Human Rights

Verma is a patient at a clinic for survivors opened five years ago by a charity called the Sabhavna Trust. Up to 100 patients come to the two-story building every day for treatment of chronic lung ailments, eye problems, psychiatric disorders and other illnesses common among Bhopal victims. Read More

A Mexican federal court Tuesday rejected an appeal by two Mexican activists jailed in 1999 while they were leading an anti-logging campaign, their defense attorney said. Read More

This island nation has long been famed for its transformation from a developing country to an industrial colossus. But a recent labor dispute at a Taiwanese-owned textile factory in impoverished Nicaragua has cast a spotlight on what U.S. activists say is Taiwan's least admired export: labor rights abuses. Read More

An angry mob gathered around a train station, passing out photocopied flyers and shouting protests against an unjust company. Scrappy stickers were slapped on billboards, directing passers-by to a crudely designed website. The company they were railing against was a frequent target of grassroots activism: Nike. And the group running this guerilla-style anti-advertising campaign? None other than Nike itself. Read More

The proposed legislation is a response to a Knight Ridder Newspapers investigation that found some boys as young as 11 are sold or tricked into slavery to harvest cocoa beans in Ivory Coast, a West African nation that supplies 43 percent of U.S. cocoa. The State Department estimates that as many as 15,000 child slaves work on Ivory Coast's cocoa, cotton and coffee farms. The House of Representatives passed the labeling initiative, 291-115, in late June, and the measure awaits Senate action. Read More

Three American civilian airmen providing airborne security for a U.S. oil company coordinated an anti-guerrilla raid in Colombia in 1998, marking targets and directing helicopter gunships that mistakenly killed 18 civilians, Colombian military pilots have alleged in a official inquiry. Read More

Rio Tinto could be a poster child for corporate malfeasance. The largest mining company in the world, Rio Tinto has headquarters both in Melbourne, Australia and London, England and operations on all continents except Antarctica. For years, Rio Tinto has had a reputation for being responsible for environmental and human rights violations at its mines and smelters. Read More

From farms and automotive plants on the outskirts of Mexico City to the industrial heartland of Monterrey and the wineries and electronics firms in Tijuana and Guadalajara, signs are that this nation's recession is becoming more entrenched. Read More

New evidence has surfaced in a Colombian government inquiry exposing active collaboration between security forces protecting oil operations of the Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum (OXY) and the notorious Colombian military in one of the country' deadliest attacks on civilians. Read More

Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor west African country. And on some of the farms, the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or tricked into slavery. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9. Read More