News Round-Up 27/01/2017

News from HART

• The HART Prize for Human Rights is still open for entries, click here for information

Burma 

• Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights, amongst others, have called on Burmese authorities to immediately release or appropriately charge two ethnic Baptist leaders who were arbitrarily detained by the military in December.
• Burma’s State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and signatories of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) met in Naypyidaw on Monday to discuss the second round of the 21^st Century Panlong Peace Conference.
• The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma, Yanghee Lee,has suggested there could be possible reprisals against people that she had met in her recent visit to Rakhine State who are linked to crimes against the Rohingya people.
• A new student political group, The Social Democratic United Front, has been formed to focus on peace, national development, abolishing the constitution and fighting ‘neo-colonialism’.

Nagorno-Karabakh

• The president of Nagorno-Karabakh has chaired the cabinet meeting of 2017.
• The PACE President has said that Nagorno-Karabakh tensions are still highly flammable, and conflict could still break out
• The President of Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev, has stated Azerbaijan will never yield independence to Nagorno-Karabakh at the opening of a military camp in Baku

Nigeria

• A prominent Christian leader in Nigeria, Bishop Diamond Emuobor, has called on Christians facing danger, from the likes of the Fulani herdsmen, to ‘buy a sword and defend themselves’.
• A report his week has suggested over 2.3 million people in Nigeria are HIV positive and not receiving treatment of any kind.
• Fulani youths have set out a list of conditions that must be met if peace is to be seen in the region.
• Violence has continued to flare up between Fulani herdsmen and local farmers, with the Fulani attacking Ipiga village in Ohimini and 1000 cows having been reported stolen.
• Female suicide bombers in Nigeria have begun to carry babies to avoid detection from security forces and local vigilantly check points.

Sudan

• Sudanese opposition leader, Sadiq al-Mahdi, returned to Khartoum on Thursday afternoon after 30 months in self-imposed exile in Egypt after the Sudanese authorities detained him for around a month in May 2014. The Sudanese government had accused him of being in contact with armed rebels.

South Sudan

• South Sudanese activist, Dong Samuel Luak, has been detained by Kenyan authorities, and faces torture if he is illegally deported back to South Sudan
• The UN Security Council stepped up calls on Monday for regional troops to help a UN contingent already in South Sudan to help stem the ongoing violence and stave off the brewing humanitarian crisis.

Uganda

• Following the re-imposition of the ‘gag rule’ by the Trump administration, thousands, if not millions, of Ugandans are set to lose family planning facilities.