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May 9, 2024

Ethiopia: Joint Submission to the Universal Periodic Review

Ethiopia's human rights situation deteriorated sharply since its last UPR on May 14, 2019. Since then, government forces, militias, and armed groups have been committing widespread abuses with impunity, resulting in grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Government efforts to address past and ongoing abuses, including atrocities carried out during armed conflict since 2020, have lacked transparency and independent oversight. Journalists, civil society organizations, and outspoken public figures have faced an increasingly hostile and restrictive environment, with government authorities resorting to arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention without charge.
May 9, 2024

Q&A: War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Ethnic Cleansing in West Darfur

In its new report, “The Massalit Will Not Come Home,” Human Rights Watch concludes that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an independent military force, and its allies, primarily Arab militias, are responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting the Massalit people and other non-Arab communities in West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina. The apparent objective was to permanently remove them from the city. Many of the abuses documented in this report constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A man walks using crutches in a refugee camp
May 9, 2024

Interview: “I Didn’t Think I Would Survive This”

As a child in West Darfur, Jamal Abdallah Khamis, a 29-year-old ethnic Massalit man, grew up surrounded by violence. In 2023, in El Geneina, the capital city of West Darfur where Jamal lived, RSF righters and its militias once again targeted Massalit and other non-Arab people. By mid-June, Jamal had fled for his life. “I didn’t think I would survive this,” he said.
Jamal Abdullah Khamis.
May 9, 2024

Georgia: ‘Foreign Influence’ Bill Threatens Rights

The Georgian parliament’s introduction of a bill obliging certain nongovernmental groups and media outlets to register as “organizations serving the interests of a foreign power” threatens fundamental rights in the country, Human Rights Watch said today
Tbilisi protests
May 9, 2024

Sudan: Ethnic Cleansing in West Darfur

Attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias in El Geneina, the capital city of Sudan’s West Darfur state, from April to November 2023, killed at least thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands as refugees.
Burnt remains of a school
May 9, 2024

“The Massalit Will Not Come Home”

Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan

The 218-page report, “‘The Massalit Will Not Come Home’: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan,” documents that the Rapid Support Forces, an independent military force in armed conflict with the Sudan military, and their allied mainly Arab militias, including the Third-Front Tamazuj, an armed group, targeted the predominantly Massalit neighborhoods of El Geneina in relentless waves of attacks from April to June. Abuses escalated again in early November. The attackers committed other serious abuses such as torture, rape, and looting. More than half a million refugees from West Darfur have fled to Chad since April 2023. As of late October 2023, 75 percent were from El Geneina.

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English report cover
May 8, 2024

China Forcibly Returns 60 Refugees to North Korea

The Chinese government forcibly returned about 60 North Korean refugees on April 26, putting them at grave risk of enforced disappearance, torture, sexual violence, wrongful imprisonment, forced labor, and execution.
Photos of the North Korean refugees helped by the North Korea Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea are displayed in Seoul, South Korea on June 11, 2019.