Human Rights Watch Organization

In February 1988, an abandoned boy was admitted to the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. At age 7, he was older than most of the foundlings dropped off at the doorstep of the city's main orphanage, a former Catholic home for abandoned children that had been converted into a state institution by the Communists in 1949. Doctors determined that the boy was deaf and mute and showed minor motor-coordination problems. Otherwise, he was fairly healthy. He weighed 64 pounds.

Venezuela expelled two senior monitors from Human Rights Watch hours after they reported that "discrimination on political grounds has been a defining feature" of Hugo Chavez's presidency, officials said Friday. Jose Miguel Vivanco, the group's longtime Americas director, was expelled along with deputy director Daniel Wilkinson for engaging in political acts while in the country on a tourist visa, the government said.

Thousands of children confined to orphanages across Russia suffer "appalling levels of abuse and neglect" that constitute a violation of their human rights, the organization Human Rights Watch charged Wednesday. In a detailed report, the group documented how children in some orphanages were kept in bare, dark rooms without stimulation, tied to furniture to restrain them, cruelly punished and deprived of toys and books.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security provides inadequate care and treatment of illegal immigrant detainees with HIV/AIDS, according to a new survey by a civil rights group that was prompted by the July death of a transgender inmate at a San Pedro facility.

Amid the furor of lawsuits, a British documentary on U.S. censorship battles will be shown in Los Angeles next week as the opening night entry of the nationally touring Human Rights Watch Festival. The screening of "Damned in the USA" at the Directors Guild Theatre on Wednesday, in association with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and American Cinematheque, is the latest episode in a dispute that the filmmakers see as a case of censoring a documentary about the subject of censorship.

U.S. troops in Afghanistan use excessive force during arrests, mistreat prisoners and commit other human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. "In doing so, the United States is endangering the lives of Afghan civilians, undermining efforts to restore the rule of law in Afghanistan, and calling into question its commitment to upholding basic rights," the New York-based human rights group said in its report.

At least 70 men, most of them Muslim and a quarter of them U.S. citizens, have been detained improperly as material witnesses since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were denied their due process rights, according to a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Of the individuals detained, seven were charged with providing material support to terrorists, said the advocacy groups' report, made public Sunday.

Human Rights Watch claims that it has collected detailed evidence to prove that former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his associates engineered a campaign of terror in Kosovo. The U.S.-based group's 593-page report concluded that Milosevic's campaign against ethnic Albanian separatists "was clearly coordinated from the top." The report said some of those allegedly involved still hold important positions in Yugoslavia, including Gen.

Rapes and atrocities are continuing in Sudan's Darfur region and the government's claim that it is acting to stop the violence is not credible, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released today. The report is the second this week by an international rights group. On Monday, Amnesty International called on the Sudanese government to stop arrests and intimidation of people who had told foreign delegations about the violence.

Human Rights Watch has urged the United States to release terrorism suspects detained for longer than a year at Guantanamo Bay without charge or legal counsel, the group said Friday. In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sent Thursday and released to the media Friday, the group said there was no legal basis to continue holding Taliban soldiers and civilians at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. On Thursday, the U.N.

A human rights group Tuesday published the names of 38 men and one woman it believes have been locked up in secret overseas facilities, and asked President Bush to disclose the identity and fate of all detainees the CIA has held since 2001. Among those that Human Rights Watch suspects of being held by the CIA now or at one time is Khalid Zawahiri, an Egyptian allegedly picked up in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan in February 2004.

A human rights group said Wednesday that its study of one of Nigeria's oil-producing states found that officials squandered or stole public money, while some hospitals required patients to bring their own beds and many schools lacked basic supplies. New York-based Human Rights Watch made the allegations after studying government finances in the state of Rivers, one of six oil-producing states in Nigeria.

More than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, most of them as a result of attacks by Taliban militants and other anti-government forces in the country's unstable south, a rights group said Tuesday. At least 100 of those deaths resulted from NATO and U.S.-led troop operations, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

China's human rights environment deteriorated significantly across a broad range of areas in 2006 as the government imposed stricter controls over the media, academia, the legal community and civic groups, Human Rights Watch says in a report released Thursday. The New York-based group adds that hopes of President Hu Jintao emerging as a reformer have been dashed.

The government of President Vicente Fox has lacked the political will to complete the ambitious program of human rights reform it first proposed six years ago, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch.

The United States operated a secret prison in Afghanistan as recently as last year, torturing detainees by chaining them to walls and forcing them to listen to loud music in total darkness for days, a human rights group alleged in a report released today. The prison was near Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in the report based on the testimony of several detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who said they were also held at the Afghan facility.

The U.S. government's willingness to compromise on human rights to fight terrorism sets a dangerous precedent and drives some nations away from joining that war, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. In its annual global survey of human rights, the private group said the U.S. "tendency to ignore human rights in fighting terrorism is not only disturbing in its own right."

China's human rights environment deteriorated significantly across a broad range of areas in 2006 as the government imposed stricter controls over the media, academia, the legal community and civic groups, Human Rights Watch says in a report released Thursday. The New York-based group adds that hopes of President Hu Jintao emerging as a reformer have been dashed.

The European Union and the continent's top human rights group said Thursday that they would investigate allegations that the CIA set up secret jails in Eastern Europe and elsewhere to interrogate terrorism suspects, and the Red Cross demanded access to any prisoners. Human Rights Watch said it had evidence, based on flight logs, that indicated the CIA transported suspects captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.

At least 70 men, most of them Muslim and a quarter of them U.S. citizens, have been detained improperly as material witnesses since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were denied their due process rights, according to a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Of the individuals detained, seven were charged with providing material support to terrorists, said the advocacy groups' report, made public Sunday.