Rights Watch

MOSCOW -- Frustrated because of what she couldn't see and devastated by what she did see, the United Nations' chief human rights official returned from Chechnya yesterday, saying she had confirmed reports of serious human rights violations. In Moscow, Mary Robinson was met by volleys of denial. The interior minister lectured her, she said. An official news agency presented a voluminous "white paper" arguing that Russia's conduct in Chechnya was inevitable. And intellectuals held a bellicose news conference, telling the rest of the world to mind its business.

WASHINGTON -- A State Department report issued yesterday said that government forces in Colombia continued to participate in the murder and torture of that country's citizens last year, but the Clinton administration pressed on with a request for $1.6 billion in U.S. aid that would expand the power of Colombia's police and army. "The government's human rights record remained poor" in Colombia, although there was some improvement, the State Department's annual rights report said. "Government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998."

A city grand jury that regularly inspects jails will be asked to review a human rights group's report that sharply criticized conditions for youths confined in Baltimore City Detention Center.Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy said she will recommend that the report by New York-based Human Rights Watch be reviewed by a new city grand jury to be impaneled in January.She disclosed those plans in a Nov. 16 letter to Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of Public Justice Center, a Baltimore advocacy group that provides legal services to the poor.

LaMont W. Flanagan doesn't dispute that the jail he runs in Baltimore is grim. But he bristles when it is portrayed as an inhumane, unsanitary and unsafe place to hold youths awaiting trial for serious crimes.The conditions at the Baltimore City Detention Center are not, he insists, "appalling" -- the descriptive term that the New York-based group, Human Rights Watch, uses often in a recent report about juveniles held in adult jails in Maryland."It is antiquated," Flanagan said, noting that parts of the jail were built in 1802.

MOSCOW -- Terrifying in its brutality, often indifferent to guilt or innocence, Russia's legal system has organized itself around an unspoken bargain: Policemen are free to torture criminal suspects as much as they like, as long as they make arrests, get confessions and keep their victims quiet.This dark assessment emerges from a two-year investigation carried out by Human Rights Watch into police methods and legal practices across Russia. The 196-page report, "Confessions at Any Cost, Police Torture in Russia," is being published today.

Hundreds of juveniles awaiting trial in Maryland are locked each day in bleak adult jails like the Baltimore City Detention Center where they endure rampant violence and appalling conditions, a human rights group says.In a report released today, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said some guards at the Baltimore facility condone and organize fights between youths who have scores to settle. It said that jailed youths lack adequate food, education and mental health services.LaMont Flanagan, the state official who oversees the city detention center, said the report gives a "highly exaggerated picture" of conditions there, and he flatly denied that any guards were allowing youths to fight.

UROSEVAC, Yugoslavia -- The last time Hava Bislimi saw her eldest son, Rexhap, his face was battered and bruised. He was being pushed by security police officers into the family's front garden, where he was handed a shovel and ordered to dig for weapons.Reeling from beatings at the police station, Bislimi, a 33-year-old accountant, was too weak to follow the orders. So neighbors were called in to help. After they failed to find the alleged cache, Bislimi was told to look at the house where he had been born, a sprawling structure with an ancient apple tree in the courtyard.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration this year has "actively obstructed" human rights efforts as well as new mechanisms to enforce internationally accepted standards, according to a highly critical report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch.The report says U.S. actions particularly have been hurtful on three issues now on the front line of the global human rights campaign: child soldiers, land mines and an international criminal court.The U.S. practice of ignoring human rights in some areas and adopting a "selective" commitment based on economic convenience or strategic interests in others poses "a growing threat" to human rights in key parts of the world, most vividly in China and Central Africa, it charges.

WASHINGTON -- Human rights in Sudan are "extremely poor," the State Department said yesterday, charging the Islamic-led government with responsibility for killings, disappearances, forced conscription of children into the army -- and slavery.Citing a series of articles in The Sun, published in June, that detailed the purchase of two young slaves by two of the newspaper's reporters, the State Department said in its human rights report: "Although the law prohibits forced or compulsory labor, slavery persists.

London. -- Does it take Human Rights Watch to point out the obvious? In its latest report, it says ''the current epidemic of communal violence is today's paramount human-rights problem.'' Unfortunately, it does have to be pointed out, because our governments and much of our press have failed to analyze the problem thoroughly.On carnage and relief efforts, the media are often adept, portraying each new disaster with great strokes of verbal and visual color. But on causes, they too often fall back hastily upon simple explanations such as ''deep-seated hatreds'' and ''ancient animosities.