Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 9 October 2014

There’s been a resurgence of fighting in the Central African Republic, which left at least a dozen people dead and twice as many injured. According to the Red Cross, it’s the worst violence the country has seen since the July ceasefire was put in place.
European Union member states’ justice and home affairs ministers meeting in Luxembourg should take forward a comprehensive and collective EU response to search and rescue needs in the central Mediterranean to urgently save lives.
The United States government made a mistake this month in relaxing a ban on lethal arms sales and transfers to Vietnam — a non-democratic, one-party state with an abysmal human rights record. The U.S. move undermines courageous activists in Vietnam and squanders important leverage that might have been used to encourage more reform.
Today’s visit by Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, to Brussels served as a pointed reminder of the European Union’s colossal failure to secure human rights improvements as part of its engagement with this government, whose human rights record has gone from bad to worse in recent years. Uzbekistan has long been under pressure to stop forcing it's own citizens, adults and children, from lawyers to teachers, to harvest cotton. The US Labor Department has found that Uzbekistan has made “no advancement” in eliminating the worst forms of child labor, despite its efforts to remove younger children from the cotton fields. As Islamic State fighters besiege the Kurdish Syrian town of Kobane, Kurds fleeing the fighting and crossing over the nearby Turkish border are being held on suspicion of being part of a Syrian-Kurdish militia. Estonia has approved same-sex partnerships. The new law gives same-sex couples almost the same rights as married couples, although it does not allow same-sex couples to adopt.