Human Rights Archive

When three Venezuelan soldiers and one civilian were injured during anti-smuggling operations on the border with Colombia last week, Venezuela’s embattled president, Nicolas Maduro, launched an escalating series of measures that created a major crisis with its neighbor and raised questions about hidden political movies. By all appearances, Maduro has found a convenient scapegoat for the multiplying problems besetting Venezuela’s economy and its people, and has done so just in time to affect crucial legislative elections in December that could threaten his hold on power. Maduro is exploiting the situation to shift blame for the country’s deterioration under his watch. […]

In a long anticipated move, late last month Cambodia’s Senate passed a controversial law that critics claim severely endangers the autonomy of foreign and local nongovernmental organizations in the country. The pushback from civil society and foreign governments has been strong, but hopes that it might be recalled were extinguished when Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni signed the draft legislation officially into law earlier this month. But the law is merely the latest in an alarming spate of efforts by authoritarian and nationalist governments to reduce the reach of NGOs working across Asia. In China, two proposed draft laws that would […]

On July 3, shortly before Venezuela’s Independence Day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sent a positive message to the Venezuelan people heralding improved relations and looking forward to “further cooperation between our people and governments.” But just a month later, the State Department released a statement criticizing the government’s disqualification of several opposition candidates from scheduled parliamentary elections, suggesting the moves “clearly have the intention of complicating the ability of the opposition to run candidates for the legislative elections.” In reaction, on Aug. 5, President Nicolas Maduro’s government vigorously rejected the American criticism, calling it interventionist. Yet three days […]

On Tuesday, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, president of the Republic of Congo, removed two ministers who had recently opposed constitutional amendments he proposed to facilitate his candidacy for a third presidential term in 2016. Sassou, as he is referred to in Congo, is among Africa’s longest-serving dictators and has held power almost continuously since his military appointment in 1979. After losing power in the country’s first multiparty elections in 1992, he emerged victorious in 1997—backed by Angolan troops—following a bloody civil war. He has retained power since. His push, then, to amend the constitution to extend his rule came as no surprise. […]

Colombia’s conflict has always looked different from the vantage point of the jungles, mountains and plains of the country’s most forgotten corners. This is “the other Colombia”: a country of extreme poverty, underdevelopment and state neglect, where Marxist guerrillas have fought the military to a stalemate in over half a century of conflict—and where the peace agreement those rebels are currently negotiating will face its toughest tests. “The country still has these ‘black holes,’ where the state has no monopoly on arms, where there is no institutional presence, no authorities, not even a military presence,” said Orlando de Jesus Avila […]