The Taliban has ordered judges in Afghanistan to fully impose their interpretation of Sharia Law, which include potential public executions, amputations, and flogging. This is a move experts fear will lead to a further deterioration of human rights in the impoverished country.

After seizing power last August, the Taliban attempted to project a more moderate image to gain international support, but in the months since, the group has clamped down on rights and freedoms.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has agreed in principle to admit Timor Leste as the group's 11th member, the bloc said in a statement on Friday, more than a decade after the country requested membership.

The half-island nation, officially called Timor Leste, will also be granted observer status at high-level ASEAN meetings.

The statement said the next steps would include a "roadmap for full membership" for Timor Leste to be submitted at next year's summit.

Haitian women and children are increasingly being targeted for rapes, torture, kidnappings, and killings by the 200 armed groups that now control 60 percent of the capital.

Their plight has been compounded by a lack of safe shelters or refuge. More than 96,000 people have been displaced by the gang violence, but neither the Haitian government nor the international community have mandated formal displacement sites.

Israel's Defense Minister has said Israel will not cooperate with any external investigation into the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, one of the most prominent journalists reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past two decades.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a probe into the killing of the Palestinian-American reporter, who was shot while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in May, wearing a protective press vest and helmet.

The UN Security Council has renewed the nearly 17,500-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in the troubled Central African Republican for another year.

The government controls the capital, but much of the country is controlled by armed groups. The CAR has faced deadly intercommunal fighting since 2013.

A United Nations independent commission of inquiry has begun public hearings on the alleged human rights violations in the Palestinian territories, with the first day focusing on Israel’s outlawing of several Palestinian rights organizations last year.

The commission, established by the UN Human Rights Council last year, plans five days of hearings beginning Monday, which it says will be impartial and examine the allegations of both Israeli and Palestinian authorities.

The life of jailed hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah is in great danger, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said, renewing a call for Egypt to immediately release him.

Abd el-Fattah, a prominent activist who is a dual British and Egyptian citizen, has been jailed since 2014. He has been on a hunger strike for over 220 days, and announced on Sunday he would stop drinking water.

The EU froze the assets of 19 people—including Investment and Foreign Economic Relations Minister, the chief justice at Myanmar’s supreme court, top military brass, and businesspeople linked to the armed forces—and banned them from traveling in Europe.

The 27-nation bloc also froze the assets in Europe of Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC). EU headquarters said in a statement that the SAC, set up in February 2021 following a military coup, “is responsible for policies and activities that undermine democracy and the rule of law.”

There are over 100,000 missing people in Mexico, and police often lack the time, expertise, or interest to look for the clandestine grave sites where gangs frequently bury them.

Faced with official inaction or incompetence, many mothers are forced to do their own investigations or join search teams that, often acting on tips, cross gullies and fields, sinking iron rods into the ground to detect the telltale stench of decomposing bodies.

British forces have paid compensation for the deaths of 64 children in Afghanistan, a toll four times higher than the 16 child deaths publicly acknowledged by the Ministry of Defense, according to a new report.

Action on Armed Violence, a United Kingdom-based charity, found that the British government paid, on average, £1,656 ($1,894) in compensation for each person killed.

Between 2006 and 2014, “there were 64 confirmed child victims in Afghanistan where the British military paid compensation, although the number of children killed could be as high as 135."