Briggs Bomba, Africa Action's Program Associate for Public Education and Mobilization, said today, " In our recent contact with Zimbabwe's civic groups they appealed for sustained support from progressive organizations in the U.S. We extend solidarity to pro-democracy forces in Zimbabwe today in fulfillment of this request and call upon people all over the U.S. to defend democracy, human rights and social justice in Zimbabwe."
Africa Action calls upon President Mugabe's administration to give democracy a chance in Zimbabwe.
"Zimbabwe can only move forward when the results of the March 29 presidential elections are released and the human and civil rights of Zimbabwean voters are respected," said Africa Action Executive Director Gerald LeMelle. "It has become clear that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has failed to release the results because of undue interference from President Mugabe's administration. Africa Action urges SADC and the AU to decisively pressure President Mugabe to immediately release the results and respect Zimbabwe's democratic process."
Africa Action noted that failure to act resolutely now will undermine SADC and the AU's standing in the region. Inaction by the international community will allow Zimbabwe to sink further into crisis and potentially destabilize the region and further undermine the integrity of the democratic process in Africa.
Sarkozy praise for Tunisian rights 'progress' sparks outrage
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's remark that "the sphere of liberties" in Tunisia is improving sparked outrage Tuesday among human rights groups and the Socialist opposition in France who accuse the North African state of torturing dissidents and blocking press freedoms.
"His unacceptable declaration has led him to legitimise the Tunisian regime's policy of repression," said Razzy Hammadi, the national secretary of the French Socialist party.
The French president has "sent a signal with very serious and dramatic consequences" for all human rights activists in the former French protectorate where Sarkozy is on a two-day state visit, said Hammadi in a statement.
Sarkozy's statement was a "stab in the back of the Tunisian activists who were expecting a lot from the visit of the French president," who upon coming to power vowed to put human rights at the heart of his foreign policy, said the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) media rights group.
"Freedom of expression remains a utopia in Tunisia. All the press does is glorify the work of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and independent journalists and their families are the victims of constant harassment," it said.
Sarkozy, in Tunisia to clinch nuclear and aviation deals and push his plan for a Mediterranean Union, said there Monday that "today, the sphere of liberties (in Tunisia) is progressing".
"These are encouraging signs that I wish to salute," added the French leader at a dinner with his Tunisian counterpart, whose government denies breaching human rights.
"These signals, these reforms are part of a narrow and difficult but essential path, that of liberty and the respect of individuals. No country can claim to have fully taken it and nobody can position himself as censor."
Khadija Cherif, of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, said: "Sarkozy is not interested in the reality of the country.
"His priority is commerce, but he should know that development cannot be purely economic," she told AFP, adding that Sarkozy's comments were a "sign of contempt for Tunsian civil society."
Mokhtar Trifi, of the Tunisian League for Human Rights, noted that "unfortunately, on the ground, we have not noticed any notable changes, it is perhaps the opposite that it happening in reality today".
France's Secretary of State for Human Rights Rama Yade, who is travelling with Sarkozy, was scheduled to meet both Trifi and Cherif on Tuesday.
For its part, the influential Le Monde newspaper in Paris said in an editorial that Sarkozy's claim that rights were improving in Tunisia was a "falsehood".
"In a country where the president installs himself in power for life, has his opponents beaten up by thugs, imprisoned and even tortured, and who only tolerates a press at his service, 'the sphere of liberty' is regressing," it wrote.
The London-based human rights group Amnesty International last November issued a stinging statement to mark the 20th anniversary of Ben Ali's arrival at the presidency.
"President Ben Ali's two decades in office have been marred by a continuing pattern of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and other ill-treatment, unfair trials, harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and curbs on freedom of expression and association," it said.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch was equally damning in a periodic review of Tunisia published this month.
"The government uses the threat of terrorism and religious extremism as a pretext to crack down on peaceful dissent," it wrote.
"There are continuous and credible reports of torture and ill-treatment being used to obtain statements from suspects in custody. Sentenced prisoners also face deliberate ill-treatment."
Taiwan's famed human rights author Bo Yang dies
The Taiwanese author and former political prisoner Bo Yang, acclaimed for his efforts advocating freedom of speech and human rights, died of respiratory failure on Tuesday, his doctor said. He was 88.
President Chen Shui-bian "is deeply saddened by the passing of Mr. Bo. He had dedicated his life to literary works and he was also concerned about democratic and human rights," said a presidential statement.
"He was one of the leading thinkers in Taiwan's modern history and his writings and theories had profound impact on the later generations," it said.
In 1967, newspaper editor Bo, which was his a pen name, was arrested in the so-called "white terror" for criticising then President Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo in a translated article under the Kuomintang (KMT) regime.
The collections of his essays full of sarcasm about human nature and criticism against the bureaucratic and authoritative KMT government were among the best sellers in the 1960s.
Bo, whose real name was Kuo Yi-tung, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on sedition charges and spent nine years behind bars, mostly in the offshore Green Island which housed political prisoners.
He wrote three books on Chinese imperial history before being released in 1977.
Besides managing a prolific writing career, Bo was keen to advocate human rights and had served as Amnesty International's Taiwan office director between 1994 and 1996.
In 2000, he was named a presidential adviser by Chen of the Democratic Progressive Party, who was elected that year ending the KMT's 51-year grip on power.
Bo is survived by his poet wife Chang Hsiang-hua and two sons and three daughters from previous marriages.
Norwegian FM discusses human rights on Saudi visit
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said on Monday he met with members of a human rights group in Saudi Arabia and urged Riyadh to invite rights watchdog Amnesty International to the kingdom.
Stoere, who arrived in Riyadh on Sunday, said he had a "useful and respectful exchange of views with the Human Rights Commission," a governmental body set up in September 2005.
The Saudi government "allowed Human Rights Watch to visit Saudi Arabia and observe for themselves," Stoere told reporters during a joint news conference with Saudi counterpart Prince Saud al-Faisal.
"That, I think, is a very positive sign," he said, adding that he urged the commission to show "the same courage" and invite London-based Amnesty International to come.
Saudi Arabia is often accused by international watchdogs of violating human rights, particularly those of political dissidents and expatriate workers. Riyadh denies the charges.
A delegation from New York-based Human Rights Watch visited Saudi Arabia in late 2006, following a similar mission in 2003.
"I have invited the (Saudi) commission to visit Norway to engage with Norwegian competent groups and by that we (would be) able to raise issues where we may have different views," Stoere said.
Saudi Arabia has another human rights body considered independent from the government. The National Society for Human Rights was the first rights watchdog sanctioned by authorities in March 2004.
The Norwegian minister hailed a proposal by Saudi King Abdullah for inter-faith talks between Muslims, Christians and Jews, a first for the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom.
"I think this is an important initiative to emphasise that religion can be a source of peace" that should not be left to those who try to portray it as "a source of violence and war," Stoere said.
European human rights court rules for Uzbeks
Russian rights groups cheered a rare victory on Tuesday after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that 12 Uzbek businessmen were denied due process as local police tried to extradite them to Uzbekistan.
In June, 2005 police in Ivanovo, a town in central Russia, held a group of Uzbek immigrants in a stationhouse where the men say visiting Uzbek authorities tried to coerce false confessions out of them with cattle prods and threats of torture.
The Ivanovo Uzbeks, as the men came to be known, were never charged with a crime in Russia, though one day after their detention documents from Uzbekistan arrived accusing them of murder, conspiracy to overthrow the government and terrorism.
Moscow-based rights' groups Memorial and the Civic Assistance Front took up the men's plight and appealed to the ECHR in France to prevent their extradition, saying they had proof the case was an instance of "buying and selling people".
"The European Court of Human Rights is not only the last but, as unfortunate as it is to admit, the only means of defence for people caught in these kinds of situations," said Elena Ryabinina, Memorial's Central Asia refugee aid director.
In May, 2005, witnesses said hundreds of people were killed when troops fired on a demonstration in Andizhan, Uzbekistan. Uzbek President Islam Karimov blamed the violence on Islamist rebels. He said 187 mostly rebels and security forces died.
Uzbek authorities eventually charged the men, who run a small textile business, with funding the events in Andizhan, though all of the men were in Russia at the time and all deny involvement.
The EHCR voted six to one on April 24 in favour of the Ivanovo Uzbeks, noting "that Uzbek officials had threatened the applicants with torture," and chastising a Russian court for failing to observe the presumption of innocence.
Karimov, in power since 1989, is criticised in the West for not tolerating dissent and violating basic liberties. The U.N. torture watchdog accused Uzbek police and prison staff of the "routine use of torture" in a November 2007 report.
Karimov has denied the allegations. The United Nations High Commission for refugees granted the Ivanovo Uzbeks mandate refugee status, meaning they have UNHCR protection in another country, in this case Switzerland.
Ryabinina said Russian complicity in the case of the Ivanovo Uzbeks was the result of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a regional treaty group meant to fight terrorism but used to solve internal political issues by nonjudicial extraditions.
"They have created this practical legal basis which, in my view, has been established in order to legally justify these expulsions," she said.
The SCO is made up of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Russia has the option to appeal the ECHR's ruling in favour of the Ivanovo Uzbeks, who were each also awarded 15,000 euros plus a small stipend for legal fees.
India: Fair Trial Doubtful for Honored Rights Advocate
Chhattisgarh Government Should Not Use Naxalite Issue to Silence Critics
(New York, April 29, 2008) – Criminal charges against award-winning human rights defender Dr. Binayak Sen raise serous concerns that he will not get a fair trial in Raipur district court in Chhattisgarh state when hearings begin on April 30, Human Rights Watch said today.
For over two decades, Sen has provided medical care in remote tribal villages in Chhattisgarh. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his work. On April 22, the Global Health Council announced that he won the 2008 Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.
"Dr. Sen appears to be a victim of the Chhattisgarh government's attempt to silence those who criticize its policies and failure to protect human rights in its fight against Naxalites," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The court should ensure that this trial is not used by the state government to cover up its failures by punishing the messenger."
Human Rights Watch said that likely political motivations for the charges and other fair trial concerns in Chhattisgarh merit the trial's change of venue to another Indian state. The case against Sen was brought after he called on the Chhattisgarh government to respect human rights in its campaign against Maoist armed combatants called Naxalites.
The presiding judge has allowed only one of Sen's supporters to attend the hearings at a time, despite a provision in international law that trials be public. A judge may cite public order reasons to restrict the attendance of the press and public. However, the district court's limit of one supporter of the defendant at the trial is unnecessarily restrictive and raises broader concerns about the fairness of the trial.
"The actions of the local authorities and the presiding judge call into serious question whether Dr. Sen will receive a fair trial," said Adams. "To ensure fairness, the venue should be moved to another state with no political axe to grind."
In 2005, the Salwa Judum movement was started with state support in Chhattisgarh to oppose the Naxalites. With state backing, the Salwa Judum began committing serious human rights abuses, including killings, beatings of critics, burning of villages, and forced relocation of villagers into government camps. As a prominent leader of the human rights group People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Sen called for an end to Salwa Judum abuses. He also opposed the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, criticized human rights violations such as torture, extrajudicial killings and campaigned for improvements in prison conditions.
Sen was first detained under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2006. Human Rights Watch has criticized this law because it could lead to serious abuses. The law allows detention for "unlawful activities," a term so loosely defined that it can severely restrict the peaceful activities of individuals and civil society organizations in violation of the Indian constitution and international human rights law.
The state's primary evidence produced in court thus far includes letters from an alleged Maoist leader, Narayan Sanyal, who Sen allegedly smuggled out of prison. The police say that Sen visited Sanyal in prison a number of times, and that documents and other materials, including his computer, confiscated after his arrest, allegedly contain unspecified subversive materials. Sen has denied all these charges and said that his meetings with Sanyal were facilitated by jail authorities to provide medical care.
"The laws in Chhattisgarh make it easy for the government to prosecute human rights defenders like Dr. Sen," said Adams. "The court must fairly decide whether a real crime has been committed."
The report states that 19 children were killed in conflict situations between July 2005 and November 2007, while 42 were maimed. Just over half of these cases were perpetrated by Government security forces, a fifth were attributed to the Abu Sayyaf Group/Jemaah Islamiya rebels, and 8 per cent to the communist insurgents, the New People's Army (NPA).
The report also says there is evidence that Government paramilitary forces and rebel groups, including the NPA and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, recruited children during the same period.
Overall, the Secretary-General's report finds that around half of verified grave violations against children were carried out by Government security forces, a third by the NPA, and 15 per cent by the Abu Sayyaf Group/Jemaah Islamiya. But the report adds that the lower number of cases reported for the rebels is most likely due to a lack of access to these groups.
The Secretary-General recommends that State and non-State actors enter into dialogue with the UN to end the recruitment of children as well as other grave violations of children's rights.
Congo-Kinshasa: Suspected War Criminal Wanted
Congolese officials and UN peacekeepers should take swift action to enforce the International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrant against a rebel leader accused of forcibly conscripting child soldiers and of other abuses, Human Rights Watch said today.
The ICC on April 29 revealed the unsealing of the arrest warrant against Bosco Ntaganda, charging him with the enlistment, conscription, and active use of children in 2002-2003 during the conflict in the northeastern district of Ituri when he was chief of military operations for the ethnic Hema militia group, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC). Ntaganda is now the military chief of staff of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) in the Congo, a position he took after leaving the UPC following internal conflicts in 2006.
Led by Laurent Nkunda, the CNDP is considered responsible for serious abuses against civilians in the North Kivu province of eastern Congo. But on January 23, 2008, the Congolese government signed a peace agreement in Goma, North Kivu, with 22 armed groups, including the CNDP. Under its terms all parties agreed to an immediate ceasefire and committed to respecting international human rights law.
"If Laurent Nkunda is truly committed to the Goma peace agreement, then he should immediately deliver Ntaganda to the international court," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch's Africa division. "Now is the time for Nkunda to put his professed commitment to human rights into action."
Ntaganda is the fourth Congolese rebel leader sought by the ICC for war crimes. Three other Congolese defendants - Thomas Lubanga, Germain Katanga, and Mathieu Ngudjolo - are already in ICC custody.
Special envoys from the African Union, the European Union, the United States, the United Nations, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region played a vital role in brokering the Goma peace agreement. A number of these diplomats meet regularly with CNDP representatives as part of the peace process. Human Rights Watch urged them to use their influence to pressure CNDP officials to swiftly hand over Ntaganda to the ICC.
The ICC issued the arrest warrant against Ntaganda on August 22 2006, but only made it public on April 28, 2008. Congolese authorities and officials in the United Nations Mission in the Congo (MONUC) have known of its existence and contents since it was first issued, but since Ntaganda remains active in a rebel group, have found it difficult to take action to arrest him.
"An alleged war criminal wanted by the world's top court should not be allowed to walk free in the Congo," said Van Woudenberg. "If Nkunda does not hand him over to the ICC, UN peacekeepers should take action to arrest Ntaganda as soon as possible."
The crimes which Ntaganda is alleged to have committed occurred when he was the chief of military operations of the UPC. He was a close associate of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the former head of the UPC, whom the ICC has also charged with the enlistment, conscription, and active use of children during the same period. Lubanga's trial is due to begin in The Hague later this year.
Human Rights Watch has collected hundreds of testimonies from survivors documenting serious crimes allegedly committed by the UPC during Lubanga and Ntaganda's leadership. These crimes include massacres against particular ethnic groups - especially those from the Lendu ethnic group - murder, torture, and rape. More recently, Human Rights Watch has documented crimes allegedly committed by CNDP forces during the time when Ntaganda was military chief of staff.
"Ntaganda has a track record of inflicting unbearable suffering on civilians in Eastern Congo," said Van Woudenberg. "The ICC should charge him with the full range of the crimes for which he is responsible, allowing his victims the justice they desperately seek."
Human Rights Watch research also indicates that there was support from senior political and military officials in Kinshasa as well as in Uganda and Rwanda to the UPC and other militias operating in Ituri. Human Right Watch also has consistently urged the prosecutor to investigate these senior officials for their role in the crimes committed in Ituri.
"Ending the culture of impunity requires the ICC's prosecutor to go after those senior individuals in Kinshasa, Kigali, and Kampala who armed and supported the armed groups in Ituri," said Van Woudenberg. "Only then will justice be done."
Background
Bosco Ntaganda is a Congolese Tutsi who fought with the Rwandan Patriotic Army in the early 1990s and assisted in the overthrow of the Rwandan government at the time of the genocide in 1994.
Ntaganda eventually became the chief of military operations of the Forces Patriotiques pour la libération du Congo (FPLC), the military wing of the UPC in Ituri. In this capacity, he was involved in numerous massacres and other serious human rights abuses. In the town of Songolo in August 2002, UPC combatants under Ntaganda's command surrounded the town and went house-to-house killing Lendu and Ngiti civilians with firearms, machetes, or spears. From August 2002 to March 2003, Ntaganda participated in hunting down, arresting, and torturing at least 100 members of the Lendu ethnic group and other opponents in Bunia in what many described as a brutal "man hunt."
In November 2002, Ntaganda also led UPC troops in attacks on the gold mining town of Mongbwalu where at least 800 civilians were slaughtered on ethnic basis. One witness who fled the town told Human Rights Watch, "If you were Lendu, you would be exterminated." According to UN peacekeepers, Bosco's UPC was responsible for killing a Kenyan UN peacekeeper in January 2004 and for kidnapping a Moroccan peacekeeper later that year.
In October 2003, the UPC president Lubanga went to Kinshasa where he was kept under nominal house arrest by the Congolese authorities; Ntaganda took over as acting head of the UPC in Bunia and was in regular phone contact with Lubanga. In January 2005, in a failed attempt to end the conflict in Ituri, Congolese authorities appointed Ntaganda to the position of general in the newly established Congolese army, though Ntaganda refused to take up the post. He was placed on the UN sanctions list in November 2005 for breaching a UN arms embargo. In March 2006, Lubanga was taken into ICC custody and transferred to The Hague, where he is currently awaiting trial.
Sometime in 2006, following alleged differences within the UPC, Ntaganda left Ituri for his home region of North Kivu and joined Laurent Nkunda's rebel group, the CNDP. Today, he is the military chief of staff of the CNDP, a group alleged to have committed numerous human rights abuses, including recruitment of child soldiers, killing of civilians, and sexual violence.
Interview: EU 'credibility gap' on human rights in Russia
While negotiating a new Partnership Agreement with Russia, the EU should not neglect the fact that the country's human rights conditions seriously worsened during outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin's era, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch told EurActiv in an interview.
"The last eight years have been a very disappointing period to the extent that civil and political rights in Russia have suffered a tremendous setback - with the freedom of the media being effectively destroyed, the independent judiciary being largely compromised, the Parliament losing its independence and the system of checks and balances becoming a mere formality," Lokshina said.
She accused the EU of violating its own principles and values by not being assertive enough on these issues, saying that a 'credibility gap' exists between words and deeds. "Cooperation and engagement should not exclude having a very strong stand on human rights […] Compromising on human rights is completely unacceptable," she said.
Lokshina dismissed the position of those EU member states which argue they have no room for manoeuvre because of their energy dependency. "This logic is deeply flawed. It is quite feasible to have serious cooperation with Russia without compromising on human rights abuses," she pointed out.
Under the German EU Presidency, Chancellor Angela Merkel displayed a more balanced approach towards Russia, Lokshina said, who regrets that other leaders have not followed suit.
Asked about the prospects for the EU-Russia relationship after the handover of power from Putin to new president Dmitry Medvedev on 7 May, Lokshina said the new political cycle will provide a "new window of opportunity" to be used by the EU "for whatever it is worth".
Her main concern was that EU leaders might let Chechnya slip off the agenda because the fighting has clamed down. "Chechnya has an impact on all aspects of Russia's social and political life, it has played a central role in transforming Russia into an authoritarian state. Having said that, I would like to stress once again that Chechnya must remain on the EU agenda in its dealings with Russia."
The numerous victims of Russian atrocities deserve "an end to the impunity in Chechnya because without accountability for perpetrators there can be no real end to that conflict," Lokshina explained.
She also raised awareness of the deteriorating working conditions for NGOs and independent journalists. Foreign governmental donors are already withdrawing from Russia as the climate for foreign donors is turning "very hostile" as the country's wealth grows, she claims.
"The Yukos case and the imprisonment of the famous oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who dared to support both political opposition and human rights NGOs, certainly contributed to the fact that Russia's business community does not want to risk anything anymore," she pointed out.
To read the interview in full, please click here.
Russia turns tables on West with rights watchdog
Russia has endured years of criticism over its human rights record but now it is hitting back by setting up watchdogs in New York and Paris to challenge the West over its own rights record.
Natalya Narochnitskaya, one of the leaders of the project, said the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation will offer a fresh perspective on human rights that is not hostage to the political agenda of Western governments.
"American policy under the flag of democracy and human rights in actual fact is a Trotskyist permanent revolution which serves the aim of giving them (political) mastery," she said.
"There is a double standard in that some countries are declared without sin or are surrounded by a wall of immunity," Narochnitskaya, a former member of Russia's parliament who will head the Institute's Paris office, told Reuters in an interview.
"But if the issue is with Russia or (Moscow's ex-Soviet ally) Belarus then here you will have a full hue and cry," said Narochnitskaya. She said institute was up and running and would move into premises in Paris in the next few weeks.
The initiative coincides with a growing frustration among senior Kremlin officials who believe Western governments are using human rights as a weapon to prevent Russia from reclaiming its place as a major world power.
Rights groups and Western governments have alleged that Russian elections are not free and fair, that media freedom is being suppressed and opposition activists persecuted, and that troops fighting an Islamist insurgency use brutal methods.
President Vladimir Putin, who steps down next month but will stay on as prime minister, has acknowledged his country's record is imperfect but says no country is blameless.
He has pointed to the treatment of detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, as well as what Moscow calls official discrimination against ethnic Russians living inside the European Union.
At an EU-Russia summit in Portugal in October last year, Putin said he wanted to set up a Russian human rights watchdog that would operate in Europe.
Narochnitskaya said her project had no links to the Russian government, though it was met with "a certain approval" in the Kremlin and it planned to apply for a government grant.
She said for now the institute had modest funding from a Russian company, which she declined to name.
One of the institute's first projects was to publish a book which argues that bloodless revolutions in ex-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine which installed pro-Western leaders were plotted and financed by the West.
Narochnitskaya said another project in development was to "monitor the monitors" who pass judgement on the fairness of elections. Moscow has accused monitors from European democracy watchdogs of having a political agenda.
She said the Institute also planned to send a fact-finding mission to Kosovo to assess if the rights of the Serb minority there are being respected. Russia backed its ally Belgrade in opposing independence for Kosovo.
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