Among the 39 signatory countries were the United States, most of the EU member states including Albania and Bosnia, as well as Canada among others.

UNITED NATIONS: The US, Japan and many EU nations joined a call on Tuesday urging China to respect the human rights of minority Uighurs, and also expressing concern about the situation in Hong Kong.

“We call on China to respect human rights, particularly the rights of persons belonging to religious and ethnic minorities, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet,” said German UN ambassador Christoph Heusgen, who led the initiative during of a meeting on human rights.

Among the 39 signatory countries were the United States, most of the EU member states including Albania and Bosnia, as well as Canada, Haiti, Honduras, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

“We are gravely concerned about the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the recent developments in Hong Kong,” the declaration said.

“We call on China to allow immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang for independent observers including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” it added.

Immediately afterward, the envoy for Pakistan stood up and read out a statement signed by 55 countries, including China, denouncing any use of the situation in Hong Kong as an excuse for interference in China’s internal affairs.

Addressing Germany, the United States and Britain, Chinese ambassador Zhang Jun criticized what he called their “hypocritical” attitude and demanded that the three countries “put away your arrogance and prejudice, and pull back from the brink, now.” 

The organization Human Rights Watch praised the fact that so many countries had signed on to the declaration “despite China’s persistent threats and intimidation tactics against those who speak out.”

In 2019, a similar text drafted by Britain only garnered 23 signatures.

Western diplomats have said that China is piling on more pressure each year to dissuade UN member states from signing such statements, threatening to block the renewal of peacekeeping missions for some countries or preventing others from building new embassy facilities in China.

On Monday, China led a group of 26 countries in a joint declaration calling for an end to US sanctions which they said violate human rights during the struggle to combat the coronavirus pandemic. 

Last month, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said it had identified more than 380 “suspected detention facilities” in the Xinjiang region, where China is believed to have held more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking residents.

In the United States, the House of Representatives passed a bill at the end of September that aims to ban imports from Xinjiang, contending that abuses of the Uighur people are so widespread that all goods from the region should be considered made with slave labor.

Entrepreneurship and Community Leadership workshop by Association of Muslim Professionals

Speaker: Dr. Abdulla Hassan

(CEO Dhow Capital, Kuwait)

Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) Bengaluru Chapter organized a workshop, “How to be an Entrepreneur?”, by Abdulla Hassan, an angel investor, Coach, Mentor, and CEO of Dhow Capital, Kuwait.  The session was delivered at Al-Ameen institute of management studies, Bengaluru, on 8th of December. 80+ Students from MBA and M.Com department along with the teaching staff benefitted through this session.

The workshop started by qira’atul Quran, followed by brief introduction about the session by college’s Principal, Dr. Anuradha. Then, Mr. Hassan, started with a brief yet engaging talk about his background setting the context for students.He elaborated upon the sequential steps involved in bringing an idea to an entrepreneurial level. As he ventured into the details, he emphasized on two crucial steps:

• Relevancy of the idea (driven by innovative approach to the current need with an eye on the future)
• Validity of the idea (test your waters even before you bring the idea to investor tables)

He encouraged the Principal to take the workshop to actualization level and generously offered to help them in case of any clarifications/ advice. Later, Mr. Imtiaz Khan, Chapter Head, Bengaluru, graced the occasion and explained about the vision, mission and projects of AMP to the students. Founder of Al-Ameen education society Mr.Mumtaz Ahmed Khan was honored with “AMP Education excellence award 2018” by Mr. Abdulla Hassan and AMP Karnataka State Head, Dr. Zahida Khan. It’s important to note that this AMP National Award for Education Excellence was conferred to 110 educationalists at PAN India level which include VCs and Founders of many such institutions.

Later in the day Mr. Hassan enlightened the Bengaluru professional youth on the need of rightful community leaders in the current times.  This session was conducted at Feroze White Manor between 3.00 PM to 5.00PM. Around 100+ AMP Bengaluru members along with few senior social leaders attended the session.

Following qira’atul Quran by Mr. Syed Nashit, Dr. Hassan took to stage and won the hearts of the participants with his candid speech. It is hardly seen that speaking about leadership, speakers talk about being a good follower. But this was the central idea that Mr. Hassan brought to the table of community leadership. He spoke about the various leadership styles by quoting the followers like Umar ibn Khattab RA and Khalid bin Walid RA. He stressed on the importance of no ego, lots of patience and forgiveness as crucial elements of being a great leader. He underlined the need of women workforce participation in India for us to become a successful community. He advised the participants to stop complaining about the circumstances and take collective responsibility of bringing change. One of the highlights of his speech was the ease with which he connected the dots between sunnah of character and current description of good leaders. For most of us,the quote that reverberated with us and hopefully will propel us to excel to be a better leader was,

“If you want to win,behave like winners!”

After the talk, the floor was opened for Q&A session.  Following Q&A, Syed Nashit and Imtiyaz briefed the volunteers and other present at the occasion about the occasion about the vision, mission and projects of AMP and encouraged for active participation to empower the community by being the foot soldiers. Dr.  Zahida ended the session with vote of thanks. The Role of Professionals in nation building is the need of the hour and they should take out an hour per week at least and play active role in givingback to society.

Eminent Professionals from MNCs and corporates attended this meet and provided their positive feedback. With a huge success of the first session,AMP Bengaluru plans of have similar session on a regular basis in the future. So stay tuned!!

For more details and to know more about AMP, you can contact Team AMP on 9573302126 or 8919731784 or visit www.ampindia.org.

Washington The Washington Post has published the last article written by its missing Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in which he wrote about the poor state of press freedom across the Arab world.

Khashoggi’s editor, Karen Attiah, received the column from the journalist’s translator one day after his disappearance on October 2.

“The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen,” Attiah said on Wednesday.

“Khashoggi’s last column titled “What the Arab world needs most is freedom of expression”, espoused the cause that animated most of his life: free expression in the Arab world”.

“Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media,” including the internet, so the region “is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power”, Khashoggi wrote.

He added that the Arabs “are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives”.

In his final article, the journalist who left Saudi Arabia where he held comfortable positions in the ruling establishment, and moved to Washington where he began contributing columns to The Post, called for “the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda”.

In 2016, he had warned against the regime of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, about “an overly enthusiastic embrace of then-President-elect Donald Trump”.

In the columns he published in The Washington Post before his disappearance, Khashoggi offered a consistent message: “Saudi Arabia desperately needed the liberalizing reforms being promised by Mohammed bin Salman, but they could not be combined with repression.”

“Replacing old tactics of intolerance with new ways of repression is not the answer,” he wrote in an article in April .

Khashoggi has been missing since he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2 to pick up documents for his upcoming wedding to his Turkish fiancee Hatice Cengiz.

Unconfirmed reports said that Khashoggi was likely killed inside the compound, a claim denied by Saudi officials as “baseless”.

(IANS)

by Asad Hashim, Al Jazeera

Electioneering officially came to a close ahead of Pakistan’s general election later this week in what has been a fraught campaign, with all three major parties accusing each other of wrongdoing.

In the eastern city of Lahore, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan made a final push at a series of rallies across the city on Monday, aiming to displace the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party from its political heartland.

Pakistan votes in a general election on Wednesday with 272 national parliamentary seats up for grabs, as well as for each of its four provincial assemblies.

PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif addressed a rally in the central town of Dera Ghazi Khan, urging the nation to “give respect to the vote”, a party rallying cry that refers to their allegation that the military and judiciary have been interfering in the political process.

Earlier this month, Sharif’s elder brother Nawaz – a three-time prime minister – was convicted and jailed by an anti-corruption court. Nawaz’ daughter Maryam and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar were also imprisoned.

Nawaz Sharif claims he did not receive a fair trial, and that the judiciary was influenced by the country’s powerful military, which has ruled Pakistan for roughly half of its 70-year history. Both institutions deny the allegation.

At a colourful rally attended by thousands in Lahore’s Walton area, Khan dismissed as a foreign conspiracy accusations that the military has aided his party by threatening opponents.

“The Western media is concerned that there is rigging going on in Pakistan, and that the military is doing it,” he said.

“I wonder how the … media has become so concerned about rigging. When I was on the roads for 126 days protesting against vote rigging, where were they?”

Khan was referring to a four-month protest in 2014 against the results of the country’s last general election.

“The man who did the rigging was the favourite of India … and of the international establishment. That’s why no one said anything!”

Time for change?
At an earlier PTI rally near Lahore’s historic Data Darbar shrine, supporters said they believed Khan was the man to bring change to Pakistan.

“I will vote for Imran Khan because he will bring about the change the others have proved unable to do,” said Adnan Ali, 20, who will be voting in his first election.

Abdullah Butt, 54, a retired civil servant who was at the rally with his grandson, felt similarly.

“My whole life, I’ve only seen these two parties in power,” he said, referring to the PML-N and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. “Isn’t it time we saw a change?”

Not all voters, however, have been convinced by Khan’s ambitious promises to end corruption and bring about systematic change to how power functions in the country.

“I will vote for Nawaz Sharif because he has been wrongly imprisoned,” said 30-year-old Muhammad Tariq, who sells toys off a pushcart a few hundred metres away from the site of the PTI’s rally.

“I am not looking at the party, I am only looking at Nawaz Sharif. I think he’s a very good man.”

Ahead of the campaign’s close, Sharif released an audio message from jail exhorting supporters to go to the polls to register their protest at his arrest.

“Imprisoned people of my free nation, you must change all of this,” he said. “The time has come for you to … show such a verdict that buries all those other verdicts that have made Pakistan a graveyard for justice.”

Press intimidation
The run-up to the polls has been marred by widespread allegations of pre-poll engineering and censorship of the press by the military.

On Monday, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said journalists in the country faced a sustained and concerted series of curbs, including disruptions and closures of the country’s top news organisations.

“Overall, continuing intimidation and the perceived need to self-censor has severely hampered objective journalism,” the report said.

It documented instances where television channels had been forced off the air, as well as how news coverage of Sharif’s conviction was shaped by the “establishment”, a common euphemism in Pakistan for the military and intelligence services.

“It has become very difficult to tell the truth,” said HRCP spokesperson Ibn-e-Abdur Rehman. “Often it is a threat to one’s life.”

Journalist Marvi Sirmed, also a member of the HRCP, said her work had been targeted, with managers pressured to censor her work.

“Free and fair elections are just a dream, which is not going to be realised any time soon,” she told Al Jazeera. “This is not elections, this is a joke, this is a selection.”

by Al Jazeera

An international rights group is calling for an investigation into alleged disappearances, torture and likely deaths in prisons and “network of secret detention facilities” run by the United Arab Emirates and allied militias in southern Yemen.

Amnesty International said in a report on Thursday that it has documented “systemic enforced disappearance and torture and other ill-treatment, amounting to war crimes” in the facilities.

The report said “some (detainees are) feared to have died in custody”.

Based on more than 70 interviews, the authors said “cruel and unlawful” practices were being committed in those prisons.

Amnesty called on the UAE government to immediately stop the torture, and to release detainees.

In the meantime, it said the US should suspend intelligence gathering cooperation with the UAE, and stop supplying it with weapons.

Amnesty said that the 51 cases of enforced disappearance took place between March 2016 and May 2018.

Nineteen of the men remain missing, it said.

Amnesty said it had collected testimonies from released detainees and relatives of the missing across Yemen.

“We’ve done this through interviews with families, government officials, current and former detainess,” Tirana Hasson, director for crisis response at Amnesty, said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“We’ve also been on the ground in Aden … and all fingers point to really alarming patterns of abuse that have been ongoing now for well over a year, and they have been taking place within a culture of impunity.”

The “most egregious violations” were committed in the “network of secret detention facilities” maintained by the UAE, Tirana said.

One former detainee told Amnesty that “UAE soldiers at a coalition base in Aden repeatedly inserted an object into his anus until he bled” and that he was “kept in a hole in the ground with only his head above the surface and left to defecate and urinate on himself in that position”.

Last year, the Associated Press news agency reported that the UAE and its allied militias were running a network of secret detention facilities, beyond the control of the Yemeni government.

‘Advancing their own interests’
Andreas Krieg, assistant professor at the defence studies department of King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that the UAE’s presence in Yemen was aimed at furthering the country’s interests in the region.

“They [UAE] have been sucked into the Yemen war at the invitation of Saudi Arabia but there has been an agreement with Saudi Arabia that if the UAE got involved in Yemen, they do so to advance their own national interests, which are not necessarily the same as Saudi interests because Yemen really never posed a direct threat to the UAE [and] neither did the Houthis,” Krieg said.

“For the Emiratis, Yemen is an access point to the Indian Ocean and the horn of Africa and if you see the string of pearls that is emerging, Yemen is in many ways the crown jewel in this string of pearls that the UAE have lined up across the horn of Africa.”

Asked whether the UAE was planning to make its presence in Yemen permanent, Krieg said that Abu Dhabi had “dug in deeply,” having built sustainable relations with local surrogates who have been involved in the detention camps.

In June, the AP revealed that hundreds of detainees had been subjected to sexual abuse and torture.

On Wednesday, Yemen called on the UAE to close the informal prisons.

The UAE has denied involvement in prisons across southern Yemen.

On Monday, Reem al-Hashimi, the UAE minister for international cooperation, met Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and Interior Minister Ahmed al-Maysari, who “insisted on the need to close the prisons and place them under judicial control”, according to Yemeni state media.

The Gulf state has played a key role in a Saudi-led military operation since 2015 to bolster Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi against armed Houthi rebels.

The war has killed an estimated 10,000 people, 2,200 of them children, and pushed the country to the brink of famine.

The three column, six inch-deep headline on page 1 of the Daily Telegraph caught my eye: “Doors open to thousands more skilled migrants.”

Given the anti-immigrant rhetoric I had heard in Rome and elsewhere in Europe, the headline was refreshing. Even more noticeable was the name of the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, the third-highest ranked member of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet who had reversed policy with the statement which formed the headline.

The 48-year-old son of Pakistani migrants who started business with a 500 pound bank loan had already established his “clubability” with the Conservative Party when he became Managing Director of Deutsche Bank.

Of comparable agility in the political race is the high profile Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, of the Labour party. He is only 41 but has already graduated through a stint in the cabinet as Transport Minister. “I am the first Muslim in Britain to have attended cabinet meetings,” Khan said with pride.

One of the obstacles in the way of Donald Trump making a state visit in 2017, a banquet with the Queen et al, was the Conservative Party’s very bipartisan objection: How can we host a US President who has imposed restrictions on citizens of Muslim countries? “We have a Muslim mayor and therefore a state visit by Trump is out of the question.”

“There are two Muslims in this country who are positioned to make a bid for the Prime Minister’s post,” said Lord Meghnad Desai. He was chairing a discussion on “India at 70: Nehru to Modi” in Committee Room 1 of the House of Lords. Instantly a question surfaced: Can a Muslim nurse such aspirations back home where he has a history for a 1,000 years?

Last year, at a similar seminar at King’s College, London, someone pointed to the presence of four Muslims in the English cricket team. This time I find that even the ever-present Moeen Ali, with a beard longer than W.G. Grace’s, is not in the squad. This waxing and waning is itself proof of a consistent quest for merit. It is not just a blanket upward mobility that Muslims have acquired: A process of distillation is taking place.

The post-9/11 war on terror which distorted most democracies by transferring extraordinary powers to the Deep State did not leave Britain unscathed. But persistent reliance on the Rule of Law has kept prejudice from taking root at an institutional level. The brief travel I have undertaken from London to Manchester has been something of an eye-opener.

A distinguished psychiatrist with the National Health Service married to my sister has been bed-ridden with a stroke he suffered three years ago. The care he has received in hospitals has to be seen to be believed. He is under 24/7 observation. The four very English “carers” who visit him round the clock have virtually become members of the family. It would be malicious to put it down to the aromatic cuisines my sister rustles up every time the carers arrive.

One evening I was invited to a “All Faith”, post-Iftar talk on a theme which surprised me because of its incongruity: “Wave of Populism in Europe”. It was all very graceful.

Earlier, in London, I had seen Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the local Rabbi and Priests of various churches breaking bread with their hosts at a “street Iftar Party” outside Finsbury Park mosque. The enthusiastic white, English participation in the event was heartwarming.

The war on terror with its random targets did cast the Muslim in an unfortunate image, particularly during the Tony Blair years. But excesses of those years also filled the ordinary people with a sense of guilt and compassion.

This somewhat exclusive focus on the Muslim in Britain must not obscure the overall south Asian profile in the country. A recent study produced a very negative image of Pakistanis among the public. A total of 1,668 British adults were asked last month to indicate the extent to which Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis made a positive or negative contribution to life in UK. The image of Indians was by far the most positive. 25 percent of those asked thought that Indians made a positive contribution. When positive and the negative figures were placed side by side for Bangladeshis and Pakistanis their score was -4 (minus four) and -3 (minus three), respectively.

Obviously proportionate to their population in the country, there are fewer Muslims in the high aspirational bracket than there are Indians, mostly Hindus in diverse careers. This imbalance can be traced to India’s social history. The majority community took to western education in late 19th century itself while Muslims remained anchored to feudal nostalgia and their rich Urdu culture.

I, in my earlier years, have seen this country rattled by Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant speech in 1968, exactly 50 years ago: “Like the Roman, I see the Tiber foaming with blood.” The Liberal press reached out for Powell’s jugular and for a while Powellism appeared to be receding. But soon enough the country experienced another bout of street racism. “Paki bashing” became the war cry in the run-down parts of the country. But such upheavals never unhinged Britain from its basic anchor: The Rule of Law. It is this anchor which has been the primary enabling factor in Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan’s rise.

It may be instructive for us in India that Britain is a very resilient Protestant monarchy which overseas secularism tied with hoops of steel to the Rule of Law.

It would be absurd to compare apples and oranges. The bewildering variety of our civilisational tapestry is unique. Even so our trajectory could have borne some resemblance to “genuine equal rights”, a phenomena Britain can boast of. Instead our politicians dissembled at the very outset leading us into a messy path. I shall explain.