A report describes in depth how human rights defenders are routinely beaten, placed in solitary confinement and forced to endure extreme temperatures and humiliation. Other tactics used to punish activists include spreading rumours to tarnish their reputation, which prevents them from finding a decent job once they are released from prison. Families are also pressured to persuade relatives to stop criticizing the state. In other cases, activists are simply told that they must leave Oman and never return.

It seems that tangible progress in human rights not only depends on the efforts of Sudanese civil society, which has been severely hampered by government restrictions, but also on the pressure exerted by the international community on the government, which needs international acceptance more than ever.

Most Israeli, Palestinian and international NGOs that fight against the Israeli occupation of Palestine face the same problem: vilification by Israel. For the Palestinian NGOs, there is an extra hardship: financial cuts by the United States (US).

Women in Iraq have been institutional victims of sectarian religious conflicts, Islamic law, cultural traditions and even the Iraqi constitution. To end this growing and dangerous trend, the Iraqi government must implement serious measures against the systematic targeting of well-known or famous women and beauty centers in the name of defending the “honor” of a country, city, tribe, or family. Iraq’s feminists need to wake up because sympathy is not enoughز

Saudi Arabia has proved itself to be an ardent opponent of human rights, despite MBS’ PR campaigns proclaiming reform. The kingdom has, some argue, also managed to damage human rights in totally novel fields. In a highly successful publicity stunt, Riyadh granted citizenship to a robot, Sophia. Granting citizenship – and thereby rights – to a machine calls into question the value that the Saudi regime places on human rights at all.

Local and international human rights organizations have documented the inhumane conditions in Syrian detention facilities, and testimonies from the prisoners who managed to be released focused on the torture they faced inside. Prisons are overcrowded and unsanitary. Detainees are given inadequate food and sometimes starved, and suffer from medical neglect. Torture is routinely and systematically implemented, on a very large scale. Women, and men, have suffered rape and sexual abuse.

The UAE is also implicated in abuses against detainees in UAE-controlled prisons in Yemen, according to Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. The human rights organization says that hundreds of detainees in Yemen have been subjected to physical and sexual torture as well as mass assault in prisons run by armed groups from the UAE, which is part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebellion.

The Moroccan female porters made headlines nationally and internationally when two women were killed at a stampede in Ceuta on August 29, 2017. Nicknamed “mule women” on the Spanish side of the frontier, the female porters struggle under burdens heavier than their own body weight, risking their lives for the job. The image of women crumbling under heavy loads of goods and harnessed like working animals went viral around the world.

Israel has always proudly described itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East. A strong pillar of a healthy democracy is freedom of the press. Yet members of the foreign media have been summoned to a Knesset hearing on the foreign press and put on the defense to explain an apparently skewed reality. Is the Israeli government clamping down on the press, both international and domestic?

In any case, the wave of arrests over the past weeks shows that the regime of Al-Sisi is planning to follow the path it has chosen since his takeover in 2013: Crushing opposition and gradually closing any space for public dissent.