Oppressing Women with an App in Saudi Arabia: Daily Brief

Oppressing women with an app in Saudi Arabia; routine torture and incommunicado detention in Cameroon; when you think European elections, think human rights; Brunei says it won't enforce death penalty for extramarital and anal sex; UN review should press Côte d’Ivoire on justice; and International Criminal Court's Appeals Chamber confirms there is no immunity for Omar Al-Bashir.

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Saudi Arabia’s mobile app Absher is used to prevent Saudi women from leaving their country without a male relative’s permission. Read our question-and-answer document, to know more about how this mobile app is used to control women’s and migrant worker's foreign travel, and what is the role of Google and Apple, which host Absher in their mobile app stores...

Cameroonian authorities have tortured and held detainees incommunicado at a facility in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. The United Nations Security Council should put the situation in Cameroon on its agenda, condemn torture and incommunicado detention, and call for the government to end these practices. 

The European elections are an important opportunity to stand for human rights and elect candidates who pledge to uphold them. Eva Cosse, our Western Europe researcher working on issues related to discrimination, migration, asylum and minority rights in Greece, explains why Greece needs a European Parliament that cares about rights.

The Sultanate of Brunei has announced that it won't enforce death penalty for extramarital sex and anal sex, a punishment that was confirmed with the introduction of a new penal code last month. The entire law, which abuses basic human rights, should be scrapped. 

Tomorrow, Côte d’Ivoire will undergo its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Countries participating in the United Nations review of Côte d’Ivoire’s human rights record should question the government’s failure to deliver justice to victims of 2010-11 post-election abuses.

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has confirmed that Jordan, a State Party to the ICC Rome Statute, did not comply with its obligations by not arresting Omar Al-Bashir and surrendering him to the Court while he was in Jordan for the League of Arab States' Summit on 29 March 2017. At the moment, Al-Bashir was president of Sudan and had two ICC arrest warrants against him related to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur.

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