A court in Belarus on Monday sentenced exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to 15 years in prison after a trial in absentia on charges including conspiring to overthrow the government, the latest move in a months-long effort by the Belarusian government to suppress dissent.

The Taliban's treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan could amount to a crime against humanity, according to a UN report presented on Monday at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. 

"The Taliban's intentional and calculated policy is to repudiate the human rights of women and girls and to erase them from public life," UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett told the United Nations Human Rights Council. "It may amount to the international crime of gender persecution for which the authorities can be held accountable."

A massive fire raced through a crammed refugee camp for Rohingya people in southern Bangladesh, leaving thousands homeless, a fire official and the United Nations said. The blaze hit Camp 11 in Cox’s Bazar, a border district where more than a million Rohingya refugees live, with most having fled a military-led crackdown in Myanmar in 2017.

Nicaragua’s government has committed serious and systematic violations which amount to crimes against humanity, a United Nations-appointed team of human rights experts has said, calling for international sanctions against the government.

Thousands of Nigerian opposition supporters protested Monday against the country’s presidential election results, as calls for a revote intensified. Dressed in black and holding signs, the protesters led by second-place candidate, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, marched to the headquarters of Nigeria’s electoral body in the capital, Abuja, and blocked the entrance as they demanded that authorities hold a new election under better conditions that would bring accurate results.

A senior Israeli minister has said the Palestinian village of Huwara should be “wiped out” days after far-right settlers went on a rampage in the occupied West Bank villages, torching dozens of houses and cars in the wake of the killing of two Israeli brothers.

Human rights lawyers have called on the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into alleged crimes they say were committed by Turkish authorities against thousands of opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The lawyers alleged that more than 200,000 people were victims of a crackdown that began after a failed 2016 coup in Turkey. However, since Turkey is not a member of the ICC, the court’s prosecutors do not have jurisdiction over cases involving victims who are in the country.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Wednesday that more than 200,000 refugees have fled Myanmar to his country and urgently called for new ways to persuade Myanmar’s ruling generals to resolve the civil conflict.

Since the military takeover in Myanmar in 2021, security forces have killed thousands of civilians and army sweeps through the countryside have displaced more than 1 million people. In 2017, a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Muslim Rohingya minority drove more than 740,000 to flee across the border to Bangladesh, where they remain in refugee camps.

Qatar, Somalia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States have expressed concern over fighting around a disputed town in Somalia’s northern breakaway region of Somaliland, where at least 34 people were killed in clashes in early February.

A Ugandan lawmaker on Tuesday introduced draft legislation that he said seeks to prohibit homosexuality in the East African country, voicing widespread anti-gay sentiment that has peaked in recent days.

The legislator, Asuman Basalirwa, said his bill would punish “promotion, recruitment and funding” related to LGBTQ activities. Same-sex relations in Uganda are already criminalized under a colonial-era penal code. Harsh anti-gay legislation enacted in 2014 later was annulled by a panel of judges amid international condemnation.