Reports

Between May and October 1992, nineteen men were arrested in Georgia on a variety of criminal charges; by September, their cases were united into one - Case No. 7493810 - along with the case against former President of Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia for abuse of power and related political crimes.

The military coup d'état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on September 30, 1991, plunged Haiti into a maelstrom of state-inflicted and state-sanctioned human rights abuses. These abuses have included numerous political assassinations, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and the torture of prisoners.

Battalion 3-16, a clandestine military death squad originally trained and equipped by the CIA, is synonymous with torture, murder and disappearance in Honduras. The nightmare began in August 1980, when twenty-five Honduran army officers were flown to a desert air strip in the southwestern U.S. to spend six months learning interrogation techniques.

The White House conference on Africa came at a time when the Clinton Administration’s cautious response to the monstrous crime of genocide in Rwanda was increasingly under attack at home and abroad and offered an opportunity for it to adopt a much-needed change of course. This report offers a summary of human rights developments and U.S. human rights policy in ten African countries.

After winning the first multiparty election since 1963 in December of 1993, the government of Daniel arap Moi has increased its harassment of the political opposition, bringing spurious criminal charges against opposition politicians, forcing unwarranted restrictions on their freedom of association, and arresting them without charge.

Despite the historic peace process that is under way in the Middle East, Israel’s interrogation agencies in the occupied territories have continued to engage in a systematic pattern of torture and ill-treatment. Well over 100,000 Palestinians have been detained since the start of the intifada in 1987.

While land has always played a central role in the cultures, identities, and religions of indigenous peoples, Indians who attempt to exercise the rights that are guaranteed to them in the Brazilian Constitution are frequently the victims of violent attacks and other human rights abuses.

The people of Guatemala have suffered savage repression at the hands of security forces, civil patrols, and guerrillas waging a thirty-year civil war. Their villages were razed and tens of thousands disappeared — presumably murdered — their bodies occasionally discovered in clandestine graves throughout the highlands.

The breathtaking political changes of 1993, which brought a well-respected governmental human rights advocate into the presidency of Guatemala, have one year later degenerated into turmoil and dashed hopes, with little to show for the promise that the new government appeared to bring.

Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia-Hercegovina after Sarajevo, is the scene of much of the most severe and systematic “ethnic cleansing”: torture, murder, rape, beatings, harassment, de jure discrimination, intimidation, expulsion from homes, confiscation of property, bombing of businesses, dismissal from work, outlawing of all scripts except the Cyrillic in public institutions, and

An investigation of the prevalence of forcible virginity control exams and the role of the government in conducting or tolerating such exams, this report cites several separate incidents in the spring of 1992 when young females committed suicide after authorities ordered them to submit to examinations of their hymens.

Heightened political tension has been characterized by physical attacks on journalists critical of the former Meciar government. HRW/Helsinki urges the interim government to give special consideration to the concerns outlined in this report and to disassociate itself from the media policies of its predecessor in order to create an environment in which the independent press can flourish.

Despite the considerable progress that has been made to ensure an independent press both in practice and in law, there is troubling evidence of official harassment of journalists whose views are critical of the ruling powers, ranging from selective denial of press credentials to the imprisonment of a journalist who wrote an allegory considered defamatory of the President of Romania.

Since 1983, the civil war in southern Sudan has claimed the lives of some 1.3 million civilians as a result of targeted killings, indiscriminate fire, or starvation and disease. Both government and rebel forces are culpable as they wage war in total disregard for the welfare of civilians, violating almost every rule of war applicable in an internal armed conflict.

In late 1993, a new armed faction emerged in Liberia known as the Liberian Peace Council (LPC), and engaged Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) in combat. While both are responsible for severe human rights abuses, the LPC stepped up its campaign against civilians, especially those it considers members of the NPFL.