Daily Brief Audio Series
How do you summarize an entire year? Specifically, how do you take all the most horrific things governments have done to people over a span of twelve months and condense them into one annual report?
And how do you do it without getting really, really depressed about the state of the world?
Today marks the publication of Human Rights Watch’s 35th annual World Report. Its 546 pages review the human rights situations in more than 100 countries.
As you would expect, it makes for some grim reading. In much of the world, government repression has expanded and deepened, cracking down on political opponents, activists, and journalists. Armed groups and government forces unlawfully killed civilians, drove millions from their homes, and blocked access to humanitarian aid.
Peaceful avenues for change have been blocked, corrupted, or otherwise proved ineffective. In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with vicious discriminatory rhetoric and policies.
In her introductory essay to this year’s World Report, HRW’s Executive Director, Tirana Hassan, highlights Trump’s win in the US, with its threat of a return to the human rights abuses of his first term – or worse. She also notes how, in European elections last year, far-right parties made significant gains by driving anti-immigrant sentiments that undermine democratic norms.
What’s more, authoritarian leaders tightened their grip on power in countries such as Russia, El Salvador, and the Sahel nations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Under President Xi Jinping, China continued its relentless campaign of repression to enforce loyalty to the one-party state.
However, there were some hopeful stories in 2024.
Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was finally driven from power.
In Bangladesh, student protests grew into a national movement that ultimately toppled its long-term repressive leader, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
We also saw meaningful democratic resilience in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hate speech on the campaign trail did not win him the electoral majority he craved.
In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol attempts to declare martial law failed, as protesters and legislators pushed back quickly to defend democracy.
The lesson is: even in the face of systemic challenges, democracy can still put a check on power domestically.
In their foreign policies in 2024, some governments that claim to champion human rights – and occasionally even follow through on their commitments – very obviously failed to do so last year, when it came to abuses committed by allies.
The most obvious example was the double standard shown by many western countries. Germany, the US, and others continue to provide weapons to Israel despite widespread violations of international law in Gaza, while condemning Russia for similar violations in Ukraine.
At least atrocities in Israel/Palestine and in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine got media and diplomatic attention in 2024. Not so many other atrocity-ridden conflicts elsewhere, like in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
With its focus on abuses and atrocities around the globe, our annual World Report – even with a few wins and bright spots also listed – does not make comfortable reading. It may seem nothing more than exhaustive evidence to add to the despair many feel with the state of the world today.
But that’s not the point of Human Rights Watch’s World Report. Its message is twofold: yes, this is the grim reality, but it doesn’t have to be. Things can improve – and things do improve – when people fight to uphold human rights.
In the face of rising authoritarianism, repression, and armed conflict, the need to respect and defend universal human rights takes on more urgency than ever. Civil society should remain steadfast in holding governments to account.
Individuals should not give in to the gloom and accept abuses and atrocities as somehow “inevitable.” No human activity – no government crimes, no repression, no war – is inevitable, and personal resignation to an imagined “inevitable” oppression only helps the oppressors.
The events of 2024 have shown that even in the darkest times there are those who dare to resist oppression and demonstrate the courage to seek progress. Take inspiration from that. Whichever way you think the world is headed, the fight against injustice begins afresh every day. With you and me.
2025 Starts Next Week
Happy new year, everyone! Let’s all hope 2025 brings some positive news in human rights around the world.
While the calendar has flipped a digit, Human Rights Watch is on a bit of a pause – at least in publishing. No, it’s not a continuation of the holiday season for us. We are back at it, hard at work.
But we’re preparing for next week’s launch of our annual World Report on January 16.
Every year, the organization pivots like this. Fifty weeks of the year, we’re publishing reports on individual countries and particular issues, but at this time, we’re making our big annual summary of the past year and a look ahead to the next.
It’s a huge undertaking. Human Rights Watch’s World Report covers about 100 countries over hundreds and hundreds of pages. Pretty much everyone in the organization takes some part in its writing, editing, reviewing, distribution, and promotion. So, even though you may not see it, trust me, it’s a busy time for us.
This Daily Brief won’t be produced for a few days. I’ll be back on the 16th, with a world of news to report.
Today’s topic… The Yearly Brief
This is Human Rights Watch’s Daily Brief for the 19th of December 2024. I’m Andrew Stroehlein.
In our final edition of the year, we look back at some of the key issues of 2024. This is a long one, so buckle in.
Afghanistan: Another year of the “most serious women’s rights crisis in the world” brought more misery for Afghan girls and women under the Taliban’s thugocracy, in which violence against women is a system.
The international community has responded poorly, at times even siding with the oppressors against the oppressed and sometimes also deporting people into the arms of the Taliban.
Children: Much of what happened in 2024 was not encouraging, but we did find at least ten good-news stories around the world related to children’s rights.
China: On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, the struggle between memory and forgetting loomed large.
We also wrote about the authorities’ attempts to erase local culture in the Xinjiang region, how the situation in Hong Kong has deteriorated fast, and how EU leaders are failing to take China’s grave human rights abuses seriously.
Climate Crisis: Another year, another overall failure of leaders to deal with the one issue that impacts every human being living today and all those who come after us.
The UN climate conference – COP29, held in authoritarian petrostate Azerbaijan – was a flop.
Also, the EU called for a delay to a regulation aimed at countering deforestation, the second largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions causing the climate crisis, after the burning of fossil fuels.
All this, as global temperatures keep rising…
Gaza/Israel: On the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups, I tried to write something balanced, looking both at those atrocities and the atrocities by Israel in response over the course of the subsequent 12 months.
I encourage you to read that and judge for yourself if I got the balance right.
Haiti: We looked at the collapse of order in the country many times over the year, as criminal gangs tightened and expanded their grip through horrific violence, including sexual violence.
Hunger pushes some children into the arms of the gangs.
The situation demands a full-fledged UN mission.
International Justice: It was a mixed year for those seeking justice for humanity’s most serious crimes around the world.
On the one hand, important prosecutions at the International Criminal Court (ICC) moved ahead.
On the other hand, the ICC faced moves to thwart justice, from non-ICC-members like the US and Russia, as well as from members like France.
The problem threatens to get even worse in 2025.
Myanmar: In the armed conflict between the junta’s military forces and the ethnic armed group, Arakan Army, both sides are committing atrocities.
These include mass killings, arson, and forced recruitment against Rohingya.
Some people trying to flee have been blocked by Bangladesh at the border.
Russia: In addition to its atrocities in Ukraine, the Kremlin has been tightening its authoritarian noose around the necks of Russians at home.
This newsletter has looked at, among other things, the death in prison of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wave after wave of repressive legislation and policies, and Russia’s repression of the childless,
Saudi Arabia: As the year drew to a close, world football organization FIFA tapped the country to host the Men’s 2034 World Cup, despite Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record.
This pretty much guarantees we’ll be writing a lot about those abuses over the next decade – in particular, serious abuses of migrant labor.
Because who do you think is going to build all the new stadiums and such?
Sudan: If not the biggest conflict-driven crisis in the world, then surely the one receiving the least international attention in comparison to the scale and severity of its atrocities.
Crimes we’ve investigated include looting and arson; attacking critical civilian infrastructure, like hospitals and markets; razing entire neighborhoods to the ground; ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region; and rape and sexual slavery.
More than 11 million people have been displaced from their homes inside the country, and more than 1.2 million more have escaped to neighboring countries.
With a couple exceptions, the international community has seriously dropped the ball on Sudan, and millions of innocent civilians are paying the price.
Syria: The eye-blink-quick collapse of the brutal Assad regime is perhaps the best good-news story of 2024.
Yes, I am saying this in the broadly hopeful moment of mid-December 2024 – many challenges no doubt lie ahead for the ravaged country.
But at least Assad’s torture centers have been emptied. There now needs to be justice for the former regime’s crimes.
Ukraine: Russia’s full-scale, atrocity-ridden invasion of its neighbor grinded on, with international fugitive from justice Vladimir Putin – wanted for mass abduction of children in Ukraine – no closer to The Hague.
The list of Russian atrocities in Ukraine is long. Ukraine’s countless victims deserve justice.
United States: There are deadly concerns around US foreign policy, like its continued approval of arms sales to Israel, despite the Israeli military’s atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Domestically, the US is failing to address human rights issues including “cancer alley,” rising censorship, a roll-back of reproductive rights, and threats to democracy.
And as a second Trump presidency approaches, the US hasn’t even cleaned up the rights abuses from the first one.
I also wrote about how many Americans forget their own family history and how that impacts human rights.
Of course, these are just some of the stories we’ve covered in the Daily Brief in 2024. We also looked at:
- Angola’s grim human rights record;
- Australia jailing ten-year-old kids;
- Belarus targeting lawyers;
- Eritrea’s repression;
- Ethiopia’s atrocities;
- France’s Olympics amid rights concerns;
- Georgia’s political violence;
- Hungary making Ukrainian refugees homeless;
- Iran’s uptick in state murders;
- Iraq’s push to legalize child rape;
- Kyrgyzstan’s “bride kidnapping”;
- Mozambique’s post-election violence;
- North Korea’s appalling rights crisis;
- Pakistan expropriating the poor;
- Rwanda’s torture;
- Turkmenistan’s extortion by passport;
- UK’s racist riots;
- Venezuela violence vs votes.
I didn’t always write about a single country.
I sometimes took a step back from specifics to examine, for example, the role of facts in ending atrocities, or how politicians and the media ask the wrong questions about asylum, and how to think about voting from a human rights perspective.
The Daily Brief also took a breather from more serious concerns on occasion.
I did one edition of the Daily Brief from a tram station.
I offered some advice on how and when to block people on social media.
Another time, I discussed how to get a job in human rights.
If you’ve found our reporting important over the past year, please forward the email or the web link to a friend or colleague and encourage them to subscribe to the newsletter.
The human rights movement will need everyone we can get in 2025.
That’s it for my Daily Brief for today. Until next year.
The Need to Secure Evidence in Syria, Daily Brief December 18, 2024
Daily Brief, December 18, 2024.
With the fall of Assad in Syria, a new wave of human rights investigations into his regime’s crimes can finally take place on the ground. What my colleagues have been finding in recent days is disturbing.
They were able to visit a mass crime scene in the southern Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon last week. They were drawn to that location by following the clues in a previously leaked video, taken in April 2013, showing summary executions by Syrian government forces and affiliated militia. Only now, 11 years later, could independent investigators examine the site.
Our colleagues retraced the final moments of 11 blindfolded victims shown in the video who were all shot at close range and pushed into the machine-dug grave, alongside the bodies of 13 other people.
Researchers also spoke to a current resident of the area who said a pro-government paramilitary group forced him and other residents to bury bodies in pre-dug graves in 2015 and 2016.
In Tadamon last week, our researchers found scores of human remains both at the location of the April 2013 massacre and strewn throughout the surrounding neighborhood. These included teeth and skull, jaw, hand, and pelvic bones on the ground and in a bag collected by residents.
Human remains are also scattered on the floor of buildings next to the mass grave, leading researchers to conclude other people were most likely killed or buried in the same location.
Human Rights Watch could not confirm whether the remains found are those of the victims in the video, nor whether more bodies are buried there. It is unclear whether or the extent to which bodies were taken out of the area.
The danger now is that, at this site and others, vital evidence is just lying around, unprotected. Without efforts to secure sites like this, there’s a risk of losing essential evidence needed to uncover the fate of thousands of missing Syrians, and prosecute and convict perpetrators.
In other words, this is a crime scene, and it needs to be treated like one.
There should be immediate efforts by the transitional Syrian authorities, with international support, to secure and preserve likely sites of mass crimes for coordinated exhumations and forensic investigations.
As HRW’s Hiba Zayadin says: “The loved ones of people so brutally killed here deserve to know what happened to them. The victims deserve accountability.”
When you read about workers in a factory overseas being mistreated, you know there are solutions available to help improve their situation.
Better labor laws and their enforcement in the countries where factories are located is one step.
Companies selling products also need to tackle the problem by establishing clear standards for suppliers.
If we’re talking about clothes, for example, companies selling shirts, trousers, and shoes need to keep a close eye on their supply chains – set clear standards for factories and visit, in person, to monitor conditions. This can help see to it that workers at the source of production are fairly treated. The same goes for agricultural products, rainforest products, and a range of other goods.
It also includes online adult content.
Don’t let the nature of the business distract you. The same rationale above about workers’ rights and supply chain monitoring applies here.
The workers in this case are models who broadcast on adult platforms around the world. The workplace isn’t a factory but a studio – often basically just cubicles with cameras.
Human Rights Watch has published a new report on webcam models in Colombia. It’s one of the top producing countries in this global, billion-dollar industry.
Workers describe video-broadcasting from small, confined spaces with a lack of ventilation and seriously unsanitary surroundings. Some identify verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by studio management, and coercion to perform sex acts they find degrading or physically painful.
Wage theft can also be a problem, and some workers reported being fined for taking breaks to eat, using the bathroom, or washing their hands after a performance. There’s a lack of mental health support.
Some readers will hear these things and maybe think: why not criminalize the whole webcam industry or at least the studios?
At Human Rights Watch, our research has shown this isn’t the solution, because criminalizing sex work drives it underground, where even worse abuses take place.
Labor reforms are far better, as sex worker rights defenders broadly agree. These organizations helped us identify concrete steps platforms need to take to address labor abuses and root out sexual exploitation.
Of course, there are actions studios should take as employers, and the government of Colombia can do more to regulate the industry locally. But Colombian studios create content for online adult platforms based in the United States and Europe.
In other words, this is a global supply chain issue. And what works for other industries can work here, too.
Companies in the US and Europe can set standards and monitor how clothing and agricultural producers in their supply chains adhere to them to make sure factory workers and farm workers abroad are treated fairly.
They can do the same for sex workers in webcam studios around the world.