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7 April 2017
Burma
- Burma’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s one-year-old government has retained support in its Yangon strongholds in this weeks by-elections, but lost backing from ethnic minority areas that helped boost her party to election victory following a by-election on Saturday
- The leader of a Rohingya Muslim insurgency against Burma’s security forces, Ata Ullah, said last week his group would keep fighting “even if a million die” unless the country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, took action to protect the religious minority
- Burma’s State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is adding her own provisions to a draft law combating hate speech. The State Counselor has asked other democracies around the world for advice on crafting the legislation. The law will criminalize hate speech and allow police to take legal action against anyone who spreads such speech, however the definition of hate speech in the draft legislation remains unclear
- State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s 30th March announcement that five ethnic armed groups plan to soon join the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement appears to have taken at least one organization by surprise. These five groups would be the first to join the NCA under the NLD-led government’s tenure. But the New Mon State Party (NMSP) says the state counsellor prematurely announced their intention to sign the NCA. The NMSP leaders say the organization is not yet ready to commit to the peace accord, but will continue along a previously established timeline of public consultations followed by a post-Thingyan meeting of its central executive committee before making a decision
- The director general of an international coalition of 61 Rohingya organizations said he was “disappointed” at Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi for saying ethnic cleansing was “too strong” a term to describe what was happening in the Muslim-majority Rakhine region
- Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed to consider closing their shared border if there was a repeat of the recent Rohingya refugee crisis. The decision was announced on April 6 at the end of a six-day meeting in Dhaka attended by senior officers from the Bangladesh Border Guard and the Myanmar Police Force
Nagorno-Karabakh
- Azerbaijan, like the whole region, will be able to fully develop its potential only after the resolution of regional conflicts, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said in a letter to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
Nigeria
- The Nigerian Presidency has vowed that the war against perfidy and corruption will continue notwithstanding resistance and fight back from the opposition – “Let me say one thing. Those whose illicit ways of accumulating money have been stopped will criticise this government but all that will not derail the unfaltering commitment of the President Muhammadu Buhari to the war against corruption”
- Boko Haram Islamists have abducted 22 girls and women in two separate raids in northeast Nigeria, according to residents and vigilantes
South Sudan
- United Nations satellite images obtained by The Associated Press show at least 18,000 structures have been destroyed in the Yei area of South Sudan. It is one of the most significant caches of evidence of widespread destruction in the country’s civil war
- South Sudanese authorities are blocking United Nations peacekeepers from visiting a town where soldiers are alleged to have killed civilians including children this week – Peacekeepers have been trying to get to the town of Pajok, near the border with Uganda, for four days after unconfirmed reports emerged of mass killings
Sudan
- Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of crimes against humanity, has labelled the ICC a “colonial tool” and called for the establishment of an African court of justice. In 2009 and 2010, the ICC issued two arrest warrants against Bashir for alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Sudan’s Darfur state, making him the first head of state to be charged by the Hague-based court since its inception in 2002. However, Bashir rejected the ICC as biased against Africans while addressing the First African Conference Heads of Justice and Higher Courts in Khartoum
- War crimes judges will hear why South Africa failed to arrest Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir during a 2015 visit, as they mull whether to report the country to the United Nations for possible action – this news comes just one week after Jordan, another Rome Statute signatory, failed to arrest him when he arrived for a Arab League conference
- At the hearing on Friday lawyers for South Africa said the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, does not oblige authorities to arrest heads of state of countries that are not members of the court, such as Sudan – they claimed “there is no duty under international law in general, and in particular under the Rome Statute, on South Africa to arrest a serving head of a non-state party”
