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/ 18 December 2007
Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday accused Zambia’s government of failing to stop escalating violence against women and prevention of access to antiretroviral treatment for people living with HIV/Aids. HRW said 17% of Zambia’s adult population is living with HIV and 57% of them are women.
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/ 8 December 2007
European and African leaders arriving for Saturday’s summit in Lisbon were accused by parliamentarians and human rights groups on both continents of trying to sweep human rights issues under the carpet. Much of the criticism was aimed at the absence of Darfur from the main agenda of the European Union-Africa meeting.
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/ 6 December 2007
Iran has hanged a man convicted of raping three boys when he was 13 despite retractions from his accusers and an order for a judicial review of his case. Makwan Mouloudzadeh (20) was put to death on Wednesday in a prison in the western province of Kermanshah.
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/ 3 December 2007
The United Nations’s top aid official, John Holmes, arrived in Somalia on Monday, calling for more to be done to help the Horn of Africa country where almost 6 000 civilians have been killed in fighting this year. UN officials say Somalia’s humanitarian crisis is Africa’s worst, with one million people displaced.
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/ 23 November 2007
The 53-nation Commonwealth suspended Pakistan’s membership on Thursday, after President Pervez Musharraf failed to meet a deadline to lift emergency rule and resign as army chief. The Commonwealth had given Musharraf until Thursday to lift the state of emergency he imposed on November 3.
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/ 18 November 2007
The bruises suffered by Hassan Tariq, a senior barrister in Sindh province, extend in large purple patches from his hip to his rib cage. According to his own account, he was beaten with ”a hard object” and kicked and punched by officers for refusing to chant slogans in favour of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf.
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/ 16 November 2007
Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma promised ”zero tolerance” on Thursday for corruption in his country after a leaked government report said rampant official graft had swallowed up donor funds. Speaking at his formal inauguration in Freetown, the 54-year-old former insurance executive called for a change of attitude in the West African state.
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/ 15 November 2007
Nigerian police have killed 785 suspected armed robbers in the past three months and lost 62 of their own men, the national chief of police was reported as saying on Thursday. Human rights groups and United Nations experts have accused Nigerian police of killing robbery suspects instead of arresting them.
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/ 13 November 2007
The numbers of women seeking treatment for rape in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has risen as a conflict that has already left four million dead over the past decade has reignited. Human rights groups describe gang rapes as commonplace and often accompanied by ”barbaric” acts of torture.
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/ 11 November 2007
The toll from some of the worst fighting in Somalia’s war-wracked capital climbed to 59 on Saturday, as thousands fled the city fearing more clashes between Ethiopian forces and rebels, witnesses said. Residents recovered bullet-riven bodies, ripped limbs and shattered skulls on the blood-streaked streets.
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/ 10 November 2007
Detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi received rare front-page billing on Saturday in Burma’s state-controlled press, which said the ruling junta is ”putting energy” into democratic reforms demanded by the international community. Suu Kyi was allowed to meet leaders of her opposition party on Friday.
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/ 8 November 2007
Troops were deployed in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, on Thursday and news programmes taken off air as international concern grew over President Mikheil Saakashvili’s imposition of emergency rule. The Nato military alliance, France and Human Rights Watch added their condemnation.
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/ 5 November 2007
An Egyptian court on Monday jailed two police officers for three years for sodomising a detainee with a stick in torture shown in widely distributed video footage that sparked nationwide outrage. ”It’s not very common for an Egyptian court to convict police officers,” Human Rights Watch said.
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/ 3 November 2007
The United Nations’s special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, was expected in Rangoon on Saturday for talks with the country’s ruling generals amid a row over the threatened expulsion of another diplomat. Gambari’s visit comes amid conflicting signals from the junta over its willingness to reform, in the wake of street protests against the ruling regime.
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/ 26 October 2007
The Central African Republic’s President defended his country’s efforts to improve human rights at international donor talks on Friday meant to bolster much-needed economic and political reforms in his impoverished nation. Francois Bozize presented a new development strategy to European Union and United Nations officials.
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/ 25 October 2007
Human rights group Amnesty International accused state security forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo of systematic torture and killings in a report published on Thursday. Amnesty blamed two government security forces — the special services police and the republican guard — for attacks on opponents of President Joseph Kabila.
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/ 23 October 2007
Recent conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Nord-Kivu province has been accompanied by an upsurge in brutal rape and often barbaric mutilations of women and girls, medical workers report. "For the whole of Nord-Kivu we normally treat 250 rape cases each month," said Jane Coyne, mission chief for Médécins Sans Frontières.
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/ 23 October 2007
An international rights group has lambasted the Somali government for ”systematic harassment” of reporters, closure of media outlets and failure to investigate the killing of eight journalists this year. Few foreign correspondents go into Somalia these days, leaving local reporters to face the risks.
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/ 18 October 2007
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Thursday transferred a militia chief to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face war-crimes charges, including sexual enslavement and using child soldiers. Germain Katanga (29), who once led the Forces for Patriotic Resistance in Ituri, was flown out of Kinshasa early on Thursday.
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/ 12 October 2007
The United States should reconsider funding anti-HIV/Aids strategies in Uganda, where recipients of such money violate the rights of homosexuals, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said. The watchdog group, in a letter to US officials on Thursday, said Ugandan officials and the media have intensified attacks on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Politics in Nigeria remains mired in violence and corruption eight years after the end of military rule, says Human Rights Watch in a report released on Tuesday. In some states of the federation, unelected but immensely powerful ”godfathers” dominate the political scene, having gained control over politicians, the report says.
Guns, machetes and looted public funds are the real instruments of power in Nigeria, where politicians backed by unelected ”godfathers” use hired thugs to win office, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 after three decades of almost continuous army dictatorship, but civilian governments have routinely abused basic human rights.
The United States military presents its new Africa Command as a helping hand offering aid and training to the world’s poorest continent, but many Africans fear it could bring double trouble to a conflict-racked region. US officials dress the new regional command to be launched on Monday in a shiny altruistic uniform, saying it is designed to help Africa improve its own stability.
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/ 29 September 2007
Burma or Myanmar? As the military regime has cracked down on pro-democracy protests in the Asian country this week, a war of words has flared again over what to call the troubled nation. The United States and the BBC prefer the old name, Burma, while the United Nations, Japan and other nations have adopted Myanmar.
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/ 27 September 2007
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hopes a new biometric identity card (ID) scheme backed by the European Union can help overhaul its undisciplined armed forces, branded by campaigners as the central African state’s worst rights abuser. After decades as a tool of repression under former leader Mobutu Sese Seko and a devastating 1998 to 2003 war, DRC’s army is bloated, unmanageable and corrupt.
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/ 26 September 2007
World governments vowed on Wednesday to hold Burma’s military rulers to account for a bloody crackdown on mass street protests, as the United Nations Security Council prepared to meet in emergency session and European Union officials began drawing up new sanctions.
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/ 16 September 2007
A real and unprecedented opportunity for peace in Darfur is emerging after breakthrough talks between Britain and Khartoum this week, according to the United Kingdom’s key envoy to the region, Mark Malloch Brown. A new optimism is building ahead of next month’s crucial talks between 13 rebel factions and the Sudanese government in Libya.
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/ 15 September 2007
Rights groups on Saturday accused Egypt of curbing press freedom after a Cairo court this week sentenced four editors each to one year in prison for criticising the president. ”Egypt continues to imprison journalists and editors who publish stories critical of President Hosni Mubarak and other high officials,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
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/ 14 September 2007
Soldiers in the Central African Republic (CAR) have massacred hundreds of people and burned villages, forcing civilians to flee, during a counter-insurgency campaign, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Friday. The watchdog group blamed President Francois Bozize’s elite guard for atrocities carried out since mid-2005.
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/ 11 September 2007
The Ugandan army tortured and unlawfully killed civilians while carrying out a disarmament programme in the country’s troubled Karamoja region, an international human rights group said on Tuesday. According to a report, Ugandan soldiers opened fire on children, among other charges.