The United Nations' human rights office in Uganda will close this weekend after the East African country decided not to renew an agreement allowing it to operate, the UN's top human rights official said Friday.

The closure comes amid concern over human rights violations including extrajudicial killings in Uganda and a new law that prescribes the death penalty for some homosexual acts. The office in Kampala will formally cease operations on Saturday, while sub-offices in Gulu and Moroto closed at the end of June and on Monday respectively.

UN appeal judges have ordered the war crimes trial for 90-year-old Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga indefinitely suspended because he has dementia, rejecting plans for an alternative slimmed-down procedure.

The decision taken on Monday likely means that Kabuga’s trial, which started last year in The Hague, will not be completed.

Kidnappings of women and children are surging in Haiti as gang violence worsens, with the number of abductions in the first half of 2023 nearly reaching last year’s total.

The United Nations Children’s Fund said in a statement on Monday that close to 300 kidnappings have been reported in the Caribbean nation in the first six months of the year.

Most often, the women and children were taken by armed groups “for financial or tactical gains,” said the agency. It called for the immediate release of those kidnapped.

Myanmar's ruling military pardoned on Tuesday jailed former leader Aung San Suu Kyi on five of the 19 offences for which she was convicted, but she will remain under house arrest, state media and informed sources said. 

U.S. officials held formal direct talks with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, this week, with the American delegation pushing Afghanistan's hardline Islamic rulers to restore basic rights for women and girls and to free U.S. nationals detained in the country. 

An alleged former member of a Syrian pro-government militia has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of crimes against humanity related to the abuse and torture of civilians in the early years of his country’s civil war, prosecutors said Thursday. 

The United Kingdom has acknowledged that the ISIL (ISIS) group committed “acts of genocide” against the Yazidi people in 2014. 

Marking the ninth anniversary of atrocities committed by ISIL against the Yazidi community, the UK’s decision on Tuesday follows a ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice which found a former ISIL fighter guilty of acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. 

Nearly half of Ukrainians held in Russian detention centers in Kherson were subjected to widespread torture including sexual violence, according to a report published Wednesday. 

The entire urban space of Gernika-Lumo, in Spain’s northern Basque region, will be considered a “place of memory.” 

Both the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), locked in a vicious conflict since mid-April, have committed extensive war crimes, London-based Amnesty International said in its latest report on Thursday.