Malians approved changes in the constitution in Sunday's referendum with 97 percent of the vote, the West African country's electoral authority said on Friday. 

Regional powers and Mali's ruling military junta—which mostly organized and backed the referendum—said it will pave the way to elections in February 2024 and a return to civilian rule. 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ruled that its prosecutors can resume an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in the South American country of Venezuela. 

The court’s decision came after the investigation into torture, extrajudicial killings and other abuses was suspended at Venezuela’s request in April 2022, to allow the country to conduct its own probe. 

Sri Lanka’s former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was accused in a report released Thursday of tampering with police records in order to hamper investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he was a military officer at the height of a bloody Marxist insurrection in 1989. 

The UN has expressed deep concern about an escalation of hostilities in north-western Syria after at least 11 people were reportedly killed in Russian air strikes on rebel-held Idlib province. 

Nine were killed when warplanes dropped bombs next to a market outside Jisr al-Shughour on Sunday, rescuers said. 

The Netherlands and Belgium have joined an international investigation into atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority in Syria and Iraq, the European Union’s judicial cooperation agency said Monday. 

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday called on Tunisia to stop restricting media freedoms and said it was criminalizing independent journalism since President Kais Saied seized wide powers in 2021. 

A gang rampaged through the Cite Soleil neighborhood, killing and raping and setting fire to hundreds of wood-and-tin homes. Forced out of the area, one family of four lived on the streets of Port-au-Prince until they were struck by a truck as they slept. 

The United States government does not have a responsibility to “take affirmative steps to secure water” for the Navajo Nation, the US Supreme Court has ruled, dealing a blow to the Indigenous community’s efforts to outline its water rights amid historic drought. 

A prominent anti-corruption activist in Honduras has filed a complaint with the Honduran human rights commissioner, claiming that threats forced her and her family to flee the country at the weekend. 

A United Nations expert said on Monday that the treatment of Afghan women and girls by the Taliban could amount to “gender apartheid” as their rights continue to be undermined by the governing authorities.