A German court has set a trial date for a 100-year-old man who is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin during the second world war.
Dominic Raab - British Foreign Secretary A British citizen has claimed he was tortured in Somalia and questioned by US intelligence officers, raising concerns about the continuation of controversial practices of the post-9/11 “war on terror” are still being used, the Guardian reports. David Taylor, whose name has been changed at his family’s request, has been detained without charge in Somalia for two years and fears that unless the UK government intervenes he will face execution in a military court or be rendered to the US. The 45-year-old from London alleges he has endured hooding, sensory...
During an Axios interview, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, fell silent on the Uyghur genocide, claiming that any issues Pakistan had with China would “always be behind closed doors”. When confronted with concerns over the genocide and imprisonment of over a million Uyghur Muslims, Khan rebuked the claim maintaining that “this was not the picture coming from that side”. On 20 October Khan had penned an open letter calling on Muslim states to “act to counter growing Islamophobia in non-Muslim states” but he himself has been noticeably silent on the persecution of Muslims in both China...
Marking the 100 th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping warned foreign powers that China “will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us”. “Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people” he added. Jinping’s statement follows a statement by NATO’s Secretary-General , Jens Stoltenberg, who waned against the challenges China posed. “We are concerned by China’s coercive policies which stand in contrast to the fundamental values enshrined in the...
751 unmarked graves were discovered at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan, just weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in British Columbia. The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, with a search with ground-penetrating radar stating that there was 751 hits. Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess added that there were at least 600 bodies buried in the area. “We want to make sure when we tell our story that we’re not trying to make numbers sound bigger than they are. I like to say over 600, just to be assured.”
Alieu Kosiah, became the first Liberian to be convicted for war crimes committed during the country’s civil war, in a court hearing in Switzerland earlier this month . The rebel commander was found guilty of murder, rape and cannibalism by the Swiss court in Bellinzona, and sentenced to 20 years in jail – the maximum permitted under Swiss law. Kosiah was arrested in 2014 and faced 25 charges, with the principle of “universal jurisdiction” used to convict him for all but four of the charges against him. Human Rights Watch labelled the sentencing a “landmark” and activists in Liberia’s capital...
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...