Daily Brief Audio Series
Solomon was a doctor in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. When armed conflict broke out there in August last year, pitting Ethiopian government forces against an Amhara militia group known as Fano, Solomon and his colleagues were overwhelmed.
Hospitals were facing increasing casualties amid both diminishing resources and attacks by government forces. Like many medical professionals working in towns experiencing heavy fighting, Solomon was treating every type of patient, whoever needed medical attention.
The Ethiopian military took a dim view of such humanitarian spirit.
When government forces took control of Solomon’s town in November, soldiers seized the hospital’s ambulance, accusing doctors of using it to help treat Fano militia fighters. They also started harassing Solomon and other staff, threatening them, and repeatedly searching the hospital, as well as their homes.
Despite all this, Solomon and his colleagues continued to treat patients. But by December threatening phone calls mounted. He later found out the military had placed his name on a list of people suspected of providing medical treatment to Fano fighters.
The threats could hardly be more serious. Government security forces in the region – including the military and allied militias – have assaulted and even killed healthcare workers.
Ethiopian government forces have repeatedly raided hospitals in search of patients with injuries like gunshot wounds, which the military considers proof of taking part in fighting or of being affiliated with their enemy.
They’ve also looted and destroyed medical supplies, and targeted ambulances, including in at least one case, in an apparent drone strike.
Fearing for his life, Solomon eventually fled the town. He’s not alone. Growing numbers of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers in the Amhara region have had to stop practicing medicine or have relocated beyond the front lines.
The result of all this has been the utter devastation of the healthcare system in the Amhara region, as our new report details.
These widespread attacks by Ethiopian security forces amount to war crimes against medical professionals, patients, and health facilities.
International humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, prohibits attacks on civilians and civilian objects. In addition, it affords special protections to health facilities, medical professionals, patients, and ambulances.
As civilians continue to bear the brunt of fighting in the Amhara region and as war crimes mount, the questions become increasingly urgent for the outside world.
What will Ethiopia’s international partners do? Will they insist on an end to attacks on healthcare facilities? Will they call for those responsible for war crimes to be held to account? And will there be any consequences from Ethiopia’s allies if the government refuses?
Of all the countries with the most appalling human rights records, Eritrea is probably the least known internationally.
Even folks who don’t have anything to do with foreign affairs are generally aware of North Korea’s horrors and Saudi Arabia’s long list of abuses.
Eritrea’s? Not so much.
However, once you learn about this country in the Horn of Africa, you’ll never forget.
For more than 30 years since gaining independence in 1993, Eritrea has suffered under the one-man rule of unelected President Isaias Afewerki. There are no independent courts, no legislature – essentially nothing to check his power.
Afewerki and his regime call all the shots, and no dissent is allowed. Opposition parties can’t operate. There are no independent civil society groups and no independent media.
Perhaps the most serious set of human rights abuses in the country concerns the government’s policy of indefinite national service, including compulsory military conscription.
The authorities draft Eritreans – both men and unmarried women, including students and children – and you have to stay in the military or civil service until… who knows? Two years, five years, fourteen years, more? That’s the “indefinite” part: your national service doesn’t end until the government says it ends. It’s completely arbitrary.
And for all those uncountable years you’re a conscript, you’ll often be facing inhuman and degrading punishment, including torture. Oh, and if you try to evade the draft, the authorities will retaliate against your family.
It’s no wonder so many Eritreans try to escape the country and end up as refugees abroad. Often they attempt to get to the EU, where most people are unaware of their plight and where some people elect politicians promising to punish refugees on the misguided notion that being cruel here will somehow stop people fleeing unknown situations elsewhere.
International ignorance about Eritrea (and other human rights crisis zones) is thus not just a shame intellectually; it has impacts on politics close to home.
One of the few ways the international community draws at least some attention to Eritrea’s abuses is through the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker. He recently delivered a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, outlining the horrors mentioned above and much more.
Next week, his mandate comes up for renewal. Some countries, like Russia and Iran, are trying to sink it, but let’s hope other countries manage to push it through.
The suffering of the people of Eritrea gets barely any attention in this world. It demands at least this.
Today, the Hungarian government assumes leadership of the European Union for the next six months, sparking deep concerns among human rights experts.
Until the end of this year, Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. This doesn’t give Budapest any kind of dictatorial power, of course – the EU and its institutions are far more multi-layered and resilient than that. But it does give Hungary’s government a key role in chairing top-level meetings and setting the agenda for those decisive meetings.
And that’s worrying enough, given the Hungarian government’s wrecking-ball approach to democracy and human rights in Hungary. For 14 years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling party, Fidesz, have “systematically centralized power, hollowed out democratic safeguards, and weakened the rule of law.”
Orbán changes the country’s constitution at his whim, declaring several states of emergency that allow him to rule by decree, side-stepping even the now rubber-stamp parliament.
The ruling party does everything it can to silence critics, attacking independent journalists, media outlets, and civil society organizations, including, most recently, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International and investigative journalism group Átlátszó.
Orbán’s party has taken control of the majority of the country’s media, using it to pump out pro-government and pro-party lies.
They also constantly vilify minority groups – migrants, LGBT people, and others – to stir up hate and create scapegoats to divert people’s attention from their anti-democratic power grab and from the fact that, under Fidesz, Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU and also the most impoverished.
They spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money on nationwide media campaigns of fearmongering disinformation against these groups – and also against the European Union.
Now, for the next six months, they’re in the driver’s seat of the EU.
Last month, Hungarian officials revealed that the motto for Hungary’s half-year presidency of the Council of the European Union would be the staggeringly unoriginal, “Make Europe Great Again,” or MEGA.
I don’t know which era of European history the Hungarian government is referring to here, but I do know many of us who’ve been following their abuses over the last 14 years are MEGA-worried about what’s to come in the next six months.
If you have a criminal conviction, should you lose your right to vote?
Public debate on this has blossomed in the United States in recent weeks, for obvious reasons. But, despite the media’s tendency to focus on individual personalities, all the buzz has also exposed a fundamental issue.
The US is out of step with the rest of the world in denying the right to vote to large numbers of citizens based on criminal convictions – what’s known as “felony disenfranchisement.”
A new report examines laws in 136 countries around the world and finds most never, or rarely, use convictions to reject a person’s voting rights. And even among those countries that do, the US is one of the most restrictive, disenfranchising a larger proportion of people.
The US currently bans more than 4.4 million citizens from voting due to felony convictions. That’s equivalent to the entire population of the US state of Kentucky or Oregon.
And, of course, some groups get hit more than others.Racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Black Americans, “continue to be disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and subjected to harsher sentences, including life imprisonment without parole…” So, they are disproportionally prohibited from voting, as well.
One in 19 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised. That’s three and a half times as many as non-Black Americans.
Yet again, we see the pervasive poison of white supremacy in US history at the origin of a US failure on fundamental rights.
US laws mandating felony disenfranchisement date back to the end of the Civil War. After formerly enslaved Black men gained the right to vote through the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, state lawmakers began expanding the list of crimes defined as felonies to target Black people. At the same time, states began revoking voting rights for any felony conviction.
The federal government officially barred some of these policies, known as “Jim Crow laws,” in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but felony disenfranchisement laws remain in 48 US states.
The current media buzz may all be about one man, but this is not an issue about any single individual. It’s about 4.4 million people being prevented from exercising a fundamental right.
The US is out of step with much of the rest of the world on this – strange for a country that likes to think of itself as a leading democracy.
As the impacts of global warming become ever more apparent, heat has hit the headlines around the world these days like never before.
In Saudi Arabia this month, more than 1,300 people have died during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Heat stress has been a major contributing factor to the death toll, with temperatures soaring beyond 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
Across the US, some 65 million people are facing heat alerts as another “heat dome” has pushed temperatures in some places over 50C (122F), as well. Heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes, floods, and tornados combined in the US, and heat-related deaths have been increasing, with more than 2,300 in 2023.
In both places – Saudi Arabia and the US – human harms have been exacerbated by authorities failing to make appropriate preparations or refusing to address longstanding social issues, ignoring that some people are more vulnerable to heat-related health problems than others.
In other words, the deadly dangers were predictable and avoidable, if only governments acted in time and made saving lives their priority.
In many ways, it’s the same with global warming as a whole. The problem is known, as is what’s needed to save lives – but governments are failing to act nonetheless.
Let’s review the science. Global temperatures have been rising because humans have been pumping too many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in particular carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
Oil, gas, and coal had been just sitting there, holding carbon in the ground for millions of years. Then, we came along and extracted and burned them, releasing that carbon as carbon dioxide into the air.
The result is, over the past ten years, the planet has been about 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the pre-industrial 1800s. That’s the hottest decade on record. And 2023 was the worst year ever, with global average near-surface temperature reaching 1.45 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments aimed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. The vast majority of climate scientists now say this target will not be met, and a rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius, or worse, is more likely.
In short, humanity has been heating up the planet, and we are missing international targets to try to get things under control, or at least make the impacts more manageable – or at the very least, a bit less dystopian.
Governments need to commit to rapidly phasing out all fossil fuel extraction and use. Specifically, this means stopping authorization for all new fossil fuel projects, and ending government subsidies and international finance, for oil, gas, and coal development.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about “saving the planet”; it’s about saving people. We need to have a planet that’s habitable for humans. This means our authorities taking decisions, locally and globally, that prioritize human lives: in Saudi Arabia, in the US, and around the world.