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World Report 2014 is Human Rights Watch’s 24th annual review of human  rights practices around the globe. It summarizes key human  rights issues in more than90 countries and territories worldwide, drawing on events from the end of 2012 through  November 2013.

The book is divided into three main parts:  an essay section, photo  essays, and country-specific chapters.

Reflecting on the “Rights Struggles of 2013,” Executive Director Kenneth Roth highlights three main themes. In Syria, the slaughter of civilians continued with only a weak international response, straining the “Responsibility to Protect,”  or R2P, doctrine, which commits world governments to respond to imminent  or ongoing mass  atrocities. Elsewhere,  governments are engaged in what Roth calls “abusive majoritarianism”—expressing outward  commitment to democracy while in reality using the real or perceived preferences of the majority to limit dissent and suppress minorities. And in the United States, new disclosures about  the use of dragnet surveillance and targeted drone killings have fueled debate about  the tactics of counterterrorism. But Roth sees encouraging signs.  The R2P doctrine appears to be holding up enough  to provide at least  some  help in several  African countries facing mass  atrocities, including the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo; public reaction has been  strong against what Roth calls “feigned  democracy”; and the US government faces increased pressure to change current counterterrorism practices. In addition, he notes improvements in the machinery  that helps  to defend  human  rights, includ- ing the United Nations Human Rights Council. The year 2013, he concludes, may have had “more than enough  suffering,”  but it also featured a “vigorous move- ment fighting back.”

Next, Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno charts  Human Rights Watch’s evolving approach to current global policies  aimed at curbing drug use and the multi-bil- lion dollar illegal drug trade  (“The Human Rights Case for Drug Reform”). For many years, Human Rights Watch documented widespread abuses that governments committed in the name of combatting drugs.  But research in several  countries led us to the increasing conviction  that,  when it came to personal use and posses- sion of drugs,  the criminalization of drugs was not only ineffective  and corrosive of institutions, but also inconsistent with personal autonomy and the right to pri- vacy. In 2013, Human Rights Watch adopted a policy calling on governments to decriminalize all personal use and possession of drugs,  and to adopt alternative policies  on the drug trade—a “new course” that McFarland argues is vital to avoiding the crippling human  costs  of the current approach to drug control.

More than a decade ago, world governments established eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—including commitments to reduce  child and mater- nal mortality and achieve  universal  primary education—all  to be achieved by

2015. In “Putting Development to Rights,” David Mepham  argues that despite real progress in some  areas, the neglect  of human  rights in the MDGs has diminished and distorted development efforts, with many people excluded or unable to bene- fit from development programs. More worrying still, many people have been harmed  by economic policies  carried out in the name of development. Mepham suggests that the current UN-led process to establish successor goals to the

MDGs provides a crucial opportunity to broaden our understanding of develop- ment and fully integrate human  rights into development policy and practice. Doing so, he says,  will help promote  more just and inclusive  development, and improve the lives of millions of the world’s poorest and most marginalized people.

After 2013’s flood of revelations about  pervasive US online surveillance, Dinah PoKempner pushes back against those who argue that we must simply live with it because public expectations of privacy have eroded (“The Right Whose Time Has Come (Again)”). Privacy, she says,  is a crucial “gateway”  to almost  every other right, and “nothing  less than the shelter in which we work out what we think and who we are.” Putting the vulnerability  that many people feel as lives migrate online into historical  and legal perspective, she describes legal efforts from the end of the nineteenth century to address technological developments seen as menacing people’s private lives. Once again,  she says, technology is evolving and the law must catch up.

The photo  essays that follow highlight three underreported human  rights crises: child marriage  in South Sudan, the impact of the 2014 Sochi Olympics on human rights in Russia, and the growing human  rights and humanitarian tragedy in the Central African Republic.

World Report