In a letter to President Yasser Arafat, dated July 16, 1997, Human Rights Watch protests the detention without charge since July 2 of a prominent Palestinian professor. Dr. Fathi Ahmed Subuh, a professor of education at al-Azhar University in Gaza, is also director of the Touffah Educational Development Center, an independent not-for-profit organization that runs an array of community education programs in Gaza. He has been held for two weeks without any official explanation and has been denied visits by his family and lawyer. Dr. Subuh's arrest occurred shortly after he gave an exam to students at al-Azhar University in Gaza asking them to analyze administrative corruption in the university and in the Palestinian Authority, and at a time when the Touffah Center is the subject of ongoing government scrutiny.

Of the 78 people on all sides publicly indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, 66 remain at large. They include General Ratko Mladic, who personally presided over the slaughter in Srebrenica, and Radovan Karadzic, the political mastermind of the Bosnian genocide. NATO knows where to find these and other accused killers and has the legal duty and the means to capture them.

In a letter to Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, dated July 7, 1997, the Academic Freedom Committee of Human Rights Watch urges the Tunisian government to restore immediately the personal liberties of Professor Moncef Ben Salem, formerly of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Sfax in Tunisia. According to Human Rights Watch, Dr. Ben Salem has been the target of a "coordinated government campaign of harassment" because of his political views. Dr. Ben Salem has been jailed twice by the current government, most recently from 1990-1993 for giving an interview to an Algerian newspaper in which he criticized the Tunisian government for human rights abuses and for what he viewed as the government's hostility to Islam. Although there have been no new charges made against him since 1993, he has not been allowed to resume his teaching post, and has been barred even from entering the campus to retrieve his books and papers. Dr. Ben Salem reports that police are stationed outside his door at all times, his activities and those of his wife and children are constantly monitored, visitors are subjected to identification checks, his mail service is irregular and unreliable, and he has been denied a passport.

Human Rights Watch calls on the NATO heads of state meeting in Madrid to order NATO to apprehend the persons indicted for war crimes in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Of the seventy-six people from all sides publicly indicted so far, only ten have been taken into custody. If peace is to endure beyond the planned withdrawal of NATO troops in June 1998, the indicted war criminals must be apprehended.