human rights - Page 23

Iran Wins Seat At UN Women’s Agency

Iran’s deplorable record on women’s rights did not stop the Islamic Republic from winning a seat on UN Women, a United Nations body that was formed in 2010 to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality.

AP Photo

Vatican Condemns ISIS’ Use of Children as Suicide Bombers

A Vatican statement released on Friday from its UN representative, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, denounces a series of atrocities committed by the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) against children in Syria. The statement follows the release of a similar speech on Thursday, which was the first Vatican document to mention the Islamic State by name, rather than the more generic “religious fundamentalism.”

syria-child-soldiers-Reuters

Amnesty Targets Venezuelan Socialists: Protesters ‘Beaten, Burnt, Sexually Abused’

The human rights violations occurring in Venezuela– from thousands of arbitrary arrests to beatings and rapes to the murder of unarmed teenagers– have taken up little of the international spotlight in the past year. They have, however, increasingly caught the attention of human rights groups like Amnesty International, which details and condemns the abuses in a report released this week.

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Video Reveals Hellish ‘Migrant Prisons of Libya’

Things are going so well in Barack Obama’s big foreign-policy “success,” Libya, that people are literally dying to get out. Vice News recently posted a 27-minute documentary video on the hideous conditions in Libya’s “migrant prisons”—internment camps where refugees are left to rot after their attempts to flee the country across the Mediterranean fail.

VICE News/YouTube

Partners in Peace: Executions in Iran Are Surging

Executions are rising sharply in Iran, reaching a 12-year high in 2014, according to the United Nations’s Human Rights Council. The UN called this “deeply troubling” and further criticized Iran for not living up to promises that it would protect ethnic and religious minorities, according to a report at Voice of America News.

REUTERS/FRANCOIS LENOIR

China Accuses Human Rights Watch Of Working For U.S. Government

Xinhua, China’s state news outlet, has published a scathing rebuke of Human Rights Watch following HRW’s criticism of Chinese authoritarianism, and its opinion that a proposed Chinese counter-terrorism law would “legitimate ongoing human rights violations and facilitate future abuses.”

Reuters