• Riot police use a water cannon to restrain a protester during an anti-government protest at Taksim Square in central Istanbul, Turkey.
    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government should end police violence and excessive use of force against protests across Turkey. Officials should uphold the right to peaceful protest and free speech.

Reports

Free Speech

  • Jun 20, 2013
    (Tripoli) – Libyan judicial authorities should immediately drop all criminal charges that violate freedom of speech over election poster cartoons against two Libyan National Party officials. Under the laws being applied in this case, the men could face the death penalty over posters their party displayed during the 2012 election campaign for the General National Congress.
  • Jun 19, 2013
    President Ilham Aliev of Azerbaijan is visiting Brussels this week for negotiations on the Southern Gas Corridor, which someday might transport gas from the Caspian Sea region to European markets. This oil-rich country in the south Caucasus plays a significant role in the European Union's energy security. That should in no way impede José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission's president, from being very clear that the need to meet human-rights standards will be a part of any relationship with the EU.
  • Jun 18, 2013
    The United States should protect people who use classified or other sensitive government information to expose what appear to be serious human rights violations and other government wrongdoing, Human Rights Watch said in a statement released today.
  • Jun 18, 2013
    The recent public disclosures of US National Security Agency (NSA) dragnet surveillance have given new urgency to an important global debate on what controls are needed to ensure that the rights of people everywhere to privacy, expression, information and association are adequately protected.
  • Jun 18, 2013
    On Tuesday (18 June), the German chancellor and the US president will embrace each other. Eyes will be shining as both sides praise the German-American friendship. After all, this visit from Washington is an election campaign present for Angela Merkel, and the president can hope for symbolic pictures to build his own legend.
  • Jun 17, 2013
    The Communications Law that the Ecuadorian National Assembly approved on June 14, 2013, seriously undermines free speech. The law includes overly broad language that will limit the free expression of journalists and media outlets.
  • Jun 15, 2013
    The two-year prison sentence for a Tunisian rapper on June 13, 2013, for “insulting the police” in a song violates freedom of speech. The criminal court sentence is another manifestation of the continuing intolerance for those who criticize government institutions in Tunisia.
  • Jun 14, 2013
    It has been a long and eventful week in Istanbul. It will be hard for many who were there to forget the scenes reminiscent of war on the streets around Taksim Square and Gezi Park, the site of the protests, on Tuesday evening and into the night. After apparently conciliatory tweets from Istanbul governor Hüseyin Avni Mutlu to the young protesters occupying Gezi Park just a day earlier, and following indications that the prime minister was ready to sit down to talks over the protests on Wednesday, both leaders made an astonishing about-face.
  • Jun 12, 2013
    Human Rights Watch welcomes the conclusions of reports of the High Commissioner for Human Rights presented to the Human Rights Council at its 21st and 23rd session and shares her view that in the area of human rights, actual implementation remains extremely weak in South Sudan. The government took noteworthy steps to develop its legal and institutional structure, but South Sudan continues to face enormous challenges.
  • Jun 11, 2013
    Recent revelations about the scope of US national security surveillance highlight how dramatic increases in private digital communications and government computing power are fueling surveillance practices that impinge on privacy in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. There is an urgent need for the US Congress to reevaluate and rewrite surveillance laws in light of those technological developments and put in place better safeguards against security agency overreach.