The 38-page report, “‘A Disaster for the Foreseeable Future’: Afghanistan’s Healthcare Crisis,” describes how the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy after the Taliban takeover in August 2021 inflicted severe harm on the country’s healthcare infrastructure. Donors’ decisions to reduce humanitarian aid have further weakened health care access, destabilized the economy, and worsened food insecurity. The Taliban’s abusive policies and practices have greatly exacerbated the crisis. Bans on education for women and girls have blocked most training for future female healthcare workers, ensuring shortages for the foreseeable future.
Systematic Violations of Women's Rights in Afghanistan
Women in Afghanistan have suffered a catastrophic assault on their human rights during more than twenty years of war and under the repressive rule of the Taliban.
In this paper, we call on the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish minimum standards for the collection of evidence in cases of sexual and domestic violence. We also call on WHO to draft a policy paper to support the effective implementation of the minimum standards.
Human immuno-deficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a national disaster for the people of Kenya, children and adults alike. Kenya is estimated to have the ninth-highest prevalence of HIV in the world with about 14 percent of the adult population infected.
Human Rights Watch began investigating the use of rape and other forms of sexual violence by all sides in the conflict in 1998 and continued to document rape accounts throughout the refugee crisis in 1999.
In the wake of the military takeover in Pakistan, Human Rights Watch released this major report on the state of women's rights in the country. The 100-page report, Crime or Custom?
Retaliation Against Women in Michigan State Prisons
This report documents how women inmates who have been raped by guards in Michigan prisons are suffering retaliation from their attackers."In Michigan, a woman risks being sexually assaulted if she's imprisoned, and being terrorized by guards if she dares report the assault," said Regan Ralph, executive director of theWomen's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
In March 1995, Human Rights Watch released Neither Jobs Nor Justice, a report documenting widespread employment discrimination on the basis of sex that was practiced, condoned, and tolerated by the Russian government.
In the United States, correctional authorities are relying increasingly on special super-maximum security facilities to confine disruptive or dangerous prisoners. Prolonged confinement in these conditions can be devastating psychologically.
This report focuses mainly on one aspect of the criminal justice system and its handling of violence against women: the performance of those involved in the provision of medical expertise to the courts when it is alleged that women have been abused. Medical evidence is often a crucial element in the investigation and prosecution of a case of rape or sexual assault.
A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages
China’s claim to guarantee the “right to subsistence” conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death a world into which thousands of Chinese citizens disappear each year.
The new South African government has pledged to ensure women a full and equal role in every aspect of the economy and society. Yet South African women continue to face extraordinarily high levels of violence which prevent them from enjoying the rights they are guaranteed under the new dispensation.
Since January 1990, the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has been the site of a brutal conflict between Indian security forces and armed Muslim insurgents demanding independence or accession to Pakistan.
The vicious conflict in Kashmir, now in its fourth year, is characterized by the Indian army’s and other security forces’ blatant disregard for international norms of medical neutrality.
Over 70 percent of women in jail in Pakistan report sexual abuse by police officials. Despite the high incidence of rape and sexual torture of female detainees, no police official has been subjected to criminal punishment for these abuses.
The Brazilian government is failing to prosecute violence against women in the home fully and fairly. Despite ever-increasing domestic violence (particularly wife-murder, battery and rap) impunity and discriminatory treatment in favor of the perpetrators of domestic violence are still the rule in the Brazilian justice system.
