Human rights and justice

PRESS RELEASE – 6 OCTOBER 2025 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSPEACE PRIZE FOR 2025 is awarded Francesca Albanese The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Francesca Albanese has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach. Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions. But first of all, Albanese...

This is the third appeal from TFF. The first and the second here. On August 22, 2025, the UN officially declared famine in Gaza. The world’s top authority on food security called for help and said starvation will spread further within the Strip unless fighting stops and much more aid is allowed in. More than half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic hunger conditions, while more than a million more are in a food emergency phase, the report states. This man-made catastrophic famine could have been prevented by a steady flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave, relief chief Tom Fletcher pointed out. “Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel,” Mr. Fletcher said. “It is a famine within a few 100 meters of food in a fertile land.” The UN’s top aid official underscored that the famine in Gaza is “caused by cruelty, justified...

Professor, Dr, TFF Board member The second of three TFF Appeals This is an example – for your inspiration – of how you can address your head of state, prime minister and other relevant ministers. To urge them to take action and not just use words.Instead of just sending it by email, which may not be read, it makes a stronger impression if you send it by snail mail – and millions do it too. It is urgently important that every citizen does something to stop the genocide on the Palestinian people now. Everybody can write a letter, short or long, and protest the lack of action. See also ideas to what you may constructively suggest in TFF’s first Appeal here. I address you deliberately in the way you prefer—in the feminine form. I write to you professor to professor, woman to woman, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother. I...

Contrary to what we stated when publishing this Call, the UN General Assembly (GA) opened on September 9, 2025, in New York, not in Geneva, as we initially wrote. However, due to the host role-violating US ban on visas to Palestinians, the Special GA Segment on Palestine will be held in the UN Geneva from September 22. And it builds up to something historic. Anyhow, here is what we believe you must advocate or do to help stop the Israeli genocide. It’s called people’s power or citizens’ diplomacy. SHARE! The first of three appeals from TFF. The second is here, and the third here. Across the world, people are witnessing the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities. The scale and intensity of Israel’s military operations — especially in Gaza — have led leading legal bodies, including the International Court of Justice, to warn of a plausible genocide. The...

The text below was published in “The Nation” on July 15, 2025, appears here unmodified. The delay is due to a weak Internet here in Turkey. There has been much critical reaction to this US Government defamatory statement justifying the imposition of sanctions on this exceptional independent expert appointed by the UN to an unpaid position, and left to hang in the wind by the politically motivated show of indifference by the UN Secretariat.] Justifying US Sanctions US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a dazzling Orwellian display inverted reality by slapping sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the much-embattled UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. If the sanctions are implemented against this extraordinary citizen of Italy, in the face of strong UN objections, Albanese will be barred from entering the US, presumably even to discharge her annual UN duty to present a...

World BEYOND War,TFF Associate For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January’s conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be anything wrong with it — or that some institution could punish us for it — never entered our minds. Legally, you’re allowed to go to a peace conference in Cuba. Nobody has so much as hinted that I’ve done anything illegal. But on Thursday June 5th I got a bunch of letters in the mail telling me that on Monday June 9th the U.S. bank accounts of World BEYOND War and the private accounts of all of my family members...

The Gaza People’s Tribunal, at the end of its first public assembly in Sarajevo, issued a Declaration that expresses our commitment to peace and justice for the Palestinian people in their struggle to realize their basic rights, above all their inalienable right to self-determination. We are inviting like-minded friends to read and endorse the Sarajevo Declaration and to share the link with others who might join our solidarity initiative at this critical time. Here is the link to Change.org where you can find the full text of the Declaration and endorser information.

Talk at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, September 2010 Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen It is a great honor to be on a panel with the Director of CPC-CC Foreign Affairs, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, the Editor-in-chief of China Daily, the Dean of the National Office of Chinese Language, the Deputy Commander of the People’s Liberation Army.  I express my gratitude to the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament and the American Friends Service Committee for having brought me to this tenth visit to China since 1973, and to Beijing Foreign Studies University for inviting me to this Forum on Public Diplomacy and China’s International Image. I define public diplomacy as diplomacy for the people and by the people. The purpose is neither public relations nor propaganda, but to bring the peoples of the world together by making them understandable to each other.  Like languages have their own logic,...

TFF is also your go-to source for understanding the Syria catastrophe in the making from now on. Introduction: The colonialist mentality Few things should surprise us anymore regarding the un-principled nature of the contemporary Western world. One day it sees a genocide and keeps supporting its ongoing barbarism. The next day – actually December 8 in the early morning – it fully supports terrorism, which, allegedly, it has been fighting since September 11, 2001. NATO countries such as the US and Turkey are the main supporters of the terrorist movements that have now occupied the cultured country, Syria, home to 25 million extremely mixed people. As far as I have looked into it, no Western leader has pointed out that taking over an entire country and sending its leadership fleeing is a violation of international law; Russia did not even plan to do so in Ukraine, but its invasion was...

For the last time, I am stating my views on the West’s genocide accusation and why I refuse to let the US/NATO/EU Cold War policy set the agenda and discourse about China in general and Xinjiang in particular. PART I Part II A daring prediction I shall be surprised if, in about 10-15 years, Xinjiang – the North-Western province of China, its largest province three times larger than France – has not become a world-leading cultural and economic hub in humanity’s multipolar/nodal future world. It exhibits a tremendous cultural variety that seems to be moving towards unity in an amazing diversity. It has a vast natural resource potential. It interacts with eight very important neighbouring countries. It’s the crossroads of past, present and future. Xinjiang is the sine qua non of the new Silk Roads, also called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves over 140 countries worldwide and...

Why it is essential to travel and see for yourself and then build networks and promote dialogues in the world’s likely most serious conflict. PART II PART I I recommend you read Part I before reading this second part. A dynamic melting pot You may ask where Xinjiang’s immense cultural diversity comes from. While I have not studied its history, I have learned that it has always been one big meeting place, dating back to the first Silk Roads, where people travelled, traded, explored, and migrated. Crisscrossing also borders with eight neighbours so that over time, it became a melting pot. There is a lot of diversity; each national group or ethnicity seems to have preserved vital elements of its own culture, language, aesthetics, way of living, dancing, etc. and also become part of the unity called Xinjiang and China. A woman I met told me that each nationality’s way of dancing could be...

I. Introduction The initiative for the “Nordic Delegation to China, September 7-15, 2024” was taken from the Norwegian side. Journalist and former editor Arild Vollan wanted to investigate claims in the media about an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in the autonomous region of Xinjiang in western China. Vollan selected an independent, cross-disciplinary and cross-political delegation group consisting of people who have worked with China and who wanted to get personal impressions of the conditions described in the previous section. The delegation consisted of: The delegation itself developed the project’s mandate. Following an excursion to Xinjiang province, the delegation’s mandate was to clarify whether observations made during the trip substantiated claims in the media that there is an ongoing genocide in Xinjiang today. Arild Vollan prepared the excursion program in dialogue with Thore Vestby, who has previously visited the province. The logistics were set up in dialogue with the Chinese Embassy in...