Human Rights | WPN World People News

The Human Rights Council chamber in Geneva.

Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar Yanghee Lee.

A draft bill proposed by the Hungarian government would allow the authorities to automatically detain asylum seekers in transit zones and to summarily return asylum seekers to the Serbian border from anywhere in Hungary, Human Rights Watch and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said in a February 24 letter to the European Commission calling for it to intervene.

United Nations human rights experts are calling on Bangladesh to act now to halt an increasing number of enforced disappearances in the country.

The Khazir camp in northern Iraq housing thousands of people internally displaced by the fight against ISIS. Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) forces have detained over 900 displaced men and boys from five camps and the urban area of Erbil between 2014, when people fleeing ISIS began arriving, and late January 2017.

Within hours of the February 14 knife attack in Pishan county, Xinjiang, China’s state media released identical reports: Three assailants attacked people in a residential district, killing five while injuring another five, and the assailants were killed by police officers who had swiftly arrived at the scene. Only the Jiangnan Metropolitan News defied a censorship order and kept open its online comment function on this story, providing a rare glimpse into netizens’ views of the attack.

The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors on February 24 approved financing of $20.17 million for the Livelihood Enhancement and Association of the Poor Project (LEAP). The Project intends to help poor and vulnerable families in the Siem Reap Province and Phnom Penh Capital by increasing income, building skills and constructing small-scale community infrastructure.

The arrest of Philippine Senator Leila de Lima on politically motivated charges signifies the widening of President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” to include critics and political foes, Human Rights Watch said on Feb 24. De Lima, a former justice secretary, is the main critic of the anti-drug campaign that has killed more than 7,000 people. She is currently being held at Camp Crame, the headquarters of the Philippine National Police, in Quezon City, Metro Manila.

Israeli authorities denied Human Rights Watch’s application for a work permit for its Israel and Palestine director on the grounds that it is not a real human rights group, the organization said on Feb 24.