Canvasopedia

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.

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.

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.

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 Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) employs tactics aimed at gaining public confidence and participation to fight corruption in Hong Kong. These tactics include corruption prevention, operations, preventive education, and enlisting the support from the public. ICAC was established as an anti-corruption organization totally independent from any department of the government and police. ICAC is committed to fight corruption with its approach of investigation, prevention, and education. It targets all areas where corruption might exist in order to prevent any loopholes. These areas are the governmental, public, and private sectors.

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.

Through a drive that encouraged citizens of all political persuasions to sign a petition, the Basque peace group, Elkarri, gave citizens a way to collectively and effectively pressure the Spanish and Basque governments to initiate a peace dialogue. Since the 15th century the Basque country, on the border between France and Spain, has been disputed territory. The repressive policies of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1939-1975, aggravated the conflict and gave rise to Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), the militant group now infamous for using terrorist tactics to fight for Basque autonomy.

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.

Eight attackers stormed the offices of a radio station and TV outlet in Tegucigalpa that are critical of the interim government that removed Manuel Zelaya, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports. They threatened guards and sprayed acid on broadcasting equipment, ending the broadcasts of a concert in support of the ousted president.

Manuel Zelaya, the ousted Honduran president, has said elections is his country due to be held on November 29 will be viewed as a fraud by the international community.Speaking to reporters in Washington, where he has been meeting with representatives from the Organisation of American States (OAS), Zelaya said he had been assured the result of the poll would not be recognised.

Hillary Clinton's attempts to resolve the crisis in Honduras have failed. It's time for Latin America to take the leadThe mediation effort that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton arranged to try to resolve the crisis in Honduras, which began when a military coup removed Honduran President Mel Zelaya more than four weeks ago, has failed. It is now time – some would say overdue – for the Latin American governments to play their proper role.

Four days after Manuel Zelaya was ousted from the Honduran presidency, all EU ambassadors have left the country, say the Spanish and Swedish foreign ministers."I have just spoken to my European colleagues and I can tell you that at this moment, all the European embassies in [the Honduran capital of] Tegucigalpa have decided to withdraw their ambassadors," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said late Wednesday .All ambassadors have been withdrawn, although the charges d'affaires remain, so "all the European representation in Tegucigalpa will be at a lower level," he told Spanish national radio.

Seriously anxious at the prospects of the fundamentalists represented by fanatic President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad loosing the next presidential elections, Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i was again compelled to come down personally in the political arena, acting not as the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic who stands above political lines, but as the champion of a political party fighting for survival. On 7th December, Mr. Khameneh’i once again expressed his full support of Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad during a meeting with Mr. Raphael Correa, the leftist President of Ecuador by the Iranian President as “a young man who works relentlessly day and night with plenty of energy”.

Iran is replacing 40 of its ambassadors, including some who voiced support for "rioters" during the unrest that erupted after June's disputed presidential election, a semi-official news agency reported.Citing informed sources, Fars News Agency said late on Tuesday that the envoys were given notification that their diplomatic postings had been terminated.It did not give details on which ambassadors were affected and government officials were not immediately available for comment on the report, which also suggested that other Iranian embassies were in need of new personnel.