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Puerto Rico
officials were charged with aggravated murder in September.
In April, the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) expressed concern about reports that unaccompanied children were detained at airports. In June, the Border Control Services announced that the Child Protection Commission would ensure support for children in Lisbon airport’s border patrol facilities.
DISCRIMINATION
In April, the HRC expressed concern over continuing racial discrimination against Roma and people of African descent in education, employment and housing, and about reports of hate speech and hate crimes.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS
In April, the HRC expressed concern at the low levels of reporting, prosecution and conviction in relation to gender-based violence.
In July, prosecutors charged a mother for subjecting her daughter to female genital mutilation, the first such case to go to trial in Portugal.
PUERTO RICO
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Head of state: Donald Trump Head of government: Wanda Vázquez Garced
The authorities failed to ensure the rights of thousands of people made homeless by earthquakes in January. The number of femicides increased. For the first time, federal hate crime charges were brought following the killings of two transgender women.
BACKGROUND
In March, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Wanda Vázquez declared a state of emergency and signed the first of many Executive Orders issued during the year in relation to curfews.
In September, health care professionals protested over the reported lack of PPE and access to tests for the COVID-19 virus, according to news reports.
CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
In May, the Youth Development Institute, a local NGO, warned that measures related to COVID-19 could increase child poverty from 58% to 65% if sufficient resources were not allocated to mitigate it.
Civil society organizations criticized the closing of canteens that provide free school lunches in public schools in the context of COVID-19, indicating that an estimated 70% of children in the public education system live in poverty and rely on school meals.
RIGHT TO HOUSING
In January, two earthquakes resulted in damage to hundreds of homes and left thousands of people living in temporary housing, shelters, vehicles or tents for months.
By late March, according to news reports, the Department of Housing had closed all the refugee centres they administered.
By September, according to the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey, of the 40,628 requests for housing assistance made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the most affected municipalities, only 34% had received assistance.
Media reports estimated that 10,000 families may still have had their homes affected ten months after the earthquakes.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS
Despite declaring a state of national alert in 2019, a symbolic response to the high number of gender-based violence cases, the authorities did not present a plan to mitigate this or protect the rights of women and girls.
By late December, 60 people had been killed due to their gender, compared with 37 in the whole of 2019, according to the Observatory of Gender Equality of Puerto Rico.
During the first three months of the islandwide lockdown implemented in response to
