Human Rights Watch, through its various divisions, increased its work on U.S. human rights and humanitarian law violations in 1991. Government actions relating to the war in the Persian Gulf produced human rights concerns at home and abroad. In January and February, the Fund for Free Expression criticized the Defense Department's policies restricting news-media coverage of the war, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's program of questioning Arab-Americans in the United States. In November, Middle East Watch reported on violations of the laws of war by both sides to the Persian Gulf War which had resulted in needless civilian casualties.

In July, following the videotaped beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, Human Rights Watch released a report criticizing the federal government for its passivity in responding to the problem of police brutality in the United States. In November, Human Rights Watch released a study of prison conditions in the United States, following an Americas Watch newsletter in May on prison conditions in Puerto Rico.

The Fund for Free Expression issued a series of reports on U.S. free expression issues, including "SLAPP" libel suits used to intimidate community and public interest organizations, censorship of the student press, and the erosion of the right to freedom of expression in decisions of the Supreme Court's 1990-91 term. The Fund also criticized the Bush Administration's proposal for secret courts to try suspected alien "terrorists," comparing it with similar provisions in other countries criticized by the State Department in its annual human rights report.

The Fund took part in a national coalition to overturn the Supreme Court's decision upholding federal regulations that barred federally funded family planning clinics from counseling clients on the availability of abortion as an option. Helsinki Watch and the Fund urged Congress to remove from the Immigration and Naturalization Services "lookout list" persons who were listed solely because of their political beliefs.

Prison Conditions

In November, after a year-long study entailing visits to more than twenty institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico, including federal, state and INS institutions, as well as jails, Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled Prison Conditions in the United States. The report raises numerous concerns about the human rights aspects of incarceration in the United States and about the difficulties in securing access to prisons.

One of the most troubling aspects of the human rights situation in U.S. prisons is the use of super-maximum-security facilities (called "maxi-maxis" in prison jargon) to confine inmates deemed especially dangerous. Conditions in these facilities are particularly difficult to bear and often fall below the minimum standards established by the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. In addition to the federal system, currently thirty-six states have such facilities. Inmates confined to maxi-maxis are essentially sentenced twice: once by the court, to a certain period of imprisonment, and the second time by the prison administration, to confinement in maxi-maxis. This second sentencing is open-ended, limited only by the overall length of an inmate's sentence, and is meted out without the benefit of counsel.

Among the violations of the U.N. minimum standards observed by Human Rights Watch in the course of researching the report were:

-- Uninterrupted extended confinement in windowless, badly ventilated cells, such as in the Q-Wing of the Florida State Prison at Starke.

-- Lack of access to educational programs, as in the elimination in 1991 of all teaching and counseling staff positions at the prison in Southport, New York.

-- Denial or sharp reduction of time outdoors, in violation of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules which mandate at least one hour a day of outdoor exercise.

-- The use of handcuffs as a disciplinary measure, as seen in the Broward institution for women in Florida.

-- The use of collective punishment at the Krome INS detention center in Florida and the Otis Bantum Center on Rikers Island in New York.

Human Rights Watch made the following recommendations regarding the human rights aspects of imprisonment in the United States:

-- Maximum-maximum security facilities should be used only under supervision that is independent from correctional administration. Even then, they must meet the test of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.

-- In jails, classification and record keeping must be improved, to avoid situations in which nonviolent offenders are housed with dangerous and predatory criminals. Limits should be imposed on the duration of a sentence that may be served in a jail. In no case should the limit be longer than one year.

-- Denial of access to reading matter should never be used as a disciplinary measure.

-- Steps should be taken to assure work for all inmates capable of working.

-- Prison officials should make every effort to confine inmates as close to their home as possible so as to facilitate the maintenance of family bonds.

-- All inmates should have access to telephones.

-- Prisons should encourage access for inmates' relatives or friends, since maintaining these bonds gives inmates a better chance of staying out of trouble upon their release.

-- The trend in the federal system of granting a diminishing number of furloughs to inmates of minimum security facilities should be reversed, and the granting of furloughs to nonviolent inmates, particularly those serving sentences far from home, should be liberalized.

-- In circumstances in which security considerations make it impossible to provide inmates with privacy, guards of the same sex should be used.

-- A review of the cases of Cuban inmates in legal limbo all over the country should be undertaken immediately. No inmate should be left in prison without knowing the duration of his or her sentence.

-- Incarceration of noncriminal illegal aliens should stop immediately.

-- Outside observers should have access to prisons, since access by outside observers is an important way of preventing abuses in prisons.

In May, Americas Watch released a newsletter on prison conditions in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The paper found that poor prison conditions stemmed from an overall abdication of authority by prison administrators, that women are singled out for contraband searches, and that the transfer of inmates to prisons in the mainland United States has a detrimental effect on an inmate's bond with relatives and is often used as a disciplinary measure. A version of this paper was presented at a conference on prison conditions in the Caribbean held in May in Trinidad.

Police Brutality

The brutal and unprovoked beating--fortuitously videotaped by a bystander--by Los Angeles police officers of motorist Rodney King focused world attention on police practices in the United States. In the wake of this event, Human Rights Watch issued a report on an undercovered aspect of the issue--the passivity of the federal government in combating such abuse. The report, issued in July, found that "violations of human rights by local police has become a sort of fault-line in United States legal-political life, causing occasional political earthquakes...yet the federal government has never created effective means of monitoring, much less controlling, abuses."

Human Rights Watch argued that this "hands-off" approach treating police brutality as a "local" issue--amounts to an abdication of the federal duty to guarantee respect for basic human and constitutional rights. This stands in sharp contrast to the federal government's active intervention, over the past forty years, in combating other violations of civil rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law, in such areas as employment, housing and voting discrimination.

The elements of the passive federal role detailed in the report include:

-- extremely narrow federal criminal jurisdiction to prosecute abusive police officials.

-- the lack of a recognized right for the Justice Department to seek injunctive remedies against systematically abusive police departments.

-- a failure by the federal government, including the Justice Department, to collect pertinent data on the scope and dimensions of the problem.

-- a passive Justice Department role in developing standards of command and accountability that would foster respect for human rights.

-- an unwillingness to use such means as the withholding of federal funds as a tool to deter systematic abuse by police departments.

The report recommends that steps be taken in each of these areas so that the federal government, particularly the Justice Department, can live up to its duty to enforce respect for the right to be free of violent police abuse.

The Air War in Iraq

In November, Middle East Watch issued a report examining the conduct of both sides to the air war in the Persian Gulf, including an extensive analysis of the U.S.-led military coalition's air campaign against Iraq. The report, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War, was prepared as a contribution to the public debate about the conduct of the war and as an effort to draw attention to violations and possible violations of humanitarian law. It draws conclusions, and also requests additional information from the U.S. Defense Department and other allied military commands. It is hoped that the information and analysis in the report will be used by the Pentagon to conduct a more thorough examination of its compliance with the rules of law than reflected in its preliminary report about the war submitted to Congress on July 16, 1991. A final report is due to Congress no later than January 15, 1992. Both reports were mandated by legislation.

Throughout the Gulf War, Pentagon and allied commanders repeatedly stressed that all feasible precautions were being taken to avoid harm to civilians, as required by the laws of war. Following the war, Pentagon officials suggested that whatever civilian deaths did occur were the product of inevitable errors rather than any substandard conduct on the part of allied forces. The Middle East Watch report challenges this carefully constructed image of a near-flawless allied campaign. Through interviews conducted during the war with scores of Iraqi residents of various nationalities who had fled the aerial bombardment for the safety of Jordan, and through subsequent research, the report provides a detailed picture of the allied bombardment as it affected Iraqi civilians.

The conduct of the campaign was evaluated under the laws of war, primarily the standards set forth in the First Additional Protocol of 1977 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Protocol I). Although the United States has not ratified Protocol I, most of the standards relied on by Middle East Watch to evaluate allied conduct have been declared by the State Department to be binding on all nations as a matter of customary international law. The Pentagon also has largely incorporated these standards into the Air Force manual.

The allies' overwhelming air superiority and their precision weaponry provided an exceptional opportunity to conduct the bombing campaign in strict compliance with legal requirements. Although in many if not most respects the bombing campaign was consistent with the requirements of the laws of war, Middle East Watch concluded that the allies violated these laws in several respects, both in the selection of targets and in the choice of the means and methods of attack. These violation appear not to have been the product of unavoidable miscalculation but a result of deliberate allied decisions to take less than the maximum feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties required by the laws of war.

Middle East Watch found that allies committed the following violations of the laws of armed conflict in the choice of the means and methods of attack:

-- The customary legal requirement codified in Article 57 of Protocol I requires parties to a conflict to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. One obvious way to fulfill this requirement is by adjusting the time of attack to minimize the risk of civilians being present. Attacks on military targets in urban areas where many civilians can be expected to be found during the day should be conducted at night. However, in several attacks in urban areas--in Nasiriyya, Falluja, Samawa and Hilla--allied planes dropped their bombs during the day, needlessly killing hundreds.

-- The allies appear not to have made full use of precision-guided weapons to minimize civilian casualties in urban areas. These "smart" weapons, according to the Pentagon, had an accuracy rate of ninety percent, while "dumb" bombs were said to have hit their targets only twenty-five percent of the time. Although the allies during the war fostered the impression that only precision weapons were used in urban areas, the Pentagon has since revealed that smart weapons accounted for a mere 8.8 percent of the munitions used. Moreover, some of these precision weapons were used not in urban areas but against hardened targets in the Kuwaiti military theater. The Pentagon and its allies have remained largely silent about where they dropped the dumb bombs that made up the remaining 91.2 percent of the munitions used. For example, while downtown Baghdad, where a small international press corps was present, was said to have been attacked with only precision weapons, Middle East Watch found that Basra and other cities in southern Iraq, which were largely closed to foreign journalists, appear to have suffered considerable damage to civilian structures, suggesting use of less advanced bombs in allied raids.

-- Middle East Watch found that under the laws of war, the United States should have issued a warning before attacking the Ameriyya air raid shelter in Baghdad. Failure to do so resulted in the loss of two to three hundred civilian lives. Quite apart from the evidence cited by the Pentagon to suggest that the facility was being used for military purposes, the Pentagon has conceded that it knew the facility had been used as a civilian air raid shelter during the Iran-Iraq war. Article 65 of Protocol I provides that even if a civil defense structure is used for military purposes, it cannot be attacked until a warning is issued and a reasonable amount of time is given for civilians to respond. Although the United States has not stated one way or the other whether it considers Article 65 to be binding as a matter of customary international law, the rule is a fair interpretation of the general duty, codified in Article 57 of Protocol I, to give "effective advance warning" of attacks that may affect the civilian population, which the United States recognizes as customary law.

Middle East Watch also found that the allies violated the laws of war in the selection of targets, in the following respects:

-- Allied bombers hit a number of food, agricultural and water-treatment facilities, including four government food warehouses in Diwaniyya, a new dairy factory north of Basra, flour-milling and grain-storage warehouses, and several water-treatment facilities in Basra. Under the customary rules of war, as reflected in Article 52 of Protocol I, these appear not to have been legitimate military targets because they were making no known contribution to the Iraqi military effort. With food shortages prevalent because of the U.N.-imposed embargo, these attacks also violated the customary principle set forth in Article 54 of Protocol I prohibiting starvation as a means of warfare.

-- Although the crippling of Iraq's electrical system impeded the Iraqi military's ability to communicate and to produce war-related goods, it also had a severe cost to the civilian population. Shortages of food due to the U.N. embargo were exacerbated by the lack of refrigeration, the impairment of Iraq's highly mechanized, irrigation-based agriculture, the crippling of the nation's electricity-dependent water-purification and sewage-treatment facilities, and the handicapping of Iraqi hospitals and clinics. The customary-law principle codified in Articles 51 and 57 of Protocol I prohibits attacks when the civilian costs are "excessive" in relation to the "concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." Allied commanders have failed to explain why such massive destruction of the electrical system, with its attendant severe dislocation for the civilian population, was not excessive under the terms of Article 57. One reason for the failure may be reflected in comments made by Pentagon officials since the war ended. They suggested that the extent of the destruction of the electrical system may not have been to achieve a "concrete and direct military advantage" but to demoralize the Iraqi civilian population and encourage it to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Whether or not one shares the goal of overthrowing the Iraqi government, the targeting of civilians to achieve political or military ends--be it to weaken civilian morale or to induce the civilian population to overthrow its leadership--clearly violates the customary-law duty to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population, as codified in Article 51 of Protocol I, and thus undermines the principle of civilian immunity that is at the heart of the laws of war.

-- Middle East Watch took testimony from witnesses to repeated incidents in which civilian vehicles, including fully occupied passenger buses, were attacked on Iraqi highways, primarily in western Iraq, during the allied effort to locate and destroy Iraqi mobile missile launchers. Even if it is assumed that the allies did not deliberately target these civilian vehicles, the attacks appear to have been indiscriminate in that they failed to distinguish between military and civilian vehicles traveling on the highway, as required by the customary-law principle set forth in Article 48 of Protocol I. Many of the vehicles hit were Jordanian civilian oil tankers. When Jordan publicly protested these attacks, the Pentagon issued public statements stating that civilian tankers were not being targeted and suggesting that its pilots were able to distinguish these tankers from military targets. Yet tanker drivers who relied on these assurances continued to be attacked, at times by low-flying aircraft, suggesting either that pilots did not discriminate between civilian and military targets on the highways or that their senior commanders were deceptive about the pilots' ability to make such distinctions.

-- A similar lack of discrimination characterized several allied attacks on Bedouin tents in western Iraq, leaving at least forty-six civilians dead. Bedouin tents, as objects "normally dedicated to civilian purposes," are presumed to be illegitimate targets under the customary-law principle affirmed in Article 52 of Protocol I. The presumption requires that in case of doubt about whether an object is a military target pilots should refrain from attack. Pilots firing on these long black tents may have thought that they concealed Iraqi missiles or war-related materiel, but given the tents' distance from highways (mobile missile launchers are large and presumably would have had considerable difficulty traversing one hundred kilometers of undeveloped desert) and the signs of civilian life surrounding the tents, pilots appear not to have done "everything feasible" to verify that the tents were not civilian objects, as required by the customary-law principle restated in Article 57 of Protocol I.

Needless Deaths in the Gulf War also contains extensive, detailed testimony about the loss of civilian life as a result of the allied bombing campaign, including numerous accounts of bombs and missiles that fell wide of their targets, most often bridges and telecommunications towers, by two or three hundred meters or more, resulting in civilian casualties. The report faults the allies for their apparently deliberate silence regarding the extent of civilian casualties in Iraq attributable to allied bombing. The allies maintained this silence despite substantial evidence indicating that they had the technological capacity to make detailed bomb-damage assessments when it was politically advantageous to do so. The report notes that the Iraqi government has also been inconsistent in its release of information on the number of civilian casualties, with figures varying according to whether it seemed desirable at the moment to inflate or deflate the loss of civilian life. The report concludes that the total number of civilians killed directly by allied attacks did not exceed several thousand with an upper limit of perhaps between 2,500 and 3,000 Iraqi dead. These figures do not include the substantially larger number of deaths that can be attributed to malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care caused by a combination of the U.N.-mandated embargo and the allies' destruction of Iraq's electrical system with its severe delayed effects.

Freedom of Expression and the Gulf War

Operation Desert Storm was characterized by an unprecedented institutionalization of curbs on the right of the news media to cover military operations. Reporters were required to travel in "pools" accompanied by military escorts, and to submit all dispatches for advance review by a military censor. In apparent deference to Saudi Arabia, the staging ground for allied operations, the Defense Department censored publications sent to U.S. troops in the Gulf, imposed restrictions on what they may say or write about a variety of topics, and impeded their freedom to engage in Jewish and Christian worship.

On January 10, the Fund for Free Expression, joined by six other U.S. anti-censorship organizations, wrote to Defense Secretary Richard Cheney to express opposition to the new rules, arguing that no case had been made for the imposition of more onerous restrictions on press coverage than were in place during the entire Vietnam War, when reporters could travel freely on their own and file reports without submitting them to military censors. The letter asserted that "it is precisely in times of national crisis such as war that the freedom of the press and the public's right to know, on which our constitutional system of self-government depends, becomes most vital." No reply was ever received. The Fund also participated as amicus curiae in The Nation Magazine v. U.S. Department of Defense, a challenge to the constitutionality of the rules.

Shortly before the onset of the war, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to interview Arab-American individuals and organizational officials, ostensibly to gather information about possible terrorist activity in the United States. These interviews were widely criticized by Arab-American groups and by civil rights and liberties organizations, including the Fund for Free Expression, which in a January 15 letter to Attorney General Richard Thornburgh argued that "such an approach presumes the disloyalty of millions of Arab-Americans and persons of Arab origin lawfully residing in the United States, and has a chilling effect on their rights to take part in the public debate over the appropriateness of U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf."

On January 28, less than two weeks after the start of the war, the Fund for Free Expression issued a newsletter, "Freedom of Expression and the War," analyzing the Pentagon's press restrictions, its policies affecting speech and expression by military personnel, and the FBI's questioning of Arab-Americans. On February 27, the Fund issued a supplement, "Managed News, Stifled Views." Among the abuses documented by the Fund newsletters were the detention at gunpoint of reporters who attempted to leave official press pools, excessive delays in approving material that was submitted for prior security review, and excision of material that was deemed embarrassing to the military.

Border Patrol Abuses

Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch are jointly undertaking an investigation of human rights abuses by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) along the U.S.-Mexican border. The report, due for release in early 1992, will address lethal and nonlethal shootings; torture; assaults, including one incident in 1988 in which a Border Patrol agent threw a seventeen-year-old boy to the ground causing fatal injuries; and other serious abuses by Border Patrol agents. It will also examine conditions in INS detention facilities and due process violations during INS proceedings and workplace raids. One section will be devoted to the treatment of children and youth.

One of the most serious problems identified is the failure of the INS or any other government agency to investigate complaints adequately or to prosecute human rights abuses committed by INS agents. For example, the agent involved in the homicide of the seventeen-year-old boy previously had been involved in violent incidents but had not been penalized. In 1983, he killed a Mexican national under circumstances that caused the California Highway Patrol to make a prima facie finding of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, but was never prosecuted. Following the boy's death, the agent was transferred out of the state and promoted to a position involving the training of junior officers.

The report will examine criminal penalties and civil remedies available under federal and state law and will recommend steps to ensure that individual INS agents and the agency as a whole are held accountable for human rights abuses.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

In the fall, President Bush submitted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, together with a series of reservations, declarations or understandings, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for advice and consent to ratification. The Foreign Relations Committee promptly held hearings on ratification of the treaty, which has languished in the Senate since it was first submitted by President Carter in 1977.

While Human Rights Watch supports immediate ratification, we object to many of the limiting provisions proposed by the Administration. The only reservation that we endorse would preserve the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, which provides U.S. citizens with broader protections than those in the treaty.

Our objections to the other proposed limiting provisions fall into three categories. First, while most of the civil and political rights protected by the Covenant are also protected by U.S. law, there are areas in which U.S. law is weaker than the treaty. In these areas, which include the death penalty for persons who committed crimes before reaching age eighteen, and several procedural protections for detained juveniles and adults, the United States seeks to maintain its lower standards rather than to raise U.S. protections to the international level.

This same unwillingness to reform U.S. law when it is weaker than the protections set forth in the Covenant also is reflected in the Administration's understanding on federalism. This understanding seeks to limit federal responsibility for the conduct of state and local governments. Instead, federal oversight of these governmental agencies should be heightened both to ensure full protection within the United States and to prevent other nations with federal forms of government from using the U.S. understanding as an excuse for not adequately monitoring and sanctioning their own state and local abuses.

Second, the package of reservations, declarations and understandings demonstrates the Administration's reluctance to allow international law to be used by U.S. courts to interpret U.S. constitutional and statutory law. This reluctance is most clearly expressed in the Administration's proposed reservation limiting the meaning of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to that already prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This reservation would impede U.S. courts from benefiting from the wisdom of courts in other countries and international tribunals that are called upon to interpret the meaning of similar prohibitions, and would deprive Americans of the benefits of evolving international understandings of such prohibitions.

Finally, the Administration's proposal that the normative provisions of the treaty be declared non-self-executing is objectionable. This proposed declaration seeks to deny domestic legal remedies to individuals who seek relief for violations of the treaty in U.S. courts. The terms of the Civil and Political Covenant are specific and could be enforced by a court of law. There is no reason for the executive branch to fear that U.S. courts will apply the human rights norms guaranteed by the treaty in a less fair way than they apply any other U.S. law. Adoption of this declaration would deprive U.S. courts of an important role in ensuring U.S. compliance with the treaty. It would deprive Americans of an avenue of redress for serious violations of internationally recognized human rights. And it would signal to other countries that U.S. ratification of the treaty is for foreign policy purposes only and is not intended to strengthen the human rights protections offered to its own people.

Participation in U.S. Civil Rights Litigation

To bring its international human rights perspective to bear on civil rights and civil liberties problems in the United States, Human Rights Watch participated in a number of amicus curiae briefs filed in U.S. courts, including:

-- Hudson v. McMillian. This case, which was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on November 13 and is expected to be decided in 1992, concerns the right to be free of violent physical abuse by government officials. The court of appeals had held that Eighth Amendment guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment were not violated by the behavior of prison guards who shackled an inmate by the wrists and ankles, held him from behind, hit him repeatedly in the face--loosening his teeth, breaking his dental plate and splitting his lip--and kicking him in the buttocks, because no "significant injury" resulted. A Human Rights Watch amicus brief outlined international conventions and agreements under which such official abuse would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, and listed occasions in which the U.S. State Department, as part of its annual review of the human rights practices of other countries, has condemned similar conduct by custodial officials abroad.

-- U.S. Department of State v. Ray. A Human Rights Watch amicus brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court with the Haitian Refugee Center and other organizations argued for access under the Freedom of Information Act to the names of Haitian citizens interviewed by the State Department in the course of monitoring the Haitian government's compliance with its pledge not to persecute persons returned by the United States to Haiti. The Court rejected this position in a decision on December 16.

-- U.S. v. Alvarez Machain. In a brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Human Rights Watch argued that customary international human rights law was violated by U.S. agents who kidnapped a foreign national to bring him to trial in the United States on charges of murder and torture of a U.S. drug enforcement agent. In October the Ninth Circuit ordered that Alvarez Machain be repatriated.

-- Trajano v. Marcos. Human Rights Watch filed a brief in the District of Hawaii opposing an effort to curtail suits for human rights abuse under the federal Alien Tort Claims Act. The suit is described at greater length in the chapter on the California Committee and the Los Angeles office.

The Right to Monitor

The United States has numerous independent, non-governmental organizations that monitor human rights and civil liberties and work to combat abuses. They include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has a broad mandate to deal with violations of the Bill of Rights, and groups that have a more specific focus, such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the NOW Legal Defense Fund. In the past these groups have relied heavily on federal court litigation to redress abuses of rights, but with the Supreme Court increasingly unreceptive to civil rights and liberties claims, they have relied more heavily on state courts and on legislative and public education campaigns. At various points in the recent history of the United States, domestic human rights monitoring organizations have been subjected to surveillance and other forms of harassment (for example, the FBI kept files on the ACLU from the early 1920s through the early 1970s), but there has been no recent indication that this remains the case. In the 1988 presidential election, then Vice President George Bush attacked his opponent, Michael Dukakis, for his membership in the ACLU, echoing the 1986 charge by then-Attorney General Edwin Meese that the ACLU was a "criminals' lobby." While these verbal attacks reflected a lack of receptivity to rights advocacy, they were not accompanied by any formal restrictions on human rights monitors or advocacy.