Good News From Myanmar: Daily Brief

There's positive news from Myanmar, where the military junta announced the release of 5,636 political prisoners, shortly after the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc decided to exclude junta head Min Aung Hlaing from an upcoming summit, delivering a major snub to the regime. At least another 1600 political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, are still behind bars, however, according to a tally kept by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

Bad news from Russia, where thugs have attacked leading human rights group Memorial and a court in the city of Kolomna has sentenced Russian activist Viacheslav Yegorov to 15 months in prison for taking part in peaceful protests in 2018 against the “import” of trash from Moscow. It is ironic that this sentence came less than a week after the UN Human Rights Council recognized the right to a healthy environment as a universal human right. 

No senior official should attend the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics at a time when Chinese authorities are blocking unfettered human-rights visits to Xinjiang, where one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are detained, coerced into forced labor and persecuted because of their culture and religion. For an overview on the topic, including the role of the International Olympic Committee, read this article in PlaytheGame - with insights from Human Rights Watch's China director Sophie Richardson

Repeated failures to investigate and hold police officers in Nepal accountable for abuses have contributed to a situation in which police misconduct is weakening the rule of law, and threatening public safety instead of protecting it. Nepal’s foreign donors should call for immediate and real progress on accountabilit and reform to end the habitual use of excessive lethal force, torture, custodial killings, and other serious crimes.

Scenes from Lebanon shocked residents and the world last week, when the streets of a residential and commercial district in Beirut descended into a level of violence last seen during the country’s the civil war. Read this comment by Lama Fakih, the Beirut-based director of Human Rights Watch's Crisis and Conflict division, about the cause of Lebanon’s tragic cycle of violence.

Good news from India, as the country's National Medical Commission has ordered publishers and medical schools to edit their textbooks and curricula to exclude discriminatory and unscientific portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex LGBTI people. 

Six Afghans, five of whom were pushed back from Turkey to Iran, have told Human Rights Watch that the Turkish army beat them and their fellow travelers – some to the point of breaking their bones – and collectively expelled them in groups of 50 to 300 people as they tried to cross the border to seek safety in Turkey. Some families were separated in the process.

And lastly: please consider joining our #BreakTheChains campaign to end the inhumane practice of chaining people with mental health conditions, everywhere.