An unwelcome ingredient in your Easter chocolate

Slavery.

Child slavery.

Sometimes the children are slaves to circumstance - the children of poverty-stricken farmers who have no choice but to send the whole family into the fields. The lack of education for the children ensures that the vicious cycle will continue.

But sometimes they are literally slaves.

Children who are involved in the worst labor abuses come from countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo -- nations that are even more destitute than the impoverished Ivory Coast. Parents in these countries sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send their earnings home. But as soon as they are separated from their families, the young boys are made to work for little or nothing. The children work long and hard -- they head into the fields at 6:00 in the morning and often do not finish until 6:30 at night.

" Though he had worked countless days harvesting cocoa pods -- 400 of which are needed to make a pound of chocolate -- Diabate has never tasted the finished product. "I don't know what chocolate is," he told the press.

The largest chocolate producers are aware of the problems but wash their hands of responsibility.

For years, US chocolate manufacturers have said they are not responsible for the conditions on cocoa plantations since they don't own them. But the $13 billion chocolate industry is heavily consolidated, with just two firms -- Hershey's and M&M/Mars -- controlling two-thirds of the US chocolate candy market. Surely, these global corporations have the power and the ability to reform problems in the supply chain. What they lack is the will.

After a string of media exposes and the threat of government action jeopardized their image, the chocolate industry finally agreed to take action in 2001. On November 30, 2001 the US chocolate industry released a Protocol and Joint Statement outlining their plans to work toward eliminating the worst forms of child labor (see ILO Convention 182) and forced labor (see ILO Convention 29) in cocoa production.

Unfortunately, the plan does not guarantee stable and sufficient prices for cocoa, or any guarantee that cocoa farmers will receive a fair income in the end. Without such a guarantee, there is now way to ensure that abusive child labor on cocoa farms will cease for good.

Fortunately there is something you can do about it. Insist on Fairtrade chocolate. Yes, you will pay more for your chocolate, but is getting a lower price on an unnecessary indulgence so important that we are willing to force children into slavery? Are you willing?

I'm not.

The Australian media reports on the abuse: click here.
The cocoa industry fails to deliver on its commitments: click here.

The Biblical take:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. ... Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.

James 5:1,4

Kommentare auf Deutsch sind immer willkommen.


Technorati tags: Cocoa, Slavery

The General has a point

General Roméo Dallaire (that's Senator Dallaire to you civvies) is upbraiding the Conservative government over the case of Omar Khadr. (In all fairness, the Liberals didn't do any better when they were in power, which may be why Stéphane Dion is threatening to discipline the senator, in yet another stunning example of Dion's lack of political and good sense.)

Dallaire's central point - and whatever you think of the General or Khadr or any of the political parties, it's a very good one - is that Khadr was only 15 at the time he was taken into custody and sent to Guantanamo. Someone that young is normally considered a victim of indoctrination and/or intimidation and is rehabilitated, not charged. He asks what makes this case different. And he's right. You cannot have two sets of standards, applied according to the political winds of the times. Either we stand for human rights and justice equally applied, or we don't.

Dallaire said Canadian soldiers have helped rehabilitate more than 7,000 child soldiers in Afghanistan. None of them have been prosecuted, he said.

"What is the political reason? What makes [Khadr] different from the others?" said Dallaire.

Technorati tags: Romeo Dallaire, Omar Khadr

What kind of Canada?

There was a very disturbing article (in French) in LaPresse today about a priest come to visit immigrant workers who was chased off the FraiseBec farm in Ste-Anne-des-Plaines by the irate owner, Isabelle Charbonneau.

There are a couple of things very wrong with this picture.

First, immigrant workers are being held in unacceptable conditions. A landlord, as Father Clement Bolduc pointed out very reasonably, has no right to restrict the visitors of tenants. Mme Charbonneau claims she has a "responsibility" to "protect" her workers, who are mostly women. There was nothing in the situation that indicated that these women were in any danger whatsoever. Mme Charbonneau, who was physically present, was well placed to evaluate this herself. She had no legal right to evict the priest.

Second, this eviction was carried out with active help from the Terrebonne police. Since when do the police assist people in asserting authority to which they have no legal right, and which, even worse, is oppressive in nature?

There are too many cases of immigrant workers being exploited and oppressed in Canada. We do not need the police intervening on behalf of those who are taking advantage of them.

FraiseBec is apparently the largest strawberry producer in the country. I do believe I will be keeping an eye out for their produce, so that I can actively avoid it.

Technorati tags: FraiseBec, Immigrant workers

The real beginning of the civil rights sit-in movement

This post at Stubborn Facts literally had tears streaming down my cheeks. It tells the story of the true and almost forgotten beginnings of the civil rights movement in the US, when a group of black teenagers, with immense dignity and perseverance, insisted on being served at a drugstore lunch counter. There is a memorial in downtown Wichita, Kansas, with no explanatory plaque.

If there were, that plaque would note that on July 19, 1958, several black teenagers, members of the local NAACP chapter, entered the downtown Dockum Drug Store (then the largest drug store chain in the state) and sat down at the lunch counter. They were ignored. They kept coming back and sitting at the counter, from before lunch through the dinner hour, at least twice a week for the next several weeks. They sat quietly, creating no disturbance, but refusing to leave without being served.

The store tried to wait them out by ignoring them. They kept coming back and sitting there, silently, day after day, waiting to be served. On one occasion three police officers tried to coerce and intimidate the teenagers to leave, and succeeded. But they came back, and the police did not return. They were breaking no law, only a store policy, and the store was not willing to challenge them directly.

...

On August 11, while the early arrivals were sitting at the counter waiting for their friends to show, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager, and said, simply, "Serve them. I'm losing too much money." He then walked back out. That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.

That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the store's state offices, and was told by the chain vice-president that "he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color." State-wide. They had won, completely. Their actions inspired others, and the sit-in movement spread to Oklahoma City. By the middle of 1959, the national NAACP was losing disaffected members for refusing to endorse the scattered but spreading sit-in protests, gave in, and sponsored the Greensboro sit-ins.

Nineteen months before the Greensboro sit-ins that have been credited with being the start of the civil rights sit-in movement, it really began at a downtown drug store in Wichita, Kansas. The Dockum sit-ins were largely ignored by the NAACP in their archives, probably out of embarrasment, and were unknown even to many civil rights historians. That error was corrected by the NAACP this summer.

Do go around to Stubborn Facts to read the whole inspiring story. It reminds me yet again that you do not need fame, power, or connections to effect real change.

Technorati tags: Wichita, Dockum Drug Store, NAACP

The Amish go to court

The Amish have generated an enormous amount of good will in recent weeks by their immensely dignified and Christ-like response to the massacre of their daughters by a neighbour, Charles Carl Roberts. I personally was enormously impressed by the sacrificial courage of some of the girls themselves and was obliged to revise my admittedly superficial impressions of the Amish as a sect hopelessly mired in legalism at the expense of the greater principles of the Christian faith.

Legalism, for those unfamiliar with the word, is a religious term used to describe the mindset of those who get caught up in the letter of the law as opposed to its spirit, and whose pursuit of holiness and the knowledge of the Holy One gets sidetracked into the pursuit of infractions and endless wrangling about the petty details of what constitutes holiness. The Taliban are probably the most vicious modern examples of this kind of mindset. The Pharisees were the incarnation of legalism in Jesus' time.

So I was greatly heartened to see that the Amish, in their retreat from modern society, had managed to keep the core principles of their faith alive and well, even robustly vigorous,despite the weight of detail of their "thou shalt nots."

But now another Amish man, "John Doe," is intent on demonstrating that though the foundations are solid, some of the construction above ground is shoddy and silly. He is a Canadian who has married an American, "Jane Doe," and is suing the American government over its insistence that he pose for a photograph as part of his application for American citizenship.

"Interpreting the Bible literally, they ... believe that photographs are 'graven images,' the making of which is forbidden by the Second Commandment," reads the lawsuit. Now it is not up to the courts to determine the theological validity of the argument, and I earnestly hope they stay away from that entire aspect, but I am not a court, so I am free to make my pronouncements.

This is not a literal interpretation of the Bible at all. It is an extrapolation, precisely the kind of thing that legalists delight in. Let's take a simple, straightforward law, interpret it widely and spin off a host of regulations based on that interpretation, with which to burden the hapless followers who trust our "wisdom."

The whole point of the second commandment is to avoid the worshipping of material objects, not to avoid the making of images. God himself, subsequent to giving the Ten Commandments to Moses, commanded the making of a bronze serpent, which was destroyed by Gideon generations later, precisely because it had become the object of worship. If the thrust of the Second Commandment had been the sinfulness of making images, he never would have commanded Moses to do such a thing.

So I honestly don't believe they have a theological leg to stand on. And I really wish that John Doe had not undertaken this lawsuit. The court is going to be obliged to either rule on the validity of their theology, or infringe directly on their freedom of religion, both very negative outcomes, in my mind. The other alternative - ruling in their favour - would also be a negative, because it would provide a loophole in national security that could be exploited by various groups who do not possess the gentleness of spirit of the Amish.

Technorati tags: Amish, Immigration

Excellent commentary on the detainee bill

Finally! I feel like I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel! This is the absolute best commentary on the detainee bill and the issues surrounding it that I have seen yet. Not just commentary either, but a practical roadmap for the future. I wish Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal Group were in power. (My thanks to Pat of Stubborn Facts for drawing this article to my attention.)

In "The Right Approach to Rough Treatment," he grapples with the moral, legislative, and practical aspects of the detainee bill and offers some common sense solutions whereby virtually everybody on every side of this debate could come away reasonably satisfied. And all in a relatively short article in wonderfully clear and lucid language. A sample:

In any case, if a law bans the use of "alternative methods" even in the direst circumstances, it will succeed only in driving those methods underground. "Any president, Democrat or Republican, faced with really frightening, bone-chilling threat reports and credible claims that he can stop bad things from happening, is going to be very hard-pressed not to push his powers to the full extent of the law," says Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former official in the Bush Justice Department. Responsible law-making respects not just human rights but also human realities.

My view is worth no more than yours or anyone else's, but here it is: The law should leave room for exceptional recourse to "alternative" interrogation techniques, while making sure that their use is genuinely exceptional. On that score, both the Bush bill and the Senate alternative improved on the post-9/11 Bush regime, under which the president made up the law as he went along and no one could say boo about it; and both improved on the Supreme Court's Hamdan regime, under which almost any sort of rough interrogation, however necessary, might be judged a war crime.

Both bills, though, made the same mistake: While concerning themselves quite properly with legality, they omitted accountability.

Read the entire article, as this excerpt taken out of context doesn't really do it justice. If I were an American citizen, I would be contacting my Congressman and Senators to promote Rauch's solutions.

As a normal rule, I don't comment much on internal American affairs, for the simple reason that I'm not an American. I've made an exception for the whole question of torture for several reasons. First, the moral issues are so profound and could have such a major impact on the rest of the world in so many ways, that I felt it would be irresponsible to just look the other way. Secondly, foreign nationals, including Canadians, are directly impacted by American legislation and practices. Lacking a vote and a representative to affect the issue directly, I have to hope that my discussion of it will, in some small way, contribute to the best possible outcome.

Technorati tags: Detainee Bill, Jonathan Rauch, National Journal Group

Truly frightening

I am depressed. And this is why.

The McCain-Graham-Warner proposal concerning military commissions was, from the beginning, an awful bill that was quite radical in its own right. As but one example, the senators' proposal strips all detainees in American custody of the right of habeas corpus, meaning that detainees are denied the right to challenge in court either the validity of their detention (e.g., by proving that they are not terrorists) or the legality of their treatment (e.g., by demonstrating that they have been tortured).

This denial-of-judicial-access provision means, as Yale law professor Jack Balkin explained, that the military can imprison, and torture, a detainee forever without ever bringing the detainee before a military commission, and the detainee has no means at all to challenge his detention or the treatment to which he is subjected. It is difficult to imagine a more radical power to vest in our government than the power to detain people (including legal residents in the U.S.) forever, and to torture them, while expressly denying a detainee all legal recourse. Yet that is exactly what the McCain-Graham-Warner proposal (and the White House's proposal) provides.

I would desperately love to hear that this is a serious distortion of the facts, that fundamental principles of justice have not been violated, and that the United States has not just taken the first great step towards becoming a police state.

Being something of a neophyte in American politics, I don't know if Glenn Greenwald is considered a loony lefty. I'm not sure it matters; I've never been overly impressed with ad hominem arguments and the mistaken impression that affixing a label trumps an argument. What I want to know from supporters of this bill is this: is this depiction accurate? Is it truly possible for an innocent to be trapped with no recourse? And if so, how can you support it? If not, please demonstrate. I would love to know that this is not actually reality. Because this kind of reality is truly frightening.

[Update] The Washington Post is also not impressed.

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

[[Update]] Do read the comment thread. There's a good, constructive discussion going on.

Technorati tags: Detainee Bill

Christian Arguments Against Torture

That bastion of left-wing ideology, the magazine Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham), came out in February in no uncertain terms against the legitimizing of torture in the war against terrorism. The article "5 Reasons Torture is Always Wrong" is available online, as well as a longer version on the website of the author, David Gushee.

In the article, Gushee lays out the moral problem, and the question of the definition of torture. He dismisses the idea that 9/11 justifies a modification of the long-standing American opposition to torture and outlines his five reasons, which I shall recap briefly here.

1. Torture violates the dignity of the human being.

2. Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice.

3. Authorizing torture trusts government too much.

4. Torture dehumanizes the torturer.

5. Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures.

And his conclusion:

We are tempted to follow the logic of a July 11, 2005, Time magazine cover story that said, "In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty."

Yet we are queasy enough about this "inevitable casualty" that we do not want to call torture what it is. We do not want to expose our policies, our prisons, or our prisoners to public view. We deny that we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners are really prisoners. When pushed against the wall, we remind one another how evil the enemy is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception that is characteristic of a descent into sin.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

I would urge any religious person (or non-religious person, for that matter) who thinks there is a justification for torture to read this article carefully. It is vitally important that we as Christians do not fall prey to moral seduction and betray Biblical standards.

Further Christian arguments against torture can be found in the post Truth About Torture on Ochuk's Blog, in which he summarizes and links to a Christian symposium on ethics that addressed the issue of torture.

Technorati tags: David Gushee

Arar has no rights in the US

It would appear that the American judicial system reserves the right to commit injustice against non-citizens. From Jurist Legal News and Research:

In 2004 Arar filed a lawsuit in US federal court challenging US extraordinary rendition practices under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Arar's lawyers argued the Act provides the US court with jurisdiction over cases involving civil rights abuses committed abroad, including Arar's case, but US District Judge David G. Trager dismissed the case in February of this year, citing "the national security and foreign policy considerations at stake" and holding that Arar, as a non-citizen, could not raise a constitutional right to due process. Arar is appealing that decision. (Emphasis mine)

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding Trager, but it sure seems to me like he's saying the US government has carte blanche to commit civil rights abuses against non-citizens. Can selective application of justice be understood to be justice at all?

In the meanwhile, O'Connor is urging the Canadian government to "register 'a formal objection' with both the United States and Syria concerning their treatment of Arar."

Technorati tags: Maher Arar, Extraordinary rendition

Maher Arar vindicated by inquiry

Justice Dennis O'Connor has concluded that Arar was an innocent victim and was not involved in al-Qaeda activities in any way, as U.S. officials had alleged.

O'Connor criticizes the RCMP for supplying misleading, inaccurate information to their American counterparts, for releasing information without reviewing it first, and for trying to whitewash their role in the affair.

The government too comes in for censure:

But O'Connor said reports were prepared by government officials after Arar's release that had the "effect of downplaying the mistreatment or torture to which Mr. Arar had been subjected."

He also slammed Canadian officials for leaking "confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about the case to the media for the purpose of damaging Mr. Arar's reputation or protecting their self-interests or government's interests."

In my mind, the most important thing now is for the government to put measures in place to ensure that this never happens again. The Anti-terrorist Act in particular needs a major overhaul.

Technorati tags: Maher Arar, Dennis O'Connor, RCMP

Time to pressure Musharraf

Ali at Eteraz is calling us all to pressure President Musharraf of Pakistan. You may be familiar with the current sorry state of women's rights in Pakistan. To give you an idea, if a woman who was raped does not have three to four male witnesses to corroborate her story, she herself will be charged with adultery. A blind girl was convicted because she was unable to identify her assailant. The Women's Protection Act would go a long way to addressing these injustices. Ali is asking us to email President Musharraf, in whose hands the fate of the bill now rests. I have done so myself. He provides a sample text and more details if you would like inspiration or further information.

Human rights in Canada

Dennis O'Connor's report into the Maher Arar affair should be released on Monday, and two other men who, like Arar, suffered torture in Syrian prisons are hoping for vindication also.

Warren Allmand, a Liberal cabinet minister in the 1970s and 80s who now heads the Montreal-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, said the key question in all the cases is whether Canada knowingly participated in the "out-sourced torture" of its citizens.

"It is not merely a question of whether there was negligence (but) whether these shameful incidents were carried out deliberately," said Allmand.

"What does all this say about the rule of law in Canada? Can officials and intelligence officers suspend the law and the Constitution to suit their own purposes?"

We must not fall into the trap of considering this to be a political issue pitting the left against the right. The Anti-terrorist Act was passed by a Liberal government and has not been seriously challenged by the Conservatives; "extraordinary rendition" first saw the light of day under Bill Clinton and has been extensively used under Bush's administration. There is blame and shame enough for everybody.

The issues here transcend political affilitation and empty-headed posturing. They are vital to conserving our liberal democracies and people from both ends of the political spectrum and points in between should be united in calling for an end to this kind of blatant injustice.

Please, contact your MP, Prime Minister, Senator, Congressman, President or anyone else with a voice in this matter and express your concern.

Technorati tags: Maher Arar, Dennis O'Connor