'Afghan Girl' Jailed; Yahoo! & the US Government; Kyrgyzstan's Constitutional Reform: HRW Daily Brief

Sharbat Gula, the girl whose photograph on the cover of National Geographic magazine famously helped bring attention to the plight of Afghan refugees fleeing to Pakistan in the 1980s, is now one of the latest casualties of the current global refugee crisis. Pakistan authorities arrested and jailed Sharbat on charges of possessing a false Pakistani identity document. And now she faces deportation. But getting official refugee status legally, as Pakistan tries to rid itself of Afghan refugees, isn't exactly easy these days. Four weeks on, the world still does not know exactly what legal basis the United States government used to obtain a secret court order requiring Yahoo! to scan all of its users’ incoming e-mails for a string of characters the government said was associated with a terrorist group. This silence cannot be squared with the human rights laws that are binding upon the United States. Kyrgyzstan is making an audacious attempt to dodge human rights responsibilities by changing its constitution. Although still beholden to international law, this is an alarming signal that Kyrgyzstan officials are willingly backtracking on rights. From earlier today: Homemade landmines planted by retreating Islamic State forces have killed and injured hundreds of civilians in Manbij, a city in northern Syria. “ISIS mined virtually everything including, quite literally, the kitchen sink before they left,” said HRW's Ole Solvang, who helped conduct the research. At least 69 civilians, including 19 children, have been killed and hundreds more injured. Staying with Syria, the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State there has killed at least 300 civilians in airstrikes, Amnesty International has said. A court in Azerbaijan has sentenced a 22-year-old activist to 10 years in prison. Giyas Ibrahimov was initially detained for spraying graffiti on a statue of a former president, but was actually jailed on drugs charges after confessing to bogus drug-related crimes following police torture.