Daily Brief Audio Series
We’ve discussed rampant insecurity in Haiti before in the Daily Brief. In this edition, we’re going to look at one particularly disturbing aspect of it.
The criminal groups that control large parts of Haiti have been intensifying their attacks against the population in recent weeks. This has included subjecting girls and women to horrific sexual abuse.
Criminal groups often use sexual violence to instill fear in rival territories, but sometimes, as one aid worker told us, they simply do it because they can: “They rape because they have the power. Sometimes they do it for days or weeks.”
Between January and October, nearly 4,000 girls and women reported sexual violence, including gang rape, mostly committed by members of criminal groups. According to the UN, the increase in cases involving children is 1,000 percent, compared to the same period last year.
And, of course, this is most likely just a fraction of the real number of cases, because most go unreported.
Many survivors suffer from the effects of physical abuse and mistreatment and/or end up pregnant, with no access to medical, psychosocial, or legal services. Sexually transmitted infections affect a large number.
Restoring basic security conditions is essential to combat sexual violence. The Haitian National Police and the UN-authorized mission – the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission – are struggling. The international community needs to step up and urgently increase funding to support an appropriate security response.
But it’s not just “hard security” measures that are desperately needed here. Haiti’s partners should also provide the necessary resources for the international mission to operate effectively on all sorts of levels.
As of September, the UN had only received 17 percent of the required US$16 million needed to strengthen and expand access to essential services for girls and women.
International partners could also do a lot more to help improve the ability of the transitional government, as well as grassroots and international organizations, to address the needs of survivors of sexual violence.
And then there’s justice. As HRW’s Nathalye Cotrino, says: “The rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape girls or women without fearing any consequences.”
The UN’s human rights office in Haiti has been supporting the formation of specialized judicial units to investigate and prosecute those responsible for serious crimes, including sexual violence. However, they still need an official decree from the transitional government, so they can be fully operational.
Security, support, and justice – Haiti’s girls and women deserve a life free from any kind of violence.
The United Kingdom is one of the richest countries in the world, so why do more than a third of its children live in poverty?
The numbers are truly astounding. Depending on how you calculate it, the UK is probably the fifth or sixth wealthiest country today. Yet, according to newly published data, 5.2 million children in the UK live in poverty. That’s 36 percent of all kids in the country.
The new(ish) government is integrating the fresh data into its official statistics and announced a Child Poverty Taskforce to study the problem. That sounds reasonable: the issue of child poverty is complex, there are many factors to consider, and deeper understanding should lead to better policies.
However, at least one cause of child poverty in the UK is glaringly obvious right now: the country’s “two-child limit” on state support. This policy, introduced by the previous government in 2017, cuts off child-related social security benefits to low-income households after the second child.
You can get support for raising your first two kids but not for any you have after that.
Why two? It’s completely arbitrary. The last government imposed austerity measures and pretty much chose the number two out of a hat.
The two-child policy clearly hurts larger families – and there are many of them. Some 440,000 families are affected by the policy. They lose out on £3,455 per child per year.
Half of all children in poverty in the UK are in this group, that is, in families with three or more children. What’s more, evidence shows the two-child rule is driving increasing child poverty in the country.
Despite the new data and all the evidence, however, the Labour government has been dragging its feet. It has resisted calls to repeal the Conservative government’s two-child policy. Maybe the Labour government is waiting for the Child Poverty Taskforce to weigh in, but neither the terms of reference nor the strategy framework of the Taskforce even mention this policy.
In any case, children living in poverty in the UK today shouldn’t have to wait for the results of the Taskforce deliberations on something as obvious as this, something where the problem has been studied and an immediate solution well-known.
These kids need help now. Making them wait six months or two years or however long the Taskforce process takes is just adding Labour insult to Conservative injury.
As my expert colleague, Kartik Raj, writes: “Children in families making decisions about whether their low incomes will stretch to pay for food, electricity, or new school shoes, do not have the luxury of time.”
What would you do with a trillion dollars? Would you try to use it to do some good in the world? Or would you use it to commit serious human rights abuses?
Today, we’re looking at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), how it’s essentially under the control of one man, and how it has facilitated human rights abuses and benefited from them.
The PIF is what’s known as a sovereign wealth fund. A lot of countries have such funds, often built on oil wealth. It’s basically a pile of surplus money a government has gathered over time and then invested domestically and abroad. The earnings from these investments could be used to help citizens through spending on health care, for example, or education or infrastructure.
In the Saudi case, however, things don’t quite work that way. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund does originate from the country’s vast fossil fuel resources, but it’s often not used to benefit people in Saudi Arabia.
It’s called the “Public Investment Fund,” but it’s not there helping the public.
The nearly one-trillion-US-dollar fund is essentially controlled by one person, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He wields this enormous economic power in a highly personalized manner, and the PIF is used to commit serious human rights abuses. It’s also used to try to whitewash reputational harm from those abuses.
It’s all described in Human Rights Watch’s newest report, The Man Who Bought the World.
It scrutinizes a vast array of Saudi and international documents and concludes the PIF has benefited directly from serious human rights abuses linked to its chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS.
This includes the crown prince’s 2017 “anti-corruption” crackdown that consisted of arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment of detainees, and the extortion of property from Saudi Arabia’s elite.
The PIF has facilitated serious human rights violations linked to MBS through companies it owns and controls.
One example is the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a key critic of the anti-corruption crackdown. Sky Prime Aviation, one of the companies transferred to the PIF during the crackdown, owned the two planes used in 2018 by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul, where they murdered Khashoggi.
MBS also unilaterally directs enormous sums of state wealth to megaprojects that have hit Saudi Arabia’s most marginalized people hard – migrant workers, rural communities, and poor and working-class residents. Projects have forcibly evicted residents, razed neighborhoods, subjected migrant workers to serious abuses, and silenced communities.
Remember, this is supposed to be state money. It’s harming the public instead.
So, what can be done?
Some international caution would be an absolute minimum. The PIF has investments around the world, and MBS uses sports in particular as a tool for his influence. Just think of the LIV golf tour, the FIFA 2034 World Cup, and Premier League football club Newcastle United.
Any business with ties to the Saudi Public Investment Fund should re-examine those links and make sure they are not also connected to serious human rights abuses.
Today marks a grim milestone. It’s been one thousand days since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, Putin’s assault on Ukraine really started more than a decade ago, in 2014, as did his forces’ war crimes. Long before a thousand days ago, Human Rights Watch was documenting torture by the Kremlin’s proxy forces in the east, and persecution of people in occupied Crimea – right from the start, in fact.
Still, the escalation of Russian atrocities in Ukraine since February 2022 has been significant, as has the terror ordinary Ukrainians have been facing.
The Russian military has been bombing and shelling civilian centers and civilian infrastructure mercilessly. This was evident on day one of their “full-scale invasion,” when, among other horrors, a cluster munition struck just outside a hospital in Vuhledar.
Russia’s indiscriminate bombing has been well-documented in many cities since, including Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Kremenchuk, Mariupol, Mykolaiv, and many, many others. Russian forces have also been repeatedly bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with little clear purpose other than to terrorize civilians – in violation of the laws of war.
In Irpin, they bombarded an intersection on a road civilians were using to flee the Russian army’s advance. In other places, Russian soldiers shot at those trying to escape, killing civilians. And for many more civilians, rather than let them flee to safety, the Russian military forcibly transferred them en masse to Russia and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine – also a war crime.
It was Russia’s mass abduction of children in Ukraine that led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Putin and another Russian official.
In March 2022, Russian forces committed a string of atrocities during their occupation of Bucha, including summary executions, enforced disappearances, and torture. Such abuses are also well-documented in other areas that were under Russian occupation, such as in Izium, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia region, and elsewhere.
And there’s evidence of many other Russian war crimes during periods of occupation, like looting of civilians’ possessions and pillaging of artwork from museums, robbing Ukraine of its cultural heritage.
Russia’s assault on education in occupied parts of Ukraine has been particularly devastating. Russian occupation authorities in schools tell Ukrainians their country and language don’t exist. Teachers who disagree are faced with retaliation by the occupiers.
As my expert colleagues, Yulia Gorbunova and Kseniya Kvitka, write today: “They have erased Ukrainian identity and rebuilt Ukrainian cities in Russia’s image.”
It’s been encouraging to see many governments around the world come together over the past 1000 days to support efforts for international justice for atrocities in Ukraine. (If only they could do so for other places where horrors are also happening, like Gaza.)
What happens next in Ukraine has been the subject of much speculation in recent weeks, but one thing remains certain regardless. The victims of Russian terror and atrocities in Ukraine deserve justice.
The United Nations Security Council has sanctioned two commanders of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the two key warring parties in Sudan’s ongoing conflict.
It is much-needed and long-awaited positive news.
The war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has been devastating Sudan since April last year. Although it’s not been getting the international media attention it deserves, we’ve covered it often here in the Daily Brief, particularly what’s been happening in the Darfur region.
We’ve highlighted the atrocities being committed by both sides and affiliated fighters, such as torturing and summarily executing people in their custody.
The RSF and its allied militias have slaughtered and terrorized entire communities in West Darfur. Looting and arson go hand-in-hand with killing and rape. They’ve attacked critical civilian infrastructure, like hospitals and markets. They’ve razed entire neighborhoods to the ground.
These RSF attacks are not random. They are targeted on ethnic grounds, focused predominantly on non-Arab communities, in particular ethnic Massalit people.
The RSF is largely recruited from the old Janjaweed, the militia known for their appalling crimes against non-Arab groups, including the Massalit, in 2003-2004. The RSF’s allied militias are mainly Arab.
In short, the RSF has been responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.
For more than a year and a half, the international community has little to address the situation in Sudan. The new UN Security Council sanctions are a welcome first step.
The Security Council imposed an international travel ban and asset freeze on two people: RSF head of operations, Major General Osman Mohamed Hamid Mohamed; and West Darfur RSF commander, General Abdel Rahman Joma’a Barakallah.
This is good news, but clearly given the scale of the slaughter in Sudan, it’s not enough. This conflict has forced more than half a million people to flee over the border to Chad. It has displaced 11 million people inside Sudan, the largest internal displacement crisis in the world. Parts of Darfur are facing famine.
Hopefully, these new UN sanctions are just the start, and more abusers will be added to the list.
The UN Security Council also needs to expand the arms embargo on Darfur to cover the whole of Sudan. New weapons from companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates, have continued to land in the hands of the RSF and the SAF since the conflict started – and are likely to be used in more abuses.
The international community still has much to do to help stop the slaughter in Sudan.