BY RONNIE LI – Biao Teng, a Chinese human rights lawyer, was walking on a street near his home one day eight years ago when someone came up behind him suddenly, took off his shirt and covered his eyes with it, and then forced him into a car before he could make a sound. Teng was taken into custody and held for about 10 weeks in solitary confinement in retaliation…
BY SHIBANI GOKHALE — Twenty-five years after Bhanwari Devi reported that five men raped her to deter her activism, she still awaits justice. Though the attack prompted nationwide protests in India and led to the enactment of a new legislation protecting women from sexual assault in the workplace, Devi’s attackers are yet to be punished.
BY HANIYA JAVED — There are as many 5000 Ahmadi Muslims living in the tristate area of New York. Seventy percent of them are Pakistanis, according to Ahmadiyya Muslim Communtiy, USA. The highest numbers of asylum seekers are from Pakistan because of the anti Ahmadi laws and constitutional amendments introduced in 1974 that declared the community non Muslims and made it a criminal offence for them to pose as Muslims.
BY SHIBANI GOKHALE — Although India is home to over 300,000 refugees, it is not a signatory to the United Nation’s Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and has not enacted a law specifically protecting their rights.
BY LOUIS BAUDOIN-LAARMAN — For the past two months the Rohingya refugee community in Bangladesh has been anxious and unsettled after the country’s prime minister restated Bangladesh’s intention to relocate the refugees to the barren 30,000-hectare island of Thengar Char in the Bay of Bengal.
Vietnam debates the issue — unthinkable a decade ago in a country dominated by Confucianism. By DIEN LUONG It was past midnight and Ngo Thi Mong Linh had already gone to sleep when her cellphone suddenly rang. Linh knew all too well what to anticipate from the other end. “A sex worker was urging me to come to rescue her,” Linh recalled in an interview. “Her client robbed her of…