Human Rights Archive

The recent spike in the numbers of migrants trying to reach Europe’s Mediterranean shores, accompanied by media images of fatal capsizings and other tragic scenes of human suffering, has reminded people of the moral as well as the humanitarian and political dimensions of the issue. This week, in response to months of urgent appeals, the European Union drafted recommendations for a quota system to distribute asylum-seekers and other migrants across the EU, to relieve some of the burden on the southern European states of Italy, Malta and Greece. But the debate over these migrants remains divisive and passionate. World media […]

Last month’s ruling by the Supreme Court of Honduras throwing out a constitutional ban on the re-election of presidents is far from an innocent opening up of democratic possibilities. Rather, the court’s decision is another step in the ongoing, methodical destruction of the rule of law and constitutional order in Honduras, which began with the 2009 military coup that deposed the country’s democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. Most ominously, given his record so far, the court’s decision paves the way for President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s continued hold on power, even as the United States is shoring him up as a […]

Migration from Africa to Europe is a hotly debated topic. Headlines about migrants crossing the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean Sea appear regularly in major international newspapers, most infamously in April, when at least 1,000 migrants died on two capsized ships between Libya and Italy. In Brussels, European leaders meet frequently to discuss policy responses to irregular border crossings and migrant deaths at sea, time and again advancing cooperation with North African states as a potentially successful strategy. But reporting has mainly focused on the European perspective, while North African states’ policy approaches and civil societies’ attitudes toward irregular migrants […]