Human Rights Politics

In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the 20th century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide.

Cameras that can see through your clothes at 80 paces; council tax rising to cover increased CCTV needs; suggestions that Internet Service Providers should monitor customer usage in the comfort of their own homes; plus ID cards, fingerprint and eyeball recognition on the horizon. In the 21st century is there anywhere to hide? And if not, should there be? Big Brother: Who is watching you? twitches the curtain and takes a hard look at our increasingly hi-tech, zero privacy society.

Accountable examines present-day conditions and the consequences for America. At its core, this book is a tool with which the community can evaluate the successes or failures of its political leaders and of itself. This insightful book acknowledges the mistakes of the past while offering hope and inspiration for a better future.

On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area.

Argentina's coup d'tat in 1976 led to one of the bloodiest dictatorships in its history - 30,000 people were abducted, tortured, and subsequently "disappeared". And hundreds of babies born to pregnant political prisoners were stolen from their doomed mothers and given to families with military ties or who were collaborators of the regime. "Anala" was one of those children, raised without suspecting that she was adopted.

Sabine Heinlein spent almost a year reporting at "The Farm", a program for mental patients at the notorious Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. Originally designed to teach its "members" confidence and skills by caring for animals and plants, the Farm had long become a dysfunctional hoarder's den. The patients sat idly on chairs in a grimy dayroom filled with the therapist's "collectibles" and garbage.

Between 1929 and 1974, more than 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized, sometimes without informed consent and frequently under coercion. The victims, poor men and women from around the state, were never compensated for losing the ability to conceive children. Nearly 40 years later, during a rancorous 2013 legislative session in which severe restrictions on abortion, voting rights and funding for public education were passed, the state got another chance to right one of its most shameful acts.

In the early days of the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, a 17-year-old girl is arrested because of her brother's involvement with leftist politics. She is placed in a makeshift jail, a former bathhouse, in which other women are also being held captive.

Making the Future presents more than 50 concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011. Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. presidential race; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftward turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel's invasion of Gaza and more.

Rogue Justice connects the dots for the first time - from the Patriot Act to today's military commissions, from terrorism prosecutions to intelligence priorities, from the ACLU's activism to Edward Snowden's revelations. And it poses a stark question: Will the American justice system ever recover from the compromises it made for the war on terror?

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Mont-gomery, Alabama. Shouting "It's my constitutional right!" as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she'd had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a young child.

No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security. Torture, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or "black sites"), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press occasionally exposes the dark side of the war on terror, and congressional investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by US intelligence agencies and armed forces, no high US official has been prosecuted for these violations.

Through declassified documents and various other sources, we further explore human experimentation. This time we zoom in specifically on mind control and the top-secret government projects that examined this realm. We name the names. This compelling book is sourced throughout. You'll find out about how the US ferried Nazi scientists into the country after World War II and how that single operation became the catalyst for the creation of multiple experimental projects.

One of Argentina's 30,000 "disappeared", Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Her writings were smuggled out of prison and published anonymously in human rights journals. The Little School is Alicia Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment in Argentina in the 1970s.

Tehran, June 12, 2009. Mohsen Abbaspour, an ordinary young man in his 20s - not particularly political, or ambitious, or worldly - casts the first vote of his life in Iran's 10th presidential election. Fed up with rising unemployment and inflation, he backs the reformist party and its candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mohsen believes his vote will count. It will not.

At the heart of America's current social conflict are fundamental questions about our values as a nation. What does it mean to be American? When will women be fully equal? Should gays and lesbians have equal rights? Does racism still exist? What should we do about immigration? As one of the most diverse nations on earth, how can we live together peacefully and productively? Leader-Chivee passionately argues that we must find a way to make our multifaceted diversity an asset, or else it will continue to be our deepest and most painful source of strife.

The murder of a young Tibetan nun at the hands of Chinese border guards at the rooftop of the world offers a unique parable for the tale of modern Tibet. Chinese police are instructed to take any measures necessary to protect the border of Tibet. When a group of climbers witness the murder of a young Tibetan nun who is fleeing to India, two men have a choice: turn a blind eye and preserve their climbing careers or alert the world to the grand scale of human injustice played out daily in Tibet.

Who Shot Ahmed? recounts the murder of a 22-year-old videographer, killed in cold blood in the dead of night at the height of Bahrain’s Arab Spring revolution. On a small island Kingdom swirling with political, economic, and sectarian tensions, Ahmed’s murder epitomized everything that had gone wrong since 2011, when pro-democracy protesters took to the streets in droves. Drawing on dozens of testimonies, journalist Elizabeth Dickinson traces the tale of Ahmed’s death and his family’s fearless quest for justice.

Per Papa Francesco, Eva è stata vittima di una fake news uscita dalla bocca del serpente. A quanto pare, da allora le bufale non hanno smesso di rovinare le donne, visto che ancora oggi se una ha subito molestie si scrive che ci ha fatto carriera, mentre se uno ammazza la moglie per i giornali ha agito in preda a una rabbia momentanea. Ma le vittime di questi abusi dell'informazione non sono solo i corpi delle donne: quando si parla di migranti la verità si inabissa in fondo al mare, come un cadavere affogato.

Sie war eine prominente deutsche Geisel der türkischen Regierung: Als angebliche Terrorunterstützerin saß die Journalistin und Übersetzerin Meşale Tolu mit ihrem kleinen Sohn in Haft; danach wurde ihr die Ausreise aus der Türkei verweigert. Jetzt, wieder in Deutschland, berichtet sie über diese Zeit: über die Brutalität von Polizei und Justiz, das Alltagsleben in der politischen Gefangenschaft zwischen Hoffnung und Verzweiflung, ihren Kampf um Freiheit für ihre Familie und ihren Einsatz für die Pressefreiheit.