Commitment from justice ministry seen as victory by rights campaigners, who say current law is exploited to coerce children
The government has committed to raising the minimum legal age of marriage to 18 in England and Wales in a victory for campaigners.
Currently, 16 and 17-year-olds can marry with parental consent, but a coalition of charities has warned that this legal loophole is being exploited to coerce young people into child marriage.
Continue reading...Human rights commissioner says junta is ‘singularly responsible for crisis’ ahead of ousted leader’s trial
Myanmar has descended into a “human rights catastrophe”, the UN’s top human rights official has warned in the run-up to the scheduled start of the trial of Myanmar’s ousted leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who faces criminal charges that could lead to decades in prison.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who previously spent a total of 15 years in detention at the behest of Myanmar’s generals and is widely revered as a symbol of the country’s yearning for democracy, is expected to appear in court in Naypyidaw on Monday.
Continue reading...Gil Arias Fernández says EU border agency, which is under investigation for illegal migrant pushbacks, cannot stop far-right infiltrating its ranks
The former deputy head of Europe’s border and coastguard agency has said the state of the beleaguered force “pains” him and that it is vulnerable to the “alarming” rise of populism across the continent.
In his first interview since leaving office, Gil Arias Fernández, former deputy director at Frontex and once tipped for the top post, said he was deeply worried about the agency’s damaged reputation, its decision to arm officers, and its inability to stop the far-right infiltrating its ranks, amid anti-migrant movements across Europe.
Continue reading...The son of the footballing legend is carrying on his father’s quest to trace the children taken from parents murdered by the junta
Diego Armando Maradona Jr, son of the late Argentine football legend, is urging Italians to submit DNA to help the Argentinian government trace hundreds of children who were stolen and their parents murdered by the military junta that controlled the country four decades ago.
Maradona Jr is doing radio interviews in Italy and using his 400,000-strong social media following to broaden the search, which has already seen DNA testing programmes rolled out in Madrid and Rome.
Continue reading...Widespread internment, torture and rights abuses have been claimed by former detainees as Beijing continues a policy of denial
Amnesty International has collected new evidence of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China, which it says has become a “dystopian hellscape” for hundreds of thousands of Muslims subjected to mass internment and torture.
The human rights organisation has collected more than 50 new accounts from Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who claim to have been subjected to mass internment and torture in police stations and camps in the region.
Continue reading...International lawyer Geoffrey Robertson to argue Australia failed to protect Dungay’s right to life and denied family justice for his 2015 death in Long Bay jail
International human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson will take the case of the death in custody of David Dungay to the United Nations, arguing that Australia violated his human rights and those of his family by denying them justice and accountability for his 2015 death in prison custody.
Robertson’s London-based Doughty Street Chambers will lodge the complaint on behalf of the Dungay family at the UN human rights committee in Geneva. In it they will say that Australia has failed to protect his right to life and failed to undertake investigations into anyone or any organisation responsible for his death.
Continue reading...Members of the body that awarded the 2019 peace prize to Ethiopia’s premier, Abiy Ahmed, should all depart in protest
The war on Tigray in Ethiopia has been going on for months. Thousands of people have been killed and wounded, women and girls have been raped by military forces, and more than 2 million citizens have been forced out of their homes. Prime minister and Nobel peace prize laureate Abiy Ahmed stated that a nation on its way to “prosperity” would experience a few “rough patches” that would create “blisters”. This is how he rationalised what is alleged to be a genocide.
Nobel committee members have individual responsibility for awarding the 2019 peace prize to Abiy Ahmed, accused of waging the war in Tigray. The members should thus collectively resign their honourable positions at the Nobel committee in protest and defiance.
Continue reading...Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed
Hundreds of healthcare workers treating Covid patients around the world have experienced verbal, physical, and sometimes life-threatening attacks during the pandemic, prompting calls for immediate action from human rights campaigners.
Covid-related attacks on healthcare workers are expected to rise as new variants cause havoc in countries such as India and rollouts of vaccination programmes belatedly get under way in some countries, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to health.
Continue reading...From Brazil to Myanmar, five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients share their experiences
Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.
Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China
Continue reading...Nourn moved from Cambodia to the US as a child, and ended up in an abusive relationship that led to a man’s murder. After years in prison, she is now a powerful voice for those who face incarceration and deportation
When Ny Nourn entered Central California Women’s Facility, the largest women’s prison in the world, there was every reason to believe she would never walk free on American soil again.
She was just 21, and had been sentenced to “life without parole” for her part in a hauntingly brutal murder – a part she was forced into. Even if, at some distant date, a successful appeal commuted that sentence, her conviction made Nourn deportable – so when she had served her time, she was likely to be transported to another prison and ultimately to Cambodia, the country of her parents’ birth, a country she had never set foot in.
Continue reading...Former political prisoner Daniel Bekele has made the commission more autonomous but critics claim he is biased on current conflict
There was a time when a report by Ethiopia’s human rights commission was a staid affair, its findings offering window-dressing for hand-wringing donors and legal cover to the government.
Between 2013 and 2017 the commission systematically “whitewashed human rights violations through compromised methodologies, dismissing credible allegations”, according to a 2019 Amnesty International study that accused it of “brazen bias against victims”.
Continue reading...Killings took place near Ethiopia’s Abuna Yemata church on 8 May, according to multiple testimonies
Eritrean soldiers killed 19 civilians in a village at the foot of an internationally celebrated rock-hewn church in Tigray three weeks ago, witnesses, relatives and local residents have claimed, the latest alleged atrocity in the war-torn Ethiopian region.
Most of the victims in the alleged attack were women and young children.
Continue reading...Responsibility for defending what the Commonwealth stands for must not pass to the country without reforms
If Rwanda had hosted the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, which has been cancelled for the second time due to Covid-19, the UK was due to hand the country the Commonwealth chair.
Rwanda would have held the responsibility for defending what the Commonwealth stands for – despite violating those same values for decades. When Rwanda was admitted as a member in 2009, I had hoped our government would apply Commonwealth values in its governance. But this did not happen.
Continue reading...Promises of better working conditions ring hollow for tens of thousands of security guards, who say they still work long hours for low pay
Every day at 5pm, Samuel boards the company bus that takes him to his night shift as a guard at a luxury high-rise tower near Qatar’s capital, Doha. When his shift ends 12 hours later, he says he will have earned £9, just 75p an hour.
Samuel, who is from Uganda, says he almost never has a day off. “You have to tell lies, like ‘you are sick, you’re not feeling good’, so that you get a day off,” he says.
Continue reading...Dozens of grassroots people’s defence forces have emerged to take on brutal military
Myanmar is on the verge of a new civil war, a spokesperson for the country’s parallel government has warned, as communities increasingly take up arms to protect themselves from a relentless campaign of military violence.
Conflict has raged for decades in Myanmar’s borderlands, where myriad ethnic armed groups are fighting with the military for greater autonomy. Since February’s coup, however, dozens of new, grassroots people’s defence forces have emerged to oppose the junta, with battles occurring in areas of the country that were previously peaceful.
Continue reading...On 12 August 2020 at 7.48am the first of a series of Home Office flights carrying asylum seekers left Stansted. This is the harrowing story of the hours before it took off and the anguish of those on board
At 7.15am, half an hour before charter flight Esparto 11 took off from Stansted airport, a detainee with a documented history of self-harm asked to use the plane’s bathroom. He was taken to the toilet by an escort working for the Home Office who held the door ajar with his foot and, after several minutes, peered inside to discover the detainee had slashed his wrist with a blade.
Pinning the man with his body weight to gain “control”, another officer squeezed into the bathroom and placed a handcuff on the wrist. According to an account written by officers, the handcuff was used to “[give] him pain”, a reference to a restraint technique which involves deliberately inflicting suffering to gain submission. In this case, most likely by twisting the cuff or pushing it into the wrist.
Continue reading...Move is part of groundbreaking effort to name 30,000 murdered by regime after 1976 coup
The Argentinian government has sent hundreds of DNA testing kits to its consulates around the world in a groundbreaking effort to put names to unidentified victims murdered in the “Dirty War” waged by the brutal military dictatorship four decades ago.
Last month, the Argentinian authorities, in collaboration with the National Commission for the Right to Identity, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo movement and investigators from the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), launched its international Right to Identity campaign, committed to putting a name to every woman, man and child killed by the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s and early 80s.
Continue reading...Obaida Jawabra was weeks from turning 18 when he was shot by an Israeli soldier, after a life shaped by arrests and imprisonment
Route 60, the north-south artery that carves its way through the West Bank, is both the lifeblood of the region and a source of daily fear.
Flanked in parts by 2.5-metre-high (8ft) separation barriers, military checkpoints and watchtowers crewed by Israeli snipers, the 146-mile highway that starts and finishes in Israel but passes Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, has been the scene of many fatal attacks and violent clashes.
Continue reading...UN chief says Israel attacks on Gaza could constitute war crimes and accuses Hamas of firing indiscriminate rockets
The UN’s main human rights body is to meet to discuss launching an investigation into “systematic discrimination and repression” in Israel and Palestine, with the aim of identifying what it said were the root causes of recent Gaza bloodshed.
A draft proposal that calls for unprecedented levels of scrutiny of alleged abuses, called at the request of Muslim states, will be put before the 47-member UN human rights council on Thursday.
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