Two decades after the disappearance of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit, his case continues to reverberate in Thailand.Somchai’s abduction from a Bangkok Street sparked a long campaign for stricter anti-torture legislation – which was finally passed in 2022
Human Rights Watch accused Israel of war crimes in its annual report, which was released on Thursday. The rights group also claimed that other governments expressed “selective outrage” over the atrocities committed in the Gaza War.
The disregard of human rights by many governments in pursuit of short-term strategic goals is “emboldening” abusive regimes around the world and contributing to global instability in the long term, this year’s annual world report by Human Rights Watch says.
In Worth Less Than an Animal: Abuses and Due Process Violations in Pretrial Detention in North Korea, Lim Ok Kyung, one of the former detainees, described extremely harsh conditions when she was arrested in 2014 for having appliances smuggled from China in her house
The report, “‘No One Cared He Was A Child’: Egyptian Security Forces’ Abuse of Children in Detention,” documents abuses against 20 children between the ages of 12 and 17 when they were arrested
There are an estimated 1,500 Rohingya Christians among more than 700,000 predominantly Muslim Rohingya forced to flee to Bangladesh as the result of a brutal Myanmar military offensive in Rakhine State in 2017, said HRW, which described the campaign as ethnic cleansing
The 65-page report, “‘My Teacher Said I Had a Disease’: Barriers to the Right to Education for LGBT Youth in Vietnam,” documents how LGBT youth in Vietnam face stigma and discrimination at home and at school over myths such as the false belief that same-sex attraction is a diagnosable, treatable, and curable mental health condition
The 57-page report, “‘Kidnapped by ISIS’: Failure to Uncover the Fate of Syria’s Missing,” highlights 27 cases of individuals or groups apprehended by ISIS and last heard of in its custody before the group’s military defeat. They include activists, aid workers, journalists, and anti-ISIS fighters from a range of groups, government and anti-government, as well as residents living under ISIS control. While the number of missing is uncertain, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented 8,143 cases of people detained by ISIS whose fate remains unknown
More than 1 million displaced people have been living at sprawling refugee camps in Bangladesh’s southeastern Cox’s Bazar district, including about 740,000 stateless Rohingya who fled their homes in neighboring Rakhine state in late August 2017
The 95-page report, “A Dirty Investment: European Development Banks’ Link to Abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Palm Oil Industry,” documents that investment banks owned by Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are failing to protect the rights of people working and living on three plantations they finance