About 30 percent of all Russian children with disabilities live in state institutions. A new report shows that many of these children suffered serious abuse and neglect in the institutions, impeding their development. Some children said the orphanage staff beat them, injected them with sedatives, and sent them to psychiatric hospitals to control or punish them. Parents of children with disabilities, like Mila, whose daughter has Down’s syndrome, face great pressure by hospital officials to abandon their children to the state.
Despite an official ceasefire, violence between Christians and Muslims is increasing again in eastern and central Central African Republic. Since June, Human Rights Watch and Stichting Vluchteling, a Dutch organization, have documented at least 146 killings, a figure representing only a fraction of the total reported killings. The new UN mission urgently needs to get more troops into eastern and central areas and take bold steps to protect civilians from these brutal attacks.
West African governments should ensure rights protections as a crucial element in controlling the unprecedented Ebola epidemic ravaging the region. Governments in Ebola-affected countries should better protect health workers from infection, limit use of quarantines, address the gender dimensions of the outbreak, ensure security forces responding to the crisis respect basic rights, and facilitate independent monitoring of emergency measures and donations.
In Iraq's fight against the Islamic State (IS) militant group, government shelling apparently hit a hospital in Falluja yesterday - just one day after the new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, called a halt to shelling of civilian areas. New evidence of an airstrike earlier this month shows a school housing displaced people hit near Tikrit, killing at least 31 civilians, including 24 children. According to three survivors, no fighters from IS or other military objects were in or around the school at the time. At a summit in Paris today, 30 countries, including 10 Arab states, committed to fight IS.
