Talking Rights

Required reading from the New York Times:
The Torture Report

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the [...]

I’m celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the first international forum on Archives and Human Rights, held in the Mexican Senate in Mexico City. The forum has brought together archivists, human rights groups, representatives of truth commissions, policy makers and universities from a number of countries, including South Africa, [...]

Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times published an excellent piece last Wednesday on the relationship between Rwanda and the Congo, the site of one of the worst human rights situations currently on-going in the world. It’s impossible to understand the Congo without factoring in Rwanda and its own tragic history, most recently on display [...]

It’s amazing to listen in on the debate now emerging over what to do about the US officials who planned and condoned human rights abuses as part of the war on terror. Law professor Jeffrey Rosen mounts one such defense here. I’ve also heard talking heads say this is so complicated or that accountability for [...]

President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for the post of ambassador to the United Nations is known as an advocate for stronger action to prevent genocide. Susan E. Rice was Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Africa and visited Rwanda just after the genocide there.
Today’s New York Times quotes from an Atlantic piece that quoted her [...]