Human Rights | WPN World People News

Burundi’s security services and ruling party youth league members killed, raped, abducted, beat, and intimidated suspected opponents in the months leading up to a constitutional referendum on May 17, 2018, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on May 18. The country has faced a political, human rights, and humanitarian crisis since April 2015, when President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for a disputed third term.

Recent violence in the Central African Republic makes the country’s new Special Criminal Court especially important as a means to offer justice to victims of brutal crimes committed during the country’s conflicts, Human Rights Watch said on May 17, 2018. A new report by Human Rights Watch finds that the court will need more support from the United Nations and government donors to prosecute grave crimes, including widespread killings, rape and sexual violence, and destruction of homes.

The Bangladesh delegation to the United Nation’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva on May 14, 2018, failed to respond to pressing human rights concerns in the country, Human Rights Watch said on May 16, 2018.

On the occasion of the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, the European Union reaffirms its commitment to combat all forms of discrimination and hate crime, on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics, and to continue to actively promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 18, 2018 in Sochi is a crucial opportunity to press for the release of a wrongfully detained Russian human rights defender and to raise other key human rights issues, Human Rights Watch said on May 16, 2018.

A paramilitary unit controlled by then-Gambian president Yahya Jammeh summarily executed more than 50 Ghanaian, Nigerian, and other West African migrants in July 2005, Human Rights Watch and TRIAL International said on May 16, 2018.

The FIFA World Cup starting on June 14, 2018, will take place during the worst human rights crisis in Russia since the Soviet era, Human Rights Watch said on May 15, 2018. FIFA should use its leverage with the Russian authorities to address labor rights abuses, restrictions on fundamental freedoms, and an ongoing crackdown on human rights defenders.

Coordinated suicide bombings of three Christian churches and the police headquarters in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, on May 13-14, 2018, were repugnant acts of violence, Human Rights Watch said on May 15, 2018. The attackers intentionally used their own children, who were between the ages of 9 and 18, to either carry and detonate explosives or to accompany their parents carrying out the attacks.

Members of the informal Central Co-ordination Body during a one-day meeting on gender equality through work of women leaders, Dushanbe, 4 May 2018.

Chinese officials, since early 2018, have imposed regular “home stays” on families in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said on May 13, 2018. These visits are part of the government’s increasingly invasive “Strike Hard” campaign in the region, home to 11 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities.