President: Heba Taher

Chair: Rama Sabanekh 

276 female students were kidnapped from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria. The kidnappings were claimed by Boko Haram, an Islamic Jihadist and terrorist organization based in northeast Nigeria. Boko Haram tends to kidnap girls, who it believes should not be educated, and use them as cooks or domestic workers. The Nigerian government’s slow and inadequate response sparked international outrage. The US government proposed to intervene in order to rescue the kidnapped schoolgirls from the group’s clutches. Necessary preventative measures need to be taken in order to ensure that little to no collateral damage is inflicted in Nigeria during the course of such an invasion, as it would be counterproductive if the US destroyed more infrastructure and impaired or ended more human lives (and violated more Human Rights as they appear in the UN Charter) than Boko Haram has.(Boko Haram has been responsible for 900 deaths in its history).

The excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities is an ongoing issue of concern and particularly in light of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This fatal shooting of black teenager Brown by a white policeman named Darren Wilson on August 9 and the killing of Eric Garner, also an unarmed black man, by New York City police last month illustrates a bigger problem of racism and police brutality in the United States. In Russia, human rights activists accused policemen of using torture techniques to extract false confessions from detainees. Finland has a recent history of police brutality, including rape in 2006, assault and battery in 2007 and 2010, and assault in 2013. Here again, there is a trend of racial profiling in the cases, where most of the victims are immigrants or not of Finnish descent. Cases have also been recently reported in Canada, China, Turkey and also Indonesia and Egypt.