The 71-page report, “‘Educate the Masses to Change Their Minds’: China’s Coercive Relocation of Rural Tibetans,” details how participation in “whole-village relocation” programs in Tibet, in which entire villages are relocated, amounts to forced eviction in violation of international law. Officials misleadingly claim that these relocations will “improve people’s livelihood” and “protect the ecological environment.” The government prevents relocated people from returning to their former homes by generally requiring them to demolish these homes within a year of relocating.
Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero
The most comprehensive account now available on human rights violations in El Salvador, A Decade of Terror documents the civil war between an armed insurgency and the military-backed government, and explains how it has led to a decade of ferocious political violence that has cost thousands of civilian lives.
Heads of state of Commonwealth nations meet this month in Harare, Zimbabwe. Their gathering is an important opportunity to take tangible steps to recognize the importance of human rights in the member states and to commit the Commonwealth to an initiative that would significantly enhance its role in combatting human rights abuses.
Human rights abuses are persistent and chronic in Northern Ireland, affecting Protestants and Catholics alike, and are committed by both security forces and paramilitary groups in violation of international standards.
The Brazilian government is failing to prosecute violence against women in the home fully and fairly. Despite ever-increasing domestic violence (particularly wife-murder, battery and rap) impunity and discriminatory treatment in favor of the perpetrators of domestic violence are still the rule in the Brazilian justice system.
Hidden under the reforms initiated by President de Klerk since February 2, 1990, human rights violations continue unabated in Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa's four so?called "independent" homelands. In the past 18 months political violence has resulted in the killing of 23 people, detention of 633 and injury of 481.
On August 6, 1993, the Kuwaiti government ordered the dissolution of all unlicensed organizations. Especially targeted were groups tracking the fate of Kuwaitis disappeared during the Iraqi occupation and believed held in Iraq, as well as human rights groups, including the Kuwaiti Association to Defend War Victims, Kuwait’s main human rights organization.
Ethnic hatred and violence directed against Gypsies in Romania has escalated dramatically since the 1989 revolution: rarely a month passed without another Gypsy village being attacked. Gypsy homes have been burned, their possessions destroyed, they have been chased from their villages, and often not allowed to return.
Following the liberation of Kuwait, the thirst to avenge the horrors of the Iraqi occupation spawned a new round of human rights victims this time at Kuwaiti hands. Despite calls to defend human rights in rallying support for the war against Iraq, the reinstated Kuwaiti government has trampled on those rights at nearly every turn, often with the use of violence.
Human Rights in Mexico One Year After the Introduction of Reform
In spite of a surge in human rights activity in Mexico during the past year, the human rights situation does not seem to have improved: the volume and severity of reported abuses remain unchanged.
For the past thirty years under both Emperor Haile Selassie and President Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia has suffered continuous war and intermittent famine until every single province has been affected by war to some degree.
In 1989, Helsinki Watch severely criticized conditions in the Czech prison system. The criticism was in a report prepared by Professor Herman Schwartz, Chairman of the Human Rights Watch Prison Project Advisory Committee, and was based on numerous interviews in early 1988 with recently released prisoners.
The government of President Alberto Fujimori has been seriously challenged by insurgent threat from Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA); both groups having been responsible for civilian casualties and other gross violations of the laws of war.
he Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA), headed by Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi, a well-known writer and leading figure in the Arab women's movement, has been ordered dissolved by the Egyptian authorities. AWSA will contest the dissolution order in legal proceedings scheduled to begin on October 31 before the State Council Court.
On May 21, 1991, the Secretary General of the United Nations issued a public statement outlining in very broad terms the framework for a political settlement of the conflict in Afghanistan.
Extradition Sought For Alleged Death Squad Participant
On August 16, 1991, a federal magistrate in San Antonio, Texas will rule on a request by the government of El Salvador to extradite César Vielman Joya Martínez, a former soldier in the intelligence unit of the First Infantry Brigade of the Salvadoran Army, for his alleged involvement in the murder of two young men in El Salvador in July 1989.