Human Rights | WPN World People News

Shackles used to bind slaves.

Police in Lebanon used force to disperse a peaceful protest on August 19, 2015, failing to uphold human rights standards.

Over the last five weeks, Chinese authorities have conducting a sweeping roundup of human rights lawyers and activists, interrogating and briefly detaining over 200 people, with 25 still in custody. Most of those 25 are being held in secret locations with no access to family or lawyers. Under Chinese law, police can detain citizens for up to 37 days before the procurator must either approve their arrest or release them. For most of those still in detention, that crucial deadline has passed; their detention is now unlawful, not just under international law but domestic law. And to think that the official justification for rounding-up the lawyers was to “uphold the rule of law!”

City landscape, Tianjin, China.

The United Nations Security Council should impose an arms embargo on the Syrian government following the government’s repeated air attacks on Douma’s popular markets and residential areas on August 16, 2015. The attacks killed at least 112 people, whom witnesses and first responders described as overwhelmingly civilian.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should create a commission of inquiry to investigate alleged serious laws-of-war violations by all parties in Yemen since September 2014, Human Rights Watch and 22 other human rights and humanitarian organizations said on August 19.

Egypt’s new counterterrorism law increases authorities’ power to impose heavy sentences, including the death penalty, for crimes under a definition of terrorism that is so broadly worded it could encompass civil disobedience. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi enacted the law on August 15, 2015.

Free speech in Bangladesh is under attack as never before, held hostage between angry, machete-wielding radicals on one hand and a government, quick to take offence, on the other.

Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).