Human Rights | WPN World People News

Bulgarian law enforcement officials summarily return asylum seekers and migrants to Turkey, often after stealing their belongings and subjecting them to violence.

Vietnam’s Communist Party should use its twelfth National Congress to announce that free and fair elections will be held to elect the country’s leaders, Human Rights Watch said on January 19. Vietnam’s donors, who regularly call for free and fair elections in countries such as Burma and Cambodia, should publicly call for pluralistic elections in Vietnam and an end to one-party rule.

The Indian government should strengthen its groundbreaking bill providing legal protections for the country’s transgender population, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday in a letter to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. The Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2015 should be improved through broad consultations throughout the country with transgender people and groups.

The Indonesian government should immediately intervene to protect members of the Ahmadiyah religious community from intimidation and threats of expulsion by local authorities on Bangka Island, Human Rights Watch said on January 16.

With hundreds of thousands of Syrians living in a “nightmarish reality dictated by a conflict that respects few rules and obeys no laws,” the United Nations deputy humanitarian chief told the members of the UN Security Council on 15 January that they cannot let more people “die on their watch.”

The Tunisian authorities’ decision to suspend the activities of the LGBT rights group Shams is a setback for individual freedoms and equal rights in Tunisia. Shams works on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights.

The signs of human trafficking could be all around Defense Department personnel: A subcontractor withholds passports and delays payment to its employees, or a company forces potential workers to pay a large fee to obtain a contract job on a DoD installation.

On Monday, Turkey announced what could be a huge step forward for Syrian refugee children’s access to education – one that European leaders should strongly support. Volkan Bozkir, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, said that his country planned to start “giving Syrians in Turkey work permits.”

The Chinese authorities’ formal arrest of at least 11 human rights lawyers, legal assistants, and activists on political subversion charges is an unprecedented and grave escalation of attacks on rights defenders in China, Human Rights Watch said on January 14. Authorities should immediately drop the charges and release the 11, as well as other lawyers and human rights advocates in custody for political reasons.