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Despite the historic peace process that is under way in the Middle East, Israel’s interrogation agencies in the occupied territories have continued to engage in a systematic pattern of torture and ill-treatment. Well over 100,000 Palestinians have been detained since the start of the intifada in 1987.

The people of Guatemala have suffered savage repression at the hands of security forces, civil patrols, and guerrillas waging a thirty-year civil war. Their villages were razed and tens of thousands disappeared — presumably murdered — their bodies occasionally discovered in clandestine graves throughout the highlands.

Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia-Hercegovina after Sarajevo, is the scene of much of the most severe and systematic “ethnic cleansing”: torture, murder, rape, beatings, harassment, de jure discrimination, intimidation, expulsion from homes, confiscation of property, bombing of businesses, dismissal from work, outlawing of all scripts except the Cyrillic in public institutions, and

While land has always played a central role in the cultures, identities, and religions of indigenous peoples, Indians who attempt to exercise the rights that are guaranteed to them in the Brazilian Constitution are frequently the victims of violent attacks and other human rights abuses.

Despite the considerable progress that has been made to ensure an independent press both in practice and in law, there is troubling evidence of official harassment of journalists whose views are critical of the ruling powers, ranging from selective denial of press credentials to the imprisonment of a journalist who wrote an allegory considered defamatory of the President of Romania.

An investigation of the prevalence of forcible virginity control exams and the role of the government in conducting or tolerating such exams, this report cites several separate incidents in the spring of 1992 when young females committed suicide after authorities ordered them to submit to examinations of their hymens.

Since 1983, the civil war in southern Sudan has claimed the lives of some 1.3 million civilians as a result of targeted killings, indiscriminate fire, or starvation and disease. Both government and rebel forces are culpable as they wage war in total disregard for the welfare of civilians, violating almost every rule of war applicable in an internal armed conflict.

Heightened political tension has been characterized by physical attacks on journalists critical of the former Meciar government. HRW/Helsinki urges the interim government to give special consideration to the concerns outlined in this report and to disassociate itself from the media policies of its predecessor in order to create an environment in which the independent press can flourish.

The breathtaking political changes of 1993, which brought a well-respected governmental human rights advocate into the presidency of Guatemala, have one year later degenerated into turmoil and dashed hopes, with little to show for the promise that the new government appeared to bring.