Reports

This 78-page Human Rights Watch report documents dozens of cases in which the immigration agency's medical staff either failed to respond at all to health problems of women in detention or responded only after considerable delays.

In this 47-page report Human Rights Watch said that countries could significantly improve access to pain medications by addressing the causes of their poor availability.

This 33-page report details the Zimbabwean government's responsibility for the country's humanitarian crisis. A cholera epidemic has left over 2,000 Zimbabweans dead and another 39,000 ill. Over 5 million Zimbabweans face severe food shortages and are dependent on international aid.

In this 100-page report, Human Rights Watch documents how the government's HIV treatment program has failed to get lifesaving drugs to the majority of children who need them. If untreated, half of all children born with HIV will die before their second birthdays.

In China, illicit drug use is an administrative offense and Chinese law dictates that drug users “must be rehabilitated.” In reality, police raids on drug users often drive them underground, away from methadone clinics, needle exchange sites, and other proven HIV prevention services.

This 60-page report found that the Know Your Status (KYS) campaign, begun in 2005 with the goal of testing 1.3 million people, was underfunded and had tested only 25,000 people by August 2007, four months before the campaign ended. Ambitious goals to train and pay thousands of lay counselors and expand support groups for people living with HIV were largely sidelined.

In this 125-page report, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch found that in Texas and Mississippi children ranging in age from 3 to 19 years old are routinely physically punished for minor infractions such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code, as well as for more serious transgressions such as fighting. Corporal punishment, legal in 21 states, typically takes the form of “paddling,” during which an administrator or teacher hits a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a long wooden board. The report shows that, as a result of paddling, many children are left injured, degraded, and disengaged from school.

This 52-page report documents the difficulties women face in accessing therapeutic abortion – those needed to save the life of the woman or avoid serious health risks – in Peru’s public health system. While no reliable statistics are available on how many women have been turned away from a legal abortion, in interviews with women, healthcare providers, rights activists and government officials, Human Rights Watch found that women in general lack accurate information about their right to a legal abortion, and public health care professionals are often unclear about the intent of laws guaranteeing women access to legal abortions.

This 119-page report examines South Africa’s decision to treat Zimbabweans merely as voluntary economic migrants and its failure to respond effectively to stop the human rights abuses and economic deprivation in Zimbabwe that cause their flight and to address their needs in South Africa. Human Rights Watch spoke to almost 100 Zimbabweans in South Africa about their plight.

This 54-page report documents the conditions in the various “camps” at the detention center, in which approximately 185 of the 270 detainees are housed in facilities akin to “supermax” prisons even though they have not yet been convicted of a crime.

This 130-page report documents how discriminatory Israeli laws and practices force tens of thousands of Bedouin in the south of Israel to live in “unrecognized” shanty towns where they are under constant threat of seeing their homes demolished and their communities torn apart.

This 61-page report documents the Chinese government’s failure to fulfill long-repeated promises to protect the rights of migrant construction workers, as well as to end deprivations caused by the discriminatory nature of China’s household registration (hukou) system. An estimated 1 million migrant construction workers, hailing from other parts of China, make up nearly 90 percent of Beijing’s construction workforce.

While acknowledging the significant overall progress made by the Zambian government in scaling up HIV treatment generally, this report documents how the government has fallen short of its international legal obligations to combat violence and discrimination against women.

This 57-page report found that routine police harassment and arrest – as well as the lasting effects of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s 2003 drug war – keeps drug users from receiving lifesaving HIV information and services that Thailand has pledged to provide.