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While the “zero-option” approach — the granting of citizenship equally to all who were permanent residents at the time the state in question gained independence — was rejected in Estonia, we uncovered no systematic, serious abuses of human rights in the area of citizenship.

Beginning in late 1991, wide-scale atrocities committed by the Burmese military, including rape, forced labor, and religious persecution, triggered an exodus of ethnic Rohingya Muslims from the northwestern Burmese state of Arakan into Bangladesh. This report warned of the possible repatriation of nearly 240,000 refugees, housed in nineteen camps in and around the Bangladeshi town of Cox's Bazar.

The eleven-year-old conflict in south Sudan continues to bring famine, pestilence and death to southerners (over one million people have died as a result of the war). This suffering is caused by gross abuses of human rights by the government and its Sudan Popular Armed Forces and the two factions of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

Highlighting some of the human rights abuses of the previous five years, this report examines the structures of the judicial system and archaic statutes that permit the denial of due process; these include aspects of the military justice system as well as inefficiency in the civilian courts and a lack of transparency in internal police disciplinary procedures.

Helsinki Watch has followed developments regarding the granting of citizenship in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union since 1991.

Government efforts to Islamicize Pakistan's civil and criminal law, which began in earnest in the early 1980s, have dangerously undermined fundamental rights of freedom of religion and expression, and have led to serious abuses against the country's religious minorities.

On September 13, 1993, as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization met in Washington to sign an interim self-rule accord for Gaza and Jericho, protestors against this agreement were killed and injured in Beirut by Lebanese Army troops. The demonstration was held in defiance of an indefinite Lebanese government ban against all assemblies and processions.

On July 18, 1992, nine students and a professor were disappeared from the Enrique Guzmén y Valle University outside Lima, widely known as “La Cantuta,” in circumstances that suggest the participation of the Peruvian army and a secret death squad operated by the National Intelligence Service.