Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

Dale Gerstenslager/Winona Times, via Associated Press

Curtis Flowers at his capital trial in 2004. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first conviction after prosecutors used all of their peremptory strikes against blacks in the jury pool.

By SHAILA DEWAN

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case.

The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

In the Madison County case, the defendant, Jason M. Sharp, a white man, was sentenced to death after a trial by a jury of 11 whites and one black. The April hearing was the result of a challenge by defense lawyers who argued that jury selection was tainted by racial discrimination — a claim that is difficult to prove because prosecutors can claim any race-neutral reason, no matter how implausible, for dismissing a juror.

While jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.

Studies have shown that racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries, and that predominantly black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty.

Excluding jurors based on race has been illegal since 1875, but after Reconstruction, all-white juries remained the norm in the South.

“It really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible,” said Christopher Waldrep, a historian at San Francisco State University and the author of a forthcoming book about a lawyer who was able, in a rare case, to prove jury discrimination in Mississippi in 1906. “If you’d had a lot of black grand jurors investigating crimes, it would have made lynching impossible.”

Back then, judges and prosecutors often argued that blacks lacked the intelligence or education to serve. That such claims persist is evidence, said Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, that jury selection remains largely unscrutinized.

“There’s just this tolerance, there’s indifference to excluding people on the basis of race, and prosecutors are doing it with impunity,” Mr. Stevenson said. “Unless you’re in the courtroom, unless you’re a lawyer working on these issues, you’re not going to know whether your local prosecutor consistently bars people of color.”

In jury selection, potential jurors are first dismissed for cause — reasons like scheduling conflicts or opposition to the death penalty. Then, both sides can ask questions and take turns dismissing jurors using what are called peremptory strikes (the number of strikes varies by state, but it is often enough for one side to eliminate all qualified minorities).

In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that if a pattern of discrimination emerged during peremptory strikes, lawyers must provide nonracial reasons for their strikes. The reason does not have to be “persuasive, or even plausible,” the Supreme Court ruled in a later case in which a prosecutor said he dismissed one black juror because he had long hair, and another because he had a goatee, saying, “I don’t like the way they looked.” It is up to the judge to decide if there was deliberate discrimination.

That is a high bar, defense lawyers say — so high that in Tennessee and North Carolina, there has never been a successful reversal based on Batson.

“Anybody with any sense at all can think up any race-neutral reason and get away with it,” said Stephen B. Bright, a capital defense lawyer in Atlanta.

Prosecutors have claimed to strike jurors because they live in high-crime neighborhoods, are unemployed or are single parents. In one Louisiana case, a judge allowed a black juror to be dismissed because the prosecutor said he “looked like a drug dealer.”

Often, a defense lawyer’s challenge is based on showing that white jurors who answered questions the same way or had the same characteristics were not struck. For example, in the Sharp case, Mr. Broussard said that because one juror was studying to be a minister, she “was not the kind of juror we were looking for.” But a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.

Mr. Broussard did not respond to requests for comment, but Stephen Wimberly, the first assistant district attorney in Jefferson Parish, said that of more than 2,000 jury trials since 1997, only two had been reversed because of discrimination. “The legal standard is not representation of any race or gender, but the fairness and impartiality of each respective juror,” Mr. Wimberly said.

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

At a retrial, in which prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the jury of seven whites and five blacks was split along racial lines, resulting in a hung jury. At the second retrial, prosecutors sought the death penalty, which eliminated more blacks from the pool of qualified jurors. The jury, nine whites and three blacks, hung again when one black member declined to convict, said Andre De Gruy, the director of the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel.

The Equal Justice Initiative study argues that jury diversity “is especially critical because the other decision-making roles in the criminal justice system are held mostly by people who are white.” In the eight Southern states the study examined, more than 93 percent of the district attorneys are white. In Arkansas and Tennessee, all of them are white.

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Arizona Government Is Racist

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City Brights: Michael Yaki : Arizona law banning Ethnic Studies: Arizona Gov't is the real racist.

by Michael Yaki

Arizona once again delves into uncharted constitutional waters by seeking to ban courses catering to minority--again, in this case, primarily Hispanic -- students. Indeed, the Arizona State Superintendent, Tom Horne, said it was written to target Mexican or Chicano ethnic studies classes, which he claims divides students by race and promotes race resentment.

The statute bans courses that "promote resentment toward a race or class of people . . . are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group . . and advocate ethnic solidarity." The statute then goes onto exempt courses on the Holocaust because, of course, without that exemption, every class that shows Schindler's List where at the conclusion you resent the Nazis (a class of people) and wanting to save the Jews (promoting solidarity), you would have violated Horne's law.

Horne's dilemma is that enforcement will be so arbitrary, so capricious, relying, most likely, on Horne's particular biases and whims that the statute is begging for a First Amendment challenge. How do you quantify or measure "resentment." "Ethnic solidarity?" If two Latino students, hearing about the plight of migrant workers in the lettuce fields of California, feel that they should send a donation to the United Farm Workers to help them combat the agrigrower owners, has that crossed a line? If a teacher shows "Roots" and black students feel compelled to talk about the anger they still feel at the legacy of slavery, is that a violation? If students leave a classroom finally understanding the prejudice and struggles of their parents of whatever race or religion or background, and feeling justifiably angry, will Tom Horne be there with a questionnaire to gauge whether their teacher fueled their discontent so he can yank their funding?

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And let's not forget Arizona's participation in one of the most shameful acts of racism in American history: the incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The Arizona desert was a lovely place for west coast Americans to spend their time simply because of their ethnic heritage. If a Park Ranger spoke at a class in Arizona about Gila River and Poston, and condemned the paranoia and racism at the time, and several Asian American students petitioned their school to form an afterschool group for Asian Americans, is that the "ethnic solidarity" deemed a no-no by the law?

I remember a history class at UC Berkeley I took on American history. It left me shaken, and angry, and ultimately disappointed that my high school history glossed over the tremendous struggles that workers and minorities suffered through in the rise of the industrial age. If anything, shouldn't Tom Horne be targeting universities, the real hot-beds of controversial thinking? On-line education? Any Learning Annex lecture given by a minority lecturer? Isn't Horne, Brewer, and the entire Arizona Legislature, plain and simple, engaging in censorship and whitewashing promoted by a state government?

If the Governor, legislature, and education departments of Arizona are worried about "resentment" towards them by the substantial Latino population in the state, there are greater things to worry about than simply 1984'ing the state curriculum. Perhaps if they addressed the inequities in health care, living conditions, the standard of living for many Latinos living there the "resentment" level might just die down. Perhaps if they didn't pass laws targeting Latinos, regardless of citizenship, for racial profiling and police interrogations on the "suspicion" that they may be undocumented persons there wouldn't be any fears of "resentment."

Learning about your heritage and your roots is part of who we are as Americans. Perhaps if the Arizona government recognized that undeniable, indisputable fact, if they just behaved like human beings who should care about other human beings, without regard to skin color, ethnicity, or nationality, then maybe, just maybe, their claims about "ethnic chauvinism" wouldn't sound so hypocritical. Because, right now, everything they have done in the past month bears the ugly stain of racism.

Posted By: Michael Yaki (Email) | May 15 2010 at 08:33 AM

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/yaki/detail??blogid=68&entry_id=63669#ixzz0o1NW8oCg

Born in Japan, but ordered out

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By Blaine Harden
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A20

TOKYO -- Fida Khan, a gangly 14-year-old, told the court that immigration authorities should not deport him and his family merely because his foreign-born parents lacked proper visas when they came to Japan more than 20 years ago.

During the past two decades, his Pakistani father and Filipino mother have held steady jobs, raised children, paid taxes and have never been in trouble with the law.

"I have the right to do my best to become a person who can contribute to this society," Fida told a Tokyo district court in Japanese, the only language he speaks.

But the court ruled last year that Fida has no right to stay in the country where he was born. Unless a higher court or the Minister of Justice intervenes, a deportation order will soon split the Khan family, sending the father, Waqar Hassan Khan, back to Pakistan, while dispatching Fida and his sister Fatima, 7, to the Philippines with their mother, Jennette.

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Aggressive enforcement of Japanese immigration laws has increased in recent years as the country's economy has floundered and the need for cheap foreign labor has fallen.

Nationality in Japan is based on blood and parentage, not place of birth. This island nation was closed to the outside world until the 1850s, when U.S. warships forced it to open up to trade. Wariness of foreigners remains a potent political force, one that politicians dare not ignore, especially when the economy is weak.

As a result, the number of illegal immigrants has been slashed, often by deportation, from 300,000 in 1995 to just 130,000, a minuscule number in comparison to other rich countries. The United States, whose population is 2 1/2 times that of Japan's, has about 90 times as many illegal immigrants (11.6 million).

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Among highly developed countries, Japan also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of legal foreign residents. Just 1.7 percent are foreign or foreign-born, compared with about 12 percent in the United States. Japan held a pivotal election last year and voters tossed out a party that had ruled for nearly 50 years. But the winner, the Democratic Party of Japan, has so far done nothing to alter immigration policy.

That policy, in a country running low on working-age people, is helping to push Japan off a demographic cliff. It already has fewer children and more elderly as a percentage of its population than any country in recorded history. If trends continue, the population of 127 million will shrink by a third in 50 years and by two-thirds in a century. By 2060, Japan will have two retirees for every three workers -- a ratio that will weaken and perhaps wreck pension and health-care systems.

These dismal numbers upset Masaki Tsuchiya, who manages a Tokyo welding company that for seven years has employed Waqar Khan.

"If Khan is deported, it will not be possible to find anyone like him, as many Japanese workers have lost their hungriness," said Tsuchiya, who has urged Japanese immigration officials to rescind the deportation order for the Khan family. "When the Japanese population is declining, I believe our society has to think more seriously about immigration."

At the Ministry of Justice, immigration officials say they are simply carrying out rules politicians make. The rules, though, are not particularly precise. They grant wide leeway to bureaucrats to use their own discretion in deciding who stays and who gets deported. Last year, immigration officials granted "special permits" to 8,500 undocumented foreigners, with about 65 percent of them going to those who had married a Japanese citizen.

Exercising their discretion under the law, immigration authorities last year offered Noriko Calderon, 13, the wrenching choice of living with her parents or living in her homeland. The girl, who was born and educated in the Tokyo suburbs, could stay in Japan, the government ruled. But she had to say goodbye to her Filipino mother and father, who were deported after living illegally in Japan for 16 years. Following tearful goodbyes at a Tokyo airport, Noriko remained in Japan with an aunt.

Japan's growing need for working-age immigrants has not gone unnoticed by senior leaders in government and business. Slightly relaxed rules have admitted skilled professionals and guest workers. The number of legal foreign residents reached an all-time high of 2.2 million at the end of 2008, with Chinese accounting for the largest group, followed by Koreans, Brazilians (mostly of Japanese descent) and Filipinos.

Still, experts say these numbers are far too low to head off significant economic contraction. A group of 80 politicians said last year that the country needs 10 million immigrants by 2050. Japan's largest business federation called for 15 million, saying: "We cannot wait any longer to aggressively welcome necessary personnel."

Yet the treatment of foreign workers already in Japan is unpredictable. The government opened service centers last year to help foreign workers who lost their jobs to recession. For the first time, it offered them free language training, along with classes on social integration. As that program got underway, however, the government began giving money -- about $12,000 for a family of four -- to foreign workers, if they agreed to go home immediately and never come back to work.

The Khan family's troubles began two years, when a policeman nabbed Waqar Khan on his way home from work. He was detained for nine months. Police in Japan often stop foreign-looking people on the street and ask for residency documents.

The letter of the law was clearly against Khan and his wife. He had overstayed a 15-day tourist visa by 20 years. She came into the country on a forged passport.

But they have refused to sign deportation documents, arguing that although their papers are bad, their behavior as foreigners has been exemplary. Under Japanese law, foreigners are eligible to become naturalized citizens if they have lived in the country for more than five years, have good behavior and are self-sufficient.

The Khans also argue that their children, who regard themselves as Japanese, are assets for Japan. "It is a bit weird that the country needs children, but it is saying to us, go away," Khan said.

The family's lawyer, Gen'ichi Yamaguchi, has tried -- and so far failed -- to convince immigration officials and judges that the Khans are just the sort of hardworking, Japanese-speaking immigrants that the country should embrace for the sake of its own future.

"During the bubble years, the number of illegal workers increased a lot and the police looked the other way," Yamaguchi said. "Japan has always looked at immigrants as cheap but disposable labor."

An appeals court is scheduled to rule on the Khan case in the first week of February.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

TSA Targets Women Wearing Hijabs?

By Matthew Rothschild, January 7, 2010

Nadia Hassan is a frequent flyer. The forty-year-old MBA, who was born in Michigan, had never been hassled until Tuesday morning, January 5.

She was traveling with her five-year-old daughter and went to Dulles International to board a plane for Los Angeles.

She was in line to go through security.

“Before I could even get to the conveyor belt,” she says, “a lady in uniform comes up to me and asks me to remove my headscarf. I said, ‘No, I cannot, but you’re more than welcome to pat me down or search me.’ ”

The TSA agent stood there while she put her belt, shoes, coat, and laptop in the bins and went through the usual screening device with her daughter.

“But as soon as we went through the screening, she said, ‘Ma’am, can you come to the side for a full body pat-down?’ She did it right in front of four men, and she was touching me everywhere. And every article in my baggage was being checked for bomb-making materials.”

Hassan says she asked the man who was examining her bags what was going on.

“Ma’am, they just switched procedures on us this morning,” she remembers him saying. “Every woman wearing a head scarf must go through this type of search.”

The TSA denies this new policy, sort of.

“The Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) current procedures for the screening of bulky clothing or headwear -- which have been in effect since 2007 -- remain unchanged,” it said in a statement. “The wearing of a hijab itself does not automatically trigger security checks. To ensure the highest level of security, passengers wearing loose fitting or bulky clothing -- including headwear -- may be subject to additional screening. In instances where passengers choose not to remove bulky clothing, including headwear, our officers are trained to offer a private screening area and may conduct a pat down search to clear the individual.”

Hassan calls the “additional screening” of women wearing hijabs “villainization.”

“I was born and raised in this country,” she says. “My father was a Marine and fought in the Korean War. We were taught to love this country. You’re targeting good Americans who just want to practice their faith and dress modestly.”

Hassan understands the need for “safeguarding Americans, myself included,” she says.

“But that morning I didn’t feel I was safeguarded or protected. I felt like I was being insulted. I felt like I was being targeted.”

In a separate incident on January 4, a Muslim woman with a Canadian passport was trying to fly from the airport in Halifax to Ohio to visit her husband. She believes she was held for questioning because she was the only woman wearing a head scarf, the Council on American Islamic Relations reports.

Nihad Awad, head of the group, objects to the policy of profiling women who wear headscarves. “Screening of passengers,” Awad said, should be based on an analysis of “people’s suspicious behaviors, not on their skin color or religious attire.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

The Real Reason Profiling Fails

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by Matthew Yglesias

Conservatives looking to engage in their favorite sport of national-security hysteria got their wish Christmas Day, when a young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with incendiary chemicals stashed in his underpants. The would-be bomber failed to destroy the plane and certainly did no fundamental damage to the United States of America. He did, however, get Fox News personalities Brit Hume and Bill Kristol to proclaim the attack a success. Under ordinary circumstances, you would expect the conservative press to avoid acting as al-Qaeda’s hype-men. But with partisan hay to be made, an attack in which only the attacker was injured becomes a victory for America’s enemies.

Coupled with the failure-as-success narrative, new calls have come for stepped-up racial or ethnic profiling. Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, offered an extreme version, proposing that we "be very serious and harsh about the profiling" to the extent that "if you are an 18- to 28-year-old Muslim male you should be strip searched." Andy McCarthy at National Review Online and Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal expressed only slightly more restrained versions of profiling enthusiasm.

These proposals to entrench systematic, formal discrimination against the world’s Muslim population raise troubling ethical issues. More fundamentally, they completely fail to grapple with the logic of anti-American terrorist violence or the responsibilities of a global power.

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Al-Qaeda's capacity to damage the United States is actually very limited. Even the devastating mass murder of September 11 left the country’s economic strength, infrastructure, and military might entirely intact. Al-Qaeda has since hit some soft targets abroad and attempted -- but failed -- to blow up airliners. Obviously, it would be a bad thing if someone like Abdulmutallab or "shoe bomber" Richard Reid killed a plane full of people, and the government rightly seeks to avoid this sort of attack. But a clear distinction should be drawn between a threat on that order and genuinely big-time dangers to national security like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and nuclear proliferation.

Instead, what al-Qaeda can do to America is scare its citizens and try to prompt us into counterproductive actions. Systematic anti-Muslim discrimination, for example, really might be an effective way of making air travel slightly more secure in the short term. But air travel is already extremely safe, and the United States of America needs to consider the broader implications of such a policy. Right now, a promising Bangladeshi scientist considering competing job offers in the United States and Europe could be honestly told that he would likely find America a more welcoming place. That’s an important source of national strength. Conversely, if we start routinely strip-searching the younger employees of the Indonesian embassy as they fly to their new posts in Washington, we can expect to adversely affect our relations with that country. Right now, over 10,000 Muslims serve in the American military. Their service is valuable on its own terms, and all the more so because they may have cultural or language skills that most Americans lack. Should they really be singled out for special maltreatment because a co-religionist set his pants on fire?

Beyond that, is it better to live in a country where a teenage American Muslim reads on a message board that the United States is a racist country hell-bent on persecuting Islam and reacts, "No, it isn’t"? Or would we really prefer he think, "That’s why I got singled out for strip searches when we went on vacation last winter"?

At the end of the day, our greatest defense against terrorism is the simple fact that few people actually seem to want to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans. The exact number of al-Qaeda operatives isn’t known, but the total is thought to be only in the thousands -- more Muslims are employed by America's own government. And most al-Qaeda operatives are apparently not volunteering for martyrdom.

One of the most under-noted aspects of the Abdulmutallab case is that his own father tried to drop the dime on him. That kind of cooperation is invaluable, as are our commercial, cultural, diplomatic, military, and law enforcement ties with majority-Muslim countries. As are the contributions of America’s Muslim citizens. To throw this all out the window in response to -- of all things -- a failed terrorist attack would be a huge mistake.

Indeed, the steps the Obama administration has already taken in this direction, most notably compiling a list of 14 "countries of interest" whose citizens and residents will be singled out for enhanced security, already go too far. This is profiling by another name, and throwing Cuba into this list -- on the theory that it’s a state sponsor of terrorism -- is childish and fools no one. Less than a month ago, Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and said, "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend." He was right. Too bad he’s lost sight of that.

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European Court: Landmark Ruling on Racial and Religious Exclusion

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Judgment says Bosnia’s Political Ban on Jews, Roma Discriminatory

December 22, 2009

(London) - The ruling today by the European Court of Human Rights, that the exclusion of Jews and Roma from Bosnia's highest state offices is unlawful discrimination, is a major step toward ending racial and religious exclusion in Europe, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Human Rights Watch said today. Bosnia, along with the US and European states that continue to play a critical role in the country, should move swiftly to remove all discriminatory provisions from the country's constitution.

"The court's ruling is a major step forward in Europe's struggle against discrimination and ethnic conflict," said Sheri P. Rosenberg, co-counsel for the successful applicant Jakob Finci and a professor and director of the Human Rights Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. "This decision affirms that ethnic domination should have no role in a democracy."

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The court found, by 14 votes to 3 (16 votes to 1 with respect to the presidency), that the exclusion of Jews and Roma could not be justified. It stated that the "authorities must use all available means to combat racism, thereby reinforcing democracy's vision of a society in which diversity is not perceived as a threat but as a source of enrichment."

"The European Court has made it clear that race-based exclusion from political office, such as that suffered by Jews and Roma in Bosnia, has no place in Europe," said Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch, who was co-counsel for Finci from his previous employment with Minority Rights Group International. "The US, EU and the other states who still play a major role in Bosnia, should ensure the ruling is put into immediate effect by backing a change in the constitution."

The ruling today was issued by the Grand Chamber of the Court in the case of Sejdic & Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, and concerned the exclusion from the Bosnian presidency and the upper house of parliament of a Bosnian Jew and a Bosnian Roma. The Bosnian Constitution, drafted by negotiators during peace talks in Dayton, Ohio in 1995, restricts the highest offices of state - the upper house of parliament and the presidency - to members of Bosnia's three main ethnic and religious groups - the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).

Members of smaller groups (such as the Jewish and Roma communities), those from ethnically mixed backgrounds and those who do not wish to declare themselves members of the three main groups are banned from running for office. Despite the extensive involvement of the international community, in particular the US and the European Union, in the governing of Bosnia since 1995, these discriminatory provisions in the constitution have never been amended.

This ruling is the first under the recent Protocol 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination in all rights "set forth by law," a much wider scope than previously existed under the convention.

Jakob Finci, the successful applicant, was born in a transit camp during World War II after his parents, Bosnian Jews, had been deported from the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Returning to Bosnia after the war, he has had a distinguished career in public life and is now Bosnian ambassador to Switzerland. But his ethnicity and religion prevented him from the possibility of seeking election to the highest offices of state.

"I am delighted that the European Court has recognized the wrong that was done in the Constitution 14 years ago," Finci said. "The Bosnian politicians need to right the wrongs in the Constitution quickly."

Bosnia's next presidential and parliamentary elections are due in October 2010.Constitutional reform has been under discussion in Bosnia since 2005 but so far has not produced any change.

"This landmark ruling clearly establishes that there is no scope for second-class citizenship in Europe," said Cynthia Morel, who also served as legal counsel in the case. "The court's finding will play an important role in strengthening Bosnia's young democracy." The case was supported throughout by Minority Rights Group International and the Human Rights and Genocide Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Iraq: Protect Besieged Minorities - Human Rights Watch

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Yazidis, Shabaks, and Christians Caught in Kurdish-Arab Contest for Control

November 10, 2009

(Erbil) - Iraq's central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government should protect besieged minorities in the disputed territories of Nineveh province, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch documented attacks by Sunni Arab extremist groups targeting Yazidis, Shabaks, and Assyrian Christians, and intimidation by Kurdish forces against minority political and civic associations resisting Kurdish efforts to incorporate the area into the autonomous territory the regional government controls.

The 51-page report, "On Vulnerable Ground: Violence against Minority Communities in Nineveh Province's Disputed Territories," calls on the regional government to grant legal recognition to Shabaks and Yazidis as distinct ethnic groups instead of imposing Kurdish identity on them and to ensure that they can participate in public affairs without fear of retribution. The report also calls on the central government in Baghdad to protect minorities at the local, provincial, and national levels, and to investigate killings and displacement of Assyrian Christians and deadly attacks against other minorities.

"Iraqi Christians, Yazidis, and Shabaks have suffered extensively since 2003," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Iraqi authorities, both Arab and Kurdish, need to rein in security forces, extremists and vigilante groups to send a message that minorities cannot be attacked with impunity."

Research for the report was conducted in February and March 2009, and included field research and interviews in northern Iraq with minority representatives and victims, senior Kurdish officials, and Nineveh Provincial Council representatives.
Minorities in Iraq find themselves in an increasingly precarious position as the Arab-dominated central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government vie for control of the disputed territories. These territories are the most diverse in the country in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion. A main front in this conflict is Nineveh, Iraq's second-most-populous province, which has a unique concentration of minority groups with a historic presence in the area. In addition to attacks and pressures against Yazidis, Shabaks and Christians documented in this report, northern Iraq's Turkmen minority and Kakai Kurds have also come under attack.

Both Kurdish and Arab authorities lay claim to Nineveh's disputed territories, and since 2003, the Kurdistan Regional Government has been in a position to reshape the reality on the ground through its extensive security and political presence. To consolidate its grip, it has offered minorities financial and other inducements to win their support while simultaneously using repressive measures to keep them in line. Kurdish forces have engaged in arbitrary arrests and detentions, intimidation, and in some cases low-level violence, against minorities who have challenged regional government control of the disputed territories.

"Iraq's Kurds certainly deserve redress for the crimes against them by former Iraqi governments, but redress for past wrongs doesn't justify repression and intimidation by one ethnic group to establish exclusive control of the region," Stork said. "These minority communities and the Kurds share a common history of oppression in northern Iraq, including Arabization, and forced displacement."

Extremist elements in the Sunni Arab insurgency, for their part, view minority communities as "crusaders" and "infidels." Some have carried out devastating attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians. Nineveh's provincial capital, Mosul, has become a hotbed of the insurgency in part because the regional government's hegemony in the immediate area has alienated Sunni Arabs long accustomed to positions of privilege and power under previous governments.

Simultaneous truck bombings in Nineveh in August 2007, presumably by armed Sunni Islamists, killed more than 300 Yazidis and wounded more than 700 in the single worst attack against civilians since the start of the war. In late 2008, a systematic and orchestrated campaign of targeted killings and violence left 40 Chaldo-Assyrians dead and more than 12,000 displaced from their homes in Mosul. Representatives from various communities have traded accusations of responsibility for the attacks on Christians.

Insurgent groups have renewed bombings in the months following the withdrawal of US forces from cities to their bases on June 30, 2009. Attacks against minority groups in five locations across Nineveh between July and September killed more than 157 people and wounded 500 from the Yazidi, Shabak, Turkmen and Kakai communities.

Papuans demand restriction of migrants - The Jakarta Post

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Nethy Darma Somba , The Jakarta Post , Jayapura, Papua | Fri, 11/13/2009 7:11 PM | National

People migrating to Papua have impacted upon the Papuans’ employment opportunities, thus necessitating further travel restrictions, a seminar hears.

Indigenous community representative Josias Serontouw told an international biodiversity conference in Jayapura on Friday that migrants in civil servant positions in the province outnumbered their native counterparts.

“Migration to Papua must be restricted as migrants are taking jobs from Papuans,” Josias said. “With more unemployed Papuans, trouble may arise.”

He called on the provincial legislative council to pass an ordinance curbing migration. He also called on another bylaw prioritizing to indigenous people in the civil servant recruitment test.

Papua has a population of more than 2 million, with migrant and indigenous numbers roughly the same. Migrants also prevail in the economic sector while many Papuans, particularly those living in remote villages, live below the poverty line.

Agus Sumule, adviser to the governor, said present restrictions had already taken effect.

According to a provincial ordinance, migrants who fail to find jobs after staying in Papua for six months will have to leave the province. The provincial government also issues special ID cards for migrants.

Meanwhile, Bintuni Bay regency in West Papua is drafting a bylaw to restrict migration into the gas-rich region in order to protect indigenous people. However, many say it is discriminatory toward migrants.

South Korea Struggles With Attitudes Toward Race - NYTimes.com

Image by maHidoodi via Flickr

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

Putting Caste on Notice - Nation

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Navi Pillay, the South African judge who became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights last year, is moving to the forefront of a campaign to free more than 250 million people from the indignities and horrors of caste discrimination. No previous commissioner has dared to openly take on this pernicious system, the majority of whose miserable victims live in India.

"This is the year 2009, and people have been talking about caste oppression for more than a hundred years," Pillay says. "It's time to move on this issue."

For Pillay, who is of Indian descent, the subject of caste has been hidden too long by obfuscation on the part of governments, not only in India, that have successfully argued in UN conferences that existing international conventions against human rights abuses do not apply. Caste did not figure in the official conclusions of a conference on racism and other forms of intolerance in Durban in 2001, after intense lobbying by India, and remained on the periphery of a review of that conference earlier this year.

That being the case, Pillay said in an interview in her New York office on a visit from her headquarters in Geneva, there may well have to be a new international convention written to apply directly to caste.

The campaign is gathering momentum among a wide range of global nongovernmental organizations, religious groups and, lately, a few governments working from a draft document on eliminating discrimination based on work or descent--in other words, being born into predestined deprivation, assigned to the most menial of jobs and segregated socially from the better born.

Pillay would like to see this draft endorsed by the member nations of the Human Rights Council and by all governments, many of which are in denial over the harmful effects of the caste system.

She relayed a story about a group of women who came to her in Geneva recently with a brick from a latrine they had torn down in protest against being forced to carry away human excrement in their bare hands. They wanted to make the point that despite India's frequent assertions that "untouchables," who call themselves Dalits ("broken people"), were no longer condemned by birth to do this job, there were still tens of thousands of such latrines in the country, and the filthy, soul-destroying work continues.

"They have good laws in India, and they have media; they have well developed civil society organizations," Pillay said. "So how come there is no implementation of these good laws, these good intentions?" Discrimination by caste is unconstitutional in India, which also has affirmative action programs for Dalits and others at the bottom of society. Dalits have risen to high office through politics, though even democracy has not helped most of them.

It was, ironically, Nepal that broke ranks with India in September and publicly joined the campaign against caste discrimination. Nepal, a majority Hindu nation like India, is home to 4.5 million Dalits, according to the Feminist Dalit Organization of Nepal. Women among the Dalits everywhere are especially vulnerable to victimization of all kinds, most often sexual abuse.

Women of lowly birth are also sometimes accused of witchcraft, and not only in Asia. Pillay said that in a country in Africa girls and women have been jailed, and officials say they cannot release them or they would be killed. Recently in India's Jharkhand state, village women, apparently Muslims who were labeled witches by accusers, were beaten, stripped naked and forced to eat excrement, the BBC reported.

The Times of India described Nepal's unanticipated decision to align with the campaign against caste discrimination as an "embarrassment" to India, saying that it contradicts India's "stated aversion to the internationalization of the caste problem." The newspaper noted that Sweden then piled on an endorsement from the European Union, "adding to India's discomfiture."

The influence of the Hindu caste system has seeped across other borders in South Asia, into Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, sometimes affecting even Muslims based on their birth or ancestry. Converts to Christianity or Buddhism who flee Hinduism to escape caste often remain branded for life nonetheless.

Dalits, regarded widely as unclean or polluted, can, and have, faced death at the hands of upper caste people for infractions such as taking water from a forbidden well or entering a Brahmin temple. There have been lynchings for intermarriage with higher castes. In some places, particularly in north India, Dalits vote at segregated polling stations. At roadside cafes they often get separate utensils, if they are served at all.

It need not be that way, Pillay, 68, notes from her own experience. Indians in South Africa, a minority in a suppressed black majority under apartheid, soon abandoned caste consciousness, she said. "I know that in the early days they did practice that, because my parents told us," she said. "I think it would be my grandparents' generation. But it broke down by force of social pressures."

As high commissioner for human rights, Pillay takes a broad view of her responsibilities, and that applies to causes she is willing to take up as well as to her definition of human rights. She focuses not only on political or civil rights but also societal shortcomings and abuses. On caste, she said she looks for other forms of similar discrimination globally, anywhere people are held in forms of slavery based on birth, for example, or are relegated to second-class citizenship for other reasons.

"What alerted me to it is that a Bolivian woman minister who addressed the Durban review conference spoke about slavery in Bolivia and described the conditions. In Mauritania [there is] slavery as well."

Pillay has also made three public speeches on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and produced a video on the subject to encourage governments to frame a declaration on LGBT rights.

When we spoke, Pillay had just come from a UN panel where victims of human trafficking presented powerful testimonies. She was struck by a fact thrown out by the panel's moderator: that there are more people being trafficked today than in the entire historical slave trade.

Caste and new forms of slavery are not unrelated, she argued in a recent op-ed article for the Huffington Post, where she wrote that landlessness, debt bondage and labor bondage, involving millions of young children, are the lot of the lowest castes.

"As high commissioner I promised to be evenhanded and raise all issues affecting all human beings," Pillay said. "I can't flow with the political concerns of anyone who doesn't want one or another issue addressed because it embarrasses them or because they are dealing with it in their own way."

Caste is now on notice: the UN has failed, she said, to educate people and change mindsets to combat the taint of caste. "How long is the cycle going to go on where those who can do something about it say, We can't, because it's the people, it's their tradition; we have to go slowly.

"Slavery and apartheid could be removed, so now [caste] can be removed through an international expression of outrage."

About Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

In Saudi Arabia, a Campus Built as a 'Beacon of Tolerance' - washingtonpost.com

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High-Tech University Draws the Ire of Hard-Line Clerics for Freedoms It Provides to Women

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 9, 2009

THUWAL, Saudi Arabia -- On this gleaming high-tech campus edged by the Red Sea, May Qurashi crossed a barrier the other day. She played a game on PlayStation with some male fellow students. Her best friend, Sarah al-Aqeel, is also reaching for the forbidden. She's getting her driver's license.

Under Saudi Arabia's strict constraints, Saudi women like Qurashi and Aqeel may neither mingle with men nor drive. But at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened last month on this sprawling site 50 miles north of Jiddah, men and women take classes together. Women are not required to wear traditional black head-to-toe abayas or veil their faces -- and they can get behind a steering wheel.

"I don't think religion should have anything to do with higher education," said Qurashi, a 23-year-old biological engineering graduate student.

The research university is the latest, and so far most significant, endeavor by a Persian Gulf nation to diversify its economy and help wean the region from its dependence on oil wealth. Saudi officials describe the multibillion-dollar postgraduate institution as the spear in the kingdom's efforts to transform itself into a global scientific center rivaling those in the United States, Europe and Asia.

But the kingdom's powerful religious establishment is increasingly voicing criticism of the university. On Web sites, clerics have blasted the school's coeducational policy as a violation of sharia, or Islamic law. Last week, a member of the influential Supreme Committee of Islamic Scholars, a government-sanctioned body, called for a probe into the curriculum and its compatibility with sharia law, local newspapers reported.

"Mixing is a great sin and a great evil," Saad bin Nasser al-Shithri was quoted as saying in the al-Watan newspaper. "When men mix with women, their hearts burn, and they will be diverted from their main goal," which he said is "education."

His comments sparked outrage from influential advocates of modernization. "It's the sort of thinking that, if not for the King, would have kept this country wandering the desert on the backs of camels in search of water and pasture," the al-Iqtisadiya newspaper editorialized.

In an unprecedented action, reformist King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz issued a royal decree over the weekend removing Shithri from his post, according to the official Saudi Press Agency and Western diplomats.

Many Saudis and Western analysts view the university as a test of Abdullah's ability to challenge hard-line Islamic clerics and expand freedoms, including rights for women, in the Middle East's most religiously austere country. In a speech last month inaugurating the university, the king, 85, declared that "faith and science cannot compete except in unhealthy souls" and that "scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first lines of defense against extremists." He said he hoped the university, known as KAUST, would become "a beacon of tolerance."

"I interact a lot with men. We hang out together. We go to classes together," said Qurashi, her moon-shaped face framed by a black abaya. "But I'm a Muslim woman. I want friendship and nothing more. If I can stick to my religion and my normal values, then what's wrong with that?"

Challenging Barriers

Three years ago, Abdullah ordered executives of the Saudi national oil company, Aramco, to build the university, fulfilling a 25-year-old vision. The kingdom was in the midst of an economic crisis, and the monarch realized that his country could no longer rely solely on oil, said Nadhmi al-Nasr, the university's interim vice president and a senior Aramco executive.

Today, the campus is a scientist's dream. It houses one of the world's faster supercomputers. A three-dimensional virtual reality room takes visitors into an archaeological dig or a coral reef. Ultra-high-resolution photography allows the study of mountain rock formations.

Research centers focus on vital areas such as finding alternative forms of energy and sources of potable water. Solar energy partially powers the campus; electric vehicles provide public transport. Fortune 500 companies such as Dow Chemical fund research. The goal, university officials said, is to effectively collaborate with industry to create a new generation of researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs.

"We'll be exporting electricity to Europe and Asia one day," Nasr said.

There are 71 professors, many from the United States, and 817 students from 61 countries. Nearly 400 students began classes last month; the rest will arrive next year. Saudi students, including 20 women, make up 15 percent of the student body.

To attract top scientists and postgraduate students, the university -- which is run by an independent board of trustees -- offered generous tax-free salaries, large houses, a golf course and a yacht club. They also set out to overcome the country's societal restrictions.

Ahmad al-Khowaiter, the interim vice president for economic development and an Aramco executive, said that the intention was not "to break social boundaries." Nevertheless, interviews conducted on the campus over three days suggest that many students and faculty members hope to contribute to a broadening of academic freedom and women's rights in the country.

One workshop held on campus recently explored the challenges facing Saudi women in the higher educational system. A higher percentage of Saudi women than men graduate from college with a degree. But they are restricted to attending all-female institutions, and social and cultural barriers stop many from entering scientific research and other postgraduate programs. They are often directed to the study of humanities and the arts -- science is viewed as a "male" profession -- and are expected to raise families. After graduation, they have trouble finding good jobs, and women in leadership roles are rare in companies, universities and government.

Nasr told the mostly female audience that the university wants to ensure that female academics are among its leaders. "I hope in my lifetime I will see a Saudi female become president of KAUST," he said.

The audience, which included Qurashi and Aqeel, exploded with applause.

Jasmeen Merzaban, a biochemistry professor and one of five women on the faculty, said she hoped the university will help change perceptions of women. "We have the knowledge and power that we can move forward and be just as good as our male colleagues," she said.

But on many Saudi Web sites and chat rooms, the reaction is mixed. A video posted on YouTube shows a Saudi KAUST employee in white tribal garments gyrating his hips on a table after the university's inauguration, as men and women cheer and dance along. By Thursday, the video had been viewed more than 67,000 times and drawn 129 comments.

"God have mercy on the employee. He wasn't raised properly. He should be punished," wrote one person.

"The purest place on earth is not segregated, and that is the holy mosque in Mecca," a university supporter responded.

Some question whether the Saudi educational system will modernize and improve enough to funnel more qualified students to the university -- or whether KAUST will remain mostly a facility for foreigners.

"It remains to be seen whether the university will be an island of freedom in an ocean of repression, or whether it can help spread freedoms to other parts of the kingdom," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

Choosing Lines to Cross

Not everyone in Aqeel's family supports her decision to study in a coed environment. Two brothers, she said, advised her parents to order her to veil her face on campus -- as she does when she walks with them.

She refused. "I'm not doing anything wrong," she said with a newfound boldness.

Now she eats lunch and dinner with her male classmates. She studies with them. A Canadian male classmate is teaching her how to play the piano. But when she goes to parties, she doesn't dance.

"We have red lines we shouldn't cross," she said.

Federal Diary: Government Lags in Hiring of Latinos

By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Latino Americans may be the nation's fastest-growing minority group, but they're also the most underrepresented among civilian federal employees. As of last September, Hispanics accounted for about 8 percent of the total civilian federal workforce, according to the Office of Personnel Management. That's well below the 13.2 percent of Hispanics in the national civilian labor force, according to Labor Department statistics.

Of the 25 largest government agencies, 17 saw modest increases in Hispanic hires in fiscal 2008 over fiscal 2007, with most being made at the lower- and mid-level General Schedule levels. At higher levels of government, Hispanics accounted for 3.6 percent of the Senior Executive Service during fiscal 2008, according to OPM figures.

The overall Latino hiring disparity is equivalent to more than 100,000 jobs or roughly $5.5 billion in salaries, according to Gilbert Sandate, chairman of the Coalition for Fairness for Hispanics in Government. His group has met with White House and OPM officials to discuss the issue.

Put another way, practically every new hire in the federal government would have to be Hispanic to make up the difference between the population size and the numbers represented in the government civilian workforce, said Jorge E. Ponce, co-chairman of the Council of Federal EEO and Civil Rights Executives.

Nobody is advocating such a move, and regardless, most Hispanic leaders that track the issue are pleased with what the Obama administration has done so far to address their concerns.

"We are encouraged by the enthusiasm and some of the things that they want to do, that they hope to do in terms of addressing this issue," Sandate said.

Hispanic activists applauded Obama's decision to appoint Hilda L. Solis as labor secretary and Ken Salazar to lead the Interior Department. The White House counts at least 43 Senate-confirmed government officials of Hispanic origin (including ambassadors and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor), a number higher than at the same point in the Clinton and Bush administrations. More than 30 other Latinos work on the White House staff, three of whom participate in the daily senior staff meetings, according to White House officials.

Those senior Latino officials should help recruitment efforts at lower levels of government, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

"One of the things we do know, and it's not surprising, is that when we have Latinos as Cabinet secretaries, we have increases in Hispanic hires," he said.

"It really comes down to a commitment from the senior-most individuals at these agencies, in this case Cabinet secretaries and directors, that they make a commitment to diversifying the workforce. It has to come from the top," Vargas said.

The OPM is working to develop a new strategy to address hiring diversity, said Elizabeth A. Montoya, the agency's chief of staff. But observers said the OPM can only do so much because it lacks the ability to enforce its hiring suggestions or hold agencies accountable.

"The federal agencies are left to self-police themselves," Sandate said. "While it's true that OPM asks the individual agencies to submit annual reports, there are no consequences whatsoever if they've done good or bad. As a result, Hispanics continue to be the only underrepresented group in the federal workforce."

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, has also called for more accountability.

"The nation's demographics are changing fast, and the government needs to react to that," she said.

Montoya said accountability measures will be considered as part of OPM's new recommendations.

"It's under discussion how we implement that accountability," she said.

In the meantime, several agencies are seeking new ways to recruit and hire Latinos for entry- and mid-level positions, according to the OPM. "Across the board, a lot of departments are struggling with the hiring in general, and that is something that everyone is willing to admit," said Vince Casillas, the former Hispanic media director for the Obama campaign who is now a partner with Balsera Communications. He has met with several government agencies to discuss launching campaigns aimed at potential Latino recruits.

"There's definitely right now a deliberate and conscious effort to start reaching out to Latinos and recruiting them," he said.