Hanoi’s Continuing Assault on Workers’ Right to Organize
The 49-page report, “There Are No Independent Trade Unions in Vietnam: Hanoi’s Continuing Assault on Workers’ Right to Organize,” documents the Vietnamese governments’ continuing useof vague, overbroad criminal laws to suppress the activities of human rights and labor rights defenders, while maintaining an atmosphere of repression to thwart independent labor organizing. The government has issued decrees and articles in state-run media that reaffirm that all labor organizations in Vietnam are under the government’s authority, and portray independent trade unions as dangerous, anti-state entities.
The level of racist incidents reported to the police in the U.K. has increased dramatically over recent years. Between 1989 and 1996 the number rose more than 275 percent, from 4,383 to 12,199.
Eastern Slavonia, the only remaining Serb-held region of Croatia, is scheduled to revert to Croatian control by July 15, 1997. Some 120,000 to 150,000 Serbs living in that region will then come under the authority of their bitter opponent during the war.
Lebanon's airwaves had long been unregulated, with scores of unlicensed private broadcasters that ranged in political diversity from the radio station of the Lebanese Communist Party to the television station of Hizballah. The broadcasting community included 52 television stations and over 120 radio stations for a population of three million.
Nearly seven years ago, on April 24, 1990, President Mobutu Sese Seko ostensibly gave in to mounting pro-democracy pressure by announcing the end of the one party state and the beginning of transition to multiparty democracy in Zaire. Seven years into the transition, there have been at least ten different governments but no transition.
Unaccompanied Children Detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) violates the rights of hundreds of unaccompanied children each year, some as young as eight, contrary to international law as well as INS regulations. Children are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, all by the same agency charged with protecting their rights.
In this document, Human Rights Watch seeks to raise concerns about some disturbing trends in the protection of refugees it has observed in the course of researching human rights abuses.
The National People's Congress took the historic step at its annual session in March of eliminating crimes of "counterrevolution" from the criminal code, a step that at first glance seemed to indicate movement toward greater respect for the rule of law.
U.S Companies and the Production of Antipersonnel Mines
Despite the Clinton Administration's attempts to lay claim to the mantle of global leadership in the effort to ban antipersonnel landmines, the United States has refused to ban or even formally suspend the production of antipersonnel mines. From 1985 through 1996, the U.S. produced more than four million new antipersonnel mines.
Rapid, unplanned growth of Brazil’s urban centers—11 of its cities are home to more than a million people each—has been accompanied in most cases by soaring crime rates and public dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system. In several states, authorities responded with policies that tolerate or promote grave violations of the rights of criminal suspects.
A two-person Human Rights Watch delegation traveled to Guatemala in January 1997. The visit focused on reports of the discriminatory treatment of trade unionists at the assembly plants there of the U.S.-based corporation Phillips-Van Heusen (PVH), and allegations of obstacles posed by the company and the Guatemalan labor ministry to the union's recognition for purposes of collective bargaining.
Human Rights Watch has uncovered evidence that the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) had an extensive and sophisticated chemical weapons program prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991; that the army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) inherited much of this program; and that the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina produced crude chemical munitions during the Bos
China is increasingly exercising its authority over the territory of Hong Kong on a number of issues and has directed, for instance, that all the Vietnamese be cleared from Hong Kong before July 1. Such pressure has spurred the Hong Kong government to redouble its efforts to resolve the Vietnamese situation, which has embroiled the territory in controversy for over twenty years.
Nearly 100,000 people, most of them Rwandans once resident in the camps of eastern Zaire, have fled to a site near Ubundu, where their further flight is blocked by the Zaire River. Among them are thousands of unarmed noncombatants as well as soldiers of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR, Forces Armées Rwandaises) and militia responsible for the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.
