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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion

‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion

Margaret Atwood writes: Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose for a happy time on Saturday night. But nobody likes women bleeding to death on the bathroom floor from illegal abortions either. What to do? Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in? One in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health…

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Biden welcomes Ukrainian refugees but neglects Afghans, critics say

Biden welcomes Ukrainian refugees but neglects Afghans, critics say

The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s aggressive push to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees has generated resentment among those clamoring for his administration to help extract the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens desperate to escape Taliban rule now eight months after the calamitous end of America’s war there. The Department of Homeland Security this week unveiled its program to accelerate the admissions process for Ukrainians, allowing U.S.-based family members, organizations and other groups to apply, using a dedicated…

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How democracies spy on their own citizens

How democracies spy on their own citizens

Ronan Farrow writes: Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to…

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UN food chief says Mariupol is starving

UN food chief says Mariupol is starving

The Associated Press reports: The head of the U.N. World Food Program said people are being “starved to death” in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and he predicted the country’s humanitarian crisis is likely to worsen as Russia intensifies its assault in the coming weeks. WFP executive director David Beasley also warned in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press in Kyiv that Russia’s invasion of grain-exporting Ukraine risks destabilizing nations far from its shores and could trigger waves…

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Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council for ‘systematic abuses’

Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council for ‘systematic abuses’

RFE/RL reports: The UN General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council over reports of “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” by invading Russian troops in Ukraine. The resolution received 93 votes in favor, 24 against, and 58 abstentions. The U.S.-initiated resolution adopted by the 193-member General Assembly expressed “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.” [Continue reading…]

Execution of a village mayor becomes a symbol of Russian brutality in Ukraine

Execution of a village mayor becomes a symbol of Russian brutality in Ukraine

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mayor Olha Sukhenko took care of her village like a family for more than a decade, locals say, sprucing up public buildings, organizing concerts and settling disputes. When the Russian army withdrew last week after a monthlong occupation, her neighbors found Ms. Sukhenko’s lifeless body in a shallow grave, her hands bound. Her husband and son lay next to her, dead. Olha, Ihor and Oleksandr Sukhenko are but three of the faces of the brutal…

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Russian invaders are now treating the whole Ukrainian population as combatants, as dirt to be cleansed

Russian invaders are now treating the whole Ukrainian population as combatants, as dirt to be cleansed

Franklin Foer writes: On the morning of March 4, a teacher was sheltering in a basement in Bucha, an old railroad stop northwest of Kyiv that over the centuries had grown into a verdant suburb. The town lay along the Russian military’s intended path of conquest, leading into the Ukrainian capital. And while the invaders struggled to realize their overarching plan, they gained a toehold in Bucha. At 7 a.m., the teacher, huddled alone with her two dogs, heard a…

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Women and girls recount huge scale of sexual violence inflicted by Russian soldiers in Ukraine

Women and girls recount huge scale of sexual violence inflicted by Russian soldiers in Ukraine

The Guardian reports: Women across Ukraine are grappling with the threat of rape as a weapon of war as growing evidence of sexual violence emerges from areas retaken from retreating Russian forces. The world was horrified on Sunday by a picture taken by the photographer Mikhail Palinchak on a highway 20km outside the capital, Kyiv, in which the bodies of one man and three women were piled under a blanket. The women were naked and their bodies had been partially…

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If the West can welcome Ukrainians, it can accept the many climate refugees to come

If the West can welcome Ukrainians, it can accept the many climate refugees to come

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Beba Cibralic write: Global migration policy has started to move in a more humane direction in response to the invasion of Ukraine. While many states are welcoming displaced Ukrainians, this is a far cry from how those states typically treat refugees. Activists and scholars have lamented the lack of similar response to people displaced from south Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The uneven global response to migration on display sets a chilling precedent for the…

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Ukrainian Americans struggle to get fleeing relatives into United States

Ukrainian Americans struggle to get fleeing relatives into United States

The Washington Post reports: Every morning and every night, from her home in Falls Church, Va., Nadiia Khomaziuk messages her sister Lidiia in her hideaway in western Ukraine. Is Lidiia still okay? How about her kids, who are 7 and 11? Every day, Khomaziuk scours the Internet, calls U.S. government offices and connects with lawyers and other Ukrainian Americans, in search of a path to bring her family to safety in the United States. To get to there, Khomaziuk’s family…

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Two million refugees, including one million children, have now fled Ukraine

Two million refugees, including one million children, have now fled Ukraine

The Associated Press reports: It’s a global day to celebrate women, but many fleeing Ukraine feel only the stress of finding a new life for their children as husbands, brothers and fathers stay behind to defend their country from Russia’s invasion. The number of refugees reached 2 million on Tuesday, according to the United Nations, the fastest exodus Europe has seen since World War II. One million of them are children, UNICEF spokesman James Elder tweeted, calling it “a dark…

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Refugees fleeing Ukraine now represent biggest movement of people in Europe since World War II

Refugees fleeing Ukraine now represent biggest movement of people in Europe since World War II

The Wall Street Journal reports: More than 1.45 million people have left Ukraine since Russia invaded the country nine days ago, the International Organization for Migration said on Saturday, sparking what the United Nations agency described as the fastest and largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last week, large numbers of Ukrainians have fled, most heading west and toward eastern members of the European Union—Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia—that have pledged assistance….

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In Afghanistan, Biden has turned a crisis into a catastrophe

In Afghanistan, Biden has turned a crisis into a catastrophe

Ezra Klein writes: Ninety-five percent of Afghans don’t have enough to eat. Nearly nine million are at risk of starvation. The U.N.’s emergency aid request, at more than $5 billion, is the largest it has ever made for a single country. “The current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than the past 20 years of war,” David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, wrote recently. And we bear much of the blame. We have turned a crisis into…

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Afghans who bet on fast path to the U.S. are facing a closed door

Afghans who bet on fast path to the U.S. are facing a closed door

The New York Times reports: As a combat interpreter in Afghanistan, Sharif Azizi helped U.S. Special Forces hunt down Taliban targets, even after suffering leg and chest injuries from stepping on a land mine. When his life was threatened by the insurgents, the United States acknowledged his eight years of service and in 2017 brought him to safety in Los Angeles. Last year, when Taliban fighters seized Kabul, they came looking for his mother and siblings. Unable to make it…

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Conservation has a human rights problem. Can the new UN biodiversity plan solve it?

Conservation has a human rights problem. Can the new UN biodiversity plan solve it?

Inside Climate News reports: For decades, if not centuries, Maasai cattle farmers in Northern Tanzania have reared their animals alongside iconic wildlife species like cheetahs, lions and black rhinos. But that may change this year for a Maasai community living in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a park adjacent to Serengeti National Park and about the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Tanzanian government, citing the growth in population of the Maasai and their cattle as the main threat…

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Washington is failing the Afghan people on all fronts

Washington is failing the Afghan people on all fronts

Grace Segers writes: Nearly six months after a chaotic and widely criticized withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, capping an ignominious two decades of conflict that saw the war-ravaged country quickly retaken by the Taliban, the Biden administration and Congress have yet to fully address the lingering crises facing the American allies left behind and the evacuees living in limbo without a pathway to citizenship. The destabilized situation presents a crisis with multiple fronts, both in Afghanistan and here at…

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