Israel s fierce targeting of human rights groups exposed in new report April 28, 2021 at 2:03 pm | Published in: Israel, Middle East, News, Palestine
Criticisms of Israel labelled as antisemitism - Cartoon [Carlos Latuff/Twitter] April 28, 2021 at 2:03 pm
Over the past decade, Israel has been running a vicious smear campaign targeting human rights groups critical of the Zionist state, a new report by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (the Observatory) has found. Titled Target Locked, the report exposed the unrelenting Israeli smear campaigns to discredit human rights groups in Israel, Palestine, and the Syrian Golan.
Human rights groups and NGOs that are working on issues related to the Israeli occupation, settlement activity, accountability for international crimes and human rights violations, asylum seekers and refugees, political prisoners, or the rights of the Palestinian minority within Israel, have been the primary target of a vast de
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Uzbek authorities have boasted of opening up, of great reforms in progress, since 2016. But for many independent Uzbek NGOs, the barriers to registration remain high and almost unscalable, as Dilmurad Yusupov, a Ph.D. researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, explains in the interview below with The Diplomat’s Catherine Putz. Tashkent has bragged of 10,000 NGOs in the country, but Yusupov says the official statistic is inflated by government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) which are backed by considerable institutional support and lack the grassroot connections of genuine NGOs.
Yusupov, an advocate for disability inclusion and civil society development in Uzbekistan, stresses that truly independent NGOs are critical to Uzbekistan’s democratic development.
There Won’t be Political Reform in Uzbekistan. Here’s Why
Genuine reform takes place not through quashing free thinkers and critics but in encouraging and even embracing them.
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December 22, 2020
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On December 10, International Human Rights Day, a group of human rights defenders, activists, researchers, artists and filmmakers gathered in Tashkent’s 139 Documentary Center. They were there for the premier of a documentary film about former political prisoners who were released from the notorious Jaslyk prison, a facility synonymous with torture, and where they had been condemned to sentences of up to 24 years after falling foul of the Karimov regime.