Human Rights

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are currently over 25 million refugees and 40 million internally displaced worldwide. In 2018, just 102,800 of refugees had been resettled, according to the UNHCR.¹ Many refugees flee without bringing necessary belongings such as clothing, food, money or a form of identification. Conditions in refugee camps are often poor, placing emotional, physical and psychological strain on families within them.² Hygiene and sanitation are compromised due to the large numbers of people living in small spaces, and children in the camps are often not provided an education.³ The sex trafficking industry produces an estimated $99 billion in revenue each year, and has been called one of the most rapidly growing industries in the world. Women and girls account for 96 percent of sex trafficking victims, and nearly 2 million children worldwide are exploited in the sex industry each year.⁴ Fifty three nations have the death penalty today, some of which include Iran, India, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Taiwan, Libya, Thailand, Guyana, Uganda and the United States. Twenty three nations collectively completed 993 executions in 2017, yet projections estimate that that number is higher.⁵ The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime enacted the Doha declaration in 2015, an initiative to adopt crime prevention and criminal rehabilitation into the United Nations agenda. Doha is focused on youth crime rate reduction, transparent justice institutions as well as humane prison and criminal justice systems.⁶ Overcrowding and disease are areas of major concerns in international prisons; HIV/AIDS, as well as TB, have much higher occurrence rates in prisons than that of the general population. In the Philippines, Morocco, Mexico and Uzbekistan torture is known to be used by law enforcement to solicit confessions, according to Amnesty International.⁷ In recent years, a number of genocides have drawn international attention. In 2000, the Darfur people in South Sudan were targeted by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s forces, many of which now reside in refugee camps. Between 2014 and 2015, the Yazidi, Shiite and Muslim people in Iraq became the subject of mass genocide as ISIS burned villages and carried out mass killings across both Syria and Iraq. In 2017, Myanmar Tatmadaw — military forces — murdered, raped, tortured and abused the Muslim Rohingya people, leading to 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to nearby Bangladesh.⁸ Of the world’s poorest populations, indigenous groups account for 15 percent of the most impoverished people in the world, and have a life expectancy nearly 20 years lower than that of non-indigenous peoples. Over a third of indigenous women report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime.⁹