Cracks in the armor of authoritarian states over the past year should give the world hope that brutal regimes can be held accountable, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in its annual analysis of human rights around the world.
HRW’s 2023 World Report charts the litany of human rights crises that have afflicted millions of people over the past 12 months, most dramatically in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have “continuously rolled back women’s rights since they took over,” and in China, where the Massed by an estimated one million Uyghurs and other Turkish Muslims, it is characterized by “heaviness, scale and ferocity”.
But fault lines have emerged in seemingly impenetrable countries, said HRW acting executive director Tirana Hassan. Hassan cited street protests in Chinese cities against strict “zero-Covid” lockdown measures and in Iran, where the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody for not wearing her hijab properly sparked the largest street protests in the country in years.
“What 2022 has shown us is that there are cracks in the authoritarian armor,” Hassan said. “There was an uprising of people who expressed their commitment, their desire and their demand for the realization of human rights.” But for things to change, states around the world must support them, she said.
“We cannot assume that this will continue until 2023 just because there are tensions and people are on the streets in Iran, for example,” Hassan said.
HRW also hailed the international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to protect refugees, investigate crimes and impose sanctions as a positive note in a year of dramatic human rights setbacks around the world.
When the organization released its global assessment for 2022, Hassan said that for the first time in decades, nations have come together to ensure “justice and accountability” for war crimes and to protect refugees.
“We have seen what is possible when the international community comes together to prioritize the safety and protection of people fleeing war,” Hassan said. Within weeks of the invasion, the international community launched criminal investigations, collected evidence and mobilized the International Court of Justice, she said. “We have seen what is possible when it is mobilized to ensure there is justice and accountability for the most egregious crimes that are being committed, including war crimes. The bar has moved for the first time in decades and it has not gone down, it has gone up.”
Hassan suggested that governments should reflect on the possible outcome if they had acted earlier, at the start of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 or when Russian planes bombed civilian areas in Syria in 2016. “What would have happened if the international community held Putin accountable for these other crimes, or even held Russia accountable for the initial invasion of Ukraine? She asked.
“Failing to hold autocrats and human rights abusers to account encourages them,” Hassan said, urging governments to respond similarly to human rights abuses outside of Europe.
“We could expect the same kind of response to gross human rights violations in Israel and Palestine, in Afghanistan and around the world. This is about how seriously the world takes its commitments. It’s reproducible. 23 is an opportunity for States to show that it’s not just about what happened in Europe.”
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The armed conflict in Ethiopia, she said, has received only a “tiny fraction” of the global attention that has focused on Ukraine, despite two years of atrocities including a series of massacres by warring factions.
“We cannot underestimate the ripple effect of unleashing some of the world’s most serious crimes,” Hassan said, recalling that 2022 was a “very challenging year” for women’s rights — particularly in Afghanistan , which provides the “shartest picture” of what the total erosion of women’s rights looks like”.
“In Afghanistan, our job is to continue to stand up for human rights, to strengthen them by any means necessary and to ensure that the Taliban are pressured to reverse their mindset. We often believe that the Taliban are untouchable. You are not.
“What I would say, given this incredibly dark time, is that we have seen some extraordinary backlash to protect women’s rights around the world.”
In a year in which the US Supreme Court reversed 50 years of federal protections for abortion rights, Latin America has seen a so-called “green wave” of women-led abortion rights expansion, including in Mexico, Argentina and Colombia “roadmap” for other countries said Hasan.