This week marks 15 years since the Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted in Dublin, Ireland, but the international ban on these awful weapons is being tested like never before.

To understand the problem, let’s first understand what these weapons are and why they are banned. Explainer time…

Delivered by artillery, rockets, missiles, and aircraft, cluster munitions open in mid-air and disperse dozens or hundreds of bomblets over a wide area – like the size of a football field or two. Many of these bomblets fail to explode on initial impact, leaving duds that act like landmines for years.

These factors mean cluster munitions are inherently indiscriminate, that is, it’s nearly impossible for those firing them to aim for military targets without causing civilian causalities, as well. In other words, using them is almost guaranteed to be a war crime.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions prohibits their use, production, acquisition, transfer, and stockpiling, and it requires destruction of stockpiles. And it’s working: there have been no reports of new use, production, or transfers of cluster munitions by the 123 countries that have signed or ratified the convention.

However, a handful of countries outside the convention have produced or used cluster munitions.

HRW has detailed how Russian armed forces have repeatedly used cluster munitions in their invasion of Ukraine in attacks causing hundreds of civilian casualties. They’ve also damaged civilian objects, such as homes, hospitals, and schools. A single Russian cluster munition attack on a train station in Kramatorsk in April 2022 killed at least 58 civilians and wounded 100 others.

Ukrainian forces have also used cluster munitions on several occasions.

In Syria, the Syrian-Russian military alliance used cluster munition rockets in attacks on camps for internally displaced people in Idlib in November 2022, killing and wounding civilians. Myanmar’s air force used an apparent domestically produced cluster bomb in an attack in July 2022.

15 years on, the Convention on Cluster Munitions needs to see more international support to finally eradicate these heinous weapons.

There’s some encouraging news out of the US, where the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made history by suing a company for collecting and using children’s data to target them with behavioral advertising. Online learning provider Edmodo faces a possible fine of US$6 million.

As a website and app, Edmodo was widely used by children in kindergarten, elementary, and middle schools across the US until September 2022, when the company pivoted to only selling its product to governments.

The suit comes one year after HRW uncovered how Edmodo and other online learning products authorized by various governments around the world during the pandemic infringed on children’s privacy. Our investigation found that Edmodo was designed with the capacity to surveil children and harvest their personal data for advertising.

Our technical analysis found Edmodo could invisibly tag children and identify their devices for the sole purpose of advertising to them. It also enabled other advertisers to do the same by embedding ad-specific third-party code on its platform.

The FTC complaint, filed by the US Department of Justice, matches our findings and marks the first time the agency has moved to ban a company from compelling children to give up their privacy in order to learn.

This will hopefully, as the FTC says, send a strong message to “others in the ed tech industry,” as well. Most companies we investigated continue to surveil children online, many citing the lack of laws compelling them to do otherwise.

Learn more about our global campaign, #StudentsNotProducts, to demand online protections for children.

Regular readers will recall how in March, we highlighted here how Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, then freshly approved by lawmakers, would be a disaster for human rights.

Sadly, the president of Uganda has now signed it into law.

The new law criminalizes people simply for being who they are, and even includes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

Condemnation is rightly flooding in from around the world.

And our question from earlier in the year remains: Why aren’t Uganda’s rulers working to make everyone’s life better, rather than spending so much time and effort to make some people’s lives worse?

(compiled by Lisa Maier)

• Australia’s crackdown on climate activists (The Diplomat)
• South Africa grants Putin and all other leaders diplomatic immunity for upcoming summit (The Guardian)
• Sudan’s other war: Harrowing accounts from refugees escaping West Darfur region (Al Jazeera)
• Spain’s PM calls snap general election after heavy local and regional defeat (El País, English)