Human Rights

UN and EU leaders alike have criticized the executions of Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar. Barzan was Iraqs former intelligence chief and Saddam Hussein's half-brother, and al-Bandar was the former head of the Revolutionary Court. Both men were hanged for crimes against humanity. UN spokesperson Michele Montas said that SG Ban Ki-moon "regrets that despite pleas from himself and the high commissioner for human rights to spare the lives of the two co-defendants, they were both executed." UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour released a statement saying, "The imposition of the death penalty after a trial and appeal proceedings that do not respect the principles of due process amounts to a violation of the right to life." EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said that the executions were "detrimental also to the question of national reconciliation" in Iraq and other European leaders restated their objections to the death penalty. More

Yesterday, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) told the Security Council that by February, his office will hand over evidence of war crimes in Darfur to a set of ICC pre-trial judges. This will set in motion a series of events that will likely lead to indictments of Sudanese government officials for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

"On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has become a universal standard for defending and promoting human rights. Every year on 10 December, Human Rights Day marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration. On Human Rights Day it is celebrated around the globe that "All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms". This year Human Rights Day focuses on fighting poverty as a matter of obligation, not of charity." More

"Marking the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for stepped-up measures to end the practice and to address the entrenched poverty which leaves people vulnerable to enslavement. "Contemporary forms of slavery - from bonded labour to human trafficking - are flourishing as a result of discrimination, social exclusion, and vulnerability exacerbated by poverty," the Secretary-General said in a message on the observance." More

"Mr. Annan said it is crucial that the Council preserves and strengthens what he called its "crown jewel" - the system of Special Procedures, or rapporteurs, independent experts and working groups tasked with examining a specific area of human rights. "It has long since been recognized in theory, and increasingly also in practice, that the rule of law cannot be left to the discretion of governments, no matter how democratically elected they may be." The Secretary-General said the area most in need of innovation is the organization of the universal periodic review, a peer review mechanism. More

BBC: "UN investigators in the Democratic Republic of Congo say they have found mass graves with about 30 bodies in an army camp in the east of the country. The dead included women and children who appeared to have been murdered, a UN spokesman said. He believed they had disappeared in the last few months."

"The head of the United Nations body mandated to protect press freedom today deplored the murder of yet one more Iraqi journalist, saying it was vital to bring an end to "the outrageous campaign of bloodshed" against media professionals in the violence-racked country." More

On Sunday, the world's top humanitarian official met one of the world's worst war criminals in a remote jungle outpost on the Congo-Sudan border. Jan Egeland, the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator met Joseph Kony, leader of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army, in the depths of the jungle in an effort to promote peace in the devastated region.

CNN: "Human trafficking, including women forced to become prostitutes or minors forced to do child labor, is worse now than the trade in African slaves of past centuries, a top Vatican official said on Tuesday. "This trafficking in human beings has intensified, persons put into slavery because they depend on certain criminals who take possession of these human beings," said Cardinal Renato Martino, former longtime Vatican envoy to the United Nations and current head of the Holy See's office concerned with migrant and itinerant peoples." More here