Category Archives: News

15May/23

Chemical Weapons: Protect Integrity of Global Ban

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Government representatives convene for a meeting of the Chemical Weapons Convention in The Hague, Netherlands, November 2019.
© 2019 Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

(The Hague, May 15, 2023) – Governments should protect the integrity of the international treaty banning chemical weapons by fully carrying out its provisions and by ensuring accountability for any violations, Human Rights Watch said today. A Review Conference of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is scheduled to take place in The Hague on May 15-19, 2023.

“Governments should use the Review Conference to reinforce the longstanding ban against chemical weapons by condemning any use and demanding accountability for violations,” said Mary Wareham, arms advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “These governments should uphold the integrity of the treaty by publicly singling out violators.”

A total of 193 countries are party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, making it the world’s most universally accepted humanitarian disarmament treaty. Only Egypt, North Korea, and South Sudan remain outside the convention, while Israel has signed but not ratified the treaty.

The landmark convention prohibits the use of the toxic properties of common chemicals such as chlorine to kill or injure. Among other obligations, each member state agrees never to “assist, encourage or induce, in any way, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.”

Human Rights Watch conducted extensive research into the use of chemical weapons in Kurdish areas of Iraq in the late 1980s by the government of Saddam Hussein, before the convention took effect internationally in April 1997. More recent research has shown that the Syrian government was responsible for dozens of chemical weapon attacks in the 2010s. Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and others have also investigated use of chemical weapons by the armed group Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq during the past decade.

Upon ratifying the convention in October 2013, Syria committed to abide by the strict prohibition on any development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer, or use of chemical weapons. Yet the Syrian government has only partially complied with the requirement to declare and destroy any remaining stocks of chemical weapons and the facilities that produced them.

Moreover, the Syrian government continued to use chemical weapons after joining the convention. Repeated investigations by the UN and the convention’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons concluded that Syrian government forces used the nerve agent sarin as well as chlorine delivered by improvised air-dropped bombs between 2015 and 2018 in attacks that reportedly killed or injured thousands of people.

In 2018, states parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention condemned “in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons by anyone under any circumstances.”

Human Rights Watch has frequently documented the often abusive and sometimes lethal use of tear gas and other chemical irritants by law enforcement and other security forces, especially during protests. Law enforcement officials may employ such riot control agents in accordance with international human rights law, which permits its use only when necessary to prevent further physical harm. The use of tear gas should be preceded, when possible, by warnings and it should never be employed to disperse nonviolent protests.

However, under the Chemical Weapons Convention, during international and noninternational armed conflicts, such riot control agents may not be used as a method of warfare. Governments need to be vigilant in preventing and suppressing any use of tear gas on the battlefield, Human Rights Watch said.

Requests from Human Rights Watch to participate in meetings of the Chemical Weapons Convention were denied in the past due to objections by a few member countries, but in April Human Rights Watch’s accreditation to attend the Fifth Review Conference was accepted. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, nearly all of Review Conference accreditation requests from nongovernmental organizations were accepted. A handful were rejected, including those from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Syria Civil Defence, and the Middle East Treaty Organization.

“A couple of governments should not be able to mute expert civil society voices by denying them access to important meetings of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” Wareham said. “The convention urgently needs to overhaul its practices for accepting or rejecting the presence of nongovernmental organizations and to make the decisions clear and public.”

15May/23

75 years later, Israel Blocking Palestinian Refugees’ Return

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 Palestinian children return from school to their homes in the Jabalia Refugee Camp on the 74th Anniversary of Nakba Day in the northern Gaza Strip, May 15, 2022.
© 2022 Mahmoud Issa/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Photo

From the morgues of Cairo to the cells of Guantanamo, I’ve seen a lot of anguish and cruelty in my human rights work over the years. But often more than blood spilled, it’s the lives stunted, solely because of a person’s identity, that hits the hardest.

I had one such moment visiting a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon several years ago. Meeting kids who, through no fault of their own, were effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, because they are Palestinian, shook me.

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May 15 marks the 75th anniversary of Nakba Day, commemorating the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes, and the more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed in the events surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948. As the Palestinian human rights group al-Haq wrote, “the legacy of the Nakba events is that about two-thirds of the Palestinian people became refugees,” while Israel “imposed a system of institutionalized racial discrimination over Palestinians who remained on the land.” Today, there are more than 5.9 million Palestinian refugees, including the descendants of those who fled or were expelled.

Israeli authorities have, pursuant to discriminatory laws, blocked those refugees and their descendants from returning to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Meanwhile, Israeli law entitles Jewish citizens of other countries to settle in Israel or West Bank settlements and become citizens. That means a Jewish citizen of any country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home in what became Israel and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp, cannot.

This reality reflects the long-standing Israeli policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, one element of its crime against humanity of apartheid.

International human rights law guarantees refugees and exiles the right to enter the territory they are from, even where sovereignty is contested or has changed hands, and reside in areas where they or their families once lived and have maintained links to. Like refugees in other contexts, such as Rohingya refugees expelled from Myanmar, Palestinians should have the freedom to choose among the options of returning to reside in the areas where they or their families are from, local integration, or third-country resettlement.

No matter how many years pass, recognizing and honoring the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland should remain central to the discussion of the future in Israel and Palestine.

15May/23

Human Rights Watch Wins Two Webby Awards

(New York) – Human Rights Watch has won two 2023 Webby Awards, the leading international prize honoring excellence on the internet.

One award is for a series of social media videos that draw attention to human rights abuses in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The second Webby is for an interactive campaign about online learning products that may have surveilled children and harvested personal data during Covid-19 school closures. Human Rights Watch also received a Webby Honoree distinction for the video #WelcomeToCanada, which is part of a campaign urging the Canadian government to end the harmful practice of immigration detention in provincial jails.

“Winning a Webby Award for our rapid response video coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine shows there’s a demand for reliable information, a demand to stop atrocities, and a demand for accountability,” said Ifé Fatunase, multimedia director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s a great privilege to be able to tell these stories, and we are honored to have been recognized.”

The Human Rights Watch project, which won in the category of social media content on News and Politics, contains close to a dozen short videos posted to social media to shed the light on war crimes and other abuses committed soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

#StudentsNotProducts won a People’s Voice Award in the Websites and Mobile Sites

Responsible Innovation category. Human Rights Watch created an interactive online campaign and video that uncovers children’s rights violations worldwide by governments that authorized online learning products during the Covid-19 pandemic without adequately protecting children’s privacy.

“Children deserve to be safe at school, in person and online,” said Amanda Alampi, acting campaigns and public engagement director at Human Rights Watch. “Inspired by our groundbreaking research, the Human Rights Watch #StudentsNotProducts campaign gave parents, teachers, and children the tools to protect kids from government-recommended online learning products that harmed children’s rights.”

With two honors presented in each category, the 27th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 14,000 entries from over 70 countries worldwide, and a record number of social entries. Human Rights Watch competed against some of the world’s best and biggest news organizations, including Reuters and CBS News. Winners will be honored at a ceremony in New York City tonight, on May 15. The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a network of over 2,000 members.

Ifé Fatunase, Laura Prieto Uribe, video producer and editor at Human Rights Watch, and Ziva Luddy Juneja, digital campaigner at Human Rights Watch will attend the ceremony and have the opportunity to deliver one of the Webby’s famous five-word acceptance speeches on behalf of the organization.