Best of Dispatches: Top News Posts This Week

Attacks on migrant boats in the Aegean; a lawyer on trial in China; hazardous mining in Burma - these were among the most popular posts to Dispatches, our daily forum for breaking human rights news and commentary.

Dispatches: Masked Men Continue to Attack Migrant Boats on the Aegean

Bill Frelick
Two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch documented, in detail, attacks by masked men on boats with asylum seekers and migrants in the Aegean Sea. I had hoped reporting on these incidents would have mobilized [regional actors]. I was wrong...

Dispatches: Showing Diplomatic Solidarity at Lawyer's Trial in China

Sophie Richardson
[Last week], while people around the world observed Human Rights Day and the fifth anniversary of imprisoned critic Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Chinese government opted for some human rights gestures of its own...

Dispatches: Greed and Death in Burma's Jade Mines

David Scott Mathieson
When Aung San Suu Kyi met recently with her long-time nemesis, retired general Than Shwe, after her party’s stunning election victory in November 2015, it was heralded as a harbinger of a smooth democratic transition in Burma. But hundreds of miles north of the capital, Naypyidaw, is a tangle of entrenched economic interests and abuse those leading this transition don’t want to openly discuss...

Dispatches: Domestic Worker Starved in Singapore

Nisha Varia
A couple is currently on trial in Singapore for allegedly starving their domestic worker to the point where she weighed only 29 kilograms (64 pounds)...

Minky Worden
Over the last year, reporting about FIFA, football’s scandal-plagued governing body, has focused on arrests, corruption, and worker rights abuses in the upcoming World Cup host countries, Russia and Qatar...