Category Archives: Human rights

Iranian asylum seeker cleared of Channel smuggling charges

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Man who took turn steering boat ‘because he didn’t want to die’ freed, with case opening way for others to appeal their sentences

An asylum seeker jailed on smuggling charges for helping to steer a boat filled with migrants from France to England has had his conviction overturned at a retrial after spending 17 months in jail.

Lawyers and campaigners say the verdict could lead to other migrants currently in jail on smuggling charges being freed, allowing the Home Office policy of prosecuting asylum seekers who play a role in piloting boats across the Channel to be challenged more widely.

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‘Bodies are being eaten by hyenas; girls of eight raped’: inside the Tigray conflict

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A nun working in war-torn Tigray has shared her harrowing testimony of the atrocities taking place

The Ethiopian nun, who has to remain anonymous for her own security, is working in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital, and surrounding areas, helping some of the tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting who have been streaming into camps in the hope of finding shelter and food. Both are in short supply. Humanitarian aid is being largely blocked and a wholesale crackdown is seeing civilians being picked off in the countryside, either shot or rounded up and taken to overcrowded prisons. She spoke to Tracy McVeigh this week.

“After the last few months I’m happy to be alive. I have to be OK. Mostly we are going out to the IDP [internally displaced people] camps and the community centres where people are. They are in a bad way.

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Rape is being used as weapon of war in Ethiopia, say witnesses

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Ethiopian nun speaks of widespread horror she and colleagues are seeing on a daily basis inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray

Thousands of women and girls are being targeted by the deliberate tactic of using rape as a weapon in the civil war that has erupted in Ethiopia, according to eyewitnesses.

In a rare account from inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray, where communications with the outside world are being deliberately cut off, an Ethiopian nun has spoken of the widespread horror she and her colleagues are seeing on a daily basis since a savage war erupted six months ago.

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Violence against women ‘a pandemic’, warns UN envoy

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A decade after Istanbul convention was drawn up to end gender-based violence, activists report decline in women’s rights and safety

A decade after the launch of the Istanbul convention, the landmark human rights treaty to stop gender-based violence, women are facing a global assault on their rights and safety, according to campaigners.

This week marked 10 years since the first 13 countries signed up to the convention, seen as a turning point in efforts to address violence against women.

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‘Weak’ US let Saudis jail more dissidents, says rights group

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Lack of US sanctions on crown prince led to harsher sentences for critics of regime, Grant Liberty reports

The Biden administration’s failure to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has led to a increase in severe sentences for political prisoners in the kingdom, the Guardian can reveal.

The UK-based human rights organisation Grant Liberty found that twice as many harsh sentences had been meted out to Saudi prisoners of conscience in April than in the first three months of this year combined. It followed the Biden administration’s decision on 26 February to publish an intelligence report that showed the crown prince, “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi”.

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Thousands of Cambodians go hungry in strict lockdown zones

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Rights groups say government and UN inaction has left people lacking food and medicine for weeks

Tens of thousands of Cambodians are going hungry under the country’s strict lockdown as Covid cases continue to rise amid criticism from human rights groups that the government and the UN are being too slow to act.

The south-east Asian country had recorded one of the world’s smallest coronavirus caseloads, but infections have climbed from about 500 in late February to 20,695 this week, with 136 deaths.

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Two transgender women jailed in Cameroon over homosexuality law

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Social media celebrity Shakiro and friend given five-year sentences as rights groups fear crackdown on LGBT+ community

Two transgender women in Cameroon have been convicted of “attempting homosexuality” and sentenced to five years in prison, in a case feared to be part of a growing campaign against sexual minorities, according to rights groups.

Shakiro, a popular social media figure, and Patricia were convicted on Tuesday. The charges included public indecency and non-possession of a national ID card, an offence rarely prosecuted in Cameroon.

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China’s feminists protest against wave of online abuse with ‘internet violence museum’

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A growing nationalistic fervour is fuelling a torrent of vitriol against anyone speaking out against the state, especially women’s rights activists

Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others.

They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on platforms such as Weibo, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili who posted video of a man who threw hot liquid at her after she asked him to stop smoking.

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Refugees and the Armenian genocide: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

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Beijing accuses G7 ministers of interfering in China’s affairs

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Foreign ministry responds to west’s human rights claims, saying countries should ‘face up to their own problems’

China has rejected accusations of human rights abuse and economic coercion, made by G7 foreign ministers, accusing them of “blatantly meddling” in China’s internal affairs, calling their remarks groundless.

“Attempts to disregard the basic norms of international relations and to create various excuses to interfere in China’s internal affairs, undermine China’s sovereignty and smear China’s image will never succeed,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin. “They should not criticise and interfere with other countries with a superior mentality, and undermine the current top priority of international anti-epidemic cooperation.”

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My father works for the company that sells weapons used in my partner’s homeland | Izzy Brown

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I had never imagined how horribly the company my father works for was entangled with the story of my West Papuan partner

​They make great trucks. That’s what my father says whenever I ask him: “What do they make? Who do they sell them to?” “Only to the good guys,”​​​​ is his standard answer, and the topic changes quickly. But what he calls “trucks”, most people call “tanks”. And ​I am always led to wonder, “What kind of ‘good guy’ drives a tank?”

My father works for Thales, one of the richest weapons corporations in the world. Before heading up security for Thales he worked for Asio, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

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More trafficking victims facing forcible removal from UK under rule change

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Rights groups warn many more survivors face being locked up after MPs back Home Office change

More victims of trafficking will be locked up in detention and forcibly removed from the UK after MPs approved a change in Home Office rules relating to this vulnerable group, campaigners have warned.

MPs recently confirmed what is known as a statutory instrument. This change in rules relating to the detention of trafficking victims comes into force on 25 May and will require them to provide a higher standard of proof that they should not be detained.

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Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks

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A Guardian analysis finds EU countries used brutal tactics to stop nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossing borders

EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic, methods being linked to the death of more than 2,000 people, the Guardian can reveal.

In one of the biggest mass expulsions in decades, European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex, has systematically pushed back refugees, including children fleeing from wars, in their thousands, using illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention or transportation.

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Child marriage ‘thriving in UK’ due to legal loophole, warn rights groups

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In a letter to the PM campaigners say forced marriage law fails to protect young people

A legal loophole that allows 16- and 17-year-olds in England and Wales to marry with parental consent is being exploited and used to coerce young people into child marriage, campaigners have warned.

More than 20 organisations have signed a letter to the prime minister insisting current forced marriage law does not go far enough in protecting young people.

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New Zealand draws back from calling Chinese abuses of Uyghurs genocide

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Parliament will not debate motion and will instead discuss rights abuses in more general terms

New Zealand’s parliament will not debate a motion that would label the abuses of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China, as acts of genocide.

Parliament opted instead on Tuesday to water down the language, and discuss concerns about human rights abuses in the region in more general terms.

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Ugandan president’s son named in ICC complaint over abductions and abuse

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Muhoozi Kainerugaba leads Special Forces Command, an elite military unit blamed for widespread abuses

  • Warning: graphic information in this report may upset some readers

Lawyers acting for the victims of a wave of abductions and torture by security forces in Uganda have named senior military commanders, including the president’s son, in a complaint to the international criminal court.

Prosecutors at the ICC are already reviewing an earlier submission from the opposition politician Robert Kyagulanyi, the former reggae singer known as Bobi Wine, describing widespread human rights abuses before presidential polls held in January.

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Female political prisoners in Iran facing ‘psychological torture’, say campaigners

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Reports of deteriorating treatment of human rights activists, with an increase in moves to ‘dangerous’ jails often far from families

Female human rights activists imprisoned in Iran face increased jail terms and transfers to prisons with “dangerous and alarming” conditions, hundreds of miles away from their families, according to campaigners.

Warnings of the deteriorating treatment of female prisoners in Iran come days after Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national who has served a five-year prison sentence in Iran, was sentenced to a further year in jail and a year-long travel ban by the Iranian courts.

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‘I am not my trauma’: survivors of sexual abuse at a Ugandan girls’ shelter – photo essay

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German national Bernhard ‘Bery’ Glaser took advantage of his ‘rich white foreigner’ status to systematically abuse girls in his care. Photographer DeLovie Kwagala captured the stories of 15 women

Eve was just eight years old and recently orphaned when she was taken to live at a girls’ shelter on Bugala island, in the Ugandan sector of Lake Victoria.

Bery’s Place had been set up in 2006 by Bernhard “Bery” Glaser, a German national living in Uganda, as a refuge for traumatised children and victims of sexual violence. Yet Eve and other girls living there at the time say that Glaser was hiding a dark secret. Taking advantage of his “rich white foreigner” status to entice parents to leave their daughters at the home, Glaser was using Bery’s Place as a cover for routine and systematic sexual and emotional abuse of the children in his care, the girls allege.

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UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

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Exclusive: Torture survivors and lone children stuck in Greece and Italy after Home Office ‘deliberately’ ends cooperation on family reunions

The Home Office has been accused of failing to reunite vulnerable refugees who have the right to join family in the UK under EU law, leaving lone children and torture survivors stranded.

The government faced widespread criticism when it announced that family reunion law would no longer apply after the UK left the EU, and it promised that cases under way on that date would be allowed to proceed.

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Beijing calls Hong Kong bar association chief an ‘anti-China politician’

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Authorities lambast British-born Paul Harris for criticising treatment of pro-democracy campaigners

Beijing and Hong Kong authorities have accused the British-born head of Hong Kong’s bar association of being an “anti-China politician” after he criticised jail sentences imposed on pro-democracy activists.

Paul Harris, a human rights lawyer and the chair of the HKBA, had represented one of 10 people convicted this month for organising or attending unauthorised assemblies during the pro-democracy protests in 2019. The defendants were given a range of suspended sentences or immediate jail terms of up to 18 months.

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