Secondary menu
Feed aggregator
UN Panel Discusses Need for Stronger Protections for Platform Workers
Today, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) held a panel discussion on the challenges to realizing the rights to work and social security in the informal economy. One critical issue raised was the growth of platform work, known as gig work, where workers find and perform jobs through digital labor platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart.
While platform companies promote flexibility, the reality for many workers is exclusion from labor and social security rights.
As Deputy UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif noted: “We find ourselves at a moment of considerable change in the world of work. Rapidly evolving technologies are transforming jobs. These technologies have brought improvements to workplace safety and have provided greater flexibility for workers. But they also carry risks and need to be managed responsibly.”
Human Rights Watch research in the United States, Georgia, Mexico, and the European Union shows that without proper regulation, platform companies regularly misclassify workers as independent contractors to cut costs and evade employer obligations. They shift business costs and risks onto workers while routinely paying below the minimum wage, denying workers compensation for job-related injuries, and avoiding contributions to social security programs.
In Texas, we found that some full-time platform workers earned just 30 percent of a living wage. An accident, sudden illness, or wrongful termination could push them into debt or homelessness, while the companies they work for expand their market share and social security systems lose out on critical funding.
Our research further found that platform companies use opaque algorithms, surveillance technologies, and behavioral tactics to control workers while maintaining the illusion that they work independently.
This is not some benign innovation—it is the erosion of labor rights.
Governments should take action to ensure that platform work does not become a loophole for exploitation and instead contribute to building a human rights economy. Governments should:
Strengthen employment classification laws to prevent misclassification.Extend wage protections, social security, and workplace safety protections to platform workers.Ensure algorithmic management of workers is fair and transparent.Support an international convention to safeguard platform workers’ rights at the International Labour Conference in 2025 and 2026.Without reforms, platform work risks deepening economic inequalities and further entrenching what the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights referred to as “in-work poverty” in his 2023 report to the UN General Assembly.
Cricket Council: Address Taliban Ban on Women Athletes
(New York) – The International Cricket Council should immediately suspend Taliban-run Afghanistan’s membership until women and girls can participate in the sport of cricket, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the council’s chair, Jay Shah, that was made public today. The championship of the men’s Champions Trophy 2025 international cricket tournament, featuring eight teams including Afghanistan, takes place on March 9, 2025, in Dubai.
Since taking over Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have banned all sports for women and girls, forcing many athletes into hiding. Members of Afghanistan’s women’s national cricket team fled the country but have continued to practice and want to be recognized to compete internationally like the men’s national team. The International Cricket Council has recognized and supported Afghanistan’s men’s cricket but has ignored repeated appeals from the women’s national team.
“The International Cricket Council’s silence on the Taliban’s discriminatory prohibition on Afghan women and girls playing sports shows disturbing disregard for fundamental human rights,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed policies on women and girls that bar them from secondary and higher education and severely restrict employment, freedom of expression and movement, as well as banning sports and other outdoor activities.”
The Taliban have banned all sports for women and girls, closed sports training centers, and threatened women athletes. As a result, some Afghan women and girls who are athletes have fled the country and have had to rebuild their lives and sports careers in exile. Others were unable to leave, went into hiding, and sought to destroy evidence of their ties to sports, including medals and sport kits.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the governing body for global sport, recognized and financially supported Afghan women athletes living abroad to compete at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
Many members of the Afghan women’s national cricket team have continued training and playing in Australia. They played an exhibition match in January, when co-captain Firooza Amiri told the Associated Press that her team represents “millions of women in Afghanistan who are denied their rights.”
The International Cricket Council’s anti-discrimination policy states that it is “committed to ensuring that wherever cricket is played, it can be enjoyed by all players, player support personnel, officials, spectators, commercial partners and others” without discrimination on the basis of “gender, sexual orientation, disability, marital status and/or maternity status.”
Under international cricket rules, member countries are required to recognize a women’s team for their men’s team to play internationally. Afghanistan has not met this requirement since August 2021. Afghan women cricket players say they have written to the International Cricket Council for support and recognition but have never received a response.
“It’s so painful and so disappointing,” Shabnam Ahsan, a cricket player, told the BBC in February. “I don't understand why they [the International Cricket Council] are not doing anything to help us. We have worked so hard, and we deserve help just like every other team.”
The International Cricket Council should adopt and carry out a human rights policy aligned with United Nations standards and:
Suspend Afghanistan’s men’s national team until the women’s team can play;Support Afghanistan’s women’s national team in exile; andCondition sponsorship on gender equality compliance.Corporate sponsors of international cricket include Coca-Cola, Emirates, and Aramco, among others.
“With cricket entering the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, global sponsors of cricket and the International Olympic Committee can no longer ignore the Taliban’s blatant gender discrimination and violation of Olympic principles,” Worden said. “The International Cricket Council has the responsibility to ensure its systems do not ignore, or worse, encourage systematic gender discrimination.”
Celebrating Afghan Women’s Achievements
This International Women’s Day we celebrate Afghan women’s bold resistance. Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, women have fought for their rights in a country where even their voices are deemed sinful and illegal, and their activism has been punished with torture.
But over the last year, thanks to their relentless courage and advocacy, we have witnessed important – if insufficient – steps toward holding the Taliban accountable.
In September, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands pledged to hold the Taliban to account for violations of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. This process could lead to proceedings against Afghanistan at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague.
The European Court of Justice ruled in October that all Afghan women qualify for asylum in countries in the European Union because of the Taliban’s systematic persecution. While the ruling is important, greater protections are needed: Afghan women and girls fleeing Taliban persecution need safe and legal pathways to asylum throughout Europe, North America, and other safe places that do not currently exist.
Also in October, 83 countries called out Taliban acts of gender persecution. And in November, six International Criminal Court (ICC) member countries referred Afghanistan to the ICC prosecutor for investigation, expressing concern about Afghanistan’s severely deteriorating human rights situation, particularly for women and girls. This January, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor filed requests before the court for arrest warrants against two Taliban leaders, including their “supreme leader,” for the crime against humanity of gender persecution.
Advocacy by Afghan women and their allies has driven increasing momentum towarddefininggender apartheid as a crime under international law. One critical opportunity to achieve this is through the draft crimes against humanity treaty currently being discussed at the UN General Assembly. A growing list of states support this effort.
Despite grave hardships, Afghan women have taken their fate into their own hands. They are organizing, protesting, and exposing the Taliban’s abuses, even as they continue to pay a devastating price for their quest for freedom. Now the international community and courts should move these legal processes forward, hold the Taliban accountable, and put an end to these violations.
UAE: Ahmed Mansoor’s 15-Year Sentence Upheld
(Beirut) – An Emirati court upheld an abusive 15-year sentence on March 4, 2025, against the prominent Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, who was convicted following a fundamentally unfair trial, Human Rights Watch said today.
The State Security Chamber of the Federal Supreme Court rejected Mansoor’s appeal along with dozens of others for those convicted in the country’s second largest unfair mass trial. On July 10, 2024, the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeals Court convicted 53 defendants and sentenced them to terms ranging from 10 years to life in prison.
“This latest decision shows how the UAE continues to target a man who courageously stood up to his abusive government even when very few would dare,” said Joey Shea, United Arab Emirates researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The UAE should be celebrating Mansoor’s contributions, not sentencing him in yet another sham trial.”
The court dismissed Mansoor’s appeal of his July 2024 sentence on procedural grounds, said the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center, a human rights organization supporting imprisoned human rights defenders in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In July 2024, the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeals Court sentenced Mansoor to 15 years in prison. In a statement released in January 2024, Emirati authorities accused the 84 defendants of establishing and managing a clandestine terrorist organization in the UAE known as the “Justice and Dignity Committee.” The charges appear to come from the UAE’s abusive 2014 counterterrorism law, which sets out punishments of up to life in prison and even death for anyone who sets up, organizes, or runs such an organization.
Mansoor is one of the UAE’s most prominent human rights defenders. He received the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2015 and is a member of the Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Advisory Committee.
He has been arbitrarily imprisoned in an isolation cell since security forces raided his home just before midnight on March 20, 2017. In May 2018, the Abu Dhabi Court of Appeals’ State Security Chamber sentenced Mansoor to 10 years in prison on charges of “spreading false news” to “harm the reputation of the state,” entirely related to his human rights activities. The court also fined him 1,000,000 Emirati dirhams (around US$272,000). Mansoor was the last Emirati human rights defender still working openly in the UAE at that time.
In December 2018, the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court, the court of last resort, upheld his sentence, quashing his final chance at early release.
All charges on which he was convicted were based solely on his human rights advocacy, including using email and WhatsApp to communicate with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations.
He was still serving that sentence when he was sentenced again in July 2024. Both trials were closed, and the authorities have refused all requests to make public the charge sheet and court rulings.
The decision to uphold the July 2024 verdict is just the latest salvo in the UAE’s vicious campaign against Mansoor. He has faced repeated intimidation, harassment, and death threats from the UAE authorities and their supporters, including a sophisticated spyware attack by the Emirati government.
Over the past eight years, the United Nations and independent rights groups have documented that the UAE government has held Mansoor in solitary confinement without access to reading materials, television, or radio. Since December 2017, he has been denied eyeglasses, most personal hygiene items, and, until recently, a bed or a mattress in his cell.
These measures violate the prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. UAE authorities deny that they have subjected Mansoor to such treatment, while refusing to allow independent observers to visit him.
“Upholding Ahmed Mansoor’s sentence from the latest sham trial is a blatant attempt by the Emirati government to undermine justice for its most celebrated human rights defender,” Shea said.
Israel/Lebanon: Hezbollah Attacks Endangered Civilians
(New York) – Hezbollah failed to take adequate precautions to protect civilians between September and November 2024, Human Rights Watch said today. Hezbollah used explosive weapons in populated areas in parts of northern Israel and failed to effectively warn civilians of attacks.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented a series of apparent war crimes and unlawful attacks by the Israeli military in Lebanon.Since the November 27, 2024 ceasefire deal, Israeli attacks have reportedly killed at least 59 people in Lebanon.
“Deadly, unlawful attacks by the Israeli military in Lebanon don’t give Hezbollah a free pass to endanger civilians by firing explosive weapons into northern Israel,” said Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “An international investigation into Israel and Hezbollah’s compliance with the laws of war is a necessary step toward ensuring accountability for possible crimes.”
The Israeli military released data on October 6, 2024, that approximately 12,400 projectiles were fired toward Israel from Lebanon between October 7, 2023, and October 2, 2024. Munitions reportedly fired from Lebanon killed at least 30 civilians. A July 27 attack on the town of Majdal Shams, in the occupied Golan Heights, also killed 12 children. While Israel claimed that it was a Hezbollah rocket attack, Hezbollah has denied responsibility. Israeli strikes in the same period killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
From mid-September until November 27, 2024, Hezbollah appeared to send rocket attacks deeper into northern Israel, beyond the “evacuation zone” along the border area, with some striking populated areas. Hezbollah statements indicate attacks targeting Delton, Kfar Vradim, and Kiryat Shmona, among others, without specifying an intended military target. Some, such as Kiryat Shmona, contain military installations.
On October 26, Hezbollah’s military wing issued an evacuation warning via Telegram, calling on residents of these and 22 other northern Israeli towns to immediately evacuate. Hezbollah said that the towns “have become a place of deployment and settlement for the enemy military forces attacking Lebanon [and] as a result have become legitimate military targets for the air and missile forces of the Islamic Resistance.”
But warnings that do not give civilians adequate time to leave for a safer area would not be considered “effective” under international law. Broad warnings unrelated to any imminent attack cannot be considered “effective” and may instead improperly instil fear.
Between late September and November 2024, salvos of Hezbollah attacks killed at least 15 civilians and injured scores, based on data Human Rights Watch compiled from media reports. Some of the areas where civilians were killed were not subject to Hezbollah’s October 26 evacuation warning.
One man described finding the body of his son, Omer, and four Thai agricultural workers after an October 31 Hezbollah attack on an apple orchard near Metula. “I came and saw the worst thing possible to see,” he told Reuters. “I didn’t think there was a 1 percent chance that one of us would be hurt, but actually, Omer paid the price.”
Hezbollah’s arsenal of missiles and rockets was widely understood by open-source military and security researchers before October 2023 to be primarily made up of large numbers of unguided surface-to-surface artillery rockets. In recent years, Hezbollah has asserted an ability to equip unguided rockets with guidance systems and in October 2024 released images of rockets with features consistent with that claim. There are no reliable or independent figures on the total quantity of rockets that may have been fitted with guidance systems. Human Rights Watch could not confirm whether guided rocket artillery was used in the attacks that killed civilians in northern Israel from September to November 2024.
Unguided artillery rockets cannot be accurately directed to a single target and are typically fired in salvos of multiple munitions. It is not possible for Hezbollah to aim its unguided artillery rockets with enough accuracy to target a particular building or fortification, but it could aim them at a town or even a neighborhood with some measure of accuracy.
Attacks that do not distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian objects violate the laws of war. Human Rights Watch wrote to Hezbollah on January 29, 2025, requesting information about its strikes on northern Israel and any steps taken to minimize civilian harm but has not received a response.
Hezbollah’s attacks brought daily life in much of northern Israel to a standstill, crippling economic activity and disrupting education for approximately 16,000 students. On October 16, 2023, the Israeli military ordered residents of 28 villages within approximately two kilometers of the border with Lebanon to evacuate. The Israeli government later expanded the order, since which more than 60,000 civilians have been displaced.
According to the head of the northern district of Israel’s Education Ministry, 16,000 students were evacuated from northern Israel and over 90 schools in the region were damaged from rocket fire or military activity. Two students from Katzrin told the Times of Israel that, for more than a year, “we studied in trailers, every time there was an alarm we were asked to go to an open space because there was no protection.”
There has been significant infrastructural damage to some Israeli border villages and towns, based on media reports. More than 60 percent of the buildings in the border village of Metula have been destroyed, Agence France-Presse reported. The Associated Press reported that three-quarters of the structures in the border village of Manara were damaged during the war. The Times of Israel reported that 110 out of 155 buildings in Manara had been damaged, including to the electricity, sewage, and gas lines.
“There is nothing to return to,” Galit Yousef, a resident of Metula who was evacuated from her home, told The Times of Israel. “My home was hit several times.” Hagar Ehrlich, a Manara resident, told a Times of Israel reporter that “the damage on the kibbutz is unbelievable.”
Human Rights Watch has previously documented a series of apparent war crimes and unlawful attacks by the Israeli military, including apparently deliberate attacks on journalists, peacekeepers, medics, and civilian objects, in addition to the unlawful use of booby-trapped devices and widespread use of white phosphorus, including unlawfully over populated residential areas.The more than 4,000 people killed between October 2023 and January 2025 include more than 316 children, 240 health and rescue workers, and 790 women.
According to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health, at least 17,371 people were injured in attacks in Lebanon. More than a thousand Israeli strikes across Lebanon on September 23 killed 558 people in one day, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry. In subsequent weeks, more than one million people were displaced, thousands of buildings and houses were destroyed, and entire border villages were reduced to rubble. While the majority of those displaced have returned after a ceasefire deal came into effect, nearly 100,000 people remained displaced from their homes.
The United Nations should urgently establish, and UN member countries should support, an international investigation into the recent hostilities in Lebanon and northern Israel and ensure that it is dispatched immediately to gather information and make findings as to violations of international law and recommendations for accountability. The UN and UN member countries should ensure accountability and the documentation of abuses by all parties.
International humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, requires parties to a conflict to take constant care during military operations to spare the civilian population and to “take all feasible precautions” to avoid or minimize the incidental loss of civilian life and damage to civilian objects. These precautions include doing everything feasible to verify that the objects of attack are military objectives and not civilians or civilian objects, giving “effective advance warning” of attacks when circumstances permit, and refraining from an attack if the requirement for proportionality will be violated.
International humanitarian law requires all parties to distinguish between military objectives and civilians and civilian objects and to target only military objectives. Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent—that is, intentionally or recklessly—may be prosecuted for war crimes.
Israel and Lebanon should endorse the 2022 Declaration on Protecting Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences of the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. The use of explosive weapons with wide area effects in populated areas, including those fired in large groups or “salvos,” place civilians and civilian objects at grave risk and should be avoided.
“There’s little hope that the cycle of abuses will end while the culture of impunity drags on,” Coogle said. “States should ensure investigations of those responsible for violating international law and the laws of war.”
Greece: Rail Crash Highlights Wider Rule of Law Failings
(Athens) - The Greek parliament’s decision to investigate a possible coverup for a fatal train crash two years ago is an opportunity to address wider rule of law failings exposed by the disastrous state response to the tragedy, Human Rights Watch said today.
On March 4, 2025, following historic nationwide protests, the Greek Parliament established a preliminary inquiry committee to examine if then-Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister Christos Triantopoulos impeded the crash investigation with the alleged speedy disposal of debris and tampering with the crash site. The ongoing parliament debate about the tragedy on February 28, 2023, outside Tempi, in central Greece, including a no-confidence vote in the government, could be critical to help rebuild the public’s faith in Greece’s democratic institutions and ensure accountability for the crash.
“The pain and suffering caused by the Tempi crash are immense,” said Eva Cossé, senior researcher in the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “Parliament should listen to the Greek people’s demands and take concrete steps to address the systemic failures that contributed to this tragedy and ensure accountability.”
The head-on collision between a passenger train and a cargo train killed 57 people, mostly young adults, and injured dozens more. A massive explosion following the crash, which caused many of the deaths, has raised concerns that the cargo train was carrying illegal flammable substances.
The public outcry for accountability has been unprecedented, culminating in mass protests across Greece, with demonstrations on February 28, 2025, potentially the largest in the country’s modern history. These ongoing protests reflect the deep public anger at the way the government and the judiciary have handled the tragedy and subsequent investigations, Human Rights Watch said.
The Greek authorities’ handling of the crash has sparked distrust and outrage among the public. The government sought to attribute the tragedy to human error alone and has rejected claims of corruption and systemic flaws in relation to government oversight in critical areas like rail management and safety protocols, while those responsible have not been held to account. A recent poll indicates that over 80 percent of Greeks doubt that the government has done everything possible to shed light on the tragedy, and a similar percentage expresses lack of faith in the justice system.
Investigations by the victims’ families and other investigative bodies determined that authorities removed debris from the site of the accident within hours of the crash, including victims’ remains that were discarded together with tons of dirt in a remote area. An independent report presented in February 2025 by the National Air and Rail Accident Investigation Authority confirmed that “[p]ressure from coordinators to restore the accident scene resulted in the loss of evidentiary material.” Victims’ families and the public have subsequently raised concerns about evidence tampering and the potential obstruction of justice.
In addition, the authorities removed the train carriages from the scene before a thorough investigation was conducted, denying accident investigators and experts appointed by the victims’ families the opportunity to locate crucial evidence in a timely manner at the site. Security footage from the station where the cargo train was loaded, has also vanished, triggering an investigation by prosecutors into the disappearance of the footage, two years after the facts.
Survivors and families of victims have accused the judicial investigative authorities of failing to conduct a thorough and impartial inquiry, including allegedly concealing crucial evidence. Judicial independence in Greece is open to criticism as high-level judicial officials are appointed by the government rather than by parliament or an independent judicial appointments body.
In November 2022, a few months before the crash, the European Public Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into potential misuse of EU funds connected to railway safety projects in Greece, including one known as Contract 717 dating from 2014. The project was supposed to modernize the Greek railway network’s remote-control and signaling systems, in part to avoid accidents like the one at Tempi. The European prosecutor’s investigation found that the project was “improperly executed.”
Evidence gathered by victims’ families and their experts, the National Rail Accident Authority report, and investigative media reports all confirmed the absence of operational safety systems at the time of the crash, something railway workers had also repeatedly warned about. In December 2023, the European Prosecutor’s Office in Athens brought charges against 23 suspects, including 18 public officials, for crimes relating to the execution of the contracts.
In June 2023, the European Prosecutor’s Office had also forwarded a request to the Greek Parliament to look into the possible criminal responsibility of two former transport ministers, Christos Spirtzis and Konstantinos Karamanlis, in relation to the implementation of Contract 717. A law on ministerial responsibility, requires parliamentary approval to initiate criminal proceedings against a minister.
The government, however, using its parliamentary majority, effectively blocked setting up an investigative committee in November 2023 and archived the case, frustrating the European prosecutors’ investigation.
The Greek government has faced increased scrutiny as the country faces serious challenges with respect to the rule of law more generally, including a major surveillance scandal, media freedom concerns, and attacks on civil society. In February 2024, the European Parliament adopted a resolution expressing “grave concerns about very serious threats to democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights” in Greece, raising concerns specifically about the Tempi crash and subsequent investigations.
Members of parliament and the judiciary should ensure a transparent and impartial investigation into the Tempi train crash, free from political influence, Human Rights Watch said. The tragedy should also prompt fundamental rethinking about the separation of powers and judicial independence and ensure that parliament and the courts are able to hold ministers to account for gross failures in their duties.
“The victims of the Tempi crash and their families deserve justice,” Cossé said. “It’s the duty of parliament to restore faith in the rule of law by uncovering the truth, ensuring accountability, and preventing future tragedies.”