The U.S. needs a plan to stop Haiti's free fall
The crisis in Haiti is worsening by the day, pushing the Western Hemisphere's poorest, most unfortunate country to the brink of collapse.
In just the first three months of this year, more than 1,600 people have been killed in gang-related violence. More than 1 million people have been displaced. Women and girls especially are left vulnerable to sexual violence. Gangs control around 85 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Town after town is falling under the control of gangs, which conduct prison raids to free inmates and bolster their ranks.
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Associated Press
38 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Rights group says global brands are at risk of links to forced labor in China's minerals industry
LONDON (AP) — Several global brands are among dozens of companies at risk of using forced labor through their Chinese supply chains because they use critical minerals or buy minerals-based products sourced from China's far-western Xinjiang region, an international rights group said Wednesday. The report by the Netherlands-based Global Rights Compliance says companies including Avon, Walmart, Nescafe, Coca-Cola and paint supplier Sherwin-Williams may be linked to titanium sourced from Xinjiang, where rights groups allege the Chinese government runs coercive labor practices targeting predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities. The report comes as China and the United States, the world's two largest economies, continue talks aimed at easing their trade dispute. The report found 77 Chinese suppliers in the titanium, lithium, beryllium and magnesium industries operating in Xinjiang. It said the suppliers are at risk of participating in the Chinese government's 'labor transfer programs,' in which Uyghurs are forced to work in factories as part of a longstanding campaign of assimilation and mass detention. Commercial paints, thermos cups and components for the aerospace, auto and defense industries are among products sold internationally that can trace their supply chains to minerals from Xinjiang, the report said. It said companies must review their supply chains. 'Mineral mining and processing in (Xinjiang) rely in part on the state's forced labor programs for Uyghurs and other Turkic people in the region,' the report said. The named companies did not immediately comment on the report. A 2022 United Nations report found China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Uyghurs are estimated to have been arbitrarily detained as part of measures the Chinese government said were intended to target terrorism and separatism. The Chinese government has rejected the U.N. claims and defended its actions in Xinjiang as fighting terror and ensuring stability. In 2021, former U.S. President Joe Biden signed a law to block imports from the Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor. The law initially targeted solar products, tomatoes, cotton and apparel, but the U.S. government recently added new sectors for enforcement, including aluminum and seafood. A recent report by the International Energy Agency said the world's sources of critical minerals are increasingly concentrated in a few countries, notably China, which is also a leading refining and processing base for lithium, cobalt, graphite and other minerals. Many of China's major minerals corporations have invested in the exploration and mining of lithium, a key component for electric vehicle batteries, in Xinjiang, Global Rights Compliance said. Xinjiang is also China's top source of beryllium, a mineral used for aerospace, defense and telecommunications, its report said.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
As crisis in Haiti worsens, UN council calls meeting to push for international support
Children —who make up nearly half of Haiti's population — are being exploited, raped and recruited by armed gangs, who have also taken over many of their schools. Some 2.85 million of them, from toddlers to teens, face famine while also being forced to flee their homes due to worsening violence. But four months after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres presented a plan to the Security Council on how to help Haiti address its alarming gang violence, the country's protracted crisis has only deepened, with no solution in sight. There is still no consensus among the council's five permanent members on the next steps to take and the U.S. is backing away, asking Congress to rescind millions of dollars in U.N. contributions. The lack of a response and budget crisis come amid a wave of fresh attacks that in April alone, displaced more than 67,000 new people after gangs moved into the country's central region. On Sunday, gangs continued their terror campaign, setting fire to a municipal market in the city of Mirebalais, in Haiti's Central Plateau and also to homes in Furcy, a rural community in the hills above Port-au-Prince where some of the country's wealthy boast vacation homes and cottages. 'When we say things are stuck, they're not just stuck in New York or Washington. It's also dealing with the need for Port-au-Prince, the government itself, the Transitional Presidential Council, to have a keener sense of urgency about what needs to be done,' said Robert Rae, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. On Wednesday, Rae, who serves as president of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, will host a special meeting on Haiti alongside the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission. The goal: to keep Haiti's protracted, multifaceted crisis in the international spotlight. 'We're not going to rest until there's a comprehensive plan for Haiti that is led by the Haitian authorities and has the full support of all the other countries in the world and the international community. That's our goal, that's our objective,' he said. But that plan, Rae said can't just focus on the security crisis. It has to also involve addressing the root causes of Haiti's perennial instability and worsening violence, which include poverty, exclusion and inequality. 'We all know it as well that the security situation feeds on the inequality and feeds on the unemployment; it feeds on the vulnerability of people, the fact that kids can't get any work, there's no work for them anywhere else, and the human trafficking that goes on. It's terrible,' said Rae, who also chairs the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti at the U.N. and has visited the country on several occasions. 'The level of violence is out of sight, and the level of safety not only in Port-au-Prince, but in the country generally, is a level that nobody can see as acceptable. 'We've got to have a coherent, effective on the ground strategy to deal with it. That's where there's a whole lot more that could happen if we could get a political will from the communities around Haiti, and also, more broadly, to support what needs to be done.' In recent months, a Haitian government task force operating out of the prime minister's office has turned to using weaponized drones to go after gang leaders after signing contracts with two private security firms. However, there has been no transparency on the value of the contracts or the rules of engagement. The government also hasn't said how it's planning on tackling the crisis, including how to stop the recruitment of children by armed groups. According to the UNICEF, the U.N.'s child welfare agency, an estimated 30% to 50% of gang members in Haiti are children, some as young as 8 years-old, and their recruitment has been soaring. 'When people say to me, 'Well, development is not so important. The real issue is security.' I say to them, you can't separate out the two, those two things go together,' Rae said. 'And you can't separate out development and security from human rights and from creating a sense of opportunity for people.' Ahead of the meeting, which will be broadcast on UN web TV, Rae and the special representative for the U.N. secretary general in Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, will host a press conference. Then they will move into discussions in addition to a representative of civil society, invitations have also been extended to senior U.N. officials, Haitian government officials and the Inter-American Development Bank. IDB President Ilan Goldfajn visited Haiti's second largest city, Cap-Haïtien, last month. Goldfajn's visit is part of efforts by Haitian authorities to get the international community to pay closer attention to areas outside of the gang-ridden capital that are also in need of attention. In a communique on Tuesday, Spain's Embassy in Port-au-Prince said that its ambassador, Marco Antonio Peñin Toledano, recently visited several project sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, known as ACEID, in the cities of Miragoâne in the Nippes region and Les Cayes. The ambassador participated in an inauguration ceremony for the rehabilitation and expansion of the drinking water supply system in the city of Miragoâne, as well as visited a similar project in Les Cayes. He also learned about other initiatives supported by Haitian civil society and Spain. During his three day tour of the region the ambassador also met with the nongovernmental organization, Biwo dwa moun, which is currently implementing a project 'Defending the Human Rights of Women, Children and Vulnerable Groups in Port-au-Prince, Cayes, Coteax, and Aquin' with funding from ACEID. The joint meeting of ECOSOC, which is responsible for coordinating the U.N.'s international work on economic and social issues, and the Peacebuilding Commission will focus on measures to address community-level peacebuilding and violence reduction, including the role of women and youth. Among the questions that will be tackled, what can the international community do to help accelerate efforts in Haiti and how can civil society help. Rae is prioritizing discussions around the recruitment of children, who now make up 30% to 50% of gangs, and prevention efforts as well as their safe exits. The issue of arms trafficking, most of which are coming from the U.S. via ports in South Florida, will also be raised. Also likely to come up is the ongoing effects of aid cuts. Last week, the World Food Program said that its warehouses in Haiti are bare and there was just enough food stock until July. An effort by the U.N. to raise $908.2 million for its Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Haiti has so far only garnered 9% of funding. Meanwhile, both the country and U.N. agencies are continuing to reel from recent U.S. government foreign aid cuts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. USAID has been a funder of foreign aid to Haiti, where in addition to the more than 1 million people internally displaced by gangs, the country is among one of the world's worst hot spots for hunger with 5.7 million Haitians, nearly half of the population, facing hunger. 'No question, the USAID decisions in Haiti have been devastating. They have had a massively negative impact on what's going on. But we also need to recognize that there needs to be other ways. We can't just throw up our hands and say, 'This is awful.' We've got to figure out, what more can we do?' Rae said. 'That's what Canada is doing, and that's what we all are continuing to do, to see 'Okay, these decisions are being made. We don't agree with the decisions, but we've got to move forward and see what else we can do.' That's the spirit with which we're addressing this thing.' In addition to providing foreign assistance to Haiti, Canada is the leading financial contributor to a U.N. Trust Fund to support the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti. As of Monday, the fund had $111.9 million in pledges with the country of Denmark being the latest to offer $1.5 million last month.
CBS News
2 hours ago
- CBS News
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is "defending bedrock constitutional protections for all of us," his lawyer says
Washington — A lawyer for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the mistakenly deported man who was recently brought back from El Salvador to face charges in the U.S., said his case is bigger than one individual. Chris Newman, who represents Abrego Garcia' family, told CBS News' Major Garrett in an interview that he does not see the case as a referendum on immigration, but as a potential turning point in the erosion of due process rights in the U.S. "The Trump administration is very invested in making this a referendum on the immigration debate, which, as you know, has become coarsened and polarized," Newman said. "And that is one way to look at it. And I think certainly a lot of people view it that way. I don't view it that way. I view this as a core constitutional order case, a core due process case. And it just so happens that a Salvadoran immigrant is defending bedrock constitutional protections for all of us." Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. on Friday to face charges of human smuggling, amid an escalating battle between the Trump administration and the courts. The case ignited widespread outrage after Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador and held in an infamous supermax prison along with hundreds of other deportees, despite a judge ruling years earlier that he shouldn't be deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration admitted that his deportation was an "administrative error." A judge had ordered the government to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the U.S., but the administration did not bring him back for months, arguing it was up to the Salvadoran government whether to release him. The indictment, which was unsealed Friday, alleges that Abrego Garcia and others transported thousands of migrants across the U.S. who were in the country illegally. It also claims that many of the undocumented migrants were members of the gang MS-13. The administration has also accused Abrego Garcia of MS-13 membership, which his family and attorneys strongly deny. "Until Friday, Kilmar Abrego Garcia had never been charged with any crime, either in the United States or El Salvador, but you wouldn't know that if you watched White House press briefings for the last two months," Newman said. "All we've been asking up until this point is for Kilmar to have his day in court so he could defend himself." In court papers over the weekend, Abrego Garcia's lawyers accused the Trump administration of an "elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders, deny due process, and disparage Abrego Garcia." The administration says it has complied with court orders by returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Newman said that Democratic lawmakers who visited Abrego Garcia when he was imprisoned in El Salvador came back with a warning from Salvadorians whose family members had been treated similarly by President Nayib Bukele's government. "We in El Salvador have no more guardrails. We have no more Supreme Court. We have no more check against President Bukele, other than public opinion. You all have to fight to make sure that you keep the bedrock institutions of your democracy because we've already lost them in El Salvador," Newman said of their message.
