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People wait to cast their votes at a polling station for the general elections, Maputo, Mozambique, October 9, 2024.
© 2024 Carlos Equeio/AP Photo

Mozambique’s election commission today declared Daniel Chapo and his ruling party Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Frelimo) winners of the country’s October 9 general elections. The elections were marred by political killings, widespread irregularities, and restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly.

International observers, including the African Union, European Union, and the Commonwealth, have raised serious concerns about the credibility of the electoral process and have called for a thorough investigation into allegations of election irregularities.

Tensions have increased dramatically since voting day, with Venâncio Mondlane, an independent candidate supported by the leading opposition party Optimistic People for the Development of Mozambique (Partido Optimista pelo Desenvolvimento de Moçambique, Podemos), asserting he won the presidential election.

Mondlane urged his supporters to stay home Thursday and Friday this week to protest what he called a fraudulent electoral process. News reports indicate that many people are participating in the nationwide shutdown, resulting in the closure of banks and supermarkets and a significant reduction in street traffic.

Earlier this week, police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators protesting alleged electoral fraud and the killing of two prominent opposition figures in the capital, Maputo, on Friday night. Numerous protesters and journalists were injured by tear gas canisters. In the lead-up to the elections, police had committed widespread abuses against civil society activists and journalists, including harassment, threats, assault, and arbitrary arrests and detentions. So far, police abuses reported to the authorities prior to election day remain unaddressed and unprosecuted.

The Mozambican authorities’ repeated crackdowns on free expression and association ahead of and during the October elections have severely undermined the credibility of the electoral process. Authorities should take steps to end police abuse of protesters and ensure respect for people’s right to peacefully protest election outcomes.

The international community should press the newly elected government to ensure cases of electoral violence and other human rights violations are promptly investigated and those responsible are fairly held to account. All victims of abuses, whatever their political affiliation, are entitled to justice.

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United Nations Headquarters building in Manhattan, New York City, on December 21, 2021.
© 2021 Sergi Reboredo / VWPics via AP Images

(New York) – World leaders gathering for the United Nations General Assembly’s annual General Debate should call for action to end the global human rights crises, Human Rights Watch said.

During the sessions from September 20 to 30, 2024, the situations in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti, Myanmar, Venezuela, and Afghanistan should top the agenda. At the UN Summit of the Future, leaders should also seek systemic changes to tackle economic injustice and promote the right to a healthy environment.

“World leaders at the UN General Assembly should commit to bold steps to end atrocity crimes in the world’s worst crises and hold those responsible accountable,” said Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch. “They should endorse concrete proposals at the Summit of the Future to address poverty, economic injustice, and the climate crisis, and the threats they pose to humanity. The world’s leaders need to demonstrate that they are willing to act to uphold human rights.”

On September 22 to 23, world leaders will participate in the Summit of the Future and are expected to endorse a “Pact for the Future,” which delegations have been negotiating for months. The nonbinding declaration is intended to be a roadmap for the future of the UN and international cooperation among the 193 UN member states. The latest draft includes language on the centrality of human rights and the need for global economic policy reforms. It calls for a transition away from fossil fuels in a just and equitable way, showing the need for urgent government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Diplomats working on the pact have expressed concern that Russia, China, Pakistan, and some other delegations have sought to weaken or even remove the language on human rights, including on women’s rights and gender.

The draft pact includes important commitments on economic justice and reforming the international financial architecture. Leaders should promote the concept of a human rights economy, which would anchor economic, fiscal, and policy decisions in existing human rights obligations. Some Global North governments have sought to dilute commitments critical to a human rights economy, such as support for a proposed UN treaty on international tax cooperation.

The draft pact’s failure to call for a new international treaty to prohibit autonomous weapons systems is a missed opportunity to energize negotiations for a treaty by 2026, even though it has broad international support.

The Pact for the Future also calls for reforming the UN Security Council, notably by limiting the scope and use of the veto by its five permanent members. Russia, China, and the United States have often used their veto power to block council action aimed at preventing atrocity crimes. Limiting the use of the veto would allow for timely and decisive Security Council action.

In New York, leaders should press for actions in Israel and Palestine that would end the widespread suffering. They should urge Israel, and all states, to abide by the General Assembly’s recent resolution calling for the full implementation of the International Court of Justice ruling on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel’s policies toward Palestinians living there.

They should accept Palestinian evacuees needing medical care, and press for Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups to comply with the court’s repeated orders to open Gaza’s crossings for humanitarian aid and allow access to all hostages and detainees.

Leaders should endorse suspending arms transfers to Israel and to Palestinian armed groups because of the risk that the weapons would be used in unlawful attacks on civilians. They should support UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ demand for accountability for the deaths of hundreds of UN staff and aid workers in Gaza.

World leaders, as well as the UN leadership, have failed to confront the conflict in Sudan, including the warring parties’ obstruction and pillaging of aid, even as part of the country is already enduring famine. They have also failed to prevent ongoing violations of the existing arms embargo, including by the United Arab Emirates, or to stop the warring parties from acquiring new weapons likely to be used to commit further atrocity crimes.

The secretary-general should propose to the Security Council detailed options to protect Sudanese civilians, which the council should urgently adopt and carry out. A civilian protection mission in Sudan is needed in areas where civilians are at particular risk of further atrocities, notably in Darfur, where ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity have been documented.

With respect to Myanmar, leaders should press for international action in the face of Security Council paralysis in addressing junta abuses. They should end the global neglect of the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have deprived women and girls of nearly all their rights three years after regaining power.

In Haiti, the Security Council authorized the deployment of a Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission in 2023 to help restore security, but it remains under-resourced. Criminal groups commit widespread abuses, depriving Haitians access to essential goods and services, leaving nearly half the population in need of humanitarian aid.

World leaders should call upon Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to end repression of protesters and other rights violations. Maduro should immediately publish precinct-level tally sheets from the July 28 election, permit independent verification of the results, and respect the will of the Venezuelan people as expressed at the polls.

Leaders should not ignore rights violations by powerful governments. They need to support action to address Russia’s widespread war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. They should seek to address China’s continued crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, and heightened repression in Hong Kong, Tibet, and throughout China. Two years on, the UN leadership has not followed up on the recommendations of the high commissioner for human rights, who in Xinjiang found possible crimes against humanity.

Broad support is needed for action on a treaty for crimes against humanity, which unlike for genocide and apartheid, has no specific international treaty.

“The world is overwhelmed with human rights crises, but leaders often fail to take advantage of the tools they have to pressure governments to end human rights violations and hold those responsible to account,” Charbonneau said. “World leaders should use General Debate events to kick-start new approaches grounded in international law for all countries, whether friend or foe.”

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Children play in a park on a housing estate in Redcar, Teesside, May 17, 2023.
© 2023 Joanne Coates/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The United Kingdom Labour Party is about to meet for its annual conference. Now that Labour is in government, with their leader Keir Starmer as prime minister, it should act to strengthen social security, and tackle poverty and inequality. The first concrete step should be immediately ending the cruel “two-child limit” policy.

The “two-child limit” is an arbitrary social security policy introduced by the Conservative government in 2017, in its austerity-motivated shake-up of social security. It cuts off child-related social security support to low-income households after the second child. Larger families are left with fewer resources as their need increases. 

The latest official data show that 440,000 families are affected, losing out on £3,455 per child per year. The Labour government has so far refused to scrap the policy, citing fiscal constraints, despite mounting pressure. Evidence shows that the two-child rule is driving increasing child poverty; it is a needless, cruel rule that harms children and society, and should end now.

Repealing the two-child limit should also be the springboard for broader UK social security reform.

The “benefit cap,” established in 2013, is an arbitrary financial limit on the amount of total social security benefits a household can receive, designed to ostensibly reduce reliance on welfare and drive people into employment. It largely hasn’t worked. And absurdly, the benefit cap, affecting 123,000 households, is lower in real and nominal terms today than it was in 2013.

Current levels of social security support are inadequate to meet people’s right to a decent standard of living in the UK. The government should listen to the Guarantee Our Essentials campaign, set up an independent evaluation of the adequacy of social security payment levels, and pass legislation to ensure no one is left below this level.

To demonstrate it takes its human rights obligations seriously, the government should also go a step further and make key programs universal, rather than means-tested.

Labour has committed to a child poverty strategy, reviewing how the Universal Credit social security system works, and enacting a socioeconomic equality duty that was first agreed 14 years ago. These are positives, but do not obviate the need for broader social security policy reform aligned with human rights, starting with immediately ending the two-child limit.

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Police vehicles outside the Makala Central prison in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, after an attempted jailbreak left many people dead, September 3, 2024.
© 2024 Samy Ntumba Shambuyi/AP Photo

A September 9 internal report by the United Nations Population Fund, the UN agency tasked with improving reproductive and maternal health, found that 268 out of the 348 women held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Makala prison – nearly 80 percent – were victims of rape and other sexual violence when an attempted prison break earlier this month turned deadly. The report, seen by Human Rights Watch and first reported on by Reuters, notes that 17 of the survivors of sexual violence were younger than 19.

Following the violence at the prison on September 2, Congolese Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani announced the same day that 129 prisoners died and 59 were injured. He also said there were “some women raped.” On September 4, a female prisoner told Human Rights Watch that she watched women being raped and none had received appropriate health care.

The report notes that while timely post-rape care, such as emergency contraception against pregnancy and HIV post-exposure prophylaxis, was provided to a number of survivors within 72 hours of the assaults, there was no adequate counseling support until September 11.

Sexual violence is a chronic problem in Congo’s prisons. In September 2020, a prison riot at Kasapa Central Prison in Lubumbashi caused a fire in the women’s section that forced the female prisoners into the main prison yard for three days, where the prison failed to provide any protection. For three days, male prisoners repeatedly raped several dozen female prisoners, including a teenage girl. A trial held 16 months later was a missed opportunity to meaningfully investigate what happened and hold those responsible, including direct perpetrators and state officials, to account.

Compounding this is the overcrowding and poor living and sanitation conditions common in Makala and many other Congolese prisons.

On September 2, Shabani said that a mixed commission would be created to establish the facts around the incident at Makala prison. While this commission will face several challenges, it should give special focus to a critical question: What does the government need to do to tackle sexual violence in Congo’s prisons and ensure the dignity and security of women and girls?