Brazil has launched raids against illegal gold miners blamed for a humanitarian crisis on the country’s largest Indigenous reservation, as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva promised to defend the Yanomami people after years of neglect and rising violence.

The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources said in a statement that agents destroyed a helicopter, a plane, a bulldozer, and support structures for the miners on Yanomami land in Brazil’s northernmost state of Roraima.

Rights activists and campaigners have condemned the Ugandan government’s decision to shut down the country’s UN human rights office, describing it as “shameful.”

The development comes less than three months after the UN’s committee against torture adopted the concluding observations on Uganda, which raised concerns that torture and ill-treatment continued to be frequently practiced, and called for investigation and prosecution of security officials accused of excessive use of force, violence, and arbitrary detention.

A special Nigerian human rights panel began investigating on Tuesday Reuters reports that the army massacred children and ran a secret abortion program when fighting Islamist insurgents and said it would refer for prosecution those it considered guilty of rights violations.

The panel's chairman Justice Abdu Aboki, who retired from the Supreme Court bench last year, told reporters, "It is now our job as a panel to investigate all the allegations of gross human rights violations raised in the reports."

Iran’s supreme leader has pardoned or allowed a reduction in jail sentences for “tens of thousands” of prisoners, including some arrested in recent anti-government protests.

The pardons approved on Sunday by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came with conditions, according to details announced in state media reports, which said the move would not apply to any of the numerous dual nationals held in Iran.

Myanmar’s military has imposed martial law in strongholds of anti-coup resistance, which will see people accused of everything from treason to “spreading false news” being tried by military tribunals.

The much-anticipated trial of 16 Hong Kong democracy activists charged under a national security law imposed by Beijing began on Monday with security tight for a case that some observers say will be a test of the city's judicial independence.

The defendants are those who pleaded not guilty out of 47 arrested in a dawn raid in January 2021 and charged with conspiracy to commit subversion for participating in an unofficial primary election organized by democracy supporters in 2020.

Four key suspects in the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise were transferred from Haiti to the United States on Tuesday to face criminal charges, the US Justice Department has announced.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has held his first face-to-face talks on Friday with Tigrayan leaders since a peace deal was inked ending two years of war, officials and state media said.

Mali’s government has ordered the UN peacekeeping mission’s human rights chief to leave the country by Tuesday, declaring him persona non grata in the latest sign of tensions between Mali’s leaders and the international community.

A controversial migration agreement between Italy and Libya has been automatically renewed for three years amid warnings by humanitarian organizations that this might make Rome and the European Union complicit in crimes against humanity.

The Memorandum of Understanding on Migration — signed in 2017 to provide Libyan authorities with financial and technical support to “combat illegal immigration” — was automatically renewed for a second time on Thursday after a November 2 deadline for making changes passed.