Human Rights

The British human rights advocate has worked to hold China accountable as the regime reaches "well beyond its borders to silence critics," he says.

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Nikki Haley cites the inclusion of countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and China on the council.

Sanctions target Iran's infamous Evin Prison and the director of a key state-run media corporation.

Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism…

Since 1992, even before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, U.S. policy has been based on the premise that Beijing's Communist leaders value Hong Kong's autonomy. The theory was that Beijing would not want to damage Hong Kong and so could be relied upon not to undermine Hong Kong's…

A couple of years ago, THE WEEKLY STANDARD noted that American business interests and the media cover up China's human rights abuses. It contains this anecdote, which seems relevant in light of the recent and long overdue scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation:

On November 18, the Supreme Court of Chile issued a protective order on behalf of Leopoldo Lopez and Daniel Ceballos, two opposition mayors imprisoned without just cause in Venezuela.  These brave individuals had the temerity to oppose the regime of Nicolas Maduro, and earlier this year they went…

President Obama met with Cuban strongman Raul Castro today in New York City. The two discussed improving U.S.-Cuba relations, according to the White House.

Even in the context of China’s steadily deteriorating human rights situation, the developments of the last few weeks have been remarkable. 

David Keyes, executive director of a group called "Advancing Human Rights" is at it again. This time in Vienna.

A Saudi fair was being held at the Gaylord National Resort outside Washington, D.C. so David Keyes, the executive director of Advancing Human Rights, tried to throw "an awesome gay party at the exact same time." Keyes uploaded video of the event:

The evils of North Korea are well-chronicled: from its political prison camps to the needless and preventable starvation deaths of between 450,000 and 2 million people. That latter estimate comes from an exhaustive report by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which found the North Korean…

Growing up blind and poor in rural China, Chen Guangcheng had few prospects. Yet before he turned 40, Chen was one of China’s most famous human rights activists, known around the world after he became the subject of a dramatic standoff between the American and Chinese governments.  Chen's new…

In the past I've wondered about the obsession with Israel by Human Rights Watch. Now I wonder again, due to the organization's new 74-page report entitled, "Ripe for Abuse: Palestinian Child Labor in Israeli Agricultural Settlements in the West Bank." Check out the HRW web site to see what subjects…

Seoul

The big speech last week was, of course, the one given before Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a forceful performance. Nancy Pelosi said that she was so dismayed by both the style and the substance of the prime minister’s speech that she was nearly reduced to tears.

Ellen Bork, writing at the Foreign Policy Initiative:

Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of a United Nations’s Commission on Inquiry’s report on human rights in North Korea. The U.N. report laid out, in devastating detail, what we’ve known for all too long: Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship is the Westboro Baptist Church of regimes –…

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a possible Republican presidential candidate, is using a crowdsourcing platform to try to reach dissidents and human rights activists in autocratic regimes. In particular, Rubio is trying to help those oppressed by the governments of Iran and Cuba.

The hideous practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is neither an exclusively Muslim nor a principally Middle Eastern phenomenon. It exists among non-Muslims through wide areas of Africa.

Coming on the heels of President Obama's Cuba announcement, the State Department is condemning the "Detentions of Activists in Cuba."

Zeina Karam of AP writes that:

As Saudi Arabia undergoes its slow process of change, the matter of women and motor vehicles remains crucial. On October 24, Saudi women were summoned by a social media campaign to take to the roads in cars they own, typically, but do not drive.

In the "Great Hall of the People" in Beijing, China, President Obama appeared with China's current president Xi Jinping at a joint press conference Wednesday. During his remarks as he noted the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China, President Obama recalled a saying of…

Amnesty International has found:

In a 2007 article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “Let a Hundred Flowers Be Crushed,” the Chinese lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, told of being followed by security agents every year around the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre of democracy protesters. Pu responded by ushering the agents to a conference room at…

With much of the Obama administration's foreign policy in tatters, John Kerry is clear on at least one goal he hopes to achieve by the end of his time as secretary of state: having lesbian, bisexual, and transgender ambassadors representing the United States.  In remarks to a GLIFAA (formerly Gays…

Sometimes a handshake is more than just a handshake. When President Obama warmly embraced the late Hugo Chávez at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, he lent respectability to a brutal autocrat who had crippled Venezuelan democracy, terrorized his political opponents, and…

In his speech today at the United Nations, President Obama continued his administration’s odd and somewhat schizophrenic policy with respect to freedom, human rights, and democracy. 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a war veteran, gave an optimistic speech about Afghanistan yesterday on the floor of the House of Representatives: 

The Human Rights Foundation has released a statement slamming pop star Jennifer Lopez for receiving "$10 million for serenading crooks and dictators from Eastern Europe and Russia." HRF is a human rights organization, which questions 5 recent performances by the singer.

In a statement, press secretary Jay Carney says the U.S. respects the Iranian election and congratulates the Iranian people.

Earlier this week, the brother in-law of Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Thursday, at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Gary Robbins delivered another response to the "many concerns" expressed by Russia about the ongoing hunger strike by many of the terrorist detainees at the Guantánamo Bay facility:

The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, last December rightly sparked a national conversation about policies that might be enacted to prevent such atrocities in the future. But where is the national conversation in response to the massacre of innocents carried out in Philadelphia by…

Philadelphia

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Mark Hemingway, hosted by Michael Graham: 

As the June 2013 presidential election in Iran draws near, it appears there is an effort underway to rekindle a national debate about the regime’s legitimacy. This effort, led by senior opposition figures pushing for clarification on the legal status of Green Movement leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi,…

A group of protestors gathered this afternoon outside the Russian ambassador’s Washington residence to protest the jailing of the three Russian punk rock musicians from the group Pussy Riot. The musicians—Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29—were sentenced…

For the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, Saudi women are being allowed by their ultra-conservative government to compete. As the Saudi athletes marched in the opening ceremonies in London, the women’s faces and open arms showed a joyful sense of emancipation from the yoke of…

Low expectations for the 17th round of the U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, conducted on July 23 and 24 in Washington, were borne out by Assistant Secretary Michael Posner’s briefing yesterday. Posner’s main points were that the dialogue is not a negotiation, but rather “just a piece” of “365 days…

The Syrian regime has reportedly perpetrated another episode of sectarian cleansing. Yesterday, the army and paramilitary gangs loyal to president Bashar al-Assad killed more than 200 people in the Sunni village of Tremseh, in Hama province.

Syria is running for a spot on the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Syrian regime, for over the past year, has ruthlessly engaged in suppressing protesters by murdering and detaining thousands of opposition figures, and now hopes the international body will be more accepting.

Human Rights Watch has just released an 81-page report detailing the Syrian regime’s systematic use of torture against opposition figures. “‘Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons since March 2011’ is based on more than 200…

As the U.S. and its allies prepare to return to the negotiating table with Iranian representatives, hoping to reach a deal on their nuclear ambitions, the Islamic Republic has significantly ratcheted up its efforts to repress religious minorities in the country. 

While the Obama administration and its allies at the New York Times are waiting for Russia to intervene and get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down, the children of Kafranbel show a clearer sense of strategic reality:

From the Washington Post: "Asked Thursday whether he could envision a situation in which the United States would take military action in Syria without U.N. authorization, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said, 'No, I cannot envision that because, look, as secretary of defense, my greatest…

In this video, obtained by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Saudi women blasts religious police for harassing her in a public mall for wearing nail polish:

President George W. Bush was back in Washington today, to mark the opening at his Bush Institute in Dallas of the “Freedom Collection.”

Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident who briefly took refuge in the U.S. embassy, recently expressed his hope that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would rescue him. "My fervent hope is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S. on Hillary Clinton’s plane," Chen…

Of the books I have read about China, The Corpse Walker, which I reviewed for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is one of my favorites. Written by Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker contains stories about the strange mix of people Liao met while traveling around China and serving time in jail for writing and…

Bashar al-Assad’s security forces have brazenly slaughtered more than 10,000 Syrian civilians, and injured or detained tens of thousands more, since the anti-regime protests began in March 2011. Despite these facts, America’s policy towards Syria—a terror-sponsoring government that is Iran’s…

An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy by Egyptian-born activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East,” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Today Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament drafted a law permitting men to…

The Chinese Communist party’s preoccupation with its leadership transition, expected to be made final next fall when Xi Jinping becomes general secretary, should not dissuade the U.S. from making a “strong intervention at the highest level” regarding Tibet, according to Lodi Gyari, who spoke…

Yesterday, the White House’s Atrocities Prevention Board held its first meeting. Chaired by NSC staffer Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the board will “coordinate action across the entire government on stopping genocide and liaise with the NGO…

Here's video from Homs, documenting yet more violations of the Kofi Annan-brokered Syrian ceasefire that the Obama administration is celebrating:

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan sought a ceasefire in Syria between forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. The Obama administration insists that the ceasefire is holding. "What we saw in the last day or so was a very fragile truce emerge, a very fragile first step," State…

In April 2009, four months after taking office, President Obama wooed Latin American leaders and liberal elites at the Summit of the Americas by apologizing for decades of U.S. foreign policy and promising a new era of cooperation. Obama said:

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change. The hope was that longstanding frustration with international isolation and relative deprivation would inspire some unspecified Baathist general to assassinate…

On March 28, 2011, Barack Obama defended his decision to intervene days earlier with military force in Libya, arguing that for the United States to stand by without responding would have been “a betrayal of who we are.”

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez is seeking a seat on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, the group U.N. Watch reports. The independent watchdog group also says that Pakistan is additionally “slated to run unopposed for seats on the UN’s 47-nation Human Rights Council this year.”

In a recent presidential debate, Congressman Ron Paul made a bizarre equivalence between a Chinese dissident taking refuge in America and Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan, as he was attempting to criticize American foreign and defense policies generally. And while it may come as a relief to…

“China is the largest hypocrisy in the world,” Richard Gere told an interviewer from Indian television station NDTV yesterday, while attending a major Buddhist teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya. In the lengthy interview, the transcript of which can be read here, Gere argues that…

On behalf of the Working Group on Egypt, Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning disturbing activity in Egypt.

SaintPetersBlog: "Latest Florida poll: Mitt Romney 27%, Newt Gingrich 26%; no one else in double digits"

Another country has calculated that Christmas time is a good time to launch a crackdown on human rights. Following China’s harsh sentencing of two writers on subversion charges, Egyptian security forces today rolled up to several prominent democracy and human rights NGOs in Cairo and shut them…

Vaclav Havel, who died yesterday, will perhaps be remembered most of all for his role in the civic initiative Charter 77, which led to his country’s Velvet Revolution and inspired dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc to defeat communism. Decades later, “living in truth” – his famous phrase from…

Now is the time to undermine Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. With major protests going on in response to the recent fraudulent parliamentary elections, with Mikhail Prokhorov announcing that he is likely to challenge Putin for the presidency in the next election, and with major ferment in Russia,…

Vladimir Putin’s official launch of his presidential campaign late last month coincided with the publication of a damning new dossier of evidence relating to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower attorney who has become a martyr to anti-corruption efforts in Russia.

Tonight, ABC News will broadcast Barbara Walters’s interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The network hasn’t released the full transcript yet, but so far press releases suggest that the big news is that Assad is denying any responsibility for the almost 4,000 Syrians killed since the…

Ben Smith reports:  

On September 25, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made world headlines by proclaiming the right of his female subjects to nominate and compete as candidates in municipal elections. The king also pledged to appoint women to the country’s 150-member, unelected “shura council,” or executive consultative…

Rick Perry only entered the presidential race a week and a half ago. As governor, Perry’s foreign policy experience has been limited. And his views on these issues have hardly been relevant, even if they’ve been known, since few care what the chief executive of Texas thinks about America’s…

President Obama has just called upon Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to step down. "We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way," the president said in a statement. "He has not led.  For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for…

Beirut—Kuwait and Bahrain are the most recent additions to the list of Gulf Cooperation Council states that have withdrawn their ambassadors to Syria. First Qatar yanked its diplomat, after a regime-led mob attacked Doha’s embassy in Damascus. Now, with the ruler in Damascus laying siege to Deir…

Lobsang Sangay was sworn in today as head of Tibet’s democratic exile government in Dharamsala, India. He succeeds Samdhong Rinpoche, the first directly elected Kalon Tripa, or chief of cabinet, who served two terms.

The other night on Current TV, former vice president Al Gore said to the host of Countdown with Keith Olbermann that America needs to work toward the “reinvigoration of democracy.”

In his column for Tablet, Lee Smith asks, "The recent massacres in Oslo, Norway, and Hama, Syria, were both carried out by heartless sociopaths. Why does one of them—Syria’s Bashar al-Assad—continue to enjoy diplomatic relations with Washington?"

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s confirmation hearing of Robert S. Ford, a first rate foreign service officer now serving as ambassador to Syria under a recess appointment, was held Tuesday, August 2nd. If the United States is to have an ambassador in Damascus, Ford is an excellent man for…

President Obama deserves some credit for using strong language to condemn the Syrian regime’s massacre of peaceful protestors over the weekend in Hama, Deraa, Idlib and other cities in the pre-Ramadan onslaught. With reports still coming in, the most conservative assessment estimates that 145 were…

Following this write up, Joshua Foust seems to have regained an interest in the reports that Russia is responsible for bombing the American embassy in Georgia. You can read it here, but the long and the short of it: Foust remains skeptical of Georgian claims, he remains skeptical of Eli Lake's…

Last week, Eli Lake reported on a very specific allegation by a senior Georgian official that the Russian GRU was behind a series of bombings in that country, including the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi. The charge was so detailed that it even included the name of the Russian officer who…

Journalist and Arab media specialist Hussain Abdul Hussain links to a remarkable film about the Syrian uprising, Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries:

It’s been five months since the revolution that ended the 30-year tenure of Hosni Mubarak, but the upheaval in Egypt is far from over. Large protests have become routine if not habitual in Egypt. In late June, 1,000 civilians criticizing the slow pace of reform were injured in clashes with riot…

The author Liao Yiwu has left China. Repeatedly denied the right to travel abroad, Liao recently slipped out of China to Vietnam, and arrived last week in Germany.

This week, “Russia denied registration of a key opposition political party Wednesday, effectively barring it from upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections that the Kremlin had hinted might be open to some competition,” the Wall Street Journal reports. According to opposition leader Boris…

Earlier today, Republican Rep. Peter Roskam, deputy whip in the House, put out a statement signaling his support for the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act.

Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport had been planning to provide an initial public offering to investors this week, allowing folks from around the world to buy shares in the currently private company that operates the facility. Suddenly, over Memorial Day weekend and in the middle of the night, Domodedovo…

Libyan military officials have left Muammar Qaddafi's army, "defect[ing] in protest [of Qaddafi's] actions against his own people, saying there had been a lot of killing of civilians and violence against women," according to Lebanon's Daily Star.

It’s Friday, so Syrians are out in the streets again protesting, as they have been on every Friday now for almost two months, braving the atrocities of a regime that has surrounded several Syrian cities with tanks and allegedly fired on its citizens with artillery.

A bipartisan group of senators joined together yesterday to discuss a proposed Senate resolution on Syria, which would condemn the rogue regime and urge the Obama administration to act decisively. The strongly worded resolution "expresses solidarity and support for the people of Syria as they seek…

The Oslo Freedom Forum is the brainchild of activist and social entrepreneur Thor Halvorssen. As the National Review’s Jay Nordlinger recently commented, Halvorssen’s Forum is “that rare thing under the sun: a genuine human rights conference.” Unlike so many other such gatherings, the goal here in…

Ahmed Benchemsi would probably have held on to his job as editor of Morocco’s top newsmagazine, TelQuel, had he known a wave of democratic uprisings was about to engulf the Middle East and North Africa. Last October, he had been forced to shutter TelQuel’s Arabic-language sister publication,…

The Obama administration has been under siege for its support of the U.N.’s top human rights body, the U.N. Human Rights Council. Until today, Syria was seeking to join the Council during elections scheduled to take place at the General Assembly on May 20, 2011. The administration, European states,…

One of the Senate's rising Republican stars is today backing calls for the Obama administration to withdraw the U.S. ambassador to Syria. "Clearly, we should be on the side of the Syrian people longing for freedom and challenging the regime's corrupt and repressive rule," writes Senator Marco…

Article 7 of the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines "crimes against humanity" as "murder" and other "inhumane acts" committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population." It would be hard to find a clearer case of such offenses…

Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak has reportedly been placed under detention in his hospital room in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak has been there since last night, when he is thought to have had a heart attack. The AP reports:

The New York Times has apparently come across photos that show atrocities Muammar Qaddafi and his henchmen committed on Libya's own people. "Some depicted corpses bearing the marks of torture," the Times reports, describing the photos they came across. "One showed scars down the back of a man…

In a post last week about the dramatically deteriorating human rights situation in China, there remained many questions about what had really happened to Dr. Yang Hengjun, the Australian citizen of Chinese descent, who disappeared one week ago and was believed to have been in Chinese custody.On his…

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu took a question at a press conference on Tuesday about the disappearance of another dissident. Her response, which quickly pinged around the Chinese online community and its English-language China-watching counterparts, was to blithely assert: "I have…

Senator Marco Rubio offered his full-throated support Wednesday for the U.S. intervention in Libya and called on President Barack Obama to be clear that regime change is the objective of America’s involvement. In an interview yesterday afternoon, Rubio said that failing to remove Libyan leader…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained the text of a letter freshman senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent tonight to the Senate majority and minority leaders. In it, Rubio proposes that the Senate authorize the president’s use of force in Libya, and that the authorization state that the aim of the use of…

Where the political shockwave inspired by Tunisia's democratic rebellion will lead we don't yet know. We do know what set Tunisia's revolt in motion: the end of Arab fear. When an oppressed people snap fear's psychological bonds, they shatter the tyrant's most potent weapon.

The president has wistfully been thinking about how easy it would be to be the leader of the People's Republic of China, the New York Times reports. And one unnamed official told the Times's reporters that "No one is scrutinizing [Chinese leader] Hu Jintao's words in Tahrir Square."

“Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”

During his annual address to the Tibetan people on March 10, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet announced that he wished to complete his decades-long effort to divest political authority from the Dalai Lama’s own institution. While the media has characterized this as a retirement announcement, it…

In mid-February, a mysterious posting on a Chinese language website called on Chinese citizens to take to the streets for low-risk meet-ups at locations with heavy pedestrian traffic throughout the country, starting on Sunday February 20 at 2 p.m. (Beijing local time). Labeled by the organizers as…

Where governments and statesmen can afford to be cynical about trade relations and security agreements with rogue regimes, human rights groups are supposed to operate at a higher level – the ultimate goal being for those regimes to alter their behavior. When NGOs traffic in realpolitik, it has a…

Jon Huntsman is about to leave the People’s Republic of China after less than two years as Washington’s ambassador. Human rights activists say he did a good job, at least by comparison with his predecessor, Clark J. Randt, Jr. That's not saying much. However, ambassadors planning a presidential…

The Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal is the author of The German Mujahid. The book addresses a unique theme for an Arab author: the Holocaust. Via the reflections of two young brothers in a Parisian banlieue, it tells the story of Hans Schiller: a German SS officer who immigrates to Algeria,…

One frequent criticism of the war in Iraq has been that it is impossible to impose democracy from above. The revolution in Egypt represents an attempt to achieve democracy from below, as it were. The jury is out on both nations--and on both paths. However, as many have noted, revolutions that…

The controlled public rage against corruption, oppression, and marginalization at the hands of tyrannical Arab regimes that has unfolded in recent weeks is unprecedented and probably unstoppable, but it caught most Western observers by surprise. While they accept the Arab revolt for what it is—a…

Though Egyptian state TV has announced Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, it is unclear what the mass revolt rocking Egypt has in store for that ancient nation’s future. But what is clear is that the momentous events in Cairo--and, indeed, the massive tsunami of people-power engulfing the entire…

UPDATE: On Friday the Army made its decision. Mubarak was forced out. His Thursday speech was a disaster and it seems to have helped persuade the generals that they had, at last, to choose between Mubarak and the people. They made the right choice.

Herzliya, Israel

The White House is accusing the Iranian regime of “hypocrisy” for placing a leading opposition figure under house arrest. Mehdi Karroubi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement after the rigged elections in June 2009, has been placed under house arrest in Tehran and is unable to meet with his…

The Working Group on Egypt, led by Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan, yesterday sent letters to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging the administration “to press for an unmistakable and irreversible transition to democracy.”

Natan Sharansky shared his memories of Ronald Reagan with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, after the former president died, in 2004:

This is the 3 a.m. phone call. Will President Obama rise to the occasion?

The Obama administration has gradually been adjusting to reality. On Friday evening, President Obama was still exhorting President Mubarak: “I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.” By this morning,…

The prestigious and, since its formation less than a year ago, consistently ahead-of-the-curve Working Group on Egypt, co-chaired by Michele Dunne of Carnegie and Robert Kagan of Brookings, has just issued a new statement late Saturday. The Group includes Middle East and foreign policy experts…

Reports from Egypt say that protests across the country’s major cities are getting violent. And now the ruling National Democratic Party’s headquarters are on fire in Cairo (follow the live stream here). But even before the demonstrations that were held after Friday prayers today turned volatile,…

The world of U.N. human rights, best known for a human rights council with members like Libya, Saudi Arabia, and China, has just outdone itself. A short press release on Monday announces that U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has made some new appointments. The biographies…

Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abandoned his post on Friday after 23 years, and has reportedly landed in Saudi Arabia. To retire from the position of president-for-life is an exceedingly rare move for an Arab regime chief. Indeed, no modern Arab ruler before Ben Ali has ever willingly…

Americans don't really need another reason not to link the senseless actions of a deranged individual in Tucson to the tenor of American political discourse, but it is worth considering how accusations that the lunatic shooter in Tucson was influenced by our political rhetoric feed directly into…

A bipartisan group of China watchers and human rights advocates have written a letter to Barack Obama, urging the president to "seize the opportunity before [him]—an opportunity nearly all Chinese lack—to confront the Chinese leadership about its profound disrespect for universal human rights."…

Germany’s journalists, human rights activists, and taxpayers are paying a painful price for its country’s woefully flawed “critical dialogue” policy with the Iranian regime.

President Obama issued the following statement this morning on Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiabo:

Tomorrow, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will give its award to jailed Chinese human rights advocate Liu Xiabo. How is China responding? In short, not well.

This bit of U.N. news would be comical if it weren't such a serious issue, as Fox News reports: 

Totalitarianism thrives on deliberate ambiguity and the installation of perpetual fear in the mind of its subjected citizenry. Even after emigrating to Great Britain, the great Hungarian-Russian historian Tibor Szamuely could never get to bed at night because he never knew when that knock at the…

As the American midterm election campaigns head to the finish line, the Obama administration is trying to convince Jewish voters that its treatment of Israel is not as hostile as it appears. In fact, it’s worse. The U.S. State Department has now adopted a practice honed by Israel’s Arab negotiating…

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, now serving an 11-year jail sentence, I could not help but think of a small, inspiring museum in Oslo called the Museum of Resistance. It tells the story of Norway’s courageous citizens who refused…

“When the United States sneezes, Latin America catches a cold.” This old maxim proved true in 2008 and 2009, when the U.S. financial crisis deeply affected countries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Yet while the U.S. economy has been struggling through a painfully weak recovery, Latin America’s…

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches, press conferences, and interviews in New York City last week, it’s obvious the Iranian president lives in a parallel universe. This has been difficult for many in the West to grasp. The Western reflex to believe that there are “universal truths” is…

The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh (“rebellion against God”), conspiracy to commit a crime…

Kabul  

In its Friday afternoon news dump before Labor Day weekend, the White House announced that President Obama had invited the ten leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to join him for a summit in New York on September 24.  This will be the second U.S.-ASEAN summit, and the…

A few miles up the road from Ground Zero, the Obama administration recently submitted its account of the United States human rights record to the United Nations Human Rights Council.  The administration’s report, the first ever submitted by this nation to that body (whose members include Libya and…

A source reports from Moscow that Mikhail Schneider, a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement, has been jailed for three days in connection with a demonstration on Russia’s Flag Day, which was held on August 22. He follows to jail Lev Ponomarev, a well known human rights activist, who also…

Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her ‘crime’ was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she’s taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the…

In April, President Obama reminded Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev that "we too are working on our democracy."

The executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, Noah Pollak, argues in Politico that the Obama administration should leave the UN Human Rights Council: