Independent Online News
The ongoing conflict in Sudan has raised the spectre of ethnic violence and crimes against humanity, senior UN officials warned on Tuesday. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was deeply concerned about the increasing ethnic dimension, and appalled at reports of large scale violence in Darfur.
Shoppers in Mali’s Gao, Timbuktu, and Ménaka regions can snap up AK-pattern assault rifles for $750 and cartridges for 70 cents apiece, from locally handcrafted pistols to smuggled French and Turkish machine guns, as a dizzying array of illegal weaponry dots market stalls across the Sahel, a 6,000-kilometre-wide belt in the middle of Africa.… Read the rest
The “lack of unity and action” in the Security Council “does little to slow the negative trajectory on the Korean Peninsula”, Rosemary DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, said on Friday, following Pyongyang’s failed military satellite launch earlier this week.… Read the rest
The special UN Investigative Team probing ISIL atrocities in Iraq is making “real progress,” its chief said on Monday, as it begins to pinpoint the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes committed by the terrorist group during its years-long occupation of large swathes of the country.… Read the rest
Competent courts, admissible and reliable evidence, and an appropriate legal framework are needed to ensure that ISIL extremist militants can be prosecuted for the atrocities they committed during their reign of terror in Iraq, the UN Security Council heard on Wednesday.… Read the rest