Unfounded Charges in Occupied Crimea: Daily Brief
Unfounded charges in occupied Crimea; US family separation causing harm; how to defend your rights in encounters with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement; witnessing the dismantlement of Syrian refugee shelters in Lebanon; UN's step forward toward accountability in the Philippines; efforts to counter violence in Colombia's port of Buenaventura; and Sylvestre Mudacumura should be arrested and brought to the International Criminal Court.
Russian authorities have brought unfounded terrorism charges against 24 Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnic minority indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula. Twenty of them were arrested during heavily armed raids on their homes in the spring of this year.
United States officials are separating migrant children from their families at the border, causing severe and lasting harm. Congressional hearings on the family separation policy, which will be held today, are just the first step in accounting for and addressing the enormous harms inflicted on them.
Immigration raids across major US cities are likely to start on Sunday. If the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) approaches you, remember that you have rights. Learn more about them here.
Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch's refugee program went to Lebanon and witnessed Syrian refugees dismantling their own shelters on orders from the Lebanese Army.
Yesterday, the United Nations took a critical step toward accountability in the Philippines with the adoption of a resoultion to probe ‘drug war’ killings.
Human Rights Watch documented how paramilitary successor groups abducted and disappeared scores, and possibly hundreds, of residents in the largely Afro-Colombian port of Buenaventura over the past years. A Bishop now hopes to counter its extreme violence.
On July 13, 2012, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sylvestre Mudacumura, accused of war crimes committed in DR Congo. Seven years later, the UN and Congolese authorities should urgently act to arrest the rebel leader and transfer him to the court.