Spyware – MEPs sound alarm on threat to democracy and demand reforms

Spyware – MEPs sound alarm on threat to democracy and demand reforms — Votes in Plenary © @Europan Parliament

EP spyware inquiry committee has adopted its final report and recommendations, condemning spyware abuses in several EU member states and setting out a way forward.

On Monday evening, the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA) adopted its final report and recommendations following a year-long inquiry into the abuse of spyware in the EU. MEPs condemn spyware abuses that aim to intimidate political opposition, silence critical media and manipulate elections. They note that EU governance structures cannot effectively deal with such attacks and say reforms are needed.

Systemic issues in Poland and Hungary

MEPs condemn major violations of EU law in Poland and Hungary, where the respective governments have dismantled independent oversight mechanisms. For Hungary, MEPs argue that the use of spyware has been “part of a calculated and strategic campaign to destroy media freedom and freedom of expression by the government.” In Poland, the use of Pegasus has been part of “a system for the surveillance of the opposition and critics of the government — designed to keep the ruling majority and the government in power”.

To remedy the situation, MEPs call on Hungary and Poland to comply with European Court of Human Rights judgements and restore judicial independence and oversight bodies. They should also ensure independent and specific judicial authorisation before the deployment of spyware and judicial review afterwards, launch credible investigations into abuse cases, and ensure citizens have access to proper legal redress.

Concerns over spyware use in Greece and Spain

On Greece, MEPs say spyware use “does not seem to be part of an integral authoritarian strategy, but rather a tool used on an ad hoc basis for political and financial gains”. Even though Greece has “a fairly robust legal framework in principle”, legislative amendments have weakened safeguards. As a result, spyware has been used against journalists, politicians and businesspersons, and exported to countries with poor human rights records.

MEPs call on the government to “urgently restore and strengthen the institutional and legal safeguards”, repeal export licences that are not in line with EU export control legislation, and respect the independence of the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy (ADAE). They also note Cyprus has played a major role as an export hub for spyware, and should repeal all export licences it has issued that are not in line with EU legislation.

On Spain, MEPs found that the country “has an independent justice system with sufficient safeguards”, but some questions on spyware use remain. Noting that the government is already working to address shortcomings, MEPs call on authorities to ensure “full, fair and effective” investigations, especially into the 47 cases where it is unclear who authorised the deployment of spyware, and to make sure targets have real legal remedies.

Stronger regulation needed to prevent abuse

To stop illicit spyware practices immediately, MEPs consider spyware should only be used in member states where allegations of spyware abuse have been thoroughly investigated, national legislation is in line with recommendations of the Venice Commission and EU Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights case law, Europol is involved in investigations, and export licences not in line with export control rules have been repealed. By December 2023, the Commission should assess whether these conditions have been fulfilled in a public report.

MEPs want EU rules on the use of spyware by law enforcement, which should only be authorised in exceptional cases for a pre-defined purpose and a limited time. They argue that data falling under lawyer-client privilege or belonging to politicians, doctors or the media should be shielded from surveillance, unless there is evidence of criminal activity. MEPs also propose mandatory notifications for targeted people and for non-targeted people whose data was accessed as part of someone else’s surveillance, independent oversight after it has happened, meaningful legal remedies for targets, and standards for the admissibility of evidence collected using spyware.

MEPs also call for a common legal definition of the use of national security as grounds for surveillance, in order to prevent attempts to justify manifest abuses.

EU Tech Lab and a boost to vulnerability research

To help uncover illicit surveillance, MEPs propose the creation of an EU Tech Lab, an independent research institute with powers to investigate surveillance, provide legal and technological support including device screening, and perform forensic research. They also want new laws to regulate the discovery, sharing, resolution and exploitation of vulnerabilities.

Foreign policy dimension

On third countries and the EU’s foreign policy instruments, MEPs would like to see an in-depth investigation of spyware export licences, stronger enforcement of the EU’s export control rules, a joint EU-US spyware strategy, talks with Israel and other third countries to establish rules on spyware marketing and exportation, and ensuring EU development aid does not support acquisition and use of spyware.

Quotes

After the vote, Committee Chair Jeroen Lenaers (EPP, NL) said: “Our inquiry has made it clear that spyware has been used to violate fundamental rights and endanger democracy in several EU member states, Poland and Hungary being the most blatant cases. Spyware use must always be proportionate and authorised by an independent judiciary, which unfortunately is not the case in some parts of Europe. Stricter EU-level scrutiny is needed to ensure that spyware use is the exception, to investigate serious crimes, and not the norm. Because we acknowledge that it can – when used in a controlled manner – be an important tool to combat crimes like terrorism. Our committee has formulated a wide range of proposals to regulate the use of spyware, while respecting national security competences. Now the Commission and member states should do their part and transpose our recommendations into concrete legislation to protect the rights of citizens.”

Rapporteur Sophie In ‘t Veld (Renew, NL) added: “Today, the committee of inquiry concludes its work. This does not mean that the work of this Parliament is finished. Not one victim of spyware abuse has been awarded justice. Not one government has really been held accountable. The member states and the European Commission should not sleep easy, because I intend to keep on this case until justice is being done. The unimpeded use of commercial spyware without proper judicial oversight poses a threat to European democracy, as long as there is no accountability. Digital tools have empowered us all in various ways, but they have made governments far more powerful. We have to close that gap.”

Procedure and next steps

MEPs adopted a report, detailing the findings of the inquiry, with 30 votes in favour, 3 against, and 4 abstaining, and a text outlining recommendations for the future with 30 votes in favour, 5 against, and 2 abstaining. The latter text is expected to be voted by the full Parliament during the plenary session starting 12 June.

Votes in Plenary © @Europan Parliament

Salty fines in Greece for disposing of butts in the environment

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Newsdesk

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14 May 2023

Disposing of butts into the environment can cause a fire and is therefore absolutely prohibited in the Hellenic Republic.

Smoking while driving is not totally prohibited in the Hellenic Republic, but in a number of cases, due to the risk of accidents and other considerations, it is punishable by law with heavy fines.

The basic fine for this offense is €200, but the Fire Protection Ordinance provides for escalating fines depending on the area in which this offense is committed (with an increased risk of fire) or if it is committed systematically. In the latter cases, the fine can reach up to 5,000 euros.

Smoking while driving in the presence of a child under the age of 12 is absolutely prohibited. According to the Anti-Smoking Act (4633/2019), smoking and the consumption of tobacco products are completely prohibited in all cars, private or public, when minors under the age of 12 are traveling in them.

The fine for smoking in the presence of a child under the age of 12 in a private car is 1,500 euros, and in a public car – 3,000 euros, and at the same time the driver’s license is revoked for a period of 1 month. It is also important to note that the driver’s license is also revoked when the offense is committed by another adult passenger in the vehicle.

Photo by Irina Iriser:

TikTok’s owner ByteDance illegally scraped content from other platforms

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Newsdesk

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13 May 2023

A former employee filed complaint about illegal activities that allegedly took place within ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, was filed.

Yintao “Roger” Yu, a former head of engineering at Bytedance in the United States, has claimed that he was terminated from his position after raising concerns to management that the company was taking user content from other platforms, primarily Instagram and Snapchat.

This dispute has arisen at a very specific time, when TikTok, an app owned by ByteDance, is facing mounting pressure from lawmakers in the United States, Australia, and some European countries due to concerns about the potential use of this platform to enact the influence from the Chinese government.

In a complaint filed on Friday in San Francisco state court, Yu has alleged that the Chinese tech company engaged in a “worldwide scheme to steal and profit from the content of others” without obtaining permission.

According to Yu, when he brought up his concerns to higher management, they disregarded them and instructed him to conceal the illicit activities, particularly from employees based in the United States, as the country had more rigorous intellectual property laws and the risk of class action lawsuits. Soon after, ByteDance terminated Yu’s employment in November 2018.

Yu’s complaint further alleges that ByteDance created “masses of fake user accounts to inflate its metrics”.

In his legal filing, Yu is requesting a court order to prevent the company from scraping content from other social media platforms.

In response, the representatives of ByteDance said these claims are baseless and the company will be defending itself. “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations. Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year,” noted company officials.

Written by Alius Noreika

Avoiding disaster in a dangerous world

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13 May 2023

Avoiding disaster in a dangerous world — © UNICEF - People flee their homes as Cyclone Freddy hits Blantyre city in Malawi.

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More people globally are being affected by disasters than ever before, despite the adoption of a UN-backed international disaster reduction agreement in 2015.

Experts from around the world are gathering at UN Headquarters to speed up efforts to fully implement that agreement to bring about a safer world.

For Malawians, Cyclone Freddy was an unmitigated disaster. In March this year, the storm ripped through the African country twice during its record-breaking month-long destructive rampage through southern Africa.

The unprecedented duration of the extreme weather event would have been difficult for any country to deal with, but for Malawi, one of the most vulnerable developing nations in the world, it was devastating. Hundreds were killed, more than half a million people were displaced, and thousands of hectares of crops were washed away.

As of early April, hundreds of people remained missing, and some 1.1 million people were in need of humanitarian support. The severe storm hit during Malawi’s worst cholera outbreak in two decades, adding to the pressures on a health system that was already severely stretched.

That same month, a group of independent UN rights experts called for more humanitarian aid, but also for Malawi to “develop durable solutions to avert, minimize, and address disaster displacement through climate adaptation measures, preparedness and disaster risk reduction.”

© UNOCHA/Jane Kiiru – Men work to repair a damaged road in the Mulanje District of Malawi in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy.

More severe, costly, and deadly disasters

The impact of Freddy is just one example of the growing number of complex and costly disasters affecting increasing numbers of people, that prompted 187 countries to sign up to an international disaster risk reduction agreement in 2015.

The Sendai Framework, named after the Japanese city in which it was adopted, is an international UN agreement designed to reduce disaster losses. It targets substantially fewer deaths from disasters, a reduction in the disaster damage to infrastructure, and improved early warning systems – all by 2030.

However, eight years on, little progress has been made: according to the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), there has been an 80 per cent increase in the number of people affected by disasters since 2015. What’s more, UNDRR finds that many of the lessons from past disasters seem to have been ignored.

© UNICEF/Muhammad Sohail – An eight-year-old girl stands near a school destroyed by floods in Quetta, Pakistan.

Half-time report

From 18 to 19 May, a High-Level meeting at UN Headquarters in New York will provide an opportunity to lay out the many challenges that have stalled progress, and chart a course towards a safer world.

Delegates at the event will have pored over the report of the Midterm Review of the Framework’s implementation, which lays bare the scale of the problem. Released in April to mark the half-way point between the launch of the Framework and the 2030 deadline, it does not make for comfortable reading.

The report emphasizes the growing impacts of climate change since 2015, and the brutally unequal consequences, which are much more severe in developing countries; a case in point is the flooding in Pakistan in 2022, which affected more than 33 million people and damaged millions of acres of agricultural land, causing widespread food insecurity.

The growing interconnectedness of the world’s societies, environments, and technologies means that disasters can spread extremely quickly. The report points to the COVID-19 pandemic as a prime example, beginning as a local outbreak in China in 2019, before rapidly spreading around the world, leading to the death of some 6.5 million people by the end of 2022.

“One doesn’t have to look hard to find examples of how disasters are becoming worse’” says Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of UNDRR. “The sad fact is that many of these disasters are preventable because they are caused by human decisions. The call to action of the Midterm Review is that countries need to reduce risk in every decision, action, and investment they make.

Less than half of the Least Developed Countries and only one-third of Small Island Developing States have a multi-hazard early warning system.

Countries taking the lead

Clearly, not enough is being done: the costs of disasters continue to rise, but funding for disaster risk reduction is not going up at anywhere near the rate needed to tackle them.

Nevertheless, as the report shows, there are many examples of countries, at a national level, putting plans in place to protect their citizens from the risk of disasters.

To date, disaster preparedness plans have been enacted in 125 countries. They range from legislation in Costa Rica that allows all institutions to allocate budgets for prevention and emergency response, to Australia’s Disaster Ready Fund, which will invest up to A$200 million per year from 2023 – 2024 in disaster prevention and resilience initiatives, and Barbados’s disaster clauses that allow for debt to be immediately frozen in the event of an economic impact caused by disaster.

And, whilst the number of people affected by disasters is going up, the proportion being killed has more than halved. The disaster-related mortality rate in the decade 2005-2014 was 1.77 per 100,000 global population, and in the decade 2012-2021 it had dropped to 0.84 (barring the impact of COVID-19).

The recommendations in the Mid-Term Report, and the measures being taken at a national level will form the basis of the discussions at the High-Level Meeting: they contain proof that a safer world is achievable, between now and 2030, if the necessary investments in risk reduction are made.

Reducing the risk of disasters at the UN

The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) helps decision makers across the globe better understand and change their attitude to risk.
UNDRR’s authoritative expertise and presence in five regional offices is used to build and nurture relationships with national and local governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society and the private sector.
The Office collects, collates, and shares the latest high quality technical information and data about reducing risk and building resilience more effectively. Hundreds of experts work in UNDRR’s science and tech advisory groups, essential partners for governments and other stakeholders all over the world.
The development and roll-out of inclusive and accessible multi-hazard early warning systems is a key part of their work. Such systems save lives: on average, when disaster strikes, fatality rates in countries without them are eight times higher than in countries that have put them in place.

Alicia Simpson, Stephanos Efthymiadis (ed), Niketas Choniates: A Historian and a Writer. La Pomme d’or S.A., Geneva 2011.

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Gaston de Persigny

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13 May 2023

https://www.pommedor.ch/choniates.html

Contents:

Introduction, Alicia Simpson, Niketas Choniates: the Historian and Stephanos Efthymiadis, Niketas Choniates: the Writer

Paul Magdalino:

Prophecy and Divination in the History

Anthony Kaldellis:

Paradox, Reversal and the Meaning of History

Stephanos Efthymiadis:

Greek and Biblical Exempla in the Service of an Artful Writer

Roderick Saxey:

The Homeric Metamorphoses of Andronikos I Komnenos

John Davis:

The History Metaphrased: Changing Readership in the Fourteenth Century

Luciano Bossina:

Niketas Choniates as a Theologian

Alicia Simpson:

Narrative Images of Medieval Constantinople

Titos Papamastorakis:

Interpreting the De Signis of Niketas Choniates

Corruption, a lucrative business for the pharmaceutical industries

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Gabriel Carrion Lopez

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12 May 2023

In August 2013, three months after Xi Jinping entered the Chinese government, a corruption scandal broke out in the national medical system, skilfully exercised by the multinational pharmaceutical companies based in that country. The campaign launched to settle responsibilities ended with the arrest of four senior officials of the British multinational GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the barring of 18 other senior officials from leaving the Asian country. At the time, the official Xinhua news agency said that some of those under investigation were …suspected of offering bribes to doctors while asking them to prescribe more drugs in order to increase sales volume; and at the same time pushing up prices….

According to a study carried out at the time, just ten years ago, the pharmaceutical sector, due to the corruption they themselves promoted, had to increase the retail price of medicines by 20%. On that occasion, several companies in the sector, including Johnson & Johnson, were sanctioned. Thanks to the extensive coverage by the Chinese news agency, we now have valuable details of how the pharmaceutical companies acted in order to sell a drug for respiratory patients in 10 hospitals in the capital of Henan province, Zhengzhou: …they invited doctors to attend high-level academic conferences to help them gain influence in their fields. They also established good personal relationships with doctors by servicing their pleasures and offering them money to prescribe more drugs.

A sales representative of those groups (GSK) even claimed that she went into doctors’ offices and even catered to their sexual needs, stating that the company’s executives in China knew everything that was going on, and that some of them even set a target, however, to increase business in that area by 30%.

Shortly after the investigation, two months later in July, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) admitted that it had replaced its head of that subsidiary, Mark Reilly, with the Frenchman Hervé Gisserot. AstraZeneca, France’s Sanofi and US-based Eli Lilly were also investigated, albeit to a lesser extent. The latter also paid 22 million euros in the United States in December 2012 to close allegations that its employees gave money and gifts to officials in China, Brazil, Russia and Poland. Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, based in the US, had accepted a year earlier a payment of 45.3 million euros due to the same circumstances.

On that occasion the Food and Drug Administration confirmed the need to take expeditious measures, crackdowns, again. It should not be forgotten that years earlier, in 2007, the head of the FDA, Zheng Xiaoyu, was sentenced to death and executed because he accepted money in exchange for allowing counterfeit products to be marketed.

The names in the article are certainly recognisable in health markets around the world.

The news over the past 10 years of multi-million dollar payoffs by pharmaceutical companies when they are caught in the act makes us think that we humans are just customers, guinea pigs in some cases, and mere numbers in annual profit and loss reports.

According to a ranking updated to 1 January 2023, the five largest companies in the world in terms of market capitalisation, or what they are worth, would be: Johnson & Johnson ($440.04 billion), Eli Lilly ($320.13 billion), Novo Nordisk ($314.65 billion), Merk ($275.14 billion) and Abbvie ($261.18 billion). The stock market update was done as of 2021. Today, other companies, such as Pfizer, have undoubtedly risen in the world ranking of stock market profits.

The professional portal es.statista.com, in its statistics section, gives us the revenue figures for pharmaceutical companies worldwide, including the figure for 2021, which was around 1.40 billion US dollars. With this figure, all is said and done. What they pay for the lawsuits or for the revelry of some people linked to the health sector, be they doctors, nurses, politicians, etc., is mere pocket money. We will not say, like the Chinese Government or the Queen of Hearts in the story of Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads!!!”, but perhaps we could comment that from time to time an example could be made of some of these companies or some of these so-called merchants, who abound in the public and private health system of any country in the world.

Sources:
EL PAIS newspaper, Monday 5 August 2013, author José Reinoso. https://es.statista.com/estadisticas/635153/ingresos-mundiales-del-sector-farmaceutico/

Migration crisis in Americas – New restrictions on migrants and refugees

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12 May 2023

Migration crisis in Americas – New restrictions on migrants and refugees — © UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso - In Texas, USA, a woman hugs her four-year-old daughter after making the perilous journey through the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama.

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The U.S. lifting of a COVID-19 pandemic measure, known as Title 42, has led to new restrictions on migrants and refugees. Concerned, UN agencies called for broad multilateral action to regularize movement across the continent.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) issued a call for a more collaborative approach to better respond to the anticipated impact of changes on the southern US border.

“The challenges facing the Americas call for ambitious, innovative, and principled cooperation among all stakeholders,” the agencies said.

Such a plan must be based on international law and genuine solidarity to advance protection and solutions for refugees and migrants, and align with the framework laid out the Global Compact on Refugees, Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, as well as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.

“Title 42” was lifted by the US government – new, safe pathways and increased refugee resettlement are welcome , but measures restricting access to asylum are of concern.

Read the statement by UNHCR and @UNmigration 👇🏻https://t.co/TemiJbBpya
— Filippo Grandi (@FilippoGrandi) May 12, 2023

New US restrictions

Welcoming positive initiatives to expand resettlement and other regular pathways in the region, the agencies remain concerned about new restrictions on access to asylum following the “long overdue” lifting of the Title 42 public health order by the United States.

Since the pandemic’s outset in 2020, Title 42 has been used by US immigration officials some 2.5 million times at the southern border, to expel people to Mexico or their home country, without assessing what risks they faced as a result of being returned.

Barriers preventing people from exercising the fundamental human right to seek asylum are unacceptable and contrary to States’ international obligations, they said, adding that the new US Government rule that restricts access for asylum-seekers who arrive irregularly, after transiting through another country is incompatible with principles of international refugee law.

While the number of people approaching the US border has grown in recent years, the agencies said that the majority of the people on the move in the Americas are still hosted by countries in Latin America.

Multi-country approach

“The challenges presented by the movement of refugees and migrants cannot be solved by any country in isolation,” they said.

“Real progress can only be made through joint efforts to address the causes of displacement and irregular migration.”

The agencies said more could be done through support to communities that are hosting the majority of displaced people, providing access to fair and effective asylum procedures and other legal stay arrangements, and facilitating access to safe and regular pathways as alternatives to perilous journeys.

More effective response

A more effective response calls for collaborative engagement by States and other stakeholders to expand access to protection and asylum and regular pathways to migration, while strengthening solutions, the agencies said.

The US-led expansion of refugee resettlement and other regular routes is a welcome step that can present real alternatives for desperate people who are risking their lives to find safety and solutions, they said.

Facilitated and expanded access to resettlement, family reunification, humanitarian parole, and labour mobility schemes, can save lives and protect people from smuggling, trafficking and other forms of violence, they said.

UNHCR and IOM are ready to redouble efforts to work with all countries and existing regional mechanisms to make this a reality, the agencies said.

However, expanding resettlement and other regular pathways cannot replace the responsibility of States to provide people with access to territory and asylum procedures, they urged.

Any return agreements between States, including of asylum-seekers to a third country, must uphold in practice the principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition on forced return of people to situations where their lives and safety are at risk, they stressed.

Moura: Over 500 killed by Malian troops, foreign military personnel in 2022 operation

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12 May 2023

Moura: Over 500 killed by Malian troops, foreign military personnel in 2022 operation

That’s according to a fact-finding report from the UN human rights office (OHCHR) released on Friday, on what the Malian authorities had described as an anti-terrorist military operation against an al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as Katiba Macina.

The UN rights chief, Volker Türk, called the findings “extremely disturbing” and stressed that “summary executions, rape and torture during armed conflict amount to war crimes and could, depending on the circumstances, amount to crimes against humanity”.

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Authorities blocking access

OHCHR said that the Malian authorities had repeatedly denied requests by the fact-finding team to access the village of Moura itself. Witnesses interviewed by the team reported seeing “armed white men” who spoke an unknown language operating alongside the Malian forces.

At least 58 women and girls were raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence.

In January, UN Human Rights Council-appointed independent human rights experts called on the Malian authorities to launch an immediate probe into the mass executions, alleging the involvement of the Russian-based Wagner mercenary group.

Experts said that a “climate of terror and complete impunity” had surrounded the private military contractor’s activities in Mali.

Accountability

The UN rights chief insisted that those responsible for the violations should be held to account, and that the Malian authorities must ensure that both their own forces and foreign military personnel under their command, respect international law.

OHCHR said that according to witnesses, on the day of the killings, a military helicopter flew over Moura, opening fire on people, while four other helicopters landed and troops disembarked. The soldiers corralled people into the centre of the village, shooting randomly at those trying to escape.

Some Katiba Macina militants in the crowd fired back at the troops and at least 20 civilians and a dozen alleged members of the armed group were killed.

Killed over four days

Then, over the next four days, at least 500 people are believed to have been summarily executed, the report says. The fact-finding team has obtained extensive personal identification details, including the names of at least 238 of these victims, said OHCHR.

According to witnesses, Malian troops were rotated in and out of Moura daily, but the foreign personnel remained for the duration of the operation.

The Malian authorities did announce an investigation shortly after the attack took place, but more than a year later and pending the final outcome of the investigation, continue to deny wrongdoing by their armed forces.

Sudan’s warring generals take ‘important first step’ on humanitarian protection

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12 May 2023

Sudan’s warring generals take ‘important first step’ on humanitarian protection

Volker Perthes – Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan and Head of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the country (UNITAMS) – underscored that the rival military leaderships had agreed to respect international humanitarian and human rights law, and withdraw fighters from hospitals and medical facilities.

Mr. Perthes also noted that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had committed to continue their talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah on a potential ceasefire.

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Hope for continued ceasefire talks

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, via Zoom from Port Sudan where the UN and partners have established a coastal humanitarian hub, Mr. Perthes said that building on this first mutually signed declaration, the aim was to reach a ceasefire which would also be “mutually agreed”, contrary to previous, unilaterally announced ceasefires.

His hope was that “within the next couple of days”, the discussions in Jeddah under the auspices of Saudi and United States mediators would lead to such an agreement, lending it “more stability and more respect”, and with clear provisions on the modalities related to the movement of troops and humanitarian pauses.

Commitments must be honoured

Mr. Perthes also expressed hope that the parties will “do what they can” to communicate down the chain of command that the humanitarian commitments agreed to in Jeddah must be honoured.

The agreement was welcomed by the “trilateral mechanism” composed of the United Nations, the African Union and the regional body known as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in Eastern Africa (IGAD).

Over 200,000 have fled

Meanwhile, the number of people having fled Sudan has passed the 200,000 mark, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday.

A race against time is underway to provide those fleeing with relief aid before the coming rainy season makes logistics even harder. Funding shortfalls are compounding humanitarian challenges, as UNHCR’s operations in neighbouring countries were only around 15 per cent funded before the conflict.

Lifeline for malnourished children destroyed

In another example of the conflict’s disastrous effects for Sudan’s most vulnerable, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday that a fire had devastated a factory in Khartoum producing ready to use therapeutic food for the treatment of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

According to UNICEF, the equivalent of food for some 14,500 children was destroyed in the fire, along with machinery, compromising future production. The agency says that Sudan has one of the highest rates of malnutrition among children in the world, with more than three million children acutely malnourished.

UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder said that in overall response to the crisis, around 34,000 cartons of ready to use therapeutic food was on the way from France to Sudan.

He said the cause of the factory fire was as yet unknown.

As conflict escalates in Sudan, refugees arrive in the Chadian village of Koufroun, which is situated on the Chad-Sudan border.

Combatants warned of the consequences: Perthes

In an interview conducted in Arabic by the UN in Geneva with UNITAMS chief Volker Perthes on Friday, he said there had been warning signs before the outbreak of hostilities on 15 April, of a potential conflict between the rival militaries.

“We warned both sides of this possibility and this scenario”, he said, and that if they began to fight, “the country and society will be destroyed.”

He said both sides had perhaps thought the fighting would be brief, but now there was a realization that victory “is not easy” and would ultimately be a loss for “a large part of the country.”

Distribution of lifesaving aid

Asked about how more humanitarian aid can be distributed to the millions in need across Sudan, Mr. Perthes said the Jeddah agreement was promising, but access to the capital Khartoum was crucial, and impossible without safe humanitarian corridors.

“We therefore hope that yesterday’s agreement will indeed help to be applied on the ground through humanitarian agencies, the United Nations, and their non-governmental organization partners.”

On the pace of delivery, he said the widespread looting across Sudan at the start of hostilities, had been a major handicap to the operation.

“Warehouses and cars were looted and trucks that were transporting aid from the east of the country or from the centre to Darfur were also looted…when your office and car are looted it is very difficult to help.

“Today, there are new arrangements, even in the preparations for the supply of Darfur through Chad, which also requires coordination with neighboring countries, with the State, with the armed movements in Darfur and other actors.”

OECD says unemployment rate stable at record low of 4.8% in March 2023

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Newsdesk

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12 May 2023