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.
This 114-page report is based on previously undisclosed Communist Party and government documents, as well as local regulations, official newspaper accounts, and interviews conducted in Xinjiang. It unveils for the first time the complex architecture of law, regulation, and policy in Xinjiang that denies Uighurs religious freedom, and by extension freedom of association, assembly, and expression.
The potential future dangers of widespread production and continued proliferation of cluster munitions demand urgent action to bring the humanitarian threat under control. At least seventy countries stockpile cluster munitions and the aggregate number of submunitions in these stockpiles is staggering.
This 80-page report documents the recent removal of critical HIV/AIDS information from primary school curricula, including information about condoms, safer sex and the risks of HIV in marriage.
`Abd al-Salam `Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni intelligence officer, disappeared in Cairo in 2002. Since then, he is believed to have been held without trial in Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.
Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region
Since late 2003, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) has committed numerous human rights violations against Anuak communities in the Gambella region of southwestern Ethiopia that may amount to crimes against humanity. These abuses have taken place in a region plagued by longstanding ethnic tensions to which the Ethiopian military has become a party.
Zimbabweans go to the polls on March 31, 2005. President Robert Mugabe and senior government officials of the government of Zimbabwe have emphasized the need for peaceful elections, and put in place electoral reforms that, they argue, meet the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections.
“Disappearances” in Chechnya—a Crime Against Humanity
Enforced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch urges the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to take urgent measures commensurate with the extreme gravity of the phenomenon.
Governments around the world have done far too little to combat the entrenched, chronic abuses of women’s and girls’ human rights that put them at risk of HIV. Misguided HIV/AIDS programs and policies, such as those emphasizing abstinence until marriage, ignore the brutal realities many women and girls face.
Human Rights Watch welcomes this opportunity to present views regarding whether Ecuador meets the eligibility criteria of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA). These criteria include those in the original Andean Trade Preferences Act (ATPA), as well as those added in the ATPDEA, which extended and expanded the ATPA in 2002.
This 39-page report documents how most families have returned to locations that still lack minimal social services, such as health care and education, let alone employment. Elderly and disabled persons, widows and female-headed households experience the worst shortfalls in government assistance, particularly in rural areas.
Uzbekistan’s Implementation of the Recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on Torture
Three years ago, the government of Uzbekistan took the important step of issuing an invitation to the United Nations (U.N.) Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman degrading treatment or punishment, the first government of the five Central Asian states to do so.
The Prosecution of Sexual Violence in the Congo War
This 52-page report documents how the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken insufficient steps to prosecute those responsible for wartime rape. Human Rights Watch calls on the Congolese government and international donors, including the European Union, to take urgent steps to reform Congo’s justice system.
Prospects in 2005 for Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey
This 37-page report details how the Turkish government has failed to implement measures for IDPs the United Nations recommended nearly three years ago. Since the European Union confirmed Turkey’s membership candidacy in December, the Turkish government appears to have shelved plans to enact those measures.
The control orders envisioned in the Prevention of Terrorism Bill 2005 (hereafter “the Bill”) offer a seriously flawed alternative to the disastrous policy of indefinite detention under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, a policy ruled contrary to human rights law by the House of Lords Judicial Committee.
This report documents more than 200 enforced disappearances perpetrated by the Nepali army and police and analyzes the factors responsible for the crisis.
