US President Donald Trump on Monday signed into law bipartisan legislation named for the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, the White House announced in a statement. The Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act aims to improve the US response to emerging or potential genocides and passed final votes last month in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Since it was set up in December 2013, a staggering 50,000 cases have been filed with Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD), the body that was set up to document the mountain of human rights abuses and corruption cases that occurred from 1955 to 2013.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has acquitted Ivory Coast ex-President Laurent Gbagbo. He had been charged with crimes against humanity in connection with violence following a disputed 2010 election that left 3,000 dead and 500,000 displaced. Mr Gbagbo was captured in 2011 in a presidential palace bunker by UN and French-backed forces supporting his rival, Alassane Ouattara. He was the first former head of state to go on trial at the ICC.

There is much to celebrate about the novelty and importance of the 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), not least due to their explicit focus on gendered experiences of war for women and LGBTI Colombians.

Twenty years after Serbian forces killed 44 people in the small Kosovo village of Reçak, the survivors still await justice. Serbian security forces attacked the village on the morning of January 15, 1999. Some locals tried to hide, but were discovered, beaten, taken away, and shot. Serbia initially insisted the casualties were all fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

President Maithripala Sirisena’s decision to appoint a notorious alleged war criminal as Chief of Army Staff is a shocking new low for Sri Lanka, a former member of a UN panel of experts appointed to Sri Lanka, said today. Yasmin Sooka, now the Executive Director of the International Truth and Justice Project, said that “Sri Lanka now has a Chief of Army Staff who risks arrest every time he travels abroad, if any country is foolish enough to give him a visa.”

The spokesperson for Egypt's House of Representatives, Salah Hassaballah, said Thursday that parliament has not received any official request to amend the constitution. He also indicated that, for various reasons, parliament has so far refrained from discussing three controversial laws that the constitution states should take priority. 

On Tuesday, representatives of the Presidential Office's Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee issued a joint statement entitled "Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples’ Message to Chairman Xi Jinping of China." The statement was a response to a speech given by Xi Jinping commemorating the 40th anniversary of a policy message from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entitled “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan.” During the speech, Xi insisted that Taiwan "must and will be" united with China based on the "1992 consensus" under the "one China principle."

After being held for 26 hours at La Aurora International Airport (AILA), Yilen Osorio Zuluaga, the investigator of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), entered the country on Monday, 7 January, amid protests against the government for refusing to comply with the Court’s decisions.

In 2018, Montenegrin prosecutors failed to secure a single conviction in any war crimes case. Although Montenegro was, in every sense, the smallest of all the former Yugoslav republics, and saw no war on its soil, the heavy legacy of the wars of the 1990s is still something with which its society remains uncomfortable.