Human Rights

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations human rights chief said Friday both sides in Somalia's conflict are committing attacks and using torture against civilians, which may amount to war crimes.

GENEVA (AFP) - The UN human rights chief said Friday that war crimes may have been committed in Somalia, where fierce fighting between hardline Islamist rebels and government troops has forced more than 200,000 people to flee in two months.

GENEVA - The U.N. human rights chief says Somalia's insurgents and government troops are committing torture and other atrocities that might be war crimes.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The next challenge for Indonesia's president, after winning re-election in a likely landslide, will be assembling a government that is bold enough to take on persistent corruption, poverty and human rights violations seen to be holding back the young democracy.

COLOMBO (AFP) - Sri Lanka has directed all international relief agencies, including the Red Cross, to scale down operations following the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels, the human rights minister said Thursday.

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has arrested a founding member of Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi's rights group amid a crackdown on critics following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election, a colleague told AFP on Thursday.

DHAKA (AFP) - An international human rights group on Thursday urged Bangladesh to overhaul its law on war crimes before trying those accused of murder and rape during the bloody 1971 liberation struggle.

LIMA, Peru - Peru's government doesn't provide adequate care for pregnant women in the impoverished highlands and jungle, a failure reflected in one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the hemisphere, a human rights group said Thursday.

JOHANNESBURG - A human rights group said Thursday that government officials in tiny Equatorial Guinea have used tens of millions of dollars in oil profits to buy lavish homes, cars and vacations while leaving citizens in miserable poverty.

CAIRO - Iranian authorities are using beatings, sleep deprivation and long interrogations to force confessions from those detained in the country's postelection turmoil, an international human rights group said Wednesday.

GENEVA (AFP) - The head of a UN human rights mission investigating the war in the Gaza Strip six months ago underlined on Tuesday that he was striving for a balanced outcome despite the obstacles.

MOSCOW - Some prominent Russian human rights activists said Monday they fear they won't be able to talk frankly and in detail about Russia's checkered rights record when they meet briefly with President Barack Obama during the summit.

MOSCOW - President Barack Obama said strengthening human rights and the rule of law in Russia should be a part of the much-heralded "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations, according to an interview with an embattled Russian opposition newspaper.

Andrew Heavens is a reporter and photographer who has worked with Reuters since 2005, from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and now Khartoum, Sudan. His African career followed 10 years of reporting for newspapers in Britain and the United States. In the following story, he recounts his experience of U.S. economic sanctions on the country whose president Omar Hassan al-Bashir is accused of masterminding human rights abuses in Darfur.

DUBAI (AFP) - Human Rights Watch has accused the United Arab Emirates of a "serious attack" on press freedom after a newspaper was suspended for reporting the alleged doping of race horses owned by UAE royalty.

MOSCOW - Russia's lower house of parliament on Friday approved a bill easing restrictions on the country's beleaguered human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations.

LONDON (Reuters) - Countries on the front line in the "war on terror" are using the battle against extremists as a smokescreen to crack down on minority groups, an international human rights group said on Thursday.

JERUSALEM - Amnesty International accused Israel and Palestinian militants of war crimes Thursday in the most comprehensive report on the recent Gaza war. Both sides rejected the findings.