The family of freed American prisoner Tony Kim thanked President Trump for “engaging directly with North Korea.” The statement was released as Kim and two other former prisoners flew home with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday.
Nicolás Maduro’s socialist dictatorship in Venezuela has overseen a 120 percent increase in the number of political prisoners in the past year, according to the legal aid group Foro Penal.
Daniel Llorente, a Cuban dissident arrested last May 1 for waving an American flag in front of the communist nation’s May Day procession, remains institutionalized at a mental ward despite not being treated for any disease or charged with a crime.
LONDON (AFP) – British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is serving a five-year jail sentence in Tehran for alleged sedition, could be due for early release and possibly home for Christmas, her husband said Thursday.
The totalitarian communist regime in Cuba continues to carry out human rights abuses and atrocities against the opposition, including “electroshock torture” on political prisoners for daring to speak out against the regime, revealed Luís Zúñiga, an anti-Castro dissident who spent 19 years behind bars.
Following the publication of a sound the Associated Press (AP) asserts was potentially used to torture and maim American diplomats in Cuba, a former political prisoner tells Breitbart News that sound resembled what was used to torture him in a Cuban prison decades ago.
Political prisoners in Venezuela have testified to torturous methods used against them by the country’s authorities, which include the use of electroshock and nude torture.
An NGO operating in Venezuela has updated their count of political prisoners in the country to 439, days after Luisa Ortega Díaz, the nation’s former prosecutor general, accused the socialist regime of systematic torture and “the annihilation of the justice system.”
Female political detainees have suffered atrocities at prison camps in communist North Korea where they often fall victim to rape, brutal executions, and have their babies fed to dogs, a South Korean newspaper has learned from defectors.
In testimony published Thursday, Luís Zúñiga – a Cuban dissident who spent 19 years in political prison – detailed his experience seeing the use of “acoustic attacks” on political prisoners to damage their brains and ultimately kill them. His testimony described a tool that resembled theories of how some U.S. diplomats may have been severely injured by sonic devices in Havana.
A Venezuelan NGO, in conjunction with Human Rights Watch, has accused the government of Venezuela of beating and torturing peaceful protesters arrested and thrown into military prisons. Among the most gruesome tortures that multiple survivors of the prisons recalled was being forced to eat “pasta with feces.”
Lilian Tintori, wife of imprisoned Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, rejected a bizarre “proof of life” video of a man alleging to be her husband published by Venezuelan socialist state television following rumors surfacing Thursday he had been taken to a military hospital in “very serious” condition.
An American woman, held for two years in Chinese custody for spying charges, was released and “deported” back to the United States, Channel News Asia reported, the development confirmed by the U.S. State Department on Sunday.
President Donald Trump has secured the release of an American citizen held in an Egyptian jail for three years, her Egyptian husband, and four fellow charity workers jailed with her.
President Donald Trump met Lilian Tintori, the wife of Venezuela’s most prominent prisoner of conscience, at the White House Wednesday night, demanding freedom for Popular Will party leader Leopoldo López “immediately.”
After canceling their silent protest for two weeks to avoid antagonizing the communist government following the death of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s Ladies in White dissident group took the streets on Sunday, the weekend of International Human Rights Day.
If Fidel Castro’s death, plus the arrival of a new U.S. administration, are the double whammy that finally brings change to Cuba, here are five dissident artists who will help usher in the post-Castro era.
Senior Trump campaign adviser A.J. Delgado joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Monday morning’s Breitbart News Daily to offer her thoughts on the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and discuss the reaction of President-elect Donald Trump and his team.
The communist regime of Cuba, in an apparent attempt to curry international favor, has announced it will pardon 787 common criminals in response to Pope Francis’s call for mercy towards the imprisoned. There is no indication any of these are prisoners of conscience, as Havana officially denies the existence of political prisoners.
Human rights researchers have published an updated study accusing China of conducting tens of thousands of organ transplants using the bodies of political prisoners without their consent. While the practice has been known to occur in the communist nation for decades, Beijing alleges that it long stopped harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience.
An extensive report published at the Cuba Archive Truth and Memory Project and flagged by the Cuban-American interest site Babalú Blog exposes the Cuban communist government’s decades-long scheme of profiting from blood and plasma-based products taken from unknowing or unwilling “donors.”
The Cuban government exerted extraordinary efforts this week to keep pro-democracy activists out of sight of international media. They failed, with one dissident demanding freedom for prisoners of conscience live on ESPN. That dissident: Yasser Rivero Boni, a political prisoner himself and the son of a member of the Ladies in White movement.
Obama could inspire a new generation of Cubans to stand up for their rights. However, there were at least five major problems with Obama’s Cuba speech.
Cuban leader Raúl Castro denied the existence of political prisoners when questioned by a U.S. reporter during a joint news conference with President Barack Obama on Monday, hours after the mass arrests of peacefully protesting political dissidents.
Cuban anti-communist dissidents have denounced communist agents – many, they say, Cuban soldiers disguised as civilians – for attacking the headquarters of the Ladies in White group, setting a fire in front of the building, and burning copies of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The pastor of an underground Evangelical church in Camagüey, Cuba, has denounced the communist government for leveling the building in which he holds religious services as a warning to others that openly practicing Christianity on the island will result in government persecution.
The Cuban government has begun feeding political prisoner Vladimir Morera Bacallao “against his will,” his wife says, more than 80 days since he began a hunger strike protesting his arrest for hanging an anti-communist sign on his window.
As the White House begins to hint that President Barack Obama would like to visit Cuba before his term is over, a political prisoner freed and re-arrested due to the U.S.-Cuba “normalization” deal has lost cognitive functions as he struggles to survive his 87th day on a hunger strike.
Vladimir Morera Bacallao, a Cuban dissident allegedly freed as part of President Obama’s deal with Cuba but sentenced to four years in prison shortly after being released, is currently on his 81st day of a hunger strike that has left him in critical condition.
The bishop in charge of the pastoral care of prison inmates in Cuba declared Wednesday that Cuba is holding a number of political prisoners on the island, some of whom are serving long sentences, a claim that Havana has repeatedly denied.
An Israeli citizen jailed for 15 years in Egypt on charges of spying was freed from prison on Thursday, the Prime Minister’s Office said. Ouda Tarabin, a Bedouin from Rahat, who has denied all the allegations against him, was returned
Washington Post bureau chief Jason Rezaian has been languishing in an Iranian prison cell for nearly nine months, with only the most cursory access to legal counsel. The newspaper reports today that Rezaian is having significant problems being allowed to speak to his attorney, and will remain in prison until his trial begins for “espionage.”
President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight, like so many of its predecessors, relied heavily on America’s moral duty to lead the world in values for its applause lines. The President vowed to “respect human dignity,” to “defend free speech, and advocate for political prisoners, and condemn the persecution of women, or religious minorities, or people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender,” to robust audience support.
There isn’t much for the United States in any of President Obama’s lame-duck fire-sale deals with foreign dictators. One of the very, very few things Cuba was expected to do, in exchange for billions of dollars pumped into the Castro’s pockets by relaxed U.S. sanctions, was release some of the political prisoners rotting in its dungeons.
Three months after the Communist mayor of a Paris suburb, Valenton, named a street, Barghouti Alley, after a convicted Palestinian terrorist, another municipality of a second Paris suburb has honored the same man.
(Reuters) – Cuba’s most prominent dissidents say they have been kept in the dark by U.S. officials over a list of 53 political prisoners who will be released from jail as part of a deal to end decades of hostility between the United States and Cuba.
