Reports

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) violates the rights of hundreds of unaccompanied children each year, some as young as eight, contrary to international law as well as INS regulations. Children are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, all by the same agency charged with protecting their rights.

In this document, Human Rights Watch seeks to raise concerns about some disturbing trends in the protection of refugees it has observed in the course of researching human rights abuses.

This report examines the context within which children and their parents must struggle to exercise their rights and looks in detail at the legal provisions which deny them even the most basic rights and freedoms. It also reports on the current situation of children in Burma and the daily practices used by the military and other government agents which violate international law.

At least eighteen million children live or work on the streets of India, laboring as porters in railway stations or bus terminals, as rag pickers, and as vendors of food, tea, or handmade articles.

Kurds are the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Syria, comprising about 8.5 to 10 percent of the population of 13.8 million. This report documents the situation of stateless Syrian-born Kurds — 142,465 by the government's count, and well over 200,000 according to Kurdish sources — who have been arbitrarily denied the right to Syrian nationality in violation of international law.

Children in Bulgaria are often deprived of their basic rights by police, the very people who are supposed to protect them.

With credible estimates ranging from 60 to 115 million, India has the largest number of working children in the world. Whether they are sweating in the heat of stone quarries, working in the fields sixteen hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or hidden away as domestic servants, these children endure miserable and difficult lives. They earn little and are abused much.

When Atlanta set out to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, its application stated that “for many,” the city is “the modern capital of human rights.” In this report, one of a series on the U.S., we offer an assessment of how Atlanta, and the state of Georgia, violates international human rights standards.

The publication of Death By Default on January 7, 1996 was followed by several weeks of intense coverage of the report by the international news media.

Throughout the world, thousands of children are used as soldiers in armed conflicts. Although international law forbids recruiting children under fifteen as soldiers, such young children may be found in government armies and, more commonly, in armed rebel groups.

China’s claim to guarantee the “right to subsistence” conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death a world into which thousands of Chinese citizens disappear each year.

In March and May 1995, the Human Rights Watch Children=s Rights Project conducted an investigation in Louisiana into the conditions in which children are confined in that state, examining the human rights aspects of their incarceration.We found that substantial numbers of children in the state training institutions are regularly physically abused by guards, are kept in isolation for long periods o

The children of Sudan, north and south, have been denied their basic rights by all parties to the conflict, and by the government of Sudan even in areas such as Khartoum where there is no war. Many who are considered street children, mostly southerners and Nuba, are removed from their families without notice.

Throughout Pakistan employers forcibly extract labor from adults and children, restrict their freedom of movement, and deny them the right to negotiate the terms of their employment. Employers coerce such workers into servitude through physical abuse, forced confinement, and debt-bondage.

Hundreds of thousands of women and children are employed in Indian brothels—many of them lured or kidnapped from Nepal and sold into conditions of virtual slavery. The victims of this international trafficking network routinely suffer serious physical abuse, including rape, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment and exposure to AIDS.