Human Rights Watch in the context of "Kenneth Roth"

The Greeks in Turkey constitute a small population of Greek and Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians who mostly live in Istanbul, as well as on the two islands of the western entrance to the Dardanelles: Imbros and Tenedos (Turkish: Gökçeada and Bozcaada). Greeks are one of the four ethnic minorities officially recognized in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, together with Jews, Armenians, and Bulgarians.

They are the remnants of the estimated 200,000 Greeks who were permitted under the provisions of the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations to remain in Turkey following the 1923 population exchange, which involved the forcible resettlement of approximately 1.2 million Greeks from Anatolia and East Thrace and of half a million Turks from all of Greece except for Western Thrace. After years of persecution (e.g. the Varlık Vergisi, the Istanbul Pogrom and the 1964 expulsion of Istanbul Greeks), emigration of ethnic Greeks from the Istanbul region greatly accelerated, reducing the Greek minority population from 119,822 before the 1955 pogrom to about 7,000 by 1978. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry places the current number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at the 3,000–4,000 mark.However, according to the Human Rights Watch the Greek population in Turkey is estimated at 2,500 in 2006. The Greek population in Turkey is collapsing as the community is now far too small to sustain itself demographically, due to emigration, much higher death rates than birth rates and continuing discrimination.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting Russian occupation of multiple Ukrainian towns and cities, numerous cases of non-violent resistance against the invasion took place. Local residents organized protests against the invasion and blocked the movement of Russian military equipment. The Russian military dispersed the protests, sometimes with live fire, injuring many and killing some. Most of the large protests ended in March.

Human Rights Watch reports that protesters had been tortured in the south of the occupation zone.

The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco, Genocidio maya, or Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S. backed military regimes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.

The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against them began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A March 1985 study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court estimated that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war, and that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed between 1980 and 1985. Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982. A 1984 report by HRW discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". In fact, the rights abuses were so severe that even the U.S. with its fervent anticommunist policy "kept its assistance comparatively limited. For most of the 1980's the Guatemalan army relied on fellow pariah-states like Argentina and South Africa for supplies."

Occurring between July 2011 and mid-2012, a severe drought affected the entire East African region. Said to be "the worst in 60 years", the drought caused a severe food crisis across Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya that threatened the livelihood of 9.5 million people. Many refugees from southern Somalia fled to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, where crowded, unsanitary conditions together with severe malnutrition led to a large number of deaths. Other countries in East Africa, including Sudan, South Sudan and parts of Uganda, were also affected by a food crisis.

According to FAO-Somalia, the food crisis in Somalia primarily affected farmers in the south rather than the northern pastoralists. Human Rights Watch (HRW) consequently noted that most of the displaced persons belonged to the agro-pastoral Rahanweyn clan and the agricultural Bantu ethnic minority group. On 20 July, the United Nations officially declared famine in two regions in the southern part of the country (IPC Phase 5), the first time a famine had been declared in the region by the UN in nearly thirty years. Tens of thousands of people are believed to have died in southern Somalia before famine was declared. This was mainly a result of Western governments preventing aid from reaching affected areas in an attempt to weaken the Al-Shabaab militant group, against whom they were engaged.

Helsinki Watch was a private American non-governmental organization established by Robert L. Bernstein in 1978, designed to monitor the former Soviet Union's compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Expanding in size and scope, Helsinki Watch began using media coverage to document human-rights violations committed by abusive governments. Since its inception, it produced several other watch committees dedicated to monitoring human rights in other parts of the world. In 1988, Helsinki Watch and its companion watch committees combined to form Human Rights Watch.

During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The Sinai Peninsula was returned to full sovereignty of Egypt in 1982 as a result of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. The United Nations Security Council and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) both describe the West Bank and Western Golan Heights as "occupied territory" under international law, and the Supreme Court of Israel describes them as held "in belligerent occupation", however Israel's government calls the West Bank "disputed" rather than "occupied" and argues that since Israel's unilateral disengagement plan of 2005, it does not militarily occupy the Gaza Strip, a statement rejected by the United Nations Human Rights Council and Human Rights Watch because Israel continues to maintain control of its airspace, waters and most of its borders.

In July 2024, the ICJ concluded that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories violated international law and that Israel should cease settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its illegal occupation of these areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible.

Baháʼís are persecuted in various countries, especially in Iran, where the Baháʼí Faith originated and where a large Baháʼí population still lives. The persecution stems from the traditional Islamic perspective that Baháʼí teachings are inconsistent with Islamic beliefs, including the finality of Muhammad's prophethood, and the placement of Baháʼís outside the Islamic religion. Thus, Baháʼís are seen as apostates from Islam.

The United Nations, European Union, rights groups including Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch (HRW) and scholarship have documented how the Baháʼí community in Iran has been subjected to the denial of civil rights, false imprisonment, torture, unjustified executions and the confiscation and destruction of property. According to HRW, the Iranian government’s long-term, systematic campaign against the Bahá’ís rises to the level of the crime against humanity of persecution. Baháʼís have also been significantly persecuted in Egypt.