Amnesty International on Tuesday urged the new Honduran President to order a full investigation into abuses committed by the security forces following June's coup d'état, bring those responsible to justice and provide reparations to the victims. Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, who is set to take office on Wednesday, was elected in November last year amidst a political crisis that saw President Manuel Zelaya ousted by military-backed right wing politicians in June. Hundreds of...

A spokesperson for the protesters said that “for the first time in more than a year,” VTV was paying attention to the opposition students’ movement, even if only because 1,000 students marched to the network’s studios in Caracas. The march to VTV came amid competing street demonstrations by opponents and supporters of President Hugo Chavez over his government’s decision to temporarily suspend Radio Caracas Television Internacional from the country’s cable...

Amnesty International has welcomed the release of a Mexican Indigenous man detained for almost 10 years following an unfair trial for murder. Ricardo Ucán Ceca, from Yucatán, was released on 31 December. He had been imprisoned since June 2000. He understood and spoke little Spanish and could not read or write. During his trial, he was not given an interpreter and his state appointed lawyer did not provide him with adequate defence. Ricardo Ucán claimed he shot...

It was a relief to get the news today of the unsuccessful appeal by Peru’s ex-president Alberto Fujimori to challenge the guilty verdict and 25-year sentence he received last April. This reaffirms the Fujimori trial as a landmark positive event for the global human rights movement, and a definite blow to Fujimori supporters and their aspirations to put Fujimori in power again (the 5 judges of the appeals court handed down a unanimous decision). The trial, as so often happens in cases...

Dina Meza lives and talks human rights at every opportunity she is given. As a journalist, an activist and a member of COFADEH (Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras), one of Honduras' oldest human rights organizations, she knows all too well what it means to work on an issue that is not always popular with the authorities. The past five months have been particularly challenging for Dina and her colleagues at COFADEH. Its members have spent countless days and nights...

Gilda Rivera works in an apparent oasis of calm on a hill in Tegucigalpa. When you are there, among the plants and paintings which decorate the building, it’s hard to imagine the stories she and her organization hear. But some days, an unknown car appears and parks suspiciously in the close vicinity of the offices for no apparent reason and waits, then it leaves. Gilda is the director of the Centre for Women’s Rights (Centro para Derechos las Mujeres), a group that works to...

The Colombian government should act swiftly to protect witnesses in criminal cases against members of groups that are successors to demobilized paramilitaries in the city of Medellín, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch called on the government to investigate attacks on witnesses and to bolster law enforcement efforts to stem the rapidly rising violence in the city attributed to the successor groups. On December 20, 2009, unidentified armed men repeatedly shot and killed...

The killing of an HIV/AIDS outreach worker on December 14, 2009, is part of a pattern of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Honduras that seems to have accelerated in the turbulent months since the June 28 coup, Human Rights Watch said today. The organization called on Honduran judicial authorities to open full investigations of all the reported killings, and to provide human rights training for the police and the judiciary about sexual orientation and...

Honduran authorities must launch an urgent and independent investigation into the murder of human rights defender Walter Trochez who was killed late on Sunday night while walking home through the centre of Tegucigalpa, Amnesty International said today. According to sources, Walter Trochez was shot in the chest by a drive-by gunman and taken to hospital where he later died. Amnesty International fears that he may have been targeted because of his human rights work. Walter Trochez told Amnesty...

Walter Trochez, 25 years old, a well-known LGBT activist in Honduras who was an active member of the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat there, was assassinated on the evening of December 13, shot dead by drive-by killers. Trochez, who had already been arrested and beaten for his sexual orientation after participating in a march against the coup, had been very active recently in documenting and publicizing homophobic killings and crimes committed by the forces behind the coup,...