Human Rights Politics

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.

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.

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.

Questo libro inizia con un episodio dell'Eneide: il naufragio dei Troiani sulle coste di Cartagine (nei pressi dell'odierna Tunisi, nel canale di Sicilia) mentre sono diretti in Italia. Enea e i suoi vengono accolti dalla regina Didone in nome dell'umanità e del rispetto verso gli dèi, perché le frontiere si chiudono di fronte agli aggressori, non ai naufraghi. Scrive Bettini: "Ci sono troppi dispersi nel mare che fu di Virgilio, troppi cadaveri che fluttuano a mezz'acqua perché quei versi si possano ancora leggere solo come poesia. Sono diventati cronaca".

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.

Times of great change did not occur by man's desire for change, but through protest and persistence. Across the globe, it seems we are in an era of protest and drive. Not since the '60s have we seen political divides and awareness of this magnitude, and it is shaping all aspects of our day to day life. While some feel lost in despair and fear, we can look to the past and rise up ourselves. Protest changes the world like nothing else has to date. What change do you want to fight for?

In this audiobook, Melvin Delgado offers a compelling case for the centrality of sanctuary cities' cause to the very mission and professional identity of social workers and others in the human services and mental-health professions. He also presents a historical perspective on the rise of the sanctuary movements of the 1970s and 2000s, giving context for the current environment and immigration debate.

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights.

August 18, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. This book reveals how the 70-year-long fight for women's suffrage was hard-won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others.

Inside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail, they’re a religious minority persecuted for their Christian faith. Outside the Middle East, they’re suspect because of their nationality. A small remnant of Christians is on the run from the Islamic State. If they are wiped out, or scattered to the corners of the earth, the language that Jesus spoke may be lost forever - along with the witness of a church that has modeled Jesus’ way of nonviolence and enemy-love for two millennia.