PARIS (AP) – Best known for investigating the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Agnès Callamard has made a career out of uncovering extrajudicial killings.
The French human rights expert’s focus on rights violations takes on new dimensions as she takes charge of Amnesty International and turns her attention to what she believes is one of the world’s most pressing issues: vaccination equality to end the coronavirus pandemic, which has eroded freedoms worldwide.
Amnesty International has released its annual report Wednesday, arguing that governments have used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to tackle human rights, whether originally intended or not. The comprehensive report focused on governments in Myanmar and Russia, among others, but also criticized the use of coronavirus-related police powers in places like Britain and the United States against protesters.
The only way to end the virus – and the abuses that accompanied it, primarily against the world’s most vulnerable – is to distribute vaccines fairly and globally, she told The Associated Press Tuesday.
“What we found is that the victims of COVID, whether in the UK, in France, in the US, in India, in the Middle East or in Brazil, those victims were mainly among the most disenfranchised and vulnerable groups, ” she said. “As a global community, as a national community, we failed the test that COVID-19 represented.”
Callamard rarely hesitates to call out the powerful. In 2019, as UN Special Rapporteur, she concluded that there was “credible evidence” that Khashoggi’s murder had been state sanctioned. She also investigated the US drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and concluded it was illegal. Earlier this week, she said there was one real risk that Russia subjected opposition leader Alexei Navalny to “a slow death”.
She said she will no longer lead her own investigations, as she has for years for the UN, but will continue to declare human rights violations as she sees them. And the pandemic has exposed a lot. Ending it, she said, will expose even more, especially among rich and powerful countries that have bought more vaccines than they need.
“We not only buy everything, but we also make sure that others cannot produce it. In the name of what? In the name of profit and in the name of greed, ”said Callamard, referring to the European Union and US decision to block a proposal to relax intellectual property restrictions on patents related to coronavirus treatments and vaccines.
One of its proposals is in the same direction as the Biden government’s call this week for a minimum global corporate tax. In a preface to Amnesty’s report she wrote before Monday’s announcement by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Callamard said the global tax system had produced more losers than winners.
“Global taxation is a way to rebalance equality,” she said. “It’s a way of ensuring that those who have the least don’t always have to give the most.”
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