Can southern regional organizations strengthen the bargaining position of less-developed countries and their societies’ needs in health care? By bringing together South American countries, UNASUR is advancing a broader rights agenda in access to medicines and attention to developing country demands.
Latin American and the Caribbean have made incredible strides in electing women heads of state and in implementing gender quota laws for national legislative elections. But how well represented are women in current national congresses and parliaments? Not as well as you may think.
Using a number of justifications, including that of regional security or defending state sovereignty, authoritarian regimes are pursuing new antidemocratic norms. To shield themselves from international scrutiny, resurgent authoritarians are seeking to reshape global institutional frameworks that have been integral to the liberal post-Cold War order.
This week we look at how countries voted in the UNHRC regarding Sri Lanka. The government of then-Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa was accused of engaging in genocide against the civilian Tamil population in its military campaign to end the civil war with the terrorist Tamil Tigers.
Despite Brazil’s image as a regional leader, South America’s largest democracy has become one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. According to research by the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least fourteen journalists have been killed since January 2011. Will President Dilma Rousseff improve conditions in the lead up to next year’s Olympics?
Three years ago, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela led a failed effort to gut the inter-American system of human rights by limiting the functions and independence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In June, two of those governments’ candidates—Ecuador and Argentina—were elected to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. Should we be worried?
In defending the 2013 Constitutional Court decision that denied citizenship to undocumented Haitian immigrants and their children and now its documentation and deportation program, the government of the Dominican Republic has thumbed its nose at the international community, the regional human rights system and transnational activists. But now’s not the time to let up.
This past May, El Salvador suffered its highest murder rate since the end of the country’s civil war 23 years ago. But this grisly flash of news—what journalists in the region call the nota roja—doesn’t give the wider context. There’s another story to be told here beyond the numbers: how Latin American journalists are affected by the violence they cover and how, in turn, their coverage is creating a cultural acceptance of violence.
When Presidents Obama and Rousseff gather next week in Washington, DC, one topic, unfortunately, is unlikely to get much attention: the roiling global rights crisis. But there is a common agenda on which both democratic leaders could establish a much-needed, progressive consensus, involving digital freedom and promoting dialogue and human and democratic rights in Cuba and Venezuela. Will they?
Is there a greater hypocrisy than dedicating yourself to basic human rights, while leaving the possibility of unjust imprisonment and death due to an inhumane and retrograde stance on a critical social and health issue?
