Weekly News Wrap: Monday, June 15, 2015

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

Africa

• President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has returned to his country, defying a South African judge’s effort to prevent his departure on the basis of an International Criminal Court (ICC) order for his arrest. Jens has a post outlining the events here and a sampling of reactions from social media can be found here.
• Eleven Somali al Shabaab militants and two Kenyan soldiers were killed when the al Qaeda-linked fighters attacked a military base on Kenya’s northern coast near to the Somali border on Sunday, a local official and a military spokesman said.
• Kenya’s army said it killed a regional commander from Somalia’s al Shabaab group, and possibly also a Briton who joined the militants, in fighting over the weekend.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• U.S. planes carried out a strike inside Libya on Sunday, reportedly killing a key terror figure in North Africa, U.S. and Libyan officials said.
• Amnesty International criticized on Monday what it said was a “dismal” global response to the plight of Syrian refugees and urged neighboring countries struggling to cope with the influx of refugees to lift “deeply troubling” measures designed to keep them out.
• Israel issued a report on Sunday arguing its 2014 Gaza offensive was lawful, a move aimed at pre-empting the release of findings of a U.N. war crimes investigation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scorned as a waste of time.
• Turkey has taken in hundreds more of Syrians fleeing the conflict along the border in Syria’s Raqqa province after fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group disrupted a previous attempt, Al Jazeera has learned.

Asia

• A teenage North Korean soldier has walked across the world’s most heavily militarised border in a bid to defect to South Korea, South Korean defence ministry officials said.
• Britain has pulled out agents from operations in “hostile countries” after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper.

Europe

• With a hundred Africans sleeping on rocks overlooking the Italian coast after being turned back at the French border, Rome and Paris argued on Monday over who should handle the waves of migrants landing on Italy’s shores.
• Greece and its creditors hardened their stances on Monday after the collapse of talks aimed at preventing a default and possible euro exit, prompting Germany’s EU commissioner to say the time had come to prepare for a “state of emergency”.

Americas

• U.S. and coalition forces launched 16 air strikes targeting Islamic State militants in nine Iraqi cities on Sunday, the U.S. military said.
• In the 2014 fiscal year there were more applicants from Mexico for asylum in the US than from any other country, with nearly 9,000 Mexicans applying for safe harbour in their neighbouring country to the north.
• Hackers alleged to be linked to China are accused of carrying out a second cyber attack within a few days. The security of 4 million current and former employees of the US government has been compromised.

Oceania

• Australia has been criticised for its hardline policy towards migrants and asylum seekers and for holding many heading to the country by boat in offshore detention centres.

UN/World

• UN-sponsored negotiations on the Yemen crisis have started in Geneva, with the aim of ending the bloody conflict in the country.These talks aimed at ending the war in Yemen have however been thrown into doubt amid uncertainty over whether rebel Houthi negotiators will attend, with reports saying the Shia rebels missed a flight to Geneva.