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Geneva, Switzerland, Mar 16, 2017 / 02:34 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Health care access is a human right, not just a matter of philanthropy, the Holy See told the United Nations last Friday.

“All our efforts must be directed to ensure human dignity, quality of health and life and to the building of a better world for the generations to come,” said Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, the Holy See’s permanent representative to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva.

The archbishop spoke to the 34th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on March 10, under general debate on access to medicines.

Archbishop Jurkovic said health is a fundamental human right that is “essential for the exercise of many other rights” and “necessary for living a life in dignity.”

“Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and of human labor is not mere philanthropy,” he added. “This is a moral obligation.”

He praised efforts to implement sustainable development goals related to medicine. These include support for research and development of vaccines and medicine for diseases that primarily affect developing countries, and support for affordable essential medicines and vaccines.

The archbishop voiced the Holy See’s appreciation for international agreements that provide legal pathways for affordable medicine and that help the most vulnerable meet their needs. He noted the need for treatments for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other epidemics.

“Access to affordable medicines no longer represents a challenge only for the least developed and other developing countries; it has also become an increasingly urgent issue for higher-income countries as well,” he said.

There are problems like antibiotic resistance worldwide and a lack of new medicines in developing countries in the face of budget constraints on health programs, the archbishop noted.

Archbishop Jurkovic said the Catholic Church makes a “major contribution” to health care around the world through local Churches, religious institutions, and private initiatives. These Catholic institutions run over 5,100 hospitals, 16,500 dispensaries, 600 leprosy homes, and 15,600 homes for the elderly, the chronically ill or disabled.

Citing firsthand information from these institutions in the most isolated and poorest parts of the world, the archbishop said that rights to health care are “far from being realized.”

“In order to promote human dignity and to adopt policies rooted in a human rights approach, we need to confront and remove barriers, such as monopolies and oligopolies, lack of access and affordability and, in particular, both overwhelming and unacceptable human greed,” he continued.

“If we fully intend to build a better world and future for the generations that will come after us, we must remedy and correct the misalignments and policy incoherence between the intellectual property rights of inventors, innovators or manufacturers and the human rights of human persons.”

“Pope Francis decries the selfishness and short-term thinking that sabotage progress on saving the environment, on peace building, and on public health crises as well,” Archbishop Jurkovic said. “He insists on dialogue ‘as the only way to confront the problems of our world and to seek solutions that are truly effective’.”

Authentic dialogue cannot allow the individual interests of countries or specific interest groups to dominate discussions, he told the United Nations.

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Juba, South Sudan, Mar 16, 2017 / 03:34 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Amid war, displacement and hunger, South Sudan's day of prayer must lead to true repentance, a leading Catholic bishop has said.

“Our call to prayer must be sincere and honest!” Bishop Barani Eduardo Hiiboro of Tombura-Yambio emphasized. “For this prayer to become historical and meaningful for us today we must repent and sin no more!”

Bishop Hiiboro, president of the Sudan Catholic Bishops' Conference, spoke in Yamibo on the March 10 day of prayer.

The country has been embroiled in civil war since December 2013, when South Sudan's President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup. The war has been fought between their supporters, largely along ethnic lines, and peace agreements have been short-lived.

The conflict has created 2.5 million refugees. At present an estimated 4.5 million people face severe food insecurity, a number expected to rise one million by July.

President Kiir had called for the day of prayer. A three-day national dialogue on the country's future began March 15.

Bishop Hiiboro said the whole country will be watching the president closely to see whether his attitude will trend towards peace.

The country's people should also watch themselves, the bishop said: “All of us who have prayed today will also be watched whether we renounce our sinfulness of hate, violence, tribal difference, for love of South Sudan and peace.”

Bishop Hiiboro said South Sudan must commit itself to God every year as a way to unite the country.

“Continual prayers help us in stepping forward to embrace the su ffering of our country, through unified, concrete action animated by the love of Christ, to nurture peace and build bridges of communication and mutual aid in our own communities throughout South Sudan,” he said.

He encouraged efforts to explore other ways to nurture open dialogue on issues of ethnic relations, justice, forgiveness, poverty, cultural power, mental health, economic opportunity and a “pervasive culture of violence.”

“The suffering is not somewhere else, or someone else's. It is our own, in our very homes,” the bishop said.

After the day of prayer, people should walk like penitent sinners. They should stop their hateful and vengeful attitudes and free prisoners. They should reach out to refugees and the South Sudan diaspora in other countries and create a ground for all South Sudanese to dialogue, he said.

The president's call for a day of prayer had drawn some criticism.

Bishop Santo Loku Pio Doggale, Auxiliary Bishop of the national capital Juba, characterized it as “a political prayer” and “a mockery.”

“It is a joke to hear the president of the country calling prayers while at the moment, the soldiers are hunting people across South Sudan,” he told Voice of America, according to the Sudan Tribune.

He charged that the government army has displaced many people from their ancestral homes. The bishop said that President Kiir, who is Catholic, does not even go to church anymore.

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Washington D.C., Mar 16, 2017 / 04:41 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland have blocked President Donald Trump’s temporary refugee and travel ban from going into effect.

Judge Derrick Watson of the Hawaii District Court “enjoined” the enforcement of “Sections 2 and 6 of the Executive Order across the Nation” on Wednesday, just before the order was scheduled to be effective.

“Enforcement of these provisions in all places, including the United States, at all United States borders and ports of entry, and in the issuance of visas is prohibited, pending further orders from this Court,” the decision stated.

President Trump’s revised executive order – his first one was struck down by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – kept a 120-day halt on refugee admissions, although the indefinite ban on Syrian refugees was left out of the new order.

The order capped the number of refugees to be admitted into the U.S. in fiscal year 2017 at 50,000, far less than the 85,000 refugees admitted in the previous year and the 110,000 mark originally set for FY 2017 by the Obama administration.

Also left out of the order was a prioritized refugee admissions status for persecuted religious minorities.

Iraq was omitted from the list of six countries from which many foreign nationals would be banned from entering the U.S. – Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan.

Those who were “outside the United States on the effective date of this order” – March 16 – and had not obtained valid visas by that date, or did not have valid visas by 5 p.m. EST on the date of the original executive order, Jan. 27, would be barred from entry into the U.S. unless they met certain exceptions, like those traveling on diplomatic visas, those granted asylum, or refugees who had already been admitted into the U.S.

Hawaii had sued President Trump over the travel ban, charging that it unfairly discriminated against Muslims seeking entry into the U.S. Washington, California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and New York have also sued the administration.

The district court ruled that the state made a strong enough case that the order violated the Establishment Clause in restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries, and that the state’s university system and tourism industry would suffer significant injury from the travel ban.

Thus, Judge Watson temporarily barred the travel ban from going into effect, which it was to do at midnight EST on Thursday.

According to the court, the state had claimed “that the Executive Order subjects portions of the State’s population…to discrimination in violation of both the Constitution and the INA, denying them their right, among other things, to associate with family members overseas on the basis of their religion and national origin.”

Hawaii had stated in its complaint that “Muslims in the Hawai‘i Islamic community feel that the new Executive Order targets Muslim citizens because of their religious views and national origin. Dr. Elshikh believes that, as a result of the new Executive Order, he and members of the Mosque will not be able to associate as freely with those of other faiths.”

Dr. Elshikh, an imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, claimed injury because his mother-in-law, a Syrian national, had applied for a visa but feared her case would not move forward because of the travel ban.

“These injuries are sufficiently personal, concrete, particularized, and actual to confer standing in the Establishment Clause context,” Watson ruled.

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Washington D.C., Mar 16, 2017 / 04:47 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- One year after the U.S. declared that ISIS was committing genocide in Iraq and Syria, advocates for religious and ethnic minorities are asking the Trump administration what the U.S. will do next to protect the vulnerable.

“This is a call for action,” said Professor Robert Destro of the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America.

On Thursday, Destro announced a joint statement of “recommended actions” for the administration to take to protect genocide survivors.

The document was a call “to stand up constantly” for minorities “who are being targeted today by ISIS and all of its affiliates around the world,” he said.

Its signers include former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Robert George; former Congressman Frank Wolf; Bishop Francis Kalabat, eparch of the Chaldean Catholic Diocese of Detroit; and Bishop Barnaba Yousif Benham Habash of Our Lady of Deliverance Syriac Catholic diocese of the U.S. and Canada.

On March 17, 2016, the U.S. declared that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and Shi’a Muslims in Iraq and Syria. Professor Destro called it the “first truly formal declaration of genocide in American history.”

In the summer of 2014, ISIS had swept across Northern Iraq and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes. Militants raped, enslaved and killed thousands of Yazidis – including women and children – and surrounded 40,000 more on Mount Sinjar who were in danger of dying of starvation and thirst until the U.S. military intervened and sent them supplies in August of 2014.

Other religious and ethnic minorities on the Nineveh Plain, including Chaldeans, Assyrians, Turkmen, and Shabak, fled their homes when they realized they were defenseless against the ISIS onslaught. Christians in Mosul were given a choice to convert to Islam, flee, be killed, or stay and pay a jizya tax.

Experts noted that the jizya tax option was not a viable option, however, as the tax could be too high and could not sufficiently guarantee the safety of Christians who agreed to pay it.

Many have not yet returned to their homes – around 70,000 Christians are living in and around the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, east of Mosul and the Nineveh Plain. Many genocide survivors are living in temporary shelters and are reliant on churches and aid groups for their basic needs.

As ISIS forces have been cleared from some areas in the region, those who have returned to their villages have found their homes vandalized and damaged, their property confiscated, churches destroyed, and even deadly IEDs set for them.

Now, one year after the U.S. declared that genocide was taking place, the Genocide Coalition – a group of congressmen, genocide experts and human rights advocates have announced the steps they would like to see the administration of President Donald Trump take to protect these genocide survivors.

Destro hailed the meeting as the “first annual commemoration of the genocide resolution.”

The coalition is advocating on behalf of all the minorities in the region who were victims of ISIS, not just Christians, insisted Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project, one of the sponsors of the document.

“We’re very much focused on the broader community of genocide victims,” he told CNA. “This isn’t only about protecting Christians.”

“Since the genocide has been recognized, we are still waiting, but no big steps have been taken and not a lot has been changed,” Yazidi genocide survivor Nadia Murad stated at the U.S. Capitol at a Thursday event marking the one-year anniversary of the declaration.

“The mass graves that they found, they are still not being protected. There has not been an effort to investigate the mass graves and recognize the victims,” she said.

ISIS still holds much of the Sinjar region where the Yazidis lived, Murad said, as well as thousands of Yazidi captives including around 1,000 children who are being “trained and brainwashed” in Syria to become suicide bombers.

What can be done about all this? The Genocide Coalition is asking the Trump administration to take three steps.

First, the U.S. should work to help secure the region and resettle many of these minorities displaced from their homes, providing them the assistance they need to make a living.

The Defense and State Departments should work “to secure, stabilize, and revitalize the ancestral homelands of indigenous religious minority communities targeted by ISIS for genocide in northern Iraq – particularly in the Sinjar, Nineveh Plain, and Tal Afar areas.”

Additionally, the U.S. must make sure that humanitarian aid from the U.S. and UN reaches those who need it most, the coalition said.

The Christians in Erbil have not received much aid from the U.S. and UN and are reliant on groups like the Knights of Columbus for food, water, shelter, blankets, and medical needs.

Andrew Walther, vice president of strategic planning at the Knights of Columbus, noted on Thursday that on his trips to Iraq in the last year, staff of the U.S. government and the UN admitted that they had not dispersed money to displaced Christians living in Erbil. One family told Walther they had received only two kilos of lamb from the UN.

This aid must also “include funding for trusted faith-based” groups that are “close to the people” like Caritas International and Catholic Relief Services, Steve Colecchi, director of the Office of International Justice and Peace at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said on Thursday.

Private investment should also be encouraged once the communities are rebuilt and local businesses re-open, he added.

Stephen Hollingshead of The Haven Project of the group In Defense of Christians said that Western businesses should trade, provide mentorship, and do business with Iraqi entrepreneurs to help them “earn their daily bread,” which is what many of the displaced want.

The U.S. must also “bring to justice both the perpetrators of this genocide and their accessories,” the coalition insists. This would include the “collaborators, affiliates, financiers, and facilitators” of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project, one of the signers of the document, explained that the U.S. could push for an international tribunal to be set up to try ISIS perpetrators for their crimes.

“When impunity prevails, violence will proliferate,” Naomi Kikoler of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said. She noted that atrocities in Iraq have continued for years because perpetrators have not been held accountable.

“Until now, there is no international committee or a team to investigate what ISIS has done. A year has passed, and not a single ISIS fighter has been brought to justice,” Murad stated on Thursday. “They [ISIS] are still free in Iraq, and they move among many countries. Without any court or tribunal to bring them to justice.”

For the International Criminal Court to try the genocide perpetrators, the United Nations Security Council would have to refer the matter to the court. A UN human rights inquiry found last summer that Yazidis were genocide victims of ISIS, but did not include Christians and Shi’a Muslims in the genocide designation.

The Trump administration can also help the situation by making important appointments to the National Security Council and State Department, the coalition claimed.

They must “get the political people in place…to get this job done,” Destro said.

In addition, the U.S. could accept its “fair share” of the “most vulnerable refugees,” Colecchi maintained, and these would include genocide survivors.

Also, the U.S. could push the Iraqi central government to strengthen the rule of law and ensure the “protection of all, including vulnerable minorities,” he added.

“To focus attention on the plight of Christians,” he insisted, is “not to ignore others” but by protecting most vulnerable, to strengthen society as a whole.

 

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