Daily Brief Audio Series

Sometimes when outsiders hear about an Indigenous community living by traditional ways, they imagine an isolated natural idyll. They perhaps jealously envision people enjoying some kind of timeless, off-grid paradise, free from the anxieties of globalized existence.

The reality is usually very different, of course. Too often, in fact, such folks are very much on the frontlines of globalization. They can be literally face-to-face with the bulldozers gobbling up their land to provide products for worldwide markets.

The community of Rumah Jeffery lies deep in the rainforest of Sarawak, on the uniquely biodiverse island of Borneo, Malaysia. This Indigenous Iban community lives in a traditional longhouse, presided over by a village chief.

The people of Rumah Jeffery live from the forest. They forage. They fish. They hunt. They harvest fruit trees planted by their ancestors. The forest provides rattan vines, which weavers use to produce mats, baskets, and backpacks.

There are things the people of Rumah Jeffery notably don’t have. Similar to many Indigenous communities in the region, they’re not connected to a water supply nor the electricity grid.

Most importantly, however, they do not have a land title that signals formal recognition by the government of their customary land rights. This is the case even though they’ve been living there and in this way for as long as anyone can remember.

This has made Rumah Jeffery vulnerable to encroachment and harassment by a Malaysian logging company, called Zedtee. It’s a member of the timber giant Shin Yang Group.

In 2022, Zedtee logged part of Rumah Jeffery’s forest. They did so without the community’s free, prior, and informed consent – a long-established principle of international law.

The company felled valuable fruit trees the community had cared for and harvested for decades. The community lost many acres of tree cover.

Government authorities have been less than helpful.

When local protesters confronted the bulldozers, telling the operators to stop the logging, officials from the Sarawak Forest Department threatened to arrest them. Later, police threatened to demolish the community’s longhouse.

The company has sought to evict the community. The government – rather than fulfilling its obligations to the Indigenous community under national and international laws – has supported the company.

An eviction order now hangs over the community. Forcibly evicting Rumah Jeffery would uproot them and leave them destitute.

Theirs is not an isolated case. Numerous Indigenous communities across Sarawak, Malaysia, face similar situations.

And while it may seem this is all happening thousands of miles away, many of us are on the frontlines, too, in a way. Top buyers of wood from Sarawak include EU countries, Japan, and the US.

The international trade of wood products is too often tainted by human rights abuses and deforestation. Fixing the problem – that is, cleaning up the supply chains – is the shared responsibility of sellers and buyers.

For its part, the Malaysian government should adopt federal legislation to protect Indigenous rights – and protect Rumah Jeffery from encroachment.

And as a new Human Rights Watch report also makes clear, the governments of importing countries have laws in the books to help address these things. They need to enforce them. 

When Venezuelan authorities announced that Nicolás Maduro had been re-elected president after last July’s vote, there was more than widespread skepticism. Indeed, substantial evidence showed opposition candidate Edmundo González had won by a significant margin.

People were outraged. Many took to the streets in protest.

Authorities responded by launching a vicious crackdown. The message was simple and thuggish: we won, you shut up – or else.

That “or else” was not an empty threat. Venezuelan authorities and pro-government groups, known as colectivos, acted on it again and again.

The abuses they committed – against protesters, bystanders, opposition leaders, and critics, during post-electoral protests and after – have now been extensively documented in a new Human Rights Watch report. It reads like a laundry list of things authorities should never do.

They killed protesters and bystanders. Twenty-four people were killed during demonstrations. Evidence points to the involvement of Venezuelan security forces in some of these killings and colectivos in others.

They wrongfully arrested and prosecuted large numbers of people, including children. More than 2,000 people have been detained for protesting, criticizing the government, or supporting the opposition. Authorities have charged hundreds with vague and unfounded offenses.

They forcibly disappeared opposition party members, their relatives, and foreign nationals. Authorities refuse to release information on their whereabouts. Families are still looking for loved ones in detention centers and morgues.

They tortured detainees. Enough said.

In responding to these well-documented abuses by Venezuelan authorities, the outside world needs to do at least four things.

First, foreign governments should keep making the basic, yet essential, calls on Venezuelan authorities to stop their violations. They should insist on the release of people wrongly detained and information on the disappeared.

Second, the international community should strongly back efforts to help victims get justice. This includes supporting the work of the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela and the International Criminal Court.

Third, other governments should expand support for Venezuelan civil society groups, independent journalists, and groups advocating for democracy and human rights.

Fourth, foreign governments need to expand access to international protection for Venezuelans fleeing repression.

They have to understand the scope of the problem in Venezuela, not least because it impacts asylum requests at their borders. Many have fled the country in the wake of the post-election crackdown. But the country’s problems didn’t start in July 2025, of course. Many left well before.

A staggering 8 million Venezuelans now live abroad. New waves of repression in Venezuela under Maduro will likely trigger new waves of refugees.

Venezuela’s human rights crisis is the most consequential in the Western Hemisphere. A serious, sustained, and principled international response is crucial for the entire region.

To say Trump’s “America First foreign policy” is grim news for human rights around the world may elicit reactions of non-surprise from many.

They would argue human rights have never played a leading role in US foreign policy. Trump’s “America First” is just a more open admission of what’s been a guiding rule for one rights-abusing US administration after another for decades.

It’s a fair argument to make. Indeed, Human Rights Watch’s research on US policies and actions over the years can offer evidence for it.

However, there’s an important shift happening in Washington right now that may get overlooked by such a dismissive argument. It lies in the details of how US foreign policy is created and implemented, in the structure of the State Department itself. The changes now underway in that structure are deeply troubling and could have longer-term implications globally.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “comprehensive reorganization plan” to align with the Trump’s “America First foreign policy.” Some offices are being eliminated or having their budgets and staff cut drastically. The functions of these offices will be dispersed to other units and/or downgraded, perhaps to the point of irrelevancy.

We’ve already seen how this administration’s sweeping foreign aid cuts have been catastrophic for many people around the world. Gutting US foreign assistance has terminated thousands of programs that supported human rights defenders and independent media. It also cut many programs that provided lifesaving humanitarian assistance.

The new State Department structure risks spreading further damage. It eliminates several human rights-focused offices and senior positions. These include things like the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the Office of Global Criminal Justice.  

Now, some functions of the Office of Global Criminal Justice are expected to be moved to the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department. So, what’s happening may sound like just a rearrangement of the bureaucratic furniture.

But there’s an important difference. The Office of the Legal Adviser does not have a policymaking role, so this shift is a kind of downgrade.

And this matters, because the specialized expertise of the Office of Global Criminal Justice has been key to decades-long efforts to advance justice for atrocity crimes in US policy and diplomacy.

It begs the question: who inside the State Department policymaking machinery is going to be pushing for such things now?

These changes – and others, detailed here – suggest a significant realignment away from support for universal human rights and international justice.

Of course, no US administration has ever fully lived up to international human rights standards or even its own declared values on human rights.

But under both Republican and Democrat administrations, the State Department provided critical funding to human rights defenders. It promoted independent media, championed some core women’s rights issues, and supported justice for victims of atrocity crimes.

It’s too simplistic to dismiss what’s happening now in the State Department by saying US foreign policy was never “human rights first” under any administration. Human rights were always at least some part of the mix.

Now, the fear is, “America First” could mean human rights last – in other words, not at all.

You don’t need to be any kind of expert to understand the problem of “killer robots.” Machines that decide who lives and who dies – through an algorithm of some sort, perhaps – are terrifying on their own.

We often think of such automated weapon systems only in the context of wars and how they might be deployed on the battlefield. However, their use in peacetime also poses a major threat.

It’s something science fiction writers have been warning us about for decades.

For example, Ray Bradbury in his 1950s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, describes a horror called “the Mechanical Hound.” It’s an eight-legged, spider-like machine with powerful sensory receptors and a long needle in its snout, filled with anesthetic. It’s used in domestic policing to hunt, even kill, humans, specifically dissidents, and once it’s let loose, off it goes on its own.

It was science fiction then, but today, three quarters of a century later, all the technology to build such a beast seems to exist. So – given there are always repressive governments seeking new ways to impose their will and tech companies eager to profit from them – dystopian dogs may be just around the corner. (See also: Black Mirror episode “Metalhead”)

Indeed, the future is now, as explained in a new report from Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. Technological advances and military investments are spurring the rapid development of “killer robots,” with multiple threats to human rights, including the right to life.

We’re talking about autonomous weapons systems, operating without meaningful human control.

Once activated, they would rely on software, often using algorithms, input from sensors like cameras, radar signatures, and heat shapes, and other data, to identify a target. After finding a target, they would fire or release their payload without the need for approval or review by a human operator.

That means a machine rather than a human would determine where, when, and against what, force is applied.

Bradbury’s needle-nosed Mechanical Hound is only one of a thousand potential horrors.

But Bradbury was also clear why he wrote science fiction: “People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it.”

And the good news is, some governments are looking to do just that: build a different future.

Next month will see the first ever United Nations General Assembly meeting on autonomous weapons systems. It follows campaigners’ efforts to Stop Killer Robots and the call by more than 120 countries for the adoption of a new international treaty on autonomous weapons systems.

Yes, getting countries around the world to agree on anything these days can be a bit like herding cats. But the threat of dystopian dogs is strong motivation.