Author: Human Rights Watch

I was in Sri Lanka on August 4, 2006, when 17 humanitarian aid workers were brutally murdered in the embattled town of Muttur, near the coastal city of Trincomalee. I’ve written about the incident ever since, but 20 years later, I still cannot report that those responsible have been held to account. During the height of the […]

Journalist Muhammad Aidha, who had reported for the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya and Al Hadath channels since 2019, was killed in Mukalla in eastern Yemen on June 24 by an explosive device planted in his car. Three days later, on June 27, Marib security forces detained journalist Hamoud Haza while he was covering a public event. Haza […]

(Beirut) – Two Israeli settler attacks on Tal village near Nablus in the West Bank on July 24, 2026, resulted in the killing of four Palestinians and two Israelis, Human Rights Watch said today.  The incident triggered a wave of settler reprisal attacks in nearby Palestinian villages, the Israeli government’s announcement of a “major counterterrorism […]

Iran’s authorities executed a young man, Mehdi Khanaki, on July 22. He was the 24th known person arbitrarily executed since March 18 in connection with recent protests. The number of executions of real and perceived dissidents on vague national security charges has significantly increased. Over the past four months alone, authorities have executed at least 50 […]

(Washington, DC) – President Donald Trump announced on July 24, 2026, that the United States was considering “a massive attack” on Iran following a breakdown of the ceasefire and US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding. US and Iranian leaders have threatened to retaliate and attack targets that could be civilian infrastructure, in violation of the laws of war. […]

(New York) – The Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC), during a special session on July 24, 2026, decided to remove the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, from office for serious misconduct and serious breach of duty. The following quote can be attributed to Liz Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights […]

(Geneva) – Recent actions by the government of Nepal that threaten the independence of the country’s judiciary are a source of serious concern, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) said today.  In particular, political pressure has reportedly been applied to alter the composition of the Supreme Court through the […]

Fresh from a trip to Haiti, US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz offered the UN Security Council on July 20 a harrowing account of the “kill zone” he said Port-au-Prince has become. In unusually graphic detail, he recounted grotesque incidents, including one in which several Haitian national police officers “were flayed alive in […]

It has been 13 days since armed soldiers seized Muwanga Kivumbi, a deputy president for the National Unity Platform, Uganda’s main opposition party. He has not been heard from since and the authorities have yet to account for his whereabouts. On July 10, the day after a court released Kivumbi on bail on politically related […]

Two incidents of videoed cruelty of stray animals in China this summer have triggered widespread outrage. Both spread rapidly online, and both showed a familiar government response: censorship, intimidation, and dispersion. In late June, videos of four boys cruelly mistreating and burning a dog and her puppies in Jieyang, Guangdong province, circulated widely online. Public […]