Nicolae Ceauşescu Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...Ceauşescu In 1965 Nicolae Ceauşescu ( b. 26 January 1918 ; d.25 December 1989 ) became the head of state of Communist Romania. By this time, this Eastern European country had already distinguished itself as unique among Warsaw Pact nations in distancing itself from the Soviet Union. On the face of it, the country's independence might have been positive in every respect, but for Ceauşescu's Romania, autonomy only served to foster the most repressive Communist regime in Eastern Europe. And while other East European countries gradually became more open and...
Tito Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...with a profound commitment to Marxist orthodoxy. Harsh repressive measures against dissident elements in the country were not uncommon. The early years of Communist rule followed the standard formula of arrests, show trials, forced collectivization, suppression of churches and religion, and the erection of a straitjacket planning system. Many observers of Yugoslavia at the time characterized it as a “ruthless totalitarian police regime” (Lees, p. 6) and the “Kremlin's satellite police state” (p. 46). The sudden break between Tito and Stalin was marked...
South American Southern Cone Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...drawing on economic technocrats for guidance. Both the military and its technocratic allies believed that the severity of the previous crisis demanded unhesitating, drastic action and that perseverance would bear fruit, and the regime brought the full weight of the state's repressive apparatus to crush opposition to its policies. By the same token, however, the military's freedom from societal pressures and exclusionary policy making made it difficult to dispel the link between government policies and the worsening economic crisis. In March and April 1980 ...
Guatemala Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...include coffee growers and their urban counterparts, while a repressive state apparatus protected international interests. Fundamental rights were severely restricted and overtly antidemocratic policies implemented in defense of elite interests. In the first years of the dictatorship Ubico crushed the nascent labor movement and destroyed a small and as yet ineffectual Communist Party. In a context of severe cultural and institutional racism, indigenous peasants were particularly vulnerable to state repression and were subject to vagrancy laws, which violated...
Kurdish Nationalism and Rights Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...its repressive policies as alliances across ethnic and religious lines started to emerge around anti-West, anti-imperialist sentiments; calls for an independent Iraq; and demands for socioeconomic reforms. The measures taken by numerous cabinets established by Prime Minister Nuri al-Said between 1932 and 1958 included martial law, anti-Communist witch hunts, the destruction of Kurdish villages, the banning of political parties, and the suppression of political mobilization efforts. Theoretically, Iraq had been an independent state and a member...
Central America in the 1980s Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...of strong opposition movements, turned to the military and created state apparatuses with tight control over society in order to ensure maintenance of power. Weak civilian control over the military and the security sector more generally enabled these forces to enjoy de jure or de facto control over political life. This in turn meant that the military became involved in internal political disputes. As a result, in the name of public security, civilians were often the targets of excesses by state forces, whether military or police, as well as (though generally...
North Africa Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...Rally ( RCD ), and the parliamentary seats reserved for opposition parties serve to cap their representation rather than facilitate participation. In the years since 1989 , the two most significant opposition parties have been decimated through legal restrictions and repressive measures. The moderate Islamist party Al-Nahdha was never granted legal status, and the liberal Movement of Socialist Democrats ( MDS ) was progressively worn down by harassment and outright repression. The MDS leader Mohamed Mouadda was arrested in 1995 for criticizing...
North Korea Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...though the North's record on human rights was difficult for national leaders to ignore. Unchallenged by calls for reform, North Korea's policies on human rights seemed certain to endure with an emphasis on absolute authority as exerted through the armed forces and the state security apparatus. The elevation first of Kim Il-Sung and then of Kim Jong-Il to godlike status and as figures of worshipful veneration does not tolerate difference of opinion of any sort, on any level. The regime viewed ruthless penalties, ranging from execution and torture to lengthy...
Soviet Gulag Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...The term “Gulag” has come to mean much more than the central camp administration, however: it signifies the whole system of camps, the special settlements, and the system of administrative exile that along with the secret police and the executions made up the repressive apparatus of the Soviet state. The heyday of the Gulag was during Joseph Stalin's rule. The Gulag (office and camps) came into being in 1929 as Stalin began his “revolution from above,” his effort to force the rapid industrial development of the USSR and end all forms of resistance to...
Kenya Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...and of transforming Kenya into a country of “ten millionaires and ten million beggars.” By the mid-1970s the ailing Kenyatta, now well into his eighties, had started to lose control over the feuding factions. The conservative wing of the party gained control of the state apparatus, which it deployed to silence its opponents. In 1975 Kariuki was murdered and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry implicated the security forces and senior members of the Kenyatta government in his death. Kariuki's murder marked the closing of the little space that had...
Mexico after the Institutional Revolutionary Party Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...worst economic and financial crisis the country had thus far suffered. The government made a dramatic turn in economic policy, transforming its economy from an inward, state-guided system to an open one oriented toward external markets. Governmental subsidies were progressively reduced and the social development apparatus of the state was dismantled. Paradoxically, in 1981 , the Mexican state had ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights ( ICESCR ) and thus acquired obligations difficult to fulfill under the new economic...
Brazil Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...class grew. Brazil was still an agrarian society, but its cities developed, its economy became more complex, and republican ideas of equality of citizenship were promulgated. The middle class expanded, and a civil service run on meritocratic lines was created within the state apparatus. Vargas was deposed in 1945 , ushering in a second republic with elections and an expanded franchise that endured until 1964 . During this period Brazil's participation in the first few decades of the post–World War II human rights “revolution,” marked by the approval of...
Nongovernmental Organizations Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...conferences, establishing national human rights institutions (state-established permanent bodies charged with overseeing human rights implementation), and intermittently attempting to develop a regional human rights framework from the foundation of either the Arab Charter on Human Rights or the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. This did not, of course, lead to substantive human rights implementation by Arab states, and human rights remains on the margins of the region's repressive status quo. Indeed, pro forma ratification of human rights treaties...
Torture Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...transnationally to create the awareness and professionalism conducive to the replacement of a culture of force by one of lawful and effective investigation. Projects, often supported (financially or otherwise) by official institutions, are aimed not just at the apparatus of law enforcement and state security but also at the administrators of justice, such as judges and prosecutors as well as at defense lawyers and medical professionals. This is no easy task. In many countries, especially those emerging from authoritarian regimes that provided a semblance of...
Film Reference library
Encyclopedia of Human Rights
...of persons of color may obscure reality. The Last King of Scotland ( 2006 ) is a representative example; in that film, the Scottish doctor and confidant of the dictator Idi Amin is subjected to cruel torture, yet he is hardly typical of the many, real victims of Amin's repressive dictatorship. Finally, the saturation of visual re-enactments of torture and abusive treatment, found in dozens of films discussed in this essay, has dramatic impact on audiences themselves. Witnessing the intimate nature of violence or hearing survivors testify about their...
