Human Rights | WPN World People News

Protesters are detained by policemen during a protest in central Bangkok on May 22, 2015.

An exception to the EU ban on trade in seal products was deleted by the Internal Market Committee on Thursday. MEPs ruled out EU sales of seal products from “maritime resource management” hunts, in line with a 2014 World Trade Organisation ruling. But another exception, for the Inuit community, whose way of life depends on these products, remains.

Most child victims of violence in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia find themselves unable to speak up and file charges in court, according to a new UNICEF regional report launched here on June 3.

Child abuse and violence is costing countries in East Asia and the Pacific around US $209 billion/year, equivalent to 2 percent of the region’s GDP, according to newly published research commissioned by UNICEF. This is the first ever costing of child maltreatment in the region and was conducted by a team of global experts using a proven methodology previously employed in Australia and the US.

A Save the Children Temporary Learning Center in Nepal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court in an emergency hearing and a written filing this week to block the recording industry’s move to force Internet infrastructure companies into becoming copyright police with far-reaching restraining orders.

“We express our profound concerns regarding the new legislation on ‘undesirable’ foreign organisations in Russia which endangers the right of free expression of the political opposition, the media and civil society,” said Theodora Bakoyannis (Greece, EPP/CD) and Liliane Maury Pasquier (Switzerland, SOC), co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Russia by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

Remnants of an air-dropped cluster munition and unexploded BLU-97 submunitions found in the al-Nushoor and al-Maqash areas of Yemen’s northern Saada governorate on May 23, 2015.

Almost 14,000 children whose schools were destroyed or heavily damaged in the two earthquakes are having classes for the first time in five weeks in temporary learning centres.

Iraqi authorities are preventing thousands of families fleeing the fighting in Ramadi from reaching safer parts of the country. The government of Iraq has primary responsibility for protecting internally displaced people and should allow those fleeing danger in Ramadi or elsewhere to enter safer areas.