Human Rights Archive

Earlier this month, a boat carrying upward of 250 migrants toward Europe sunk off the coast of Libya. A week prior, an estimated 500 migrants were killed when their vessel was sunk by human traffickers off the Maltese coast. These are just the latest events in a year that has proven to be exceptionally deadly for migrants seeking to enter Europe. With over 3,000 people having drowned trying to enter Europe so far this year, there have been many calls for European nations and the European Union to do more to address the issues of migration and asylum. The dramatic […]

The Western Sahara conflict is fast approaching its 40th anniversary with no end in sight. A web of geopolitical interests keeps the conflict in a permanent state of limbo. At the heart of this web is the U.N. Security Council, which has managed the conflict since the late 1980s. The council has been historically reticent to take dramatic action to resolve the dispute and remains so today. Though there has been “peace” in Western Sahara since 1991 when a cease-fire came into effect, all efforts to reconcile Morocco’s claim of sovereignty against the local population’s right to self-determination have failed. […]

On Sept. 5, the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it was “indefinitely” halting its prosecution of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is on trial for allegedly directing the ethnic violence that followed the country’s 2007 elections. The presiding ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, claimed that amid many delays since the start of the trial, the evidence required to bring a case against Kenyatta had still not materialized. But other factors may be at play: The lapsed prosecution, in fact, appears to reflect the limited authority of the ICC as well as unease over global governance jurisdiction in sub-Saharan Africa. Key […]

In April 2013, outside the steps of Parliament in London, a group of nongovernmental organizations launched a new campaign to ban the use of fully autonomous weapons. Political entrepreneurs calling themselves the International Committee for Robot Arms Control had been raising concern over this issue since 2004, but their calls for a killer robot ban had been virtually ignored by the advocacy community. Things changed dramatically in 2012 when the well-known NGO Human Rights Watch published a report calling for such a ban. Within a month, nine well-known human security organizations had joined the steering committee for a new campaign. […]