Reports

This report documents how broad restrictions on financial transactions, coupled with aggressive rhetoric from US officials, have drastically constrained the ability of Iranian entities to finance humanitarian imports, including vital medicines and medical equipment. While the US government has built exemptions for humanitarian imports into its sanctions regime, Human Rights Watch found that in practice these exemptions have failed to offset the strong reluctance of US and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods. The result has been to deny Iranians access to essential medicines and to impair their right to health. Under international law, the US should monitor the impact of its sanctions on Iranians' rights and address any violations sanctions cause. 

This report documents the use and abuse of a range of broad and vaguely worded laws and orders to criminalize peaceful expression, including debates on matters of public interest, and provides specific recommendations for the repeal or amendment of those laws. Focusing largely on the period between the military coup in May 2014 and nationwide elections in March 2019, Human Rights Watch documented the Thai government’s use of repressive laws and orders against pro-democracy activists, opposition politicians, critics of the junta, and ordinary citizens.

This report found that instead of providing support to older people with dementia, facilities use drugs to control their behavior, a practice known as chemical restraint. Many of the drugs used to control people in aged care facilities are antipsychotics that are not approved in Australia for older people with dementia. In addition to the physical, social, and emotional harm for older people restrained with these drugs, the use of these drugs in older people with dementia is also associated with an increased risk of death.
 

This report examines how a patchwork of weak laws, exacerbated by poor government oversight, and the failure of oil palm plantation companies to fulfill their human rights responsibilities have adversely affected Indigenous peoples’ rights to their forests, livelihood, food, water, and culture in Bengkayang regency, West Kalimantan, and Sarolangun regency, Jambi. The report, based on interviews with over 100 people and extensive field research, highlights the distinct challenges Indigenous people, particularly women, face as a result.

This report documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes. 

This report documents how Nigerian authorities are detaining children, often based on little or no evidence. Children described beatings, overwhelming heat, frequent hunger, and being packed tightly in their cells with hundreds of other detainees “like razorblades in a pack,” as one former detainee said.