A special National Investigation Agency court in the Indian capital New Delhi has sentenced iconic Kashmiri pro-independence leader Yasin Malik to life imprisonment in “terror” funding case. Malik, one of Indian-administered Kashmir’s prominent pro-freedom leaders, is the chief of now banned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. The group renounced violence in 1994. The court prosecutor had sought the death penalty for Malik, who has pleaded guilty to all charges. 

The Gambian government has said it will prosecute former President Yahya Jammeh for murder, rape, torture and other alleged crimes committed during his more than 20-year rule. The Ministry of Justice said on Wednesday that it accepted all but two of the 265 recommendations made by a commission that probed alleged crimes committed by the state under the despotic former leader from July 1994 to January 2017.

Tunisia’s powerful UGTT trade union has refused to participate in a national dialogue proposed by President Kais Saied, its spokesperson has said, arguing the process excluded democratic forces. Saied sacked the democratically elected government last July before dissolving parliament and seizing control of the judiciary, in moves opponents called a coup against the only democracy to emerge from the 2010 Arab Spring uprisings. 

Armenia and Azerbaijan have announced that they had set up a border commission, a potential step towards ending a dispute over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that has festered for 30 years. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Monday posted a decree on his website creating a border delimitation commission under Vice-Premier Shahin Mustafayev. Armenia’s commission on border delimitation and security will be headed by Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan, according to the Telegram channel of the Russian Sputnik agency.

Flanked by bodyguards with bulletproof shields, Gustavo Petro stood on a stage and lashed out at Colombia’s political elite in a speech to the residents of Fusagasuga, a rural town where farmers are struggling. The leftist presidential candidate spoke of the need to protect local farmers from heavily subsidized foreign competitors.

The ruling Communist Party is accused of detaining over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western region as part of a years-long crackdown the United States and lawmakers in other Western countries have labelled a "genocide." China vehemently denies the allegations, calling them the "lie of the century." Michelle Bachelet is expected to visit the Xinjiang cities of Urumqi and Kashgar on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of a six-day tour.

A baptismal certificate. A baseball cap. Wallets, belts, neckties and bank membership cards. At first, the ordinary-seeming items do not seem fit for display in a museum. Then, with just a few words from one of the slips of paper accompanying them, the objects’ quotidian nature takes a chilling turn. “Certificate awarded to Kanyiba Kanyl for the completion of Computer Operation course,” one note reads. “He was forcibly disappeared on 18th September 2006.

Full results announced by the interior ministry two days after the election revealed that no bloc will control the 128-seat assembly, a deadlock observers fear could usher in a tense period of political jostling. The polls, the first since Lebanon was ravaged by its worst ever economic crisis and a cataclysmic explosion at Beirut port in 2020, were seen as a prerequisite for a crucial IMF bailout. 

A Georgia court has sentenced a prominent journalist to three-and-a-half years in prison. Nika Gvaramia, an anchor and owner of the pro-opposition Mtavari TV, was found guilty of abusing his position and harming the financial interests of a television station he ran earlier, a judge of the Tbilisi City Court said on Monday. Mtavari TV is the country’s most popular television station and is critical of the Black Sea nation’s government. Gvaramia has also been a lawyer for Georgia’s ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year jail term for abuse of power. 

Mexico marked a grim milestone this week: The number of people officially listed as disappeared passed 100,000. A national database for the missing began in the 1960s, but the numbers really shot up after 2006, when Mexico's government launched a U.S.-backed war against drug cartels. Relatives of the disappeared and human rights advocates say Mexican authorities must do more to bring about truth and justice for the victims. "The scourge of disappearances is a human tragedy of enormous proportions," said Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.