Category Archives: Government Oppression

If you are South Asian American and perpetuate anti-Blackness, you have fallen prey to an oppressive tactic of the United States government, the concept of model minorities.To combat anti-Blackness, we need to understand the history behind the term model minority. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, prioritizing individuals with specialized skills in the immigration processes. Consequently, the only South Asians allowed to immigrate to America were exceedingly intelligent and/or talented in a specific discipline. By only allowing the best South Asians to enter the country, the U.S. government predetermined the South Asian immigrant population to be successful.On the other hand, people from the African diaspora were forcibly brought to the U.S. through the transatlantic slave trade. They had no choice to come to America, let alone indulge in the opportunity to learn and develop special skills to prove their worth. Therefore, South Asian Americans were systematically supported to be more successful, making the U.S. government consider them a model minority. However, this detrimental approach to immigration policy allowed our government to rest on their laurels and believe that their work in supporting South Asian Americans was advancing the mission of all inclusivity and diversity in the U.S.Meanwhile, African Americans, who were forced into immigrating and were not given the right resources to become successful, continued to be oppressed and struggled to survive. The African-American community fought through chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and now police brutality, while the media painted South Asian Americans as good, law-abiding citizens. When African Americans engaged in protests to merely exist as equals in U.S. society, South Asian Americans benefited off of their model minority status, playing into the governments hands, even if it meant turning a blind eye to the continued oppression of their fellow peoples of color.You might be thinking, Just because Im not Black doesnt mean I dont experience racism. The difference here is that the racism that we, as South Asian Americans, have faced and continue to face is not institutionalized and not as rampantly widespread and maintained across U.S. government policies as racism that Black Americans face.Now, more than ever, the South Asian-American community has the opportunity to reject the model minority messaging. One of the officers abetting the murder of George Floyd was Asian American, and we, as a minority population and a part of the larger Asian community, have a responsibility to strongly condemn this anti-Blackness and racism. The Asian-American population has long played a major role in the United States systematic racism: Now is the time to fight back.

Anushka Srinivasan was born and raised in Los Altos.

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The myth of the 'model minority' - Los Altos Town Crier

Even when President Donald Trump finally manages to do the right thing, its rarely for the right reasons. Such was the case Wednesday, when he signed a law that allows for sanctioning as human rights violators Chinese officials responsible for running camps imprisoning up to 1 million Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang Province of western China.

Trumps been so inconsistent on what should be a core tenet of American foreign policy opposition to large-scale internment of a minority population that theres some truth to claims from Beijing that Trumps move this week was a hypocritical one motivated by a desire to weaponize the issue against China amid high-stakes trade negotiations. He almost certainly didnt take this long-overdue step in support of the Uighurs because he genuinely cares about human rights, but as a way to dig at China with relations at their current low.

Theres some truth to claims from Beijing that Trumps move this week was a hypocritical one motivated by a desire to weaponize the issue against China.

After all, according to a forthcoming book by former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, excerpts of which were leaked to the press earlier in the week, Trump expressed support for the idea of the internment camps when Chinese President Xi Jinping explained in a private 2019 G20 meeting how they were his solution to combat unrest in the Uighur population.

This stance is actually somewhat consistent for Trump, who has been forthright in his aggressive disregard for human rights, particularly those of Muslims. Trump has also used spurious security concerns to back up his discriminatory policies. All of which makes it that much more important to understand why Xis justifications are so erroneous and his policy so urgently in need of vociferous, unified American opposition.

Xinjiang is the home of the Uighurs, a Turkic people who once ruled their own empire. As is the case with many of the areas bordering on China, control has been a matter of dispute, tension and even outright violence. Chinas Qing Dynasty completed its conquest of Xinjiang in the 18th century, though centuries of revolt followed. Ever since the Chinese Revolution and the installation of the Communist Party government in 1949, however, the land has been controlled by the central Beijing government.

Over the decades, Uighur separatist violence and Chinese repression have rocked the region. In addition to exerting military force, Beijing has encouraged the countrys dominant Han Chinese ethnic group to move to Xinjiang and populate it to diminish Uighur independence claims.

But the Communist Party has also given signs of accepting the cultural diversity of its population during its rule. It officially recognizes 55 ethnic minorities, 10 of which practice Islam. It has made arrangements for government-approved Muslim clerics and grudgingly tolerated small-scale religious practice though it remained unacceptable among party members themselves.

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Over the years, Beijing also attempted to foster economic growth and implement affirmative action policies for minorities, who on average live in poorer areas with inferior educational opportunities.

When I taught in the mid-2010s in a university in Gansu, another northern province adjacent to Xinjiang, the local religion and customs were on a full, peaceful display. The Muslim Hui ethnicity lived amid minaret-laden mosques, wearing Islamic clothing such as white caps for men and head scarves for women and eating cuisine adapted to the requirement of Halal regulations such as spicy Lanzhou beef-noodle soup in place of pork dishes.

The Hui lived alongside the Han Chinese majority as well as other minorities Mongols, Tibetans, Kazakhs giving the mountainous region its diverse character.

But the government now sees that diversity as a problem to be erased. A massive crackdown in northwestern Xinjiang has led to a broader campaign to erase Muslim cultural institutions across China.

New repressive measures first employed just against Uighurs in Xinjiang, but more recently becoming more widespread came in response to a wave of terror attacks by Uighur separatists in 2013 and 2014, including a shocking knife attack at the train station of a major southwestern city that left 31 dead, the bombing of a vegetable market in the capital of Xinjiang province that killed 39 and a vehicular suicide attack at Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.

Former detainees report hours of chanting praise for the Communist Party and being monitored by 24/7 surveillance systems. Some allege worse treatment, including forced labor, rape and torture.

Beijing authorities feared that the Uighur population had been radicalized by the global spread of Islamic extremism. The Chinese government initially resorted to armed checkpoints and heavy-handed regulations. The leading moderate critic of Chinas Xinjiang policy, Ilham Tohti, was imprisoned for life in 2014.

But documents leaked from the Chinese Communist Party to The New York Times in 2019 reveal that soon after Xi came to power in 2013, he concluded that more coercive measures were needed and should be adopted with absolutely no mercy. The new strategy: Round up everyone displaying cultural signifiers that hinted they might be susceptible to radicalization.

Starting in 2017, a network of informants, mass surveillance footage and Big Data-style techniques were used to identify Uighurs infected by unhealthy thoughts with such incriminating evidence as having a long beard, studying Arabic, attending a religious service or browsing an article critical of the Chinese government. For a good measure, cultural artifacts such as veils and long beards were outright banned.

The worst response, though, was the wide-scale internment of Uighurs. In Xinjiang, locals were arrested indiscriminately simply to fulfill quotas requiring detention of a certain percentage of the population.

Former detainees report hours of chanting praise for the Communist Party and being monitored by 24/7 surveillance systems. Some allege worse treatment, including forced labor, rape and torture.

While curbing violence in and emanating from Xinjiang is undoubtedly important, forcing 1 out of every 10 Uighurs in Xinjiang into concentration camps is a massive human rights violation and by no means a proportionate response. For every prospective militant theoretically cowed by the reeducation camps, thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens have been grossly mistreated by their own government.

Indeed, so many local officials thought the camps were excessive that more than 12,000 were investigated by the party under suspicion of undermining the internment program.

The claim that Chinese policy is based on combating extremism and terrorism is undermined by the fact that this cultural purification is gradually being expanded to populations without the tensions experienced in Xinjiang.

Authorities in several provinces recently made it more difficult to know whether food met Halal standards in order to curb religious extremism. Mosques in Ningxia have been ordered to remodel with Chinese-style architecture or face demolition. Some in other provinces have been shut down completely. And more than 100 Uighur graveyards have been destroyed even though their inhabitants presumably caused no threat whatsoever.

Collectively, these decisions suggest a broad policy decision has been taken to try to assimilate or Sinicize minorities into Han Chinese culture and abandon the Communist Partys previous multicultural recognition. Xi even announced in 2019 it was scaling back affirmative action policies and local tax incentives for minorities, in an apparent bid to remove any incentive to identify as a minority.

These decisions suggest a broad policy decision has been taken to try to assimilate or Sinicize minorities into Han Chinese culture.

I think back to the ambitious and idealistic students I knew while I was a teacher in China. Surely those who were of minority descent believed they and their culture had a place in Xi Jinpings Chinese Dream of a harmonious and prosperous country.

Sadly, the unique heritage of many Chinese minorities is now being treated as an unwelcome aberration to be normalized an erasure of cultural diversity and history that would come at the expense of all of Chinas citizens.

The United States is far from done with reckoning over its own dark legacy of internment and displacement of native peoples and other minorities. But that doesnt mean it cant consistently and actively condemn gross human rights violations of ethnic minorities happening today, rather than belatedly taking actions like imposing sanctions only after trying and failing to lower tariffs and improve the sitting presidents re-election prospects. The American and Chinese people both deserve better.

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Trump's move against China for its Uighur oppression makes him look like a hypocrite - NBC News

The modern market system, with its far-flung and highly intricate division of labor, is a miraculous social technology with incredible powers to incentivize and coordinate the invention, production, and distribution of goods and services. It is the primary engine of the modern wealth explosion, which began two-and-a-half centuries ago in England and whose continued progress has now made possible what all prior generations would have considered utterly fantastic: the liberation of humanity from the Malthusian prison of mass privation. Were not there yet, but with the riches we have already heaped up, the eradication of extreme poverty from Planet Earth is now a realistic goal.

Many brilliant scholars have contributed to our understanding of this astonishing phenomenon. Adam Smith deserves pride of place among them, but after him (on my scorecard, at least) the most profound insights have come from a pair of Austrian-born economists, F. A. Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter. From Hayek we learned how the market order, especially through the mechanism of freely moving prices, acts as a gigantic information-processing system, allowing people to make use of and act upon widely dispersed knowledge that otherwise would be completely inaccessible to them. And from Schumpeter, with his celebration of entrepreneurship and creative destruction, we gained appreciation for capitalisms incessant and unruly dynamism. Although we benefit greatly from the efficient use of existing information as described by Hayek, the greatest gifts of the market economy come from the incentives it provides for the discovery and application of new, socially useful knowledge.

The free-market intellectual movement has done much to further develop and more widely disseminate these insights, and for that we are in its debt. But in appreciating the world-transforming virtues of the market system, it is vitally important for us to keep in mind this qualification: a well-functioning market system is neither self-executing nor self-sustaining. To achieve what they are capable of, markets need to be embedded in and supplemented by supportive legal, political, and social institutions. Alas, the free-market movement has done a bad job of recognizing this fact and its implications for policy. This blind spot is the result of flawed ideology, as I described in the previous essays in this series. But it also reflects the fact that the movement has been led by economists, and as that discipline has professionalized, its practitioners have tended to narrow their focus and take the existence of the market order as given.

But the market order is not a given. Start with the fact that all the worlds richest, freest, most advanced economies today belong to countries with large, powerful states, elaborate regulatory codes, and extensive provision of social insurance and other public goods. If modern, large-scale, impersonal markets were truly self-executing and self-sustaining that is, they emerged naturally and spontaneously and thrived wherever they are not smothered by overbearing government we should expect to see flourishing market economies in the worlds most lightly governed places. Yet if we look at, say, the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the writ of the central government barely reaches, or Somalia, which lacked any central government at all from 1991 to 2006, we see nothing of the kind.

Not only do prosperous market economies and strong states go together in the present day, but history shows that the two emerged and developed in tandem. Early modern Europe was the scene of both intensive state-building and a commercial revolution that set the stage for industrialization. Although the two developments were distinct and at times in conflict, overall, the rise of the modern nation-state helped to midwife the subsequent wealth explosion.

Centralized states contributed to market development on a number of fronts. By deterring and repelling foreign aggression, they protected local economies from the devastation of war. And because there was military advantage in commercial strength and the resources for war-making it provided, rulers of centralized states had strong incentives to promote economic development. Centralized systems of taxation allowed integrated national markets to emerge and the division of labor to develop accordingly. The growth of effective bureaucracies provided a check against rent-seeking by local interests and made possible more efficient systems of taxes with lower deadweight losses. Centralized states with the capacity to enforce their laws nationwide allowed economic life to be governed by a system of general and abstract rules, which then created the freedom to plan and invest within the context of those rules. And the growth of cohesive national identities built around a common language and history lent cultural support to the provision of public goods and governance that promoted the national interest over the perpetuation of local privileges.

When we move forward in time to take a closer look at the present, we see the coevolution of state and market has been carried to the point that what started as a haphazard partnership is now full-fledged complementarity between the public and private spheres. As my Niskanen Center colleague Ed Dolan has documented in a pair of essays, the size of government (as measured by government expenditures as a percentage of GDP) shows a strong positive correlation with measures of economic freedom and well-being. In other words, the relationship is precisely the opposite of what you would expect if you think that big government is the enemy of markets and market-mediated prosperity. What drives the decidedly pro-market tilt of larger government is a strong correlation between the size of government and the quality of government that is, the integrity and effectiveness of legal and political institutions as measured by judicial independence, impartiality of courts, adherence to due process, free and fair elections, relative absence of corruption, and related indicators.

In other words, a flourishing market economy requires, not small government, but high-quality government which we can also refer to as high state capacity, or effective government. The private sector and the public sector are not antagonists, as libertarian ideology would have it. On the contrary, they are necessary complements: The health of the former depends on the health of the latter.

At the Niskanen Center, we are developing a new, distinctive policy vision based on the recognition that a strong, effective private sector and a strong, effective public sector go together. In particular, our advocacy of a free-market welfare state highlights the interdependence between vibrant, dynamic markets and the robust provision of social insurance and other public goods. A well-designed welfare state supports market functioning by expanding peoples capabilities and allowing them to participate in economic life at a higher level; by protecting against dislocation and waste through mitigating otherwise uninsurable risks; and by making creative destruction politically sustainable through ensuring that the rules of the game work for the benefit of all. Meanwhile, the wealth generated by innovative and robustly competitive markets makes possible the social investments and protections of the welfare state.

When we see that markets work best, not in the absence of government but in the presence of good government, we are able to see the ideals of free markets and limited government in a new and clearer light. Freeing those vital principles from the misunderstandings created by libertarian ideology, we can reconceive them so that they serve, rather than undermine, the cause of effective government on which our freedom and prosperity depend.

Thus reconceived, the concept of free markets is no longer associated with the overall size and scope of government. Rather, the free in free markets describes certain key attributes of a well-functioning market system. Markets are free, not when they are unregulated, but when the rules that define them allow for wide freedom of action along a number of key dimensions: free entry, free exit, freely moving prices, free trade across national boundaries, freedom to hire and fire, freedom to take a job or quit, freedom to introduce new products or production methods without prior permission, and freedom to invest. The commitment to free markets is based on evidence, not ideology: Wherever competitive markets are a workable method of organizing production and distribution, they tend to function best when new firms are free to enter and existing firms are free to compete on price and quality. Accordingly, the commitment is robust but not dogmatic: a strong but rebuttable presumption in favor of entrepreneurship and competition.

When we understand free markets this way, we are in a much better position to recognize what kinds of regulatory policies actually support market functioning and what kinds undermine it. Because the association between free markets and deregulation has been broken, it is easier to see that regulations that are effective in preventing harms to workers, consumers, third parties, or the environment are actually pro-market: Such rules make possible the Invisible Hand that guides private profit-seeking to serve the public good. And when we no longer see regulation as something imposed on business by nefarious bureaucrats, it is easier to recognize those cases where regulation is actually used as a tool by business to gain advantages it couldnt win in the marketplace.

Once we recognize that free markets are always embedded in a larger system of rules and institutions, it becomes clear that the problem of regulatory capture is both perennial and symmetrical. First, perennial: Regulatory capture stands revealed as the inexpungable Achilles heel of capitalism. Capitalism cannot work without good rules, but it is always in the interest of powerful economic actors to twist and rewrite those rules so that their narrow interests are served in preference to the larger public interest. And symmetrical: Regulatory capture can lead to the absence of good rules just as well as the presence of bad ones. Regulatory loopholes that allow polluters to foul air and water without consequences create rents just as surely as do regulatory barriers to entry that shield incumbents from new competition. Regulatory capture is the name for all cases where the rules enable narrow interests to profit by imposing costs on the rest of us, whether that is because those rules bind the rest of us inappropriately or because they grant impunity to narrow interests when they harm others.

And what becomes of the principle of limited government when ideologically predetermined limits on the size and scope of government have been abandoned? Freed from the hopeless task of specifying in advance when government can and cannot solve collective problems and improve lives, we can direct our energies toward strategies for controlling government power that are actually viable. The first great check on government, of course, is public accountability: Legislative and executive power are vested in elected officials who are chosen via universal adult suffrage. Partisans of small government tend to be less than enthusiastic about democracy, seeing it as vulnerable to redistributionist excess. In fact, universal suffrage is a vitally important shield of our liberties, which is precisely why oppression and exclusion from the franchise often go together and why historically oppressed groups focus so much energy on gaining, protecting, and exercising their right to vote.

Popular government alone, however, is no guarantee of effective government: In the words of James Madison, we are in need of auxiliary precautions. Specifically, government power needs to be limited by procedural rules that channel its exercise into designated structures of authority and decision-making. Here we are talking not just about the formal, written Constitution, but about all broadly constitutional rules that establish the processes of government. Such rules empower government even as they set boundaries outside which its authority is absent: Without a stable institutional structure, it is impossible to govern coherently, much less effectively.

As to how government authority and decision-making should be structured, the guiding principle is the ultimate end of all republican governments: the public interest. Ensuring that government of the people, by the people is also for the people requires governing structures that can filter the raucous cacophony of public opinion and focus the muddled signals of vote tallies to enact government policies and programs that redound to the general welfare. Two fundamental attributes of good constitutional design can be mentioned here: Good government requires deliberation, and deliberative government requires effective representation of all affected interests.

Contemporary governance is infernally complicated, which means that effective governance depends on large amounts of information gathering, analysis, and debate in short, deliberation. Necessary elements include the systematic collection of statistical and other data, processes for tapping expert opinion, and of course broad, open channels for input from affected interests and the broader public. As the last point indicates, deliberative government is impossible without wide representation. Decision-making works best when it incorporates the perspectives of all significant constituencies that will be affected; government capture is the regular result when one narrow interest succeeds in dominating the decision-making process. Ensuring that government is truly representative begins with zealously protecting voting rights but hardly ends there; every aspect of the policymaking process the accessibility of the decision-making venue, the intelligibility of the subject matter, the openness to opposing views needs to be evaluated for its effect on who actually gets seats at the table.

Just a couple of concrete examples can illustrate the larger point. Small-government advocates may find it counterintuitive, but as my colleague Steven Teles and Lee Drutman have argued, upgrading and professionalizing congressional staff would be a powerful tool to limit the power of special interests to manipulate government to their own narrow ends. With extremely limited in-house expertise on staff, legislators are forced to depend on information supplied by interested parties information carefully selected to favor a particular point of view. Accordingly, improved deliberative capacity can be a bulwark against rent-seeking. And as much as the information at the disposal of decision-makers matters for good policy, so too does the locus of decision-making. Take land use, for example: Decisions made hyper-locally, on a parcel by parcel basis in obscure meetings of zoning boards, ensure massive overrepresentation of immediate neighbors and their NIMBY instincts relative to would-be residents who at the time may be living in another metropolitan area. Moving decision-making up to higher levels of government with broader constituencies would make land-use decisions more representative and, as a consequence, less exclusionary.

For the cause of effective government, the public interest serves as both the ultimate empowering principle and the ultimate limiting principle. Classical republicanism envisioned a comprehensive and monolithic public interest, but in a liberal democratic republic such as ours, we recognize that the interests shared by all in a sprawling, ethnically and religiously heterogeneous, commercial and pluralistic country are necessarily thin and abstract. Accordingly, the idea of the public interest serves to impose fairly strict boundaries on the proper business of government. As a limiting principle, the public interest rules out policies that benefit narrow interests to the detriment of the rest of us, as well as policies that aim at public goals but fail to achieve them. Given the current state of the American political economy, the standard of effective government in the public interest provides anybody with a critical stance toward government an ample supply of policies and programs to find fault with and oppose.

The nature of the critical stance, however, is markedly different from the one based on small-government ideology. The move can be described as one from anti-government to anti-corruption, with corruption defined broadly to include all deviations from good government. The state is no longer the adversary; on the contrary, the health of the state is the foundation of our freedom and our prosperity. The adversary now is whatever imperils the health of the state, with that health understood as fidelity to the public interest. Waste and failure to achieve objectives are one species of corruption; another is the undue influence of narrow interests on government, whether that influence results in inappropriate action or inappropriate inaction.

An American center-right that abandoned its misguided attachment to small government for small governments sake, and instead based its critical stance toward government on the standard of effective government, would of course look very different from the right we have today. But it would be able to draw on a rich historical tradition within the Republican Party. That tradition was especially vital at the partys outset. The founding generation of Republicans were strong proponents of energetic and effective government, supporting public goods in the form of canals and land-grant universities as well as a kind of proto-social insurance in the form of free land for homesteaders and pensions for Civil War veterans. And while they were at it, they effected the single greatest limitation on government power and triumph for individual freedom in American history: the liberation of four million African Americans from slavery.

As industrialization took off after the Civil War, Republicans became the party of big business a partnership that led in some good directions and a number of bad ones. But even as support for business became the dominant tendency within the party, the good-government, anti-corruption tradition remained robust and influential at least until relatively recently. That tradition is visible in the Mugwumps, that initial group of dissident Republicans to choose country over party; the push for civil service reform; the embrace of progressive reform by Theodore Roosevelt; opposition to the corruption of urban machine politics; the moderation of Dwight Eisenhower and his refusal to relitigate the New Deal; and most recently, the maverick conservatism of John McCain.

There is no hint of anti-government animus in this tradition: Public service is seen as a high calling, duty and honor are trumpeted as virtues, and corruption is condemned as a betrayal. While the small-government tradition within the GOP is an outgrowth of the partys close relationship with business, the good-government tradition has benefited from the partys connection to the military. It is no accident that the most prominent figures of the good-government tradition within the GOP Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and in our time John McCain first achieved fame as war heroes.

Whether a decent, constructive center-right in America can be reestablished after the descent into plutocratic populism remains to be seen: A necessary, if not sufficient, precondition is a sound electoral thrashing for Trump and his enablers. What I am certain of is that American politics badly needs a decent, constructive center-right, and that among its necessary elements are a sound understanding of and firm commitment to free markets and limited government. I hope that the thoughts provided here will prove useful to the project of regrounding those principles on a firm intellectual foundation in the event they can find a political home.

This essay is part 3 of a three-part series. For part 1 and part 2, see here.

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Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived - Niskanen Center

The Mounties are under fire.

In early June, a video circulated on social media showing a Nunavut RCMP officer driving his truck into a man and hitting him with the door before getting out to arrest him.

Then, Chief Allan Adam broadcast a dashcam video documenting his violent arrest at the hands of two Mounties in Alberta a video the prime minister said raises serious questions.

On June 12, RCMP officers in New Brunswick killed Rodney Levi, a 48-year-old man from Metepenagiag Mikmaq Nation. His death was just a few weeks after another local police agency killed Chantel Mooreof Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation.

Pinned between criticism over the Mounties handling of the worst mass murder in modern Canadian history and the movement to defund police sweeping the continent, Justin Trudeaus government has offered strong indictments of systemic racism within the force.

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In interviews and tweets, his cabinet ministers have disavowed racism and made it clear they recognize solving the problem requires drilling down to the roots. As Minister of Crown Indigenous-Relations Carolyn Bennett tweeted: The system isnt broken, it was built that way.

The cabinet ministers tweets, in particular, struck some as performative given theyre in the party thats been leading efforts to reform the RCMP for years now. Indeed, one of the select few people the RCMP must abide by is their colleague, the public safety minister, who answers to Parliament.

Erick Laming, a Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation PhD candidate in criminology at the University of Toronto, is blunt: It sounds like more lip service.

The governments current reform plan, as outlined by Mary-Liz Power, press secretary for the public safety minister, includes body-worn video cameras to be worn by Mounties across the service (experts have already made it clear this wont address systemic racism).

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The government is also working on a legislative framework to expand First Nations policing and to bolster the forces Civilian Review and Complaints Committees (CRCC) powers along with renaming it the Public Complaints and Review Commission.

Power did not respond to questions about what role the civilian advisory board, brought in last fall to help modernize the force following years of bullying and sexual harassment, will play in addressing systemic racism.

Former public safety minister Ralph Goodale announced the creation of the board in January 2019 in response to the CRCCs 2017 report. Critics were quick to note that the board has no power to make binding decisions, despite civilian oversight being a mainstay recommendation in more than 15 reviews of the RCMP conducted in under a decade.

Richard Dicerni, chairperson for the board, told Global News that the events of the last few weeks have more to do with police work than management, human resources and training. As such, he says, its not explicitly in our space.

Still, Dicerni expects over the next few weeks and months the board will discuss how to incorporate conversations about systemic racism into its mandate.

But the governments attempts to convince people that whats to come wont be more of the same are certainly not helped by Mountie Commissioner Brenda Luckis flip-flop on whether systemic racism in the force exists, says Laming (it does).

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For Trudeau to say reforms are needed at all levels of policing and Minister of Indigenous Services Marc Miller to tweetthere is work to do to reform and modernize the RCMPs culture, to do better, but then carry on with the same reformation plan?

Like I said, more lip service, says Laming, because what have you really done?

Global News asked both Millers and Bennetts offices whether the tweets could be taken as a sign the ministers intended to press Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to follow through on more aggressive reform measures. Only Bennetts office responded.

And while spokesperson Emily Williams did not answer the question, in an emailed statement she said: Reconciliation is a crucial priority for our government and we are committed to renewing our relationship with Indigenous Peoples based on the affirmation of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership.

Calls for increased oversight of Canadas national police force arent new, although theyve been growing louder as of late.

Speaking on June 17, the Green Partys Elizabeth May called for an inquiry into the force, asking its culture of accountability be put under a microscope.

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That same day, the RCMP released a use-of-force report showing that in the last three years, Mounties have pointed their guns at people far more frequently than theyve pointed other, less lethal, weapons like Tasers.

Then, the CRCC added fuel to oversight concerns when it released new data showing its sitting on 181 outstanding interim reports into the conduct of members because the commissioner has yet to provide the official response required before the CRCC can finalize its investigations.

Of those, 130 have been waiting for more than a year. The oldest report the commissioner has yet to respond to is nearly four years old and includes recommendations on topical issues like use of force in a cell block, medical assistance to prisoners, strip searching a woman prisoner and force policies about strip searching.

The force has developed an action plan that it has shared with the CRCC to prioritize completing the outstanding reports, per Catherine Fortin, a spokesperson for the RCMP. She also noted, efforts are underway to double the number of personnel responsible for review and analysis moving forward.

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But what most RCMP experts have agreed on for far longer than that particular report has sat awaiting official response is that reform requires tackling Mountie culture, which is deeply embedded in its structure.

The RCMP is paramilitary in nature, which several reports, including the 2017 one from the CRCC, have blamed for pervasive problems: members who fear repercussions if they speak up, promotions that arent driven by skill but rather who you know and a military-style presumption that because an officer occupies a senior rank, they must wield their power with skill and professionalism.

So even if you put the question of is it or isnt it systemic racismaside and take a closer look at what reforms the government has undertaken, Laming says its clear they havent really done anything in terms of changing the culture.

Its the culture thats crucial to reform at least, according to numerous inquiries and expert reports conducted this century and last. The many, many reviews have been in response to bad press sparked by multiple harassment, bullying and sexual harassment class actions, as well as a proposed class action over the RCMPs handling of the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and another proposed class action over Mounties treatment of Indigenous people in the north.

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To successfully tackle that will mean going back to the beginning, says Steve Hewitt, a senior history lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of three books about the RCMPs history.

Itll mean going back to the fact the RCMP was created as a means to control Indigenous people and clear the path for western settlement. In a way, he says, Mounties are prisoners of their own history, which makes change hard.

It isnt just that theyre a police force, says Hewitt.

Theyre a foundational national myth to English-speaking Canada, which makes it hard to bring about any kind of change when on one level the public sees the organization as a fundamental component of their vision of Canada.

Fortin, the Mountie spokesperson, says the force is aware of its long, sometimes difficult history with Indigenous communities in Canada and has a number of efforts underway in an attempt to improve it. That includes an Aboriginal and First Nations awareness course and cultural sensitivity training specific to different regions in Canada.

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Theres a real risk to reforming the Mounties now, cautions Matthew Norris, a Cree man from Lac La Ronge First Nation who is vice-president of the Urban Native Youth Association and co-chair of the Vancouver Just Recovery Coalition.

If not done correctly, it can result in the reinforcing of the very anti-Indigenous kind of systemic discrimination and racism within the institution, Norris says.

If you reform the institution in ways which support it without addressing these underlying systemic issues then you just reinforce the ongoing violence and abuse.

So, if Canada is serious about this then we have to start from square one, Norris says.

We have to recognize that the RCMP in particular was developed on the oppression and the marginalization and the removal of Indigenous voices and Indigenous bodies from the land.

Recognizing these problems are not new, Morris says, is key to acknowledging that Canada cant continue to reinforce an institution that has had the chance to rebuild trust and has failed to.

Defunding the force is a solution Chad Haggerty, a Mtis ex-Mountie from northern Alberta, can get behind.

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A high percentage of the calls that I went to were calls that no police officer was properly equipped to deal with, he says.

Haggerty attended mental health calls, including ones for people feeling suicidal, and welfare checks the kind that ended in death for Moore, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman in New Brunswick, and more recently, for 62-year-old Ejaz Choudry in Mississauga, Ont.

Still, it wasnt until the end of his career that Haggerty started to second-guess his cop mentality. At the time, he says, he was facing domestic violence charges (he later pleaded guilty) and he decided to resign from the force.

One of the reasons Haggerty is so supportive of defunding the RCMP is the 17 years he served as a Mountie.

When police investigate themselves, on some level, officers know that it could one day be them in the hot seat, he says.

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That, coupled with this foundational belief amongst the majority of police officers Ive met in my service that it takes a police officer to do a proper investigation, means a fundamentally flawed mindset.

It persists now, Haggerty says, and requires a wholesale cultural shift to fix, which means reforming the RCMP Act and letting Canadians take a peek behind the curtain.

And while policy changes take time, he says the public needs some actions now.

The public needs the ability to review police actions RCMP or municipal as it happens without police having the opportunity to spin the situation.

With files from Beatrice Britneff, Mike De Souza and the Canadian Press

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2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Trudeaus government has a plan to tackle racism in the RCMP. Experts say it wont work - Global News

By Roger D. HarrisFrom Corte Madera, California

The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th was the spark that ignited the tinder of accrued injustice throughout the US and globally. This injustice has deep antecedents in the US and indeed in much of what is now called the Global South. There is a shared history of colonial conquest of the Indigenous and the abominable institution of the enslavement of African peoples.

What happened has its roots in systemic oppression that has resonated internationally. Just as the police suffocated George Floyd, US unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Zimbabwe, and nearly one third of humanity are designed to asphyxiate those nations which aspire to pursue an independent course.

International Movement Erupts

Defying coronavirus restrictions on public assembly, people are amassing in solidarity.

This historic alliance of the Movement for Black Lives with the oppressed abroad goes back to their 2016 founding document, which then characterized Israel as an apartheid state, condemned US backing for the settler genocide against Palestinians, and supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.

Linking Home and Abroad

The militarization of the US domestic police is bringing home the practices that the government perfected in suppressing popular expressions for self-determination abroad. The USs closest international partner, Israel, is a master of abusive police practices against its own Palestinian population. Development of those practices, partly funded by the US, are then imported back to the US. Over 100 Minneapolis police received training from Israeli law enforcement officers along with other police departments across the country.

Newsweek describes how Americas police became an army. Under the 1033 Program, military equipment is transferred to the domestic police, who are then mandated to use the equipment as a condition of the program.

While the police have been shooting rubber bullets and teargas at demonstrators in the homeland, the US military deployed a so-called Security Force Assistance Brigade to Colombia. As the worlds policeman, the US has some 800 formal military bases internationally; no other country has more than a handful of foreign bases.

Budgets for both domestic police and the US military are obscenely inflated and continue to grow, receiving bipartisan support. The Black Lives Matter movement questions whether either of these armed forces police and military truly serve or protect us. When Hurricane Katrina flooded poor African American neighborhoods in New Orleans, people were left to die stranded on rooftops while the police and the National Guard guarded private property.

Amid the current pandemic, ordinary people are experiencing punishing austerity with the worst yet to come. While the US Fed is doling out hundreds of billions of dollars daily at a 1/10 of one percent interest rate practically free money to the banks, the average US citizen is saddled with average credit card penalty interest rates of just under 30%. Who is doing the real looting?

Likewise, payments of unjust debt mostly accrued by US-backed military dictatorships to vulture capitalists from the US and other wealthy countries are stealing the livelihoods of the peoples of Argentina and other nations saddled with socially unsustainable debt burdens.

More people are behind bars in the US than anywhere else in the world, largely due to the so-called war on drugs, which in fact is a war on the most vulnerable and a pretext for the deployment of coercive means of social control. Black and brown people are targeted for arrest, adjudication, and imprisoned disproportionately compared to their numbers in the general population. The NAACP reports African Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites. While poor communities in the US, particularly those of color, are suffering from the plague of drugs, the primary world source of cocaine is the US client state of Colombia and the primary world source of heroin is US-occupied Afghanistan.

Delegitimization of American Exceptionalism

President Obama unequivocally exclaimed: I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. In another speech, he proclaimed: [W]hat makes us the envy of the world[is] the fact that weve given everybody a chance to pursue their own true measure of happiness. Thats who we are.

Thats not who we are, and the chant no justice, no peace is exposing that to the world. American exceptionalism is the ideological construct used to extol American world leadership based on the vision that the US is uniquely just and therefore has an obligation to endow the rest of the world with its freedom. As George Floyds niece Brooke Williams asked, when has America ever been great?

The US leads the world in incarceration of its own people, in consumption of addicting illicit drugs, in military and police spending, and in foreign military bases. No one elected the US to impose its full spectrum dominance on the globe. With the internationalization of the Black Lives Matter movement, this justifying ideology is being challenged, delegitimizing the US imperial project.

Indicative of the USs eroding legitimacy was its failure to suppress an inquiry by the UN Human Rights Council of racially inspired human rights violations. The representative from Burkina Faso, representing the 54 African countries, pressed for the investigation of the injustice and police brutality that persons of African descent face on a daily basis. This followed the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discriminations call for the US to make immediate structural reforms to end racial discrimination.

The internationalization of the protests reflects an understanding that it is the same US imperialist knee on the neck at home and abroad. Martin Luther Kings indictment that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, rang true in 1967 and ever more so now. Appropriately, the movement around Black Lives Matter, which has engaged the popular classes in what Che called the belly of the beast, has taken international prominence signifying that where there is oppression, there will be resistance.

As activist and lawyer Mark P. Fancher observes, resistance is global. International solidarity among the oppressed has a long tradition and is gathering momentum based on the understanding there is one struggle for justice with many fronts. No justice, no peace is being heard around the world.

Roger D. Harris is Associate Editor at COHA and also part of the Task Force on the Americas, a human rights group working in solidarity with the social justice movements in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1985.

[Main photo-credit:Patricio Zamorano/COHA.org]

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Black Lives Matter is International: Where there is oppression, there will be resistance - Council On Hemispheric Affairs

I saw the world we were fighting for: a diverse cohort of all races, sexualities, and religions celebrating together. RVA Magazine catches up with local protesters to hear their voices during a movement sweeping the nation.

I cant breathe. These three words, once uttered in a moment of desperation, now represent a new generations fight. In the aftermath of George Floyds death, protesters have sparked a movement across the nation to demand justice, denounce systemic racism, and advocate for social reform. The movement is very much alive in Richmond.

As a young black female, I feel that this movement means change, justice, and equality, said Jamie Hatcher, a 20 year old activist and student at Virginia State University.

Hatcher is from Caroline County, Virginia. She said she first became involved with social reform movements after the heartbreaking death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student who was killed by a white police officer in 2012.

After the death of George Floyd, Hatcher began participating in todays Black Lives Matter movement by sharing resources on social media, creating art, and attending protests.

[I want to see] justice for George Floyd and his hurting family, along with full equality throughout the American justice system, she said.

Beginning in the days after George Floyds death, thousands of people in cities and towns across the United States came together to express their outrage with systematic police brutality. As the movement grew, protesters began to widen their message, further advocating against institutional racism and the social inequality that the black community faces in America.

Fletcher Dalton, a 20 year old student at University of Richmond, attended his first protest in Richmond on May 29. He has been present at every local protest since.

This movement is necessary and warranted, said Dalton. The black community has been discriminated against and killed, over and over again. I saw this [movement] as a chance to stand up for what is right.

While the movement takes place on the streets, protesters advocate for change in government.

This goes past the criminal system, said Dalton. Minorities have been oppressed socio-economically in housing and in employment. We need to create a just society That begins with changing the criminal justice system.

Photographer and videographer Domico Phillips, 27, decided to use his professional and creative skills to aid the movement. Phillips said that Floyds death felt very personal for him, and he has participated in the movement every day since protests began in Richmond.

For Phillips, this movement represents the desire for a necessary reform.

Being a black man in this world, said Phillips, I know the same thing [that happened to Floyd] can happen to me.

This movement is about the liberation of black communities from oppression, said Julia Funk, a 20 year old protester from Northwest Chicago and rising junior at the University of Richmond.

It is about checking and dismantling a police force that systematically murders and imprisons black Americans, she said. It is about listening to black voices, and educating ourselves so that we can change these systems of oppression.

Of his experiences at Richmond protests, Dalton expressed anger and disappointment with the violent treatment of demonstrators by the local police force.

The police were throwing tear gas, fireworks, firecrackers, and pepper spraying the protesters, he said. My boyfriend, his friend, and I were hit with tear gas multiple times that [first] night, said Dalton. There were moments when I could not breathe because the pepper spray was so strong. It literally makes your entire chest and face tense with pain.

Despite being tear gassed by the police, Dalton described the protests as freeing and liberating.

Everyone was dancing in the streets and chanting for the Black Lives Matter movement, he said. It was scary and exciting. I saw the world we were fighting for: a diverse cohort of all races, sexualities, and religions celebrating together.

Protesters and activists have had a few victories to claim thus far. On May 29, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed Floyd, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, later upgraded to second-degree murder. The remaining three ex-officers involved in the incident have also been arrested, although they face lesser charges of aiding and abetting murder. In the community, various organizations, businesses, and state and local governments have taken symbolic actions in support of the movement. NASCAR, for one example, has banned the use of the Confederate flag from events.

A Richmond victory came with Governor Ralph Northams June 3 announcement that the state will remove Confederate statues in Richmond, including the Robert E. Lee statue, which has become a gathering site for local protest demonstrations.

Protesters in Richmond have taken it upon themselves to remove statues of Jefferson Davis, Christopher Columbus, and Williams Carter Wickham, a 19th century lawyer, slave owner, and Richmond native.

Dalton stated that while he is supportive of the removal of the Confederate statues, he does not believe the local and state governments are doing enough to advance social justice. Hatcher also expressed her disappointment with the local and state government.

While African-American anger is finally being voiced, she said, it is not really being heard or understood.

This sentiment is also mirrored by Funk. She expressed that she would urge white people to take this time to listen to black voices, and reflect upon what is being said.

Now is the time to educate yourself, and resources are everywhere, said Funk. [The white community] has to be able to listen, learn, and change, or we will continue to reinforce systems of oppression.

Floyds homicide has spurred activists to gather, speak out, and march. Regardless of their opposition, communities are once again coming together against the institutional practices that allow racism, ignorance, and police brutality to run rampant in the United States.

Top Photo by Domico Phillips

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No Justice, No Peace: Voices of the Young and Outraged - rvamag.com

ISLAMABAD:At least 30 innocent Kashmiris have been martyred by Indian armed forces since the beginning of this month alone. Despite the whole world battling the Covid-19 pandemic, Indian authorities continue their misadventures in Kashmir valley.

Not only are the youth being systematically killed, but the houses of civilians are being razed, leaving many inhabitants homeless in these testing times. The bodies of the martyred youth are also not being returned to their families for funeral processions. They are being silently buried in the woods, away from their hometowns so that no one is able to retrieve their bodies. If one uses common sense, it is not hard to imagine why the Indians would do such a thing. Furthermore, multiple machinations are being carried out on the one hand, Indian forces are targeting the Kashmiri youth on a regular basis, while on the other they are accelerating their settler-colonial agenda. Recently, they brought about some grave changes in the domicile laws whereby Indians can now obtain a domicile of the disputed region which was previously restricted by the articles 370 and 35A. The Indians are trying to dilute the Muslim majority in the valley, and world powers must move to stop this systematic oppression.

For how long do the Kashmiris have to suffer like this? Why is the world silent about this and why does anyone not pay heed to the miseries of Kashmiris? It is high time that world leaders urged the Indian government to stop the atrocities against Kashmiris and also assisted them in their struggle for the right to self-determination. We all need to stand hand in hand with Kashmiris and show the Indians that when united we can become a force to be reckoned with. The world needs to stand staunchly against oppression.

Musaib Manzoor

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24th, 2020.

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Unabated killing in IOK - The Express Tribune

When I was growing up in apartheid South Africa, my family often said that to be a Jew meant to always be on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor. But their life stories made plain how complicated this identity could be: They had run for their lives from pogroms in Lithuania and suddenly found themselves reaping the vast socioeconomic benefits of being white in a racist dictatorship.

My cousin Denis Goldberg, who died two months ago at the age of 87, took our family conversations about our Jewish commitment to justice to heart. He joined the black resistance movement led by Nelson Mandela and spent 22 years in prison for his commitment to fighting a brutal regime that was hell-bent on devaluing the lives of black South Africans.

Over four decades later, living in New York, Ive been thinking about those early discussions and Denis level of moral courage as I participate in and take the full measure of the mass historical uprising against institutionalized racism in the United States sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Millions of people have been propelled into action by the video of a black man being asphyxiated for nearly nine minutes by a white police officer an image that ignited the accumulated tinder of anger resulting from centuries of wrongs and three years of racist provocations by President Donald Trump.

We are now in a historic uprising against the institutionalized racism and violence that exists in every corner in our country, perpetuated by major institutions, the police, other authorities and racist whites against black women, men and children. The chasm between these unrelenting attacks on black people and our promise as a nation that all people are equal under the law is sickening and unacceptable.

As I see the police crackdown on demonstrators, I flash back to the social and political turmoil I witnessed during my youth in Cape Town, where police officers used the power of the state to beat black citizens with clubs and take them into police custody, some of them never to be seen again. By elementary school, I was accompanying my parents as they protested apartheid and campaigned for progressive legislators, including Jewish members of Parliament such as the anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman.

At rallies, I wore protest signs draped over my shoulders like a walking billboard, proclaiming my familys outrage. In high school, I learned how the African National Congress the political party created to fight racism was banned by the white South African government, and how speaking out or peacefully protesting was met with government-sanctioned violence.

I had arrived in the United States believing in a multiracial democracy but I was dismayed to learn that my new country was struggling with its own issues of race and class, inequality and oppression.

A few years later, after immigrating to the U.S., where I studied music at Julliard, I performed weekly classical concerts in New York City public schools. I was stunned by the abysmal conditions just a few miles from my campus in Lincoln Center. At one school in the South Bronx, the auditorium which was packed with thousands of kids, nearly all of color was decrepit. I could tell within minutes of my arrival that none of the kids were getting the education they deserved. I had arrived in the United States believing in a multiracial democracy, where everyone benefited from quality public education, but I was dismayed to learn that my new country was struggling with its own issues of race and class, inequality and oppression.

This shocking experience in America led me to a social justice law school, to the fight for gay men and people of color suffering from HIV/AIDS, and to theAmerican Jewish World Service, where we support the human rights struggles of communities of color in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and participate with other Jewish organizations in making the Jewish community more diverse, open and inclusive for Jews of color, women and girls, and LGBTQI+ Jews.

In recent days, Jewish colleagues and friends have asked me how to respond, as Jews, at this historic time to make sure that we can finally make national change that sticks. There is a hunger to be involved, to take action, and to show up as partners and allies. And we must seize this moment when the entire country as well as allies from countries all around the world are laser-focused on racial justice in America. Whats inspiring me isTa-Nehisi Coatessage advicethat if youre going to go in an opposite direction, you need to consciously exercise an opposite force.

To be a part of this opposite force of taking America in a new direction we, as Jews, must make it known that we stand with the oppressed, not the oppressor. We must make it clear that black lives matter and we must join our black sisters and brothers by protesting, providing financial resources, supporting grassroots and national organizations, and most important, demanding change from our government.

Every one of us should be voting and mobilizing for leaders in every sector of society who willrecognize and root out institutionalized racism, hold police accountable for their actions and protect First Amendment rights. As Jews, we must ensure that our community is diverse and inclusive.

As the historic uprising against four centuries of structural racism continues and as Covid-19 continues to infect and kill Americans of color disproportionately, American Jews have a choice to make: Step up and participate as so many Jews have or allow a historic opportunity to repair a deep breach in the world to pass us by.

This moment and this choice remind me of the words of Athol Fugard, the white South African playwright, from his 1989 play My Children! My Africa!: The clocks are ticking my friends. History has got a strict timetable. If were not careful we might be remembered as the country who arrived too late.

This historic moment takes me back to our family conversations in Cape Town in the 1960s and 70s about the choices Jews face when others must fight for justice. Time moves fast. This is a time for us to do and act. Lets remember that we are what we do, not only what we say.

This piece was distributed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or J.

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I grew up a white Jew in South Africa, so I am joining the fight against racism - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Fifteen years after it came into effect, promising a new era in transparency in government functioning, Indias Right to Information, or RTI, Act is dying a slow but certain death, with the executive letting go of no chance to hasten theprocess.

According to an estimate, between 40 and 60 lakh RTI applications are filed every year, but less than 3 per cent Indian citizens have ever filed an RTI plea.

Of the applications filed, less than 45 per cent received the information they had sought, according to the Report Card of Information Commissions in India, 2018-19 released by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SSN) and the Centre for Equity Studies (CES). But of the 55 per cent who didnt receive the information, less than 10 per cent filed appeals.

It doesnt help that the Chief Information Commission (CIC) and the State Information Commissions (SICs) have an unwritten rule about not penalising erringpublic information officers for their failure to respond to RTI applications properly and in time. And then there is the matter of huge backlog.

The Report Card revealed that as of 31 March 2019, there were 2.18 lakh appeals and complaints pending before the SICs. The study added that it took an average of more than a year for most SICs to dispose of complaints/appeals. While the SIC of Andhra Pradesh would take 18 years to dispose of a complaint, West Bengal SIC would take seven years and five months.

Also read: Indian citizens and media have been terrorised enough with sedition. SC must end it now

When demonetisation happened, RTI applications were routinely rejected by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on the specious ground that disclosing the information would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the state, relation with foreign state or lead to incitement of an offence all mentioned in Section 8 of the RTI Act, which deals with exemptions.

When the CIC directed the RBI to provide the list of wilful loan defaulters, the RBI went tocourt and got a stay. Finally, on the directions of the Supreme Court, the RBI issued the list.

More recently, the Narendra Modi government has resolutely rejected applications seeking information about the controversial PM CARES Fund, set up to collect financial aid from citizens to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

Helping the government in its endeavour to make the RTI movement ineffective is the higher judiciary, which has been resisting bringing in any kind of transparency in its own functioning.

After all, the Supreme Courts own record in dealing with cases pertaining to the applicability of the RTI Act on matters of judicial appointment isnt something to write about.

Lack of adequate infrastructure and shortage of staff in government offices to deal with RTI applications is another cause for worry.

Then there is the issue of threats and acts of violence against RTI activists. In the last 15 years, at least 86 people who had filed RTI applications have been killed while 175 others have been attacked. At least seven applicants committed suicide while 184 applicants reported being harassed.

Also read: Modi govt set to appoint J&K separatists son-in-law as high court judge

Publicly available data, including in the annual reports of the CIC, shows that while there has been a steady increase in the number of RTI applications filed every year, the backlog, too, has been increasing.

As per a study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, between 2012-13 and 2018-19, the total number of RTI pleas with various central government offices rose by 83 per cent from 8.86 lakh to 16.30 lakh. But the number of CPIOs mandated to handle them increased by only about 13 per cent from 21,204 to 24,048. More importantly, there was a a sharp fall in the mandatory reporting of data by ministries and departments to the CIC.

Another successful method to prevent outflow of information under the RTI Act is to appoint former government servants as information commissioners. After all, who better than a retired bureaucrat to prevent from getting public an information that could embarrass the government.

The 2018-19 SSN-CES Report Card found that of the 374 information commissioners appointed in the 29 SICs since the inception of the RTI Act, over 58 per cent were former government officials. Of the 115 chief information commissioners appointed during this period, over 83 per cent were retired government servants, with 64 per cent from the elite IAS.

Also read: Information panel wants Modi govt to relax RTI response deadline during lockdown

The central and state governments have devised an effective way to thwart activists attempt to seek information by keeping the posts of information commissioners vacant.

In fact, on 16 December 2019, the Supreme Court directed the central and state governments to appoint information commissioners in CIC and SICs within three months. The court had said in its order that operational information commissions were vital for the smooth working of the RTI Act.

But, the governments cant be bothered, because several posts continue to remain vacant. When the term of the information commissioners of the common SIC for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana ended in May 2017, it took an order of the High Court of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to push the two states to constitute SICs.

Andhra Pradesh took over a year to finally appoint three ICs, that too after the intervention of the Supreme Court, choosing not to appoint a CIC for almost two years. BJP-ruled Tripura remained without a functional SIC for over six months.

Also read: 21 of 29 state information commissions did not hold any RTI hearings during lockdown

In its judgment in the Central Board of Secondary Education versus Aditya Bandopadhyay on 9 August 2011, the Supreme Court observed that the RTI Act should not be allowed to be misused or abused, to become a tool to obstruct the national development and integration, or to destroy the peace, tranquillity and harmony among its citizens.

Nor should it be converted into a tool of oppression or intimidation of honest officials striving to do their duty. The nation does not want a scenario where 75% of the staff of public authorities spends 75% of their time in collecting and furnishing information to applicants instead of discharging their regular duties. The threat of penalties under the RTI Actand the pressure of the authorities under theRTI Act should not lead to employees of a public authorities prioritising `information furnishing, at the cost of their normal and regular duties, the bench further said.

Many public information officers often cite these words to discourage RTI applicants.

But, like several other spheres, in these times, the courts have often been siding with the government and failing to uphold the letter and spirit of the RTI Act. They have ensured that people seeking to use the RTI Act to expose the wrongdoings of the government are fearful of adverse observations. What hopes then do the common citizens have to hold their governments accountable? Perhaps, the judiciary can ask this question on behalf of Indian citizens.

The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal.

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In 15 years, RTI has gone from Indian citizens most powerful tool to an Act on life support - ThePrint

In August 2011, Norman Eisen, then the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, joined diplomats from a dozen other countries in voicing support for Pragues first gay pride march. The backlash was as swift as it was unexpected and the controversy over what was seen as inappropriate interference in domestic affairs became a defining moment of Eisens ambassadorship. It was not just fringe figures on the Czech right who spoke out against it, but also the countrys conservative president, Vclav Klaus. Even Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister and a staunch Atlanticist, pushed back, saying that expressions of support to rights that nobody in the Czech Republic is denied are counterproductive and redundant.

If a post-Trump United States is to get back into the business of promoting democracy, freedom, and human rights around the world, special care must be given to avoiding a recurrence of the situations from past administrations in which the United States would insert itself into other countries divisive domestic debates.

Public diplomacy has suffered under the Trump administration. The president is notorious for cozying up to authoritarian leaders. Meanwhile, the promotion of democracy and core American values has been on autopilotjust occasionally punctured by dismal news such as the appointment of a Viktor Orbn admirer, Merritt Corrigan, to the position of the White Houses liaison with USAID, or more recently the firings at Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

A course correction is vitally neededbut the next administration ought to be wary of an overcorrection.

To be effective, U.S. public diplomacy and the promotion of American values overseas cannot go through wild swings every election cycle. In the past, efforts at promoting democracy, good governance, and the rule of law generally sought to avoid political and ideological controversy, and thereby commanded bipartisan support. In an time of growing polarization and bitter culture wars, that will be no easy feat.

The Prague gay pride example demonstrates even the most innocuous acts in support of an obviously worthy cause can backfireeven under favorable conditions. The Czech Republic has been a reliable ally. It is also the least religious country in in the region, by a wide margin, and as early as in 2006, the Czech legal system began to recognize registered partnerships for same-sex couples, with little controversy. In short, little suggested that backing a gay-pride march in the countrys capital could backfire so spectacularly.

And that, mind you, was nearly a decade ago. Compared to the relative idyll of 2011, the divisiveness of cultural and values-related questions in Central and Eastern Europe has only grown. Russian propaganda actively seeks to depict Putins regime as a bulwark against Western decadence. Hungarys Orbn has actively exploited LGBT issues and migration to distract from his authoritarian practices and corruption at home. As he put it in a recent speech, Hungary is an island of peace and security in comparison to Western Europe, which is twisting in the multicultural grip of their vindictive colonies.

With the United States largely absent from the scene, the ire of Orbn and his ilk has been directed mostly at Brussels. And often, the would-be authoritarians have half-a-point. Two years ago, while the Hungarian government was seeking to chase out our foreign-funded NGOs and the Central European University founded by George Soros, the European Parliaments Sargentini Report lambasted Hungary for failing to to adapt working conditions for pregnant or breastfeeding workers, for the prevalence of negative stereotypes and prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, particularly in the employment and education sectors, and for the fact that Hungarys constitutional ban on discrimination does not explicitly list sexual orientation and gender identity.

To be sure, such criticisms may not be without merit. But they have also helped Orbn make his case to Hungarian voters that the real issue was not his rewriting of the countrys constitution and purges in the judiciary but a wholesale attack of Western elites on traditional values.

If November brings a Democratic victory, the next administration must avoid the risk of overreach by the left, particularly given the rising prominence of illiberal, iconoclastic voices who depict traditional American, and Western, tenets of liberal democracyrepresentation, limited government, and free speechas a faade for white supremacy and other forms of oppression of women and minorities. Inevitably, that will play into the hands of ruthless leaders who never believed in those principles to begin with.

The ultimate driver behind the Black Lives Matter movementthe effort to eradicate police brutality and racismis noble and just, and the movements recent protests resonated around the world, as a paradoxical testament of Americas continuing cultural dominance around. Yet the failures and excesses of the movements leadership and intellectual undercurrentsin the form of the so-called cancel culture, street mobs tearing down statues, and a deeply revisionist attitude toward historyare unlikely to travel well, particularly outside of English-speaking countries.

The reason is not that Europes history is without blemishesquite the contrary. Marked by serfdom, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism, and culminating in two world wars and the Holocaust, Europes past is a treasure trove of grievances. Yet, after the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, the continent has been consistent in keeping a tight lid on the ghosts of the past. Hence President Emmanuel Macrons flat refusal to consider taking down statues of controversial figures of French history, and hence the sense of panic around European capitals whenever past traumaslost territory, language rights of ethnic minorities, or reparations for old injusticesresurface in political conversations.

The progressive agenda of seeking to dismantle all lingering structures of oppression and to purify the public square, university campuses, and the corporate environment of sins of the past will provoke a reaction in the United Statesas it has before. But if, in an atmosphere of political triumph after the defeat of Trump and Trumpism, such ideas permeate policy choices made by the next administrationespecially over what causes and values the U.S. government lends its support overseasthen the 2011 kerfuffle in Prague will be nothing compared to the controversy progressive America risks stirring by its moralizing in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and beyond.

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Public Diplomacy and the Risk of Overmoralizing - The Bulwark