Human Rights Archive

Earlier this month, a professor from New York University was barred from entering the United Arab Emirates, where the school recently opened a new campus, after he criticized the country’s labor practices. In an email interview, Stephen Wilkins, director of the integrated doctoral program in business and management at Plymouth University and the former director for professional management programs at Dubai University College, discussed the challenges facing satellite campuses of Western universities. WPR: What are the motivations for establishing satellite campuses of Western universities in places like China and the Persian Gulf, both for the schools and the host countries? […]

Last year, during a midnight search for contraband in South Africa’s St. Albans maximum security prison, more than 200 inmates were forced to lie naked on the ground in a human chain, each one’s face pressed into his neighbors’ buttocks. They were then subjected to beatings, electric shocks and torture. The abuse was not an isolated case. According to a complaint lodged by former inmate Bradley McCallum with the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC), a similar incident occurred at St. Albans in 2005 after the stabbing of a prison warden. In his complaint, McCallum alleged that inmates were forced […]

Earlier this month, the European Commission launched the European Agenda on Migration, intended to be a comprehensive new policy approach to trafficking, labor migration, border security and asylum issues. As European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos has put it, “We need more legal routes for people to arrive to Europe safely, and to avoid deaths in the Mediterranean and other irregular migrant routes. We need more resettlement places.” The announcement comes as the migration crisis in Europe continues unabated. The same day the European Union launched the European Agenda on Migration, Italy rescued over 1,000 refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, […]

Rafael Correa, a left-leaning academic turned populist politician, has dominated Ecuadorian politics since 2007. He won three presidential elections and has consistently maintained popularity rates of over 50 percent. His movement, the Alliance for a Proud and Sovereign Homeland, controls the legislature. The judiciary and all institutions of horizontal accountability are in the hands of his lieutenants. At the time of this writing, Ecuador’s National Assembly, as the congress was renamed, is modifying Ecuador’s 20th constitution, enacted during Correa’s term, to allow for his permanent re-election. According to Correa, his regime is promoting a better democracy that is advancing social […]

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates—Demands for democratic reform in the Arab world over the past five years have met with a range of responses. In most of the countries where a wave of uprisings toppled regimes beginning in December 2010, the process and its aftermath proved traumatic. In some cases it has been devastating. The segment of the Arab world that survived the fury of pro-democracy revolts most effectively was the one ruled by monarchs, whether kings, princes or emirs. These countries have been mostly able to withstand the winds of revolution, at times by accommodating demands for democracy with modest […]

There are two leading theories about the death of Boris Nemtsov, the former Russian deputy prime minister and liberal activist gunned down in Moscow last week, and neither one is flattering to Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to one interpretation, Putin himself must have signed off on the murder, which took place in view of the Kremlin on a bridge under constant surveillance. A second theory—advanced by Masha Gessen in The New York Times, among others—holds that Putin and his inner circle are not directly responsible, but that Nemtsov was killed by vigilante nationalist gangs, an accidental casualty of the […]

The assassination last week of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition political leader, in downtown Moscow, just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, presents a challenge for Washington. The current tensions in U.S.-Russia relations over crises ranging from Ukraine to Syria make a successful engagement with Moscow on human rights even more unlikely. Yet the U.S. must somehow find ways to support the democratic vision for Russia advocated by Nemstov and other political and civil society activists. Nemstov’s murder is in some ways reminiscent of 1990s-era Russia under then-President Boris Yeltsin. At the time, law and […]