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Biden Needs a Middle East-Wide Human Rights Policy

On the campaign trail and during his first three months in office, President Biden promised a US return to a multilateral foreign policy that supports human rights. That is an important vision for the Middle East, a region often destabilized…
President Joe Biden speaks about foreign policy, at the State Department in Washington, February 4, 2021. 
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The Chinese Government Cannot Be Allowed to Undermine Academic Freedom

Universities are not taking seriously Beijing’s efforts to stifle free speech on campus

  A few years ago, I met a student from rural China who had come to a university in Washington, DC, and fallen in love with political science. But he was too afraid of being reported to the Chinese…
Chinese visitors talk with education consultants at the booth of the United States during an expo in Beijing, China, 20 October 2018.
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Can Algorithms Save Us from Human Error?

Human Judgment and Responsibility in the Age of Technology

This month we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark the occasion, we have asked Human Rights Watch experts to reflect on some of the key human rights challenges in their area of specialty…
Sophia the Robot, Chief Humanoid, Hanson Robotics & SingularityNET, on the Centre Stage during the opening day of Web Summit 2017 at Altice Arena in Lisbon
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US Military Aid to Israel – from Another Perspective

Israeli soldiers arrested Ahmed, 16, in the West Bank city of Hebron last year. He said the soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed him and took him to a police station in a settlement, where he was made to sit outside on the ground for…
2015-July-IOPT-KidsArrest
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Trump Might Like Putin, but He’s No Despot

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin finally had their much-anticipated first meeting on Friday. Many compared Trump to Russia’s authoritarian leader, whom Trump has said he admires. Since Trump’s…
U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russia's President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 7, 2017.
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What the Trump Administration Needs to Tell the Kremlin

News of Russia has dominated the Washington press for weeks. Whether, when, and to what extent President Trump and his advisors had contacts with Russian officials prior to his electoral win has provided endless fodder for pundits and politicians alike,…
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington D.C., January 28, 2017. © 2017 Reuters
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Preserving Our Democracies

Democracy must be grounded in human rights. To many, that is obvious, but increasingly, we see some in Europe suggesting that democracy is about merely winning elections and then doing whatever the voters are deemed to want.  Democracy, for them, becomes…
Kenneth Roth Headshot
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Pardon Edward Snowden

Edward J. Snowden, the American who has probably left the biggest mark on public policy debates during the Obama years, is today an outlaw. Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed to journalists secret documents detailing…
A supporter of Edward Snowden holds a combination photo featuring U.S. President Barack Obama and Edward Snowden, during a news conference in Hong Kong on June 14, 2013.
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Congress asking right questions on Central Asia

Congress, or at least parts of it, is getting restless with the White House approach to human rights abuses in Central Asia. A recent hearing by the House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on the region’s terrible human rights record…
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Offender-turned-advocate still caught in sex-law maze

Josh Gravens’ childhood was turned on its head when he was reported to authorities at the age of 12 for inappropriately touching his younger sister. He ended up spending 14 years on a register for sex offenders and eventually became an advocate for youths…
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Kids don't belong in adult jails

When I first visited the Baltimore City Detention Center in 1999, I found an archaic, decaying facility that held people in grim cells with no direct natural light. The detention center held many children who were charged as adults, and they suffered some…
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Kids Shouldn't Be at Rikers, Period

New York State's top corrections official said this week that he supports moving all adolescent inmates off Rikers Island. His statement raises hopes for an end to what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a scathing recent report,…
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A year after Snowden, a watershed moment for Internet freedom

It would be hard to overstate the extent to which Edward Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. mass surveillance techniques in the post-9/11 period have shaken up geo-political dynamics on Internet freedom, security and governance over the past year. …
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US: It's Been a Year Since Snowden, and Nothing's Really Changed

Is the Obama administration blind to the real and tangible harm the NSA surveillance program is doing to America’s credibility? It’s been a year since we woke to media reports on June 5 that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been sweeping…
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India’s Snooping and Snowden

“It is not actually snooping.” This was the Indian foreign minister’s response to the U.S. mass surveillance programs that also targeted India. One year ago, Edward Snowden released data revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency had spied on the…
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Why U.S. should care about surveillance abroad

Under growing pressure to rein in domestic surveillance, President Barack Obama recently offered a proposal to end the government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. Under the new plan, those records would stay with phone companies but be…
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Witness: How Adult Court Changed Oliver

Christina sat on the couch while her teenage son, Oliver, 18, played with his 1-year-old brother. Christina’s smile faded. Oliver used to really live his life, she said. He used to love being out with his family. Now, he’s afraid to go outside. He won’t…

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