Human Rights Abuses

Speaking in the heart of the nation's largest Vietnamese American community, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Vietnam warmed up the crowd by saying that he would push for human rights as he took a critical look at Vietnam's Communist regime. But, he warned, substantial changes in the country would not happen overnight.

A prominent Russian journalist known for reporting of human rights abuses in war-torn Chechnya was shot and killed Saturday in her apartment building in what colleagues and authorities described as an apparent assassination. Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was shot in the chest as she was getting out of an elevator, then shot in the head, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing investigative sources.

The Bush administration's declared war on terrorism has sparked an increase in human rights abuses as countries turn a blind eye to violations by their allies, Amnesty International said today. The group accused countries such as the United States of double standards, saying in its annual report for 2006 that their credibility had been weakened by reports of prisoner torture in third countries and other rights abuses.

The United States released $3.2 million in aid to Guatemala's military Thursday, ending a 15-year freeze on the assistance in a largely symbolic recognition that the Central American nation has made progress reforming an army tainted by past human rights abuses. The money was freed up after this nation of 14 million agreed to make its military subject to civilian courts, establish an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and remove legal impediments to U.N.

"In My Country" is the kind of serious, intelligent probing of the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up by the government in 1996 to investigate human rights abuses under apartheid, that one would expect from a director of the caliber of John Boorman. He has confronted the horrors straight on but has been stymied by a ponderous script adapted by Ann Peacock from the book "Country of My Skull" by Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog.

Key U.S. allies including Egypt, Russia and Saudi Arabia were criticized in the State Department's annual human rights progress report Monday, while violations in North Korea and strife-torn Sudan provoked sharper concerns. The report, the first since President Bush's inaugural pledge to promote democracy worldwide, says that although elections in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iraq had encouraged hope for improvements worldwide, "progress along this path will not be easy or rapid."

Investigators have recommended that 26 soldiers face charges in an inquiry in abuses in Afghanistan that included the deaths of two detainees, Pentagon officials said. Charges against individual soldiers in the nearly 2-year-old cases from the U.S. Bagram air base could be as serious as negligent homicide or as limited as failure to report an offense. Most of the soldiers facing charges are with the Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Photographs depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops prompted a wave of outrage across the Islamic world Tuesday as Muslims condemned the United States for what they perceived as cruelty and hypocrisy.

The Supreme Court today for the first time will take up one of the nation's oldest laws to decide the emerging question of whether victims of abuse abroad can sue their abusers in American courts. The case to be heard began 14 years ago when a Mexican doctor, Humberto Alvarez Machain, was abducted in Mexico by Mexican agents dispatched by U.S. authorities and brought back to Los Angeles to stand trial for his alleged role in the murder of Enrique Camarena, a U.S.

Lawyers for Myanmar villagers suing Unocal Corp. over alleged human rights abuses committed during construction of its Yadana pipeline told a judge Tuesday that the oil giant, and not its subsidiaries, should pay for the villagers' injuries. The El Segundo-based oil firm went on trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court in two closely watched cases that have been delayed for seven years.