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Ugandan authorities should immediately restore internet access and refrain from imposing blanket shutdowns that undermine fundamental rights and threaten election integrity.

(London, January 15, 2026) – Kazakh authorities should drop charges against 18 Kazakh activists who peacefully protested against Chinese government abuses in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said today. The activists, from the Nagyz Atajurt Volunteers group, face up to 10 years in prison for exercising their freedom of expression. Thirteen are in pretrial detention, while the rest are under house arrest. The trial is expected to begin on January 21 in the city of Taldykorgan.

On February 12, Bangladesh is scheduled to hold its first general elections since the country’s August 2024 Monsoon revolution. But attacks on women, girls, and religious minorities are on the rise.

Last month, Azerbaijani police raided a venue in the capital Baku, known as a safe space for LGBT people, and detained over 100 people.

On January 12, 2026, days before Uganda’s national elections on January 15, the National Bureau for Non-Governmental Organizations ordered at least 10 nongovernmental organizations to immediately cease their operations indefinitely. The suspended organizations include human rights, media, and election monitoring organizations.

Colonel Claude Pivi, Guinea’s former minister for presidential security and one of the men convicted in a landmark trial for rapes and killings committed in Guinea in 2009, reportedly died in custody in a hospital on January 6, 2026, of natural causes.

• The Hungarian government is failing to ensure older people’s rights to social security and an adequate standard of living, including access to sufficient food, medicine, and energy. • The rise in poverty among older people, which became evident during sharp inflation in 2022 and 2023, highlights longstanding structural problems with the Hungarian pension and social security system. • Hungary should raise the lowest pensions to reduce pension inequality and guarantee the rights of all older people in the country to social security and an adequate standard of living.

Yemen’s president Rashad Al-Alimi on January 12, 2026, called for the closure of all “illegal” prisons in southern Yemen.

New reporting that US forces used an aircraft painted to appear civilian for a lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea on September 2, 2025,—killing 11 people—raises new questions about the erosion of internal safeguards on US military operations.