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Tag: human rights violations
Fox News Will Pay $1M Penalty For Human Rights Violations

Fox News Will Pay $1M Penalty For Human Rights Violations

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In 2021, Fox News' legal troubles have included not only a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, but a human rights lawsuit too. And Fox News, as journalist Lloyd Grove reports in the Daily Beast, has agreed to pay a $1 million fine to settle that lawsuit.

Grove explains, "Despite Fox News' claims to have repaired the company's toxic workplace culture since the firing of founder and chairman Roger Ailes in July 2016, Rupert Murdoch's media empire has effectively admitted to ongoing misconduct that includes sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation against victimized employees, and has agreed to pay a million-dollar fine for what New York City's Commission on Human Rights called 'a pattern of violating of the NYC Human Rights Law.'"

According to Grove, "The settlement agreement, reached last week with the Human Rights Commission, contains the largest-ever financial penalty assessed in the agency's six-decade history, and also requires Fox News to remove mandatory confidential arbitration clauses from the contracts of on-air talent along with other employees and contributors for a period of four years when they file legal claims under the city's human-rights law outside of the company's internal process."

Labor attorney Nancy Erika Smith, who represented former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson in a sexual harassment lawsuit, described the lawsuit settlement as "monumental."

Smith told the Beast, "I'm not aware of any government agency requiring an employer to stop silencing victims of discrimination, harassment and retaliation, and that's what NDAs and arbitration do: They silence victims. So, bravo! Finally! The government is seeing that silencing victims protects harassers."

During a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, claimed that she has been working hard to change the work environment at Fox News for the better and fight sexism in the workplace. In a statement, the company defended its progress under Scott, saying, "No other company has implemented such a comprehensive and continuous overhaul, which notably, earned FOX News Media recognition as a 'Great Place to Work' for the first time in its existence, a testament to the many cultural changes that Ms. Scott has instituted during her tenure as CEO."

But Smith is highly critical of Scott, telling the Beast, "Suzanne Scott has always been instrumental, since the beginning of Fox News, in a culture founded on misogyny and enabling harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. So, anybody who thought she changed it in any way is extremely naive or uninformed."

UN Rights Chief: Xenophobia In EU Paves Way To Violence

UN Rights Chief: Xenophobia In EU Paves Way To Violence

GENEVA — The recent rise in xenophobic rhetoric from EU politicians could pave the way for violence and human rights violations, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay warned Tuesday in Geneva.

At the opening of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s summer session, Pillay said the xenophobic, racist and religiously intolerant discourse could undermine the fight against discrimination in Europe.

“There is a road to perpetration of human rights violations. And hate speech — particularly by political leaders — is on that road,” she said.

Pillay added that the recent deadly attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels was connected to this climate of extremism.

The suspect in the shooting is 29-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, who is believed to have trained with jihadists in Syria.

The U.N. rights chief pointed out that the newly elected European Parliament will include several extremists, including the former chief of the German National Democratic Party, Udo Voigt, who has said that “Europe is the continent of white people and it should remain that way.”

She also mentioned French Front National chief Marine Le Pen, who was re-elected in last months’ EU polls and who has compared Muslims praying in public with France’s occupation by Nazi Germany.

Another EU parliamentarian who secured another term was Mario Borghezio of Italy’s Northern League, who has been convicted of setting fire to migrants’ makeshift beds.

The EU elections resulted in wins by rightist parties in France, Britain and Denmark, as well as in gains among such parties in Austria, Finland and Sweden.

Top EU officials on Tuesday also discussed the threat of extremism during talks with religious leaders in Brussels.

“We have highlighted the importance to be vigilant (on) all attempts to come to extremist positions against each other and namely against the values that are so important in the EU,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.

He spoke of the dangers of fundamentalism, racism and discrimination, highlighting the “tendencies that we’re seeing in some parts of our society … putting into question relations between people, where the other is perceived as the enemy.”

“We need a prosperous, efficient, generous and protective Europe to avoid a Europe dominated by the fear of the other and the hate of the other,” EU President Herman Van Rompuy added.

The participants in the Brussels talks held a minute of silence in honor of the Jewish Museum victims.

“I don’t think there are religions worthy of the name that preach the death of innocent people,” said the chief rabbi of Brussels, Albert Guigui. “Fanatics who use religion as a lever for their own interests, they take advantage of religion to kill.”

In Geneva, meanwhile, Pillay said some progress has been made in the human rights field in the six years since she became high commissioner, including efforts to abolish capital punishment and the creation of the UN Human Rights Council. Her term ends in September.

At the same time, she deplored the situation in Syria.

“It is shocking beyond words that war crimes and crimes against humanity have become commonplace and occur with complete impunity,” she said, pointing to last month’s vetoing of a U.N. Security Council resolution by Russia and China, who blocked Syria’s referral to the International Criminal Court.

Photo: United Nations Photo via Flickr

Ugandan Named To Head UN Assembly Faces Criticism On Human Rights

Ugandan Named To Head UN Assembly Faces Criticism On Human Rights

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, who is set to take over the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, has a decades-long legacy of corruption, military aggression and human-rights abuses, according to opponents of his selection as ceremonial head of the world body.

The 65-year-old career politician and longtime ally of Uganda’s controversial president, Yoweri Museveni, was unanimously chosen by the African Union last month to fill the rotating U.N. presidency during the continent’s year-long term at the helm.

There will be no vote at the U.N. before the mantle passes to Kutesa. But his selection has stirred an eleventh-hour campaign to prevent him from taking office and presiding over General Assembly sessions, including the annual meeting of all 193 member states in September, when President Barack Obama and other world leaders address the gathering.

Milton Allimadi, a Ugandan journalist based in New York and editor of the Black Star News website, has been circulating an online petition appealing to the U.S. State Department to revoke Kutesa’s visa so he cannot attend Wednesday’s administrative session, where he is to assume his presidential duties.

In his petition, Allimadi accuses his country’s top diplomat of being a partner in Museveni’s alleged crimes of “domestic repression in Uganda and multiple invasions of neighboring countries” that have caused millions of deaths in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

Kutesa also defended Museveni’s introduction of an anti-gay law last year that imposes life sentences to those convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” a charge applied to same-sex couples openly living together. Those who promote gay rights or help homosexuals evade detection can also face up to seven years in prison under the law.

Elevating Kutesa to the prestigious role of U.N. General Assembly leader and host “would be a mockery of all the ideals that the U.N. is supposed to stand for,” Allimadi says in his petition, which has drawn more than 3,000 signatures.

U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, who represent the state of New York, the seat of the United Nations, have also expressed concerns about Kutesa’s assuming the post.

“It would be disturbing to see the foreign minister of a country that passed an unjust, harsh and discriminatory law based on sexual orientation preside over the U.N. General Assembly,” Gillibrand said.

Schumer suggested that the U.N. “review Mr. Kutesa’s participation” in enacting the anti-gay law, noting that the U.N. Charter “clearly promotes respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

Homosexuality has been outlawed in Uganda since it was a British colony. But the punitive law enacted in December has been associated with a 10-fold increase in attacks on gays in the conservative country, the group Sexual Minorities Uganda attested in a report last month carried by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Human rights groups that castigated the anti-gay law when it was enacted in February have also criticized the choice of Kutesa to head the General Assembly.

“There are real concerns about Sam Kutesa’s commitment to the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including his defense of Uganda’s profoundly discriminatory anti-homosexuality law,” said Human Rights Watch Africa expert Maria Burnett.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Africa Affairs, Will Stevens, said he was not aware whether the petition had been presented to Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

Uganda’s U.N. mission envoys have declined to comment on the controversy, although Western news agencies in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, have reported that Kutesa has rejected the criticism of his nearly three decades in government as based on “a lie.”

Photo: United Nations Photo via Flickr