Human Rights Quote (79): Hate Crime

(source)
We must send a clear and strong message to all who would commit crimes of hate: it is wrong, it is illegal, and we will catch you and punish you to the full force of our laws. Al Gore
A hate crime (or a bias crime) is a crime committed against a person that is motivated, [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (95): Waterboarding

(copyright http://www.rall.com/)
Waterboarding is an old torture technique from the Spanish Inquisition. It consists of immobilizing the “target” on an inclined board, head down, with cloth covering his or her face. Pouring water over the face simulates drowning. The victim inhales water, and is convinced that he or she is drowning and about to die. As [...]

Human Rights Facts (46): Religious Liberty

(source)
Religious liberty or the freedom of religion and belief is a human right. It is the right to be protected against coercion in matters of religion, to be free to practice and profess a religion of your choice, in private as well as in public, to change your religion, or to practice no religion at [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (94): Types of Equality

(copyright by Bill Mauldin)
Here’s a short overview of different types of equality (I’ll come back to this in future posts):
1. Equality before the law
This concept is linked to the concept of non-discrimination. Laws must be equal for everybody and should not discriminate between people. Everyone should be protected and punished by the law in the [...]

Human Rights Facts (42): Discrimination

I’ve written before on discrimination, especially gender discrimination (also here) and discrimination based on sexual orientation. This post tackles the subject more generally.
Discrimination, in its non-political and non-legal sense, simply means the recognition of differences. In the political and legal sense, it means unjustifiable differences in treatment between groups of people, most often the unjustifiable [...]

Human Rights Quote (56): Habeas Corpus and Guantanamo

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say what the law is.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the US Supreme Court, [...]

Human Rights Facts (34): Arms Trade

This post on the international arms trade is a follow-up of a previous post on the evolution of war in the world and of one on the evolution of military budgets and defense spending.
Again, it’s useless to oppose trade in or production of arms in general. People and countries have to be able to defend [...]

Human Rights Facts (33): Military Spending

This is a follow-up of a previous post on the evolution of war in the world. Whereas the number of wars and their intensity seem to decrease over the last decades, the same cannot be said of the arms trade and the defense budgets. This makes it difficult to hope that the statistics on warfare [...]

Human Rights Facts (29): International Private Charity

Economic rights, such as the right to be free from poverty, should not be viewed as primarily the business of states, otherwise we will lose the benefits of solidarity which results from spontaneous mutual assistance. Allowing economic rights to be realized at the level of people’s relationships will strengthen solidarity, feelings of common humanity and [...]

Human Rights Facts (22): Humanitarian Intervention

Humanitarian intervention is an armed intervention in one state by another state or states with the objective of ending gross violations of human rights, such as genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Whereas the moral case for such an intervention is very strong, it remains controversial because of the fact that violence is used and that the national sovereignty of [...]