Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted, the organization that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, publicly apologized Saturday to descendants of the study’s victims. The move is rooted in America’s racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. 

Belgian King Reiterates Regrets for Colonial Past in DR Congo, Stops Short of Apology

In a speech outside the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) parliament, Philippe amplified remorse he first voiced two years ago over Belgium’s brutal colonial rule—an era that historians say saw millions die. King Philippe of Belgium, in a historic visit to DRC, said on Wednesday that his country's rule over the vast central African country had inflicted pain and humiliation through a mixture of “paternalism, discrimination, and racism.”

Tunisian judges have launched a week-long strike in protest at President Kais Saied’s “interference” in the judiciary, days after he sacked 57 of their colleagues, accusing them of corruption and protecting “terrorists.” The strike, which began on Monday, is the latest in a series of escalating moves by Tunisia’s politicians, institutions, and civil society as the country’s political crisis deepens.

The pre-trial judge at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, Nicolas Guillou, decided on Thursday that Hashim Thaci and Kadri Veseli should remain in detention ahead of their trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo. Judge Guillou turned down a defense request for the release of Thaci and Veseli, who were two of the wartime leaders of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. The two men have been in detention for around a year and a half, since November 2020.

Myanmar’s military regime has said that appeals by two prominent democracy activists against their death sentences have been rejected, paving the way for the country’s first executions in decades.

Veteran democracy activist Kyaw Min Yu and Phyo Zeya Thaw, a lawmaker for the National League for Democracy, which the generals removed from power in a coup in February 2021, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal in January on charges of treason and terrorism, according to a military statement at the time.

A United Nations human rights expert on Sudan has called for accelerated investigations into the killings of protesters and other atrocities, as the death toll since last year’s coup nears 100. Sudan has been rocked by deepening unrest and a violent crackdown against near-weekly mass protests since army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s power grab on October 25 derailed a fragile transition to civilian rule.

Tunisian police used pepper spray to disperse protesters against President Kais Saied's planned July referendum on Saturday, June 4, nearly a year after he seized wide-ranging powers in what opponents decry as a coup.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has selected 13 journalists, historians, artists, and activists to receive grants to create small projects based on the archives of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague and domestic courts in former Yugoslav countries. The recipients of the grants will conduct research, collect documents, and dig deeper into the courts’ archives in order to produce projects about issues of justice and the Yugoslav wars.

Following the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Carmelo Victor A Crisanto, the executive director of the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, is rushing to preserve the accounts of victims under martial law. He is focused on digitizing victims’ case files so that they are protected and more widely accessible to researchers. The digitized files relate to 11,103 individuals who secured reparations from the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board, which began its work in 2014 and has since closed.

The United States has imposed sanctions on the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Bosniak-Croat federation and an official of the Bosnian-Serb entity, accusing them of threatening the country’s democratic institutions. In a statement on Monday, the US Department of the Treasury said it was blacklisting Marinko Cavara, a member of a nationalist Bosnian-Croat party, and Alen Seranic, the Serb Republic’s minister of health and social welfare.