Browsed by
Category: Human rights/civil liberties

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

What I saw in Jenin after Israel’s largest West Bank raid in 20 years

What I saw in Jenin after Israel’s largest West Bank raid in 20 years

Diana Buttu writes: As I entered the Jenin refugee camp, a few days after Israel’s deadly assault in early July, I was overcome by the sights and smells—and by my own memories. At the camp’s entrance, garbage was piled high, the first sign of Israel’s destruction of much of the camp’s infrastructure, including its sewage lines. The smell of the garbage rotting in the hot sun, mixed with the open sewage, was overwhelming. But as I walked deeper into the…

Read More Read More

Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more

Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more

The Associated Press reports: The Ukrainian civilians woke long before dawn in the bitter cold, lined up for the single toilet and were loaded at gunpoint into the livestock trailer. They spent the next 12 hours or more digging trenches on the front lines for Russian soldiers. Many were forced to wear overlarge Russian military uniforms that could make them a target, and a former city administrator trudged around in boots five sizes too big. By the end of the…

Read More Read More

Heat is the human rights issue of the 21st century

Heat is the human rights issue of the 21st century

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Consider the cantaloupe. It’s a decent melon. If you, like me, are the sort who constantly mixes them up, cantaloupes are the orange ones, and honeydews are green. If you, like me, are old enough to remember vacations, you might have had them along with their cousin, watermelon, at a hotel’s breakfast buffet. Those spreads are not as bad as you remember, especially when it’s hot out; add a couple of cold bagels and a…

Read More Read More

Abducted Princeton student’s friends warn ‘lies’ could get her killed

Abducted Princeton student’s friends warn ‘lies’ could get her killed

The Daily Beast reports: Friends and colleagues of Elizabeth Tsurkov, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq earlier this year, are slamming what they describe as dangerous lies spreading online about the Princeton doctoral student. Tsurkov, 36, went missing in March after traveling to Iraq on a research trip for her dissertation, Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement this week, adding that she was abducted by Kataib Hezbollah, a notorious militia group…

Read More Read More

Israel attacks Jenin in biggest West Bank incursion in 20 years

Israel attacks Jenin in biggest West Bank incursion in 20 years

The Guardian reports: Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”. At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday, and the death toll is likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry. On Monday afternoon, Israeli sources suggested…

Read More Read More

Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped

Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped

The New York Times reports: From air and by sea, using radar, telephone and radio, officials watched and listened for 13 hours as the migrant ship Adriana lost power, then drifted aimlessly off the coast of Greece in a slowly unfolding humanitarian disaster. As terrified passengers telephoned for help, humanitarian workers assured them that a rescue team was coming. European border officials, watching aerial footage, prepared to witness what was certain to be a heroic operation. Yet the Adriana capsized…

Read More Read More

Republicans are torching democracy to deny women abortions

Republicans are torching democracy to deny women abortions

Rolling Stone reports: Kierre Morgan has had an abortion, but it was the abortion she didn’t have that transformed her into an activist. She was 17 and in denial, at first, about being pregnant at all. Under Ohio law, she needed permission to terminate her pregnancy, and — after considering whether she could use a fake ID — she finally had a conversation with her adoptive parents. They overruled her decision. “Their options were: I could have my daughter, and…

Read More Read More