Human Rights

Workers at a factory in American Samoa that made apparel for the J. C. Penney Company and other retailers were often beaten and were provided food so inadequate that some were ''walking skeletons,'' a Labor Department investigation has found. Read More

More than 250 Vietnamese garment workers are stranded in American Samoa, lacking money, jobs and fearful of punishment if they return home. Read More

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on business to work harder on environmental and social issues. Read More

The multinational oil giant, the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation (SPDC) was yesterday accused of importing arms and ammunitions into the country with which destabilisation was engendered in the Niger Delta. Read More

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's visit to Burma is mainly for business and not for human rights, critics here say. Read More

Here is the annual Top 10 Worst Corporations of 2000 list compiled by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. This year, rushing to the head of the pack of irresponsible biotech companies was the French corporation Aventis, the maker of Cry9C corn, sold under the name StarLink. Read More

A international coalition of human rights and environmental organizations announced the launch today of an online campaign to urge the Kenyan government to protect the Ogiek, an indigenous tribe that lives in Kenya's Mau Forest and is fighting to remain in their ancestral home. Read More

The new century is starting in Porto Alegre. All kinds of people, each in their own ways, have been contesting and critiquing neo-liberal globalisation, and many of them will be gathering in this southern Brazilian city on 25-30 January for the first World Social Forum. This time they won't just be protesting -- as they were in Seattle, Washington, Prague and elsewhere -- against the world-wide injustices, inequalities and disasters created by the excesses of capitalism (see the article by Bernard Cassen). Read More

Kenyan human rights activists are adding their voices to those already opposed to the World Bank driven land reforms, which they say, seek to make land "just another commodity" to be subjected to the whims of market forces, at the expense of millions of landless peasants. Read More

The aerial fumigation program that has grown out of the U.S. government's so-called ''war on drugs'' is endangering the fragile ecosystems and indigenous cultures of Colombia's Amazon Basin, a coalition of groups warned today at a news conference on Capitol Hill. Read More