Tag Archives: human rights

Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

by OliverSheets Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tonight Oklahoma will continue the nation’s ongoing experiment in executing people with untested drug combinations as it moves forward to kill death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner using a new, secretly acquired drug cocktail.

Officials in Oklahoma and other states have resorted to these methods because they can no longer access sodium thiopental, the anesthetic traditionally used in lethal injections, and another drug used to paralyze the condemned. The lone US manufacturer quit producing sodium thiopental in 2011, and international suppliers—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;particulalry in the European Union, which opposes the death penalty on humanitarian grounds—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;have stopped exporting both drugs to the United States. This has left states like Oklahoma scrambling to find new pharmaceuticals for killing death row inmates. Some have been reduced to illegally importing the drugs, using untested combinations, or buying from unregulated compounding pharmacies, a number of which have a history of producing contaminated products.

Death row inmates and their lawyers have protested on the grounds that these untested protocols could produce a level of suffering that violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve sued for more information about the source and purity of the drugs. In response, several states have passed secrecy laws, allowing them to keep the names of their suppliers, and in some cases the contents of the lethal injection, under wraps. (Oklahoma is so eager to hide the source of its death drugs that it buys them with petty cash so there are no transaction records.) Death row inmates, in turn, have filed suits challenging the constitutionality of these secrecy statutes.

In February, Lockett and Warner prompted a high-profile showdown between Oklahoma officials when they sued the state, asserting that its execution protocol could inflict “severe pain” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A lower state court found the drug secrecy law patently unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court ultimately stayed the two men’s executions until the issues were fully litigated. But Republican Gov. Mary Fallin insisted they be executed regardless of the court’s ruling, prompting a political crisis. On April 23, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, whose justices are now being threatened by the Legislature with impeachment, caved and allowed the executions to move forward.

The public knows very little about the drugs that will be used to kill Lockett and Warner who stand convicted of murder. â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;Lockett shot a teenage girl, then buried her alive, while Warner raped and killed his girlfriend’s 11-month-old daughter in 1997. Initially, the state said it would deploy a three-drug cocktail, including the sedative pentobarbital (normally used to euthanize animals); vercuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The first drug is supposed to knock out the inmate so he doesn’t feel pain. The second drug paralyzes him so onlookers can’t tell if he’s suffering. But pentobarbital, which states substituted for sodium thiopental after it went off the market, works more slowly than the old drug, and wasn’t tested in advance to make sure it was an appropriate substitute. Also, lawyers argue that it doesn’t prevent pain during an execution. For that reason, injecting it into a conscious animal in California is actually a crime.

Due to a shortages of pentobarbital and vercuronium bromide, Oklahoma planned to buy the drugs from an unnamed compounding pharmacy. This was problematic because such pharmacies are unregulated, and contaminated pentobarbital can result in excruciatingly painful deaths. (Experts say it can feel as though the insides of a person’s veins are being scraped with sandpaper.) South Dakota used a compounded pentobarbital contaminated with a fungus to execute Eric Robert in 2012. During the execution, he repeatedly opened his eyes—a sign that the drug wasn’t working, some experts said. Oklahoma has had similar problems. In January, it executed another man, Michael Lee Wilson, using pentobarbital from an unidentified compounding pharmacy. During the execution he sputtered, “I feel my whole body burning,” another sign that the drug wasn’t doing its job.

In March, Oklahoma backed away from this approach and said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. His family, who watched in horror, is now suing over what they allege was cruel and unusual punishment.

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs. “It is an experiment, and I don’t think anybody is absolutely certain what will happen in Oklahoma,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Dieter adds that we’ll never know whether the drugs worked properly or caused needlessly painful deaths because the people who could tell us will be dead.

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Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

by MilfordMnh Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

When an incarcerated pregnant woman in Illinois slept too long through mealtime, a guard decided to punish her by placing her in solitary confinement. While in isolation, the woman—who had a long history of depression—was denied access to her prenatal vitamins and was not given water for hours. She soon became highly anxious. This is one of the disturbing ways that US prisons treat incarcerated women who are pregnant, transgender, mentally ill, or who report that they are raped, according to a new report published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Many of the reasons women are placed in isolation are highly subjective, the reports notes: “Because many cases come down to the word of a prisoner against the word of a corrections officer, a guard’s bad day can easily turn into a solitary confinement sentence for a prisoner for retaliatory reasons, such as a prisoner’s filing a grievance.”

Solitary confinement, where prisoners are isolated for 22-24 hours a day with greatly reduced human contact and access to sunlight, is common practice in US prisons, but its harmful effects are well-documented. A United Nations torture expert said in 2011 that solitary should never be used on people with mental disabilities, and should never last longer than 15 days. In February, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for US prisons to stop using solitary confinement on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women. And recently, the Justice Department sued Ohio for placing mentally ill boys in solitary confinement for excessive amounts of time.

According to the ACLU report, guards sometimes use solitary confinement to retaliate against women who report rape by corrections officers. As we reported in 2010, Michelle Ortiz, who was serving one year at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, alleged that she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a guard. When she spoke out, she was allegedly placed in solitary confinement. In another case, a prisoner named Lisa Jaramillo served more than 100 days in solitary confinement for allegedly lying about incidents of sexual assault.

“Women who have been sexually abused by prison guards are…forced to decide between reporting the attack and risking retaliation, or not reporting it and risking further assault,” the report reads. The authors note that the lack of privacy in solitary cells can further victimize women. In solitary, a woman’s attacker can closely watch her sleep, use the toilet, or undress.

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

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Beloved Author Gabriel García Márquez Was Also a Go-Between for Colombian Guerrillas and the Government

by Tawanna55K Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Gabriel García Márquez passed away on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87. The Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist was celebrated for such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. “The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers—one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Obama said on Thursday.

When a literary figure as towering as García Márquez dies, there are too many fascinating things to write about—his writing, his political history, his wild ride of a life. (Hell, I could see myself writing an entire term paper on his friendly relationship with Colombian pop star Shakira!) I’m not going to attempt anything close to a definitive obituary of a man who gave the world so much through his art. I’ll leave that to others.

But I’d like to highlight one politically significant part of Gabo‘s life: García Márquez wasn’t just an acclaimed writer and passionate supporter of left-wing causes—for a time, he was an intermediary between Colombian leftist guerrillas and the government.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1999 New Yorker profile written by Jon Lee Anderson:

García Márquez who has often referred to himself as “the last optimist in Colombia,” has been closely involved in the peace negotiations. He introduced Colombian president Andrés Pastrana to his old friend Fidel Castro, who could facilitate talks with the guerrillas, and he helped restore good relations between Washington and Bogotá. “I won’t say that it was Gabo who brought all this about,” Bill Richardson, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, said early this summer, “but he was a catalyst.” García Márquez was invited by the Clintons to the White House several times, and friends say he believed that he was going to not only carry off the immediate goal of getting some sort of negotiated settlement between the guerrillas and the government but also finally help bring about an improvement in relations between the United States and Cuba. “The U.S. needs Cuba’s involvement in the Colombian peace talks, because the Cuban government has the best contacts with the guerrillas,” he explained to me. “And Cuba is perfectly situated, only two hours away, so Pastrana can go there overnight and have meetings and come back without anyone knowing anything about it. And the U.S. wants this to happen.” Then he smiled in a way that indicated he knew much more than he was telling me, as usual.

The whole profile, which you can check out here, is definitely worth a read.

I now leave you with this footage of García Márquez visiting Shakira and dancing:

R.I.P.

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Beloved Author Gabriel García Márquez Was Also a Go-Between for Colombian Guerrillas and the Government

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Stephen Colbert Is Replacing Letterman. Here Are His Best—and Worst—Political Moments

by MaxineSolar Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, CBS announced that Stephen Colbert will replace the retiring David Letterman as host of Late Show. (Mashable reported last week that Colbert was the network’s top choice to take over for Letterman.) When Colbert leaves for CBS, he’ll be leaving behind The Colbert Report at Comedy Central, where he has played the part of fake conservative cable-TV commentator since 2005.

We’re assuming that once he starts his gig at Late Show he’ll be doing less left-leaning political satire than he’s used to. So here’s a look back at his very best—and very worst—political moments over the past few years. And no, #CancelColbert does not make either list:

THE BEST:

1. Colbert slams the Obama administration’s legal justification for killing American citizens abroad suspected of terrorism: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do,” Colbert said in March 2012. “The current process is, apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

“Due process just means that there is a process that you do” is pretty dead-on:

The Colbert Report
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2. The Colbert Report‘s incredibly moving, stereotype-smashing segment on the openly gay mayor of Vicco, Kentucky: “To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh,” Mayor Johnny Cummings told Mother Jones, after the segment aired. “That’s how I look at it. So I thought, OK, The Colbert Report would be perfect.”

“If God makes ’em born gay, then why is he against it?” a Vicco resident asks in the clip’s moving final moments. “I can’t understand that. I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand that, and I can’t.”

The Colbert Report
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3. Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor: Bill O’Reilly still seems to think that Colbert, the satirist, is doing great damage to this country.

4. Colbert’s roasting of President George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner: “Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating,” Colbert said. “But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

For a transcript, click here.

5. Colbert’s surreal congressional testimony: He testified (in character) before a House hearing in 2010 on immigrant farm workers. He offered to submit video of his colonoscopy into the congressional record:

6. Colbert was a two-time presidential candidate who used comedy to highlight the absurdity of the post-Citizens United election landscape. Here’s his recent letter to the IRS, in which he requests the opportunity to testify at a public hearing:

Stephen Colbert Comment to IRS

THE WORST:

1. That time he used Henry Kissinger as a dance partner: The former secretary of state and national security advisor has been accused by human rights groups and journalists of complicity in major human rights violations and war crimes around the globe: In Chile (murder and subversion of democracy), Bangladesh (genocide), East Timor (yet more genocide), Argentina, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name a few.

So it’s odd that Colbert would feature him in a lighthearted dance-party segment last August. The video (set to Daft Punk’s hit “Get Lucky”) also includes famous people whom no one has ever accused of war crimes, such as Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges, Bryan Cranston, and Hugh Laurie:

The Colbert Report
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2. The other time he made Kissinger seem like a lovable, aging teddy bear: Kissinger was also on The Colbert Report in 2006 during the Colbert guitar “ShredDown.” The following clip also features Eliot Spitzer and guitarist Peter Frampton:

The Colbert Report
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Colbert’s apparent coziness with Kissinger is even stranger when you consider how Colbert has blasted “the war crimes of Nixon,” and has said that he “despairs that people forget those.” Perhaps he forgot that “the war crimes” he spoke of were as much Kissinger’s as they were President Nixon’s.

Anyway, viewers can hope that when he’s hosting on CBS, there will be fewer musical numbers featuring war criminals.

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Stephen Colbert Is Replacing Letterman. Here Are His Best—and Worst—Political Moments

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How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

by Ilariaujg Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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March 31 is Cesar Chavez’s birthday and a national holiday honoring his pioneering activism (which is the subject of a new feature film) around farm-workers rights. He is perhaps best known as a founder of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), now the United Farm Workers, a labor union. His cofounder Dolores Huerta, though still alive, is not nearly as well known. So who is she? Born in 1930 and raised in Stockton, California, Huerta, who is portrayed by Rosario Dawson in the Chavez film, has been arrested more than 20 times during peaceful protests, and is still out on the front lines taking part in civil rights actions. Here are five things you should know about her.

1. She’s the mother of the farm-workers movement.
After quitting her teaching job in 1955, Huerta helped register people to vote and became an organizer in the Community Service Organization, a Mexican-American association in California where Cesar Chavez was the statewide director. The pair eventually branched off, in 1962, to found the NFWA, and the rest is history.

2. She was instrumental in winning key protections for workers.
Only a year after launching the NFWA, Huerta secured disability insurance for California farm workers, and was central in the creation of the Aid for Dependent Families, a federal assistance program that stayed in effect until 1996.

3. She led a historic boycott against the grape industry.
In 1965, a group of Filipino workers went on strike for better working conditions, a cause that became known as the “Delano Grape Strike.” Huerta suggested to Chavez that the National Farm Workers Association boycott all California table grapes in support of Filipino workers. In 1970, the grape industry signed an agreement that increased wages and improved working conditions.

4. She originated the phrase, “Si se puede.”
Translated as “Yes we can,” this expression should be familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a labor protest in California. Although it is often misattributed to Chavez, Huerta told Makers that she came up with it. “It’s important for women to be able to take credit for the work that they do,” she said.

5. She helped put Latinas in power.
After a life-threatening assault by a police officer at a protest rally when she was 58, Huerta took a leave from the union to focus on the women’s movement. She campaigned across the country for two years as part of the Feminist Majority’s project to encourage Latinas to run for office. According to Huerta’s website, it had a significant affect on the number of women in government.

So, Happy Cesar Chavez Day, and don’t forget to give Huerta her due! Here’s a trailer for the film:

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How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

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Uganda’s President Signs Extreme Law That Has Led to Calls to Kill, Burn, and Beat Gays

by MaribelClifford Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Brushing aside protests from Western leaders and human rights organizations, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the country’s draconian anti-gay bill into law Monday. The measure increases the penalty for homosexuality, which was already illegal, to life in prison in some cases. It also includes a raft of other harsh provisions, as Human Rights Watch explains:

The “attempt to commit homosexuality” incurs a penalty of seven years as does “aiding and abetting” homosexuality. A person who “keeps a house, room, set of rooms, or place of any kind for purposes of homosexuality” also faces seven years’ imprisonment. Because the law also criminalizes the “promotion” of homosexuality, there are far-reaching implications beyond the increase in punishments for same-sex sexual conduct…Public health promotion and prevention efforts targeting “at risk” groups might have to be curtailed, and health educators and healthcare providers could also face criminal sanction under the same provision.

During the signing ceremony at his official residence outside the capital, Kampala, Museveni blamed the rise of gay culture in Uganda on “arrogant and careless Western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality and lesbianism” and claimed that some were doing so for “mercenary reasons—to get money—in effect homosexual prostitutes.”

Gay rights activists say the climate for gays in Uganda has already deteriorated drastically since the bill passed the Ugandan parliament in December. According to Frank Mugisha, the executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, the nation’s primary gay rights group, police are rounding up 30 to 40 suspected homosexuals each week. In some cases, simply being unmarried and spending time in the company of people of the same gender is enough to arouse police suspicion. Mugisha also says that the bill’s passage has also brought a surge in anti-gay vigilantism and that religious leaders in the suburbs surrounding Kampala have been calling for gays to be killed or burned over the public address systems. “The situation is extremely worrying,” Mugisha says. “We are living in fear.”

Maria Burnett, a senior Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, believes Uganda may see more anti-gay violence now that the bill is officially law. “When political leaders stir up hate,” she says, “it can look like a tacit approval of this kind of mob violence.” Burnett also stressed that the measure’s passage was part of a “broader pattern of clawing back basic human rights, such as freedom of association and freedom of expression, in Uganda.”

The White House sounded a similar note in a statement late Monday morning: “As President Obama has said, this law is more than an affront and a danger to the gay community in Uganda, it reflects poorly on the country’s commitment to protecting the human rights of its people and will undermine public health, including efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. We will continue to urge the Ugandan government to repeal this abhorrent law and to advocate for the protection of the universal human rights of LGBT persons in Uganda and around the world.”

For more on the roots of Uganda’s anti-gay law, see Mac McClelland’s “The Love that Dares.”

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Uganda’s President Signs Extreme Law That Has Led to Calls to Kill, Burn, and Beat Gays

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WATCH: Anti-Gay Evangelical Calls Protesters "Homo-Fascists"

by Gwenn Record Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, hard-line anti-gay activists gathered at the National Press Club in Washington to announce the formation of a new organization to fight what they call the “global LGBT agenda.” Known as the Coalition for Family Values, the group is the brainchild of two extreme anti-gay advocates: Scott Lively, a Massachusetts-based pastor who is running for governor of the Bay State, and Peter LaBarbera, the founder of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. The coalition’s aim is to spread Russian-style anti-gay legislation throughout the world. Lively kicked off the event by praising Russia’s “much needed leadership in restoring family values,” and urged other countries to follow its “excellent example” by passing laws against gay-rights “propaganda” and banning adoption by gay parents. But the event did not go as planned.

About 20 minutes into the program, a young gay Russian man named Slava Revin stood up and yelled, “Vladimir Putin is a dictator!” After that, the conference dissolved into chaos, with Revin and the speakers shouting over each other. “Stop killing us,” cried a Lively supporter. “Stop killing speech. Stop killing freedom.” Eventually, Lively launched into a diatribe about “homo-fascists,” and Press Club staffers ushered Revin and another activist named Ellen Sturtz out of the room. Below is video of the exchange:

This kind of rhetoric is not unusual for Lively. The anti-gay crusader co-authored a book called The Pink Swastika, which argues that homosexuals were the driving force behind the Holocaust. In the United States, Lively’s ideas haven’t gotten much traction. But he has forged deep ties to religious and political leaders in Uganda and former Russian republics, where he has helped pave the way for anti-gay bills. Uganda’s main gay-rights organization is suing him for crimes against humanity for allegedly fostering anti-gay sentiment and legislation in that country. (Last week, President Yoweri Museveniâ&#128;&#139; of Uganda declared that he would sign a bill that makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison.)

Through the Coalition for Family Values, Lively and LaBarbera intend to promote other types of legislation, including a bill to protect discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Lively casts it as a matter of religious freedom.) So far, they say, 75 pro-family organizations around the globe have signed on. Those listed in press materials are mostly obscure groups, but a few prominent social conservative outfits have joined, including Liberty Counsel Action and the American Family Association. “Other nations, including the United States, could learn form Russia and stop the homosexualization of our nation,” Diane Gramley, a representative of the AFA’s Pennsylvania affiliate told the crowd at Friday’s event. “It’s time for the United States to stop using our children as lab rats to see how they react to homosexual propaganda.”

Lively noted at the press conference that he considers most family-values crusaders too timid and said that he believes strong laws, such as the recently-passed Russian measure that criminalizes public support of same-sex relationships, are the only way to keep gay activists from “tearing down the fabric of society.”

After the event, the crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk. Revin, the gay Russian activist, was standing in the rain, holding a rainbow banner, and reciting the speech he had intended to give inside. “Putin is corrupted thief who invents scapegoats and deflects attention from his crimes” he declared. “His latest invention is the anti-gay law, so gays in modern Russia feel like Jews back in the USSR.” Then Sturtz handed Lively a miniature rainbow flag.

Lively tucked the flag into his pocket.

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Defend The Family statement (PDF)

Defend The Family statement (Text)

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American Family Association of Pennsylvania statement (PDF)

American Family Association of Pennsylvania statement (Text)

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WATCH: Anti-Gay Evangelical Calls Protesters "Homo-Fascists"

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Russian enviro who criticized Olympics sentenced to three years of forced labor

by 2Gofman3 Posted on February 15, 2014

Russian enviro who criticized Olympics sentenced to three years of forced labor

By

Oleg Kozirev / Human Rights Watch

Yevgeny Vitishko, in happier days.

An activist who coauthored a report cataloging the appalling environmental damage wreaked by Olympic construction will spend the next three years in a Russian penal colony.

Yevgeny Vitishko, a 40-year-old scientist, is ostensibly being punished for the crimes of spray-painting a fence and swearing in public. Vitishko was among seven members of Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus detained on the eve of the Olympics. An appeal of the decision to jail him for three years was rejected during a hearing that he couldn’t attend this week because he was imprisoned.

“The case against Vitishko has been politically motivated from the start,” said Yulia Gorbunova, a Human Rights Watch official in Russia. “When the authorities continued to harass him it became clear they were trying to silence and exact retribution against certain persistent critics of the preparations for the Olympics.”

IOC officials on Thursday sought “clarification” from Russian authorities on Vitishko’s incarceration. “We have raised this case in the past,” an IOC spokesman said.

As members of Pussy Riot recently learned, life in a Russian penal colony means being enslaved in inhumane conditions and forced to work. Nearly 600,000 people are serving sentences in such facilities.


Source
Russia: Justice Fails Environment Activist at Appeal, Human Rights Watch
Sochi Winter Olympics: IOC ask Russian authorities for explanation over Yevgeny Vitishko sentence, The Sydney Morning Herald

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Russian enviro who criticized Olympics sentenced to three years of forced labor

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From Russia With Love: Photos of Brave Gay Activists Fighting Homophobia

by Alison O'neil Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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On June 28, 2013, five couples in wedding finery piled into a white limo and pulled up to a municipal office in St. Petersburg, Russia. The same-sex pairs come to apply for marriage licenses they knew they were unlikely to get, but they wanted to make a statement. A video of the day shows confounded clerks unsuccessfully trying to keep the beaming lovers out as they head to a waiting room where they kiss in protest. “They didn’t even want to give us the blank applications,” says Yana Petrova, who tried to marry her partner, Elena Davydova. “But there wasn’t much they could do—we’d already downloaded them.”

Just two days earlier, the nation’s upper house of parliament had unanimously passed a bill banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors” and imposing fines between $120 and $30,000 for offenders. The bill was understood to prohibit all open expression of gay identity, from parades and rainbow flags to same-sex couples holding hands in public. President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law on June 30.

The new law, which has drawn worldwide criticism and inspired calls to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, further codified Russia’s widespread homophobia: 12 cities, including St. Petersburg, had already passed similar measures, and surveys suggest more than 70 percent of Russians believe LGBT people should remain closeted. Last year, Moscow enacted a century-long ban on gay-pride events.

Since the gay-propaganda law passed, activists have noted a sharp uptick in antigay violence. Yet some also say the law has bolstered their cause. “Before, it wasn’t accepted to talk about this,” Petrova says. “Now, there are no neutral people left. Everyone wants to express their opinion. That’s good. Debate is the only thing that can lead to any battle or change.”

Danish photographer Mads Nissen was in Russia teaching a photography workshop when Article 6.21 passed. A student tipped him off to the wedding registry attempt. The activists he met were suspicious at first, asking him to share his website and other information to test his intentions. (Antigay activists have attempted to infiltrate Russia’s LGBT community.) But soon, they were bringing him to underground clubs and spaces where the community gathers, and sharing their stories of being assaulted and arrested. At one gay pride rally, Nissen witnessed a brutal attack on Kirill Fedorov, a young gay man and activist he’d been following for several days. “An antigay activist just came up to him and punched him in the face,” Nissen recalls. “In that moment, this wasn’t a theoretical thing anymore. It was real. It was happening. It was worse than I imagined.”

“Sometimes you do a story—you think it’s a big topic, and then when you get into it, it doesn’t seem so bad,” Nissen says. “This was absolutely the opposite. The more I got into it, the worse it was.”

Yaroslav Yevtushenko with his boyfriend Dmitry Chunosov. On June 30, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses into law. The law had passed Russia’s lower and upper chambers of parliament with unanimous approval.

Ultra-nationalists, wearing Cossack-style hats and holding whips, shout abuse at participants in a Gay Pride rally in June 2013 in St. Petersburg. Anti-gay protestors later violently assaulted some of the people taking part in the rally. Attacks on the gay community have become the norm: Since the law’s passage, Moscow’s main gay club, Central Station, has seen at least five attacks—including a shooting, a poison gas attack, and a raid in which equipment was stolen and the roof was damaged.

LGBT activist Kirill Fedorov was violently assaulted by anti-gay protestors during the St. Petersburg gay pride rally in June. He was later arrested.

Yana Petrova, 28, appears in court after being arrested at the June gay pride rally. A few years ago, Petrova probably would not have ended up in court—or have been at a pride event. “These laws are terrible, but thanks to them, so to speak, many people are actually coming out,” she says. “Before this, many gay people in Russia believed that if this isn’t being discussed, no one’s beating us, so great, all is fine, we can live. We can’t marry, but we can live. So, okay. Leave it at that.”

Natali Zamanskix, right, and her girlfriend, Ludmila Gorbatova, meet after work near their home on St. Petersburg’s outskirts.

Ilmira Shayhraznova, left, and Elena Yakovleva, on their way to the St. Petersburg municipal office where they and four other gay couples attempted to file applications for marriage. When they arrived, the clerks gave the couples a copy of the Russian code to read, which de facto defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Pavel Lebedev, right, with his boyfriend Kirill Kalugin. Lebedev says that he has been violently attacked six times in the previous year. In spite of the danger, he insists on his right to be open about his sexuality and to choose whom he loves.

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From Russia With Love: Photos of Brave Gay Activists Fighting Homophobia

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Do Sex Traffickers Really Target the Super Bowl?

by rikkiqlyons Posted on February 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the past few years, as January comes to an end, the media and government officials sound an ominous warning: Sex trafficking will be on the rise during the Super Bowl. Because of the sporting event, “the cruelty of human trafficking goes on for several weeks,” said Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey, the site of this year’s Super Bowl. John McCain’s wife, Cindy, has called the Super Bowl “the largest human-trafficking venue on the planet.” As their logic goes, hundreds of thousands of fun-seeking fans will descend on New Jersey and New York this weekend. With the crowds will come an increased demand for sex, and, in turn, sex trafficking.

But as several publications have noted, data from the past few years doesn’t support this link—only four arrests were made during coordinated sweeps at the last three Super Bowls combined. Bradley Myles, the CEO of anti-trafficking nonprofit Polaris Project, which houses the National Human Trafficking Hotline, told Mother Jones that “we haven’t seen a great deal of evidence that there is a massive rise in trafficking during the Super Bowl,” adding that the hotline will “staff up modestly” but “doesn’t experience a major increase in calls.”

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Do Sex Traffickers Really Target the Super Bowl?

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