From our Bureau of Socialist Tolerance, Compassion, and Social Justice
We all know the United Nations won’t lift a finger to help Cuban political prisoners but human rights organizations keep denouncing Castro, Inc. constantly. These folks never seem to grow weary. God bless them. But the sad truth is that all of their denunciations fall on deaf ears. Keep charging at that giant windmill, folks. Please don’t stop. Your gestures might not have immediate results, but historians in the future might be able to expose the criminality of Castro, Inc. through the records left behind by your efforts.
From 14yMedio via Translating Cuba
Human rights organizations Prisoners Defenders (PD) and Consorcio Justicia denounced to the United Nations a “scandalous repressive escalation this quarter against peaceful demonstrators” throughout Cuba. In a report published this Friday, they point out that between October and November, there have been at least 216 people arrested in the country in an “indiscriminate and arbitrary” manner.
The document presented to the international organization indicates that the freedoms of association, assembly and demonstration on the Island are prohibited by a legal framework that runs through the Constitution, the Criminal Code and the Law of Associations to “multiple legislative rules” that “criminally make it impossible to exercise the least of these rights.”
Presented before the Mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, the complaint highlights how the Constitution itself, far from guaranteeing freedoms, “acts as a blank law* (a legal concept that subjects one rule to another leaving arbitrariness open), where it subjects these alleged rights to lower norms that proscribe them, and where there is no court of constitutional protection for legal norms that, flagrantly, contradict fundamental rights.”
Likewise, it explains that the Law of Associations makes it impossible to “register an association without State approval,” so the Government “is the only entity that has the power to create organizations in the country.” In that way it can control the population while simulating an environment of guaranteed rights for civil society.
There is also a “remarkable absence of freedoms for political association, in a Cuba where, by law, only the Communist Party can exist,” the text adds.
This regulation, the report emphasizes, has made it possible to suppress any attempt at mobilization that, in turn, has skyrocketed in recent months due to prolonged blackouts and shortages of all kinds.
Between October and November, PD registered 48 new political prisoners, 34 (71%) of whom belong to the civilian population, with no known affiliation or political activism. In the complaint, the organization says that the criminal proceedings against these people are “fabricated.” In most cases, they are accused of public disorder: 18 in Villa Clara, five in Santiago de Cuba, three each in Ciego de Ávila, Granma and Camagüey, and one each in Pinar del Río and Sancti Spíritus.
PD also points out that there are currently 1,153 political prisoners in the country, and since the nationwide protests on 11 July 2021, more than 1,790 innocent people have suffered political or conscientious imprisonment on the Island.
It also indicates that among the political prisoners there are 650 with serious medical pathologies and 70 who suffer from serious mental health disorders, without access to adequate medical and psychiatric care.
continue reading HERE