Gaps in Support Systems for People with Disabilities in Uruguay
The 50-page report, “I, Too, Wish to Enjoy the Summer”: Gaps in Support Systems for People with Disabilities in Uruguay, documents Uruguay’s shortcomings in meeting the support requirements under its National Integrated Care System for everyone with a disability. Many are ineligible for the care system’s Personal Assistants Program due to their age, income, or how “severe” their disability is. People with certain types of disabilities, like intellectual and sensory disabilities, and those with high-support requirements, are effectively excluded from the program because personal assistants are not trained to support them. Human Rights Watch found that Uruguay has not sufficiently involved organizations of people with disabilities in the design, administration, and monitoring of personal assistance under the care system, resulting in its failure to recognize users as rights-holders and its delivery of inadequate, limited services.
Since the election of President Khatami in May 1997, Iranian reformists have spoken openly of respecting basic freedoms and the rule of law. In Iranian society generally, many petty social restrictions have been eased. The atmosphere surrounding the current parliamentary election campaign in Iran is notably freer than the last time around, in March 1996.
This report has the limited goal of assessing the number of civilian deaths from NATO attacks, as a step toward assessing NATO forces' compliance with their obligation to make protection of civilians an integral part of any use of military force. The benchmarks to be used for judging NATO's attacks are those of international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war.
Russian soldiers summarily executed at least thirty-eight civilians in the Staropromyslovski district of Grozny, Chechnya, between late December and mid-January, according to testimony taken by Human Rights Watch. Most of the victims were women and elderly men, and all appear to have been deliberately shot by Russian soldiers at close range.
There are currently more than twenty thousand prisoners in the United States, nearly two percent of the prison population, housed in special super-maximum security facilities or units. Although supermax facilities are ostensibly designed to house incorrigibly violent or dangerous inmates, many of the inmates confined in them do not meet those criteria.
On December 27, 1999, Interfax reported Russian forces were using fuel-air explosive bombs in the fighting in Chechnya.(1) The use of fuel-air explosives (FAEs), popularly known in Russia as "vacuum bombs," represents a dangerous escalation in the Chechnya conflict--one with important humanitarian implications. FAEs are more powerful than conventional high-explosive munitions of comparable size, are more likely to kill and injure people in bunkers, shelters, and caves, and kill and injure in a particularly brutal manner over a wide area. In urban settings it is very difficult to limit the effect of this weapon to combatants, and the nature of FAE explosions makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take shelter from their destructive effect.
This report shows that military support for paramilitary activity remains national in scope, and includes areas where units receiving or scheduled to receive U.S. military aid operate. The report relies on Colombian government documents and extensive interviews with government investigators, refugees, and victims of political violence.
On November 4, 1999, an armed gang killed seven Nigerian policemen in the community of Odi, Bayelsa State, in the oil producing Niger Delta region in the far south east of the country. Five other police were killed in subsequent days.
As the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is being celebrated around the world, Human Rights Watch is deeply concerned about the harsh steps that Egyptian authorities have taken in recent days against the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), an independent Cairo-based nongovernmental organization.
On December 5, Uzbekistan's voters will go to the polls for the second time since independence in 1991 to elect 250 deputies to the Olii Majlis, or parliament. Despite government claims that elections will be free and pluralistic, the parliamentary and local council elections will be a highly-controlled exercise in Potemkin democracy.
This report is based on interviews with more than one hundred East Timorese returnees in transit centers in Dili, the capital of East Timor. It documents the continuing obstacles to return for East Timorese refugees in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia.
In the run-up to important parliamentary elections, civil and political rights are seriously restricted in Croatia, Human Rights Watch said in this report. The report describes this political repression as the "human rights legacy" of the late President Franjo Tudjman, who died earlier this month. Parliamentary elections in Croatia are scheduled for January 3, 2000.
Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam headed the junta which in 1974 overthrew the government of Emperor Haile Selassie in a bloody coup. Known as the "Derg" or "Dergue," the "committee," the junta consisted of about a hundred junior officers drawn from all regions of Ethiopia.
Multi-party democracies remain stable throughout most of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the notable exception of Cuba, where the government of Fidel Castro celebrated its fortieth anniversary in power with no sign of a significant political opening on the horizon.
Sovereignty loomed less large in 1999 as an obstacle to stopping and redressing crimes against humanity. Governmental leaders who committed atrocities faced a greater chance of prosecution and even military intervention.
With frequent references to juvenile predators, hardened criminals, and young thugs, U.S. lawmakers at both the state and federal levels have increasingly abandoned efforts to rehabilitate child offenders through the juvenile court system. Instead, many states have responded to a perceived outbreak in juvenile violent crime by moving more children into the adult criminal system.
