Trump's Manufactured Crisis: Daily Brief
Trump's manufactured crisis; Immigrant children severely mistreated in US juvenile detention center; absurd and scathing attack by US on human rights organizations; sham trials in Turkey and rushed ones in Iraq; Polish Supreme Court upholds LGBT rights; Thailand resumes death penalty; Indonesia's new counterterrorism laws imperil rights; majority of human rights defenders killed in defense of land and environmental rights.
A satellite image of a desert tent city for children taken from their parents at the US-Mexico border shows the humanitarian crisis manufactured by the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. While Trump has finally signed an executive order to end the separation of families, the order does nothing to reunite the 2,300 children who have already been taken away. Many are likely to be shipped off to the remote desert tent site.
The treatment of immigrant children in the US has also come under the spotlight in federal court filings in Virginia. In sworn statements, Latino teens housed at a juvenile detention center allege that children as young as 14 were severely mistreated.
In an absurd and scathing letter, Nikki R. Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has in part blamed human rights organizations, among them Human Rights Watch, for its decision to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Er... what?
Criminal proceedings against Amnesty International Turkey’s honorary chair Taner Kılıç and 10 other human rights defenders are set to resume today. The rights advocates are facing bogus, unsubstantiated criminal charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
In rushed trials against foreigners charged with illegal entry and membership in or assistance to ISIS, Iraq is sentencing women to death and children to long prison terms. The individual circumstances of each case are not taken into consideration.
Poland’s Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General, Zbigniew Ziobro, has sharply criticized a Supreme Court decision that upheld the right to equality for LGBT people, accusing the Court of siding with the “ideology of homosexual activists”. The controversy comes at a time when the Polish government has introduced new legislation, giving the government greater influence over the appointment of judges to the court.
Despite many pledges about moving toward abolishing the death penalty, Thailand has executed a 26-year-old man by lethal injection. The execution, which was the first in 9 years, marks a major setback for human rights.
Indonesia’s new counterterrorism law risks undermining human rights and could weaken efforts to counter extremist threats.
The majority of human rights defenders killings in 2017 were related to mega projects linked to extractive industries, says new Front Line Defenders report. International investors and companies still do not regard local community leaders and human rights defenders as key actors, the report found.