Teenager who travelled from London to Syria to join Isis says decision is ‘kind of heart-breaking’
Shamima Begum, the teenager who travelled from east London to Syria to join Islamic State in 2015, has described Home Office plans to strip her of citizenship as “kind of heart-breaking”.
Related: Shamima Begum: will the plan to revoke her citizenship succeed?
Continue reading...‘Homosexuality is not an illness,’ says health minister Jens Spahn
The German health minister, Jens Spahn, has said that he will seek to ban “conversion therapies” that claim to change sexual orientation. “Homosexuality is not an illness, which is why it does not need to be treated,” Spahn, who is gay himself, told the left-leaning Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung.
Related: ‘I still have flashbacks’: the ‘global epidemic’ of LGBT conversion therapy
Continue reading...Campaigners demand external investigation after human rights organisation dismisses their claims
Prominent Indian rights activists have withdrawn their support for Amnesty India amid allegations of caste discrimination and harassment within the organisation, the Guardian has learned.
The allegations include claims that staff were humiliated, ill-treated and discriminated against because of their caste, a system of social hierarchy among Hindus.
Continue reading...Refugee Bahraini footballer returning to Melbourne after extradition case dropped
The refugee Bahraini footballer Hakeem al-Araibi has boarded a flight to Australia after Thai authorities withdrew an extradition case against him.
Thai authorities said the Bahraini government had decided to end its pursuit of Al-Araibi, who fled Bahrain in 2014 before being granted permanent residence in Australia, where he has lived since.
Continue reading...Joint committee on human rights says people should be held for no longer than 28 days
Indefinite detention in immigration centres is traumatic and the practice should be stopped, with people ideally held for no longer than 28 days, a parliamentary committee has recommended.
In a highly critical report, the joint committee on human rights (JCHR), made up of MPs and peers, described the UK’s immigration system as “slow, unfair and expensive to run”, and said detention should be authorised only by decision-makers independent of the Home Office.
Continue reading...UK among countries set to back Guaidó as interim president unless Nicolas Maduro calls election
The UK, France, Germany and other European countries are expected to recognise Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela on Monday if the current president, Nicolás Maduro, has not set a date for fresh elections by then.
EU leaders, including the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, started expressing their support for Guaidó before the midnight deadline Sunday night.
Continue reading...Authorities say Chinese-born writer refused to see legal team but secretive process means claim can not be verified
Two lawyers hired by the wife of an Australian detained in Beijing for suspected espionage have said they were denied access to him by Chinese authorities, who said the detainee had not agreed to their appointment.
Yang Hengjun, a 53-year-old Chinese-born writer, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou while waiting for a transfer to Shanghai in January. He had flown in from New York.
Continue reading...Study reveals ‘unchecked’ exploitation of women and girls from marginalised communities
Most consumers don’t think twice about the buttons on their shirt, or the sparkles on their dress. But these finishing touches are sewn by some of the world’s most vulnerable women and girls.
A week on from revelations that women in a Bangladesh factory were paid the equivalent of 35p an hour to make Spice Girls T-Shirts sold to raise money for Comic Relief, a new report highlights the exploitative conditions facing millions of home-based garment workers in India.
Continue reading...UNHCHR wants access after Indonesian military crackdown in response to guerrilla attack
Indonesia has agreed in principle to allow the UN office of the human rights commissioner into West Papua amid continuing violence in the region.
The long-running low-level insurgency violently escalated late last year, after West Papuan guerrillas attacked a construction site in Nduga, killing at least 17 people they claimed were Indonesian military but who Jakarta insists were civilian workers.
Continue reading...• Al-Araibi has been detained in Thailand since November
• ‘We are clearly facing a human rights emergency’
Activists campaigning for the release of the Bahraini refugee footballer Hakeem al-Araibi, who has been detained in Thailand since November after an Interpol red notice was wrongly issued against him, say his plight has become an emergency.
The warnings came from Brendan Schwab of the World Players Association and the former Australia captain Craig Foster after news that Bahrain has formally submitted an extradition request for Al-Araibi’s return.
Continue reading...Lawyer who defended activists, victims of land seizures, and members of Falun Gong found guilty of ‘subversion of state power’
The prominent Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for subversion.
A court in Tianjin heard on Monday that Wang had been found “guilty of subversion of state power”.
Continue reading...Asian Football Confederation, which has come under fire for failing to call for the refugee footballer’s release, says its president was recused from overseeing the region 18 months ago
The Asian Football Confederation claims its president, Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, is not responsible for matters regarding the Thai detention of Hakeem al-Araibi because he was recused from overseeing the region 18 months ago out of conflict-of-interest concerns.
The new claim came in response to a call from the World Players Association for Salman to be disqualified from office if the refugee footballer was returned to Bahrain.
Continue reading...Investigation comes as Saudi efforts to normalise relations with west move on to Davos
A UN expert on executions is to travel to Turkey next week to lead an “independent international inquiry” into the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October.
Agnes Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said she would evaluate the circumstances of the crime and “the nature and the extent of states’ and individuals’ responsibilities for the killing”. She will report on the findings from her five-day visit to the UN human rights council in June.
Continue reading...Exclusive: In an interview with the Guardian he pleads for his release and says he fears torture and jail if extradited to Bahrain
Hakeem al-Araibi, the refugee footballer from Bahrain who was detained in Thailand while on his honeymoon, has said he is “losing hope” and believes he will be tortured again or even killed if he is deported to Bahrain.
Speaking to the Guardian from Bangkok Remand Prison, a visibly distressed Al-Araibi said he was “terrified ” and that his fear was “getting worse every day”. Al-Araibi was given asylum in Australia in 2017 after fleeing his home country where he was persecuted for his beliefs, tortured in prison and convicted on a trumped-up vandalism charge.
Continue reading...Journalists, lawyers, minority rights activists and anti-hijab protesters among those held
Iranian authorities arrested more than 7,000 dissidents last year in a sweeping crackdown that led to hundreds being jailed or flogged, at least 26 protesters being killed, and nine people dying in custody amid suspicious circumstances, according to Amnesty International.
Those rounded up during violent dispersals of peaceful protests in what Amnesty called “a year of shame for Iran” included journalists, lawyers, minority rights activists and women who protested against being forced to wear headscarves.
Continue reading...The woman was robbed and told if she protested she would be ‘killed and put in box’
A Bangladeshi factory that produces clothes for Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Mothercare was forced to compensate an “outspoken” female worker after she was beaten up on the orders of management and threatened with being murdered, the Guardian has learned.
The woman claimed to have been “severely beaten up” by security guards and the HR and compliance management at the factory, which is used by the brand Stanley/Stella. She said she was robbed of her severance pay and told that if she protested she would be “killed and her body put in a cardboard box”, an industry watchdog report that endorses her account states.
Continue reading...Open letter says the arrests mean diplomats are more cautious about work in China
More than 140 former diplomats and leading China experts have called on Xi Jinping to release two Canadian citizens detained last month as a diplomatic stand-off between Ottawa and Beijing escalates.
In an open letter Chinese president, former envoys to China from Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, Sweden and Mexico described how the arrests of Michael Kovrig, a Canadian diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, have sent a chill through the diplomatic community.
Continue reading...The people are rising up. But the western celebrities and the human rights industry that fought for this are absent
In 2017, a US law firm signed a contract with the Sudanese government, to assist in efforts to lift the economic sanctions that had been suffocating the country since 1997. Within weeks, George Clooney and John Prendergast, veteran activists for human rights in Sudan, wrote a letter in Time magazine, objecting to this. They asked rhetorically, did the law firm’s senior ranks, filled with ex-senators and congressmen, not know that president Omar al-Bashir’s regime had committed mass atrocities? That it was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur? That it persecuted Christians? “The question of their firm working in the service of such a brutal and vile regime can only be answered by the simplest of terms,” they concluded. “Probably, they just don’t know.”
The sanctions were lifted, but it made little difference. The world had forgotten Sudan and was in no rush to be reminded. All that was associated with the country, ticked off neatly in the Clooney/Prendergast letter, was unsavoury. So allow me to remind you. For the past four weeks, Sudan has been seized by a popular uprising on the part of a people that has been suffering under a brutal dictatorship for 30 years, and from the effects of the global human rights machine that cut them off from the world for 20.
Continue reading...Judges rule decision to share evidence with US without death penalty assurances not unlawful
The mother of an alleged hostage killer for Islamic State has lost her legal challenge against a Home Office decision to share evidence with the US without seeking assurances that her son and another suspected jihadist terrorist would not face the death penalty.
El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey are accused of belonging to a group of Isis members, nicknamed the Beatles because of their British accents, responsible for killing a number of western captives.
Continue reading...Opposition to authoritarian rule reflects increased concern of voters and institutions, Human Rights Watch claims
From Europe to Yemen and Myanmar to the US, authoritarian and populist leaders face an increasingly powerful human rights pushback, according to an influential annual survey of global rights.
Despite mounting pessimism around rights abuses and attacks on democracy by populists on both the far left and far right, the “big news” of the past year was the growing trend to confront abuses by “headline-grabbing autocrats”, said Human Rights Watch.
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