Pompeo singled out Beijing for detaining members of Muslim minority groups as he unveiled annual human rights report
China is “in a league of its own” when it comes to human rights violations, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said on Wednesday as he unveiled the state department’s annual report on human rights around the world.
Related: 'If you enter a camp, you never come out': inside China's war on Islam
Continue reading...Britain is Egypt’s largest foreign investor. Yet at the recent Arab-EU summit, Theresa May was oddly quiet on rights abuses
While there may be “a special place in hell” for those who backed Brexit without a plan, regimes that execute people after fundamentally flawed trials get their own summit. Just a fortnight ago, Donald Tusk and the leaders of the EU met with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, at the Arab-EU summit in Sharm el-Sheikh – days after his regime executed nine people.
The summit was co-chaired by Tusk and Sisi. Tusk and other European leaders, including Theresa May, were curiously silent at the summit about the fate of Egypt’s political prisoners. The execution of the nine – convicted after unfair trials in which human rights campaigners say confessions were elicited by torture – was the third consecutive week of executions. In total 15 people were put to death in February in Egypt.
Continue reading...A landmark ruling legalised gay sex in the country in 2018, yet the LGBT community still face stigma and violence
When India’s supreme court announced it was legalising gay sex, people hugged in twos and threes on the lawns outside the Delhi courthouse. They draped themselves in rainbow flags in Bangalore and released balloons into the sky. In Mumbai’s nightclubs, they danced all night.
In Patna, the dusty capital of the east Indian state of Bihar, Roshni did nothing. “We felt good when people were marching in Delhi and Mumbai,” she says. “Everyone wanted to follow [them], but then we feared what other people would think – how they would react.”
Continue reading...Prejudice faced by Afghan women with a disability has proved no barrier to its national wheelchair basketball team
Nilofar Bayat played her first game of wheelchair basketball in an open court in the middle of Kabul, surrounded by mainly male onlookers who shouted insults and called her names.
She decided to keep playing anyway.
Continue reading...The inhabitants of a remote village at the heart of India’s coal industry brave deadly sinkholes and toxic gases simply to survive
In the village of Liloripathra, in a remote corner of India’s eastern Jharkhand state, mother-of-three Sushila Devi grips the hands of two women sitting on either side of her. Coal fires spew clouds of smoke into the already heavy, polluted air.
At about 8pm, a policeman cradling a small body wrapped in black plastic bags emerges through the smoke and the crowds that have gathered around her home. He has come to deliver the body of her 13-year-old daughter Chanda, killed along with two others from the village when a coal mine caved in on top of them. They had been scavenging in a colliery operated by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a subsidiary of state-owned Coal India.
Continue reading...‘Video clubs’ and watching on mobile is taking over from the joyful experience of going to the cinema
Three riders on horseback canter up a dusty road in Ouagadougou to deliver the top prize, a golden horse, to the awards ceremony of Africa’s most important film festival. Dressed head to toe in glitter, film-themed wax fabric and flowing silks, celebrities of African cinema settle down, Rwanda’s national ballet performs and the presidents of Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Mali look on from golden chairs as gongs, cheques and conical Fulani grass hats are handed out for more than three hours.
The pan-African film and television festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco) is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the ceremony was the culmination of two weeks of screenings, parties and debates over the future of African cinema.
Continue reading...A visit to the world’s fifth poorest country has shown me that battling early and forced marriage begins with communities
Islam, for me, is a way of life and the core of my world. As a Muslim woman I have always been encouraged to be who I want to be.
I get frustrated when people say: “Why do you wear a hijab? Isn’t that a sign of women’s oppression?” I choose to wear a hijab; I choose to be an educated and liberated woman and I choose to follow Islam.
Continue reading...Scores of high-profile signatories mark International Women’s Day by signing letter calling for stronger global political support
• Letter: Women worldwide must be heard and respected
Emma Watson, Keira Knightley, and Dame Emma Thompson are among 76 actors, writers, business leaders and campaigners calling on governments to increase support and protection of women fighting for their rights around the world.
The letter, published in the Guardian to mark International Women’s Day on Friday, says women risk “backlash, censorship and violence” whenever they defend their rights or speak out over injustice.
Continue reading...Campaigners will march on International Women’s Day to protest against harassment, child marriage and ‘honour killings’
During Jalwat Ali’s school days in Lahore, there were limited spaces to gather with other women, never mind flood the streets with punchy placards.
Public spaces often feel constricted in Pakistan, as though under critical male scrutiny. But over the past few days, Ali has been recruiting dozens of women, from garment workers to domestic helpers who barely get a day off. “To solve any problem, we need to make a collective effort,” she says.
Continue reading...Claims that the World Wide Fund for Nature is in bed with paramilitaries point to a wider need for root and branch reform
World Wide Fund for Nature, put down your weapons. You are not a mercenary. You are not a government. You are not a terrorist. Your mission: to save the planet. Saving the planet does not happen by shooting people, or even by threatening them.
One might be forgiven for thinking that headlines this week revealing allegations that WWF was in bed with paramilitaries in different parts of the world must have been referring to the erstwhile World Wrestling Federation, not the fluffy panda charity that saves tigers. How could this possibly be?
Continue reading...Young people taken to UK are exploited in transit through Europe as governments ‘pass the buck’ on protection
Thousands of children trafficked from Vietnam to the UK are being abused and exploited in transit through Europe because governments are “passing the buck” on their protection, research has found.
Victims are typically trafficked through eight countries before arriving in the UK, and at each point are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation. Yet governments routinely view Vietnamese children as the responsibility of other states, according to a report published on Thursday by Anti-Slavery International, the Pacific Links Foundation and Every Child Protected Against Trafficking UK (Ecpat UK).
Continue reading...Sweeping health reforms, which also include free provision for pregnant women, heralded as national ‘turning point’
After decades of suffering some of the highest maternal and child mortality rates in the world, Mali has vowed to provide free healthcare for pregnant women and children under five in a “brave and bold” move to revamp its dismal healthcare system.
Following a raft of reforms announced by President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, free contraceptives will also be provided across the country as tens of thousands of community health workers are introduced in a bid to provide more localised healthcare to Mali’s population of 18 million people.
Continue reading...San Ferdinando shanty town cleared in first major eviction after launch of hardline immigration measures
More than 1,500 people are being ousted from the refugee camp at San Ferdinando, in southern Italy, in the largest eviction since Italy’s rightwing populist government’s immigration measures kicked in.
On Wednesday morning, almost 1,000 paramilitary police officers surrounded the 400 shacks where the migrants have lived since the camp was established in 2010, near Gioia Tauro, in Calabria. As people were ushered out clutching their few possessions, bulldozers demolished the shanty town of cardboard and wood huts in a matter of hours.
Continue reading...Thousands of homes swept away as rains follow devastating drought, with UN ‘shocked’ by lack of crisis funding support
Afghanistan has been hit with the worst flooding in seven years, with 20 dead, thousands of homes swept away and many families, already displaced by drought, forced to leave their homes for the second time.
The latest climate shock, which affected eight provinces including Kandahar, came as the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan criticised the European Commission for its “wholly insufficient” response to hunger and suffering in a country already in the grip of what analysts describe as the world’s deadliest conflict.
Continue reading...Anti-choice doctors and health officials accused of obstructing legal terminations after 11-year-old girl gave birth to rapist’s child
The lives of thousands of girls in Argentina are being put at risk as legal abortions are delayed and obstructed by doctors trying to force pregnancies to full term.
The issue of anti-choice doctors, medical institutions and government officials deliberately trying to hold up legally sanctioned terminations was brought into sharp focus last week when it emerged that an 11-year-old girl’s baby was born alive because health officials delayed her request for an abortion. The girl had fallen pregnant after being raped by her grandmother’s boyfriend.
Continue reading...As well as global funding, Penny Mordaunt announces creation of £250,000 taskforce to tackle problem in Britain
The UK government has announced £2m to support organisations around the world to end period poverty by 2030.
The minister for women and equalities, Penny Mordaunt, also announced £250,000 for the creation of a taskforce comprised of government departments, businesses, charities and manufacturers to come up with new ideas to tackle the problem in the UK.
Continue reading...Report says aid to displaced people in Africa undermined by Home Office approach to asylum seekers and refugees
The UK government’s migration policy is “disconnected and incoherent” and involves the pitting of one government department against another, a report by MPs has said.
The international development committee (IDC) urged the government to double the number of vulnerable refugees offered resettlement in Britain, up to 10,000 a year.
Continue reading...Tauqir Sharif calls on UK to distinguish between humanitarian workers and potential security threats
A British aid worker and his family say they are stuck in Syria after his UK citizenship has been revoked and his eldest daughter refused a passport.
Tauqir Sharif, 31, from Walthamstow, who lives and works in Idlib alongside his British wife, Racquell Hayden-Best, had his citizenship revoked in May 2017. Speaking to the Guardian this week, he called on the UK government to review its revocation policy for those engaged in humanitarian work in conflict zones.
Continue reading...World Wide Fund for Nature launches inquiry into claims that it works with paramilitaries allegedly involved in serious abuses
One of the world’s largest charities has launched an investigation into claims that it funds, equips and works with paramilitary forces accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting and murdering scores of people in national parks across Africa and Asia.
Human rights specialists will lead an independent review of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) conservation charity, following allegations of abuse in six countries, published by BuzzFeed news on Monday.
Continue reading...Medical experts and victims say practice, deemed by perpetrators to protect girls from sexual harassment and rape, is child abuse
Comfort was nine when her older sister told her she was going to flatten her chest with a stone to prevent her breasts from developing too soon, telling her it was for her own good.
“She said it’s so that girls don’t get abused as children or as teenagers,” Comfort said.
Continue reading...