A leading Congolese human rights activist killed this week had suffered a pattern of intimidation because of his work, a senior UN official said, as a rights group questioned whether police were already staging a cover-up.
The body of Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, head of Voix des Sans Voix, or Voice of the Voiceless, was found in his car on Wednesday in a suburb of Congo’s capital. The rights group, one of the largest in Congo, said he appeared to have been strangled.
“For more than 20 years, Chebeya Bahizire had survived many death threats, arrests and ill treatment due to his work as a human rights defender. He believed in the cause of human rights and was not afraid to pursue it against all odds,” Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said on Thursday.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed shock at Chebeya’s death, saying “his reputation as a champion of human rights earned him the respect and admiration of his compatriots and of the international community,” UN deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.
The secretary-general said that Congo’s interior minister on Thursday ordered the state security services to investigate Chebeya’s death and added that the investigation “should be thorough, transparent and independent, with full respect for due process and rule of law,” Okabe said at UN headquarters in New York.
The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo is prepared to assist such an investigation, if requested, she said.
Amnesty International had called on the government to launch an investigation into Chebeya’s death.
“We are stunned and appalled by the suspicious death of such a prominent and respected human rights defender ... It seems he may have paid the ultimate price for his valuable work,” said Veronique Aubert, deputy director of the group’s Africa Program.
The rights group said he was last heard from on Tuesday night, when he sent a text to a family member saying that he had just met with a senior police official and was headed home. Passers-by later found his body.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS