Daily Brief Audio Series
Pamela Fabiana Cobas. Mercedes Roxana Figueroa. Andrea Amarante.
These three women died horrific deaths, after a man threw a Molotov cocktail into their boarding house room in Buenos Aires last week. They were all lesbian women.
Cobas was severely burned and died almost immediately. Figueroa, her partner, suffered burns covering 90 percent of her body and died of organ failure two days after the attack. Amarante died in hospital on Sunday. A fourth woman, Sofía Castro Riglos, remains in critical condition.
In the wake of the appalling attack, people have rightly been demanding justice and taking to the streets of Argentina’s capital.
Police have arrested a 62-year-old male suspect. They have not yet announced a motive for the deadly crime, but hatred against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people has been rising in Argentina lately. Prominent politicians, including some who hold high office, have been promoting such hatred.
A 2023 report highlighted anti-LGBT speech by members of President Javier Milei’s political party, as well as on social media and in the streets, during last year’s presidential election campaign. As a candidate, Milei himself railed against gender and sexuality education in apocalyptic terms. The current foreign minister, Diana Mondino, compared marriage equality to head lice.
The report found that rising hate speech in Argentina, “built a climate of segregation, rejection and discrimination; the most fertile ground for violence toward historically vulnerable groups.”
The atmosphere, poisoned by politicians, has been contributing to already high levels of violence against queer communities, well before last week’s attack.
Public demands for justice in the case of this horrific crime are spot on. Authorities should conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the killings and ensure proper medical care and housing for the surviving woman.
Politicians’ promotion of hatred and their politics of scapegoating vulnerable minorities needs to be comprehensively and repeatedly called out, too.
Government officials and others with large audiences have a particular responsibility here. They should speak out against rhetoric that stigmatizes queer women and contributes to a climate in which they are seen as deserving of violence.
Any reasonably intelligent person knows what hate brings. Any reasonably responsible person knows they must condemn it.
In the past seven months, Israeli forces have carried out strikes on humanitarian aid workers in Gaza – not once, not twice, but over and over.
Israel’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy, which killed seven aid workers last month, was far from being an isolated “mistake.” The Israeli military has hit aid workers’ convoys and premises at least eight times, according to a new report, killing or injuring at least 31 aid workers and those with them.
It’s critical to realize here Israel is striking known locations of aid workers on the ground. Aid groups had provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities through a process used in war zones called “deconfliction.” In humanitarian work, the basic idea is, aid workers tell warring parties where they are, and those warring parties try to avoid hitting them in their military operations.
Communication between warring parties and humanitarians working in the war zone is essential, but when the attacks described in the new report came, Israeli authorities did not issue advance warnings to any of the aid organizations beforehand. Eight strikes on humanitarian aid workers suggests – at the very least – fundamental flaws with the deconfliction system.
If the government of Israel is concerned by this pattern of attacks on aid workers, it should allow international experts to conduct an independent review of the military’s humanitarian deconfliction process.
Israel’s allies ought to pressure Israel to do so and not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but also because they may be connected directly to these military strikes. In at least one of these incidents, Israel apparently made use of weapons and other equipment provided by the US.
Last week, US President Joe Biden announced his administration has “held up” at least one shipment of 3,500 bombs and artillery shells to Israel. This partial pause on weapon transfers didn’t go far enough, but was a step in the right direction.
Other allies have also revised their policies of supplying weapons to Israel. Canada announced it would halt future arms exports. Italy and Spain also stopped new licenses. In the Netherlands, a lawsuit forced the government to pause sales of F-35 fighter jet parts.
All governments should suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit systematic and widespread violations of the laws of war – including using starvation as a weapon of war – against Palestinian civilians.
Remember: governments that continue to provide arms to the Israeli government risk being complicit in war crimes.
Daily Brief subscribers are already familiar with the war in Sudan generally, and atrocities in Darfur more specifically. Since the conflict started in April 2023, we’ve been ringing alarm bells about the crisis, over and over, and highlighting the international community’s failure to address it.
Still, some of the details in a new, 218-page report are exceptionally horrifying.
The new investigation looks at how the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias carried out wave after wave of attacks in El Geneina, the capital city of West Darfur state last year. They killed unarmed civilians in their thousands, rapedwomen and girls, and tortured detainees.
The RSF and allied militias also looted on a massive scale and razed entire neighborhoods to the ground. They sent hundreds of thousands fleeing over the border to Chad.
These attacks were targeted on ethnic grounds, not random. The RSF and their allied militias focused on neighborhoods of El Geneina that were predominantly home to ethnic Massalit people.
The RSF is largely recruited from the old Janjaweed, the militia known for their appalling crimes against non-Arab groups, including the Massalit, in 2003-2004. The RSF’s allied militias are mainly Arab. Attackers used ethnic slurs against their victims and made it clear they wanted them out of Darfur.
Many of the atrocities described in the new report are war crimes or crimes against humanity. The targeting of the Massalit, with the apparent aim to have them permanently leave Darfur is ethnic cleansing.
It is also possible that the RSF and their allies killed Massalit civilians with the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part the Massalit population in at least West Darfur. That would mean we’re looking at possible genocide here – perhaps even still in progress.
Of course, there must be justice for crimes committed, and the new report identifies individuals who held command responsibility over the forces that carried out these crimes. The global community should support the investigations of the International Criminal Court (ICC) – and not just in its Darfur work, but across all the Court’s work.
However, justice takes time – the first ICC trial of Darfur crimes from 2003-2004 only started in 2022 – and the people of Darfur are under threat again right now.
Human Rights Watch is therefore calling on the United Nations, in coordination with the African Union, to deploy a new mission to protect civilians at risk in Sudan. This mission – along with other measures, like targeted sanctions on perpetrators and an expanded arms embargo – is needed urgently.
How many more massacres must the people of Darfur suffer before governments take serious action?
Israel is starving Gaza, and children are paying the price.
It’s doing this in defiance of the World Court, and today, I’m going to go into a bit of detail to explain what’s been happening in The Hague, but please, never forget this fundamental point: the government of Israel is starving Gaza as a weapon of war.
The International Court of Justice has issued legally binding orders requiring Israel to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. The Court has done this twice, in fact: first in January and again in March.
Let’s be clear about a couple of things here.
First, the International Court of Justice – the ICJ, also called “the World Court” – is not the same thing as the International Criminal Court, the ICC. They are both based in The Hague, and they are both in the news regarding the Gaza crisis, so I’ve seen some confusion out there, particularly on social media.
The ICC can deal with individual responsibility for atrocity crimes – including war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It has not issued indictments related to the Gaza crisis yet, but rumors of possible indictments of top Israeli officials, and inappropriate threats of retaliation against ICC officials from US senators and others, have been in the headlines.
The ICJ does not deal with individuals; it deals with states, specifically international legal disputes between states. In the relevant case here, South Africa is alleging that Israel is violating the international Genocide Convention of 1948. The ICJ is being asked to make a legal determination about state responsibility for genocide.
The ICJ has not made that determination one way or the other yet. It may take years before they rule on the question of genocide.
However, the ICJ has issued what are called “provisional measures” to address the immediate situation. Citing “catastrophic conditions” in Gaza in January, the court issued legally binding orders, including an order to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. They gave the government of Israel a month to comply, and the government pretty much ignored the Court.
In March, with the “spread of famine and starvation,” the Court imposed additional measures, ordering Israel to ensure the unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance, in full cooperation with the UN, including by opening new land crossing points. Again, Israel contravened the Court and the legally binding order.
Now, it’s true that, in April, Israeli authorities allowed more aid trucks to enter Gaza, and they opened an additional crossing and allowed construction of a port for aid entry. However, the increase in aid was small, nowhere near enough aid to meet the overwhelming need, according to the UN and humanitarian groups, who reported that Israel continued to block critical aid items.
The most recent news from the ground is even more grim. On May 5, Israeli authorities closed the Kerem Shalom crossing after a Hamas rocket attack, and on May 7, they seized the Rafah crossing, thus blocking aid entering from Egypt currently.
There’s a lot of detail here, I know, but the result of all this is straightforward enough. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, about half of them children,
face famine, and many risk dying of starvation following Israel’s continued disregard for the law.
In short, Israel is starving Gaza, and children are paying the price.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting Europe this week, and as is too often the case with these high-level meetings, European leaders are strenuously avoiding the words “human rights” and “crimes against humanity.”
Yesterday, China’s leader held meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron, including a trilateral get-together with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
There was reportedly no mention of human rights anywhere. European leaders’ failure is as shocking as it is unsurprising.
It’s shocking because the human rights situation under Xi Jinping’s rule has been increasingly brutal. His government has committed crimes against humanity – including mass detention, forced labor, and cultural persecution – against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province. It’s also erased Hong Kong’s freedoms. Thousands of critics across China are behind bars.
European leaders’ failure is also unsurprising because we’ve seen it so many times before. Just a few weeks ago German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Beijing, where he, too, neglected to mention China’s serious human rights violations.
As always, trade dominated EU-China discussions yesterday. There were spats over potential EU tariffs targeting China’s subsidies of electric vehicles and a Chinese threat to retaliate on things like French cognac.
Trade is important. No one denies that.
But something seems to happen to top EU leaders when they meet with their Chinese counterpart. It’s not that they’re afraid to bring up difficult issues. The trade matters they talked about yesterday were tense and tricky, as were discussions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which they also raised.
But when it comes to China’s human rights violations, EU leaders somehow lose their tongues.
It’s as if EU leaders have forgotten their own power: that the EU is about one sixth of the global economy and that the interconnectedness of the Chinese and European economies – two of the three largest in the world – is not something Beijing would want to wreck on a whim.
Once again, EU leaders have behaved as if they are simply too scared to even say the words “human rights” or “crimes against humanity” in Xi’s presence.
Some leadership we’ve got here.