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.
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.
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.
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.
In this investigation of the application of the 1991 Latvian law “On the Registration of Residents,” our findings indicate that the Department of Citizenship and Immigration has targeted certain non-citizen groups and denied them registration as legal residents of Latvia.
The Widespread Rape of Somali Women Refugees in North Eastern Kenya
While the tragedy in Somalia made daily news, the plight of thousands of refugees in neighboring Kenya remains unpublicized. Since 1992, approximately 300,000 Somalis have fled across the 800 mile Kenya-Somali border, most of them women and children. Many were the victims of violence, including rape, as they fled war-torn Somalia.
On April 21, 1993, the Bolivian Supreme Court delivered a historic verdict, sentencing a former military dictator and forty-seven collaborators to lengthy prison terms for human rights violations, the disruption of a democratic government, and other offenses. This report reviews the verdict of the Bolivian Supreme Court.
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.
The Misguided Use of In-Country Refugee Processing in Haiti
The Clinton Administration's efforts toward achieving a political solution in Haiti can be favorably contrasted to his predecessor's inaction. Nevertheless, this progress is diminished by the continuation and promotion of a refugee policy that is inhumane and illegal and ultimately calls into question the U.S. government's commitment to human rights and a democratic regime in Haiti.
The U.N. peace-keeping period in Cambodia was marked by major human rights violations, among them the slaughter of ethnic Vietnamese residents of Cambodia, abuse of prisoners and incidents of politically-motivated murder, assault and intimidation that accelerated in the months leading up to the May 1993 elections.
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.
One Party State in KwaZulu Homeland Threatens Transition to Democracy
In examining the human rights record of the government of the KwaZulu homeland in Natal province of South Africa, we found that it does not support Chief Buthelezi’s claim that he is a democrat. KwaZulu is a one-party state, in which the institutions of Inkatha and those of the homeland administration are virtually indistinguishable.
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.
Since the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989, Romania has experienced a dramatic increase in xenophobia and racist propaganda characterized by an increasingly vocal press and right-wing political parties.