Human Rights Watch

(HRW/IFEX) – Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called upon British Prime Minister Tony Blair to use the first ever European Union (EU)-China summit to define concrete benchmarks for human rights improvements in China and Tibet. In a letter made public on 1 April 1998, HRW urged Blair to use the London summit to present Chinese […]

(HRW/IFEX) – On 24 February 1998, a Minsk court sentenced two teenagers, sixteen-year-old Vadim Labkovich and nineteen-year-old Alexei Shidlovsky, respectively to a one-and-a-half year suspended prison term and a one-and-a-half year unsuspended prison term in a strict regime colony for writing political graffiti and replacing an official state flag with the banned flag of “independent” […]

(HRW/IFEX) – HRW’s Academic Freedom Committee is gravely concerned over the formal warning recently sent to researchers at Indonesia’s prestigious National Institute of Sciences, Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI) by Dr. B. J. Habibie, State Minister of Research and Technology. On 20 January 1998, a group of nineteen LIPI researchers held a press conference and […]

(HRW/IFEX) – The following is an open letter sent by Human Rights Watch on 16 February 1998 to the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia) regarding the recent announcement on 6 February 1998 of an open bid for temporary radio and television frequencies, and other laws regulating broadcasting in Serbia. It was sent […]

(HRW/IFEX) – Human Rights Watch reports that Yuri Khashchevatsky, an internationally renowned film director and member of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee who recently became a member of the pro-democracy movement “Charter ’97”, has been severely beaten. On the night of 23 December 1997, two unidentified men broke into Khashchevatsky’s film studio and beat him unconscious, […]

(HRW/IFEX) – East Timor activist Vaughan Williams from the Darwin-based Australians for a Free East Timor was due to appear at the Northern Territory’s Darwin Magistrates Court on 15 December 1997 for publicly displaying pictures of East Timorese women being tortured by the Indonesian Armed Forces (Abri). He is being charged by police under the […]

(HRW/IFEX) – On 28 November 1997 at the Russian American Press Center a press conference was to be held on the latest developments in the case of Alexander Nikitin, whom the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) accuses of having committed serious anti-state crimes. Scheduled participants in the press conference were: Pavel Gutiontov (Chair of the […]

(HRW/IFEX) – Human Rights in China, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International will be sponsoring Wei Jingsheng’s first press conference in the United States of America at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum (entrance on 42nd Street) on 21 November 1997 at 10:30 am EST. The press conference will run no later than […]