Following a divisive debate, the Lebanese parliament passed a landmark law to investigate the fate of thousands of people who have been missing since its 1975-1990 civil war, in which some 150,000 people died, and to hold those responsible to account. The law sets up a national commission to find out what happened to those who were never found — an estimated 17,000 people — including collecting DNA samples from living family members and exhuming mass graves.

After the Sri Lankan Supreme Court suspended the dissolution of Parliament ordered by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, a majority of Sri Lankan lawmakers voted to remove Rajapaksa from office, saying that his appointment last month was illegal. Rajapaksa is considered the strongman of Sri Lankan politics; he is a wealthy, powerful former president who has been accused of grave human rights abuses.

Former guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have chosen rafting as their path to reintegration, as the government pushes to make tourism a top engine of the Andean nation’s economy. “During the conflict, this region was rough, there were bullets and bombs all the time. Today, so much has changed—many people come to see the waterfalls, the mountain, the river,” said guide Duberney Moreno, 34, a 13-year veteran of the FARC.

A court refused to grant early release to former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, convicted of war crimes against Croatian civilians and prisoners of war in 1991. Vasiljkovic’s lawyer Tomislav Filakovic applied for conditional release because the former paramilitary has served about 94 percent of his war crimes sentence. But the court said it turned the request down because Vasiljkovic remains unrepentant. “The inmate denies committing the criminal offence and considers his sentence undeserved,” the court said in a statement released on Thursday.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said his country has survived a “dark period,” when corruption was rampant, and is now focused on achieving economic growth and land reform to win popular support in general elections next year. “We are moving from a very dark period of our recent history,” said Ramaphosa to international journalists, describing that his ruling party, the African National Congress, is working to root out graft. “We are in a new period now, we are no longer in a period of just sliding downward ...

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled Myanmar, citing rape, murder, and arson, will not be forcibly repatriated, Bangladesh’s Rohingya Relief and Repatriation Commissioner, Mohammad Abul Kalam, has said. “No one will be forced back to Myanmar,” Abul Kalam told Al Jazeera. Bangladesh is scheduled to send back an initial group of 2,260 Rohingya from 485 families, in line with a bilateral plan agreed by the two governments in October.

Over 200 mass graves holding as many as 12,000 bodies have been found in areas of Iraq once controlled by the Islamic State (IS), the United Nations (UN) said on Tuesday. The findings were highlighted in a joint report released by the UN mission to Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which called the sites a “legacy of terror.” The UN has estimated that 30,000 civilians were killed by the IS from 2014 to 2017 — “a number that should be considered an absolute minimum.” But many of those victims were found and buried by their families.

Pope Francis has decreed that an American religious brother, James Miller, was killed out of hatred for the Catholic faith during Guatemala’s civil war and can be beatified. Miller is the second American slain in Guatemala to move a step closer to possible sainthood in recent years. The Vatican said Thursday that Francis approved a decree recognizing that Miller, from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, died as a martyr on February 13, 1982, in Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

Speaking at the first day of the national summit against gender-based violence and femicide in Centurion, South Africa, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called on the country’s judiciary to come to the aid of women. The government convened the two-day gathering together with civil society organizations in an effort to find ways to stop the scourge of abuse. Most speakers at the gender summit shared a similar belief that South Africa’s legal framework, especially when it comes to women victims of gender-based violence, needs to be reviewed urgently.

For almost three years, while her home city of Mosul was under occupation by so-called Islamic State (IS), Tahani Salih kept a daily diary documenting their crimes. Although the diary is gone, Tahani remembers every word of the plans she made. Now that IS has been defeated, Tahani is throwing herself into putting those plans in place.