Human Rights | WPN World People News

Students watch a performance by their peers at Barros Barreto School, in Salvador, Brazil. The performance tackled social issues such as racism and gender discrimination.

Atrocities by Islamist armed groups in Burkina Faso’s northern Sahel Region and by security forces during counterterrorism operations have left scores dead and created widespread fear and displacement, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on March 22, 2019. The violence has forced tens of thousands of villagers to flee since early 2019.

The Formula One Group disregards its human rights commitments and overlooks grave rights abuses in Bahrain, Human Rights Watch said on March 22, 2019. Some of the abuses appear to be directly related to Formula One’s activities in the country.

Expressing deep concern at the “magnitude and gravity of the human rights impact” of Venezuela’s current crisis, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said on Wednesday that the country had become “a worrying destabilizing factor in the region.”

Cambodian authorities should immediately reveal the whereabouts of a land activist forcibly disappeared in Preah Vihear province, Human Rights Watch said on March 20, 2019.

Saudi Arabia’s charges against women’s rights defenders appear almost entirely related to their human rights activities, Human Rights Watch said on March 21, 2019. Saudi Arabia opened individual trials on March 13, 2019 of 11 activists, most of them prominent women’s rights advocates detained beginning in May 2018. Saudi Arabia should immediately release all human rights activists detained merely for their rights advocacy, Human Rights Watch said.

The Myanmar and Chinese governments have failed to stem the trafficking of ethnic Kachin women and girls as “brides” to families in China, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on March 21, 2019.

The Tajik government should immediately and unconditionally release a seriously ill political activist who says he has been tortured, nine human rights groups said on March 20, 2019. The prisoner, Mahmadali Hayit, is deputy head of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), the country’s largest opposition party, which was banned by the government in late 2015.

Japan’s government should stop forcing transgender people to be surgically sterilized if they want legal recognition of their gender identity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on March 19, 2019. Requiring a medical intervention as a condition of having their gender identity legally recognized violates Japan’s human rights obligations and runs counter to international medical standards.