Experts from 13 Latin American countries called for a shift in counter-drug policies from a punitive to a public health-based approach for users, in order to reduce drug-related violence, on the argument that the current "war on drugs" has been lost in the region.

Sudan's elusive President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir and the unrelenting Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo are playing a political cat- and-mouse game.

New challenges and a long list of shocking cases involving hidden power structures are faced by the new head of the United Nations-mandated International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

In the first ever U.N.-mandated self-assessment of the United States' human rights record, the Barack Obama administration has reaffirmed its commitment to closing the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and to fixing the country's "broken immigration system".

After all the turbines in the Xiaowan hydropower station sputtered to life this week in China's south-west Yunnan province, the Asian giant was able to lay claim to having the world's largest hydropower capacity.

Green activists have various ways of pushing their causes, from enlisting movie stars to launching protests, but India's campaigners have also been quietly using legal weapons to try to get the projects they oppose, such as thermal plants, stopped or reversed.

Striking health workers have continued their work stoppage despite accusations that it endangers patients' lives. They are part of a nationwide strike by public sector workers that has some observers concerned that rising wage demands could harm South Africa's economy.

Peasant activists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera hope to find, at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the justice that eluded them in their home country of Mexico, to which they hope to return to rejoin their families.

Irene Wangolo was advised to undergo an HIV test during her antenatal visit and to return to the clinic with her husband so they could be counselled on preventing HIV transmission to their unborn baby. But her husband refused to accompany her saying it was not his business and Wangolo never returned to the clinic in Bungokho in eastern Uganda. So she missed all the services, including the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT).

News that Malawi's November local government elections are to be postponed yet again has hit female candidates hard – and mostly in their pockets. And it could mean that the country will have less female candidates to vote for when they finally go to the polls.

Health rights activists still insist that, despite some improvements to Uganda's controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Bill, it will affect the availability of generic medicine if enacted in present form.

The poverty rate in the districts of southern Chile where the logging industry is the main economic activity is nearly twice the national average, a new study shows.

It was supposed to help right old wrongs as well as protect India's forests, but four years after it took effect, a landmark law recognising the forest rights of scheduled tribes remains the subject of acrimonious debates among the country's government officials, environmentalists, and rights advocates.

Wearing a floppy cotton cap for shade, an exhausted Sarawut Kunrapang enters the compound of a mosque in the blistering afternoon sunshine. It is the latest stop for this 27-year-old Thai Buddhist in his walk for peace since mid-July from Bangkok.

Rightwing Israeli groups financially supported by Jewish and fundamentalist Christian groups from abroad are on a campaign to undermine free thought in Israeli universities. Collaterally, a move is under way by right-wing parties in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, to limit the freedom of action of civil and human rights-minded NGOs.

It was his second time to be caught stealing a car, so Turki was meted a jail term of five years. But the young repeat offender was only 17 years old at the time of his arrest, and therefore was still considered a minor under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

An average of 100 people go missing and between 40 and 50 unidentified bodies are found every month in this Brazilian city -- mysteries that could be cleared up simply with the sharing of information across agencies, a task that judicial and forensic experts have begun to successfully implement.

South African farm workers – especially female labourers – continue to be exploited, despite the existence of national labour laws and regulations designed to protect them. But in the absence of information and education about their rights, workers have a hard time claiming them.

The Jenpoj ("winds of fire) community radio station in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, which plays an important role in keeping the Mixe indigenous community informed, has had its equipment confiscated and has fought and won a court case to get a broadcast license.

A mother accused of backing insurgents in the Philippines and her newborn son are awaiting their release from prison, in a case that has gained international attention.