Equatorial Guinea is perhaps the world's most striking example of why oil hurts, rather than helps, many of the countries that have it. Will the Obama administration stop the country's dictator from sucking its people dry?
They might end up as costly baubles on sale in shops around the world. But for some diamonds mined in Zimbabwe, the journey begins in massive illegal pit mines where men, women, and children are forced to work long days under the brutal authority of government troops, who took over the mine in a spree of bloodshed.
Namibia hosts the Kimberley Process Intersessional Meeting in Windhoek starting tomorrow. Namibia's Deputy Mines Minister, Bernhard Esau, who chairs the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), has a problem on his hands: protecting the integrity and credibility of the Process and the international diamond industry.
Turmoil tends to be bad for human rights, and the current global economic crisis is no exception. The consequences are not just the obvious ones - more poverty, setbacks in education and healthcare, further marginalisation of the downtrodden, backsliding in economic development.
In the midst of the economic crisis, the Bush administration has decided to spend its final days in office pushing for a trade agreement with Colombia that few Americans even know about.
Olympic sponsors have not only an opportunity but a duty to speak out about human rights abuses in China, since these abuses violate the Olympic Charter, the human rights pledges made by Beijing when bidding for the Games, and, most important, the principles upon which their own corporate social responsibility policies are built.
When China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, it was due in good part to human rights pledges. These included a specific commitment of “complete freedom” to report for the global media. Beijing made these pledges after losing its first bid to host in 1993, largely because of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
RE "THE promise of a Colombia trade pact" (Op-ed, April 11): Edward Schumacher-Matos misrepresents the work of Human Rights Watch on killings of trade unionists in Colombia when he says we "imply" that all such murders are because of labor organizing.
If death squads with ties to the U.S. government were targeting Post reporters for assassination, I doubt that The Post would dismiss the problem by arguing that the murder rate for journalists was less than the rate for the District as a whole. Yet that is exactly what The Post did in dismissing the killings of trade union activists by paramilitaries in Colombia on the basis that trade unionists are still less likely to be killed than the average citizen ["The Sin of Speaking Truth," editorial, April 8]. Congress is right to delay approval of a free-trade agreement with Colombia until Mr. Uribe takes on the violent right as he did the violent left.
In the remote Nariño region of southwestern Colombia, one mother amongst many mourned her loss. "The paramilitaries said my son was a guerrilla," she told me last month. "They tortured him, tied him up ... and then shot him three times in the head in front of everybody."
Equatorial Guinea is perhaps the world's most striking example of why oil hurts, rather than helps, many of the countries that have it. Will the Obama administration stop the country's dictator from sucking its people dry?
They might end up as costly baubles on sale in shops around the world. But for some diamonds mined in Zimbabwe, the journey begins in massive illegal pit mines where men, women, and children are forced to work long days under the brutal authority of government troops, who took over the mine in a spree of bloodshed.
Namibia hosts the Kimberley Process Intersessional Meeting in Windhoek starting tomorrow. Namibia's Deputy Mines Minister, Bernhard Esau, who chairs the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), has a problem on his hands: protecting the integrity and credibility of the Process and the international diamond industry.
Turmoil tends to be bad for human rights, and the current global economic crisis is no exception. The consequences are not just the obvious ones - more poverty, setbacks in education and healthcare, further marginalisation of the downtrodden, backsliding in economic development.
In the midst of the economic crisis, the Bush administration has decided to spend its final days in office pushing for a trade agreement with Colombia that few Americans even know about.
Olympic sponsors have not only an opportunity but a duty to speak out about human rights abuses in China, since these abuses violate the Olympic Charter, the human rights pledges made by Beijing when bidding for the Games, and, most important, the principles upon which their own corporate social responsibility policies are built.
When China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, it was due in good part to human rights pledges. These included a specific commitment of “complete freedom” to report for the global media. Beijing made these pledges after losing its first bid to host in 1993, largely because of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
RE "THE promise of a Colombia trade pact" (Op-ed, April 11): Edward Schumacher-Matos misrepresents the work of Human Rights Watch on killings of trade unionists in Colombia when he says we "imply" that all such murders are because of labor organizing.
If death squads with ties to the U.S. government were targeting Post reporters for assassination, I doubt that The Post would dismiss the problem by arguing that the murder rate for journalists was less than the rate for the District as a whole. Yet that is exactly what The Post did in dismissing the killings of trade union activists by paramilitaries in Colombia on the basis that trade unionists are still less likely to be killed than the average citizen ["The Sin of Speaking Truth," editorial, April 8]. Congress is right to delay approval of a free-trade agreement with Colombia until Mr. Uribe takes on the violent right as he did the violent left.
In the remote Nariño region of southwestern Colombia, one mother amongst many mourned her loss. "The paramilitaries said my son was a guerrilla," she told me last month. "They tortured him, tied him up ... and then shot him three times in the head in front of everybody."