Author: Human Rights Watch

(Bangkok) – The Vietnamese authorities should immediately drop all charges and release the prominent rights activist Nguyen Chi Tuyen, Human Rights Watch said today. Hanoi police arrested Nguyen Chi Tuyen on February 29, 2024, for criticizing the government on social media. He was charged under article 117 of the penal code, which criminalizes “making, storing, disseminating, […]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2024 electoral campaign frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities, inciting discrimination, hostility, and violence. Inflammatory speeches, amid a decade of attacks and discrimination against minorities under the Modi administration, have normalized abuses against Muslims, Christians, and others. The new Modi government needs to reverse its discriminatory policies, […]

Play Video Los Angeles systematically criminalizes unhoused people through arrests and citations for violations arising out of their unhoused status and by destroying their property through sanitation sweeps. Criminalization drives unhoused people out of public spaces but does nothing to solve their lack of housing. City government should stop its practice of criminalization and destructive […]

Survivors and relatives of victims of a 2004 attack on the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi have filed criminal cases against alleged perpetrators in their home countries of Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The complaints, which allege genocide and crimes against humanity, are an effort to secure justice two decades later. The lawyer involved […]

(Bangkok) – Myanmar junta forces and the opposition Arakan Army have committed extrajudicial killings and widespread arson against Rohingya, Rakhine, and other civilians in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State in recent months, Human Rights Watch said today. The military’s unlawful recruitment of Rohingya men and boys has stoked communal tensions between the Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist […]

(Beirut) – The bodies of hundreds of thousands of victims of unlawful killings remain buried in mass graves across Iraq, Human Rights Watch said today. The graves contain the bodies of victims of successive conflicts, including Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds in 1988 and mass killings by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) […]

Authorities and healthcare providers in the state of Mexico, the nation’s most populous state, are failing to guarantee access to abortion care, even in cases in which it is legal. Barriers to legal abortion care make it more difficult for people to get services they are entitled to, especially people living in poverty, adolescents, and […]

In a video circulated on social media on July 21, Steve Akam, alias Ramon Cotta, a Cameroonian social media activist, stands before a barrier in an outdoor space, handcuffed and surrounded by members of the Cameroonian police. It was the last time he was seen. Human Rights Watch contacted sources in Cameroon, and geolocated and analyzed […]

(New York) – The Taliban have created the world’s most serious women’s rights crisis since taking power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, Human Rights Watch said today. Afghanistan is also experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with aid severely underfunded, thousands of Afghans forced back into Afghanistan from Pakistan, and thousands of others expecting to emigrate to […]

When veteran journalist Elyes Gharbi announced on June 28 that he was leaving the “Midi Show” on Tunisia’s leading radio station, Mosaïque FM, after nine years, he did not explain why. However, Gharbi’s decision came just months after he acknowledged “unbelievable threats” against journalism in the country and a year after police investigated him for comments made […]