Daily Brief Audio Series

Mozambique faces enormous challenges in keeping pregnant girls and young women, or those with small children, in school, a new HRW report finds.

These women and girls need strong support from schools – especially during one of the most vulnerable times in their lives.

Why do pregnant or parenting girls and women drop out? The reasons vary and intersect. They face discrimination, gender-based violence, and poverty. For many, juggling school and childcare responsibilities can be impossible. Additionally, the lack of free education pushes many girls from the poorest households out of school. Most have no childcare options.

A quick rundown of numbers reveals the challenging situations girls in Mozambique find themselves in:

· 70 percent of pregnant girls in Mozambique dropped out of school, a study shows.

· The country has the fifth highest rate of child marriage in the world.

· Mozambique’s adolescent pregnancy rate is one of the highest in Africa. At least 1 in 10 girls has had a child before age 15, according to the United Nations.

· In 2022, only 41 percent of girls completed lower secondary school.

· In 2020, only 4 percent of girls completed upper secondary school.

In 2003, the Mozambican government adopted a decree mandating school officials to move pregnant girls and adolescent mothers from daytime schools to night-shift schools. This decree effectively authorized and cemented discrimination against these students in the national education system. Following that, society groups in Mozambique led a campaign that successfully pressed the education ministry to revoke the decree in 2018. But despite showing the political will for change, the government has struggled to tackle the enormous systemic and social barriers girls face to stay in school.

In our research, Human Rights Watch found that some teachers and school authorities still automatically referred students to night-shift schools due to stigma, existing discriminatory practices, or unclear or no guidance from officials. Encouragingly, other teachers did support female students to stay in schools.

Mozambique should adopt legally enforceable regulations to ensure girls’ right to education during pregnancy and parenthood. The government should also ensure all students access comprehensive sexuality education and adequate reproductive health services.

Mozambique’s girls – just as all the girls the world – have a fundamental right to education, no matter what circumstances they are in – and this right should be guaranteed.

Afghanistan’s public healthcare system was ailing even before the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. For decades, much of it had depended on donor funding. Since the Taliban’s takeover, however, most development spending has ceased. Today, the country’s economy is on the verge of collapse - and so is its heath care system.

With millions having lost their jobs over the last two and a half years, families are facing harsh choices: Do they spend the little money there is on food or take their malnourished children to the doctor and buy medicines?

Not surprisingly, Afghanistan’s women and girls are particularly hard hit by this crisis. As regular readers of this newsletter will know, the country has become one of the most repressive worldwide for women and girls.

For more than two years now, Afghan women and girls have been refused access to secondary education. Most training for future female healthcare workers has stopped as a result. This has created potentially life-threatening shortages in the provision of healthcare for women.

Even before August 2021, Afghanistan had one of the highest rates of maternal deaths per capita in Asia, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. With half of all potential medical students not allowed to study things are bound to get worse. Simply put: In a country where male doctors are not allowed to see female patients, if women workers are not there to deliver aid to women, women will most likely go without aid altogether.

If this wasn’t bad enough, in some provinces doctors have been instructed not to treat any female patient who is not accompanied by a mahram – a male guardian - and is not covered from head to toe. How can a doctor properly diagnose someone if they can’t examine them? Are women comfortable divulging their medical history in front of a father, uncle, cousin or brother?

“My family won’t understand,” Mehria A., a woman in Nangarhar, who has experienced depression, told my colleague Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, during research for her report “‘A Disaster for the Foreseeable Future’: Afghanistan’s Healthcare Crisis”. “I wish there were confidential services available for women so I could seek those.”

Female doctors are also obliged to be accompanied by a male guardian – often even at work. This has increased costs for clinics, as the guardian needs to be paid for food and transport, while making the delivery of community health services more difficult because skilled healthcare workers who don’t have mahram can’t work. And all of this, while people are in greater need, with millions of children suffering from malnutrition and depression among women on the rise.

“The unprecedented economic crisis in Afghanistan has meant that millions are facing life-threatening conditions,” says Fereshta. “The situation demands more than humanitarian aid, it requires sustainable efforts to avert further economic decline and alleviate the immense suffering of the Afghan population.”

The response of governments and international organizations to this crisis, though, has been poor if not apathetic. It’s high time world leaders stood by the Afghan people and showed more determination to alleviate the ever-increasing misery life under the Taliban has meant for women and girls in particular.

This is a big one. It’s not every day Human Rights Watch releases such a massive research project.

Usually, two or three in-house investigators focus on an issue for three to six months and draft a report with input from our legal experts and other internal specialists. That’s a lot of work as it is. Sometimes, the scope of the research is a bit wider, and it takes a few extra months.

But this major new project on Mariupol – which HRW has done jointly with the leading Ukrainian human rights organization Truth Hounds and the visual investigations agency SITU Research – is on another level. It took nearly two years and involved dozens of researchers and other experts.

From multiple angles using a variety of tools, the project documents the terrible consequences of Russia’s assault on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol between February 24 and May 20, 2022. The devastation – and Russia’s continued efforts to erase Ukrainian culture there – was one of the worst chapters of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion and occupation of Ukraine so far.

The operation, which included Russian forces pounding Mariupol for weeks with explosive weapons, left thousands of Ukrainian civilians dead and injured. It trapped hundreds of thousands for weeks. And it turned a thriving city into a wasteland of charred buildings and shallow graves.

Our detailed damage assessment of the city center found more than 4,800 buildings were damaged, including 93% of the area’s 477 high-rise apartment buildings. Our city-wide assessment found all 19 of the city’s hospital campuses, and 86 of the 89 schools and universities we identified were damaged.  

We also documented extensive damage to city infrastructure, which left residents without power, running water, heating, gas, or the ability to communicate with the outside world for weeks as they sheltered in basements in the darkness and sub-freezing temperatures. 

In the first two weeks of March, multiple attempts to provide safe passage out of the city and to bring humanitarian aid into the city failed in the face of Russian obstruction.

The report also contains 14 case studies of specific attacks that killed and injured civilians. This includes attacks that struck hospitals, a theater, a food storage facility, an aid distribution site, a supermarket, and residential buildings serving as shelters.

In those incidents, we either found no evidence of a Ukrainian military presence in or near the building that was struck or found only a limited military presence. We built 3D reconstructions of seven of these attack sites to illustrate the damage.  

We identified 17 Russian and Russia-affiliated military and national guard units that were operating in Mariupol in March and April 2022, and we name ten senior Russian commanders involved in the assault.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials should be investigated and prosecuted for their role in these apparent war crimes, and Russia should pay reparations to victims and their families. 

Again, this project was a big one. With a 215-page report, a 22-minute video and a detailed digital feature, it is surely the most comprehensive look at Russian crimes in Mariupol to date.

I encourage you to take a look for yourself: start here.

A new UN report on Darfur hasn’t been officially published yet, but it’s already ringing alarm bells. Rightly so.

Regular Daily Brief readers will be familiar with the deteriorating situation in this western region of Sudan. We’ve highlighted Darfur’s downward spiral, detailed the ethnic killings and other atrocities, and called for greater international action, many times last year.

Now, a report from the UN Security Council Panel of Experts of Sudan is adding to the world’s knowledge of the horrors taking place there. Not yet published but widely shared with the media, it makes for disturbing reading.

The report describes waves of devastating attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias in West Darfur’s capital of El Geneina. The RSF killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people in and around the city last year, according to the UN report.

The report confirms the RSF and its allies have been targeting ethnic Massalit civilians in attacks that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” HRW has similarly documented how the RSF and allied militias carried out widespread ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, and torture against predominantly ethnic Massalit civilians. The fresh atrocities have forced more than half a million of people to flee across the border to Chad, part of the 10.7 million people who have been uprooted from their homes across Sudan, most since the conflict broke out in April. Sudan’s level of internal displacement – nine million people – is the highest in the world.

The UN panel’s report names key individuals within the RSF and militias who oversaw atrocities in Darfur.

It also presents credible allegations against the United Arab Emirates for shipping arms and ammunition to the RSF in Darfur in violation of the UN arms embargo.

The UN Security Council should act on these findings.

So far, it has condemned abuses in Darfur, but the Security Council has not yet taken action to rein in those responsible for atrocities nor explicitly condemned violations of its own arms embargo. The Security Council needs to move on both fronts. It should add the names of perpetrators of serious crimes to their general sanctions list, and it should follow up on all allegations of illicit arms transfers. Other governments should do the same, using the evidence in the new UN report to take action under their own sanction regimes.

This update today is grim, I know. Atrocities are continuing in Darfur, and the world is not doing enough to stop them. And the former won’t likely change until the latter does.

Russia heads toward presidential elections in March, and no one is doubting the outcome. Authoritarian governments don’t hold elections to give people a free and fair choice. They do so as a choreographed show for the nation and the world to demonstrate the leader is loved.

It may be a wonder such authorities even bother to go through all the fakery, but the shared make-believe is important. The public pretending reinforces the political power.

In Russia, as elsewhere, these election shows are tightly managed. They don’t want to leave anything to chance, let alone to actual public input. Essential preparations include censoring the media for years, as well as jailing some opposition leaders and barring other possible candidates from running.

It also means silencing critics, and Russian authorities have conducted a vicious drive to eliminate dissent. Case in point: the Kremlin now seems hell bent on putting Oleg Orlov in prison before the March vote.

Regular readers will well remember Orlov, whose case we highlighted twice last year. He’s one of the most prominent and outspoken human rights defenders in Russia. Orlov is co-chair of Memorial, a leading rights group in the country that was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

The Russian government shut Memorial down in the same year, yet the group’s core activists continue their human rights work, some from abroad, and some, like Orlov, from inside the country.

The case against Orlov stems from his anti-war pickets and an article he wrote in which he argued Russia had descended into fascism. He is charged with “repeated discreditation” of Russia’s armed forces. As far as the authorities are concerned, the military’s war crimes in its atrocity-ridden invasion and occupation of Ukraine are not the problem. Talking about them is.

There are two grim new developments in Orlov’s case.

First, his retrial has been moved up. The prosecution gave his legal team three days to examine the seven-volume case file. The court denied his lawyers’ request for more time.

Second, Russia’s Justice Ministry has now declared Orlov a “foreign agent,” because of his opposition to the Kremlin’s war. This official designation is toxic. The law demands journalists and other commentators note this “foreign agent” status in any quote by Orlov and any reports about his trial.

Coming right before the opening of Orlov’s trial, as Memorial has noted, this “foreign agent” designation “cannot but influence the judge.”

The 70-year-old Orlov is facing up to three years in prison. It seems the Kremlin is keen to get him behind bars as soon as possible – and before its March “elections” show.