Human Rights

The documentary category is where Hollywood wears its conscience on its sleeve, and this Oscar season's nominees have the politically engaged members of the industry buzzing more than usual over the range and variety of topics. Partly, that's because the motion picture academy's recent documentary winners have seemed more relevant -- and, more important, influential -- than usual.

Chinese officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed Saturday to step up their cooperation on the global economic crisis and climate change, while treading carefully around the human rights issues that have often strained Washington's relationship with Beijing.

In her first official trip overseas, Hillary Rodham Clinton showed herself to be a different kind of secretary of State for a different time. She broke with almost half a century of tradition in choosing Asia rather than Europe or the Middle East for her initial voyage, going to countries not only where American prestige is largely intact but whose help with the global economic crisis is, as she put it, "indispensable."

A ranking Iranian judiciary official defended his country's human rights record Saturday, lashing out at a recent State Department report that condemned the Islamic Republic's record on upholding the rights of minorities and dissidents.

Reports from Damascus say Syria's leading dissident is on his deathbed. Riad Seif, 62 and suffering from prostate cancer, has spent the last year in Adra prison as punishment for attending a meeting of pro-democracy groups in Damascus. Syrian President Bashar Assad has prohibited him from seeking treatment abroad, a restriction Seif once called "a slow death sentence."

Reports of rights violations by the Mexican army have shot up during the two years that President Felipe Calderon has deployed troops nationwide to battle drug traffickers, a coalition of human rights activists said Friday. The allegations include illegal searches, arrests without cause, rape, sexual abuse and torture, eight Mexican and international rights groups said in a report prepared for presentation to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington.

The aging turboprop filled with a squad of blue-clad Italian riot police banks over the Mediterranean and descends onto a tiny, wind-swept island that emerges like an apparition from the turquoise waters near Tunisia. Lampedusa has been a base for fishing fleets, an exile for radicals and Mafiosi, and a vacation spot in summer, when the population multiplies tenfold. Today, it is the border. Like the U.S.

Harold Hongju Koh, an outspoken advocate of human rights and international law, has been chosen to be the top lawyer at the State Department. Koh, dean at the Yale Law School, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's approach to the detention and trial of terrorism suspects, calling a 2002 memo justifying harsh interrogation methods a "stain on our national reputation."

Former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru made an impassioned plea of innocence at his human rights crimes trial in the Peruvian capital, portraying himself Friday as the leader who rescued his country from anarchy, not the man prosecutors have cast as a "Frankenstein" monster. "Rather than prove my guilt, the prosecution has merely shown the inconsistency of its accusations," Fujimori said, alleging that prosecutors fabricated evidence in their effort to make an "iceberg from a piece of ice."

President Obama's early moves to condemn torture, order the closure of Guantanamo and commit to combat climate change won him accolades from international human rights advocates turned off by the go-it-alone attitude of the Bush administration. Now the world's lawyers are worried that those goals could languish on the diplomatic back burner as the president and his team concentrate on the global economic crisis.