Human Rights

Moment Magazine, where I am the senior editor, just launched the first in a multi-part series on Israel’s Arab citizens. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most covered conflicts in the world. But there is little media attention given to Israel’s one million Arab citizens, in spite of disturbing calls on the far Israeli […]

Today, after a much-anticipated wait, U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus laid out a health care reform plan. One of the key features of this plan is that it would prohibit private insurance companies from denying insurance to people because of preexisting conditions that they may have, and from discriminating against them because of […]

Uganda has made headlines this past week for violent clashes in the capital city of Kampala over development, property rights, and the traditional Buganda king. The unrest is unusual for Uganda, but highlights growing discontent with the government of Yoweri Museveni. The cause of the clashes was a planned trip by the Buganda king, King […]

A U.N. fact-finding mission to Israel and Gaza announced today that it has found evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity and violations of international humanitarian law committed by both Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas during the Israeli invasion of Gaza that commenced at the end of last year. “The mission finds that the […]

The Pentagon has announced it will allow those prisoners held by the US military in Afghanistan, including the Bagram military facility, to challenge their detention in a new military review system. The prisoners will be given military officials – not lawyers – to represent them and will be allowed to call witnesses and present a […]

Florence Hartmann, former spokeswoman for the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugosavia, was found in contempt of the tribunal Monday and fined 7,000 Euros – over $10,000 U.S. dollars.  She was found in contempt for revealing secret information implicating the Serbian government in massacres in her memoir “Peace and Punishment”.  The […]

Click on the photo to launch the 5 minute audio-photo slide. Testimonies…in their own words. Yesterday I met two Iranian political refugees.  Their relatives are at Camp Ashraf, a refugee camp north of Baghdad with around 3500 Iranians.  At the end of July, Iraqi security forces entered the camp and beat the residents.  Eleven died […]

Stories of soldiers murdering civilians, illegal wiretapping, targeted killings of indigenous people, assassinations of labor rights activists and other human rights abuses are troubling, but not troubling enough for the US State Department.  Last week the State Department certified Colombia as complying with basic human rights requirements, a necessary condition for releasing the remainder of […]

W.B. Yeats penned one of his most celebrated works at end of first the World War. The Second Coming drew allusions to a world that had lost hope, to an existential crisis into the human condition where a destroyed landscape had been littered with so many bodies – all for a few yards of dirt […]

I wanted tp cross-post today, DC takes on Human Trafficking and wins!, as the event is such a great example on how cities and communities across the country can really take a stand against Human Trafficking/Modern Slavery and make it a fun event for all ages! As the Washington Nationals and Philadelphia Phillies prepared to […]

I just attended a meeting of the subcommittee on human rights at the European Parliament in Brussels.  On the agenda was Burma.  And as ever, the lack of political will and inaction in the international community was particularly salient. For two decades Aung Sun Suu Kyi has been in the headlines.  Her cause celebrated and […]

Governments and religions around the world remain intensely interested in what women, but not so much what men, are wearing in public. On September 6, 2009 I wrote about the proposed parliamentary ban on the public wearing of the niqab in France. On September 8, media outlets lit up with discussions of the recent trial […]