How the U Visa Builds Trust, Counters Fear, and Promotes Community Safety
The 50-page report, “‘We Need U’: How the U Visa Builds Trust, Counters Fear, and Promotes Community Safety,” finds that the administration’s deportation policies undermine federal visa programs that provide a pathway for crime victims to obtain legal residency when they cooperate with law enforcement. Changed enforcement guidance, such as allowing Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to apprehend people in previously safe places like courthouses and health centers, is a strong deterrent for immigrants who might otherwise report crime to police or seek a protective order.
"There were four men standing there and one of them held a knife up to my throat. I tried to fight him off with my hands. He was 'hanging' [choking] me. He pushed me down and pulled up my dress. They were all going to rape me - but I refused to open my legs. So, then he took his knife and sliced my thigh. [...] They started raping me. I passed out eventually."
Each year, hundreds of young men in Moscow and St. Petersburg are detained and forcibly conscripted into the Russian armed forces, Human Rights Watch said in a new report today.
China must end the forcible return of North Korean asylum-seekers and the arrest and harassment of aid workers who assist them, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims,and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11
Public officials tried vigorously to contain a wave of hate crimes in the United States after September 11, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Nevertheless, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose 1700 percent during 2001. The report documents anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence and the local, state and federal response to it.
The Record of the Colombian Attorney General's Office
Colombia’s Attorney General has seriously undermined the investigation and prosecution of major human rights cases. The 14-page report “A Wrong Turn: The Record of the Colombian Attorney General’s Office,” documents how the attorney general's office has failed to make progress on critical human rights investigations.
The U.S.-led coalition forces are actively backing a warlord in western Afghanistan with a disastrous human rights record, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
In recent weeks civilians have once again paid the price of local and international struggles to control the resource-rich eastern and northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Hundreds have been killed and injured and tens of thousands have fled their homes to join about two million others previously displaced.
Free trade alone cannot ensure greater respect for workers' rights nor prevent millions of people from being excluded from the benefits of globalization. Human Rights Watch believes that measures to protect workers' rights should be built into trade agreements to ensure that globalization does not come at the expense of human rights.
The Turkish government, security forces and paramilitaries are obstructing the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers to their homes in the formerly war-torn southeast.
In recent months, the conflict between the northern Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and the Ugandan government has significantly escalated, with resulting serious human rights abuses against civilians not only in northern Uganda but also in southern Sudan.
Less than a year after the signing of the 2001 Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in Doha, Qatar, parties to the proposed thirty-four-country Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) are revisiting the relationship between intellectual property rights and access to essential medicines.
Turkey's parliamentary elections scheduled for November 3 will present an important test for the country, just one month before the European Union's Copenhagen summit, at which the E.U. is expected to give Turkey a signal about its prospects for membership in the Union.
When a civilian government was reinstated in Nigeria in 1999, many of those living in the Niger Delta region, the source of Nigeria's oil wealth, hoped that a "democratic dividend" would end decades of neglect they had suffered under successive military regimes.
Burma is believed to have more child soldiers than any other country in the world. The overwhelming majority of Burma's child soldiers are found in Burma's national army, the Tatmadaw Kyi, which forcibly recruits children as young as eleven. These children are subject to beatings and systematic humiliation during training.
The people responsible for planning and carrying out suicide bombings that deliberately target civilians are guilty of crimes against humanity and should be brought to justice, Human Rights Watch said in a new report today.
