China: Protect Chen Guangcheng From Extrajudicial Violence | Human Rights Watch

 New York) – The Chinese government should immediately guarantee blind human rights defender Chen Guangcheng’s safety, end its persecution of him and his family, and ensure that he is not returned to any form of detention or subject to any restrictions on his rights, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has been calling for Chen’s release since 2006.

Chen, a blind legal activist, is reported to have escaped from his home village of Dongshigu in Shandong province on April 22, 2012, after 19 months of unlawful detention. According to activists, Chen is reportedly in a “100% safe location” in Beijing. Chen described his escape in a video circulated on the Chinese-language website Boxun earlier today. In the video, Chen appeals to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to “personally intervene” by opening an investigation on Chen and his family’s confinement and “those who ordered county-level police and officials to break into my house, beat and hurt me, refused me medical attention – without any legal foundation or officers wearing uniforms.”

“The central government has for years condoned, abetted, and possibly directed the human rights abuses visited upon Chen and his family,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “We’re well past the time when the government should focus on the conduct of officials in Shandong, and cease persecution of someone whose activism is wholly legal.”

In June 2005, Chen filed a class action lawsuit accusing officials in Linyi, Shandong Province, of seeking to enforce strict population control laws by subjecting thousands of people to forced abortions and sterilization.

China: Protect Chen Guangcheng From Extrajudicial Violence | Human Rights Watch

Girl Power - Afghanistan: FIGHTING THE WORST MYSOGYNISTS ON THE PLANET

Girl Power - Afghanistan

In war-weary Afghanistan women are still sold to pay debts and brutalized by family members. This report exposes the full horror of their plight and introduces the brave women combating the injustice.

Even in Afghanistan amidst endless unfolding horrors, the case of a 15-year-old girl named Sahar Gul shocked and ashamed many Afghans as they saw images of her brutalised body. The teenager was imprisoned and tortured at the hands of her husband's family, because she refused to become a prostitute. She was cut, burned with cigarettes, beaten to a pulp and many of her fingernails were ripped out. She was barely alive when police found her. "It's not just Sahar, there could be many more we're not aware of." Even after the ultra-misogyny of the Taliban has retreated into isolated pockets, women in Afghanistan are desperately downtrodden. "I think when you are born a woman in Afghanistan you are taught every day to hate yourself. Women don't respect themselves." But across town, another teenager Noorjahan Akbar refused to look away. And, as an Australian TV producer working in Afghanistan points out, Noorjahan is not alone. "I see now a generation of amazing young women, determined to make a change." Through the eyes of Noorjahan this is a confronting but ultimately inspiring story of emerging female power in Afghanistan.

A Film By ABC Australia
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
March 2012

Marie Colvin last report

Marie Colvin last report

Syrian forces committed crimes against humanity: U.N. report

Demonstrators march against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in Deir Balaba near Hom. (Reuters)

inShare

By Al Arabiya with Agencies
 
Dubai

Syria’s military and security forces have committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and rape in their brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters, U.N.-appointed investigators said on Monday.

The commission added that the government of President Bashar al-Assad bore responsibility for the crimes.

“The commission is gravely concerned that crimes against humanity have been committed in different locations in the Syrian Arab Republic during the period under review,” the Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in its report, concluding that military and security forces were behind the acts.

“It calls upon the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic to put an immediate end to the ongoing gross human rights violations, to initiate independent and impartial investigations of these violations and to bring perpetrators to justice,” it wrote in its summary.


TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE: Syrian forces committed crimes against humanity: U.N. report

U.N. human rights committee condemns Syria over crackdown

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

The resolution was passed by 122 votes to 13 with 41 abstentions at the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee. (Reuters)

By Al Arabiya with Agencies

The U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee on Tuesday condemned Syria for its eight-month crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in a vote backed by Western nations and a number of Arab states.

The resolution was passed by 122 votes to 13 with 41 abstentions at the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee. Syria’s U.N. envoy accused the European backers of the resolution – Britain, France and Germany – of “inciting civil war.”

The resolution “strongly condemns the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by the Syrian authorities,” highlighting the “arbitrary executions” and “persecution” of protesters and human rights defenders.

It also condemns “arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill treatment of detainees, including children” and demands an immediate end to all such violations.

Arab nations Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Qatar were among more than 60 countries to co-sponsor the resolution.

Russia and China, which vetoed a European-drafted resolution that would have condemned Syria in the U.N. Security Council last month, voted against it.

FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE: U.N. human rights committee condemns Syria over crackdown

Qaddafi rape victim breaks her silence

A Libyan woman who claims she was raped for five years by former leader Muammar Qaddafi says she is still haunted by memories of sexual assault and captivity. (File photo)

By Amal al-Hilali

Al Arabiya Dubai

Muammar Qaddafi might have physically disappeared but his specter will apparently keep haunting a lot of Libyans for some time to come. One such person is Safiya, a woman who alleges that the former Libyan leader had been raping her for five whole years and who has finally decided to tell her story.

“Qaddafi destroyed my life.” That is how Safiya, who is not yet 22, began her story as told to Le Monde correspondent in Tripoli.

“I wish he were not dead so he could be tried for all the crimes he committed in cold blood against Libyan women.”

Safiya felt a mixture of happiness and bitterness at the sight of Qaddafi’s lifeless body in a fridge in Misrata; she was happy he was gone yet bitter because there were many questions she wanted to ask him.

“I wanted to ask him why he did all that to me, why he took me from my parents, why he violated my honor and destroyed my youth.”

FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE: Qaddafi rape victim breaks her silence

Secret Intelligence Documents Discovered in Libya | Human Rights Watch

Secret Intelligence Documents Discovered in Libya | Human Rights Watch

Secret Intelligence Documents Discovered in Libya

Files Show Intimate Relationship Between CIA, MI6, and Libya

September 8, 2011

Among the files were documents confirming that both the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom’s MI6 sent terrorism suspects to Libya for detention – despite Libya’s notorious record for torturing prisoners.

Human Rights Watch discovered in Tripoli tens of thousands of archived documents containing evidence of crimes – such as the US and UK governments’ complicity in torture – committed during Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s rule

The documents were found in the office of Musa Kusa, Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief. We viewed several hundred documents and photographed about 300, but didn’t remove any. We have been working with Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to secure the building, keeping the documents safe so they can be used as evidence in court. We continue to scour Tripoli for more documents, trying to ensure that archives are secure.

Among the files were documents confirming that both the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom’s MI6 sent terrorism suspects to Libya for detention – despite Libya’s notorious record for torturing prisoners.

The CIA communications that we saw were drafted while George W. Bush was president and included information like flight schedules and lists of questions to be asked of suspects. They also established that the CIA sent agents to interrogate suspects in Libyan custody.

This confirms Human Rights Watch’s earlier findings of US and UK complicity in the torture of suspects in foreign countries, published in 2004. The US says it has not transferred any detainees to Libya since 2007.

CIA renditions

The files we reviewed included details of at least four renditions, including that of Abdul Hakim Belhaj, former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and now rebel military commander in Tripoli. The group sought to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1990s and played a major role in the current revolt.

During a mission to Libya in 2009, Human Rights Watch interviewed Belhaj. At the time, he was in Abu Salim prison, where Gaddafi locked away political prisoners and the site of a notorious 1996 prison massacre. It was also where Libya detained many of the prisoners transferred by the CIA. Belhaj said that he and his pregnant wife were detained in Malaysia in 2004, then rendered to Libya. He said CIA agents interrogated him about alleged ties to al-Qaeda – ties he denied – and beat and hung him by his limbs on a wall.

Diplomatic assurances and the Gibson Inquiry

An analysis of the documents viewed by Human Rights Watch reinforces the need to end the policy of relying upon “diplomatic assurances” by governments that torture that they will treat prisoners transferred to them humanely. At least two of the documents – one involving Belhaj – show that the US sought assurances that Libya would respect the rights of rendered suspects. But it is inconceivable, given the Gaddafi regime’s record of torture – acknowledged by the State Department – that the US government took these assurances seriously.