Tag: Human Rights and Human Rights Violations

A Chance for Hope in Haiti’s Latest Crisis

Dead bodies are rotting on the streets of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Clean drinking water is scarce, and a cholera outbreak threatens. Hunger looms. The outgunned police force has all but disappeared. Armed groups have seized control of ports and major roads in the capital and freed inmates from jails. They shut down the airport, preventing […]

Read More

New Online Speech Law Could Chill Political Humor in Sri Lanka

Even in the darkest of times, Sri Lankans held on to their humor. In 2022, when the island nation’s economy collapsed and the government announced a QR code system to ration gasoline, a meme spread online: “Scanning Fuel QR Code Now Makes You Forget Last Three Months.” And when public anger forced the strongman president […]

Read More

Iran’s 2022 Protest Crackdown Included Killings, Torture and Rape, U.N. Finds

United Nations investigators say Iranian authorities killed, tortured and raped women, men and children in a brutal repression of mass protests that erupted over the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly wearing a mandatory hijab incorrectly. A U.N. fact-finding mission reporting to the Human Rights […]

Read More

The New Rape Denialism

On Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel and filmed itself committing scores of human-rights atrocities. Some of the footage was later captured by the Israeli military and screened to hundreds of journalists, including me. The “pure, predatory sadism,” as Atlantic writer Graeme Wood described it, is bottomless. Yet Hamas denies that its men sexually assaulted Israelis, […]

Read More

When Eyes in the Sky Start Looking Right at You

For decades, privacy experts have been wary of snooping from space. They feared satellites powerful enough to zoom in on individuals, capturing close-ups that might differentiate adults from children or suited sunbathers from those in a state of nature. Now, quite suddenly, analysts say, a startup is building a new class of satellite whose cameras […]

Read More

Volkswagen and BASF Are Reconsidering Ties to Xinjiang, China

Volkswagen Group is reviewing the future of its joint venture in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China and another German industrial giant is starting to sell its stakes there following new international scrutiny of forced labor by predominantly Muslim ethnic groups. Volkswagen said last week that it was in discussions with one of its main […]

Read More

As a Son Risks His Life to Topple the King, His Father Guards the Throne

The riot police appeared out of nowhere, charging furiously toward the young protesters trying to oust King Mswati III, who has ruled over the nation of Eswatini for 38 years. The pop of gunfire ricocheted through the streets, and the demonstrators started running for their lives. Manqoba Motsa, a college student, and his fellow Communists […]

Read More

Venezuela Expels U.N. Human Rights Agency

A United Nations agency that defends human rights was ordered on Thursday to leave Venezuela by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, an extraordinary move that will further strip the country of foreign oversight at a time when its government has been accused of intensifying repression. The announcement, by foreign minister Yvan Gil, comes just […]

Read More

The Detention of Rocío San Miguel Raises Human Rights Concerns

Of all the government critics, few thought that Rocío San Miguel would be the one to disappear. Ms. San Miguel, 57, has long been one of Venezuela’s best known security experts, a woman who dared investigate her country’s authoritarian government even as others fled. She is also a moderate, has international recognition and appeared to […]

Read More

On a Frozen Border, Finland Puzzles Over a ‘Russian Game’

Poking up through the snow drifts on the Finnish-Russian border lies a symbol of Moscow’s biggest provocation yet toward NATO’s newest member: a sprawling heap of broken bicycles. The battered bikes are sold for hundreds of dollars on the Russian side to asylum seekers from as far away as Syria and Somalia. They are then […]

Read More

Report Calls for Putin and Russian Officials to Be Investigated for Assault on Mariupol

President Vladimir V. Putin and other senior Russian officials should be investigated for war crimes after the destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol killed thousands of civilians, Human Rights Watch and several other organizations said Thursday at the end of a two-year investigation. The Russian assault on Mariupol from February 2022 to May […]

Read More

Ecuador Embraces President Noboa’s War on Gang Violence Amid Terror

Since Ecuador’s president declared war on gangs last month, soldiers with assault rifles have flooded the streets of Guayaquil, a sprawling Pacific Coast city that has been an epicenter of the nation’s yearslong descent into violence. They pull men from buses and cars looking for drugs, weapons and gang tattoos, and patrol roads enforcing a […]

Read More

Federal Records Show Increasing Use of Solitary Confinement for Immigrants

The United States government has placed detained immigrants in solitary confinement more than 14,000 times in the last five years, and the average duration is almost twice the 15-day threshold that the United Nations has said may constitute torture, according to a new analysis of federal records by researchers at Harvard and the nonprofit group […]

Read More

Chinese-Australian Writer Yang Given Suspended Death Sentence in China

An Australian writer and businessman who has been detained in China since 2019 has been declared guilty of espionage and was given a death sentence with two years’ probation on Monday, in a blow to warming relations between Australia and China. The severe punishment for the businessman, Yang Hengjun, was first revealed by the Australian […]

Read More

Over 800 Officials in U.S. and Europe Sign Letter Protesting Israel Policies

More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza. The letter is the first instance of officials in allied nations across the Atlantic coming together to openly criticize their governments […]

Read More

El Salvador’s Strongman Is Set to Ride a Landslide Past Checks and Balances

El Salvador’s government has jailed thousands of innocent people, suspended key civil liberties indefinitely and flooded the streets with soldiers. Now the president overseeing it all, Nayib Bukele, is being accused of violating the constitution by seeking re-election. And even his vice-presidential running mate admits their goal is “eliminating” what he sees as the broken […]

Read More

The International Court of Justice’s Ruling on Israel Tests International Law

Over the past month, we’ve watched an astonishing, high-stakes global drama play out in The Hague. A group of countries from the poorer, less powerful bloc some call the Global South, led by South Africa, dragged the government of Israel and by extension its rich, powerful allies into the top court of that order, and […]

Read More

The meaning of the first I.C.J. ruling in the genocide case against Israel

Today the United Nations’ highest court, the International Court of Justice, issued its first, preliminary decision in the genocide case South Africa brought against Israel. South Africa won its application for “provisional measures,” roughly equivalent to a temporary injunction, ordering Israel to take proactive steps to ensure genocide doesn’t occur in the future, while the […]

Read More

When Chaos Erupted in Ecuador, Disinformation Followed

This spasm of violence began on a Monday morning with news of the prison escape of Adolfo Macías, better known as Fito, the leader of one of the many powerful criminal gangs in Ecuador. That night, attacks by gangs were reported in several cities, along with the kidnappings of dozens of prison guards. By Tuesday […]

Read More

Israel’s Treatment of Gaza Detainees Raises Alarm

Cold, almost naked and surrounded by Israeli soldiers with M16 assault rifles, Ayman Lubbad knelt among dozens of Palestinian men and boys who had just been forced from their homes in northern Gaza. It was early December and photographs and videos taken at the time showed him and other detainees in the street, wearing only […]

Read More

What Might Happen Next in the Genocide Case Against Israel

Depending on the angle from which you view it, the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice can embody either the promises or the failures of one of the primary aims of the international human rights project: making rights a matter of law, not just of power. Last week, the court, which […]

Read More

With Harsh Anti-L.G.B.T.Q. Law, Uganda Risks a Health Crisis

For decades, Uganda’s campaign against H.I.V. was exemplary, slashing the country’s death rate by nearly 90 percent from 1990 to 2019. Now a sweeping law enacted last year, the Anti-Homosexuality Act, threatens to renew the epidemic as L.G.B.T.Q. citizens are denied, or are too afraid to seek out, necessary medical care. The law criminalizes consensual […]

Read More

Taiwan’s Democracy Draws Envy and Tears for Visiting Chinese

At the Taipei train station, a Chinese human rights activist named Cuicui watched with envy as six young Taiwanese politicians campaigned for the city’s legislative seats. A decade ago, they had been involved in parallel democratic protest movements — she in China, and the politicians on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait. “We came […]

Read More

Senate to Vote on Potential Freeze to Israel Aid as Democrats Question Conduct of War

When Hamas unleashed a bloody attack against Israel in October, there was a swift and strong bipartisan clamor of support in Congress for the United States to spare no expense in backing a robust military response by the Jewish state. One hundred days later, that consensus on Capitol Hill shows signs of fraying, as left-wing […]

Read More

At World Court, Israel to Confront Accusations of Genocide

The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, will begin hearings this week in a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The hearings, the first step in a lengthy process should the case go forward, will be the first time that Israel has chosen to […]

Read More

They Said ‘I Do’ in a Moscow Prison

Nadezhda Shtovba did not wear a white dress to her wedding. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. She and her husband, Yegor, did not exchange wedding bands either — rings are banned in Butyrka prison. That is where Yegor Shtovba has spent the past 15 months in pretrial detention. In September 2022, he had read […]

Read More

In Burkina Faso, Criticizing the Army Could Get You Drafted

One Friday earlier this month, just as Dr. Daouda Diallo stepped out of the passport office in the capital of the West African nation of Burkina Faso, four men grabbed him off the street, pushed him into a vehicle and drove off. Dr. Diallo, a pharmacist-turned-rights-activist who had recently been awarded a prestigious prize for […]

Read More

There Is Finally Hope of Ousting Myanmar’s Military Junta

For decades, Myanmar’s military junta has withstood both foreign pressure and an array of armed rebel groups opposed to its dominance of the country. But over the past two months, the generals’ aura of invincibility has been significantly dented at home. Resistance forces galvanized by the junta’s coup in 2021 — which seized power from […]

Read More

Opponents of Solitary Confinement Say It Qualifies as Torture

More than a half-century after he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, Victor Pate still avoids elevators. “The enclosure, that small space when the doors close: It’s so reminiscent of going into that cell and the door closing on me,” Mr. Pate, 71, said at a City Hall rally this week supporting a […]

Read More

An Anti-L.G.B.T.Q. Law in Uganda Is Hurting the Economy

Sitting on a sofa in his tiny office, Simon Azarwagye, the owner of a travel company called Azas Safaris, points to numbers on his laptop — visual aids for a story that still makes him miserable to tell. “See that?” he says, gesturing to a graph marked “quote requests.” It represents the 89 prospective customers […]

Read More

Hong Kong Democracy Figure Jimmy Lai Stands Trial After Long Delay

Unlike other Hong Kong tycoons who were careful not to provoke China’s leaders, Jimmy Lai had long been a proud rebel. He founded a newspaper with a decidedly anti-Beijing slant. He was a prominent face at massive pro-democracy protests. He lobbied American officials to protest the city’s declining autonomy. Then, in 2020, Mr. Lai was […]

Read More