Demonstrators gathered in cities across Europe, the US and South America to demand an end to Russia’s invasion
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities including Santiago, Vancouver Paris and New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia’s invasion.
The protesters rallied on Saturday against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack, which began on 24 February and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.
Continue reading...Mateo Sobode Chiqueno’s lifelong project compiling cassettes of the Ayoreo people’s stories, songs and struggles to survive is now the subject of an award-winning film, Nothing but the Sun
In a tattered cardboard box in Mateo Sobode Chiqueno’s home, hundreds of plastic cassette cases contain four decades of memories. “Here in my house, I have more than 1,000 cassettes of Ayoreo histories and songs,” says Chiqueno, who keeps them alongside his tape recorder at his wooden shack in Campo Loro, Paraguay. Many of the voices belong to people who are dead.
Chiqueno began compiling his interviews with the Ayoreo, hunter-gatherers of the Chaco Forest, in 1979, after seeing missionaries using tape recorders to document their experiences. His tapes partially preserve a fast-disappearing culture.
Continue reading...Dissident couple say their lives would be under threat if returned from Bosnia to Kuwait, as rights groups claim notice undermines refugee law
A Kuwaiti princess seeking asylum in Bosnia-Herzegovina has claimed the Kuwaiti state is using an Interpol red notice to intimidate and harass her and force the extradition of her partner, a prominent dissident blogger, back to the country.
Sheikha Moneera Fahad al-Sabah and Mesaed al-Mesaileem, said they face torture and threats to their lives if they are returned to Kuwait due to their political activism.
Continue reading...Non-white refugees face violence and racist abuse in Przemyśl, as police warn of fake reports of ‘migrants committing crimes’
Police in Poland have warned that fake reports of violent crimes being committed by people fleeing Ukraine are circulating on social media after Polish nationalists attacked and abused groups of African, south Asian and Middle Eastern people who had crossed the border last night.
Attackers dressed in black sought out groups of non-white refugees, mainly students who had just arrived in Poland at Przemyśl train station from cities in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. According to the police, three Indians were beaten up by a group of five men, leaving one of them hospitalised.
Continue reading...Public prosecutors’ claim that detainees inflicted injuries on themselves with a coin is ‘laughable’, says Human Rights Watch
Detainees seen in videos allegedly showing torture in a Cairo police station inflicted their injuries on themselves, according to Egyptian authorities, who have charged the prisoners with spreading “fake news”.
Up to 13 people detained in El-Salam First police station for unknown petty crimes made multiple videos that they say show the abuse they suffered at the hands of police officers and security forces.
Continue reading...Most of 358 victims worked on land, environmental and indigenous rights, with more killed in Mexico, India and among Afghan women
A Colombian conservationist who saved a rare species of parrot from extinction, a young feminist activist in Afghanistan, and two poets in Myanmar who used words to protest against the military coup were among 358 human rights defenders murdered in 35 countries last year, analysis has found.
The environmentalist Gonzalo Cardona Molina, 55; Frozan Safi, a 29-year-old Afghan economics lecturer; and K Za Win and Khet Thi, two of several poets to be killed, were among those targeted because of their “peaceful and powerful” work, according to a global analysis of threats and attacks faced by human rights activists compiled by Front Line Defenders (FLD) and the Human Rights Defenders Memorial.
Continue reading...Lawsuit filed after state’s governor and attorney general called medically necessary gender-affirming care ‘child abuse’
America’s largest civil rights non-profit has filed a lawsuit asking a Texas state court to block officials from investigating parents who seek medically necessary gender-affirming care for their children.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, named the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, as a defendant, along with the Texas department of family and protective services (DFPS) and its commissioner, Jaime Masters.
Continue reading...Zahir Jaffer tortured and beheaded Noor Mukadam, in July last year, in case that sparked outrage over violence against women
A court in Islamabad has sentenced to death the tycoon’s son who raped and murdered Noor Mukadam, a case that sparked outrage in Pakistan.
Mukadam, 27, the daughter of a former Pakistani diplomat, was held captive, tortured and beheaded in July last year by Zahir Jaffer, a member of a well-known industrialist family.
Continue reading...With breakdancers, artists and parkourists facing a bleak future under the Taliban, a global network stepped in to help, drawing on the activist spirit of rap culture
A veteran of the hip-hop scene and internationally celebrated breakdancer, Nancy Yu – AKA Asia One – has her fair share of people contacting her looking for advice. But the message she received in 2019 from a young Afghan was a little different.
Frustrated by his breakdancing crew’s inability to get visas to perform internationally, Moshtagh* was wondering if Asia could help. “He felt they were really good, but they felt, like, invisible to the world,” she says. “I liked him. He wasn’t trying to bug me or say ‘we need this right now’ … He seemed rather humble and honest.”
Continue reading...Friends of Doski Azad said the 23-year-old makeup artist had received repeated death threats from male family members
The Kurdish transgender woman Doski Azad shot dead by her brother last month, had been living in hiding from her family after repeated death threats, friends have said.
According to friends, Azad had had to move home regularly after several death threats by male members of her family.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico
Continue reading...Celebrated blogger had suffered ill health after spending 17 months in prison for speaking out against president Ali Bongo
Hervé Mombo Kinga, the pro-democracy activist and celebrated blogger who spent 17 months in jail for insulting the Gabonese president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, was not impressed when he saw the pictures of the leader limping up the stairs of France’s presidential palace.
Kinga, who died last week at 47 after contracting Covid, was infuriated by the episode – widely shared in the west African country of Gabon, despite the embarrassment it caused the president, whose family has held power for more than five decades.
Continue reading...Authorities regularly detain environmentalists, rights campaigners and dissidents to prevent them travelling or attending events, says Human Rights Watch
The Vietnamese government is routinely placing activists under arbitrary house arrest, employing tactics including stationing guards outside their homes, setting up roadblocks nearby and using superglue and padlocks to jam their doors shut, according to a report.
The study by Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented cases involving 170 rights activists, bloggers, dissidents and their family members who were prevented from domestic and international travel between 2004 and 2021. The real number of those affected is likely to be higher, the report warned.
Those targeted had worked on various issues, from land rights and environmental activism, to advocating for media freedom and the rights of political prisoners, to participating in anti-China protests.
Officials often underestimate the dangers faced by failed asylum seekers who are forcibly sent home, writes Jackie Fearnley
The recent Human Rights Watch report on the harm done to Cameroonian asylum seekers, both while they were trying to make their claims in the US and when repatriated in a blaze of publicity, should be required reading for all asylum decision-makers (African migrants deported in Trump era suffered abuse on return, 10 February).
From my experience of helping Cameroonian torture survivors over the past 14 years, I have noted that Home Office decision-makers, and many judges, can fatally underestimate the degree of risk attached to the forcible return process, particularly as failed asylum seekers are viewed as having brought the country into disrepute and can be punished with imprisonment.
Continue reading...Abuse of the policing body’s ‘red notice’ system is blamed as an activist is forced to return to life in prison in the Gulf state
Marko Štambuk arrived at Belgrade district prison on a Monday morning in late January, only to be told his client was no longer inside. “Immediately I knew something had happened,” he said.
Štambuk, a lawyer, had spent the previous Friday frantically obtaining an injunction from the European court of human rights (ECHR) demanding Serbian authorities halt the extradition of his client, Ahmed Jaafar Mohamed Ali, a Bahraini dissident. This banned the Serbian authorities from extraditing Ali until late February, and warned them that doing so would constitute a rare breach of the European convention on human rights.
Continue reading...UK-based Hong Kong Watch says outage could be part of wider Beijing crackdown
The website of a UK-based advocacy group appears to have become inaccessible through some networks in Hong Kong, raising fears of mainland-style internet censorship in the Chinese territory.
The group, Hong Kong Watch, which monitors human rights, said it worried the censorship could be a part of a wider crackdown on freedom of speech under Hong Kong’s national security law, which allows the police to ask service providers to “delete” information or “provide assistance” on national security cases.
Continue reading...A report by Fortify Rights claims soldiers have carried out massacres and used civilians as human shields
The Myanmar military kidnapped civilians and forced them to work as human shields, attacked homes, churches and carried out massacres, according to a report that warns recent atrocities in eastern Myanmar may amount to war crimes.
The report, by the Myanmar-founded human rights group Fortify Rights, documents abuses by the country’s military in Karenni state, also known as Kayah state, an area that has seen intense fighting between the army and groups opposed to last year’s military coup.
Continue reading...Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring was born from a desire to preserve online expressions of outrage, grief and dissent, say editors
The first literary work to emerge from Myanmar since the military seized control of the country a year ago reveals the altruism and courage of a new generation of writers, its editor has said.
Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring is an anthology of poems and essays, many of which were written during the military crackdown after last February’s coup. Others date from 1988 to 2020.
Continue reading...Fifty years after the UK forcibly deported them, five Chagossians have visited the disputed archipelago with Mauritius’s help
Returning to their birthplace after decades of enforced exile, five Chagossians leapt from a motor launch on to the palm-shaded beach of Peros Banhos atoll on Saturday afternoon, kissed the sand and stood – hands joined together – in prayer.
For Olivier Bancoult, Lisbey Elyse, Marie Suzelle Baptiste, Rosemonde Bertin and Marcel Humbert, it was the moment they had long anticipated – the first time they could step ashore without close close monitoring by British officials. It is 50 years since they were forcibly deported to Mauritius by the UK, which cleared the archipelago of its entire population to make way for a US military base on the island of Diego Garcia.
Continue reading...Parliamentary report finds ‘compelling evidence’ of trafficking and highlights missed opportunities to protect vulnerable people later stripped of citizenship
There is “compelling evidence” that British women and children currently detained in camps in north-east Syria were trafficked to the country against their will, according to a new parliamentary report.
After a six-month inquiry by the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on trafficked Britons in Syria, the report published on Thursday highlights how systemic failures by UK public bodies enabled Islamic State (IS) trafficking of vulnerable women and children as young as 12.
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