Human Rights

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.

The bodyguard is a thick and bullish man with a bald head and black turtleneck. He trails his client in the front door and then lurks around the entryway. The client, a slight, tweedy and unassuming man, slips behind his desk with a sigh. His face still bears the ghosts of bruises. "I feel uncomfortable," Lev Ponomaryov said with a shrug when asked about his hulking guard. "But that's what my children asked me to do, and I didn't argue."

Gunmen ambush a military patrol pursuing drug traffickers. The soldiers retaliate, rounding up dozens of townspeople. Four girls held for 20 hours later tell prosecutors that soldiers repeatedly raped and abused them. The case, from exactly two years ago in the state of Michoacan, is one of 17 allegations of serious human rights abuse by the Mexican army, including torture and murder, detailed in a major report released Wednesday by U.S.

For the family of Gao Zhisheng, a maverick lawyer under house arrest for years after confronting the Communist Party head-on, security was so tight that police sometimes sat in the bedroom of their Beijing apartment, insisting the lights remain on all night so they could keep an eye on them. In order to keep the family incommunicado, authorities forbade telephones or Internet access.

In May 1989, I was a 20-year-old history student at Beijing University. By June 13 of that year, my name was at the top of the list of the 21 "most wanted" student leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I was arrested and spent nearly four years in jail, was rearrested in 1995, and then exiled to the United States in 1998.

Hundreds of innocent civilians have been slain by soldiers and falsely identified as guerrillas killed in combat as part of a "more or less" systematic practice by significant elements of Colombia's military, a U.N. human rights investigator said Thursday.

Amnesty International said Thursday that serious human rights abuses continue in Zimbabwe and criticized members of President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, saying they regard violence as a useful political tool. After a six-day trip to Zimbabwe, the group's chief, Irene Khan, dismissed the government's explanation that it lacked the funds to make improvements on human rights.

A human rights worker known for her fearless criticism of the Kremlin and its Chechen proxies was abducted in broad daylight and shot to death Wednesday. Natalia Estemirova, who worked doggedly to document ongoing human rights abuses in war-wrecked Chechnya long after international attention had drifted away, was on her way to work when men snatched her off the street in front of her Grozny home.

Protesters in Los Angeles joined thousands across the world Saturday evening to rally in support of demonstrators who have taken to the streets in Iran to protest human rights violations and that country's disputed June presidential election. Organizers with United 4 Iran, a coalition of individuals and human rights organizations that came together to organize the "Global Day of Action," said more than 100 rallies took place in cities around the world.