The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles
The 337-page report, “‘You Have to Move!’ The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles,” documents the experiences of people living on the streets and in vehicles, temporary shelters, and parks in Los Angeles, as they struggle to survive while facing criminalization and governmental failures to prioritize eviction prevention or access to permanent housing. Law enforcement and sanitation “sweeps” force unhoused people out of public view, often wasting resources on temporary shelter and punishments that do not address the underlying needs. Tens of thousands of people are living in the streets of Los Angeles; death rates among the unhoused have skyrocketed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every recognized country in the world, except for the United States and the collapsed state of Somalia, has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, pledging to uphold its protections for children. Today the convention stands as the single most widely ratified treaty in existence.
Human Rights Watch has prepared this assessment of the Patten Commission report-issued on September 9, 1999-as a means of following up on its participation in the commission's consultation process and as a contribution to the government's three month post-report consultation period.
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.
Though nine years have passed since Pakistan ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Pakistani children in conflict with the law continue to be denied the juvenile justice protections of the convention.
Despite legislation protecting freedom of speech and the press in Tajikistan, in practice freedom of expression is severely limited. For six years major opposition parties and their newspapers were banned. The government of Tajikistan continues to employ a variety of tactics to limit political content in the remaining media.
For the last two years, the government of Bulgaria has pledged to control the country's notorious arms trade as part of its strategy to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (E.U.). Sofia has taken important steps toward reform, but further improvements are urgently needed to ensure that the legacy of irresponsible weapons dealing is put to rest.
The Russian police routinely torture people in custody in order to force them to confess, Human Rights Watch charges in this report. Russian courts commonly accept these forced confessions as grounds for conviction, and federal and local governments do not recognize police torture as a problem, the report says.
