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Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 29 May 2015

EU migrants, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, safe schools, Pakistan, Turkey, southeast Asia boat people, Mexico

An article in the UK's Daily Mail has highlighted the desperate plight of British tourists on the Greek island of Kos whose holiday was reportedly ruined by refugees from Afghanistan and Syria who had inconsiderately made themselves visible, turning the island into a "disgusting hellhole". Yes, that's sarcasm, but shockingly, the article in the Mail was serious. Eva Cossé, a Human Rights Watch researcher who just returned from a reporting mission on Kos, sets the story straight about the desperate, vulnerable people there who have escaped true hellholes...
Speaking of hellholes, human rights defender Azam Farmonov in Uzbekistan has had his sentence in the hellhole of the notorious Jaslyk prison arbitrarily extended for five years... Farmonov, who had defended the rights of farmers and people with disabilities, was originally arrested in 2006 on fabricated charges of extortion and sentenced to nine years after being tortured to confess and a trial marred by serious due process violations. Now he's been handed five more years in Jaslyk for no reason...
Staying with Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch is calling on the United Nations Human Rights Council to recognize the country as having one of the worse rights situations in the world by establishing a UN special rapporteur.
Nigeria's newly elected president officially took the reins today. Between large-scale violence, endemic corruption, and a lack of accountability for abuses, he faces some very serious human rights challenges.
Governments from around the world have met at an international summit in Oslo, Norway, to focus on guaranteeing safe schools for children who live in countries affected by armed conflict. Participating states are joining a “Safe Schools” declaration, making fresh commitments to protect students, teachers, and schools from targeted attacks, and to refrain from using schools for military purposes such as bases, barracks, detention centers, and ammunition and weapons caches.
On 25 May, police fired into a group of between eight to twelve lawyers protesting outside the municipal building in Daska, Pakistan. Two lawyers were killed, while another protester and a passerby suffered gunshot wounds and are hospitalized in critical condition. Punjab’s security forces have a history of using excessive force against civilians with impunity. An investigation by the police and intelligence agencies is insufficient to create public confidence in its outcome. An independent and impartial investigation is necessary if the authorities in Punjab are to stem the flow of public distrust and escalating protests.
Jailing journalists has been one of the hallmarks of Turkey’s poor human rights record, a kind of shorthand for describing the country’s authoritarian tendencies and flawed justice system. But in the run up to a highly contested general election in June, that treatment has been extended to judges and prosecutors who issue decisions the government doesn’t like.
Governments have gathered in Bangkok today to discuss the southeast Asia boat people crisis, with rights defenders hoping they will reach binding agreements to save people at sea, permit them to disembark without conditions, and ensure unimpeded access for United Nations agencies to protect the rights of asylum seekers,

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