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The Norwegian state pension fund has invested approximately 200 million Norwegian kroner (in excess of 32 million USD), in the South Korean company Daewoo. This company is known to have sold weapons and other equipment to the military junta of Burma (Republic of the Union of Myanmar), writes Inger Lise Husøy, Executive Director of the Norwegian Burma Committee. (14-FEB-07)
 

On 7 February 2007 the Rafto Foundation received a letter from the Vietnamese embassy in Copenhagen informing that a long planned visit to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to meet with Vietnam’s leading dissident, Venerable Thich Quang Do, is not possible. The Rafto Foundation is accused of harming good relationships between Norway and Vietnam. Right, Arne Lynngård, Chairman of the Rafto Foundation. (13-FEB-07)
 

Russia’s receives a very low Freedom Rating. According to human rights activists, the year 2006 is characterized by frontal attack on human rights and democracy in the Russian Federation that developed into general revenge of authoritarian-police regime against rights and freedoms earlier declared on paper. However, President Putin rejects accusations of human rights violations. (13-FEB-06)
 

For decades, a large part of the Saharawi / Western Saharan population has lived in camps in the barren desert of neighbouring Algeria. For ever more Saharawis, this is the only life they know. Their own country is but a distant dream. Independent photo journalists Rådmund Steinsvåg and Anne-Torhild Nilsen of Berserk Productions made it into the camps and produced this photo gallery. (12-FEB-07)
 

´The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Warsaw, Poland) strongly objects to the detention of the human rights defender Ms. Umida Niyazova. This is an example of the inadmissible practice carried out for some time now by Uzbek authorities, which consists in prosecuting individuals benefiting from the Helsinki Foundation’s educational programs´. (12-FEB-07)

Thursday February 15, Rafto Human Rights Award laureate from 2002 Sidi Mohammed Daddach, right, visits the Human Rights House in Oslo. Daddach, who was released in 2001, was the longest serving human rights activist in Moroccan prisons ever, with the major part of his sentence, 14 of the total 24 years, served on death row. He was released after sustained pressure from Western Saharan and international human rights groups. Read the full invitation to the meeting, in Norwegian, below. (12-FEB-07)
  

Following pressure from the Rafto Foundation and 30 other Norwegian human rights organisations, among them the Human Rights House Foundation, Sidi Mohammed Daddach had his passport back late last year. The passport had been confiscated since 2003. Below is the letter that did the trick, addressed to the Moroccan Minister of the Interior. (12-FEB-07)
 

The Karen Women´s Organization (KWO) today launches its report State of Terror, which documents in detail the terrible treatment suffered by women in the Kren state at the hands of the Burmese army. Among other things, the report documents the army´s systematic use of rape as a weapon of ethnic discrimination, suppression, and ultimately, war. The Norwegian Burma Committee supports the KWO, and stresses that the situation in the Karen state has gone from bad to worse in the last year. (12-FEB-07)
 

Uyghur political prisoner Ismail Semed was executed on the morning of February 8 in Urumchi, the provincial capital of East Turkistan (also known as Xinjiang Province) in northwest the People´s Republic of China. Semed, who was 37 years old at the time of hisexecution, was sentenced to death in October 2005 on charges of “attempting to split the motherland” and other charges relating to the alleged possession of firearms and explosives. 
(10-FEB-07)