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Guatemalan Civil War

Cassandra Wilson March 6, 2019 For 36 years, from 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s military was at war with its own indigenous people.    Army commanders backed by the United States of America took control of the country in 1954, under the leadership of Colonel Carlos Armas, to stop the Guatemalan Revolution which put communists in charge of the country in the early 1950’s.     Six years later, a far more brutal leader, General Fuentes, took power by assassinating Colonel Armas, and began a large scale conflict against former supporters of the leftist movement, and armed rebel groups who lived mainly in the country’s northwestern interior. About two hundred thousand people, mainly indigenous Mayans, were either killed, or simply disappeared.    As the civil war raged on, ordinary citizens protested against the actions of the military, and they and their families also became targets. By the 1980’s there was almost no remaining opposition and the military ruled the country with unquestioned
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do human rights really exist if they can be taken away so easily? a one person discussion

Human rights were created by humans to ensure that things like holocaust and slavery never happen again. But in places around the world, those very right are being ignored and violated. The Gay-concentration camps in Chechnya, and the African Slave trade. The Gay-concentration camps in Chechnya are a product of the Chechens a mainly Islamic group of people in a part of Russia, the concentration camps are modeled after the Nazi camps. The UN hasn't done anything but demand that they stop... they haven't and won't. The camps violate The Universal declaration of human rights article 5 " No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Africa has become the world's epicenter for the modern slave trade. There is little to not enough being done about this. Slavery itself violates  The Universal declaration of human rights  article 4 " No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall
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Uighur Detention Camps

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You are an ethic and religious minority, forced from your home to a desolate and cramped political "reeducation" camp. There are thousands of you there. You have not been charged with any crime, and many have already been there for many months. You have no idea how long you'll be here for. This isn't the beginning of a biography of a Holocaust survivor from 1939, but rather the real life of current Uighur minorities in modern day China, where thousands of them are being separated from their families and detained in these camps to be forcibly assimilated into a single, unitary state. This atrocity is happening almost exclusively in the far western province of Xinjiang. The Uighurs, being a Turkish ethic group that primarily practice Islam, are routinely discriminated against for their appearance and religion, and are being supplanted by Xi Jinping's government by having the majority population, Han Chinese, being brought into the province to have the Uighurs assi
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Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia

Women's rights have historically been overlooked by the government in Saudi Arabia. However, as Salman has began to make some changes to the law the public believes things are going to get better for women. In 2017, a law, to be put in place by 2018, was passed to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia. What the public doesn't realize is everything going on in the background that is still impeding on women's rights. A women named Loujain al-Hathloul is a strong women's rights activist. In 2014, she drove into Saudi Arabia using a United Arab Emirates and was arrested. United Arab Emirates licenses are usually valid in Saudi Arabia but because of Saudi Arabia's old laws against women drivers her actions were considered illegal. She, along with other women's right activists she was working with, was arrested again just months before the driving band was lifted in 2018. During this time she says she was tortured with waterboarding, beatings, confinement, and electric
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How Do Human Rights Compare Internationally to the United States?

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According to a landmark paper published in 2014, titled Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability , it was found that the way we measure human rights has changed overtime. The standards for human rights protection have gotten higher over the last 65 years that this study was analyzing (1949-2014). In response to this, the author created the “dynamic standard model” which uses different statistical techniques to adjust the “bias in measurements so that human right protection measurements can be compared over time” ( Fariss ; Roser). Below is an adaptation of the data he collected for the year 2014, where zero is the mean internationally over time, and any number below or above zero accounts for a standard deviation in the respective direction (Roser): Notice that the United States is in fact below average (below 0). This is more evident by plotting a graph comparing different countries using the data from the study mentio
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French protestors' rights violations

An article in the Human Rights section of UN News discussed serious concerns among experts about the French government’s treatment of yellow vest protestors, citing excessive use of force as nearing violation of the protestor’s rights. They said of an additional law the French government wanted to pass to further restrict the protestors that it was “not in line with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which France is a Party.” Perhaps especially coming from a country founded on freedom of speech and assembly, it’s chilling to see these rights violated, especially in a first-world European democracy. While the government may argue that they have only resorted to measures as extreme as they have because of the violent nature of the protests, the article explained most experts agree the response is hugely disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the protestors. Seeing an argument so widely agreed to be false stand as defense on an international level is
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Human Rights Violations Against the Rohingya People in Myanmar

As part of my research for my Human Rights presentation, I read an article from BBC News titled “Myanmar Rohingya: What you need to know about the crisis.” It was very clear and succinct about the issue, and it also contained a lot of images and statistics that were a lot easier to understand than some of the other sources that I saw. It talked about human rights violations about the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar since August 2017, which is when the most recent attacks by the military started. Myanmar is a majority Buddhist country, so the Rohingya have faced a lot of discrimination for a long time. The majority of them live in the Rakhine state of Myanmar and face a lot of restrictions due to the fact that they are considered by Myanmar to have illegally immigrated from Bangladesh, so they are not considered citizens of Myanmar. Since the violence against them started up again in August 2017, the military has commited many acts of what is considered “ethnic cleansing” and even “mass g
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