Daily Brief Audio Series

Three generations of Bashir Husain’s family ran a small shop in a Karachi market in Pakistan. For 70 years, they paid rent to the local government, as well as utility bills and taxes.

But in 2018, the authorities demolished Husain’s family shop.

It was part of something called an “anti-encroachment” drive, and it’s all too common in Pakistan. In short, the authorities want to use a space for something else – or give it to someone else – and so they say they are removing structures that “encroach” on public lands or state property.

Now, governments are allowed to expropriate land, including evicting people from their property, if it’s in the public interest and in other exceptional circumstances. What’s happening in cities across Pakistan, however, looks a lot more what international law calls “forced eviction,” and many have been made homeless by it.

You shouldn’t just push individuals and families from their homes and business premises “without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection.”

In a new report, Human Rights Watch found the authorities frequently fail to take the proper steps beforehand. They often don’t look into the land rights of residents, and they provide little if any compensation.

In some cases, the police arrest and prosecute those who resist without any lawful basis. Police who carry out abusive evictions never face any penalties.

Corruption in land development sometimes drives abuses. The rich and well-connected take advantage of poor and socially marginalized families, who often have only a patchy paper trail to prove ownership. Much of this concerns properties hastily allotted to refugees arriving from India after the Partition of British India into two new countries, India and Pakistan, in August 1947.

But the problem goes back even further than that. The basis for public land acquisition in the country is the Land Acquisition Act, a colonial-era law from 1894. That law, and various other laws based on it, enable authorities to forcibly evict people from their homes and lands with few if any safeguards.

Clearly, reforming the law is long overdue. If it is sometimes necessary to get people to move, it should be planned and carried out in a way that respects people’s rights to housing and livelihoods. There should be adequate compensation and resettlement options.

In short, the colonial-era law is not fit for purpose.

Trees. Everyone loves trees.

We love to look at them, walk among them. We also love to do things like live on a habitable planet and breath – two things trees help us do by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping out oxygen.

And yet, we’re destroying trees at an alarming rate. Last year, the world lost the equivalent of almost ten football fields of climate-critical forest per minute.

The problem is while we love trees, we also love things like wood, palm oil, soy, coffee, cocoa, rubber, and cattle. Industrial-scale agriculture is by far the single largest driver of deforestation worldwide, and the global trade in these seven things, and their related products, is among the main culprits.

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.

Hitting the brakes on deforestation globally is essential, but getting global agreement on anything is tough. It’s made more complicated by the fact the bulk of deforestation happens in the tropics, while a large proportion of the consumption of the products happens elsewhere.

One serious effort to address this came last summer, when the European Union adopted a new law recognizing Europe’s oversized role in driving deforestation around the world. The EU’s Deforestation-Free Products Regulation (EUDR) targets global trade in the seven commodities mentioned above.

The new regulation requires EU companies to ensure what they import and export isn’t produced on land deforested after December 31, 2020. They 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. Businesses will have to start complying with the new regulation from January next year.

Several countries have been leading the way on this. A number of EU and non-EU states are gathering in Madrid this week for a summit to push further for deforestation-free, sustainable commodities.

That’s a good thing, too, because in the context of upcoming elections around Europe, we’re also seeing attempts at pushback. Some politicians have been attacking the new regulation, calling for a delay in its implementation. Some business lobbies continue to push for voluntary schemes instead of regulation, ignoring their history of failure.

Neither delays by politicians nor promises of good will by companies will solve global deforestation. If they did, we wouldn’t be losing ten football fields of forest every minute.

We need this regulation. We need the trees.

When you find yourself in trouble with the authorities, the best advice is always: find a good lawyer to defend you.

In Belarus, however, this is pretty much impossible, especially if your case has anything to do with human rights.

You see, the Belarusian authorities have used a lethal combination of repressive laws and measures to take over the legal profession. It’s now under total state control.

Authorities have been systematically retaliating against lawyers who defend clients in human-rights-related cases. They’ve revoked at least 140 lawyers’ licenses to practice. In at least six cases, they’ve imprisoned lawyers for representing their clients fighting bogus, politically motivated charges. Obviously, the threat of such consequences is also intended to put others off. But it goes even further. As a new report explains, authorities in Belarus have turned the Belarusian Republican Bar Association into another vehicle of government repression.

In other words, the state is prosecutor, and the state prevents you from presenting an effective defense.

Naturally, this is a disaster for anyone targeted by the state for exercising their rights or for attempting to protect their fundamental freedoms. Belarus has some 1300 political prisoners, and many have suffered serious abuses, including torture, in state custody.

There are some steps outside governments can take to help here. They could – and should – apply targeted sanctions against Belarusian justice ministry officials and leaders of the Belarusian bar who are responsible.

But on top of that, there’s a creative tool available, as well. Given the situation inside Belarus, many of its lawyers are now living in exile, in neighboring Lithuania, Poland, and elsewhere. Countries hosting these exiled lawyers should look into ways of incorporating them into their own legal systems.

The idea is to preserve their professional potential for when democratic change is possible back in Belarus.

Despite all the dictatorship’s repression, Belarusian lawyers have not given up. They are continuing to fight from exile. They deserve protection and support.

Today, we’re going to go back a decade and a half to get to the present day.

Fifteen years ago, in the final months of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, the world witnessed unbelievable horrors.

The Sri Lankan military had been tightening the noose around its foes, the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for some time. The military designated “no fire zones” where civilians were supposed to be safe – and then bombarded the areas mercilessly.

The Sri Lankan authorities argued that the LTTE was using civilians under their control as human shields, and that was true. The so-called “Tamil Tigers” were even shooting at families who tried to escape. In a sense, it was like a massive hostage situation – but that did not justify the military’s indiscriminate shelling of areas where civillians were highly concentrated.

It also didn’t justify the government restricting humanitarian supplies to civilians in the conflict zone, something the LTTE also did.

The result of these months of horror in 2009 was up to 40,000 civilians killed. A UN expert study found, during that period, “virtually every hospital in the [region], whether permanent or makeshift, was hit by artillery.”

The abuses continued after the war had officially ended. The government of Sri Lanka imprisoned without charge over a quarter of a million ethnic Tamils displaced by the conflict. They locked them in overcrowded internment camps, in terrible conditions, and they would shoot at those trying to escape.

The Sri Lankan army also forcibly disappeared an unknown number of people after the war. Many are believed to have been extrajudicially executed. That is, the military murdered them.

There has never been any justice for these crimes. Today, 15 years on, we’ve seen no accountability for atrocities by government forces, which not only include the indiscriminate attacks, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, mentioned above, but also torture and rape.

The LTTE leadership mostly either died in battle or were executed, and so can never face justice for their summary killings, bombings of civilians, abductions, and the use of child soldiers.

There’s been no reckoning with the past, and people cannot even mourn their lost loved ones in peace. Sri Lankan authorities are still, to this day, threatening and detaining people who try to commemorate the dead and disappeared.

The final layer of terrible in all this, is that some militaries elsewhere started to see “the Sri Lanka method” as a “model” for fighting insurgencies, ignoring the horrific human cost. Some still do, even today.

But mass killing of civilians should not be a model for anyone anywhere. The atrocities in human history should be a warning, not a how-to guide.

As the European Union heads to the polls in a few weeks, and with other key elections on the horizon elsewhere in the world, let’s talk about how we use our votes.

Now, naturally, I’m not going to endorse individual candidates or political parties. That’s not something Human Rights Watch does.

What we do before elections is ask voters to look at some key issues with a human rights lens. For the upcoming European Parliament elections we’ve produced a guide for voters on ten different issues facing Europe today.

To this guide, I would add two points of my own.

First, beware of politicians who blame vulnerable groups for your problems. You can usually spot them easily enough: they’re the ones not talking about making your life better but about making someone else’s life worse.

Their target may be refugees or a religious group or an ethnic group or trans folks. But whoever the vulnerable minority is, the message is basically the same: you’re supposed to believe that denying these people their rights will somehow help you and your family. It won’t, of course. Don’t buy it.

Second, maybe think a bit more long-term when you vote. This can help you see the value of universal human rights. Let me explain with a bit of personal history.

I look back just four generations, and I see my 16 great great-grandparents. All of them spoke a mother tongue different to mine. All of them had religious beliefs different from mine. They were all born in countries different from where I was born.

Now, if you have kids or plan to, think about your descendants, a few generations down the line. You don’t know what they'll look like, what language they’ll speak, what religion they’ll follow, who they’ll marry, where they’ll live and work… Things change, and you have no idea where they’re going to end up.

If you vote for politicians who aim to punish one group in society, and they then make laws to do just that, you may ultimately be putting your own grandchildren at risk.

Taking the long view with your family in mind, it makes sense for you to get behind universal human rights – rights for everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and so on.

It’s in your own self-interest to vote for politicians and parties that are more likely to support universal human rights. It’s the best bet for the people who come after you.

Oh, and one last thing: remember, the people who come after you will also need a habitable planet to live on.