Media Coverage

Taliban officials are sending Afghan women to prison to protect them from gender-based violence, according to a UN report published Thursday. Before the Taliban seized power in 2021, there were 23 state-sponsored women protection centers in Afghanistan where survivors of gender-based violence could...

Myanmar’s military government confirmed Monday that it has been holding talks, brokered by China, with representatives of an alliance of ethnic minority armed groups against which it is engaged in fierce combat in the country’s northeast. Fighting has been raging in northern part of Shan state since...

The Taliban’s “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls in Afghanistan, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Wednesday. The Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from secondary school and university, but the rights group says there has...

Thousands of demonstrators in New Zealand are protesting the new government's policies towards indigenous Māori communities. The new center-right coalition government in Wellington plans to limit the use of Māori language, review affirmative action policies, and reassess how the country's founding...

The Philippine government will resume peace talks with the country’s communist rebels, in a bid to end decades of civil strife. Authorities will re-engage with the New People’s Army (NPA), the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, for the first time in six years, both parties and...

Bangladesh has launched a sweeping and violent crackdown on opposition parties to "eliminate competition" ahead of general elections, including arresting almost 10,000 activists, Human Rights Watch said Monday. As well as the thousands arrested—many from the key Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)—a...

Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group. Afghan Witness—an open-source project run by the nonprofit Center for...

United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said he is “alarmed” by reports that Afghan refugees are being abused in Pakistan as the country carries out its policy of forced mass deportation. In a statement Wednesday, Türk expressed concern at reports that “the arbitrary expulsion of Afghan...

Philippine human rights campaigner Leila de Lima has been granted bail, according to her lawyer, putting her a step closer to freedom after nearly seven years behind bars. De Lima was “triumphant” on Monday after a judge granted her bail. One of the most outspoken critics of former President Rodrigo...

David McBride—a former army lawyer who revealed information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan—could be facing a “life sentence” if found guilty in a trial that started on Monday. While Australia has established an independent special investigator into alleged war crimes committed by...