Human Rights

The U.S. and Cuba built sudden momentum Friday toward easing half a century of hostility as President Obama met Havana's willingness to discuss sensitive topics, including human rights, with a declaration that he was ready for a "new beginning" in relations. One official acknowledged that the Obama administration was caught off guard by Cuban President Raul Castro's willingness to discuss issues long considered off-limits by the communist leadership.

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 CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Sometimes, it's the forbidden stories, the ones people are afraid to tell in full, the ones that emerge only in fragments, that reveal the truth about a place. This is such a story. It's being told now not because the complete truth is known, but because the story nags at those familiar with its outlines, and because it says as much about Iraq's progress as it does about Iraq's resistance to change.

North Korea's sentencing of two American TV journalists to 12 years of hard labor Monday could imperil the Obama administration's already difficult goal of curtailing the authoritarian nation's nuclear weapons ambitions. If no deal is reached, the two women face a grim future in a brutal prison system notorious for its lack of adequate food and medical supplies and its high death rate.

The Pentagon has concluded that the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay meets the standards for humane treatment of detainees established in the Geneva Convention accords.

The Obama administration says it is committed to protecting human rights and supporting multilateral institutions, and the decision to seek a place on the United Nations Human Rights Council was a step in that direction. We are pleased that the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly last week to seat the United States on the council for the first time since its creation in 2006. The council was set up to replace the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which was ineffective.

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.