For over 30 years, the Vietnamese Government have continued to subject the Degar people, a peaceful ethnic minority Christian group, to arbitrary arrests, beatings and forced denunciations of their religion, with little or no repercussions at all. Seeking political autonomy and freedom to practice their religion, outside of the communist rule, the Degar people face continuous oppression and restrictions to living their lives, every day.

As the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, they are also sometimes referred to as the Montagnard people, which means ‘’mountain people’’, taken from the French colonial period in Vietnam. The Degar people constantly face the onslaught of rising communist ambitions, and the consequence of not adhering to the Vietnamese government’s demands. Since the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese have grown increasingly suspicious of the Degar people due to their Christian faith being a reason to cause them to sympathise with the French and Americans.

8th March, 1911 marked the beginning of celebrating women, in all aspects; socially, economically and politically, in a global spectrum. In a time of rapid growth, and great industrialisation, both men and women marched to campaign for women's rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination. Indeed, in the last 100 years there is much to celebrate, from the rise of influential female politicians and some becoming Prime Ministers, to more women being educated to a higher standard  and earning as much as men.

But this day isn’t just about celebrating the ‘famous’ or the most ‘powerful’ women. It is about ALL women. Take a moment today and read the story of any woman, a mother, daughter, a sister, whose struggle is unheard, but very real nonetheless. It is women who live marginalised and oppressed, that need to be championed, their heroism ‘celebrated’.

Last year Hilary Clinton, US Secretary of State delivered a speech on the freedom of the internet. In her speech she set out her ideas on how internet freedom would become a foreign policy priority for the US – saying that the US government was "supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship" and that those tools would be put "in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights". At the time, Clinton's speech was thought mainly to be a response to Google's censorship of search results in China but the Secretary of State answered questions on government censorship in various countries. Now, when you hear about internet censorship you might think of China, North Korea, Iran or Burma. But Vietnam? Most people don't know much more about Vietnam than what they studied at school in history class. But flying under the radar of most news outlets is the multitude of human rights violations that the Vietnamese government are committing.

Restless Beings has received news of the arbitrary arrest of a Palestinian reporter and peace activist by Israeli forces in the town of Hebron in the West Bank. Mahmoud Jabari, aged nineteen, was arrested during a protest in Hebron on Friday 25th February.

Jabari, who has been an active advocate of peaceful dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the age of thirteen, was present at the protest as a correspondant and photograher for Al Jazeera Talk. He has been detained since his arrest, charged with throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. A fellow reporter present at the protest firmly denies this allegation against Jabari, while his friends and family state that this reported behaviour contradicts Jabari's character and commitment to achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The UN has consistently confined its international interventions to peace-keeping, thereby resisting the possibility of violent action. Does this commitment to peace, the grand ideal of political, sociological and spiritual discourse, actually amount to the failure of international justice? If the UN refuses to intervene, or to ‘take sides’, even if this means taking the side of a victim against an aggressor through proportionate intervention, it cannot prevent violent action and bring peace about. It can apparently only operate if a state of peace already exists. If situations of conflict are underway, if there is no peace to keep, is the UN defunct? And if a situation is heading for conflict, but no pronounced acts of violence have yet begun, and ‘peace’ is therefore prevalent, is the UN’s job done, despite conflict being imminent?