Sheffield Hallam University ordered professor to cease human rights study into Uyghurs forced labour in China
An investigation into allegations that a British university was subjected to pressure from Beijing authorities to halt research about human rights abuses in China has been referred to counter-terrorism police.
The Guardian reported on Monday morning that Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC) research institution, had ordered professor Laura Murphy to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in the country in February.
A People’s Mission to Kanaky New Caledonia says the French Pacific territory remains in a fragile political and social transition nearly three decades after the signing of the Nouméa Accord.
It says the pro-independence unrest in May last year has “left visible scars” — not only in a damaged economy but in trust between the territory’s institutions and the communities being served.
The mission is launching its report at a media event in the Fiji capital Suva tomorrow.
“France cannot act as both referee and participant in the decolonisation process. Its repeated breaches and political interference have eroded trust and prolonged Kanaky’s dependency,” said mission head Anna Naupa, a Pacific policy and development specialist, in a pre-launch statement.
“The Pacific must now take a principled stand to ensure the right to self-determination is fulfilled.”
The mission — organised by Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), Eglise Protestante de Kanaky Nouvelle-Calédonie (EPKNC) and the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) — said regional observers had noted that the situation now hinged on whether France and Pacific leaders could “re-establish credible dialogue” that genuinely included Kanak perspectives in shaping the territory’s future.
Five key findings
According to the report, the Pacific Peoples’ Mission to Kanaky New Caledonia had identified five interlinked findings that defined the current crisis:
Political trust has collapsed. Communities no longer view the decolonisation process as impartial, citing France’s dual role as both administrator and arbiter;
Reconciliation remains incomplete. Efforts to rebuild unity after the 2024 unrest are fragmented, with limited Kanak participation in recovery planning;
Youth exclusion is fuelling instability. Young Kanaks describe frustration over limited education, employment, and representation opportunities;
Economic recovery lacks equity. Reconstruction support has disproportionately benefited urban and non-Kanak areas, widening social divisions; and
Regional leadership is missing. Pacific solidarity has weakened, leaving communities without consistent regional advocacy or oversight.
The People’s Mission to Kanaky New Caledonia report will be launched tomorrow in Suva. Image: PANG
Together, said the mission, these findings underlined an urgent need for a renewed, Pacific-led dialogue that would restore confidence in the independence process and focus on Kanak agency.
A New Zealand academic and activist who was part of the mission, Dr David Small, said: “What we witnessed in Kanaky is not instability; it is resistance born from decades of broken promises.
“The international community must stop treating this as an internal French matter and
recognise it for what it is — an unfinished decolonisation process.”
The People’s Mission report will be launched at the Talanoa Lounge, Itaukei Trust Fund Board, Nasese, Suva, 3-5pm, Wednesday, November 4. More information.
“France cannot act as both referee and participant in the decolonisation process.” Image: PANG
William Faulkner was right: past events continue to inform and shape our world. With powerful forces gathering to reassert US dominance over not just Venezuela but the entire Western hemisphere, the vexed issue of local elites, for example Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado and her backers, enlisting an imperial power in domestic broils, is again top of the agenda.
Back in the 1980s I studied in France. The most thrilling lecture of my university career was an outline of the significance of the Battle of Valmy, a crucial win for the young French Revolution.
The lecture was given by the distinguished historian Antoine Casanova.
One of the revolutionary generals that day in 1792 was a Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda, who in time, returning to the Americas, would wrest power from imperial Spain and become leader of an independent Venezuela.
Miranda knew Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and, of significance to this story, the father of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe. Were he alive today he would again unsheathe his sword to fight King Donald Trump and all the forces of L’Ancien Régime.
L’Ancien Régime — the “Old Order” — refers to the system of absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and rigid social hierarchy where a tiny elite owned everything while the masses owned little or nothing.
In today’s world, given the concentration of power among the few in our countries, I extend the term Ancien Régime to capture the way the US, working in concert with local elites, is operating in ways that would be familiar to a Bourbon King or a British monarch.
If they had such a thing as shame, the American elites should wince that their country, born out of an epic anti-colonial struggle, now plays the role of a Prussian army seeking to impose its will on another state.
1792. La patrie en danger. The homeland is in peril. The monarchies of Europe had rallied their armies for an assault on France to destroy the Revolution that had swept from power not only King Louis XVI but the entire absolutist order of L’Ancien Régime.
After a string of victories, the invaders swung their armies towards Paris, intent on snuffing out the revolution, to ensure the contagion did not infect the rest of Europe. Desperate, the French Assembly declared “La Patrie en danger” and called on patriotic citizens to rally to the flag.
The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.
At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!” “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).
Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.
To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.
Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered. The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.
French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later. A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly — told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”
Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.
The “first global revolutionary” . . . Miranda knew President James Monroe, father of the Monroe Doctrine. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Some of my fellow students at L’Université de Franche-Comté were South and Central Americans who had fled political persecution. Their stories were my first exposure to the concept of “death squads”.
This was a time when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were drenched in blood as a pitiless struggle was waged by the US and the local military and financial elites on one side, and coalitions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers and various progressives on the other.
Repeated US interventions to support companies like United Fruit Company went hand in hand with brutal suppression of peasant workers. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratic progressive Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a war — the Guatemalan Genocide or The Silent Genocide — in which 200,000 were killed and tens of thousands more “disappeared” over the succeeding three decades. Amnesty International estimated 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Maya people.
In 1980, while I was in France, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down mid-service by a killer working for El Salvador’s military dictatorship. A quarter of a million people braved the junta to attend his funeral.
Romero’s fate was sealed when he appealed to US President Jimmy Carter to end aid to El Salvador’s military dictatorship.
Death squads follow
Whether we look at the Iran Contra scandal, Reagan’s funding of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 or any of dozens of such organisations, the pattern is clear: where the US wishes to assert control via elites, death squads follow. The State Department and CIA spent decades building and evolving El Salvador’s National Security Agency. They helped compile lists of leftists, intellectuals and all sorts of people who were then eliminated by the regime’s death squads.
While I was getting an education in history, literature and politics, tens of thousands were killed in Argentina by the US-backed Junta during the “Dirty War”. Similarly in Chile, from the US-promoted military takeover forward, being a social worker, teacher or trade unionist could be a fatal occupation.
Sadly, as most people my age know, one could go on and on and on about US covert activity to destroy democratic movements and foster alliances with the most vicious oligarchs on the continent. That is why I fear for Venezuela and I have zero confidence in any political leader who calls for US direct military and paramilitary (via CIA) action in her own country.
For these reasons and more, I shuddered when I heard Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado praising Donald Trump and urging him to continue his pressure campaign, saying only Trump can “save Venezuela”.
“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.
Praising a man who is indiscriminately killing your own citizens is not, in my estimation, a good look for either a Nobel Peace laureate or a patriot. Francisco Miranda would roll in his grave.
The price of freedom from foreign powers is often counted in millions of lives and centuries of struggle; it should not be given away lightly.
The Maduro government has its fans and its detractors; both can mount solid arguments.
One thing I believe is firmly in its favour, however, is that, for its many faults, it is a national project that seeks to resist dominance from foreign interests, foremost the US. I will give the last word to Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (28 March 1750–14 July 1816):
“I have never believed that anything solid or stable can be built in a country, if absolute independence is not first achieved.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
William Faulkner was right: past events continue to inform and shape our world. With powerful forces gathering to reassert US dominance over not just Venezuela but the entire Western hemisphere, the vexed issue of local elites, for example Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado and her backers, enlisting an imperial power in domestic broils, is again top of the agenda.
Back in the 1980s I studied in France. The most thrilling lecture of my university career was an outline of the significance of the Battle of Valmy, a crucial win for the young French Revolution.
The lecture was given by the distinguished historian Antoine Casanova.
One of the revolutionary generals that day in 1792 was a Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda, who in time, returning to the Americas, would wrest power from imperial Spain and become leader of an independent Venezuela.
Miranda knew Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and, of significance to this story, the father of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe. Were he alive today he would again unsheathe his sword to fight King Donald Trump and all the forces of L’Ancien Régime.
L’Ancien Régime — the “Old Order” — refers to the system of absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and rigid social hierarchy where a tiny elite owned everything while the masses owned little or nothing.
In today’s world, given the concentration of power among the few in our countries, I extend the term Ancien Régime to capture the way the US, working in concert with local elites, is operating in ways that would be familiar to a Bourbon King or a British monarch.
If they had such a thing as shame, the American elites should wince that their country, born out of an epic anti-colonial struggle, now plays the role of a Prussian army seeking to impose its will on another state.
1792. La patrie en danger. The homeland is in peril. The monarchies of Europe had rallied their armies for an assault on France to destroy the Revolution that had swept from power not only King Louis XVI but the entire absolutist order of L’Ancien Régime.
After a string of victories, the invaders swung their armies towards Paris, intent on snuffing out the revolution, to ensure the contagion did not infect the rest of Europe. Desperate, the French Assembly declared “La Patrie en danger” and called on patriotic citizens to rally to the flag.
The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.
At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!” “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).
Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.
To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.
Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered. The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.
French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later. A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly — told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”
Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.
The “first global revolutionary” . . . Miranda knew President James Monroe, father of the Monroe Doctrine. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Some of my fellow students at L’Université de Franche-Comté were South and Central Americans who had fled political persecution. Their stories were my first exposure to the concept of “death squads”.
This was a time when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were drenched in blood as a pitiless struggle was waged by the US and the local military and financial elites on one side, and coalitions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers and various progressives on the other.
Repeated US interventions to support companies like United Fruit Company went hand in hand with brutal suppression of peasant workers. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratic progressive Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a war — the Guatemalan Genocide or The Silent Genocide — in which 200,000 were killed and tens of thousands more “disappeared” over the succeeding three decades. Amnesty International estimated 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Maya people.
In 1980, while I was in France, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down mid-service by a killer working for El Salvador’s military dictatorship. A quarter of a million people braved the junta to attend his funeral.
Romero’s fate was sealed when he appealed to US President Jimmy Carter to end aid to El Salvador’s military dictatorship.
Death squads follow
Whether we look at the Iran Contra scandal, Reagan’s funding of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 or any of dozens of such organisations, the pattern is clear: where the US wishes to assert control via elites, death squads follow. The State Department and CIA spent decades building and evolving El Salvador’s National Security Agency. They helped compile lists of leftists, intellectuals and all sorts of people who were then eliminated by the regime’s death squads.
While I was getting an education in history, literature and politics, tens of thousands were killed in Argentina by the US-backed Junta during the “Dirty War”. Similarly in Chile, from the US-promoted military takeover forward, being a social worker, teacher or trade unionist could be a fatal occupation.
Sadly, as most people my age know, one could go on and on and on about US covert activity to destroy democratic movements and foster alliances with the most vicious oligarchs on the continent. That is why I fear for Venezuela and I have zero confidence in any political leader who calls for US direct military and paramilitary (via CIA) action in her own country.
For these reasons and more, I shuddered when I heard Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado praising Donald Trump and urging him to continue his pressure campaign, saying only Trump can “save Venezuela”.
“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.
Praising a man who is indiscriminately killing your own citizens is not, in my estimation, a good look for either a Nobel Peace laureate or a patriot. Francisco Miranda would roll in his grave.
The price of freedom from foreign powers is often counted in millions of lives and centuries of struggle; it should not be given away lightly.
The Maduro government has its fans and its detractors; both can mount solid arguments.
One thing I believe is firmly in its favour, however, is that, for its many faults, it is a national project that seeks to resist dominance from foreign interests, foremost the US. I will give the last word to Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (28 March 1750–14 July 1816):
“I have never believed that anything solid or stable can be built in a country, if absolute independence is not first achieved.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
In a first-of-its-kind investigation into the closed-door negotiations of the UN’s budget in New York, ISHR uncovers how a small group of States – led by China and Russia – have coordinated efforts to block and slash funding for the UN’s human rights work through political manoeuvring and influence. At a moment of sweeping UN reform and financial crisis, these efforts – compounded by the US failure to pay their UN membership fees and outstanding debts – pose an existential threat to the UN’s human rights system.
…The UN’s historically underfunded human rights work now faces an existential threat due to budget cuts under the UN80 Initiative and the UN’s liquidity crisis, fuelled by the failure of the United States, China and other countries to pay their contributions in full and on time. Drawing from dozens of interviews and combing through official documents and internal budget negotiation documents from 2019 to 2024, ISHR’s report ‘Budget Battles at the UN: How States Try to Defund Human Rights’ finds that China and Russia have led a sustained effort to build influence, disrupt proceedings, and politicise technical discussions at the UN General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (5C), where States negotiate the UN’s budget, and its little-known yet influential advisory body, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ). Over the past decade, Chinese influence within these bodies has expanded sharply, the report shows. Beijing has invested heavily in building its representation at the 5C, the ACABQ and other related bodies to push heavy budget cuts to human rights. Russia has frequently played the role of outspoken spoiler in negotiations, enabling China to deploy its influence more quietly but effectively behind closed doors.
Russian and Chinese diplomats have weaponised UN budget negotiations to serve their own interests and shield allies from scrutiny, at the expense of human rights. Budget negotiations should be solely guided by the goal of adequately funding the UN’s work, not serving as a political tool to weaken accountability and rights protection.‘ – Madeleine Sinclair, Director of ISHR’s New York office..
A deepening cash crisis The report finds that years of underfunding and attacks on the UN’s human rights budget are now being compounded by a severe liquidity crisis triggered by US and Chinese late or non-payment of dues, while the United Nations undergo urgent reform. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump Administration has launched repeated assaults on UN bodies, often on grounds of an alleged ‘anti-Israel bias’, abruptly blocking the payment of overdue contributions from 2024 dues and all of the US contributions for 2025, while cutting nearly all voluntary funding to the UN. As the US, the largest contributor, withholds this vast portion of the UN budget, Beijing’s increasingly late payments risk depriving the UN of over 40% of its operational cash flow for 2025. Meanwhile, China’s paying in full but extremely late has a similar result to not paying contributions in full, as a little-known State-imposed UN rule perversely returns unspent cash – that could not be used as it came so late – to Member States in the form of credits to future dues. In 2024, China paid its contributions on 27 December, four days before the year’s end. The broader US withdrawal from multilateralism also enables China and Russia to further grow their influence in shaping a more State-centric UN, at the expense of civil society and the universality of human rights.
….
UN80 reform risks deepening the damage US cuts also forced the UN into an unprecedented race for reform through the UN80 Initiative, an internal reform drive to make the organisation more efficient and effective, yet so far focused primarily on austerity and cost-cutting. Initial cuts proposed by the Secretary-General in September slash the human rights budget by 15%, a higher percentage than cuts proposed for the UN’s development and peace and security work. Further cuts are expected once the ACABQ reviews the Secretary-General’s proposals, and States table additional reform proposals under UN80 in the coming months.
‘China and Russia have long exploited UN processes in order to spin a web of influence against human rights progress, and now the Trump administration is moving in that same direction. But this is not irreversible. The UN80 Initiative must be more than a hunt for ‘efficiency’: it should be a collective effort towards meaningful, human rights-driven reform. For this, States, and particularly Global South countries who have a clear stake in having strong, responsive UN human rights bodies, can still take back the space and ensure funding for a UN that advances human rights protection on the ground for all.’ – ISHR Executive Director Phil Lynch
Funding for the UN’s human rights work is on the brink of collapse at a time when it is most needed to address global crises…
In a first-of-its-kind investigation into the closed-door negotiations of the UN’s budget in New York, ISHR uncovers how a small group of States – led by China and Russia – have coordinated efforts to block and slash funding for the UN’s human rights work through political manoeuvring and influence. At a moment of sweeping UN reform and financial crisis, these efforts – compounded by the US failure to pay their UN membership fees and outstanding debts – pose an existential threat to the UN’s human rights system.
…The UN’s historically underfunded human rights work now faces an existential threat due to budget cuts under the UN80 Initiative and the UN’s liquidity crisis, fuelled by the failure of the United States, China and other countries to pay their contributions in full and on time. Drawing from dozens of interviews and combing through official documents and internal budget negotiation documents from 2019 to 2024, ISHR’s report ‘Budget Battles at the UN: How States Try to Defund Human Rights’ finds that China and Russia have led a sustained effort to build influence, disrupt proceedings, and politicise technical discussions at the UN General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (5C), where States negotiate the UN’s budget, and its little-known yet influential advisory body, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ). Over the past decade, Chinese influence within these bodies has expanded sharply, the report shows. Beijing has invested heavily in building its representation at the 5C, the ACABQ and other related bodies to push heavy budget cuts to human rights. Russia has frequently played the role of outspoken spoiler in negotiations, enabling China to deploy its influence more quietly but effectively behind closed doors.
Russian and Chinese diplomats have weaponised UN budget negotiations to serve their own interests and shield allies from scrutiny, at the expense of human rights. Budget negotiations should be solely guided by the goal of adequately funding the UN’s work, not serving as a political tool to weaken accountability and rights protection.‘ – Madeleine Sinclair, Director of ISHR’s New York office..
A deepening cash crisis The report finds that years of underfunding and attacks on the UN’s human rights budget are now being compounded by a severe liquidity crisis triggered by US and Chinese late or non-payment of dues, while the United Nations undergo urgent reform. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump Administration has launched repeated assaults on UN bodies, often on grounds of an alleged ‘anti-Israel bias’, abruptly blocking the payment of overdue contributions from 2024 dues and all of the US contributions for 2025, while cutting nearly all voluntary funding to the UN. As the US, the largest contributor, withholds this vast portion of the UN budget, Beijing’s increasingly late payments risk depriving the UN of over 40% of its operational cash flow for 2025. Meanwhile, China’s paying in full but extremely late has a similar result to not paying contributions in full, as a little-known State-imposed UN rule perversely returns unspent cash – that could not be used as it came so late – to Member States in the form of credits to future dues. In 2024, China paid its contributions on 27 December, four days before the year’s end. The broader US withdrawal from multilateralism also enables China and Russia to further grow their influence in shaping a more State-centric UN, at the expense of civil society and the universality of human rights.
….
UN80 reform risks deepening the damage US cuts also forced the UN into an unprecedented race for reform through the UN80 Initiative, an internal reform drive to make the organisation more efficient and effective, yet so far focused primarily on austerity and cost-cutting. Initial cuts proposed by the Secretary-General in September slash the human rights budget by 15%, a higher percentage than cuts proposed for the UN’s development and peace and security work. Further cuts are expected once the ACABQ reviews the Secretary-General’s proposals, and States table additional reform proposals under UN80 in the coming months.
‘China and Russia have long exploited UN processes in order to spin a web of influence against human rights progress, and now the Trump administration is moving in that same direction. But this is not irreversible. The UN80 Initiative must be more than a hunt for ‘efficiency’: it should be a collective effort towards meaningful, human rights-driven reform. For this, States, and particularly Global South countries who have a clear stake in having strong, responsive UN human rights bodies, can still take back the space and ensure funding for a UN that advances human rights protection on the ground for all.’ – ISHR Executive Director Phil Lynch
Funding for the UN’s human rights work is on the brink of collapse at a time when it is most needed to address global crises…
Every journalist who dares to speak the truth faces danger, yet their courage lights the path for all of us. Remembering those killed is not enough; we must demand justice, protection, and a world where truth can be spoken without fear”. Burhan Sonmez, PEN International President
31 October 2025: On the Day of the Dead, we the undersigned, honour the journalists in Mexico who have been killed for their work. This act of remembrance is also an urgent appeal: violence against the press has reached alarming levels in the region. In Mexico, practicing journalism carries deadly risks. The Mexican State must acknowledge this reality and take immediate action.
PEN International and Article 19’s Mexico and Central America office have documented the killing of at least ten journalists over the past twelve months in Mexico. Seven of these cases are believed to be directly linked to their work, while the motives behind the remaining three killings are still under investigation. The past year, UNESCO, PEN, CPJ, RSF also recorded the murder of journalists in Brazil (1), Colombia (3), Ecuador (2), Honduras (1), Guatemala (1), Haiti (2), and Peru (2), positioning Mexico once again as the country with the highest number of journalists murdered in the continent. The murders of journalists are closely linked to their reporting on matters of high public interest, including corruption, organised crime, drug trafficking, human rights violations, environmental concerns, and abuses of power.
The brutality of the attacks, combined with entrenched impunity, has created a perpetual cycle of violence that undermines not only the right to freedom of expression but also the public’s right to be informed.
Despite its international obligations, the Mexican State continues to fail to ensure the protection of journalists and a safe environment for journalism, and to deliver effective justice for victims and their families.
This reflects a reality that cannot be ignored: Mexico faces not only a crisis of violence, but also a crisis of structural impunity that enables attacks to continue without consequence. Such impunity creates a chilling effect of self-censorship, restraint, and fear among journalists.
Emblematic cases
We remember the journalists Kristian Uriel Martínez Zavala andCalletano de Jesús Guerrero, killed in Mexico in 2025. …
Mexico’s ongoing crisis is no accident. It is the result of entrenched impunity and a state either unable or unwilling to protect those who bring truth to light.
We urge the Mexican State to:
Take concrete steps to guarantee that journalists in Mexico can exercise their right to freedom of expression without fear of reprisals.
Review and strengthen the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, ensuring that effective measures are deployed swiftly.
Undertake thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the killings of and attacks on journalists, and deliver effective justice for victims and their families.
Every journalist who dares to speak the truth faces danger, yet their courage lights the path for all of us. Remembering those killed is not enough; we must demand justice, protection, and a world where truth can be spoken without fear”. Burhan Sonmez, PEN International President
31 October 2025: On the Day of the Dead, we the undersigned, honour the journalists in Mexico who have been killed for their work. This act of remembrance is also an urgent appeal: violence against the press has reached alarming levels in the region. In Mexico, practicing journalism carries deadly risks. The Mexican State must acknowledge this reality and take immediate action.
PEN International and Article 19’s Mexico and Central America office have documented the killing of at least ten journalists over the past twelve months in Mexico. Seven of these cases are believed to be directly linked to their work, while the motives behind the remaining three killings are still under investigation. The past year, UNESCO, PEN, CPJ, RSF also recorded the murder of journalists in Brazil (1), Colombia (3), Ecuador (2), Honduras (1), Guatemala (1), Haiti (2), and Peru (2), positioning Mexico once again as the country with the highest number of journalists murdered in the continent. The murders of journalists are closely linked to their reporting on matters of high public interest, including corruption, organised crime, drug trafficking, human rights violations, environmental concerns, and abuses of power.
The brutality of the attacks, combined with entrenched impunity, has created a perpetual cycle of violence that undermines not only the right to freedom of expression but also the public’s right to be informed.
Despite its international obligations, the Mexican State continues to fail to ensure the protection of journalists and a safe environment for journalism, and to deliver effective justice for victims and their families.
This reflects a reality that cannot be ignored: Mexico faces not only a crisis of violence, but also a crisis of structural impunity that enables attacks to continue without consequence. Such impunity creates a chilling effect of self-censorship, restraint, and fear among journalists.
Emblematic cases
We remember the journalists Kristian Uriel Martínez Zavala andCalletano de Jesús Guerrero, killed in Mexico in 2025. …
Mexico’s ongoing crisis is no accident. It is the result of entrenched impunity and a state either unable or unwilling to protect those who bring truth to light.
We urge the Mexican State to:
Take concrete steps to guarantee that journalists in Mexico can exercise their right to freedom of expression without fear of reprisals.
Review and strengthen the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, ensuring that effective measures are deployed swiftly.
Undertake thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the killings of and attacks on journalists, and deliver effective justice for victims and their families.
Former UN inquiry chair Navi Pillay says ‘what’s so unusual about this genocide’ is that ‘we are all witnesses to it’
Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – on Gaza, there is one to which Navi Pillay returns: a lone shell, fired by the Israel Defense Forces at the Al-Basma fertility clinic in December 2023. A single strike that wiped out 4,000 embryos in a moment.
For 20 years, populists have been blaming the ECHR for endangering Britain by offering basic protections to immigrants
In the latest series of Blue Lights, the BBC drama about police officers in Belfast, there’s a scene where a constable insists on staying with a mentally ill man until a nurse arrives. “This is an article two issue,” the officer tells his colleague – by which he means that under article two of the European convention on human rights (ECHR), incorporated into UK law by the 1998 Human Rights Act, the state has a duty to protect life. It is an uncontroversial example of how the ECHR, which turns 75 this week, has found its way into everyday life across the UK.
In Westminster, withdrawal from the ECHR has become a new rallying cry for the right, which claims it is the solution to unauthorised migration. In early October, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives said they want to take the UK out of the convention if they win the next election. Last week, MPs voted down a largely symbolic proposal by Reform’s Nigel Farage to do the same. The right’s hope is that it will become a wedge issue similar to Brexit. “We are not sovereign all the while we are part of the European convention on human rights,” Farage claimed.
Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities
A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.
In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.
Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities
A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.
In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.
The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it “regrets” the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to grant the Tel Aviv government 30 days to respond to a petition to allow journalists access to the Gaza Strip following the ceasefire.
RSF said in a statement it believes the blockade on access — in place for more than two years — remains illegal, unjustifiable and contrary to the public’s fundamental right to news and information, and should be lifted at once.
During a hearing before the Supreme Court on October 23 — in which RSF participated as an interested party having contributed an amicus brief in the petition by the Jerusalem-based Foreign Press Association (FPA) — the Israeli government acknowledged that the ceasefire constituted a significant change in circumstances justifying a review of its policy on journalists’ access.
The court ordered the Israeli government to present a clear position on its blockade in light of the new circumstances but granted it another 30 days to do this, despite the urgency of the situation and although the Israeli government had already benefited from six postponements since the start of these proceedings.
“If the blockade preventing journalists from entering Gaza was already illegal and seriously violated the fundamental right to information of the Palestinian, Israeli, and international public, it is now totally unjustifiable,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.
“RSF deplores the Supreme Court’s decision to give the Israeli government 30 days to reach this obvious conclusion, and calls on the Israeli government to open Gaza’s borders to journalists immediately and without conditions.”
Israel has closed off Gaza and denied external journalists’ independent access to the besieged territory since 7 October 2023.
To counter this ban, RSF has joined the FPA’s petition for the Gaza Strip’s borders to be opened to independent entry by journalists, andfiled an amicus brief with the Israeli Supreme Court on October 15 that was designed to help the judges understand the FPA’s position.
This major investigative documentary examines the facts surrounding the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Akleh, as she was reporting in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, in May 2022.
Palestine: Who killed Shireen? Video: Al Jazeera
It sets out to discover who killed her — and after months of painstaking research, succeeds in identifying the Israeli sniper who pulled the trigger.
Eleven Al Jazeera journalists have been killed by the Israeli military among at least 248 Gaza media workers slain by the IDF, reports Anadolu Ajansı,
“Nearly nine out of 10 journalists killings remain unresolved. Gaza has been the deadliest place for journalists in any conflict,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman to the UN secretary-general, told reporters.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “independent, impartial” investigations into the killings of journalists, emphasising that “impunity is an assault on press freedom and a threat to democracy itself,” Dujarric said.
“When journalists are silenced, we all lose our voice,” he said.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it “regrets” the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to grant the Tel Aviv government 30 days to respond to a petition to allow journalists access to the Gaza Strip following the ceasefire.
RSF said in a statement it believes the blockade on access — in place for more than two years — remains illegal, unjustifiable and contrary to the public’s fundamental right to news and information, and should be lifted at once.
During a hearing before the Supreme Court on October 23 — in which RSF participated as an interested party having contributed an amicus brief in the petition by the Jerusalem-based Foreign Press Association (FPA) — the Israeli government acknowledged that the ceasefire constituted a significant change in circumstances justifying a review of its policy on journalists’ access.
The court ordered the Israeli government to present a clear position on its blockade in light of the new circumstances but granted it another 30 days to do this, despite the urgency of the situation and although the Israeli government had already benefited from six postponements since the start of these proceedings.
“If the blockade preventing journalists from entering Gaza was already illegal and seriously violated the fundamental right to information of the Palestinian, Israeli, and international public, it is now totally unjustifiable,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.
“RSF deplores the Supreme Court’s decision to give the Israeli government 30 days to reach this obvious conclusion, and calls on the Israeli government to open Gaza’s borders to journalists immediately and without conditions.”
Israel has closed off Gaza and denied external journalists’ independent access to the besieged territory since 7 October 2023.
To counter this ban, RSF has joined the FPA’s petition for the Gaza Strip’s borders to be opened to independent entry by journalists, andfiled an amicus brief with the Israeli Supreme Court on October 15 that was designed to help the judges understand the FPA’s position.
This major investigative documentary examines the facts surrounding the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Akleh, as she was reporting in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, in May 2022.
Palestine: Who killed Shireen? Video: Al Jazeera
It sets out to discover who killed her — and after months of painstaking research, succeeds in identifying the Israeli sniper who pulled the trigger.
Eleven Al Jazeera journalists have been killed by the Israeli military among at least 248 Gaza media workers slain by the IDF, reports Anadolu Ajansı,
“Nearly nine out of 10 journalists killings remain unresolved. Gaza has been the deadliest place for journalists in any conflict,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman to the UN secretary-general, told reporters.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “independent, impartial” investigations into the killings of journalists, emphasising that “impunity is an assault on press freedom and a threat to democracy itself,” Dujarric said.
“When journalists are silenced, we all lose our voice,” he said.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
It has been more than two weeks since world leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh and declared, once again, that the path to peace in the Middle East had been found. As with previous such declarations, the Palestinians, the people who must live that peace, were left out.
Today, Israel holds the fragile ceasefire hostage while the world is fixated on the search for the remaining bodies of its dead captives.
There is no talk of the Palestinian right to search for and honour their own dead, to mourn publicly the loss.
The idea of reconstruction is dangled before the residents of Gaza. Those who call for it from abroad seem to envision just clearing rubble, pouring concrete, and rehabilitating infrastructure.
There is no talk of rebuilding people — restoring their institutions, dignity, and sense of belonging.
But this is what Palestinians need. True reconstruction must focus on the people of Gaza and it must begin not with cement but with the restoration of classrooms and learning.
It must begin with young people who have survived the unthinkable and still dare to dream. Without them — without Palestinian educators and students at the centre — no rebuilding effort can endure.
Reconstruction without exclusion The plans for governance and reconstruction of Gaza currently circulating are excluding those Palestinians most affected by the genocide. Many aspects of these plans are designed to control rather than empower — to install new overseers instead of nurturing local leadership.
They prioritise Israel’s security over Palestinian wellbeing and self-determination.
We have seen what such exclusion leads to in the Palestinian context: dependency, frustration and despair.
As scholars who have worked for years alongside Palestinian academics and students, we have also seen the central role education plays in Palestinian society.
That is why we believe that reconstruction has to start with education, including higher education. And that process has to include and be led by the Palestinians themselves. Palestinian educators, academics and students have already demonstrated they have the strength to persevere and rebuild.
Gaza’s universities, for example, have been models of resilience. Even as their campuses were razed to the ground, professors and scholars continued to teach and research in makeshift shelters, tents, and public squares — sustaining international partnerships and giving purpose to the most vital part of society: young people.
In Gaza, universities are not only places of study; they are sanctuaries of thought, compassion, solidarity and continuity — the fragile infrastructure of imagination.
Without them, who will train the doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, lawyers, and engineers that Gaza needs? Who will provide safe spaces for dialogue, reflection, and decision-making — the foundations of any functioning society?
We know that there can be no viable future for Palestinians without strong educational and cultural institutions that rebuild confidence, restore dignity and sustain hope.
Solidarity, not paternalism Over the past two years, something remarkable has happened. University campuses across the world — from the United States to South Africa, from Europe to Latin America — have become sites of moral awakening.
Students and professors have stood together against the genocide in Gaza, demanding an end to the war and calling for justice and accountability. Their sit-ins, vigils and encampments have reminded us that universities are not only places of learning but crucibles of conscience.
This global uprising within education was not merely symbolic; it was a reassertion of what scholarship is about. When students risk disciplinary action to defend life and dignity, they remind us that knowledge divorced from humanity is meaningless.
The solidarity they have demonstrated must set the tone for how institutions of higher education approach engagement with and the rebuilding of Gaza’s universities.
The world’s universities must listen, collaborate and commit for the long term. They can build partnerships with Gaza’s institutions, share expertise, support research and help reconstruct the intellectual infrastructure of a society. Fellowships, joint projects, remote teaching and open digital resources are small steps that can make a vast difference.
Initiatives like those of Friends of Palestinian Universities (formally Fobzu), the University of Glasgow and HBKU’s summits, and the Qatar Foundation’s Education Above All already show what sustained cooperation can achieve. Now that spirit of solidarity must expand — grounded in respect and dignity and guided by Palestinian leaders.
The global academic community has a moral duty to stand with Gaza, but solidarity must not slide into paternalism. Reconstruction should not be a charitable gesture; it should be an act of justice.
The Palestinian higher education sector does not need a Western blueprint or a consultant’s template. It needs partnerships that listen and respond, that build capacity on Palestinian terms.
It needs trusted relationships for the long term.
Research that saves lives Reconstruction is never just technical; it is moral. A new political ecology must grow from within Gaza itself, shaped by experience rather than imported models. The slow, generational work of education is the only path that can lead out from the endless cycles of destruction.
The challenges ahead demand scientific, medical and legal ingenuity. For example, asbestos from destroyed buildings now contaminates Gaza’s air, threatening an epidemic of lung cancer.
That danger alone requires urgent research collaboration and knowledge-sharing. It needs time to think and consider, conferences, meetings, exchanges of scholarships — the lifeblood of normal scholarly activity.
Then there is the chaos of property ownership and inheritance in a place that has been bulldozed by a genocidal army. Lawyers and social scientists will be needed to address this crisis and restore ownership, resolve disputes and document destruction for future justice.
There are also the myriad war crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Forensic archaeologists, linguists, psychologists and journalists will help people process grief, preserve memory and articulate loss in their own words.
Every discipline has a role to play. Education ties them together, transforming knowledge into survival — and survival into hope.
Preserving memory As Gaza tries to move on from the genocide, it must also have space to mourn and preserve memory, for peace without truth becomes amnesia. There can be no renewal without grief, no reconciliation without naming loss.
Every ruined home, every vanished family deserves to be documented, acknowledged and remembered as part of Gaza’s history, not erased in the name of expedience. Through this difficult process, new methodologies of care will inevitably come into being. The acts of remembering are a cornerstone of justice.
Education can help here, too — through literature, art, history, and faith — by giving form to sorrow and turning it into the soil from which resilience grows. Here, the fragile and devasted landscape of Gaza, the more-than-human-world can also be healed through education, and only then we will have on the land once again, “all that makes life worth living”, to use a verse from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Rebuilding Gaza will, of course, require cranes and engineers. But more than that, it will require teachers, students and scholars who know how to learn and how to practise skilfully. The work of peace begins not with cement mixers but with curiosity, compassion and courage.
Even amid the rubble, and the ashlaa’, the strewn body parts of the staff and students we have lost to the violence, Gaza’s universities remain alive. They are the keepers of its memory and the makers of its future — the proof that learning itself is an act of resistance, and that education is and must remain the first step towards sustainable peace.
Sultan Barakat is professor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, honorary professor at the University of York, and a member of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute ICMD Expert Reference Group. Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for refugee integration through education, languages and arts at the University of Glasgow. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Defence Minister Judith Collins says the liaison officer will work from a United States-led Civil Military Coordination Centre, initially for six weeks.
She said it would act as a coordination hub for support to Gaza, monitor the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, and support the implementation of the 20-Point Peace Plan to end the war in Gaza.
“The deployment will improve New Zealand’s understanding of co-ordination efforts on the ground and enable us to better assess options for any potential future contributions to the centre or other initiatives in support of sustained peace in Gaza,” she said.
She said this would improve New Zealand’s understanding of efforts on the ground and enable a better assessment of future contributions to the centre, or other initiatives to support peace in Gaza.
Future deployments would be a decision for the government.
Add to this that the Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister, Sharren Haskel, visited NZ last weekend to thank evangelical Christian freaks who empower them and the Zionesik apologist groups who threaten everyone with anti-semitism for criticising Israel’s genocide and we are now in danger of being seen as an ally for war criminals.
We are on the side of genocide because this New Zealand government has no morality whatsoever.
Kiwis have cut their Jacinda off to spite their race to justify the way their post-covid bitterness has been manipulated into agreeing to this.
For shame New Zealand.
For shame.
Editor’s note: Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel met the PNG, Fijian and Samoan prime ministers on her week-long drumming up Pacific support last week, but while she met rightwing Destiny Church leaders, she did not meet any cabinet ministers on her unofficial visit to New Zealand. Republished with permission.
A classified US State Department report found that Israeli soldiers committed “many hundreds” of potential violations of US human rights law in the Gaza Strip that would require “multiple years” to review, the Washington Post reported on 31 October.
Details of the report prepared by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General were provided to The Post by two US officials.
The report has, for the first time, “acknowledged the scale of Israeli actions in Gaza that fall under the purview of Leahy Laws, the landmark legislation that bars US security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of gross human rights abuses,” the newspaper wrote.
However, the Office of Inspector General report “raised doubts about the prospects for accountability for Israel’s actions given the large backlog of incidents and the nature of the review process, which is deferential to the Israel Defense Forces,” The Post added.
Today marks 108 years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and New Zealand pro-Palestinian protest groups have condemned this infamous date in rallies across the country.
“Britain promised a land that wasn’t theirs to give,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair Maher Nazzal.
“That single act of colonial arrogance set in motion more than a century of displacement, occupation, and suffering for the Palestinian people.
“It’s time for the world, including Aotearoa New Zealand, to stand firmly for justice, equality, and the right of Palestinians to live free on their land.”
Reporting on the Auckland rally and march yesterday, Bruce King said Janfrie Wakim, a longtime stalwart of pro-Palestine activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, had criticised the Balfour Declaration that had promised Palestine as a Jewish state.
‘Mendacious, deceitful’
She quoted the late British journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk calling it “the most mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document in British history”.
Opposition Labour MP and shadow attorney-general Vanushi Walters outlined discussions over sanctions legislation against Israel in preparation for the party winning next year’s general election.
The opposition Labour Party currently leads in most opinion polls.
The infamous Balfour Declaration by Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917. Image: MN screenshot APR
Greens MP Ricardo Menéndez protested against the NZ government having signed a free trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this year.
This week, the rebel RSF (Rapid Support Forces) fighters that the UAE is accused of backing overran the city of El Fasher, capital of Darfur in Sudan, and carried out massacres of civilians, reports the United Nations.
Al Jazeera reports the Balfour Declaration (Balfour’s “promise” in Arabic) turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine into a reality when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” there.
The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the brutality that the emerging Zionist state of Israel inflicted on the Palestinian people.
It is regarded as one of the most controversial and criticised documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades.
On Friday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued the first clear United Nations (UN) condemnation of US military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, calling them unacceptable and demanding they stop.
“These attacks, and their mounting human cost, are unacceptable,” Turk said. “The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”
“Over 60 people have reportedly been killed in a continuing series of attacks carried out by US armed forces against boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since early September, in circumstances that find no justification in international law,” he stated.
November 5 marks the day that has been set aside to acknowledge Parihaka and the courageous and peaceful resistance of the people against the armed militia that invaded their village in 1881.
This year, Parihaka will be the focus of an international conference held in New Plymouth Ngā Motu on November 5 – 8.
This is the first time that an IPRA conference has been held in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the first time it has had the theme of “Indigenous peacebuilding”.
The conference will begin with a pōwhiri and hāngī at Ōwae Marae, the traditional home of the Te Atiawa iwi, one of the Taranaki tribes that has a close association with Parihaka.
Tribal leaders such as Wharehoka Wano, Ruakere Hond, Puna-Wano Bryant, and Tonga Karena from Parihaka will be among the welcoming speakers at the marae.
Other keynote speakers for the conference will include Rosa Moiwend, an independent researcher and human rights activist from West Papua; Professor Asmi Wood, who works on constitutional rights for Aboriginal people; Akilah Jaramoji, a Caribbean Human Rights Activist; Bettina Washington, a Wampanoag Elder working with Indigenous Sharing Circles; Vivian Camacho with her knowledge of ancestral Indigenous health practices in Boliva and Professor Kevin Clements from the Toda Institute.
Throughout the five-day conference, academic papers will be presented related to both Indigenous and general issues on peace and conflict.
Some of those deal with resistance by women through the music of steelpan in Trinidad and Tobago; collaborative Indigenous research from Turtle Island and the Philippines towards building peace; disarmament and peace education in Aotearoa; cultural violence experienced by minority women in Thailand; permaculture and peace in Myanmar; resistance and peacebuilding of Kankaumo Indigenous people in Colombia; intercultural dialogue for peace in Nigeria; Aboriginal Australian and Tsalagi principles of balance and harmony; the resistance of Roma people through art; auto-ethnographical poetry by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities around the world; and community-led peacebuilding in Melanesia.
Plenary panels include nuclear justice and African negotiations of peace and social justice through non-violent pathways.
Professor Kelli Te Maihāroa (Waitaha, Ngāti Rārua Ātiawa, Taranaki, Tainui Waikato) of the Otago Polytechnic Te Kura Matatini ki Ōtakou, is the co-general secretariate for Asia Pacific Peace Research Association and co-chair of the IPRA conference, along with Professor Matt Mayer who is co-secretary-general of IPRA.
And – to no one’s surprise but what should be the horror of all – the AI systems come preloaded with racism.
Facial recognition and human rights
The UN’s office for human rights, as well as anthropologists and tech experts, have long known that AI systems are inherently racist, either by design or through the biases of their creators — but the police facial recognition systems are going above and beyond in the service of racist discrimination.
Investigative work by civil rights group Big Brother Watch has found that of the people misidentified by these police AI systems, 80% are Black – like anti-knife crime worker Shaun Thompson, who was detained by police and forced to give fingerprints, and Robert Williams, held for thirty hours by police who wrongly thought he was a watch thief.
The Met’s own data show that of more than a thousand people flagged by facial recognition since the beginning of 2025, more than half had no arrest warrants against them – yet the force also insists that nobody has been wrongly arrested since the beginning of 2023, twisting words to claim that because police officers thought the arrests were justified at the time, the arrests were not wrong, as its response to a Freedom of Information Act request shows:
The facial recognition push goes hand in hand with Starmer’s plan to force ‘digital ID’ on anyone who wants to work — and on children in school.
Big Brother Watch Legal and Policy Officer Jasleen Chaggar said:
Live facial recognition is a mass surveillance tool that risks making London feel like an open prison, and the prospect of the Met expanding facial recognition even more across the city is disproportionate and chilling.
Far from police using these cameras to find serious wanted criminals, the Met’s report shows that the majority of people flagged by facial recognition were not wanted for arrest.
It’s disturbing that 80% of the innocent people wrongly flagged by facial recognition were black. We all want police to have the tools they need to cut crime but this is an Orwellian and authoritarian technology that treats millions of innocent people like suspects and risks serious injustice.
No law in this country has ever been passed to govern live facial recognition. Given the breathtaking risk to the public’s privacy, it’s long overdue that the government bans its use.
The Director General of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Munir al-Barsh, said that the bodies of the 30 martyrs received by the ministry on Friday were “the most difficult and most damaged” of all those recently handed over by the Israeli occupation. In Gaza, bodies are a common sight — but this was different.
In a press statement on Saturday, al-Barsh explained that Israeli forces delivered most of the bodies in a state of near-complete decomposition, while others were nothing but bones. Many had lost their facial features entirely — the result, he said, of torture and long burial under the sand.
He added that the occupation “tortured and executed the owners of these bodies, then buried them and later exhumed them for handover,” which caused the melting and severe disfigurement of their tissues.
Al-Barsh noted that some bodies still wore torn clothes and shoes — details that may help families identify their loved ones, despite the near impossibility of the task. Many bore visible signs of gunfire, brutal abuse, and even being run over by tanks.
He confirmed that the Ministry of Health would follow its usual procedures in such cases, allowing the families of the martyrs to view and attempt to identify the bodies before burial.
The health official revealed that of the 255 bodies received since the ceasefire agreement took effect, families have been able to identify only 75 martyrs. Authorities have already buried the remaining 120 unidentified victims
On Friday, the Israeli occupation army handed over the bodies of 30 martyrs as part of the fifth batch of the exchange deal with the Palestinian resistance — still without providing any official list of names.
Patricia Egessa, Director of Global Communications, published this NGO assessment:
Looking back at the year 2000 from a gender justice perspective is sobering. The previous decade had famously been declared as ‘the end of history’ by Western male political pundits. But women knew better. As conflicts continued to rage with devastating and disproportionate impacts on women and families, gender justice activists decided history still had some way to go and demanded a central role in peacebuilding. Their efforts galvanized the adoption of the pathbreaking UN Resolution 1325, which established the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.
As the WPS agenda marks its 25th anniversary, civil society organizations are uniting to reaffirm the importance of women’s full and meaningful participation and leadership in global processes. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security has released its annual Open Letter calling on the international community to defend the core values of the WPS agenda amid growing threats to women’s rights globally. We cite just a part of that letter as a statement of our shared concern:
Yet, when we should be paying tribute to the hard-fought achievements of these feminist movements, we are instead confronting an alarming backlash against women’s autonomy and rights, and against those who advocate for them, at a time when the consequences of armed conflict and crises on the lives of women and girls could not be more devastating. The very term gender—a core concept in international human rights law mobilized by feminist movements for decades to challenge the systematic oppression of women and LGBTQIA+ people—is today being blatantly undermined by anti-gender movements globally, including at the United Nations (UN). Civil society and human rights defenders around the world, especially those defending gender equality, women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights, are being targeted for who they are and the work they do. Combined with rising militarism, erosion of respect for international law, capitalist exploitation and slashing of funding for gender equality and women’s rights organizations, these attacks have thrown our work and our movements into crisis, even as the vision of the WPS agenda is more necessary than ever.
ICRW has proudly signed on to this collective statement precisely for the reason so clearly articulated in this letter: to remain silent as the WPS agenda and those who advocate for it are attacked not only undermines decades of progress but jeopardizes peace and security for everyone. Twenty-five years after the adoption of the UN resolution, our work is unfinished. We join over 600 organizations worldwide in ensuring that our unified voice reaches the UN Security Council, governments, and the world’s citizens who understand and support a more peaceful world for our children.
More than a quarter of Australia’s National Press Club sponsors are part of the global arms industry or working on its behalf. Michelle Fahy reports.
ANALYSIS:By Michelle Fahy
The National Press Club of Australia lists 81 corporate sponsors on its website. Of those, 10 are multinational weapons manufacturers or military services corporations, and another eleven provide services to the arms industry, including consultants KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY.
They include the world’s two biggest weapons makers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (RTX); British giant BAE Systems; France’s largest weapons-maker, Thales; and US weapons corporation Leidos — all of which are in the global top 20.
BAE Systems, which is the largest contractor to the Department of Defence, received $2 billion from Australian taxpayers last year.
In 2023, those five corporations alone were responsible for almost a quarter of total weapons sales ($973 billion) by the world’s top 100 weapons companies that year.
Last year, UN experts named Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, RTX (Raytheon) and eight other multinationals in a statement, warning them that they risked being found in violation of international law for their continued supply of weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces.
The experts called on the corporations to immediately end weapons transfers to Israel.
None has done so.
Another of the club’s sponsors, Thales, is being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. In a fourth, long-running corruption case in South Africa, the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is now in court, alongside Thales, being tried on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and money laundering in connection with arms deals his government did with Thales.
Global expert Andrew Feinstein has documented his extensive research into the arms industry. He told Undue Influence that wherever the arms trade operates, it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”.
Undue Influence asked the Press Club’s CEO, Maurice Reilly, what written policies or guidelines were in place that addressed the suitability and selection of corporations proposing to become Press Club sponsors.
Reilly responded: “The board are informed monthly about . . . proposals and have the right to refuse any application.”
National Press Club The National Press Club, established by journalists in 1963, is an iconic Australian institution. It is best known for its weekly luncheon addresses, televised on the ABC, covering issues of national importance, after which the speaker is questioned by journalists.
The club’s board has 10 directors led by Tom Connell, political host and reporter at Sky News, who was elected president in February following the resignation of the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The other board members are current and former mainstream media journalists, as well as at least two board members who have jobs that involve lobbying.
Long-term board member Steve Lewis works as a senior adviser for lobbying firm SEC Newgate, which itself is a Press Club sponsor and also has as clients the Press Club’s two largest sponsors: Westpac and Telstra.
SEC Newgate has previously acted for several Press Club sponsors, including Serco (one of the arms industry multinationals listed below), BHP, Macquarie Bank, Tattarang, and Spirits & Cocktails Australia Inc.
Gemma Daley joined the board a year ago, having started with Ai Group as its head of media and government affairs four months earlier. Daley had worked for Nationals’ leader David Littleproud, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Joe Hockey, and, before that, for media outlets The Financial Review and Bloomberg.
Ai Group has a significant defence focus and promotes itself as “the peak national representative body for the Australian defence industry”. The group has established a Defence Council and, in 2017, appointed a former assistant secretary of the Defence Department, Kate Louis, to lead it.
The co-chairs of its Defence Council are senior arms industry executives. One of them, Paul Chase, is CEO of Leidos Australia, a Press Club sponsor.
Conflicts of interest Undue Influence asked Daley for comment on several aspects related to her position on the board, including whether she has had to declare any conflicts of interest to date. She responded: “Thanks for the inquiry. I have forwarded this through to Maurice Reilly. Have a good day.”
Given the potential for conflicts of interest to arise, as happens on any board, Undue Influence had already asked the Press Club CEO what written policies or guidelines existed to ensure the appropriate management of conflicts of interest by board members and staff. Reilly responded:
“The club has a directors’ conflict register which is updated when required. Each meeting, board members and management are asked if they have conflicts of interest with the meeting agenda. We have a standard corporate practice that where a director has a conflict on an agenda item they excuse themselves from the meeting and take no [part] in any discussion or any decision.”
MWM is neither alleging nor implying inappropriate or illegal behaviour by anyone named in this article.
Selling access While Reilly declined to disclose the club’s sponsorship arrangements with Westpac and Telstra, citing “commercial in confidence” reasons, The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that Westpac paid $3 million in 2015 to replace NAB as the Press Club’s principal sponsor.
The SMH article, “Westpac centre stage at post-budget bash”, on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House in late March, added:
“(Westpac) . . . gets more than its money’s worth in terms of access. New-ish chief executive Anthony Miller got the most coveted seat in the house, between Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese . . . Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles were also on the front tables.
“Westpac occupied prime real estate in the Great Hall, with guests on its tables including Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Glyn Davis, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Labor national secretary and campaign mastermind Paul Erickson…
“Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was on the Telstra table.”
Reilly told Undue Influence that all the other corporate sponsors pay $25,000 a year, with a few paying extra as partners in the club’s journalism awards.
The 21 arms industry and related sponsors, therefore, contribute an annual $525,000 to the Press Club’s coffers. This is 23 percent of the $2.26 million revenue it earns from “membership, sponsorship and broadcasting”, the club’s largest revenue line for the 2024 financial year.
“The National Press Club of Australia proudly partners with organisations that share our commitment to quality, independent journalism,” says the club’s website.
Acclaimed journalist and Middle East expert Chris Hedges . . . the National Press Club cancelled a planned speech by him, reportedly under pressure. Image: The Chris Hedges Report
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on September 10, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Compare this with two addresses given by $25,000 corporate sponsors — Kurt Campbell (former US deputy secretary of state, now co-founder and chair of The Asia Group), who gave an address on September 7; and Mike Johnson, CEO of Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), who gave an address on October 15. Neither the Press Club nor the speakers disclosed the companies’ sponsorship of the Press Club.
The club also promotes additional benefits of corporate sponsorship, including “Brand association with inclusion on our prestigious ‘Corporate Partners’ board and recognition on the National Press Club of Australia website”.
The club also promises corporate sponsors that they will receive “priority seating and brand positioning” at its weekly luncheon addresses.
Profiting from genocide In July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, issued a report explaining how the corporate sector had become complicit with the State of Israel in conducting the genocide.
Albanese highlighted Lockheed Martin and the F-35 programme, which has 1650 companies worldwide in its supply chain. More than 75 of those companies are Australian.
Her report also noted that arms-making multinationals depend on legal, auditing and consulting firms to facilitate export and import transactions to supply Israel with weapons.
Four of the world’s largest accounting, audit and consulting firms — all of which have arms industry corporations as clients — are sponsors of the Press Club: KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY. Until recently, PwC counted among them.
EY (Ernst & Young) has been Lockheed Martin’s auditor since 1994. EY is also one of two auditors used by Thales, and has been for 22 years. Deloitte has been BAE Systems’ auditor since 2018. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — a Press Club sponsor until 2024 — has been Raytheon’s auditor since 1947.
Lockheed Martin’s supply to Israel of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and C-130 Hercules transport planes, and their parts and components, along with Hellfire missiles and other munitions, has directly facilitated Israel’s genocide.
Raytheon’s (RTX) supply of guided missiles, bombs, and other advanced weaponry and defence systems, like the Iron Dome interceptors, also directly supports Israel’s military capability.
In England, BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage of every F-35, with the horizontal and vertical tails and other crucial components manufactured in its UK and Australian facilities. It also supplies the Israeli military with munitions, missile launching kits and armoured vehicles, while BAE technologies are integrated into Israel’s drones and warships.
Thales supplies Israel’s military with vital components, including drone transponders. Australian Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were murdered by an Israeli Hermes drone, which contained Thales’ transponders. Yet, echoing Australia, France claims its military exports to Israel are non-lethal.
Michelle Fahy is an independent Australian writer and researcher, specialising in the examination of connections between the weapons industry and government. She writes for various independent publications and on Substack on Undueinfluence.substack.com This article was first published on Undueinfluence and Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
More than a quarter of Australia’s National Press Club sponsors are part of the global arms industry or working on its behalf. Michelle Fahy reports.
ANALYSIS:By Michelle Fahy
The National Press Club of Australia lists 81 corporate sponsors on its website. Of those, 10 are multinational weapons manufacturers or military services corporations, and another eleven provide services to the arms industry, including consultants KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY.
They include the world’s two biggest weapons makers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (RTX); British giant BAE Systems; France’s largest weapons-maker, Thales; and US weapons corporation Leidos — all of which are in the global top 20.
BAE Systems, which is the largest contractor to the Department of Defence, received $2 billion from Australian taxpayers last year.
In 2023, those five corporations alone were responsible for almost a quarter of total weapons sales ($973 billion) by the world’s top 100 weapons companies that year.
Last year, UN experts named Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, RTX (Raytheon) and eight other multinationals in a statement, warning them that they risked being found in violation of international law for their continued supply of weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces.
The experts called on the corporations to immediately end weapons transfers to Israel.
None has done so.
Another of the club’s sponsors, Thales, is being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. In a fourth, long-running corruption case in South Africa, the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is now in court, alongside Thales, being tried on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and money laundering in connection with arms deals his government did with Thales.
Global expert Andrew Feinstein has documented his extensive research into the arms industry. He told Undue Influence that wherever the arms trade operates, it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”.
Undue Influence asked the Press Club’s CEO, Maurice Reilly, what written policies or guidelines were in place that addressed the suitability and selection of corporations proposing to become Press Club sponsors.
Reilly responded: “The board are informed monthly about . . . proposals and have the right to refuse any application.”
National Press Club The National Press Club, established by journalists in 1963, is an iconic Australian institution. It is best known for its weekly luncheon addresses, televised on the ABC, covering issues of national importance, after which the speaker is questioned by journalists.
The club’s board has 10 directors led by Tom Connell, political host and reporter at Sky News, who was elected president in February following the resignation of the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The other board members are current and former mainstream media journalists, as well as at least two board members who have jobs that involve lobbying.
Long-term board member Steve Lewis works as a senior adviser for lobbying firm SEC Newgate, which itself is a Press Club sponsor and also has as clients the Press Club’s two largest sponsors: Westpac and Telstra.
SEC Newgate has previously acted for several Press Club sponsors, including Serco (one of the arms industry multinationals listed below), BHP, Macquarie Bank, Tattarang, and Spirits & Cocktails Australia Inc.
Gemma Daley joined the board a year ago, having started with Ai Group as its head of media and government affairs four months earlier. Daley had worked for Nationals’ leader David Littleproud, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Joe Hockey, and, before that, for media outlets The Financial Review and Bloomberg.
Ai Group has a significant defence focus and promotes itself as “the peak national representative body for the Australian defence industry”. The group has established a Defence Council and, in 2017, appointed a former assistant secretary of the Defence Department, Kate Louis, to lead it.
The co-chairs of its Defence Council are senior arms industry executives. One of them, Paul Chase, is CEO of Leidos Australia, a Press Club sponsor.
Conflicts of interest Undue Influence asked Daley for comment on several aspects related to her position on the board, including whether she has had to declare any conflicts of interest to date. She responded: “Thanks for the inquiry. I have forwarded this through to Maurice Reilly. Have a good day.”
Given the potential for conflicts of interest to arise, as happens on any board, Undue Influence had already asked the Press Club CEO what written policies or guidelines existed to ensure the appropriate management of conflicts of interest by board members and staff. Reilly responded:
“The club has a directors’ conflict register which is updated when required. Each meeting, board members and management are asked if they have conflicts of interest with the meeting agenda. We have a standard corporate practice that where a director has a conflict on an agenda item they excuse themselves from the meeting and take no [part] in any discussion or any decision.”
MWM is neither alleging nor implying inappropriate or illegal behaviour by anyone named in this article.
Selling access While Reilly declined to disclose the club’s sponsorship arrangements with Westpac and Telstra, citing “commercial in confidence” reasons, The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that Westpac paid $3 million in 2015 to replace NAB as the Press Club’s principal sponsor.
The SMH article, “Westpac centre stage at post-budget bash”, on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House in late March, added:
“(Westpac) . . . gets more than its money’s worth in terms of access. New-ish chief executive Anthony Miller got the most coveted seat in the house, between Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese . . . Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles were also on the front tables.
“Westpac occupied prime real estate in the Great Hall, with guests on its tables including Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Glyn Davis, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Labor national secretary and campaign mastermind Paul Erickson…
“Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was on the Telstra table.”
Reilly told Undue Influence that all the other corporate sponsors pay $25,000 a year, with a few paying extra as partners in the club’s journalism awards.
The 21 arms industry and related sponsors, therefore, contribute an annual $525,000 to the Press Club’s coffers. This is 23 percent of the $2.26 million revenue it earns from “membership, sponsorship and broadcasting”, the club’s largest revenue line for the 2024 financial year.
“The National Press Club of Australia proudly partners with organisations that share our commitment to quality, independent journalism,” says the club’s website.
Acclaimed journalist and Middle East expert Chris Hedges . . . the National Press Club cancelled a planned speech by him, reportedly under pressure. Image: The Chris Hedges Report
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on September 10, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Compare this with two addresses given by $25,000 corporate sponsors — Kurt Campbell (former US deputy secretary of state, now co-founder and chair of The Asia Group), who gave an address on September 7; and Mike Johnson, CEO of Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), who gave an address on October 15. Neither the Press Club nor the speakers disclosed the companies’ sponsorship of the Press Club.
The club also promotes additional benefits of corporate sponsorship, including “Brand association with inclusion on our prestigious ‘Corporate Partners’ board and recognition on the National Press Club of Australia website”.
The club also promises corporate sponsors that they will receive “priority seating and brand positioning” at its weekly luncheon addresses.
Profiting from genocide In July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, issued a report explaining how the corporate sector had become complicit with the State of Israel in conducting the genocide.
Albanese highlighted Lockheed Martin and the F-35 programme, which has 1650 companies worldwide in its supply chain. More than 75 of those companies are Australian.
Her report also noted that arms-making multinationals depend on legal, auditing and consulting firms to facilitate export and import transactions to supply Israel with weapons.
Four of the world’s largest accounting, audit and consulting firms — all of which have arms industry corporations as clients — are sponsors of the Press Club: KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY. Until recently, PwC counted among them.
EY (Ernst & Young) has been Lockheed Martin’s auditor since 1994. EY is also one of two auditors used by Thales, and has been for 22 years. Deloitte has been BAE Systems’ auditor since 2018. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — a Press Club sponsor until 2024 — has been Raytheon’s auditor since 1947.
Lockheed Martin’s supply to Israel of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and C-130 Hercules transport planes, and their parts and components, along with Hellfire missiles and other munitions, has directly facilitated Israel’s genocide.
Raytheon’s (RTX) supply of guided missiles, bombs, and other advanced weaponry and defence systems, like the Iron Dome interceptors, also directly supports Israel’s military capability.
In England, BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage of every F-35, with the horizontal and vertical tails and other crucial components manufactured in its UK and Australian facilities. It also supplies the Israeli military with munitions, missile launching kits and armoured vehicles, while BAE technologies are integrated into Israel’s drones and warships.
Thales supplies Israel’s military with vital components, including drone transponders. Australian Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were murdered by an Israeli Hermes drone, which contained Thales’ transponders. Yet, echoing Australia, France claims its military exports to Israel are non-lethal.
Michelle Fahy is an independent Australian writer and researcher, specialising in the examination of connections between the weapons industry and government. She writes for various independent publications and on Substack on Undueinfluence.substack.com This article was first published on Undueinfluence and Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
Abdulrahman al-Qaradawi has been imprisoned in the UAE for almost a year for criticising Emirati, Egyptian and Saudi governments
The UN special rapporteur on torture is being urged to investigate Lebanon’s role in the treatment of the Egyptian-Turkish poet and activist Abdulrahman al-Qaradawi, a dissident who has been imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates for more than 10 months over a post he made on social media.
Legal counsel representing Qaradawi filed a complaint to the UN rapporteur on Thursday, asking it to examine the situation.
Palestinian officials have accused Israel of using the issue of captive bodies in the Gaza Strip as a pretext to violate the ceasefire and prolong its military presence in the devastated territory.
The officials said Israel was exploiting the matter to justify new attacks, stop aid entering the territory, and delay the reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
The ceasefire, which came into effect on October 10, was meant to allow humanitarian relief and a gradual return to calm. Instead, Israel has carried out repeated airstrikes and tightened restrictions on aid deliveries.
Overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, the Israeli army launched dozens of raids on Gaza City. At least 100 Palestinians were killed and many more wounded.
The Israeli army claimed the attacks were in response to delays in handing over Israeli remains and to the killing of a soldier by a sniper in Rafah, which is under full Israeli control.
Hamas said this week that it had recovered two additional Israeli bodies — one in Khan Younis and another in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, delayed handing them over because Israel “breached the agreement” with new airstrikes on Gaza.
Despite limited Egyptian equipment entering the Gaza Strip to help with recovery efforts, Israel continues to block the entry of heavy machinery and specialist teams.
11 bodies remain lost
With the two bodies newly recovered, Hamas said 11 remain lost in Gaza. Israeli officials admit they lack information on about five of them, meaning they may not be located soon.
Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas in Gaza, said finding the remaining bodies was extremely difficult. Vast destruction and the deaths of fighters who had guarded captives had made recovery operations almost impossible.
At least 10,000 Palestinian bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble.
Since the truce began, Palestinian factions have handed over 20 living Israeli captives and about 15 bodies. Some were killed by Israeli strikes during the war; others died on 7 October 2023, at the start of the conflict.
Ahmad al-Tanani, director of the Arab Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, said Israel created the very conditions that now make recovery so difficult.
“This has become a political pretext to sustain a state of no war, no peace and to block the second phase of President Donald Trump’s plan,” he told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
He said not all the bodies were held by Hamas. “They are divided among different factions, and some of those who knew their locations were killed in the war,” he explained.
Al-Tanani added that some Israeli captives were likely killed by the Israeli army’s bombing of sites that held captives.
Israel blocks equipment
“Israel refuses to allow the equipment and technical teams that could help,” he said. “The factions in Gaza have offered every guarantee and even broadcasted recovery attempts live to prove good faith.”
He accused Israel of spreading “a false narrative that the resistance is manipulating the issue” to justify continuing its assault and maintaining constant tension in Gaza. This, he said, gave the Israeli army “freedom of movement” and weakened Egyptian mediation efforts aimed at stabilising governance in the Strip.
Tel Aviv, he added, was working to block any path toward a new political reality or a reorganisation of Palestinian leadership.
Israeli affairs analyst Firas Yaghi said Israel was using the bodies as “a political card” to stop progress toward the next stage of Trump’s plan, which calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and renewed political talks.
“Netanyahu is using the issue to justify Israel’s continued military presence deep inside Gaza under the pretext of searching for the missing,” Yaghi told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Gaza’s changed landscape
He said Israeli intelligence “knows that some bodies were lost under the rubble due to intense bombardment that changed Gaza’s landscape completely”.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, he noted, had warned against letting the issue block the ceasefire. But “the current government prefers to exploit it for domestic political gain”.
Yaghi also criticised the United States for what he described as a weak position.
“Trump’s administration and its allies are giving Netanyahu wide freedom of action,” he said. “They ignore repeated ceasefire violations and the ongoing closure of Rafah.”
“If Washington decided to apply real pressure,” Yaghi added, “the plan could still move forward regardless of the handover of bodies. But for now, the US does not want to weaken Netanyahu”.
On 29 October 2025the North-South Centre in Lisbon announced that the 2025 North-South Prize is awarded to Miguel Ángel Moratinos and the Olympic refugee sports initiative
The Council of Europe North-South Prize has been awarded to Miguel Ángel Moratinos, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of civilizations, and to an initiative that enables refugees to compete in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The award ceremony took place at the Portuguese Parliament in Lisbon.
In his speech at the ceremony, Secretary General Alain Berset said: “The Council of Europe is first and foremost a peace project. Peace built on justice and international cooperation – vital for the preservation of human society and civilisation. This is what the North-South Centre is all about. And that is why this prize matters. The recipients we honour today are for dialogue, human dignity, and for hope”.
Miguel Ángel Moratinos has been rewarded for his career in diplomacy and international relations, dedicated to advancing peace – notably in the Middle East, for which he was European Union Special Representative for seven years – and intercultural dialogue between different regions. He has also served, among other roles, as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain.
The initiative enabling refugees to compete in the Olympic and Paralympic Games – led by the Olympic Refuge Foundation, the International Olympic Committee and the International Paralympic Committee – was honoured for their commitment to making the participation of refugee athletes in the Olympic and Paralympic Games possible. By competing on the world stage, these athletes – displaced by conflict, persecution or crises – inspire hope and exemplify the power of sport to unite people in the spirit of fair play, tolerance and cooperation.
The initiative was represented at the ceremony by Nawal El Moutawakel, Vice-President of the International Olympic Committee, Leila Marques, Vice-President of the International Paralympic Committee, and the athletes Cindy Ngamba and Zakia Khudadadi, who made history as the first members of the Refugee Olympic and Paralympic teams to win a medal.
Despite the demoralization and destruction produced by Israel’s two-year-long genocidal campaign on the Palestinians, Israel potentially finds itself at its weakest point in its short history.
In his new book, Israel on the Brink, renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé makes the case that Israel’s current path forward is unsustainable. With a combination of domestic, political, military and international pressures, Israel will continue to destabilize.
Pappé writes, “A potential fall of Israel could either be like the end of South Vietnam, the total erasure of a state, or like South Africa, the fall of a particular ideological regime and its replacement by another. I believe that in the case of Israel, elements of both scenarios will unfold sooner than many of us can comprehend or prepare for.”
A total of 14 people were killed and one survived after the US government conducted three strikes against four small boats in the waters of the Eastern Pacific near Mexico, in what is being described as another extrajudicial killing.
The information was released Tuesday morning by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who claimed on social media that “three lethal kinetic attacks were carried out against four vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations … A total of 14 narcoterrorists died during the three attacks.”
Hegseth claimed that the first attack killed eight people on board two boats, the second killed four men, and the third killed two people. He also claimed that there is one survivor. While writing that “there were no casualties among the US forces,” Hegseth confirmed that the US government had ordered further extrajudicial executions, in flagrant violation of international and US laws.
