rights

Nov. 29 (UPI) — The federal government is ending its anti-Semitism investigation at Northwestern University in exchange for a $75 million fine in an agreement that restores $790 million in federal funding for research.

The Chicago-area private university must abide by federal anti-discrimination laws regarding admissions and hiring and initiate mandatory anti-Semitism training for students, staff and faculty as part of the deal, the Chicago Sun Times reported.

University officials also must enact and maintain policies that clearly regulate protests and other “expressive activities,” review its policies regarding international admissions and end its Deering Meadow agreement that enabled “peaceful” protests at the university’s 2-acre park.

“This is not an agreement the university enters into lightly, but one that was made based on institutional values,” interim President Henry Bienen said, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Attorney General Pam Bondi called the settlement a win for civil rights.

“Today’s settlement marks another victory for the Trump administration’s fight to ensure that American educational institutions protect Jewish students and put merit first,” Bondi said in a statement.

“Institutions that accept federal funds are obligated to follow civil rights law,” Bondi added. “We are grateful to Northwestern for negotiating this historic deal.”

Bienen said university officials had several “hard lines” that they refused to cross when negotiating the settlement.

“We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty would teach or how our faculty would teach,” he said.

University officials said they will review their international admissions criteria and develop training to better socialize international students so that they understand the campus norms regarding open debate and inquiry.

Northwestern’s board of trustees also will create a committee to ensure the university complies with the agreement with the federal government.

The university must pay its $75 million fine in increments over the next three years, which is the second-highest amount being paid by a college or university to settle accusations of discrimination and anti-Semitism amid pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Columbia University in New York City earlier agreed to pay a $200 million fine to settle claims made against it by federal investigators.

The $790 million in federal research funding that had been suspended should be restored by the end of December, according to Bienen.

Authorities also designate Anti-Corruption Foundation as ‘terrorist’ group and consider total ban on WhatsApp.

Russian authorities have outlawed Human Rights Watch as an “undesirable organisation”, a label that, under a 2015 law, makes involvement with it a criminal offence.

Friday’s designation means the international human rights group must stop all work in Russia, and opens those who cooperate with or support the organisation to prosecution.

HRW has repeatedly accused Russia of suppressing dissenters and committing war crimes during its ongoing war against Ukraine.

“For over three decades, Human Rights Watch’s work on post-Soviet Russia has pressed the government to uphold human rights and freedoms,” the executive director at Human Rights Watch, Philippe Bolopion, said in a statement.

“Our work hasn’t changed, but what’s changed, dramatically, is the government’s full-throttled embrace of dictatorial policies, its staggering rise in repression, and the scope of the war crimes its forces are committing in Ukraine.”

The decision by the Russian prosecutor general’s office is the latest move in a crackdown on Kremlin critics, journalists and activists, which has intensified since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In a separate statement on Friday, the office said it was opening a case against Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot that would designate the group as an “extremist” organisation.

Separately, Russia’s Supreme Court designated on Thursday the Anti-Corruption Foundation set up by the late opposition activist Alexey Navalny as a “terrorist” group.

The ruling targeted the foundation’s United States-registered entity, which became the focal point for the group when the original Anti-Corruption Foundation was designated an “undesirable organisation” by the Russian government in 2021.

Russia’s list of “undesirable organisations” currently covers more than 275 entities, including prominent independent news outlets and rights groups.

Among those are prominent news organisations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, think tanks like Chatham House, anticorruption group Transparency International, and environmental advocacy organisation World Wildlife Fund.

Founded in 1978, Human Rights Watch monitors human rights violations in various countries across the world.

WhatsApp might be ‘completely blocked’

Meanwhile, Russia’s state communications watchdog threatened on Friday to block WhatsApp entirely if it fails to comply with Russian law.

In August, Russia began limiting some calls on WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, and on Telegram, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of refusing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and “terrorism” cases.

On Friday, the Roskomnadzor watchdog again accused WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian requirements designed to prevent and combat crime.

“If the messaging service continues to fail to meet the demands of Russian legislation, it will be completely blocked,” Interfax news agency quoted it as saying.

WhatsApp has accused Moscow of trying to block millions of Russians from accessing secure communication.

Russian authorities are pushing a state-backed rival app called MAX, which critics claim could be used to track users. State media have dismissed those accusations as false.

Nov. 28 (UPI) — Russia has designated Human Rights Watch as an “undesirable foreign organization,” the nation’s Ministry of Justice announced Friday.

This decision means the organization, which was founded in 1978, is banned from operating in Russia. HRW is in 78 nations.

“Designating rights groups undesirable is brazen and cynical,” Philippe Bolopion, executive director at Human Rights Watch, said in a news release. “It only redoubles our determination to document the Russian authorities’ human rights violations and war crimes, and ensure that those responsible are held accountable.”

HRW has documented human rights violations in Russia and the military committing war crimes in Ukraine.

“For over three decades, Human Rights Watch’s work on post-Soviet Russia has pressed the government to uphold human rights and freedoms,” Bolopion said. “Our work hasn’t changed, but what’s changed, dramatically, is the government’s full-throttled embrace of dictatorial policies, its staggering rise in repression, and the scope of the war crimes its forces are committing in Ukraine.”

In 2015, Russia introduced the “undesirable” law to silence independent media, opposition groups and foreign organizations.

Russian authorities have designated at least 280 organizations as “undesirable,” including the Moscow Times. Courts have issued administrative and criminal sentences, including in their absence, against several hundred people, HRW said.

“Undesirable” organizations, as determined by the Prosecutor’s Office, undermine Russia’s security, defense or constitutional order.

The Prosecutor General’s Office banned HRW on Nov. 10.

Those who continue to engage with these organizations, in Russia or abroad, may face administrative and criminal penalties, including a maximum six-year prison sentence. The authorities interpret “engagement” widely and arbitrarily, HRW said.

The organization leaders risk up to six years, according to Russian law.

In 2021, Andrei Pivovarov, a political activist, was sentenced to four years in prison for social media posts, which the authorities said promoted Open Russia, a political opposition movement designated “undesirable.” Russian authorities released and expelled him from the country in 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange with Western nations.

In May 2025, a Moscow court sentenced Grigory Melkonyants, a prominent Russian rights defender and election monitor, to five years in prison after authorities wrongly equated the Russian election monitoring group Golos with the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, which were designated “undesirable” in 2021.

After the initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, HRW was among several international organizations and non-government organizations with offices shut down in Moscow.

HRW had operated in Russia since 1992 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era, HRW began working there in 1978.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a rapporteur for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Venice Commission, an advisory body to the Council of Europe, have criticized the legislation.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Monday prepared for a showdown over whether noncitizens held at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right to question the legality of their imprisonment.

A measure passed by the chamber last week on a 49-42 vote would effectively overturn a Supreme Court decision granting detainees the right to challenge their detention in federal court. A final vote on adding that language to a defense spending bill was expected today.

But two proposed amendments would slightly ease that prohibition; one of them was proposed by the author of the original language, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

If adopted by the Senate, the detainee amendment would need to be accepted by the House of Representatives to be sent to President Bush.

Graham sponsored the amendment to ban foreign captives at Guantanamo — who number about 500 — from challenging their detention with a writ of habeas corpus, a provision that dates from English common law.

In an effort to soften the prohibition, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) on Monday introduced a competing amendment that would permit prisoners to question the rationale for their incarceration but exclude petitions over other matters, including conditions of confinement.

“It is reasonable to insist that when the government deprives a person of his or her liberty, and in this case for an indefinite period of time, that the individual have a meaningful opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention,” Bingaman said on the Senate floor. “This is not a radical proposition that I’ve just enunciated. It is enshrined in our Constitution.”

But Graham, a military lawyer before he began his political career, argued that since the Supreme Court granted Guantanamo prisoners access to federal court in 2004, the system has been swamped with frivolous complaints.

“Does the United States Senate want [to give] enemy terrorists, Al Qaeda members being detained at Guantanamo Bay, unlimited access to our federal courts to sue our troops?” Graham asked. “Never in the midst of warfare has an [enemy] prisoner been allowed” such judicial rights.

In response to concerns raised by some senators, Graham was offering to amend his initial provision to give Guantanamo prisoners some legal rights to appeal findings by the military that they are enemy combatants. In addition, detainees sentenced to 10 years or more would receive an automatic appeal; those who received a lesser sentence could ask for a hearing.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he hoped his colleagues would adopt Bingaman’s more permissive language. But if not, he added, he hoped the Senate would accept Graham’s revisions to his amendment as an improvement over the measure adopted last week.

“All of us really believe that we must operate according to our Constitution and our laws,” Levin said.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court struck down a key part of the historic Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, ruling that Southern states may no longer be forced to seek federal approval before making changes in their election laws.

The ruling came on a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. speaking for the court.

Roberts said the 1965 law had been a “resounding success” and has ensured that blacks now register and vote at the same rate as whites.

But he said it was no longer fair or rational to subject these states and municipalities to special scrutiny based on a formula that is more than 40 years old.

“States must beseech the federal government for permission to implement laws that they would otherwise have a right to enact and execute on their own,” he wrote. This conflicts with the principle that all the states enjoy “equal sovereignty” and cannot be subjected to different federal laws, he said.

PHOTOS: 2013’s memorable political moments

“Our country has changed in the last 50 years,” the chief justice said. He said that Congress needs to “speak to current conditions.”

As it currently stand, nine states are covered by the law based on voting data from the 1960s and early 1970s.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined with the chief justice.

The decision may have an immediate impact. Texas has been fighting federal courts over its voter ID law and plans to redistrict its congressional districts. Those state actions were halted under the part of the law struck down Tuesday.

The decision leaves open the possibility that Congress could adopt a new formula to target states or municipalities for special scrutiny.

The decision leaves intact the rest of the Voting Rights Act, which makes it illegal to adopt or enforce laws that have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. But civil rights advocates say the provision struck down Tuesday was still needed because it stopped discriminatory measures before they could take effect.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke for the four dissenters. She said the court had made an “egregious” error by striking down a law that had been extended in 2006 by a near unanimous vote in Congress.

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

[email protected]

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday lauded South Korea’s co-sponsorship of this year’s U.N. resolution condemning human rights violations in North Korea.

Ban made the remarks in his keynote speech to an international conference on North Korean human rights held in Seoul, after the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee adopted a resolution against North Korea’s human rights abuses last week in New York.

A total of 61 countries co-sponsored the annually adopted resolution, including South Korea under the liberal Lee government, which has been making overtures to resume dialogue with North Korea.

The move marks a departure from the former liberal Moon Jae-in administration, which withheld its support for the resolution from 2019 to 2021.

The resolution will be reviewed at the upcoming General Assembly plenary session next month for final adoption.

“It is noteworthy,” Ban said of the action. “(It) would be viewed as the new Korean government’s recognition that North Korean human rights issues constitute one of the universal values.”

Ban pointed to “a lack of coherence” in South Korea’s approach to North Korean human rights issues, depending on changes of government between the conservative and progressive blocs, as he delved into obstacles to addressing the issue.

Political deadlock between the two major parties has also left the North Korean Human Rights Foundation, an organization intended to promote research and activities on North Korean human rights and envisioned under the 2016 North Korea human rights law, still unlaunched, he said.

“North Korea’s human rights situation remains grim for long-suffering North Koreans, while Pyongyang’s spending continues to expand,” he noted, urging the international community not to overlook the issue.

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

The immigrant experience holds special meaning to Rams defensive end Kobie Turner — his grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica and his wife’s parents immigrated from Peru. When choosing an organization to highlight in the NFL’s “My Cause My Cleats” campaign, he wanted to show support not only for his family but all immigrants as well.

“There’s been a lot of hard times as of late, a lot of families that are not sure what comes next and I just want to uplift them,” Turner said. “Immigrants are so important to America; they are the backbone to this country.”

The NFL’s “My Cause My Cleats” initiative started after Chicago Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall was fined for violating the league’s uniform policy when he wore cleats promoting Mental Health Awareness Week in October 2013.

After criticizing the NFL for failing to support players and their charitable causes, he met with league officials and two sides created a campaign that allowed players to wear custom-designed cleats that highlighted an organization they support. Since 2016 the “My Cause My Cleats” campaign has been a mainstay on the NFL calendar.

With the immigrant community in Los Angeles and across the country dealing with raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Turner wanted to meet the moment by partnering with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an organization that advocates for the civil rights of immigrants and refugees.

Rams defensive end Kobie Turner’s cleats for the NFL’s 2025 “My Cause My Cleats” campaign. The cleats support CHIRLA, an organization dedicated to the advance the human and civil rights of immigrants and refugees.

(Los Angeles Rams)

He is the only player in the NFL supporting an immigrant rights charity via the “My Cause My Cleats” campaign.

“I really wanted to do something to lend a voice to the immigrant community,” Turner said, “and I know that CHIRLA does a really good job of providing opportunities and pathways for citizenship.”

Luis Tadeo, director of marketing and public relations of CHIRLA, understands the critical role sports and culture play in shaping the way that the community engages and heals in unprecedented times. He knows having the support of a star player on one of L.A.’s biggest sports teams is a powerful statement.

“We hope that other players and other teams in Los Angeles, who have been silent during these moments, see Turner and the Rams as an example of what they could do for immigrant families,” Tadeo said.

Turner, 26, will wear the bright pink cleats when the Rams go for their sixth consecutive win Sunday night against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at SoFi Stadium. One of the stars of a Rams pass-rushing contingent that includes Byron Young, Jared Verse and Braden Fiske, Turner has 22 tackles and 1½ sacks for an 8-2 Rams team that is among the favorites to win the Super Bowl.

Bursting onto the NFL scene two years ago with an impressive nine-sack rookie campaign, Turner gained fame for an appearance on “The Masked Singer” last year, belting out notes befitting of “The Conductor” nickname he earned while singing in college. Music and football played big roles in Turner’s life while growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Clifton, Va.

Rams defensive end Kobie Turner tries to break through the Baltimore Ravens’ offensive line during a game on Oct. 12.

(Terrance Williams / Associated Press)

Now he wants to give a voice to something that goes beyond football and singing — he wants to remind everyone that immigrants are an integral part of American culture.

“You look around and you see ‘Vamos Rams,’ the communities that we serve are immigrant communities,” Turner said. “It’s important to be able to lend a voice to those people and let them know that they are being heard.”

For Turner, his charitable efforts go beyond this weekend. On Tuesday, Turner, Rams staff members and cheerleaders, in conjunction with South L.A. nonprofit A Place Called Home, will serve meals and distribute 400 turkeys and Thanksgiving supplies to families in need. Turner also will perform with 29Live, the youth band of A Place Called Home, during the event.

CHIRLA members will attend Sunday’s game with a group of immigrant youth. In a time when federal agents are detaining and arresting immigrants across the U.S., Tadeo hopes Turner and his cleats will help promote change.

“Our mission is to achieve a just society fully inclusive of immigrants, and whether that’s on the football pitch, if it’s in the halls of Congress, if it’s at the White House making decisions on laws that will impact the lives of immigrants, we need all of the support,” Tadeo said.

The annual United Nations climate conference has ended with an agreement that urges action to address global warming, but falls short of endorsing a phase-out of fossil fuels.

After two weeks of heated debates, meetings and negotiations at the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem, world leaders on Saturday agreed to a deal that calls for countries to “significantly accelerate and scale up climate action worldwide”.

The text lays out a series of promises and measures – including a call for developed countries to triple their funding to help poorer nations respond to the crisis – but makes no mention of a fossil fuel phase-out.

Dozens of states had been calling forthe COP30 deal to lay out a framework to ease away from their reliance on oil, gas and coal – the major drivers of the climate crisis – but several countries that rely on fossil fuels had pushed back.

While observers say the deal marks a step forward in the world’s effort to address climate breakdown, several have argued that COP30 fell short of expectations.

Here’s a look at how some world leaders and climate advocates have reacted to the agreement.

COP30 President Andre Aranha Correa do Lago

“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know that you, civil society, will demand us to do more to fight climate change. I want to reaffirm that I will try not to disappoint you during my presidency,” he said during Saturday’s closing session.

“As [Brazilian] President [Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva] said at the opening of this COP, we need roadmaps so that humanity – in a just and planned manner – can overcome its dependence on fossil fuels, halt and reverse deforestation and mobilise resources for these purposes,” he said.

“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps: One on halting and reverting [reversing] deforestation and another to transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

“COP30 has delivered progress,” Guterres said in a statement, including the call to triple climate adaptation financing and recognition that the world is going to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target for global warming set under the Paris Agreement.

“But COPs are consensus-based – and in a period of geopolitical divides, consensus is ever harder to reach. I cannot pretend that COP30 has delivered everything that is needed. The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide,” the UN chief said.

“I understand many may feel dissapointed [sic] – especially young people, Indigenous Peoples and those living through climate chaos. The reality of overshoot is a stark warning: We are approaching dangerous and irreversible tipping points,” he added.

Wopke Hoekstra, European Union climate commissioner

“We’re not going to hide the fact that we would have preferred to have more, to have more ambition on everything,” Hoekstra told reporters.

“It is not perfect, but it is a hugely important step in the right direction.”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro

“I do not accept that the COP30 declaration does not clearly state, as science does, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not stated, everything else is hypocrisy,” Petro wrote on social media.

“Life on the planet, including our own, is only possible if we separate ourselves from oil, coal, and natural gas as energy sources; science has determined this, and I am not blind to science.

“Colombia opposes a COP30 declaration that does not tell the world the scientific truth.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla

“While the results fell short of expectations, the Belem COP strengthens and demonstrates the importance of multilateralism in addressing major global challenges such as combating #climatechange,” he wrote on X.

“Among its key outcomes are the call for developed countries to provide climate finance for adaptation in developing countries, at least tripling current levels by 2035; the establishment of a mechanism to support our countries in just transitions; and the commitment from developed countries to fulfill their obligations under the Paris Agreement.”

China

“I’m happy with the outcome,” Li Gao, head of China’s delegation at COP30, told the AFP news agency.

“We achieved this success in a very difficult situation, so it shows that the international community would like to show solidarity and make joint efforts to address climate change.”

Alliance of Small Island States

A group representing the interests of 39 small island and low-lying coastal states described the deal as “imperfect” but said it nevertheless was a step towards “progress”.

“Ultimately, this is the push and pull of multilateralism. The opportunity for all countries to be heard and to listen to each other’s perspectives, to collaborate, build bridges, and reach common ground,” the Alliance of Small Island States said in a statement.

Amnesty International

Ann Harrison, climate justice adviser at Amnesty International, noted that COP30 host Brazil had promised to make sure “every voice is heard and made strenuous efforts to broaden participation, which should be replicated”.

“Yet the lack of participatory, inclusive, and transparent negotiations left both civil society and Indigenous Peoples, who answered the global mutirao [working together] call in large numbers, out of the real decision making,” Harrison said in a statement.

Still, she said “people power” had helped achieve “a commitment to develop a Just Transition mechanism that will streamline and coordinate ongoing and future efforts to protect the rights of workers, other individuals and communities affected by fossil fuel phase out”.

Oxfam

Viviana Santiago, executive director of Oxfam Brasil, said COP30 “offered a spark of hope but far more heartbreak, as the ambition of global leaders continues to fall short of what is needed for a liveable planet”.

“A truly just transition requires those who built their fortunes on fossil fuels to move first and fastest – and provide finance in the form of grants, not loans, so front-line communities can do the same. Instead, the poorest countries already in debt are being told to transition faster, with fewer funds,” Santiago said.

“The spark of hope lies in the proposed Belem Action Mechanism, which puts workers’ rights and justice at the centre of the shift away from fossil fuels. But without financing from rich countries, the just energy transition risks becoming stalled in many countries.”

Four new labour codes come into force as India seeks to attract investment and strengthen manufacturing.

India has announced a sweeping set of labour reforms, saying it will implement four long-delayed labour codes that the government says will modernise outdated regulations and extend stronger protections to millions of workers.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X on Friday that the overhaul would provide “a strong foundation for universal social security, minimum and timely payment of wages, safe workplaces and remunerative opportunities”.

He said the changes would spur job creation and lift productivity across the economy.

The labour ministry echoed that message, saying the reforms place “workers, especially women, youth, unorganised, gig and migrant workers, firmly at the centre of labour governance”, with expanded social security and portable entitlements that apply nationwide.

The government says replacing 29 fragmented laws with four unified codes covering wages, industrial relations, social security and occupational safety will simplify compliance and make India more attractive for investment.

Many of India’s existing labour laws date back to the British colonial era and have long been criticised by businesses as complicated, inconsistent and a barrier to scaling up manufacturing, an industry that still accounts for less than 20 percent of India’s nearly $4-trillion gross domestic product (GDP).

The new rules formalise changes approved by parliament in 2020 but stalled for years due to political resistance and pushback from several states and unions.

The reforms introduce significant shifts in how factories operate. Women can now legally work night shifts, firms have greater room to extend working hours, and the threshold for companies requiring prior approval for layoffs has been raised from 100 to 300 workers.

Union opposition

Officials argue this flexibility will encourage employers to expand operations without fear of lengthy bureaucratic delays.

For the first time, the codes also define gig and platform work, offering legal recognition and expanding social protection to a fast-growing segment of the labour force.

Government estimates suggest the gig economy could reach more than 23.5 million workers by 2030, up sharply from about 10 million in 2024/25.

Economists say the changes may initially strain small and informal firms but could strengthen household incomes over time.

“In the short term, they may hurt small, unorganised firms, but in the long run … with minimum wages and increased social security, it could be positive for both working conditions and consumption,” said Devendra Kumar Pant of India Ratings & Research, speaking to the Reuters news agency.

Trade unions, however, remain fiercely opposed. “The labour codes have been implemented despite strong opposition from the trade unions and it will snatch the workers’ rights, including fixed-term jobs and rights available under the earlier labour laws,” said Amarjeet Kaur of the All India Trade Union Congress.

Intuit is the first new founding partner of the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics to take advantage of venue naming opportunities available for the L.A. Games as the financial technology company and LA28 announced a sponsorship deal Friday.

Per the partnership, Intuit will retain its name on Intuit Dome for Olympic basketball competitions and work with LA28 to assist small businesses in the city, provide select U.S. athletes with free tax preparation and expand financial education for students in the L.A. community.

Previously, the International Olympic Committee required “clean venues,” which necessitated scrubbing all mention of corporate sponsorship. It has required LA28 organizers to use generic names such as Exposition Park Stadium for BMO Stadium or 2028 Stadium for SoFi Stadium.

But after the IOC and LA28 announced an agreement in August that opened potential venue naming rights, Honda Center (volleyball), Peacock Theater (weightlifting and boxing) and the Comcast Squash Center at Universal Studios became the first venues to have corporate sponsorship. Honda and Comcast had already previously announced deals to become founding partners with LA28.

John Slusher, chief executive of LA28’s commercial operation, believed Intuit, which is in a 23-year partnership with the Clippers, would have been a potential Olympic partner no matter what, he said the pace of conversations picked up after naming rights became available. The Intuit Dome will host men’s and women’s basketball competitions that are among the most popular Olympic events and basketball is one of the few sports that competes for the duration of the Games, giving the arena a prime position in the Olympic spotlight.

“It wasn’t just any building. It was an incredibly important and state-of-the-art building,” Slusher said in an interview with The Times. “And it obviously ties so well with their investment in Los Angeles and what they do with the dome right now.”

Intuit Dome opened in 2024 for the Clippers. Hailed for its innovative use of technology, massive halo board and large fan section dubbed “The Wall,” the project from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has already secured hosting rights for the NBA All-Star Game in February.

“Intuit is incredibly proud to be a founding partner of the LA28 Games,” Intuit chief marketing officer Thomas Ranese said in a statement. “Our commitment to powering prosperity aligns perfectly with the spirit of the movement: celebrating determination, optimism, and the belief in what’s possible. Just as athletes strive for gold, we empower consumers and businesses to outdo their financial goals with confidence.”

Conversations with partners regarding naming rights for temporary venues have started, Slusher said, beginning with companies already involved in The Olympic Partner (TOP) program. While no deals have closed for temporary venues yet, the initial feedback from partners “seems incredibly excited,” Slusher said.

The venue naming rights opened a never-before-tapped revenue stream for the 2028 Games, which are expected to cost about $7.1 billion. Organizers are hoping to cover at least $2.5 billion with domestic sponsorship. The financial terms of Friday’s contract were not disclosed, but founding-level partnerships are reported to start at roughly $200 million, according to Sports Business Journal.

The organizing committee had lofty marketing expectations heading into 2025. Hoping to capitalize on the successful 2024 Paris Games, the group aimed to bring in $800 million to $1 billion in deals this year and reach $2 billion total by the beginning of 2026. After announcing three founding-level partnerships this year between Intuit, Honda and Starbucks, Slusher says he believes the team is on track to meet its goals.

“We feel very confident that what we said back then will be true,” Slusher said. “So we’re feeling great about the progress. I think we saw an incredible momentum in the first quarter, and now what we’re seeing is that same momentum. … We are super excited about it and more to come.”

Every last deal matters approaching the July 14, 2028, opening ceremony. Any debt incurred from Games operation by LA28 will fall to L.A. The city is on the hook for the first $270 million in overrun costs, with California picking up the next $270 million and the rest falling back to L.A.

SEOUL, Nov. 20 (UPI) — A U.N. committee adopted a resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights violations, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday, with 61 co-sponsors including South Korea and the United States.

The draft resolution, introduced earlier this month to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly, “condemns in the strongest terms the long-standing and ongoing systematic, widespread and gross violations of human rights in and by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, including those that may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the official name of North Korea.

The resolution calls on Pyongyang to “respect, protect and fulfill all human rights and fundamental freedoms” and to “immediately close the political prison camps and release all political prisoners unconditionally.”

It was approved by consensus during a plenary meeting of the Third Committee on Wednesday.

South Korea was among the initial 41 member states to co-sponsor the resolution, despite speculation that the liberal administration of President Lee Jae Myung might withhold support in an effort to improve relations with Pyongyang.

However, South Korea maintained the position of former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s conservative government, with the Foreign Ministry noting that Seoul’s approach to North Korean human rights would remain a matter of principle.

In a statement on Thursday, the Foreign Ministry said the resolution “urges the DPRK to establish an operating environment conducive to the return of international and humanitarian staff and encourages all Member States and U.N. entities to provide more support for the work of civil society organizations.”

“The ROK government will continue its close cooperation with the international community for the substantive enhancement of human rights of DPRK people,” the ministry added, using the official acronym for South Korea.

North Korea has long rejected such resolutions as hostile acts, accusing the United Nations and Western powers of using human rights as a pretext to undermine its government.

During Wednesday’s plenary meeting, North Korean Ambassador to the United Nations Kim Song said Pyongyang “strongly condemns and totally rejects” the resolution, calling it “a document of political plots motivated by the impure intention of defaming the dignity of our republic and undermining its sovereign political system.”

Representatives of China and Russia also dissociated themselves from the consensus, with Beijing rejecting what it called a “politicized approach to human rights issues.”

A September report by the U.N. Human Rights Office found that North Korea’s human rights situation “has not improved over the past decade and, in many instances, has degraded,” citing worsening food shortages, widespread forced labor and tight restrictions on movement and expression.

This week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un praised his regime’s state security forces, which run the political prison system and have been widely accused of employing brutal methods of repression and torture. The security apparatus has long been central to maintaining the Kim family’s grip on power through pervasive surveillance and the suppression of dissent.

The United States, which was not initially among the co-sponsoring nations, later joined the group that also includes Australia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

The resolution will be reviewed at the upcoming General Assembly plenary next month for final adoption.

The family of Mohammed Ibrahim, a Palestinian American boy who has been detained by Israel since February, is demanding that an independent doctor assess the teenager’s condition amid alarming reports about his situation in prison.

Mohammed’s uncle, Zeyad Kadur, said an official from the United States embassy in Israel visited the 16-year-old last week at Ofer Prison.

The official told the family afterwards that Ibrahim had lost weight and dark circles were forming around his eyes, Kadur told Al Jazeera.

The consular officer also said he had raised Mohammed’s case with multiple US and Israeli agencies.

“This is the first time in nine months that they showed grave concern for his health, so how bad is it?” Kadur asked in an interview on Wednesday.

Despite rights groups and US lawmakers pleading for Mohammed’s release, Israel has refused to free him, and his family said the administration of President Donald Trump is not doing enough to bring him home.

Israeli authorities have accused Ibrahim of throwing rocks at settlers in the occupied West Bank, an allegation he denies.

But the legal proceedings in the case are moving at a snail’s pace in Israel’s military justice system, according to Mohammed’s family.

Rights advocates also say that the military court system in the occupied West Bank is part of Israel’s discriminatory apartheid regime, given its conviction rate of nearly 100 percent for Palestinian defendants.

Adding to the Ibrahim family’s angst is the lack of access to the teenager while Mohammed is in Israeli prison. Unable to visit him or communicate with him, his relatives are only able to receive updates from the US embassy.

The teenager has been suffering from severe weight loss while in detention, his father, Zaher Ibrahim, told Al Jazeera earlier this year. He also contracted scabies, a contagious skin infection.

The last visit he received from US embassy staff was in September.

Israeli authorities have committed well-documented abuses against Palestinian detainees, including torture and sexual violence, especially after the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

“We hear and see people getting out of prison and what they look like, and we know it’s bad,” Kadur said.

“Mohammed is an American kid who was taken at 15. He is now 16, and he’s been sitting there for nine months and hasn’t seen his mom, hasn’t seen his dad.”

He added that the family is also concerned about Mohammed’s mental health.

“We’re requesting that he gets sent to a hospital and evaluated by a third party, not by a prison medic or nurse. He needs some actual attention,” Mohammed’s uncle told Al Jazeera.

Mohammed, who is from Florida, was visiting Palestine when in the middle of the night he was arrested, blindfolded and beaten in what Kadur described as a “kidnapping”.

The US Department of State did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the latest consular visit to Mohammed.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Israel last month, he appeared to have misheard a question about Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti and thought it was about Mohammed’s case.

“Are you talking about the one from the US? I don’t have any news for you on that today,” Rubio told reporters.

“Obviously, we’ll work that through our embassy here and our diplomatic channels, but we don’t have anything to announce on that.”

But for Kadur, Mohammed’s case is not a bureaucratic or legal matter – it is one that requires political will from Washington to secure his freedom.

Kadur underscored that the US has negotiated with adversaries, including Venezuela, Russia and North Korea, to free detained Americans, so it can push for the release of Mohammed from its closest ally in the Middle East.

The US provided Israel with more than $21bn in military aid over the past two years.

Kadur drew a contrast between the lack of US effort to free Mohammed and the push to release Edan Alexander, a US citizen who was volunteering in the Israeli army and was taken prisoner during Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Alexander was released in May after pressure from the Trump administration on Hamas.

“The American government negotiated with what they consider a terrorist organisation, and they secured his release – an adult who put on a uniform, who picked up a gun and did what he signed up for,” Kadur said of Alexander.

“Why is a 16-year-old still there for nine months, rotting away, deteriorating in a prison? That’s one example to show that Mohammed – and his name and his Palestinian DNA – [are] not considered American enough by the State Department first and by the administration second.”

More than 130 people suspected of being in the United States illegally have been detained in Charlotte, North Carolina, authorities said, as President Donald Trump’s nationwide deportation push intensifies. The raids took place over just two days.

Here is what we know:

What happened in Charlotte?

Federal agents swept into Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday, escalating Trump’s widening immigration crackdown and turning the city into the latest focal point for large-scale arrests in Democratic-led areas. Charlotte is a Democratic-leaning city of about 950,000 people and a financial services hub.

Officers were seen outside churches, around apartment complexes, and along busy shopping corridors as the operation unfolded.

“We are increasing the presence of DHS law enforcement in Charlotte to keep Americans safe and remove threats to public safety,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on Saturday.

According to Homeland Security officials, 44 of the detainees have criminal records, including two described as gang members. The alleged offences include driving while intoxicated, assault, trespassing, larceny and hit-and-run. One arrested person, according to the commander leading the raids, is a registered sex offender.

President Trump and Secretary Noem will not back down from their mission to make America safe again.

North Carolina sanctuary politicians are protecting the nearly 1,400 criminal illegal aliens in Charlotte’s jails by REFUSING to turn them over to ICE, ultimately releasing these… pic.twitter.com/rM2kt3gLuB

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) November 17, 2025

What exactly is Operation Charlotte’s Web?

The DHS has labelled the raids Operation Charlotte’s Web, playing on the title of the famous children’s book, which is not about North Carolina.

The book, Charlotte’s Web, follows a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being killed, Charlotte writes messages in her web to try to save him.

But in Charlotte, the city, the web is not a saviour — it is the dragnet to catch immigrants.

“Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please,” Gregory Bovino, the DHS commander leading the raids, said on X on Saturday, quoting from the iconic book.

“This time, the breeze hit Charlotte like a storm. From border towns to the Queen City, our agents go where the mission calls.”

‘Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.’ — Charlotte’s Web

This time, the breeze hit Charlotte like a storm. From border towns to the Queen City, our agents go where the mission calls.#DHS #CBP… pic.twitter.com/de0nqHn3vR

— Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino (@CMDROpAtLargeCA) November 16, 2025

Yet the DHS decision to use a popular children’s book title for a campaign that is expected to break up several families has also faced criticism, including from the granddaughter of EB White, the author of Charlotte’s Web.

“He believed in the rule of law and due process,” Martha White said in a statement, referring to her grandfather. “He certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons.”

What is driving the immigration raid?

Officials insist the surge is aimed at tackling crime, arguing — as the Trump administration has in other cities that have been targeted in similar raids — that local authorities have failed to ensure law and order.

However, local leaders have objected to the raids and pointed to police data, which shows that crime has been declining.

According to data released by the city, crime has dropped 8 percent from last year, with violent crimes down 20 percent.

However, Charlotte nevertheless grabbed national and global attention this summer when Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was fatally stabbed on a light-rail train, in an attack captured on video. The suspect is a US citizen, but the Trump administration repeatedly emphasised that he had been arrested more than a dozen times before.

The DHS also said the Charlotte raids happened because local officials did not honour nearly 1,400 requests to hold people for up to 48 hours after their release, which would have allowed immigration agents to take them into custody.

“I made it clear that I do not want to stop ICE from doing their job, but I do want them to do it safely, responsibly, and with proper coordination by notifying our agency ahead of time,” Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden said in a statement, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a part of the DHS that has been leading anti-immigrant raids in multiple urban areas across the country. Charlotte falls in Mecklenburg County.

Tensions remain high. “Democrats at all levels are choosing to protect criminal illegals over North Carolina citizens,” state Republican chairman Jason Simmons said on Monday, even though ICE agents have also arrested several visa holders and permanent residents — all living legally in the US — during the raids.

Who is Gregory Bovino?

Gregory Bovino is a senior US Border Patrol official who has become a central figure in Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdowns in big cities. He has led the high-profile enforcement campaign in Chicago since September and has also been involved in operations in Los Angeles and now Charlotte.

Bovino has frequently served as the public face of these efforts — holding press briefings, giving interviews, and promoting arrest numbers as signs of success.

His approach has drawn controversy. Civil rights groups, local officials, and legal experts have criticised tactics used under his command, including aggressive arrests, the use of chemical agents against detainees, and the use of Border Patrol troops far from the US border. Several operations have faced legal challenges, and judges as well as local leaders have questioned whether federal agents are acting within their jurisdiction.

Regarding the use of chemical agents, Bovino told The Associated Press news agency that using chemical agents is “far less lethal” than what his agents encounter. “We use the least amount of force necessary to effect the arrest,” he said. “If I had more CS gas, I would have deployed it.” CS gas is a tear gas commonly used by federal agents.

What do we know about the communities affected?

Local reporting shows that Charlotte’s immigrant neighbourhoods felt the impact immediately. The Charlotte Observer described how a baker, Manuel “Manolo” Betancur, shut down his bakery on Saturday afternoon — the first closure in its 28-year history — after learning that Border Patrol agents had arrived in the city.

He said he has no idea when he will reopen.

“The amount of fear that we have right now is no good,” Betancur said, outside Manolo’s Bakery on Central Avenue, a major hub for the city’s immigrant community.

“It’s not worth it to take that risk,” he said. “We need to protect our families and [prevent] family separation.”

The bakery was not the only one. Businesses along Central Avenue shut their doors as masked federal agents conducted arrests, prompting anger and anxiety in the community.

Pisco Peruvian Gastrolounge posted on Saturday that it would be temporarily closing. “We cannot wait for the moment we can safely welcome you back and continue sharing our culture, our food, and our vibes,” the restaurant shared on Instagram.

What’s next?

Federal immigration officials are preparing to widen their activities in North Carolina, with Raleigh expected to be included in the enforcement effort as soon as Tuesday, the city’s mayor said.

Raleigh Mayor Janet Cowell noted on Monday that she had received no details about how large the operation would be or how long it might last, and immigration authorities have yet to make any public statements.

“I ask Raleigh to remember our values and maintain peace and respect through any upcoming challenges,” Cowell said in a statement.

Raleigh, with a population of more than 460,000, is North Carolina’s second-largest city after Charlotte, and is part of a region known as the Research Triangle that is home to several leading universities, including Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The possible expansion of immigration raids comes as nationwide detention figures reach historic levels. ICE held 59,762 people in custody as of September 21, 2025, according to TRAC Reports, a nonpartisan data-gathering platform. This is the highest number of ICE arrests ever recorded. Roughly 71.5 percent of those detained had no criminal conviction, and many of those with convictions had only minor offences, such as traffic violations.

Sydney, Australia – Ju-rye Hwang grew up assuming her parents in South Korea were dead and that she was alone in the world after being adopted to North America at about six years of age.

That was until a phone call from a journalist in Seoul turned her world upside down.

“He told me that I was not an orphan,” Hwang said.

“And it was most certain that I was illegally adopted for profit,” she said.

The journalist went on to tell Hwang about the notorious Brothers Home institution in South Korea, a place where thousands had endured horrific abuse, including forced labour, sexual violence, and brutal beatings.

Hwang discovered that she had spent time at the institution as a child, before being offered for overseas adoption.

The journalist also explained how his investigative team had uncovered a file from the home’s archives containing a list of international adoptions, and among the clearly printed names was that of her adoptive mother.

Hearing “the truth”, Hwang said, “made me break down and lose my breath”.

“I felt physically ill,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I believed that my parents were not alive.”

‘Beggars don’t exist here’

Hwang is now a successful career woman in her mid-40s. But her origins link back to South Korea during the 1970s and 80s, when government authorities in the rapidly industrialising nation cracked down brutally on those considered socially undesirable.

Kidnapping was rampant among the children of the poor, the homeless and marginalised who lived on the streets of Seoul and other cities.

Children as well as adults were abducted without warning, bundled into police cars and trucks and hauled away under a state policy aimed at beautifying South Korean cities by removing those designated as “vagrants”.

By clearing the streets of the poor, South Korea’s government sought to project an image of prosperity and modernity to the outside world, particularly in the lead-up to the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.

The then-president and military leader, Chun Doo-hwan, famously boasted of South Korea’s economic success when he told reporters: “Do you see any beggars in our country? We have no beggars. Beggars don’t exist here.”

The president’s push to “cleanse” the streets of the poor and homeless combined toxically with a police performance system based on the accumulation of points that propelled a surge in abductions.

At the time, police earned points based on the category of suspects they apprehended. A petty offender was worth just two performance points. But turning in a so-called “beggar” or “vagrant” to institutions such as the Brothers Home could earn an officer five points – a perverse incentive that prompted widespread abuse.

“The police abducted innocent people off the streets – shoe shiners, gum sellers, people waiting at bus stops, even kids just playing outside,” Moon Jeong-su, a former member of South Korea’s National Assembly, told Al Jazeera.

Brothers Home of horrors

Located in the southern port city of Busan, Brothers Home was founded in 1975 by Park In-geun, a former military officer and boxer.

It was one of many government-subsidised “welfare” institutions across South Korea, established at that time to house the homeless and train them in vocational skills before releasing them back into society as so-called “productive citizens”.

In practice, such facilities became sites of mass detention and horrific abuse.

“State funding was based on the number of people they incarcerated,” said former Busan city council member Park Min-seong.

“The more people they brought in, the more subsidies they received,” he said.

At one stage, up to 95 percent of the Brothers Home’s inmates were delivered directly by police, and as few as 10 percent of those confined were actually “vagrants”, according to a 1987 prosecutor’s report.

In a recent Netflix documentary dealing with the events at Brothers Home, Park Cheong-gwang, the youngest son of the facility’s owner, Park In-geun, admitted that his father had bribed police officers to ensure they sent abducted people to his facility.

Records reviewed by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate historical abuse at Brothers Home and similar centres, revealed that an estimated 38,000 people were detained at the home between 1976 and its closure in 1987.

Brothers Home reached peak capacity in 1984, with more than 4,300 inmates held at one time. During its 11 years of operation, 657 deaths were also officially recorded, though investigators believe the toll was likely much higher.

The home was known among inmates as Park’s “kingdom”. It was a place where the founder wielded absolute control over every aspect of their lives. The compound had high concrete walls and guards stationed at the towering front gate. No one was permitted to leave without express permission.

Inside, children were forced to work long hours in on-site factories producing goods such as fishing rods, shoes and clothing, while adults were sent out for gruelling manual labour at construction sites.

Their labour was not supposed to be free.

A 2021 investigation by Al Jazeera’s 101 East investigative documentary series revealed that Park and members of his board of directors at Brothers Home had embezzled what would amount to tens of millions of dollars in today’s value, and which should have been paid to inmates for their work.

Those operating Brothers Home also profited from the country’s lucrative international adoption trade, with domestic and foreign adoption agencies frequently visiting the facility.

Former inmate Lee Chae-shik, who was held for six years at the home, told 101 East that young children, just like Hwang, would simply disappear overnight.

“Newborns, three-year-olds, kids who couldn’t yet walk … One day, all of those kids were gone,” Lee said.

‘The child said absolutely nothing’

Hwang’s intake form at the Brothers Home states that she was found in Busan’s Jurye-dong neighbourhood and “admitted to Brothers Home at the request of the Jurye 2-dong Police Substation on November 23, 1982”.

A black-and-white photo of a very young Hwang is affixed to the top corner of the document, which was seen by Al Jazeera.

Her head is shaved. The form is stamped with her identification number: 821112646, with a line in the comments section: “Upon arrival, the child said absolutely nothing.”

The document notes Hwang’s “good physique”, “normal face shape and colour”, and she is marked on the form as “healthy – capable of labour work”.

At the bottom of the page are Hwang’s tiny fingerprints. She was about four years old at the time.

“That girl is probably scared and in shock,” said Hwang, looking at her own intake document and the picture of her childhood self. Her voice quivering as she spoke, she referred to the “innocent” child who already “has a mugshot”.

“I 100 percent believe that I was kidnapped,” she said. “I know I was never supposed to be at Brothers [Home] as a four-year-old.”

A deeply unsettling discovery was also made in her adoption records: Her name, Ju-rye, was given to her by the home’s director, Park, who named her after the Jurye-dong neighbourhood where police say she was found – the same neighbourhood where the Brothers Home was located.

“I felt violated. I felt sick in the stomach,” she said, recalling the origins of her name.

Growing up, Hwang said she had fragmented memories of South Korea.

Of the few she could recollect, one was of a towering iron gate. The other was of children splashing in a shallow underground pool. For years, she dismissed those memories as probably imagined. Then, in 2022, six years after the call with the journalist, she finally mustered enough courage to investigate her past with the help of a fellow adoptee from South Korea, who had sent her links to a website detailing what the Brothers Home once looked like.

“I was just toggling through the different menus of that website when two vivid images clicked for me,” Hwang said, snapping her fingers.

“The large iron gate – that was the entrance. The underground pool was inside the facility,” she said, matching her unexplained dreams with the images featured on the website.

“It was overwhelming to know that I was not imagining my memories of Korea,” she said.

Hwang would discover that she was kept at the Brothers Home for nine months before being sent to a nearby orphanage, where she was deemed a “good candidate” for international adoption.

In the consultation notes for eventual adoption, the circumstances of Hwang’s so-called abandonment and her admission to Brothers Home, as well as details of her health, were all provided by Park. She was recorded as being in good health, weighing 15.3kg (33.7lb), measuring 101cm (3.3ft) in height, and having a full set of 20 healthy teeth.

Adoption records also described her as an outgoing and well-behaved young girl. Hwang was noted for her intelligence: she could write her own name “perfectly”, was able to count in numbers, recognised different colours, and was also capable of reciting verses from the Bible from memory.

“It seems odd that I had those skills and was well nourished, and yet the police claimed I was a street kid. It just doesn’t add up,” said Hwang, who is convinced she was well looked after before she was taken to the Brothers Home.

In 2021, Hwang submitted her DNA to an international genetics registry and was immediately matched with a fully-related younger brother who had also been adopted to Belgium. She describes her first video call with her long-lost brother as “surreal”.

“For an adopted person who has never had any blood relatives their entire life, coming face-to-face with a direct sibling was jaw-dropping,” Hwang recalled.

“There was no denying we were related,” she said.

“He looked so much like me – the shape of his face, the features, even our long, slender hands.”

Hwang soon learned that she had another younger brother, and both had been adopted to Belgium in early 1986.

Their adoption files, also seen by Al Jazeera, state the brothers were “abandoned” in Anyang, a city about 300km (186 miles) from Busan, in August 1982, about three months before Hwang was taken to Brothers Home.

The timing of her brothers’ adoptions made her wonder whether her parents may have temporarily left her with relatives in Busan, a common practice in Korean families, possibly while they searched for their missing sons, who may also have been taken off the streets in similar circumstances.

Among the few vivid memories that Hwang still retains from her very early childhood, before the Brothers Home, is of a woman she believes may have been her biological mother.

“The only image that stayed with me,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “is of a woman with medium-length permed hair. I only remember her from the back – I have no memory of her from the front.”

Hwang still holds on to hope that one day she will be reunited with her mother and will discover her true identity.

“I would love to know my real name – the name my parents gave me,” she said.

Truth and Reconciliation

In 2022, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared that serious human rights violations had occurred at Brothers Home. This included enforced disappearances, arbitrary confinement, forced labour without pay, sexual violence, physical abuse, and even deaths.

In the report, the commission stated the “rules of rounding up vagrants to be unconstitutional/illegal”, that “the process of inmates being confined to be illegal”, and “suspicious acts” were discovered “in medical practices and the process of dealing with dead inmates”.

Most children at the home were also found to have been excluded from compulsory education.

The commission concluded that such acts had violated the “right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of relocation, right to liberty, the right to be free from forced or compulsory labour, and the right to education, as guaranteed by the Constitution”.

The government, the commission said, was aware of such violations but “tried to systematically downscale and conceal the case”.

The commission also confirmed for the first time earlier this year that Brothers Home had collaborated with other childcare centres to facilitate illegal overseas adoptions.

Although many records were reportedly destroyed by the home’s former management, investigators verified that at least 31 children had been illegally sent abroad for adoption. The inquiry eventually identified 17 biological mothers linked to children sent for adoption overseas.

In one case, the commission uncovered evidence of a heavily pregnant woman who had been forcibly taken to Brothers Home. She gave birth inside the facility, and her baby was handed over to an adoption agency just a month later and then sent overseas three months after that.

Investigators found a letter of consent to adoption signed by the mother. But the adoption agency had taken custody of the baby the very day the form was signed, leaving no opportunity for the mother to reconsider or withdraw consent.

The commission noted the high likelihood of the mother being coerced into consenting to the overseas adoption of her child while held inside the Brothers Home, from which she could neither leave nor care adequately for her newborn under the home’s oppressive conditions.

Brothers Home’s former director, Park, died in June 2016 in South Korea. He was never held accountable for the unlawful confinement that occurred at his facility, nor did he ever apologise for his role in it.

The commission’s 2022 report strongly recommended that the South Korean government issue a formal state apology for its role in the abuses committed at the home. To date, neither the Busan city government nor the South Korean national police have apologised for involvement in the abuses or the subsequent cover-up, and, despite mounting pressure, no president of the country has issued a formal apology.

In mid-September, however, the government withdrew its appeals against admitting liability for human rights violations that occurred at the facility, following a Supreme Court ruling in March. The move is expected to expedite compensation for a number of the victims who had filed lawsuits against the state over the abuse they suffered.

Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho described the decision to drop the appeals as a “testament to the state’s recognition of the human rights violations [that occurred] due to the state violence in the authoritarian era”.

This week, the Supreme Court further ruled that the state must also compensate victims who were forcibly confined at Brothers Home before 1975, when a government directive officially authorised a nationwide crackdown on “vagrants”.

The court found that the state had “consistently carried out crackdowns and confinement measures against vagrants from the 1950s onwards and expanded these practices” under the directive.

Hwang submitted her case to the commission for investigation in January 2025, and she received an official response confirming that, as a child, she was subjected to “gross human rights violations resulting from the unlawful and grossly unjust exercise of official authority”.

‘Child-exporting nation’

In the decades after the 1950-53 Korean War, more than 170,000 children were sent to Western countries for adoption, as what started as a humanitarian effort to rescue war orphans gradually evolved into a lucrative business for private adoption agencies.

Just last month, President Lee Jae Myung issued a historic apology over South Korea’s former foreign adoption programme, acknowledging the “pain” and “suffering” endured by adoptees and their birth and adoptive families.

Lee spoke of a “shameful chapter” in South Korea’s recent past and its former reputation as a “child-exporting nation”.

The president’s apology came several months after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released another report concluding that widespread human rights violations had occurred within South Korea’s international adoption system.

The commission found that the government had actively promoted intercountry adoptions and granted private agencies near total control over the process, giving them “immense power over the lives of the children”.

Adoption agencies were entrusted with guardianship and consent rights of orphans, allowing them to pursue their financial interests unchecked. They also set their own adoption fees and were known to pressure adoptive parents to pay additional “donations”.

The investigation also revealed that agencies routinely falsified records, obscuring or erasing the identities and family connections of children to make them appear more “adoptable”. This included altering birthdates, names, photographs, and even the circumstances of abandonment to fit the legal definition of an “orphan”.

Under laws in place at the time of Hwang’s adoption, South Korean children could not be sent overseas until a public process had been conducted to determine whether a child had any surviving relatives.

Adoption agencies, including institutions such as the Brothers Home, were legally required to publish public notices in newspapers and on court bulletin boards, stating where and when a child had been found. This process was intended to help reunite missing children with their parents or guardians, and to prevent overseas adoption while those searches were still under way.

However, the commission found that in cases involving the Brothers Home, such notices were published only after formal adoption proceedings had begun. This indicated that the search for an orphan’s relatives was considered a procedural formality rather than a genuine safeguard to protect children who still had family.

The notices were also published by a district office in Seoul rather than in Busan, where the children had originally been reported as found.

The commission concluded that the government had failed “to uphold its responsibility to protect the fundamental human rights of its citizens” and had enabled the “mass exportation of children” to satisfy international demand.

‘Right your wrongs’

Hwang now lives in Sydney, Australia, and her new home is coincidentally the same city where some of the extended family of the late Brothers Home director, Park, now live.

An investigation by 101 East revealed that the director’s brothers-in-law, Lim Young-soon and Joo Chong-chan, who were directors at the Brothers Home, migrated to Sydney in the late 1980s.

Park’s daughter, Park Jee-hee, and her husband, Alex Min, also moved to Australia and were operating a golf driving range and sports complex in Sydney’s outer suburbs, 101 East discovered.

Noting the coincidence of living in the same city as relatives of the late Brothers Home director, Hwang said she believed “things happen for a reason”.

“I’m not sure why, but maybe there’s a reason I’m here,” Hwang told Al Jazeera, adding that if she ever had the opportunity to speak with the Park family, her message would be simple: “Right your wrongs.”

Park’s son, Park Cheong-gwang, admitted in the Netflix documentary series about Brothers Home – titled “The Echoes of Survivors” – that abuses had taken place at the centre.

But he insisted that the South Korean government was largely responsible and that his father had told him that work at the home was carried out under direct orders from the country’s then-President Chun, who died in 2021.

Park Cheong-gwang also used his appearance in the Netflix show to issue the first formal apology of any member of his family.

He apologised to “the victims and their families who suffered during that time at the Brothers Home, and for all the pain they’ve endured since”.

Other relatives living in Australia have dismissed the reported abuses at the home.

Hwang said their lack of remorse “was sickening”.

“They’re running away from their history,” she said.

“It’s not only the adoption, but it’s the fact that everything in my life was erased,” she added.

“My identity, my immediate family, my extended family, everything was erased. No one has the right to do that.”

UN rights chief urges countries to ‘stand up against atrocities’ committed by paramilitary RSF in takeover of the city.

The United Nations’s top human rights body has ordered a probe into abuses in Sudan’s el-Fasher, where mass killings have been reported since the city fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last month.

During a special session in Geneva on Friday, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution ordering the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan to urgently investigate violations in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.

The resolution also called on the investigative team to “identify, where possible” suspected perpetrators in an effort to ensure they are “held accountable”.

The move comes weeks after the RSF, which has been battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of Sudan since April 2023, took full control of el-Fasher on October 26 after an 18-month siege on the city.

Nearly 100,000 people have fled el-Fasher since the RSF’s takeover, with displaced Sudanese civilians saying they faced indiscriminate attacks and sexual violence, among other abuses. Many said they saw dead bodies lining the streets.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told the council on Friday that the “atrocities that are unfolding in el-Fasher were foreseen and preventable” and “constitute the gravest of crimes”.

He said the UN had warned that the fall of el-Fasher “would result in a bloodbath”.

“So none of us should be surprised by reports that since the RSF took control of el-Fasher, there have been mass killings of civilians, ethnically targeted executions, sexual violence including gang rape, abductions for ransom, widespread arbitrary detentions, attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers, and other appalling atrocities,” Turk said.

“The international community has a clear duty to act. There has been too much pretence and performance and too little action. It must stand up against these atrocities, a display of naked cruelty used to subjugate and control an entire population.”

Violence spreading

The RSF has denied targeting civilians or blocking aid, saying such activities are due to rogue actors.

But the UN, human rights groups and other observers have said evidence suggests that mass killings were committed by the paramilitary group.

Sudanese medics have also warned that the RSF appears to be trying to bury the bodies of those killed in el-Fasher in an effort to conceal what happened.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are believed to remain trapped in the city, prompting the head of the UN’s migration agency this week to urgently call for a ceasefire and a humanitarian corridor to provide aid to those civilians.

During Friday’s Human Rights Council session, Mona Rishmawi, a member of the UN’s independent fact-finding mission on Sudan, described examples of rape, killing and torture and said a comprehensive investigation is required to establish the full picture.

She said RSF forces had turned el-Fasher University, where thousands of civilians had been sheltering, “into a killing ground”.

Meanwhile, Turk warned that violence is “surging” to the neighbouring Kordofan region, where bombardments, blockades and forced displacement have been reported. “Kordofan must not suffer the same fate as Darfur,” he said.

The council, which is made up of 47 UN member countries, does not have the power to force countries or others to comply, but can shine a spotlight on rights violations and help document them for possible use in places like the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In early November, the ICC said it was “taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in el-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions” as part of an ongoing investigation into abuses committed in Darfur since April 2023.

More than a thousand unionised Starbucks baristas have walked off the job in more than 40 cities across the United States as negotiations have stalled between the company and the union, Starbucks Workers United.

Workers at 65 stores began an open-ended strike on Thursday, coinciding with the Seattle, Washington-based coffee shop chain’s Red Cup Day sales event, when customers who order a holiday-themed beverage can receive a free reusable cup with their purchase.

The event typically drives higher traffic to Starbucks stores.

The coffeeshop chain, which has more than 18,000 stores across the US and Canada, says that the walkouts have caused limited impact.

More stores could soon join the strike. Starbucks Workers United represents roughly 550 stores around the US. Combined, this strike could be the largest in the history of the coffeeshop chain.

Stores in cities including Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and Portland will join the work stoppage, it said. Some locations had already shut down for the day, a union spokesperson told journalists on a media call.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, the union called on consumers not to shop at any Starbucks location “today and beyond” ahead of a nationwide rally slated to begin at 4pm local time for each location.

The union has filed more than 1,000 charges to the National Labor Relations Board for alleged unfair labour practices such as firing unionising baristas, and last week, it voted to authorise a strike if a contract was not finalised by November 13.

Starbucks has said it pays an average wage of $19 an hour and offers employees who work at least 20 hours a week benefits including healthcare, parental leave and tuition for online classes at Arizona State University.

The union said starting wages are $15.25 per hour in about 33 states and the average barista gets less than 20 hours per week.

Talks between the union and the company stretched for about eight months in 2024, but broke down in December, after which workers went on strike during the key holiday period.

“Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to see stall tactics used in collective bargaining, as we’re seeing with Starbucks. But the situation and the strike vote also demonstrate that long-term grassroots organising empowers workers. There’s strength in numbers,” Jennifer Abruzzo, former General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board under former US President Joe Biden, said in remarks shared with Al Jazeera.

History of strikes

Starbucks workers have gone on strike several times over the last few years, starting in 2021. Workers at a location in Buffalo, New York became the first unionised store and subsequently launched a nationwide movement, which now represents four percent of the Starbucks cafe workforce, or about 9,500 people.

In 2022, workers at roughly 100 stores went on strike, and in December 2024, workers walked off the job amid stalled negotiations at 300 stores. Negotiations began again earlier this year, but the two parties have yet to come to an agreement.

In April this year, the union voted to reject a Starbucks proposal that guaranteed annual raises of at least two percent, saying it did not offer changes to economic benefits such as healthcare, or an immediate pay hike.

“Despite the fact that thousands of Starbucks baristas voted to engage in collective bargaining some years ago, the company has manipulated the situation to avoid having a contract,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, said in remarks provided to Al Jazeera.

“Baristas are staying strong. The strength of the strike vote shows that baristas aren’t giving up. They continue to demand fair treatment by the company.”

Executive pressures

The strike comes as Starbucks under CEO Brian Niccol shuts hundreds of underperforming stores this year, including the unionised flagship Seattle location, while trimming corporate roles to control costs.

Niccol, who previously spent six years leading Chipotle, has stressed improving service times and in-store experience in the US to revive demand for beverages as sales have remained flat or negative for the past seven quarters.

Niccol had said in September last year when he took over as CEO that he was committed to dialogue.

However, Lynne Fox, the union’s international president, said on a call with journalists that things changed once Niccol took the helm.

“A year into Niccol’s tenure, negotiations have gone backwards after months of steady progress and good faith negotiations last year,” Fox said.

In 2024, Niccol’s compensation package totaled more than $95m, which is 6,666 times the median employee salary, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch tracker. That represents the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the S&P 500, according to the Institute for Policy Studies’ Executive Excess report.

Niccol’s pay, however, is largely driven by the performance of Starbucks’ stock, with $90m coming from the value of stock awards. Since Niccol took over the company in September 2024, the stock price of Starbucks has fallen by about 6 percent.

On Wall Street, Starbucks’ stock in midday trading is down by 0.9 percent.

The treaty, which comes more than 220 years after the state was colonised, creates an assembly and truth-telling body.

The first treaty between Indigenous people and a government in Australia has entered into law in the state of Victoria after it was finalised and signed.

Members of the state’s First Peoples Assembly gathered for a ceremony to sign the document on Wednesday evening before state Governor Margaret Gardner added her signature to the treaty on Thursday morning.

Jill Gallagher, a Gunditjmara woman and former commissioner of the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission, told Australian public broadcaster ABC that the treaty represents “the story of the Aboriginal people’s resistance”.

“I feel very happy. I’m just over the moon,” Gallagher said.

“Today marks a turning point in our nation’s history, a moment where old wounds can begin to heal and new relationships can be built on truth, justice and mutual respect,” she said.

Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan described the signing of the treaty as marking a “new chapter” in the state’s history.

“It is a chapter that is founded on truth, guided by respect and carried forward through partnership … a partnership to build a stronger, fairer, more equal Victoria for everyone,” Allan said.

Australia was colonised by the then-British Empire in 1788, with settlers first arriving in what is now known as Victoria in the early 1800s.

While British powers entered into treaties with Indigenous peoples in other colonised countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the United States, no treaty was ever signed in Australia.

The treaty, which has been described as historic by the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk, formalises the creation of the permanent First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria.

Turk said the treaty “addresses the continued exclusion of and discrimination against the country’s First Peoples – the result of colonisation”.

The agreement, he added, had the “potential to be truly transformative, ensuring the First Peoples have a direct voice in advising and shaping laws, policies and practices that affect their lives”.

The treaty process began in 2016 and included the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a formal truth-telling body which concluded in June this year and heard from Indigenous people harmed by colonisation, including members of the Stolen Generations, who were Indigenous children taken from their families and communities by state agencies and religious organisations.

Australia held a referendum in 2023 that sought to change the constitution and create a permanent Indigenous voice to inform parliament on issues related to Indigenous people.

The referendum failed to achieve enough support to change the constitution.

The referendum followed after the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart petition, which had called for an Indigenous voice to inform parliament, and emphasised that Indigenous people had 60,000 years of ancestral ties to their land. This “sacred link” could not be erased from world history in “merely” 200 years, according to the statement.

Cape Town, South Africa – On an August evening in 1977, 30‑year‑old Steve Biko was on his way back from an aborted secret meeting with an anti-apartheid activist in Cape Town, taking the 12‑hour drive back home to King William’s Town. But it was a journey the resistance fighter would never finish, for he was arrested and, less than a month later, was dead.

Against the backdrop of increasingly harsh racist laws in South Africa, Biko, a bold and forthright youth leader, had emerged as one of the loudest voices calling for change and Black self-determination.

A famously charming and eloquent speaker, he was often touted as Nelson Mandela’s likely successor in the struggle for freedom after the core of the anti-apartheid leadership was jailed in the 1960s.

But his popularity also made him a prime target of the apartheid regime, which put him under banning orders that severely restricted his movement, political activities, and associations; imprisoned him for his political activism; and ultimately caused his death in detention – a case that continues to resonate decades later, largely because none of the perpetrators have ever been brought to justice.

On September 12 this year, 48 years after Biko died, South Africa’s Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi ordered a new inquest into his death. The hearing resumed at the Eastern Cape High Court on Wednesday before being postponed to January 30.

There are “two persons of interest” implicated in Biko’s death who are still alive, according to the country’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which aims to determine whether there is enough evidence that he was murdered, and therefore grounds to prosecute his killers.

While Biko’s family has welcomed the hearings, the long wait for justice has been frustrating, especially for his children.

“There is no such thing as joy in dealing with the case of murder,” Nkosinathi Biko, Biko’s eldest son, who was six at the time of his father’s death, told Al Jazeera. “Death is full and final, and no outcome will be restorative of the lost life.”

The Biko inquest is one of several probes into suspicious apartheid-era deaths that South Africa’s justice minister reopened this year. The inquiries are part of the government’s plan to address past atrocities and provide closure to families of the deceased, the NPA says.

But analysts note that the inquest comes amid growing public pressure on the government to bring about the justice it promised 30 years ago, as a new judicial inquiry is also probing allegations that South Africa’s democratic government intentionally blocked prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.

Biko: ‘The spark that lit a fire’

Steve Biko was a medical student and national youth leader who, in the late 1960s, pioneered the philosophy of Black Consciousness, which encouraged Black people to reclaim their pride and unity by rejecting racial oppression and valuing their own identity and culture.

The philosophy inspired a generation of young activists to take up the struggle against apartheid, pushed forward by the belief that South Africa’s future lay in a socialist economy with a more equal distribution of wealth.

In his writings, Biko said he was inspired by the African independence struggles that emerged in the 1950s and suggested that South Africa had yet to offer its “great gift” to the world: “a more human face”.

By 1972, Biko’s student organisation had spawned a political wing to unify various Black Consciousness groups under one voice. A year later, he was officially banned by the government. Yet, he continued to covertly expand his philosophy and political organising among youth movements across the country.

In August 1977, despite the banning order still being in effect, Biko had travelled to Cape Town with a fellow activist to meet another anti-apartheid leader, though the meeting was aborted over safety concerns, and the duo left.

According to some reports, Biko heavily disguised himself for the road journey back east, but his attempts at going unnoticed were to no avail: When the car reached the outskirts of King William’s Town on August 18, police stopped them at a roadblock – and Biko was discovered.

The two were taken into custody separately, with Biko arrested under the Terrorism Act and first held at a local police station in Port Elizabeth before being transferred to a facility in the same city where members of the police’s “special branch” – notorious for enforcing apartheid through torture and extrajudicial killings – were based. For weeks in detention, he was stripped and manacled and, as was later discovered, tortured.

On September 12, the apartheid authorities announced that Biko had died in detention in Pretoria, some 1,200km (746 miles) away from where he was arrested and held. The minister of justice and police alleged he had died following a hunger strike, a claim immediately decried as false, as Biko had previously publicly stated that if that was ever cited as a cause of his death, it would be a lie.

Weeks later, an independent autopsy conducted at the request of the Biko family found he had died of severe brain damage due to injuries inflicted during his detention. Following these revelations, authorities launched an investigation. But the inquest cleared the police of any wrongdoing.

Saths Cooper, who was a student activist alongside Biko, remembers the moment he found out about his friend’s death. Cooper was in an isolation block on Robben Island – the prison that also held Mandela – where he spent more than five years with other political prisoners who had taken part in the 1976 student revolt.

“The news stilled us into silence,” the 75-year-old told Al Jazeera, recalling Biko’s provocatively “Socratic” style of engagement and echoing Mandela’s description of Biko as an inspiration. “Living, he was the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa,” Mandela said in 2002. “His message to the youth and students was simple and clear: Black is Beautiful! Be proud of your Blackness! And with that, he inspired our youth to shed themselves of the sense of inferiority they were born into as a result of more than 300 years of white rule.”

After initial shock at the news of Biko’s death, “then the questions flowed of what had occurred,” Cooper recalled, “to which we had no answers.”

About 20,000 people, including Black and white anti-apartheid activists and Western diplomats, attended Biko’s funeral in King Williams Town on September 25. The day included a five-hour service, powerful speeches and freedom songs. Though police disrupted the service and arrested some mourners, it marked the first large political funeral in South Africa.

His death sparked international condemnation, including expression of “concern” from Pretoria’s allies, the US and the UK. It also led to a United Nations arms embargo against South Africa in November 1977.

Three years later, the British singer Peter Gabriel released a song in his honour, and in 1987, his life was depicted in the film Cry Freedom, in which Biko was played by Denzel Washington.

Nevertheless, Biko’s stature did nothing to hasten justice.

‘The unfinished business of the TRC’

Under the apartheid regime, any further investigation into Biko’s death was effectively put to rest for decades following the official 1977 inquest.

Then in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to investigate past rights violations, with apartheid-era perpetrators given the opportunity to disclose their crimes and apply for amnesty from prosecution.

Former security police officers Major Harold Snyman, Captain Daniel Siebert, Warrant Officer Ruben Marx, Warrant Officer Jacobus Beneke and Sergeant Gideon Nieuwoudt – the five men suspected of killing Biko – applied for amnesty.

At TRC hearings the following year, the men said that Biko had died days after what they called “a scuffle” with the police at the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth, while he was held in shackles and handcuffs. Up to that point, the commission heard, Biko had spent several days in a cell – naked, they claimed, in order to prevent him from taking his life.

In the decades since, it’s come to light that after being badly beaten at the Sanlam Building on September 6 and 7, Biko suffered a brain haemorrhage and was examined by apartheid government doctors, who said they found nothing wrong with him. Days later, on September 11, the police decided to transfer him to a prison hospital hours away in Pretoria. Still naked and shackled, Biko was put in the back of a van and moved. Although he was examined in Pretoria, it was too late, and Biko died on September 12 alone in his cell.

Despite admitting to beating Biko with a hose pipe and noticing his disoriented, slurred speech, the former officers claimed at the TRC that they had no indication of the severity of his injuries. Therefore, they saw nothing wrong with transporting him 1,200km away.

Eventually, the men were denied amnesty in 1999, partly for their lack of full disclosure of the events that caused Biko’s death. The suspected killers, some of whom have since died, were recommended for prosecution by the commission.

However, like most TRC cases, the prosecutions never materialised.

“The Biko case, along with others, must be viewed as the delayed activation of the unfinished business of the TRC – a matter that is a national imperative if we are to instigate a culture of accountability in South Africa,” Nkosinathi, now 54, said of the reopened inquest into his father’s death.

Though the scope of the Biko inquest has not been publicly stated, Gabriel Crouse, a political analyst and fellow with the South African Institute for Race Relations, worries that it will not examine new evidence, but that its goal will simply be to decisively determine whether Biko was murdered.

If this is the case, it would leave many questions unresolved, he says. For example, who pressured the initial forensic pathologist to declare a hunger strike as the cause of death; who ordered Biko’s killing; and what was the official chain of command?

‘The worms are among us’

Although the Biko inquest has renewed hope among his family that some of the perpetrators of his death will finally be brought to justice, analysts warn that the process may reveal uncomfortable truths about the nation’s past – including possible collusion between South Africa’s current government and the apartheid regime.

Nkosinathi now heads a foundation that promotes his father’s legacy. He points out that it is only pressure on the government that brought about this moment.

Months before the Biko inquest reopened, President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered the establishment of a commission of inquiry into whether previous governments led by his African National Congress (ANC) party intentionally suppressed investigations and prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.

His move in April came after 25 survivors and relatives of victims of apartheid-era crimes launched a court case against his government in January, seeking damages.

The allegations of probes being blocked go back more than a decade. In 2015, former national prosecutions chief Vusi Pikoli caused a stir when he submitted an affidavit in a court case about the death of anti-apartheid fighter Nokuthula Simelane, in which he blamed the stalled cases on senior government officials interfering in the work of the NPA.

Former President Thabo Mbeki, who was head of state during Pikoli’s tenure, has denied that any such political interference took place. But the judicial inquiry, announced in April and now under way, lists former senior officials among those it considers interested parties.

The inquiry will look at why so few of the 300 cases that the TRC referred to the NPA for prosecution, including Biko’s, have been investigated in the last two decades.

“That it has become necessary to have to look into such an allegation tells much about how the huge sacrifice that was made for our democracy has been betrayed,” Nkosinathi told Al Jazeera.

Cooper believes the delayed prosecutions are a result of a compromise made by the apartheid regime and the ANC to conceal one another’s offences, including alleged cases of freedom fighters colluding with the white minority government.

“It’s justice clearly denied,” Cooper said, adding that he once questioned TRC commissioners about why they had concealed the names of rumoured apartheid-era collaborators who went on to work in the new democratic government. “The response was, ‘Broer, it’ll open a can of worms,’” Cooper told Al Jazeera.

“I see one of the commissioners died, the other is around, and when I see him, I say, ‘There’s no more can of worms, the worms are among us.’”

Like Cooper, political analyst Crouse also believes some kind of “backdoor deal” was struck following the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994.

Many political actors failed to apply for amnesty, he says, despite prima facie evidence of their guilt. “And so it became very apparent that white Afrikaner supremacists and Black ANC liberationists, some from both camps, had gotten together and said, ‘Let’s both keep each other’s secrets and go forward into the new South Africa on that basis,’” he said.

Pikoli’s 2015 affidavit seems to echo such analysis. In his document, Pikoli recalls a meeting in 2006, where former ministers grilled him about the prosecution of suspects implicated in the attempted murder of Mbeki’s former chief of staff, Frank Chikane. Pikoli does not specify what the ministers objected to but says it became clear they did not want the suspects prosecuted “due to their fear of opening the door to prosecutions of ANC members, including government officials.”

A plea bargain was struck with the suspects while Pikoli was on leave in July 2007, as part of which the suspects refused to reveal the masterminds behind the compilation of a hit-list targeting activists. Pikoli believes a court trial would have forced them to disclose more details.

‘A stress test’ for democratic South Africa

Mariam Jooma Carikci, an independent researcher who has written extensively about the failure of justice in the democratic era, believes the official inquiry into the hundreds of unprosecuted TRC cases, including Biko’s, is “a stress test” of democratic South Africa’s honesty.

“For three decades we treated reconciliation as an end in itself – truth commissions instead of prosecutions, memorials instead of justice,” she said.

She sees Biko’s ideas continuing to flourish in today’s student movements, for example, in the #FeesMustFall campaign that called for free university tuition and the decolonisation of education in 2015.

“You see his echo in decolonisation debates and student movements, but the truest honour is policy – land, work, education, healthcare – designed around human worth, not investor or political comfort,” Jooma Carikci said.

While the country waits to hear the outcomes of the Biko inquest and the wider TRC inquiry, Nkosinathi Biko remains haunted by constant reminders of his father.

His younger brother Samora, who recently turned 50, looks exactly like Biko, he says, but being only two at the time of his death, “he was unfortunate not to have had memories of his father because of what happened.”

Meanwhile, for the country in general, Nkosinathi sees connections between Biko’s death and the 2012 Marikana massacre, during which police shot and killed 34 striking miners – the highest death toll from police aggression in democratic South Africa.

In his mind, the image of police opening fire on unarmed protesting workers echoes the country’s dark history – a sign that the state brutality that ended his father’s life has spilled over into democratic South Africa.

Nov. 12 (UPI) — Dozens of Venezuelans incarcerated in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT — terrorism confinement mega prison — after being deported from the United States were tortured and subjected to other serious human rights abuses, according to a report out Wednesday.

Titled “You Have Arrived in Hell,” the 81 page report by Human Rights Watch and regional human rights organization Cristosal details the treatment of 40 Venezuelans during four months of incommunicado detention in the maximum security facility this year.

The men were among 252 Venezuelans flown to El Salavador in March and April by U.S. authorities, most of them on the basis of allegations by the U.S. and El Salvadorean governments that they were “terrorists” in the Tren de Aragua organized crime gang, designated a foreign terrorist group by Washington.

Detainees told HRW of constant beatings from the moment they were taken off the plane, being held in inhumane conditions, insufficient food, poor hygiene and sanitation, limited access to health care and medicine and zero recreation or education provision.

Three said they suffered sexual violence and several reported being severely beaten, apparently as punishment for speaking with the International Committee of the Red Cross when the charity visited CECOT in May.

The ill-treatment did not constitute isolated incidents by rogue guards or riot police, but rather systematic violations “designed to subjugate, humiliate, and discipline detainees,” Human Rights Watch and Cristosal said.

“The brutality and repeated nature of the abuses also appear to indicate that guards and riot police acted on the belief that their superiors either supported or, at the very least, tolerated their abusive acts,” they added.

Human Rights Watch and Cristosal said that contrary to the allegations the men were terrorists, only 3% of them had U.S. convictions for violent or potentially violent offenses, half had no U.S. criminal record at all and many had clean records in their home country of Venezuela or other Latin American countries.

The report said the human rights abuses in El Salvadorean prison were well known — including by the State Department which had criticized security and law enforcement in the countrty — but the Trump administration sent the Venezuelans, including dozens of asylum seekers, there anyway.

“The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans who were then abused by Salvadoran security forces on a near-daily basis,” said HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus.

“The Trump administration is complicit in torture, enforced disappearance, and other grave violations, and should stop sending people to El Salvador or any other country where they face a risk of torture,” she said.

Cristosal executive director Noah Bullock, said the Trump administration was guilty of “hir[ing] the Salvadorian prison system as a prop in a theatre of cruelty.”

“They wanted to demonstrate and send a message of brutality. But I don’t know if they knew how far it would go and how terrible the horrors of torture are,” he said.

HRW and Cristosal also called for an independent investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and warned that U.S. complicity in the violations drew parallels with the human rights abuses meted out to Iraqis by U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraqib prison in the Iraq War.

SEOUL, Nov. 12 (UPI) — South Korea will again co-sponsor a United Nations resolution condemning North Korea‘s human rights violations, its Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday, amid speculation that Seoul might withhold support in an effort to improve relations with Pyongyang.

The draft resolution, introduced last week to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly, “condemns in the strongest terms the long-standing and ongoing systematic, widespread and gross violations of human rights in and by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, including those that may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the official name of North Korea.

The resolution calls on Pyongyang to “respect, protect and fulfill all human rights and fundamental freedoms” and to “immediately close the political prison camps and release all political prisoners unconditionally.”

South Korea was among the 41 U.N. member states that co-sponsored the resolution, maintaining the position of former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s conservative government.

The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Seoul’s approach to North Korean human rights would remain a matter of principle.

“Our government, recognizing the importance of substantially improving the human rights of North Korean citizens and committed to continuing cooperation with the international community to this end, has participated as a co-sponsor of this resolution,” the ministry said in a statement sent to UPI.

The move comes as Seoul weighs how to balance engagement with Pyongyang against pressure to address its human rights record. President Lee Jae Myung has made efforts to improve relations between the two Koreas since taking office in June, with conciliatory gestures such as dismantling propaganda loudspeakers and restricting activist groups from floating balloons carrying information across the border.

He has expressed support for renewed diplomacy between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying last month he hoped Trump would have a chance to play the role of “peacemaker” on the Korean Peninsula.

South Korea co-sponsored the resolution from 2008 through 2018, but withdrew during a period of inter-Korean detente between 2019 and 2022 under then-President Moon Jae-in.

In late October, Human Rights Watch and 20 other groups sent an open letter urging Lee’s government to back the resolution, warning that recent domestic policy shifts “signal a troubling move away from support for the victims of North Korea’s repression.”

The rights watchdog praised Seoul for its support on Wednesday.

“South Korea’s co-sponsorship showcases leadership as a democracy upholding law and dignity,” Lina Yoon, senior Korea researcher at Human Rights Watch, told UPI.

“Seoul should sustain it, by supporting U.N. accountability, protecting North Korean escapees, expanding information flows and pressing Pyongyang along with other governments for reforms to end repression,” she said.

The United States was not among the sponsoring countries. In February, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council, reinstating the position he adopted during his previous term.

North Korea has long rejected such resolutions as hostile acts, accusing the United Nations and Western powers of using human rights as a pretext to undermine its government.

Following the adoption of last year’s measure, Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry denounced it as a “politically motivated provocation.”

A September report by the U.N. Human Rights Office found that North Korea’s human rights situation “has not improved over the past decade and, in many instances, has degraded,” citing worsening food shortages, widespread forced labor and tight restrictions on movement and expression.

The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote on the resolution in December.