Health and Human Rights News

Week ending 23 August 2025

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Physical punishment harms children’s health and development

The World Health Organization has found that physical punishment remains ‘alarmingly widespread and causes significant harm to children’s health and development’. A new report finds that physical punishment “offers no benefits to the behaviour, development or well-being of children and no benefit to parents or societies either. It’s time to end this harmful practice to ensure that children thrive at home and at school.” Children who experience such punishment are more likely to experience anxiety and depression, and to develop aggressive behavior as adults.

US data finds 2.8m people identify as trans

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Williams Institute used federal surveys and data from state health agencies to calculate that more than 2.8 million people, including an estimated 724,000 youth, now identify as transgender in the United States. The Guardian reported that this evidence counters Trump’s aggressive efforts to deny trans minors’ existence and to remove references to them, and to erode protections and programs for LGBTQ+ communities.

See also:

FIGHT FOR RIGHTS: Trump’s Banned Words and Disastrous Health Policies, Joseph J. Amon, 3 February 2025

Taliban violation of women’s rights is “relentless and escalating”

Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right to health, and other UN Experts urged the international community to reject the Taliban’s violent and authoritarian rule and resist any moves towards normalising its regime, four years after it seized power in Afghanistan. Systematic and institutionalized gendered discrimination and oppression under its rule, the experts said, constitutes a crime against humanity as it impedes women’s and girl’s rights to education, health, and participation in public life.

Gaza: Children with disabilities hit hardest by starvation

Israel’s starvation of Gaza is harming the entire population and “inflicting particularly profound suffering on children with disabilities,” reports Human Rights Watch. “Between April and mid-July alone, more than 20,000 children in Gaza were hospitalized for acute malnourishment, 3,000 of them severely…starvation of civilians is not an accident of war, it is a deliberate policy.” The report situates the unique impacts on those with disabilities within the larger genocide in Gaza.

Record numbers of child amputees in Gaza

Ten children are losing one or both legs every day in Gaza, and the area has become home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history, according to reports provided to the UN Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The UN Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine said since the beginning of the war there had been 4,800 amputations of limbs, with 76 per cent of those affecting the upper limbs and 24 per cent the lower limbs.

See also:

Amputating the Body, Fragmenting the Nation: Palestinian Amputees in Gaza, Ghada Majadli and Hadas Ziv, Volume 24/2, December 2022

Evidence on Russian use of sexual torture in Ukraine…

UN experts including the Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edward, have compiled reports of sexual torture allegations perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine and warn it reflects a broader trend in deliberate and systematic torture of the civilian population. “There is also credible evidence of arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced disappearances, and serious violations of the right to health of civilians. The information received also refers to deaths in detention due to torture, including through the denial of medical care.”

… targeted attacks on maternity hospitals in Ukraine

Russian attacks on hospitals in Ukraine are taking away women’s fundamental right to safe childbirth and worsening a birth-rate crisis in the country, reports The Guardian. There have been more than 2,000 attacks on medical facilities, and 81 attacks on maternity units in Ukraine.

Attacks against Druze minority in Syria

UN experts have sounded the alarm over a wave of armed attacks on Syrian Druze communities with reports of killings, enforced disappearances, abductions, looting, destruction of property, and sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls. The targeted campaigns against Druze minorities has involved multiple human rights violations, they warned, resulting in growing numbers of internally displaced people. “Many displaced families are living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions without adequate food, clean water, or medical care. Reports of unburied bodies in residential areas raise serious public health concerns.”

Advances on a Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation

Major shifts in global economic policymaking and geopolitics came out of substantive negotiations for the first-ever UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation over the past two weeks, reports Human Rights Watch (HRW). The treaty could replace the current patchwork system that deprives governments of considerable revenue and undermines their capacity to support human rights. HRW explained that proposed reforms, such as enabling governments to tax any company with a ‘significant economic presence’ in their territory, could generate new revenues for all countries, which is especially critical to help low and middle income countries close financing gaps for health care, education, social security, and other rights.

See also:

FIGHT FOR RIGHTS: A Tax on the World’s Ultra-Rich to Fight Hunger and Disease, Eric A. Friedman and Lawrence O. Gostin, Vol 27/1, June 2025

EDITORIAL Economic Inequality and the Right to Health: On Neoliberalism, Corporatization, and Coloniality, Gillian MacNaughton and A. Kayum Ahmed, Vol 25/2, December 2023

Decriminalizing sex work in South Africa?

Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) legal challenge to decriminalise sex work in South Africa will be heard this September, presenting an opportunity for sex work to be decriminalized in the country. Human Rights Watch explains that criminalization of sex work has been proven to make sex workers less safe and instead is more likely to “force sex workers into unsafe, hidden environments, where violence and abuse happen with impunity, often at the hands of those meant to protect them.” Decriminalizing sex work also makes it easier for sex workers to access health care, including prevention, treatment, care, and support for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

Inter-American Court recognizes care as a human right

The Inter-American Court on Human Rights has recognized care as a human right in an Advisory Opinion. The Center for Economic and Social Rights explains that for states to meet this obligation to provide everyone access to quality, affordable, and dignified care they “must invest in universal, gender-responsive public services that meet the needs of both caregivers and those receiving care.” This includes public funding for health, education, childcare, eldercare, disability support, water, sanitation, and energy.”

Honduras must not bypasses rights to a healthy environment

Amnesty International is calling on the government of Honduras to prevent the passage of a law that would allow projects to bypass human rights considerations and ease the granting of environmental licenses. The organization has warned that this “could jeopardize the rights to a healthy environment, to receive information and to participate in public affairs”.