What was hailed as a landmark ruling in Guatemala has been thrown out, as the country’s high court ordered a former dictator’s case on charges of genocide return to a lower court.

Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt was just less than two weeks ago convicted of committing genocide against his own people during his time in power. According to the charges against him, Rios Montt was aware of the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayans during the country’s lengthy civil war, and did nothing to stop it. As punishment, the 86-year old former dictator was sentenced to eighty years in prison, the first time a national court had convicted a former head of state for committing genocide.

Instead of sitting in a cell for the rest of his life, however, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court has overturned the conviction and ordered that the trial jump back down to the tribunal that originally tried the case. Additionally, the trial has to rewind to where it stood back on April 19, to cover what Rios Montt claimed were violations of due process. As a result, it seems that Rios Montt will likely be released from custody in the near future, while many involved with the prosecution have already fled the country for fear of reprisals from those who sought to have the conviction reversed.

When it was first announced, Human Rights Watch called Rios Montt’s guilty verdict an “unprecedented step toward establishing accountability for atrocities.”

“The conviction of Rios Montt sends a powerful message to Guatemala and the world that nobody, not even a former head of state, is above the law when it comes to committing genocide,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, at the time.

The overturning of the ruling should be particularly disappointing for Americans, given the role that the United States played in enabling Rios Montt’s rule and subsequent abuse of power at the height of the Cold War:

When General Ríos Montt was installed in a coup in March 1982, Reagan administration officials were eager to embrace him as an ally. Embassy officials trekked up to the scene of massacres and reported back the army’s line that the guerrillas were doing the killing, according to documents uncovered by [Kate Doyle, a Guatemala expert at the National Security Archive].

Over the next two years, about $15 million in spare parts and vehicles from the United States reached the Guatemalan military, said Prof. Michael E. Allison, a political scientist at the University of Scranton who studies Central America. More aid came from American allies like Israel, Taiwan, Argentina and Chile. In the 1990s, the American government revealed that the C.I.A. had been paying top military officers throughout the period.

President Bill Clinton in 1999 traveled to Guatemala to apologize for the U.S.’ support for the dictator, saying that “support for military forces or intelligence units which engage in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the [Commission for Historical Clarification] report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

Tuesday morning, a consortium of human rights organizations launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a joint project to enact an international treaty banning the use of “fully autonomous robots” — machines that kill without direct human oversight — in combat. The launch highlights a net of thorny ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of these weapons, ones that have yet to be fully resolved by the US government or international community.

The campaign to ban robot soldiers began in response to rapid advancements in military robotics in roughly the past decade and a half, developments that most famously produced the armed Predator and Reaper drones in common use by U.S. armed personnel today. In 2009, several concerned researchers founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), the first NGO dedicated to pushing an international treaty that (among other things) would ban autonomous weapons. Debate over the topic heated up in late 2012, when Human Rights Watch released much-debated report arguing that autonomous weapons were in-principle inconsistent with international humanitarian law.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots joins ICRAC and HRW with 20 other like-minded organizations, including Amnesty International and Code Pink, in a renewed effort to codify a ban on autonomous weapons. There is no currently existing fully autonomous weapons platform and the U.S. Department of Defense, which supervises what is by far the most robotically advanced military in the world, has a self-imposed moratorium on deploying weapons capable of autonomously using lethal force. However, the Campaign’s member groups are worried that technological advancement will make the deployment of such weapons inevitable without a treaty ban:

Over the past decade, the expanded use of unmanned armed vehicles or drones has dramatically changed warfare, bringing new humanitarian and legal challenges. Now rapid advances in technology are permitting the United States and other nations with high-tech militaries, including China, Israel, Russia, and the United Kingdom, to move toward systems that would give full combat autonomy to machines…”We cannot afford to sleepwalk into an acceptance of these weapons. New military technologies tend to be put in action before the wider society can assess the implications, but public debate on such a change to warfare is crucial,” said Thomas Nash, Director of Article 36. “A pre-emptive ban on lethal autonomous robots is both necessary and achievable, but only if action is taken now.”

These efforts are obviously in their infancy, and militaries have some pretty obvious reasons to want autonomous weapons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a treaty banning robot soldiers anytime soon. Moreover, it’s not even clear if it’d be a good thing: lawyers and ethicists are sharply divided as to whether autonomous weapons would be illegal, unimportant, or potentially even an improvement over human soldiers.

Critics of autonomous weapons argue that they’re incapable of complying with critical provisions in international humanitarian law aimed at protecting civilians. That Human Rights Watch report concludes that no algorithm or artificial intelligence could sufficiently distinguish, for example, between civilians and insurgents in an Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency, meaning that no army employing autonomous weapons could satisfy the legal principle of “distinction” (that all armies must, over the course of fighting, identify civilian populations and military targets and treat the two differently). Critics also believe that autonomous weapons would have difficulty making the kinds of contextual moral judgments necessary to comply with the principle of proportionality, the idea that any unintentional cost to civilian life must be proportionate to the military benefits, or “military necessity,” the legal principle requiring armies to hold off on attacks (even on military targets) that aren’t necessary for winning.

Opponents of a treaty ban, by contrast, argue that such criticisms are missing the point. All weapons, they hold, can be used illegally — obviously, armies using machetes alone can violate the principles of distinction, proportionality, or military necessity. Indeed, they might be more likely to: while humans are driven to massacre by anger or sadism, a properly programmed robot will never lash out (Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on just this sort of programming). It’s much smarter, they argue, to attempt to identify the specific circumstances under which autonomous weapons could be used lawfully or unlawfully rather than tilt after the windmill of an international treaty.

While some of these quandaries depend on technical assessments — How well can we program robots? How good are their sensors? — others are more conceptual. One such challenge comes from Monash University Professor Robert Sparrow, who argues that robots create problems of moral responsibility for atrocities that are in principle impossible to resolve. Sparrow argues that, the more autonomous a combat machine is, the less predictable its behavior in combat zones becomes, and hence the less fair it is to hold either its programmer or commanding officer responsible for any atrocities it commits. But if it’s wrong to hold anyone responsible for atrocities, then the entire system of international law and the morality of war — which depends on being able to hold particular individuals responsible for war crimes — falls apart.

Others, like Jeffrey S. Thurnher and Michael Schmitt, counter that it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a robot could commit a war crime without the person who ordered it into combat knowing that atrocity was a possible outcome of their order, suggesting that a person could always be responsible for the machine’s actions.

These issues have yet to be resolved as a matter of law, philosophy, or even robotics. Yet one thing is clear: the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots won’t end the end of debate about the use of robots in war. If anything, it’ll escalate it.

A new report out this week warns of an “ethnic cleansing” taking place in Myanmar as the majority Buddhist population forces the nation’s Muslim communities from their homes.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report — titled “‘All You Can Do is Pray’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State” — documents the clash between two ethnic groups in Myanmar’s Arakan State. The majority ethnic Arakanese population, according to the report, sought to remove the disenfranchised Rohingya group living within the Arakan state from their communities. The Arakanese are majority Buddhist, while the Rohingya are Muslim.

Further, the report accuses the Myanmar government and local authorities of not only complicity with efforts to forcibly evict the Rohingya from their homes, but also overt support for the campaign:

“The Burmese government engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions on movement,” said Phil Robertson, [Human Rights Watch's] deputy Asia director. “The government needs to put an immediate stop to the abuses and hold the perpetrators accountable or it will be responsible for further violence against ethnic and religious minorities in the country.”

The majority of the violence Human Rights Watch documented took place during a surge in violence in Oct. 2012. HRW says at least 70 Rohingya were killed in one day and that police assisted by disarming the Rohingya of the sticks and other weapons carried to defend themselves. The group also claims to have found evidence of at least four mass graves dug in the aftermath of the massacre throughout Arakan. Currently at least 125,000 Rohingya and non-Rohingya Muslims reside in a displacement camp, while the Myanmar government drags its feet on following through on its pledges for reconstruction aid.

Clashes between ethnic and religious communities have not quieted in Myanmar, however, nor are they limited to Arakan state. Rakhine state just last month was home to a renewed spate of the majority targeting Muslim communities, spurred on by hardline Buddhist monks. According the United Nations, more than 12,000 Muslims were forced from their homes during the most recent fighting. The BBC on Tuesday released newly obtained video showing Myanmar police officers standing idle while Muslim shops and houses were set ablaze, lending further credence to the Human Rights Watch reporting.

Despite the ongoing violence, the European Union on Monday lifted most of its sanctions on Myanmar, citing the country’s “remarkable process of reform.” Asked about the Human Rights Watch Report on Monday, U.S. State Department acting spokesperson Patrick Ventrell said, “We continue our engagement with Burmese authorities and we also continue to urge the government to bring justice to affected communities, to address the root causes of this violence, and put in place mechanisms to prevent future outbreaks so that ethnic groups in Burma can coexist.”

A new report out on Thursday shows just how much the Syrian government has come to utilize air strikes as part of its ongoing struggle against rebels, unable to discriminate between fighters and civilians.

In the newly released report, Human Rights Watch chronicles the increasing use of air strikes in the ongoing conflict in Syria, representing a shift from the early days of fighting. Since the beginning of the conflict, an estimated 70,000 Syrians have died, mostly at the hands of government security forces.

Among the targets that the Assad regime is said in the report to have focused on include those with no military value, but instead represent areas where civilians would meet in large numbers. This includes eight documented air strikes on four bakeries throughout Syria, all while people waited in bread lines away from active fighting between the government and rebel fighters. In once instance, a government helicopter circled a bakery near Aleppo, before dropping two bombs in the immediate vicinity, killing at least twenty-three civilians and injuring another thirty.

Another issue at play is technological inferiority in the skies, compared to, for example, the accuracy that U.S. air power displays. The Syrian Air Force’s lack of precision also plays a role in increased civilian casualties:

Four Syrian Air Force officers who defected told Human Rights Watch that the Syrian Air Force does not have the technology to identify and target specific military objectives in urban areas. They believed their commanders nonetheless ordered air strikes in cities and towns, in part to instill fear in the civilian population in opposition strongholds, and also to deprive the opposition of its support.

Civilian casualties are always possible, even when using the most sophisticated technology, as NATO uses in Afghanistan. As Human Rights Watch points out, however, the intentional targeting of civilians by the Syrian government (PBS’s Frontline has recently documented on such case) violates international law. “In village after village, we found a civilian population terrified by their country’s own air force,” said Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch emergencies researcher who visited the sites and interviewed many of the victims and witnesses. “These illegal air strikes killed and injured many civilians and sowed a path of destruction, fear, and displacement.”

Human Rights Watch’s report comes out as the United States continues to grapple with what role it should play in ending the strife in Syria. So far, the Obama administration has spent $385 million on humanitarian aid for Syrian civilians alone, and recently reportedly agreed to provide greater amounts of non-lethal assistance to Syria’s rebels. Calls for the United States to provide weapons to the certain parts of the Syrian opposition or establish a No-Fly Zone in Syria have increased in volume in recent weeks, even as one rebel groups’ ties to Al Qaeda have increased.

Security forces in the Mexican government may have been cooperating to facilitate hundreds of “enforced disappearances” of citizens as part of the failing struggle to rein in drug gangs, according to a new report.

Mexico has been steeped in a conflict with drug cartels for the last six years, resulting in the death of over 50,000 Mexican civilians. During the course of that conflict, hundreds of civilians have gone missing — or “disappeared” — and are presumed to be dead. Prominent NGO Human Rights Watch, in their report titled “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Legacy Ignored,” alleges that the government of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón has not only failed to bring disappearances under control, but actively taken part in some instances:

Human Rights Watch has documented nearly 250 such “disappearances” that have occurred since 2007. In more than 140 of these cases, evidence suggests that these were enforced disappearances—meaning that state agents participated directly in the crime, or indirectly through support or acquiescence. These crimes were committed by members of every security force involved in public security operations, sometimes acting in conjunction with organized crime. In the remaining cases, we were not able to determine based on available evidence whether state actors participated in the crime, though they may have.

The report goes on to describe several of those disappearances in-depth, including the beatings by local police, detentions by federal police, and possible shootings ordered by the Navy. Calderon’s war on the cartels did not go as planned, with actions to rein in fighting between organized crime rings instead leading to greater bloodshed. By conquering all elements of crime and supplanting the government, the Zetas — the largest of the cartels — currently controls the third-largest state in Mexico.

In the end, Human Rights Watch urged newly sworn-in President Peña Nieto to take action to reverse the policies of his predecessor. “While disappearances may have started on Calderón’s watch, they did not end with his term,” Human Rights Watch Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco said in a release. In a visit to the White House in November, Nieto pledged to reduce violence within his country, without offering details on how.

Instability in Mexico is finally making its way into the politics of the United States, though in the context of border security and immigration reform rather than the war on drugs. During a town hall meeting, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) faced down a constituent who said invading Mexico was necessary to “clean up the cartels.” Despite the worries of many conservatives, the achieved nearly all of the targets for border enforcement in 2007, with 81 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border now meeting one of the top three levels of “operational control” by U.S. enforcement officials.

Last month, hopes were raised that Saudi Arabia would allow women to compete on their Olympic team, bringing the kingdom in line with Brunei and Qatar, which are sending their first female competitors to the London Olympics. But yesterday, Saudi Arabia reported that no Saudi women qualified for the London Olympics, meaning the Saudi Arabian Olympic team will continue to be all-male.

The news was confirmed by the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat which announced that Saudi male athletes have qualified to compete in track, equestrian and weightlifting at the games but there would be no “female team taking part in the three fields,” said an unidentified Saudi official. The official added that no female athlete had taken part in qualifying events in Saudi Arabia.

Hope for a Saudi female Olympian had come to focus largely on Dalma Rushdi Malhas, a 20-year-old showjumper, but her participation in the games appears to have been cut short by an injury to her horse.

In June, Saudi Olympic officials announced that they were lifting a ban on women athletes representing the conservative Gulf monarchy at the Olympics but rights groups doubted the Saudis’ resolve. “It is 100% the case they knew she couldn’t compete when they made the announcement,” Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch told the Wall Street Journal after Malhas failed to qualify. HRW is one of the international organizations that has called for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the London Olympics if the country declines to send women athletes.

Worden added that the initial Saudi announcement of including females on their Olympic team “was total spin for the west… But on the other hand, it pins them down to finding a woman.” The latest news would suggest that Saudi Olympic officials have been unable, or unwilling, to place a female athlete on the team. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s track record of discriminating against women and girls may have ultimately undermined the Saudi Olympic team’s ability to find a suitable female athlete.

“[H]aving banned its women and girls from engaging in sports at home, finding one who’s had access to Olympic-level training is a long stretch,” opined Lara Setrakian in the International Herald Tribune last week.

With a growing civil war in Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s notorious police state only increases repression and human rights violations against its own people.

A new report from New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) demonstrates just how prolific these violations of basic human rights have become in Syria. The group interviewed more than 200 Syrians and used the information to identify at least 27 detention centers where torture is used. The “archipelago of torture centers,” said HRW, “clearly point to a state policy of torture and ill-treatment and therefore constitute a crime against humanity.”

Syria’s four intelligence agencies, known together as the mukhabarat, employed a variety of torture methods against civilians and anti-government actors. One 31-year-old described the methods used against him:

They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The staples in the ears were the most painful. They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice.

HRW detailed the methods and published sketches depicting their use. The group also published diagrams showing that, based on the interviews, Syrian authorities were putting up to 70 people in cells that European standards for detention would limit to five occupants.

When two or more interviewees identified a detention center, HRW added the location to an interactive map. Here’s a screen capture of the map showing the ten detention centers HRW identified in the capital Damascus (click here for the full interactive map):

HRW Emergencies researcher Ole Solvang said in a release: “By publishing their locations, describing the torture methods, and identifying those in charge we are putting those responsible on notice that they will have to answer for these horrific crimes.”

The group said that because Syria is not party to the Rome Statute, International Criminal Court proceedings against officials ordering and carrying out the torture would need to be mandated by the U.N. Security Council. Russia and China have so far blocked such measures. Clearly aiming to pressure Russia — Assad’s top international backer — HRW published its findings and recommendations (PDF) in Russian.

When Washington’s right-wing wants to take military action to foster Middle Eastern “democracy and freedom,” as Sen. John McCain said attacking Syria would do Monday night on CNN, they often cite the willingness of the U.S.’s Gulf Arab allies to go along with their plans. But if increasing crackdowns against merely dissenting Twitter users is any indication, many of the Gulf Sheikhdoms need to get their own houses in order first.

In recent weeks, rights groups criticized arrests of activists in Kuwait and Bahrain for doing little more than tweeting criticisms of their governments or religion. The crackdown follows the rise of Twitter in these Gulf countries as a central means of political discourse, utilized by a spectrum of dissenters and government supporters, according to the Financial Times. Only dissenters, obviously, face the wrath of their governments. The FT reported:

The arrests –- together with other detentions in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates –- show how social websites are expanding Gulf public life in contrasting and sometimes conflicting directions, as nationals traditionally served only by heavily censored media grapple with rapid social change at home and the political turmoil gripping the Middle East.

On June 7, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said a Kuwaiti court’s ten-year prison sentence for Hamad al-Naqi for the charge of “insulting” the prophet Muhammad “violates human rights standards.” Moreover, al-Naqi’s lawyer told HRW that the conviction also came on national security grounds because of insults against neighboring rulers.

In Bahrain, human rights activist Nabeel Rajab was arrested on June 6 for the second time in as many months, this time for calling on the country’s prime minister to step down. “Nabeel Rajab’s comments concern political discussion and therefore are clearly protected under his right to free speech,” said HRW deputy Middle East director Joe Stork of the case. Last month, Amnesty International criticized Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim rulers for their crackdown on the Shia majority’s political rights, including Rajab’s arrest for “insulting” the government (he already faced charges of participating in “illegal” demonstrations). Authorities “continue to compound their violations of his basic right to free speech by adding to the charges against him as he continues to criticize the government,” Stork said of the latest arrest.

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