Daily Brief Audio Series
Get a Russian passport or leave your home.
That’s essentially the “choice” Russian occupiers are giving Ukrainian citizens in occupied areas of Ukraine.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new decree. It requires Ukrainian citizens living in certain Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to “regulate their legal status.”
Ukrainian citizens in occupied areas of Zaporizka, Khersonska, Donetska, and Luhanska regions must obtain Russian passports by September 10. Otherwise, they will be classified as “foreigners,” subject to mandatory medical examinations, and a range of work restrictions, and only allowed to stay for a maximum of 90 days.
Stay. In their own country.
Let’s be clear: these areas are part of Ukraine. In any international conflict, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, occupying forces are not simply allowed to do whatever they want. There are rules. Such as not changing local laws or imposing their own – ie, Russian – legislation.
What Russia is doing here is a violation of international law, that relating to occupation in particular. It adds to the long list of violations, including war crimes, already committed by Russian forces.
It’s worth recalling some of those other atrocities. Russian forces have indiscriminately bombed civilian homes. They’ve hit hospitals. They’ve targeted civilians trying to flee.
Russia has attacked energy infrastructure – terrorizing civilians, rather than securing military gain. In areas under occupation, Russian forces have also committed summary executions, enforced disappearances, and torture, which the UN has categorized as crimes against humanity. They’ve deported Ukrainian children en masse. Another crime against humanity.
Russia has looted artwork from museums, robbing Ukraine of its cultural heritage. In occupied areas, they’ve forced the use of Russian language and the Russian state curriculum in schools, with brutal reprisals for teachers, parents, and even students.
The recent move to double down on forcing Ukrainian citizens to obtain Russian passports has echoes of these last crimes in particular. It’s part of Russia’s effort to erase the identity of a people and their culture.
It’s not exactly new, of course. Russian authorities have already forced millions of passports on residents of the occupied areas of eastern Ukraine and in occupied Crimea. For many Ukrainians in those areas, taking the unwanted document was simply a matter of survival.
What’s next could be darker still. Those Ukrainians who acquire a Russian passport might be forced to fight in Russian armed forces again their own kin. And Russia is clearly threatening to deport Ukrainian citizens who refuse the passport. Both are war crimes and the later could also constitute a crime against humanity.
All of this flies in the face of the strict legal obligations Russia has under international humanitarian law as an occupying power.
Pride and a Shameful Government, Daily Brief March 25, 2025
Daily Brief, March 25, 2025.
It seems not a week or two goes by without the Hungarian government attacking the rights of its citizens.
For 14 years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling party, Fidesz, have taken a wrecking-ball approach to democracy, rule of law, and human rights in Hungary.
Orbán changes the country’s constitution at his whim, declaring several states of emergency that allow him to rule by decree, side-stepping even the now rubber-stamp parliament.
The ruling party does everything it can to silence critics, attacking independent journalists, media outlets, and civil society organizations.
Orbán’s party has taken control of the majority of the country’s media, using it to pump out pro-government and pro-party lies.
They also constantly vilify minority groups – migrants, LGBT people, and others. They spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money on nationwide media campaigns of fearmongering disinformation against these groups.
They surely do this to stir up hate and create scapegoats to divert people’s attention from their anti-democratic power grab and from the fact that, under Fidesz, Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU and also the most impoverished.
Which brings us to last week, when Hungary deepened its repression of LGBT people with a draconian new law targeting them.
The law limits the right of assembly when it pertains to supporting LGBT rights. LGBT-related event organizers and attendees face fines of up to €500 for exercising their freedoms of assembly and expression. It also authorizes authorities to use facial recognition technology to identify them.
Orbán made clear the intention of the law is to ban Pride event.
The anti-Pride law has rightly sparked widespread criticism. Thousands have gathered on the streets of Budapest to protest it. Despite the ban, organizers plan to go ahead with Pride in late June and Budapest’s Lord Mayor said that Pride will happen in the city.
Ini other words, people are defending their rights against an authoritarian-minded government.
Watch this space.
Germany. The industrial powerhouse of Europe. The world’s third richest economy.
Germany has a poverty problem.
Despite the country’s vast wealth, the German social security system is simply failing many people.
How many? Let’s look at some numbers.
The latest official statistics show 14.4 percent of Germany’s population live in poverty. That’s more than 12 million people.
Single-parent families and older women make up a disproportionate number of those in poverty. The government considers 40 percent of Germany’s households with a lone parent raising children to be “at risk of poverty or social exclusion.”
Social security support often doesn’t even get a family up to the poverty line, let alone above it. There’s a gap.
For example, a single-parent household with two children receives €1,198 in social security benefits. But the poverty threshold is €1,626. That’s a gap of 26 percent. The gap for a single adult living alone is 51 percent.
Among people 65 and older, more than 18 percent are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, older women even more so.
This is in part because women essentially get shortchanged in pension calculations. Childrearing years are unpaid and not equally counted as work. There’s a significant gender pay gap generally. Women make up two-thirds of the people in marginal, low-wage employment.
Such things reduce their pension contributions over the years, and thus, in the German system, their pension payments later in life.
There are basic pension supplements, but they are often not enough to lift people above the poverty line.
Numbers… Calculations... Thresholds… They tell you one part of the story.
To understand the full picture, you have to listen to the people affected. This is what Human Rights Watch has done for a new report, more than two years in the making.
People described difficulties affording adequate food, and paying for rent, utilities, and health and education costs.
A 42-year-old single working mother of three living in rural Saxony said: “I can’t afford to properly feed my children. It’s a bitter feeling when all we have at the end of the month is bread and butter…”
A 71-year-old woman pensioner who lives alone in a city in the Ruhr Valley said: “…the support from the government simply isn’t enough. Life is expensive. At home I stay under a blanket and drink tea, coffee, or soup to stay warm. There’s not much else to do.”
Surely, the world’s third richest economy can do better than this.
In fact, the German government is legally obliged to do better. Germany has signed international treaties promising to uphold the human rights to social security and to an adequate standard of living.
Political parties are now in coalition talks to form a new government. They should take note and commit to improving Germany’s failing social security system.
Israel’s Deadly Cruelty in Gaza Hospitals, Daily Brief March 20, 2025
Daily Brief, March 20, 2025
Ceasefire deal or no ceasefire deal, the slaughter in Gaza goes on.
This week, the Israeli military launched a new wave of airstrikes and artillery fire across Gaza. This has killed more than 400 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the most reliable source for such numbers.
Since March 2, the Israeli government has also again been blocking all aid entering Gaza. This is in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.
For nearly a year and a half now, the Israeli authorities have been committing war crimes, crimes against humanity – including forced displacement and extermination – and acts of genocide in Gaza.
Since the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have repeatedly carried out unlawfully indiscriminate airstrikes. In doing so, they’ve killed and maimed thousands of civilians, including wiping out entire families. They’ve reduced much of Gaza’s infrastructure, homes, schools, and hospitals to rubble.
Attacks on healthcare facilities deserve special mention. Human Rights Watch has reported on unlawful Israeli attacks on hospitals and ambulances. We’ve also documented the arbitrary detention and torture of healthcare workers.
A new report details how, while occupying hospitals in Gaza during the current hostilities, Israeli military forces caused deaths and unnecessary suffering of patients.
Witnesses at three hospitals described how Israeli forces denied electricity, water, food, and medicines to patients – leaving sick and wounded people to die. They shot civilians, mistreated healthcare workers, and deliberately destroyed medical equipment. Forced evacuations put patients at grave risk.
Such acts are not only brutal and cruel. They are also war crimes.
Israeli authorities have not announced any investigations into these actions by Israeli ground forces in control of these or other hospitals.
The list of atrocities by the Israeli military in Gaza simply keeps growing. Many around the world have been expressing their outrage.
However, we’ve yet to see the kind of political and diplomatic pressure and action needed to get Israeli authorities to stop committing atrocities.
What that international action might look like essentially comes down to three things.
First, other countries should suspend arms transfers to Israel.
Second, they should support the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders. Members of the ICC, which includes all EU countries, should state clearly they are obligated to – and will – arrest anyone wanted by the ICC on their territory.
Third, other countries should impose targeted sanctions on officials responsible for war crimes and other atrocities across Israel and Palestine.
Until there’s this kind of international action, it’s hard to see when Israeli officials will stop their slaughter and brutality in Gaza.
As readers of this newsletter are well aware, the human rights situation in Afghanistan is appalling, and the country is facing a humanitarian catastrophe.
Pakistan’s authorities are no doubt well aware of this. And yet, they have been forcing Afghan refugees to return to Afghanistan regardless.
In January, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced Afghans without official residence documents must leave the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi or face deportation. Even Afghans holding appropriate documents that are supposed to allow refugees to stay in Pakistan, like the Proof of Registration card, must leave by June 30.
This is just the latest in a series of policies and actions by Pakistani authorities against Afghan refugees.
A previous wave of deportations and expulsions, from September 2023 through January 2024, drove more than 800,000 Afghans to Afghanistan. Many of them were actually born in Pakistan or had been living there for decades.
Pakistani police have raided houses, beat and arbitrarily detained people, and confiscated refugee documents, including residence permits. They have demanded bribes to allow Afghans to remain in Pakistan.
Such abuses seem almost calculated to coerce Afghan refugees to leave. Most Afghans who have returned to Afghanistan have cited fear of detention by Pakistani authorities as the reason they left.
When they get to Afghanistan, they are thrown into the disastrous situation there under the Taliban.
The prospects for women and girls are beyond bleak. The Taliban have banned girls and women from education past sixth grade, blocked them from many forms of employment, and restricted their movement in public. A woman cannot even leave her house without a male family member chaperoning her.
But it’s not just women and girls who face hardships. The economy is a wreck, unemployment is widespread, and the healthcare system has collapsed. More than 22 million Afghans, almost half the population, require emergency food aid and other assistance. Some 3.5 million children are acutely malnourished.
Meanwhile, levels of foreign aid are in sharp decline.
Afghans who worked in previous government jobs or other prominent roles are at particular risk if sent back. They face a genuine threat of persecution, torture, or death. Returning them likely breaks Pakistan’s obligations under international law.
Pakistani authorities surely know all this, and yet, they are only increasing pressure on Afghan refugees to go back.
Pakistan is not alone in ignoring Afghanistan’s reality, of course. Germany and other countries have also sometimes put Afghans at risk by deporting them to Afghanistan. It’s outrageous and unconscionable.
But the numbers we’re looking at with Pakistan right now are enormous. Some 800,000 Afghan refugees were forced back to Afghanistan in Pakistan’s last drive.
Who knows how many hundreds of thousands more will be caught up in this new push if Pakistan’s leaders don’t change course.