radiofree.asia

Category: South and Central Asia

  • Trump’s first 100 days supercharged a global ‘freefall of rights’, says Amnesty

    World now in era of repressive regimes’ impunity, climate inaction and unchecked corporate power, says report

    The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.

    In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • EU urged to put human rights centre stage at first central Asia summit

    Bloc to discuss trade, security and energy with leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan

    The EU is being urged to put human rights centre stage as it begins its first summit with the leaders of central Asia.

    The president of the European Council, António Costa, and the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, are meeting the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on Friday.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘I begged them, my daughter was dying’: how Taliban male escort rules are killing mothers and babies

    The need for women to be accompanied by a man in public is blocking access to healthcare and contributing to soaring mortality rates, say experts

    It was the middle of the night when Zarin Gul realised that her daughter Nasrin had to get to the hospital as soon as possible. Her daughter’s husband was away working in Iran and the two women were alone with Nasrin’s seven children when Nasrin, heavily pregnant with her eighth child, began experiencing severe pains.

    Gul helped Nasrin into a rickshaw and they set off into the night. Holding her daughter’s hand as the rickshaw jolted over the dirt road, Gul says she prayed they would not encounter a Taliban checkpoint.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Taliban made me marry my boss: how one word led to a forced marriage

    Afghanistan’s ‘morality police’ arrested Samira at work in Kabul – and then made the 19-year-old marry her employer

    It was a normal summer morning in July last year when 19-year-old Samira* made her way to the carpet-weaving shop where she worked in Kabul to pick up her wages. She had no way of knowing that in just a few hours, her life as she knew it would be over.

    She would end the day in a Taliban police station, a victim of forced marriage with her entire future decided for her by a group of strangers with guns.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • We can be heroes: the inspiring people we met around the world in 2024 – part one

    From an exuberant mountaineering woman to a boy representing unheard refugees, here are some of the brave individuals that gave us hope

    Nine years ago, Cecilia Llusco was one of 11 Indigenous women who made it to the summit of the 6,088 metre-high Huayna Potosí in Bolivia. They called themselves the cholitas escaladoras (the climbing cholitas) and went on to scale many more peaks in Bolivia and across South America. Their name comes from chola, once a pejorative term for Indigenous Aymara women.

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  • ‘Many migrant workers will die’: why awarding the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia alarms rights groups

    Millions of migrants will build stadiums, transport networks and hotels. But testimonies from Bangladeshis who have worked there suggest abuse is deeply entrenched in the Gulf kingdom

    When Shahadat set out for Saudi Arabia from his village in Bangladesh, he was driven by a single purpose: to earn money for his impoverished family. “If he sent money home, his family would eat. If he didn’t, they wouldn’t,” says a relative.

    For years he just about scraped by, sending a little money home each month and trying to pay down the huge debt he took on to afford the illegal fees a recruitment agent had charged him to get to Saudi Arabia.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Women arrested by Taliban for begging report rape and killings in Afghan jails

    Draconian new laws allow mass incarceration of women and children forced to beg because of work ban

    Destitute Afghan women arrested for begging under draconian new Taliban laws have spoken of “brutal” rapes and beatings in detention.

    Over the past few months, many women said they had been targeted by Taliban officials and detained under anti-begging laws passed this year. While in prison, they claim they were subjected to sexual abuse, torture and forced labour, and witnessed children being beaten and abused.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Education is survival’: parents of Rohingya refugee children fight for their right to go to school in India

    Official attitudes are hardening towards the minority group amid an anti-Muslim crackdown, say activists

    For Rohingya refugee Hussain Ahmed, the hope that his children might receive a formal education to secure a better adulthood than his own was what “kept him going”. After fleeing to India from Myanmar in 2016, he began working as a construction worker in a country where he is not allowed to seek legal employment. Then he met with a new hurdle.

    “For the last few years, I have been running from pillar to post, trying to get a local government-run school to enrol my 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. I cannot afford the fees of privately run schools, so the government ones were my only hope. But all of them turned my children down,” says Ahmed, who lives in the Khajuri Khas area of Delhi with his wife and four children.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Bangladesh to seek extradition of ousted leader Sheikh Hasina from India

    Interim leader Muhammad Yunus confirms plans to put former PM on trial accused of crimes against humanity

    Bangladesh will seek the extradition of the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina to face trial on charges including crimes against humanity, the country’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, has said in a speech.

    Hasina, whose autocratic regime governed Bangladesh for 15 years, was toppled in a student-led revolution in August. Since then she has been living in exile in India after fleeing the country in a helicopter as thousands of protesters overran the presidential palace.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay

    The journalist Mélissa Cornet and the photographer Kiana Hayeri met more than 100 Afghan girls and women in seven provinces, and found resistance and defiance but also despair

    Earlier this year, I spent 10 weeks travelling with the photographer Kiana Hayeri across seven provinces of Afghanistan, speaking to more than 100 Afghan women and girls about how their lives had changed since the Taliban swept back to power three years ago.

    Hayeri and I both lived in Afghanistan for years, and remained here after the Taliban took control in August 2021. In the past few years, we have seen women’s rights and freedoms, already severely curtailed, swept away as Taliban edicts have fallen like hammer blows.

    Mitra plays with children in Yamit district, near the Wakhan mountains. Her daughter and her cousin, who were both grade 11 pupils aged about 17, took their own lives in these pools last year

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • What is gender apartheid – and can anything be done to stop it?

    Activists hope a change in international law could help to address the intensifying erosion of women and girls’ rights in Afghanistan

    Read more: Afghan exiles on the Taliban’s gender apartheid

    Over the past three years, the world has watched in horror as women and girls in Afghanistan have had their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away.

    In the face of inaction by the international community, a campaign for the conditions being imposed on Afghan and Iranian women to be made a crime under international law as gender apartheid was launched last year. What does the term mean and will it make a difference?

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Afghan women fight to hold Taliban to account over gender apartheid

    What women face in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity, say activists pushing for recognition by UN

    Explainer: What is gender apartheid – and can anything be done to stop it?

    When Sima Samar and other Afghan women came up with the term “gender apartheid” in the 1990s to describe the systematic oppression faced by women and girls under Taliban rule, she never imagined it would have become a key weapon in the fight to hold a second Taliban regime to account for their crimes two decades later.

    “When the first Taliban regime fell, the idea that we would once again see the persecution, isolation and segregational and systematic repression of half the Afghan population on the basis of their gender seemed impossible,” says Samar, who served as the minister for women’s affairs after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and now lives in exile. “But now, in 2024, it is happening again and this time we must find a way to fight for justice.”

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Afghan women meet in Albania in ‘act of defiance’ against Taliban crackdown

    Organisers of international summit hope to create pressure to reverse laws including a ban on women speaking in public

    More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.

    Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Observer view on Afghanistan: Britain and the US are complicit in the Taliban’s oppression of women

    Despite the regime withdrawing even the most basic human rights of women and girls, liberal democracies have failed to take action

    ‘So pervasive is the Taliban’s institutionalised gender oppression, and so slender are the spaces in which women and girls may live freely, that in Afghanistan today almost any act can be characterised as an act of resistance.”

    That conclusion from Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, encapsulates how unbearably suffocating it is to be female in Afghanistan today: excluded from education and from running a business; forbidden from going outside for a walk or to exercise, to speak or show any part of their face or body outside the home; or even for their voices to be heard singing or reading from within their own home. There is no other country where women and girls are so oppressed on the basis of their sex.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘She has won our hearts and minds’: can one woman unite the Baloch people in peaceful resistance?

    With more than 70 people reportedly killed by rebels this week, Dr Mahrang Baloch’s effective and non-violent protests against Pakistan’s government are rapidly gaining support

    On the morning of 26 August, about three dozen armed men intercepted traffic at Musakhel in Pakistan, a district on the border between Balochistan and Punjab. Identifying and off-loading 23 men from the Punjab province from different vehicles, they shot them dead. They also set 35 vehicles ablaze.

    The Balochistan Liberation Army, the most active militant group in the province, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was the second of its kind this year. In April, nine passengers were forced out of a bus near Noshki, a city in Balochistan, and shot dead after the assailants checked their ID cards.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Frightening’ Taliban law bans women from speaking in public

    New vice and virtue restrictions offer ‘a distressing vision of Afghanistan’s future’, says UN

    New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.

    The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Bangladeshi journalists hopeful for return to press freedom as Hasina era ends

    Reporters cautiously optimistic as interim government takes over after years of intimation and censorship under outgoing prime minister

    Bangladeshi journalists are hoping the resignation of the prime minister Sheikh Hasina will bring an era of censorship and fear to an end, as they prepare to hold a new interim government to account.

    Arrests, abuse and forced disappearances at the hands of Bangladesh’s security forces have loomed over journalists for most of Hasina’s 15-year rule, preventing them from routine reporting for fear of writing anything that could be perceived as embarrassing for the government.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘The Taliban tried to silence us’: the musicians who escaped to Portugal

    With music now a crime in Afghanistan, Braga has become one of the few places where the practice is being preserved

    A stone’s throw from Portugal’s oldest cathedral and buzzing bakeries serving up pastéis de nata, the complex notes of a sitar fill the ground floor of an unassuming building in the northern city of Braga.

    The soft strumming belies the radical nature of the mission that has taken root here: to preserve Afghan music and use it as a tool to counter those who want to eradicate it.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘I fear they will kill me for talking’: The Pakistani poet abducted for his activism

    Ahmad Farhad’s abduction sent ripples across Pakistan. After being released on bail, he insists on telling his story

    It was late at night in Islamabad and Ahmad Farhad was returning from a quick trip to the shops when someone walked up behind him. “Don’t be scared, don’t scream and come with us,” the figure, dressed in civilian clothes, whispered discreetly into his ear.

    Still clutching bread, eggs and jam intended for the next morning’s breakfast, Farhad went to the car without a sound. With a sinking feeling the poet recognised the vehicle, with its blacked-out windows, as one known to be used by shadowy military agencies in Pakistan for abductions.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Pakistani poet was abducted because of human rights activism, says wife

    Ahmad Farhad was pushed into vehicle hours after posting about threats from country’s spy agency, says Syeda Urooj Zainab

    The wife of a Pakistani poet and journalist who was abducted from outside his house last week has accused the country’s spy agency of responsibility, saying it acted because of his activism.

    Ahmad Farhad was pushed into a vehicle after returning from a dinner in the early hours of Wednesday 15 May and driven away.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘They are trying to eradicate us completely’: the passion and pain of telling the stories of Afghan women

    Her family have been threatened and her team faces increasing risks in Afghanistan, but Zahra Joya knows she must keep reporting from exile

    On the nights that she manages to fall asleep, Zahra Joya always returns to Afghanistan in her dreams. On good nights she travels back to Bamyan, her home province, with its green mountains and bright blue lakes, or to her parents as they looked when she was a little girl.

    Increasingly though, her dreams are full of roadside bombs or men with guns. Some nights, memories of her last hours in Afghanistan play over and over on a loop: the panicked crowds outside Kabul airport, people being whipped and beaten, the sound of her sisters crying.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UK accused by Amnesty of ‘deliberately destabilising’ human rights globally

    Rights chief also warns Britain will be ‘judged harshly by history for its failure to help prevent civilian slaughter in Gaza’

    The UK has been accused by Amnesty International of “deliberately destabilising” human rights on the global stage for its own political ends.

    In its annual global report, released today, the organisation said Britain was weakening human rights protections nationally and globally, amid a near-breakdown of international law.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Human rights in decline globally as leaders fail to uphold laws, report warns

    Human Rights Watch’s annual report highlights politicians’ double standards and ‘transactional diplomacy’ amid escalating crises

    Human rights across the world are in a parlous state as leaders shun their obligations to uphold international law, according to the annual report of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

    In its 2024 world report, HRW warns grimly of escalating human rights crises around the globe, with wartime atrocities increasing, suppression of human rights defenders on the rise, and universal human rights principles and laws being attacked and undermined by governments.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Myanmar’s military commanders responsible for rape and torture – war crimes report

    Security Force Monitor finds 64% of senior army officers led units allegedly committing killings, rapes, torture and disappearances

    New research into alleged war crimes in Myanmar has concluded that the majority of senior commanders in the Myanmar military, many of whom hold powerful political positions in the country, were responsible for crimes including rape, torture, killings and forced disappearances carried out by units under their command between 2011 and 2023.

    The research, by the Security Force Monitor (SFM), a project run by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, states that 64% – 51 of 79 – of all Myanmar’s senior military commanders are responsible for war crimes. It claims that the most serious perpetrator of human rights violations is Gen Mya Tun Oo, Myanmar’s deputy prime minister, former defence minister and a member of the ruling military council.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • McDonald’s and Amazon’s ties to alleged labor trafficking: five key takeaways

    Foreign workers at the Middle East locations of US and UK brands allege low pay, harsh conditions and a legal limbo with few protections

    Today the Guardian has published an investigation into labor conditions at the Persian Gulf locations of major US and UK brands, including Amazon, McDonald’s and the InterContinental Hotels Group.

    Almost 100 current and former migrant laborers spoke to reporters, and many claimed they were misled into taking poorly paid jobs, subject to extortionate and arbitrary fees, or had their passports confiscated. These practices are broadly considered to be indicators of labor trafficking.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Taliban ban women from national park in Afghanistan

    Minister says women visiting the lakes of Band-e-Amir have not been wearing their hijabs properly

    The Taliban have banned women from visiting one of Afghanistan’s most popular national parks, adding to a long list of restrictions aimed at shrinking women’s access to public places.

    Thousands of people visit Band-e-Amir national park each year, taking in its stunning landscape of sapphire-blue lakes and towering cliffs in the country’s central Bamiyan province.

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  • Pakistan government faces backlash over ‘draconian’ arrest powers

    Amendment to bill would allow intelligence agencies to search ‘enemies’ and their premises without warrant

    The Pakistan government is facing a backlash from MPs and senators after introducing an amendment to a colonial-era secrets act that critics have said will grant “draconian” powers to its military intelligence agency to detain and arrest citizens with impunity.

    The amendment was quietly added in a parliamentary session and passed without providing copies to MPs, creating concern among parliamentarians on both sides of the aisle.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Resistance is possible’: Ravish Kumar, the broadcaster risking his life to tell the truth about India​ today​

    The eminent journalist’s fearless reporting on India under Narendra Modi cost him his job and freedom. Now broadcasting to millions on YouTube, he is the subject of a new documentary

    Ravish Kumar was born near the same Indian city – Motihari in Bihar – as George Orwell. In his early years as a TV journalist and nightly news anchor, Kumar did not imagine that he would live to be part of a modern-day Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare. But that changed almost a decade ago with the election of Narendra Modi’s government in India. In the years since then, Kumar has become an increasingly lone voice of truth-telling in an Indian media landscape in thrall to the Hindu nationalist politics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Kumar’s one-man campaign to maintain journalistic integrity, as mainstream news organisations became promoters of politicised fake news, earned him the “Nobel prize of Asia,” the Ramon Magsaysay award, in 2019. It also led to an unending campaign of harassment and death threats from government supporters.

    Kumar, the Indian equivalent of, say, Jeremy Paxman in his prime, finally resigned from his post at NDTV in New Delhi last November, after the station was taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, a close friend of Modi. He now lives in virtual hiding with his family and broadcasts through a personal YouTube channel. His story, one of repression in modern India and of the existential crisis in truth-telling worldwide, is the subject of an urgently compelling documentary, While We Watched.

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  • Thousands of Afghan refugees in UK set to be made homeless

    Downing Street crisis meeting hears that about 8,000 who arrived under Operation Warm Welcome will be evicted this summer with nowhere to go

    Thousands of Afghan refugees in the UK face homelessness this summer, the government was warned last week at a secret crisis meeting in Downing Street.

    Council officials told No 10 and Home Office civil servants that about 8,000 Afghan refugees, allowed into the country in 2021 under the slogan Operation Warm Welcome, are due to be evicted from hotels as early as August because of a government deadline, yet have nowhere to go.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UK aid to India does little for human rights and democracy, watchdog finds

    Programme spent £2.7bn between 2016 and 2021 but is fragmented and lacks a clear rationale, report says

    Britain’s aid programme to India is fragmented, lacks a clear rationale and does little to counter the negative trends in human rights and democracy in the country, the government’s aid watchdog has found.

    The findings are likely to be used by those who claim the UK government risks using its aid programme to deepen its relationship with India, including seeking free trade deals, rather than attempting to reduce poverty, which is the statutory purpose of UK aid.

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