Browsed by
Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Israeli president says there are no innocent civilians in Gaza

Israeli president says there are no innocent civilians in Gaza

HuffPost reports: As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not…

Read More Read More

Humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens as Israel prepares a possible invasion

Humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens as Israel prepares a possible invasion

The New York Times reports: Six days of Israeli airstrikes have left more than 300,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip homeless, with two million residents facing critical shortages of food, water and fuel, while Israeli troops prepared on Thursday for a possible ground invasion after Hamas’s deadly weekend assault. Retaliating for the bloodiest attack on Israel in 50 years, Israel is pummeling Gaza with a ferocity not seen in past conflicts and has cut off vital supplies to the coastal…

Read More Read More

Biden accused of betrayal of Khashoggi over push to deepen Saudi ties

Biden accused of betrayal of Khashoggi over push to deepen Saudi ties

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden is facing accusations of betraying a pre-election promise to re-evaluate ties with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in favour of pursuing a rapprochement with the kingdom aimed at repelling a challenge from China to US primacy in the Middle East. The charge, from human rights campaigners and some Democrats, follows the fifth anniversary of Khashoggi’s death at the hands of Saudi regime agents and comes amid mounting criticism of a proposed new…

Read More Read More

Saudi Arabia sentences schoolgirl to 18 years over tweets, says rights group

Saudi Arabia sentences schoolgirl to 18 years over tweets, says rights group

Middle East Eye reports: Saudi Arabia has sentenced a secondary schoolgirl to 18 years in jail and a travel ban for posting tweets in support of political prisoners, according to a rights group. On Friday, ALQST rights group, which documents human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, revealed that the Saudi Specialised Criminal Court handed out the sentence in August to 18-year-old Manal al-Gafiri, who was only 17 at the time of her arrest. The Saudi judiciary, under the de facto…

Read More Read More

The secret life and anonymous death of the most prolific war crimes investigator in history

The secret life and anonymous death of the most prolific war crimes investigator in history

Ben Taub writes: It was 4:17 a.m. on February 6th in Antakya, an ancient Turkish city near the Syrian border, when the earth tore open and people’s beds began to shake. On the third floor of an apartment in the Ekinci neighborhood, Anwar Saadeddin, a former brigadier general in the Syrian Army, awoke to the sounds of glass breaking, cupboard doors banging, and jars of tahini and cured eggplant spilling onto the floor. He climbed out of bed, but, for…

Read More Read More

Saudi Arabia on ‘relentless killing spree,’ Amnesty International says

Saudi Arabia on ‘relentless killing spree,’ Amnesty International says

Deutsche Welle reports: Authorities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have executed at least 100 people in 2023, according to human rights watchdog Amnesty International. In a statement on Friday, the activists said they documented several cases in which people had been sentenced to death for social media posts or drug-related offenses in “grossly unfair trials that fell far short of international human rights standards.” “The authorities’ relentless killing spree raises serious fears for the lives of young men on…

Read More Read More

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

The Guardian reports: The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada. The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid…

Read More Read More

U.S. presses Saudi Arabia on reported migrant massacres which could be crimes against humanity

U.S. presses Saudi Arabia on reported migrant massacres which could be crimes against humanity

The Washington Post reports: The Biden administration is pressing Saudi Arabia to identify which elements of its security forces are alleged to have slaughtered migrants along the kingdom’s border with Yemen, a step that would mark an advance toward determining responsibility for the reported abuses and help the United States establish if it has provided weapons or training to those units. Riyadh has categorically denied the allegations in last week’s explosive report from Human Rights Watch, which described widespread killing,…

Read More Read More

South Carolina’s all-male Supreme Court upholds abortion law, reversing earlier decision

South Carolina’s all-male Supreme Court upholds abortion law, reversing earlier decision

The New York Times reports: The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the state’s new near-total ban on abortion by a 4-1 vote, reversing a decision it had made in January that struck down a similar ban and declared that the State Constitution’s protections for privacy included a right to abortion. The court’s decision was not unexpected, because the makeup of the bench had changed, and Republicans in the State Legislature had passed a new abortion law in the…

Read More Read More

Government’s own experts found ‘barbaric’ and ‘negligent’ conditions in ICE detention

Government’s own experts found ‘barbaric’ and ‘negligent’ conditions in ICE detention

NPR reports: In Michigan, a man in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was sent into a jail’s general population unit with an open wound from surgery, no bandages and no follow-up medical appointment scheduled, even though he still had surgical drains in place. A federal inspector found: “The detainee never received even the most basic care for his wound.” In Georgia, a nurse ignored an ICE detainee who urgently asked for an inhaler to treat his asthma. Even…

Read More Read More

Montana judge hands young plaintiffs significant victory in landmark climate trial

Montana judge hands young plaintiffs significant victory in landmark climate trial

CNN reports: A Montana judge handed a significant victory on Monday to more than a dozen young plaintiffs in the nation’s first constitutional climate trial, as extreme weather becomes more deadly and scientists warn the climate crisis is eroding our environment and natural resources. In a case that could have legal reverberations for other climate litigation, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that Montana’s continued development of fossil fuels violates a clause in its state constitution that guarantees its citizens…

Read More Read More

Growing segregation by sex in Israel raises fears for women’s rights

Growing segregation by sex in Israel raises fears for women’s rights

The New York Times reports: The trains from Tel Aviv were packed one evening last month when Inbal Boxerman, a 40-year-old mother of two, was blocked by a wall of men as she tried to board. One of them told her that women were not allowed on — the car was for men only. Ms. Boxerman was stunned. It was a public train operated by Israel Railways, and segregated seating is illegal in the country. The men stopping her appeared…

Read More Read More

Racism at heart of U.S. failure to tackle deadly heatwaves, expert warns

Racism at heart of U.S. failure to tackle deadly heatwaves, expert warns

The Guardian reports: Racism is at the heart of the American government’s failure to tackle the growing threat of deadly heatwaves, according to the author of an authoritative new book on the heating planet. Jeff Goodell, an award winning climate journalist, told the Guardian that people of color – including millions of migrant workers who are bearing the brunt of record-breaking temperatures as farmhands, builders and delivery workers – are not guaranteed lifesaving measures like water and shade breaks because…

Read More Read More

Let the tragedy in my homeland be a lesson

Let the tragedy in my homeland be a lesson

Tahir Hamut Izgil writes: About seven years ago, people around me started disappearing. It began slowly, quietly. The editors of a well-known literature textbook were suddenly nowhere to be found. A friend of mine left for work and never came home. My family and I are Uyghurs, and at the time we were living in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. The political situation in our region had been growing gradually more tense for…

Read More Read More

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Greg Sargent writes: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-state governors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually just to send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But…

Read More Read More

Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Kourosh Ziabari writes: The Iranian government is handicapped by unrelenting sanctions that do not look as though they are going away anytime soon. The country’s economic paralysis is compounded by the inadequacies of a squad of callow officials and corrupt functionaries, whose nepotism triggers frequent scandals these days. While the sanctions have almost irreversibly insulated the national economy from the outside world and rendered Iran’s banking and financial sectors irrelevant, the iron-fisted establishment has been unable to tame its top-tier…

Read More Read More