The 45-page report, “Like a Prisoner in My Home’: Coal Fueling Toxic Air in Bulgaria” analyzes the data revealing alarmingly high air pollution levels in Dimitrovgrad, a town in southern Bulgaria, which hosts Maritsa 3, one of the country’s oldest coal plants. Maritsa 3 emits hazardous air pollutants, which contribute to poor air quality that harms the health of local residents, particularly children.
This report documents how ethnic Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) face fear, uncertainty, and violence in Kosovo. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 164,000 Serbs have left Kosovo during the seven weeks since Yugoslav and Serb forces withdrew and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) entered the province.
Azerbaijani security forces regularly torture those in custody, and get away with it, according to a this report. The international monitoring group charged that Azerbaijan has failed to enact legal reforms and that corruption is rampant in the criminal justice system.
The village of Racak, about half a kilometer from the town of Stimlje, had a pre-conflict population of approximately 2,000 people. During the large-scale government offensive in August 1998, the Serbian police shelled Racak, and several family compounds were looted and burned. Since then, most of the population has lived in Stimlje or nearby Urosevac.
Tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom have lived in Tanzania for more than two decades, have been rounded up by the Tanzanian army and confined to camps for the past year in the western part of the country, Human Rights Watch charges in this report.
The Internet dramatically empowers persons in the exercise of their right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas regardless of frontiers. Online communication must therefore be fully protected by international guarantees of the right to freedom of expression. In the Middle East and North Africa, Internet use is growing rapidly after a slow start.
On June 15, 1999, Serbian and Yugoslav forces withdrew from the town of Glogovac in the Drenica region of central Kosovo, in accordance with the agreement signed by NATO and Yugoslavia's military leadership.
Sierra Leonean refugee children in Guinea are among the most vulnerable children in the world. They have lived through an extremely brutal war -most have witnessed or suffered unspeakable atrocities including widespread killing, mutilation, and sexual abuse.
Abuses by Indian Security Forces and Militant Groups Continue
In this report, Human Rights Watch charges that human rights violations by all parties in Kashmir have been a critical factor behind the current conflict. The report says that if those violations had been seriously addressed at any time over thelast ten years, the risk of amilitary confrontation between India and Pakistan might have been reduced.
This report by Human Rights Watch details how President Aleksandr Lukashenka's government has suppressed research on controversial topics, re-centralized academic decision- making, and maintained a ban on political activity on campuses.
The Expulsion of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon
For more than a decade, Israel and its auxiliary Lebanese militia have been expelling innocent civilians from their homes and villages in south Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said today. In this report, Human Rights Watch says that entire families have been expelled from the occupied zone in a summary and often cruel manner, without due process law.
Two months ago Human Rights Watch published a report, "Red Onion State Prison Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Virginia" that sets out human rights-based concerns about who is being confined in Red Onion State Prison, Virginia's first super-maximum security prison, and how they are being treated. That report drew on Human Rights Watch's long experience assessing prison conditions in the U.S.
As the millennium draws near, multi-party democracies appear stable throughout most of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the notable exception of Cuba, where the government of Fidel Castro celebrated its fortieth anniversary in power on January 1, 1999, with no sign of a significant political opening on the horizon.
This sixty-page report documents how, as rebels took control of the city in January 1999, they made little distinction between civilian and military targets. Testimonies from victims and survivors describe numerous massacres of civilians gathered in houses, churches and mosques. One massacre in a mosque on January 22 resulted in the deaths of sixty-six people.
The announcement by the U.S. Defense Department at the end of April of a move toward the use of more Aarea weapons in Operation Allied Force, and the reports of a growing shortage of precision-guided weapons, point to an increased use of unguided (dumb) weapons by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in the war against Yugoslavia, including so-called cluster bombs.
On Wednesday, 26 May 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, will hear testimony challenging the legality of secret interrogation procedures used by the Israeli General Security Service (GSS).
