December, 19 2018, 11:00pm EDT
USDA's GMO Labeling Rule Keeps Consumers in the Dark for the Sake of Big Ag Profits
Statement of Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
Today the USDA released a final rule governing the consumer labeling of genetically engineered (GMO) foods. In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter issued the following statement:
"This deceptive rule will keep people in the dark about what they're eating and feeding their families. It is meant to confuse consumers, not inform them. This deception is a tool being utilized to maximize corporate profits, plain and simple.
"This rule is filled with loopholes that will allow manufacturers to use digital codes and other technology that make GMO disclosure more difficult for consumers than simple on-package labels. Many people don't have access to smartphones needed to scan QR codes, or access to a good signal while shopping.
"The rule refers to GMOs as 'bioengineered,' or BE foods. This is a deceptive strategy because most consumers don't know what that means. The symbol that rule allows manufactures to use in their disclosure suggest to consumers the product is natural and sustainable, when genetically engineered foods are anything but. And the rule's definitions of what triggers labeling are far too limited.
"Consumers are more interested in ever in knowing how their food was produced, but this rule is a big step backwards from commonsense, transparent GMO labeling measures that some states were already adopting before Congress did the bidding of the biotechnology and processed food industries by preempting state laws on labeling."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
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'The Land Theft Continues': Israel Announces Biggest West Bank Seizure in Over 30 Years
The Israel-based activist group Peace Now says "2024 is by far the peak year for Israeli land seizure in the occupied West Bank."
Jul 03, 2024
Human rights defenders on Wednesday condemned the far-right Israeli government's announcement of the largest seizure of Palestinian land—many critics bluntly called it "land theft"—in the illegally occupied West Bank in over 30 years.
On June 25, Israeli occupation authorities unilaterally declared 12,700 dunams, or 4.9 square miles, of land in the Jordan Valley "state lands." Israel's Custodian of the State's Property in the Civil Administration published the declaration on Wednesday. The move supplements previous Israeli land grabs totaling nearly 11,000 dunams (4.2 square miles) in February and March.
Combined, these are the biggest seizures of Palestinian land since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
"Land theft is a component part of colonial genocide as a social process," noted Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto.
Muther Isaac, academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College in Jerusalem, lamented that "the land theft continues in the West Bank!"
Israel's goal, according to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is to "establish facts on the ground" in service of annexing the Palestinian lands and establishing or expanding overwhelmingly Jewish colonies there. The push comes as more and more countries—nearly 150, according to Palestinian officials—officially recognize the state of Palestine and as Israeli forces continue an assault on Gaza that has been widely condemned as genocidal.
"We will establish sovereignty... first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements," Smotrich said last month, referring to illegal outposts that are newer and smaller than established Jewish settler colonies.
"My life's mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state," he added.
Under international law, all of the settlements are illegal. Most were built on land seized from Palestinians through terrorism and ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Arabs were expelled during the establishment and consolidation of modern Israel in the late 1940s, and during the conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "are determined to fight against the entire world and against the interests of the people of Israel for the benefit of a handful of settlers who receive thousands of dunams as if there were no political conflict to resolve or war to end," the Tel Aviv-based activist group Peace Now said in a statement Wednesday.
"Today, it is clear to everyone that this conflict cannot be resolved without a political settlement that establishes a Palestinian state alongside Israel," the group added. "Still, the Israeli government chooses to actually make it difficult and distance us from the possibility of peace and stopping the bloodshed."
That bloodshed includes a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since last October. More than 500 Palestinians—around a quarter of them children—have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers there over the past nine months, according to Palestinian and international agencies.
Protected and sometimes aided by Israeli troops, Israeli settlers have launched multiple deadly pogroms targeting Palestinian people and property in the occupied territories since last year.
These and other previous attacks prompted the Biden administration to impose sanctions on a handful of the most extremist Israeli settlers. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also reverted to classifying Israeli settlements as unlawful, which was the State Department's position from 1978 until the Trump administration reversed it in 2019.
However, the U.S. remains Israel's staunchest international supporter, providing billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover for Israeli policies and actions that, in addition to occupation and colonization, critics say amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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'Groundbreaking' Report Calls for Protecting Rights of Climate Refugees
"ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity," an advocate said.
Jul 03, 2024
A human rights group on Wednesday released what it called "a gift to the international legal and climate action communities" to support their efforts to protect people around the world displaced by the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency.
The "groundbreaking" policy brief from the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD) was crafted to fill a "void in international human rights law" using the insights of Indigenous and climate frontline communities, attorneys, climate modeling experts, social scientists, researchers, and data analysts.
Already, the climate emergency is displacing people within and beyond their home countries. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2023 for a range of reasons. The report comes as Hurricane Beryl is leaving a trail of destruction through the Caribbean.
The Institute for Economics & Peace has estimated that by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 1.2 billion people, about 10% of the global population. Given such warnings, ICAAD's report urges countries to "adopt inclusive, evidence-based legal frameworks" for climate refugees that center on "the right to life with dignity" (RTLWD).
The brief builds on a January 7, 2020 decision from the United Nations Human Rights Committee. As the document details:
Ioane Teitiota and his family sought to remain in New Zealand after migrating from Kiribati. Though the claimant identified how environmental degradation and its downstream impacts would violate his family's right to life with dignity, the majority of the committee did not find that returning the claimant to Kiribati would violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), citing a lack of individualized and imminent harm. Nevertheless, the committee did provide a significant opening by recognizing that environmental degradation could be so severe as to violate Article 6, right to life (with dignity), and Article 7, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (CIDT). This policy brief's analysis centers on Article 6, right to life with dignity, by first looking at the origin of the term "dignity" in legal contexts and how it should be applied today when considering climate-induced displacement.
After examining the etymology of "dignity," its use in international human rights law, and meanings in non-European philosophies and cultures, ICAAD proposed a legal standard for determining whether a climate-displaced person's RTLWD has been violated.
Under the group's standard, the right has been violated if they are deprived of, or are at risk of being deprived of:
- Life or access to basic necessities of life, including but not limited to potable water, food, or shelter;
- Security from serious illness or injury, whether physical or psychological; or
- Something that is fundamental to the identity, conscience, or the exercise of human rights of the applicant and of a particular social group to which the applicant belongs, including but not limited to the ability to engage in cultural practices vital to the particular social group.
ICAAD also offered an evidentiary standard for tribunals charged with considering a displaced person's application: "An applicant is entitled to protection and nonrefoulement if there is a reasonable chance that the applicant will suffer, in the applicant's lifetime, a violation of their right to life with dignity."
"In cases where multiple similarly situated applicants with familial or community ties apply for protection, some of whom satisfy this reasonable chance standard and some of whom do not, complementary protection should be extended to a nonqualifying applicant if denying protection to the nonqualifying applicant would violate any applicant's RTLWD," the group emphasized.
The new brief points out that "the proposed legal standard could also be adopted in national immigration policies, bilateral immigration policies, and internal relocation policies," highlighting that "in May 2019, a group of eight Torres Strait Islander people submitted a complaint against the Australian Government to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, alleging that Australia's failure to protect them from climate impacts was a violation of their rights under the ICCPR."
In a Wednesday statement, Yumna Kamel, co-founder and executive director of Earth Refuge, welcomed that "ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity for climate-displaced persons."
In addition to recommending legal and evidentiary standards, she noted, the brief "goes so far as to provide a guide to incorporating scientific modeling into future cases."
"The legal standard and overall thesis proposed is one that Earth Refuge would readily support and indeed seek to apply in pursuance of the rights of climate-displaced people," Kamel said. "It provides the practical, conscientious answers to the questions that those working in this field, and those experiencing these travesties, have been asking for years."
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Former Officials Say US Has 'Undeniable Complicity' in Killing, Starvation of Gazans
"The administration’s policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to U.S. national security," said 12 ex-officials who resigned from the Biden administration over its support for Israel's war on Gaza.
Jul 03, 2024
Former Biden administration officials on Tuesday sharply criticized its Gaza policy, arguing that the continued supply of weapons to Israel is not only "morally reprehensible" but also a violation of U.S. and international law.
In a joint statement, 12 officials who've resigned in protest in the last nine months set forth a list of recommendations and urged their former colleagues in the administration to use American leverage to help bring an end to the assault on Gaza.
"The administration's policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to U.S. national security," the statement says. "America's diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza."
The other resignees & I issued a statement calling for a new policy
"This failed policy has not achieved its stated objectives—it has not made Israelis any safer, it has emboldened extremists.. while it has been devastating for the Palestinian people"
1https://t.co/PHShChrn1u pic.twitter.com/PI8L5pjcYj
— Dr. Annelle Sheline (@AnnelleSheline) July 2, 2024
The 12 signatories included former officials from a wide range of posts and backgrounds.
One was the the administration's latest defector: 24-year-old Interior Department special assistant Maryam Hassanein, who resigned on Tuesday, tellingHuffPost that "serving in the administration in any capacity does essentially make you complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians." Hassanein was the first Muslim American administration appointee to resign, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which applauded the resignation on social media. She said the administration was engaging in the "dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims."
Another signatory was Harrison Mann, the most senior military official to have left in protest of the Gaza war. Mann had been a major at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He made the news this week when he toldThe Guardian that Israel was seeking out a war with Lebanon for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political gain.
Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year-old State Department veteran who resigned in May over a key report, dealing in part with whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gazans, that she says contained "patently false" findings, was also among the statement's signatories, as was Lily Greenberg Call, a former Interior Department official who was the first Jewish American appointee to resign in protest of the administration's war policy.
The joint statement, timed to come on the week of Independence Day, warns that the U.S. government is risking its international credibility and the safety of its own citizens by putting a "target on America's back."
The authors argued that the administration was "willfully violating multiple U.S. laws and attempting to deny or distort facts, use loopholes, or manipulate processes to ensure a continuous flow of lethal weapons to Israel." They cited the Leahy Laws that forbid providing military support to forces engaged in human rights violations.
The U.S. provides Israel with billions of dollars per year in military aid and has significantly increased its support during the war. In April, President Joe Biden signed a bill providing at least $15 billion in military funds for Israel.
The former officials called for an end not just to the U.S. supply of weapons for the war but also the "diplomatic cover" the U.S. provides for Israeli military occupation and settlements in Palestinian territory. The administration should announce that U.S. policy is "to support self-determination for the Palestinian people," they wrote.
The 12 ex-officials also called for an "immediate expansion" of humanitarian aid to Gaza and funding to help rebuild the territory.
Their statement comes as Israel continues to pummel Gaza with strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Nearly 38,000 Gazans have been killed in the last nine months, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Several strikes that killed Palestinian civilians, including a massacre in Rafah in late May that killed at least 45, have been undertaken with U.S.-made weapons, forensic analyses have showed.
The conditions for those that have survived the Israeli bombardment are dire, with Gazans forced to live amid sewage and debris.
"Civilians in Gaza are clinging to their dignity under the most inhumane conditions," Sigrid Kaag, United Nations senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator, said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The war has not merely created a humanitarian crisis, it has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery," she said.
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