Month: July 2019

Do you feel guilty about watching porn? If so, you’re not alone.

A 2014 survey published in The Atlantic found that only 29 percent of Americans think watching porn is morally acceptable. Men and women have very different opinions on the issue: Only 23 percent of women approve, while 35 percent of men think it’s okay.

Pornography is a controversial subject: Videos can range be anything from married couples enjoying one another consensually to depraved acts that dehumanize everyone involved, including the viewer.

Conversely, studies suggest that as the availability of porn increases, the incidences of sexual assault decrease. 

For those who see porn as a guilty pleasure, Pornhub wants you to feel better about spending time on the site.

Back in April, the site launched “Beesexual,” a collection of bee pollination videos voiced by some of the sites most popular adult performers including Julia Ann, Daya Knight, Olivia Austin, Joanna Angel, Dante Colle, Domino Presley, Will Pounder, Avery Black, and Charlotte Stokely.

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According to the site, “Beesexual” is “a whole new genre of porn especially dedicated to saving bees,” the site reads. “We turned short videos of foraging bees into what they really are: nature porn, but now featuring the voices of some of your favorite porn stars.”

The good news is that for each view of a video on its Beesexual channel, Pornhub will donate money to “bee saving charities across the world.”

The bees and the rest of the planet could really use the money.

According to ABC News, over the past 15 years, bee colonies have been disappearing across the world in what’s known as “colony collapse disorder.” National Geographic says that some regions have seen losses of up to 90 percent.

Honey bee pollination is responsible for over $20 billion in annual crop production every year in the U.S. alone.

“With over 110 million daily visitors, we thought our users could come together to lend a helping hand and help conserve this precious species,” Pornhub’s Vice President Corey Price said in a statement. “It’s our duty to ensure that bees continue to fornicate and pollinate.”

The global movement fighting climate breakdown has made some promising advances recently, chiefly thanks to Greta Thunberg and the other admirable school climate strikers. The British, Irish, French and Canadian parliaments have declared a climate emergency. In the European Parliament elections, Green parties and other allies got about 14% of the vote. A twenty-six nation 2018 survey found that of a list of major public concerns, climate change has the most people rating it a “major threat.”

However we can’t assume that climate action will continue to be a public priority. In a large poll undertaken in early 2019 in 14 EU nations, climate change was rated only the fifth greatest threat, substantially below “Islamic radicals,” “immigration” and “the economy.” Australia’s Labour Party unexpectedly lost the recent “climate election,” despite nearly three in ten Australians considering that the environment was the number one issue.

Merely getting more publicity is not enough to make sufficient progress. The celebrity-backed Mothers Rise Up climate march on May 12 2019 got substantial advance publicity. However even the sympathetic Guardian did not consider it significant enough to do more than include a small photo towards the back of the paper. So what can we do to attract greater support and show that we have the ability to push decision makers effectively?

First of all, substantial research shows that we need to arouse anger, empathy, and hope in order to counter fatalism. Anger is an action-oriented emotion, and it can be sustained constructively provided that people can focus their anger on tackling the problem at source, and feel confident that it will be offset by positive progress. So our communications need to reflect this finding and also arouse empathy at the plight of extreme weather victims, which research shows boosts support for the cause.

We must emphasise the need for urgent action, and show concisely how the situation can be improved. A slogan such as Clean Energy, Safe Climate, or Safe Climate for our Kids could play an important role here by conveying that solutions exist, while reminding people that the alternative is a catastrophic change in the climate which will harm people like them. Researchers emphasise that “one unified message repeated over and over is stronger than many disconnected messages.”

Secondly, it’s important that we choose tactics which maximise support from the allies we need from all shades of opinion. Former Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell, for example (a supporter of Boris Johnson) recently spoke enthusiastically in favour of large emissions cuts. Former Conservative leader Michael Howard supported the call of the Committee on Climate Change for net zero emissions by 2050. William Hague has commended David Attenborough’s call for urgent climate action.

We need to remember that about 30-40% of people in most Western countries consider themselves to be broadly conservative, while a similar proportion do not have a strong political allegiance. A recent French poll found little difference in levels of concern about climate change between supporters from different political outlooks. The urgency of the cause requires that we have allies from all civilised strands of opinion. This encourages potential supporters, showing that the cause is very widely supported, thus indicating good prospects of success. It is perfectly possible to frame the action we want in language which appeals to people from a wide political spectrum by emphasising a safe climate, clean energy and green jobs.

In September there will be a week of action initiated by the school climate strikers, starting with a strike that also includes adults on September 20. Unfortunately there’s a risk that strikes for adults will mobilise mostly existing adult supporters but few newcomers. Many workers will be sceptical about losing essential money for a strike whose impact they expect to be limited. Creating a successful strike is so difficult that Jonathan Neale, who has helped organize many strikes, wrote a long article recently in the Ecologist explaining the long process of preparation recommended, emphasising that “everyone is frightened at work, with reason.”

Naming the September 20 action as a climate strike for adults, in addition to children and young people, also means it may be perceived by some as a left-wing activity, enabling sceptics and opponents to portray the climate cause as controversial and the preserve of a fringe minority. If the only big-name supporters of the strike are leftists or climate activists, this could reinforce its peripheral place in society.

Many campaigners have cited the research of Erica Chenoweth which shows that no campaign has failed once it has the sustained participation of 3.5% of the population. This will be much harder to achieve if the climate movement is perceived as the property of one part of the political spectrum, or is only engaged in actions which – to some at least – appear irresponsible and uncaring by withdrawing peoples’ labour from important tasks. But if we can show them that are many other convincing ways in which they can help, they will be more likely to join campaigns. And that brings me to my third set of points – which decision-makers can be moved?

Campaigns to get action by governments need to take into account the deep and widespread cynicism that currently exists about politicians. Less than a quarter of Europeans, for example, believe that “the political system in my country allows people like me to have an influence on politics.” In June 2019, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion foresaw that legally non-binding recommendations from a citizens’ assembly “will…get ignored” by government, just “like people have been ignored for the last 30 years.” Caroline Lucas recently condemned governments’ “grotesque abdication of responsibility” on climate breakdown, while Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has said that “the politicians are continually failing us.”

There are numerous examples of governments’ woeful failure to tackle climate breakdown. The European Union recently failed to agree to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, while its member states’ national energy and climate plans collectively fall short of its 2030 targets. The World Bank is loaning three times more for fossil fuels than for renewables. Even politicians like Emmanuel Macron, who speak as if they want to prioritise climate breakdown, aren’t giving it anything like the urgency required. The head of Greenpeace France recently said that “The ecological transition is still not a priority, despite the fact that it was supposed to be one of four pillars of [Macron’s] great national debate.”

Therefore, alongside campaigns focused on governments it is important to push big business to cut emissions too. Needing to survive in a competitive market, businesses are ready to react promptly to threats to their profits. The key businesses to target are the world’s top banks, which invested $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels between 2016 and 2018. This dwarfs the amount the EU invests in renewable energy, which only slightly exceeds what it spends on fossil fuel subsidies.

Banks are increasingly worrying about climate risk. Unlike oil companies whose business depends entirely on fossil fuels, banks can readily switch their investments in pursuit of a more reliable profit, and to protect their brand. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has highlighted their vulnerability to public pressure. A recent report emphasised banks’ need “to defend market share against an increasing array of competitors,” and to place “the consumer…front and center.”

Therefore a campaign targeting banks would probably achieve some of the early wins we need to sustain morale and gain vital additional supporters. This should be part of a repeated process of choosing achievable and substantial targets. Campaigns have had many successes in getting banks to cut their investments in dirty energy, including BNP Paribas’s recent commitments not to fund major coal producers or high carbon electricity generators, and significant restrictions on coal funding agreed by Crédit Agricole.

It is also crucial that we combine with campaigners from key nations to target other major polluters, countering the argument that campaigns in smaller nations ignore the misdeeds of certain larger ones. One vital target in this regard is deforestation. New research shows that additional trees could remove two-thirds of CO2 from the atmosphere. In a recent 25 nation European poll, nine out of ten Europeans said they cared deeply about forests and agreed that “deforestation is harmful for people and wildlife.”

We need to identify radical new methods to combat this problem, which has frustrated campaigners for decades. As tropical forests are perceived as precious by such a large proportion of people, we can be confident that an assertive international campaign could get massive support provided it was run or backed by respected high-profile organisations and individuals. It might involve campaigning for funding to help lower-income nations, conditional on forest preservation. It could also include a campaign to name and shame major companies whose products are suspected of causing deforestation, and banks financing those companies. Failing to make progress on forest preservation could cause a serious loss of campaign morale when future bad climate news emerges.

The rapid emergence of large-scale school climate strikes shows how well understood the issue now is. But this level of energy and participation will be sustained only if we achieve some real emissions-cutting victories quite soon. Therefore it is vital that we concentrate our attacks on a few selected and susceptible decision-makers, draw in the widest possible range of allies, and arouse as much anger, empathy and hope as we can muster.

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Spiritual beauty should be more important than physical beauty. Unless you’re a woman. Then, you gotta make sure your soul is smoking hot, right? The Dalai Lama was recently put on blast for saying a female Dalai Lama should be attractive. But the spiritual leader says that his comments were taken out of context and that he is “deeply sorry” if he came across as sexist.

In a recent interview with the BBC, His Holiness said, “If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive.” But what the Dalai Lama said isn’t what he meant. His office issued a statement saying his comments were misunderstood. “His Holiness genuinely meant no offense. He is deeply sorry that people have been hurt by what he said and offers his sincere apologies,” the statement said.

The Dalai Lama first said similar sentiments in 1992 during an interview with Vogue Paris. The Dalai Lama was asked if there could be a female Dalai Lama in the future. “Certainly, if that would be more helpful,” he said, joking that she should be attractive.

The Dalai Lama chalks up the misunderstanding to “the contradictions between the materialistic, globalized world he encounters on his travels and the complex, more esoteric ideas about reincarnation that are at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.” The statement says, “However, it sometimes happens that off the cuff remarks, which might be amusing in one cultural context, lose their humor in translation when brought into another.” The current Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of his 13 predecessors.

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The statement also mentioned the Dalai Lama’s history of supporting women. ”For all his long life, His Holiness has opposed the objectification of women, has supported women and their rights and celebrated the growing international consensus in support of gender equality and respect for women,” said the statement. “His Holiness has frequently suggested that if we had more women leaders, the world would be a more peaceful place.” The Dalai Lama also allowed Tibetan nuns to earn Geshe-ma degrees, something which used to be only for male monks.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency to objectify women, even those who are in power. The Dalai Lama’s comments might have been a joke, but a female Dalai Lama would probably have to answer the question, “What are you wearing?” or have her physical description discussed in detail by people who are dead serious.

Most central bankers think that there is a tenuous connection between the operations of central banks and human rights. They think that this is not a problem because, as unelected officials, it would be inappropriate for them to take policy decisions that require political judgements. Their responsibility is to concentrate on the relatively narrow set of macro-economic variables that are relevant to their mandates and to leave to their country’s political leadership the decisions dealing with the complex and politically sensitive variables that affect the functioning of the economy and society. Moreover, they contend that they do not need to make such decisions. Their mandates require them to make decisions that must be implemented within time horizons that are too short to incorporate the relatively slow pace of the social changes that lead to sustainable human rights progress. They may add that if they do their job effectively they will help create a macro-economic environment that can facilitate the realization of human rights over time.

This position is no longer tenable. Climate change is forcing the central banking community to rethink their view of their responsibilities. The recent release of the Network for Greening the Financial System’s first comprehensive report on climate change as a source of financial risk, is the latest indication that central banks are beginning to take environmental risks more seriously in their monetary and financial operations. They can no longer treat the environment as fixed, in the sense that it is changing too slowly to affect current monetary and financial policy.

Their focus on climate change is inevitably pushing central banks to start paying more attention to other environmental risks and to social considerations more generally. For example, in order to fully understand the risk that climate poses to price and financial stability over the relevant time horizon, they will have to consider not only the risk of an extreme weather event but how changing weather patterns will affect such variables as food production, migration patterns, social stability and how these, in turn, will influence demand in the economy, credit allocation, inflation, government deficits and people’s access to food, water, housing, jobs and social security.

In other words, central bankers are being inexorably pushed to consider the relationship between central banking and human rights, particularly economic and social rights. This article briefly describes this relationship and its implications for central banks. It makes two points in this regard. First, central banks have human rights responsibilities. Second, both their monetary and financial operations have unavoidable human rights impacts which need to be incorporated into their decision making and governance procedures. In order to make these points the article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the human rights responsibilities of central banks. The second part discusses how they should deal with their human rights responsibilities. The third part is a conclusion.

The connections between central Banks and human rights

Central banks are created by law in their home states. It determines their mandates, powers, and governance arrangements. They also must operate in compliance with all the applicable law including the constitutional and international legal obligations of their home state. Thus, in principle, central banks must take the international human rights commitments of their sovereign into account in the way in which they implement their mandates and conduct their operations.

While the precise mandates of central banks vary, all central banks are responsible for maintaining price stability. Their primary policy tools for achieving this objective are interest rates, the capital and reserve requirements for banks, and trading debt instruments in financial markets. In the past, central banks have used other policy tools to maintain stable prices, such as the quantity of money in the economy or a fixed standard, such as the gold standard.

Central banks also act as a lender of last resort to the banking system or more generally to the financial sector, regulate and supervise the activities of banks and other financial institutions, manage the country’s payment system, maintain financial stability and manage the foreign reserves of the country. In some countries, the central bank may be assigned additional responsibilities such as promoting development finance or financial inclusion.

Many, but not all central banks operate independently of their political leadership. It is important to note that usually their independence is limited to instrument independence. This means that the central bank does not sets its own monetary policy objectives but determines for itself how it will use its policy tools to meet this goal. For example, the political leadership determines that inflation should be maintained within a specified range over a certain period of time and then lets the central bank decide how to use its policy tools to maintain inflation within this target zone.

This arrangement has two consequences. First, it means that the central bank’s independence is ostensibly limited to the technical issues regarding the best way to reach the goals that the government has set. Second, since the political leadership sets the goal, it is assumed, at least implicitly, that the social, environmental and political implications of the country’s monetary and financial policies are its responsibility and not that of the central bank. Thus, the central bank is not assumed to be publicly accountable for the social or environmental impacts of its decisions. This assumption is strengthened by the relatively short time horizons (about 18-36 months) which central banks use in their monetary operations.

However, in reality central banking is not a purely technical function. As indicated above, a central bank’s operational decisions will have environmental and social as well as monetary or financial implications within the time period used by the central bank in its decision-making. For example, the social and environmental impacts, but not necessarily the monetary impacts, of its decision to change interest rates will vary depending on how it implements the decision. If the central bank decides to change the rates by trading in financial instruments the social and environmental impacts will be determined by which instruments it chooses to trade and in what proportions, and by the size and the timing of these transactions. On the other hand, the central bank could cause a different set of social and environmental impacts if it chose to implement the decision by changing the reserve requirements for banks or the interest rate it charges banks for short term loans. In these cases, the social and environmental impacts will depend on how the banks change their credit allocation decisions in response to the central bank’s action.

This means that the central bank’s operational decisions can affect the risk and reward calculations of financial institutions so that they allocate more or less of their resources, for example, to government financing, green technologies, carbon intensive businesses, luxury apartments, low income housing, small and medium size businesses or multinational corporations. Similarly, their decisions regarding the factors that can affect financial stability and the way in which they exercise their lender of last resort responsibilities will have social and environmental impacts. For example, central banks could be under-estimating financial risks if they fail to incorporate such things as the impact of climate change on the availability of food and water and on migration patterns into their decisions regarding the risks to financial stability. In this regard, it is noteworthy that some central banks, for example those of China, England and the Netherlands, have begun to incorporate environmental risks into their financial stability assessments. Similarly, the central banks of Kenya, the Netherlands and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco consider such factors as community development and financial inclusion in their stewardship of their financial systems. The Dutch central bank, in fact, now has a mandate to include sustainability in its decision making and the Chinese central bank has been authorized to take climate considerations into account in its monetary decisions.

The fact that the operations of central banks inevitably have social impacts means that they cannot avoid having an impact on the social and economic rights of the citizens of their countries. This means that their decisions to change interest rates and how they are implemented, to support/not support banks in distress, and how much risk to tolerate in the financial system can affect the access of some people in the society to housing, healthcare, education, work and to adequate food and water. It may also have implications for the security of their pensions and for the quality of their environments.

The human rights responsibilities of central banks

The unavoidable impact of central banking operations on human rights means that central banks have to develop a better understanding of their human rights responsibilities and its implications for their decision making and operations. The applicable law is the starting point for this analysis. However, while the relevant law and jurisprudence may define the human rights obligations of the state in some detail, it is unlikely to provide detailed guidance on how the central bank in that state should operationalize these requirements. Thus, the central bank will have to determine for itself how to do this.

A good reference tool in this regard is the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These principles stipulate that all businesses should have a human rights policy and should conduct adequate human rights due diligence before and during their decision making and implementation process. The former requirement is usually interpreted to mean that the senior leadership of the entity should adopt a human rights policy that is publicly available and that should be applied in the operations and decision-making of the entity. The latter requirement means that they should conduct human rights impact assessments of their proposed operations. They should also then take steps to avoid or mitigate all adverse human rights impacts. Another relevant instrument is the Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Economic Reforms, that were recently submitted to the UN Human Rights Council.

It is important to note that central banks will face particular challenges in meeting their human rights responsibilities. Since they are public institutions, whatever human rights policy they adopt may have implications for other state owned entities and for the political leadership in the country. This however, will complicate but not render impossible the task of drafting a central bank human rights policy. The drafters will need to ensure that the policy is respectful of the central bank’s independence, monetary and financial mandates and its human rights responsibilities while not contradicting the human rights policies of their home state in general and other parts of the government involved in economic policy making in particular. This suggests that there needs to be some dialogue between central banks and the political authorities about the implications of the central bank’s proposed human rights policy.

Central banks will also experience unique challenges in conducting human rights impact assessments. For example, in regard to their monetary policy, the central bank’s ability to conduct detailed human rights impact assessments is complicated by the relative speed and discretion with which they must operate. This does not however make it impossible to assess human rights impacts. Instead, it suggests that central banks need to develop and maintain a sufficiently detailed general understanding of their actual human rights impacts so that they can make informed judgements about the likely impacts of their proposed monetary decisions. A similar approach should be taken towards all the other functions performed by the central bank. This means that the human rights impacts of each of these functions should be analyzed to more fully understand both their positive and negative human rights impacts.

One consequence of these assessments is likely to be that it will push central banks to assess if their current decision making and operational procedures and practices are appropriately designed to identify, assess and, if necessary respond to these impacts. This analysis can be updated periodically to ensure that central bank decision makers are fully informed about the human rights impacts of their proposed decisions.

In this regard, it is important to note that a human rights impact assessment can provide the central bank with an important and novel benefit. This follows from the fact that the human rights impact assessment focuses on the impact of central bank operations on individuals and communities. This disaggregated approach offers central banks a more detailed and nuanced understanding of how its policies actually affect different sub-groups of their society and thus of the true costs and benefits of their policies and actions.

Second, acknowledging their human rights responsibilities means that the central banks are also recognizing that their unelected leaders in fact are making decisions that affect the rights of citizens. Although this reality is unavoidable, it does raise questions about the governance and independence of central banks. It is important to note that this does not mean that central banks should lose their independence. The reason is that there are monetary benefits associated with having an independent central bank that need to be protected. In addition, there are costs that would be associated with allowing the political leadership to use the central bank’s increased attention to human rights to undermine the central bank’s instrument independence.

This suggests that there will need to be a re-evaluation of how central bank independence can be protected while striking the optimal balance between the central bank’s human rights and monetary and financial responsibilities. This will require creative thinking about alternate ways in which central banks can be held accountable for their compliance with their monetary, financial and human rights responsibilities. It may also require reassessing the central bank’s appointment process for its policy makers and the appropriate level of stakeholder participation in this processes. In this regard, attention should also be paid to the implications of these changes for the optimal functioning of financial markets, financial institutions and the economy.

Conclusion

The above analysis demonstrates three key points. First, central banks cannot operate without having social impacts and thus without impacting human rights. Second, human rights offers central banks a new tool for understanding the true costs and benefits of their proposed actions as well as useful additional information that can help them identify ways to mitigate the adverse consequences of their action. Third, central banks can meet their human rights responsibilities without compromising the independence they need to effectively meet their monetary and financial responsibilities.

Most central bankers think that there is a tenuous connection between the operations of central banks and human rights. They think that this is not a problem because, as unelected officials, it would be inappropriate for them to take policy decisions that require political judgements. Their responsibility is to concentrate on the relatively narrow set of macro-economic variables that are relevant to their mandates and to leave to their country’s political leadership the decisions dealing with the complex and politically sensitive variables that affect the functioning of the economy and society. Moreover, they contend that they do not need to make such decisions. Their mandates require them to make decisions that must be implemented within time horizons that are too short to incorporate the relatively slow pace of the social changes that lead to sustainable human rights progress. They may add that if they do their job effectively they will help create a macro-economic environment that can facilitate the realization of human rights over time.

This position is no longer tenable. Climate change is forcing the central banking community to rethink their view of their responsibilities. The recent release of the Network for Greening the Financial System’s first comprehensive report on climate change as a source of financial risk, is the latest indication that central banks are beginning to take environmental risks more seriously in their monetary and financial operations. They can no longer treat the environment as fixed, in the sense that it is changing too slowly to affect current monetary and financial policy.

Their focus on climate change is inevitably pushing central banks to start paying more attention to other environmental risks and to social considerations more generally. For example, in order to fully understand the risk that climate poses to price and financial stability over the relevant time horizon, they will have to consider not only the risk of an extreme weather event but how changing weather patterns will affect such variables as food production, migration patterns, social stability and how these, in turn, will influence demand in the economy, credit allocation, inflation, government deficits and people’s access to food, water, housing, jobs and social security.

In other words, central bankers are being inexorably pushed to consider the relationship between central banking and human rights, particularly economic and social rights. This article briefly describes this relationship and its implications for central banks. It makes two points in this regard. First, central banks have human rights responsibilities. Second, both their monetary and financial operations have unavoidable human rights impacts which need to be incorporated into their decision making and governance procedures. In order to make these points the article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the human rights responsibilities of central banks. The second part discusses how they should deal with their human rights responsibilities. The third part is a conclusion.

The connections between central Banks and human rights

Central banks are created by law in their home states. It determines their mandates, powers, and governance arrangements. They also must operate in compliance with all the applicable law including the constitutional and international legal obligations of their home state. Thus, in principle, central banks must take the international human rights commitments of their sovereign into account in the way in which they implement their mandates and conduct their operations.

While the precise mandates of central banks vary, all central banks are responsible for maintaining price stability. Their primary policy tools for achieving this objective are interest rates, the capital and reserve requirements for banks, and trading debt instruments in financial markets. In the past, central banks have used other policy tools to maintain stable prices, such as the quantity of money in the economy or a fixed standard, such as the gold standard.

Central banks also act as a lender of last resort to the banking system or more generally to the financial sector, regulate and supervise the activities of banks and other financial institutions, manage the country’s payment system, maintain financial stability and manage the foreign reserves of the country. In some countries, the central bank may be assigned additional responsibilities such as promoting development finance or financial inclusion.

Many, but not all central banks operate independently of their political leadership. It is important to note that usually their independence is limited to instrument independence. This means that the central bank does not sets its own monetary policy objectives but determines for itself how it will use its policy tools to meet this goal. For example, the political leadership determines that inflation should be maintained within a specified range over a certain period of time and then lets the central bank decide how to use its policy tools to maintain inflation within this target zone.

This arrangement has two consequences. First, it means that the central bank’s independence is ostensibly limited to the technical issues regarding the best way to reach the goals that the government has set. Second, since the political leadership sets the goal, it is assumed, at least implicitly, that the social, environmental and political implications of the country’s monetary and financial policies are its responsibility and not that of the central bank. Thus, the central bank is not assumed to be publicly accountable for the social or environmental impacts of its decisions. This assumption is strengthened by the relatively short time horizons (about 18-36 months) which central banks use in their monetary operations.

However, in reality central banking is not a purely technical function. As indicated above, a central bank’s operational decisions will have environmental and social as well as monetary or financial implications within the time period used by the central bank in its decision-making. For example, the social and environmental impacts, but not necessarily the monetary impacts, of its decision to change interest rates will vary depending on how it implements the decision. If the central bank decides to change the rates by trading in financial instruments the social and environmental impacts will be determined by which instruments it chooses to trade and in what proportions, and by the size and the timing of these transactions. On the other hand, the central bank could cause a different set of social and environmental impacts if it chose to implement the decision by changing the reserve requirements for banks or the interest rate it charges banks for short term loans. In these cases, the social and environmental impacts will depend on how the banks change their credit allocation decisions in response to the central bank’s action.

This means that the central bank’s operational decisions can affect the risk and reward calculations of financial institutions so that they allocate more or less of their resources, for example, to government financing, green technologies, carbon intensive businesses, luxury apartments, low income housing, small and medium size businesses or multinational corporations. Similarly, their decisions regarding the factors that can affect financial stability and the way in which they exercise their lender of last resort responsibilities will have social and environmental impacts. For example, central banks could be under-estimating financial risks if they fail to incorporate such things as the impact of climate change on the availability of food and water and on migration patterns into their decisions regarding the risks to financial stability. In this regard, it is noteworthy that some central banks, for example those of China, England and the Netherlands, have begun to incorporate environmental risks into their financial stability assessments. Similarly, the central banks of Kenya, the Netherlands and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco consider such factors as community development and financial inclusion in their stewardship of their financial systems. The Dutch central bank, in fact, now has a mandate to include sustainability in its decision making and the Chinese central bank has been authorized to take climate considerations into account in its monetary decisions.

The fact that the operations of central banks inevitably have social impacts means that they cannot avoid having an impact on the social and economic rights of the citizens of their countries. This means that their decisions to change interest rates and how they are implemented, to support/not support banks in distress, and how much risk to tolerate in the financial system can affect the access of some people in the society to housing, healthcare, education, work and to adequate food and water. It may also have implications for the security of their pensions and for the quality of their environments.

The human rights responsibilities of central banks

The unavoidable impact of central banking operations on human rights means that central banks have to develop a better understanding of their human rights responsibilities and its implications for their decision making and operations. The applicable law is the starting point for this analysis. However, while the relevant law and jurisprudence may define the human rights obligations of the state in some detail, it is unlikely to provide detailed guidance on how the central bank in that state should operationalize these requirements. Thus, the central bank will have to determine for itself how to do this.

A good reference tool in this regard is the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These principles stipulate that all businesses should have a human rights policy and should conduct adequate human rights due diligence before and during their decision making and implementation process. The former requirement is usually interpreted to mean that the senior leadership of the entity should adopt a human rights policy that is publicly available and that should be applied in the operations and decision-making of the entity. The latter requirement means that they should conduct human rights impact assessments of their proposed operations. They should also then take steps to avoid or mitigate all adverse human rights impacts. Another relevant instrument is the Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Economic Reforms, that were recently submitted to the UN Human Rights Council.

It is important to note that central banks will face particular challenges in meeting their human rights responsibilities. Since they are public institutions, whatever human rights policy they adopt may have implications for other state owned entities and for the political leadership in the country. This however, will complicate but not render impossible the task of drafting a central bank human rights policy. The drafters will need to ensure that the policy is respectful of the central bank’s independence, monetary and financial mandates and its human rights responsibilities while not contradicting the human rights policies of their home state in general and other parts of the government involved in economic policy making in particular. This suggests that there needs to be some dialogue between central banks and the political authorities about the implications of the central bank’s proposed human rights policy.

Central banks will also experience unique challenges in conducting human rights impact assessments. For example, in regard to their monetary policy, the central bank’s ability to conduct detailed human rights impact assessments is complicated by the relative speed and discretion with which they must operate. This does not however make it impossible to assess human rights impacts. Instead, it suggests that central banks need to develop and maintain a sufficiently detailed general understanding of their actual human rights impacts so that they can make informed judgements about the likely impacts of their proposed monetary decisions. A similar approach should be taken towards all the other functions performed by the central bank. This means that the human rights impacts of each of these functions should be analyzed to more fully understand both their positive and negative human rights impacts.

One consequence of these assessments is likely to be that it will push central banks to assess if their current decision making and operational procedures and practices are appropriately designed to identify, assess and, if necessary respond to these impacts. This analysis can be updated periodically to ensure that central bank decision makers are fully informed about the human rights impacts of their proposed decisions.

In this regard, it is important to note that a human rights impact assessment can provide the central bank with an important and novel benefit. This follows from the fact that the human rights impact assessment focuses on the impact of central bank operations on individuals and communities. This disaggregated approach offers central banks a more detailed and nuanced understanding of how its policies actually affect different sub-groups of their society and thus of the true costs and benefits of their policies and actions.

Second, acknowledging their human rights responsibilities means that the central banks are also recognizing that their unelected leaders in fact are making decisions that affect the rights of citizens. Although this reality is unavoidable, it does raise questions about the governance and independence of central banks. It is important to note that this does not mean that central banks should lose their independence. The reason is that there are monetary benefits associated with having an independent central bank that need to be protected. In addition, there are costs that would be associated with allowing the political leadership to use the central bank’s increased attention to human rights to undermine the central bank’s instrument independence.

This suggests that there will need to be a re-evaluation of how central bank independence can be protected while striking the optimal balance between the central bank’s human rights and monetary and financial responsibilities. This will require creative thinking about alternate ways in which central banks can be held accountable for their compliance with their monetary, financial and human rights responsibilities. It may also require reassessing the central bank’s appointment process for its policy makers and the appropriate level of stakeholder participation in this processes. In this regard, attention should also be paid to the implications of these changes for the optimal functioning of financial markets, financial institutions and the economy.

Conclusion

The above analysis demonstrates three key points. First, central banks cannot operate without having social impacts and thus without impacting human rights. Second, human rights offers central banks a new tool for understanding the true costs and benefits of their proposed actions as well as useful additional information that can help them identify ways to mitigate the adverse consequences of their action. Third, central banks can meet their human rights responsibilities without compromising the independence they need to effectively meet their monetary and financial responsibilities.

Mindfulness provides important psychological and emotional benefits for individuals, but caring for our own personal wellbeing as if it were a private affair is no longer sustainable given the impending risk of the collapse of civilization. Paving a mindful path for collective liberation and ecological healing requires a shift in consciousness from ‘me to we’ to engage with the challenges we face in ways that go beyond a concern for personal salvation.

This shift calls for new forms of spiritual activism that engage the sociopolitical domain with what the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi calls “conscientious compassion,” where the practice of compassion is unified with a drive for justice. Thus, we need a ‘civic mindfulness’ that focuses attention on stresses in the body politic as well as the structural interventions and systemic changes that are the root causes of our cultural malaise and ecological collapse. Whereas most therapeutic interventions place the burden on the individual for coping with the anxieties produced by this malaise, civic mindfulness empowers individuals to question the dominant order so that they can see how their everyday worries and insecurities are linked to the social and economic contexts of their lives.

When mindfulness is taught and practiced in ways that help people connect the dots between their personal troubles and public issues, it becomes potentially transformative, but this can’t be done without forging deep bonds of solidarity and communities of resistance as a path for engendering a regenerative culture. However, isn’t this just another call for politics and social activism? Where does mindfulness come in?

To answer this question it’s useful to go back to the principles underlying mindfulness in the spiritual traditions from which it emerged, especially Buddhism.

Existential suffering of the human condition – the suffering of sickness, old age and death, anxiety and stress, conflicts in personal relationships, divorce and personal loss – has long been the domain of religious consolation and pastoral care, individual counseling and psychotherapy, and, more recently, of mindfulness-based interventions. This is the first-order of suffering.

Second-order suffering concerns human evil and atrocities where the source of suffering is readily identifiable – whether it be victims of violent crimes or murders, children caged in detention centers, whole populations suffering from wars, genocide or social and environmental injustice, or oppressive working conditions.

The problem is that human distress is no longer limited to or demarcated by these two orders of suffering. Greed, ill will, and delusion – what Buddhists consider the three root causes of suffering – have become institutionalized. This institutionalization makes a third order of suffering difficult to identify because it has become so amorphous, pervasive and systemic. As Bruce Rogers-Vaughan puts it, “Oppressors no longer have faces, even the impersonal ‘faces’ of the state, the corporation, or the church. Third-order suffering does not simply replace first or second-order suffering. Rather, it arises alongside them. The three orders coexist and interpenetrate. They too are entangled.”

Hence, suffering that is purely private in its causes and effects no longer exists. To become truly revolutionary, teachers of mindfulness need new practices that reflect this fact and are capable of tackling the entangled nature of distress. This requires a much wider focus, using communal practices to develop insights into how our social and political experience is embodied.

A civic-oriented mindfulness helps individuals to cut through the obscuring fog of third-order suffering in order to recognize that the anxieties, insecurities and rage they feel are political, not merely personal in nature. But we cannot take on such a task in isolation. Civic mindfulness is grounded in community formation by recognizing our shared vulnerabilities and mutual interdependence. In this way, people can come to see how social conditioning has influenced their identities and how they have internalized messages of competition, violence and domination. This form of mindfulness offers an opportunity to reorient practices away from instrumental ends towards a more prophetic critique of underlying problems and solutions.

By contrast, the “faux mindfulness revolution” is led by elites and affluent professionals who have used their cultural capital to gain insider access to a variety of institutions including corporations, public schools, community agencies, government, and even the military. Rather than opposing and confronting institutional authorities, these mindful elites believe that by inoculating individuals with mindfulness, social reform and systemic change will naturally follow.

Many mindfulness trainers (even those who view themselves as quite progressive) are fond of providing anecdotal stories of how individuals in their programs became kinder and more relationally sensitive and aware of their surroundings. That’s fine. Nobody questions these outcomes as a possibility, but such ‘mindful moments’ are unlikely to go further without some other impulse towards deeper and broader action and understanding.

Being mindful in the sense of pausing and reflecting before re-tweeting an inflammatory political post, for example, is a commendable act of impulse control, but it is a far cry from joining with others in collective action to address political polarization and create new constituencies for change. Similarly, providing philanthropic or pro-bono mindfulness interventions – whether it be teaching mindfulness in prisons or training community agencies in response to environmental crises – are still dependent on a model of individual suffering and service. As the socially-engaged Buddhist teacher David Loy is fond of saying, “we have become much better at pulling drowning people out of the river, but…we aren’t much better at asking why there are so many people drowning.”

This is why a recent UN report suggests that mental health can be promoted and treated more effectively by focusing on social justice using a rights-based approach. Alleviating inequality is a much better public policy investment than doling out pharmaceuticals, therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions. “The best way to invest in the mental health of individuals is to create a supportive environment in all settings, [including the] family and the workplace,” says Dr. Dainius Pūras, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Health. As his report concludes:

“Conceptualizing the determinants of mental health requires a focus on relationships and social connection, which demands structural interventions in society and outside the health-care sector… [pushing back against the] use of interventions that focus on immediate, individual behavioural factors, rather than adequately addressing the structural conditions, which are the root causes.”

In this sense the current hype around quick-fix TED talks and self-help gurus for training individuals who are ‘mentally fit’ and ‘resilient’ is seriously misleading. Here is Dr. Michael Ungar from the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Canada writing in the Globe and Mail:

“We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the ‘cures’…The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science.”

In that case, where should we look for guidance and inspiration – for examples of civic mindfulness in action? One emerging case is Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose leaders have intentionally integrated mindfulness practices into creating cultures of constructive resistance. In their demands to halt biodiversity loss and reduce carbon emissions, XR deploys mindfulness as a ‘spiritual truth force’ in their civil disobedience and direct action protests. In an interview for Transformation, Bill Beckler, a co-coordinator of outreach for XR in New York City, told me that “mindfulness is used as a spiritual support” and “is partly the reason for the success of our protests.”

Beckler emphasizes that in XR’s organizing efforts, “we don’t want to mute suffering.” Instead, mindfulness is used to amplify the distress activists feel by bringing it into collective awareness. Pain, grief, despair and anger are not impediments to mindful resistance, they are its fuel.

Tom Carling, the board president of the New York Insight Meditation Center, has joined forces with the XR movement, attending all four major actions in New York. “We can no longer just focus on personal transformation,” he said when I spoke to him by phone.

Responding to the criticisms that the XR movement in the US is “too white”, Carling told me that the center is now focusing on the intersectionality of the ecological crisis. In the US, a fourth demand has been added to be more inclusive of the most vulnerable people, who have been bearing the brunt of environmental injustice for decades, especially in the Global South. Carling’s aspiration is that the New York Insight Meditation Center can be the spiritual home for XR New York chapter.

As these examples show, allying mindfulness practices with radical action is a way of “making refuge.” This begins by bearing witness to our shared vulnerabilities as a means to rebuild trust and safety, and re-situating mindfulness in a larger socio-ecological context. By doing so, we can develop capacities for collective resistance and socially-engaged action as well as individual liberation. Those who suffer together – the literal meaning of ‘compassion’ – can re-imagine new futures together.

Ronald Purser’s new book is McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

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In May 2018, the Colombian Congress approved the construction of the Port of Tribugá, as part of package of improvements in connectivity linked to the four-year National Development Plan (PND) and the Multi Year Investment Plan (PPI) proposed by President Ivan Duque.

This gives the project the political legitimacy it needs in the medium term, which, along with its financial, technical and legal feasibility, could turn the port into one of the most important undertakings for infrastructure, and regional and national development, by the current government.

However, the proposal still needs approval from the National Agency for Environmental Licenses (ANLA) due to the significant impact it will have on one of the most important biodiversity “hot spots” in the world. The proposal is a concern not only because of the 3,600 meters of length and 20 meters of depth proposed for the port but also because it will require the construction of access roads that will cross more than 200km of virgin forest.

Added to this, is the lack of social legitimacy for the project, that would impact on the ancestral territories of black and indigenous communities who make up the majority of the regional population and who have special constitutional protection. “They are ignoring our right to self-determination” said Harry Mosquera, a representative of the Community Council of the region, at a public hearing where the project was discussed.

The most remote regions have historically been excluded from shaping the development of the country

The Gulf of Tribugá is located in the Chocó region of Western Colombia, in the centre of the second most biodiverse and humid region of the world. Despite having an enviable geostrategic position, with coasts facing onto both the Pacific and Atlantic, the region is virtually disconnected from the rest of the country: neither of the access roads are paved and more than half of the region’s municipalities are not connected to the capital by land.

This level of isolation has meant that social conditions are in inversely proportional to the biodiversity and resource abundance: the basic needs of 80% of the 490,000 people are not met and 50% live in extreme poverty. There are also illegal armed groups operating in the region involved in drug production and trafficking, smuggling and illegal mining. Tribuga is located in one of the key corridors with Panama and is therefore involved in the shipment of drugs to the north of the continent.

But these remote conditions are not exclusive to Chocó. In fact, half of Colombia is not accessible by road. In the Pacific regions, for example, there are only 2 roads along the 1,300 km of coastline and there is no road that links the centre of country with the Amazon. This clear abandonment by the state has created social inequalities for the population, especially when compared with the central regions of the country.

The intervention by the centre on the periphery has been vertical and violent

The state historically arrived at remote regions of Colombia in two ways. Firstly, via colonisation of poor farmers and people who have been internally displaced by the various political conflicts that have taken place since Independence. This was case with the colonization of the Antioquian region in the late 19th century and the progressive expansive from the “piedmonte llanero” to the Amazon region in the mid 20th century, for example.

Secondly, the state has arrived via development projects such as roads, ports and hydroelectricity or in conjunction with the private sector through mining, timber and oil projects. These initiatives, rather than generating regional development, have often meant the deepening of social and economic inequalities and exclusion and often brought violence as well. Examples include:

In the 1960s, the most ambitious hydroelectric in Colombia’s history began with the construction of the Guatapé dam in the West of Antioquia region, which currently generates approximately 20% of Colombia’s energy. The construction of the dam led to the flooding of the urban area of the municipality of Peñol and the displacement of thousands of families. The community was not involved in the development of the hydroelectricity project, this then led to the creation of a civic movement in Antioquia to demand fair compensation for those who were affected and the freezing of energy prices.

The movement was stigmatized by the political elite and businesses in Antioquia who supported the dam project as well as by the media that supported these elites, triggering the systematic murder of dozens of the movement’s leaders and the displacement of hundreds of its members in the mid 1980s. This created a breeding ground for the arrival of illegal armed groups in region who fought to try and take control of the territory until a decade ago, leading to the displacement of a further 20,000 inhabitants. There were 33 massacres in the municipality of San Carlos alone, where some of the most important hydroelectric generators were located.

However, the clearest case is that of the port of Buenaventura, located in the middle of the Pacific coast, the most important in the country. 60% of Colombia’s products enter and leave through Buenaventura. Of a population of nearly half a million, 66% live in poverty and 10% in extreme poverty. Unemployment exceeds 60% and 90% of the population live in areas without access to a hospital and can access drinking water for less than 10 hours a day. Despite its strategic importance, the territory is controlled by illegal armed groups, and has one of the highest rates of homicides and torture in the country.

This history means that there is a question as to whether the imposition of development projects from the centre to periphery of Colombia can actually serve as a tool for the social and economic welfare of its inhabitants. The central issue, then, with regards to the Tribugá port is including indigenous and local communities in discussions about the future of the land and how to find a balance between development and the protection of the environment and ecosystems.

According to the government of Duque, it is important to improve the country’s port capacity to improve Colombia’s connections with the rest of world. However, some claim that, in fact, Colombia is only using 50% of its current port capacity and that even the Port of Buenaventura is only moving 28 million tons, much less than its potential of 34 million tons.

Is it necessary, therefore, to build another port or can we make use of and improve the ones that already exist? Even more important, it is absolutely necessary to include the communities who have historically lived on the land in the conversation. So far, the project has been promoted by the Archimedes society, a public-private partnership that includes actors such as governors, chambers of commerce and decentralized bodies of the coffee sector, but Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities have been left out of the conversation despite the fact that these communities view the land as an essential part of their identity.

Are we repeating the mistakes of the past?

2017: Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist investigating endemic corruption in Malta, was murdered by a car bomb. Journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot in India. Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach Velducea were shot in Mexico (in Sinaloa and Chihuahua respectively).

2018: Jan Kuciak (a journalist exploring ties between organised crime and the Slovakian Government) was shot. Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. 13 staff members of Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet were convicted in Turkey following the attempted coup.

2019: The Intercept Brazil’s staff have been threatened due to critical coverage of Bolsonaro’s administration in Brazil. Seydi Moussa Camara and Ahmedou Ould al-Wadea have been arrested in Mauritania during Presidential elections. Two TV stations (Horyaal 24 TV and Eryal TV) in Somaliland have been shut down due to ‘national security’ concerns. Journalist Lyra McKee was murdered at a protest in Northern Ireland. And Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey were threatened with imprisonment in the UK for the alleged theft of confidential documents relating to the Loughinisland massacre that suggested collusion between the authorities and the Ulster Volunteer Force.

This is a tiny glimpse into the ongoing and enduring risks to press freedom across the globe. This article is not long enough to give adequate shape or scale to this epidemic, but few countries are immune.

In 2018, according to Reporters Without Borders, 66 journalists were killed worldwide, while so far in 2019, 174 journalists, 150 citizen journalists and 17 media assistants have been imprisoned during the course of their duties. Beyond this, the work of journalists has been devalued and demonised, opening the door for violence, disinformation and legal restriction against journalists everywhere.

What was previously understood as something that took place in conflict zones or countries with few legal protections and no independent judiciary, has spread to functioning, modern and robust democracies, leaving journalists everywhere at risk in complex and challenging ways. Threats to press freedom do not start and finish with the killing of journalists – the erosion of press freedom starts prior to that, through badly defined laws such as criminal defamation, over-broad national security laws, ‘fake news’ laws and many other laws and repressive regulations that stifle journalism, alongside a more general devaluing of the press – all these contribute to an atmosphere which could lead to the murder or imprisonment of journalists. This is a deadly continuum that leads to an ill-informed public, unopposed corruption and, ultimately, silence.

Threats against journalists do not come out of nowhere. Every murdered, imprisoned or exiled journalist is a policy failure. When there are vested interests, weak legal systems, uninformed populations and rampant corruption, there are threats to journalists who seek to uncover information many would prefer hidden. In Europe we have seen an increase in the murder of journalists many of whom were working to uncover corruption. Corruption and abuses of power require secrecy, opaque systems and weak institutions to flourish, leaving journalists as the sole and necessary checks and balances every democracy needs.

In 2019, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has prioritised protecting global press freedom as a key Government strategic goal. Leading human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, after being appointed as the UK special envoy for media freedom stated: “It has never been more dangerous to report the news. Targeting journalists undermines democracy and impedes our ability to hold the powerful to account and it allows countless human rights abuses to take place in the dark. Those with a pen in their hand should not feel a noose round their neck.”

Concerted action is needed, but to properly and adequately protect journalists we need to address larger more systemic issues. We need to strengthen the rule of law, and we need to address the root of corruption, where many governments including the UK are culpable. It is not enough to call for journalists not to be assassinated or imprisoned – these actions are symptoms of a more fundamental failure. Without addressing these failures, journalists will always be at risk.

On 19th July, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh Law School, Saltire Society and the National Union of Journalists, Scottish PEN is bringing together leading journalists, academics, activists and experts at the Scottish Press Freedom Summit 2019. The conference will look at these issues to see how journalists everywhere can be protected and press freedom respected. By addressing the imprisonment and murder of journalists, by looking at how media monopolies, independence and plurality affects the health of media environments and what laws need to be reformed to protect press freedom, we can protect this vital aspect of democracy, the ability to challenge power, have our voices heard and take an active role in the world around us.

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Syrian activists took to the internet to commemorate and celebrate the legacy of al-Sarout when he died on June 8. They were surprised that Facebook banned the images of the opposition leader and deleted any post mentioning him. They organized themselves and fought back, and two days later, Facebook lifted the ban. Abir Kopty investigates the power Facebook has in censoring national debates and policing Freedom of speech.

On June 10, Guevara Namer, a Syrian filmmaker based in Berlin received a notification from Facebook that her post, mourning Abdul Baset al-Sarout, an icon of the Syrian revolution who died two days before, has been removed because it “violates Facebook community standards”.

When the Syrian uprising began in 2011, al-Sarout was already well known in Homs as the Al-Karamah SC youth goalkeeper. He soon emerged as a protest leader, the charismatic 19-year-old was fearless, and he led demonstrations singing and chanting. His songs were much loved and motivated many to join the protesters. The regime cracked down, and the uprising turned into a war, al-Sarout became a fighter and a rebel leader. He lived through Homs siege, and after the rebels surrendered Old Homs back to the regime in 2014, he travelled to the opposition-held north where he was fighting at the frontline till his death. While many in the opposition saw him as a revolutionary icon and brave leader, regime loyalists criticized his links to Islamists fighting in Syria, and said he repeated Jihadi songs to indicate he was a terrorist. The war in Syria is not restricted to the frontline, it is a war of narratives, and the symbolism of al-Sarout as an icon was contested when he died.

Al-Sarout was 27-year-old when he died on June 8 in a Turkish hospital from wounds sustained in a strike by the Syrian Army in northern Hama. His death revived massive pro-revolution voices who took to social media, to express collectively their sorrow and loss of a prominent voice and figure in the fighting against Assad’s regime. However, their sorrow has faced attempts of silencing by the giant platform, Facebook.

For Guevara Namer, this was a clear coordinated attack. “When my post was removed from Facebook, I posted about the removal and reposted a screenshot of the post that was removed, this post too, was removed and I was banned from commenting on others’ posts for 3 days. But I kept seeing other posts by people who said their posts about al-Sarout had been removed too, all for the same reason: violating the community standards”, she said.

According to Syrian opposition media, there were hundreds of cases of posts removal or pages/groups shut down including Zaman Alwasl TV or the Forum for Syrians in France page. According to what we could track, most posts were removed on June 9th and 10th, one to two days after the death of al-Sarout. This included posts by Syrian writer Yassin Haj Saleh, Syrian playwright and theater maker Mohammad Al Attar, Syrian actor Fares Helou, Syrian writer and journalist Nisreen Traboulsi and many others.

But they fought back, Namer and others did not only submit “request review” to Facebook, but they kept constantly posting about the ban. For two days, Syrian opposition activists tried to fight against the ban and put pressure on Facebook in different ways including a campaign of massive posting under al-Sarout hashtag and a petition on avaaz signed by over 16,000 people. On June 12th, the ban was lifted and most posts or pages that were closed returned.

This is not the first time where Facebook has helped in silencing Syrian opposition voices. In 2012, Facebook apologized after it mistakenly deleted a free speech group's post on human rights abuses in Syria. In 2014, Facebook closed dozens of Syrian opposition pages, including the Kafranbel Media Center’s page.

Each time Syrian opposition accounts or posts get banned, The Syrian Electronic Army is mentioned as a possible suspect. From as early as 2011, they surfaced as a guard of the Syrian regime’s narrative on the internet. They are a collective of pro-Assad hackers and online activists who use tactics of attacking websites, Facebook pages and accounts, phishing campaigns to steal accounts, or flooding the social media with pro-regime messages. Their Facebook page does not exist anymore, and their efforts are hidden from the public platforms, many believe they were behind the latest reporting on al-Sarout posts. However, no matter who did the reporting on those posts, the question is how Facebook reacts.

In many ways, these censorships resonate in the Palestinian context. Palestinians have also been the victims of Facebook censorship, though in the Palestinian case the “Israeli electronic army” works in the light.

In September 2016, Facebook met with Israeli officials to discuss cooperation in dealing with “incitement” on Facebook. Few months after that meeting, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked reported that Facebook responded positively to 95 per cent of the requests made by Israel to remove Palestinian content.

“Sada Social”, a Palestinian initiative that documents social media platforms violations against Palestinian freedom of speech reported 200 cases of shutting down accounts, deleting pages and banning posts on Facebook throughout 2017. And 370 cases throughout 2018.

According to Nadim Nashif the director to 7amleh, the Arab Center For the Advancement of Social Media, “There is a cooperation between a coordinated effort of Israeli governmental bodies including the Cyber Security Unit ran by the state attorney's office and semi-governmental bodies such as organized students’ groups and mobile apps to report on Palestinian content and on the other hand Facebook’s responsiveness, that stands behind this massive censoring of Palestinian voices”.

Whether in the Palestinian case or the Syrian, it’s clear to Nashif that “This is a war over content, the power dynamics that exist in reality are reflected in this war. The party that is more organized and has the human and financial resources wins.”

Indeed, the way Facebook functions when it comes to moderating content sets the ground for these power dynamics to unfold in the cyberspace as well.

Facebook evaluates content according to its “Community Standards” which, were made public last year, after an ongoing pressure and criticism against the ambiguity of its decision making when it comes to deleting content and policing speech. These 27-page document on standards guides the work of Facebook human moderating teams. These teams work in what is known as the “deletion centers”, which are usually employed by subcontractors of Facebook and are located in different parts of the world to respond to different time zones, languages and regions. Employees in these centers are responsible for moderating the content of Facebook posts that are reported by other users, and decide whether they should be deleted or not.

A team of Facebook’s experts develops the Community Standards, but their work is influenced, of course, by the context in the countries Facebook is functioning in.

It is no secret that Facebook complies with governments’ restrictions because its existence in many countries is under the scrutiny of the authorities there and dependant on their permission. This means that governments have potentially, though not all of them use that potential, a say through political and legal means in formulating Facebook Community Standards. They also have the power to censor certain accounts, posts or pages through submitting direct requests to Facebook, as is evident in the Israeli case.

Syria Untold talked to a former employee in one of Facebook’s “deletion centers” in Berlin, who requested to remain anonymous.

He said that al-Sarrout was on Facebook terrorists list and this is why all posts “praising him” were deleted. The moderator used to be one of the hundreds of employees who work for sub-contractors of Facebook and responsible for examining content and deleting it when it violates Facebook’s Community Standards. In Germany, there are two such centers, one in Berlin, opened in 2015 and operated by Arvato, a division of Bertelsmann and specializes in customer support and one in Essen opened in 2018 and operated by Competence Call Center, a European company that runs service centers around Europe. Both employ over 1000 employees. Other such centers function in different parts of the world and employ over 15,000 employees, according to Facebook.

Each employee, when accepted to the job, undergoes an intensive training course, after which he/she is “supposed to know the guidelines by heart”, said the Facebook moderator. “What Facebook publishes as “Community Standards” on its platform are way smaller than the guidelines we work with. The public ones are very general, we have detailed documents with names and lists of organizations and figures that any content related to them should be banned.”

He is referring to the 1400-pages internal booklet, which was leaked to the New York Times in 2018. The paper highlighted that these files reveal “numerous gaps, biases and outright errors”, and how Facebook has the power to “shut down one side of a national debate” through its content moderation.

Employees in deletion centers rely on these guidelines when deciding over content. They will delete any post supporting a group or figure on that list, if spotted.

According to the former moderator in Facebook deletion center, “we examine content that gets reported. So in order for us to decide on a post whether to be deleted or not, it has to be first reported, whether one time or 1000 times, it doesn’t really matter. Any reported post would come to us for judgement.”

“We can see who reported this content, but we do not check who is the reporter, if he is a troll, someone who is part of an electronic army, an account that is managed by governments or so on. We don’t do that, we just look at the content that has been reported”, he tested.

The community rules can change from one night to another. “I remember that one day, we arrived at the center and we received the announcement from our supervisors that Khairat el-Shater of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was now on the terrorists list, so from that moment on, any posts that praise him, should be removed.”

If anything, this shows how politicized the process of forming the Community Standards is, even if the changes seemed arbitrary at times. But also, to what extent these moderators understand the nuances and contexts of each country or situation is called into question. They have little time to decide on a post and they rely on their training and the booklet as a reference.

In the case of al-Sarout, activists did “request review” of the deleted content, including Namer. However, It is hard to believe that this action has pushed Facebook to reconsider. According to the former moderator “In 99% of the cases where users request reviews, the decision does not change. Only when there is a higher pressure on Facebook, it would reconsider and change decision.”

These activists further mobilized, and organized a campaign calling on Facebook to lift the ban, reposting content with al-Sarout hashtag and signing a petition. We could not confirm what exactly happened inside Facebook concerning the ban against al-Sarout, but it’s clear that the pressure was successful.

“Facebook’s admission of al-Sarout exoneration of radicalism was the result of efforts by faithful Syrians and Arabs in response to massive and systematic reporting that aims to block Syrians commemorating their popular hero, al-Sarout. This admission was reflected by lifting the ban on posts related to al-Sarout and publishing back what was removed.” actor Feras Helou wrote on his Facebook account.

“I saw this as a battle over who writes the history, it’s a battle similar to our battles on the ground. The revolution is over and now the battle is over its narrative. For the regime and its Russian allies identifying al-Sarrout as a terrorist serves their narrative, but for us, he represents a man who believed in freedom and in revolution and sacrificed his life for it.”, said Namer.

Though this incident could be marked as a victory for the opposition, it still highlights, on the one hand, the problematic power Facebook has in policing the freedom of speech, and on the other, how these social media platforms has turned into a battlefield of clashing narratives. Those who have more power, would usually end up having the upper hand. And when it comes to Facebook, the upper hand doesn’t seem to be the ally of the oppressed.

This article was originally published by SyriaUntold on July 3, 2019.

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