Daily Brief Audio Series
Rampant insecurity in Haiti can be summarized in some shocking numbers.
Criminal groups control nearly 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and its surrounding region, and they’re expanding into other areas. About 2.7 million people live under their control. Another number stands out: experts estimate at least 30 percent of criminal gang members are children.
But you need to go beyond the numbers to understand the depth of the horrors here.
Recruited as young as ten years old, child gang members may start as informants or running errands, but soon, many of them are carrying weapons, looting, extorting, and kidnapping. The kids are abused if they refuse to take part, usually with beatings and death threats. Girls are particularly at risk of sexual violence.
What pushes children into violent gangs in the first place is often hunger and poverty. Abandoned by the state, deprived of food, education, and health care, these kids find in criminal groups their only source of livelihood and shelter. In other words, it’s about survival.
A 16-year-old from Port-au-Prince, said he joined a criminal group when he was 14:
“Before [joining], I lived with my mother … [A]t home, there wasn’t any food. But when I was with [the group], I could eat.”
Haiti is caught in a hunger trap: crime drives poverty; poverty drives crime. And at the moment, the situation seems to be getting worse.
Criminal groups have apparently increased their recruitment of children as a response to the law enforcement operations of the new international presence, the Multinational Security Support mission, and the Haitian National Police. Hundreds, if not thousands, of kids, driven by hunger and poverty, have joined criminal groups in recent months.
Escaping this downward spiral will obviously be neither quick nor easy, but Haiti’s transitional government should focus on children in particular, as a new HRW report highlights. Authorities need to concentrate on providing protection and access to essential goods and services, like education.
While holding to account those responsible for abuses, authorities also need to provide pathways for rehabilitation and reintegration, so children can safely leave gangs and have a life afterward.
In short, kids need survival options outside criminal groups, and authorities need to help kids find them.
Many may not be able to point to Azerbaijan on a map, but it’s about to take center stage globally.
The Caspian Sea country of some ten million people wedged between Iran and Russia will host COP29, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in mid-November. So, it’s worth everyone learning a bit about it.
First, Azerbaijan is a petrostate, a country where the oil and gas industry provides most of the government’s revenue. Yes, a petrostate is hosting the global conference on climate change. It’s a bit of a trend, unfortunately – the United Arab Emirates was last year’s host.
Second, Azerbaijan is an authoritarian state, or what some experts prefer to call a “consolidated authoritarian regime,” where power is extremely concentrated in few hands.
For more than three decades – almost since the country became independent of the Soviet empire, in fact – Azerbaijan has been ruled by two presidents. First, there was Heydar Aliyev, from 1993 to 2003, and since then, the country has been ruled by his son, Ilham Aliyev.
Third, Azerbaijan is deeply repressive. Freedom of expression and association are severely curtailed. Journalists who try to say anything out of line get jailed. Public protests are swiftly and often brutally dispersed.
The government also enforces highly restrictive laws regulating nongovernmental organizations to limit their ability to register, access funding, or operate legally. Unregistered groups that continue their work do so on the margins of the law, at great personal risk.
Authorities are particularly nasty in Azerbaijan with their politically motivated repression. They often use bogus criminal charges to prosecute and imprison civic activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. They’ll wrongly accuse them of financial fraud or fabricate drug charges. Ugly stuff.
In recent months, in the run-up to the COP29 climate conference, the crackdown has escalated.
A new report documents the government’s concerted efforts to decimate civil society and silence its critics: dozens of fresh arrests on bogus criminal charges, prosecutions, detentions, and harassment.
As my expert colleague, Giorgi Gogia, says, the government’s “contempt for civic freedoms is putting independent groups and critical media on the path of extinction.”
So, with the global climate conference underway next month, these points are the bare minimum of what the world should know about the COP29 host, Azerbaijan.
For the past year, the words “since October 7” have been repeated in some form in nearly every article and analysis about the hostilities in Israel-Palestine.
“Since October 7.” There was the before times, and there’s now, as if everything started on that day. Atrocities in Israel-Palestine didn’t start that day. And, in fact, it doesn’t matter when it started or “who started it” – atrocities are atrocities and need to end.
Still, that day does mark some kind of key moment, an acceleration point for atrocities.
What happened twelve months ago today was horrific. Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups carried out numerous coordinated attacks in southern Israel, including on civilian residential communities and social events, as well as on Israeli military bases. They attacked at least 19 kibbutzim and five moshavim (cooperative and collective communities), two cities, two music festivals, and a beach party, killing hundreds of civilians.
At many attack sites, Palestinian fighters fired directly at civilians as they tried to flee and at people driving through the area. The attackers hurled grenades, shot into shelters, and fired rocket-propelled grenades at homes. They set houses on fire, burning and choking people, and forcing out others whom they shot or captured. They took dozens hostage and summarily killed others.
These atrocities were war crimes and crimes against humanity. The continued holding of civilian hostages is an ongoing war crime.
In response to these crimes, the Israeli government has spread more horror over the past year, committing its own atrocities and acting as if the laws of war no longer apply at all.
Civilian protection is a cornerstone of these laws, but the Israeli military has been using explosive weapons in densely populated areas in Gaza, raising the risk of unlawfully indiscriminate attacks. They’ve damaged or destroyed homes, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls, without advance warning, caused death, severe injuries, and permanent disabilities, including in attacks HRW has documented as unlawful.
The majority of buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Entire neighborhoods have been razed to the ground.
Almost all civilians in Gaza are displaced, with most crammed into an area that’s just three percent of Gaza’s territory.
Palestinians in Israeli detention facilities have been tortured, abused, held in incommunicado detention, and subjected to sexual violence. Israel has tortured healthcare workers.
Also flouting international humanitarian law and in direct defiance of orders from the World Court, the government of Israel is starving Gaza as a weapon of war. Its blockade restricts humanitarian aid, not only severely limiting food but also medicine and medical supplies.
Nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the most reliable source for such numbers. The majority of them have been civilians.
Hostilities and the risk of more atrocities have been spreading to Lebanon and beyond.
Many governments around the world only seem to care about backing “their side,” rather than supporting international law and justice for the victims of the crimes being committed. They continue to provide arms – the US, the UK, and Germany to Israel, and Iran to Hamas and Islamic Jihad – despite continuing atrocities and the risk of their being complicit in these crimes.
One year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, we wrote:
Their atrocities do not justify your atrocities. The brutality of their war crimes does not lessen the brutality of your war crimes. Their inhumanity drives your inhumanity which drives their inhumanity further, on and on until the world around you burns to the ground and beyond.
Since October 7, 2023, the answer to atrocities has only been more atrocities, and one year on, more of the world is burning.
Progress in human rights is rarely quick and hardly ever follows a straight line. Sometimes, just when you think things have finally moved a step forward after years of effort, someone in power decides to kick them backward again.
The European Commission yesterday said it would propose delaying implementation of the European Union’s new deforestation regulation by a year. This move, which follows relentless industry lobbying, is a body blow to what has been one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation globally in recent years.
We’ve looked at the EU’s Deforestation-Free Products Regulation (EUDR) before in the Daily Brief, but here’s a quick refresher…
Deforestation is the second largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions causing the climate crisis, after the burning of fossil fuels. Once cut down, trees not only stop absorbing carbon dioxide, they also release their stored carbon, a double whammy for the climate.
Critical forests are being cut down at an alarming rate – ten football fields a minute – mostly to clear land for industrial-scale agriculture, aiming for the global trade in wood, palm oil, soy, coffee, cocoa, rubber, and cattle, and their related products. The EU is a huge market for them.
In 2023, the EU finally approved a new draft law, the EUDR, which specifically targets global trade in these seven commodities. It requires EU companies to ensure what they import and export isn’t produced on land deforested after December 31, 2020.
Companies also have to make sure these commodities are produced in conditions that comply with laws on land use rights, labor rights, and other human rights.
Everything was done and dusted in the complex EU lawmaking process. Businesses were expected to have to start complying with the new regulation from January next year.
Yesterday, however, the European Commission balked, calling for a delay.
Some details of the new move suggest it may not have been a sudden decision. For months, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, failed to publish key documents to provide guidance on implementation of the regulation. Governments and many companies were asking for them, but she let them grow dust on her desk.
As my expert colleague Luciana Téllez Chávez commented to media yesterday: “It would seem the Commission President sabotaged the most significant environmental legislation passed during her previous term.”
What happens next is that the Commission’s proposal needs to be voted on by the European Parliament and the European Council to be approved or repealed.
They should reject the delay and remind von der Leyen her role is to implement what has already been painstakingly agreed.
A fight that climate and rights activists thought was won, now continues into another round.
Defending Democracy in the US, Daily Brief October 2, 2024
Daily Brief, October 2, 2024.
The US finally heads to the polls on November 5, after a seemingly endless campaign season, fantastically long for those living in most other democracies. The years of daily drama, with all their agonizing and unlikely plot twists, can almost make you forget these national elections are not a Netflix show in its eleventh season that jumped the shark in its fourth.
But whether you’re obsessed with the drama or exhausted by it, you can’t turn the channel, because this show is all too real, and these elections could have major impact on hundreds of millions of people both inside and outside the country.
From the human rights standpoint, there are many key issues at stake in these elections, including many we’ve highlighted in the Daily Brief in the past – from children’s rights to health care to racial justice to immigration to foreign affairs. As always with all elections everywhere, we want a concern for human rights to be at the core of these public policy issues and influence how people should vote.
But this time around in the US, there’s something more besides. It can seem as if democracy itself is at stake, because of attacks on and threats to the democratic process in recent times.
For example, election officials in the US have not always been able to do their jobs in safety, as should be the case. A survey found one in four local election administrators experienced abuse, harassment, or threats during the last two election cycles.
Election administrators in the US states of Colorado and Arizona have faced online threats. In Michigan, administrators received threatening voicemails. Some election officials in Georgia, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington were sent letters laced with the potent opioid drug fentanyl.
There have also been disturbing threats to voters. In a 2022 survey, 43 percent of respondents reported concerns about intimidation or threats of violence while voting.
Actions by the authorities in states like Texas and Tennessee targeting specific groups – like people with a criminal record and naturalized citizens – can intimidate eligible voters. An “illegal voting tipline” in Texas seems almost designed to encourage harassment along ethnic and racial lines.
These are all causes for serious concern, as the US enters the final stretch of this election season. Election officials and voters need protection against those trying to subvert the democratic process.
The glass-half-full view on all this is the US hopefully has what it takes to confront the challenge. The country is home to a strong network of democracy protection activists, organizations, and attorneys who have deep experience in dealing with these issues. They know how to push back on violations against the rights of election administrators and voters.
The next few dramatic weeks will no doubt see them fighting hard to defend democracy across the country.