Content in Other Languages

The ongoing prosecution of two prominent human rights defenders in Greece is a politically-motivated attempt to silence their efforts to expose abuses against migrants, Human Rights Watch said today. The trial of the two activists, Panayote Dimitras and Tommy Olsen, is set to begin on the Greek island of Rhodes on October 6, 2026.

Laying flowers, speaking out, reporting the news – once ordinary acts in Hong Kong— can now lead to prison under the city’s sweeping national security laws.

Egyptian security forces arrested six journalists working for the independent investigative journalism platform Matsda2sh on September 28 and 29 and appear to have forcibly disappeared them.

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on September 21 detained Mark Mabasa, the 40-year old son of slain Philippine journalist Percival “Percy Lapid” Mabasa, who was shot to death in Metro Manila in October 2022.

United States forces intercepted and destroyed eight Ecuadorian fishing vessels between August 28 and September 16, 2026, detaining over 140 of 160 crew members and abusing some.

Human Rights Watch thanks the Special Rapporteur for his report, which describes the deteriorating situation for civil society and the political opposition amid an unrelenting crackdown on freedom of expression.

US immigration authorities have detained at least eight Nicaraguan exiles whom the Ortega-Murillo government has stripped of their nationality, including some with pending asylum claims.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Son-gyong, in his September 28 address to the United Nations General Assembly, asserted that the country’s status as a permanent nuclear state is “uncompromisingly and permanently fixed, both physically and legally.” This was an unmistakable reference to a March constitutional amendment that codified the centrality of North Korea’s nuclear doctrine.

In November 2013, I went to Bangui and met Michel Djotodia, then the Central African Republic’s self-proclaimed interim president. He had taken over the country as the head of a rebel coalition called the Seleka.