Action Needed on Incendiary Weapons: Daily Brief
Plus: US midterms show that people care about rights; Indonesia requires policewomen to be ‘good looking’; Tanzania loses billions due to repression; Iran executes 2 people for economic crimes; commanders in Colombia received benefits for kills; Somalia journalists face death for fighting fake news; and looking at Zimbabwe a year after the coup.
Faced with evidence of 30 new incendiary weapons attacks in Syria, states at the UN disarmament conference on November 19 should agree to strengthen the international law that governs their use, and protect civilians.
2018 midterm elections in the US showed that people care about the rights of the marginalized in America.
Why do Indonesian policewomen have to ‘not only be pretty, but also good looking’?
The World Bank suspended all visiting missions to Tanzania because of discrimination against the LGBT community, but it is the policy of expelling pregnant girls from schools that was one of the reasons for a $300 million loan from the World Bank to be withdrawn. Over 40% of adolescents are out of school in Tanzania.
Iran’s judiciary’s long record of violating detainees’ rights and wanton application of the death penalty raises grave concerns. Executions are never the answer.
Between 2002 and 2008, army brigades across Colombia killed thousands of civilians, and commanders and soldiers who reported kills received benefits such as money, time off, awards and were publicly congratulated.
Press freedom suffers as journalists in Somalia face death threats as they battle misinformation.
And finally, a year after the coup in Zimbabwe, fears that the election would be illegitimate were realized, along with extreme violence by the military on 1 August with the subsequent military-led crackdown on opposition activists including abductions, beatings, and arbitrary arrests.