Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 23 July

With renewed fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki made an important announcement:  "We call upon Rwanda to immediately end any support for the M23 (and) withdraw military personnel from eastern DRC."  This call came one day after this Human Rights Watch report documented the summary executions of at least 44 people and the rape of at least 61 women and girls since March 2013. Dispatches: Lessons from the Trayvon Martin Case. The human rights to life and freedom from racial discrimination are critical to the review of the "stand your ground" laws. Such laws are in force in two dozen states.

A few years ago the European Union woke up to the fact that permitting its funding to go to Israeli settlements violates not only international law, but also EU law. On 16 July, the European Commission announced new “guidelines” intended to prevent this from happening. Will Washington finally show some principled backbone and do the same?

The BBC should take a page out of the AP's style book. The board of the World Bank met today. We hope they have a look at our new report to make some overdue policy changes regarding human rights. Hopefully the Dutch can help sway them.  Good news on children's rights! And the head-scratching moment of the day:  From this morning. HRW continues to follow the crisis in Syria, even on those days when world media attention seems directed elsewhere. Our particular focus in the past week or so has been the issue of humanitarian access -- many civilians are trapped by the fighting and cannot get the aid and medical attention they need. In a commentary yesterday, Tamara Alrifai summarized the situation clearly: Syria’s humanitarian blackmail is a war crime.