Catherine Samba-Panza, a militant for women, peace, and hope

January 21, 2014 by 22 Comments

Yesterday, the National Assembly of the Central African Republic chose Catherine Samba-Panza as President, to lead the country out of two years of violence. While the Republic has known more than its share of turbulence, conflict and predation, from within and without, this latest engagement is the first to pit religious communities, Christian and Muslim, against one another. The world press has framed Samba-Panza’s election as one in which a woman has been chosen. The real story is that a woman chose. Catherine Samba-Panza chose.

Catherine Samba-Panza was raised in Bangui. She studied law in France, then returned to Bangui, joined an insurance brokerage firm and then established and led her own. It’s said that her experience in business developed her fierce opposition to corruption of any kind. And she is known as a fierce, independent, and successful businesswoman.

Catherine Samba-Panza is also known as a fierce defender and promoter of women’s rights. A leading member of l’Association des femmes juristes de Centrafrique (AFJC), Samba-Panza worked for greater inclusion of women in government positions and for the rights of victims of violence, beginning with survivors of sexual violence. She has been a leading voice for women’s rights, for real programs to end violence against women, and for human rights, in the Central African Republic and across the Great Lakes Region. Again, she is known as fierce, independent, and successful advocate and activist.

Since 2003, Samba-Panza has been formally in politics. She has worked with, and around, successive and opposing regimes, always in the service of dialogue and inclusion as a means of national reconstruction. She has always kept her eyes on the prize, including that of securing real peace for everyday women every day. Until yesterday, Samba-Panza was Mayor of Bangui. In the current crisis, she was never identified with either side. Thus, she was able to defuse episodes that otherwise were destined to end in lynching and other forms of violence.

It is not surprise that the women of the Central African Republic are pleased. They danced and sang when Catherine Samba-Panza’s named was announced. Marie-Louise Yakemba, who heads an interfaith ngo, cheered: “Everything we have been through has been the fault of men. We think that with a woman, there is at least a ray of hope.” Annette Ouango cheered: “As a woman, she can understand the sufferings of the people, and as a mother, she will not tolerate all of this bloodletting.” So did 18-year-old student Judicaelle Mabongo, “The men have done nothing but fight. The men, they are fighting. But they are only destroying the country. This woman, she might be able to change things.” Rose Yodoma, a member of the National Assembly, cheered: “We are super-happy! This is a good choice, a very very good choice.”

In her acceptance speech, Catherine Samba-Panza spoke as President of all Central Africans. She implored Christians and Muslims to lay down their arms. She committed herself to working to resolve the situation of displaced persons and communities and to make it possible for them to come home as part of the restoration of stability to the nation and to the region. She spoke of suffering as well as of sovereignty, and was clear that the country stands on the precipice of collapse. She made crystal clear that women, youth, and inclusion would be policy priorities.

While many hope Samba-Panza will save the Central African Republic, Samba-Panza herself refuses any traces of messiah. Instead, she says, as she has always said, that she is a mediator, a maker of dialogues, a woman. In her opening remarks, as in her earlier speeches as Mayor of Bangui, Catherine Samba-Panza suggests that her greatest power is her sensibilité de femme, her women’s sensibility.

Later, Samba-Panza reflected on the meaning of her being the first woman President of the CAR: “I feel a great deal of emotion because Central African women have waited for this for a long time, and when they saw there were no women candidates in any elections these past few years, they began to despair. To have overcome these obstacles is a source of great pride for all Central African women… It really was very discouraging. Many people advised me that the time was not right for a woman. But it wasn’t only women who supported and pushed me. Many youth did as well. We all felt that the people wanted a break. They wanted an end to the political man. I felt that. At the very heart of the people, I felt this desire to elect a woman who could bring peace and reconciliation.”

Once again, the work of peace, informed by hope, requires a woman who has spent her lifetime working peace and hope in the company of women. This time, it’s Catherine Samba-Panza.

 

(Photo Credit: AFP)

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Eritrean and Sudanese women asylum seekers protest in Israel

January 15, 2014 by 19 Comments

 

Thousands of mostly Eritrean and Sudanese women and children asylum seekers marched through the streets of Tel Aviv today, protesting Israel’s new `immigration policies’ and new `open’ immigrant detention center, Holot.

In September, the Israeli Supreme Court declared Israel’s 2012 Prevention of Infiltration Law unconstitutional. Under that law, an undocumented resident, including asylum seekers and refugees, could be held without trial for up to three years. They were previously held in the notorious Saharonim prison. One of the reasons Saharonim is notorious is the number of infants, toddlers and young children, held for what were basically indefinite periods.

When the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, the State swung into action and, first, passed a new amendment to the law. Under the new legislation, the undocumented, again including asylum seekers and refugees, can only be `detained’ for one year … but they can be held in an `open’ facility indefinitely. Welcome to Holot `open’ facility, where `residents’ can walk outside, but must report for roll call three times a day and can’t seek work. And it’s in the middle of the Negev Desert. It’s a prison.

Last week, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers went on a three day strike. This affected primarily restaurants, hotels, cafes, and cleaning services. One of the strike organizers, twenty-eight-years-old Eritrean Kidane Isaacs, explained: “The new law basically gives us two choices: be a prisoner indefinitely or self-deport. We have been here for years without any sort of human treatment. We are forgotten, neglected.” In Eritrea, Isaacs experienced torture, imprisonment, forced labor, and more.

Today, the women, and children, by thousands, resumed the public struggle. They chanted, “We are refugees!” They carried placards that read, “We need freedom” and “Stop racism!” As one Eritrean woman, Zabib, explained, “We are seeking asylum. We’re not criminals. Our kids have no legal documents so they don’t have any basic rights. We have no kind of support for us and the kids … we’re in survival mode.”

The women’s formal statement read, “The Israeli government treats us like we aren’t people. We live here without states, without basic rights, without hope and without the ability to support our children with honor. We are not criminals. The Israeli government summons the heads of families to the Holot detention facility in the south, separates women from their husbands, fathers from their children, and breaks families apart. The detention and arrests of asylum seekers destroys the one support we have – the support of our family and our communities.”

No one disputes that Sudan and Eritrea are under repressive regimes, but these women, children, men, somehow, despite that consensus, pose `a threat’ to the State’s Jewish character. Indefinite detention, torture, racism, inhumanity, is the threat, not the “negligible number” of Black African bodies.

 

(Video Credit: YouTube.com)

 

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It was amazing

January 14, 2014 by 3 Comments

It was amazing

It was amazing
sex workers disclose
while folks still can
(we have a right to know
those Mandela-moments)

It was amazing
good money made
outside of the launch
of the ANC’s manifesto

It was amazing
more clients came
election plans made
the country anticipates
(will it be work for all)

Participants’ hotels
lodges and their cars
the scene of much activity
(service delivery at work)

(was the handbook
suitably amended
allowing members
to go forth and engage
with the electorate)

It was amazing
the demand very high
big fish landed
colleagues wishing for more
(ANC rallies out yonder)

After the main event
local industry supported
was it business as usual
or was it the usual business

(though food and fruit vendors
had different responses
to the brisk street trading)

It was amazing
politicians at work
introducing our born-frees
and other impressionables
to the ways of the world

It was amazing

Sex workers in Mpumalanga’s capital city get to meet the ruling party’s politics (“Launch is a shot in arm for sex trade”, Cape Times, January 14 2014).

 

(Photo Credit: The Randburg Sun)

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For women, the bodies come home, the extraction continues

January 13, 2014 by 19 Comments

 

A report came out today that considers the compensation system for occupational lung disease in South Africa’s mines. The compensation system mirrors the mining industry in that it brutalizes the mostly male Black work force and, equally and systemically, the mostly female Black mining communities `back home.’

According to the report, the system is one hundred years old, and in a hundred years, not much has changed. Mineworkers still come primarily from the Eastern Cape, and from Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, and Mozambique. Mine work in South Africa is “particularly risky,” which, given mining conditions elsewhere, is saying something. South Africa `boasts’ the world’s deepest gold mines, and the orebodies are extraordinarily narrow. As a result, miners face high rates of exposure to silica dust every single day.  While the compensation for those who suffer silicosis is no longer formally skewed towards White mineworkers, effectively it still disenfranchises Black mineworkers. Much of the reason for this is the lack of access those mineworkers have once they go back home. Thus the sinister impact of geographical employment patterns continues more or less unabated a full century later, and twenty years into the new South Africa.

Much of the compensation falls under the Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act, or ODIMWA, passed in 1973. Despite some fifteen rounds of amendment since 1973, not much has changed. The status quo has a particular fate in store for women:

“ODIMWA’s autopsy provision for deceased workers effectively puts compensation out of reach for already disadvantaged claimants, such as migrants, women, and blacks. If autopsy remains a route to compensation, it should be more accessible and better explained. If a mineworker or former mineworker was not diagnosed with a compensable disease while alive, survivor claimants can only receive compensation by submitting the deceased’s cardiorespiratory organs to the DOH for autopsy. This requirement can prove a major hardship. Organ removal is inconsistent with various claimant communities’ cultural beliefs. For instance, some southern African customs exclude widows from decision-making, which can include providing medical consent, during a bereavement period following husbands’ deaths. As a result, using autopsies to determine eligibility disadvantages female survivors, especially those from certain African ethnic groups. In addition, logistical shortcomings, such as unequal distribution of government-issued autopsy organ collection boxes, make it challenging for black survivors to apply. These barriers are also high for survivors of migrant workers, as the South African government does not distribute autopsy equipment in other countries. Moreover, many survivors are not even aware of the autopsy option.”

Women are the survivors, and women in mining communities, which are often quite distant from the mines, discover, in the niceties of autopsy provisions, that, for those who labor the mine, there is no dignity in labor, and, for their survivors, there is no dignity in death. The bodies come home, the debts and demands pile up, the extraction continues.

 

(Photo Credit: LeighDay.co.uk / YouTube.com)

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Judge Leonie Brinkema and the overwhelming fact of isolation

January 12, 2014 by 13 Comments

 

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema confirmed a decision she had made last November. In Prieto v Clarke, Judge Brinkema ruled that, despite the horrific nature of Alfredo Prieto’s crimes, which had landed him on Virginia’s death row, he still had rights, including his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. At issue was Virginia’s practice of automatically and permanently putting all death row prisoners into 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

In her November ruling, Judge Brinkema wrote, “Plaintiff’s conditions of confinement on death row are undeniably extreme, He must remain alone in his cell for nearly 23 hours per day. The lights never go out in his cell, although they are scaled back during the overnight hours. Plaintiff is allowed just five hours of outdoor recreation per week, and that time is spent in another cell at best slightly larger than his living quarters. He otherwise has no ability to catch a glimpse of the sky because the window in his cell is a window in name only. Nor can he pass the time in the company of other inmates; plaintiff is deprived of most forms of human contact. His only real break from the monotony owes to a television and compact disc player in his cell and limited interactions with prison officials. Such dehumanizing conditions are eerily reminiscent of those at the maximum-security prison in Wilkinson. … The Court likewise finds it significant that plaintiff has already spent five years in this placement, and there is no end in sight. Plaintiff has not even begun federal post-conviction proceedings, which are likely to play out over the course of several years and further delay the carrying out of his sentence. For all practical purposes, his placement `is for an indefinite period of time’.”

Wilkinson was a 2005 Supreme Court case in which the Court decided, among other issues, that being sent to supermax had to be based on certain considerations. As Judge Brinkema put it in November, “Courts have considered whether the conditions in question are particularly extreme or restrictive, whether the duration of confinement is excessive or indefinite, whether an inmate’s parole status is negatively affected, and whether an inmate’s confinement in such conditions bears a rational relationship to legitimate penological interests.” According to Judge Brinkema, Virginia had failed on all three counts: particular extremity and restrictiveness of conditions; indefinite duration of confinement; lack of legitimate penological interests.

To no one’s surprise the Commonwealth of Virginia objected, and this Friday, Judge Brinkema responded. She rejected Virginia’s request that her decision be delayed. Judge Brinkema reiterated her view of what counts here: “the overwhelming fact of isolation — plaintiff is left alone in a small cell for nearly every hour of every day.”

The overwhelming fact of isolation is an injustice. Indefinite and prolonged isolation is an injustice. Justice, as part of being human, matters. That’s what U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema confirmed on Friday, and therein some hope lies.

 

(Image Credit: ACLU)

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Mix it

January 11, 2014 by 2 Comments

Mix it

Mix it
your metaphors
images and symbols
professors of doom
demoralizing our people

(whosoever our people
might be this time round
matric results under scrutiny
on the horizon)

Mix it
like anti-majoritarian
liberal critics
(a dangerous elitism)

(making hay
on a scrabble board
with big words)

So says the guardians
of our selves
keepers of the keys
to the democratic project

(the democratic project
led astray by mixing it
some folks might say)

Mix it
twitter and tweet
even twerk your way
to the dustbins of history

Pass one pass all
(suffer our born-frees)
recite from your songbook
peddle your election-wares
in Mandela’s name

Mix your metaphors
and I’ll blend mine

Our red-blooded spokespersons counsel…. “all our people not to be demoralised by professors of doom and anti-majoritarian critics” (“Serious challenges face education system despite matric pass rate rising”, Cape Times, January 8 2014); and “Dangerous elitism a worry, and no dustbins should await failed Grade 12s” (Cape Times, January 10 2014).

(Photo Credit: eNCA / Bafana Nzimande)

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War against the refugees, madness, madness, war

January 10, 2014 by 10 Comments

The news today presents the two faces of a spinning coin. On one side, the direct war against asylum seekers. On the other side, the structural war against asylum seekers. Spin the coin, and the two become one.

On a morning talk show today, Australia’s Prime Minister was asked about the varieties of silence and secrecy that mark the State’s campaign against boat people reaching Australia. Boats have been secretly towed to Indonesia, according to some reports. Reporters are routinely denied access to immigration prisons. The Prime Minister’s response is telling: “The public want the boats stopped and that’s really what they want – that’s really my determination. If stopping the boats means being criticised because I’m not giving information that would be of use to people smugglers, so be it. We are in a fierce contest with these people smugglers. If we were at war we would not be giving out information that is of use to the enemy just because we might have an idle curiosity about it ourselves.”

When it comes to the immigration centers, the Prime Minister continued his line of reasoning: “I am confident that we are running these centres competently and humanely … Let’s remember that everyone in these centres is there because he or she has come illegally to Australia by boat. They have done something that they must have known was wrong. We don’t apologise for the fact that they are not five star or even three star hotels. Nevertheless, we are confident that we are well and truly discharging our humanitarian obligations. People are housed, they’re clothed, they’re fed, they’re given medical attention, they’re kept as safe as we can make it for them, but we want them to go back to the country from which they came. That’s what we want.”

The public wants, we want, war. Under the new campaign, Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia militarized its refugee practices, policies and policing agencies. In permanent of border protection, all’s fair, and no need to discuss justice. It’s about winning the fierce contest. The Prime Minister bristles with military `confidence’.

On the other side of the world, the British government today received a report from its National Audit Office. The report, COMPASS contracts for the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers, suggests, in detail, that the `confidence’ placed in private corporations that house asylum seekers was, at best, misplaced.

COMPASS stands for Commercial and Operating Managers Procuring Asylum Support. As always, this outsourcing was meant to save the government money. In March 2012, the government contracted three companies: G4S, Serco and Clearel. From the beginning, Clearel seemed to meet its contractual obligations, and complaints from residents were far and few between. G4S and Serco, on the other hand, started poorly and continued in that vein. This is not surprising, given that neither Serco nor G4S had any experience in housing asylum seekers. They knew how to detain them, how to put them in cages and throw away the keys, as the Yarl’s Wood experiences have shown. But they had never actually housed asylum seekers in communities. So … how did they get the contracts?

Confidence.

The two largest outsourcing and private security corporations in the world exuded confidence. The State felt confident as well. And now, two years later, they’re failing, and the government wants to recover £7m, and that’s just for starters.

Sometimes the housing was substandard, other times the processes were inhumane. With little to no prior warning and absolutely no consultation, women and children, in particular, found themselves shunted from one side of the country to another. Women asylum seekers also reported that staff would carry out unannounced property visits. Sometimes staff would enter into the house or apartment without even knocking. Some women asylum seekers reported these intrusions “made them feel unsafe.” The majority of women asylum seekers in England, as everywhere, are fleeing sexual violence, more often than not from partners or community members, and are single. None of that mattered to the staff; they had their jobs to do.

When it comes to refugees and asylum seekers, only confidence counts. The State has confidence in itself and in its contracted confreres. In the Australian and the British cases, this confidence is intensified by the racial/ethnic dynamic of White majority governments declaring war on individuals and populations, and in particular women and children, of color.

Where once the situation was “war amongs’ the rebels, madness, madness, war”, today the song sung with confidence is “war against the refugees, madness, madness, war.”

 

(Photo Credit: AAP/Scott Fisher)

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Brazil’s chronicle of a death foretold

January 9, 2014 by 11 Comments


Yet again, women gather outside prison gates to find out if their loved ones are still alive. This time, it’s Pedrinhas Prison, in the state of Maranhão, in the northeast of Brazil.

On Tuesday, a local news outlet broadcast a video, delivered by Sindspem, a prison workers’ union, showing the decapitated bodies of three prisoners in Pedrinhas. Local, national, and international agencies yet again decried the situation in Brazil’s prison system, and in particular at Pedrinhas. In 2013, 60 or more prisoners were killed in Maranhão prisons. Maranhão is bad, and Pedrinhas is bad. But Pedrinhas is not the worst. The worst is that it’s typical.

Pedrinhas is designed to hold 1700 prisoners. It currently houses 2500. By Brazilian standards, that’s not so bad. The entire system is supposed to hold no more than 3,300 prisoners, and actually holds 6,200. Pedrinhas may be intolerably overcrowded, but, by Brazilian standards, it’s not so bad.

At the end of last year, a judicial report listed cases of torture, assassination, and sexual violence. Women visiting loved ones have been raped by gang leaders. As one judge put it, “The relatives of the powerless prisoners inside the jail are paying this price so that they won’t be murdered.” The relatives have paid the price all along, for their loved ones but also for `national development.’

Maranhão is a particular case. The Brazilian `economic miracle’ hasn’t quite reached the northeast state. Of Brazil’s 27 states, Maranhão has the second-worst Human Development Index. Its per capita income is Brazil’s lowest in Brazil. Where Brazil’s national illiteracy rate is just below 9 percent. Maranhão’s is over 20 percent. One family, the Sarneys, have ruled the state for almost fifty years. Not surprisingly, the Sarneys claim the press is being sensationalist, the report is the work of disgruntled employees, and the overcrowding is a result of slow courts.

In that last claim, the Sarneys are not altogether wrong. Where Maranhão is an outlier State, Pedrinhas is just one of the gang. Brazil boasts the world’s fourth largest prison population. In the past twenty years, the prison population has increased 380 percent, while the national population has only gone up by 30 percent. From 2000 to 2012, the number of prisoners awaiting trial skyrocketed from just below 81,000 to close to 200,000, an increase of 250% in 12 years. HIV prevalence among prisoners in Brazil is one of the highest in the world.

And for women? The incarceration of women has kept pace with the national trend, which is to say it’s risen quickly over the last twenty years. Women’s prisons are overcrowded. Women prisoners have high rates of HIV. Half of women prisoners are young (18 to 29 years old). Two-thirds are categorized as Black or Mixed race, and two-thirds of women prisoners are in for “drug trafficking”.

Sound familiar? It should.

And what’s the proposed solution to the twenty-year surge in incarceration that has criminally overcrowded prisons, by criminalizing and then militarizing urban poor and working-class populations? Privatization!

None of the Pedrinhas story is a surprise. It’s been Brazil’s public policy for twenty years. For Lucia Nader, executive director of Conectas, “The tragedy in Pedrinhas was foretold.” The real tragedy is that there is no tragedy. There is only redundancy, murmurs of complicity, and, then, as in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the inconceivable: “It was inconceivable that they would suddenly abandon their pastoral spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blame.”

 

(Photo Credit: Mercopress.com)

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Women in mining communities say NO to devastation

January 8, 2014 by 8 Comments

 

In December 2013, an event in London claimed to honour `Women in Mining.’ It did quite the opposite. WoMin brings together women in mining communities from across the African Continent. WoMin joined with others in the International Women and Mining Network to protest the event and its logic. Here’s the statement we distributed in London.

Statement from WoMin

WoMin, an Africa-wide regional platform of well over three dozen organisations representing peasant women or working with women directly impacted by the extractives industries, stands with sister organisations in other parts of the world in our campaign against this Women in Mining ‘women-washing’ project that conceals the devastating impacts of mining on many millions of poor women across the Global South and North.

This project paints an appealing veneer over the realities by pointing to the benefits and successes enjoyed by an infinitesimally small number – one hundred – of women the world over. In sub-Saharan Africa women produce 60-80% of food consumed in rural households and so when lands are grabbed and polluted by the mining industries it is the women who pay first.

When waterways and underground supplies are polluted by toxic chemicals and community members fall ill, it is women that must carry the burden of searching for safe water and caring for the ill. When families are divided through the system of migrancy that is integral to the mining industries in Southern Africa especially, it is women from the labour sending areas that must reproduce families with little or no support, care for husbands returning ill from the mines, and are themselves left deeply vulnerable to contracting HIV/Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases.

For these and many more reasons, we say NO to this devastating model of mining the WIM project is seeking to reinforce through its project.

We advocate and struggle for an alternative ‘model’ which protects food rights, which internalises all social and environmental costs to corporations, which operates at a smaller and less destructive scale, which privileges the developmental interests of local communities and regional interests over and above the national and international interests of corporations and the political elites aligned to them, which restores a different relationship between humanity and eco-systems and which supports the reproductive and healing labours of peasant and indigenous women. This is our vision and our call on the occasion of the WIM project launch which only serves to legitimate an industry which stands opposed to the interests and aspirations of the majority of the world’s women.

WoMin is housed in the International Alliance on Natural Resources in Africa (IANRA), a regional alliance of organisations working with communities to advance a just mining regime.

 

(Photo Credit: London Mining Network)

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In Spain, the neoliberal State attacks women to `protect’ them

January 7, 2014 by 18 Comments

 

Austerity measures help neither the republic nor the democracy. They usher violence and injustice into the civil society. For women, austerity measures mean something dreadful.

In 2011, Spain elected populist conservative Mariano Rajoy from the People Party (PP), with the support of fascist groups and the ultraconservative branch of the Catholic Church. He campaigned as a strong believer in neo liberal values, particularly pushing austerity as the basis for economic policies. No matter that the so-called public debt originated from a complex association of debt and profit making through outrageous interest rates to private banks and investors.  As in the United States, the message and the methods involve the religious right and the control of women’s bodies and the most vulnerable.

Once again women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, labor rights are at stake.

“Today, it is going to be impossible for women to have abortions. We expected a bad law, but this is the worst we could have imagined,” said Francisca Garcia, president of ACAI, La Asociación de Clínicas Acreditadas para la Interrupción Voluntaria del Embarazo. This worst law imaginable has overturned previous reproductive laws, and in particular the 2010 law passed under the socialist government of Zapatero, one of the most comprehensive defenses of women’ss right to control their bodies. The new law will make abortion impossible unless pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or if the pregnancy is the result of a sexual assault.

Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardon, who designed the antiabortion bill, explained: “Women are victims of abortion.” His comment shows his utter contempt for women’s intelligence and capacity to understand their bodies and their needs. He pretends that the morality of this bill rests on the defense of the unborn yet conceived child and on an economic necessity. Actually, countries, like France, that have progressive abortion laws and public services to support mothers have among the highest birth rates in the industrial world. Moreover, it goes against the European Union views on abortion rights with twenty of the twenty-eight members guaranteeing women’s right  to freely decide on their pregnancy. Six EU countries have conditions on abortion but allow it. Only Malta and Ireland prohibit abortion.  According to Le Monde, the Rajoy government and its campaign against abortion received funding and support from the ultraconservative Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, based in the United States with representation in Spain.

Undocumented immigrants are also targeted by Spain’s so-called reform of the health care system. They are now denied any kind of coverage under the public health care system. Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have protested these measures. As with abortion rights, there is no rationale or morals that can justify these measures, since health is recognized as a basic human right and covering a population is both more humane and cost efficient. These bills have been designed to show the muscles of this government and its commitment to punitive public policies. By reducing public services to the bare minimum, neoliberal policies overpower human rights.

Simultaneously, Gallardon wants to `reform’ the penal system and create a life-without-parole sentence. Following the United States, he is advocating for a Patriot Act-type of security law with more restrictions applied to unions and the right to strike.

Meanwhile, demonstrations multiplied in Spain and across Europe.  In Spain the police responded violently to women demonstrating for their rights. They pushed groups of women to the ground, which was filmed and triggered more protests.

Almost 25 years ago, Jacques Derrida noted, “Today the police are no longer content to enforce the law, and thus to conserve it; they invent it.” Today, the Rajoy government, no longer content, invents the law to exercise violence against women while showing a cynical contempt for the Spanish people.

To fight for these rights is to fight for the people of Spain and elsewhere against the oppressive globalized neoliberal order that, with mechanical precision, disassembles human society and turns profit-making into a State religion.

 

(Photo Credit: Fernando Alvarado/EFE)

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