Forums for discussion of feminist and LGBTQ+ views face growing intolerance from Chinese state, say experts
Beijing’s annual independent queer film festival has been cancelled after what is understood to have been a campaign of sustained harassment from authorities.
Beijing Queer film festival, which was due to begin on Friday in China’s capital, is one of the country’s oldest independent film festivals.
Continue reading...Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed website
Lina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.
Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt.
Continue reading...Use of death penalty against people for crimes committed when they were children a ‘new low’, say rights groups
A young man faces imminent execution in Saudi Arabia for attending protests and funerals when he was aged 15 to 17, say human rights groups, in the latest example of the kingdom’s surging use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes.
Youssef al-Manasif was arrested in 2017 and accused of crimes including joining demonstrations for religious freedom by the Shia minority and attending funerals that the Saudi authorities deem to be protests. He was convicted and sentenced to death by the specialised criminal court, a secretive tribunal set up for terrorism-related cases.
Continue reading...At least 320 people detained for ‘acts against nature’ after law criminalising homosexuality toughened, HRW reports
Mass arrests, forced HIV testing and barriers to legal representation are part of an escalating crackdown against LGBTQ+ people in Senegal, according to a new report.
More than 320 individuals have been arrested and detained on allegations of “acts against nature” since February, according to HIV Justice Network, an organisation quoted in the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. Among these, at least 84 were charged with “voluntary HIV transmission”, solely on the basis of their HIV status.
Continue reading...Global human rights commitments adopted by government extend reach to enablers of unlawful activity
The UK is expanding its sanctions powers to freeze assets and target entities enabling illegal Israeli settlements, obstructing humanitarian aid or unlawfully holding prisoners.
The statutory instrument introducing the global human rights and international humanitarian law sanctions adds three new grounds to the 2020 regime: serious violations of international humanitarian law, obstruction of humanitarian assistance and serious violations of the right to liberty and security of person.
Continue reading...Rights groups warn of Tehran regime’s increasing use of executions to suppress dissent, with at least 600 this year
Human rights groups have raised the alarm over the growing number of death sentences and executions in Iran, after reports that a 23-year-old woman, Najmeh Amini, has been sentenced to death for blasphemy over a social-media post.
Amini, an accounting student, is being held in Vakilabad prison in the north-east city of Mashhad. She has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and death in separate cases heard by a revolutionary and a criminal court.
Continue reading...Anger at electoral roll changes has boiled over, sparking a crisis for Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government
Born into a small village in West Bengal, Shahida Fakir had always taken her vote for granted. That was, until it was suddenly taken away. She presented officials with her Indian birth certificate and family land documents from the village going back to 1962.
Both her parents had been on the electoral roll going back decades, so she showed proof of that too. But when the final revised voter list came out in April, Fakir was not on it.
Continue reading...Tran Hiep spent his 51st birthday alone in a notorious detention centre in Ho Chi Minh City after his sudden arrest last month
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Tran Hiep spent his 51st birthday alone in a notorious detention centre in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City after his sudden arrest last month.
The Melbourne-based Vietnamese-Australian democracy campaigner hasn’t been heard from since mid-September when Vietnamese authorities detained him for alleged terrorism and forging identity documents.
Continue reading...Israeli PM calls for criminal investigation into soldiers and officers interviewed in Guardian-produced documentary
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the country’s attorney general and the head of the Shin Bet security service to reveal the identities of soldiers and officers interviewed in the investigative documentary NAZA and prosecute them for causing “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.
The award-winning documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The film is in cinemas, including in the UK and the US, and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
Continue reading...Only Iran and Afghanistan routinely carry out sentences in public, with Saudi Arabia appearing to have ended practice
If the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, goes ahead with plans to livestream the execution of a soldier radicalised to extremist Islam who killed 13 people at a military base in Texas, his country will join a motley assembly of lesser powers and rogue actors who have conducted public executions in recent years.
Only two countries currently systematically carry out capital sentences in public: Iran and Afghanistan. In 2025, the Taliban authorities carried out six such killings and the regime in Tehran 11, according to Amnesty International.
Continue reading...Legislation is an effort by ruling Liberals to address growing clash over who has access to doctor-assisted death
Canada’s federal government said on Wednesday it would advance legislation to prevent people whose sole health condition is mental illness from accessing euthanasia, an effort by the ruling Liberal party to address a clash in the country over who has access to physician-assisted death.
Under the current rules, people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness have been barred from accessing medical assistance in dying (Maid) to end their lives. But that ban – due to be lifted in March – has divided lawmakers over whether to permit this expansion of the Maid program.
In Canada, Crisis Services Canada can be contacted at any time on 1.833.456.4566, or via text on 45645 from 4pm-12am ET. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Iranian court upholds sentence against 29-year-old star Parastoo Ahmadi and other musicians in crackdown on women flouting hijab law
An Iranian court’s decision to uphold a sentence of 74 lashes against the popular singer Parastoo Ahmadi for performing without a hijab has sparked outrage among rights groups, who described it as “a form of torture”.
In June, Ahmadi, 29, and eight members of her production team, including musicians, were sentenced by a court in the city of Qom over a concert that was streamed online in 2024, which went viral and racked up millions of views. The court said the group had violated the country’s “legal and cultural norms” and called the performance “obscene and vulgar”.
Continue reading...Kuala Lumpur plans to send a total of 5,000 Myanmar nationals back to the war-torn country despite persecution concerns
Malaysia began sending back about 1,500 Myanmar nationals on Tuesday, the government confirmed, as it launched a scheme that rights groups say may endanger migrants and asylum seekers by returning them to the war-torn country.
The group is the first of 5,000 Myanmar citizens that Kuala Lumpur says agreed to “voluntary” repatriation from detention centres amid a huge uptick in anti-migrant sentiment in Malaysia.
Continue reading...Detained anti-human trafficking campaigners include Tran Hiep, a Vietnamese Australian, not heard from since 18 September
Vietnamese authorities have detained three activists, including a Norwegian and an Australian, on what have been described as “fabricated” charges.
The Vietnamese government said the three confessed to being members of Viet Tan – a pro-democracy organisation – which it describes as a terrorist group.
Continue reading...Israel ‘categorically rejects’ publication and says businesses on database have committed no wrongdoing
The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.
Continue reading...Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were charged with ‘waging war against God’ after joining protests against Tehran regime
The family of 21-year-old twins who have been sentenced respectively to death and decades in jail for protesting against the Iranian regime have appealed to the United Nations for help.
A formal “submission of information” relating to the case of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi has been submitted by British human right lawyers on their family’s behalf.
Continue reading...Protesters teargassed as minister claims widespread raids and arrests under obscenity laws were to ‘protect families’
Turkish authorities have used accusations of obscenity to justify a wave of raids and arrests targeting the LGBTQ+ community, which has grown to include journalists as well as more than 150 arrested during protests against the raids.
Starting in the early hours of Sunday, Turkish police carried out simultaneous raids on the offices of LGBTQ+ rights organisations and HIV-advocacy groups in the cities of Istanbul, the capital, Ankara, and the coastal city of İzmir, as well as the cities of Aydın and Mersin.
Continue reading...Leaked documents and testimony reveal extent of regime’s crackdown in 2022 and how it paved the way for more brutal killings of protesters this year
Iranian security forces “coordinated” the killing, torture and sexual abuse of hundreds of people who took part in the women-led nationwide protests in September 2022, according to leaked state documents and interviews.
Tens of thousands of people, including children, took to the streets of towns and cities across Iran after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, after her arrest by the “morality” police for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab regulations.
Continue reading...Rights groups say those missing after being deported under one in, one out deal include dozens of age-disputed children
Hundreds of asylum seekers including at least 41 age-disputed children who were removed to France under the “one in, one out” deal have disappeared, human rights organisations have said.
The pilot scheme was hailed as “groundbreaking” by the former prime minister Keir Starmer when he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced it in July 2025. Under a treaty drawn up for this agreement, it forcibly returns small-boat asylum seekers to France in exchange for others brought legally to the UK from France.
Continue reading...Labour peer tells Council of Europe inquiry failure to implement legal protections still putting journalists at risk
Malta is vulnerable to “repeated instances of high-level corruption” unless it strengthens the rule of law and protections for journalists, the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti said at the opening of an inquiry into judicial failures following the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Chakrabarti, a member of the House of Lords and former director of the human rights group Liberty, has been named special rapporteur for a Council of Europe investigation into the fallout from the assassination of the anti-corruption journalist, who died in a car bombing in October 2017.
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