On Feb. 11, 1990 — 20 years ago this Thursday — Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of a South African prison after 27 years of confinement. His release was celebrated the world over. But it had a particular effect on those who were being held as political prisoners by other repressive regimes. The Op-Ed [...]
Archive for the ‘Human rights’ Category
Nelson Mandela’s Captive Audience
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics, tagged Mandela on February 7, 2010 |
Italy’s African Heroes
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics, tagged Italy on January 25, 2010 |
WHEN I was a teenager here, kids used to shoot dogs in the head. It was a way of gaining confidence with a gun, of venting your rage on another living creature. Now it seems human beings are used for target practice. This month, rioting by African immigrants broke out in Rosarno, in southern Italy, [...]
The Iranian Exile’s Eye
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Human rights, tagged Iran on January 17, 2010 |
One day last June, on the quiet Tehran street where I lived, I noticed a man in a white Peugeot across the street looking at me, straight in the eye, as I started to drive out of my garage. “There she is,” he said, and he rushed to start his own car. I pulled onto [...]
Flowers for a funeral
Posted in Computers, Economy and business, Human rights, tagged China, Google on January 15, 2010 |
Google and China Censorship and hacker attacks provide the epitaph for Google in China “WE’RE in this for the long haul,” wrote a Google executive four years ago when the company launched a self-censored version of its search engine for the China market. Now Google says it might have to pull out of the country [...]
Google Gets On the Right Side of History
Posted in Computers, Editorials and opinion, Human rights on January 13, 2010 |
No more censored searches to please the Chinese government. One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It’s about what happened in East [...]
Democracy’s Wane
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights on January 12, 2010 |
The world is in a ‘freedom recession.’ After the West won the Cold War, democracy flourished in the world as never before. No more. The tide of political and human freedom hasn’t merely slowed but in recent years has turned in the other direction. Seeing that the U.S. midwifed the post-1989 world, these trends are [...]
Don’t mess with us
Posted in Human rights, tagged China on December 30, 2009 |
Harsh justice in China No forgiveness; no quarter. Happy Christmas from China A SEASON of good cheer in much of the world, late December saw a typically harsh apportionment of justice by China’s legal system, and a typically rigid display of governmental indifference to foreign opinion. On Christmas Day a Beijing court sentenced Liu Xiaobo, [...]
Obama Puts the Dis in Dissident
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics on December 28, 2009 |
The cry going up in China: Where is the president of the United States? Here’s a timely New Year’s resolution the president might do well to deliver to his National Security Council: “When it comes to nasty regimes that brutalize their people, we will never again forget that the most powerful weapon in a president’s [...]
Pakistan’s transvestites to get separate gender
Posted in Human rights, Law, Living on December 25, 2009 |
Supreme Court tries to ensure rights of transvestites Hijras are both feared and pitied in Pakistan Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered authorities on Wednesday to allow transvestites and eunuchs to identify themselves as a distinct gender as part of a move to ensure their rights, a lawyer said. Known by the term “hijra” in conservative Muslim [...]
Combating Prisoner Abuse
Posted in Human rights, Law on December 21, 2009 |
When Mississippi inmates sued their prison, charging that they had been sodomized by a staff member, the claim was thrown out. Under a harsh federal law, inmates must show that they suffered a “physical injury” to prevail in a suit challenging cruel prison conditions. A federal district court ruled in 2006 that the alleged sexual [...]
The Long Arm of China
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, tagged Cambodia, China, Uighurs on December 20, 2009 |
Why were members of China’s Uighur minority group recently deported from Cambodia? On Saturday night under cover of darkness, a special Chinese plane departed from the military section of the Phnom Penh airport carrying 20 Uighur asylum seekers. For this group of men, women and children, this was the end of their failed effort to [...]
A Nobel winner who went wrong on rights
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights on December 12, 2009 |
In accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday, President Obama talked about the quiet dignity of human rights reformers such as Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, the bravery of Zimbabwean voters who “cast their ballots in the face of beatings” and the need to bear witness to “the hundreds of thousands who have [...]
Switzerland’s Invisible Minarets
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Living, Politics, tagged Switzerland on December 5, 2009 |
THREE years ago I was invited to the Tehran International Book Fair; afterward I traveled around the country. The mosques I visited were so empty as to give the impression that Iran was as secular as Western Europe. It wasn’t until I took a trip to a place of pilgrimage in the mountains that I [...]
Freedom’s Martyr
Posted in Editorials and opinion, History, Human rights, tagged John Brown on December 2, 2009 |
IT’S important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown. Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and [...]
‘Germany Would Also Have Voted to Ban Minarets’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics, tagged Germany, Switzerland on November 30, 2009 |
The World from Berlin The Mahmud Mosque in Zurich has one of only four minarets in Switzerland. No more will be built following Sunday’s referendum. Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets is a disaster for its image, write German commentators. The vote doesn’t just reflect a fear of “Islamization” but also shows that setbacks in recent [...]
Iranians in Exile
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Human rights, tagged Iran on November 27, 2009 |
There is a Persian saying that goes, “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.” Shortly before I left Iran on June 24, there was a late-night knock at the door of my hotel room. Alright, I thought, this is it. By then I was one of the [...]
Poland to Ban Communist Symbols
Posted in History, Human rights, Law, Politics, tagged Poland on November 26, 2009 |
Vestiges of ‘Genocidal System’ Poland is considering criminalizing its communist past. Reforming Poland’s hate-crime legislation may mean criminalizing communism. An amendment to the criminal code awaiting the president’s signature would ban a broad category of communist symbols. Left-wing politicians say the law does more to violate human rights than protect them. Poland is on the [...]
Death to law
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, tagged Russia on November 24, 2009 |
What Russia’s ‘legal nihilism’ means in practice RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Dmitry Medvedev keeps giving speeches about ending the lawlessness and corruption that have overtaken his country. That would be encouraging — except that Russians who try to act on the president’s words keep turning up dead. The latest victim of what Mr. Medvedev calls “legal nihilism” [...]
Beijing’s Post-Obama Crackdown
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics, tagged China on November 21, 2009 |
Beijing arrests a human-rights lawyer. President Obama soft-pedaled human rights in Beijing this week, presumably in an effort to cajole China into better behavior. The country’s public-security apparatus has responded by proceeding with business as usual. The wheels of Air Force One were barely off the runway when Beijing’s security forces beat and seized human-rights [...]
German Constitutional Court OKs Curtailing of Free Speech
Posted in Human rights, Law, tagged Germany on November 18, 2009 |
Neo-Nazis gather in Wunsiedel in 2001 for a parade to honor Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess. Germany’s constitution strongly and explicitly protects the freedom of speech. Still, the country’s highest court has now said that — given the injustice and horrors of the Nazi regime — it is constitutional to make an exception that bans speech [...]
Iran, Its Hostages and the West
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Human rights, tagged Iran on November 17, 2009 |
The folly of expecting good faith from Iran’s hostage-taking rulers. Iran’s big news yesterday is that the government will formally kill five people who participated in June’s pro-democracy rallies. Consider, though, the implications for the West’s peace-brokers of the case of Frenchwoman Clotilde Reiss. It is now 20 weeks since Ms. Reiss was arrested while [...]
Korea’s Berlin Wall
Posted in Human rights, Politics, tagged China, North Korea on November 13, 2009 |
Obama, China and the stranded refugees. One trigger for the collapse of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago was the flow of East Germans across their country’s newly opened border to Hungary, then on through Austria to West Germany. One day a similar flow of refugees from North Korea to China and on to South [...]
Complainers in China disappear into ‘black jails,’ rights group says
Posted in Human rights, tagged China on November 12, 2009 |
Report sheds new light on the economics of the jails and why they evade crackdowns despite violating Chinese and international law. Kidnapping villagers who have travelled to Beijing to lodge complaints with China’s central government and keeping them in unofficial jails to silence them has evolved into a lucrative cottage industry that police refuse to [...]
America Needs Human Rights in China
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, tagged China on November 4, 2009 |
Beijing’s abuses affect many issues the U.S. holds dear. “Don’t they know they need us?” So wrote a Chinese human-rights activist friend of mine, expressing frustration at the Obama administration. Since taking office, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—both of whom mustered some criticism of China’s rights record while they were candidates—have said [...]
Hillary Versus State
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights on November 4, 2009 |
You can’t split the difference on free speech. First the good news: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believes in free speech. The not-so-good news is that her department may not be of quite the same view. In a short speech last week marking the publication of State’s annual report on international religious freedom, Mrs. [...]
Secret Mission Rescues Yemen’s Jews
Posted in Human rights, tagged Yemen on October 30, 2009 |
UNDER SIEGE: The State Department has resettled about 60 Yemeni Jews in the U.S. since July amid rising violence; more are expected to arrive. Here, the father of Moshe Nahari, who was killed in December, with his daughters outside a court in Yemen following a hearing in the murder case. In his new suburban American [...]
Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights on October 20, 2009 |
AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it [...]
Does Obama Believe in Human Rights?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics on October 19, 2009 |
Human rights “interfere” with President Obama’s campaign against climate change. Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he [...]
China Daily Assails Prisoner Abuses
Posted in Human rights, Law, tagged China on March 24, 2009 |
Inmates in China’s 2,700 pretrial detention centers suffer bullying and torture at the hands of fellow prisoners and police officers, and some experts want a neutral body to take the centers out of police control to curb the abuses, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Tuesday. The newspaper noted that the Communist Party’s [...]
Student facing 20 years in hell
Posted in Human rights, Law, tagged Afghanistan on March 12, 2009 |
An Afghan policeman escorts Pervez Kambaksh from court in Kabul. __________ Afghan court secretly sentences student whose cause was taken up by The Independent. His crime? To download article on women’s rights. Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years [...]
