Human Rights | WPN World People News

A criminal court in Manama on October 30, 2017, sentenced three relatives of a prominent exiled Bahraini human rights defender to three years in prison on terrorism-related charges, Human Rights Watch said on Oct 30. The judicial process was marred by due process violations and allegations of ill treatment and coerced confessions. All three will appeal the verdicts, a relative told Human Rights Watch.

A house in a rural Wayuu community in La Guajira, Colombia, June 2016.

A Parisian court on October 27, 2017, convicted the president of Equatorial Guinea’s eldest son in absentia of embezzling tens of millions of euro from his government and laundering the proceeds in France.

Algerian authorities have been rounding up sub-Saharan Africans in and around Algiers and have deported more than 3,000 to Niger since August 25, 2017, without giving them an opportunity to challenge their expulsion, Human Rights Watch said on Oct 30. Those expelled include migrants who have lived and worked for years in Algeria, pregnant women, families with newborn babies, and about 25 unaccompanied children.

Yanghee Lee, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, briefs reporters at UN Headquarters.

The Qatari government’s newly announced labor reforms are a step in the right direction, but their implementation will be the decisive factor, Human Rights Watch said on Oct 27.

The United Nations Security Council and Chemical Weapons Convention member countries should take strong measures to ensure accountability after a UN-appointed inquiry found the Syrian government responsible for an April 2017 chemical attack that killed nearly 100 people, Human Rights Watch said on Oct 27, 2017.

The U.S.’s oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP, is warning black flyers to exercise caution when flying American Airlines after a string of “disturbing incidents.”

Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) have failed to protect the well-being of hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers sent to Manus Island under Australia’s mandatory offshore processing policy, Human Rights Watch said on Oct 25. About 770 men remain stuck in PNG, where many have suffered assaults and robberies and received inadequate health care, according to new interviews by Human Rights Watch.

Medical professional associations should enact standards of care for intersex children that rule out medically unnecessary surgery before patients are old enough to consent, Human Rights Watch and interACT said in a report released on Oct 26, 2017. After decades of controversy in the medical community over the procedures, the lack of centralized care standards allows doctors to continue operating on children’s gonads, internal sex organs, and genitals when they are too young to participate in the decision, even though such surgery is dangerous and could be safely deferred.