- The Ties That Bind Us In the Fight to Expose Human Rights Abuse In her monthly message, WITNESS' executive director looks back on human rights stories from October and reflects on how our work resonates as more and more of us fight to expose human rights abuses.
- Human Rights Video Weekly: Spotlight on the Sochi Olympics This week we're focused on Russia, where the Olympics have drawn attention to issues of forced evictions, homophobic violence, and other human rights struggles throughout the country.
- The Human Rights Video Weekly: Ethnic Tension in Russia A death stokes xenophobic violence in Moscow, while in Damascus, community reporters document a humanitarian crisis escalating around them.
- This Week in Human Rights Video: 5-Year-Old Detained by Israeli Defense Forces The detention of a 5-year-old highlights a widespread practice- the detention of children by Israeli forces and citizen videos show ethnic tension in Central Russia
- This Week in Human Rights Video: Police Torture in Bahrain and Why Brazilians are Protesting This month's Citizen Watch also includes: violence in Guinea, a raid on a prominent human rights organization in Russia, and disturbing reports of chemical weapons used in Syria.
- Video Advocacy Example: Amnesty International’s Campaign for the Arms Trade Treaty More than 740,000 people die every year as a result of armed conflict. Who fuels these conflicts? Which nations provide the arms and munitions that enable dictators, gangs, and human rights abusers to kill, rape, torture, and forcefully evict innocent civilians?
- Video Advocacy Example: Hope for Intravenous Drug Users In Russia The Andrey Rylkov Foundation (ARF) is the only organization providing needle exchange for drug users in Moscow. Their mission is to promote and develop humane drug policy based on tolerance, protection of health, dignity and human rights.
- Video Advocacy Example: In Syria, Exposing Official Lies Through YouTube Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that over 2600 people have died as a consequence of repression of protests in Syria. The Syrian government claims that far fewer have died, and that the balance is split between government forces and armed protestors.
- Archives of human rights NGO seized by Russian police The St. Petersburg offices of the prominent human rights group Memorial were raided on Thursday by Russian security forces. (Memorial in Grozny is a WITNESS partner.) According to Human Rights Watch: “In the morning of December 4, 2008, seven masked men, armed with batons, broke into the office of the Memorial Research and Information Center […]
- Archives, power & memory “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” – Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. Clifford Levy’s November 26 NY Times article about renewed control and suppression of the archives in the Putin era chillingly illustrates Derrida’s thesis: “TOMSK, Russia: For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving […]
- Mobile Phone Video Exposes Abuse in Russia http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6319439.stm
- Eastern Europe: Video documents homophobia on the rise [via GV/WITNESS] [Originally published here as part of WITNESS‘s collaboration with Global Voices Online] The latest twist in the long-running saga of anti-gay violence and state oppression took place yesterday in Moscow, as an appeals court upheld the earlier lower court ruling to ban Moscow’s Gay Pride March in May 2006. The gay rights activists who brought […]
