Category Archives: Middle East and North Africa

Iran suspends execution of three anti-government protesters in death row

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Trio who participated in November demonstrations received public support following request of retrial

Iran’s supreme court has agreed to suspend the executions of three men on death row for their participation in anti-government protests in November, whose sentences sparked an online outcry last week.

Lawyers for the trio – Saeed Tamjidi, 26, Mohammad Rajabi, 28, and Amirhossein Moradi, 26 – said in a statement on Sunday the country’s supreme court had agreed to examine the men’s application for a retrial.

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Ministers ignore pleas to honour vow and bring ‘innocents’ back from Syria

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After last week’s Shamima Begum ruling, Home Office stays silent on rescue of minors from camps in the north-west of the country

The Home Office has been accused of “alarming inaction” after making no apparent attempt to bring back any British children from Syria for the past eight months despite pledges of help from ministers.

The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, announced last October that “unaccompanied minors or orphans” in Syria could be returned to Britain. After three orphans returned in November, he hailed the move as “the right thing to do”. He added: “These innocent, orphaned children should never have been subjected to the horrors of war.”

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Israel returns to partial lockdown with immediate weekend shutdown

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Government unveils measures after marathon emergency cabinet session as infections rise

Israel has reimposed some lockdown measures following a vigorous second surge in the number of coronavirus infections, putting in place stringent weekend shutdowns in which shops, hairdressers and attractions will be closed.

The government announced the measures in the early hours of Friday morning, following a marathon emergency cabinet session called after daily infection rates climbed to close to 2,000.

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Protests predicted to surge globally as Covid-19 drives unrest

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New analysis finds economic shock of pandemic coupled with existing grievances makes widespread public uprisings ‘inevitable’

The economic impact of coronavirus is a “tinderbox” that will drive civil unrest and instability in developing countries in the second half of 2020, according to new analysis.

Highest risk countries facing a “perfect storm”, where protests driven by the pandemic’s economic fallout are likely to inflame existing grievances, include Nigeria, Iran, Bangladesh, Algeria and Ethiopia, the analysis said.

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Shamima Begum: how the case developed

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Twenty-year-old has won right to return to UK from Syria to challenge citizenship decision

The case of Shamima Begum, the now 20-year-old woman who fled to Syria to join Islamic State as a child, has sparked fierce debate over how the UK should deal with “foreign fighters”.

Opponents of her return say she is a threat to the country’s security and must live with the consequences of her actions, while critics of her exile say greater human rights principles are at play, and the UK must not shirk its responsibility to administer justice for any alleged crimes she may have committed.

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Oil spill from Yemen tanker ‘would be four times worse then Exxon Valdez’ – UN

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Spill from decaying vessel could wreck environment and livelihoods for decades

Time is running out to prevent a disastrous oil spill from a deteriorating tanker loaded with 1.1m barrels of crude that is moored off the coast of Yemen, the UN’s environment chief has said.

Inger Andersen told the UN security council that a spill from the FSO Safer, which has had no maintenance for more than five years, would wreck ecosystems and livelihoods for decades.

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Shamima Begum wins right to return to UK to challenge citizenship decision

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Appeal court partially overturns earlier ruling that backed Home Office

Shamima Begum, the 20-year-old woman who left east London as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, should be allowed to return to the UK to challenge the Home Office’s decision to revoke her British citizenship in person.

The court of appeal partially overturned an earlier ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) this year, which held that she had not been illegally rendered stateless while she was in Syria because she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.

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‘Thank you, our glorious revolution’: activists react as Sudan ditches Islamist laws

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After 30 years under Omar al-Bashir, the country has abolished several discriminatory policies and banned FGM – in what activists have called ‘great first steps’ towards liberalisation

Sudan’s transitional government has been praised for its latest reforms, which decriminalise apostasy, ban female genital mutilation (FGM) and end the requirement for women to get travel permits.

The legislation makes major strides in pushing back against discrimination faced by women and minorities during the 30-year rule of Omar al-Bashir that came to an end in 2019, according to equality advocates.

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Seven vessels catch fire in southern Iranian shipyard

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Incident at port of Bushehr latest in series of fires and blasts that could be part of sabotage campaign

At least seven vessels have caught fire in a southern Iranian shipyard, in the latest in a series of explosions and fires that analysts speculate could be part of a state-sponsored sabotage campaign targeting the country’s industrial, nuclear and military sites.

No casualties were reported at the port of Bushehr, the city that hosts Iran’s only nuclear power plant, but images distributed by state media showed plumes of thick smoke billowing into the air and several fire trucks at the site.

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Tensions mount as Ethiopia allows dam across Nile headwaters to fill

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Egypt fears hydroelectric project will restrict limited waters on which its population depends

Ethiopia has allowed a controversial dam built across the headwaters of the Nile to fill with rain water, raising tensions with Egypt and Sudan.

The huge hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile, known as the Grand Renaissance dam, is at the centre of Ethiopia’s plan to become Africa’s biggest power exporter, but Egypt fears already limited Nile waters, on which its population of more than 100 million people depends, might be restricted.

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Migrant workers in Qatar face ‘structural racism’ says UN report

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World Cup host heavily criticised over discrimination and ‘coercive conditions’ experienced by labourers from south Asia and Africa

The United Nations has raised “serious concerns of structural racial discrimination against non-nationals” in World Cup host nation Qatar, in a highly critical report to be presented to the UN human rights council this week.

The report, by the UN’s special rapporteur for racism, Tendayi Achiume, is notable for its uncompromising language, saying a “de facto caste system based on national origin” exists in Qatar, “according to which European, North American, Australian and Arab nationalities systematically enjoy greater human rights protections than South Asian and sub-Saharan African nationalities”.

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Egypt: doctors targeted for highlighting Covid-19 working conditions

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Overwhelmed staff detained by state security agency after voicing concerns about lack of PPE

Overwhelmed and ill-equipped medical staff in Egypt are being threatened for speaking out about poor working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic, with increasing numbers detained by a domestic security agency.

Doctors recounted threats delivered via WhatsApp, official letters or in person. They said hospital managers and government officials told them failing to attend shifts, posting on social media or voicing objections would result in complaints to the National Security Agency, Egypt’s primary internal security body, which rights groups say has arrested multiple healthcare workers.

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The two-state solution is a political fiction liberal Zionists still cling to | Joshua Leifer

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Political fictions take a long time to die, if they ever fully do. The two-state solution is one of them

Israel’s impending annexation of the West Bank has put the fate of the two-state solution – or, perhaps more accurately its death – back in the headlines. Yet neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement of his annexation intentions, nor the Trump “peace plan”, killed the chances of two states, which ceased to be realistic long ago. What the great drama of annexation playing out in the Anglo-American press is really about – in no small part due to the exclusion of Palestinian voices – is whether liberal Zionists will reconcile themselves to this reality or continue to deny it.

Related: Israel's annexation of the West Bank will be yet another tragedy for Palestinians | Ian Black

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Alleged breaches of international law by Saudi forces in Yemen exceed 500

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UK government figures revealed days after it justified resuming arms sales because incidents were isolated

The Ministry of Defence has revealed it has logged more than 500 Saudi air raids in possible breach of international law in Yemen, even though last week it justified resuming arms sales to Riyadh on the basis that only isolated incidents without any pattern have occurred.

The trade minister, Greg Hands, answering an urgent question in the Commons on last week’s resumption of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, refused to say how many bombing incidents had been reviewed by the UK before it agreed to grant UK arms export licences again.

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The Guardian view on Covid-19 worldwide: on the march

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Infections are accelerating in largely untouched countries and those which hoped they had come through the worst. But there is hope

“Most of the world sort of sat by and watched with almost a sense of detachment and bemusement,” said Helen Clark, appointed to investigate the World Health Organization’s handling of the pandemic. The former New Zealand prime minister was describing the early weeks of the outbreak, and the sense that coronavirus was a problem “over there”. The failure to recognise our interconnection created complacency even as the death toll rose.

It took three months for the first million people to fall sick – but only a week to record the last million of the nearly 13 million cases now reported worldwide. As England emerges from lockdown at an unwary pace, Covid-19 is accelerating globally. The WHO has reported a record surge of a quarter of a million cases in a single day. The death toll is over half a million people and rising fast.

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Iran report on downed Ukrainian jet blames misaligned air defence system

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Missile defence operators had failed to recalibrate their systems, Tehran says

A report from Iranian investigators on the shooting down in January of a Ukrainian jet has blamed a misaligned air defence system giving wrong information to its operators, who did not seek authorisation to fire before killing all 176 people onboard.

Iranian officials initially blamed the crash of Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 near Tehran on the morning of 8 January on technical problems with the aircraft, but days later admitted their own missiles had mistakenly downed it.

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‘Sensational’ Egypt find offers clues in hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb

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Exclusive: discovery of two ancient mummies filmed for Channel 5 documentary

She was the fabled queen of ancient Egypt, immortalised over thousands of years as a beautiful seductress. But, despite her fame, Cleopatra’s tomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries.

Some believe she was buried in Alexandria, where she was born and ruled from her royal palace, a city decimated by the tsunami of 365AD. Others suggest her final resting place could be about 30 miles away, in the ancient temple of Taposiris Magna, built by her Ptolemaic ancestors on the Nile Delta.

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Climate activists slam Norman Foster over Saudi airport

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Architect is ignoring his own environment pledge, say critics

One of Britain’s most famous architects is under fire for agreeing to design an airport and terminal in Saudi Arabia despite signing a climate emergency manifesto that called for an “urgent need for action” on climate change.

Norman Foster’s design firm, Foster and Partners, was one of the founding signatories of the profession’s Architects Declare manifesto last year. However, The Architects’ Journal last week revealed that several new Foster and Partners projects in Saudi Arabia have caused controversy in the profession over their links to the aviation industry.

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Iran denies latest blast reports and accuses west of disinformation

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Tehran says incident in early hours in garrison town of Gamdareh was a power outage

Iran has denied reports that fresh mysterious explosions have rocked two towns close to Tehran, accusing the west of waging psychological warfare by spreading false messages on social media.

Reports suggested that the blasts had occurred in the early hours of Friday in Gamdareh, a residential town that houses a number of military garrisons, including bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and in Shahr-e Qods. Officials insisted the reports were false but accepted there had been a power outage.

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UK accused of ’empty talk’ as Bahrain activists face death penalty

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Calls intensify for withdrawal from security arrangement with kingdom over human rights

The British government has been accused of “empty talk” over human rights as two pro-democracy campaigners in Bahrain face the death penalty.

The UK has provided security advice to the island nation in the Persian Gulf for five years and funds a body that examines allegations of police mistreatment.

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