Category Archives: News

15Feb/22

El Salvador Releases Woman Imprisoned after Miscarriage

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Women in San Salvador, El Salvador march in a protest for safe and legal abortions on the Global Day of Action for Abortion, September 28, 2021.
© 2021 Camilo Freedman / SOPA Images/Sipa via AP Images

After ten years languishing in an El Salvadorian prison, Elsy, 38, has been released. In 2011, Elsy suffered a miscarriage only to be arrested and sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges of aggravated homicide because the authorities concluded she had had an illegal abortion.

Last December, as part of the campaign “Las 17” and “BringHomeLas17”, celebrities urged President Nayib Bukele to free all women serving prison sentences for homicide when they had suffered miscarriages, stillbirths, or other obstetric emergencies. Since December 2021, five women, including Elsy (whose name has been withheld for privacy reasons) has been released.

This follows an Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision from November 2021 that found El Salvador responsible for the death of Manuela, who after an obstetric emergency, was convicted in 2008 of aggravated homicide and who later died in prison from cancer.

Elsy’s release is a good step, but scores of women remain in prison under similar charges.

Abortion is a crime in El Salvador, with no exceptions, even where the pregnancy endangers the pregnant woman’s life or health or in cases of rape. Anyone who has an abortion, and the medical providers who perform or induce them, can face harsh prison sentences. Under the draconian law, women accused of having had abortions have been convicted of murder, sometimes with prison terms of up to 40 years. Like Elsy, some of these women had experienced miscarriages or obstetric emergencies.

Women who face criminal charges in El Salvador over abortion are disproportionately poor, women’s rights organizations have reported. They often face violations of their medical confidentiality and due process rights and have a hard time getting adequate legal representation.

This is consistent with Human Rights Watch findings in other Latin American and Caribbean countries, like Ecuador, where women face similar violations of their rights.

Hospitals should not be a revolving door to prisons, and women should not be criminalized for having an obstetric emergency. Nor should those in poverty be disproportionately targeted for prosecution. El Salvador should repeal the total ban on abortion, pardon and release the women who remain in prison, and establish protocols to ensure access to safe, legal abortions. The lives and rights of women and girls in El Salvador are depending on it.

15Feb/22

Australia: End Indefinite, Arbitrary Immigration Detention

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A protester outside the Park Hotel calling for the release of refugees being detained inside the hotel in Melbourne, Australia on January 8, 2022.
© 2022 AP Photo/Hamish Blair

(Sydney) – Australian authorities continue to indefinitely detain 32 refugees and asylum seekers at the same facility where Novak Djokovic was held, one month since the world tennis star’s detention brought international attention to their plight, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Australian government should immediately end its harsh and unlawful policy of indefinite and arbitrary immigration detention of refugees and asylum seekers. It should adopt alternatives to immigration detention, Human Rights Watch said in a new submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, which is considering a bill to end indefinite and arbitrary immigration detention.

“The world learned about Australia’s cruel approach to refugees and asylum seekers during Novak Djokovic’s encounter with the immigration detention system,” said Elaine Pearson, Australia director at Human Rights Watch. “With an Australian election expected soon, all political parties should reject the indefinite, arbitrary immigration detention of refugees and asylum seekers.”

Successive Australian governments have used detention of refugees and asylum seekers as a form of deterrence. Under international human rights law, immigration detention should not be used as punishment, but rather should be an exceptional measure of last resort. Conditions at immigration detention centers need to meet international standards.

The Australian Department of Home Affairs reported that 1,459 people are currently in immigration detention facilities in Australia. Those detained include more than 70 refugees and asylum seekers who were transferred to Australia from Nauru or Papua New Guinea for medical treatment. Many of them have spent long periods detained in hotel rooms in Australia with heavily restricted freedom of movement, and limited access to sunlight, space to exercise, and fresh air.

Mehdi Ali, a 24-year-old refugee from Iran who has spent the last two years detained at the Park Hotel in Melbourne, where Djokovic was held, described his and a fellow detainee’s situation as “a real-life nightmare.”

“The residents of this building are desperately in need of freedom,” Ali said. “Some of them think about committing suicide every night before they go to sleep.”

Currently, the average period for people held in Australian immigration detention is 689 days; the highest ever recorded. This compares with averages of 55 days in the United States and 14 days in Canada. Australian authorities have also detained 117 people for five years or more, with 8 people having spent more than 10 years in detention.

The proposed law on ending indefinite detention makes mandatory immigration detention illegal, provides alternatives to immigration detention that are focused on the immediate needs of refugees and non-citizens, and dismantles Australia’s current offshore immigration detention policies. If adopted, it would help bring Australia in line with its international legal obligations and best practice in relation to immigration detention.

Community-based alternatives to detention have been successfully used in countries across Europe, Human Rights Watch said. Alternatives have proven not only more humane than detention, but effective in achieving immigration enforcement goals at a lower cost.

“Detaining people solely due to their immigration status is harmful, expensive, and ineffective as a deterrent to migration,” Pearson said. “The Australian government should stop punishing those who may have fled violence and other injustices and offer rights-respecting alternatives to detention.”

15Feb/22

LGBT Rights Under Renewed Pressure in Hungary

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Dorottya Redai, an activist with Labrisz Lesbian Association and publisher of the book A Fairy Tale For Everyone, reads from it in Budapest, Hungary, on July 21, 2021.
© 2021 Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights and the groups who work to protect them are under fresh pressure in Hungary.  

On February 1, an appeals court in Hungary ruled against Labrisz Lesbian Association, saying that an article in a pro-government newspaper likening them to pedophiles did not injure the group’s reputation. The same week, the ruling party-controlled media regulator Media Council fined RTL Klub, an independent TV station, for running a public service announcement ad produced by leading Hungarian LGBT organization Hatter Tarsasag, featuring LGBT families.

In 2020, Labrisz Lesbian Association published A Fairy Tale for Everyone, a book of reimagined fairy tales featuring LGBT characters and themes. The book was the target of homophobic pushback, including from politicians who called it “homosexual propaganda” and from conservatives who sought to have it banned from bookstores. Lawmakers later seized on the controversy to enact a law that bans depictions of LGBT people in school materials or television programs aimed at youth.

The court ruling in the Labrisz case reversed a November 2021 decision by a lower court that found comparing LGBT activists to pedophiles was both unfounded and offensive. The Media Council decision was based on legislation enacted in June 2021 banning depictions of LGBT content in media prior to 9 p.m. but concerned ads had run in 2020, thus retroactively applying the law. RTL Klub is appealing the decision.

In recent years, lawmakers have ended legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people and amended Hungary’s Constitution to define marriage as a heterosexual union and to functionally prohibit same-sex adoption.

Seeking to justify its anti-LGBT rhetoric as “child protection” and bolster its own support, Hungary’s ruling party plans to hold a referendum on its anti-LGBT law on April 3, coinciding with national elections, with distorted questions, including whether people agree with children being provided information in schools and media about sexual orientation and gender reassignment treatments.

The conflation of LGBT rights with pedophilia jeopardizes children’s rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and other human rights experts have stressed that withholding “relevant, appropriate, and timely” sexuality education from children, including LGBT children, jeopardizes their right to seek and receive information as well as their right to health. This can leave young people ill-equipped to protect themselves whenever they do become sexually active.

Hungarian authorities should not be putting the rights of children and LGBT people up for a vote or seeking to silence those who speak out on their behalf.

15Feb/22

Nigeria’s Kano State Needs Child Protection Law

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Women and girls arrive to make traditional Friday prayers at a mosque in Kano, northern Nigeria on February 15, 2019.
© 2019 AP Photo/Cara Anna

Last week, the Federation of Women Lawyers Kano (FIDA KANO) led a peaceful demonstration through the streets of Kano City, demanding that the long-delayed Child Protection Bill finally becomes law in Kano state.

The federal Child Rights Act (which the draft Child Protection Bill is derived from) was passed by Nigeria’s federal parliament in 2003, but has yet to be adopted by Kano State, one of Nigeria’s biggest northern states.

FIDA Kano partnered with several nongovernmental organizations, including Nigerian Association of Women Journalists and Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative, to demand justice against various child rights abuses that have taken place in Kano state.

These fresh demands for the bill come in the wake of a grisly killing of a five-year-old girl, Hanifa Abubakar in December. Three people have been arrested by Kano police and are awaiting trial. 

Children in Kano state are at risk of many child rights abuses, including widespread child marriage and sexual violence, including at school. In a recent report on child marriage, Human Rights Watch found that Kano state lacks important safeguards to protect children who are married off as young as 10 years old, denied access to education, and forced to have sex and bear children with the men who marry them.

Human Rights Watch has joined these organizations and others in calling for Kano’s state parliament, the House of Assemblies, to urgently adopt the Child Rights Act to bring the state in line with Nigeria’s human rights commitments, including the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Adopting the Child Rights Act would increase protection for children against rights violations, such as child marriage, and ensure that victims of crimes are provided with adequate legal redress through the court system.