Podcast
Rights & Wrongs
Rights & Wrongs is a podcast by Human Rights Watch that takes a deep dive into major human rights issues. The podcast, hosted by Ngofeen Mputubwele, formerly of The New Yorker, taps into the expertise of our researchers around the world and the stories of local activists on the ground. More Spotlight

Latest

November 4, 2024

Gen. Sri Rumiati served as a policewoman in Indonesia for decades, but her life’s work became centered around protesting a policy of the state security forces. When she was summoned for military service, she was shocked to learn that she was required to take a virginity test. The Indonesian military and police held the misogynistic belief that female soldiers and officers needed to be chaste and that they could test for virginity by examining a woman’s hymen, an abusive practice that has no scientific basis.

The policy lasted for decades, until a Human Rights Watch report and tireless advocacy by activists like General Rumiati moved the immovable. Indonesia’s military and police forces stopped requiring virginity tests.

 

Andreas Harsono: Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch

Sri Rumiati: Retired police general & activist

Meenakshi Ganguly: Deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch 

 

Graphic of a man sitting in hallway, under Rights & Wrongs logo and title.
Follow and subscribe

Follow us wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

SpotifyApple PodcastsYouTubeAmazon MusicPodcastIndexPlayerFM DeezerGaanaJioSaavnBoomPlay

All Episodes

November 4, 2024

Gen. Sri Rumiati served as a policewoman in Indonesia for decades, but her life’s work became centered around protesting a policy of the state security forces. When she was summoned for military service, she was shocked to learn that she was required to take a virginity test. The Indonesian military and police held the misogynistic belief that female soldiers and officers needed to be chaste and that they could test for virginity by examining a woman’s hymen, an abusive practice that has no scientific basis.

The policy lasted for decades, until a Human Rights Watch report and tireless advocacy by activists like General Rumiati moved the immovable. Indonesia’s military and police forces stopped requiring virginity tests.

 

Andreas Harsono: Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch

Sri Rumiati: Retired police general & activist

Meenakshi Ganguly: Deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch 

 

Graphic of a man sitting in hallway, under Rights & Wrongs logo and title.
October 21, 2024

In the late 1960s, the United Kingdom made a deal allowing the US to build a military base on Diego Garcia, one of 58 islands that make up the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The UK, which had colonized the islands in the 1800s, claimed there was “no permanent population” in Chagos. But that was a lie. Several hundred Chagossians lived on those islands. They were all forcibly removed by 1973 and have been campaigning to return ever since. In 2024, the UK announced it would relinquish its last colony in Africa, recognizing the sovereignty of Mauritius. What does this mean for the Chagossians? Will they finally be able to return home?  

 

Mausi Segun: Executive Director of the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch 

Ellianne Baptiste: Second-generation Chagossian  

 

 

Screenshot of HRW audiogram depicting beach of Chagos.
October 7, 2024

Finn Lau, a Hong Kong activist, was taking his daily walk along London’s River Thames when Chinese government thugs beat him up. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was filing paperwork at a Saudi consulate in Turkey when Saudi government assassins murdered and dismembered him. And Bi-2, a dissident Russian-Belarusian rock band, narrowly avoided being forcibly sent to Russia while on tour in Thailand. All had fled repression and thought they were safe in exile. But increasingly, governments are reaching beyond their borders to target critics – is anywhere safe?

Sarah Yager: Washington Director at Human Rights Watch 

Graphic of world map over script from episode.
September 23, 2024

President Nayib Bukele came to power in El Salvador on a promise of ending gang violence. He succeeded, turning a state that was the world’s murder capital into to one with one of the lowest homicide rates in the Western Hemisphere. But in the process, he systematically dismantled democratic checks and balances and arbitrarily detained tens of thousands of people, including children. El Salvador now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

What’s to be done when an elected leader attacks human rights, yet remains wildly popular? That question is personal to Agustín, a Salvadorian teenager who spent his whole life trying to avoid gangs but was wrongly detained in Bukele’s crackdown.

Juanita Goebertus Estrada: Director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas Division;
José Miguel Cruz: Director of Research at Florida International University's Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center 

Screenshot of HRW audiogram depicting Nayib Bukele.
July 14, 2024

Since April 2023, more than a half-million people have been forced from their homes in Sudan due to fighting between two armed groups who were once aligned. The story of how the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces turned on each other, with devastating consequences for Sudan’s civilians, can be traced back to 2013 when a group of dissidents, were told by their interrogators to ride a bicycle that was drawn with chalk on the wall of a Sudanese jail. 

Screenshot of HRW audiogram depicting chalk bicycle.
July 1, 2024

In the early 2000s, a campaign to “Save Sudan” became the bipartisan issue of the time. Celebrities and politicians alike implored a global audience to pay attention. As interventions waned, so did the world's attention. But, since the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began fighting in April 2023, more than 500,000 Sudanese civilians have been displaced. What has happened in Sudan since the world stopped paying attention? 

Screenshot of audiogram depicting protests in Sudan.
June 17, 2024

When Robert Taylor bought land and began to build a home in St. John Parish in Louisiana, he envisioned a compound that would house his family for generations to come. Now, Taylor hopes that his grandchildren don’t have to live in the “Sacrifice Zone”  in Louisiana's Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of land along the banks of the Mississippi River home to some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations.

Human Rights Watch request for comment in advance of publication.
Comment received from Denka Performance Elastomer LLC.

Screenshot of audiogram depicting Robert Taylor looking at petrochemical plant.
June 3, 2024

In 2023, Human Rights Watch researcher Nadia Hardman came across a letter the United Nations had sent to the government of Saudi Arabia expressing concern over the killing of Ethiopian migrants who were attempting to enter the kingdom - including a mention of a mass grave of up to 10,000 in a remote border region. Nadia's investigation showed how Saudi authorities had summarily executed hundreds of unarmed migrants – many of them women and children – in what is likely a crime against humanity.  

Screenshot of audiogram depicting Ethiopian migrants.
May 20, 2024

What happens to cargo ships at the end of their lives? Often, they wind up beached on shores in the global south where untrained and unprotected workers are tasked with breaking them apart in dangerous conditions. In this episode, Host Ngofeen Mputwbwele takes listeners to the beaches of Bangladesh where Human Rights Watch recently completed an investigation of the shipbreaking industry. Here, in what the International Labour Organization calls the most dangerous job in the world, workers are hit with nails, maimed by exploding pipes, sickened by exposure to asbestos and have been trapped in burning hulls as they “recycle” the ships that transport consumer goods to Europe, the United States and beyond. 

Shipbreaking: The Most Dangerous Job in the World
May 2, 2024

The first episode of Rights & Wrongs looks at Human Rights Watch efforts to document the destruction of Mariupol as Russian forces laid siege and cut off communications to the Ukrainian city. Documenting what happened became all the more critical when Russia began destroying evidence of war crimes as it began to rebuild Mariupol in Russia’s image. 

Rights and Wrongs Ep1

Spotlight on Ngofeen Mputubwele, Host of Human Rights Watch’s New Podcast

Ngofeen Mputubwele could never have planned his route to becoming host of the new Human Rights Watch podcast, Rights & Wrongs, but it would be hard to find anyone better suited.  

Ngofeen Mputubwele

The son of immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mputubwele was born in Indiana, where his father was a doctoral student. When his father was offered a professorship at Lane College, among the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the family moved to Jackson, Tennessee. Mputubwele’s high school, which had been desegregated through busing but remained socially segregated, provided a crash course in US race relations – though it remained confusing to the son of Congolese immigrants.

Mputubwele’s father grew up during Belgian colonial rule in what was then known as the Belgian Congo, and later as Zaire. He managed to get an education beyond the 6th grade by embracing the church (the only way available), and eventually received a Fulbright to study linguistics at Indiana University. He went on to Purdue and received a doctorate in comparative literature. The elder Mputubwele steeped his children in anti-colonial doctrine from an early age. Ngofeen and his two brothers were given African names, and the comic books in the Mputubwele household included those about Toussaint Louverture, who led the Haitian Revolution against the Atlantic slave trade.   

“We were steeped in Blackness,” Mputubwele says. “Toni Morrison, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – we read all of these books. But culturally, we were very Congolese. We ate our food at home with our hands and we spoke Kikongo and French.”  

But to the teachers and students at Jackson Central-Merry, Ngofeen was just another Black kid at a segregated high school in the American South, which made for alienating and lonely teenage years. At times, American Blackness felt illegible, he says, but by the end of high school, he began to find his own place inside Black American life. 

Mputubwele soon returned to Indiana, where he went on to study music at Ball State University. It was there, in 2005, that he saw the film “Invisible Children,” a documentary about the abduction of children in East Africa whom the Lord’s Resistance Army uses as child soldiers.     

“How in the world did I get to grow up here?” Mputubwele asked himself.  

He developed an interest in human rights and made his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He went on to get a master’s degree in international development from the University of Pittsburgh. The master’s degree and Africa trip led to a desire to study something concrete – to have a skill, as Mputubwele describes it – which resulted in a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. That, in turn, led him to practice law for several years, though Mputubwele soon left to forge his path in podcasting.    

He moved to Brooklyn, New York and got jobs at the podcasting companies Gimlet Media and Stitcher, and then at the New Yorker magazine. The net result is an experienced podcast host with a long-standing interest in human rights, expertise in international human rights law and the lived experience of growing up in an immigrant family from a country at war.

“It’s funny, when I was getting my master’s degree, I would have been super happy to get an internship with Human Rights Watch,” Mputubwele said. “And now here I am, 15 years later, hosting a podcast for Human Rights Watch. And I’m like, so that worked.”