Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 25 April 2014

(Stories from yesterday on the one year anniversary of the Bangladesh garment factory collapse and the Istanbul Convention available here).
In an attempt to keep everyone happy, the Obama administration offers two types of rhetoric: secure the border to "finally stem the tide of illegal immigrants" while targeting serious criminals, not "folks who are here just because they're trying to figure out how to feed their families". It's an appealing formula – but it's not what Obama's administration is actually doing. Human Rights Watch has documented how so-called "targeted" interior enforcement is often anything but. Bahrain has a well-deserved reputation for torture, but now the authorities are threatening action against people who discuss it. Bahrain’s official news agency asserted that “those who make false allegations about torture will be challenged by law.” One week before Iraqi's head to the polls to vote in parliamentary elections, at least 31 were killed today in a series of blasts targeted a Shia election rally in Baghdad. From this morning: "Very unstable." That's how the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in eastern Ukraine, Klaus Zillikens, described the situation in the country. After knife-edge tensions flared into gun battles between state security forces and pro-Moscow separatists at the flashpoint town of Slavyansk yesterday and Russia began new military exercises with its forces within one kilometer of the border, US Secretary of State John Kerry was less diplomatic, accusing Moscow of launching a "full-throated effort to actively sabotage the democratic process" in its neighbor. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned of "consequences" following Slavyansk, and there are fresh reports of gun shots and explosions at the Kramatorsk airport (photo above). Meanwhile, the OSCE's media watchdog has highlighted attacks on journalists in the country, though in one piece of encouraging news, the reporter Simon Ostrovsky, who had been held by separatists for three days, was released yesterday, and he has given a brief interview about his ordeal.