THIS BLOG IS CLOSED

AS FROM TODAY, THIS BLOG IS CLOSED FOR COMMENTS.

PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG HERE.

I HAVE EXPORTED ALL POSTS AND COMMENTS OVER THERE.

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS VISITED AND READ MY POSTS HERE. I HOPE YOU WILL UPDATE YOUR BLOGROLLS AND LINKS.

DD Live

My Thursday night chat will be on tonight at the usual time. See the top of the page under DD live for details if you are a first-time visitor. Please note: us nasty little politically correct, liberalleftiecommie feminazis are ruining Christmas so don’t expect any fun and games tonight in my festive chatroom.

PS: I love my tree!

Happy Christmas everyone.

Technorati Tags: chat, DD live, deviousdiva

New Direction

As I have moved my human rights blog to my own server and this one has been sitting here, I decided to try and make it work for me. So I am taking it in a new direction. I will still be posting on issues I care about but will attempt to look at them in a more global sense with more linking to news articles and blog posts relevent to them. I hope you will enjoy the new outlook.

Selling Babies

The recent case of a British woman who made a deal to buy a baby from a young Romanian girl and then just took it without paying, has caused a flurry of reporting about illegal adoptions here in Greece. There are many problems that arise when dealing with cases of adoption here because

9 out of ten prospective parents prefer to sign a private agreement with a natural mother willing to hand over her infant

and that is perfectly legal here. This leaves room for adoption rings to operate (with the help of doctors and lawyers) because unless it can be proved that money has changed hands, the cases are very difficult to uncover.

The police say that babies are being sold — mainly in Athens, northern and central Greece and the island of Crete — for up to $33,000, with male blue- eyed infants fetching the highest prices. According to Bulgarian officials, most of the mothers are from Roma, or Gypsy, settlements in Bulgaria and are paid about $4,000 for relinquishing their infants

Read the full article at the International Herald Tribune

UPDATE: Panayote Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor also sent me the link to this article from the Independent Online Edition.

Technorati Tags: greece, illegal adoption, trafficking, women

International Migrants Day

Today is International Migrants Day. Many people become confused when talking about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers especially since those terms have become entangled with the word “illegal”. So I thought today would be a good day for people to really look at the meaning of those labels and the rights that each of those individuals have.

Amnesty has a very clear and concise article called Refugees have rights which explains what the terms mean and what rights people have.

Please take five minutes to read it. Further reading on International Migrants Day can be found here and here with plenty of links to other information.

Technorati Tags: amnesty international, asylum, asylum seeker, human rights, immigrants, immigration, migrants, international migrants day, refugee

Happy Weekend

I will not be blogging for couple of days but I will write up and post on my recent visit to the Votanikos and Aspropyrgos Roma settlements as soon as I can.

Have a very happy weekend.

DD Live

My usual Thursday night chat will be on tonight at the usual time. See the top of the page under DD live for details if you are a first-time visitor. I have found it incredibly inspiring to be able to “meet” readers of this blog over there and just to have a laugh or discuss things that are on our minds. So thank you to everyone who has participated over the last few months. See some of you later

Technorati Tags: blogging, chat, DD live, deviousdiva

Refugee Issues

It is often the way that once a famous person gets behind a campaign, things start moving rather more quickly than before. I have no problem with that if change can happen because of it and I am happy that they are putting their considerable weight behind human rights concerns. I just think that we should also acknowledge the many people who work for little or no money, for NGOs and other organisations, to do this work on a daily basis. It is thanks to them that many of the issues I raise here on this blog ever come to light.

Having said that, I am very happy to read this…

George Dalaras, the singer and now UN Goodwill Ambassador met with ministers, police and other officials to raise a number of serious issues concerning immigrants and asylum seekers in Greece.

* Locating and distinguishing individuals, who seek asylum or are in need of a humanitarian regime, from illegal immigrants

* The quality of asylum procedures, as Greece holds a low recognition percentage for those who are in need of asylum, in comparison to other EU countries

* The existing conditions at detention centres, where illegal immigrants are kept

* The protection of unaccompanied foreign children in Greece, whose trails were lost, although they had been within the jurisdiction of the state authorities

The Public Order Minister Byron Polidoras has promised to visit the detention centres in the near future to assess the situation personally and then arrange what measures to take.

Read the full article from ERT

Technorati Tags: activism, asylum, asylum seeker, greece, immigrants, immigration, refugee

Alex Meshivilli

…So a friend of mine pulled me up by the bootstraps and reminded me (again) why I’m doing this. Am I as fickle as the mainstream media when it comes to a story? What happened in some of the cases I have covered here ? Have they just disappeared like so much old news. Well, yes and no. I am not a journalist so I am not privy to information as it breaks. I am like everyone else. I am affected by things that touch me personally and that’s what I am trying to do here.

If you did a search for “alex meshivilli” yesterday, only my blog appeared. This is not a point of pride. Far from it. Alex is a boy, the same age as my own, who has been missing for 10 months now. He disappeared on his way to basketball, a passion he shares with my boy. He was a nice kid, much like my own. Doing well at school, much like my own. An unremarkable story? An everyday story. Except this boy didn’t come home. My kid went on a school trip today and was five minutes late home. I called the school. He arrived five minutes later.

I cannot imagine… I don’t want to imagine if it had been ten more minutes. Or ten hours. Or ten days. Let alone ten months. Alex Meshivilli has been missing for that long. Ten months. Possibly murdered by classmates and covered up by various grown-ups

There is no more news on Alex. Just an absence of news. And a mother waiting for her son to come home…

Technorati Tags: children, greece, immigrants, immigration, media, personal

Reclaiming my Blog

I have had a spate of attacks on this blog by extremists and racists. My comment policy at the top of the page clearly states that I will delete such comments. One particularly nasty one I left up and even wrote a post about it. Why ?

Because I want people to know…
I want people to see the kind of opinions some people hold. About me, about other women bloggers, about other bloggers of colour, about the issues I write about.
I want people to know that sometimes this is not easy.
I want people to read and react.
I want to feel solidarity with the community I have tried to build here.

Don’t get me wrong. Trolls are a waste of time, space and energy. They are out there and they will always have more time on their hands than we do. As a friend said to me today, they don’t care how they might affect you. In fact they probably get enormous pleasure from knowing they have angered you.

So I am reclaiming this blog for my small community by asking for one message from each of you. One sentence or even one word that reminds us that we are here. That we are together. That we far outnumber the racists and xenophobes. That we stand together to make a change, however small. And that we will not be broken by ignorance and prejudice.

and a reminder for the Trolls

SHOULD YOU COMMENT ON THIS BLOG?

If you think that sexism/racism/homophobia is over, do not comment.

If you have ten or less standard responses to sexism/racism/homophobia, do not comment.

If you cannot see anything beyond the colour of my skin or my gender. do not comment.

If you are going to call me by some demeaning endearment like cupcake, baby or darling, do not comment.

If you feel so threatened by me that you need to become a big-mouthed bully, do not comment.

If you feel compelled to write the same comment on many different blogs, do not comment.

If you have read 5% of what I actually wrote and made up the rest, do not comment.

If you get a kick out of putting people down, do not comment.

If you are going to go away and write a feeble, insulting post about me and then try and advertise it here, do not comment.

If you disagree with what I say but cannot cope with people responding, do not comment.

Technorati Tags: blog love, blogging, personal, racism, trolls, xenophobia