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Human Rights Watch IN THIS ISSUE:
The Human Rights Watch monthly email update highlights the impact of our work around the world, as well as recent campaigns. It does not list everything we produce or on which we work. For the latest information from Human Rights Watch, visit our home page. Past monthly updates are archived.
Azerbaijan: Documenting Violence in Stolen Election
On October 15, election day in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, opposition members took to the streets in protest, and riot police dispersed the rallies and severely beat scores of activists. At least one person—but probably more—was beaten to death. Perhaps just as shocking was the initial reaction by the U.S. government. An anodyne State Department statement welcomed the new president’s strong performance at the polls, but failed to condemn what had happened in the oil-rich, former Soviet republic. But by December, Human Rights Watch had managed to turn the U.S. administration’s position around. Using Bouckaert’s reporting, and generating press and editorial criticism of the initial U.S. position, Human Rights Watch convinced the State Department and the National Security Council to put out a much stronger policy statement on the Azerbaijani government's actions. The Bush administration’s new statement called into question the credibility of the election, and urged an independent investigation into both the violence and election fraud. Human Rights Watch also successfully lobbied the U.S. Senate to pass a resolution, sponsored by Sen. John McCain, that made the same points. In two missions to Azerbaijan, Bouckaert monitored abuses related to the presidential election, which followers of the outgoing president Heydar AliyevŠa Communist-era holdoverŠviolently stole to secure the presidency for Aliyev’s son, Ilham. Before the election, Bouckaert documented how the Azerbaijani government launched a campaign of intimidation and harassment, beating opposition members—and preventing a free and fair election. In the weeks afterwards, the government arrested dozens of opposition members, including Isa Gambarov, the main opposition leader and presidential contender. While he acknowledged that Azerbaijan remains on the periphery of the international community’s agenda, Bouckaert noted that the country is directly related to the core U.S. foreign policy of spreading democracy around the world. “Azerbaijan directly borders Iran and Russia, it’s not far from Iraq, and it’s in crisis,” he said. “Azerbaijanis stopped believing in democracy and basic human rights. We managed to bring that situation to the attention of the U.S. government.” Find out more about human rights in Azerbaijan at http://hrw.org/doc/?t=europe&c=azerba
United States: Curbing Mistreatment of Mentally Ill Prisoners
In the United States, hundreds of thousands of the mentally ill are in prison, or three times as many as in mental hospitals. Many of them suffer from hallucinations and other severe symptoms, and are punished for “acting out,” which often leads to solitary confinement—and a worsening of their conditions, the report found. One week after the report was released, the U.S. Senate passed the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, the bill introduced by Sen. DeWine. The bill authorizes federal grants to support collaborations between mental health, criminal justice, juvenile justice and corrections systems. “We believe our visit with Senator DeWine and his enthusiasm to the report helped energize the Senate’s movement on the bill”, said Fellner. “When Congress returns next year, we will be involved in getting the House to pass the legislation.” Fellner spent two years researching and writing the report, which was released October 22. She conducted hundreds of interviews with prisoners, corrections officials, lawyers and mental health experts. As well as generating wide coverage in the local, national and international media, Fellner’s report was widely discussed in correctional and psychiatric publications. Her report documents how many people with mental illness—particularly the poor, the homeless or those struggling with substance abuse problems—cannot get mental health treatment, which was promised decades ago during widespread deinstitutionalization, but never delivered. If they commit a crime, even low-level nonviolent offenses, punitive sentencing laws mandate imprisonment. “We are literally drowning in patients, running around trying to put our fingers in the bursting dikes, while hundreds of men continue to deteriorate psychiatrically before our eyes into serious psychoses,” said one prison psychiatrist. Burdened with much the same problem, other correctional officials—including many at conferences where Fellner spoke in November and December—agreed with the report’s findings and its recommendations for reform. Read the report “Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness” at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/ For more Human Rights Watch research on the treatment of prisoners in the United States, visit http://hrw.org/prisons/
Uganda: Tracking Down Detainees Held Secretly
When it came to the safety of the 10 remaining men, Rone knew that there was no time to waste. She immediately wrote an open letter to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, calling for a thorough and independent investigation of the four executions. “As for the men arbitrarily arrested, they should be immediately charged with recognizable criminal offences and brought to trial or released without delay,” Rone urged in her letter to President Museveni. Human Rights Watch on October 2 faxed the letter to the State House, the Ugandan government headquarters in Kampala, and sent out an accompanying press release to the international and local press, including the country’s two main newspapers. The next morning, Rone was woken up by a phone call at 6 a.m. Noble Mayambo, chief of Uganda’s military intelligence, called her from Kampala, furious after reading the news on the front page of The New Vision, the pro-government daily. The 14 men had been detained in central Uganda in August by the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a joint unit drawn from several state security agencies. Apparently, four of them had been executed in early September because they were accused of having links to a rebel group. Meanwhile, the others remained in undisclosed places of detention, where some were reportedly mistreated. Less than 48 hours after Rone first heard about their plight, however, eight of the 10 remaining men were produced in a court in Uganda. Although the men were charged under state security laws rather than released, their appearance in court safeguarded from being tortured—or executed. “Only when we came out with a public statement did the government charge them,” Rone said. She also noted that the Ugandan government wanted to avoid trouble with donors like the United States and European Union countries, which provide half of the government’s operating costs—and much of the military’s overspent budget. Early next year, Human Rights Watch will release Rone’s report on detention and torture in Uganda. On November 25, Rone released her 754-page report on oil and civil conflict in Sudan—the most comprehensive examination yet published of the links between exploitation of natural resources and violations of human rights. Read "Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights" at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/ Read more about human rights in Uganda at http://hrw.org/doc/?t=africa&c=uganda
China: Fighting AIDS by Combating Human Rights Abuses
Meg Davis, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, hailed the landmark decision. But her experience as a human rights researcher documenting HIV-related abuses in China made her wary about certain key elements of the Ministry of Health's program—particularly the government’s proposal to increase the crackdown on drug users and sex workers. Systematic human rights abuses against groups at high-risk of HIV infection such as these, she knew, could in fact hinder the effective delivery of AIDS drugs. In September, Davis released a report documenting how pervasive discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS was fueling the spread of the epidemic in China. “We have to be careful,” said Davis, discussing the difficulties of conducting research in China. “We can’t go in publicly.” Chinese citizens who have helped to document the country’s bourgeoning epidemic, and the related rights abuses, have paid the price. In early October, Davis learned that a Chinese court had sentenced a provincial health official to at least eight years in prison for “circulating state secrets.” The official, Ma Shiwen, was convicted for having leaked a restricted government report on the blood scandal in Henan province. Ma had allegedly sent the report, which blamed national authorities for the spread of HIV to villagers who sold their blood in the province, to one of China’s most prominent AIDS activists, Dr. Wan Yanhai. A year earlier Human Rights Watch and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network honored Dr. Wan as the first recipient of their Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights. On the day he won the award, Dr. Wan was detained by Chinese authorities—partly for his instrumental role in exposing the burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic in Henan. Amid international pressure, however, Chinese authorities released him in September 2002 after a month of detention. Now another Chinese AIDS activist was in danger. After hearing news of Ma’s sentence, Davis drafted a letter calling for his release and sent it to senior officials at some of the key donor countries that fund HIV/AIDS programs in China. Ma was released from jail on October 16, partly through the targeted pressure of Human Rights Watch and other groups. Whether working to secure the release of Chinese whistleblowers like Ma or Dr. Wan, or disseminating its research findings and recommendations in meetings from Hong Kong to Geneva to Washington, Human Rights Watch’s advocacy continues to take a multi-pronged approach to the problems of HIV-related human rights abuses in China. Read the report "Locked Doors: The Human Rights of People Living with HIV/AIDS in China" at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/china0803/ Read more about human rights and HIV/AIDS at http://hrw.org/campaigns/aids
HRW Website: Speaking Your Language—and Others
The non-English sites feature new reports and photo galleries, and allow users to sign up for e-mail updates on human rights news. When the German Website was launched in June, the positive feedback was immediate. Major German magazines, newspapers and Web sites link to the site everyday, while German-speaking visitors e-mail their ideas to Human Rights Watch. On each Human Rights Watch Web page, a link on the upper-right corner points to an index of the non-English language Web sites—including Albanian, Amharic, Bahasa Indonesia, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Serbian, Swahili and Turkish. Creating content in so many languages is done with the assistance of dedicated staff and volunteers. Even so, because of resource limitations, Human Rights Watch is often not able to create as much content in as many languages as it would like to. "But with more people going online worldwide every day, we have an obligation to make our vital human rights information available to those who need it most," said Jagdish Parikh, Human Rights Watch's Web strategist. Today, out of all the Web pages read by visitors to the site, one in seven is in a language other than English. Human Rights Watch will continue to work to make human rights universal—in as many languages as possible. Visit the index of non-English language Web sites at http://hrw.org/allindex.htm
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