Following reports of indigenous Yanomami children dying in Brazil of malnutrition and other diseases caused by illegal gold mining, there is strong evidence of "genocide," the country's Justice Minister Flavio Dino said on Monday.

Late last week, the health ministry declared a medical emergency in the Yanomami territory, the country's largest indigenous reservation. 

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Sierra Leone has passed what has been described as a "ground-breaking" law to improve women's rights. The law states that 30 percent of public and private jobs must be reserved for women.

Under the new Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Act, women also benefit from ringfenced senior positions in the workplace, at least 14 weeks of maternity leave, equal access to bank credit, and training opportunities.

In a fast-changing world, ICTJ regularly reexamines and adapts its methodology to develop innovative solutions to emerging problems, advance its mission, and achieve justice for victims of human rights violations. In that spirit, ICTJ recently launched an exciting new website and newsletter design. After over a year of research, planning, surveying stakeholders, designing, and testing, we unveiled a site that better aligns with what ICTJ and transitional justice are today.

On New Year’s Eve, a small boat carrying more than 230 would-be migrants, most of them Syrians, broke down and began to sink after setting sail from the northern coast of Lebanon. After bringing them back to shore, to the port of Tripoli, where they recovered overnight, the Lebanese army loaded nearly 200 rescued Syrians into trucks and dropped them on the Syrian side of an unofficial border crossing in Wadi Khaled, a remote area of northeastern Lebanon, some of the survivors and human rights monitors said.

Germany’s lower house has recognized as “genocide” the 2014 massacre by the armed group ISIL (ISIS) against the Yazidi minority group in Iraq and Syria.

After seizing large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, ISIL killed more than 1,200 Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community from their homes in northern Iraq.

The United Nations deputy secretary-general discussed women's rights with Afghanistan's acting foreign minister on Wednesday after the Taliban authorities banned most female aid workers and stopped women and girls from attending high school and university.

Amina Mohammed "stressed the need to uphold human rights, especially for women and girls" and was "encouraged by exemptions" to the ban on female aid workers.

Many aid groups, some of whom carry out humanitarian work under contracts with the United Nations, stopped operations following the ban.

The UN says there was an “alarming” rise in the number of Rohingya refugees lost at sea fleeing their Myanmar homeland or Bangladesh last year, warning more would die without concerted action.

More than 3,500 Rohingya attempted sea crossings in 2022, representing a huge increase on the year before, when some 700 people made similar journeys, UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, said on Tuesday.

Brazil’s prosecutor-general has presented its first charges against some of the thousands of people accused of storming government buildings in an effort to overturn the results of the October election, which former President Jair Bolsonaro lost.

The prosecutors in the recently formed group to combat anti-democratic acts also requested that the 39 defendants accused of ransacking Congress be imprisoned as a preventive measure, and that 40 million reais ($7.7 million) of their assets be frozen to help cover damages.