Conflict and Human Rights Update #2 - September 2024
Civil society repression, gender-based violence and US arms sales
Welcome to the second edition of perspicacity’s Conflict and Human Rights Update!
This newsletter brings you the most penetrating reports and investigations published in August 2024 on conflict and human rights issues across the world.
Edition #2 comes three years after the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, and includes an update on the country, including the treatment of women by the regime and analysis that implicates regime officials in more than half the reported incidents of gender-based violence. In Nicaragua, more than 5,000 civil society organisations are now banned; the Kazakhstan government is repressing civil society by treating peaceful protestors as extremists; authorities in Uganda have arrested dozens protesting a controversial oil pipeline; and Russia has eviscerated civic space in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, following a decade-long erosion of fundamental freedoms.
Protests against the results of the recent presidential election in Venezuela have been met with violence by security forces; in Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country in early August, after 400 people died during protests against her government. Conflict in the Middle East is deepening, as the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza now numbers more than 40,000. The US has lifted its ban on selling offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia – a ban that did not prevent it selling almost $10bn of so-called defensive arms and military services to the kingdom over the past four years.
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AFGHANISTAN
Three years after the Taliban takeover
International Crisis Group, 14 August 2024
In August 2021, as foreign troops departed, Taliban insurgents seized power in Kabul, bringing the country back under their rule. In this Q&A, Crisis Group expert Graeme Smith assesses the regime’s record and its implications for international policy. When the Taliban retook power, Western donors cut off the development aid that had covered 75 per cent of the previous government’s expenditures; alongside other factors, this plunged Afghanistan into an economic and humanitarian crisis.
Since 2022, the world has pursued a mix of isolation and selective engagement with the new regime. Western countries, frustrated especially at the Taliban regime’s restrictions on the rights of girls and women, have enforced a raft of sanctions, asset freezes and banking restrictions. The have also devoted billions of dollars to mitigating poverty and preventing famine, while some have kept in discreet contact with the Taliban about security issues.
The erasure of women
Afghan Witness, Centre for Information Resilience, 14 August 2024
Following the Taliban’s decision in March 2022 to ban girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade (ages 11-12), and the subsequent ban in December 2022 on women pursuing higher education, a reported 80 per cent of school-aged girls and young women in Afghanistan do not have access to education. Afghanistan is the only country in the world to have banned girls’ education. Women’s labour force participation rate fell from 16 per cent in 2020 to 5 per cent in 2023, according to the World Bank.
In January 2024, the Taliban initiated a campaign to arrest women and girls for non-compliance with mandatory hijab rules. Dozens of women and girls were taken into Taliban custody, with many reporting degrading treatment, torture, and even rape. The arrests led to widespread fear among Afghan women and girls, and reports of families preventing women and girls from leaving their houses due to safety concerns.
Related:
Afghan Witness, Centre for Information Resilience, 16 August 2024
Hundreds of cases of femicide recorded in Afghanistan since Taliban takeover are ‘tip of the iceberg’
The Guardian, 15 August 2024
Analysis implicates regime officials in more than half of reported incidents of gender-based violence. Open-source investigators at the Centre of Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project combed through social media and news sites to record 332 reported cases of femicide since the Taliban took Kabul on 15 August 2021. The analysis also found 840 women and girls had been subject to gender-based violence from 1 January 2022 to 30 June 2024, almost one a day. More than half of the reported cases said that Taliban officials were responsible. Analysis of crimes allegedly perpetrated by the Taliban revealed 115 incidents of sexual violence, including forced marriage, sexual slavery, assault and rape. Another 73 incidents concerned non-sexual violence and torture, while 113 involved the reported arrests of women, many for flouting the regime’s repressive policies on women and girls, which include forbidding them to travel significant distances without a male guardian.
BANGLADESH
The long road ahead
International Crisis Group, 7 August 2024
After a month of mass demonstrations against her government’s increasingly autocratic rule, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on 5 August. She sought refuge in neighbouring India as thousands of protesters stormed her residence in the capital Dhaka. For several weeks, it had seemed inevitable that Hasina would be forced from office after 15 years in power, but she fought doggedly – and brutally – to hold on to power. At least 440 people were killed as state forces tried to suppress the unrest, a substantial majority of them protesters.
Hasina’s departure, which came after she lost the army’s support, sparked jubilation in Dhaka and cities across the country, but also outbreaks of violence and looting. The army chief announced that an interim government will step in until order is restored and new elections can be held. The immediate priority is to prevent any further killings, but Bangladesh also needs to embark on the arduous task of rebuilding democracy, which has badly eroded over the last decade as the country moved ever closer to becoming a one-party state.
Related:
The Fall of Sheikh Hasina: footage from the streets of Bangladesh
Bellingcat, 7 August 2024Indigenous right activist Michael Chakma is found
Amnesty International, 9 August 2024
ISRAEL / PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
Avoiding all-out regional war in the Middle East
International Crisis Group, 2 August 2024
The killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July brought the Middle East to its moment of greatest peril in years. Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political wing and a high-level guest of the Iranian government, was killed in the Iranian capital Tehran on the day of the new president’s inauguration. The attack on Haniyeh left the region awaiting the retaliation that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has promised and reportedly greenlighted. While Israel has not officially claimed the hit, it has given every indication that it was the author. A day before the Haniyeh operation, Israel struck and killed a top Hizbollah commander, along with several civilians and a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in a Beirut suburb where many of the Iran-backed organisation’s supporters live.
Türk pleads for end to fighting as death toll passes 40,000
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 15 August 2024
The people of Gaza are grieving 40,000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza’s health ministry, most of them women and children. This is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war, according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking, said Türk. International humanitarian law is very clear on the paramount importance of the protection of civilians, and civilian property and infrastructure, he said. The OHCHR has documented serious violations of international humanitarian law by both the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups, including the armed wing of Hamas. Türk called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians. Israel’s illegal occupation must end and the internationally agreed two-State solution must become a reality, said Türk.
Related:
Satellite imagery shows vast destruction in Rafah
Bellingcat, 27 August 2024
KAZAKHSTAN
How Kazakhstan’s Financing Terrorism List Compounds Human Rights Harms
Human Rights Watch, 27 August 2024
Gulzipa Dzhaukerova was a schoolteacher before she got involved in civic activism. Her participation in peaceful protests was treated as evidence of involvement in political opposition groups that a court deemed “extremist” and banned, even though the groups have neither carried out nor advocated violence. Although Dzhaukerova was not found guilty of financing or committing any acts of violence or terrorism, she was automatically added to Kazakhstan’s “list of organisations and people associated with financing terrorism and extremism.” People on the list are subject to “targeted financial sanctions related to the prevention of terrorism and the financing of terrorism” under article 12 of Kazakhstan’s 2009 money laundering law.
Dzhaukerova is subject to significant financial restrictions, including being blocked from accessing her bank accounts, using credit or debit cards, and conducting certain financial transactions at the post office or notary. She has had to ration portions of food to ensure her 14-year-old son has enough to eat. The country’s “financing terrorism” list included just over 1,400 people, nearly half of whom were convicted of “extremist” or “terrorist” offences under the country’s criminal code.
NICARAGUA
Massive closures of NGOs in Nicaragua
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 20 August 2024
The decision by the Nicaraguan authorities to ban a further 1,500 civil society organisations, about half of them religious associations, is deeply alarming, all the more so in a country that has seen civic and religious space fundamentally eroded in recent years. With these closures, more than 5,000 organisations, including NGOs, media outlets and private universities, have had their legal status cancelled in Nicaragua, most of them since the end of June 2022. All of their assets are under government control. The severe impact of these measures on the rights to freedom of association and expression, as well as freedom of religion, makes the defence of human rights in Nicaragua increasingly difficult. Of those civil society organisations still functioning, many have opted for self-censorship or dissolution amid restrictive laws curtailing their activities.
RUSSIA
Russia’s legislative minefield
Human Rights Watch, 7 August 2024
A new report from Human Rights Watch focuses on the wave of repressive legislation and policies that the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin has adopted since 2020, and how the Kremlin has used them to suppress internal dissent and incapacitate civil society. These laws severely restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, and impose historical, social and political narratives in public life.
The Russian government’s evisceration of civic space after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was preceded by an escalating assault on fundamental freedoms over more than a decade. Suppression of internal dissent and civil society intensified in the fall of 2020 against the backdrop of three developments: mass protests in neighbouring Belarus; opposition to constitutional reform in summer 2020 that made it possible for President Vladimir Putin to run for two more terms of office; and an imperative to weaken political opposition and civil society groups before the 2021 electoral campaign. Russian authorities adopted a series of laws designed to crush potential mobilisation, opposition, and dissent against government policies - policies that eventually came to include the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
SAUDI ARABIA
The US has resumed sales of bombs and missiles to Saudi Arabia, which still owes $15 million for jet fuel from its war on Yemen.
The Intercept, 12 August 2024
The Saudi Royal Family is reportedly worth more than $1.4 trillion, but for several years, the Pentagon has been chasing the kingdom for $15 million it owes for American assistance during the Saudi war in Yemen. Despite the unpaid debt, the Biden administration announced on 9 August that it is lifting a ban on selling offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, authorising an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions to the Gulf kingdom. The ban had been in place for the past three years as a response to the heavy civilian casualties of the country’s campaign in Yemen, but did not apply to sales of so-called defensive arms and military services. Those sales have amounted to almost $10 billion over the past four years.
The US-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, which de-escalated following a 2022 truce, has directly or indirectly killed at least 377,000 people, including thousands of civilians slain in Saudi-coalition air strikes. A 2022 investigation by the Washington Post and Security Force Monitor at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that a substantial portion of Saudi coalition air raids were carried out by jets developed, maintained, and sold by US companies, and by pilots who were trained by the US military.
UGANDA
Global Witness condemns escalating arrests of climate campaigners in Uganda
Global Witness, 20 August 2024
In December 2023, Global Witness released a report ‘Climate of Fear’ documenting reprisals against land and environmental defenders challenging plans to build the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline, the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, through Uganda and Tanzania. At the time, 47 people had been arrested for challenging the pipeline in Uganda between September 2020 and November 2023. The number of arrests has recently skyrocketed, with 96 reported cases of people being detained or arrested for opposing the controversial pipeline in the past nine months. In early June, environmental campaigner Stephen Kwikiriza was abducted and detained by the army, who reportedly beat him and dumped him on the roadside.
UKRAINE
Targeting civilians in Ukraine with drones
DW Investigations, Deutsche Welle, 27 August 2024
For months, Russian drones have terrorised civilians near Ukraine's frontline. DW Investigations reveals that some of these attacks could constitute war crimes, with efforts underway to identify potential perpetrators. Since at least the fall of 2023, Russian drones have ravaged Beryslav, a small city near Kherson in southern Ukraine by the Dnipro River. DW analysed over a hundred attacks, most of which were reported on Telegram by Ukrainian authorities. Between September 2023 and July 2024, they counted over a hundred strikes that reportedly left nearly 130 civilians injured and 16 dead in Beryslav and surrounding settlements. DW was supported in processing and analysing the data for the investigation by the Centre for Information Resilience's Eyes on Russia Project and the Ukrainian Archive at Mnemonic, NGOs dedicated to exposing, documenting and archiving human rights violations and war crimes.
VENEZUELA
What next after its election uproar?
International Crisis Group, 2 August 2024
Six hours after most polling stations in Venezuela’s presidential elections on 28 July closed, the National Electoral Council declared incumbent Nicolás Maduro victorious. But neither then nor in the days since did it provide any breakdown of the results by polling station or evidence to substantiate its announcement. Convinced that the election had been stolen, the following day opposition supporters, many from working class communities, took to the streets. They have been met with a violent response from state security services, which have made clear they will stand with the Maduro administration and unfurled a wave of targeted arrests. With Maduro digging in, the past few days’ turbulence could leave in its wake a weakened government, a galvanised but frustrated opposition, and a broad front of foreign governments all struggling to determine their next moves.
Also worth exploring…
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 9 August 2024