Humanity now stands at a total population of 8.1 billion, of which 2 billion are mothers. Apropos of this year's Christmas celebrations throughout the Christian part of humanity, I've often had occasion to observe to my students that the classic Nativity story is also a stirring narrative of how the birth of Jesus Christ occurred within a dark vacuum of human rights suppressed during a time of violent occupation by a foreign imperial power. The imperial power orders a census of all its conquered peoples to levy more taxes on subjugated peoples (as well as determine identities of potential threats, rebels, and dissidents), forcing everyone to return to their respective hometowns to register themselves and their families. A heavily pregnant Mary, accompanied by her husband, is forced to travel for the census, while deprived of any access to safe housing or health care facilities, and ends up giving birth in a manger also without medical assistance or health care. This barely recovered new mother, her husband, and the infant Christ are forced…
Humanitarianism
130 days and counting: A responsibility to end the blockade of the Lachin Corridor
Severe shortages in food and medical supplies are increasingly imposing great hardship on Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 ethnic Armenian residents, with provisions depleting quickly and no alleviation anticipated so far. The question that arises is whether a responsibility to end the (current form of) protests and hence alleviate the situation may be uncovered. The Lachin Corridor – the…
There wasn’t before, and now there even more definitely isn’t, any legal barrier to providing cross-border humanitarian assistance in northwest Syria
For three long days following last week’s earthquake in Southern Türkiye, thousands of people in northwest Syria lay trapped under rubble, with no help from the UN. The road through Türkiye to the border crossing between southern Türkiye and northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, was damaged. Although, to quote the International Crisis Group’s Syria Analyst Dareen Khalifa,…
Opening an ICRC Delegation for Cyberspace
With humanitarian organizations becoming more active in and reliant upon new technologies and the digital domain, they have evolved from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace. They also become vulnerable to adverse cyberoperations that could impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by violence or armed conflict whilst having…