Category Archives: Global development

Child trafficking victim wins £85,000 from UK government over rape attempt

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Court orders Home Office and Ministry of Justice to make payment to teenager attacked while being illegally detained at Morton Hall

A child trafficking victim has won £85,000 in compensation from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice after he was sexually assaulted and illegally detained at Morton Hall immigration centre.

The Home Office must pay £82,000 to the Vietnamese national – known as H – after it admitted the teenager was being detained illegally when a fellow inmate attempted to rape him in his cell in 2016.

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‘We will lose any hope of going home’: Rohingya live in fear of resettlement

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Plans to relocate Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state promise to dash their dreams of returning to traditional life

For the past seven years, Mohammad has been able to see the beach on the outskirts of Sittwe, and the Indian Ocean beyond, only through a barbed wire fence.

“The only difference between a prison and the Rakhine camps is that in prison at least they know how long their sentence is,” says the 23-year-old, shaking his head.

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Dutch court will hear widows’ case against Shell over deaths of Ogoni Nine

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Judges order oil firm to release confidential documents as wives of late Nigerian activists get go-ahead to pursue claim

A Dutch court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to determine whether Royal Dutch Shell was complicit in the Nigerian government’s execution of the Ogoni Nine, environmental protesters who fought against widespread pollution in the Niger Delta.

In a 50-page ruling hailed by campaigners as an “important precedent” for global human rights cases, judges at The Hague’s district court said on Wednesday that they would allow the case to go forward, also indicating that the claimants – widows of four of the activists – would be able to bring further evidence to prove their case.

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Will the UK commitment to development become another casualty of Brexit? | Preet Kaur Gill

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Uncertainty and the falling pound are jeopardising aid that millions of people worldwide rely on, says the shadow development minister

Since the 2016 referendum we have all learned a lot more about the depth of the relationship between the UK and the EU; whether it’s joint cooperation on research, or the potential impact of leaving the EU on agriculture exports.

When considering the effects of Brexit, parliamentarians have focused their attention on our constituencies and the country as a whole. International development has only raised its head in discussions of post-Brexit trade deals.

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Tunisia invokes sharia law in bid to shut down LGBT rights group

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Judicial harassment and rise in arrests under anti-sodomy law add to climate of tension and fear

One of the Arab world’s most visible advocacy groups defending the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people is facing closure following legal threats by the government.

Association Shams has been officially operating in Tunisia since 2015, helping the country’s LGBT community repeal article 230 of its penal code, a French colonial law, which criminalises homosexuality with up to three years in jail.

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Killings of police and polio workers halt Pakistan vaccine drive

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Deaths follow wave of rumours and a hoax video intended to derail final push to eradicate the disease

A federal government campaign to vaccinate more than 40 million children under five against polio in Pakistan has been suspended following a series of attacks on workers and police over the past week.

On 23 April a police officer responsible for protecting polio workers was gunned down in Bannu. The same day, a polio worker was injured with a knife in Lahore by a man refusing to allow his child to be vaccinated, citing a recent hoax video that claimed children were becoming ill after the immunisations.

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Poor bear the brunt as global justice system fails 5.1 billion people – study

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Flawed legal systems mean two-thirds of the world’s population are deprived of justice

Across the world, an estimated 5.1 billion people – two-thirds of the global population – are being failed by the justice system, a study has found.

But providing universal access to basic justice could save the global economy billions of dollars every year, as lost income and stress-related illness due to seeking legal redress can cost countries up to 3% of their annual GDP, according to a report published today by the Task Force on Justice.

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‘Say no to child marriage’: Bangladeshi women fight for equality – in pictures

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From violence and harassment to the pursuit of simple pleasures like playing football or riding a bicycle, women in Bangladesh encounter innumerable obstacles. Here, those on the frontline of that struggle discuss the challenges they have faced and the hurdles that remain

Girls in Bangladesh talk their way out of forced marriage

All photographs by Muhammad Murtada/British Council

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Girls in Bangladesh learn to talk their way out of forced marriage

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A project in Bangladesh’s Narsingdi district is one of several making inroads on women’s rights, despite a wider conservative backlash that has proved deadly

When Modina Begum heard that a 13-year-old girl in her village in central Bangladesh was about to be married off, she went straight to the girl’s parents and persuaded them to cancel the wedding, rescuing the teenager from a fate Begum herself had escaped.

“I convinced my parents to call off my own marriage, let me finish my studies and become self-reliant before getting married,” says Begum, now 19, as she leads a group of girls in English and digital skills at the Edge club in Narsingdi district, 50 kilometres north-east of the capital, Dhaka. “Now my parents have faith in me and I have the confidence to speak out for others.”

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Speech that led to death threats against an Armenian trans activist – video

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Armenia’s first passport-registered transgender woman has received death threats following an impassioned parliamentary speech. Lilit Martirosyan became the first member of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community to take to the parliamentary podium, speaking out against discrimination at a session before the committee on human rights. The speech, delivered a fortnight ago, has sparked a vicious backlash in Armenia, where homosexuality has been decriminalised but discrimination against LGBTI people remains rife 

Armenian MPs call for trans activist to be burned alive after historic speech

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Armenian MPs call for trans activist to be burned alive after historic speech

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Landmark parliamentary address on LGBTI discrimination challenges reformist agenda of post-revolution government

Armenia’s first registered transgender woman has received death threats after making a historic speech in her country’s national assembly.

Lilit Martirosyan became the first member of her country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community to take to the parliamentary podium, speaking out against discrimination at a session of its committee on human rights. A video of the speech has been shared around the world.

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UK modern slavery helpline receives over 7,000 calls in a year

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Arrests and prosecutions remain thin on the ground despite 62% rise in reports of suspected labour exploitation

More than 7,100 suspected victims of modern slavery were identified across the UK in 2018, with Romanian nationals comprising the largest victim group, according to a national helpline.

Labour exploitation – the majority of which was identified in car washes, beauty parlours, construction sites, hotels and on farms – accounted for the largest number of suspected modern slavery cases, with London the location for the highest number of suspected victims (1,477), found the helpline’s second annual assessment, published on Thursday.

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Footage shows refugees hiding as Libyan militia attack detention centre

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At least two people reportedly killed in shooting at Qasr bin Ghashir facility near Tripoli

Young refugees held in a detention centre in Libya have described being shot at indiscriminately by militias advancing on Tripoli, in an attack that reportedly left at least two people dead and up to 20 injured.

Phone footage smuggled out of the camp and passed to the Guardian highlights the deepening humanitarian crisis in the centres set up to prevent refugees and migrants from making the sea crossing from the north African coast to Europe.

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Vaccines by air as drone medicine service takes off in Ghana

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Up to 600 flights expected daily as largest service of its kind in the world targets country’s remote areas

Twelve million people in Ghana are set to benefit from the launch of the world’s largest drone medical delivery service.

Up to 600 drone flights will be made each day, delivering vaccines, blood supplies and life-saving medicines to 2,000 health centres in remote areas around the country.

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Cyclone Idai: ‘My family needs to eat, I don’t know how we will survive’

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In Mozambique, where many people rely on crops to live, Idai’s impact on two key agricultural areas has been devastating

Marie Jose stares out at her field of broken maize stalks, the cobs yellow and mouldy from days of excessive water followed by weeks of extreme sun. She should have harvested them last month, but Cyclone Idai struck her village in Buzi district, in central Mozambique, and destroyed them all.

She is still dealing with the trauma of losing her grandparents and niece to the tropical storm. “They couldn’t hold on in the trees where we were sitting and the wind pushed them into the water,” she says. Their bodies are still missing.

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Rotten eggs: e-waste from Europe poisons Ghana’s food chain

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Toxins from old computers, fridges and other electronic goods are polluting chicken eggs in an area where 80,000 people live

Some of the most hazardous chemicals on Earth are entering the food chain in Ghana from illegally disposed electronic waste coming from Europe.

According to a new report by two environmental groups tracking the disposal of e-waste, chicken eggs from the Agbogbloshie slum in Ghana’s capital, Accra – where residents break up waste to recover metals – contain dangerous levels of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), among other harmful substances.

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Campaigners fight to lift ban on morning-after pill in Honduras

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Law against emergency contraception leaves desperate women, including rape victims, forced to buy medication on black market

A pioneering grassroots campaign to legalise emergency contraception is launched in Honduras this week amid ongoing false claims by church leaders, senior doctors and conservative politicians that the medication causes abortions, infertility and cancer.

Honduras is the only country in Latin America where emergency contraception is banned, forcing desperate women, including rape victims, to buy expensive and unregulated contraband pills on the black market.

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Rumour and violence rife as Congo Ebola outbreak surges out of control

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Attacks on health centres are impeding efforts to contain an epidemic that has claimed nearly 900 lives in nine months

Archippe Kamuha knows the signs of Ebola well: diarrhoea, bleeding, persistent fever. But if the 25-year-old developed such symptoms, she would not contact specialist health workers.

“I know that if I go [to a treatment centre], I’ll die. All my friends who go there don’t come home, they die,” said Kamuha, whose home town, Butembo, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, is at the centre of the country’s escalating Ebola outbreak.

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UN waters down rape resolution to appease US’s hardline abortion stance

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Measure on sexual violence in conflict passes after Trump administration threatened to veto document over references to reproductive health

The UN has backed a resolution on combatting rape in conflict but excluded references in the text to sexual and reproductive health, after vehement opposition from the US.

The resolution passed by the security council on Tuesday after a three-hour debate and a weekend of fierce negotiations on the language among member states that threatened to derail the process.

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Malawi starts landmark pilot of first ever child malaria vaccine

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Immunisation gives partial protection against the killer disease, and lessens the severity of other cases

Malawi will begin immunising young children against malaria today, in a landmark large-scale pilot of the first vaccine to give partial protection against the disease, the World Health Organization said.

Although the vaccine protects only a third of children aged under two years from life-threatening or severe malaria, clinical trials have found those who are immunised are likely to have less severe cases of the disease. Earlier, smaller trials also showed the vaccine prevented four in 10 cases of malaria overall, in babies aged between five and 17 months.

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