Human Rights | WPN World People News

Forty-one donors pledged US$404.6 million to the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), an increase of $21.2 million (or 5.5 percent) compared to pledges made last year during the annual high-level conference. The pledges will allow CERF to continue helping aid agencies jump-start emergency responses during natural disasters and other crises in 2014.

Amara al-Khatabi in his hospital bed where he remains under heavy guard in Tripoli, Libya on April 10, 2013.

Nigeria’s government has largely ignored years of mass murder in Plateau and Kaduna states in central Nigeria, Human Rights Watch said in a report released. The new report catalogues horrific sectarian violence in these two states, which has left more than 3,000 people dead since 2010.

Louisiana state laws and practices that prohibit access to sterile syringes and criminalize sex work contribute to an uncontrolled HIV epidemic and an extremely high AIDS death rate, Human Rights Watch said in a report released. The AIDS death rate in Louisiana is more than double the US average. New Orleans police regularly interfere with sex workers who carry condoms, putting them and their clients at risk of HIV.

The ruling by India’s Supreme Court on December 11, 2013, that same-sex conduct between consenting adults remained a criminal offense is a setback for the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people, Human Rights Watch said. The court reversed a landmark 2009 Delhi High Court decision that a colonial-era law infringed upon fundamental rights provided under the constitution.

India's Supreme Court has upheld a 19th-century law making homosexual acts a crime, overturning an earlier court decision that had ruled the law invalid.

Janez Lenarčič, the Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, delivers a briefing to journalists at the OSCE Ministerial Council in Kyiv, 6 December 2013.

The OSCE Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, speaking at the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Rome, 18 July 2013.

On UNICEF’s 67th birthday, the organization released a new report showing that the births of nearly 230 million children under-five have never been registered; approximately one in three of all children under-five around the world.