Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 12 June

Child labor in focus today. Aid for Syria not getting through. The abusive approach of the Greek police. Urgent reform needed for US surveillance methods. And how last night in Turkey, the situation took a turn for the worse. Today is "World Day Against Child Labor"... HRW put a special focus this year on the plight of children in domestic work and called on governments to ratify the Domestic Workers Convention. We produced a map to show the ratification status of the Convention in countries around the world, we offered some tips on actions individuals could take, and we created a short video to highlight the issue... In Syria, HRW research focused on how desperately needed aid was not reaching many, and we called on UN agencies to do more. They should facilitate and support the expansion of cross-border operations by nongovernmental groups and actively consider conducting cross-border operations themselves. Human Rights Watch launched a major new report on Greece as well today, highlighting how Athens police have been conducting abusive stops and searches and have detained tens of thousands of people in a crackdown on irregular migration. Of course, the US surveillance scandal continues to make headlines. HRW has called for urgent reforms, noting that existing laws do not seem to have kept up with the threat to privacy and other rights posed by the government’s relatively new capacity to collect and analyze quickly vast quantities of personal information... Finally, just in case you missed it: HRW's Carroll Bogert was in Taksim Square, Istanbul, last night. She witnessed the violence and visited hospitals to get a sense of the cost...  And we produced this statement...