Ecuador’s Slow Progress Tackling and Preventing School-Related Sexual Violence
The 60-page report, “‘Like Patchwork’: Ecuador’s Slow Progress Tackling and Preventing School-Related Sexual Violence,” documents significant gaps in the government’s response to prevent and tackle abuses in Ecuador’s education system. Many schools still fail to report abuses or fully implement required protocols. Judicial institutions do not adequately investigate or prosecute sexual offenses against children, affecting survivors’ ability to find justice.
Forced Disappearances, Torture and Summary Executions
European Union governments must press the issue of the "disappeared" in Chechnya when Russian President Vladimir Putin visits Stockholm this week, Human Rights Watch urged in releasing a new report on Chechnya today.
Chile's record on freedom of expression has improved little since the end of military rule, Human Rights Watch charged in this report. Although the country has made great progress in prosecuting the abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship, the same repressive defamation laws that the military regime regularly employed against its critics are still in use.
The violence in Sampit, Central Kalimantan, started on the night of February 17-18 when a Dayak house was burned down. Rumor spread that an ethnic Madurese was responsible, and immediately, a band of Dayaks went into a Madurese neighborhood and began burning houses.
On March 27, 2000, Kheda Kungaeva, an eighteen-year-old woman, was taken from her home in Chechnya, beaten, raped, and murdered. On February 28, 2001, the Rostov District Military Court will try Col. Yuri Budanov for Kungaeva's murder.
When Colombian President Andrés Pastrana meets with President George W. Bush next Tuesday (February 27), the two leaders will discuss U.S. military aid to Colombia, including the issue of Colombia's progress on improving human rights.
Russian authorities have concealed and obstructed the prosecution of Russian forces for violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Chechnya conflict.
When George W. Bush visits President Vicente Fox in Mexico this Friday, the two leaders will discuss issues that have important implications for human rights in the region-including migration, trade and the war on drugs.
On February 14-15, Bahraini citizens will cast "yes" or "no" votes for a National Charter drafted late last year on the instructions of the country's ruler, or amir (prince), Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
When Jean-Bertrand Aristide is sworn in for a second term as Haitian president on Wednesday, February 7, he will face a number of pressing challenges in the areas of human rights and democracy.
This report documents two massacres committed by Taliban forces in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in January 2001and May 2000. In both cases the victims were primarily Hazaras, a Shia Muslim ethnic group that has been the target of previous massacres and other serious human rights violations by Taliban forces.
If Yemeni voters cast a "yes" vote in the constitutional referendum on February 20, Field Marshall Ali Abdallah Saleh's term as president will be extended for two years and enable him to be re-elected in 2006 for another seven years.
Government Violations in the Lead-Up to the Election in Uganda
There are serious human rights concerns in the lead-up to Uganda's March 12, 2001 presidential elections that shed doubt on whether the election will be free and fair. Not only is President Yoweri Museveni relying on a biased legal framework, but he is also using the state machinery to obstruct a transparent and fair electoral process.
In the past two years, Ugandans have recruited and trained both Hema and Lendu to serve in the forces of the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement (RCD-ML), a rebel group which is backed by Uganda and which nominally controls this area. Within the last year, however, at least some Ugandan officers have reportedly favored the Hema.
Using fraud and forgery of official documents, district officials in Ratanakiri province and intermediaries of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Gen. Nuon Phea are attempting to force nearly one thousand indigenous minority villagers to give up rights to 1,250 hectares of land that their families have lived on for generations.
This report examines the response of Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) to a massacre in Aceh that occurred in August 2001. Thirty men and a two-year-old child, all ethnic Acehnese, were shot and killed by a group of armed men who suddenly appeared on the grounds of the Bumi Flora rubber and palm oil plantation in Julok, East Aceh.
