In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka that have left some 290 dead (and many more injured), a number of prominent Democratic politicians and ex-politicians have taken to Twitter to express sympathy and solidarity with the victims—many of whom were Sri Lankan Christians attending Easter church services.
On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I'm praying for everyone affected by today's horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.
The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity. On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.
On a day of redemption and hope, the evil of these attacks on Easter worshippers and tourists in Sri Lanka is deeply saddening. My prayers today are with the dead and injured, and their families. May we find grace.
At first read, these statements come across as perhaps boilerplate, but nevertheless sincere expressions of grief following the horrible attacks that struck the island nation.
Not for many conservatives on Twitter however, who saw in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “Easter worshippers” an attempt to minimize the Christian identity of many of the victims, and obfuscate the religious motivations of the recent attacks.
“Easter worshipers” makes no sense. The Pittsburgh shooting wasn’t “Shabbat celebrators” and the New Zealand shooting wasn’t “Friday prayer adherents.”
These barbs are little more than partisan point-scoring. The reference to “Easter worshippers,” while perhaps clumsy phrasing, is hard to see as anything but an attempt to highlight the religious motivations of these attacks, and the fact that they struck at Christian churchgoers as they were peacefully observing a religious holiday. What else is an Easter worshipper but a Christian?
Indeed, President Donald Trump’s failure to say the word “Christian” in his tweeted response to these attacks attracted notably less outrage.
138 people have been killed in Sri Lanka, with more that 600 badly injured, in a terrorist attack on churches and hotels. The United States offers heartfelt condolences to the great people of Sri Lanka. We stand ready to help!
Silly as this is, it is nevertheless an incredibly predictable response, whereby any tragedy around the globe is quickly filtered through the lens U.S. domestic politics as a way of opportunistically attacking one’s partisan opponents.
Often these attacks will seize on the most innocuous words or phrases in an effort to convert someone’s expressions of sympathy or sadness into dog whistles to a much more nefarious agenda.
This is not an exclusively right-wing tactic. Take, for instance, the left-wing attacks on Ben Shapiro, who responded to the Notre Dame cathedral fire by bemoaning the loss of “a magnificent monument to Western civilization.” This was reported as a covertly racist sentiment, meant to stir up violence against Muslims.
I can’t help but think that bickering over the precise phrases we need to use in the aftermath of the terroristic violence in Sri Lanka, even if it’s not being done for cynical or partisan reasons, is not the best way to express sympathy for the victims or their families.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Vg6I9Y
via IFTTT
In the immediate aftermath of a series of Easter Sunday bombings that killed at least 290 people, the Sri Lankan government took the extreme step of blocking access to any social media sites, citing a desire to stop the spread of fake news.
“The government has decided to temporarily block social media sites including Facebook and Instagram,” read a post on news.lk, the Sri Lankan government’s official news portal. “Presidential Secretariat said in a statement that the decision to block social media was taken as false news reports were spreading through social media,” the post added, explaining that “the blockage would be effective until investigations [into the bombings] were concluded.”
In addition to Facebook and Instagram, social media services like Snapchat, YouTube, Viber, and WhatsApp were blocked as of Monday morning, according to a Twitter post from NetBlocks, a digital rights group. “Concerns have been raised over the impact to citizens’s ability to communicate and impart information in the midst of crisis,” the group wrote in a blog post. “Many Sri Lankan internet users are complaining about difficulty checking up on friends and family following the attacks.”
The government’s action came after nearly 300 people were killed and 500 more injured in the bombings, which targeted churches and hotels. Twenty-four people have been arrested in connection with the attacks, and the government has pinned the blame on National Thowheed Jamath, a small Islamist terror group, the BBC reported.
“We are aware of the government’s statement regarding the temporary blocking of social media platforms,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN. “People rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones and we are committed to maintaining our services and helping the community and the country during this tragic time.”
Viber, a messaging service, posted on Twitter: “We encourage everyone to be responsible and rely on updates from official and trusted sources.”
Social media companies, particularly Facebook, have been criticized for allowing fake news and images of graphic violence to spread in the aftermath of tragedies. A perfect example is the shooting attacks carried out on a pair of New Zealand mosques last month. The alleged shooter livestreamed part of the shooting on Facebook, and the company struggled to remove the video and copies of it from the site.
“If I were #facebook and #whatsapp I’d take a moment to ask myself where I’d gone wrong,” Ivan Sigal, executive director of the journalism and digital advocacy group Global Voices, wrote on Twitter. “A few years ago we’d view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat,” he added.
Vagelis Papalexakis, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, detailed what he sees as the problem of American social media companies trying to avoid the spread of misinformation in foreign nations. “What needs to be addressed is if I have a very well-polished system that works for English and is optimized for the U.S., how can I successfully ‘transfer’ it to a case where I’m dealing with a language and a locale for which I don’t have as many examples or human annotators to learn from?” he told The Guardian.
Sanjana Hattotuwa, a senior researcher at Center for Policy Alternatives in Colombo who monitors social media for fake news…cited two instances of widely shared unverified information: An Indian media report attributing the attack to Muslim suicide bombers, and a tweet from a Sri Lankan minister about an intelligence report warning of an attack.
Notably, neither of those instances appears to have been fake news. As previously mentioned, the Sri Lankan government does indeed believe Muslim extremists were responsible for the attacks. And intelligence agencies had been warned about a possible terror attack in recent days, as CBS News reported.
While there may have been some misinformation spreading in the initial aftermath, the Sri Lankan government’s action highlights the danger of banning social media apps right after a tragedy. “What we’ve seen is that when social media is shut down, it creates a vacuum of information that’s readily exploited by other parties,” NetBlocks Executive Director Alp Toker told the Associated Press, explaining that “it can add to the sense of fear and can cause panic.”
“That’s going to be a problem for people trying to communicate with friends and family,” he added.
Joan Donavan, who leads the Harvard Kennedy School’s technology and social change research project at the Shorenstein Center, echoed those sentiments. “We know based on the past that in crises, everyone goes online to find information,” she told The Guardian. “When there are large-scale fatalities and multiple emergencies, it’s very important for people to be able to communicate and feel safe … This really puts people who already have vulnerable access to communication in a much worse position. It is a dangerous precedent to set.”
That’s not all. Banning social media to stop the spread of fake news means the misinformation might not get debunked. “While a ban on social media helps to contain the spread of rumors, it also hampers efforts by journalists to push back on them,” Hattotuwa told the Post.
It’s the second time in a little over a year that Sri Lanka has banned social media sites to stop the supposed spread of misinformation. The government took similar action in March of last year, claiming it was part of an effort to stop the spread of hate speech and fake rumors that some Buddhist extremists were using to target Muslims.
In December 2016, the Turkish government banned access to social media services like Facebook and Twitter after the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated. As former Reason writer Ed Krayewski noted at the time, the Turkish government was “using any excuse, from mass arrests to attempted coups, to crack down on internet use.”
In Sri Lanka, it’s unclear whether the social media ban will even have the desired effect. Last March, many social media users (possibly up to half of them) bypassed the ban using virtual private networks (VPNs), according to The New York Times. Unfortunately, poor residents who don’t have access to VPNs will likely be in the dark until the ban is lifted.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IKy29o
via IFTTT
A newspaper’s investigation into food stamp fraud lands at SCOTUS. Food stamps and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) collide in a case coming Monday to the U.S. Supreme Court (Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media).
“At stake,” writesArgusLeader investigative reporter Jonathan Ellis, “is more than 40 years of established case law on a key provision of the Freedom of Information Act.”
Back in 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture denied an Argus Leader FOIA request for information on reimbursements to South Dakota stores under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Authorities cited one of the nine exemptions to FOIA-eligible information: a prohibition on “trade secrets or commercial or financial information that is confidential or privileged.”
The Sioux Falls paper objected. And in 2016, a judge sided with the paper, holding that simply sharing SNAP sales data would not cause “competitive harm” to these companies.
“It didn’t help USDA’s case that before trial, the agency surveyed all 321,988 SNAP retailers, and only a few hundred were opposed to releasing the food stamp sales numbers,” writes the editorial board at USAToday (which shares a parent company with the Leader). More:
USDA conceded defeat. But a trade and lobbying group, the Food Marketing Institute […] intervened and appealed. The institute hopes a majority of justices will diminish or even reject the “substantial competitive harm” standard that has been used in FOIA cases for decades.
Weakening FOIA with a wide exemption for “confidential” data would be a loss for the public. A decade after the act became law, the Supreme Court defined the objective of FOIA as ensuring “an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.”
The government doesn’t need more ways to withhold information from taxpayers who deserve accountability and transparency.
But the Food Marketing Institute says that data on private business sales is outside the scope of FOIA, even when the customers are being financed by the federal government. FOIA “was created to shine a light on the government, not on private parties,” writes the Institute’s CEO Leslie Sarasin. “Congress expressly exempted confidential commercial information from mandatory disclosure because that disclosure can harm private interests without adding much insight about the government’s own work.”
To take this standard to its logical conclusion, however, would mean that no information on government activity could be turned over if that activity also involved a private business. This wouldn’t just let the government off the hook and keep citizens in the dark about totally benign business behavior, but it would also exclude crony corporations and shady business-political dealings from scrutiny, too.
The standard settled upon for FOIA—that information must cause “competitive harm” to a private business, not merely involve one—helps balanced the interests of privacy, accountability, and transparency.
“We’ve been at this a long time,” ArgusLeader News Director Cory Myers said. “At every turn the courts have sided with our argument that this is public information. It’s unfortunate that FMI felt the need to intervene after government had agreed to release the public data, but I’m confident the U.S. Supreme Court will find in the public’s favor.”
FREE MINDS
Easter bombings in Sri Lanka killed hundreds. Now the country’s government is blaming the Islamic militant group National Thowheed Jamath for the attacks. So far, no group has admitted to the church and hotel suicide bombings Sunday that caused the deaths of 290 people and injured around 500 more.
As with other recent acts of violence, we’re seeing government respond to the chaos and violence by taking broader than necessary aim at speech and suspending civil liberties.
“Police arrested 24 people in a series of raids and the president’s office declared a state of national emergency,” reports the BBC. The declaration “will give police and military extensive powers to detain and interrogate suspects without court orders.”
The government also “blocked access to Facebook and other social-networking sites,” in “a move meant to stop misinformation from inciting further violence in a country where online mistruths have fomented deadly ethnic unrest,” notesTheWashingtonPost. “But the blackout also had the effect of eliminating a key means of communication during a major terrorist event—a problem Sunday for both Sri Lankans and foreigners desperate to get information about security and check in with loved ones.”
QUICK HITS
“Immigrants accounted for almost half of all population growth in the United States between 2017 and 2018,” Axiosreports on newly released census data.
While talking up criminal justice reform efforts, the Trump White House is considering instituting a federal government-wide hiring policy change that would make getting a job harder for people with previous run-ins with the law, even when those people did not have a criminal record. If the change goes through, anyone seeking a job from Uncle Sam would have to disclose if they had ever gone through any sort of pretrial diversion program (a growingly popular option for drug and other vice charges) that let them avoid incarceration and/or a criminal record.
If you want to find a federal court case—say, to look up the latest juicy filing in the prosecution of one of Donald Trump’s indicted cronies—odds are you’ll hold your nose and log on to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) website, a system run by the federal judiciary.
It’s an old and clunky platform, running on the best interface the mid-1990s had to offer. Which might be excusable if it were free, but it’s not.
PACER charges 10 cents a page for court records and searches. There’s a $3 cap on large documents, and users pay nothing if their bill is under $15 per quarter. This keeps most casual users from needing to pony up—but for news organizations, researchers, and legal professionals, costs can pile up quickly.
According to the E-Government Act of 2002, PACER is only supposed to charge enough to cover its operating costs. Instead, it’s a slush fund for the U.S. court system. PACER has raked in about $145 million annually over the last few years while incurring about $3 million per year in costs. Even the Justice Department has to pay to use PACER—124 million taxpayer dollars between 2010 and 2017.
“PACER is the only major government system that charges by the click, and access to federal court dockets is one of the most important government databases we have,” says Carl Malamud, a prominent public domain advocate. “Distribution of documents on the internet at costs that resemble 1970s copyshop fees is ridiculous in today’s day and age.”
Several class-action lawsuits, backed by media outlets and pro-transparency groups, have been filed in recent years and are currently winding their way through the system.
In the meantime, some vigilante coders have come up with workarounds to the PACER paywall. A project called RECAP created a browser extension that, when installed, uploads any court docket or document that a PACER user views to a free website and lists which filings are already available. USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath created Big Cases Bot, an automated program that monitors notable cases, uploads filings to DocumentCloud (another free repository of public information), and tweets out newly added records almost as soon as they’re available.
But none of this fixes the fundamental problem, which is that PACER is operating beyond its charter to the detriment of public access to the law.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UR3aLV
via IFTTT
The California Assembly’s Natural Resources committee has approved a bill that would bar hotels from providing guests with tiny bottles of shampoo, body wash, lotion and other personal care items. Supporters say the law would reduce the amount of plastic that is thrown away.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IxANvJ
via IFTTT
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours is the latest book by the libertarian economist David Friedman, with a single chapter each contributed by Peter Leeson (on the law of pirates) and David Skarbek (on the law of prison inmates). It describes 13 different legal or quasi-legal systems from a variety of places and times. No modern nation-state is found among these systems, and some readers may decline to count some of the systems as genuine legal systems at all.
This would be particularly true of the “embedded” legal systems—those adopted by a sub-group within a larger society that has its own, government-made law. Pirates, prisoners, gypsies, and the Amish are all subject to traditional governmental law, whether or not they respect it, yet each group also has or had its own code of conduct and methods for enforcing it, which sometimes conflict with the state-made law of the wider society.
All of the systems in the book are nevertheless recognizably law-like. That is, all are systems of socially enforced rules of conduct designed to mitigate and manage human conflict. The book’s other examples include imperial Chinese law, Jewish law, Islamic law, saga-period Icelandic law, Somali law, early Irish law, the law of the Plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne), 18th century English law, and ancient Athenian law.
Readers familiar with Friedman’s political views may be expecting a defense of an anarcho-capitalist legal system, yet, for better or worse, he holds back on that score
In general, Friedman handles normative questions with a very light hand. At the outset, he lets readers know that all the systems to be considered deserve to be taken seriously, as all are the work of adults no less intelligent than those who designed the modern American legal system. I confess that at certain points, I found it difficult to take some of these “very different” systems seriously as systems of justice. Under imperial Chinese law, for example, “If beating a child resulted in his death and there was no excuse for the beating, the punishment was one year of penal servitude. … There was no punishment for a reasonable beating of a disobedient son that resulted in death.” (Emphasis mine.) Reading that, I am inclined to doubt not the intelligence but the moral decency of the people who designed such law. But Friedman describes such seeming outrages dispassionately, without the moralism some of us might be tempted to indulge.
Friedman makes no effort to identify the best system, expressing doubt more than once that any such thing exists. He aims only to understand them, identifying some of the important advantages and disadvantages of each before making a few suggestions for reforming our own legal system. There is a faint libertarian theme which might go unnoticed by those unfamiliar with Friedman’s earlier work. Perhaps Friedman was trying to illustrate the feasibility of reducing the legal system’s reliance on the state in favor of private mechanisms; nevertheless, the book covers each legal system in general, rather than focusing solely on the aspects that teach libertarian-friendly lessons.
I believe imperial China was chosen chiefly to illustrate the potential for designing contracts that minimize people’s need to use the court system to resolve disputes. (This was done by relieving each party of duties whose breach would be difficult to prove.) Several systems were seemingly chosen to illustrate the feasibility of private enforcement of court decisions, in contrast with our own system’s entirely government-based enforcement. In saga-period Iceland, for example, courts’ decisions were enforced by private violence. If one party to a dispute disobeyed the court’s decision, that party could be declared an “outlaw” by the court, with the consequence that it would become legal for other members of the society to kill that individual. This eliminates the need for a centralized, governmental police force, albeit in a brutal manner.
In the case of present-day American prison inmates, individuals join gangs chiefly for protection, and these gangs enforce laws against their own members. If a gang member disrespects a member of a rival gang in a manner deemed unacceptable by prison culture, the offender’s own gang may authorize, or themselves carry out, a beating of the offender, with the aim of keeping the peace between gangs. A less violent and more sympathetic example is Amish laws, which are generally enforced by social ostracism.
This book stops short of calling for private enforcement of all laws. Friedman does not hold back, however, when he describes the possibility, under medieval Icelandic law, of a tort victim giving or selling his legal claim to another party. Friedman thinks this a great advantage of the Icelandic system over the modern American system. If, for instance, you have vandalized my house, but I am for some reason unable or unwilling to directly pursue a lawsuit against you, I should be able to give or sell my claim for damages to someone who is more willing and able to pursue the case. Perhaps there would be a company that would pay me for the right to pursue a lawsuit on my behalf; if the lawsuit wins, the company then receives the damages that would have been due to me.
Another improvement Friedman puts forward is inspired by the system of ancient Athens. There, private individuals could prosecute one another for crimes. They would then be tried by a large jury. If the prosecution was successful, the prosecutor would receive a portion of the fine imposed on the defendant. If the prosecutor failed to convince at least 20 percent of the jury of the merits of his case, the prosecutor himself would be fined. This deters meritless accusations.
Along similar lines, Friedman proposes that tort plaintiffs who lose should be required to pay compensation (over and above court costs) to the victorious defendant, with the amount of compensation proportional to the amount that the plaintiff sought to recover from the defendant. In addition, he suggests, government prosecutors who repeatedly file charges for which they cannot convince at least four jurors to vote for conviction should be removed from their jobs. These rules would eliminate incentives to file frivolous lawsuits or unjustified criminal charges.
Taking a page from 18th century English law, Friedman suggests that private citizens should be permitted to initiate criminal prosecutions, but perhaps only against government officials. This would address the problem of the government’s unwillingness to prosecute its own members.
On each of these points, I find Friedman’s recommendations well-taken. Friedman generally considers costs and benefits in utilitarian terms, asking not “Is this rule intrinsically just?” but “What desirable or undesirable behaviors would this rule bring about?”, using the economist’s assumption of generally rational and self-interested agents to answer the latter.
As in his earlier work, Friedman occasionally draws striking connections. My favorite example: Courts in the Middle Ages faced a problem with collecting enough evidence for convictions. Their solution was to extract confessions from suspects by means of torture. Similarly, modern-day American prosecutors face difficulties satisfying the demanding standards of trials. They, too, solve this problem via coerced confessions: They threaten to pile up more charges—or more serious charges—against the defendant unless the defendant pleads guilty. Like the medieval approach, this technique works against the guilty and innocent alike. Suppose I have just a 10 percent chance of being convicted at trial, of an offense that comes with an expected 20-year prison sentence. The prosecutor need only offer to reduce the charges against me to something with a less than 2-year sentence, and it becomes rational for me to accept a deal. Of course, my “confession” under such circumstances hardly constitutes strong evidence that I am guilty of anything.
This is just one of many insights sprinkled throughout the text. Friedman’s fans will appreciate the book’s characteristic clarity, candor, and rationality.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2GyCsyQ
via IFTTT
The dusty streets and patchwork buildings of Ifo, one of the camps that make up Dadaab Refugee Complex in eastern Kenya, don’t seem like much of a home. But for Abdullahi Ahmed, now 62, Ifo has long been a home worth fighting for.
Ahmed arrived in Ifo back in 1991, when he fled the civil war in Somalia. His journey to the refugee camp was unspeakable: At one point, he had to leave his dying son under a tree and just keep walking. It’s the kind of calculus from which a father never recovers, but Ahmed had to make it: His wife and other children were counting on him to lead them to safety, and Ahmed, himself emaciated and weak, couldn’t carry the dying boy anymore.
In Ifo, he started building a new life. A loan from a fellow refugee turned into a vegetable stall, and that vegetable stall turned into a restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Today, Ahmed watches over Ifo like a friendly patriarch: His restaurant has become a community center of sorts, where fellow refugees inhale plates of rice and meat between colorful painted walls. Ifo feels settled, fixed in the landscape. But it wasn’t always that way.
In 2006, representatives from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) called Ahmed and other community leaders to a meeting. For years, seasonal rains had caused flash floods, terrorizing Ifo’s residents. The floods washed away homes, dismantled toilets, and ruined much-needed food and other supplies. On the advice of an engineer from Nairobi, the agency had decided to dismantle the entire settlement and relocate its residents.
Ahmed was aghast. Over the previous decade and a half, Ifo’s residents had turned a desperate refugee camp into a city. Children had been born and raised there; small businesses had flourished; temporary huts made of sticks and repurposed tin cans had been refurbished into long-term homes. A second displacement would devastate this already-traumatized community.
Ahmed had lost one home due to war. He wasn’t about to leave another one just because some bureaucrats told him he had to.
“I thought, ‘This engineer from Nairobi is bogus,'” recalls Ahmed, who smiles broadly from behind a wiry scrub-brush beard. So he spoke up. Ahmed told the agency that the engineer they had hired was wrong. There was a better and cheaper alternative to relocation: a levee to redirect the floodwaters away from Ifo’s families. In the months that followed, the UNHCR took Ahmed’s advice and built the levee. The camp stayed put; the floods stopped. Ahmed was never paid a consultation fee, but he was right.
In 2017, the World Food Programme had to cut food rations to Kenya’s refugee camps by 30 percent due to insufficient funding. In the good old days, the refugees at least got rice. Today, they don’t even get that.
Of course he was right. Before the war, he had been one of Somalia’s most respected civil engineers.
We are in the midst of the world’s worst refugee crisis since World War II. According to the UNHCR, the earth currently contains 68.5 million forcibly displaced people. To put that in context, the population of the United Kingdom is 66 million. There are more refugees in the world right now than Brits.
More than 870,000 Somali refugees are in the Horn of Africa and Yemen alone, while another 2.1 million Somalis are internally displaced. Dadaab, the world’s third-largest refugee complex, hosts the highest percentage of refugees from Somalia.
First established in 1991, Dadaab has grown over the decades to become a city of 209,000 people. The majority are Somali, but refugees from Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Congo can be found there as well. Life in the camps is grim: Hundreds of thousands of traumatized people, half-starving on too-small rations, live in conditions that Oxfam calls “barely fit for humans.” (Dadaab is eerily well-named: The word means “a rocky hard place.”)
Taking care of all these people comes with a hefty price tag that no one wants to pay. According to a report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nongovernmental organization (NGO), proper care in 2018 would have cost an estimated $191.1 million; as late as November, only 19 percent of that was funded. In 2017, the World Food Programme had to cut food rations to Kenya’s refugee camps by 30 percent due to insufficient money. In the good old days, the refugees at least got rice. Today, they don’t even get that.
“The food they give us is not even fit for dogs to eat,” says Bishar Ahmed, 35, who came to Dadaab from Kismayu, Somalia, in 1998. “We want to work so we can buy food that is fit for human consumption.”
A refugee entrepreneur in Hagadera camp negotiates with a client. Jillian Keenan
But Kenya has imposed harsh limits on the refugees’ ability to work. As we’ll see, this doesn’t just make life harder for the people in the camps. By hobbling their self-reliance, it forces large numbers of them to depend on the authorities for survival, inflating those enormous costs. According to the World Bank, more than 90 percent of Somali refugees in Kenya are entirely dependent on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs.
Third-country resettlement options for Somali refugees are grim and getting worse. Historically, America has been a positive force in global refugee resettlement, taking in tens of thousands each year. In 2016, 90 percent of African refugees who settled somewhere other than their home country or the country to which they initially fled ended up in the United States, according to the IRC. But in January 2017, President Donald Trump slashed the refugee resettlement cap more than in half and issued an executive order severely restricting entry for citizens of half a dozen countries, including Somalia. Now U.S. refugee resettlement is at its lowest point since 1977. Somali refugee resettlement has seen a 97.4 percent decrease from the first three months of 2016, according to State Department data. And as anti-refugee sentiment flares, Europe hasn’t done much better: In 2017, E.U. member states took in only 9,451 refugees out of a total of 1,190,000 with resettlement needs, according to IRC.
As Dadaab lingered in a state of limbo for decades with no exit strategy in sight, Kenya began to show signs of asylum fatigue. In 2012, then–President Mwai Kibaki called for refugees in the camps to be “resettled” inside Somalia, saying “Kenya can no longer continue carrying the burden.”
Then security concerns made the situation worse. Following brutal attacks at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 and Garissa University in 2015, Kenyan officials found a quarter of a million scapegoats in Dadaab. Claiming that the Somali terror group Al-Shabab had infiltrated the camps, making them a “nursery” for violent extremism, Deputy President William Ruto threatened to close the complex down. Human rights groups condemned the proposal and Ruto backpedaled. But a year later, in May 2016, the controversy was reignited when the Kenyan government announced that it had disbanded its Department for Refugee Affairs as a first step to shuttering Dadaab.
The timing of the announcement was significant: Just two months earlier, the E.U. had brokered a deal with Turkey to send back every Syrian refugee who crossed its borders. The double standard did not go unnoticed in Nairobi.
“In Europe, rich, prosperous, and democratic countries are turning away refugees from Syria, one of the worst war zones since World War II,” Kenyan Interior Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said at the time. “There comes a time when we must think primarily about the security of our people. Ladies and gentlemen, that time is now.”
Following a petition from human rights organizations, Kenyan High Court Judge John Mativo ruled that the government’s plans to close Dadaab and repatriate its refugees were an unconstitutional “act of…persecution.” The disbanded Department for Refugee Affairs was replaced with a new Refugee Affairs Secretariat.
Since then, life in limbo has continued. More than 79,000 people have voluntarily repatriated to Somalia, but many in the camps say they’ll never go back. Closing Dadaab would be a logistical and political nightmare—a quarter of a million people won’t just disappear. Where would they go? Who would pay for the relocation operation? What if the now three generations of Dadaab refugees simply refused to leave the only home many of them have ever known?
As former Human Rights Watch researcher Ben Rawlence put it in City of Thorns (Picador), his 2016 book: “No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent.”
Refugees are often seen as a drain on national resources. But that doesn’t have to be true. When Abdullahi Ahmed shared his engineering expertise with UNHCR, for example, he saved the global community from paying for an exceedingly expensive relocation. (The agency could not provide an estimate of how much it would have cost to move Ifo, but according to The Nation, a proposal to relocate Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi was projected to run roughly $9 million.) Failing to capitalize on the economic value of refugees isn’t just a humanitarian mistake. It’s an economic one.
Thirty years ago, Dadaab was a remote outpost where camel and goat herders had to walk 66 miles to the nearest town just to sell their meat and milk. Today, according to a 2010 study commissioned by the Kenyan, Danish, and Norwegian governments, the direct and indirect benefits of Dadaab’s camps amount to as much as $14 million a year in a region that sorely needs it. That study also found that Dadaab’s informal refugee-run markets turn over around $25 million per year—a quarter of all economic activity in northeastern Kenya.
Dadaab’s informal refugee-run markets turn over around $25 million per year—a quarter of all economic activity in northeastern Kenya.
“We would rather have the refugees stay around; they are our brothers,” says Mahat Moge, 37, a Kenyan who owns a conference venue and restaurant just outside the camps. “And,” he adds with a grin, “we can do business with them.” Moge buys sugar, milk, and other staples from refugee vendors, since their informal markets operate outside the Kenyan legal framework and therefore don’t incur a tax.
In April 2018, the International Finance Corporation released a consumer and market study of Kakuma, a smaller refugee camp on the other side of Kenya. Rather than focus on the camp’s humanitarian needs, the study looked at Kakuma “through the lens of a private firm looking to enter a new market.” It found a vibrant informal economy, including 14 wholesalers—an economic vitality the camp shares with its host community.
“Kakuma camp and town are a single market in more than just name,” the report concludes. “Over the past decades, the two have become socioeconomically interdependent with refugees hiring, trading, and working with town residents and vice versa.”
The economic value of refugees isn’t unique to that country or even to the continent of Africa. One study, which looked at the economic impact of refugees in Ohio, found that the Refugee Services Collaborative of Cleveland spent an estimated total of $4.8 million on refugee services in 2012—but refugee activity boosted the local economy by an estimated $48 million, created 650 jobs, and generated $2.7 million in state and local tax revenue. In the words of a 2016 report from the Open Political Economy Network, “Investing one euro—or dollar—in welcoming refugees can yield nearly two in economic benefits within five years.” The 2017 book Refugee Economies (Oxford University Press) concludes that “far from being an inevitable burden, refugees have the capacity to help themselves and contribute to their host societies—if we let them.”
But if the influx of economic value that refugees bring is so clear to researchers, why isn’t it more clear to the countries that host them, such as Kenya? If refugees build such vibrant and thriving informal markets, what has stopped them from translating that potential into formal employment and self-reliance?
Although the UNHCR gives Kenya’s refugees the essentials of survival—free shelter, free food, free water, free medical care, free education, even free firewood—entrepreneurship is everywhere. Parts of Hagadera, one of Dadaab’s camps, are comparable to any other central business district in small-town East Africa, if you ignore the fact that the buildings are made of sticks and sheet metal rather than concrete. (Government policies prohibit the refugees from building permanent structures.) Refugees have opened stores, restaurants, photography studios, internet cafés, and much more. In the words of 28-year-old Ahmed Ali, who tries to work as a mechanic even though roadblocks around the region mean that sometimes months pass without a car to repair, “It is better to work for yourself than sit and wait for aid.”
Yet despite all the “free” things the camps’ residents receive, the refugees themselves are not free. Two policies—the UNHCR’s incentive worker policy and the Kenyan government’s encampment policy—waste the vast human potential at places like Dadaab, with negative consequences for refugees and native Kenyans alike.
Abdiaziz Ali, who was born in Mogadishu in the late ’80s or early ’90s (like many refugees, he isn’t certain about his age), was always one of the smart kids. He arrived at Dadaab as a toddler and quickly began to excel academically. When he finished secondary school in 2004, he was accepted to the University of Nairobi. After working for seven years, he finally saved enough to move to the capital city and begin studying for his B.A. in sociology and conflict resolution. At that point, Abdiaziz felt like he was living the dream: With hard work and an education, he would build a future that was brighter than the nightmare his parents had fled.
Refugee-run market. Jillian Keenan
Then the terrorist attacks in Nairobi and Garissa changed his life. In 2014, the Security Laws Amendment Act placed all refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya under so-called “encampment.” Leaving Dadaab and other refugee settlements without a movement pass became nearly impossible. The government raided homes, businesses, and schools to round up refugees who were working or studying outside the camps.
“Kenyan police and security forces are using abusive and discriminatory tactics in the name of national security, targeting entire communities,” Daniel Bekele of Human Rights Watch said at the time. Thousands of people were detained in police stations without charge. Just before what would have been his graduation ceremony, Abdiaziz was sent back to the camp where he grew up.
At Dadaab, Abdiaziz had no good options. With his degree in sociology and conflict resolution, he could have been a valuable asset to one of the NGOs that works in the camp complex. But refugees employed by UNHCR and its partners are allowed only to be “incentive workers.” Regardless of their experience or qualifications, incentive workers earn as little as $50 a month, even as Kenyans are paid far more for doing the same jobs. “I will spend weeks writing a report,” says one such worker, who makes the equivalent of about $80 a month working full-time for the International Rescue Committee, “and then the Kenyan who emails it out for me gets paid 10 times as much.” (The incentive worker asked not to be identified. His job sucks, but in the absence of better options, he doesn’t want to lose it.)
“NGOs will only pay Kenyans, because that is the law of the country,” Abdiaziz says. “But private companies want to pay whoever is best. The problem is, private companies are not in the camps.”
For a while, Abdiaziz considered going back to Somalia, where he’d be free of the Kenyan government’s employment limitations. One of his childhood friends, Abbas Siraji, had left Dadaab in 2011 and returned to Mogadishu with dreams of rebuilding their homeland. At first, it went well: He was able to work for fair compensation in Somalia, and he was eventually appointed minister of public works and reconstruction. Then in May 2017, Abdiaziz learned that Siraji had been shot to death in Mogadishu. Abdiaziz had a wife and children. No job was worth that risk.
“Abbas used to tell us to come back home,” says Abdiaziz. “But the moment he was killed, I knew I would never go back.”
Today, Abdiaziz is placing his bets on the only free space he can access: the internet. He’s using the secondhand laptop he bought as a student in Nairobi to get an online degree in computer programming and web design. Someday, he hopes, he can find overseas clients online.
Kenya’s parliament is aware of these problems. In 2017, it passed the so-called Refugees Bill, which would have recognized employment and land ownership rights for roughly 500,000 refugees. “It does not make sense to continue as we have been,” says former Kenyan Member of Parliament Agostinho Neto, who introduced the legislation. “We have refugees with professional backgrounds who could help support our economy and sustain themselves. Instead, they’re incarcerated in the camps.” Neto’s bill was widely praised as a positive attempt to enable refugee self-reliance, but President Uhuru Kenyatta rejected it, citing a lack of constitutionally required “public participation” in the proposal.
The policies that have held back Abdiaziz hurt native Kenyans too. One refugee—you’ll understand why he’s anonymous in a moment—needs to buy a new generator for his successful business in Hagadera camp. He has applied for a movement pass to travel to Nairobi to make the purchase, but he knows he won’t get it. After he’s denied, he’ll have one remaining option: pay to have a generator smuggled in from Somalia. The refugee entrepreneur will have to overpay for the machine, and some businessman in Nairobi will lose a sale. The only winners will be the Somali smugglers.
Amid all this uncertainty, there is a reason for hope: Kenya needs workers.
Thanks to recent discoveries of oil, gold, and other natural resources, Kenya’s extractive sectors are booming. The industries could explode to as much as 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product by 2030, surpassing even traditional exports such as coffee. But Kenya doesn’t have enough skilled labor to meet the booming demand. Already, the shortage has forced the Kenya Pipeline Company to import workers from China and Nigeria.
To address the problem, Tullow Oil Kenya launched a $1 million training program to equip new graduates with the knowledge they need to work in the oil and gas sector. In addition to geologists and engineers, there’s a demand for people with skills in information technology, equipment repair, and welding.
“I feel like we are in an open prison,” one 20-year-old welder in Ifo tells me. “Our skills are needed, but we can’t use them.” He has no clients, but he grabs his tools anyway, eager to show off the trade he learned from his cousin. Like the engineer who saved Ifo from the floodwaters, like millions of refugees around the world, the welder could contribute to his adopted country’s growing economy. But instead he waits, stuck in a rocky hard place, for clients who never appear.
“My name is Issaq Ahmed,” he says, ripe with potential. “And I am a welder.” At least he could be—if he were free to work.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2GvQnEK
via IFTTT
Mehros Nassersharifi is being charged with making “a telecommunication” “with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse a person at the premises to which the telecommunication was made” (Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.21(A)(1)), by
creat[ing] a Twitter account named “Perrysburg Girls Ranked” and post[ing] numerous girls names which contained descriptions of their physical attributes in a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory post about a female of Jewish ethnicity.
The Twitter account apparently had at least 15 posts, which
contained female student’s names, with a number beside them, and a description of them.
Many of the posts contained derogatory, harassing and abusive descriptions of their physical attributes. One of the posts contained a derogatory description of a female of Jewish ethnicity. The post read, “The Jew. Other than the fact that she should have been perished along with the 6 million back In the 1940’s, she’s annoying as hell, she has a weird chunky body. NO ass, no tits, and an ugly fucked up face. Jumps from guy to guy, and no real positives to dating her. I came daddy brings her to a 61.”
Now this is obviously nasty behavior. While I think that even it is constitutionally protected (there’s no established First Amendment exception that covers it), I have to agree that little would be lost to public debate if people couldn’t publicly insult high school students’ appearance, and say that they ought to have been killed.
But nothing in the statute that the prosecutor is using is limited to such speech. Instead, the statute applies to a vast range of speech—at least if one accepts the prosecutor’s theory that a Twitter message is “made … to” “the premises” of everyone who might read it:
(A) No person shall knowingly make or cause to be made a telecommunication, or knowingly permit a telecommunication to be made from a telecommunications device under the person’s control, to another, if the caller does any of the following:
(1) Makes the telecommunication with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse any person at the premises to which the telecommunication is made, whether or not actual communication takes place between the caller and a recipient; …
Tweeting about government officials is a crime, if a prosecutor and jury decide they were sent “with purpose to … abuse” the officials (or “to harass” them, whatever that means). Same for messages (or Facebook posts or blog posts) about activists, businesspeople, and others.
Same for messages that “abuse” by condemning people’s actions or ideologies, and not just their looks. Nor is the law limited to anti-Semitic or otherwise bigoted speech; indeed, R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) makes clear that it would be unconstitutional for the law to be so limited.
Online newspaper articles would be covered, too, if the prosecutor and jury decide they were posted “with purpose to … abuse” the people being written about. Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.21(F) does provide an exception for employees or contractors of various media outlets, but that exception applies only to certain other provisions of the law, not to (A)(1), which is the provision being used here.
To be sure, most prosecutors will likely use the law sparingly, and might perhaps try to limit it, for instance, just to nonpolitical personal insults of private citizens (and perhaps especially of teenagers). But that is precisely the same argument the Supreme Court expressly rejected in U.S. v. Stevens (2010) (the animal cruelty video case):
Not to worry, the Government says: The Executive Branch construes § 48 to reach only “extreme” cruelty, and it “neither has brought nor will bring a prosecution for anything less.” The Government hits this theme hard, invoking its prosecutorial discretion several times. But the First Amendment protects against the Government; it does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige. We would not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the Government promised to use it responsibly.
Last year, I lost a Sixth Circuit case (Plunderbund Media, LLC v. DeWine) in which my clients and I challenged a related provision of the same statute, § 2917.21(B)(2); that provision expressly applied to “post[ing] a text or audio statement or an image on [the web] … for the purpose of abusing, threatening, or harassing another person,” which is how the prosecutor in Nassersharifi is interpreting (A)(1) as well. We lost that case on the grounds that the court didn’t think that our clients (political organizations) faced a sufficient threat of prosecution for their usual speech; the court therefore concluded that we lacked standing to bring our challenge.
But Nassersharifi, if he chooses to fight this, would have standing to challenge the law on its face, and to argue that—even if his own speech might be restrictable on some theory—the law is substantially overbroad, because it covers a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech. That challenge should, I think, prevail.
(It’s possible that Nassersharifi could be disciplined by the school, or even expelled, for his speech; that’s a separate and complicated matter that I’ll leave aside for this post.)
A good line from Louis Henkin, writing in 1971. His “something more” is “a workable accommodation of competing values properly achieved and reasonably justified”; others might say “an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution, both those parts that secure freedoms and those that secure government power”; others might say “a focus on the traditions of the American people, and on the precedents that embody those tradition.” But in any event, he is surely right that not all restraints on liberty, even all foolish or immoral ones, are unconstitutional, and that the Constitution is aimed at securing not only liberty from governmental excesses but also other “competing values” as well.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2W1vFTK
via IFTTT
As more states legalize recreational marijuana use, another part of the cannabis plant has found a market niche. CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a molecule that can be derived from hemp or cannabis. It doesn’t contain THC, so it won’t get you high.
The compound has become a common ingredient in trendy wellness products because of its purported therapeutic benefits.
“I became really like obsessed with CBD,” says Jonathan Eppers, founder of Vybes beverages. “I always tell people it’s like liquid yoga.”
Eppers, whose company makes CBD drinks that are sold in nearly 250 U.S. grocery stores, coffee shops, and hotels, says that he launched the beverage startup in 2017 after using CBD oils to treat his own anxiety. But the products that he sells are illegal—even in states like California where recreational marijuana is now widely available.
“I didn’t really didn’t think too much about the regulations around CBD because CBD oil was being sold in grocery stores here in LA,” Eppers says. “But once I got into it we sort of realized we were in a gray area with CBD.”
In January 2019, Eppers said officials from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) showed up to one of his Los Angeles warehouses and confiscated $140,000 worth of Vybes beverages. Eppers says state officials put an embargo on his product and went after a company that helps package his products in Northern California.
“Basically for two months, we haven’t been able to sell Vybes which is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars,” states Eppers.
California is just one of many states where CBD sales are legally murky. The law clearly allows for the sale of cannabis-derived CBD products, but items that contain the hemp version of the molecule are prohibited.
“The Department of Public Health here is of the view that CBD can’t be put in foods, beverages, animal foods you name it,” says Griffen Thorne, a cannabis lawyer with Harris Bricken. “It is kind of interesting that you have marijuana, which is still federally illegal and there’s a path towards sales for companies that want to actually make and sell marijuana products. Whereas CBD is derived from a plant that’s no longer federally illegal and there are a ton of roadblocks and there’s zero clarity on how to do it for many products.”
Just months after Eppers launch his company, the CDPH released an FAQ document that echoed the Food and Drug Administration’s stance on CBD, stating that products containing the compound could not be sold by unlicensed retailers. But the document contained no guidance for enforcement, and many retailers—unaware of the state’s stance on CBD—have continued selling the product to consumers.
“I was confused because CBD had been sold in California for several years and it’s only getting bigger,” Eppers says. “And all of a sudden they were coming out and saying we couldn’t put this in food and beverages. So it was like what changed?”
While continuing to sell his product, Eppers asked the state for legal clarification. He was hopeful that passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, removing hemp from the Controlled Substances list, would establish that his products are fully legal. But he soon discovered that wasn’t the case.
“It wasn’t until after the Farm Bill passed that California became a lot more aggressive and actually [started] going after companies here in California that were producing CBD products,” says Eppers.
Kenny Morrison, a cannabis industry veteran who runs VCC Brands and serves as president of the California Cannabis Manufacturers Association, sees parallels between today’s CBD market and the early days of recreational marijuana.
“It’s all just layovers from prohibition,” Morrison states. “The retail model of cannabis being sold at a storefront, in order for that to become accepted and commonplace people had to sort of break the law or interpret the law in a new way. And we’re seeing that with CBD as well. So it’s kind of ironic that now cannabis is super regulated and CBD isn’t. Yet cannabis paved the way for CBD.”
With consumer sales of CBD products projected to top $2 billion by 2020, lawmakers in several states, including California, are pushing for bipartisan legislation that would legalize the use of CBD in food, beverage, and cosmetic products.
California’s CBD bill, AB 228, is currently making its way through the statehouse, a move Eppers and others hope will clean up the regulatory mess left over from prohibition.
“What’s happened with the state kind of clamping down on this is it’s really brought the industry together,” Eppers says. “The state will fix this legislatively.”
Produced and shot by Alexis Garcia. Additional camera by Zach Weissmueller, Paul Detrick, and Justin Monticello.
Photo credits: Hollandse-Hoogte/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Jens Kalaene/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom, Michal Fludra/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS/Newscom, Jevon Moore/SplashNews/Newscom, and Vybes. Additional footage provided by the Drug Policy Alliance.
Deep Space by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (http://bit.ly/1bFo3O7)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/
Ghost Dance by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (http://bit.ly/1bFo3O7)
Source: http://bit.ly/2114bZa
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
