Human Rights | WPN World People News

The UN refugee agency is deeply concerned about the recent deportation of Pakistani asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka.

South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS) should stop seizing and shutting down newspapers as well as harassing, intimidating, and unlawfully detaining journalists, two leading human rights organizations said in a joint report.

Government-backed militias have been kidnapping and killing Sunni civilians throughout Iraq’s Baghdad, Diyala, and Hilla provinces over the past five months. The killings and abductions mark a serious escalation in sectarian violence at a time when the armed conflict between government forces and Sunni insurgents is intensifying.

As evidence of the increase in greenhouse gasses mounts, children – the most vulnerable and largest population affected by climate change – continue to be ignored in high level climate negotiations. In response, top climate change thinkers have joined forces to analyze a range of dilemmas and challenges for children thrown up by the unabated warming of the world.

The identification cards of two sisters who were disappeared from a Tumaco neighborhood in early 2013, evidence strongly suggests by a paramilitary successor group. The sisters were 13 and 14 years old at the time of their disappearance.

The Syrian government is raining high explosive barrel bombs on civilians in defiance of a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution, Human Rights Watch said. Resolution 2139 of February 22, 2014, ordered all parties to the conflict in Syria to end the indiscriminate use of barrel bombs and other weapons in populated areas.

The US Congress should support greater due process protections for migrant families rather than increasing funding for facilities to detain those crossing the US southern border, Human Rights Watch said. In the last week of July 2014, Congress is expected to debate supplemental appropriations requested byPresident Barack Obama on July 8 for 6,350 additional detention beds for undocumented migrant families with children.

The US Senate should move swiftly to approve a surveillance reform bill introduced on July 29, 2014, by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, Human Rights Watch said. The bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, is a significant improvement over a companion bill that the US House of Representatives passed on May 22 and, if approved, has the potential to end bulk collection of phone records in the US.

A boy looks at the remains of a neighbouring house while sitting amid the rubble of another home destroyed in an Israeli air strike in the town of Rafah in southern Gaza.

Large-scale US surveillance is seriously hampering US-based journalists and lawyers in their work, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released. Surveillance is undermining media freedom and the right to counsel, and ultimately obstructing the American people’s ability to hold their government to account, the groups said.