Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 4 March 2015

Colombia’s paramilitary successor groups are abducting, “disappearing,” and dismembering residents at “chop-up sites” in the mostly Afro-Colombian port of Buenaventura, despite government measures announced a year ago to curb the violence.
Azerbaijan is hosting the first-ever European Games in Baku this June. The question is, will Azerbaijan release the journalists and activists it has wrongfully detained before the games begin? Two US government reports released this week, both prompted by the events in Ferguson, Missouri last August, begin to tackle the deeply rooted problem of racial discrimination in the US criminal justice system and put emphasis on ending abuses by police. Staying with the US, a recent article in The Guardian revealed a compound in Chicago where criminal suspects are “disappeared” and interrogated in total secrecy. People should certainly be shocked by this, but it’s important to remember that in the US immigration system, people are often detained and held in similar circumstances. Following President Benjamin Netanyahu’s Washington visit, the Obama administration published “key facts” on the US-Israel relationship. Here’s what wasn’t mentioned: Officials in the Philippines are paying $110 per hit to a death squad to carry out the murders of drug dealers and petty criminals. Curiously, officials also deny the existence of the killers. An additional 16,000 civilians have fled the northeastern Nigeria, where fighting between Boko Haram and Nigerian forces is heating up, to a UN camp in Cameroon. This latest surge of refugees is putting increased pressure on aid workers in Cameroon to provide adequate relief.