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.
On May 23, 1997, Iranians went to the polls for the seventh time to elect a president of the Islamic Republic. The incumbent, Hashemi Rafsanjani, served the two consecutive four-year terms permitted by law. The transfer of power by way of elections was a notable event in a region in which most leaders do not voluntarily leave power or subject themselves to any type of open electoral process.
Policing, Human Rights, and Accountability in Northern Ireland
Police conduct throughout the long conflict in Northern Ireland has given rise to serious allegations of human rights abuses. The emergency regime imposed on Northern Ireland by the British government invests the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) with expansive police powers to stop, question, search, arrest, detain, and interrogate persons merely suspected of terrorist activity.
Police Abuse and Detention of Street Children in Kenya
In addition to the hazards of living on the streets, street children in Kenya are subject to frequent beatings, extortion, and sexual abuse by police. In violation of international law, they are rounded up and held for days or weeks in police lockups under deplorable physical conditions, commingled with adults and often beaten.
U.S Companies and the Production of Antipersonnel Mines
Despite the Clinton Administration's attempts to lay claim to the mantle of global leadership in the effort to ban antipersonnel landmines, the United States has refused to ban or even formally suspend the production of antipersonnel mines. From 1985 through 1996, the U.S. produced more than four million new antipersonnel mines.
Rapid, unplanned growth of Brazil’s urban centers—11 of its cities are home to more than a million people each—has been accompanied in most cases by soaring crime rates and public dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system. In several states, authorities responded with policies that tolerate or promote grave violations of the rights of criminal suspects.
Eastern Slavonia, the only remaining Serb-held region of Croatia, was scheduled to revert to Croatian control by July 15, 1997. Some 120,000 to 150,000 Serbs who lived in that region will come under the authority of their bitter opponent during the war. While the transition of authority in Eastern Slavonia was designed to be carried out peacefully under the auspices of a U.N.
The level of racist incidents reported to the police in the U.K. has increased dramatically over recent years. Between 1989 and 1996 the number rose more than 275 percent, from 4,383 to 12,199.
Eastern Slavonia, the only remaining Serb-held region of Croatia, is scheduled to revert to Croatian control by July 15, 1997. Some 120,000 to 150,000 Serbs living in that region will then come under the authority of their bitter opponent during the war.
Lebanon's airwaves had long been unregulated, with scores of unlicensed private broadcasters that ranged in political diversity from the radio station of the Lebanese Communist Party to the television station of Hizballah. The broadcasting community included 52 television stations and over 120 radio stations for a population of three million.
Nearly seven years ago, on April 24, 1990, President Mobutu Sese Seko ostensibly gave in to mounting pro-democracy pressure by announcing the end of the one party state and the beginning of transition to multiparty democracy in Zaire. Seven years into the transition, there have been at least ten different governments but no transition.
Unaccompanied Children Detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) violates the rights of hundreds of unaccompanied children each year, some as young as eight, contrary to international law as well as INS regulations. Children are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, all by the same agency charged with protecting their rights.
In this document, Human Rights Watch seeks to raise concerns about some disturbing trends in the protection of refugees it has observed in the course of researching human rights abuses.
The National People's Congress took the historic step at its annual session in March of eliminating crimes of "counterrevolution" from the criminal code, a step that at first glance seemed to indicate movement toward greater respect for the rule of law.