Negotiations in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear program are "substantive and forward-looking," according to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Too bad Iranians can’t learn about the talks over social media because of Iran’s censorship policy.
For the past two years, Moscow has criticized, or more often ignored, Human Rights Watch reporting on Syria and our documentation of government abuses. But this week, the Russian Foreign Ministry lauded one of our Syria reports – but only because it blames some rebel groups for atrocities rather than government forces.
From earlier today: Russia seems to be arresting the wrong people. After the fatal stabbing of a young man in Moscow last week, word spread that the attacker was not an ethnic Russian, and racist mobs swarmed a wholesale vegetable market where many traders and handymen work who come from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In the wake of the violence, Moscow police incredibly began rounding up ethnic minorities. Sadly, this kind of thing is all too common in Russia, as human rights campaigner Svetlana Gannushkina explains... Staying in Russia, today also marked a significant moment in the case against opposition leader Alexei Navalny, with a court suspending his sentence. Still, the surprise end to this political trial hardly represents progress.
