Human Rights Watch

As the leaders of three key European Union institutions prepared to visit Greece's land frontier with Turkey, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for emergency humanitarian aid at the border and fair burden sharing among member states.

Gunmen killed 24 civilians, including a church pastor, and kidnapped three others on Feb. 17 in Burkina Faso, an official said. It was the latest attack against a religious leader in the increasingly unstable West African nation.

N1 said the latest attacks happened last Thursday when a paid DDoS strike from China hit the Serbian website twice that day.

The attacks started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday afternoon. The second attack was five times stronger, with up to 300,000 access requests hitting the portal server a second.

In a sweeping legal victory for members of the Rohingya Muslim minority, the United Nations' top court on Jan. 23 ordered Myanmar to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people.

The court's president, Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, said the International Court of Justice "is of the opinion that the Rohingya in Myanmar remain extremely vulnerable.''

The latest report from Human Rights Watch, published on Tuesday evening, says that discrimination and violence against minorities, domestic violence, pressure on media and problems with dealing with the wartime past continued to be major issues for Balkan states and Central Europe last year.

JANUARY

January 11 - Romania begins a six-month EU Council presidency amid anti-government protests at home and calls from EU leaders to respect the rule of law.

January 17 - Human Rights Watch's World Report 2019 highlights threats to journalists and minority and immigrants' rights as key problems in the Balkans.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed China on Dec. 28 for its treatment of minority Muslim Uighur population, calling for "respect and protect religious freedom".

"From #Tibet to #Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party's repressive campaigns are not about combating terrorism," Pompeo wrote on Twitter.

The United Nations on Dec. 27 approved a Russian-led bid that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime, alarming rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom.    

The General Assembly approved the resolution sponsored by Russia and backed by China, which would set up a committee of international experts in 2020.    

Hundreds of unaccompanied children are living in "inhuman and degrading" conditions in a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, putting their mental and physical well-being at risk, an international human rights organization said Wednesday.

A decade after the European Court of Human Rights first ruled that the Bosnian constitution violates the rights of minorities, Human Rights Watch, HRW, has said in a press release that Bosnia has done nothing to end second-class status for Jews, Roma, and other minorities.