A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Founder Aryan Pasha wants La Beauté & Style to be an inclusive and comfortable space, as well as tackle prejudice and provide employment
The beauty treatments listed at the new La Beauté & Style salon are much the same as those offered by the dozen or so other parlours that dot the traffic-heavy Dilshad Extension area of Ghaziabad, 17 miles (28km) east of Delhi. But that is where the similarity ends.
The wall behind the reception desk is painted in rainbow colours; a mural of a trans man with flowing multicoloured locks decorates another wall; a woman wearing a sari is having her eyebrows plucked next to a trans man who is telling a stylist how he would like his hair cut.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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We return to the story of a journalist forced to flee as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August. Unable to return home without putting at risk everyone she loves and hounded by threatening calls, she remains in hiding in the country four months on
- Read her first story: ‘Please pray for me’: a female reporter being hunted by the Taliban
I am an Afghan female journalist and I have been on the run for more than four months. I have lived in numerous safe houses and the homes of people who’ve offered me refuge. I am constantly moving to avoid being caught, from province to province, city to city.
The Taliban insurgents have been threatening to kill me and my colleagues for two years, for our reports exposing their crimes in our province. But when they seized control of our provincial capital, they started to hunt for those who had spoken out against them. I decided to escape, for my own and my family’s safety.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Courts in the global north have a duty to protect citizens of developing countries from plunder by corporations
In 1977, the Myanmar military launched a national drive to register citizens and drive out people they deemed to be “foreigners”. Since then, more than 2.5 million Rohingya people have fled the country, with 740,000 fleeing to Bangladesh in the displacement crisis of 2017 alone. It is nearly a decade since the Myanmar regime and its supporters were first denounced by the international community for carrying out a “campaign of ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya people.
Legal initiatives on behalf of Rohingya survivors issued this week allege that the campaign of clearances and genocide perpetrated on the Rohingya people was facilitated by a Goliath, Facebook. “Facebook turned away while a genocide was being perpetrated,” claims Tun Khin, the president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK. “Putting profit before the human rights of the Rohingya people, permitting the spread of hateful anti-Rohingya propaganda which directly led to unspeakable violence.”
Jason McCue is senior partner of McCue, Jury and Partners LLP and James Libson is managing partner of Mishcon de Reya LLP
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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MPs’ inquiry given further details of Britain’s mismanagement of Afghanistan exit with ‘people left to die at the hands of the Taliban’
Further evidence alleging that the government seriously mishandled the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been handed to a parliamentary inquiry examining the operation, the Observer has been told.
Details from several government departments and agencies are understood to back damning testimony from a Foreign Office whistleblower, who has claimed that bureaucratic chaos, ministerial intervention, and a lack of planning and resources led to “people being left to die at the hands of the Taliban”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Joe Biden’s ‘waffle-fest’ summit shows the international community is toothless when faced with a murderous junta boss
Promoting democracy worldwide is an admirable ambition, unless of course you are a bloody-minded dictator and serial human rights abuser like Myanmar’s top general, Min Aung Hlaing. This coup leader and junta boss prefers brute force to ballot boxes.
While the US president, Joe Biden, hosts more than 100 countries at a virtual “summit for democracy” this week, Min Aung Hlaing and his Tatmadaw troops will be busy killing civilians for demanding democratic rights, launching merciless attacks on villagers they call “terrorists”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Human Rights Watch says 47 former members of Afghan national security forces have been killed or forcibly disappeared
The US has led a group of western nations and allies in condemnation of the Taliban over the “summary killings” of former members of the Afghan security forces reported by rights groups, demanding quick investigations.
“We are deeply concerned by reports of summary killings and enforced disappearances of former members of the Afghan security forces as documented by Human Rights Watch and others,” read a statement by the US, EU, Australia, Britain, Japan and others, which was released by the state department on Saturday.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Arakan Army in Rakhine state suggests clashes broke out after junta troops entered ceasefire area
The UN security council has expressed its “deep concern” about unrest in Myanmar and called for an “immediate cessation of violence” as well as efforts to ensure civilians are not harmed.
Reports have emerged of clashes between junta troops and fighters from a major militant group in Rakhine state. The security council warned that “recent developments pose particular serious challenges for the voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable return of Rohingya refugees and internally displaced persons.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Human Rights Watch has logged illegal seizures of land and homes then given to Taliban supporters
Thousands of people have been forced from their homes and land by Taliban officials in the north and south of Afghanistan, in what amounted to collective punishment, illegal under international law, Human Rights Watch has warned.
Many of the evictions targeted members of the Shia Hazara community, while others were of people connected to the former Afghan government. Land and homes seized this way have often been redistributed to Taliban supporters, HRW said.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Ministers from Muslim-majority nations to travel to Kabul to discuss women and girls schooling ban
Foreign ministers from several Muslim-majority countries are planning to go to Kabul in part to urge the Taliban to recognise that the exclusion of women and girls from education is a distortion of the Islamic faith.
The proposal has the support of western diplomats who recognise that calls from them concerning universal values are going to have less traction with the Taliban than if the call comes from leaders of largely Islamic states.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Thousands who fled Taliban are living in hotels with inadequate healthcare in Operation Warm Welcome
Afghans who recently arrived in the UK after fleeing the Taliban takeover have asked to be sent back, casting doubt over the success of Operation Warm Welcome, the government’s Afghan resettlement programme.
It was launched by Boris Johnson on 29 August to help Afghan refugees arriving in the UK by providing support so they could “rebuild their lives, find work, pursue education and integrate into their local communities”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Taliban deny Morteza Samadi, 21, has been sentenced to death but family concerned for his safety after he was detained while covering women’s protests in Herat
Fears are growing for a photojournalist who has been detained by the Taliban for more than three weeks after being arrested while covering the women’s protests in Herat.
Morteza Samadi, 21, a freelance photographer, was one of several journalists who were arrested at street protests at the beginning of September. All were quickly released except Morteza, whose whereabouts is not known. Some of those detained in Kabul have alleged they were badly beaten and tortured.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The respected academic, who has died aged 80, was a leading anti-caste campaigner and fought tirelessly for women’s rights
At the village of Kasegaon, in India’s rural western region of Maharashtra, huge crowds turned up for the funeral in August of a US-born, white sociologist whom many local people saw as one of their own.
Most of the mourners were Dalits, who belong to the lowest caste in Indian society, previously deemed “untouchables”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Four corpses taken to main square and hung from cranes by Afghanistan’s Islamist regime
Taliban authorities in the western Afghan city of Herat killed four alleged kidnappers and hung their bodies up in public to deter others, a local government official has said, in a sign of Afghanistan’s new rulers’ return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.
Graphic footage shows the dead bodies of at least four men with their clothes covered in blood hanging from cranes in the city’s main squares as people watch.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Female taekwondo and karate trainers are forced to practise in secret since the Taliban takeover and fear they may never compete again
On the morning of 15 August, when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, Soraya, a martial arts trainer in the Afghan capital, woke up with a sense of dread. “It was as though the sun had lost its colour,” she says. That day she taught what would be her last karate class at the gym she had started to teach women self-defence skills. “By 11am we had to say our goodbyes to our students. We didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she says.
Soraya is passionate about martial arts and its potential to transform women’s minds and bodies. “Sport has no gender; it is about good health. I haven’t read anywhere in Qur’an that prevents women from participating in sports to stay healthy,” she says.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Children as young as 20 weeks old are being seized to force opponents to hand themselves in
Myanmar’s military junta is systematically abducting the relatives of people it is seeking to arrest, including children as young as 20 weeks old, according the UN special rapporteur for the country.
Tom Andrews told the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday that conditions in the country had continued to deteriorate and “current efforts by the international community to stop the downward spiral of events in Myanmar are simply not working”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse
Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Afghan-Australian Mahboba Rawi says the valley’s residents are without food and medical supplies in the last holdout against the militants’ rule
Afghanistan’s Panjshir valley is facing a humanitarian crisis, with families trapped inside the narrow valley without enough food or medical supplies, and cut off from the outside world as the Taliban attacks the last holdout to their control of the entire country.
Afghan-Australian Mahboba Rawi – the “mother of a thousand” who has for decades run Mahboba’s Promise which houses, educates and supports thousands of Afghan widows and orphans – traces her ancestral home to the famously redoubtable valley, and said under Taliban besiegement, the people of Panjshir were suffering.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Rebels say they are holding on despite celebratory gunfire in Kabul amid reports that hardliners have wiped out last pocket of resistance
Militia forces say they are enduring “heavy assaults” as they battle the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, the final holdout against hardline Islamist control.
The Taliban face the enormous challenge of shifting gears from insurgent group to governing power, days after the US fully withdrew its troops and ended two decades of war.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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There are signs of a return to something worryingly close to the hardline restrictions of the past across Afghan life
When Taliban fighters moved into Herat city in western Afghanistan last month, one thing mattered more to some of them than the battle itself. As gunmen faced off around the governor’s office, a group of militants came to Shogofa’s* workplace and ordered all the women home.
“They hadn’t even taken all the city, but they came to our headquarters. The manager called an emergency meeting and they told all the women to leave,” she said.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Related: Take this woman to be your wife | Kyrgyzstan
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Geoffrey Bindman says that without collective action to defend the oppressed and the vulnerable, we are heading into dangerous isolationist territory
Simon Jenkins is right that “moral imperialism” has long been a motivating factor in military interventions by Britain and other western nations (The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan, 20 August). Afghanistan and Iraq are contemporary examples.
But concern about motive does not detract from the need to support and strengthen the international protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the framework of international humanitarian law which followed it were endorsed by almost every nation. The absence of an international police force – a weakness in the structure – increases the need for individual states to share responsibility for enforcement, particularly of international criminal law. The development of a “responsibility to protect”, dismissed by Jenkins, gives legitimacy to necessary humanitarian intervention. Military action should be a last resort, but it cannot be ruled out of every situation where lives are at stake.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Geoffrey Bindman says that without collective action to defend the oppressed and the vulnerable, we are heading into dangerous isolationist territory
Simon Jenkins is right that “moral imperialism” has long been a motivating factor in military interventions by Britain and other western nations (The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan, 20 August). Afghanistan and Iraq are contemporary examples.
But concern about motive does not detract from the need to support and strengthen the international protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the framework of international humanitarian law which followed it were endorsed by almost every nation. The absence of an international police force – a weakness in the structure – increases the need for individual states to share responsibility for enforcement, particularly of international criminal law. The development of a “responsibility to protect”, dismissed by Jenkins, gives legitimacy to necessary humanitarian intervention. Military action should be a last resort, but it cannot be ruled out of every situation where lives are at stake.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Only the strong escaped to safety, as evidence builds that thousands of Afghans entitled to come to Britain still remain in Kabul
When the email arrived last Tuesday, Faaiz Ghulam and his young family were euphoric. Approved for evacuation, they were instructed to head straight to the west gate of Kabul’s Baron Hotel. There, British officials would process their case. Next step, the UK.
Yet Ghulam, his wife and their two children – an 18-month-old daughter and three-year-old son – are today in hiding in Kabul, terrified for their lives. Their first attempt to reach the hotel ended at a Taliban checkpoint. A second was abandoned over safety concerns as Ghulam and his wife carried their children through febrile crowds outside the airport.
Related: Afghanistan live news: last dedicated civilian flight to UK has left Kabul, says Ministry of Defence
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Athens calls for a united response, as refugees already in Lesbos hope their asylum claims will now be reconsidered
Greek officials have said that Greece will not become a “gateway” to Europe for Afghan asylum seekers and have called for a united response to predictions of an increase in refugee arrivals to the country.
Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotaki, has spoken to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about the developing situation in Afghanistan this week. Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi last week said: “We cannot have millions of people leaving Afghanistan and coming to the European Union … and certainly not through Greece.” The country has just completed a 25-mile (40km) wall along its land border with Turkey and installed an automated surveillance system with cameras, radars and drones.
Related: Fleeing the Taliban: Afghans met with rising anti-refugee hostility in Turkey
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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First minister raises ‘deep concerns’ about case of Jagtar Singh Johal, who has been imprisoned for four years awaiting trial
Nicola Sturgeon has written to the embattled foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, urging him to intervene in the case of a Scottish Sikh man who has been imprisoned in India for nearly four years awaiting trial, and is facing the death penalty after a confession allegedly extracted under torture.
In Sturgeon’s first formal intervention on the case, seen exclusively by the Guardian, the first minister expresses the Scottish government’s “deep concerns” about Jagtar Singh Johal’s detention without trial – as well as his allegations of torture and mistreatment by Indian authorities while in custody.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Misogyny continued to run through society behind the ‘new Afghanistan’ facade
I am thinking about Farkhunda. You may have read about her six years ago and felt outrage at the Afghan men who killed her. All that represents Farkhunda now is a forlorn clenched fist emerging from a block of stone, silently aimed at the sky near the place where she was publicly tortured and murdered in 2015, a popular shrine in Kabul where pigeons circle and hawkers and beggars approach crowds of pilgrims. Her “sin” was burning pages of the Qur’an, a fake accusation aimed at her by the vendor of charms whom she had criticised.
Farkhunda’s fate should also tell us that brutal corporal punishment meted out by the mob on religious grounds, especially to a woman, is not just the domain of the Taliban. More disturbingly, it should also tell us that even in the “new Afghanistan” there remained a troubling undercurrent of misogyny in some quarters of society. On that day, Afghan security forces stood by and watched as people tried to rip the young woman apart. I suspect the frustration of decades of being told to grudgingly accept women’s rights in public was unleashed on one small crumpled body.
Related: Amanda Gorman and Kate Winslet join advocates urging Biden to protect Afghan women
Women and children bore the brunt of bad policies, corruption, lack of rule of law and pervasive conservatism
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.