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Brunei Travel: Ready to be stoned to death? How will WTTC and UNWTO respond?

March 30, 2019 by Forimmediaterelease

Brunei is becoming a deadly place to visit starting April 3, specially if you are member of the LGBT Community.

Next week the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) will have their annual summit in Seville, Spain. Tourism leaders from around the globe will meet and listen to keynote speaker U.S. President Obama. Will President Obama, UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili, or WTTC CEO Gloria Guevara say something on what is developing in Brunei?

No country in the world so far issued travel warnings against Brunei. U.S. authorities have a level 2 travel advisories against Germany or the Bahamas but find travel for Americans perfectly safe when a new law threatens citizens and visitors, including children to be subject to death by stoning for same-sex sexual acts and amputation for robbery. Such a law will come into effect in Brunei Darussalam on April 3.

Brunei is a tiny nation on the island of Borneo, in 2 distinct sections surrounded by Malaysia and the South China Sea. It’s known for its beaches and biodiverse rainforest, much of it protected within reserves. The capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, is home to the opulent Jame’Asr Hassanil Bolkiah mosque and its 29 golden domes. The capital’s massive Istana Nurul Iman palace is the residence of Brunei’s ruling sultan

“Pending provisions in Brunei’s Penal Code would allow stoning and amputation as punishments – including for children, to name only their most heinous aspects,” said Rachel Chhoa-Howard, Brunei Researcher at Amnesty International.

“Brunei must immediately halt its plans to implement these vicious punishments and revise its Penal Code in compliance with its human rights obligations. The international community must urgently condemn Brunei’s move to put these cruel penalties into practice.”

These punishments are provided for in newly-implemented sections of the Brunei Darussalam Syariah Penal Code that are due to come into force on 3 April 2019, according to a discreet notice on the Attorney General’s website.

“To legalize such cruel and inhuman penalties is appalling of itself. Some of the potential ‘offences’ should not even be deemed crimes at all, including consensual sex between adults of the same gender,” said Rachel Chhoa-Howard. “These abusive provisions received widespread condemnation when plans were first discussed five years ago.”

Amnesty expressed grave concerns over the Penal Code when the code’s first phase was implemented in April 2014.

“Brunei’s Penal Code is a deeply flawed piece of legislation containing a range of provisions that violate human rights,” said Rachel Chhoa-Howard. “As well as imposing cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments, it blatantly restricts the rights to freedom of expression, religion, and belief, and codifies discrimination against women and girls.”

Stoning and a hunt to kill members of the LGBT community is not an isolated problem in Brunei alone. Brunei is joining countries like Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Tanzania.

Background

Brunei Darussalam has signed but not yet ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and has rejected all recommendations to this effect in its human rights review at the UN in 2014.

Under international human rights law, corporal punishment in all its forms, such as stoning, amputation or whipping, constitutes torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, which is prohibited in all circumstances.

Acts of torture and other ill-treatment are absolutely proscribed in the main international human rights instruments, most of which Brunei has not signed or ratified. In addition, this prohibition is also recognized as a peremptory rule of customary international law, meaning that every state is bound by it even if they are not a party to a relevant human rights treaty. All acts of torture constitute crimes under international law.

While Brunei retains the death penalty in law, it is abolitionist in practice. One new death sentence was imposed in 2017, for a drug-related offense.

Just a few years ago the Sultan of Brunei told UNWTO Secretary-General and WTTC CEO: “We will do our best to support tourism. Tourism is of strategic importance for Brunei and based on two principal resources: the country’s pristine rainforest in the heart of Borneo, and its spiritual and cultural heritage. Environmental protection and conservation must, therefore, lie at the heart of any tourism development, the Sultan had stressed.

Travel News | eTurboNews

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Uganda travel and trafficking

March 23, 2019 by Forimmediaterelease

Sub-Saharan Africa has enormous tourism potential: leopards lounging in acacia trees, elephant herds drifting across vast savannah plains, gorillas and chimps rioting in deep forests, the earliest traces of human beings and their works. But according to the World Bank, the region receives a mere 3% of global tourism arrivals.

What scares tourists off may have something to do with an unfair, continent-wide reputation for lawlessness. There is a way around this. During the 1970s, entrepreneurs created the idea of eco-tourism as an alternative to the sun and sand package tours that wreaked havoc on the environment and local communities. Perhaps the eco-tourism concept could be expanded to encompass human rights more broadly, focusing not just on the ethical conduct of companies but on governments as well. Thus, travelers could be assured that their fees, taxes and entertainment dollars aren’t being used to support regimes engaged in grand corruption, human rights abuses, wildlife trafficking and the persecution of minorities.

Uganda’s new tourism push is a case in point. The government hopes to welcome four million visitors in 2020, more than double the current number. The Uganda Investment Authority is expediting bids from eco-tourism companies to develop ten sites in the nation’s national parks, including Queen Elizabeth, Masindi and Kidepo Valley. The World Bank has lent Uganda $25 million dollars to build a new hotel and tourism school, purchase equipment such as buses, game drive trucks, boats and binoculars and hire public relations firms to market Uganda in US, Europe, the Middle East and China. In October, Kanye West boosted the publicity effort by recording a music video in one of Uganda’s fine resorts and also visited Statehouse where he presented President Yoweri Museveni with a pair of his patented sneakers. Then in January, Tourism Minister Godfrey Kiwanda launched a beauty contest to identify Miss “Curvy” Uganda, whose zaftig figure will appear in tourism brochures.

The downside of Uganda’s tourism campaign is that every safari-goer it attracts will pay fees to government agencies such as the Uganda Wildlife Authority, which is currently engaged in a program of violent evictions that have left thousands of people in northern Uganda’s Acholi region destitute, and has also been implicated in trafficking in ivory, pangolin scales and other illegal wildlife products, both inside Uganda and in neighboring countries.

Since 2010, thousands of huts in Apaa, northern Uganda have been burned to the ground, and animals and belongings stolen by UWA officials and members of other security agencies. The government claims the area is gazetted for a game reserve, but residents say their families have lived in the area for generations and have nowhere else to go. Sixteen people have been killed and thousands, mainly women and children are now homeless. Some of the raids appear to have been carried out by members of the neighboring Madi ethnic group, and government officials have characterized them as ethnically motivated. However, the Madi and Acholi have lived in peace for generations and some suspect that senior government officials may be inciting the attackers.

Meanwhile, CITES, the international body that tracks endangered species has named Uganda as a global hub for the illegal wildlife trade. After damning reports about the scale of poaching in Kenya and Tanzania revealed that elephant populations were plummeting in both countries, stricter laws and better enforcement resulted in a nearly 80 percent decline in poaching in Kenya since 2013. Tougher enforcement has also resulted in steep declines in poaching in Tanzania. But between 2009 and 2016 an estimated 20 tons of ivory were trafficked via Uganda, along with over 3000 kilograms of pangolin scales.

The trade in wildlife products appears to be organized by senior officers of the army and UWA. Ivory traffickers working along the Uganda-Congo border told Belgian political scientist Kristof Titeca that much of their loot came from Congo and the Central African Republic, where the Ugandan Army, with US support, unsuccessfully tried to track down the notorious warlord Joseph Kony between 2012 and 2017. Thus, US taxpayers may have inadvertently facilitated Uganda’s wildlife crimes.

Uganda’s recently established Standards, Utilities and Wildlife Court, which is supposed to deal with trafficking crimes has begun prosecuting and convicting low level traffickers—the men who transport the goods to Kampala for export – but as yet there have been no prosecutions of those suspected of organizing the trade. When 1.35 metric tons of confiscated ivory disappeared from a Uganda Wildlife Authority storehouse in 2014, the director was suspended for two months and then reinstated. According to a 2017 Enough Project report, two senior Uganda Wildlife Authority officials quit the force in despair after apprehending traffickers and then being ordered by officials in President Yoweri Museveni’s office to drop the cases.

Uganda’s own elephants have largely been spared, and their numbers may even have increased in recent years. But other animals have not been so lucky. In 2014, the UWA granted a local company a license to collect thousands of pounds of scales from the shy, aardvark-like creatures known as pangolins. While officials claimed that the intention was to purchase the scales from people who’d collected them from animals who had died of natural causes, there’s little doubt that huge numbers of pangolins were killed as a result.

Unfortunately, the World Bank’s assistance to Uganda could be making things worse. It’s $25 million Tourism Sector Competitiveness and Labor Force Development loan, approved in 2013, is part of a larger $100 million Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project which, according to project documents, allocates 21% – or $21 million, to government agencies, including the Uganda Wildlife Authority. World Bank spokespersons declined say how much of that will go to the UWA, and what the money will spent on, other than “systems strengthening and procuring tourism assets.”

Before the World Bank launches any project, it commissions an environmental impact assessment, as well as a review of safeguards to protect habitats and indigenous people who might be affected by it. In this case, the safeguards and Impact Assessment documents don’t consider the risk that Ugandan security agencies, including the army and UWA, might use funds raised from the project to engage in human rights abuses and trafficking.

This matters because countless development groups, including the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the Red Cross and the World Bank itself– have seen millions of dollars in funding sink into Uganda’s swamp of corruption. Billions more have been siphoned out of the Treasury and the workers’ pension fund and or in inflated bids for infrastructure projects such as roads and dams.

In power for 33 years, Uganda’s leader Yoweri Museveni has hung on in part by spending funds looted from various development projects on voter bribery and harsh repression. In 2017, he sent Special Forces troops into Parliament to beat up MPs who were trying to block debate about a bill that would enable him to rule for life. One of the victims, MP Betty Nambooze, may never walk unaided again. Then in August, the same Special Forces arrested and tortured four other MPs and dozens of their supporters, including the famous pop star-politician Bobi Wine

Some of Museveni’s opposition-politician-victims, if allowed to govern, might – like the leaders of Tanzania and Kenya–do a better job of protecting Uganda’s people and its wildlife than he has. But as long as the World Bank and other donors keep allowing Museveni’s government to get away with corruption, human rights abuses and wildlife trafficking, these activities will only continue. While the World Bank continues to ignore this reality, Uganda’s prospective investors and tourists should steer their dollars towards less odious regimes.

Travel News | eTurboNews

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Ashanti, Keyshia Cole, Ja Rule to headline 2019 St. Maarten Carnival

March 18, 2019 by Forimmediaterelease

Music legends Ashanti, Keyshia Cole, and Ja Rule will be headlining a concert at the 50th Anniversary of St. Maarten Carnival. On April 25, the three globally renowned musicians will take the stage at the Soulful Company concert. Presented by the St. Maarten Carnival Development Foundation (SCDF), the concert promises to provide a night of “smooth groovin’ and boppin’.”

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of St. Maarten Carnival. Festivities will officially take place from April 20 to May 7, with pre-Carnival activities kicking off on March 16. At 33 days in overall length, St. Maarten Carnival is the longest carnival in the Caribbean.

“We’re so excited to welcome Ashanti, Keyshia Cole, and Ja Rule to St. Maarten,” stated the Director of Tourism of St. Maarten, Ms. May-Ling Chun. “To have these three artists, all who have impacted the international music scene on such a large scale, headline at the 50th anniversary of our renowned Carnival is a joy and an honor. We cannot wait to see the energy that they bring to the stage.”

The three headliners will also be joined by two of St. Maarten’s best young singers and their bands. Local talents Natisha Hanson and Kenyo Baly will accompany the headliners on stage, representing The Friendly Island at the second iteration of the Soulful Company concert.

“We have so many gifted musicians in St. Maarten, and to bring our island’s local musical talent together with these artists is sure to bring forth a unique, incredible concert,” said St. Maarten’s Minister of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transport, and Telecommunication, Stuart Johnson. What’s more, we look forward to the opportunities this collaboration will bring forth for these exceptional St. Maarteners, and can’t wait to see them showcase their musical gifts on the main stage.”

Travel News | eTurboNews

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