Category Archives: Global development

UN resolution hailed as ‘crucial turning point’ for victims of Sri Lanka civil war

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UK-led action ramps up scrutiny of the regime against a backdrop of worsening human rights abuses

Civil rights groups have welcomed a UK-led UN resolution on Sri Lanka as a “crucial turning point for justice” for victims of the country’s nearly 30-year-long conflict.

The resolution, which ramps up international monitoring and scrutiny of the country, was passed on Tuesday by the human rights council after the UN high commissioner for human rights warned Sri Lanka could rapidly descend into violence unless decisive international action was taken. Michelle Bachelet expressed alarm over “worrying trends” in the country since President Gotabaya Rajapaksa took office in 2019 and last month told the human rights council the country had “closed the door” on ending impunity for past abuses.

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Abandoned: gangs in Guatemala replace families – photo essay

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Decades of migration to the US left generations of children behind for whom gangs are substitute families

Photographs and text by Ignacio Marin

Since she arrived in Guatemala City a few decades ago, she has lived in the same humble home. Between bare concrete walls and under a tin roof, she raised three children. Now Berenice is raising her 15-year-old grandson since his mother left for the US and his father was murdered.

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The world has a vested interest in Somalia. Will it act to stop its collapse? | Vava Tampa

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Starvation, al-Shabaab and postponed elections have made the country a ready gun. If the trigger is pulled, global trade is at risk

Frantz Fanon once quipped: “Africa is shaped like a revolver, and Congo is the trigger.”

More than 60 years later, I think the French philosopher’s assessment is only half true. It leaves out Somalia – which once held the crown as the “Switzerland of Africa”, but is now again on the verge of political disintegration.

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Over 30 million people ‘one step away from starvation’, UN warns

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The pandemic, climate crisis and conflict combining to drive ‘alarming’ levels of global hunger, says report

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    • Acute hunger is likely to soar in more than 20 countries in the next few months, the UN has warned.

    Families in pockets of Yemen and South Sudan are already in the grip of starvation, according to a report on hunger hotspots published by the agency’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP).

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    ‘I’ve lost everything once again’: Rohingya recount horror of Cox’s Bazar blaze

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    Refugees caught up in the deadly blaze describe panic and despair after fire tore through the Balukhali area on Monday

    Marium Khatun, 40, was feeding her 10-month-old son at home when she first saw the fire and smoke nearby. Realising a huge blaze was ripping through the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp just metres from her two-room shack, she panicked.

    “I suddenly noticed people were running, scattered on the road in front of my house. I came to the door and saw this huge fire around 30 metres (100ft) away from my house. I couldn’t think straight.

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    Hundreds of people missing after Rohingya refugee camp fire

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    At least 15 people killed as blaze spread across Bangladesh camp of about 124,000 refugees from Myanmar

    Hundreds of people are missing with at least 15 confirmed dead, including three children, after a fire tore through a camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

    The toll was exacerbated by barbed wire fencing that caged refuges into areas of the sprawling Balukhali camp that were going up in flames, aid workers said.

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    Alone in Oman: Covid worsens abuse for trafficked women

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    Women from Sierra Leone tricked into servitude find themselves sold on under Gulf’s kafala system

    Isha knew she was in trouble when her passport was snatched from her hands. The 27-year-old from Sierra Leone had just arrived in the Omani capital, Muscat, believing she was to start a well-paid job at a restaurant. Instead, her recruitment agent bundled her into a car and drove her to a house where she was told she would be working as a live-in maid.

    “My agent told me he could take my passport because he had bought me,” she says. “I was confused. How can you buy a human being?”

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    Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers

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    Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins

    They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.

    The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

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    Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters flock to shoot rare ibex

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    Conservationists fear for endangered Nubian ibex in Sudan as westerners sold permits to hunt

    Sudanese conservationists have accused trophy hunters of exploiting the country’s political transition to hunt the country’s unprotected rare animals.

    Photographs posted online of westerners posing with the body of a rare Nubian ibex angered Sudanese wildlife campaigners this week. They called for Facebook to remove the pages of tour groups promoting such hunts.

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    Girl, two, dies after being rescued from migrant boat in Canaries

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    Toddler from Mali has died in hospital after being resuscitated on a dock last week

    A two-year-old girl from Mali who was rescued from a migrant boat and resuscitated on a dock in the Canary Islands last week has died in hospital, becoming the latest victim of the perilous Atlantic route from Africa to Europe.

    The girl was one of 52 people travelling on a boat that had left the city of Dakhla in Western Sahara bound for the Spanish archipelago.

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    Covid ‘may leave 12 million children unable to read’

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    UN finds pandemic is widening education inequality with millions of girls unlikely to return to school

    More than half of all children who turn 10 this year will reach their milestone birthday without being able to read a simple sentence, according to a new analysis of UN data.

    Of those 70 million 10-year-olds, 11.5 million of them could be unable to read as a direct result of the impact on education of the Covid pandemic.

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    De Klerk seeks accountability. What about his own?

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    Apartheid-era South African president calls for justice for female victims of violence in Guardian article but some say his own record needs scrutiny

    South Africans don’t give much thought to FW de Klerk these days. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, his fellow Nobel peace laureate, the last apartheid president is more highly regarded outside his own country than in it.

    But some South Africans were taken aback to see De Klerk putting himself forward in a Guardian article on 10 March as an advocate of protecting women from violence and asserting that “holding perpetrators accountable, irrespective of how long ago the crime was committed, is essential to stamping out impunity and preventing future atrocities”.

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    UK aid budget cut unlawful, legal advice to Tory rebels says

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    Government could face judicial review if it does not reinstate its spending commitment, advice adds

    The government will be in clear breach of the law and exposed to a judicial review if it presses ahead with a multibillion-pound cut in the UK’s foreign aid programme, according to legal advice given to Tory backbenchers.

    Advice issued by the QC and peer Ken Macdonald said No 10 had acted outside the law when it abandoned its commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid.

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    ‘We were left in the sea’: asylum seekers forced off Lesbos

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    One refugee’s terrifying story illustrates how ‘pushbacks’ are creating a crisis for the right to asylum at Europe’s borders

    “We were all forced on to the boat. If we looked up they shouted at us and hit us in the head. Then they stopped at a place in the sea where there were no other boats, they left us.”

    Mustafa, his wife and two young children had only been on the Greek island of Lesbos a few hours when, they say, they were driven in a van to the coast, beaten by masked men and then taken out to sea on a raft and abandoned there.

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    Surge in gun violence is stress test for Oakland’s defund the police campaign

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    Homicides in the city have risen 314% and while some back shifting resources to prevention and healing, others want alternatives in place to keep Black and brown people safe

    Since the visceral video of George Floyd pinned beneath a police officer’s knee sparked massive uprisings in US cities last summer, movements to defund police departments have grown from siloed local campaigns into a national movement. But in multiple cities, this work is being done amid a disturbing rise in gun violence that is affecting the same Black and Latino communities most affected by police misconduct.

    While some crime survivors support shifting resources from police and into prevention and healing services, others who have lost loved ones to shootings and live in high-crime areas worry that depleting police budgets without proven alternatives to fill any gaps will make Black and brown communities less safe.

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    Drowned land: hunger stalks South Sudan’s flooded villages

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    Two years of torrential rains have left 1.6m people in Jonglei province without crops and with their homes flooded. But, with extraordinary resilience, people in Old Fangak are working together to rebuild their lives.

    • by Susan Martinez, photography by Peter Caton for Action Against Hunger

    After the unprecedented floods last summer, the people of Old Fangak, a small town in northern South Sudan, should be planting now. But the flood water has not receded, the people are still marooned and now they are facing severe hunger.

    Unusually heavy rains began last July, and the White Nile burst its banks, destroyed all the crops and encroached on farms and villages, affecting Jonglei and other states, leaving people to scramble for a few strips of dry land.

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    Fight against tuberculosis set back 12 years by Covid pandemic, report finds

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    Number of people diagnosed and treated in worst-affected countries has fallen to 2008 levels as resources diverted

    Twelve months of Covid-19 has reversed 12 years of global progress against tuberculosis, worse than previously estimated.

    The pandemic has resulted in nearly a 25% decrease in diagnosis and treatment around the world, according to research published on Thursday by a coalition working to end TB.

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    ‘We choose good guys and bad guys’: beneath the myth of ‘model’ Rwanda

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    President Paul Kagame – long feted by leaders in the west – is accused of serial human rights abuses in expansive new book

    A devastating new book will accuse Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame – long feted by his prominent international supporters as the model of visionary new African leadership – of being a serial human rights abuser, including for his role in a sustained campaign of assassinating his rivals in exile.

    Written by Michela Wrong, the author who covered the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when more than 800,000 people – largely ethnic Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus – were killed by Hutu militias over 100 days, Do Not Disturb represents one of the most far-reaching historical revisions of Kagame and his regime.

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    Lack of skin-to-skin care for small and premature babies hits survival rates

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    Life-saving techniques fall out of favour on maternity wards in developing countries over Covid fears

    Small and sick babies are at increased risk of dying due to disruptions in care caused by coronavirus, a survey of health workers across 62 mainly developing countries has found.

    Every year, 2.5 million babies die within 28 days of birth, and more than 80% of them have low birth weight. A technique for premature and small babies known as kangaroo mother care (KMC), involving early prolonged skin-to-skin contact with their mothers and breastfeeding, can help reduce mortality.

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    ‘Judith never came home’: deadly fate of ‘disappeared’ women in Peru

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    Policeman accused of sex trafficking, while 12,000 women and girls vanish in ‘shadow pandemic’

    Judith Machaca was last seen on her way home from work in her home town of Tacna in southern Peru. The environmental engineering student had been working part-time at a mobile phone shop and would always send a message if she was going to be late.

    The last text message from her phone was sent at 11pm on 28 November and the next day her distraught father reported the 20-year-old’s disappearance to the police. They sent him away, saying that she was probably with a boyfriend and would show up soon enough.

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