La Vega, Guatemala Photo: Anna Vogt
A report published today by the Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute (HRI) finds that Mexico is currently falling short of its human rights obligations and is putting migrant children at risk of being returned to violent and dangerous situations in their home countries by failing to provide adequate access to international protection. The report is the product of months of research, including dozens of interviews with affected children and families, advocates and government officials and agency staff. Many of the Central American children interviewed were seeking asylum in Mexico.
U.S. Ambassador Urges Mexico To End “Alarming Levels Of Impunity” In Crimes Against Reporters
“Mexico remained one of the world’s most dangerous places for media workers in 2014, and freedom of expression faced new threats… multiple attacks on journalists and media outlets were carried out during the year, reporters faced police aggression while covering protests, and self-censorship remained widespread,” said the group.
Last month, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled that Article 239 of the national constitution was no longer applicable. The article prohibited the re-election of presidents, who were limited to a single four-year term, and furthermore stipulated that any president “directly or indirectly” supporting a modification of said article would be immediately removed from his post and banned from public office for 10 years.
Guatemala on brink of crisis after vice-president falls to corruption scandal
“We could be heading for chaos,” she said. “If the president is forced to resign there would be a power vacuum and the consequences of that could be terrible.” Others, however, see a chance for forcing political reforms that could start rooting out the corruption endemic in many Guatemalan institutions.
‘The Most Complex Elections’ Since the Signing of the Peace Accords
El Salvador’s electoral democracy has made enormous gains in recent years. But increasing politically-motivated Supreme Court interventions threaten the nation’s democratic institutions. Unfortunately, it does not seem like these interventions will stop anytime soon. On April 28, in a move that was described by Sigfrido Reyes, current head of the Salvadoran Congress, as a technical coup d’état against the March elections, the Supreme Court, ruled that the investiture of 24 elected legislators would be temporarily halted. This ruling was made after the Supreme Court accepted appeals from losing candidates from the PCN, GANA, PDC and CD parties to contest the results.
Measuring the Real Impact of a $50 Billion Engineering Marvel
Rather than consulting the local indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities, as required by national and international law, the government has reportedly offered money to communities to make them sign papers, set up power point presentations about the canal’s benefits, or simply told them next to nothing, merely marking the canal’s route. Forced relocation of people along the route may be inevitable, and many fear that the Rama language, spoken by only a handful of people, would be totally eradicated were the Rama people forced off their constitutionally guaranteed lands.
How a group of Dominicans were stripped of their nationality and now face expulsion to Haiti
They face expulsion to a country many do not know, where they have no family ties and whose language they do not speak. Even if they are not deported, the threat will presumably hang over them and they will have formally lost their status as equals within the DR. For Dominicans of Haitian descent, many are discovering that despite what their paperwork may say, they are foreigners in their country of birth. It is hard to escape the conclusion that for the Dominican state, they were never really citizens in the first place.
Reparations issue clouds Hollande’s Haiti trip
Ira Kurzban, a civil-rights lawyer based in Miami, told Al Jazeera that France’s obligation is clear: “France does owe something to Haiti given the circumstances that the Haitian people see themselves in. “They should have clean water, they should have infrastructure, these are the kinds of things that the French can help with right away.” Haiti was still paying off its so-called independence debt to France in 1947
Defying U.S., Colombia Halts Aerial Spraying of Crops Used to Make Cocaine
The government of Colombia on Thursday night rejected a major tool in the American-backed antidrug campaign — ordering a halt to the aerial spraying of the country’s vast illegal plantings of coca, the crop used to make cocaine, citing concerns that the spray causes cancer.
Review, Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change
Evo’s Bolivia is no doubt one of the most detailed and comprehensive assessments of Morales’s administration written to date. Its value lies in the authors’ capacity to contextualize the Bolivian experience regionally and globally, without losing sight of the country’s historical and social specificities. This work is an essential reference for those interested in studying the challenges and transformations of the Bolivian experiment that inspired global attention for attempting potential alternatives to capitalist development and colonialism.