Columns

PLOWE | The Basis for Human Rights is Presence

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I write to invite readers to be more present with themselves and with others. 

As a senior on The Sun, I’ve produced a lot of material. While I’ve written most recently about political moral responsibility and relating the Uyghur genocide to our lives here in Ithaca, I have also written about the state of local arts, music and literature as they contribute to our capacity to just be, and to be together. Advocating for presence is a common thread throughout my writing — the concept is immense to me. 

What does it mean to be, or to be present? What greater implications does presence have beyond feeling good on the meditation cushion?

Columns

PLOWE | Human Rights Activism at Cornell: Interview with Suha Khan ’24

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On Saturday, Feb. 11, Cornell students rallied in Washington, D.C. with politicians, community leaders and students from other universities to reiterate the demands of the Uyghur Policy Act and Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act in response to the genocide in China. 

Their stand reflects an important statement of solidarity amongst those who value human rights. The rally had support from The Hong Kong Student Association, Cornell Chinese in Ithaca, Free Tibet, Free Uyghur Now, Athenai Institute, Uyghur Human Rights Association, the Uyghur American Association and others.

I spoke with Suha Khan ’24, a Cornell Interfaith Council leader who drummed up support for the rally. Zoë MeiLing Johnson-Berman ’24, who fostered solidarity amongst organizations through social media networking, also joined us for the conversation. This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Columns

SENZON | Intergovernmental Bodies in Protecting Human Rights 

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My interest in the law involves the intersection of labor and environmental law focusing on defending the rights of workers exploited by the agricultural system of America. This issue disproportionately impacts undocumented immigrants who don’t have the legal right to unionize given their lack of citizenship. And yet, seventy-three percent of all agricultural workers in the United States belong to immigrant backgrounds, while an estimated three percent of all workers in the U.S. belong to unions in agriculture. In addition to this overwhelmingly large population of agricultural workers that belong to immigrant backgrounds, twenty-eight percent of this workforce is women. This topic of discussion is not directly related to what I will be discussing today, but I figured offering context on my interest in the law might explain my inclination to enroll in a related course at CLS.

Columns

PLOWE | What About the Genocide?

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The center of Asia remains virtually invisible to most of the students here at Cornell. The invisible Asia is the land of Tibet and Xinjiang, currently the site for an ongoing genocide, where there is no religious, cultural, intellectual or bodily freedom. Islam is institutionally targeted as “terrorism” and Tibetan Buddhist institutions are under strict Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control. 

Recently, health workers in Xinjiang expressed that there were positive results as they treated COVID-19 patients with traditional Uyghur medicine, which dates as far back as 2,500 years. This is an irony, as the Chinese government imprisons Muslim Uyghurs for not conforming to Han culture. Uyghurs ought to have the right to practice their cultural traditions without fearing persecution and appropriation.

Columns

LEVIN | Sit This World Cup Out

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As citizens of the world, Cornellians love the most popular global sport: soccer. Some of our first memories are on the field. I started playing aged four and grew up dribbling past opponents, tackling heavy-set forwards and scoring to the applause of my family on the sidelines. At a time of great polarization in America and abroad, the beautiful game, as it’s called, unites us, but we also need to recognize when the principles of sportsmanship are ignored for greed — that is my concern with the Qatar World Cup, which opened on Nov. 20. 

china

GUEST ROOM | Cornell Has a Responsibility to the Uyghur People when Collaborating in China

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In light of the ongoing discussions about the lack of awareness, sensitivity and the objectionable response from members of the Brooks School of Public policy in conversations regarding human rights violations against Uyghur people in China, we should assess Cornell’s policies and initiatives surrounding the ongoing genocide. Cornell has extensive collaborations in China, ranging from scholarships such as the Tang Cornell-China program to the Cornell-Tsinghua Dual Degree Finance MBA program, Cornell Institute for China Economic Research and the Cornell China Center. In fact, Cornell has the greatest number of collaborations — amounting to over 10 percent of all international collaborations — in China, including off-campus programs at Peking University. In these numerous efforts affiliated with China, what is Cornell doing to support the Uyghur people and voice opposition to the massive genocide by the Chinese government? Human rights violations against Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other Muslim minority groups perpetrated by the Chinese government range from denial of the expression of civil and political rights, freedom of religion, to the right to a fair trial.

Columns

GUEST ROOM | ‘Singling Out’ President Pollack’s Divestment Confusion

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In President Pollack’s much-publicized statement rejecting Students for Justice in Palestine’s proposed divestment measures against Israeli occupation, Cornell’s leader claimed that such action would “unfairly single out one country in the world for sanction, when there are many countries around the world whose governments’ policies may be viewed as controversial.” In case she has forgotten, we would like to remind her of the other countries whose human rights violations have been brought to her attention by anti-imperialist members of the campus community. In May 2017, Pollack’s administration declined to take action to utilize Cornell’s purchasing power to help curb militia violence in the Congo in accordance with the demands of the global “conflict-free” movement. A resolution that earned the near-unanimous support from the Student Assembly was unilaterally dismissed, even though the relatively uncontroversial conflict-free campaign provided Cornell with a feasible action plan to directly address the country’s human rights violations. University leadership simply couldn’t be bothered to care about this powerful student-led effort, let alone act on it. The following month, an SA resolution authored by human rights organizers and Native American student leaders asked the University to divest from dirty pipeline projects that violate Indigenous sovereignty and put the future of all peoples at stake.

Dueling Columns

JOHNS | Reining In Iran’s Brutal Regime

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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new dueling columns feature. In this feature, Michael Johns ’20 and Giancarlo Valdetaro ’21 debate, “Forty years after the Iranian Revolution, what posture should the U.S. take on the Islamic Republic?” Read the counterpart column here. An unidentified man was publicly hanged in the Iranian city of Kazeroon last month, one of thousands of Iranians executed on charges of homosexuality in the country since its 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s despotic legal system and practice of secret executions make it easy to underestimate the magnitude of Iran’s human rights abuses, which also have targeted political opponents and religious minorities. Yet, while numbers are hard to come by, human rights experts are nearly unanimous in placing Iran among the world’s worst human rights violators.

Featured in Category

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: An Invitation to President Pollack on Qatar

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To the Editor:

As student labor organizers involved with Cornell’s United Students Against Sweatshops chapter, we heartily welcomed The Sun’s Feb. 5 editorial on the decades-old discussion surrounding Cornell’s operation of a medical campus outside the capital city of Qatar. We hope to further contextualize the longstanding fight to secure a third-party investigation into working conditions at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, with an eye towards future concerted action. To do so, we must first touch on relevant aspects of this campus’s rich history of student-driven labor organizing. At the turn of the millennium, the prolific USAS network mobilized to counter the influence of a Clinton-made organization, the Fair Labor Association, whose corporate ties clearly compromised its ability to independently monitor sweatshop conditions.