Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign relations chief, should raise human rights concerns with Syrian officials during her visit next week and seek specific commitments to improve their record, Human Rights Watch said today.

Philippine authorities should act swiftly to protect eyewitnesses to the November 2009 massacre of at least 57 people in Maguindanao province on Mindanao, and to protect their families as well.

Libyan authorities should immediately release Jamal al-Haji, who was arrested after he submitted a complaint to the government about human rights violations.

The Egyptian authorities should drop all charges against Ahmad Mostafa, a 20-year-old engineering student charged with writing about corruption in the military academy on his blog.

Click. And then silence.

It was the sound I dreaded in my calls to Cuba. As I gathered testimony from relatives of political prisoners, I never knew what an abrupt end to the call meant.

The Olympic Movement urgently needs to focus on human rights reform, Human Rights Watch said today as the 2010 Winter Olympics opened in Vancouver.

I recently went to Tripoli, where we held a news conference to release a report about human rights in Libya. That's right - a public event in Libya's capital.

On January 23, 2010, the Chávez government threatened to take action against cable providers that aired channels that did not comply with Venezuelan regulations, including the requirement to interrupt regular broadcasting to broadcast presidential speeches. The following day, the country's cable providers stopped broadcasting seven channels, including TV Chile, Chile's public TV channel, and RCTV International, the cable channel that was created after RCTV—Venezuela's oldest television channel and a constant critic of President Hugo Chávez—was taken off the public airwaves in 2007.