Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, speaking in Mexico City in August 2007. (AP)

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A new Sudan policy out today from the Obama administration — and immediate scrutiny from human rights advocates of its impact on a campaign called genocide.

It’s been a tough decade for human rights. As if terror and torture and war on terror weren’t tough enough to deal with, then came economic collapse.

From dissidents in prison to populations in peril and poverty, it’s a hard world.

This hour, we’ll talk with the secretary general of Amnesty International worldwide, Irene Khan, and The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, about human rights up against tough times.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Irene Khan joins us in our studio. She is has been secretary general of Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization, since Sept. 12, 2001. She’s the first woman, the first Asian, the first Bangladeshi, and the first Muslim in the job. Her new book is “The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights.”

Joining us from New York is Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times and author of the On The Ground blog. He is the co-author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

Cambodian prostitutes at a Phnom Penh slum house, in July 2002. (AP)

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New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is calling for a new abolition movement: the abolition of 21st-century slavery — by which he means sex slavery.

The global sex trafficking of young girls, in numbers greater than the 19th-century Atlantic slave trade ever knew. Girls kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, maimed and degraded, every hour of every day.

George W. Bush has made a good start on attacking the problem, Kristof says. Barack Obama, he says, should finish it.

This hour, On Point: Sex trafficking, a new century’s slaves, and a new push for abolition.

You can join the conversation. Have you seen it? In Cambodia? India? Closer to home? Is this slavery? Can we stop it?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Nicholas Kristof, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. He’s been writing about sex trafficking for a dozen years, most recently blogging and writing a series of columns on Cambodia’s brothels. His blog includes a video, “The Face of Slavery,” about Long Pross, a young Cambodian woman who was forced into sexual slavery.

Joining us from Kolkata, India, is Ruchira Gupta, president and founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization in India which helps women out of prostitution. She won an Emmy Award for her documentary “The Selling of Innocents” on the trafficking of women and children from Nepal to India. Watch it on YouTube here.

Joining us from Washington is Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Democratic Congresswoman from New York’s 14th District, which includes parts of New York City. She is Co-Chair of the Congressional Human Trafficking Caucus and was one of the driving forces behind the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which President Bush signed into law on December 23, 2008.

Attendees at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Darfur and the Olympics, June 7, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Genocide Intervention Network)

It’s almost show time for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

China fought hard to get the games, and has spent at a level without precedent on preparations that have remade its capitol and wide swaths of the country.

For activists, the Olympics were a chance, when China was at its most sensitive, to push the country on Darfur, Tibet, human rights and its own legal system.

Now, with the opening ceremony in Beijing just days away, August 8th, we’re looking at where China has moved under that pressure. Where it hasn’t. And what may come next.

This hour, On Point: Olympic leverage and what it’s wrought with China in the homestretch to the Beijing Games.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Melinda Liu, Beijing bureau chief for Newsweek. She writes the “Countdown to Beijing” blog at Newsweek.com. She opened Newsweek’s Beijing Bureau in 1980 and is president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

Joining us from Amherst, Massachusetts, is Eric Reeves. He has been at the center of a global campaign against China’s policy on Darfur and Sudan, labeling the Beijing Olympics the “Genocide Olympics.” He is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.”

And joining us from New York is Jerome Cohen, one of the world’s top authorities on China’s legal system and Chinese human rights. He is a professor at New York University School of Law and a senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Two weeks after the worst cyclone in fifty years to hit Asia, the ruling generals in battered Myanmar may be cracking open their door to international aid.

For two weeks — with more than 130,000 dead or missing and millions more clinging to life — the country’s ruling junta has let in only a trickle of desperately-needed relief. Which has raised the question: If a government is willing to let its own people suffer and die in disaster, should the world force in relief?

This hour, On Point: Myanmar and the world’s responsibility to protect the desperate.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Chris Johnson, correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.

Ivo Daalder, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and former director for European affairs on the National Security Council.

Roger Cohen, editor-at-large and columnist for the International Herald Tribune and author of “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo.”

David Mathieson, Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch.

The images out of China are heartbreaking. Whole villages essentially flattened by Monday’s powerful earthquake in mountainous Sichuan province. Schools down. Hospitals down. Grieving families standing in the rain.

And now, news of dams at risk of bursting. Maybe 20,000 dead. Maybe many more.

Beijing has responded with a hundred thousand soldiers and a national call for help, for shovels, for courage.

America learned from Katrina that natural disasters tear open big windows on a nation.

This hour, On Point: the earthquake in China, and what it reveals

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Peter Ford, Beijing Bureau Chief for the Christian Science Monitor, joining us from Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

James Areddy, Shanghai correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and a member of the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Sun Zhe, Professor at the Institute for International Studies and Director of the Center for US-China relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Orville Schell, Director of the Asia Society Center on US-China Relations in New York, he is the author of nine books on China, including “Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood.”

World food prices are soaring. The world’s poor are hurting. And the price hikes may pinch in a supermarket near you.

In Cameroon and Burkina Faso and Egypt and Indonesia, they’ve rallied and rioted over hunger and the high price of food. In Haiti, they’ve turned out a government.

The U.N. calls it a “silent tsunami,” but it’s loud out there now. Between global warming, high oil and fertilizer prices, rising demand, and food crops poured into ethanol, we’ve got a hungry, angry world out there. And don’t imagine you’re immune.

This hour, On Point: the food crisis, and what to do about it.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John McArthur, executive director of Millennium Promise, an organization assisting the U.N.’s anti-poverty goals, and a research associate at the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Raj Patel, visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, he is author of “Stuffed and Starved.”

Joia Mukherjee, medical director for Partners in Health, an organization with initiatives in countries such as Haiti and Rwanda, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital

A Chinese protester holds a banner reading No More Home during a protest in front of the Ministry of Construction in Beijing, China on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

People’s Square, in the middle of Shanghai, is not like Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Shanghai’s square is huge — but green. It feels in April a bit like Central Park.

A few months ago something extraordinary—for China—happened here. Thousands of people marched into People’s Square to protest the extension of a high-speed Maglev train line through their neighborhood — and the protest worked. The project was dropped. In China, that’s news. Almost amazing. Because most dissenters in China face a much grimmer outcome… Harassment. Beatings. Jail. Worse.

The Chinese government doesn’t like to talk about it. But we will, with people who know the problem well. This hour, from Shanghai: Dissent in China.

Our panel of guests for this important hour are people who know the often hidden world of dissent and punishment well.

Guests:

Joining us in Shanghai is Jerome Cohen, one of the world’s top authorities on China’s legal system. He is a professor at New York University School of Law, a partner in the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and a senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been following the law and dissent in China for more than 30 years.

Joining us from New York is Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, a group that promotes democratic reform in China. She is a professor of law emerita at City University of New York School of Law and a board member of Human Rights Watch/Asia.

And with us from Boston is journalist Leu Siew Ying. She worked for the South China Morning Post from 2002 to 2007 in the southern province of Guangdong, and covered local protests there. (See her prize-winning article “From Village Protest to National Flashpoint” [pdf].) She is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, studying grassroots democracy in China.

You know the news out of Iraq these days: the surge seems to be working, at least for now. Some refugees are trickling back in. The U.S. military complains that Iraq’s politicians aren’t doing their part to stabilize the country. Foreign jihadis are on the run. There’s still not much oil flowing.

To Iraqi citizens these headlines don’t exactly ring false — but they don’t really speak to their daily struggles to stay alive and look ahead to when this mess is over.

This hour, On Point: On being a civilian in Iraq today. Life? Maybe. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness? You’ve got to be kidding.

-Jacki Lyden

Guests:

Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she served during the Clinton administration as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance.

Dr. Najib Hanoudi, an Iraqi ophthalmologist and former resident of Baghdad, now residing in the United States.

Kristele Younes, an advocate and analyst for Refugees International.

Michael Youash, project director for Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project.

Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General looked like a sure thing. Now, with the legal definition of torture in the balance, Democrats aren’t so sure.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Charlie Savage, reporter for The Boston Globe, is author of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

John McGinnis, professor at Northwestern University School of Law and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School.

Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya was a passionate, powerful advocate of American intervention in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He laid Saddam’s crimes before the world, begged for action, dreamed of the democracy that could be.

He promised George Bush in the Oval Office that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in the streets of Iraq. Now, American soldiers are dying in those streets.

Sober minds call Iraq a catastrophe. And Kanan Makiya — activist and advocate — has had to search his soul.

This hour, On Point: Kanan Makiya now, on his Iraq and America’s war.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Kanan Makiya, professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University and author of “Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq,” “The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and “Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World”