Government roundup campaigns to clear Hanoi’s streets of “wanderers” and “vagrants” are landing street children in detention centers, where some are beaten and subject to other forms of abuse, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

Hundreds of persons, many of them children, are being held in deplorable conditions in an unofficial detention center in the Gikondo neighborhood of the Rwandan capital Kigali, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper issued today.

As presidential elections approach, Congo’s tens of thousands of street children risk political manipulation and physical harm.

Human Rights Watch has documented the plight of Uganda’s lost generation of children in a new video, “Night Commuters: Uganda’s Forgotten Children of War.” A powerful photo essay by Bruno Stevens accompanies the video.

Violence against children is a bigger problem than governments acknowledge, and in fact is often carried out by officials of the state, Human Rights Watch charged in a new study released today.

Macedonian forces are systematically separating out ethnic Albanian males fleeing fierce fighting in northern Macedonia, and severely beating some of the men at police stations, Human Rights Watch said today. In the most severe cases documented by Human Rights Watch, the ill-treatment appears intended to extract confessions or information about the National Liberation Army (NLA) and amounts to torture. The fear of violence at the hands of the Macedonian police is also stopping many ethnic Albanians from fleeing to safety into government-controlled territory.