k-interarma.bsky.social
Human rights lawyer (national security, warfare); humanitarian law, civilian protection, and the occasional rant about Belfast. Co-chair @soclawireland 🇮🇪 / 🇩🇿📍Belfast / NYC
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They have rights, too. The NLG even set up a hotline for troops to know their rights and the ecosystem regarding following unlawful orders.
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I continue to think about the trauma she’s already suffered, and the one they have been inflicting for the past 48 hours, some of them even sharing identifying characteristics of the victim online.
It’s clearly not about defending women and girls. It’s the direct opposite.
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This isn’t a class issue. It’s a racism issue. Painting deprivation as a cause of radicalization is false. It is context, not the chain of responsibility. / end
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But I’m also tired of this being an excuse for abject, base-level xenophobia. Working-class communities, in high levels of social deprivation, have also been capable of standing up for their neighbours, of cleaning up the aftermath of violence, of demanding a return to peace.
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We have to refuse to go on like this, and to let this spree - which will inevitably result in loss of life - go on unabated under the watchful eye of a police force that’s all but lost its purpose, if it even had any. We must resist paramilitarism and its exploitation of disenfranchisement.
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It was a fundamental mistake to have let off the pavement for those few months. The scapegoating of ordinary, working class families simply because of their known or perceived country of origin doesn’t belong in a modern society that claims to be open for business.
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We have failed to root out this disease. We have failed to respond appropriately - adequately and proportionately - to the events of summer 2024. Politicians buried a hate crime bill and their UNCERD obligations under the carpet. The sector went back to business as usual.
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We cannot continue like this. We absolutely cannot. This must be a turning point. Societal attitudes to GBV must change. The PSNI must change. The PPS is barely salvageable as is. The DoJ has to drop the blinkers. Not mentioning that racial violence and GBV are often hand in hand.
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As we said in our @soclawireland.bsky.social statement, misogyny is not antithetical to the far right. It is foundational to it. It is an insult to all victims of violence in NI, across all genders, to cynically exploit and re-traumatise in order to score extremism point before an exhausted country.
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None of those people were ever there or submitted evidence before the Education Committee on access to the RSE curriculum - in fact many align ideologically and politically with leaders and parties that are doing whatever they could to perpetuate this context of gender based violence.
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Between historical and institutional CSA, dangerous spikes in lethal DV cases and other forms of femicide, sexual violence is rampant and ubiquitous. Never did we hear about reform of the criminal justice system to be victim-centred and trauma informed.
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Over 1,600 instances of sexual violence cases were brought to the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) for the years 2023/2024. Only a handful were prosecuted. That’s not counting the submarine iceberg of non reported offenses. No one ever addressed the pandemic. No one ever did.
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And frankly the sudden and uncharacteristic focus on sexual violence would be so blatantly a grift if it wasn’t so cynically exploitative. A young girl’s life is upside down and instead of respecting her wishes and that of their family, they use her trauma as an excuse to damage.
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I don’t want to hear about legitimate concerns, and I have already heard it from the so-called anti racism sector on the radio today. There is nothing legitimate about paramilitaries burning people out of their homes. We’ve been there before and we said no, and no more.
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The goal is to terrorise. We must shift our language around racial violence. It is absolutely terror. Its goal is to paralyse actual people with very real lives and real experience into disappearing into the cracks. Its goal is to dictate government policy from the other side of the barrel.
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The animalistic racism on display in Ballymena didn’t happen overnight. Since the riots last year, arson with intent to endanger life and paramilitary intimidation have continued, this time under the radar and past the media’s attention span. It’s now loudly ugly again.
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Sheila was talking about the US, and I’m talking about NI, but fascism grows and expands. The same forces, funding streams, spokespeople and straw men are at play, whether it’s the US, the UK, France, Ireland, everywhere. Our response must also be global.
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Immigration isn’t a “problem”. It’s only a problem when dehumanization of the “other” has already advanced enough to criminalize or pathologize the most evident of human instinct, and behaviour, which is migration. Migration is never the issue.
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On the crisis: immigration policy that isn’t regulated by international law can be successful or it can fail. The crisis is the policy, not the people. The policy is wrong when it is not people-centered. Blame the system.
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And Newsom also used the right words: “LA did not have any unmet need”, meaning there is no requirement of involvement.
Remember. We’ve been there before.
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Because declarations of insurrection or emergencies will be made to justify the presence of armed troops, and other rights-limiting policies (curfews, for instance; protest bans; raids etc). Local authorities such as mayor + governor are witnesses to the actual needs of the community.
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The healthy democratic response would have been a congressional debate on abolishing ICE as a GWOT legacy. The authoritarian response is to send armed troops to bring the community response to heel.
The escalation is on Miller, not on protesters. This has to be made clear time and time again.
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We cannot issue the very correct claim that the only response to fascist violence is community support then go against community support. the people of LA, of Minneapolis, of NYC, have made their voices heard: no ICE in their communities.
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I’ve never been a fan of insisting on particular rules, especially surrounding policing, of protests. Very obviously everyone’s rights and safety should come first. Similarly, if rights come first, then response must be understood as part of that safeguarding.