The European Court of Human Rights has told Russia to pay over 500,000 Euros to the families of eight men apparently abducted by security forces in Chechnya.

The men who disappeared between 2002 and 2004 are all presumed dead.

The judges at the EU court said that four human rights articles had been violated by Russia, and also highlighted many deficiencies in the authorities’ investigations.

The vice-president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BHCR), Sayed Yousif al-Muhafdha has been detained at a protest commemorating the death of two Bahraini protestors.

Prosecutors ordered that Muhafdha was to be detained for a week due to a pending investigation that claimed Muhafdha had broadcast false information on Twitter.

Muhafdha, who has campaigned for the release of the detained BCHR president, Nabeel Rajab, has also been detained on several occasions by Bahrani authorities.

The former leader of a Congolese militia has been acquitted By the International Criminal Court, who had charged him with 7 counts of war crimes and 3 counts of crimes against humanities.

Judge Bruno Cotte told the court that Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui will be acquitted of all charges, as the prosecution had "not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui was responsible" for the massacre of 200 villagers in 2003.

He said the decision was unanimous, and that witness testimony had been "too contradictory and too hazy".

Two men convicted for their roles in the Rwandan genocide have been granted early release from their imprisonment in Mali by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT).

The MICT was established in 2010 to handle assist both the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Leaders of Iraq and the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan warned that they were close to civil war, due to Exxon Mobil’s attempt to drill for oil, amidst negotiations between the two opposing armies. 

Commenting on the situation, a confidant of Iraqi Prime Minister, Sami Alaskary said,

Indonesian police have shot dead two members of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), a separatist group, campaigning for West Papuan independence.

Hubertus Mabel, 30, and Natalis Alua were killed, bringing the toal of KNPB members killed this year to 22.

A police post was later burnt down by unidentified men, which saw retaliation by police who attacked a house used as a tribal council and burnt it to the ground.

Syrian Vice-President Farouq al-Sharaa has told Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar that without a settlement, neither side can win the war in Syria.

See here for full interview on al-Akhbar.

Quotes from al-Sharaa reproduced below:

“The drop in the number of peaceful protesters led one way or another to the rise in militants,”

Egypt’s public prosecutor, appointed by President Mohamed Morsi, resigned from his post on Monday, in a move that was seen by Morsi’s opponents as a victory for the independence of the judiciary.

The public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim, stepped down after unrest among the judges, who described President Morsi’s decision to sack the former public prosecutor and appoint Ibrahim as an assault on the independence of the judiciary.