Trump's Politicized Barriers to Healthcare: Daily Brief
Trump's politicized barriers to healthcare; deaths and criminality in post-election Guinea; abusive security forces in Iraq; silencing a witness in Thailand; Australia prosecutes former spy and his lawyer for exposing government misconduct; pact for equality in Tunisia; and Cambodia's unfree elections.
Our new report documents how many LGBT people are currently unable to find services in their area, encounter discrimination or refusals of service in healthcare settings, or delay or forego care because of concerns of mistreatment. The Trump administration is now considering regulatory changes that would further worsen the barriers many LGBT people in the United States face in obtaining health care.
Three months after Guinea’s latest round of bloody election violence, there is now credible evidence that Guinean security forces used excessive lethal force and engaged in other unprofessional conduct during the violent street protests in February and March 2018. However, the authorities have taken no concrete steps to investigate and sanction those responsible.
Iraq’s security forces fired on and beat protesters in Basra governorate during a series of protests from July 8 to 17, 2018. The largely Interior Ministry forces used apparent excessive and unnecessary lethal force against protests over water, jobs, and electrical power leaving at least three deaths and 47 wounded.
Natthida “Waen” Meewangpa is a volunteer nurse who witnessed the shooting of civilians and unarmed supporters of protesting “Red Shirts” by soldiers during the 2010 political confrontations in Bangkok. After she resisted intimidation by the Thai military to stay silent, she is now locked up. Natthida’s case has become a glaring example of arbitrariness and injustice in Thailand’s justice system under military rule.
A former Australian spy and his lawyer are being prosecuted in Australia for exposing government wrongdoing. The two men were involved in exposing government misconduct in relation to legal disputes between the governments of Australia and Timor-Leste concerning entitlements to revenue from oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea. They played an important role in holding the authorities to account and need to be protected, not prosecuted.
More than 90 organizations and civil society groups in Tunisia have issued a Pact for Equality and Individual Freedoms, outlining the fundamental rights that all Tunisians should enjoy. The commissions’ proposals aim to place human rights at the heart of the Tunisian justice system and to get rid of laws that governments had long used as tools of repression.
On the eve of the Cambodia Election, our Deputy Asia Director, Phil Robertson, denounces that there has been "a fundamental failure of the international community to push back against repression in Cambodia".