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Koo Sze-yiu, with his close-cropped hair and long gray beard, was a fixture of Hong Kong’s protest scene.

World Cup city host committees and FIFA have fallen short on the steps needed to protect players and fans, with the tournament two months away.

The Russian Supreme Court on April 9, 2026 designated “International Public Movement Memorial” as an “extremist” organization in a dramatic escalation of the Kremlin’s efforts to suppress human rights work, Human Rights Watch said today. The sweeping “extremist” designation entails a ban on engaging in any of Memorial organizations’ activities under threat of long prison sentences.

Thai authorities should urgently, thoroughly, and impartially investigate the assassination attempt on Kamonsak Leewamoh, a Muslim member of parliament and prominent human rights lawyer.

Georgian authorities forcibly returned an exiled Azerbaijani journalist, Afgan Sadigov, to Azerbaijan, exposing him to a credible risk of politically motivated prosecution and ill-treatment, Human Rights Watch said today.

Belarus’s parliament adopted a new law on April 2 banning “propaganda” of same-sex relationships, of “gender reassignment,” and even of “childlessness.”

More than 100 Israeli strikes across Lebanon on April 8, 2026, including in densely populated neighborhoods in Beirut, killed over 300 people and damaged the last main bridge linking southern Lebanon with the rest of the country. Israeli strikes making bridge crossings over the Litani River unusable threaten to sever tens of thousands of people in southern Lebanon from access to humanitarian aid, food, and health care.

Since its establishment in 1991, one of the most reliable messengers about life for Palestinian children under Israeli occupation had been a group called Defense for Children International-Palestine.

1. This submission highlights Human Rights Watch’s key concerns regarding the Tajik government’s compliance with its international obligations since its last Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2021. Since then, in November 2021 and May 2022 Tajik authorities carried out violent crackdowns on peaceful protests in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). They have also systematic sought to crush civil society through mass NGO closures and imposition of legal restrictions, and in transnational repression of government critics and dissidents living abroad, particularly in Europe including Turkey and Russia. Tajik forces committed apparent war crimes during a border dispute with Kyrgyzstan in September 2022.