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

Africa

• The Liberian government has closed most of the West African nation’s border crossings and introduced stringent health measures to curb the spread of the deadly Ebola virus that has killed at least 660 people across the region.
• Nigerian Boko Haram militants kidnapped the wife of Cameroon’s vice prime minister and killed at least three people on Sunday in a cross-border attack involving more than 200 assailants in the northern town of Kolofata, Cameroon officials said.

Asia

• China will hold military exercises in southeast coastal areas beginning on Tuesday, the Ministry of National Defence said on Sunday. 
•  The U.S. government urged Pakistan on Friday to prevent displaced Haqqani militants from returning to their traditional sanctuary after a Pakistani military offensive near the Afghanistan border.
• Indian officials indicated late on Wednesday that they would not be able to support the implementation of the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) unless they see their concerns on food security addressed, according to multiple media reports.

Europe

• International experts have been forced to abandon their plans to visit the site where the Malaysian airliner crashed because of fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian troops in the area. 
• Russia reacted angrily on Saturday to additional sanctions imposed by the European Union over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis, saying they would hamper cooperation on security issues and undermine the fight against terrorism and organized crime.
• Norway closed part of the airspace over its second city Bergen and tightened border checks on Saturday, two days after the country upped security following what it described as a “terror alert”.
• British police have arrested two people in London on suspicion of conspiracy to carry out female genital mutilation (FGM) and placed a young girl in the care of social services, a police statement said on Saturday.
• France is to repatriate the bodies of all 118 people who were aboard an Air Algerie plane that crashed in Mali, as it declared an unofficial three-day period of mourning.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• European nations and the US have called on their citizens to leave Libya as heavy fighting between troops loyal to a renegade general and militias in the eastern city of Benghazi left more than 36 people dead.
• U.S.-Israeli tensions rise as hostilities in Gaza subside.
• Syrian army said on Sunday it recaptured a gas field east of the central city of Homs that was seized by hardline Islamic State fighters earlier this month.
• The UN has sent its first humanitarian aid convoy into rebel-held areas of Syria without government consent on Thursday, as UN chief Ban Ki-moon accused warring parties of denying assistance to millions as a tactic of war.
• Egypt summoned the Turkish charge d’affaires on Saturday for the second time in a month to complain about comments by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan deemed insulting to the leadership in Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said.

Americas

• A former Venezuelan military intelligence head detained on the Caribbean island of Aruba over U.S accusations of drug-trafficking was released and flew home on Sunday.
• President Barack Obama has urged the leaders of three Central American countries to work with him to stem the flow of child migrants who have surged across the US border, warned that most of them would not be allowed to stay.
• EU and Ecuadorian negotiators have agreed upon terms that will allow Quito to join an existing trade agreement that Brussels has with Colombia and Peru, officials confirmed last week, bringing to a close a prolonged – and sometimes acrimonious – process dating back several years.

Oceania

• The first of 157 asylum-seekers who attempted to enter Australia by boat arrived on the country’s mainland on Sunday, after being held at sea for weeks

UN/Other

• The UN has reported alarming rates of malnutrition in the Somali capital where aid agencies cannot meet the needs of 350,000 people due to insufficient funds, drought and conflict.
• UN aid chiefs have begged donors to increase efforts to stave off a looming famine in South Sudan, where a third of the population are in crisis after months of war.
• The new UN human rights envoy for Myanmar has expressed serious concern about conditions in camps for more than 100,000 mostly minority Muslims displaced by violence led by Buddhist extremists, and has warned that the country’s human rights situation may be deteriorating.
• The UN atomic watchdog IAEA said it needs 1 million euros in extra funding to help pay for its monitoring of a four-month extension of an interim nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers.
• The U.N. civil aviation agency will hold a broad international meeting to discuss airline safety in the industry’s most coordinated response to the downing of a Malaysian airliner, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

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

Africa

• Suspected Islamists raided the remote northeast Nigerian town of Damboa over the weekend, shooting dead more than 40 residents and burning down houses in a familiar pattern of killing that has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes this year.
• South Sudanese rebels and government soldiers clashed in the northern town of Nasir on Sunday, adding to fears that a shaky ceasefire agreement signed in May could totally collapse.

Asia

• A US drone attack has killed at 11 people in the Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said.
• The U.N. Security Council on Thursday condemned recent ballistic missile launches by North Korea describing the three rounds of Scud short-range missiles fired in June and July as a violation of council demands on Pyongyang.

Europe

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid out what he called overwhelming evidence of Russian complicity in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 as international horror deepened over the fate of the victims’ remains.
• Britain’s new Foreign Secretary Philip Hammonds reiterated his position from two years ago that if Britain does not get good renegotiation, it should leave the European Union.
• A former Libyan Islamist commander who says he suffered years of torture by Muammar Gaddafi’s henchmen after British and U.S. spies handed him over to Libya will try this week to overturn a ruling blocking legal action against the British government.
• The remains of 284 victims of the Bosnian war were laid to rest on Sunday having been unearthed from what is believed to be the largest mass grave of Europe’s worst conflict since World War Two.
• Spain summoned the British ambassador to complain about Britain’s handling of an incident on Wednesday involving the Spanish Navy near the disputed territory of Gibraltar.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Two Israeli soldiers were killed in a cross-border attack by Hamas militants on Saturday, the army said, as the Palestinian death toll from the conflict rose above 300 with no diplomatic solution in sight. 
• Italian rescuers have found 18 bodies on a boat carrying hundreds of asylum-seekers and another died while being evacuated, the ANSA news agency reports.

Americas

• Central American leaders will ask U.S. President Obama to support a regional development and security plan to stem the tide of illegal child migrants to the U.S. at a meeting next week, a Honduran minister said on Saturday.
• Pope Francis called for justice to be served in his native Argentina on Friday, the twentieth anniversary of the deadly bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish commuity center that local courts blamed on Iran.
• The CIA station chief in Berlin who was told to leave by Germany due to new allegations of U.S. spying has now left the country, a spokesman for Germany’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

UN/Other

• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the killing of dozens of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli shelling as an “atrocious action” and called for an immediate end to almost two weeks of fighting.
• According to the IAEA, Iran has turned all of its enriched uranium closest to the level needed to make nuclear arms into more harmless forms.
• The U.N. Security Council is due to vote today on a resolution that would condemn the downing of a Malaysian passenger plane in Ukraine and demands that those responsible be held accountable and that armed groups don’t compromise the crash site integrity.
• The United Nations accused Islamic State fighters in Iraq of executions, rape and forced recruitment of children during a campaign to seize much of northern Iraq, part of a conflict it said has killed almost 5,600 civilians this year.
• The International Monetary Fund expects to decide within weeks on issuing the second tranche of a $17-billion bailout to Ukraine, whose economy is likely to contract by 6.5 percent this year, its Kiev mission chief said on Friday.

Announcements

• A one-day conference on the UN Migrant Workers Convention will be held at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation in Venice on Monday, 28 July. The conference, which boasts a stellar line-up of speakers, will take place in the 12^th century monastery of San Nicolò and is free and open to the public. 
• Workshop: Foreign Investment in the Services Sector. A workshop – organized by Andreas R. Ziegler and Michael Hahn (University of Lausanne), Eric de Brabandere (Grotius Centre, Leiden University) and Tarcisio Gazzini (UNIL – Foreign Services in Africa Project) – will take place on 19 September 2014 at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in the context of the opening of the academic year of the LLM Programme on International and European Economic and Commercial Law, and it will explore the specific problems relating to foreign direct investment in services sector and thus the overlap of International Investment Law and Trade in Services.

Last year’s inaugural Emerging Voices symposium was a big success, so today we’re kicking off our second annual edition. Through mid-August, we will be bringing you a wide variety of posts written by graduate students, early-career practitioners and academics.

Tune in over the next several weeks if you’d like to read more about litigation of international law in domestic courts, interstate arbitration, statelessness, and rape as a war crime–to name just a few of the topics some of our contributors will cover. Please feel free, as usual, to weigh in on the discussion. Thanks for following us here on Opinio Juris–we hope you enjoy this second edition of our Emerging Voices Symposium!

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

Africa

• In Nigeria, Boko Haram-style violence radiates southwards.
• Ebola continues to spread in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with a combined 44 new cases and 21 deaths between July 6 and 8, the World Health Organisation has said.

Asia

• North Korea has fired artillery shells into waters near its sea border with South Korea, Seoul’s military said, a day after the country test-launched two ballistic missiles in the latest of a series of weapon tests.
• China and the United States must avoid a “new cold war” in their international relations, China’s top newspaper said on Saturday, in the wake of high level talks in Beijing between senior leaders of the world’s two largest economies.

Europe

• Russia has promised to respond with “irreversible consequences” to a “dangerous escalation” of violence near its border, after a Russian man was killed and two women injured by shells fired across the Ukraine border.
• Russia will most probably extend former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s temporary asylum on the grounds that “his life is endangered”, an official close to the country’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) was quoted as saying on Friday.
• Germany has taken the unusual step of asking the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country, after two reported cases of suspected US spying. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, says new allegations of US spying show Berlin and Washington are completely at odds over how they view the role of intelligence, and she hopes German action will persuade the US not to spy on partners.
• Crucial logs revealing flights to a British overseas territory, Diego Garcia, when it was allegedly used as a secret US prison are in the possession of the police. The Guardian provides 7 things to know about Diego Garcia and renditions.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday major differences persist between Iran and six world powers negotiating on Tehran’s nuclear program, with a week to go before a deadline for a deal. 
• Heavy fighting between rival militias vying for control of Libya’s main airport in Tripoli has left at least seven people dead and halted all flights.
• Reuters has an exclusive: Egyptians fear Islamist militants are gathering on Libyan border.
• Israel said it shot down a drone from Gaza a week into its offensive on Monday, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted.
• Iraqi security forces and government affiliated militias appear to have unlawfully executed at least 255 prisoners over the past month in apparent revenge for killings by Islamic State fighters, according to Human Rights Watch.

Americas

• In Brazil, Germany has been crowned the champions of the World Cup. After a month of football in a country where the sport is regarded a religion, Al Jazeera takes a look at how the World Cup has affected the volatile political situation in Brazil and what will happen now that the tournament has come to an end. IntLawGrrls has a look at how human rights situations can affect host country selection of major sporting events like the World Cup. Hundreds of Ghanaian Muslims who entered Brazil as tourists for the World Cup have asked for asylum on religious grounds, police have said.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin begins a six-day tour of Latin America on Friday, seeking greater influence in the backyard of the United States while under pressure from the West to help restrain pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.
• President Dilma Rousseff said the Obama administration was not directly responsible for U.S. spying on Brazil and has taken steps toward smoothing over the diplomatic tensions set off by espionage disclosures last year.

UN/Other

• Iraqi soldiers backed by Shi’ite militias fought Sunni rebels for control of a military base northeast of Baghdad on Saturday as a U.N. envoy warned of chaos if divided lawmakers did not make progress on Sunday towards naming a government.
• Europe must open its doors to more Syrian refugees, having welcomed only a “miniscule” number while Syria’s neighbors have reached “saturation point”, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.
• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday appointed veteran U.N. official Staffan de Mistura, a former U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq, to replace Lakhdar Brahimi as the international mediator seeking an end to Syria’s civil war.

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

Africa

• West African countries and international health organizations adopted a fresh strategy on Thursday to fight the world’s deadliest Ebola epidemic, which has killed hundreds of people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Asia

• India summoned a senior U.S. diplomat to explain reports that the U.S. National Security Agency was authorized to spy on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party before he took office, and to seek assurances this would not happen in future. 
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has arrived in China for her seventh visit since 2005, with economic ties topping the agenda and a high-powered business delegation in tow.
• Australia has confirmed it handed over a boatload of asylum seekers to Sri Lankan authorities in a transfer at sea, drawing outrage from rights groups who fear those on board could face persecution when they go home.

Europe

• Ukraine’s president has called the capture of the Pro-Russian separatist stronghold of Slovyansk a “turning point” in the fight for control of the country’s east.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel said allegations that a German man worked as a double agent for U.S. intelligence were serious and, if true, were a clear contradiction of what cooperation between partners is supposed to be about. 
• French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Thursday to encourage separatists in eastern Ukraine to reach an agreement with the Ukrainian authorities, the French president’s office said.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• A 12-year-old girl has been killed and eight other civilians wounded in an Iraqi airstrike on a Kurdish-held town in Iraq’s northern province of Salahuddin, a Kurdish security forces official said. 
• Israel does not expect world powers to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran by a late July deadline, a government minister said on Friday, accusing Tehran of maintaining a “hard line” at talks under way in Vienna.
• Around 30 Islamic State fighters broke out of a makeshift jail where rival Syrian Islamists had been holding them, a monitoring group said on Friday as it detailed the latest territorial gains by the al Qaeda offshoot.
• Clashes in the north Yemen town of Omran continued on Sunday between the army and fighters from the Houthi movement after at least 104 people were killed on Saturday, while in the south six soldiers were shot dead by al Qaeda militants.
• Israeli air strikes killed seven Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the Islamist group said, in the deadliest attacks in a surge of violence exacerbated by the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youths and a Palestinian teen.

Americas

• Enhanced international police cooperation during the World Cup has led to the arrest of a fugitive wanted for torture and murder during Argentina’s “dirty war” against leftists four decades ago, Brazilian authorities said on Thursday.
• U.S. military advisors have secretly operated in Somalia since around 2007 and Washington plans to deepen its security assistance to help the country fend off threats by Islamist militant group al Shabaab, U.S. officials said. 
• Airlines with direct flights to the United States have been told to tighten screening of mobile phones and shoes in response to intelligence reports of increased threats from al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

UN/Other

• Australia, Luxembourg and Jordan circulated a draft resolution to the 15-member U.N. Security Council on Thursday that seeks to boost cross-border humanitarian access in Syria but it was not immediately clear if Russia and China would support the move.

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

Africa

• The two main factions in the Central African Republic’s conflict have taken a tentative step towards ending violence that has killed thousands and forced more than a million people to flee their homes. 

Asia

• India’s domestically-produced Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) has blasted off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota, carrying satellites from France, Germany, Canada and Singapore. 
• Pakistan has launched a ground offensive against rebel strongholds near the Afghan border after evacuating nearly half a million people from the tribal region, the army has said.
• North Korea has said it will put two US tourists on trial for committing crimes against the state, dimming any hopes among their families that they would soon be released.

Europe

• EU leaders have nominated Jean-Claude Juncker for European Commission president by an overwhelming majority over the fierce objections of David Cameron, UK prime minister, who has called it “a bad day for Europe”.
• Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said government forces would renew offensive operations against rebels and “free our lands”, hours after a ceasefire to allow for peace talks with the pro-Russian separatists had expired.
• The EU signed a historic free-trade pact with Ukraine on Friday and warned it could impose more sanctions on Moscow unless pro-Russian rebels act to wind down the crisis in the east of the country by Monday.
• More than 5,000 migrants have been picked up by the Italian navy in the past 48 hours in several rescue operations between Sicily and North Africa.
• Bosnia has marked 100 years since the murder of Austrian prince Franz Ferdinand in the city, an act that lit the fuse for the First World War.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Hours after three bodies of missing teenagers were found in the Occupied West Bank by the Israeli army, Israeli aircraft bombed dozens of sites in the Gaza Strip, and troops opened fire and killed a Palestinian during an arrest raid in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian medics said.
• Newly elected Iraqi lawmakers convene on Tuesday, under pressure to name a unity government to keep the country from splitting apart after an onslaught by Sunni Islamists who have declared a “caliphate” to rule over all the world’s Muslims.

Americas

• The US has armed drones flying over Baghdad to protect US troops that have recently arrived to assess Iraq’s deteriorating security, the Pentagon said on Friday.
• The White House says the US will no longer produce or acquire anti-personnel landmines in the future and intends to join the Ottawa Convention that bans their use.
• BNP Paribas has pleaded guilty to two criminal charges and agreed to pay $8.83 billion in a broad agreement with US authorities over charges the French bank violated US sanctions laws.

UN/Other

• A U.N. expert panel has concluded that a shipment of rockets and other weapons that was seized by Israel came from Iran and represents a violation of the U.N. arms embargo on Tehran, according to a confidential report obtained by Reuters on Friday.

Events

• The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals will take place  on 18 July 2014 in Geneva. The seminar, the program of which is found here, will focus on the dialogue between the International Law Commission and international courts and tribunals. Members of the ILC, experts and practitioners will take part. The event is open to all.

Calls for Papers

• The Editorial Board of Comparative Constitutional Law & Administrative Law Quarterly (CALQ) is inviting submissions for Vol. 2 No. 1 from legal academicians, professionals and students. The Journal attempts to initiate and foster academic dialogue concerning the subjects of Administrative Law and Constitutional Law keeping in mind a global perspective. More information can be found here.
• Call for papers: Imagining post-neoliberal regulatory subjectivities @ Faculty of Law, University of Turku, Finland 15-17 October 2014. The Faculty of Law, University of Turku is pleased to announce a research seminar addressing post-neoliberal regulatory subjectivities. They have issued a call for papers dealing with different aspects of the “subjectivity turn”, understood here as the new art of neoliberal regulation aimed at producing actors with appropriate agency-a subjectivity. The papers could, for example, map the possible genealogies for the emergence of post-neoliberal law, or address the implications of anthropomorphic corporate regulation, or transformations in sovereign subjectivities. The organizers are able to pay for travel and accommodation for presenters.
• Transnational Dispute Management has announced a new call for papers. The special will be edited by Craig Shepherd and Mike McClure and deals with “Arbitration in the Middle East - Expectations and Challenges for the Future.” 

Last week’s events and announcements can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.

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

Africa

• Three armed groups from northern Mali have agreed to begin peace talks with the government aimed at resolving long-standing disputes in the country. 
• More than 50,000 children in South Sudan face death from disease and hunger, the United Nations has warned while seeking over $1bn to support those hit by six months of civil war.
• Entire elephant populations are dying out in many African countries due to poaching on a massive scale, wildlife regulator CITES has warned, while also hailing the continent for improving its crackdown on ivory smuggling.

Asia

• The Philippines said on Monday that China’s “expansion agenda” in the disputed South China Sea threatened security and stability in the region, calling on all claimant states to halt construction activities that may raise tensions. 
• Thailand’s junta denied on Monday that they were pursuing a “sweep and clean” policy of driving illegal foreign workers out of the country, despite mass departures by fearful Cambodians since the military took power last month.
• Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has filed a case with local police accusing 17 people of breaching regulations over the construction of a building that collapsed last year, killing nearly 1,130 mostly garment workers, officials have said.

Europe

• NATO is preparing measures to help Ukraine defend itself in its stand-off with Russia, and must adapt to the fact that Moscow now views it as an adversary. 
• Ukraine’s energy minister says Russia has cut off all natural gas supplies to his country, adding however that he guarantees reliable gas flows will continue to Russia’s European clients who get imports through pipelines via Ukraine.
  
• UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party said on Thursday it would resume a stalled drive to make a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union legally binding, a move designed to woo Eurosceptic voters and unite the party.
• Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko took office this past weekend, immediately promising to sign a long-awaited trade deal with the European Union as soon as the latter approves the pact.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• An offensive by insurgents that threatens to dismember Iraq seemed to slow on Saturday after days of lightning advances as government forces regained some territory in counter-attacks, easing pressure on the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad. 
• Sunni rebels in Iraq have posted pictures on Twitter apparently showing their fighters killing many Shia soldiers.
• Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian man and arrested the speaker of parliament, as the hunt for three Israelis believed to have been kidnapped in the West Bank continued.

Americas

• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won a second term on Sunday with an election victory that allows him to continue peace talks with Marxist guerrillas to end a half-century war. 
• President Barack Obama has said that the United States will not be sending its troops back to Iraq, but is reviewing other options to assist the Iraqi government threatened by an advancing armed group.

UN/Other

• Nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals and appear determined to keep sizable numbers of such weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future, the SIPRI think-tank said in its annual report on Monday.

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

Africa

• A Liberia-flagged oil tanker has gone missing off the coast of Ghana and a senior port official told Reuters on Saturday the captain sent a distress call to say the vessel was attacked by pirates. 
• Up to 37 people including women and children were killed in Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern province of South Kivu on Saturday in an attack that government officials blamed on a dispute over cattle.
• A female suicide bomber killed herself and a soldier outside an army barracks in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Gombe on Sunday, the military said, as local leaders reported the death count from a string of earlier militant attacks had reached 110.

Asia

• Taliban militants disguised as security forces stormed Pakistan’s busiest airport (Karachi International) on Sunday and at least 27 people were killed in a dramatic night-long battle at one of the country’s most high-profile targets. 
• China confirmed that it will participate for the first time in a major U.S.-hosted naval drill this month, sending four ships including a destroyer and frigate, even as deep military distrust persists between the two countries.
• China has accused Vietnam of ramming its ships more than 1,400 times in a disputed part of the South China Sea and said while it wanted good relations with its neighbor, it would not abandon principles to achieve that.
• Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan inked a deal last week to formally establish an economic union between them, capping approximately two decades’ worth of talks.

Europe

• Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko said his country would never give up Crimea and would not compromise on its path towards closer ties with Europe, spelling out a defiant message to Russia in his inaugural speech on Saturday.
• Russia, Ukraine and the European Union will restart talks on Russian natural gas supplies to try to resolve a disagreement over price.
• Russia would consider any further expansion of NATO forces near its borders a “demonstration of hostile intentions” and would take political and military measures to ensure its own security, a senior diplomat was quoted on Monday as saying.
• Tens of thousands of Basques held hands on Sunday to form a 123-km chain stretching across the northern Spanish region calling for the right to hold a vote on independence.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• The United Arab Emirates has introduced a new law requiring compulsory military service for adult males. 
• Iranian, U.S. and European Union officials will start two days of talks about Tehran’s nuclear program on Monday, Iran said, giving its first word about what appears to be a bid to rescue faltering wider negotiations on ending a decade-old dispute.
• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced a wide-ranging amnesty on Monday, less than a week after he was re-elected to another seven-year term in the midst of civil war.
• Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, has said Turkey and Iran are determined to stand against violence and extremism in the Middle East during a trip to Ankara.

Americas

• Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have agreed to set up a truth commission that addresses the deaths of thousands of people in five decades of the country’s conflict. 
• The US Commerce Department announced on Tuesday that it would be imposing preliminary countervailing duties on imports of certain Chinese crystalline silicon photovoltaic products – including solar cells, modules, laminates, and/or panels.

UN/Other

• The kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls and several recent horrific murders of women is expected to raise pressure on the world community to take concrete action to punish those responsible for sexual violence at a global summit in London this week. 
• A UN group tasked with formulating a proposed set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) will for the first time consider a zero draft of a possible text at its next meeting later this month

Call for Papers

• The American Society of International Law has extended the deadline for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held during the Society’s Midyear Meeting in Chicago November 6-8, 2014. Papers can be on any topic related to international and transnational law and should be unpublished.  Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome. Interested paper-givers should submit an abstract (no more than 1000 words in length) summarizing the scholarly paper to be presented at the Forum. Review of the abstracts will be blind.  Proposals should be submitted online by June 15, 2014. To submit a proposal, or for more information, please click here. 

Event

• ALMA and the Radzyner School of Law of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) have announced the next session of the Joint International Humanitarian Law Forum. The session will be held on June 18, 2014, 18:30. The speakers and topics are:
  Yahli Shereshevsky, PhD candidate, Hebrew University: “Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defence and the battle over the laws of war.” and Ido Kilovaty, PhD candidate, Georgetown University: “Cyber Warfare and Jus ad Bellum: Does Economic Cyber Coercion Violate Article 2(4) of the UN Charter?” For more information, click here.

Announcement

• Vacancies for: Book Review Editor, an Assistant Editor, and two Editorial Assistants for the journal Transnational Environmental Law (TEL) is a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the development of new ideas on law’s contribution to environmental governance in a global context. TEL is published by Cambridge University Press, and appears twice annually. For further information about the journal, including its full mission and scope, see: http://journals.cambridge.org/TEL A Book Review Editor. For more information, click here.

Last week’s events and announcements can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.

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

Africa

• China and the African Development Bank jointly unveiled a US$2 billion multilateral investment fund last week, marking a symbolic shift in their partnership. 
• A bombing in a bar in Nigeria’s northeast has killed at least 14 people and injured another 14 in the second attack targeting football fans in a fortnight, likely carried out by Boko Haram.

Asia

• Australia has resettled more than 500 Afghans who helped the Australian military during its mission in the country, according to a government statement. 
• The US defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, has said China actions in the South China Sea are “destabilising” and “unilateral”, rubbishing Beijing’s description of the waters as a “sea of peace, friendship and cooperation”.

Europe

• The fifth round of negotiations for a bilateral US-EU trade and investment pact wrapped up on Friday, with continued progress reported.
• The WTO Appellate Body has found that the EU’s ban on imported seal products is justified under the right to protect public morals, specifically on the grounds of protecting animal welfare.
• NATO defense ministers will discuss temporarily reinforcing forces in Poland when they meet in Brussels this week, a spokesman for the German defense ministry said on Sunday, a move that would be aimed at reassuring countries nervous about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
• Ukraine and Russia are to enter crunch talks on Monday to settle a long-running dispute over the price of gas deliveries.
• Six Ukrainian rebels have been killed while trying to collect the bodies of comrades who died under Ukrainian army fire earlier this week near the Donetsk airport, Ukrainian separatist leader Denis Pushilin says.
• Italy’s navy says it has picked up nearly 3,000 people in the last 24 hours as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean by boat.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Heavy fighting is ongoing in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, apparently between the armed group Ansar al-Shariah and irregular forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, a former army general.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday against any international rush to recognize a Palestinian government due to be announced under a unity pact between the Fatah and Hamas Islamist groups.
• About 200 migrants, mostly from Ethiopia and Eritrea, have been detained in Zawiya west of Tripoli as they tried to cross to Europe while hidden in vehicles, Libyan officials have said.

Americas

• The NSA is capturing “millions of images a day” of Americans and foreigners for use in facial recognition programs, documents leaked by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden show.
• The Obama administration is set to roll out a plan to cut earth-warming pollution from power plants by 30 percent by 2030, setting in motion one of the most significant actions to address global warming in US history.
• Five Taliban leaders have arrived in Qatar after being freed from Guantanamo Bay in a swap deal for a US soldier held in Afghanistan for nearly five years. Republicans questioned whether the deal freeing Bowe Bergdahl amounted to negotiation with terrorists. 

UN/Other

• Almost 800 people have been killed in violence across Iraq in May, the United Nations has said, making it the deadliest month for the country this year.