Posts tagged : "Human rights"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: When facing down public dissent and unrest, Iranian authorities are known to downplay the magnitude of the various crises they confront. But officials are uncharacteristically sounding the alarm about a mounting water crisis, one which could trigger a full-blown conflict over access to the essential resource. According to Minister of Energy Reza Ardakanian, the coming summer in the Iranian calendar year will be the “driest in the recent five decades.” The minister said he was concerned about peaking demand for drinking water and cast doubt on the government’s ability to ensure an uninterrupted supply of water nationally. Iran is now confronting its most severe drought in half a...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Climate change is a complex threat to life on Earth, driving countless shifts worldwide, and it is only through collective action on the individual, national, regional and international levels that it can be addressed meaningfully. The provision of food, fiber, fuel and freshwater, without which human society and its economy cannot survive, is jeopardized by the rising global temperature and record levels of land and freshwater exploitation. The UN Secretary General António Guterres has termed climate change the “defining challenge of our time.” Some experts talk of climate change as a “threat multiplier” that even has the potential to increase the risk of political instability and terrorism. Climate...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: There are many indications leading us to believe that we are living in an age characterized by the face-off of religion and science. Even so, although science is making headway in eliminating many of the humanity’s challenges, faith hasn’t surrendered its preeminence, and The Guardian reported in 2018 that 84 percent of the global population identifies with a religious group, with Christianity being the largest faith group, followed by Islam, Hindus and Buddhists. Sixteen percent of the people in the world, at nearly 1.2 billion, said they have no religious affiliation. Freedom of religion is a fundamental human right safeguarding the diversity and conscience of human societies. The ability of the...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The world is reeling from an unprecedented, lethal pandemic and governments are scrambling to come up with a remedy in the form of a vaccine that can tamp down the torrent of deaths and infection it is causing. It is intrinsic that the scourge of COVID-19 and the global economic recession associated with it represent the leitmotif of daily conversations, soaking up the attention of media and the public. At this critical time, it might be that such pressing global challenges as global warming are overlooked. But let’s face it: our summers and winters are getting warmer; with the rise of sea levels at rates not chronicled in some 3,000 years, cities as colossal as Jakarta might be submerged altogether; the...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: It was in 1965 when scientists on the US President’s Science Advisory Committee broached the idea of a “greenhouse effect” that was sparking concerns about the rising temperature of the Earth, and no more than a decade later, the distinguished geoscientist Wallace Broecker coined the term “global warming”, which took a while to enter the mainstream debate but carved a fundamentally new path for research and excavation into how anthropogenic activities accelerate the heating of the planet and endanger the lives of humans and other species. The international community’s fight to tackle climate change as a concern of universal proportions started more than three decades ago, when the...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: In 2020, a string of unprecedented extreme weather events across the globe highlighted the exigency of taking meaningful action to tackle the climate crisis more seriously than ever. From record rainfalls in Indonesia forcing some 62,000 people from their homes to wildfires in Australia killing nearly 3 billion animals and demolishing 3,000 homes, from the Chinese province of Yunnan reporting the worst drought in 10 years to devastating floods in Kenya and Uganda displacing at least 400,000 people, the twinge of the heating Earth and changing climate was felt excruciatingly. Experts say 2020 was an apocalyptic wildfire season, with the global direct cost of forest fires standing at USD17 billion. Aggregately,...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Facts that corroborate the world is entangled in a climate emergency are abundant. Scientific evidence paints a clear and unambiguous picture of what lies ahead for the humanity: climate change is happening, it is almost entirely triggered by harmful anthropogenic activity, and in the decades to come, its impacts on human life will be scorching and at times irreversible. 2020, the second hottest year on record since 1880, witnessed unfortunate natural disasters almost unvaryingly linked to climate change. Record-setting wildfires engulfing Australia, California, Brazil and Siberia; an unprecedented hurricane season in the Atlantic marked by 30 named storms; massive floods overwhelming India and Bangladesh,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: While US-Iran relations are apparently warming, with hopes rising of a resumption of the scuppered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear pact, Washington continues to pile on punitive measures, particularly in the technology sector. The US government recently imposed a penalty of US$8 million on Germany’s SAP Software Solutions for “illegally” exporting US-origin software, including upgrades and security fixes, to Iranian users. The sale violated the technology sanctions placed on the Middle East nation, which is home to nearly 60 million internet users. From 2010 to 2017, SAP and its international partners exported the technology a total of 20,000 times to people in Iran and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Facebook has closed hundreds of fake accounts linked to the Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MEK), a move that will be cheered in Tehran and raise questions about official US attitudes about the group under the new Joe Biden administration. Over 300 accounts, pages and groups believed to be affiliated with the MEK, also known as MKO, were tagged by Facebook for egregious online behavior including disseminating misinformation to discredit the Iranian government. Facebook ascertained that the majority of the accounts were operated from a single location in Albania and almost universally projected a favorable image of the otherwise historically infamous group some even liken to a...

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: A decision to extend the mandate of the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran has ruffled the feathers of authorities in Tehran who say the country is being unfairly singled out. Experts, however, argue that Iran’s human rights profile needs impartial, thorough scrutiny. Twenty-one out of 47 member states of the UN Human Rights Council voted on March 23 to extend the mandate for another year, telling the representative to submit his findings on the country’s human rights challenges in time for the UN General Assembly in September. Only 12 countries voted against the resolution, which included Iran’s stalwart allies Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba, while 14 other states, mostly...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani squabbles with hardline parliamentarians over next year’s national budget, state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) will inevitably be richly funded despite rising public objections to its partisan reporting. A draft of the budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year, which begins on March 21, sparked an uproar over a proposed 35% year on year increase of IRIB’s budget. IRIB operates upwards of 100 local, national and international radio and television stations, and holds an absolute monopoly over media services in Iran. With satellite dishes capable of receiving international signals still officially banned and no real competition...

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: New US President Joe Biden has started his tenure with a flurry of executive orders aimed at annulling various of his predecessor’s policies and decisions. But his move to repeal an entry block imposed on several Muslim nations signals a potential more conciliatory foreign policy in the Middle East. In January 2017, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, officially titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, which blocked the entry of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen nationals to the US. It also suspended indefinitely the admission of Syrian refugees and slashed the total number of refugees taken by the US to 50,000 per year. Since all...