Reports

Press Backgrounder For President Jiang Zemin's Visit to the U.K. and France.

Government harassment and discriminatory legislation are suppressing independent political activity in Uganda, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today.

Angola returned to all-out war in December 1998, the fourth period of open warfare in living memory. The human cost since fighting resumed is impossible to determine with precision, but the United Nations estimates that nearly one million people have become internally displaced persons because of the renewed conflict, 10 percent of Angola's population.

This report profiles five Tibetans living in exile in Dharamsala, India. All are in their late twenties or thirties, and all are originally from the areas known to Tibetan nationalists as Amdo and Kham. Today almost all of this territory lies in what Tibetans call "eastern Tibet" and Chinese call the Tibetan regions of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and Yunnan provinces. Their stories show a common pattern: all had unusual access to education; all became involved in political activities through discussions at state schools or academies; all were arrested and detained by Chinese security forces for possession or circulation of published materials about the Dalai Lama or Tibetan independence; and some were tortured. The men's stories are similar to many others we heard in Dharamsala, and while we do not claim that five cases are illustrative of a broader pattern of repression, their accounts suggest that peaceful political activity in Tibetan areas outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region (T.A.R.) and its capital, Lhasa, is no more acceptable to authorities than it is in the T.A.R.

Between January 1998 and February 1999, the Indian Parliament reported a total of 116 incidents of attacks on Christians across the country. Unofficial figures may be higher. Gujarat topped the list of states with ninety-four such incidents.

For most Kenyan children, violence is a regular part of the school experience. Teachers use caning, slapping, and whipping to maintain classroom discipline and to punish children for poor academic performance. The infliction of corporal punishment is routine, arbitrary, and often brutal.

The twenty-four year conflict in East Timor may be nearing the end game with voters there choosing on August 30 between autonomy under Indonesian sovereignty and independence. But a potentially much more dangerous conflict is spiraling out of control in Aceh, the resource-rich region on the northern tip of Sumatra.

This report documents how ethnic Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) face fear, uncertainty, and violence in Kosovo. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 164,000 Serbs have left Kosovo during the seven weeks since Yugoslav and Serb forces withdrew and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) entered the province.

Azerbaijani security forces regularly torture those in custody, and get away with it, according to a this report. The international monitoring group charged that Azerbaijan has failed to enact legal reforms and that corruption is rampant in the criminal justice system.

The village of Racak, about half a kilometer from the town of Stimlje, had a pre-conflict population of approximately 2,000 people. During the large-scale government offensive in August 1998, the Serbian police shelled Racak, and several family compounds were looted and burned. Since then, most of the population has lived in Stimlje or nearby Urosevac.

For more than a decade, Israel and its auxiliary Lebanese militia have been expelling innocent civilians from their homes and villages in south Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said today. In this report, Human Rights Watch says that entire families have been expelled from the occupied zone in a summary and often cruel manner, without due process law.

Tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom have lived in Tanzania for more than two decades, have been rounded up by the Tanzanian army and confined to camps for the past year in the western part of the country, Human Rights Watch charges in this report.

The Internet dramatically empowers persons in the exercise of their right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas regardless of frontiers. Online communication must therefore be fully protected by international guarantees of the right to freedom of expression. In the Middle East and North Africa, Internet use is growing rapidly after a slow start.

On June 15, 1999, Serbian and Yugoslav forces withdrew from the town of Glogovac in the Drenica region of central Kosovo, in accordance with the agreement signed by NATO and Yugoslavia's military leadership.

Sierra Leonean refugee children in Guinea are among the most vulnerable children in the world. They have lived through an extremely brutal war -most have witnessed or suffered unspeakable atrocities including widespread killing, mutilation, and sexual abuse.