Country joins growing list of African nations free of capital punishment, but execution remains for high treason
Ghana has become the 29th country in Africa to abolish the death penalty in a move hailed by human rights activists.
The decision means that the 176 people currently on death row, including six women, are likely to have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
Continue reading...Child’s death follows hunger strike at Jammu & Kashmir jail amid increasing hostility towards 40,000 refugees ahead of elections
A five-month-old girl has died after Indian forces fired teargas at Rohingya refugees trying to escape a detention centre where they have been held for more than two years.
Videos – sent to Rohingya activists by detainees at Hiranagar jail, now operating as a holding centre – appear to show women and men amid clouds of teargas. About 270 Rohingya detainees at the centre, in the Indian-administered territory of Jammu & Kashmir, have been on hunger strike since April over their detention.
Continue reading...Peace between Hemedti’s RSF and Sudan’s army will not end war crimes. As UN security council president, Britain must act
As conflict in Sudan escalates, it is becoming clear that the Rapid Support Forces has returned to Darfur to complete the genocide it began 20 years ago. The RSF is the Janjaweed rebranded, the “devils on horseback” used by the Sudanese government from 2003 to implement widespread and systematic crimes against non-Arab communities across Darfur. The RSF was, and still is, commanded by Gen Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
In recent weeks, what we knew was coming has been confirmed. Yale University’s Conflict Observatory, which uses a combination of satellite imagery, Nasa thermal-detection data and open-source analysis, found evidence of the “targeted destruction of at least 26 communities” by the RSF between 15 April and 10 July. Mass graves have been discovered, and satellite imagery shows entire urban neighbourhoods and villages have been burned down.
Continue reading...Security council session told that world’s poorest and most vulnerable at risk after Russia blocked exports
• What was the Black Sea grain deal and why did it collapse?
Russia has been accused at the UN security council of stoking famine by blocking grain exports through the Black Sea, with the aim of profiting from higher global food prices.
Russia’s representative said on Friday that Moscow might consider restarting the scheme if it was given better terms for its own food and fertiliser exports, but was accused by western diplomats of holding the world’s poor to ransom.
Continue reading...A rise in violence towards staff has led Médecins Sans Frontières to rethink its presence in the Sudanese capital as intense fighting continues
Increased violence against health workers in Khartoum is endangering the few hospitals still open in the Sudanese capital, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said after its employees were beaten and whipped by armed men on Thursday.
The MSF team was attacked 700 metres from the Turkish hospital, one of only two operating in southern Khartoum after others were forced to close during almost 100 days of fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Continue reading...Opposition leader Raila Odinga rallies his supporters to the streets where there have been clashes with armed police in Nairobi and western city of Kisumu
Teargas and live ammunition were used against demonstrators as pockets of violence broke out in Kenya during a second day of protests against tax increases and rising living costs.
Despite relative calm in Nairobi on Thursday morning, there were clashes in the informal settlements of Kibera and Mathare in the capital, and in the western city of Kisumu. Protesters threw stones at police, who had mounted a heavy presence in Nairobi after the deaths of at least six demonstrators and more than 300 arrests around the country on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Katalin Novák, an anti-abortionist and promoter of pro-natalist policies, spoke at the opening of the Women Deliver conference in Rwanda
Some leading delegates at a women’s rights conference in Rwanda have expressed shock at the appearance there of the Hungarian president, an anti-abortionist criticised for an anti-equality stance.
Katalin Novák, an important player in the international “anti-gender movement”, was invited by the Rwandan government to speak at the Women Deliver conference in Kigali this week, where reproductive rights is one of the areas under discussion.
Continue reading...Cyclone Freddy cited as contributing factor in feared new outbreak that follows inoculation of 8 million children
Malawi is investigating at least 17 suspected polio cases just as a vaccination campaign is completed with more than 90% of the country’s children inoculated against the virus.
Health authorities fear Cyclone Freddy – the world’s longest-lasting tropical cyclone – which made landfall in March in the southern African nation and led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of displacements – could be a contributing factor.
Continue reading...Fears rise that UN could be forced into compromise with Damascus to keep vital corridor open from Turkey to rebel-held Idlib
Aid groups and their backers at the United Nations are pushing to revive an aid corridor into rebel-held Syria after Russia vetoed the renewal of the cross-border lifeline that has been getting food and medicines into Syria for almost a decade.
Moscow has repeatedly attempted to stymie deliveries through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing from Turkey into Idlib, a strip of land controlled by the de facto opposition known as the National Salvation government, which is linked to the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militant group. At least nine people were killed in a Russian airstrike on a vegetable market in rural Idlib last month.
Continue reading...The World Food Programme’s Haiti response is only 16% funded with more than half of the country’s population regularly hungry
The World Food Programme (WFP) will be unable to feed 100,000 Haitians this month as the UN agency has insufficient funding to meet burgeoning humanitarian needs in the embattled Caribbean nation.
Haitians grappling with dire malnutrition will have to endure the absence of vital food and financial support amid the worst hunger crisis the country has ever witnessed, the WFP announced on Monday.
Continue reading...Students say they are being targeted with expulsion, physical assault and death threats after writing about sensitive subjects
Yolanda Agne, 23, was just months away from graduating in journalism at a university in Maluku province, Indonesia, when she was banned from finishing her studies.
In March last year, the student magazine Lintas – of which Agne was then editor-in-chief – published a damning piece on the prevalence of sexual harassment on her campus at Ambon Islamic State Institute. Among the alleged perpetrators were eight lecturers, with incidents dating over a six-year period.
Continue reading...People are united to end military dictatorship but international support is needed, Naw Hser Hser says
The crisis in Myanmar should be referred to the international criminal court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including widespread sexual violence, an open session at the UN security council will be told.
Naw Hser Hser, the first Myanmar human rights defender to brief council members in an open session since the 2021 coup, will also call for greater action to cut crucial supplies of arms and finances to the military junta.
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Continue reading...Faith leaders say the proceedings, brought by a transgender woman, are an attempt to legitimise ‘sinful acts’
Scores of religious groups and churches took to the streets of several cities in Malawi on Thursday to denounce same-sex marriage before a constitutional court hearing next week.
The court is expected to sit for two days from 17 July to consider a case brought by Jana Gonani, a transgender woman who was charged with “unnatural” behaviour.
Continue reading...Documents containing allegations of torture filed to court in support of complaint made by Bobi Wine
The Uganda president, Yoweri Museveni, and his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba have been accused of sponsoring violence and abusing critics in harrowing testimony filed before the international criminal court.
The submissions contain detailed allegations of the torture of opposition figures and activists who report being arrested arbitrarily and being held incommunicado in “torture centres”, where they were reportedly interrogated about their links with the opposition figure Bobi Wine and subjected to physical harm and indignifying treatment.
Continue reading...Use of veto threatens operations on route from Turkey that supports millions of people in north-west
Russia has been accused of “an act of utter cruelty” after it used its veto at the UN security council to block a nine-month renewal of cross-border aid designed to help 4 million people living in rebel-held north-west Syria.
The vote throws into doubt the continued existence of the key aid route into Syria from Turkey, and represents another hammer blow to a population still reeling from the devastating earthquake that struck the region in February.
Continue reading...Poor oversight, lack of understanding and weak collaboration between allies contributed to ease of Taliban takeover, conclude US and UK aid bodies at London conference
America’s huge, badly-coordinated and politically-driven aid programme in Afghanistan engendered the corruption that undermined its entire mission and turned Afghans away from the western coalition, according to the head of a US aid watchdog.
“We did not really understand Afghanistan or how it worked as a country,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar), told a conference at the defence and security thinktank the Royal United Services Institute.
Continue reading...Police take action as activists, politicians and the company involved all condemn tactics used by managers investigating who put sanitary towel in wrong bin
Three senior managers from a Kenyan dairy company have been arrested over allegations of indecent assault after they forced a group of female employees to undress in order to find out which of them was on their period.
The incident, which happened last week at Brown’s Food Company’s dairy factory in Limuru, in central Kenya, followed failed attempts by the managers – all three of whom are women – to find out who had put a sanitary towel in the wrong bin.
Continue reading...Research into loss of trawler with hundreds of deaths strongly contradicts official accounts – while finding a failure to mobilise help and evidence that survivor statements were tampered with
Attempts by the Greek coastguard to tow a fishing trawler carrying hundreds of migrants may have caused the vessel to sink, according to a new investigation by the Guardian and media partners that has raised further questions about the incident, which left an estimated 500 people missing
The trawler carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank off the coast of Greece on 14 June. There were 104 survivors.
Continue reading...Female students reportedly given sham disciplinary ‘hearings’, suspended from classes and threatened with ‘zero grades’ for defying head covering law
At least 60 female students in Iran have reportedly been barred from university for flouting the country’s mandatory hijab law.
Videos recently shared by citizen journalists show the harassment of women and girls in subways, streets and university campuses by disciplinary committees and pro-regime civilians. In defiance, female university students across the country have been recording themselves without headscarves.
Continue reading...Greg Slater is co-founder with his wife Sharon of Family Watch International, a US group accused of financing propaganda about sexual and gender diversity
A group of human rights organisations in Africa renewed their calls this week for the American multinational Intel Corporation to dismiss a senior employee over his alleged involvement in fanning the growing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in several countries, including Kenya and Uganda.
In a change.org petition, supported by more than a dozen organisations, the rights groups claim that Greg Slater, Intel’s vice-president of global regulatory affairs, has been “actively responsible for exporting, financing, and spreading hate, homophobia” on the continent for decades, through the American conservative organisation, Family Watch International.
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