Saudi Arabia and Kurdistan launched a joint economic cooperation committee this month, aimed at expanding investment between the two regions, Asharq Al-Awsat reported. 

“The investment law in Kurdistan provides good opportunities for Saudi businessmen to invest in the region and we are all trying to enable the private sector to play an active role in this field and to form task forces to activate investments in the near future,” the chairman of the Federation of Saudi Chambers of Commerce, Sami bin Abdullah al-Obeidi told the paper. 

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua is set to have seven new offices across the country, its chairman, Benny Wenda told Vanuatu Daily Post. 

Three offices have already been opened and another four are planned. 

Mr Wenda expressed concern that the new offices could be attacked by the Indonesian military. 

Offices in Wamena and Fak Fak have previously been attacked, he added. 
 

Both the Prime Minister of India and the President of China have paid tribute to the victims of the Rwanda genocide, in separate visits to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda this week.

An aide to former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, was jailed for life under accusations of selling 500kg of a key drug-making chemical on Saturday, just days before the country’s general election in which he was running as a candidate.

Hanif Abbasi is accused of supplying the chemical ephedrine to a smuggler.

Former fighters from the guerrilla movement FARC took their seats in Colombia’s Congress in a swearing-in ceremony on Friday.

Under the terms of the 2016 peace deal between the FARC and the Colombian government, the group formed a political party, kept its famous acronym as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force, and was awarded five seats each in the 108-member Senate and the 172-member lower house through 2026.

The European arrest warrant for the former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont was dropped by Spain's Supreme Court on Thursday after the extradition request was refused by Germany. 

Mr Puigdemont accused of rebellion and sedition after declaring Catalonia independent following a referendum last year. 

The arrest warrants for five other Catalan leaders was also dropped, including that of the former Catalan Education Minister Clara Ponsati who is currently living in Scotland. 

“Withdrawing the European arrest warrants demonstrates the immense weakness of this case,” Mr Puigdemont tweeted.

A Rwandan academic has been sentenced to nine years imprisonment after being cleared of all but one charge, being found guilty of genocide revisionism.

Dr Leopold Munyakazi who was extradited to Rwanda by the US government in 2016 was cleared of the charges of genocide, complicity to commit genocide and incitement to commit genocide and murder by the specialised chamber for international crimes which is affiliated to Rwanda’s High Court.

He was however convicted of genocide revisionism for his use of academic space for trivialising the genocide against the Tutsi while in the USA, where he had fled in 2008 and continued work in academia.

The President of Nigeria urged all states that have not yet done so to accede to the Rome Statute so that it can become a universal treaty.

Speaking at the International Criminal Court’s 20 Anniversary commemorations, Preisdent Buhari said "I urge all States that have not yet done so to, as a matter of deliberate State policy, accede to the Rome Statute of the ICC so that it can become a universal treaty."

President of the Court, Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, said at the event:

 "Let us ensure that allegations of the most serious crimes are met with a robust, fair and impartial judicial response – at the international level as a last resort, where national systems prove unable to give victims their day in court. Let us make sure that we do not let down those who worked so hard to make the Statute of an International Criminal Court a reality.”

See more here.

Israel’s Knesset has passed a controversial new law which declares the country is an exclusively Jewish nation state, as Arab lawmakers were thrown out of the parliament in protest.

The bill states that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it” and that a "united Jerusalem" is the capital of Israel and that Hebrew is the country's official language.

Turkey has ended its 2 year state of emergency, which was first imposed after a failed coup on July 20, 2016.

The measure normally lasts three months but was extended seven times by the President Erdogan.

The state of emergency saw the detention of around 80,000 people and double the number sacked from public jobs.

Although alleged supporters of the coup were targeted, the Turkish government used emergency laws to crackdown particularly on Kurdish activists.

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