The UN Economic and Social Council voted Wednesday to immediately oust Iran from the UN’s premiere global body fighting for gender equality because of its systematic violation of the rights of women and girls, a decision the United States hailed as “historic” and Iran claimed was based on “fabricated allegations.”

A Tunisian advocacy group has called on United States President Joe Biden to confront Tunisian President Kais Saied during the latter’s visit to Washington for human rights abuses it says were carried out by high-ranking Tunisian officials over the past year.

The US-based Tunisian United Network (TUN) said on Monday that it had catalogued dozens of human rights abuses inflicted on Tunisian citizens since Saied sacked the government and suspended parliament in July 2021 and later decided to rule by decree.

In a milestone ruling judges at the Kosovo tribunal on Friday convicted a former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrilla commander who ran a prison where torture took place during the 1998-99 independence conflict with Serbia.

In its first ever war crimes verdict, the court sentenced Salih Mustafa to 26 years in prison for war crimes including murder and torture in a detention centre where prisoners, mostly fellow Kosovo Albanians who were political opponents of the KLA, were beaten and tortured on a daily basis.

Serbia on Thursday formally demanded that its security forces return to the breakaway former Serbian province of Kosovo, despite warnings from the West that such calls are unlikely to be accepted and only add to tensions in that part of the Balkans.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told state RTS television that the government asked the commander of NATO-led peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo since 1999, when the Western alliance pushed out Serb troops from the region, to allow the return of up to 1,000 Serbian army and police officers to the Serb-populated north of the country.

Tensions were high in northern Kosovo on Sunday, with Serbs blocking roads as shots and explosions rang out and the Serbian president warned that Serbian troops are ready to defend their “homeland” if peace doesn’t prevail.

The roads in Serbia’s former province of Kosovo, which proclaimed independence in 2008, were blocked with heavy vehicles and trucks a day after Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he would ask the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo to permit the deployment of 1,000 Serb troops in the Serb-populated north of Kosovo, saying they are being harassed there.

The United Kingdom has launched an independent inquiry into allegations of unlawful killings by its soldiers in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, the country’s defence ministry announced on Thursday.

The statutory inquiry headed by senior judge Charles Haddon-Cave will start early next year. It will probe the alleged wrongdoing by commandos in the elite Special Air Service (SAS) corps spanning a period from mid-2010 to mid-2013.

The independent probe will look into allegations that British special forces killed dozens of Afghan civilians over a decade ago.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk says he is determined to engage with China on a damning report published by his predecessor that alleged government mistreatment of the Uighurs and other mostly Muslim groups that may amount to crimes against humanity.

Turk made the comments during a media briefing in Geneva on Friday, referring to the report released by Michelle Bachelet just minutes before her tenure ended earlier this year.

Twenty people were lashed in public on Wednesday in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as punishment for alleged adultery, theft, and other crimes, a provincial official said.

Afghanistan’s new authorities have set hardline policies since they took over the country in August 2021 that reflect their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.

Mohammad Qasim Riyaz, a Taliban-appointed spokesman for the governor’s office in southern Helmand province, said the lashings took place at the sports stadium in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand.

A Peruvian judge on Thursday ordered ousted President Pedro Castillo to remain in custody for 18 months as nationwide protests set off by the political crisis showed no signs of abating and the death toll rose to at least 14.

The judge’s decision came a day after the government declared a police state as it struggles to calm the violence that has been particularly fierce in impoverished Andean regions that were the base of support for Castillo, a leftist former schoolteacher, himself of humble roots.

Peru’s new government declared a national emergency Wednesday as it struggled to calm violent protests over President Pedro Castillo’s ouster, suspending the rights of “personal security and freedom” across the Andean nation for 30 days.

Acts of vandalism, violence and highway blockades as thousands of Peruvians are in the streets “require a forceful and authoritative response from the government,” Defense Minister Luis Otarola Peñaranda said.