Category Archives: Publication

2022 Annual Report on Human Rights in Iran

News, Publication,

Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), founded 2005 in Iran, is a NGO which aims to promote, safeguard and sustain human rights in Iran. Since 2010 HRAI is registered as non-profit organization in the U.S. 

The 62 pages report, published December 26, is based on 1.3342 cases, gathered from 267 news sources during 2022 [January 1st to December 20th]. 55% of reports analysed came from sources gathered and reported by Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), HRAI’s press association.  13% came from official Iranian government sources or sources close to the government. 32% of reports came from other human rights news agencies. The report has 13 chapters on different fields of Human Rights, as ethnic and religious rights, education, work and trade unions, children, women, gender and sexual minorities. The cases are also sorted by months and regions.

The chapter on violation of cultural rights reports 17 cases. This included reports of 7 arrests, 27 individuals summoned to judicial and security organizations, 4 trials held, 1 house search, 4 cases of obstruction and interference with publications, 1 case of stopping an event and speech, 2 cases of confiscation of property and belongings. In this category, arrests have increased by 16% compared to the previous year. 

6.311 reports of violations against freedom of thought and expression have been registered. These violations included 2.2655 individuals arrested. 

Source: Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI)

Human Rights Watch World Report 2023

News, Publication

The HRW World report looks at the state of human rights and covers nearly 100 countries. Besides the crises arise and authoritarian governments deepen their assault on human rights, HRW’s Acting Executive Director Tirana Hassan writes that 2022 revealed a “fundamental shift in power in the world that opens the way for all concerned governments to push back against…abuses by protecting and strengthening the global human rights system.”

The 712-page world report can be downloaded in total or browsed by country at the HRW website.

Artistic Freedom in Africa and Latin America

News, Publication,

Artists at Risk Connection in partnership with regional and global networks continues regional reports on artistic freedom, based on closed workshops with artists, human rights defenders, and cultural practitioners from the respective region. After Connecting the Dots (Asian region) now Art in Turmoil: Artistic Freedom and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean has been released, with Amnesty International and Labo Ciudadano.

In November We Have Always Had To Fight: African Artists on Human Rights and Artistic Freedom was released in cooperation with  Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network (SouthernDefenders).

 

Downloads via ARC’s website:
We Have Always Had To Fight,
Art in Turmoil (English and Spanish)

Connecting the Dots: Artist Protection & Artistic Freedom in Asia

News, Publication

 PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), in partnership with the Mekong Cultural Hub (MCH) and the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM ASIA) have released a publication, which captures growing anxiety among artists and creative practitioners across South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia.

Connecting the Dots explores questions that are critical to understanding the state of artistic freedom in Asia, through the lens of 25 artists, creative practitioners, human rights defenders, lawyers and other stakeholders coming from 19 countries in South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia. It presents key discussions, findings, and recommendations from a closed virtual workshop convened in November 2021 and shares powerful anecdotal references from the participants, including a Uyghur musician and activist, a Vietnamese filmmaker, and a Myanmar artist – whose identities are kept confidential for security reasons.

Source: Artists at Risk Connection  

Report: Learning from the Pandemic

News, Publication, ,

A  report, edited by Pelin Çakır and introduced September 2021 by Martin Roth-Initiative (MRI) and Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), Germany, explores risks and restrictions for artistic freedom and mobility beyond the Covid-19 Crisis. By learning from the recent experiences, and particularly from restrictive contexts such as Turkey, Learning from the Pandemic explores how to support artists and maintain spaces of artistic freedom despite these circumstances. The full report is now available in English.

Sources: Full report (English),  Summaries: English, Turkish 

Performance as a Human Right

News, Publication

With new expectations for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world, the civic stakes of the performing arts are shifting. In a series of convenings, futureStage, an international, interdisciplinary team of scholars and experts at MetaLab (Harvard University) have compared and analyzed best practices and key ideas across a variety of areas.
Published October 2021, MetaLab’s futureStage Manifesto offers a condensed vision of performance as a human right, intimately entangled with all the stages on which contemporary life is performed, and offering global society new skills, sensibilities, and points of view.

future-stage.org (Manifesto)

German Translation at nachtkritik.de