April 24, 2025
Expulsing The Right to Asylum, Daily Brief April 24, 2025.
Daily Brief, April 24, 2025.
Daily Brief Audio Series
On Inauguration Day, US President Trump declared there was an “invasion” at the US-Mexico border. He also claimed that people who crossed the border without permission could not ask for asylum.
But according to US law, anyone—no matter how they came into the country—has the right to ask for asylum if they are at the border or inside the United States.
Words were followed by actions.
Less than a month later, the United States carried out mass expulsions of 299 third-country nationals to Panama. The people expelled to Panama had all crossed the US border from Mexico since the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Third-country nationals, in this case, are people who are neither from the US nor from Panama.
A new report finds, that the US denied these people due process and the right to seek asylum, combined with harsh detention conditions and mistreatment.
Panama on the other hand, held them in incommunicado detention, where authorities kept their phones, blocked visitors, and isolated them from the outside world.
HRW interviewed 48 of the 299 in-person. Many of them had fled persecution due to ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, family ties, and political views.
A 27-year-old woman from Iran had fled her country after converting to Christianity fearing arrest and persecution by authorities, as converts face serious human rights violations and can even be sentenced to death.
She told HRW that she repeatedly asked for asylum once in the US “I didn’t understand why they didn’t listen to me. Then an immigration officer told me President Trump had ended asylum, so they were going to deport us.”
Between February 12 and 15, she and others were put in shackles and on US military planes. They had no idea where they were being flown. People realized they were in Panama only after landing.
In early March they were released. Panamanian authorities issued 30-day humanitarian permits—extendable up to 90 days—urging recipients to leave the country. In April, the permits were extended for another 60 days.
Of the 299 expelled, 180 were later returned to their home countries.
The US should stop sending noncitizens to other countries and follow the principle of nonrefoulement, which means not sending people back to places where they could be harmed. This is a violation of international law.
Panama should not accept third-country nationals from the US in the future.
Now, it is the country’s responsibility to protect these people. And that starts with giving them a full and fair hearing on their claims for refugee status.
The right to asylum is a universal human right.
At around 2 p.m. on November 1, 2024, an Israeli strike on the al-Salah neighborhood in Younine, Lebanon, destroyed a two-story building.
Ali Salah lived in the same neighborhood at the time of the attack. He lost 10 family members in one strike by the Israeli forces.
Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed Salah in February this year, after visiting the site of attack.
Ali Salah said that those killed in the strike included his sisters, Wadha and Fairouz; his brothers-in-law: Haidar Mahdi Salah and Mohammad Mahdi Salah; his nieces, Elissar and Zeina; his nephew Ali Haidar Salah and his wife, Nour Boudaq, his one-year-old son, Haidar, and his mother-in-law, Um Bachir Boudaq.
They all had ordinary lives, ordinary jobs. Haidar worked as a painter, Mohammad as a Taxi driver. The strike came shortly after Mohammad returned home after finishing his shift as a taxi driver.
“There’s no one I value more than my sisters. If I thought there was any reason for there to be a military target here, I would have forced them to leave. There was nothing here. Just civilians,” Ali Salah said.
Between October 2023 and December 2024, Israeli attacks in Lebanon killed more than 4,000 people and displaced over one million.
Since the November 2024 ceasefire deal between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect, Israeli attacks have reportedly killed at least 146 people in Lebanon.
HRW conducted open-source research on the strike that killed Ali Salah’s family members, to determine if they were combatants. We did not find any evidence indicating the presence of combatants or a military objective at the site of the strike. All individuals interviewed said that no evacuation warning was given to residents prior to the strike.
HRW also investigated another Israeli airstrike on Younine from September; both attacks combined killed 33 civilians, 15 of them children and were apparent indiscriminate attacks on civilians. At least one attack used an air-dropped bomb equipped with a US-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit.
The US government’s provision of arms to Israel, which have repeatedly been used to carry out apparent war crimes, has made the US complicit in their unlawful use.
Under international humanitarian law, all parties to the conflict are obligated, at all times, to distinguish between combatants and civilians. – Apparently, Israeli forces did not do that.
When carrying out any attack, warring parties must take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm and damage to civilian objects. This includes taking all necessary actions to verify that targets are military objectives. – Apparently, Israeli forces did not do that.
Therefore, both attacks should be investigated as war crimes.
Victims and survivors deserve justice.
Lebanon’s government should provide a path for justice for grieving families, including by giving the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes.
All countries – including the US, the UK, Canada, and Germany – should suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel.
Have you ever used social media to complain about an issue that bothers you? I surely have.
Maybe you have posted about police abuse in your country or a sociopolitical issue, like a poverty problem?
In Vietnam, there is a good chance, you might be convicted and jailed for it.
Le Minh The discussed sociopolitical issues including economic development, corruption, poverty, and land rights on social media. Voicing his opinions got him 21 months in prison between 2018-2020.
In 2023, he was arrested again, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison, also for criticizing the authorities.
His younger sister, Le Thi Binh, also served two years in prison between 2020-2022 for “posting, livestreaming, and sharing” content that “defames” state’s policies.
This all happens under Article 331 of Vietnam’s penal code, the “infringing of state interests” law. The law is being abused by Vietnamese authorities to punish people simply for raising concerns or complaints about government policies or local officials.
In the past, people who were convicted under the law were often bloggers or human rights activists: those the government sought to silence but who were not considered threats to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. They were convicted of crimes considered less serious than crimes against national security.
Now, article 331 of the penal code is increasingly used by the government to target ordinary people who complain about the government or voice opinions, just like Le Minh The did.
Human Rights Watch found that the authorities have enlarged the scope and application of article 331 so that it reaches much further into society. As a result, ordinary people face arrest and up to seven years in prison for criticizing low-level officials.
The escalation in arrests and convictions is measurable. HRW examined dozens of Vietnamese court documents, numerous media sources, and hundreds of posts and videos on social media.
Between 2018 and February 2025, Vietnamese courts convicted and sentenced at least 124 people to harsh prison terms under article 331. This is a significant increase over the previous six-year period (2011-2017), when only 28 people were reportedly convicted and sentenced to prison for violating the predecessor to article 331.
Social media and other means to publicly raise issues like religious freedom, land rights, rights of Indigenous people, and corruption of the Vietnamese government are not infringing upon state interests. Rather, Article 331 has become the government’s handy tool to infringe upon the basic rights of Vietnamese citizens.
The authorities should immediately end the systemic repression, and release everyone detained or imprisoned for exercising their basic rights.
You may have read a lot in the news recently about tariffs. Especially, since US President Donald Trump boastfully announced import tariffs many on goods from virtually every country on April 2.
Many were above 40 percent, although a week later he “paused” these tariffs above a baseline 10 percent except for China.
Let’s talk tariff basics: Tariffs are charged on goods bought from other countries. Typically, they are a percentage of a product's value. They can be an important tool for protecting or developing domestic industries, but they also can raise prices.
The tariffs are getting a lot of attention for upending the global economy these days, but they are part of a bigger economic and - also - human rights story.
The promise to reshape the economy, central to Trump’s reelection campaign, tapped into a pervasive sense among many US voters that they were being financially cheated by wages not keeping up with rising prices.
The new tariffs illustrate the danger of pursuing economic reforms without regard for people’s human rights.
Economies should be transformed to ensure everyone can enjoy their rights to food, housing, health care, education, social security, and other economic, social and cultural rights: But Trump’s approach gives no evident consideration to these or any rights.
The tariffs are so broad that many economists expect them to be inflationary, hurting those struggling the most.
Not only is there no plan to help with the immediate negative impact on people (goods costing more), but the tariffs are also combined with policies already making things harder for many.
The Trump administration has slashed billions in spending and fired thousands of public employees, many of whom are Black, decimated programs vital for health care, education, and other rights.
At the same time anti-corruption rules have been weakened and tax cuts for the wealthiest are being pushed through.
These measures are the opposite of an economy aligned with human rights – or also called a human rights economy, that bases economic decisions on their impact on people’s welfare and the planet.
You can apply that to tariffs. Here is how: By carefully weighing the risk of increasing prices on necessities like food and housing against the potential benefits.
Tariff policies should be part of a wider set of reforms that advances rights. For example, using new income to strengthen public services and social security.
And this is exactly what the US should be doing. Because the problem is not that the country is being ripped off by foreign countries and immigrants, as Trump contends. Everyone in the US is entitled to a living wage, access to health care, and adequate housing.
This is solvable without making lives harder for people, it’s solvable with a human rights economy.
April 16, 2025
Tunisia’s Toolbox of Repression, Daily Brief April 16, 2025
Daily Brief, April 16, 2025.
Since President Kais Saied has taken over in Tunisia in 2019 and confiscated powers in 2021, his government has increasingly tried to intimidate, punish and ultimately silence its critics.
Since early 2023, they have stepped up their repression of dissent. The government is robbing Tunisians of these hard-won civil liberties.
The most destructive tool in Tunisia’s toolbox of repression has been arbitrary arrest and detention.
It’s mostly aimed at those opposing the government, lawyers, political opponents, activists, journalists, human rights defenders or even social media users.
Human Rights Watch documented the cases of 22 people detained on abusive charges, including terrorism, in connection with their public statements or political activities.
Tunisia’s authorities have charged many of the detainees whose cases were documented in this report with “attempting to change the nature of the state,” which can carry the death penalty. At least 14 of the detainees documented by HRW could face the death penalty if convicted.
President Saied fuels the alarming repression by publicly accusing critics of being “traitors” and even “terrorists.”
One strategy to intimidate dissidents has been detaining prominent people for publicly criticizing the authorities. Authorities regularly bring additional charges or issue new detention orders to keep public figures behind bars.
An eerie example is the case of Sonia Dahmani, a famous lawyer and media commentator. She was arrested on May 11, 2024, by masked plain clothes security forces who stormed the Tunisian Bar Association headquarters.
Her “crime”? – Sarcastic comments she made on the TV four days prior, questioning the claim, backed by President Saied, that Black African migrants were seeking to settle in Tunisia.
In July 2024, a Tunis Court sentenced Dahmani to a year in prison for her remarks. On appeal, her sentence was reduced to eight months, but behold: In October, she was sentenced in another case to two years in prison for statements she made on racism in Tunisia.
In January this year, her sentence was reduced to a year and a half on appeal, but behold: According to her lawyer, she still faces trial in three other cases in connection with her peaceful expression.
Additionally, Sonia Dahmani filed a complaint for acts of torture and rape in Manouba prison against the prison director and a guard following rights violations in detention in August 2024. Dahmani was subjected to an “intrusive strip search which violated her physical integrity and affected her psychologically,” her sister told HRW.
Repression has many ugly faces. Tunisian authorities should immediately release all those arbitrarily detained, drop abusive charges against them, and stop prosecuting individuals for exercising their human rights.