Женевская конвенция

[tijd]

Независимо от того, что произойдёт через неделю, Америка уже свернула на новые рельсы с заменой RBG на ACB.

Эра борьбы за гражданские права в 1960ых была временем Верховного суда Эрла Уоррена, за отставку которого неустанно боролись предтечи Трампа.

TERRY GROSS, Host: So what were some of the accomplishments of the Warren court?
JIM NEWTON: Well, I think you'd have to start with--the landmark decisions of the Warren court would include the right of privacy in Griswold, which is now, of course, the foundational right debated in the context of abortion. The right to counsel in state trials. Before the Warren court, poor defendants were in some states required to defend themselves. Probably the biggest case of all, Brown vs. Board of Education, which curiously was really Warren's first big decision as a Supreme Court justice, which established the principle of school desegregation and then later the follow-up cases after Brown which desegregated a whole host of public institutions. Also a variety of cases in the area of police procedure, Miranda, probably the best known, requires police to read suspects their rights. In case after case, I think what's really interesting about them too is they were almost to a case extremely controversial in that period and yet the rights that they establish are really very much accepted rights of American life today for the most part. So I think the Warren court's legacy has actually worn quite on the country. <...>
GROSS: What do you see as being Earl Warren's legacy?
NEWTON: On a national scale, I think that the architecture of civil liberties that we enjoy today in this society are largely there. Not exclusively, but largely there because the Warren court and Earl Warren put them there. Whether it's a right to privacy or a right to counsel or a right to vote in elections that--where votes are counted equally. Whether it is in the principle of integration as a value of American society. These are the real hallmarks of a mature society, and it's important to remember that they were not there pre-Warren. And so I think Warren personally and certainly the Warren court deserves a huge amount of credit for leaving a legacy of a fairer and more mature country. There is a separate legacy and that is in California that is not, obviously, national in scope, but Warren left a legacy in California of genuine political centrism. He--in 1946, he was nominated not only by the Republican Party in California but also by the Democratic Party for governor. That is an altogether unimaginable achievement in modern California life. But he really does leave for California a sense of what it is to genuinely govern from the center. And I think that, too, while that is not national in scope, that is a profound contribution to the history of the nation's largest state.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6592640



Замена ненавистного им Уоррена на Бергера и последующий разворот суда стали одним из самых существенных наследий Никсона.

Their enmity dated to 1946, when Warren was the governor of California and Lieutenant Commander Nixon, home from war and service in the Navy, declared his candidacy for the Los Angeles-area congressional seat held by Democratic Representative Jerry Voorhis.
Warren was a progressive Republican who won by appealing to Democrats and Independents in a state that then favored non-partisan politics. He had nice things to say about Voorhis, who had helped represent California’s interests in Congress. When Nixon sought to have Harold Stassen, a Republican presidential hopeful, come to California and campaign for him, Warren-who had his own national ambitions-persuaded Stassen to stay away.
Nixon defeated Voorhis, but never forgot what Warren had done. “Right then, a slow burn was kindled in Richard Nixon,” campaign aide Bill Arnold, recalled.
The slow burn blazed in 1950, when Nixon ran a successful Red-baiting campaign for the U.S. Senate against his Democratic opponent- Helen Gahagan Douglas - and Warren refused to endorse him. Nixon and his friends were outraged. “Unless a man is a crook he is entitled to the united support of the party he represents,” Nixon’s mentor, banker Herman Perry, wrote the congressman. Warren’s actions would “not go well with me and 80 percent of the real Republicans.”
When Warren stumbled during the Republican presidential primaries in 1952, Nixon’s wife, Pat, gloated in a letter to a friend. “Warren’s showing in Oregon was sad,” she wrote. “I’m not crying.”
Nixon himself went further. He boarded the Warren campaign train as it made its way from Sacramento to the Republican convention in Chicago, and stealthily urged California’s delegates to support the governor’s rival, General Dwight Eisenhower. The episode became known in state political lore as “The Great Train Robbery.” At the convention, Nixon was tireless, securing the delegation for Ike on the key procedural votes that determined the nomination.
Warren, fuming, sent an envoy to Eisenhower. “We have a traitor in our delegation,” he charged. “It’s Nixon.” But Ike declined to act. In fact, he told the envoy, Nixon was likely to be the general’s running mate. For “keeping the California delegation in line,” Nixon had been given a place atop the short list, Eisenhower’s campaign manager later confirmed.
The feuding reached full boil. At the California delegation caucus, Warren thanked his supporters for their help and publicly snubbed Nixon. “The slight was perfectly obvious, as it was intended to be,” one of Nixon’s friends recorded in a diary. Warren believed that “Dick was trying to sabotage him.”
From that day forward, “Warren hated Nixon,” longtime Republican fundraiser Asa Call remembered in an oral history. Over the years, Warren would tell people how “Nixon cut my throat from here to here,” and gesture with his finger across his neck. <...>
The quarrel ebbed until 1968, when Nixon launched yet another comeback, campaigning for the presidency. The smoldering fuse got fanned, and the resulting detonation transformed the Supreme Court nomination process.
Warren was ready to retire, but didn’t want Nixon to name his successor. He approached President Lyndon Johnson, and reached an agreement to have LBJ’s good friend and adviser, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, promoted to chief justice after just a couple of years on the court.
Nixon would have none of it. Employing the reasoning used by today’s Republicans when they blocked Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the court last year, Nixon argued that “a new president with a fresh mandate” should fill the empty seat.
Senate Republicans went to work, filibustered, and blocked the Fortas nomination. Warren was compelled to stay on, with the sour duty of swearing-in Nixon as the 37th president in January 1969.
Senate Democrats, however, seethed at the manner in which Fortas was treated. Their wrath grew downright broiling when reports from the Nixon Justice Department confirmed that Fortas was on a $20,000-a-year retainer from a convicted financier. Fortas resigned in May, and Warren, not getting any younger, finally stepped down from his seat in June. Nixon would now have two seats to fill.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-story-richard-nixons-ugly-30-year-feud-earl-warren-180962614/



В какую сторону разворачивают страну, становится понятно из подписанного на днях документа под названием Geneva Consensus Declaration. Покинув ВОЗ, госсекретарь Помпео и министр здравоохранения Азар озабочены не спасением жизней умирающих от пандемии, а спасением нерожденных зародышей.

The US has today signed an anti-abortion declaration with a group of about 30 largely illiberal or authoritarian governments, after the failure of an effort to expand the conservative coalition.
The “Geneva Consensus Declaration” calls on states to promote women’s rights and health - but without access to abortion - and is part of a campaign by Trump administration, led by secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to reorient US foreign policy in a more socially conservative direction, even at the expense of alienating traditional western allies.
The “core supporters” of the declaration are Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda, and the 27 other signatories include Belarus (where security forces are currently trying to suppress a women-led protest movement), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya.
Most of the signatories are among the 20 worst countries to be a woman according to the Women, Peace and Security Index established by Georgetown University.
None of the top twenty countries on the Georgetown index - with the exception of the US (ranked 19th) - has signed the declaration.
The only other European signatory (apart from Belarus and Hungary) is Poland, where the constitutional court approved a near total ban on abortion on Thursday.
The list of Geneva Consensus supporters has grown little over the past year, despite a campaign by the Trump administration to find new recruits.
“In 2019, around 25 countries signed one or more joint statements regarding these issues of mutual concern,” a US memorandum circulated among supportive governments said earlier this year. “We would like many more countries to join this Declaration in 2020 so that our mutual priorities in the multilateral space can succeed.”
Gillian Kane, senior policy adviser for Ipas, an international organisation advocating safe access to abortion, said: “The United States has failed at consensus and coalition building. There are 193 UN member states and they’ve got 31. This is a terrible showing. None of our like-minded partners are there, and none of the people on the list could care less about women. It’s a failure of diplomacy.”
A virtual signature ceremony was co-hosted by Pompeo and US health and human services secretary, Alex Azar. They portrayed the declaration as a historic moment in a movement to stop abortion being supported as part of reproductive health care, and credited Donald Trump.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the United States has defended the dignity of human life everywhere and always,” Pompeo said. “He has done it like no other president in history. We have mounted an unprecedented defense of the unborn abroad.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/us-trump-administration-signs-anti-abortion-declaration



Женевская декларация включает страны, с которыми не стыдно оказаться в одной коалиции.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Finally, I’d like to recognize the 31 co-signing countries who have joined with us. This coalition is, indeed, stronger together and the United States is proud to stand with each and every one of you. Thank you all for your commitment to this noble cause.
MS HUBER: And I am pleased and honored to read the names of those co-sponsoring countries: The Kingdom of Bahrain; the Republic of Belarus; the Republic of Benin; Federative Republic of Brazil; Burkina Faso; Republic of Cameroon; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Republic of the Congo; Republic of Djibouti; Arab Republic of Egypt; Kingdom of Eswatini; Republic of The Gambia; Republic of Haiti; Hungary; Republic of Indonesia; Republic of Iraq; Republic of Kenya; Republic - excuse me, the State of Kuwait; the State of Libya; the Republic of Nauru; the Republic of Niger; the Sultanate of Oman; Islamic Republic of Pakistan; Republic of Poland; Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; Republic of Senegal; Republic of South Sudan; Republic of Sudan; Republic of Uganda; United Arab Emirates; the United States of America; and the Republic of Zambia.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-secretary-alex-m-azar-ii-at-the-signing-ceremony-of-the-geneva-consensus-declaration/



Одновременно Помпео работает над тем, чтобы заклеймить крупнейшие правозащитные организации.

The Trump administration is weighing a proposal to brand prominent human rights organizations as "anti-Semitic" and to discourage governments from supporting their work, five congressional aides and a Department of State official told NBC News.
Backed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the proposed declaration would take aim at Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam and possibly other rights groups that have criticized the Israeli government over its policies toward Palestinians, the sources said.
The possible move has caused alarm among career officials at the State Department and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in Congress, the sources said. The rights organizations, which often share their research with U.S. diplomats and military officers, said they were blindsided by the proposal and that it could be used by foreign governments as a pretext to ban or restrict their work abroad.
The move could prompt legal challenges in court and lead government officials to shy away from having any contact with human rights groups, former officials said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-admin-considers-branding-amnesty-international-other-human-rights-groups-n1244335

Америка, которая отнимает право женщин на аборт и отказывается от защиты других прав человека у себя дома и в других странах - воплощение мечты многих поколений реакционеров и диктаторов.



Польша, ныне полностью запретившая аборты по любым причинам, начала своё сползание в диктатуру с Верховного суда.

Since taking power in 2015, the PiS government has moved aggressively to assert control over the judiciary. One of its first steps was to pass legislation designed to curb the powers of the Constitutional Tribunal (TK) and to install progovernment judges on its benches. In 2017, three significant judicial reforms were adopted. The first gave the justice minister the power to appoint and dismiss presidents and deputy presidents of courts. The second, which came into force in 2018, mandated that 15 of the 25 members of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), which is responsible for nominating judges, be appointed by the parliament instead of elected by the judiciary. And in July 2018, new, lower retirement ages for the Supreme Court came into force, effectively meaning that 27 out of 73 judges had to step down unless they were given the president’s approval to remain. Other parts of the new Supreme Court law created powerful new chambers-the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs (responsible for declaring the validity of elections), and the Disciplinary Chamber. The law also established a new system of extraordinary appeals that would allow cases up to twenty years old to be reopened, potentially allowing retrospective, politically motivated abuses. Ignoring a Supreme Court order to suspend part of the reforms until the ECJ issued a ruling on them, the new KRS began an accelerated process of nominating new judges, many of whom have links to the ruling camp.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/poland/freedom-world/2020

Ныне процесс продолжается наступлением на свободу прессы, по венгерскому образцу.

Senior Polish officials last week confirmed reports that a state-owned oil company is negotiating to purchase 20 of the 24 regional newspapers in the country, which are currently owned by a German publishing group. That has been the pattern in Hungary, where independent journalism has been eliminated not by brute censorship but through the purchase of outlets by the government or friendly businessmen.
For those not eager to sell, Law and Justice’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has signaled that the party may press ahead with two laws it has long threatened to pass. One would limit foreign ownership of Polish media outlets, while the other would force the breakup of media companies that have multiple outlets. “Media in Poland should be Polish,” says Mr. Kaczynski, a nationalist populist who crusades against immigrants and gay rights. The obvious targets are newspapers, magazines and a television channel wholly or partially owned by German and U.S. companies.
The government’s campaign could devastate what remains of Polish democracy, which has already been badly weakened by Law and Justice’s takeover of the judiciary. Poland’s most popular and respected newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, is part of a conglomerate that also owns radio stations and a publishing house and is partly owned by two U.S. companies. The most influential television station - now that Law and Justice has turned the state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet - is TVN, which is owned by Discovery Inc., an American multinational. The government has already damaged Gazeta Wyborcza by blocking advertising purchases by state companies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/polands-campaign-against-the-press-could-devastate-whats-left-of-its-democracy/2020/10/23/871c7a74-0f0d-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html



Дело о запрете абортов станет одним из первых, которые предстоит рассматривать новой судье - одновременно с делом об ограничении времени для подсчета голосов на президентских выборах в Пенсильвании, ключевом штате, и нескольких других штатах.

As abortion rights backers and opponents spar over whether Barrett's confirmation would mean the end of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision, the justices will consider Friday whether or not to hear a case that could directly challenge the precedent.
The case pertains to Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, which Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law in 2018. The law made exceptions only for medical emergencies or cases in which there's a "severe fetal abnormality," but not for incidents of rape or incest. A federal judge in Mississippi struck down the law in November 2018, and the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling late last year.
But in supplemental briefs filed Thursday, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch referenced the last Supreme Court case heard by the court, a Louisiana regulation involving hospital admitting privileges. Roberts' concurring opinion, appearing to walk back precedent on how courts should analyze the benefits and the burdens of a particular abortion law, had been interpreted differently by different circuit courts, she argued.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/26/politics/taxes-election-abortion-amy-coney-barrett/index.html

Secret money behind the Supreme Court in earlier eras would have been considered a scandal. https://t.co/kOB8f0UOUb
- Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) October 26, 2020

The gathering in Northern Virginia was organized by the Council for National Policy, a little-known group that has served for decades as a hub for a nationwide network of conservative activists and the donors who support them. Members include Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, an outside adviser to President Trump who has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors to support conservative causes and the nominations of conservative federal judges.
Videos provided to The Post - covering dozens of hours of CNP meetings over three days in February and three in August - offer an inside view of participants’ obsessions and fears at a pivotal moment in the conservative movement. The videos, recorded by CNP to share with its members, show influential activists discussing election tactics, amplifying conspiracy theories and describing much of America in dark and apocalyptic terms.
“This is a spiritual battle we are in. This is good versus evil,” CNP’s executive committee president, Bill Walton, said on Aug. 21, addressing attendees at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. “We have to do everything we can to win.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/council-national-policy-video/2020/10/14/367f24c2-f793-11ea-a510-f57d8ce76e11_story.html