Human Rights

A review of the book Slave Hunter by Rada Ghemigian Wasn’t slavery abolished? Actually, no. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than at any point in our history. Slave Hunter by Aaron Cohen and Christine Buckley (New York, NY: Simon Schuster, Inc., 2009) looks at the eye-opening truth behind human...
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Book Discussion of Murder in the Name of Honour by Rana Husseini (Winter 2009/2010, at the Soros Foundation in New York City). Rana Husseini is a senior reporter at the Jordan Times. Honor killing is an international phenomena happening mainly in impoverished and uneducated areas. In most of the cases, the crime of honor killing...
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Human Rights violations: A recent report by Yemeni human rights organizations presented to the United Nations Committee Against Torture reveals serious human rights violations by the Yemeni National Security Agency against Yemeni jurists and human rights activists. Moreover, Amnesty International recently reported police brutality and torture of detainees held in connection with politically motivated...
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One of the more nail-biting voter decisions to come out of this past Tuesday’s elections here in the United States was the repeal of a law allowing same-sex marriages in the state of Maine. The 53% or so who voted to strike down the law made Maine the 31st state in the U.S. to...
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President Obama announced today that he would lift the 22-year-old ban restricting HIV-positive people from entering the United States. This is great news for an old, fear-motivated piece of legislation that’s been in effect for far too long.
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Today I sat in on a panel discussion that took place at the United Nations headquarters where two prominent journalists discussed a new book that they authored: Half the Sky – Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.  One of the journalists is the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof...
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The Department of Labor came out with a comprehensive report last week on the production of goods made by child labor or forced labor, in violation of international labor standards. The list of goods is a result of 15 years of investigation and research by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs...
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We all hear stories that capture us — news stories so shocking that we’re sometimes moved to take action — but eventually the story fades or some other shocking release takes its place. The problem is that this isn’t always the case for the news subjects. Often we’ve moved on to new stories...
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In an earlier blog I wrote about the leaders in Bangladesh and Thailand that were beginning to put pressure on the Government of Burma to discuss the out-migration of the Rohingya to Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia. It seems now that we may be beyond that point. Business Day recently reported that the...
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That a young man or woman might not choose whom they marry is contrary to modern, western thinking.  We typically marry whom we would, rarely with restriction.  Ours is a fiercely personal concept of marriage that way.  It might surprise some, then, that in many countries matrimony is not experienced...
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