Full Coverage: Human rights

23.03.2012 Proof that film is the most effective way of creating mass awareness and action on an issue comes from Invisible Children’s KONY2012 video campaign, says John Biaggi, director of the Human Rights Watch film festival that is under way in London.

10.03.2012 The attack by Italian police on sleeping G8 demonstrators in a school in Genoa in 2002 is far from being the worst case of police brutality in the world. But it should never be forgotten, and thanks to Black Block it won’t be.

01.03.2012 COLOMBO, Feb 29 (IPS) - Strung across the main road leading away from the international airport is a banner that has an intriguing message: ‘USA, Pls Do Not Support Terrorism’.

27.02.2012 GENEVA, 24 February (IRIN) - Many of the countries that have contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions will be the worst affected by global warming, a “climate injustice” that highlights the link to human rights, experts told a Human Rights Council gathering in Geneva.

06.02.2012 PHNOM PENH, 3 February (IRIN) - On 3 February, judges in the Extraordinary Chamber of the Courts in Cambodia – more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge trials – sentenced Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), the former chairman of the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng security prison, to life in prison.

01.02.2012 Leaving the theatre after watching Guantanamo Boy, I heard someone say, “It makes you hate Americans, doesn’t it?” Sadly, such a response falls into the same trap as the US interrogator in this play, who acts on general assumptions rather than specific individuals.

16.10.2011 Stella Feehily didn’t want to put people off by a title that reflected her play’s concern with human rights defenders on the trail of a Congo warlord accused of rape and sexual slavery. It might be bad for the box office. So she’s called it Bang Bang Bang.

03.10.2011 What motivates an international human rights activist? A sense of justice? Ambition? Guilt? A craving for excitement? Empathy? A desire to escape from a dull relationship?

11.09.2011 Slave at the Riverside Studios is one of those evenings at the theatre when the subject overwhelms the play.

21.08.2011 Slave was a big-selling book by Mende Nazer about her capture in the Nuba Mountains at the age of 12 , her enslavement in Sudan and Britain and finally her escape. Now you can see the play.

06.08.2011 Slave - A Question of Freedom is about 12-year-old Mende Nazer, who was abducted in a raid in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, was passed to a diplomat’s family in London from which she finally escaped in 2000, only to face a new struggle for asylum and freedom.
+ When ex-slave met slave-playing actress

24.06.2011 BHUBANESWAR, Jun 24 (IPS) - Fourteen-year-old Satikanta Sahu loves going to school, but these days, he would rather spend his time manning the barricade and facing down policemen in the sandy coastal village of Govindpur in India’s eastern state of Orissa.

06.06.2011 You can't quibble with the scale and commitment of Oxfam's GROW campaign on global hunger launched last week. But everything else about it strikes me as the outcome of too many people trying too hard. I could list the symptoms but by far the most serious is the omission of the right to food as the vital political leverage on hunger. Throughout the GROW material the right to food is presumed rather than reiterated. Surely its status in international law and in most national constitutions is the knife to twist in all those flaws in the global food system that Oxfam identifies. The broad sweep of the campaign's ambition badly needs a simple philosophy to glue it together for supporters and policy-makers alike. I can't see any way through the world food crisis that doesn't lean heavily on a rights-based approach.

21.05.2011 Human rights groups, particularly Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, have been accused of labelling the Rwandan government authoritarian and dictatorial without trying to understand what is really going on in the country.

26.04.2011 COLOMBO, Apr 26 (IRIN) - The government of Sri Lanka has criticized the UN for releasing a report alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by both sides during the country's decades-long civil war.

14.04.2011 Bangladesh has a dubious record on human rights, especially in the context of political violence. Not many countries would shoot themselves in the foot by humiliating their only internationally recognised figure, as in the case of Mohammad Yunus. It was a big surprise therefore to find that the government devoted the opening chapter of its most recent MDG Progress Report to the subject of “Democratic Governance and Human Rights.” I can't think of any other developing country which has so explicitly analysed the connection between human rights and poverty in the context of the MDGs.

10.03.2011 SAN JOSE, Mar 10 (New America Media) - Survivors of Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime are finally hopeful about getting answers to the question they have carried for 30 years: Why?

03.03.2011 DAKAR, Mar 2 (IRIN) - In northern Côte d’Ivoire vaccines are going bad, taps are dry and the families of women in labour are ferrying buckets of water to hospital, three days after the government of Laurent Gbagbo ordered power cut in the region.

26.02.2011 NAIROBI, Feb 25 (IRIN) - Anti-government protesters, who have taken to the streets of Khartoum and other Sudanese cities over recent weeks, run the risk of sexual assault, torture and detention, say human rights workers and demonstrators.

30.05.2010 The tussle over a UN investigation into alleged war crimes during the final stages of the Sri Lankan conflict illustrates the current tendency to dilute human rights principles. IPS News