What is being voted on right now at the special session of the HRC #SS35:
A strong mandate for an independent international inquiry mechanism, with a mandate to establish facts / the truth …
… to collect, analyse & preserve evidence in a way that can be used in court proceedings. It will also identify perpetrators and prepare case files against them.
The budget will be 3.7 million Euros. 3 high level independent experts will lead the work of the mandate. A total of no less than 18 staff should be hired.
This includes 1 lead investigator and 6 investigators (2 open source investigators who will do desk research and 2 other investigators that will also hold interviews etc., 1 sexual and gender based investigator & 1 child rights investigator).
This might still be slightly reduced by the 5th Committee in NY (validating budgets) next month, so these numbers are not definitive.
The FFM should likely be fully operational, with the full team hired, by March / early April.
Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger is going to jail for basically daring to take on Chevron & their environmental abuses.
I initially connected w/ Steven b/c I'd only seen these kinds of attacks on lawyers in Iran, Egypt or other dictatorships. Yet this is happening in the US.
This move is meant to intimidate and silence lawyers everywhere who are willing to stand up for our planet and take on big corporations who pollute. As a fellow lawyer, I'm appalled and I will make sure to not stop talking about it while Steven is away. democracynow.org/2021/10/27/ste…
Reminder of what Steven is trying to redress:
STEVEN DONZIGER: “[Chevron], in the form of Texaco, its predecessor company, went into the Amazon of Ecuador and decided to create an operational system, with literally hundreds of wells, where they deliberately dumped toxic waste…
"[s]ince the treacherous munafiqin do not believe in Islam and whatever they say is stemmed from their deception and hypocrisy, and since according to the claims of their leaders they have become apostates of Islam, and since they...
... wage war on God and are engaging in classical warfare in the western, northern and southern parts of the country with the collaboration of the Baathist Party of Iraq, and also their spying for Saddam against our Muslim nation, and since they are tied to the World Arrogance...
... and have inflicted foul blows to the Islamic Republic since its inception, it follows that those who remain steadfast in their position of nifaq in prisons throughout the country are considered to be muharib (waging war on God) and are condemned to execution."
Brutally killed and disposed of by his family because of his sexuality.
Cultural attitudes in society towards homosexuality are a literal life or death problem. What compounds the problem is when the laws of a state do not provide any protection.
As a baseline, it is important to understand that Iran's Islamic Penal Code explicitly criminalizes same-sex relations, even imposing the death penalty on individuals convicted of sodomy.
The evidentiary burden for proving that a homosexual act has occurred is difficult to overcome, but in Iran’s legal system, a judge, based on his own “knowledge,” can independently convict a person.