The US Department of Justice should open a criminal investigation into post-9/11 interrogation practices.

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.

Since the mid-1980s, the United States has pursued aggressive law enforcement strategies to curtail the use and distribution of illegal drugs. This ostensibly race-neutral effort has been waged primarily against black Americans.

The Obama administration should rescind the Bush-era regulation that allows healthcare workers to deny women essential health information and services, Human Rights Watch said today. April 9, 2009, is the final day for public comment on a proposal to rescind the regulation, the “provider conscience rule.”

"I was starting to go blind," said Mary T. A diabetic, she was being held by U.S. immigration authorities when her vision began to fail. "I could only see shades of people," she said, "I couldn't see numbers or letters." She repeatedly complained to her jailers but received no medical care for 15 days as her condition worsened. When a nurse finally was summoned, Mary T. recalled, the nurse asked her, "Why didn't you tell us?"

The medical care system in US immigration detention is dangerously inadequate, with unique consequences for women, and improving health care for immigration detainees should be a top priority for the new administration, Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC) said.

Blacks have been arrested nationwide on drug charges at higher rates than whites for nearly three decades, even though they engage in drug offenses at comparable rates.

Human Rights Watch called on the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8, a referendum narrowly passed last November that withdrew the right to marry from lesbian and gay couples.