Weekly News Wrap: Monday, October 31, 2016

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• At least 25 people have been killed, six of them police, in two days of violence around the town of Bambari in the troubled Central African Republic, the UN force MINUSCA has said.
• Twin suicide bombings by suspected Boko Haram fighters have killed at least nine people in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, officials and witnesses said. One of the attackers was reportedly a woman.
• South Africa and Burundi’s decision to quit the International Criminal Court (ICC) and an attack by Gambia against the court’s supposed “Caucasian” justice may embolden other African states to leave the world’s only permanent war crimes tribunal.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Iraqi troops including elite counter terrorism forces resumed an offensive on the eastern front of Mosul on Monday, a military statement said, targeting the eastern bank of the Tigris river which divides the northern Iraqi city.
• Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant appears to be using tens of thousands of people as “human shields” in and around Mosul, where Iraqi forces are waging an offensive aimed at retaking the country’s second biggest city.
• Saudi Arabia has arrested eight people suspected of planning separate attacks targeting security forces and a World Cup qualifying football match.
• Turkey has dismissed another 10,000 civil servants and closed 15 more media outlets over suspected links with “terrorist organisations” and US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for orchestrating a failed coup.
• At least 18 civilians were killed in Yemen’s southwestern province of Taiz on Saturday by air strikes that struck several homes, local officials and residents said.

Asia

• Indonesia will resume some shipments of coal to the Philippines, a government official said on Sunday, after a months-long halt due to concerns about piracy in seas between the two archipelagos.
• A US airstrike in Afghanistan on Friday hit the home of a Taliban commander in the eastern province of Nangarhar and caused several civilian casualties, government and insurgent spokesmen said.

Europe

• The number of migrants sleeping rough on the streets of Paris has risen by at least one-third since the start of the week when the “Jungle” shanty town in Calais was evacuated.
• Germany is looking into a claim by Islamic State that one of its followers was responsible for a fatal stabbing in the German city of Hamburg two weeks ago in which a young couple were attacked.

Americas

• The European Union and Canada signed a historic free trade agreement on Sunday that is promised to generate jobs and economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic.

Oceania

• Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defended on Monday a proposal to ban asylum seekers who arrive illegally by boat from ever entering Australia again, rejecting criticism from rights lawyers who say it would breach the U.N. Refugee Convention.

UN/World

• United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly to start negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, despite strong opposition from nuclear-armed nations and their allies.
• The United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said that he is “appalled and shocked” by the high number of rockets indiscriminately launched by armed opposition groups on civilian suburbs of Syria’s western Aleppo in the past 48 hours.