Human Rights | WPN World People News

On the Day of the African Child, UNICEF joined the African Union to mark the efforts by African communities to promote social change and end practices that endanger the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of children each year.

Children living in armed conflict face unprecedented threats. These include grave violations such as the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, sexual violence against children, killing and maiming of children, and recurrent attacks on hospitals and schools.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned in the strongest terms the shelling on a United Nations logistics base in Sudan’s South Kordofan State which killed at least one UN peacekeeper and wounded two others.

The two-year prison sentence for a Tunisian rapper on June 13, 2013, for “insulting the police” in a song violates freedom of speech, Human Rights Watch said. The criminal court sentence is another manifestation of the continuing intolerance for those who criticize government institutions in Tunisia.The First Instance Criminal Tribunal of Ben Arous, in the southern suburbs of Tunis, sentenced Alaa Eddine Yaakoubi, better known as Oueld El 15 (the 15-year-old boy), to two years in prison for “insulting the police” and defamation of public officials under articles 125, 128, and 226 of the penal code.

Two chess players enjoying an outdoor game in New York City’s Central Park.

Rabbi Andrew Baker, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office on Combating Anti-Semitism, speaking at an expert conference on the security needs of Jewish communities in the OSCE region, Berlin, 13 June 2013.

Young girl doing domestic work in Nepal.

The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatović, warned that the closure of Greece’s public service broadcaster, ERT, could deprive citizens of a diversity of views, and it creates economic hardship for the dismissed journalists.

Combating trafficking in human beings all over the OSCE region is in focus of OSCE conference in Kyiv in June 2013. Anti-trafficking poster designed as part of OSCE-supported awareness campaign in Tajikistan.

More than a dozen anti-corruption activists in Beijing and Jiangxi Province were detained between late March and late May after participating in or organizing demonstrations calling for government officials to publicly disclose their assets, China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers, Front Line Defenders, Human Rights Watch, and Independent Chinese PEN said. The Chinese government should release the anticorruption activists and drop all charges against them, the organizations said.