Weekly News Wrap: Tuesday, July 7, 2015

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

Africa

• Burundi’s parliamentary elections on Monday were not fair or free and human rights were violated, the United Nations said on Thursday.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• US President Barack Obama has said that the US-led coalition battling fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was “intensifying” its campaign against the armed group’s base in Syria.
• A suicide bomber from Syria’s al-Qaeda offshoot – the Nusra Front – has blown himself up at an army outpost in a contested neighbourhood of northern city of Aleppo, killing at least 25 soldiers and allied militia, a monitoring group says.
• Kuwait has detained 26 people suspected of involvement in a suicide bombing on a Shi’ite Muslim mosque last month that killed 27 people, a local newspaper reported on Monday, quoting the public prosecutor.
• Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN special envoy to Yemen, has arrived in the country’s capital in a bid to arrange a pause in fighting until the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on July 17, to allow for deliveries of humanitarian aid.
• Iran and world powers made progress on future sanctions relief for Iran in marathon nuclear talks on Saturday, but remained divided on issues such as lifting United Nations sanctions and the development of advanced centrifuges.

Asia

• The Philippines will start on Tuesday its legal battle against China’s territorial claims before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
• The Philippine navy recently found a large steel marker bearing Chinese inscriptions and hundreds of yellow buoys in waters near the Reed Bank, an area of the South China Sea where Manila has long explored for oil and gas, Philippine naval sources said.
• The BRICS emerging economies will launch a development bank at a summit this week which President Vladimir Putin hopes will help reduce Western dominance of world financial institutions and show Moscow is not isolated.
• China has no “ethnic problem” in its far west, and Muslim Uighur minorities there enjoy freedom of religion, the country’s foreign ministry has said, following anti-China protests in Turkey over Beijing’s treatment of the group.
• A deep-seated cultural preference for boys is skewing India’s sex ratio and making slaves of women.

Europe

• Rights group Amnesty International has accused the European Union of abandoning migrants trying to access member countries through the Balkans, where it says they face abuse and exploitation.
• Greece faces a last chance to stay in the euro zone on Tuesday when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras puts proposals to an emergency euro zone summit after Greek voters resoundingly rejected the austerity terms of a defunct bailout.
• Hungary’s parliament passed legislation on Monday that tightens its asylum rules, providing the legal framework for the erection of a fence along the country’s southern border with Serbia to stem the flow of illegal migrants.
• France swiftly rejected on Friday a request for asylum by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Americas

• Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Monday said he was calling in the country’s ambassador in neighboring Guyana for consultations amid an escalating row over oil exploration in a disputed offshore territory.
• The Colombian government and rebels from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have exchanged blame over a peace process to resolve the decades-long conflict between the two sides.

UN/World

• About 800 million people still live in dire poverty and suffer from hunger despite the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) being the most successful anti-poverty push in history, the U.N. said on Monday.
• U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday offered help to resolve a long-running border spat between Venezuela and its South American neighbor Guyana that heated up after oil was found in the disputed area in May.
• The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on Thursday calling for an end to child, early and forced marriage, and recognizing child marriage as a violation of human rights, a move campaigners welcomed as crucial to progress on the issue.