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.
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.
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.
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.
This report focuses mainly on one aspect of the criminal justice system and its handling of violence against women: the performance of those involved in the provision of medical expertise to the courts when it is alleged that women have been abused. Medical evidence is often a crucial element in the investigation and prosecution of a case of rape or sexual assault.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
