Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 12 May 2016

Kenya joins sinister global trend on refugees; Thailand's "meaningless" promises; torture is still torture; same-sex unions for Italy; Iraq car bombs; Turkmenistan goes tobacco-free; teen rape victim whipped in India; Kazakhstan arrests land protesters; & Iran politician in headscarf row...

Get the Daily Brief by email.
The first World Humanitarian Summit comes at a critical time. Armed conflicts are raging across the globe, with civilians paying the highest price. Displacement from conflict and natural disaster has reached levels unseen since World War II. And the shortfall in funding for humanitarian crises is growing by the year.
From defending civil rights in the US to defending Central American revolutions, and from representing HIV-positive Haitian asylum seekers quarantined at Guantanamo Bay to representing the Muslims brought there in the “global war on terror,” the radical lawyer Michael Ratner, who died on May 11 at age 72, was always, instinctively, in the right place, fighting the right battle, from the right trench.
Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted down a restrictive ‘foreign agents’ bill today. Russia has used its own “foreign agents” law to carry out intrusive inspections of hundreds of NGOs, and some groups have had to close their doors.
From earlier today:
Blaming refugees for everything from economic woes to terrorism is becoming a sinister global trend, and Kenya is the latest country to join the bandwagon with its recent threat to shut camps for Somali refugees, which are home to 600,000 people.
The Thai government’s pledge to the UN Human Rights Council to respect human rights and restore democratic rule have been slammed by Human Rights Watch as "mostly meaningless".
Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, speaks approvingly of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”, but neglects to call these tools what they really are: torture.