Last month, the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a new set of laws that would allow minority religious groups from neighbouring Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to more easily gain Indian citizenship. While at first glance these policies seem welcoming to targeted minorities, they notably exclude Muslims, raising questions about their true motivations.
Across Nigeria, reports of mental health patients being mistreated in “treatment centres” – presumed medical centres dedicated to treating mental health patients – led human rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) to visit and investigate these centres. They found that patients were being chained, denied meals and a sanitary environment, and in some cases even harmed physically as part of their treatment procedure.

Tonight, over 52,000 people will fall asleep in detention centers across the United States. Many have come fleeing gang violence, domestic violence, and poverty. They are hungry, as they are not given sufficient food, and the little food that is given is lacking in nutrients, or sometimes even rotten. They are not guaranteed to receive toothbrushes and soap. Conditions are so inhumane and so clearly based in xenophobia that U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called detention centers “concentration camps.”1

On August 31st, 2017, the lifeless husks of 9 women and 10 Rohingya refugees washed ashore the sands of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.1 Under dictatorial rule of the Myanmar army between 1962 and 2011, the Rohingya people of the Rakhine State have been handed a predicament of institutionalized oppression on the grounds of religious and ethnic discrimination. While these acts of terror are often justified by the supposed targeting of extremist subsets within the population, the scale and scope of these acts can only be regarded as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” says United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. 2