Reports

Kosovo is a police state. Police raids on homes and marketplaces occur daily and Serbian authorities have stepped up a drive to push Albanians out of Serbian-populated areas. Heavily armed Serbian police, paramilitary troops and regular army forces spread their terror.

This report documents that physicians continue to be involved in executions, in violation of ethical and professional codes of conduct. This involvement is often mandated by state law and specified in departmental regulations about execution procedures.

As El Salvador winds up the campaign for presidential, legislative, and municipal elections scheduled for March 20, 1994, no issue represents a greater threat to the peace process than the rise in political murders of leaders and grassroots activists belonging to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

Researched and written prior to the 1994 elections in South Africa, this report describes how the former South African government failed to fulfill its obligations to protect its citizens from violence and guarantee the exercise of their political rights in two homelands.

In spite of the peace accord signed in October 1992 between government forces and RENAMO rebels, innocent civilians are maimed and killed by landmines in Mozambique on a daily basis.

While visiting over twenty prisons as well as lockups in at least five different cities throughout South Africa, we found significant improvements had been made since the political climate began to change in 1990.

A campaign to curb pornography has backfired dangerously in Canada, leading not toward its ostensible goal of gender equality, but to a weakening of fundamental liberties for women and gay men. The cornerstone of this campaign is R. v. Butler, an anti-pornography decision issued by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1992 that sets forth a litmus test for determining obscenity and has been used to prosecute a lesbian magazine, to destroy books intended for gay consumers, and to confiscate an array of political and erotic works.

Despite the considerable attention that has been brought to homicides of adolescents, impunity for those responsible for these abuses has in most respects, continued to prevail.

On January 3, 1994, a massacre in a Venezuelan prison left more than one hundred inmates dead and scores injured. While security personnel stood by, a group of prisoners set fire to a prison building, then shot and stabbed prisoners who tried to escape the inferno.

This report provides an update on the human rights situation in Cuba. Again this last year, Human Rights Watch/Americas (formerly Americas Watch) has been handicapped in monitoring Cuba because of the regime's refusal to allow us to visit the country, to conduct inquiries and talk to victims, and to engage in a dialogue with the authorities.

In two separate shipments in May 1992 and August 1993, eighteen tons of official Iraqi state documents captured by Kurdish parties in the 1991 uprising arrived in the U.S. for safekeeping and analysis. Our team has conducted research on these documents and catalogued a large percentage.

On February 22, 1993, the U.N. Security Council promised to create an international tribunal to try accused war criminals in the former Yugoslavia, but a year later the tribunal appeared to be part of a pattern of empty threats and broken promises.

Even as the Indonesian government repealed a controversial decree and stated it's concern for the welfare of workers, we continued to receive reports of labor rights violations. These violations include the harassment of union members and reports of bonded labor in Irian Jaya.

Last year, the United States formally adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), undertaking a commitment to ensure the covenant's protections for "all individuals within its territory." the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have prepared this report - the first of its kind -covering race and sex discrimination, prisoners' rights, police brutality

The Algerian government and the armed Islamist opposition it is fighting are each responsible for a severe deterioration in human rights conditions.