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Amnesty International (AI-Ghana) and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) have kicked against plans by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to forcibly evict more than 40,000 people leaving in a slum of Accra, popularly called 'Sodom and Gomorrah."The slum is a melting pot of various ethnic groups, with majority of them coming from the three northern regions. It has also gained notoriety for violence and crime. A recent bloody clash between supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the National Patriotic Party (NPP) left four people dead.The latest violence sparked another round of plans to evict the residents, but AI-Ghana and COHRE in a petition to President John Evans Atta Mills copied to relevant ministries and agencies say they are deeply concerned about the threatened forced eviction of more than 40,000 residents.

The history of Non Governmental Organisations dates back for not more than four decades in Ethiopia. They were mainly engaged and their primary area of focus was in relief works and service delivery. It is only in the last 10 years or so that Organisations started to actively work on rights issues. Despite the number of limitations and some witnessed malpractices, NGO’s have been doing a commendable work in Ethiopia over the years. Restricted during the Derg regime, there were only few of them allowed to operate under tight government control. Freedom of association was de facto forbidden to independent professional associations, trade unions, the media, academia, the private business sector, and the like as they might be threats to authoritative ruling system. After the fall of the regime however, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia came into being and created conducive working environment for NGOs/CSOs to work under, adopting a constitution which allows for the freedom of association and other related rights after having ratified different international instruments which comprised of different civil, economic, political and cultural rights.

Telling the truth—especially after imbibing one too many—is a sure way to end up in a Cuban jail. That’s exactly what happened to Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, known by the nickname Panfilo, after he drunkenly burst into a documentary filming and began ranting about Cubans going hungry.Today, a Cuban appeals court upheld the two-year prison sentence Gonzalez Marcos received for “public dangerousness,” rejecting his plea for leniency.When he interrupted the documentary on Cuban music, he began yelling in Spanish, “"What we need here is a little bit of chow!" According to Associated Press reporting, He continued for more than 90 seconds, imploring the camera about how Cubans are going hungry in a country where the communist system is supposed to provide for all citizens' basic needs.

Although the international community has warned that it will not recognise the results of the November elections in Honduras, the de facto government in power since the Jun. 28 coup d'etat says the vote is going ahead.Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, who mediated the unsuccessful talks between ousted President Manuel Zelaya and the coup government, says the elections scheduled for Nov. 29 could be "a solution to the crisis." Others like prominent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes have expressed similar views.

On May 26 I wrote The Summer of Shove Begins, at a time when pundits and bloggers alike were gnashing teeth over whether US President Barack Obama was overreaching in his now successful agenda to have Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor confirmed by early August and to have a health care bill ready in September.I suggested, as I pretty much always do, that readers ignore the chattering up above and watch the ground game down below and that will decide how the story goes: “the real history will be made, this summer - as during the last two - by the unsung heroes and heroines: the organizers.”

Hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese anti-riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic unrest left 156 people dead and more than 800 injured. Chinese police have arrested more than 1,400 people following rioting in the restive far western region.Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in ChinaThe protesters said their family members had been arbitrarily arrested in a crackdown after rioting broke out in the regional capital Urumqi on Sunday, a Reuters reporter said.

China was criticized Saturday over the treatment of three Hong Kong television journalists who claimed they were detained and beaten up while covering protests in the far western city of Urumqi. Hong Kong's Beijing-appointed leader, Donald Tsang, said he was "deeply concerned" at reports about their treatment at the hands of armed police Friday as they covered unrest in the ethnically divided city. Senior Beijing-based reporter for Hong Kong channel TVB Lam Tza-ho and his cameraman Lam Wing-chuan were tied up and held for hours during Friday's riots along with cameraman Lam Chun-wai from Hong Kong's Now cable TV channel.

There are reports of continued violence in China's autonomous Xinjiang region, with police dispersing unruly crowds of the country's predominant Han ethnic group and scattered clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.Han Chinese demonstrators smashed shops thought to be owned by minority Muslim Uyghurs in the regional capital, Urumqi, two days after ethnic unrest in the city that officials blamed on Uyghurs left more than 150 people dead. Police said more than 1,400 had been arrested.

News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.China has gone to new lengths to control activity by its huge population of Internet users, like these in Beijing on Saturday. Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

The top Communist official in Urumqi in western China was dismissed on Saturday as a large deployment of the military police appeared to have brought a measure of peace to the city after two days of large street protests.Urumqi was the site of huge ethnic protests in early July. Li Zhi, the party secretary of Urumqi, lost his post, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday evening. He became the most senior person to be removed since ethnic tensions erupted there in rioting in July.

China said a riot that shook the capital of the western Xinjiang region on Sunday killed 140 people and the government called the Uighur ethnic unrest a plot against its power, signalling a security crackdown. Locals took to the streets of the capital, Urumqi, some burning and smashing vehicles and confronting ranks of police and anti-riot troops.A frame grab of a television screen created on July 6, 2009 shows a broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV) in which two bloodstained women are seen on a street in Urumqi, the capital of China's Autonomous Footage also showed a crowd of men pushing over a police car, smashing its windows and throwing stones at it.

In the mid-1990s the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude publicly exposed the use of child domestic help by government officials in order to highlight the widespread problem of child servitude in India. The use of children as laborers continues on a large scale in India, in spite of provisions in the Indian constitution upholding the rights of children and a number of acts that have been passed dealing with child labor. One common type of illegal child labor is as domestic help. Many government officials kept children as domestic help, despite rules forbidding the practice.

People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) worked with a coalition of civic organizations to survey the South Korea population in order to identify criteria meant to eliminate politicians and make them ineligible for election.  Corruption in Korea was so serious that it was the foremost obstacle hindering the progress of Korean society.  Korean political parties have remained unchanged and politicians do not represent the people’s interests. Instead, they exclusively pursue their own interests: power monopolized by politicians only. Although the people have been under severe economic strain since the national financial crisis in 1997, political corruption has not abated.

African Public Radio used its power as a media entity to influence individuals and groups who could help fix the situation in the Burundi’s hospitals, where poor people were being held against their will because they could not pay their bills. Eventually, in partnership with local NGOs, APR successfully pressured the government to order the people’s release.

In war-stricken Burundi, many cannot afford needed medical care. Adding to the problem, a general system breakdown in the 1990s reduced the state’s capacity to support the health system. Facing a budget crisis and growing debt, hospitals began to detain people who could not pay their bills. Because the hospitals felt they were being wronged by those who would not pay, they did not see this as a human rights issue.

Citizen Initiative for Constant Light mobilized 30 million people in Turkey to turn off and on their lights to demand that the government act against corruption. The action resulted from public outrage after a car crash openly revealed connections between government, police and the mob. Turkey is a secular nation with a tradition of democracy. But it also has a tradition of human rights abuse. The influence of corruption extends throughout society through local patronage systems undeterred by any investigative reporting from a mass media industry, which is itself complicit in the corruption. As a result, the corruption issue has historically sparked only apathy and hopelessness in Turkish civil society.

The Center for Human Rights & Development (CHRD) is a Sri Lankan NGO founded by a group of human rights lawyers and activists. It has facilitated the release of approximately 400 political prisoners by widely sharing stories of political prisoners and their relatives.

After their meetings with political detainees at prisons and subsequent meetings with members of victims’ families, CHRD produces lobby documents which detail the arrest, imprisonment duration, and family background of the detainee. The documents also describe the social and financial cost of detention, and the torture and humiliation suffered by the detainee. Additionally CHRD circulates memorandums during campaign meetings to obtain signatures of support, which has resulted in later tabling in Parliament by members representing minority communities. The case of prisoner is analyzed in detail, followed by a media campaign highlighting the unlawful arrest and the human, social and financial losses resulting from their long-term detention without conviction. In order to draw media attention CHRD especially publicizes prisoner hunger strikes, postponements of a long-due case, or discovery of prisoners having been tortured. Copies of these documents are regularly distributed to the human rights commission, the international community, the president, respective ministries and attorney general’s departments.

A group of women in the poorest district of Pennsylvania came together in 1991 and organized the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) after welfare cuts threatened their families and community. KWRU sought to reframe the welfare debate as part of a larger fight for human rights, rather than one about personal responsibility for poverty or charity-based responses from governments. KWRU called the welfare cuts a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Section 23 and 25 (the right to a job and the right to an adequate standard of living) and organized other impoverished people by teaching them about these rights. Their position is that the government has an obligation to meet the basic human needs of those living in poverty. By framing the issue in this way, KWRU was able to mobilize a group of people that had not been mobilized and gain national and international attention about the continuing poverty in the Americas.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Thursday that the United States would formally suspend nearly $30 million in aid to the coup-installed government in Honduras. She also suggested for the first time that the United States might not recognize the country’s elections this fall if the ousted president was not returned to power by then.

SAN SALVADOR, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- Several Salvadorian organizations and some Hondurans on Wednesday marched in San Salvador , capital of El Salvador, demanding the reinstatement of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. The demonstrators, organized by The Solidarity Network for the Human Rights' Sovereignty and Return of Democracy in Honduras, marched along the main streets of San Salvador, calling for the return of democracy in Honduras.

OCOTAL, July 25 (AP): Ousted President Manuel Zelaya stood on the edge of his country and called on his fellow Hondurans to resist the coup-installed government. Then he quickly retreated back to Nicaraguan territory, saying he wanted to avoid bloodshed and give negotiations another try. His foray Friday brought the Honduran political crisis no closer to a resolution - and irritated some foreign leaders who are trying to help Zelaya reclaim his post.Still, his brief but dramatic excursion a few feet into his homeland kept up the pressure on the interim government and the international community, highlighting the threat of unrest if the two sides cannot resolve the crisis through negotiations.