Concluding the first-day summit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called for a unified response to the challenges posed by China. “We are concerned by China’s coercive policies which stand in contrast to the fundamental values enshrined in the Washington Treaty. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal with more warheads and a larger number of sophisticated delivery systems” warned Stoltenberg. This was the first time NATO had presented China’s expanding reach and capacities as a security challenge. In his statement, Stoltenberg highlighted China’s “coercive behaviour”; increased...
Photograph: UN News An appeal by Ratko Mladic, the commander of Bosnian Serb forces in the country’s 1992-95 war, against the 2017 verdict that convicted him of genocide has been turned down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Switzerland will be holding a referendum on a controversial terrorism bill, which has been widely panned by international human rights organisations, on 13 June. The measure, which gained parliamentary approval last year but still requires a majority via a referendum, significantly expands the powers of the police as well as the definition of “terrorism”. The bill has been criticised by 80 Swiss non-governmental organisations, over 60 law professors from Switzerland, and leading human rights organisations including the UN , Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists...
Photo credit (Twitter: @TVRVNTO) A mass grave was found at a residential school in British Colombia, Canada, containing the remains of 215 indigenous children on Friday. Photo credit (Twitter: @TVRVNTO) Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation said that the remains, of children as young as 3 years old, were found with ground-penetrating radar. The Tk’emlups te Secwépemc continues to work with specialists and coroner’s office to establish the cause of death and an estimate of when it occurred. The deaths of these children was not documented by school administrators...
French President, Emmanuel Macron, asked for Rwandan’s forgiveness its silence over the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu dissidents were killed, however, Macron fell short of apologising for the role France played. In his statement Macron maintained that France had for too long "valued silence over examination of the truth" but also noted that France had not been an accomplice in the killings and that "France did not understand that by wanting to block a regional conflict or a civil war, it stood de facto by a genocidal regime". This statement follows the publication of a...
Myanmar’s ousted democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi made her first public appearance since the military deposed her government and seized power on 1 February 2021, at a court hearing on Monday. Suu Kyi, along with 4,000 others, was arrested following the military which took place after her party the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the November 2020 elections. Myanmar’s military government leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing justified the coup by accusing the NLD of committing election fraud despite scant evidence. Last week, Myanmar’s media reported that the junta-appointed Union...
The Irob minority group in Ethiopia are facing an existential crisis in addition to the mass atrocities inflicted by ongoing conflict in the Tigray state. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched military forces in response to “traitorous” attacks on military camps that has since escalated to thousands of civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands of people who have been internally displaced within Tigray, and 63,000 refugees who have fled to Sudan since fighting broke out on November 4th, 2020. The embattled region the Irob occupy “has been turned totally upside down,” Teklay, resident...
Palestinian casualties have sharply increased as Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza early on Friday as tanks and artillery massed at the border and joined aerial attacks. The Gaza Health Ministry says casualties have risen to 119, Including 31 children and 19 women, with 830 wounded. This announcement preceded an intense barrage before dawn on Friday conducted by Israeli tanks and warplanes on the northern end of the Gaza strip. Israel has massed troops along the border and called up 9,000 reservists. The escalation of violence has also led to Palestinian deaths in the West Bank on...
The Taliban has announced a three-day ceasefire to mark Eid al-Fitr following the bombing of a girls’ school in Dasht-e-Barchi, in which over 50 people, mostly young girls, were killed and over 100 were injured. Afghanistan’s President, Ashraf Ghani, accused the Taliban of conducting the attack and declared Tuesday a day of national morning. It was the deadliest attack in over a year. In a statement Ghani said; “This savage group does not have the power to confront security forces on the battlefield, and instead targets with brutality and barbarism public facilities and the girls’ school”...
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported that Israel’s policies constitute apartheid; with the intention to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem. HRW highlights that currently, Israel presents a single authority “ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory”. In...