Workers in many leather tanneries in the Hazaribagh neighborhood of Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, including children as young as 11, become ill because of exposure to hazardous chemicals and are injured in horrific workplace accidents. The tanneries, which export hundreds of millions of dollars in leather for luxury goods throughout the world, spew pollutants into surrounding communities. Human Rights Watch documents an occupational health and safety crisis among tannery workers, both men and women, including skin diseases and respiratory illnesses caused by exposure to tanning chemicals, and limb amputations caused by accidents in dangerous tannery machinery. Residents of Hazaribagh slums complain of illnesses such as fevers, skin diseases, respiratory problems, and diarrhea, caused by the extreme tannery pollution of air, water, and soil. The government has not protected the right to health of the workers and residents, has consistently failed to enforce labor or environmental laws in Hazaribagh, and has ignored High Court orders to clean up these tanneries. Under international law, the government is required to take reasonable steps to protect the right to health of everyone in its territory.

Several thousand ethnic Kachin refugees from Burma are isolated in Yunnan, China, where they are at risk of return to a conflict zone and lack needed humanitarian aid. Human Rights Watch documented how 7,000 to 10,000 ethnic Kachin refugees are scattered across more than a dozen makeshift settlements lacking adequate shelter, food, potable water, sanitation, and basic health care. Most children have no access to schools, while adults are vulnerable to abuses by local employers and have been subject to arbitrary drug testing and prolonged and abusive detention by the Chinese authorities. While the government of China has allowed most of the refugees to stay in Yunnan, some have been forced back to the conflict zone or denied entry into China at the border. Many Kachin originally fled severe abuses by the Burmese army ­– including attacks on villages, killings, rape, and the use of abusive forced labor. Most of the displaced fled to makeshift camps in Burma, where international humanitarian aid has been minimal, and the only assistance has come from private and local Kachin aid networks.

Approximately 400 women and girls are imprisoned in Afghanistan for “moral crimes”, which usually involve flight from unlawful forced marriage or domestic violence. Some women and girls have been convicted of zina, sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution. Zina is a crime under Afghan law, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Human Rights Watch found that almost half the women in prisons and all the girls in juvenile detention centers had been arrested after they fled a forced marriage and women who had fled abusive husbands and relatives. Some women interviewed by Human Rights Watch had gone to the police in dire need of help, only to be arrested instead. The women and girls described abuses including forced and underage marriage, beatings, stabbings, burnings, rapes, forced prostitution, kidnapping, and murder threats. Virtually none of the cases had led even to an investigation of the abuse, let alone prosecution or punishment.