January 2016 - Mission Blue

Monthly Archives: January 2016

The Island President Released From Prison to the UK

If you’re planning on booking that next dive trip to the Maldives, you may want to think twice. Human rights abuses there are on the rise.
“I think it’s important for tourists to know the facts of what’s happening in the Maldives,” human rights lawyer Amal Cooney recently said to NBC News. “I don’t think people realize that there’s a flogging taking place a kilometer away when they’re sunbathing in their resort. Democracy is dead in the Maldives. I mean literally, if there were an election now there would be no one to run against the president. Every opposition leader is either behind bars or being pursed by the government through the courts.”

One such opposition leader is Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives and international champion of climate change action, who was ousted as president of the Maldives in 2012 and jailed on what Mrs. …

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A New Years Resolution for the Climate

By Courtney Mattison

The dust has settled following the momentous COP21 climate summit in Paris last month, and now the real work begins. Ministers from nearly 200 countries have voluntarily committed to scale up the global response to climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, backing sustainable development and renewable energy projects, working to eradicate poverty in areas threatened by the effects of climate change, and ratchet up those efforts over time. The 32-page COP21 Paris Agreement even recognizes the ocean—a key driver of climate and weather covering 71 percent of our planet—as an important ecosystem to protect despite the fact that the ocean was not included in the COP21 agenda. What happens next is as important as what has been agreed.…

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