Departments

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human rights

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/24/2021

    The Armenian ‘Genocide’: This is What Happened in 1915

    The Polish Jewish Lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in part after losing 49 family members to the Holocaust. But he was also motivated by his earlier study of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. 

  • SOURCE: National Security Archive
    3/23/2021

    Argentina’s Military Coup of 1976: What the U.S. Knew

    Newly declassified documents demonstrate that the US government, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were aware of the developing coup and evaluated policy as a balancing of the prospective military dictatorship's friendliness to the US against its likely willingness to commit human rights violations. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/17/2021

    The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality

    Xiyue Wang was released from an Iranian prison in 2019 after being detained for four months. The Princeton doctoral student is now a critic of softening American sanctions aginst Iran. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    3/11/2021

    Joe Biden is Making Clear that Saudi Human Rights Violations Won’t be Ignored

    by Nicholas DeAntonis

    President Biden's recent affirmation of an American commitment to human rights in discussions with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud fell short of many demands for action against the Saudi regime. But it is a step in reforming a relationship in which human rights have not been an afterthought, but a non-thought. 

  • 3/7/2021

    The Return of Human Rights on the American Agenda?

    by Richard Moe

    One of Jimmy Carter's legacies, albeit erratically observed, has been the assertion of human rights as a foreign policy priority. After four years of ignoring the issue, will the US under Joe Biden reclaim leadership in high-stakes relationships with Russia and Saudi Arabia? 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    2/16/2021

    Whose Rights Matter in Pandemic America?

    by Liz Theoharis

    In Cold War America, political movements that challenged the oppression of poverty were suppressed in favor of the formal ideal of civil rights. A leader of the revived Poor People's Campaign first envisioned by MLK before his death says that history must be addressed and undone. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/18/2021

    For Generations, African Americans Have Led Global Antiracist Movements

    by Brenda Gayle Plummer

    International organizations in the 20th century provided space for people from the developing world and African American activists to come together in movements that merged opposition to colonialism with demands for domestic civil rights. 

  • 2/14/2021

    How Abraham Lincoln Can Inspire Peace for Yemen

    by William Lambers

    The postwar "friendship train" campaign involved Americans personally in delivering food to the hungry in Europe, and symbolized the nation's larger commitment to the Marshall Plan. A similar broad effort could help advance the policies needed to end the humanitarian crisis of war and starvation in Yemen. 

  • SOURCE: CNN
    1/12/2021

    Israeli Rights Group: Nation Isn't a Democracy but an "Apartheid Regime"

    B'Tselem declared that "the traditional view of Israel as a democracy operating side-by-side with a temporary Israeli occupation in the territories 'imposed on some five million Palestinian subjects ... has grown divorced from reality'." The Israeli embassy in London dismissed the finding.

  • 12/13/2020

    Seven Years from the "Day of Infamy" to "Human Rights Day"

    by Rick Halperin

    "As 2020 comes to a close, even in the midst of a terrible pandemic which may claim 300,000 U.S. deaths by year’s end,  we would do well to pause and reflect upon how much progress has been made, and still needs to be made, in the struggle for human rights."