Ιδεογραφήματα

18 December 2014

Greece : Report unveils human rights violations stemming from austerity policy

Athens, Paris, 18 December 2014 – Austerity measures adopted in response to the economic crisis have adversely impacted human rights, such as the rights to work and health, and curtailed fundamental freedoms in Greece, denounce FIDH and its member organisation the Hellenic League for Human Rights (HLHR) in a report released today.

The report gathers findings from a mission of investigation carried out by our organisations in January 2014. It depicts a country where economic hardship and austerity combined have threatened human rights and democratic standards across different sectors, from social and economic rights, to civil and political ones.

It also exposes the risks inherent to policies that have ignored the adverse impact they were bound to have on society and points to the responsibilities that national and international institutions, particularly the EU and its member states, bear for such violations. The report reaches conclusions that are valid far beyond the Greek case, and indeed apply to all countries that have been undergoing economic assistance in response to a severe economic recession.

As a further extension to the Greek bailout has been negotiated within the Eurogroup and Greece is undergoing presidential elections, the report signals that what has been shrinking alongside public budgets, in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, is the space for individual rights and freedoms.

“The measures taken by Greece to meet its lenders’ demands proves a readiness, at the national as much as at the international level, to sacrifice nearly everything to economic recovery” declared FIDH President Karim Lahidji, in Athens for the release of the report. “While we accept that exceptional circumstances can require exceptional responses, the way policies were adopted and implemented in this context clearly failed to respect international standards”, he added.

The draconian targets for deficit and debt reduction set by the Troika were achieved mainly through cuts to public expenditure, including in essential services such as work and healthcare, without any consideration for the need to preserve minimum levels and meet minimum core obligations with respect to those rights. Authorities have thus overlooked the disastrous social effects that the programmes agreed with the Troika would likely produce, and failed to address pre-existing conditions – particularly regarding equal access to economic and social rights - that these exacerbated. In fact, the measures’ impact on human rights was never considered by neither Greece nor the Troika.

The one-sighted focus on economic and financial targets proved harmful to an already traumatised labour market and healthcare system. Massive cuts in public sector’s employment and a failure to tackle the fundamental social needs arising from the crisis have fuelled a sharp rise in unemployment, which touched unprecedented levels at 28% (September 2013) and 60,8% for the young (February 2013), before setting at 25,7% and 49,3% respectively. It also exacerbated pre-existing inequalities, with vulnerable categories paying the highest toll for a reduced access to work and worsening working conditions. Minimum wage was cut after February 2012 (when the second bailout was being negotiated) by 22% for all workers aged over 25 and 32% for under 25, while reforms aimed at making the labour market more ‘flexible’ significantly reduced protection for workers’ rights. Austerity clearly increased inequality.

Access to basic healthcare has also been severely impaired by the cuts to the public health budget and essential public health services and programmes. Doctors revealed that they sometimes had to refuse patients or postpone important surgeries due to a reduced number in hospital beds and cuts in an already understaffed and strained workforce, amongst other things. This, coupled with increased difficulties to contract health insurance, especially for the unemployed, has severely hindered access to healthcare, despite recent reforms aimed at ensuring access to public services to the uninsured. Again, vulnerable groups including women, migrants and the youth suffer a disproportionate burden, as the report shows.

"Unlike finances, human rights and fundamental freedoms cannot benefit from international bailouts” said Konstantinos Tsitselikis, HLHR President. “Economic and fiscal policies have blatantly disregarded their devastating social impacts and authorities have failed to provide the needed social support.”

Civil and political rights have also been undermined. The social unrest prompted by an austerity agenda in whose design the population has not been implicated – in blatant disregard for all regular channels for decision-making- and the deteriorating living conditions have been met with increasingly violent response and brutal repression by the authorities, while incidents are rarely investigated and hardly ever prosecuted. Far-right groups, most notably neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, gather increasing support as they draw on people’s discontent and a strong anti-austerity agenda. The government has also adopted an increasingly authoritarian stance towards public criticism, making the social and professional environment increasingly oppressive for independent media and other dissenting voices. This climate led, in summer 2013, to closing the Public Radio and Television Broadcast Service ERT, in a move that provoked public outrage in Europe and overseas.

By outlining the challenges that the country is facing and assessing them against international human rights standards, the report intends to show that what started as an economic and financial crisis has turned into an unprecedented assault on human rights and democratic standards in all countries sharing a similar fate. It calls on all the actors involved to address these challenges and overhaul an approach that threatens the very foundations on which the EU and its member states are built.

Although the Greek state bears primary responsibility for the human rights violations that occurred on its territory, the EU and IMF in imposing anti-crisis measures have also breached their obligations under international law. Similarly, EU Member States, which set up the Troika and endorsed its proposals, have breached their own obligations to assist Greece in fulfilling its human rights commitments’. The EU has in particular breached the obligation to respect, protect and promote human rights deriving from its own founding treaties and the EU Charter for Fundamental Rights. “I seriously doubt whether any human rights concerns were ever raised in designing and implementing the country’s “rescue” plans. On the contrary, human rights violations appear as having simply been regarded as an acceptable collateral damage in a broader crisis management, or as a well deserved answer to the ’Greek problem’. This is simply unacceptable” concluded Dimitris Christopoulos, FIDH Vice President.

Certain parts of the report received the fruitful collaboration of the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.


https://www.fidh.org/International-Fede ... -austerity

I cannot help but respond to some trolls who think they're geniuses (thankfully very few)
and give me nonsense like this...




anyone who'd like to respond to this.... gentleman, can go to his
actual post here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6U6Prh ... q6c0llugZU


it is obvious that the man hasn't seen (or heard of, not even in his sleep)
the following article:



The unprecedented genocide of the Greek people



About 36.000 souls were lost from Greece’s population just in 2017 due to the difference between the soaring numbers of deaths and the new, even bigger, drop in births. That is, an average sized Greek town was lost in 2017; something like Tripolis.
We didn’t have such an amount of casualties during the war against the invading Italian and German forces in 1940-41, in which the Greek casualties were in the vicinity of about 14.000.
The provided table below which comes from ELSTAT (Greek Statistics Authority) is indicative of the demographic collapse to which the country was deliberately driven with the imposition of the new pro-lender occupation. From 2011 onwards, we’ve been observing a continuous reduction of the population. The result is earth shattering. Greece’s population has been reduced by 151.420 people during the 2011-2017 period. Unprecedented.
And this happened because the Greek people has been led to extinction, even under physical terms, on purpose and totally deliberately, due to the occupation and distress sale policies imposed on our homeland by the lenders. The official diagram, coming from ELSTAT, provided below, shows the grοwing deficit between deaths and births in Greece.

And all this before counting forced immigration in the physical reduction of the population. Then the result becomes even more tragic. According to World Bank statistics the summed total population reduction in Greece for the 2011-2017 period adds up to 360.920 people. This population reduction in Greece is the biggest on the planet, at least concerning countries that haven’t recently been through a “hot” war.
The reduction in total employment numbers based on to ILO (International Labour Organization) data shows a reduction in employment of 267.997 people during the 2011-2017 period. Talking about a supposed success in reducing unemployment numbers under such circumstances of reduction of the working population and the population in general is nothing more than a macabre joke.
And this country is rife with macabre jokes. Because in this country of the “Foolish Fir-trees” we can see anything ranging from campaigns to save strays and the reduction of motor vehicle accident victims to the agonizing cries for the extinction of rare unfortunate species of the animal kingdom. But we won’t hear a breath about the demographic collapse imposed by the occupation regime, which in the legal language of the whole world is called genocide. I repeat: Genocide!
The reason is simple. With the occupation regime in our country, established for the benefit of the lenders and a domestic gang of subservient boondogglers of politics and economy, the lives of Greeks aren’t even worth as much as a stray’s. It’s not even worth seriously discussing the extermination of a whole populum. Misanthropy at its highest.
If we extend these World Bank statistics to the future we will realize that in 2060 – the year in which the “enhanced supervision” of the lenders is supposed to end – Greece’s population will have suffered an additional reduction of about 2.000.000 people. That’s about the numbers of 1960. With a very serious quality difference: the average age of the population will vastly surpass 55.
That situation, naturally, will be non-reversible. Both demographically and socially.
It’s the first time in global history that there is such a genocide taking place without armaments or military means. It’s the first time after the 2nd World War that such a mechanism of mass extermination has been activated. And it also marks the first time in Greek history, since the great descent of the northern tribes to the Balkan and Hellenic lands after the 8th century, that they’re threatened with extinction.
Will we allow this to happen as a people? Will we keep accepting that nothing can be done and consider this genocide through demographic collapse a secondary thing analogous to the “aging of the population” in other countries? Will we allow our generation and those of our children’s to be exterminated? Or will we finally take matters into our own hands by overthrowing the occupation regime before it’s too late?

http://dimitriskazakis.blogspot.com/201 ... ek_26.html

lol