The Persecution of Environmentalists and Indigenous Leaders in Indonesia
The 70-page report, “Grabbed Land, Silenced Justice: The Persecution of Environmentalists and Indigenous Leaders in Indonesia,” documents how Indonesian police have responded to complaints filed by company officials or politicians by silencing Indigenous villagers who demand their customary land rights and the activists who defend them. The authorities have targeted environmental and Indigenous community defenders using the criminal code and other laws to bring charges ranging from defamation to “spreading communism” to silence protest over environmental harm.
Millions of people in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East have been denied or stripped of citizenship in their own countries solely because of their race, national descent, and gender. In many countries, children born in their mother's country are denied her nationality because women can not transmit nationality.
The State Response to Violent Crime on South African Farms
The South African government is failing to adequately protect residents of commercial farming areas from violent crime, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. Black farm residents are most severely affected by this failure, and black women are most vulnerable of all, Human Rights Watch said.
In this report, Human Rights Watch called on both the Indonesian government and armed rebels in Aceh to protect civilians, saying both sides had been responsible for human rights violations.
When, on October 20, 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid became Indonesia's firstdemocratically elected president in more than four decades, he was welcomed at home and abroad as the country's best hope for healing political rifts, building civil society, and revitalizing government.
Human Rights Watch traditionally advocates reparations as part of the remedy for any serious human rights abuse. For example, under traditional human rights law and policy, we expect governments that practice or tolerate racial discrimination to acknowledge and end this human rights violation and compensate the victims. However, the U.N.
Uzbekistan's post-Soviet development, like that in most of the former Soviet Union, has entailed enormous and disproportionate obstacles to women's realization of their human rights. During the past ten years, Uzbekistan's government has attempted to institute some safeguards for women's rights, mainly in the area of social welfare support.
Hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees along Guinea's border were relocated from the embattled border area in early 2001 to camps in the interior of the country. While the organized movement from the border is a welcome and long overdue step, the long-term safety of the refugees is still under threat.
The political situation in Irian Jaya (also known as West Papua or Papua), Indonesia_s easternmost province, is fundamentally unsettled. Papua is remote from Jakarta and home to only two million of the country's more than 200 million inhabitants, but what happens in the resource-rich province is likely to have great importance for Indonesia.
The United Nations Security Council should impose a comprehensive embargo on all military assistance against all warring factions in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch urged today. In this report, Human Rights Watch accused Pakistan, Iran, and Russia of providing military support to Afghan factions with a long record of committing gross abuses of human rights.
In this paper, we call on the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish minimum standards for the collection of evidence in cases of sexual and domestic violence. We also call on WHO to draft a policy paper to support the effective implementation of the minimum standards.
Human immuno-deficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a national disaster for the people of Kenya, children and adults alike. Kenya is estimated to have the ninth-highest prevalence of HIV in the world with about 14 percent of the adult population infected.
Serbian and Yugoslav Forces in the Kosovo Conflict The two principal military forces in Yugoslavia in 1998 and 1999 were the Yugoslav Army (Vojska Jugoslavije, or VJ) and the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova, or MUP). The police of the Montenegrin Republic remained loyal to the Montenegrin government and were not active in Kosovo.
Indictees: Slobodan Milosevic, at the time President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; Milan Milutinovic, the President of Serbia; Nikola Sainovic, the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia; Colonel General Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army; and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Serbia.
Abuse of Domestic Workers with Special Visas in the United States
The special visas granted to foreigners who work as household domestics in the U.S. leave them vulnerable to serious abuse, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. Thousands of these workers, typically women, enter the United States every year to work for diplomats, officials of international organizations, foreign businesspeople, and U.S. citizens temporarily back in the U.S.
