Arbitrary arrest and detention is the arrest and detention of an individual in a case in which there is no likelihood or evidence that they committed a crime against legal statute, or in which there has been no proper due process of law or order. Arbitrary arrest and detention is similar to but legally distinct from wrongful detention, which is broader in scope and does not involve arrest.
Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
In 2014, the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism, which involved surveillance and restrictions in Xinjiang. Beginning in 2017, under Xinjiang Party secretary Chen Quanguo, the government incarcerated over an estimated one million Uyghurs without legal process in internment camps officially described as "vocational education and training centers", in the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since World War II. China began to wind down the camps in 2019, and Amnesty International states that detainees have been increasingly transferred to the penal system.
The Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine are areas of southern and eastern Ukraine that are controlled by Russia as a result of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the ongoing invasion. In Ukrainian law, they are defined as the "temporarily occupied territories". As of 2024, Russia occupies almost 20% of Ukraine and about 3 to 3.5 million Ukrainians are estimated to be living under occupation; since the invasion, the occupied territories lost roughly half of their population. The United Nations Human Rights Office reports that Russia is committing severe human rights violations in occupied Ukraine, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, crackdown on peaceful protest and freedom of speech, enforced Russification, passportization, indoctrination of children, and suppression of Ukrainian language and culture.
The occupation began in 2014 with Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea, and its de facto takeover of Ukraine's Donbas during a war in eastern Ukraine. In 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion. However, due to fierce Ukrainian resistance and logistical challenges (e.g. the stalled Russian Kyiv convoy), the Russian Armed Forces retreated from northern Ukraine in early April. In September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched the Kharkiv counteroffensive and liberated most of that oblast. Another southern counteroffensive resulted in the liberation of Kherson that November.
Habeas corpus (/ˈheɪbiəs ˈkɔːrpəs/ ) is a legal procedure invoking the jurisdiction of a court to review the unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual, and request the individual's custodian (usually a prison official) to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether their detention is lawful. The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as a fundamental safeguard of individual liberty.
Habeas corpus is generally enforced via writ, and accordingly referred to as a writ of habeas corpus. The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the "extraordinary", "common law", or "prerogative writs", which were historically issued by the English courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The writ was a legal mechanism that allowed a court to exercise jurisdiction and guarantee the rights of all the Crown's subjects against arbitrary arrest and detention.At common law the burden was usually on the official to prove that a detention was authorized.
The Romani Holocaust was the genocide of European Roma and Sinti people during World War II. Beginning in 1933, Nazi Germany systematically persecuted the European Roma, Sinti and other peoples pejoratively labeled "Gypsy" through forcible internment and compulsory sterilization. German authorities summarily and arbitrarily subjected Romani people to incarceration, forced labor, deportation and mass murder in concentration and extermination camps.
Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust. Historians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Nazi Germans and their collaborators.
The Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (French: Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo), also known by the French acronym AFDL, was a coalition of armed movements and political organizations composed of Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, and Congolese dissidents, and various disaffected ethnic and political groups. Formed on 18 October 1996, the AFDL launched a military campaign that culminated in the overthrow of President Mobutu Sese Seko and the ascension of Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power in May 1997, which then marked the end of the First Congo War. Although the group was successful in overthrowing Mobutu, the alliance fell apart after Kabila did not agree to be dictated by his foreign backers, Rwanda and Uganda, which marked the beginning of the Second Congo War in 1998.
Members of the AFDL and their allied forces were responsible for widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, massacres of unarmed civilians and refugees, arbitrary detentions, "disappearances", and acts of torture and sexual violence. These abuses, often condoned or directed by political and military leaders within the movement, were committed with near-total impunity, as many perpetrators later assumed positions of authority in the new government. Amnesty International and other organizations also condemned the international community's inaction, noting that the United Nations Secretary-General's Investigative Team (SGIT) confirmed that AFDL and the Rwandan forces had committed atrocities amounting to serious violations of international humanitarian law, some potentially constituting genocide, but the UN Security Council failed to take adequate measures in response.