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.
August 1994 marked the tenth anniversary of the bloody conflict in largely Kurdish southeast Turkey between the Turkish government and the separatist Kurdistan Worker’s Party guerrilla movement. What began in 1984 with isolated PKK attacks in rural southeastern Turkey has grown into a conflict that has consumed an estimated 13,000 lives, with over half the losses coming in the past year or so.
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina, has become a stark symbol of both the strengths and the depravities of human nature. The dignity and resourcefulness of Sarajevans who have survived a siege of more than 900 days stands in bold contrast to the atrocities that have been committed in the savage war against civilians that continues, unending, in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
The Work of the Tripartite Commission in Nicaragua
Since the inauguration of Pres. Chamorro in 1990, Nicaragua has been the scene of significant political turmoil and political violence, including violent strikes, destruction of property, politically- inspired kidnappings and the assassination of political figures. Police investigations were marked by irregularities and no suspects have been identified or detained.
Human Rights Abuses Rampant as Nigerian Military Declares Absolute Power
The military government of Gen. Abacha, in a bid to destroy the pro-democracy movement after using abusive and illegal means to break an oil workers’ strike for democracy, is steadily bringing the country closer to chaos and collapse.
Weeks before the opening of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Jakarta on November 15,1994, the Indonesian government tightened controls on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the press and took harsh anti-crime measures involving what appeared to be extrajudicial executions of suspected criminals.
Every day in Jamaica, children as young as ten years of age are locked in dark, overcrowded, filthy cells which they share with rodents and insects. Sometimes they are held with adults charged with serious crimes. While in the cells, the children are subjected to physical and mental abuse from police and other inmates and are often denied appropriate medical care if they are injured or ill.
The massive proliferation of small arms and light weapons in South Asia is directly linked to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the subsequent creation by the United States of a system, commonly known as the Afghan pipeline, to funnel weapons covertly to the Afghan resistance.
Discrimination Against Women Under Botswana’s Citizenship Act
Recent events indicate that the government of Botswana is continuing to enforce provisions of the Botswana Citizenship Act that discriminate on the basis of sex, in defiance of a 1992 Botswana Court of Appeal decision holding those provisions unconstitutional and contrary to international human rights standards.
For the last few years, the watchword of the Indonesian government has been “openness.” It was both a policy — the Indonesian equivalent of letting a hundred flowers bloom — and a prescription, from President Soeharto himself, for a dynamic, developing society.
Political Rights and the 1994 Presidential and Congressional Elections
Demands for an overhaul of the Mexican political system acquired renewed political force following an armed uprising by Indian peasants in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. The fairness of these elections was a litmus test of the government’s willingness to achieve a genuinely representative democracy and give ordinary Mexicans the right to hold their representatives accountable.
Like their enslaved ancestors more than two centuries ago, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Haitians are on the run, fleeing the murderous military regime that sent their elected president into exile after the September 30, 1991 coup d'etat.
In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that executed prisoners are the principal source of supply of body organs for medicaltransplantation purposes in China.
Abuses Rise as International Pressure on India Eases
As the conflict in Kashmir continues into its fifth year, the government of India appears to have stepped up its catch-and-kill campaign against Muslim insurgents, resulting in an escalation of human rights abuses since early 1994. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the casualties, falling victim both to government forces and to the various factions, collectively known as “militants.”
Between May and October 1992, nineteen men were arrested in Georgia on a variety of criminal charges; by September, their cases were united into one - Case No. 7493810 - along with the case against former President of Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia for abuse of power and related political crimes.
