Amnesty International has slammed Facebook owner Meta for its "failure to curb hate speech" on its social media platform that eventually "fuelled a storm of hatred" against the Rohingya Muslims over the years. Alleging in its report that Facebook’s algorithms "proactively amplified" anti-Rohingya content five years ago, Amnesty has sought compensation for the victims from Meta. Read:“Not possible for us to take any more people, Rohingyas must go back” In the report, 'The Social Atrocity: Meta and the right to remedy for the Rohingya', released on Thursday, the global NGO claimed that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act. “In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty's secretary general. "In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence," he added. While the Myanmar military was committing crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, "Meta was profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiralling algorithms", Callamard said. "Meta must be held to account. The company now has responsibility to provide reparations to all those who suffered the violent consequences of their reckless actions," he stressed. Read:Momen briefs Japan about Rohingya situation; seeks support for permanent solution Sawyeddollah, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee, told Amnesty International: “I saw a lot of horrible things on Facebook. And I just thought that the people who posted that were bad… Then I realised that it is not only these people – the posters – but Facebook is also responsible. Facebook is helping them by not taking care of their platform.” In 2017, the Rohingya Muslims were forced to leave their country and take refuge in Bangladesh after facing the most heinous ethnic cleansing campaign by the Myanmar Army. More than 730,000 Rohingya eventually fled their home country and took shelter in Bangladesh. Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a repatriation deal on November 23, 2017. On January 16, 2018, Bangladesh and Myanmar inked a document on 'physical arrangement', which was supposed to facilitate the return of Rohingyas to their homeland.

Amnesty International’s South Asia Campaigner Saad Hammadi has urged the authorities to take urgent steps to protect the members of the minority community in Bangladesh against any attacks and ensure access to justice and effective remedies for victims.  "Authorities must promptly, thoroughly, impartially and transparently investigate the incidents and bring those suspected to be responsible for the violence and vandalism to account through fair trials," said Hammadi. Violence erupted in Bangladesh following allegations on social media that a copy of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, was desecrated at a puja pandal (temporary structures made for the religious ceremony) in Cumilla on October 13. Read:Amnesty stands up for Bangladeshi journalists Responding to the "violent attacks" on Hindu minority households and temples in Bangladesh during and after the Durga Puja, the country’s biggest Hindu festival, Hammadi said reports of a spate of attacks by angry mobs against members of the Hindu community, their homes, temples and puja pandals are "symptomatic of the growing anti-minority sentiment" in the country.  Targeting religious sensitivities to stoke communal tension is a serious human rights violation and requires immediate and decisive action from the government to address the situation of minorities in the country, said Hammadi.

The Amnesty International has called for a speedy investigation into the assassination of Mohib Ullah, a top Rohingya leader, to bring the culprits to justice in fair trials. Mohib Ullah, 46, who led the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, was killed by unidentified gunmen last night at his office in the Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar.  Read:HRW for quick probe into Mohibullah’s killing In a statement received here on Thursday Saad Hammadi, Amnesty International’s South Asia Campaigner, said the leading Rohingya activist’s killing sent a "chilling effect" across the entire community.  “We call on the Bangladeshi authorities and the UN Refugee Agency to work together to ensure the protection of people in the camps, including refugees, civil society activists and humanitarian workers from both the Rohingya and host community, many of whom have shared concerns about their safety," said Hammadi. Read: Mohib's murder: US, UK envoys express deep shock Violence in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar has been a growing problem, he observed.  He said "Armed groups operating drug cartels have killed people and held hostages. The authorities must take immediate action to prevent further bloodshed.”    Mohib Ullah had represented the Rohingya community at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2019.     Read: Rohingya leader Mohibullah assassinated Mohib Ullah was a leading representative of the Rohingya community, who spoke out against violence in the camps and in support of the human rights and protection of refugees, said AI. He also had campaigned for a safe and sustainable repatriation of more than 12 lakh Rohimgyas who fled to Bangladesh in 2017 to escape killings, rape and arson by Myanmar military regime.

An investigation by a global media consortium based on leaked targeting data provides further evidence that military-grade malware from Israel-based NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire outfit, is being used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents. From a list of more than 50,000 cellphone numbers obtained by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International and shared with 16 news organizations, journalists were able to identify more than 1,000 individuals in 50 countries who were allegedly selected by NSO clients for potential surveillance. They include 189 journalists, more than 600 politicians and government officials, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists and several heads of state, according to The Washington Post, a consortium member. The journalists work for organizations including The Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and The Financial Times. Amnesty also reported that its forensic researchers had determined that NSO Group’s flagship Pegasus spyware was successfully installed on the phone of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, just four days after he was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The company had previously been implicated in other spying on Khashoggi. Read: CJA shocked at killing of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui NSO Group denied in an emailed response to AP questions that it has ever maintained “a list of potential, past or existing targets.” In a separate statement, it called the Forbidden Stories report “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories.” The company reiterated its claims that it only sells to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals and that it has no visibility into its customers’ data. Critics call those claims dishonest — and have provided evidence that NSO directly manages the high-tech spying. They say the repeated abuse of Pegasus spyware highlights the nearly complete lack of regulation of the private global surveillance industry. The source of the leak — and how it was authenticated -- was not disclosed. While a phone number’s presence in the data does not mean an attempt was made to hack a device, the consortium said it believed the data indicated potential targets of NSO’s government clients. The Post said it identified 37 hacked smartphones on the list. The Guardian, another consortium member, reported that Amnesty had found traces of Pegasus infections on the cellphones of 15 journalists who let their phones be examined after discovering their number was in the leaked data. The most numbers on the list, 15,000, were for Mexican phones, with a large share in the Middle East. NSO Group’s spyware has been implicated in targeted surveillance chiefly in the Middle East and Mexico. Saudi Arabia is reported to be among NSO clients. Also on the lists were phones in countries including France, Hungary, India, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. “The number of journalists identified as targets vividly illustrates how Pegasus is used as a tool to intimidate critical media. It is about controlling public narrative, resisting scrutiny, and suppressing any dissenting voice,” Amnesty quoted its secretary-general, Agnes Callamard, as saying. In one case highlighted by the Guardian, Mexican reporter Cecilio Pineda Birto was assassinated in 2017 a few weeks after his cell phone number appeared on the leaked list. AP’s director of media relations, Lauren Easton, said the company is “deeply troubled to learn that two AP journalists, along with journalists from many news organizations” are on the list of the 1,000 potential targets for Pegasus infection. She said the AP was investigating to try to determine if its two staffers’ devices were compromised by the spyware. The consortium’s findings build on extensive work by cybersecurity researchers, primarily from the University of Toronto-based watchdog Citizen Lab. NSO targets identified by researchers beginning in 2016 include dozens of Al-Jazeera journalists and executives, New York Times Beirut bureau chief Ben Hubbard, Moroccan journalist and activist Omar Radi and prominent Mexican anti-corruption reporter Carmen Aristegui. Her phone number was on the list, the Post reported. The Times said Hubbard and its former Mexico City bureau chief, Azam Ahmed, were on the list. Two Hungarian investigative journalists, Andras Szabo and Szabolcs Panyi, were among journalists on the list whose phones were successfully infected with Pegasus, the Guardian reported. Among more than two dozen previously documented Mexican targets are proponents of a soda tax, opposition politicians, human rights activists investigating a mass disappearance and the widow of a slain journalist. In the Middle East, the victims have mostly been journalists and dissidents, allegedly targeted by the Saudi and United Arab Emirates governments. Read:Gaza-based journalists in Hamas chat blocked from WhatsApp The consortium’s “Pegasus Project” reporting bolsters accusations that not just autocratic regimes but democratic governments, including India and Mexico, have used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware for political ends. Its members, who include Le Monde and Sueddeutsche Zeitung of Germany, are promising a series of stories based on the leak. Pegasus infiltrates phones to vacuum up personal and location data and surreptitiously control the smartphone’s microphones and cameras. In the case of journalists, that lets hackers spy on reporters’ communications with sources. The program is designed to bypass detection and mask its activity. NSO Group’s methods to infect its victims have grown so sophisticated that researchers say it can now do so without any user interaction, the so-called “zero-click” option. In 2019, WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook sued NSO Group in U.S. federal court in San Francisco, accusing it of exploiting a flaw in the popular encrypted messaging service to target — with missed calls alone — some 1,400 users. NSO Group denies the accusations. The Israeli company was sued the previous year in Israel and Cyprus, both countries from which it exports products. The plaintiffs include Al-Jazeera journalists, as well as other Qatari, Mexican and Saudi journalists and activists who say the company’s spyware was used to hack them. Several of the suits draw heavily on leaked material provided to Abdullah Al-Athbah, editor of the Qatari newspaper Al-Arab and one of the alleged victims. The material appears to show officials in the United Arab Emirates discussing whether to hack into the phones of senior figures in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, including members of the Qatari royal family. NSO Group does not disclose its clients and says it sells its technology to Israeli-approved governments to help them target terrorists and break up pedophile rings and sex- and drug-trafficking rings. It claims its software has helped save thousands of lives and denies its technology was in any way associated with Khashoggi’s murder. NSO Group also denies involvement in elaborate undercover operations uncovered by The AP in 2019 in which shadowy operatives targeted NSO critics including a Citizen Lab researcher to try to discredit them. Last year, an Israeli court dismissed an Amnesty International lawsuit seeking to strip NSO of its export license, citing insufficient evidence. NSO Group is far from the only merchant of commercial spyware. But its behavior has drawn the most attention, and critics say that is with good reason. Read:Journalist Ranjan appointmented 1st Secretary (Press) at Kolkata Mission Last month, it published its first transparency report, in which it says it has rejected “more than $300 million in sales opportunities as a result of its human rights review processes.” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a strident critic, tweeted: “If this report was printed, it would not be worth the paper it was printed on.” A new, interactive online data platform created by the group Forensic Architecture with support from Citizen Lab and Amnesty International catalogs NSO Group’s activities by country and target. The group partnered with filmmaker Laura Poitras, best known for her 2014 documentary “Citzenfour” about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who offers video narrations. “Stop what you’re doing and read this,” Snowden tweeted Sunday, referencing the consortium’s findings. “This leak is going to be the story of the year.” Since 2019, the U.K. private equity firm Novalpina Capital has controlled a majority stake in NSO Group. Earlier this year, Israeli media reported the company was considering an initial public offering, most likely on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Senior journalist Rozina Islam's arrest and the failure of the Bangladesh authorities to provide concrete evidence pointing to a recognisable criminal offence raise concerns that she is being targeted for her critical reporting, Amnesty International said Wednesday. In the absence of such evidence, the authorities must release Rozina immediately and she should not be punished for fulfilling her professional duties as a journalist, the human rights organisation also said. Also read: Will ensure justice for journalist Rozina: Info Minister Amnesty's South Asia Campaigner Saad Hammadi said: "Rozina Islam has exposed irregularities in Bangladesh's health sector for the past few months during the Covid-19 pandemic and her arrest points to an increasing trend of a wider crackdown on freedom of expression through draconian laws to silence critical or dissenting views." Prothom Alo Managing Editor Sajjad Sharif told Amnesty that Rozina has produced several investigative reports critical of the public health sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. The newspaper feels that the actions taken against her are a result of the authority's grievance against her. Also read: DB to investigate case against Rozina "The prosecution of Rozina under the Official Secrets Act is a brazen attack on the right to freedom of expression and the ability of Bangladeshi society to seek and receive information," Saad said. "Information about how the government is procuring Covid-19 vaccines is in the public interest and should not be hidden behind national security locks. The way in which the public health sector operates during the pandemic is of critical public interest," he added. Also read: That's something concerning: UN on Rozina's arrest On May 17, the authorities held Prothom Alo senior journalist Rozina for five hours within the Health Ministry on the allegations of stealing confidential official documents and espionage. A deputy secretary of the health ministry accused her of stealing confidential official documents from the ministry under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act 1923 and the Penal Code of Bangladesh.

Soldiers from Eritrea systematically killed “many hundreds” of people, the large majority men, in a massacre in late November in the Ethiopian city of Axum, Amnesty International says in a new report, echoing the findings of an Associated Press story last week and citing more than 40 witnesses.

Amnesty International (AI) has said the governments in the region must immediately deploy search and rescue measures to assist those Rohingyas stranded in Indian Ocean.

Australia’s acting prime minister on Tuesday defended his comments comparing the attack on the U.S. Capitol building with Black Lives Matter protests despite criticism from Indigenous and human rights groups.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International on Tuesday said that it has been forced to halt its India operations after the government froze several of the organisation’s bank accounts.

More than 300 civil society groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Service for Human Rights, are urging the United Nations to set up an international watchdog to address human rights violations by the Chinese government, reports AP.