Free Republic

Vladimir Putin is more than a year into his third term as president of Russia, and he is likely to dominate the country's next decade as he dominated the last—just as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev dominated their own times in the Kremlin. Like Putin or loathe him, he embodies an era. But centuries from now, the history books will barely remember the human rights abuses or oil pipelines in today's coverage of Russia. Mr. Putin will be remembered for one thing only: missing the chance to save his nation from a lingering decline. The United Nations predicts that, by...

As Biden speaks at event named for Old Hickory tonight, more appalling stories show party should dump him as icon Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And theyÂ’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina DemocratsÂ’ dinner tonight.But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should...

"Being Canadian, I would not expect much interference from the U.N. in my country. We are a proud multicultural First-world nation. We believe in human rights and liberty. We certainly cannot be compared to such horrific nations as, say, North Korea or Iran on matters of human rights. Yet here we are."

The kidnapping of the two Syrian Orthodox archbishops in Syria is an act of retaliation on the part of terrorist Chechen jihadists who are fighting with anti-Assad rebels over the killing of one of two Chechens responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings and the arrest of the other, by U.S. police forces, Turkish newspaper Sabah reported this morning. The two prelates, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrabhim and the Greek Orthodox bishop Boulos Yaziji were taken hostage on Monday, 30 kilometres from the Turkish border, as they were returning by car to Aleppo. Their driver was killed by...

China slammed the human rights record of the United States in response to Washington’s report on rights around the world, saying that U.S. military operations have infringed on rights abroad and that political donations at home have thwarted the country’s democracy. The report released Sunday in China—which defines human rights primarily in terms of improving living conditions for its 1.3 billion people—also cited gun violence in the U.S. among its examples of human rights violations, saying it was a serious threat to the lives and safety of America’s citizens. … “American citizens do not enjoy a genuinely equal right to...

Inmates at the Masanjia labour camp for women. Photo: AP A rarely seen report by a Chinese monthly has exposed some of the dark practices of a Liaoning labour camp including torture and inhuman treatment of female prisoners at a time when the government has vowed to reform the country’s notorious, decades-old labour camp system. The claims, reported by Lens, part of the leading SEEC Media Group, are based on accounts of provincial procurators, former camp officials and former and current prisoners. Masanjia female labour camp, near Shenyang, houses nearly all the female forced-labour prisoners in Liaoning province and is...

(CNSNews.com) – Reports about a fatwa urging young girls to travel to Syria to provide sexual services for jihadist rebels are causing a stir in Tunisia, while also drawing attention to the Islamic concept – little-known in the West and controversial among Muslims themselves – of “temporary marriage.” Girls as young as 14 are counted as eligible for the “sexual jihad,” and around a dozen young Tunisians are believed to have taken up the call, attributed to an influential Saudi scholar, Sheikh Mohamed al-Arifi. The pan-Arabic Al-Hayat newspaper reported this week that a video circulating on social media sites in...

Fusion center director: We don’t spy on Americans, just anti-government Americans Law enforcement intelligence-processing fusion centers have long come under attack for spying on Americans. The Arkansas director wanted to clarify the truth: centers only spies on some Americans – those who appear to be a threat to the government. In trying to clear up the ‘misconceptions’ about the conduct of fusion centers, Arkansas State Fusion Center Director Richard Davis simply confirmed Americans’ fears: the center does in fact spy on Americans – but only on those who are suspected to be ‘anti-government’. “The misconceptions are that we are conducting...

Bangkok, Thailand - Over two months after the bloody finale of Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, a lingering row over civilian casualties continues to roil a fractured society. Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their final military push against Tamil Tiger rebels didn't target hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped behind enemy lines. But aid workers, church officials, and government doctors reported that heavy shelling had caused mass casualties. A preliminary United Nations report estimated that 7,000 had died between January and May. On Wednesday, however, a group of doctors who had provided dramatic firsthand accounts of civilian suffering in...

The Obama administration’s “reset” of its relationship with Russia has largely failed, and in his second term, the president must press Moscow harder on human rights, which are under threat from President Vladimir Putin, Russian opposition leaders and Kremlin critics say. “In the beginning, the [Obama] administration mostly focused on global security aspects but forgot about human rights,” said Mr. Kasyanov, who is co-chairman of the Republican Party of Russia-People’s Freedom Party. At the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London, President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, released a joint statement announcing a “fresh” start in U.S.-Russian relations....

I’m about to commit one of the most deadly sins of “serious” commentary: whataboutism. You see in the United States the idea that we need to punish Russian officials for their human rights violations has rapidly become a bi-partisan consensus. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, a bill targeted at Russian human rights violators and their US-based assets, passed the US senate by a vote of 92 to 4. 92 to 4! In a deliberative body like the US senate, a chamber that can no longer pass a budget and that increasingly borders on complete dysfunction, a 92...

Obama’s Amazing AchievementsHis military intervention prompted some stunning reversals. By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:(a) War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress” in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong,” fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best...

TEL AVIV – A staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat served on the committee that invented the military doctrine used by President Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya. As WND first reported, billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, the world's leading organization pushing the military doctrine. Several of the doctrine's main founders sit on multiple boards with Soros. The doctrine and its founders, as WND reported, have been deeply tied...

“When it was my turn, they took me blindfolded,” the thief said. “Suddenly I felt a pain in my right hand that was out of this world. My hand had just been chopped off.” This is Gao, once the seat of an empire, and then a glorified village, and now a city the size of Scranton under the boot of its Islamist conquerors. Gao has become a place where thieves have their hands cut off, where women are forced to wear the stifling Hijab in 113 degree heat or be lashed and where unmarried couples are stoned to death. Borders...

BAMAKO, Mali — Isolated for centuries by the harsh desert that surrounds it, Timbuktu now finds itself even more cut off from the rest of the world. Rebels who captured the city in northern Mali in April have imposed a form of hard-edged Islamic rule, prompting many residents to flee in fear and changing the face of what had been a tolerant and easygoing destination that drew tourists from around the world. Women are now forced to wear full, face-covering veils. Music is banned from the radio. Cigarettes are snatched from the mouths of pedestrians. And the look of the...

Far from protecting hard-fought freedoms, modern human rights culture is being used to suppress liberty of conscience and restrain Christianity, he said. In one of his biggest addresses of the year, Benedict XVI said a false concept of human rights had gripped the western world. As a result, he said, religion is being marginalised and symbols of faith, such as the cross, are being treated with growing hostility. He also singled out how, he said, some charities and schools are limiting the freedom of Christians to practise or express their faith and spoke of the need for “conscientious objectors” who...

But look on the bright side, at least it wasn’t Sudan, Syria or Saudi Arabia. I’m coming around to the opinion that we should do everything possible to keep the UN Human Rights Council around. Not only is it the greatest source of irony since fish in a blacksmith shop, but it’s also a living reminder that the United Nations is to human rights as an exploding train is to transportation safety. The UN Human Rights Council met today in Geneva and elected Mauritania as its Vice-President and Rapporteur for the next year, the second highest position at the world’s...

Every so often, I share breakthrough stories about advances in “human rights” around the world. In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat. Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right. In Finland, broadband access is a basic right. There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe. In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles. Now, in honor of Sandra Fluke, the United Nations has decided that contraception is a human right. Not just a human right, a universal human right. The New York Times...

Barack Obama blunders again on the world stage By Nile Gardiner World Last updated: November 19th, 2012 Barack Obama: hardly off to a flying start It is only two weeks since his re-election, and his second term remains two months away, but Barack Obama is already blundering again on the world stage, with the kind of gaffes that would have been plastered on the front page of The New York Times if they had been committed by George W. Bush when he was in the White House. Obama's first term was littered with foreign policy gaffes, and there is every...

A Toronto barbershop has found itself at the centre of a human rights complaint after its barbers refused to cut a woman's hair. Faith McGregor, 35, went to the Terminal Barber Shop on Bay Street, back in June looking for a haircut. But she was turned away. The barbers, who are all Muslim, told her their religion didn't allow them to cut the hair of a woman who is not a member of their family. McGregor filed a human rights complaint.