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Human Rights Developments Defending Human Rights The Role of the International Community In addition to two independent human rights leagues and an official human rights monitoring body (lObservatoire national des droits de lHomme, ONDH), Algeria boasted a variety of womens rights and victims rights groups, and a number of lawyers who focused on human rights cases. All of these received some coverage in Algerias private press, though some were ignored by the state media. The biggest impediments to human rights work were not so much acts of repression directed at activists as obstacles placed in the way of information. These included restrictions on access to the scenes of mass killings, and intimidation that dissuaded persons from speaking to outsiders. The reluctance of witnesses to testify was prompted sometimes by fear of the security services or of armed groups, or both. The government provided little or no information in response to démarches from human rights organizations and lawyers concerning the whereabouts of disappeared persons and other human rights matters. One of Algerias leading human rights lawyers, Rachid Mesli, remained behind bars, serving a three-year sentence after an unfair trial in 1997 on charges of encouraging and providing apologetics for terrorism. In February 1998, the mentally disabled son of human rights lawyer Mahmoud Khelili was detained without charge for eight days in an apparent act of harassment directed at his father. The ONDH served mainly as a conduit to the government for citizen complaints and initiated no in-depth investigations. Its public credibility suffered from a tendency to minimize governmental abuses and a poor record in obtaining results for those who filed complaints about abuses such as torture or disappearances. However, the ONDHs annual report for 1997 did evoke the gravity of the disappearances problem; it reported logging 706 complaints during the year and cautioned, The procedure for pre-arraignment detention must not under any circumstances become a device for placing persons secretly in places that Algerian law did not specify for this purpose. During 1998, the government continued to deny requests to visit from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Federation of Human Rights, and from the U.N. special rapporteurs on torture and summary executions (see below). |
Algeria Bahrain Egypt Iran Iraq Israel, The Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Palestinian Authority Territories Saudi Arabia Syria Tunisia |
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