Weekly News Wrap: Monday, April 28, 2014

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

Africa

• South Africa is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its first ever all-race, democratic election that ended decades of racial oppression under the apartheid system.
• International mediators have called on South Sudan’s rebel leader to meet his rival President Salva Kiir to prevent an ethnic-fuelled conflict turning into a civil war or genocide.
• At least 22 people, including 15 local chiefs and three members of staff of the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, were killed in an attack on a town in the Central African Republic

Asia

• The US has signed a new 10-year defense agreement with the Philippines.
• India successfully test-fired an anti-ballistic missile on Sunday capable of intercepting targets outside the earth’s atmosphere, a major step in development of a missile defense system that is available to only a handful of nations.

Europe

• The mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city has been shot in the back and pro-Russia separatists have seized yet another government building as tensions rise in eastern Ukraine ahead of a new round of US sanctions.
• German politicians on Sunday condemned as “unacceptable” and “absurd” comments by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that Germans denied the existence of Nazi concentration camps.
• Delegates from several European countries and the United States, Turkey, Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia are to meet next month to discuss ways to stop young fighters from leaving their countries to join rebel groups in Syria, Belgium says.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• An Egyptian judge has sentenced 683 alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death, including the group’s supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, and confirmed the death sentences of 37 of 529 alleged supporters previously condemned.
• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad declared he will seek re-election in June, defying calls from his opponents to step aside and allow a political solution to the devastating civil war stemming from protests against his rule.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state” if there is no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and dozens of former government officials have appeared in a Tripoli court to face charges ranging from war crimes to corruption.
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the Nazi Holocaust “the most heinous crime” against humanity in modern times, in an apparent bid to build bridges with Israel days after troubled peace talks collapsed.

Americas

• The United States froze assets and imposed visa bans on seven powerful Russians close to President Vladimir Putin and also sanctioned 17 companies in reprisal for Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
• A retired Brazilian colonel who last month admitted carrying out torture during the country’s 1964-1985 military rule has been found dead following a break-in at his suburban Rio home, police have said.
• A review board has recommended that the United States free a Yemeni man, Ali Ahmed al-Rahizi, who has been held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 12 years.

UN/Other

• The UN Security Council is set to partially ease a decade-long arms embargo on Ivory Coast and lift a ban on diamond exports, diplomats said on Friday, despite claims by U.N. experts the measure failed to stop illicit trafficking of rough diamonds.