Reports

Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan

The 218-page report, “‘The Massalit Will Not Come Home’: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan,” documents that the Rapid Support Forces, an independent military force in armed conflict with the Sudan military, and their allied mainly Arab militias, including the Third-Front Tamazuj, an armed group, targeted the predominantly Massalit neighborhoods of El Geneina in relentless waves of attacks from April to June. Abuses escalated again in early November. The attackers committed other serious abuses such as torture, rape, and looting. More than half a million refugees from West Darfur have fled to Chad since April 2023. As of late October 2023, 75 percent were from El Geneina.

A man walks using crutches in a refugee camp

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  • August 1, 1997

    A month after Second Prime Minister Hun Sen's coup, Cambodia bears little resemblance to the society envisioned in the Paris accords of 1991 that laid the framework for an end to conflict and a United Nations peacebuilding effort on an unprecedented scale.
  • August 1, 1997

    Children in Confinement in Colorado

    The summer of 1996 was an appropriate time for the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project to examine conditions of confinement for children in Colorado's detention and corrections institutions. Several sensational crimes had created an alarming Asummer of violence in 1993. Public fear triggered a call by Governor Roy Romer for an Airon-fisted response to gang violence.

  • August 1, 1997

    In his three years in office, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka has reversed nearly all the advances in the field of human rights, freedoms and democratization that had marked the perestroika era and the post-Soviet period.
  • August 1, 1997

    The Misuse of Authority in Bihac, Cazin, and Velika Kladusa

    The Una Sana canton, a province in northwestern Bosnia, is currently controlled by the SDA, with officials loyal to the SDA dominating almost all aspects of government, including law enforcement, public utilities and medical and educational institutions, and the economy.
  • August 1, 1997

    The Search for a Lasting Solution

    Between July 20 and 22, 1997, the Bangladesh government forcibly repatriated some 400 refugees belonging to the Rohingya minority of Burma's northern Arakan state. The repatriations, which drew international protests, highlighted the dilemma facing the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the international community in addressing the Rohingya situation.

  • July 1, 1997

    On November 18, 1996 presidential and parliamentary elections were held in Zambia, five years almost to the day since the first multiparty elections in November 1991. The election results returned President Frederick Chiluba and his Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) to power; but these were very different elections.
  • July 1, 1997

    The U.S. Army and Antipersonnel Mines in the Korean and Vietnam Wars

    Most of the world is poised to ban antipersonnel landmines, the indiscriminate weapons that kill or maim an estimated 26,000 civilians each year. More than 100 governments have committed to negotiating a comprehensive ban treaty in Oslo, Norway in September, with the intention of signing the treaty in Ottawa, Canada in December.
  • July 1, 1997

    Police Violence and Abuses in Detention

    Thousands of children living in Guatemala's streets face routine beatings, thefts, and sexual assaults at the hands of the National Police and private security guards (who are under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry). More serious crimes against street children, including assassination and torture, have lessened since the early 1990s, but still occur.
  • July 1, 1997

    Civil Rights and the Political Crisis in Bahrain

    Human rights abuses in Bahrain are wide-ranging and fall into two basic categories. The first relates to law enforcement and administration of justice issues.
  • July 1, 1997

    This report documents the continued systematic violation of internationally recognized human rights by the Burmese military against ethnic minority villagers in Burma’s Karen, Mon, and Shan States during 1996 and 1997.
  • July 1, 1997

    The Draft Law to Halt Palestinian Tort Claims

    Israel's Ministry of Justice has drafted a law that would exempt the State of Israel and its security forces from tort liability for the wrongful bodily injury and killing of Palestinians during the period of the intifada.
  • June 1, 1997

    The New Amendments to the Press and Publications Law

    Since Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, there has been growing tension between the Jordanian government and the independent press, particularly the kingdom's small-circulation weekly newspapers. Journalists and editors have been arrested, detained and prosecuted for violations of both the penal code and provisions of the press and publications law of 1993.
  • June 1, 1997

    Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India's Brothels

    At least hundreds of thousands, and probably more than a million women and children are employed in Indian brothels. Many are victims of the increasingly widespread practice of trafficking in persons across international borders. In India, a large percentage of the victims are women and girls from Nepal.
  • June 1, 1997

    The UNDP Displaced Persons Program in Kenya

    Between 1993 and 1995, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) administered a program to return an estimated 300,000 persons who were driven off their land by state-sponsored “ethnic” violence.
  • June 1, 1997

    Algerians went to the polls on June 5, 1997 in the first parliamentary elections since the military-backed government canceled elections in January 1992. That measure, taken to prevent a victory by the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS), plunged the country into endemic violence that continues today and has claimed more than 60,000 lives, most of them civilians.