Cyclone Survivors Forced To Trade Sex For Food: Daily Brief
Survivors of Mozambique's devastating cyclone are being sexually exploited in return for aid; fears that religious hatred will be stirred again after Sri Lanka bombings; UN chief's disappointing silence on human rights; "grave injustice" against jailed Myanmar journalists; Central African Republic warlords rewarded with government posts; food poverty in the UK; mass executions in Saudi Arabia; and Syrian refugee Nujeen Mustafa makes UN history...
The Mozambique authorities should urgently investigate the alleged sexual exploitation of Cyclone Idai victims by local officials, HRW has said. Hunger and destruction caused by the cyclone have left hundreds of thousands of women vulnerable to abuse.
If one of the bombers’ goals in slaughtering hundreds of innocent men, women and children at hotels and churches on Easter Sunday was to stir new religious hatred in Sri Lanka, that may now be happening in some areas.
Halfway through his first five-year term, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is becoming defined by his silence on human rights — even as serious rights abuses proliferate.
A senior UN human rights expert has said that the rejection by Myanmar’s Supreme Court of a final appeal by two jailed Reuters journalists is a "grave injustice". Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were jailed for seven years in connection with their investigation into the massacre of Rohingya men and boys in Rakhine State in 2017. Last week they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting.
Prosecutors in the Central African Republic should investigate why militia leaders have been recently awarded with government positions.
There is alarm in the UK, where new figures show that a record 1.6 million emergency food parcels were given out by a food bank network last year – more than 500,000 of them to children. Food poverty is a growing problem in the UK.
The mass execution of 37 men in Saudi Arabia this week was a travesty of justice and shows, if there was ever any doubt, that the current Saudi leadership has no interest in improving the country’s dismal human rights record.
And finally, 20-year-old Nujeen Mustafa made history this week as she became the first person with a disability to formally brief the UN Security Council. Nujeen, a refugee who fled the conflict in Syria in a wheelchair, is now a well-known disability rights advocate.