Guinea-Bissau Forgotten?

Link: http://allafrica.com/stories/201302080986.html?aa_source=mf-hdlns

Guinea-Bissau is a country in West Africa and although this region receives a lot of coverage in the news the poor conditions in Guinea-Bissau has long eluded the headlined. The article highlights some of the most ‘timely’ sections of the human rights situation report prepared by the Guinean Human Rights League (GHRL) and released on February 7^th, 2013. One of the most shocking information highlighted by this article is the fact that the several human rights violations taking place in Guinea-Bissau are not being mentioned about. Organizations such as the Human Rights Watch did not even include Guinea-Bissau in their 2012 report. This is particularly surprising as Human Rights Watch is very highly regarded around the world for its coverage. This has greatly increased the importance of the report published by the GHRL.

Guinea-Bissau had a coup d’etat last April and the transitional period to a normal government has been extremely difficult on the local people. The military regime that is controlling the country has no plans laid out for the transition to a regular government. Instead all political voices and opinions are being repressed extremely strongly and the article discusses a few such ‘incidents’ that are referred to by the report. All the reasons to have a coup d’etat, have been left unfulfilled since last April and there is no ‘peace’ that was promised before the coup. The people of Guinea-Bissau live in fear and dread as the country is nearly in a state of lawlessness. There are violation of economic and social rights and the rights of women and children, and well connected people are settling their ‘personal scores’ without any influence from the judiciary.

The rights of the people are severely curtailed by the military command and most of the world is unaware of these human rights violation because there is no coverage about them in the international news. This situation is something that needs to be addressed quickly by the world leaders to demonstrate the importance of human rights to every human living in this world and to ensure them that their human rights will and must be respected by all.