“Judge Rotenberg Educational Center: Please Stop Painful Electric Shocks on Your Students”

Taken from: http://www.change.org/petitions/judge-rotenberg-educational-center-please-stop-painful-electric-shocks-on-your-students#

Warning: video is very graphic. 

At a “special needs school” in Canton, Massachusetts, children and teenagers with autism and other disabilities are being administered electric shocks as a means of controlling their behaviors.  As a former Teacher’s Assistant, I regret having participated firsthand at this school – The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC).

The human rights abuses taking place at the JRC are well documented. The United Nations is aware of the JRC and has called these shocks “torture”, and says that “The prohibition of torture is absolute.” Yet the school continues to use a powerfully painful electric shock device on students to control their behaviors. These devices are reportedly much stronger than police stun guns and were created by the founder of the Judge Rotenberg Center.

The Judge Rotenberg Center must immediately stop its practice of shocking special needs students.

Rather than shocking students for only severe behaviors, student behavior plans at JRC dictated that we shock certain students for even the most minor of behavioral issues like closing their eyes for 15 seconds while sitting at the desk, pulling apart a loose piece of thread, tearing an empty used paper cup, or for standing up and raising a hand to ask to go to the bathroom. In some classrooms, very often students who observe their peers being shocked react in fear by standing up out of their seat, yelling or crying, or throwing down their task — and are then shocked for these reactions.

A non-verbal nearly blind girl with cerebral palsy was shocked as part of her behavioral plan for making a moaning sound and for attempts to hold a staff’s hand (her attempts to communicate and to be loved).

In 2002, 18 year-old Andre McCollins was strapped down and shocked for hours at the JRC. He begged for the shocks to stop and when they did, he was left in a catatonic state for days which resulted in permanent damage.

The JRC’s founder, Dr. Matthew Israel, resigned after being charged with misleading a grand jury by destroying video footage of other students being shocked.

Not only does the JRC need to immediately stop this practice but Massachusetts legislators need to make these shock procedures illegal. These students are among Massachusetts’ most vulnerable citizens and have no voice of their own to describe their pain. They need your help.

Demand that the JRC stop shocking students now!

If you are interested, please help by signing the petition using the link above. 

“Auschwitz survivor dies on 67th anniversary of camp’s liberation”

Taken from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/auschwitz-survivor-dies-in-same-town-on-67th-anniversary-of-camps-liberaton/2012/01/27/gIQAtr1LVQ_story.html

January 27, 2012

Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of the memorial site, died Friday on the 67th anniversary of its liberation.

Smolen died in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Friday is the anniversary of the camp’s 1945 liberation by Soviet troops. Jan. 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005, and was marked with ceremonies across Europe.

Two years after the war ended, Auschwitz-Birkenau became a museum — and Smolen himself served as its director from 1955-1990. He continued to live in the town after his retirement, often attending the memorial ceremonies marking the camp’s liberation.

Sawicki said soon after Smolen’s death the news was announced to Holocaust survivors who had gathered at the vast site of dilapidated barracks still enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. They fell silent for a minute in his honor.

Smolen was born on April 19, 1920, in the southern Polish town of Chorzow Stary. He was a Pole involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was arrested by the Germans in April 1941 and taken to Auschwitz in one of the early mass shipments of prisoners there. He left the camp on the last transport of prisoners evacuated by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945, nine days before its liberation. He later attributed his survival to good health and extreme luck.

He once explained his decision to return to the camp to manage it as a way of honoring those who were killed there. “Sometimes when I think about it, I feel it may be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of obligation I have for having survived,” he said.

In other gestures of remembrance, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg apologized for his nation’s role in arresting and deporting Jews after it was invaded by Nazi Germany. During the war, 772 Norwegian Jews and Jewish refugees were deported to Germany. Only 34 survived. He said it’s time the nation acknowledges that politicians and other Norwegians took part and expressed “our deep regrets that this could have happened on Norwegian soil.” He spoke at a ceremony in Oslo attended by the last surviving Jew in a group of 532 deported from Norway in 1942.

In Turkey, state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary “Shoah,” about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country. “It is a historical event,” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in Paris. “It is extremely important that it is being shown in a Muslim country.”

Germany’s Parliament also gathered Friday for a special sitting to remember the Holocaust. Prominent survivor and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki recalled how the Nazi SS informed members of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish council in July 1942 of plans for the inhabitants’ ”resettlement” to the east. Reich-Ranicki, 91, recounted how a “deathly silence” was followed by uproar. He said those present “seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence.”

The Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into inhuman conditions. Most who survived disease and starvation in the ghetto were transported to death camps.

“UN human rights chief welcomes start of second Khmer Rouge trial”

Taken from: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40455&Cr=Cambodia&Cr1=

November 21, 2011

The United Nations human rights chief today welcomed the opening of the genocide trial of three former senior Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, while stressing the need for vigilance to ensure that victims’ rights are respected.Opening statements are scheduled today from the prosecution and defence in the trial of former foreign minister Ieng Sary, former so-called Brother Number Two Nuon Chea, and former head of State Khieu Samphan on charges including genocide, crimes against humanity and torture.It is the second case to be brought to trial by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a mixed court set up under a 2003 agreement signed by the UN and the Government to try those deemed most responsible for crimes committed between 1975 and 1979 during which nearly two million people are thought to have died.

“This is another historic day for the people of Cambodia, many of whom have waited a long time to see the start of this trial, and who can at last begin to hear evidence of the atrocities committed all across the country over 30 years ago,” said High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. “The survivors’ testimony will undoubtedly help a new generation of Cambodians to understand their history and add impetus to the international community’s efforts to prevent future mass crimes,” she added in a news release.

Nearly 1,000 visitors came to the court to watch today’s proceedings, during which National Co-Prosecutor Chea Leang depicted what types of crimes took place and how millions of Cambodians endured forced labour, tortures and inhumane conditions before being perished.

From the mass evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 onwards to the torture and execution at security prisons around the country to genocide against the Cham Muslim and the ethnic Vietnamese, she illustrated how a series of crimes were committed under the regime presided over by the accused. “Democratic Kampuchea… was one of the most brutal and horrific regimes in modern history,” she concluded after speaking almost all day.

The trial in what is referred to as Case 002 is considered one of the most significant in international criminal justice due to the magnitude of the crimes and its complexity, according to a news release issued by the UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials (UNAKRT). “We’re embarking on an unprecedented journey,” International Co-Prosecutor Andrew Cayley said, speaking on the roles of the defendants during the regime and the legal framework for the case. “One in four Cambodians perished during the four-year reign of Democratic Kampuchea. The scope of human catastrophe during the regime was incompatible.”

Despite the progress made so far by the tribunal, Ms. Pillay noted that it continues to face challenges, particularly regarding the need to safeguard the integrity of its proceedings. In a series of recent decisions, the minority judges of the pre-trial chamber have found “serious deficiencies” in the application of international standards in the cases still before the court’s investigating judges. “It is essential that these concerns are squarely addressed as the court moves forward,” said the High Commissioner, adding that allegations of interference “mar the credibility of any court in the eyes of the public.”

Last week the ECCC’s trial chamber ruled that Ieng Sary’s wife, 79-year-old Ieng Thirith, the former Social Affairs Minister for the Democratic Kampuchea who was on trial for genocide and other crimes against humanity along with the other three men, is unfit to stand trial and ordered her unconditional release.

“South Korea presses Japan at U.N. over ‘comfort women’”

Taken from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/reporting-from-seoul-following-decades-of-frustration-personal-protests-and-governmental-declarations-south-korea-on-we.html

October 12, 2011

REPORTING FROM SEOUL — After decades of frustration, personal protests and government  declarations, South Korea on Wednesday appealed to the United Nations in its demand that Japan take “legal responsibility” for enslaving an estimated 200,000 Korean women as prostitutes during World War II.

Known euphemistically as “comfort women,” the victims were forced to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers based on the Korean peninsula. For years, Japan has paid lip service to South Korean demands for monetary payments to surviving victims, leading South Korea to seek support through the court of world opinion.“This systematic rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes, and also, under defined circumstances, crimes against humanity,” Shin Dong-ik, South Korea’s deputy chief envoy to the U.N., told a General Assembly committee.

The statement is the first time in nearly a generation that a Korean diplomat has raised the issue at the U.N.’s Third Committee. Each year since 1992, South Korea has broached the issue at the less influential U.N. Human Rights Council.

A Japanese representative at the committee hearing acknowledged the use of Koreans as comfort women during the war, and he  expressed remorse. However, Japan, which occupied the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, has insisted that the issue was settled by a 1965 compensation package in which South Korea reportedly received $300 million.

Many surviving comfort women have waged regular protests at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. In December, the women will hold their 1,000^th protest. The issue will be revisited during an Oct. 19  summit here between South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.