Civilians in Mali suffered serious abuses carried out by Islamic militants and the Malian armed forces and their allies during attacks across the West African country earlier this year, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Monday. 

Pakistani forces’ ground operations and strikes killed at least 36 civilians in Afghanistan overnight and wounded more than 160 others, Afghan officials said Monday, as tensions between the neighbors escalated. One Afghan official said the attacks would be met with retaliation. 

Six people who were found “abandoned by the roadside” in Kenya allege that they were “beaten” and subjected to “torture” after they were arrested during a memorial gathering for protesters killed in 2024, rights groups say. 

About 355 people were arrested across the country on Thursday, according to Kenyan Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen, as demonstrators marked the second anniversary of a 2024 protest where 60 people were killed by security forces. 

Prominent Tunisian rights activist Sihem Bensedrine told AFP on Friday that she had been sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges including falsifying part of a transitional justice commission's final report.

Tunisia emerged from the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as a beacon of democratic hope for the region after decades of authoritarianism, but rights groups have reported backsliding under President Kais Saied.

Congo said Friday it has filed a case against Rwanda at the International Court of Justice, accusing its neighbor of bearing legal responsibility for more than three decades of violence that has devastated eastern Congo. 

Congo accused Rwanda of breaching international conventions on genocide, racial discrimination, discrimination against women and torture. It said civilians in the east have suffered massacres, extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, forced displacement and ethnic and gender-based discrimination since the 1990s. 

Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, on Friday raised the alarm internationally about deaths in US government immigration custody and called for “prompt, independent, impartial, and effective investigations.”

Türk’s call came as the Trump administration faced investigations by watchdogs at its own Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into deaths and use of force against people detained in its expanding immigration detention system across the country. 

President Zoran Milanovic has stripped Branimir Glavas, a retired military general and politician, of his state decorations, according to a decision published on Wednesday in Croatia’s Official Gazette. 

The decorations were revoked following a ruling by the High Criminal Court of Croatia, which made Glavas’s war crimes conviction final on June 10. 

The Nigerian Senate on Wednesday approved a bill to allow states to have their own police forces, paving the way for a major reform that would reshape the policing structure of the conflict-racked nation. 

The proposed constitutional change will decentralize the country’s police force, which is currently controlled by the federal government, but has been overstretched by an escalating insecurity crisis. The state police forces will operate alongside the federal police. 

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Tuesday authorizing new steps to ensure that perpetrators of crimes against peacekeepers face justice. 

Nearly 1,100 peacekeepers from countries around the world have lost their lives in the line of duty, and thousands of others have been injured since 1948, according to UN peacekeeping department figures. Yet the resolution says the rate of prosecution for killings and other criminal acts against peacekeepers “has remained very low.”