Human rights organization Witness will be responsible for ensuring content is balanced and has adequate context. Storyful will source and verify all of the channel’s content.

“In the case of human rights, video plays a particularly important role in illuminating what occurs when governments and individuals in power abuse their positions,” a YouTube blog post says, pointing toward the Arab Spring.

According to YouTube, 100,000 videos were uploaded during the height of the revolution in Egypt, representing a 70% increase over the previous three months. And Egypt’s not the only example — we’ve seen YouTube content creation from protests in Syria, Russia and even Chicago.

Beyond protest footage, YouTube says the channel will highlight topics such as police brutality, discrimination, elder abuse, gender-based violence, issues of socio-economic justice, access to resources and bullying. Videos will also be curated from non-profit organizations working in the human rights space.

The channel launches with stories from the U.N. Observers in Syria, an anti-government hunger strike in Bahrain, clashes in Cambodia over land rights and Occupy Wall Street.

“We hope this project can not only be a catalyst to awareness, but offer people new avenues for action and impact,” YouTube says. “The channel is committed to providing new citizen creators as well as viewers with the tools and information necessary so that every citizen can become a more effective human rights defender.”

You can send video for review to the channel at witness@storyful.com, with information about the story you’re watching unfold. The channel will be available on Google+, where YouTube hopes discussions of human rights will continue.

Is YouTube’s Human Rights channel the future of activism? Let us know if you think this will become a destination for online organizing.

“The United States’ tarnished human rights record has left it in no state — whether on a moral, political or legal basis — to act as the world’s ‘human rights justice,’ ” China said in an annual report on U.S. human rights.

The report cited the arrests of protesters participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Many protesters, it said, accused police of brutality.

It also said the United States has “fairly strict restrictions” on the Internet, saying the U.S. Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act both have clauses about monitoring the Internet, giving the government or law enforcement organizations power to monitor and block any Internet content “harmful to national security.”

“The facts contained in the report are a small yet illustrative fraction of the United States’ dismal record on its own human rights situation,” China’s report said.

Thursday, the U.S. State Department criticized a number of countries, including China, in its annual report on human rights around the world. The human rights situation in China, it said, “deteriorated, particularly the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association,” with Chinese forces reportedly committing “arbitrary or unlawful killings.”

The report said Chinese authorities have held activists in unknown circumstances and placed their family members under house arrest. Abuses “peaked around high-profile events,” including visits of foreign officials, milestone anniversaries and calls for street gatherings inspired by the Arab Spring.

The U.S. report comes after the arrival in the United States of one of China’s best-known activists, Chen Guangcheng, after he escaped house arrest and took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, marking a dramatic diplomatic showdown between Washington and Beijing while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was visiting China for talks. China regularly criticizes U.S. interference with what it calls domestic political issues.

Although the U.S. report covered 2011, before the high-profile saga over Chen, it detailed concerns about Chen’s treatment, including thugs’ “severe” beatings of him and his wife. It said that Chen was denied medical care, while activists trying to visit his house in eastern Shandong province said they were “assaulted, detained, forcibly removed or otherwise abused.”

The State Department report also criticized the human rights records of Myanmar, Syria, Bahrain, North Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Amnesty as reported by Press TV on Friday (5/25/2012), also condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which has caused a humanitarian crisis for more than 1.5 million Palestinian residents.

Amnesty also criticized the government’s policy of destruction of Tel Aviv on Palestinian homes and construction of Jewish settlements.

Report in 2012 highlights the human rights situation in 155 countries around the world during 2012.

Recently, the European Union also condemned the Tel Aviv discrimination policies and mistreatment of Palestinians living in territories occupied by Israel.

Rev. Jackson, speaking to the City Times said the move was a bold step in the right direction for an equal protection of all citizens under the law.

The Reverend further went calling on all black preachers especially to address the issue of same-sex marriage with their congregations on Sunday mentioning that lesbians and gays are indeed fighting for the country and doing their best to teach America’s children. He added in justification of his support for same-sex marriage that it opens the door for every individual to have the same opportunity as another.

“You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate,” Jackson said.

Rev. Al Sharpton’s similarly supported Obama’s stand on the issue of same-sex marriage wit hthe following words “I salute President Obama’s statement today supporting same-sex marriage,” Rev. Sharpton said the issue was not of his or anyone’s personal or religious views but was for the equity of everyone before the law.

Pastor Martin Niemoller said

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

He understood, if only too late, that rights do not, indeed they cannot be specific to one group. Black rights, gay rights, Women’s rights: They are your rights and my rights. And those who would infringe on the rights of one group will, one day, come for you. To say otherwise is akin to being in a boat with a hole and telling another passenger “Your side of the boat is leaking”.

John Donne said

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Indeed it does. And the bell that tolls for your rights may one day toll for your death. Because the mobs are there; the bigots are there; the people who would claim your rights are there. And there is only one protection: To protect us all.

Black rights = gay rights = women’s rights = your rights = my rights = human rights.

Equal rights for all humans. Because we’re all human.

First, we need to make a distinction between “animal rights” and “animal welfare”. “Animal welfare” allows humans to use animals to satisfy certain needs, such as: food, clothing, medical research, even entertainment. The animals should, however, live in good conditions and be treated in a humane way. “Animal rights”, on the other hand, imply that humans do not have the right to use an animal for human purposes. Animal rights organizations include: PETA, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Animal Liberation Front and HSUS. Animal welfare organizations include: the World Organisation for Animal Health and the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).

Most controversy arises around animal rights groups, because of the extreme position they occupy, the methods they sometimes use, and their tendency to impose their ideas upon others. In doing so, they seem to attach little importance to factual data, and the truth often only appears to be relevant insofar it proves their point. Anything that is contradicting their views or arguments is carefully ignored, or dismissed as a lie. This modus operandi appears to be a constant throughout the communication of many groups, and the mere fact that such kind of propaganda methods are felt necesary, puts a dark shadow on the “good intentions” of these groups.

If a killer whale throws up a seal in the air, breaking every bone in the poor animal’s body,causing internal bleeding that will lead to a certain death, I don’t hear anybody denounce this as an act of sheer cruelty. When the killling (for food, or for research) of an animal is done by a human predator, however, it becomes an act of barbarism.
Some actually claim that animals should have the same rights as humans: the School of Helsinki even listed a number of basic rights for Cetaecans, comparable to the Declaration of Human Rights by the UN: the right to live, the right of habitat, etc… But I wonder how much the orca cared about those “rights” when he first spotted that seal? The only right I can think of was for the seal to serve as dinner.

In 2002, AnimalScam.com was put online, a project of the “Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF)”. The idea behind this project is that every consumer should have the right to decide what to eat, to wear and to do in his/her freetime, and it’s goal is to expose any lies or twisted truths, that are sometimes part of the activists’ propaganda. CCF argues that many of the things that we take for granted, are likely to dissapear if the animal rights groups get it their way: no more meat products, no more dairy products, no more eggs, no more fish, no more leather, no more visiting the circus,…

So, should attributing “human rights” to animals not imply that humans get “animal rights”?

According to www.dicitonary.com, poverty is defined as the condition or state of having either very little or no money at all, no goods or any means of support. The synonyms of poverty are impoverishment, destitution, pauperism, indigence, neediness, penury, and privation. It can be defined in various ways. There are social and statistical definitions of poverty. In this essay, we shall describe these kinds of poverty.

Poverty is described by some people as a deprivation of essential items for life- such as water, food, clothing, and shelter- required for a proper living. The United Nations World Summit on Social Development passed a declaration, “Copenhagen Declaration” which defines poverty as “a state characterized by harsh deficiency of essential human needs, including safe drinking water, food, health, education, sanitation facilities, and information.” When people do not have anything to eat, have access to health facilities- they are considered poor regardless of their level of income.  This is the social definition of poverty and does is problematic at times as in this regard, most people living in developing and underdeveloped countries of the world will judged as poor. The Statistical definition yields more relevant results on how poverty should be measured. Using statistical measures, two methods are mostly used to describe poverty. These are Relative Measurement of poverty and Absolute Measurement of Poverty. Both of these measures rely on consumption or income values getting information to accumulate statistics on impoverishment much enhanced.

The simplest way of measuring the degree of poverty in individual countries is Relative property measure. By using this method, the whole population is classified in order of their per capita income. Then the bottom 10% is believed to be ‘impoverished’ or ‘indigent’. This method is well for country-wide measurements, but it has some great drawbacks in worldwide use. If, for instance a 10% relative poverty extent was applied in a universal setting, it would appear that both a developed nation, like United States, and a sub-Saharan African country had 10% rate of poverty, even though the situation of the deprived sub-Saharan Africa are much worse than circumstances in the United States. For this very reason, absolute poverty measures are more frequently used to describe poverty on a universal scale.

The absolute measurement fixes a ‘poverty line’ at a definite amount of income or amount of consumption on a yearly basis, relied on the predictable value of a ‘basket of goods’ (shelter, water, food, etc) required for a proper living. For instance, if $5 a day is resolute to be the income poverty line in an area, then any person with an income less than $1860 would be believed to be indigent.  If however, a poverty line based on the level of consumption was used instead, any person consuming goods with a financial value of less than $1860 would be impoverished. Many poor people employ in agricultural jobs. Some of them use farming to survive, and others are hardly able to produce sufficient food to stay alive. Widely used definition of poverty is the absolute poverty line which is set by the World Bank. According to this definition, a person is considered poor if he earns an income of $2 or even less per day, and extreme destitute is set at $1 per day or less. It was first created in 1990 when World Bank developed its World Development Report and found out that majority of the developing countries have set their poverty lines at $1 per day or less. Developed countries are allowed to set their poverty lines at which ever rate they want. For highly developed countries, such as U.S, Japan and Britain, the absolute poverty line has been set as high as $14.40 in the past. Poverty line of 2005 for a single individual in United States is set at $26.19 per day.

Various definitions of poverty have entailed the world from time to time. Together, definitions, explanations (and their interpretations and conversions into measurements) and wider conceptualizations link together to shape policy answers to the phenomena known as “poverty”. The event of poverty has to be comprehended both as a sore reality faced by millions of human beings and also as a building of contending conceptualizations, measures and definitions. The point here is that the definition can only be privileged by cultural and historical contexts. In this scenario, we are able to go beyond a rather sterile argument between relative and absolute definitions of poverty.

References

Bell, Peter. Telephone Interview. 19 December 2005.

McHugh, Kathleen. Telephone Interview. 5 January 2006.

Reddy, Sanjay G. How Not to Count the Poor. Columbia University, 2005.
Gilbert, Geoffry. World Poverty. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO 2004

Think Quest. A Dollar A Day: Poverty Overview. 2006. [ONLINE] Available at:

http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00282/over_whatis.htm

Policy, UK. Defining Poverty: Key Concepts. [ONLINE] Available at:

http://www.polity.co.uk/keyconcepts/samples/lister-chapter.pdf

First, what is the penalty for?

There is a small section of society who believes that it is a personal punishment. That a person who commits a crime should be forced to suffer that crime. But then what of those who are put to death for non-violent crimes? And does this mindset mean that all crimes should be punished with the crime itself? Should a man convicted of bashing another man be himself bashed and then released?

For the majority of people, suffering an act they themselves have committed has been definitively shown by the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner not to be an effective form of disuasion. Making people suffer ironically does not make most of them feel remorse or learn from their mistakes.

Further studies have shown that punishing someone using a different method likewise does little to inhibit the unwanted act itself. That is, if someone is convicted for bashing another person, then torturing them will also not make them less likely to reoffend. Actually, it makes them more likely to commit their original crime and many other unrelated acts. It makes them worse.

So punishing or killing people in a way to make them suffer is useless in terms of deterrents or to make them feel guilty.

It does, however, meet a very basic and nasty part of our humanity: the desire to harm those we hate. And we do not want to live in a society where is it acceptable to make others suffer if we can justify it. After all, many murderers feel perfectly justified in what they do. This is not a world we want to go into.

A lot of research has been geared towards how to make the death penalty as humane as possible, rather than a barbaric form of revenge. What criteria must such a penalty meet?

1. It must not be painful or distressing

2. It must be able to be performed on a large scale

3. It must be easy to do, i.e. it does not require extensively-trained experts or doctors who might not always be available.

4. It must work.

The 3 most used methods of death are electric chairs, hanging, and lethal injection. Which of these fit all the criteria?

Lethal injection is not performed by doctors, since, by law, they are not allowed to kill prisoners. Technicians instead perform the injections, and there are many horror stories about injections gone wrong, causing horrific suffering before death finally arrives.

Hanging involves falling until a length of rope reaches its end, is snapped tight, and the neck is broken. This damages the brain stem, instantly stopping the lungs and heart, and death occurs in a few seconds. Hanging is more painless than lethal injection, which uses an anaesthetic that lasts 5 minutes wheras death takes 10-15 minutes to occur via painfull chemicals. But hanging can go wrong.

The key to a successful hanging is correct rope length. Too much rope and the prisoner is decapitated, much to the distress of any onlookers. To little and the neck is not successfully broken, and the crippled but still living prisoner suffers a great deal until the process is repeated successfully.

Rope length is calculated based on prisoner weight, but even two people of the same weight have different amounts of neck muscle, fat, and other types of tissue, meaning that the above errors will always occur with a certain frequency.

Electrocution involves running a high current through a prisoner, causing their heart to spasm until they die. This is not always successful, and to ensure that death always occurs, the few American states which still use electric chairs state that electrocution must occur not once but three times to ensure death. Even then, there are cases of prisoners surviving all three electrocutions. Electrocution itself is incredibly painful, the worst of the three methods described here.

None of the currently used methods of execution fit the criteria. There are further problems which we shall not go into here, suffice to say that they fit fewer of the criteria than we have mentioned.

Is a humane and easy form of execution possible?

Scientists who perform tests on animals have to euthanise them before many experiments. They often have to ensure there is no suffering and that the method is easy and consistent, or a mouse whose brain will be dissected might suffer too much and render its brain full of anxiety chemicals and effectively useless.

There exist gases which cause death. Some are very painful, but others actually cause euphoria and happiness as consciousness slowly slips away. Nitrogen and Argon, the first and third most common gases in the air respectively, are inert but stop the blood from taking up oxygen, which it needs. The brain is slowly starved of oxygen and becomes deliriously happy as it gradually and painlessly shuts down. The entire procedure lasts about 5 minutes.

Is this the answer? Placing people in a cubicle and gassing them happily to their fate? It is cheap, easy, requires no special expertise beyond equipment, consistently causes death, and best of all is humane. Surely this is what we need.

If the idea was implemented properly then it would have made better persons out of hardened criminals, but sadly, the conditions prevailing in many so-called ‘Correctional Centers’ around the world are really pathetic and they are actually breeding grounds for creating new criminals rather than reforming the bad ones.

There are countless prisons in Latin America, South-east Asia, Africa and other parts of the world that to describe in one word is a ‘Living Hell’! Inmates are made to live there in unthinkable and inhuman conditions, at times worse than even animals in small dingy cells, taking away the most basic human right of an individual person that is provided to the worst of criminals even by the “United Nations Declaration of Human Rights”. In such places not only people caught for petty crimes or under trials are herded into cells with hardened criminals, but also there is nobody to protect them from being beaten up, sexually assaulted or even killed by the more-seasoned offenders.

Countless people around the world rot in such jails without even a single trial for years, as there were none to fight their cases, until their cases come to the notice of any good NGO, fighting for the cause of such abandoned people. Many of them are even innocent and appear to have been framed by a corrupt system. Officials of such jails are mostly corrupt and at many times they work in cahoots with mafias and crime syndicates, besides being exploiters of the inmates.

In such prisons those who are physically tough, manipulative and are easily able to get into the good book of the officials by helping them carry on their depraved actions within the jail premises get lots of advantages and privileges from the authorities for their allegiance, including quality food, drugs, alcohol, gadgets, etc…for others it’s a life of terrible suffering with little food or no food.

I don’t think any average normal person would come out of such a jail reformed ever? If someone survives the full-term then it would take him or her much longer in recovering from the traumatic experiences of such a prison. Many others begin their journey of crime from these very places, as conforming appears the easy way out. History is testimony to the fact of how juvenile delinquents or first time offenders have been converted to hardened criminals by rubbing shoulders with their likes.

Amid all the darkness there is also a ray of light and all is not lost. There are honest and dedicated officers trying their best to bring about positive changes and programs within the jail premises that would help the convicts find better ways of integrating into the mainstream once they finish their jail term. Innumerable prisoners have acquired vocational training courses from such unique prison campuses and even got master degrees on various subjects. I have even read about jails where some companies were ready to hold campus interviews after initial hesitancy, for their prospective new recruits and ultimately found some fresh new talents and the concerned persons got good paying high-skilled jobs after their release.

These positive stories inspire us and will continue to do so, but it cannot take away the focus from the vast darkness that prevails in the countless jails across the world. So naturally the obvious question that arises out of all this is that, does prisons or ‘Correctional Centers’ actually create criminals rather than reforming them? Is it a place where innocents and minor offenders are persecuted while the big bad boys get away? Well the ones I mentioned above certainly creates such an atmosphere. It is time for the ‘United Nations Human Rights Council’ to pull-up the nations that allow such horror penitentiaries to function? It is a shame for humanity!

If we still have doubts about human rights being respected in China, here we have some of the latest news. Their government have just decided to ban a TV programme called Interviews Before Dying. It is the most popular programme in the province of Henan, which is also one of the poorest ones in China. Every evening several millions of people sat to watch an interview to a person who was most probably going to face death right after being interviewed. The presenter seems to be quite a celebrity in the area and she’s known as “The beauty among the beasts”. All the prisoners have been judged without being seen a lawyer. When they appear on TV, they are handcuffed in both hands and feet. The presenter defended such a programme that in a modern country would have been regarded as “rubbish TV” as one to educate people and to convince them on not taking the wrong path. 

However, wherever there is sheer poverty, there will always be crime.  A person may have killed or stolen or whatever, but this person is still entitled to have a fair trial and its own defence. On the other hand, we have seen way too often that death penalty doesn’t help in any country to keep crime figures low, but quite the opposite. Even sending those with a sentence to jail won’t help them to improve themselves for when they go out. But quite the opposite, when they leave jail they are likely to do the same things all over again. 

It is enough with being deprived of freedom, but staying in a jail to complete a sentence should help the prisoner to learn things so they can be apart from crime when they leave. 

Jails are overcrowded.

Prisoners are at the mercy of guards’ moods and punishment for petty issues occur day in and day out.

There is lack of hygienic conditions.

The fact that they are prisoners completing a sentence doesn’t mean that they have to ill-treated or even tortured.

China is about to become a new financial power. The Chinese make up half the world population. Therefore, I find it quite scary that in such a country there is such lack of respect for human rights.