Human Rights Archive

NAIROBI, KENYA—One chilly evening late last month, Nathanial Ndichu wandered the tarmac roads of Githurai, one of the rambling and largely informal neighborhoods on the outskirts of Nairobi, searching for a place to sleep. After eight years of living in Kenya’s frenetic capital city, Ndichu, an 18-year-old unemployed day laborer, thought he had put this kind of precariousness behind him. But as darkness fell, he sounded less frightened than bewildered, genuinely confused as to how he was homeless, once again. “Akuna mtu aliye mleta mwingine uku Nairobi,” he said with resignation in Swahili. The phrase’s literal translation means “no person […]

The cycle of violence between the Turkish state and insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is reaching proportions not seen since the 1990s. The fighting has left approximately 11,000 homes destroyed, leading The Financial Times to declare Turkey “the most dangerous country in Europe” and others to begin speaking of the “Syrianization” of the country’s southeastern region, where the brunt of the conflict has taken place. The fighting in the provinces of Diyarbakir, Sirnak, Hakkari, Van and Bingol has taken a heavy toll on civilians. About 1.3 million people have been impacted, with tens of thousands forced to flee […]

Last week, authorities in Bahrain stripped Sheikh Isa Qassim, the country’s most prominent Shiite cleric, of his citizenship. His crime: “Serving foreign interests” and spreading sectarian discord. The move wasn’t in isolation. One week prior, a Bahraini court suspended the activities of al-Wefaq, Bahrain’s main Shiite opposition group, on charges of terrorism, extremism and violence. Days before, Bahraini police detained Najeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, during a raid on his home. Zainab al-Khawaja, a political dissident, also fled the country earlier this month after being released from prison. In May, an appeals court extended the […]

There is a crackdown underway in Iran. But it is no longer just a crackdown on dissent. Rather it is an attempt to crush views or expressions that depart from the insular and rigid worldview of an increasingly small band of hard-liners. It is not opposition parties, secularists or even reformists that are the latest targets of repression, but longtime insiders and scions of the Islamic Republic; a conservative and clerically vetted president and his administration; and revered cultural figures whose music, art and writings have long been the pride of Iranians. These are the new targets of repression, and […]

On Friday, the aid group Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym, MSF, announced that it will no longer take money from the European Union or any of its member states, in a denunciation of the union’s “intensifying attempts to push people and their suffering away from European shores.” In 2015, the group received about $42 million from member states and nearly $21 million from the EU itself. The move is a response to a deal between the EU and Turkey, in which Turkey agreed to take back all migrants, including Syrian refugees, who arrived on Greek islands, in […]

Next week, on June 23, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) will meet to discuss Venezuela, a country in the throes of an economic, political and humanitarian crisis. It now appears that it’s only a matter of time before Venezuela—virtually institution-less, politically polarized, facing chronic food and medical shortages, and with its government and military wracked by corruption—implodes and becomes a failed state. How did this happen? How did a country with abundant natural resources, a nominally democratic government and basic human rights, one that is a member of a multilateral system with numerous safeguards to […]

Against a broader backdrop of regional turmoil, Mauritania has remained surprisingly, if delicately stable. This feat is especially noteworthy given that just a few years ago the country was considered at significant risk of destabilization. Its politics and society have been perennially buffeted by the storms of racial tensions, ethnic cleavages and political volatility. Since its independence from France in 1960, Mauritania has wavered precariously between this state of fragile stability and state collapse. Its record of successive coups and attempted coups between 1978 and 2008; major ethnic clashes in 1989 and 1990; and terrorist attacks between 2005 and 2011 […]

Since late May, Kem Sokha, vice president of Cambodia’s opposition party, has remained in the party headquarters to avoid arrest over charges that he procured a prostitute. The case is the latest in what the European Union has condemned as a campaign of “judicial harassment” against the opposition. In an email interview, Stuart White, the national news editor at the Phnom Penh Post, discusses Cambodia’s current crackdown on the opposition and the prospects for reform. WPR: What is driving the current crackdown on Cambodia’s opposition, and what explains Prime Minister Hun Sen’s decision to end the truce represented by the […]

United Nations officials currently find themselves in a position similar to that of members of a religious cult who, having expected the messiah to appear in the near future, begin to grasp that there is no savior after all. For almost a decade, they have labored unhappily under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. They believe that he is too cautious and too loyal to the U.S. and other big powers. But with Ban leaving office at the end of this year, U.N. staffers have hoped and prayed that a far more decisive and independent leader will take his place in 2017. Their […]

On June 5, the Maldives’ former vice president, Ahmed Adeeb, was convicted of attempting to assassinate its president, Abdulla Yameen, the latest politically motivated court case against the opposition. In an email interview, New Delhi-based journalist Vishal Arora discusses the state of democracy and rule of law in the Maldives. WPR: What is the state of democracy and rule of law in the Maldives, and how has the space for political dissent been reduced since the 2012 resignation of former President Mohamed Nasheed, his subsequent arrest and trial, and the legal proceedings against other opposition leaders? Vishal Arora: While democratic […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss El Salvador’s iron-fisted approach to gangs, the Republic of Congo’s violent crackdown on the opposition, and Turkey’s and South Korea’s diplomatic outreach to Africa. For the Report, journalist Yaqiu Wang joins us to talk about the struggle to keep dissent in China alive in the internet age. Listen:Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant Articles on WPR: El Salvador’s ‘Iron Fist’: Inside Its Unending War on Gangs Opposition Has No Way Out of Republic of Congo’s Political Violence Turkey Looks to Play Larger Economic and Security […]

The Republic of Congo rarely captures global attention, but the government’s military attacks on civilians, which have raged since early April, have become impossible to ignore. On April 4, amid a five-day media blackout, the results of the March 20 presidential elections were announced. To nobody’s surprise, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso secured yet another term. Sassou, as he’s known in Congo, has held nearly uninterrupted power since 1979, through elections that are routinely marred by fraud and closed to international observers. The March vote was no different. After the results were announced, young protesters set fire to the government’s administrative headquarters […]

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. When NPR reporter Louisa Lim brought the iconic photograph of “Tank Man”—the young Chinese man who stood before a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, just one day after the massacre at Tiananmen Square—to the campuses of four prestigious universities in Beijing, only 15 of the 100 students she randomly interviewed could identify the picture. In her book, Lim wrote: The students I spoke to are the crème de la crème, […]

Last week, El Salvador’s president, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, celebrated two years in office. El Faro, the country’s premier online investigative news source, acknowledged the milestone with a feature titled, “Seven Years of Governing Like ARENA.” It was a pointed commentary on the policy similarities between Sanchez Ceren’s left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and its rival party, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which were also foes on the battlefield during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Since assuming office, Sanchez Ceren, a former leftist guerrilla commander, has continued the hard-line policies on gangs that go back to ARENA-led governments […]

The conviction last week of Chad’s former president, Hissene Habre, for crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture is a significant victory for the civil society campaign that has fought tirelessly for more than 20 years to bring him to justice. In a Senegalese courtroom last Monday, Habre was sentenced to life in prison for his ultimate responsibility, as Chad’s head of state from 1982 to 1990, for thousands of cases of torture in secret prisons, along with killings, rapes and waves of repression against communities that opposed his rule. Delivering his verdict, the head of the specially created Extraordinary […]