Free Republic

Before you join Jay Leno and Susan Sarandon and sign an open letter to Gov. Jerry Brown to protest "solitary confinement" in California prisons' security housing units, there are a few things you should know. Start with the criminal records of the leaders of the Short Corridor Collective -- the four inmates who, despite their "extreme isolation," orchestrated a hunger strike with more than 30,000 inmate participants July 8. While serving time for burglary in Folsom State Prison, hunger strike leader Todd Ashker stabbed a fellow inmate to death in 1987. During his murder trial, a fellow inmate and fellow...

Beijing says the human rights situation in China is at a historic best, rejecting comments from a senior U.S. diplomat that the rights situation is deteriorating in China, with relatives of activists increasingly being harassed and policies in ethnic areas becoming more repressive. In a statement issued late Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry said that the Chinese are enjoying unprecedented rights, but added those rights must be exercised within China’s law. … Rights watchers have been alarmed by the targeting of relatives of high-profile dissidents, including blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who exposed abuses in the enforcement of China’s one-child policies, and...

Western diplomats at the Rouhani inauguration Sunday should challenge him to release political prisoners The inauguration of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran on Sunday has stirred considerable hope among some Western observers for the start of a new era of liberalization in the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rouhani may prove to be the reformer his supporters claim, but the luxury of such optimism isn't available to the hundreds of dissidents who have run afoul of the Islamic Republic and are trapped in its prisons. Since Mr. Rouhani's election in mid-June, the regime's executions of prisoners—a good barometer of a government's...

President Robert Mugabe has yet again revived his acerbic attacks on Zimbabwe's gay community whom he called worse than pigs and threatened to behead them. Mugabe is a self-proclaimed homophobe who in the past has labelled gay people "worse than pigs and dogs", and threatened them with severe punishment. Mugabe's latest threats were made in Mutare where he was addressing a rally at the Aerodrome Ground on Tuesday, according to a NewsDay report. In the report, Mugabe is quoted telling his followers that: "If you take men and lock them in a house for five years and tell them to...

Amid a surge of anti-gay violence and repression in several countries, the United Nations’ human rights office on Friday launched its first global outreach campaign to promote tolerance and greater equality for lesbians, gays, transgender people and bisexuals. Called Free & Equal, it’s an unprecedented effort by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to change public attitudes around the world on issues that have bitterly divided the U.N.’s own member states. The multi-pronged campaign—announced at a news conference in Cape Town, South Africa—will include videos and public-service announcements distributed through social media, a new website, a...

"When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone's rights are at risk." So says the American Civil Liberties Union on the section of their website dedicated to the issue of immigrants' rights. "No Human Being Is Illegal" reads the banner at the top of the page, a tacit indictment of any who don't tow the liberal line when it comes to immigration policy. Scroll over to a different section of the website, and you'll find this: "The 'War on Women' describes the legislative and rhetorical attacks on women and women's...

The Pentagon has wonderful news for the inmates at Guantanamo who are refusing to eat: It will not infringe on their religious beliefs by force-feeding them during the daylight hours of the upcoming holy month. Their right to decline food will be scrupulously respected until nightfall. "We understand that observing the daytime fast and taking nothing by mouth or vein is an essential component of Muslim observance of Ramadan," a prison spokesman said. "And for those detainees on hunger strike we will ensure that our preservation of life through enteral feeding does not violate the tenets of their faith." Come...

The Egyptian army has set a deadline of 4 p.m. Cairo time for the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Morsi to compromise with the people of Egypt (by stepping down.) Morsi refuses. 18 people were killed and 200 were wounded in clashes at Cairo University last night.A Washington Post report from Cairo on dueling statements from Morsi and the army: Waving his hands and shaking his fists in a 45-minute speech on national television late Tuesday, Morsi swore that he was committed to the democratic process that brought him to power and said that any attempts to subvert the constitution...

In Europe in particular, “human rights” have become dirty words. For that we have to thank supranational bodies like the European Court of Human Rights, that have given this concept a bad name through a never-ending proliferation of entitlements that often have very little to do with the concept’s original and true meaning. Parts of the European counterjihad have also started systematically attacking the idea of human rights. And there were some who did not sign the Brussels Declaration at the conference of July 2012 because they had problems with its human rights strategy. The phenomenon of so-called “judicial imperialism”,...

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius added a new twist to the typical pro-abortion line… “I’m alarmed about restrictions being passed by various legislatures that take out of the control of women, and their partners, and their doctors, and their priests, their own decisions about their healthcare.” Video follows:

President Obama told attendees at an LGBT Pride Month celebration that the U.S. needs to get marriage equality "done now," but that he believed the nation had reached a "turning point" on gay rights. "We´re not going to have to wait that long," Obama said. "From Minnesota to Maryland, from the U.S. Senate to the NBA, it´s clear we´ve reached a turning point." The president said that progress could be traced "from the courage of those who stood up." "Eventually America gets it right. That doesn´t mean we can be patient," Obama said.

Chen Guangcheng, known for exposing coerced abortions and sterilizations resulting from China’s one-child policy and enforced by state family planning officials, has been booted from the New York University campus. Chen received a fellowship to study at New York University after seeking help at the U.S. embassy in Beijing last year to escape China, where he faced imprisonment and house arrest for exposing brutal campaigns of forced abortions. New York University law professor Jerome Cohen assisted Chen in China after he fled to the U.S. Embassy and assisted him in obtaining a fellowship at New York University. The two had...

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Nicholas Winton rescued hundreds of young Jews from the Nazis and is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. We meet some of the children he savedThe birthday party will be modest and understated, in keeping with the man. Sir Nicholas Winton is 104 tomorrow and naturally some of his children will be there to wish him well. Not only his blood offspring but those known as Winton’s Children – the ones he saved from near-certain death three-quarters of a century ago. Nicholas – Nicky – Winton hates to be thought of as a hero, hates being compared with Oskar...

FULL TITLE: Child rapists taken off Sex Offenders' Register in secret... and police say it's to protect their human rights Police have secretly removed dozens of convicted sex offenders, including paedophiles and rapists, from the Sex Offenders’ Register, the Mail can reveal. Following a human rights ruling, the law was changed last year to allow sex attackers to claim they no longer posed a threat and apply to be taken off the register. Since then, 43 applications have been approved behind closed doors, at the rate of one every five days. About half of those who apply have been successful...

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...