Human Rights Watch Warnings
Monday, March 01, 2004
Human Rights Watch has issued two important statements in recent days.
Their report on Haiti's rebel leaders details the violent nature of the new rulers.
As the backgrounder explains, former members of the disbanded Haitian Armed Forces (Forces Armées d’Haiti, FAd’H) have been mobilizing for about three years near the border of the Dominican Republic in central Haiti. In that region, over the past year, bands of 30 to 100 men have been harassing police, killing government supporters, taking over towns temporarily, and recruiting supporters. On July 25, 2003, they reportedly killed four members of a Ministry of Interior delegation that visited the area. Human Rights Watch also described tensions within the rebel coalition, which suggest possible power struggles to come. In Gonaïves, for example, local gang leader Butteur Métayer shares power with former paramilitary Jean Tatoune, the man who led a 1994 massacre targeting Métayer’s family.
Another report released just today details how gay men in Egypt, a strong US ally, are arrested and tortured - just for being gay.
(Cairo, March 1, 2004) -- The Egyptian government continues to arrest and routinely torture men suspected of consensual homosexual conduct, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The detention and torture of hundreds of men reveals the fragility of legal protections for individual privacy and due process for all Egyptians.“The prohibition against torture is absolute and universal, regardless of the victim,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Accepting torture of unpopular victims—whether for their political opinions or their sexual conduct—makes it easier for the government to use this despicable practice on many others.”
The 144-page report, “In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct,” documents the government’s increasing repression of men who have sex with men. The trial of 52 men in 2001 for the “habitual practice of debauchery”—the legal charge used to criminalize homosexual conduct in Egyptian law—was only the most visible point in the ongoing and expanding crackdown.