Human Rights

20 April 2020; MEMO: The European Union has warned Israel’s Benny Gantz not to accept the annexation of the country’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, Quds Press reported on Sunday.

EU officials have apparently told Gantz’s foreign affairs adviser, Melody Sucharewicz, over the past few weeks that Europe strongly opposes any unilateral move to extend Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

20 April 2020; MEMO: Russia has confirmed its rejection of Israel’s plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, stressing that this would undermine the settlement of the conflict on the basis of a two-state solution, and especially the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

19 April 2020; MEMO: Palestinian Prisoners Day, EuroPal Forum hosted a webinar via the ZOOM communications platform titled ‘5000 Prisoners: Israeli Racism and Medical Negligence Amidst the COVID-19 Outbreak’.

The webinar, which heard from Motasem Dalloul, Akram Satari, and Charlotte Kates, sought to bridge the lack of coverage on the issue of Palestinian prisoners through facilitating a forum to better understand the current status quo for Palestinians in Israeli jails amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.

New Delhi, Apr 19 (PTI) Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Sunday urged the government to transfer cash and distribute free food grains to the poor, saying only a heartless government will not do anything.

He said more and more people have run out of cash and are standing in queues for free cooked food.

18 April 2020; MEMO: Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced on Friday that the mass trial of 68 Jordanians and Palestinians held by Saudi Arabia raises serious concerns about due process, amid charges of committing violations against the detainees.

New Delhi, Apr 18 (PTI) Opposition leader Sharad Yadav on Saturday alleged that migrant labourers were facing discrimination as they were not allowed to travel to their native places while the Uttar Pradesh government was allowed to bring back state students studying in Kota in Rajasthan.

Politics is being played even in imposing lockdown measures, he said.

17 April 2020; MEMO: Militant Hindus spreading hatred and committing crimes against Muslims should be expelled from the Gulf, a Saudi Arabian scholar has said, amid a growing number of hate crimes by Hindu supremacists against India’s Muslim minority.

Kochi, Apr 17 (PTI) The Centre on Friday informed the Kerala High Court that there was no immediate plan to bring back the Indian citizens stranded in the Gulf countries due to the novel coronavirus outbreak and that the expatriates had been granted visa extension.

The counsel for the central government made the submission before a division bench comprising justices Rajavijayaraghavan and T R Ravi during the hearing of a plea seeking a direction to bring back Indians stranded in the UAE.

New Delhi, Apr 17 (PTI) A plea has been moved in the Delhi High Court seeking to restrain Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his administration from classifying some COVID-19 cases as "Tablighi Jamaat" or "Masjid Markaz", alleging it amounts to religious profiling.

In Delhi, coronavirus has infected around 1,640 and claimed 38 lives.

The petition by a lawyer on Thursday alleged that after the Tablighi event, Kejriwal via his tweets "deliberately" classified several affected cases under a separate caption -- "Masjid Markaz".

Mumbai, Apr 16 (PTI) Maharashtra Minister of State for Home Shambhuraje Desai on Thursday said the state government's `demand' of special trains for taking migrants back to their home states was valid.

Speaking to a Marathi news channel, Desai said that Shiv Sena leader and state tourism minister Aaditya Thackeray had been saying that migrant labours stranded in Maharashtra should have been allowed to return to their home states.