Weekly News Wrap: Monday, November 18, 2013

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Middle East

• Israel has secretly detained a suspected al-Qaeda biological weapons expert for more than three years, court documents disclosed, after the man appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to free him.
• The president of Iraqi Kurdistan has called on Turkey’s Kurds to back a flagging peace process with Ankara, in a show of support for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to overcome a three-decade conflict.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Israel later this week to discuss a proposed deal between world powers and Iran on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Asia

• Australia’s spy agencies attempted to listen in on the mobile phone conversations of Indonesia’s president and targeted the mobile phones of his wife and senior ministers, citing documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
• Pakistan has announced that it would put former military ruler Pervez Musharraf on trial for treason, punishable by death or life imprisonment, for imposing emergency rule in 2007.
• Commonwealth leaders have agreed on steps to tackle high debt and poverty as they staged a show of unity after a summit in Sri Lanka dominated by a bitter dispute over war crimes.
• A senior Sri Lanka’s minister has said the government will not allow an international probe into alleged war crimes during its 27-year ethnic conflict, despite mounting pressure from abroad.
• China will loosen its decades-old one-child policy by allowing two children for families with one parent who was an only child and will abolish a much-criticized labour camp system, its ruling Communist Party said.

Africa

• Former members of the Seleka rebel group have shot dead a Central African Republic judge and his assistant, a para-military police official has said.
• The UN Security Council has rejected an African demand to suspend the International Criminal Court trial of Kenya’s president and his deputy for one year.
• According to the UN, at least 460,000 people in Sudan’s Darfur region have been displaced this year as a result of tribal violence and rebel-government battles.
• The UN via its Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, has found that squalid conditions, poor food and overcrowding in Ghana’s prisons amount to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Europe

• French President Francois Hollande has called for a complete halt to Israel’s settlement activities on land the Palestinians want for a future state.
• EJIL: Talk! offers commentary on the United Kingdom Supreme Court’s recent decision in the R. v. Mohammed Gul case defining terrorism in times of armed conflict.
• OnNovember 14, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in Armin Maletic and Marianne Maletic v lastminute.com GmbH and TUI Österreich GmbH and defined the concept of “international character of consumer contracts.”
• The European Court of Human Rights has rejected a request from the Polish government to exclude the press and public from a hearing next month into whether Poland hosted a secret CIA jail on its soil.

Americas

• The US Department of Defense announced that media entities and other would-be observers will not be allowed to sit in on the first session of the Periodic Review Board, a parole-style hearing process for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
• The United States military is considering a mission to train Libyan security personnel with the goal of creating a force of 5,000 to 7,000 conventional soldiers and a separate, smaller unit for specialized counterterrorism missions.
• The US has been quietly offering as much as $10 million since January for information about the attack on a diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.