Domestic Violence Still Not A Crime in Kazakhstan: Daily Brief
Domestic violence should be criminalized in Kazakhstan; crisis in northern Syria intensifies; fresh calls to free UAE's Ahmed Mansoor; Malta remembers slain journalist; China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang; will Qatar really abolish its abusive 'kafala' system?; Moroccan journalist who denies having abortion pardoned by king; and "institutional insanity" in Egypt...
Women in Kazakhstan facing domestic violence receive insufficient protection and little access justice, HRW said in new research released today, and to make matters worse, battery and 'light bodily harm' is not a crime.
The US is facing intense criticism for withdrawing its forces from Syria, which some say gave Turkey the green light to launch a cross-border offensive against Kurdish-led forces. In the past week alone, thousands of people have been forced to flee and many people have been killed and injured.
There are renewed calls to free the unjustly-jailed Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor, on the occasion of his 50th birthday.
Malta has marked the two-year anniversary of the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb.
Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing, a new Guardian report says, all part of a wider campaign by China to silence criticism of its policies that have detained more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in internment camps.
Qatar has announced plans to abolish its abusive 'kafala' system, which ties workers to their employers and means they cannot move jobs or leave the country without their employer’s approval. While this is welcome news, human rights groups are still waiting to read the proposed laws in detail, as there are fears that not all aspects of kafala will be abolished.
Morocco's king has pardoned Hajar Raissouni, a journalist for an independent newspaper who was sentenced to a year in prison for an abortion that she denied having.
And finally, institutional "insanity" is the new normal in Egypt, it's being argued, amid a wave of mass arrests in the country.