Martin Luther King's Human Rights Legacy: Daily Brief
#MLK50; booted out from Bahrain; unsafe Afghanistan; blow for Malawi's mining communities; four face lashes in Indonesia for same-sex relations; Syria chemical weapons attacks; Saudi & UAE send aid (and bombs) to Yemen; North Korean refugees detained in China; UK rejects #PunishAMuslimDay; & Buddhists back Burma's Rohingya.
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Fifty years after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, racism remains integral to the criminal justice system in the United States despite decades of civil rights activism. Police shootings of unarmed black men still make news – most recently the killing of Stephon Clark, shot by Sacramento police while holding a cellphone – and only rarely are the officers who pull the trigger punished. Dr. King well understood the important link between civil rights, human rights, and combatting racial injustice.
Just days before Bahrain is set to host the Formula 1 Grand Prix, reports suggest that an activist and Danish parliamentarian are being deported from the Gulf state - just hours after landing. Brian Dooley and Lars Aslan Rasmussen had hoped to visit the jailed human rights defender Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who has been imprisoned since April 2011 and is serving a life sentence after an unfair military trial. But instead they were denied entry by Bahraini authorities and have been told they're being deported.
A French court has confirmed what HRW and others have been arguing for months: that Afghanistan is simply too unsafe for failed asylum seekers to be returned to.
Information is key to protecting the health and the livelihoods of people in areas affected by economic development, such as mining. So a 10 percent cut in the Malawi Human Rights Commission's budget is very bad news.
Indonesian authorities should immediately and unconditionally release four people detained in Aceh for same-sex relations.
International efforts to deter chemical attacks in Syria in the year since the devastating sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun one year ago today have been ineffective.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates drew praise at a UN conference this week for offering $1 billion in aid for Yemen, where "their air campaign against Houthi rebels has killed thousands of civilians and their crippling blockade has hindered aid delivery".