Governments around the world are rolling back decades of progress on gender equality resulting in increasing attacks on reproductive rights, the silencing of feminist voices, funding cuts for women’s rights organizations, and much more.
Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls is more important than ever, and will be top of the agenda when UN member states convene for the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women from 9 to 19 March.
Here are eight areas in which Amnesty International has been campaigning for gender equality and justice. These wins take different forms – from landmark court rulings and legal reforms to hard-won recognition, accountability and resistance in the face of injustice. As long as we don’t give up, humanity can – and will – win against discrimination, gender-based violence and injustice!
Warning: This press release contains descriptions of sexual violence and torture.
Members of Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) have subjected women and girls to sexual violence committing rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, summary killings and destruction of civilian property which may amount to war crimes, during the conflict which started in the Oromia region in 2019, Amnesty International said in a new briefing today.
The briefing, “No one came to my rescue: Gang rape, sexual slavery and mass displacement of women in Oromia, Ethiopia,” documents the atrocities against civilians particularly women and girls committed by the OLA armed group in Sayo and Anfillo woredas (districts) of Kellem Wallaga zone between 2020 and 2024. “For seven years, under the cover of darkness caused by a communication and media blackout, fighters in the Oromia region have caused immense suffering on civilians. These repeated abuses are not only horrific but may amount to war crimes,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa. “International and African rights monitors cannot continue to look the other way. They must demand that Ethiopian authorities launch immediate, impartial and thorough investigations into the atrocities with the aim of bringing all perpetrators to account and provide access to justice and remedy for victims and survivors.”
For seven years, under the cover of darkness caused by a communication and media blackout, fighters in the Oromia region have caused immense suffering on civilians. These repeated abuses are not only horrific but may amount to war crimes.
Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa
“The Oromo Liberation Army must immediately issue an order to all its fighters to respect international humanitarian law and international human rights law. They must also disarm and demobilize fighters and/or units who committed sexual violence, other forms of torture, killing, forced displacement, and other crimes under international law.”
Fighting between the former military wing of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), and the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), along with allied Oromia regional security forces, erupted in 2019, and the conflict continues to take a heavy toll on the civilian population.
For the briefing, Amnesty International interviewed 10 survivors of gang rape, seven of whom were under 18 at the time of the assaults. The organisation also received testimonies from healthcare providers and reviewed medical records of the survivors.
The Nigerian Government must immediately expedite their investigation into gas leaks across the Bille community in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, which are putting the lives of local residents in grave danger, warned Amnesty International.
In October 2025, fishermen from Bille, a coastal town in Rivers State, reported seeing bubbling water accompanied by a sulphurous smell in a mangrove swamp and river several kilometres away from the town. Within a week, scores of residents reported the same phenomenon at other sites including inside the town itself, while some said they were able to set fire to the air near where the gas was bubbling. The Bille community is located close to various sites of extensive oil and gas infrastructure, including oil wells and pipelines.
“The alarming number of reports of gas leaks across the Bille community is harrowing and the affected area appears to be expanding. The leaks are already contaminating the town’s drinking water, while a number of children at a local school have been forced to relocate after they fell ill and started vomiting,” said Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International Nigeria’s Country Director.
“The Nigerian government has a duty to protect Bille residents from human rights abuses, including any which may be caused by private actors, such as oil companies. Oil company infrastructure has previously been found to be impinging on a range of rights including the right to health and to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The government needs to immediately identify the source of the leak and stop it – or take other measures to secure the community from a potentially catastrophic incident.”
Nigeria must take action and prevent further harm
The site of the bubbling methane is located close to extensive oil and gas infrastructure, including pipelines and wells, constructed and operated by the oil major Shell, but then sold to various Nigerian companies. An investigation of the gas leak has not been completed, so the source is not known. This is precisely why Nigeria must take urgent action to investigate and prevent further harm.
Residents are now desperate for Nigerian state agencies to take action, having reported the leaks widely. In December 2025, the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) sent a representative to conduct air quality tests at several sites, which found that methane levels at one site were 10,000 times higher than normal background methane levels.
Everyone in Bille is affected by the methane leak and something needs to be done urgently to save the lives of the residents.
Chairman of the Bille Council of Chiefs, Bennett Okpoki
“Everyone in Bille is affected by the methane leak and something needs to be done urgently to save the lives of the residents,” said Chairman of the Bille Council of Chiefs, Bennett Okpoki.
“The tests have revealed that there is a high level of methane and until now the Nigerian government has not done anything to remedy this situation. This is an indication that the life of Bille residents is not important to the government. We want the international community to step in and at least tell the government to do something about it.”
Oil companies must cooperate with the government
Going forward, Amnesty International is calling for oil companies to co-operate with the Nigerian government to prevent any further harm to this community.
“While it remains unknown whether oil and gas infrastructure has caused the methane leak, all oil and gas companies in the region must determine whether their current or former infrastructure could be contributing to the issue and fully cooperate with any forthcoming investigation by Nigerian authorities,” said Isa Sanusi.
“The choice to divest from or abandon certain infrastructure does not absolve any company from the responsibility to clean up and remedy any harm it may have caused. Urgent action needs to be taken now.”
Notes to editors
Amnesty International contacted Shell prior to publication and provided the company with an opportunity to respond. Shell replied that it “no longer owns or operates onshore oil and gas infrastructure in the Niger Delta” following the sale of its Nigerian subsidiary in 2024.
Amnesty International Nigeria contacted NOSDRA to request a report of the findings from this visit, but the regulatory agency declined to provide any materials until “investigations are completed”.
Amnesty International also contacted Nigeria’s Ministers of State for Petroleum Resources for comment on the government’s plans to protect the Bille community, but has not received a response as of the date of publication.
Background
Amnesty International has been supporting the residents of Bille and another community, Ogale, for more than ten years after their livelihoods had been destroyed and homes damaged by hundreds of oil spills caused by Shell. The pollution caused widespread devastation to the local environment, killing fish and plant life, and left thousands of people without access to clean drinking water.
Oxfam and partners are responding to the immediate needs of people who have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion of Lebanon, as the conflict across the region enters a dramatically new and dangerous phase.
Oxfam in Lebanon is scaling up its emergency response by supporting thousands of people across shelters in Mount Lebanon, the South, and the Bekaa, providing bedding kits, hygiene kits, menstrual hygiene management kits, and clean water.
“This expansion of Israeli occupation and its bombing of Lebanon will devastate people across Lebanon who had not yet recovered from the last wave of violence, inflicting more trauma on an already traumatized population,” said Lebanon country director Bachir Ayoub. “Once again, families have been forced from their beds and their homes as Israel rained bombs down on their communities.”
There is grave concern about the scale and impact the conflict will have on tens of millions of people across the region, where almost 60 million already rely on humanitarian aid. The broader escalation in the region is triggering further mass forced displacement, placing additional strain on overstretched systems and pushing humanitarian conditions further towards catastrophe.
It will widen inequality gaps, intensify existing poverty and injustice, and limit the ability of humanitarian organisations to reach communities in need.
“Global inaction has set the scene for this dangerous escalation,” said Ayoub. “The inability of the international community to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing violations of international law has led us to this point, where we again see hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon forced to flee in the march towards a wider regional war.”
Oxfam staff and partners are poised to respond with pre-positioned life-saving aid throughout the countries where the aid agency operates if the escalation is allowed to further spill out across the Middle East.
In light of unlawful attacks by the United States and Israel and Iran’s retaliation, Oxfam demands that the international community reaffirm its commitment to international law. Rules governing the use of force must be applied equally, most of all the prohibition against the aggressive use of force enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The U.S, Israel, Iran and all parties to the conflict must immediately cease their attacks, de-escalate the chaos across the region and refrain from future actions that lead to yet another cycle of violence.
Ends
For more information and interviews, please contact Lisa Rutherford, Oxfam International News Manager, on (+44) 07345 772278
Source: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) –
The tritium concentration of the 18th batch of Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS)-treated water, which Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) began discharging today from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS), is far below Japan’s operational limit and consistent with the international safety standards, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed today.
As part of its ongoing safety assessment, the IAEA conducted independent sampling of the latest batch at the discharge vertical shaft and seawater pipe header, where ALPS-treated water is blended with seawater prior to release via a one-kilometre tunnel into the ocean. On-site analysis confirmed that the tritium concentration is far below Japan’s operational limit of 1,500 becquerels per litre and is in line with international safety standards.
Since Japan began releasing ALPS-treated water in batches in August 2023, roughly 133,000 cubic meters have been discharged. The IAEA has confirmed that the tritium levels in all first 17 batches were far below the operational limits set by Japan.
Background
In a comprehensive report issued on 4 July 2023 before the first discharge began, the IAEA’s safety review found that Japan’s plan for handling the treated water was consistent with international safety standards and that the release as planned would have a negligible radiological impact to people and the environment.
Reports on sampling, independent analysis, data evaluation, as well as timelines, are available on the IAEA website.
Chinese authorities must stop blocking access to medical treatment for a land rights activist, Amnesty International said, as the annual ‘Two Sessions’ meetings of China’s government opened in Beijing.
The family of woman human rights defender Yang Li, who recently spent 15 months in detention for her advocacy on land rights, say that her condition has deteriorated to end-stage kidney failure following prolonged inability to access medical care during and following her time in custody.
According to the family, since her release police have repeatedly blocked her travel to Beijing to receive potentially life-saving dialysis treatment, restricting her freedom of movement to her home in the eastern province of Jiangsu.
The ‘Two Sessions’ – annual meetings of Chinese Party and government leadership that set the tone for political, social and economic reforms for the year to come – began on Wednesday 4 March with the elite Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, while the regular, rubberstamp National People’s Congress (NPC) annual session started on Thursday.
“Keeping Yang Li from essential treatment is unconscionable. Denying urgent care to a critically ill woman – seemingly in retaliation for her peaceful advocacy – is a glaring violation of China’s duty to respect and fulfil the right to health of all,” said Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director.
“As China’s leaders gather for the ‘Two Sessions’, we expect to hear about their commitment to improving peoples’ lives and ensuring social services; this must be matched by action and applied to all.
“The authorities must enable Yang Li’s safe transfer to a trusted hospital — including outside Jiangsu or abroad — and guarantee no reprisals against her or her relatives.”
A year on from the detention of Fidel Antonio Zavala Pérez, a member and spokesperson for the Unidad de Defensa de Derechos Humanos y Comunitarios (UNIDEHC), Amnesty International expresses its concern regarding his prolonged pre-trial detention and the abusive use of criminal law against defenders and community leaders to criminalize the defence of human rights in El Salvador.
“What we are witnessing in the case of UNIDEHC spokespersons is evidence of a worrying trend of unlawful use of criminal law against those working to defend the rights of communities,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International. “When justice becomes a weapon for intimidation, the rule of law is undermined and a message of deterrence sent to those reporting abuses.”
When justice becomes a weapon for intimidation, the rule of law is undermined and a message of deterrence sent to those reporting abuses.”
Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International.
A new scientific study has provided the most comprehensive look at how our attachment to oil and gas is killing people and making us sick. President Trump, of course, wants more oil, more drilling, less renewable energy, and fewer protections against pollution. The science shows that if he gets his way, Trump will flood our environment with even more pollution and end up making America sicker.
Of course, Trump says the opposite. In his loud, meandering style, he claims he is actually making America healthier:
“Keep the dangerous chemicals out of our food supplies,get toxic substances out of our environmentand deliver the American people the facts as to really where we’re going. […] And we want to be healthy. And we want to have a lot of good things happen. And I think we’re going to have that. I think this is just the beginning.”– President Trump, Make America Healthy Again Meeting, May 22, 2025
Up is down, fact is fiction, dirty is clean.
It is exhausting to continually fact-check the most powerful politician in the country, and sometimes it feels futile, but I believe the truth is still worth fighting for. So here’s the scoop.
Oil and gas pollution is bad for you
A 2025 study from Vohra et al. published in the journal Science confirms what countless other studies have found. Oil and gas production, processing, and combustion creates air pollution that harms the health of humans exposed to it – and that’s before we even factor in dangerous climate change.
The new study uses cutting-edge science on the health impacts of air pollution combined with a comprehensive survey of pollution across the oil and gas lifecycle, from oil well to the refinery to the places where the fuels are burned. All told, just one year of air pollution from the oil and gas lifecycle causes an astounding 91,000 premature deaths. And that is in addition to over 10,000 preterm births, over 200,000 childhood-onset asthma incidences and 1,610 lifetime cancers.
One figure from this report is worth a thousand words.
Each row shows the estimated concentrations of six major air pollutants associated with three phases of oil and gas production. The Upstream + Midstream sector refers to the regions where oil and gas are extracted, stored and transported, and the sure enough pollution hotspots coincide with the Permian, Bakken, Appalachian and other large oil and gas basins.
The Downstream sector refers to facilities that refine and process oil and gas, with the Gulf Coast being the largest pollution hotspot associated with this sector.
The final End-use sector is the largest, showing the places where we use oil and gas products every day. This includes car and truck traffic along our roads and highways, in countless industrial facilities, and even in our own homes. The pollution hotspots for this sector sprawl across the country, closely tracking population patterns.
And this study doesn’t even include air pollution from coal. An earlier study showed that if you included air pollution impacts from all fossil fuels (including coal, oil and gas), premature deaths from one year of air pollution could be as high as 355,000 people.
Destroying public health
Trump’s support for dirty energy is notorious, but his second-term attacks on our health don’t stop there.
Trump’s EPA has announced plans to weaken environmental rules for at least 13 cancer-causing pollutants. Nearly 160 million Americans are exposed to the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, but in May 2025 the EPA announced that it would abandon drinking water limits for them. Trump has even given coal plants and other polluting facilities a “two-year exemption from their Clean Air Act responsibilities.” The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 4.6 million people live within two miles of the polluters that received a Trump pollution pass.
Bizarrely, EPA officials have justified rolling back pollution rules by saying that we need to increase electricity derived from fossil fuels to help power AI data centers, so that AI can find more cures for pediatric cancer. No, it doesn’t make sense to us either.
We haven’t even talked about climate change yet. On February 12, 2026, Trump’s EPA revoked the scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health – a move that would end all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act with disastrous consequences. If Trump’s climate rollbacks are allowed to stand they would lead to an estimated 1.3 million more heat-related deaths worldwide.
To make it even more explicit, the EPA recently announced that it will just simply stop considering the benefits of saving lives when setting air pollution rules. All of this is a massive betrayal of the EPA’s mission “to protect human health and the environment”, but it could also start to expose deep fissures and contradictions in Trump’s coalition.
There are no doubt people in the MAHA movement who sincerely care about the many ways our modern economy is making us all less healthy. But increasing fossil pollution – much like firing scientists, eroding scientific integrity, elevating charlatans, dismantling the CDC, undermining vaccines, and ending health insurance subsidies – moves us in the wrong direction.
Make honesty great again
A wise man once told me not to lie, because for every lie you have to tell ten more just to cover up the first one… and then ten more for each of those, and so on and so forth. Well, after a decade of the President lying about things big and small, the problem has grown exponentially into a vast alternate reality. It’s not surprising that someone who would lie about winning the 2020 election, or accuse immigrants of eating pets, would also lie about pollution and health.
The cold truth is that ‘Drill baby, drill’ is a terrible idea, and the faster we can transition away from fossil fuels, the healthier we’ll all be.
Across the world, governments and anti-rights movements are rolling back on decades of progress on gender equality, including access to abortion. But people are fighting back, determined to protect the rights so many have fought so hard to achieve.
Ahead of International Women’s Day, we spoke with five courageous activists from Tunisia, Mexico, Burkina Faso, Poland and the United States who shared their strategies to protect access to abortion, their hopes for the future and the reasons why they believe that, despite the many increasing challenges, humanity must always win.
My name is Selma Hajri, I’m 71 and I am Tunisian. I am a doctor and a feminist. About fifteen years ago, I was the founder of an association dedicated to sexual and reproductive rights: the TAWHIDA Ben Cheikh Group. I am an endocrinologist specialising in reproductive health, and I am still the General Secretary of this association.
A few years ago, I created a regional network of activists and health professionals for abortion rights and access. This network focuses on the southern Mediterranean region, but with a view to exchange experiences with the northern mediterranean region more. I am very proud because it is the first and only network in this region that directly addresses abortion rights.
Responding to the launch of Molly vs The Machines, a documentary about Molly Russell, a 14-year-old British girl who died by suicide in 2017 after she viewed harmful online content while struggling with depression, Hannah Storey, Amnesty International’s Head of Children and Young People’s Digital Rights, said:
“Molly is remembered by her family and friends for her kindness. She deserved protection from algorithms that fed her negative content. Social media companies have a responsibility to prevent Molly’s tragedy from happening again.
“The documentary shows not only the profound harm young people can face on social media, but also the deeply problematic business model driving these platforms. Amnesty International has been raising the alarm about this for years, including in our TikTok research, which exposed how TikTok’s design can amplify depressive and suicidal content, putting already vulnerable young users at even greater risk.
“Given the severity of the harms, we understand why some are proposing to ban teenagers from these platforms, but bans are a blunt tool. They fail to reflect the complex reality of children’s needs online, and they risk excluding children because companies have failed to fix designs that profit from capturing their attention.
Hannah Storey, Amnesty International’s Head of Children and Young People’s Digital Rights
“It’s vital we hold these companies to account for the harm they cause and demand a fundamental overhaul to the way these platforms operate.
“Governments need to move beyond debating bans and instead follow due process to put in place robust, well‑enforced legislation that genuinely safeguards young people. That must include measures to tackle addictive design and ensure platforms are built with children’s rights at their core.”
