Human Rights Watch - Tag Search

Human Rights Watch -- which everyone knows is hopelessly obsessed with Israel and unwilling to criticize Arab autocrats -- issued a statement today that slammed the Syrian government for its "grow[ing] repression" of activists and journalists and urged Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, to press the issue with Syrian officials during her visit there next week.

Human Rights Watch issued a short statement earlier in support of a new United Nations resolution -- scheduled for a vote on Friday -- which gives Israel and the Palestinians five months to finish investigating the Goldstone Report's findings.

"Israel and Hamas have failed to conduct credible investigations thus far, so UN members need to ensure justice for civilian victims on all sides," said Steve Crawshaw, UN advocate at Human Rights Watch. "All states that support justice should endorse the resolution and maintain pressure on the parties to hold perpetrators of war crimes to account."

As we said yesterday, the resolution doesn't actually advance the report. It won't lead to a Security Council vote or an International Criminal Court referral or anything like that. But it does keep Goldstone on the UN's radar, and it guarantees another vote on the report in July.

First they were accused of plotting terrorist attacks. Now the Egyptian government says the 16 Muslim Brotherhood members it arrested last week are also setting up a secret "women's organization" within the Brotherhood (عربي).

The text of the indictment... says that [deputy supreme guide Mahmoud] Ezzat and other Brotherhood members are working to attract women to the organization, and to use them to pass messages to other Brotherhood members undetected by Egyptian security forces.

There's a bit of precedent for this: A woman named Zainab al-Ghazali, who died a few years ago, ran an organization called Jama'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat (the Organization of Muslim Women).  It was affiliated with the Brotherhood, and Ghazali was imprisoned and tortured because of her connection to the group.

The United Nations is already poking holes in Israel's preliminary response to the Goldstone Report.

The IDF's response says the el-Bader flour mill -- the only working flour mill in Gaza, destroyed during Operation Cast Lead -- was hit by tank shells. But a United Nations de-mining team says it found the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 bomb inside the mill, according to a report in The Guardian by Rory McCarthy.

Hamas' reported conclusion that it did not commit war crimes during Israel's Operation Cast Lead "contradicts all the facts on the ground," Human Rights Watch told the Majlis today.

The Islamist movement's indiscriminate rocket fire "landed exactly in civilian areas across Israel's south, which suggests that civilian[s] were the target," Fred Abrahams, a New York City-based senior emergencies researcher, wrote in an e-mail.

Time for a little compare-and-contrast exercise on Yemen policy. Here's a snippet from the excellent Human Rights Watch memo published on Saturday:

Yemen's allies should not explicitly or implicitly give unqualified support for President Saleh's government, but instead demand an end to torture, arbitrary arrests, and the government's crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. They should ensure that foreign aid does not strengthen, and is not perceived as strengthening, the repressive apparatus of the state.

And here's Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, at a press conference on Yemen yesterday.

I think it's important to underscore a few points about what is going on in our relationship with Yemen. First of all, it is very much a two-prong strategy we have. There's been a lot of attention paid to the work we're doing with the Yemeni Government to increase its ability to take care of its own security threats and to take on, in particular, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. That is vitally important.

Maybe Benjamin misspoke; maybe he meant the U.S. wants the Yemeni government to deal with AQAP by itself, out of respect for Yemeni sovereignty. But the phrasing is critically important here: When Benjamin says "its own security threats," officials in Sana'a hear "the Huthis and the southern separatists."

And if Benjamin didn't misspeak, then tis is the second high-level statement in a week encouraging the Yemeni government to use U.S. security assistance to fight its domestic insurgencies (the first came from secretary of state Hillary Clinton).

Egypt's finest would like to wish you a very happy Police Day.

The Koshary Today article is satire, but the holiday is real: The country takes a day off on January 25 to celebrate a police force known to most Egyptians for its corruption and brutality.

Coincidentally, Human Rights Watch held a press conference in Cairo yesterday to unveil the Egypt chapter of its latest global report. It rebukes Egypt's security services for "regularly engag[ing] in torture and brutality in police stations and detention centers, and at points of arrest."

Update: Here's a link to the memo on HRW's Web site.

Original post: I'm not sure if it's available online yet, but Human Rights Watch sent us an advance copy (pdf) of a new memo, Seven Principles for Effective International Engagement in Yemen, which they're releasing ahead of next week's London conference on Yemen. We're posting it here as a PDF file.

The memo covers everything from development aid to the importance of closing Guantanamo Bay, but the most important section -- from my perspective -- deals with the human rights abuses committed by the Yemeni government in its conflicts with Huthi rebels in the north and separatists in the south.

Frederick Kagan is such a firm believer in counterinsurgency doctrine that he wants the United States to get involved in fighting pre-existing insurgencies. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed this morning, which Kagan co-authored with Christopher Harnisch, urging the U.S. to get involved in Yemen's intractable Huthi insurgency.

Wondering why you haven't read more about this weekend's unprecedented Human Rights Watch press conference in Libya?

It's because only one Western newspaper, the Times of London, was allowed to cover the event, which was broken up early by government security agents who shouted down the speakers.

The BBC's Arabic service also covered the press conference (عربي). It doesn't mention the security agents, but it says the Libyan government prevented people from traveling from Benghazi to Tripoli to speak at the event.

HRW's full report is online here.

Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood, because I've spent the morning watching al-Qaeda videos and reading about military operations in Afghanistan. But I tend to think this is a giant publicity stunt by the Qadhafi family:

Libya is marking another step forward in its quest for international respectability by hosting the country's first press conference by a human rights organisation scrutinising leader Muammar Gaddafi's record.

The Qadhafis are getting a lot of great press for this decision. The Guardian press release article linked above reads almost like it was ripped off JANA.

Adam Serwer posted a short item on the American Prospect's blog this morning, calling the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, and the subsequent deposal of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a "national security disaster."

The removal of the ICU empowered its radical wing, Al Shabaab, led by the al-Qaeda-trained Aden Hashi Ayrow, which has now taken over terrorizing the country with suicide bombings, assassinations, and the killing of civilians. The ICU weren't what you might call "good guys" by any means, but they also weren't as bad as Al Shabaab.

That prompted a long and somewhat disjointed Twitter argument (redundant, I know) between Serwer, the Washington Times' Eli Lake, and a few other interlocutors (including us).

Somalia is a bit outside our normal coverage area, but some interesting points came up in the discussion, and I wanted to expand on them (in more than 140 characters).

Steve Clemons just posted an interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. Meshal promised to form an "honest and neutral investigative committee" to look into the Goldstone Report's conclusions.

I'll believe it when I see it, of course, but that's encouraging to hear. And it might eventually shame Israel into conducting its own investigation; the only committee Netanyahu is forming right now is one tasked with refuting the report.

One quote from the interview that I want to highlight:

"Hamas does not want to target the civilians. Hamas defends itself, but because it has simple abilities and its rockets are inaccurate in targeting, so it reaches the civilians, but we do not intend to do that."

Clemons doesn't push Meshal on this claim, but it's pretty clearly bullshit. As Human Rights Watch has documented, Hamas routinely fires rockets at areas with no military presence, and Hamas leaders have praised attacks that target civilians.

The Yemeni military bombed a refugee camp in northern Yemen, killing dozens of people, most of them women and children.

The refugees were camped in Amran province, which has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the months-old war between the government and Shi'ite rebels. The Yemeni military acknowledged the attack; an unnamed official told AFP the air force was targeted rebels who "were firing while hiding among the displaced people."

Huthi rebels quickly issued a statement calling the bombing a "massacre" by the government. Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation.

Evan posted some background on the Yemeni insurgency earlier this month.

Israel has really been ramping up the rhetoric against NGOs lately. Today we read about the latest installment in the anti-Human Rights Watch jihad: NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based group, says HRW's latest report (on human rights abuses committed by the IDF) has "a very serious bias and lack of credibility."

And the IDF blasted a report by B'Tselem, the leftist Israeli group, on the number of civilian deaths in last winter's war in Gaza. The report found that half of the 1,328 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians.

The Jerusalem Post uncovers an insidious plot:

The J Street political action committee has received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from dozens of Arab and Muslim Americans, as well as from several individuals connected to organizations doing Palestinian and Iranian issues advocacy, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The article throws scare quotes around J Street's description as a "pro-Israel, pro-peace" group -- and goes on to quote an AIPAC staffer who says the donations from Arabs and Muslims "raise questions" about whether J Street is really pro-Israel.

(It also eventually confesses that these treacherous donations account for "a small fraction" of the group's fundraising -- "several dozen of the [group's] 4,000-5,000 donors.")

To be serious, though, this is the same kind of guilt-by-association smear campaign that's been targeting Human Rights Watch since last month. And in this case I'm not even sure what the guilt is: J Street raises some money from people who pray towards Mecca, and this makes the group... what? A tool of Hamas and Hizballah?

Human Rights Watch has an insightful report out today about Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism program.

The report found that Saudi Arabia's domestic security police, the mabahith, often detain suspects without charges and then ignore court orders to release them.

Human Rights Watch spoke to over two dozen families of mabahith detainees in 2006 and 2007, only two of whom reported that their relatives had received trials. According to the families, these two men had completed their sentences but remained in detention. One former detainee of the mabahith prison in the northern Juf province, arrested for his dissident views, said in November 2006, "There is a group of about 20 persons in Juf, arrested for acts of violence [related to national security], whose sentence has expired, but they have not been released."

The Daily Star has a summary if you don't feel like reading the whole report. The Saudi counterterrorism program is run in close collaboration with the U.S. and U.K. governments, by the way.