CJA

Grave two starts to emerge…

On Friday, families showed up at the site for an antemortem interview. The grave is being excavated and the bodies of at least five people are visible.

To be able to change someone’s fate by retrieving them from a pit of horror and return them to their family and loved ones for a future with a proper burial full of respect and love is the most honourable thing I have ever had the opportunity to partake in.

We have found the grave.

After a moving ceremony this morning, we began the process of exhumation at the site known as Badkha 2.

We have arrived in Hargeisa.

Prominent human rights attorney and long-time CJA partner Mario Joseph is facing an escalating series of threats and harassment against his person and the offices of the Haitian human rights NGO, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). The threats come as possible retaliation for BAI’s human rights claims against former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and the current government of Michel Martelly. Learn how you can take action to defend Mario Joseph and BAI’s important work.

In the history of state-sponsored torture, a rarely acknowledged truth is that accountability only takes place in countries where the torturing government has fallen from power. Victors tend neither to acknowledge nor to hold themselves accountable for torture.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) dismissed Ieng Thirith from the second Khmer Rouge trial on grounds of mental unfitness. Ieng Thirith has been widely believed to have Alzheimer’s disease, affecting her memory and ability to confront evidence against her at trial.

A former El Salvadoran military official accused of colluding in the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests admitted that he lied to U.S. immigration officials, a guilty plea that could allow him to be extradited to Spain for prosecution in the killings.