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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH -----
----- On January 14, Human Rights Watch released its 2003 World Report. The 558-page report covers human rights developments in 2002 in 58 countries. The report highlighted the ongoing impact of counter-terrorist measures on human rights and the degree to which the United States and other western governments provided support to repressive governments in the name of the war against terrorism. Massive publicity was given to the report's finding that by supporting repressive governments and depriving terrorist suspects of their rights, the United States was undermining the popular support it needs to fight terrorism successfully. In its summary of developments over the last year, the report also identifies positive trends such as the formal end to wars in Angola, Sudan, and Sierra Leone, as well as peace talks in Sri Lanka. But negative developments included the outbreak of serious communal violence in Gujarat, India, and the continued killing of civilians in wars from Colombia to Chechnya, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, serious human rights abuses continued in countries such as Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, and Vietnam. Read the report, or purchase a copy at http://www.hrw.org/wr2k3/ ----- ILLINOIS GOVERNOR EMPTIES DEATH ROW On January 10, Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned four men whose confessions were allegedly obtained through police coercion. The following day, he granted a blanket clemency to the remaining 167 inmates sentenced to death in Illinois, clearing the state's death row. The move comes nearly two years after Governor Ryan instituted a state-wide moratorium on executions. Read more at http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/us0110.htm For additional information about the Chicago Police Department's use of torture, a factor behind Gov. Ryan's pardons, see the HRW report, "Shielded from Justice" available on the web at http://www.hrw.org/reports98/police/uspo53.htm.
On January 6, Mississippi governor Ronnie Musgrove granted Ronald Chris Foster a reprieve until Foster's case can be considered by the state Supreme Court. Foster was scheduled to be executed on January 8 for a murder he committed at age 17. The reprieve will also stay Foster's execution until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on another case involving a death row inmate who was under the age of eighteen at the time of his crimes. The governor's action comes two days before Mississippi was scheduled to put Foster to death in what would have been the state's first execution of a child offender in over fifty years. Human Rights Watch had publicly appealed to the governor to halt Foster's execution, and is campaigning internationally against the United States' imposition of the death penalty on people who were under 18 at the time of their offenses. The United States is one of only four countries to continue this practice, which is contrary to international law. Read HRW's press release at http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/us010106.htm Find out more about the Death Penalty in the United States at http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/deathpenalty/ ----- On December 26, the Washington Post reported that persons held at a CIA interrogation center in Bagram air base in Afghanistan were being subjected to "stress and duress" techniques such as "standing or kneeling for hours" and "being held in awkward, painful positions." The article also noted that thousands of persons have been arrested and detained with U.S. assistance in countries that routinely use torture, such as Uzbekistan and Morocco. Human Rights Watch immediately responded by sending a letter to President Bush asking that steps be taken to ensure that the United States does not engage in torture or become complicit in torture committed by other governments. This letter generated a wide amount of press coverage in U.S. and international papers. A Bush administration official responded to the Human Rights Watch in the Washington Post, stating that "we believe we are in full compliance with international and domestic law." Read HRW's letter and press release at http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/12/us1227.htm ----- On December 18, Human Rights Watch released "Fatally Flawed: Cluster Bombs and Their Use by the United States in Afghanistan." Based on a month-long mission to Afghanistan last spring, the report documents the harm cluster bombs caused to civilians during the recent war. The report finds that although the United States made some efforts to reduce the civilian harm caused by its cluster bombs, the weapon's fundamental problems remained Š a lack of accuracy in targeting making them inappropriate weapons to use near civilian populations, and an excessively large number of submunitions that do not explode on initial contact with the ground, leaving highly volatile and deadly explosives that indiscriminately kill civilians. Human Rights Watch presented the findings of the report in a formal session of the Group of Governmental Experts for the Convention on Conventional Weapons at the United Nations in Geneva. This Group is about to start negotiating a new protocol on explosive remnants of war, which include cluster bomb duds. The presentation generated formal and informal discussion among States Parties and NGOs. The Chinese delegation, for example, praised the report in open session and directly quoted its recommendations that users of cluster bombs should bear a special responsibility for clearing unexploded submunitions. The comment forced the U.S. representative to acknowledge the report, and he responded by referring to other HRW findings. Such discussion ensured awareness of HRW's recommendations among the parties drafting new international law on the subject and will help HRW influence the forthcoming negotiations. For more information on cluster bombs, see http://www.hrw.org/arms/clusterbombs.php ----- On December 23, the United States ratified an international treaty banning the forced recruitment of children under the age of eighteen, or their use in armed conflict. Human Rights Watch has worked for several years to gain US support for this treaty. The United States initially opposed an 18-year minimum age for combat, and in the past has sent 17-year old troops into armed conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia and the Gulf War. A campaign led by Human Rights Watch helped influence the Pentagon to change its deployment practices to exclude 17-year-old soldiers from direct combat roles. After the treaty's signature by President Clinton in July 2000, Human Rights Watch led advocacy efforts to gain support for the treaty within the United States Senate, which unanimously gave its support for ratification in June 2002. The treaty is officially known as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. To date, 111 governments have signed the treaty; the United Sates is the 45th to ratify it. For more information on our work on child soldiers, see http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/index.htm ----- Human Rights Watch assisted several threatened human rights prosecutors in Colombia, one of whom became the first Colombian prosecutor involved with human rights cases to receive direct assistance from the United States to gain political asylum and resettle in the country. We brought these cases to the direct attention of Colombia's president and the US ambassador, urging their personal intervention to protect the lives of public officials who had investigated key cases implicating the military in collaboration with paramilitary groups. We also published an important opinion piece in Colombia's main newspaper responding to a paid advertisement in the same daily that had charged Human Rights Watch with failing to denounce abuses committed by guerrillas. The op-ed, which described HRW's extensive reporting on and advocacy about guerrilla abuses, quelled the flood of enraged letters and emails to HRW that the advertisement had unleashed. Through vigorous lobbying, HRW helped block a provision included in draft legislation before the Colombian Congress that would have given judicial powers to the military. In tune with the times, President Alvaro Uribe has been pushing draconian counter-terrorism laws that directly violate due process and threaten once again to involve the security forces in serious abuses. However, there are forces, among them the country's Constitutional Court and some within the Congress, that have worked to ensure that basic guarantees remain in force. During a November mission, Human Rights Watch met with key participants in this debate, among them President Uribe, the Constitutional Court, and influential Congressional members, to push for guarantees to be preserved. Find out more about human rights in Colombia at http://www.hrw.org/americas/colombia.php ----- Following several years of intensive advocacy by Human Rights Watch and others, the Uzbek government finally agreed to extend an invitation to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit the country. The visit, which took place from November 24 to December 6, was the first visit to Uzbekistan by any U.N. investigator and received immense media coverage. In an unusual move, Theo van Boven, the Special Rapporteur, stated in a press conference at the conclusion of the visit that torture was "systemic" in Uzbekistan. He also made clear that the level of cooperation on the part of the Uzbek authorities had been unsatisfactory, describing one instance in which the deputy head of the National Security Service had denied him access to the institution's facilities in Tashkent. In another case, the Special Rapporteur was allowed to visit the notorious prison colony at Jaslyk for only two hours rather than the requested six. Human Rights Watch's Tashkent office provided significant assistance to the Special Rapporteur during his visit, facilitating meetings for him with local civil society representatives and making sure he had access to victims and witnesses of torture. A report detailing the Special Rapporteur's findings will be published in advance of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in March. ----- In January 2003, the European Court of Human Rights declared admissible six applications from victims of the war in Chechnya against the Russian Federation Š the first such admissibility decision on applications concerning the Chechnya war. The six applicants allege that Russian forces violated their and their relatives' right to life in several incidents such as bombing raids and summary executions during 1999 and 2000. These incidents were extensively documented by Human Rights Watch. Memorial Human Rights Center, a leading Russian human rights group, filed the applications on behalf of the victims in April and May 2000. In December 2000, Human Rights Watch assisted Memorial in collecting and systematizing evidence, as well as in drafting the plaintiffs' memoranda to the court. Human Rights Watch has since brought numerous other victims of the Chechnya war in contact with lawyers willing to represent them before the court, and helped these lawyers draft applications and memoranda. The court will pass judgment on these applications at a later date. ----- On January 22, the Justice Committee of the Belgian Senate passed two important proposals. The first aims at restoring the 1993 universal jurisdiction law to its original scope, while the second aims to adapt the same law to the new International Criminal Court. The Belgian law, which permits prosecutions in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad, had been severely curtailed by recent restrictive judicial decisions. This proposal overrules these negative decisions and clearly reaffirms that the presence of the accused on Belgian territory is NOT a condition for application of the 1993 law, which had been amended in 1999. This development comes as a great victory after months of behind-closed-door negotiations among Belgian politicians and an intense NGO advocacy campaign initiated by Human Rights Watch. This law is necessary to preserve the work already completed on the Hissein Habrˇ (former dictator of Chad) and other cases filed under the 1993 law. The second proposal is a more global law modifying the 1993 law, which confirms the universal jurisdiction principle while recognizing state immunities "to the extent required by international law" and setting some nexus requirements for new cases. These proposals must still be adopted by the full Senate and the Assembly before Parliament dissolves in April. ----- Your contribution to Human Rights Watch will allow us to continue to investigate human rights conditions in more than 70 countries and to generate pressure to end abuses. HRW does not accept financial support from any government or government agency. Every investigation we undertake, every advocacy campaign we embark on, and every report we produce is funded solely by generous private contributions. To find out more about membership, or to make a donation online, by phone, or by postal mail, visit http://www.hrw.org/donations// |
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