Tuesday, Feb 17th
Last update09:10:23 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.
I recently sat down for 90 minutes to speak with six Afghan judges, all of them women, and an English-Dari interpreter, a man. They spoke to me as individuals. They aren't preparing any investigations or indictments.
The relevance of their being judges is that they know the law. They've studied international law, and they were visiting the United States to learn about our legal and political systems. They believe the United States is guilty of war crimes.
The Western Regional Minister, Paul Evans Aidoo, has ordered the immediate arrest of all homosexuals in the region. He tasked the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and all security agencies to smoke out persons suspected to be engaging in homosexuality.
He also enlisted the services of landlords and tenants to provide reliable information which will lead to the arrest of homosexuals. His directive follows months of campaign against the practice of homosexuality in the country.
A video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday showed an IDF officer pointing a loaded gun at an unarmed Palestinian in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, last month.
According to B'Tselem, a human rights organization that uploaded the video, on June 18 IDF forces came to arrest a youth from the village for allegedly throwing stones when his cousin stopped the IDF officer to try to prevent the arrest.
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John Kurtz, the Orlando Copwatch founder who was facing six years in prison for battery on a law enforcement officer, was acquitted of that felony charge last week.
But he was convicted of resisting arrest without violence – even though the officer testified he was not resisting – proving once again that Florida has an unethical and unconstitutional habit of dishing out resisting arrest convictions without underlying charges to justify the arrest in the first place.
A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute George W Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the Obama administration fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that the US authorities were legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration's legal team was part of the conspiracy in preparing opinions authorising abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.
Frequently taken from their beds in the middle of the night, children have been interrogated without the presence of lawyers, their parents or other family members, and nearly all have been subjected to some form of either physical or psychological abuse during their arrest and questioning.
This practice violates both international conventions, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and Israel's own laws related to the rights of minors.
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