A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Turkey to Colombia
Continue reading...Category Archives: Global development
No man’s land: three people seeking asylum stuck in Cyprus’s buffer zone
The Cameroonians, who had ‘no idea’ they had jumped into the demilitarised area, have been trapped for almost two months
A few months after Grace Ngo flew into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus from her native Cameroon, she decided to head “for the west”. Smugglers pointed the student in the direction of the Venetian walls that cut through the heart of Nicosia, Europe’s last divided capital.
A little before midnight on 24 May, Ngo leapt from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot republic into what she hoped would be the war-divided island’s internationally recognised Greek south.
Continue reading...First Nation calls for release of school records to identify residential victims
• Indigenous community seeks Canada state and church records
• Report on finding of 215 unmarked graves calls for wider search
The First Nations community that shocked Canada with the discovery of unmarked graves says school records will be critical in identifying victims – and that a much greater area needs to be searched to understand the true scale of the tragedy.
Related: The Indigenous children who died at Canada’s residential schools – podcast
Continue reading...How public ‘apologies’ are used against domestic abuse victims in Chechnya
Activists say Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime uses televised confessions ‘under duress’ to hold back women’s rights, despite changes in society
Khalimat Taramova, the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent Chechen businessman, sits demurely on a velvet sofa ornately embellished in gold. She is wearing a modest dress and a headscarf. With her on the sofa are three men dressed in suits. They are appearing on Grozny TV, the state television channel of Russia’s Chechen Republic.
Only a couple of weeks before the programme was shown on 14 June, Taramova fled her home, where she said she was subjected to violence after going against her family’s wishes. She sought help from a group of women’s rights activists, the Marem project , who let her stay in a flat owned by one of its members in the neighbouring republic of Dagestan. In a video released on social media on 6 June, she pleaded for the Chechen authorities not to come looking for her.
Continue reading...Fresh evidence of violence at Libyan detention centres as boats turned back
Amnesty International says sexual abuse and beatings rife at camps for those forcibly returned after trying to cross the Med
New evidence of starvation and abuses inside migrant detention centres has been collected from migrants inside seven facilities across Libya.
A report by Amnesty International comes less than a month after Médecins Sans Frontières announced it was suspending its operations at two centres in Libya because of increasing violence towards refugees and migrants.
Continue reading...Land defenders: will the Cáceres verdict break the ‘cycle of violence’ in Honduras?
Conviction of businessman who conspired in murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres raises hopes of end to impunity
When Bertha Zuñiga heard that a former Honduran army intelligence officer and businessman had been found guilty of collaborating in the murder of her mother, Berta Cáceres, she breathed a big sigh of relief. Five years after the environmental campaigner was assassinated by hired hitmen, this was the verdict her family and friends had been waiting for.
“I know there is still a long road, maybe very long and very hard, but to have achieved a guilty verdict against the [former] president of a corporation, [who is] connected to the armed forces: it is unprecedented in our country,” says Zuñiga, 30.
Continue reading...Nepal sees huge rise in maternal deaths as Covid keeps women at home
Health workers fear deaths could reach levels not seen this century as up to 90% miss check-ups and many opt for home births
Earlier this month, 21-year-old Lakhu BK decided to have her baby at home in her village in the far west of Nepal. She had feared contracting Covid-19 if she went to a health centre. She lost her life giving birth.
“I thought my daughter-in-law will die from [the] virus but did not think she would die from being unable to give birth,” said her mother-in-law, Pamfi BK, 50.
Continue reading...Ecuador abortion laws discriminate against minority ethnic women – report
Criminalisation disproportionately affects indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian women and exacerbates inequality, says Human Rights Watch
Gladys, an indigenous woman from rural Ecuador, went to hospital after injecting poison into her stomach to end her pregnancy. Doctors went straight to the police, and she was sentenced to two months in jail for having an abortion with consent.
Elsewhere in the South American country, a 20-year-old Afro-Ecuadorian woman went to hospital after a fall, and found out she was pregnant and miscarrying. She was swiftly arrested and spent four months awaiting trial, where she was cleared.
Continue reading...Missing school: how art can help girls in Nepal get an education – in pictures
Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United World Schools, which has opened schools in the country.
All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS
*All girls’ names have been changed
Continue reading...Hunger sweeps India in Covid’s shadow as millions miss out on rations
Desperation grows for those unable to access subsidised food, as worst hunger in two decades reported
When India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 struck in April, Nazia Habib Khan’s second marriage abruptly came to an end after a year of beatings and abuse. The 28-year-old daughter of migrants from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh returned to live with her mother, brothers and a sister-in-law in Mumbai.
Their 40 sq metre (400 sq ft) home in Kurla East stands huddled among the 800 or so brick, tin sheet and tarpaulin houses of Qureshi Nagar, the entire shanty town trembling when a train roars past on a nearby railway line.
Continue reading...Why have Cuba’s simmering tensions boiled over on to the streets?
Anti-government protests have rocked the communist-ruled island, supercharged by shortages, social media and sanctions
Liuba Álvarez leaves her house three times a week at 3.45am to queue outside her local supermarket for basic goods like meat, oil and detergent. Her last queue was “relatively short”: after eight hours she came home with some minced meat in time for lunch. Other days she doesn’t get back until 5pm.
Related: Thousands march in Cuba in rare mass protests amid economic crisis
Continue reading...Canada: at least 160 more unmarked graves found in British Columbia
- Penelakut Tribe says graves found close to ex-residential school
- Kuper Island school run by Catholic church closed in 1975
A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school – the latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
Members of the Penelakut Tribe in south-western British Columbia said in a statement late on Monday that the graves had been discovered near the site of the Kuper Island industrial school on Penelakut Island, nearly 90km north of the provincial capital Victoria.
Continue reading...‘I haven’t been paid a cent’: Jerusalema singer’s claim stirs row in South Africa
Nomcebo Zikode threatens legal action, claiming she was never paid for the song that became a global hit during the pandemic
While her haunting vocals on the global hit song Jerusalema continue to reverberate around the world, the South African singer Nomcebo Zikode claims she is yet to receive any money for her work.
The singer took to social media on Sunday threatening legal action against Open Mic Productions, the label that recorded Jerusalema in late 2019.
Continue reading...‘We can do anything’: the Indian girls’ movement fighting child marriage
At 17, Priyanka Bairwa refused her arranged marriage. Instead, she started Rajasthan Rising to help thousands of others and call for free education
Priyanka Bairwa was 15 when her family began to look for a husband for her. The pandemic sped up the process, as schools shut and work dried up. By October 2020, her parents had settled on a suitable boy from their village of Ramathra in the district of Karauli, Rajasthan.
But Bairwa, now 18, wouldn’t hear of it. “During the pandemic, every family in the village was eager to marry off their girls. You’d have to invite less people, there were fewer expenses,” says Bairwa. “But I refused to be caught in a child marriage. There was a major backlash – constant fights. I finally threatened to run away and, fearing I would do something drastic, my family called it off. My mother convinced them to let me study and I joined a college.”
Continue reading...Arrested, abused and accused: wave of repression targets LGBT+ Ghanaians
Opening of community space in Accra, which was quickly shut, has been the trigger for new anti-LGBT+ action
“All I wanted to do was help vulnerable people,” said Shaun Apong, tears streaking down his face, from behind the bars of a squalid police cell in Ho City in eastern Ghana.
Apong was one of 21 people arrested in early June, charged with unlawful assembly and accused of spreading an LGBT+ agenda, amid a marked and sudden increase in sensitivities around the rights and advocacy of gay and queer people in the west African country.
Continue reading...Almost one in three globally go hungry during pandemic – UN
Big leap in malnutrition during Covid, with fifth of children now believed to be stunted, report warns
The number of people who did not have enough food to eat rose steeply during the Covid-19 pandemic to include almost a third of the world, according to a new UN report published on Monday.
Five UN agencies said the number of people without access to healthy diets grew by 320 million last year to nearly 2.37 billion people– more than the increases in the previous five years combined.
Continue reading...‘We cannot vote or get jobs’: plight of 300,000 Zimbabweans without documents
Amnesty is calling for action to help those with no papers who are denied access to education, employment and healthcare
At 45, Philimon Mashava has never had a bank account or a phone in his name.
He has never had a birth certificate and, without documents, Mashava’s stateless existence has meant him missing out on school and countless job opportunities, as employers want some form of identification.
Continue reading...Health campaigners call for an end to the use of the word leper
Derogatory use of the “L-word” has increased during Covid and is said to be further marginalising people with the curable disease
Health campaigners are calling for an end to the use of the word leper, saying the language frequently used by politicians and others during the pandemic has made people with leprosy even more marginalised.
The metaphor of the socially outcast “leper” has been used often, whether in media reports on stigma against early Covid-19 patients or by politicians in Italy and Brazil complaining about being seen as “leper colonies”. Campaigners now want an end to the use of what they call the “L-word”.
Continue reading...‘No peace without justice’: families of Italy’s mafia victims wait for closure
Italy’s sluggish legal process under the spotlight as devastated relatives fight for cases to go to trial
Clinging to his son’s coffin, Vincenzo Agostino solemnly swore that he would not cut his hair or beard until justice was served. It was 10 August 1989, five days after two mafia hitmen on a motorbike had killed Antonino Agostino, a police officer, and his wife, Ida, who was five months pregnant.
The couple were shot dead in broad daylight on the seafront promenade in Villagrazia di Carini, a town about 20 miles from Palermo. Vincenzo witnessed his son’s agony as the killers fired a full magazine of bullets at him. He saw his daughter-in-law, who was shot in the heart, move closer to her husband in a vain attempt to console him.
Continue reading...Global philanthropists pledge £94m to cover UK foreign aid cuts
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation among organisations picking up some of bill for health projects
A group of global philanthropists, including Bill Gates, have pledged £93.5m to help cover the shortfall left by the UK government’s cuts to foreign aid.
After the government cut funding by about a third in the autumn spending review, many “critical” projects have stalled or been put at risk.
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