Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 16 December 2015

Jordan has announced the deportation about 800 Sudanese asylum seekers back to Sudan. Authorities detained them following protests against resettlement policies. Most of those detained had come from Darfur, escaping the ongoing conflict there. Sending them back is wrong and unlawful. A court in Tunisia has sentenced six male students accused of sodomy to three years in prison. The medieval sentence violates international law and comes as the rest of Tunisia was celebrating the Nobel Prize for a collective of its own rights groups. Some of Azerbaijan’s international partners are finally taking steps to signal their alarm over the government’s serious crackdown on human rights. From earlier today: Thousands of photographs smuggled out of Syria by a military defector showing scores of dead detainees are authentic and present damning evidence of crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said today. For a new report, If The Dead Could Speak, researchers spent nine months meticulously examining "Caesar's" photos and piecing together testimony from defectors and survivors. For the first time, Human Rights Watch has now identified a number of victims and showed how some of them died. At least 175 people have been kidnapped for ransom during 2015 in DR Congo, Human Rights Watch said today. Former and current members of armed groups appear responsible for many of the kidnappings.