The Associated Press reports foreign visitors to North Korea will have the ability to purchase access to 3G data service on their mobile devices as early as next week:

“Koryolink, a joint venture between Korea Post & Telecommunications Corporation and Egypt’s Orascom Telecom Media and Technology Holding SAE, informed foreign residents in Pyongyang on Friday that it will launch a third generation, or 3G, mobile Internet service no later than March 1.”

This freedom for foreign visitors is in stark contrast to the digital isolation that defines its citizens lives: the only networked access available to the general public is the closed intranet known as “Kwangmyong” started in 2000 — although “central party, national security units, and some Cabinet-level government organizations, as well as foreign diplomatic missions, joint ventures, and foreign individuals staying in Pyongyang can have ‘full but monitored’ access” to the real world wide web.

Google’s Eric Schmidt noted the restricted nature of North Korean’s access to communication technology following his visit last year — as well as how the infrastructure of these closed systems could be easily modified to allow a more democratic information experience:

“There is a 3G network that is a joint venture with an Egyptian company called Orascom. It is a 2100 Megahertz SMS-based technology network, that does not, for example, allow users to have a data connection and use smart phones. It would be very easy for them to turn the Internet on for this 3G network. Estimates are that are about a million and a half phones in the DPRK with some growth planned in the near future.

There is a supervised Internet and a Korean Intranet. (It appeared supervised in that people were not able to use the internet without someone else watching them). There’s a private intranet that is linked with their universities. Again, it would be easy to connect these networks to the global Internet.”

Despite the highly questionable ethics of financially supporting a regime that holds as many as 200,000 people in political prison camps “rife with torture, rape and slave labor” and recently conducted yet another nuclear test much to the dismay of the international community, North Korea claims to be experiencing a tourism boom. While those tourists will undoubtedly appreciate being able to check Facebook on their iPhones during their visit, thousands of North Koreans remain under a regime that denies them the most basic of human rights, let alone real internet access.

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.

In retaliation for the United States placing sanctions on Russian human rights violators, the Russian parliament has passed a bill banning U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans. The action comes after President Obama signed the so-called “Magnitsky Act,” named for a Russian lawyer who died while in prison, into law on Dec. 14.

The Russians are responding with the Dima Yakovlev bill. The measure commemorates a young boy adopted from Russia who later died in the U.S and places travel sanctions on those Americans whom Russia has deemed violate the human rights of Russian citizens. The Russian Duma, or Parliament, voted unanimously in favor of the bill on Wednesday, and President Vladimir Putin is fully prepared to sign it into law. Putin attempted to head off criticism about the effect the ban will have on the already strained Russian system of care for its orphans:

In televised comments, Putin tried to appeal to people’s patriotism by suggesting that strong and responsible countries should take care of their own and lent his support to a bill that has further strained U.S.-Russia relations.

“There are probably many places in the world where living standards are higher than ours. So what, are we going to send all our children there? Maybe we should move there ourselves?” he said, with sarcasm.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs Olga Golodets says that putting the ban into effect would not only violate Russian federal law, but also international law and a 2011 agreement that the U.S. and Russia put into place regarding adoption. At present, Americans adopt more orphans from Russian than they do any other country.

In a landmark ruling today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the CIA tortured a German citizen during his time in custody.

Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese decent, was found to have been taken in 2004 in a joint U.S.-Macedonian effort first to a hotel near the Skopje, Macedonia airport, then to an extraordinary rendition location — also referred to as a “black site” — in Afghanistan. In both locations, the Court has ruled that the actions of both the CIA and Macedonia qualified “beyond a reasonable doubt” as torture:

“Masri’s treatment at Skopje Airport at the hands of the CIA rendition team – being severely beaten, sodomised, shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation – had been carried out in the presence of state officials of [Macedonia] and within its jurisdiction,” the court ruled.

It added: “Its government was consequently responsible for those acts performed by foreign officials. It had failed to submit any arguments explaining or justifying the degree of force used or the necessity of the invasive and potentially debasing measures. Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain information. In the court’s view, such treatment had amounted to torture, in violation of Article 3 [of the European human rights convention].“

El-Masri was also awarded 60,000 Euros in the verdict, to be paid by Macedonia. The ruling is the first from Europe’s highest judicial authority on human rights that specifically labels the CIA’s actions during the Bush era of extraordinary rendition as torture.

According to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the practice of taking foreign nationals to third countries for harsh interrogation, often utilizing torture, officially halted in 2009, as the U.S. sought to seek “assurances” that the host country would not utilize torture. Despite that, the renditions themselves remain classified, meaning the full extent of the current program is still unknown.

The ruling comes at a time when the debate over torture is reigniting in the United States. Depictions of the act in the film Zero Dark Thirty has prompted defenders of the torture program under the Bush administration to reemerge, while the Senate Intelligence Committee is due to approve a 6,000 page report on the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Thursday.

The European Commission published its annual report on the performance of newly minted and aspiring members of the European Union on Wednesday. Notable among the findings — often seen as a road map for prospective members to follow — was the view that Turkey has not yet met the civil rights requirements to join, particularly regarding press freedom issues.

The report chided Turkey for a “lack of substantial progress” in ensuring the “right to liberty and security and a fair trial, as well as of the freedom of expression, assembly and association.” The unwritten threat: if Turkey does not secure these bare minimum social freedoms, it will have little hope of joining the EU. But perhaps that is what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in mind. While Erdogan said it was his goal to midwife Turkey’s ascension to the EU when he came to power in 2002, he has since turned away from the West amid the European financial crisis and European skepticism about a majority Muslim nation joining the bloc.

Turkey’s minister of EU relations, Egemen Bagis, responded to the news, claiming the EC’s report placed “too much emphasis was placed on isolated incidents.” Yet history indicates that such rights violations, especially in the realm of press freedoms, are far from isolated. It is estimated that around 100 journalists are currently imprisoned, held on suspicions ranging from conspiring against the government to being aligned with the Kurdish separatist and terrorist group PKK.

One of the most highly-publicized cases was that of Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener, who were held for more than a year until their release in March. They were accused with being affiliated with the so-called Ergenekon plot — a shadowy group allegedly aimed at overthrowing the government — but lack of evidence, and severe domestic and internal pressure led to their release. But the Turkish government’s war on journalists didn’t start and end with the Şık and Şener cases, as past arrests of journalists in Turkey have been just as suspicious.

But other reporters rounded up in the Ergenekon case have been left to languish in prison. Forty Kurdish-affiliated reporters were put on trial Monday in the biggest case of its kind.

A recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that the “overall diagnosis” on press freedom in Turkey is “rather bleak” with “more negative than positive developments.”

– Nate Niemann

At the U.N. General Assembly this morning, President Obama spoke forcefully in favor of free speech and human rights more broadly, saying “Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views — even views that we disagree with.” The General Assembly was, as it turns out, an appropriate venue for the President’s words: according to a new report, diplomatic engagement with U.N. member states have moved important elements of the organization more in line with universal ideals about human rights.

The study, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, tallies vote counts in the U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Council and determined how many states voted with the EU bloc, with which the U.S. aligns almost identically (according to the report) on human rights issues like condemnations of atrocities and endorsement of basic legal rights protections. The study found “that there is a genuine shift [since 2008] towards Western human rights positions in UN forums, extending beyond the Syrian case, but that this is built on fragile foundations.”

While some of this shift can be explained by repressive Arab states aligning with the West on Syria votes, this is by no means the entire shift. Indeed, the vote counts in the General Assembly and Human Rights Council suggests a genuine global shift in favor of Western views that splits the influential BRICS — India, Brazil and South Africa backing pro-rights resolutions and Russia and China opposing them:

[T]here have been glimmers of progress in diplomacy on other countries on the General Assembly’s agenda. In recent years, the EU and U.S. have supported annual resolutions tackling the state of human rights in Myanmar, Iran and North Korea. Although the number of countries voting in favor of the Burmese resolution remained roughly level over the last two years, the number backing the Iran resolution jumped from 78 to 89 and that on North Korea from 106 to 123. Most of the Arab countries that supported the Syrian resolutions did not back the West in any of these cases (Gulf Arab countries avoid taking on Iran directly at the UN) although Libya and Tunisia did vote for them. U.S. and European diplomats can take credit for building up human rights coalitions beyond Syria in the General Assembly. The same is true at the Human Rights Council.

One of the report’s authors gives significant credit for the changing vote counts to the Obama administration’s more engaged approach to the U.N., saying “the Bush administration still adopted a semi-detached approach to multilateral institutions. Since 2009, the Obama administration has adopted a much more engaged posture and the U.S. and Europeans have gradually strengthened their position at the UN.” Further, Ted Piccione, an expert on the United Nations at the Brookings Insitute, has written that “human rights is rising on the agenda of the international community and leading to surprising, albeit slow, progress” as a consequence of (in part) “determined leadership from the United States and other democracies.”

Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, by contrast, have publicly embraced extreme anti-U.N. conspiracy theories. Top Romney adviser and potential Romney administration Secretary of State John Bolton was, as Ambassador to the U.N. for President George W. Bush, famously contemptuous of the organization.

Several thousand people in Georgia rallied against the incumbent government of Prime Minister Mikhail Saakashvili this weekend after videos from government-run prisons depicted appalling torture of inmates. Pushed out on September 18 by the opposition leader, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the videos document savage beatings and sexual assault against prisoners by guards who were seemingly enjoying themselves (warning — graphic depiction of sexual assault):

PRISONER: “Please don’t video tape it. I will do everything you ask for!”

GUARD: “What will you do?”

PRISONER: “Please stop!”

GUARD: “It is already videotaped. Did it hurt? Did it hurt a lot? Did your ass hurt?” …

Prisoner is chained to cell bars, wears a head protection, so he can’t hurt his head hitting it on the cell bars. This time there is no guard in the cell itself. The guard asks the same question over and over again. The prisoner was raped with a broom and is abased by the guard.

Given the scale of the protests and the upcoming election on October 1, the scandal — dubbed Georgia’s Abu Ghraib — appears primed to shake up the Georgian political scene. The videos, together with past reports of prisoner abuse, appear to implicate several officials high-up in the Saakashvili government. Moreover, they cement the broader perception of lost democracy and reversion to one-party rule in Georgia, as the government’s respect for human rights has been in decline in recent years, despite the fact that Saakashvili rose to power as part of a democratic uprising:

Georgia’s human rights record remained uneven in 2011. The government used excessive force to disperse anti-government protests in Tbilisi, the capital, in May, and prosecuted dozens in misdemeanor trials without full respect for due process rights. The authorities failed to effectively investigate these events and past instances of excessive use of force. Other concerns include restrictions on freedom of association and media, as well as forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in state-owned temporary housing.

The evidence of torture and authoritarian backsliding in Georgia presents a serious problem for American neoconservatives, who have embraced Georgia as a democratic bulwark against Russia and potential NATO ally after the latter’s 2008 invasion of the small, post-Soviet republic. The Romney campaign has pledged to confront Russia on Georgia-related issues. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said this month that he “admired the remarkable progress made by Georgia under [Saakashvili's] leadership,” adding that the Georgian President was a personal friend and a “friend of the United States.” He also wrote that “the partnership between the United States and Georgia rests not on individuals alone, but on our shared commitment to a set of mutual interests and universal values, including democracy, rule of law, and human rights.”