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Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 12 June 2015

Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Military use of schools, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Kenya; Egypt, Sudan & ICC.

The first European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, have become historic for all the wrong reasons. The repression in the country on the Caspian Sea is unprecedented in the post-Soviet era, with dozens of dissidents behind bars on bogus charges. Several journalists from major European outlets have been refused to enter the country to cover the games. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were also not allowed in.
Khadija Ismailova, Azerbaijan's leading investigative reporter and an ardent government critic who's already been kept behind bars for six months on false charges, managed somehow to get the truth out, via a letter in the New York Times.
In Saudi Arabia, the peaceful activist Raif Badawi may be about to face another flogging for blogging.
Will governments endorse the new Safe Schools Declaration at the United Nations Security Council debate on children and armed conflict on June 18? They should.
School children are paying the price for the war in Yemen. Those governments supporting the coalition or the Houthis should use their influence to help protect education in the country.
Aung San Suu Kyi is visiting China, but did she ask for the release of the imprisoned fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo? And discuss the very bad human rights situation in China? Or the fate of Rohingya Muslims in her home country Burma?
The extremist group Islamic State slaughtered hundreds of Shia army recruits in Iraq one year ago. Murders that were shocking in ISIS’s cold-blooded brutality and ideological fanaticism.
Afghanistan is in the news again because of attacks on the media. A bomb exploded at the offices of Pajhwok Afghan News, the country’s largest news agency. Promises by the president and other government officials on their commitment to protecting journalists will ring hollow unless the government starts to live up to it.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur, Sudan, urgently need protection. The UN Security Council should require more vigorous civilian protection and better human rights reporting when it renews the mandate of the Darfur peacekeeping mission this month.

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