In her report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Special Rapporteur Siobhan Mullally said that the 2018 Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration obliges countries “to save lives and prevent deaths and injuries of migrants through individual or joint search and rescue operations” at sea.
But that won’t stop at least 8,565 people dying on routes around the world in 2023, “making it the deadliest year on record,” Ms Mullally said. Just over half of the deaths were from drowning, she added.
“For victims of human trafficking at sea, the right to life must first be guaranteed as a fundamental and inderogable human right. States have a duty to ensure that maritime actors can fulfill their duties towards persons in distress at sea,” she said.
Search and Rescue
“It is therefore essential that maritime actors are fully supported in meeting their search and rescue obligations under international law. Those obligations must be carried out without discrimination or taking into account the status of the persons being rescued.”
Ms Mullally highlighted the critical situation of Rohingya refugees, many of whom, including many child refugees, are at risk of trafficking at sea.
She said nearly 4,500 Rohingya embarked on dangerous sea voyages in 2023 and 569 were reported dead or missing. Compared to a year earlier, the number of people leaving the coast increased by 21 percent, while the number of dead or missing rose by 63 percent.
A third of adults are at risk of disease due to physical inactivity
Almost a third of adults worldwide, approximately 1.8 billion people, did not meet recommended levels of physical activity in 2022, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO).WHO) has revealed.
If this trend continues, inactivity levels are expected to rise to 35 percent by 2030.
“Physical inactivity is a silent threat to global health and contributes significantly to the burden of chronic diseases,” said Dr Rüdiger Krech, Director of Health Promotion at WHO.
According to WHO recommendations, adults should do 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity – or 75 minutes of vigorous activity – each week. Physical inactivity puts adults at greater risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancers such as breast and colon cancer.
The highest rates of physical inactivity were observed in the high-income Asia-Pacific region (48 percent) and South Asia (45 percent), while inactivity levels in other regions range from 14 percent in Oceania to 28 percent in high-income Western countries.
Gender inequality
Physical inactivity is still more prevalent among women than men worldwide, with inactivity rates of 34 percent compared to 29 percent. In some countries, this difference is as much as 20 percentage points.
In addition, people over 60 are less active than other adults, highlighting the importance of promoting physical activity for that age group.
Despite the worrying results, almost half of the world’s countries have made some improvements over the past decade and 22 countries have been identified as likely to meet the global target of reducing inactivity by 15 percent by 2030.
The scale of arbitrary executions in Iraq may constitute a crime against humanity
The “systematic” execution of prisoners sentenced to death based on confessions extracted through torture under an “ambiguous” anti-terrorism law amounts to arbitrary deprivation of life and could amount to a crime against humanity, a group of human rights experts said Thursday.
“We are alarmed by the high number of executions made public since 2016, almost 400 in total, including 30 this year, and the explicit political commitment to continue carrying out the death penalty,” said the experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council.
This continues “with total disregard” to reported irregularities in the administration of justice, cases of enforced disappearances and confessions tainted by torture, which have fuelled penal policies, the Special Rapporteurs said.
With some 8,000 prisoners on death row in Iraq, experts say arbitrary executions, when carried out on a large scale and systematically, could amount to crimes against humanity.
They said that Iraq and other countries that maintain the death penalty for common crimes should reserve the punishment only for the “most serious crimes,” that is, intentional murder.
‘Very disturbing’
“We insist that most of the crimes described in articles two and three of the Counter-Terrorism Law No. 13 of 2005… do not meet the threshold of the ‘most serious crimes’, making these executions arbitrary in nature,” said the experts.
“The alleged political use of the death penalty, mainly against Sunni Iraqi men, is deeply troubling.”
They again urged the Iraqi government to immediately halt all executions, ensure fair retrials for prisoners on death row, particularly those accused of terrorism offenses, and immediately launch a thorough and impartial investigation.
Special Rapporteurs and other UN Council for Human Rights-appointed human rights experts are independent of any government, do not receive a salary for their work and perform their duties on an individual basis.
