"The violation of human rights in this Territory is massive." So found the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, on a visit to Gaza this week. She went to Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza which the Israeli army shelled heavily on 8 November. Nineteen people were killed, all of them civilian. […]
The right to water, the right to health, the right to life, the right to education. They all tie in to something as simple and unmentionable as sanitation. Yes, toilets. The most basic will do, plus some way to wash your hands. One kind that is inadequate is the ‘flying toilet’ found in unsewered shantytowns. […]
At least 1,770 people were executed in China last year — probably far more — and China’s Health Ministry and Foreign Ministry have admitted that organs of at least some of these people were harvested and transplanted into paying customers. BBC journalist Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has confirmed in undercover investigations what Canadians David Kilgour and David […]
It’s hard to believe something so fundamental as water was not mentioned in any of the major human rights treaties until 1989. I guess earlier drafters took water for granted in a way that is now unthinkable. In addition to the explicit provision in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the right to […]
Have you received a reply from Australian Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone? I wrote to the Minister regarding the fate of Mohammed Moussa Nazaree and Yacoub Baklri, among others, and have received a reply from her Assistance Secretary (sic.), John Okely. His letter of 5 September makes no mention of Nazaree and Baklri, Afghan asylum seekers […]
The Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), a Thai NGO established by Burmese expats in 1998, provides primary health care and health education to rural and conflict-ridden areas of Burma. They have 70 teams of 2-5 health workers trying to meet the health needs of some 140,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the east of […]
There are the moral and legal arguments in favour of human rights, which ought to be enough, but, let’s face it, sometimes it helps to come up with self-interested reasons for abusers to cease and desist and for governments to protect and promote. And in this geo-political clime, ‘national security’ is leverage par excellence. Here’s […]
Eleven years after Europe’s largest mass murder since World War Two, there is the prospect of justice for the victims and survivors of the massacre of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the UN ‘safe haven’ in Srebrenica. The trial of seven former Bosnian Serb officers began last month at the International Criminal Tribunal for the […]
Greetings to all breastfeeding women! It’s World Breastfeeding Week and what better time to take a rights-based approach to breastfeeding? We all have a right to health. More fully expressed, it is a right to the "highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." Well, the highest available standard of health, both in infancy and […]
It couldn’t last. Two good-news posts in a row (25 July), but now I’m afraid my subject matter turns to human rights hell. Since the de facto privatisation of the health system in China in the early 1980s, most Chinese can’t afford decent medical care. Meanwhile, human organs are sold to rich Chinese and foreigners […]
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