The 89-page report, “Whose Abortion Is It? The Harms of State-Mandated Parental Notification for Abortion and Judicial Bypass in the United States,” documents how state-mandated parental notification laws in six US states threaten young people’s health and safety and undermine their human rights. Most young people considering abortion involve a parent in their decision. Those who do not often have no access to a parent or fear that parental involvement will lead to severe consequences, such as physical abuse, loss of housing, family alienation, or forced continuation of a pregnancy against their wishes. The alternative to notifying a parent involves petitioning a judge for a court order in an invasive, stressful, and often traumatizing process called “judicial bypass.”

The 86-page report “Tainted: JBS and the EU’s Exposure to Human Rights Violations and Illegal Deforestation in Pará, Brazil,” details how cattle ranchers illegally seized land and devastated the livelihoods of lawful residents in the Terra Nossa smallholder settlement and the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous territory, affecting their rights to housing, land, and culture. Human Rights Watch analysis of official sources shows that illegal farms in these areas sold cattle to several JBS direct suppliers.

The 101-page report, “Tax Giveaways, Struggling Schools: How Low Taxes Drove Sri Lanka’s Economic Crisis and Squandered its Education Lead,” describes how Sri Lanka’s successive governments have adopted policies that resulted in inadequate revenues, contributing not only to Sri Lanka defaulting on its debt but also to a decades-long decline in public education spending as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to among the lowest in the world. It also documents the impacts of inadequate funding on children’s right to education. Moreover, low corporate and personal tax revenues have led to an average of 80 percent of taxes coming from goods and services, which generally are regressive because they claim a higher share of poorer people’s income. 

The 120-page report, “Debt Traps: Predatory Microfinance Loans and the Exploitation of Cambodia’s Indigenous Peoples,” documents that over-indebtedness among Indigenous communities in Cambodia’s northeastern provinces has led to coerced land sales, debt-driven suicides, food insecurity, and loss of access to health care and education. Cambodian microfinance institutions (MFIs) have routinely issued loans to Indigenous borrowers through credit officers and loan documents using Khmer, a language many Indigenous people do not understand, for amounts far exceeding their ability to repay.