RightsBase

human rights news & views

No more Nestlé

It's International Nestlé-free Week. Time to swear off Nescafé, Milo (*gasp*), Butter Menthol and Nestlé chocolate, yoghourt, frozen dinners and goddam Cheerios and find ethical alternatives. Sometimes a lack of joined-up thinking allows people who care about human rights (whole NGOs, in fact) to drink Nescafé. Or maybe they aren't familiar with the world's longest-running […]

New commitment to ending child soldiers

Recruiting child soldiers under the age of 18 is a crime under international law. Recruiting children under the age of 15 is a war crime. The International Criminal Court‘s first trial will be that of DRC warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with recruiting child soldiers as young as 10. The term ‘child soldier’ refers to […]

Housing to become legal right in France

Homeless people in France will have legal redress if a draft bill is passed in the current parliamentary session. Homelessness was forced onto the French political agenda when fires in inadequate, overcrowded Paris housing killed almost 50 people in 2005. The issue has been kept alive by the ‘Children of Don Quixote’, a small voluntary […]

Worst year ever for journalists

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says 84 journalists were killed worldwide in 2006. Include media support staff such as interpreters and drivers, and that figure climbs to 177, the worst on record. At least 155 of those were murders and unexplained deaths, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the remaining 22 being […]

‘The most violent place in Asia’

Extra-judicial killings are a major source of human rights violation in Asia, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), and, of eleven countries reviewed in the Commission’s 2006 Report on human rights in the region, Sri Lanka is the worst. On this second anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, reconstruction in the north-east of […]