Human Rights Watch is charging that, despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a “budding police state” — cracking down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists. The organization’s Middle East and North [...]
The Spanish Judge whose work triggered the investigation that nabbed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet back in 1998 believes that Spain could bring charges against six Bush Jr. administration officials for clearing the way for the use of torture during the Iraq war – but he is being blocked by charges making him the culprit. On [...]
While unarmed civilians die on Bahrain’s streets, the king of the tiny oil-rich nation continues to tell his people he is eager for dialogue and refuses entry to a prominent human rights champion from the U.S. Denied a visa was Richard Sollom, deputy president of the US-Based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who was hoping [...]
After months of performing like Egypt’s Cinderella leader, jet-setting between Cairo and his old home in Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei has finally reached the limits of his frustration. At a press conference last week, ElBaradei said the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over from Mubarak, had governed “as if no revolution took place [...]
Predicting that the current Middle East unrest would continue through 2012, Amnesty International is slamming Western governments for their tepid responses to peaceful protests, for their “double standard,” and for being more concerned with preserving their political and economic interests than with the historic changes sweeping the region. The charges are being made in a [...]
Analysts at Syracuse University have concluded that the Obama Administration’s figures for the number of people deported from the US are being grossly overestimated. Analysis of government immigration data provided to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in late December — almost two years after TRAC had requested it — show that [...]
The Arab Spring has been greeted in Saudi Arabia by “a new wave of repression” that saw authorities arresting and imprisoning peaceful protesters demanding political reforms. Now, the Saudi crackdown may be reinforced by a draft anti-terror law that would effectively criminalize dissent as a “terrorist crime.” In a new 61-page report, “Saudi Arabia: Repression [...]
You probably know that the United States has more people in jail than any other country in the world. The staggering number is 2.3 million. China, which has four times as many people as the US, is a distant second with 1.6 million prisoners. What you may not know is that the US also tops [...]
Seeming to borrow a page from the Hosni Mubarak playbook, Egyptian security forces yesterday raided the offices of two Egyptian, two American and one German non-governmental organization and held their staffs inside these offices while police and prosecutors search their papers and computers. The reason for the raids is still unclear, but it is known [...]
The United Nations’ top human rights official is calling on tiny, oil-rich Bahrain to release prisoners detained for joining peaceful demonstrations earlier this year, and to restore the jobs of thousands of people who were dismissed for joining the protest. Navi Pillay said in a statement that this action should be taken as a confidence-building [...]
