"Women together are invincible. We can change the world, but we have to do it together." ~ Isabelle Allende

Afghanistan is not the only country where women’s rights are under attack this International Women’s Day. But the speed and extent of the obliteration of women’s rights in Afghanistan is a warning to women around the world about the fragility of progress toward equality, how quickly it can vanish, and how few will defend it

This International Women’s Day, we honor all the women who support each other in these extraordinary times. Today, hundreds of thousands of women have fled the conflict in Ukraine, many caring for dependents, after being separated from their adult male relatives who are required to remain behind because conscription has been activated. They join the millions of refugees around the world. This is another reminder that armed conflicts and refugee crises are women’s rights crises.

Indiscriminate Attacks May Amount to War Crimes 

As Russian forces invading Ukraine confront stronger and more effective resistance than the Kremlin probably anticipated, the big question is: what comes next. The Russian military has a history of meeting such resistance with serious violations of the laws of war, including deliberately targeting civilians and subjecting

It’s a harrowing situation for everyone trying to get out of harm’s way, and everyone escaping the war, no matter where they come from, should be allowed to leave. A week into the invasion, marked by serious violations of the laws of war, one million people have fled across borders into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Slovakia

4 Civilians Killed, 10 Wounded

Listen to HRW's Jayshree Bajoria in conversation with Siddharth Varadarajan, Vidushi Marda, Vrinda Bhandari, and Apar Gupta as they discuss India, tech, and human rights.

(New York) – Older people are often at heightened risk of abuses during armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. All parties to armed conflict should end abuses against older people and facilitate humanitarian assistance to older people in need. The United Nations Security Council should ensure that the UN addresses the need for enhanced protection of older civilians in armed conflict in its work. The 49-page report, “No One Is Spared: Abuses against Older People in Armed Conflict,” describes patterns of abuses documented by Human Rights Watch between 2013 and 2021 against older people affected by armed conflicts in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Mali, Mozambique, Nagorno-Karabakh, Niger, South Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine. The report also draws on the serious protracted violence in two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, Myanmar security force atrocities against older ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine State, and the experiences of older refugees in Lebanon displaced by conflict in Syria.