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	Nothing can justify these despicable attacks by FRA, StreetPress, Liberation, HRW, agencies   13 Nov 2016   France marks the first anniversary of November 13 Paris attacks. (France 24, Liberation)   France has marked the first anniversary of the Paris attacks with sombre ceremonies and painful memories for the relatives of the 130 people killed.   President François Hollande unveiled plaques at sites across the city that were attacked by the Islamic State jihadist group, starting at the Stade de France.   Manuel Dias, 63, was killed by a suicide bomber outside the national stadium where France were playing Germany in a football match in the first of a series of coordinated attacks on the evening of November 13, 2015.   Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also unveiled plaques outside bars and restaurants in the neighbourhood where gunmen sprayed bullets at people enjoying a Friday evening out.   The final ceremony took place outside the Bataclan, the concert hall where 90 people were killed by three attackers during a rock gig in the culmination of the carnage.   The names of those killed at the concert were read out as hundreds of people gathered under rainy skies watched in silence.   Olivier, 28, who was injured during the rampage, fought back the tears as he attended the unveiling of the plaque in front of the Carillon bar and the Petit Cambodge restaurant, where 13 people were killed.   He was hit in the arm by a bullet while his friend was killed by the gunmen and on Sunday he accompanied his friend''s mother to the ceremony. "I had to be here to support her," he told AFP.   http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/11/13/13-novembre-2016-une-journee-d-hommages_1528191   Nov. 2015   Following the attacks in France that killed at least 129 people and injured hundreds of others, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights expresses its sadness and sympathy with the families and friends of those who died or were injured.   "These attacks were acts of barbarism, and our thoughts are with all those close to the victims," said the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). "But both France and the EU as a whole are sending a clear message that such acts cannot and will not shake our firm commitment to democracy, equality and respect for human rights."   In this context, FRA stresses the fact that all security responses must fully respect fundamental rights, as further evidence that these attacks have failed to achieve their aim.   Nov. 2015   On November 13, Paris suffered its second terrorist attack in a year. Over a hundred people were killed, and many other victims, severely injured, are clinging to life in hospitals. Johan Weisz-Myara, publisher of the Paris-based online news magazine StreetPress, talks about the mood in Paris today and the media’s role in organizing democratic resistance.   What is the mood like in Paris since the attacks? Is it any different than after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January?   The Charlie Hebdo attacks targeted certain individuals for a specific reason, explicitly given by the terrorists: the caricatures of the prophet that had been published several times in the magazine. This time, the people of Paris and the suburbs in the wider sense were targeted. People feel affected in a more direct way—everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who was injured or killed by the terrorists. These days in Paris and in the suburbs, there is a heavy feeling of sadness and grief, counterbalanced by a strong will to hold on to life, to remain open, and to support those who are suffering. A popular concert hall, hip restaurants and cafes in a young, multicultural neighborhood—why do you think the terrorists chose to target these places?   I think we should avoid misunderstandings on this. The terrorists had planned attacks on places they knew would be crowded on a Friday night: a football stadium, a major concert venue, very popular bars and restaurants, places where people gather in masses. I do not believe we should post-rationalize the killings as an attack on people who drink wine, who listen to music, who have a certain lifestyle. The main message of the terrorists is that this can happen to everyone.   Let’s be mindful that, in parallel to the attacks at the Bataclan (the concert venue) and at bars and restaurants in the center of Paris, a massive bomb attack was planned at the Stade de France (the French national stadium in the northern suburbs of Paris), where tens of thousands of people of all kinds of ethnic and social backgrounds were gathered to watch a football game. If the terrorists had managed to enter the stadium, this could have been a massive tragedy.   One of your reporters was at the Stade de France during the attacks. What is the mood like in the suburbs at the moment?   Everyone is as sad, shocked, and affected as in the center of Paris. Twelve Street Press journalists are currently reporting from Paris and from the suburbs. They tell me that the mood in the suburbs is as heavy and depressed as it is in Paris—no difference.   A few days ago, similar terror attacks took place in Beirut. After the Paris attacks, how do French people relate to what happened in Lebanon?   The Beirut attacks seemed far from us, like the Garissa University tragedy in Kenya, where 147 students were killed by al-Qaeda terrorists. In our minds, those incidents happened in faraway places, and we were somehow protected from that. In France, we are not prepared to live with the risk of attacks that could happen at any moment. But now we will have to cope with it.   Frankly, our society is full of resources. It will reorganize and reimagine itself in light of the recent attacks.   In your opinion, how did the French media handle the attacks? What should be the responsibility of the media in such situations, and how are the various dynamics at play affecting your editorial choices?   The mainstream media did well at providing raw information and hard facts. However, at StreetPress, we practice a type of journalism focused on public debates and in-depth analyses. We will particularly aim to offer a platform for expression for the young generation, which was hit hardest by the attacks on Friday night. In the coming days, we are going to publish articles by young journalists and will organize live debates between our journalists and our readers.   Under the state of emergency promulgated by the French authorities, public gatherings in physical public places are unauthorized for an indefinite period of time. In this context, I believe the media should fully embrace its role as an open space for public debate.   Many positive grassroots initiatives emerged on social media after the attacks. Can you tell us more about these?   In the first 24 hours, social media had a strong positive impact. Streets around the places that were attacked were blocked by the police for two to three hours; hence, survivors of the attacks tried to escape from the areas at risk, but could not find shelters and were left vulnerable on the streets. As a response, social media users launched the hashtag #PorteOuverte (#OpenDoor) to encourage people living in the neighborhood to open their homes to survivors of the attacks, some of them injured. This is a positive use of social media, and I hope such practices will continue.   * StreetPress is a French-language publication that covers marginalized communities in France.   http://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1447628194-gardons-nos-portesouvertes http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2015/11/15/on-s-embrassera-en-abominables-pervertis_1413569 http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/141115/la-peur-est-notre-ennemie http://www.opendemocracy.net/edwy-plenel/why-fear-is-our-enemy http://l461.mj.am/nl/l461/116yt.html   We can’t ignore that atrocities happen every single day in the world, by Jeanne Kay.   Since the Paris massacre of Friday the 13th, I’ve witnessed an unraveling of questions and debates over the question of selective mourning. Who gets to be mourned and on what grounds?   Who gets to be marked “safe” on Facebook’s Safety Check feature when tragedies occur? Which atrocities deserve public and media attention, and which are relegated as too routine to be noticed?   Of course, all of these questions are based on the premise that the sphere of consciousness that matters most in the West is our own. If it’s not on CNN, in Le Monde, or trending on Twitter, it didn’t happen. It’s an unfair standard, of course. But these are the sources of information that influence public opinion, which in turn affects policymaking—including on foreign policy.   So let’s ask the question: Is it, in fact, wrong for Westerners to mourn the victims of the Paris massacre more acutely and more vocally than those of, say, the recent Beirut bombings?   My father was French and I spent several years of my childhood in France. I’ve lived in Paris and have close friends who live there now. I’ve seen a concert or two at the Bataclan and probably took the Métro to Oberkampf one night to have dinner at Petit Cambodge. For me, part of the shock of the massacre came from this proximity and familiarity: These places felt safe.   It could’ve been me among the dead, or some of my best friends. It’s like learning that the flight you missed crashed. Or that your best friend’s school burnt down a year after she graduated. When it hits so close to home, who lives and who dies feels crushingly arbitrary.   Yet when it hits farther away—in Beirut, Damascus, or Baghdad—it doesn’t feel nearly so immediate, even if others are suffering in exactly the same way.   I don’t think that it’s fair or helpful to judge these feelings too harshly: There’s a natural, socially engrained tendency to have stronger feelings towards proximate objects with which we have direct links—like the Little Prince caring more about his Rose even though there were many other Roses which were just the same, because il l’avait apprivoisée.   Part of the selective mourning by the non-French does come from a sense of familiarity with Paris—having a French friend, for instance, or having a fond memory of a trip there, or perhaps cherishing a romanticized vision of the city acquired through film or literature.   This is understandable. But we can’t ignore that atrocities like these happen every single day in the world, in places that don’t ignite these feelings of recognition, familiarity, or empathy for most of us in the powerful countries of the West. They are familiar and recognizable and mournable to many, many others in just as deep and real a way as Paris seems to us.   Others whose humanity is exactly equal to ours, whose capacity for feeling pain, trauma, and loss has in no way been lessened by the frequency with which it is mobilized—others with the same rights to go see a concert on a Friday night without a care in the world.   These daily tragedies and crimes are just as horrific, destructive, and unacceptable—and usually afflict many more people on a much more intense rhythm—as the ones we Westerners tend to care more about.   The solution isn’t to “care less” about the Paris massacre, but rather to use those feelings as a window into what others—especially those we routinely forget to recognize or remember—feel on a routine basis.   To remind ourselves that we have the privilege and luxury of forgetting about war on most days.   Our feelings of horror, sadness, and even trauma towards victims we instinctively recognize as our own should wake us up to our daily forgetfulness about the identical horror, mourning, and trauma inflicted on the Others, the Strangers, the unfamiliar Non-Us of our world.   It’s therefore not a question of Paris or Lebanon, or of not having the right to mourn Paris today if we didn’t mourn Beirut yesterday.   Instead, let our current grief over the familiar be a wake-up call so that we not only remember to grieve the lives lost in unfamiliar places tomorrow but actively work to stop all parties from inflicting them in the first place.   Who knows? Through the struggle for more just foreign policies, those faraway places might end up becoming just as familiar, just as close to our hearts as those Parisian streets.   Paris: Reaffirming the importance of defending Human Rights, by Kenneth Roth. (Executive Director-Human Rights Watch)   This past month has seen a sudden proliferation of horrific attacks on ordinary people apparently committed by the terrorist group IS. Between the slaughter in Paris, the bombs in Beirut, Baghdad, and Ankara, and the downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai, we are seeing an intensification of the random use of violence against the general population to score political points.   Having lived through Al Qaeda’s attack on New York City some 14 years ago, I can imagine how the survivors feel—the deep sense of loss, the impression that my city has been deeply violated, that spaces I had considered perfectly safe were now suddenly menacing.   Nothing can justify these despicable attacks. They are an affront to the most basic principles of human rights, which value human life over its cheap manipulation for some cause.   IS at first blush may seem immune to the traditional shaming of the human rights movement. But even IS must draw recruits and build support, and we can make that more difficult by showing the ugly reality of the political order that it would prescribe—the sexual enslavement of women, the casual execution of people for the slightest “offense” or for being of the “wrong” religion or political background, the imposed rigidity of an imagined pre-modern era. We can highlight the offense to practicing Muslims around the world that the architects of such cruelty and inhumanity would deem their regime “Islamic.”   But the human rights movement’s defense against ISIS depends on far more than our reporting on ISIS. In our day-to-day work documenting and denouncing all violations of human rights—including in governments’ reaction to IS and other such groups—we reinforce the basic values that enable the world to condemn the actions of ISIS as so abhorrent. Tending the fundamental rights and freedoms that usually contains such aberrations is essential for rejecting this particularly ugly one.   So at a moment of horror and shock, at a moment when those of us who confront these issues may be feeling doubt and despair, it is important to remember that these outrages to our core principles provide all the more urgent reason for us to carry out our work. The human rights principles that IS has been flouting with increasing depravity cannot be taken for granted. It is at moments of profound challenge like today that our defense of them is most important.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/11/16/paris-moment-profound-challenge http://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2015/fra-expresses-shock-and-outrage-attacks-france http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16762&LangID=E http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=52572#.Vk1Xn16pUd9 http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/11/lebanon-beirut-bombings-reveal-appalling-disregard-for-human-life/ http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=52591#.Vk0FKF6pUd8 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=52612#.Vk-8tV6pUd8
	Stop the Violence. Protect Health Care by Federation of Red Cross, Red Crescent Societies   In the last few months, a number of attacks against health-care workers, medical transports and facilities have taken place in several countries, like Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen to mention a few. These incidents are taking place in countries with fragile health-care systems that are already struggling to treat the numbers of people affected by the ongoing conflicts there. In some cases, the situation is made yet worse by the restrictions placed on aid workers, preventing them from getting to the people who need them.   Both the attacks themselves and their consequences are of serious concern. These were attacks on medical personnel and facilities protected under international humanitarian law, leaving death and destruction in their wake and disrupting vital health-care services. All those involved with the Health Care in Danger initiative are alarmed by the long-term impact these attacks may have on people’s health.   These are not isolated incidents. The International Committee of the Red Cross, through the Health Care in Danger project, has been gathering data in 11 countries since January 2012. By December 2014, 2,398 attacks against health-care personnel, facilities and vehicles had been recorded. This alarming situation highlights the urgent need for measures to prevent future violence.   The Health Care in Danger initiative, with the support of experts and professionals from different backgrounds, including from governments, the armed forces, humanitarian agencies, international professional associations and health-care services, as well as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, has formulated a substantive body of recommendations and identified practical measures that, if implemented by all those concerned, would increase the protection of health-care services in armed conflict or other emergencies.   As members and partners of the Health Care in Danger initiative, we call on States, weapon bearers, international and national humanitarian agencies and health organizations to give urgent attention to the recommendations resulting from the Health Care in Danger initiative.   In particular, we urge States to make every effort to investigate and condemn attacks against health-care personnel, facilities and medical transports that violate international law, including international humanitarian law.   To revise their domestic legislation and its implementation to ensure that it is in line with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law.   To ensure that the military are properly trained to know, abide by and respect the applicable legal framework for the protection of health care as well as ethical duties of health-care personnel.   To cooperate with health and humanitarian organizations to ensure that health personnel are specially trained to know, apply and uphold their legal and ethical duties.   To actively seek to raise awareness of the proper use of the red cross/red crescent/red crystal emblems by armed forces and by the population at large.   To take the opportunity of the forthcoming International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent to further their commitment to implementing recommendations and measures on protecting health care in armed conflict and other emergencies and to consider submitting specific voluntary pledges on this issue.   We urge State armed forces to respect in all circumstances, in particular in situations of armed conflict or other emergencies, health care workers, facilities and medical transports and to allow patients to receive adequate care, regardless of their affiliation.   To revise military rules of engagement and operational practice and procedures to ensure that recommendations and measures for the protection of the delivery of health care are included therein and that military personnel are adequately trained in them.   We call on all non-state actors to respect in all circumstances, in particular in situations of armed conflict or other emergencies, health care workers, facilities and medical transports and to allow patients to receive adequate care, regardless of their affiliation.   We encourage international and national humanitarian and health organizations to continue to advocate for the preservation of principled humanitarian action, the respect of the "Ethical Principles of Health Care in Times of Armed Conflict and Other Emergencies “endorsed by civilian and military health-care organizations in June 2015.   And the protection of patients, health-care personnel, facilities and medical transport in armed conflict or other emergencies and to join ongoing efforts or to start their own initiatives to those ends.   To ensure that health facilities they govern are taking necessary actions to reduce the risk of violence within the facilities premises.   * Health Care in Danger is an initiative of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to make access to, and delivery of, health care safer in armed conflict or other emergencies. The initiative is supported by a number of partners and organisations, members of the Health Care in Danger Community of Concern.   http://healthcareindanger.org/ http://healthcareindanger.org/the-issue/ http://www.ifrc.org/en/news-and-media/opinions-and-positions/opinion-pieces/2015/stop-the-violence-protect-health-care/ http://www.icrc.org/en/document/hcid-statement http://www.safeguardinghealth.org/sites/shcc/files/SHCC2016final.pdf (60pp)   http://bit.ly/2a2tNak http://www.emro.who.int/eha/news/protecthealthworkers-stop-the-attacks-on-health-care-in-syria.html http://www.emro.who.int/eha/countries-in-crisis/index.html http://www.msf.org/en/article/20160808-syria-msf-supported-hospital-idlib-bombed-ground-amid-increased-intensity-attacks http://bit.ly/2aLCxjr http://bit.ly/2b8ij3I http://www.msf.org/en/news http://bit.ly/2bsS8qJ http://bit.ly/2bNEc7x http://bit.ly/2aQefF2 http://ab.co/29VrkZX   * UN Security Council Resolution 2286 adopted in May condemning attacks on health care workers and facilities in armed conflict: http://bit.ly/2beluch Visit the related web page
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