The escalation in fighting between Myanmar’s military and ethnic Rakhine rebels in recent months has triggered a surge in violence against children and left some villagers facing starvation.

The humanitarian group, Save the Children, said in a report on Tuesday that the conflict in the far west of Myanmar has left children increasingly exposed.

“The widespread use of mines and improvised explosive devices poses a specific threat to children,” Duncan Harvey, Save the Children’s top official in Myanmar, said in a statement.

Inspired by global protests at the death of unarmed black American George Floyd, some 30,000 people in Belgium have signed two petitions to remove statues of the country’s colonial-era King Leopold II, whose troops decimated Congo in the late 1800s.

The online petitions, one of which was started by a 14-year-old boy on the photo-sharing app Instagram, demand the removal of the monuments across Brussels and a bust in the city of Halle.

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Sparing almost no corner of the world from its wrath, the COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to every country. In an effort to slow the contagion, governments in most countries have been taking drastic measures requiring all residents other than essential workers to confine themselves in their homes, and shutting down vast sectors of their economies. The impact has been crushing. COVID-19 has profoundly affected every country where ICTJ currently works: Armenia, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Uganda. We recently caught up with ICTJ’s heads of country programs to learn more about the impact the pandemic is having on transitional justice and society more broadly.

This week, the International Criminal Court heard closing arguments in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a top commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda. Among the 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity he faces are 19 counts of sexual and gender-based crimes, including rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage—the widest range of such crimes ever to be brought to trial before the court. The case thus marks a milestone in the jurisprudence of these international crimes.