Category Archives: Human rights

Tigray has been the scene of ‘ethnic cleansing’, say human rights groups

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Human Rights Watch-Amnesty report accuses Ethiopian paramilitaries of war crimes and crimes against humanity

Ethiopian paramilitaries have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes using threats, killings and sexual violence, according to a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The rights groups accuse officials and paramilitaries from the neighbouring Amhara region of war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia.

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Nigerian humanist jailed for 24 years after pleading guilty to blasphemy

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Mubarak Bala’s case seen as part of a clampdown on critics of religious orthodoxy in a deeply conservative region

A prominent Nigerian humanist has been sentenced to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to blasphemy charges, in a landmark case that has put a new focus on the threats to freedom of expression in the west African country.

Mubarak Bala, the president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was sentenced on Tuesday afternoon, two years after his arrest at his home in the northern Kaduna state on 28 April 2020. He was then taken to neighbouring Kano, where calls for action against him had been made by members of the religious establishment in the majority Muslim and conservative state.

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Russian mercenaries and Mali army accused of killing 300 civilians

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Human Rights Watch says deaths during anti-jihadist operation in Moura ‘the worst atrocity in Mali in a decade’

Suspected Russian mercenaries participated in an operation with Mali’s army in March in which about 300 civilian men were allegedly executed over five days, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.

Eyewitnesses and local community leaders said hundreds of men were rounded up and killed in small groups during the anti-jihadist operation on 23 March in the central town of Moura. The rural town of about 10,000 inhabitants is in the Mopti region, a hotspot of jihadist activity that has intensified and spread to neighbouring countries in the Sahel region.

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Tourists urged to avoid Myanmar as junta prepares to reopen to world

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Travel agents and aid workers raise issues of safety and note that tourism dollars will only benefit the ruling military

Foreign tourists have been urged to avoid visiting Myanmar after the junta signalled plans to open up the country despite widespread ongoing rights abuses and violence including kidnappings and killings by the military, as well as food shortages and regular blackouts.

More than a year after it seized power and ousted Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s military has announced it plans to reopen for tourism and resume international flights on 17 April.

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Revealed: migrant workers in Qatar forced to pay billions in recruitment fees

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Guardian investigation finds labourers – including those on World Cup-related projects – were left with huge debts

Low-wage migrant workers have been forced to pay billions of dollars in recruitment fees to secure their jobs in World Cup host nation Qatar over the past decade, a Guardian investigation has found.

Bangladeshi men migrating to Qatar are likely to have paid about $1.5bn (£1.14bn) in fees, and possibly as high as $2bn, between 2011 and 2020. Nepali men are estimated to have paid around $320m, and possibly more than $400m, in the four years between mid-2015 to mid-2019.

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Britain hands billions to projects linked to labour abuse and climate damage

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UK Export Finance used £5.24bn of taxpayer money to fund overseas energy and infrastructure ventures – despite its own review raising concerns

The British government has provided more than £5bn in the past three years to overseas energy and infrastructure projects linked to labour abuses and environmental damage, according to documents and interviews with workers.

The funding – a combination of loans and guarantees – comes from the government’s export credit agency, UK Export Finance (UKEF), a government department to help UK companies access business contracts overseas.

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Federal police blame ‘oversight’ for delay in Australian review of Sri Lankan war crime allegations

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AFP not aware of ‘administrative oversight’ until letter from justice groups seeking update on 2019 complaint about Jagath Jayasuriya

Federal police blamed an “administrative oversight” for huge delays in reviewing war crime allegations against a Sri Lankan man as he travelled to and from Australia, documents show.

In 2019, human rights groups wrote to the Australian federal police warning that Jagath Jayasuriya, a retired Sri Lankan general, “has entered Australia and may still be in the jurisdiction”.

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Polish woman is first to face trial for violating strict abortion law

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Justyna Wydrzyńska, who gave a woman experiencing domestic violence miscarriage-inducing pills, could be jailed for three years

The first person to be charged in Poland for breaking the country’s strict abortion law by providing miscarriage-inducing tablets to a pregnant woman is due to face trial next week.

Justyna Wydrzyńska, from the Polish group Aborcyjny Dream Team (ADT), is charged with illegally aiding an abortion and faces up to three years in prison if she is found guilty.

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Amnesty hits out at Tory plans to replace Human Rights Act with bill of rights

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Justice secretary Dominic Raab’s proposals will ‘slash away’ at rights of ordinary people to challenge government, group says

Amnesty International has criticised plans by the justice secretary Dominic Raab to replace Labour’s Human Rights Act with a British bill of rights.

Raab has argued that the proposal will better protect the press in exposing wrongdoing and said he feared free speech was being “whittled away” by “wokery and political correctness”.

The deputy prime minister told the Daily Mail that under plans being drawn up, there would be only limited restrictions placed on the protections on free speech with checks to stop people abusing it to promote terrorism.

Laura Trevelyan, Amnesty’s human rights in the UK campaign manager, hit out at his plan on Saturday.

“Scrapping the Human Rights Act has long been the intention of Mr Raab and others not because they want to extend any protections, but because they want to slash away at the powers ordinary people have got to challenge the government and its decisions,” she said.

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Coalition urged to terminate Canstruct contract to end financial ‘black hole’ on Nauru

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There is little sense keeping refugees on island at great expense following New Zealand resettlement deal, human rights groups say

The government must end the “moral and financial black hole” on Nauru by ceasing its contract with Canstruct and returning those on Nauru to Australia in the wake of the New Zealand refugee resettlement deal, human rights groups say.

Asked on Friday whether it would end the Canstruct contract for “garrison and welfare services”, the government declined to answer.

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France opens inquiry into alleged torture by Interpol’s Emirati head

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Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi accused of being responsible for the torture of opposition figure in UAE

French anti-terror prosecutors have opened a preliminary inquiry into torture and acts of barbarism allegedly committed by Emirati general Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi, according to judicial sources.. Raisi in November became president of Interpol.

The inquiry follows a legal complaint by an NGO that accused Raisi of being responsible in his role as high-ranking official at the United Arab Emirates interior ministry for the torture of an opposition figure.

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Australian man, 83, dies in Iranian prison after being denied healthcare

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Amnesty says Australian-Iranian Shokrollah Jebeli was subjected to ‘more than two years of torture’

An Australian-Iranian man in his eighties jailed over a financial dispute has died in prison in Iran, Amnesty International said, accusing Tehran of subjecting him to torture by denying urgent medical care.

Shokrollah Jebeli,83, who had been incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison since January 2020, died on Sunday after being taken from prison to hospital the previous day, Amnesty said.

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US declares Myanmar army committed genocide against Rohingya

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Designation could put global pressure on military-led government, which faces accusations at international court of justice

The US has declared Myanmar’s mass killing of the Rohingya Muslim population to be a “genocide”.

The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made the announcement at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Sumaya Sadurni: photojournalist and ‘rock’n’roll Mother Teresa’ dies at 32

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Described as ‘outstanding and fearless’ by Bobi Wine, tributes have been paid to Sadurni, whose work featured in the Guardian and New York Times

Sumaya Sadurni Carrasco has died while travelling to take photographs for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine in northern Uganda. Thomas Mugisha, an NGO worker, also died in the accident on 7 March.

Sumy, as she was known, was a talented, driven and courageous photojournalist with a rare gift for friendship. At just 32 years old, she had built a powerful body of work, which had been published in some of the world’s best-known publications; in 2020 she was shortlisted for the Guardian’s agency photographer of the year. She also leaves a legacy of knowledge and inspiration that she passed on to young photographers as a Uganda Press Photo award mentor, a teacher at Makerere University and a Canon trainer.

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‘Contemptuous’: anger in Brazil as Bolsonaro given Indigenous merit medal

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Government honours president who activists accuse of undermining Indigenous protections

Brazilian activists are outraged after Jair Bolsonaro – who has been accused of spearheading a cataclysmic attack on Indigenous rights – was honoured by his own government for his supposedly “altruistic” efforts to protect Indigenous lives.

Bolsonaro was granted the Medal of Indigenous Merit on Wednesday in recognition of what the justice ministry called his attempts to defend Indigenous communities in the South American country.

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Australian Human Rights Commission to slash staff after budget cuts and surge in workload

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Agency says one in three jobs will be lost and warns current funding is insufficient for it to perform its statutory function

One in three jobs will be slashed at the Australian Human Rights Commission as a record number of complaints and low base funding take their toll.

The human rights agency has issued a blunt warning that its current funding “does not provide us with the resources required to perform our statutory functions”.

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Johnson compares Putin to drug dealer ahead of Saudi Arabia trip

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British PM hopes to persuade Gulf state to raise oil and gas production to reduce reliance on Moscow

Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to a drug dealer who managed to hook western nations on Russian supplies of oil and gas, ahead of a trip to the Middle East in an attempt to diversify the sources of Britain’s energy imports.

The UK prime minister urged European countries to “get ourselves off that addiction” and said he wanted support from “the widest possible coalition” to help offset the pressures caused by spiralling oil and gas prices.

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Saudi Arabia executes 81 men in one day

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Officials say those executed were convicted of charges including terrorism and holding ‘deviant beliefs’

Saudi Arabia has executed 81 men over the past 24 hours, including seven Yemenis and one Syrian national, on charges including terrorism and holding “deviant beliefs“, state news agency SPA said on Saturday.

The number dwarfed the 67 executions reported in the kingdom in all of 2021 and the 27 in 2020.

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Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, imprisoned for ‘insulting Islam’, freed after 10 years

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It’s unclear if Saudi authorities placed restriction on his release but human rights campaigners promise to fight them

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has been released from prison in Saudi Arabia after serving a 10-year sentence for advocating an end to religious influence on public life, his wife said on Friday.

“Raif called me. He is free,” his wife, Ensaf Haidar, who lives in Canada with their three children and had been advocating for his release, told AFP.

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UN human rights chief to visit China, including Xinjiang, in May

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Michelle Bachelet’s announcement comes as 192 groups call for release of long-postponed report into region

The UN rights chief has announced that she will make a long-delayed visit to China in May, including to Xinjiang, where activists and western lawmakers say Beijing is subjecting Uyghur people to genocide.

“I am pleased to announce that we have recently reached an agreement with the government of China for a visit,” Michelle Bachelet told the UN human rights council on Tuesday.

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