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The UN expert overseeing the use of armed drones has demanded greater accountability and transparency by those states using them - including public investigations into allegations of civilian casualties.
Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, investigated 37 recent drone strikes in countries. In Yemen he noted a sharp rise in strikes and a "significant number" of civilian casualties since the end of 2013.
LONDON - The UN expert overseeing the use of armed drones has demanded greater accountability and transparency by those states using them - including public investigations into allegations of civilian casualties.
Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, investigated 37 recent drone strikes in countries. In Yemen he noted a sharp rise in strikes and a "significant number" of civilian casualties since the end of 2013.
His report cites the following cases, supported by legal charity Reprieve, as requiring prompt investigation:
Emmerson's findings come as pressure builds on the US and European countries involved in the covert CIA-led programme. The US is currently under review by the UN's Human Rights Committee (HRC) on its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) - Article 6 of which enshrines the right to life. Meanwhile, the European Parliament last week condemned the use of drones, and called for countries like the UK and Germany to disclose their role in supporting the strikes.
In Yemen, where the national parliament recently voted to outlaw drone strikes, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, brother-in-law of killed imam Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, said: "President Obama's drone strikes killed my nephew and my brother-in-law Salem; a man who was famed for his sermons denouncing al-Qaeda. What possible justification could there be for these strikes? I hope that this new report will finally encourage the US and its allies to provide some answers."
Rafiq Rehman, the son of victim Mammana Bibi, said: "Drone strikes in Pakistan have devastated my family and brought only fear and suffering to my community; yet we still have had no explanation as to why they happened, and who was responsible. I still hope that we might one day see justice and an end to these catastrophic strikes in Pakistan."
Kat Craig, Legal Director at Reprieve, said: "In Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, the US, assisted by its European allies, is carrying out devastating attacks with total impunity - a practice that is terrorising local communities, and creating far more extremism than it has ever eliminated. It is high time that the US provided full accountability and transparency around its use of drones, and investigated civilian casualties. This report will only increase pressure on the US to bring their covert programme out of the shadows."
ENDS
Notes to editors
1. For further information, please contact Clemency Wells or Donald Campbell in Reprieve's press office: +44 (0) 207 553 8161 / 8166 or clemency.wells / donald.campbell@reprieve.org.uk
2. The full UN report can be found here.
4. For more information on the HRC review of the US, visit the website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
"States can and must save lives before there are none left to save."
A coalition of more than 100 aid organizations issued a dire warning Wednesday about worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground in the Gaza Strip, where starvation continues to spread under the Israeli government's suffocating blockade.
The groups, including Save the Children and Oxfam, called on the international community to pressure Israel to "open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, U.N.-led mechanism; end the siege, and agree to a cease-fire now."
"Just outside Gaza, in warehouses—and even within Gaza itself—tons of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel sit untouched with humanitarian organizations blocked from accessing or delivering them," the groups said in a joint statement. "The government of Israel's restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death."
The aid groups said their colleagues in Gaza are among those impacted. "With supplies now totally depleted," they said, "humanitarian organizations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes."
The statement was released amid harrowing evidence that the manufactured hunger emergency in Gaza is rapidly intensifying, with at least 21 Palestinian children dying of starvation over just the past several days. Since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food aid, mostly near hubs run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). A spokesperson for the Trump State Department declared Tuesday that GHF operations have "been a tremendous success" despite the repeated massacres at its sites and still-spreading famine across the enclave.
"Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and cease-fires, only to wake up to worsening conditions," the aid coalition said Wednesday. "It is not just physical torment, but psychological. Survival is dangled like a mirage. The humanitarian system cannot run on false promises. Humanitarians cannot operate on shifting timelines or wait for political commitments that fail to deliver access."
The groups decried inadequate deals—such as the European Union's recent agreement with Israel to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza—and "symbolic gestures" like food airdrops as "a smokescreen for inaction."
In the absence of "real change on the ground," the groups said, "children starve while waiting for promises that never arrive."
"They cannot replace states' legal and moral obligations to protect Palestinian civilians and ensure meaningful access at scale," the coalition said. "States can and must save lives before there are none left to save."
The aid groups' warnings echoed those of U.N. officials such as World Food Program emergency director Ross Smith, who said Tuesday that the hunger crisis in Gaza "has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation.
"We have a third of the population who are not eating for multiple days in a row—this includes women and children," said Smith. "We see severe, acute malnutrition surging. Almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe, acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible."
"People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance every day," Smith added. "And we are seeing this escalate, day by day."
"We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment," Sanders said as the Ivy League school expelled or suspended scores of students in what critics called a bid to win back blocked federal funding.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.
Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.
Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.
Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.
On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.
"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.
The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.
As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.
The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."
Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.
Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.
"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."
The analysis "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
Echoing previous research from countries including Iceland and the United Kingdom, the biggest trial ever conducted of a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay found that the shift positively impacts workers' well-being.
For the new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, 4 Day Week Global invited independent researchers to collect and analyze data. Four experts from Boston College in the United States and Ireland's University College Dublin collected data from 2,896 employees across 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.
The organizations underwent a "pre-trial work reorganization to improve efficiency and collaboration, followed by a six-month trial," the paper details. Analysis of the data collected "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
"Both company-level and individual-level reductions in hours are correlated with well-being gains, with larger individual-level (but not company-level) reductions associated with greater improvements in well-being," the paper says. "Three key factors mediate the relationship: improved self-reported work ability, reduced sleep problems, and decreased fatigue. The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being."
There are limitations to the study, which the authors acknowledged: The organizations were generally smaller companies in English-speaking countries and participated voluntarily, and the outcomes were self-reported by workers. Given all that, the experts encouraged future randomized, government-backed research.
Still, the apparent impact of the study seems to bolster researchers' conclusions. According to co-author Wen Fan, an associate professor of sociology at Boston College, over 90% of companies opted to keep the four-day workweek after the trial.
In coverage of the study published by Boston College, both Fan and her co-author and colleague in Boston, Juliet Schor, noted how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted conversations about working conditions, including the length of the workweek.
"This would've been a difficult sell pre-Covid—it would've struck a lot of people as pie-in-the-sky, and not feasible for companies," said Schor. "But the pandemic created such levels of stress and burnout, and led many employees to say, 'I want to live my life differently,' and this created more of a space for reimagining work—and, as part of that, the four-day week."
Noting that the "traditional" 40-hour, in-office model is still dominant in many places, Fan said: "Social change is always difficult, especially when it comes to challenging the deep-seated institutional logics dictating how, when, and where we work. Let's hope we don't waste the crisis of Covid in terms of the profound workplace innovations it has precipitated."
The new study comes amid the Trump administration's "barrage of attacks on workers," with the U.S. Department of Labor planning to overhaul dozens of rules intended to protect employees from exploitation and wage theft.