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Human Rights Watch ----
---- Human Rights Watch was deeply saddened to announce the death of our beloved colleague Mike Jendrzejczyk, the Washington Director for our Asia division. In his 13 years with Human Rights Watch, Mike was the leading advocate in the United States on human rights in Asia. To remember Mike Jendrzejczyk in a way that he would have appreciated, Human Rights Watch has created the "Mike Jendrzejczyk Emergency Fund for Asian Human Rights Activists" to protect human rights workers in Asia who are threatened or attacked and have to flee their residence or even their country. Mike first became involved in the human rights movement as a Vietnam war protestor in the 1970s and an anti-nuclear demonstrator in the 1980s. He worked for Amnesty International USA in the mid-1980's and joined the staff of Amnesty's International Secretariat in London in 1988. In 1990, he became Washington Director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. Mike worked tirelessly to help people in these situations Ð people like the Chinese dissidents Xu Wenli, Wang Dan, and Wei Jingsheng, and Vietnamese activist Dr. Nguyen Dan Que. The emergency fund will be used for the protection of local activists, or to help them move for their safety. Read more about Mike and ways of contributing to the new fund at http://hrw.org/about/bios/mikej/fund.htm ---- Uzbekistan has one of the poorest human rights records of any former Soviet republic. So human rights groups in Uzbekistan and around the world were surprized when a major financial institution chose Tashkent as the site of its annual meeting. Because the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has a mandate to promote development in those countries in the region that are committed to democracy and human rights, Human Rights Watch led a coalition of more than fifty partners in trying to induce the bank to insist that Uzbekistan make human rights improvements before the meeting in Tashkent on May 4 and 5. The Bank's annual meetings usually center on investment opportunities in the host country. But this year, the coalition's campaign turned the meeting into a debate of the Uzbek government's poor human rights record and the Bank's commitment to addressing these concerns. Neither of them made for a pretty picture. Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov failed to deliver on what was widely reported as an agreement reached with the Bank, to use his own televised speech to condemn torture in Uzbekistan. This failure bore out Human Rights Watch's concerns that the Bank had failed to use its leverage to extract genuine concessions from the government in the lead-up to the meeting, rather than at the meeting itself. But in keynote speeches also broadcast live on Uzbek television, EBRD President Jean Lemierre and U.K.'s then-Development Minister Clare Short emphasized the need for the Uzbek leadership to make progress on human rights. They raised in particular the recent recommendations by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, which found torture in the country to be "systematic." This amounted to a public scolding of President Karimov's broken promise, and it did not go unnoticed. As Lemierre and Short delivered their critical speeches, President Karimov removed his headphones and demonstratively covered his ears. The participation of non-governmental organizations in the meeting reached record levels. More than 150 NGOs attended, some 60 of them from Uzbekistan. The gathering provided a rare forum for Uzbek NGOs to confront their government directly about its human rights record. The meeting also set in motion a process for the Bank to engage in follow up with the Uzbek government, to ensure protection for those who used the Bank's presence to exercise their right to freedom of speech and assembly. In worrisome developments documented by Human Rights Watch, local human rights defenders had already suffered several incidents of intimidation and harassment by Uzbek law enforcement before, during, and after the meeting. For more information, see: http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/05/uzbek050203.htm and http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/05/uzbek050703.htm For Human Rights Watch's very latest advocacy efforts on this issue, see: http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/07/ebrd071703.htm The EBRD will also have to actively monitor the Uzbek government's fulfillment of the specific benchmarks for human rights improvements it set in its recent country strategy for Uzbekistan. In the strategy, adopted in March, the Bank gave the Uzbek leadership one year to meet these benchmarks, focused on freedom of expression, free operation of civil society and political opposition, and measures to combat torture. When the year is up, the Bank will undertake a thorough review of progress, and use that assessment as a basis for determining its level of engagement in the country. Human Rights Watch and its campaign partners will continue to actively monitor developments in Uzbekistan, and the Bank's commitment to keeping up the momentum for change. For more information about Human Rights Watch's campaign page on the EBRD meeting in Uzbekistan, see http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/uzbekistan/ ---- Human Rights Watch's March 4 report, "Double Standards: Women's Property Rights Violations in Kenya," documented the denial of property rights to thousands of Kenyan women, especially widows. Now two critically important United Nations bodies have taken up the call. The two United Nations bodies, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and the Governing Council of the U.N. Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), recently passed resolutions calling on governments to stop violations of women's property rights. In April, the CHR passed a resolution on women's land, property, and housing rights that encourages governments to transform discriminatory customs that deny women their property rights, reaffirms women's equal inheritance rights, and underscores how violations of these rights are often perpetrated by spouses or in-laws. In May, UN-HABITAT for the first time passed a resolution on women's rights and role in human settlements development and slum upgrading. This resolution urges governments to promote women's participation in human settlements planning and development and requests that UN-HABITAT integrate women's perspectives in all its activities. Human Rights Watch worked with a coalition of grassroots and international women's organizations during and after the CHR session in Geneva to press the U.N. to adopt these resolutions. At the CHR session, HRW took part in panel briefings and advocacy with government delegates, and used its recent report on women's property rights violations in Kenya to highlight how sexist laws and customs deny women their rights to own, inherit, and control property. Read the report at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/kenya0303/. ---- Human Rights Watch published a report on censorship in Ukraine in March 2003, "Negotiating The News: Informal State Censorship of Ukrainian Television." The following month, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma took steps towards guaranteeing freedom of expression. On April 24, 2003, President Kuchma ordered the Prosecutor General's Office to drop criminal cases against five local newspapers that had been charged with publishing material that "undermined the president's authority" and "prevented him from carrying out his professional duties." Four days later President Kuchma signed into law a bill designed to provide additional protections for the media. The law defines censorship, makes it a criminal offense for government officials to deliberately intervene in the work of journalists, and limits the financial penalties that can be demanded from journalists in defamation suits. These much-needed reforms coincided with a Human Rights Watch delegation visit to Ukraine specifically to discuss political censorship with Ukrainian officials. Human Rights Watch and many others have long been calling for an end to informal political censorship and greater protections for journalists in Ukraine. Among those most vocal has been the Council of Europe, which has issued a series of critical assessments on the issue of media freedom in Ukraine over the last several months. For more information on freedom of expression in Ukraine, see the March 2003 report, "Negotiating the News: Informal Political Censorship of the Ukrainian Media" at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/ukraine0303/ ---- In February and March, Human Rights Watch quickly responded to reports of arbitrary arrest of opposition activists in Armenia following the first round of presidential elections. Our research showed how the law punishing public order misdemeanors (the Soviet-era Code of Administrative Offenses) was abused in order to imprison key opposition campaign staff and peaceful demonstrators. Our press releases documenting these abuses generated widespread local media coverage. Following them, in April the Armenian Constitutional Court ruled that the arrests violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe, meanwhile, reiterated its call for reform of the Code of Administrative Offenses. Armenia's compliance with its Council of Europe membership obligations will become the subject of a thorough review by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly in early 2004. See Human Rights Watch's work on Armenia at http://hrw.org/europe/armenia.php ---- Turkey took an important step toward curbing torture on June 19 when it abolished a criminal procedure code provision that denied detainees, held for offenses under the jurisdiction of State Security Courts, the right to legal counsel for the first forty-eight hours of their detention. Human Rights Watch has long been calling for this measure to be among reforms required from Turkey as part of its accession to the European Union. Read Human Rights Watch's January 29 letter to the Turkish Justice Ministry on this issue at http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/turky-ltr013003.htm ---- On June 30, the Russian government took an important step toward transparency on its torture and ill-treatment problems when, for the first time, it authorized the publication of a report by the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT). The report, which contained the findings of an inspection the CPT carried out in December 2001 at police stations, prisons, psychiatric institutions and military detention centers, cited a "disturbing number of allegations of physical ill-treatment by members of the Militia" and found complaint procedures to be ineffective. On the positive side, the report noted improvements in the situation in prisons and colonies. The CPT report concludes with a comprehensive set of recommendations detailing steps that the Russian government should take to address police torture. Human Rights Watch has long called on the Russian government to authorize the publication of all CPT's reports on visits it has conducted in Russia. The publication of the first report was a welcome first step, but another ten reports, including on CPT visits to war-torn Chechnya, remain confidential until the Russian government authorizes their publication. Russia was the last Council of Europe member state to allow for CPT reports concerning it to become public. Read Human Rights Watch's 1999 report on torture in Russia, "Confession at Any Cost," at http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/russia/ In other developments related to Russia, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg took the first step toward hearing a case concerning one of the bloodiest massacres of the current Chechnya war. In a June 18, 2003 letter to the applicants, the Estamirov family, the Court stated that the Russian government had been asked to provide comments on the applicants' allegations and to disclose the investigation file. The Estamirovs filed their case on behalf of five relatives, including a one-year-old child and a woman in the last month of her pregnancy who were killed on February 5, 2000, when Russian soldiers went on a rampage in a district of Grozny and extrajudicially executed around sixty civilians. Human Rights Watch assisted the applicants in bringing their case to the European Court of Human Rights. They are now being represented by British attorney Gareth Peirce and Chechnya Justice Initiative. Read Human Rights Watch's June 2000 report on this issue, "February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novy Aldi," at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya3 ---- How do we know that governments care about the language of resolutions at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights? Because they lobby so hard against them. The U.S. attempted to weaken language prohibiting the juvenile death penalty in a resolution on children's rights earlier this year's session of the Commission, but Human Rights Watch successfully pressed other governments to resist this effort. Human Rights Watch also successfully pressed for stronger language condemning the execution of juvenile offenders in the death penalty resolution approved at this year's session of the Commission. The resolution calls on those states that retain the death penalty not to impose it on persons below the age of 18. Unlike past years, the resolution does not couch this demand in terms of the treaties that states have ratified, notably the Convention on the Rights of the Child (to which the United States is not a party). This is a further affirmation that the execution of juvenile offenders is absolutely prohibited under international law and is yet another indication of the overwhelming international concensus against the execution of juvenile offenders. Read more about Human Rights Watch's work on children's rights at http://www.hrw.org/children/ ---- Human Rights Watch and the Los Angeles Young Advocates inspected the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail on May 14. The jail holds between thirty and fifty youths under the age of eighteen, twice as many youths as the rest of California's adult pretrial detention facilities combined. Youths in the juvenile module are generally locked in single cells with little or nothing to do for twenty-three-and-a-half hours each day, with thirty minutes each day to shower, place telephone calls, and walk along the corridor outside the cells. Two youths in the jail attempted suicide ten days after our May 14 visit. In mid-June, the L.A. Sheriff's Department revoked a volunteer chaplain's access to the jail in an apparent act of retaliation for his outspoken criticism of conditions for youths in the jail. Human Rights Watch has pressed the Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to take action to protect these children and remove them from the jail and to reinstate the chaplain's access. Human Rights Watch has received a good deal of local media coverage, including five articles and an editorial in the LA Times. This has prompted an evaluation of alternative housing options for youths by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and a call for hearings by state Sen. Gloria Romero. The Los Angeles grand jury has called for a new facility. For more information, see http://hrw.org/press/2003/06/us062603.htm ---- Human Rights Watch planned and coordinated a congressional staff briefing on counterterrorism and civil liberties in the United States, focusing on expanded powers of detention and surveillance after 9-11. The June 2 briefing, which was co-sponsored by Senators Leahy, Kennedy, and Feingold, drew over 75 congressional staff from 31 Senate offices and 13 House offices. Wendy Patten, U.S. Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch, moderated and spoke about secret arrests and secret detentions. Other presenters included the ACLU, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Center for National Security Studies, the National Council of La Raza, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the OSI Policy Center. Read Human Rights Watch's report on the 9-11 detainees, "Presumption of Guilt," at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/us911/ ---- Human Rights Watch has been working with administration officials, congressional aides, and other nongovernmental colleagues to develop civil rights oversight and accountability mechanisms within the Department of Homeland Security. The Migration Policy Institute recently released a report that analyzed the impact of the U.S. government's policies on domestic security and civil liberties. The report, which was prepared by a team of experts on national security, immigration and civil liberties issues, recommends, among other things, that a senior-level position devoted to monitoring civil liberties be created within the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, a recommendation that Human Rights Watch has urged the administration to adopt. Read a letter from Human Rights Watch to Secretary of Homeland Security Read the report of the Migration Policy Institute at http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ ----
Child trafficking is a global human rights tragedy. Over one million children worldwide, including thousands in West Africa, are recruited from their homes each year by individuals seeking to exploit their labor. Extreme poverty, sometimes combined with the death of one or both parents, makes children highly vulnerable to false promises of education, vocational training or paid work. Human Rights Watch's April 2003 report "Borderline Slavery: Child Trafficking in Togo" highlights Togo as a case study of trafficking in the region. The report documents how children as young as three years old are exploited as domestic and agricultural workers in several countries. WHAT YOU CAN DO Contact your elected representatives, your countries' embassies, and Togo's president and Minister of Public Health, Promotion of Women and Child Protection, and international lending agencies; urge them to condemn, monitor, and prevent all forms of child trafficking. Call on them to increase aid to programs targeted at abolishing child trafficking and protecting trafficked children. Visit http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/togo/ Read "Borderline Slavery: Child Trafficking in Togo" at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/togo0403 ---- According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, more than two million men and women are now behind bars in the United States. The country that holds itself out as the "land of freedom" incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than any other country. Human Rights Watch's 2001 report "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons," charges that state authorities are responsible for widespread prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse in U.S. men's prisons. The 378-page report is based on more than three years of research and is the first national survey of prisoner-on-prisoner rape. Representative Frank Wolf (D-Virginia) is a lead co-sponsor of the Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2003, which was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 9. Human Rights Watch recently provided 65 copies of the report to Congressman Frank Wolf, who plans to share them with other members of Congress, urging them to support the legislation. This bill encourages federal, state and local authorities to take effective measures to prevent and punish rape, and is supported by a diverse coalition of groups opposed to prison rape. WHAT YOU CAN DO If you live in the U.S., urge your members of Congress to support the Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2003 (H.R. 1707). For more information and a sample letter visit http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/action.html Read "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons" at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison ---- Your contribution to Human Rights Watch will allow us to continue to investigate human rights conditions in more than 70 countries and to generate pressure to end abuses. HRW does not accept financial support from any government or government agency. Every investigation we undertake, every advocacy campaign we embark on, and every report we produce is funded solely by generous private contributions. To find out more about membership, or to make a donation online, by phone, or by postal mail, visit http://www.hrw.org/donations// |
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