Amnesty International called on the People's Republic of China July 2 to halt its attempts to control the selection process for the future Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. Amnesty's China director, Sarah Brooks, said: "The Chinese authorities must immediately end political interference in Tibetan religious practices and cease using religious succession as a tool for control and coercion."

A court in Algeria has sentenced French sports journalist Christophe Gleizes to seven years in prison on charges of "glorifying terrorism" and "possessing propaganda publications harmful to the national interest," the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on July 1. Gleizes, who has written for French publications So Foot and Society, was arrested on May 28, 2024, in Tizi Ouzou, in Algeria's restive Kabylie region, after interviewing the president of football club JS Kabylie. Authorities alleged the interviewee had ties to the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), which Algeria designated a "terrorist group" in 2021. Gleizes' arrest was not made public until his sentencing on June 29.

Dozens of internally displaced Rohingya in Burma's Rakhine state have died of starvation this year, according to a report released June 12 by the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK). Nearly 150,000 Rohingya have been confined to internment camps in the state since 2012, relying on humanitarian assistance to survive. Tens of thousands are experiencing starvation as a result of a trade blockade and severe humanitarian access restrictions imposed by the ruling junta in response to escalating clashes with the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic Rakhine militia. The AA has also been accused of atrocities against Rohingya living in areas under its control.

Escalating violence in Indonesia's West Papua region is threatening the security of the largely indigenous population amid intensified clashes between Indonesian security forces and separatist rebels, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned May 29. Military operations in the densely forested Central Highlands have resulted in the deaths and injuries of dozens of civilians due to drone strikes and the indiscriminate use of explosive munitions, forcing thousands of indigenous Papuans to flee their homes.

Presumed ISIS militants attacked a police station of the Kurdish autonomous administration at al-Sabha in Syria's eastern Deir ez-Zor province June 8. The attack with grenades and small arms was repulsed by the local Asayish police force without loss of life. But this was only the latest in a spate of new ISIS attacks in Syria. In a first attack on central government forces since the ouster the Assad dictatorship last December, ISIS boasted in a communique May 31 that its fighters had killed several soldiers of the "the apostate Syrian regime" at a road checkpoint in Talul al-Safa, in southern Suwayda province. That same day, one member of the Free Syrian Army was killed in an ambush by ISIS militants on an FSA patrol in al-Tanf Deconfliction Zone, a US military outpost near the Jordan border. (Rudaw, Kurdistan4, CNN)

A May 21 suicide attack on bus serving an army-run school in Khuzdar district of Pakistan's Balochistan province killed five people, three of them children. Islamabad, which faces accusations it was involved in last month's attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, quickly pointed the finger at neighboring India and Afghanistan. Both New Delhi and Kabul have denied the allegations. Balochistan has been the subject of a decades-long armed struggle for autonomy. Ethnic Baloch communities have accused Pakistani authorities of disenfranchisement, neglect and forced disappearances.

Amnesty International on May 14 condemned the life sentence handed down by a military court in Cameroon against activist Abdu Karim Ali, calling it an "affront to justice" and demanding his immediate and unconditional release. According to Amnesty, Ali was arrested without a warrant in 2022 and arbitrarily detained after he produced a video exposing torture carried out by the leader of a pro-government militia in Cameroon's conflicted Southwest Region. Last month, a military court in Yaoundé, the national capital, sentenced him to life imprisonment for "hostility against the homeland" and "secession."

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) held its 12th Congress between May 5 and 7, where delegates voted to dissolve the group's organizational structure and end the armed struggle against the Turkish state that it has waged since 1984. The congress was convened in response to the "Call for Peace and a Democratic Society" issued in February by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan ("Apo"), who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. The statement called for his followers to lay down arms and pursue a civil struggle for Kurdish rights. The 232 delegates at the 12th Congress held a collective oath-taking ceremony in which they pledged to "intensify the struggle for the freedom of the Kurdish people," and to "fight against the male-dominated civilization and the statist system" and for "a democratic society based on the Apoist line."