Weekly News Wrap: Monday, November 23, 2015

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

Africa

• Mali’s president has questioned claims that al-Mourabitoun, an al-Qaeda linked group, was responsible for last week’s assault on a luxury hotel in the capital Bamako.
• Plans by the Senegalese government to prohibit women from wearing full-body veils, amid growing security concerns, have sparked debate within the majority-Muslim country.
• Al Jazeera investigates allegations of apartheid-style extrajudicial killings in South Africa.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Russian air strikes in Syria have killed over 400 civilians since September this year, monitoring groups say; the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the death toll from September 30 – when the strikes were launched – until November 20 stood at 403 civilians, a figure that includes 97 children.
• A Belgian citizen of Moroccan origin suspected of playing a role in the Paris attacks has been arrested in the southern Turkish city of Antalya, two Turkish officials told Al Jazeera.

Asia

• Southeast Asian nations have established a formal community that attempts to create freer movement of trade and capital in an area of 625 million people with a combined economic output of $2.6 trillion.
• South Korea said planned military firing drills would go ahead on Monday near a disputed maritime border with North Korea, which has threatened “merciless retaliation” if Seoul fires into its waters on the anniversary of a 2010 bombing that killed four people.
• A new road linking the Afghan capital with a trade hub near Pakistan has been stuck in the slow lane since a state-owned Chinese company took the contract to build it two years ago, bedeviled by militant attacks and accusations of mismanagement.
• Bangladesh executed two opposition leaders on Sunday for war crimes committed during the 1971 war to break away from Pakistan, a senior police official said, in a move likely to draw an angry reaction from supporters.
• Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement got a boost on Monday with about eight candidates involved in crippling protests last year winning office at district-level elections, while some veterans from both sides of the political divide suffered defeat.
• The United Nations voiced alarm on Friday about the fate of nine North Koreans feared to have been deported from Vietnam via China back to their homeland, saying they might face torture or even execution.

Europe

• Belgian security forces have carried out multiple raids across the country, arresting 16 suspects believed to have ties to the deadly attacks in Paris.
• A former senior intelligence officer in Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency says air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will “absolutely not” eliminate them.
• A metal capsule containing over 20,000 wishes for the future was stored away in a Sarajevo museum on Saturday to mark the 20th anniversary of the peace deal that ended the Bosnian war but left the country deeply divided and dysfunctional.

Americas

• The Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum has called on to the US not to turn away Syrian refugees; the museum expressed concern over refugee crisis, called on politicians to “not turn” their backs on Syrians fleeing conflict.
• Additionally, rights groups have criticized American politicians’ comments about Muslims as a debate over the future of Syrian refugees in the United States intensified in the wake of the Paris attacks.
• Colombia’s government said on Sunday it will free 30 jailed members of the Marxist FARC rebel group as a gesture of goodwill as the two sides negotiate an end to more than five decades of war.
• The U.S. Navy will likely carry out another patrol within 12 nautical miles of artificial islands in the South China Sea before the end of the year, a U.S. Navy official said on Friday.

Oceania

• The Sydney Morning Herald provides two charts showing Australia’s “human rights crisis.”

UN/World

• All able states should join the fight against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and redouble efforts to prevent further attacks by the militant group, the United Nations Security Council said on Friday.
• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday announced plans for a summit in March on resettling millions of people who have fled Syria as he expressed concern at “misplaced suspicions about migrants and refugees.”
• The World Health Organization’s failure to sound the alarm until months into West Africa’s Ebola outbreak was an “egregious failure” which added to the enormous suffering and death toll, global health experts said on Monday.
• The new United Nations envoy to Libya on Sunday urged warring factions to sign up to a previously negotiated agreement for a unity government, saying there could be consultations but no changes to the draft.
• FIFA’s ethics committee says it completed its investigation into the conduct of FIFA President Sepp Blatter and UEFA head Michel Platini and requested sanctions against both of them.