Refugees in America are given a terrible deal

A terrible reality about America’s immigration policy is how little the general public actually sees: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s increasing practice of transferring immigrants facing deportation to detention centers far away from their homes severely curtails their ability to challenge their deportation, Human Rights Watch says in a report released today. The agency…

Mugabe’s curse

Human Rights Watch releases a report on the political violence in Zimbabwe: The 69-page report, “‘Bullets for Each of You’: State-Sponsored Violence since Zimbabwe’s March 29 Elections,” documents numerous incidents of abductions, beatings, torture, and killings by officials and supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the armed forces and police, “war…

Campaigning for all (including Islamists)

My friend Elijah Zarwan, a New Yorker who until recently was a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Cairo, writes about the Muslim Brotherhood, its treatment at the hands of the US-backed dictatorships and the universality of human rights: Let me be clear: I don’t support the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m fundamentally opposed to their platform,…

Human rights first

Last week the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, spoke in Sydney. He gave a passionate, wide-ranging talk, outlined the “rules of the game” for tyrannies around the world and a West that loves to collaborate with them: The Bush administration, for example, seems to prefer promoting a narrow conception of democracy as…

The importance of democracy

Human Rights Watch has launched its 2008 World Report. HRW head Kenneth Roth explains: Rarely has democracy been so acclaimed yet so breached, so promoted yet so disrespected, so important yet so disappointing. Today, democracy has become the sine qua non of legitimacy. Few governments want to be seen as undemocratic. Yet the credentials of…

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