Human Rights

A call from a South African trade unionist for national supermarket chains to stop importing avocado from Israel could ultimately lead to the banning of all imports from the Jewish state, if unions and human rights activists have their way. Read More

Enslaved workers make charcoal used to make basic steel ingredient Read More

Levi Strauss, the denim company, has been suspended from the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) for a year in a row over the concept of a living wage. Read More

Almost four years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's healthcare system is still a shambles. While most hospitals lack basic supplies, dozens of incomplete clinics and warehoused high-technology equipment remain as a testament to the failed U.S. experiment to reconstruct of Iraq. First in a series of CorpWatch articles. Read More

Lawyers will today begin preparing the ground for one of the largest class actions heard in the UK over 400 tonnes of allegedly highly toxic waste dumped in the Ivory Coast from a cargo ship chartered by a London-based company. Read More

It has been a year since the horror of the bloodshed in Sudan's Darfur region-with over 200,000 dead in three years-began leaking across the border into Chad. It has also been a year since a simmering conflict boiled over into a full-scale confrontation between World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and Chadian President Idriss Deby. Are the two connected? In a word, yes. Here's how. Read More

Hundreds of workers yesterday held a protest in Pingshan (Shenzhen) outside DeCoro, an Italian sofa company, accusing supervisors of severely beating three employees who dared to ask for respect of the minimum wage. In November 2005 disputes had already taken place between the employees and the company with mutual accusations of violence made. Read More

Supervisors of DeCoro company in Shenzhen have been accused to ill treating three employees who refused to accept salary cuts. The police said the five attackers have been arrested. There were disputes between workers and this company already in 2005. Read More

By permitting oil exploration on indigenous lands in the Toledo District the Government of Belize is violating treaty obligations and also a 2004 ruling by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Read More

In Liberia, a war-ravaged country with 80 percent unemployment, almost any job is a good one. But Firestone is increasingly under fire from human-rights advocates here and in the United States who say conditions on the 80-year-old plantation in Harbel - Firestone's single-biggest source of raw material for its U.S. manufacturing operations - are scandalous. Read More