounts and evidence that he had fought in the artillery unit of the Mexican army that defended Tampico during the Mexican-American War accompanied his application. He was issued a carta de naturalizacin (naturalization letter) signed by the president of Mexico shortly thereafter.

Alice L. Baumgartners South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War presents little-known, but astounding narratives of Black Americans such as Dupuis who claimed freedom in Mexico in the antebellum period. She argues that fugitives from slavery who fled to Mexico threatened American slavery, igniting the sectional crisis that led to the overturning of the Missouri Compromise and the birth of the Republican Party. The US drive to extend slavery to the Pacific had cost Mexico half of its territory, the author adds, and it was this land that had kept the sectional crises at bay crises later unleashed as the United States seized territory from Mexico where slavery was already abolished.

Mexico abolished slavery more than three decades before the United States and had become the closest land of the free for enslaved Americans, even more inviting than the North. Baumgartners work centers on Black flight across the Texas borderlands and the Gulf of Mexico, specifically in the period between the Texas Revolution and US emancipation. It traces the ways members of the Mexican government committed themselves to not only putting the peculiar institution on the path to ultimate extinction, but also passing laws that entitled enslaved people who escaped to Mexico to liberty, legal protections, and even pathways to citizenship.

By the 1860s, Mexico was still actively fighting to stop the further expansion of chattel slavery as it had after the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. Mexico openly supported the antislavery Republican Party in the United States and they sent Matias Romero, its charg daffaires, to Illinois immediately after Lincolns victory to convince him to stand with Mexico against the egotistical and antihumanitarian principles that had not only shrunk Mexicos vast territory, but endangered the Union and both countries shared principles of liberty and progress. But Lincoln initially did not heed Romeros request and instead considered the best way to save the Union was to avoid the issue of slavery altogether. Lincoln thought the war would be brief, even when Romero predicted the opposite, but when the Emancipation Proclamation was finally issued, Mexico celebrated it as a victory and as a signal that both countries were at last fighting for the common glorious cause of liberty and self government.

The antislavery cause was not unique to abolitionists in the Northern United States. The Mexican government and ordinary Mexicans sheltered enslaved persons because of moral and religious views, to uphold their constitution, to fill the labor needs, and importantly because fugitives from slavery often became integral members of the communities they reached. When federal authorities failed to protect refugees, chiefly because they did not have the manpower, local Mexicans stepped in and protected fugitive slaves as they defended any other member of their community.

In the summer of 1850, Mathilde Hennes fled her Louisiana enslaver, William Cheney, and headed to Mexico, where she knew she could be free. She also found work in the household of a local family in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a family who in addition to wages, offered her room and board and considered her an essential member of their household. William Cheney, however, pursued his former slave into Mexico and with the help of a slave-hunting party attempted to retrieve her. Manuel Luis del Fierro, Henness employer, and his family confronted the kidnappers at gunpoint when they broke in attempting to retrieve her. Baumgartner demonstrates through Henness narrative how ordinary Mexicans often risked their lives to protect fugitives from American slavery, especially when they had become regarded members of Mexican households.

South to Freedom also includes the stories of people who the Mexican government failed to protect, in spite of the existing laws established to assist escapees. The narrative of Jean Antoine is particularly striking. He fled enslavement and managed to make it to New Orleans and onto a vessel heading to Mexico, but he was caught and prevented from disembarking in the Mexican port of Campeche. Upon his forced return to New Orleans, he chose to take the ultimate act of resistance: suicide.

Readers will appreciate the descriptive prose of the 12 chapters that analyze the processes that positioned Mexico as a safe haven for Black people. This work traces not only how the country gained moral power through the rejection of slavery, but also the pathways that enslaved men, women, and children used in Mexico to claim freedom and citizenship. The first step was applying for naturalization through the state or federal government by proving good conduct and Catholic faith. The second option was military service or performing some honest and useful industry that benefited the nation.

South to Freedom is a meticulously researched monograph that examines the political and diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United States to explain how Black movement south paved the road to conflicts such as the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and ultimately the Civil War. Baumgartner shows how American ministers, diplomats, and consuls consistently attempted to deliver a death blow to Mexicos emancipatory politics. Mexican diplomats fought back by insisting chattel slavery be excluded from all ceded Mexican lands during the negotiations of after-conflict treaties.

Through an impressive utilization of primary sources in English, Spanish, and French from archives located in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, South to Freedom makes a significant contribution to borderlands history. But this research could have been elevated had it included more engagement with works written by experts on the histories of Black resistance, such as Stephanie Camps Closer to Freedom (2004), Jennifer Morgans Laboring Women (2004), Erica Armstrong Dunbars Never Caught (2017), and Martha Joness Birthright Citizens (2018), among other texts. Her work would have richly benefited from Manisha Sinhas The Slaves Cause (2017). Nonetheless, the author sagaciously revitalizes our understanding of the forces that led to Civil War through a transnational lens anchored at the intersection of Latin American, Mexican, and US scholarship.

Alice Baumgartner asserts that the collective story of individuals such as Francisco Dupuis, Mathilde Hennes, and Jean Antoine had strategic and political significance to distinctively American events.

Mara Esther Hammack is a historian researching Black women freedom fighters in North America.

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Abolition from Below: On the Underground Railroad to Mxico - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

Colonialism and slavery. There is, of course, a connection between them. Yet the reason for our present interest in the topic assumes something stronger not merely a connection, but an equation. That is why we are told we have to decolonise ourselves. Because until we do, the vicious racism that slavery incarnated will continue to be our own. The assumption, however, is mistaken.

It is true that the British were heavily involved in trading slaves across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of North America, mostly between 1660 and 1807. Britain transported around 3 million Africans in conditions that were infamously dreadful, with human cargo packed like sardines below decks. Maybe 450,000 slaves did not survive the voyage. Those that did were mostly put to work on sugar plantations, to toil for their owners for up 12 hours a day, six days a week, without pay, and with no legal redress against maltreatment. Malnourished and prey to disease, they suffered a high rate of mortality. That is why the plantation-owners had to keep on importing fresh supplies.

In Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944, the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams famously argued that profits from the slave trade provided a major source of capital for financing Britains world-leading industrial revolution. In 2010, however, David Brion Davis, the distinguished historian of slavery and its abolition in the Western world, confidently pronounced that Williams thesis has now been wholly discredited by other scholars.

In the second half of the eighteenth century both the slave trade and the institution of slavery came under mounting public criticism in Britain. A leading catalyst for this was Christian humanitarianism. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, prefaced his Thoughts upon Slavery with a quotation from the Book of Genesis:

And the Lord saidWhat hast thou done? The voice of thy brothers blood crieth unto me from the ground (Genesis 4.10).

The context is Cains murder of his brother Abel and the implication is clear: Africans and Englishmen, slaves and masters, are brothers, common children of the same God. Anti-slavery sentiment acquired practical, political focus in 1787 with the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London. In 1807 the British Parliament legislated to abolish the slave trade. And in 1833 it abolished the institution of slavery through the British Empire.

One controversial feature of the process of abolition was the agreement to compensate slave-owners for their loss of property to the tune of 20 million, paid by the government and funded by metropolitan taxpayers. The reason for this was that the French Revolution and its Terror had made it unthinkable for the state to ride roughshod over the right to property. The payment of compensation to the slave-owners was a necessary political compromise. Besides, since the planters faced ruin without compensation, not to have granted it would have bankrupted the plantations and destroyed much of the prospect of paid employment for newly freed slaves.

In recent times the greatest controversy attending the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself surrounds another of Williams theses, namely, that the trade had only been abolished because it was no longer profitable. Against this, Roger Anstey demonstrated in 1975 that, in terms of economic interest, 1806-7 was the worst possible time for Britain to abolish its slave trade, embroiled as it was in a long war with Napoleon. Two years later Seymour Drescher published Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, which presented a mass of empirical evidence that abolition amounted to an act of suicide for a major part of Britains economy.

The strength of abolitionist feeling in Britain was so great that it did not relax after 1807 or 1833. It went on to persuade the British Government to adopt a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution across the globe. One sign of this enduring commitment was the emergence in the Foreign Office of a separate Slave Trade Department to stamp out the trade, which was in fact the Offices largest department in the 1820s and 1830s. From the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 onward the British used their diplomatic clout to secure support for a general abolition treaty between all the major European powers.

In addition to the velvet glove, they also deployed the hard fist. Up to ten ships of the Royal Navy were stationed off the coast of west Africa to disrupt the export of slaves until 1833. And from 1844 to 1865 the number seldom fell below 20, for several consecutive years stayed at over 30, and twice reached a peak of 36. At its height, the west African station employed 13.1 per cent of the Royal Navys total manpower.

Meanwhile, on the African continent itself the British promoted legitimate commerce as an alternative to the slave-trade, while bringing persistent diplomatic pressure to bear upon the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which was the main port for the Great Lakes slave trade. Bit by bit the trade in slaves was throttled.

How much did all this cost? David Eltis reckoned that the suppression of the Atlantic slave-trade cost British taxpayers a minimum of 250,000 per annum (equal to about 1 billion today) for half a century. Moreover:

In absolute terms the British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade in the 47 years, 1816-62, as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807.

In addition to the costs of naval suppression, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape factored in the loss of business caused by abolition and the higher prices paid by British consumers for sugar, since duties were imposed to protect free-grown British sugar from competition by foreign producers who continued to benefit from unpaid slave labour. Overall, they reckoned the economic cost of the anti-slave trade effort to be roughly 1.8 per cent of national income over 60 years from 1808 to 1867. Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: today the UK spends 0.5 per cent of GDP on international aid and just over 2 per cent on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape concluded that Britains effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history.

The problem with the assumption that underlies the call for decolonisation is that it requires amnesia about everything since 1787. It requires us to overlook how widely popular in Britain was the cause of abolition from the closing decades of the eighteenth century onward. According to John Stauffer, Harvard historian of anti-slavery in the US:

Almost every United States black who travelled in the British Isles acknowledged the comparative dearth of racism there. Frederick Douglass noted after arriving in England in 1845: I saw in every man a recognition of my manhood, and an absence, a perfect absence, of everything like that disgusting hate with which we are pursued in [the United States].

Between the slave-trade and slavery of the eighteenth century and the present lies 150 years of imperial penance in the form of costly humanitarian endeavour to liberate slaves around the globe. British colonialism was quite as much about anti-slavery as it was about slavery. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not its essence, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.

A more extensive discussion of this subject by Nigel Biggar is available at Briefings for Britain.

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Britain's slave trade and the problem with 'decolonisation' - Spectator.co.uk

Wildfires swept through Clackamas County this summer. JUSTIN KATIGBAK

Now, a coalition of activist groups focused on police abolition is holding a fundraiser to further compensate the inmate firefighters for their life-risking work. The goal is to raise around $55,000enough to put $200 into each persons commissary account.

Every year, during the wildfire season, a lot of people are outraged to hear that inmate firefighters arent fairly compensated for their labor, said Evan Quarles of Lane County Mutual Aid, one of the groups in the coalition. Theyre putting their lives in danger because of climate change, to save the lives impacted by it.

Quarles said the fundraiser started as an informal campaign on Twitter this summer, and led to the coalition pestering the Oregon Department of Corrections for at least a month to get the names of all the inmate firefighters. Volunteers with the coalitionwhich also includes Critical Resistance Portland, Care Not Cops PDX, Black & Pink PDX, and Siskiyou Abolition Projectthen sent letters to each inmate firefighter, asking if they were interested in the fundraiser. The majority of the firefighters have already replied with interest, and the group continues to receive responses.

Most of the people we are in contact with were extremely glad to hear people recognized the labor that they do to save the lives of countless people," Quarles said. Theyre desperately in need of resources. A lot of their families are out of work because of COVID-19, or they dont have anyone on the outside.

Rory Elliott, an organizer with Critical Resistance Portland, said she read one letter in which an inmate described how people he met who were impacted by the fires treated the inmates "as people who saved their homes and not as people who are imprisoned. But for the most part, Elliott said, the firefighters wrote about not receiving recognition from the larger public for their work.

One the one hand, [the inmates] recognize theyre being exploited for their labor, added Quarles. But on the other hand, they have a sense of pride in what they do.

The coalitions fundraiser, which kicked off last week, will also include raffles with prizes provided by Oregon artists and musicians. The group is also seeking volunteers who will maintain letter correspondence with the inmate firefightersthose interested can email LaneMutualAid@gmail.com.

In addition to communicating about the fundraiser, Quarles said the letter-writing had evolved into a labor-building project, with inmates writing that they wish they could get time off their sentences for their firefighting worka practice used in other statesor pardoned by Gov. Kate Brown to help lessen crowding in Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. The coalition plans to advocate for these demands in its future work.

Elliott said the inmates she corresponded with planned to use the commissary donations to buy healthier food than what is available in the cafeteria. One person said they planned to buy protein powder to stay in shape for the next firefighting season.

Others said they planned to use the donations to support others in Oregons prison system who can use the help.

This is a project of mutual aid, Elliott said. We know that by resourcing people outside were also supporting the mutual aid work that happens inside prison.

You can donate to the fundraiser here.

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Activists Fundraise for Oregon Inmates Who Fought Fires this Summer - The Portland Mercury

By Amby Uneze

Imo State communities and stakeholders have been urged to work tenaciously and assiduously towards the total elimination of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and all forms of violence against the girl child.

The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) Chief of Field Office, Enugu, Dr. Ibrahim Conte made the remarks recently while presenting an address at the public declaration of abandonment/abolition of FGM by the 44 autonomous communities in the two local government areas of Owerri West and Ehime Mbano LGAs of Imo State, led by the Chairman of the Council of Traditional Rulers, Eze Geoffrey Ejimogu and Eze Emmanuel Ibechi respectively.

According to him, since nobody has been able to prove the importance of FGM in society, the time has come for the people to work in tandem with UNICEF, National Orientation Agency (NOA) and other relevant government agencies so as to put an end to this obnoxious practice that inhibits the proper development of the girl child.

Dr. Conteh who was represented by the UNICEF Child Protection Specialist, Victor Atuchukwu encouraged the various communities to be on the same page with appropriate authorities and work towards the sustainability of the milestone recorded at the various engagements.

He explained that UNICEF will continue to forge ahead towards battling this ugly menace and take the message to the grassroots with a view to setting up surveillance team that would monitor and report prospective offenders to the law enforcement agency for prosecution and appropriate sanctions.

UNICEF is poised more than ever to work in close collaboration with the surveillance team, community leaders and other relevant agencies so as to fish out individuals and groups that will fall short of the laws eliminating the practice of FGM in the various communities.

He commended the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development and individuals who have continued to identify with the crusade against FGM in the state.

Dr. Conteh however expressed dismay that despite the disastrous consequences of FGM to the girl child and would therefore continue to intensify measures to tackle the menace in the state.

Speaking, the Coordinator of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), in the state, Uka Ukachi disclosed that the Commission would soon come up with fresh measures to tackle the prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation in some communities in the state along with other right abuses/violation of the girl child.

According to her, the Commission has already established offices across the 36 states of the federation and FCT to strengthen the onslaught of all forms of human right abuses against the girl child including FGM which she said violates the rights of the privacy, right to life, survival, sexual reproduction and development of the girl child.

This is even as the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) has vowed to henceforth arrest and prosecute parents. Guardians found guilty of FGM.

As an organisation set up to monitor and to remedy established cases of human rights abuses particularly that of the girl child, Ukachi said that NHRC is now working in collaboration with the police and other security agencies to stem the ugly practice.

In his remarks, the state Director of NOA, Vitus Ekeocha revealed that all the efforts by UNICEF and NOA towards bringing the communities together for declaration has yielded positive results.

According to him, for the communities to willingly decide to abolish any tradition or culture, such communities must have consistently participated in their dialogue sessions and realised the negative effects of this obnoxious practice.

Ekeocha explained that what we are witnessing today is the outcome of various engagements, dialogue and advocacy meetings with critical segments on the immediate and long term negative health and psycho-social consequences of FGM on the health of girls and women in the 21 autonomous communities by various partners and civil society organisations.

In their public declaration agreement, the royal fathers of Owerri West autonomous communities represented by HRH Eze Geoffrey Ejiogu and HRH Eze Ethelbert Ekwelibe unanimously consented and agreed to publicly declare their intention to eliminate the obnoxious practice in their various communities.

We the royal fathers of the 21 autonomous communities in Owerri West Local Government Area of Imo state and the entire people of Owerri West Local Government Area comprising of more than 250 villages having being sensitised about the harmful effects of FGM and having deliberated during the several community dialogue have recognised the immediate and long term negative health, physical and psycho-social consequences of FGM.

His Ehime Mbano counterpart, Eze Ibechi also declared on behalf of other traditional rulers in the council area pronounced that hence forth, anybody caught in the practice of FGM would be treated as an criminal offence against the state.

We also recognised the health implication of this practice to our daughters, wives and sisters subjected to this practice. Based on the above we have publicly declared to put an end to this practice.

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UNICEF Expresses Satisfaction over FGM Abandonment in Imo, as 44 Communities Abolish Practice - THISDAY Newspapers