Human Rights

Unlike many nations, the United States has a Bill of Rights and civil-rights laws, along with independent courts available to remedy abuses. What has been lacking until recently, when the United States finally ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights after more than 25 years' delay, is any recognition that this country must account to the world for its human-rights practices.

Dolores Huerta runs on righteous ferocity the way cars run on gasoline. The woman who co-founded the United Farm Workers union 50 years ago with Cesar Chavez has harried, prodded, hectored, rallied and protested. She's been arrested more than a score of times, and once, picketing in San Francisco, she was beaten so badly by a police officer that her spleen was ruptured. You'd be hard-pressed to tell, the way she bounces around the Central Valley, a woman on many missions. So, can she stand still next week in Washington long enough for President Obama to present her with the Medal of Freedom, along with honorees such as Toni Morrison, John Glenn and Bob Dylan?

President Obama told Chinese students today that the U.S. does not wish to contain China's rise, but also offered a gentle critique of their country's approach to human rights. "We welcome China as a strong and prosperous and successful member of the community of nations," Obama said at the start of a town hall-style meeting in Shanghai as he began the China leg of his tour of Asia. Obama acknowledged that the United States has struggled with race relations over the course of its history, but he said America would "always speak out" in favor of free expression, worship, political participation and access to information -- which he termed "universal rights."

As the war on drugs has spread from Mexico to Central America, so has the U.S. role in Honduras. Pentagon contracts are helping to fund new military bases in remote regions of that country, and U.S. troops and special Drug Enforcement Administration agents have been deployed to train local security forces and assist in counter-narcotics operations. It's a delicate partnership, and one that is already causing controversy. Last week the Obama administration confirmed that DEA agents were with Honduran security forces aboard a U.S. helicopter during a botched May 11 operation.

The U.N. human rights chief accused the Sudanese army of looting towns and raping girls and women during attacks carried out in West Darfur with the help of Arab militias. The Feb. 8 attacks on Sirba, Sileia and Abu Suruj, with helicopter gunships and fixed-wing craft, killed at least 115 people and caused 30,000 to flee their homes, Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a report. "The scale of destruction . . . suggests that the damage was a deliberate and integral part of a military strategy," the nine-page report says.

Southeast Asian leaders are wrapping up a summit today they hoped would highlight their championship of human rights, but instead suffered a setback when military-ruled Myanmar and Cambodia refused to talk to two pro-democracy activists. The prominent activists were barred from a meeting on human rights in the region, after the leaders of the two countries threatened to walk out. The activists had been selected as delegates for their countries. The two-day summit of the 10-nation bloc is to end with a general declaration and a document on the region's economy and the global financial crisis.

China's state-monitored Internet has been having a field day with the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, even as some analysts here warned that the issue could alter the Sino-U.S. human rights debate. "It could strengthen China's position, putting the political dialogue between the U.S. government and the Chinese government at least on an equal footing," said Yan Xuetong, an expert at Qinghua University here on relations between the nations.

NEW YORK - After years of detention and a bold escape to the U.S. Embassyin Beijing, blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States, a bittersweet moment in a harrowing journey that had touched off a diplomatic crisis and poses continued challenges for U.S.-Chinese relations. The human rights leader and his family were suddenly whisked out of Beijing, as Chen expressed gratitude but also concerns about the safety of the relatives he was leaving behind. He arrived Saturday night in Newark, N.J., and was ferried to an apartment at New York University, where he will be a fellow at the School of Law. "I am very gratified to see that the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm, and I hope to see that they continue to open discourse and earn the respect and trust of the people," Chen said through an interpreter.

Maliwan Clinton recalls her first taste of America with a shudder. In this fabled land of the free, she was enslaved behind razor wire and around-the-clock guards in an El Monte sweatshop, where she and more than 70 other Thai laborers were forced to work 18-hour days for what amounted to less than a dollar an hour.

"Political pilgrims" is a term coined to describe leftist intellectuals who credulously praised various Marxist dictators, while ignoring their abuses of power. But in the 1980s, it was an ultra-right-wing strongman, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, who benefited most from idealistic American apologists blind to grotesque abuses of human rights. D'Aubuisson's political pilgrims contributed to a reign of terror that claimed the lives of thousands of people.

NEW YORK - After years of detention and a bold escape to the U.S. Embassyin Beijing, blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States, a bittersweet moment in a harrowing journey that had touched off a diplomatic crisis and poses continued challenges for U.S.-Chinese relations. The human rights leader and his family were suddenly whisked out of Beijing, as Chen expressed gratitude but also concerns about the safety of the relatives he was leaving behind. He arrived Saturday night in Newark, N.J., and was ferried to an apartment at New York University, where he will be a fellow at the School of Law. "I am very gratified to see that the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm, and I hope to see that they continue to open discourse and earn the respect and trust of the people," Chen said through an interpreter.

MEXICO CITY — Tomas Borge, last living founder of Nicaragua's Sandinista movement and one of its most hard-line enforcers as it battled U.S.-backed forces for decades, has died. He was 81. In Nicaragua, the government of President Daniel Ortega declared three days of national mourning and Borge's remains lay in state at the National Palace of Culture. Borge died Monday night in a military hospital in Managua, Ortega's office said. No cause of death was given, but Borge had been ill for some time, suffering pneumonia, lung disease and other ailments.

WASHINGTON - Even before a blind human rights lawyer slipped away from house arrest in rural China last week, Washington and Beijing were each trying to navigate a turbulent time in their internal politics and their relationship. Now they are trying to avoid their worst diplomatic spat in years. Although U.S. officials are mum, Chen Guangcheng's supporters are believed to have outwitted his guards and then spirited Chen several hundred miles from his village to seek refuge with U.S. diplomats in Beijing.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The litany of abuses was chilling: mass murder, rape, sexual slavery. Forcing children to fight. Chopping off victims' limbs. Former Liberian President Charles Taylor's conviction Thursday by an international tribunal in the Netherlands on charges of abetting such war crimes in the West African country of Sierra Leone sent a powerful message to other warlords that they will eventually face justice, human rights activists and prosecutors say. But it also highlights what can be a wrenching tension between pursuing justice or peace first in some of the world's most violent, chaotic corners.

WASHINGTON - Foreign political organizations like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and multinational corporations cannot be sued for the torture or murder of persons abroad, including Americans, under the terms of a 1991 U.S. anti-torture law, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday. Only individual perpetrators of such crimes can be held liable, the court said. The decision is a setback for human rights activists who have sought to extend American law to target inhumane conduct aboard.

BEIRUT - As the cease-fire in Syria appeared to be unraveling, the U.N. Security Council on Saturday unanimously approved sending as many as 30 unarmed monitors to try to help maintain the fragile truce. Activists reported almost 30 deaths across Syria on a day when the international community sent a rare message of unity that the violence must come to an end. The bloodshed has been intensifying as rebels have increasingly taken up arms in the face of a yearlong crackdown by the government of President Bashar Assad.

The Delhi High Court issued a landmark ruling Thursday decriminalizing homosexuality, a move that could bring more freedom to millions of people in this deeply conservative nation. The ruling said that treating relations between consenting adult homosexuals as a crime is a violation of basic human rights safeguarded under the Indian Constitution. The court decision amending an 1860s-era British Empire statute ostensibly applies only to Delhi.

The former head of Nicaragua's government-operated human rights commission has defected to the United States, accusing Sandinista authorities of refusing to allow his office to investigate most abuses in that country, according to U.S. government documents. Mateo Jose Guerrero, former executive director of Nicaragua's National Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, told U.S.

The Obama administration is stubbornly defending a policy that treats immigrants who are fleeing persecution unequally, resting its decisions on where immigrants initially sought asylum rather than on the merits of their cases. It should yield to the recommendations of immigrant and human rights groups and adopt a more consistent set of rules. About 41,000 immigrants applied to immigration courts for asylum last year, according to federal statistics. Those who sought protection at the borders or airports were immediately held until immigration officials released them or immigration judges granted asylum.

HAVANA — Pope Benedict XVI held private talks Tuesday with President Raul Castro and sought an expanded role for the church in Cuban life as part of a broader mission to preach hope and freedom to the communist nation. Senior Cuban officials, however, sounded a defiant note and made it clear that the nation's important and ongoing reforms were directed at its economy, not at its political system. "In Cuba, there's not going to be political reform," Marino Murillo, a senior economy official and rising star, told reporters.