Trump's Rooms of Crying Infants: Daily Brief
Big day - Lots of news - Deep breath... Trump's policy of ripping children away from their parents; Looking at deaths in ICE custody; US leaving UN Human Rights Council; Hungary criminalizing assistance to migrants; Believe it or not, it's World Refugee Day; The danger that chemical weapons will become normal again; Saudi crackdown on women's rights activists; The need to investigate protester deaths in Gambia; What is the Indonesian government hiding in Papua?; and finally, some good news: new global health guidelines are a victory for transgender people.
The Trump administration is doubling down on its cruelty to children at the border and defending its policy of tearing even the tiniest babies from their mothers' arms.
A new joint study reveals that poor medical treatment contributed to more than half the deaths reported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a 16-month period.
Given everything that's going on with this administration, it seems unsurprising that the US has announced it is pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council... But it's still the wrong move.
The Hungarian government today is rushing through legislation to criminalize efforts to help migrants and asylum seekers and curb their access to protection. Budapest is not even waiting for the Council of Europe's Venice Commission's assessment of the proposal. Europe's center-right is being destroyed from the inside by far-right authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
And, yes, you read that right... it's World Refugee Day...
Governments should strengthen the tools to reverse the unprecedented threat to the global ban on chemical weapons, a coalition of 21 human rights and humanitarian groups have said. The continuing unattributed use of chemical weapons in Syria and nerve agents in the United Kingdom and Malaysia highlight the need to assign responsibility for those violating the longstanding and near universally accepted prohibition against chemical weapons.
Saudi authorities have arrested two more women’s rights activists in recent days in what appears to be an unrelenting crackdown on the women’s rights movement, Human Rights Watch said today. Saudi activists have reported that the authorities have placed travel bans on numerous others since May 15.
The Gambian authorities should thoroughly investigate the alleged excessive use of force by police causing the deaths of two anti-sand mining demonstrators on June 18.
What is the Indonesian government hiding in Papua? That’s the question raised by the government’s seeming refusal to make good on an official invitation promised to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, to visit Papua and West Papua provinces (collectively referred to as “Papua”).
World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines published this week no longer describe gender non-conformity as a “mental disorder”—a major change that was the result of tireless advocacy by transgender activists around the world to update the WHO’s global manual of diagnoses.