JAKARTA, Indonesia โ Widespread opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the strength of a unified response against human rights abuses, and there are signs that power is shifting as people take to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction in Iran, China and elsewhere, according to a leading rights group.
A โlitany of human rights crisesโ emerged in 2022, but the year also presented new opportunities to strengthen protections against violations, Human Rights Watch said in its annual world report on human rights conditions in more than 100 countries and territories.
โAfter years of piecemeal and often half-hearted efforts on behalf of civilians under threat in places including Yemen, Afghanistan and South Sudan, the worldโs mobilization around Ukraine reminds us of the extraordinary potential when governments realize their human rights responsibilities on a global scale,โ the groupโs acting executive director, Tirana Hassan, said in the preface to the 712-page report.
โAll governments should bring the same spirit of solidarity to the multitude of human rights crises around the globe, and not just when it suits their interests,โ she said.
Relatives of soldiers from the Azov Regiment and protesters hold banners against Russia on Aug. 18, 2022, in Lviv, Ukraine.ย
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a broad group of nations imposed wide-ranging sanctions while rallying to Kyiv's support, while the United Nations Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court both opened investigations into abuses, HRW said.
Countries now need to ask themselves what might have happened if they had taken such measures after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, or applied the lessons elsewhere like Ethiopia, where two years of armed conflict has contributed to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, Hassan said.
โGovernments and the U.N. have condemned the summary killings, widespread sexual violence and pillage, but have done little else,โ she said of the situation in Ethiopia, where Tigray forces signed an agreement with the government late last year in hope of ending the conflict.
Bags with dead bodies are seen during the exhumation Sept. 16, 2022, in the recently retaken area of Izium, Ukraine.ย
The New York-based organization highlighted the demonstrations in Iran that erupted in mid-September when Mahsa Amini died after being arrested by the country's morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic's strict dress code, as well as protests in Sri Lanka that forced the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign, and the democratic election in Brazil of President Luiz Inรกcio Lula da Silva over far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
โCourageous people time and again still take extraordinary risks to take to the streets, even in places like Afghanistan and China, to stand up for their rights,โ HRW's Asia director Elaine Pearson told reporters at the report's launch in Jakarta.
In China, Human Rights Watch said the U.N. and others' increased focus on the treatment of Uyghurs and Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region has โput Beijing on the defensiveโ internationally, while domestic protests against the government's โzero-COVIDโ strategy also included broader criticism of President Xi Jinping's rule.
As many Western governments turn away from China on trade toward India, however, Pearson admonished them not to ignore Prime Minister Narendra Modi's own human rights record.
โIndia, under Prime Minister Modi, has also seen very similar abuses, the systematic discrimination against religious minorities, especially Muslims, the stifling of political dissent, the use of technology to suppress free expression and tighten its grip on power.โ
At a later press conference in Beirut, HRW highlighted economic crises in the Middle East and North Africa that have impacted peopleโs ability to meet their basic needs and have, in turn, triggered social unrest and violence, sometimes followed by government repression.
โOutside of the Gulf, nearly every country in the region is suffering from some kind of major economic challenge,โ said Adam Coogle, citing a growing currency crisis in Egypt and fuel and electricity crises in Lebanon and Syria. In Jordan, fuel price hikes have led to protests that turned violent.
One of the greatest humanitarian crises continues to be in Myanmar, where the military seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and since then has brutally cracked down on any dissent. The military leadership has taken more than 17,000 political prisoners since then and killed more than 2,700 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
Human Rights Watch said peace attempts by Myanmar's neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have failed, and that aside from barring the country's military leaders from its high-level meetings, the bloc has โimposed minimal pressure on Myanmar.โ
It urged ASEAN to engage with opposition groups in exile and โintensify pressure on Myanmar by aligning with international efforts to cut off the junta's foreign currency revenue and weapons purchases.โ
In Jakarta, Pearson noted that the only lasting solution to the Rohingya refugee situation would be holding Myanmar's government accountable for their persecution, and giving the Rohingya the ability to safely return.
โMost Rohingya want to go home, but they want safety, they want equal treatment, they want their land back, and they want the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide held to account.โ
HRW chose Indonesia, the current chair of ASEAN, as the site to launch its report in the hopes that Jakarta would use the opportunity to push the group to hold Myanmar to account for implementing its five-point peace process, Pearson said.
The Hunted: These are the Ukrainians Russia wanted to find
Viktor Maruniak
Updated
Two carloads of Russians came for Viktor Maruniak on his 60th birthday.
It was March 21. Maruniak, the head of Stara Zburivka village, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, said he and three other local men were taken to a nearby hotel, blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, strangled and forced to strip naked in below zero weather.
"They'd point a gun toward our heads or toward the head of someone else, saying if you don't say something, we will kill them," Maruniak said. "Something was turned off in my head. It helped me survive. I was out of my body."
After several days, he said, he was taken to a second detention center and tortured with electric shocks. They asked where weapons were stored. He said his captors' vehicles and uniforms, along with documents he spotted and conversations he overheard, indicated that he had been taken by a special paramilitary police force under Russia's National Guard.
To his surprise, he was released three weeks later, on the condition that he return to his village as an informant.
Instead, he fled to Latvia. He said he had nine broken ribs. Photographs taken after his ordeal show him thin and withered, with injuries to his hands, back, buttocks and leg. He looks with a level gaze at the camera, a man beyond shock or sorrow, as if nothing human beings might do to each other would surprise him anymore.
"They kept kidnapping people in my village," he said. "Nobody knows where they are kept and why they are kidnapped."
Ihor Kuraian
Updated
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ihor Kuraian buried his wedding rings for safekeeping and signed up with a volunteer military group in Kherson. Kuraian and his friends planned to storm a detention center where pro-Ukrainian activists were being held โ an idea they later abandoned.
They had gathered 300 Molotov cocktails, 14 guns and a bag of grenades. When Russians found the weapons cache in his car, they tied him up and dragged him to a basement.
They interrogated him, twisted his fingers with pliers and beat him with a wooden club, he said. One man was beaten so badly his sternum fractured, and he died slowly, Kuraian recounted.
Under torture, Kuraian named another person involved in the plan to storm the detention center. When Russians forced him to call the man, he slipped false information into their conversation as a warning. The friend fled. Russians also took over his social media accounts to pump out propaganda.
"They wanted me to cooperate," he said. "They even offered to make me mayor of Kherson. I refused."
Kuraian was detained in Crimea and featured in a propaganda spot about prison conditions on Russian television. His family saw the video and lobbied for him to be released in an April 28 prisoner exchange.
"We were exchanged as you see in the movies," he said. "Walk on the highway towards each other."
Vlad Buryak
Updated
Before the war, Vlad Buryak had the plump, carefree face of a well-loved child. Family photos show his father, Oleg Buryak, gazing at him with a happy smile in front of a Christmas tree.
All that changed at 11:22 a.m. on April 8th at the Vasylivka checkpoint between Melitopol and Zaporizhzhia, where Russians seized Vlad, then 16 years old, according to evidence gathered by his father, the head of the Zaporizhzhia district administration. As a guard looked on, Vlad called his father from a detention center and said he had not been beaten.
Buryak struggled to find words to help his son. "Do not get into conflicts, do not get nervous, do not get pissed off," he advised.
Vlad had two questions for his father: "Why am I here?" and "When am I going to get out?"
As Buryak scrambled to negotiate his child's release, the answer to the first question became clear: He was the reason Vlad had been taken. The Russians wanted local leaders like him to stand in front of a Russian flag and welcome them.
Three hard months passed before Vlad could tell the world all the things he hadn't said on those calls with his dad -- about the torture he'd witnessed, the blood he'd mopped up, the man who broke down and tried to kill himself.
Finally, on July 7, Vlad was released. Buryak held his son in his arms.
"We are going home," Buryak said. "Thank God."
Yevheniia Virlych
Updated
Yevheniia Virlych, editor of the local news website Kavun City, and her husband, Vladyslav Hladkyi, have spent years writing about Russian efforts to infiltrate Kherson and cultivate collaborators there.
When Kherson fell, they went into hiding and pretended on social media that they were in Poland. In fact, they were barricaded in a friend's apartment with their cat.
They never went outside. They set up a code so they would know whether to open the front door. Three rings at the doorbell meant one friend; two rings and a knock meant another.
"I was afraid 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Hladkyi said. "I had headaches. I've got a tic with my left eye."
One July afternoon, Virlych was near the open kitchen window when she overheard two Russian soldiers asking around for her by name. She and her husband created fake Telegram accounts to book tickets on the next bus they could find.
Forty Russian checkpoints later, they were in Zaporizhzhia looking at a Ukrainian flag, wondering whether it was a Russian fake.
It wasn't a fake. "It was real freedom," Hladkyi said.
"I wanted to cry," Virlych said.
Ilya Yenin
Updated
On a warm June night, a dozen armed men in balaclavas scaled the fence of Ilya Yenin's house in Russian-occupied Melitopol. Yenin's partner, Olga, went to the front door and was greeted by the glare of a flashlight. The Russians knew who they were looking for.
They hit Ilya a couple of times and asked where his brother Daniil was.
Both brothers were civilian activists, and Ilya helped found a group to deliver food and medicine to civilians. Daniil has been working with a different charitable fund that helps civilians and supports the Ukrainian military. He left Melitopol in early April, but his brother stayed behind to care for their grandmother.
Daniil waited for a call demanding ransom for his brother's release, but none came. He began to wonder if Ilya had been taken just to scare โ or punish โ the people of Melitopol.
After three weeks in a detention center in Melitopol, Ilya was released. He has not dared to try to pass Russian checkpoints to leave occupied territory.
Daniil advises families of the disappeared to talk as much and as loudly as possible about it.
"If no one is looking for you, it means they can do whatever they want with you," he said.
Pastor Dmitry Bodyu
Updated
Pastor Dmitry Bodyu was having coffee the morning of March 19 when his wife saw a group of Russian soldiers jumping over their fence.
A U.S. citizen, Bodyu founded the Word of Life church in Melitopol, an occupied city in southern Ukraine. The chilling thing was that the Russians seemed to know his secrets โ not only who he was, where he lived and what he did, but also obscure details about his finances.
"Someone was talking about me. When they arrested me, they knew a lot of information about me," Bodyu said.
In detention, his daily interrogations were a battery of accusations, all of which he said were false: You are helping the Ukrainian military. You are organizing protests. You are a spy for the United States. He thought his captors โ some of whom he said wore uniforms with markings of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB โ wanted him to spy for Moscow.
"I said, what kind of information do you want to know about the U.S.? Where the McDonald's is?" he said. "You are talking to the wrong man."
The Russians insisted they'd come to help Ukraine and wanted Bodyu to spread their message of liberation. He said he was not beaten but could hear others held in the basement cells crying and screaming in pain.
After eight days, Bodyu was released, but Russians kept him under surveillance. In April, he fled with his family to Poland through Russia. He said Russians seized his church and set up a base there, driving parishioners underground.
"It's not safe," he said. "But people still meet together and even make plans to celebrate Christmas!"
Serhii Tsyhipa
Updated
Serhii Tsyhipa, a blogger, activist and military veteran in Nova Kakhovka, in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, knew the Russians were looking for him.
He went into hiding but kept posting updates about Russian forces and a barrage of anti-Russian messages, including a fantastical satire about a pigeon sent to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 12, he went out with his dog and never came back.
Around six weeks later, a thin, hollow-eyed Tsyhipa surfaced in a video on pro-Russian media. He trembled and he held his arm funny. He regurgitated Russian propaganda. The video has gotten nearly 200,000 views on one YouTube channel alone.
His stepdaughter Anastasiia watched with horror: What had they done to him? "It's not normal, the way he's talking," she told AP.
Voice analysis experts with the Ukrainian police concluded that Tsyhipa had made the video under duress, according to a copy of their analysis obtained by AP.
In July, his wife, Olena, got a Telegram message from a man who claimed to be a Russian agent. He told her to bring Tsyhipa's clothes and passport to a checkpoint in Russian-held territory, where her husband would be returned to her. Olena thought something was amiss: If she or a friend went for the handover, would they be taken too?
Tsyhipa's family has reached out to lawyers, NGOs, international organizations, journalists and every Ukrainian authority they can think of, and European officials have publicly lobbied for Tsyhipa's release. But nothing has worked.
"I asked them to put pressure on Russia to release political prisoners," Olena said. "I think there are many people like my husband."
