Two years ago in the United States, Terri Schiavo—a brain-damaged woman in a persistent vegetative state—made headlines with her famous euthanasia case. Her husband and her parents were battling over whether she should be unhooked from her machines so she could die peacefully.

Now the debate over euthanasia is raging on the opposite side of the planet, in China. 

Typing with a chopstick held in her mouth, 28-year-old Li Yan has been writing a blog called "Nowhere to go" that calls for China to enact legislation on euthanasia, or "peaceful death." Li Yan has suffered from terminal cancer since she was a baby. She can only move her head slightly, along with several fingers. Her mother must feed her, take her to the toilet, and turn her a dozen times during the night.

"I treasure life, but I don't want to live," she writes.

Schiavo and Li are unusual cases, but controversy over when to pull the plug is bound to grow more common as the world population ages. My hunch? Euthanasia will become more accepted as terminal illness hits closer to home for more people.

And although it's repugnant to make human life a matter of money, crippling financial costs will be an unspoken factor that makes euthanasia more accepted. When U.S. President George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he signed the Texas Futile Care Law. It allows hospitals to discontinue life-sustaining treatment if the patient is so sick that all care is, well, futile. Families get a 10-day notice before the plug is pulled. While the Schiavo debate raged, a Texas baby was unplugged against his mother's wishes.

As the world grays and financial resources remain finite, some tough decisions will have to be made. So let the worldwide debates continue.

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United Nations investigators have unequivocally condemned the Sudanese government for "orchestrating and participating" in crimes including murder, mass rape and kidnap in Darfur. Over the past four years, over 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2.5 million more displaced, yet international action to halt the crisis has been negligible.

Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to ban landmines and leader of the team that submitted the report, called the international community's response to this crisis "pathetic." She added:

There are so many hollow threats towards Khartoum, that if I were Khartoum I wouldn't pay any attention either .... It is more than a tragedy. It was after Rwanda that people said 'never again', and here we are again ... and the world sits by."

So why have we just sat by and let the slaughter continue and even spill over into neighboring countries?

It could come down to human psychology, according to decision-making expert Paul Slovic in FP's latest web exclusive. Slovic argues that the statistics of mass murder actually paralyze us into inaction, which is why we need more than just our moral outrage to stop genocide in places like Darfur and elsewhere. Check out Slovic's insightful—and not a little bit disturbing—article here.

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An intriguing report from the International Crisis Group this week contains what may be the first good news to come out of Zimbabwe in years. Cracks are appearing in the ruling ZANU-PF party, the research group notes, and President Mugabe may be on his way out:

After years of political deadlock and continued economic and humanitarian decline, a realistic chance has at last begun to appear in the past few months to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis, by retirement of President Robert Mugabe, a power-sharing transitional government, a new constitution and elections. Both factions of the divided Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition and powerful elements of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party support the concept in outline.

Crucially, the group found that targeted sanctions have played an important role in undermining Mugabe's support:

Targeted EU and U.S. sanctions on senior regime figures are working. ZANU-PF leaders cite their personal financial situations as motivation for wanting Mugabe out. “We have businesses which we worked hard over years to set up which are collapsing. It is about time we change course”, said a senior politburo member.

The possible implications stretch far beyond Zimbabwe. Targeted sanctions, which limit the activity of specific regime members, rather than the entire country, are a relatively recent innovation. The hope has been that they would better pressure a target government while sparing its citizens needless suffering. Officials in Sudan, Iran, and North Korea are currently on the receiving end of these appeals to their unenlightened self-interest. The news out of Zimbabwe is reason to hope they might be similarly persuaded.

The U.S. State Department released its 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices yesterday. Tucked away in all the jargon in the report on Kazakhstan was this gem, filed under the section titled Internet Freedom:

In December 2005 the government deemed as offensive the content of a satirical web site controlled by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and revoked the .kz domain."

Sacha Baron Cohen, is, of course, the British actor who plays a fictional Kazakh TV reporter in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. 

Shortly before the revocation of the ".kz" domain, a Kazakh government official had threatened to take "legal measures" against Cohen. Responding in the character of Borat, Cohen—who happens to be Jewish—said:

I ... fully support my government's position to sue this Jew."

In reality, Cohen didn't skip a beat, moving his site to www.borat.tv. As Nurlan Isin, president of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, explained at the time, "We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name." So it's a stretch, to say the least, for the U.S. State Department to lump Cohen's case in with the very real and serious human rights abuses that permeate the rest of the report.

Editor's note: Passport blogger Preeti Aroon also contributed to this post.

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As Blake noted in the Morning Brief, Angelina Jolie makes a strong case for Darfur justice in today's Washington Post. The victims want justice, she argues, and Khartoum doesn't. Those are very good reasons to celebrate the International Criminal Court's recent moves. But I think she also inadvertently highlights the danger of the judicial strategy for advocates of action in Darfur:

There has been a groundswell of public support for action. People may disagree on how to intervene -- airstrikes, sending troops, sanctions, divestment -- but we all should agree that the slaughter must be stopped and the perpetrators brought to justice.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem. The ICC becomes the lowest common denominator, and politicians averse to taking the hard steps can point to the prosecutions as evidence of progress.

Jolie also points out that the situation in Darfur has worsened considerably since 2004. The deterioration on the ground is evidence that, at least so far, the threat of prosecutions has not done the job that ICC enthusiasts hoped it would. And as the recent Bosnia genocide ruling demonstrates, the wheels of justice can move very slowly indeed.

The ICC is in action now, and it should aggressively push its case. But I think activists would be wise not to celebrate its small steps, lest they create the impression that something has actually been done.

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As noted in today's Morning Brief, The International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s highest legal body, has cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for what it ruled was a genocide during the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia. However, the court did rule that Serbia violated international law by not preventing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys. The court, which rules on disputes between U.N. member states, has been deliberating on the case since May of last year. In a nuanced statement that took nearly two hours to read, British judge Rosalyn Higgins said the Srebrenica genocide "cannot be attributed to the respondent's (Serbia's) state organs."

Bosnia's case rested on the argument that Serbia incited ethnic hatred within Bosnia, armed ethnic Serbians, and actively participated in the war, which killed over 100,000 people between 1992 and 1995. Serbia has always denied the charge, insisting the war was an internal Bosnian conflict. Indeed, Serbia disputed the legality of the whole proceedings, as the U.N. had suspended Yugoslavia's membership at the time in question. Today, however, Judge Higgins ruled that Serbia had inherited Yugoslavia's "legal identity," and was thus bound by the Geneva Convention at the time of the massacre. It's doubtful that most Bosnian Muslims—who were looking for justice, not legalisms, and likely see an ethnic Serb as inseparable from the Serbian state—will be satisfied by this result.

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The United Nations-sponsored international tribunal charged with bringing the remnants of the Khmer Rouge to justice looks set to collapse, following the latest round of dithering by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Despite near universal support for the tribunal in Cambodia and in the international community, Hun Sen has trotted out the old red herring that has doomed so many similar efforts: concern over the tribunal's threat to national sovereignty.

Exactly whom is Hun Sen protecting? Himself? He was, after all, a mid-level soldier for the regime. But he ultimately defected. Old Khmer Rouge cronies? Quite possibly, given that Sen's ruling party, the CPP, is a notorious haven for former members of the Pol Pot regime. Der Spiegel offers another plausible explanation: 

[Hun Sen's] delay tactics may not just be a function of his powerful friends. The Khmer Rouge had support from China, and current Chinese leaders have made it clear to their tiny neighbor that Beijing's role in the 1970s bloodbath shouldn't be revisited.

If the tribunal does collapse and Chinese pressure on Hun Sen is seen as the culprit, international outrage will probably be minimal. After all, amid breathless reports on the country's GDP and the occasional bit about urban-rural stratification, China's ghastly human rights record doesn't get nearly as much play in the press as it did in the 1990s.

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For at least the third time, the Chinese government has blocked Gao Yaojie—a Chinese doctor who has played a critical role in drawing attention to China's HIV/AIDS crisis—from leaving the country to accept an award from Vital Voices, a U.S.-based advocacy group supported by Hillary Clinton. Gao was prevented by police from leaving her house, causing her to miss her flight to Beijing (where she was planning to apply for her visa).

Gao Yaojie was one of the first people to expose the "blood scandal" in Henan province, in which local authorities knowingly allowed blood contaminated with HIV to spread throughout Henan's blood supply, which has created around 100,000 orphans. In the 1990s, local officials set up clinics and began paying peasants $5 for blood donations to meet the massive shortage of blood in local hospitals. But because donors were suffering from anemia from giving away too much blood, the collectors switched to taking only plasma, then pooling the blood of different types together, and re-injecting the remaining blood into the donors—a sure-fire way to spread diseases quickly.

Authorities have tried to cover up the scandal by arresting AIDS activists, closing down orphanages, and trying desperately to prevent the media from getting wind of it. Thanks to people like Gao, though, they haven't succeeded entirely.

(Hat tip: China Shakes the World by James Kynge)

We're going to hear a lot over the next couple years about nationalizing healthcare in America. But before you hop on that train, take a look at what's going on up north. With waiting lists for organ transplants running 4,000+ people strong in Canada's nationalized healthcare system, droves of crazy Canucks are heading over to China in search of cheap human organs. According to a report released Wednesday by David Kilgour, Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region, and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, the organs are mainly being harvested from Chinese prisoners, particularly Falun Gong practitioners.

Much of the harvesting, Kilgour and Matas report, is being done by China's military. "Recipients often tell us that even when they receive transplants at civilian hospitals, those conducting the operation are military personnel,'' the report said. The going price for a People's Liberation Army kidney is about $52,000. As many as 100 Canadians have traveled to China to have transplants in recent years.

Matas had this to say:

Everywhere else in the world, you have recipients waiting for donors. In China, it's the reverse, donors are waiting for recipients. Once a customer arrives into China somebody is killed for the organ."

And it's not just China—it's unbelievable how global the phenomenon of organ harvesting has become. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a prominent professor of medical anthropology at Berkeley, broke down the numbers on it for FP in this eye-opening piece:

A 2-meter-high baby diaper made out of police uniforms has been banned by communist authorities in Vietnam. The artwork is the same light brown color as the uniforms of Vietnam's traffic police, and the inside of the giant diaper is lined with pockets—each fastened by a police button.

The artist, Truong Tan, was merely trying to make a coy statement on official corruption by comparing the absorbent capacities of diapers with the pockets of police officers. But he wasn't coy enough. All cultural events in Vietnam need to be approved in advance, and organizers must submit photos of artwork along with descriptions. In this case, the photo was submitted sans description, so authorities were a bit slow in picking up on the sculpture's hidden meaning. But after one member of the police department saw it up close, he got the joke—and the giant diaper was duly banned from the exhibition.

A previously undisclosed cache of letters written by Anne Frank's father reveals just how desperately Otto Frank tried to save his family and get them out of Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The letters, discovered two summers ago in New York City, reveal that he investigated escape routes through Spain to neutral Portugal, tried to obtain visas to Paris, and attempted to get his family into the United States and Cuba.

The letters once again bring to light questions about U.S. immigration policy at the time, and why Mr. Frank's desperate pleas for help were not successful. As chronicled in Anne Frank's famous diary, the family ended up having to hide in an Amsterdam attic for two years, only to be discovered and sent to concentration camps.

David Bosco, one of our bloggers here at Passport, has a nuanced essay in this morning's LA Times making the case that Iraq has become as much a humanitarian crisis as the more celebrated Darfur:

POLLS TELL US that Americans want to be less involved in Iraq and more involved in Darfur. It's not hard to understand why. For the American public, and many of its leaders, Iraq is a tainted war without good guys. Darfur, by contrast, is a chance to save the helpless. In our minds, Iraq and Darfur seem to fit into neat categories: One is a botched war, the other is a humanitarian crisis.

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The ugly truth is that in both cases, thousands of innocent civilians are suffering. Bosco highlights a recent finding by the United Nations that over 34,000 Iraqis died in 2006 (here's the pdf of the report itself). He could have added that another 471,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since last February's Samarra shrine bombing. The death toll for Darfur has become a political football, but the U.S. State Department's most recent estimate is that 200,000 people have been killed by the violence since it began in 2003, and over 2 million people have been displaced. But Bosco's not trying to play the numbers game. Rather, he's trying to grab Americans swayed by moral arguments over Darfur, and shake them into asking themselves whether the United States can still save lives in Iraq:

It's natural that Americans would yearn for a simpler and clearer conflict than Iraq to showcase their humanitarian impulses. But our concern for Darfur must not become a moral salve that allows us to abandon Iraq to its spasm of violence. There may be no blameless factions in Iraq, but there are thousands of ordinary victims. Unless it is clear that we are doing no good, we owe them more.

If Bosco wanted to make the case that Iraq is actually more important to American interests than Darfur, he could have, but I think he would reject that kind of cold, amoral calculus. Is one person's life more valuable than another's? Yet, while it's not clear to me that the U.S. military is doing "no good" in Iraq, absent a more realistic regional strategy from the White House, what little it is accomplishing by staying is probably not worth the costs.

As the world's eyes focus on Baghdad, problems in other parts of the world have a stubborn way of plodding along, whether or not anyone takes notice. In Bangladesh, a fragile democracy of nearly 150 million souls, caretaker president Iajuddin Ahmed has just resigned as "chief adviser" in the face of a general strike and growing protests.  Our Thursday Video takes you to the streets of Dhaka, where violence between police and protesters is getting increasingly out of control:

Demonstrations by the opposition Awami League have thrown much of the country into chaos; the League claims that the outgoing government of the Bangladesh National Party has rigged a general election due in two weeks. The UN and the EU have both left, claiming that the deteriorating situation make it impossible to hold a free and fair vote as scheduled. A state of emergency had been declared by President Ahmed last night. 

Why does this matter? As a country made up of mostly moderate Muslims, Bangladesh is an important counterweight to more politically repressive regimes elsewhere in the Islamic world. Countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Turkey, when their political systems work, show that democracy and Islam are not mutually exclusive. They also preclude the emergence of religiously-based terrorist groups by better channeling dissent. The success or failure of democracy in places like Bangladesh could reverberate in other countries, like nearby Pakistan and distant Iraq, that occupy more real estate on newspaper front pages.

Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, and the charges against him for the murder of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds have been dropped. Nevertheless, the former dictator held center stage at yesterday's court proceedings for the remaining defendants in the Anfal case. John F. Burns reports for the NYT on how recordings played of Saddam coldly advocating the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages prove that the world just said goodbye to a brutal despot.

On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

"Yes, they're very effective if people don't wear masks," Mr. Hussein replies.

"You mean they will kill thousands?" Mr. Douri asks.

"Yes, they will kill thousands," Mr. Hussein says. [...]

Mr. Hussein sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. "They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won’t be able to sleep in their beds," he says. "They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated." [...]

But it was Mr. Hussein's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

"Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," Mr. Hussein replies.