Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 27 January 2016

Many Yezidi women in Iraq who survived slavery and rape at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) still faced abusive and denigrating "virginity tests", even once they found safety. In a big step forward, Kurdistan announced of an end to "virginity testing" for survivors of rape. Civil society is under attack at an unprecedented level. Globally, governments are clamping down on independent groups in an effort to silence free expression and escape accountability. The LGBT community in Indonesia is under attack once again as a prominent official denounced a support group and said he "forbids" LGBT-oriented academic groups. From earlier today: The politics of fear led governments around the globe to roll back human rights during 2015. That's the view from Human Rights Watch, which today released the 26th edition of its Annual Report, which reviews human rights practices in 90 countries around the world. Among the many findings is the news that the human rights outlook in Turkey has sharply deteriorated. There is special mention of the global refugee crisis... which has in large part been driven by fear on behalf of governments faced with disaster on an unprecedented scale.