The state of California’s new procedure for carrying out executions by lethal injection violates international human rights law.

California’s proposed lethal injection protocol is inconsistent with international human rights law, including human rights treaties ratified by the United States.

The Obama administration should shelve reported plans for holding terrorism suspects without charge or trial. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the administration had drafted an executive order that would reassert authority claimed by the Bush administration to detain suspects without charge indefinitely, including those currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

For years, we have been shocked by stories of the abuse — much of it sexual — of security detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. But prisoners are not just abused overseas. Rape and sexual violence are all too frequent here in our own backyard. If America is to reclaim its moral authority as a defender of human rights and dignity, it must start at home.

The new report and standards on prison rape – released today by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission – challenge prison officials to end this devastating and all too prevalent human rights violation.

In an Op-Ed published in the Puerto Rico Daily Sun, Human Rights Watch researchers describe their impressions from a recent visit to the Medication Assisted Therapy program at Camp Zarzal, a minimum-security prison in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.

Since the mid-1980s, the United States has pursued aggressive law enforcement strategies to curtail the use and distribution of illegal drugs. The costs and benefits of this national “war on drugs” remain fiercely debated. What is not debatable, however, is that this ostensibly race-neutral effort has been waged primarily against black Americans. Relative to their numbers in the general population and among drug offenders, black Americans are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated on drug charges.