Elena Urlaeva (born 1957) [1] is an Uzbek human rights activist. She is the president of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan. She focuses on "document[ing] the practice of forced labour in the cotton industry." [2] According to the BBC , "Urlaeva's persistent work contributed to an international campaign which ultimately led major global brands to join a boycott of Uzbek cotton." [2]
Urlaeva was arrested on May 31, 2015, in Chinaz. [3] Human Rights Watch reported that "Police and doctors forcibly sedated Elena Urlaeva and then subjected her to a body cavity search, x-rays, and other abuse." [3]
The Solidarity Center reported that Urlaeva was "detained against her will in a psychiatric hospital in Tashkent" in May 2016, [4] "for more than a month". [5]
On March 1, 2017, according to Anti-Slavery International, Urlaeva was "arrested [...], beaten by Uzbekistan police and detained in a psychiatric prison on forced medical treatment." [6] Reuters further reported she had explained her situation in a video, [1] days before she was scheduled to speak in front of the World Bank, the International Labour Organization and the International Trade Union Confederation. [7] She was released from the hospital after 23 days. [8]
Human rights in Uzbekistan have been described as "abysmal" by Human Rights Watch, and the country has received heavy criticism from the UK and the US for alleged arbitrary arrests, religious persecution and torture employed by the government on a regional and national level. Amnesty International stated that freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly continue to be restricted, and that relations between gay men are illegal.
The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights was a Bahraini non-profit non-governmental organisation which works to promote human rights in Bahrain, which was founded by a number of Bahraini activists in June 2002. The centre was given a dissolution order after its former president Abdulhadi Al Khawaja was arrested in September 2004 a day after criticizing the country's Prime Minister, Khalifah ibn Sulman Al Khalifah at a seminar in which he blamed the Prime Minister for the failure of widespread economic development for all citizens. The BCHR is still banned by the government, but has remained very active.
Mao Hengfeng is a women's rights and human rights activist in the People's Republic of China. She refused to abort her third child after already having twins and was detained in an ankang and then dismissed from her job. A frequent petitioner, Mao served a year and a half of re-education through labor from 2004 to 2005 and two and half years in prison for "intentional destruction of property" in from 2006 to 2008. She was released from Shanghai Women's Prison on 29 November 2008. Since then she has served another year in RTL after protesting in support of Liu Xiaobo. She was briefly released, in February 2011, but under house arrest. She was almost immediately taken again, and placed in Shanghai City Prison Hospital, where she was previously tortured and ill-treated.
According to human rights organisations, the government of the UAE violates a number of fundamental human rights. The UAE does not have democratically elected institutions and citizens do not have the right to change their government or to form political parties. Activists and academics who criticize the regime are detained and imprisoned, and their families are often harassed by the state security apparatus. There are reports of forced disappearances in the UAE; many foreign nationals and Emirati citizens have been abducted by the UAE government and illegally detained and tortured in undisclosed locations. In numerous instances, the UAE government has tortured people in custody , and has denied their citizens the right to a speedy trial and access to counsel during official investigations.
Human rights in Thailand have long been a contentious issue. The country was among the first to sign the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and seemed committed to upholding its stipulations; in practice, however, those in power have often abused the human rights of the Thai nation with impunity. From 1977 to 1988, Amnesty International (AI) reported that there were whitewashed cases of more than one thousand alleged arbitrary detentions, fifty forced disappearances, and at least one hundred instances of torture and extrajudicial killings. In the years since then, AI demonstrated that little had changed, and Thailand's overall human rights record remained problematic. A 2019 HRW report expanded on AI's overview as it focuses specifically on the case of Thailand, as the newly government of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha assumes power in mid-2019, Thailand's human rights record shows no signs of change.
Human rights in Egypt are guaranteed by the Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt under the various articles of Chapter 3. The country is also a party to numerous international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, the state of human rights in the country has been criticized both in the past and the present, especially by foreign human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. As of 2022, Human Rights Watch has declared that Egypt's human rights crises under the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is "one of its worst ... in many decades", and that "tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists, peaceful activists, and human rights defenders, remain imprisoned on abusive 'terrorism' charges, many in lengthy pretrial detention." International human rights organizations, such as the aforementioned HRW and Amnesty International, have alleged that as of January 2020, there are some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. Other complaints made are of authorities harassing and detaining "relatives of dissidents abroad" and use of "vague 'morality' charges to prosecute LGBT people, female social media influencers, and survivors of sexual violence". The Egyptian government has frequently rejected such criticism, denying that any of the prisoners it holds are political prisoners.
Shadi Sadr is an Iranian lawyer, human rights advocate, essayist and journalist. She co-founded Justice for Iran (JFI) in 2010 and is the Executive Director of the NGO. She has published and lectured worldwide.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
Ni Yulan is a civil rights lawyer in the People's Republic of China. She has established herself in defending human rights in China by providing legal aid to persecuted groups such as Falun Gong practitioners and victims of forced eviction.
The 2011 crackdown on dissidents in China refers to the arrest of dozens of mainland Chinese rights lawyers, activists and grassroots agitators in a response to the 2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests. Since the protests, at least 54 Chinese activists have been arrested or detained by authorities in the biggest crackdown on dissent since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Since the start of the protests in mid-February 2011, human rights groups have claimed that more than 54 people have been arrested by authorities, some of whom have been charged with crimes. Among those arrested are bloggers who criticise the government such as Ai Weiwei, lawyers who pursue cases against the government, and human rights activists.
Azimzhan Askarov was a Kyrgyzstani political activist who founded the group Vozduh in 2002 to investigate police brutality. Of ethnic Uzbek descent, during the 2010 South Kyrgyzstan ethnic clashes, which primarily targeted people of the Uzbek nationality, Askarov worked to document the violence.
Nabeel Ahmed Abdulrasool Rajab is a Bahraini human rights activist and opposition leader. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch's Middle East Division, Deputy Secretary General for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), former chairman of CARAM Asia, member of the Advisory Board of the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO), and Founding Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR).
Zainab Abdulhadi al-Khawaja is a Bahraini human rights activist, and a participant in the Bahraini uprising. She rose to prominence after posting tweets online about the protests under the name AngryArabiya as well as for protesting her father Abdulhadi Alkhawaja's detention during his hunger strike.
The Bahrain health worker trials were a series of legal cases in which forty-eight doctors, nurses, and dentists faced charges for their actions during the Bahraini uprising of 2011. In September 2011, twenty of the health workers were convicted by a military court of felonies including "stockpiling weapons" and "plotting to overthrow the government". The remaining twenty-eight were charged with misdemeanors and tried separately. The following month, the felony sentences were overturned, and it was announced that the defendants would be retried by a civilian court. Retrials began in March 2012, but were postponed until June 14. Convictions against nine of the defendants were quashed and reduced against another nine. The Court of Cassation upheld the sentences against the remaining nine on 1 October.
Cotton production in Uzbekistan is important to the national economy of the country. It is Uzbekistan's main cash crop, accounting for 17% of its exports in 2006. With annual cotton production of about 1 million ton of fiber and exports of 700,000-800,000 tons, Uzbekistan is the 8th largest producer and the 11th largest exporter of cotton in the world. Cotton's nickname in Uzbekistan is "white gold".
Nguyễn Văn Đài is a Vietnamese human rights lawyer, democracy activist and blogger. He was arrested on December 16, 2015, by the Vietnamese authorities and charged under Article 88 for "conducting propaganda against the state". The arrest was condemned by international human rights organisations and elected representatives across the world.
The Association for Human Rights in Central Asia (Eng.), Association Droits de l’Homme en Asie Centrale (Fr.), Ассоциация "Права человека в Центральной Азии" (Rus.), AHRCA is an abbreviation used in official documents of the organization and the media.
Chonthicha Jaengraew is a Thai human rights defender, pro-democracy campaigner, Master's student at the Institute of Human Rights Peace studies, Mahidol University, and co-founder of the New Democracy Movement. She has been a prominent student activist for civil and political rights since the 2014 military coup and ensuing crackdown on civil society by the military government. Prior to the coup, Chonthicha was an environmental activist. Despite official restrictions, she and other students have continued to carry out small-scale peaceful protests calling for democracy, rule of law and an end to unlimited use of powers by the military government. As a result, she currently faces criminal proceedings and an unfair trial before a military and civilian court. Chonthicha has also faced online and offline harassment and threats.
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. The camps have been criticized by the governments of many countries and human rights organizations for alleged human rights abuses, including mistreatment, rape, and torture, with some of them alleging genocide. Some 40 countries around the world have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey, Honduras and Japan. The governments of more than 35 countries have expressed support for China's government. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs".
The Jasic incident was a labour dispute in Pingshan District, Shenzhen of the Guangdong province of the People's Republic of China between labour organizers and Chinese authorities that lasted from July to August 2018.