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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The Program in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at Cardozo Law School in NYC hosted a conference on March 30, 2009. The conference, entitled “Healing the Wounds: Speech, Identity and Reconciliation in Rwanda,” featured presentations by anthropologists, lawyers, professors, civil servants and Rwandan genocide survivors. The speakers came together...
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March 12th is World Day Against Cyber Censorship — a day to remember that in 2008, more online journalists were killed than journalists in any other media, and that the rights of bloggers and other attempts of free expression over the Internet are still being stifled around the world.
Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International...
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UNHCR just published its statistical yearbook for 2007. This includes statistics on: populations and trends, durable solutions, displacement, asylum, living conditions for refugees, and case studies. This includes updated data on displaced and refugee populations, which rose to 25.1 million during UNHCR’s reporting period of January – December 2007. There are also figures on...
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Related to my last post, La Nacion, an Argentinean newspaper, has just published a piece on Abu Bakker Qassim, one of the five Uyghur men sent to Albania in 2006. You can read the translated version here. It’s an interesting, brief article on conditions in Guantanamo and the Uyghurs’ views on Obama.
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Seven years after the Uyghurs, an oppressed Muslim minority group in the west of China, were detained, they are still in Guantánamo prison. They should have never been there in the first place. Although it was apparent in 2001 that the Uyghurs only enemy was the Chinese government, they were considered suspected...
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