Human Rights Watch - The African Mirror

Jul

13

2026

Brussels names Abu Dhabi: Europe’s Sudan resolution breaks a two-year diplomatic silence

NEWS

THE European Parliament has for the first time formally named the United Arab Emirates as a state fuelling Sudan's civil war, adopting a resolution on 8 July that links the Gulf federation directly to atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in North Kordofan. The move breaks a pattern of diplomatic evasion that has, since fighting broke out in April 2023, allowed one of the war's most consequential external backers to escape formal censure. The resolution comes as residents of El Obeid, the North Kordofan state capital besieged by the RSF, continue to endure near-daily drone strikes on the…

Jul

11

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Kinshasa’s third-term gambit turns violent – and exposes a familiar African script

NEWS

ON 12 June, the streets around Kinshasa's Palace of the People became the latest testing ground for a question that keeps recurring across Africa's fragile democracies: how far will an incumbent go to hold on to power, and how much of that effort can be outsourced to deniable hands? The answer, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation released this week, is that the Democratic Republic of Congo's security forces did not merely fail to protect demonstrators opposing a proposed law that could extend President Félix Tshisekedi's tenure beyond two terms — they joined, and at times enabled, an assault…

Jul

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Tunisia’s vanishing republic: Saied’s courts bury rights defenders, journalists, opposition alike

NEWS

TUNISIA’S courts have, in the space of a single week, sentenced two of the country's most prominent human rights defenders to prison terms that human rights lawyers describe as effectively a life sentence by attrition. On June 26, a Tunis Court of First Instance sentenced Sihem Bensedrine, the former president of Tunisia's Truth and Dignity Commission, to 25 years in prison and ordered her and several co-defendants to pay a joint fine of roughly 1.8 billion Tunisian dinars — about US$600 million. Three days earlier, an appeals court in Tunis sentenced Saadia Mosbah, the president of the anti-racism association Mnemty,…

Jul

10

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Egypt’s bureaucracy is leaving refugees to pay the price

NEWS

FOR refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt, a delayed appointment can now mean detention, deportation or disappearance into legal limbo. Human Rights Watch says many Sudanese and South Sudanese families are being arrested even when they hold UNHCR documents, because residency renewals have been pushed so far into the future that their legal status expires before the state acts. That has turned paperwork into a form of danger. Egypt hosted more than 1.1 million refugees and asylum seekers registered with UNHCR as of May 2026, a sharp rise since the war erupted in Sudan in April 2023, but the system…

Jul

08

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

America shuts the door: Supreme Court clears way to deport 330,000 Haitians into a nation in ruins

WORLD

FOR sixteen years, Temporary Protected Status was the thin legal membrane standing between hundreds of thousands of Haitians and a homeland unravelling into anarchy. That membrane has now been torn away by the very court meant to be America's final word on justice. On June 25, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled that Haitian Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders challenging the Trump administration's termination of their protections are not entitled to orders halting the removals while their case proceeds, and that their constitutional claims are unlikely to succeed. In one stroke, the country's highest court cleared the path for the…

Jul

04

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

DRC MURDERS: A Colonel falls, a state walks free

NEWS

THE Democratic Republic of Congo's High Military Court in Kinshasa has convicted Colonel Jean de Dieu Mambweni of the war crime of murder, ruling on appeal that the officer actively orchestrated the March 2017 assassinations of United Nations Group of Experts investigators Zaida Catalán, a Swedish-Chilean national, and Michael J. Sharp, an American. The verdict, delivered on June 5 and reviewed on video by Human Rights Watch, closes a trial chapter that dragged through Congolese military courts for nine years. It also does something no previous ruling in this case had done: it places a named, uniformed, senior officer of…

Jun

25

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

A manufactured crisis: How Washington turned Minnesota into a laboratory of state terror

WORLD

FOR three months between December 2025 and March 2026, the world's most powerful government turned its security apparatus on a single American metropolitan region — and what it produced, according to Human Rights Watch, was not law enforcement but terror. In a 180-page report released this week, the New York-based watchdog has delivered one of the most damning indictments yet of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement machinery, documenting killings, mass arbitrary detention, racial profiling and a climate of fear so pervasive that it emptied clinics, classrooms and city streets across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The report,…

Jun

22

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

France’s ticket to nowhere: how Paris turns Black and Arab boys into lifelong debtors

WORLD

AT 13 years old, a French boy guilty of nothing more than standing outside his own front door became a debtor of the French Republic. By the time he reached manhood, that first fine had multiplied into a debt he may spend his working life trying to extinguish. He is not alone. Across the housing estates ringing Paris, Lyon and Grenoble, a generation of Black and Arab boys is discovering that in France, simply existing in public space carries a price — and the bill never stops growing. A damning new report released this week by Human Rights Watch, the…

Jun

20

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Israel escalates East Jerusalem home demolitions, evictions in Silwan as discriminatory laws drive forced displacement

WORLD

ISRAELI authorities have sharply stepped up home demolitions and forced evictions of Palestinian residents in the Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, human rights groups say, in what critics describe as an orchestrated campaign to change the city’s demographics that may amount to international crimes. According to Human Rights Watch, the demolitions and eviction enforcement in Silwan — a cluster of neighborhoods immediately south of Jerusalem’s Old City — have accelerated since October 2023 and surged again during recent hostilities in Gaza and Israel’s 2026 confrontation with Iran. United Nations data shows 587 Palestinians have been displaced by demolitions since…

Jun

19

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Sweden retreats on child jail plan – but Human Rights Watch urges full reversal as gang violence fuels political pressure

WORLD

SWEDEN’S right-wing government has abandoned its controversial proposal to imprison 13-year-olds for serious violent crimes, a major policy reversal triggered by insufficient parliamentary support and fierce opposition from legal experts, police authorities, and the prison service. Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer announced the withdrawal on June 11, saying the government "decided to act responsibly" by withdrawing the bill when it became clear the measures lacked the votes needed to pass. Instead, officials will propose lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14- a move Human Rights Watch (HRW) says is still "the wrong move". The original proposal, part of…