Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 26 September 2014

Uzbekistan's brutal treatment of political prisoners has been exposed in an extensive new report. Activists, journalists, and others imprisoned by the Uzbek government on politically motivated charges suffer torture and abysmal prison conditions. Sentences are often extended arbitrarily for years.  As the international coalition against Islamic State builds, some are asking how the US and others can find and work with Syrian opposition groups that are not associated with serious rights abuses themselves. In Iraq, Islamic State has executed a human rights lawyer after she criticized the group's brutality on Facebook. A rare good news story... The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has confirmed that future host city contracts will include an antidiscrimination requirement - an important step toward greater respect for human rights in global sport.  The imprisonment of Uighur economist Ilham Tohti risks further accelerating a vicious circle of repression and violence in China’s westernmost region, Xinjiang, where ethnic Uighurs face indiscriminate arrests, disappearances and widespread use of torture.  The deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission is a positive step in enhancing civilian protection in the Central African Republic. But the world cannot assume the story is over: serious human rights violations continue.  A group of international non-governmental organizations has welcomed France's leadership in calling on the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council to agree to voluntarily refrain from using their veto in situations of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Veto threats and actual vetoes have blocked critical efforts to save lives and introduce accountability for gross abuses on a number of occasions, most recently in Syria.