Widespread Human Rights Violations Under El Salvador’s “State of Emergency”
The 89-page report, “‘We Can Arrest Anyone We Want’: Widespread Human Rights Violations Under El Salvador’s ‘State of Emergency’” documents mass arbitrary detention, torture and other forms of ill-treatment against detainees, enforced disappearances, deaths in custody, and abuse-ridden prosecutions. President Nayib Bukele’s swift dismantling of judicial independence since he took office in mid-2019 enabled the abuses.
Indefinite Detention Without Trial in the United Kingdom Under Part 4 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001
The U.K. government introduced emergency legislation in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the U.S. The resulting Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act became law on December 14, 2001. This briefing paper details how indefinite detention, contained in part 4 of ATCSA, has seriously damaged the mental and physical health of the detainees.
This 38-page report examines how the Bush administration adopted a deliberate policy of permitting illegal interrogation techniques – and then spent two years covering up or ignoring reports of torture and other abuse by U.S. troops.
Detainees held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have been subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, held in painful stress positions, forced to stand for long periods of time, interrogated while nude, and otherwise mistreated.
Human Rights Watch has repeatedly tried to gain access to U.S. detention facilities in Iraq but U.S. military officials in Baghdad have denied requests for visitation rights. Human Rights Watch is able to have regular access to prisons and detention centers under Kurdish control in northern Iraq.
Torture in Egypt is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. Security forces and the police routinely torture or ill-treat detainees, particularly during interrogation. In most cases, officials torture detainees to obtain information and coerce confessions, occasionally leading to death in custody. In some cases, officials use torture detainees to punish, intimidate, or humiliate.
There is growing concern in the United States, and a growing belief around the world, that the United States itself has engaged in torture or condoned its use by others as part of its war against terrorism. Newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have published credible reports, based on interviews with former detainees and unnamed U.S. officials, alleging that U.S.
In recent weeks Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan have captured hundreds of foreign fighters with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The United States has announced that it would detain upwards of 500 captured fighters and has been screening persons taken into custody by Afghan forces.
As a result of the findings contained in this report, Human Rights Watch is calling on the Georgian government to take a number of steps to amend the applicable laws and improve practices so as to safeguard against torture, and to meet United Nations and other international standards regarding fair trials and the treatment of persons held in pre-trial detention. This report reiterates the U.N.
International humanitarian law categorically prohibits hostage-taking. On April 12, 2000 Israel's highest court ruled that the administrative detention of Lebanese nationals as "bargaining chips" -- hostages -- was illegal under Israeli domestic law, making Israel's continued detention of Lebanese nationals as hostages a violation of Israeli domestic law as well.
On Wednesday, 26 May 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, will hear testimony challenging the legality of secret interrogation procedures used by the Israeli General Security Service (GSS).
In the past few years, the human rights panorama in Peru has brightened considerably because of the decline in the massive "disappearances" and extrajudicial executions that has accompanied reduced political violence. Despite this positive trend, however, serious human rights violations continue, chief among them the use of torture.
Human Rights Violations and the Faceless Courts in Peru
The incarceration of hundreds of innocent prisoners charged or convicted of terrorist crimes they did not commit is now an open secret in Peru. While there may be disagreement about the numbers unjustly prosecuted by Peru's "faceless courts," no one in Peru, including the architect of the court system, President Alberto Fujimori, denies that the problem exists.
Between May and October 1992, nineteen men were arrested in Georgia on a variety of criminal charges; by September, their cases were united into one - Case No. 7493810 - along with the case against former President of Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia for abuse of power and related political crimes.
This report examines gross human-rights abuses in Egypt: torture and long-term detention without charge or trial. It focuses particularly on the use of torture by officers and soldiers of the Ministry of Interior's General Directorate for State Security Investigation (SSI) during the period when political and security suspects are held in incommunicado detention.
