The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Friday December 10th, 2021 – Human Rights Day
#Migration: Neither Safe nor Orderly by Rene Wadlow
10 December is the anniversary of the signing of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at Marrakech in 2018. The aim of the United Nations organized Compact was to bring together existing commitment to improve migration management and the treatment of migrants. The Compact calls upon States to develop national implementation plans and to review their national practices.
However, recent events underline that today much migration is neither safe nor orderly. National priorities have often been focused on how to keep migrants out rather than on a policy based on the dignity of migrants and their place within national societies. Events at the Polish-Belarus frontier indicate how migrants can be used against their expectations to advance narrow national policies. Frontiers are being fortified; walls are being built. The takeover of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan has added to the number of people who wish to flee and find refuge elsewhere. The number of migrants in Mexico wishing to enter the U.S.A. is still as great, and U.S. policy remains restrictive despite the change of administration.
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River Teach Me #poem by George Cassidy Payne
“River teach me change
as falling leaves decompose in the formless current”
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Project UATX: New Universities, Old Problems by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Among the motivations behind establishing a university is a desire to leave old ones. Old in tooth, depraved, decayed, the assumption is that a new institution will return to original purposes on the pretext that these are truly radical. This, on the face of it, is the purpose of The University of Austin (UATX) – at least as originally advertised. “We’re done waiting for America’s universities to fix themselves,” came the words of a promotional video for the incipient body. “So we’re starting a new one.”
This is the sentiment of Pano Kanelos, who left his position as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to, in his words, “build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” What riles Kanelos is the “gaping chasm between the promise and reality of higher education.” Harvard proclaims a dedication to veritas. Stanford students are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows. Nice to have such “soaring words” – but he is not convinced that the “pursuit of truth – once the central purpose of a university” is the “highest virtue”. Campus life is now characterised by “illiberalism”.
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Eleanor Roosevelt, World Citizen by Rene Wadlow
It was Eleanor Roosevelt who helped to craft and then championed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose anniversary we celebrate on 10 December. She was appointed the US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights and was then chosen as its chairperson. Originally, her selection was a reflection of respect and gratitude toward her husband Franklin who had been the US leader during the Second World War and who wanted to avoid a US refusal of a world institution as had been the case with the League of Nations after World War I.
However, Eleanor was much more than the widow of FDR. She had always been an ‘internationalist’ concerned with the establishment of machinery that would ensure a lasting peace. In 1939 she had read Clarence Streit’s Union Now and had the author dine at the White House to explain his ideas of a federal union among democratic countries. She accepted to serve as a delegate to the first UN General Assembly held in London “largely because my husband laid the foundations for the organization through which we all hope to build world peace.”
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Mika Toxica 21#13 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Mika Toxica, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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