Newsroom

Update

There are powerful efforts to ensure that the Goldstone Report doesn’t get acted on. Amnesty International believes the report is a means toward justice in a conflict in which the evidence suggests war crimes were committed.

February 26, 2010

Update

By almost any measure, Qing Hong Wu is an American.  He has lived in the US since the age of five, completed all of his schooling here and obtained a university degree, through hard work rose in prominence to the position of Vice-President of a national IT company, and he is engaged to be married.  He also takes care of his mother, an elderly naturalized US citizen, but when Mr. Wu applied for US citizenship at the age of 29, he was detained and placed in deportation.  The reason?  His juvenile record.  Mr. Wu made some mistakes in his youth,…

February 25, 2010

Update

Pattani Razeek, a Sri Lankan human rights defender, has been missing since he was apparently abducted on February 11 in the town of Polonnaruwa.  He may have been taken by the security forces or a group allied to them, and could be at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.  Please write the Sri Lankan government and ask them to investigate his disappearance.  Thanks.

February 24, 2010

Update

Back on September 16, 2009, the day before the 222nd anniversary of the US Constitution, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) chose NOT to decide whether Texas death row inmate Charles Dean Hood was denied a fair trial because the judge and prosecutor in his case were sleeping together.  The court avoided taking any responsibility for this embarrassing question by ruling that Mr. Hood should have raised that particular issue earlier, even though he couldn’t – the affair wasn’t confirmed until June of 2008.  Mr. Hood’s execution had nonetheless been postponed because of a separate issue, a claim that…

February 24, 2010

Update

There is no question that the September 28th, 2009, Bloody Monday massacre in Guinea was an unprecedented episode of violence and brutality by Guinea’s security forces. But let’s not forget that this was not the first time that Guinea’s military and security forces have used excessive force and acted with impunity in the past decade. In fact, the behavior of the security forces has been defined by a clear pattern of unlawful killings, extrajudicial executions, rape, arbitrary detentions, torture and grossly excessive use of force. You did not want the military, so now we are going to teach you a lesson…

February 24, 2010

Update

Am I the only one that notices that press coverage of the conflict in northwestern Pakistan is completely dominated by a geopolitical and counterterrorism viewpoint? I was reminded of that fact again over the last few days with the spike in coverage following the Afghanistan offensive and the related arrests of key Taliban leaders in joint US-Pakistani operations. The most recent example is an op-ed in yesterday’s Boston Globe, titled Pakistan smart to hit Taliban. Its author, Eric Rosenbach, does a good job of analyzing the most recent events and putting them in a broader (geopolitical, of course) perspective. Like…

February 22, 2010

Update

Juan Manuel Martinez, the political activist wrongly accused of killing US video journalist Brad Will, has been released.  Although this is welcome news, his accusation and detention constitute a miscarriage of justice that has ensured that the real perpetrator of Brad Will's killing is still at large. Brad Will's tragic death and the subsequent unwarranted arrest of Juan Martinez have served to highlight Mexico's human rights abuses and broken criminal justice system.  Brad Will, a video journalist, was filming a confrontation between protesters and local police when he was shot. Juan Martinez had been wrongly detained for his murder since October…

February 22, 2010

Update

The United Nations International Mother Language Day is celebrated every February 21 on the anniversary of the Language Movement in Bangladesh.  It is a time when we remember the power of language—to tell us where we came from, to share our story, to debate, to educate, and to preserve our cultures. In 1947, India was partitioned, creating Pakistan.  Although sharing the same religion, Pakistan was split geographically, culturally and linguistically.  In the western part of Pakistan, they spoke Urdu or Punjabi, while in the eastern part of the country they spoke Bengali.  In 1948, the Pakistani government declared Urdu the…

February 21, 2010

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The Iranian government has repeatedly insisted that it cooperates with the international human rights community and abides by internationally recognized human rights instruments and agreements. However, these assertions are belied by Iran's dismal performance at its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) by the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on February 15 and 17. The Iranian delegation incredibly denied its government’s egregious human rights violations, asserting that any criticisms of Iran’s human rights record were merely politically motivated and deliberate mischaracterizations of its efforts to protect its people from "terrorism."  The Iranian delegation also rejected important recommendations made by the…

February 21, 2010

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The humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is reporting that the Bangladesh government has launched a crackdown against the Rohingya community around the Cox's Bazar district (see map).  The site of the crackdown is a makeshift camp of refugees in Kutupalong that is not recognized by the Bangladeshi government and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has limited access to the area.  From MSF's press release: “More than 6,000 people have arrived at the makeshift camp since October—2,000 in January alone,” said MSF Head of Mission in Bangladesh Paul Critchley. “People are crowding into a crammed and unsanitary…

February 19, 2010

Update

With a tie vote, the Kansas Senate today failed to pass SB 375, a bill which would have abolished that state’s death penalty.  The Kansas Senate consists of 31 Republicans and 9 Democrats, and the vote was 20-20. Extensive debates like the one today have been taking place in state legislatures across the country, reflecting a growing national concern that the death penalty is ineffective and unnecessary, and that there are better ways to tackle the problem of violent crime.  Kansas has not had an execution since 1965, and has less than a dozen people on death row.  On Thursday, Governor Mark Parkinson had said: …

February 19, 2010

Update

Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released their "Education under Attack" report, in which they have experts discuss the incidence of politically and ideologically motivated attacks on teachers, students and school buildings throughout the world. The report includes both a case study and a country report on Pakistan, both of which paint a stark picture of the impact of the Taliban on education in northwestern Pakistan. The report tells us that between 2007 and March 2009, 108 schools were fully destroyed, an additional 64 were partially damaged, and 40,000 children, including 23,000 girls, were deprived…

February 19, 2010