Human Rights Abuses Against Children Under El Salvador’s “State of Emergency”
The 107-page report, “‘Your Child Does Not Exist Here’: Human Rights Abuses Against Children Under El Salvador’s ‘State of Emergency,’” documents arbitrary detention, torture, and other forms of ill-treatment against children under President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs.” Detained children have often faced overcrowding, lack of adequate food and health care, and have been denied access to their lawyers and family members. In some cases, children have been held, in the first days after arrest, alongside adults. Many have been convicted on overly broad charges and in unfair trials that deny due process.
The children of Sudan, north and south, have been denied their basic rights by all parties to the conflict, and by the government of Sudan even in areas such as Khartoum where there is no war. Many who are considered street children, mostly southerners and Nuba, are removed from their families without notice.
Throughout Pakistan employers forcibly extract labor from adults and children, restrict their freedom of movement, and deny them the right to negotiate the terms of their employment. Employers coerce such workers into servitude through physical abuse, forced confinement, and debt-bondage.
Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India’s Brothels
Hundreds of thousands of women and children are employed in Indian brothels—many of them lured or kidnapped from Nepal and sold into conditions of virtual slavery. The victims of this international trafficking network routinely suffer serious physical abuse, including rape, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment and exposure to AIDS.
Human Rights Watch opposes the imposition of the death penalty on all criminal offenders in all circumstances because of its inherent cruelty. In addition, Human Rights Watch is concerned that the death penalty is most often carried out in a discriminatory manner on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds.
Child Soldiers and Unaccompanied Boys in Southern Sudan
This report focuses on the use of child soldiers by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The government’s ill treatment of children is described in another report (see 1290). The use of child soldiers bodes ill for the future of the country. Boys as young as 11 have been recruited to fight in Sudan’s civil war.
Gross human rights violations continue in Sudan five years after a military coup overthrew the elected civilian government in June 30, 1989, and brought to power a military regime dominated by the National Islamic Front (NIF), a minority party that achieved only 18.4 percent of the popular vote in the 1986 elections.1 The Sudanese have suffered under military rule and single-party dictatorship for
To be a poor child, a runaway, a child prostitute, or a child in a war zone in Colombia is to live with the threat of murder in daily intimacy. At an average of six per day, 2,190 children were murdered in 1993 according to Colombia's national statistical bureau (DANE). In some regions, the murder of children has reached epidemic proportions.
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.
An investigation of the prevalence of forcible virginity control exams and the role of the government in conducting or tolerating such exams, this report cites several separate incidents in the spring of 1992 when young females committed suicide after authorities ordered them to submit to examinations of their hymens.
Police and Death Squad Homicides of Adolescents in Brazil
Despite the considerable attention that has been brought to homicides of adolescents, impunity for those responsible for these abuses has in most respects, continued to prevail.
Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand
Thousands of Burmese women and girls are trafficked into Thai brothels every year where they work under conditions tantamount to slavery. Subject to debt bondage, illegal confinement, various forms of sexual and physical abuse, and exposure to HIV in the brothels, they then face wrongful arrest as illegal immigrants if they try to escape or if the brothels are raided by Thai police.
Human Rights Abuses Along the U.S. Border with Mexico Persist Amid Climate of Impunity
A follow-up on human rights violations along the U.S. border with Mexico, this report concludes that serious abuses by U.S. immigration law enforcement agents continue and that current mechanisms intended to curtail abuses and discipline officers are woefully inadequate.
During the period of Ethiopian rule in Eritrea (1962-91), a systematic policy of denying educational freedoms to Eritreans was followed. This ranged beyond stifling freedom of thought to a sustained attempt to dismantle the educational system and block the emergence of a university serving Eritreans.
Children have suffered greatly as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland; of the almost 3,000 people who have lost their lives since 1969 in political violence associated with "The Troubles," many have been children killed by paramilitaries or by security forces. Moreover, children in the province are caught between two powerful groups - security forces and paramilitaries.
