Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 29 October 2014

Child marriage in Tanzania limits girls’ access to education and exposes them to exploitation and violence - including rape and female genital mutilation (FGM) - Human Rights Watch said in a new report today. Girls as young as seven years old are being married off in what is a widespread problem in the country: almost half of all Tanzanians girls are married before they turn 18. One of Bahrain's most prominent human rights activists, Nabeel Rajab, will discover his fate at a court hearing in Manama today. Rajab has been charged with 'insulting national institutions' for Tweets he posted about the Bahraini government's counterterrorism laws. Rajab was released from prison in May of this year after serving a two-year sentence on a different charge, only to find himself behind bars again just months later. Staying with Bahrain, another court in the country has ruled that 10 people who have been stripped of their Bahraini nationality are to be deported. The 10 are among 31 people whose nationality was arbitrarily revoked almost two years ago. Amnesty International is calling for the decision to deport the group to be quashed immediately. A court in Kazakhstan has awarded thousands of dollars in damages against an advertising agency for a poster. The poster's supposed offence? It shows two male cultural icons kissing. A paramilitary unit in Thailand shot dead a 14-year-old boy as he rode his motorbike past their camp and then planted a pistol on his body to fabricate evidence that the child was an insurgent. The Thai government should immediately investigate and prosecute the personnel responsible for the slaying, Human Rights Watch said. Terminally ill patients in Mexico are suffering needlessly from severe pain because they don't have access to decent palliative care. Tens of thousands of Mexicans die in terrible pain every year, but the problem is largely preventable. Thousands of people in Switzerland who were forced into child labour are demanding compensation for their stolen childhoods. Since the 1850s hundreds of thousands of Swiss children were taken from their parents and sent to work on farms - a practice that continued well into the 20th Century. A man in Afghanistan has been convicted of raping a 10-year-old girl. In any other country, the abhorrent crime would be the news, but in Afghanistan - where violence against women and girls is endemic - it's the conviction that made headlines, not the rape itself.