Subjects Archives: Human Rights

  Excerpt: To know that the United States is undergoing a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties, one need not look further than police treatment of protesters in the streets.  Those who speak out against government policies increasingly face many of the same types of weaponry used by the U.S. government in its […]

ALTHOUGH several articles on this subject were published before and after September 1st, 2010, on that day the Mexican daily La Jornada published one of great impact entitled “El holocausto gitano: ayer y hoy” (The Gypsy Holocaust: yesterday and today) which reminds us of a truly dramatic history. Without adding or removing a single word […]

  On August 26, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report on the most serious violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven-year period (1993-2003).1  The massive draft report states that after the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to […]

If I were to be asked who best knows about Israeli thinking, I would answer that without question it is Jeffrey Goldberg. He is an indefatigable journalist, capable of having dozens of meetings to ascertain how some Israeli leader or intellectual may think. He is not neutral, of course; he is pro-Israel, without question. When […]

  Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red. Paris, October 1961: A Novel (translated by Mildred Mortimer).  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008.  xxiv + 116pp.  $17.95 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 10-0253-2202-38. The official French obfuscation of the police violence against Algerians in Paris in October 1961 has inspired long-term personal and collective memory retrieval that […]

  27 June 2010 The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) endorses and supports the call for Boycott of Arizona on account of its manifestly racist laws, HB1070 and SB 2281. SB1070 calls for police officers to require documentation from people to establish resident status.  The law essentially requires police […]

  The government’s credibility and strategy were battered by the overwhelming victory of the student strike which had paralyzed the entire University of Puerto Rico system and surprised everyone with its legal and technological mastery, its willingness to resist the police, and its model of direct democracy which made the national political institution look bad. […]

  Anxiously waiting outside the court of the chief judicial magistrate Mohan Tiwari in Bhopal on 7 June, 36-yearold Raghu Jaidev and many other victims of the Bhopal catastrophe were crestfallen, some of them, outraged, upon hearing the verdict of the trial that had lasted 23 long years.  “Rich people always get away”, said Jaidev, […]

  Brodwyn M. Fischer.  A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.  xx + 464 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5290-9. From the 1920s to the 1950s, largely under the impetus of reforms associated with Getúlio Vargas (president, 1930-45, 1951-54), the Brazilian state expanded significantly and extended […]

  Anita McNaught: The last passengers from the Mavi Marmara arrive at a hospital in Turkey — two men, up to now too badly injured to fly out of Israel, their lives still hanging in the balance. . . .  Of the 24 injured brought to Ankara’s Ataturk Hospital, five remain in a critical condition. […]

  Excerpt: Did the human rights activists on board the ship have the right to repel the Israeli commanders on the basis of self-defence? Since the initial boarding of the ship was likely illegal, the civilian passengers did have the right to act in self-defence against the invading soldiers.  However, lawful self-defence on the part […]

  Today is the 21st day since the arrest of Ameer Makhoul at his home in Haifa, Israel, under the cover of darkness, by the International Crimes Investigation Unit and General Security Service (GSS or Shabak) officers.  The arrest was conducted in a brutal and terrifying manner.  Our house was raided, its contents ransacked, and […]

  Manhattan/Brooklyn/Bronx — Early on Wednesday morning, the anniversary of Malcolm X‘s birth, Picture the Homeless carried out two banner drops.  Transgressing into vacant buildings in Brooklyn and El Barrio, they dropped banners from the top that read “Homes Not Shelters / Casas No Refugios,” and “Let Housing Bloom . . . berg.” For more […]

  Social Justice and Neoliberalism: Global Perspectives.  Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning, and Katie Willis, eds.  Macmillan/Zed Books, 2008.  253 pages. Following the tradition of critical geographers, this book explores the expansion of neoliberalism into different spheres and spaces of everyday life.  It consists of a collection of essays by writers from the global South, the […]

  Two former soldiers from the Army unit responsible for the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” incident have written an open letter of “Reconciliation and Responsibility” to those injured in the July 2007 attack, in which US forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees.  […]

  A coalition of nearly 20 Jewish groups, ranging from the right-wing David Project and the Jewish National Fund to the liberal J Street, is distributing a misleading statement condemning a Student Senate bill at UC Berkeley.  The ground-breaking bill calls for divestment from companies that profit from the perpetuation of the Israeli military occupation […]

This cartoon was published by Vos el Soberano on 6 April 2010. | | Print

Dr Tajing Siripanit, a commissioner from the Thai National Human Rights Commission, stated on NBT television at 13.30 on 4th April 2010 that the military-backed government “would be justified in using force” against the peaceful pro-democracy Red Shirt protestors “because they were disrupting shopping” in the centre of Bangkok.  In fact, the Red Shirts are […]

Iraj Yamin Esfandiary is a painter, designer, and cartoonist from Iran.  This cartoon was first published in Iranian.com on 25 March 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Click here to see other cartoons by Esfandiary. | | Print

The situation of violence in Aguán is a result of an unresolved structural problem in Honduras, an expression of the necessity for profound changes in this country so that the majority of its people may enjoy their human rights fully and effectively. Since the politico-economic-military coup d’état perpetrated on 28 June 2009 against the established […]