• Cameroon: Three Years in Prison for Love... Impunity for Hate
    Feb 28, 2013
    "This will be bloody." So reads a text message received by a Cameroonian lawyer in October 2012. "Tell your accomplice that nowhere in this country will [his children] have peace." Over the last four months, two Cameroonian lawyers have received a series of death threats by email and SMS. The messages have become increasingly vitriolic, with threats to kill the lawyers, their children, and their clients.
  • Creating Sochi Olympic site comes at high cost for local residents
    Feb 28, 2013
    Bakinskaya Street is located on a sloping hillside in Veseloye village within the city limits of Sochi, the Russian city where, less than a year from now, the 2014 Winter Olympics will launch.
  • Child domestic workers: 'time to protect us'
    Feb 26, 2013
    Children make up nearly 30 per cent of the world's 50 to 100 million domestic workers, working long hours for little or no pay and at risk of exploitation – but now governments have a chance to do something about it.
  • Listening In
    Feb 21, 2013
    New revelations at Guantánamo show the walls have ears, and justice is being made a mockery.
  • Don’t Overlook Domestic Violence
    Feb 18, 2013
    According to December 2011 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four women in the U.S. has been a victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in her lifetime. Nearly one in five has been raped.
  • Divided We Fall: Intolerance in Europe Puts Rights at Risk
    Feb 14, 2013
    An Afghan migrant is stabbed in the heart on the streets of Athens. Black-shirted paramilitaries linked to Hungary’s third-largest political party march through a Roma neighborhood shouting, “You will die here.” A neo-Nazi gang commits a string of murders of Turkish immigrants in Germany. An ideologue driven by hatred of “multiculturalism” kills 67 mostly young people on a Norwegian Island.
  • Should Companies Take Responsibility for Repression?
    Feb 13, 2013
    The Arab uprisings have been a poignant reminder of how the Internet can promote free expression and assembly, but also how governments can try abuse it. The medium used by demonstrators to organize protests and bring medical supplies to Tahrir Square, for example, was also used by the government to pinpoint human rights defenders for arrest, harassment, and even torture.
  • An end to violence against women starts with SA’s boys and men
    Feb 10, 2013
    It’s an occupational hazard when you work on women’s rights, to routinely face women who have been subjected to unspeakable violence, horrible beyond anything you could imagine. As a young lawyer in South Africa in the 1990s, one of first my clients was stabbed by her estranged husband. I held her hand as she bled to death on the pavement. When I worked as the director of the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to End Violence Against Women in Johannesburg, I, and the other lawyers who provided legal advice at the centre, saw women every day looking for help to protect themselves from rape, beatings and other violence. Many of our clients arrived at the office with the signs of violence clearly visible on their bodies and their faces.
  • Russia's anti-Olympic spirit
    Feb 8, 2013
    The countdown to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi is officially under way. Exactly one year from today a colossal project few thought possible in 2007 – building a state-of-the-art winter sports venue in the Caucasus mountains and the on the subtropical Black Sea coast – will become reality.
  • How to Ease Syrian Suffering
    Feb 8, 2013
    The Syrian people are caught in a horrible downward spiral. The government’s slaughter seems only to intensify as President Bashar al-Assad pursues a ruthless strategy of draining the sea to get the fish — attacking civilians so they will flee and leave the armed opposition isolated.